SixImpossibleThingsBeforeBreakfast
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
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Social movements typically grow from ¿cramped spaces¿, situations that are constricted by the impossibilities of the existing world with a way out barely imaginable. But precisely because they are cramped, these spaces act as incubators or greenhouses for creativity and innovation ¿ ¿creation takes place in bottlenecks¿. Social movements that grow from these spaces might form around antagonistic demands (more money, better housing, withdrawal of the police) but they also produce their own problematics. They throw up concepts, desires, forms of life that don¿t ¿make sense¿ within existing society and so call forth new worlds. But just as social movements take root and slow down, so these problematics stop moving. What was once new becomes codified. It¿s a vicious circle: as problematics slow down, they acquire baggage; as they acquire baggage, they slow down. Rather than being innovative and productive, the problematic loses its purchase and becomes cliché. It becomes saturated in meaning. [...] This ceaseless, debilitating antagonism is central to how capitalism works. Compared with feudalism or slavery, capitalism is a dynamic and relatively resilient social system for two related reasons. The first is its ability to feed off antagonism, to use antagonism to fuel its own development. One example of this is the move from the production of absolute surplus value to relative surplus value. As the workers¿ movement became stronger in England in the 18th and 19th centuries, factory owners were forced to shift from a strategy of extensive exploitation (longer working day and shorter breaks) to one of intensive exploitation (using machines to increase productivity). This launched a new cycle of accumulation, celebrated as the Industrial Revolution. The strategy reached its zenith with Henry Ford's mind-numbing production lines. A different relationship to antagonism can be seen in the post-war 'welfare states' and the Keynesian policies that underpinned them. These societies institutionalised the antagonism between capital and the industrialised working class; a certain level of welfare provision was negotiated in exchange for rising productivity. The fierce autonomous struggles of the 1960s and '70s exploded this frozen antagonism by asserting new problems and new antagonisms. The second reason for capital's resilience is the fact that its inherent antagonism is constantly displaced. Capital as a social relation dominates our lives yet it's virtually impossible to get a grip on it. Some have argued that it's just a matter of 'false consciousness', as if all we have to do is pull aside the curtain and reveal the man pulling the levers. But it's not about ideology. Capitalism doesn't need us to believe that commodities have a life of their own, or that capital produces wealth. We simply have to act as if those things are true when we work or consume. That's the way in which reality cannot but appear under capitalism. Nothing else 'makes sense', because of the presuppositions that capital places on us. It's the same with the violence that separates us from the commons, as people are forced off the land in the global South or, in the North, find their working hours seeping into the rest of their lives. 'It is very difficult to pinpoint this violence because it always presents itself as pre-accomplished' From a standpoint within the capitalist mode of production it is very difficult to say who is the thief and who is the victim, or even where the violence resides.' [...] Thus, capital's antagonistic nature manifests itself less as a clash between worker and boss than as a bitter struggle between worker and worker, as everyone struggles to meet or beat the market-determined norm (and set a new one). This displaced antagonism is aggravated by climate change-and not simply by wars over water and other resources. As we've hinted, capital's solution is a new round of austerity, a redistribution of income from workers to capital. Measures like carbon taxes and road pricing will increase the cost of basic items like food, heating and transport, so limiting our mobility and our autonomy. Climate change is a double whammy for the vast majority of the world's population. Not only are we more likely to suffer from its effects ' the rich don't have to live in areas susceptible to flooding and always have insurance-we will also suffer more from capital's solutions to the problem. Moreover, given capitalist social relations, the best individual response lies in trying to get more money (since money buys mobility, etc), just as the best individual response in a workplace is to get ahead at the expense of fellow workers. It 'makes sense'. The net effect is to intensify competition, the war of all against all that is capital's lifeblood. The enormous changes in the structure of capitalist relations over the last three decades have also had major implications for how antagonism appears in our everyday lives. With outsourcing and privatisation it's increasingly unclear who our enemy might be at any one time. Governance is multi-layered, with responsibility always lying 'elsewhere'. Politicians and decision-makers at every level, from local councils to national governments, can honestly say 'our hands are tied'. Politics, as it's traditionally understood, is replaced by administration, with the result that a political antagonism often makes no sense. [...] For us, one of the most liberating moments in the 1980s was the way that anarchist politics gave names (and addresses) to the people who dominate our lives. It broke the rules of the game. It rejected the power imbalance between rich and poor, the asymmetry of a world where profits are privatised but loss is always socialised. (Look at the current credit crisis: whilst the 'subprime' poor are being turfed onto the streets, top bankers are selling third homes or luxury yachts.) In a bizarre way, naming the rich re-asserts a common humanity by denying them the ability to hide behind limited liability companies, off-shore tax havens, and multi-layered management. It is an echo of Lucy Parsons in 1885 when she said 'Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live.' There are a huge number of dangers here. Besides the obvious dead-end of terrorism, this approach can easily slide into populism. Naming capital (a social relation) as the enemy doesn't offer an easy course of action; naming the rich simplifies the social field, offering us some grip on the world. But it does this by providing a scapegoat. This stand-in might be the aristocracy, the ruling class or investment bankers-any element that is seen as 'parasitic' or 'unproductive'. And historically it has often been linked with violent anti-Semitism.
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