On the 28^th of April 2006 a group of activists dressed in Superhero costumes burst into the insanely expensive Hamburg delicatessen, Frische Paradies and ran out with 1500 Euros worth of expensive food. Despite several police cars and a helicopter rushing to the scene, the culprits they got clean away. Not, however, before they posed for the photo above, which they release along with a communiqué explaining that the food was given away to some of the city’s precarious workers. Months later the police raid some houses and arrest a woman in relation to the incident. The evidence against her wasn’t the strongest; they claimed that she sometimes wore her hair in a ponytail, as did one of the superheroes, and that on her computer were documents that mentioned precarity, which was also mentioned in the Superheroes communiqué. The case against her has recently been dismissed.

It’s a nice story but I want to use the incident to think through some recent concerns. Firstly, responses to the current crises. Secondly how to act without that acting seeming like specialised work for activists. And thirdly, how mediatised figures can change the way people think about themselves by allowing them to recognize commonalities with others.

In many ways the incident chimes with other recent actions and suggestions, which are all variations on the tradition of self-reduction struggles. In the UK there has been a suggestion for a Price Reduction Campaign, we’ve mentioned this before. The idea is to organize mass meetings outside supermarkets to decide what a fair price for essential goods should be in these exceptional times. One of the problems with this idea is how to avoid getting trapped in the identity of ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’. Another recent practice has been that of the Greek Robin Hoods, who have conducted mass raids on supermarkets, leaving the goods outside for the general public to help themselves. A problem with this, however, is that it is acting on behalf of other people, which could reinforce the identity of the activist as separate from passive category, ‘ordinary people’.

The precarious superheroes incident might seem similar but they try to overcome such problems by inventing identities meant to represent common experiences of precariousness. The superheroes call themselves names like Spidermom, Multiflex, Santa Guevara and Operaistorix. The idea is that you need super human abilities just to survive in this world of insecurity and precarity. As they explain:

“Superflex is familiar with every type of job contract: part time, full time, internship. All the stress led him to a pleasant mutation of his molecules… Operaistorix survived the last few years with the help of his unemployment module… Spider Mum’s mutant body developed somewhere between the kindergarten and unpaid and paid cleaning jobs. In her hands, Ajax and a mop turn into merciless weapons… Santa Guevara dodges all control checks and disappears without a trace. With this power, he is able to escape from the boredom of call centers and university seminars.”

We could think of the superheroes as P2P icons, a concept first raised in the context of San Precario, the patron saint of the precarious. San Precario was invented as a symbol or icon in which all the different experiences of the precarious could invest their desires. Large models of San Precario have been carried round on demonstrations, like the saints parades of Catholic countries.

The superheroes are a variation on this theme that address the problem of how people’s subjective understanding of themselves can limit their possibilities. Or as Mario Tronti put it: ‘As a matter of urgency we must get hold of, and start circulating, a photograph of the worker-proletariat that shows him as he really is - “proud and menacing”‘. The certainty and dignity of the job for life, that was some small compensation for the world of the mass workplace, has become increasingly rare. The precarious superheroes want to create a new “proud and menacing” photograph by reframing our precarious experiences as training for a world when we are in control of our lives and can be as flexible as we want. With the crumbling of the financial sector, the erstwhile ‘masters of the universe’ have been revealed as small men who wasted their lives building pointless pyramid skills. Our greatest revenge would be the menacing prospect of a new class of people stepping on to the world stage. As Spidermom says:

“We don’t care for the romanticism of the lonely hero type, we’d much rather bump into more and more superheroes in our daily lives.”

I went to a really productive meeting at the CommonPlace last night, throwing about ideas on the financial crisis and trying to work out how best we can ‘intervene’ (ugh, bad word but you know what I mean). I’m slowly coming to terms to with the fact that I’m fairly crap in meetings: I get distracted too easily and lose the thread; plus I have the turning circle of a small tanker (a small tankie, even), and need time to digest new ideas. But I can think on my wheels, if not on my feet, so here are a few things that occurred to me on the way to work this morning.

One of the recurring themes of recent debates around the financial crisis is that we really don’t know how things will pan out, and what new regime might take the place of neoliberalism (if it is dead), or what new form neoliberalism might take (if it’s just a bit poorly). Clearly some new Bretton Woods is going to take shape – it already is happening – but it might be more useful for us to focus on our end of the bargain. It’s not as if our leaders are going to emerge victorious from a boardroom clutching a piece of paper and proclaiming a new global financial regime… Actually, they might do just that, but the point is that regime will only ‘work’ to the extent that we allow it to work. Simplistic, I know, but it’s the same as any campaign around the law: during the struggle against the Poll Tax in the UK, it was really important for activists to know the law, to advise non-payers of their rights, to know how to use the power of “McKenzie Friends” to clog up the courts etc. But the aim of the game was to make the law unworkable.

Related to this is the problem that it’s really hard to work out what’s going on while we’re in the middle of this shit-storm. True. I’m struggling to understand what the fuck is going on (and why) and where we fit into this. But perhaps we can flip this around. This sense of global uncertainty is exactly what’s offering a possible opening. There’s a crack in capitalist reproduction (altho not one obviously created by our activity), and this has led to the suspension of some of the “normal” laws of operation. The impetus for a new Bretton Woods is an attempt to minimise this state of exception (and normalise what can’t be reduced), so we can all “stop worrying and get back to work”. So how can we slow down this process of normalisation? How do we keep these times exceptional?

One of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism (at least in the global north) is the way the logic of capital has penetrated ever further into our lives. And one of the results of this has been a real cramping of time and space. Two simple examples: the “working week” has been extended in countless, barely visible ways; and the cut-backs in state provision (and privatisation of social resources) have meant a decline in real, physical space available to us – community centres shut or squeezed, and the domination of shopping centres (private space) over the traditional High Street.

The idea of a Fair Price Campaign (or whatever it might turn out to be) could work really well on several fronts. First, it’s something new, a break with normality – an “exceptional” tactic. It could capture the imagination in a way that straightforward ‘political’ activities (like marches around town) doesn’t. Second, it tries to disentangle our needs from money. It’s not perfect, I know: it would be better to completely bypass the cash nexus, but we have to start in some sort of real world. Third, there’s a reclamation of space (and time), and the possibility of laying foundations for a new collectivity (subjectivity, even).

But (and this is a big ‘but’) there’s a real danger of getting trapped down a populist dead-end. This could be as simple as us all ganging up on Tescos, and Aldi/Waitrose/Netto then picking up a whole load of new business. Or the introduction of a new ‘Recession’ food range. Or maybe a wide-scale reintroduction of food stamps, or even rationing… All of these could easily be sold back to us as ’solutions’, precisely because none address the fundamental problem – our desire to escape this world and create new ones.

It’s useful here to think about the relation between demands and problematics which we talk about in Worlds in Motion. The demands we pose (like ‘fairer prices’) are useful because they help open up space for the development of problematics. Problematics are, well, problematic because they’re about movement into the unknown, the creation of the new – exploration, as our surrealist friends might say. Demands, on the other hand, are always partial or one-sided (we can demand lower prices knowing that they’ll only come by supermarkets screwing producers even further into the ground) because they operate within this world. It’s crucial that we don’t get stuck inside them, unable to remember what it was that brought us here in the first place.

I went to a great evening of talks and films put on by the Leeds Surrealist Group yesterday. They presented material from their new journal Phospher, which includes a positive review of Turbulence 3. There was a load of interesting stuff but the main focus was on surrealism and games, including a talk on the subject by our good friend Gaz. The talk is reproduced below but before we get to that I just want to riff off on the theme a little.

To give you a flavour of what they mean I’ll describe a little of what happened. One of the games the group has played was called Explorations of Absence which involved collective interpretations, of what they called, atopoi or non-places. “The unused or abandoned interspaces between different planned spaces”. The sort of places that children seek out. A photo was taken of such a place and then different reactions to the photographs were made, these then sparked of the collective creation of an object that was left at the non-place. Last night a picture of an over grown path was shown and then people took it in turns reading out their reactions and responses to it. It really worked for me and reminded me of the optical illusion rabbit/duck or two faces/vase pictures. You would look at the path one way and then someone’s interpretation would go up a level of scale and all of a sudden you could only see it as a landscape with trees and alluvial fields of boulders.

Anyway Gaz’s talk really got me excited as he talked about surrealist games as the combination of collectivity and chance and called surrealism the communism of genius. You can read all that for yourselves but I was struck by how that resonates with our own concerns and indeed one of the central concerns of contemporary theory and indeed social movement practice, namely how do we get a politics adequate to the event. We have tried to think this through in terms of moments of excess.

I asked a question about the possibility of the games bursting the bounds of the participants, that is getting out of control. But I suppose what I was really asking was what relation do such games have with wider social transformation. Gaz’s answer was that revolution was the biggest game of all and I suppose we are all looking for a way to get that game started, while making sure everyone else is able to join in.

Surrealist Games

Gareth Brown

Samantha, blithely disregarding even the slightest pretence of playing chess in the usual manner (she was, it is true, only three or four years old), announced that as far as she was concerned, it was vastly more fun to put the pieces into a small wagon and give them wild rides around the yard. This incident strongly affected me at the time. Recalling it now, I am reminded of Andre Breton’s admonition, also regarding chess, that “it is the game that must be changed, not the pieces”

That’s from a bit of writing by Franklin Rosemont called ‘The Only Game in Town’

I’m going to talk to you a bit about surrealist games. Kenneth has already talked about the fact that surrealism isn’t an aesthetic movement or an art movement or anything like that. In fact, the absence of surrealist artefacts (texts, images, objects, etc) would not in any way imply the absence of surrealism since these things are, by and large, simply a means for communicating or for helping to understand, the results or revelations of surrealist games or they’re by-products created by the processes of game playing, the excrement of game playing if you like. And, although surrealist artefacts are constantly created, they are not a vital organ of surrealist activity. Games however, are. If there is one activity that remains absolutely essential to us as surrealists, it’s game playing and certainly this is something that’s glossed over in the popular understanding of surrealism which is very much an understanding derived from that of the gallery owner who of course needs to fill the gallery with artefacts so who can blame them for skewing it in their favour.

In one of his books, (I forget which), Freud talks about a game beloved of children (although I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any children playing it) to which I think he gives the name Fort Da (Fort - ‘Off you go’, Da - ‘Here you are’). It’s a game that involves a bobbin with a piece of string tied around it. The bobbin is allowed to roll off accompanied by an exclamation of the word ‘Fort!’ and then reeled back in accompanied by an exclamation of the word ‘Da!‘ The point of this game is to play with chance (and really with fear) in a way that is totally inconsequential. The bobbin always returns but the fun is derived from the unconscious fear that it might not and relief when it does. This kind of game is in keeping with the ideas of game play developed by Johann Huizinga and Roger Caillois for whom the defining element of a game is that they end in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning. This, it seems to me describes one of three totally distinct forms of game. It’s the form that in capitalism gets sectioned off and isolated as leisure or pastime for the two-fold reason that its lack of productivity means that it’s of no use in the work place and of much use in ensuring that nothing transformative ever happens outside of the work place (pastime - to pass the time when not at work). We mustn’t forget, of course, that even though these games are unproductive in themselves, huge markets form around them. It’s not all bobbins and string any more.

The second form of game is the competitive game, which is concerned with the acquisition of individual wealth (I know this category also includes team games but the principle is still the same) and therefore doesn’t fit with this idea of games as inconsequential although it’s only semi-transformative which is why it is still exalted in present day society. The need to compete and to win is important to capital but actually the winners and competitors are of no importance at all. It’s the taking part that counts. In stark contrast with Freud’s Fort Da, It’s also concerned with the domestication or elimination of chance. This is in stark contrast too with the third form of game, a form of which the surrealist game is representative, a form of game that‘s the only form of the three that’s transformative in a way that is potentially subversive. This form of game is concerned not with acquisition but with expenditure.

The Portuguese poet Mario Cesariny once remarked that the whole world is organised on the model of the Exquisite Corpse.

Exquisite Corpse is one of the earliest games developed by surrealists based around the idea that you have a set of players who each write an element of a sentence without being aware of the previous player’s contribution so that you get a sentence like ‘The exquisite corpse drinks the young wine’ (the sentence from which the game gets it’s name) where each adjective, each noun, and the verb are all contributed by different players. I used to play something not dissimilar in school only it was known as ‘consequences’. There are, of course, countless possibilities for variants of this game. Indeed, you will find few coffee-table art books on surrealism that don’t contain at least one example of exquisite corpse played as an image-based game.

The Portuguese poet Mario Cesariny once remarked that the whole world is organised on the model of the Exquisite Corpse.

This is illustrative one of the fundamental positions of surrealism: that the world is created and life is transformed through the interplay of collectivity and chance. (An essentially Marxist position but one that focuses on the aleatory as opposed to the deterministic) and it’s certainly true, whether you’re talking about the natural world or capitalist production. Horizontal, non-hierarchical modes of organising such as that employed by the surrealist movement and in Anarchism simply lay this fact bare but it exists everywhere else as well. That’s why Svejkism (also known as work to rule) is such an effective form of workplace sabotage. Svejk comes from a book by a Czech author Hajek called ‘The Good Soldier Svejk’. He’s basically a soldier who brings about the downfall of the Czech military by following orders to the letter. What this tactic does is pull the reins on all the collective creativity that forms the essential part of any process of production thus exposing the illusion at the heart of capitalism: that the world is created and transformed via a process of competition between corporations and sovereign individuals. This is why surrealist game playing is subversive. It exposes the process vital to the transformation of life.

I said that surrealist games focus on the aleatory, on chance. Really this is an extension on their focus on collectivity. It enables the collectivity to exceed the boundaries of the actual participants themselves, resulting in play that encompasses the weather, the urban landscape, nature, detritus, relationships with other human beings etc, etc and most importantly the marvellous, that which can be found when objective chance throws out unlikely tendrils between objects or ideas or sounds etc. that create moments of disturbing friction that seem to tear big strips out of the functionalist form of reality and jar with time and space in a way that can be extremely arresting. So objective chance, in a sense, is the invisible participant in all surrealist games.

Largely, as is certainly the case with ‘Exquisite Corpse’ they are ways of exploring a collective intelligence, a collective creativity that goes far beyond the sum of its parts. Surrealism has been described as ‘the communism of genius’. The surrealist position is that genius as a thing to be found in a select smattering of golden selves is a scam, a great big charade, with social atomisation and the creation of the specialist at its heart. In fact it is in the in-between spaces that genius is to be found. When Lautreamont said ‘the conditions must exist whereby poetry can be made by all’ I don’t think he meant ‘whereby poetry can be made by each’, I think he was trying to emphasise the same collective intelligence that surrealist games attempt to investigate rather than being a simple, anti-hierarchical gesture about equal rights. (Comte de Lautreamont, real name Isadore Ducasse, is an important influence for surrealists. That quote comes from ‘Les Chants de Maldoror’).

So Kenneth also pointed out that the surrealist movement and surrealist activity is strongly internationalist. Certainly many of the games we play cross national boundaries and it was really in 1968 with a document entitled ‘the platform of Prague’ signed by members of the surrealist groups in Prague and Paris that games became the most important focal point for surrealist activity (although they’d always been important). I’ll just read a little bit from that document.

As regards the sharing of thought, which remains one of our specific pre-occupations, the most lively impetus will be given, in surrealism, to game playing and experimental activities. We place all of our intellectual hopes in both of them. Animating the life of groups, exalting friendship by integrating it with spiritual exchanges, they establish each spirit in a state of intersubjectivity where the facts of the present and individual history resound in a consonant way. Surrealist games are a collective expression of the pleasure principle. They are increasingly necessary since both technocratic oppression and the civilisation of computers do nothing but inexorably increase the weight of the reality principle. Intellectual blood regenerates itself through experimental activity. We appeal constantly to individual initiatives to propose the axis of research for all.

In The Platform of Prague they talk about the importance of experimental activities but I prefer to think of games as exploratory since experimental can carry with it a sort of positivist connotation which is very much at odds with surrealist exploration. Similarly, it’s often said that surrealist games are revelatory (in fact I think I used this word myself earlier) but again this is an idea that for me is problematic or at least it is if this is seen as a function of surrealist games because of course, it’s not really about revealing something that’s already there. Revelation if anything, has even stronger positivist connotations that experimentation. The point of the surrealist game is very much to cut the string and throw the bobbin and see what happens. You may never see it again. You may find the bobbin years later covered in moss and lichen. The bobbin may be carried off in the stomach of a horse or an owl. Most importantly, you don’t know. You have no idea what you’re hoping to find or where it might be. Alternatively it could be to wander round looking for string to pull without knowing what might be on the other end. The point of competitive game playing is the opposite. It is to do what ever you need to do in order to make the bobbin reappear. You know precisely what you are looking for (presumably victory). Precisely where you’re going.

The other main aspect of the surrealist game is as a sort of symbolic exchange between players. This point is clearly very important for the authors of The Platform of Prague. Through games, this sort gift economy develops within the movement, a permanent reciprocity through which bonds are formed and strengthened and collective activity is ensured.

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

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

Dear Midnight Notes Friends,

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

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

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

2. Lessons from the Debt Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of the Financial Crisis and Our Response

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

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

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

With warm greetings

Silvia and George

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.

The non-lego version of this image came to represent the Tiananmen square events in the West. It seemed to sum up the narrative that the western press had forced onto the events, of the merciless Stalinist state apparatus being stopped by a symbol of individualism. At the time I remember the picture being put on a poster by the Federation of Conservatives Students with some slogan like “Stand up to Socialism”. This was alongside their “Hang Nelson Mandela” posters.

However another version of events has gradually emerged which puts those conservative students on the other side of the barricades. In the “The Shock Doctrine”, Naomi Klein quoting Wang Hui, a leading figure in the protests and now a well known Chinese leftist critique of the Chinese Communist Party, puts it like this:

What ignited the protests, he recalls, was popular discontent in the face of Deng’s “revolutionary” economic changes, which were lowering wages, raising prices and causing “a crisis of layoffs and unemployment.” According to Wang, “These changes were the catalyst for the 1989 social mobilisation.”

The demonstrations were not against economic reform per se; they were against the specific Friedmanite nature of the reforms-their speed, ruthlessness and the fact that the process was highly antidemocratic. Wang says that the protesters’ call for elections and free speech were intimately connected to this economic dissent. What drove the demand for democracy was the fact that the party was pushing through changes that were revolutionary in scope, entirely without popular consent. There was, he writes, “a general request for democratic means to supervise the fairness of the reform process and the reorganization of social benefits.”…

Before Tiananmen, (Deng) had been forced to ease off some of the more painful measures; three months after the massacre, he brought them back, and he implemented several of Friedman’s other recommendations, including price deregulation. For Wang Hui, there is an obvious reason why “market reforms that had failed to be implemented in the late 1980s just happened to have been completed in the post-1989 environment”; the reason, he writes, “is that the violence of 1989 served to check the social upheaval brought about by this process, and the new pricing system finally took shape”…

It was this wave of reforms that turned China into the sweatshop of the world, the preferred location for contract factories for virtually every multinational on the planet. No country offered more lucrative conditions than China: low taxes and tariffs, corruptible officials and, most of all, a plentiful low-wage workforce that, for many years, would be unwilling to risk demanding decent salaries or the most basic workplace protections for fear of the most violent reprisals” (From The Shock Doctrine p.187-190).

It seems timely to go back to this event in history as we sit amidst the multiple crisis of neo-liberalism. The production of cheap consumer goods in China was the other half of the story of a boom created at the cost of our personal indebtedness in the West. Every now and then we have to step back and realise just how rooted in class struggle these crisis are, even if we have to trace it back over decades. It also shows how contingent history is, something to remember as we contemplate how to intervene into the present mess.

Or the incredible credit crisis.

And so the dominoes begin to fall. In many ways this is a classic capitalist crisis, the popping of a 15 year credit fuelled consumer spending bubble, but it is also a singular event. It is singular because, the ‘credit fuelled’ part of the sentence is not some foolish excess or avoidable side effect but is inherent to the neo-liberal wave of accumulation over the last 30 years. Real wages in the developed world have fallen since 1979. Actual wages might have gone up a little but they don’t go anywhere near enough to cover the rollback of the social wage during that period. You might have more theoretical cash in your hand (although most is taken out by direct debit before your hand gets anywhere near it) but you have to pay directly for stuff the state used to provide and that you paid for indirectly through taxes but now you have to pay much more for that stuff (housing, etc). Since real wages have declined, increased consumer spending has only been possible through increased indebtedness. And that indebtedness in the UK and US is what has driven ‘development’ in China and India. Once credit dries the pyramid crumbles.

The credit crisis is also singular because, as we have pointed out in Turbulence, it is just one of a series of overlapping and interpenetrating crises; the food crisis, the energy crisis and perhaps most difficult of all the climate change crisis. This does indeed seem to be the playing out and the coming to a head of the contradictions of thirty years of neo-liberalism. In many ways the social movements have been ahead of the game here. There has been awareness for years that Seattle marked the beginning of the end of ‘the end of history’, of neo-liberalism in its modernist phase. Neo-conservatism was the attempt to restructure neoliberalism through a populist supplement based on permanent war. This seems to have stumbled to a halt but I suppose it could be picked up again. After all military Keynesianism is what got the US out of the 1930’s great depression – hard to see where the resources would come from though. Well, the same place it always does I suppose – our pocket – but war capitalism is a high risk strategy, that needs a Staussian uniting of the nation against a common enemy: Al Quida has never really fit the bill.

There is something that might though, although the neo-cons can’t quite get to this enemy, that’s global warming. This is what makes the Copenhagen summit to sign a new post-Koyoto agreement, so important. One of the most likely new regimes to emerge is a green Keynesianism, based around ameliorating the most catastrophic possibilities of climate change, while imposing a new austerity, that is a Keynesianism but not one based on social provision. As Naomi Klein reminds us it is just such shocks as we are going through that are used to change the normally unchangeable.

So it seems very likely we are at a new conjuncture and that a new regime of regulation will have to emerge and no-one knows what that new regime will look like. What is certain is that the amount of struggle taking place will have a huge influence on this and that the forms of struggle will have to change dramatically to accord with and influence the new situation.

Britain has the highest personal indebtedness of any country in the world. Now debt is normally a disciplining mechanism, it makes you stay on the straight and narrow, but it does get to a stage where it has the opposite effect, where it gets to the size where it can’t be dealt with under the rules of the game. Many people must be fairly close to that. This is also inherent to neo-liberalism, which was about privatising risks that used to be socialised, (as welfare provision, national insurance schemes). Well, that is for most of us; for the banks and the rich it’s been privatising profits while socialising losses. We have an interesting antagonism emerging when we are confronted with the truth of this. The hatred and Schadenfreude against the bankers is very apparent on talk radio, blog comments, etc.

There is also no clear idea how far this crisis goes, some are talking about a hundred year event, the wiping out of the global financial architecture. We can’t know if that’s true because nobody can: nobody knows how much Lehman brothers is worth, or what its debts are and nobody knows what other banks’ liabilities are. You’d always imagine that techniques of governance are sophisticated enough that global meltdown won’t be allowed to happen but the overlap of these various crises make that a difficult task too.

We can look to the experience of the Argentinazo to think how that could play out and also for the forms that struggles might take. Of course we in the UK have our own history of debt struggles and the anti-Poll tax movement might be an interesting period to revisit. There might also be increased opportunity for the cross-pollination of the UK and European movements, especially around the concept of precarity. There have been some suggestions along those lines, originating from some unlikely sources. There was even a little discussion on Ian Bone’s blog about how the timing might be good for price reduction struggles. The previous attempt to import Euro-mayday style precarity actions into the UK being a little mistimed and so not resonating widely.

But that would mean a little joined-up thinking and the overcoming of a lot of the parochial baggage that we have inherited from the UK anarchist scene and indeed a shift in the level of thinking at least to the European level. And here we come back to Copenhagen, the ESF in Malmoe this weekend and the possibilities of a new green Keynesianism. The time does seem right for a cross-pollinating of the green orientation of a lot of the UK movement, with the focus on work, in particular the new conditions of work, of movements on the continent.

For some in the class struggle anarchist tradition that means overcoming the class-as-identity, class-as-culture orientation of the UK and starting to look at class composition, class as a tool of anti-capitalist analysis. That means the end of hiding behind all the lazy, comforting, bullshit rhetoric about “woolly jumper wearing yogurt weavers” and moving to think about climate change as a fundamental front in the class war. In fact the inability to make a similar leap was the reason we were involved in trying to dissolve the Class War Federation a decade ago.

The parochialism of the UK anarchist scene is only one of the things we have to take into account, however. The UK is in a funny position at the moment, as the political parties are almost entirely absent from the field. The Labour party looks like it will be wiped out at the next election, the Liberal Democrats have decided that the time is right for a move to the right and are promising even more fundamentally neo-liberal policies. The secret of great comedy - timing. At the same time the largest, but also most pernicious of the left groupuscles, the SWP, is in a state of virtual collapse and is turning in on itself, in order to regroup and survive as a rump. This all offers great opportunities but also great difficulties, for the social movements, as much as they exist, and the autonomous left in the UK.

The chances of the autonomous left getting at least some sort of workable relations with the traditional left is probably better with the SWP less confident and in regroupment. And that actually matters to some degree, they are part of the field we have to play in. If we can’t work together, then we have to at least be in control of our relationship. This goes for institutional parties although there are hardly any for us to have even very critical relations with in the UK, except perhaps the Green Party, who end up in the same tents at the climate camp. And despite the distorting effects they have on our ability to analyse things, we have to remember that they and the local MPs provided some protection for us at Kingsnorth. After all NECTU are leading a pre-emptive strategy against us to try and increase their fiefdom, and that, which in itself provides both opportunities and problems for us, has to be taken into account in how we act.

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.