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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 and produces the countervailing tendency to treat class as just one identity amongst others, such as gender, race all of which are equivalent.

Against this we don’t want to think in terms of real or false but we do want to assert that there is a central antagonism to capital, but one that gets (re)composed in different ways. Capital forms from an original encounter between deterritorialised labour and deterritorialised capital, this is the foundational antagonism of the capital relation. It’s the fundamental axiom that all the other axioms of capital are built upon. In times of crisis we can see this original axiom reasserting itself; capital returns to its liquid form and labour gets ripped from the means by which it thought it had protected itself, laws, pensions, house prices, etc. Labour is also freed from the beliefs tied to this security.

We can see the outlines of this now with the effects of the credit crisis provoking a reaction at the polls – the revolt of the suburbs – leading to Brown immediately ripping up the green axioms and measures that seemed so certain and solid just months ago. This is why the climate change movement needs to take account of capitalist crisis, as I tried arguing last year at the climate camp meeting. Moreover it’s why the climate change movement has to come to terms with capital’s axioms, dynamics and central antagonism. And why movements have to be based on freedom, on an increase in capacities and through that orientated to how capital cramps our lives by imposing endless work.

Endless work causes climate change – no shit Sherlock.

But isn’t that arguing that green issues, or Queer issues,or feminism should be subsumed by class politics? No, I don’t think so. We aren’t saying they are mystificatory antagonisms. All these antagonisms are real. The point is that they are composed and recomposed through the dynamics of capital, as well as, of course, our struggles, which exceed those dynamics.

We’re not arguing that the post-war agreement between capital and some sections of the organized industrial working class is the central antagonism of capital.

The foundational antagonism is between liquid money and vogelfrei workers, the post-war settlement was just a particular composition of it, just as the present composition is. The route to unveiling the central antagonism isn’t through some frozen class fundamentalism, which is retrieving some 1950s version of the antagonism and holding that up as the essence of capital.

When we look at the antagonisms that emerged with the autonomous struggles of the 1960s and ’70s – young/old, gay/straight, male/female – can we say that these are the displacement and recomposition of capital’s antagonism? Don’t they pre-exist capital?

We might approach that question by asking weren’t there young people before capital? The answer to that one is NO, not in the sense of that category as it emerged from the 1950s and ’60s. Gay, youth, women are all socio-political categories, they have all been fundamentally recomposed by capital. That doesn’t mean they are reducible to capital or that they are just an effect of capital – humanity exceeds capital but it folds what exceeds it into its BwO.

The important thing is to take into account capital’s effects on these antagonisms and then try to escape them. Lazzarato argues that the route is not through class, which he sees as structurally pre-defined and therefore incapable of escaping capital, but through the minor/major distinction and then the minoritarian line of flight that leads beyond capital’s BwO.

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?

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, the specific impossibilities of each specific problematic and the relationship between impossibilities, cramped space and creativity.

One of the things we’ve been arguing is that the problematics that groups or movements form around involve a recomposition of antagonism. And that antagonism involves the simplification of social space, a simplification that is necessary to get some purchase on the world and so allow political action. The point is that those simplifications have an excess to them, which we might think of as their impossibilities – certain things become possible and other things become less possible. This is the cramping that each problematic contains.

Deleuze made the link between cramped space and creativity when he said, “Creation takes place in bottlenecks” and “We have to see creation as tracing a path between impossibilities.” In fact we can see the movement of problematics as us pushing forward and finding our own cramped space. As Deleuze goes on to say: “A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.”

We have to bring out this relationship between the recomposition of antagonism as the creation of impossibilities and the creativity provoked by cramped space. Antagonism creates the impossible things, which is why we have to be able to displace the antagonisms and move from impossibility to impossibility or even “trace a line between impossibilities”. Isn’t this a conception of antagonism as stratification? Or as a mechanism of stratification. A productive simplification that has to be escaped to allow increased complexity.

Then there is the relationship between the movement’s impossibilities and capital’s impossibilities. Social movements create their own problematics, acting as creators by creating their own impossibilities and thereby possibilities. Creating their own cramped space. But they don’t do that from a position of absolute freedom of movement: we are cramped by capital’s impossibilities, or even different actualizations of capital’s fundamental impossibilities. So, for neo-liberalism, capitalism isn’t an inherently antagonistic system it’s just the best of possible systems. That fundamental antagonism is an impossibility.

We might think of these impossibilities as the limit point of sense, of what makes sense in a group, movement or socius. As such I think it’s related to Deleuze and Guattari’s impossibly complex concept of the Body Without Organs, which we might think of as the de-territorialised limit of an organised body. “It’s what remains after you take everything away.” So capital has its own BwO, which isn’t capital as in plant or stock but capital as a social relation, acceptance of capital as a model of right. The BwO can be thought of as the point of stupidity of any organized body. Beyond its limits of sense lays its impossibilities.

So when movements form around problematics, they form their own BwO, their own limits of sense.

To the extent we can effect the creation of movement problematics we have to try and orientate them towards escaping capital’s impossibilities, or at least returning capital to its BwO and so posing the fundamental question: “How do we want to 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.

“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 pulsate, in an alternation between the destabilization of the reigning cartographies and the mobilization of a blast of collective intelligence which invents new forms of life. Every time it happens, you become chidlike. Godard said that men don’t have much childhood and are very childish. Well, if what mobilizes your childhood can be called a “people,” making you radiant, running in all directions, in this case the “people” isn’t a thing – it isn’t a class, or group, or nation. “People” is the name of these currents, which are not to be confused with the places that they agitate, with the historical contexts that they help to create…

It’s toward these currents that you have spent your life travelling. It has more to do with comets, as Teca said, with a “becoming-comet,” than with a “becoming-scout” or a “becoming-priest.” Perhaps the boy scout and the priest appear because they are the only way, or the age-old way, that we have for dealing with this kind of thing, which lacks a language of its own. That’s why they’re so kitsch. But, behind or through this priest and/or scout, what most draws the attention in the quality of your presence is precisely the opposite of these figures: your insistence on the importance of being attentive to the creation of a different logic, new languages – “minor languages” as you and Gilles call them – your desire to participate actively in this creation.”

(from Molecular Revolution in Brazil)

I really like this quote. It’s Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik complimenting Felix Guattari, after a 1982 trip they made through Brazil where they met and discussed with different activist groups and in particular with members of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers Party) including with a young Lula, now the Brazilian president. I like the image of active forces gusting through different bodies and animating them. I also like this concept of becoming-comet, as a subjectivity that starts blazing when it comes into contact with active forces, but has to take its place alongside the child-like enthusiasm of the becoming-scout and the holder of received wisdom of the becoming-priest. As Rolnik says you need: “the coexistence of all these characters and many more still.”

What would a diagram of a becoming-comet look like? Well it can’t be seen when it’s moving through the stillness of the outer solar system but when it comes within the influence of solar heat and wind it bursts into visibility. In fact it makes those active forces visible. We can only see such forces in their effects on bodies and at certain times, particular bodies have affects that illuminate particular forces. Guattari might have been one and Johnny Rotten at a very particular point in time and space might well have been another comet, one that gave off such a bright detritus that you can still just about make it out. But the important point is we mustn’t mistake the body for the force. Those forces move on or change direction and effect; the body in turn might stop being receptive or be unable to find the right affect or combinations to detect those forces. Then all you are left with is the burnt-out husk, a mere cinder of what was. Such is the present-day John Lydon – trapped in a caricature of his younger self, not the vital embodiment of the emergent common that he once was.

Comets have historically been seen as the harbingers of doom but perhaps that’s just a way to talk of them as the harbingers of change. They accompany momentous events. Of course we think we know about comets now, that we can predict their arrival but there are plenty of comets out there with such large orbits that from our historical perspective they are for all intents and purposes unpredictable in both their arrival and their course.

The band Crass had a big effect on some of us Free Associator’s lives. Indeed we’ve had a bit of talk about them here of the years. We’ve discussed the chances of a Crass revival, or whether, in fact, Crass are beyond recuperation. In fact Brian brought up the topic just the other day. Well M’lud, I present above exhibit A, nicked from the ever interesting Uncarved Blog. Angelina makes a strong case for the recuperation argument. The important point though is does it matter This seems timely because Crass have actually had a bit of a revival recently. Firstly Anti-Folk Anti-star Jeffery Lewis released a great album of 12 Crass covers. Then ex-Crass lead singer Steve Ignorant did a couple of gigs playing the Crass album “Feeding of the 5000”, alongside a load of reformed anarcho-punk bands from the time. Check out this video of him doing “Big A, Little A”. Given the heavy moralism of the scene around them at that time, these events have caused plenty of discussion. Out of it all I particularly liked this post:

Also, those early Crass gigs weren’t just about the people on the stage playing instruments and singing, it was about the whole event – being in small, claustrophobic venues, with all the rumours flying about that there was going to be trouble, but still choosing to be there, the people going around selling their hand-produced fanzines and cassettes, the films, the poets, the handouts and badges, mingling with all the odd-balls, misfits, hippies, punks and creatives and general outsiders to mainstream society who would turn up, being introduced to often new and challenging ideas and ways of thinking, the tension and energy and that whole sense of being ‘in the moment’ and not quite knowing what was going to happen, either during that evening or in terms of where ‘the movement’ might be headed – sometimes it really did feel like being part of a revolution… naive though that sounds now that was the kind of energy and buzz that you’d get at a Crass gig back in the day. Sometimes it was about the empowerment of realising that you weren’t the only one who thought this way, and gaining confidence from the whole DIY and ‘there is no authority but yourself’ ethic to believe in yourself. A revivalist Crass of old geezers on a stage going through the motions would no more recapture that spirit than The Sex Pistols doing huge stages in public parks recaptures what it must have been like at the 100 Club Punk Festival or Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976, or that real sense of ‘Oh shit, society is about to collapse!!’ I had as a kid when Steve Jones swore on the Bill Grundy show… Which isn’t to say the Crass night wouldn’t be a ‘right good laugh’, but it does feel as if theres something slightly sad about the whole thing.

In a way this guy is right. These are singular moments in time and space, that can’t just be recreated. It’s a contingent coming together of ideas, subjectivities, bodies, technologies, practices that at a particular moment in time opens up potential for the creation of something new, that elevates a time and place as a singular moment. It’s not something that is carried in one person as though you can find the reason for singular moments in a person’s biography. On the other hand such moments are fairly rare and perhaps you can re-visit events to re-examine their potential, to see if that potential can be re-actualised in different conditions, which I think was partly the idea that Jeffry Lewis was playing with on his album. He even has a comic strip about Trojan horses on the album cover and wonders if you can smuggle the ideas across without the harshness of the original presentation. I mean who can tell what would spark off those affective refrains in someone.

The other thing it makes me think is just how strange it is that a certain style of dressing or a style of music can carry such potential at a certain times and places and not in others. I was reminded of it earlier this week when I went to see a play by the Belarus Free Theatre. Back home in Minsk they perform underground, that is in semi-secrecy, with the constant threat of arrest for them and their audience. To recreate that atmosphere they followed the practices they do at home in Leeds. We had to gather at a redirection point and then follow a guide to where the play would take place. Of course we’re familiar with these tactics from political actions such as Reclaim The Streets. The group then performed a medley made from Harold Pinter’s plays, alongside excerpts from Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech as well as testimony of torture from their own country. It was pretty powerful and vital stuff: the staging and performance left you with an overwhelming sense that this stuff really mattered, that Pinter’s plays and style really resonated with their situation and that underground theatre was an important art form in their country. This must reflect the cramped conditions in which it’s made but you wonder how long it would stay so vital under different conditions. So does recuperation matter? Well recuperation does describe something that happens, it is a material process but it isn’t the only process that occurs or come to that the most important one. Perhaps what we need to think about is whether the recuperation prevents the new from emerging. I quite like the way Sadie Plant puts it in an old interview:

I used to be fascinated and very concerned by this dilemma – the situationist notion of recuperation is still a very good way to think about it, and that’s how I came to be so interested. But I now think that what is really important is the sense of momentum and dynamism in the system – the fact that small scale, grass roots movements continue to emerge. Even if or when they do become absorbed into the establishment, political or artistic, there are always new tendencies coming up behind them. If one looks at dance music, for example, which moves very fast and continually changes, it is probably a mistake to regret the fact that, say, jungle or drum’n’ bass get absorbed or recuperated into the mainstream – what is vital is the emergence of new music, new undergrounds in their wake. Even if they are destined to become part of standard culture, they can still stir things up in the meantime. What I really fear, and what it is perhaps most important to oppose, is the possibility that such a dynamic would cease to operate: it’s the movement, the continual emergence of activity, that is really important.

Oh yeh and as to Brian’s suggestion that we call an anthology of our stuff “When Two sevens Clash” – here’s a potential front cover.

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

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

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

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

Seeing as Brian brought up Max Gogarty I wanted to add my two peneth worth to an affair that has been sorely under reported. I mean I basically agree with everyone else that the whole thing was thoroughly heart warming. Still I want to waste a bit more bandwidth doing so.What I liked was the unveiling of the utter hatred that Guardian readers have for Guardian journalists. I suspect (hope) that it reflects a wider hatred people have for media land’s hegemony. One commenter talked about a Ceaucescu moment, the look of shock and disbelief that came over the dictator’s face as the crowd booed his speech was evident in the Guardian journalists’ cynical avoidance and misrepresentation of what was happening. At first I thought they were just trying to fan the flames at poor Maxie’s expense but on reflection I think they just couldn’t comprehend the sheer resentment at their shitty practices of class reproduction. Their response was an attempt to engineer a moral panic about Cyberbullying to deflect attention away from concrete media practice.They seem to have cast loose that particular sinking ship now though and the last couple of pieces on the affair have drawn the focus back to the practices of hegemony. This guy even cites Chomsky.

“Now, a Chomsky might say that if someone’s calling for one aspect of the media to be controlled, odds are they have an interest in the rest of the media; specifically that they want the message from their portion to get through; to swamp, devalue, undermine, counter the uncontrolled message. Chomsky always draws back from claiming an active overarching conspiracy – I do too; I can’t see how an orchestrated conspiracy could pervade every aspect of the mainstream media. Far easier to postulate a series of hidden hands – recruitment that favours those like yourself, training practices – like internships – that favour those with money, commissioning policies that – sorry Max – favour the well connected.”

It’s serendipitous that this storm in a teacup has occurred just as Nick Davies’ book on media practice gets reviewed and the word churnalism enters the vocabulary. Not that this hegemony stuff should be the basis of our politics but of course it has an effect and it’s interesting when its concrete workings get an airing. Not least because we’ve had our own dealings in that world.