"Moments of Excess"

Leeds Mayday Group

We want to talk about ‘moments of excess’. We think this idea is
timely because the tactics of militant protest have recently
spread to the Countryside Alliance and Fathers 4 Justice, and this
can make it seem as if the direct action movement of the 1990s
and the anti-globalisation movement of the 21st century have
been usurped or hijacked. By considering moments of excess we
can see that, perhaps, what’s really happened is that our global
anti-capitalist movement has kept its participants one step
ahead. These days we are no longer satisfied with symbolic
protest – which can almost be seen as militant lobbying. Our
movement is leaning towards a more constitutive politics. People
are beginning to work out what they want, what they are for, not only what they are against. What is more, people are actually
‘acting’ for what they want: practice not just theory. Realising
that ‘we live in a world of our own making’ and attempting to
consciously (re)make it.

Since timing is everything, we think it might be useful to look
at previous constitutive moments. Moments when similar
questions have been raised. We call these ‘moments of excess’ to
emphasise what these disparate times have in common: a
collective creativity that threatens to blow open the doors of
their societies. The ideas we discuss are relevant to activities we
are and have been involved in, such as the series of European
Social Forums, anti-G8 protests and, more locally, plans for a
social centre in Leeds.

••

The phrase ‘moments of excess’ helps us make the connections
between exceptional moments and everyday life. Work in a
capitalist society automatically carries an element of excess
because it is ultimately based on co-operation that can never be
reducible to capital. Our abstract potential always exceeds and
tries to escape the conditions of its production (that is, the capital
relation). That’s why we think there’s ‘life despite capitalism’;
because as a living, breathing mass, our needs, our desires, our
lives constantly transcend the limits of capital.

What do we mean when we say ‘limits’? Capital needs to
make a profit and to do this it needs to impose measure upon our
activities, cramping our creativity. For example, most of us in
work have some job description, however vague, laid down by management. Yet if we restrict our workplace activities to those
duties, nothing meaningful would ever get done; which is why a
‘work-to-rule’ can be so successful. Similarly, capital needs to
codify everyday practice into laws which relate to sovereign,
rights-bearing individuals, even though this contradicts the way
that innovation actually occurs. In fact capitalist culture tends to
reduce all collective products of creativity to the sole property of
individuals. ‘Brunel built this…’, ‘Farraday discovered that…’ On
top of all this we have to factor in our everyday (partly
unconscious) refusal to be homogenised, flattened, measured or
made quantifiable.

In the most obvious sense then, there is an excess of life. In
work, at home, on the bus, we produce a surplus of collectivity.
This is our humanity, and it is this which capital is constantly
trying to appropriate, harness, regulate or contain. All this has
become more obvious over the last half-century, as capital –
capitalist social relations – seems to have leaked into every
aspect of our lives. At the same time, and of course related to
capital’s colonisation, work – our daily activities – has become
ever-more socialised. It’s no longer just a matter of the extraction
of surplus value in the workplace: capitalist production is now
inserting itself deep into the texture of our day-to-day social
existence, in such a way that it now makes sense to think that
society itself functions as a factory. But this increasing
socialisation of labour has opened up new possibilities for cooperative
and creative collectivities within capitalism that seem
to lead beyond it. As work spreads throughout life so does the cooperation
it relies on and it is this excess of co-operation which
makes transformation possible.

•••

This leads us to the second, more profound type of excess. Every
now and then, in all sorts of different social arenas, we can see
moments of obvious collective creation, where our ‘excess of life’
explodes. In these ‘moments of excess’, everything appears to be
up for grabs and time and creativity accelerates. From our own
lives, we’re thinking of punk in the mid to late 1970s, and the
struggle against the poll tax in the late 1980s/early ’90s, and the
recent moments within the anti-globalisation movement. At
these times, which may have spanned several years or literally a
few moments, we have glimpsed whole new worlds. But we
could also mention the 1960s underground, the free software
community, the popular uprising in Argentina. All of these
examples are specific to a certain time and place, but we can see
a common thread: a collective, liberating creativity that delights
in mixing things up and smashing through all barriers. And they
constantly lead back to the fundamental questions: ‘What sort of
lives do we want to lead? What sort of world do we want to live
in?’. We don’t mean this in a utopian sense. Moments of excess
aren’t concerned with developing ideal types or blueprints of
how life should be lived. Instead they deal with the possible, and
represent practical experiments in new forms of life.

In these spaces, there is a real sense of subversive energy,
freedom and possibility. After Seattle we started talking about
‘fast track revolutionaries’ – the way that social struggles today
appear to go directly and immediately to the heart of capital and
its state: you can be reading Naomi Klein on Monday morning
and hurling bricks at the police by Wednesday afternoon.

Perhaps the existence of ‘fast tracks’ is one of the defining
features of all moments of excess. The concept of a ‘fast track’,
though, is in itself too simplistic. It suggests a predetermined
linear progression. Rather, moments of excess are points when
time is compressed whilst the possibilities expand almost
infinitely. These points are characterised by a breakdown in
accepted theories and the ‘laws’ of capital or of political
economy. In other words, ‘normal’ conceptions regarding what is
possible in a given time and space are turned upside down. One
question rapidly leads to another and the whole relation
between capital and life is brought into sharp relief.

The recent anti-war movement contained ‘moments of
excess’. We saw people demonstrating who’d not been on a
demonstration in decades, if ever. Across the UK schoolkids
walked out of classes because they heard that ‘something’ was
happening’ in town. (Often, nothing was happening… until they
turned up and started something!) These people were exposed to
new experiences and brought new skills and attitudes, in
particular a ‘do what we want’ mentality. They carried no
baggage regarding ‘what happens’ on a demonstration and this
frequently made such demos difficult to police (for both paid
cops and organisers) because the new protesters had little
knowledge of and respect for the ‘rules’. As a result new
subjectivities were produced.

Another defining characteristic of moments of excess is that
existing methods of mediating people’s desires and demands
fail. People don’t stop to think what’s possible, what’s realistic –
and no ‘expert’ is there to help them keep their feet on the
ground. Hence the Paris 1968 slogan ‘Be Realistic, Demand The Impossible’. In times of heightened activity we simply pose the
only question worth asking: ‘what sort of life do we want to
lead?’ Or even ‘what does it mean to be human?’. And it’s
perhaps important to note that moments of excess are not just a
modern phenomenon, they can be traced back through history.
During moments of excess (‘revolutionary’ moments) we feel
more connected to past experiments in new-world construction:
to the Italian autonomists, the Naxalite rebels, the Paris
Communards, the English Diggers. During bursts of revolutionary
creativity we feel ‘really’ connected to our antecedents, not just
warming ourselves with their memory.

••••

But how do these moments of excess emerge from the ‘everyday’
excess, our daily surplus of life? Clearly it’s not a question of
pushing the right buttons, or aligning the right material forces.
We can’t engineer these situations. But it might be revealing to
turn the question on its head and look at how these moments of
excess subside and return to everyday ‘normality’.

Some writers have used an analogy with geological
formations. If moments of excess are about horizontal flows of
energy and desire, there is a simultaneous pull in the opposite
direction. A way of thinking about this is that possibilities are
channelled in certain directions – towards static, vertical forms
(‘stratification’ and ‘striation’). One of the most exciting
elements of punk, for example, was the way it broke down
boundaries and identities. It was an excuse to reinvent yourself,
with a new look and a new way of viewing things; this play with identity was often topped off with a new name. Other
boundaries were broken by bands having shifting and multiple
line-ups, or by gigs where the split between band and audience
became blurred. But there was a counter-tendency, towards
identification and demarcation. All of a sudden you had to wear
the right ‘punk’ clothes, you had to know who was in the band,
and the stars were always on stage.

Of course it’s not as simple as saying the first was good, and
the second was bad. A certain amount of stratification is
necessary to focus our co-operation and energy; without it the
result would be entropy – the dispersal of energy. Stratification
can have productive and restrictive moments. For instance, the
way people look, talk, and hold their bodies can reflect a certain
commonality and can help spread recognition of a shared
antagonism. Moments of excess often produce their own
common styles and common conducts. Our struggles aren’t just
struggles for bread and potatoes, but for new ways of being and
the revolutionary movements with the most resonance (the
Black Panthers, Zapatistas etc.) have understood this. Over time
such styles and the attitudes they reflect can become rigid and
begin to act as a conservative force. But just as you can still see
the original lava flows in rock formations, traces of the moment
of excess are always present and can always be ‘re-activated’.
That’s why many of the people who threw themselves headfirst
into the early days of punk were people who’d lived through
those moments in the late 1960s. And why so many who became
involved in rave were old punks.

Stratification also occurs as a result of attempts to defend
moments of excess. In the free software movement, for example, hackers have adopted a legal framework (the GNU General Public
License) in order to safeguard open-source code. They have tried
to use copyright laws to lock software into communal ownership.
This can be seen as a productive moment of stratification as it
opens up a field of possibilities for cooperative production.
However there is a danger that this could draw the free software
movement towards legalistic ways of thinking. A more worrying
tendency within software, and another example of stratification,
is that towards homogenisation. Free software frequently
mimics proprietary packages. For example Open Office, which
runs on Linux, is an almost exact clone of the Microsoft Office
suite of programs. But such software, although it may threaten
Microsoft’s profits, provides little in the way of real alternatives.
These software projects ‘may have freedom in the sense of free
speech, but this speech is not the result of free thought. Their
composition is determined by the submissive relation to the
standards set by Microsoft. This is a deliberate abdication of the
imagination’.

In political movements, stratification often appears as a turn
to ‘ghetto politics’, where ‘purity’ is the driving principle. We
lived through the anarcho-punk movement of the 1980s and it’s
a prime example (although by no means the only one). Capital
was seen as an outside ‘alien’ force, rather than something that
is inherent in all social relations. The ‘ghetto’ offered the illusion
of solid foundations on which we could stand and cast
judgement on other efforts to escape this world. As anarchopunk
collapsed and Class War (the organisation) grew, this
grouping shifted from being a chaotic and uncontrollable force to
one that was, on occasions, paralysed by its own over-organisation, bureaucracy and fear of losing itself. There was a
clear attempt to formalise and capture flows of energy, but it
was done by defining boundaries and drawing lines in the sand
which had the opposite effect from that intended. In fact, we
witnessed a bizarre reversal in the 1990s, where much of our
workplace life took on many of the traditional features of
political action – communication, teamwork, independent and
critical thinking directed towards common purpose. At the same
time, ‘politics’ became more and more like work: a focus on
‘efficiency’, micro-management, directing of resources,
performance targets, and so on. To put it another way, so much
of ‘politics’ represents the very opposite of those moments of
excess: space is compressed, while time expands infinitely (who’s
never looked at their watch in a political meeting?).

This blinkered vision can also be seen in the holy grail of
purity, beloved of many anarchists.There is an idea that one can
be ‘pure’ in one’s politics. For example, one shouldn’t rent a
building for a social centre – the only acceptable option is
squatting. Of course, few, if any, of those arguing this position
actually live in squats. Many have jobs and most make rent or
mortgage payments, but this attitude derives from the
misconception that ‘politics’ is somehow purer and separate
from ‘everyday’ life.

We can even point to the contradictory tendencies at work in
the European Social Forum. During the organising process the
‘horizontals’ have fought the ‘verticals’ to keep things open. In
the process, however, people have come to define themselves as
one or the other. In the past our strength has been our ability to
be more than the definitions that are thrust upon us.

•••••

One way to think this through is to make a three-way distinction
between majority, minority and minoritarian. In 1976 punk was
minoritarian, it was undefined and open, it revealed a huge
range of possibilities. But that initial urge to change, which was a
process, got solidified into a never-changing state of being; a
quarter-century on punk is an established minority identity. It’s
fine to be a punk, it poses no threat: you wear the right clothes,
you mess up your hair a certain way, you listen to certain records.
Capital can incorporate any identity because you aren’t actually
required to believe in anything for capitalism to function.

Another way of understanding the links between identity,
individuality and collectivity is to look at riots. A common police
strategy during big demonstrations is to (attempt to) create
panic, by charging with horses, by driving vehicles into the crowd
at high speed, by firing bullets (usually ‘only’ plastic in the North,
frequently live bullets in the global South), in order to shock
participants into an individual identity. Literally, ‘shock tactics’
whose aim is to disorient and then divide. The collective dissolves
into competing individuals, all desperate for the quickest route to
safety. A similar process can be seen in the days after such an
event. For instance, following the Trafalgar Square Poll Tax riot of
1990, newspapers published pages of photographs of individual
‘rioters’: their aim to isolate through identification.

Still, it’s important to note that when the police break up riots,
they’re not attempting to destroy collective organisation, per se.
Rather, their aim is to re-order our collectivity in a way that
doesn’t challenge the capital relation – we’re expected to go home and consume, to work, to reproduce. It’s a high risk
strategy that’s only used as a last resort: driving vans into a
crowd will decompose our collectivity but there’s no guarantee
that it will be regrouped in a way that works for capital. Stronger
and/or more numerous anti-capitalist subjectivities may just as
easily be the outcome.

For example, at last year’s G8 summit in Evian, we
experienced two different responses to police tactics. A road
blockade out in the countryside (at Saint-Cergues, on the road
between Annemasse and Evian) involved several hundred
disobbedienti and other ‘activists’ (for want of a better word).
Despite hours of bombardment by tear gas, pepper spay and
concussion grenades, our self-organisation and collectivity were
too strong to be broken. For us, the experience felt liberating: we
participated in ‘spokes-councils’ for the first time, we observed a
fluidity of roles and almost complete absence of demarcation of
militancy; we had great fun for many reasons (which included
enjoying the sun and great views of the Swiss mountains). But in
some ways the action was something of a ‘set-piece’. Our
subjectivities against-and-beyond capital were certainly
strengthened, but not fundamentally altered. (Perhaps the most
interesting interactions in this respect were those between
blockaders and the sympathetic residents of Saint-Cergues, who
brought coffee, food, biscuits and who opened up their houses so
that people could collect water, wash off tear gas, use the toilet,
etc.)

The following day in the centre of Geneva, outcomes seemed
much more open, more unpredictable. Following police actions to
intimidate and corral demonstrators, they themselves came under pressure from outside of their cordon and found themselves
surrounded. As night fell, this crowd outside became more
chaotic and more menacing and the police were forced to turn
their water cannon around to confront the crowd they’d created.
In this urban setting, where troublemakers freely mingled with
commuters, our collectivity was much weaker. On the one hand,
it was easier for the police to disperse us with water cannon and
plastic bullets, to push us out of the city, even if that meant
moving trouble elsewhere. But, on the other hand, their actions
also forced ‘activists’, angry but ‘apolitical’ youth, ‘respectable’
Genovese citizens into close proximity. In effect, city-centre
Geneva that night became a cauldron of new subjectivities.

Yet again, we’re not suggesting one situation is better than
the other. In a sense, we need both. We do need to resist
definition, to constantly challenge the limits they imply. But at
the same time, having boundaries or identities can sometimes
work in our favour, opening up other spaces for us to move into.

If shock tactics represent an excessive response to our excess,
they’re not restricted to riot settings. We can see the same
criminalisation and demonisation at work against the free
software communities. The US government is keen to claim that
ripped-off corporate logos might be raising funds for terrorists. In
2001 Assistant US Attorney warned of the dangers surrounding
DeCSS utility, a program which allows PCs running on Linux to
read digital video disks, likening DeCSS to tools useful to
terrorists, such as ‘software programs that shut down
navigational programs in airplanes or smoke detectors in hotels…
That software creates a very real possibility of harm. That is
precisely what is at stake here.’

••••••

It’s easy to dismiss all of this as ephemeral, to do with
‘superstructure’, ‘culture’ or ‘ideology’, and thus far removed
from the real forces in society. Or, in a different language, to
criticise it for being just about subjectivities and not about
objective conditions. You might think that by talking of moments
of excess we’re mixing together things that are actually
different; that political revolts matter and cultural revolts don’t.
We reject all that. Capital is engaged in an attempt to
appropriate our very capacity to be human: whether we’re call
centre workers, office cleaners, migrants or programmers,
whether we’re at work or at home, what is increasingly being
exploited is our very capacity to interact, to communicate, to
create, to be human. By subsuming the whole of life itself,
production has effectively destroyed the division between
‘inside’ and ‘outside’. There is nowhere that is not simultaneously
capital, so it makes no sense to talk of ‘politics’ or ‘economics’ or
‘culture’ as discrete areas.

This clearly has important implications for our idea of
‘revolution’. It’s usually been understood as an ‘event’: the
execution of Charles I, the storming of the Bastille or the Winter
Palace, the election of Mandela and the ANC. As a consequence,
many concerns are deferred: ‘wait until after the revolution…’
The period ‘after the revolution’ then assumes the status of
‘heaven’ in orthodox religious thought (whether of Christian,
Islamic or Jewish variety). Be good, know your place, conform,
suffer, make sacrifices and wait for your (eternal) reward in the
afterlife. This is exactly the language used by many revolutionaries. We are expected to suppress our own desires for
the ‘greater good’ (of ‘the people’, ‘the working class’,
‘womankind’, whatever). We reject this notion of revolution and
the behaviour it encourages. We much prefer Digger Gerard
Winstanley’s idea of a Republic of Heaven: heaven exists here on
earth, we have only to create it!

But from another perspective, we are forced to ask ‘Where is
the rupture?’ If all forms of action are socially productive, and if
capital is amoral and infinitely malleable, isn’t our resistance
simply the creative cutting edge of capital? Will we turn round in
ten years time to find that the things we’re fighting for now
appear against us? Will we close down Starbucks only to find a
chain of organic fair-trade coffee houses clogging up our cities?
Are we stuck in an eternal return where all struggles are
recuperated? Do we have to give up millenarian fantasies of a
mighty day of reckoning where the truth will out and the unjust
shall be judged? We don’t know. With no inside and outside,
there is no solid foundation on which we can stand to make
those judgements: all we know is that nothing is certain. Perhaps
we won’t even recognise rupture until after it has happened,
especially if we’re still looking for a winter palace to storm. In any
case, ‘recuperation’ is itself a problematic concept, as it still
works with an inside/outside logic, as if there is some place that
capital can not penetrate: we’d rather think in terms of striation,
where flows of energy are temporarily captured but always have
the potential to ‘unfreeze’ and move again. This moves the
problem from protecting pure spaces to keeping spaces open to
the dynamism of new movements.

So what can we do to extend and expand these moments of excess? There is a general conflict between, on the one hand, our
collective productivity and the creative production of our
subjectivity and, on the other, capital’s attempt to dampen all of
this and reduce it to the valorisation of capital. At certain crucial
moments, a surplus of collectivity in one sector amplifies, and
ripples right through a social formation. Why? The key seems to
be resonance, the way that things ‘make sense’ at certain points
in history. Seattle made sense to millions of us five years ago:
time shrank and our horizons exploded so that everything
seemed possible. We can’t repeat Seattle, in the same way that
we can’t do punk again. But what we can do is keep on the same
line of opening ourselves up, constantly turning outwards rather
than in on ourselves. We need to keep open not only our ways of
thinking, but also the related methods of organising, the tactics,
techniques and technologies we use – it’s a constant battle to
ward off institutionalisation. That sense of openness and
movement seems fundamental to a different way of life.

Leeds May Day Group, aka Sunday League, are Alex, Brian, Dave,
Keir and Nette. Comments and communication are welcome.
Contact us at lmdg@ntlworld.com.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

Cyril Smith discusses our struggle to define our humanity in Marx
at the Millennium (London: Pluto Press, 1996). The application of
geological analysis to social movements and the language of
stratification and striation (which freeze the horizontal energy
flows of so-called ‘smooth spaces’) come from Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(London: Athlone Press, 1988), as does the
majority/minority/minoritarian distinction. The Matthew Fuller
point and quotation are from ‘Behind the Blip: Software as
Culture (Some Routes into “Software Criticism”, More Ways
Out)’, published in his collection Behind the Blip: Essays on the
Culture of Software (New York: Autonomedia, 2003). The essay’s
also available on-line at various sites, including
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ ideas_articles/pdf/
fuller_sw_as_culture.pdf. For an account of the anti-poll tax
struggle, see Danny Burns, Poll Tax Rebellion (Edinburgh:
AK Press, 1992), while Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming: Sex
Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) is the best
history of punk we’ve come across. For one perspective (ours!) on
the group Class War and its demise and dissolution, see issue 73
of its paper (intended to be the final issue), available on-line at
http://www.spunk.org/library/pubs/cw/sp001669/ and at
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/last_cw.html
•

October 2004"