A good example of this problem can be found in the seeming isolation of the hugely significant but preposterously under-reported three month long struggle against increased tuition fees in Quebec.

A student strike has been supplemented by road blockades and regular night marches of inspiring scale. But despite the scale and longevity of the movement, and the resignation of the education minister this week, the students’ victory is not yet assured. The Quebec government seem set on a strategy of escalation, passing draconian new anti-protest laws and seeking a version of the militarised roll-back of democracy in evidence right around the world.

It’s this context that made us so excited to receive a review of our book from a participant in the Quebec struggles. It’s a lovely review which proves that the concept of a moment of excess is easy to grasp when you are actually within one. Yet in many ways our attitude towards moments of excess has shifted since we first started writing about them. At first we were concerned with how to engineer moments of excess, how do you get into one? Now they seem to be generating themselves and the question has changed to how do you get out of one? Or rather how do you exit the high points of struggle with increased capacity for the struggles to come? How can we navigate these inevitable periods of movement dissipation and politicise the moments of collective sadness that follow collective joy?

As the Quebec student movement faces up to a crunch point of repression, these may seem premature questions but they seem apt from our viewpoint in the UK. The answers that the Quebecois eventually find might also help us answer our other question: how can struggles cohere on a global scale? After all, if movements are peaking at different times in different places, then it’s not just their high points that need to resonate but their modes of persistence as well.

PS yes, this post was just an excuse to link to the review.

Some have suggested that 2011 will go down as a new ‘68. That seems doubtful, but then again history is in motion and the significance of events is only determined by what follows them. What we can say is that something epochal is in the air. For us this really became apparent during the period of our article’s incubation. The first draft was written from within the stagnant state of limbo that had reigned since the start of the crisis. Our intuition was that attitudes and desires were changing, while our analysis made us expect the return of antagonism, but how can you be sure of such things until events emerge to mark them. In the UK it was the storming of Milbank that marked the point of rupture. As we finished our article we were still trying to think through the explosive student movement that followed. Since that point we’ve had the Arab spring, the student uprising in Chile, the movement of the Indignants in Spain and Greece, and then the world- wide re-booting of those square occupations by the Occupy Wall Street actions. This list, of course, is far from exhaustive.

And yet, in our opinion, these subsequent events have not made the article redundant. If anything, the problems raised there have become even more urgent. A new political generation is certainly emerging and in many places it is clothing itself in the political forms of its antecdents. This inheritance is most visible in the widespread adoption of consensus decision-making process, particularly amongst the Indignants and Occupy movements. We could explain this phenomenon by highlighting the initiating role played in these new movements by veterans of the counter-globalisation cycle of struggles. But the sheer breadth of the spread of consensus process, and the prominence it has been given, indicates that something more is at play. Consensus has moved beyond mere functionality to become a form of expression for the movement. Its adoption has become one of the ways through which the movement understands and delimits itself.

It seems clear that the participatory nature of consensus is incredibly attractive to subjects raised during the neoliberal era. Politics has, for a long time, been reduced to the tedious manoeuvring of a technocratic elite. As that period begins to crack then consensus process has become a means for people to rediscover the affect of democracy. On its own, however, consensus process is not the solution to the Spanish Indignados’ demand for ‘Real Democracy Now!’ We understand the strong temptation to short circuit the process of transformation and erect consensus as a new universal model of democracy. The experiences of past movements, however, reveal it as a tool that carries its own limitations and drawbacks.

Consensus is most useful for gathering and coordinating forces around an already pre-established objective. It has also proven to be a powerful mechanism for allowing new political subjectivities to show themselves and recognise each other. This ‘assembly moment’ appears to be a necessary staging post in the escape from a-political world. The very aim of seeking consensus, however, carries problems of its own. Since it is easier to find consensus closer to the status quo of a movement, the process is less useful for the task of strategising, of changing objectives and of challenging existing sense. These tasks also need moments of dissensus and rupture and it is these tasks that the movements must tackle next. If we want to avoid a farcical repetition of the counter-globalisation cycle of struggles then the new movements must overcome the limitations of their inheritance, they must, in short, “constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew.”

You can, if you so desire, listen to a recording of the talk we did in London last week. If you can’t be bothered to listen then we can provide a summary: Keir plays fast and loose with thirty years of history, while rolling out some of our favourite riffs.

The event itself was great. It managed to pull of the difficult trick of not looking like a squat. There was an exhibition of old copies of the Class War newspaper, along with other ‘autonomist’ publications from the 1980s, notably the seminal one off paper ‘Attack’. The same page also contains an interesting recording of Ian Bone talking about the exhibition.

I think we attracted a reasonable crowd for 1pm on a Thursday afternoon, however the event that evening, a talk by Marina Vishmidt and Mark (Kpunk) Fisher, was rammed. In fact it was a little over crowded and too damn hot. It seemed significant, however, that so many people turned up. Perhaps it was due to the event featuring in the Guardian’s top ten art events for the week. But it’s worth considering whether the event itself, and the response it got, tells us something about the explanatory  purchase that ‘autonomist’ ideas have on the present situation.

It seems unlikely, for instance, that the Guardian would have been interested in publishing our recent piece on Zombie-liberalism if we had sent it to them a few years ago. Isn’t that because the narratives that made sense then have lost traction on the world? As a contributer said in the Guardian today, recent events have lent:

“credence to a somewhat counterintuitive observation. Contrary to the common assumption that the global economic crisis has politically benefitted the centre-right – as visualised in this interactive map – we now witness a crisis of conservative ideology emerging on the horizon… there is no coherent conservative narrative explaining the crisis and the responses to it.”

But as we have mentioned before a collapse of ideological faith in neoliberalism or even our narrative being proved right by history, just isn’t, on its own, enough to save us. As is argued in our talk mentioned above the task is to find the political forms that can take advantage of this ideological void by expressing the widespread discontent while at the same time overcoming the blockages to the circulation of struggle that come with our neoliberal inheritance.

‘London riots: the underclass lashes out’ Daily Telegraph. Incredible stuff from the ‘Torygraph’, e.g.

The failure of the markets goes hand in hand with human blight. Meanwhile, the view is gaining ground that social democracy, with its safety nets, its costly education and health care for all, is unsustainable in the bleak times ahead. The reality is that it is the only solution.

The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom By Peter Oborne

Interesting stuff from less unexpected sources (new stuff will be at the top):

Talk by Paul Gilroy

David Starkey is right, by ‘a close brother of Sons of Malcolm’

These riots reveal some unpalatable home truths by Hari Kunzru (The Guardian)

The other side of ‘we’re all in it together.’ By Rodrigo Nunes

The London Riots – On Consumerism coming Home to Roost - by Zygmunt Bauman

In Broadway Market – James Meek (London Review of Books)

Feral Capitalism Hits The Streets, by David Harvey

‘Nothing to lose, nothing to win’ by David Broder (The Commune)

‘In defense of Anarchy’ by Boff Whaley (The Independent)

The Salford riots and the greed of the disenfranchised (The Guardian)

An eyewitness perspective on the riots in Salford and Manchester (Indymedia)

#riotcleanup or #riotwhitewash? by The University of Strategic Optimism

#Riotcleanup: a physiognomy of an old fascism restored (The Third Estate)

London rioters resent media image of hooded teen thug (Reuters)

An open letter to those who condemn looting (Part one) by Socialism and/or Barbarism

An open letter to those who condemn looting (Part two) by Socialism and/or Barbarism

Eyes Wide Open in London by Occupied London

 Riot Thoughts by Spillway

A FITWatchers view of the riots

“Recreational looting” in perspective by John Naughton

Riots: The left must respond by James O’Nions (Red Pepper)

The Riots: A grim mirror image of neoliberal Britain by Tom Fox (Red Pepper)

Criminality and Rewards by Max von Sudo

 Britain and its Rabble (As I Please blog)

Violence at the Edge: Tottenham, Athens, Paris by Illan rua Wall (Critical Legal Thinking)

From Self-Mutilation to Self-Organisation (Nomadic Utopianism blog)

North London Solidarity Federation’s Response to the London Riots

There is a Context to London’s Riots which Cannot be Ignored by Nina Power:

‘Panic on the Streets of London’ by Laurie Penny

‘AA+ for the Rioters?’  by The Free Association

Statement by Arts Against the Cut

‘A Message to a Country on Fire’ statements by London Anti-Cuts Space

‘Five Quick Points on The Riots’ by Kenan Malik

‘Don’t Moralise, Don’t Judge, Don’t Take Pictures – It’s Time for the Riots to get radical Daniel Harvey (The Commune)

Report from members of The Commune about rioting in Hackney (The Commune)

Tottenham: Neoliberal Riots and the Possibility of Politics by William Wall (Critical Legal Thinking)

London Riot Pt 2 Arts Against the Cuts

Other stuff:

Badiou article about the ‘Banlieue riots’ in France (2005). Worth a read now.

This radio show contains a very interesting discussion of the context of the riots.

Darcus Howe on the BBC

Interesting interview from the London Streets

Interview with Tottenham local the morning of Sunday 7th August

“Truly extraordinary speech by Fearless and Brave Lady to Hackney London rioters:”

Darcus Howe and Richard Seymour on Democracy Now: Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The roots of the riff lie in the annals of pop history, more specifically, in a famous bootleg tape of the Troggs (a popular beat combo, m’lud) having a hilariously sweary argument at a recording session. The sound engineer, who failed to press stop on the tape player, captured a band trying desperately to grasp what turns any particular song into a hit record. The conclusion reached is legend: “You got to put a little bit of fucking fairy-dust over the bastard.”

Since the introduction of this story into our discussions we have used fairy-dust as a stand-in for the element of chance in political action. There must be a limit point for analysis when we are seeking to go beyond what seems possible. Perhaps the Troggs were channeling a wider point about the process of creation. After all if we shift the register from pop music to revolutionary political analysis, the problem of the elusive hit record could read something like: ‘how do isolated acts of resistance gel to become mass rebellions? And what conditions make them more likely to succeed (even if only for a short time)?’

I always thought fairy-dust was just a nice metaphor; I liked it because it contained pop music and swearing, but reading a new book called “Capitalist Sorcery” makes me think there may be a more substantial concept in it. In fact the book, of which I’ve only scratched the surface, argues for the utility of certain ‘supernatural’ concepts in moments that make us question what we had previously taken as ‘natural’. Of course we are talking about a materialist reading of the ‘supernatural’: “There is a tendency to put everything into the same bag and to tie it up and label it ‘supernatural’. What then gets understood as ‘supernatural’ is whatever escapes the explanations we judge ‘natural’, those making an appeal to processes and mechanisms that are supposed to arise from ‘nature’ or ‘society’” (Pignarre, Stengers 2011: 39).[1]

This seems like a useful way into the political problems of the current situation because the economic crisis, which began in 2007, has severely dented belief in the ‘naturalness’ of the neoliberal world-view. Indeed the series of revolts that have followed, from Athens to London, from Tunis to Cairo, have allowed us to glimpse a different, re-potentialised world. Is this a glimpse of the ‘‘supernatural’? Of course neoliberalism isn’t dead, its current zombie state seems stubbornly persistent. Meanwhile our political and media elites continue to broadcast from within the old worldview, as though such events never happened. The introduction to Capitalist Sorcery describes this last point nicely: “Politicians within the parliamentary-democratic system (or its near equivalents) are entirely caught up in the logic of killing politics [a logic we can] associate with capitalism. It is a logic that aims to ‘naturalise’ – and hence automate and de-politicise – political decisions.”

Isn’t this the logic that is justifying austerity? The political possibilities opened up by the crisis have been disappeared behind a veil of apparent necessity. The mantra of neoliberalism remains the same: There Is No Alternative. We have to smash this mask of naturalness, to show that these decisions are political and that there are many other possible forms of social organization. This is, however, far from a simple task. Politicians (and indeed the rest of us) are not the freely choosing agents presupposed by liberal ideology. They are caught up in this logic of killing politics and even if they wanted to escape it they simply wouldn’t know how. Marx and Engels captured this point when they channeled Faust in the Communist Manifesto: “Modern bourgeois society is… like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” Capitalism isn’t just greed; nor is it reducible to the nefarious plans of individual capitalists or politicians. It is a set of logics that we are all caught up in, a series of abstract dynamics that have been summoned forth but which, during their operation, come to appear as natural and eternal. Isn’t this what we might understand as Capitalist Sorcery?

We are all caught up in forces that we can’t quite get at. As we go about our everyday lives, as we go to work or to the shops, we presuppose, for instance, that money will be the basis of our interactions. Because we presuppose these things they seem beyond our control. Of course we also know that our interactions contain something in excess of capital, something human, but we are continually encouraged to discount this excess. Such dynamics are facets of capitalism but they are made worse by neoliberalism. As politicians impose competitive markets in ever more areas of life, as we are put into situations that force us to see others as competitors, as we repeat behaviours over and over, then it becomes harder to make out where capital ends and we begin. As the Gang of Four put it: ‘Each day seems like a natural fact.’ The paradox is that the effects of capital become hidden and ungraspable and yet they act concretely to limit our lives.

Anti-capitalist politics is about breaking with these limitations, it is about re-potentialising the world. However to most people, most of the time, anti-capitalist politics don’t quite make sense. The individual components might be sensible enough but as a whole it just doesn’t seem viable. It is, after all, an ‘unnatural’ position to take, so much in our everyday lives argues against it. Events and crises, however, put the continuation of our previous everyday lives into doubt. When the ‘naturalness’ of the current state of things begins to lose its grip then the space opens up for ‘supernatural’ solutions.

Despite the disappearance of the crisis behind the veil of necessity we still feel something changed in 2008. It is hard to make out what that something consists of; it has after all remained largely mute. With some analysis though we can begin to guess at its contours. The ‘natural’ state of things once seemed to promise an improved life, if not for us then at least for our children. Now that promise appears unviable and the ‘natural’ state of things seems more like a trap. If the path to what we currently understand as ‘the good life’ becomes blocked then we can come to doubt if it was such a ‘good life’ after all. This is why it has been so hard to make out the something that has changed; it is a change in the underlying structure of contemporary desire. What we once desired, and the mechanisms that produced those desires, have lost their coherence.

This means that new desires are being produced and with them new political possibilities. We can be sure of this because of the change in recent struggles. We have seen the unexpected resonance of previously minority ideas. We have seen the emergence of the kind of movements not seen for a generation. We have seen cascades of events that have broken forty-year stalemates. Yet we still don’t know how far the new possibilities go because they have not been given full expression. Only collective political action can do this and our task, if we have one, is to see if we can trigger it. The problem, of course, is that we also caught, to a greater or lesser extent, within the current sense of things. As such we, as anti-capitalist militants, are also sorcerers. We are trying to conjure up something beyond ourselves, something we can’t wholly know, something beyond the existing ‘natural’ limits of society; something ‘supernatural’. It is in conditions like these that concepts like fairy dust begin to make sense. Fairy dust invokes the need for a gamble, a roll of the dice, an experiment. For this we need to leave our safety zones. “’We don’t know’ thus makes us leave the safety of the regime of judgment for one of risk, the risk of failure that accompanies all creation,” (Pignarre, Stengers 2011: 39). This does involve the element of chance, however it is not a question of just trusting to luck. We might better think of the process of putting ‘a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard’ as a kind of incantation that draws on past experience in order to exceed it. Even the Troggs knew that the path to fairy dust lies between knowledge and cliché. “I know that it needs strings, that I do know”.

Given this we can see the Milbank occupation as an invocation. That jubilant show of defiance as boots went through windows crystallised a new mood of militancy. By doing so it conjured up a movement no one was expecting. Yet that movement has stuttered as it has failed to generalise. Another example of actions sprinkled with fairy dust can be found with UK Uncut. Who could have predicted that occupations of Vodafone shops would resonate so widely and spread so virally? Was it the result of fortuitous circumstances? Or did the specifics of its incantations facilitate its spread?

UK Uncut certainly shows us some of the elements needed for a contemporary invocation of politics. Firstly it manages to capture a spreading desire to take part in direct action. There is a deeply felt need for a new collective, participatory politics to counter the parliamentary-democratic system’s killing of politics. Yet UK Uncut’s actions also spread because they are easily replicable. They have a low entry level. Taking part isn’t too difficult. It doesn’t require too much preparation or specialist knowledge. The risks involved are not too high. Secondly, although the actions contain a ‘supernatural’ element they also make immediate sense. The argument is instantly grasped: austerity is a political decision and not the result of a ‘law of nature’. It is a political decision not to tax corporations and the rich as rigorously as the rest of us. It is a political decision to impose the costs of the crisis onto the poorest of society and those who did least to cause it. The UK Uncut actions, and the police response they provoke, reveal some of the dynamics of capital that neoliberalism seeks to deny. They reveal, for example, that capital contains different and antagonistic interests and that politicians, the police and contemporary structures of power align themselves with certain interests and against others. It is a political decision to do so.

Yet there is a danger here. The actions must be instantly understandable but that means they can only push so far into the boundaries of what it is currently possible to say. They must by necessity still contain many of our societies hidden presuppositions to thought. If the actions don’t contain a dynamic that pushes further and generalizes wider then the movement risks collapsing fully into the sense of the old world. We are all too familiar with this. “Of course we’d love to tax the bankers”, says the government, “but if we did they’d simply move to Geneva.” The parliamentary-democratic system seeks to kill every revelation of a political decision with a new ‘naturalisation’.

Now we can make out the third necessary element of our incantations. Our forms of action must include mechanisms or moments that set the conditions for collective analysis. Perhaps they must build in spaces, physical and temporal, which can maintain collectivity while slowing down the level of intensity. We need that familiar rhythm between the high intensity of action and the cooler pace of discussion and analysis. Only by maintaining this rhythm can we push further through the dynamics of capital that limit our lives. In such conditions movements can change and adapt in order to generalise. During the student movement the occupations played something of this role but on their own they weren’t enough. For a movement to move it must exceed the conditions of its own emergence. While a small group might stumble across a workable incantation they must conjure up forces that make themselves redundant. The aim must be to make the mass its own analyst, to spread the potential for leadership across the whole of the collective body. After all if a Genie gives you three wishes then your last wish should always be for another three wishes.