Postcards from Late(r) Capitalism(s)

A poetic-philosophical crywank

[postcardsfromlate]

Let's do as Nige says...

(This is an article I wrote around a year ago about Warwick university and Nigel thrift, which is only more relevant now) Now, some people (myself included), might have thought that after last year’s uproar, occupations and newspaper coverage, that Mr. Nigel “Critical Geographer” Thrift might have this year decided to live up to his namesake: maybe just a nominal pay rise, or slightly above inflation. But no. “But of course,” we’re told by Peter Dunn and his cronies “we’d love to raise wages, but we live in the real world...we’re in austerity, everyone has to make sacrifices.” Everyone except them, and Mr. Thrift it seems. This decision is either ill-judged, or actively Callous. Why? In the past five years, support staff, junior lecturers, and many other employees have experienced a 15% real wage cut- a cut that follows one of the fastest rates of decline in pay for any profession since wwII. This also happens at a time in which the institution is charging us NINE GRAND fees. Bursaries are also being cut, or divested into “fee waivers” -which are next to useless if, like myself, you can’t actually afford to live at university without a bursary Despite a reported £19.5M surplus, we seemingly cannot find the cash. And yet average spending on teaching has been steadily declining. Whilst management wages go up. The reasons cited for the pay rise are equally “thrifty” with the truth: They say that this merely recompensing him for the 3 year pay freeze that he so honorably took, to appear sympathetic to wage freezes across the university in 2006-2009. LIES. THIS IS THE SAME REASON THEY GAVE LAST YEAR: DESPITE THE FACT THAT LAST YEARS PAY RISE COVERED THE REAL TERMS CUT HE ELECTED TO TAKE, AND THEN SOME ON TOP. It wasn’t true then, and it is even less true now. And even if it were: When will everyone else be compensated for their cuts in wage? Or funding? The answer is never. The glaring holes and inaccuracies point to one thing: That this is nothing to do with efficiency, merit, cost-saving, or whatever words the managerial pig-dogs would have us gobble up. This has to do with running this university, or better, as a factory. A perception-factory. We pay the fees. As soon as they have our money they no longer have to care about us; only about appearing to care about us to prospective students, and caring about research and innovation, to foster better imbrication within the corrupt corporate machine. The “democratic structures” of the university only exist in order to show they exist; if they were truly democratic, there would be no need for structures in order for students and workers to play a part in the preservation and development of the university. Those who make the university should own it; not those who seek to profit from it. With the introduction of fees they have seized the opportunity; they bank on students now only thinking of university as an investment in a piece of paper with letters from a place with a good reputation. This allows them, via a narrative of debt, instability and precarity, to drive a wedge between “radicals” like myself, and people who just want to keep their head down and get a 2:1 and get a good job. It pits us against our lecturers and staff; because when they strike against unfair pay and conditions, we see them stealing a good we payed for. And whilst we’re all so busy clambering over one another for an internship, or a grad scheme NO MATTER THE CONSEQUENCES, Thrift and his ilk can award themselves disgusting pay rises on money that could raise wages and hence the overall standard of teaching; money that could improve facilities; that could widen admittance to courses.... It is not as if the university has ever been a democratic utopia; but this ‘ivory tower’ is being turned into a bleak, moribund business estate. The occupation of last year has not driven the message home; they have not felt their power threatened. But Thrifts pay rise is merely a repellent symptom of this vile cancerous fucking system. As such, we must envision the university as just one site of struggle within a broader nexus of exploitation. Pay rises for management and fees go hand in hand with the persecution of squatting and the cutting of the NHS. The university is one site of systemic exploitation. It is but one site of wider industrial conflict. We must act accordingly. We must start at the pay rise and escalate, taking the charge to the whole of society, demanding what they see as the impossible that for us has to be actual. We must build a broad campaign embracing a variety of tactics; From poster campaigns to blockades; from demos to viral videos; from chalking to setting up a student housing co-op to undercut your shitty landlord; from stealing meals from the library cafe to give to homeless ex-big issue sellers victimized by university security to sabotaging prestigious events and decrying the vice-chancellor for the hypocrite he is; from scrawling your inner thoughts on toilet doors to hacking into the university mainframe and shutting down power to the campus on strike days; from challenging lecturers who cow-tow to the market teaching ‘philosophy for business’ to taking the senate chamber and hosting a sick rave... As your careers department is no doubt so fond of telling you, there are so many opportunities. And it only takes a few people with an idea to start. Do it yourself; no one will do it for you! The stakes are high; it’s more than just another pay rise. Every moment that passes with the university functioning as it does, is the choice between a space for critique and transformation or a securitized corporate behemoth where everything costs and nothing is worth anything. As Thrift himself (hilariously enough,) states “We are seeing the rise of a hierarchical order which increasingly constructs its power by both producing and using diversity. In these circumstances, an imperative for the left is to identify the varied sites and geographies of hierarchical power, and not shy away if that journey takes us into unfamiliar territory. The rise of right-wing politics of various kinds which are clearly associated with a series of state and corporate ideologies and practices...must be denied any room in the world...and must be rolled back.” So lets do what Nige says. Starting with his paypacket, and in time, the whole fucking university.

[postcardsfromlate]

I was once on a bus, overhearing a conversation amongst a couple of students (being then, and now as I write, also a student.) The air of the bus was close and damp with perspiration and irritation. Having tried for fifteen minutes to read my book above the dull roar of the vehicles inhabitants, I gave up, and attempted to convert my exasperation into something more interesting; I listened, intently. It was the sort of conversation which is at least entered into, or syntactically framed as a debate, a minor disagreement; however this was one of those most interesting forms of debate in which everyone actually agrees, yet carries on to talk over each other. I forget the beginning of the conversation (perhaps from rage at what follows,) just as I forget their precise clothing, hair, or the number of people.) But I remember keenly their discussion of their lecturers, supervisors, and the status of postgraduate study.   “I could have a postgraduate so easily,” one of them said “in fact, I’ve been offered money to do so.” “Yeah,” another chipped in “me too...I wouldn’t fucking dare though y’know? That’s just for failures...for people who fail to find a place in the world.” I clenched my fist, resting lightly upon my knee. “I know right?” the first one clucked affirmatively, along with general murmuring from their cohorts. “Like all these lecturers, talking about these ideas, hanging out with kids, writing their little articles...I mean, they just have no idea; I just don’t get why they do it, they’re like children.” “Because they couldn’t adapt, they couldn’t fit into the real world, the real world after ‘university’; they couldn’t be real.” “Did I tell you I got that internship?” a deep, cut-glass voice responded. “Yeah, they are just failures really,” a new voice added. “Pathetic.” Trapped in this container, with these voices, they became inscribed into my memory, if only fragmentorily. I rang the bell, and got off early, having to walk ten extra minutes to deposit my weary and sweat-stained body at home.

[postcardsfromlate]

The facsimile decor envelopes me as I sit prostrate whilst optics drip blood sinews and brain tissue explodes with the crisp packets opening again around while I waste alone while I taste alone the spoils of privilege the knowledge that comes from slavery’s ignorance squalor disease and idleness But dripping through the vodka evaporating from a forest of sodden fag-ends a ghost or a hope peeks through the moment. small but ever present lingering, prostrate as I was. killed and reborn, it blisters from the friction of the grindstone, the pharisee student, the final warning letter, the ‘joke’, the final click of the iron heel of the boot on the face I went to the bar, and bought another drink.

[postcardsfromlate]

‘Art is what makes life more interesting than art.’ And so it is. That is why we must burn the canvas, the clay, the wage-slip, the gallery, the university, the parliament, the theatre...and every other apparatus of one-dimensional subjectivation to the ground. Only then, out of the ashes, can we use each others hands to inscribe maps of true beauty into the world, and ourselves(which is the same thing). But in the mean-time, I, you, we...we think, write, create, re-appropriate, re-define, remember: we organise...

[postcardsfromlate]

Anticapitalism is not ‘biting the hand that feeds’. On the contrary, it is the demand that the control over the organisation of the creation of all nutrients, and the distibution of said nutrients (along with their antithesis, scarcity) should not be carried out by an 18th century, ideational ‘invisible hand’. It is the demand that the material ‘hands’ attached by muscle, tendon, bone, nerve and sinew to material mouths, seize control over the ‘bread’- this bread of which only some are dropped crumbs from by capitalism’s table. This carelessness over crumbs is ‘philanthropy.’ Only being free from the shackles of charity, can true solidarity be forged. Only in universal autonomy and collectivity, can anyone be free from the ‘hand’. * ‘We respect the right to free speech’ And maybe you do, maybe you don’t; formal respect is of no matter. The ‘right’ to free speech is an irrelevancy to us; any notion of a ‘right’ presupposes its possibility of being retracted. Rights, by definition, are ‘gifts’ of the state. They are juridical preservations of certain ‘freedoms’, which due to their origin, are only freedoms insofar as they coincide spatio-temporally with the smooth running of capitalism’s flows. “I am apprehended as a person, in which [respect] all are identical. A human being counts as such because he is a human being, not because he is a jew, catholic, protestant, german, italian etcetera” This “identical” abstract citizen of to whom the ‘rights of man’ apply offers us no interest. The very abstract nature of a right is merely a way to preserve the functioning of power, by legitimating freedom only within an ideational political discourse; “Political emancipation is not the completed, contradiction-free form of human emancipation...” As such, far from an affirmation of freedom, the notion of a ‘right’ is instead, a limit placed upon where freedom is appropriate; in pure abstraction. Only the concrete emancipation of all people, as particulars (and thus universal examples of subjectivity) is worth fighting for. False unity through subsumption of the particular into the abstract universal is no tactic against totalitarian atomism; it is merely its dialectical image. Fuck the party line. And along with it, the abstract tyranny of ‘rights’ must be abandoned, and freedom grasped in the particular-universal. Difference does not preclude solidarity- it demands it.   The right of free speech is only respected by those in power when it is directed through the ‘proper channels’; through petitions, through student unions, national ballots, through marches with pre-defined routes... The right to private property affirms your right to purchase, and posses a permanent marker. Yet at another time (a political rally or march for instance,) a police officer’s suspicion of you to commit criminal damage with said property can transform this ‘right’ to private property. Your ‘right’ to property becomes an action in which you as surrender all your rights, as potentially criminal. Through justice, you become an enemy of justice- and with this, an enemy of ‘rights’.  As such, these freedoms only operate within parameters defined by the state; outside these parameters, freedom is inexpressible (even potentially,) and as such, is a crime. The right to free speech then, is not a right of freedom, but instead based on a liberal notion of choice; you are free to express your autonomy in x number of ways, at x times, in x places. This is not freedom, nor autonomy; this is totalitarian ‘choice’. You must chose to be free. ‘Rights’ exist in order to define a space, and time of ‘freedom’- in order that said freedom, and autonomy does not encroach upon the spaces and times crucial to the maintainence of power; political society on the one hand, civil on the other; theory and practice; the constitution and the sweat-shop. As such, we have no interest in ‘the right to free speech.’ Appealing to the right to ‘free speech’ merely ratifies the states benevolence and democratic principles- and worse, condones their power to construct ‘freedom’ through tyranny. “Pas de droits sans devoirs dit-elle Égaux, pas de devoirs sans droits” ‘The rights of the poor are an empty phrase.’ We do not want rights. We want autonomy. The autonomy of the individual should be the model of the group. Autonomy in this way does not mean the individualism of Friedman, Hayak or Mill; it is the ability of all to live a life that is unfettered by the dictates of others. It is mutually respecting autonomy. It rejects the conflict of the private and the public, the state and the market, the individual and the group. It is the ‘realisation of species being’- but not constrained by petty notions of ‘the human’. Only when this form of autonomy is the basis of society can any form of freedom-whether ‘rights’ based or otherwise- be anything more than “Privilige extended”. Let us not folly with the enemy’s tactics, even in negative form; neither ‘rights’, nor leaders, nor abstract unities.

[postcardsfromlate]

I first noticed the flatness of your ‘u’s an omission of a ‘g’ or ‘t’ at the end an interjected ‘but..’ in a tense and excitable meeting a new hand signal I met you ‘on the barricades’ inside with our comrades, occupying ‘territory’, our swords of wit and typeface glinting with mixed ire, and fear scratching, parrying, and occasionally piercing people who we did not want to be fighting but they fulfilled their roles; automated human shields, the beauraucrat-generals, protected far behind. Yours was a friendly accent in the middle of a summer skirmish; an impassioned discussion about a brilliant young german, long dead in spain; an intense two, five twenty too many hours, nicotine starved and laptop-screen-bleeched frantically scouring for information, ammunition tapping the flows of the edu-factory, from within. Late evening in the chamber we all lay about, exhausted surreal ramblings, gazing, spontaneous laughter and embraces being all of our, and both of our sustenances or maybe just mine. Claustrophobic but brilliantly so, Trapped by our own devices, beliefs, causes we made the council chamber become a dancehall, an echo chamber, a communal bedroom, a war machine Watching your cartwheels, flik-flaks, hair, laughter, boots, jokes, bravery, teeth, stories, sweat, cunning, eyebrows, love... I longed for you, your beauty, your passion, your intellect, your style, your nonchallance... Or did I long to be you? Everything that I did not know then I had been lacking danced, trespassed, recited and flyered back into my life like the memory of my first cigarette again, on the balcony after 4 days inside, the lock finally, unbelievably picked (not by me, but in a sense by ‘the collective,) the  heady intoxication flooded back with the whispers and stars and grass, weeks later bringing to mind, a self past. Guilty, joyously I submitted and struggled in the familiar yet strange mixture of ecstasy and anxiety my ‘life’ and my ‘politics’ rubbing, hugging so closely in this space that we took, that we reconstructed, remapped, that we trans-formed. Distilled and blended, every contradiction, assymmetry, relation, every power is linked here, focalised: the personal is political I second guess myself for it, I slip into this cloud of indecision and captivation, of infatuation and self-reproach, my faint, vainglorious doggy paddle only superficially keeping me afloat as the other half below, longed, and did dive, plummet, run to you, beneath the pavement... The penny dropped, and bounced off the concrete slab, Debord’s beach no more to be seen, as the gap in history once again, grew half closed for now, it seems at least. Leaving me on my own ‘in the real world’ with the four-year old spectre of a ‘boy’ and a‘girl’ who long since ceased to exist.