freely associating

A few years ago we commented (in Moments of Excess) that tactics of militant protest and direct action seemed to have spread, been usurped or hijacked even, by other rather dubious campaigns, such as the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice. We then dismissed ‘militant lobbying’ and went on to talk about constitutive politics. Certainly both the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice were pretty marginal campaigns in ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

[gallery] One of the questions we keep tripping up on when we talk about antagonism is whether there is a real antagonism that is masked by false antagonisms. Of course this makes us nervous given the left's history of subsuming other struggles so that class struggle (narrowly defined) is primary and women's issues, for example, are classed as secondary. This is related to treating class as a fixed identity ...

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 ...

We've talked before about how “Social movements produce their own problematic at the same time as they are formed by them.” Then recently, in an as yet unfinished piece called ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, we’ve been trying to write about antagonism. These are just some notes to try and think through how those are related. That is the link between movement problematics, the recomposition of antagonism, ...

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 ...

"It's true that there is in you a kind of air of communist youth, summer camp, 'onward comrades!' and all that. It's leftist kitsch. But this is only one of your aspects, because, on the other hand, what moves you in all of this is a kind of passion for the currents of active energy that blow gusts of air into the social body, which then starts to ...