ACFM - ACFM Trip 38: Movement and Stillness

Episode Date: November 5, 2023

Ever feel like there’s too much change these days? Don’t worry, you’re not (necessarily) becoming more conservative. On this Trip, Nadia, Jem and Keir think about the ebb and flow of political currents, social movements and our inner lives. What’s the difference between being still and being stuck? When does a campaign turn into a […]

Hello and welcome to Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milburn and I'm joined as usual by my very dear friends, Jeremy Gilbert Hello. And Nadia Idle. Hello. And today we are discussing stillness and movement. Okay, let's get into it.

Why are we discussing stillness and movement? Has it got any relationship to what's going on at the current moment? Well, it always would have. It's interesting partly to think about the nature of the moment that we're in now, historically, in terms of what's changing and what's not changing. I mean, arguably, that is all. always what the analysis of the conjuncture, as we like to call it, following Grant Shee, involves the, you know, the conjuncture is the name given in certain strands of social, political,

cultural theory or analysis, just to the convergence of forces and factors that shaping any given historical moment. And analyzing the conjuncture is always primarily a question of asking yourself or what's changing and what's staying the same from before and when we were preparing for the show we thought well in some ways what characterises the feeling of the present is that things are changing in a really bad way it's really rapidly and things that are bad are also sort of staying the same so I think that's partly why we feel it's it's a relevant way of thinking about things and what do you think yeah I mean I'd agree with all of that I think on a on a on a similar vein but maybe approaching it from from a different kind of framework or or I don't know from a different angle but also related to what you're saying jeremy is this this this kind of sense this at this social affect of you know the times that we're living in in the UK at the moment where you know as you're saying there's this sense that movement like the movement or the direction that we are experiencing

is sort of stuff being done to us, stuff that's being done to the planet. Like all of the action, as you're saying, is negative or bad or experienced in a bad way. And that's made me think about what then that does to us as both human beings and as social actors in terms of how we relate to the concept of change. So, you know, a lot of our political leaders, and we'll talk about this in a bit, but a lot of our political leaders and various different, you know, actors and figures talk about, you know, this is time for change. It's time for change. Like, we want to change, like changes.

And there's this assumption that change is good, whereas I think a lot of people are currently experiencing change is bad. And I'm wanting to say, no, stop. We don't want any more change. Whereas in effect, like something has to change, but it feels like they're not in control over it. So I guess what I'm saying is there's something there about. movement and agency and what the relationship between movement and agency is. At the same time, though, there's another plane of discussion, which is really interesting, which is about the social psychology of mass anxiety and mass depression.

And I'd really like to talk about that. I think we'll flesh that one out later, but, you know, it should get us to a point of think, well, what kind of movement is both good and progressive socially, but also psychologically, you know, for humans in the 21st century, and what kind of stillness is required to be able to kind of build not just the world that we want, but also, you know, in the same vein as with the movement, kind of happy, reflective, joyful human beings. So those are kind of some of the ins of why I'm interested talking about both stillness and movement today. What about you, Kea? Well, that's great, yeah. I'm not that much to add in terms of the things we need to talk about,

Apart from perhaps to say that, you know, one of the ways we can think about what's going on in this really present moment is that the left movement, and perhaps we're reflecting, whether we can talk about or what it means to talk about movements at all in terms of social and political movements. We'll get into that, perhaps. But in any which way, we can definitely say, you know, those movements seem to move in sort of ebbs and flows, and we really are in an ebb at the moment. the collective affect, particularly on the left, but I think probably more just socially, is this feeling of stasis or stuckness and inability to move partially caused by a sort of cascading series of events which seem to overwhelm us. And there's all sorts of war, etc., which caused those sorts of effects of stuckness behind all of those perhaps is climate change and it's like increasing instances or increasing rate of which you have these extreme weather events.

and, you know, so there's a feeling of like, you know, unstable movement, but we're not in control of, and in fact, but stuckness. We want to move it in a different direction where the movement is something that we are creating, but we're also in the control of creating moments of stillness in which we can analyze things, perhaps, and work out where to go. Anyway, but we're going to get into that. Before we get into that, let's do the parish notices. So, as you know, or hopefully you know, every month to go along with each new trip,

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Spotify. I mean, just search for ACFM on Spotify. Also, I'd say we've been getting some very nice reviews recently and they give us a little bit of a boost. One of the things we're doing a podcast is you don't get a lot of feedback to keep you going and to say that people are enjoying it, etc. So please do leave us a review on whatever platform you're listening on. When we say that, we only mean good reviews, of course. If you hate the show, well, the best thing is, is to embrace a moment of stillness and think about where your taste has gone wrong. Anyway, of course, it produces some sort of money. No, sorry, it requires resources to produce podcasts, etc.

You know, on ACFM we're supported and we're hosted by Navarra Media, who also do some other interesting stuff, I do believe. I need to check that out. Anyway, look, we think you should support our hosts if you can afford it. support our host, Navarra Media. You can do so for as little as a pound a month. You can sign up and become a subscriber and support Navarra Media by going to navara.media forward slash support. Parish notices out the way.

Let's get back into it. All right, let's hear one of the greatest tracks ever recorded. Curtis Mayfield, 1970, move on up. Clearly a song about movement and inspiring movements. Hush not child, and don't cry, your phones might under span you, by and by, just move on. So we're going to be thinking around concept of stillness moving in different ways, including thinking about nice kinds of stillness. But are we going to start off, I think, exploring this idea of the conjuncture, the present moment,

the present historical moment, what is its nature, what's changing and what isn't? I had this phrase a few years ago for a talk I did a few times called everything's changing, but nothing is changing. That was really the pity expression of that long 90s thesis that somehow the tech was all changing, but the cultural content wasn't. Yeah. But I don't think that's exactly where we are now and now. It is more like clearly things are changing quite dramatically, the level of climate, at the level of the increasing kind of dissolution of any sort of coherent public culture.

But it's difficult to feel like anyone's really got. control over it. I think especially in the UK where we're really in a sort of political meltdown. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is, I think, important is that when we situate this conversation, there's going to be like larger political trends that we're talking about, you know, on a kind of like, on a century level. But there's something very specific happening in the UK at the moment. And I think what's important to know when we come and do a little bit of a historical analysis there and talk about the conjuncture is the amount of different events which this country has experienced just over the last 15 years. And I know

we want to talk mostly about what's happening from 2020, but just like the pandemic in itself as a kind of very strange event where things are happening and accelerating which you have no control over. And I wonder to what extent that has an effect on, you know, and also the whole like stay-at-home thing and what it's done to people's psychology and ability to engage with movement in a positive way, in a progressive way, in a way that builds rather than destroys. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, but also I think we should say that in the UK, well, and in the US to some degree, but more so in the UK, the left, which was on the rise during the Corbyn years, has been thoroughly defeated by like neoliberal centrism in a just, you know, much wider

alliance with basically the political establishment. And so that's why there's a feeling of like, you know, a stuckness to some degree. That's why I would also argue, however, that the centre is also basically in a position where it's just responding to events and has no program to control them. And in fact, the act of defeating the left, the act of defeating Corbinism really accelerated a process of breaking down the public sphere, breaking down the sort of norms of how democratic process should go, breaking down the norms about how the media should respond and deal with politics. It accelerated a process of that being breaking down the amount of like just political

coherence and the inability to hear a joint story about what's going on in the world. That was massively accelerated by the act of defeating Corbinism, basically. And of course, the writers responded in a way in which it has given up all notion that you could have a share. picture of what's going on in the world, and in fact, just a complete embrace of cynical lying and the inculcation of like separate life worlds where if your right wing, you will have no contact at all with like, you know, people from outside of that, you know, by setting up these new political institutions, Fox News obviously in the US, but in the UK we've had like, you know, GB News and these new billionaire, oligarch funded news channels which have

bear no resemblance to, you know, the very, very. imperfect sort of media environment that was around during the era of political efficacy. That also adds into this feeling of stuckness, I think, and inability to move and being overwhelmed by events, partly because it's just incredibly hard to process and come to an understanding about them and actually come to a shared understanding about them and therefore to act on them. Yeah, well, I think that's exactly right. I mean, what's happened in the UK in the past three years is, well really in the past six years there was a there have been populists and broadly democratic movements from both the right and the left and the right project culminated in brexit which predictively was has been an economic disaster and hasn't hasn't delivered any of the effect actually which the its supporters were hoping it was going to deliver and then on the left you know there was the corbin movement which was just you know was just was shut down by the collaboration of of the right wing of the Labour Party

and various actors in the media and state institutions. And it was shut down with no real objective beyond those people making sure they kept their jobs, really. So now we're left in this situation where support for the Conservative Party has totally collapsed. I mean, they're pretty much now openly embracing what would have been seen as a fringe alt-right agenda just three years ago.

But they're doing that out of desperation because they're in the opinion polls, like I don't think the Tories have been this low for this long in the history of the party. And Labor are clearly, it looks like Labor are going to form a government, but a very right-wing Labour government, but they're going to be come to power being very unpopular.

I mean, they are really, I mean, the opinion poll show people are going to vote Labor rather than vote Tory, but they're going to do so very little enthusiasm because there's very little support for them or the programme. So we're going to be in, we're heading to a situation where this political elite has managed to re-establish its authority, which it had really lost after the 2008 financial crisis, which has really used the conditions of the pandemic

and the aftermath of the pandemic and the chaos that ensued. It's used that opportunity to re-establish itself, but it's re-establishing itself with no other project beyond being in power. So, like, I don't think it's even really accurate to call these people neoliberal centrist anymore because they don't really have any ideological content

to their program at all. Their program is just, we are going to be the people in charge, and we don't care what it takes to make sure we retain that situation. And so there's no sense of political direction because they don't have a political direction. It is just about stillness. It's just about stasis. Not in a political sense, but in a social, in a political sociological sense, the people who are currently running institutions from the Labour Party to the Bank of England, to local authorities, to universities, want to make sure they keep being the people running them

for the next 10 to 15 years and they don't care really what they have to do to make sure that happens. So yeah, so that is the crisis but it does have, you know, it clearly does have correlates elsewhere. I mean, the closest correlate I can think of is one of his own nearest geographical

neighbor in France. I mean, the political content of Macron's program has been quite different because the precise political pressures in France are different. But you've had a similar situation in which, you know, Macron got elected, you know, because of not being a

fascist, you know, because the left had been successfully knocked out of the process, out of contention. What you've just said, Jeremy, begs a really, begs the question, which is, can political projects achieve social change without movement? Because that's something that I'm finding interesting about what you're saying. For France and for the UK, there's this project, basically, to, you know, to. to do the least possible to achieve power, but not change, then effectively, for lack of a better word, there is no momentum.

And it's that lack of momentum, which is creating a kind of sense of cynicism amongst the wider population that, you know, like, fuck it, we don't, you know, we're to vote for the least worst option because we have no hope that things can be, that there's any movement that can match up to or level up to the multiple crises that are coming our way. Do you see what I mean? That distinction between movement and project is one I'm really interested in and I want to come back to when we talk

about the concept of a political movement quite shortly. But I think in a way I think project and movements are sort of conceptually different from each other, although they're always related. But in a sense it's not, I would say, it's probably

more accurate to say that in Britain at the moment, that political class, they don't even really have a project. They just have a set of intentions. Their intention is just to hold on to institutional power. But the problem is they, even on their own terms, they really don't have a project, meaning they don't have an idea really about what it's going to look like, about what the next five years are going to look like, how they're going to hang on to power, and how they're going to rebuild some kind of authority and legitimacy. And once again, we have to say that like, this is not 1997 when Tony Blair got

into power in which the wider circumstances are more facilitous for a project, you know, for his project. This is the worst possible moment to have a project based on stasis, basically, because that's not what's going to happen. It's like climate change. It's not exogenous. It's caused by our activities, but it feels as though it's something that that happens to us, basically. It's going to happen no matter what we do, and we can ameliorate it or we can accelerate it. And, you know, and business as usual is just to accelerate it, changes coming down the pipeline, no matter what happens. So politics of stasis is sort of, you know, it's sort of like a King Canute type strategy, if there's any strategy there at all. While thinking about a show on movement and stillness,

I thought a lot about music which encourages and facilitates stillness. One of my favourite tracks in the vein of music which is absolutely about celebrating and facilitating encouraging stillness is this. This is from Hiroshi Yoshimuro's classic Japanese ambient album music for nine postcards from 1981. This track is called Urban Snow. The other, snow, no, no. about this conjuncture, particularly in the UK, because the British Social Attitude Survey came out a month or so ago. It just showed that, like, political opinion in the UK

is the most left-wing it's been, you know, since the 1980s, not just economically left, but also, you know, in terms of attitudes towards things such as immigration, gay rights, etc., etc. Of course, there's been, like, activity to try to reverse that by having moral panics about small boats, etc., but the direction of change is clear. It's almost as though there's something to do with living in contemporary capitalism

which builds a sort of – people talk about it as, like, social liberalism or tolerance, but just builds, you know, acts against the inculcation of, like, prejudices, basically. Well, what's mad about that is the culture is not reflecting that. And this is the thing. I mean, again, like, I was pretty young in – I was pretty young in the 80s. But I even remember in the early 90s that they're just not. loads of anti-establishment culture, whether it was on the radio or on the telly or whatever, where there's some kind of voice that spoke to that fact that things are really fucking shit,

but like people have a perspective on this. And it just feels so controlled. I mean, maybe it's just because we're old. But I think with, I mean, my sense is with youth culture, it's partly because those attitudes are ubiquitous now, that it's kind of banal. Like, it's not, it's not a point of identification. Like, when we were young, like, you know, you wouldn't be into someone like a big mainstream pop star like Taylor Swift, like and consider yourself basically on the left. And now like that's normal for like people, you know, teenagers and people in their 20s,

partly just because there's no, that match, that connection between cultural and political identity has been shifted because there aren't, they just aren't any Tories amongst that generation. They're negligible numbers of them. Now let me just put a, let's statistic on it. So there was a polly of a day.

and among 18 to 24 year olds in the UK, only 1% said they would consider voting conservative. Yeah, 1%. It's insane. 1%. That is, that's, I'm sure that's within, you know, so negligible. We could say that there is absolutely no support for them. I mean, if you can, if you think about the 80s, I mean, the early 80s in British cultural history is like the high point of that sort of cultural radicalism, of like radicalism being in the culture. And a lot of that stuff you remember from the 90s was sort of left over from that, as we've talked about on the showload of times. But again, the actual politics was like, Fatcher had a lead among young voters in like 79 and 83.

Yeah, because there was an offer, because there was an offer on the table. That's what Fatcher did. There was an offer. And also saying in terms of the cultural thing, like if you were a young person on the left, like you felt a bit beleaguered. You felt like you had to kind of express it through your culture because you felt a little. you felt a bit beleaguered because it wasn't normal. Like it wasn't the case that everyone in your class has hated the Tories and always had done. Right. So this is interesting. And coming back to our subject, I would say, well, even if what you're saying is true and it sounds like, you know, it totally makes sense what you're saying, Jeremy.

It doesn't necessarily mean that that would lead to a progressive movement or a progressive political forward motion amongst the, you know, that class of young people. Because my observation on that is that because of the state of play, because of the state of the nation, because of the economics, because of the depressive anxiety-filled affect that we're in, is people effectively want to retreat to small groups and want to retreat to safe spaces, for lack of a better word, as opposed to this kind of like expansive, joyful, like growth-based, you know, youth culture,

which I'm finding, I find it really difficult not to think that the latter is better in terms of progressive politics. So that's the challenge for me, right, when it comes to talking about stillness and movement, is it's like, okay, well, what is our, what is our, if we were to scenario plan, like an ACFM scenario plan based on what we've just said, Like, what are the potential outcomes, even if we're seeing, as all, you know, the statistics that you've talked about and other indicators say that, you know, young people say hate the Tories. Like, what is the outcome from a movement level? Well, I'm still harping on your question about the culture, really, about the place of culture. Because I think you're right that I just want to say, I think it's an important part of the general diagnosis of the strengths and weaknesses of the left, like now and over the past five years. that in some ways, the lack of a kind of radical left culture

was part of the weakness, which meant that Corbinism crumbled so quickly. And it is tied to the fact that a lot of people, I mean, you know, I'm really sort of, I'm not talking about ACFM listeners now, almost by definition, but, you know, my impression is you're typical to enter something today on the one hand, they'll tell opinion posters and they think to themselves consciously,

that basically I'm a socialist, I want radical change. but a lot of so much of their affective economy and their way of thinking about themselves and the world is shaped by this hypercapital is logic, like Instagram and identity politics and a kind of consumer, kind of retail politics. Exactly.

They find it really difficult to, you know, participate in collective movements or projects for any length of time and with any kind of discipline. And that's partly what, that is why Corbinisms have crumbled so quickly in part. So I think it is really important. But then that's a persistent theme of our show from literally a day, one from episode, one about collective joy. A persistent theme is one of the things we need for an effective political movement against,

maybe we're not in neoliberalism, any more, just against capitalism, really, is forms of culture, which promote feelings of solidarity, feelings of collectivity, feelings of collective joy, not just in the kind of fleeting moments of ecstasy, but in the sense of really enabling people to experience themselves as part of wider groups over sustained periods that, you know, are what I call, you know, potent collectivities, are able to actually be in the world and do things collectively. And we, you know, we've talked quite a lot on the show about some of the cultural forms that can do that. But we also, you know, it's partly the, you know, it's partly what we need from artists and cultural actors is to keep inventing new ones.

No, I think it's fine. I think you're totally right. And I think there's several things there. Like, one is just, I'd be interested, actually, in terms of like, you know, whether if we're going into the detail of those polls or whatever, of like how, if there was a question about how people define themselves, because I'm, I would be surprised if people define themselves as, you know, so young people define themselves as socialists and communist. But even if they do, to be honest, going back to the point that we brought up a couple of podcasts ago, or maybe it was the last episode, is that just because

people say there's something doesn't mean that they are. And there's plenty of groups of people out there who call themselves socialists, who I would look at their politics and be like, that's not socialist politics, mate. Do you know what I mean? Like there's all these various different interplay about like why from an identitarian perspective, people would want to call themselves communists or socialist, but actually it's not in the practice. And for me, all of politics is always in the practice. It has to be about what you do and how you relate to society and other people. Before it sounds like a bunch of middle-aged people are just moaning about you. I'm not moaning. I'm a lot more than moaning.

I've been moaning about precisely this tendency among a certain type of leftists since I was, you know, 14 and like they were all older than me. So it's not like it's not like being that kind, you know, it's not like that kind of a thing has only just been invented. Absolutely not. You're right. There's a lot of, there's a lot of older people who are doing, who are doing this. But it's just that, you know, online forums makes it worse as a, as a, as a, as a, dominant in my view. Can I just interject? Because I'm developing a new ACFM character called Mr. Stats.

So I haven't got any stats. I haven't got any stats for the UK about the title of socialist because it's slightly more widespread but like basically in the US a couple of years ago there was a poll which show that there was a couple of years ago now this. This was about seven years ago that poll you were about to cite. I think it's

slightly less than that. But anyway. You're so in each other's heads. This is cosmic man. It was like 20, 15. I knew Jeremy wouldn't let me embrace my stats. Come on, embrace it, it's true. It's nonetheless true. Let him own it. Let him own it.

More people said, more young people, and I think this was like under 35s. I'm not great at being Mr. Stats because my memory is awful. But I'm still developing this character. More people under 35 in the US said that identified as socialist and identified as capitalist. I had more favourable attitudes towards. socialism than they did towards capitalism.

US is different. I would say with that, with that terminology, with, with the use of that terminology, like there's different, you know, there's different shit going on there. There is, yeah. But that, like, if, you know, but if you found that in the UK, you would not be as surprised as you would find that in the US, I would say. No, my thing's the other way around. Because there's not a history of a social democratic party in the US, basically.

And so, like, socialism and communism is, was completely outside. of what was acceptable to say, basically. And of course, I know what you're going to say now, so when that came up, you know, a lot of what people thought about when they were socialist, was, oh, we just want, you know, welfare state, like they imagine still exist as Scandinavia and so forth, right? So, yes, I understand that.

But still, like, these are imperfect, sort of, like, indicators that show that there is some sort of movement going, and there is some sort of dissatisfaction. You can accept that as just an accomplished fact, therefore all we need to do is take power and move into socialism, right? That's obviously not true. You know, and Gem's completely right. You know, we all exist in this world of like, you know, of social media and these sorts of things which, which, you know, forces to think about ourselves as brands and all these sorts of things, you know, really deleterious to collective forms or solid collective forms of organisation, which lend itself to like mobilisation by particular affects rather than, you know, the long-term patient, perhaps slower work.

the slow boring of holes, as Weber put it up, you know, of politics. But it's still something, basically, it's still something you have to take on board when you're thinking about the conjuncture and what to do next. Great speech. That was not what I was going to say. Just saying, you guessed wrong. You guessed wrong, actually, Keir, but fine, that was a really nice spiel. I'll let you have it. Go on. Well, ventriloquizing somebody else is one of the characteristics of my new stats character. we should play the song

At Home He's a Tourist by the Leeds band Classic Lees Post Punk Band Gang of Four the very interesting band who formed at the art school there were a wave of bands that came out of the art school

at the Leeds University and the art school at the Leeds Polly as was at the band the Mekons come out of the Polly there's a highly sort of like politicised, highly quite theoretically sophisticated

sort of scene at that point gang of four formed with the singer John King, guitarist Andy Gill, and then the drummer Hugo Byrne, were the only ones I can actually think of at the moment. And they released this album, Entertainment in 1979, I think that is, which contains this song, at home, he's a tourist. And it gets at that point, perhaps when you go somewhere where you leave where you're from, where you go somewhere else, you know, you can get that sense of alienation. You're outside of the culture. And of course, the point with this is that sense of alienation is present in

Contemporary Capitalism, Contemporary Capitalist 1979 Leeds as well. At home, he feels like a tourist. At home, he feels like a tourist. He fills his head with culture. He gives himself an ulcer. He fills his head with culture. He gives himself an ulcer. I mean, one of the things that we are now heading towards in this conversation is one of the topics we wanted to talk about that is what does it look like when you have a social or political movement?

Like, what, what is, is there a difference between a bunch of people answering yes to a question in an opinion poll and a movement? It's a really interesting question and it's one that's hotly debated. by theorists, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists. It's worth taking a moment just to think about this terminology even. So there was a huge amount of talk during the years of Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party about his stated desire to turn the Labour Party into a social movement. And there was a lot of grumbling and dissatisfaction from pedants like me about this. I would say, well, we know what he means, but by definition, the Labour Party

cannot itself be a social movement because those are just two different types of thing. The Labour Party could animate a social movement or at least a political movement. It could lead one. It could be part of one. It can't be one. Because what a social movement is

is a specific kind of thing, which is different kind of thing from a political party. There's also a question as to whether you can make a distinction between a social movement and a political movement. Those distinctions are not often made. I tend to think it's quite important. because I sort of think, I think Corbynism was a political movement. I don't think it ever really could be said to have been a social movement in the most capacious sense.

Don't you think that there was like political signalling by making that statement? Whether or not Corbin actually thought that he could actually build a movement, do you know what I mean? You know, sure. Yeah, exactly. That's why I said, I would always say, I know what he means and I endorse what he means in terms of what he is aspiration. But technically, but technically there are different things, which I would agree with. It makes sense. I mean, you know, you're right. You aren't right. And it does, you know, it gestures towards a bigger question there. But what, like, where do these terms come from? Like, what do they even mean? So we don't hear this terminology so much these days, but there was a lot of talk on the left

and within sociology and political science, certain branches thereof from the, really from the early 70s onwards, about what was called for years, the new social movements. And this is a term I've asked like absolute experts on this and nobody can agree exactly who first coined that phrase but the so-called new social movements but the names given

to these social and political tendencies that have become very visible by the early 70s. You can say maybe beginning with the peace movement in Britain, the anti-nucity movement in the 50s with civil rights in the United States around the same time.

They include the ecology movement. They include women's liberation, gay liberation, black power. And these all came to be referred to under this umbrella heading of the new social movements. And they were new because basically they were seen as having a different historical temporality

to the sort of classical movements which emerged in the 19th century. And they're basically socialism of various kinds and nationalism of various kinds. So if there were old social movements, maybe they were socialism and nationalism. is it. But then this phrase social movement, I think it was most competitive, in some ways that the thing which the term social movement most obviously applied to, I think was women's

liberation, because one of the distinctive features of women's liberation was the fact that it, well, it wasn't primarily organized around a set of political and legal demands, like even the civil rights movement was, it had been in the state. It was organized around a very broad-based aspiration to change social behavior across the society and to change people's ways of thinking and perceiving the world and change a whole way of life in a really fundamental way. And then I think ever since say the high point of women's liberation in places like Britain, America, Australia, France, other places as well, say in the early 70s, there's always been this question as to, well, can you pinpoint other formations which have that scope?

They have that level of internal coherence. They have that level of apparent efficacy in actually changing people's attitudes and outlooks across a whole range of social spheres. And it's a really interesting question. Yeah, I mean, I think, okay, so a question that I would posit against that to kind of test that in a way to be like,

okay, well, if that's the question we're asking, like where else has there been a movement that's like the women's movement, then I would try and, kind of dig down and say, well, in practice, what does that look or feel like? How does that express itself in society? And I guess I'd argue that the, and I might end up being wrong with this, but I'm going to test it anyway, this idea that there has to be some sense of momentum. There's a pot that's boiling and it's been on the simmer for some while and then now it's about

to like tip over and we are experiencing this social change off the back of this effervescence and it's building momentum and it keeps on growing, you know, which is why momentum is actually like a really important term to talk about here. And then you find yourself in a situation, you know, a decade later or a couple of decades later where society has effectively changed just because of the surge. And I'm using these terms on purpose, like the surge or the momentum that is coming from like such a, you know, widespread and big movement, whether or not it is in the majority or not. But then you end up in a situation, you know, know, with the example that you're talking about, with the women's movement, where society is so dramatically changed in terms of the role of 50% of its population, socially, which then tips into a lot of other legal and political rights. So like, you know, you're right, Jeremy, this is not what it, this is not how it manifested itself, but it's also off the back of, you know, so-called first wave being about, you know, women's suffrage and whatever. So there were kind of legal rights on either end of it, really.

That's the classic way of thinking about a social movement as like a parabolic arc where you have this explosive moment where new things get created, new problems, new ways of thinking, or at least they're new in terms of the way that society was thinking or sensing the world before that. You get

this explosive moment and then, you know, it starts to spread, you have momentum, and then it produces these new movement forms and repertoires, etc. And they sort of get exhausted as you have a diffusion of these new attitudes and these new problems at the wider society. I mean, it's kind of, I think maybe one of the answers, again, with women, is that with women, women, women are not a minority.

And women can't be minoritized because it's like literally half the people. So it's like in every house. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's like literally every household, like almost every household. You know, it could, you know, obviously not all households. But in general, households, maybe not. every workplace, but in society, like, women are everywhere. So, like, even from a vantage point of, like, a very male standpoint, whether or not you have consciousness around the patriarchy

or not, it's kind of like, shit, the women are pissed up. Like, there's a lot of women, you know what I mean? It's not the same as, like, perhaps other groups and other causes that can be minorised in the same way. I think it might be worth going into social movement theory a little bit, though, because that'll help give us some sort of definitional thing. And so that's like, there's social movement theory is like, you know, there's a field of study, social movement theory within sociology, and the dominant form of that is this weird sort of set of theory is based, coming out of American liberalism, basically.

And in fact, one of the classic models of the political system within political science is the black box model of the political system, which is this Robert Easton's black box, and he takes it from Ludwig van Berthelanthi's sort of general system theory. So it's like this. It's almost like cybernetics, right? It's like, you know, you want to reduce the entity you're looking at

to a series of inputs and outputs and feedback mechanisms and what goes on within that entity, perhaps a rabbit in its environment, perhaps a political system, you know, interacting with society. You can leave that as a black box because what counts is what goes in, what comes out, and how feedback between why does society relates to it. And so, like, there's this sort of black box mechanism, and, like, pluralism is an expansion.

Robert Dahl's theory of pluralism is, you know, it elaborates on, on Eastern's black box model. And then U.S. social movement theory sort of takes that, that sort of feedback arc and says, yes, that's the, that's the shape of a social movement. Like I was saying, you have this sort of moment in which is an explosion, like you were saying, Nadia of, like, pent-up, perhaps pent-up needs and desires, which cannot be a, expressed by it through the political system at the moment. So you have this eruption outside the social system and the social movement, the social movement takes on the form of feedback for the political system because it cannot access it. But like, and within that there's a various types of theory, but one of the most dominant ones is what they call it resource mobilization

theory. And it's interesting because it does have this form of like variability of speeds, something like that. It was like this explosion of creating. Probably, like you're normally an event, right? So we'd say Seattle 1999 produced the anti-globalization movement. You have these like perhaps the invention of new, they call them repertoire of contention, but they could be like forms of acting, forms of organization, slogans, that sort of thing, perhaps new ways of thinking, new problems which previous society couldn't relate to. I mean, I've talked about it in terms of this moments of excess before. And one of the things that influenced me in moments of excess was an article. by a guy called Aristille Zolberg who basically wrote an article called Moments of Madness in which he sort of looked back at all of the big explosive social movement events

and like revolutions in France going back to the Paris Commu. This is a post-1968 article obviously and he said, look, within those, you see the same sort of things happening, you see these same people thinking, you know, this incredible acceleration, you know, an opening up,

an acceleration of during these moments, you're active all the time, involved in all of these conversations, people who didn't use to talk to each other, talk to each other, new stuff emerges. When we call it moments of excess, it's because it's like, it creates all this new stuff which exceeds the society, the pre-existing society's ability to sense it or make sense of the world, basically. Produce all this new stuff and then there's an art in which that new thinking either devolves into or this distributes into society becomes the new, influences the new common sense, or basically you get defeated

and shunted off to one side. What you're describing here is like all of that makes sense, but, you know, like there are huge amounts of like needs and desires that people have, like in Britain today, which are not being fulfilled, but it feels like the energy is inward looking and it's like being internalized in a way rather than coming with this kind of like explosive exothermic energy and maybe that's because we can't predict, you know, what I call tipping points, which is something that I'm really interested in. And maybe at the next point, there will be a tipping point and all of that energy, that pent up energy, which is coming out in anxiety, it's coming out in

domestic violence, it's coming out in people just sitting in front of screens, it's coming out at people ranting at each other and shouting at each other on high streets, maybe that energy is actually going to be, will be at some point, become some sort of movement. Because that's the thing for me which I'm struggling with is that what is it about the conditions today which seem to make a movement almost impossible and instead we've got a kind of it's not a stillness it's kind of like an anxious carbonated bottle where the effervescence has nowhere to go I would say I mean the answer to that question is when I think we're exploring on the show all the time and it's something that you know I've written about and other people have that

the whole matrix of advanced capitalist culture the whole point of it is to prevent people from feeling like collective agency it can be a real possibility like at every level every minute of the day to a certain extent that the whole thing is about making people feel that something like a collective movement is not possible and that the only forms of agency they can exercise are micro forms around their own immediate life world their own immediate spheres you know mostly forms of consumption or forms of consumptive expression. So I think we sort of know what, and I think to the extent that that goes unchallenged or that are challenges to that are periodically defeated, it's just inevitably going to keep getting worse. It's going to get worse every single year, except to the extent that there are countervading forces

and countervading projects, I think. Sure, but don't you think with that argument, like based on what we were saying about, like, how basically the 70s happened or the 60s happened or whatever, Like that's off the back of like really oppressive like 1950s, you know, gendered social roles. So like this is not the first time in the last 150 years where we have moments where it's like this is such a controlled environment. Yeah, there were, but I don't think the specific, what's specific to this period really of the past few decades is the way that it makes people feel collectively disempowered, which I don't think like the 70s didn't happen in that context, happened in a context which people had had had all kinds of. of experience of collective empowerment. They often felt individually repressed. But

collectivity, like at the level of the factory, the level of the state, the level of the neighbourhood felt very powerful. So it did feel possible. And so much of what's happened, the whole project of neoliberalism, this is always my argument, really, is to surgically remove from people's daily lives, like any experience of that sort of collective potency. I mean, that's partly why, you know, that we still remember the revolt of the 60s and 70s in such ambivalent terms, because they were partly people looking for kind of individual freedoms or personal, private freedoms, but they were also collective expressions of democratic desire at the same time. I mean, that's what's sort of specific to the historical moment

we're in now is that people are subject to these mechanisms which try to make them feel disempowered. I think there are countervailing forces in it. They're not just political forces. There are also countervailing forces in the fact that, well, and this is something typical of the history of capitalism as well, you know, platform capitalism, it has to, to some extent, to get its stuff done. It has to give people tools like social media, which don't only turn you into a narcissistic lunatic. They also give you the capacity to organise with millions of other people simultaneously in a historically unprecedented way. So there are always countervailing tendencies. And it's those countervailing tendencies. And it's those countervailing which people have to try to build on, I think, in order to create opportunities. So I wouldn't want to say, like, oh, this is like the worst moment in history. It's never been this bad before, even at the level of that sort of individual disempowerment, actually. Because I think you can look back at earlier moments in the history of capitalism. You know, my reference point is always like Daniel Defoe in writing Moll Flanders in like the 18th century.

like he presents this vision of like early capitalist London as a zone of that we would really recognise like a zone of atomisation of which like social bonds have all broken down like nobody can trust each other no one everybody's competing with each other people are dying in the street because nobody cares about each other so that is a persistent tendency of capitalism which other times has been resisted

it's been, it's been resisted by progressive forces. It's also, at times, capitalists themselves have been forced to sort of resist that tendency for the sake of preserving any kind of a social fabric at all. We should also recognize that there are, you know, social movements or nascent social movements emerging all the time. One of the problems, I think, is, you know, that little narrative I was going on, giving earlier about this explosion, it's almost like a spontaneous argument that that's not enough to create a sustained social movement.

you need social movement organisations, basically. Sorry, it's not enough for what? Just can you clarify that? Well, I created this, this, this, recreated from American social movement theory, this idea that you have this sort of like this spontaneous explosion, which creates all this creativity that then diffuses into society and change happens. That's a liberal argument. That's like, it's not enough just to have this, like, wait, let's wait on these.

We can see all these unmet needs and desires. Surely they'll arise and the world would be a nice place. That's just basically not enough. You can, but you can get change. You can get really dramatic change from that. It's just about sustaining and embedding those values or those kind of, quote, unquote, wins politically might be the thing that you're unable to do. If you use the example of the Egyptian revolution, like the problem was in 2011 is that there was no infrastructure, there was no progressive infrastructure to create any sort of organization to kind of take over or provide an alternative platform. form, like after the fall of, you know, the President Mubarak. There was, and so the Muslim Brotherhood took over, but it doesn't mean that they didn't topple the first dictator in 7,000 years. Like, it still happened.

You know, it still happened. So the action still happened. You still get these markers. You can still get these markers, which we will then look back at and go, oh, look at this, you know, on this timeline. This happened, this happened, this happened. But you're right, if this is what you're alluding to, that it doesn't necessarily lead to some kind of systemic change, then that's the point, isn't it?

No, absolutely. That is basically the point I was trying to make. And I think you can use that to analyse and think about the social movements which are emerging, such as Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. You know, they are social movements. They've mobilised lots of people to various degrees in the different organisations. But what they don't have, and almost don't have by design, is the ability of those people to have that moment of stillness away from the we must do something about this incredible crisis to step back and say yes but what should we do how has it gone so far how should we adjust our strategy and i say it's by design because roger hallem purposely tries to prevent that you know the sort of

organic growing up social movement organisations which can step back reflect and and change direction and aim not just for this explosive, you know, we must do something to, well, yeah, well, how do you win then? Do you know what I mean? If you look at the history of XR, they have to check Hallam out in order to try to start to begin to go through that process. We should play the 1995 track It's Oh So Quiet by Bjork from her incredible album post for its auditory contrasts between cool, slow and reflective bars and big, brassy active sounds urging life and move. movement. You're all alone, shh, shh, and so peaceful until you fall in love, simple, the sky up above, simple is caving in, wow, wow!

You've never been so nuts about a guy you want to love, you want to cry, you crush your heart and hope to die. There's also something else which is kind of like quite a boring thing to talk about, but, you know, it is to do with like power and money, which is around resources, like how resources play into how people organize themselves as movements or organizations. And that could be in terms of both how they are co-opted, like movements or like groups of people or collectives can be co-opted by, you know, larger NGOs or like structures or whatever that have the resources to resource them. or they end up, you know, perhaps changing certain parts of their policy or whatever

and don't end up being as radical as they were. But also you get a lot of really radical and interesting groups, which under the current conditions, they might not be able to reflect because they don't have the resources to reflect. So therefore they build their kind of political structure and outward facing tactics on the fact that the one thing that they can do is go out and do more demonstrations because they've got no capacity to kind of like meet and think on a resource level.

Does that make sense? yeah it does and i but i and i'm going to say at this point i'm going to try to explain why for me it is a really important question like what actually is your definition of a movement like why is the typology of movement's important and and why is it important to push back against what i think is like a massive overuse of that term movement good let's do it because i mean i'll tell the story i don't think i've told the story i don't think i've told this on the show before. I think you two have heard it loads of times. I don't think I've actually told it on

the show, but apologise it if I had. One of the funniest experiences in my political life was getting studied by some Italian sociologists as a supposed representative of the British anti-capitalist movement sometime in the early

2000s. So there was me a couple, a few other activists in a room, that's SOAS, and these Italian sociologists were studying us. Like it was a whole day and they wanted us to talk about our experiences as part of the anti-capitalist movement and mostly our feelings about it. And they absolutely hated me because my first response was to say,

well, I don't think there is any, there is no movement. There's like a few hundred people who go to demo, who pretty much all know each other and go to demos and actions. But I don't think you can meaningfully designate that a movement. It would like to become a movement. There's an aspiration to have a movement. But it doesn't pass a threshold beyond which you could really call it one. But I think this is important.

I've had arguments with people, you know, I've had arguments with people about whether or not you can ever apply any kind of criteria to the question of whether at a given historical moment. There is an active women's movement. And this person said to me, if there are two people anywhere in the world who regard themselves as part of a women's movement, then there is a women's movement. And my response to that was, well, you know, comrades of mine who,

friend of mine who dedicated years of their lives to building women's liberation in the 70s and 80s might have something to say about whether their work was of no different value from two people on the internet calling themselves a movement. And I think it's important because I think a huge problem with a lot of activism is, and this is true on a really large scale, it became true of Corbinism, but it's also often true of people involved in things like environmental activism is honestly people get caught up in the excitement of their moment and of a few dozen or maybe a few hundred of their friends being really mobilised around an issue and they lose sight of the difficult question of what it would mean to actually grow that coalition out past the point

to the point where it could actually have some political efficacy and one of the mistakes people often make in overstating to themselves like how successful they're being at a given moment, how much effect they're having, is they start calling what they're doing a movement. When really it's not, it might be a proto movement, it might have want to be a movement, but it has not yet achieved the status of a movement. And because I think being a proper movement, as I would call it, is a thing to aspire to. And it's a useful benchmark of success. And I think, I mean, I thought around Corbinism, for example, it was an important distinction because it was quite successful as a political movement. I don't

think it ever did get to the point of being a social movement, by which I mean, it didn't really get to the point where there was a widespread sense in the wider society of what it would mean to be part of that collective project for change at the level of kind of shared cultural attitude, shared identity, shared critique of other tendencies, in particular amongst people who were not really actively involved. And I think this is another key thing. This comes back to what Keir was saying. This is a kind of line I've had for years in years, which I really stick to. If you look at the examples of like clearly relatively successful movement historically like civil rights or women's liberation is they're not just even large networks of activists.

Like what it means from my point of view probably to have a movement is you've got a bunch of people who they're never going to turn up to a meeting. They're probably never going to turn up to a demo but they support you and they sort they have a general idea of what it means to support you. And having and that having that penumbra of like, relatively passive supporters who are, they're not doing them, they're not activists, they're relatively static, but they're sort of part of the movement for change in that they share your desires, your aspirations, is really, really important. And also, any movement does have spaces within it, like Keir was saying, for stillness, for reflection, for strategising,

for evaluating how things are going, for think. And in fact, to the extent that women's liberation. It's like one of the classic examples, you know, as I've said before many times, women's liberation was nothing but it was a bunch of reading groups. That was its organizational form, basically. That's why it's Jeremy's ideal movement. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, can we just, can we just clarify one thing? So when you're saying people share your, like, these are none, we're talking about non-active people who are sharing your vision or like what you want to achieve. With regard to the women's movement, who's you in this case? Do you mean other people or you mean some kind of leadership? No, I mean, if you're like an active, an active participant

in what was being called women's liberation. Right. So non-active and active. But, you know, I mean, one of the things, I mean, I've written about this before years ago. I mean, one of the things that made the women's movement a successful movement was that it became the case that there were people who were just, they were just doing literary criticism. But they had a sense of what it meant to do literary criticism from a point of identification with that movement and its objectives. I would say it was more because there's shitloads of women who were standing up to their husbands at home. That's what made it. I didn't. I'm not, no, no, I'm not count. This is not a counter. This is not a counterpoint, Jeremy. I'm saying like, it's all of

those things together, right? It's not just that when we talk about people being inactive. Basically, I'm trying to think about what you're saying about the women's movement and think about how do you think about it in relation to something like Corbinism. Like who who because with the women's movement there were so many people who like they might have been standing up to their husbands at home but actually never have never

joined even a literary criticism whatever but they felt empowered by feeling like oh women are changing something so they are literally in the domestic sphere changing social relations on mass what is the equivalent and I in for example the so called

Corbin movement and I think this proves your point if anything, is that what would have been that conversation which people are pushing up against something that would have created the conditions for it to become a social movement? And I don't know what the answer is. Well, I think the project of ACFM has always been partly to contribute to that

because it would be having conversations, not just the political movement aspect of Corbinism. For it to be a political movement, it needed loads of people to sign up and join the Labour Party, it needed the most passive people simply to vote Labour. It needed slightly more active people to just get an online membership and vote the way they were asked to in NEC elections. That was its status as a political movement.

But to be a social movement, it would have also needed people having broader conversations, which people like us and TWT were always committed to encouraging about, okay, well, what does it mean to think about the world in a genuinely non- neoliberal way? What does it mean to actually start to relate to each other in terms of solidarity? So consciousness raising on a local level, effectively.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's not, I mean, that's like a novel idea that was like people like us kind of, you know, ran with. But if you go back, if you go back like 100 years, that was absolutely normally, it was widely understood within the labor movement and the socialist movement. The part of what it meant to be a socialist was to think about, well, how do you apply those principles in all kinds of areas of life? And that was when socialism was a social movement. I mean, that was socialism was a social movement under those historic circumstances when people were thinking about, well, what does it mean, what does it mean to do things in a socialist way, like in schools? What does it mean to do things in a socialist way in your family, in your neighbourhood? Yeah, when I go cycling, I go cycling as a socialist was a widespread attitude and practice. Sure, but this is interesting. This is really, really good actually, because it gets me thinking, right, what was the sort of activity, like, in a real sense, in a like, you know, an event sense that was taking place. on a local level during

Corbinism. And, you know, I would say, from my knowledge, there were some things that I would think were potentially, like, radical, but mostly it was things like fundraisers, you know, and like a fundraiser is not a radical form. So I think to test your argument, would be saying actually what would have needed

to have happened in, you know, the late stages of Corbinism is some kind of development of like radical forms of interacting. that were practicing something, but actually what we had was, you know, some fantastic events, you know, in support of Corbyn or in support of whatever,

but it's not actually as a radical form or like ideologically moving us beyond, you know, the system as it exists. No, that's right. We came up against the limits of the result, the fact that to do that properly would have needed resources. I mean, that's what do we do? We do a podcast so we can be like really minor internet celebrities.

talking about this stuff because that's basically what we don't do it to believe. We don't do it to that's what we've got the resources to do. That's all we've got the resource to do. Like what we would have really liked to do and we said to people at that what we would have loved to do and friends at things like the world transform

would have love to do is I have like a national network of local groups of people doing consciousness raising and doing experimental culture and also getting involved in local politics. And rave in every constituency, Jeremy. That's what we were going for. But every time anybody

suggested to the only organisations in the country with the resources to facilitate that, the trade unions, they might want to give the world transforms some money to do some of that, they weren't interested. That's also about trust, isn't it? It's about trust and control and like where the centre, it's a bit centre and

periphery, isn't it as well, this kind of argument? It is, but it also speaks to this question of movement and the fact that one of the features, historic features of trade union bureaucracies is they become very suspicious of the whole idea of the Labour movement as a social movement. They prefer it to be at

best a political movement and preferably just what you might call an industrial movement. In other words, one that really restrict its objectives and sphere of operation to workplaces and workplace demands. There could be a counter argument that was just this little piece

that there would be a counter argument that says that actually like avant-garde like expressions and like forms of relating need to happen outside political movements anyway. And they can never really come up with that kind of innovative expressions when constrained by something like a movement. I totally agree. And this comes about to another point I wanted to make about this moments of madness. And I would say from my thoroughly Gramscian perspective, the problem with that notion of moments of madness and the various

iterations of it in different theoretical schools is that it always ignores the extent to which Well, there's always some kind of groundwork going on. There's always some history to those moments. They're always, they are tipping points rather than just miraculous events, like always. And from that point of view, the big historic moments when there's been really productive, you know, there's been productive eruptions of novelty. And then there are always moments when, well, that you get some kind of positive relationship happening between political movements. sections of established institutions and those zones of the culture

where indeed the real experimentation has to happen and has to happen relatively autonomously. So there's this sort of moments, there are these sort of resonances which emerge, but they don't just emerge. They're deliberately cultivated. So, you know, what's happening in the early 70s

is, you know, women's liberation doesn't come out of nowhere. This is partly why I really hate, you know, as an aside, I hate that popular typology that says, oh, there's a first wave of feminism, there's a second wave of feminism. Because it fails to differentiate between the moments of movement organization and the periods when feminism is a relatively organized political project,

but it doesn't really have a movement form. So, which is, you know, people have this idea there's no feminism between like women's suffrage in 1969, which is nonsense. Because, you know, for example, the American Civil Rights Act in 64, like 65, contains all these provisions around sexual equality. And that's because there had been people who could trace their political ancestry back to the suffrage movement

and socialist feminism in the early 20th century who was still involved in institutions and in politics and in unions over the course of the decade of the 20th century and were committed to feminist objectives. And it was the fact that those people were still there kind of beavering away, the fact that there were artists and poets

and filmmakers and playwrights, you know, giving voice to women's design and women's dissatisfaction, you know, over all that period is the fact that people like Simone de Beauvoir, so publishing from in 1949, all that stuff converges, yeah, all that stuff converges in the late 60s and early 70s, and it converges with elements of the trade union movement who are broadly sympathetic. It converges with, you know, male trade union bureaucrats who are, you know, have some historic memory of the socialist feminism of the early 20th century and are just, you know, decent guys who can see what's happening.

And it's when all that stuff converges. And the non-decent ones were forced to. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But I'm saying all that stuff converges, and it converges because people make it converge, not just because it spontaneously happens. And so the work of politics is nearly always about beavering away,

trying to do your thing and also trying to make those convergences happen, and they usually don't. But those apparent moments when everything suddenly changes and becomes possible, and new movements emerge, they're always the product. of people doing that kind of work, which is part of why I think, you know, I think it is important to reflect. In some ways, you know, we opened the show talking about like the present moment as if it's historically, like, really, really bad. But I would say really, if you look at the

whole history of capitalism, going back to the enclosures, like it's probably more normal to be in one of these moments when it feels like everything's going to share and you've just suffered a terrible disappointing defeat and only the complete bastards are in power. And it's probably more normal to feel like you're in one of those moments and to keep pushing through it and keep pushing through it until new configurations become possible. I mean, I totally agree with all of that, obviously. But I think, like, definitionally, I think there's also an important point in there. And it's the point you made, Jim, that, like, what looks spontaneous as a result of, like, when you look back in hindsight,

a result of this huge amount of organizing, this sort of like cultural preparation, etc. And then always, always when you have a movement explosion of these sorts, you know, some initiator group, some initiator who say, let's do this. You know, like Occupy Wall Street, there's eight people in a room and say, why don't we do this? And then that sort of, you know, takes on a form which gets reflected in the Arab Spring, you know, the whole protest camp.

And it spreads all over the place. But the point is, you know, there is always groups saying, let's do this. most of them fail. And so the distinction is sometimes you do, even though there's all preparation, you have these moments, these sort of explosive moments where things just resonate and people see themselves in whatever form of,

in the form of like either the action repertoire or the form of organization or that, you know, they see themselves in it and they want to either participate or they just basically, they feel positively about it. So there is a moment of like chance, and spontaneity and allowing things to go out of control, basically,

which is why I think the Corbyn movement, like lots of the people who, you know, were basically in control of the Corbyn movement, didn't want a social movement to explode because they would not be in control of that. They don't know quite where that's going to go, right? And obviously that also relates, of course, to like the constraints of electoral politics

in terms of like, you know, the need for like message discipline and all these sorts of things and have to fight, you know, in a media environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So perhaps one of the things I'm trying to argue here, actually, is that we have to cultivate within ourselves, the sensibilities of allowing things to get out of control and seem dangerous, you know what I mean? And then that, you know, don't just accept them where they go,

you have to then build in, try to build up, either before or during, you know, those spaces and forms of organisation which allows you to think about what's happening. It's gone out of control. Right, we need to fucking understand this. We need to get together and discuss it and work out what next to do. Do you know what I mean? I think what you're saying here is we need to learn to go with the flow.

No, I think this is, well, I do think there's something really interesting emerging in both of what you guys are saying, which is that if we're saying that convergence and effectively alliance building is like an actual project, which psychologically, like groups and individuals, need to be in that headspace of thinking there are opportunities, there are things happening, we want that sort of convergence and alliance to happen. We're pushing for convergence and alliance to happen so that change can escalate or, you know, something can occur socially. That requires risk and curiosity. I think those are two things that are lacking in today's moment in the UK. Because I don't think people psychologically either on an individual level, on a group level, on a party level, on a whatever collective level, if those collectivities even exist, are even able to like to play with that as a concept, let alone actually take it as part of a, insert it into a political program. I don't think people are able to be risky and curious, which I think is a real problem.

I thought we should hear a track with meditation in the title. This is a 2022 track by Moore Mother, M-O-O-R mother. Brilliant American artist, really compelling contemporary artist. And the track is called Meditation Rag. Good night, jazz fire. Smoke. desire praise. Yeah, that point about people being afraid of change. That is really interesting

because I remember having a conversation in the late 90s with John Jordan. He was one of the key organizers of Reclaim the Streets about this issue. And at the time, for various reasons, John and I were both really interested in Taoism. Daoism is like a Chinese philosophical tradition and it informs various things like meditative traditions and martial arts practice. It's not something you can really summarize philosophically because it's really a name for a tradition rather than a set of ideas. But if there is a sort of core idea, which is supposed to go back to the Taoist classics written thousands of years ago. It's this idea that everything in nature is always changing and that change as such and changeability are

phenomenon which should be embraced and it's the fear of change and desire to sort of hold on to things or stop things changing which leads to all kinds of unhappiness. I mean, yeah, Taoism especially at that time it was being put to quite a bit later in the early 2000s. You know, it got put to really dodgy political uses. I mean, basically, it was a point made correctly, actually, by people like Zhijek, that this philosophy which supposedly embraces change in all things is a really good, handy tool for, you know, move fast and break things, techno-capitalists, tell everybody that they ought to embrace change,

and if they're not doing, that they're unenlighted. But Taoism has this really interesting, I mean, one of my favourite line from the Tao Te Ching that suppose Taoist classic is, without moving, you can know the whole. whole world. The more you travel, the less you know. And it's this idea of, this ideal of like just not wanting to kind of roam around, not wanting to be a tourist, not wanting to not really even be curious about the wider world, but engaging in some kind of contemplative practice as being preferable to that. But with all those caveats about not wanting to embrace some kind of capitalist ideology, like it is interesting that in those, some of those

contemplative traditions like Taoism and really early Buddhism, there's this idea that everything is always changing. And if you can't deal with the fact that everything is always changing, including you, who is going to keep getting older, for example. Now, no matter how hard you try not to, then you're just going to be like miserable. And that's also, you could also say that a philosopher like Gilles de Lours in his work in the late 60s in particular, is putting forward quite similar ideas in his book, difference in repetition, but arguably his big philosophical statement. One of the key events he's interested in in human thought is the invention of calculus. And part of the point about calculus is it enables you

to calculate and measure velocity. And velocity is all about not just speed, but rate to which speed is changing. So it's about measuring rates of change. And there's this idea that, that change, understanding changeability are sort of inherent to matter and to social relations and to selfhood is really important. There is this sort of counter idea which runs back to ancient philosophy, but I think it's still, you know, it's still there in a lot of places today, this idea that somehow anything that's changeable is like unreal or inauthentic. I mean, I remember having a conversation with a colleague at the university once years ago, and she's like a committed Freudian psychoanalysis person.

And it was about the nature of gender. And she said, gender is real. And this was like against a sort of social constructionist position on gender. And I said, yeah, it's real. Just because it's real doesn't mean it's not changeable. It doesn't mean it's not subject to historical variation and political intervention, you know, personal intervention in some ways. And this idea that, and this is also an idea in a lot of ancient philosophical traditions

and that somehow movement itself, you know, physical movement must be an illusion because in some sense it's mathematically impossible. And actually anything that seems to be changing, the scale upon which you can see phenomenon are changing must be somehow illusory. Because at some fundamental level, like everything is part of one substance or everything is part of God or however you under conceptualise it. And so I think it is important. And so it is really interesting to think about this idea that, well, there is some, there is some, there is some, there is, the intuition that John and I, Jordan and I had in the late 90s was that despite capitalist appropriations of it, there's some, the sum resonance between a radical conception of the possibility of social change and the, and a way of looking at both selfhood and the world, which is, which is not afraid of change.

and which recognizes the changeability of things and the mobility of things, even at the level of molecules moving in matter, as opposed to perspectives which are suspicious of that, which think that stasis is by definition, preferable or more authentic. And I think that does play out. I mean, this is certainly one of the messages,

this is one of the ideas in classical Buddhism is the idea that being attached to an idea of yourself, of any fixed idea of yourself is just always going to lead to unhappiness. And I think that does have a real political resonance. Massive. It has a real political resonance. Well, you

say why, because I've gone on enough about that. I mean, I think there's a couple of things I'd like to pick up on before we get into that argument from what you're saying, Jeremy, which is, I think, you know, and you touched on this with the kind of accelerationist argument around tech or whatever. But it's important to note who's deploying these sorts

arguments at and at which political moment, right, and how those arguments interact with agency. Because there's, there is on some level, you know, that quote of like, what is it, the, the only constantist change or whatever. Like, these are big, like, philosophical points, which are really important and of which have, like, really important learnings and catchments to the self and the individual at times of, like, tumult, whether internal or external. But I think the problem that we have here, and this kind of, this harks back to what we were talking about earlier, is that if you're experiencing this kind of rapid external change and effectively somebody's saying to you, or this argument is being deployed of like,

well, there is nothing to do about it. There's nothing to do here. Like the only way that you will find satisfaction is by sitting back and accepting, if that change is actually, you know, your experience of life over the last 15 years, you know, arguably as we've had here in the UK, is that things are getting worse, in a material sense, in a, you know, workplace sense, in a, you know, high street sense. if every other week, you know, crudely, another shop that used to go to is like shutting down, then it becomes a question of like, well, who does that argument serve? Because from a Buddhist principle perspective, like, I agree. I think in terms of a mental health, you know, argument, it's really important that that one is able to understand from a stoic level, like what you can change and what you can't change. but that comes up against, that butts up against, an argument about how change happens

and how you believe social change happens and what is the role of, I don't even want to say activists really, but like activism and mobilising. Just activity. Just activity. Exactly. Exactly. Activity. So that's the issue there.

And I'm not sure like how we can like resolve that. And that maybe, you know, and maybe that's why the framing of still. and movement is actually quite useful, because there are moments where, you know, post a big political defeat, we're like just trying to do the same shit again for the purpose of it being, you know, and speaking back to what you were talking about, your identity. Like, you identify as someone who goes out and organized demonstrations and does this because that is who you are. And if you hold, if you are unable to experience yourself and your humanity in a set of understandings of self that are away from that.

That causes a problem for you, like when this is, as you said, a social moment, a political moment where there's an ebb, where actually maybe it's a better time for reflection. But if you do not have the tools, either as an individual who has a meditative practice or as a collective or as a group of people or who identify in a certain way, then you are unable to, you become. unable to gather your energy and resources by having or accepting that movement of stillness.

I think there are like there are resources within Deleuze to think about that more than what Gem was just saying, particularly when Deleu starts writing with Felix Guateri in the early, in the early 70s, I think it is. Late 60s, he's done. Late 60s anti-edibus. And they basically, they're two main books together, are anti-edibus and a thousand plateau. and in anti-edipus, the emphasis is much more on, you know, it's almost like an accelerationist thing, not technological accelerationism, but, you know, the emphasis is like to embrace change or push change. Yeah, change is good, and status is always negatively, Mark.

Always negative, you know. And in a way, this is a post-68 book, so it's like, what do you do with the insight that the state of things is actually change and not stasis? You know, what do you do with that? You can just recognize it and say, well, that's nice. Or you can try to think at what politically to do with it. And their initial thing was, yeah, change, just change, let's destroy, et cetera.

And then by a thousand plateaus, they're much, much more cautious, you know, and in the last chapter, or the last plateau, I suppose I'd have to say, they have this thing about, you know, yeah, we have to experiment quite cautiously, perhaps with change or de-territorialising or de-stratification, as they would put that. And in fact, you should always have a little bit of territory. to retreat back to, a little plot of land to retreat back to. When you go off and do an experimentation, try to change something, you should have somewhere to come back to unless you lose

yourself. I mean, I think at particular points they're thinking about these moments of sudden change being followed by outbreaks of drug addiction and these sorts of things, but also, you know, just a danger of like individual madness or just the complete breakdown of coherence. that sounds like an argument for the in a literal and a metaphorical sense the need for some sort of grounding which basically almost lends itself to the argument that not all conserving of something or conserving as energy is necessarily conservative is the argument that I would make yeah yeah but I think it lends this thing to this like you know moments of like moments of madness moments of excess we as I put it before and then like the more these moments of of slowing down, etc.

In fact, I think where I got the phrase moments of excess from or where me and my colleagues got the, in the Free Association got the moments of excess thing is from an interview,

I think Gittari and Deleu's deal with some Maoist group and they're sort of saying, look, these moments where everything goes off, these moments of excess, or just a faith that things will turn out or right at the end, they're basically not enough to save us.

And what you need is, you need these moments where things go off, these moments of excess, where, like, the previous sensibility of this society in which, you know, the previous things that the society could make sense of or even just sense, perhaps, as in, like, recognise, that gets exceeded. But then you also need analytical war machines, but, like, just basically spaces of analysis, right?

So there's almost like a rhythm, do you know what I mean, where you have these explosions, but then you have to have this prepared ground to step back to to slow down and analyze. Oh, no, I was going to say, I'm not sure, just thinking, you know, one here we're speaking there, I'm not sure that slowing down is the same as stillness. I think there is stillness is a much kind of stronger position conceptually. And I think there is, you know, different, different kinds of stillness that we can talk about there because stillness is related to, you know, the, the pejorities of stasis effectively.

Like I think we're saying that for something to be ground to a halt is very different to the kind of stillness that is needed, from which comes creativity and reflection and big ideas, right? Yes. Say more about that. Well, I mean, I'm just thinking about it from a philosophical sense

and also parallels to those Buddhist principles is I think, you know, like if people feel like you're in a political ebb and you've been forced to slow down and you're trying to conserve energy. It seems like quite a different perspective to actively being still, whether that's to do with observing yourself

or observing the movement or observing history and that kind of Buddhist presence of this idea of there is nothing to do here. So, you know, the idea that meditation at its essence is not about, you know, trying to stop your brain working. It's about the absence of. That's a very difficult thing to be able to get that perspective politically when you're in a moment. Is it a distinction between choosing or perhaps cultivating stillness to having stasis imposed on you?

Is that the distinction you're making? I'm basically saying I don't think it's stillness. What we're trying to say, the stillness that I'm envisaging is not something that can be imposed on you. I think that's stasis or that's that stuckness that we're talking about. And that has some kind of claustrophobia to it or some kind of like being put, you know, an effect of being forced indoors or forced inside or pushed into a box. It's unfreedom. It's the most basic form of unfreedom, is have your room for movement constrained and constricted,

whether it's by borders or prison walls. Completely. completely, completely, which is very different to whether collectively or as an individual, like coming to a movement, coming to stillness, because from that stillness can come like, it's like what we were talking about with boredom before, like I want the right to be bored. Like you want the right for stillness. You want the right to be able to stop and have the space and the time for that kind of like deep reflection. from which comes big ideas and creativity and new relationships.

You know, that's kind of like it's, the metaphor there would be about a seed, like a seed is still until its force is instigated. And when its force is instigated, it can then grow like rapidly into this huge, incredible, amazing, like tree or whatever. But it has this ability within it to conserve energy in a way that is still until the right conditions are there for it to explode, which is not the same as, you know, like squashing a seed or like setting on fire to make it stop germinating, you know.

Can I push that point on a little bit then? Because I totally agree with that. It's a great point. But like there have been conceptions of revolution, which is about pulling on the brake. So let me just explain that. June the early 20th century, there was the idea of a train on a train track, you know, sort of unmovable, being dragged along by the forces of history

was like a metaphor that was reached for quite a lot in terms of like a metaphor for revolution, basically. And then Walter Benjamin starts arguing that in fact, no, the revolution perhaps is getting on the train, this runaway out of control train and pulling on the train, you know what mean, to pull on the brake, I mean to say. So it's this idea that perhaps we need to, yeah, there are these runaway processes of change and we need to work out how to stop them going basically in order to create the space to do something else and you could you could make an argument that one of the contemporary iterations of that would be something like when people talk about degrowth economics and in fact people sort of talk about a steady state economy I don't

actually like the steady state thing but that would be much more the way I would interpret it degrowth is it not that we don't want change right not that we want some something where things don't change at all, right? You want dynamism, but like, you have to have that within recognition of, that we actually exist within an environment, with other animals, etc. And there are sort of like these limits that get exceeded by this sort of runaway change. And the runaway change is just growth for its own sake, you know, the increase in economic activity for its own sake. And so the degrowth thing would be, yeah, you can't have, you can't have economic activity for its own sake.

You know, there are limits that economic activity takes place and therefore you have to have, that has to be guided in some sort of way, in the way you have to guide that is to have a democratic economy, etc. I think the 20th century argument, I mean, there's a strong, you know, it's definitely in many cases a conservative, like, anti-progress, you know, with a capital P like argument of like there's too much social change occurring. And in a sense, it's about conserving,

which I think is quite different to, you know, what it looks like from the 21st century when you're actually saying you're trying, I think it's a very difficult argument to make the one that you've just alluded to Kea that there is a future that is dynamic outside capitalism. I think that is the argument is you're wanting to say there is a possibility for like innovation. There's a possibility for like coexisting with nature's rhythms. There's a possibility for like coexisting with you know animals in a different way as part of nature that is kind of dynamic and effervescent and like fun and full of joy and productive as well you know is a productive economy outside capitalism and I think it's really difficult for people to

envisage that like really difficult yeah I think I think that's true yeah that's true but I think it is worth reiterating that it's not even it's not only benjamin I mean the the argument that what's wrong with capitalism is it transforms everything without anybody being controlled of the process consciously is in the Communist Manifesto. And they're drawing on, that was one of the arguments made by a socialist in the early 19th century. And I think it is quite a compelling argument. I think it still resonates with a lot of contemporary political debates that what you need to do from a left perspective is put forward the view that the alternative

that the choice is not only one between uncontrolled change and no change, but there is always a third option, which is change in which people have a democratic stake. I think it's a real problem with the way in this country, like we've dealt with debates over immigration on the left, is that we haven't really dealt with the fact that there are big, there are constituencies who are now are really hostile to immigration, but the thing they're primarily hostile to, I think, is the sense that they don't have any,

that it involves a change in the social composition of their communities that they don't have any say over. It's not that they're necessarily hostile to the idea of welcoming people who are different from them. It's the fact that they might want to be involved in actively welcoming them rather than just people, rather than things just happening that nobody has consulted them about. And I think... Which is completely legitimate. Completely legitimate. And the left is really shit at this. The left, you're right, is really... Well, we've accepted a situation where it's either the

conservatives or the liberal position, the liberal perspective, the liberal perspective. is this is just just basically change is good like accept it, welcome it, you know it's not really any of your business who your neighbours are anyway because you're a liberal who respects private property and individual rights and

I think we've accepted that as the alternative understandably the alternative to like a conservative argument on immigration which is so it should be stopped to preserve the authenticity of the national community whatever which is also which is even more wrong from our point of view and I think you know

it's also based on like no historical reality also. Yeah, no, of course, yeah, it's total nonsense, of course. Like if those are the only choices available, I mean, this is a whole other argument. I think it's been really crucial to the way in which neoliberalism has secured consent, especially from urban populations the past few decades, to basically tell people,

create engineer a situation where either you accept neoliberal globalization and its massive flows of, and it's, you know, flows of, and form, its particular forms of migrancy, or you just oppose migrancy altogether in ways, which is ethically and even aesthetically abhorrent

to us. It's really good reasons. I think we haven't, we've never, we haven't really put forward an argument that, okay, look, we're one of the richest countries in the world, especially those of us living in towns and cities. Like we like having people from all around the world. Like we need to sort of get together as a community, collectively work out how we bank that happen in a way

which benefits everybody, which doesn't frighten people. We haven't done that at all. And it's one reason, I think it's, I would say that is the primary reason, actually, where the left is so marginalised over the past few decades, because we haven't been able to address that question. And that is a question about, well, how do you have change in a way which people feel like they have a stake in it? People feel like they have some control over it.

And that is the basic question of democracy. The basic question of democracy is how do you enable collective people to feel the sense of collective agency, and agency is about being able to change things and to decide what doesn't change and instead we end up in this situation where we're having change imposed upon us from that outside or we're just saying no

or we're just adopting a position of conservatism and I think that that can never be an appropriate response from socialist's perspective. But also it like this brings us to like what I would call the can we just stop sentiments Like it's understandable that in Britain today there's people who are seeing the world around them like change so rapidly in a myriad of different like in negative ways and where like you said they are not in control they don't feel like they have any agency and they own they feel like their best possible response is basically you know putting their hands up in a kind of like defensive bodily position and saying can we just stop can we just have one month can we just have one year? year where things are not getting worse because what happens is that it's almost like collectively everyone's on a not everyone of course but as a collectivity people are being pushed so far down

the maslow's hierarchy of needs that you're unable to think about social change you're unable to think about movement you're unable to see your kind of role as some kind of actor because all your basic needs have been taken away from you know if you can't pay or you're if you're anxious about what your electricity and gas bill is going to be this winter. You don't want to think about that stuff at all. You'd be like, can people stop the migrants? Can people stop climate change? Can people stop all of the things?

All of these things that politically are not necessarily in the same side, you know, traditionally, just can people stop stuff so that I just can have a bit of arrest. So I can just gather my thoughts is I feel like what's happening en masse, you know? I suppose like one of the other, one of the other big problems for the left is not just that, Yeah, this effect of like you'd be getting yourself worn down and overwhelmed by this relentless drip, drip, drip of change or the, you know, or even perhaps not drip, drip, drip, drip. Tides. Tides washing over you constantly. Yeah, that's a much better. That's a much better analogy, yeah. But also that change sometimes comes to like horrendous big spasms. Do you know what I mean? Like a crisis of some sort or a war, this sort of stuff. Or a riot, you know, a riot kicks off. I'm thinking of the 2011 riots. Like one of the responses that tends to come out in one of the spasms of change or violence or whatever they are is that, you know, the response tends that comes out from the media, etc.

It's like to prohibit thinking. Do you know what I mean? It's like in the 2011 riots, it was, you know, what's his name, Cameron. Oh, thank God he's disappeared from my head. Great. Fuck off. That's been of history for you, mate. You know, he said, like, you know, we, you know, we explain too much and condemned too little.

And it's like, you know, thinking about it, like, what's going on? Why is this thing happen? I think any new ones is, like, basically prohibited. And, like, you know, what happens is that you're supposed to build yourself up into, you know, this sort of, I suppose it's like the affect of fear and panic, isn't it? Like, panic where you can't think, basically. You know, there's a conscious mobilization. Like, Nadia wanted to talk about shock. It's also, it's shock, isn't it?

Yeah, it's that affect of shock, yeah, basically. And, like, so what's the shock absorbers, basically? How do we put some shock absorbers in there, which say, because what you need to do in that situation, well, I suppose there's a couple of things to do. One is to try to prevent this mobilisation of shock, to prevent it being, you know, producing a new spasm of violence. Do you know what I mean?

Like, you know, 9-11, it's shock's America, and you get this, well, I don't know, continuing spasms of violence, over the world, etc. So you have to, we have to move, you know, we have to move to try to prevent that happening. But you also need to like basically defend the space for thinking and adding nuance and analysing. Totally. And I think that's actually the introduction of the concept of a spasm there is actually a really useful one because that again brings us back to talking about what a useful form of stillness is. And it's impossible, like if you are still and you are

spasming, then that is not stillness. That is anxiety. is like high adrenaline, that is the sort of energy that is going to make you get up and do something rather than, like you're saying, take a moment to analyze or have some kind of nuance. And if, you know, the forces, dominant forces, hegemonic forces in society, like government are going right, you know, or whatever, mainstream media or whatever, like not wanting to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Now I feel like I can't say mainstream media without worrying Well, that's coming across us. But you know what I mean?

Like if you're at a moment, like those, you know, good examples, like what's just what's happening at this time of recording with, you know, Israel, Palestine or with 9-11 or with whatever, all of these big moments where people are, you're in such shock, you know, because this, this spasm has occurred. And it's, and it's, it's reverberating into your body. And then that space is filled with like a very simplistic discourse. it becomes difficult to critique that because you or yourself are going through this shock of like the horrors of war or the horrors of attack or like of you know civilian deaths or whatever

and people lap up all sorts of rhetoric not because they're stupid but because they don't have the space you know for for kind of an alternative construction and going back to our original point like if there is no space like predetermined space, space for like alternative cultural production, then where are you going to get the alternative viewpoint from? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And it's, I mean, it's a cliche. It's probably cliche on the show that, you know, capitalism works to deliberately to engineer that feeling of like being so pulverized by change that you actually can't act. I mean, you know, this is partly Naomi Klein's argument in the shock doctrine. And it's, but it's an,

observation that people have been making for a long time. And, you know, it speaks to what I've said loads of times that we're still living in a historical period when sort of whether consciously or unconsciously, you know, capitalism and its agents and elite has learned the lessons of the post-war period when what happened when you made people too safe and secure for a whole generation is that you gave them all sorts of ideas about what might be possible. And that was part of the precondition for those, the radicalism of the 70s. and so I think that is all really illuminating

because the problem we've got now this comes back to the stuff we were talking about at the start of the show is that if what we need to get out of this condition of stutteness is forms of democratic solidarity and solidaristic democracy then the problem, the immediate problem we've got is this technocratic managerial political class

really the only thing they're afraid, the one thing they're most afraid of because it would remove them from their position of privilege is anything like meaningful democracy. So we've got all these democratic desires very potently manifest in the culture, whether it's people voting for Brexit because they think it will take back control, or whether it's people just spending loads of time on social media that gives them a kind of casual sense of participation and creativity, or whether it's people being on the left and getting involved in socialist movements of various kinds. And they're all being constantly pushed back and shut down and attacked by a very specific

group, I think, really, of people, this professional political class and the kind of wide, this wider managerial class, because their whole, their whole raise on debtor through the period of neoliberalism has been to prevent any form of meaningful democracy re-emerging after the crisis of the 70s. And that's still the basic contest we engaged in is one between democracy and its opponents. And I think democracy, like in an expansive sense, is the only possible solution.

We talked a bit on this show about contemplative practice. One of the most important traditions of contemplative practice is Zen. The Zen concept of beginner's mind in some, as a thing you should always try to cultivate, is sort of about cultivating a sense of openness to the world and its possibilities in a way that we've talking. We've been talking about on the show.

A really interesting album by American musician Tony Scott from 1965 is called Music for Zen Meditation. And this track is called Zah Zen. Zazen is just the Japanese name for the Zen practice of sitting meditation with as much as possible and empty and open. mind. I also think, like at a personal level, I was thinking about how a lot of stuff we've been talking about. It relates to things we've talked about on the show.

And when we did that session at the world transformed in Liverpool last year about what it means to sort of think about yourself as a subject in history, as an agent of history, but a product of history. I mean, in a way, for me, this is, that is like the socialist version of the more the travel you less you know, that you, without moving, you can know the whole world. The sort of socialist iteration of that is the idea that you have to, you have to accept the, both accept the extent to which you are, you and your condition are all products of social forces. Like, you're not a kind of individual free agent, however much you would like to be. and that the forms of agency and action you can engage in are about always moving within a network of forces

within which you can't really control the outcomes to a large extent. And I sort of think, you know, I think the reason I'm really interested in contemplative practice in those traditions like Buddhism is because I sort of think, like on the one hand, those traditions, they're very, they often, they usually take these very anti-political manifestations. but there is something about the kind of condition of consciousness they're trying to cultivate which is really useful to someone who is trying to think of themselves in these like completely

non-individualistic terms as a sort of non-agent agent in the world as someone who's trying to understand their absolute relatedness to everything else and not just be made miserable and disempowered and static because of it I think there's something really useful there if you can kind of marry up those techniques of contemplative practice and that kind of attitude of openness to, both openness to change and willingness to embrace stillness at certain times with a historical consciousness and a belief in the possibility of politics as sometimes producing positive outcomes.

I think that is all really powerful. I mean, perhaps the other thing, the other lesson to draw from that is it takes us back to where we started saying, look, there are ebbs and flows. There are ebbs and flows in the moment. movement of the left, you know, those of us, like on this podcast, who are a little bit older and who lived through various ebbs and flows in the past can say, you know, you know, this is what it feels like to be in an ebb. The way you may be feeling and thinking at the

moment, you know, this moment of stuckness, you know, you're not always going to feel like that. And in fact, if you look around, I think we started the show on this, you know, on this sort of note, if you look around, you can sort of see all of the conditions for moving into place for for a new wave to come along when there's a political opening in a way there's all of this stuff

building up on what has been done all political opportunities for expressing this these forms and these desires and these desires and these have been blocked off

that's what Starmerism is that is its project in toto right and we know that's incredibly brittle situation you know we feel stuck now but like you may not always feel stuck you're not always going to feel this way.

Things will open up and you have to act now in the preparation in that sort of historic knowledge that that new opening is not only possible, but it will come along. Yeah, no, and I think, you know, I think that's all like wise words from you guys. I think there's also maybe a step before that that is important to consider, which brings us back to, you know, something that we've talked about on this show and on other episodes. quite a bit, which is that kind of, linking back to your point about openness, Jeremy, of consciousness raising and why it's important. Like, it's not so much, I think, necessarily to say, okay, everyone, you know,

you've got together your energy because the moment will come. But it's also about, like, the importance of, like, curiosity and openness and a kind of self-awareness of ourselves as individuals and as, you know, collectives and as groups and as, you know, however different configurations that people live within at this moment and time, and understanding the importance of having, you know, self-compassion and compassion to others and not getting tied up in and making enemies with those people who you will need to build alliances with perhaps very soon. And it just feels like that's an important, you know, message to put out.

out is that it's not just that it feels like people are fighting themselves in this kind of state of kind of anxiety or, you know, collective anxiety and fear, but they're also like fighting their political neighbors. And there's a lot of bad vibes out there. And I think we need to be wise to that. And, you know, pick our battles and pick our enemies and not waste our energy at this at this point in time.