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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know things have been very quiet on this blog for the past few months, but we are still alive and kicking. Honest. Over the last few months we’ve been occupied elsewhere – including the latest issue of Turbulence and an organised walk through Leeds – and that’s left us little time to do stuff with our Free Association hats on.

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

We shall return.

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 in the middle of two crises, the climate crisis and the economic crisis. Although we we seem to treat them as separate, I’m going to argue that they are completely entangled. Tackling one without tackling the other is impossible or fruitless. But the connections are complex and shifting, so I want to first give a quick overview of how the economic crisis arose, before probing a little deeper…

60 YEARS IN 60 SECONDS

To understand the current economic crisis (and the collapse of what we call neo-liberalism, the most current phase of capitalism), we have to understand how it arose. And for that we have to go right back to the end of the Second World War. The post-war productivity boom was based on a ‘deal’ of higher wages in return for improved productivity – those were the days when we were told “you’ve never had it so good”. But by late 1960s this period of growth was being derailed by a wave of strikes and global unrest: in the workplace there were a growing number of struggles over time & quality of life (rather than money), while there was an explosion of anger from those excluded from this deal (i.e. anyone who wasn’t a white, skilled, male factory worker).

In the face of this, the post-war settlement was killed off in the mid- to late-1970s by a capitalist counter-attack which laid the foundations for ‘neo-liberalism’. You can pick any number of key moments – the coup in Chile in 1973, the defeat of the US air traffic controllers strike in 1981, or the defeat of the miners in 1984/5 in the UK. They were all part of a much broader systematic strategy, which played out here like this.

First, the old centres of workers’ militancy (mining, manufacturing) were dismantled and outsourced to low-wage economies overseas. In the UK in 1971 over 70% of people were employed in primary industries (like mining) or manufacturing, today over 70% of workers are in the service sector.

Second, the banking sector was massively deregulated. All sorts of complicated ‘derivatives’ markets were created. When this started to unravel in summer 2007, it ultimately resulted in the credit crunch – because no-one knew what all these pieces of paper were really worth.

Under neo-liberalism, wages were driven ever downward. I’m not alone in the fact that every pay rise I’ve had over the last 15 years has been below the rate of inflation. But while this boosts profits, the problem is that it keeps consumer spending (= economic growth) down. This problem was ‘solved’ by extending massive consumer credit, based mostly on rising house prices. This gave us the spending power to purchase all those lovely commodities coming out of the new manufacturing centres in the Far East and elsewhere. Hence the anomaly where our living standards in the UK rose at the same time as our wages as a proportion of profits kept falling.

Without primary industries or manufacturing the economy came to rely more and more on the banking and financial sector. This sector was in turn heavily reliant on rising house prices: complicated ‘mortgage derivatives’ were one of the major assets held by the big banks. So when the housing bubble burst, everything started to unravel – banks teetered on the brink of collapse, credit dried up, and the economy nosedived.

We are in uncharted waters. Despite comparisons to 1929, this level of collapse is unprecedented. How things pan out is of course partly down to us. But we don’t need a crystal ball to predict the storm that’s coming: in the UK, we’re already facing redundancies, wage cuts, benefit cuts, wage cuts, public service cuts, repossessions & evictions. Globally, there is mass social unrest on the horizon: workers laid off from thousands of factories in China have taken to the streets; food riots exploded in over 30 countries across the globe this time last year; and in the last few months we’ve seen violent battles in Latvia, Bulgaria & Iceland, not to mention Greece, Italy and France…

WHAT HAS ALL THIS GOT TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE?

Obviously at a superficial level, there’s a shift of focus away from climate change, both for us as citizens/campaigners/workers/claimants and for NGOs and local and national government. Plus we now have to deal with the fact that a huge slice of public funds have been diverted into propping up financial institutions.

But we need to dig deeper. We talk about it as a “climate crisis” but from the point of view of capitalism (seen as a thing, an endlessly expanding dynamic system) it’s actually an energy crisis. And it’s an energy crisis that capital has to tackle in order to re-launch a new cycle of accumulation. This isn’t something new: the idea of “limits to growth” were an endless headache for capital in the mid-1970s before neo-liberalism took hold and unleashed new levels of exploitation.

In fact energy in its widest sense has been a permanent problem for capitalist development. Capitalism is an exploitative, ecologically destructive system but it is also incredibly dynamic. 300 years ago, when it faced down a similar twin crisis of a rebellious population and ecological crisis, its salvation was coal. Unlocking these carbon resources played a crucial role by allowing capital to substitute machinery for our labour, at a price that could sometimes be fixed years in advance and without risk of strikes, sabotage or go-slows.

It’s impossible to think about patterns of energy consumption, and therefore about global warming, without thinking of those social relations – capitalist social relations – that have shaped those patterns. The collapse of neo-liberalism and the climate crisis are intimately linked – so much so that they’re almost impossible to separate.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for us. At the back of much of the talk around climate change has been the idea that if we can just get people to accept the thesis of “peak oil” or “global warming”, then we will be able to magically pass into a different sort of world. As if we can switch off a carbon-based economy without also switching off the material social relations that surround it. As if the relentless drive for economic growth is some sort of mad aberration that we can turn off, or tone down. It’s not. There is no accident. There are structural causes at work here: the way we reproduce ourselves socially is bound up with the way we reproduce ourselves economically and the way we reproduce ourselves ecologically. But – and this is the key thing – the global financial meltdown could lead to a recomposition of social forces that would enable the rapid switch-over we need.

To get that right, I think there are four related areas worth thinking about

1. HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT TIME?

By this I don’t simply mean what time-scales are we thinking about, altho they are also important.
There’s a time lag in the economic crisis which mirrors the time lag in climate change
– the first cracks in sub prime sector began Aug 2007 = implosion last year
– credit crisis from last summer = redundancies & layoffs now
– £500bn bank bail-out last autumn = massive public sector squeeze for the foreseeable future

This disconnect makes our responses very problematic – by the time we act, it may be too late. But there’s an even more important aspect to this time lag. Neo-liberalism has been built on a massive expansion of debt. By mortgaging our futures (in the case of pensions quite literally) we’ve been able to put off dealing with the fact that a few are reaping massive profits on the back of our falling wages. The same deferral, the same displacement of antagonism into the future, has also been going on with climate change. Except as we know that process is non-linear: once we reach a tipping point, change will be irreversible when it comes time to pay.

This leads into a deeper connection. Capitalist social relations are based on a particular notion of time. Capital is value in process: it has to move to remain as capital (otherwise it’s just money in the bank). That moving involves a calculation of investment over time – an assessment of risk and a projection from the present into the future. The interest rate, for example, is the most obvious expression of this quantitative relation between the past, the present and the future. It sets a benchmark for the rate of exploitation, the rate at which our present doing – our living labour – must be dominated by and subordinated to our past doing – our dead labour.

It’s hard to over-state how corrosive this notion of time is. It lies at the heart of capitalist valorisation, the immense piling-up of things, but it also lies at the heart of the production of everyday life. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a cash till ringing up a sale, forever. This is true at all levels, whether for capital’s planners meeting in Davos or for us trying to make ends meet.

But this is the deeper meaning of the meltdown: just like global warming, it has brought the future crashing into the present. Interest rates are now effectively below zero. We have reached a singularity. Capital’s temporality depends upon a positive rate of interest, along with a positive rate of profit and a positive rate of exploitation – all that has collapsed. And just as with climate chaos, the debts are, quite literally, being called in.

2. HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT CHANGE?

The word ‘crisis’ has its origins in a medical term meaning turning point – the point in the course of a serious disease where a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. So capitalism may be in crisis, neo-liberalism may be over, but that doesn’t mean we’ve won. Far from it. Crisis is inherent to capitalism. Periodic crises allow capital to displace its limits, using them as the basis for new phases of accumulation. In that respect, it’s true to say that capitalism works precisely by breaking down. But that’s only true in retrospect – after the resolution of the crisis. In fact crisis is mortally dangerous to capital, because it means an open-ness to other possibilities.

The critical instability we’re living through offers a chance for a phase transition, a rapid flip from one form of social organisation to another – or to many others. From capital’s point of view, it’s exactly this sense of openness, of possibility, that needs to be closed down. At the three major summits this year (G20 in the UK in April, G8 in Italy in July, and COP15 in Denmark in December), world leaders will be looking to contain things, to rein in our desires, and draw a line under the events of the past few months. “Move along now, there’s nothing to see here…” Every ‘solution’ that’s touted at these summits will also be an act of closure, an attempt to reintroduce capitalist temporality, one that sees the future rolling out inexorably from the present. In other words, get back to work: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

We have to do a fine balancing act here. On the one hand, as recession deepens, we’ll resist any measures that restrict our immediate freedoms. That might mean pushing for ‘solutions’ that are slightly less damaging, and which may therefore help capitalism off its sickbed. Individually we may accept pay cuts rather than risk redundancies (altho historically one doesn’t rule out the other). Similarly, the catastrophic build-up of greenhouse gases needs us to act quickly and decisively.

But on the other hand our greatest chance of something different lies in keeping the crisis ongoing, in keeping the future open. So we also have to resist the pressure from capital’s planners for a quick fix, whether at the G20 or at Copenhagen. As soon as crises are ‘solved’, our room for manoeuvre is diminished.

3. HOW DO WE RELATE TO THE MARKET?

As crises are closed down, the way the question is framed moves back on to a safer terrain for capital. We drift back into that temporality.

Climate change becomes a matter of carbon trading, or investment, rather than circulation of capital. It becomes a question of technical solutions and national/international policy decisions. Funnily enough, as climate change becomes the major topic at summits, it becomes fundamentally depoliticised. It’s easier to debate carbon parts per million in the atmosphere, rather than ask ourselves what sort of worlds we want to live in

It’s the same with the financial meltdown. Since last summer, it’s gone from a “banking crisis” to a “credit crunch” to an “economic crisis” to “negative economic growth” to “recession”. For months the use of the word “recession” was discouraged on the grounds that it would become self-fulfilling. But if there’s no name to what we’re living through, it can’t be normalised. And if it’s not normal, then we can behave exceptionally… So it’s officially a Recession.

We can see this move from “crisis” to “recession” in another way: a crisis for capital has become a crisis for us. Costs are shifted on to us. The massive bail-out of the banking system in the UK and the US is just the tip of the iceberg.

And it’s exactly the same with climate change. It’s obvious that costs of climate change are met disproportionately by the poor: globally it’s the poor who are most at risk of flooding, spread of disease, crop failure, resource shortages etc. And without a structural change, the costs of alleviating climate change will also be met by the poor. Three examples: green technologies are likely to remain expensive, so the poor will be shut out and forced to use “dirty” energy; agrofuel schemes which are still being forcibly rolled out across the global South (and in the US) in the face of widespread opposition; increasing enclosure of common land in the name of “conservation”, driving people away from resources that they have traditionally worked in order to sustain themselves. And in fact, as well as excluding the poor, all three have disastrous environmental consequences…

If we frame the question in this way, if we support attempts to resolve these crises through the market, and through the state, then we run the risk of engendering a green Keynesianism. In other words, a new regime of capitalist accumulation based on any combination of renewable energy, nuclear power, so-called clean coal or agro-fuels. It’s easy to see how this could make sense. You start off with the idea that in terms of life on earth “we’re all in it together”; but we need to save the economy first to enable us to have the resources to tackle the challenge…

In fact, far from being a ‘problem’ to overcome, the hope is that climate change may actually become a primary source of revenue to solve the massive fiscal problems faced by Europe and the US (but not those of the global South). Renewable energy, for example, is a huge growth sector, where demand far outstrips supply. And according to the head of UN Climate Change Secretariat:  “The credit crisis can be used to make progress in a new direction, an opportunity for global green economic growth… it is an opportunity to rebuild the financial system that would underpin sustainable growth … Governments now have an opportunity to create and enforce policy which stimulates private competition to fund clean industry.”

Or as the European commission President puts it when the EU signed a new climate change deal in December “We mean business when we talk about climate”.

But if the key question isn’t whether we shift away from fossil fuels, but how, then framing the answer in terms of the market and growth is a huge and explosive contradiction.

The problem of adopting the market as a frame of reference is that capital monetizes everything, it turns everything into money. And with financialisation, that trend has become even stronger. Under neo-liberalism, one of the most important roles of the the state, locally and globally, has been to impose “good governance”. In other words, to reinforce the idea that every problem raised by struggles can be addressed – on ONE condition: that we address those problems through the market. There’s a solution for everything, as long as we buy it. Or rather as long as ‘we’ (meaning the world’s poor) pay for it. If neo-liberalism had a slogan, it would be “stop me and buy one”.

Ironically some of the pressure for this has come from green campaigners who have argued, correctly, that capitalism takes no account of environmental costs when calculating price. But under the dictatorship of the market, money has become the measure of all things. The market tries to make commensurable things that are incommensurable. But how can you ‘sell’ the right to emit carbon? Or to poison water supplies?

This isn’t simply an ethical question, one of value against values. The idea of price is also based on linear dynamics. What price can you put on something when you can no longer calculate the probable outcome? As sea levels rise, it’s easy to predict coastal flooding. But then there’s the amount and pattern of rainfall, a probable expansion of the subtropical desert regions, Arctic shrinkage and resulting Arctic methane release, increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, changes in agricultural yields, modifications of trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and changes in the ranges of disease vectors… Put that in your calculator.

4. HOW DO WE RELATE TO THE STATE?

With neo-liberalism in crisis, and the threat of irreversible climate change, the state’s role is going to become increasingly crucial. A de-carbonised global capitalism is not impossible. But it will require even higher levels of “discipline”. Austerity will have to be enforced on a massive scale.

As I said earler, capitalism is value in process – like a shark, it needs to keep moving or die. But this drive to self-expansion means it needs an ever-increasing energy base. Let’s look at it from the perspective of capitalism. The logic of capitalist growth is that it will always seek to externalise its costs. If we imagine there’s a three-way relation between capital, us and the environment (although none of these three things are actually discrete), then limits enforced in one sphere re-surface as intensified exploitation in another. If capital can’t rob one, it will rob the other. Leaving the coal in the hole, on its own, means more energy sucked from our bodies…

Let’s not forget that the last capitalist era of renewable energy (the age of sails and windmills) was also a time of slavery, genocide and enclosures on a massive scale

CONCLUSION

There are no easy answers here. The ground on which we’re fighting is shifting far too fast for that. But one thing to bear in mind is that movements rarely take straightforward forms.
In 1905 the Russian revolution which threw up the first Soviets began with a small strike by typesetters at a Moscow print-works: they wanted a shorter working day, a higher rate of pay, and the right to be paid for apostrophes. In France the uprising of May 68 was sparked in part by a student protest which began in Nanterre with a fight over demand for boys to be let into girls’ dormitories…

Last week a wave of wildcat strikes swept through UK oil refineries. They were hugely controversial, unpredictable, and came out of nowhere. Who knows their long-term meaning? And is it a coincidence that they happened in the energy sector?

What I’m trying to say is that real powerful interventions around climate change may well come from people and areas who don’t explicitly identify with climate change politics. They may take the shape instead of food riots, struggles against property developers, fuel poverty campaigns etc

There are two key points of intervention coming up. On 2 April the G20 are meeting in London’s Docklands. There’ll be a Climate Camp in the Square Mile in the City of London on 1 April. Then in December Copenhagen sees the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15). There’s a huge mobilisation underway amid an ongoing debate about what attitude we should adopt. Inside? Outside? One foot in? It’s been given added significance because will be almost exactly 10 years since the WTO shutdown in Seattle.

Before that, We Won’t Pay for Their Crisis are having a meeting on Saturday 28 February. It’s called ‘We are an image from the future’ and we will be picking up some of these themes and trying to relate them to recent events across Europe.

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 but we’re departing a little from what is on the flyer and advertising for this meeting.

The reason for that is that the last few weeks have really emphasised that we’re in the midst of a crisis, and just how large this crisis is and how it could potentially play out into quite significant changes in society. So it seems a bit ludicrous not to talk about this.

We want to still have the original questions in the background, which is sort of who are the agents of change, what connections, conflicts and resonances might there be between the radical Left and radical Greens or perhaps the autonomous left. Which seems to reflect the make-up of this group. Anyway we’re still going to have these questions in the background but we want to address them in terms of the crisis.

Our focus isn’t going to be so much on trying to predict how events will go. That’s a pretty difficult thing to do when you’re in the midst of a crisis. In fact our focus isn’t so much on analysing the crisis in some objective way, but on us – most broadly that means the working class, but more directly us in this room and the networks we’re involved with. We want to focus on how we fit into the crisis, how it affects us. And how it affects the way we struggle, how it might open new possibilities.

We sense an opening: there seems to be change in the offing but no-one can be sure where things are going… We’re not going to say that this is the end of capitalism or anything like that. Capitalism operates through crisis: it works by breaking down. But crises of the magnitude of the one we’re experiencing now tend to lead to big changes in the way capitalism works. It’s quite likely that over the next few years a new regime of regulation will emerge.

In her recent book “The Shock Doctrine” Naomi Klein quotes the neo-liberal guru Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

This also applies to us to some degree: times of instability are the best times to intervene into a system. What we’d like to do is to discuss how we can intervene with you. We’re not going to talk for long, because we haven’t got any answers but we’ll try and stimulate some discussion.

We face at least four overlapping crises:
1. Credit
2. Food
3. Energy
4. Climate change

We can look at all these through the lens of RISK, as composed differently i.e. privatised risk or collective risk

1. CREDIT
Capitalism is a socialising force: even in its simplest form, it brings people off the land and sets them to work together. But there’s a tendency in the opposite direction too: that of breaking people up (to undermine the power of socialised labour). So we get divisions, hierarchies, separation, compartmentalisation etc. The ideology of liberalism and ‘the individual’ are important here, but so too is the notion of ‘privatisation’. It’s a wooden word now because we take it to mean the break-up and sale of state-managed concerns, but it has a wider sense – the process whereby things that are social or common are forcibly made private.

This ‘becoming private’ has assumed greater significance under neoliberalism. We produce our lives in common but one of the main aims of the neoliberal project is to fracture any social arrangement that allows people to maintain common resources for the common good. It does this by smashing them, criminalising them, or simply forcing them to the marketplace.

In the global south this enclosure means the expansion of sweatshops, driving people off land, and the manipulation of environmental catastrophes etc to enforce capitalist discipline. The ‘old’ enclosures, although they’re ongoing all the time. But in the global north neoliberalism has also involved the privatisation of risk in more subtle ways. So risks that used to be socialised through welfare provision, national insurance, etc, are now privatised. Pension provision is one really obvious example, but it goes on everywhere. It runs from the contraction of social housing right through to more ‘trivial’ areas like the extension of ‘choice’ in education: one of my kids is in Year 6, so recently I’ve been spending time visiting high schools, examining prospectuses, checking out bus routes etc. There’s a real pressure on parents here: we are obliged to make the ‘right’ choices for our kids so as to maximise their future life-chances. We’re also encouraged to make ridiculous projections about their possible ‘careers’.

Now the net result of all this privatisation (this ‘becoming private’) is that it involves us all in the financial markets and puts us far more at risk to market fluctuations and collapse. That means we face an incredible amount of extra risk.

If we look at the current crisis, it represents a collapse of credit. And this is significant because the ‘boom’ of the last 15 years in the UK has been credit-led. Here’s a startling statistic: 97% of money in circulation in UK is debt. We know that the rate of profit has increased massively since 1979, while real wages have been in decline – not least because of the squeeze on the social wage. So this ‘boom’ has been consumer-led boom and has has only been possible by increase in personal indebtedness. UK has the highest level in the world.

There’s a link here to wider politics of neoliberalism, i.e. Thatcherism in UK,
The defeat of the miners’ strike (and the printers etc etc) represented a defeat of collectivity. This is what Thatcher meant when she said: “There is no such thing as society.” Collective action disappeared, it couldn’t find a voice, it couldn’t register. Because of course credit is individual: you buy ‘your own’ house, you have ‘your own’ pension, you sort out ‘your own’ education. In the past wage demands and wage bargaining at least had the merit of being collective. Now we enter the market, naked, as individuals.

Finally, this level of personal risk also complicates lines of antagonism, e.g. our pensions are tied to the exploitation of others. “I can only get ahead at expense of others.” It appears to be a zero-sum game which just amplifies the war of all-against-all.

2. FOOD
On a daily level, we could talk about the rising price of food in shops. But let’s also leap to macro-level: millions on verge of starvation. Between May 2007–May 2008 corn prices increased by 46%, wheat prices up 80%, soybeans up 72%, rice up 75% etc etc. This is a crisis on a huge scale. This year food riots have occurred in big cities in 37 countries.

Commodity prices have fallen a little since their high point but the real question we should be asking is how has this been made possible. The price hikes are the end result of whole series of policies imposed since 1980s. The World Bank & IMF have imposed Structural Adjustment Programs on developing countries, which involved privatising agricultural lands and commodifying food production and distribution. Agricultural production had to be orientated towards the needs of the global market rather than local needs, resulting in a huge increase in cash crops. There’s been the destruction of subsistence farming, with those thrown off the land being forced into the growing shanty towns and mega slums. Importantly the SAPs also insisted on the dismantling of national food reserves and putting those reserves onto world market.

Countries that were self-sufficent are now net food importers and millions of people are forced to rely on the vagaries of the global grain markets. It’s this reliance that makes global famine possible. So it’s clearly similar to the credit crisis: people are forced onto the market, collective provision is destroyed, the common is enclosed.

This is how neoliberal mechanism work. There’s not less food. Our access to it goes through the market: people starve because they can’t afford food. The risk of starvation is personalised. There’s another link back to credit crisis: sub-prime crisis means houses are re-possessed and then knocked down or sit empty…

3. ENERGY
We could look at the energy crisis in terms of peak oil. That’s the normal framework. But aside from the endless arguments about whether or not we have reached it (never mind what ‘it’ means), it doesn’t seem particularly helpful. Much of the argument seems irrelevant because it’s based on an extrapolation from our current ‘needs’: who knows what we will ‘need’ in years to come?

It’s more interesting to look back to the last big energy crisis – the oil shock of the 1970s. This was actually the first edge of the neoliberal counter-offensive to roll back the gains we had made in the 1960s and early 1970s. That crisis was used to break the back of the most powerful working class organisations (not least those in the energy industry, like the miners). The aim of capital’s counter-attack was to drive home the message that prosperity is not guaranteed. Again we see the return of risk to our front doors.

More recently, it’s easy to think of ways consumption patterns have impacted on energy use. The credit-led consumer boom has been totally bound up with the globalisation of markets, the massive rise in container shipping around the world etc. There’s also an interweaving of several different processes: the ideology of car ownership fits with the search for individual solutions to transport fits with a road-building programme fits with the privatisation of public transport and the closure of non-profitable routes etc.

We can also think about this at the level of production. So companies externalise risk wherever possible by sub-contracting and outsourcing production. If you need widgets, you buy them from a supplier rather than make them on site. And you don’t even hold a stock of them: you get what you want when you want. One of the immediate practical consequences of this Just In Time approach is the huge rise of wagons thundering across the road.

Finally we also need to think about the ways in which fossil fuels have historically replaced our energy. Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels isn’t an accident. As workers have resisted enclosure of common, and resisted the imposition of work, capitalism has turned to ‘natural resources’ for energy provision.

4. CLIMATE
And sitting over all of these crisis sits the climate change crisis.

It overlays other three, but is of a different order and so it’s harder to think through how it links up to the others. Weirdly it’s both the most abstract yet the most real/physical. Its effects are utterly physical yet it’s abstract because the time scale is longer and involves the projection of future interests. There’s a time lag between cause and effect.

But one way of thinking this through is that global warming involves a huge increase of energy into the climate and a large increase of energy injected into any dynamic system causes instability. There is a massive increase in risk.

Two clear ways of dealing with this
a) The market solution that we’re being offered at the minute are aimed at reducing carbon emissions by pricing the poor out. Business as usual. We will bear the brunt (individually) in a new round of austerity with increased costs of travel, carbon taxes, road pricing etc etc. Risk here is same as COST

But there’s a vicious circle here: neoliberalism means the best individual response to threat of climate change is to get more money and try to insulate ourselves from the increased risk. This means we have to work harder and longer, which inevitably increases carbon emissions.

b) but there is possibility of another approach, which would mean collectivising risk, and collectivising solutions.

And here we can see the importance of seeing all the crises as linked. For instance the huge credit bailouts that are taking place at the moment mean that there’s less public money available for the huge infrastructural changes that climate change and the energy crisis will require.

One of the dangers of overlapping crises is that risk becomes a generalised condition (it’s always been virtual but will become actual). Debt is a good example: if you owe a small amount, it can act as a disciplining mechanism, restricting your ability to act. But if you start to owe a lot, discipline can break down altogether: “The equity underwriting my debt is now in doubt. Cheap credit gone. We may be on brink of recession. Or even complete meltdown. So I might as well fuck off the lot…” It’s the kung-fu principle: as risk becomes generalised, it ceases to be a weapon against us, and potentially becomes a new form of commonality, new ground of struggle.

So to end, we want to look at some struggles that have tried to come to terms with the changes in work and its effects on struggle. Some interesting innovations have happened in struggles against precarity in continental Europe, responding to the lack of the mass workplace as a site of collectivity.

One of these is the Mayday parades, which take the form of carnivals and are modelled more on Gay Pride parades and the love parades that happen in Berlin. They started off in Milan in 2001 with 5,000 people and grew to 50,000 by 2003. These then turned into Euromayday with simultaneous parades in different cities. So in 2006 there were 300,000 participants in 20 cities.

Another interesting innovation is San Precario, the patron saint of the precarious. He was invented as a symbol or icon that all the different experiences could invest their desires in. They make big models of San Precario and carry them round, like the saints parades in Catholic countries. This is an attempt to form a collectivity out of very varied experiences of precarity.

‘Precarity’ is a fancy-sounding word, but it just means a condition of existence without predictability or security. Precarity has never really caught on in this country, as an idea or tool. We’re at a different stage of neo-liberalism than Spain, France or Italy, for example, where it has taken off as a category of struggle. For us, in the UK, precarity isn’t a new condition and we understood it differently as casualisation. However if we experience a more generalised increase in precariousness then some of those tactics might begin resonate.

And in the face of these four overlapping crises, we can also start to think of precarity in a wider sense: it’s not just about work, it’s about existence. Here we can look at the anti-CPE struggles in France in spring 2006, or the actions of the piqueteros in Argentina (they had no workplace so they picketed the cities, throwing up barricades and bringing everything to a halt until their demands were met). And we can also look at innovations in struggles around money and debt: in the UK we have the experience of the Poll Tax revolt to draw on. But there are options: In gReece there have been raids on supermarkets by Robin Hood-type figures, filling trolleys and dumping them outside for people to help themselves. There’s even been talk of a ‘mortgage strike’ here in the UK (and who knows what that would look like).

There are no guarantees here. No-one can know how these crises will play out. But the example of the Argentinazo in December 2001 should remind us how quickly everything can change. There, the struggles of piqueteros etc laid ground for social revolt. They provided the ideas that were laying around. Here we need innovation and experimentation to see what resonates.

So the idea of a Fair Price campaign makes sense, not as a stunt but as a genuine campaign that tries to link up all the crises. It could be linked to the logic of “No profiteering from a crisis” and the logic that exceptional times call for exceptional measures. I think that logic runs like this:

– The government and big business say these are exceptional times. They’ve made exceptions to normal rules and laws, they just suspended competition laws to let Lloyds buy HBOS. At the same time we, ordinary people, have had to put our hands in our pockets and bail out the richest people in the country. They get to keep all of their profits but we have to pay for all of their losses. Well, if it’s exceptional times for them it should be exceptional times for us.

– At the same time as we’re being asked to pay to bail out the banks, food prices are rocketing and – guess what – the supermarkets’ profits have been rocketing too. The supermarkets are cashing in on this crisis, they are acting like spivs, profiteering from hardship.

– No-one believes the government is going to help us out so we should help each other.

So the plan could be as simple as this. Let’s meet outside Tesco’s, discuss together what’s a fair price and then ask to meet the manager and ask him if he’ll reduce prices. The advertised price of goods under UK law is only an offer – it’s called an ‘invitation to treat’. So it is legal to negotiate and managers of stores have some leeway on prices. This is legal, possible and fair.

Again it could be promoted really simply: “Come to Tescos carpark 10am Saturday 10th of blah, blah. Look for the Fair Price banner and join in the discussion. Exceptional times call for exceptional measures! A bailout for them, reductions for us!”

There would have to be a big build-up for this, with letters in local newspapers, posters, etc. It could only work if it was something of a national talking point before the actions. This means campaigning and trying to cause awareness in different ways. But the logic of this makes sense and could reach outside the usual circle of committed activists (i.e. be more than a little Situ stunt). This crisis is going to be continuing for a long time – in fact this might work better in a couple of months when the effects are biting home on main street, as the Americans would say.

Some research would have to be done, e.g. work out what percentage of the price of goods is profit, on average. Also supermarket owners can ask anyone they want to leave their property so we’d need to find a bit of highly visible, adjoining public land or land owned by someone else who isn’t going to be there.

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 policy or style: step outside that and it’s a criminal/police matter. OK, an MP getting jostled and almost pepper-sprayed hardly matches up to Genoa or Bolzaneto but you know what I mean…

In fact, when we wrote a piece about antagonism (how productive it can be) in the latest issue of Turbulence, we had half an eye on the camp. In my most cynical moments (hmm, I do have a few) I was ready for the camp to be another media love-in or liberal festival of single-issue reformism. Instead, the fact that people had to penetrate a row of riot cops to get in meant that antagonism of some sort was never really off the agenda. And it cut the ground away from under many reformists: it’s hard to talk seriously about the positive role of the state in an atmosphere of repression, even if some of it (like riot cops playing Ride of the Valkyries on a car stereo) was typically naff rather than nasty.

Second, there seemed to be a much better understanding of class politics and anti-capitalism than I feared. It didn’t feel like we were barking mad for talking about class. Again that might appear a small thing but…

As well as facilitating a workshop on class, we also did a re-run of our presentation on climate change and work. It was OK, but I think we could have made the message even clearer – maybe even repeated it several times and tattooed it in CAPITAL LETTERS across our foreheads. We had one bloke stand up at the end, applaud our talk and then say that the way forward was clear: we should all become self-employed, there’d be no bosses any more and capitalism would simply cease to exist. Erm, no… Seriously though, we packed a lot into our presentation and I think the main thrust got a bit sidelined by other stuff. The point we wanted to make was this: the biggest single cause of climate change isn’t aviation, or coal mining, or people driving 4×4s. It’s work. So any attempt to reduce carbon emissions without thinking through ‘work’ is pretty much doomed to failure or represents tinkering round the edges. To put it even more strongly, the way to reduce carbon emissions isn’t to campaign for their reduction: it’s to explore ways of resisting the imposition of work. And that might not happen under the banner of ‘climate change’.

In this respect, one of the most depressing things was the interplay between miners (i.e. Arthur Scargill and Dave Douglas) and climate campers (some of the background is here and you can see some other comments here and here). It was depressing because the exchanges were so unproductive and seemed happy to stay on the level of public policy (as if we’ve got any say in that). Self-education is fantastically liberating, but is not quite the same thing as becoming an expert on CCS for example. On the other hand, it was just as disheartening to hear Scargill and Douglas acting as defenders/spokesmen of the “coal industry”, as if that’s a totally unproblematic notion. In all the noise the whole idea of social change just seemed to slide away.

All of this made me think about how much our horizons have shrunk over the last twenty years. I’ve just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day which is a huge sprawling comment on light, invisibility, identity, anarchists, the build-up to the First World War, militant trade unionism, time travel, and the mythical paradise of Shambhala. One of the recurring threads in it is this:

The world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one.

Most of the time those other worlds are just dreams (or nightmares) a million years away. But there are moments of extraordinary possibility where everything opens up. The 1984-85 miners’ strike in the UK was precisely one of those moments. What started out as a defensive trade union action exploded into something that threatened (however briefly) to blow all of this away. If you’re in any doubt about this, check out Jenny Dennis’ tale which is a stunning reminder of that moment and what we could have become.

OK, it’s a little unfair to hold the climate camp up to the miners’ strike – you can only play the teams in front of you. But we have to keep hold of that sense of possibility: that’s what we’re fighting for.

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?