In a recent blog post asking why some forms of action resonate and others don’t, Brian dismissed the idea that there is ‘some magic pixie-dust that will guarantee success’. He’s right of course but perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss pixie-dust too quickly. In fact during our collective discussions the Free Association has frequently toyed with the prospect of a materialist analysis of pixie-dust (née fairy-dust). It’s one of our favourite riffs.

The roots of the riff lie in the annals of pop history, more specifically, in a famous bootleg tape of the Troggs (a popular beat combo, m’lud) having a hilariously sweary argument at a recording session. The sound engineer, who failed to press stop on the tape player, captured a band trying desperately to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. The conclusion reached is legend: “You got to put a little bit of fucking fairy-dust over the bastard.”

Since the introduction of this story into our discussions we have used fairy-dust as a stand-in for the element of chance in political action. There must be a limit point for analysis when we are seeking to go beyond what seems possible. Perhaps the Troggs were channeling a wider point about the process of creation. After all if we shift the register from pop music to revolutionary political analysis, the problem of the elusive hit record could read something like: ‘how do isolated acts of resistance gel to become mass rebellions? And what conditions make them more likely to succeed (even if only for a short time)?’

I always thought fairy-dust was just a nice metaphor; I liked it because it contained pop music and swearing, but reading a new book called “Capitalist Sorcery” makes me think there may be a more substantial concept in it. In fact the book, of which I’ve only scratched the surface, argues for the utility of certain ‘supernatural’ concepts in moments that make us question what we had previously taken as ‘natural’. Of course we are talking about a materialist reading of the ‘supernatural’: “There is a tendency to put everything into the same bag and to tie it up and label it ‘supernatural’. What then gets understood as ‘supernatural’ is whatever escapes the explanations we judge ‘natural’, those making an appeal to processes and mechanisms that are supposed to arise from ‘nature’ or ‘society’” (Pignarre, Stengers 2011: 39).[1]

This seems like a useful way into the political problems of the current situation because the economic crisis, which began in 2007, has severely dented belief in the ‘naturalness’ of the neoliberal world-view. Indeed the series of revolts that have followed, from Athens to London, from Tunis to Cairo, have allowed us to glimpse a different, re-potentialised world. Is this a glimpse of the ‘‘supernatural’? Of course neoliberalism isn’t dead, its current zombie state seems stubbornly persistent. Meanwhile our political and media elites continue to broadcast from within the old worldview, as though such events never happened. The introduction to Capitalist Sorcery describes this last point nicely: “Politicians within the parliamentary-democratic system (or its near equivalents) are entirely caught up in the logic of killing politics [a logic we can] associate with capitalism. It is a logic that aims to ‘naturalise’ – and hence automate and de-politicise – political decisions.”

Isn’t this the logic that is justifying austerity? The political possibilities opened up by the crisis have been disappeared behind a veil of apparent necessity. The mantra of neoliberalism remains the same: There Is No Alternative. We have to smash this mask of naturalness, to show that these decisions are political and that there are many other possible forms of social organization. This is, however, far from a simple task. Politicians (and indeed the rest of us) are not the freely choosing agents presupposed by liberal ideology. They are caught up in this logic of killing politics and even if they wanted to escape it they simply wouldn’t know how. Marx and Engels captured this point when they channeled Faust in the Communist Manifesto: “Modern bourgeois society is… like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Capitalism isn’t just greed; nor is it reducible to the nefarious plans of individual capitalists or politicians. It is a set of logics that we are all caught up in, a series of abstract dynamics that have been summoned forth but which, during their operation, come to appear as natural and eternal. Isn’t this what we might understand as Capitalist Sorcery?

We are all caught up in forces that we can’t quite get at. As we go about our everyday lives, as we go to work or to the shops, we presuppose, for instance, that money will be the basis of our interactions. Because we presuppose these things they seem beyond our control. Of course we also know that our interactions contain something in excess of capital, something human, but we are continually encouraged to discount this excess. Such dynamics are facets of capitalism but they are made worse by neoliberalism. As politicians impose competitive markets in ever more areas of life, as we are put into situations that force us to see others as competitors, as we repeat behaviours over and over, then it becomes harder to make out where capital ends and we begin. As the Gang of Four put it: ‘Each day seems like a natural fact.’ The paradox is that the effects of capital become hidden and ungraspable and yet they act concretely to limit our lives.

Anti-capitalist politics is about breaking with these limitations, it is about re-potentialising the world. However to most people, most of the time, anti-capitalist politics don’t quite make sense. The individual components might be sensible enough but as a whole it just doesn’t seem viable. It is, after all, an ‘unnatural’ position to take, so much in our everyday lives argues against it. Events and crises, however, put the continuation of our previous everyday lives into doubt. When the ‘naturalness’ of the current state of things begins to lose its grip then the space opens up for ‘supernatural’ solutions.

Despite the disappearance of the crisis behind the veil of necessity we still feel something changed in 2008. It is hard to make out what that something consists of; it has after all remained largely mute. With some analysis though we can begin to guess at its contours. The ‘natural’ state of things once seemed to promise an improved life, if not for us then at least for our children. Now that promise appears unviable and the ‘natural’ state of things seems more like a trap. If the path to what we currently understand as ‘the good life’ becomes blocked then we can come to doubt if it was such a ‘good life’ after all. This is why it has been so hard to make out the something that has changed; it is a change in the underlying structure of contemporary desire. What we once desired, and the mechanisms that produced those desires, have lost their coherence.

This means that new desires are being produced and with them new political possibilities. We can be sure of this because of the change in recent struggles. We have seen the unexpected resonance of previously minority ideas. We have seen the emergence of the kind of movements not seen for a generation. We have seen cascades of events that have broken forty-year stalemates. Yet we still don’t know how far the new possibilities go because they have not been given full expression. Only collective political action can do this and our task, if we have one, is to see if we can trigger it. The problem, of course, is that we also caught, to a greater or lesser extent, within the current sense of things. As such we, as anti-capitalist militants, are also sorcerers. We are trying to conjure up something beyond ourselves, something we can’t wholly know, something beyond the existing ‘natural’ limits of society; something ‘supernatural’. It is in conditions like these that concepts like fairy dust begin to make sense. Fairy dust invokes the need for a gamble, a roll of the dice, an experiment. For this we need to leave our safety zones. “’We don’t know’ thus makes us leave the safety of the regime of judgment for one of risk, the risk of failure that accompanies all creation,” (Pignarre, Stengers 2011: 39). This does involve the element of chance, however it is not a question of just trusting to luck. We might better think of the process of putting ‘a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard’ as a kind of incantation that draws on past experience in order to exceed it. Even the Troggs knew that the path to fairy dust lies between knowledge and cliché. “I know that it needs strings, that I do know”.

Given this we can see the Milbank occupation as an invocation. That jubilant show of defiance as boots went through windows crystallised a new mood of militancy. By doing so it conjured up a movement no one was expecting. Yet that movement has stuttered as it has failed to generalise. Another example of actions sprinkled with fairy dust can be found with UK Uncut. Who could have predicted that occupations of Vodafone shops would resonate so widely and spread so virally? Was it the result of fortuitous circumstances? Or did the specifics of its incantations facilitate its spread?

UK Uncut certainly shows us some of the elements needed for a contemporary invocation of politics. Firstly it manages to capture a spreading desire to take part in direct action. There is a deeply felt need for a new collective, participatory politics to counter the parliamentary-democratic system’s killing of politics. Yet UK Uncut’s actions also spread because they are easily replicable. They have a low entry level. Taking part isn’t too difficult. It doesn’t require too much preparation or specialist knowledge. The risks involved are not too high. Secondly, although the actions contain a ‘supernatural’ element they also make immediate sense. The argument is instantly grasped: austerity is a political decision and not the result of a ‘law of nature’. It is a political decision not to tax corporations and the rich as rigorously as the rest of us. It is a political decision to impose the costs of the crisis onto the poorest of society and those who did least to cause it. The UK Uncut actions, and the police response they provoke, reveal some of the dynamics of capital that neoliberalism seeks to deny. They reveal, for example, that capital contains different and antagonistic interests and that politicians, the police and contemporary structures of power align themselves with certain interests and against others. It is a political decision to do so.

Yet there is a danger here. The actions must be instantly understandable but that means they can only push so far into the boundaries of what it is currently possible to say. They must by necessity still contain many of our societies hidden presuppositions to thought. If the actions don’t contain a dynamic that pushes further and generalizes wider then the movement risks collapsing fully into the sense of the old world. We are all too familiar with this. “Of course we’d love to tax the bankers”, says the government, “but if we did they’d simply move to Geneva.” The parliamentary-democratic system seeks to kill every revelation of a political decision with a new ‘naturalisation’.

Now we can make out the third necessary element of our incantations. Our forms of action must include mechanisms or moments that set the conditions for collective analysis. Perhaps they must build in spaces, physical and temporal, which can maintain collectivity while slowing down the level of intensity. We need that familiar rhythm between the high intensity of action and the cooler pace of discussion and analysis. Only by maintaining this rhythm can we push further through the dynamics of capital that limit our lives. In such conditions movements can change and adapt in order to generalise. During the student movement the occupations played something of this role but on their own they weren’t enough. For a movement to move it must exceed the conditions of its own emergence. While a small group might stumble across a workable incantation they must conjure up forces that make themselves redundant. The aim must be to make the mass its own analyst, to spread the potential for leadership across the whole of the collective body. After all if a Genie gives you three wishes then your last wish should always be for another three wishes.

What follows are some random (and rambling) thoughts on the power of events or acts to inspire whole movements – in part provoked by Paul Mason’s Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere, but also as an excuse to display this brilliant poster which I found at the bottom of a drawer the other day.

The events in north Africa sparked Paul Mason’s comments but obviously the question is a lot wider. How do isolated acts of resistance gel to become mass rebellions? And what conditions make them more likely to succeed (even if only for a short time)? The points that really interest me at the moment are points 3 and 7:

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.

7. Memes: “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.” (Wikipedia) – so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly “market tested” and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.

This brilliant timeline gives a sense of the stuff that’s been kicking off across the world over the last few months. It’s easy to over-state the cohesion and power of these events. And there is a risk of neophilia, of uncritically celebrating the new: “the time for change is now” – as if real change was impossible at earlier points. The flipside to this is the apocalyptic undertone which says, more or less openly, that if we fail to resist the imposition of austerity now, we’ll be fucked for several generations to come. But all the same, it certainly feels like we might be on the cusp of a shift in social relations (the crazy before the new). And part of that feeling is to do with the accelerating pace of events: that truth (the unfolding of new social relations) is moving faster than lies (the ability of capital and the state to restrain or limit our desires).

In the 1980s security experts in the West used the idea of the domino effect to talk about social movements in Central Latin America. El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras… the US government feared that victory by “communist” (sic) forces would threaten its own strategic interests. But underlying the domino theory was the idea that outside agitators (in this case, Moscow- or Cuban-trained revolutionaries) were somehow responsible for the rise of popular national liberation movements (fast forward 30 years and Gaddafi has been coming out with the same sort of bullshit, blaming widespread revolt in Libya on al-Qaeda).

Thinking about the speed of change, a lot has been made of the role played by social networking tools (Twitter, Facebook etc etc), but the fact is that struggles have always circulated one way or another – the Black Jacobins didn’t rely on tweets from Paris, but news still went back and forth, albeit in a much slower way. Obviously, the speed at which information can be shared helps to build up momentum in a way that three-monthly dispatches can’t. And momentum appears to be key here. As recent events in north Africa and the Gulf states show, it is the idea of rebellion that spreads as much as the act itself – and it moves far faster than any outside agitator. It’s a contagion that doesn’t depend on physical contact. In fact, it makes more sense to think about this in terms of resonance.

But if we are thinking about social change in terms of memes, how do they arise? Perhaps one of the key assets of memes is that they are reproducible across a range of environments. In Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain and elsewhere, for example, the occupation of public space, like Tahir Square and Pearl Roundabout, has been a central theme. There might be a connection here to simple acts of disobedience or resistance which are taken up and spread rapidly – like Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus, or the mass refusal of the Poll Tax. These acts tend to be low-cost entry points into a movement: people can ‘do’ them (and so join a ‘movement’) without actually doing a lot. To join the anti-Poll Tax movement, all people had to do was not pay something that many of us couldn’t afford to pay anyway. Those individual acts then became part of a much wider collective event. And in a world of atomised social relations, it is this collectivity that is crucial. It creates new possibilities, new worlds (perhaps, we could conjugate resistance in this way: I transgress, you resist, we world).

But numbers, on their own, are not enough. I lived down South during the 1984–85 miners’ strike and the bright yellow Coal Not Dole stickers were a great marker for where the lines had been drawn between Us and Them. But most of the time they were also accompanied by a sense of stalemate, of a pitched battle. There was rarely enough shift in Us to destabilise Them. Compare this to the anti-Poll Tax movement where the weeks and months leading up to Trafalgar Square seemed to be filled with an escalation of events as local town halls were occupied or surrounded as they set their taxes. There was a sense of movement. Perhaps numbers plus momentum equals a new collective body. And perhaps we can think of momentum as the rapid expansion and mutation of memes.

Again, it seems that the sense of moving is key to the way memes multiply and spread. The moment of greatest potential in this festival video is when dozens of people swoop in from all directions to join the dance. At that stage we have no idea what will happen: perhaps we’ll storm the stage; perhaps we’ll tear down the fence that separates the festival from the rest of the world; perhaps we’ll create a living sculpture. Who knows what this new collective body can achieve? And it’s hard not to feel a little deflated when the crowd turns toward the stage at the end and applaud the band and themselves: like establishing a Commune and then rushing to home to cheer a newly elected government.

Moreover, if this sense of momentum offers a real break from the everyday, it’s a break not just from the numbing routine of work-consume-sleep but also from the routine of work-politics-meeting-leaflet etc etc. The multiplication of acts of resistance and emergence of social movements also means a regroupment or re-alignment of our forces. The ‘activist fiction’ (the idea that the world will be changed by activists, therefore we need to make more activists) has become even more unsustainable in the face of recent events.

But why are some acts taken up, replicated and spread, while others remain entirely isolated? Why do we remember Rosa Parks and not Claudette Colvin? Is there some magic pixie-dust that will guarantee success? Clearly not. We have to gamble. And that means history will always be littered with discarded leaflets, dead campaigns, acts that didn’t take off. Our notion of what is possible is constrained by the ‘reality’ of everyday life. Sometimes it takes an act of imagination (of fiction, even) to reveal the real potential. And once we’ve glimpsed another world, it’s harder to go back.

Which also makes me think of this line from Pulp’s Glory Days:

Oh we were brought up on the Space-Race,
now they expect you to clean toilets.
When you’ve seen how big the world is,
how can you make do with this?

A short advert, based on this video, to promote our contribution to this year’s Left Forum in the US.

Moments of Excess, a Free Association anthology, is now available here. It’s a project that’s taken the best part of a year to realise, but it’s not the usual tale of missed deadlines. As the book’s introduction says:

The texts collected here were written over a ten year period from summer 2001 to January 2011. All were initially written as interventions, one way or another, so it’s no surprise that they betray their origin and context. One or two were originally written for books, some appeared in ‘movement’ publications such as Derive Approdi and Turbulence, and most were also handed out as self-published booklets in the heat of the moment. Yet as we assembled this edition, we were struck by how well the articles hang together as a collection. They are coherent—and they tell a story.

In fact, as we re-read the texts we were both tempted to update them in the light of recent events and simultaneously struck by how much sense they still made. The final article, Re:generation, was initially conceived, early in 2010, as a simple postscript to the other texts, a piece that would tie up loose ends and draw our story to a close. But when we sat down to think about it at the end of last year, of course we discovered that events had taken place and things had moved—as they always do. And how could we not think and attempt to make sense of these movements? More than a simple coda, it opens up more than it closes down.

So what is the story of Moments of Excess? As we re-read the texts, at least three different narratives emerged from the threads that run through them. The first is a tale about the movement of movements, focused on the cycle of counter-summit mobilisations that is usually reckoned to have begun with the WTO Seattle meeting in November 1999. Looking back now, it seems clear that this cycle has come to an end—first stalled and then definitively thrown aside by the economic crisis that ripped across the planet in 2008.

But this isn’t just a historical anthology: there’s a second, wider thread about the form of politics appropriate to the world we live in. Neoliberalism’s ideology of permanent progress through growth may have been shattered by the economic crisis, but it staggers on, zombie-like—and unprecedented cuts in public expenditure across the world are actually expanding its programme of social decomposition. As cracks appear in the most unlikely of places, there’s space to ask the one question worth asking: what sort of world do we want to live in?

And finally there is an even older narrative—the story of ‘the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer—the Revolution’. These are whispers across time and space that can’t be silenced. However it’s expressed—‘Omnia sunt communia’, ‘The poor shall wear the crown’, ‘Que se vayan todos’—we hear the same refusal, the same desire to stop the world as we know it and create something else. Who knows? By tomorrow, this book may well be meaningless, rendered irrelevant by the grubbing of that old mole. We are, after all, part of ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.

(But in the meantime, do yourself a favour and get hold of a copy…)

Just a little teaser/shameless plug for our book Moments of Excess which is being published early next year by the good folk at PM Press. This guy has clearly read it…

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I came across this great quote here about the recent storming of the Tory party HQ.

I pushed a little and realised we were winning, so I thought what happens if we push a little more, so we did, and we broke a window! Then I thought, wow, we broke the window, what happens if we go inside? Then we got inside! So I thought, if we got this far, could we go further? And before I knew it I was on the roof!

This is the line that leapt out at me: If we got this far, could we go further? I’m hoping the answer’s in our book…

Like many people who reach our ‘advanced years’ we in the Free Association have turned our attention to the question of inheritance and new generations. What we’re interested in, however, is the prospect of a new cycle of struggle and the emergence of new social movements. Using the concept of a generation to think this through leads to questions such as: How does a political generation form? And what role can the experience of past generations play in this? Let me explain why we think these are apt questions for this moment in time.

Some of us have argued previously that the world is trapped in a state of limbo, and has been since the economic crash of 2007-8. The ongoing social and economic crisis has shattered the ideology of neoliberalism that’s dominated the world for thirty years. Any notion that neoliberal globalisation will solve the world’s problems has simply collapsed. Instead neoliberalism stands naked, exposed as a simple smash and grab, which has concentrated social wealth into a tiny number of hands. Far from being a modernist project, leading to inevitable social progress, neoliberalism is revealed as a decadent, and perhaps always doomed, deferral of the unresolved crisis of the 1970s. Yet despite this ideological collapse the neoliberal reforms of the public sector continue to be rolled out and with the forthcoming cuts are even being speeded up. This is not because the general population believe it to be the best way to organise the world, it is, rather, because no other conception of society has been able to cohere and gain the social force needed to replace it. The result is that neoliberalism staggers on, zombie like, ideologically dead, shorn of its teleology and purpose, containing no hope of a better future, yet with no opposition strong enough to finish it off.

Why have we ended up in this position? In part it is because, particularly in the US and UK, neoliberalism has been extremely effective at decomposing society and removing the preconditions for collective action. One of the primary aims of the neoliberal project has been to change our common sense view of the world, or to put that in a different language, the neoliberal reforms of society aimed to produce neoliberal subjectivities. In the absence of a change in the organisation of society neoliberalism continues to operate, markets are imposed on ever-wider areas of life and participation in those markets trains people in a neoliberal world-view. To explain this further: when you participate in a competitive market you are forced to act as a utility maximising individual, you have to act in ruthless and heartless competition with others over scarce resources. The more we do this the more we come to adopt this outlook as natural; this is what is meant by a neoliberal subjectivity. The difference now, however, is those trained in this world-view are finding it increasingly hard to make sense of world.

We can gain another angle on this through the concept of antagonism. The transfer of social wealth into the hands of the very, very rich would tend to provoke antagonism in those whose wealth is being taken away. Neoliberalism deals with this problem by obscuring these antagonisms, partly by inculcating a world-view that can’t recognise them but also through mechanisms that displace or defer them. We have talked previously about the central role that cheap credit has played in the neoliberal deal. Real wages in the West have been in stagnation or decline since the late 1970s. Yet access to cheap credit has helped to maintain living standards in the present and so defer the consequences of neoliberalism, displacing the antagonism over social resources into the future. With the massive cuts in public spending it seems that the debts are being called in, but can we expect the displaced antagonism to arrive at the same time?

The prospect of the arrival of antagonism, and with it a new generation of struggle has been dominating Britain over the last few months. In fact in recent weeks, a sort of phoney war has settled in. The phoney war is the name given to the first few months of World War Two before the invasion of France and the start of real fighting between France, Britain and Germany. In our case, of course, we are still not sure whether this sensation of phoney war is merely a nostalgic expectation. Large-scale class warfare has erupted across a swathe of Europe but we simply don’t know yet if it will spread to Britain. To put this differently, we still don’t know how deep the neoliberal decomposition of society goes. To me it seems likely that the breaking of the neoliberal deal will provoke an upsurge in struggle and collective action. However I doubt it will appear in the form or shape that people are expecting. Because of the transformations in society it seems unlikely that these struggles will resemble the 1980s. The response to austerity will likely take an unexpected, or even displaced forms, indeed we might not perceives some struggles as responses to public service cuts, even though they are.

So the question arises: how can we best prepare for an event of unknown shape and time of arrival? Or from another perspective, how do we, who have been through previous generations of struggle, prepare ourselves for the emergence of new movements? What role can our past experiences play, or will the expectations our past experiences produce obscure what is new about the situation?

Second time as farce…

Luckily for us in the Free Association these questions seem to fit with a project that we are already committed to. Early next year PM press is publishing a collection of our writing and we have to write an introduction and epilogue for it. Most of the pieces in the collection were written as interventions into particular moments in what might loosely be called the alter-globalisation cycle of struggles (although it took many other names, movement of movements, etc,). Writing the epilogue has allowed us to revisit those texts with an eye for what remains useful and what was simply of its time. In turn this has provoked the question of how the lessons of previous generations can be learnt and repeated in a useful and productive way.  After all, from a certain angle the existing state of limbo, and indeed the sensation of a phoney war, can be seen as a pregnant pause between the exhaustion of one cycle of struggles and the emergence of a new one.

One of the resources with which we can conceptualise this problem is Marx’s great text on historical repetitions, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which contains this famous passage:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brains of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in their time-honoured disguise and in this borrowed language (Marx The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1968: 97).

The starting point here is that we only rarely get the chance to become historical actors. We only rarely face the possibility of breaking with the historical conditioning that limits how our lives can be lived. The Free Association want to call these moments, when we collectively gain some traction on the world, moments of excess. What Marx is noting above is the tendency within such moments to draw on, and repeat the traditions of past generations of struggle. During moments of excess people are confronted with experiences, problems and degrees of freedom that they won’t have previously faced. It makes sense in this situation that people seek out antecedents to help orientate themselves. In fact it’s a well-noted phenomenon that those engaged in large-scale collective action soon discover affinities not just with their direct antecedents but also with other struggles right across the world. Failure to learn from and repeat the experience of those who have faced similar problematics would leave you disoriented and unarmed in the face of historical conditioning, helpless to stop the old world re-asserting itself. There are, however, different forms that this repetition can take.

When Deleuze (Difference and Repetition 2001: 92) reads the passage from Marx he finds that:

[H]istorical repetition is neither a matter of analogy nor a concept produced by the reflection of historians, but above all a condition of historical action itself… historical actors can create only on condition that they identify themselves with figures from the past… According to Marx, repetition is comic when it falls short – that is, when instead of leading to metamorphosis and the production of something new, it forms a kind of involution, the opposite of authentic creation.

The comic repetition that Deleuze speaks of here refers to the famous line from Marx that precedes the passage above: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” A farcical repetition then is one in which the organisational models, forms of acting and interpretive grid of a previous generation of struggle are simply over laid onto the new situation, forcing the new movement to fold in on itself, obscuring the potential for authentic creation. We are all too familiar with the farce of treating each new movement as a simple repetition of 1917, 1968, or even 1999. If present generations of struggle are to prevent the inheritance of past generations from weighing “like a nightmare upon the brains of the living” (Marx Eighteenth Brumaire 1968: 97), then they cannot repeat those traditions uncritically. Authentic creation requires forms of repetition that “constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew” (Marx Eighteenth Brumaire 1968: 100).

Talking about my generation…

Perhaps at this point we should attempt to pin down what we mean by a generation. We can start thinking about this through the perhaps unlikely figure of Thomas Jefferson, who despite being the second President of the United States, was, we should remember, also a revolutionary leader grappling with revolutionary problematics. Jefferson approaches the concept of a generation by extending the logic of the American war of independence. If one country can’t be bound by the laws of another, then one generation should not be bound by the laws of its antecedents. It is from this notion that Jefferson proposes, “The earth belongs always to the living generation… [e]very constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.” The problem here, of course, is that births don’t actually occur in twenty-year bursts, they happen continuously; as such, the concept of a generation only makes sense if we say they are formed in relation to certain seminal shared experiences. Jefferson’s generation, for instance, was formed through the experience of the American Revolution. From this we can argue that generations are generated through events. This implies, of course, that the same groups, or individuals, can partake in several generations of struggle. When we talk about the traditions of past generation weighing “like a nightmare upon the brains of the living”, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to count ourselves amongst the ranks of the living.

We can see already some failed and potentially farcical repetitions of past struggles in the attempts to adjust to the present crisis. One of the more sympathetic of these has come from the Camp for Climate Action, which over the last couple of years has tried to incorporate financial institutions within the scope of its actions, most recently a camp outside RBS in Edinburgh. It is fair to say that this attempt has been a bit of a failure. The camp has not been able to adapt its interpretive grid to adequately cope with the new situation. The economic crisis is still seen only through its environmental consequences. As such the camp has turned in on itself, it’s been unable to connect to the rest of the population’s experience of the crisis. For one generation to participate in the generation of a new generation a lot must be given up – often it is only the shock of an event that can complete that process and allow the displacement from one, saturated problematic to a new one.

The Climate Camp is an interesting example because it is the repository of a lot of the direct action experience developed in Britain over the last 15 years. This can be seen in the blockade of the Coryton oil refinery, which seemed fantastically well executed. However the fact that it coincided with a huge wave of strikes and protests in France, in which oil refinery blockades have been pivotal, raises certain possibilities. Wouldn’t the Coryton blockade have had a bigger effect if it had also been done in solidarity with the French?

The prospect of this kind of repetition of the climate justice and alter-globalisation movement came to mind during the recent TUC conference, when the general secretary Brendan Barber suggested that a campaign of civil disobedience could act as a supplement to union led strikes and protests during forthcoming anti-austerity struggles. Such a scenario does seem feasible.  In fact something like this, though no doubt not what Barber had in mind, began to emerge in Sweden 4 or 5 years ago. The Swedish anti-globalisation movement suffered serious repression following the 2001 anti-EU summit protests, including the shooting of two activists. In response the movement shifted resolutely away from summitism, and experimented in using the direct action tactics of the movement within more traditional syndicalist struggles.

The danger in this is that one tradition becomes subsumed within the repetition of another. There is after all a long traditional of seeing the unions as the leading sector, to which all other struggles must subordinate themselves. However, the unions have drastically reduced social power these days and this is partly because they have been unable to adapt to the changed composition of society. The alter-globalisation cycle of struggles, for all its faults, contained useful experiments in how you can produce collective action in a neoliberalised world. These would be lost if these experiences became subsumed under a nostalgia for a lost 1970s social democracy. It was after all neoliberal globalisation that did for that world.

If these forms of repetition seem inadequate then perhaps that’s because there remains a lot that need addressing, for instance:

– Are the conditions for a global cycle of struggles in place? Or do the different post-crisis experiences in different parts of the world and the decomposition of a unified neoliberal global project make such common action impossible?

–  Relatedly for those form a more autonomous background, what should the relationship be with existing institutions, and indeed the more institutionally oriented left? It seems obvious that fighting cuts in public services requires a different and more nuanced relation to state institutions than the alter-globalisation cycle of protests required. The climate justice movement has already begun to work through this problem, first at the Cop15 in Copenhagen and then with the Morales inspired climate conference in Cochabamaba. It is, however, far from straight forward.

– Is it enough to problematise the neoliberal responses to the crisis, or indeed the various proposals for neo-Keynesian solutions to the crisis? Won’t this mean that fighting the cuts will lead to defending the status quo? Is it possible to propose reforms, directional demands as a means of making another world seem possible? Or will this obscure the main task of transforming the possible all together?

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– From a different perspective, how is it possible for one generation to help create another generation? (Well apart from the obvious, keep it clean people). Are you formed by your first foundational event? Do you only get to really belong to one generation? Is the perspective of veterans always different to event virgins? As you go through life do you become saturated with experiences, which excludes you from full participation in new generations?

Answers on a postcard please.

As the Greek crisis develops and spreads, threatening to become a Europe-wide sovereign debt crisis, I thought the following line from The Economist‘s editorial on the matter (‘Acropolis now’, 1 May 2010) is worth noting:

When the unthinkable suddenly becomes the inevitable, without pausing in the realm of the improbable, then you have contagion.

Another piece in the same issue is entitled ‘The cracks spread and widen’, which reminds me of John Holloway’s new book Crack Capitalism. One of the reasons financial investors are unwilling to purchase Greek debt — now rated below ‘investment grade’, i.e. ‘junk’ — is because they fear ‘Greece will not be able to stomach the programme of budgetary and economic reform which the IMF is due to set out in early May, and on which the euro-zone rescue funds will depend’. The Economist is talking about struggle.

I’ve been thinking about some of the issues around events in Greece and also ‘public concern’ over government debt in many other countries, including here in the UK where all three main parties are promising austerity in order to sort out the ‘public finances’. From the perspective of the financial markets, the number everybody’s talking about is the spread on bond yields between Greek government debt and that issued by the German central bank. The spread — or premium — is essentially the difference in interest rates. At the moment, financial investors are demanding a premium of almost four and a half percentage points for Greek 10-year bonds over 10-year bunds. Put the other way round, while at the moment the German government pays an interest rate of about 3% on its new borrowing, the Greek government must pay 7.4%. Investors are demanding this higher yield — this premium — because they fear sovereign default, i.e. there’s a risk the Greek government won’t be able to repay and investors want some reward for taking on this additional risk they won’t get their money back. (Of course, investors fear sovereign default because of the ‘structural’ problems in the Greek economy — low productivity, too generous social entitlements, etc. — and the fact that, so far, Greek workers are resisting attempts at ‘structural readjustment’.)

The problems don’t just affect Greece. Portugal, Ireland and Spain have all been mentioned. But also Britain. Britain’s public debt is almost at the level of its GDP and, if it continues on its present trajectory, debt will rise to more than five times the level of annual output by 2040. This is ‘unsustainable’. In the words of three Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ bank) economists: ‘the question is when markets will start putting pressure on governments, not if’. These economists are talking about investors demanding higher yields — increasing the interest rates that governments must pay to borrow money. The circle is a vicious one, because higher interest rates mean the burden of higher interest payments and an ever-worsening fiscal position — in the absence of what the BIS economists call a ‘fiscal consolidation programme’.

There’s a lot to said about ‘market discipline’ (what it means for ‘the markets’ to ‘put pressure’ on entities like governments or populations), as well as about struggles around structural adjustment and austerity. What I’ve started thinking about is capital’s flight. Capital flees Greece or threatens to flee Greece, unless it receives that premium. Capital is threatening to flee Britain — and the ratings agencies are warning the UK may lose its AAA credit rating, which would herald higher interest rates, again a premium reflecting a slightly higher chance of sovereign default. But this fleeing capital… Where’s it gonna run? It can’t all wind up in Germany (the ‘strongest’ EU economy)? What about China? Some of it’s taking refuge in gold, whose price (now at more than $1,100 per ounce) has risen three-fold over the past decade. The problem with gold, of course, is that it isn’t productive in any way: it’s a ‘store of value’, but the only ‘rate of return’ it produces is a result of its rising price (kind of like housing) and it certainly doesn’t contribute to the production of value and surplus value, through the exploitation of human labour — the lifeblood of capital.

So we have a story of flight. Following the crises of the 1970s, capital fled the factories of the First World. It headed South, to Latin America and Africa, so stoking the international debt crisis of the ’80s. Then it fled some more. To China, to India and other ’emerging markets’. It also sought refuge in finance, seeking a return from and a safer haven in government debt, in household debt and so on. But the present crisis has forced it to flee some more. What I’m wondering is: first, where can capital flee to next? second, if capital is fleeing, are we chasing; can we ‘chase it out of Earth, send it to outer space’? And third, how useful to our struggle is this story?

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 projects for the New Year is to finish off an anthology of our written work so far. Looking back, that seems to follow a familiar post-Seattle trajectory, as we tried to keep up with changes in the ‘movement of movements’. A number of questions spring to mind. Has that cycle definitively ended? What other forces have emerged since? How does that relate to the global financial crisis? And how much did we laugh at this?

We shall return.