ACFM - #ACFM Trip 2: Collective Joy

Episode Date: May 7, 2019

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert discuss the politics of collective joy. FULL SHOW: http://novaramedia.com/2019/05/07/acfm-collective-joy/

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. And on the podcast version of this show, you'll get the stimulating and mind-expanding discussion from our hosts, but you won't get the music. That's because of the way rights and licenses work in the digital age. So you're really only getting half the picture, but there is an easy way to fix that. If you head over to the Navaramedia.com website, you can stream the full show. It's easy enough just to follow the link in the description of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the standalone discussion in this episode of ACFM. I found this really difficult question. So when was the last time you experienced collective joy? My mind went back to like, I think a cold May day

in the year 2000 when I was in a barn in Wales doing like folk dancing with like 40 people. And I can never forget that moment and it made me think about okay well I must have had collective joy in the last 18 years and I'm pretty sure that I have but but the the moments that I remember are ones where I'm with a lot of other people dancing being at a rave sort of DJing at raves a really good example when a lecture goes really well or a kind of seminar goes really well there's this feeling in the room you know where the kind of everybody is tuned into a particular frequent and everybody in the room or most people in the room are experiencing a kind of enhancement in their capacities to be in the world just because I'm explaining something, students are understanding it, they're responding, you know, everybody's slightly altered, like permanently and in a good way by the experience. You know, being in a library can also involve sort of collective joy. It's not just connectedness, but productive connectedness to, you know, lots of other people, lots of other things and ideas. I've got a very specific answer. The last time I experienced, collective joy, it was like October the 18th, 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And the circumstances were,

so I went on an anti-fascist march in London. A big group, like 50, 60 of these racist marches broke through the police lines and started charging down, charging down the road at us, basically. And it would just, it turned into this like surreal moment where I'm stood there. And I think, oh my God, I might have to fight now. I'm not really prepared for this sort of thing. There was this sound system playing, and it had been playing disco earlier, and then they turned it into punk, and then everybody who was on the march started, like, chanting in time to the music,

and jumping up and down and stuff. The sort of fascists who were running down the road, they sort of saw this big group of people who basically weren't flinching, and then they did that sort of, you know, when you sort of slow down, it's like, hold me back, hold me back, you know, and they allowed the police to get in front of them, and the police sort of carted them off. But it was one of these weird moments where,

Later on I was thinking, why was I not scared at that point? That's ridiculous. I should have been really scared. And I thought, well, that's because of the collective affect, basically. You're tuned in to ACFM, the home of the weird left, bringing you acid, turbo, curbo, commie perspectives on cultural politics. Today we're joined by Asad Joy Collective members, Jeremy. I have the best sound system in Europe, Gilbert. And Keir, look at the turn-ups on these jeans I'm-so-Modd Milburn. Hello. And myself, Nadia, when do I get to do a dark cabaret playlist, Takeover, Idol? And today, listeners, we're talking about collective joy. So, why are we interested in collective joy? Jeremy? I think we would say that it's a really important element of any kind of radical politics.

And we're going to come into that in more detail in a moment. But I think also understanding collective joy and understanding what inhibits or prevents collective joy is really important to understanding neoliberalism and how it works and how it disempowers people and how it oppresses them. You know, one of the key mechanisms by which neoliberalism sort of secures its hegemony and maintains its power is by making it very difficult for people to experience collective joy. And indeed, making people feel that the only form of joy that is really available to them is private. You know, basically neoliberalism wants us to experience the world in such a way that the only kind of joy we know is the joy of private

consumption. And in order to do that, it has to create a situation through manipulating our working patterns, through manipulating the economy, through manipulating the institutions that we all have to work through, so that we basically experience any context in which we have to deal with other people or engage with other people as stressful. And we have to basically experience other people as a problem. So the consequence of that, for example, is that people come to think of meetings that you have to go to for work or even for political purposes is just inherently frustrating, inherently boring, inherently disempowering, when in fact they shouldn't be any of those things necessarily. So I think it's really important to understand collective joy because collective

joy is the thing that neoliberalism absolutely tries to deprive us of and tries to convince us is in fact unattainable and unachievable so that we will accept that private consumption probably fueled through debt or fueled through doing jobs that we don't really like is the only form of happiness that we can actually expect. I mean, I'm also interested in collective joy because frankly, it's a reason to live.

It's kind of all I care about. I mean, my blog is called Not Alone in the World because what I'm interested in is the points where people are like not alone, where they're feeling intense, meaningful, transformative feelings in some kind of group format. Like, that is what drives me. It's what drives my politics.

It's what drives the organizing work I do. It's what drives, like, my creative thinking. So, like, it's not just, like, the theoretical underpinnings of why that's important, but just, like, from a very personal kind of, place it's it's just so important to me and i know it's important to like everyone in this collective too yeah sure i mean i mean i mean most of my sort of attempts to theorise it are partly attempts to explain to myself why i spend so many hours of every year sort of yeah organizing dance parties that i've tried to count i've tried to explain and sort of calculate sometimes to other

people the other people i do that with like how much it's probably cost me in terms of my academic career. You know, if I just spent all that time doing, you know, peer-reviewed papers and research grants, I'd be a lot richer than I am now. Who cares? Boren. I think, I know, I know, but it's, you know, partly it is. You're right. I mean, for me, the problem of collective joy is partly trying to figure out, like, well, why is that so important? Because it is, I mean, the starting point is it clearly is important. We should probably also just mention that, you know, one reason we're using this phrase is because it's a phrase collective joy that comes up recently is the subtitle of lynn seagull's book radical happiness but it's in the subtitle of

barbara aaron wright's book uh dancing in the streets uh from a few years ago which is a sort of you know genealogy of some of the kinds of phenomenon that we're talking about a history of collective joy is a subtitle of that yeah history of collective joy and then in and in my book common ground which is a sort of political philosophy book collective joy emerges as a sort of key notion as something that you know you needs to be a kind of central object of radical cultural and political practice those are the part of the reasons why we're using this phrase today so I decided I was going to ask on social media for people for suggestions from people for songs which they associate with collective joy I got

loads and loads of answers back on Twitter and Facebook and some of them may betray my own social networks and the age of them because there was a lot of raving there as you might imagine. But the song I liked or the suggestion I liked was Dancing in the Street by Marfa and the Vandela's which is actually suggested by Navarra Media's very own James Bellar. But it's a good one

because when it came out so it comes out in the early 60s and it's basically just it's a good dance song but it's just a party song but just a few years later it gets associated with the Black Civil Rights movement and the dancing in the streets bit It gets associated with protesting in the streets. I mean, in particular, rioting in the streets,

a whole series of urban riots, you know, and Watts, etc. So basically what happens is H. Rapp Brown, who's a black civil rights leader. H. Rat Brown starts playing dancing in the streets on civil rights protests, and it becomes associated with those protests, and at that point, it gets banned from those of radio stations. So it's like a really nice story of that connection that people make,

and it does seem to make it quite often, but between these sort of collective, as in big collective joy moments that you find in dancing, etc. And then those other like collective joy moments you find in like contentious political events, you know, like protests or even riots, do you know what I mean? We've been doing these consciousness raising groups

where we ask a question. And one of the questions is, when did you last experience collective joy? So people talked about particular demonstrations that they've been on, a particular moment. And there were normally moments which had an unexpected element to them, which were unexpectedly successful or something like that. We'd say that. People also talked about partying, of course. Yoga came up. Other things that's just gardening and more solitary things. The connection doesn't have to be with other individual humans.

See, I'm quite anthropocentric, I'll happily say. And I think that when I think about collective joy, I feel very much that I'm talking about other human beings. in terms of its political power. I can obviously see the theoretical point and I think being connected to, you know, the material world around you and the kind of meta world is really important. But I think, for me at least, when we talk about collective joy,

I'm talking about the collectivity of other human beings. I mean, something else that came up when some people answered that question, I remember is people were talking about the joy of, you know, hanging out and not doing something that is, that was like an event sometimes the collective joy comes from you know five mates sitting in a room doing not very much and somebody cracks a joke and everyone like is just laughing and feeling that joy

of those bonds between between those people and that it doesn't have to be like the rave you know where everyone's like coming up at five o'clock in the morning and you know the DJ is just at this peak you know that doesn't have to be the point that we're talking about I think we often talk about when we talk about collective joy, we often think of these moments of extremely heightened collective joy, these kind of almost ecstatic moments, these moments when there's large numbers of people, feeling very kind of empowered or just enlivened by each other's presence. But I also think, in some sense, the phrase collective joy is a tautology, because, I mean, for me, like all joy in some sense is collective. When I use it, it certainly has this particular kind of

mean it's significant and registered. It comes from a philosophical tradition going back to the 17th century philosopher Spinoza, who says that all sort of positive affects, which we could just translate as meaning positive feelings for the moment, are always about a kind of enhancement of capacity. They're about the sort of, they're about the enhancement, the augmentation of the increase of a body's capacity to act. And the philosopher John Pratavi kind of interpreting Spinoza and interpreting Gilles de Lures as well says that

that kind of enhancement of capacities is in fact always about the enhancement of a body's capacity to relate to other bodies in the world I mean what that means in practice is every time you experience a kind of positive sensation or to any degree on

some level you're always experiencing even if only very slightly a kind of increase of your ability to connect with the world to connect with others to sort of connect with the future in some way and I sort of think when you think about it in that way like all joy is collective to some extent and all collectivity is joyful to some extent and I think that's an important observation because for me collective joy is sort of going on all the time I mean maybe it's just because I do a lot

of yoga and stuff but you know I think collective joy is sort of going on or it's going on all the time and it's the moments when it's not happening at all when life really starts to become unbearable that it's the you know I think that's what in some sense that's what depression is you know depression is the complete withdrawal of a certain basic level of collective joy which is required just to sort of live you know just to go through your life just to be an organic being in the world and be happy so so in a way I'm always a bit I'm a bit resistant of isolating these very obviously extreme moments but I think in some sense I don't want to kind of totally like

shift the focus away from these notions of sort of heightened collective joy or very obvious manifestations of it which are normally what we think of that I think it is important to think about those and about how hard it is to get them in contemporary culture and how important it is to get them but I think Keir's example I think is sort of it would be paradigmatic for us wouldn't it

that would be I mean that's an example of a situation in which something other than just anger or something other than just hatred or resentment is what's motivating the crowds even though what they're being motivated to do is engage in a militant confrontation with an enemy to me that I think that's something that's

something that's really important actually is that the anti-fascist crowd is not just sort of motivated by hatred of the fascists it's not just motivated by wanting to attack them it's motivated by a certain belief in the capacity of its members to kind of support

each other and you know in some sense to love each other and to love to love others who are different from them in a way that fascists can't. Does collective joy require a self-awareness of collectivity? So that's always a question for me. So when I was thinking about, you know, when it was the last time, I experienced collective joy. Like I feel like I've experienced like small pockets of joy a lot. I think I'm lucky or privileged for various different reasons that I go through my day.

and there's various little things that genuinely give me a lot of joy. Some of them I experienced with other people, but some of them I don't. And I was wondering, like, to what extent everyone else needs to be aware of this same thing for it to be collective joy? Because I feel like the way that you were both talking about it, with reference to Spinoza earlier, has a little bit to do with, it's an existential, it's an existential and the theoretical. way of understanding how joy relates to us all rather than like in an everyday moment by moment sense does that make sense it's a really important question politically whether people are sort of aware of their inherent sort of connectedness and relatedness to others and so you know and to their

environment and to other things sort of all the time and it seems to me that's to some extent that's one of the logical kind of objectives of things like the consciousness rating groups is the desire to cultivate a sort of awareness of that in a way which to some extent enhances one's joyful relationship to the world just in everyday life. And I think, yeah, it's not just about it's about where that joy leads to and the fact that if that experience of joy leads to the place where you're able to see yourself in other people and you're able to see that really kind of natural level of solidarity with another human being, then that becomes a point of a lot of political power and I think a point of potential political leverage, which is really strong

and which has been missing, I think, from a lot of our experienced reality. Sorry, Keir, you wanted to come in. Well, there's a sort of spinosist answer. You can have joyful and sad affect, right? And a joyful affect is feeling of the increased capacity to affect the world or for the world to affect you. But as well as being joyful and sad, they can also be active and passive, right? So you can have active, joyful experiences, but you can also have passive joyful experiences. Then you can have active sad experiences and passive sad experiences. So a passive joyful experience would be an experience in which the cause, you didn't have control over what caused that joyful experience, right? So you couldn't repeat it. Okay. So

this is where John Protovi talks about, when he talks about political affect, he talks about, you know, the fascist crowd is a crowd which can only, which experiences joy as it feels collectivity amongst the crowd and it feels an increased capacity from that, but it can't repeat that experience if the fewer is not there. You know what I mean? And so it's the same as when we go and watch football, right? If you go watch football in the joy you feel in the crowd is only available to you when that football team is there. Well, actually, when they're there and when they're winning, you know, when they perform in a certain way. And we can't control how they perform. So that's a passive, we have a passive relationship with that. Do you know

what I mean? So the way you move something from a sort of passive joyful experience to an active joyful experience is to get control over the causes of that joy. And the first thing you need to do in order to get control over that is to understand what is causes. that joy. Do you know what I mean? So that process of understanding, raising your consciousness about what causes joyful feelings and what causes sad feelings and then organising yourselves in order to push towards active joyful experiences. That's sort of like a spinosis politics, I think. If you want one example of a musical form or kind of genre of the past hundred years that's definitely been associated

in a very positive way with political movement a radical political movement has achieved some clear successes and it is soul. That kind of soul aspiration of combining a kind of music which celebrates the joy of the present moment, the joy of the dancing

body, the joy of the kind of sexual body, the joyed bodies being together in space which really comes to a full fruition in funk. Combining that with the kind of gospel tendency to have a kind of utopian quality to the sounds, have a, you know, a real sense of belief in the possibility of a future, which is radically better than the present, that carries on.

It carries on through disco, carries on into house music. In disco, one of the sort of great anthems, kind of, which embodies all that in the 1970s is MFSB's Love is the Message, which is an unreal anthem for The Loft, which is the loft is David Mancuso's sort of party, which starts in the early 70s, explicitly a kind of multi-ethnic, polysexual, explicitly psychedelic sort of dance party,

coming directly out of the counterculture and the interaction between the counterculture and sort of, you know, downtown New York, black and Hispanic culture. And I feel like, it's a bit like I said about the Grateful Dead last time, like you sort of have to hear it in context for it to work because if you just listen to it on YouTube it's just going to sound very cheesy you know it's got big strings it's got big vocals it's got the three degrees singing you know what is basically a kind of banal you know set of you know lyrics about how you know love is the message for us all but when you hear it you know in

the context of the loft you hear it in the context of this assemblage of a kind of you know extraordinary refined sound system and a really kind of receptive and, you know, very socially mixed crowd, then it becomes this absolute expression, this kind of physical expression of the possibility of solidarity and the hope that can be engendered by the experience of solidarity between lots of different people and different social groups. So I think it's really important that we situate collective joy within the history of popular culture. So there's someone want to talk about that? Well, Keir, why don't you talk about football a little bit?

Nobody else is going to talk about football. Go for it. No, I mean, the reason I go to football is for those really rare moments of collective joy, basically. It's the same as when you go to a really good gig or a really good rave, where you basically, you go there, because you want to get drawn out of yourself. You want to get overtaken by collective feeling, basically, because a goal has been scored when you didn't expect a goal to be scored. and that goal has got real big meaning because it has consequences because you're going to be coming back to this football ground again,

two weeks' time, etc., etc. And football is one of those places where you can go and basically you end up in a situation where you're hugging this big, hairy-assed guy next to you who would normally punch you in a face if you hugged him. And the thing I enjoy most about it is I'm not thinking about the things that I think about the rest of the week and you get absorbed in it

and then every now and then you get the top of your head blown off So what is the relationship between that and people watching football on television which is how most people now relate to football? Yeah, it's a totally different feeling you know football started as a thing you experience in the crowd together

and that's the heart of it I think I mean one thing that's a really sort of significant phenomenon of sort of advanced capitalist advanced modern cultures and societies is these various forms of popular culture that were at one time about people actually being physically together in one place, being remediated and re-commodified in forms which stop that. So, you know, you move from the theatre, you know, to the cinema to television at home. You move from, you know, people, you know, listening to music, sort of live in concerts

to people listening to it in their living rooms, on high-fis to people. or just listening to it on headphones and iPods. And I think that there's something about that logic of commodification and privatisation is sort of really problematic. And I think when we get pleasure from, you know, like a movie or music or a football match or something like that, is it, which is sort of what Freud would say, like what classical psychoanalysis says, is it just because we have a sort of problem? individual relationship with this object, that it gives us a sense of personal completion,

you know, it gives us a sense of individual satisfaction, you know, satisfy some needs we have. Or is it more, as I think, you know, say Spinoza or sort of Deleuze or Negri would say, is it that there's something about the relationships you have with the people next to you, you know, that is more important than your relationship to the team on the pitch, or your imagined relationship to them and I think it seems to me like with the kind of mediation and quantification of popular culture

you get into a situation where it's still a bit of both you know it's still a bit of your sort of personal experience your personal fantasies or whatever your personal relationship to the imaginary team but it becomes harder

and harder you know if you're listening to music on your iPods or you're watching football on a tell or you're watching a TV show home it comes harder and harder to access those elements of the experience that are about your kind of, you know, lateral relationships with the people around you. And it becomes more, there's more and more of a tendency for that experience just to be a sort of fantasy relationship where, you know, you're, you know, you're supporting a team from a town you'll never visit, you know,

and it's just about a bunch of cartoon characters you see on the TV rather than physical people you'll be in the same space as. Well, if we think about football, they introduce seating, so they banned people standing in terraces where you're much easily, more easily part of a swirling mob. And then now you have a seat and your seat has a number and your number, you know, your seat number has a name attached to it, etc. So there definitely is work that's been done all the time in order to make you feel like an individual even when you're in a crowd situation, etc. I mean, it might be interesting to think about football chants as well. So that's the other thing that people like about football and sort of separates it from other sorts of sports

is the football culture that goes on. Football fans are there, and you're right, it's like a classic Freudian thing. We've got the shared object that we identify with. And that's, so any collectivity we feel in a lateral sense is mediated through that thing that we don't have control over on the pitch. So like chanting is one of those ways in which the crowd tries to take, tries to take control over its own

creation of collective joy can we tub thumping I'm not joking look tub thunking was the extraordinary moment with chumba-wamba this band this completely sort of obscure kind of a narco-punk band have this massive

chart here in a song which is a sort of elegy to just to the possibility of you know almost sort of football chant style you know glam rock almost you know being a vehicle through which people can express their sense of collective potentiality.

And I think it's really interesting because you could do a whole history of music, especially British sort of popular music, going back to the 60s, and the way in which the football chant, the terrace chant, gets taken up in music. You know, that's what kind of mud and the kind of commercial end of glam rock are doing in the early 70s. That's what sort of the clash and then the allie punk bands are doing in the 70s using these kind of harmonies that are bit are inspired by kind of soul. and gospel but are really inspired by football chants

and the idea of taking that collective energy of the chanting crowd and turning it from being something kind of banal or even proto-fascist into being something kind of potentially radical I think is really kind of interesting and tub thumping does really express that it does what chumber Wamba does it uses Alice's voice and the kind of pop sensibility to really kind of do away with the kind of macho quality which carries on through a lot of

sort of angry punk and anarcho punk and so you get this kind of music this record which yeah it ends up appealing sort of you know hundreds of thousands of people yeah as a way of expressing that kind of you know that potential for collective joy which you know for a lot of people

chanting on the football terrace is the only version of they ever get to experience so I was reading dancing in the streets which is a book by Barbara Erin Reich and there's this fantastic I came across this fantastic statistic that in the 15th century in France one in every four days of the year was a holiday or a festivity of some sort.

So that's like an official holiday. So that didn't even include local holidays that might happen in one town, etc., which is like a phenomenal amount, basically. And those festivities, they tended towards, you know, this institution of carnival, which had a sense of like, you know, you'd have a day where you could break the rules. There would be a day where you would get drunk and dance. So there'd be a day where you could, where the world would be, turned upside down in some sort of way.

A ritual of license, it was called. Yeah, a ritual of license. But if it's every four days, then it can't be a ritual of license because it becomes in a way of life. I mean, that's really interesting because, you know, anthropologically, the idea that, you know, you go to Glastonbury once a year and, like, lose your mind for eight days and become this person that you can't be the rest of the time because of capitalism is a ritual of license. But if you're doing it every four days, then, you know, that's a completely different thing. thing. It's transformative in a sense because it's the way you live your life, suppose.

We should explain that phrase, ritual of licence, because that, I mean, specifically that phrase is used when the implication is that the society permits certain kind of deviations from norms during specified times, but as a way of sustaining the norms overall. Okay, so this is next bit in Barbara Ehran Wright's book. There's this whole chapter on this, what she calls an epidemic of melancholy. So beginning in England in the late 17th century, like this is epidemic of basically what we'd call depression. And so people are starting reporting depressions all the time. It starts in England. It spreads around Europe. You know, and so basically you can sort of like literary studies, you can you can just see this epidemic of melancholy emerge in literature, etc. And so Barbara Ehran

Reich sort of says, well, look, if we think about it, that was a time when capitalism first comes along. Capitalism and, you know, some of the more repressive forms of Protestantism, such as Calvinism, which are more focused on work and not on licence. So, yeah, well, absolutely against things such as carnival, etc. So this is also the time when all of these, you know, that having these huge amounts of holidays and festivals, they all start to get banned or stopped. The life of a peasant is, or the work life of a peasant is much more significant. cyclical. At some parts of the year, you'll have loads of work to do. Other parts of the year, you won't have work to do. So there's time to have much more time set across, set aside for

festivities and moments of collective joy, etc. But as soon as you get to capitalism, you have to have, you know, you move from cyclical time to clock time, basically. E. P. Thompson goes on about this shift, this horrible shock it was, so all of these ex-peasants to find themselves, you know, in the cities of Northern England having to turn up for work at 9 o'clock in the morning at probably 8 o'clock in the morning, you know, and work at work all the way through and then just keep doing that six days a week, you know, doing like 16 hour shifts, six days a week, et cetera. Yeah, Orbital. Well, Orbital are just classic early 90s rave. I mean, they're a classic evocation of, you know, the possibility of the crowd as being this

space where you feel connected to everyone, you feel joyful, feel powerful. By the time Orbital were becoming big and releasing records like Halcyon, that was already part of like rave nostalgia. It was something that had already. was seen as having died down, having happened like four years previously, or two or three years previously, the orbital rave scene. And I think that, I mean, that is sort of interesting because that track itself already has this kind of wistful, slightly nostalgic quality. Because I think that was always part of the problem with rave,

and it's part of the problem with the kind of particular affect that rave tended to generate, is, you know, on some level it was always, it was always about finding a kind of a collective compensation for everything we'd lost, you know, because because of the kind of the way which Thackerism had destroyed all of our capacity for real kind of collective power, real politics. And we were coping collectively with the historic defeat of the left in the mid-80s, like globally. And we were just, we were in the wake of that. Okay, guys, so we've been talking about collective joy and all sorts of various different aspects of it. But what do we think the role of collective joy is in

or should be in left politics and strategy in the current present kind of situation that we're in. I mean, one of the things it's really important to think about strategically in political organizing is how do you produce collective joy, not just in the sense of kind of really intense moments of sort of democratic ecstasy, but also just, you know, how do you make sure that people feel empowered and connected, etc, by being involved in whatever they're involved in. I have to say, I tend to think this is one of those things that everybody thinks everybody else hasn't thought about and everybody has. You know, I don't know how many times over the past 20 years, I've heard somebody say,

meeting shouldn't be boring, like people should be welcoming, you know, politics should be fun, as if it's like a new idea and as if someone else just around the corner hasn't thought of that. I sort of think, I do sort of think everybody does know that. and a lot of the time it's just not easy to make that happen. In some ways what I think is more difficult and more to think through is how you make a notion like collective joy central actually to political demands and the kind of political program you want

because I would say collective joy is our answer to the question, well, what do we want? What do we want to be the thing which the entire policy agenda we would want a radical government to pursue, for example, is aiming to produce. You know, if neoliberalism is trying, to produce a population of highly competitive entrepreneurs who can add value to the companies they work for. That's what it's trying to produce. What should we be trying to produce? What we

should be trying to produce is a culture of collective joy. That's how we should think about the function of education. That's how we should think about what the economy is for. That's how we should think how housing policy is organised. So I think it should be really central. To think about it in that way, you do necessarily have to make it quite abstract. You know, because we're not saying, oh, well, everybody should be living in a permanent party all the time. That's not what we're saying. But I do think that, you know, we should be saying, well, what we want from education, from housing policy, from economic policy, from everything else, is a culture and a society in which people feel that being part of a society is empowering and liberating and not something that just kind of weighs down on them. And they want to escape from, like into their virtual world or their private lives or their debt fuel.

you know, consumption habits. I mean, I completely agree with a lot of what you said, Jeremy, but I do think I'm going to come back on the point of, you know, we've been saying for 20 years this thing that meetings shouldn't be boring, etc. And I think we've been saying this for 20 years because a lot of meetings are still really boring and non-welcoming and spaces, you know, getting involved in politics are exclusionary. And I think the reason why that's the case is that because there's been this

juxtaposition, which I think is what we're trying to get away from, and definitely what, you know, like groups like Plan C have been working towards between this idea that if you're doing serious politics, you know, to get through the business of getting things done, is in somehow in conflict to, you know, like having a nice time and treating people properly. I'd answer it on a more on a more abstract level, I think. In the last episode, we were talking about freedom a little bit, and so we could connect joy to freedom, I think. And we were talking about like freedom, this, the alt-rights version of freedom but really it's probably like the liberal version of freedom

which is sort of like basically freedom to be left alone as an individual I always have this image of like basically somebody with a load of money and they want to be left alone and there's only one answer we've got to that it's like no we want a definition of freedom where we want an openness to people

we want to increase our capacities to act in the world the only way we can do that is to connect with other people and collectively get a better understanding on of how the world works of the things that you know uh that that that's that limit our lives it's in order that we can get some control over them and so that's like a shift towards like an active sense of of joy increasing capacities to act like that should just that should be like

the aim of politics but we also need to feed ourselves those that feeling in order to keep motivating ourselves to keep going do you know what I mean it's sort of like part of the the process of getting towards this aim is actually about by having those feelings of joy, you know, within our everyday, everyday practice, or perhaps just, you know, perhaps if you could just experience that feeling of joy, once every four days, that would be fine for me. But there is a danger in this, right, there's a definite possibility that you can just, that creating moments of joy for you and your mates can be the aim of politics,

and it gets separated from a wider strategy of changing the whole world, so everybody has access to that joy. SunRar is for me really interesting because when it is just the most extraordinary sort of live experience I've ever had, you know, music experience I've ever had, and it is to do with the fact that they are this collective who have lived together and played together and practiced together every single day for decades.

And when you actually hear them playing together in a room, this music, if you just hear it on a CD or an MP3 file, sounds really forbidding in its avant-garde, abrasive, of sadism. It takes on a totally different quality. It sounds sort of inviting. It sounds playful. It sounds joyful. It sounds kind of unlimited in its capacity to express the joy of collective creativity. I suppose one question to think about really, which I know listeners will want us to think about this, is what difference does all this make? If our views on collective joy are fully taken on board, how would the politics of Corbynism, how would the politics of the

Labour Party look different. And I think, I mean, we sort of know the answer. We sort of know that, you know, the point over the past couple of years at which Corbinism has been an expression of collective joy have been, you know, for example, the election where like tens of thousands of people found themselves out canvassing, for example, in big groups, quite literally, you know, connecting with other people, talking to other people on the doorstep, you know, using innovative, you know, smart. smartphone apps to find out, you know, where they could connect with others, you know, and how

they could communicate with others in order to facilitate the campaign. And that, it was that kind of decentralized, you know, relatively self-organized, you know, opportunity for people to really experience their own, their own kind of collective capacities was both joyful and incredibly powerful, and it was that, it was that that produced the, you know, totally unexpected result at the election. And I think, If you were going to take seriously all those observations, you would say that, for example, the Labour Party Democracy Review right now is not going nearly far enough, not nearly far enough,

in asking how do we bring actual participatory democracy into the decision-making processes of the party, into the organisational process of the party? The democracy view shouldn't just be asking, how many seats on the NEC should CLPs get, should it be eight or should it be 10? It should be saying, look, how do we capture that vast, But how do we reproduce that vibe of the kind of energy and excitement that people experienced when they were using what's my nearest marginal and using that app that let them talk to people they'd met canvassing?

And how do we make that part of the fabric of the way the Labour Party organises itself? I don't know what the answer to that question would be. I don't know how far you could go in replacing the tedious structure of branch meetings and motions and, you know, GC delegations with some much more, you know, plan Cish. form of you know participatory democracy and consciousness raising but that should be at least be the question that should be being asked this show is brought to you by navara media to find articles videos and more audio content like this head to navaramedia.com if you particularly enjoyed this podcast and would encourage others to listen to it why not head to iTunes and as well as subscribing leave us a review navarra media can only exist thanks to subscribers and supporters if you have the means

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