ACFM - #ACFM Trip 13: Crowds

Episode Date: January 17, 2021

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert return to talk about the power and potential of crowds – from mobs and marches to mesmeric leaders and terrace anthems, with music from the Joubert Singers, Sham 69 and more. Music: The Polyphonic Spree – Light and Day / The Joubert Singers – Stand On The Word […]

Hello and welcome back to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name is Keir Milbin, and today I'm joined by the usual, unusual crew, Nadia Idle. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. On this episode, we're going to be discussing the very ACFM topic of crowds. But before we get into that, I just need to explain where we've been. We've been on an ACFM hiatus for the last few months.

It's been several months since we released our previous. episode. We had a few changes to make, not least to ourselves, and so we've all been on a spiritual journey of our own. I know Jeremy has spent the last few months in deep, deep meditation. He only survived, actually, because he managed to enter a state of suspended animation, lower his body temperature to just above freezing. Luckily, the plumberers come around and fix the heating, so Jeremy's back with us. Nadia, on the other hand, I know that she undertook at a sacred Ayahuasca vomiting ceremony in Bethnal Green, after which she entered the astral planes and journeyed far and wide to try to find herself. It took a while. She didn't like

the first self she found. She went back, found another one. And this one's proven most satisfactory, so welcome back Nadia and her new self. And I myself have been studying at the feet of my own South American guru. I've spent several weeks in deep contemplation of Marcelo Bielsa's man-marking system. The appearance of chaos can mask a simple but powerful structure is the profound wisdom I brought back with me, although Lisa plane Chelsea later, so that might turn out to be complete bullshit. Anyway, the point is we're back. We're back, we're better, we're improved. This is series two of

ACFM, back on a monthly schedule, now of our own podcast feed, so get sharing and subscribing. And let's get back to the matter at hand. Okay, Nadia, crowds. Why are we talking about crowds at this time? I think we wanted to talk about crowds because basically we're not allowed to be in one

at the moment with coronavirus, especially under lockdown two. And crowds are really important things if you're somebody who is on the left and goes to demonstrations. And I really miss it. I really, really miss being in a crowd, all sorts of crowds. A crowd at a party, a crowd on the street, just being around other human beings. And I'm lucky enough to have just left the country for a bit to see my family.

And it makes a big difference being around people. And I didn't realize the effect that it had on me not being with people. So that's why I'm particularly interested in it, but also because we've had a fantastic chat with Echete Tamil Koran, the writer and journalist, about crowds. And I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit about that later. Yeah, I mean, I've been really, really missing crowds. I mean, partly because I've been thinking about crowds for this podcast. But it's also come up quite a bit of the last week. I think it's a general, basically, a general sort of point in the whole socially distance thing that, like, is the one thing we're.

we can't do is get into those big, big crowd situations, you know, those sort of crowds where you get lost in the crowd, you get lost in crowd emotions, you know what I mean, whether it's sporting event or at a gig, a really good gig, or go and dancing, something like that where you lose yourself in a crowd. That just seems something you cannot do via Zoom. I've been so jealous of all of the people who have been irresponsible in the sense of irresponsible in the spreading of the virus. Every time they kind of shut down, down another illegal rave somewhere. I'm just like, oh, shit, I just really wish I was there, even though I know it's like the wrongest thing to do in terms of the virus. It's just like,

I don't blame people at all for doing that. I think you're completely right. It tells us so much, doesn't it, this period about like what it is to be human, basically. Although I've been sort of reflecting as well. Basically, I've been sort of like having this melancholic searching through images of crowds and so forth. Just trying to remind myself what it was like. like, I have you sort of thinking, obviously this has been like this huge removal of crowd experience during COVID, but like that is sort of an acceleration of a more general tendency in society where like those big sort of uncontrolled crowds become rarer and rarer. If you go to football, when we were allowed to have crowds at football, you know, it's

very different experience now than it was 20 years ago, perhaps 25 years ago actually, perhaps even 30 years ago when there was, when there was, when you were allowed to stand. at football grounds, rather than having all seating and CCTV, etc. And the experience of like festivals and gigs, well, it depends what size gigs and what kind of festivals. But if you go to sort of like a normal gig, you know, you're getting searched on the way in. It's just a completely different experience, I think.

Especially like festivals, you know, there's a whole events management sort of industry that's built up to sort of take away the sort of spontaneity and the ability to just, you know, to have anonymity and lose yourself in a crowd. Do you know what I mean? Crowds have become much more controlled. There's much less public space. And in fact, there has been a limited, I think there might have been a decline

in the number of like political crowds over the last sort of five to ten years. I'm not sure about that, actually. I might go back on that statement. I was going to ask you, Jeremy, what you think also, like what your specific experiences as the person I think who likes crowds least in a kind of personal experience.

Are there any crowds that you do like or do you miss? Obviously, like a big part of my life is organising parties and sort of creating crowds and the crowd is the term we use for the people at the party when you're organizing the party and when you're DJing, you're always thinking about the relationship with the crowd. So I guess I'm sorry that we can't have parties. I don't really have this sense of sort of missing it that much, but that's partly because I really, I spend more time normally around those kind of crowds than most people, my age.

So I still feel like I've got quite a big bank of crowd experience to draw on. I think it's interesting that thought of kids that there's been a decline of the political crowd anyway. But if we're talking about specifically like the British political context, I mean, that's partly because there was a move from kind of street activism to, you know, working through the Labour Party, wasn't that? And NGOs, yeah.

Well, the NGOs, I always think of the period of street activism as being, and the period when everybody was working through NGOs is like two sides of the same coin, really. I mean, that was my experience anyway. And the party is like a different thing. I mean, you know, the crowds of canvases in a way with a sort of what replaced, the crowds of the crowds of street protests that lots of people have been nostalgic for on the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the 2010 to 2011 student protest. tests in the UK. So, and in a way, you know, in a way that was an advance, that was always

an advance from my point of view. It was always more, you know, it was some kind of an advance to have lots of people knocking on doors actually talking to people rather than just congregating in central London in the name of a cause most people in the country didn't really understand. But also, I guess for people like us three, that was that past five years when people have been doing so through the Labour Party, it does mark a break, doesn't it, from quite a long period. I mean, all my adult life, all the time you've been in the UK now, dear, basically sort of street protest, which involved deliberately, basically, it involved deliberately forming, you know, somewhat chaotic crowds in central London. It was just like the basic form of political activism for a lot of

people, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But then I think what the interesting thing there is then there was this terminology that came out as a kind of critique going, oh, no, it's yet another A to B March. And I think that's partly unfair because even though I would definitely be a critic of the A to B, March, as this kind of like regulated way that people can do something that in theory doesn't have any effect. I think it does have an effect because I think the very fact that a group of people are together is important in itself, even though it might not lead to the political change. And I think that, you know, that was the correct basis for criticizing it. But I want to be, I don't want to diminish the importance of the assembly, whether it's, you know, A to B or slightly chaotic.

I think it's an interesting one, actually, because, well, there's a couple of things there. One of them is, so we're recording just after the 10th anniversary of the Millbank demonstration, which was when a protest against introduction of student fees ended up stormy. Well, the introduction of student fees, the increase of student fees. Sorry, yes, of course. This is part of the mythology, the extremely middle class mythology of that movement. that student fees becoming too expensive for middle class people wasn't the same as them being introduced yeah yeah they're tripling of student fees i do apologize but like that

experience where basically the millbank tower in london got smashed up so there was like you know sort of street action in the sort of looser sense um big demonstrations etc being you know the in some ways the focal point of politics like leaving that behind has been like not just in terms of sort of like an electoral focus and moving to the Labour Party but also just, you know, militants these days, it's all about organising but getting people organised rather than mobilised

and perhaps that previous era was like an era of which you mobilise people rather than organised people. That is all a good thing. It's just totally a good thing in my book but yeah, I still think there might be a little bit of a, it might not just be COVID, it might also

this sort of longing for these sort of political crowds perhaps, it might also be you know, this, this real desire at the moment to sort of restart things, to refound things, to restart things after a defeat. If we look at the US, which has had a very similar sort of trajectory in that the Bernie Sanders movement was defeated roundly, just after the Corby movement was defeated roundly. But in the US, what happened was, you know, within a month, they have this really, like the bigger social movement in history, the second Black Lives Matter movement.

And I think that's had a different effect on helping that. movement refound itself and reground itself, whereas that hasn't happened in the left. Sorry, I am going on a rant now. You're right. I hadn't really thought of that. I mean, if nothing, I mean, obviously BLM was about all kinds of things, but also it was partly a cathartic response to the kind of angered the frustration of the political class, having shut down, you know, the possibility of the Bernie Sanders. And we haven't had that, although partly we haven't had that because the whole temporality was different because we did capture the leadership of the party for a while.

I thought a track we could play be a very rare, relatively modern example of a band using a sort of full chorus is the polyphonic spree who had that big hit, Follow the Day, nearly 20 years ago, a very nice uplifting tune, which I used to play at parties until it got killed by being used on too many supermarket adverts.

You'll say, because all my feelings are more than I can let by or not. It's more than you've got. Just follow the day. Follow the day. You know, one reason why a lot of older music has a certain. affective power for people that contemporary, a lot of most, very little contemporary music does. Very little contemporary music, almost no contemporary music is made by groups of musicians together in a studio. It's made on laptops or it's made by people who are kind of separated and it's

made on, you know, it's not actually made by crowds in a room. Whereas most music, you know, before sort of digitisation, like before sometime in the 90s, was made by groups of people in a room together. And that does produce a really sort of different affect, I think. It does produce something really different. Going back to that point, it's like what you were saying about Milbank 10 years, there is nothing like it, like the experience of being in your kind of political education. There is no amount of either organising, which I agree with you tactically is there's an important move to organising away from just mobilising for the sake of it. But the experience of being on the street, in various forms,

whether it's a protest or it's an occupation or whether it's a riot, you know, and those all might feel very different in different places in the world at different times. But it's a very, very different thing. I mean, that's one of the things that I talk about with Ece. It's like no one can take that experience away from you. And when things come like the 10-year anniversary or whatever, it rekindles this real kind of spirit,

where some people have, you know, either forgotten themselves or, you know, they've told themselves another story or a narrative about what happened. And you remember through the experience that you had with your feet in the street. And, you know, all three of us have had that experience and loads of our listeners will have as well. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. And I've always thought, well, there's two different things in a way to say about that, I think. I mean, one is just to reiterate what you said, the sheer experience of being together on the streets, even if it doesn't achieve any immediate political objective, it's affectively, like at the level of how you feel,

at the level of your body and your physical memory is really, really important for sort of empowering people, then it does, you know, it can stay with people for decades. So it's never a complete waste of time. There's also, when we think about like conventional demonstrations, I always think, it was a point that was made to me, like when I was, you know, my early teamed and I was becoming sort of disillusioned with the apparent futility

of massive campaign for nuclear disarmament marches. I can't remember who it was said to me, but somebody said, but wouldn't it be even worse if we didn't, it would be even worse to live in a society where there aren't loads of people on the street protesting this stuff, even if it doesn't stop it happening. I think that's really true in some ways.

But I think it's also, I hadn't expected us to be talking about this, but there's an interesting question for me about these different cycles, because look, for me, the whole cycle of, you know, the anti-pole tax protest and then things like reclaimed, the streets in the 90s, right through to sort of Occupy, around 2008, right through to Millbank. It was, I mean, it was mostly an experience of these things. I mean, to me, a lot of the time, I'll be honest, a lot of the time, I wasn't convinced a lot of the time that those things weren't, while for some people, they were clearly having this empowering effect. They might

have long-term positive consequences. I mean, a lot of the time, it did just seem like a sort of ritual of license. And it just seemed like it was just something that a certain kind of middle-class person who would end up going to work for an NGO and just becoming a sort of, you know, slightly to the left of David Miliband, like NGO person would do at some point in their life. And it didn't really seem like it was sort of going anywhere. And then the thing about the Milbank protest is something did happen with that cohort is they tried, basically they tried street protest, saw that he didn't get anywhere and said, right, we're going to do something else now. And they ended up kind of revive, you know, you know, driving the whole kind of political

revival of the British left. This is sort of what you've written about here, isn't it? But it's an interesting question, like, what the shift was. Because to me, to my experience of those steam protests was just, I remember people getting all excited and people talking about kettling, you know, the police tactic of surrounding crowds to try and make them really uncomfortable for people. Like, it was this new thing that suddenly was being done. And to me, it was already like kind of old news.

And at the time I thought, yeah, here we go, like another street protest movement. Like I'll support it, like I'll join in a bit, but it's not going to do anything. But somehow that cohort actually went through the process of it and sort of came out at the other side far more politically mature in a way which honestly, I would say most of the street activists of our generation never did. I mean, why is that? Well, I mean, the first thing you'd have to say about that, though, is it didn't just happen in Britain, did it? Well, that's true.

I mean, at the same time as that was going on or just before or after, I'm sure Nadia will talk about it. Occupy, because Occupy is in 2011, isn't it? It's October 2011 in the UK. But no, so Nadia was at Turia Square. I'm sure she'll talk about that, which was the key point in the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt. And then Echie talks about being at the 2013 protest. Is it taxing? It's taxemia, yeah. Yeah, that's right. In Turkey. Obviously, it's a couple of years later. But basically, I think that's still part of that stuff. that same sort of cycle and, you know, then you have the Occupy Movement, etc., which is sort of a little bit different, but like a little bit similar.

I mean, that's all, I mean, just to say one thing and then, sorry, go back to your point is, is I think there's two things we're talking about here. One is like being on the street and like demonstrating and the other one is the effect of the crowd. And I think they overlap, but they're not exactly the same because, you know, let's not forget Iraq in terms of demonstrations. And that was a huge political moment for a lot of people, but in terms of its fore. on the street, it was very different to Milbank and very different to, you know, the movement of the squares or whatever. Yeah. But I think what Jeremy was bringing up, which is really interesting

one, is there is these different, like, there's a difference every now and then, one of these crowd experiences and nearly always crowd experiences, they turn into something which like trigger something really new. I've talked about it before as moments of excess, which is this idea that I came up with my friends in the Free Association, and then it's in my generation left book, and I'm trying to just say that, like, you have these sort of moments. a real, like, you know, when something happens or some real innovation and that can spark, you know, a whole cycle

or it can spark, you know, political generation, etc. But I'm like, and I think right through the 90s, I think the poll tax was one of those and like that was my formative moment. I might talk about that in a moment, but I see that as the end point of like a whole, of the sort of like struggles of the 80s in Britain.

You know, there were people trying to do, trying to spark crowds in certain ways to do with the anti-criminal justice bill and reclaim the streets and these move came out. And then there was another sort of one of these moments of excess things around Seattle and in a series of demonstrations

that year. But like what happened was people tried to recreate that over the next five years. Just try to recreate the same experience. The guys don't like the rebel. They don't like the rebel clown clown clown clown clown clowns on. He was. Yeah. How can we innovate? Let's add clowns to the yeah. Anyway, but I think

one of the things that happened. I have clown costumes in cops. Extra clowns and extra cops. That was the main difference, wasn't it? Just want to interrogate the point about whether an occupation is a crowd and how it relates to the crowd. This might be a point where you bring in the sort of Elias Kinetti's distinction between an open crowd and a closed crowd.

His thing of like an open crowd is like this sort of basically an uncontrolled crowd. But basically just it wants to keep growing. at all points. Do you know what I mean? It's like a crowd which just wants to keep, keep growing and we'll keep growing until basically it either falls apart or it or it loses some sort of direction or something. And that's one sort of crowd with the crowd we've got in our heads. But there are lots of like controlled crowds in which crowd behavior is sort of limited in some way. So like the football crowd, there's a stadia there. Now it's all seating, etc but you know it can only grow to a certain extent you know that's different to like an open

crowd and so like an occupation would be something like that i think much more structured right um yeah i don't know i mean while you were thinking while you were just saying that i was thinking about it and i'm not sure and i'm also kind of taken by um etche's point from the from the interview i did with her that that which i guess is a different plane of thinking about it but that the the crowd as a kind of body or an organism is also a self-regulating form. And that doesn't entirely line up with what's his name, Kenetti's idea of kind of an open crowd. I'm really interested in the crowd as a kind of form in itself and like where does it start and where does it end, not in a philosophical sense, but like how does it become? And do people in the crowd all

have to be aware of why they're there in a sense? And that would make it very different to an occupation because an occupation has more of a kind of like, we are all here for this one cause. I mean, Keir talked to the start of the recording about the increasing regulation of social space to make it impossible for spontaneous crowds to form. In Britain, that's certainly true in the past few decades. I mean, it's interesting actually to think there is, I mean, there is a tradition within liberal political theory of what is called freedom of assembly. Historically, there's a long tradition of trying to prevent people from assembling, especially in cities because of the fear that if they do, well, it'll get out of control and they'll threaten

property and they'll impose their unruly will on people. I mean, it's something I've written about and I've drawn on work other people have done like, you know, like a lioness Kennedy's classic book, Crowds and Power. I mean, my favourite study of this is a book by just a British political philosophy scholar called J.S. McClelland, and he wrote a book called The Crowd and the mob. And he basically argues, well, I don't think even argues, he's, just demonstrates very clearly that the whole history of political philosophy in the West basically begins with people saying, with Plato really saying, look, democracy is bad.

And the reason democracy is bad is because democracy is about crowds and crowds are inherently irrational. So people get together, they start influencing each other, they're not thinking like rational beings, they become like animals, like they go get this group think, and therefore it's bad. And that idea just persists all the way through. And the basic argument is, is a basic argument even being made in Plato, is what crowds do is everyone who's a member of the crowd

loses their capacity for reason. And so what happens is they become just like animals or children or like sort of these uncontrolled beings. And that makes them really susceptible to being like just following whatever some leader tells them and just attacking enemies kind of wildly. It's the idea of the mob. That's two and a half thousand years ago. you saw exactly the same language being used by sort of liberal commentators in The Guardian

talking about Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. Exactly the same idea. The whole notion that Corbinism couldn't have any rational content. Like it couldn't be a rational response to declining prospects for people in Britain. No, it could only be conceptualised as a pathological personality cult. Yeah, the language people in the Labour Party, like MPs used when they saw themselves as being threatened by Labour Party members being given the right to vote on whether they wanted to have those people as their MPs or not? You know, was it all this language of, this language of bullying, intimidation? It's all this language which drips with just the fear of the imagined crowd, actually. So is that then something that's always in the, is a tool that's in the arsenal

of, you know, the right? Is this basically a sort of a piece that comes out every time, basically, there's a right wing or an establishment argument, basically saying we don't like this person or what they're doing or what they're doing or is a followers are doing, then these people must be part of a or are behaving like a rabble and a crowd. Or does it always work? I mean, when has it not work? It doesn't work when enough people see themselves as part of that crowd and say no, actually, what we're demanding is a voice, you know, it's a collective voice rather than, you know, and what we now demands are rational and are reasonable. But do you think that's the imagined crowd, or do you think it is the literal crowd?

Well, this is the thing, it's both. The reasons Paris has those famous big wide boulevard, because it was all redesigned in the mid to late 19th century to make it impossible for the Paris mob to kind of organise itself politically and take control of the city, the way they did, you know, ultimately under the commune. I mean, the fear of the crowd, the fear of the working class crowd at the football ground, the fear of the festival, the fear that you can't have all these hippies, like just gathering at Stonehenge, you know, just because they want to.

Ultimately, it's all the same fear. It's the fear that, well, if you have to be, if you let people gather together, whether symbolically... It'll take your stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're thinking about this collective chant as a kind of sound of connectivity. For me, it's always, you know, Americans of gospel. It's the most developed kind of modern choral tradition, isn't it?

It's the sound of people singing together. You know, when soul music first emerges, you know, Ray Charles codified soul music in the early 60s as supposedly a synthesis of rhythm and blues and gospel. Like it's seen by a lot of gospel aficionados as sort of sacrilegious because he's mixing this kind of secular, physical, like sexy music with the spiritual transcendence of gospel. But gospel just because gospel carries on, you know,

being a really key element right into disco. And it's, I mean, disco basically is, just gospel funk mixed with gospel. Gospel is the music of the hopeful crowd. It is the sound of the crowd who are united and harmonious and hopeful and optimistic, whether they're being optimistic about the life to come or optimistic about the possibility of a better future. I suppose the classic gospel disco tune is stand on the word. The Jew bear singers stand on the word. It's like a loft tune, which has this completely, completely reactionary lyric actually. It's a lyric telling people that you should just obey God are unquestionably.

You shouldn't question the word of God. But it becomes this absolute anthem for these mostly gay black crowds in New York, at the loft and at the Paradise Garage. And it still is to date because it's such a powerful aesthetic expression of kind of sonic connectivity. There's a word The word of God There was a

As a direct response To the experience of the Paris Commune And that is sort of That is like a sort of This emergent liberal world view In which the only thing that exists or individuals, right, trying to resolve itself with this, with the fact that, like, basically crowds exist and, like, you know, you have crowd behavior. How do you resolve those two things?

Do you know what I mean? Then in that case, you have to then, you'd have to complicate your worldview. But instead of doing that, you just, so like Gustav Lebonne is one of, it's like the classic sort of, it's a reactionary sort of account of crowds. And his, his account is really like, like Jeb was just saying about basically, when you're in a crowd, yeah, your mental faculties are lowered, you're more susceptible, and therefore you can come under the behavior of a crowd leader. You know, it's sort of like hypnotism is a thing in vogue at that time. So that's the sort of mechanism by which the crowd gets hypnotized by the crowd leader.

But if you think about that, all of that is just a way of saying, what looks like the subjectivity, the collective subjectivity of a crowd is actually just a reflection of the collective subjectivity of the leader. So it's like, oh, right, yeah, so it really is this emergent crowd experience, which doesn't fit our worldview is actually just, you know, the effect of very strong individuals who are leaders, you know what I mean? So we've remained in the world where there's only, only individuals exist and all these sorts of things. But have you not been hypnotized in a crowd? I mean, I do think, I mean, it's a side point, but I think it's like, I find the experience of a crowd hypnotic.

Well, I think this is an interesting, this is an important point, isn't it? But I think it's a different thing, right? I think this is probably what you're going to say, Jeremy, I might be wrong, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, like, the most completing experience I have is being in a good crowd. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think that the thing is that, that, that kind of liberal imagination, it recognises exactly the same phenomena that you would describe that we would describe as people becoming empowered in the crowd and then it re-describes them as psychotic basically. Because to them it is, to them, to them It is psychotic. The threat of the collective. The threat of the collective. Yeah, exactly. It's the threat of the collective. I would say one thing, though, and like, what your description there really captures this.

I mean, my argument in my book, common ground is that, well, that kind of liberal imagination, what it can't get to grips with is the fact that the crowd has a certain, and not just a crowd, but a person, does have a kind of rationality. But it's a rationality that can't be conceptualized in terms of just the individual. That it's about every person is a complex multiplicity. And every crowd is a complex multiplicity. Those complex multiplicities are powerful to the extent that they are complex, and that's a multiple, that's what makes them creative. But to the liberal imagination, that is just terrifying and unthinkable. So you either have to imagine the crowd is just this sea of individuals who have nothing to do with each other, but they're just sort of tied to the leader. And as soon as that, if you can cut that tie to the leader, they'll just disperse. You know, that's the way they imagine it. And at the same time,

you can also only imagine that that crowd is always acting in a completely homogenous way. It's always following the leader. It's always what's they call a meta-individual. The ideal form of this is fascism. That's partly why Le Bonn, when he's right in the late 19th centuries, he's sort of grumpy liberal,

basically moaning about the onset of political democracy. But he gets a lot of cachet and people like Freud start taking him really seriously in the 20s and 30s because they think he sort of predicted fascism. And he's understood the psychodynamic, of fascism. In fascism, people kind of lose their individual capacity for ethical behavior and they just become part of this mass and they follow this leader and the whole thing is about

oneness, like einvolch, ein feura, ein Reich, you know, the one people, one empire, one leader. I mean, all that is true. And I think, I mean, I think like from the left, you've always got to say, yeah, that can happen. I mean, there are fascist crowds, like crowds can become fascist. And partly this is something that, you know, Eché talks about in the interview, you know, She's talking about not liking rave, you know, not liking rave and club experiences. And her description of them basically is just the classic Freudian explanation, actually, that in the crowd you regress, you know, you become infantile, you know, you regress, and then you're subject to control.

But for me, it's always, like, it's really important. It's always, and in my book, like, I have a whole chapter. There's a whole chapter of my book called The Non-Fascist Crowd. I always tell this story. I tell the story in the book, and it's a really good story about crowds, which for me, for me, this was like the formative crowd experience, actually. It was the mid-80s, and it was, it would have been like the late 80s. We probably would have been like about 1988.

And it was just out for the day with mates in Liverpool, like normal. It's like, you know, going to record chops and stuff in central Liverpool. And in those days, it was just normal in Liverpool to see, you would see like sometimes up to four different like far left group selling papers and magazines and stuff on the streets. It was completely normal. It was like a thing to do when we were bored on a Saturday afternoon was just go see who was selling papers

and how much we could wind up the living Marxism people. And then so one day we're just, you know, we're in the streets and we're just, we're coming out of a shop and we see these guys, we see a group of guys stop in the street and start to get papers out of the bag and we assume it's like some other, you know,

far left group. And we're really shot to see it's fascists. Like they're pulling the British National Party paper out of the bags to sell. And so we just stop there. We just sort of stop still, like the staring at them, sort of open mouth. But then suddenly it's not just us. Like the entire crowds of, basically the crowds of people just milling about on the shopping street, like a large number of people just stops and forms a circle around them,

just like completely spontaneously. This circle just emerges. It just crystallises out of the mass. And people, mostly people are just staring at them like, what the fuck are these fash doing in Liverpool? Like, well, they can't, you know, this isn't going to stand. And then a couple of people from the crowd, like these, you know, just sort of step forward and started haranguing them. Like, not really screaming, but there was literally, you know, some quite old woman saying,

you know, my husband fought in the war against the legs of you, get out. And then a guy, you know, a guy in a, he was one of those big, like, red and black coats, which he could have been a posty or he could, or he could have been a bus driver. It was one or the other. And he's, like, steps forward and, like, is wagging his finger just saying, get out of here. Like, we don't want you all out here. And then, and they just put the bags away. They put the bags away and just drifted up.

They just went. And then we just dispersed. The very fact that that can happen, that is how a crowd can behave, like in a completely rational way, in a completely horizontal way. There was no leadership, really. There was just self-organized, spontaneous self-organization in order to see off the fascists. And then, you know, and then kind of disperse. To me, it's just fundamental. Like all my politics is predicated on the recognition. That's not necessarily what's going to happen. That doesn't always happen, but it can happen. It seems to me from that example, it's as if what we want to believe or what we'd like to believe, definitely what I believe in a similar way to you, Jeremy, is that inside us as human beings, there is that potential. And it takes one person to act out that potential. And for that one person to start, you have to have faith that others will follow or have the trust that there will not be danger to you.

in terms of some kind of level of confrontation like that, or, you know, the first person who throws a bottle or the first person who wakes a molotov or the first person who wags a finger. And those are usually the images that we remember. But often those spark a whole, a very literal movement of other people towards something or away from something.

And it then sort of nourishes that faith that you have that human beings can act collectively. It's the sort of spark that like turns a lot of people standing around into a crowd, isn't it, basically? There's something that happens. So Kenetti talks about it as like there's just a moment of discharge

and then all of a sudden, this is a crowd that's formed. And so when he describes crowd experience, he describes it very differently to Le Bonn or even Freud. He's saying like, what happens it is, you have this sort of like discharge in which everybody all of a sudden

loses themselves as loses their sort of differences and becomes equal. They start to feel equal, do you know what I mean? The crowd is like this discharge which creates a feeling of equality, which creates a feeling of power. Absolutely. Well, it's that notion of the horizontal,

which is really important. I mean, it's really, you know, I mean, again, in that chapter of my book, I'm basically arguing against people in the psychoanalytic tradition, including contemporary people, drawing on Freud, who basically say, well, the only,

the social relations that make up, the crowd are all vertical. So they're all really about that each individual having a single relationship to the leader. And my argument has always been, no, that might be sometimes the dynamic, but that has to be a relation of equality, but there is a possibility of equality and solidarity. To me, in fact, that is what solidarity is. Solidarity is that egalitarian relation of kind of mutual empowerment, which is not dependent upon leadership or shared identity. I think what the point James been making for the last sort of 10 minutes is, fascist crowds do exist, but they don't exhaust the possibility of crowds.

But just that, and recognising that means we have to think differently about what is going on in crowds. So basically, Freud's interpretation of Le Bonn is sort of, he does it through this idea of the ego ideal, basically, where, you know, perhaps we project our ego ideal onto our fathers most of the time. But in a sort of crowd situation, we project, you know, our ego ideal onto the leader. and everybody's projecting it onto the leader, projecting love onto the leader, but the leader can't project it back, because he's one person. So there's like a spillover of love that forms in the crowd.

And so, like, you can recognize that there's a sort of feeling of love in the crowd, even in a fascist crowd. But the point that the fact that crowds can form not just through leaders or not through leaders at individuals, you can have a spark. The best bit in crowds formed around music is like, you know, it can be just be, you know, the dropping of a beat or like, you know, just the reaching of a particular sort of emotional resonance can just

spark a whole crowd off to react in the same way. And that cannot be the identification with an individual. But surely also what you're saying is, you know, true if only in our lived experience is none of that, even though I really like it, it's very neat as a theory in terms of what you've just said, like how the love can't resonate back so then people pass it on to other people. Like, I can't identify with that, any of that in 20 years of being in crowds, like whatsoever. And I don't think that comes from... Well, you want to hang around in more fascist crowds, Nadia? Well, it's funny you bring that up. It's funny you bring that up because actually one point I wanted to make was something that

etche said that I thought was interesting and thought, oh, I'm not sure if I feel the same way about that, is when she said that she was a journalist and she went to, you know, or see what was going on in this kind of right-wing government-mandated, kind of basically, I don't know if it was fascist or not, but it was a right-wing-controlled, in Kenetti's words, closed crowd. And I thought that's interesting. In that specific experience, I can see how you can be a crowd observer, right? Because she's a journalist. This is a thing that's happening outside. But then it did make me think, it's like, can you be an observer? Like, I've heard this from, like, liberals and other people before saying, there was this demonstration happening, or there was this

occupation happening and I went to look at it from the outside. And it's like, is that really a thing? I don't think you can be an indifferent observer because you get caught up into crowd affect, basically. But I, you know, you can, I've been in crowds where I feel really alienated from the crowd and that the crowd behavior makes me feel, makes me go into myself, I think makes me feel alienated and not part of that crowd. You know what I mean? It's a really uncomfortable feeling. I'm sure, right, on that sort of experience of a crowd, being outside a crowd, and alienated from a crowd, I'm sure that's a large part of,

you know, that's the sort of experience that from which, you know, that's that sort of, that 19th century crowd theory and, you know, all of the stuff that goes on after that,

you know, describing crowds as being formed by outside agitators, you know, that classic right-wing tropes. I'm sure those are the sorts of experiences that produce them. Do you know what I mean?

I don't think it's experiences of being within a crowd and that feeling of equality within a crowd that provokes those sorts of paranoid interprets. No, and it's also, I mean, it's a reaction against the various descriptions of the crowd as joyful, which you get right from, I mean, you get from Wordsworth talking about the French Revolution and through to the people in the Paris Commune in particular, because they have to have a response to that. And their response to that basically to say, oh, you're mad, you're psychotic. I should say, to be fair to the psychoanalysts before people write in, like Freud, there's one line in where Freud says, of course there's loads of of other kinds of crowds, and there might be some where people have sort of fraternal relations with each other. But he's clear he's not interested in writing about those, so it doesn't develop

a theory. It's interesting thinking about this question of like, well, the types of, like the types of crowds that we sort of interested in and the types of crowds that produce these sort of positive affect, because you talked about the samb, you know, I mean, you've talked about, and you talked did I actually, no idea, about the samba crowd. In a way, playing the samba on the street in the crowd and being one of the people playing it, it's sort of an ideal typical example of this non-fascist crowd, isn't it? It's that part, the power of the collectivity that you experience is also, it's just so transcendental. It's very powerful experience, both on an individual level, but also, you know, and this is the question I was asking to myself when I was speaking to

Eché, is like, which came first, the politics or the experience of being in the crowd, because I just found it absolutely addictive. Like, why wouldn't you want to do that with your Saturday? It's so joyful and it's so powerful. And it also brings more people back. And it also sends the message that we can be on the most expensive roads on the monopoly board, you know, in London, and like own the space. And it changes how you relate to public space and how you relate to other people in the country day to day, you know, year on, year on.

It's definitely been a cornerstone of my politics. If I hadn't had those experiences, I don't think I would have had very much faith in people, especially the way how atomized, you know, life can be in the south of East of England. As you were talking about that, I was thinking about what are the other types of crowd experience that induce those.

sort of feelings. And this is a point, I mean, this is a point that these days people don't even remember this, but like in the early 90s, for the first, for most of the 90s, really, up until the late 90s, it was a real ideological tenant of rave culture and club culture, sort of post-rave club culture, that you weren't supposed to treat the DJ like a rock star. I mean, the idea of this superstar DJ came along and got imposed upon dance music culture as a way of re-normal, of bringing it back into the fold of like neoliberal capitalist culture and turning the dancing crowd into, you know, basically like a fascist crowd, like somebody, you know, just everybody's standing in one direction looking at their DJ. The very first episode of the show

we ever did, I talked about the Grateful Dead. I mean, the Grateful Dead sort of tour scene in the States, it was also the case actually, like the people who were considered like the most radical, the most conscious of the sort of deadheads had this practice where they would all find a space in the crowd and find a space themselves and create a sort of dance floor space and not look at the band and just be looking at each other, just be dancing. It's traditional. If Jeremy mentions a grateful dead, I have to talk about football. Now I was about to say, I was about to say, I'm not the football guy, but also an early piece of academic writing when I was talking about some of this theory, I actually said, I said, look, let's think about football crowds. And if

you're coming at it from this Freudian perspective, your assumption is, oh, well, the football crowd, they're just a bunch of individuals who each have this imaginary, this sort of fantasy relationship with the football team, and they've actually got no relationship with each other. And that's fine if you're just talking about them as spectators. But the moment when that becomes an unsustainable understanding of what's actually going on in the psychodynamics of a football crowd is when the chant starts, because the chant doesn't work like that. The chant works in a completely different way. And it demonstrates that, in fact, the football watching crowd

has some relationships to each other that can't be reduced to, the kind of private relationships of each fan to the fantasy of the team. The greatest example of the point Jeremy was making is this video that Dan Hancock was sharing on Twitter yesterday. He's a journalist, quite often talks about music,

and he's written a couple of articles about crowds and about longing to being a crowd during COVID. And like he says, the reason he started getting interested in this topic because he watched this video of 26,000 Hibbs fans, Hibernian fans, singing a proclaimer song called Sunshine on Leith. There's 26,000 Hibbs fans in this stadium. All the players have left. There's all the opposing fans has left.

There's only Hibbs fans in the line of riot cops, basically. And they just sing this song. They're not singing it to anyone. They're singing it to themselves. They're not, there's not being channeled through footballers. It's so good, isn't there? It's so good. It is.

It's almost impossible to watch you without tearing up. And in fact, Dan says, you know, even the police horses had tears in their eyes when people were singing it. And it's not really a chant. It's a complex song. And it's like a sorrowful sort of song. But it's about sunshine on leaf and Leafs in Edinburgh and Hibernians in Edinburgh team, etc. And it is like that if we wanted to provide evidence for Jeremy's argument, you would present that video. Because the players aren't there.

They've won the football, this kept that they've been after for years. and they're just celebrating each other and it is incredibly emotional basically and God damn I'm missing football for me hearing all of these examples and thinking about it for myself belonging is a massive part of this so in Tahrir I felt like I belong

I knew where I was and I felt completely comfortable there in a demonstration where I've played Samba and there's been thousands of people around us it's like dissolving into not having the anxiety you know, the self-consciousness has completely goes of like, who am I? Do I look right? Am I saying the right thing or whatever? And that's when I felt most comfortable because it's a transcendental experience. So where I've not felt that and I've been jealous has been football. So, you know, if a crowd of football supporters get on a train or whatever, I have this mixture of feeling intimidated because they're usually like tanked up and it's like loads of men and their shouting and I just feel uncomfortable, but also I'm jealous. I'm like, I wish I was in that

because it looks like it's quite fun. You know, one, a track we should definitely include is a bit of pink, early Pink Floyd track, Fearless. This is Pink Floyd, like the London-based, you know, upper-middle class kind of hippie band of the time, but there's a track, the early track called Fearless, and they sample a bit of the Liverpool crowd singing, you'll never walk alone. which is of course the best football song. Oh no, that's going to make me pride just thinking about that. That sound of the Liverpool crowd, like singing and chanting, obviously has this real utopian sense of it. And that's something that's really there, actually, in the whole kind

of music culture of the early 70s. The high moment of kind of radical working class consciousness in Britain, like that moment of the early 70s, there is this kind of seeping of the aesthetics of the football chant into popular music. It's basically varying the sort of stump of glam rock, I think, actually, is the sort of football chant vibe. You know, people like Slade are doing that. And then the punks, you know, the clash, the early clash with their kind of sort of chanted harmonies are basically doing sort of football chants.

And then that becomes sort of explicit in some oi punk. It's kind of explicitly, you know, at times violently, sort of working class like substrand of punk in the late 70s and early 80s. But so there's this, but there's this, but that all, all the aesthetics of the football chants seeps into music culture as a direct expression and celebration of the idea of working class solidarity at that time. I think it's really important. The most familiar examples of people would be, is it the skids? Is it the kids are united? Shama 69, yeah. And the kids are united is the absolute

classic, isn't it? Yeah, Shama 69. One of the other bits I am naughty that will never be nobody. One of the other bits about talking about crowds and groups, which I like is a distinction that Sartre makes. When he talks about different types of groups, one of them is like the serial group

or the practico-inert serial group, which is like where people are just gathered together, but they're not, they're not in control of the purpose of why they're there. And so, Sartre's example of a, of a serial group or a practico-inert group, a practico-innert series is a bus queue, basically. People are at the bus queue. They're a group of people, but they may, they haven't decided to be there under their own. They're not in control of the reason why they're there, that's what I'm trying to say.

Sartre calls it a group infusion. And then Guattari picks up this distinction where you were subjugated or subjected to somebody else's determinations in some way. So basically, why are people at the best stop at that particular point? Because, you know, perhaps they've got to go to work or perhaps they're, you know, they've had a look at the best timetable and that best timetable is created by somebody else, so they're all there. But of course, that's not, that's not the basis from which you can form an active group necessarily. And so the group in infusion is a group, which has got a purpose, but the point of that distinction is to make it, to make an argument that, you know, the purpose,

the good type of group, if you want to put it that way, is a group that is in control of the reason why it's gathered. It's a self-causing group in some sort of way. So I think it's a useful distinction, this idea that, you know, what we are subjected to a lot is being formed as serial groups and what we enjoy from groups is groups infusion or the subject group. If you think about the football crowd, a lot of the time it can be a serial group.

We're there because somebody else has decided we've paid money, all of these regulations are created by somebody else. And so, like, the chant, the conscious creation of a particular type of crowd feeling is that, like, that movement of it, of the football crowd from being a serial group or a practical inert series to a group infusion, they're fusing themselves into an active group. It sounds like you're saying fruit infusion. Fruit infusion. I could do have a fruit infusion about that. We have been talking a long time. It's very difficult to talk about that. You know, we're at the edge of, I mean, the reason, for example, Deleuze and Guittari are so difficult to read is partly because, they are kind of at the edge of what language can enable us to talk about.

There's something going on there, and there's something going on, you know, in the musical crowd at a moment when it's not the case, you know, the musical crowd, they've all come together. It's not like they are all making the music, you know, it's not like they are all really making decisions about what's happening next. And yet, the musicians or the DJ is always in a feedback loop with them, is responding to them. And there is this general sense of a kind of heightening of capacity, a heightening of ability. And that stuff, that is really important. It's really important. That stuff is crucial to sort of, you know, I sometimes say, well, that's what democracy feels like. We talked about the A to B demo before. And the biggest A to B demo in history

in Britain was the demo against the Iraq war, which, you know, which ultimately didn't prevent the Iraq war from happening. But the way I always describe it and telling younger people is, I went from, travelled from Leytonstone into central London. And every person you saw, on the street was heading in the same direction. Everybody was like heading to the tube station, then pining onto the tube to go down to London for this demonstration. Really incredible. And the date for that had been set at the European Social Forum

like six months earlier. And both the European Social Forum and the demonstration seemed to be things which didn't really achieve anything. And yet I've always thought this is something that can't be proved, but that global delegitimization of American imperialism, which was represented by those, those worldwide, demonstrations against the Iraq invasion was part of the reason why America

didn't feel able or capable of intervening in Latin America for a few years, which was part of the reason why Latin America was able to get all these radical governments in the same period in the early first decade of the 21st century. And it's not like nobody planned that. Nobody

thought, right, what we'll have a do, what we'll do is we'll all meet in Florence and we'll decide the date for a demo and then we'll all have the demo, which is supposed to be about the war, but the effect of that is it'll allow Chavez to form a government in Venezuela. But nonetheless, those effects did emerge from all that collective agency and all that collective behavior in ways that you can't really identify. And so I'm saying all that just because the idea of the group infusion is still

a little bit tied to this notion of sort of collective intentionality, which is really important, and it is really important. It is really important that we can form parties and make decisions and win elections and lead revolutions. But it's also really important to understand this dimension of what it means to be in a group, whether it's on the street or on a dance floor or in a meeting. Nothing really does get properly apparently decided at that moment and yet real effects, like democratic effects, emerge from it. Ultimately, that's what, that's what that this feeling of equality is all about, you know, what you actually, what is life changing about being in one of these crowds where you do feel equal to everybody else and you feel

others are you've got a collective purpose, is reaffirming the constrained conception of human nature that we often operate on. It's false, do you know what I mean? In fact, it can change us because it pulls us out of our constraints, the way that we think of ourselves as limited people. It changes the democratic potential in society.