ACFM - #ACFM Trip 4: Love and Hate

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert discuss love and hate. Listen to the full version of the show, including music and archive material on the Novara Media website: http://novaramedia.com/2019/07/16/acfm-trip-4-love-and-hate/

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. And on the podcast version of this show, you'll get the stimulating and mind-expanding discussion from our hosts, but you won't get the music. That's because of the way rights and licenses work in the digital age. So you're really only getting half the picture, but there is an easy way to fix that. If you head over to the Navaramedia.com website, you can stream the full show. It's easy enough just to follow the link in the description of this podcast. Otherwise, enjoy the standalone discussion in this episode of ACFM. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert and I'm joined as usual so far by Nadia Idol. Hello. And Keir Milbin. Hello. So today

we're talking about love and hate, but we're also talking about punks and hippies. Jeremy, do you want to tell us a little bit about why those two pairs are related? Well, I think of the think, you know, the hippies thought, all you need is love. And the response to that was, no, you need hate and anger in order to fight oppression. And this seems like a kind of interesting challenge to the sort of politics of collective joy that we've been promoting on this podcast. Because we've been very sort of hippie, positive, I think. We're talking about this partly because in some ways the whole kind of notion of acid communism and acid carbonism, the whole sort of project, I think, in my

head, probably only in my head. It begins at this moment when Mark Fisher and I are doing some, we're doing some seminar at UEL and the issue of the kind of legacy of 1968 comes out, comes up. And Mark says, which was the kind of normal

thing still for people to say in those days, oh well, 1968, it was just a failure. You know, it was just part of the counterculture and that all went nowhere. And I just said, no, I turned around and said, that's not true. It got defeated. You know, it wasn't inherently doomed to fail. And the belief that it's doomed to fail is, you know, is part of, you know,

what you Mark call capitalist realism. I think, I don't know if it was the same seminar. I might have been a different one and Mark might not even have been at that one. There was something about politics and music. And someone else trotted out, you know, the, what was the sort of traditional line of anybody who'd grown up with the British music press in the kind of 80s and 90s, which was that, you know, hippies had been an embarrassing disaster and, you know, everything associated with the counterculture or the kind of radicalism of the early 70s was just embarrassing and punk had somehow rescued us

from that brilliantly and that we should all be eternally grateful for the brilliance that was punk and I turn around and start going on to now that's just rubbish yeah that's just hippophobia and it's also historically not true and it's been proven wrong by history because where has punk ended up? Punks ended

up with both John Leiden and Iggy Pop doing TV adverts they Iggy Pop had done an advert for car insurance and John Leiden had done one for utterly buttally like dairy spread no really and I goes Jerry Garcia

of the Grateful Dead never advertised car insurance therefore jury of history is in hippies are better than punks does he not get any money from that Cherry Garcia ice cream Ben and Jerry's ice cream

well maybe but you know do you know what the company that's given the most so far to the Bernie Sanders campaign is Ben and Jerry's is Ben and Jerry's yeah yeah so there's some sort of dairy conflict lurking by utterly butterly

all you need is love famous kind of hippie anthem sung by the Beatles in 1967 the summer of love they wrote it especially for

a program called One World which was the first ever global satellite broadcast it was kind of organised by the BBC but also by a load of other broadcasters

around the world and it had a viewership of something like 400 million and so it was this kind of, you know, simplistic, but deliberately so, so that it could be understood by people all around the world who didn't necessarily speak English, sort of evocation of an idea of sort of global unity and peace.

And on the one hand, it was a really kind of fantastic moment, and it was the very high moment historically of sort of post-war social democracy. It was the moment just before kind of unemployment was really going to start biting in those industrial areas, like Birmingham and Detroit. and the whole thing was going to sort of fall apart. But also, by a year later, I think even in the eyes of people like John Lennon, he wrote the song, it was going to seem like a really naive message because it was clear to people by sort of 1968 that actually, if you wanted to stop the war in Vietnam, if you wanted to get a progressive government

without having your potential progressive politicians assassinated, as happened to Bobby Kennedy in 68, then you were probably going to have to find some way to fight back again. the sort of, you know, oppression of capitalist and imperialists who did not want us to live in the world, in which all we would need is love. So, and I would say sort of punk is the sort of, you know, it's a somewhat delayed reaction, but in a way sort of punk is just reacting against what it sees as, that complacency and that unwillingness to confront oppression and alienation, that more sort of naive version of hippootopianism expressed.

You know, I mean, when I first encountered punk as any kind of an organic phenomenon in the 80s, I mean, the scene I encountered it in was really this sort of squat and festival scene. And mostly it was people who had come out of, actually, the hippie movement of the 60s and early 70s, which believed that they would change the world just by showing everyone a better way to do things,

by living in communes, by, you know, living as much as possible without commerce and, you know, without capitalism, by being peaceful, by dropping out, as Timothy Leary said in the 60s, tune on, turn on, drop-down, they tried to do that. They lived in hippies, they'd live in tepees in Wales, you know, they'd lived in, you know, sort of communes or squat or, you know, on traveller sites. And what had happened is from the late 70s onwards, the kind of rather tolerant attitude of the establishment and the state to them had started to change.

And specifically under Thatcher, Thatcher, you know, took the view that in order to be able to implement her neoliberal projects, he was going to have to attack those people. So instead of just allowing things like the Stonehenge Free Festival to develop, you know, they, the police started to try and close it down, they started to attack it. And then there's this, of course, there's this famous episode in the mid-80s when the so-called Battle of the Beanfield happens, when the police, Wiltshire Police, just physically attack the peace convoy, the travellers travelling to Stonehenge Festival. So they were people who were motivated by they thought a kind of politics of love, but they came up against the confront, the reality

that brutal neoliberal capitalism, especially in its early, you know, New Reich and authoritarian phase wasn't going to let them. And they was going to come at them with the police truncheons if they try to wave spliffs and, you know, vegan, you know, veggie burgers in the face of the police. That's one of the key problems, isn't it, right? Like, unrequited love is fucking painful. You know, yeah, I mean, people found that out in the Battle of the Beanfield as they got their homes smashed up and got beaten to a pole. you know you can't if you just if you just want to open yourself up and be and love everybody you know if it's unrequited then that's a problem i think it's important to understand the perception of what of of the perception of people like john lyden as to what had happened to the

60s and the legacy of the counterculture and what had happened i think the perception was that what has happened was the actual idea of the counterculture which is that you would link kind of hippie ideals of indeed love, peace, creativity, self-consciousness exploration, with a radical, political and economic agenda had really broken down. And what had replaced it was a very kind of complacent kind of consumer capitalism within which certain kinds of, you know, lifestyle, so very self-indulgent sort of, you know, lifestyle experiments were going to be tolerated, especially for rich people. But for everybody else. you know, nothing much was going to really change.

So for them, like the key figure of the hippie, like Jamie Reid, have this famous slogan, never trust a hippie. But he said, if you pushed him on it, like, well, who's a hippie? The person he meant was Richard Branson, you know, who was running Virgin Records at that point. It was the kind of hippie entrepreneur

or the long-haired, socially liberal, but entirely pro-capitalist, sort of entrepreneur. And that was what provoked this need for a break. So hate and war is a song from the classic, his first album and to me it is the sort of definitive announcement of what punk is supposed to be about i mean i mean it's a very strange lyric actually which the singer takes on a persona it's not actually he's not actually saying he's in favor of hate and war but he is sort of you know he's taking on the persona of a highly alienated kind of individual you know in the city surrounded by

kind of antagonistic relationships to just to other individuals and but it is you know the title is a deliberate, you know, reversal of the hippie slogan, love and peace. And it is basically, you know, it's saying, we don't, we're not living in a world of love and peace. And we were not living, you know, that's not what, you know, living through the crisis of capitalism of the mid-70s feels like for most people. You know, the punk reaction against the hippies is really important, or the punk reaction against a particular idea of hippie or a particular destination of, for the hippies is important because, because it does, it puts on the agenda, this question of, well, how do you express, you know, alienation? How do you express

a negative situation? Like, how do you respond to it in a way which is sort of constructive? Because, of course, you know, the character you get from both conservatives and liberals of the left, of any kind of radical left is that it's motivated by hate. It's motivated by anger. It's motivated by resentment. I think that's interesting and it's worth exploring because I see the left or sections of the left kind of reaction to that. a lot of the time as, you know, a defensive one, but also one where it feels like the response is cornered. When if, when, you know, effectively I think it's, it's important to say yes, you know, people who care about justice are angry. Like, of course we're going to be

angry. It doesn't mean that part of the project of what we're trying to agitate for isn't a project of love and joy and collectivity, but that doesn't stop the reality of us of us being angry and angry of the world, angry and, you know, about the world the way and the way it is and that and that and there being hate being at the center of that and hating that that things are the way that they are and hating the fact that some people are getting in the way of the vast majority of people living decent lives. The main problem that I have with with hate being an emotion that is that's central to to a lot of people's motivation for their politics is that if it becomes more anger, more hate than anger, then I think hate is an emotion

which eats people up as individuals but also as groups. It's a very, very active emotion and it can end up taking up a lot of your time and energy when time and energy can be used elsewhere. So that's what I'm interested in. I'm interested in talking about. Is it more productive for us to try and put our emotions to one side to try and to push through?

Just to respond to your, should we be emotionless? emotionless technocratic politics is basically what we're against if that's what we're fighting and in fact we could go back to richard branson right as the epitome of never trust a hippie because if we think about what the 1990s early 2000s and still today you know the world we lived in branson's world right you know that sort of socially liberal but ruthlessly neoliberal economics you know that was the world of new labor the third way etc you know we lived in his world and in that world politics is not something you should bother yourself about don't you worry about that we'll take care of that is you know you know we just make evidence-based

decisions you know based on no no emotion and interest etc and so what you've seen since 2008 is a return of like you know the passions in some sort of way so so how I think this links to like 2019 there's this just journey that you go on in which the hippie movement was like, right, we're going to drop out and then realizing coming up against neoliberal capital basically saying no, your project of wanting to drop out and live in TPs or an alternative lifestyle or your school, your kids differently or whatever, has to be destroyed for us to continue with our project. And then comes punk and anger and the need for a reset. And what I think is happening today is that instead of that

emotion of anger surfacing as a reaction to the post-crisis neoliberalism I think that is being manifested in depression it's being manifested in an inward looking kind of eating of oneself and I think that's also prevalent in quite a lot of left spaces to be honest where people are scared to be angry

because they're scared to be angry by themselves because we don't have that either subculture or that outlet for people to be, like, angry in big groups that isn't a kind of right-wing fascist march, frankly. I mean, I'd like to hear if you guys have any ideas for, like, where are we allowed to get angry anymore? See, the way you've just framed that question assumes that getting angry is what we want. And we've already said, I agree with Keir, we don't want a politics of, we don't want a politics of kind of emotionlessness. But I also feel like one of the reasons why it's really interesting to think about punk is because

the sort of conclusion I came to in my 20s, like having sort of been a punk and a punk fellow traveller and then living through kind of rave, which was the punk axiom, the anger is good, the anger is productive, the anger is constructive. I couldn't really see any evidence for it actually in reality. Like I couldn't see any real historical examples of a sort of cultural movement or even a political movement that was primarily motivated by anger and outrage, actually having gone anywhere. And I think, I mean, I think one has to say that about punk to some extent. It's true that a lot of the people were older came out of the 60s, but a lot of the people who were younger, you know, people like Julie Burchill, you know, they end up on the kind

of libertarian right or, you know, they end up, you know, they end up sort of Tories in the 80s. I mean, that's partly what anarcho punk was sort of reacting against, actually. It was reacting against the fact that a lot of sort of mainstream punk had just turned out to be a sort of dress rehearsal for the, the Thetterite rejection of everything to do with the 60s. And I don't know what I feel about anger. Intuitively, it makes a certain sense. that the idea is that most we should be motivated by anger and outrage and injustice. But I tend to think, you know, in my lived experience in the history that I know about, I tend to think anger does just tend to be sort of consuming,

that it's sort of wrong to be angry at capitalism, for one thing, because capitalism just does what it does. Being angry at capitalism is like being angry, like a tiger for biting you. That you want to stop it biting you, and you want to do everything you can to stop it biting anyone else. But getting angry at it is just stupid. It implies a kind of moral economy according to which you could say you could imagine it doing anything other than what it does

and I think I always think of that phrase from Che Guevara you know the revolutionary is motivated by feelings of great love and I feel like it doesn't mean we have to love capitalists that we want to or it doesn't mean we have to love capitalism but it is on some level for me

it is purely from kind of love for each other and love for ourselves and love for the world that it's on that basis that we want to oppose everything that tries to you know capture the world and colonise it and destroy it and kill it. And I'm not sure what the place of anger is in that kind of economy of affects. I'm not totally saying I'm against anger. You know, you should never get angry.

But I'm not sure I can really see examples of when actually it ever really helps anything, apart from in a very short term. Okay. So that's really interesting and a really interesting way of putting it. And I think you're absolutely right in terms of talking about anger as being a, the primary motivation for kind of people's actions and politics. I would agree

with that. I would say that I wouldn't want anger to be the basis that people are motivated to try and kind of break through capitalism. And I really like your thing about the tiger, Jeremy. But I think, I guess

what I'm saying there, it is possible and this is kind of the synthesis of hippie, hippiness of a 1960s, I suppose, through to kind of neoliberal, living under neoliberal reality today is kind of, it's possible to like want a future that is based on like love and freedom and is motivated by how we want all of these things and we don't have all of these things and that's kind of the world that we want that also is able to encompass within it the kind of anger that

one has because of the injustices that are that are around us every day. I mean, I'm, but I agree, it can be all consuming. I want to talk about Bullet with Butterfly Wings by the Smashing Pumpkins, which came out in 1995 as part of their album, Melancholy in the Infinite Sadness. It's just, it's such a relief. I find it such a relief and a release to listen to because it's so, it's so, it's so angry and it and it and but the the lyrics despite all my rage I'm still just a rat in a cage is kind of a call to for anti-capitalism to make it self-known anger is one thing right um but exactly what we're talking about is love and hate so let me let me turn it round generally if you're so down on anger and hate what's so good about love

like why would we be interested in love like what is it about what we're talking about when we mean love right what's what's so good about it that's Howard Jones said what is love anyway well heart and negree in empire say love means only that our continuous collaborations bring us joy and they say without this love we are nothing and that's one of my favorite quotes like forever from anything so love is obviously in some sense related to this spinousin idea of joy that we talked about before in relation to collective joy i think in spinoza though isn't so love in the episode on collective joy we define joy in spinoza in terms as like you know the the feeling of increased capacities to affect or be affected by the world because of you to connect with other people

and like in spinoza love is is that feeling but connected to an ex the idea of an external cause right so it's basically you know you meet the same person you feel joy you You know, your repeated encounters and feelings of joy means you start to associate joy with that person. Or a political leader, right? That's the, you know, or, or, you know, some sort of idea of a nation or something, right? Or, you know, some sort of political experience, perhaps a football match between national teams. And then that feeling of joy comes created, connects to a football team and then perhaps connected to a nation.

Do you know what I mean? And like, hate, no, but hate is the, it's just the opposite. it's like it's the association of sadness with it with the idea of an external cause right so yeah you basically um you know you get to hate things which you think diminish your connectedness with the world or diminish your ability to affect the world or to be affected by the world you know you come to hate what you think is causing that do you know what I mean I think it's really interesting if you think about it in that way um because there's a lot that can go wrong with love in those terms because you can get you can make a mistake about what you can make a mistake about

what's causing you sadness and what's causing you joy do you know what I mean I have an alternative thesis which is an alternative frame let's say that I have an alternative frame because I'm an amateur aromatherapist for me the big difference between joy and love is that joy is like you know the bergamot or eucalyptus or one of the top notes in an olfactory scale and what do I mean by that? I mean that it is

as we I think we touched on this in episode three it's like it's here now and then it's gone it's not something that will stay with you it might be associated with the collectivity like the other the experience you have a memory of it

but it necessarily isn't something which lingers and I think that's the opposite of love even though they come from the same family and obviously are related love is the kind of like the patchouly of emotions as is hate like it linger it lingers with you it's like a bottom bottom note you it's so you it might associate it with all of these different feelings but i think love love sits in you in the same way that hate kind of sits it sits with you and it can be all encompassing um in a way that i

think joy doesn't have is not one of joy's attributes and I think why I'm more more inclined to chase joy than I am to chase love. I quite like that idea of love is

love is is that the lingering scent of joy because joy is fleeting but you know you use you know you sort of like sit with that emotion by linking it with something with an external cause which just caused that joy. We talked a little bit about rave and this kind of the experience of

you know, rave as a sort of experience of somewhat contentless love, you know, love for the crowd, love for, love for, you know, the people around you, so love for everything. I still think for me that the greatest, you know, the classic evocation of that is the source, Candidstatin version of You Got the Love from 1991, which is still, you know, great sort of dance law anthem. But Of course, really interestingly, it's really interesting the way that is heard and experienced by crowds, because like so many, like a lot of even sort of disco and soul songs, technically the lyrics are just, you know, Christian. You know, the person who's being addressed in the song is God, you know, according to a very Christian theology. That's not how you experience it when you hear it on the dance score.

You hear it as, you hear it as an experience. Indeed, you hear it as an expression of solidarity. The you who've got the love is all the people around you. And then, you know, the thing that you have to be seen through is to some extent the struggle of daily life, you know, to some extent the struggle of, you know, antagonism and conflict that we all have to engage in. Let's talk about the left. Like my relationship to the left, like it's love and hate all of the time. Like it takes up so much of my like internal emotional mechanisms because from one day to the next, it's like I hate the left. What is the left doing? Why am I even doing this? Can I go and find another experience of life somewhere else? This is terrible. I'm so disappointed in the left.

And then the next day, it's like, I love the left. Like, the left is everything to me. The left is like my family. The left is my partner. This is the only place that I feel at home. And it's all of these incredibly strong emotions. Like, I never feel like indifferent about the left. And it's always kind of lingering.

I think part of my kind of ideal for myself, and I do manage to achieve this quite a lot of the time is to be out of that cycle of like loving the left and hating the left loving things and hating things one day to the next is to be a bit in the sort of position of what the Buddhists call equanimity just sort of accepting

you know that is just you know that things are imperfect they'll be exciting one day they'll be disappointing the next day and yet to be able to maintain that position while also being implacable in my antagonism to capitalism and the fact that it makes it very difficult for me to achieve that state

and it makes it even more difficult for people who are less privileged to me in lots of ways to achieve that state and I think I mean for me that's how that question that that notion of a sort of universal love sort of relates to notions of sort of political conflict and political antagonism that I think that I do

want to cultivate universal love I think it's quite good I think it's sort of I don't think it's like a possible it has a permanent state unless you're unless you are just a fully enlightened being or something. But I also think that the thing that makes it more difficult for people to achieve, all of us to achieve, like most of the time is, you know, at the moment, in the present moment in history, is capitalism. So I think you can be both basically down with that,

down with like cosmic love and, you know, and also, you know, implacably opposed to capital. I think, for me, if that is what sort of acid communism means in some sense, actually, I think it probably, for me, It does sort of mean that, I think. Yeah, the acid is love and the communism is not hate, but the inherent antagonism of capital, basically. Capitalism is inherently antagonistic, right?

It involves inherently antagonistic relationships. In fact, you know, the interests of workers are, you know, the opposite of the interests of capital, other people who operate on behalf of capital, which is, you know, those are antagonistic. So one of the ways in which acid communism must work out is how does that recognition of, you know, infinite relationality, basically,

that we're all part of the, part of, you know, that the boundaries between us are sort of like, you know, much less stable than we might think, et cetera, you know, and that feeling of connectedness to everything and love for everybody and everything. How do we stop that from just obscuring their inherent antagonisms in society. And there's lots of, you know, I'm going to do this bit, actually. So there's this great bit in Peter Shapiro's book about disco, the turn the beat around, right? And he talks about

this moment in soul music in early 70s, where they start talking, like these soul songs start talking critically about smiling faces. And Shapiro's got in mind, you know, the smiley face, the smiley face symbol, which is now an emoji. And that's, sort of, that becomes this really big thing in 1970 where it gets released on these pin badges with the slogan Have a Nice Day, which is interesting. Have a nice day.

And it sort of stands to represent that sort of, you know, the universal cosmic love being turned into just, you know, undifferentiated positivity, right? And so Shapiro starts saying, well, look, you know, what, we could also link that in terms of soul music

to, you know, the playing out of the sort of certain sort of like wing of the civil rights movement, the black civil rights movement in America, which is sort of based on a Christian idea of like universal love. Do you know what I mean? And so he starts talking about these songs, we start problematizing that and there's a number of songs backstabbers by the OJs, etc. But the best example is probably, I'll take you there by their staple singers, right?

which uh because the first lines of that are i know a place ain't nobody crying ain't nobody worried ain't no smiling faces lying to the races right so it's sort of in that utopian um drive of of soul you know we're going to get to the promised land you know um you know people get ready there's a train coming and we're everybody's going to get on board you don't need any tickets everybody can can get on board this train to the promised land etc um but it's sort of saying you know but it's saying there's a critique in that in that sort of utopianism it's a critique of at the moment

you know you've got all of this smiling faces positivity which hides the fact that there's conflict and antagonism and like a lot of that is around race do you know what I mean well that's it's really good point actually

and it links to some of what we talked about already because that kind of experience that people who come through you know the peace movement and the hippie movement in Britain and then found themselves confronting factorism in the 80s. I mean, to some extent, they were just going through in a rather lower key way

the experience that people had been through the civil rights movement had gone through, where the civil rights movement had been able to achieve quite significant political successes by the mid-60s, but then it came up against the limit. And the limit came at precisely the moment when Martin Luther King starts saying, and he wants to organise across a multiracial,

poor campaign. They called it the poor people's campaign. They want to build a campaign for class solidarity and class consciousness. And, you know, he doesn't live. And he starts saying this and he actually, I mean, it's true. And he's saying to his closest friends, they're going to shoot me for saying this. I'm not going to live, I'm not going to live a year if I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. And it's true. He gets shot. And so they're up against, and like the radicalisation of black power, the radicalisation of the black movement, really is a direct response to that recognition that a recognition that they've come up against the limits

of what they can achieve through a non-antagonistic politics a really important, you know, musical discourse in the 70s and 80s which, you know, appeals a lot to notions of love is obviously reggae and Rastafari. It has this language which seems to somehow evoke both antagonism and the kind of notion of universal love and solidarity. So, you know, one love, you know, like as in sort of Bob Marley's one love and other songs is the one of the great slogans of Rastafarian reggae. And it

precisely implies the notion of universal love and solidarity. But reggae also has a language of antagonism. You know, it has a name for the thing, you know, which we are in struggle against, which is, you know, the capitalist state, which is Babylon. Babylon, exactly. Max Romeo, socialism is love. I mean, that is great. That is the reggae explicit socialist anthem. This is the moment in the mid-70s when reggae and Rastafari culture in Jamaica is explicitly associated with Michael Manley's project to try to build a kind of democratic socialism in Jamaica, which is ultimately defeated by American imperialism, like so much helps in the 70s and early 80s. In some ways, the question we were sort of gesturing towards is like,

well, how should we feel about the things we are opposed, that we are opposed to? And how how should we feel about even the people who are responsible for them? Like, do we, like, how do I, you know, how do I feel about, you know, Jeff Bezos? Like, do I hate him? I don't know if I do. I don't know if I, like, and this is one of those things I really go back and forth over the years about, like I remember, you know, I was brought up with a sort of, sort of, sort of, Quaker influence, but also actually sort of anarchist influence,

kind of old, very, very old school, like early 20th century anarchist, kind of influence. kind of influenced notion indeed of universal love that you even and it's even their remarks actually sometimes like we pity the bourgeois you know we want to emancipate the bourgeois from their kind of bourgeoisness like that's but i remember you know having a conversation about this with my girlfriend when i sort of at 19 and saying well i think you should sort of try to love everybody and she said why like i don't love thatcher a hater like the war she's done i was just say oh yeah you're right actually that is the tester isn't it that's the test of your universal love i know it is i find it almost It's impossible not just to say, to say, I don't hate that.

It's almost impossible. But it's still, it's to what extent that hate is a position or to what extent that consumes you? And I think this goes back to what you were saying before, Jeremy, about like, you know, both of you were talking about this, actually. It's like when I'm hating Thatcher, like, I don't know, actually, if I agree with you, Jeremy, now I'm thinking about it. Like, I think I hate capitalism more than I hate Thatcher.

I think so. I mean, in terms of an accurate. In terms of an active emotion. Like, I hate, I hate Thatcher, but I don't, it doesn't consume me. Maybe because, like, Thatcher's a figure of the past. What I think consumes me more is, like, the injustices that I see every day in terms of, like, when people treat each other in a shit way, that I find that, that brings up a lot stronger emotion for me. But, yeah, so, but, so, like, hate is, is an attachment to something. It's like an obsession with something.

but actually we don't want to be attached to these things that we hate we want to break that attachment which would mean losing your hatred moving beyond it some way do you know what I mean like yeah so that's probably who said this

our greatest revenge will be by bringing ourselves to happiness I think it might be in William Morris and he was talking about after Peterloo and he was saying like let's not talk about vengeance and hate like what the real you know the real vengeance is by making, is by bringing ourselves to happiness and making these forces that we hate irrelevant. Do you know what I mean? I always think of that in terms of like, like if Thatcher was

still alive, you know, the best revenge would be to make her and her ideas completely irrelevant to the world and something we don't have to think about or bother about. And that's the same with capital, isn't it? It's a relationship. Capital is a relation we want to escape from. We want to make it irrelevant. We want to get it out of our lives. You know what I mean? And if you hate something, you can't do that because you obsess about it. But that's the bypass mechanism. That makes sense, but it's a bypass mechanism which doesn't take into consideration the reality of that system in terms of how it manifests itself on your like material life day to day and how it affects other people.

I think it would be great for us. And I think part of this, the acid carbonism project, we're trying to create the spaces where people can see themselves and other people and their relationships and the possibilities. differently. And I do think that's really important, but I'm not sure that we've answered the question. I'm not sure we're able to answer it in this podcast of how that relates to, like, the bypass system would relate to justice. Because that's up to be bypassed, though, because that brings us just back again to this, you know, can you drop out sort of thing? Exactly. It's like, basically, the real question is this, right? Can you have a politics

which includes antagonism, which isn't based on hate? Or perhaps you can use the politics of but, like, how'd then you escape from it? Do you know what I mean? I think you're right. You're exactly right. I think we have come at a good formula. We want a politics which is antagonistic, but which doesn't, but isn't based on hatred.

I think that's right. I mean, I think, you know, I found all that stuff about people celebrating when Thatcher died. I found that personally really depressing because I thought, well, if you think it was Thatcher who did all that to us, then you really don't understand the situation. If you think Thatcher was anything but an agent

of personal forces and class relations and you don't understand that that's the thing to which we have to fight against then you're just trapped in a kind of bourgeois conception of history so but I think oh I don't know I don't know I don't know that is a problem because you People have names and addresses man

I think it's a really important point Jeremy is that like you know you don't have to be a bad person to do bad things and you just have to follow the logic of capital Right. Mark talks about it in capital. I can't remember who he caught Mr. Moneybags or whatever. It doesn't have to be, you know, he can be, you can go to church on Sunday and be the most kind person. But, you know, he, if he's going to, if his business is going to survive, he has to be, you know, he has to act in a horrible, ruthless, inhuman way. But the problem with that is, you know, how do you make a motivational politics around something which is so intangible, which is abstract, do you know what I mean? So the tendency is to personalise it. You're right. And Nadia, you're completely right. People have names and address. I mean, I've been really critical of those people who want to say, oh, like, you can't

you can never concretize. Like, you know, I mentioned Jeff Bezos, and I think you've got to talk about Jeff Bezos. I think we cannot, you're right. We want to be not contained with hatred by him. I think we want to feel quite cold towards him, actually. I don't think we have to really love him. I like that coldness, yeah. Yeah, we don't get to be cold, but we want to be absolutely implacable, you know,

determination to take everything away from it that he's accumulated, like on the basis of accumulation. We want to be implacable than that and implacable in our resilient determination to do that and our recognition that there is nothing we cannot negotiate with him. He will do everything in his power to stop us and we have to do everything in our power to stop him

without that turning into a personalised relation of hatred. We want a cold implacable love. Yeah, that's good, that is good actually. Right, that sounds like a basis of a song. So we've got the lyrics. This show is brought to you by Navarra Media. To find articles, videos and more audio content like this, head to navaramedia.com. If you particularly enjoyed this podcast and would encourage others to listen

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