An Anarchists Wetherspoons Or Virtuous Resistance? Social Centres As Macintyres Vision of Practice-Based Communities
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An Anarchist’s Wetherspoons or Virtuous Resistance? An Anarchist’s Wetherspoons1 or Virtuous Resistance? Social Centres as MacIntyre’s Vision of Practice-based Communities Lucy Finchett-Maddock This paper uses narrative from the social centre movement in the UK to argue that social centres are examples of the MacIntyrean small communities that can virtuously resist the overbearing market influence. Looking at the contrast between rented and squatted centres, the paper argues that those that are squatted are practice-based communities, and those that are rented, are institutions. This therefore highlights the interrupting role of the market and argues that the rented centres as incompatible with MacIntyre’s ideal. Introduction MacIntyre claims that we should work to make small communities that are capable of preserving the practices and virtues previously suffocated by the force of liberal capitalism, a reality. Accordingly, MacIntyre states ‘…it is important that the construction of such an alternative cannot begin from any kind of philosophical or theoretical statement. Where then does it begin? Only in the struggles, conflicts, and work of practice and in the attempt to find in and through dialogue with others who are engaged in such struggles, conflicts, and work an adequate local and particular institutional expression of our shared directedness towards our common goods’.2 In this paper, my aim is to offer the radical movements of our time, as examples of such small communities, as sites of contested dialogue with the purpose of the common good as their quintessence. Each individual internalises involvement in the ‘practices’ and virtues, through their everyday interactions, internal organisation, and external protest. They are the living and breathing formulation of MacIntyre’s utopian project. Looking specifically at the social centres and designated ‘social spaces’ within the London area and some in the remainder of the UK, I will argue the presence of genuine ‘internal goods’ within the actions and beliefs of these communities. The goods that are generated are as a result of their belief in, and commitment to resistance. In order to highlight the implications of MacIntyre’s ‘Revolutionary Aristotelianism’, the relationship between practices and institutions will be addressed through the critique of rented spaces presented by those committed to action in squatted centres. I shall support this critique and argue that rented centres are contrary to MacIntyre’s vision, and that those that are truly autonomous zones, set outside of the institutionalising forces of the market culture, are indeed those small communities of withdrawal that MacIntyre advocates. Methods and Methodology My usage of the term ‘Revolutionary Aristotelianism’ is taken from the work of MacIntyrean Kelvin Knight. The phrase originated from his 1996 article 'Revolutionary Aristotelianism', and has been outlined in more detail in 'Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre’. Knight’s use of E P Thompson’s express belief that individuals are more ‘realised’ as rational or moral agents when collectively resisting the biopolitical percolations of market,3 is combined with 1 Wetherspoons is a popular chain of pubs in the UK 2 Alasdair MacIntyre Selected Essays Vol. 2 – Ethics and Politics Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2006 p xi 3 This was alongside Thompson’s great wish for MacIntyre to uphold his valiant task of practical philosophy, seeing the revolutionary impact his thought could have (E P Thompson ‘An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski’ in: R Miliband and J Saville (ed) The Socialist Register Merlin Press 1973 pp 58-9) Philosophy of Management Volume 7 Number 1 2008 21 Lucy Finchett-Maddock MacIntyre’s ordering in which institutions exist to serve practices. The invocation results in resistance as a virtuous practice in defiance of the omnipotent spectre of liberal individualism and late capitalism. MacIntyre is of course the main theoretical backdrop to this piece aside from Knight’s appropriation of his rebellious traditionalism. On an empirical level, I undertook embedded observation at the ‘rampART’, one of the social centres concerned, in particular with the women’s group ‘WANC’ during 2006 and 2007. I have also conducted an unstructured interviews with an important contributors to the UK social centre movement. A number of internet sourced articles and papers associated with the social centre movement’s involvement in the Gleneagles anti-G8 mobilisation (2005), have been of great use. These have provided a fascinating glimpse of the conversation that was going on, and remains, over the implications of rented spaces on the social centre scene.4 There is a plethora of secondary source material that has been of use, so too the websites of the social centres themselves. Revolutionary Aristotelianism MacIntyre’s ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’5 informs this piece with a resounding understanding of collective action, and an irrefutable application of his syllogism couched in the premise of '…human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos’.6 The task will be to exemplify MacIntyre’s tenets through the practices and ethos of the social centre movement. One of the most explicit themes evident within MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1985) is the transformation of autonomy to anomie as a result of the Enlightenment project’s separation of practice and morality, the bifurcation of social relations that he argues continues through the auspices of liberal individualism and free market capitalism; the separation of the public and the private, science and metaphysics, facts and values. With the severance of practice from morality, moral judgments are no longer seen as facts,7 the consequence of which MacIntyre argues resulting in a humanity that can never be unalienated and have '…clarity about means and ends’.8 In line with this formulation, is therefore the architectonic backdrop in which the component of rational ethics from which MacIntyre’s threefold scheme has been removed and the ultimate conclusion of man-as- he-could-be as no longer intelligible, no longer relevant.9 In the question couplet 'What is good for me? What is good for mankind?”10 the latter has been removed, and therefore an ultimate telos replaced by independent pleonexia. In MacIntyre’s synchrony of his Marxist past with that of his Aristotelian ethics, bureaucratic individualism reduces practices to means serving the ends of individual accumulation of wealth and power.11 The conception of virtue is therefore altered,12 means becoming ends and the conception of a series of actions in relation to the overall good is lost in translation. The only demographic capable 4 See Rogue Element ‘You can’t rent your way out of a social relationship (Work in Progress)’ found at http:// www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/manchester/2004/08/296049.html and Text Nothing ‘All and Nothing: for radical suicide! Towards some Notes and Confusion on ‘You Can’t Rent Your Way Out Of A Social Relationship: A Critique of Rented Social Centres’ ...and to continue the dialogue...’ found at http:// www.56a.org.uk/rent.html 5 Kelvin Knight ‘Revolutionary Aristotelianism’ in I Hampsher-Monk & J Stanyer, (Eds.) Contemporary Political Studies 1996 Vol.2 (Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom) Cambridge, Polity; and Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre Cambridge, Polity 2007 p 224 6 Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory Guildford, Biddles Ltd 1985 p53 7 Ibid p59 8 Alasdair MacIntyre Marxism and Christianity Hammondsworth, Penguin 1971 p66 9 Alasdair MacIntyre 1985 (op cit) p59 10 Ibid p 219 11 Kelvin Knight 2007 (op cit) p 158 12 op cit p 225 22 Philosophy of Management Volume 7 Number 1 2008 An Anarchist’s Wetherspoons or Virtuous Resistance? of sustaining the anterior conception of virtue, an understanding of virtues that nurture political communities where '…men and women seek the good together…’13 are those whose '…existence is on the margins of the central culture.’14 Resuscitating Aristotle’s practical philosophy, MacIntyre therefore suggests that capitalist individualism should be met by a politics of resistance in the form of overcoming cooptation15 and manipulation, the practice of resistance itself therefore becoming a virtuous act. A ‘politics of local community’,16 as characterised by small scale localities that share a practical understanding of goods, rules and virtues17 are those that partake in virtuous resistance. It is this proposition that social centres manifest such local communities that I shall argue. Using the social centre movement as a living and breathing example of MacIntyre’s ‘politics of the local community’, the paper takes a deeper look into their practices, the ‘goods of conflict’ that are produced and the apparent fissure that exists between rented and squatted centres. Introduction to Social Centres Social centres are occupied spaces, their conception based on a non-commercial use of abandoned urban apertures, propelled by premises of community-based activity, creativity, inclusion, and autonomy from the command of the dominant culture. They attract a pastiche of folk, some unemployed, others married with families and full-time jobs, those who live in the centres, and those who visit. They are places in which, according to the ‘Social Centre Network’ (UK): 'people can come together to create, conspire, communicate and offer a collective challenge against capitalism’.18 Hanging as a provocative backdrop to each of the centres is the contested nature of the spaces that have been chosen for occupation. The presence of the groups that form within these spaces can be seen as a rupturous symbolic gesture to the control of private property over the urban geographies of city dwellers and the control that this has over the lives of those who ‘remain within the system’. Offering a sonorous semiotic of radical resistance, the centres are a deliberate presence within the communities in which the buildings and structures of the spaces have been found, attracting attention ranging from hostility to appreciation from those outside the confines of the autonomous zones.