freely associating

I know things have been very quiet on this blog for the past few months, but we are still alive and kicking. Honest. Over the last few months we’ve been occupied elsewhere – including the latest issue of Turbulence and an organised walk through Leeds – and that’s left us little time to do stuff with our Free Association hats on. Hopefully that will change soon. One of our ...

Oh dear, last weeks wide-eyed talk of green shoots have already been replaced by a new sense of gloom and talk of a double dip recession. That must rank amongst the shortest, least noticeable economic recoveries in history. I suppose wishful thinking can only get you so far. Ultimately the pundits and spinners are going to have to face up to the idea that the present economic crisis ...

It’s funny how quickly and unexpectedly things can move. I’ve obviously thinking of the MPs’ expenses scandal, which seems to spiraling out of control. It’s also hard to know how to act in these situations. In one sense the obvious “thing to do” is to try to deepen this crisis of legitimacy (of MPs and of parliament) into a crisis of governance -- linking this crisis with economic ...

I stumbled over this and can't get it out of my head, so I’m posting it here as an act of exorcism. Kottke says this Gaussian goat “is perhaps what the world would look like if human vision could perceive all of an object’s possible quantum mechanical states at the same time.” It’s much the same with social movements. Once we give them a name (anarchist, anti-crisis, libertarian Marxist etc), ...

Things have been quiet on this blog (we’ve been getting on elsewhere with life, birth & death, among other things). But the other night I got pulled up over my reservations about the forthcoming anarchist movement conference. So here are some rambling responses… There’s all the usual trivial stuff about what “anarchism” means. Like a lot of people, I have a love/hate relation with the label. In the grand ...

Last night I gave a short talk on behalf of We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis to the Climate Chaos Cafe at The CommonPlace. There’s nothing staggeringly original in it, but it does contain some nice insights harvested from all over the place (some chunks were lifted verbatim from the latest issue of The Commoner and libcom). WHAT DOES THE ECONOMIC CRISIS MEAN FOR THE CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT? We are ...

“The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.” – William Morris This leaped out at me give our recent obsession with temporalities. Plus he’s got a beard to die for… (pinched from The Sea-Greens Society)

Things have been a bit quiet here because we've been trying to piece together our thoughts on crisis for an article in the next Shift. Those speculations can be found here (although we may one day produce a slightly longer version because we ended up cutting sections on wealth and value, among other things). As we threw ideas around, one that kept bouncing back was the meaning of ‘crisis’. ...

On the 28th of April 2006 a group of activists dressed in Superhero costumes burst into the insanely expensive Hamburg delicatessen, Frische Paradies and ran out with 1500 Euros worth of expensive food. Despite several police cars and a helicopter rushing to the scene, the culprits they got clean away. Not, however, before they posed for the photo above, which they release along with a communiqué explaining that ...

I went to a really productive meeting at the CommonPlace last night, throwing about ideas on the financial crisis and trying to work out how best we can 'intervene' (ugh, bad word but you know what I mean). I'm slowly coming to terms to with the fact that I'm fairly crap in meetings: I get distracted too easily and lose the thread; plus I have the turning circle ...