On 17 October 2010, the artists at the occupied JTG Gallery hosted a series of talks and discussions centered around the upcoming cuts. We're not exactly early risers, so we didn't make it down for the entire event, which lasted from 2pm until midnight, but we did manage to get some (not great quality) audio from the early evening.

The first set of remarks, by well-known anarchist direct actionist / theoretician David Graeber, was pretty much off the cuff, as the speaker scheduled to talk at 6pm was trying to find his way to the gallery from the more civilized half of the city.  Hackney is a pretty hellish place to get to if you're from south London.  Artists need to be squatting more galleries in Brixton and Stockwell. Regardless, keep in mind that this audio is not Graeber's talk from earlier in the afternoon, entitled Debt: The first five thousand years.

After his arrival, Stefano Harvey talked about capitalism, and specifically the kind of personal and ideological outlook fostered by value production in finance markets. In his view, taking part in banking activity generates an internally consistent system of ethics which divides people into 2 categories: those who can instantly and exactly measure the amount of value they have produced during the day (day traders looking at their screens), and those who can't (everyone else).  The talk was engaging and thought-provoking.

One thought I had during Stefano's talk: it seemed to me that I keep hearing people talking about "fugitive spaces", "escape", and other defensive measures when it comes to cuts, and I have now seen two waves of cuts in my lifetime (in the early '80s and mid '90s in Canada). This seems to be a standard line of thinking when people are talking about ideologically-driven government attacks on all the "nice" parts of the state, the socially beneficial parts which actually bring some benefits to the majority of the population: when the cuts come, get out of the way.  I don't think it's good advice, as there's not exactly much fat left in the system to constitute an escape route.

Looking around the room at a group of highly intelligent and motivated people, I wondered if a better message wouldn't have been, "tell the truth about the cuts".  The internally-consistent system Stefano describes, to me, has no more validity as an attempt to control fate, than a bunch of ancient Greek priests cutting the head off a chicken and attempting to divine the future based on which way the blood spurts.  It seemed to me that simply saying this, in artistic works, as part of a wider political movement, would have been better advice.

Many thanks to JTG gallery and http://no-w-here.org.uk/ for a great evening, although the talk after this one struck me as a whole lot of syllables spilled for very little intellectual purpose.  It is possible that I my subjectivity was not properly extended.  We fled to a Hackney blues bar for some pints.

Before leaving, we had a look around through the main-floor gallery, which was interesting all by itself. JTG is not a traditional art gallery space, it is best described as an artist occupation of a 25,000 sq foot space in the East End awaiting finance for its planning permission for conversion to luxury flats. In the meantime the gallery is an artist run live work space that sites exhibitions while facing a rolling 2 month notice of eviction.