There’s a lull. The trade unions have won or caved. The left of the Labour Party has been routed. The street movement to free Palestine is alive but not likely to transition into a movement organisation. The civil disobedience of JSO looks like it's heading for months of rebranding and reorganising. If you feel stuck and scared that change is going to take longer than we have, then fair enough.
But, as Keir Milburn host of ACFM, says in a gorgeous little hype speech at the end of the latest show, “we’re not always going to feel this way”:
“Things will open up and you have to act now in preparation with the historic knowledge that that new opening is not only possible but it will come along.”
ACFM - one of the many cultural legacies of the Corbyn moment - has been a lodestar for me in the politically dreary years that have followed its launch. Hosts Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir, all movement elders in their own ways, are committed to connecting music, ideas, events and politics to the radical tradition. I love them because they insist that joy and specifically ‘collective joy’ should be the aspiration of all left-wing political projects and that bureaucracy, tedium and infighting are all part of the cooptation of freedom-loving movements.
So, you can imagine, I was rapt listening to this latest episode as they describe how all of the conditions might be moving into place for “a new wave” of transformative politics in the UK. The question though is still, what do we do before the new wave comes? Or, what do we do in the ebb?
This is, as you probably know by now, the central question of our little corner of substack.
On the one hand, there’s an urge to long for the ebb to end. And I fully respect that. The ebb can be lonely, painful, miserable even. But I’ve recently wondered whether what happens in the ebb might be more important than what happens in the burst of energy that it precedes. This runs a bit counter to a lot of radical common sense which usually says ‘wait for the revolutionary moment and act decisively to shape it into something positive’. But what if once the upheaval comes it’s too late?
This is one of the conclusions of Vincent Bevins’s new book on the last decade of protests around the world. Whether it’s Tahrir, Sao Paulo, Kyiv or Hong Kong, when everyone’s out on the streets and the political establishment is crumbling, the balance of power is usually already measured. The groups that are organised are the ones that win. There’s too little time and too much else to do to build coalitions from scratch or change the engrained habits of capitalism (nationalism, chauvinism, domination etc.). You can only look back longingly on the time when you had the space to do the real work.
Which is all to say, what you do in the moments that you think don’t matter, matters the most.
What Jeremy, Nadia and Keir are trying to counsel against is the tendency among young activists to fail to pause and think in this received lull. It is the workaholic, trapped in a cycle of frenetic action, afraid of what they’ll discover if they were to stop and rest, writ large. And Keir, incredibly astutely, somehow knows exactly why this is in JSO, where Roger Hallam has intentionally created a culture of freneticism so that people won’t get bogged down in the big, tricky questions of movement organising, and he can continue to direct the ship.
But bodies are resisting that. The JSO war machine is leaking exhausted humans, looking for something to do that feels as meaningful but that won’t leave them chronically ill (hello). The utterly infuriating truth is, that there is no other movement organisation to catch them right now.
There are hundreds of disparate refuges across the country, community farms, embryonic communes, or my favourite workers' coop cafe The Gleaners, inviting them to come, slow down, cook a meal for some people who’ll love it and take the time to build something good. There is organisation and there is movement and it is promising. But there is no movement organisation.
Being honest about this absence is important. Jeremy Gilbert is clear about this in the show. As is this The Last Farm on their excellent substack:
A movement is not a loose structure. It is a single organization or a small handful of organizations working in tight coordination towards a shared goal. Anything looser is not a movement; it might be a trend, but it has not cohered into a movement. Non-movements are usually incapable of making sustained structural change.
Nevertheless, what is here can offer an important kind of stillness. This is not stasis or stuckness (coerced) but a calm, reflective capacity (found freely). The ACFM trio offer some Zen koans and Daoist quotes about this like “the more you travel, the less you know”. I prefer John Berger’s advice to Naomi Klein a few years ago. “Calm”, he said “is a form of resistance”, or maybe more accurately, an organised resistance movement needs calm to form.
Short and sweet, but excellent as always. Thanks Greg!