Right to the City

(As with the previous post, this one is taken from my personal blog and is a few days old...)

To Glasgow again, to participate in Right to the City's education forum in Partick. The format of the event was facilitated discussion in small randomly assigned groups of various pieces of writing relating to the current crisis in education. The group I was in spent a lot of time discussing the potential conflict between protecting what we have and trying to bring about something better. I found this pretty thought-provoking - sure, I'm tuned in to both narratives (protecting education from cuts and engaging critically with the education system, particularly higher education since that's where my experience mostly is), but hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about how they square. But of course it is a vital question - there are problems with the nature of education in Britan, these problems were there before the current government started the latest and most extreme round of trashing, and if there is anything left standing when Gove and friends have had their wicked way chances are we will still see these problems.

Another point that struck a chord with me was someone's reference to a narrative of students (particularly those at university level) being somehow undeserving; portrayed as an elite group acting out of self-interest or for a thrill (haha yeah being kettled is so fun and exciting!) and expecting the rest of society to subsidise a privileged existence. What interests me in this case is WHERE the narrative is coming from. It is being constructed and perpetuated by the likes of Cameron, Osborne, Johnson and similar people - public school, Bullingdon Club types who are commonly regarded as overprivileged brats. (They are also of a generation that did not have to pay tuition fees. And the fact that they broke windows for fun is already a meme...) I could actually be convinced that they have genuinely no idea that university students exist who aren't like them, that anyone has to struggle to get any non-compulsory education, that anyone is being priced out of going to university by the increased fees. I *could* accept that line, but that would be letting those guys off the hook - more likely they do know but don't care, and would paint any picture, however flimsy the canvas, to push their wider agenda.

'Green authoritarianism'

I alluded early in this blog's life to the debates within the Camp for Climate Action and some potential implications for horizontal politics. One debate I didn't discuss in that post, but which is very much at the heart of the controversy, is the issue of 'green authoritarianism' - a concept that, depending on the political outlook of the person using it, spans a continuum of meanings from any state interference regarding environmental impact to a full-scale system in which liberties are severely curtailed for environmental reasons. (The specific issues being objected to by those in the CCA who adhere to the original horizontal principles are 'green' taxation of various sorts and state-enforced population control.)

Anyway, today I heard someone - a very good friend with a talent for playing devil's advocate, not that this alters what she actually said - come very close to advocating the latter end of the continuum in a question to a visiting speaker, her rationale being that this is the only way people are going to be significantly moved to change their environmental impact. Now, granted, if you are not taking an intrinsically horizontal or anarchist standpoint and your main concern is preventing environmental damage, this may seem like a tempting solution to the issues Mathew raises at Election 2010: specifically that, while people claim to desire a reduction in environmental damage, they are less keen to personally bear the costs of doing so. However, just off the top of my head, I can think of a few counter-arguments:

• Making something government policy doesn't change people's attitudes towards it, except maybe making them resentful. Hence, people will be busy looking for polluting loopholes rather than considering whether their behaviours are unsustainable.
• Some aspects of environmentally damaging behaviour can be policed fairly easily, but how far can this go? You can certainly monitor how much recycling a household generates compared to landfill, or their use of a car, but it is harder to keep tabs on whether people switch their lights off, unplug phone chargers and so on without severely infringing civil liberties.
• Moratoriums on certain products are possible, but who's to say it won't just lead to a thriving black market in those products and an increase in their desirability? Yes, even toxic cleaning crap, if people still believe that the wretched stuff is the best product for the job and either don't care about or think efficacy outweighs the damage to the waterways.
• Giving the state that much power over people's everyday lives has a destructive potential all of its own. It mandates the government to intervene in an unprecedented range of areas, which is liable to spread.
  
• Who decides what is an environmentally necessary law? Can governments be trusted not to have any hidden agendas? I'd be especially concerned about population control here...
  

Steal this...

I'm currently gearing up to write a chapter on culture and its importance to the conceptual landscape of horizontal politics, and part of the background reading I've been doing is Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book. I may make more comment when I've digested it a bit. However, my first impressions are:
-If it is bourgeois not to adopt the ideas in this book wholeheartedly, I guess I am bourgeois and past it. I prefer to think Hoffman is engaging in hyperbole though.
-I'm amazed at how much you could get away with in those days in terms of publishing stuff about guns (ok it was America...) and homemade explosives. Two people at my university were arrested a year and a half ago merely for downloading a terrorist group's ideological document from the State Department website for research purposes. And Hoffman was printing this stuff under his own name, either he was very brave or very stupid.
-And was also mildly shocked at the open references to violence - use of guns, pipe bombs etc - going beyond the unarmed/primitively armed (sticks, stones etc) defensive context or property damage.
-Beyond that, so much of it could have been written at any point in time, evidently the Yippies have had a fair bit of influence.
-The Yippies were unequivocally a political movement, rather than say an artistic one, making it a bit odd that they get less attention this side of the pond than the Situationists.
-In today's context it feels like a bit of a jarring note whenever animals are mentioned - discussion of how to get free meat from an abbatoir, inclusion of pets under 'how to get free stuff' - clearly there was a limit to the examination of types of oppression!

Ideals and ideology

There are so many debates surrounding the Camp for Climate Action that I don't know if I could cover them all. But as someone who studies ideological morphology (the construction of an ideology, in a descriptive rather than pejorative sense, using particular arrangements of political concepts) there are certain elements I find particularly interesting. The general impression I get is one that may be counterintuitive to some - that the core of horizontal politics, rather than being weakened by infighting, may in fact be strengthened by the push to define itself.

Bear in mind here that I'm looking at this from the perspective of horizontal politics - where the core contains a conception of anti-hierarchy formed of components such as consensus, affinity and autonomy, shaped by adjacent concepts such as prefiguration (creating change in the here and now rather than waiting for a revolution) - and not of green politics, where the core is focussed more around saving 'the planet'. Yes, I'm simplifying a bit here. Long story short, from the horizontal politics standpoint, I don't find it shocking that activists with climate change on their agenda may also give priority to issues of wider social change.

In fact, from this perspective, it is those involved in the linked radio show who are missing the point. Yes, if the climate fairy could wave a wand and end climate change but leave the world otherwise unchanged, with people as mean and selfish and destructive as before, horizontal activists wouldn't find this a tolerable solution. (I'm not really sure how many greens would either tbh, but the person who ventured the suggestion seemed to think they should) The fact that her 'solution' wasn't greeted enthusiastically suggests that the Camp for Climate Action has a greater claim on being a horizontal movement with an ecological slant than on being purely a green movement.

Let's look at the original aims of the CCA. (source) One of the central themes is 'direct action' - including civil disobedience but also encompassing a wider theme of acting directly, at a grasroots level, in an autonomous fashion, rather than waiting for a leadership to do it for us. Under the question 'what kind of social movement?', the following answer is given: 'Grassroots, participatory and self-organised. Challenging consumerism, growth & capitalism. Strong anti-capitalist ethos. Slipping between anti-capitalist / anti-growth – an ongoing debate. Needed to embrace civil resistance / direct action – to challenge the 'democratic norms' which don't themselves challenge the system, and because its not about asking others do do things.' More, similar information can be found on the linked discussion thread.

Now, the debates. These arise largely due to the inclusive and participatory nature of the Camp, and in particular the inclusion of 'liberal' (in the pejorative sense as generally deployed by anarchists for those who see the state as a potential defender of freedom) elements. More pertinently, the last few Camps have openly included elements which see the state as the provider of solutions to climate change (arguably those who see it purely as an environmental rather than a social issue). The controversy stems from the favouring by some participants of solutions such as a 'green tax' or population control - described by the horizontals and anarchists in the vicinity as 'green authoritarianism'.

It is possible to speculate on these debates in terms of the potential for the Camp - and if you're really optimistic/pessimistic (depending on outlook) the wider constellation of horizontal movements - to be irrevocably decided. This I do not agree with, seeing instead the potential for a stronger and more coherent horizontal outlook - forced to define itself by the need for distance from the elements described above. This may mean a clearer definition of horizontal space - a decision to ask certain groups to work seperately - even an exodous by horizontals to start up a seperate space (although this would be a shame since the CCA is arguably their baby). But it will also mean that the anti-hierarchical - and by extension anti-hegemonic and anti-state - elements will be reinforced, through the need to defend them. I am hypothesising and also, as this is a matter of personal belief as well as acadmic interest, hoping!