Dark matter and the social factory

I know I’m a bit late with this (I’ve been searching for the missing mass of the universe) but I stumbled across an interesting snippet about the response to Tony Wilson’s death. Apparently someone went down to Whitworth Street and chucked a load of yellow and black paint over the posh flats where the Hacienda used to stand. OK, it’s not big, and it’s not clever but it makes a lot more sense than some of the shite that I’ve come across.

As ever it’s more interesting to pan out a little and look at the wider context. Here’s something we wrote last year:

Let’s look at the refrain of the ‘entrepreneur’. For the left this is a dirty word, and with good reason: it conjures up images of Richard Branson, of creativity channelled into money-making. But it also contains a certain dynamism, an air of initiative, in fact an imaginary of a kind of activist attitude to life. Indeed we might be putting on free parties, gigs, or film showings, rather than launching perfumes, but we still act in ways somewhat similar to entrepreneurs: we organise events and try to focus social cooperation and attention on certain points. We’re always looking for areas where innovation might arise. The DIY culture of punk is a great example of how a moment of excess caused a massive explosion of creativity and social wealth. There is a difference in perspective though. A capitalist entrepreneur is looking for potential moments of excess in order to enclose it, to privatise it, and ultimately feed off it. Our angle is to keep it open, in order to let others in, and to find out how it might resonate with others and hurl us into other worlds and ways of being.

Seems a pretty accurate description of Tony Wilson. He was never too bothered about being correct; he was interested in making things happen. Or rather, he was interested in making conditions for the creation of new truths. In that sense he didn’t exist outside of his context (and over the last few years his pronouncements had started to sound more and more twattish – independence for the North West!?! – precisely because they weren’t resonating in the same way they once had). And I think there might be a connection here to ideas we’ve been tossing about on affinity and identity.

Crudely put, identity politics tends to operate on the basis of changing a world, which is ‘out there’, without any impact on ourselves. It suggests that battles are lost and won by shuffling pieces on a chess board: ‘OK, we need to link up with organised workers here, build a coalition with feminists from the global South here, and then maybe move in a gay and lesbian battalion here. But that still leaves our left flank exposed to counter-attack by native struggles here…’

From this perspective, Tony Wilson was a pain in the arse, a loose cannon, someone who got up everyone’s nose. But if we think about affinity, then there’s a little more method in his madness. It’s less about ideology or fixed categories, and more about shared affect. People moving together. Of course it’s messy and inchoate (this is dark matter, and dark energy after all), and for every ‘success’ there are a dozen fuck-ups. But each success itself only creates further openings, further problematics. So it goes… This is how it was with punk. Which is why the least interesting thing about punk was the squabbles between ‘first’ and ‘second’ generation punks: once punk hit the headlines, any attempt to restrict it to those in the know was doomed to failure. The tension between punk-as-hip-minority and punk-as-mass-movement was just that, a tension rather than a divide. There was the same tension in the Madchester scene, with the usual scramble to claim authenticity. And it also relates to the tension between audience and public. The audience are the paying punters, but at some stages they can become the public who are inextricably part of the performance. Think Woodstock or Spike Island…

Once the public/audience/performer thing breaks down, who knows what can happen… I’ve just finished reading a book which tries to link today’s globalisation struggles to the working class battles which raged over the past two centuries. It’s more micro-level reportage than analysis, but I came across two fantastic passages which are worth noting.The first relates to the wave of factory occupations in France in 1936 (emphasis added):

Contagion, imitation, certainly played a decisive role in a large number of cases. The very novelty of the undertaking was a source of attraction – with its creation of a whole new set of situations – the feeling of escape from the routine of everyday life, the breaking down of the barrier between private lives and the world of work, the transformation of the workplace into a place of residence, fulfilment of the desire for action, of the need to ‘do something’ at a time when everyone felt that important changes were coming. All these elements played a part in the spread of the occupations and helped to account for participants’ universal enthusiasm and cheerfulness.

And here’s an account of the end of a sit-in in Flint, Michigan in 1937:

As the exhilaration of our first union victory wore off, the gang was occupied with thoughts of leaving the silent factory… One found himself wondering what home life would be like again. Nothing that happened before the strike began seemed to register in the mind any more. It is as if time itself started with this strike. What will it be like to go home and to come back tomorrow with motors running and the long-silenced machines roaring again? But that is for the future… Now the door is opening.

Open with Tony Wilson. Close with factory. Exit stage left.

All at C: climate change, crisis, catastrophe, capital, class, commons, communism…

These are some notes/a rough draft for an op-ed piece we thought the Guardian might publish to coincide with climate camp. As it turned out, the Guardian lost interest. In Keir’s words: “It didn’t fit the narrative the media were building up on the climate camp which had a ridiculous amount of publicity when BAA tried to take out an injunction against Prince Charles amongst others. And also the story got too big, the press were only interested in their old reliable liberals (Mombiot) or new Swampys (Joss from Plane Stupid) who are, of course, also liberals.”

Capital likes a good crisis. Crisis provides it with an opportunity to restructure, to sweep away existing barriers to its expansion and to realise new profits. An opportunigy to re-order social life according to its own logic of profit and waged labour, money and markets, to produce and reproduce hierarchies. In the words of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism develops through “waves of creative destruction”.

Global warming is such a crisis. Let’s have no doubt: the threat of climate change is as real as it is terrifying. But climate change is not a threat facing all of humanity. The problem for capital is one of security of the state and security of investment – always top of the agenda at any high level leaders’ summit whether the context is Africa or global warming. The problem for the rest of us is different. We are more concerned about things like the security of our drinking water supply as rising flood waters threaten the security of our homes.

It’s become common to compare the climate crisis to Britain “at war” and to invoke the “Blitz spirit” to describe our apparently all-in-it-together situation. This war analogy is more apt than commentators imagine. While millions lost their lives in two world wars, the few invested and made millions, both in financing the wars and in post-war reconstruction. In fact just as each year we continue to remember the dead, the British government continue to pay dividends on war bonds issued a century ago. War is always a catastrophe for humanity. For capital it’s not only a profit-making opportunity but an opportunity to extend its logic. Just think of Iraq.

Global warming will only reinforce existing hierarchies. The world’s poor are more likely to live in areas at risk from flooding or drought, or both. or even to live in areas at risk of total submersion or desertification. Poor people are less likely to have insurance or the ability to migrate. With so many millions already lacking access to adequate food or healthcare, or the means to live in the catchment area of a good school, climate change will strengthen these inequalities and for many increase the precariousness of existence.

But climate change is a double whammy for the vast majority of the world’s population. For not only are we more likely to suffer from its effects, we will also suffer more from capital’s solutions to the problem. Carbon trading is, in effect, a privatisation or enclosure of the atmospheric commons with a market mechanism used to limit emissions. It’s the mobility of the poor which will be constrained. Travel will once again become the preserve of the rich.

And here’s the rub. As our lives become more precarious, and as travel and other goods and services become luxuries, we will be forced to work harder, and this is really what’s in it for capital. Because capitalism is a mode of production which organises life through work. We mostly work 35-40 hours a week for most of the year for most of our adult lives. So of course we must organise our lives around that work. Capitalist value is created through work, through waged labour. But capitalist value is not the same as wealth, and sometimes the two stand in direct opposition. A good example of this is those mega-dam projects which destroy the livelihoods of thousands (destruction of wealth) in order to power the factories in some export-processing zone (creation of capitalist value). Certainly any link between increased value and increased wealth is tenuous. Victoria Beckham is only an absurd instance of this. With the almost immeasurable growth in productivity since the Industrial Revolution, we could easily satisfy all our most basic needs and much more, by working just a few hours each week. And so to keep us setting the alarm for seven every morning, capital produces scarcity. Marketing and brands. Built-in obsolescence. Intellectual property rights which may actually hinder the development of new drugs and software besides denying them to those who can’t afford to pay. In extreme circumstances it imposes scarcity through the physical destruction of war. And it will try to impose scarcity through climate crisis.

But a crisis is not only an opportunity, it’s a threat too. Capitalist solutions to climate change are not the only solutions. In fact capital itself is the source of the problem. Waged labour, and all that goes with it, pollutes. All the business flights, the miles we commute daily, the energy used to heat and light all those office blocks and out-of-town shopping centres. Why don’t we convert them into houses, instead of developing greenbelt or yet more flood plains? If we only worked six months in the year, or four or three – and it’s entirely possible - imagine what else we could do. No need to easyjet to Malaga or Prague. Who’d worry about taking a day to travel across Europe if we could stay for a month?



So, what are we gonna do now? The problem is capital and capitalist work and we need to recognise that. Climate change activists – and I include here the thousands of scientists who’ve been forcing the issue – have been successful in raising awareness, forcing the issue into the mainstream. And since the Stern Report, the various IPCC reports, etc., the issue has become mainstream. But the movement hasn’t moved. Now we need to construct a clear antagonism, to identify capital as the enemy. But this leaves us with at least two problems.

First, yes, we have to destroy capital. But we no longer have the luxury of time. With the climate “tipping point” possibly little more than a decade away, we can’t afford to patient. Kay and Harry make this point in “The end of the world as we know it”. And somewhere or other John Holloway has also attacked the orthodox Left’s “be patient” exhortations.

Second, if we are guided by an anti-capitalist ethic, then we must treat all market-based “solutions” with extreme scepticism, if not outright opposition. In fact we may have to consider adopting some apparently paradoxical positions, such as opposing congestion charging or new taxes on aviation (I admit, this makes me uncomfortable), as these will limit our autonomy and reinforce existing hierarchies. An alliance with Jeremy Clarkson? Opposing airport expansion or new road building is different, as this “rations” in a different way.

And that’s where I’ll leave it…

Are We Not Men? We Are Dada.

Ok, seeing as we’re posting quotes about punk this one from “Rip It Up and Start Again” needs flagging up and reflecting on:

“Devo had been hippies, of a sort. Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, the group's conceptual core, were among the anti-war students protesting at Kent State University, Ohio, on 4 May 1970 when the National Guard opened fire. Two of the four slain students - Alison Krauss and Jeffrey Miller - were friends of Casale. 'They were just really smart liberal kids, eighteen and nineteen, doing what we all did back then,' he says. 'They weren't crazy sociopaths.' He recalls the dazed, slow-motion sensation when the guns started firing, 'like being in a car accident'; the blood streaming down the sidewalk; the eerie sound of moaning from the crowd, 'like a kennel of hurt puppies'. At first, even the National Guard was frozen, freaked out. Then they marched us off campus and the university was shut down for three months.' That date in May 1970 is one of several contenders for 'the day the sixties died'. 'For me, it was the turning point,' says Casale bitterly. Suddenly I saw it all clearly: all these kids with their idealism, it was very naive.' Participants in SDS - Students for a Democratic Society - like Casale reached a crossroads. 'After Kent, it seemed like you could either join a guerrilla group like The Weather Underground, actually try assassinating some of these evil people, the way they'd murdered anybody in the sixties who'd tried to make a difference. Or you could just make some kind of whacked-out creative Dada art response. Which is what Devo did.'”

Of course this is great for several reasons. Firstly, as we’ve argued before punk's a continuation of hippie. In fact it was both a reaction to hippie's failed revolution and its renewal.

Secondly, it helps us to reflect on the relation between excess and exception by bringing up Kent State again. We have to remember that Dada was a reaction to the horrors of WW1. Is the resort to Dada a retreat into art caused by the closure of the space for politics or is it best to see it as a sidestepping of a problematic that had become saturated by the states excessive violence. Punk as well as Dada ultimately reopened the space for politics, at least for a time.












A word of warning, you can't keep that space open for ever you know.