As well as being a place to store our half-baked ideas, this blog is also meant to be a place where we can collect, record and circulate interesting stuff. And amidst all the shite that’s been written about the current credit/finance crisis, this piece (by George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici of Midnight Notes) really stands out. Read and think on…

“MUST THE MOLECULES FEAR AS THE ENGINE DIES?” –NOTES ON THE WALL STREET “MELTDOWN”

Dear Midnight Notes Friends,

The breakdown of the Wall Street financial machine makes the task that we outlined in our June meeting more urgent. In June we planned to rethink Midnight Notes in view of the restructuring of the accumulation process and class relations carried out through the neoliberal turn and Structural Adjustment. We can now define this project more precisely: what do the current crisis and restructuring of the financial system imply for us as we join the rest of the world in the dog house of structural adjustment in the twilight of the American empire?

In response to these questions, it is important, first, that we realize that the so-called Wall Street “meltdown” is certainly the end, but also the completion of the neoliberal program. Let us be clear about it. To think otherwise is to ignore the lesson taught to us by the event that opened the present capitalist era: the 1973 coup again the Chilean working class experiment with socialism, that led to the victory of strong state backed market economy. Karl Polanyi’s theory that the single most important cause of the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe was the inability to control the financial market after the 1929 crash also resonates here. In other words, we should not read the restructuring taking place as a turn to socialism/Keynesianism, to the extent at least that Keynesianism was an intervention by the state into the economy aimed at increasing the state’s investment in social reproduction, starting with the reproduction of the working class, in exchange for an increase in the social productivity of labor. Despite the adoption of regulatory mechanisms, the operation presently conducted by the US government bears little resemblance to the Keynesian program launched with the New Deal.

Behind the $700 billion bail-out and the many others that will follow – some already in the pipeline – is a massive transfer of funds from the US working class to capital, inevitably leading to an assault on the last remaining entitlements (like Medicare, Social Security) and a general program of austerity the like of which we have not seen yet in a long time. The fact that there is no organized response to this assault makes us fear the worst. For things would never have reached this point if over the last decade the US workers had responded to the repeated thefts of their money and benefits, through the Enron scandal and the many other “crises” that have followed it. That despite the “instability” of the market, despite its usage as a means to expropriate thousands of small/working class investors, US workers continued to trust their livelihoods and future to it is certainly a key factor in what we are presently witnessing and Washington/Wall Street confidence in launching the new austerity program. It is our argument that in the same way as September 11 served the US government to shed the last remains of “democracy” and move to a model of government where militarization is always around the corner (apparently Representatives were threatened with the proclamation of martial law if they did not pass the bailout bill), so the Wall Street crash will serve to shed the last remaining elements of working class “socialism” in the US political economy, starting with Social Security, Medicare, a thorn in capital’s flesh, but so far demonstrating a great resilience, the last shore for working class struggle in the nation.

2. Lessons from the Debt Crisis

There is an important parallel here, not sufficiently noted, between the present crash and bail-out and the “debt crisis” of the 1980s, which engulfed most Third World nations (except for China) and was the start of the globalization process. Both have been engineered in the same fashion.

The “debt crisis” was the outcome of a financial campaign conducted by Washington and Wall Street, to practically force Third World nations to take cheap development loans – liberally dished out at the lowest interest rates – at a time when capital was refusing to invest in Europe and North America in the face of the most successful working class attack on its profit-rate since the 1920s, and a new generation of Africans, Asians etc. were organizing to demand a global redistribution of wealth and a program of reparations, that is, in the language of the Bucharest Conference of 1974: A NEW WORLD ORDER.

Through the lending mechanism, the massive flow of petrodollars that had been amassed in the aftermath of the 1974 embargo (the first attack on US wages, organized through a stiff inflationary wave) was redirected to the coffers of Third World nations, which, attracted by the bait of cheap loans, were soon hooked to the global economy, all dreams of an independent path to development foregone.

In other words, loans at the lowest interest rates were key to the creation of a global debt and the process of primitive accumulation (through structural adjustment) that was imposed on most of the workers of the world.

As we know, within less than a decade, the rise of the interest rates in the US, turned manageable debts into a long-term process of economic and political subordination. Debt became the hook for a massive restructuring of Africa’s, Asia’s & Latin America’s political economies, re-establishing a colonial dependency that for three decades has served to promote a massive transfer of funds from the Third to the First World and defeat the organizational efforts of TW nations for an independent road to development.

Under the guise of the “debt crisis,” portrayed as a case of “mismanagement” by backward countries, requiring First World-style financial responsibility, countries across the world were forced to open their books to Washington – via the IMF and World Bank – and accept any terms of repayment imposed on them. They were forced to freeze wages, terminate all social spending, open their markets to foreign investors and products, devalue their currencies and so forth. The consequences of these policies are well known. While Washington and NY built forests of skyscrapers, sucking on the blood of Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Caribbean people, such levels of impoverishment and expropriation were imposed on the people of the world that millions took the road out of their countries, unable to survive in them, while those remaining witnessed epidemics, elimination of schools, famines, wars, the loss of ancestral lands, waters and forests, brutal wars of privatization, all directly related to the debt.

This is history now, though the politics of SAP have set back for decades the project initiated by the anti-colonial struggle, reformulated and reasserted, as I mentioned, at the Bucharest Conference of 1974, where TW nations emboldened by the defeat of the US in Vietnam, demanded a NEW WORLD ORDER, i.e. the redistribution, return of the wealth that Europe and the US have robbed from the colonial world.

With the debt crisis, international capital obtained three major objectives.

i) It disciplined the working class in Europe and the US, by dismantling its manufacturing structure and refusing for years to engage in any serious investment in these regions [remember “zero growth”?]

ii) It destroyed the attempt of the former colonial world to escape a dependent/subordinate position, as demanded by the new generation of Africans, Asians, etc., who, infused of the spirit of Fanon, were keen on import substitution schemes, were pressing for REPARATIONS, and pushing for some form of socialism (in Angola and Mozambique).

(iii). In addition to defeating revolution in First and Third World, the “debt crisis” built the infrastructure for the new global economy. It forged the mechanisms by which industries and offices could be relocated, companies could run around the globe, the work process could be computerized and streamlined and the working class thereby could be flexibilized and re-divided.

Against this background, we must note some basic similarities between the engineering of the debt crisis and the engineering of the Wall Street crash and must assume these similarities will extend to the social consequences of the crash. The housing bubble was the result of loans made at very low though adjustable credit rates, redirecting the influx of capital coming from abroad (China and other countries) toward the US market.

Is it possible that investment banks, credit rating agencies, the head of the Federal Reserve all FAILED to realize what would be the inevitable result of an “easy credit,” lending policy that reversed decades of regulatory principles and rules? Unless we want to revel in the nonsensical tale of a blinding surge in human greed, the answer must be a negative one. Thus, we must stop using the concept of “failure” to describe the absence of regulations and the reasons for the crash. We must rule out that the architects of the housing/mortgage crisis did not know it would end in a financial disaster and cascade of foreclosures for the home owners, in the same way as banks are partly responsible for the debt of the US working class ($45,000 on average per capita).

Continuing with the parallel, we have to conclude that with this 700 billion dollar “bail-out,” coming straight out of our pockets and hides, the “structural adjustment” that since the 1980s has been imposed on countries across the world, is going to be extended to the US territory and the US working class. This time (after many beginnings and many deferrals) we too are being “adjusted.” I will discuss later what adjustment will mean at this time for us. For the moment we only want to stress that we are witnessing not only a financial meltdown, but also a great robbery, a macro-process of expropriation, an immense transfer of labor, this time siphoning funds to the US banking system not only from the Third World, as in the Debt Crisis of the 1980s, but from our households, through the classic maneuver of increasing the national debt. What we are witnessing is a capitalist coup, an example of capital’s historic readiness to destroy itself in order to regain the initiative and defeat resistance to its discipline.

3. Where does this resistance come from? How is the collapse of the financial systems a response to it?

We cannot understand the Wall Street crisis unless we read it in class term as a means to negotiate a different class deal and response to class struggle and resistance. However, in dealing with these questions, I also want to distinguish this approach and the growing tendency to view every development in capitalist planning as a realization of working class struggle and demands, the Negrian perspective on capital’s response to class movements.

This perspective is dangerous, because besides turning even defeat into a victory, (such as: we wanted globalization, we wanted flexibilization, etc), it ignores the fact that a capitalist response must use working class demands against themselves, use them to drive part of the working class out of the struggle, turn it against or away from the other half, use them in such a way as to spark off forms of development that decompose the class.

Let us look now at the crisis as a disciplinary tools and strategy. There are at least three areas of resistance to the neoliberal accumulation project that the Wall Street collapse has to respond to. I will list them without an attempt to establish an order.

First, the crash and the bail-out must defeat the attempt of the US working class to circumvent class discipline by using financial markets, rather than struggle, sweat and labor, to increase their wages. While strikes and struggles have died out over the last two decades, workers have tried to increase their income in three ways: investing in the stock market, buying on credit, now even for everyday expenses, getting equity money through housing, and defaulting student loans. These tactics have clearly failed and now millions of workers are now to pay twice for them, in terms of their individual losses and in terms of the losses that will be inflicted on the US proletariat as a class through the bailouts. If successful, these bail-outs will in fact be conducive to a new regime of low wages and zero entitlements the like of which we have not seen since the last part of the 19th century.

The new regime will not be the end of market fundamentalism. It will be a revitalization of market investment through the injection of our social security money, and it will be a revitalization of some parts of American industry now presumably taking advantage of the fact that workers are desperate enough to accept any conditions just to have a job and a roof over their heads. A large part of capital has for a long time been lusting to bring back America to the situation before the New Deal, when employers had the upper hand. The “crisis” is giving them a chance to return to that era.

That this time Social Security is at stake is due to various factors. First, Social Security is the last pot of money available to re-launch the US market, in a context in which workers have no savings and monetary flows from the outside are drying out. It is also the last “scandal” on the list of US capitalists who have relentlessly for years now told us it must go. Most important of all, Social Security affects primarily the old, the retired, and it is therefore an easier target than entitlements affecting the whole working class.

So far workers in the US have resisted the privatization of Social Security despite many governmental attempts. But cuts in pensions have already gone a long way in the private sector, where employers have given stocks of their companies to workers, or stopped putting any money in their pension funds. The present crisis will extend that to government-backed pensions. And the road to it has been cleared by years of false statements to the effect that Social Security is unsustainable. Though it is a colossal lie, younger generations have, however, accepted it. By cutting Social Security, capital undoubtedly hopes to pit the young against the old, who (as in Africa today) are being pictured as a crew of selfish gerontocrats sucking up the funds the young need to build their future.

The second target of the attack is the global resistance to capital’s appropriation of natural resources beginning with oil and gas extraction. The defeat in Iraq is the peak of it. To this day, despite an immense expenditure in war funding, the US has not been able to put its hands on Iraqi oil. Resistance to international capital control over global energy resources has also come from Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Many more countries are also refusing the neoliberal packet, especially in Latin America. These refusals, not peak oil, are the true limits to capital’s energy plans.

There have also been bottlenecks in the exploitation of forests, waters, minerals, and lands which structural adjustment was to remove. A new “rurban” peasant movement has been growing that is fighting independently of unions, parties, “civil society” and NGOs, using direct action tactics, to re-appropriate the lands and resources of which it has been robbed —poaching, harvesting timber or produce in commercial plantations, mining diamonds and gold “illegally,” or farming in the very lands from which they have been “legally” excluded. When they move to the cities they squat on urban land and take over land not used, private or public to farm it for their needs. It is a vast re-appropriation movement that is redefining the fundamentals of social reproduction globally. It has put globalizers and adjusters out of government, it has forced the nationalization of local resources, and has redistributed wealth and political power, putting the World Bank and IMF almost out of business in Latin America. It has defeated the attempt to completely liberalize the economies of the TW through the rule of the World Trade organization. Though not sitting at the table, the specter of the rural/urban peasants of the world has guided the refusal of TW representative to comply.

Third, global migration has developed in ways that make it difficult for governments to use it as a regulatory mechanism for the labor market. Far from being an easy device for driving wages down, migration is now an autonomous uncontrollable phenomenon, with a logic of its own that is not reducible to the needs of the labor market. It is important however to stress (against the idealization of the migrant and of Exit, Exodus, Flight as the highest form of struggle) that the struggle of the migrants is not superior to the struggle of those who remain. In fact, migration can lead to the dissolution of local organizations, it can create new divisions among the locals, separating those benefiting from remittances and those deprived of them, it can boost the cost of living in the area of origin by the influx of new money and hook local economies more strongly to the international monetary system, fostering the expansion of monetary relations. These, of course, are not inevitable results. Actually, migrants have been able to use the wage against the wage, to refuse impoverishment, to create transnational networks, to move from country to country seeking a better deal and nullifying national boundaries and borders.

The attacks on immigrants of recent months, which have seen the most massive factory raids and deportations ever in the US, are responses to this autonomy. They are part of the attempt to create a population of rightless workers, to function as a safety valve for the labor market. Only if they have no rights can immigrants function as regulatory mechanism for the labor market (in the same way as mass incarceration and expansion of unpaid labor do). The redefinition of immigrant workers as outlaws and the criminalization of the working class – historically a key strategy to devalue labor power – will continue to be a tool of the world order we will see emerging from the crisis. But the crash will intensify the divisions between “natives” and migrants, attack the organizational strength of migrant organizations, unless there is strong opposition to this strategy.

The Politics of the Financial Crisis and Our Response

Crises are always a threat and an opportunity as they break down business as usual, and reveal something of the inner workings and nastiness of capitalism. This one is not an exception and we can be sure that what will come out of it will be greatly a result of what people do in response to it. If the Great Depression is an indication, it took more than ten years for capital to organize a different social order. Much can happen in such a period.

The problem for us today is that workers are only organized around electoral politics at best. And many still place more hope in a racist and imperialist stance than in working class solidarity. We certainly don’t have a communist or an anarchist movement organizing rallies of the unemployed, fight against evictions, or organize “penny auctions” of farms as they did during the Great Depression. Nor do we have an anti-capitalist alternative as the Soviet Union was in the eyes of many. We also do not have the kind of solidarity that in the Great Depression led to invention of new commons, like the hobo movement and the creation of “jungle cities.”

Where to start then? This is what we need to work on in the coming months and years. There is no clear path to this kind of mobilization. But we need to start somewhere. On two things we can get people to agree with us: First, we better find alternatives, because, as things stand presently, we are so incestually connected with capitalism that its demise threats our own existence. Second, unless we organize to resist government planning, what lies ahead for us, after a cut of more than a trillion dollars of our “entitlements,” looks much more like some variant of fascism than socialism.

With warm greetings

Silvia and George

I’ve just started reading Naomi Klein’s new(ish) book, The Shock Doctrine, and I came across this quote on page 7:

Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

There’s a lot to be thought through here, but the basic insight makes a lot of sense to me. What’s interesting is that the quote’s from arch-neoliberal Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Friedman (published almost half a century ago).

I guess my reaction to it is perhaps similar to that of Stephen Duncombe when he read of that Bush advisor’s quote about acting and creating reality.

On the subject of quotes I like, a friend who knows activists in Uganda sent me this one from a community association there:

When people know their rights they become a bit difficult to manage.

I should probably mention the source of the image. It’s called Shock and Awe 1 and 2, it’s by a artist called Anne Swannell and I came across it after typing “shock and awe” into the search engine.

The band Crass had a big effect on some of us Free Associator’s lives. Indeed we’ve had a bit of talk about them here of the years. We’ve discussed the chances of a Crass revival, or whether, in fact, Crass are beyond recuperation. In fact Brian brought up the topic just the other day. Well M’lud, I present above exhibit A, nicked from the ever interesting Uncarved Blog. Angelina makes a strong case for the recuperation argument. The important point though is does it matter This seems timely because Crass have actually had a bit of a revival recently. Firstly Anti-Folk Anti-star Jeffery Lewis released a great album of 12 Crass covers. Then ex-Crass lead singer Steve Ignorant did a couple of gigs playing the Crass album “Feeding of the 5000″, alongside a load of reformed anarcho-punk bands from the time. Check out this video of him doing “Big A, Little A”. Given the heavy moralism of the scene around them at that time, these events have caused plenty of discussion. Out of it all I particularly liked this post:

Also, those early Crass gigs weren’t just about the people on the stage playing instruments and singing, it was about the whole event – being in small, claustrophobic venues, with all the rumours flying about that there was going to be trouble, but still choosing to be there, the people going around selling their hand-produced fanzines and cassettes, the films, the poets, the handouts and badges, mingling with all the odd-balls, misfits, hippies, punks and creatives and general outsiders to mainstream society who would turn up, being introduced to often new and challenging ideas and ways of thinking, the tension and energy and that whole sense of being ‘in the moment’ and not quite knowing what was going to happen, either during that evening or in terms of where ‘the movement’ might be headed – sometimes it really did feel like being part of a revolution… naive though that sounds now that was the kind of energy and buzz that you’d get at a Crass gig back in the day. Sometimes it was about the empowerment of realising that you weren’t the only one who thought this way, and gaining confidence from the whole DIY and ‘there is no authority but yourself’ ethic to believe in yourself. A revivalist Crass of old geezers on a stage going through the motions would no more recapture that spirit than The Sex Pistols doing huge stages in public parks recaptures what it must have been like at the 100 Club Punk Festival or Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976, or that real sense of ‘Oh shit, society is about to collapse!!’ I had as a kid when Steve Jones swore on the Bill Grundy show… Which isn’t to say the Crass night wouldn’t be a ‘right good laugh’, but it does feel as if theres something slightly sad about the whole thing.

In a way this guy is right. These are singular moments in time and space, that can’t just be recreated. It’s a contingent coming together of ideas, subjectivities, bodies, technologies, practices that at a particular moment in time opens up potential for the creation of something new, that elevates a time and place as a singular moment. It’s not something that is carried in one person as though you can find the reason for singular moments in a person’s biography. On the other hand such moments are fairly rare and perhaps you can re-visit events to re-examine their potential, to see if that potential can be re-actualised in different conditions, which I think was partly the idea that Jeffry Lewis was playing with on his album. He even has a comic strip about Trojan horses on the album cover and wonders if you can smuggle the ideas across without the harshness of the original presentation. I mean who can tell what would spark off those affective refrains in someone.

The other thing it makes me think is just how strange it is that a certain style of dressing or a style of music can carry such potential at a certain times and places and not in others. I was reminded of it earlier this week when I went to see a play by the Belarus Free Theatre. Back home in Minsk they perform underground, that is in semi-secrecy, with the constant threat of arrest for them and their audience. To recreate that atmosphere they followed the practices they do at home in Leeds. We had to gather at a redirection point and then follow a guide to where the play would take place. Of course we’re familiar with these tactics from political actions such as Reclaim The Streets. The group then performed a medley made from Harold Pinter’s plays, alongside excerpts from Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech as well as testimony of torture from their own country. It was pretty powerful and vital stuff: the staging and performance left you with an overwhelming sense that this stuff really mattered, that Pinter’s plays and style really resonated with their situation and that underground theatre was an important art form in their country. This must reflect the cramped conditions in which it’s made but you wonder how long it would stay so vital under different conditions. So does recuperation matter? Well recuperation does describe something that happens, it is a material process but it isn’t the only process that occurs or come to that the most important one. Perhaps what we need to think about is whether the recuperation prevents the new from emerging. I quite like the way Sadie Plant puts it in an old interview:

I used to be fascinated and very concerned by this dilemma – the situationist notion of recuperation is still a very good way to think about it, and that’s how I came to be so interested. But I now think that what is really important is the sense of momentum and dynamism in the system – the fact that small scale, grass roots movements continue to emerge. Even if or when they do become absorbed into the establishment, political or artistic, there are always new tendencies coming up behind them. If one looks at dance music, for example, which moves very fast and continually changes, it is probably a mistake to regret the fact that, say, jungle or drum’n’ bass get absorbed or recuperated into the mainstream – what is vital is the emergence of new music, new undergrounds in their wake. Even if they are destined to become part of standard culture, they can still stir things up in the meantime. What I really fear, and what it is perhaps most important to oppose, is the possibility that such a dynamic would cease to operate: it’s the movement, the continual emergence of activity, that is really important.

Oh yeh and as to Brian’s suggestion that we call an anthology of our stuff “When Two sevens Clash” – here’s a potential front cover.

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.

I really like the image of affective refrains created in more intensive moments behaving like disorganising, destabilising barbs of other potential presents, pasts and futures lodged in our organised bodies and occasionally helping to dissolve them. And I want to say bodies not just subjectivities because as we know these refrains can be corporeal – how we hold our bodies, where our bodies end –Cue Hives anecdote 3a. One of the pitfalls with all this is it’s a little like looking at a photo album – a narrative constructed out of flashes means nostalgia must be guarded against. But then again we can’t just leave the past alone as though it’s all over. The past is unwritten or at the very least every present includes a re-writing of the past. Relatedly time is not homogenous, there are periods of intensification and drastic divergence when the future does seem unwritten and then there are periods of cloying, clagging impotence when the present seems utterly effaced by an unalterable but still fictional future.

 Anyway something else I watched last week was Paul Morley’s “Pop! What is it good for?” and one of the things I got from that was the idea that songs carry ‘invisibles’ around with them. The power of pop is that we can’t get it out of our heads. It enters by osmosis and provides us with the refrains out of which we build our worlds. There was a section where Richard X was commenting on his mash-up “Freak Like Me”. He claimed that the creativity of the mash-up is recognising and playing with the invisibles – the affects, feelings and associations that songs bring up. It’s the mashing up of these that are the element of creativity. More than just Mash-ups all pop trades on these invisibles As it eats itself. In another section Suggs talked about how the influence of vaudeville had unconsciously snuck into Madness, and punk, through the influence of parents and wider culture. This is another way of thinking about invisibles. In fact that same point was brilliantly made in Julian Temple’s other Punk film: “The Filth and the Fury” when he shows Max Wall’s influence on the Johnny Rotten persona.

Pop trades on possibilities, re-invention. On the creation of the new out of repetition and imitation. At its best it’s about the introduction of a strangeness into the everyday. That strangeness is a moment in the repotentialisation of everyday life but capital is about depotentialisation. Capital needs to subordinate all life and creativity to it’s own life, that is it’s need to grow. And surely that is the story of pop music – How the residue of moments of autonomous creativity are carried as invisibles into music made for purely commercial reasons. Then vice versa how the potential of those moments and affects are eaten by capital’s need for a novelty that changes nothing. Yet the whole idea of recuperation always seems too pat and easily done. What about the idea that capital constantly has to eat stuff that contain elements it finds indigestible. As capital circulates, as it has to, it also spreads those invisible indigestibles. As a quote from Howard Slater puts it:

What should be stated is that music is not revolutionary per se but carries with it many presuppositions of an awareness of a need for social change; not least in terms of its activation of desire in the listener, its opening up of unconscious and imaginary terrains and its proclivity towards social interaction. It can be rhetorical, propagandist and a source of optimism and hope, and from jazz scenes through anarcho-punk to rave and techno, music has always been attached to counter-cultural and political movements, exacerbating dissatisfaction with the status quo and working the contradictions between ideas of reality and what it could be transformed to be…          

Hang on a minute wasn’t I supposed to be talking about the Strummer documentary? Well one of the interesting things about it was that the Clash weren’t really the main story. The stuff about the early Squatter, 101er days was great, it set up the DIY ethic and reminded you of the importance of that holey space where weeds can grow. Weeds of course are just plants that have escaped domestication. Then when it got to the Clash it was all a bit familiar and not quite as interesting. The real story of the film, though, was Strummer trying to recover from the harmful effects of fame. The beauty of it was that the recovery only came about when he engaged with rave, free parties and festivals – a new wave of that mix of music, politics and intense collectivity. The solution to celebrity is to dissolve into collectivity.A bit ironic then that the main fault with the film was that it was a bit star fucker. Loads of people were cut out of the story to be replaced by famous friends and admirer’s recollections.  Why does any of this matter?  Well one reason to talk about stuff like this is that it could help us deal with the danger of a new asceticism and purism the possibility of which can be detected in some climate change activism. The idea that ordinary people are the problem. An appreciation of how widespread the affects of revolutionary politics go may help with this. Also those affects have to be part of any calculation of what is possible. But also I think these sort of experiences are central to how we need to think about the role of the political militant. At least partly because the Strummer story is about how at certain times the creation of the common moves through a singular event. Such as the way Johnny Rotten’s style, his innovations, become the repository of people’s changing desires and then the means of their transmission. This can be a destructive experience for the people caught up in such singular events. John Lydon has obviously never recovered or dealt with its inheritance but Strummer did, or at least he made a good fist of it. Militants, and others, need to avoid getting trapped in the transcendent fictions of fame, which Strummer came to realise is illusionary. Just look at the elevation of Joss Garman from Plane Stupid as the latest activist celebrity. But it also relates to what Argentinean militants have called political sadness. Once you’ve been caught up in a singular moment – where you were an activist in your own life – how do you cope with its passing. When possibility closes up and you move from the joyful affect of powerfulness and increased collective capacities into the sadness that comes from those capacities and potential closing up. A life is made from such singular moments and “The Future is Unwritten” ends on a nice commentary from Joe when he offers us an ethic for living: 

“ And so now I’d like to say: People can change anything they want to and that means everything in the world… greed is going nowhere They should have that on a billboard in Times square. Without people you’re nothing. Anyway that’s my spiel.” 

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 it was the seamless way struggles flitted back and forth without any of the sniping or prejudice that set in later. There didn’t seem to be any outright contradiction between any of these struggles – anarcho-punk squatters, anarcha-feminist peace campers, animal rights activists, striking miners, wannabe rioters etc. Sure there was loads of tension, some of it pretty aggressive and intense, but all of it was productive. Resonance produced movement: we seemed to be going somewhere (probably related to the fact that we were often literally going somewhere: demos, marches, Stonehenge, Henley…).

OK, one of the simplistic counter-arguments to this is that we were young, and everything seemed possible – it’s that feeling you get as you lie in the grass on a summer’s day and stare up into the sky. A slightly more sophisticated response points to the importance of dole culture. Both points are pretty valid. And there’s also a sense that getting older is, as much as anything, a process of accretion – things stick to you (jobs, homes, families…). We slow down.

But I’m trying to fit this in with the stuff we’ve been thinking about recently, especially the relation between the intensive and the extensive. It seems to make sense. Part of the madness about Class War then was that it was immeasurable. Literally. Groups were springing up all over the place calling themselves ‘Xxxx Class War’. And this whirlwind was making the intensive field visible. A bit like throwing flour onto a kitchen surface so you can see where the mice are going. The process is nothing new. It’s exactly the same as punk, or the Paris Commune or blah blah blah. I like to think that the ‘Behold Your Future Executioners’ banner had some small print somewhere which read ‘Behold the Unruhe’. Compare that to the bureaucratic machine of the Class War Federation with its delegate meetings and conference proposals…

Of course it’s easy to drift into thinking that intensive=good and extensive=bad, or that it should be a one-way relationship. Cold water in the face brings you back to this awful place… But this awful place is where we are. The intensive might be the realm of change but that change happens in the real, which involves the extensive. So Bone’s book has made me think again about ‘stuntism’, as way of trying to direct the movement from extensive to intensive, i.e. trying to use the normal mechanisms of capture (especially the media) to re-open the field of possibilities. Which was a pretty fucking cute tactic – just so long as you don’t call it a dialectic, OK?

And if you really want to get down-and-dirty philosophical, this caught my eye:

‘Thesis of Ontological Excess’: Being is more than one and prior to one. The preindividual is in excess of its actual individual expressions. Being is ‘problematic’ (or differential) and individuals are only ever temporary resolutions of these tensions; tensions that continue to subsist even after actualization. This thesis of excess is thus counter to any ontology based on lack.

I don’t claim to understand the finer points of it, does it fit in with relation between extensive and intensive?

I’ll stop here cos I’m rambling (something else to do with age).

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 other and they have no relationships with each other. These two components do not suffice to form a world. A third component is needed, which will bring about relations between atoms. At least some atoms must encounter each other for a world to exist. That means at least one atom had to deviate from its path parallel to all the others, in order to run into another atom or atoms. The name of this swerving off of the parallel line is “clinamen.” It means “swerve,” and that’s the term I’m going to use. The swerve of one atom is what makes encounter between atoms possible.

Encounter alone is not enough to form a world. The atom which swerves might bounce off the atom it encounters, and get bumped back into its original path or some other path parallel to all other atoms. To form a world, there must be a relationship established during the encounter. The encounter or its effects must last.

There is no guarantee that an encounter will happen or that it or its effects will last. Even if they do last, there is no guarantee that the effects will continue to last. There is a world, so swerve must have happened, which means encounters must be possible, and lasting encounters or encounters with lasting effects must be possible. Still, none of this had to happen. The world could have not come into existence at all, or it could have come into existence with different traits. Its current make up may change. It may cease to last, that is, cease to last.

None of this is intended as a claim about actual atoms and void. The point is one about possibility and guarantees. There are no guarantees.

Althusser uses ancient atomism to think his way out of some bad habits of thought within the Marxist tradition and within philosophy. The habits basically consist of being too sure and thinking there are guarantees. One such habit is taking the accomplished fact of something’s existence – say, the world – as if to mean it had to exist this way, or that it had to exist. Another version is a certainty as to outcomes – what will and will not, can and can not, happen next.

In atomism, under Althusser’s discussion of it, in a sense the world already contains everything it needs. The pieces need rearranging, certainly, but such a rearranging is possible. Aatoms are capable of swerve. They are capable of encounters, and they are capable of making encounters last. They are, of course, also capable of continuing to fall parallel to each other such that encounter do not occur and they are capable of disentangling themselves from encounters such that the effects do not last.) The point is that there are capabilities. Capabilities do not determine outcomes, and outcomes do not indicate the absence of capabilities. To think otherwise is a mistake.

A former student of Althusser’s provides something that can serve as an example of this point, although it wasn’t intended as such an example, as far as I know. Jacques Ranciere discusses intelligence in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster. (I recommend this book very highly. If I can recommend only one book to you, I recommend Marx’s Capital in all three volumes. If I can recommend one additional book, it is this book by Ranciere.)

Imagine a pair of twins, taking all the same classes in school, with all the same teachers. One twin gets better grades than the other. Someone could point to these twins and say “one twin is more intelligent than the other.” One can easily agree to this, as long as one takes it as an assertion of synonymy: “intelligent” means “gets good grades”, and vice versa, so “more intelligent” means “gets more good grades” or something like that. Using a synonym doesn’t really tell us much more than the original term does, but one is free to use synonyms.

The problem comes when it is forgotten that the terms are synonyms, and someone says “this twin gets better grades because this twin is more intelligent.” This doesn’t make sense, because a synonym can not be the cause of another of its synonyms. (”Why is it so cold outside?” “Because it’s chilly.” That doesn’t explain anything.)

The thought process goes something like this. The person first says, at least implicitly, “I will say ‘is intelligent’ about someone who gets good grades.” They then say, “this one gets good grades, therefore this is intelligent.”Then they say “Because this one is intelligent, this one gets good grades.” The presence of good grades is asserted as evidence for the quality called intelligence (and more good grades or means more of the quality called intelligence), and the quality called intelligence is taken as the cause for the good grades.

The function of this argument is to say two things. First, “this one gets good grades because of a capacity to get good grades.” This partially right. The presence of something means there must be a possibility for that something. That can not be argued against. (To say something is actual but impossible is to contradict oneself.) But this is also partially wrong. Capacity does not cause something. That there is a possible outcome does not mean that outcome will occur. Something has to happen to make a result, and this happening is not and was not guaranteed to take place. Much of the time, possibility is noted after the fact.

The second thing this argument says is more pernicious. It say “That one did not get good grades because that one was not capable of getting good grades.” This is false. There is often very little way to identify genuine incapacity and impossibility, if there is such a thing at all. That good grades are not gotten says nothing about whether good grades could have been gotten. “Not gotten” does not mean “could not have been gotten.” This argument is essentially a claim and justification of inequality and hierarchy. It is thus politically to be opposed. It also, happily, does not hold philosophically. Similarly, that atoms do not or did not swerve does not mean swerve is or was impossible.

What is shut out in the assertion of incapacity is the aleatory, the openness of possibility, the prospect for swerve, encounter, maintaining of encounter or its effects, and dissolution of encounter or its effects. The world has (the atoms have) all the capacities they need. They can swerve, encounter, maintain encounters, and construct worlds. And dissolve them.

To say the world has all the capacities it needs does not, of course, mean the world is fine. The world needs a lot of different actualities, and a lot of actualities in the world need to be dissolved. The point is that the path from this world – a far cry from the best of all possible worlds – to better worlds starts here. To get from point A to point C starts at point A. That is to say, what is valuable in this perspective is to orient us toward what is as our starting point. The problem is not one of impossibility – inability to pierce ideology, incapacity to free ourselves from consumerism, and any of a number of despairing lamentations. The problem is that the current actuality must be abolished and – which is to say the same thing – a new actuality is to be produced using our capacities. Asserting impossibility is simply to state that one hasn’t started.

Again, though, there are no guarantees. Encounters may well not happen or not last last. Encounters that last for a time may cease to last. The point is that one must try. “Keep going” is what, Alain Badiou, another former associate of Althusser, takes as the primary ethical injunction. Of course, one must also try better and try to learn from experience as best one can. Part of keeping going is to never mistake “did not happen” or “has not happened” for “could not have happened” or, even worse “can not happen.”

The swerve of the atoms essentially serves for Althusser to distance himself from a certain of causality as centrally important. The point is not so much why something did or did not happen, and certainly not that something must have happened or could not have happened, but rather simply that it did happen or did not happen, or does happen or does not happen. Actuality, the material world as it is, that’s the starting point.

Along these same lines, it’s important not to read the swerve of the atom as an external occurrence, a hand which reaches down and knocks the atom out of its parallel course. That reintroduces a causal perspective, a “must be” or “can not be,” the logic – or rather, the fantasy – of the guarantee. The emphasis is simply that atoms swerve sometimes. If we can identify conditions when swerve seems to happen more often, then we can seek to replicate those conditions, remembering, of course, that outcomes are not guaranteed of pre-determined.

I want to read the atoms and their encounters rather simplistically as an analogy for people and encounters between people. There is a partial truth to despairing pictures of society, where people are alienated, isolated, atomized, falling along parallel lines with no relation to each other. Many people do not encounter others, do not talk to others very much, develop new connections. But this does not mean it has never happened, that it can’t happen, that it doesn’t sometimes happen.

People have a power like that of atoms to swerve (and to encounter, maintain encounters, continue to maintain encounters). This doesn’t mean people will swerve and so on, but they can. Badiou calls this a power of thought, as a power to disrupt established orders, and he vigorously asserts that people have this power. Ranciere similarly asserts that people have a power which can be read as akin to swerve, which is to say encounters may happen and orders can be disrupted, parallel lines can be deviated from. This power is not a conclusion or something deduced, something to convince anyone of, so much as is the starting point for meaningful activity.

When any outcome occurs, it’s reasonable to ask why it happened. Despite my earlier remarks downplaying causality, there is a value to asking why. It can help suggest better ways to act next time. It can help suggest responses in the present. It can help preserve a sense things could have gone differently, and things can be made different.

I find all of this resonant with my involvement in organizing. The basic unit of organizing as I see it is the one-on-one meeting. This is akin to the encounter between atoms. The goal is for the encounter to last. For an encounter to last, there must be an encounter. For there to be an encounter there must be a swerve, an atom must deviate from its trajectory falling parallel to all other atoms. A person or people must deviate from the lines along which people fall in relative non-relation to each other – lines including the grooves along which capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other systems of power-over flow, as well as lines which are more mundane and more of an immediate obstacle: lack of confidence, lack of ideas on how to start or what to do, and various habits. These lines can be addressed by encouragement, training, success stories, invitation to first-hand experiences of actions and meetings, and so on, but as noted repeatedly there is no guarantee.

Swerve sometimes does not occur. (I want to note here as well that swerve is something atoms do. The swerve, they do not get swerved.) Absence of swerve may later be replaced by swerve, but it may not. We should neither despair nor think we can automatically condition swerve. It is a general safe working assumption that swerve occurs around other occurrences of swerve. Action occurs more around action, and the answer to inaction is action. The answer to falling in parallel lines is swerve.

When swerve does occur, it only leads to encounter when another atom is present. Otherwise the swerving atom just follows a different course through empty space. Concretely, in organizing, this means one must be able to talk to workers. Not as in “have the capacity” but as in “be in the presence of.” A site and a time to talk is required. This can be at work sometimes, but mechanisms exist to prevent or attack encounters at work, and early on – when encounters are fewer and the number of swerving atoms are fewer – we are more vulnerable.

Some means of getting workers’ contact information include going through dumpsters at the workplace to find information, following workers carefully, being given contact information, and looking in the phonebook. Other methods exist and should be documented, discussed, and experimented with. All of them take time. This is part of why I find ideology uncompelling as an explanation for problems in the world. It’s largely not needed. Capitalism steals our time. Attacking capitalism takes a lot of time, which many of us are hard pressed to come up with or don’t want to use for those purposes. If we worked half as much we would have more time to fight the bosses, among other things. Hence the extension of worktime not only can boost profits but can serve to make organizing harder.

When an encounter does happen, what happens? On the one hand, every encounter is absolutely unique. Every atom is unique, which means every encounter is also unique. There are more possibilities for encounters and combinations than there are atoms. (If one starts with a group of just four items with no qualities but their names, A, B, C, and D, the combinations of them exceed the number of items: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD, ABC, ABD, ACD, BCD, ABCD. In a similar sense, possibility exceed actuality, or in another sense, thought exceeds being.) That uniqueness is very important. Still, we can identify general procedures for the conduct of some encounters. This does not make encounters identical, it just provides us with some points of orientation, a framework with which we can try to act in ways to generate the encounters that produce actually existing differences. One of the values of aleatory materialism is that it orients toward practice. It looks what happens (this is the materialism part), tries to identify consistencies, qualities, things in common and different, things resonant and things opposed, across the range of what happens. It also tries to propose conducts (this is the aleatory part, the part about encounters) or experimentation with conducts, the generation of procedures. Another term for this is to say it is praxiological, it takes the study and production of practices as its object.

Every one-on-one meeting is unique, singular. But these singularities, these encounters, can still interact with others. They can last and in their lasting be part of forming bodies which can encounter others and form other bodies. This means they are not absolutely singular, atomic in the sense of unable to relate to each other. They have relationships with each other, or they can. The elements composing an encounter – the atoms, the people – are themselves unique, singular, but they can still encounter. The goal is for that encounter to form something which can itself swerve, encounter, and have encounters last.

I would like to suggest that swerve should be thought of as a power or a likelihood, the ability to actualize the possibilty of swerve. This power can be increased by exercise, and can be excited or encouraged by being in the presence of the exercise of this power. For this reason, after more people are swerving and encountering as individuals, in one on one meetings, the next step is a group meeting. This facilitates the composition of larger bodies, multiple encounters, and an increased rate of individual encounters. All of these are small steps toward confrontations which are themselves small steps toward replacing the world as it is, replacing it at least in part with actualities generated during the process of composition already described.

Althusser takes primitive accumulation, as the logic and the moment of the beginning of capitalism as well as the logic and the occurrences of the reproduction of capitalism, as an example of one form of encounter, of aleatory processes. Capitalism could well have not happened, or happened in different places and times, and it could well cease to be. I have in these notes tried to suggest another place to view the type of aleatory processes Althusser discussed, and I would like to suggest this is a site which could be productive if attended to more directly, the site of production of the encounters with which capitalism will be overturned. The goal is an accumulation of power direct against capital.

I don’t claim that the idiom used here is required for the carrying out of any of the proposals and practices suggested here. I think the theoretical idiom of aleatory materialism lends itself to the practical suggestions and practical idiom I favor, but the practices and practical idiom do no require the theoretical idiom and the theoretical idiom could also encounter and relate to other perspectives than mine. One could well ask, why use this theoretical idiom? This is fair question and one I don’t have a satisfactory answer for. I use it, and sometimes it’s useful to me. If anything, my view is that aleatory materialism should orient itself toward addressing and trying to practice the self-subjectification of the working class, more than the working class requires aleatory materialism.

There are two additional things that make aleatory materialism attractive to me. First, it does not assess people as atoms, as object, but as active, in motion, dynamic. People as actors of swerve. The emphasis is not class consciousness or proclivity to this or that position or ideological beliefs (all of which suggest not starting, staying in a position of incapacity), but rather on encounters and their outcomes and additional encounters. The second strength is that the focus is internal – the criteria are based on what happens in the encounter, inside the world or body formed, rather than external, subject to the dictates of leadership or the need to harm an enemy in combat – but not absolutely internal, because the encounter can produce bodies which then can encounter and produce (with) others.

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 to an immanent logic. It’s the flow of energy, transmitted as wind and gravity, through a substance whose cohering traits lead to the formation of dunes.

The overlaying of the body of the earth with a grid relates to a wider hylomorphism and paying attention to the self-organising traits of matter is the difference between an architect and an artisan for Deleuze and Guatarri. Sometimes when you’re flying on bright days you can be really struck by the gridding that marks the body of the earth. Flying over towns and villages is the only times that you get an architects eye view of town plans, the viewpoint (and judgement) of God. I remember flying over Spain on a clear day and seeing a wind farm on a mountain range. It looked quite unlike a man made design, a very odd shape. Then I realised that it was about harnessing flow and it had to take the dynamics of that flow into account in its design. So the wind turbines were positioned at highpoints that had uninterrupted wind flow and this dictated the shape of the roads servicing them. Of course all assemblages are mixed and the wind farm still had an architect who was bound up by wider flows of capital and indeed the flows of our struggles and desires. Anyway nothing ground breaking but a couple of pretty pictures none the less.

In an article “On the New Philosophers” Deleuze sticks the boot into Bernard-Henri Levy , et al, saying:

“We’ve been trying to uncover creative functions which would no longer require an author-function for them to be active (in music, painting, audio-visual arts, film, and even philosophy). This wholesale return to the author, to an empty and vain subject, as well as to gross conceptual stereotypes, represents a troubling reactionary development… That’s how things go: precisely when writing and thought were beginning to abandon the author-function, when creations no longer require an author-function for them to be active, the author-function was co-opted by radio and television, and by journalism. Journalists have become the new authors, and those writer who wanted to become authors had to go through journalists or become journalists themselves.”

Well this immediately made me think of some of the YBA’s (Young British Artists) Tracy Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood, et al. Just as contemporary art practice and theory does away with the author-function then it’s re-imposed in an emptied out and corrupted form as a subsection of journalism.

Interestingly the artist as producer has been proposed by some as a paradigmatic figure of immaterial labour and precarious work, just look at this snippet from a larger interview

“Atelier Europa Team: One of your theses is that conceptual artists are “the blueprint’s for today’s “affective labourer”. Why do you focus explicitly on the conceptual artists?

Marina Vishmidt: To be quite concise and general, conceptual art heralded the de-materialisation of the art object, focusing instead on the symbolic mediations that instantiate art as an event and mode of communication. The object has also been displaced from contemporary capitalist production as it concentrates on branding, differentiation, lifestyle marketing, attention management and so forth. Both share the feature of valorising information, and some conceptual artists practices were in many ways prototypes of today’s standard IP regulations. In fact, it could be argued that the de-materialised object is actually information, as it is subject to the same forms of proprietary relations.”

Perhaps this opens out more widely onto the role of the celebrity in our culture. Just as immaterial labour and the dissolving of the object reveals all production to be collective and all of life to be creative then the author-function or even the genius-function is killed but comes back to haunt us, zombie like, through the figure of the celebrity. I mean, what is the celebrity but the hollowed out genius-function, famous for being famous, for being empty, for being non-productive or rather corruptive of the collectivity of production.

The celebrity and ‘intellectual property rights’ are partners in crime. Our regulatory and juridical systems but also our political imaginaries haven’t escaped the outdated figure of the abstract, autonomous liberal individual. But let’s not underestimate the unholy power of Paris Hilton’s rotting corpse. Just because these forms are corrupt and are, to some extent, based on an illusion, doesn’t mean they aren’t concrete. There’s no easy way out. Zombies can be brought down with a bullet to the head but don’t take this too literally, tempting though it may seem to Dando a few celebs, the only real answer is to separate our heads from their bodies and dissolve them into the living flesh of the multitude, something much more monstrous. In fact perhaps we’re living a B-movie, fuck ‘Aliens versus Predator’ this is ‘Zombies versus the Blob.’

That book popped into my head on my busride the other morning as I was thinking about Brian’s calling 70s squatting a nascent biopolitics and my calling it a resurgent biopolitics. What follows is a reconstruction of my train of thought, only I’ve replaced all the “I remember this one thing I read once where it said something like, no wait, it was – oh fuck! this is my stop!” parts with quotes I googled for.

So, my first thought was of this Midnight Notes quote, which is from Toward The New Commons:

“[C]apital cannot be society.

We might envision capital as a power grid overlaid on a vast nebula, with the working class as that nebula.(15) Workers are captured by and in some ways defined by the grid. That is the sphere of exploitation. However, the nebula is life: capital must draw on it and cannot survive without it, but the workers have life and can survive without the grid. As others have discussed it, this is the sphere of everyday life, however corrupted and influenced by capital, which seeks to control it and tap its energy and creativity — but no matter how controlling, capital cannot be everyday life, which thus remains a great reservoir of energy against capital. This is in some ways more visible when, as with the Zapatistas, everyday life incorporates social structures and relations that pre-date capital and have visible anti-capitalist potential. But such potential is everywhere — though being everywhere is no guarantee it will be mobilized against capital.

Let us put this just a bit more formally (c.f., Caffentzis, in press). Capital creates identity via work and commodities. Workers sell their labor power and purchase consumer products, thereby creating identities as workers and consumers. Refusal and resistance move in all these circuits. More, it is only because workers can resist and refuse that they have the ability to negotiate to sell their labor power. If they have no autonomous space, if they are fully capital, they cannot negotiate and therefore cannot sell their labor power.

This is another way of saying that capital depends on the life energy of the working class — but that life energy cannot be reduced to capital nor fully possessed by capital. This harkens back to our earlier discussion of homogeneity and diversity: capital must have access to diversity, but must reduce that diversity to a usable homogeneity to control it, while maintaining the diversity in a capitalist, hierarchical form in order to have productive energy.

As capital attempts to control all aspects of life, the logical end of capital is pure machine (as science fiction writers often suggest). Ironically, the total triumph of capital would be the end of capitalism.

It is the space outside of capital, the space of human life not defined by capital, that is the fundamental source of power against capital as well as the basic source of capital itself. That is, working class struggles necessarily come also from outside the working class’ existence as working class and move not only within the circuits of capital but also extend or create spaces outside of capitalist circuits. “

It’s the part about life as a nebula over which capital is a net that I had in my head. To my mind, if we agree with this then I think it is the case that struggle against capitalism can potentially always take a biopolitical form, in the sense that Brian used the term biopolitics about the 70s squatters in the documentary you all watched.

From there, I started to think about what the Event Horizon pamphlet called composition, as opposed to opposition:

“Reclaim The Streets is an excellent example of a shift towards a more compositional approach. But what do we mean by composition? Maybe it’s as simple as acting as though we already exist in a different reality – we reclaim a street and recompose it according to a logic different to that of cars and capital. Without exception, every political organisation in the UK has been left flat-footed by this switch, as the dreamers out on the streets suddenly became the realists. From here on in, compositional tactics are the only ones worth having. “

My friend and translation buddy Sebastian Touza has also used the term composition, he gets it from some Argentine sources and/or Deleuze… he used it for instance in a discussion on Virno:

“Horizontal” relations among the many (what I would call ‘composition’) In one sense, this dimension refers to the types of bonds between the many. A fundamental question is when those horizontal relations define a bond that does not lead to the formation of a One separate from the many, to which the many delegate their power. Another aspect to consider is the “structure” of those bonds and the subjectivity they relate to. For instance, linguistic communication (including Virno’s “common places”), common notions, money, commodities, etc. Which compositions make the many powerful as many and why? Another question arises regarding the universality of what connects between the many and how it relates to the formation of a political subject, i.e. to emancipatory struggles. For instance, does the formation of a political subject originate in the search for communication with other the members of the multitude? Or does it originate in the concrete forms of life a group within the multitude build in their locale (e.g. Zapatistas, autonomous piquetero groups in Argentina, etc.)?

I think there something in common between what we mean by the squatters and related stuff as biopolitics and compositional politics. I think it’d be worth exploring this further.

Thinking about it now (digressing a bit from my reconstructing my train of thought…) it seems to me that some aspects of at least some presentations of class composition analysis present the working class at given points in time as having limited abilities to practice composition, which is a flawed way to talk about history. There’s questions to ask as to why politcs takes the forms it does at different places and times, but I think it’s important not to say that people at certain times didn’t have the ability to practice composition (to compose?). Not composing doesn’t mean inability to compose… There’s a sort ambiguity in Event Horizon about this too – it says that composition is the best idea from here on out, when it was probably a better idea from the beginning. End digression…

From composition and all this past-present-future stuff I thought about this section in Event Horizon:

” in 1955, in Montgomery, when Rosa Parks refused to obey a public bus driver’s orders to move to the back of the bus to make extra seats for whites, she wasn’t ‘making a protest’. She wasn’t even in ‘opposition’. She was in a different reality. It’s a reality that can be traced back to the Diggers and the Paris Communards. We can trace it across the world to Buenos Aires or Chiapas. It’s the reality underlying the slogan ‘Don’t Strike, Occupy!’ of May 1968 and the auto-reduction practices of 1970s Italy. And this reality re-emerges here at Gleneagles”

And this is also linked to the bits with the Smiths quote and about the bodily feelings of these moments – hair standing on end and all that. It’s all connected, I think, in moments of time that connect different moments in time together. That’s where the book A Wrinkle In Time comes in. In the book they use a form of space and time travel called a “tesseract”, the verb form is “to tesser”.

I found a brief explanation of the idea here, which summarizes a conversation in the book:

“Imagine holding up a string with two hands, stretching that string so it is a straight line.

A hypothetical ant on your left hand (point A) could reach your right hand (point B) by walking on that straight-line string.

But is there a quicker route? Yes there is. Bring your two hands together so that the string’s tips touch each other, and there you have the shortest route from point A to point B… and it isn’t a straight line.

It’s a wrinkle.

That is a tesseract.

The theory is that one may tesser through the fabric of time-space in order to get to places quicker. “

Some googling turned up a bunch of science stuff related to this that is way beyond me… Among that was this from some blog which compared the tesseract to time travel stuff involving worm holes (burrows dug by moles/tribes of moles?) and black holes -
like I said the science is all beyond me, but I found it a nice piece of resonance that, from what I remember from science back when I used to know a bit about it, black holes are also called singularities, and they have a part called an event horizon. Nifty.

Anyway, I think the tesseract is a nice metaphor for the type of relationship between past and present, history and politics that I’m keen to see more of and to try and develop both as an idea and practice… instead of just slagging off stuff that doesn’t do this, like the periodizing impulse in Negri and others. It’s like, you know, instead of complaining about what’s on the radio you can just go start a punk band instead, to compose rather than just oppose. (Do I get a point for that? It’s a bit of a thin punk reference but a reference none the less…)

Lastly, I found a long quote from the book here, which if my memory serves follows directly after the conversation quoted above:

“Oh, dear, ” Meg sighed. “I guess I am a moron. I just don’t get it.”"That is because you think of space only in three dimensions,” Mrs. Whatsit told her. “We travel in the fifth dimension. This is something you can understand, Meg. Don’t be afraid to try. Was your mother able to explain a tesseract to you?”

“Well, she never did,” Meg said. “She got so upset about it. Why, Mrs. Whatsit? She said it had something to do with her and Father.”

“It was a concept they were playing with” Mrs. Whatsit said, “going beyond the fourth dimension to the fifth. Did your mother explain it to you, Charles?”

“Well, yes.” Charles looked a little embarrassed. “Please don’t be hurt, Meg. I just kept at her while you were at school til I got it out of her.”

Meg sighed. “Just explain it to me.”

“Okay,” Charles said. “What is the first dimension?”

“Well—a line:—— ”

“Okay. And the second dimension?”

“Well, you’d square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension.”

“And the third?”

“Well, you’d square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn’t be flat anymore. It would have a bottom, and sides, and a top.”

“And the fourth?”

“Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you’d square the square. But you can’t take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it’s got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you could call the fourth dimension Time.”

“That’s right,” Charles said. “Good girl. Okay, then, for the fifth dimension you’d square the fourth, wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

For a brief, illuminating second Meg’s face had the listening, probing expression that was so often seen on Charles’s. “I see!” she cried. “I got it! For just a moment I got it! I can’t possibly explain it now, but there for a second I saw it!” “

So I figure, I’m going to start telling people I’m a commonist, an otherworldist, and a tesseractivist.

Them’s my thoughts. Hope this doesn’t you regret inviting me into the blog. (David was worried about nutters from outside the group, I assume this means nutters who are already in the group are allowed to say, right?)

take care,
Nate