Tell the People: Vince Cable Advocates Direct Action

"No government - coalition, Labour or other - would change its fundamental economic policy simply in response to a demonstration of that kind."¹

So sayeth Vince Cable yesterday, with regards to the March for the Alternative that took place on Friday. I cannot imagine a greater vindication of direct action and civil disobedience than that. In a single sentence Cable has affirmed the facticity of a truth understood by all who believed in the rightfulness of direct action.

Let's be clear. Direct action is not an intensifier in the dialogue of protest. It does not exist to punctuate our statement by saying, 'Yes, we are this angry.' Just and neccesary direct action must be both of those things. They are mutually inclusive. Neccesary action is always just, and just action must always be neccesary. When the state condoned form of protest discourse has been sublimated by the system such that its power is negated (as it is in our current system, where it is diffused along socially prefigured lines of characterisation and storytelling, repackaged as an old, powerless narrative), then direct action becomes neccesary. This should not be hard to accept: When there is no power in civil obedience, we must turn to civil disobedience to become empowered. (And the rider to that, which is that we must not accept disempowerment.) All of those who have been acting upon the rightfulness of direct action (and here I most definitely include UK Uncut, and exclude the stupidity of the Black Bloc) have held at heart the knowledge that civil obedient protest - marching and rallying - has been disempowered. Until now that view has had opposition from ineffectual neoliberals insisting that endless marching within state constraints is the only rightful form of protest.

As of yesterday, that argument has been exploded. No longer is this argument contested. Now we have a statement, a declaration from one of the central figures in the ConDem cabal, that the civil obedient form of protest will not be recognised by the state in any effectual way. It almost beggars belief that Cable would misstep so badly as to make a statement so blunt, but so he did, and the ConDem mask has slipped. The government will not listen to its people. We must disobey to maintain common power, and we must not surrender common power. There's only one course of action.

Now we need to get that message out there. It saddens me that so few people will even see Cable's message, and fewer still will grasp what it means. We need to push it out, educate people. If people truly understood what was happening in this country's political sphere (and beyond it, of course) they would be frightened for the future. Anyone who is not concerned about the path we are taking, nor angry at the exercises of power by these falsely elected ideologues, does not understand what is happening. Or, of course, they're one of those who stand to profit. We need to make sure people do understand, so actions like this do not slip past barely noticed nor challenged:

'Academic fury over order to study the big society'

One line in particular stands out:

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) will spend a "significant" amount of its funding on the prime minister's vision for the country, after a government "clarification" of the Haldane principle – a convention that for 90 years has protected the right of academics to decide where research funds should be spent.

This use of the word 'clarification' is deeply, deeply sinister. It's an omen of things to come. What other policies and principles might the coalition see fit to 'clarify'? In the face of such things, when fully comprehended, who would not be up in arms? So it's vital we make sure these actions, this information, is diseminated and understood. Cable has given us a perfect rallying point, a statement simultaneously sweeping in its impact yet uncommonly clear in its meaning. Now we need to let people know.

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¹http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12874631

Living Beyond Means

It's a great success of the Conservatives' rhetoric that they have convinced a lot of this country that 'Living beyond one's means' is the crime of the benefits claimants. This has been accomplished simply by the old staple technique of twisting definitions.

At the heart of the misconception, there is a conflation of this nebulous idea of 'means' and income. This is a misconception only on the part of the public who have bought into the idea. The Conservatives who have spun the story should not be seen as a piece with the accepting public. The public are mistaken - fooled - but the Tories are wilfully misdirectional.

The Conservatives have spun the story - sadly accepted in many quarters - that to live beyond your income is the great sin that has triggered the depression. They are able to gain credibility from pundits across the spectrum citing 'living beyond means' as the trigger for the depression. But note the distinction: Means, not income. To equate the two is the Conservative falsehood. Those without income are living beyond their means if they live at all, and those with absurdly overinflated incomes would struggle greatly to live a lifestyle that actually exceeded them.

The truth is that those 'living beyond their means' are comitting the excess at the point of income - their income is wildly beyond a reasonable level. And likewise, viewed in this light - the true light - we see that it is preposterous to accuse the benefits claimants of living beyond their means. If they have an income of zero, how can they possibly be living in excess of anything?

Of course a lie like this is insidious. Nobody explicitly draws the connection underpinning it - indeed, to do so is to expose the strings. Instead it is simply made a tacit assumption, an unspoken underlying definition. That way there will be many - those who are not already scrutinous but who assume veracity - who do not even notice an assumption is being made. And the best way to reinforce the false equivalency is simply to take it for granted, as if there is nothing even to dispute. But there is, and not just in this case. And those who assume veracity on the part of those in power are going to find themselves deeply confused down the line as to how things have gone so bad.

More to the point, they'll be responsible.

By Any Other Name

I saw a nonsense article on the BBC news site the other day, in which the Economics editor tried to make the claim that we were no longer living in a capitalist society. Her argument was that with the government bailing out the banks, we no longer met the definition of capitalism, which required laissez-faire government. Well, bollocks to that. What a stupid semantic argument to completely miss anything relevant or of worth.

There is no such thing as true capitalism, or true communism, or true anything else in a working world. A practical economic system will never equate precisely to the theoretical model, because no model has yet been conceived that can account for all the chaos of a human element and all the unpredictable eventualities of life. It's unsurprising, though, that those people who do try and reduce the boundless and most definitely irreducible problem of life to a few pages of economic modelling are now crowing meaningless arguments that we no longer meet the definition, no longer adhere to the model, and therefore are no longer of that system.

What's relevant is the underlying principles of the system, and the tenets of the economy have not changed one bit. The economy is now, exactly as it was previously, underpinned by the reduction of everything to commodity. All things have to be precisely defined in what they are, in order that they may be assigned specific value. Everything is reduced to precisely defined value-packages, and each individual element of a thing is itself reduced to component value-packages. This is exemplified nicely in the buying out of shareholders. Each individual interest in a product or service does not share in the whole of the thing, but instead has their own slice, of carefully defined parameters, which can be assigned specific value and purchased from them. It's also no coincidence that this closely mirrors the urge to reduce a person to a series of metrics, the two are intertwined; we fast approach the day when we will have to assert ownership of our own eyes, or fingerprints, lest we are expropriated of it.

The other aspect of the economy, correspondent with the commoditisation of everything, is the assignation of ownership to all things. Everything must belong, there must always be a person who holds the power to any thing – because ownership is equal to power. This is why everything need its owner, so we know who it is who can dictate how that thing is used, how we may interact with it, even what the thing is.

There was another story in the news the same say as the capitalism article. It mentioned that police-seized computers were continuing to be held to serve the interests of FACT, a private interest. As a friend indicated, this reveals the falsity in the 'freedoms' we are given by the power-holders. Expropriating his words for a moment:

What the computer fiasco shows is that, for example, the ‘right to your own private property’ is an everyday assumption masking what is actually only *permission* to keep and use what remains at all times open to the possibility of sequestration by police (acting on behalf, here, of other private corporations). Nothing you ‘own’ privately cannot be forcefully taken away from you under the reign of speculative investigative powers. [...] This is the paradigm on which the above kind of interventionism is premised: the possibility that copyright-infringing material might be found on a computer system is enough to seize hold of it indefinitely, the possibility that Iraq might house underground weapons bunkers the first Bush administration overlooked is enough to invade it and change it irrevocably, the possibility that a foreign-looking man running in the London Underground could be a suicide bomber is enough to gun him down fatally, the possibility that someone is a terrorist is enough to detain them without due legal process, render them or submit them torture, etc. In each case a state, police or corporate claim to a right (copyrights, rights to regulate arms, rights to act on suspicion, rights to suspend international law) privileges itself in order to suspend other rights, which are thus revealed to be mere permissions (permission to use media, permission to defend oneself, permission to use public transport, be foreign-looking, be protected under international laws, etc., etc.) that can at any time be withdrawn.

It is in fact the power-holders (primarily I mean the government, but there are some others in this group) who hold all the power over anything we allow to be commoditised, and that power is deferred to us only contingent on investing the power-holders with the power to withdraw it. They are, after all, the power-holders.

If you really want to argue that there is no capitalism, look to the fact that the individual is not the owner of his belongings, but is rather holding only a permitted stewardship. If we are not living under capitalism, it is because the power-holders are the owners of all commodities. The economic system we seem to labour under exists only because the power-holders grant the permissions which support it. The system is the same, but the rights it is premised on have been exchanged for provisions.

(I need a better term than power-holder. This is what is meant by sovereign power, right?)