Apple of my desire

Notes from 20 November 2006

Some questions and problems.

First, measure. How do we *know* when we're winning? We can set targets, but what sort of targets? How can we measure achievements within social movements? How *do* we measure achievements within social movements? Because we do always measure. We say: “Oh, that was a good meeting." Or: “That thing we did wasn’t very effective [whatever ‘effective’ means], let’s try something else next time.” At Gleneagles, we celebrated the fact that we tied up the police for ages and prevented the Canadian delegation from reaching the summit at all on its opening day. This was an index of our success. This was measure.

But how useful is this type of measure? Measure must always take place in the *extensive* realm, the realm of the *actual*, the realm of what *exists* (De Landa). The extensive realm isn’t unimportant and it isn’t ‘bad’, but it isn’t the whole story; there’s more! How do we ‘measure’ the pleasure of eating apples, for example? In the extensive realm, all we can do is the count the number of apples. But living a life is not simply about calories and nutrition. It’s about freedom and potential. Our freedom and potential to produce, regardless of whether we do, in fact, produce. It may not be apples we actually desire. In terms of exploring out potential, transforming our subjectivities, developing our collectivity… well, these processes are immeasurable.


Here, when we are thinking about subjectivities and desire and potential, we have moved into the realms of the *intensive* and the *virtual*. It’s processes in the intensive realm – the movement of our desires and subjectivities -- which constitute or produce the extensive. And the virtual realm is the field of potential, the field of what is possible or what might be possible.

A major problem for us (the second problem or question) is that it’s hard to see these intensive processes which constitute the extensive realm. In other words, we can observe the ‘actual’ world quite easily, but not the underlying movements. We can easily see poverty. We can look at statistics on life expectancy. We can even trace these back to ownership of the ‘means of production’ or the ‘division of labour’. But it’s more difficult to work out what’s going on underneath. This is certainly the case in ‘normal’ situations, when the world is in ‘equilibrium’. However…

… the intensive realm is far more apparent in far-from-equilibrium situations. At summit protests, for example, we can see more easily what social movements are made of. We can see commodities for what they are: dead. We get a sense that this is *real*, this is *life*. ‘Reality’ itself is punctured. Can also be punctured or ruptured by various other means. Not only ‘political’ or ‘cultural’ moments of excess, but also drugs or meditation perhaps. Sometimes, in these situations, things, the ‘way the world is’ – e.g., class inequality – just become blindingly obvious. *But*. Does this mean that ‘reality’, the extensive, is simply a shell? A shell which hides (and protects us from?) the intensive which lies beneath?

Third problem or question. The relation between the extensive and the intensive. Causality is not all one way, from intensive to extensive. Outcomes in the extensive realm do impact on the intensive realm and the field of possibilities. Victory of the Democrats in the US Congressional elections changes things for us. It alters the field in which we operate. E.g. there is no longer any point in organising around a "don't invade Iran" position. Similarly, now the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are all in crisis, struggles against these institutions seem to make less sense.

And this brings us back to the question of winning. For the crisis of the WTO and its cousins is our victory. (Remember Seattle in 1999 was a mobilisation against the WTO.) But it’s a victory in the extensive realm. And is this really what we mean by winning? Is it ‘our’ sort of winning? In 1999, these institutions appeared hegemonic, unquestionable, impossible to challenge. (‘There Is No Alternative.’) But we did challenge them. The very act of questioning the unquestionable, of practically imagining another world, is a victory in the intensive realm.

And we have to remember that the WTO is itself only a husk. It is less a ‘thing’, then a rigidified set of social relations. Its crisis means a certain web of social relationships are more fragile. But maybe those social relationships 'moved on', to organise the Olympics, for example. Which reminds us that capital also has an intensive realm – which it shares with us; they’re not separate; we are not separate from capital. More generally, the state is one of capital's extensive faces. States attempt to harness or service capital’s movement. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of social movements versus the state (or state actors, such as the police). But the state just a moment of class struggle (Bonefeld and Holloway). And when capitalist organisations/states are in crisis, it is also more possible to observe capital's intensive realm. (Really all we are doing here is observing the ‘same’ far-from-equilibrium situation from two perspectives: our own and that of capital.)

Fourth problem/question: strategy. Can you place yourself to even a small degree in the future to think strategically. That is, can we immanently strategise? One example is the climate camp. Can we think about its possibilities, its potential, even if we don't quite know what those possibilities or potential are? Or can we only think about strategy in the extensive realm?

In moments of excess -- when everything is open, when we ask "how do we want to live?" -- we just *be*: this is also when we *can* think strategically but don't have to. This is where strategy becomes just *be*. Ineffability. Vocalising freezes and drags us back into realm of politics. Teleology. Strategy closes off. Victory in the intensive realm opens up possibilities. Burrowing... want more and more, wider and wider, without any sense of direction... different subjectivities experiment in different areas.

Fifth problem (restating the second). If the intensive is the realm of change, with the extensive the realm of stasis, how do we access it? Because when the intensive becomes visible, so does the virtual. And when we glimpse the intensive, we also 'see' (sense) connections to other processes/events. Resonance! But resonance is independent of consciousness. So struggles don't have to be ‘aware’ of one another in order to resonate.

So how can we create right materials -- tools or techniques -- to facilitate intensity? We have to strategise because we can't do everything. It's about what seems possible. And that’s why strategy is different in intensive moments. But intensive states are quite fragile. At Gleneagles, there was resonance and consensus decision-making helped maintain consistency. Political animosity vanished (Zolberg: ‘Moments of Madness'). The bombing of July 7 shattered this state. How can we make intensive moments less fragile? Use refrains. Could argue that consensus decision-making is part of the extensive realm? But using it as a refrain means we can change it, use it, drop it. A tool. It doesn't need to be formalised. Don't need to use this tool for meeting with just four people, say. Unless it's extensive, doesn't exist for some people.

Final question/problem. How do we stay on the productive edge, which lies on boundary between the void and the extensive realm?

Intensive and extensive realms

Movements are things that become visible and thus amenable to capture. When they take a form, they crystallise, they get hard, and the State can capture them. But things that are formless have to take on some kind of form. Collaborative sociability fits in to this. But is there a way of making social movements invisible? How would this happen, and what would it look like?

Moments of emergence are mediated and so expanded. But it’s impossible to avoid these movements. This might have something to do with velocity – riots and ossified ultra-left groups could be the limiting cases on either side of this, the first very fast and without demands, the second very slow and nothing but (unachievable) demands. You can’t mediate a riot. Anti-political moments (Arianna) fit in here – things that aren’t reducible to demands.

All the old forms of social movements broke down, and so you can read American politics as atomised in the North and traditional and Church-based in the South. This means the South can mobilise through mass politics. Social centres aren’t about somewhere from which to move out and mobilise, but are about forming a certain form of sociality, matched to contemporary social formations. We talked a bit here about home-schooling in the States, and the ways in which social movements (e.g., civil rights) changed their forms as they moved from the South to the North. These are, in however fucked up ways (teaching creationism instead of evolution), constitutive politics.

Anti-political phenomena like riots have no durability. They can’t avoid taking a form – to think they can is just spontaneism. Can you learn any transferrable skills in a riot? Is there something you can take with you (apart from the booty)? How can events in summit mobilisations, etc., be taken with you in the rest of your lives? If riots are just ephemeral, they don’t give you anything that could be taken away. If these are on a continuum, though, we shouldn’t get too bogged down with considering ‘riots’ or ‘parties’ as if they were separable or unusual phenomena. Underneath demands (‘No Poll Tax’) there can be lots of other things going on that manifest themselves in riots, etc. People get drawn into riots. Riots depend on something else – some commonality that might just have been formed, but which has to be there. The same people show up again and again. These are emergent, moments of excess.

Complexity theory is important here – self-organisation is like being on the edge of chaos all the time. It evolves because it’s precarious, creative and always on the verge of dropping down into the unknown. The unknown is the ‘structured’ part: we can’t have strategy because we have no certainty – but we need to know where the chaotic edges are, to be able to be in the right place at the right time. We don’t have a strategy, we think strategically. It would be great to be able to link up our airy-fairy stuff with these kinds of ‘strategic’ issues.

A bit of a discussion here about strategy: everything we do involves some kind of strategy, however tacit or ephemeral. The architect and the artisan in Deleuze and Guattari. Avoiding slipping over the edge is our strategy.

Moving into the extensive realm doesn’t mean the intensive is bad and the extensive is good. Even riots are representational – they’re not durable or capturable in an extensive form – but you get a horde of experts coming out after them trying to say what they’re ‘really’ about. George Monbiot and Bono. Nothing evades capture entirely. That’s why the Italian movements were so important – recognising that mediation always happens, and negotiation (however implicit) is an essential part of what we do.

Anti-politics is interesting but it can fall into ultra-leftist or spontaneist traps. Things always have mucky edges, and these edges are where interesting and productive things happen.

How do we relate this back to the question of winning? We don’t have to give an answer, but we should engage with some of the ideas current in the movement.

Mediation is productive for capital and for us. The ‘edges’ can also be on a huge macro scale, like Venezuela, or small, like wage labour in the Common Place. Sometimes we just  organise something to mix elements together in order to see if something interesting or productive will emerge – we do this all the time as people, but do it really consciously as participants in the movement. We are, however, in the experiment. We don’t know what’s going to happen – and a ‘strategic’ perspective would presuppose we could see things from the outside. As soon as you start to talk at a ‘strategic’ level we run the risk of becoming too prescriptive – another rough edge.

The Common Place could change week by week, and that’s okay – it is currently self-organising and self-running, which is fine. The thing to do is to keep it moving and not stick to a ‘formula’ that ‘works’. User-created content. The Common Place 2.0. You can’t ever stop experimenting. Chucking money at it (buying a PA, buying tools) sometimes helps – but this is one of the messy edges. The ethos was against money, even if that meant that ridiculous amounts of effort were required to get something small done. If you’re trying to raise money there are good ways, if you’re trying to raise awareness there are others – but trying to do both with one action (e.g., a jumble sale) is pointless.

You don’t ‘achieve’ a future state of affairs by living as if it were already there – pretending that wage-labour and the State don’t exist. That’s like the economic strategy of workers buying the world, to buy out capitalism: mistaking capital for power. Capital will suspend itself at any time, if it has to, and we should know that. We fetishise money and capital when we make it (or avoiding it) the basis of our activities.

Tactics and strategy aren’t qualitatively different things – they blend into each other. Tactics are their best when they adapt what is to hand (e.g., Rosa Parks) but if they’re used at the wrong time they just fail – you get beaten up. Reducing the importance of power and money is important, though – minimising this allows us to maximise our power and creativity, which is the point.

Relationship to pornography: is society now pornographied? Porn chic. The Playboy bunny is ubiquitous. Commodity logic has invaded more and more of life – porn is a form of it – but isn’t more or less worse than anything else. We want the social relations embodied in the commodity, so buy it, and never get to the social relations behind it – the free shop as a case in point. You don’t break the logic of commodities, but just get it cheaper or for nothing: just because something is a bonny bargain doesn’t mean it’s not a commodity. Fetishism: imbuing something dead with the characteristics of something alive.

Supermarkets without checkouts. We shouldn’t talk about ‘what it’s going to be like’, or ‘what we want’ ‘after the revolution’. Some talk here about distribution systems and shops, the logic of capitalist exchange as instantiated by Asda, etc. You start where you are, not where you want to go (Class War), or else you lose the flows around you. But the world isn’t linear – we can wander down a dead end, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The more strategic you are, the less grounded in where you are, the more you end up disengaged from where you are. This isn’t about a means–ends relationship, but co-ordinating things doesn’t mean orientating to an ‘end’ but to putting people and possibilities together.

Excavating capital means digging and digging – communism is here already. We’re not trying to herd everyone into one direction. You can be certain that you don’t know, but that’s about it. The ‘struggle’ shouldn’t be confused with the thing that’s moving at a different, faster, velocity to what you’re a part of. It’s like evolution: the organism develops, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Darwin says it’s random, complexity theory says it’s not. Here it’s not random, but it’s also not teleological. Or is it? I can’t work out what on earth’s being argued about here. Gentle reader, any suggestions?

We’re talking about creating worlds, though. What’s the status of our work, of our interventions? Things that have been done successfully in the past aren’t productive now – our activities are contingent on the circumstances in which we act. Just because something’s always worked doesn’t mean it’ll work now. Is this random? Are we trying to change our own reality as individuals or is clash consciousness a way of looking at the world more generally and systematically? You can have a capitalist consciousness and push it beyond capital’s current limits but that’s not necessarily going to be anything to do with what we want (exchange dealers in the 1980s). It’s a bit random. No it’s not. It’s not conscious. Yes it is. Ringing in sick as another example – is this either random or class conscious?

The question ‘what is it to win’ is badly phrased. It can’t be answered, but we can use it to talk about some interesting things, particularly the intensive and extensive realms. How do we keep ourselves tingling, to recognise the patterns we’re a part of when we’re not in an open state? The big, expansive, moments kick off structures like parties, etc. They’re arborial in the classic sense, like the Trots and 1917 or liberalism and the American Revolution. Because they all grow from a single root they can never properly engage or communicate with others. By connecting the expansive moments, by making the rhizome explicit, we can show something that they can’t. Like the Moments of Excess talk – there are real connections, which we can show, not make. We might be able to make those kinds of situations, like summit mobilisations, by setting up the preconditions for self-organisation (like Stirling). We create spaces for things to happen – mobilisations, social centres, etc. We should think of some examples that we weren’t involved in. It’s never spontaneous but it’s not pre-planned either. Co-operation and commonality come first. You make a difference unobtrusively (like the four little ones dressed in black in Geneva).

Rhizome again: the couch grass movement going on underneath, invisible from the outside, but where the real production is going on. Things become ritualistic after a while, because the visible form gets mistaken for the productive content and relationships. You’ve got to keep moving, even within the form (if you don’t keep moving in a mobilisation you get physically enclosed). The Common Place is successful because it’s on the margins of lots of movements – it’s been able to escape just being a small hub for a fixed group of people. Because it engages more people more arguments and messy edges are produced – making for a more successful intervention.

Negri: we operate in a small stretch that runs into the future. The further forward we push our perspective the less successful we are. In a ‘pure’ society things might be different, but it’s unhelpful for us to try to think about that now.

So what doesn’t it mean to lose? Winning takes place in at least two registers: the intensive and the extensive realms. It’s not a zero-sum game. Our wins aren’t necessarily capital’s losses and vice-versa, because what’s at stake isn’t measurable in that way. These things aren’t commensurable in that way. Perhaps this is where the commons/enclosures discourse breaks down – open/closed is more useful. Some of our victories strengthen capital as well. Badiou says Negri always argues that capital’s strength is our strength. Rupture and emergence – a radical break. Once something is open to question everything can be questioned – e.g., the perspective of gays/lesbians before legalisation, the experience of the anti-war movement as a site of politicisation. Rupture is one point of emergence. You create a new world, things fall into place in ways that they can’t under capital.

Using fences to enclose protesters and create ‘legalised protest zones’ – once you’re enclosed your identity is fixed and your potential limited.

Win when we’re singing…

Notes from 6 November
How do we know when we’re winning? Maybe it’s the sense of openness when we return from these events, the traces they leave in us.

Dave’s science interlude on quantum mechanics: whether light is photon or wave depends entirely on how it's measured. What you observe takes every possible path and you don't know what that is until you observe it. Quantum effects also take place on large scale: universe we observe depends on who we are and where we’re standing. And one of the things about winning is the sense of possibility. Expanding possibilities and changing perspectives on history are two of the key effects of counter-summit mobilisations – and that in itself changes history.

Relates to this idea of worlding. There’s a break with existing reality and we then create a new world around us. But what makes winning for us different from winning as a survivalist or as a fascist or as an arch-capitalist? Do they have the same measure for winning as us? Winning is not a state – the fat lady never sings. We can track movements of victories by looking at the extensive effects of movements (=moving of social relations): eg at any time over last 30 years, look where the SWP are, then go back another year or so and there you'll find social movements.

Demands are always put to others (the state, corporations etc), so the only way to measure victory is in the actions of the state etc. So even if those demands are met, it never feels like a victory: they claim it’s on their terms (so it’s part of their counter-attack) but also our affects of victory only emerge at moments of excess when new worlds emerge. Of course some people get stuck on those demands (cf single issues), and getting that victory (a new law, a concession from the state etc) is all that matters.

Everything seems to come back to moving: we win when we’re moving. But we only realise we’re moving when we look at static objects. While we’re all travelling at the same speed, we’re just not aware of movement: it has become imperceptible (cf Deleuze & Guattari or the turtles in Finding Nemo). Yet our movements always seem to throw up demands: how do we avoid getting stuck on them? Maybe we should think about the problematics of the anti-globalisation movement rather than the demands. In fact, even thinking about the anti-globalisation movement in terms of a ‘democratic deficit’ might be a rationalisation after the fact: maybe there’s something inarticulate (ineffable) about social movements. Holloway says in the beginning was the scream. This is too functionalist and also too negative. In the beginning was the worlding (altho that can't happen without some sort of rupture, which might be the scream).

But at the same time we can't avoid throwing up demands. And they're part of the way we shape those movements. Maybe demands are what happen when our minor languages get put into a major language (i.e. we ‘talk’ to the state, we do ‘politics’).

Another science interlude: our moments of excess are singularities like the Big Bang. When we’re out of them, all we can see of them are the traces they've left; and those traces go out in all dimensions. Royal science takes away the dimension of time and attempts a cross-section which misses everything. It’s a fiction. It's those multiple dimensions which allow us to link up with different movements across time and space (cf Dustin Hoffman's blanket trick in I Heart Huckabees, or A Wrinkle in Time)

Notion of becoming molecular, being able to become anything — breaking down limits on what a body can do.

One of the (ultra-leftist) criticisms of our ideas is that they’re idealist, subjective and not materially grounded: we go to summits, experience moments of excess & intensity and come back ‘changed’. Yet materially, our lives are as before (we still reproduce capitalist social relations), so how real is this ‘change’? Most of that criticism is misplaced: eg affect of victory at Seattle led to a whole series of struggles which have ended in effect of victory (virtual collapse of WTO – Olivier’s piece). What frames possibility is partly our ability to organise and make connections but also the effect we have on representational politics (how it has to move to accommodate us). That can lead to ‘defeat’ as in Make Poverty History or explosion of Fairtrade etc, but you could see both as ‘victories’.

Ultra-leftist critique is a mirror of the socialist one: both avoid movement and are bound up with certainty (ultra-leftists also occupy a fictional place outside of capital).

Movement throws up its own problematics all the time, but they appear in different dimensions and some might not be visible to us – battles between feminists and autonomists in 1970s Italy. But not all problematics are productive, we have to make a judgment call: BNP’s problematic is definitely a part of the ‘moving of social relations’ but that doesn’t mean it’s productive. How do we ward off closure? It’s easy to imagine that our enemies are static but they move as we move: Empire’s arguments were quickly taken up by capital.

It’s hard to be aware that we’re moving: only way is to refer to something fixed, and immediately part of the movement ceases. In same way, it’s hard to know we’re winning: only way is to refer to ‘victories’ which are effects of struggles that have since moved on eg WTO (maybe this is less true as time speeds up). Victory only takes place in realm of representation (cf owl of Minerva?). How does this relate to poll tax struggle or CPE? Much more focused struggles, and ‘victories’ were less delayed. A question of scale? CPE and poll tax were less strategic, less self-consciously global? How does this relate to struggle for basic income which is more clearly aimed at the representational sphere?

Relation between (a) our autonomous movements, inventing new forms, throwing up new problematics etc and (b) the effects those movements have on capital & state and their mechanisms of capture. And we’re always trying to break out of (b) to get back to (a). Need to stress that (b) isn’t ‘bad’: those movements themselves can throw up new problematics for us and can be productive (eg Criminal Justice Bill brought loads of people together in a way we could never achieve). But there isn't a position outside of (a) or (b), and that's one of the problems with the basic income strategy – it seems to have been theorised at a very strategic level (“as struggles break out around precarity, we can get capital to adopt these measures, maybe in a mutant way, and that will widen the field of possibility for us”). But that strategic point of perspective, way above any movements, doesn’t exist. (NB similar to editorial arguments in Turbulence). We should start ‘in the middle’ (D&G).

How can we talk about revolution without talking about heaven on earth? How to ward off re-emergence of capital or state? (capital now = the warding off communism). Can we relate this to the question of durability, even our own stubborn persistence as a group? Emergence of reading groups, self-improvement groups (Bowling Alone thesis). We fit that model better than the model of a political group or an activist group – we have made a conscious attempt to move, rather than cling to Aims & Principles. Free Association is not a fixed point (we move and we’re elastic) but we still serve as an essential reference point for each other (cf deterritorialisation). Does this relate to Badiou’s notion of immanent discipline (Keir will expand on this). How can you have discipline without having firm foundations on which to stand? This isn’t just a problem for us: it’s a massive problem for autonomist politics – how do we act without certainty?

Leeds, London, Rome, Berlin; we shall fight and we shall win.

The problem before us comrades is winning. I’m not telling you to go back to your constituencies and prepare for power rather the Free Association has undertaken to write an article for the new journal Turbulence which takes the slogan “We Are Winning” — famously sprayed on a wall in Seattle during the 1999 WTO protests — and ask, “What, actually, would it mean to win?”

In fact more than just the article, several of us are involved in the editorial team and so are each editing a couple of other articles on the same theme.

Anyway this means we need to start using this blog to help us think through the topic. So here’s some thoughts and links. Firstly there’s an article by our good friend Olivier de Marcellus which interestingly suggests that the cycle of anti-summit protests of the turn of the century and beyond has actually won. Stating that: ”it's a strange but frequent phenomenon - when movements finally win them, they often go unnoticed.” Which leads me to think that perhaps all movements ever get from “winning” is movement. Or perhaps what we get is movement from one problematic to another. Perhaps, at best, ”winning” results in us having new expanded fields of problematics through escaping previous, artificial, limits.

So I suppose what I’m putting forward here is the idea that social movements form around problems. Not in a simple functionalist fashion, as though there is a pre-existent problem that then produces a social movement that, in turn, forces the state or capital to respond which solves the problem. Rather social movements produce their own problematic at the same time as they are formed by them. I think this works in a couple of different ways.

Firstly there has to be a moment of rupture that creates a new problem, one that didn’t fit into the ‘sense’ of contemporary society. Social movements create their own sense, they create their own worlds, they world. That process of worlding is accompanied by an affect which is experienced as close to victory. The “we are winning” of Seattle was a victory full of potential, where the possibilities seem unlimited. "Another world is possible". This is winning in the intensive register.

But the winning of the demands that accompanied the formation of the movement happens at a different time. Demands are met in the realm of extensity and representation, which is enemy territory. It only really charts counter attacks from the movement’s enemies. A counter attack that sets up new constraints and therefore new problematics. This is winning in the extensive register or the realm of representation.

This introduces the need to distinguish the difference between demands and problematics and to clarify the role demands play. Laclau in his book “Populist Reason” sees demands as the foundation of politics but he also sees populism fulfilling that role. Both of these, of course inscribe the state at the centre of politics. The thing is Negri and the basic income advocates also seem to put demands at the centre of politics or as the basis of movements. I think the do see a different role for demands to Laclau but I’m still not sure what that is.

The point, for me, is that problematics move faster than demands because they are based on how a movement acts. So by the time we have victory on the level of demands the movement problematics have moved on. At that time there isn’t an affect of emergence within the movement but a cramped affect struggling for a new moment of emergence or excess.

Another thing to think about here is that the movements problematics change as the movement moves. So the experience and subjectivities created within the movement provoke a movement of problematics. I haven’t put that very well but think about how second wave feminism emerges out of the experience within the new left. This creates expanded problematics that are a remove away from dialectical struggle where the movement and the state dance around each other.

I think you could argue that there is an autonomous tendency to all social movements, or perhaps a tendency towards exodus, which tries to break with the dialectical relationship within which they are initially actualised. We might think here of how social movements are constantly moving to avoid capture by the state and they way we need to continually insert new moments of rupture to escape the twin apparatuses of capture the state deploys. The first way the state captures is through incorporation into the states logic of sense. Here we can think of how the police tried to incorporate the land squatted climate camp into its own logic of legality by offering to be helpful and just wanting to walk around the camp once. However when you are nice and legal you are within their sense not ours and so we can’t possibly refuse constant patrols. A new rupture was forced by the tension between the two logics. Accompanying this machine of incorporation is one of repression. Both strategies force us to move in response to them and these responding moves can sometimes be productive for us and sometimes not. However our moves need to tend towards exodus away from this dual embrace that the state forces on to us. Sometimes this means that social movements need fresh ruptures and new starts

To finish lets go back to the idea of extended problematics. This might even translate to winning on the level of scale needed to think through such unfashionable words as revolution or even liberation. After all we’re not religious we’re anti-capitalists. Even if we could imagine a post-capitalist society we would still need to constantly ward off capital as an apparatus of capture as well as deal with a whole series of new and old problems unrelated to capitalism or at least not articulated through capital. In fact one of the good things about the question “What does it mean to win is that it operates on several levels of scale.