On ‘Welcome to the future: this strike wave is just the start’ (WR)

https://notesfrombelow.org/article/welcome-future

This is the best thing I’ve read regarding the current political situation. I find its least articulated point to be both the most difficult and the most important one. Expressed as a question, this point would be How, in the current situation and its likely future, to move from economic demands to political ones? The fact of raising this question makes this text an unusual one in a situation where most Left thinking seems to assume that the present task is to build rank-and-file organisation as new layers of workers come into the struggle for a living wage. The Notes from below text states quite clearly that given that economic growth in the UK is impossible--under current conditions and for the foreseeable future--, real gains by working people will mean taking from one class and giving to another. In other words that the struggle for a decent life is now political, in a way that hasn’t been the experience of living generations.

But the text treats this as an incremental process: over time, workers will discover that employers (including the state) cannot give them what they need and as they do so they will need to organise differently, for instance in committees of reps reaching across several work places. Long spans of the history of workers’ struggles are at stake here, but what I want to draw attention to is something else. That is that the transition from wage demands to political demands is posed as a linear process. Ok, history does not move linearly but in leaps, but like any ‘correct’ statement that falls into banality.

Supposing we think of the curve of workers’ struggles as intersecting with another curve, that of capital. What if capital’s need for growth, in the context of planetary climate crisis, global competition for extractive resources and the geopolitical spread of falling rates of profit, translates into increasingly irrational behaviours of ruling classes? (wars, ecologically destructive industry, Caesarism and fascism in the political). And what if capital’s process is subject to sudden accelerations? (Ukraine war and its lateral outcomes, other present and future wars).

But that kind of language, too, can fall—I was going to say fall into correct description, which is true, but it’s the temporal arc we’re inside of, the intersection of the temporal arcs of subjective struggle and of capital’s infinite greed that is difficult and requires work because the narrative of 20c revolutions is of no use, is merely food for nostalgia or melancholy or for desire of being right. One can speak of tectonic shifts, quantum leaps, but the point is there’s work to be done. Mourning, if that means actually abandoning the thing that’s been lost. What does that look like?

‘A world lost, a world unsuspected, beckons to new places’. This is W C Williams in ‘The Descent’, a poem from the late 1930s.

 

One More Time On Damage (DH)

the other city was beautiful: the sky was completely cloudless and the street demonstration was larger and full of red smoke. grass is greener etc. i still felt frustrated, like i always do, that the things that i want to say i can never put right, that the 'stakes' never come across clearly, that i am continually allowing my arguments to be derailed by the minor satisfactions of the crescendo, the hissy fit or rhetorical blowout, tilting at windmills, trying to show off, making a verbal scene. i felt dismayed that the response that i wrote to w had veered off into a display of over-inflated egoistic disappointment that might have felt to him like an attack, when i felt nothing but gratitude to him for the way of his thinking and for the other paths that his thoughts had opened up. i was reading anna mendelssohn's implacable art, which once again seemed to demonstrate to me something fundamental that i have felt and have wanted to get across. 

a few related thoughts have been at the centre of everything that i have recently written. so the following as a kind of abstract (and perhaps also as a provisional full stop): 

(i) i have been trying to articulate for myself the idea of a communist resilience that we can develop in ourselves, a way of being; and along with that comes the longing for a style and a form of thought and a way of speaking in which that mode of being can be expressed implicitly and at every turn, regardless of the particular thing that happens to be being said, or articulated. if we could cultivate that style, i sometimes think, then it would be possible to talk about how to stay alive, how not to abandon ourselves to unhappiness, how to live well alongside one another, how not to get isolated, without those things becoming their own self-sufficient horizons and replacing 'politics' (or class struggle) as the ultimate object of our concern. we would speak more openly and freely, without internalised guilt for addressing the 'wrong' subjects, or abandoning our earlier commitments, and we would be secure in the knowledge that our style and our way of speech (and perhaps finally just *who we are*) would guarantee the connection of our thinking to ultimate ends -- commitments that we no longer even need to name, or identify, or conceptualise, because they are just there in the *way* that we speak, and live. and so we would be liberated from the hateful gut-wrenching sensation of confusion that comes from watching our friends and comrades start to say things that are foul to us, using the language (but not the style) that we too have invested our lives in, and fought for and attempted to define. we would cease to feel as if we were trapped in a kind of labyrinth, in which by following our 'ideas' to their logical conclusions we travel further and further away from the principles that initially motivated them. 'and so / I am only interested in nonexploitative relations between people // the people who sneer at that 'on our side' are not on our side / our side is the people who do not sneer like that / and there are no others sides // only illusions mirages and labyrinths of words / that lead us away from ourselves'. just before i left i saw a friend who said he was only interested in tyrannicide, something else i forget, and modern art. and i recognise this impulse immediately: to retreat to basic principles, to want to find ways not to get lost, to screen out the noise and the confusion and the distractions and the smokescreens and the people who don't interest us. and all of us are going through this same process in different ways, and we are only just beginning to share with one another our thoughts about what it is that we need to do. i want to know what more of my friends have thought to themselves about this problem, to see how it is processed through their own vocabularies and terms of reference. i can feel very painfully the limits of my own.  

(ii) and too many of us have been playing roles in an elite-class game. the system of elite-class writing in its current phase makes a virtue of injury: the speaking subject should be injured. the injury should come from a marginal position, whether of race or class or gender or migration. representation of the group injury as personal experience (= as property) is a condition of entry into the elite class system of representation in the current phase of its management of group injuries that it presides over and inflicts. the representation-game i am talking about increases the resilience of that system, and turns ramifying collective losses to its own spectacular advantage. it has been hegemonic in the 'cultural sphere' in roughly the period 2013 to today, which means: in more or less the same period in which global economic crisis was remedied by means of mass economic austerities and bureaucratic state violence. (but i'm not pointing fingers. we've all played it.)

(iii) that's a specimen of 'analysis'. the person who i was thinking of when i wrote it is dead now, which means that it probably isn't sufficient...  'the communist party is not a big clean party', wrote p-p pasolini, 'it is a big dirty party; but it is dirty with the oil of the shop, with metal, with rust, flour, dried fish, blood, mint, sweat, and dust'. and sometimes i think what we really need is a canon. writers who have tried to bring their ideas closer to damaged and injured ('dirty') people (including themselves) include andrei platonov, pasolini, ivan illich, anna mendelssohn, m. e. o'brien ('junkie communism'), verity spott ('that horrible burning religion') and william blake. the 'dirty party', the idea of revolutionary harm reduction, of convivial technology, of the marriage of heaven and hell -- all of these notions point towards a style of thinking in which grand revolutionary transformation belongs to the damaged and resembles them, *rather than vice versa*, and in which damage and injury are *inescapable starting points* and not moral virtues for their own sake: the goal then is still emphatically to create the new social order, but one that the damaged and the injured *in this world* are themselves able to control and comprehend. there are snatches of romanian and polish in it, of bengali and salt-sea, incense and fishblood and weed smoke in arcades: obviously it all depends on exactly where you come from. but there are also other things as well: arguments, visions, utopias. the thing that we want does not come solely from the future. it does not gleam. it is not at the cutting edge. 

(iv) the emergence of an elite class game of injury-representation does not reduce or ameliorate group injury, but is continuous with the processes that inflict it in the first place: ok sure, but also *the lucid recognition of this reality is not enough to help us to endure*. the people who taught me to recognise it themselves seem pretty fucked up right now, have become confused, isolated or cut off, unable to situate themselves in the present in which the ideas they once articulated are taken up by the mass culture and twisted spitefully against them. it seems really obvious to me that they lack the resources to survive, and i think now that part of the problem is that they didn't develop a style, a way of being that would allow them to go after those resources without feeling that they were abandoning their basic conviction that everything had to change before their own condition did, or could, or might. 'we play our lives like pieces of music', somebody writes. 'We know that a perfect score exists, but we can't read it; and the hesitant discordant melody that we do execute is in the end the only access we have to the music of our lives as we know that it really is'.        

(iv) i think that probably most of us who love poetry have the conviction that there is one bit or snatch or line of it that seems to define everything else and to encompass it: a kind of ur-poetry, possessing an almost metaphysical significance. for me those lines have always been the ones from william blake's 'london': '[i] mark in every face i meet / marks of weakness, marks of woe'. and i mean it. i come back to those words every single day, like a mantra. they encapsulate for me the task of poetry and a basic challenge to 'my' politics, to my belief that things can change, that they don't have to be like this. and the struggle as i have felt it has always been to understand *in what sense the lines can be true*, in what sense the 'marks' (which i have always felt must be *indelible*) can be real, without the belief that things can change being proved false, or illusory; and it's only pretty recently that i've begun to feel as if i have a way of answering that question. try it like this. imagine a universe in which these lines of blake's are the centre and project outwards invisible fields of force, invisible lines of gravity within which everything else is located: 'the class struggle', economic reforms, principles of hope, going to work, reading the news, producing art, 'reproducing yourself'. shit like that. and we don't 'talk' about these fields, but everything that we *do* talk about moves within them insensibly: pasolini's rust and fish and dried blood and smoke in the air and our ideas about 'communism' all move within this forcefield that blake's lines define, and delineate. so the point is that when these marks of weakness, marks of woe are thought or felt like this *they don't rule anything else out*, the fact of their irremediability does not rule out revolution or happiness or, i don't know, whatever you like, transcendence, renewal, jfc even spiritual insight if you want it, they just don't, and the borders and walls and inner citadels of 'real injury' outside of which everything else is just pipe dreams and adolescent fantasies crumble like 'Cathedrals ... based on symmetry which later becomes magmatic, abnormal and out of proportion'. nothing is ruled out, nothing is destroyed, nothing left behind, we play the notes of our life in the wrong order, and somehow we still hear the music as it really is, even though it can only ever exist like this, in the way that we're playing it right now: misphrased, discordant, a little slow, a little hesitant. and everything is the same and everything is different, and we are travelling backwards in time towards a thing that no one has ever seen before: and when i started writing these notes a few months ago i wanted to talk about what had gone wrong, i had the feeling that so many of us had lost our way, that the damage was accumulating but that we didn't know how to get it into words (I don't mean with 'professionals'), that even the act of opening our mouths to talk about ourselves would fill us with unwanted invasive feelings of guilt, and now it's six months later and i'm starting to feel like i've turned a corner, as if i've finally understood something basic and something has clicked or become clear: that blake's universe of woe and weakness is really just a set of rules, as indifferent and as mild and as neutral as electromagnetism, or gravity, or multiplication, and it is only when it ceases to be the substance of our style and our way of being that it becomes unbearable and stops us from thinking; but when it exists in our style or way of being everything else becomes possible again, we can go back to our political ideas and see them in a new light, changed but also persistent, and enduring, and for the first time in our life maybe they really seem like *our* ideas too, like things which are coming towards *us*, as the planets move towards the objects at the centre of their orbits; and maybe this feels good? to no longer have to chase after *them*, feeling ourselves getting weaker and weaker, and less and less able to remember why it is that we started, and looking up sometimes and seeing them always further and further away? i don't know, you tell me. we all know that when a new chapter of our lives begins, it'll have to be lived day by day: and there are notes that none of us have been able to play, and we hear them anyway in the notes that we are able to play, and do. perhaps even here.