#54: Autonomy in the UK with Seth Wheeler

You know, but there's a tendency with youth at any moment, you know, myself included, you know, when I was younger, right? where you see everyone older as, you know, they failed, they had the wrong ideas, they weren't radical enough, etc.

You know, and as we all get older, how do you navigate, you know, that sort of generation gap or orientation within movements, to emphasize this gaze, you know, both backwards and forwards, or to not dismiss everyone that came before you as sort of an idiot or a failure or sellout? I'm kind of curious, you know, my own work, you know, touches on some of this as well.

But I wanted to hear you kind of think or talk a bit about this

i mean there's often that thing isn't there when you're a younger militant and you you meet older comrades there's often some aspects of like transference it's like oh here's fucking dad coming to tell me something but um so that i've been basically working for not working at mayday but working alongside mayday rooms um on and off for the last 10 years.

So for listeners, Mayday Rooms is basically an archive and safe haven for social movement, radical social movements and experimental culture.

The vast majority of its holdings relate to the extra-parliamentary left in Britain, but also internationally, with a sort of strong focus on the sort of anti-authoritarian left and the anarchist movement, but also like feminist movement, anti-colonial struggles, et cetera, et cetera.

One of Mayday's key missions is to obviously not just be like some sort of repository of dead ideas, but to try and connect this archival holdings to questions that contemporary militants may have over their organising.

So how can we activate these archival holdings in relationship to, I don't know, like contemporary class struggle? So over the last 10 years, Mayday's staff team have developed, I think, a relatively successful set of models for how to do that, which is often sort of like inviting contemporary militants to come and utilise the archive to think through an organising question and then the staff there will help them go through the material to try and tease out both what has transformed in sort of like class composition, what renders some of these tactics maybe obsolete, but also to try and work out why some tactics just sort of drifted out of vogue when they could still be really relatively useful.

So a lot of that work is often quite patient and it's about like trying to work through what younger militants want and what they need rather than trying to impose a sort of correct analysis or a correct lineage over that.

And that's something that we've also been trying to do with Agit Press is trying to like, obviously that's very clearly associated with ideas around probably creative autonomia.

or at least focused on the ideas of that.

But obviously those books that we, well, not obviously, but those books that we publish are archival books made up of sort of like old material that we attempt to sort of contextualise with sort of organisational questions.

So we did a book with Franco Berardi about his movement sheet, A Traversa, which he published around the sort of like movement of 77.

And the question was really about print media, the role that print media played in not only like disseminating ideas, but also through the actual materiality in the process of building a magazine together, how you create politics through that process.

And asking younger militants what that may mean for them in an era where they're sort of disseminating their ideas online.

Does that somehow change how they do politics? does that render the political imagination somehow different etc etc so it's yeah the praxis is an attempt to try and connect the past to the present but without necessarily imposing the past on the present basically