For the last few weeks I’ve been caught up in the idea of fugitive planning. In their book The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney talk about “an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of positions… embodied notation, study, score”, which is “practiced on and over the edge of politics, beneath its ground.” The quick melody of these words has haunted me since the election, and this is, undoubtedly, because it rhymes so tightly with what I have been seeing around me. The events of May seem to have released a quiet wave of conversation, a new, gently building movement of talking to make plans, and of planning to escape the unbearable future the new government appears to promise.

But this is also planning as an excuse to escape a more than unbearable present. We call ourselves together so that we may sit in the warm darkness that collects in the back of pubs, and so that we may be there amongst the people who make us feel less alone, less scared, less helpless. Yet no matter how much we feel it, we always sense the need to deny it. No, we say, we didn’t come to be amongst one another, but to produce; we point proudly to our fulfilled agenda, highlight our action points, bask in the sense of accomplishment that comes from the setting of new things to accomplish.

This denial is a symptom of the poisoned bodies we make our politics with; bodies envenomed by the workerism and the heteronormative masculinity that turns us against care, no matter how much we may secretly crave its embrace. Marx said that “tradition weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”, but it is far more of a poisoning than a bad dream. The rhythms, modes and movements of work and patriarchy cannot be overthrown by some momentary awakening; their potency is a virtue of their piercing pervasiveness. Like toxins they hide within us, and from us seep into our spaces. It is this poison which eats our organising from within, but also this which attacks it from without. When Owen Jones spits bile about “leftwing meetings serving as group therapy” it is this poisoning that moves him. The sad truth is that he has become so used to the toxins of work and machismo that an antidote to them makes him sick.

I haven’t got all that much to say about praxis, I will leave that to others far more incisive and clear-sighted than myself. Instead I am interested in the strategies and tactics already diffuse within the reproduction of antagonistic life.  By antagonistic life I mean the living of all those for whom daily survival is synonymous with struggle. Here I am, as I think we all are, forever indebted to Silvia Federici, whose work so acutely identifies “the destruction of our means of subsistence [reproduction]” as being fundamental to the oppressions we experience. The agents of this destruction take a multitude of forms; they can be the racist on our bus, the sexist on our street, the transphobe in our bathroom, the landlord at our door. They are police brutality as much as they are poor pay, they are ill health as much as they are ill will.

The only real way to survive these things is to plan, and that is what most of us do. We go out with friends that we know will have our backs, that will bash back, that won’t take that, and then we go home and take the pills a comrogue had leftover. We huddle close behind our mates to slip through the barriers, we drop the kids with our parents and do the washing at our neighbours. We plan, we organise, and we do so every day, without ever pausing for long enough to call it politics. We have our own practices, our own thinking, our own “embodied notation, study, score.” Fugitive planning is always already a fact of our lives.

What concerns me is the reproduction of this planning, which is also, of course, the reproduction of the antagonistic life which begets it. It feels like surviving is often trying to find something worth surviving for, and if this is true of how we survive it should also be true of how we organise. Thus we come to two affects I feel are essential to the reproduction of our lives: ecstasy and warmth.

The ecstatic is the moment of transcendental intensity; it’s in clubs and gigs when you are lost in the crowd and the music. It’s that feeling when you’re not quite sure where you are, but the reason you go out is to get back there. It’s those moments of ecstasy which help us endure the tearing tedium of survival; they are so precious to us because they offer some release, some escape, however fleeting. This is, I guess, the essence of living for the weekend. Saturday Night Fever is a film about the ecstatic. Can we think of a better avatar of this affect then Tony Manero? “Fuck the future” he says to his boss, “tonight is the future, and I am planning for it!”

Football is also a game about the production of ecstasy. It’s a theatre that writes itself, and that, at its best, always writes towards moments of utter excitement. There has been much talk of late about Clapton FC; a football club where a group of fans called the “Clapton Ultras” have gained a reputation for the inclusive and radical crowd they create on the terrace. Many people have focused on the songs the crowd sings or the flags the crowd waves, but this all misses the point – the most important thing is the crowd itself. Indeed to be more specific what really matters is that which the crowd is consciously producing – the potential for ecstasy. I will never forget the moment James Briggs scored an implausible free kick in Clapton’s cup final against Barking. The feeling was indescribable, but ecstasy is the word that comes closest to doing it justice; a joy multiplied a thousand times by its communising in the crowd. What makes Clapton special is that this feeling can be enjoyed by those excluded from other football grounds, be it by the bigotry of the crowds inside them or the cost of the tickets you need to even experience that. My point is this; that the taste of the ecstatic need not be limited to those straight white men wealthy enough to buy season tickets for Premier League clubs.

We cannot, however, survive on excitement alone. The ecstatic is only potent when it is surrounded by this other, crucial, affect: warmth. It’s hard to find another word for what I mean by warmth, for it is really a composite of many feelings: safety, closeness, comfort, ease, rest. I suppose warmth is being released from custody to find your friends waiting, but it’s also watching a film in quiet company. Warmth is what makes our struggles bearable, it softens the edges of our anger and our pain and stops them from cutting us up. You tell your friends you have nightmares about cops and they listen to you, tell you that they have them too. It doesn’t make the nightmares go away of course, it never does, but it weakens the shadows they cast on your day.

As I said at the beginning, the potential for warmth resides in many of the meetings we already have. What is needed is to stop fighting its existence. Instead we should embrace the inherent warmth of true collectivity; ask one another about our lives, offer aid where we can, push the contours of our struggles beyond the narrow borders of the “political”. We should not be afraid to linger after the agenda is finished, nor to take pleasure in the simple fact of being there, amongst comrogues, amongst friends.

Perhaps we can imagine communism as the elucidation of this warmth and ecstasy, as their emergence from the exceptional into the everyday. Communisation then appears to us as the conscious attempt to create spaces and collectivities conducive to the production of these affects. Our fugitive planning already involves holding club nights or going to the football, but what I am calling for is for people to accept such activities as fundamental to the reproduction of antagonistic life. Likewise we already trade meds, share nightmares and hold one another, but again these are seen as ancillary acts, as mere consequences rather than constituents of our struggle. My dream is of a politics that recognises the vitalness of ecstasy and warmth, and that comprehends their vitality – their power of life and growth. I can see this power shaping new forms, new organisations, new institutions even. We could have clubs like the CNT and clinics like the Panthers, finding as much excitement in the former as we did care in the latter.

More important, however, is that we allow this recognition to inform all of our politics, that we don’t isolate it in a few of our spaces but rather embrace it in all of them. Together, ecstasy and warmth are the precondition of any revolutionary project; they dim the pain which annexes our dreams and they bring us to those moments which make us dream anew.  We must, as a matter of great urgency, escape the logic which says that struggle must destroy us and make us miserable, and instead begin to build cultures which are as loving as they exciting.

Let us reach for the ecstasy beyond us then, allow ourselves to stretch out for it as far as we think we can. But, at the same time, never let our attempt to grasp the ecstatic pull us away from that which is already around us; the great warm embrace of our comrogues. Reaching and embracing by turns, we find that by which we may become something more, more animated, more exhilarated, more cared-for, more loved. In warmth and ecstasy we find the possibility of living a life infinitely greater than that which we currently live.

Our survival may well be radical, but our flourishing is revolutionary.

// This piece was originally published by my comrogues at the Occupied Times: http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=14010 //

“What happens when the salmon people can no longer catch salmon in their rivers?”[1]

Jeff Corntassel.

When I was a child I slept in a room at the back of my parent’s house. During the summer, the old wisteria would climb up the garden wall, edge over the window-sill and spill into my room. Great green crickets would crawl up the stems and find themselves suddenly inside. I can remember hours spent watching them pace my ceiling in the half-light before I fell asleep. I never thought it was strange that the wisteria, the crickets and I should share a room. It was the consequence of a simple arrangement; the wisteria shaded the house, and the house supported the wisteria, and the wisteria in turn sheltered the crickets, who, admittedly, served no discernible purpose beyond distracting sleepless children.

There is a word in Greek which perfectly describes the old house and the straggling wisteria. Oikeios comes from oikia, home, it means; “that with which one is at home, it is one’s own.”[2] The word does not mean “property” i.e an alienated thing made our own by some force, but that which we naturally inhabit, that which is favourable to our existence. It is a totality, a peaceful completeness.

THE DIVISION OF SOCIETY AND NATURE

Nature and society are not divisible things. The two live inside each other. It is a state of reciprocal immanence, one in which the existence of humans is inexorably entwined with the existence of non-humans. We are mutually dependent unto extinction.

If we look at hunter-gatherer communities we see a common understanding of this reciprocal immanence. Amongst those peoples who live thus it is usually understood that their water is of the rivers, their shelter of the forests and their food of the plains. From this conception springs a rich culture of reciprocity; a deep respect for the non-human life which makes human life possible. The people who live off the salmon think of themselves as the salmon-people; their existence is inseparable from the existence of that which sustains them.

“Like Cherokee or Nishnaabeg peoples, Zapotecs have their own word to describe belonging as responsibility. The word guendaliza means that we all are relatives and as such we have reciprocal responsibilities. When we say thank you in Zapotec we say chux quixely, which means ‘I will reciprocate’. Reciprocity is not limited to human beings but extends to the land and other beings visible or not.”[3]

Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez.

However the coming of agriculture helped spark the notion of property, setting in progress millennia of violent accumulation and appropriation. New agricultural productivity also made possible large settlements, towns and cities of ever greater size; a concentration of humanity which in turn facilitated the birth of industry. With the power from our increasing development we turned our gaze towards that which was not-human, and wondered how we may develop that too. Thus we othered nature, no longer could we merely live in it, now we had to stand atop it. Peaceful co-existence gave way to dreams of mastery and domination.

Western civilisation has been as much about defining what isn’t us as what is. From the parts we have cut from oikeios we have made allotrios, that which is alien.

“The symbolic distinction itself – ‘social power’ and ‘biophysical process’ – becomes possible only through the forcible separation of the direct producers from the means of production and its symbolic expressions, emerging during and constitutive of the rise of capitalism.“[4]

Jason Moore.

Such an argument is not unusual amongst radicals in the colonial heartlands, but in these circles it often becomes entwined with deeply problematic assertions. Western radicals can easily fall into a fetishisation of hunter-gathering which nearly always involves a selective and orientalist reading of indigenous voices and struggles. One of the failings produced by such a reading is the common confusion of indigeneity with hunter-gathering. It is vital to remember the great diversity of indigenous societies, and that many indigenous peoples lived in metropolises that were reliant on agriculture. These indigenous metropolises often brought about a vivisection of oikeios every bit as deep and destructive as that found within the colonial heartlands.

A thousand years ago, a great city flourished on the floodplains of the Mississippi river. Estimates of its population vary hugely, as only 1% of the site has ever been excavated, but as many as 40,000 people may have lived there.[5] Even taking the lowest estimate, the city of Cahokia was not exceeded in population by a settler city until the 19^th century.[6] The scale of the metropolis is extraordinary; over 120 mounds cover an area exceeding 13 square kilometres, with the precision and layout of the groundworks indicating careful planning.[7] The mounds, which functioned as places of burial and ceremony were huge structures; the largest was 100 feet high “with a rectangular base longer than that of the Great Pyramid of Egypt”.[8] The city’s expertise was not limited to monolithic construction projects however; amongst the artefacts from the site is a funeral blanket of exquisite artistry.[9] It is made from twelve thousand shell beads.[10]

Of course, such a metropolis required great quantities of food to sustain it, and the greatest part of this demand was met by the huge fields of maize to the east of Cahokia.[11] Without maize Cahokia would never have become a metropolis, but its dependence on the crop proved to be its downfall. As the city grew, the forests surrounding it shrunk rapidly. The construction of a wooden rampart all the way around the city in about 1200 significantly increased deforestation, as did a boom in house building around the same time.[12] As the forests vanished so too did their capacity to slow and store rainfall runoff, and soon Cahokia began to experience serious flooding.[13] The maize fields were either submerged or stripped of their topsoil, either way they became impossible to cultivate.[14] Deprived of its staple food, Cahokia collapsed. By 1350, the city was all but deserted.[15]

THE CREATION OF WILDERNESS

”. . an exorcism of social activity from universal nature [is enacted] in order to attenuate the contradiction between external and universal nature. The possibility of the socialization of universal nature is ultimately denied not on the basis of historical experience but by the contradiction with external nature.“ [16]
Neil Smith.

Colonialism saw the creation of wilderness at a continental level. Africa and America became places of nature, in which humans lived so primitively that to the colonialists they still appeared connected to the land. The definition of this land as wilderness, and these people as primitive, legitimised the greatest process of enclosure and dispossession in history. For Locke, it was that there was an unexploited surplus, a waste in the wilderness, which demonstrated the primitive nature of the indigenous Americans a nd thus the right of the colonialist to take their lands. Wilderness was described as non-productive space;

“If either the grass of his inclosure rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering, and laying up, this part of the earth, not withstanding his inclosure, was still to be looked upon as waste, and might be the possession of any other”

John Locke.[17]

The destructive drive of manifest destiny owes itself in no small part to such statements of colonial intent. The wilderness was rendered productive through rituals of enclosure and extinction; the plains were bisected by barbed wire and railroads, whilst settlers roamed the claimed lands, hunting flights of passenger pigeons, herds of bison and tribes of indigenous people.

It is important to note the entangled relationship of colonialist ecocide and genocide. The ideology of dominating and purifying the land in order to make it productive ensured the extinction of humans and non-humans alike. To prove this let us look first at the discourse applied to the non-human; in this case botanical life;

“Maison Rustique employed rhetoric of sickness and cleanliness to describe fields. The farmer’s first job was “to cleanse arable ground of stones, weedes, and stubble.” Rocks and natural vegetation represented a kind of filth, polluting the ground. The rhetoric became even more intense when describing “wilde grounds or desartes.” There the farmer needed to cure “the disease of your fieldes.” Surflet recommended, “If you desire with more haste and certainty to destroy them, you shall burne the ground the two first yeeres.” Natural vegetation, rather than a source of potential sustenance, was an illness that the farmer cured through total immolation. Even valued plants, such as trees, were only appropriate in specific locations, such as gardens or planned woods. If there were too many woods, then farmers needed to employ the same solution as they would on weeds: fire.”[18]

Keith Pluymers.

To the last sentence we could easily add “if there were too many indigenous people, then the farmers needed to employ the same solution as they would on woods”. The efficiency with which the settlers cleared the non-human elements of the land was matched only by the efficiency with which they cleared the human elements. When the British landed in Australia in 1788 they found an aboriginal population of between 250,000 to 750,000 people.[19] By 1911 there were just 31,000 left.[20] The barbarity and efficiency of their extermination shocked even that most blood-soaked of nations, Britain. A shaken High Commissioner, Arthur Hamilton Gordon, wrote to Prime Minister Gladstone;

“The habit of regarding the natives as vermin, to be cleared off the face of the earth, has given the average Queenslander a tone of brutality and cruelty in dealing with "blacks” which it is very difficult to anyone who does not know it, as I do, to realise. I have heard men of culture and refinement, of the greatest humanity and kindness to their fellow whites, and who when you meet them here at home you would pronounce to be incapable of such deeds, talk, not only of the wholesale butchery (for the iniquity of that may sometimes be disguised from themselves) but of the individual murder of natives, exactly as they would talk of a day’s sport, or having to kill some troublesome animal.”[21]

Colin Tatz

Gordon provides us with all the evidence we need. This is the ideology of the colonialist, which sees the indigenous human as “vermin”, a “troublesome animal” which needs “to be cleared off the face of the earth”. The reciprocal immanence of the indigenous peoples and their land was alien to the colonialists, and thus they sought to bury the one in the other. Oikeios became a state found only in the killing fields and the mass graves. Only there were people “at one with nature”.

The colonised lands saw nature and man split apart, but only under the force of countless gunshots, infections and enslavements.  

“There is no ontological divide between social nature (developed, degraded, managed) and external nature (wild, pristine, ecological), yet it is precisely this divide which the conservation biology proponents relentlessly forge and defend”

Joseph Hintz

Environmentalism remains trapped in the thought of colonial-capitalism. Nature is something which happens in foreign lands, amongst barbarous people, who are now found to be incapable of protecting it. Neo-colonialism finds the indigenous community guilty of the mirror-crime of that for which they were condemned by colonialism; rather than too connected to their environment, they are now too disconnected. This time they shall be thrown off their land so that civilisation may save it from them, rather than them from it.

In west Kenya the Sengwer people are being chased from their homes. Thousands of them flee before the military police, who tear apart their huts before setting them on fire.[22] The government calls them squatters, blaming the Sengwer for the degradation of the forest they inhabit.[23] They neglect to mention that the Sengwer have lived as hunter-gatherers in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills for thousands of years.[24] Why are these people being made homeless?  Part of the blame at least falls on the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) programme.[25] The World Bank has been funding the Government of Kenya’s new Natural Resource Management Programme (NRMP), which includes “financing REDD+ readiness activities”. In practice this means the forest is being readied for market, to be sold to whichever company which needs to offset its pollution and habitat destruction.[26] The idea that corporate ecocide should be rewarded with cheap land stolen from the global south embodies all that is wrong with modern environmentalism.[27] We are supposed to believe here that the environmentalists are those that are colonising indigenous land and that the Sengwer people, who have lived sustainably in the forest for millennia, present its gravest threat.  

RECLAIMING OKEIKIOS.

Thus we come to the present state of things. As we look out across the killing fields, where corpses mingle with felled trees, it is hard to see a reason for hope. Indeed, sometimes it is hard to even see a reason to live. However the genocide is incomplete, the ecocide, as yet unfinished. The land is not yet dead and neither are those who live within it. Three hundred years of murder have not seen the death of the last indigenous person, nor the settling of the last piece of indigenous earth. This is only true due to the indefatigable bravery of the indigenous resistance.  Outnumbered and outgunned, they have refused to except their own extinction, and have fought back with a ferocity that has denied the colonial states the luxury of forgetting them. From the Zapitistas to the Miqmaq, the indigenous resistance, continues with a ferocity that still terrifies the colonial states. Even more worrying for them is the revival of indigenous culture, most recently seen in the US, where indigenous artists are fusing hip-hop and dance with the old songs of their people.[28]

The actions of western governments and non-governments give us no reason to hope. But the struggles of the indigenous peoples do. In these we often find the understanding of oikeios still alive, still expressed, still fought for. “The fact that over eighty percent of the world’s biodiversity thrives on Indigenous lands is not a coincidence.”[29] The indigenous peoples are not “closer to nature”. To say they do is to speak in the tongue of those who saw the nations and tribes as stones or weeds, to be cleared with force or fire.We cannot get closer to nature, for we already live within it. Nothing demonstrates this better than the reality of climate change; there is no escape from that which constitutes the totality. What is there is an understanding, and an understanding we must learn ourselves.

The only way we may save the world is to realise our own place within it, to recognise our state or reciprocal immanence. We do this in fleeting moments now, perhaps when we swim in the sea, or gaze at the green crickets that wander our ceilings, but we must make this understanding solid and constant. Once we see ourselves as part of the earth we will finally be able to summon the energy to save it. No longer will we invest our hopes in alienated others; in conferences or anti-conferences, but instead act directly to preserve that which we relate directly to. Then we may stand in solidarity with those who have been fighting to preserve non-human life for as long as we have been trying to destroy it. Then we may build a world we may live within. Then we may reclaim Oikeios.

FAO DISCONTENTED WORKERS OF THE WORLD;

1. The capitalist does not buy machines for the benefit of the worker but to benefit from the profit the machines can create.
2. Machines do not strike. They are all scabs.
3. Indeed, even the foulest scab cannot equal the toadying of the machine. Not only do the machines demand no improvement in pay, but in fact content themselves with no wage at all.
4. A machine has no life outside of work, they do not buy books or visit the cinema. Their maintenance is thus minimal compared to the wage required to maintain us.
5. A capitalist will constantly strive towards automation. At first the machines take just parts of our jobs, and we lose the corresponding parts of our wage. But eventually they take over all of the work and we lose all of the wage.
6. Thus the machines liberate us from work, bosses and the wage, but only so that we may starve on the dole.
7. It is not the fault of the machines that they are deployed to drive us out of a living. It is the fault of the capitalists who use them against us.
8. To free the worker from work and the boss remains the promise of the machine. However for this promise to be utopian the products of the machine must be shared by all, not accumulated by a select few.
9. SMASH THE MACHINES WHICH ENSLAVE US, ENSLAVE THE ONES WHICH MAY LIBERATE US!

Everyone knows that the past is a foreign country, far fewer realise that the same is true of the future. The ability of humankind to engage with the future is, in fact, even more limited than their ability to engage with the past. This is not illogical, for whilst the past is concrete, real, the future is a tangled web of potentialities and causalities, with everything that does happens colliding with everything else that could happen.  Quite simply, the future is a fucking mess.

Sadly it is upon this fucking mess that the environmental movement has chosen to construct its entire argument.  “We must act today to save tomorrow” is the cry of the global greens.  Great sacrifices must be made immediately for a reward launched far into the distant future. But such a reward it is! Yes, it may be far away now, but one day, dear friend, you may not be flooded! You may not starve! You might not even suffer more than you do already!

Such is the dismal promise of environmentalism. It is on this territory that it fought, and it is on this territory that it lost. There are many reasons, but most fundamental amongst them is this question of temporality. “We must act today to save tomorrow” is a slogan as catchy as it is cataclysmically wrong. Firstly, humans will not fight for the distant future. They might struggle for a better wage tomorrow, the protection of a local park or the preservation of their children’s school. The potent and popular struggle against fracking proves this point. Couched in the cold reality of a hulking rig in your backyard, anti-fracking has become the lifeblood of the European environmental movement. People will willingly put their livelihoods and even their lives on the line to prevent immediate material threats, but they will not do the same for the sake of the world in fifty years’ time.

But even if they did, even if humanity upped its cognitive sticks and redefined the territory of its groupthink, the exercise would be utterly pointless.  Let us presume such a thing as a “green capitalism” is possible, that the relentless search for surplus is compatible with the preservation of the planet. Whatever this reformed system might look like, it is clear we are very far from it today. In order to leap into this brave new world, a transition of gargantuan proportions is necessary.  Firstly we would need to see some of the largest energy companies on earth give up fossil fuels in favour of renewables. In 2012 Exxon Mobil had net profits of $44.88 billion, its total assets amounting to $333.795 billion.[1] To bring these numbers into perspective, compare them with the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, who in 2010 reported net profits of €156 million and total assets of €7.066 billion.[2] I mention assets in this context as it is worth thinking of the huge carbon stockpiles possessed by the big energy companies. Exxon Mobil’s reserves were 72 billion oil-equivalent barrels at the end of 2007.[3] In 2013, Mobil announced it was replacing these reserves at a rate of 115%.[4] That Mobil would willingly leave these resources in the ground for a notional payment of 50% of their value, as some have proposed, seems hopelessly utopian.[5] Secondly we would have to see a global commitment to sustainable resource extraction. Mining, forestry, fishing, the industrialised harvesting of Earth’s bounty would have to be greatly limited. Given the amount large companies have invested in the means by which these processes are carried out, it seems highly unlikely this will happen anytime soon.

Thus the crux of the matter is not “can you build a green capitalism” but “can you build a green capitalism in time”? This is not an abstract academic exercise, but a race in which there are definite deadlines. Primary amongst these is the 2 degrees Celsius rise in global temperature, which, under current projections, will need to be revised upwards within the next decade.[6] This 2 degrees change signals the point at which “dangerous climate change” is unleashed. Given the amount of devastation that already surrounds us, it is sobering to think what “dangerous climate change” might actually look like. In addition to this we have the prospect of global collapse of integral ecosystems. As early as 2006, a third of the world’s fisheries had collapsed, by 2050 it is eminently possible that every single fishery on Earth will have followed suit.[7]

All the available evidence points to a simple conclusion; even if green capitalism is possible, it cannot be adopted in time to stave off increasingly severe collapses.  

Unfortunately, the situation is actually even worse than this. In July 2011 the respected climate scientist Kevin Anderson made a speech in which he said that averting dangerous climate change is no longer possible.[8] The potent effects previously associated of the 2 degree rise were actually based on a series of miscalculations.[9] In reality it would only take a 1 degree rise in global temperatures to trigger “dangerous climate change”. [10] Up till now humanity has been cowering from a bullet we thought was speeding towards us. It turns out we’re in shock. The bullet isn’t in flight, its already hit us. The disaster we thought was in the future has actually already happened, now we have a matter of moments to save ourselves. Tomorrow is too late, for we will bleed out long before then. Everything must be done at a ferocious, frantic pace. No future, to survive we must act now.

As an utter necessity we must abandon the future, for we cannot win there.  No future, for we will never convince the majority to fight for the sake of a time they cannot imagine.  No future, for capital will always defeat any strategy based on a next-ness, for against airy notions of tomorrow’s world, they can posit the cold hard facts of today counted out in wages and jobs. No future, because, right now, there is literally no future, right now we are condemned to collapse.

But “no future” alone is a nihilistic thing to cry. To survive we must couple bleak reality with the utopian impulse.  No Future, Utopia Now.  Let us jettison the notion of gradual change. There is no time for a transition. Let us pledge ourselves unflinchingly to a utopia. Not a distant one, not an imaginary thrown out into the future, but one we can build right now. One in which work is all but abandoned, in which the liberation of every minority is a priority, in which collective well-being is the only ideology. In which the machines which previously worked against earth and its inhabitants are turned into the mechanisms of their preservation and emancipation.

The new utopian movement will not be Eurocentric. It will incorporate that which is vibrant right now, the indigenous awakening which dwarfs the struggles in Europe. Idle No More in North America and the anti-dam struggles in the South, have shown a nascent potency which only blossoms when the government sends in cops or troops.  Real hope is revealed in the light from burning cop cars outside Elsipogtog.[11] The new movement cannot limit itself to that which is legal. As things stand, the destruction of Earth stands well within the law, actions for its preservation, much less so.

The current system of production poses an existential threat, a threat against which collective action is our only hope. Thus we come to the Luddites and not out of a primitivist desire for a return to a pre-industrial utopia. What is important about the Luddites was that they recognised that their own welfare existed in contradiction with the welfare of current industry.

“Around and around we all will stand

And eternally swear we will,

We’ll break the shears and windows too

And set fire to the tazzling mill.”

How Gloomy And Dark. Luddite Song,

To propose a modern environmental movement based on frame-breaking may sound an absurd anachronism. However, on the day I began to write this piece, villagers in Baha, south-western China stormed a factory that had been polluting their land, smashing its offices and equipment. One of the villagers who participated in the attack is quoted as saying; "we have been living with the factory for 14 years, and we live in dust almost every day and can’t sell our rice and other farm products… We need to live.”[12] Such a lucid conception of the incompatibility of this system of production with the wellbeing of those who live under it must be generalised. Despite this, it is worth remembering that the system is vulnerable in a thousand ways. Just as potent as an anti-industrial strategy would be an intelligent industrial one. When the capitalist class attempted to destroy the green spaces of Sydney in the 1970s, the city’s inhabitants turned to the syndicalist New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). The BLF passed Green Bans upon the spaces at risk, agreeing that none of its members would work on the sites. The bans would eventually hold up as many as 40 developments worth over $5 billion.[13]

Despite the bleak reality, there is hope. There are those willing to give up their lives to destroy this collapsing dystopia and build anew amidst the ruins. What we need is a message which captures this willingness, and mechanisms by which it may be challenged to alternately destructive and constructive ends. More than any struggle before this, we need a variety of weapons and tools. WE need to materialise solidarity with those still fighting the settlers on their land, and link their struggle with the global battle for survival. Paradoxically, this is a struggle we cannot win as long as we define it in terms of survival alone. We must promise the earth to all those willing to save it.

“The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanised automaton.”[1]

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab.

It is that old nightmare. Deep in dreaming, the subject wakes to find their face encased within an iron mask. Rust fills their mouth, spikes torment their eyes, but for all their frenzied efforts the mask cannot be removed. The post-fordist subject has a different dream, a brave new nightmare for a dysphoric age. In this, the dreamer awakes but finds no mask upon their face. Instead, with rising horror they discover that gleaming pistons rest where once were legs and cold lenses spin in the place of eyes. In their chest beats not a heart, but an engine, fevered and hungry. That which was human has been ripped from them and replaced with steel and wire. That which was alive has become that which is automated.

We slumbered whilst the war took place, the grand offensive against free time, free expression, free thought. The onslaught was waged in the name of growth and productivity, but in the pursuit of what is dead they stole what is living. Now mankind must work like the machines it used to fear. The mechanization of the factory has become the mechanization of the school, the hall, the home.

History is the misery of the worker, but the manifestation of that misery is always changing. In the agricultural economy of feudal England, work was characterized by fiscal constraints but technical autonomy. Every serf had to survive, but how they survived was largely their own business. A degree of independence was granted as long as the lord’s corn was harvested and his deer were not. In fact, the medieval peasant enjoyed spells of extraordinary freedom. By the middle of the 14^th century, the peasant class was averaging a working year of around 120 days, or 1440 hours (by contrast the average American worker receives just 8 days holiday a year[2]).[3] After the ravages of the Black Death, labour was in such chronic shortage that labourers all but dictated their conditions. Yet even before the pandemic, records show 13^th century peasant families working as little as 150 days a year.[4] These statistics are extraordinary, and absolutely unheard. The capitalist myth of liberation by industrialisation has burnt the history of the world that preceded it.

In the industrial economy of Victorian Britain, work became typified by control. The production line and proto-Fordism created the possibility of the workforce under watch. Any mill or foundry was deemed worthy of patrol and discipline, the serf’s fear of the wrath of God became the machinist’s fear of the overseer. Despite this offensive, free time remained largely unmonitored, as London, Birmingham and Liverpool testify. The night was prone to a thousand crimes, carnages and cavorts, over which the Peeler struggled to maintain the barest semblance of control. Attempts to impose authority were repulsed, sometimes bloodily, and the refuge of the street and the pub was preserved.[5]

Thus it is only the post-fordist world which suffers the surveillance and control of both work and not-work. “Not-work” is the right word, for “leisure” seems unfitted to time defined by depression, exhaustion and insomnia. The call centre is the modern mill, and its people the machines.[6] They cannot be true automatons, for the “caller hears a smile”[7] and in their moment of distress only human voices will do. Despite the fact its existence depends on the façade of humanity, the call-centre does everything it can to strip the worker of any human dignity. Days are ten hours, with a brief unpaid lunch break in which a few seconds of unprocessed air and natural light may be gifted. The disgust of the company at the feeble physical needs of their workers is manifested in those facilities where the staff are prohibited from using a toilet.[8] In most of these buildings the windows don’t open more than a centimetre. Even the freedom to end ones suffering has been withdrawn. The contradiction is clear, the capitalist wants machines, but the customer wants a human. The compromise is the human is treated as a machine. The myriad complexities of identity are stripped away, leaving only the ability to perform a task.

The step out of the workplace does not stop the discipline, the surveillance or the control. Closed circuit cameras jostle with flashing ad panels.[9] Cops with electric weapons look for trouble and find it in the colour of your skin. Running for a train is suspicious, meeting your friends is suspicious, taking a picture is suspicious. Any political activity is discouraged, only consumption and all-consuming depression are permitted. Should you transgress the norms and laws, your job, benefits and home are repossessed. If this knowledge frightens you, take another pill. In fact, the decision to medicate may not even be your own, if you dissent, your cries may be stifled by a mouth crammed full of chemicals.[10] The dystopia is not the preserve of the cinema or the future, but here, right now. You can only not see it because you’re drowning in it.

“Consideration has not been given… to this big distinction as to how far men work through machines or as machines”[11]

Under capital there has always been a degree of the machine around man. The duress of “work to live” is fundamental to capitalism, whilst the necessity of production divides the workforce into machine-like specialism. Marx observed in the 1844 manuscripts that “the division of labour renders [the worker] ever more one-sided and dependent bringing with it the competition not only of men but of machines…the worker has sunk to the levels of machines”.[12]Marx also realises the idiocy of the liberal faith in the machine liberating workers under capital, he quotes Mill “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the days toil of any human being”, then observes “That is, however, by no means the aim of the capitalistic application of machinery… it is a means for producing surplus-value”.[13]

It is of course a historical process, however, of late the mechanization has accelerated. The explanation for this phenomenon lies in the organic composition of capital, the relationship between that which is living and that which is dead. Fixed capital is the capitalist’s favoured solution to the conundrum of labour. Wherever they can, they will automate, for “there is always a difference of labour saved in favour of the machine”[14], and machines will work for a century and never break once for a strike. It is well understood that the workers wish to liberate themselves from their bosses, but less so that the bosses wish to liberate themselves from their workers.

The desire of the capitalist to free himself from the worker is, however, frustrated. Fixed capital is sometimes too expensive, or simply beyond the technological reach of mankind. A clear example is in the slow uptake of the power loom in 19^th century Britain. The gradual realisation of the Jacquard principle hampered the development of power looms, whilst the “very cheapness and superfluity of hand-loom labour retarded mechanical invention and the application of capital in weaving”.[15]  Variable capital thus fulfils the tasks fixed capital cannot. Yet, as a consequence of the need for ever greater returns and the competition from those who have found fixed capital solutions, the influence of the machines cannot be escaped, and the worker must work harder, for longer, for less.[16] In short, they must work more like machines.

As our work becomes more unpleasant and unnatural to us, ever greater forms of control are needed to ensure that we do it. As machines take over our labour, forces need to be employed to see that idleness does not give way to mischief. Discipline is employed with sadistic readiness, in ever more complex and powerful ways. The obvious power in the batons of the police is matched by the subtle power contained in the stamp of the benefits adviser. The state which we believe to protect us is actually our captor and master. The worker has developed Stockholm syndrome.

Let us return to the nightmare. In it, the worker finds themself to be a machine, to have been changed by powers beyond their control. Those powers however, though manipulated by the capitalist class, did not originate from them. Neither did they stem from the machines themselves, for ultimately machines are but human tools. The horror of the situation resides in the realisation that the workers have brutalised themselves. The forced mechanisation of the working class is the product of the class itself. It is the Copernican inversion Tronti recognised, that; “It is the specific, present, political situation of the working class that both necessitates and directs the given forms of capital’s development”.[17] The old Marxist interpretation of a working class condemned to a purely reactive relationship with capital needs upending, for in reality capital is always reacting to the struggle of the working class.

This is not to say that the workers therefore can determine the direction of capital, for every movement cannot perceive the effects it will have on the future. The endeavour of workers to free themselves from the most oppressive elements of capital often merely changes the form of misery they suffer. The agitation of linen workers for better rights made mechanisation attractive to the capitalist. The agitation of the Fiat workers made the super-mechanisation of the factory desirable. Every demand from variable capital increases the allure of the fixed capital solution. Marx realised this, he notes that the passing of the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, which prevented women and children from working under ground, forced capitalists to invest in machinery.[18] The worker and the capitalist exist like boxers in a ring. One punch from the worker leaves them vulnerable to a counterpunch from the capitalist.

If nothing else, this demonstrates the uselessness of compromise. Anything we win can turn to dust in a second. We are locked in a war of attrition with capital, where any moments rest can cost us all of the ground we won. The realisation of this is spreading, it resides in the slow death of the union movement and the crisis of the centre left. None of the old forms can save us from a fate worse than death, that of working forever without a moment to live. All of existence will be subsumed into the mechanical struggle for survival, of either trying to survive in work, or outside it.

This is the dystopia which deepens around us. There is only one means of escape. We must use that which created the current system to destroy it. We must struggle afresh, and struggle incessantly. Every concession must be treated only as a sign of the enemy’s weakness, and spur us to fight ever harder. The parties must be imaginary, the committees invisible. The only union with any worth will be the one that is willing to slay the antagonist which defines it, and thus destroy itself. The insurrection will not be controlled or led by any other than the masses at the barricades. And what of the machines? What of the mechanisms whose effect on our lives was disastrous enough that we should risk it all? We shall take them and make them work for us. “The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.”[19] Without capitalism to twist its purpose, the machine shall cease to be the automaton of oppression, and instead enable us to be truly free. Within each machine resides nothing less than the promise of the total liberation of humankind.[20]

It appears I may well have read a much greater disagreement into this piece than actually exists. After some clarification (http://by-strategy.tumblr.com/) it appears that my dear critic (a term I use not in disparagement but out of genuine respect, and to attempt to show I mean no personal offence) and I are far less opposed than I had thought.  

1.

I apologise, I misunderstood the point here and mistook agreement for disagreement. Hence my response beginning “I disagree” looks somewhat out of place.  

2.

To me it is clear that the left is a problematic term for carving up reality. The problem here is one of taxonomy, the taxa of “the left” is both too impossibly broad and too tenuously attached to political identities to accurately describe those it encompasses.  However, it may be hard to stop using “the left” as a term to define those who use it to define themselves. What I would hope is that the desire to name oneself thus will wither as recognition of its inherent flaws grow.

5.

 “The likely response to this from you would be that the historical bloc of The Left persists.”

An admirably accurate prediction.

6

I think unity betrays claims to homogeneity, to dissolve difference in favour of one all-consuming idea. A shared general understanding (which I would distinguish from an idea) would, in reality, always be composed of a multiplicity of intricate imaginaries, rooted in the singular experiences of its members. Unity implies uniforms, ranks and the oppression of individuality, it does not appeal to me on any emotional level. Aside from this, unity means an intellectual inflexibility, an opposition to dissent which seems incompatible with a vibrant, potent movement.

“What could be a more Leftist phrase than solidarity?” I would dispute this, the concept has been appropriated by the left, but so rarely enacted by it that it deserves little jurisdiction over the concept. This aside, I do not believe the values of the left exist in any homogenous, definable manner. If we take the left as organisations, it is clear that they are a peculiar in their lack of values beyond self-preservation. If a value is a basis for action, is inaction a surrendering of values?

8

I am glad we are agreed on this.

What next? It is clear that to destroy the left has become a matter of survival, for it is clear the Left, in full knowledge or in ignorance, has become a guarantor of the perpetuation of capital. A true struggle will needs tools to make the great mechanism shift once more, tools to communicate, to agitate and innovate. These will be fusions of human and machine, cyborgs capable of acting in both the material and immaterial worlds the struggle now inhabits. Human ingenuity must be nurtured, rather than restricted; we must allow things to grow organically without care for their longevity.

We depart from the left and know we take with us all that we need; solidarity, resilience and innovation.

I’m not going to lie. I didn’t expect anyone to like “Left For Dead”. I published it mainly because the word document had been hanging round my hard drive like an obnoxious spirit, reminding me at every occasion of both my depressing inability to write and my complete lack of courage in confronting this fact. The realisation that people liked it is still giving me warm shivers. It’s rather lovely.

However, this doesn’t mean I don’t cherish the fact people have questioned it. I’ve responded as quickly as I could to the shorter comments, but this, I felt, deserved a post to itself. For clarity I will reply to the piece using the numbers found in the original (available here; http://by-strategy.tumblr.com/post/54277945326/whats-left-on-left-for-dead)

1.

I disagree that it is a “mistake and an ethical one at that” to challenge the classing of absurdly disparate groups into one. The ignorance of difference necessary to sustain such delusions is as frustrating as it is dangerous. It seems far more unethical to take Riot Grrl or Pussy Riot and force them to rub shoulders with George Galloway out of a pure desire for simplicity. The world is complex, and we should confront it as such, not lie to make it easier to explain.

2.

The second paragraph hopes to exceed the first one in its problematic nature. I disagree with the games analogy. Games are a relatively simple human construct hardly comparable to a weltanschauung.

There is of course an exchange of ideas, a sharing of perception which is common to the opposition. The critique pulls in the Black Panthers and Stalin as sharing a Marxist influence. Though this is true, it does not mean they have a close similarity. A shared Marxist influence did not stop Stalin murdering hundreds of thousands of anarchists and libertarian communists, or the Assault guard attacking the CNT, or Solidarność helping to bring down the USSR. Classification by familial similarity is deeply problematic. To play off two other examples against each other, it is much harder to clearly categorise European social democracy and the Diggers as part of the same continum. I’d argue that Blair had a lot more in common ideologically with Thatcher than Bakunin. I would contest that this point would be largely uncontested.

3.

The next point opens with a misunderstanding. I never deny that movements of the left were responsible for horrific violence, in fact I believe I write that;

“(the USSR, China and Cuba) are state-capitalist, authoritarian basket cases, but they are also of the left.”

My point was in fact the complete opposite, that the left seeks to disown the abuses even though they clearly fall within the broad definitions it claims for itself. Broad definitions my dear critic seems determined to defend.

4.

Yes, it’s not original in its ideas, but the need for the repetition of a critique remains as long as the subject exists, the same problem, the same answer.  

5.

I also do not dispute that this is a text of its time. I have yet to find a text which isn’t. However the inference, that “Communists like Us” isn’t relevant to this temporal reality, is clearly mistaken. As I said under 4, the analysis of the same flaws will yield a similar result, Negri and Guattari are advocating a non-hierarchical struggle of the multitude which is capable of embracing and protecting singularities. Until full communism has been established, I should imagine this advocacy shall remain relevant.

6.

This next section is based on another misunderstanding. The reality of class and the delusion of unity are fundamentally different entities. Class presumes that under capital those who own the means of production will do better than those who do not. Unity presumes that all of the different struggles this inequality creates, all of the singular experiences and interconnected oppressions can be fought on one front, by one force. This is as naïve as it is dangerous. Unity is impossible due precisely to the diversity “the left” cannot recognise, and this understanding is fundamental to the solution, intersectionality and solidarity. Unity of organisation cannot be compared to the underlying class division that structures our reality. As for my critic’s charming idea that barricades and pickets are in some way less valuable because they are “hardly new actions”, well I invite my critic to think of a “new” way of blocking access within the spatial plane.

7.

Hopefully I have dealt with some of this section through my explanation of the fundamental difference between class reality and left unity.

A lot of this part is common sense with philosophy, there is not really a lot to debate.

8.

Firstly, I reject the claim this a mood in the “anti-austerity” struggle. The struggle Im fighting, and which I hope the piece contributes to is the anti-capitalist struggle. There is a fundamental distinction. Austerity is a way for capital to reinvent and protect itself after an existential crisis. The fire-sale of public utilities to the market may serve to spark the great cogs again, the provision of state support to the private sector through programmes like workfare may return confidence to timid markets. It is also clear that the enemies the anti-capitalist struggle faces are not confined to the reactionary benches. My dear critic neglects to engage with the fact that the motors of struggle we relied upon (predominantly the unions and their client groups) are fundamentally opposed to the actions we take or the world we wish to create. This is evident in both the systematic attempts by the established unions to prevent grass root militancy (particularly at flashpoints like Sussex University, where the established bureaucracy have tirelessly worked to prevent a strike), but also in the consistent anti-radicalism of organisations such as Unite Against Fascism which has co-operated with the police in targeting actual anti-fascists.

If you are a leftist, you face enemies within. If you are a radical, we face the same enemies we always did.  

The left is fucked. It has no present, no future and no hope. Despite this, it remains incapable of engaging with the majority of the population, whose lives are defined by the same three realities.[1] The peculiar imagined community around which the left is built coheres with all the tenacity of a spinning lie. The great combined forces of labour and the academy are bound together merely by the stories they weave and the delusions they perpetuate. The closeness is claustrophobic, but instead of breaking for air they huddle ever closer, crushing themselves together out of fear for the dark around them.

We are approaching true dystopia. As the last remnants of the welfare state burn to warm the bourgeoisie, people freeze to death on streets of empty houses. Work is given for free, education for a fee and tax breaks for a kitchen supper. And should the people take to the streets? Well the ambush is well set. The batons that beat them down will be the same ones their taxes provided, the poison pens that libel them the same they paid with the morning paper. In fact, the ambush has already been sprung. They won’t let you find a place to work or a place to sleep.[2] They will shake the trust you put in those you organise with, live with, love.[3] You are no longer a subversive, you are a domestic extremist.[4]   

And where is the left? It cowers in half-filled assembly rooms, ossifying to the cracked voices of Labour hacks, petrifying in the flickering light of films of ‘forty-five. In the twilight it may venture out to push a paper at the alienated masses, shout mock defiance at unheeding stone, then march away to wallow once more in existential despair.

And still the left cannot understand the people’s indifference. It has handed out so many papers, held so many conferences, filled a thousand columns with a million words, worn tracks in the paving slabs of London squares. Its petitions could wind around the nation, smother the bourgeoisie in the terrible order of names and addresses. “John Holmes of Milton Keynes”, thanks for aiding the revolution.  

Into the rich archives of its failure the left may add the notion of “Left Unity”. Why if only our piteous strength was united, then we could really smash capitalism! Think of the insurrection we could bring with a UKIP of the left![5] To Parliament, comrades, for I have always wished to sit on one of those green seats!

The left is fucked.

“The Left” is a construct of the 18^th century.[6] As the King of France struggled to protect divine autocracy, the Constituent Assembly of 1789-91 split; the radicals moved to sit together on the president’s left whilst the reactionaries coalesced on his right.[7] Over time spatial and ideological positions became interwoven, ideas of an elected legislature, a broad franchise and progressive taxation became the politics of “the left”.[8] It is worth noting that even in its nascent form the left was overtly reformist. Time since has seen the ceaseless agglomeration of ideas to the original core. If the identity was ever cohesive and intelligible, it certainly is not now. When anyone from Bakunin to Blair can look into the same amalgam and draw out their inspiration, the absurdity of describing a human weltanschauung through this concoction is clear. Blair wished to embrace the State and Capital, Bakunin wished to smash both, yet the two of them can fairly be termed to of “the left”, for the only thing the term has rejected from its ever-widening embrace is any real meaning.

The desire to protect or perpetuate such a clear absurdity is perplexing.[9] It destroys attempts at understanding, and instead means that intelligent and pleasant human beings are neatly categorised alongside Stalin, Mao and Harriet Harman. This is clearly insufferable. The USSR was left wing, as are both China and Cuba. If that sentence incensed you, good. Direct your fury at the terminology, not its critic. Under the hopelessly nebulous definitions of the left, all three nations fit into the category; they all pursued a vision of society where the means of production were altered in order to advance a (however deluded) idea of democracy. These are state-capitalist, authoritarian basket cases, but they are also of the left.

These are the bones of the left’s skeleton, an osteological form steadfast in its refusal to be returned to the cupboard. Of course the past is not merely an embarrassment for the left, its obscurity offers refuge too. A leftist can look behind themselves and see Diggers, Luddites, Chartists, Communards, Suffragettes, Black Panthers, Stonewallers, Zapatistas, Pussy Rioters, Occupiers, or the countless millions who were too busy fighting to think of a name. It is an insult, however, to take these human lives, rich in suffering and costly victories, and lump them with some of the very people they were struggling against.

The left today is splintered, yet resistant to disunity. The idea that those who apologise rape for the SWP, torture for the WRP or statism for the SP are part of the same movement which unceasingly criticises them is deluded.[10] The party form upon which the SWP, WRP, SP and all of the other muddles of sovietised letters depends is based on an oxymoron. “Democratic centralism” is a contradiction dressed up an ideology, an impossibility arrogant enough to wear its dissonance as a name. [11] The idea that a narrow party can blossom into a mass movement, then bear fruit as a government for the masses is pure fantasy. The structures of the bureaucratised tyrant lie sleeping within the smallest cadre.

Even in the party stage the organisation of top-down governance is the midwife to authoritarianism. The SWP’s reaction to the rape of one if its members by a high ranking party official exemplifies this truth. The central committee carried out its own investigations, and delivered the inevitable verdict; “innocent”.[12] When faced with criticism from within the party, the committee laid down its zero-tolerance attitude to dissent, which presented an opportunity to compare it to their exceedingly liberal attitude to sexual assault. Comrades were purged for offences as serious as discussing the leadership on Facebook, or forming factions fully endorsed by party rules.[13] The subsequent deterioration of the party is depressing in that those who left in disgust represent a minority. That a section of the left is willing to forget rape in pursuit of party discipline is testament to the necessity of never letting these people come close to power.

Currently the left seeks to reanimate itself though the pursuit of unity. The social democratic wing will continue its deification of the people’s assembly, whilst the revolutionary left experiments with left unity. Though both warrant a full examination, in passing one can remark on the delusions inherent in both. The people’s assembly is formed around a base of Labourites, Greens and Trade Unionists. These groups have relatively little interest in the people, and presumably use the term “assembly” in the primary school, rather than radically political sense. The revolutionary left meanwhile seeks unity. One needs to only look back at previous Trotskyist unity experiments to predict the result.

We need an alternative to “The Alternative”. Unity is a false idol, the desire for “one” in  the left is that of the principle of negation;

“the negation of all singularities, of all singularities, of all pluralities. One is an empty abstraction… One is the enemy.”[14]

The pursuit of unity is to desperately chase our own nemesis. Fuck that. There are not seven classes, only two.[15]  One is our enemy, and one is us. What more unity do we need? We need solidarity, we need people organising within the struggle rather than trying to organise it into one cohesive whole. The struggle shall be disparate, amorphous, discursive. It will intersect more times than the threads of a spiders web, and find the infinite strength that brings, it will ensnare any and all and care for them despite it. We don’t need parties, we need bodies. We need people willing to stand on picket lines, protect occupations, block evictions but we also need those who can explain why the evictions will continue, why the occupations and picket lines are not actions atomised in history. There can be no struggle without education, but not the teaching of the school room. It is essential we have education as mutual aid, the exchange and sharing of learning without recognising any hierarchy.

“Let a thousand machines of life, art, solidarity and action sweep away the stupid and sclerotic arrogance of the old organisations”.[16]

To progress in the pursuit of the total emancipation of humanity, the left must liberate itself from itself. It is time to free ourselves from the tyranny of obscurity and go forth either unlabelled or more truthfully described. Before the 1780s, “the left” did not exist, yet the world was not one of unquestioning obedience to authority and unchallenged oppression. The old forms which typify the established left will not help us, the war for the future will must be fought against hierarchies, not from within them. We must atomise to unionise, divide to multiply, break apart to discover form with true potential. Friends, let us smash the left, from its rubble we can build barricades.