Another shameless plug, this time for our talk on Movements, Generations and Fairy Dust at this year’s Anarchist Bookfair in London, on Saturday 22 October.

Short notice, I know, but here’s the blurb for a talk we’re giving this Thursday in London, at ‘We have own concept of Time and Motion’. It’s a four day event devoted to the idea and practice of self-organisation: full programme here.

Living with an earthquake: from punk and autonomia to the [...]]]>

Short notice, I know, but here’s the blurb for a talk we’re giving this Thursday in London, at ‘We have own concept of Time and Motion’. It’s a four day event devoted to the idea and practice of self-organisation: full programme here.

Living with an earthquake: from punk and autonomia to the present

A talk and discussion on the continuing relevance of autonomist ideas and practice. Free Association member Keir Milburn traces a red thread that runs through … deep breath… the Italian movement of ’77, punk-rock in the UK, urban riots, Class War, Reclaim the Streets, the counter-globalisation movement and the struggles of the present crisis. He asks whether thinking about things like ‘class composition’ and ‘auto-valorisation’ can help us escape from the present impasse.

The details of our Manchester launch event have now been sorted, thanks to our friends and comrades in Shift magazine.

Although it’s billed as a launch event, it’s not really about racking up book sales (!). The main purpose of talks like these is that we get the chance to engage in [...]]]>

The details of our Manchester launch event have now been sorted, thanks to our friends and comrades in Shift magazine.

Although it’s billed as a launch event, it’s not really about racking up book sales (!). The main purpose of talks like these is that we get the chance to engage in ongoing political discussions. One of the things we’ve been thinking about, in particular, is the relation between the shape of our politics – our ways of organising – and the wider contours of social formations. In autonomist terms, it’s a question of class composition.

This talk on sorcery, rupture and fairy dust looks at how we reproduce capitalism (or rather, capitalist social relations) behind our own backs. And we try to think about what the notion of a “real abstraction” might mean, by looking at the way capital is so slippery and elusive while its effects are horribly real.

But all this has to be put into the context of the economic crisis of 2007–8 which changed the political landscape irrevocably. There was (and is) obviously a crisis in the reproduction of capital: we pay for the crisis in the shape of wage cuts, job losses and closures, a massive reduction in public spending, and a widespread imposition of austerity. But as the effects of this crisis begin to bite, it’s also become clear that there’s a “crisis in political representation”.  It’s an ugly phrase, but it’s shorthand for saying that it’s increasingly obvious to everyone that we cannot vote our way out of this mess. Even the most cynical reformist has to admit that the power of parliament (or any democratically elected sovereign body) is more limited than ever. That’s why we’ve seen a range of social movements which have pushed way beyond traditional political solutions – from Iceland in 2008–2009, to Millbank and the student movement in the UK, to the Arab Spring and the huge swell of events in Spain and Greece. These movements have their own peculiarities, but you could say they all have an intrinsic extra-parliamentary logic. In their common rejection of “politics as usual”, they echo the cry of “que se vayan todos” that rang through Argentina in 2001–2002. “All of them must go!”

So, although the imposition of austerity, by definition, means shrinking and closure, we can also see the outlines of radical possibilities in this new landscape. But there are two problems. First, despite the obvious resonances between them, the struggles that are emerging don’t seem able to cohere into a social force capable of effecting change. So while movements have emerged rapidly (and explosively), they’ve also dispersed fairly quickly — demobilised, frozen or swallowed up by traditional civil society organisations — leaving only traces of their initial potential.

Second, there’s a related impasse in terms of the way we organise as anti-capitalist militants. Existing forms of organising and activism that stem from pre-crisis days don’t seem up to exploring the possibilities of this new landscape. And by “existing forms of organising and activism” I really mean all forms — from Leninist parties and national federations to affinity groups and anti-hierarchical networks. In the face of some of the stuff that’s been going on, even the most progressive and liberating of these seem wooden or flat-footed.

Can we find a new political approach adequate to the moment? Is there the possibility of some sort of re-groupment? Or do we need “just one more push, comrades”? Get yourself along to Manchester on 21 July and help find out…

Our London launch event has at last been finalised and will happen on Friday 1 July at Limazulu. Thanks to the efforts of comrades in London, our talk will run as part of Militant Cinema, a short series of films around the Italian Workerist Movement, and will be followed by a [...]]]>

Our London launch event has at last been finalised and will happen on Friday 1 July at Limazulu. Thanks to the efforts of comrades in London, our talk will run as part of Militant Cinema, a short series of films around the Italian Workerist Movement, and will be followed by a screening of Il Posto and Gli uomini che mascalzoni. The full season runs from 25 June to 3 July, and looks brilliant.

Through allegory and pastiche the films expand and illustrate the ideas contained within the movement. First, that it is the working class who are the active agent within capitalism rather than capital, which is always reactive to the movements of the working class, subjugating and oppressing their innovations. Second, that Marx should be radically re-read beginning with works such as the ‘Grundrisse’ to reunderstand Marxism as a thoroughgoing materialism. Third, that the answer is for workers within a constantly shifting class structure to unite around the abolition of the system of wage labour, rather than agitate for more equity in its mediation. Rather than pass through a period of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, communism could be established more immediately, through struggling for autonomy of the working class from capitalism, a capitalism whose continuation is contingent on their labour. Opposed to more traditional Leninist parties such as the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), workerist tactics of occupation, sabotage and the valorisation of the working class spilled into concern for the place of women’s work in the home, for ‘the social factory’ and the cooperative and hence proto-communist nature of working class life.
This eclectic group of films help trace the ideas of the movement and portray something of the social context in which it was born, promising a broad and colourful introduction to late 20th century Italy – a site of mass insurrection, violent struggle and state repression, with a legacy that has left the Italian political landscape with permanent and bloody scars

A short advert, based on this video, to promote our contribution to this year’s Left Forum in the US.

Moments of Excess, a Free Association anthology, is now available here. It’s a project that’s taken the best part of a year to realise, but it’s not the usual tale of missed deadlines. As the book’s introduction says:

The texts collected here were written over a ten year period from summer 2001 [...]]]>

Moments of Excess, a Free Association anthology, is now available here. It’s a project that’s taken the best part of a year to realise, but it’s not the usual tale of missed deadlines. As the book’s introduction says:

The texts collected here were written over a ten year period from summer 2001 to January 2011. All were initially written as interventions, one way or another, so it’s no surprise that they betray their origin and context. One or two were originally written for books, some appeared in ‘movement’ publications such as Derive Approdi and Turbulence, and most were also handed out as self-published booklets in the heat of the moment. Yet as we assembled this edition, we were struck by how well the articles hang together as a collection. They are coherent—and they tell a story.

In fact, as we re-read the texts we were both tempted to update them in the light of recent events and simultaneously struck by how much sense they still made. The final article, Re:generation, was initially conceived, early in 2010, as a simple postscript to the other texts, a piece that would tie up loose ends and draw our story to a close. But when we sat down to think about it at the end of last year, of course we discovered that events had taken place and things had moved—as they always do. And how could we not think and attempt to make sense of these movements? More than a simple coda, it opens up more than it closes down.

So what is the story of Moments of Excess? As we re-read the texts, at least three different narratives emerged from the threads that run through them. The first is a tale about the movement of movements, focused on the cycle of counter-summit mobilisations that is usually reckoned to have begun with the WTO Seattle meeting in November 1999. Looking back now, it seems clear that this cycle has come to an end—first stalled and then definitively thrown aside by the economic crisis that ripped across the planet in 2008.

But this isn’t just a historical anthology: there’s a second, wider thread about the form of politics appropriate to the world we live in. Neoliberalism’s ideology of permanent progress through growth may have been shattered by the economic crisis, but it staggers on, zombie-like—and unprecedented cuts in public expenditure across the world are actually expanding its programme of social decomposition. As cracks appear in the most unlikely of places, there’s space to ask the one question worth asking: what sort of world do we want to live in?

And finally there is an even older narrative—the story of ‘the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer—the Revolution’. These are whispers across time and space that can’t be silenced. However it’s expressed—‘Omnia sunt communia’, ‘The poor shall wear the crown’, ‘Que se vayan todos’—we hear the same refusal, the same desire to stop the world as we know it and create something else. Who knows? By tomorrow, this book may well be meaningless, rendered irrelevant by the grubbing of that old mole. We are, after all, part of ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.

(But in the meantime, do yourself a favour and get hold of a copy…)

Just a little teaser/shameless plug for our book Moments of Excess which is being published early next year by the good folk at PM Press. This guy has clearly read it…

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I came across this great quote here about the recent storming of the Tory party [...]]]>

Just a little teaser/shameless plug for our book Moments of Excess which is being published early next year by the good folk at PM Press. This guy has clearly read it…

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I came across this great quote here about the recent storming of the Tory party HQ.

I pushed a little and realised we were winning, so I thought what happens if we push a little more, so we did, and we broke a window! Then I thought, wow, we broke the window, what happens if we go inside? Then we got inside! So I thought, if we got this far, could we go further? And before I knew it I was on the roof!

This is the line that leapt out at me: If we got this far, could we go further? I’m hoping the answer’s in our book…

I know things have been very quiet on this blog for the past few months, but we are still alive and kicking. Honest. Over the last few months we’ve been occupied elsewhere – including the latest issue of Turbulence and an organised walk through Leeds – and that’s left us little [...]]]>

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

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

We shall return.

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, [...]]]>

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!