I was asked to speak at the launch of the Leeds for Change website about some of the thinking behind our involvement in it (as Together for Peace).Much of what follows is lifted (with permission!) from a friend’s thesis on activism and social movements.
The space of flows
Leeds for Change is about supporting and linking action towards justice, equality and solidarity. This inevitably means struggle against the powers-that-be preventing the realisation of this good and self-evident trinity, but this isn’t as easy or as obvious as it maybe once was. Manuel Castells in ‘The Rise of the Networked Society’ (2000) says power is no longer concentrated in institutions (such as the state), organisations (such as capitalist firms), or symbolic controllers (such as corporate media, churches, etc). It is diffused in global networks of wealth, power, information and images which circulate and transmute in a system of variable geometry and dematerialised geography.
Small pieces loosely joined
So what is the nature of activism and social movement that can effectively take up this struggle? I’m new to the writing of John Holloway and love how he answers this conundrum. In ‘Crack Capitalism’ he speaks of ‘assuming our own responsibilities, re-appropriating our own lives, pushing aside the capital that is the constant expropriation not just of our products but of our doing and thinking and deciding and living’… ‘Fight from the particular, fight from where we are, here and now. Create spaces and moments of otherness, spaces and moments that walk in the opposite direction, that do not fit in. Make holes in our own reiterative creating of capitalism. Create cracks and let them expand, let them multiply, let them resonate, let them flow together.’ This flowing together is both enabled by and influenced by a new consciousness arising from the nature of the worldwideweb. David Weinberger’s theory of the internet is ‘small pieces loosely joined’ in which the internet is not just virtual – it connects to and fundamentally affects society, by both pulling and tearing. The bar is set high for Leeds for Change!
The tyranny of the Right Answer
Holloway continues: ‘The admission that we do not know is both a principle of knowledge and a principle of organisation that aims at the participation of all in the process of determining our individual and collective doing. Knowing would lead to a different organisational structure, a structure of monologue with established leaders and institutions to hold them in place. We do not know, and yet there is a growing desperation: what do we do? How do we stop creating capitalism? How do we change the world? How do we stop this horrific destruction that surrounds us? There is no Right Answer, just millions of experiments. There is no single correct answer to the desperate (and time-honoured) question of what is to be done. Perhaps the best answer that can be given is: ‘Think for yourself and yourselves, use your imagination, follow your inclinations and do whatever you consider necessary or enjoyable, always with the motto of against-and-beyond capital.’ For some, this will mean throwing themselves into the preparations for the next anti-G8 summit. For others, it will mean trying to open up perspectives of at different world for the children they teach in school. Others will join with their neighbours to create a community garden, or take part in the activities of the nearby social centre. Some will dedicate all their energies to organising opposition to the extension of a motorway that threatens the livelihood of thousands of peasants, some will devote themselves to permaculture or creating free software, others will just play with their children and friends, or write a book on how to change the world. All of these are cries of hope, projections towards a different way of living, attempts to do something better with our lives than creating capitalism. They may not all have an equal impact, but fortunately we have no standard by which to measure them. Who is to say that forming part of the so-called Black Block in an anti-G8 summit is more or less effective a means of struggle than creating a garden as a means of fighting against the massacre by humans of other forms of life? There is no single correct answer, but this does not mean that all these struggles are atomised. There is a resonance between them, a mutual recognition as being part of a moving againstand-beyond, a constant sharing of ideas and information. The No shared by the many Yeses is a practical connection, the constant weaving of a We, the shaping of a common flow of doing and rebellion. This shared resonance does not mean that we all agree: on the contrary, disagreement and discussion are crucial in the formation of the resonating We. There is no purity here: we try to overcome the contradictions, we rebel against our own complicity, we try in every way to stop making capitalism, we try to direct the flow of our lives as effectively as possible towards the creation of a society based on dignity. We are part of the social flow of rebellion, and in this flow there is no room for rigidities and hard lines. The concepts of correctness and betrayal, its complement that is so rooted in the culture of the left, are obstacles to the flow of rebellion. To create rigidities and dogmas and ‘we do not talk to them because they are reformists’ and ‘we will have nothing to do with them because they drink coca cola’ and ‘we will not cooperate with them because they are sectarian’, is to take an active part in the freezing of the flow of rebellion, to reproduce the definitions and classifications and fetishes of capitalist thought.
Under our noses
And, finally from John Holloway, ‘…the issue is not to bring revolutionary consciousness to the masses, but to develop the sensitivity to recognise the revolts that exist everywhere, and to find ways of touching them, resonating with them, drawing them out, ways of participating in the thawing and confluence of that which is frozen.’
And, finally from me…If Castells is right about power being diffused in global networks in a system of variable geometry and dematerialised geography, why should we be thinking at city level at all? Leeds’ very own Zygmunt Bauman also sees power having evaporated away from the nation state. To face this challenge would require the restoration of the commensurability of power and politics – at global level to be sure, but also (and perhaps more realistically and hopefully) at the level of the city in all its particularity.
Mike Love
T4P
23.5.2015