Your Order is Built on Sand
An invitation to a one-day informal seminar on class struggle in a collapsing climate
Tuesday September 24th, Pelican House
A new leadership can and must be created by the masses and from the masses. The masses are the crucial factor. They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built.
Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Order Prevails in Berlin’
In 2013, Endnotes famously argued that capitalism was caught in a ‘holding pattern’ after the struggles and crises that followed in the wake of 2007-08. A decade on, we can see the outlines of how that holding pattern comes to an end. Multiple overlapping factors are interacting to generate an increasingly powerful and destabilising feedback loop. We could characterise this loop in many ways: as a polycrisis; a catastrophic convergence; a decomposition; a widening metabolic rift; secular stagnation; a crisis in the wage-relation. What matters is not so much what we name it, as how we understand its material basis and likely direction of development.
But we don’t seek to understand its development as disinterested observers. Instead, we understand that the stakes could not be higher. Whilst it may be capital’s order that is built on sand, it is our lives that are at stake.
In the wake of the Labour party’s majority, this informal seminar will offer researchers and militants based in Britain the chance to discuss:
How climate collapse is being metabolised into the social relations of everyday life
The contemporary technical, social and political composition of the working class in Britain
How the post-Brexit migration regime, the construction of race and the rising far right are interacting with one another
What strategic approaches are being developed in the class struggle as we speak
What emerging trends and tendencies have the potential to become catalysts of mobilisation.
Attendees will be invited to give a short presentation to the group about how their current research or organising overlaps with these questions. These presentations should not be formal papers, but rather indications of the questions we are asking, and any preliminary thoughts on what the answers might be. These presentations will be followed by a collective discussion of how we understand the cycle of struggle from 2008 to present, before opening up to address wider questions.
Your Order is Built on Sand will take place from 9am-5pm on Tuesday 24th September at Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London.
Participation is open to researchers and militants both at and beyond universities, although we recognise that many comrades will find a weekday event difficult to attend. With that in mind, there are two options for asynchronous participation discussed in the logistics section below.
There will be an upper limit on participation determined by available space. If you are interested in attending, please fill in this form. There is a possibility for this seminar to become a more regular event, depending on how useful we find it.
Organisers: Callum Cant and Kai Heron
Logistics
The seminar will be a one day event running from 9am-5pm with a lunch break and socialising after. It will be hosted at Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green.
Attendees will be invited to split the train fares of those attendees from outside London so that the cost of travel is evenly distributed. The same will apply to childcare costs for any participants that need them.
To register, please complete this form.
Asynchronous participation
If you want to contribute but can’t make this first seminar in person during the working day, there are two options. First, send us a written contribution for us to circulate before the day which we can then feed back on, and second, joining us for dinner after the seminar. If you’re interested in either of these options, please drop Callum an email.