Goodbye I, hello we: a personal narrative of the birth of a student movement

Perhaps it’s a symptom of an urban campus cleaved in twain by a major transport artery.

Perhaps it’s the organic result of a national culture that lauds the Ordinary and ridicules idealism.

Maybe I’m a cynic.

But up until recently I thought that a dynamic, exciting, critical and united voice on campus in New Zealand was an impossibility. Until the 14^th September.

As a postgraduate student who has been haunting the uni for longer than I care to admit, the apathy and isolation of student life at Auckland has always seemed inexorable. Add to the generally self-interested malaise of life on campus the atomised and unfriendly culture of my “home” department, and I understand very well the feeling of students who just want to get their job ticket and leave the university forever. An interest in critical theory and modernist literature does not have employers lining up. I have despaired often at the prospect of having to give up the work that I love and towards which I’ve put a large chunk of myself, achieving, arguably, a bit of learning and skill. The fact that being an undergrad at Auckland was like walking into a frigidarium did not fill me with confidence that I could find a sense of sorority and solidarity in my experience of the university.

Reading nostalgic accounts of the great student movements and intellectual cultures of the past always filled me with a sense of alienated dis-ease with what the university is today, in reality. Not for me the long nights in dingy cafes discussing the finer points of Foucault’s genealogies; no solace or clarification would be found through impassioned discussions of Lacan’s theories of the unconscious in some basement at 4am; no one with whom to lean towards a nearing of the potential of Deleuzian thought: these experiences of experimental and communal intellectual horseplay, crucial to a well-rounded apprehension of critical principles, lived in books, in an impossible past. The age of Kafka, of Dostoevsky, of Bloomsbury and the Beats was over, not to be resuscitated. These eras were a dream, a half-remembering of times not had, an unrealisticidealisation of the unifying and nurturing potential of the student experience, thought I.
I could have my study, but I could not eat it too.

Until 14^th September.

I watched with great interest the student protests against cuts and corporatism in London. I stayed up all night on countless occasions to watch events unfold over the internet, often crashing my browser with the strain of 150 open tabs, monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Livestreams, traffic cameras, blogs and critical columns in progressive independent media.  I had been stirred into enthusiasm for the principles of informed dissent and direct democracy evident in the student protests of 25^th November, 10^th December and 26^th March. While the winter of discontent raged, I was having my own summer of web content, observing the uprisings in London and globally, like Tiny Tim at the window, moved and optimistic, but with no immediate outlet for confronting the things about my own national context which are witheringly unjust – economic inequality causing rampant poverty, increasing and frankly frightening erosion of civil rights, cuts to vital services for those most in need, all having lemon juice squeezed into them by a wantonly destructive right-wing government intent on furthering the same sort of proto-fascist neoliberalism which is currently decimating the very bedrock of democratic society, and which has been creeping out its mindlessly cruel and entirely banal reform agenda for the last 30 or so years. I was heartened on the one hand by watching the creative rhizome of resistance spreading around the world. But I was also, necessarily, excluded from those struggles, except insofar as they became for me a form of cathartic desublimation as I observed them from the void of my critical dystopia across the seas. Stuck in Auckland, watching, with nothing to offer but the pseudo-active tweetery and remote commentary of an armchair in New Zealand.

At the beginning of this year, I took a postgraduate paper in social theory, in my second home of Sociology. In this class I was able to meet a few other students who felt as I did about the experience of life at the University of Auckland. A few of us formed a group aimed at discussion of how to use critical theory towards creative practice. Our goal became the re-enfranchisement of students into the politics of the university and, by extension, society at large. These others, I found, had also been watching the world, also had theory-based analyses of why the three bedfellows of the apocalypse, that is, patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism, are the greatest threats there are to an equitable and authentically liberated future civilisation. The group is process, the group is a moving-towards and, as such, was slow to collate and find paths through the social mire towards our goals.

We spent many hours discussing our parameters, going back and forward on points of process and range and function. Many times it felt like circling the drain, bordering upon Sisyphean beard-stroking. We could see movements and groups whose aims and actions we wished to emulate (the University for Strategic Optimism being among these), but felt that perhaps New Zealand was not at its tipping point yet, or that our campus culture was past the apathetic point of no return. As we narrowed our goals and focused our thoughts and plans it became clear that what was required was a new consensus at uni, one geared not towards the job ticket, but towards the educational institution as a radically indispensible social good. The university, we saw, needs to be so much more than the banal sausage factory that has been the experience of so many of us.

In August, an opportunity was presented to us which revealed a path towards the re-vivifying of a politicised consensus on campus. Nominations were closing for the 2012 editorship of the weekly student rag, Craccum. We decided to nominate one of our number, Tom, for this role, with precious little hope that the frigid student body would thaw to our stated goals of radicalising the publication as an inclusive resource, a reforming of student media as a critic and conscience of society and the scholarly experience. Ten days later saw us discover this not to be the case.  Students from all quarters who had been feeling the same creeping unease and alienation flocked to the polls in response to our intensive campaigning. When the results came in, we found that our wild stab in the dark had found purchase in the hearts of the unheard, the students who’d moved beyond dick jokes and proud apathy. In short, Tom won. Emboldened and newly involved by this coup, we continued to expand and network with other groups and individuals towards a reclaiming of our space at uni.

On the 14^th September, during, but not officially affiliated with the Auckland University Students’ Association (AUSA) Human Rights Week, some students had organised a teach-in in the basement of the library, a yawning network of halls and lecture theatres. Talks were arranged with prominent and progressive lecturers in Law and Sociology. Banners were sewn and painted, readers on analysis and dissent furnished and over a hundred students amassed themselves around the halls to discuss, out loud, together, the stories that their innards had been feeling.

After Dr Mohsen Al Attar had spoken rousingly on the divide between integrative and formative education, the soft and hard wars waged upon students by way of student debt and the crushing of dissent on campuses; and Dr Campbell Jones on the neoliberal system’s attacks upon student and staff democracy and their wider effects on social consensus. After these talks was planned a period of discussion on the role of the university in society and a screening of video of the day’s events at Victoria University of Wellington, where students had gone in their hundreds to deliver a letter of complaint to their Vice Chancellor Pat Walsh requesting a halt to the support of plans to remove automatic membership of student associations, among other wilfully atomising policies in the name of capital. They had experienced the long arm of discipline, being punched and pushed down the stairs of their registry building by security guards (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiYbund_msA). The group congregated in the library basement were incensed by this display of how the increasingly centralised management sectors of universities in New Zealand respond to disagreement.

When our own campus security told us to leave, we declined politely and continued to have our discussion, a discussion long-overdue, a liberation of those half-perceived feeling of wrongness through the realisation of our common goals and grievances. Security told us that if we didn’t leave, the lights would go off by computer in fifteen minutes. Twenty-five minutes later saw our discussion illuminated still. Presently, someone came and told us that we had been locked inside the building. Guards were positioned at all of the exits, taking photos of students through the glass doors. We had a talk about our plans in response to this kettling and intimidation.

(It was not the first time that guards had been dispatched to follow students around with cameras. Weeks earlier, some students had gone to the Courses and Careers day to hand out fliers raising awareness of the increasingly draconian corporatist policies of the university. Tertiary Education Union (TEU) members were boycotting this day in protest of attacks by management on academic staff’s working conditions, key to the proper functioning of the university as a site of academic freedom and, accordingly, social progression. The leafleting had been in solidarity with these staff and had been met with stalking behaviour by guards ordered to follow and photograph those perceived as threats on this day.)

Back to the basement. We decided collectively that if anyone was going to control the doors to our space, it would be us keeping them out, not them keeping us in. It is our university. We are all too cognisant of the thousands upon thousands of dollars that we’ll be paying off for years to use this space. Whose uni? Our uni.

So the doors were barricaded with the conveniently-sized-and-weighted seats strewn around the hallway. We sent out messages over the internet appealing for support on the outside, which came. As did around 50 officers of the Auckland City Police. We learned later that two students on the outside had been arrested for trespass. One on the grounds of their own university, the other across th road on a public footpath. When we knew that the police were planning to break into our library, we repaired to one of the lecture theatres and discussed our plan to leave peacefully on request. Tom, ever the forward-thinker, brought in loo roll and set it up by a bin at the front of the room. I for one am glad that it didn’t come to using it, though, as he was quick to point out, we would have been bloody glad to have it had we decided to hold the room for any length of time.

In due course, the police broke through our barricades and entered the lecture room. Officer Good Cop, calling himself “the Friendly Face of Policing” came in and span some pretty funny Python references.

(“Who’s the leader?”

“We are the university, you can speak to us collectively.”

“Ah. An anarcho-syndicalist commune then…”)

After some negotiation, we agreed to leave peacefully on the understanding that no penalty would be meted out to us. We left in unity. On the way out, one of our number was picked off and arrested for wilful damage, for the cracking of a window that had occurred in an earlier skirmish with security. In solidarity with this student and the two others who had been taken into custody we marched through the central city to the police station to demand their release.

(“RELEASE THE PRISONER!!” – Tom)

This was a good first lesson in the power of unity and signalled a rebirth of critical dissent on campus. We saw first-hand the force with which uni management was prepared to crush resistance to their cynical machinations. Most of us had never been involved in this sort of action, and though intimidated by the heavy-handed actions of security and police, were also incensed and encouraged into defending our principles, if anything more strongly.

A week and a half later, a follow-up action occurred which compounded further our intent to dissent. Around 300 students stormed and occupied the top floor of the Business School, financed in part by its named sponsor, inveterate profiteer Owen G Glenn. We held the space for five hours before Police were once again called onto our campus and peaceful dispersion was effected. A fuller account of this day can be found here: http://wearetheuniversity.org.nz/?page_id=66. Students have also occupied a University Council meeting to decide on fee rises and taken part in many actions supporting other groups.

For me though, it was the 14^th September that signalled the end of lone rumination, the end of intellectual isolation, the end of seeing university as a place of atomised factory-farmed essay-writing and debt-racking and not much else.

The 14^th September was the day that students at the University of Auckland united to begin the process of casting off the shackles of profit-driven fast food education. The day when we stood up and found, to our pleasant surprise, that the dissent in our hearts resonated across the minds of others, that idealism is alive and that the collective imagination of the university has real potential for making meaningful change, that we are all the university and that it falls to us to defend it against the attacks based in the greed of its managers and the right-wing government who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. “I” no longer exists in relation to the university. It is we. We are all the university, and we will defend it.

It is not a symptom of a city campus.

It’s not the national culture that lauds ordinariness and quashes idealism

And I really don’t think I have the pessimism to be a cynic.

It is the oppressive corporate takeover of the university that divides us, that conquers us.

Until now.

Visiting Professor T. Jones

What is education for, and who should it benefit?

These are familiar questions for those of us here at the UfSO where we try to emphasize that it is the learner who should be the ultimate beneficiary of education rather than the ego of the instructor, purse and prestige of the institution, or the stability of the existing political order. However, in today’s educational institutions (from the prisons where we grow-up learning about discipline to the factories of the corporate university where we discover productivity) all of these things are equated. What is in the best interest of the student is that he or she be able to embark on a career path upon graduation and become a successful contributor to ‘society’. Thus we need to coddle our teachers to get those references, engage in the research for which there is funding, and all the while not upset the powers that be lest they decide to revoke all that which they have so graciously given us as a reward for dutifully perpetuating the status quo. Maybe this is all a bit fatalistic, but it serves the purpose of establishing a standard model of education existing today from which we can differentiate ‘antagonistic educations’. These are curriculums which cultivate students not interested in becoming catalysts for the reproduction of the current social form, but rather in bringing that form into crisis through its critique; being epistemic terrorists if you will. Yet, although ascribed little to no immediate value in the ‘official’ realm of the social (because they don’t generate financial profit), what sort of historical and political significance do such educations have? In the most recent contribution to the “Writings Section” our esteemed colleague Prof. Jimbeau Pickett looks at just such questions in relation to the recent ban of ethnic studies programs in Arizona by Superintendent John Huppenthal, who we can see below furiously working to create further opportunities for The American Dream.

Read full article.

I think perhaps the most fundamental reason, or maybe what initially drew me to Marxism, was that I was not satisfied with the world. Avoiding questions about what the world is….growing up, in what I saw and experienced, it just didn’t seem to be good enough. So I’m talking about the pain, suffering, loneliness, boredom, whatever. All the staple existentialist teenage angst stuff. But also deeper than this. The social stuff. Why are we so lonely? Why is there suffering? And why are we so bored? Once I got past the teenage angst bit (I think probably when I got my first job that I actually needed to keep because I had bills to pay) I started thinking about society. What is society? How does it impinge on what I thought was my lonely and radically free existence? Well, quite a lot actually.

I hate work. I realised this very early on, and this doesn’t mean I hate any specific kind of work, because I’ve had some shitty jobs that I’ve actually quite enjoyed. Like being a A/V Technician in an FE College. This was back in the glory days when you could swear at students, get pissed with colleagues (and students) at lunch-time and go back to work and sleep it off. Then I worked as a park attendant, which involved sitting in a hut all day reading books and drinking coffee, occasionally acknowledging a member of the public. Winter was the best, huddled next to a radiator, reading A day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, not seeing a soul for the whole 9 hours. Of course, this was the era of New Labour, when nothing was true, everything was permitted. Work was sweet, but I still hated it.

I hate the very essence of work, the global acceptance that it’s fine that we all have to do something we don’t really want to do in order to live. I have come to realise that the things that make work tolerable have nothing to with work.

I would say I was a Marxist before I even knew much about it. I had read The Communist Manifesto, but I didn’t really understand the points it made. But the essence of the hatred of capitalism was already inside me. I still hate work. Even teaching, which I love to do, the careerism, the requirement of kissing ass and being shamefully exploited for years and years before someone gives you a real (i.e. contracted, or full-time) teaching job. One of my colleagues has been an hourly paid lecturer for about ten years now, teaching pretty much a full week. Yeah, the pay is alright in the winter, but what happens in those 4/5 months in between the shrinking term times? I know….who cares about lecturers, at least the job is interesting and you get some “respect”. But I even hate this job. i hate the essence of the job, the thought of getting stuck in an ever-tightening system of control and bureaucracy. The sacrifice you make in teaching is your soul for a secure job. It makes me want to get out while I still can.

Nowadays, with the help of some badly applied Marxist theory, I can understand and sometimes explain to other people why I hate work. We are always fundamentally alienated from our labour in a capitalist society. Easier to say when you work on a production line, but with enough imagination this can be stretched to cover most wage-work. With the marketization of education and public services, it becomes even easier (and these sectors will be the most exploited of all, because it will take us much longer to give up the fantasy of teaching for teaching’s sake. We will be exploited and furthermore happily exploit ourselves: presenting management with an irresistible crusty topping like you get on posh clotted cream). Work is always for someone else’s benefit, And we always delay living until later, when we have achieved some balance between exploitation and financial renumeration: Is it £30k? £40k? (More?!)

This is my current “bug bear” (I looked at a room in a shared house and this guy couldn’t stop saying this, it’s a horrible idiom). How sad is it that we waste an entire life in order to get somewhere later? To eventually do a job that we like. Or to earn enough money for the lifestyle we want to lead, or for family security, or for a later life of leisure. Is that really the best use of this incredible gift of life that us human beings have? We have achieved some kind of intelligence and creativity and we use it in this way. For fuck’s sake, this makes me want to scream. What passion is there in this way of living?

It reminds me of a thought experiment I read about during my philosophy degree. Mill’s Utilitarianism: the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. Great. Brilliant idea. But what if you could choose between living forever as a turtle (or some creature, I can’t remember what it is), which would have a moderate level of pleasure forever, no anxiety, no boredom, or living the life of some creative genius, say Mozart, or Einstein? Would you choose the turtle? Or would you take the risk, live the intense highs and lows of an exceptional human, creative existence? This thought experiment is supposed to show how Mill’s quantitative measure of happiness doesn’t take into account the qualitative dimension of experience. Isn’t there something qualitatively different about the kind happiness you achieve by living life to the full, taking risks, experiencing suffering and disappointment? To me the choice is a no brainer, I don’t want to work all my life in the hope that there’ll be something at the end. (Doesn’t this sound like Christianity to you? Hasn’t capitalism  just inherited the Christian work ethic, the absurd conclusion that everything depends on an afterlife and that this life is ultimately irrelevant? Fuck that!)

Don’t get me started on money. I’ve just this morning been talking to a colleague about his going out for an expensive meal in a posh restaurant. Yeah, ‘the food is amazing, it’s worth it – would you rather spend that 100 quid on a food experience or a massive piss up?’ (well, actually the latter!). ‘But it’s such a waste of money’, I argue, it’s not what the money is spent on, it’s the expenditure itself which I find depressing.

When I go out for an expensive dinner, I feel like the pure waste of it all is just continuously slapping me in the face. It’s over so quick, and then it turns to shit. ‘But you are enjoying the hard work that you did that week…’ I don’t know, I can’t do the counter-argument justice, sorry. But I can see a direct relationship between the amount of labour I have sacrificed and the speed at which it literally ends up in the toilet. The process is the same for everything we spend money on, even living expenses. The house, the bills, the food. Yeah, all essential, but they are only commodities in a capitalist economy. Private property: this means a reliance on wage labour to live. Someone owns the means of production, someone else (or maybe the same person!) owns the means of subsistence and allows you to rent/buy it off them.

I hate spending money pretty much in equal measure to working, it’s the same cycle of nonsense. Work to live, live to work. Spend to make up for the utter boredom of living, all social relations mediated by the commodity. Buy stuff to justify working, work to be able to buy stuff. Fucking hell! Work less, spend less! I’d rather work less and live on poached eggs and toast. (But then there’s a reason why it’s impossible to get decent part-time job).

Anyway, maybe I’m trying attempting retrieve some kind of pre-theoretical space that isn’t yet Marxist, to try and remember what for me at least is its essence. Because when you get into theory, you lose yourself and the reasons why you need it. Call me a bourgeois existentialist (no  please do, I enjoy it). The bet I think we make when we become Marxists is that all of this shit that we see and experience in life is somehow traceable back to something we all call “capitalism”. This is the fundamental framework which justifies and sustains all this shit, and we all for some reason sign up to it without question.

We wager that there is a system and a logic to this nonsense and that this logic is historical. This should make us feel better: it wasn’t always like this, it won’t always be like this in the future. Also, agreeing on a hatred and critique of capitalism should bring us together (if we can stop being so dogmatic and arrogant); like in the Bible, slowly moving away from Judaism and Roman society, an ever growing army of the disillusioned and angry.

But can we be so sure about Marxism? Shouldn’t we always attack it and think it through? What if “capitalism” is like a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory? What if we who hate capitalism are in the minority, and actually represent an idealist elite, about to be left behind by history? Maybe capitalism suits the reality of the human condition, and this is the end. Or maybe overcoming capitalism is a matter of individual responsibility, that evolution will occur within the individual unit and the next epoch of society will be something totally unexpected.

GR

Scholars long ago noted that Soviet party meetings and congresses had changed by the 1930s. Before that time, they had been lively forums for policy debate and discussion. In the 1930s, when open opposition was no longer tolerated, these meetings seem at first glance to have been pointless scenes where policies already decided above were dictated to the assembled members, where challenges to and debates about those policies were prohibited, and where those decisions were approved unanimously.
It was always the same. Attendance was mandatory. A reporter read a long report and draft resolution, carefully prepared in advance with attention to the approved slogans and linguistic conventions. Then, each speaker (and most activists were expected to speak) expressed “complete agreement” with the report and provided appropriate embellishments. In short, party meetings from the Central Committee down to the party cell had become apparently empty rituals

[...]

Kritika/samokritika is an example of an “apology ritual” in which the apology element served to affirm the “mistake,” to pronounce a lesson to others below not to make the same mistake, and to recognise the status and rights of the party receiving the apology (the leadership) to set the rules. It thereby affirms the unity and authority of the collective. The subject, who was either removed or censured, was supposed to play his part by recognising that the leadership’s position was “completely correct”, reiterating the critique in the context of “self-criticism”. These apologetic rituals were a “show of discursive affirmation from below,” indicating that the dissident “publicly accepts … the judgment of his superior that this is an an offense and reaffirms the rule in question.” In this sense, they had a transactional component, in which the self-criticism paid “symbolic taxation” to a higher authority. As we shall see, these rituals were not frozen set pieces. They were contingent and unpredictable performances in which outcomes and punishments depended more on how well the subject complied with the symbolic transaction than on the nature of the offense itself

[...]

Much of Stalinism involved attempts to create an interpretive template, a collective representation of reality or discourse that made sense of a society in crisis. Whether we call them dominant discourses, master fictions, ruling myths, transcripts, hegemonic ideologies, or party lines, it is clear that elites everywhere support a basic system of beliefs, assumptions and tenets. Whether they are about democracy, socialism, fascism, patriarchy, or religion, they provide an organising thought pattern and validation of the existing order (even if that order be revolutionary): ‘This is the way things are and this is the way things should be.” They also provide a “self-portrait of dominant elites as they wold have themselves seen.” They facilitate a unified elite self-representation, cohesion, and integration and offer a means of social control by insisting that people adhere to the belief system; they thereby provide a definition of heresy in the form of non-adherence or, as in the cases examined here, in the form of non-participation in unity rituals

J. Arch Getty. Samokritika: Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933-38

‘Just received a couple of intriguing Minor Compositions books from the excellent Stevphen Shukaitis. Hope to read 19  & 20 Notes for a New Social Protagonism (as well another Minor Compositions book I recently got, Ben Noys’ Communization and Its Discontents) soon. Did have a chance to read (well, skim) Undressing the Academy, or The Student Handjob a collective product of the University for Strategic Optimism.

Gotta say–my first reaction is that the optimism is hard to find; it’s being deployed so strategically as to be barely apparent at all. I think for the authors–students–and likely readers–students the optimism might come out of a combination of the expressions of rage and despair in the book and the emphasis on responding collectively, whether through writing, squatting, or protesting–although the book is not naive about the efficacy of protests: it notes the failure of the last decades biggest protests (February 15 2003, globally, and March 26 2011 in the UK).

That said, I love the book as a rejoinder and anecdote to the stream of educational propaganda shoveled through my college’s listserv. We are constantly being told how to engage students, help them be responsive learners, how we should be co-learners, what skills we need them to develop so that they will become leaders (“leadership” is the new buzzword–but really? who is it kidding? as an object of pedagogical practice it’s another vehicle for extend corporate logics more deeply into society, grasping people at younger ages, and disciplining the curriculum). The cynicism and anger in Undressing the Academy are like having students stare blankly at an enthusiastic lecturer giving them guidelines for success and then take a massive shit in the middle of the class before walking out of room.

The overall critique of the education is its absorbtion within and continued production of capitalism. So this is not the 60s call for relevance, meaning, and authenticity. It’s more brutal. There’s no safety net of welfare to catch it; the result of education in contemporary conditions is prostitution and debt.

The book is like a cry for education free from capitalism, free from exploitation, competition, and the miserable conditions that leave students with no time to think open and faculty with no time to teach. Capitalism fundamentally destroys the relationship at the heart of education (even as unbearably lame experts try to provide us with compensatory tricks–like using clickers in large lectures so that faculty can see quickly whether students are learning; apparently the option of smaller classes and more professors is off the table).

I wonder if many faculty will assign it–too dangerous?–and if it will circulate as student samizat–among those who don’t have time to read? If the critique of the university in the 60s was that education was a factory, the critique in this book is that the workers are over-extended and the products are shoddy; the factory has broken down–its capitalist setting has shown its horrible face. Its filled with cheating, bribery, exhaustion, excuses, and all for the profit of the very, very few.’

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2012/01/undressing-the-academy.html

You can purchase one here: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=272

Or read online version for free here: http://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/the-student-handjob/

Prof. G Riddle

Before Nietzsche there was Schopenhauer. He was a pessimist. This means roughly that he believed there was no purpose intrinsic to human life, or life in general. He was a true materialist, basing his pessimism on the scientific studies of his time, of animals and humans as biological organisms, which pass through cycles of birth and death as species, not as individuals. The individual is just an illusion, and the human “will” is just our experience of the irrational and intrinsic flow of biological life.

Our actions are dictated by our desires, which are ultimately physical: sex, food and survival. Schopenhauer was writing before Darwin, nevertheless, it is useful to think of the ‘world as will’ as something like the evolutionary explanation of the purpose of life. The natural world evolves over massive spans of time, human beings just one minor aberration in an otherwise a-moral history. Life is a biological fact, and the individual just an illusion created by consciousness. And the worst part of it is that these desires can never be satisfied; they are always transitory. We satisfy the sexual urge, then we desire it again. We eat, and then we are hungry. We survive, and then are faced with another set of dangers. This is just the mechanism of life, the way that nature reproduces itself through living beings, and we are no more advanced in this respect than any other creature.

Modern capitalism. We can see capitalism as the social system that fits this reality. We are “desiring machines”, to steal a catchy phrase from Deleuze and Guattari. We are constantly seeking to connect our desires to flows of satisfaction. Capitalism as consumerism allows us to do this. We have come to understand that satisfaction is transitory, and have based an entire social system of production on this fact. We have now accelerated this vicious circle of desire to ever more advanced speeds of production-consumption, desire-satisfaction-desire. We have learned how to sell food, sex and survival. We have learned even better how to consume these basic human needs at insatiable levels of greed and gluttony.

The problem is, of course, that this circle of desire and momentary satisfaction does not lead to happiness. In a way, happiness is beside the point. Capitalism is the social expression of human biology. Capitalism as a philosophy has faced up to the meaninglessness of human existence and embraced it as a way of life. It is a social system without religion, myth and idealism. But it also has no intention of alleviating suffering, or fighting the negative traits of human kind. Again, these are just biological facts of evolutionary success, why should it? To take away violence, envy, competition, nepotism, etc, would be to destroy the very mechanics of human progress, as a species. Capitalism is only the most honest of social systems. It doesn’t deny the totality of the human condition like idealist philosophies do. Imposing abstract ideas of what human beings should be like, as opposed to what they are like, has lead to many horrific atrocities in the last century alone.

Yet, according to Schopenhauer, there is another way. There is an aspect to being human that gives us a brief respite from this endless trap of desire-satisfaction-desire. This is aesthetic contemplation. Yes, this is where philosophy sounds at its most out-of-date and reactionary, but maybe we can suspend our contemporary arrogance and imagine a more genuine meaning to this aesthetic contemplation. It is the same kind of contemplation that Kant talked about in his Critique of Judgment. Of course this is a bourgeois luxury, but wait. In moments of pure aesthetic appreciation, a bad example would be in an art gallery (we know that this is unlikely) a better one would be standing on the top of a mountain, or seeing the northern lights, something devastating, breath-taking. This moment of aesthetic appreciation brings momentary relief to incessant desire, and has this appreciation of beauty also suspends the need to consume or own the aesthetic object in question. As Kant would have said, this aesthetic appreciation is disinterested, I,e, it contains no motivation apart from appreciation itself.

It’s true that this aesthetic appreciation is as fleeting as the satisfaction of biological desires, yet Schopenhauer says we can learn to harness this mode of being, which is qualitatively different from the disappointment of satisfaction. It can be fostered, nurtured and extended. Effectively, what Schopenhauer thinks is the solution is an increasing denial of desire, eventually reaching a kind of asceticism, only indulging the bare minimum of biological needs. We can see, therefore, how much of an influence Eastern philosophy had on Schopenhauer, as this is also the Buddhist solution to the reality of suffering. Moderation, self-discipline, peace on earth.

I don’t think this is as “reactionary” as it at first seems. I think the reactionary accusation makes sense, if we think of the Tory ideology of discipline and moderation, always for the working-class, never for the bourgeoisie. The role of religion in precapitalist societies, the difference being that organised religion was always already enmeshed in corruption and power-money politics. This kind of refusal of desire always seems to justify the suffering in the world, and instead of doing something about it, we are told to accept it and find a way of coping. This acceptance is usually required by those that suffer, and this wouldn’t be reactionary if this suffering was equally distributed across society. But it isn’t. We are therefore reminded of the recent Tory post-recession propaganda that ‘we are all in this together, we must all make sacrifices’. These sacrifices are more disastrous to the already poor and hopeless than to the rich and secure.

What is my defense of Schopenhauer? If we gave up the endless cycle of desire-satisfaction-desire, or production-consumption-production, wouldn’t this undermine the efficacy of capitalism? Wouldn’t it in fact work against capitalism to the point of perhaps even destroying it? Fair enough, why should we give up our desires and pleasures when the ruling classes can enjoy what they want? But doesn’t their power in a capitalist system depend on the mass production and consumption of commodities?

Therefore a Schopenhauerian anti-capitalism would be an ethics of denial and self-discipline. We would refuse to consume, only buying what was absolutely essential. Perhaps we could even find a way to produce these essentials ourselves, through growing food, making clothes, inventing our own entertainment (sex can already be free). One immediate advantage of this would mean we could work less, even though it is hard to find decent part-time work. A long-term effect of this cult of self-discipline could be the eventual collapse of capitalism, or at least it might accelerate an already disintegrating system. Because we are all in this way of organising work and subsistence now, we cannot go back to earlier social systems. Too many people, everything and everywhere is economically co-dependent. This is the major lesson of the last recession, which sets it apart from previous ones. We watch the news and see the cancer of crisis spreading to country after country, even China. This system relies on ever increasing growth, which depends on ever increasing levels of exploitation and consumption.

One criticism I can see being leveled at this idea is that the poorest members of society, perhaps they would be referred to as the “underclass”, haven’t got the luxury of asceticism. But is this really true? Isn’t this just a socio-cultural fact, not an economic one? I mean, this kind of asceticism has been available to the poorest people across the world as part of religious devotion, i.e. Christian and Buddhist monks. Another problem will then be, what to do with our life it isn’t based around work and consumption? We would have to invent a whole new way of socialising outside of the commodity, which will require much creativity. I think we have all but forgotten how to just “be” with each other, sometimes even with our best friends and partners.

Dr. Rosa Salome,
UfSO Reactionary Division

I think the biggest problem we face in fighting capitalism is that we don’t even know what it is, perhaps in a slightly different way to the idea behind a book like Das Kapital. Not an analysis to show how capitalism works in an economic sense, although this is also crucial. Actually, what I mean to say is that Capitalism with a big C has become an entity in itself, and every Marxist analysis maintains this reification of the system we are fighting. There is a sense of suffocation when we think of Capitalism, in the way that Mark Fisher describes as “capitalist realism” and in the old days might have been talked about in terms of hegemony. The most frustrating part of this hegemony is that when we talk about it in this way, it reinforces exactly that which we are trying to dissolve through analysis. That’s the idea isn’t it? We talk about capitalism in order to remember it is a historical social formation, a relationship between people mediated by the commodity. But this doesn’t seem to help. The minute we leave the critical theory we are lost again.

The problem is that Marxism has become as reified as Capitalism, and the two are no longer in any serious dialogue with each other. The relations of production have left the theory miles behind, and it seems that every post-Marxism or post-structuralism gets it totally wrong. I mean, they haven’t changed anything. The world has changed and intellectuals struggle to keep up. As workers, we change very efficiently along with the changes within production and distribution. And as consumers too. Why is it so easy to adapt to the material conditions of life, yet fail to understand what motivates these changes? If it really is so bad, why do we continue to go along with everything? Conspiracy theories?

What the previous article points out very clearly I think is that there is a difference between change romanticized as an utopian project, always put off towards the future, or to a supposed revolutionary class, and then real material change within this world, within this society. It is around this issue that Marx was original; there already existed socialists and anti-capitalists before Marx. What Marx was saying, and I think in total agreement with Nietzsche, was that the conditions for change are held in potential within the society that actually exists, right now. The problem is that as soon as you try to predict when and where, you lapse into utopianism. The discussion about whether history has proven Marx wrong or not is also part of the same problem, it seems pretty clear to me that globalisation has had a huge effect on the longevity of the capitalist relations of production, and technology has provided some unexpected developments that complicate these relations.

As a myth to replace religion, Marxism did pretty well for a bit in the 20th century. But its efficacy has faded significantly. It really is now a hobby for the intellectual class. Can we change the world with a new myth? Do we have to wait for the economic conditions to force a change? The only candidate for this I can see is the crisis of natural resources, which might perhaps bring about the technological invention of a way to produce free energy. Surely this would bring about massive changes in the relations of production?

Can we change ourselves? What is wrong with individuality? I think about this a lot. Marx talked about capitalism as a necessary stage on the way to socialism. So can we say the same about individualism? Isn’t our attack on individualism itself “reactionary”? It seems to be based on an empty opposition, with the opposite to individualism ultimately derived from some kind tribal or anthropological form of pre-society. Either that or something out of post-structuralism, which to me always ends up very helpful to the destruction of politics and the lubrication of consumerism. What comes first, a change in production or a change in the relations of production? Can we evolve the individual into something different, someone political, social and responsible, yet still creative and free? Who can do this? Us? Someone else? A combination of both? An abstract system of production?

I don’t think we understand what is “reactionary”. I personally see three ideological forces in operation (within British society at least) and only one of them should be called reactionary. This is the conservative element, represented by the Tories, who look back to a feudal system of social organisation. This might be distinctly British, I don’t know, because we never did get rid of the aristocracy.

Therefore I’m not so sure it’s right to call “capitalists” (by which I supppose I mean people who identify with capitalism as a way of life) reactionary. I think Marxism and capitalism, at least in theory (as in the theories of Marxism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, etc) meet, in terms of a “progressiveness” at their most utopian points. Pure capitalism, which may not be possible, sees the future as free from class and poverty. Of course, Marxism says that there is a class structure to capitalism itself which will never allow this utopia to happen, but the point is that this argument is never resolved. They are both progressive in an odd way. Therefore I think its wrong to call the last article reactionary, because it seems to encapsulate the philosophy of capitalism, the philosophy of competition and individuality, the philosophy of Nietzsche, the philosophy of the future and the Übermensch.

You’ll probably tell me I’m talking total shit, and I dare say I am, but this distinction really helped me get a grip on contemporary British society. Before it seemed hopelessly confusing. I suddenly saw the real difference between New Labour and the new Tories (mainly after reading Williams’ Culture and Society), the former being the properly capitalist party and the latter being a reactionary, very confused (distinctly British) party which tries to fuse neo-liberalism and old-fashioned elitism. It’s also been good, in a horrible way, to have such a pure cunt in charge of the country again, someone who is so Tory he is like an action figure. It has politicised us, brought class into focus again.

So I think on the one hand it is quite easy to get a clear picture of the reactionary element in society, especially here in Britain. But perhaps it isn’t so easy to get a clear idea of what capitalism is, or who it is, or what its ideology is. Maybe I’m just too thick. But who wants capitalism? Who is the capitalist subject? I can’t get a grip on this between my full-time job in a super-capitalist global commodity trading company, my lecturing job at university and studying for an MA. Who am I politically? What should I do? Who should I hate? I don’t think I have the energy to be a Marxist anymore…

GR

I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said – and did not say. I wish he had remained taciturn also at the last moment of his life; in that case he might belong to a still higher order of spirits [Geister]. Whether it was the poison or piety or malice – something loosened his tongue at that moment and he said: “O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster.” This ridiculous and terrible “last word” means for those who have ears: “O Crito, life is a disease.” Is it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully and like a soldier in the sight of everyone, should have been a pessimist? He had merely kept a cheerful mien while concealing all his life long his ultimate judgment, his inmost feeling. Socrates, Socrates suffered life! And then he still revenged himself – with this veiled, gruesome, pious, and blasphemous saying. Did a Socrates need such revenge? Did his overrich virtue lack an ounce of magnanimity? – Alas, my friends, we must overcome even the Greeks! (Nietzsche, The Gay Science: §340)

The above passage sums up Nietzsche’s attitude to all those people who look beyond this world towards another one, existing perhaps in the heavens, or in the afterlife, or most probably in the imagination. This is the worst crime, to ignore this life that we are given in favour of a possible one, a way of coping with the fact that life contains difficulty and suffering. This is Socrates’ ultimate betrayal: to have looked as if he enjoyed life and attended to it in all its coarseness and irreducibility, only to say at the last minute that he had hated it all along, that death would bring joy in oblivion, or perhaps in the reincarnation of his soul into a better life. This is also the crime of Christianity, for Nietzsche, to put all one’s faith in an afterlife in order to cope with this life. And with the death of God, we have the death of coping. A godless world is a world without hope and optimism.

The same goes for Marxism; at least in its utopian form. Marx was a materialist like Nietzsche, and he clearly understood socialism as something very much a part of this world, and within Capitalism itself, in the present even. It was a matter of the working class taking control of the means of production, of life itself, as a social manifestation of the will to power. But this isn’t always the position of the so called radical left in the recent reactions to crisis and neo-conservative, neo-liberalism. “Revolution”‘ is always invoked as an event in the future, sometimes inevitable, sometimes unimaginable. And this is an idealism very much tied to advanced Western capitalist states, such as Britain. Because the revolution you Marxists are imagining is not the democratic revolutions of the Arab Spring, where a totalitarian state is overthrown in favour of an alternative that already exists in the world. The coming socialist revolution, now global and necessarily apocalyptic, will be something qualitatively different, something different to the really existing socialism of the 20th century, which skipped the crucial stage of advanced capitalism and produced horrible tyrannies to match anything in the middle east, or in the case of Stalinism, even comparable to National Socialism.

But you can’t tell us what this new world will look like, can you? Marx couldn’t either, and could only manage scattered remarks and empty comparisons to capitalism. And this is a strange consequence of Marx’s rejection of idealism. The analysis of capitalism revealed irresolvable contradictions which would inevitably lead to its self-overcoming by the revolutionary class it has itself created. We might struggle to accept this now, but perhaps the ecological, global financial apocalypse will prove Marx ultimately right. Yet we must always deny this life in favour of a hypothesised better one, far in the future, or one made impossible by the apparent hegemony of the status quo.

This does sound like religion though doesn’t it? At least Christianity has some pretty good stories and mad prophets to make it popular to the masses. Marxism has Das Kapital, an unreadable tome of dry economic-philosophical analysis. No fire and brimstone, no Jesus anti-hero, no bearded magnificently vengeful God, no visions of the apocalypse with sci fi concepts like the rapture. Marxism is a religion without charm, one that totally fails to appeal to the class it worships, a class that always turns its back on them. The working class prefer capitalism to socialism. Hell, a lot of them prefer church on a Sunday to socialism, and that’s got to be telling you something.

What’s wrong with capitalism? We are competitive individuals, this social system respects this fact about human beings and allows people to flourish. It’s not perfect, mainly due to the interference of other facts about humankind: greed, envy, selfishness, cruelty, nepotism, etc. I don’t mean to use these in a moral sense, if we accept these as descriptions of tendencies within the social interactions of people, we should celebrate them as virtues like any other. This is what it means to be a true materialist. You Marxists always avoid the question of whether the world is like this because we aren’t perfect, and aren’t capable of perfection, because this perfection is an intellectual abstraction in the first place. You say, oh these undesirable tendencies are created by the class system and the relations of production that maintain them, i.e. capitalism. This can sound very convincing, but it is ultimately idealism, and based in the imagination not in the material reality of life.

Why do you Marxists hate individuality? All I ever hear and read about from you is how bourgeois individualism must be overcome in favour of class solidarity. But where is this solidarity? Individualism is an amazing historical achievement. We are freer in thought and action than we have ever been. Our individual creativity is no longer constrained and held back by internalised and eternalised social roles. We can be whomever we want with enough will to power. This doesn’t have to be about money, I’m not just invoking the meaningless ideology of Alan Sugar or Dragon’s Den. We have the freedom to change the world like we have never had before, yet we have discovered that we don’t necessarily want equality and fairness. We, as a race of intelligent animals, like competing and winning. We like being better than other people. We like falling in love with people and owning them, they are our partners, not someone else’s. We like private property. We like life.

Marxism is a bourgeois religion. It is a neurotic symptom of the middle class. You Marxists are all bourgeois intellectuals who hate the fact that you are bourgeois intellectuals. So you talk about a mythical working class who you can constantly blame for not fulfilling their destined role in history. You cannot bring about revolution because you come from the class that betrayed that revolution in the 18th century. You are part of the same class who decided against equality in favour of economic freedom and power, and the intellectual left-wing is this class’s historical neurotic self-hatred. The working class are for Marxists really just another name for what Nietzsche would have referred to as “the herd” (the masses who aren’t clever enough to think for themselves, and if only they could be as educated and critical as the bourgeois intellectual class they would realise that capitalism is rubbish, and would immediately overthrow it in favour of socialism).

You Marxists hate life, and hide from it in abstraction and idealism. Capitalism is life. We are competitive and cruel. We are also creative and brilliant. Capitalism is just a name given to the economic and social reality that up until this point has come closest to human nature. It could be better, and hopefully we will get there. We as individuals are more than capable of coming to terms with life and living the kind of life that we can be proud of. To face life as it is and become who you are will bring about a revolution in human nature on a global scale that no socialist state could ever compete with. Why would we want some life-denying Marxists to create a world based on mediocrity and endless toil (one in which I dare say the intellectuals will still be excluded from manual labour because their talents would go to waste)? Let’s just get on with this life, realise our own potential, accept the world as it is and stop wasting it dreaming of a different one.

Dr. Jane Grant, Coventry University

‘I want to put the heart back into the centre of our High Streets, re-imagined as destinations for socialising, culture, health, wellbeing, creativity and learning. Places that will develop and sustain new and existing markets and businesses. The new High Streets won’t just be about selling goods. The mix will include shops but could also include housing, offices, sport, schools or other social, commercial and cultural enterprises and meeting places. They should become places where we go to engage with other people in our communities, where shopping is just one small part of a rich mix of activities.’ Mary Portas, The Portas Review: http://www.maryportas.com/news/2011/12/12/the-portas-review/

‘There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.’ Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

I don’t pretend to understand Marx’s analysis of “commodity fetishism”. My reading of Marx is a work in progress. Yet what I do understand is that it is impossible to conduct any kind of social relationship under capitalism without it being at some point mediated by the commodity. An example: the other day a friend was asking me if I would like to do something. I said maybe, but what? And then we ran through the list of things to do in Coventry: cinema, drinking, bowling, eating out, more drinking; well that about sums it up. But even in London (if not more so) there would be a lot more to do, but it would all involve spending money. But it’s not just a point about spending money, it’s the impossibility of imagining how to socialise without the help of commodities. Eventually my friend and I came up with playing the option of playing board games, which kind of involves just sitting around and chatting, but of course the board game is still a commodity. Sometimes capitalism is just suffocating.

And so to Mary Portas’ recommendations to the government on how to ‘save the high-street’. I’m not going to engage with her 28 recommendations in any detail at all, because the whole thing is nonsense from the beginning. Or what I mean to say is that it is impossible to achieve what she aims to achieve within the economic frame of her argument: capitalism. What Portas wants is for the high-street to be ‘not just about selling goods’. But what she doesn’t seem to grasp is that it is either/or. If the high-street is going to be a privately owned space for the production of surplus value, then there will never be a community there.

Her practical plan to create this community includes creating a variety of outlets on this high-street: creches, cafes, gyms, whatever. This diversity of products is supposed to encourage the consumer to stay on the high-street longer. There is this thing about trying to get the consumer to hang around for hours, like whole families do in those horrible sub-urban shopping centres that JG Ballard so brilliantly pushes to the limits of social sanity. These “non-places” become destinations in themselves on sleepy Sunday afternoons: ‘What shall we do today kids? Shopping!’ The idea is that if you are strolling about looking at commodity after commodity, you will eventually have to buy something. And if you are there for long enough, you will want to eat, drink, park, etc. Everything is private property, therefore chargeable.

So with Portas’ high-street dystopia, she wants to basically turn the high-street into a self-contained Ballardian nightmare. Go there in the morning and hang out there all day, every second money pouring out of your pocket and into the greedy hands of the petit-bourgeois. Oh, that’s the other point: Portas wants diversity in retailers, not just big chain stores. The rent must be cheap enough to encourage entrepreneurs. Problem solved, the community will appear in no time. Sound familiar? (A hint: The Big Society…that smug cunt who is running the country…that bunch of toffs who decide what we should and shouldn’t be doing with our lives)

Of course it won’t just appear. A community needs a commons. “Community” is a worn out concept, with barely any meaning whatsoever in today’s usage. We all lament the loss of community, and in the current era of neo-conservativism, community is a moral issue; ‘the health of the nation’ and all that bollocks. The Tories’ separation of morality and economics means they can aggressively push economic growth as a main principle, while at the same time having a go at the country for not being a community. The Tories can endlessly fall back on attacking the family: ‘not enough traditional family values’, ‘not enough discipline’, ‘not enough saving for a rainy day’, ‘not enough community spirit’. (Let’s not mention the devastating steps that Thatcher took to destroy communities in order to foster economic growth: classic primitive accumulation, the neighbourhood, high-street, communications and transportation infrastructures, the welfare state, social housing, the NHS – all colonised by capital. Fucking Tories, I can’t articulate in words how much I hate you all!

Portas: In order to recreate the community you want, you need to create a space in the city centre, town centre, village centre, that is not privately owned. There must be a space free from commercial interests. It needs to be a place where people go just to be, talk, argue even, commit to community projects, play music, read books. Sounds a bit like a park. That’s fine, but the point is that what Portas wants cannot come from private property, because within this condition social relations will always be mediated by the commodity, and therefore not based on any kind of solidarity.

Capitalism has utterly individualised us. We get home from work and are happy to sit at home, on our own, or with our partners, or families, and not really socialise at all. We are happy to go to the pub, and we can genuinely socialise in these places because there is a left over commonality within them, yet we are still hemorrhaging money as we do it (and destroying our bodies, and also self-medicating against the possibility of political action). We feel like the only way to see people is through an event or place provided for us by capital, for a price. We arrange a time, consume the social service provided for us, and then we go home, as alienated from each as before.

Why do we need to live in these fortresses away from each other? I’m not saying I could necessarily handle a commune, but living the other side of the city makes it very hard just to hang out with my friends without spending money on something, even if it is just petrol or bus fare.

What’s the moral of this rant? Capitalism destroys communities. The high-street is a ghost town because it only pretends to be a centre for the city. It also cannot compete with the self-contained shopping villages in the middle of nowhere.

Why don’t you just give us back our commons? Let us make the centre into a place we can share, with libraries, subsidised leisure centres, parks, children’s play areas, skate parks, sheltered and comfortable meeting places, places to play and listen to music, read books, grow vegetables, keep chickens, I don’t know, whatever as long as it isn’t commodified. As long as it has nothing to do with surplus value, I think this would really help to bring back the community to our cities.

We don’t need to spend money. The economy might need us to, and a capitalist economy certainly does, but that isn’t necessarily our problem. Capital is fucked, let’s deal with that as a long-term project. The first step is to take back our public spaces and have conversations again, help each other out, support each other. No matter how much we earn, capital wants a significant portion of this money to go back into the system. So why bother? If we can create our own ways of enjoying ourselves outside work, that are not mediated by commodities, they will be cheaper, if not free, and also direct.

The potential bonus of this socio-economic gamble is that if we could really reclaim the streets and the city centres, if capitalism does fall apart around us (which it would if we stopped spending so much money on commodities; the economy would stagnate and we would all lose our jobs) then we could just carry on together, on a new model we have already started to make a social reality. This could be an example of something like anarcho-syndicalism; each city a community of working and mutually supportive individuals who decide what to do with the city’s production and resources.

Fuck capital, let’s march into our city centres and make them into what we need, not places for other people to tell us what we need and make us pay for it.