beyondclicktivism

By Aaron John Peters

Facebook, in spite of what the T-shirts in Tahrir Square might say, is not a force for truly radical change. Instead it represents a recuperation by existing power of a frontier where capital has not yet gained hegemony, the broadly non-hierarchical and voluntarist ‘network of networks’ – the internet.

The status quo of the contemporary corporate mainstream media is a ‘communicative ecology’ that permits the perpetuation of what some have called ‘capitalist realism’. Capitalist realism is a state of collective consciousness where ‘the end of the world is seen as more conceivable than the end of capitalism’. A state where the mantra of TINA (There Is No Alternative) is not only applied to national economic policy but even to the inevitability of a Tesco being present on every British high street. This gives rise to the cultural logic of ‘Late Capitalism’ according to Jameson – a logic where all sincerity is rendered irony, where any belief in a better world is kitsch or utopian.

Within capitalist realism the media’s presentation of the ‘possible’ means that collective ambitions for social progress remain within the confines of reproducing existing relations of power. This being in spite of the fact that the ambitions of capitalist realism are perhaps the most ‘utopian’ project of all (in the sense of inviting incredulity).

The corporatized communications ecology has permitted a very small number of persons the ability to not only exercise a monopoly over what and what is not told, but even over what is considered possible. Thus capitalist realism should be viewed as entirely dependent on the existing communicative ecology, with the erosion of publicly owned media strengthening the hand of an increasingly small and powerful media oligarchy. All that has essentially changed with the rise of corporate ‘social media’ is that the likes of Zuckerberg have joined the ranks of Murdoch and Berlusconi.

A faith in the ability of the internet to challenge the existing communications ecology does not mean adhering to the growing orthodoxy that corporate social media is a challenge to existing power. Just as capital’s introduction of new technologies, by potentially freeing huge surpluses of time, has opened up prospects of liberation from work – so its expansion of new communications technologies inadvertently opens up a world of counter-usage. As computerization makes possible either intensified exploitation of labour or subversion of the wage form – so too electronic communication by reducing the neccessary circulation time for information goods, bifurcates into diametrically opposed and antagonistic options.

Either it can intensify the process of the commodification of everything, including social relations – through ‘pay-per’ services and consumer surveillance (as with Facebook and Google) – or alternatively it can lead to a fundamental negation of the commodity form, through the generalised transgression of property rights (as with Wikipedia, Aaaaarg, Vuze and the Pirate Bay).

Social media simply denotes the idea of a media that is socially constituted and co-created without a clear distinction between producers and consumers of content. What the technology naysayers fail to distinguish is the difference between ‘corporate’ social media and the possibility of a commons-based social media, created by the people for the people.

Any radical possibilities within the internet must find themselves mobilized in the name of a ‘communications commons’ – a counterproject against the attempts of capital to enclose the immaterial territory of the internet and social networks in the same way it once enclosed the collective lands of the rural commons.

Karl Polanyi spoke of the various ‘Acts of Enclosure’ throughout the 18th and 19th centuries as marking the advent of modern capitalism with the enclosure of previously common land – this adhering to Marxian notions of accumulation by dispossesion or primitive accumulation. The same process is now being enacted with regards to the ‘commons’ of our social relations and much of our immaterial labour – this being the case with Facebook, Google, Amazon and eBay to name just a few. Character, preference, networks of friends, psychological disposition and social values are translated to being of exchange value between Facebook and third parties such as Microsoft that purchase the data. Yet another field of possible returns for capital has been opened up.

What the radical left should be advocating with regards to how we proceed online is not a question of opting out of corporate social media – we must instead build a ‘communications commons’ that permits similar platforms as Facebook and Twitter (such as Thimbl and Diaspora) which crucially undermines the mainstream media and with it grotesque concentrations of power to frame debate and discourse.

The task is to ensure that the same concentrations of power found within the corporate media are not reproduced in the realm of networked media.

There are many, be they liberals, libertarians, communists, anarchists or otherwise, who regard the concentration of power – be it in the market or the state – as something to be opposed at every turn. If we are to act on such sentiments then we must begin to create a communications commons that can well and truly undermine both the state and the market in informing and framing the debate. The other world that we believe is possible will require another media – one that MUST be commons-based. This is not the time for cynicism but for counterprojects.

(This is an edited version of a longer original article The Communications Commons: Resisting the Recuperation of the Internet by Capital   by Aaron John Peters published under a Creative Commons licence. )

By Tim Hardy

We need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong.

John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power

(Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.)

One repeated and misguided criticism of the extraordinary Spanish Democracia Real Ya protests that have continued all week and of the solidarity demonstrations that are taking place in cities around the world is that they are not political. What this accusation boils down to is the fact that the demonstrations are not party political – but that is precisely the point.

Of course, our frivolous corporate media, more interested in the sexual antics of athletes than in analysis or in investigative journalism, is only too happy to relegate the story to a semi-racist footnote about exuberant young Latins. The good-natured, festive spirit of the demonstrators is used as further proof that their demands are not really serious. This fits into a narrative that is beloved of politicians, one in which they are the hard-headed realists and everyone else a starry-eyed idealist who needs to grow up.

A practical scheme, says Oscar Wilde, is either one already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under the existing conditions; but it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to, and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish.

Emma Goldman, Anarchism: What it Really Stands For

We must be practical, we are told. We must be reasonable. Ideology disguises itself as common sense. This is capitalist realism: the limits that are placed upon the ways of living we might imagine.

But is this world we are forced to live in reasonable?

Is it reasonable that the UK’s young were seduced into voting for a party that promised to abolish tuition fees who then turned around and tripled them? Is it reasonable that our government is giving away billions of pounds in corporation tax cuts while pretending there is no money for education, for the disabled, for healthcare or pensions? Is it reasonable that rather than help the millions locked out of the housing market, the government refuses to increase protection for private tenants, is trying to raise the cost of social housing for tenants to meet market rates and is aiming to “level the playing field between investors and owner-occupiers” making it easier for parasitic speculators to drive up the price of housing now that ordinary people cannot continue to inflate the value of asset bubbles that might once have been considered homes?

Forget being reasonable. Reasonable isn’t getting us anywhere.

The demonstrators have had enough of a political system that fails to represent them, one that restricts their power to expressing a preference every few years for one identikit professional politician or another. This is a far more radical politics. This is a crisis of confidence in democracy under capitalism when the failure of the free-markets is being used as an excuse to extend their poisonous reach.

The increasing intensity of the crisis has made this model of politics blow up. It has shown clearly that the current politicians use the legitimacy which the voting box grants them in order to make citizens ever more impotent against the demands and requirements of a global capitalist class which the politicians either do not know how to or do not want to tame.
Communique from Universidad Nomada Regarding Events in Spain

The dream of the left is a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, a world of equality. This dream is constantly frustrated when those who attain office with the stated aim of implementing it fail to do so. As John Holloway notes, the quest for power with the aim of transforming society sets us up for perpetual disappointment: attempting to conquer power merely extends the field of power relations into the struggle against power and the movement becomes corrupted from the outset.

A revolutionary movement becomes puritanical when it sets as its goal the conquest of power and represses frivolity and anything else that does not contribute to that end. The laughter, singing and dancing at the Spanish protests, far from being a sign that these protests can be ignored, is on the contrary a sign of just how serious a challenge they are. They don’t hope to seize power. They seek instead to transform existing power relations. As with the university occupations and the occupations in Wisconsin, this is not just a demonstration to be witnessed, a public gesture of dissent, but instead it is a chance for the participants to directly experience the possibility of a better world through participating in assemblies and consensus decision-making.

No wonder they have caught the imagination of people and given hope to thousands around the world.

Many have noted the connections between the spirit of these protesters and those who go out to demonstrate with UK Uncut, a movement repeatedly dismissed as unrealistic until its demands could be ignored no longer prompting the state to use politicised policing to try to shut it down.

Conversations are beginning in London between the solidarity protesters outside the Spanish embassy and with those involved in the People’s Assembly network  including members of the Campaign for Real Democracy. An open organising assembly is planned for tomorrow night to discuss ways in which these movements might come together to support industrial action on June 30th. London-based protesters who have been involved with UK Uncut will be warmly welcomed as will those who have taken part directly or indirectly in actions and discussions with Arts Against Cuts or anyone else sympathetic to the goals and tactics of these various groups and the merely curious.

Something beautiful is happening. It’s time to be unrealistic and look beyond the old solutions. It’s time to try something new.

By Tim Hardy

(Image by DRYAsturies.)

How big does a demonstration have to be before the media pays attention?

Sunday saw enormous demonstrations in 57 Spanish cities by people marching with the cry of  Democracia Real Ya. Occupations of town squares followed including the occupation of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol by 150 people who plan to stay until 22 May after police failed to evict them at 5am this morning. More demonstrations are planned for tonight.

Yet the world’s press is almost silent.

Twitter, however, is alive with the hashtags #acampadasol (camping at Sol square) , #democraciarealya and #spanishrevolution

Like UK Uncut, this is a movement organised by social media, a set of shared ideas around which the young can mobilise. Their manifesto lacks the sophistication of more established political movements yet speaks of the outrage felt by millions and a deep dissatisfaction with the political establishment where those outside look from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again and find it impossible to say which is which.

The relationship between activists and the media is a contentious one. There are serious problems with a lack of representation in the papers and on the television and there is systematic dishonesty practised by large sections of the press. We may turn our back on the mainstream, but there is also a constant danger that our media becomes our ghetto if our stories do not come out to a wider population.

But as Gandhi wrote:

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

We don’t need corporate approval of our ideas to share them or to be told what we can chose to believe. Politics in the age of the internet is different. It is also far less about grand political theories than in the past where opposition required significant organisation and more about ideas that resonate and around which people can mobilise (in what Joss Hands has called a QARN: a quasi-autonomous recognition network). Historically, to be a Marxist, for example,  has always required a certain commitment. But now anyone who cares about the destruction being carried out on our society by the wealthiest can decide to go on a UK Uncut action or to take to the streets with Democracia Real Ya without worrying about ideological purity.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that the press are silent. Perhaps it is enough that we share our ideas and the stories of those engaged in similar struggles around the world through blogs and social media. There will come a point beyond which the world cannot ignore the size of these movements. And when that day comes, we will almost have won.

The Democracia Real Ya site is down right now but a copy of their manifesto in English is below.

Manifesto (English)

We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.

Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.

This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But if we join forces, we can change it. It’ss time to change things, time to build a better society together. Therefore, we strongly argue that:

The priorities of any advanced society must be equality, progress, solidarity, freedom of culture, sustainability and development, welfare and people’s happiness.

These are inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development, and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.

The current status of our government and economic system does not take care of these rights, and in many ways is an obstacle to human progress.

Democracy belongs to the people (demos = people, kr�tos = government) which means that government is made of every one of us. However, in Spain most of the political class does not even listen to us. Politicians should be bringing our voice to the institutions, facilitating the political participation of citizens through direct channels that provide the greatest benefit to the wider society, not to get rich and prosper at our expense, attending only to the dictatorship of major economic powers and holding them in power through a bipartidism headed by the immovable acronym PP & PSOE.

Lust for power and its accumulation in only a few; create inequality, tension and injustice, which leads to violence, which we reject. The obsolete and unnatural economic model fuels the social machinery in a growing spiral that consumes itself by enriching a few and sends into poverty the rest. Until the collapse.

The will and purpose of the current system is the accumulation of money, not regarding efficiency and the welfare of society. Wasting resources, destroying the planet, creating unemployment and unhappy consumers.

Citizens are the gears of a machine designed to enrich a minority which does not regard our needs. We are anonymous, but without us none of this would exist, because we move the world.

If as a society we learn to not trust our future to an abstract economy, which never returns benefits for the most, we can eliminate the abuse that we are all suffering.

We need an ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.

For all of the above, I am outraged.

I think I can change it.

I think I can help.

I know that together we can.I think I can help.

I know that together we can.

[Edit: those in London interested in solidarity demonstrations should look at Real Democracy London via @RooftopJaxx]

By Tim Hardy

Activism without political education and ideological education is just “good works”. We mustn’t lose ourselves in good works. We should use the good works also as a way of advancing consciousness.

How many wake-up calls do we need before we stop waiting for our successive governments to do something and start doing something for ourselves?

In the UK, more and more people are getting involved in activism in horror at the assault on the welfare state being carried out by a privileged elite with no democratic mandate for radical change. What starts with a gut feeling of revulsion that the most vulnerable in society are being blamed for the consequences of the unpunished criminal negligence of the most rich, slowly grows into a broader consciousness that these are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a far more profound sickness in our politics. Suddenly the solutions being offered by the professional political class seem like different tints of the same colour from a very narrow section of the spectrum. As ideas re-emerge that were long considered to have been consigned to a historical footnote, such as anarchism as a viable political philosophy, so too do other ideas often lampooned as marginal or eccentric become more and more compelling.

Over the last year, Matt Anderson, Natalia Leite, David Black, Paul Park and Michael Gerner travelled 15,000 miles across the United States to witness a landscape and culture in crisis and to interview a number of activists and thinkers who are responding by creating innovative, sustainable methods of living. The footage is being used to make a documentary, Fall and Winter.

Among the many inspiring individuals interviewed are Michael Reynolds, creator of the Earthship, an off-grid, carbon-zero home built largely from natural and recycled materials found at local landfills. Earthships are self-sustaining structures that make maximum use of renewable resources — sun, wind, rain and snow — for heat, cooling, light, collecting and pumping water, treating sewage, even growing food in indoor greenhouses. They require little or no energy to construct and produce no greenhouse gases.

It remains to be seen how a culture obsessed with turning shelter into an investment opportunity that further entrenches the wealth of the richest will cope with the idea of sustainable homes for living rather than opportunities to do something up and flip it for a quick profit.

Another inspiring individual featured in the documentary is Detroit activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs, co-author of The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, and a thinker who has spent a lifetime looking at ways in which we can rebuild our communities from the ground up. As other artists have noted, Detroit itself is a particularly eye-catching vision of post-industrial America and a promise of what is to come. Those living in parts of the UK destroyed by Thatcherism know only too well the despair that comes when a once thriving community is reduced to poverty following the destruction of local industry.

Nobody could doubt that we need stronger grass-roots organising in a world where our leaders seem only concerned in filling their own pockets and already vulnerable communities are being destroyed and left to struggle alone. Change is not going to come from those that profit from unsustainable lifestyles or who are comfortably insulated from the harm their policies are causing. The ideas are going to come from the margins and support for them needs to grow from the ground up since it will not come from a media that is too cosy with the rich.

From what I have seen of it, this film seems like a beautifully shot, well researched and much-needed project to share the solutions discovered by visionaries living on the edge of society and whose work as a result is insufficiently well known. I am often suspicious of the rhetorical strategies used by documentaries to advance arguments but I cannot deny that they are a powerful and necessary way of raising awareness. As our government embarks on a program of disaster capitalism where the financial and ecological destruction resulting from their own policies is used as an excuse to inflect even more of their toxic ideology on us, this film seems particularly timely.

The film crew hope that by sharing ways in which individuals are taking control of their own lives that their film will give hope and help grow a community around the world. At the moment, they are raising funds using kickstarter to complete a rough cut of the film: with only days to go, they are tantalisingly close to their goal.

If you can help, even by pledging just a dollar, please do so. If you cannot, then please just share the word so more can hear about this inspiring project to educate us all in alternative ways of living that lie outside the narrow solutions offered by contemporary parliamentary politics.

As the right-wing struggle to return us to levels of inequality not seen since the Victorian age and gladly forge alliances with dictators, arms dealers and remorseless corporations, we desperately need to explore new ways of living so that the language of capitalist realism can no longer be used to force us to accept the destruction of our communities and our planet in the name of profit.

By Tim Hardy

The coalition government are systematically destroying civil liberties out of fear at resistance to their program of vicious, unnecessary cuts and their plans to dismantle the welfare state.

The UK police are being given a free hand to intimidate as well as prosecute. MPs are turning a blind eye when the police overstep the limits of their power. Cuts to legal aid mean that access to legal representation is being restricted. Fear of occupations is driving calls to outlaw squatting. Fear of strikes is driving calls to outlaw industrial action.

And this is all being done with the full support of most of the mainstream media.

Under New Labour, people were concerned that we were sleepwalking into a police state. Now we are goose-stepping into one. The Liberal Democrats abandoned all pretense at concern for civil liberties when offered the chance to take a bullet for the Conservatives in return for the trappings of power. Even now, they are too absorbed by self-pity to stand up for the values on which they were elected.

Fortunately there are a few ministers who are willing to speak out for what is right.

While our government issues guidelines to benefits staff to prepare them for the wave of suicides that has already begun, the richest in the country are seeing their wealth increase and reducing their contributions to charity, the cash-rich continue to inflate the cost of property impoverishing the many and tax avoiding corporations are involved in negotiating a thieves’ charter that will turn Britain into the most grotesque tax haven in the world.

It is up to us to stop them. It is up to us to get the word out to people who are not involved in political activism and have no idea that arrests are being carried out for Orwellian precrimes. It is up to us to challenge organisations like the BBC who refuse to practice journalism and instead are little more than the light entertainment wing of state propaganda.

If resistance is not coming from parliament then resistance has to come from the people. The government understand that too well.

Make no mistake. Just three years after the myths of free-market capitalism were dealt a fatal blow, those who have profited the most by the old order are making a concerted effort to lift up the ladders and defend their privileges with force. Perhaps, looking to the Chinese model, they have discovered that far from being a necessary conjunct to capitalism, democracy is in fact a hindrance to it.

With the media asleep at the wheel, perhaps they think nobody will notice until it is too late.