Their Spectacle and 'Ours'
Can't help but agree almost entirely with Mark's critique of the G20 protests as a purely spectacularised revolt, something acknowledged both by the protesters themselves (that 'Enjoy Your Spectacle' graffiti), by the media (even before the RBS windows got smashed, photographers were around a quarter of us in the Kettle) and by the Police, who in a sense gave a proportion of the crowd exactly what they wanted, the 'wounds' to display about which Mark is so withering. It seems to me that it shows the final uselessness as a concept and protesting tactic of the 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' - but before we bury it, we should acknowledge exactly why this is initially so persuasive a tactic, in both political and geographical terms. The City of London is a place ringed by steel even on the most mundane rainy Tuesday, and seeing it yesterday presented a spectacle of the latent become suddenly blindingly obvious, as the quiet surveillance and police presence became thumpingly loud and brutal, something made especially apparent at 8pm when those de-kettled all had to submit to be photographed and have their name taken down. What can really be seen here is an inversion of a Situationist tactic - the creation of a spectacle is the degeneration of the production of a situation, a failed situation.
The photos here, courtesy of Felix Waterhouse, document some of this in architectural terms - a line of police in front of the Bank of England, Herbert Baker's horribly lumpen, clumsy 1930s edifice parasitic upon John Soane's original (and, as an 18th century anti-riot gesture, windowless) ground floor, a classicism that imitates the past while actively destroying it, lined up in front of the sculptures on the building's frontage, redolent of Hitler's favoured sculptor Arno Breker; the climate camp setting up something genuinely adaptable and indeterminate in the shadow of the capitalist Constructivism of Lloyds...the City should, in theory, have been an enormously difficult place to kettle, given the complexity of its streetplan, the diametric opposite of those Haussmanian anti-barricade boulevards, and it's remarkable that the organisers managed to pick, for symbolic value, one of the few areas there that can be successfully enclosed. Both the police and the protesters tried to remake everyday spaces, either intentionally or unintentionally. After being dekettled, I walked around streets of offices where you could see, readied, vehicles more usually employed in 1970s Northern Ireland, or groups of riot police psyching themselves up like American footballers. The security landscape became blindingly, barbarically obvious. This should in theory have contrasted with the area within the protest itself, with its own transformation of space, but whether this was noticed by the office workers of this already deeply enclosed and protected area of London is a decidedly moot point. So who was this for?
The zone created was certainly temporary, but there is no sense whatever that it was autonomous, as the entire area was sealed off with remarkably little difficulty, and the potential - which, by being broadcast to those outside of the 5000 inside the kettle, was necessarily a spectacle rather than a situation - of a reclaimed space, an area of work and capital reclaimed for the ludic, is easily replaced with a spectacle of boredom, violence and aimless inertia, moreover of ritual. A tactic of this sort could only work on a far wider scale, where a large area - which could become part of everyday life, not be contained within a fixed boundary - were reclaimed. That would be a question of numbers as much as of tactics. The video above suggests that the Climate Camp demonstrators - who, much as I dislike their supposedly classless rhetoric of the 'green' and the 'sustainable', don't deserve to be dismissed, given that the economic policies they advocate are necessarily not concomitant with even a reformed, neo-Keynesian capitalism - had a linked, but dissimilar problem. Obviously determined not to give the Evening Standard what it wanted, they reacted to the riot police's attempt to sweep them off Bishopsgate by putting their hands in the air and chanting 'this is not a riot' - and faced almost exactly the same treatment. Now that, as a televised spectacle, would be genuinely alarming, something outside of the rules as currently played - but broadcasters can simply choose not to show it.
Nonetheless, I don't agree with Mark that we can fairly contrast the thinktanks and institutes that successfully created neoliberalism with current anticapitalist protest. Our ideas might have (potential) resonance with millions of people, but neoliberalism directly appealed to those who already possessed power and capital, and told them what exactly they wanted to hear. We are telling people something which, even after neoliberalism's failure, they frequently do not want to hear. But we must surely be able to think of smarter ways of doing it.
Update: The Institute responds.
posted by owen hatherley at 3:07 pm
14 Comments:
The optimism/pessimism cycles of large protests are interesting, and both side are important.
While the spectacle may fail on certain political accounts, I would argue the spectacle is also a success. Not for the political content of the spectacle (or non-content, depending how po-mo one takes it), but the visceral, desiring-spectacle.
I'm talking about the psychoanalytic angle, for one. I think the unsettled anger coming to the fore, to the point of expression (in reactionary/apolitical ways, perhaps) is also the first step towards political revolt. You have to desire to take back the streets, before you actually can, even if you fail in doing so. Also, standing up to a cordon of testosteroned-up cops is a big make-or-break for many people who may be willing to oppose state power. Perhaps this is not the best tactical decision, but it is certainly an important unconscious decision.
But even setting aside psychoanalytic readings of the event, there is still something ever-presently visceral about protest (if you excuse the weekend-warrior ontology). One can feel the anger seething through the streets, and this is important, because it means that humans are not yet demobbed: (pun intended) they still act in the pack, despite how many cameras, latte's, and sit-coms may pass through our existences. Part of this "pack" sensibility is also the ability to be herded, of course, which is not tactically good. But any police riot will show that humans are not yet de-humanized into androids, sheep, or any other de-vitalized abstraction. There is brutality there, and the ability to be brutal is the possibility of tactical power.
So, I hate to look on any protest, no matter how trite or abstacted, as "failure". It is all part of the dialectic of human action, and as much as it might be a lack of political movement, it is still an enthusiastic expression of humanity. Humanity, after all, IS the production (as well as means of), and any radically human activity enables its own expression as history, whether abstractly "good" or "bad", from a tactical point of view.
But besides my disagreements, let me say I really enjoy reading and commenting on your blog. It's nice to find folks discussing things in this way. Cheers!
-Adam
I cannot help but agree completely with you and k-punk (except that I don't think his comments on 'organisation and planning' reduce to 'think-tanks and institutes')*. Both of your analyses have given a form to my frustration and confusion over yesterday's spectacles. For which I am grateful.
But isn't there a genuine problem here? In leftist academia especially there is a lot of talk about thinking through alternatives, creating more analyses as a precondition to action, etc (of which Žižek's On Violence is just the latest installment). What results is a kind of chronic throat-clearing, an endless deferral of actual organisation.
Are we not rather trapped in a disabling desire for 'total' revolution? How many of us are engaged in struggles for workplace democracy now, however limited and reformist? Something like Parecon tries to foreground these issues but is pretty roundly ignored. How is Verso run? As a left-wing mirror-image of any other publisher? Or as a worker's council? Should we be organising like the SWP?
Don't some of the old slogans have some purchase here? 'Be the change you want to see'? Well, that and 'build the new society in the shell of the old'.
* As one example, the gap between the tenets of the 'Washington Consensus' and actually-existing neo-liberalism (especially in LDCs) is huge. Even someone like Hayek was considerably more left-wing than the conditionalistas of the IMF and World Bank in the last decades - "Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services..." (The Road to Serfdom).
Well, I wasn't there and from this distance--the west coast of the US--it's hard not to feel that I'm missing out on the potential enjoyment, even if I realize I would feel the same despair you and K-Punk do (since this is what I feel after and sometimes during every demo or march). But still, isn't the point of something like this that it demonstrates its own inadequacy, that everyone goes home and says, "shit, well that accomplished nothing!" and comes and reads your critique and K-Punk's and readies themselves (perhaps) for the distinctively less pleasant work of organizing and planning, etc. Not that people will actually act on that sense of despair, but they just might. It's better than nothing, right, to continually phrase in clearer and clearer terms our own inadequacy. Or do you think the dangers of a smug self-satisfaction are too great here?
I mean, I feel the conversations here, at Conjunctural, LT, K-Punk are good and necessary if there is going to be that work of organizing.
I suppose, too, that any successful movement has its dialectic of skeptics and optimists, each of whom plays their role.
Yes. Thanks.
I think this question of what exactly neoliberalism did to organise itself needs to be expanded, it's one thing to say that we can't learn from capitalist politics (although I'm not entirely sure of this) but I think it's pretty clear neoliberalism wasn't just about thinktanks (or insofar as it is you're going to have to grant thinktanks a lot more of a material role).
So the obvious point here is that the thinktanks which developed neoliberalism 'tested' their thoughts pretty thoroughly in the peripheries of international capitalism. The most obvious place to look at here is Pinochet's Chile and the important role that the Chicago boys had in its implementation. Indeed, one might draw a parallel with the role that some of leftists from the centre (e.g. Alan Woods or Mike Lebowitz) are attempting to (and to some degree are) play in Latin America, especially Venezuela.
More importantly, it's not the case that these thinktanks just had to convince certain bourgeois politicians to do their work. They also had to act through pressure groups, fronts, 'civil society organisations' etc. TThis is important I think becuase it helps us see that neo-liberalism wasn't (and isn't) just a doctrine of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois states. No matter what we on the left want to believe, a large swath of the population (particularly in the core of international capitalism) was convinced that neo-liberalism would benefit them, or were materially advantaged by it.
There are a lot of people who did/do believe that the public sector has to be privatised in the name of efficiency. There are a lot of people who accept the 'home owning democracy' line at the expense of adequate provision of social housing. There are plenty of people who enjoyed the easy access to credit. In sum, and I don't want to overblow this, T.I.N.A was - to some degree - common sense for a good period of time. Moreover, neo-liberalism was a remarkably successful hegemonic project insofar as it managed to build a coalition which encompassed many European social-democratic parties, as well as big parts of the 'middle class'.
So I don't just think neo-liberalism was just about persuading the ruling class. And whilst we can't necessarily learn verbatim from it, the careful, disciplined building of a hegemonic project is surely more important than creating spectacles.
I think it's pretty clear neoliberalism wasn't just about thinktanks
The mention of thinktanks is partly spurred from a material argument with Mark K-P a little while ago (in short, over the idea that we should, or could, learn from the way that neoliberals organised themselves, popularised and perpetuated their ideas), and partly is a dig at the Adam Curtis version of politics that posits every successful idea as the product of certain influential individuals and/or institutes (not that I would accuse Mark of something so simplistic). So -
No matter what we on the left want to believe, a large swath of the population (particularly in the core of international capitalism) was convinced that neo-liberalism would benefit them, or were materially advantaged by it.
I agree, much as it depresses me (the supreme British example is, of course, the Right to Buy council houses) - and as this was a fairly short comment in a fairly short post, I should make clear I wasn't claiming that neoliberalism solely came about through the activities of Friedman, Joseph et al through their various fronts, institutes and speechwriting gigs. What I do think is important to stress is that the effort of convincing the ruling class (and a very sizeable section, no doubt, of the working class) that the Butskellite consensus should be abandoned not only progressed through means not usually used by the Left (except if you count the curious libertarian ex-Trots of rcp/LM/Spiked/IOI as 'left') but told the ruling class what it wanted to hear (as do the Spiked crowd, btw). It was kicking at an open door.
Dismantling the Blatcherite consensus will of necessity be a very, very different job, and though I think a media presence that doesn't progress through networks of the converted (Indymedia, et al) would be very important indeed, not only do I not think that it can disseminate itself in a similar manner to neoliberalism (because of the likely hostility of existing media), but also that a certain amount of protesting in the open air getting rained on will almost certainly be involved - as it has in the actions that have ushered in and/or supported the anti-neoliberal governments in Bolivia and Venezuela, which I think are decidedly more interesting than spectacularised protest. I don't think that the form of protest we need will have anything much in common with the (non)events in the City of London yesterday.
I think what you say in the last paragraph is exactly right. I would agree that we cannot really learn very much from the specific methods of neoliberalism but what I think we ought to do is learn from its discipline, focus and seriousness, as well as its hegemonic ambitions. I think these are attributes that the London protests lacked but they are not inherent aspects of protest movements.
The Institute's article is also interesting (and again neoliberalism's ambitions beyond just the economic are instructive here), although I think we have to combet some of the rights-talk a la David Harvey.
Thinking about it, is there not a sense that neoliberalism learned from us? In its totalising and explicitly hegemonic ambitions and with its knowledge of the importance of class struggle, neoliberalism does strike me taking a lot of the insights of the Marxist traditon and teaching them to capital. So maybe what I'm saying is something to do with re-learning old lessons.
That all sounds about right to me. To nuance the 'telling the ruling class what it wants to hear' point, as this is really a question of the balance of forces in the class struggle. It wasn't particularly remarkable that, faced with the 'failure' of Keynesian social capitalism in the mid-70s, there was a (re)turn towards a basically Victorian model of economics (and besides, the UK had, since losing its technological supremacy to Germany and the US in the late 19th c, long maintained a kind of capitalism that privileged immaterial finance and property over the materiality of industrial innovation). What was new was the effort to make this brutal capitalism appealing to the middle and working class, or else it would never have lasted - hence the Right to Buy, credit, hyperconsumerism, the assault on 'deference' and more dubiously 'paternalism' - and this happened precisely because a strong working class needed to be bought off for the project to work in the first place.
Meanwhile, we now have a situation in which there is an extremely weak working class, so the return to Keynesian social capitalism has no real need for the 'social' part. If neoliberalism was a sort of laissez-faire with left language, what we appears to be emerging now ('we are all socialists now' etc) is a leftist rhetoric with rightwing content. I don't really know what our approach to this should be.
Also, if we are to relearn old lessons, perhaps one of them should be that the attempt to create something counter-hegemonic, while worthwhile and an obvious gaping hole in our politics, is nothing without a serious political strategy - Perry Anderson's recent near-obituary for the Italian left is instructive here.
Agnetha, what you persistently don't seem to understand is that a Revolution requires the willingness to SACRIFICE, which usually includes highly unpleasant acts like dying for a cause or in any case putting your interests behind those of others. If you seriously think that these Zizekian peanuts like K-punk are capable of such an Act personally, then you're deluded girl; their sophistique opinions are just baroque ruse on the capitalist media machine. And the same goes for the whole school of snotty bourgeois Marxists of the West, with their pompous rant about the Act and their self-proclaimed Proselytism. My prognosis is that we will have to first experience an enormous catastrophe of WW II's magnitude, which is the only thing that could possibly get the denizens of the West to leave the cable TV sofa, and then the Ruskies will probably once again act upon the Orthodox creed. I just hope that the next time they make sure the English, the French and the Dutch are forever locked up in work camps. There certainly won't be any salvation coming from the SWP, darling.
"the City should, in theory, have been an enormously difficult place to kettle, given the complexity of its streetplan, the diametric opposite of those Haussmanian anti-barricade boulevards"
So praise be upon Prince Charles. If it weren't for him, Number 1 Poultry would have been a big Miesian plaza. And where's the fun in protesting there?
Note the 'in theory'. The streetplan cravenly replicated by Stirling and Wilford proved every bit as defensible as Mies' plaza would have been. My point was that the 'theory' here is bollocks - from Paris 1871 to Petersburg 1917 to Alexanderplatz 1989, big plazas and boulevards have been the site of successful insurrections. So there.
I dunno if this is going to sound a bit mental - I'm not familiar with a lot of the references being used here - but the discussion about this kind of impotence triggered memories of Zygmunt Bauman's "Modernity and the Holocaust". Although obviously many, many orders of magnitude less serious than the Holocaust, what Bauman's conceptions seem have in common with this situation are the tactic of the powers-that-be to define the boundaries of "rational" thought by controlling the situation, so that the only "rational" choices are to submit to, for example, having your name and photograph taken. In the case of the Holocaust, this kind of control kept the ghettos pacified by making the only "rational" choices ones that complied with the Nazis' demands - by presenting the only choices as being "terrible" or "not quite so terrible". The difference being, of course, that in the 21st century UK it should be much easier to both break out of that mental headlock, and to prepare for it in advance.
As to how to do that, I'm not sure - but the impotence of the anti-war movement certainly suggests that government-sanctioned protest has no place in an effective challenge to the status quo any more. I think the effectiveness of a protest of that sort relies on an institutional target - the government, for example - being able to feel (or perhaps show that they feel) some kind of collective shame. Which isn't exactly politicians' strong point.
An example might be the inquiry into MP's expenses, which is going to be televised. Whether it turns into a whitewash or not remains to be seen, but the sheepishness of MPs when their dubious expenses for second homes were published, and the subsequent announcement of an inquiry, suggests that being able to provoke that kind of shame does get results...
Didn't Engels say that the barricades in Paris were largely of a propagandistic rather than a military value (and he was a keen student of those things)?
As to the G20 protests, the weakness was the politics, not the tactics. There has always been a strand of conservative radicalism that despises consumerism. At the G20 protest, the left chose to hide its differences with the romantic anti-capitalists.
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