freely associating

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

We gave a talk recently over in Hebden Bridge. What follows are the bare bones of what we said, but if you scroll right to the end, there's a concrete idea building on a recent post here. We got asked to talk on the theme “Who will save us from the future?” which is the theme of the latest issue of Turbulence. We’re sort of going to do that ...

I've been away so this overview is a bit late and more than a bit disjointed… First up a couple of positives. Against an absurd level of police harassment, the camp for climate action refused to be intimidated… That might appear a small thing but it's easy to underestimate the importance of such an open and public display of opposition. Elsewhere 'politics' is daily reduced to questions of public ...

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

How do we face the future? The same way we face the past… Maybe it’s because time’s dragging at the moment (the sun’s out and I’m slaving away at work), but I’ve been thinking about the way time works – how it speeds up, slows down, and occasionally crosses over on itself. And I’ve been trying to link that to our recent work on antagonism. Part of the motivation for ...

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

We’ve been thinking antagonism recently and have drafted a piece entitled ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, that we hope will be published in the forthcoming Turbulence product and also - in an extended form - in Antipode in a special issue on ‘autonomy’. In the piece we describe the 1980s UK anarchist practice of publishing names and addresses of those who dominate our lives as liberating and quote Lucy ...