freely associating

Keir’s great blog about be(ar)s, rupture and the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ song has really got me thinking... about what's radical, what’s revolutionary and what is not, about rupture and even about ‘directional demands’. And about context or perspective. And about all that non-linear stuff about small actions potentially have very large effects. I’ve been reading Massimo De Angelis’s new book, The Beginning of History. Massimo talks about value ...

Here’s a thought that occurred to me after Sunday’s meeting (Keir will be posting notes from that later). It’s not very well articulated but it might prompt something more coherent... At the meeting a few people talked about ‘an extended we’ as one of the signs that we’re winning. What does that mean? I think it’s to ...

I’m half-way through a new book by one of the founders of Class War. It’s pretty un-fucking-putdownable (see, it’s already having an impact on the way I write), mainly cos it captures that whole sense of potential that existed in the mid to late 1980s. Some of this might be pure nostalgia, but it was a pretty mad time. And one of the things that was mad about ...

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 ...

The problem before us comrades is winning. I’m not telling you to go back to your constituencies and prepare for power rather the Free Association has undertaken to write an article for the new journal Turbulence which takes the slogan “We Are Winning” — famously sprayed on a wall in Seattle during the 1999 WTO protests — and ask, “What, actually, would it mean to win?” In fact more ...

(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 recently finished the new Althusser collection, the Philosophy of the Encounter. In it Althusser sketches what he calls “aleatory materialism” or “materialism of the encounter.” Althusser draws upon ancient atomist philosophy as a metaphor for what he means. In atomism there are two initial components before the world existed, atoms and the void. Atoms fall through the void, empty space, parallel to each other. They never touch each ...

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 ...

I really like this photo. A friend who suggested it illustrated smooth space sent it to me. If you look at desert part though it's not smooth like a pool table but is marked by the flow of sand. It's a space of flows but unlike the striated space on the right which has a transcendent grid imposed on it, the deserts dunes are self organised according ...

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 ...