Post by david

There’s this interesting tension within The Free Association. Our name has two or three connotations. One reflects Marx’s idea of communism as a ‘free association of producers’. This suggests quite an open group, receptive to new members as well as new ideas, a group with a fluid membership. We have, in the past, collaborated with others under The Free Association moniker. Perhaps we will again.

But in another way, we’re quite a closed group. It’s not that we’re not open to new ideas and new experiences. We are. It’s not that we’re not open to the potentials of working with other people. That’s exactly what we’ve done with the Turbulence project. But we’re quite a tight-knit group. We share a gang mentality. And that’s precious. It’s the result of more than 15 years’ friendship (the course of which, like true love, has not always run smooth). We break bread together, so we’re compagni. And we’ve shared all manner of accommodation — not literally barracks, but ferry cabins, beds in plush hotel rooms, tents, sodden forest floors, even tarmac roads — and so we’re comrades. We’re definitely comrades. We’re cracked more smutty jokes than you could shake your stick at and been in more than a few dicey situations together. We’ve been on the receiving end of no end of abuse and we’ve usually given as good as we’ve got. The name Leeds May Day Group perhaps better reflected this hard-edgedness.

One of this year’s collective projects — very much in keeping with the gang identity of the group — is to all get tattoos. Brian had been on about getting an Omnia sunt communia tat for several years, but kept prevaricating over the design. Then back in April Keir suggested all four of us do it.

Brian finally sorted his out a couple of months ago. Nette and Keir are still working on their designs. I went under the needle yesterday.

The design is Brian’s of course. The font is William Morris’s ‘golden type’. William Morris was a revolutionary as well as an ‘arts and craftsman’ and some of his thoughts have popped up in our writings. The lion is there for that verse in Percy Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy, written in response to the British government’s Peterloo (Manchester) massacre of 1819:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few

Fast forward a century and a half. We’re still in Manchester and it’s 1975. Peter McNeish reinvented himself as Pete Shelley. With Howard Devoto he formed Buzzcocks, one of the ‘first wave’ of punk groups. Punk is, as is well known, a recurring motif in LMDG/TFA musings. Pete Shelley went onto to become one of England’s finest songsmiths and his words too have graced our writings.

Everything is connected!
Everything is common!

I’ve just started reading Naomi Klein’s new(ish) book, The Shock Doctrine, and I came across this quote on page 7:

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.

There’s a lot to be thought through here, but the basic insight makes a lot of sense to me. What’s interesting is that the quote’s from arch-neoliberal Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Friedman (published almost half a century ago).

I guess my reaction to it is perhaps similar to that of Stephen Duncombe when he read of that Bush advisor’s quote about acting and creating reality.

On the subject of quotes I like, a friend who knows activists in Uganda sent me this one from a community association there:

When people know their rights they become a bit difficult to manage.

I should probably mention the source of the image. It’s called Shock and Awe 1 and 2, it’s by a artist called Anne Swannell and I came across it after typing “shock and awe” into the search engine.

We’ve been thinking antagonism recently and have drafted a piece entitled ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, that we hope will be published in the forthcoming Turbulence product and also – in an extended form – in Antipode in a special issue on ‘autonomy’.

In the piece we describe the 1980s UK anarchist practice of publishing names and addresses of those who dominate our lives as liberating and quote Lucy Parsons:

Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity. Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live…

This section drew some criticism. One of our Turbulence comrades wondered whether we seriously believed this naming revealed some real vulnerability in the capital relation and suggested we had confused the ‘important distinction between the “personalisation” and “personification” of capital, [using] the latter term here to describe what is actually the former’:

My boss, at work everyday, personifies capital. But to blame the rational behavior of an individual, like my boss, on that person him/herself is a problematic personalisation of the capital relation. It not only (as you note yourselves) corresponds in some ways to some of the vulgar anti-capitalist positions which characterised earlier anti-Semitic movements (in this sense, the horrific Parsons quote about “extermination without mercy is particularly unfortunate!); but it also attributes too much agency to individual capitalists. As Marx said, “…looking at these things as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.” (Capital, Vol I, 381). In other words: don’t fight the players, fight the game, baby!

Our comrade is, of course, correct about this distinction between personalising and personifying … to an extent. And he’s also right that we are all – workers and capitalists alike – confronted by laws that appear as coercive forces external to us.

But, capital is a social relation. It is a relationship amongst human beings, not a relationship between things, although this is how it frequently appears – this is what Marx meant by fetishism. John Holloway writes about this in Change the World Without Taking Power, describing it as the ‘rupture of doing and done’:

Marx begins the second paragraph of Capital saying, ‘A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us.’ The commodity is an object produced by us, but standing outside us. The commodity takes on a life of its own in which its social origin in human labour is extinguished. It is a product which denies its own character as product, a done which denies its own relation to doing. (p. 46)

Somewhere else, he (Holloway) has emphasised the ‘in the first place’ bit; once we get beyond this ‘the first place’ to delve more deeply, we discover that the commodity is not external to us at all. It’s the same with the idea that the ‘forces of competition’ or the worker-capital (or worker-boss) relationship are somehow external to us. They’re not!

Fetishism is one aspect of the separation effected by capital, the way, as we say in our ‘Six impossible things’ piece, that atagonism is constantly displaced. There’s an interesting take on separation in a new book on finance by two Marxists Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives. . Bryan and Rafferty talk of three degrees of separation. The first is the separation of humans from the commons and the transition from feudalism to capitalism (primitive accumulation). The second occurs with the creation of the joint-stock company when the owners of capital become distinct individuals from its managers. And the third separation takes place with the emergence and widespread growth of financial derivatives, which make it possible to ‘own’ some attribute of an asset – e.g. its profitability – without owning the asset itself. For example, you could purchase some share-index derivative linked to the performance of the FTSE-100, giving you an interest in these companies without owning a single share in any one of them.

At each new level of separation, antagonism is further displaced. ‘Doing (human activity) disappears further and further from sight.’ (Holloway in Change the World again: p. 47) Under feudalism, the peasant or serf’s relationship with the lord who dominated him or her was personal and direct. The lord was there, on his horse, in his manor, visible. Moreover the relationship between the lord and his serfs was fixed: the lord could no more escape the lazy or unruly serf than the serf was allowed to run away from an unusually cruel lord.

With the transition to capitalism this relationship became more fluid. Both capitalists (who once were lords) and workers (né serfs) were free. The worker was free to seek employment wherever he or she liked, just as the boss could ‘let go’ the worker if market conditions were unfavourable or for any other reason. And the capitalist was as buffeted by market forces as the worker: if he was forced to sack workers he could always hold up his hands and blame these market forces. But the relationship remained face-to-face and thus quite personal: the industrious Victorian factory-owner would probably have spent almost as long each day stalking his satanic mill as his overworked ‘hands’. What’s more, his livelihood was on the line, just as theirs were. If his business failed, his creditors wouldn’t spare the family home, his horse or his wife’s silk.

This shifted once again with the creation of joint-stock companies in 1844 and the ‘invention’ of limited liability in 1855. The joint-stock company allowed many wealthy individuals to pool capital and thus led to the development of large-scale projects such as railways. It also introduced a further separation: the relationship between workers and capital(ists) was now mediated by a layer of professional managers, a new managerial class. Limited liability introduced a (second) asymmetry into the capital relation. (One asymmetry is that while capital is wholly dependent upon living labour, we, humanity, does not need capital. The second asymmetry is in capital’s favour, not ours.) With limited liability a capitalist’s (whether this capitalist is an owner-manager or a shareholder) liability is limited to her investment, to the value of the company or of his shares or whatever. If the company goes bust, the manager will keep his or her house, the car, the savings. Except in certain cases (where a firm carries on trading whilst insolvent, which is illegal) creditors – including workers who are owed wages or pensions – are powerless.

This has consequences. Whilst the boss is the personification of capital in the workplace, he or she can leave this persona behind once s/he walks out the door. S/he climbs into the not-at-risk car to drive to the not-at-risk home, becoming a private citizen, who might be a good father or mother, even a generous benefactor of worthy causes. (There’s a quote somewhere in Capital vol. 1 about this but I can’t find it.) But it’s much harder for the worker to shed their identity as worker. Just as a person carries their social power in their pocket, so the worker carries home their relative lack of social power, their precarity. Because their home is at risk, just as their reproduction depends upon more unwaged domestic labour. It’s not that the boss won’t suffer economic consequences if their business goes bust, it’s that these consequences will be less serious and will be limited. Just think of the current credit ‘crunch’: whilst subprime borrowers and others are being turfed onto the streets, the Wall-Street executives and analysts who’ve been caught are having to sell third homes and luxury yachts.

So? The ‘game’ and its ‘rules’ are created by the ‘players’. They’re not external. It’s all personal, not just ‘business’: to repeat one of my favourite recurring LMDG/Free Association riffs, one of the themes running through The Godfather is ‘this isn’t personal, it’s business’. Michael Corleone, in contrast, understands that all business is personal: ‘It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s as personal as hell.’ No, we’re not mafiosi, but just substitute ‘the market’ for ‘business’! Attempting to identify those responsible for our subordination is a way – imperfect admittedly – of reducing the separation, making less external the ‘laws’, practically criticising the separation, making the relationship less asymmetrical. And that’s why it felt liberating, at least in the 1980s.

Finally, on the Lucy Parsons quote. Of course it’s horrific. But ‘extermination without mercy’ would seem to be an apt way to describe current processes of enclosure, for example in Cambodia, just as it would well describe the ‘clearances’ catalogued by Marx.

Sang Run was out in his boat at 7am when disaster struck his village. He arrived back at 11am to find bulldozers had flattened his home and those of the 229 families who lived beside him. He heard from neighbours that it had happened in an instant. Uniformed men, sent in by governor Say Hak, used electric batons to chase terrified residents from the burning ruins; three of Sang Run’s neighbours were knocked unconscious. Village Number One – a mundane name that failed to capture the beauty of its uninterrupted sea views and vegetable gardens that ran to the beach – had been erased. Sang Run heard that a hotel was planned, although no information was given to the people evicted from their homes for a further 18 months. (The Guardian 26.04.08)

And what is the current financial crisis doing if not devastating the avenues where the poor live?

Money and finance don’t normally get much discussed on this site. All that might change. Last summer’s ‘subprime’ mortgage crisis in the United States (and the run on Northern Rock bank-cum-building society over here) has developed into a full-blown ‘credit crisis’: the global financial markets are in what the commentators describe as ‘turmoil’ and ‘catastrophe’ threatens. Last week, the US’s fifth-largest investment bank, Bear Stearns, imploded. In a ‘rescue’ orchestrated by the Federal Reserve, another bank, JPMorgan Chase mopped up its shares, which had been trading for $170 a year ago, for two bucks each. Jimmy Cayne, Bear’s chairman and former chief executive, who held a 5% stake, has seen his ‘worth’ fall from $1.2 billion to a mere $11 million. Apparently managers are having to sell holiday homes. (What were we saying about resentment?)

But it’s all more interesting and complicated — and worrying and exciting — than this. Not only is there financial crisis. There’s also recession in the US — economists define recession as two successive quarterly falls in output — but if it wasn’t poor people finding they could no longer keep up with mortgage payments that triggered the subprime crisis then what was it? And central bankers in Europe and elsewhere are worried about inflation. (‘Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice’ — this was a former IMF chief economist quoting poet Robert Frost in an address to a recent meeting of monetary policymakers. Fire = recession; ice = inflation.) So, the return of stagflation?

Let’s look at inflation. Well commodity* prices are rising rapidly, but what’s behind this? A lot of it comes down to climate change activism in the North and workers’ struggle in the global South. Greater demand for biofuels (so we can stop emitting CO2 without changing the way we live) is pushing up the price of all crops. As people get richer in the South they are demanding more meat and this also puts upward pressure on crop prices — since it takes something like 6kg of wheat (or equivalent) to produce a single kilo of meat. There is much commentary about ‘China’s voracious appetite for resources’, which is pushing up the prices of commodities such as steel, copper and so on, but the real wages of Chinese production workers have risen by an average of 11% every year over the past decade (compared with 3% a year over the previous ten years). However much this statistic is phrased in the passive voice doesn’t change the fact that there’s an active subject here.

But what sparked me to post this, was a piece in this week’s Economist, ‘Apocalypse now?’. With ‘the world going to hell in a handcart’, the piece wonders what ‘you’ [i.e. a financial investor] should buy. And here we’re getting back to more familiar Free Association territory. Because we’ve written before about how at times of crisis (far-from-equilibrium situations, ‘moments of excess’, states of exception…) illusions and ‘ideology’ are stripped away, reality seems to be laid bare. This is as true for ‘them’ as it is for ‘us’ — which is why The Economist, say, is usually a much better read than The Guardian.

In the pub after our recent talk about capitalism and climate change, discussion turned to money and somebody suggested the universal equivalent is a mutually agreed fantasy. Exactly! This precisely the problem facing investors now. There’s no mutual agreement on what anything is ‘worth’, or (and in the world of capitalism/finance this is the same thing) will be worth at some point in the future.** After discussing the problems with holding government bonds (the government, the US government at least, won’t default, but what if its currency the dollar keeps falling in value?), depositing money in banks (what if they collapse, like Bear Stearns?) or buying gold (but it’s taken gold almost three decades to regain its price of 1980) the author, ‘Buttonwood’, concludes:

In a complete meltdown, for example during world wars and revolutions, it is hard to find anything that keeps its value. Stockmarkets collapse. Governments default on their debt. Private property is no longer respected, either because governments seize the assets or because goods cannot be protected from criminals. Jewellery might hold its worth, but you had better have a good hiding-place. Think of all the treasures looted by the Nazis or the Red Army.

But we also see here how bourgeois commentators still don’t get it. Buttonwood is assuming that ‘value’ is something objective, a property intrinsic to a thing. It’s not, it’s social. S/he can’t move beyond categories like ‘government’ and ‘criminal’, or conceive of revolutionaries who aren’t of the bolshevik sort. Why would I want to loot jewellery? And, more importantly, it’s only a store of ‘value’ in a world of abstract labour. And here’s the other big assumption. Buttonwood assumes any such period of uncertainty and ‘suspension’ of the law of value will be temporary, that after some period of months or even a few years, things will return to capitalist ‘normality’.

So, what should ‘you’ do? Buttonwood quotes approvingly the advice offered by some ‘Wall Street veteran’ who suggests that ‘investors should own, as insurance against the apocalypse, “a farm or a ranch somewhere far off the beaten track but which you can get to quickly and easily.” Well, as Buttonwood admits, this assumes ‘war and disorder are avoided’, but it reminds me of Marx’s story in Capital of ‘unhappy Mr Peel’:

Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative — the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!

And this is why all this is exciting for us. Because this crisis is a crisis of value — what things are ‘worth’ — and that means that it has the potential to become a crisis of values (plural): what do we value, what sort of world(s) do we want to live in?

* Being good Marxists here at freelyassociating.org, we understand a commodity to be that peculiar amalgam of (capitalist) value and use-value, the product of abstract and concrete labour, but in economist-parlance commodities are agricultural goods, such as wheat, coffee, pork bellies (bacon) and soya (yes, all you vegans, soya is a commodity too) and minerals and metals, such as oil, steel and gold.

** One of the main ‘points’ of finance and financial markets — along with their disciplinary function — is to convert uncertainty into risk. I’ve just started reading An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, by Randy Martin. In the Introduction, the author suggests that ‘preemption, bringing the future into the present, has since the 1970s been the guiding principle for fiscal policy.’ (As it has been for foreign policy/politics, such as the ‘war on terror’.) And then this bit, which is great: ‘In terms of the experience of time, preemption means that the future is profaned. The future no longer holds a promise that the constraints of the present can be transcended or transformed. Without a conviction that the future bears our dreams, the idea of progress becomes difficult to sustain.’ Maybe this is why most of us find finance boring, because it holds no promise, it leaves no space for hope.

These are some notes/a rough draft for an op-ed piece we thought the Guardian might publish to coincide with climate camp. As it turned out, the Guardian lost interest. In Keir’s words: “It didn’t fit the narrative the media were building up on the climate camp which had a ridiculous amount of publicity when BAA tried to take out an injunction against Prince Charles amongst others. And also the story got too big, the press were only interested in their old reliable liberals (Mombiot) or new Swampys (Joss from Plane Stupid) who are, of course, also liberals.”

Capital likes a good crisis. Crisis provides it with an opportunity to restructure, to sweep away existing barriers to its expansion and to realise new profits. An opportunigy to re-order social life according to its own logic of profit and waged labour, money and markets, to produce and reproduce hierarchies. In the words of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism develops through “waves of creative destruction”.

Global warming is such a crisis. Let’s have no doubt: the threat of climate change is as real as it is terrifying. But climate change is not a threat facing all of humanity. The problem for capital is one of security of the state and security of investment – always top of the agenda at any high level leaders’ summit whether the context is Africa or global warming. The problem for the rest of us is different. We are more concerned about things like the security of our drinking water supply as rising flood waters threaten the security of our homes.

It’s become common to compare the climate crisis to Britain “at war” and to invoke the “Blitz spirit” to describe our apparently all-in-it-together situation. This war analogy is more apt than commentators imagine. While millions lost their lives in two world wars, the few invested and made millions, both in financing the wars and in post-war reconstruction. In fact just as each year we continue to remember the dead, the British government continue to pay dividends on war bonds issued a century ago. War is always a catastrophe for humanity. For capital it’s not only a profit-making opportunity but an opportunity to extend its logic. Just think of Iraq.

Global warming will only reinforce existing hierarchies. The world’s poor are more likely to live in areas at risk from flooding or drought, or both. or even to live in areas at risk of total submersion or desertification. Poor people are less likely to have insurance or the ability to migrate. With so many millions already lacking access to adequate food or healthcare, or the means to live in the catchment area of a good school, climate change will strengthen these inequalities and for many increase the precariousness of existence.

But climate change is a double whammy for the vast majority of the world’s population. For not only are we more likely to suffer from its effects, we will also suffer more from capital’s solutions to the problem. Carbon trading is, in effect, a privatisation or enclosure of the atmospheric commons with a market mechanism used to limit emissions. It’s the mobility of the poor which will be constrained. Travel will once again become the preserve of the rich.

And here’s the rub. As our lives become more precarious, and as travel and other goods and services become luxuries, we will be forced to work harder, and this is really what’s in it for capital. Because capitalism is a mode of production which organises life through work. We mostly work 35-40 hours a week for most of the year for most of our adult lives. So of course we must organise our lives around that work. Capitalist value is created through work, through waged labour. But capitalist value is not the same as wealth, and sometimes the two stand in direct opposition. A good example of this is those mega-dam projects which destroy the livelihoods of thousands (destruction of wealth) in order to power the factories in some export-processing zone (creation of capitalist value). Certainly any link between increased value and increased wealth is tenuous. Victoria Beckham is only an absurd instance of this. With the almost immeasurable growth in productivity since the Industrial Revolution, we could easily satisfy all our most basic needs and much more, by working just a few hours each week. And so to keep us setting the alarm for seven every morning, capital produces scarcity. Marketing and brands. Built-in obsolescence. Intellectual property rights which may actually hinder the development of new drugs and software besides denying them to those who can’t afford to pay. In extreme circumstances it imposes scarcity through the physical destruction of war. And it will try to impose scarcity through climate crisis.

But a crisis is not only an opportunity, it’s a threat too. Capitalist solutions to climate change are not the only solutions. In fact capital itself is the source of the problem. Waged labour, and all that goes with it, pollutes. All the business flights, the miles we commute daily, the energy used to heat and light all those office blocks and out-of-town shopping centres. Why don’t we convert them into houses, instead of developing greenbelt or yet more flood plains? If we only worked six months in the year, or four or three – and it’s entirely possible – imagine what else we could do. No need to easyjet to Malaga or Prague. Who’d worry about taking a day to travel across Europe if we could stay for a month?

So, what are we gonna do now? The problem is capital and capitalist work and we need to recognise that. Climate change activists – and I include here the thousands of scientists who’ve been forcing the issue – have been successful in raising awareness, forcing the issue into the mainstream. And since the Stern Report, the various IPCC reports, etc., the issue has become mainstream. But the movement hasn’t moved. Now we need to construct a clear antagonism, to identify capital as the enemy. But this leaves us with at least two problems.

First, yes, we have to destroy capital. But we no longer have the luxury of time. With the climate “tipping point” possibly little more than a decade away, we can’t afford to patient. Kay and Harry make this point in “The end of the world as we know it”. And somewhere or other John Holloway has also attacked the orthodox Left’s “be patient” exhortations.

Second, if we are guided by an anti-capitalist ethic, then we must treat all market-based “solutions” with extreme scepticism, if not outright opposition. In fact we may have to consider adopting some apparently paradoxical positions, such as opposing congestion charging or new taxes on aviation (I admit, this makes me uncomfortable), as these will limit our autonomy and reinforce existing hierarchies. An alliance with Jeremy Clarkson? Opposing airport expansion or new road building is different, as this “rations” in a different way.

And that’s where I’ll leave it…

It must be at least three months since anyone’s mentioned punk on this blog, so…

I’ve been reading Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s ‘oral history of punk’. This quote from Legs, one of Punk magazine’s founders back in 1975 expresses perfectly several ideas dear to our hearts, to do with the critique of identity politics, the majority/minority/minoritarian distinction and the importance of openness.

Gay liberation had really exploded. Homosexual culture had really taken over — Donna Summer, disco, it was so boring. Suddenly in New York, it was cool to be gay, but it just seemed to be about suburbanites who sucked cock and went to discos. I mean, come on, ‘Disco, Disco Duck’? I don’t think so.

So we said, ‘No, being gay doesn’t make you cool. Being cool makes you cool, whether you’re gay or straight.’ People didn’t like that too much. So they called us homophobic. And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, ‘Fuck you, you faggots.’

Mass movements are always so un-hip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

But as far as us being homophobic, that was ludicrous, because everyone we hung out with was gay. No one had a problem with that, you know, fine, fuck whoever you want. I mean Arturo would regale me with these great sex stories. I’d be going, ‘Wow, what happened then?’

What was great about the scene was that people’s curiosity seemed stronger than their fear. The time was rife with genuine exploration, but not in a trendy mass-movement way. And was always fascinated by how anyone made it through the day, what they really did when the lights were out, to keep their sanity, or lose it.

Most of the Free Association crew have just returned from Heiligendamm and the counter-mobilisation against the G8 summit and it’s worth jotting down a few thoughts whilst the memories are still fresh. (When I say most of us have returned, I don’t mean some are still on German soil, languishing in some prison cell; just not all of us went in the first place.)

First, the overall assessment. One of us has a 4-year old son who ranks good things as follows: cool, wicked, awesome, bring it on, kerchow. On this scale we agreed the Heiligendamm summit protest was awesome. The front-page headline in the left-of-centre Die Tageszeitung — reporting on the summit’s opening day — was ‘G8 successfully blockaded’. According to the Financial Times our ‘protests tipped the G8 summit into logistical chaos’. The FT reported ‘overwhelmed police forces’ and ‘lines of exhausted riot police streaming out of the area in the early evening, some of them with stitches and black eyes, as formations of helicopters roared overhead. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said one officer.’ (‘Marauding clowns and squabbles embarrass organisers’)

In a great piece, which hopefully Red Pepper will publish, our friend and comrade Ben, of the FelS (the Sha La La Communists), describes every road into the Red Zone being blockaded for the better part of 48 hours, from 11am on Wednesday 6 June, the summit’s opening day, until 11am on Friday, when blockaders voluntarily began to disperse (en masse) in order to reassemble for a massive demonstration in Rostock. Summit organisers were forced to resort to plan B, which involved using helicopters to airlift many delegates, whilst journalists and others had no choice but to travel by sea, facing huge delays. We heard reports that even this plan was disrupted by blockades of ports/ferry terminals in Rostock; apparently on the first day of the summit many delegates were advised to remain in their hotels. And according to some reports, only four journalists made it to the opening ceremony. Oh yes, and the Japanese PM was delayed at the airport as he arrived. (By yet another blockade-cum-demonstration; not because he was hanging about by the carousel waiting for his baggage.)

This was certainly a victory and the most successful protest against a major summit ever. In fact, I wonder whether the Heiligendamm summit protest is to the G8 what Seattle was to the WTO. Seven years after that crazy November day in 1999, the latest round of trade negotiations — the Doha round — faltered and collapsed. The WTO now seems to be defunct. The Seattle protest and the social movements which formed around it and of which it was a part played a vital role in that. My guess is that the G8 leaders and political strategists are desperately looking for a way out of their annual shenanigans. Probably, there’s been a gnawing anxiety about their summit for a few years now, but our almost victory this month will have made them even more desperate. Because, the G8 summit is about legitimising neoliberal globalisation. An overriding message from Heiligendamm was that the G8 and neoliberalism is illegitimate. No doubt they’ll meet as planned next year in Japan. Probably they’ll meet in Italy in 2009 too, though that one will be tricky, being both the 10th anniversary of Seattle and the first Italy-hosted summit since Genoa. (That venue has already been decided: a small island in the Mediterranean Sea; not Elba, where the French emperor Napoleon I was exiled in 1814, but maybe the effect will not be so different.) But then… who knows, but I doubt very much that the G8 will exist in its current form.

Of course, they’ll spin it. They’ll talk of making their meetings more effective, perhaps they’ll have biannual meetings but on a much smaller scale with little publicity. They’ll use the comments of Helmut Schmidt, cofounder of the G6 (as it then was) in 1975, who’s criticised the current summits as a ‘media circus’ or something similar. But whatever they say, we should remember: it was us that done it. Or, as we wrote in ‘Worlds in Motion’: ‘sometimes it’s hard to see the social history buried within the latest government announcement.’

So, no doubt about it, Heiligendamm was a victory for us. It really is important to stress this. Many reports, particularly in the UK, adopt a top-down approach. The mainstream media tends to focus on what happened or did not happen inside the Red Zone — that piece in the FT was something of an exception. Indymedia seemed to more interested in reporting on repression and decentralised actions than the mass blockades. The following response to my comment that Heiligendamm was a victory to us is interesting.

i find this a bit offensive. how was it a victory?
maybe you enjoyed yourself, but i don’t think the kids of bangladesh were cheering. nothing changed; ergo, no victory.

Let’s leave aside the implicit racism of the comment — it homogenises the ‘kids of Bangladesh’ and assumes that ‘they’ are less politically sophisticated than ‘us’ (if I can cheer the victories of others, recognising them as part of my struggle, then why can’t they cheer my victories? — and the author’s quickness to take offence. It nevertheless raises at least two important questions.
First, did anything change? If so, what and how? Second, how does the mobilisation against the G8 in Heiligendamm relate to struggles elsewhere, e.g. in Bangladesh. I.e. how do antagonisms articulated locally become global? Or, perhaps these local antagonisms are immediately global. If so, then how do we understand them as such? Third, in exactly what sense was Heiligendamm a victory? (That hoary chestnut again: what does it mean to win?)

There are probably several reasons why it was a victory and why something changed.

1. Our mobilisation was a massive demonstration that the G8 and neoliberal globalisation is illegitimate. With neoliberalism already struggling for legitimacy, this is important. Though, as Rodrigo points out, it’s probably true that global capital can continue to reproduce itself without legitimacy for some time.

2. We produced the affect of victory. Of course I enjoyed myself! How could I experience those feelings of collective power and not enjoy myself? And I’m sure thousands of others did too. This is great. These feelings will remain with us and give us the confidence and optimism to continue acting. Whcih increases our power. So the ‘affect of victory’ isn’t just about ‘feelings’; it’s about material forces.
(And conversely (tho’ arguably) our enemies probably returned home without any affect of victory. Yes, they were reasonably successful in producing a spectacle of victory — more successful in some countries than others — but journalists were pissed off at having to spend so long on boats and queuing for boats, delegates’ helicopters had no proper landing places (and it’s undignified for a dignitary to have to wade through long grass) and the food and wine ran short! To top it off, delegates fought a lot amongst themselves. I’m not sure how important this all is. I think it’s probably less important whether Bush or Merkel experienced an affect of victory or not. But perhaps it matters when we’re talking about journalists and others essential for producing the summit as its organisers would wish. In Heiligendamm, it was very clear that the real energy was located with us. And energy is attractive! I’m sure journalists reporting on our blockades enjoyed a far richer experience and I think that’s important.)

3. We demonstrated very clearly — both to ourselves and people observing around the world — that mass actions can be effective. Again, this confidence in our own power is enormously important.The question of the relationship between local and global antagonism is harder. Tadzio (in his letter) makes a great point about this:

we failed to construct a clear antagonism because we were playing on different laying fields. concretely: while our protests were a mere police matter (a clear antagonism certainly existed between cops and demonstrators, as all of us who were beaten, arrested, tear-gassed, water-cannonned can surely attest to), the legitimation of the summit occurred on the discursive field of talking about climate change. now, the german radical left almost completely lacks a good political story about climate change, one that goes beyond individual appeals to fly less, raises the question of property and capital, while at the same time giving suggestions for how to act (the latter being a crucial component of every good political story).

7-8 years ago, when summits’ headline issues were still very much trade, privatisation, ‘the neoliberal agenda’, we had an excellent counter-story. our militant actions were embedded in this counter-story, so that our actions could rise beyond being mere policing matters, to being explicitly political, because they directly interfered in the construction of the discursive field that was being built to legitimate global authority. today, we have no story to counter theirs, so this production can go on undisturbed, no matter how effective our blockades are. it may be responded at this point that issue-engagement with the summit’s headline issues would add to the legitimation of an institution we try to delegitimate, but i think it’s fairly obvious that this year’s refusal to really construct a counterstory didn’t lead to a greater delegitimation of the G8.

thus the action point of this particular political story: we in the german radical, autonomous, anticapitalist left (whatever you want to call it) need to work to come up with a good story about climate change, to break through the relegitimation strategies so effectively deployed by merkel. more generally, at summits, we need to work in advance to develop a punchy story that relates to the summit’s headline issues, within which we can embed our actions. otherwise the latter remain mere public order problems, and cannot interfere with the production of global authority as legitimate.

The Heiligendamm mobilisation was also notable for two other important questions.

First, violence. (Not really a novel question, I know.) In some ways, I wonder whether the movement has gone backwards here. One of the exciting aspects of Heiligendamm (and what made it different from and more successful than Gleneagles in 2005) was the hard-won coalition of 120-odd groups that was the Block G8 campaign. But this coalition threatened to implode after the mini-riot in Rostock on Saturday 2 June. Simon makes some good points about this, talking of media (both corporate and IMC) hyperbole and of people reverting ‘to type’. Dorothea also said something really good. She said she’d learned long ago that denouncing certain protesters as ‘violent’ is never helpful. This links to Simon’s point, of course. Denunciation is about definition, it’s about closure, it’s about limiting our movement. Reverting to type is about stasis. But changing the world requires movement.

But, as Simon goes on to say, between Saturday and Wednesday, ‘the turnaround was amazing — because of the success of the blockades — and their fluidity and diversity. If you wanted a ruck, find the blockade where it was happening and contribute. If you wanted to keep a more tranquil blockade going overnight, you could find out where to go. Diversity and working together was again OK.’

Second, the tension between different modes of decision-making. The success of the Block G8 blockades depended on a closed group with a secret plan. This group did a brilliant job in getting thousands of people from the Rostock camp to the North gate and thousands more from the Reddelich camp to the East gate (by Bad Doberan). Our departure time, our route, our exact destination all had to be kept secret. How else could our objective of getting onto the key roads into Heilgendamm have been achieved otherwise?

Some people were very dismissive of Block G8 for this: ‘I’m an anarchist, I’ll not follow anyone, I’ll do my own thing. Fuck Block G8’. One person wrote on Indymedia: ‘Block G8 was a very hierarchical organisation. In the meetings I went to, all the details of the action were being organised by “action councils” and seemed very unaccountable and inaccessible unless you were prepared to go along and be cannon fodder for a central organising committee.’ As somebody responds on Indymedia, this is ‘quite disrespectful of those who had put huge effort and time into organising things (which are usually illegal, and enormously stressful, and done at great potential personal cost). I was really happy that some people had thought beforehand extremely carefully about to get us from camp to blockade in a coordinated way.’

But, getting thousands of people from camp to road is one thing. Maintaining a successful blockade once there is something else. The Block G8 secret ‘action committees’ did a great job getting us all onto the road and I was happy to follow them there. But sustaining the blockades required participation by all the blockaders and consensus decision-making, and Block G8 were reluctant to give up their power. So at the East gate we suffered a number of highly frustrating meetings on Wednesday evening, as the Block G8 action committee dominated discussions — taking full advantage of their ‘ownership’ of megaphones and the sound system and of the authority they’d won through their successful leadership in getting us onto the road. In short, they behaved like arseholes, accusing anyone who disagreed with them of attempting to destroy the ‘action consensus’ and of being intent only on ‘escalation’. At one point, they suggested that if they didn’t get their way, the blockade would no longer be under the auspices of Block G8 — this was a despicable attempt on their part to delegitimatise our action, which would have made it easier for the state to repress and criminalise. In fact, the blockade was in danger of falling apart altogether as Block G8 claimed that we’d achieved our objective and ordered a retreat. This retreat was halted only when two people sat down in the road in front of the sound system to prevent it leaving: blockading the blockaders!

Tensions within the blockade. Frustration with Block G8 and their tactics. The unsettling experiences of giving up a location we’d become familiar with to retreat 200m down the road and of watching many groups of people drift away altogether. Nervousness as darkness fell: the fear we’d be rudely awakened at 3am by water cannon and, possibly, tooled-up riot cops (combined with the more prosaic worry that tarmac doesn’t make for the best of beds). Wednesday night was somewhat tense! (It was important to bear in mind that although darkness presented uncertainties for us, it did so for the police too. They were exhausted too. They had no idea what we or some of us would do in the night — we were, after all, literally metres from the fence encircling the Red Zone. If they attacked, how would be react — and not only were we near the fence, we were right next to a railway line, with its plentiful supply of fist-size ammunition. Much safer for them to hold off. But this is exactly why we needed to maintain our collective identity and this is why the behaviour of Block G8 was so dangerous.) In the event, the night passed uneventfully, though some of our fears were realised: our numbers seemed to have dwindled from several thousand to fewer than one thousand. Thursday morning brought some great coffee — artisan-brewed latte from a wonderful man in a van operating two tiny expresso pots and a saucepan on a tiny stove — and more frustration courtesy of Block G8, who again suggested we’d done enough and that it was time to leave. But this time, we’d really had enough: a couple of organised and collective-minded affinity groups with experience of consensus decision-making challenged their leadership and we enjoyed a couple of fantastic blockade-wide spokes-meetings. As a result, our collectivity was reestablished and the blockades at that gate lasted for another 24 hours.

So, two points here.

First, how can we learn to shift between these two modes of decision-making — on the one hand, having a secret plan put into action by a closed group, and on the other, open, horizontal consensus decision-making — more smoothly, without rupture and discord?

Second, our experience on that blockade shows again the importance of affinity groups. Not only for dealing with the state, but, as there, for having the ability to override Block G8’s action committee which had outlived its usefulness.

That’s enough criticism of Block G8 and I want to end on a more positive note. Their advice as we headed for the road on Wednesday morning was spot-on and expresses our politics perfectly:

Don’t run straight at the cops; aim for the gaps!

Keir’s great blog about be(ar)s, rupture and the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ song has really got me thinking… about what’s radical, what’s revolutionary and what is not, about rupture and even about ‘directional demands’. And about context or perspective. And about all that non-linear stuff about small actions potentially have very large effects.

I’ve been reading Massimo De Angelis’s new book, The Beginning of History. Massimo talks about value practices:

those actions and processes, as well as correspondent webs of relations, that are both predicated on a given value system and in turn (re)produce it. These are, in other words, social practices and correspondent relations that articulate individual bodies and the wholes of social bodies in particular ways. This articulation is produced by individual singularities discursively selecting what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ within a value system and actually acting upon this selection. This action in turn goes through feedback mechanisms across the social body in such a way as to articulate social practices and constitute anew these ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ or, given the nature of feedback mechanisms, to set a limit to these ‘goods’ and ‘bads’. To talk about value practices is therefore to talk about how social form, organsiational reach, mode of doing, modes of co-producing and relating, forms of articulation of powers, are constituted through social processes.

I’m thinking that actions which appear to be within a capitalist logic, the value practices of the market, may in fact take us outside it, if only marginally. This tiny crevice, this little fissure or rupture, may then give us a foothold to step further outside, it may be a crack large enough to ease a crowbar into, it may spread and join with other such fissures, as John Holloway writes in his ‘Breaking Time’ piece.

So ‘Thou shalt not kill’ may be just another song for sale on the market, but the references to Crass and Minor Threat perhaps take us fleetingly outside market relations. And this is perhaps the potential of the ‘fair trade’: money, commodities, etc. are all produced/circulated, but participants are stepping outside the market logic which values only lowest cost of production as a ‘good’. But I think that how one views (or values) these, depends on one’s perspective. Compare the social centre in Venice which offers a three-course meal (doubt very much if it’s vegetarian), let alone vegan, for 10 euros (or a kebab, if you’re in a hurry) with the Common Place in Leeds, where such a menu would be considered a ‘bad’.

So, from where I’m standing it looks like Keir’s lying on the left side of the bed — along with David Essex, Bryan Ferry, et al. — but, no doubt, from where he’s lying, it all looks very different.

Notes from 20 November 2006

Some questions and problems.

First, measure. How do we *know* when we’re winning? We can set targets, but what sort of targets? How can we measure achievements within social movements? How *do* we measure achievements within social movements? Because we do always measure. We say: “Oh, that was a good meeting.” Or: “That thing we did wasn’t very effective [whatever ‘effective’ means], let’s try something else next time.” At Gleneagles, we celebrated the fact that we tied up the police for ages and prevented the Canadian delegation from reaching the summit at all on its opening day. This was an index of our success. This was measure.

But how useful is this type of measure? Measure must always take place in the *extensive* realm, the realm of the *actual*, the realm of what *exists* (De Landa). The extensive realm isn’t unimportant and it isn’t ‘bad’, but it isn’t the whole story; there’s more! How do we ‘measure’ the pleasure of eating apples, for example? In the extensive realm, all we can do is the count the number of apples. But living a life is not simply about calories and nutrition. It’s about freedom and potential. Our freedom and potential to produce, regardless of whether we do, in fact, produce. It may not be apples we actually desire. In terms of exploring out potential, transforming our subjectivities, developing our collectivity… well, these processes are immeasurable.

Here, when we are thinking about subjectivities and desire and potential, we have moved into the realms of the *intensive* and the *virtual*. It’s processes in the intensive realm – the movement of our desires and subjectivities — which constitute or produce the extensive. And the virtual realm is the field of potential, the field of what is possible or what might be possible.

A major problem for us (the second problem or question) is that it’s hard to see these intensive processes which constitute the extensive realm. In other words, we can observe the ‘actual’ world quite easily, but not the underlying movements. We can easily see poverty. We can look at statistics on life expectancy. We can even trace these back to ownership of the ‘means of production’ or the ‘division of labour’. But it’s more difficult to work out what’s going on underneath. This is certainly the case in ‘normal’ situations, when the world is in ‘equilibrium’. However…

… the intensive realm is far more apparent in far-from-equilibrium situations. At summit protests, for example, we can see more easily what social movements are made of. We can see commodities for what they are: dead. We get a sense that this is *real*, this is *life*. ‘Reality’ itself is punctured. Can also be punctured or ruptured by various other means. Not only ‘political’ or ‘cultural’ moments of excess, but also drugs or meditation perhaps. Sometimes, in these situations, things, the ‘way the world is’ – e.g., class inequality – just become blindingly obvious. *But*. Does this mean that ‘reality’, the extensive, is simply a shell? A shell which hides (and protects us from?) the intensive which lies beneath?

Third problem or question. The relation between the extensive and the intensive. Causality is not all one way, from intensive to extensive. Outcomes in the extensive realm do impact on the intensive realm and the field of possibilities. Victory of the Democrats in the US Congressional elections changes things for us. It alters the field in which we operate. E.g. there is no longer any point in organising around a “don’t invade Iran” position. Similarly, now the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are all in crisis, struggles against these institutions seem to make less sense.

And this brings us back to the question of winning. For the crisis of the WTO and its cousins is our victory. (Remember Seattle in 1999 was a mobilisation against the WTO.) But it’s a victory in the extensive realm. And is this really what we mean by winning? Is it ‘our’ sort of winning? In 1999, these institutions appeared hegemonic, unquestionable, impossible to challenge. (‘There Is No Alternative.’) But we did challenge them. The very act of questioning the unquestionable, of practically imagining another world, is a victory in the intensive realm.

And we have to remember that the WTO is itself only a husk. It is less a ‘thing’, then a rigidified set of social relations. Its crisis means a certain web of social relationships are more fragile. But maybe those social relationships ‘moved on’, to organise the Olympics, for example. Which reminds us that capital also has an intensive realm – which it shares with us; they’re not separate; we are not separate from capital. More generally, the state is one of capital’s extensive faces. States attempt to harness or service capital’s movement. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of social movements versus the state (or state actors, such as the police). But the state just a moment of class struggle (Bonefeld and Holloway). And when capitalist organisations/states are in crisis, it is also more possible to observe capital’s intensive realm. (Really all we are doing here is observing the ‘same’ far-from-equilibrium situation from two perspectives: our own and that of capital.)

Fourth problem/question: strategy. Can you place yourself to even a small degree in the future to think strategically. That is, can we immanently strategise? One example is the climate camp. Can we think about its possibilities, its potential, even if we don’t quite know what those possibilities or potential are? Or can we only think about strategy in the extensive realm?

In moments of excess — when everything is open, when we ask “how do we want to live?” — we just *be*: this is also when we *can* think strategically but don’t have to. This is where strategy becomes just *be*. Ineffability. Vocalising freezes and drags us back into realm of politics. Teleology. Strategy closes off. Victory in the intensive realm opens up possibilities. Burrowing… want more and more, wider and wider, without any sense of direction… different subjectivities experiment in different areas.

Fifth problem (restating the second). If the intensive is the realm of change, with the extensive the realm of stasis, how do we access it? Because when the intensive becomes visible, so does the virtual. And when we glimpse the intensive, we also ‘see’ (sense) connections to other processes/events. Resonance! But resonance is independent of consciousness. So struggles don’t have to be ‘aware’ of one another in order to resonate.

So how can we create right materials — tools or techniques — to facilitate intensity? We have to strategise because we can’t do everything. It’s about what seems possible. And that’s why strategy is different in intensive moments. But intensive states are quite fragile. At Gleneagles, there was resonance and consensus decision-making helped maintain consistency. Political animosity vanished (Zolberg: ‘Moments of Madness’). The bombing of July 7 shattered this state. How can we make intensive moments less fragile? Use refrains. Could argue that consensus decision-making is part of the extensive realm? But using it as a refrain means we can change it, use it, drop it. A tool. It doesn’t need to be formalised. Don’t need to use this tool for meeting with just four people, say. Unless it’s extensive, doesn’t exist for some people.

Final question/problem. How do we stay on the productive edge, which lies on boundary between the void and the extensive realm?

We’ve all experienced those moments of excess, moments – such as Seattle, Genoa, Evian, Gleneagles – when we’ve put our lives on the line, or felt like we have. Felt the vulnerability of our tender human flesh. This feeling is real. Demonstrators in the global South have always risked bullets. Since the repression of anti-EU summit protests in Gothenburg in June 2001 and the murder of Carlo Giuliano in Genoa a few weeks later, this risk has become real for us in the North too. And even without ‘live’ ammunition, police batons, boots, tear gas, water cannon can still do mortal damage to our bodies… the risks may be low, but our lives could be snuffed out in an instant.

We’ve all experienced those moments of excess during which we feel that total connection with our fellow human beings, when everything becomes possible, when absolutely anything could happen! Those moments when our energy threatens – or rather promises – to spark a cascade of changes which sweep through society, opening up a whole new range of possibilities. When we rupture capital’s fabric of domination: breaking time. Rapture!

But these events – these moments of excess – don’t last forever. It’s simply not possible for our bodies and minds to survive that level of intensity indefinitely. And indefinite ‘events’ probably aren’t even desirable. We frequently leave lovers and/or loved-ones behind to travel to such gatherings. And we miss them! Or we know our allotment or garden needs tending. Or there’s a favourite cycle ride or view or cityscape we need to enjoy again. ‘There is a rose and I should be with her. There is a town unlike any other.’

So what happens when we ‘return’ to the ‘real world’? Counter-summit mobilisations (say) allow this immensely productive focusing of our energies, but how can we sustain this movement in our ‘habitual lives’. How can we ‘do politics’ in the ‘real world’? How can we live a life? And we don’t mean simply survive, hanging on in there until the next event… or our fortnight’s holiday in the sun, or our Friday-night bender, or our Sunday-afternoon walk in the park, or our ‘adventure weekend’ – none of which are any real escape from capitalism at all, but simply another form of capitalist (re)production, recreation of ourselves as workers. We mean live: life despite capitalism.

We don’t really have too many answers to these questions. But we believe that thinking about them can help us to better understand the function of social centres, say, and the way we conceive the borders between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between what is ‘pure’ and what is not. Thinking about these questions can help us understand the potential of various issues and struggles – urban development and ‘regeneration’, climate change, precarity and so on – perhaps help us recognise our own power in a productive way, that is, in a way which allows it to resonate and become amplified. It involves recognising that we always live in the real world, that there are no ‘pure spaces’, there is no ‘pure politics’, and that we should welcome this. Because purity is also sterility. It’s the messiness of our ‘habitual’ lives which gives them their potential. This messiness, this ‘impurity’, the contaminations of different ideas, values and modes of being (and becoming) are the conditions which allow mutations, some of which will be productive. It’s from this primordial soup of the ‘real world’ that new life will spring. ‘Only in the real world do things happen like they do in my dreams.’