Solidarity with those in Trafalgar Sq.
by Arran James
Whatever we think of celebrating the death of a woman, let’s not forget that Thatcher wasn’t simply a woman. Is this a celebration of the death of that woman, or the death of a name? People say it is bad taste- others say they are trying to be as in bad taste as possible: but taste itself is a bourgeois category. As I sit here, as I walked here earlier on, I found myself overcome with a surge of manic energy. The demand to participate is affective as much as it is anything else; it is impersonal and arises in the interpellation of a call. Its not a matter of desire but of compulsion- and here, where I am in Dundee (without even enough money to get to Glasgow), there is nowhere that this compulsion can be expressed.
I am with those in Trafalgar Sq. despite my distance from them. I am telepresent with them, but I am also present in the sense that I stand with them. If nothing else, even if it is around a death, this is an example of joy arising on the left for once! The moralism against joy risks condemning us to sinking back into a defeated sadness or an impotent rage. In fact, to ask the question outright, is anything other than a celebration not just an affirmation that there is no “we”, no “left” to speak of? Is it not to capitulate, just before we return.
Here is a live stream from the protest:
Plenty of laughter, plenty of whistles, a spirit of carnival. And the man who is streaming this insists he is in Traf Sq. for a birthday party, and claiming it is a sunny day! haha!
Just now a young woman has said to the man recording the stream- after having established that she was not alive during Thatcher’s premiership- that she is at the protest
“not to celebrate Thatcher’s death, but to celebrate the resistance and the beginning of the end of Thatcherism”.
This is an ebullient optimism the left doesn’t often allow itself.
EDIT:
a second live feed:
http://bambuser.com/channel/OccupyMayDay
one of the messages that is being repeated on the live feed from within the Trafagar Sq. protests is that no one is celebrating the death of Margret Thatcher, that they are in fact celebrating “the people’s resistance” and the “beginning of the end of Thatcherism”. watching the feed- though its nothing as to being there would be- you get a sense very clearly of ebullient optimism, of joyful conviviality, that is completely lacking in sad passions, resentment or impotence.
Coming as it does at the same time as calls for Left Unity, as the explosion of interest in SolFed, as the SWP begins to give way, and as groups like UKUncut indulge in direct actions… is it time for the left to have a little confidence? A confidence in its own ability to begin again… to be a force again… to organise.
I’m quite torn on these matters, I share your wired in/up response to the massive (and even not so massive) injustices all around us and the around the world but don’t see much in the way of productive allies and have not been very successful in my 20plus years of political work, advocacy, and community organizing so this bad energy just builds in my body which is battered enough in its own autoimmune disordered way.
what is the secular formulation of the serenity prayer?
I have always been on the sidelines in organising, never really involved, although I’ve attended protests, demos, squats, workshops, a few SWP and Green Party meetings (in my earliest days), a Beyond ESF event… largely been peripheral out of nervousness, shyness. Training as a nurse knocked that out of me to a large extent, I’m happy to report. I’m keen to take part within my mood of optimism without hope, which is a kind of joyful pessimism minus the commitment to everything always being shit or getting worse. Politics become post-nihilist praxis, or maybe a ‘left wing pragmatism’.
In that connection, its perhaps not exactly a secular formulation but I find Epictetus’ opening to The Enchiridion incredibly helpful, especially when anger begins to get the better and to eat away at what little calm its possible to have in this accelerative, connective world:
Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.
The things in our control are by nature free, unrestrained, unhindered; but those not in our control are weak, slavish, restrained, belonging to others. Remember, then, that if you suppose that things which are slavish by nature are also free, and that what belongs to others is your own, then you will be hindered. You will lament, you will be disturbed, and you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you suppose that only to be your own which is your own, and what belongs to others such as it really is, then no one will ever compel you or restrain you. Further, you will find fault with no one or accuse no one. You will do nothing against your will. No one will hurt you, you will have no enemies, and you not be harmed .
The question- as I am sure you’re sick of me repeating- of what is in my control, in our control, is thus “what can be done”? This is the basis, I think, for a tactical openness that allows for absolute mobility, absolute experimentalism, that says if I can make use of it so I shall make use of it. I was even thinking about the question of “the state”- to pretend for a moment that such a monolith could be taken as unproblematically as it so often is. Can I make use of the state? Well, I already do in certain pragmatic registers; I work for it, my partner receives child benefit from it and so on. The political question is how can I use it? Can it be weaponised? Well, it is a weapon in some respects- a weapon that capital can call on in order to maintain social peace and enforce consensus whilst at the same time being itself a weapon that particular classes use against the body of the governed and in order to actively recompose capital itself. The anarchist purity of a rejection of the state as such needs to be supplanted by Foucault’s injunction to question each and every particular state; this is more flexible… indeed, it is tactical and mobile… it may even been seen as a weaponisation of the very opportunism that Paulo Virno think marks mood of the contemporary “multitude” (the scare quotes are to keep me safe from that term).
In short, I think I am arguing for a kind of nuanced naivety that doesn’t proceed by political axioms or the conviction that historical lessons must be rendered as ideological a priori decisions about what can or can’t be undertaken, worked with, on, and alongside. In the bid to cope with being in a world together, we can’t rule out possible coping mechanisms from the off because they didn’t work for another set of people in another place and at another time. What is politics if it isn’t a kind of collectively organised coping?