Back in fashion
In the introduction to Radical thought in Italy: a potential politics, Michael Hardt writes something about how Italian political theory has the feel of having been written late at night after tremendous political activity. The Revelli piece I linked to below has this quality in spades; it’s also something that Indymedia ought to be encouraging, although unfortunately it’s not all that common (I suppose we need to have the tremendous political activity first; certainly, Indymedia is at its best covering large, innovative, exciting, protests).
The Cambridge Indymedia cadre are at least having a go, with good articles recently from yossarian, on opposing Bush in Brussels and manos on the Cottenham Residents’ Association (a meeting of which another friend of mine described as one of the most frightening things he’d ever witnessed).
This precarity stuff really seems to be picking up momentum (check the latest issue of Mute), with some great actions at Milan fashion week; are we seeing a new stage in the alter-globalisation movement, with the western sections refashioning themselves to adopt some of the focus on local struggle we’ve seen recently in the global south?
Off with her head
In a shocking occourence, I’ve changed my opinion about the monarchy. Obviously, for as long as I can remember I’ve thought this country ought to be a republic; but previously I’ve not really thought it to be a matter of much importance. But no longer; maybe it’s the Charles and Camilla bollocks, maybe it’s the denoument of the McLibel trial or the absurdity of Charles Clarke’s manic invention of new anti-civil liberties measures. Whatever it is, it made me realise that we do need a written constitution and a proper post-Napoleonic republic, rather than the current situation which has more in common with a school mock-parliament. Not that this would immediately fix anything, of course; but as with everything, it’s a matter of the terrain of struggle. A juridical order which was based on something more than memories of etiquette at the Union Society would strengthen our position on those ocassions when law impedes our flight from capital.
Bond’s pants
> Bond had always disliked pyjamas and had slept naked until in Hong Kong he had come across
> the perfect compromise. This was a pyjama-coat that came almost down to the knees. It had no
> buttons, but there was a loose belt round the waist. The sleeves were wide and short, ending
> just above the elbows. The result was cool and comfortable.
It’s common to complain about the Bond films for being unfaithful to the darkness of the books. But this misses the point that Bond’s introspection and self-doubt only makes sense in the context of the stories’ fundamental ludicrousness. The ridiculousness of the films is entirely faithful to the books. In fact, the later films are _most_ faithful, because in the books, this insanity is _not the result of running out of steam_. The quote above comes from the _first_ book, Casino Royale, which is also all about beating a spy at baccarat to embarrass him into retiring.
How unique was the Rwandan genocide?
Mark Lawson has just described it as “one of the most immoderate conflicts in history.” Haven’t _all_ wars involved massacres? Of course Rwanda was unique: but historically, not in some kind of transcendental way. Badiou criticises the idea of radical evil precisely because it _fails_ to understand the specificity of holocausts (and isn’t it terrible that that word is now inescapably plural?):
> In fact, to think the singularity of the extermination is to think, first of all, the singularity of
> Nazism as a political sequence … The defenders of ethical ideology are so determined to locate
> the singularity of the extermination directly in Evil that they generally deny, categorically, that
> Nazism was a political sequence. This position is both cowardly and feeble.
>
Ethics, p. 64f
The Nathan Barleys of the movement of movements
I’d never really read Adbusters before, but of course we had a copy lying around our bourgeois anarchist congress. Some people are enthusiastic about the magazine because of its rejection of hair-shirted leftist opposition to design, but it seems to be more like a recapitulation of the worst parts of advertising ‘design’, the sort of thing you see in the Weekend on Sunday and think, “Oh, I see what you’re doing, very clever you wankers.” If you want a genuinely beautiful radical magazine, Greenpepper is a better alternative.
Adbusters also seems a bit like Counterpunch with nicer typography, adopting the same viewpoint that editorial intervention or any kind of quality control is oppressive. Which is not to say that a couple of articles weren’t good, particularly an article by Žižek including his hilarious analysis of Isreal-Palestine and an unexpected call for slums to be recognised as the site of the new proletariat. Over the page, there’s a so-so article by Michael Hardt which does include a very good short description of the hegemony of intellectual labour:
Although only a small portion of global labor is involved in such immaterial production, its model of decentralized network collaboration has become dominant and tends to influence all other types of production.
In other words, the hegemony of intellectual labour does not mean that everyone is doing intellectual labour; it means those not doing intellectual labour are increasingly organised as if they were.
Not Girls Aloud
>Two central themes of Marxist thought are prominent in the youthful works of Lenin. The first
> is the unity of capitalism’s social functioning throughout all its development - from merchant
> and usury capital to industrial capitalism.
This quote from Panzieri seems pretty intresting in relation to the CCRU idea that capitalism is a system of _anti_-markets.
4th-dee event matrix irruption!
As was perhaps obvious from my description of the activities involved, I wasn’t really at a secret anarchist training camp, I was on holiday (with some friends who mostly are in fact anarchists). We had some interesting discussions about anarchism, though, carried on in an entertainingly stereotypical British activist fashion (a whole evening talking about what was effectively communitarian vs. individualist anarchism, in which none of Stirner, Kropotkin or Bakunin were mentioned). It was interesting to discover that, on one level, this group of friends/comrades (many of whom I’ve known for three or four years) are _much_ more ideologically diverse than I realised. I would never have imagined, in all the times I’ve seen Nick dragged away by cops or security guards, that he thinks “basically, something like the court system is right on.”
Only on one level, though, and not, I think, on a level that matters much. These differences arise when we start asking questions _as if_ we could now decide on the consitution of the anarchist utopia to come . I’ve previously dismissed such discussions as irrelevant, but it’s really a little more subtle than that. When we talk about utopias, we’re like the blind men and the elephant, each grabbing hold of a bit of something we’re not (yet) able to actually speak of. You could talk about this in Badiou’s terms — self-aware utopian discourse is a way of making the void, the essentially unrepresentable element of the current situation, more visible in its void-ness. So it’s a preparation for an event, allowing us to see where an event might arise and what decision it might call on us to make.
We did actually discuss Badiou a little, because I happened to have one of his books with me, and there were a number of mathematicians there (indeed, we were doing pretty well in terms of Alistair’s discipline/company hierarchy, with an astronomer and an ex-physicist, too). However, it’s also interesting to think about utopias in Grant Morrison-esque terms. What different people are seeing are different perspectives on a hypercube. This makes a lot of sense if we think that what people are looking at is post-revolutionary society: because after all the revolution is four-dimensional.
And the fact that the revolution is extended in time explains our unity in practice. Although we all see different bits of the hypercube but act from the same position on it, our current actions can all be in accordance with the revolution. This explains the importance of the anarchist direct-action conception of revolution. Some Mexican anarchists came to speak in Cambridge yesterday, and I thought they phrased it very nicely: “We don’t think the revolution is something that will happen tomorrow, we think today’s changes will happen today, and actually we’re a little behind.”
So all in all it was a great holiday (the skiing was lovely, you know). Terribly bourgeois, of course, although I hadn’t realised how terrible until, as we were leaving, I discovered that the guy who owned the house had taken part in the march of middle-managers which broke the strike at FIAT. I have a horrible feeling of 4-dimensional scabbing.
21st birthday
Since Tim is away fighting capitalism in a skiing resort, I thought I should probably write something :). It is my 21st birthday today, and I am so hungover from going out last night that I can’t think of anything remotely sensible today. I’m trying to cut down a bit on drinking now, since it actually does make me incapable of working, but it is very difficult since all my friends drink lots.
Not really a secret
I’m going to be away till the middle of next week at one of those secret anarchist training camps you read so much about, and so probably won’t have internet access. Expect exciting pictures of (anarchist) skiing and (anarchist) drinking, and possibly anarchist discussion of anarchism, when I get back.
If you don’t push it, it won’t fall
Usually, stories of the horrors of capitalism don’t make me reach for the worrying historical analogy. Actually, stories like this one about trains with TVs you can’t turn off cheer me up. It’s some unresolved crypto-Hegelianism, I think: one imagines capitalism playing the role of Geist, becoming self-aware and capable of its own self-criticism, not to say self-overcoming. How can something this dumb not implode out of its own stupidity? The revolution’s just around the corner, we just need to sit back and let it happen.