ACFM

Just what is it good for?

This time on ACFM, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn respond to the Ukraine invasion with a conversation about war. Is it an aberration, or an unavoidable product of human power struggles? Are conflicts between nations better understood as a reflection of domestic divisions? And how is war used to divert the working class from progressive politics at home?

The gang think through these questions and more as they relate to global politics and the UK left, with music from Stiff Little Fingers, Rage Against The Machine, Robert Wyatt, Digital Mystikz and more. An ever-expanding playlist of all the music discussed on the show can be found on Spotify.

Books & articles: Deleuze & Guattari – A Thousand Plateaus / Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine / Michel Foucault – Society Must be Defended / Jeremy Gilbert – The Bennites’ revenge: how Jeremy Corbyn and his allies survived political exile / Keir Milburn – The August riots, shock and the prohibition of thought / Why war? A letter from Freud to Einstein

Music: Rage Against The Machine – ‘Killing in the Name Of’ / Mala – ‘Anti-War Dub’ / Bob Dylan – ‘With God on Our Side’ / Jimmy Cliff – ‘Vietnam’ / Stiff Little Fingers – ‘Tin Soldier’ / Elvis Costello – Oliver’s Army / Robert Wyatt – ‘Shipbuilding’

Has democracy broken down? Is it even an idea worth fixing? Trip 22 is a three-horse race as Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn consider the anti-democratic shifts happening across the political spectrum and ask what it really means to be ruled by the people.

The gang discuss whether democracy is necessary to tackle climate breakdown, how democratic relationships can spawn creativity and joy, and what happens when left politics abandons mass movements – as well as selecting some suitably egalitarian music from Crass, Shonen Knife and more.

An ever-expanding playlist of all the music discussed on the show can be found on Spotify.

Music: Crass – ‘Punk is Dead’ (Use Knife Remix) / Cornelius Cardew & the Scratch Orchestra – ‘The Great Learning’ / Shonen Knife – ‘Riding on the Rocket’ / Persimfans Orchestra – Beethoven’s 9th Symphony / Weather Report – ‘Milky Way’

Books & articles: Robert D. Putnam – Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community / Andreas Malm – How to Blow Up a Pipeline / Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright – Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future / Paul Hirst – Associative Democracy / Francesca Polletta – Freedom is an Endless Meeting / Sean Smith – Crass Goes Disco

Produced and edited by Chal Ravens and Matt Huxley. PRS Licence Number: LE-0016481

When he’s not working on #ACFM, show producer Matt Huxley is a musician. His recent EP under the name Muckers is the inspiration for this Microdose – a short audio essay about land, family, trespass and belonging.

Recorded while out walking, Acid Camping considers who owns the landscape, the methods by which people have been driven off the land, and how we can dissolve the boundaries within ourselves. Matt draws on ideas from Nick Hayes, Richard King, Jodi Dean and, of course, #ACFM. All the music has been repurposed and rearranged from the Dingly Dell EP by Muckers, released on Circle Dance Recordings.

Thanks to Amber Husain and Thom Andrewes for editorial advice on the text. Written, produced and mixed by Matt Huxley. Mastered by Rupert Clervaux. Design by Joe Nava.

In the first #ACFM Trip of the year, Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn look at the conflicting desires and demands that make up a political movement. Is unity possible? Is coalition desirable? Do we need to agree in order to win?

The gang discuss the difference between liberal and radical conceptions of identity and gaze out towards the communist horizon with help from Gilles Deleuze and Jodi Dean and musical selections from Desmond Dekker, Roy Ayers and Fela Kuti.

Look out for the accompanying Microdose interview with actor and activist Norah Lopez Holden on the women who fought in the Spanish Civil War and the feminist dynamics of the Popular Front.

Music: Desmond Dekker – ‘Unity’ / Blue Mink – ‘Melting Pot’ / Byron Morris & Unity – ‘Reunion’ / Graham Reynolds – ‘The Difference Engine’ (Demián Gálvez Remix) / Roy Ayers & Fela Kuti – ‘2000 Blacks Got To Be Free’

Books and articles: Katrina Forrester – ‘By Leaps or by Federation: Two Paths to Left Unity’ / Paulo Gerbaudo – The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy / Jodi Dean – The Communist Horizon / Gilles Deleuze – Difference and Repetition

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS Licence Number: LE-0016481

What can we learn from the women of the Popular Front? Ahead of an #ACFM Trip on Unity and Difference, Nadia Idle talks to actor and activist Norah Lopez Holden about the milicianas who fought in the Spanish Civil War. What brought these women together – and what pushed them apart?

Lopez Holden has worked at theatres around the UK, including the Young Vic, Shakespeare’s Globe and The Royal Exchange Manchester, and performed as a voice artist for the BBC Radio Drama Company. She is an organiser of the Good Night Out Reading group of socialist theatre workers and is also involved with advocacy and organising at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London.

Please note: this conversation was recorded in October 2020. We also apologise for the diminished sound quality of this recording. Produced by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens.

Books: No Turning Back – Lidia Falcón (edited) / Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell / Fighting Women – Isabella Lorusso / Doves of War – Paul Preston

Films: Land and Freedom (1995) dir. Ken Loach

What should political organisation in the 21st century look like? Wiggly? Lumpy? Diagonal? Something rather like that, suggests political theorist and author Rodrigo Nunes, who joins Keir Milburn and Jeremy Gilbert on this additional revolutionary Microdose.

Focusing on the last few decades of radical left politics, the trio reflect on on their own experiences in movement building and thrash out alternatives to the old opposition between “vertical” and “horizontal” organising.

Surveying the shifting sands of revolutionary potential, they also discuss how our ideas of organisation can break free of the party to be understood as a diverse ecology of initiatives and forms.

Don’t miss the other recent Microdose, Revolution from Cromwell to Castro, a brief history of several centuries of political upheaval which sets the scene for Trip #20 on Revolution.

Nunes’ book, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal, is available now from Verso.

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS Licence Number: LE-0016481

The #ACFM gang square up a suitably momentous topic for their milestone 20th Trip: revolution!

Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn wonder how the idea of political revolution ever became thinkable, and if it’s still thinkable today. Was the sexual revolution a real revolution? How did disillusionment with Soviet communism affect our political imagination? And who is the revolutionary subject?

The gang of three discuss all that and more with reference to Gramsci, the Black Panthers and the Arab Spring, plus righteous music from Public Enemy, Manu Chao, the MC5 and more.

Don’t miss the accompanying Microdose episode, Revolution from Cromwell to Castro, which sets the scene for this Trip via a brief history of several centuries of political upheaval.

Music: Public Enemy – ‘Revolution Generation’ / 4 Non Blondes – ‘What’s Up’ / MC5 – ‘Kick Out the Jams’ / Billy Bragg – ‘The Internationale’ / Manu Chao – ‘Clandestino’

Books & articles: Rodrigo Nunes – Neither Vertical nor Horizontal / Erik Olin Wright – How To Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty First Century

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS Licence Number: LE-0016481

In anticipation of the next Trip, the ACFM trio deliver a condensed but essential history of revolution from Oliver Cromwell to Fidel Castro, with stop-offs in France, America, Haiti, China, Spain and Russia.

What does it take to cook up a revolution? Is the French Revolution still relevant to our idea of radical social upheaval? Can we have unlimited political reforms without eventually triggering a revolution?

Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn speed through several centuries of unrest in a collective Microdose which sets the scene for the main event: Revolution, the 20th Trip in the series. Look out for the full Trip this Sunday, followed by an extra Microdose with Rodrigo Nunes, author of Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal.

Texts: Reinhart Koselleck – Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time / James C. Davis – ‘Toward a Theory of Revolution’

Music: Excerpt from a Rara procession from Haiti / Los Zafiros – ‘Cuando Yo La Conocí’ / ‘La Marseillaise’ / The national anthem of the USSR / A rendition of Spanish civil war song ‘A las Barricadas’

Produced by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS Licence Number: LE-0016481

In this #ACFM Microdose to accompany the gang’s recent Trip into space, Keir is joined by Fred Scharmen, author of Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space.

Drawing on his background in architecture and spatial design, Scharmen unpacks the human desire to go into space and create new worlds from scratch. How do the rocket-powered endeavours of oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk differ from the visions of a communist space utopia set out by Soviet sci-fi writer Alexander Bogdanov? And do we need to settle on Mars and mine asteroids to achieve a post-scarcity society – or is that an impossible dream?

They also discuss afrofuturist visions of the cosmos, ethnic separatism beyond geographical borders, and why colonising space is the same as colonising the future.

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens.

Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn explore the politics of space. What even is space, and why does it so often seem to be the domain of the political right? How does the built environment have the power to discipline or liberate us? And why do all the billionaires want to get off the planet and into outer space?

With reference to Reclaim The Night, public-common partnerships, Jeff Bezos’ phallic rocket and ’90s free party culture, the gang work it all out with some suitably spacey music to match.

Music: Sun Ra – ‘Space is the Place’ / Babylon Zoo – ‘Spaceman’ / DJ Noisekick – ‘Army of Speedcore’ / Hawkwind – ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’ / Roy Rogers – ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ / Gil Scott-Heron – ‘Whitey on the Moon’

Books & articles: Doreen Massey – For Space / Henri Lefebvre – The Production of Space / Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space / Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt – Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire / Alexander Bogdanov – Red Star / Keir Milburn & Bertie Russell – Public-Common Partnerships: Building New Circuits of Collective Ownership

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS Licence Number: LE-0016481