freely associating

We gave a talk recently over in Hebden Bridge. What follows are the bare bones of what we said, but if you scroll right to the end, there's a concrete idea building on a recent post here. We got asked to talk on the theme “Who will save us from the future?” which is the theme of the latest issue of Turbulence. We’re sort of going to do that ...

While thinking about Dave's post on shock and awe, I stumbled over this quote which merits a post of its own. It's from Jack Common, a working class writer from the 1930s (more on him here). The dark age technique of unlearning is what is needed, and it is not such a strange thing as it seems. We have an acquisitive view of learning as of a thing you ...

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 ...

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 ...

How do we face the future? The same way we face the past… Maybe it’s because time’s dragging at the moment (the sun’s out and I’m slaving away at work), but I’ve been thinking about the way time works – how it speeds up, slows down, and occasionally crosses over on itself. And I’ve been trying to link that to our recent work on antagonism. Part of the motivation for ...

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 ...

It must be at least three months since anyone’s mentioned punk on this blog, so... I’ve been reading Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s ‘oral history of punk’. This quote from Legs, one of Punk magazine’s founders back in 1975 expresses perfectly several ideas dear to our hearts, to do with the critique of identity politics, the majority/minority/minoritarian distinction and the importance of openness. Gay liberation had really ...

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 ...

As hinted at by Brian I've been wanting to post on the tension between identity politics and politics based on affinity. In " No Logo ” Naomi Klein (not someone regularly cited here) critiques the identity politics of her college days. She tells a familiar story of fracturing micro-struggles around representation of identities within both institutions and language. And how these were fundamentally outflanked by capital. ...

Just a quick note to let y’all know that Worlds in Motion, our article for Turbulence, has finally been approved. All i’s dotted and t’s crossed and it’s here. That’s me with the Engels beard by the way... The whole Turbulence experience has been a bit, well, turbulent. We wrote the bulk of the article at the back end of last year so it seems a bit stale now, ...