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Cafe Politique is not about experts nor is it about 'Theory'. For the price of a cup of coffee or a beer, anyone can come and help explore ideas about politics and our lives
The Cafe will start with a short talk from a speaker to introduce the topic. After this, there'll be an open discussion, where we hope we can talk honestly and try to think differently about our lives.
Cafe Politique is not about experts nor is it about 'Theory'.Instead we want it to be a friendly and informal space where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a beer, anyone can come and help explore ideas about politics and our lives, without fear or favour.
Thursday July 12th 2007
What are social centres for?
Social centres like the Common Place have increasingly become an integral part of what anarchists and anti-capitalists 'do' in the UK. And there is a long tradition of occupied political spaces across Europe and the world. But what are these spaces for? Can they really help us change the world? And how does that fit in with our monthly struggle to pay the rent in Leeds?
Hopefully this discussion will be really useful for all sorts of CommonPlace users, and might focus on our minds on what we want to do with this space. We want to take on board the experience of other social centres in the UK (the Cowley Club, Sumac, the 1 in 1) as well as considering the European dimension, where social centres have a slightly different flavour.
The Cafe will start with a short talk from a speaker to introduce the topic. After this, there'll be an open discussion, where we hope we can talk honestly and try to think differently about our lives.Cafe Politique is not about experts nor is it about 'Theory'. Instead we want it to be a friendly and informal space where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a beer, anyone can come and help explore ideas about politics and our lives, without fear or favour.
Previously at cafe politique -
Thursday 12 April 8pm
What is successful action?
In the run-up to this year's G8 summit and Climate Camp (among other things), it seems timely to ask ourselves what we do (and why we do it), and how we can do it better. Affinity groups? Civil disobedience? Mass blockades? Street stalls and petitions? Demonstrations? Lobbying?
But there's no limits to where the discussion could take us. How does what we do relate to the sort of world we want? Can we create that world now? What are social centres, like the CommonPlace, for? How can they work better?
Thursday 24 May 8pm
Why do we need ideas?
Changing the world is about getting off our arses and 'doing it'. Or is it? Do we need to understand the world before we act? Or can we get the answers as we go along? And just what the hell are these things called 'ideas' anyway?
speakers notes 24/05/07
What use are ideas?
Ok today we’re supposed to be talking about ideas, about the role of them.
Why this topic?
The question: what’s the point of talking about ideas? seems like an obvious question or perhaps an overarching question for something like Café Politique, which is specifically a space for talking about political ideas.
Also I think the question seemed to come up in various guises in the first Café Politique, which I came to.
Ok, I mean for me, the starting point for talking about ideas is that I think the world is fucked up and it needs changing.
I think a lot of us think that way but I’d be interested in hearing how people came to those conclusions.
My sense is that we don’t tend to come to this conclusion through reading books, or not exclusively.
And I’m speaking as someone who reads a lot of books and who’s just spent a lot of time producing a journal, Turbulence, which is full of political theory.
I mean we can certainly come to a better understanding of the way the world works through reading but I think the impulse comes from our experience of our lives, of being hemmed in, not being able to live the lives we want or can imagine.
But then understanding what hems us in seems important for deciding how to act to change it.
The question might then become how do we come to an understanding of the world.
Reading and discussing ideas is an important part of learning about the world, but I think the most important part of learning about the world is by acting with others. Taking part in movements is when ideas change and develop and where reading and discussing makes the most sense. Because you are reading in order to do something you are putting ideas into action. Ideas become like tools, which help to make new things possible.
Perhaps the question we need to ask is how much agreement do we need to have about how the world works before we can act together.
I’ll just set that in a bit of context:
The sort of classic leftist formula was that a group forms around a platform that you have to sign up to. That you agree on the view of the world before you act together and then those ideas don’t change. Or they change very slowly. The group has formed around those ideas so changing them is very traumatic and involves a hard split. We are all familiar with left groups splitting over some arcane, indecipherable disagreement about what happened at a meeting in Russia in 1923, or some such.
I should add that in the 1990’s anarchist movement that I was involved with there was a tendency towards following this model. Of groups drawing up a platform that people would have to agree with before joining.
There’s also been quite a lot of proposals coming out of the anti-globalisation movement for the drawing up of a list of demands that will be the basis of agreement for further action.
I also think there’s a related tendency within activism, that we have the answers and that if only we can make the rest of the world like us everything will be OK.
Affinity
The main strand of the anti-globalisation movement though, I’d argue, has been for action based not on shared ideology but on affinity. Acting with those you get on best with. Acting with those you can best act with regardless of ideology.
You sometimes end up working with those that aren’t closest to you in the books that they’ve read but that want to do similar things or that you just get along with and can work with.
I think this is one of the innovations of the counter-globalisation movement.
It’s the meaning of the Zapatista slogan: “Walking we ask questions?” That the most important thing is to be in motion. We’ll work out the direction as we go not before we start.
Perhaps the question then becomes: are there no boundaries to who you work with?
Thursday 14 June 8pm
The psychology of activism
A few people say there's nothing wrong with their world; some people say that there are problems, but they can't do anything about it; others are more or less certain what's wrong with their world and devote a large part of their lives trying to put it right. Are these essentially different people, or different states of mind that anyone could get into? And if people can move between these states, what might influence that?
Speaker's notes 14/6/07
I'm not a proper psychologist and not sure if an activist.
The questions as stated in the preamble to this were of difference between stereotypes. Ignorance, passivity and action. Granted that this is a simplification, it can still be a starting point. Are these differences part of a person's make-up? Are they the result of effects that the world has on us, or freely willed choices? And in either case, could they just be states or stages of being-in-the-world, in which case how do we talk about the becoming-active of a person?
Activism can be seen as a general trait in a person, also thought of as a personality type, or a style of working (eg. in considerations of interpersonal dynamics and in ergonomics): this has been addressed by research showing for example, that being brought up by socio-politically activist parents predisposes offspring to activism. However, heritability of the trait is low which suggests that this kind of determination is minor. It may well be an artefact of the experimental methods used, but it dose make sense that social attitudes can be 'modelled' from one generation to the next.
The shortcomings of determination point towards a need for a more hermeneutic understanding, ie. that the meaning of the individual's actions are key to an understanding of the motivations, the persons capacity and their way of actualising their wishes. This can stand even if the person is predisposed to behave in a certain way. It may seem obvious in this group, but it's important to remember that rejection of determinism is still controversial to some, especially materialist neurophilosophers and criminologists. The observation that those people who are active in one political area are usually active in others, either contemporaneously or serially stands against the notion of political action being the result of free will. This tends to suggest that people are driven to activity by something more than the separate issues; this could be a trait in the person, or it could be a perceived commonality between causes, despite caveats that should be made of effort after meaning.
What then of the becoming? How is it that a person can be held back from change or growth then suddenly wake up and realise their freedom? Some speak of an individual's 'core values and beliefs', with a suggestion that individuals can be pushed a long way into compromises on matters that are of small personal importance, and that what spurs an individual to change is when their integral, essential nature is somehow challenged. However cognitive scientists, eg. investigating smoking cessation have found that it is common for people to know and believe that they are actively harming themselves and carry on smoking despite lacking any self-destructive urge. This points to one of the mechanisms by which passivity is maintained; the over-coding of hedonism by commerce, whereby people associate pleasure with a product so strongly that the bonds can't be broken by reason alone.
Desire itself has been contorted away from its biological purpose of sustaining the species, into perpetuating habits of consumption that will be the end of the species unless challenged. The desire to belong to a group, deformed into nationalism; the desire to be included in a process flattened into economics. People digging themselves into holes and identifying themselves not just with their patterns of consumption, but with their very passivity in some cases. This might feel like the only possible sane response to an insane world for some people, some times.
The next layer of consideration of impediments to the free flow and becomings-active might be said to lie in the media. It is said that a feature of supermodernity is that the overload of mediated information exceeds any individual's ability to understand, and this can be cited as a reason for the passivity of consumers of popular culture. It is also a prior fact that channels of mass-media communication are so swamped with incitements to irresponsible consumption and dehumanised behaviour that we don't stand a chance. Or do we? After all, we sit here now taking these things apart, and there are ferral media channels.
A final layer of complexity in these considerations comes with questions of self-awareness. That is to say that people have an idea of how they appear to others, or how they wish to appear to others, and this self-image is likely to exert in influence over how they behave. For example, just how hungry would one have to be to go into MacDonalds? In the easiest of scenarios, it's simple to say that one would rather go to the cute organic vegan cafe next door, and in the hardest scenario, it's easy to say that one won't starve oneself to death, but real life is usually somewhere in between, and I'd suggest that being part of a group, and knowing how you'll be judged by that group, will make one's threshold for compromise much higher. It's part solidarity, partly peer-pressure, but also the very positive fact that I like to think that other people are making positive judgements about me.
Similarly, retreating into nihilism or fatalism are often associated with people seeming to choose ignorance or choose passivity. One way of understanding this is to consider that at some stage in an individual's development, he or she will have wanted the world to be a kind, happy place and probably it was the failure of the world to live up to those beautiful, primitive expectations that led to the process of disempowerment. In this sense, disempowerment can be seen as the interaction between a primitive wish to be in a good world with an all-or-nothing (breast or non-breast) perfectionism. Hence rejection of the imperfect world leads to disengagement, and effort after meaning produces cynicism; the world is not-breast. This also could point to possibilities for renewal; that if the perfectionism can be loosened at the same time as developing a person's sense of self-efficacy, people can and do change their habits of thought. And once the individual begins to see the possibilities for other ways of being, a world that may become more than an absence of breast.
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