Bash the Rich

December 1, 2006

I’m half-way through a new book by one of the founders of Class War. It’s pretty un-fucking-putdownable (see, it’s already having an impact on the way I write), mainly cos it captures that whole sense of potential that existed in the mid to late 1980s. Some of this might be pure nostalgia, but it was a pretty mad time. And one of the things that was mad about it was the seamless way struggles flitted back and forth without any of the sniping or prejudice that set in later. There didn’t seem to be any outright contradiction between any of these struggles – anarcho-punk squatters, anarcha-feminist peace campers, animal rights activists, striking miners, wannabe rioters etc. Sure there was loads of tension, some of it pretty aggressive and intense, but all of it was productive. Resonance produced movement: we seemed to be going somewhere (probably related to the fact that we were often literally going somewhere: demos, marches, Stonehenge, Henley…).

OK, one of the simplistic counter-arguments to this is that we were young, and everything seemed possible – it’s that feeling you get as you lie in the grass on a summer’s day and stare up into the sky. A slightly more sophisticated response points to the importance of dole culture. Both points are pretty valid. And there’s also a sense that getting older is, as much as anything, a process of accretion – things stick to you (jobs, homes, families…). We slow down.

But I’m trying to fit this in with the stuff we’ve been thinking about recently, especially the relation between the intensive and the extensive. It seems to make sense. Part of the madness about Class War then was that it was immeasurable. Literally. Groups were springing up all over the place calling themselves ‘Xxxx Class War’. And this whirlwind was making the intensive field visible. A bit like throwing flour onto a kitchen surface so you can see where the mice are going. The process is nothing new. It’s exactly the same as punk, or the Paris Commune or blah blah blah. I like to think that the ‘Behold Your Future Executioners’ banner had some small print somewhere which read ‘Behold the Unruhe’. Compare that to the bureaucratic machine of the Class War Federation with its delegate meetings and conference proposals…

Of course it’s easy to drift into thinking that intensive=good and extensive=bad, or that it should be a one-way relationship. Cold water in the face brings you back to this awful place… But this awful place is where we are. The intensive might be the realm of change but that change happens in the real, which involves the extensive. So Bone’s book has made me think again about ‘stuntism’, as way of trying to direct the movement from extensive to intensive, i.e. trying to use the normal mechanisms of capture (especially the media) to re-open the field of possibilities. Which was a pretty fucking cute tactic – just so long as you don’t call it a dialectic, OK?

And if you really want to get down-and-dirty philosophical, this caught my eye:

‘Thesis of Ontological Excess’: Being is more than one and prior to one. The preindividual is in excess of its actual individual expressions. Being is ‘problematic’ (or differential) and individuals are only ever temporary resolutions of these tensions; tensions that continue to subsist even after actualization. This thesis of excess is thus counter to any ontology based on lack.

I don’t claim to understand the finer points of it, does it fit in with relation between extensive and intensive?

I’ll stop here cos I’m rambling (something else to do with age).

5 Comments

Keir December 1, 2006 at 3:40 pm

Did I not fucking tell ya son. That’s why I was banging on about it at that writing meeting. Bone has written a fucking great book. I hope they market it alongside all the football hooligan stuff and not in the political theory section. He could sell thousands. Actually the political theory in the book is so much better than you might imagine but of course with Bone it’s the all about using style to the create the affect which can connect up heterogeneous elements, innit. (Please read above paragraph in Sarf London accent).

Fantastic post by the way. The image of slowing down due to accretion of kids, mortgages, etc, is spot on. It makes me think of trying to walk to the kitchen with a kid hanging on to your leg (which happens all the time in my house).

But of course fluidity isn’t always the most productive thing. When we think about kids as accretion they are also about creating a richer, more consistent substance out of our lives. One with new traits and possibilities. The problem is all the rigid strata around parenthood, including mortgages.

We can also think about rented or bought social centres as accretion. As strata around which people, process, refrains stick and consolidate into a substance with new possibilities. The important point is being able to move from the extensive to the intensive.

Perhaps we can also see the formation of the Class War Federation as a productive stratification at a certain point. Just look at Bones frustrations with the absolute fluidity of the early ’80’s and the difficulties getting things done.

It’s great the way the post moves ‘seamlessly’ from Ian Bone to ontological excess but it does remind us why we ended up knee deep in Deleuze, because we needed resources to escape from the aporias of Class War. Which is why your insight about stuntism is so good. Philosophy can be used to re-cast problems, although practice has to solve them.
brian December 1, 2006 at 5:52 pm

Totally. I didn’t mean to suggest that accretion or consolidation (nicer term by the way) was bad. Having kids, for example, is just part of weaving an ever-richer tapestry, building up layer upon layer, an adventure in folding and doubling, a making of world(s)… Mind you, it didn’t facking feel like that at breakfast this morning – no war but the porridge war, I tell ya
David December 1, 2006 at 7:57 pm

I feel compelled to inject some science into this heady mix of Boneist populism and Deleuzian philosophy. The ‘rich tapestry’ stuff made me think of fractals such as the famous Mandelbrot set. (See, e.g. http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/mandelbrot/mandelbrot.html.)
If you look at a picture of the fractal, it appears to be this mixture of spaces of dense detail and spaces of great openness. But fractals are characterised by the property of ‘self-similarity’ at different scales. So, as you zoom in on any point, these patterns are repeated. So zoom in on some area of great density, say, and suddenly… everything opens up!

So these events or processes of ‘consolidation’ or ‘accretion’ — jobs, mortgage, kids — may seem at first to produce great density, and even closure. But increase the magnification a little and everything may open up again. Kids, for example, may teach us how to live more freely, without inhibitions. A job may provide the money to fund struggle or other projects of ‘self-valorisation’. And having a house may actually make it easier to go off and travel say, ‘cos you know you have something to come back to.
Keir December 1, 2006 at 8:22 pm

No Dave, I think Brain was right the first time. Kids are little shits.
Nate December 11, 2006 at 5:07 am

“events or processes of ‘consolidation’ or ‘accretion’ — jobs, mortgage, kids — may seem at first to produce great density, and even closure. But increase the magnification a little and everything may open up again.” It’s dialectics, innit? In Holloway’s sense.