So I decided to step back for the weekend, meaning that I missed the visit of the Spanish activist Amador Fernández-Savater from the May 15 movement to OWS. As I read the wonderful materials provided, I found that in January Fernández-Savater had suggested that there were fewer people attending M-15 events because “people have returned to making their lives.” I want to explore what this phrase might mean.
If the encampments (whether in Spain or New York) were an exception to the crisis, it is nonetheless “difficult to live in an exception,” if you cannot devote your life to it as an activist. At the same time, Fernández-Savater follows the thought through to a consideration of how the crisis “forces us to constantly make and remake everything.” I think we can see a periodization emerge here: out the crisis of the 1970s emerged both neo-liberalism and its everyday ideology, and the counterpointed politics of the everyday. The present crisis has transformed neo-liberalism into an ideology of inequality and calls for politics every day in response.
Fernández-Savater locates the formation of a consensus in Spain to the Moncloa Agreements of 1977, two years after the end of the forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco:
the culture that was imposed on the defeat of the dreams of emancipation and communism in the 1970s. Culture in the strong sense of the word: a configuration of sensitivity that decisively structures the play of politics, universities, the media, the production of work and our very perception of things.
I’ve recently been re-reading an evocation of that defeat in the detective novel by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Murder in the Central Committee, originally published in 1981. By means of an investigation into a classic “closed room” murder mystery, Montalbán was able to create a portrait of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party. As befits the noir genre, there’s a certain romantic nostalgia–together with, it has to be said, some sad sexism and homophobia.
In one passage, however, Carmela, a PCE cadre, complains precisely of the difficulties of reconciling activism and making a life in terms that are familiar to many of us:
“In the end I’ve got to work, function in the Party, do the shopping, keep house and be a mother–which is the least of my worries. And if you complain some old comrades come round and tell you a life-story that makes your hair stand on end….There are more and more who cook in order to forget.”
When the detective Carvalho asks her what she’s trying to forget, Carmela answers: “That there’s been reform but no political break.”
In this period, a new activism of the everyday chose to celebrate such activities as cooking as in themselves a form of resistance. So de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, with his emphasis on cooking as one element of that practice, was formed in the aftermath of May 68, while British cultural studies were part of the response to what Stuart Hall called “the great moving right show.”
The neo-liberal consensus on everyday life is familiar to us all as the boilerplate of every mainstream politician: work, homeowning, health care, college and pension provision. Within that consensus the technocratic discussion has been about the allocation of state and so-called “market” provision. It need hardly be pointed out that all these aspects of the everyday (aka the “American dream”) are rapidly moving out of reach. Further, the current Troika and market consensus is that people don’t deserve these things unless they can afford them.
So we find ourselves in the situation of “precariousness,” an awkward word for an awkward situation. It means finding that even if you have health insurance, your plan no longer covers a drug you use and the cost is $248, as recently happened to me. It means that if you did what the consensus told you to do and “saved” for college tuition, the amount saved has reduced in absolute terms and the costs are anyway so far higher than predicted that it is pointless to try and catch up. It means discovering that as people live longer, there is a new duty of care for elders to which the state is indifferent because these people are no longer economically active. And so on.
Living precariously is a struggle every day, and it is not in the least everyday. Although I did not know this when I started, it is why I do this project every day. It is part of the collective struggle to find a way to combat inequality every day.