The right leaning media have been criticising the occupation at St Paul’s \u00a0in London for not being able to specify an alternative to the system they are against and, specifically, that their demands are poorly and inconsistently articulated. One possible response to this is that their objective is to keep the focus on the issues around the bankers’ responsibility for the economic collapse and the apparent immunity of the top 1% and their hangers-on and immediate\u00a0collaborators\u00a0to the consequences of their actions while the\u00a0remaining\u00a099% are bearing the\u00a0financial\u00a0and ideological brunt. \u00a0The occupiers’ actions provide a rallying point for discussion and further action and is drawing in ever larger numbers and organisations. The TUs are getting involved and there is even\u00a0the\u00a0possibility that Christians will form a defensive ring of prayer around the occupation to shield it from violent eviction! \u00a0The movement may not yet have a coherent set of ideas about an alternative society and how to get there but it is at the very least enabling and encouraging a space of dissent and\u00a0resistance\u00a0that leaves open a range of possibilities.<\/p>\n
None-the-less, that discussion will sooner or later have to\u00a0coalesce\u00a0into a\u00a0reasonably\u00a0concrete vision of objectives and how to\u00a0achieve\u00a0them, in practice. It is difficult to over\u00a0emphasise\u00a0the considerable obstacles to\u00a0doing\u00a0this. I am currently working on some ideas about how to think about this and what the practical and political possibilities are. For the moment I will just list the\u00a0conceptual\u00a0resources I am starting to work with, in no particular order.<\/p>\n
John Holloway’s<\/strong> ideas on Crack Capitalism<\/strong><\/em> and the possibilities for developing alternative modes of behaviour and ways of doing that resist reproducing the social relations of capital. Part of what I am doing is building on a critique of these ideas.<\/p>\n Zygmunt Bauman’s<\/strong> take on ‘liquid modernity’, the fact of irreducable uncertainty and what the role of sociology and socilogists should be. \u00a0This relates directly to his ideas on freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to’ and the possibilities of going beyond the naturalisation of the current system and promoting a dialogue, even a poly-logue, that makes thinking about and enabling alternatives that are emancipatory.<\/p>\n Slavoj Zizek’s<\/strong> view of what is possible as laid out in the Afterword – \u00a0Welcome to Interesting Times – of the paperback edition of Living in the End Times<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n Norbert Elias’<\/strong>s ontology of ‘levels of integration’ and how, in a social developmental context, this creates increasingly far flung and dense networks of dependency and interdependency that help explain the relative lack of opportunity and power chances at the lower levels of integration (limited in autonomy,\u00a0opportunity\u00a0and mobility) and the\u00a0relative\u00a0autonomy and immunity of the higher levels of integration including, in Baumans’ terms, the free floating, trans-state and seemingly immune highly mobile global elites. It is difficult to see how much progress can be made towards a radical restructuring of society without taking these far flung networks of dependency into account.<\/p>\n I think to way forward for me will to be to produce a summary and critique of these thinkers ideas and then see to what extent some sort of synthesis may be of possible that is conceptually, empirically and\u00a0politically\u00a0useful. Maybe this is a project that could be conducted\u00a0collaboratively\u00a0in some way – perhaps via presentations, discussion and workshops in the sorts of spaces for\u00a0resistance\u00a0that are\u00a0opening\u00a0up?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The right leaning media have been criticising the occupation at St Paul’s \u00a0in London for not being able to specify an alternative to the system they are against and, specifically, that their demands are poorly and inconsistently articulated. One possible response to this is that their objective is to keep the focus on the issues … Continue reading “What do we want? What is possible?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,2,16,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-capitalism","category-economics","category-politics","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terrywassall.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}