freely associating

Or the incredible credit crisis. And so the dominoes begin to fall. In many ways this is a classic capitalist crisis, the popping of a 15 year credit fuelled consumer spending bubble, but it is also a singular event. It is singular because, the ‘credit fuelled' part of the sentence is not some foolish excess or avoidable side effect but is inherent to the neo-liberal wave of accumulation ...

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 ...

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've talked before about how “Social movements produce their own problematic at the same time as they are formed by them.” Then recently, in an as yet unfinished piece called ‘Six impossible things before breakfast’, we’ve been trying to write about antagonism. These are just some notes to try and think through how those are related. That is the link between movement problematics, the recomposition of antagonism, ...

"It's true that there is in you a kind of air of communist youth, summer camp, 'onward comrades!' and all that. It's leftist kitsch. But this is only one of your aspects, because, on the other hand, what moves you in all of this is a kind of passion for the currents of active energy that blow gusts of air into the social body, which then starts to ...

At the risk of sounding Hegelian, antagonism seems to have two sides to it. Dave’s mentioned how we are sometimes much closer to the most progressive wings of capital than to dickheads like Monbiot. If we’re about ‘production of the new’, how do we avoid that new being ‘captured’ by (or rather, becoming part of) capitalist development? One of the ways might be that antagonism draws a line ...

I know I’m a bit late with this (I’ve been searching for the missing mass of the universe) but I stumbled across an interesting snippet about the response to Tony Wilson’s death. Apparently someone went down to Whitworth Street and chucked a load of yellow and black paint over the posh flats where the Hacienda used to stand. OK, it’s not big, and it’s not clever but it ...

These are some notes/a rough draft for an op-ed piece we thought the Guardian might publish to coincide with climate camp. As it turned out, the Guardian lost interest. In Keir’s words: “It didn’t fit the narrative the media were building up on the climate camp which had a ridiculous amount of publicity when BAA tried to take out an injunction against Prince Charles amongst others. And also ...

Most of the Free Association crew have just returned from Heiligendamm and the counter-mobilisation against the G8 summit and it’s worth jotting down a few thoughts whilst the memories are still fresh. (When I say most of us have returned, I don’t mean some are still on German soil, languishing in some prison cell; just not all of us went in the first place.) First, the overall assessment. One ...

In the news today is the discovery of a tape recording of the 1970 Kent State Massacre. It reveals that the National Guard troopers who shot four students dead were ordered to open fire. This is important because it shows a degree of deliberation in the massacre. The story kept to at the time was of spontaneous shooting triggered by panicking soldiers. The event had a huge effect, ...