°1973
My friend Steve, who blogs less than I would like him to - so I’m going to cutnpaste here - sends me this in the midst of the tumult, and I appreciate it, not least because it converges some preoccupations of mine (the Ford Strike, queer politics, the emergence of activism as a phenomena, the sense of the archive and a city). The notes on fordism/arousal are here [ 1 2 3 ], and one on activism here. So, I share Steve’s remarks along.
It hasn’t come yet, but I’ve ordered a book by Illuminati that is about ‘activists’ and ‘militants’ (along with another one by him on 1968). I remember you being interested in his thoughts on this, not sure if you got to read anything by him. There’s a really old book in the Monash library from the days when he was an ML - nearly fifty years ago he was chucked out of the communist youth organisation for being a trot (speaking of whom, my book has finally appeared in Italian this month, published by the Mandel-line trots). If you like, I’ll give you my impressions when the Iluminati book arrives.
What it means to be a militant has been preoccupying me more and more - even (especially) if it’s a long time since I considered myself one. I’ve been talking with Graham Willett - do you know him at all? maybe from when he was an editor of Reconstruction? - about assembling a digital archive of materials from local sixties and seventies movements, in large part in the hope that it might intrigue people a little younger than ourselves. I’ve particularly interested in leaflets, as a sort of basic tool of political activity - they don’t get nearly the attention they deserve IMO, given how many hours one can slave over them (and then trying to distribute them). I’m not sure if you’ve ever looked at the State Library ephemera collection, but there is a mass of intriguing stuff from 1968 onwards that is just trapped in folders and hardly ever gets looked at. So the idea is some sort of online database that holds a horde of documents - as a pilot, we’re thinking of Gay Pride Week and the Ford Broadmeadows strike, with the excuse that they are both from 1973 - and good metadata that allows someone to navigate around them.
Connected to this is the desire to understand how layers of militants/activists/cadre/whatever you call them are ‘generated’ as a social phenomenon, rather than just a matter of individual biographies - eg how do so *many* of them/us arise from the late sixties onwards? Have you ever come across useful explanations of this? There are the situationist critiques of militancy, and the ‘give up activism’ debate of a while back, but I haven’t seen much trying to explain how and why ‘activists’ are formed as a layer within movements (maybe some old Aufheben articles touched on it).
