Activism Mania (and Depression)

Days, in London, always pass fast. This city embodies the very essence of late capitalism. Its illness. Working over-time, running along underground platforms, eating late at night, pills, kebabs, sleeping drunk on buses, waking up at the last stop or already late for work.
There couldn’t possibly be a better city for activism.

In fact, during the last few weeks, the creative rhythm of the students protest against cuts in education has almost reached the same peaks of adrenaline overload experienced by bankers in Canary Wharf. Activists don’t sleep, they eat only when possible. They occupy universities, libraries, streets, shops, institutions such as Tate Britain. Their protest runs on the social media and the virtual time of communication is mirrored by the apnoea of the kids on the streets. One of the most recent demonstrations has proved this very clearly. For fear of being ‘kettled’ once again, thousands of students spread throughout central London, playing cat and mouse with riot police, running madly throughout all the main traffic arteries of zone 1. A breathless run in the snow, until complete exhaustion of all energies. Something extraordinary, surprising and utterly unsustainable. The rhythms of this protest and those of life do not belong to the same register of time.

British students spend their nights discussing in the rooms of occupied universities, with bloodshot eyes and veins in their neck almost dangerously prominent. It is enough for them to look at each other to suddenly become aware that all this will be over soon. If it is true that a struggle is a state of crisis between two moments of stability, it is also clear that this overdose of adrenaline will never be able to turn into that permanent struggle that they have been discussing so much during countless assemblies over the last weeks. This generation of protesters is running the risk to see all their activism turning just into an exhilarating juvenile page of their personal biographies.

But the students seem to be willing to exceed the declared objectives of their protest. Their ambition is growing into that of creating a new way of understanding communal life, that would be able to go beyond both the siege laid by late capitalism and the progressive emptying of the Welfare State. The students talk about connecting their fight with those of the workers, they chant on the streets ‘students and workers / unite and fight!’, they invite anarchist anthropologists such as David Graeber to discuss the meaning of debt and they end up spending entire nights discussing about the end of capitalism. They set up road blocks in order to slow down the rhythm of production and give back to people the necessary time to think, or at least this is what they say.

Strangely enough, though, they seem to be fighting the monster of late capitalism from its same psychological position: the excruciating dynamic between mania and depression. The joy of these days often translate into the possibility of saying that the infamous apathy of British students has finally crumbled and has liberated its long-dormant energies. Reality seems to be, though, that the pathological cycle of a long phase of depression has just left place to a period of exaltation which, probably, will be followed soon by another depressive dip. A typical medical case study.

In a few days, on what has been renamed ‘Day X’, the House of Commons will vote the proposed cuts to education and thousands of students will march again on the Parliament. According to the narrative of the students, Day X will be the peak of the struggle of the last weeks, the day of the final clash with the lib-con coalition. And yet, if we are to leave for a moment this narrative, and regardless of the results of the vote, the truly crucial moment seems to be another one. The morning after Day X will unfold on the streets and on the universities of this island as the merciless picture of all that is left of weeks and months of activism.

Protests are massive adrenaline rushes, sometimes even able to take history out of its joints and push it forward. On the opposite, the structures of a new type of communal life need much slower processes of constitution. They need a will that is constructive and not at all hysterical, an attitude towards oneself that is loving and not self-destructive, a mass psychology that is neither manic or depressive.

Maybe the students will win this battle, maybe they won’t. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. Although at this stage it wouldn’t make much sense for them to step back or to save energies during the big demonstration on Day X, it is very important that they remember to keep pushing their gaze forward, beyond the often illusory field of democratic battles and of parliamentary elections. The struggle that is now increasingly firing up Britan, France, Greece, Italy and Ireland has a much deeper potential than the inner immobilism of the concept of ‘resistance’ is able to express. The current wave of rage has the potential to turn into the creation of a new way of  imagining the practice of social life, that the reaffirmation of the power and the very essence of politics. The Zapatistas wisely said that to change the world is a very difficult challenge, almost impossible - it is much easier to create a new world.

Perhaps, the struggle of tomorrow won’t be any longer one of protesting and picketing the doors of old universities, old parliaments and old working places. Instead, it might become the joyous struggle of building the walls of new universities, new centres of autonomous self-management and new spaces liberated from capital and work. But, if they really want this to happen, today’s sleepless activists will have to give themselves some decent sleep, their frantic hands will have to drop for a second banners and placards and make themselves some food, their chocking thought will have to take back its breath and remember to ask itself how it feels.

History might be made of corpses, but this Struggle needs living bodies.