I have seen the future of economics and it is no fucking bosses. No profits. No markets. No hierarchical division of labor. In this future, people collectively, freely, justly, rationally produce for one another. Workers and consumers minimize waste, maximize human fulfillment, and escape class division. There is equity for all, dignity for all. Everyone lives in accord with nature. We become our most caring thoughtful selves, moved by feelings of love. The muse wakes us all. Who wouldn’t want no more crazy sorrow? No more cruel leaders or leaders who turn cruel? Many corporate fools and fanatics wouldn’t want that. Many masters of war wouldn’t want that. Too bad for them. I am for new economics for a better world. What about you?
Sure, you are probably for new economics too. Why else would you read this review? No more grey flannel bosses. No more blood drenched profits. No more malicious markets. But wipe away bosses, profits, markets, and corporations, and what’s left? A humungous vacuum. Nature abhors that. So, what would fill it?
When movements overcome the past, sometimes they get too much nothing. They kick up noise and turmoil. The dust settles. They are back where they came from. Other times when movements overcome the past, they cause big change. The dust settles. They suffer a new boss in place of the old boss.
The book, No Bosses, A New Economy for a Better World describes how movements might escape class rule smartly, equitably, sustainably, and with dignity for all. No Bosses’ introduction savages existing relations. Its opening chapter sets out positive values to use to orient and judge economics. Subsequent chapters answer who owns what, who decides what, who does what, who earns what, and who allocates what. They propose new institutions wherein we decide our own lives with equity, solidarity, and dignity for all. Finally, two concluding chapters discuss winning a new economy and offer a bit of personal and social context for the whole perspective.
No Bosses doesn’t paint a full picture of future daily life. It doesn’t speculate on second, third, or fourth order details. It doesn’t dictate how long future people will choose to work each day, precisely how they will conduct their personal relations, or even what they will individually or collectively consume.No Bosses doesn’t conjure up electric car designs. It doesn’t celebrate bio chemically improved health care. It doesn’t predict much less dictate contingent future circumstances.
No Bosses’ agenda is instead simple and even elegant. Passionate indignation pursuing truth. Perceive a world where people freely decide and implement their own life choices with no bosses who severely impose inequality, enforce anti-sociality, and destroy the very planet our lives depend on.
So what new features does No Bosses propose?
A productive commons from which we all borrow to produce things socially desired.
Workers and consumers self managed councils where we cooperatively decide our economic lives.
Jobs and work where we are all empowered to participate in decision making with confidence, skills, and knowledge commensurate with informed, effective, choices.
Life in which all who work get a share of the social product based on how long, how hard, and the onerousness of our socially valued work. And where we who can’t work get a full income for being alive.
And finally, what No Bosses calls participatory planning, or a collective, decentralized, cooperative, self managed means for us to collectively determine economic inputs and outputs.
No Bosses lays bear each of these five proposed defining features’ logic. It reports each of these features’ implications for individuals, for groups, and for our social and natural surroundings. And finally, No Bosses addresses predictable concerns about each of the proposed features.
No Bosses is not a book about replacing bad people in high positions. It is not a book about reducing corruption. It is not a book about bandaging gushers of pain.
No Bosses is a book about eliminating high positions. It is a book about producing integrity. It is a book about removing the causes of gushers of pain and implementing instead fields of dignity and fulfillment.
No Bosses is a book about economic and social revolution. It is a book about after our ship comes in.
No Bosses is timely not because we are going to win our new world overnight, but because to win it as early as our accumulated past history now permits, we will have to self-consciously work towards it, and we will have to do so with clarity as well as openness to learning our way as we go.
The world is bleeding. All too many people passively view the rivers of blood and barely blink. All too many people are rendered passive by hopelessness or habit. There is too little shared passionate indignation. Too much atomized pain and anger. And even people who courageously and collectively resist passivity rarely contemplate actually winning a wholly new economy in a wholly better world. There is too little audacity. Yet we not only only need indignant outraged vision of a better world to collectively rise up against climate change, racism, misogyny, violence in all forms, and an economics built on bosses. We need indignant outraged vision of a better world to sustain hope, orientation, and confident commitment, and even to avoid savaging ourselves in circular firing squads. Can we muster loving, honest, truthful hope, orientation, and commitment against a slippery slope to suicide? Can we muster it to reverse our suicidal slide? Can we muster it to chart a path to a better world?
So, does No Bosses deliver? Is its writing sufficiently clear and concise, much less poetic—and is it appropriately passionate? No Bosses shouts out for more effort, more experimentation, and especially more program and struggle that knows where it wants to wind up. To dream together. But there is a rub.
Once a book is read, what happens? For a book like No Bosses, tallies of sales mean nothing. Volume of pages read mean little. A book like this doesn’t earn points for entertaining. It doesn’t even earn points for enlightening. What does reading it engender? That is the question. Not just to understand, but to affect. That is the purpose.
Will No Bosses help foster constructive, respectful, mutual movement relations that steadily grow and enrich activism and organizing? It depends in part on how many read it, but even more so, it depends on what the people who read it then do with what they have read. Truth needs action needs truth.
Ten thousand readers who forget it all a month later? Little to celebrate. Five readers who use the lessons conveyed for months and years. Much to celebrate. The appropriate metric to assess a social change book (speech, article, or event), is not sales revenues. It is not even smiles while reading. It is what comes after readers set aside the book (speech, article, or event).
So I Bertrand Bob Guevara review No Bosses and give it my blessing, not as a formal exercise, not to cleverly sing praises, not to earn a paycheck, not to expand a resume. I review it in hopes you who are reading these words will next read No Bosses, and will then think on, refine, enrich, and correct its words, and let others into your reading and yourselves into their’s—to breathe shared life into the vision.
Bertrand (Russell), Bob (Dylan), and Che (Guevara) did not write this review but they did write large parts of the history and culture leading toward its vision and to my choosing to write it. Their actions, ideas, and words did contribute to the contents of the vision that No Bosses presents.
Authors matter. I am an author. So what? Mentors, friends, partners, lovers, and mostly readers matter more.
I said that. And, dear reader, what do you say? That is what now matters.
And yes, I am Michael Albert, an aspirant to a new economy for a better world who in a fit of frenzy while awaiting No Bosses publication happened to imagine the sentiments offered in this review.
Audacious? Maybe. Desperate? For sure. We inhabit a world at a crossroads. There is a dream we ought not defer.
And so here I am. Younger once. Older than that now. Trying hard to advance a vision summarized as No Bosses. You bet I am. Why wouldn’t I? How about you?
A day somewhere in the future. A day with a long, numerical title like those in sci-fi movies; names of days are no longer relevant. Time stretches, bends and breaks. The bones in our bodies follow the same pattern. Everything is a network, connected. If something breaks, everything else feels it. How did we get here? It’s hard to tell. The evidence is scattered, but at one point there was a flight. A flight out of this planet and a flight that charged through everything we have taken for granted on this planet; tearing down those barriers, watching them crumble and fall on the door like a pile of broken bones. During the crash everything collided together, and, in the debris, new connections were made. What before seemed impossible became a union, what before deemed unimaginable became a neuron. There was no more distinction between species, no more omnipotent humans, no more separation, just networked sentient beings. Emerged out of necessity, out of revolution, because no other option was left: a crash, long-time in the making. Scattered visions and objects of this new normal are arrested in space. Glimpses of vegetal and humanimal abundance from Earth – back when we called her a Mother – have fused with evidence of death and relics of what humans gured the apocalypse would look like. But these become visions and talismans of hope and promise. They reside in a future anterior continuum, one that always keeps slipping away from humankind. They offer premonitions from a past time, déjà vus of what is happening, scientific visions of what is coming, sorcery to interfere with the future, rituals and fantasy to cope with the anxiety of its arrival. Preparing to leave this planet is not an easy feat and will not always be an escape strategy reserved for the privileged and the few. Escaping is a strategy that has ecological potential. To escape is not to falter in the face of adversity, it is not done to leave destruction behind, it does not show lack of courage: escape is to be reclaimed as a revolutionary tactic of togetherness. Fantasy is escape, reimagining, together, with other species, our future on this planet, without ever leaving it, is escape: an escape from authoritarian regimes that insist on controlling not only the lifespans of the in nite number of beings in our system, but also their imaginaries. If this is to be no more, then a very di erent image of our worlds and their futures emerges. A rocket made of techno-biomatter, visualisations of curious life specimens, a chair with the ability to navigate our present and future imaginary, an armour to dress us with what we have already dreamt, velvet dust, and a logo for a singular mission that may become a symbol of resistance for the masses. What happens when deep ecology* becomes an ecology of the abyss, of the universe, of the infinite? What is it that shifts when a union between the infinitesimal and the majestic, the terrestrial and the celestial, the corporeal and the fantastical, the earthbound and the ethereal, the defined and the imagined, the human and the more-than-human, becomes an equation? If linear time travel and everyday life processes fail, then an orbital way of being and relating can perhaps show us the way to reimagine our entangled lives and our -hopefully- entangled futures – however they might look like. Transformation is to be mutual. End of message. Mission launched. Estimated time of arrival unknown. In Orbit.
*Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy and social movement based in the belief that humans must radically change their relationship to nature from one that values nature solely for its usefulness to human beings to one that recognizes that nature has an inherent value.
MARO MICHALAKAKOS was born in Athens in 1967. She studied painting in France (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques de Cergy-Pontoise, 1987-1993) and Germany (Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Braunschweig, 1988-1989). In 2006 she was shortlisted for the Painting Award of Castelon County in Valencia, Spain. She has presented her work in numerous exhibitions in Greece and abroad. Recent shows include: ‘Mr. Robinson Crusoe stayed home. Adventures of design in time of crisis’, Benaki Museum, Athens (2021); ‘Weaving the future II’, Katsigra Museum, Larissa (2021); Artwork commission by Hermès for the Athens store (2021); ‘La chasse’, Embassy of France, Athens (2020). Her works are part of private and public collections, such as the Fonds Nationales d’Art Contemporain in France, Istanbul Modern and others. She has also created set-installations for the theatre, in collaboration with directors, theatre companies and festivals, including the National Theatre of Greece, the Athens and Epidaurus Festival and Onassis Stegi among others. Enigmatic and multifaceted, the work of Maro Michalakakos is imbued with the softness and ambiguity of dreams. In her sculptural installations, painting, drawings and reliefs on velvet, the artist includes social and cultural references, and often draws from personal and family memories. In some of her works she introduces birds and the natural kingdom, often as a way to touch upon universal themes such as power, oppression, authority and the interconnected concepts of life and death.
KOSTAS STASINOPOULOS is a curator and art historian working at the intersection of art, ecology and identity. He works as a curator at Serpentine, London, focusing on live and interdisciplinary programmes, Back to Earth and General Ecology. He served as Associate Curator at The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center and has collaborated with the Whitechapel Gallery, White Cube, Frieze and the Athens Biennale. Kostas received his PhD in History of Art from University of York (2016) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Onassis Foundation and NEON. He holds an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2011) and a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London (2004). Together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine, he is the co-editor of 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth (Penguin, 2021).
Introducing a Cultural Deal for EuropeThe moments of major crises often present us with windows of opportunities to reconsider our overarching priorities and ways of achieving them. While the policy-makers are currently concerned with mapping out the road towards Europe’s sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, the European cultural community urges them to include culture as a key component in this process – and beyond. It is time to acknowledge the central role that culture and creativity play in European society, economy, and identity and provide it with the necessary means to fully realize its potential as a major consolidating factor of the European project.
To put this visionary idea into motion, Culture Action Europe, European Cultural Foundation, and Europa Nostra (representing the European Cultural Alliance) jointly proposeda Cultural Deal for Europeframework. This overarching strategy aims at placing culture at the center of the European project and mainstreaming it across all policy fields:from the green transition to Europe’s geopolitical ambition and from the digital shift to a value-driven Union. It focuses on both facilitating the contribution of culture to Europe’s sustainable development and providing the sector with the credibility and resources for realising its full potential. By bundling together both short and long term objectives, Cultural Deal for Europe is envisioned as a roadmap towards a more balanced, more comprehensive, and more inclusive European development model.
The Cultural Deal for Europe is an initiative in the making. It is an umbrella framework to be developed in the course of the following months, particularly in view of the preparations to the upcoming Conference on the Future of Europe. By launching this campaign, the European community of cultural, creative, heritage and philanthropic sectors leads a call for ideas and input from the representatives of the sector, with regards to the role of culture in the post-pandemic recovery of Europe and beyond.
What does the Cultural Deal for Europe propose?
Devoting at least 2% of the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) for culture. All national recovery and resilience plans must show due evidence of cultural and European relevance. Full inclusion of culture in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and the European Green Deal. Make sure funding for culture is mainstreamed into other relevant EU programmes and actions. Relevant and timely support to cultural workers. Philanthropy to be associated strategically in the recovery of Europe and design of its future. Upholding democracy and rights for a values-based Europe. Culture is key for the EU’s external relations. Culture for the future of Europe.Cultural Deal for Europe
The launch event The Cultural Deal for Europe was launched on 18 November 2020 during a high-level online event, with the participation of the key European policy-makers and cultural stakeholders. Within the context of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the discussion unfolded around the role that culture plays in Europe’s recovery from the pandemic, how it can contribute to a more long-term vision of the future of Europe and what can the role of philanthropy be in this process. The debate was divided into three sessions, in which the policy-makers and the representatives of the European cultural ecosystem exchanged their views.[Video Chapter 1: Culture as a driving force for Europe’s recovery][Video Chapter 2: Philanthropy as contributor to the Cultural Deal for Europe][Video Chapter 3: Culture and cultural heritage for the future of Europe][Video Conclusions]Message from David SassoliThe online debate on the Culture Deal for Europe was opened with a video address by the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli. In his speech, he talked about culture and arts as the creative force animating the European project. Claiming beauty and ‘poetics’ vital to the quality of our lives, President Sassoli argued that cultural dimension is central in building a new, post-pandemic future of Europe.Social Media Action Day Take part in the #CulturalDealEU social media action day On the 13th of January 2021, Culture Action Europe organises a social media action day to communicate widely about the Cultural Deal for Europe. We invite you to support this action by engaging with the #CulturalDealEU on Social Media.
#CulturalDealEU campaign is jointly brought to you by Culture Action Europe, the European Cultural Foundation and Europa Nostra (also in its capacity as a coordinator of the European Heritage Alliance). #CulturalDealEU is the framework in the making. Would you like to know more about the campaign? Visit #CulturalDealEU section on the CAE website. Interested in being engaged with the campaign more actively? Do not hesitate to reach out to us.
Send us photos and videos of climate issues that you are facing in your local area and be part of DiEM25’s Activist Circle on November 6!
As our planet’s clock approaches midnight, world leaders are set to converge in Glasgow next month at COP26 in order to come up with new excuses, new symbolic targets and new ways to silence the real progressive voices who oppose them. We refuse to sit in the back while no one drives. On November 14 – 16, join Noam Chomsky, Yanis Varoufakis, Caroline Lucas and many other progressives in saying: COP OFF!
In this three-day online event, DiEM25 will gather progressives from around the world to discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time, ideas you won’t hear at COP26.
Before then, on November 6 at the Global Day of Action, DiEM25 is planning a Pan-European action to take the Green New Deal for Europe out onto the streets. We are calling on you to join forces with the rest of DiEM25 to help us raise awareness about our transformative green economy proposals.
Please send us photos and videos of the most pressing climate issues you are facing in your local area and contribute to DiEM25’s Activist Circle street action! Submit your photos and videos here till Sunday October 31.
What is DiEM25’s Activist Circle?
DiEM25’s Activist Circle will see groups of DiEM25 members take to the streets in their local towns and cities, standing in a circle with laptops showing passers-by pictures and videos of pertinent climate issues that are impeding the lives of citizens across Europe. We will hold a meeting on October 28 at 6PM CEST, to coordinate and organise the action. DiEM25 members are invited to participate.
Time to act!
To make this happen, we need as much evidence as possible about the detrimental impact that the climate crisis is having where you are. Perhaps you or others around you have stories that show how polluting factories, extreme weather, wildfires, flooding, appalling consequences of animal farming etc, have affected your area. If so, please send us pictures and videos that you have taken or collected so that we can showcase why it’s so important to implement the Green New Deal for Europe!
What to do:
Take pictures and videos of evidence of the impact that the climate crisis is having where you are (polluting factories, extreme weather, wildfires, flooding, appalling consequences of animal farming etc.)
Upload them here to this form. till Sunday, October 31.
If you need any help to fill in the form or if you have any other questions, please write to us at: [email protected]
All of us are in a new world, and we’d better get used to it.
Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, Calif., and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived. The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already “blackened” 504 square miles of Northern California in what was still essentially the (old) pre-fire season. It would soon become the second-largest wildfire in the state’s history. When it swept through Greenville, much of downtown, along with more than 100 homes, were left in ashes as the 1,000 residents of that Gold Rush–era town fled.
I remember Greenville as a wonderful little place that, all these years later, still brings back fond memories. I’m now on the other coast, but much of that small, historic community is no longer there. This season, California’s wildfires have already devastated three times the territory burned in the same period in 2020’s record fire season. And that makes a point that couldn’t be more salient to our moment and our future. A heating planet is a danger, not in some distant time, but right now—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Don’t just ask the inhabitants of Greenville; ask those in the village of Monte Lake, British Columbia, the second town in that Canadian province to be gutted by flames in recent months in a region that normally—or perhaps I should just say once upon a time—was used to neither extreme heat and drought, nor the fires that accompany them.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re no longer just reading about the climate crisis; we’re living it, in a startling fashion. At least for this old guy, that’s now a fact—not just of life but of all our lives—that simply couldn’t be more extreme, and I don’t even need the latest harrowing report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to tell me so. Whether you’ve been sweating and swearing under the latest heat dome, fleeing fires somewhere in the West, broiling in a Siberia that’s releasing startling amounts of heat-producing methane into the atmosphere, being swept away by flood waters in Germany, sweltering in an unprecedented heat-and-fire season in Greece (where even the suburbs of Athens were being evacuated), baking in Turkey or on the island of Sardinia in a “disaster without precedent,” neck-deep in water in a Chinese subway car, or, after “extreme rains,” wading through the subway systems of New York City or London, you—all of us—are in a new world and we’d better damn well get used to it.
Floods, megadrought, the fiercest of forest fires, unprecedented storms —you name it and it seems to be happening not in 2100 or even 2031, but now. A recent study suggests that in 2020 (not 2040 or 2080), more than a quarter of Americans had suffered in some fashion from the effects of extreme heat, already the greatest weather-based killer of Americans and, given this blazing summer, 2021 is only likely to be worse.
By the way, don’t imagine that it’s just we humans who are suffering. Consider, for instance, the estimated billion or more —yes, one billion!—mussels, barnacles, and other small sea creatures that were estimated to have died off the coast of Vancouver, Canada, during the unprecedented heat wave there earlier in the summer.
A few weeks ago, watching the setting sun, an eerie blaze of orange-red in a hazy sky here on the East Coast was an unsettling experience once I realized what I was actually seeing: a haze of smoke from the megadrought-stricken West’s disastrous early fire season. It had blown thousands of miles east for the second year in a row, managing to turn the air of New York and Philadelphia into danger zones.
In a way, right now it hardly matters where you look on this planet of ours. Take Greenland, where a “massive melting event,” occurring after the temperature there hit double the norm this summer, made enough ice vanish “in a single day last week to cover the whole of Florida in two inches of water.” But there was also that record brush fire torching more than 62 square miles of Hawaii’s Big Island. And while you’re at it, you can skip prime houseboat-vacation season at Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border, since that huge reservoir is now three-quarters empty (and, among Western reservoirs, anything but alone!).
It almost doesn’t matter which recent report you cite. When it comes to what the scientists are finding, it’s invariably worse than you (or often even they) had previously imagined. It’s true, for instance, of the Amazon rain forest, one of the great carbon sinks on the planet. Parts of it are now starting to release carbon into the atmosphere, as a study in the journal Nature reported recently, partially thanks to climate change and partially to more direct forms of human intervention.
It’s no less true of the Siberian permafrost in a region where, for the first time above the Arctic Circle, the temperature in one town reached more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a summer day in 2020. And yes, when Siberia heats up in such a fashion, methane (a far more powerful heat-trapping gas than CO2) is released into the atmosphere from that region’s melting permafrost wetlands, which had previously sealed it in. And recently, that’s not even the real news. What about the possibility, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that what’s being released now is actually a potential “methane bomb” not from that permafrost itself but from thawing rock formations within it?
In fact, when it comes to the climate crisis, as a recent study in the journal Biosciencefound, “some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content, and ice mass, set worrying new records.” Similarly, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide “have all set new year-to-date records for atmospheric concentrations in both 2020 and 2021.”
Mind you, just in case you hadn’t noticed, the last seven years have been the warmest in recorded history. And speaking of climate-change-style records in this era, last year, 22 natural disasters hit this country, including hurricanes, fires, and floods, each causing more than $1 billion in damage, another instant record with—the safest prediction around—many more to come.
“IT LOOKED LIKE AN ATOMIC BOMB”
Lest you think that all of this represents an anomaly of some sort, simply a bad year or two on a planet that historically has gone from heat to ice and back again, think twice. A recent report published in Nature Climate Change, for instance, suggests that heat waves that could put the recent ones in the US West and British Columbia to shame are a certainty and especially likely for “highly populated regions in North America, Europe, and China.” (Keep in mind that, a few years ago, there was already a study suggesting that the North China plain with its 400 million inhabitants could essentially become uninhabitable by the end of this century because of heat waves too powerful for human beings to survive!) Or as another recent study suggested, reportsThe Guardian, “heatwaves that smash previous records…would become two to seven times more likely in the next three decades and three to 21 times more likely from 2051-2080, unless carbon emissions are immediately slashed.”
It turns out that, even to describe the new world we already live in, we may need a new vocabulary. I mean, honestly, until the West Coast broiled and burned from Los Angeles to British Columbia this summer, had you ever heard of, no less used, the phrase “heat dome” before? I hadn’t, I can tell you that.
And by the way, there’s no question that climate change in its ever more evident forms has finally made the mainstream news in a major way. It’s no longer left to 350.org or Greta Thunberg and the Sunrise Movement to highlight what’s happening to us on this planet. It’s taken years, but in 2021 it’s finally become genuine news, even if not always with the truly fierce emphasis it deserves. The New York Times, to give you an example, typically had a recent piece of reportage (not an op-ed) by Shawn Hubler headlined “Is This the End of Summer as We’ve Known It?” (“The season Americans thought we understood—of playtime and ease, of a sun we could trust, air we could breathe and a natural world that was, at worst, indifferent—has become something else, something ominous and immense. This is the summer we saw climate change merge from the abstract to the now, the summer we realized that every summer from now on will be more like this than any quaint memory of past summers.”) And the new IPCC report on how fast things are indeed proceeding was front-page and front-screen news everywhere, as well it should have been, given the research it was summing up.
My point here couldn’t be simpler: In heat and weather terms, our world is not just going to become extreme in 20 years or 50 years or as this century ends. It’s officially extreme right now. And here’s the sad thing: I have no doubt that, no matter what I write in this piece, no matter how up to date I am at this moment, by the time it appears it will already be missing key climate stories and revelations. Within months, it could look like ancient history.
Welcome, then, to our very own not-so-slow-motion apocalypse. A friend of mine recently commented to me that for most of the first 30 years of his life, he always expected the world to go nuclear. That was, of course, at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. And then, like so many others, he stopped ducking and covering. How could he have known that, in those very years, the world was indeed beginning to get nuked, or rather carbon-dioxided, methaned, greenhouse-gassed, even if in a slow-motion fashion? As it happens, this time there’s going to be no pretense for any of us of truly ducking and covering.
It’s true, of course, that ducking and covering was a fantasy of the Cold War era. After all, no matter where you might have ducked and covered then—even the Air Force’s command center dug into the heart of Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado—you probably wouldn’t have been safe from a full-scale nuclear conflict between the two superpowers of that moment, or at least not from the world it would have left behind, a disaster barely avoided in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. (Today, we know that, thanks to the possibility of “nuclear winter,” even a regional nuclear conflict—say, between India and Pakistan—could kill billions of us, by starvation if nothing else.)
In that context, I wasn’t surprised when a home owner, facing his house, his possessions, and his car burned to a crisp in Oregon’s devastating Bootleg Fire, described the carnage this way: “It looked like an atomic bomb.”
And, of course, so much worse is yet to come. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a planet on which the Amazon rain forest has already turned into a carbon emitter or one in which the Gulf Stream collapses in a way that’s likely to deprive various parts of the planet of key rainfall necessary to grow crops for billions of people, while raising sea levels disastrously on the East Coast of this country. And that just begins to enumerate the dangers involved, including the bizarre possibility that much of Europe might be plunged into a—hold your hats (and earmuffs) for this one— new ice age!
WORLD WAR III
If this were indeed the beginning of a world war (instead of a world warm), you know perfectly well that the United States like so many other nations would, in the style of World War II, instantly mobilize resources to fight it (or as a group of leading climate scientists put it recently, we would “go big on climate” now). And yet in this country (as in too many others), so little has indeed been mobilized. Worse yet, here one of the two major parties, only recently in control of the White House, supported the further exploitation of fossil fuels (and so the mass creation of greenhouse gases) big time, as well as further exploration for yet more of them. Many congressional Republicans are still in the equivalent of a state of staggering (not to say, stark raving mad) denial of what’s underway. They are ready to pay nothing and raise no money to shut down the production of greenhouse gases, no less create the genuinely green planet run on alternative energy sources that would actually rein in what’s happening.
And criminal as that may have been, Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and crew were just aiding and abetting those that, years ago, I called “the biggest criminal enterprise in history.” I was speaking of the executives of major fossil-fuel companies who, as I said then, were and remain the true “terrarists” (and no, that’s not a misspelling) of history. After all, their goal in hijacking all our lives isn’t simply to destroy buildings like the World Trade Center but to take down Earth (Terra) as we’ve known it. And don’t leave out the leaders of countries like China still so disastrously intent on, for instance, producing yet more coal-fired power. Those CEOs and their enablers have been remarkably intent on quite literally committing terracide and, sadly enough, in that—as has been made oh-so-clear in this disastrous summer—they’ve already been remarkably successful.
Companies like ExxonMobil knew long before most of the rest of us the sort of damage and chaos their products would someday cause and couldn’t have given less of a damn as long as the mega-profits continued to flow in. (They would, in fact, invest some of those profits in funding organizations that were promoting climate-change denial.) Worse yet, as revealing comments by a senior Exxon lobbyist recently made clear, they’re still at it, working hard to undermine President Biden’s relatively modest green-energy plans in any way they can.
Thought about a certain way, even those of us who didn’t live in Greenville, Calif., are already in World War III. Many of us just don’t seem to know it yet. So welcome to my (and your) extreme world, not next month or next year or next decade or next century but right now. It’s a world of disaster worth mobilizing over if, that is, you care about the lives of all of us and particularly of the generations to come.
Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
Cao Fei, Asia One, 2018. Commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, for The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers.
Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age October 2, 2021–January 16, 2022
Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean 3, Park Dräi Eechelen L-1499 Luxembourg Luxembourg Hours: Wednesday 10am–9pm, Thursday–Monday 10am–6pm
Post-Capitalbrings together works of sculpture, painting, photography, video and performance that address the nature of production, consumption and wealth. Developed within a period of significant change and uncertainty, the exhibition takes as its starting point the inherent paradox within a capitalist system that is both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress.
Today forms of labour, currency, commodities and the nature of consumption have been dramatically transformed by technologies that continue to evolve. Multinational information technology and e-commerce firms rank amongst the highest valued publicly traded companies. Information that is both abundant and infinitely replicable has become a valuable commodity that defies traditional economic principles where value is determined by scarcity. The artworks in Post-Capital variously explore the paradoxes, absurdities and ethical questions posed by post-industrial and perhaps post-capital economies.
Artists Ei Arakawa, Mohamed Bourouissa, Cao Fei, Simon Denny, Lara Favaretto, GCC, Guan Xiao, Shadi Habib Allah, Roger Hiorns, Oliver Laric, Liz Magic Laser, Katja Novitskova, Laura Owens, Yuri Pattison, Sondra Perry, Josephine Pryde, Nick Relph, Cameron Rowland, Hito Steyerl, Martine Syms, Nora Turato.
Post-Capital: A Reader A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue including a curator’s essay and texts by James Bridle, Heike Geissler, Richard Seymour, Hito Steyerl, McKenzie Wark, and Shoshana Zuboff is available online at mudamstore.com.
Public programme The exhibition is accompanied by a programme of performance, lectures, screenings and workshops including contributions from Cédric Durand, Lara Favaretto, Helen Hester, Nick Srnicek, Martine Syms, Nora Turato and Jackie Wang. To view the full programme visit mudam.com
Curator Michelle Cotton, assisted by Clémentine Proby, Nelly Taravel and Joel Valabrega.Partners A version of the exhibition will be presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, in 2022.
The exhibition is supported by The Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), The Italian Embassy in Luxembourg and its partners (as part of the Italian Contemporary Art Day), and the Mondriaan Fund.
Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean opened in 2006 in a purpose-built building designed by the renowned Sino-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei and is located in the Park Draï Eechelen, overlooking the historic city of Luxembourg. Through its collection, exhibitions, artistic and educational programmes and partnerships, Mudam Luxembourg aims to advance its mission to present the most relevant contemporary art of our time to the largest possible public.
Roger Hallam was interviewed by Athina Karatzogianni and Jacob Matthews in February and March 2021. Their discussion focuses on ideology, leadership, organisation, communication and mobilisation strategies in radical movements, class and youth politics, transition, community, and resilience, as well as conflict within Extinction Rebellion (henceforth XR), delving into Roger’s thinking on radical politics more broadly.
Athina Karatzogianni: How did you get involved in radical politics?
Roger Hallam:I’ve been involved in radical politics since I was 14 or 15. In the 1980s when I was a teenager, I was involved in the peace movement in Europe. I got arrested and went to prison during that period. So, I was well aware of civil disobedience as a method of bringing about political change. And then when I was at the London School of Economics, I studied Gandhi and non-violence for a year.
Athina Karatzogianni: This was in your early twenties then?
Roger Hallam:Yes, and then I became involved in workers collectives and organic farming and other things in my thirties and my forties. But when I went to London, the main thing I was working towards was how to mobilise people to engage in mass participation, civil disobedience. I was particularly influenced by research in the United States. It seemed enormously clear to me that the most effective way to bring about rapid political change was mass, non-violent civil disobedience. I studied various different forms of direct action as part of my field research: light strikes, occupations, rent strikes and suchlike. Then I was asked to advise climate change activists on how to be effective. So, I talked to them about creating a more civil resistance sort of model based upon the global south, which is to occupy major cities. Given that part of the problem is obviously systemic, as it were.
Athina Karatzogianni: When were you advising climate change activists?
Roger Hallam:Around 2007 I think, and through those discussions, Rising Up was formed, which was a sort of network of activists and academics researching how to engage in mass participation, civil disobedience. Then I did a paper called Pivoting to the Real Issue in January 2013, which proposes that we create a rebellion against the British government on civil resistance principles and that led to the foundation of Extinction Rebellion. And since that’s been formed, I’ve been one of the main strategic voices in XR on how to do that effectively.
Athina Karatzogianni: Your first very publicised action was at King’s College when you were a PhD student there. You were arrested for that and then you were vindicated. In relation to that specific period of your life, how did that particular action inspire you? Given that arrests are a tactic that is used by XR, what was your own experience of that arrest and how did it influence what you were doing in XR?
Roger Hallam:As I was basing my action designs on the principles developed by Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and the classical theory of non-violence is that you engage in disruption in order to get attention and force an opponent to come to the table and negotiate. That’s the other side of classical non-violence: once the opponents come to the table, you’re very respectful towards the opponent and focus upon a change in behaviour or policy, rather than denigrating the opponent in a in a sort of traditional political way. So those are the two elements. The hypothesis, as you might say, of the King’s College campaign was that direct action would produce a result a lot quicker and more efficiently than traditional forms of campaigning. Usually, a divestment campaign to force a university to divest from fossil fuels can take anything from one to five years.
The campaign I engaged with changed their whole corporate policy in five weeks. The outcome of that case today, as it were, was that vigorous non-violence is massively more effective than traditional campaigning, and the mechanism was to create criminal damage with lawful excuse – as it turned out, causing £7000 worth of damage to the building and then carrying on a 14-day hunger strike. That produced a change of policy in those two weeks. They had an emergency investment meeting. I was suspended from King’s College, banned from King’s College for ten days, and then they reinstated me, because it was too embarrassing for them. And then when we came to an agreement, everyone shook hands and were friends as it were, so it was a classic Gandhian sort of progression of giving an ultimatum, engaging in direct action, negotiation and reconciliation. What I took from that was to replicate that on a mass scale towards the government or towards larger institutions. The main hypothesis being that in any power relationship, there is a certain point of non-cooperation or pressure, at which an opponent will be forced to negotiate and no one has absolute power, and it is all a question of numbers and a non-violent force, those that are two criteria.
Athina Karatzogianni: Were you influenced at all by Gene Sharp?
Roger Hallam: Yes, I mean he was one of the main scholars in classical civil disobedience, very much so. And you know, as I just said, his main proposition is that power is relational. It’s not absolute. In other words, a group only has power over another group to the extent that the oppressed group cooperates with the oppressor, and to the extent that there will come a point where the oppressor will be required to negotiate. That is a very positive philosophy of action and it is empirically robust, as we know.
Athina Karatzogianni: I want to move from the ideological discussion and that of strategy towards organisational matters. From attending some meetings about self organisation tactics, I am aware that in the last six months there has been a restructuring of XR. I broadly understand it is based on the holacracy model, and that this organisational structure is based on distributed, decentralised architecture, distributed authority. There are differences between this kind of architecture and the model of Occupy, for example, that was consensus-based, and where things tended to be a little bit slower, what activists call ‘the muddle of Occupy’, whereas XR has follows the ‘by consent’ model. I wonder about your views on how this architecture of organising came about and what whether you had contributed to the organisational structure yourself. What are your views on movement organisation more broadly?
Roger Hallam: Well, the plan for XR took about a year and a half of research and conversations, so it didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t like Occupy where there was no pre-organisation. We had twenty or thirty people involved in designing a modern social movement. And there were six or seven sort of key elements which made it successful. One, of course, was mass civil disobedience and another one was trying to transcend the conflict between hierarchy and horizontalism. The middle way or the transcendent sort of notion was a whole structure where there is delegated authority to mandated groups to have autonomy to get on and initiate creative action within their mandates and so on. The big advantage was that it created an institutionalisation of the social movement, to avoid it collapsing because of structurelessness, as has happened with all the horizontal movements over the last twenty-thirty years. But it didn’t take on a traditional left wing, sort of top-down, leadership structure, as you might say. It was very successful to the extent that thousands of people joined it very quickly.
But in my view, it’s been extremely unsuccessful in being able to create a leadership structure that can create strategic coherence and inspiration, in the context of the biggest existential crisis in the history of humanity. Sociologically speaking, all crises require a top-down leadership in order to create strategic coherence, so there’s a big contradiction between the sort of high-tech model and the necessity for rapid decision making, which is always needed in non-violent confrontation, if it’s going to be successful. As you can see from Martin Luther King and Gandhi models, there was always a central hierarchy that is even more essential now, because we’re going to have billions of people starving to death in the next twenty to thirty years, if we don’t create some sort of coherence. So, there’s a big clash really between the existential emergency and the idealism of some that don’t understand the urgency of the situation.
Athina Karatzogianni: You talked about being a teenager in the 1980s and the peace movement and getting arrested, etc. Going back to the 60s and 70s, the civil rights movement, the student movement in the US and Europe, basically you had the emergence of this idea of more participatory, shared and decentralised leadership, to recognise the emotional labour of activists, to have more participatory leadership. And right now, in the global north, you find this obsession with decentralisation and horizontalism. For example, Alicia Garza has talked about the same problem of the misapplication of decentralised leadership, decentralised structures in Black Lives Matter. This for me is of particular interest: if you go back to your formative years, what were your impressions from people that mentored you, so to speak, or that you worked with? And what’s going on in this continuum of the last fifty-sixty years? What are your impressions of this leadership question?
Roger Hallam: There was a big transition from what you might call traditional left social democratic organisational structures, which were rooted in the mid 20th century, but lasted until the 1990s, and decentralised New Left and postmodernist sort of orientated movements, which originated after 1968 and became even more prominent after 1989. Since 1989, the horizontal dogma has dominated radical politics. In my view, this has been the primary reason for the failure of radical politics, because of its inability to create material power formations that are capable of presenting a material threat to the neoliberal system. Horizontalism is part of the neoliberal construction of society, which enables radical people to virtually signal their opposition, but not to create any material opposition. You can obviously see that in the failure of the climate movements to prevent a 60% increase in carbon emissions over the last fifty years, and in the failure of the left to stop the massive increase in social inequality.
The left has catastrophically failed, in my view, over the last thirty years, and the radical left has been a disaster, insomuch, as it’s been incapable of creating strategic coherence and mass organisation. This is largely a function of its domination by the privileged urban middle class in the Global North that has been disconnected with the older working-class formations of the mid-twentieth century, such as a structural default. But I think horizontalism now is reaching a crisis point, because of the determination, as it were, of the climate crisis. The climate crisis will be manifested through a rise of right-wing populism and fascistic movements.
Over the next five to ten years, the moment of truth for social movements is whether they break out of that domination of the radical left and move towards a more twentieth century realist model of alliances across different social and economic groups – a little bit like in the 1930s – and accept the democratic hierarchical models which were most effective in the 20th century, where you vote a leadership in, the leadership is given executive control, and you can vote them out if you don’t like it. So, for me, it’s a sort of return: what climate change is going to do is that it will force a return to a modernist political culture in the next ten years. The postmodernist period will be seen as an aberration of northern privilege.
Athina Karatzogianni: I want to ask you about the digital communication experiences you have had in the last three or four years. To my understanding XR used WhatsApp up until a point and then changed to Signal and Telegram due to privacy and security concerns. There’s a platform that is based on a carbon neutral server in Switzerland, and there is also Glassfrog and mattermost that is used by XR activists as well. When you consider communication aspects both internally (their role within the group, the movement) and externally (publicising, coordinating actions with the masses), what role do you think communication has particularly played in the trajectory of the movement? What is your own experience of this?
Roger Hallam: Well, my view is that social media has a heroin like aspect to mobilisation processes, in other words, you get a quick hit and then you got a quick collapse. Social media undermines the ability to create effective hierarchical organisation that will maintain the material resistance to the neoliberal state. What social media does is that it creates very rapid mobilisations and then facilitates very rapid collapse, because it can only and it’s only really good at creating action. It’s not good at creating decision-making structures. It undermines decision-making structures, because it overloads people with information and it also privileges outside voices that are usually destructive. It is a major problem and it doesn’t add anything, in my view, to the process of effective mobilisation. Effective mobilisation really has to be rooted in in meetings and in in face-to-face mobilisation contexts such as public meetings and people’s assemblies and such like, where you can enable people to engage in active speech, which is the primary mechanism of personal empowerment and then free people engaging in the ICT stage. You can go through a process of aggregation and once the aggregation is happening, then there needs to be delegation to an executive to take the aggregation and put it into action. The big problem with social media is that it privileges only a few voices, because there’s too much information on it and it degenerates into aggressive sort of speech. It’s impossible to aggregate, because unless it’s specially designed, you can’t aggregate. And last of all, there’s no implementation because there’s no agreement on who the executive should be. All those things make it extremely difficult, and really a diversion from material resistance to the state. Extinction Rebellion realised this in its design stage of not engaging in social media mobilisation.
Another problem with social media and organisation is that you tend to speak to people similar to yourself and that leads to a dead spot, to disconnected network structures which over and over radicalise people and turn things into a sort of cult-like, paradox of political identity-esque situations. So, what Extinction Rebellion decided to do was to mobilise through 19th century mechanisms, which is the public meeting. And the great thing about the public meeting is that it invites a lot of people. You’ve got the emotional connection and people together. You revisit the age-old successful oratory, which in my view is essential for maintaining and promoting mobilisation, the emotionality of the speech and the testimony of ordinary people. Those are the things that drive mobilisation, the emotionality of collective spaces. Obviously, that’s a major reversal of a lot of the wishful thinking of social media utopianism, but I’m just being empirical about, you know, not looking ideologically against social media. Everything I’m telling you is broadly empirical.
Athina Karatzogianni: I wanted to ask you about this meeting where XR youth came and occupied the meeting. Can you talk to me a little bit about this experience, if you faced challenges from a part of XR in relation to your role in the movement, how you dealt with those, and how you feel about this conflict? Has it harmed the movement, this conflict in relation to you in particular and on a personal level?
Roger Hallam:Well, you know, as you probably noticed, I take a broader sociological view of social situations. What I’m trying to communicate to you – and a lot of scholars have a difficulty understanding this – is that in the next ten to twenty years, it’s highly likely that there’ll be social collapse around the world, and that realisation is creating an exponential increase in social stress psychologically, materially.
You need to understand that we’ll be going over 0.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures in the next five to ten years, which will lead to the collapse of the Paris agreement, which was never serious in the first place. And we’ll be going over 2 degrees in the next ten to twenty years, which will precipitate mass starvation events. Given that that’s 5 to 6 degrees in inland areas, which means 10 to 20 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures during heatwaves, it makes it impossible to grow food. We have an absolute crisis, that will continue to create a fragmentation in the social space, as is well documented in previous social periods, when a society faces annihilation. The fragmentation is between fatalism or hedonism or revolution. Those are the three main fragmentations, and they always happen simultaneously. And these fragmentations interfere with each other, as you might say.
One of the dynamics in Extinction Rebellion is the intense emotionality of people realising that all that they wish for is not going to come true and it is particularly true for young people. There are two sorts of polarisations there. One is to move towards self-pity and try to create safe spaces and avoid what is horrible, as you might say, and another one is towards explicit resistance. Now, those two approaches obviously conflict. And one of the reasons in my sense is that a lot of young people are conflicted between those two: their desire for safety and their need to enter into resistance. So that conflict is working its way through and it leads to a lot of denial and fear. This leads to a bigger tension in middle class northern social movements. Social movements tend to attract people who are very likeable and want to see a good world. They find it very difficult to engage in confrontation. And so, paradoxically, they withdraw from confrontation, because they think confrontation is what they’re against. It is a major challenge to persuade people that you might have confrontation.
Most social resistance movements make that crossing of the Rubicon moment where they decide they’re going to create whatever confrontation is necessary. Because, you know, in the words of one of the girls who did the children’s march in 1963, we are going to get hurt anyway. The realisation you’re going to get hurt anyway for me is the major impetus towards civil resistance. In other words, you can’t escape. You’re already going into the gas chamber, right? There’s no alternative. And obviously, the more privileged you are, the more you can deceive yourself. So really, in a sense, Extinction Rebellion is a transitory movement that has mobilised the wrong demographic. It has mobilised the demographic that’s the most privileged and the keenest on nice things happening.
XR needs to mobilise the traditional revolutionary demographic, which is the lower middle class, which is the main revolutionary demographic. Either it goes to fascism or it goes to the left-wing movements historically. The reason for that is because it doesn’t have skin in the game as much as the professional middle class. But it’s intelligent enough, educated enough and has enough time and money to effectively rebound. So, it’s a sweet spot in the social structure in terms of civil resistance. The major strategy in our transition has to be connecting and integrating the climate crisis with the social crisis. Through that integration, we can create civil resistance that is centered on the lower middle class in Western societies. But that’s a massive challenge because, the professional middle class has monopolised the climate movement for the last thirty years and it doesn’t want to give it up.
Athina Karatzogianni: I want to ask you about your experience, because obviously at some point you said, this is the strategy, in connection to Heathrow airport, and then you were arrested a few days prior and then after. At that point, XR and yourself were at odds with going ahead with that action. How did this conflict arise? I’m talking specifically about XR youth, which, of course, you explained to me really well. What do you think is going on with XR Youth? I want to ask about this particular conflict in relation to you and your strategies. Do you think that this group dominates now? How do you see your role inside XR now? Because I know you have created other organisations, such as Burning Pink. What is your experience of this struggle?
Roger Hallam:In my previous answer, I gave you the sociological structure of the division and conflict. A particular side of that conflict was the inability of Extinction Rebellion to agree to engage in flying drones, safely, to the extent of closing down the airport. So, it wasn’t agreed by XR, largely because of the intervention of those young people. It went along independently insomuch as effective material resistance to the general project is ethically and strategically imperative. A bunch of people did that and it obviously largely failed to have the impact because it didn’t have the infrastructural support. One of the reasons for setting up Burning Pink is to create an infrastructural support for civil resistance projects, Extinction Rebellion being largely appropriated by the privileged middle class of the global north. As a consequence of that, they’re not willing to engage in in classical civil resistance, because they’ve got too much skin in the game.
Athina Karatzogianni: I have noticed that you still post and that you still work with colleagues in XR. You must still feel that there is a role for you to play there.
Roger Hallam:Yes, Extinction Rebellion is a broad church. There are still twenty-five to fifty percent of people in XR around the world who are actively engaged and wishing to bring about civil resistance episodes. There is still a role to play, as you might say. However, I think once we come out of the pandemic, then the movement will probably diverge. Part of it will return to the traditional denial of the old model environmentalist movement. And other people will move forward to a civil resistance social model. My prediction is that the latter will thrive and the former will discontinue, because they’re historically irrelevant, because of the structural determinants of a system.
Athina Karatzogianni: Now some specific questions regarding framing. Your argument is that there should be a culture, not a neutral language, for the mass movement to be built. But then you say that the movement might need to create separate mobilisations to be channeled into a movement of movements. You talk about the need for workers to organise themselves, people say from the black community should organise themselves separately – to have this set of mobilisations that they feed into a movement of humans.
Roger Hallam:To understand what I mean you need to have quite a sophisticated analysis of this area, because it’s quite easy to talk about in simplistic team terms which don’t really relate to the underlying causal determinants of how to be successful. One of the common misunderstandings with the notion of movement of movements is that it doesn’t differentiate between what you might call top-down alliances and bottom-up alliances, which are fundamentally different sorts of strategies, so that the top-down and likely movement alliance idea is that you go to the gatekeepers and leaders, the central power holders of an alternative movement space. And then you persuade those to enact civil disobedience with you. The alternative strategy is to go in at the side of the movement, as it were, and cooperate with people locally or in the local branches. A third strategy is to just create a completely separate mobilisation, which includes people in that demographic, as an alternative. For instance, the three strategies with trade unions would be either to talk to the trade union leaders and they come on side. That’s number one. You go to a trade union office, to branches, and recruit them to do stuff. And the third one is the separate mobilisation of trade unionists who have their own structure. What I was suggesting was that the two that are meaningful and work are the latter two, which is going sideways and going in to create separate mobilisations of people from that demographic.
The reason for that is largely empirical in the sense that if you go and talk to the main gate keepers, power holders or leaders of other social movements, spaces or left political spaces, then what you find is entrenched, reformist orientations, which means that people in positions out of ideology or privilege are going to be unwilling to enter into civil resistance, and they will block your attempts to mobilise for those reasons. I don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual in terms of social theory about how this works, because the vast majority of civil resistance episodes are created by autonomous mobilisations, separate from the official organisations. For instance, in 2012, in the Egyptian revolution, it was the grassroots of the Muslim Brotherhood that joined the revolution, it wasn’t the hierarchy and the leadership; the hierarchy and the leadership came in at the end. There’s no point going to the hierarchy in the leadership before the revolution, because they don’t have the political imagination, courage or willingness to risk their status to engage in a revolution. The primary strategic sort of point I’m making here is to criticise conventional movement building, which pursues an elitist, reformist method, and therefore ineffectual political change.
Athina Karatzogianni: I want to take you back to a term you have used, “culturally neutral language”. That is the very classical problem, strategy or identity in a movement. The more open the framing is, the more people can feel included in that, and be mobilised and recruited. But then you have the problem of what is the strategy and who is included. This is the alliances that you’re mentioning externally and then internally. When you use the term “culturally neutral language”, I was wondering about that because the next point is about the separate mobilisations as well. It seems like a paradox, that tension.
Roger Hallam:What I’m proposing is a dual strategy. The first strategy is to make the mainstream movement space as opening open and neutral and welcoming as possible. There’s a whole number of concrete micro designs that ensure that that happens, in order to encourage different demographics, cultures and ethnicities to create their own mobilisations, so that they can draw in the benefits of attracting people. The major mechanism of mobilisation is to have people from the group talking to that group. Neither of those are perfect and both of them have dangers. But the point is that both of those strategies are a lot more preferable to the default political identity problem, which is a movement builds and it ends up manifesting just one particular demographic or culture, excludes people from joining the mainstream movement, and therefore limits its growth and prevents it from becoming a mass movement.
By refusing to enable other groups to self organise, then you end up not being able to integrate groups who do fundamentally want to organise on their own within their own identities, because their identities are quite strong or different to what you might call the mainstream identity. None of that is conflict free. There’s no utopian solution to movement building. What we’re looking at is the best suboptimal scenario and that’s better than what you’ve got at the moment, which is often combined with superficial tokenism, the idea of bringing black people in to make a speech, but not enabling black people to organise, because they won’t fundamentally change the culture of the organisation to welcome black people in.
Athina Karatzogianni: That’s actually very true. You can see it also with how some councils work and the representation there, especially in that sense. I was going to ask you about the Citizens Assembly. It is quite central in what you are proposing and also in relation to the transition period, specifically, because I think you don’t seem to be settled on that one yourself in terms of design, because you talk about a transitional period of two years, where perhaps you will have a thousand people for a fixed period of that, and then you have regional and cities citizens assemblies. I was wondering about this transitional period for the citizens assemblies because it’s a national city/ regional focus. But how does that work in a global context as well? So definitely on the transition point, I have questions in regards to that and the role of the citizens assemblies.
Roger Hallam:One of the annoying things about social change is it’s unpredictably non-linear. It’s very difficult to design transition periods, which don’t involve highly unpredictable breaks in previous social arrangements. In other words, usually what happens is a crisis that will throw up various potentialities and then basically the revolutionary leadership has to scramble around to innovate very quickly because it’s all or nothing. That’s not because it’s proactive design. That’s because no one’s on the street and suddenly everyone’s on the street, because of the collective action dynamics and the herding dynamics of mobilisation. Having said that, I don’t think there’s anything particularly intellectually or academically challenging about a transition to a citizens assembly based constitution.
Citizens assemblies is a constitutional mechanism in the same way as representational democracy is, as the same way as sort of autocratic kingship is. We’ve got numerous examples historically about how you make constitutional revolutions. I mean, there’s been dozens of them. But the general gist is that people on the street demand for a new constitutional arrangement and then that comes in and then the elites fight back against it. People come onto the street and you have a to and fro scenario for two years or a few months, depending upon the historical example. That new constitutional regime becomes embedded and then maybe ten or twenty years later, it gets challenged again. An example is French history over the last 200 years, how many constitutional breaks that they had? About four or five, something like that. So that’s what we’re really looking at. We’re not looking at some total collapse of the social system or something. What will happen, the big break, is when in terms of real political power, citizens assemblies have more political and moral authority than the representational bodies. I think that will probably happen quite rapidly because of the optics of citizens assemblies, given the mass alienation from the political class. I think the big attraction of certain assemblies is not that people are making decisions, so much as that people are being seen to make decisions. That would be highly attractive in terms of real popular political power.
Jacob Matthews: When you mention the fact that in the movement at the moment, you see a clear division between middle class interests. And what you said is that the upper middle class have effectively confiscated the ecologist movement over the past 30 years, that they are not willing to relinquish their position, and that sociologically this is what you’ve seen play out in XR. Now, my question really is, what are the structural elements to actually constitute these two groups as a class? Why would you still consider that they belong to the same middle class? And secondly, I understood what you said about the lower middle class and obviously having had access to better social capital education. That’s where you think lies a soft spot and where the potential for revolutionary change is coming from. This is a slightly polemic question here. Have you actually kind of given up on the working class completely?
Roger Hallam:Whenever you’re talking about this, you’re talking about sort of rules of thumb and a certain degree of generality, because there’s loads of exceptions to the rule that you might cite, because the categories you talking about are obviously very big. There’s lots of diversity within those categories. And the boundaries of categories are highly fluid in terms of definitional elements of them. I think an appropriate approach here is to use the notion of that sort of family resemblance. As you know, there’s no central foundational notion in the lower middle class, but there’s five or six characteristics of that group which interrelate. Often, individuals will display some of those characteristics, but rarely all of them. I think that needs to be said before you engage in an analysis of what the broad dynamics are: you have to accept they are broad dynamics, right? We’re not talking about some vulgar Marxist sort of determinism here. But at the same time, I think that class is massively underestimated in terms of the dynamics of politics in Western societies. And obviously, class does coincide with culture. The two things are quite a bit of a tortuous debate. But there are many elements of class, all cultural, and of course, a lot of cultural elements are very class-based as well. So, it’s difficult to separate the two out. But having said all those caveats, let’s go back to your first question…
Jacob Matthews: When you said that the movement had been, in a sense, confiscated by the upper middle class over the past thirty, forty years, which is something that we definitely relate to, although we’re not using those precise terms. To what extent is there still a unity of class between what you call the lower middle class and this upper echelon? Does it still constitute, a single class?
Roger Hallam:I’m not really bothered by the terminologies. I think what I’m trying to highlight is fundamental differences between the regional middle class and the urban professional middle class. The upper middle class is a bit of a problematic sort of category, because that really assumes the top three or four percent of the population, arguably. What we’re talking about here and various scholars have pointed out that potentially, the biggest division in society is between university educated and the non-university educated, because that has a class element to it, but it has also a strong cultural element to it as well. To a certain extent, this is reinforced by age. The older people who are university educated have a very different orientation between educated urban people that somewhat coincides with urban, educated young people in their thirties. This is a major fracture in society and this is exacerbated by the culture wars and this general sort of cultural irrationality that sees uneducated people moving to the populist right, while educated university people are moving to the elite left, as you might say…
Jacob Matthews: The extreme centre, as we call it, in France.
Roger Hallam:Yes, there are interesting things happening. There’s a specific orientation with the green movement and then there’s a matter of strategic orientation, about how to save ourselves from fascism. My orientation in terms of movement building is that we can provide more specificity about the paradox of the political identity problem. Because my proposition is that the paradox of political identity is a key problematic element in mass mobilisation. I agree that it reinforces its culture and its initial success, but it’s the primary reason why it fails to get further success, a dynamic you see in loads of systems. First movers are not like second movers in very entrepreneurial first movers, all nerdy, and you have to get rid of the first movers in order to get to the second movers.
In terms of a social movement strategy, you have to obviously recruit the urban middle class because they are the quickest to mobilise. But then you have to reduce the power of the urban middle class or persuade them to allow in the rural lower or lower middle class, which is a very different culture, and the regional lower middle class has greater numbers. This is how you create the mass movement. The sort of liberal urban middle class is actually a very small demographic. It’s not half as big as people think it is. Whereas the regional low middle class, of course, is a very large demographic, so people get confused between proportions and absolute numbers.
You might say you’re going to mobilise ten percent of the urban professional class. But that in absolute numbers, it’s less than three percent of the rural, regional, middle class. So strategically, you should focus on the regional middle class in terms of mobilising. Now, the thing to understand about the lower regional middle is although they’re socially conservative, they’re politically left or at least open to political arguments, because objectively they’re in a position of their lifestyles being degenerated and status degenerated for the last fifty years, because of globalisation and the rich running off with tax avoidance and all the rest of that.
That’s really the central conundrum of XR and the ecological movement: to move towards mobilising people that never been in the green movement. A data point on this, for instance, is when I went round and did my speeches two years ago. If I went to North London or Brighton, I would get plenty of people, but only ten, fifteen percent of them would be prepared to be arrested, while in Sunderland or Derby or Newcastle, it’d be more like 30 percent of people prepared to be arrested. I would estimate that at least half of them, and maybe even three quarters of them had never been involved in politics before. So, this is the move that has to be made more generically on the left: to talk in the language and in the interests and in the culture of the regional middle class. And of course, that is what the populist right has done, which is why the populist right is able to mobilise a lot of people, because it’s mobilising people that are being excluded or feel excluded from politics. The problem is with the urban professional class and identity politics, which is completely alienating to the rural and middle class. That’s the conundrum that has to be negotiated.
Jacob Matthews: That would also apply to the working class or what’s left of the working class.
Roger Hallam:Working class is quite a complicated space as far as I can see, and I’m still not entirely clear about this. My general orientation, as I am on record saying, is that you have to separate the lower working class from the higher working class. The lower working class is characterised by chaotic lifestyles. This is not criticising them; it’s just being analytical about it: broken families, irregular financing, drug problems, domestic violence, all that sort of stuff. But the established working class, objectively it’s in its class interests to join a left mobilisation. And obviously for climate catastrophe mobilisation, they should be on that street, because they’re the people who are going to lose most from it.
But I think in the respectable working class, there are two problems. One problem is that they’ve lost their political confidence, because they don’t have any mentors and they don’t have any revolutionary sort of tradition, within living memory. So, it’s very difficult for them to really get re-empowered by that glorious tradition, as you might say. Then the other problem is, insomuch as they do have collective organisations, those collective organisations are demoralised and dominated by old men who have no imagination and no zest. But I think they are one of key mobilisation demographics. So are the urban working-class youth, which is a different kettle of fish.
You saw this reinvigoration of working-class culture with punk and the anti-racist movements in the late 70s where you’ve got a demoralised youth culture that sprang into some confidence. I think there’s a good chance of that happening. But again, you’ve got the political identity problem that you know: all the climate youth mobilisation is even more middle class than the adult mobilization, and that’s one of the reasons it’s been co-opted by the NGOs ineffectual reformist strategies. I think there’s the space there to mobilise lower middle class urban youth and working-class urban youth, because they’re all so pissed off, of course. At the moment, they don’t have any mentors.
Athina Karatzogianni: About youth mobilisation. I wanted to ask what kind of experience you’ve had of mentoring young activists. In relation to what we said about XR youth that it is dominated by the middle class. What is your experience working with youth or mentoring other young activists over the years? I know you joined as a teenager the anti-war movement in the eighties. I was wondering about this interplay with how you feel you were mentored in terms of leadership or other qualities to be a movement activist.
Roger Hallam: What I’m saying is going to be pretty damning, really. The most disastrous element in global mobilisation at the present time is the inability to radicalise global youth. People promote the world youth for rising up and influencing climate change. However, I think the international youth are totally disorganised, totally ineffectual and totally demoralised given the objectivity of the injustice being impacted upon them. I think in terms of Western societies and particularly Anglo-Saxon sort of America and us and to a certain extent Canada and Australia, the youth spaces are dominated by a completely ineffectual therapeutic organisation of politics, which has the counterintuitive consequence of demoralising, depressing and individualising the suffering of youth, which is what therapeutic action is. It’s basically a post-war strategy of demoralising and dividing rule and atomising people and creating a narcissism of the self. To my mind, this is an imposed ideology by the dominant sort of left space, which all about victimisation, suffering, trigger warnings and all the rest of it.
The problem here is that this creates a sort of downward spiral, which is that as the objective conditions get worse than the desire to protect young people, it becomes even more extreme if both conditions are imposed by adults and reproduced by young people. This creates an even greater counter-intuitive sort of degeneration of their mental state. The counter proposition is that you’ve traditionally, in terms of revolutionary activity, been fearless, joyful, humorous and strong and all these elements, which is what you traditionally associate historical youth movements with. The challenge here is to really empower working class youth and regional lower middle-class youth who haven’t been infected with this reactionary ideology and enable them to go out and enjoy resistance.
The religious dogma of the radical left is that joy is taboo, right? Enjoyment. It’s pure Calvinism and it’s no surprise that it’s encouraged by the same class that is the traditional Calvinist class, which is the urban professional middle class. This is revolting structurally and culturally, I think, to working class youth, which is why working-class youth are completely alienated from political space, because they are excluded by middle class from participation, through this imposed ideology of middle-class etiquette.
Athina Karatzogianni: What have been your own efforts in that? Have you worked in that direction?
Roger Hallam: Well, I’ve been looking for a year and a half to try and organise youth who want to move away from that self-defeating sort of culture and strategy. And I think there are two things that are opening it up. One is that with working class youth and lower middle-class youth, you periodically get to some sort of critical mass. And when they do, then things will take off. The other thing is that for a lot of middle-class youth can only be in that space for a year or two, before they either burn out, or realise how dysfunctional it is. As people go through that process and come out the other side, then they’re potentially more interested in engaging in a real strategy, which is a mass mobilisation strategy. So, it may happen, but it’s impossible to predict. I mean, this is a bunch of people at the moment trying to create impressionable mass mobilisation events for youth. I think it will obviously take off at some point in the next five years, but it will be despite of the youth movements, not because of them. That’s my prediction.
Athina Karatzogianni: Going “beyond politics”, there is a sense that in your own political spaces and organisations youth and younger activists is not something that you focus on in particular…
Roger Hallam: It’s part of the project, but creating a revolutionary project at a time of massive social repression and social denial is a mug’s game right now. Because if you want to get out, then you join a reformist space, which is why the reformist spaces are so powerful, because of the hurting effects. It’s not because there’s any objective rationality in that strategy. Before revolutionary upheavals, you always get this massive tension between people wanting to break out of the system and create a revolutionary alternative and people in the space realising that everything they do is completely useless and hopeless, and all the cognitive dissonance that goes along with that. So that’s where we’re at the moment.
Athina Karatzogianni: What has been your own experience of mental health? And your own well-being, being part of a rebellion. How do you get motivated to continue? Because, in some respects, this is a really excruciating experience where there are controversies and you have to explain yourself. I have watched you do it on Facebook, for example, where you have these tensions and conflicts. You are one of the founders of this movement and you have to battle every day, not just externally with the governments, the police knocking on your door and so on, but also internally inside that movement and also lead separate organisations as well. I wanted to hear a bit, if you don’t mind, about how you are coping in all of this, if that’s not at all an indiscreet question to ask.
Roger Hallam: I think it’s a vitally important question. This comes back to my previous analysis, which is that, historically, the rebel personality is rooted in virtue ethics. Virtue ethics has been more or less destroyed by neoliberalism, both on the left and the right, and one of the central reasons in my mind, why movements are so fractious: it is because of individualisation and utilitarianism. In other words, all strategy has become rooted in utilitarianism, i.e., if you do that, will that happen? But in the historical experience, rebel uprisings initiating movements are all motivated by virtue ethics, which is: it’s my duty to God to rebound and achieve immortality. If I die, you know, they can come and do what they like because I’m over this shit. This is the central explanation for the inability of Western societies to mobilise: they’ve got a philosophy of life which is completely dysfunctional at a time of annihilation and will.
My prediction is that there’ll be a massive collapse of the utilitarian cultural edifice over the next ten years as people start to disappear into hedonism or, you know, self-destruction or revolutionary activism. And the revolutionary activism will be primarily sustained through virtue ethics construction. What that practically means, of course, in terms of emotional sustainability is that you have no expectation of success. And if you don’t have expectation of success, then you don’t get burnt out. It’s as simple as that, right?
Athina Karatzogianni: If you don’t have great expectations and you can keep going, because you are less disappointed. But it is hard living with disappointment!
Roger Hallam: …No, my life has been one long disappointment, but that doesn’t matter. This is why it’s very difficult to see from ninety percent of human beings have a virtual ethics orientation. The role of my life is to fulfil my tradition and be good and look after my kids and do my duty to my superiors, period. That said, there’s no expectation of social balance. There’s no expectation of, you know, ego sort of massaging or whatever. You’re just a cog in a system that’s a spiritual and material system. And that’s how most people see life apart from the western middle class over the last thirty years. We have to return to that orientation in order to become sustainable. You see what I mean? But it’s an orientation that most people don’t get, particularly university lecturers.
Athina Karatzogianni: Well, thanks for that! I want to ask you something about the concept of resilience. I mean, you use it a lot in your book Common Sense for the 21st Century, in the section on preparing the community for resilience in the Great Transition. What is resilience for you, because it can be seen as neoliberal discourse. As you know very well, resilience is that you can get hit repeatedly but you bounce back, you survive. But I don’t think from what I read in your book this is what you have in mind. You have in mind also some form of flourishing, not just surviving. There’s an extension to survive: you try to bring back the ecosystems, and working towards that, you won’t have to necessarily make decisions about who survives and who doesn’t. These decisions are made by governments. Therefore, the efforts would go toward influencing them, and involves the labs, the scientists. You write about creating a large voluntary service where people contribute and then you have economists looking at the economics of this as well, in your broader vision of this effort of preparing the community for resilience in the great transition. So, I want to ask about resilience in particular, and whether you think it’s perhaps a good concept, or is it overloaded.
Roger Hallam:Resilience means different things to different people, right? To explain how I see resilience on an individual level, there are three elements. The first element is a spiritual orientation where you’re not dependent upon the world: you’ve made that transition and transcendent move, where what happens in the world is not of your concern; what is of concern to you is how you respond to what’s in the world, what is under your control and how you act in the world, which is under your control. The outcomes of the world are under your control. This is a fundamental mental principle. When you get up in the morning and someone doesn’t show up to a meeting, you’re not going to get upset, because that was outside your control. You see what I mean? All people that are highly resilient have that orientation, that transcendent orientation. And obviously it’s embedded in various cultural, secular and religious constructions. But the fundamental structure is the same. The second thing is having a service orientation, which obviously is embedded within the broader Christian tradition, which is to love your neighbour and to be of service to your society. So you’re not looking for personal aggrandisement. What you’re looking to do is make things better for people. And that’s been shown, you know, conclusively to produce better mental health and all the rest of it from looking after number one. The third element is group community. You have a group of people around you that can support you practically in terms of being attacked in the press for example. That will help you prepare responses as a practical element to it. And then obviously there’s an emotional element that you’ve got a shoulder to cry on when you have a bad time. So, you know, that does seem to me to be the three elements of what needs to be created, and that can be juxtaposed to the victimisation sort of neurotic self-worship, pseudo-spirituality of Western individualism.
Athina Karatzogianni: You mentioned Christian values. How influenced are you by religion? Are you a believer yourself? I mean, I don’t know enough about this, about you.
Roger Hallam: Well, I was brought up a Christian, in the Methodist church. So, I’m fully embedded in that from a cultural point of view and in a moral point of view as well, in the notion that the highest value is to love other people, in the sense of seeking their well-being and that’s the purpose of one’s life, is to seek the well-being of others, both as a spiritual principle, i.e., you know, that’s how you can fulfil your soul. And secondly, because of the pragmatic, spiritual principle, which is people that help other people generally have happier lives because you’re outwardly focused.
Athina Karatzogianni: So, you’re not an atheist or you’re just culturally Christian…?
Roger Hallam:I think in a cultural sense that Christianity is at the heart of Western culture. In terms of its social orientation, like we just said with, with reductive Calvinism, that’s part of the Christian tradition. But there are also elements of the Christian tradition, which is about loving your enemies and suchlike. And that’s one of the big strengths, you know, which is the basis of our democratic and dialogical culture: when you don’t like people, you don’t shoot them. You sit down and talk to them.
Athina Karatzogianni: Yes, that’s the basic principle of politics. Can I take you to the leadership question again, in your experience, who is a good leader? What are the qualities? What are they doing and how are they doing it? What have you experienced yourself, as a good leading figure that you aspire to that influenced you at all? What kind of organisation enhances leadership, brings forward emerging leaders, younger people to get involved? We talked before about this evolution of leadership from the 60s and I want to ask more about you and whether you think that you were influenced by a leading figure, or do you think of yourself as a leader, so to speak?
Roger Hallam:Leadership is an extremely complex phenomenon, and I think everyone agrees on that. Ever since I was a teenager, I stood out from the crowd. I’ve always initiated things and been in a leadership position in groups – informally in some cases, as I’ve been involved in left-wing anarchist social groups, but I’ve always been initiator and an organiser, that comes quite naturally to me. Now I’m 54 and I’m arguably quite good at what I do. So I’m quite happy in that position.
What I’m trying to investigate, I suppose, is how to become a better leader. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing on that, but I think a lot of it’s to do with not being reactive to criticism. I’ve worked quite hard on being gracious around getting criticism, becoming detached from it and even welcoming it. I think a sign of a real mature leadership is to encourage criticism even when it’s unfair. That obviously involves negotiating with your ego and making sure you have self-mastery over yourself, as you might say, from an Eastern perspective. For me, that’s the main thing. I mean, obviously, the other side of leadership is being fearless, you know, from a prophetic point of view and leading from the front to being unpopular. The two things go together and in a revolutionary situation leadership is absolutely the central causal factor, I think, of progressive outcomes, which completely counteracts the orthodoxy of the last thirty years. This is coming from somebody who was an anarchist for fifteen years. I’m fully aware of the literature, the last two hundred years of literature of opposition to hierarchy and opposition to leadership. It’s got a lot going for it. But like all orientations, it’s not an absolute right.
There are times and spaces and situations where you need leadership. And we do need leadership in the present context, because what we’re facing is existential: everyone’s going to die, and it’s exponential. We need to get on with that so we haven’t got the time. We’ve got the massive pressure of the horror of it and we’ve got the massive, massive pressure of having to get on with that. Both of those things structurally determine the necessity of leadership in the social system. Like I said before, whether we like it or not, it’s a matter of sociological determinism. If you’re just running a wholefood shop in 1975, you don’t need a leader. But when you’re facing three billion deaths in the next thirty years, it’s a world of difference. You need to have fast moving leaderships.
Basically, what I think I’m trying to communicate to you is that in a revolutionary period, you have a build-up of a certain sort of a mobilisation and then a complete flip to mass mobilisation. Like with the dissidents in Eastern Europe, they were the leaders of the movement. They’d been doing it for 30 years. They were good at what they did. They were really pragmatic, they were valued, and they got to a certain point. And then when mass mobilisation happened, that space collapsed because they couldn’t adapt. What you got was a mass mobilisation of ordinary people, which had a pragmatic aspect. It was an idealist movement, you might say, or whatever: they just wanted to get rid of communism and spend lots of money. What’s going to happen in the climate space is that all the present mobilisations are going to collapse, in my view, because they’re all dominated by the elite urban middle class and they can’t make that transition to mass mobilisation. And if they don’t, then the populist right will take over in the next 10 years. The challenge we have right now is, when the mass mobilisation comes along, whether it has a pragmatic realist left leadership. And at the moment, that’s not there. You see you see what I mean? It’s a dramatic thesis but I think I’m right because it’s happened so many times before.
Jacob Matthews: I’m wondering about where it’s going to spring from, this leadership that we need so desperately.
Roger Hallam:I’m being entirely pragmatic and realistic about it. In the mid-twentieth century, there was no problem with leadership in the 1930s and until the 1970s, on the left, everyone understood that you need a mass organisation and you need leadership, which obviously had to be democratic and all the rest of it. That was how the 20th century left dominated politics. You know, from the 1930s to the 1970s. So that strategy needs to be really reinvented.
Athina Karatzogianni: But the with the present conditions, it seems that we are looking at something more revolutionary than social democracy and that a strong welfare state is not going to solve the problem here…
Roger Hallam:Any social democrat now has to be a revolutionary. That’s the point right now, like liberals or revolutionaries in the nineteenth century. There’s nothing intrinsic about an ideology and the strategy of revolution.
Thu 30 Sep 2021. Why has the artist painted scenes of bloodletting, decapitation and a woman with 10,000 breasts? He’s scared to talk about it – but he can explain his fascination with vaginas and the world’s blackest black.
At 67, Anish Kapoor, with a knighthood, a Turner prize and a retrospective due at the Venice Biennale next year, appears determined to strip away his own artistic skin. Like Marsyas – the satyr flayed alive by Apollo, whose gory fate Kapoor once commemorated in a 150m-long, 10-storey-high sculpture – the artist is exposing his innards. That’s the only way to describe his latest works. One of the world’s most renowned sculptors is about to go public as, well, a painter. Yet it is the content of the works he’s about to unveil that may disconcert. “They’re very, very violent,” he confesses. “And I just wonder what the hell that has to do with what’s in me. I can’t sit here and psychoanalyse them. I don’t know how to. But I recognise that it’s there.”
The works, about to go on display at Modern Art Oxford, are beautifully painted yet brutal: full of images of bloodletting, decapitation and disembowelling. Kapoor seems to have taught himself to paint the human figure in order to desecrate it. At his London studio, there are stacks of these blood-soaked canvases depicting huge wounded bits of bodies and purple organs spattered on the walls.
“Yikes,” he says. “I’m not doing it intellectually. I just wanted to make a many-breasted quasi-female figure and see what happened. Could I unwrap her pristine exterior and look at her problematic interior, full of blood and guts and breasts and bits and pieces, and all that? Fuck knows. Freud would have a field day.”
Kapoor isn’t exactly an inhibited conversationalist. We meet twice, at his gallery, then his studio. On the weekend in between, he gives a speech to Index on Censorship in which he warns against “self-censorship”. And the flow of images and ideas in our discussion is certainly a masterclass in how to not censor yourself. Throwing out provocations and theories, he tries to explain what he’s up to.
“I’m doing what I’ve always done, which is to look to some primal ritual act. If one takes that to its logical conclusion, the primal ritual act has to be murder or sacrifice. In Freud’s Moses and Monotheism he talks initially about Moses having not been a Jew but an Egyptian – which I quite like – but from there on, it’s all about the idea that Moses was murdered. Moses was sacrificed.”
I read a book called Blood Relations that said the first culture was made by women – and it came from menstruation
In case anyone misses the point, the paintings are accompanied by sculptures of enigmatic doorways and stepped buildings like Aztec pyramids, over big metal trays flowing with great painterly globs of red matter. Human sacrifice has played a part in many cultures. For Kapoor, it is a part of what religion is: “Its purpose has to be to ask ridiculous questions like, ‘Where do I go after I die?’ Or, ‘Where was I before I was born?’ Public display of the victim, public sacrifice, somehow helps us, even though it’s completely counterintuitive. We think the energy of civilisation is in a different direction. But apparently not so.”
These are unusual ideas and impulses to put on public display. At the gallery of his London dealer, we stop in front of a triptych of three big canvases that depict what at first look like florid, sensual blooms. Then you notice a headless neck bursting with blood, and the flowers turn out to be exposed anatomies. What’s going on? “The Diana of Ephesus who has 10,000 breasts … she’s there. So I think what was in my mind was the sacrifice of Diana, the opening up, the revealing, of what’s inside her body. You’ll see that the only remaining bit, in a way, is her vagina. All the rest is opened up.”
Leaning in … Kapoor with one of the exhibits for his show at Modern Art Oxford. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
The vagina has become quite a theme for Kapoor. There was a row in France over his Versailles sculpture, Dirty Corner, which was nicknamed ‘“the queen’s vagina”. So what’s with the vaginas? Kapoor answers, unexpectedly, in terms of Marxist anthropology. “There’s an anthropologist I’m really interested in who’s weird,” he says. “A man called Chris Knight who wrote a book called Blood Relations, in which he speculates that the first culture was made by women and that it came from menstruation. That women who lived together, especially in small groups, menstruated together, and that they used red ochre to cover their bodies so as to hide their menstruations. He speculates that the first acts of culture were to do with this act of solidarity.”
The earliest artistic material known is indeed red ochre, which was used at Blombos Cave in South Africa up to 80,000 years ago. It makes a strong red pigment – hand prints and animal images in red ochre survive in cave art. Kapoor can’t get enough of it either. “I have an obsession with red. My favourite colour of all, the one I use by the ton, is Alizirin crimson. It’s a very dark bloody Bordeaux wine red. What’s interesting about red is that it links to black so unbelievably easily. Red makes great darkness. And of course one might say red is fully a colour of the interior.”
So Kapoor’s paintings are not so far from his sculpture after all. Since the 1980s, he has used colour to release the cosmic and the inward – from early works, in which he scattered raw pigment on small objects, to Descent into Limbo, a 2.5m deep hole painted with a black so dark the drop seems infinite (and into which one gallerygoer fell). “Colour is deeply illusionistic,” he says. “Deep space is something I’m constantly in conversation with – the way colour affects deep space, in ways that are indescribable with words.”
The drop seems infinite … Descent Into Limbo, made with ‘the universe’s blackest black’. Photograph: ART on FILE/Getty Images
In his studio, among the bloody canvases, is a black lozenge on a white background, encased in a glass tank. He asks me what I think it is. One thing I am sure of – it’s flat. Then he gets me to look from the side. It’s not flat at all: it bulges out into space, a solid diamond form. The optical illusion is mind-blowing. “So this is one of these new works made in the blackest material in the universe,” he says. “It’s in a case because the material is highly toxic and it’s incredibly fragile, especially to saliva, so you can’t talk in front of it. It’s a nano material. And what happens is the light enters and basically it’s trapped and doesn’t escape.”Advertisement
It traps 98.8 % of light – “blacker than a black hole”. When Kapoor got exclusive artistic rights to this material a few years ago, there was a bit of a hoo-ha. You can even buy a “blackest black” acrylic paint, created by self-styled rival Stuart Semple, with the warning that by ordering it, “you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor.”
After my breakdown, my mother went to India, got some earth and put it under my bed – so I could dream myself well
The entire row is daft, for Kapoor’s actual black nano material is dangerous, difficult to use and has taken years to develop into artworks. He shows me 19 more of these freaky spatial illusions in an upper room of his studio. Next year they will be unveiled at the Venice Accademia show. They take a lifetime’s colour research to a sublime extreme. Is it a cliche to ask if this fascination with colour was influenced by his childhood in India? “I think some of my relationship to colour has to be cultural. This propensity for red has to have something of that. I think of Picasso and his relation to his Spanish roots. They were with him always – the dark mythological forces playing away”.
In fact, when I push him to explain how his gory canvases reflect his own psyche, as opposed to anthropological ideas, he comes out with a moving story about India, displacement and the healing power of ritual. “I grew up in India,” he says. “I was there until I was 17, 18. My mother was Jewish, so my brother and I then went to Israel. And I had the most awful, terrible nervous breakdown. I could hardly walk. I had an aunt who lived in Israel and my mother came to visit me. And my aunt, who had a kind of shamanistic predilection, said to my mother, ‘You must go back to India and you must bring some earth and you must put it under Anish’s bed.’ Sorry Jonathan, this sometimes makes me want to cry. But anyway, I’ll tell you it. And so my mother, bless her, went to India and got some earth and put it under my bed, and my aunt said further, ‘He will be able to dream himself well from this matter.’ Wow! You know it took me years to recognise the power of this thing. It gives me goosebumps. Sorry, but it does give me goosebumps.”
Kapoor is an artist who takes you to the edge. He can make you contemplate the biggest questions. His new paintings are not so much a departure as a key to everything he has ever done, ransacking religion and myth to ask why human beings have always been driven to ponder the mystery of being. “I’ve been in Buddhist practice for a long, long time,” he says. “Zen practice. It matters to me. I do really believe that we are religious beings. Where do I come from? Who am I? What am I? Where do I go? Those are questions that puzzle us all.”
“What if this is not capitalism, but something worse?” McKenzie Wark’s question eloquently summarizes the criticism of profit-maximizing businesses in the digital economy. That “something worse,” appears to take the form of a new kind of feudalism, as in the case of Facebook. If feudalism was based on the ownership of land by an elite, the resource now controlled by the elite is the platform and the data. Or, as in the case of delivery or taxi platforms, individuals-freelancers contribute their equipment and labour, and the privately-owned platform manages demand and supply; put simply, data.
The concept of “platform cooperative” has been proposed as an alternative to such businesses. A platform cooperative is an online platform (e.g., website, mobile app) organized as a cooperative and owned by its employees, customers, users, or other key stakeholders. For example, a delivery platform owned by the couriers.
We fully support the broader movement of platform cooperativism. However, we cannot be content with isolated cooperative alternatives to counter globalized capitalism. A global post-capitalist economy needs to be built. How could this be done? We outline a tentative list of four interrelated strategies for post-capitalist entrepreneurial coalitions.
First, closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. Though knowledge can be shared easily when it is in digital form, closed businesses use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of knowledge. Through legal repression or technological sabotage, knowledge is made artificially scarce so that extra profits may be generated. This is particularly galling in the context of life-saving medicines or planet-regenerating technological knowledge. The cooperatives, in comparison, should not make knowledge artificially scarce. To do so, state-support, which businesses such as Google and Apple have been receiving, is important.
Second, the cooperatives could make use of open designs to produce sustainable goods and localize manufacturing. Profit-maximization businesses often aim to achieve obsolescence in products that would wear out prematurely. In that way, they maintain tension between supply and demand and maximize their profits; obsolescence is a feature, not a bug. In contrast, open design communities, such as these of L’Atelier Paysan, which produces agricultural machines, and RepRap, which produces 3D printers, do not have the same incentives. So, the practice of planned obsolescence is alien to them.
Third, the cooperatives could reduce waste. The lack of transparency and penchant for antagonism among closed businesses means they will have a hard time creating a circular economy – one in which the output of one production process is used as an input for another. But the cooperatives could create ecosystems of collaboration through open supply chains. These chains may enhance the transparency of the production processes and enable participants to adapt their behavior based on the knowledge available in the network. Cooperatives could move toward mutual coordination of production through open supply chains.
Fourth, the cooperatives could mutualize not only digital infrastructures but also physical ones. The misnamed “sharing economy” of Airbnb and Uber, despite all the critique it receives, illustrates the potential in matching idle resources. Co-working, skill-sharing, and ride sharing are examples of the many ways in which we can reuse and share resources. With co-ownership and co-governance, a genuine sharing economy could achieve considerable advances in more efficient resource use, especially with the aid of shared data facilities and manufacturing tools (e.g., community makerspaces).
We have highlighted four practices that are already emerging in various forms but need to be more universally integrated. It is high time cooperatives fully realized the sixth cooperative principle: to empower the cooperation among cooperatives. Thus a global post-capitalist economy could be created in which cooperatives will have both a global and local focus. This can only happen through building a cooperative knowledge commons.
*Vasilis Kostakis is a Professor at TalTech and a Faculty Associate at Harvard University. Michel Bauwens is the Founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. The essay is based on authors’ 2019 book.
Yanis Varoufakis takes us back to ancient Alexandria and the life of the first woman to make her name as a mathematician. But Hypatia is best known now for being brutally murdered. Yanis Varoufakis makes the case for her as a philosopher and mathematician, and explores how her story has been interpreted and misinterpreted in the centuries after her death. He’s joined by the writer and broadcaster, Professor Edith Hall.
Presented by Matthew Parris and produced for BBC Audio in Bristol by Chris Ledgard
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