What do I mean by this? Well the first thing to say is the crisis doesn’t, on its own, mean the end of capitalism, it is, however, an interruption in the general direction in which global society has been pushed over the last thirty years. That is to say it does seem to be a fundamental crisis for the neo-liberal mode of capital accumulation. Central to this assessment is the way the crisis has broken the implicit neo-liberal deal of compensating for stagnant wages through access to cheap debt. We have talked about this deal elsewhere but it was also outlined with surprising accuracy in a recent article in the Financial Times titled: Debt is capitalism’s dirty little secret.

The FT article goes as far as admitting that neo-liberalism is fundamentally about the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and argues that cheap debt was the only thing that prevented revolution. This seems like a vindication of David Harvey argument that neo-liberalism is based on ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and of course this process hasn’t ended with the crisis. The bank bailouts are a huge and naked transfer of wealth to the wealthy. Indeed some have argued that the bailouts in the global north are playing the role that Structural Adjustment Programmes have played in the global south. There is a lot of truth to this. The bailouts are a neo-liberal solution to the crisis in neo-liberalism, in this sense they are just neo-liberalism intensified. But it is this degree of intensity that indicates it is more than neo-liberalism in normal operation. After all it’s when a system enters a crisis situation; when it is far from equilibrium, that we can see most clearly the intensive processes that make it up. The socialisation of risk to defend the privatisation of profits follows neo-liberal logic but destroys neo-liberal ideology. It is for this reason that the underlying processes of neo-liberalism have become apparent not just to us but to the Financial Times. Neo-liberalism has been stripped of the fetishisms that would normal disguise it and this has caused a real, ongoing ideological crisis. At the very least there’s been a significant wobble, if not a total collapse, in the religious hokum of the invisible hand of the market magically producing the common good. The ideas and practices that have formed the middle ground of society are ceasing to make sense, even on their own terms.

Of course this raises the question of what happens now?

One common assumption is that when the middle ground of society is in crisis then a new middle ground will have to emerge; a new deal will have to be struck. There is an expectation that some version of Keynesianism must follow, a New, New Deal or perhaps a Green New Deal. There are however several serious obstacles to this scenario, not least amongst them is that the world still has a fundamentally neo-liberal composition. The common sense of society, how we understand the world and ourselves, (within which the political middle ground develops) has been fundamentally transformed by thirty years of neo-liberal governance (although this is true to greater or lesser degree in different parts of the world).

One important point we should recognise is that neo-liberalism has only a limited role for its own ideological argument. Such argument is used to create neo-liberal ideologues and activists but this isn’t how it transforms wider subjectivity or our common sense understandings of what is possible. These changes are brought about more operationally than ideologically. That is to say that neo-liberal common sense is actively brought about by interventions into class composition rather than through ideological argument. Neo-liberalism re-organises material processes, it intervenes into society to try and bring about the social reality that its ideology claims already exists. It actively tries to create its own presuppositions.

Instead of being persuaded by the power of argument, people are trained to view themselves as homo-economicus by being forced to engage in markets. It is in this way that people come to view themselves as human capital; that is as little enterprises locked in competition with others. Indeed this is increasingly true not just in our economic activities but throughout our whole lives. Thus we have the imposition of markets into more and more areas of life, which mean increasingly huge bureaucracies and more and more corruptive systems of measure. This is the Market Stalinism has taken hold in the public services.

Foucault, in his lectures on neo-liberalism, talks about changes in Governmentality, that is the manner or mentality through which people are governed and govern themselves.
Governmentality is multi-scalar; it isn’t just about global governance or how to govern states but also about the management of individuals. It is about how you should live. It sets up a model of life and then establishes mechanisms whereby you are shepherded towards ‘freely’ choosing that manner of living. If you want to participate in society you are force to behave as homo-economicus. The markets are rigged to make certain actions make more sense and other actions less sense. The dice are loaded.

Of course, despite the circularity of its self-fulfilling and self-affirming prophecy, there have always been large areas of life that haven’t accorded with neo-liberalism. However held in place by the neo-liberal deal it has seemed quite stabile for a long time. Access to cheap credit was essential for neo-liberalism to solve the problem of effective demand, to make sense on its own terms and to disguise the huge transfers of wealth and power that were taking place. This manner of living is now in real crisis and many of the things that were previously rigged to make sense, no longer do. A couple of years ago in the UK you were acting irrationally if you rented a house when you could afford to buy, now the reverse is true.

Neo-liberalism no longer ‘makes sense’, yet its logic keeps stumbling on zombie style. Just look at PFI schemes in the UK, where private finance is supposed to supply the money for government infrastructural spending, with the state renting back infrastructure for vast sums over a thirty-year period. Except now there is no private finance so the government has to lend banks the money to lend to private firms to build infrastructure, which it will then rent back to the state that lent the money in the first place. At every stage huge sums are skimmed off in to private hands. It doesn’t make sense yet the scheme is still being rolled out at the same rate it was before the crisis. There isn’t another logic or common sense to guide policy so neo-liberal logic is twisted through amazing contortions just to keep it all going.

Any new common sense, any new middle ground for politics, has lots of problems to overcome. It would have to operate in a similar multi-scalar fashion to neo-liberalism, that is, it would have to be tied to a new manner of living. It would also have the difficulty of starting from the composition we have now, with large parts of the world’s population still in the grip of neo-liberal common sense and modes of living. This is one of the greatest problems facing those advocating a New, New Deal. We aren’t talking about a few changes in elite thinking or some dabbling with government spending but the global re-composition of society.

Neo-liberalism is in crisis ideologically, it no longer ‘adds up’ on its own terms, yet it doesn’t seem to know it is dead. I could imagine it stumbling on for a considerable period, as no new middle ground is able to cohere and replace it. We face zombie-liberalism. This raises the prospect of no resolution being found for the crisis as we end up stuck in a long 10 or 20-year period of stagnation and drift. Even in its heyday neo-liberalism could actually be seen as a period of stagnation, it never reached anything like the growth levels of the post-war settlement years, but it still had its modernist side, the idea that neo-liberalism would solve the worlds problems. Without an overarching project we might just get a series of phoney recoveries, repeated crashes and a slow fragmentation, with some fractions of capital seeking to extend neo-liberalism and others trying to replace it but with nobody really succeeding.

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 but we’re departing a little from what is on the flyer and advertising for this meeting.

The reason for that is that the last few weeks have really emphasised that we’re in the midst of a crisis, and just how large this crisis is and how it could potentially play out into quite significant changes in society. So it seems a bit ludicrous not to talk about this.

We want to still have the original questions in the background, which is sort of who are the agents of change, what connections, conflicts and resonances might there be between the radical Left and radical Greens or perhaps the autonomous left. Which seems to reflect the make-up of this group. Anyway we’re still going to have these questions in the background but we want to address them in terms of the crisis.

Our focus isn’t going to be so much on trying to predict how events will go. That’s a pretty difficult thing to do when you’re in the midst of a crisis. In fact our focus isn’t so much on analysing the crisis in some objective way, but on us – most broadly that means the working class, but more directly us in this room and the networks we’re involved with. We want to focus on how we fit into the crisis, how it affects us. And how it affects the way we struggle, how it might open new possibilities.

We sense an opening: there seems to be change in the offing but no-one can be sure where things are going… We’re not going to say that this is the end of capitalism or anything like that. Capitalism operates through crisis: it works by breaking down. But crises of the magnitude of the one we’re experiencing now tend to lead to big changes in the way capitalism works. It’s quite likely that over the next few years a new regime of regulation will emerge.

In her recent book “The Shock Doctrine” Naomi Klein quotes the neo-liberal guru Milton Friedman: “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.”

This also applies to us to some degree: times of instability are the best times to intervene into a system. What we’d like to do is to discuss how we can intervene with you. We’re not going to talk for long, because we haven’t got any answers but we’ll try and stimulate some discussion.

We face at least four overlapping crises:
1. Credit
2. Food
3. Energy
4. Climate change

We can look at all these through the lens of RISK, as composed differently i.e. privatised risk or collective risk

1. CREDIT
Capitalism is a socialising force: even in its simplest form, it brings people off the land and sets them to work together. But there’s a tendency in the opposite direction too: that of breaking people up (to undermine the power of socialised labour). So we get divisions, hierarchies, separation, compartmentalisation etc. The ideology of liberalism and ‘the individual’ are important here, but so too is the notion of ‘privatisation’. It’s a wooden word now because we take it to mean the break-up and sale of state-managed concerns, but it has a wider sense – the process whereby things that are social or common are forcibly made private.

This ‘becoming private’ has assumed greater significance under neoliberalism. We produce our lives in common but one of the main aims of the neoliberal project is to fracture any social arrangement that allows people to maintain common resources for the common good. It does this by smashing them, criminalising them, or simply forcing them to the marketplace.

In the global south this enclosure means the expansion of sweatshops, driving people off land, and the manipulation of environmental catastrophes etc to enforce capitalist discipline. The ‘old’ enclosures, although they’re ongoing all the time. But in the global north neoliberalism has also involved the privatisation of risk in more subtle ways. So risks that used to be socialised through welfare provision, national insurance, etc, are now privatised. Pension provision is one really obvious example, but it goes on everywhere. It runs from the contraction of social housing right through to more ‘trivial’ areas like the extension of ‘choice’ in education: one of my kids is in Year 6, so recently I’ve been spending time visiting high schools, examining prospectuses, checking out bus routes etc. There’s a real pressure on parents here: we are obliged to make the ‘right’ choices for our kids so as to maximise their future life-chances. We’re also encouraged to make ridiculous projections about their possible ‘careers’.

Now the net result of all this privatisation (this ‘becoming private’) is that it involves us all in the financial markets and puts us far more at risk to market fluctuations and collapse. That means we face an incredible amount of extra risk.

If we look at the current crisis, it represents a collapse of credit. And this is significant because the ‘boom’ of the last 15 years in the UK has been credit-led. Here’s a startling statistic: 97% of money in circulation in UK is debt. We know that the rate of profit has increased massively since 1979, while real wages have been in decline – not least because of the squeeze on the social wage. So this ‘boom’ has been consumer-led boom and has has only been possible by increase in personal indebtedness. UK has the highest level in the world.

There’s a link here to wider politics of neoliberalism, i.e. Thatcherism in UK,
The defeat of the miners’ strike (and the printers etc etc) represented a defeat of collectivity. This is what Thatcher meant when she said: “There is no such thing as society.” Collective action disappeared, it couldn’t find a voice, it couldn’t register. Because of course credit is individual: you buy ‘your own’ house, you have ‘your own’ pension, you sort out ‘your own’ education. In the past wage demands and wage bargaining at least had the merit of being collective. Now we enter the market, naked, as individuals.

Finally, this level of personal risk also complicates lines of antagonism, e.g. our pensions are tied to the exploitation of others. “I can only get ahead at expense of others.” It appears to be a zero-sum game which just amplifies the war of all-against-all.

2. FOOD
On a daily level, we could talk about the rising price of food in shops. But let’s also leap to macro-level: millions on verge of starvation. Between May 2007–May 2008 corn prices increased by 46%, wheat prices up 80%, soybeans up 72%, rice up 75% etc etc. This is a crisis on a huge scale. This year food riots have occurred in big cities in 37 countries.

Commodity prices have fallen a little since their high point but the real question we should be asking is how has this been made possible. The price hikes are the end result of whole series of policies imposed since 1980s. The World Bank & IMF have imposed Structural Adjustment Programs on developing countries, which involved privatising agricultural lands and commodifying food production and distribution. Agricultural production had to be orientated towards the needs of the global market rather than local needs, resulting in a huge increase in cash crops. There’s been the destruction of subsistence farming, with those thrown off the land being forced into the growing shanty towns and mega slums. Importantly the SAPs also insisted on the dismantling of national food reserves and putting those reserves onto world market.

Countries that were self-sufficent are now net food importers and millions of people are forced to rely on the vagaries of the global grain markets. It’s this reliance that makes global famine possible. So it’s clearly similar to the credit crisis: people are forced onto the market, collective provision is destroyed, the common is enclosed.

This is how neoliberal mechanism work. There’s not less food. Our access to it goes through the market: people starve because they can’t afford food. The risk of starvation is personalised. There’s another link back to credit crisis: sub-prime crisis means houses are re-possessed and then knocked down or sit empty…

3. ENERGY
We could look at the energy crisis in terms of peak oil. That’s the normal framework. But aside from the endless arguments about whether or not we have reached it (never mind what ‘it’ means), it doesn’t seem particularly helpful. Much of the argument seems irrelevant because it’s based on an extrapolation from our current ‘needs’: who knows what we will ‘need’ in years to come?

It’s more interesting to look back to the last big energy crisis – the oil shock of the 1970s. This was actually the first edge of the neoliberal counter-offensive to roll back the gains we had made in the 1960s and early 1970s. That crisis was used to break the back of the most powerful working class organisations (not least those in the energy industry, like the miners). The aim of capital’s counter-attack was to drive home the message that prosperity is not guaranteed. Again we see the return of risk to our front doors.

More recently, it’s easy to think of ways consumption patterns have impacted on energy use. The credit-led consumer boom has been totally bound up with the globalisation of markets, the massive rise in container shipping around the world etc. There’s also an interweaving of several different processes: the ideology of car ownership fits with the search for individual solutions to transport fits with a road-building programme fits with the privatisation of public transport and the closure of non-profitable routes etc.

We can also think about this at the level of production. So companies externalise risk wherever possible by sub-contracting and outsourcing production. If you need widgets, you buy them from a supplier rather than make them on site. And you don’t even hold a stock of them: you get what you want when you want. One of the immediate practical consequences of this Just In Time approach is the huge rise of wagons thundering across the road.

Finally we also need to think about the ways in which fossil fuels have historically replaced our energy. Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels isn’t an accident. As workers have resisted enclosure of common, and resisted the imposition of work, capitalism has turned to ‘natural resources’ for energy provision.

4. CLIMATE
And sitting over all of these crisis sits the climate change crisis.

It overlays other three, but is of a different order and so it’s harder to think through how it links up to the others. Weirdly it’s both the most abstract yet the most real/physical. Its effects are utterly physical yet it’s abstract because the time scale is longer and involves the projection of future interests. There’s a time lag between cause and effect.

But one way of thinking this through is that global warming involves a huge increase of energy into the climate and a large increase of energy injected into any dynamic system causes instability. There is a massive increase in risk.

Two clear ways of dealing with this
a) The market solution that we’re being offered at the minute are aimed at reducing carbon emissions by pricing the poor out. Business as usual. We will bear the brunt (individually) in a new round of austerity with increased costs of travel, carbon taxes, road pricing etc etc. Risk here is same as COST

But there’s a vicious circle here: neoliberalism means the best individual response to threat of climate change is to get more money and try to insulate ourselves from the increased risk. This means we have to work harder and longer, which inevitably increases carbon emissions.

b) but there is possibility of another approach, which would mean collectivising risk, and collectivising solutions.

And here we can see the importance of seeing all the crises as linked. For instance the huge credit bailouts that are taking place at the moment mean that there’s less public money available for the huge infrastructural changes that climate change and the energy crisis will require.

One of the dangers of overlapping crises is that risk becomes a generalised condition (it’s always been virtual but will become actual). Debt is a good example: if you owe a small amount, it can act as a disciplining mechanism, restricting your ability to act. But if you start to owe a lot, discipline can break down altogether: “The equity underwriting my debt is now in doubt. Cheap credit gone. We may be on brink of recession. Or even complete meltdown. So I might as well fuck off the lot…” It’s the kung-fu principle: as risk becomes generalised, it ceases to be a weapon against us, and potentially becomes a new form of commonality, new ground of struggle.

So to end, we want to look at some struggles that have tried to come to terms with the changes in work and its effects on struggle. Some interesting innovations have happened in struggles against precarity in continental Europe, responding to the lack of the mass workplace as a site of collectivity.

One of these is the Mayday parades, which take the form of carnivals and are modelled more on Gay Pride parades and the love parades that happen in Berlin. They started off in Milan in 2001 with 5,000 people and grew to 50,000 by 2003. These then turned into Euromayday with simultaneous parades in different cities. So in 2006 there were 300,000 participants in 20 cities.

Another interesting innovation is San Precario, the patron saint of the precarious. He was invented as a symbol or icon that all the different experiences could invest their desires in. They make big models of San Precario and carry them round, like the saints parades in Catholic countries. This is an attempt to form a collectivity out of very varied experiences of precarity.

‘Precarity’ is a fancy-sounding word, but it just means a condition of existence without predictability or security. Precarity has never really caught on in this country, as an idea or tool. We’re at a different stage of neo-liberalism than Spain, France or Italy, for example, where it has taken off as a category of struggle. For us, in the UK, precarity isn’t a new condition and we understood it differently as casualisation. However if we experience a more generalised increase in precariousness then some of those tactics might begin resonate.

And in the face of these four overlapping crises, we can also start to think of precarity in a wider sense: it’s not just about work, it’s about existence. Here we can look at the anti-CPE struggles in France in spring 2006, or the actions of the piqueteros in Argentina (they had no workplace so they picketed the cities, throwing up barricades and bringing everything to a halt until their demands were met). And we can also look at innovations in struggles around money and debt: in the UK we have the experience of the Poll Tax revolt to draw on. But there are options: In gReece there have been raids on supermarkets by Robin Hood-type figures, filling trolleys and dumping them outside for people to help themselves. There’s even been talk of a ‘mortgage strike’ here in the UK (and who knows what that would look like).

There are no guarantees here. No-one can know how these crises will play out. But the example of the Argentinazo in December 2001 should remind us how quickly everything can change. There, the struggles of piqueteros etc laid ground for social revolt. They provided the ideas that were laying around. Here we need innovation and experimentation to see what resonates.

So the idea of a Fair Price campaign makes sense, not as a stunt but as a genuine campaign that tries to link up all the crises. It could be linked to the logic of “No profiteering from a crisis” and the logic that exceptional times call for exceptional measures. I think that logic runs like this:

– The government and big business say these are exceptional times. They’ve made exceptions to normal rules and laws, they just suspended competition laws to let Lloyds buy HBOS. At the same time we, ordinary people, have had to put our hands in our pockets and bail out the richest people in the country. They get to keep all of their profits but we have to pay for all of their losses. Well, if it’s exceptional times for them it should be exceptional times for us.

– At the same time as we’re being asked to pay to bail out the banks, food prices are rocketing and – guess what – the supermarkets’ profits have been rocketing too. The supermarkets are cashing in on this crisis, they are acting like spivs, profiteering from hardship.

– No-one believes the government is going to help us out so we should help each other.

So the plan could be as simple as this. Let’s meet outside Tesco’s, discuss together what’s a fair price and then ask to meet the manager and ask him if he’ll reduce prices. The advertised price of goods under UK law is only an offer – it’s called an ‘invitation to treat’. So it is legal to negotiate and managers of stores have some leeway on prices. This is legal, possible and fair.

Again it could be promoted really simply: “Come to Tescos carpark 10am Saturday 10th of blah, blah. Look for the Fair Price banner and join in the discussion. Exceptional times call for exceptional measures! A bailout for them, reductions for us!”

There would have to be a big build-up for this, with letters in local newspapers, posters, etc. It could only work if it was something of a national talking point before the actions. This means campaigning and trying to cause awareness in different ways. But the logic of this makes sense and could reach outside the usual circle of committed activists (i.e. be more than a little Situ stunt). This crisis is going to be continuing for a long time – in fact this might work better in a couple of months when the effects are biting home on main street, as the Americans would say.

Some research would have to be done, e.g. work out what percentage of the price of goods is profit, on average. Also supermarket owners can ask anyone they want to leave their property so we’d need to find a bit of highly visible, adjoining public land or land owned by someone else who isn’t going to be there.

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 add to the personality, this being the opinion proper to an acquisitive society. Yet when you learn to swim you are really escaping from doubt and awkwardness into an innate swimming rhythm which everybody possesses, rather marvellously, whether they use it or not. And queerer than that, there is the case of the recently developed art of cycling. When I took it up, the man who showed me how pointed out that it wasn’t a question of learning to ride, what you had to do was to unlearn the inability to ride. He was perfectly right. It is all there if you can get it.

It’s the concept of unlearning that caught my eye, which runs counter to the suggestion that in times of crisis “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”. I don’t want to start banging the anti-intellectual drum, but maybe the opportunity thrown up by a crisis is precisely the chance to “unlearn the fears and inhibitions by which you are lessened” and reveal the “Eldorado of infinite potentiality”. And it also links into my general uneasiness about the role of ‘experts’. It’s easily done. You read a few books, write a few words, and all of a sudden people are asking you to provide them with the answer. Or worse, you think you have the answer…

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 policy or style: step outside that and it’s a criminal/police matter. OK, an MP getting jostled and almost pepper-sprayed hardly matches up to Genoa or Bolzaneto but you know what I mean…

In fact, when we wrote a piece about antagonism (how productive it can be) in the latest issue of Turbulence, we had half an eye on the camp. In my most cynical moments (hmm, I do have a few) I was ready for the camp to be another media love-in or liberal festival of single-issue reformism. Instead, the fact that people had to penetrate a row of riot cops to get in meant that antagonism of some sort was never really off the agenda. And it cut the ground away from under many reformists: it’s hard to talk seriously about the positive role of the state in an atmosphere of repression, even if some of it (like riot cops playing Ride of the Valkyries on a car stereo) was typically naff rather than nasty.

Second, there seemed to be a much better understanding of class politics and anti-capitalism than I feared. It didn’t feel like we were barking mad for talking about class. Again that might appear a small thing but…

As well as facilitating a workshop on class, we also did a re-run of our presentation on climate change and work. It was OK, but I think we could have made the message even clearer – maybe even repeated it several times and tattooed it in CAPITAL LETTERS across our foreheads. We had one bloke stand up at the end, applaud our talk and then say that the way forward was clear: we should all become self-employed, there’d be no bosses any more and capitalism would simply cease to exist. Erm, no… Seriously though, we packed a lot into our presentation and I think the main thrust got a bit sidelined by other stuff. The point we wanted to make was this: the biggest single cause of climate change isn’t aviation, or coal mining, or people driving 4×4s. It’s work. So any attempt to reduce carbon emissions without thinking through ‘work’ is pretty much doomed to failure or represents tinkering round the edges. To put it even more strongly, the way to reduce carbon emissions isn’t to campaign for their reduction: it’s to explore ways of resisting the imposition of work. And that might not happen under the banner of ‘climate change’.

In this respect, one of the most depressing things was the interplay between miners (i.e. Arthur Scargill and Dave Douglas) and climate campers (some of the background is here and you can see some other comments here and here). It was depressing because the exchanges were so unproductive and seemed happy to stay on the level of public policy (as if we’ve got any say in that). Self-education is fantastically liberating, but is not quite the same thing as becoming an expert on CCS for example. On the other hand, it was just as disheartening to hear Scargill and Douglas acting as defenders/spokesmen of the “coal industry”, as if that’s a totally unproblematic notion. In all the noise the whole idea of social change just seemed to slide away.

All of this made me think about how much our horizons have shrunk over the last twenty years. I’ve just finished reading Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day which is a huge sprawling comment on light, invisibility, identity, anarchists, the build-up to the First World War, militant trade unionism, time travel, and the mythical paradise of Shambhala. One of the recurring threads in it is this:

The world we think we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one.

Most of the time those other worlds are just dreams (or nightmares) a million years away. But there are moments of extraordinary possibility where everything opens up. The 1984-85 miners’ strike in the UK was precisely one of those moments. What started out as a defensive trade union action exploded into something that threatened (however briefly) to blow all of this away. If you’re in any doubt about this, check out Jenny Dennis’ tale which is a stunning reminder of that moment and what we could have become.

OK, it’s a little unfair to hold the climate camp up to the miners’ strike – you can only play the teams in front of you. But we have to keep hold of that sense of possibility: that’s what we’re fighting for.

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.

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 writing about antagonism is (obviously) to get us thinking about rupture. How do we punch our way out of this world? In this respect, antagonism isn’t something we’re trying to will into existence (as if we could!), because it’s simply a condition of living in this world. It’s all around us, facing us at every turn. But it’s a case of “water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”. In this war of all-against-all we experience antagonism in our relations with our work colleagues, our families, our neighbours, rather than as fractures with capital as a social relation. If we’re guilty of voluntarism, I guess it’s a recognition of the need to recompose the antagonism we face all the time into something more productive.

Which leads on to this: thinking about antagonism also means thinking about continuity. Hatred of the rich and movements to overthrow this shitty world are a constant thread running through history. Sometimes those threads get lost or covered up or simply forgotten, and it’s always useful to bring them to the fore. I’ve just finished reading Norman Cohn’s brilliant book. The liberal way to read Cohn is to regurgitate his conclusion that the “totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century” (ie Stalinism and nazism) share a “common stock of European social mythology” with apocalyptic medieval movements. But actually his conclusion is quite jarring, running counter to the 300-odd pages that precede it. Guy Debord (admittedly not someone you’ll run into a lot on this blog) has a much better take on this:

The great revolts of the European peasants are also their attempt to respond to history – which was violently wrenching the peasants out of the patriarchal sleep that had guaranteed their feudal tutelage … The social revolt of the millenarian peasantry defines itself naturally first of all as a will to destroy the Church. But millenarianism spreads in the historical world, and not on the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary expectations are not irrational continuations of the religious passion of millenarianism… On the contrary, it is millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, which is already a modern revolutionary tendency that as yet lacks the consciousness that it is only historical…

Of course the other great thing about Cohn’s book is that it leads straight to the astounding Q and from there to the brilliance of Wu Ming. There’s an interesting thread on what in the hell which touches on history, and Nate at one point brings up Wu Ming’s declaration at the time of Genoa. It’s fantastic stuff and well worth re-visiting:

We are the weavers of Silesia who rebelled in the year 1844.
We are the fabric printers that set fire to Bohemia in the same year.
We are the proletarian insurgents of the Year of Grace 1848.
We are the spectres that tormented popes, tzars, bosses and footmen.
We are the populace of Paris in the Year of Grace 1871.
We have gone through the century of revenge and madness, and we keep on marching

This is the way that time turns back on itself, the way the threads through history are constantly picked up and rewoven. And it’s in those flashbulb moments that the past becomes the present becomes the future.

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 in the sand, and says ‘this world is different from that one’. Of course we’re not separate from capital (it’s in here, not out there), and no amount of lines or fences will stop encroachment by capital. But antagonism can slow it down enough that we can make good our escape. Maybe antagonism can offer us time and space to become that-which-we-are-not.There’s also a positive side. ‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ are misleading, maybe it’s more like looking in and looking out. Whatever, this second aspect is the same as when you’re swimming. It’s really difficult to just start swimming in open water. It’s much easier to push off against something. Becoming is about movement. But it has to begin with some sort of ‘No’. Holloway might call it the scream. Massumi calls it an inhibition. However we figure it, it represents a rupture. A break with the world-as-it-is, an “unhinging of habit”. That’s how some people saw the riot in Rostock, as a way of saying No to enable us to develop our Yeses.

Is there a double articulation here, in the looking out/looking in? Maybe we need a rearguard to allow exodus to take place, but that rearguard also acts as an ultra-left lighthouse to enable us to see how far we have travelled. That’s one way of thinking of the black bloc, for example.

And here’s the tricky thing. Once you’ve pushed off against the wall, you need to start swimming. Movements need to develop their own autonomous dynamic. If we fail to do that, we’ll be clinging to the side of the pool forever, and we’ll never make it to open water. This is the danger of ‘micro-fascisms’, the risk that antagonism (on its own) will makes us become the inverse of what we want to escape. That’s why the transversal shift (aka the sideways step, the Cruyff turn) is so crucial.

Finally we should think about this not as the politics of affect, but as the politics of movement. Of becoming-other. Which is exactly why all those hegemonic visions or Ten-Point-Plans fall to pieces, because they depend on stasis. They assume that we will be the same as we are now, when want precisely to be other than we are now. As Massumi puts it, “To achieve the goal that has no end means ceasing to be what you are in order to become what you cannot be: supermolecular forever.”

Supermolecular forever? Now that’s a fucking great song title.

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 exploded. Homosexual culture had really taken over — Donna Summer, disco, it was so boring. Suddenly in New York, it was cool to be gay, but it just seemed to be about suburbanites who sucked cock and went to discos. I mean, come on, ‘Disco, Disco Duck’? I don’t think so.

So we said, ‘No, being gay doesn’t make you cool. Being cool makes you cool, whether you’re gay or straight.’ People didn’t like that too much. So they called us homophobic. And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, ‘Fuck you, you faggots.’

Mass movements are always so un-hip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

But as far as us being homophobic, that was ludicrous, because everyone we hung out with was gay. No one had a problem with that, you know, fine, fuck whoever you want. I mean Arturo would regale me with these great sex stories. I’d be going, ‘Wow, what happened then?’

What was great about the scene was that people’s curiosity seemed stronger than their fear. The time was rife with genuine exploration, but not in a trendy mass-movement way. And was always fascinated by how anyone made it through the day, what they really did when the lights were out, to keep their sanity, or lose it.

First, the overall assessment. One of us has a 4-year old son who ranks good things as follows: cool, wicked, awesome, bring it on, kerchow. On this scale we agreed the Heiligendamm summit protest was awesome. The front-page headline in the left-of-centre Die Tageszeitung — reporting on the summit’s opening day — was ‘G8 successfully blockaded’. According to the Financial Times our ‘protests tipped the G8 summit into logistical chaos’. The FT reported ‘overwhelmed police forces’ and ‘lines of exhausted riot police streaming out of the area in the early evening, some of them with stitches and black eyes, as formations of helicopters roared overhead. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said one officer.’ (‘Marauding clowns and squabbles embarrass organisers’)

In a great piece, which hopefully Red Pepper will publish, our friend and comrade Ben, of the FelS (the Sha La La Communists), describes every road into the Red Zone being blockaded for the better part of 48 hours, from 11am on Wednesday 6 June, the summit’s opening day, until 11am on Friday, when blockaders voluntarily began to disperse (en masse) in order to reassemble for a massive demonstration in Rostock. Summit organisers were forced to resort to plan B, which involved using helicopters to airlift many delegates, whilst journalists and others had no choice but to travel by sea, facing huge delays. We heard reports that even this plan was disrupted by blockades of ports/ferry terminals in Rostock; apparently on the first day of the summit many delegates were advised to remain in their hotels. And according to some reports, only four journalists made it to the opening ceremony. Oh yes, and the Japanese PM was delayed at the airport as he arrived. (By yet another blockade-cum-demonstration; not because he was hanging about by the carousel waiting for his baggage.)

This was certainly a victory and the most successful protest against a major summit ever. In fact, I wonder whether the Heiligendamm summit protest is to the G8 what Seattle was to the WTO. Seven years after that crazy November day in 1999, the latest round of trade negotiations — the Doha round — faltered and collapsed. The WTO now seems to be defunct. The Seattle protest and the social movements which formed around it and of which it was a part played a vital role in that. My guess is that the G8 leaders and political strategists are desperately looking for a way out of their annual shenanigans. Probably, there’s been a gnawing anxiety about their summit for a few years now, but our almost victory this month will have made them even more desperate. Because, the G8 summit is about legitimising neoliberal globalisation. An overriding message from Heiligendamm was that the G8 and neoliberalism is illegitimate. No doubt they’ll meet as planned next year in Japan. Probably they’ll meet in Italy in 2009 too, though that one will be tricky, being both the 10th anniversary of Seattle and the first Italy-hosted summit since Genoa. (That venue has already been decided: a small island in the Mediterranean Sea; not Elba, where the French emperor Napoleon I was exiled in 1814, but maybe the effect will not be so different.) But then… who knows, but I doubt very much that the G8 will exist in its current form.

Of course, they’ll spin it. They’ll talk of making their meetings more effective, perhaps they’ll have biannual meetings but on a much smaller scale with little publicity. They’ll use the comments of Helmut Schmidt, cofounder of the G6 (as it then was) in 1975, who’s criticised the current summits as a ‘media circus’ or something similar. But whatever they say, we should remember: it was us that done it. Or, as we wrote in ‘Worlds in Motion’: ‘sometimes it’s hard to see the social history buried within the latest government announcement.’

So, no doubt about it, Heiligendamm was a victory for us. It really is important to stress this. Many reports, particularly in the UK, adopt a top-down approach. The mainstream media tends to focus on what happened or did not happen inside the Red Zone — that piece in the FT was something of an exception. Indymedia seemed to more interested in reporting on repression and decentralised actions than the mass blockades. The following response to my comment that Heiligendamm was a victory to us is interesting.

i find this a bit offensive. how was it a victory?
maybe you enjoyed yourself, but i don’t think the kids of bangladesh were cheering. nothing changed; ergo, no victory.

Let’s leave aside the implicit racism of the comment — it homogenises the ‘kids of Bangladesh’ and assumes that ‘they’ are less politically sophisticated than ‘us’ (if I can cheer the victories of others, recognising them as part of my struggle, then why can’t they cheer my victories? — and the author’s quickness to take offence. It nevertheless raises at least two important questions.
First, did anything change? If so, what and how? Second, how does the mobilisation against the G8 in Heiligendamm relate to struggles elsewhere, e.g. in Bangladesh. I.e. how do antagonisms articulated locally become global? Or, perhaps these local antagonisms are immediately global. If so, then how do we understand them as such? Third, in exactly what sense was Heiligendamm a victory? (That hoary chestnut again: what does it mean to win?)

There are probably several reasons why it was a victory and why something changed.

1. Our mobilisation was a massive demonstration that the G8 and neoliberal globalisation is illegitimate. With neoliberalism already struggling for legitimacy, this is important. Though, as Rodrigo points out, it’s probably true that global capital can continue to reproduce itself without legitimacy for some time.

2. We produced the affect of victory. Of course I enjoyed myself! How could I experience those feelings of collective power and not enjoy myself? And I’m sure thousands of others did too. This is great. These feelings will remain with us and give us the confidence and optimism to continue acting. Whcih increases our power. So the ‘affect of victory’ isn’t just about ‘feelings’; it’s about material forces.
(And conversely (tho’ arguably) our enemies probably returned home without any affect of victory. Yes, they were reasonably successful in producing a spectacle of victory — more successful in some countries than others — but journalists were pissed off at having to spend so long on boats and queuing for boats, delegates’ helicopters had no proper landing places (and it’s undignified for a dignitary to have to wade through long grass) and the food and wine ran short! To top it off, delegates fought a lot amongst themselves. I’m not sure how important this all is. I think it’s probably less important whether Bush or Merkel experienced an affect of victory or not. But perhaps it matters when we’re talking about journalists and others essential for producing the summit as its organisers would wish. In Heiligendamm, it was very clear that the real energy was located with us. And energy is attractive! I’m sure journalists reporting on our blockades enjoyed a far richer experience and I think that’s important.)

3. We demonstrated very clearly — both to ourselves and people observing around the world — that mass actions can be effective. Again, this confidence in our own power is enormously important.The question of the relationship between local and global antagonism is harder. Tadzio (in his letter) makes a great point about this:

we failed to construct a clear antagonism because we were playing on different laying fields. concretely: while our protests were a mere police matter (a clear antagonism certainly existed between cops and demonstrators, as all of us who were beaten, arrested, tear-gassed, water-cannonned can surely attest to), the legitimation of the summit occurred on the discursive field of talking about climate change. now, the german radical left almost completely lacks a good political story about climate change, one that goes beyond individual appeals to fly less, raises the question of property and capital, while at the same time giving suggestions for how to act (the latter being a crucial component of every good political story).

7-8 years ago, when summits’ headline issues were still very much trade, privatisation, ‘the neoliberal agenda’, we had an excellent counter-story. our militant actions were embedded in this counter-story, so that our actions could rise beyond being mere policing matters, to being explicitly political, because they directly interfered in the construction of the discursive field that was being built to legitimate global authority. today, we have no story to counter theirs, so this production can go on undisturbed, no matter how effective our blockades are. it may be responded at this point that issue-engagement with the summit’s headline issues would add to the legitimation of an institution we try to delegitimate, but i think it’s fairly obvious that this year’s refusal to really construct a counterstory didn’t lead to a greater delegitimation of the G8.

thus the action point of this particular political story: we in the german radical, autonomous, anticapitalist left (whatever you want to call it) need to work to come up with a good story about climate change, to break through the relegitimation strategies so effectively deployed by merkel. more generally, at summits, we need to work in advance to develop a punchy story that relates to the summit’s headline issues, within which we can embed our actions. otherwise the latter remain mere public order problems, and cannot interfere with the production of global authority as legitimate.

The Heiligendamm mobilisation was also notable for two other important questions.

First, violence. (Not really a novel question, I know.) In some ways, I wonder whether the movement has gone backwards here. One of the exciting aspects of Heiligendamm (and what made it different from and more successful than Gleneagles in 2005) was the hard-won coalition of 120-odd groups that was the Block G8 campaign. But this coalition threatened to implode after the mini-riot in Rostock on Saturday 2 June. Simon makes some good points about this, talking of media (both corporate and IMC) hyperbole and of people reverting ‘to type’. Dorothea also said something really good. She said she’d learned long ago that denouncing certain protesters as ‘violent’ is never helpful. This links to Simon’s point, of course. Denunciation is about definition, it’s about closure, it’s about limiting our movement. Reverting to type is about stasis. But changing the world requires movement.

But, as Simon goes on to say, between Saturday and Wednesday, ‘the turnaround was amazing — because of the success of the blockades — and their fluidity and diversity. If you wanted a ruck, find the blockade where it was happening and contribute. If you wanted to keep a more tranquil blockade going overnight, you could find out where to go. Diversity and working together was again OK.’

Second, the tension between different modes of decision-making. The success of the Block G8 blockades depended on a closed group with a secret plan. This group did a brilliant job in getting thousands of people from the Rostock camp to the North gate and thousands more from the Reddelich camp to the East gate (by Bad Doberan). Our departure time, our route, our exact destination all had to be kept secret. How else could our objective of getting onto the key roads into Heilgendamm have been achieved otherwise?

Some people were very dismissive of Block G8 for this: ‘I’m an anarchist, I’ll not follow anyone, I’ll do my own thing. Fuck Block G8’. One person wrote on Indymedia: ‘Block G8 was a very hierarchical organisation. In the meetings I went to, all the details of the action were being organised by “action councils” and seemed very unaccountable and inaccessible unless you were prepared to go along and be cannon fodder for a central organising committee.’ As somebody responds on Indymedia, this is ‘quite disrespectful of those who had put huge effort and time into organising things (which are usually illegal, and enormously stressful, and done at great potential personal cost). I was really happy that some people had thought beforehand extremely carefully about to get us from camp to blockade in a coordinated way.’

But, getting thousands of people from camp to road is one thing. Maintaining a successful blockade once there is something else. The Block G8 secret ‘action committees’ did a great job getting us all onto the road and I was happy to follow them there. But sustaining the blockades required participation by all the blockaders and consensus decision-making, and Block G8 were reluctant to give up their power. So at the East gate we suffered a number of highly frustrating meetings on Wednesday evening, as the Block G8 action committee dominated discussions — taking full advantage of their ‘ownership’ of megaphones and the sound system and of the authority they’d won through their successful leadership in getting us onto the road. In short, they behaved like arseholes, accusing anyone who disagreed with them of attempting to destroy the ‘action consensus’ and of being intent only on ‘escalation’. At one point, they suggested that if they didn’t get their way, the blockade would no longer be under the auspices of Block G8 — this was a despicable attempt on their part to delegitimatise our action, which would have made it easier for the state to repress and criminalise. In fact, the blockade was in danger of falling apart altogether as Block G8 claimed that we’d achieved our objective and ordered a retreat. This retreat was halted only when two people sat down in the road in front of the sound system to prevent it leaving: blockading the blockaders!

Tensions within the blockade. Frustration with Block G8 and their tactics. The unsettling experiences of giving up a location we’d become familiar with to retreat 200m down the road and of watching many groups of people drift away altogether. Nervousness as darkness fell: the fear we’d be rudely awakened at 3am by water cannon and, possibly, tooled-up riot cops (combined with the more prosaic worry that tarmac doesn’t make for the best of beds). Wednesday night was somewhat tense! (It was important to bear in mind that although darkness presented uncertainties for us, it did so for the police too. They were exhausted too. They had no idea what we or some of us would do in the night — we were, after all, literally metres from the fence encircling the Red Zone. If they attacked, how would be react — and not only were we near the fence, we were right next to a railway line, with its plentiful supply of fist-size ammunition. Much safer for them to hold off. But this is exactly why we needed to maintain our collective identity and this is why the behaviour of Block G8 was so dangerous.) In the event, the night passed uneventfully, though some of our fears were realised: our numbers seemed to have dwindled from several thousand to fewer than one thousand. Thursday morning brought some great coffee — artisan-brewed latte from a wonderful man in a van operating two tiny expresso pots and a saucepan on a tiny stove — and more frustration courtesy of Block G8, who again suggested we’d done enough and that it was time to leave. But this time, we’d really had enough: a couple of organised and collective-minded affinity groups with experience of consensus decision-making challenged their leadership and we enjoyed a couple of fantastic blockade-wide spokes-meetings. As a result, our collectivity was reestablished and the blockades at that gate lasted for another 24 hours.

So, two points here.

First, how can we learn to shift between these two modes of decision-making — on the one hand, having a secret plan put into action by a closed group, and on the other, open, horizontal consensus decision-making — more smoothly, without rupture and discord?

Second, our experience on that blockade shows again the importance of affinity groups. Not only for dealing with the state, but, as there, for having the ability to override Block G8’s action committee which had outlived its usefulness.

That’s enough criticism of Block G8 and I want to end on a more positive note. Their advice as we headed for the road on Wednesday morning was spot-on and expresses our politics perfectly:

Don’t run straight at the cops; aim for the gaps!

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. As she puts it: “The need for greater diversity – the rallying cry of my university years – is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, weren’t a threat, they were a gold mine.“ If it’s an identity you’re after then capital is always selling.

Although identity politics had valid, minoritarian moments they also fitted too neatly with the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s and its tendency to separate politics from economics. Another angle on this can be seen in New Social Movement theory. It was also tied to the identity politics of the 1980’s and early 90’s with its “post-material” concerns. I had to read some recently and it seemed so hilariously out of date I kept imagining it on one of these list programs alongside leg warmers and Spangles. For Klein, escape from the inward looking paralysis of those politics was one of the achievements of the anti-globalisation cycle of struggles.

Not that I’m saying identity politics are no more, I’m not even sure that it’s something that can be totally escaped but I present a couple of stories to illustrate potential problems. A couple of years ago I went to a talk by Jane Flax, a Freudian, Foucauldian, feminist psychoanalyst (don’t ask how she squares that circle). A big point she made was that you shouldn’t say either race or gender. The two oppressions overlapped so much that you had to say race/gender. I asked her why you didn’t have to say race/gender/class or (to stop the list growing and making page long sentences the norm) just power relations. She replied that she hadn’t come across a good analysis of class. Yeh, well whatever but she then went on to psychoanalyse the film “Monster’s Ball” and the failings of the race/gender category became uncomfortably apparent. Her analysis gave the impression that the problems of the world were caused by redneck men whose relationships with their fathers made them all psychologically abnormal. Now I’m not a shit-kicking country music type myself but it was so easy to see how this all worked out. By keeping class out of the analysis everyone in the room could declare themselves normal/healthy/pure but definitely not part of the problem. It fitted right into that wider liberal idea, we’re already saved and all we need to do is turn the rest of the world into us. Change the world without changing ourselves.

I should say though that simply (re)introducing class, as a category, doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. It can be easily subsumed into the identity game. Class has always had a very culturally based definition in the UK and class as identity was one of the central strands of the 1980’s – 90’s class struggle anarchist scene that we were part of. At it’s worst this tendency fell into deeply reactionary and fucked up positions, denying that there was a ruling class or even such an abstract thing as capital. Instead it declared that “the enemy is the middle class” because they denied a voice to the working class. One of the names the tendency gave itself was “openly classist” putting class alongside a list of isms, racism, sexism, speciesism. It was pure liberal identity politics. It’s funny to think back on that now and recognise it as an offshoot of the politics of woolly jumper wearing, middle class feminists (sic) but of course that was one of the political environments it emerged from and in reaction to.

Another strand that fed into the “enemy is the middle class” tendency was the quite necessary critique of the power held by experts. Unfortunately neo-liberals (or public choice as it was known in this context) were also attacking professionals seeking to replace their power with, the more easily manipulable, judgement of the market.

In fact the parallels get even worse. I was reading Thomas Franks book “What’s the matter with Kansas?” which charts the rise of the US conservative movement. In a way that story is more of a straight out ideological trick where the re-assertion of class power and a huge increase in inequality is achieved through the misdirection of attention on to cultural issues. It’s based on class as cultural identity although, of course, class can never be mentioned in the US of stateside. Still “the enemy is the liberal elite” is the US version of a disturbingly familiar world-view. It should act as a marker of just how fucked up identity politics crossed with ‘class as identity’ can get.

That doesn’t mean that there is an easy outside to identity politics. The whole counter-globalisation cycle of struggles can be partly seen as an attempt to escape liberal politics, trace out the links between the economic and the political and escape the paralysis of identity politics. There was a shift towards identifying a common enemy in neo-liberalism or even capitalism and an emphasis on working through problems by acting together. It’s a politics based on affinity, with movements grouping together through shared affect rather than shared ideology. What was important is what you do, not what you say. The priority became moving, taking risks, acknowledging the messiness of politics. Not worrying about shoring up behind you meant you could move faster and take more audacious leaps. I think that’s what the Zapatista slogan “walking we ask questions” means, we sort things out on the road, work out the destination as we go.

Identity politics can be seen as a compensatory power move that ends conversation in a certain direction. The aim is to deny a voice to certain people in order to allow the usually silent to speak, to let the sub-altern speak. That’s how it’s in tension with affinity politics. Identity politics is anti-affinity, its logic is to isolate and cut off conversation along ever deepening gradations of power imbalances. Until you have battles over who is the most oppressed. Which oppression counts most becomes important to work out because it determines who has the right to speak at all.

But it’s been pointed out in an article in Turbulence there are no shortcuts, that a politics based on affinity can’t sidestep the problems identity politics tries to address. Unless we address the material and structural basis of the old hierarchies they will just reassert themselves.

Of course striation is necessary and at certain points you need rupture to get things moving again. We can’t just all get along, as Rodney King put it. But rupture is a dangerous thing involving destruction. There is a smell of corruption that hangs over identity politics; it is an assertion of power that stops potentially productive encounters. Perhaps the way to avoid that corruption solidifying into paralysis is to recognize that there is no pure outside. We have to all change ourselves as we change the world.