freely associating

There’s this interesting tension within The Free Association. Our name has two or three connotations. One reflects Marx’s idea of communism as a ‘free association of producers’. This suggests quite an open group, receptive to new members as well as new ideas, a group with a fluid membership. We have, in the past, collaborated with others under The Free Association moniker. Perhaps we will again. But in another way, ...

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…

We gave a talk last night at the CommonPlace on capitalism and climate change. The slides and notes for it are available here, but a horribly brief summary goes like this… The climate crisis is an energy crisis. It's about the conversion of one form of energy (fossil fuels) into another. Physicists call that conversion 'work'. But the climate crisis is also a 'work' crisis in the everyday sense ...

La la la La la la la la La la la La la la la la… We've been vaguely considering doing some sort of anthology of our work so far, and it's made me think about the different ways of reading (and by extension of writing). My first reaction was that it would only be worth collecting up our various texts if we could somehow make them cohere, so that they stand ...

Sorry about this, but we’re trying to tidy this blog up so it’s a bit more useful to the random passer-by (we get loads of those). In the past we’ve used this space as a way of composing our collective thoughts. And when it works, it works really well. But for the last couple of months we’ve been working on an article which we’ve just submitted to Turbulence ...

Notes from 20 November 2006 Some questions and problems. First, measure. How do we *know* when we're winning? We can set targets, but what sort of targets? How can we measure achievements within social movements? How *do* we measure achievements within social movements? Because we do always measure. We say: “Oh, that was a good meeting." Or: “That thing we did wasn’t very effective [whatever ‘effective’ means], let’s try something ...

(Note to self: must use this blog more often) We’ve recently re-worked our piece on anti-capitalist movements for inclusion in a book scheduled to come out next year (we’ll post it, along with the book details, once it’s been finally accepted). The original article was written some five years ago, and it was strange coming back to it after such a gap. For one thing, some of it was ...

I just got the copies of What is a Life? in the mail. Thanks for sending them. It looks good and as always I'm happy to be part of it and wish I had more to contribute than "fuck yeah!" I was looking over a hardcopy of the thing today (it's great how a hold-able object is different than a computer screen), then read the stuff on refrains in ...

This post is in the spirit of tidying up the blog and making it intelligible to any poor bastard who happened to stumble across it. The Free Association is, amongst other things, a collective writing project. The way of working that we’ve settled on is to decide on a vague area for a project and then blog on topics that seem related. We then have a discussion meeting on ...

These are a couple of random thoughts that have been buzzing around my head. Part of this is the idea to maybe finish the Event Horizon trilogy – Event Horizon is the pre-event attempt to set a mood, On The Road is an analysis of how things turned out and this new piece tries to look at how we live after the event. This is tied up with ...