Unsolicited Recommendations n.9
The longer the picket line, the shorter the strike
Organized labour is following me around this month. We could argue that it’s self-inflicted, if interest begets further interest. But between strikes hitting the headlines in my daily news podcast and anarchists popping up in my tv and film choices, it does feel like something’s in the air.
I’ll admit to searching high and low for a copy of Astra Taylor’s essay collection, “Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions” (which I eventually found in Shelf Life Books — an excellent shop). And I’ll admit to an enthusiastic and probing conversation with friends a few weeks ago about the psychology of growing up in post-Communist economies and what life in a free market teaches — or doesn’t teach — us about freedom. Maybe collective action is a notion I’m following around as much as the reverse.
Intellectual chats with friends aside, most of today’s news leaves me thinking: seriously? Corporate bailouts, special-interest lobbies, climate collapse — and meanwhile, working-class people can’t afford to heat their homes or are being displaced from them altogether. Taylor writes:
The old liberal consensus issued from the blithe insistence that the marriage between democracy and capitalism, between free elections and freeish markets, was a charmed and stable union that would yield prosperity and justice everywhere. Those foundational precepts look more and more fanciful as acute conditions of economic inequality and democratic deficit continue to deepen.
She later continues, quoting Natasha Lennard, a radical antifascist writer and activist:
If liberal democracy is incapable of delivering the basic conditions required for democratic participation — “being alive on a not-dead planet, not in a cage, enfranchised, not starving and sick” — then it is our duty, she argued, to question such a system and to challenge it.
Here, here.
Unsolicited Recommendations
The aforementioned “Remake the World” by Astra Taylor.
My new favourite show, Who Do You Think You Are? — specifically Series 16, Ep. 3 with Jack and Michael Whitehall, in which they discover a 19th-century ancestor doing his best to hamstring the working-class movement for political reform in Wales.
Strong words on the U.K. government’s new anti-strike bill from law professor Keith Ewing and Labour peer John Hendy.
Cyril Schäublin’s slow and stilted film Unrueh, which has stuck with me and contributed to my awareness and perception of the history of collective action, especially on an international scale.
Mostly unrelated but still relatable: this decision-making dice by illustrator Tom Gauld, for when you get tired from all the organizing and need to recharge.
Questions to Ask about unrest.