ACFM - ACFM Trip 47: Disruption

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Disruption is a byword for success in the tech industry, but when it affects people’s daily routines – say, when JSO activists are slow-marching down a road – it becomes nothing short of criminal. On this Trip, Jem, Nadia and Keir unpack the political uses and abuses of disruption and the ‘creative destruction’ inherent to capitalism. […]

Hello, and welcome to Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kea Milbin, and I've joined as usual by my very good friend Nadia Idle. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're discussing disruption. Why are we discussing disruption this month? Nadia?

Context-wise, obviously it's bonfire night and the US elections, both disruptive in different ways in November. But I think I'm mostly interested in disruption in the sense of how it interplays with people's expectations or needs or wants or desires. in everyday life. And I guess what I mean by that is the perception that the worst thing that can possibly happen to, you know, somebody's day or to somebody's experience of transport as they go about commuting to work or in terms of like what is expected as part of their day or their life, this idea that the worst thing and the most agitating thing, the most frustrating thing,

the thing that causes the most anger in people is that it can be disrupted, I think, is a really interesting idea and one to be contextualised. Yeah, the irritation around disruption, I guess, is a way to think about it. And what about you, Jeremy? Well, I really wanted to explore this relationship or non-relationship between the idea of disruption and a disruptive entrepreneurial innovation is this extremely positive term in the discourse of Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley so of economics are on the one hand

and on the other hand the idea that somehow causing disruption in the context of disruptive protest is like the worst thing you can possibly do hence extremely stiff jail sentences being handed out

for people protesting against the carbon capitalism in Britain in the past few weeks and months and I think the whole concept of disruption and what's at stake in these positive and negative accounts of it really needs unpacking quite urgently. Yeah, when I was thinking about disruption, I had two images in my head, which have been in the

news recently concerning disruption. The first one is the images from Valencia. So as we record now that this week there's been these absolutely horrific scenes of flash flooding. Flash flooding actually across southern and eastern Spain, but particularly in Valencia, there's just these torrential rains have hit basically like a year's worth of rain in a few hours and there's just been these huge flash floods and like some of the images are totally apocalyptic there's this image that's been going around the internet of cars piled up in a high street it's like 40 50 60 cars piled up altogether just been washed there smashed to pieces by this huge flood and then I saw footage yesterday of some people who were trapped in a supermarket they were just shopping and it came so

quickly and there's water up to their chests and they're trying to smash through the window of the supermarket with a fire extinguisher because they just don't know how high this water's going to go. It's like a scene out of a disaster movie or something like that. 95 people died in those floods this week so far. That number's going to go up quite a lot, I think. There's that one image of like disruption caused by climate change. It's quite difficult to say that. But basically it's, You know, all the predictions are these extreme weather events will increase in frequency and increasing ferocity because of climate change. So you've got that image of disruption on one hand.

And then what Jen mentioned earlier, a couple of weeks ago, as we record now, two protesters got sent to jail for throwing soup on the glass that protected Van Gogh's sunflowers. Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, two young climate activists, They did this back in 2022, and they just got sent to jail. Well, Phoebe got sent to jail for two years, three months, and Anna got sent to jail for 20 months. What they were charged with was criminal damage.

Like, there was no criminal damage to the Van Gogh. That was protected by a sheet of glass, of course. There was some damage done to the frame. The usual sentence for that would be something like perhaps a small fine, perhaps a community order where you have to do work in a community for 100 hours or something like that, perhaps a suspended sentence. And instead, they were sent to jail for like these really long sentences. We also saw Roger Hallam sent to jail for five years for conspiracy to cause a traffic jam.

So conspiracy to cause some sort of disruption. And so one of their plans was to cause disruption on the M25 motorway. And so you could have these two images, these huge, this pile of cars smashed to pieces by climate change. And you could put that next to the idea of a traffic jam going around, of course. 95 people didn't die in a traffic jam. Those two images that sort of set up, sets me up because the other thing that goes along with that is if you complain, if you say, look, these sentences, they're completely out of whack with the rest of the criminal justice system in the UK. You know, you just get these bizarre things where you can, you get more time

for conspiracy to cause a traffic jam than you do for trying to burn down a hotel full of people. But if you complain about that on social media, people get real anger. People really, really furious, loads of messages back. You know, you see these footage of, like, people protesting by sitting in front of traffic and then getting people getting out and beating them and drag them around, etc., etc. You don't get that with climate disasters. There doesn't seem to be that level of anger, basically. That's something we need to explore, because if you look at it objectively,

what is common sense in our society stops making sense, becomes like, you know, it's hard to just look at it objectively and say, well, I can understand that. like there's a sense of unreality that is across the whole of our society. In a way, that's what provokes me to want to think about disruption. But before we get to that, I just want to do some parish notices. One, we have a sort of mail out, a newsletter that goes out once a month. You should sign up to that because we always create a little bit of an exciting content for that, exclusive content.

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We recommend you do. And you can do that by going to navara.media forward slash support. If we're talking about disruption, we should probably play some punk, I think. And, you know, the 1976 is seen as this moment where the music industry is disrupted by the revolution of punk. If we're going to play some punk, we could play the disruptors who were a punk band from Norwich,

who later became sort of like an arco-punk. And out of their songs, we could probably play Shelters for the Rich, which is from 1982. So what do we think is going on This is incredibly intense A hatred of disruption It's especially perceived disruption of transport networks

Actually, isn't it? Trains, roads, traffic more than anything else It makes people absolutely furious And there's a whole body of opinion in the country who it seems to think it is basically legitimate to hand out prison sentences, you know, for inconveniencing, I mean, honestly a few hundred people in traffic, equivalent to what you would get for extremely violent crimes

against people's bodies. I was reading the sentencing comments that the judge sort of passes his sentence and he makes some sort of justifications of his sentencing. It's a judge called Judge Heel. and he also sentenced Phoebe and Anna he also sentenced Roger Hallam. He's a real fanatic, basically. He's the person that they send these cases to

because they know he's going to dish out preposterous sentences. But his actual sentencing comments are really interesting because in a way you've got like, well, where did these come from? What sort of gymnastics, what intellectual gymnastics do you have to go through in order to justify two years, three months in jail for causing very much, mine a criminal damage to a frame. And he said this about that. He said, this is criminal damage.

So the normal sentence would be perhaps a suspended sentence, perhaps a bit of community work or something like that. But he said, but this, this time he says, your harm is at category one, which means it is of extreme harm to society, he says. I reject any suggestion that your offending can properly be described as peaceful or nonviolent. Throwing the contents of a tin of soup in somebody's face. would not be a peaceful act.

And there's nothing peaceful about throwing the contents of tins of soup at paintings in an art gallery with members of the public, including children, present. I mean, that is just fucking stupid. That's like, that is not a logical sentence where you form something and follow on from.

That's just fucking insane. I'm going to qualify this by saying, I look at what he's saying from the position of what has become and understood as, I would say, between quotation marks, because of the hegemonic daily male style discourse, common sense, I think that is in line with the common sense. Of course, it's not a violent, it's not a violent act. Of course it isn't. But the Van Gogh Sunflowers is like one of the most important paintings in the entire world. And so throwing a can of soup at it

is like an affront, is like an affront on several levels. It's like the audacity of it, I think, which then becomes translated in that statement into violence as a translation from what he's trying to say, which is that this is ridiculous and silly. He's not saying it's silly, Nadia. He's not saying it's silly. He's saying that if I threw soup into somebody's face,

that would be violence. And if you throw soup at an inanimate object, that's also violence. I'm not saying his defensible argument. I'm trying to analyse and understand how a statement like that sits in the current discourse and how it would be understood. Yeah, but we shouldn't give him that much credit. We shouldn't give him any credit at all. He's not making an argument that he believes. He doesn't believe this. He had to define their action as violent and not non-violent in order to rule out a whole series of things. Then he would have to actually take into account in his sentencing, such as proportionality, basically.

So you could have a defense which say, I did cause criminal damage, but of course by doing that criminal damage, I was trying to prevent the greater criminal damage and loss of life that you see in Valencia, for instance, right? He ruled all that out how he said that you're not allowed to make those sorts of sort of defense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I get that. picking, what I'm picking at here is that if this was a painting and they did damage the actual painting. So if you damage Mona Lisa or if you damage Van Gogh, that will be viewed by the public as like a massive criminal, like a bit of criminal damage. Like I get that it's not violent. I'm not defending him, but I'm saying trying to understand how those kind of words will be translated in the current hegemonic discourse is important and it's actually what I'm interested in. I understand that the point you're going to make is that this is, like, this is ridiculous. But, you know, I don't think, I think an act like that, like the audacity of

it is, is going to be seen by most people as like, yeah, those people should, you know, be hung in a square, not by most people, but by a lot of people in the current climate that we live in. One of his other statements, this judge, was that, you know, if it wasn't for that inch of glass, you could have damaged a painting. That was the dumbest thing. Like, yeah, of course. If it wasn't for that like five foot of space, I would have run over that person on the pavement when I drove down the road, did they? It's almost not an argument, isn't it? It's just he's saying some things, like you said. He's saying some things to that it gets categorized in one way or another, which in a sense is corrupt. Well, yeah, I think we're witnessing one of our favorite themes, which is just the degeneration of liberalism, really. The liberalism just can't sustain itself anymore as an ethical, political project.

liberalism is supposed to be the sort of basis of the law and to some extent there is still this appeal to the sort of most capitalistic strand of liberal political and legal theory going back to people like John Locke which historically basically says that the role of law is to protect people's rights in their property and therefore it's really violence against property which is the worst kind of violence so to the extent that you are you can be seen as in violation of property rights somehow. It's as bad as any other kind of violation, including physical violence against somebody's body. Partly what is going on there is this appeal to that kind of language. But I think as Keir's pointing out, even on its own terms, that really doesn't

hang together as a coherent argument in this context. It really doesn't. The only basis on which the sentence makes any sense is if you take a view, which is a conservative view, really, a liberal view, that basically anyone who violates some established accepted norms of behaviour has more or less completely voluntarily given up their rights to any sort of normal protections or freedoms within the law. That's the implicit understanding of what's going on here, that basically like going throwing soup at a painting in a gallery is just so much not the kind of thing that you do you're supposed to be, that you would normally do, that by doing it, simply opened yourself to any level of punishment that the court can be bothered to apply to it.

That's what I kind of mean. It's like, that's why I'm talking about the audacity of it. It's like, I actually think that there is a connection between like trying to infantilize people who do this sort of thing while also giving them the harshest sentences. Like, I don't think those things are unrelated. It's a certain categorization and understanding of like what an adult is, which is that being an adult is like making arguments. that are not arguments, like being corrupt, like all of those things are okay for like being this new conception under late neoliberalism of what a citizen is or what, you know, like a proper person is, but being disruptive, and we'll get to the exception of this when we talk about Silicon Valley, but like being disruptive or like doing something that is like creatively disruptive is like there's so much anger and disdain about it because it makes what the judge said acceptable

or the non-argument that he makes is almost like a defence in itself because it's creating rhetoric which then becomes pumped out by right-wing media or whatever. There's some interesting going on, isn't there? Because you're right, Nadia, like, you know, the choice of like throwing it over the sunflowers was to provoke that sort of, oh my God, what are they doing? This is a national treasure, etc. Before you get to realise that it's actually just protected by glass, of course. And so they're going for that.

The protesters must be going for that. they must be trying to trigger that. They were probably expecting when you get to a court of law and you have to examine these things rather than just be your first shocked reaction when you have to say, actually, Judge, no, there is a bit of glass there, you know. You have to take that into account.

They were probably expecting the rule of law to take place and that initial shock to be undone. But the initial shock of like what they were presenting as the destruction of sunflowers, you know, that was part of their motivation, wasn't it? I think, you know, we should talk about what might motivate these sorts of acts. But the thing I wanted to talk about was, I think Jem's right. You know, you could see this as

part of a sort of rollback of the rule of law, basically. You can also, you could make that argument around, you know, around Gaza, etc., where the US is obviously trying to undo the idea of an international rules-based system in some sort of way. The justifications for like Israel's genocide in Gaza, which America pays like 73% of so far. They've paid 73% at the cost by supplying arms, et cetera, et cetera. There's not even a potential sort of like a legal defense of any of this or some sort of like legalistic logical defense of any of this. It's just we can do it.

What the fuck are you going to do about it? It's basically the U.S. position now, basically. That is a change from the era of neoliberal globalization where power, the international power was basically done via control over the international rules-based order, basically. Now it's just, let's undo that. Let's just break that up somehow. I think we should play Vossi Bop by Stormsy from 2019,

not only because it includes the line, fuck the government, fuck Boris, but basically it was written as a song because Stormsy was inspired by this trend that was the Vossibop, and he said that it gave him this feeling of the confidence and humor and anarchy and chaos, and he loved that vibe. So this is Vossibop by Stormsy. La. My brothers don't die, we just Vossi Bop. I tell you got to link me at the coffee shop. Getting freaky in the sheets, we're taking body shots. Then I finish with just to top it off.

My brothers don't die, we just Rossiebock. I tell you got to link me at the coffee shop. Getting freaky in the sheets We're taking body shots Then I finish with her face With just the top of it off Hey You ain't got a clue Let's be honest

I had a couple seas I made a forest I put in the work And take the profit Looking at my girl That what goddess I mean there's something In what Nadi was saying

About the infantilisation Of the whole idea of politics Really Just any action You know Yeah Any, well any To exercise political agency

And any kind of attempt to exercise agency in a way which isn't just reproducing social norms and reproducing existing social relationships. That is one aspect of our old friend capitalist realism. It's also worth noting it's something I'm always mentioning to students. I mean, historically, if you want to justify massively oppressing a set of people, then what you do rhetorically is you define them as children. That was really, really important to the discourse of slavery. It was really important. The racist discourse justifying slavery, it occasionally strayed into, well, they're not even really human, these people.

But basically, no one could ever buy that, because everyone can see the basic difference in humans and other animals is humans have language, and these people clearly have language. So even, like, proper racists really struggled to convince anyone of that one. But so their line would be, well, yeah, okay, they are human, but they're children. They're like children. So it's right for us to look after them and discipline them and put them to work and make them. and productive because otherwise they're just not going to do anything useful. And because one of the variation, I mean, one of the things that doesn't really vary between human cultures is that all human cultures make some distinction between a child and an adult.

However, people categorize people who are going to gender or sexuality or social class or caste and whatever the age or whatever the meaning of shifting from child to adult, there's no known human culture that doesn't differentiate between adults and children and doesn't extend certain protections to children and certain rights. rights to adults. Also, I think what that means is when you get to the point where people are resorting to infantilising the others in order to justify oppressing them or marginalising them or not listening to them, that usually means there isn't an argument, basically. They don't really have any logical basis. They're just asserting a power relationship. Yeah. And I think,

but I think that's the whole point is that needing to make an argument in order to justify an action or an exertion of power is like basically being done away with anyway. I mean, and that goes back to your point about, you know, like the collapse of liberalism, which used to be, you know, all about like institutions and like legal precedents and like all of these things that supposedly underpins some kind of democracy. In effect, when you, like you said, when you infantilize people, you're, you know, you're justifying some kind of like authority or subjugation based on the fact that you are an adult and they are a child, like full stop.

not on the basis of any kind of logic, not on the basis of, like, what this is trying to achieve, not on the basis of, like, looking at the information, which, you know, and the ironic thing is, like, these are supposedly, like, the things that, like, Britain is known for, is that, like, you'd critique all of, like, you know, the concept of Britain and the UK on all sorts of different other things, but, you know, like, things ran on time, like, there's this legal structure, like, there are these processes, like, this is the point of bureaucracy and why bureaucracy works. But then if you get to a point where like you really, it's kind of like a bit of a like kangaroo court, really. And what does it mean about levels of quote unquote

anarchy? Well, I would just say, I mean, sort of as an aside, I think it's a point we made before, but it is one of those ironies of British public life that people think that part of the rhetoric of British public life is this idea that, for example, the rule of law is some like uniquely British tradition that we exported to the rest of the world. And it's just total nonsense. Like it's based on kind of almost totally fictional and ethnocentric kind of imperial histories from the 19th centuries. It's not based on anything. And basically the opposite is true. Britain has resisted the turn to constitutional, properly constitutional government, which characterised basically post-enlightenment ideas about liberal democracy in places like

the United States and France and basically everywhere else in the world. So Britain is one of the few countries in the world that considers itself a liberal democracy but doesn't have a written constitution it doesn't have a set of fundamental rules which are more difficult to change than any other normal laws are the contrary principle which does inform the british constitution such as it is is parliamentary sovereignty but the point is parliamentary sovereignty means that there is no law which is above like the contingent decisions of parliament on a week by week basis so any law can be changed by parliament at any time, no matter what its consequences. And I would see all that as consistent with the fact that, for example, as we've said on the show before, just within British

political culture, even on the left, really, there's a really, really weak commitment to the idea of freedom of speech. I mean, people throw the term freedom of speech around, but no one believes in it. Like, no one doesn't want to ban the people they really disagree with from, like, voicing their opinions in public. Like, you know, on the left, you're considering, a weak-willed liberal, if you don't want, like, every single person, you know, with a right-wing or racist opinions to be completely deplatformed by the state. One of the things that Judge Heer, the pro-climate change hanging Judge Judge Here made when he was sentencing the Sunflowers protesters, he started talking about, like, how arrogant

that you are imposing your views on the rest of the population. And that's how something that comes up again when you see, like, well, how dare you impose your views by sitting down and disrupting the traffic in some sort of way. Well, if we unpack Judge Heer's statement there, he's got this really solipsistic, so almost like relativistic thing is that we've all got our own values, etc. We've all got our own beliefs. We can't impose them on anybody else, basically,

but from Higand because he's a judge. In that way, like, I think that does link to that rollback of the rule of law and democracy. In some ways, it links to the fact that, like, capitalism is very hard to legitimize now. It's like the legitimacy of the rule of capitalism is incredibly thin because it can't provide the increasing in living standards. It is heading towards like 3.1 degree increase in warming above pre-industrial levels is what came out. That's where we're heading at the moment. That's the most likely outcome by the end of the century.

With the moment it's 1.3 degrees above pre-industrial levels. That is pretty catastrophic. we don't know whether human civilisation can survive after that. So the legitimations for things to carry on the way they are incredibly thin, basically.

And so I think what you're seeing with like this reaction of how dare you impose your views on it is it's like that anti-democratic thing. You know, it's not that the law could be something that could be debated in a variety of means, basically, which is always the sort of like

liberal justification of civil disobedience is that the democracy is like not perfect. Therefore, you know, there are power imbalances therefore, you can have civil disobedience to correct those sorts of things. But like, and the judge here is sort of conception, there is no debate, there is no discussion, basically. We all have our own ways of behaving. And it's because I think power is ceasing to operate at the level of like discourse to such a degree. And it's like power is, you know,

we have the power with the control of infrastructure. What I say, as a judge, you know, is going to be backed up by that police officer over there who's got trenching in his pocket. Well, that's too up to a point, but I think you're straying into a post-Hedemone thesis there, which I'm always going to push back again. Oh, my God, and I? Very sorry, Gem. I've crossed the line. In my experience, people are forever announcing that the capital or the state or those in power no longer need to exercise any kind of persuasive power. They have returned to the brute force of like the pre-democratic epoch. We've been being told that by someone, like, every, a couple of years like all my professional life. And my response to that is, well, no, not really. That's not really right. Because if you actually analyze what's going on in the case of the judge here situation, I would say it was just a transparently nonsensical judgment. And the reason he got

away with it and the reason he was allowed to make that judgment was because a general climate of sympathy for sentiments and statements of that nature had been created precisely by the kind of general backlash against just up oil and some of the rather disruptive activities. And so the real thing we have to think about was, well, why wasn't there like a massive public outcry

against the absolutely draconian sentence against Hallam and people, and some of those people, just a few months previously? And that is partly because there is, there is this not, I don't think it's a clear majority, but there is a strategically significant section of the public who

genuinely do experience, is visceral distaste for anything that they can categorize as disruption. And so I think what's going on in that here judgment, which your analysis of here is, I think it's completely right. What's going on in that here judgment is, I mean, it is just an almost random, like, you know, internally incoherent, rhetorical set of appeals to a sort of general vibe, basically. But that general vibe is disruption is bad. Anyone who does public disruption is bad, they're arrogant, they're doing something wrong just by doing it and the justice of their cause or their right to freedom of expression can't possibly legitimate it. And all of that, I think, was an effect of the much more

sort of genuinely persuasive rhetoric for some sections of the public that was generated around those other judgments and has been generated around these anti-protester judgments over the past three years. And that brings us back to the question, I think, well, what is actually going on? What is going on in that there's this section of the public who are so enraged by the thought that they or anyone who might have to sit in traffic for 20 minutes longer than they otherwise would have done, that they're willing to see people subjected to completely draconian by historic or international standards, prison sentences, as a sort of retaliation for that. And one way of framing this question that we thought of when we were preparing the episode was, is it there? the case that people are just so infantilized now by their own experience of consumer capitalism? You know, people are just little babies. They just can't stand anything like getting in the way

of their friction-free day. Or is it the case that actually people are so frustrated by the perpetual inconvenience of living in a society and an advanced capitalist society in which basic social institutions, infrastructure, political institutions are all just completely falling apart, that they are sort of on the brink of rage, like nearly all the time, and that what they're experiencing when somebody like just stop oil, you know, stops the traffic for a bit. What they're experiencing is this is just the last straw. This is just one more thing making my life harder, or my life is already incredibly hard. And I have no sense of agency, no sense of any ability to control my life or make it better.

And therefore, and here is just one more thing from a bunch of people who probably should know better than to just make my life even more difficult when climate change is clearly not my fault anyway. Which of those things is it? That's the question. Or is it both in a way? My quick response would be, it's the latter not the former. I don't think they're unrelated, those things.

I think it was a really nice description you made there, Jeremy, of like the internal, like emotional and daily experience of people, which harks back to the point of like why I wanted to talk about this subject in the first place. To try and get to understand why you've got this such, what seems to be this rising rage when yet again, I think this is how people are experiencing, I am being disrupted. So I think there's several things going on there. Like one, it's a kind of individuated experience.

So it's not like people are experiencing any kind of like, collectivist understanding, both in terms of their own experience or like who this person is and what they're doing. And that links to my second point, which is about solidarity. Like what happens when solidarity becomes like the furthest possible experience or like way of relating that you could possibly have at that very given moment, as in what I'm seeing is that solidarity becomes like so remote at those moments because people are unable to put themselves in the shoes of those people and say, well, actually, why? To ask the question, say, like, why is somebody trying to do this?

There must be some kind of reasoning behind it for me to even arrive at a point of, like, disagreement at a cognitive level. But what we're saying is that's not what's happening, right? That's what we're observing. It's not like people are saying, oh, hang in a minute, people are trying to do something here. It's inconvenient for me, but let me try and understand why. It's like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing, I think, at this stage.

And this is why I think your latter argument is the one that makes sense, Jeremy, even though I think it's related to the former, is that people are experiencing life on this kind of high cortisol level, where, you know, like, as you said, it's just one thing after another and like nothing works. And people are putting hours and hours and hours of labor, like, just to get basic things working. And, you know, human beings react to other human beings. We talked about this on the cosmic right episode, being able to pin responsibility and agency for like your shit life onto actual humans is a much easier thing than

to say it's the system or it's climate change with these very, very abstract concepts. So at that level, when with a person is put in front of you, acting in a kind of like creative and, you know, disruptive as in like disrupting your idea of what a commute is, disrupting your idea of what your day is supposed to look like, like, you know, like this basically fluffing not the edges of what was previously, what you were trying to create some kind of smooth path where you're having to jump over obstacles anyway. You then have a very kind of visceral reaction to that. And that is what I find super interesting because the next stage for me is like, well, how do you disrupt that in a sense? That's the question. It's like, what is the activist

response or what is the interventionist response? Like to go back to the question we sort of started on. It's like, why do people get furious at protest, climate protesters, but don't get furious at the disruption of climate change? It's because there is a level of distance, isn't there, between the action of humans and the effects of climate change? And people do get angry when they can personalise it and say, that person is causing this disruption to me, basically. So there's definitely that to it. But I think we also, we also have to criticize the, the, the process. protests forms, basically, because in a way what those protest forms are sort of doing, the way that the protesters are sort of addressing the public or the people in the cars, perhaps, if you take a sort of like disruption of traffic, sort of protest, they are being addressed as like the causes. You're the ones who are causing this. And of course, that's not how people feel because they don't feel as though they are causing that, because the distance is too far. And you're right, it's like, you know, the, the distance then to sort of like to say, well, you know, we have to think about structural causes.

Well, that's the sort of thing that we've been trained out of thinking about, basically, to think that there can be sort of like structures that condition the way that we act. That can be as simple as that there's no tax on air fuel, therefore, you know, basically to fly as much cheaper than to get the train, et cetera, these sorts of things. These condition our choices, basically, but we find that harder, harder to see. But of course, like part of the reason that we find that frustration might well be the affect of our time, basically. You know, why that we have these huge, huge stresses. Part of the reason for that is because we're trying to think about all of the problems in our lives as emerging from ourselves,

that we are the causes of the problems in our lives. So I think in addition to all of what you said, Gem, about, like, well, is it, are they angry at being disrupted, or are they just, are we all just overburdened and don't have this sort of like cognitive and physical sort of energy to deal with these sorts of things? I do think we have to put some sort of displaced worry about climate change in there basically as well and like you know

so there's a refusal to be blamed for climate change and that's the sort of thing that leads into sort of climate denialism and also just like real anger about anybody who's saying this is what's going on this is the reality that we're trying to ignore and we're all playing a part in it I mean I think I think the disrupting traffic thing has played itself out in terms of climate change

you know, I think in fact just up on in Extinction Rebellion have caused a lot of difficulties actually in trying to tackle climate change as well as the fact that they've raised awareness we have to take that on into account and really reassess how you act on climate change.

Well, I thought we would play Joe Arrua and the Tricksters disruptive dub for obvious reasons from 2012. Let's hear that. This idea. This idea about frustration being the affect of our time. This is a suggestion being the affect of our time. This is a suggestion I sometimes make that there's something about advanced capitalism produces frustration as a

kind of ubiquitous affair, partly because, you know, my line is always that capitalism has to it works by necessarily sort of potentiating us. Like it gives us all these technologies and these capacities and this ability to organise and talk to each other. And then it has to set up all these kind of channels and blockages to ensure that we don't use all that potential to build democracy and communism that instead we just carry on churning out and consuming commodities endlessly that necessarily produces a sort of high level of frustration a lot of the time because people have a kind of imminent sense of their own potential and now collective potential and have to constantly experience that potential and being unrealized or being blocked in the 90s the

idea of the street party blocking traffic to protest against road building it was partly informed by this idea that, well, if you give people a little taste of collective joy out in the streets, you're disrupting the capitalist spectacle, but you're also making people feel like another world is possible, and partly what you're doing is generating collective joy. I mean, that was always a dubious theory. It depended on a highly sympathetic and highly educated audience, and I think a lot of the people whose traffic got stopped never experienced it that way. But if you're just disrupting traffic and you're not even putting on a street party, If you're just removing from the scene any possibility of collective joy, you're just wanting

everybody to be sort of angry about climate change and to feel responsible for it. Is that really the intention? Isn't the intention about drawing attention to the issue rather than drawing the people who are being disrupted to the issue? I think it's just about getting on the news, isn't it? I mean, my understanding is with a lot of those tactics, it's about stopping something, even an A to B march. You're stopping something because you're occupying space for a specific message or a specific issue, which will always piss a certain number of people off. But the question is, like, whether those tactics,

like what those tactics are serving now. And I'm not necessarily down on those tactics. And I want to give, you know, solidarity to protesters who are trying to take action on everything everywhere. But I think it's also important to have this level of analysis, which we're trying to dig into now, of being like, okay, what is the next stage for this specific issue? I don't know specifically with the Van Gogh, like whether it was about the gallery,

whether it was about the painting, like, what is the message that's coming out? And as someone who's like an experienced activist, but also not knowing about that specific action, like there isn't a direct link where it makes sense to me in a way that going up a tree to stop a motorway being built or, you know, or that tree being removed makes direct sense. whether you agree or you don't agree that the motorway should be created, trying to stop it by physically putting yourself in the space of the dickers, like makes logical sense. Do you see what I mean? The way I've understood the Sunflowers thing is that you're right, there isn't a link between the object and the thing you're trying to portray. So like we've reclaimed the streets.

They weren't always street parties. Sometimes they would stop the traffic, then you'd unload some sofas and a sandpit, etc. The idea was if we stop traffic, if our citizens, weren't dominated by traffic, we could have all this other stuff going on there. Yeah, yeah, exactly, which is what happened in May Day 2000. Like, I don't know if you were there, like, I think we were all there. And, you know, turfing over Parliament Square and then, like, planting things and, like, making it. Yeah, we were all there, yeah. Guerrilla guards.

Yeah, and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And that's different to me, because even, do you see what I mean? Like, whether you agree with it or not, you can see what the point is that's being made. That's not what's going on with the sunflowers, although there was basically a thousand artists of people working in the arts signed a petition saying, look, this action fits well within the tradition of art practice in the 20th century, basically.

You know, lots of famous art was made in this way. You could interpret that as an artistic act. But the way I've always interpreted it was it wasn't that. It was much more of two young people who are trying to deal with the sense of utter and reality about the fact that basically nothing is getting done. There's no reduction in emissions. In fact, remissions last year were 1.3% bigger than the year before.

Emissions aren't going down. We're heading to 3.1 degrees of warming, basically. And so it's that thing of like, but everything carries on, and all the institutions act as though the life we have now is going to be the life we have in the future. If the stock market is priced at such a way that, like, all of the fossil fuel reserves are going to be taken out and burnt, that's what the stock market is based on the valuations of fossil fuels.

companies, it's almost like slapping somebody to get them to wake up in some sort of way. Whether that's effective or not, I'm not sure, but there was some research that came out a couple of weeks ago, which did look at disruptive climate protests and then attitudes, like it linked them chronologically to more people saying that something should be done about climate change. And you could actually have that, which is that people actually hate the protesters, but it does make them snap out of that and think, well, look, someone has to be done, doesn't it? We have to do something, etc. The problem, though, of course, is that you don't need to just build up people who think something should be done. You need actors to do that, and you also

need to be aware of, like, building up the opposition to that, basically, you know, making it more difficult to act, even if people think things should be done. The problem of climate change is not just awareness. That's what climate activism has basically been based on for the last sort of 30 years, years and it's failed. It certainly raised awareness, but it's not got us anywhere towards reducing climate emissions. I've got no evidence for this, but my guess is that the public sentiments are a lot less hostile towards the sunflower protest. Because once it becomes clear to people that they were throwing the soup at the glass, not the painting, there was never any danger to the painting itself. I mean, you can wipe soup off glass in 10 minutes. You know, I think

most people are going to think they're trying to make a political point. You might think it's a bit childish the way they're doing it, but, you know, putting them, sending to the prison for two years seems kind of crazy. Whereas the, I think there's much more genuine antagonism to the traffic disruptions, for example, even though I'm going to say, you know, despite all our criticisms of Hallam and his, in his colleagues and their tactics, I want to reiterate, it's completely barbaric that they've been given such long prison sentences and we should be, or fighting hard to get them out just as a basic principle of

liberal justice. And from my point of view, again, I mean, for my point of view, just on a purely strategic tactical level, for the reasons you have both given, that the traffic disruption, which is completely counterproductive, it doesn't achieve anything. Loses far more support than it gains. But

I wouldn't put the sunflower process in the same category. I mean, it was an attention-seeking media stunt in the grand tradition of attention-seeking media stunts. So I think it does increase support for the cause, while also perhaps increasing hostility to the actors. And the problem is that's not the disruption that's going to bring about change, basically. It makes it harder for things which actually might be harder for situations where disruption actually might be an important

part of it. I, you know, the disruption that comes with a strike in trying to amplify strikes, etc. or the sorts of like sabotage of carbon infrastructure and new building of carbon infrastructure, you know, which people such as Andreas Marm have sort of talked about how do you blow up a pipeline, etc. Now that could form part of a strategy

for trying to deal with climate change, but all of that has been made much, much more harder. In fact, the room of the space for maneuver, the space for protesters are hugely cramped basically by sort of like the sort of extinction rebellion and just up

who didn't follow, they had a different strategy of change than most of the other actors who've been trying to act on climate change and these sorts of things who did do disruption, but we're trying to focus it, trying to focus it and keep people on side, whereas the sort of theory of change that Hallam was talking about was, oh, we only need 3.5% of people to get active and then everything will change.

That's the problem with extinction rebellion, etc. They definitely shouldn't be in jail, and we definitely should be campaigning to get them released, basically. We absolutely need to overturn the anti-protest laws in order to try to rescue some sort of semblance of democracy, basically, in some sort of space upon which people can have some agency to combat this huge agency of people who have capital, basically. One thing we're talking about on this episode is frustration in people's experience or frustration in a capitalist society. Maybe the definitive anthem expressing that sentiment, it's the Rolling Stones in 1965. or satisfaction. It's such a weird and now such a sort of historically interesting phenomenon

because as I always point out to people whenever I play it to them, I mean, this is 1965. This is like to be exactly the age that Mick Jagger was in exactly that year, you are like the luckiest cohort in history. Like not even, never mind generation. Like that exact year cohort is probably the most fortunate in history. They probably still are like now. So what do you moaning about. Still your moaning. Still your moaning about, you know, your sense of frustration. So maybe that stands as evidence that there's something built into the dynamic of capitalism itself. information

so I've looked at all these ways the idea of political disruption is incredibly frowned upon and negatively marked in our public discourse but of course on the other hand the term disruption and the term disruptor are, you know, incredibly positively marked terms in Silicon Valley discourse. And, I mean,

to the point where, in other context, you will hear even mainstream and conservative politicians talk about disruption as obviously a good thing if it's being done by entrepreneurs and technological innovators. I made this a quip about this on Twitter. And I got a tech bro reply guy lecturing me, like, because I didn't understand the theory of disruptive innovation. I do understand it. The theory of disruptive innovation is the idea that significant technical innovation will always have a disruptive effect on established ways of doing things and established market relationships. I do well understand that. It's not a new idea. It's an idea which in my mind, and probably anyone who's familiar with a particular sort of canon of 20th century political economy, it's particularly associated with the ideas of Joseph Schumpeter. Very sort of an interesting figure in the history of political. economy. Is he Austrian Schumpeter? Yeah. Well, I like all those economists.

Joseph Schumpeter is a fascinating figure, very famous for his concept of creative destruction. He says at some point capitalism is a process of creative destruction, which I always find really, really useful for explaining the logic of commodity production to students. What does it

mean for a tree growing in a forest to get turned into the usable and saleable commodity, a chair, which has, in Marxian terms, has use value as a thing you can sit on and exchange value is a thing you can sell. What does it mean? Well, it means the tree has to get destroyed, but also something else has to get created out of it. So creative destruction is really interesting idea of understanding the basic process by which capitalism is always creating things by destroying things. I mean, Schumeter more broadly is a sort of fascinating figure

He's one of these, you know, Austrian economists, like a lot of whom went on to become sort of founding fathers of neoliberalism or even right-wing libertarianism, who sort of in the early 20th century is like looking around, looking with despair upon what seems to be the inevitable victory of socialism and communism. And he has a basically Marxian understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, but like he's not a communist. He doesn't want to live in a socialist society. He thinks that'll be bad. And his great hero, like more than anyone else, else, more than any other, like, proper economists, he's the person who's hero is, like, the entrepreneur. They're much more than, say, Adam Smith, although, you know, the sort of right-wing mythology about Adam Smith is Adam Smith, like, he venerates the entrepreneur. It's really, it's really Schumpeter, you know, for him the hero of modernity, it's like the entrepreneur. He's interesting then, because he's writing from a kind of pro-bourgeur perspective, but his understanding of the basic logic and dynamics of capitalism is pretty much

completely consistent with the Marxian one, which means he doesn't, he doesn't, he, has historically often been read by Marxist and neo-Marxist political economists. So in that sense, there's nothing at all original about this idea that, like, the entrepreneurship is disruptive and disruption is good, and it is basically the engine of progress. And in fact, it's not, that is not an idea that Marx and Engels themselves, you know, disagreed with. The Marx and Engels right from the moment when they're writing the Communist Manifesto in 1848, they are very impressed by the kind of the disruptive and creative power of capitalism. Capitalism's capacity to change the world through the creation of the global market, through the massive transfers

of land and people and things that, well, not really transfers of land, that's supposed transfer of ownership. Transfers of people around different bits of land. And transfers of goods, transfers of energy on massive scales that take place under the auspices of the colonial project and industrialisation. And they see that as sort of necessary to creating a modern world within which socialism might actually become possible. So this idea that capitalism has this fantastic, dislocatory, innovative, disruptive force is not a new idea. And it's not a new idea that that's something that ought to be sort of valorized. I mean, the problem, of course, is always that, you know, that there are victims. Things get lost.

in the creative process of destruction because things get destroyed. And the political question posed by capitalism since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, since long before the Industrial Revolution, really, since the 15th, 14th centuries is, well, you know, how much of this disruption do we have to put up with to get the good stuff? And who gets to decide, like, who gets disrupted and by one,

and to what extent? And I would even say you can make a good argument, and it's sort of an argument I have made historically, in teaching and even stuff I've written that on some level the whole experience of modernity and even postmodernity is the experience of human beings having to conduct this question that to what extent are you going to allow the logic of the development and market relations the commodification of everything you know the endless innovative potential of capitalism just to create more and more new stuff out of old stuff and to get rid of

old stuff in the process, to what extent are you going to just let that process run rampant, like willy-nilly, like going where it will, you know, and to what extent are you going to try to subject those processes to some form of political control, or even to the point of replating them with totally different ways of organising production and reproduction? And on some level, that's the fundamental question of modernity from my point of view. So from all those perspectives, there's nothing new about this idea that capitalism and entrepreneurship of these disruptive forces and that disruption has that progressive potential. But then when you just go around saying that disruption as such is a good thing,

then you quickly just descend into a kind of anti-human nihilism. And that is where a lot of that Silicon Valley discourse ends up these days. It ends up with this kind of anti-human nihilism that somehow the force of disruption is like a force in its own right That has to be, you know, no one can stop it and no one could try. No one should try. It's just like a god you have to appease or feed or subject yourself to. I think it's useful to go back to the Communist Manifesto. It's always useful to go back to the Communist Manifesto, dear listeners.

But that quote, the really famous quote, I'll just read it out, actually. I'll read out a little bit more than we normally read out. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society all that is solid melts into air all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses

his real conditions of life his relations with his kind so there's that the most famous lines of that all that is solid melts into air and all that is holy is profaned but the next line the follow-on line sort of gives you know it gives almost like a positive

valuation to the disruption of capital, basically, or the disruption of the bourgeoisie, because, you know, it's going to strip away religion. It's going to strip away all of these illusions, and you're going to have to be faced with sober senses, you know, your real conditions, etc. And you can trace that, like, that line through, like, low to 20th century philosophy. I mean, most famously, Deleuze in Guattari, well, they write a couple of very famous book in Anteotipus, this, what they call de-territorial. the breaking down of the territory, the breaking down of the way in which we make sense of the world, that constant revolutionising is sort of valorised, and then famously in the book they write

later. The sobering up. The sobering up after 1968, basically. A thousand plateaus, you know, it's much more, whereas like, anti-edipus is all like destroyed, destroyed, you know, in a thousand plateaus, they have caution, caution. One of the lessons from Deleuze and Guattari is that, Like, for every de-territorialisation, there's a re-territorialisation. When something gets undone, we can't exist on that, so we have to put something, we have to put a new territory in its place. I think that's a really useful lesson for looking at, like, Silicon Valley. And the recent tendency in Silicon Valley to erect some of the most old hackneyed forms of

territorialisation, such as race, you know, sort of like scientific racism. I do that with quotation marks, of course, it's completely against current scientific understandings of genetics, but that idea, if you know, you revolutionize something, you sweep it away, but you can't exist there,

you need to re-territorialize and put something back in there, basically. I also think, basically, Schumpeter's really interesting because not only is he, he's a reader of Marx, and like, that quote I just read out about all that is wholly, is profaned, etc. that there's a quote in Schumpeter's most famous work,

which is capitalism, socialism, and democracy, where he defines creative destruction thus, let me read it out, because he's almost rewriting that passage from the Communist Manifesto. He defines creative destruction as this, the protest of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old,

incessantly creating a new one, this process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. He's reading the communist manifesto and trying to twist it against itself, trying to use it against itself. It's not just an anti-communist Marxist. He's also like a long wave theorist. So he also, he adopts this economic theory from this Soviet economist, Condratia, who identifies these really long waves of like boom and slump, basically, in economic cycles. And he links that to new technological basis. The creative destruction moment is a particular moment that takes place a particular point on these waves,

basically when you're trying to move one technological base to another technological base, and then you're trying to get the productivity gains of that, and then they get distributed out to the whole of society, and there's no new gains to be made from productivity gains from that technological base, and then you have a slump, etc., and then you need a new technological base to come along. So creative destruction is a very small moment,

and he changes his idea about who the entrepreneur is. He starts off an idea of an idea of an, entrepreneur as, you know, the genius in his, in the garage, basically, who was creating the new technological base. But he changes, you know, he changes, he says, look, you know, in order to revolutionise the industrial base, the technological base, you need, like, huge resources. So the entrepreneurs are not the new startups. They're the big monopolies. He said, and he has his defense of, like, monopoly power, monopolization, this defense of the idea that, you know, you basically want to construct a situation where capitalism is not about competition around prices. It's about

big oligopolis who are basically defending themselves against competition. It's very interesting because he's a defender of capitalism as such. I mean, one of the things that are so interesting about him is he, from my point of view, he's one of the very few bourgeois economists who really does understand what capitalism means, which is capital accumulation. So he is a defender of accumulation And he's the one who makes the defence that look, without these massive accumulation to capital, you just don't get the level of technical innovation that modern industrial societies require because there just no one, because indeed, like the small business, the scrappy small business entrepreneur just doesn't have the resources to do it.

Yeah, totally. He has little track with like neoclassical economics, which is like the orthodox economics. It's a shit argument, to be clear. I mean, because there's just no good argument. He doesn't have a good argument. why shouldn't the democratic state do that then? But yeah, he thinks it will. He doesn't want it to.

But he doesn't have a good argument against that, basically. Like the other thing you would say to Anonymous tech guy who replied to you is that like we're not seeing that swap out of a new technological base. We're not seeing these huge increases in productivity now. Like we're seeing economic stagnation. We've seen seen it for a long time. You've obviously missed the news about chat of GBT here. We just heard in the budget yesterday

it's going to increase productivity across the public sector that's why we don't need we only need 1% increase in spending because we're going to get a 2% increasing productivity by using CHAPGPT in schools and hospitals If your calculation of productivity is changed to include wasting time creating pictures of nuns with chainsaws attacking dragons

or something like that Well, you're only saying that because you don't use ChatGBTGPT, which I use all the time, and it's a very good time saver. So I'm not saying that's a good argument on behalf of the government, but Chat Chabitis, like, I'm very pro. We're not, we're not telling people that Chat TBT is scripting this podcast now, Nardi. We've agreed. No, we've agreed again.

We're going to hide that. Sorry. So basically, let me just put these large language models, which is not AI, but it's what we call AI. is an absolute dead end, and it's a bubble. And we've just had many of those bubbles, basically. You know, Bitcoin, all of those sort of things. It's not going to produce those productivity gains, basically.

We're going to spend huge amounts of resources doing it, and we're going to burn incredible amounts of carbon in this absolute dead end. But that's the sort of thing you get. This is your tulip bulb of the moment, basically. That's what you get in moments where it's really not obvious how you solve the economic stagnation of capitalism. you get these sorts of bubbles, like, you know, large language models aren't the way that's going to happen. The range of utility is relatively small, I think.

And like what we're saying instead is not these big, big monopolies, they're not spending their money revolutionising the technology. They're spending it doing things such as like share buybacks or just extracting rents, etc, which is why you see the huge, huge, massive increase in the wealth of the very wealthiest, because that money that's sitting in those bank accounts are going to buy a yacht, And the capitalism, that's not why that's supposed to go. That's supposed to go back into production to increase the amount of capital and, you know, to self-expansion of capital, et cetera. You know, what we can say from that is, Shumpeter is wrong.

It's not about like new technological bases. Behind that is class struggle, basically, right? And so you'd say, like, why does capital want to automate things? It wants to automate things because machines aren't insubordinate, workers are. They can demand stuff, they're human beings, etc. That's why capital flees from workers into automation. And the really, really big problem for capitalism is that, you know, we're in a de-industrialized society.

Like, what can be automated is manufacturing. Manufacturing has been automated to some degree. It was held back a little bit by geographical displacement to low-wage areas in the world. But now, like, you know, a huge amount of people work in service. Work and service work is incredibly hard to automate because it involves human-to-human interaction. And if you're a worker who has to interact with, humans, the more humans you interact with, the worse the services. That's just like almost like an iron law. They call it Baumel's cost disease, basically. It's really hard to ought to increase

productivity in service work. They hope large language models will be able to do that, and perhaps it will to some degree. But that's the real, real problem, like Schumpeter is wrong. He's, he reads marks and he's with him to a large degree, but the bit he disagrees with the bit about class struggle is the bit that we are facing now, basically, that and the limits of resources and the carrying capacity of carbon in the atmosphere. Okay, I think we should play a tightrope from Janelle Monet, which kind of covers the themes of the struggles of balancing one's own needs with societal expectations.

And really, I just wanted to include this because I feel like Janelle Monet is in herself quite disruptive as a kind of different kind of artist and embodies a kind of conceptual art in a kind of formulaic pop landscape. So this is Taitrope by Janelle Monet. I think it's we're a sort of positive idea in radical discourse. We've talked about detritoryalization, being a little bit more about this history of disruption being a sort of positively idea in radical discourse. We've talked about DeLis and Guittari, the idea of de-territorialization, being good unnecessarily de-territorialization, which really just does mean any form of disruption, to be honest. We don't need to get into what they mean by territory anymore today. Territory is just any form of stability almost, basically.

Any stable phenomenon. I mean, in the 90s, you know, people like Nick Land, Simonetic Culture Research Unit, those people, they got very high on a particular reading of Dulles and Gritari, which went on to be labelled accelerationism, initially by critics of it, which did really want to take this idea that, well, actually, indeed, the fantastically destructive force of capitalism is basically superior to any form of human endeavor and it'll actually just be good if we let it to sort of destroy our humanity and make us post-human human to just a virus to be eradicated, blah, blah, blah. Taking to a certain logical conclusion, what Lickland himself called in the title of his first book,

The Thirst for Annihilation is where you get to if you just valorise disruption for disruption's sake. But on the other hand, I mean, there's a reason why. all of these guys have had some kind of terminology for thinking about disruption as a positive force or a potentially positive force. I would also add Ernesto LeClaue and Chantelle Moves' term, Dislocation, which they is a term, they put forward in their essay the new reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. They're really, they're reading Husserl there, I think. And they have this idea of desedimentation and dislocation as things which sort of have to happen

to establish power relationships and institutions for them to be democratizable in any way. And obviously, if you are someone who wants to change the way things are currently done, then on some level, you have to sort of, you have to not have the totally conservative position, the disruption as such is bad. The dislocated, the disruption is bad.

And this is something that, you know, for example, I know this is something you're interested in here, that, you know, when people have tried to think about what it would actually mean to move, away from a capitalist economy, when people have tried to address the problem of what socialist transition would look like, whether it would be revolutionary in character or not, then the fact that it is, you know, it is disrupt, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, to establish ways of doing things on some level, to move towards a new social order is something

you do have to think about. I mean, again, historically, the way I've often explained this to students is, well, look, you know, one of the basic reasons historically, why radical social change doesn't happen a lot of the time. It's a massive hassle. Like even for people who really want it, it's a hassle. It's not, it isn't all just fun and games. It isn't all just collective joy.

And to the ecstasy in the streets, that it's, it involves a difficulty that, you know, quite probably if you were going to move, trying to genuinely, like, move from a high, an advanced consumer focus to capitalist economy

towards some sort of eco-socialist economy. And you might have to, go through periods, you know, when you're setting up new systems, when people are going to experience sort of, you know, what feels like austerity in some ways, in some aspect of their lives. And, you know, you can look at examples like Cuba where for long periods of time, people seem to have collectively accepted. That's an acceptable price to pay for, you know, decent healthcare and education and a reduction in social equality, for example. But there is some sense in which, you know, just because we want, we do want change,

necessarily, you know, we can't completely get away from this vocabulary and this way of thinking about things, according to which some things which are necessarily disruptive are things that we want. But the trick is to do that without then just falling into the trap of valuing disruption for its own sake and just seeing disruption itself almost as this the kind of abstract force of progress to which you're going to concede all your potential for agency. Yeah, I think that's really interesting and how also disruption there like interfaces with the concept of change and like whether people actually view those things as as like good

in themselves or bad in itself and like different points in history. Because if there's this kind of like this sense that everything, I've spoken about this a lot on the show before. Like, if things are changing for the worst, then some kind of disruption can potentially be seen as a good thing. But in another framing, it could be seen as a bad thing. So, like, how those things interplay with each other, like in terms of people's conception of them in the world that we live in today and how people react to them is, I think, really interesting. Lots of people have tried to think through this problem or transition. An interesting way to think about it is this guy, Eric Oling writes, who wrote a number of books, actually,

but he's trying to think through transition he has these graphs he calls them transition troughs and he's just trying to plot what the average person's sort of quality of life would be going through a process of transformation to like a socialist economy is what he's trying to model

and he says like the real big problem is that like people's quality of life might well fall off because of the disruption of change and some of that disruption is the fact that you will have forces who don't want that change so it's not just a problem of like some image of a revolution storming of the Winter Palace.

It's also the problem of trying to have a left government, as we know, as we've seen from like Syriza, et cetera, et cetera. Basically, you'll have things such as capital flight or capital strikes where capitalists who control the resources won't invest or they'll move their money, etc., which of course then provokes a crisis of like social reproduction, we can't feed ourselves, etc., etc., which means that people's quality of life might well go down before they go up, basically, as you know, you get to solve those problems and move into, like,

a more socialist or socialized economy or more democratized economy, etc. The interesting thing about this moment in time is that transition is the problem of our time anyway, no matter whether you're on the left or the right to some degree. So, like, the big thing at people that, like, political elites are trying to think through is, like, decarbonizing the economy, moving from a fossil fuel-based economy. And that has incredible. a couple of complexities because you cannot just stop one energy system and then build a new one. You have to start to build it as you go in along, basically. You have to wind down one fossil fuel-based energy system while you're building up a new one.

That's actually not what's happening because the fossil fuel industry has not been rolling down its emissions at all. But that's the problem that people are trying to solve. So the problem with transition, there's probably even of a transition trough, It's the problem that all, like, you know, well, popular it this way, like liberal, even centrist, policy elites are trying to think through me and my friend and comrades, Bertie Russell and Kai Harrow, we're just finishing a book called Radical Abundance. Coming soon, everyone, it's going to be going to be very good.

But like the first half of that book is trying to think through a conception of transition, basically. What do you need to put into place now in order to transition to somewhere? better. And one of the arguments we use is saying, you know, that's just the problem of our time. You've got to think this through if you're engaged in serious politics. I think Rachel Reeves isn't really thinking that through and she's not engaged in serious politics. But there were people around the Biden administration, around the Inflation Reduction Act, who were engaged in serious politics and we're really trying to think this problem through. The lesson of all of that is if you want change, you have to build up a different kind of economy now to parallel the

ever economy and then you have to diminish the ever economy. And so, to an economy that's governed on a different logic. Just a little flavour, it's a little taste of the joys to come when that book comes out next September. I think we should play Declare Independence, the 2008 song by Bjork. She is, of course, a very anti-establishment and disruptive character herself, but also this was written specifically as an anti-establishment tune.

And it was controversially used to support various independence and separatist movements. It's also quite disruptive on the ear. And I thought it would be good to play something that, you know, didn't quite flow that easily. So this is Bjork's Declare Independence. Declar Independence. Don't let them do that to you. Declare independence. Don't let them do that to you.

make your own flag make your own flag make your own flag well I think to close us out it's worth coming back to thinking about this question of disruptive protest because we've been talking about

different ideas about the necessarily disruptive nature of capitalism but of course one of the things that defines the political left and the Labour movement, is its willingness and ability to disrupt capitalism itself, the capacity of people collectively, especially in workplaces, but also through political organisation, you know, to disrupt the logic of capitalism and to redirect the processes of social change and material change that industrialisation and modernisation and urbanisation

give rise to their own ends and to socially useful ends. And I think it is significant that if you think about this idea of disruptive protest, well, it's true, it's not, it hasn't always been the case that British public political discourse has simply assumed that any form of disruptive political protest was illegitimate. Actually, I mean, one of the peculiarities of the British, the history of British labour relations, and one reason, actually, why we haven't ever had a sort of proper constitutional settlement

around political rights is that from the late 19th century this really up to the end of the 70s this idea emerged and it partly is partly influenced by sort of laissez-faire ideas actually in economics and it's coming from various sources this idea that will really

government should take a sort of hands-off attitude to the relationship between the Labour movement and employers and broadly speaking they should be, the labour movement and employers should be allowed to sort of get on with negotiating with each other and using whatever tactics and strategies are available to them to get the best possible deal for their side. I mean, this is what was known as free collective bargaining, you know, the idea that there shouldn't really be too many rules governing how trade unions operate. And then in the, really during the political crisis of the 70s,

the kind of right wing of the Conservative Party under the leadership of people like Willie Whitelaw, Keith Jasey, Michael Thatcher, really sort of comes around to the view that this can't carry on anymore. And they can't carry on anymore because the demands being made by trade unions have become too militant. The relationship of trade unions

to broader, like democratic political movements, you know, youth movements, women's liberation, et cetera, is becoming too disruptive. It's becoming too disruptive to the whole process. process of capitalist profit-making and accumulation to the point where it seems that the acceleration and joining up of all these democratic demands is going to disrupt capitalism out of existence to some extent. And that is why they really settle on the discourse of law

and order as the first discourse they're going to use in order to legitimate their project. It's Nixon, who first uses this language in the English-speaking world, in his response direct political response to the political events of 1968, and he gets elected president, much to everybody's surprise at the time, on the basis of this appeal to the silent majority of Americans who don't want any more disruption to their way of life, you know, from anti-war protesters or civil, the black freedom struggle or, you know, incipient women's liberation, they want law and order. And it's absolutely crucial when Thatcher first gets elected in 79th. It's clear to people who are paying very close attention.

and what she wants to do. It's clear that what she wants to do is what a certain very right-wing strand of conservatism has always wanted to do, which is to roll back the welfare state settlement, just as her American equivalent want to roll back the New Deal and the Great Society settlements. But that is not the basis on which she gets elected. If the only thing Thatcher had been promising to do in 79 was to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor curtail the trade unions and privatised public assets, then she would have got like 20 or percent of the vote. What she gets selected on the basis of is the promise to restore law and order, to bring to heal, to bring to heal the disruptive elements which include, you know, youth, feminists, black people in the cities

and above all trade unionists. And that is the beginning of the end, really, of the principle of free association and free collective political expression in British political discourse. And I think it's worth reflecting on some level, for example, we still haven't seen, and we definitely didn't see at all during the new Labour years, a restoration of the key political rights which are withdrawn from people during that period of the FACHA government in the 80s. I mean, I would say that absolutely the most fundamental one is the right for political strikes. That basically, I mean, it was considered to be a sort of, you know, a right of your freeborn English people and Welsh people and Scottish people and Northern Irish people. For about a century,

really, it was considered a normal thing that people should be able to go on strike and withdraw their labour. In support of other workers in other sectors or other workplaces, if the people striking were willing to endure the loss of pay that I would entail. But what happened in the 70s is the scale of working class solidarity as evinced in famous episodes like the Grunwick dispute where a workforce mainly made up of Asian women is supported by mostly white male workers in attendant industries who like who for example refused to carry on delivering supplies to this pha processing plant where they're on strike defending their paying conditions instances like that lead to the criminalisation of what was called secondary action

or political action. The criminalisation of mass picketing, you see, after the minor strike, even peaceful mass picketing. You're not allowed to use a mass picket to demonstrate to potential scabs like how much support the strike has and how many people don't want you to go back to work across that picket line. All of that is criminalised over the course of the 80s. And so neoliberalism in Britain, the implementation of neoliberalism in Britain, is completely inseparable from this process by which various kinds of previously legitimate democratic collective action, particularly undertaken by trade unions, undertaken by workers as workers, is criminalised and is redefined as illegitimate forms of disruption, disruption to economic activity,

disruption to market relations, disruption to ordinary civic life, disruption to the kind of non-political functioning of the market economy to which neoliberalism always aspires. So I think that is really important to keep in mind, and it's really important to keep in mind that on some level, you know, the only thing that ever made, they ever granted British people the right to engage in those forms of supposedly disruptive protest was, I would say, was the strength of organised labour. That it was because the trade unions were sufficiently strong, sufficiently militant, sufficiently solid, especially after the great wave of strikes of the 1890s, that employers and politicians saw it as basically too much trouble to try and suppress this stuff. It's too dangerous to try to suppress this stuff. It might

just lead to a revolution if you try and suppress it too much. So you're going to just let people get on with it. And as the working class, as an organised force has become weaker and weaker and less well-organized and less solidaristic, since the mid-70s really, then our rights, even as individuals, our political rights have been eroded. Our right to disrupt has been taken away from us. And I think it is really important, always to keep in mind that really it's artificial to make this sort of distinction, actually, I think, between liberal rights, democratic rights, labour rights, the truth is that the establishment of democratic regimes which extended freedom of both collective and individual agency to all see.

citizens was always dependent upon class struggle to a certain extent, and its disruptive power and its disruptive threat. And it still is that we're never going to recover those rights just because some government thinks it's a nice thing to do, to let us protest again. It's only if they're worried about the level of disruption we can cause that they're going to do, that they're actually going to, you know, those rights are ever going to be restored. What that brings up is this fact that democracy is disruptive, or in fact too much democracy is disruptive. So in the 1970s there was a famous report

written by Samuel Huntingdon, which talked about an excess of democracy. There were just too many... It was the report of the Trilateral Commission in 73. Yeah, for the Trilateral Commission. And the argument was that people were too active. They were too self-assured. They were just demanding more and more of the state, etc.

And it was disruptive of the smooth operation of capital. Yesterday I was rereading an essay from 1943 by an economist called Mikhail Kalecki called The Political Aspects of Full Employment. It's a really interesting article to read. It's a great Polish left-Kindian to Marxist economists. Yeah, I can't really call him a left-Kintham because he was writing and he came up with very similar ideas to Keynes, at the same time as Keynes, basically. Yeah, he predicted something that would look like neoliberal.

And the argument goes something like this. He makes this in 1943. He says, like, you know, basically we know, know that action by the state can create a situation of full employment. And we know, in fact, that their profits will be higher in those sorts of circumstances. But I can also predict that, like, that contains a contradiction, which will lead to a reaction from capitalists who will then react against it and move to a situation where there's less profitability of. the long term. His argument is this, is that like, if you have full employment, you remove that threat of destitution, you remove the threat of the sack, the key sort of means of which capital disciplines workers, their workers will just become too self-assertive. They'll become too self-assertive

and it will cause a crisis. You ever transform capitalism so fundamentally, it doesn't look like capitalism, or you just leave capitalism behind. He says, you know, what will happen in those terms is that capitalists will realize, in fact, that they will have to forego stability, the stability of the post-war periods and the increased profitability of that because capitalism itself becomes the barrier, basically. And he predicts that, in fact, what happens will be that the self-assertion of the working class will lead to these democratic demands which go beyond capitalism's ability to deliver. And so Kalecki, in 1943, is basically predicting the report,

to the Trilateral Commission, is predicting the reaction of capital afterwards. Yeah, I think that Kalecki is really impressive. And he's one of, I think, several thinkers in the 20th century, who grasped very completely, as I think Marks Nenghis did, and I think lots of other people did, that ultimately the disruption of traditional ways of life or very well-established, agricultural, you know, medieval, even pre-medieval ways of life, which began, like,

at the end of the medieval period, like it could eventually lead to a situation where, you know, the entire planet is despoiled and the resources are all concentrated in the hands of a tyrannical oligarchy. Or it could lead to something much better. It could lead to a situation in which the disruptive power of democracy overwhelms and takes control of the disruptive power of capitalism. And I think now, we are now in a historical period where it's more urgent than ever. It's more urgent than it's ever been for us to realize that we have to accelerate and empower and make use of the disruptive power of democracy to disrupt capitalism before the smooth running of capitalist accumulation just completely destroys

the planet and disrupts the atmosphere out of existence. I think that is the task before us. And I think it's one that we all have to engage in. If you look at Valencia, you'll see that like we live in an age of disruption. There's no getting away from that. We have a gain democratic control over that, the process of change and disruption through the disruptive nature of democracy, or we just are subjected to ever-increasing waves of disruption, which are going to make human life extremely uncomfortable. far out Deep far out