ACFM - #ACFM Trip 5: Consciousness Raising

Episode Date: September 8, 2019

Nadia Idle, Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert discuss consciousness raising, with bonus excerpts from an interview with Mica Nava, one of the pioneers of feminist consciousness-raising in the UK. Listen to the full show, with music and archival material, on the Novara Media website here: https://novaramedia.com/2019/08/16/acfm-trip-5-consciousness-raising/

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. Unfortunately, because of the way copyright works with the internet, the version you're listening to only has the conversation and discussion from the show. The music and archive material is only available in the version you can stream online. So, really, you're only getting half the picture or seeing through a glass darkly or on a really weak dose. why not head over to the Navarra Media website or our SoundCloud where you can stream the whole thing in its glorious fullness the link is also in the description of this podcast version too

but if you just want the chat, keep on listening the first women's meetings were a kind of revelation switching on a light I didn't think about it that everything fell into place so it did feel like a very dramatic transformation but from there what followed was a bit more complicated sometimes Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left My name's Keir Milburn and today I'm joined by a couple of weirdos My very strange friend Jeremy Gilbert

Hello And my odd and quite peculiar friend Nadia Idol Hiya Today we're going to raise your consciousness by talking about what are consciousness raising. We also have something new for you today. As well as the usual discussion, you will hear clips from an interview

that Jeremy conducted with Mika Nava. Mika got involved in the Women's Liberation Movement in the UK in the late 1960s and has participated in feminist consciousness raising group since that time. We basically thought Mika could provide a perspective on this topic that me, Jeremy and Nadia might struggle to provide.

Okay, let's get stuck in. Let's get stuck in with the usual questions, really. Why are we interested in consciousness raising? And why do we think consciousness raising is relevant to acid carbonism, acid communism? Jeremy? me? Well, again, in the now, you know, very famous little half-finished essay by Mark about acid communism, he uses this really wonderful phrase, consciousness inflation, and he counterposes that to consciousness deflation. And he says basically, you know, the aim of radical politics is to inflate consciousness and, you know, that's counterposing the work of sort of neoliberalism or other oppressive ideologies in deflating. consciousness. But this is all really riffing on the fact that at the kind of high moment of cultural and political radicalism, the late 60s and early 70s, there's a convergence between

a number of different movements and tendencies. So on the one hand, there's psychedelic culture and its explicit commitment to what it calls consciousness expansion. And that's an idea that goes back at least to the early 50s, this idea that psychedelic drugs do something called expanding your consciousness, whatever that might mean, so we can talk about that. And at the same time, from about 1966 onwards, various tendencies and organisations that are part of the new left and the kind of radical movements for black power, for women's liberation, and then for gay liberation, all use this phrase, consciousness raising at times to refer to part of their political practice.

and all these things all converge. So there's the kind of, you know, there's hippies and acid heads wanting to kind of, you know, envision a new way of being in the world, you know, with the technological assistance of, you know, psychedelics and yoga, etc. And then there's also sort of, you know, social revolutionaries wanting to, wanting to envisage a new world through reorganising society. And there's a lot of kind of circulation between those things, which is, you know, is really what defines the idea of the counterculture. And obviously, Assy Corbinism is about trying to take some of those ideas and insights and analyses and think about what they might mean within out of contemporary political moment. So I think that's why we're interested in the idea of consciousness raising, because consciousness raising was a key part of that set of practices which we're sort of partly inspired by and raises a set of questions that we want to try to think through a bit, I think. Also related is the concept of capitalist realism and this idea of being stuck inside a bubble where you can't see a possibility of a way out and the reason why that's relevant for talking about consciousness raising is that just as you were saying Jeremy when you think about the possibility of you know taking certain drugs but also certain political practices as changing your viewpoint about what is possible we're interested in the practice of consciousness raising in the the neoliberal reality that we live today

in terms of how it can make people see the possibility of being different sorts of people outside this kind of experience that they have and how that very consciousness could potentially help people break through in a collective sense. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, in some ways, it's strange that we haven't talked, we haven't had an episode, we're on episode five, and this is the first episode about consciousness raising, because it has been like central to how we've been thinking about this.

But it does make me think about, you know, what is the relationship between consciousness raising and acid? Why are we linking these things up? You know, why did Mark Fisher link these things up? The way we've been thinking about psychedelic culture and in fact like psychedelic experience, we've been thinking about them as like denaturalizing tools, tools to denaturalize existing categories,

you know, social structure, or just to denaturalize, you know, your life to make them, the way you live your life seem, you know, one possibility amongst a whole range of other possibilities. You know, and that's one of the effects that people talk about, about taking psychedelics, is that, you know, things which seem solid can now seem changeable and malleable, et cetera. So, like, we could sort of think about, well, you know, is that what people are looking for? for in consciousness-raising practices, you know, are consciousness-raising groups, acid in that sense is that they de-naturalise the world? And if they do denaturalise the world, you know, how do they

do that? What is the techniques and technologies that do that? I think that's right, you know, I mean, acid is denaturalising, but the other, and consciousness-raising is denaturalising, but it's also, it also, it denaturalises something really specific as well, which is the, the experience of the self as a kind of autonomous individual private subject disconnected from others I mean I heard someone on some American just lefty podcast

just a couple of weeks ago make this remark and the remark was they were slagging off some conservative who would you know presenting it as some great revelation that they'd realise that like people are all connected to each other and the person on this podcast said

oh well you know if that guy had taken acid as a teenager in high school like every normal person, then he'd have had that banal, you know, moral truism, you know, sort of brought home to him years ago. I mean, that was historically, classically supposed to be the psychedelic idea that's supposed to be the insight you get,

is that, well, actually, you're not, you're not just a kind of isolated subject, you know, detached from the rest of the cosmos. And I think that's exactly what consciousness raising meant specifically in those contexts like, you know, women's liberation, black power, gay liberation, It meant realizing that what you had thought of as being just symptoms of, you know, your personal circumstances or you'd experienced in that way were actually social and that they could, and that the way in which to change those, you know, to overcome the problems you were experiencing was through sort of collective work with other people. So collective, sometimes you say collective struggle, but also just the phrase collective work gets used, for example, in gay liberation, I know, in quite interesting ways.

I think in some ways it raises an interesting question, though, actually, about what, in relation to what Nandia said about capitalist realism, because in some ways, capitalist realism is quite a simplistic notion of ideology. It's this notion that, well, you just can't imagine any alternative. You can't even conceptualize the possible alternatives to the way things are now. And the implication then is, we're just becoming aware that there are historical, political alternatives to the way things are now is going to do the kind of liberating trick. And in some ways, that's repeating, you know, that's quite a very old idea in sort of radical politics. But it's often been counterposed by a slightly different idea, which is that, well, actually, you might well know that things as they are now are bad. And you might even know that hypothetically they could be different, but you might not feel any real capacity to engage it, you know, in a project of changing it. And so I think, and certainly, I mean, that is the shift, I think, from just thinking in terms of capital. Israelism to thinking in terms of consciousness raising and consciousness of inflation is that, you know, consciousness inflation is partly about, you know, developing a kind of real felt sense of your capacity to work with other people to change things. I mean, it is a really interesting question

like to talk about today in relation to consciousness raising, the history of these debates over the nature of ideology and they come up again and again and again, you know, in every phase of radical politics. Like, well, is it the people just don't know shit? Do they just not know are they being exploited like capitalism's bad or is it that they do know that but they just feel like there's nothing you can do about it doesn't you know it can't really be changed before we move on I just want to ask for a bit of clarification because I'm not entirely sure I get what you guys were meaning when you said naturalized you know we we tend to we tend to fall into the lives that we live and the and the sort of you know the social relations that we're embedded with we tend to

mistake them for eternal and natural occurrences rather than the end, you know, their end point of a whole series of historical and social forces. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, so we tend to build up a natural picture of the world that is actually quite hard to get out of. And one of the, one of the first things that you need to do if you're going to think about changing the world is to realize that it's changeable. Why was consciousness raising and consciousness raising groups so vital to is second-wave feminism. You know, it was because they had to denaturalize the concept of what a woman was

and what their capabilities were. They had to denaturalize this, you know, received idea that they lived in. Do you know what I mean? They had to denaturally. They had to take their lives and discuss them in order to realize that something, a different way of living was possible.

Do you know what I mean? And so the reason it's related to acid is that, you know, the experience of taking psychedelics, I have been told, is that, you know, that you see things from a different angle and things which seem solid seem less solid all of a sudden. All right. So unsurprisingly, it seems, we often keep coming back to this music from the early 70s, which is this high point of kind of radical consciousness, I think, that does get expressed through the kind of revolutionary music of the period. Gilts got Heron, I mean, in some ways. his work is the kind of epitome of that moment and his song The Revolution will not be televised, a direct exercise in, you know, musical, lyrical consciousness raising in itself and still a classic. Before we, we, you did this, this great interview with, with Mika, which

we're going to talk about, Jeremy, sort of, it kind of sat, feminist consciousness raising group sat with me as some kind of like amazing folklore of this reality of. this time where women got together in, you know, small groups, in people's homes and talked about the reality of their everyday lives. And it was through that experience of talking about, you know, the relationship to their husbands, the relationships to housework, the relationship to their children, to all of these sort of experiences that they realized as individuals that their problems or their stresses or their antagonisms were not individual. There was something that a lot of other women were experiencing and therefore understanding that those problems must be

structural and understanding therefore that to break through and to change and to liberate themselves from those situations, it had to be a collective experience. It had to be a collective project. And so to me, a lot about that is fascinating. But I'm interested in the fact that it was an actual deliberate exercise that a group of people, in this case, women, and I think we'll talk about why it's important that it was women in this situation, but a group of women from, you know, a local area getting together in a living room rather than, like you said, Jeremy, a meeting or, you know, with an agenda that was outside their own experience. And I think that, in a sense, is quite unique.

Or maybe it's not, but I think it both's thinking about. That is an interesting question of like, how would a feminist consciousness raising group of the 70s be different from just a group of friends hanging out? But also how it would be different from a more classical political meeting, you know, and in the first one, you know, it's more purposeful, you know, there's more purposeful than just meeting, yeah, it's intentional rather than just meeting, you know, perhaps, you know, with groups of friends, you probably do fall into discussing your lives. But, you know, you might actually just enjoy bullshitting and messing about, et cetera. So it's an intentional thing, you know, and they were there probably quite a lot of freedom about where this discussion was going to go. But with, you know, specific aims, which is to talk about your life, but to think about it in terms of, you know, structural forces, overcoming bourgeois conditioning was something that Mika Navi talked about, you know, to try and think about. like our lives are like this, why are they like this, you know, how could they be different is the sort of intentional sort of thing. And that's probably the difference between a more,

or between many, you know, more formal political meetings. Is it, is it, it starts with the personal, you know, it starts with your own lives and experiences and then moves out from there to how do you change the world, which is different to a sort of campaign sort of group or a classic, you know, campaign political meeting. Consciousness, along with righteousness, is the thing which defines Rastafarian reggae and differentiates it from its kind of capitalist, commercial, you know, apolitical,

antecedents and the things that come after, you know, when after the kind of end of a Rastafarian is the kind of Rastafarian dominance of Jamaican music, you know, slackness is the kind of ethic of, you know, apolitical hedonism. which deliberately rejects righteousness and consciousness. And so one of the great anthems of conscious reggae is Johnny Osborne's Truth and Rights.

As far as we know, from our detailed archive research, the idea of consciousness-raising groups came into the women's liberation and to some of the other movements after the publication in 1966 of a book called Fanchin, which was a book written by an American sort of aristocratic, sort of Maoist sympathiser called William Hinton. And it was a book about the Chinese Revolution. And he was talking about the Chinese Revolution in the 1940s.

And the consciousness-raising groups were, you know, sort of basically Maoist, you know, revolutionary education groups in villages, in sort of revolutionary villages in the 40s. And that idea, now that, I mean, when we've talked about consciousness raising, when we started talking about it publicly, you know, sort of acid corbinisms of events and publications. I mean, that was one of the first thing we got sort of pushback on

was people being worried that what we were talking about were some sort of scary kind of Maoist, you know, political education projects. Of course, Maoism, the sort of Chinese version of revolutionary communism, you know, sort of inspired by the leadership of Chairman Mao, you know, became famous for having such a radical anti-individualist perspective that really, you know, anyone who, who thought of themselves in kind of personal or individual terms at all is considered bourgeois

and that you were supposed to just devote your entire life to serving the interest of the collective and everybody was supposed to wear identical clothes. And, you know, you were supposed to engage in these practices of kind of rigorous self-criticism where you got into groups and kind of omitted all your failings as a revolutionary. And that was what it meant to kind cultivate revolutionary consciousness, at least by the time of, so where Maoism had reached at an advanced stage in the late 60s. And I think that's not exactly the same as what was going on even in those consciousness-arrating groups. In the 40s, we seem to have been more, you know, fairly kind of typical kind of revolutionary to education groups. And that would have

been in the tradition of kind of Marxist-Leninist, communist revolutionary practice. Now, Can I just interject there? Yeah, please, yeah. You know, the greatest horror story of how horrendously bad Maoist self-criticism sessions can get was the Japanese Revolutionary Red Army, I think it was called the Japanese Revolutionary Red Army. There was a great film about it. And they, you know, a group of young students who got caught up in the ferment of the late 1960s in Japan. Then they decide to go in a sort of armed struggle direction.

go off into the mountains and they basically just criticised each other to such a degree that they killed half the group as a result of their criticism sessions. They would just, you know, beat them and leave them out into the inner cold. You know, you can go too far. Now, obviously, we need some self-criticism. But then again, you know, that fell into one of these hierarchical, cultish, sort of dynamics, do you know what I mean? Yeah, it did, well, as did Maui's in generally.

Yeah. But to me it sounds like Twitter, do you know what I mean? I mean, it sounds like Twitter is Maoist in that what it's trying to achieve or how some of these debates, how some political debates have been formulated or how the architecture is built of how people discuss things

or how some people discuss things is this attempt to get someone to break down and that the only way out is for you to accept all of this criticism which isn't true. Anyway, it's a side point, but I think it's like, I think there's a culture about, there's a culture of that. Sharon James and the Dap Kings are kind of contemporary American sort of cell phone band. It's no accident they record, they've recorded absolutely the best ever version of Woody Guthrie's, This Land is Your Land. It's one of the very few recorded versions which includes all of the verses, including the explicitly anti-capitalist

verses. And I think that as an example of the kind of consistency of that sort of soul tradition as a vehicle for political radicalism. So shall we talk about feminist consciousness raising groups? Okay. So when was it, would we say, that these groups started in in London or in the UK? Well, the pivotal year is 69. Is the pivotal year. Okay. So Mika Nava is retired now. She was a professor at University of East London for many years. She's very well known as a kind of scholar of cultural studies and consumer culture, but also a kind of, you know, someone who was active in women's liberation from very early on. I asked me, like, just actually what went on in the groups

and how they were organised, and she gave a very kind of an illuminating answer about that. I went to my first meeting when my youngest kid was about three weeks old, and I took him along in a caracot. I was probably 30. And where was it? Where was the meeting? The meeting was in Tuffel Park. Dave Slaney and Karen Slaney's flat in Dartmouth Park Hill and it was a really small room and there were about 15 people there.

First of all, people felt that they had to meet as women only and that was a very radical thing, radical demand of radical structural difference from all the other political meetings around at the time and that it had to be a relatively small group. You couldn't have these massive meetings that everybody should be involved, everybody should be given a chance that people shouldn't monopolize meetings

there was no chair there were no rules that's why I still can't quite get all the rules in the Labour Party we agreed things we would discuss we somehow or other would have if there was anything to agree we would try and do it by consensus rather than any other way I mean we were into the personal

as political and that meant that we had to talk about ourselves I mean there are a lot of fantasies about what went on in those groups and I think a lot of and groups were very different, but both the first group and my second group had quite a few people with, quite a few women with young children. We talked about issues that, you know, things like childbirth, things like equal opportunities, but abortion, I mean, all of those initial issues, sexual division of labour, and how, and monogamy, marriage. But we deliberately

focused away from the kind of most important issues that we thought had been addressed by the suffragettes, that is to say the vote. And importantly, and this is really one of the most important things about what those groups did, they talked about political ideas, but they were all, they were polemical, but they were also about changing the way we lived. So they were prescriptive in a way, and that was sometimes very stressful. And I remember thinking, God, I can't go on any longer because I'm going to have to change everything and it's just too much. I can't change everything so it was changing household arrangements. Household arrangements were giving up all money and possessions. I mean there were a few brave households that did that. Others were living

together and sharing or at least sharing a little bit more equally child care and child responsibility. I mean even just helping was a kind of improvement but people did change the way they lived. Absolutely. I think we all share, we all share an intuition that there's something in this consciousness raising form and there's something specific to now. Do you know what I mean? There's something specific to the way we live our lives now which seems to, seems to make this, this sort of function, a function that consciousness raising groups fulfilled in the feminist movement in the 1970s, it seems to be a need for that. And it seems to be, I think there's probably still a need for it around feminist politics and issues,

but it seems to be wider. One way I can sort of think about that is that, like, it's the effect of neoliberalism, isn't it? You know, the consciousness deflation of neoliberalism was to basically remove the political and make everything into the personal, basically. Neoliberalism's ideology is just everything is personal, right? So where else could you start then?

Well, we have to start from, if we're going to try and get out of neoliberal ideology, we have to start with the personal and find the political. in it, do you know what I mean? So that was one of the ways in which when I started looking at the movements of 2011, you know, Occupy, the 15M, etc. Well, what was really noticeable was that these same organisational forms just popped up all around the world, basically. You know, they were all camps in city squares, but they were also just doing the same decision-making format, these general

assemblies where everybody would use consensus process to come to decisions. And when you look at people when they're, you look at people using them, they seem to be using them for something else. And I think it looks like something similar to consciousness raising groups, or at least the first function of a consciousness raising group. I've called in my generation left book, I call it the testimony function, where basically people get up and testify about the lives.

And, you know, they just, you know, I've got this problem. I mean, 30,000 pounds worth of debt, I can't pay it off. And somebody else gets up, you know, and they've got a very similar problem. You start for your personal problem. problems and realize they're not just personal, they're collective, right? But there's several other functions, there's several other functions that need to take place then to turn that into collective action. That thing around testimony is important. So whether it comes out in a general

assembly with somebody standing up saying, I'm in, you know, 20,000 pounds of debt and I don't know what to do, or whether it's said in a consciousness raising group, like the reason why that's important is the actual utterance of it takes away the power. takes away the power from from the thing that is bearing down on somebody's life and and brings it out into the open in the kind of way I guess what am I trying to say I'm trying to say that there's there's a loneliness in those secrets and there's a there's a weight and a heaviness in living in living with that and what consciousness raising does whether it's through the general assemblies or whether it's through you know the women's groups of people the same people meeting over and over again or you know even in the the ones that we've done is that there's a release there's a there's a physical embodied experience of of something being being let out and shared which makes which gives people power I think so it's not just about learning actual things where you think oh that's an interesting idea I haven't thought about that before or I haven't thought about looking at the world that

way before it's someone saying something like I feel really claustrophobic at home when I doing the dishes and I feel really bored or for someone to say, you know, I feel anxious all of the time even though my material conditions are kind of okay. And when you're in a consciousness raising group and you're meeting, usually if it's someone you know or if someone in the case of the groups that we've been doing, where a lot of people don't know each other, I think there has been that thing of like, we've had so many people tell us, like, I've never had this conversation before around the questions that me and Kira are asking. I mean, every

single time we do one of these workshops, people come and say, we've never had this discussion before. I've never had that experience before. And that, I think, has transformative potential. We should explain those groups again, because the sort of experiments that we've been running,

they're not a classic consciousness raising group, because a classic consciousness raising group is the same group of people meet you know, week after week and build up this sense of solidarity. And And what we've, what we've been doing is, is a sort of one-offs, one-offs where we get a group of people together quite often, you know, perhaps a political festival or, you know, a particular meeting that's been called or something like that. Yeah, it's self-selecting. It's self-selecting. But it, yeah, but it's also people who don't know each other. And I think that that is one of the powerful things that people find is that, you know, is that a group of strangers just meet there and, and, you know, they're provoked into talking about about, about, about,

their lives and feelings and problems in a political context right where they're also encouraged to think about how these what structural forces might be linking them together that's quite a strange and unusual thing we've reached the limit I think we've started to spot the limits of

that come with that particular our particular experiment you know that the limits of how far you can just get together with a group of strangers discuss your problems and then come up with a good map of how the world works I think we've probably reached the limits of that but it's not a classical consciousness raising group I think

you know my experience of when we've a couple of times we've done at events quote-unquote consciousness raising so workshops I mean you know my experience of those is quite powerful is that even though I know you know I'm a sort of you know on some levels on some measures I'm a sort of world expert on a lot of this stuff and I'm in the room with people you know who are not then nonetheless the experience of that form of engagement, you know, affect me sort of affectively, sort of in my body, you know, in my kind of emotional state, in a way which seems really important. And it seems like, well, and I think this is one of, for me, this is one of the kind of basic insights of sort of the acid communist acid

communist project, actually, or, you know, what I've sometimes called psychedelic socialism, is that, well, you can sort of know theoretically, conceptually that, you know, it's a myth to think of yourself as a sort of individual subject in constant competition with others. But also we all know that the vast apparatus of capitalist society is constantly trying to make us feel like that all the time. So it was just naive to think you can just kind of liberate yourself from that sense of yourself just by sort of knowing something. That we all need to engage in types of technique and practice, which can enable us to feel, to really feel differently than that. And to me, my understanding of the idea of the consciousness raising groups,

at least in the liberation movements, like women's liberation and gay liberation, is that that's part of the point of it. I think what consciousness raising groups can do, and I have seen them do, is that you force a conversation around stuff where you can't make throwaway comments of like, well, you know, well, everyone gets pissed because we have to find a way. way of dealing with this or oh you know the way that it is we're all addicted to our phones or oh well you know what it is you know i guess in like fema in women's um consciousness of raising groups you'd imagine well you know the way men are like like what are we going to do a you know there's loads of

people who i know who you know are intelligent political people who still operate on a day to day basis with this kind of defeatism as if there's no way that they're going to escape their reality or like our reality collectively and the way that that is expressed is through the kind of language and banter that we use or which kind of which which which which is and like anti possibility or anti-futuristic but if you have a consciousness raising group around that then you start you have the space and the intentionality to interrogate that and the same goes not just for women's issues but for issues around capitalism because you're able to say to each other no hold on a second like why are you saying that it's

inevitable that the only way that you're going to live is to live for the weekend or like to get absolutely shit-faced because you can't deal with monday or whatever that's why i think it's important because it's even if it's not just raising consciousness around the fact of like what the reality is it's allowing for the space of the conversation to go somewhere else this notion of consciousness also gets picked up on as you know consciousness meaning politically conscious political consciousness radical consciousness gets picked up on in hip hop in the 1980s it tends to be a bit of a myth amongst kind of younger hip hop fans these days that somehow hip hop starts off as this really radical form and then it gets corrupted it's a bit more complicated than that i mean hip hop really starts off as kind of funk-based party music and then the idea of it as maybe having a kind of revolutionary or socially organized potential is actually the late 80s and the beginning of the 90s is the kind of high point of sort of hip conscious hip pop and again probably one of the most kind of explicit examples

kind of musically and lyrically was the the first arrested development album and this song give a man a fish uh always memorable for the line brothers with AKs want to learn how to use them save those rifles for the revolution no just the rest of development it's a really it brings up this really interesting problem, right, of, you know, what's relationship between conscious music and realism? Do you know what I mean? So basically, you know, the rest of development, I don't know if you could say that their reaction against gangster rap, but yeah, there's some sort of antagonism there between conscious rap and gangster rap. And gangster rap's whole shtick is, you know, there's the sound from the streets, it's

realism, you know. And like, if we look back at what was going on in Africa and American communities, that point, they may have had a point, do you know what I mean? That, that, that, that, they're perhaps the material conditions for raised consciousness on, on a mass level, were, were being diminished at that point, you know, were there are they, yeah, there's no question, there's no question that there's, I mean, at that moment of the late 80s, early 90s, it is the last gasp of black radicalism. There's no question the neoliberalisation of hip-pop, the emergence of gangster. It is a reaction to that.

It is an expression on the part of a generation of black youth who don't have the realistic alternative of sort of revolution as a way of responding to their social conditions. But at the same time, of course, the problem with gangster rap and sort of G-Funk in the early 90s, which is, you know, what Dr. Dre is calling his music for the first couple of years after he releases the chronic. Of course, it does present the condition of being the gangster

as always and forever, now the only thing. thing to which black youth can aspire. And I think that argument in favour of, in favour of sort of gangster rapper is defensively. I mean, I just think it's another historical argument which, you know, the jury of history is in on it now. I mean, we know where that goes. It just, it goes with hip-hop just becoming completely capitalist,

completely reactionary, and Kanye West eventually endorse, he's not a gangster rapper, but he's an inheritor of that mainstreamization of hip-hop, endorsing Trump. So, and I think there's not, It's not an accident that today, kind of radical hip-hop, you know, people like Boots Riley, Childish Gambino, you know, we're quite self-consciously differentiating themselves from that. I mean, it's really interesting that, like, those two Boots Riley and Charlie Chalichambino, they are deliberately embracing anti-realism or like, no, actually, it's not anti-realism, is it?

It's surrealism, which is, you know, more than real. You need to go beyond, you know, just representing experience to, you know, some of the forces which are constructing those experiences, which is sort of what surrealism is. Yeah, and the childish, I mean, this is America. I mean, it really is doing what gangster rap claims to do. It's depicting the reality and the violence of contemporary Afro-American life, but in a way which formally, clearly doesn't give you,

you know, leave you coming away with the idea that, well, that's the only way it can be, and actually it's quite cool and sexy, which is what gangster rap tried to do. It's sort of realism, but it's sort of, you know, critical realism. It's a sort of, you know, what in the, you know, certain strands of the Marxist tradition, we call a sort of Brechtian sort of critical realism. And it's not, it totally fits, of course, with every sort of theory we would probably want to endorse about the relationships in culture and politics that, well, you know, it's not an accident.

You're suddenly hearing new music again after Black Lives Matter has seen the first significant radicalisation of Africa, of Black America since, you know, since that those great defeats of the kind of late 80s and early 90s. Do you think it would be a useful thing for people to do today? Yes. I mean, I think what it does is it produces a kind of solidarity and a kind of enduring friendship. And it's sort of a bit, I mean, it overlaps with things like group therapy, of course. Very intense, but it was incredibly, I mean, solid.

We also did things together. We produced plays. We went to Wales. We did LSD together. We went to... That's what we like to hear. And is there anything that people you think should have been done differently? Well, we look back and it was so naive and so utopian,

and we really did think we could change the world. There was a kind of, you know, as long as we made people think differently, and it would be quite easy to get people to think differently, because look, we had been transformed by these ideas. And now there's a kind of much deeper pessimism. So I think it was, yeah, naive in lots of words. ways, but then perhaps most people look back on their 20s with amazement that they could believe the things that they did. But certainly, I mean, it was incredibly important part of,

I mean, absolutely incredibly important part of my life. I was a bit lost in London in the 60s personally until feminism. And then I thought, yes, we're making history. We definitely are making history. So as I was listening to the interview, I was thinking, right, what are the barriers to us making this stuff happen like if we agree that it has kind of revolutionary potential or at least a potential to get people to to see themselves and other people and the potential for change in a different in a different light then what are the barriers to making that happen and I'm wanting to see and you know I don't think it's same it's the same everywhere around the country I think it would be easier for people to do in places that are are not London but I know

for a fact that I have tried both within Plancy and other experiments of trying to get a group of people together is almost impossible because of what people's lives are like and the demands on their minds not just in terms of work and anxiety that's created through technology but you know everyone's responsibilities etc which obviously takes away the potential for people to either be reflective or to be able to especially reflect in groups. The thing that Mika spoke about, I think she mentioned this, which really made me think about spaces where consciousness is raised, where I have had an experience, where it's not supposed to be deliberate, but it ends up being the same thing, is things like book clubs.

I think that, you know, I have had, and several people have had, that I've spoken to, this, this experience of in political book clubs just again going back to this idea of you've got four you know three or four hours ideally where a group of people are sitting together in a living room that's close to your house is actually seems to be a very revolutionary thing for for me maybe it's my experience of life and because I feel um you know travel and distance and and being atomized and like every every meeting with someone having to have a purpose and and being an event that actually a space like a book club allows for the mental space and the bonding around ideas where even though you're not talking about your own experiences it's

got quality to it maybe it's just basically people's living rooms that's what I'm saying when you do something in somebody's living room it seems to have a specific power maybe it's the biscuits, I don't know. Another recent track is Gregory Porter, kind of jazz singer, did this sort of jazz dance, sort of jazz house, sort of disco, a really powerful kind of dance floor track called 1960 What, which is, again, the lyric is an evocation

of the Detroit riots in the 1960s, but it's also a deliberate evocation of the fact that the condition of, you know, black people in the American cities now is not significantly better than it. was at that time. You know, it does make me think about, we haven't really touched on just the fact that, well, you know, the idea of just, you know, collective experience, collective joy dance as itself a form of consciousness raising. You know, we did, we had someone at an acid

carbonism event that we were all at that who said that, you know, coming to one of my parties had made, had made a want to join momentum. And there is this sense that while they do fulfill this function, you know, they're kind of just dancing together, fulfills a certain kind of consciousness raising function in that it overcomes the immediate kind of everyday affective sense that being with other people is just a drag and it's just a pain it's just disempowering

on the other hand it's limited I think the historical experience of rave shows that yeah sooner or later you know you probably do have to you know probably do have to have people reading books you probably have to have you know we probably should at some point we should start having like groups like before the party or something

where you actually talk about stuff I mean, I think it's the scum's full circle. It's basically saying eventually you have to sit in living rooms and talk about your own lives with intent with cups of tea and biscuits. Hi, everybody. This is Matt, one of the editors of ACFM. I've come out from behind the laptop and in front of the microphone to tell you about some supplementary material soon to be available for this main episode of ACFM. Both the full audio of the interview with Mika Navar and a fuller explanation of the history of theories of ideology and political, consciousness that were discussed here but that we didn't have space for in this episode

will soon be available online somewhere soon. We're not totally sure whether this will be, maybe the main Novara feed or a new supplementary ACFM feed, or just out there online somewhere. But if people check out the acid carbonism page on Facebook or any of us on social media, we'll put announcement up there when they're available. All right, play us out, Bernie. This show is brought to you by Navarra Media. To find articles, videos and more audio content like this,

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