The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. (Lewis Mumford)

During the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city … there were people shooting at the clocks … (Walter Benjamin)

Just like the clocks, the debate about clock-time is going forward and back, forward and back. See [...]]]>

The clock, not the steam engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age. (Lewis Mumford)

During the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city … there were people shooting at the clocks … (Walter Benjamin)

Just like the clocks, the debate about clock-time is going forward and back, forward and back. See this report here about proposal that Britain moves to Central European Time. Why does no-one ever suggest that we all work an hour a day less during the winter months? That way, we’d have both lighter evenings and lighter mornings with all the associated benefits. Let’s call it life-time saving… Let’s propose it!

In the context of all this, there’s another text by the English historian E.P. Thompson that is definitely worth reading, ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism‘. Pasted below is John Holloway’s ‘prologue’, written for a German edition of Thompson’s article, which isn’t otherwise available in English. Obviously I like it because it says nice things about us, but quite apart from that it’s a fantastic piece.

Thompson and the Decomposition of Abstract Time

John Holloway

1. Perhaps the most striking thing about Thompson’s article on “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” is that it is such a pleasure to read.

In part, this is because of the elegance with which it is written. It is a beautiful article. The sense of fun, the extraordinary knowledge and the love of history leap at us from every paragraph. When one reads that the New English Dictionary (but not the Oxford English Dictionary) records as an example of pre-capitalist time measurement a “pissing while”, and then Thompson’s comment that this is “a somewhat arbitrary measurement”, one knows that the article was written with enjoyment and that it has been enjoyed by generations of readers ever since.

But our pleasure in reading the article also has to do with the substance of the argument. On the face of it, it is a sad story: Thompson tells us of the victory of abstract clock-time over lived time. There is nothing automatic about this victory. It is the outcome of a struggle that lasts for centuries. In the end, however, the workers come to accept the time of capital: “The onslaught, from so many directions, upon the people’s old working habits was not, of course, uncontested. In the first stage, we find simple resistance. But in the next stage, as the new time-discipline is imposed, so the workers begin to fight, not against time, but about it.” (1969, 85) When we come to that statement, we sigh with sadness, recognising it to be true. But that is the point, isn’t it? We take sides. We read of the clash between two times, the clock-time of capital and the lived-time (or whatever we want to call it, because, as Thompson points out, there is no agreed name for it) which is defeated as part of the struggle to impose capitalism. We take sides, we sympathise with the people who lived time in a different way. When Thompson tells us of the Rev. J. Clayton who bemoaned the fact that “’the Churches and Streets [are] crowded with Numbers of Spectators’ at weddings and funerals, ‘who, in spight of the Miseries of their Starving Condition … make no Scruple of wasting the best Hours in the Day, for the sake of gazing…’” (1969, 83), then we side with the gazers and silently (or perhaps loudly) boo the reverend gentleman.

But why, why do we take sides? Does this mean that the victory of clock time was not so complete as we sometimes think it was? Is the struggle between the time of capital and lived (or whatever) time still alive? And are we part of that struggle?

In the last part of his article, Thompson suggests that there is a decomposition of clock-time. After emphasising the role of Puritanism in imposing the internalisation of clock-time, he asks: “if Puritanism was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialised world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past, will the Puritan evaluation of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax? Is it decomposing already? Will men begin to lose that restless urgency, that desire to consume time purposively, which most people carry just as they carry a watch on their wrists?” (1969, 95)

As we read the article now, nearly forty years after it was written, this is surely what we have to ask: is there a decomposition of clock-time? Is it something more than a decomposition? “Decomposition” suggests perhaps a process we do not control, but Thompson shows clearly that the imposition of clock-time was an active struggle, so that any “decomposition” too must be understood as an active struggle. Is that what engages us so actively when we read Thompson? Is there a revival of struggle not just about time but against time, a revival of the struggle between abstract clock-time and lived time? And when we read the article, are we taking part in that clash of times? Are we the decomposition of clock-time? Are we perhaps the crisis of abstract time?

2. Yes, we are the crisis of abstract time, the crisis of the separation of time from doing.

Clock time abstracts from our doing. Whereas earlier forms of time measurement tended to revolve around human doing (“task orientation” is the rather ugly phrase adopted by Thompson), the imposition of clock time separates time measurement completely from human activity. Clock time is not interested in pissing or singing misereres or boiling rice or frying locusts. A second is a second is a second; a minute is a minute is a minute. For the clock an hour is exactly the same whether we are living or dying, whether we are sitting in class or making love. The clock is absolutely indifferent to our passions, our intensities and boredoms, the rhythms of our living and doing.

Clock time could only come to dominate in a society in which doing itself abstracts from doing, in which doing itself becomes indifferent to its own content. Clock time, indeed, is part of the process by which doing becomes indifferent to itself: part of the transformation of doing into labour, that is, the metamorphosis of willed, project-laden doing into a labour that is imposed upon us, a labour that is indifferent to us. Labour is measured by time: in the morning the capitalist watches the clock to make sure that we arrive on time, in the evening we watch it and wait for the day to come to an end. The abstraction of time is inseparable from the abstraction of doing into labour.

We revolt against this: against the abstraction of doing into labour and against the abstraction of time. Inevitably and constantly. Our revolt is the endemic and permanent crisis of both forms of abstraction.

We revolt all the time against the transformation of doing into labour. Often we just refuse: we find ways of not going to labour or of disobeying instructions. Or we try to limit as much as possible the part of our lives subjected to labour, by working part-time or taking time off. Sometimes we do more than refuse; we try to find ways of doing that make sense to us, or that we feel we control. Often these efforts do not lead anywhere, but there is a constant theme in the lives of most or all of us: the antagonism between doing and labour, the search for a way of not subordinating our life’s activity to an activity that has no meaning for us.

We revolt too against clock time: quantitatively, of course, as we try to have more time “free” of direct alien control, but also qualitatively. In our relations with those we love, for example, we try to establish a different sort of time. Sometimes people speak of spending “quality time” with their children or loved ones, but what is meant is not just a better time, but a radically different time. Thompson suggests “lived time” to refer to the other time, but also helpful is the distinction that Richard Gunn (1985) makes between time-in-which and time-as-which: the time we reject is the “abstract and homogeneous progression leading from past to present to future”, the time for which we struggle is the “temporality of freely chosen actions and projects”. The aim is to live not “in time” but “as time”, when “time exists only as the rhythm and structure of what it is [we] choose to do”. This time-as-which is the time of a society that does not yet exist and therefore exists not-yet, as present struggle.

The existence of domination is inconceivable without resistance. The abstraction of labour is inconceivable without the revolt of doing. The abstraction of time constantly confronts time-as-which. In that sense the crisis of capital, of labour, of time, is permanent: we are that crisis. But is there something more than that going on? Is there an intensification of the endemic crisis at the moment, is there a heightened crisis of clock time, a decomposition of clock-time of which we are an active part?

I think so. In the last twenty or thirty years, time has become an overt issue in class struggle, not just in quantitative but in qualitative terms. There is a surge in the revolt of time-as-which against time-in-which, and a surge in the struggle of doing against labour. The rule of clock time and the abstraction of  doing into labour reached their crudest expression in the Fordist factory – caricatured in Chaplin’s aptly named Modern Times. Here the complete separation of labour from the person performing it is clear; clear too is the domination of clock-time, incarnated in the Taylorist measurement of each movement of the worker. The crisis of Fordism comes in a rise of class struggle that goes far beyond the traditional concerns of trade union struggle to question labour itself and the very meaning of time and life. The crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s is overtly a crisis not just of capital but of labour.

Since then, the nature of time has been a constant issue both in open anti-capitalist struggles and in the common experience of life. There is nothing automatic about this: the meaning of time is a two-way conflict. When Thompson speaks of the decomposition of clock-time, he emphasises the importance of learning “to break down once more the barriers between work and life” (1969, 95). But breaking down the barriers between work and life can be understood in two senses: either as the de-alienation of labour, its transformation into a doing which we control at the rhythm we choose, or as the spreading of factory discipline to the whole of society (to constitute the “social factory”). Some authors have hastened to argue that Fordism has now been replaced by a new mode of capitalist domination, post-Fordism, characterised by, among other things, a new regime of time in which all the hours of our day are now subordinated to the direct dominion of capital.

What we learn from Thompson, surely, is that such a conclusion is too hasty, too crude. He helps us to see that time is always a struggle, always a clash between times. He opens up time for us, shows that there is nothing pre-determined about it, that it is not just a field of domination but of struggle. Certainly there is at the moment a struggle by capital to extend its dominion more profoundly to every aspect of life, but there is also a struggle to break time, to subvert time, to create cracks in clock time. Sometimes the lines may not be very clear: it can be that just when we think we are breaking from capital, we are actually contributing to its reproduction in a new form. But that is true of all revolt: it forces a change in the pattern of domination, so that distinctions become blurred, and yet the antagonism and the revolt remain.

What is this time without name (time-as-which, lived time) that we oppose to clock-time? If capital rules through the abstraction of time from doing, then our struggle is to recover the centrality of doing, the centrality of ourselves as doers, as active subjects. But how does that happen, and how do we do it? Here are some thoughts.

Attacking duration: The reproduction of capitalism depends on its duration. By duration I mean the continuity between yesterday, today and tomorrow, the assumption that just because something existed yesterday, it will exist today and go on existing tomorrow. In a world of duration, the subject plays no role. She may have created the things that exist, but they have acquired an autonomy, their existence has separated itself from their constitution. The things themselves deny their own origin in human doing. So it is in capitalist society: the things we produce become commodities and the commodity, according to Marx, “is, in the first place, an object outside us”. In a world of duration commodities are, capitalism is. In this perspective the only way of thinking of revolution or radical social change is by abolishing capitalism.

Is this duration real or is it appearance? It is both, it is real appearance. Duration is based on the suppression of the creating subject. This is a real suppression: capitalism is the rule of things, the negation of human creativity (or its imprisonment within the cage of things, represented by money). And yet the things which rule actually depend on the doers who make them. In that sense the autonomy of the done from the doers is an apparent one. The apparent autonomy of things is an autonomy which we constantly reproduce and owes its existence to our repeated action. Duration exists only to the extent that we create and re-create it: it is a false appearance which is real only to the extent that we create and re-create it. Capitalism exists not because we produced it two or three hundred years ago, but because we produced it today: if we do not produce it tomorrow, it will cease to exist. The problem of revolution is not to abolish capitalism, but to stop producing it.

The struggle for human dignity (communism, in other words) is a struggle to recover our power-to, our creative capacity, a struggle therefore to break duration and all forms of dominance of the past over the present. In time-as-which, the past is not a history which determines but a memory which enriches. Our time is not a time of nouns but a time of verbs, a time in which doings do not become frozen in their results but remain open to change. Can we just shed the past like that, so easily? Of course not, but the struggle goes in that direction, as a struggle against abstract time and against history. As the total destruction of humanity becomes a more and more imminent threat, it is clear that revolution can no longer be seen as the culmination of history, but only as its breaking.

Opening the moment: To break duration is to open each moment as a moment of possibility, to seek to lift each moment from the general flow of time and push it beyond its limits. In abstract time, each moment is exactly the same as the next and the last; in doing-time, time-as-which, each moment is distinct. This does not mean that each moment is cut off from the surrounding flow of time, but that each moment is different from the preceding and the succeeding moment, and each has its own potential. Carpe diem becomes a revolutionary principle, but not in the sense of a Friday night escape valve which confirms the abstract time of the rest of the week, but as an opening which probes each moment of the week for its possibilities.

This is the time of the child, a time in which each moment is different from the last, in which each moment is filled with wonder, with amazement and possibility. And with horror: we see the killing of people (by violence, by hunger) and the deadening of people (by boredom, by repression) and we see it with amazement and say “that cannot be!” We cast off the blinkers that help us to survive in this society of horrors and open our eyes with the naïveté of a child and think “no, this cannot continue one moment more, the change must be now, not in the far-off revolutionary future”. “The child’s days”, says Vaneigem, “escape adult time – they are time swollen by subjectivity, by passion, by dreams inhibited by reality.” Even after the child has learnt school discipline, grown up and become imprisoned by adult time, “his childhood will remain within him like an open wound”. (1994, 222) The struggle for our time, the struggle against duration, is the stirring of this open wound, the awakening of a time repressed, a time in which the whole of existence is at issue in each moment. Our communism is indeed an infantile disorder.

To open up each moment is to go against institutions. Institutions seek to freeze the moment, to give duration to some agreement or some achievement, to bind today by the rules of yesterday. Even where the institutions are designed to give substance to the real achievements of past struggle, they quickly become oppressive, unless they are constantly re-created (and therefore de-institutionalised). The history of class struggle is full of such cadavers that live on, weighing like a nightmare on the struggles of the living. For how long did that dead, institutionalised result of the Russian revolution oppress and imprison the strugglers of the world?

Going for excess: opening up each moment means pushing each moment beyond its limits, trying to make each moment a “moment of excess” (as the Leeds May Day Group put it (Leeds 2004)), a moment in which we overflow the social relations and regulations of capitalism. This form of rebellion against time is reflected, for example, in a politics centred on events. The great political events of the movement against capitalist globalisation (Seattle, Genoa, Gleneagles and so on), or the great riots in France in 2005 and 2006, cannot be understood in instrumental terms (did Gleneagles make poverty history? of course not) but in terms of the breaking of time itself. They are events in which the world is turned upside down, in which everything becomes possible, in which our relations with those around us are transformed. That the events may be short does not affect the fact that a moment of time is opened up and transformed into our time, and that requires no sort of justification in instrumental terms.

Giving ourselves time for the patient creation of different social relations: Moments of excess cannot be everything. A politics of events is important in breaking the sense of duration created by capitalism, but if we are going to stop making capitalism, we must do something else instead. The creation of this other can only take place now in the interstices of capitalism (the old idea that communism could not grow interstitially no longer stands), and this requires a long and patient practice of creating other doings, other social relations. If the moments of excess are a sort of concentrated performance-time, perhaps one can think of this second temporality as gardening-time or weaving-time. It involves processes of creation that cannot be rushed. The Leeds group (now called the Free Association) follow Deleuze and Guattari in speaking of this time as a time of refrain: after the intense creativity of a jazz improvisation, for example, the refrain restates and develops the basic melody (Free Association 2006). Struggling for time-as-which cannot be a question only of intensities or of just running from one event to another but must also involve times of relaxed and thoughtful creation. The two temporalities are necessary – but first the impatience and then the patience (and not the other way around, as in traditional revolutionary theory). Revolution can only be now: the idea of a future revolution is a contradiction in terms, precisely because it remains locked in clock-time.

Creating a world of social self-determination requires in many ways a more relaxed time than capitalist time. It requires time for thinking and discussing. In the initial dialogue between the EZLN and the Mexican government, the Zapatistas at one point said that they would need to consult their communities. Given the bad conditions of communication in the Lacandona Jungle, and the need to discuss everything thoroughly, the principle of ‘mandar obedeciendo’ meant that the decision would take time. When the government representatives insisted on rapid replies, the zapatistas replied that they did not understand the indigenous clock. As recounted by Comandante David afterwards, the zapatistas explained that ‘we, as Indians, have rhythms, forms of understanding, of deciding, of reaching agreements. And when we told them that, they replied by making fun of us; well then, they said, we don’t understand why you say that because we see that you have Japanese watches, so how do you say that you are wearing indigenous watches, that’s from Japan’ (La Jornada 17/5/95). And Comandante Tacho commented: ‘They haven’t learned. They understand us backwards. We use time, not the clock’ (La Jornada, 18/5/95). This is important not because the Zapatistas are indigenous, but because rebellion itself, and especially a rebellion that has self-determination as basic principle, must necessarily confront the clock with a quite different time.

Setting the agenda: Class struggle (or, more simply, living, trying to live a human life in, against and beyond a society that negates our humanity) is a struggle to set the agenda, to set the priorities and the temporalities. Once we accept the agenda of capital, once we agree to fight on their spatial or temporal terrain, we have lost, whether or not we win on a particular demand. In Thompson’s terms, a struggle about time that is not also a struggle against time is already lost, because, although it may change the relation between labour and its twin, leisure, it does nothing at all to create freedom, to weaken the abstraction that deprives our lives of meaning and humanity. Most of capital’s struggle to dominate us is concerned with pushing us on to its terrain: the very existence of the state seeks to lure us into logic of spatial divisions between states and the temporalities of bureaucracy and elections; state violence too pushes us towards the violence of violent response. Any response that remains within the space and time of capital is lost before it begins. The very existence of humanity itself now depends on our ability to break the time and space of capitalism, to stop making capitalism and make something else, a society based on our creative power, and therefore a society with a new space and a new time.

3. All these points are not just taken from my imagination, but seem to me to be very much part of the general air of anti-capitalist struggle in recent years. If so, then there is indeed a decomposition of clock time, as Thompson suggests, and we are the active ingredient of this decomposition.

The argument here seems to me to be implicit in Thompson’s analysis. But perhaps not. In any case it is a wonderful article and should be enjoyed – and as you enjoy it, ask yourselves why you are enjoying it.

References (stated and unstated):

Benjamín, Walter (1973): “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations. (New York: Schocken Books)

Bloch, Ernst (1993): Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp)

Free Association (2006): What is a Life? (Leeds: Free Association)

Gunn, Richard (1985): “’The only real Phoenix’: Notes on Apocalyptic and Utopian Thought”, Edinburgh Review, no. 71, 1.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Toni, Empire, (Cambridge: Harvard U.P.)

Leeds May Day Group (2004): Moments of Excess (Leeds: Leeds May Day Group)

Vaneigem, Raoul (1994): The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: The Rebel Press/ Left Bank Books)

Virno, Paolo (2004): A Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext(e))

As part of a debate elsewhere, somebody asks whether the “August days of 2011 [i.e. last weekend's rioting and looting] can be considered in terms of moments of excess”. It’s a good question.

For us a moment of excess is an intense collective experience, a moment [...]]]>

As part of a debate elsewhere, somebody asks whether the “August days of 2011 [i.e. last weekend's rioting and looting] can be considered in terms of moments of excess”. It’s a good question.

For us a moment of excess is an intense collective experience, a moment in which we feel — viscerally — our own collective power, a moment in which we glimpse other worlds outside and beyond capitalist social relations. So in this sense there’s no doubt the nights of rioting and looting were moments of excess for many of the participants. They experienced that collective power, they took over the streets, they cocked a snoop to the “Feds” (“Annoyed that the rioters call the police ‘feds’,” tweets Ben Liddell. “What happened to proper British nicknames like old bill, pigs and filth?”), and they took according to their needs (one half of Marx’s understanding of communism).

But moments of excess aren’t “pure”; they don’t stand “outside” of capitalism. The glimpse of other worlds we get in a moment of excess is from the standpoint of where we are now, i.e. within a fucked-up, capitalist world. And there’s no doubt a lot of fucked-up stuff took place over the four nights of rioting. From relatively minor incidents, such as the robbing of the young Malaysian by people pretending to help him or the pulling of cyclists from their bicycles, to really major instances of fucked-up, anti-social behaviour — the cases of arson and the killing of the three young men in Birmingham. (More pervasively, one outcome maybe more gentrification and more concentration of capital in the retail sector.)

We’re not interested in drawing up criteria which determine whether events qualify as moments of excess, or which can categorise their content as “progressive” or “revolutionary” or “anti-social” or “reactionary” excess. There’s a  danger here of simplifying the notion of moments of excess so that they become a glimpse of some pure liberated zone, a taste of milk and honey. The streets of Tottenham, Hackney, etc. were certainly not pure liberated zones.

In many ways, for us, the more interesting question is not: what are moments of excess and how can we get into them? Rather it is: how can we get out of moments of excess? I.e. what happens afterwards, and what is the relationship between a moment of excess and “everyday life”?

And these questions are certainly the ones we need to be addressing right now.

We’re in the midst of a furious, knee-jerk reaction on the part of the British state. Cameron and the Tories are fuming, and magistrates seem to have responded with gusto to the instruction to “disregard the guidelines” and are delivering their “disproportionate” sentences. We need to be able to counter that. In large part, this will depend on what happens from the bottom up, that is, in the neighbourhoods at the heart of the unrest. Will people hunker down and hope that theirs isn’t the next door to be kicked in? Or will they organise in some way, countering the state’s age-old strategy of individualisation? (Out of 1990′s poll tax riot, for example, emerged the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign, which became a model for political activists over the subsequent two decades.)

Also interesting and important are the discursive cracks which have opened up within the Establishment — in spite of, or maybe because of, the state’s totalising clampdown. I’m not thinking so much of the Liberal Democrats’ “bonkers, bonkers, bonkers” comments — they clearly need to put some clear blue water between themselves and the Conservatives and Clegg is probably a little nervous that his own arson conviction might be brought up again.

More I’m interested in the journalists who are starting to join the dots. In BBC Radio Nottingham’s interview with Clegg, for example, the presenter, having rattled the deputy PM, says that, yes, he does feel empathy for the rioters. And here is Daily Telegraph columnist Mary Riddell:

It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

She goes on to propose social democracy as the only solution:

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution.

Here’s another Telegraph columnist, suggesting that “the criminality in our streets cannot be dissociated from the moral disintegration in the highest ranks of modern British society”:

Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday – are just as bad. They have shown themselves prepared to ignore common decency and, in some cases, to break the law. David Cameron is happy to have some of the worst offenders in his Cabinet. Take the example of Francis Maude, who is charged with tackling public sector waste – which trade unions say is a euphemism for waging war on low?paid workers. Yet Mr Maude made tens of thousands of pounds by breaching the spirit, though not the law, surrounding MPs’ allowances.

A great deal has been made over the past few days of the greed of the rioters for consumer goods, not least by Rotherham MP Denis MacShane who accurately remarked, “What the looters wanted was for a few minutes to enter the world of Sloane Street consumption.” This from a man who notoriously claimed £5,900 for eight laptops. Of course, as an MP he obtained these laptops legally through his expenses.

Yesterday, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman asked the Prime Minister to consider how these rioters can be “reclaimed” by society. Yes, this is indeed the same Gerald Kaufman who submitted a claim for three months’ expenses totalling £14,301.60, which included £8,865 for a Bang & Olufsen television.

Or take the Salford MP Hazel Blears, who has been loudly calling for draconian action against the looters. I find it very hard to make any kind of ethical distinction between Blears’s expense cheating and tax avoidance, and the straight robbery carried out by the looters.

From the Daily Telegraph this is incredible stuff!

Perhaps, slightly less unlikely, here is Channel 4 newsreader/journalist Jon Snow, pointing out that there is “one law for the rich and another for the poor”:

There is a sense in Britain too of a widening gap in both wealth and law – that there is a that there is one law for the elite and one for the poor. Take the MPs’ and Peers’ expenses scandal. A tiny handful of the expenses abusers have gone to jail. The vast majority have been allowed to pay stuff back or retreat to the political undergrowth. How many of the looters will be allowed to bring their plasma screens and running shoes back in return for their freedom? And yet it is the very unpunished abuse of the state by its elected and unelected elite which many argue is part of the landscape that the recent riots played out across.

We are told over two and a half thousand rioters and looters have been arrested. Hundreds have been charged, some have already been punished – many cases are still in train.

Many have pointed to the reality that an even smaller handful of bankers have faced the law even than those  politicians who have been prosecuted. No British banker is in jail for what happened in 2008. And as financial upheaval cascades before us all over again, almost no serious measures have been taken to stop the same people from doing it to the people all over again.

To keep replicating that meme, I think these cracks, these discursive spaces, have opened up because neoliberalism has become zombie-like, it no longer makes sense. So we need new stories to help us make sense of our lives: it’s only if we can get a (collective) grip on what’s going on in the world, that we’ll be able to (collectively) change the world. So, it’s important that we keep the cracks open.

First the London burning story: three nights of rioting (and counting) in the capital, spreading from borough to borough and, now, to other cities (Birmingham). What a finance type might describe as a serious case of contagion.

Second, financial meltdown 2. Plummeting share [...]]]> We’re in the midst of two enormous news stories.

First the London burning story: three nights of rioting (and counting) in the capital, spreading from borough to borough and, now, to other cities (Birmingham). What a finance type might describe as a serious case of contagion.

Second, financial meltdown 2. Plummeting share prices, a deepening of the eurozone crisis and the downgrading by a notch of US government debt (for the first time ever) from the highest ‘triple A’ rating to AA+. (The credits ratings system is quite arcane – Wikipedia’s explanation is here.)

Most of the reporting on and analysis of the riots has been (predictably) poor. Comparisons have been made with the series of inner-city riots of the early 1980s. However most of the discussion is couched in terms of ‘criminality’; few commentators have bothered to mention the economic backdrop. But it’s no coincidence that that series of riots happened during the period when neoliberalism was being imposed on Britain’s population by Thatcher’s first government, when class antagonism was most naked and when Thatcherism/neoliberalism was arguably most fragile. Now, three decades later, neoliberalism is in crisis (as we’ve argued in Turbulence, a zombie – or here for our Comment in The Guardian) and we’re seeing more riots and more unrest. A great exception is Nina Power’s piece in The Guardian.

In fact, a year or so ago, parts of Britain’s Establishment were making the connections, e.g. an ACPO spokesperson in April 2009, Nick Clegg just before the election. Of course, now their predictions have come to pass they (the ruling class) have to pull together. Restoring order is the priority.

So that’s the riots then. Now let’s move on to consider the financial maelstrom…

In fact, the turmoil in the financial markets is all part of the same, much broader story.

What the commenters say is that there are doubts whether governments can repay their debts. Exactly. Those who trade in the financial markets, particularly those who buy and sell so-called sovereign debt — basically the IOUs, known as bonds or bills, that governments issue –think that there’s a risk that governments won’t actually be able to honour these IOUs. They fear default. And because they think there’s a risk of default they’re less willing to lend to governments. To persuade the people and institutions who lend to governments to overcome their reluctance, governments must offer a little extra compensation, a higher reward. In other words governments must pay a higher rate of interest, the lenders receive a higher yield. That’s why the yields on Greek and Spanish and Portuguese and Irish (the so-called PIGS) government debt, and now Italian and Cypriot government debt, have gone sky-high. Because financial investors think there’s a high chance these governments will default and they want additional reward for taking on that risk. Yields on US government debt haven’t reached Mediterranean levels, but nevertheless, they believe there’s a slightly higher risk — the reason why on Friday Standard and Poor’s (one of the three rating agencies) downgraded US government bonds from AAA to AA+.

So far so orthodox. But why the doubts? Why do ‘the markets’ fear that governments won’t be able to repay their debts? Because, to do so, governments must either increase their revenue (raise taxes) or reduce spending (make cuts). As we know, most governments are ruling out meaningful tax increases on the wealthy (individual rich people) and on capital (corporations), preferring instead to attempt to impose austerity. But this is where they’re running into trouble, particularly in southern Europe. Essentially governments aren’t able to impose as much austerity as ‘the markets would like’. And that’s because of class struggle — the occupations, the demonstrations, the social unrest, that we’ve been witnessing over the past couple of years.

And from here, we can travel north again, to this weekend’s rioting in London. Nick Clegg today claimed that ‘the international debt crisis vindicates the coalition government’s decision to prioritise cutting Britain’s budget deficit’:

Clegg insisted the crisis showed why the government was right to introduce sweeping spending cuts in a bid to eliminate the UK’s structural deficit by 2015.

“All governments around the world need to get to grips with their public finances and, at the same time, to put in place the long-term reforms that create growth and prosperity for millions of people around the world,” he said.

“If anyone had any doubt about the need for this coalition government first to come together in the national interest in times of great economic uncertainty and then to get on top of our public finances, I think that recent events should demonstrate the necessity of the steps that we took last year.”

Clegg is saying here that the British government has done — or is attempting to do — what the governments of the PIGS (and more) haven’t managed. The ‘recent events’ he’s referring to are the financial crises. But the recent — and ongoing — events on the streets of Britain’s capital may demonstrate that Clegg’s hubris may be premature.

At the moment, financial investors are betting that ‘the U.K. will remain insulated from the fiscal crises roiling the U.S. and the euro region‘ — yields on British government debt (known as ‘gilts’) have fallen over the past few days, indicating that ‘the markets’ do not currently fear British default. But over the next days, weeks and months, we should keep as close an eye on these indicators as on the ‘street’. The City is not apart from the city.

A few days ago the following post appeared on the website of the Class War Federation.

The Class War Federation is no more.

Given our inability to continue to function at an organisational level and the huge amount of debt that the organisation finds it self in we have no [...]]]>

A few days ago the following post appeared on the website of the Class War Federation.

The Class War Federation is no more.

Given our inability to continue to function at an organisational level and the huge amount of debt that the organisation finds it self in we have no choice but to formally dissolve the group.

Given that we only have 5 paid up members it is the decision of the five of us to end our association and in doing so end the project known as Class War.

Déjà vu? 14 years ago, we were members of the Class War Federation and were part of a faction that successfully argued for its dissolution. As it turned out, a rump continued… and following changes in membership which I’ve had no interest in following, it looks like the last remaining few have finally decided to call it a day.

In fact our reasons for dissolving Class War were neither organisational nor financial. (At least not organisational in the sense that we weren’t able to carry on the day-to-day tasks on maintaining the organisation’s structures, producing a paper, etc., though these tasks were frequently onerous.) Our reasons were political. In short, we decided that Class War was incapable of making sense of the changed social and political terrain of Britain in the 1990s. It was incapable of understanding new movements, such as Reclaim the Streets and the anti-roads struggles more generally, not to mention the problematics and possibilities opened up by the Zapatistas.

As part of this project we produced what we hoped would be a final issue of Class War the paper and organised a national conference — May Day ’98, held in Bradford — inviting various anarchists, anti-authoritarian communists, militant environmental activists and others for three days of discussion. With the decision to dissolve Class War and the production of the final issue of the paper, we’d done a lot of soul-searching and been very self-critical. But we reckoned that the problems we’d identified weren’t just ours — they applied to most if not all of the groups on ‘the left’ (including the anarchist ones) — and we hoped that others would question their own political practices too.

We probably had some success and the discussion at May Day ’98 was intense and, I think, productive. But others used Class War’s dissolution as an invitation simply to stick the boot in some more. We’d been self-critical, but this wasn’t enough for many on the left and there were several ‘and another thing’ type attacks which seemed to be written from pure positions of certainty. One example was ‘Death of a Paper Tiger‘, published in Aufheben, and linked to again in the libcom discussions on Class War’s second death.

In the last 14 years, arguments about Class War seem to keep cropping up on forums like LibCom. I’ve tended to steer clear and when I have dipped in I’ve been pretty unimpressed. (A recent post complained about the skull-and-crossbones logo, comparing it to the SS insignia.) In fact, rereading ‘Death of a Paper Tiger’, for example, I’m struck with how weak it is — its analysis, never mind its patronising and uncomradely introductory note: ‘But we do recognize that some people joined Class War out of a sincere desire to challenge this society and did some good things to further that goal while in Class War.’ I remember agreeing with much of the article at the time — and I still do agree with many of its criticisms of CW — but it fails to seriously address any of the what I’d today call problematics that Class War was wrestling with.

But this enduring fascination with Class War is itself fascinating. [A few years ago I did a talk at a meeting in Lund, Sweden and the organiser asked if I could put Class War in its title as this would attract a bigger audience — even though it was a decade since I'd been involved. And the first question was about Class War.] So, it might, after all these years, be worth putting down some of our thoughts on the subject… I’m making no attempt at any sort of nuanced, critical analysis of Class War — that can wait for another post. Instead I want to make some notes on what was good and important about Class War.

Working-class identity politics?

Quite a common criticism of Class War is that it glorified working-class identity, and a particular type of working-class identity. E.g. in the recent discussion somebody posted:

They’ve never been a class struggle group, it’s always been identity politics – worse, one based on a caricature.

Well… there’s identity and there’s identity politics, and there’s anti-identity. (Deleuze and Guattari, John Holloway and Sub-Commandante Marcos have all offered insights on this in various places.) Asserting I am black [or a Jew or a woman or queer]— and proud of it is not equivalent to saying I am white [or Aryan or a man or straight] and proud of it. And the ‘inequivalence’ of such pairs depends on the context — the time and place. The first statement can often be understood as anti-identitarian as it challenges the position of the dominant, majority identity. (‘Majority’ used here in way Deleuze and Guattari use it. I.e. male identity is majority desite woman making up slightly more than half of the population; white identity majority in apartheid South Africa.) In 1980s Britain, the majority identity was middle-class — it still is, of course, but in the 1980s this represented a break from the earlier, Keynesian, more collectivist era. Thatcher introduced the idea of a ‘property-owning democracy’ and policy of allowing council-house tenants to buy their homes. Having a mortgage meant being/becoming middle-class.

Of course, nobody wants to be working-class; we all want to escape the relation to capital, to work, to money, etc. that being working-class implies. As Holloway puts it somewhere in Change the World Without Taking Power the working class is better understood as an anti-working anti-class: this is Marx and Engels’ point about the working class abolishing itself. But this escape must be collective if the class (and classes) are to be abolished. With neoliberalism’s/Thatcherism’s attack on working-class organisation, the discourse that escape could only be individual became deafening. [As the author of ‘Death of a Paper Tiger' writes, ‘Class War [was] the bastard child of Thatcherism’. Well, yes, of course. Anti-capitalist struggles and capitalism always develop in relation to one-another. It’s always possible to say this struggle is the product of that policy or that that policy was proposed in response to this struggle. Substituting ‘bastard child’ for ‘product’ makes it sound more of criticism, without much changing the meaning.] So, given this context, attempting to promote a strong working-class identity is not necessarily a bad thing to do. ‘Death of a Paper Tiger’ again: ‘Class War responded by publicising themselves as the defenders of the traditional working class values of these communities’. Values like solidarity and mutual aid?

Reversal of class perspective

It’s true that Class War frequently seemed to promote a particular type of working-class identity, maybe at times a ‘caricature’, as charged above. But really, what it was trying to do was represent the working class as ‘proud and menacing’. Here Class War was simply following the advice of the ‘father of Italian workerism‘ Mario Tronti in 1980: ‘As a matter of urgency we must get hold of, and start circulating, a photograph of the worker-proletarian that shows him as he really is — “proud and menacing”.’ In the context of the British political landscape this was an enormously important shift. In the mid-’80s (when Class War was formed), particularly during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, almost all of the left depicted the working class as victims and as passive, whilst anarchism tended to be dominated by pacifists. Class War challenged both: the working class is an active subject in the making of history, and sometimes that history involves violence. And what better expression of the reversal class perspective than the aphorism used on the masthead of Class War for several years: ‘The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise’. (Variously attributed to Max Stirner, Bakunin and James Connolly.)

Bash the rich

Capital is a social relation. It’s an abstract dynamic, what Marx called a ‘real abstraction’. Of course, Class War didn’t understand this, choosing instead to personify this social relation by attacking the police, bosses, the royal family and ‘the rich’. But the social relation is asymmetric, in a couple of ways. It’s asymmetric in the sense that capital needs and will always need labour — that is, the living human beings that become labour in the capital relation. But, we, as human beings, don’t need capital. This asymmetry is in our favour. But it’s also an asymmetric relation in that when a capitalist enterprise fails those who work for it may lose their whole livelihood: when workers lose their jobs, they may also lose their homes as well. But a capitalist’s risk — or liability — is nearly always limited. In fact, the legal concept of limited liability is one of capitalism’s most important ‘innovations’. A shareholder-capitalist may walk away from a bankrupt business and its debts, losing only the value of his or her shares, with profits securely banked — creditors, who nearly always include workers owed unpaid wages, may end up with nothing.

In this context, trying to personify the relation, however imperfectly or theoretically incorrectly, can be enormously powerful and liberating. Attacks on capitalists say: we won’t let you forget you’re a human being too; you cannot limit your liability; we will make you liable. As we wrote in ‘Six impossible things before breakfast‘:

For us, one of the most liberating moments in the 1980s was the way that anarchist politics gave names (and addresses) to the people who dominate our lives. It broke the rules of the game. It rejected the power imbalance between rich and poor, the asymmetry of a world where profits are privatised but loss is always socialised. (Look at the current credit crisis: whilst the ‘subprime’ poor are being turfed onto the streets, top bankers are selling third homes or luxury yachts.) In a bizarre way, naming the rich re-asserts a common humanity by denying them the ability to hide behind limited liability companies, off-shore tax havens, and multi-layered management. It is an echo of Lucy Parsons in 1885 when she said ‘Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.’

It’s funny because, in some ways, the more we stress that capital is a social relation, the more we reinforce the continual process of fetishisation essential to capital’s reproduction. The executive relocating a factory to somewhere where wages are lower, the manager sacking a worker, the politician cutting a service all claim their hands are tied, there’s no alternative, they’re just obeying the laws of the market… and we, when we discourse on capital’s logic, the ‘laws’ of capitalist development, etc. quite frequently agree: yes, your hands are tied, you have no alternative, you’re just obeying the laws of the market! But paraphrasing Wildcat, bosses do a difficult job in difficult circumstances… and that’s why we hate them. Part of our role as anti-capitalist militants is to attempt to defetishise the capital relation, i.e. locate the human content in it. Personifying/naming the enemy is one way of doing this.

Resonance

Finally, much of what Class War said and did seemed to resonate. As an organised group I don’t think Class War ever numbered more than a hundred or so members, probably far fewer active members. But the ideas expressed in Class War must have struck a chord, even inspired, many many more people, even if they didn’t actually mobilise them. Something would happen somewhere, some action, institigated by people with no formal connection to Class War as an organisation. But asked who they were, the response would come: “We’re Class War!”

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 [...]]]>

Poster by the Pleasure Tendency

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?

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 [...]]]>

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 [...]]]>

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 [...]]]>

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 [...]]]>

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.