a book launch and talk
8pm Wednesday 18 May
Albert Room, Victoria Hotel
Great George St, Leeds
Facebook event here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=197835556925954#!/event.php?eid=197835556925954
Image from Deterritorial Support Group
After a bit of delay, the Really Open University has set its next Concept Meeting! The topic of the participatory discussion will be ‘The possibilities and limitations of activism in and beyond Web 2.0’
Web 2.0 is a term used to encapsulate internet sites and applications that depend upon user-produced content. This includes a diverse range of sites including facebook, youtube, wikipedia, twitter, wordpress, digg and bittorrent.
These days the internet is pretty hard to ignore. Increasingly our lives are online, we use it to shop, work, plan social events with our friends, read the news, download music, etc, etc. Therefore as the latest development of the internet, Web 2.0 is pretty hard to ignore. Many have done more than simply take part, proclaiming Web 2.0 to be a chance for activists to get their message out quicker and to organise in more fluid and decentralised forms. Proponents often point to the ‘Arab Spring’ where initial protests reportedly were sparked on the blogosphere and twitter, resulting in the government attempting to shut down social networking sites and even the internet all together.
However on the most popular Web 2.0 sites, users (or more rightly as the content producers, workers) face increasing repression. Just two weeks ago over 50 groups, accounts and pages associated with anti-cuts campaigns were taken off facebook. Furthermore, use of facebook and others takes away our anonymity and the Met has just bought technology designed for the US military to help track us using, in part, social networking. Even more troubling is that as the workers (those that produce the product) of Web 2.0, even our activism can be seen to be part of the capitalist machine.
The Really Open University with our facebook page, twitter stream and wordpress site certainly feel we cannot take the lifestylist position of abstaining from corporate Web 2.0. But much is left to discuss. Can we as Web 2.0 workers unite to cease the means of production? In this world, what is the means of production? Are there chances to subvert Web 2.0 to our ends? Is the internet so uncontrollable that it does not matter who owns it? What are the limitations and possibilities for the struggle for transformation in this new age (if it is a new age?)?
6pm, May 24 – Upstairs, Packhorse Pub, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds.
Reading/Viewing list:
http://www.metamute.org/en/content/analysis_without_analysis
http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0
http://sociology-compass.com/2009/01/16/prosumers-of-the-world-unite/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/10/uk-uncut-tax-avoidance-twitter
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25929643/Immaterial-Labour-Biopolitical-Power-and-the-Web-2-0
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/25/twitter-facebook-uprisings-arab-libya
In our second day here in Tunis, the Knowledge Without Borders Tour was plunged into the chaotic but stimulating reality of post-insurrectional Tunisia. While the transitional government and the mainstream media try to give a vision of a pacified political situation, calling for order and normalization, the reality is that there are still many groups calling for the continuation of the revolutionary process. In fact, at 10 a.m. this morning, we took part in a lively protest organized by the Neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution that happened on the now-famed Avenue Bourghiba. After assembling hundreds of people on the steps of the Municipal Theater and chanting slogans calling for the continuation of the revolution against the oppressive transitional government, the Committees were brutally attacked by militia groups armed with clubs and knives and secretly organized by the Minister of the Interior. The repression here is being implemented through the use of unofficial squads of armed citizen in civilian attire who are hired and given free reign in the city squares; this is a strategy of low-intensity warfare similar to those that have been used in Latin America and elsewhere. The result is an unrestrained social violence aimed at creating political tensions without directly implicating the government itself. Arrests and veritable man hunts against activists and young people are continuing, especially against those who come from the countryside and who persist in their protests in Avenue Bourghiba even after the end of the last Casbah. Moreover, various people told us of an activist who was arrested and then raped in the police station. Following this unreasonable violence, the demonstrators reassembled in front of the Ministry of Women and Social Affairs and then did in a sit-in in front of the UGTT, the Tunisian Workers’ Union calling for a general strike to support the continued revolutionary effort. These revolutionary committees, together with young activists, are working for real systemic change where political and economic powers are simply attempting to substitute the positions previously held by the Ben Ali entourage. At the same time, an important demonstration of lawyers and magistrates took place in front of the Ministry of Justice calling for independent justice, freedom of expression and the end of government censorship, as well as the end of political persecution. A mainstream media information black-out has now been implemented, resulting in a real censorship surrounding all protests and demonstrations, with the exception of magistrates. After this morning’s events, our delegation then proceeded to collect materials with various actors still working on the political scene here in the capital. The afternoon was rich in meetings, interviews and organizational encounters working towards a transnational Meeting envisioned for the coming fall here in Tunis. Tomorrow, the delegation from the Knowledge Liberation Front will continue our militant research, deepening our understanding of this complex situation that Tunisian social movements are going through. In collaboration with the many collectives we have already met here, the material transnationalization of Euro-Mediterranean struggles is underway…
Knowledge Without Borders Tour 14 May 2011
This is a brief summary of the Leverhulme Lecture John Holloway gave on the 11th of May at Leeds University. The lecture focussed mainly on the ideas developed in his book, Crack Capitalism. John spoke for over an hour (though it didn’t feel like it!) so this summary will no doubt do some violence to what he said but hopefully others there will correct these brief impressions and perhaps fill in any important gaps I have left. In due course a video will be made available on-line. He structured his talk round a number of key points and this is a set of notes on the ones I can remember and that made a particular impression.
Generally John avoids prescription but there are two things he was adamant about. Our understanding and action has to start from a concept of capitalism and from struggle rather than seeking domination. The two are related.
We look for enemies. We look for who is to blame so we have a target and adversary. We blame the government because they run the State; we blame the corporations, the capitalists, the bankers, or empire, or patriarchy. But all this is to miss the point. Behind all of these is the impersonal system that is capitalism. It is a system that has a life of its own, controlled by nobody, not State institutions and apparatus, not corporations, and not capitalists. Certainly some massively benefit more than others and some have more sway than others but the system that is capital holds all in its strangling embrace. Behind all our bogey men is the totalising (but not totalitarian) impersonal force of capitalism.
So it is necessary to understand what we mean by capitalism as an impersonal system. The key thing here is that it is a system that structures the social relations that make up society. John spent some time on this. We can understand the system fundamentally in terms of the social relations and social cohesion it produces, seen as a triumvirate of equivalences – capital, money, labour. It is this system that engulfs us in a “tsunami of social determinations”. We are obliged to work and live within the money economy to survive. This reduces (or attempts to reduce) our social relationships to monetised relationships and transforms our activity into labour that reproduces the system and provides the engine of capital accumulation. But there are cracks in capitalism that allow us to push against this current and take some opportunities and the responsibility to say “no”, to refuse to fit into the pattern of capitalist social relations. We can engage in different types of doing that are within, against and in some instances beyond capitalist social relations and the spaces we can do this in are everywhere, in many respects quite everyday and ordinary. These possibilities are the result of a fundamental weakness in the capitalist system: it depends on us and our labour to meet its need for accumulation and to reproduce the form of social cohesion the system requires. It is dependent on those it dominates. This is the key to the possibility and actuality of our resistance.
Living in the cracks in social relations and activities that deny and resist the social determinations of capitalism is not the old failed agenda of trying to take control of the state in order to build a new society from the top. It is not a project to seek domination via the State. Resistance and change need to start on the ground by subverting the forms of social relationships that the system depends on. John gave many examples of cracks in capitalism, spaces where literally or metaphorically signs at the edges announce that capitalist social relations are not welcome and do not operate here. He instanced, among others, the Zapatistas, the Really Open University and the students taking the MA in Activism and Social Change at Leeds University he is currently working with. Other excellent examples are the Social Science Centre at Lincoln and the Roundhouse Journal.
The cracks and their forms of relations and activities are fluid and dynamic. To some extent they come and go. But there is evidence of proliferation and confluence.
This, I think, is the gist of John’s argument. The questions from the predominantly student audience were impressive and homed in unerringly on what John himself admitted was a potential weakness in his position. Early on in his lecture John characterised capitalism as a dynamic and developing system driven by the necessity to handle its dependency on labour and its disrupting potentialities. Resistance tends to be neutralised and absorbed, even sometimes commodified and swallowed into the system of capitalist relations. The problem of this feature of the capitalist system seemed to be the context of nearly all the questions. One question was concerned that the many instances of cracks would not necessarily join up and coalesce into a total transformative movement to overcome and replace capitalism. Just as likely would be that they would remain isolated and fail ultimately to be transformative. How would the ‘confluence’ that John alluded to occur? Surely it would need some sort of organised cohesion, some forms of overarching leadership? John’s response was to say that institutions do not work. Inevitably hierarchical and vertical structures and relations develop. Distinctions begin to be made between roles, between part-time and full-time, more or less committed, and so on. Gradually forms of domination and distinction emerge and solidify reproducing in many respects the forms of social relations that were being resisted. But how, if not through organisation and leadership will the confluence of cracks occur? John gave as an example the forms of communication and transition that occurred with the Zapatistas – resonances and echoes created and transmitted through poetry, art, theatre, and forms of non-hierarchical democratic dialogue. No one mentioned the internet at this point, a form of communication that has developed its radical (and to some extent repressive) potential enormously in recent years.
John was asked what his attitude is towards more conventionally ‘reformist’ approaches, for instance the attempt to institute some sort of financial transaction tax to finance welfare measures and/or pay for public services. John’s answer invoked his earlier reference to resistance within, against and beyond. There are different forms of resistance which individuals will be more or less comfortable with. But the bottom-line for him is that capitalism stinks and needs to be completely dismantled. His response echoed that of Slavoj Žižek – of course no one can object to feeding the poor but we should be fundamentally concerned with and focussed on the system that produces and reproduces their poverty. Reformism ultimately supports and reproduces the system of repression and indignity.
One questioner made the powerful point that cracks as characterised are often instrumental for the system. One of John’s examples of a space where relationships and actions do not conform to the pattern of capitalist relations is the family. But historically and still today the family is crucial to the functioning and reproduction of capitalism.
To summarise John’s answers to all the questions, he consistently stated that there are no guarantees, that the possibility of change is uncertain, even that it may be too late. But the hope and potential for change rests in autonomous struggle, not the acquisition of the power and institutions of state. It is the practice, proliferation, propagation and confluence of other ways of doing that resist and subvert the social determination of capitalist relations that we should engage in, promote and nurture.
Taken from: http://terrywassall.org/blogs/capitalism/2011/05/12/john-holloways-crack-capitalism/
Use the comments function is you want to discuss John’s talk/ideas .
By Jon Gaynor, and published in issue 12 for Shift
Peaceful and violent protests
Well, we should have seen it coming. The police, media and protest organisers were talking up the prospect of “violent troublemakers” “hijacking” the TUC march for weeks in advance of March the 26th, and a few smashed windows and paint bombs later, they showed us – in the words on the Daily Telegraph – “Britain’s face of hatred” in all its spectacular glory.
The distinction between “legitimate”, “peaceful” protest on the one hand, and on the other the “violence” of property destruction was used and abused in the aftermath of the demonstration, with Teresa May describing “black shirted thugs” rampaging through the West End, championing the arrest of 146 protesters and outlining further curbs to the right to protest. While the number of arrests was consistently quoted in the media within the context of “violence”, the overwhelming majority (138) of them came from the mass arrest of the peaceful occupants of Fortnum and Mason’s. In fact, only three people were charged with criminal damage, and two with assaulting police officers.
While the mainstream media and police had already set up their distinction between “peaceful” and “violent” protesters well in advance of the day, and made maximum use of it afterwards, this division began to be mirrored in radical circles in the distinction between the peaceful disorder of UK Uncut and the “violence” of the window-breakers. Some UK Uncutters appeared to object at being lumped in with the black bloc, and sought to distance themselves from its actions. Describing their occupation of Fortnum and Mason’s in an article for The Guardian the following day, Alex Pinkerman pointed out that “Balloons and beachballs were the only things being thrown in the air. A basket of chocolates was accidentally knocked over so we picked them up.”
While the binary distinction between “peaceful protesters” and “hooligans” is obviously questionable, there is some mileage in comparing the actions of UK Uncut and the black bloc. Mainly, this is because of the nature of the targets. Some of those of the bloc’s were simply posh shops and other ostentatious displays of wealth, Topshop was smashed because of the Arcadia group’s tax dodging, and the Ritz Hotel is owned by the Barclay brothers, who live offshore their own Island, Brecqhou. Fortnum and Masons, which was occupied by UK Uncut, is owned by Wittington Investments and has its own elaborate tax-dodging schemes.
In this article, we want to look at some of the issues surrounding both forms of protests, and make some suggestions for the direction of the anti-cuts movement.
The promise and limitations of UK Uncut
The UK has seen a wave of high-street demonstrations under the banner of the UK Uncut campaign, many of which have been organised locally following call outs distributed through the internet. The protests have seen a number of stores associated with Tax-Dodging picketed, occupied and flyered in cities and towns up and down the country.
The targets of the campaign have been pretty specific. The most high-profile company to be taken on has been the UK-based telecoms giant Vodafone, which is the most profitable mobile phone operator in the world. Last year veteran investigative magazine Private Eye broke a story on Vodafone’s successful tax-dodging, which had involved setting up a subsidiary company in Luxembourg purely to route profits from the company’s acquisition of Mannesman through a country with a more agreeable tax regime. After a lengthy legal battle, which apparently was going HMRC’s way, the taxman agreed to let Vodafone pay a tax bill of £1.2 billion, rather than the full £6 billion in estimated tax. Vodafone have since dismissed the £6 billion figure as a “urban myth”, despite the fact their accountants projected for it in their own bookkeeping. Understandably, the story produced a groundswell of anger, of which these demonstrations are a product.
Target number two is head of the Arcadia group empire – and author of the Efficiency Review advising the government on how to shape its cuts – Sir Philip Green. Green, who made his fortune on the back of workers in South Asia working 12 hour shifts for poverty wages, took home a paycheque unprecedented in UK history when he paid himself £1.2 billion in 2005. This was paid to his wife, living in the tax-haven of Monaco, so as to avoid tax.
The demonstrations have garnered a good deal of attention from the authorities and the media, both of whom have launched investigations into the “ringleaders” of the protests. On their own, the demos have caused a fair bit of disruption, and brought to light the fact that the same government seeking to impose historic cuts in the standard of living in the UK is also allowing its friends in business to avoid fulfilling their tax obligations, if nothing else shattering the great lie that “we’re all in this together”.
There are evidently positive aspects to the protests, but some of their limitations are immediately striking. Fundamentally, the protests don’t push beyond the logic of social democracy, in fact, playing devil’s advocate one could go further and argue they are compatible with a right-wing populist analysis of the crisis: tax-avoiding multinational companies are sucking money from the country, unlike the hard done-by ‘British taxpayer’, forming another fundamentally alien parasite on the country’s back – add it the list with the EU, immigrants, etc…
Furthermore, the basic logic of the callouts is the need to uphold the rule of law – these companies have a legal obligation to pay their taxes, which they shirk. This much is stated up front by UK Uncut, who, styling themselves as “big society revenue and customs”, state that “if they won’t chase them, we will”. Essentially, the argument as it stands is for the state to live up to its promise and to actually deliver on the idealised face of its material function. The role of the state in capitalism is to underwrite the functioning of the capitalist market. The state is a prerequisite of capitalism in that the ability to guarantee private property rights and therefore the ability to buy and sell requires a legal and judicial system and repressive state body there to make those rights possible. What makes any property yours or mine, but much more importantly what makes the property of the capitalist his, is ultimately the ability of the state to adjudicate and guarantee that he can dispose of his accumulated wealth as he pleases. In practice this means the need to mediate parties and maintain the social fabric in the face of potential unrest – translated into bourgeois ideology in its current, successful iteration as an even-handed regime of “fairness” where we are all taxed, prosecuted, and end up on the receiving end of cuts fairly. Witness every political party attempting to outdo one another by positing the “fairness” of their plans for the economy and attacks on working class living standards in the UK. The state is a subject of criticism because it fails to fulfil its promised role correctly, not because this promised role, along with the toleration of tax avoidance and the regime of austerity all step from its role as a key actor in the continued existence of capitalism.
However, saying this is not to dismiss these protests out of hand or deny they have positive aspects that can be built on, or that there is no space for growth and dialogue. To remain aloof to nascent movements and all the inevitable contradictions real people in the real world bring with them as they become politically engaged is to condemn ourselves to irrelevance.
One positive feature of the demonstrations is the fact that protesters in many cases are willing to create disruption as a tactic. Effective direct action, be it in the form of strike action, demonstrations or occupations, is effective by virtue of its ability to disrupt the normal functioning of society. In a society entirely based on the accumulation of capital, this means the disruption of the economy. Occupations of high-street stores have the capacity to inhibit buying and selling and affect directly the normal working of parts of the economy. If we are to effectively resist these cuts, we will have to recognise that ultimately symbolic protests and petitioning representatives to manage capitalism differently isn’t going to cut it. The rowdier of the UK Uncut protests have involved high-street linchpins like Topshop being effectively shut down and unable to trade. Such disruption needs to take the form of mass action, and links need to be built with shop workers – the vanguardist paradigm of a few activists on an “action” supergluing themselves to things is no basis for a mass movement, and promisingly many UK Uncut activists recognise this fact.
Another positive aspect of the protests – with qualification – is the fact that the line spun by the government, opposition and media on the ultimate inevitability of the cuts agenda is being rejected. Clearly, the “there is no alternative”, “Britain is bankrupt” line on cuts to public services isn’t washing with people, and with good reason – it’s hardly a convincing argument when HMRC is haemorrhaging billions in unpaid tax. This rejection is obviously positive. However, this needs to be qualified. Ultimately, if those on the receiving end of these attacks feel the need to balance the state’s books on capital’s behalf by offering alternate solutions to Britain’s deficit there is a problem. Firstly, because we can question the degree to which public debt is a “problem” for capital anyway, as opposed to an integral part of the functioning of states in today’s world which is neither inherently “good” or “bad”.1 Secondly, the overall subordination of everyday life and our needs to those of the economy needs to be questioned. Many attacks on tax-avoidance take the desirability of a healthy national economy as a given, with tax-dodging companies being seen as at least in part to blame for capitalism’s present difficulties.
Of course, nascent movements are going to be full of contradictions. People don’t develop a perfect analysis (if such a thing exists) overnight, and any mass movement against the cuts that may appear is going to be full of all kinds of illusions in social democracy, the labour party, the petitioning of our representatives, the rule of law and order and so on. There remains the possibility of escalation and radicalisation, that participants in such campaigns can move beyond the initial limitations they have. There are a number of positives to such protests which can be built on without tempering constructive criticism.
“Violent protest”
There are criticisms to be made of black bloc-type actions too, but first it is necessary to question some of the common assertions about these kinds of protests, which inform some of the most common criticisms. One obvious point to make is that the policing of protests, even the “fluffiest” of peaceful demonstrations makes any situation implicitly violent. The role of the police is to exercise the state’s monopoly on violence; under capitalism this means providing the underpinning of commodity exchange and capital accumulation by guaranteeing property rights and containing any social unrest that could pose a threat to capital. In the context of a demonstration, the police’s presence represents ultimately the threat of state violence.
Another obvious point is that property destruction is not violence – violence is the harming of living things, breaking a window is damaging an inanimate object which can be replaced by another. By this reasoning, the overwhelming majority of the black bloc’s actions were nonviolent.
However, there are criticisms to be made of this kind of spectacular protest. One is practical – the risks involved as far as prosecution goes compared to the outcomes are significant. Another is that the black bloc strategy can lend itself to a kind of protest tourism and the separation of political action from our daily lives. There are many activists for whom politics is something they do at the weekends, “actions” unrelated to day-to-day organising and agitation in communities and workplaces, the front line of our exploitation by capital. There isn’t much evidence that this was the case in London, but nonetheless it is a tendency associated with these kinds of actions that must be borne in mind.
Still, the “disorder” was much more captivating for many of the marches participants than both the official rally and its unofficial rivals, such as that organised by the National Shop Steward’s Network, which was a washout. Many demonstrators, admittedly overwhelmingly younger than the majority of the TUC marches participants, were pulled into the unofficial splinter marches and direct action which the black bloc were part of. The author even saw a fair few afternoon drinkers out for a pint before the football getting involved. So much for the elitism of these actions, as was roundly asserted on the internet in the following days.
Moving forward – dialogue, direct action, and mass action
March 26th was inspiring, both in the numbers who turned out to show their opposition to austerity and the willingness of many to break out of the straitjacket of police-“facilitated” protest. But mass demonstrations like it are not going to beat the cuts.
Ultimately, being right isn’t what matters. We can turn out in the hundreds of thousands to make the point that the deficit is a fraction of what it was for decades after the war, that the cuts aren’t necessary, that they are opportunistic, that they are laying the bill for the financial crisis at the feet of those who didn’t cause it, that the government could raise funds by cracking down on tax evasion, by selling the banks it owns, by returning corporate tax levels to somewhere near what they were for most of the postwar period, etc, etc. We’re right, but that isn’t what matters.
What matters is the balance of power between capital on the one side and those it exploits on the others – all those who have to work for a living, will have to work for a living (students) or those who must scrape by on the dole. The government feels confident enough that they won’t face significant resistance that they’re even cutting the pay of the police and prison guards.
So how do we go about building a movement against austerity that can win?
First, by resisting attempts to divide and rule. We have to reject the narrative of “peaceful” protests being hijacked by “extremists”, of property destruction as being inherently “violent”, or of UK Uncut being the legitimate face of direct action as opposed to hooded youths.
Secondly, by taking what is effective from the protests which have emerged so far. Occupying a shop en masse and denying it a day’s trading is an effective way of causing economic disruption for those who are not in a position to go on strike or take other workplace action. This logic can be expanded to carrying out economic blockades, which have been used with success in the past 20 years as part of protest movements in South America and France. Direct action is only meaningful when it is mass action which has an economic impact – it is alienating and counterproductive when it becomes the preserve of activists “doing actions” for their own sake.
Thirdly, by not fetishing “non-violence” – either as unthinking reverence for property even when it belongs to a company like Fortnum and Mason’s, or refusing to defend ourselves in the face of police violence. Peaceful protesters chanted “this is not a riot” and held up their hands as they were brutally kettled and dispersed during the G20 demonstrations in 2009 – it didn’t stop them being beaten by the police.
Jon Gaynor is a member of the Anarchist Federation
Source: http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=435
March 26th saw over half a million people take to the streets of London to protest against the latest regime of austerity, cuts and social reorganisation. This multitude of bodies had no one single (or simple) demand. Their dissent flowed through select channels on the day; three well worn acts of an old play, one that looked tired and failed to evoke much feeling from the audience or the actors on the streets. What comes next is the pressing question, but we need to first look at why the play failed to resonate. What happened on the 26th and why did it leave so many with such an empty feeling?
ACT ONE – THE MARCH
The march on the 26th was significantly larger than had been anticipated when the Trade Union Council (TUC) reluctantly called it last year. The TUC’s complicity with the human rights organisation, Liberty, and the Metropolitan Police around the management of the protests was born of a particular fear – one that may still come to pass. Their fear was (and is) that the mass of bodies on the march would not merely flow smoothly into electoral politics but instead move beyond it into some realm of civil disobedience. They fear that we will move past the existing consensus that organises our lives and become ‘ungovernable’.
In many ways their fear is justified – disobedience is becoming attractive and the impotence of electoral politics (and the bankruptcy of the Labour Party) is patently clear. Since the global downturn began there has been a return of workplace occupations and wildcat strikes in the UK, and a series of uprisings and revolutions around the globe. Their fears were heightened by the militancy of the student protests last year and the actions inspired by groups like UK Uncut as well as the range of disobedient struggles by groups defending libraries, nurseries and other services and spaces.
The sheer scale of numbers involved in the march speaks to the powerful potential for disobedience and resistance. On their own, however, numbers are just one public relations element in the electoral cycle; fodder for headlines, opinion polls, party manifesto promises and back-room deals – much like the Iraq war protests of 2003. Complicity with the police was the only possible response to the not-yet disobedient mass, to contain it and direct it towards acceptable political spaces and ward off any possible contagion from its proximity to more radical forms of politics.
In many ways the moment of fear may have passed, in part because the radical left failed to make the most of the potential on the day. Disobedience is not the preserve of the radical left.
Disobedience and resistance are both continually coming into being throughout society. But the tides of rebellious desire, spontaneous in their eruption, also tend to ebb without channels within which to flow. Spontaneity and organisation have a necessary (if conflictual) relationship – in whatever form they take (gang, collective, union, party, social network, etc) – that is necessary for substantive social transformation ‘from below’. The radical left has an important role to play here; not as leaders but as co-conspirators, comrades organising resistance through their proximity to other potentially rebellious bodies.
The two main co-conspiratorial bodies on the day – UK Uncut and Black bloc – both failed to make something more – more disobedient, more radical, more disruptive – out of the day. UK Uncut because of their organisational and political limits and the Black bloc because of their separatism and misjudged theatre of militancy.
ACT TWO – THE OCCUPATION
Somewhere in the order of 4,000 people headed off from the TUC march towards Oxford St on the 26th. However singular and distinct they were, their actions were largely conditioned by the narrative (political and organisational) of UK Uncut, and a much smaller number as a part of the Black bloc. So while the radical left in general can be said to have fallen short of what was possible, particular attention has to be paid to the two ‘groups’ that demarcated the disobedient space on the day.
After March 26th it is clear that UK Uncut has reached its political and organisational limit. Beyond the critique of the ‘leaderless network’ form adopted by them over the last year, their network on the day failed. By all accounts the dispersed actions were poorly coordinated and left largely to the initiative of individual groups who lacked the means to effectively communicate between themselves. The main occupation on the day was so badly organised that several of the groups, organised by flag colour, were ‘led’ by people who didn’t know where they were going or what the action was.
This lack of organisational capacity speaks to a larger problem. Calling UK Uncut a ‘banner that actions can take place under’, a network that needs no further coordination or leadership of any kind, both mystifies the actual organisational processes that are at play and works to inhibit the development of other forms of coordination. UK Uncut is clearly not leaderless – it is obvious that there are some core personnel narrating the story via ‘owned’ communication channels and by the dominance of their voices both within the network and publicly (manifesting an invisible hierarchy of the most unreconstructed kind). All this is enabled by the rhetoric of a leaderless network. There is no such thing. All structures have spaces, processes or bodies that have more or less access to power than others. The important question is not whether or not there are leaders, but how power is distributed and decisions made.
If the problems with UK Uncut were purely organisational, it would be easy enough to call some form of spokescouncil (as in the days of the anti-globalisation movement), or arrange some form of participatory democracy or delegate structure. We can speculate that perhaps the fact that this hasn’t happened echo’s some of the similarly problematic processes within Climate Camp – a political precursor to UK Uncut. It also points to the urgent need to analyse the NGO-ification of social movements in the UK. But the problems of UK Uncut go beyond organisational forms and into its political content.
Tax avoidance is an easy entry point for many people and it directs outrage towards those that embody a kind of capitalism that is built on theft and dispossession. However, while it might be easy and simply it misdirects people and their outrage in three important ways.
Firstly, it rests on a false assumption – one that moves people back towards the kind of policy-driven politics that the TUC favour. The basic political ‘ask’ (to use the NGO concept that underpins so much of the strategy of UK Uncut) is that if all the tax that large corporations avoided was paid there would be no need for cuts. The problem with this is that the cuts are not necessary per se (i.e. for purely economic reasons, as evidenced by the variety of economic strategies being pursued by other neoliberal governments) – the cuts and restructuring are political and would still be taking place if the tax was paid. Targeting ‘unpaid’ tax reinforces the idea that it is this ‘missing’ money that is the problem and ignores the immediately political nature of the restructuring.
Secondly, targeting tax avoidance as a practice accepts the reduction of politics to economics. Part of the neoliberal project is to reduce politics to a narrowly defined species of economics. Individual responsibility and a belief in the market as a fair mechanism for distribution are both essential to neoliberalism. Fighting the political reordering of society by calling for companies to play fair ‘just like us’ leaves this form of politics intact. What UK Uncut is calling for is mere correction, one brought about by a (very) ‘civil’ disobedience.
Finally, the main actor prefigured in UK Uncut’s actions is the ‘good citizen’ – one who does the right thing, who pays their taxes, participates and above all believes. This wholesome figure, if it ever existed, is certainly fracturing under the weight of the crisis. This is exactly where the outrage and defiance we have seen over the last six months comes from, with the betrayal of the old form of citizenship and aspiration, of the promise of social mobility and the payout on entrepreneurial activity. Using this figure reinvigorates what is now a false constituency and misdirects people’s anger and rage.
What attracts people to the actions of UK Uncut is something that many seem to instinctively grasp as appropriate to the moment – the occupation. The occupation as an idea has been bubbling up through the imaginary within the UK – from Climate Camp to the numerous workplace occupations that have taken place over the last three years, as well as examples from Greece to France and Tunisia to Egypt. Occupation has a strong grip on our imagination of disobedience. It is this that we should take from UK Uncut – people recognise it as an appropriate tactic for this moment and one that speaks to our reappropriation of time and space.
INTERMISSION
The terrain of the 26th was marked out by two different forms of protest that both led back to existing political forms of expression, both aimed at reform and both ultimately correlated to a reduced constituency. What we saw was a mass of bodies from a range of networks, organisations, groups and tendencies take part in these two spaces. While the potential existed within this disparate multitude to go beyond the limits of the TUC march and the UK Uncut spectacular occupation, on the day this did not manifest itself. Hope lies with some of the actions and forms that emerged before the 26th – such as the university occupations, the local anti-cuts actions and town hall ‘riots’, the various service actions and campaigns around childcare and the NHS.
This hope requires that people quickly recover from the fact that while most organisations were building for the TUC march or actions on the 26th, few had any plans for what comes next. Despite a vast amount of the radical left proclaiming otherwise, the latest neoliberal restructuring of our lives is not a re-run of the Poll Tax. It is in fact completely different. Our parallel is not with the Poll Tax but with the Structural Adjustment Programs that until 2008 have been taking place in the global South. We need to look to the forms of resistance in South Africa, Mexico, Argentina and elsewhere, and not to the much-reified Poll Tax resistance and riot.
ACT THREE – THE BLACK BLOC
According to those that took part on the day, at their height the Black bloc numbered around 500. While the boundaries between the Black bloc and the remaining mass involved in civil disobedience were not absolutely distinct, the Black bloc was a clearly demarcated form on the day, and needs to be analysed as such. Especially, it marked itself out as the militant anti-capitalist body above all others.
The Black bloc as a form came into its own during the anti-globalisation movement. Its purpose was to form a visible anarchist body that engages in property damage against specific targets that embody capitalism. It was, ten years ago, an attempt to engage in a form of militant theatre that broke with the non-violence mantra of other protesters and to bring into the movement a form of class analysis that was perceived to be lacking.
On March 26th, as an alternative to both the TUC march and the UK Uncut inspired actions, the Black bloc’s propaganda of the deed had two implicit aims: to deepen and generalise the militancy on the streets and draw attention to a critique of capitalism through its choice of targets. The Black bloc failed on both points.
The Black bloc does not represent militancy – this isn’t, but should be, obvious. Reviewing the various analysis and conversations surrounding the events of the 26th, it would seem that this is the perspective of many on the bloc. There were 4,000 people actively engaged in radical disobedience on the day and 500 on the bloc at its peak.
The majority of the militants who have come out of the various protests over the last six months, many of whom engaged in property damage, chose not to join the Black bloc. This does not mean that they were any less militant for it. Militancy cannot be reduced to property damage, nor is property damage the most militant form of protest. As the history of Black struggles in the USA teaches us, sometimes taking a seat in the ‘wrong’ place can be the most militant action of all. Militancy has become generalised, and with 4,000 militant bodies in the streets, what was the point of the Black bloc as a separate entity? As a piece of militant and aggressive theatre it wasn’t needed to maintain visible antagonism on March 26th, or to develop the existing militancy out there on the streets. Nor did it generate ‘more’ militancy in the same way the Millbank riot in November 2010 did. Why?
Millbank was a mass action – it wasn’t a self-defined group that smashed its way into the Tory HQ but a huge section of the demonstration. Its character as such made it resonate – it was open and undefined. The protests that followed had similar characteristics: huge sections of the crowd were involved in fighting the cops during December, for example. This open and undefined nature created spaces where bodies came together to find a common need for militancy. It was this free-for-all nature that generalised militancy; the open relationships in struggle without pre-definition beyond a shared anger and rage. And it is the closing down of this space that was the ultimate achievement of the Black bloc on the day.
By failing to do something that took things further that others could join without losing their own political identities, or by refusing to act as just a part of the larger mass, the Black bloc actively separated itself from the remaining militant bodies and ruptured this openness.
This exclusivity meant that the imagery of the Black bloc in action struck no chord in its audience. All they saw was empty theatre – what they were expecting from ‘the anarchists’. Symbolic actions, including attacking banks, can be vital moments in a rebellion. But the power of these actions comes from their resonance – people must feel the moment and realise what lies at the heart of that feeling. But what they saw was a group of bodies alien to them, apart, engaged in actions they could not be involved in or identify with because they were not the Black bloc. The Black bloc ultimately marks out a territory – we are the militants, taking the battle to the state and capital, and you are not – that fractures the potential for mass insurrection. There are times this alienness can serve to excite the imagination, but when it is but a small part of a larger militant mass, it has the opposite effect and undermines its own reason for being.
FINALE
The frustration with the 26th is born of the potential to move through those limits that currently define our resistance. A potential that was not fulfilled for a transgression that somehow didn’t come to pass.
It is clear that the politics of the TUC and the old electoral left are long past being able to serve even reformist ends. It is less clear what emerges beyond the politics of UK Uncut and the Black bloc. What was surprising was the lack of visible presence from the other main character on the stage in the lead up to the 26th – the students as a singular body. After all it is this body that made many think something more was possible. As individual occupations and groups they were there, but somehow their presence was not felt, not as a moment of rupture. Perhaps it was impossible that they could provide this moment on the day. Perhaps something else was needed. Or, perhaps, the day was made for something more subtle and quiet – a series of subtexts and whispers that ran between the lines and acts of the play.
We haven’t really begun to explore what militancy could mean – we don’t really know what is possible anymore. We need to move out of our old roles and habits, and find new ways to inspire resistance and revolt and make both endure. The day could have been, and should have been, a space to explore what this could be. But we lack, as a radical left, the places for these conversations and seductions to happen. After the 26th it’s become painfully clear that we need forms of organisation to carry this militancy further. If militant organisation has any meaning, it is in this – to inspire revolt and make it endure beyond the moment of insurrection and riot.
Nic Beuret is currently a member of The Paper collective and was on the buggy bloc with his daughter on March 26 (while his partner caused havoc in the city). He has variously been involved in a successful community nursery campaign in Hackney, resisting job losses as a shop steward in his workplace, local anti-cuts campaigning and No Borders activism in Australia over recent years.
Source: http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=433
Statement from occupiers:
Peaceful occupation evicted by Police midnight raid
The entirely peaceful student occupation of the Graduate Centre on the Holloway Road was raided tonight by 16 thugs, including private security guards, 10 bailiffs, 4 police officers and only ONE London Met Security guard, John Hunt.
They forced entry to deliver a high court injunction at about 11.55pm, which was ordered against 5 named individuals and Persons Unknown. It required the defendants to cease their current trespass, or they would be in breach of court and “could be arrested or imprisoned”.
This was massively initmidating and directly victimises students who face transfer to other universities as a result of the cuts. Students were only given 10 minutes to read the order and to leave the premises. The management had got the police involved to intimidate the students and threaten them with arrest, despite this being a civil matter and should not even be on site. The police told the student to “pack up and go” or be arrested.
The students had no time to prepare their defence, read the paperwork OR call lawyers. This is a disgrace and shows Malcolm Gillies (VC) is just as much of a thug as the sexist and racist individuals he has placed inside and outside the occupation, at an alleged cost of £35,000.
The eviction came as a surprise, as Malcolm Gillies had agreed to meet the students tomorrow morning at 9.30am to begin a dialogue about their futures. Clearly this was all false information and proves that his view of ‘consultation’ is that it is worthless. Tonight’s events illustrate how Gillies continues to cowardly refuse to communicate, even though his plans will devastate hundreds of lives.
Worried that they were about to be arrested, the students decided to leave the occupation peacefully, and now face having to find their ways home when public transport is closed.
The fight for our futures is now hanging in the balance. Please join us for a mass lobby of the Board of Governors on Wednesday at 4.30pm in Moorgate, to make a public protest to save London Met, and call for the resignation of Malcolm Gillies. This is disgraceful behaviour and such actions by Management should not be acceptable in a University environment.
Source: http://wearelondonmet.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/peaceful-occupation-evicted-by-police-midnight-raid/
On May 4th, 2011 with 70% cuts London Met students occupied the Graduate centre on Holloway road. They are calling for national demonstration to support them.
Statement
A certain area of the Tower Building in Holloway Road is being currently occupied by students in protest against Vice- Chancellor Malcolm Gillies’ decision to axe 70% of courses- including Performing Arts, Philosophy and History.
Gillies’ decision came as a shock a couple of weeks ago. None of the university teaching staff was consulted about the cuts. A majority of the excellent, dedicated tutors are under imminent threat of losing their jobs.
Students already enrolled on the courses face an uncertain future. There have been rumours about transfers to other universities with which WE DO NOT AGREE.
This statement is our call for help to save our university, our future and our dreams: to keep London Metropolitan University open to everyone, regardless of their social class, wealth and chosen subject of study. The purpose of this occupation is to present the Vice-Chancellor with our demands
Demands
- Meeting with Vice- Chancellor
- Transparent process and direct communication
- University management goes back to HEFCE to renegotiate repayment terms
- Vice- Chancellor to accept proposals put forward by staff in HALE
- University retracts decision of cuts of ALL courses
- Students on existing courses which are being deleted, WILL NOT BE TRANSFERRED.
- Free access IN and OUT of the Occupation
- No student is victimized following action taken to occupy the space.
Today (May 4th) at 2 p.m., French riot police – under orders from the socialist government of the City of Paris – raided the occupation in 51 Avenue Simone Bolivar, Paris where Tunisian migrants and activist had been staying for the last 62 hours. Using batons, riot shields and helicopter surveillance, the police first beat and chased hundreds of activists who were blocking the entrance.
After establishing a perimeter around the building, isolating the occupants still inside, the police then broke down the door and proceeded to raid it. Tunisian migrants and activists were drug out of the building and loaded into police vans to be taken to the Commissariats of the 18th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements of Paris.
Outside, activists managed to regroup in front of the building, chanting slogans and attempting to impede the arrest of the occupants. The police then attacked the crowd, again beating protestors and pushing them back into a nearby park. While the battle outside continued, the police proceeded to load the occupants into vans and take them away.
As a result of the activists’ resistance outside, 20 were arrested, adding to the 128 Tunisian occupants that are now in custody.
Groups of activists are now gathering in front of the Commissariats of Paris demanding the immediate release of all the occupants. An emergency meeting has been called for this afternoon at 5 p.m. at the Coordination des Intermittents et Précairs.
The Knowledge Liberation Front hereby denounces this military response to a political question. The true face of the French government’s “solidarity” for the Tunisian revolution has been shown today. While the political left claims to support democratic movements in Tunisia, at home they beat and arrest Tunisian migrants and their supporters.
Source: http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/the-city-of-paris-evicts-the-tunisian-occupation/
PUBLIC LEVERHULME LECTURE: “Crack Capitalism”
By Prof John Holloway,
University of Puebla (Mexico) and
Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the School of Geography (University of Leeds)
11th of May 2011, 5.30pm
Geography Lecture Theatre
(refreshments at the end of the lecture)
*OPEN TO EVERYONE*
The lecture will be video recorded and published on our website for everyone to share
Capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity.
It encloses us in a dynamic of destruction and death.
Is there any way that we can break that dynamic?
John’s lecture will be based in his recently published book “Crack Capitalism” published by Pluto Press and whish is already being translated into 9 languages. John is an international renowned expert on autonomist Marxist theory and the author amongst others of: Zapatista! Rethinking Revolution in Mexico (1998), Open Marxism: Emancipating Marx (1995), and Change the world without taking power (2002), all of which have significantly influenced thinking around social movements particularly in Latin America.
This is part of a Leverhulme Lecture series by prof John Holloway which will continue in November 2011. For more information about Prof Holloway’s visit see here or contact s.gonzalez@leeds.ac.uk
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Really Open University 