War Games (or: politics and hashtag #ukuncut)

Here's a talk I gave tonight at a Cardiff University education activist event. I cut a bit here and interpolated a little there, but this is essentially it.

 

 

War Games

 

Reading The Independent this morning, I learned two things. The first was a clarification of the extent to which the Con-Dem Coalition government seeks to privatize public services. The second was that the government has started to play war games: theoretical computer simulated enactments of various scenarios of how a period of protest, demonstration, striking and political mobilisation may play itself out and be combated, dominated, controlled and defeated by the government.

 

Of course, this is all couched as necessity. The government needs to make cuts, to balance the books, remember? But, of course, this is nonsense: remember. The causes and solutions to all of the financial problems are considerably simpler than the government pretends. If you remember nothing else, remember this: the banks caused the crisis; the government bailed out the banks, the poorest in society are being made to pay for this.

 

Also remember this: the sums don't even add up. The easiest way to balance the books would be, of course, to privatize the debt. The second easiest way would be to make those who took our money pay it back. Another logical if not necessarily easy way would be to make all those global and international companies who avoid paying tax in the UK actually pay the tax that they owe.

 

Instead of this, the government has chosen to persecute those who are least responsible for the deficit and certainly the least able to pay: the public services; the services that constitute society as such; the services and institutions that are all we have that could be classed as society in distinction to economy: education, welfare state, council services, public services, social services, the NHS, and all that goes with them: public sector pensions, book-start (free books for preschool children), community libraries, swimming pools, free swimming for children and OAPs, subsidised public transport, never mind forests, maintenance grants to help teenagers gain an education and the prospect of a future.

 

To me one of the most outrageous (in the sense of preposterous) elements of the Con-Dem sophistry is the erection, in the face of the real onslaught to society, of the nonsensical notion of 'the big society'. This vacuous and asinine platitude is being held up like a shield to deflect and divert and dazzle and bamboozle – or like the pack of cards that the conjurer asks us to watch while the other hand is busy behind the scenes. The idea of the big society is a Maguffin, a red-herring, a nothingness, presented to turn our gazes away from the black hole caused by the wholesale dismantling of actual society.

 

In the 1980s, Thatcher argued that there was no such thing as society. Her point was that if you think in terms of society then you are thinking in the wrong terms: we should, insisted Thatcher, be thinking in terms of economic efficiency and performance, and only this way will we produce a wealthier world for all. That is because, she held, a welfare state breeds 'dole scroungers'; the discipline of market forces breeds efficiency and wealth. Hence the Thatcherite (or, rather, neoliberal) argument – the often downplayed argument – that massive social inequalities and a dramatically polarised society between the haves and the have-nots is a 'good thing'. It is presented as a good thing because the argument or cant is that the immense wealth at the top will 'trickle down' to such an extent that even the have-nots will be better off overall. (This is of course an ex post facto argument: an argument retroactively constructed to justify the status quo, manipulated into existence to support the desired answer.)

 

Three decades of evidence to the contrary later (wealth does not trickle down; societies do not benefit from inequality) and the Con-Dems are here to finish the job started by Thatcher. They arrive after the period of ideological consolidation and fumbling of and fiddling with the baton by Labour. For, Labour shed their socialist skin to win political power. But Labour were rather more carried along by macro-economic currents (occasionally trying to patch up and alleviate the most dramatic consequences of the currents they rode), rather than furthering them dramatically themselves.

 

But the Con-Dems were given a gift: a crisis of capitalism that they could call a crisis caused by Labour. Moreover, the vocabulary of 'crisis' and 'urgency' was used with gay abandon to justify rushing through dramatically right wing neoliberalist policies. And all this despite the overwhelming empirical evidence that neoliberalism only advantages the very top end earners. For the rest of us it introduces insecurity, uncertainty, anxiety and instability.

 

And this has been introduced into the university, as in so many other places. The cutting of funding for many undergraduate programmes has supposedly been justified by a market logic of competition. But it has been weighed down by an artificial (non-market) cap placed on the amounts of fees the universities can actually charge.

 

This is contradictory, and suggests that those implementing these supposedly marketizing principles do not believe in or trust the market after all. For, if they trusted the market, then surely the state should fund no subjects at all. But this is not being done, and mainly because if we did not artificially prop up the sciences, the costs to everyone concerned (producer and consumer) would be so astronomical as to make them completely unviable.

 

Many have asked: why marketize education at all? Why only some subjects? And if we are marketizing, then why place an artificial cap on the top prices of a so-called free market?

 

Interpretations abound about this utterly internally self-contradictory situation and discourse. These range from regarding the whole thing as bodged, as a botch job, to regarding it all as a deliberate, coherent and concerted attempt to implement a socio-economic programme that will either emancipate us all or retrench class privilege by moving higher education out of the reach of the poorest and by forcing more people to choose vocational qualifications rather than the once-prestigious-sounding BA honours degree.

 

(The Con-Dems explicitly hold the position that not everyone should be able to pursue a degree because, they say, it merely raises people's expectations of gaining a professional career. This expectation, the Con-Dems tell us, is now unreasonable. So, despite the fact that today's generation of young adults is far fewer in number than ever before, jobs are now scarcer and less professional than ever before…)

 

Some interpretations suggest that this will destroy UK higher education in all but the most financially secure institutions. Some suggest that nothing whatsoever will essentially change, except that students will graduate with mortgage-sized debts. Others that the government has initiated a change at the genetic level of higher education, in a piece of genetic social engineering whose consequences remain to be seen.

 

There are lots of issues and interpretations circulating. I cannot hope to engage with them all. But the point, as we should all know, is not merely to interpret the world: the point is to change it. So, if we oppose these cuts, in higher education as elsewhere – cuts which are ultimately designed to privatise what are currently public institutions – the key question is surely: what is to be done?

 

To reiterate: The government is playing war games. The government is, in other words, preparing for war – the tumult of mass and widespread protest; perhaps political war, political conflict. It is preparing for conflict on the reasonable assumption that its onslaught on everything society normally says it holds dear will provoke some anger. And we should bear this calculation in mind: cause and response, action and reaction are carefully planned, with as little as possible left to chance.

 

The conflict the government is preparing for is going to be the traditional confrontational kind of strike action and marching in the streets. And it is preparing to fight this sort of conflict on all fronts: from micrological and technical (how are protests to be policed and managed) to mediatic and political (how are conflicts to be spun in the media and in parliament) to pragmatic (how might they be used to political advantage – for instance, to usher in private companies to provide the services that striking workers are withholding – the very thing that the government ultimately wants, in many cases, in fact) to legislatively (how might protesting and striking actually be criminalized).

 

All of this has happened before, and will happen again. And this is what anyone concerned to redress the government's imposition of so many draconian cuts in so many realms and sectors must bear in mind: the government is planning for a political response, and is planning to fight it on the streets, in the media, in parliament, and in the courts. The government is planning not only to break strikes but to actually make strikes work for its own ends: so that if the public sector withholds, then the private sector will be invited to provide. Job done.

 

So what is to be done? I would suggest that protestors and opponents of the government must play their own war games, but according to different paradigms and scenarios than those envisaged by traditional confrontational protest.

 

Let us look at the case of UKuncut. UKuncut is what cultural theorists might call a kind of non-hierarchical, non-identitarian desiring assemblage. It is an impassioned and technologically mediated facilitator of movement. It is a twitter hashtag, a facebook page, a point of identification, a way of making rallying calls, a place to find words and vocabularies and arguments and accusations and evidence, and facts and figures and calls to arms and suggestions for creative demonstrations of an anti-governmental and anti-cuts message. It is at the same time its own reporting on and representation of its own and others' activities. It is something quite new and immensely promising.

 

However, at the same time as we look at UKuncut, which is not necessarily connected to any single or concrete institution, and which is animated by a wholehearted anti-cut and anti-injustice ethos, we must also look at the many institutions that are actually facing cuts. These will act via their own representatives – basically, their unions. And their unions may call for strikes. And these strikes will play themselves out through standard narrative structures and tropes and representations and vocabularies: the media will speak of a radical minority and the police will blame the strikers and protestors and the protestors will blame the police; and people may or may not sympathise and will become sick of being unable to get or do what the striking workers used to enable them to get or do. And so on.

 

In this, traditional political forms and media forms will play key roles: union representatives will speak with political representatives in a mediatized discourse. This is the terrain on which the war games are being planned. It is about police management, and media management and discursive management – the domination of these scenes.

 

But then there is twitter and UKuncut. I take these to stand for new and alternative repositories of strategies and tactics.[i] For, remember: Many workers will only be able to protest their own particular plight via the mechanism of the union, wherever a union is present or active. And the presence or absence of formalised protest depends very much on the specific institution or sector, here. Some cut sectors may be unable to protest through the usual unionized channels.

 

Which is where assemblages like UKuncut can come in (a little like the cavalry). But this is only going to be the case to the extent that the (so to speak) 'universal' energies of UKuncut are directed towards and articulated with 'particular' protests. Without such direction and connection, then UKuncut may really only be working in the realms of impotent moralism. There is only so much that can be done by the creative, performative 'exposing' of the financial and ethical misdemeanours of banks and big businesses. Of course, this 'so much' is very much. But it needs to be coordinated with politics proper. And that takes place around specific end-oriented struggles.

 

The communication, coordination and mobilization enabled by technologies like Twitter in particular actions and occupations has already proved to be quite remarkable. It is certainly the only reason I am on Twitter. Protestors, demonstrators and occupiers communicate with each other, inform each other, boost each other's morale, at the same time as informing any inclined to find out about what is going on, in a way which bypasses or overtakes the slower temporality and limitations and inevitably biased institutions of mainstream TV, radio, print and even online news media.

 

Here, the technology works as a supplement to politics and to representation. But the problem is that opposition to the cuts is going to have to play itself out in parliament. So, what is to be done?

 

The first thing to be done is what is already being done by the creative protests of UKuncut. This is a politics of creativity and not negativity. It is a kind of direct action, but not premised on the defensive negativity of striking. Here, UKuncut picks up the direct action baton of Reclaim the Streets, but now, staging teach-ins about economics and tax avoidance in high street stores, opening libraries and childcare crèches in high street banks, and so on.

 

Much of this takes the form of what Slavoj Žižek has called a strategy of overidentification. That is, these political performances take the literal and explicit words of power and insist on their actualisation. As in: so, Cameron wants a big society, then let's perform our interpretation of this, ideally at the same time as clarifying its beautiful difference from the stark ugliness of the institutions the government supports. Anything that is mobilised along the lines of 'but you said you wanted this' is a kind of overidentification, and according to Žižek, it can sometimes be the most subversive thing possible, as it reveals the lie or the obscenity or the hypocrisy of those who made the claims in the first place.

 

This kind of consciousness-raising performance is certainly valuable. And in today's context, it is easy and urgent and important to draw and reiterate the stark contrasts which illustrate the obscenity and hypocrisy of the state of affairs: multimillion and multibillion pound profits and bonuses for the bailed-out banks in the face of unemployment and misery dished out to providers of vital public services.

 

And it doesn't have to be the bankers either. We might look at the pay-rises awarded to many university Vice Chancellors or those at the top of the NHS and so on in conjunction with looking at the drastic cuts we are told we have to make to front-line staff and services.

 

A politics of overidentification would say: 'but you said we were all in this together. How come the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?' Or: 'if we are all in this together, how come it is not the case that everyone, everywhere, all the way up and down the chain of an institution, takes equivalent pay and budgetary cuts? If this were really about the figures and about the money – about balancing the books – then wouldn't cuts at the very top result in much greater savings than cuts at the bottom?'

 

In slightly different terms, the philosopher Jacques Rancière notes that there have been great changes in the orientation of political protest since the 1960s. He notes that in the 1960s, protestors tended to be 100% against the powerful and their institutions. But this meant that there could be no dialogue: for, on the one hand, the protestors believed that every word said by power was evil; on the other hand, the representatives of institutions believed that the protestors were just silly children who deserved only contempt. But, more recently, Rancière observes, protest has been less millenarian or less based in outright opposition. Protest has been more about particular clauses, the wording of proposed legislation, complaints about details, technicalities, interpretations, and so on. Rancière calls this a politics of verification.

 

I think that UKuncut is leading the way in the performative politics of overidentification and the argumentative or rhetorical politics of verification. This is not a party politics, and nor do I think it needs to be. But I think that it will work much better if it becomes articulated and elaborated as something that an oppositional politics could step up to.

 

Labour appear to have been nowhere throughout all of this. And this is the first question which now needs to be posed regularly and repetitively to Labour: where are you? The second question is: where do you stand on the cuts? The third question: will you reverse the cuts? This is the key question: do the opposition oppose? Will they cut the cuts?

 

These questions need to be asked, and over and over again, if these are indeed war games or political games that the protestors are playing, and not just games.

 

Of course, the problem with politics is that no matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. But there are governments and there are governments. And this government is a vandal.

 

So what is to be done? What can I do, what can you do, what can we do? I think that there is something important in the fact that the government is playing war games, based on a politics of strikes and protests. I am not suggesting that strikes and demos shouldn't take place. But I am proposing the importance of accentuating the positive too.

 

Thus: rather than waiting for or waging negative, defensive strike action, perhaps we can take preemptive creative strike action: strike out: tweet, email, telephone, write to Labour MPs. Ask them: will you uncut the cuts? Do you condemn the Con-Dems? Will you do the opposite of the current government? Are your politics and your ideologies different? If not, why not? We want them to be.

 

How do we ask them? Literally, directly, technologically: most of these people are on Twitter; all are on email. As well as showing and demonstrating through traditional demonstrations, let's discourse directly. Direct armchair action. Let's just ask them: will you uncut the cuts? Let's just tell them. Collective twitters. Put your hands out, and touch the screen and believe.

 

Some may say this is very little, almost nothing. And in and of itself, it is. But combined and collectively, it may become more and other and different – and may help to sidestep and wrong-foot the war machines of the right who are so very wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[i] I also take them to stand to particular concrete struggles as the universal stands to the particular, the global to the local, the ideal to the actual, and so on. The universal, the global, is embodied (if embodied is the right term) in the disparate but aligned energies of UKuncut. The particular, the local, are the specific instances and institutions – those who are cut, condemned, struggling, perhaps striking.