What Would it Mean to Win?

Turbulence Collective Turbulence Collective, Turbulence Collective Turbulence Collective

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781604863505
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Movements become apparent as "movements" at times of acceleration and expansion. In these heady moments they have fuzzy boundaries, no membership lists—everybody is too engaged in what's coming next, in creating the new, looking to the horizon. But movements get blocked, they slow down, they cease to move, or continue to move without considering their actual effects. When this happens, they can stifle new developments, suppress the emergence of new forms of politics; or fail to see other possible directions. Many movements just stop functioning as movements. They become those strange political groups of yesteryear, arguing about history as worlds pass by. Sometimes all it takes to get moving again is a nudge in a new direction… We think now is a good time to ask the question: What is winning? Or: What would—or could—it mean to "win"?

Contributors include: Valery Alzaga and Rodrigo Nunes, Colectivo Situaciones, Stephen Duncombe, Gustavo Esteva, The Free Association, Euclides André Mance, Michal Osterweil, Sasha Lilley, Kay Summer and Harry Halpin, Ben Trott, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and more.

This edition includes a foreword by John Holloway and an extended interview with Michal Osterweil and Ben Trott of the Turbulence Collective.

A conversation with the Turbulence Collective

Sasha Lilley, with Michal Osterweil and Ben Trott

Sasha Lilley The essays in this book were put together in newspaper form for distribution at the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany in 2007. What response did you receive from counter-summit activists?

Ben Trott The immediate feedback we received in Heiligendamm was overwhelmingly positive. To be honest, I had my doubts that people would find the time to read through the paper whilst so much was going on. But it seems that somehow they did.

Ahead of the summit, some members of Attac, with John Holloway, organised an event in Berlin, as well as another series of workshops at one of the protest camps in Rostock. Some of the articles from the now included in this formed the basis for discussion at these events.

During the summit itself, thousands of people took part in three days of mass blockades, organised by Block G8. While we were taking part, we distributed copies of the paper. The police had been fairly brutal in trying to stop people reaching the blockades, but once the roads had been taken there was very little confrontation and people found various ways of occupying themselves. This included reading the paper. We were really amused to see what else people did with the collection of texts. Some people, on their way to the blockades, wrapped the papers around their arms to protect themselves from the police’s batons. And during the blockades, one group managed to turn the paper into a giant game of Twister.

The paper was also distributed around some independent bookstores and radical social centres in the UK, the US and Germany. Demand soon outstripped supply, so we were really pleased to get the offer to collaborate with PM Press on this book. People have also been really great in terms of translating some of the articles in the first issue of Turbulence. Most of these can now also be found on our website.

So generally speaking, the paper we distributed at Heiligendamm was well received. However, my feeling is that it was more the problematics addressed, rather than the ‘answers’ offered up by the articles which allowed it to find the resonance it did. I think there is now a general recognition that the counter-globalisation movement finds itself at an impasse. To take the time to ask ourselves what it would mean to or to be winning seems like an extremely timely task to busy ourselves with.

SL You argue that Left victories can be complex and contradictory, as capital often responds by co-opting oppositional demands so as to open up new avenues of accumulation. How does this process tend to and is there a way for us to organise to impede it?

BT This is one of the issues that we sought to address by problematising the notion of measuring success in the first issue of Turbulence. And it’s something we explore in relation to the current struggles around climate change in Move into the Light?

There’s a quote from William Morris, the 19th Century English socialist, writer and founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which explains this process brilliantly. He suggests people “fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and then it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”

Quite appropriately, the quotation forms one of the two opening epigraphs to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire. I say appropriate because I think one of the greatest accomplishments of their book has been to bring together the Italian Marxist tradition of Operaismo and a particular strand of French post-structuralism, i.e. that of Foucault and, more importantly, Deleuze and Guattari. The book was not the first time that the two traditions had resonated with one another, but it is certainly the most accomplished effort to date towards developing a productive synthesis between the two approaches.

Operaismo famously inverted the traditional approach to analysing the relation between labour and capital, in which the former had often been regarded as a passive, reactive victim of the whether that be through territorial expansions embodied through colonial or imperialist projects, or transformations at the point of production. What Operaismo did was turn this on its head and explain capitalist development as a constant process of reacting to the struggles of the working class. Every upsurge in struggle was met by an effort at ‘decomposing’ the working class, attacking its organisational forms and reorganising both the mode of production and regulation. The most recent and generalised examples of this would be the move from the era of ‘Fordism’ to ‘post-Fordism’.

Towards the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, there was a massive upsurge in resistance by the social subjects which constituted the Fordist-Keynesian reality. From workers involved in mass production (characterised by the industrial factory conveyor belt) and students (who were subject to a similar process of massification, through the so-called ‘proletarianisation’ of education), to women’s movements and the increasing power of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles the world over.

Capital’s gradual and uneven response to these struggles was the move towards what is generally labelled ‘post-Fordism’ and neoliberalism. Large production plants were broken up and replaced by smaller scale, networked, more flexible processes exemplified by the developments at Toyota and Benetton (this was, of course, a process which was most obvious in the global North, but similar, less drastic tendencies have also been observable in the South). Trade was liberalised and both domestically and was reduced, increasing capital’s mobility. Restrictions were placed on the ability of trade unions to act and intervene.

As a result, ‘old’ organisational forms were decimated (i.e. ‘decomposed’), providing huge challenges, for example, to workers seeking to improve their lot. And in those locations where workers were able to organise, capital was increasingly able to simply pack up and move elsewhere.

Post-Fordism and neoliberalism, however, have their ambivalences. Whilst the former, for example, in many ways represents an intensification of to the extent that it tends towards requiring that our entire subjectivities are put to work for it is in many ways a result of the demands of earlier movements for a more creative way to spend one’s time than working 9-to-5, five days a week on a conveyor belt, or pulling a lever. So to stick with the Morris quote, post-Fordism in many ways was the defeat of the struggles of Fordist social subjects, whose in came about after all, in the sense that change was forced. But the precarious, neoliberal reality of today is certainly not the communist or socialist utopia that the workers and students of ‘68 were fighting for. The task which faces us now, then, is to continue this struggle (albeit, perhaps, under a different name!).

Deleuze, particularly in his collaborations with Guattari, describes a similar dynamic in their deployment of a number of different concepts. What they describe as the ‘war machine’, perhaps surprisingly, does not stand for any kind of ‘military-industrial-complex’, but rather resistance against the state. The war machine operates as something that resists centralisation and everything sedentary, it sets in motion a process of transformation (what they call ‘becoming’). In response, the state always attempts to appropriate and/or capture this resistance, using it for its own ends.

There are strong parallels here with Deleuze’s concept of ‘desire’, a productive and positive force which embodies a potential for transformation against that which seeks to repress it. At the same time, it is never entirely ‘free’ from codification by the powers of social regulation. The combination of these two processes tends to involve the harnessing of again, like the war machine, a kind of by power, as a means of transforming and reinventing itself.

These processes and dynamics, however, don’t just take place on the level of large epochal shifts, like the move from Fordism to post-Fordism. The approach developed by Operaismo and, in a slightly different way, Deleuze and Guattari, provides a more general way of thinking about the relation between power and resistance. We refer to a similar phenomenon, for example, when we talk about the development of summit protests and the counter-globalisation movement in Move into the Light? The discourse around poverty alleviation at the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, and climate change at Heiligendamm in 2007, illustrates, on the one hand, the power of our movements to move and set the global agenda. On the other, however, it demonstrates the means by which capital often seeks to harness movements of or the changes in public sentiment which they and render them productive for itself.

At Gleneagles, a worldwide movement against global poverty and, more generally, for a better life than a constant struggle for bare survival, was translated into a discourse of poverty alleviation which eventually began to be deployed by the ‘world leaders’ themselves. By and large, it involved flirtation with the idea of a new global Keynesianism (what George Caffentzis has called neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’). A billion people were to be lifted out of poverty through their fuller incorporation into the capitalist, wage-labouring economy. Whereas in the 1930s, Keynes saw a necessity for ‘political’ intervention into ‘the economy’ in order to create full employment (largely through the stimulation of demand) which he saw as the key to economic growth and stability, the global Keynesianism of 2005 involved considering similar interventions designed to turn large numbers of the ‘global poor’ into wage-labourers. The goal was to achieve full employment par excellence by turning those who reproduced themselves, at least in part, outside of capitalist social relations, into wage-labourers proper.

In Heiligendamm, we saw the heads of state recognise the pressing need to deal with the issue of climate change. In many ways, this was a victory for environmental campaigners and a relatively small number of climate change scientists who had been trying to highlight the issue for years. At the same time, it became increasingly clear as to how the challenge posed by climate change also offers a number of possibilities for capital. On the one hand, as we explain in Move into the Light?, this is likely to involve austerity measures: regressive ‘green’ taxation, restrictions on mobility and the consumption of ‘luxuries’, and so on. On the other, it is likely to mean the opening of new, potentially profitable, markets: carbon trading, climate consultancy, ‘green’ consumerism, etc.

The task with which struggles and resistance movements are confronted, then, is to remain aware of the way in which these processes operate. This is where the reasonably abstract ideas about power and resistance offered up by the Operaisti (as well as Deleuze and Guattari) has real, practical application. This recognition then provides a basis for both recognising our own agency; as well as the need to constantly rethink strategy, tactics, and the very nature of struggle as capital constantly develops new ways of imposing decomposition.

Michal Osterweil I want to raise a couple of related issues that I think often go unaddressed in leftist and movement discussions of strategy and social change: the role we play in creating the monster known as capitalism, and our insufficient attention to other problems, such as the dogmatisms and microfascisms, that sometimes arise precisely because of too rigid or too encompassing a theory or ideology.

As many people have already pointed out, a very serious problem on the Left is our complicity in creating a vision of capitalism as total, totalising and completely hegemonic. As J.K Gibson-Graham put it in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), “the project of understanding the beast [capitalism] has itself produced a beast, or even a bestiary; and the process of producing knowledge in service to politics has estranged rather than united understanding and action.” (There is an important difference here between ubiquity and totality. It is one thing to acknowledge that capitalism is everywhere (ubiquity), and quite another to speak of capitalism as having no outside and being that which defines all social relations (totality)).

While I have few qualms with the former, I believe that analyses based on the latter are very problematic in that they contribute to a sense of paralysis, powerlessness and leading so many of us to ask, ‘What can we do that won’t be co-opted or destroyed by capital?’ However, they also obscure other issues and problems that are not necessarily reducible to capitalism’s processes of accumulation, nor the antagonism between capital and labour. (Issues having to do with cultural and sexual difference, but also complicated issues of crime, gentrification, etc. come to mind.)

This is particularly interesting because it makes it difficult to know what action will really be most radicle – most able to get at the heart of the system. For, while within the global justice movement we have been quick to distinguish between ‘reformists’ and ‘radicals’ – i.e. people with more systemic, or rather anti-systemic approaches, we neglect that the depiction of the system might create other obstacles to transformative change. For example, often, in our efforts to organise movements with an anti-systemic i.e. movements that understand that it is not just a matter of repealing a few misguided policies, or reforming institutions like the G8, World Bank, etc, but rather overturning or transforming an entire political, economic, cultural and social we not only make capital appear far more coherent and hegemonic than it actually is, we also make it seem like the definition of a more ‘radical’ approach is universal, or definable outside particular circumstances. Moreover, in the process we end up reproducing the kinds of movements and activist subjectivities that are unable to address and deal with complexities issues, and problems, which are not necessarily already explainable vis-à-vis the meta-analysis of capitalism those activists are working from.

The appeal of an anti-systemic analysis and vision of ‘our enemy’ always risks turning into a rigid, un-reflexive, and potentially problematic formula that people fall back on even in situations that are tremendously complicated. A very serious challenge at the core of the Turbulence project is finding ways to undermine the tendencies within so many of our movements (and ourselves!) to become so invested in one meta-narrative, ideology or reading of both the problem and the solution that we both help create the monster and neglect other issues and possibilities.

SL You make the point that we may not be able to recognise our victories, since some are not immediately visible. That’s fair enough. It can be difficult to see which seeds will grow. But it’s equally hard, or harder, to ask if we’re failing. For example, opposition movements cannot necessarily take credit for the breakdown of multilateral negotiations within the World Trade Organisation, as these have been derailed, not by stateless movements, but specific nation-states. A contributor to Turbulence puts it in bold terms: the or ‘movement of movements’ as you refer to is in crisis, following the mass mobilisation in Genoa in 2001. What do you think is the basis of that crisis?

BT This distinction between ‘success’ and ‘failure’ takes us back to the Morris quote mentioned earlier. What appears as a failure, in other words, often turns out to be some kind of a limited success. The challenge which then presents itself is moving beyond these limitations. And you’re certainly right about identifying failures being as difficult as and in a similar way. In other words, what initially appears as a success might, in some ways, also point towards certain defeats.

Let’s take the example of the collapse of WTO negotiations, since you mentioned them. There have been at least three separate ministerials at which talks have either completely broken down (Seattle in 1999 and Cancún in 2003) or the agreement reached has been so precarious that it came undone almost immediately afterwards (Hong Kong in 2005). At each of these three events, despite enormous demonstrations and mass acts of disobedience, it was in fact a collection of state largely acting in their own political and economic self-which brought about the collapse of negotiations. So whilst movements celebrated this breakdown, and in part claimed the victory as their own, it would perhaps seem that it was states, or coalitions of states, which were able to derail negotiations and halt the neoliberal juggernaut, rather than ‘stateless movements’. In this sense, the collapses could be interpreted as a sign of the agency of constituted over constituent forms of power.

There is certainly some truth to this. But the full reality is a little more complicated. There are, for instance, a number of ways in which the agency of movements can be seen as having influenced the behaviour of state actors within negotiations. First of all, there are powerful, popular anti-neoliberal movements in many of the countries which made up the G20 group of ‘developing’ nations, for instance, which played a key role in derailing the negotiation of the Doha Round in Cancún. The ability of these movements to influence domestic political and economic policy impacted on the position taken by state representatives engaging in international negotiations.

Secondly, the development of a worldwide movement against which often took its cue from these movements in the as well as often spectacular scenes on the streets outside the summits themselves, almost certainly contributed to the legitimacy with which the G20 and other states were able to rupture negotiations.

There are certainly issues worth considering here as to where change does and does not take place, but there does seem to have been a (not-entirely deliberate) working in concert that took place between movements and state actors during the WTO negotiations. Precisely whether this represents a ‘success’ or ‘failure’ for movements, I’m not so sure. This is a question that The Free Association deal with at length in their article, ‘Worlds in Motion’, contained in this book.

In relation to the question of the counter-globalisation movement’s crisis and its nature, I would agree that the current crisis began sometime around the mobilisation to Genoa in 2001. Although it is important to point out that what took place in Genoa was unlikely the sole, or even primary, cause of the crisis.

In terms of how this crisis can be understood, I think the since has undergone a number of decompositions. In other words, a reduction in its ability to act, intervene and influence has been experienced through a simultaneous attack on its forms of organisation (through the introduction of new legislation, transformations in policing, an escalation in the levels of violence generally waged against the movement), as well as significant changes in that which the movement is posited against: neoliberalism. This second aspect is connected to fall out from the flirtation with global Keynesianism by the G8 and others around 2005, mentioned above.

The conventional way of thinking of ‘movements’ – including by many people who consider themselves involved in is quite problematic. They are often thought of as discrete actors, with a clear inside and an out; generally possessing a ‘consciousness’ as to their own existence, as well as their aims and objectives. On one level, of course,...