On the move!

For several years now, the Free Association (née Leeds May Day Group) has been writing about movement, and other subjects, in various publications and more recently on our blog. During that period it seems we’ve accumulated quite a few words, on at least two sites. So, to make more room for our expanding output and allow a little consolidation, we’ve decided to do some moving ourselves. We’ve relocated all our stuff (including this blog) to larger, more suitable premises, in a more reputable neighbourhood. We’re still settling in at the moment, unpacking boxes and experimenting with colour schemes, but come and visit us at our new address: freelyassociating.org.

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.

Curiosity vs. fear

It must be at least three months since anyone’s mentioned punk on this blog, so...

I’ve been reading Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s ‘oral history of punk’. This quote from Legs, one of Punk magazine’s founders back in 1975 expresses perfectly several ideas dear to our hearts, to do with the critique of identity politics, the majority/minority/minoritarian distinction and the importance of openness.

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

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

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

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

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

Heiligendamning the G8

Most of the Free Association crew have just returned from Heiligendamm and the counter-mobilisation against the G8 summit and it’s worth jotting down a few thoughts whilst the memories are still fresh. (When I say most of us have returned, I don’t mean some are still on German soil, languishing in some prison cell; just not all of us went in the first place.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, two points here.

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

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

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

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

To affinity and beyond...

As hinted at by Brian I've been wanting to post on the tension between identity politics and politics based on affinity.

In " No Logo ” Naomi Klein (not someone regularly cited here) critiques the identity politics of her college days. She tells a familiar story of fracturing micro-struggles around representation of identities within both institutions and language. And how these were fundamentally outflanked by capital. As she puts it: “The need for greater diversity - the rallying cry of my university years - is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, weren't a threat, they were a gold mine.“ If it’s an identity you’re after then capital is always selling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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