Excerpted from Moments of Excess by May Day Leeds Group (I recommend you read the whole thing--but I have included excerpts for easy reference)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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