I’ve talked a lot in the last year about the magic of rupture, [...]]]> This is the text of a talk I gave at The Space at the Leeds launch of Occupy Everything, an excellent anthology of writings provoked by Paul Mason’s blog post ‘Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere’

I’ve talked a lot in the last year about the magic of rupture, the little sprinkle of fairy dust that can turn an event into something explosive. I want to leave that to one side and instead think about the magic of consistency, how things hang together (or not) in the aftermath of that rupture. And I want to start by going back to the roots of Western materialist philosophy… and football.

For the Classic philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius, nothing comes into existence out of nothing, and nothing disappears into nothing. For them, the only two entities are body and void. And this is how they present the universe – bodies raining down in straight lines, never touching, never deviating, through a bottomless void. Pretty grim. Actually Lucretius says, it’s not like that. If it was, nothing would ever exist except bodies and void, and we would be robots with every movement and action determined by unbreakable causal chains. Instead, there is what he calls the clinamen or swerve – a spontaneous tiny change of direction in the course of an atom’s downward fall which makes it lean into another atom.

This swerve is vital. Lucretius says: ‘If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards like raindrops through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom upon atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.’

What has this got do with ‘Occupy Everything’? Well, everything.

That vision of an atomised world, of single bodies falling in straight lines through a bottomless void seems very familiar if you’ve ever been on the Tube or stood in a checkout. But we’re also familiar with the idea of a swerve – a magic moment when bodies come together, when individuals coalesce and become a force. So in football we might say that swerve could be something like the Cruyff turn or a crunching tackle, a moment of brilliance (or brutality) that lifts a crowd to its feet and changes the game. Or it might be the audacity of seizing Tahrir Square or putting a boot through the window at Millbank.

Obviously that swerve is much easier in football where you’ve got a set of rules, a clearly identified opposition and 30,000 people who are already up for the encounter. But we can also think of the ruptures that happened at the end of 2010 and the start of 2011 as swerves, as deviations in our falling bodies. People bumped into other people, new bodies were formed and those movements rippled outwards across the globe.

The promise of moments like Millbank or the Arab Spring is that they generate enough consistency between different social actors that new forms of class power, collectivity and organisation can emerge and then recognise themselves.

But there’s a problem. Bodies come together. They get hot. They get sticky. But then things cool. When that happens, bodies drift apart or go off looking for some other encounter.

So how do you keep very different forms of struggle articulated together? And how do you sustain political organisation across the ebb and flow of distinct protest waves?

There’s no easy answer but I think it has to do with finding some sort of consistency or coherence, one that enables bodies to literally stick around. Reading through ‘Occupy Everything’, there are two clear reasons why this is especially important now.

First, we have to take a long term view of the economic crisis that engulfed the world in 2007–8. Even in simple fiscal terms, we are going to be living through its consequences for at least the next ten years. And politically its impact may be even greater, as austerity becomes the new normal. In fifty years time, people might look back and see Keynesianism and social democracy as temporary blips in the normal, brutal functioning of capitalism. Over the next few years, then, there are bound to be waves of resistance followed by periods of quietism and troughs of defeat. Even now, the joy of Millbank and the Arab Spring seem a long time ago.

And when we take this long term view, we need to think again about the effect of speed on our bodies. During the events covered in this book, it was all about the speed of virtual politics – Facebook, Twitter and the power of the meme. But as George Caffentzis has pointed out, the experiences of the last year have actually shown that speed is not enough for political effect. You need momentum as well. If you remember your physics lessons from school, you’ll know that momentum is mass times velocity, so it can mean a small group travelling very fast – via tweets & BBM etc. But if we’re serious about change, it must also mean a much larger number of people moving at a slower pace. In the Arab Spring, for example, what was decisive in the end was massive numbers of physical bodies in physical spaces. So we can think of consistency as a way of bridging that gap between huge numbers of people and small groups moving fast.

And that brings us on to the second reason why finding consistency is crucial. It’s not just our bodies that are in movement. There are other bodies falling down as well. Any one of those can collide with us and send us spinning off in another direction.

In football, a couple of quick goals from the opposition can make a crowd turn in on itself. What was one body becomes 30,000 squabbling individuals, each with their own agenda.

And here we can think about the weak ties of network politics that are so celebrated in this book and in Paul Mason’s. Those weak ties are great because they make movements very elastic, highly responsive and able to grow exponentially. But without more coherent forms of organisation to back them up, those weak ties can make movements very vulnerable to disruption. For me one of the enduring images of late 2010/early 2011 in the UK was that brilliant photo of a boot going through a Millbank window. But fast forward a few months to the August riots. Those virtual social networks which had been so powerful couldn’t hold together all the shocked metrosexual liberals who suddenly discovered their inner fascist. The aftermath of the riots is summed up in those horrible photos of the ‘Broom Army’ – hundreds of people banging the drum for law and order.

So that’s another aim of consistency or coherence: to find ways to help our bodies deal productively with shocks, ruptures and collisions. One of the worst ways of tackling shock is to try and cope with it in an atomised and individual way. If we can develop some sort of consistency, or stickiness, then we can slow down the intensity, collectivise the experience, and create a space for us to take stock and analyse together. So we could think of forms of organisation as shock absorbers or even crumple zones. And for that, spaces like this, and books like this, are absolutely crucial.

So where does that leave us now? All this talk of long-term strategy, of regroupment, of a down-turn, of resignation seems a bit depressing compared to the excitement of the movements covered in this book. If that’s all we’re left with, maybe we should ask what exactly did we gain from the events of 2011? A few north African governments have fallen, but for most of us here in the UK, aren’t we back in the same state of impasse where we began?

Let me answer that with one of Keir’s favourite stories, another football analogy. Let’s call it Riff no. 9. Back in the early 1990s there was a football manager who was trying to introduce a more patient, continental style of football to English players used to a much more direct, physical game. During a training session the manager asks his attackers to pass and move, and pass and move in the final third of the pitch instead of just lumping the ball into the box as they usually do. So they do this, but after five minutes the centre forward pipes up: “Boss, what was the point of all that running? We’re back in the same positions as we started?” “Ah, yes,” says the manager, “but their defenders aren’t.”

Or as Lucretius might say, “nothing disappears into nothing.” The experience of 2011 is in our bodies. We just have to open up to it and use it.

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.

Documenting the revolution sounded like an easy thing, but what is the revolution? When did it start? When did it end? What constitutes participation in the revolution – is it only those who went down to Tahrir, or is it also the doctors who worked extra-long hours in their hospitals to [...]]]>

Documenting the revolution sounded like an easy thing, but what is the revolution? When did it start? When did it end? What constitutes participation in the revolution – is it only those who went down to Tahrir, or is it also the doctors who worked extra-long hours in their hospitals to treat the wounded? What about a police officer who fought the protesters – is he a part of the revolution or not?

It is people who make history, not generals or leaders.

The question of access to information and archives is political, because reading history is interpreting history, and interpreting history is one way of making it. Closing people off from the sources of their own history is an inherently political gesture, and equally opening that up is a political – even revolutionary – act.

This was a leaderless revolution, and one which came about through mass participation. The way we write history now has to be part of the same process, and so does the way we access that history. That for me is as much a part of the revolution as anything else.

Egyptian historian Khaled Fahmy, quoted in ‘The struggle to document Egypt’s revolution‘, The Guardian, 15.07.2011.

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

The Class War Federation is no more.

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

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

The Class War Federation is no more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working-class identity politics?

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

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

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

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

Reversal of class perspective

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

Bash the rich

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

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

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

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

Resonance

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

What follows are some random (and rambling) thoughts on the power of events or acts to inspire whole movements – in part provoked by Paul Mason’s Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere, but also as an excuse to display this brilliant poster which I found at the bottom of [...]]]>

Poster by the Pleasure Tendency

What follows are some random (and rambling) thoughts on the power of events or acts to inspire whole movements – in part provoked by Paul Mason’s Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere, but also as an excuse to display this brilliant poster which I found at the bottom of a drawer the other day.

The events in north Africa sparked Paul Mason’s comments but obviously the question is a lot wider. How do isolated acts of resistance gel to become mass rebellions? And what conditions make them more likely to succeed (even if only for a short time)? The points that really interest me at the moment are points 3 and 7:

3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.

7. Memes: “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.” (Wikipedia) – so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly “market tested” and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.

This brilliant timeline gives a sense of the stuff that’s been kicking off across the world over the last few months. It’s easy to over-state the cohesion and power of these events. And there is a risk of neophilia, of uncritically celebrating the new: “the time for change is now” – as if real change was impossible at earlier points. The flipside to this is the apocalyptic undertone which says, more or less openly, that if we fail to resist the imposition of austerity now, we’ll be fucked for several generations to come. But all the same, it certainly feels like we might be on the cusp of a shift in social relations (the crazy before the new). And part of that feeling is to do with the accelerating pace of events: that truth (the unfolding of new social relations) is moving faster than lies (the ability of capital and the state to restrain or limit our desires).

In the 1980s security experts in the West used the idea of the domino effect to talk about social movements in Central Latin America. El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras… the US government feared that victory by “communist” (sic) forces would threaten its own strategic interests. But underlying the domino theory was the idea that outside agitators (in this case, Moscow- or Cuban-trained revolutionaries) were somehow responsible for the rise of popular national liberation movements (fast forward 30 years and Gaddafi has been coming out with the same sort of bullshit, blaming widespread revolt in Libya on al-Qaeda).

Thinking about the speed of change, a lot has been made of the role played by social networking tools (Twitter, Facebook etc etc), but the fact is that struggles have always circulated one way or another – the Black Jacobins didn’t rely on tweets from Paris, but news still went back and forth, albeit in a much slower way. Obviously, the speed at which information can be shared helps to build up momentum in a way that three-monthly dispatches can’t. And momentum appears to be key here. As recent events in north Africa and the Gulf states show, it is the idea of rebellion that spreads as much as the act itself – and it moves far faster than any outside agitator. It’s a contagion that doesn’t depend on physical contact. In fact, it makes more sense to think about this in terms of resonance.

But if we are thinking about social change in terms of memes, how do they arise? Perhaps one of the key assets of memes is that they are reproducible across a range of environments. In Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain and elsewhere, for example, the occupation of public space, like Tahir Square and Pearl Roundabout, has been a central theme. There might be a connection here to simple acts of disobedience or resistance which are taken up and spread rapidly – like Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of the bus, or the mass refusal of the Poll Tax. These acts tend to be low-cost entry points into a movement: people can ‘do’ them (and so join a ‘movement’) without actually doing a lot. To join the anti-Poll Tax movement, all people had to do was not pay something that many of us couldn’t afford to pay anyway. Those individual acts then became part of a much wider collective event. And in a world of atomised social relations, it is this collectivity that is crucial. It creates new possibilities, new worlds (perhaps, we could conjugate resistance in this way: I transgress, you resist, we world).

But numbers, on their own, are not enough. I lived down South during the 1984–85 miners’ strike and the bright yellow Coal Not Dole stickers were a great marker for where the lines had been drawn between Us and Them. But most of the time they were also accompanied by a sense of stalemate, of a pitched battle. There was rarely enough shift in Us to destabilise Them. Compare this to the anti-Poll Tax movement where the weeks and months leading up to Trafalgar Square seemed to be filled with an escalation of events as local town halls were occupied or surrounded as they set their taxes. There was a sense of movement. Perhaps numbers plus momentum equals a new collective body. And perhaps we can think of momentum as the rapid expansion and mutation of memes.

Again, it seems that the sense of moving is key to the way memes multiply and spread. The moment of greatest potential in this festival video is when dozens of people swoop in from all directions to join the dance. At that stage we have no idea what will happen: perhaps we’ll storm the stage; perhaps we’ll tear down the fence that separates the festival from the rest of the world; perhaps we’ll create a living sculpture. Who knows what this new collective body can achieve? And it’s hard not to feel a little deflated when the crowd turns toward the stage at the end and applaud the band and themselves: like establishing a Commune and then rushing to home to cheer a newly elected government.

Moreover, if this sense of momentum offers a real break from the everyday, it’s a break not just from the numbing routine of work-consume-sleep but also from the routine of work-politics-meeting-leaflet etc etc. The multiplication of acts of resistance and emergence of social movements also means a regroupment or re-alignment of our forces. The ‘activist fiction’ (the idea that the world will be changed by activists, therefore we need to make more activists) has become even more unsustainable in the face of recent events.

But why are some acts taken up, replicated and spread, while others remain entirely isolated? Why do we remember Rosa Parks and not Claudette Colvin? Is there some magic pixie-dust that will guarantee success? Clearly not. We have to gamble. And that means history will always be littered with discarded leaflets, dead campaigns, acts that didn’t take off. Our notion of what is possible is constrained by the ‘reality’ of everyday life. Sometimes it takes an act of imagination (of fiction, even) to reveal the real potential. And once we’ve glimpsed another world, it’s harder to go back.

Which also makes me think of this line from Pulp’s Glory Days:

Oh we were brought up on the Space-Race,
now they expect you to clean toilets.
When you’ve seen how big the world is,
how can you make do with this?

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…

Repetition and difference is a large part of the project we’re working on right now). But sometimes you stumble across something that says exactly what you were groping for without using any words at all. More here.