Post by brian

We gave a talk recently over in Hebden Bridge. What follows are the bare bones of what we said, but if you scroll right to the end, there’s a concrete idea building on a recent post here.

We got asked to talk on the theme “Who will save us from the future?” which is the theme of the latest issue of Turbulence. We’re sort of going to do that but we’re departing a little from what is on the flyer and advertising for this meeting.

The reason for that is that the last few weeks have really emphasised that we’re in the midst of a crisis, and just how large this crisis is and how it could potentially play out into quite significant changes in society. So it seems a bit ludicrous not to talk about this.

We want to still have the original questions in the background, which is sort of who are the agents of change, what connections, conflicts and resonances might there be between the radical Left and radical Greens or perhaps the autonomous left. Which seems to reflect the make-up of this group. Anyway we’re still going to have these questions in the background but we want to address them in terms of the crisis.

Our focus isn’t going to be so much on trying to predict how events will go. That’s a pretty difficult thing to do when you’re in the midst of a crisis. In fact our focus isn’t so much on analysing the crisis in some objective way, but on us – most broadly that means the working class, but more directly us in this room and the networks we’re involved with. We want to focus on how we fit into the crisis, how it affects us. And how it affects the way we struggle, how it might open new possibilities.

We sense an opening: there seems to be change in the offing but no-one can be sure where things are going… We’re not going to say that this is the end of capitalism or anything like that. Capitalism operates through crisis: it works by breaking down. But crises of the magnitude of the one we’re experiencing now tend to lead to big changes in the way capitalism works. It’s quite likely that over the next few years a new regime of regulation will emerge.

In her recent book “The Shock Doctrine” Naomi Klein quotes the neo-liberal guru Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

This also applies to us to some degree: times of instability are the best times to intervene into a system. What we’d like to do is to discuss how we can intervene with you. We’re not going to talk for long, because we haven’t got any answers but we’ll try and stimulate some discussion.

We face at least four overlapping crises:
1. Credit
2. Food
3. Energy
4. Climate change

We can look at all these through the lens of RISK, as composed differently i.e. privatised risk or collective risk

1. CREDIT
Capitalism is a socialising force: even in its simplest form, it brings people off the land and sets them to work together. But there’s a tendency in the opposite direction too: that of breaking people up (to undermine the power of socialised labour). So we get divisions, hierarchies, separation, compartmentalisation etc. The ideology of liberalism and ‘the individual’ are important here, but so too is the notion of ‘privatisation’. It’s a wooden word now because we take it to mean the break-up and sale of state-managed concerns, but it has a wider sense – the process whereby things that are social or common are forcibly made private.

This ‘becoming private’ has assumed greater significance under neoliberalism. We produce our lives in common but one of the main aims of the neoliberal project is to fracture any social arrangement that allows people to maintain common resources for the common good. It does this by smashing them, criminalising them, or simply forcing them to the marketplace.

In the global south this enclosure means the expansion of sweatshops, driving people off land, and the manipulation of environmental catastrophes etc to enforce capitalist discipline. The ‘old’ enclosures, although they’re ongoing all the time. But in the global north neoliberalism has also involved the privatisation of risk in more subtle ways. So risks that used to be socialised through welfare provision, national insurance, etc, are now privatised. Pension provision is one really obvious example, but it goes on everywhere. It runs from the contraction of social housing right through to more ‘trivial’ areas like the extension of ‘choice’ in education: one of my kids is in Year 6, so recently I’ve been spending time visiting high schools, examining prospectuses, checking out bus routes etc. There’s a real pressure on parents here: we are obliged to make the ‘right’ choices for our kids so as to maximise their future life-chances. We’re also encouraged to make ridiculous projections about their possible ‘careers’.

Now the net result of all this privatisation (this ‘becoming private’) is that it involves us all in the financial markets and puts us far more at risk to market fluctuations and collapse. That means we face an incredible amount of extra risk.

If we look at the current crisis, it represents a collapse of credit. And this is significant because the ‘boom’ of the last 15 years in the UK has been credit-led. Here’s a startling statistic: 97% of money in circulation in UK is debt. We know that the rate of profit has increased massively since 1979, while real wages have been in decline – not least because of the squeeze on the social wage. So this ‘boom’ has been consumer-led boom and has has only been possible by increase in personal indebtedness. UK has the highest level in the world.

There’s a link here to wider politics of neoliberalism, i.e. Thatcherism in UK,
The defeat of the miners’ strike (and the printers etc etc) represented a defeat of collectivity. This is what Thatcher meant when she said: “There is no such thing as society.” Collective action disappeared, it couldn’t find a voice, it couldn’t register. Because of course credit is individual: you buy ‘your own’ house, you have ‘your own’ pension, you sort out ‘your own’ education. In the past wage demands and wage bargaining at least had the merit of being collective. Now we enter the market, naked, as individuals.

Finally, this level of personal risk also complicates lines of antagonism, e.g. our pensions are tied to the exploitation of others. “I can only get ahead at expense of others.” It appears to be a zero-sum game which just amplifies the war of all-against-all.

2. FOOD
On a daily level, we could talk about the rising price of food in shops. But let’s also leap to macro-level: millions on verge of starvation. Between May 2007–May 2008 corn prices increased by 46%, wheat prices up 80%, soybeans up 72%, rice up 75% etc etc. This is a crisis on a huge scale. This year food riots have occurred in big cities in 37 countries.

Commodity prices have fallen a little since their high point but the real question we should be asking is how has this been made possible. The price hikes are the end result of whole series of policies imposed since 1980s. The World Bank & IMF have imposed Structural Adjustment Programs on developing countries, which involved privatising agricultural lands and commodifying food production and distribution. Agricultural production had to be orientated towards the needs of the global market rather than local needs, resulting in a huge increase in cash crops. There’s been the destruction of subsistence farming, with those thrown off the land being forced into the growing shanty towns and mega slums. Importantly the SAPs also insisted on the dismantling of national food reserves and putting those reserves onto world market.

Countries that were self-sufficent are now net food importers and millions of people are forced to rely on the vagaries of the global grain markets. It’s this reliance that makes global famine possible. So it’s clearly similar to the credit crisis: people are forced onto the market, collective provision is destroyed, the common is enclosed.

This is how neoliberal mechanism work. There’s not less food. Our access to it goes through the market: people starve because they can’t afford food. The risk of starvation is personalised. There’s another link back to credit crisis: sub-prime crisis means houses are re-possessed and then knocked down or sit empty…

3. ENERGY
We could look at the energy crisis in terms of peak oil. That’s the normal framework. But aside from the endless arguments about whether or not we have reached it (never mind what ‘it’ means), it doesn’t seem particularly helpful. Much of the argument seems irrelevant because it’s based on an extrapolation from our current ‘needs’: who knows what we will ‘need’ in years to come?

It’s more interesting to look back to the last big energy crisis – the oil shock of the 1970s. This was actually the first edge of the neoliberal counter-offensive to roll back the gains we had made in the 1960s and early 1970s. That crisis was used to break the back of the most powerful working class organisations (not least those in the energy industry, like the miners). The aim of capital’s counter-attack was to drive home the message that prosperity is not guaranteed. Again we see the return of risk to our front doors.

More recently, it’s easy to think of ways consumption patterns have impacted on energy use. The credit-led consumer boom has been totally bound up with the globalisation of markets, the massive rise in container shipping around the world etc. There’s also an interweaving of several different processes: the ideology of car ownership fits with the search for individual solutions to transport fits with a road-building programme fits with the privatisation of public transport and the closure of non-profitable routes etc.

We can also think about this at the level of production. So companies externalise risk wherever possible by sub-contracting and outsourcing production. If you need widgets, you buy them from a supplier rather than make them on site. And you don’t even hold a stock of them: you get what you want when you want. One of the immediate practical consequences of this Just In Time approach is the huge rise of wagons thundering across the road.

Finally we also need to think about the ways in which fossil fuels have historically replaced our energy. Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels isn’t an accident. As workers have resisted enclosure of common, and resisted the imposition of work, capitalism has turned to ‘natural resources’ for energy provision.

4. CLIMATE
And sitting over all of these crisis sits the climate change crisis.

It overlays other three, but is of a different order and so it’s harder to think through how it links up to the others. Weirdly it’s both the most abstract yet the most real/physical. Its effects are utterly physical yet it’s abstract because the time scale is longer and involves the projection of future interests. There’s a time lag between cause and effect.

But one way of thinking this through is that global warming involves a huge increase of energy into the climate and a large increase of energy injected into any dynamic system causes instability. There is a massive increase in risk.

Two clear ways of dealing with this
a) The market solution that we’re being offered at the minute are aimed at reducing carbon emissions by pricing the poor out. Business as usual. We will bear the brunt (individually) in a new round of austerity with increased costs of travel, carbon taxes, road pricing etc etc. Risk here is same as COST

But there’s a vicious circle here: neoliberalism means the best individual response to threat of climate change is to get more money and try to insulate ourselves from the increased risk. This means we have to work harder and longer, which inevitably increases carbon emissions.

b) but there is possibility of another approach, which would mean collectivising risk, and collectivising solutions.

And here we can see the importance of seeing all the crises as linked. For instance the huge credit bailouts that are taking place at the moment mean that there’s less public money available for the huge infrastructural changes that climate change and the energy crisis will require.

One of the dangers of overlapping crises is that risk becomes a generalised condition (it’s always been virtual but will become actual). Debt is a good example: if you owe a small amount, it can act as a disciplining mechanism, restricting your ability to act. But if you start to owe a lot, discipline can break down altogether: “The equity underwriting my debt is now in doubt. Cheap credit gone. We may be on brink of recession. Or even complete meltdown. So I might as well fuck off the lot…” It’s the kung-fu principle: as risk becomes generalised, it ceases to be a weapon against us, and potentially becomes a new form of commonality, new ground of struggle.

So to end, we want to look at some struggles that have tried to come to terms with the changes in work and its effects on struggle. Some interesting innovations have happened in struggles against precarity in continental Europe, responding to the lack of the mass workplace as a site of collectivity.

One of these is the Mayday parades, which take the form of carnivals and are modelled more on Gay Pride parades and the love parades that happen in Berlin. They started off in Milan in 2001 with 5,000 people and grew to 50,000 by 2003. These then turned into Euromayday with simultaneous parades in different cities. So in 2006 there were 300,000 participants in 20 cities.

Another interesting innovation is San Precario, the patron saint of the precarious. He was invented as a symbol or icon that all the different experiences could invest their desires in. They make big models of San Precario and carry them round, like the saints parades in Catholic countries. This is an attempt to form a collectivity out of very varied experiences of precarity.

‘Precarity’ is a fancy-sounding word, but it just means a condition of existence without predictability or security. Precarity has never really caught on in this country, as an idea or tool. We’re at a different stage of neo-liberalism than Spain, France or Italy, for example, where it has taken off as a category of struggle. For us, in the UK, precarity isn’t a new condition and we understood it differently as casualisation. However if we experience a more generalised increase in precariousness then some of those tactics might begin resonate.

And in the face of these four overlapping crises, we can also start to think of precarity in a wider sense: it’s not just about work, it’s about existence. Here we can look at the anti-CPE struggles in France in spring 2006, or the actions of the piqueteros in Argentina (they had no workplace so they picketed the cities, throwing up barricades and bringing everything to a halt until their demands were met). And we can also look at innovations in struggles around money and debt: in the UK we have the experience of the Poll Tax revolt to draw on. But there are options: In gReece there have been raids on supermarkets by Robin Hood-type figures, filling trolleys and dumping them outside for people to help themselves. There’s even been talk of a ‘mortgage strike’ here in the UK (and who knows what that would look like).

There are no guarantees here. No-one can know how these crises will play out. But the example of the Argentinazo in December 2001 should remind us how quickly everything can change. There, the struggles of piqueteros etc laid ground for social revolt. They provided the ideas that were laying around. Here we need innovation and experimentation to see what resonates.

So the idea of a Fair Price campaign makes sense, not as a stunt but as a genuine campaign that tries to link up all the crises. It could be linked to the logic of “No profiteering from a crisis” and the logic that exceptional times call for exceptional measures. I think that logic runs like this:

– The government and big business say these are exceptional times. They’ve made exceptions to normal rules and laws, they just suspended competition laws to let Lloyds buy HBOS. At the same time we, ordinary people, have had to put our hands in our pockets and bail out the richest people in the country. They get to keep all of their profits but we have to pay for all of their losses. Well, if it’s exceptional times for them it should be exceptional times for us.

– At the same time as we’re being asked to pay to bail out the banks, food prices are rocketing and – guess what – the supermarkets’ profits have been rocketing too. The supermarkets are cashing in on this crisis, they are acting like spivs, profiteering from hardship.

– No-one believes the government is going to help us out so we should help each other.

So the plan could be as simple as this. Let’s meet outside Tesco’s, discuss together what’s a fair price and then ask to meet the manager and ask him if he’ll reduce prices. The advertised price of goods under UK law is only an offer – it’s called an ‘invitation to treat’. So it is legal to negotiate and managers of stores have some leeway on prices. This is legal, possible and fair.

Again it could be promoted really simply: “Come to Tescos carpark 10am Saturday 10th of blah, blah. Look for the Fair Price banner and join in the discussion. Exceptional times call for exceptional measures! A bailout for them, reductions for us!”

There would have to be a big build-up for this, with letters in local newspapers, posters, etc. It could only work if it was something of a national talking point before the actions. This means campaigning and trying to cause awareness in different ways. But the logic of this makes sense and could reach outside the usual circle of committed activists (i.e. be more than a little Situ stunt). This crisis is going to be continuing for a long time – in fact this might work better in a couple of months when the effects are biting home on main street, as the Americans would say.

Some research would have to be done, e.g. work out what percentage of the price of goods is profit, on average. Also supermarket owners can ask anyone they want to leave their property so we’d need to find a bit of highly visible, adjoining public land or land owned by someone else who isn’t going to be there.

While thinking about Dave’s post on shock and awe, I stumbled over this quote which merits a post of its own. It’s from Jack Common, a working class writer from the 1930s (more on him here).

The dark age technique of unlearning is what is needed, and it is not such a strange thing as it seems. We have an acquisitive view of learning as of a thing you add to the personality, this being the opinion proper to an acquisitive society. Yet when you learn to swim you are really escaping from doubt and awkwardness into an innate swimming rhythm which everybody possesses, rather marvellously, whether they use it or not. And queerer than that, there is the case of the recently developed art of cycling. When I took it up, the man who showed me how pointed out that it wasn’t a question of learning to ride, what you had to do was to unlearn the inability to ride. He was perfectly right. It is all there if you can get it.

It’s the concept of unlearning that caught my eye, which runs counter to the suggestion that in times of crisis “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”. I don’t want to start banging the anti-intellectual drum, but maybe the opportunity thrown up by a crisis is precisely the chance to “unlearn the fears and inhibitions by which you are lessened” and reveal the “Eldorado of infinite potentiality”. And it also links into my general uneasiness about the role of ‘experts’. It’s easily done. You read a few books, write a few words, and all of a sudden people are asking you to provide them with the answer. Or worse, you think you have the answer…

I’ve been away so this overview is a bit late and more than a bit disjointed…

First up a couple of positives. Against an absurd level of police harassment, the camp for climate action refused to be intimidated… That might appear a small thing but it’s easy to underestimate the importance of such an open and public display of opposition. Elsewhere ‘politics’ is daily reduced to questions of public policy or style: step outside that and it’s a criminal/police matter. OK, an MP getting jostled and almost pepper-sprayed hardly matches up to Genoa or Bolzaneto but you know what I mean…

In fact, when we wrote a piece about antagonism (how productive it can be) in the latest issue of Turbulence, we had half an eye on the camp. In my most cynical moments (hmm, I do have a few) I was ready for the camp to be another media love-in or liberal festival of single-issue reformism. Instead, the fact that people had to penetrate a row of riot cops to get in meant that antagonism of some sort was never really off the agenda. And it cut the ground away from under many reformists: it’s hard to talk seriously about the positive role of the state in an atmosphere of repression, even if some of it (like riot cops playing Ride of the Valkyries on a car stereo) was typically naff rather than nasty.

Second, there seemed to be a much better understanding of class politics and anti-capitalism than I feared. It didn’t feel like we were barking mad for talking about class. Again that might appear a small thing but…

As well as facilitating a workshop on class, we also did a re-run of our presentation on climate change and work. It was OK, but I think we could have made the message even clearer – maybe even repeated it several times and tattooed it in CAPITAL LETTERS across our foreheads. We had one bloke stand up at the end, applaud our talk and then say that the way forward was clear: we should all become self-employed, there’d be no bosses any more and capitalism would simply cease to exist. Erm, no… Seriously though, we packed a lot into our presentation and I think the main thrust got a bit sidelined by other stuff. The point we wanted to make was this: the biggest single cause of climate change isn’t aviation, or coal mining, or people driving 4x4s. It’s work. So any attempt to reduce carbon emissions without thinking through ‘work’ is pretty much doomed to failure or represents tinkering round the edges. To put it even more strongly, the way to reduce carbon emissions isn’t to campaign for their reduction: it’s to explore ways of resisting the imposition of work. And that might not happen under the banner of ‘climate change’.

In this respect, one of the most depressing things was the interplay between miners (i.e. Arthur Scargill and Dave Douglas) and climate campers (some of the background is here and you can see some other comments here and here). It was depressing because the exchanges were so unproductive and seemed happy to stay on the level of public policy (as if we’ve got any say in that). Self-education is fantastically liberating, but is not quite the same thing as becoming an expert on CCS for example. On the other hand, it was just as disheartening to hear Scargill and Douglas acting as defenders/spokesmen of the “coal industry”, as if that’s a totally unproblematic notion. In all the noise the whole idea of social change just seemed to slide away.

All of this made me think about how much our horizons have shrunk over the last twenty years. I’ve just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day which is a huge sprawling comment on light, invisibility, identity, anarchists, the build-up to the First World War, militant trade unionism, time travel, and the mythical paradise of Shambhala. One of the recurring threads in it is this:

The world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one.

Most of the time those other worlds are just dreams (or nightmares) a million years away. But there are moments of extraordinary possibility where everything opens up. The 1984-85 miners’ strike in the UK was precisely one of those moments. What started out as a defensive trade union action exploded into something that threatened (however briefly) to blow all of this away. If you’re in any doubt about this, check out Jenny Dennis’ tale which is a stunning reminder of that moment and what we could have become.

OK, it’s a little unfair to hold the climate camp up to the miners’ strike – you can only play the teams in front of you. But we have to keep hold of that sense of possibility: that’s what we’re fighting for.

Our piece on antagonism which seems to have dragged on for ages (we’ve talked about it here, here, here and here…) has finally been finished. Well, sort of. A short version of it is being published in the forthcoming Turbulence magazine, out in August. A slightly longer version has been submitted for inclusion in Antipode and we’ll post that remix in due course…

How do we face the future? The same way we face the past…

Maybe it’s because time’s dragging at the moment (the sun’s out and I’m slaving away at work), but I’ve been thinking about the way time works – how it speeds up, slows down, and occasionally crosses over on itself. And I’ve been trying to link that to our recent work on antagonism.

Part of the motivation for writing about antagonism is (obviously) to get us thinking about rupture. How do we punch our way out of this world? In this respect, antagonism isn’t something we’re trying to will into existence (as if we could!), because it’s simply a condition of living in this world. It’s all around us, facing us at every turn. But it’s a case of “water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”. In this war of all-against-all we experience antagonism in our relations with our work colleagues, our families, our neighbours, rather than as fractures with capital as a social relation. If we’re guilty of voluntarism, I guess it’s a recognition of the need to recompose the antagonism we face all the time into something more productive.

Which leads on to this: thinking about antagonism also means thinking about continuity. Hatred of the rich and movements to overthrow this shitty world are a constant thread running through history. Sometimes those threads get lost or covered up or simply forgotten, and it’s always useful to bring them to the fore. I’ve just finished reading Norman Cohn’s brilliant book. The liberal way to read Cohn is to regurgitate his conclusion that the “totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century” (ie Stalinism and nazism) share a “common stock of European social mythology” with apocalyptic medieval movements. But actually his conclusion is quite jarring, running counter to the 300-odd pages that precede it. Guy Debord (admittedly not someone you’ll run into a lot on this blog) has a much better take on this:

The great revolts of the European peasants are also their attempt to respond to history – which was violently wrenching the peasants out of the patriarchal sleep that had guaranteed their feudal tutelage … The social revolt of the millenarian peasantry defines itself naturally first of all as a will to destroy the Church. But millenarianism spreads in the historical world, and not on the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary expectations are not irrational continuations of the religious passion of millenarianism… On the contrary, it is millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, which is already a modern revolutionary tendency that as yet lacks the consciousness that it is only historical…

Of course the other great thing about Cohn’s book is that it leads straight to the astounding Q and from there to the brilliance of Wu Ming. There’s an interesting thread on what in the hell which touches on history, and Nate at one point brings up Wu Ming’s declaration at the time of Genoa. It’s fantastic stuff and well worth re-visiting:

We are the weavers of Silesia who rebelled in the year 1844.
We are the fabric printers that set fire to Bohemia in the same year.
We are the proletarian insurgents of the Year of Grace 1848.
We are the spectres that tormented popes, tzars, bosses and footmen.
We are the populace of Paris in the Year of Grace 1871.
We have gone through the century of revenge and madness, and we keep on marching

This is the way that time turns back on itself, the way the threads through history are constantly picked up and rewoven. And it’s in those flashbulb moments that the past becomes the present becomes the future.

We gave a talk last night at the CommonPlace on capitalism and climate change. The slides and notes for it are available here, but a horribly brief summary goes like this…

The climate crisis is an energy crisis. It’s about the conversion of one form of energy (fossil fuels) into another. Physicists call that conversion ‘work’. But the climate crisis is also a ‘work’ crisis in the everyday sense of the word, because work is the main organising principle of capitalism. And the idea of ‘work’ as a separate, measurable activity is an incredibly recent one, dating back a few hundred years. Along with work goes separation, the way that we’re separated from each other, separated from the products of our labour, and separated from our environment (which is then tagged as ‘natural resources’). And money. But capitalism isn’t a thing out there. It’s a dynamic social relation. As we try to flee it, capital attempts to pull us back, chase us down, enclose our activities and order them through work. But capital also tries to escape us – or rather escape our insubordination. And it would like to escape its dependence upon us (ultimately of course it can’t, because the relationship is asymmetric). One of the ways it does this is by increasing the conversion of other forms of energy. So we get rising proportion of fossil-fuel (etc) energy to human energy etc etc. What does all this mean? Climate change is a limit to capital. But capital has a knack of overcoming its limits, of using them to fuel its own development. Climate change is not a challenge facing all of humanity equally, but a (set of) events that will intensify competition and reinforce hierarchies. Solutions to it have be collective and social.

Of course one of the things climate change has done is introduce a new sense of urgency into talk and action about social change. It has raised the question of the future. And there is a tendency to think and talk in fairly apocalyptic terms. But why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism? One of the problems is that it’s really difficult to avoid thinking about the future in terms that only make sense in the present. To borrow one of Keir’s current turns of phrase, it makes no sense to ask a fish what it means to be wet. It has no conception of wetness, or dryness. In the same way many of the suggested solutions to climate change are based on categories that are totally bound up with the way we live now. Consume less. Cycle to work. Buy a low-energy house. Similarly, there’s a tripartite relation between capital, humanity and ‘natural resources’. As we resist exploitation (as with the fight to reduce the working day) capital has to squeeze more value out of ‘natural resources’ (mostly by fucking up the environment). But the corollary of this is that if we defend ‘the environment’ (as a category separate from us) without attacking the capital relation, we are asking capital to shift the costs on to us.

Maybe it would have been easier to think about capitalism as a system that’s driven by the need for profit. But we wanted to avoid the idea that it’s somehow the fault of the rich, or the corporations, something ‘out there’. Thinking about capitalism as work puts us (me, you, everyone…) centre stage.

Yeeuch, it’s a horrible mash-up. Sometimes it feels like we’re living in the last days of Babylon, with the strange becoming increasingly common and Deleuzian concepts storming up the charts; at other times it’s like the 1970s never really went away (I’m half expecting another Winter of Discontent run alongside a Crass revival). But of course it’s none of those. It’s just the way things are…

So how does this neoliberalism thing work then? Not at moments of excess, but in those endless days of deficit. I’m employed in a very small company. This has its advantages: no-one really minds if you stroll in late or a little hungover; it’s OK to leave early to pick up the kids; there’s no dress code; and micro-management is so poor that I can sit and type this and they all think I’m working. In fact several times, very straight clients have come into the office and been given the spiel about how we’re a small concern but one with a certain affinity blah blah blah – and their response has been “Oh, so it’s a workers’ co-op then?”. “Umm, no…”

Because of course there’s still a boss and there are still workers. There are still sides. But it’s really hard to see them, especially when everything here is so personal. It’s one of the downsides of not working a in a huge corporation. Here any form of opposition is hard to articulate, let alone sustain. When I point out that a pay rise below the rate of inflation amounts to a pay cut, everyone else looks at me like I’m mad. When our Christmas bonus was slashed in half, everyone else said “Thanks” while I had to bite my tongue. And if I start to complain about the huge dividends that my boss is drawing (while refusing me a pay rise), it just means I’m trying to take food out of his mouth…

None of this is particularly new. The sickening paternalism is a throwback to 19th century attitudes (on both sides). We don’t quite doff our caps but we eagerly lap up the latest news on his holiday abroad/new Porsche/house renovation etc etc. And the mantra that ‘There Is No Alternative’ has always been a big part of capitalism’s own mythology. But there is something new, I think. In the past, anti-capitalist movements seemed able to create their own frames of reference, carving out space (and time), so they could present themselves as an ‘alternative’. That’s a luxury in short supply these days. The decoding drive is so powerful that anything Other is gobbled up as soon as it appears.

In the face of this, any antagonism looks like madness, a suicidal gesture. It just doesn’t make sense. This is a vicious circle: as long as it looks crazy, it will stay marginal. And while it remains marginal, it stays at an individual level. That sort of resentment can end up being really unhealthy. It can be corrosive, just as likely to end up in someone going postal as in moments of excess (that’s crazy-bad, not crazy-good, obviously).

But (and this is a big ‘but’) we still wake up on the wrong side of capitalism. Every day we haul ourselves off to work. Every day we get fucked over. And every now and then you get little reminders that class resentment is alive and kicking. OK a few hundred people flaming, however hilariously, is a poor substitute for thousands doing it for real. But there’s something heart-warming about the sheer bloody-mindedness of this. Narrow-minded? You bet! Sectarian? Yes please! One-sided? Too fucking right!

La la la
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La la la
La la la la la…

We’ve been vaguely considering doing some sort of anthology of our work so far, and it’s made me think about the different ways of reading (and by extension of writing). My first reaction was that it would only be worth collecting up our various texts if we could somehow make them cohere, so that they stand up to scrutiny. But there’s a tension here (one that’s not necessarily productive). On a superficial level, there’s the whole academic trip where you attempt to pre-empt every criticism, shore up every argument and tie up any loose ends. But at a deeper level you can see this as the work of some molar perspective which seeks to totalise, to impose some sort of unity-in-identity, and to capture energy. “We have to relate this argument here to that one there… And how does this fit in?” But the end result might well be stasis or death. All the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed. You know the feeling when you finish reading a book or article – it’s all clear, you agree with almost everything (how could you not?) but your response is “Yeah, and…?” It’s done to death. It has a trajectory that’s entirely predictable: the authors think A and B, therefore they’ll almost certainly think C.

Another example: there’s a critique of Move into the Light? (a text we had a hand in) on the grounds that it’s easy to read, so you think “that’s nice, that’s interesting…” and then 5 minutes later you think “what does that mean?” From one perspective, the incoherence/confusion over the metaphor of light is a weakness of the text. Just when you think you’ve got a grip of the metaphor, it shifts again and unbuckles the understanding you’ve carefully assembled. I’ve been watching Carnivale and I have exactly the same problem.

But in another way, that’s one of the more productive ways to read a book/watch a film/listen to a song. It makes sense, but only sort of – it’s always hinting at something else and keeps sliding away towards it (obviously I’m not talking about sloppy writing which is just annoying). It’s much harder to extrapolate from, because it’s always threatening to become something else, to fall off the charts. And I think there might be a connection here to the way the Turbulence tabloid for Heiligendamm ‘worked’, I think. Individually the articles had weaknesses, but the whole more than made up for it.

So, I guess the question is this: does this have any bearing on how we understand affinity? And becoming? Is there something ineffable about it, something that resists scrutiny and yet – or maybe because of that – is still enormously productive? More crudely, what makes us hang around the anti-globalisation movement when we know all the arguments against it, when many of the critiques of it make sense?

I just can’t get you out of my head
Boy it’s more than I dare to think about

At the risk of sounding Hegelian, antagonism seems to have two sides to it. Dave’s mentioned how we are sometimes much closer to the most progressive wings of capital than to dickheads like Monbiot. If we’re about ‘production of the new’, how do we avoid that new being ‘captured’ by (or rather, becoming part of) capitalist development? One of the ways might be that antagonism draws a line in the sand, and says ‘this world is different from that one’. Of course we’re not separate from capital (it’s in here, not out there), and no amount of lines or fences will stop encroachment by capital. But antagonism can slow it down enough that we can make good our escape. Maybe antagonism can offer us time and space to become that-which-we-are-not.There’s also a positive side. ‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ are misleading, maybe it’s more like looking in and looking out. Whatever, this second aspect is the same as when you’re swimming. It’s really difficult to just start swimming in open water. It’s much easier to push off against something. Becoming is about movement. But it has to begin with some sort of ‘No’. Holloway might call it the scream. Massumi calls it an inhibition. However we figure it, it represents a rupture. A break with the world-as-it-is, an “unhinging of habit”. That’s how some people saw the riot in Rostock, as a way of saying No to enable us to develop our Yeses.

Is there a double articulation here, in the looking out/looking in? Maybe we need a rearguard to allow exodus to take place, but that rearguard also acts as an ultra-left lighthouse to enable us to see how far we have travelled. That’s one way of thinking of the black bloc, for example.

And here’s the tricky thing. Once you’ve pushed off against the wall, you need to start swimming. Movements need to develop their own autonomous dynamic. If we fail to do that, we’ll be clinging to the side of the pool forever, and we’ll never make it to open water. This is the danger of ‘micro-fascisms’, the risk that antagonism (on its own) will makes us become the inverse of what we want to escape. That’s why the transversal shift (aka the sideways step, the Cruyff turn) is so crucial.

Finally we should think about this not as the politics of affect, but as the politics of movement. Of becoming-other. Which is exactly why all those hegemonic visions or Ten-Point-Plans fall to pieces, because they depend on stasis. They assume that we will be the same as we are now, when want precisely to be other than we are now. As Massumi puts it, “To achieve the goal that has no end means ceasing to be what you are in order to become what you cannot be: supermolecular forever.”

Supermolecular forever? Now that’s a fucking great song title.

I know I’m a bit late with this (I’ve been searching for the missing mass of the universe) but I stumbled across an interesting snippet about the response to Tony Wilson’s death. Apparently someone went down to Whitworth Street and chucked a load of yellow and black paint over the posh flats where the Hacienda used to stand. OK, it’s not big, and it’s not clever but it makes a lot more sense than some of the shite that I’ve come across.

As ever it’s more interesting to pan out a little and look at the wider context. Here’s something we wrote last year:

Let’s look at the refrain of the ‘entrepreneur’. For the left this is a dirty word, and with good reason: it conjures up images of Richard Branson, of creativity channelled into money-making. But it also contains a certain dynamism, an air of initiative, in fact an imaginary of a kind of activist attitude to life. Indeed we might be putting on free parties, gigs, or film showings, rather than launching perfumes, but we still act in ways somewhat similar to entrepreneurs: we organise events and try to focus social cooperation and attention on certain points. We’re always looking for areas where innovation might arise. The DIY culture of punk is a great example of how a moment of excess caused a massive explosion of creativity and social wealth. There is a difference in perspective though. A capitalist entrepreneur is looking for potential moments of excess in order to enclose it, to privatise it, and ultimately feed off it. Our angle is to keep it open, in order to let others in, and to find out how it might resonate with others and hurl us into other worlds and ways of being.

Seems a pretty accurate description of Tony Wilson. He was never too bothered about being correct; he was interested in making things happen. Or rather, he was interested in making conditions for the creation of new truths. In that sense he didn’t exist outside of his context (and over the last few years his pronouncements had started to sound more and more twattish – independence for the North West!?! – precisely because they weren’t resonating in the same way they once had). And I think there might be a connection here to ideas we’ve been tossing about on affinity and identity.

Crudely put, identity politics tends to operate on the basis of changing a world, which is ‘out there’, without any impact on ourselves. It suggests that battles are lost and won by shuffling pieces on a chess board: ‘OK, we need to link up with organised workers here, build a coalition with feminists from the global South here, and then maybe move in a gay and lesbian battalion here. But that still leaves our left flank exposed to counter-attack by native struggles here…’

From this perspective, Tony Wilson was a pain in the arse, a loose cannon, someone who got up everyone’s nose. But if we think about affinity, then there’s a little more method in his madness. It’s less about ideology or fixed categories, and more about shared affect. People moving together. Of course it’s messy and inchoate (this is dark matter, and dark energy after all), and for every ‘success’ there are a dozen fuck-ups. But each success itself only creates further openings, further problematics. So it goes… This is how it was with punk. Which is why the least interesting thing about punk was the squabbles between ‘first’ and ‘second’ generation punks: once punk hit the headlines, any attempt to restrict it to those in the know was doomed to failure. The tension between punk-as-hip-minority and punk-as-mass-movement was just that, a tension rather than a divide. There was the same tension in the Madchester scene, with the usual scramble to claim authenticity. And it also relates to the tension between audience and public. The audience are the paying punters, but at some stages they can become the public who are inextricably part of the performance. Think Woodstock or Spike Island…

Once the public/audience/performer thing breaks down, who knows what can happen… I’ve just finished reading a book which tries to link today’s globalisation struggles to the working class battles which raged over the past two centuries. It’s more micro-level reportage than analysis, but I came across two fantastic passages which are worth noting.The first relates to the wave of factory occupations in France in 1936 (emphasis added):

Contagion, imitation, certainly played a decisive role in a large number of cases. The very novelty of the undertaking was a source of attraction – with its creation of a whole new set of situations – the feeling of escape from the routine of everyday life, the breaking down of the barrier between private lives and the world of work, the transformation of the workplace into a place of residence, fulfilment of the desire for action, of the need to ‘do something’ at a time when everyone felt that important changes were coming. All these elements played a part in the spread of the occupations and helped to account for participants’ universal enthusiasm and cheerfulness.

And here’s an account of the end of a sit-in in Flint, Michigan in 1937:

As the exhilaration of our first union victory wore off, the gang was occupied with thoughts of leaving the silent factory… One found himself wondering what home life would be like again. Nothing that happened before the strike began seemed to register in the mind any more. It is as if time itself started with this strike. What will it be like to go home and to come back tomorrow with motors running and the long-silenced machines roaring again? But that is for the future… Now the door is opening.

Open with Tony Wilson. Close with factory. Exit stage left.