
Prologue — Activists and the long march home
This is not a book; it is a movement in a movement — a very long movement — with a view to doing things differently in life, in every life. A view to making it possible — easeful, with resources so readily to-hand, graceful in a landscape known so deep — that the continuous, mundane fabric we weave in every place every day should be liberation; that the liberation that we are making should be utterly self-evident, its origins and intention and weaving obvious, its substance generous, protecting, lovely, manifestly well judged.
The movement is a movement about work of every kind; which therefore continues without ending. That is to say, it is a movement which, even if it puts words on pages — as is happening here — attends at its heart to conduct, to practice; which is to say, to making. To actions. To the intentions and dispositions and delicate disciplines out of which actions arise, and which action lays down. We all of us act always, and until our last conscious breath. Let’s discover, then, how to do it very well! Let’s attend to work, and make the work beautiful and that which is made beautiful.
This lovely apprehension of work, and belief in our capacity together for lovely work, makes us socialists: the action coming from all according to our fullest capacities, the action affording to all according to our most particular needs. This action is what society is for. This organising of making and serving is what society is; this is what people — a mere few generations ago, in the time of the making of the working class — invented the word ‘society’ to be a proudly held, proudly served banner for.
Stated thus, the movement is plainly one of self-conscious politics. But the felt, handled form of it is a movement of the living of lives; actual lives of actual humans in actual landscapes in actual time. Your life, in your next breath. Our lives alongside one another, as long as we both shall live, in the tides of all the lives in our times. And because of this, it is a movement that attentively addresses and skillfully re-forms forces. In the landscape out-there, forces — of cultural and economic production and reproduction — organise and predispose: communities, institutions, dispositions of stuff, dumped at our door by history, sloshing around in tides of turbulent action, willful and incoherent by turns. The movement of liberation that we are in intends the re-weaving of these forces.
Forces of another kind, equally powerful, equally fateful, organise and predispose, also, in the landscape in-here. In each person: our hoping and fearing, our wanting and disdaining; our moving-towards and turning-away and striving to be and remain and realise that which we feel we are. Forces of production and reproduction of the heart, these; and our movement intends also the remaking of these. The making and remaking of living, pulsing hearts, as more skillful, capable hearts, is where liberation resides. This is what makes our socialist activism libertarian.
What adventures we shall yet have. What wisdom we shall harvest and set in further motion and furnish. What legacies of open-hearted life lived we shall draw upon and leave.
As we do these things we shall attend to knowledges — or rather, knowing: the active and intentional constituting of collective and individual capacities to effectively know and effectively act, in specific ways, for specific ends.** Our world is strung together with these, both intimately in-here (in our personal capacities for skill, insight and well-founded action) and grossly out-there, in the massive forces of ‘knowledge based’ labour and apparatus that are mobilised now by globalised capital and inserted — as public administrations, media, industries, social services, communications, technological infrastructures — between the hopes and aspirations and incomes and mutual relations of communities and persons. We had best understand these things well.
** The branch of the movement that I have come up through began to address this in the 70s as a matter of ‘science’. But it’s much deeper than ‘radical science’. It’s about the human capacity to know in well-founded ways; that are capable of informing wise action; in the conduct of everyday living and working. Which is to say: it’s about labour power, and the production (and altered production) of labour power. Labour-power, in this sense, is a notion given to us by Karl Marx. More of him — and liberation, and labour-power — anon.
We shall attend also to how to weave: lives together, pasts into presents into futures: an active, self-aware, skilful and utterly modern kind of practice. At the centre of this are blood and guts, fight and flight and freeze, feelings and identities: deeply forceful, wired-in, ancient movements of affiliation and separation, association and competition. We have a potential to be the convivial animal; and this is a wonderful story that we must continue to tell and investigate about ourselves. But it is far from a foregone conclusion that this will be how we, in the collective, will in fact act. We do harm, hate Others, cling to privileges, throw-up barricades, spend lives committed (as history sees, even when we don’t) to featherbedding and grasping and getting ahead of a game that snaps always at our heels. If we mean for our grandchildren to have lives of conviviality **, we had best understand these things very well: not in history or in society but in-here. We must develop capacities to act remarkably well. And to weave threads of well-lived lives, into fabrics of different history.
** This term — conviviality — is from Ivan Illich, who wrote Tools for conviviality and a slew of related works at a point when it had begun to be clear (though not as fatefully clear as it is today, in the days of data analytics, globalised supply chains and super-rich oligarchs) that ‘professional’ practices are deeply compromised, and threaten humane action as such. More of conviviality, and unhelpful professionalism, anon.
All is open to change, in time. All will, of course, in fact, change, in time. It will be unwise to live and act without being deeply aware of the historicity of all things. In particular, it will be unwise to forget just how young we are, as a species, and how small we are on the landscape of deep time. We are made of star-stuff and think we were born yesterday. We are only the slightest in difference from the apes — from lizards, even, sea slugs even — and think we are civilised and above it all and have the whole of creation to wreak our will upon. We depend entirely for our quality of living, and for the very fact of our living, on the Earth, and so easily forget that the Earth does not in the slightest depend on or value us: the Earth and life on Earth will continue long after we have shuffled off the coil. Cockroaches can have it, bacteria can have it. There is modesty incumbent on our continued living here — well — that we in our few hundreds of generations have only cultivated patchily at best.
Becoming realistic about our standing in history is utterly important for our children and their children: what may stay, what must go, what aspiration is wise and what foolish, what is scope and what is nonsense and pathetic desire. We had best understand very well our place as a dot in a landscape that will change every day, until the end — which is long after our end.
This is a big and complex landscape that we travel in (or that travels in us). This book — this project of which the book is a small re-beginning — needs a large starting. It needs starting very soon, in our lifetimes: in the space of the life of each of us. It has, of course, started — that, for example, is why I have the historical notion of libertarian socialism already to-hand, to sketch things with. The journey needs travelling with great skill and we had best understand very well what these skills of conviviality are, and cultivate them for all we are worth. These skills are the only thing that makes us potentially worth anything . . . labour powers, and the altered (re)production of labour powers.
Convening a college
The project that I speak of is some kind of college — a college being a convening of people for the purpose of developing and sharing and securing the mobilising of wisdom: for knowing the world into a good shape. It is an ‘invisible college’, meaning that it has no walls, no dignitaries or jobsworths, no banked assets; that all membership is active. I call it the college of conviviality because this is a way of speaking of the breadth and depth of the forms and intentions of libertarian socialist activism.
I picture a generation of activist baby-boomers convening to review what they now find they know of activism, and of the changed and changed-again landscapes of activism that they have made journeys in and mapped. I picture them reviewing what they now know of the making of socialist life, having been ‘libertarians’ in diverse fields: fields that overtook them and made fragments of them before the 70s were through, and burgeoned and grew walls-between in the 80s — radical science, alternative technology, community development, oral history, anthropology-from-below, deschooling, active citizenship, regional and local economies and global fair-trade, sustainable transport and production, transition towns, peace and reconciliation, social justice, participatory design and planning, production for use and wellbeing not domination, socialisation of domestic labour, personal growth and radical therapy and child-centred learning. Etcetera. And I picture this purposefully convened community — the defining thing — devoting itself to conversations, and the collaborative design of actions, with twenty-something activists: who might be themselves, fifty years on, but are active in changed times.
Building lives now. Up against and constituting changed — and profoundly unchanged — forces now. Communicating and interacting now: flash-mobs and blogs and festivals, professions and zero-hours contracts and networked freelancers and cash-in-hand below-the-radar services, tracked and targeted through Google and smart-cards and Facebook; in debt and in transition and in the lurch and in deep emotional waters. The college of conviviality is all of these people, addressing all of these things, for generations, for the grandchildren, starting now.
The college is a collective of skilled and developing labour. It has the aim of knowing well how to make objects and collectives and material infrastructures and cultures, to research and develop work practices, to cultivate and mobilise diverse labour powers and diverse modes of rigour. It has the aim of skilfully nurturing diverse and well-formed life in well-founded ways, especially in infants and children and peoples who are weak or hungry and people who are incapable. It has the aim of preventing and ending violence and bringing reparation and healing, and of doing this out-there in society and indoors in the family and in-here, in the person.
People will be changed in the travelling, before we eventually come home, and there will be a lot of clinging and ugliness and hurt to weather well. If we have known for a generation that ‘the personal is political’, we have yet to really put this to work and discover the skills. If we have known for a generation that ‘radical technologies’ are essential, we have yet to discover how to develop and mutually align at scale the practices through which they can be constituted and mobilised. These things are ‘core curriculum’ in the College.
❦ How small and full of texture. Every place is itself
This is a big and complex landscape that we travel in; that travels in us. And yet; how small and full of texture the landscape seems, most of the time, right here.
Rogers remembers walking in the sparkling morning with the small boy down to Fistral beach, the boy being full of imagination and vigour, the greens being wonderfully diverse and bright, the sands being cool and wet as freshwater runs its final yards from saltmarsh into the quiet surf. He remembers too this memory becoming part of a morning in Iron Cove in Sydney, the boy now a man, as many miles away as it is possible to be on the surface of this Earth, the greens now being the odd antipodean grey-greens of gums and mangroves, the water glinting now under the oars of a rowing four, exercising ahead of the hard mid-day glare. Rogers remembers the feeling of both feelings, the walking of both walks; knows their difference from any green he will see today, any water he will walk alongside, any connection with a nearby or distant person today (even, that ‘same’ man-boy-man). He almost cannot believe, he almost is stunned, how much of this stuff there is, passing all the time, remaining all the time, arising all the time, being storied all the time into now-context and now-action.
m is in the taxi from Arlanda with Bob, they are setting out into new territory, they have a deal to seal. Snow is falling in the dark as they reach the outskirts of Stockholm, and younger Swedes, Bob says, are subject to accidents, not knowing how to drive in snow, which comes less often these days. In the morning they head for T-Centralen and take the Tunnelbahn — over vigorous water at Slussen then through the city’s underlying massive granite — emerging into bright, sub-zero air at Telefonplan, and the undistinguished 60s office buildings that are the global headquarters of the telecoms multinational, LM Ericsson. They have brought themselves by plane and train and taxi into deep water and m is stepping into the largest, most challenging landscape: of out-on-a-limb action research, of rock-blasted tunnels and powerful fast-flowing channels. He does not today regret this; but how he now wishes he had known better how to map and journey in global-reach landscapes of corporate emotion and community and revenue targets. And: just what their distances were, from the worlds of new, capable, good-hearted friends in the community of ‘participatory IT design’ that he himself was making around the globe, at that time in his adventurous and risky professional life.
In these muggy drugged summer days, the wife has been knocked down by exhaustion and distress and is swept by waves of paralysis. Each day these waves precess, in the late morning, from the lower body, toward the head. Today, it will be the head. The husband and the wife both are afraid, but hope and — in their own way — do something like praying. Resting in some afternoon coolness, tongues of cold fire lick up and down Walker’s spine; he did not know that terror felt like this, he files it for reference in indelible memory. Today the paralysis seems to have run its course. In another few days the community psychiatric nurse will give them good advice. In a couple of weeks they will move house and begin a new way of living in another town and both will make a recovery and both will discover and survive utterly unimagined further things about the force of movements of feeling. But they do not know this today, and today . . . they await the late-morning wave in the muggy drugged heat of a midsummer morning, and hope it will not be the last thing they share and do not know how to feel about this. It is his 44th year and Walker does not yet have maps of this territory. He has no way of imagining yet how landfall can be made when so adrift.
How small and full of texture the landscape seems, most of the time. Every place is itself.
Picture the child who cholera has killed before a year of their small life has been lived, because a war of fundamentalisms has denied his parents their land and made migrants of them. Picture the wage-worker who despairs of skill, despairs of recognition and betterment, despairs even of an hour of decent wage-work today; because the corporations that have ‘work to give’ have other priorities for the reserves in their bank accounts. Picture the woman who winnows the grain, makes the bread, bears the children, mends the clothes, plants the crop, attends the sick; and the men who tell her how she is to look, how she is to speak, how she is to deport herself and what she is to submit herself to, if she wishes to avoid violence on her body and outright abuse of her spirit. Picture the one who dwells near the ocean, who can imagine the day in their grandchild’s life, when the village will be inundated and the catch will be too small. Picture the pensioner and the housewife who remember when their weekly supermarket shop was 50p an item, and see that it now is two pounds and rising. Picture the tower block going up in flames, and the ones gathered to celebrate Eid on the 20th floor; and the loved ones who outlive them, and find no succour in legally constituted government; and hardly know what to do except resort to anger.
• There is suffering; know it. Know it well. Know it today. Do not be afraid.
• There is an origin of suffering, know it. Know it very well in yourself, know it very well in others. Openness in the heart is pivotal.
• Suffering can be ceased, know it. Know it as a matter of conduct and discretion. Know it as a matter of demands and of ownership. Know it as a matter that is the only proper purpose of the State. Know it as the responsibility of each person.
• You can walk a path to the ending of suffering for every person, know it. Know what forces you may acquire mastery of, in what kind of collective, in what kind of solitude. Know what forces are not wisely resisted. Know that each person needs and warrants their own mapping and equipping on this path.
This is conviviality. We shall associate freely in making these things possible, in ‘the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers’.**
** Karl Marx (1866), ‘The Different Questions: 5 — Cooperative labour’ in Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council, International Workingmen’s Association, August 1866.
In this book — and in the movement this book is made to belong to — there will be three voices speaking of this. These voices constitute a sketch for ‘the curriculum’ of the college of conviviality. There will be Rogers. Rogers is the voice of equanimity and skilful commitment and graceful movement that belongs to the tiny, aware, responsible actor in the impossibly long history. There will be Walker. Walker is the voice of radical diversity, person to person, person-within-person; and, founded in this, of well-founded mutualism and association: true compassion and conviviality and help. And there will be m. m is the voice of self-management and making, and proud depth of skill and mastery of means, and of the well-founded practical (re)organising of forces of mutuality and wellbeing; and the unmaking of domination. These voices are not literary devices. They have emerged in the making of a libertarian socialist life, as quite distinct ‘pieces of self’.
Of course they all belong to one person, and that person is writing this book. But each speaks from a different place in that life, into a distinct landscape, and addresses others in the world in a distinct way. He will not be a socialist and a libertarian unless he speaks continually in all three voices, and acts in all three ‘places’.
He hopes — he intends — that the college will be convened, that you will be in membership. There is work to do. Well met.
