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.

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, we’re quite a closed group. It’s not that we’re not open to new ideas and new experiences. We are. It’s not that we’re not open to the potentials of working with other people. That’s exactly what we’ve done with the Turbulence project. But we’re quite a tight-knit group. We share a gang mentality. And that’s precious. It’s the result of more than 15 years’ friendship (the course of which, like true love, has not always run smooth). We break bread together, so we’re compagni. And we’ve shared all manner of accommodation — not literally barracks, but ferry cabins, beds in plush hotel rooms, tents, sodden forest floors, even tarmac roads — and so we’re comrades. We’re definitely comrades. We’re cracked more smutty jokes than you could shake your stick at and been in more than a few dicey situations together. We’ve been on the receiving end of no end of abuse and we’ve usually given as good as we’ve got. The name Leeds May Day Group perhaps better reflected this hard-edgedness.

One of this year’s collective projects — very much in keeping with the gang identity of the group — is to all get tattoos. Brian had been on about getting an Omnia sunt communia tat for several years, but kept prevaricating over the design. Then back in April Keir suggested all four of us do it.

Brian finally sorted his out a couple of months ago. Nette and Keir are still working on their designs. I went under the needle yesterday.

The design is Brian’s of course. The font is William Morris’s ‘golden type’. William Morris was a revolutionary as well as an ‘arts and craftsman’ and some of his thoughts have popped up in our writings. The lion is there for that verse in Percy Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy, written in response to the British government’s Peterloo (Manchester) massacre of 1819:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few

Fast forward a century and a half. We’re still in Manchester and it’s 1975. Peter McNeish reinvented himself as Pete Shelley. With Howard Devoto he formed Buzzcocks, one of the ‘first wave’ of punk groups. Punk is, as is well known, a recurring motif in LMDG/TFA musings. Pete Shelley went onto to become one of England’s finest songsmiths and his words too have graced our writings.

Everything is connected!
Everything is common!

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

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

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

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 up to scrutiny. But there’s a tension here (one that’s not necessarily productive). On a superficial level, there’s the whole academic trip where you attempt to pre-empt every criticism, shore up every argument and tie up any loose ends. But at a deeper level you can see this as the work of some molar perspective which seeks to totalise, to impose some sort of unity-in-identity, and to capture energy. “We have to relate this argument here to that one there… And how does this fit in?” But the end result might well be stasis or death. All the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed. You know the feeling when you finish reading a book or article – it’s all clear, you agree with almost everything (how could you not?) but your response is “Yeah, and…?” It’s done to death. It has a trajectory that’s entirely predictable: the authors think A and B, therefore they’ll almost certainly think C.

Another example: there’s a critique of Move into the Light? (a text we had a hand in) on the grounds that it’s easy to read, so you think “that’s nice, that’s interesting…” and then 5 minutes later you think “what does that mean?” From one perspective, the incoherence/confusion over the metaphor of light is a weakness of the text. Just when you think you’ve got a grip of the metaphor, it shifts again and unbuckles the understanding you’ve carefully assembled. I’ve been watching Carnivale and I have exactly the same problem.

But in another way, that’s one of the more productive ways to read a book/watch a film/listen to a song. It makes sense, but only sort of – it’s always hinting at something else and keeps sliding away towards it (obviously I’m not talking about sloppy writing which is just annoying). It’s much harder to extrapolate from, because it’s always threatening to become something else, to fall off the charts. And I think there might be a connection here to the way the Turbulence tabloid for Heiligendamm ‘worked’, I think. Individually the articles had weaknesses, but the whole more than made up for it.

So, I guess the question is this: does this have any bearing on how we understand affinity? And becoming? Is there something ineffable about it, something that resists scrutiny and yet – or maybe because of that – is still enormously productive? More crudely, what makes us hang around the anti-globalisation movement when we know all the arguments against it, when many of the critiques of it make sense?

I just can’t get you out of my head
Boy it’s more than I dare to think about

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 (as soon as it’s finalised we’ll post it here) and this blog has become a little too introspective. So we’re now setting up a private room, round the back, where we can tinker with ideas without imposing on you lot too much.
And then hopefully this space can become a little more productive, a little more interactive, and maybe a tad less painful.

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 else next time.” At Gleneagles, we celebrated the fact that we tied up the police for ages and prevented the Canadian delegation from reaching the summit at all on its opening day. This was an index of our success. This was measure.

But how useful is this type of measure? Measure must always take place in the *extensive* realm, the realm of the *actual*, the realm of what *exists* (De Landa). The extensive realm isn’t unimportant and it isn’t ‘bad’, but it isn’t the whole story; there’s more! How do we ‘measure’ the pleasure of eating apples, for example? In the extensive realm, all we can do is the count the number of apples. But living a life is not simply about calories and nutrition. It’s about freedom and potential. Our freedom and potential to produce, regardless of whether we do, in fact, produce. It may not be apples we actually desire. In terms of exploring out potential, transforming our subjectivities, developing our collectivity… well, these processes are immeasurable.

Here, when we are thinking about subjectivities and desire and potential, we have moved into the realms of the *intensive* and the *virtual*. It’s processes in the intensive realm – the movement of our desires and subjectivities — which constitute or produce the extensive. And the virtual realm is the field of potential, the field of what is possible or what might be possible.

A major problem for us (the second problem or question) is that it’s hard to see these intensive processes which constitute the extensive realm. In other words, we can observe the ‘actual’ world quite easily, but not the underlying movements. We can easily see poverty. We can look at statistics on life expectancy. We can even trace these back to ownership of the ‘means of production’ or the ‘division of labour’. But it’s more difficult to work out what’s going on underneath. This is certainly the case in ‘normal’ situations, when the world is in ‘equilibrium’. However…

… the intensive realm is far more apparent in far-from-equilibrium situations. At summit protests, for example, we can see more easily what social movements are made of. We can see commodities for what they are: dead. We get a sense that this is *real*, this is *life*. ‘Reality’ itself is punctured. Can also be punctured or ruptured by various other means. Not only ‘political’ or ‘cultural’ moments of excess, but also drugs or meditation perhaps. Sometimes, in these situations, things, the ‘way the world is’ – e.g., class inequality – just become blindingly obvious. *But*. Does this mean that ‘reality’, the extensive, is simply a shell? A shell which hides (and protects us from?) the intensive which lies beneath?

Third problem or question. The relation between the extensive and the intensive. Causality is not all one way, from intensive to extensive. Outcomes in the extensive realm do impact on the intensive realm and the field of possibilities. Victory of the Democrats in the US Congressional elections changes things for us. It alters the field in which we operate. E.g. there is no longer any point in organising around a “don’t invade Iran” position. Similarly, now the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are all in crisis, struggles against these institutions seem to make less sense.

And this brings us back to the question of winning. For the crisis of the WTO and its cousins is our victory. (Remember Seattle in 1999 was a mobilisation against the WTO.) But it’s a victory in the extensive realm. And is this really what we mean by winning? Is it ‘our’ sort of winning? In 1999, these institutions appeared hegemonic, unquestionable, impossible to challenge. (‘There Is No Alternative.’) But we did challenge them. The very act of questioning the unquestionable, of practically imagining another world, is a victory in the intensive realm.

And we have to remember that the WTO is itself only a husk. It is less a ‘thing’, then a rigidified set of social relations. Its crisis means a certain web of social relationships are more fragile. But maybe those social relationships ‘moved on’, to organise the Olympics, for example. Which reminds us that capital also has an intensive realm – which it shares with us; they’re not separate; we are not separate from capital. More generally, the state is one of capital’s extensive faces. States attempt to harness or service capital’s movement. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of social movements versus the state (or state actors, such as the police). But the state just a moment of class struggle (Bonefeld and Holloway). And when capitalist organisations/states are in crisis, it is also more possible to observe capital’s intensive realm. (Really all we are doing here is observing the ‘same’ far-from-equilibrium situation from two perspectives: our own and that of capital.)

Fourth problem/question: strategy. Can you place yourself to even a small degree in the future to think strategically. That is, can we immanently strategise? One example is the climate camp. Can we think about its possibilities, its potential, even if we don’t quite know what those possibilities or potential are? Or can we only think about strategy in the extensive realm?

In moments of excess — when everything is open, when we ask “how do we want to live?” — we just *be*: this is also when we *can* think strategically but don’t have to. This is where strategy becomes just *be*. Ineffability. Vocalising freezes and drags us back into realm of politics. Teleology. Strategy closes off. Victory in the intensive realm opens up possibilities. Burrowing… want more and more, wider and wider, without any sense of direction… different subjectivities experiment in different areas.

Fifth problem (restating the second). If the intensive is the realm of change, with the extensive the realm of stasis, how do we access it? Because when the intensive becomes visible, so does the virtual. And when we glimpse the intensive, we also ’see’ (sense) connections to other processes/events. Resonance! But resonance is independent of consciousness. So struggles don’t have to be ‘aware’ of one another in order to resonate.

So how can we create right materials — tools or techniques — to facilitate intensity? We have to strategise because we can’t do everything. It’s about what seems possible. And that’s why strategy is different in intensive moments. But intensive states are quite fragile. At Gleneagles, there was resonance and consensus decision-making helped maintain consistency. Political animosity vanished (Zolberg: ‘Moments of Madness’). The bombing of July 7 shattered this state. How can we make intensive moments less fragile? Use refrains. Could argue that consensus decision-making is part of the extensive realm? But using it as a refrain means we can change it, use it, drop it. A tool. It doesn’t need to be formalised. Don’t need to use this tool for meeting with just four people, say. Unless it’s extensive, doesn’t exist for some people.

Final question/problem. How do we stay on the productive edge, which lies on boundary between the void and the extensive realm?

(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 awfully clunky – reflecting our own lack of confidence, I think, and the fact that we had yet to develop a style of our own. But I was surprised how well some of the ideas still stood up, especially the whole movement-as-thing which we’re always banging on about. We’d already gone back to the piece for What is a life?, so maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. All the same, I find this sort of ‘consistency’ (continuity?) quite reassuring: we might be barking up the wrong tree, but at least it’s the same damn tree and we haven’t (yet) started chasing cars or howling at the moon…

There’s some link here to that notion of durability which we’ve been mulling over, altho’ I’m not really sure what that link is. How do you stay working together as a group without blood-letting or clinging to some doctrinal purity, and yet still remain open? I don’t think we’ve cracked it, although we’ve had our moments.

Finally I stumbled across this which has some smart things to say on the ‘identity politics of class’ and the thing-like nature of, well, things… I got really giddy until I saw that Nate had already been there, marking his territory. Arf, arf!

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 the earlier post. I’m curious if what I’m about to describe counts as a refrain.

I’m rather shy by inclination. I’ve worked a long time in different affective labor and in these – in particular my time working for one of the business unions – I got a lot better at managing socializing, and coming off as confident even if I don’t feel it. Partly this is because I had to mix in with lots of different folks than I had before and do so successfully (as measured by rather draconian bosses) and I got to feeling a lot more confident as a result. But also because I had a framework: there’s an agenda to the conversations. Figuratively (a goal, usually to get the person to convince themselves to sign a union card) and literally (broken up into five sections). Successfully navigating the agenda means asking lots of questions, getting the person to talk, knowing when to ask a follow up question (“I haven’t had any major run ins with the boss.” “It sounds like you have had some minor ones, though. What are some of those?”), etc.

After I did this for a while I got a lot better at situations, like being at parties and so on. “Where are you from? Where do you live? How long have you lived there? Where do you work? How long have you worked there?” Etc. Folk generally like the attention, and begin to feel like “this guy’s listening to me, he’s interested in me.” It made social interaction way easier for me. Not quite a refrain, I think, so much as a key or a scale or a chord – a few things one can do instinctively. The goal is to get people to tell stories, and to elaborate on those stories, and when appropriate tell corresponding stories, and if one does it enough one establishes a few techniques (which form an ensemble) one can use with some measure of success and confidence. It’s a way to provide one of the shapes required for a flow to happen in a social setting, since without any form or channel there can be no flow (just dissipation at infinite speed). It’s also ambivalent, something functional for positive as well as for negative ends, like the business unions’ instrumentalization of this mechanism.

There’s also a particular enjoyment of interacting with folk in a visit, sharing a refrain – the same feeling as in playing music with people, being in synch in time together, someone makes a change and it just fits and you make a change with them or in response. It’s complicated in this model, though, because the organizer has the agenda consciously and the other person doesn’t.

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 the general area. We record that discussion and then transcribe the recording, précising it a little as we go. The last few entries on the blog have been such transcriptions, which is why they don’t make much sense.

What we’re aiming for is a boiling down process where we discuss the previous transcript, transcribe that discussion and then discuss that. This goes on until it gets to the stage when someone has to go away and write a first draft, but when they do they have a lot to draw on. It always seems to be that we’re struggling to grasp the problem we’re approaching and it’s only during the actual writing process that it starts to become clear. For many years we were a reading group. The book we were reading was the object around which we transformed ourselves but making the move to collective writing makes the transformation much more active. Although, the turn to collective writing was bound up with a more interventionist, re-engagement with social movements on our part, so I suppose that inevitably would be more active.

Anyway the piece that we produced is here; it’s sort of the final installment of a trilogy. We’ll now return to occasional posts on things that come up.