ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK

OF RADICAL POLITICS

Successive waves of global protest since 1999 have encouraged leading contemporary polit-
ical theorists to argue that politics has fundamentally changed in the last twenty years, with
a new type of politics gaining momentum over elite, representative institutions. The new
politics is frequently described as radical, but what does radicalism mean for the conduct of
politics?
Capturing the innovative practices of contemporary radicals, Routledge Handbook of R ­ adical
Politics brings together leading academics and campaigners to answer these questions and
­explore radicalism’s meaning to their practice. In the thirty-five chapters written for this col-
lection, they collectively develop a picture of radicalism by investigating the intersections of
activism and contemporary political theory. Across their experiences, the authors articulate
radicalism’s critical politics and discuss how diverse movements support and sustain each other.
Together, they provide a wide-ranging account of the tensions, overlaps and promise of radical
politics, while utilising scholarly literatures on grassroots populism to present a novel analysis
of the relationship between radicalism and populism.
Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics serves as a key reference for students and scholars
interested in the politics and ideas of contemporary activist movements.

Ruth Kinna is a professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University where she spe-
cialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist thought and contemporary rad-
ical politics, particularly anarchism and the utopianism of prefigurative politics. Since 2007,
she has been the editor of the journal Anarchist Studies. She is the co-founder of the Anar-
chism Research Group and co-convenes the Anarchist Studies Network. She is the author of
Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition and The Government of No One.

Uri Gordon is formerly the co-convenor of the Anarchist Studies Network and has taught
political theory at universities in Britain and Israel. He has been active in climate ­justice,
­Palestine solidarity and anticapitalist movements in both countries. Uri is the author of
­Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory and the co-editor of the
­monograph series Contemporary Anarchist Studies. His recent publications include a conceptual
genealogy of prefigurative politics and a collaborative article on co-production in social and
political theory. His work has been translated into thirteen languages.
Routledge Handbook
of Radical Politics

Edited by Ruth Kinna & Uri Gordon

 First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Ruth Kinna and Uri Gordon to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kinna, Ruth, editor. | Gordon, Uri, 1976– editor.
Title: Routledge handbook of radical politics / edited by Ruth Kinna &
Uri Gordon.
Other titles: Handbook of radical politics
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056329 (print) | LCCN 2019003869 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781315619880 (Master) | ISBN 9781317215288 (Adobe) |
ISBN 9781317215271 (ePub3) | ISBN 9781317215264 (Mobi) |
ISBN 9781138665422 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315619880 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Radicalism. | Radicalization. | Right and left
(Political science)
Classification: LCC HN49.R33 (ebook) | LCC HN49.R33 R68 2019 (print) |
DDC 303.48/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056329

ISBN: 978-1-138-66542-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-61988-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
 Contents

List of Tables ix
List of Contributors x
Acknowledgements xviii

Introduction1
Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

Radicalism: Situating Contemporary Movement Practices 3

Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

Section 1
Critiques 21

1.1 A Radical Feminist Diaspora: Speaking of Imelda, Reproductive

Justice and Ireland 24
Speaking of IMELDA

1.2 Animal Liberation 42

Will Boisseau

1.3 Basking in the Fire: Militant Antifascism as a Most Radical Gesture 53

M. Testa

1.4 The Radical Politics of AntiMilitarism 67

Chris Rossdale

1.5 From ‘Bed-Push’ to Book Activism: Anti/Critical Psychiatry Activism 82

Bonnie Burstow
v
 Contents

1.6 Radical Climate Politics: From Ogoniland to Ende Gelände 97

Leah Temper

1.7 Eco-defence, Radical Environmentalism and Environmental Justice 107

David Naguib Pellow

1.8 ‘Information for Action’ – Research at Corporate Watch 121

Rebecca Fisher

Section 2
Solidarities 131

2.1 The Radical Politics of Indigenous Resistance and Survival 134

Pamela Palmater

2.2 On Decolonisation 163

Maia Ramnath

2.3 Radical Disability Politics 178

A. J. Withers and Liat Ben-Moshe (eds) with Lydia X. Z. Brown, Loree Erickson,
Rachel da Silva Gorman, Talila A. Lewis, Lateef McLeod and Mia Mingus

2.4 Migrant Solidarity in Postcolonial Europe: Challenging Borders,

Creating Mobile Commons 194
Claire English, Margherita Grazioli and Martina Martignoni

2.5 Penal Abolition Organising: Can New Courses Be Charted by

Troubling Privilege? 211
Claire Delisle

2.6 Safer Spaces 222

Ruth A. Deller

2.7 Fighting to Win: Radical Antipoverty Organising 240

A. J. Withers for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)

Section 3
Repertoires 253

3.1 The Intersections of International Nonviolent Accompaniment and

Radical Local Politics 256
Patrick G. Coy

vi
 Contents

3.2 Making Spaces Our Own: Performance Interventions to Disrupt,

Revive and Reclaim Public Spaces 267
Mel Evans

3.3 Radical Bicycle Politics: Confronting Car Culture and Capitalism as

Root Causes of Mobility Injustice 276
Aurora Trujillo and Matthew Wilson

3.4 Black Blocs: A Complex Case of Radicalism 291

Francis Dupuis-Déri

3.5 Online Activism 303

Jeff Shantz

3.6 Streets and Institutions? The Electoral Extension of Social

Movements and Its Tensions 314
Josep Lobera and Diego Parejo

3.7 Cells, Communiqués and Monikers: The Insurrectionary Networks

of Antistate Attack 326
Michael Loadenthal

3.8 Radical Media 341

Sandra Jeppesen

3.9 Anarchist Publishing: An Interview with Ramsey Kanaan 359

Ramsey Kanaan

Section 4
Transformations 371

4.1 Anti-work: A Stab in the Heart of Capitalism 374

Peter Seyferth

4.2 Radical Education 391

Emily Charkin and Judith Suissa

4.3 The Politics of Dumpstered Soup: Food Not Bombs and the Limits
of Decommodifying Food 405
Sean Parson

4.4 Social Centres as Radical Social Laboratories 417

Luca Lapolla

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 Contents

4.5 Dances with Agitators: What Is ‘Anarchist Music’?433

Jim Donaghey

4.6 Techno-Politics: An Interview with Jim Thomas, ETC Group453

Jim Thomas/ETC Group

4.7 The Revolution under the Table: On the Social Ecology of the

Local Food Movement in the US460
Lisa Trocchia-Baļķīts

4.8 Permaculture and Ecological Lifestyle: A Restricted Radicalism?477

Bürge Abiral

4.9 ‘Religious’ Radicalism492

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Anthony T. Fiscella

4.10 How Political Is a Political Subculture? The Paradoxical Place of

Politics within the Squatter Movement510
Bart van der Steen

4.11 Sustainable Activism524

Laurence Cox

Index 539

viii
 tables

3.6.1 Results in Spanish elections 317

3.6.2 Results in Greek elections 318
3.8.1 Key analytical dimensions of radical media by genre 343

ix
 contributors

Bürge Abiral  is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins

University. She received her bachelor’s degree from Williams College, USA, with Hon-
ours in Anthropology, and her master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Sabancı University,
Turkey. She is currently working on her dissertation project on the ecological agriculture
movement in Turkey, and her interests include human-environment relations, multispecies
ethnography, food studies, value and social movements.

Liat Ben-Moshe  is a scholar-activist based in Chicago. Her books include  Politics of

(En)Closure: Deinstitutionalization, Prison Abolition and Disability and the anthology Disability
Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada (edited with Allison
Carey and Chris Chapman). 

Will Boisseau researches the place of animal advocacy within the British left, particularly
the relationship between the anarchistic/direct action and the legislative wings of the move-
ment. His work explores the class and gender issues influencing this relationship, the mar-
ginalisation of animal rights in mainstream labour politics and a range of concepts including
speciesism, total liberation and intersectionality. He completed his PhD at Loughborough
University in 2015.

Lydia X. Z. Brown is an activist/organiser, writer and educator focused on state violence

against multiply-marginalised disabled people, especially institutionalisation and incarcera-
tion. They have worked to end restraint, seclusion, and adversives; challenge police violence;
close institutions; and disrupt social justice communities.

Bonnie Burstow is a professor at the University of Toronto, an anarchist, a philosopher, a

long-time antipsychiatry activist and a prolific author. She teaches in courses in community
organising in alliance with disenfranchised populations. She is the chair of such activist
organisations as Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault. Her books include Psychiatry and the
Business of Madness, Psychiatry Interrogated, and Psychiatry Disrupted, with her latest book being
a novel called The Other Mrs Smith, where we not only see the horrific experiential effects of
electroshock, but see activists organising against it.

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 Contributors

Emily Charkin is writing a PhD about self-build and radical education at the UCL Institute
of Education. Her previous research and writing has been about children’s experiences of the
Peckham Health Centre (1935–1950), Whiteway Colony (1926–today) and the educational
ideas of Colin Ward (1924–2010), Leila Berg (1917–2012) and the US deschoolers in the
1970s. She also runs a community woodland in East Sussex with her husband and three flexi-
schooled children, where they try out some of these ideas (http://www.wildernesswood.org).

Alexandre Christoyannopoulos is a senior lecturer in Politics and International Studies

at Loughborough University. He is the author of Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary
on the Gospel and Tolstoy’s Political Thought  as well as a number of articles, chapters and other
publications on religious anarchism and on Leo Tolstoy, including the multi-volume collec-
tion of Essays on Anarchism and Religion. A full list of publications is available via http://orcid.
org/0000-0001-5133-3268.

Laurence Cox is a senior lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth where
he co-directs the MA on Community Education, Equality and Social Activism and runs
a PhD-level programme of participatory action research in social movement practice. He
­co-founded the practitioner-oriented social movement studies journal Interface and the
Council for European Studies’ social movements research network. Cox is the co-author of
We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism and
has also published extensively on contemporary Buddhism in the west, including Buddhism
and ­Ireland: From the Celts to the Counter Culture and Beyond.

Patrick G. Coy is a professor of Political Science and the director of the Center for Ap-
plied Conflict Management at Kent State University. He has taught both academic and
practitioners’ courses in mediation, negotiation and conflict resolution, and has served as an
international observer and as a member of Peace Brigades International during the ethnic
conflict in Sri Lanka. Coy is the author of over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters,
and co-author of Contesting Patriotism: Culture, Power and Strategy in the Peace Movement. He
has also edited eleven books including Social Conflicts and Collective Identities and A Revolution
of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker Movement.

Rachel da Silva Gorman is an academic and an artist working in dance theatre and cu-
rating. Her work focuses on political economy and anticolonial aesthetics. She teaches cho-
reographic process in disability and queer arts communities, and is a long-time organiser in
feminist, antiracist and anti-occupation movements.

Claire Delisle is an activist-scholar and critical pedagogue who focuses on power, resistance
and leadership. Her labour, Irish republican and abolitionist activism are central to her research
on social movement organising. Claire teaches criminology and sociology at the University
of Ottawa. She also teaches at Discovery University, where she engages with students who
were at one time homeless. She has been taking part in ICOPA since 2008, and co-organised
ICOPA 15 on Algonquin territory. She is the founder and co-lead of a lifers’ liaison group
that collaborates with life-sentences prisoners at a maximum-security penitentiary in Ontario.

Ruth A. Deller is a reader in Media and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University,

UK and is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA). She has published widely
on a range of topics including: identities and media representations; audience and fan studies

xi
 Contributors

and the relationships between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. She is currently writing a monograph,
provisionally titled Religion on Television: Broadcasting Belief in the 21st Century.

Jim Donaghey is a sometime anarchist agitator with a limited range of dance moves. Jim’s
PhD ‘Punk and Anarchism: UK, Poland, Indonesia’ was completed at Loughborough Uni-
versity in 2016, and he is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Queen’s University Bel-
fast. He is also a member of the collective that runs Just Books radical bookshop at the Belfast
Solidarity Centre. He has been involved with Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and anarchist music for
the last sixteen years, playing hundreds of gigs around Ireland, the UK, Europe and South
East Asia, and helping to produce dozens of records and zines. He is keeping his musical oar
in with an anarcho-riot-folk outfit called Gulder.

Francis Dupuis-Déri is a professor of political science at Université du Québec à M

­ ontréal
(UQAM); has been part of many radical collectives in Québec, France and the United States;
and since 2003, has published many books in French, including The Black Blocs (which was
subsequently translated into English and Brazilian Portuguese) and Anarchy Explained to My
Father (translated into English and Greek). The author wishes to acknowledge the financial
support of the Observatoire sur les profilages (CRSH) and the translator Ellen ­Warkentin,
who helped him with regard to the English language.

Claire English is a feminist mother, agitator and organiser, presently working as an asso-
ciate lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at Queen Mary University of London. Claire’s
research explores the workings of gender and race in transnational migrant solidarity activ-
ism in the UK and Europe, particularly at the French/British border of Calais. She helped to
form Calais Migrant Solidarity in 2010 and is a member of Plan C, a group that looks at the
social reproduction of social movements.

Loree Erickson is a porn star academic and organiser. Her work is focused on transforming
cultures of undesirability through creating, theorising and supporting others in the production
of queercrip porn. She also organises and theorises on collective care and transformative justice.

Mel Evans is an artist and campaigner part of Liberate Tate. Her book Artwash: Big Oil and
the Arts was published in 2015. Her play Oil City was produced by Platform and presented as
part of the Two Degrees Festival in 2013. Her writing has been published in Contemporary
Theatre Review, Performance Research Journal, Internationale Online, The Guardian, The Indepen-
dent, New Internationalist, Dissent!, Red Pepper and others. She regularly speaks about art and
politics at events, which have included Economic Exceptionalism at the Institute of Contem-
porary Arts London, D&AD President’s Lecture, Performing Protest Conference Leuven
University, Artwash Book Tour UK and Ireland, Curating Conflict at the V&A Gallery
London and Question Everything at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Anthony T. Fiscella, born and raised in Virginia and currently living in Sweden, com-
pleted his doctorate in 2015 at Lund University in the history of religion where he also
obtained his master’s degree. His doctoral dissertation ‘Universal Burdens’ focused largely
on what might be considered a decolonisation of the concept of ‘freedom’. With a general in-
terest in social change, dissemination of power and the role of life-organising stories, he has
written about follower-power, Islam and anarchism, the MOVE Organization, taqwacore
and the Daoist-like anarcho-primitivism of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

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 Contributors

Rebecca Fisher  was until recently a researcher at Corporate Watch, an independent re-
search and publishing group, providing critical information on the social and environmental
impacts of corporations and capitalism. Fisher’s work has focused mainly on issues of democ-
racy and consent, including in relation to the 2003 invasion and subsequent ‘reconstruction’
of Iraq, and as the editor of the Corporate Watch publication Managing Democracy, Managing
Dissent. She has also been active in various grassroots movements, especially in alternative
media and against border controls.

Uri Gordon is formerly a co-convenor of the Anarchist Studies Network and has taught
political theory at universities in Britain and Israel. He has been active in climate justice,
­Palestine solidarity and anticapitalist movements in both countries. Uri is the author of Anar-
chy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory and the co-editor of the monograph
series Contemporary Anarchist Studies. His recent publications include a conceptual ­genealogy
of prefigurative politics and a collaborative article on co-production in social and political
theory. His work has been translated into thirteen languages.

Margherita Grazioli is a postdoctoral research fellow in Urban Studies (Social Sciences) at

the Gran Sasso Science Institute (L’Aquila, Italy). Her research interest in urban geography,
housing policies and social movements is rooted in her activism in the Movimento per il
Diritto all’Abitare in Rome. She completed her PhD (‘The right to the city in the post-­
welfare metropolis. Community building, autonomous infrastructures and urban commons
in self-organised housing squats in Rome, Italy’) at the University of Leicester.

Sandra Jeppesen  researches with autonomous media and antiauthoritarian social move-
ments from an intersectional queer, trans*, feminist, antiracist, anticapitalist and decolonising
perspective. She is the co-founder of the Media Action Research Group (MARG,  me-
diaactionresearch.org), and was a member of the former Collectif de Recherche sur l’Autonomie
Collective (CRAC) in Montreal. Currently, she is an associate professor in Interdisciplinary
Studies/Media Studies at Lakehead University Orillia, Canada, where she holds the Lake-
head University Research Chair in Transformative Media and Social Movements.

Ramsey Kanaan founded AK Press as a young teenager out of his bedroom in Scotland.

He’s been wrestling with the eternal question ‘if ideas actually matter, how do we dis-
seminate them’ for almost four decades now. He’s currently the publisher of PM Press in
­Oakland, California.

Ruth Kinna  works at Loughborough University and writes on nineteenth- and early
­t wentieth-century socialist thought and contemporary radical politics, particularly a­ narchism.
Since 2007, she has been the editor of the journal Anarchist Studies. She is c­ o-founder of the
Anarchism Research Group and co-convenes the Anarchist Studies Network. She is the
­author of Kropotkin: Reviewing the Anarchist Tradition and The Government of No One.

Luca Lapolla  was awarded his PhD in History at Birkbeck, University of London, in
January 2018. He researched post-1968 libertarian communities in Britain and Italy re-
flecting on the importance that memory, space and representation have in influencing the
theory and praxis of anarchist movement(s). He is interested in social and cultural history
and takes an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. After a BA in Modern Foreign
Languages and an MA in Modern and Contemporary History, his master’s thesis on the

xiii
 Contributors

1970s anarcho-communist organisation ORA was published in Italy. Luca aims at producing
academic historical research of practical significance for present and future radical activists.

Talila A. Lewis is a social justice engineer, attorney, educator and organiser whose liberation
struggle centres around prison abolition, correcting and preventing wrongful convictions of
deaf and disabled people, and ending all forms of violence against multiply-marginalised
individuals and communities.

Michael Loadenthal is a visiting professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Miami Uni-
versity, and the executive director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association. Michael holds
a PhD in Conflict Analysis and Resolution (George Mason University), and a m ­ aster’s ­degree
in Terrorism Studies from the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence
(University of St Andrews, Scotland). His research has involved ethnographic studies with
abortion providers, Rastafarians, Mexican revolutionaries, ‘eco-terrorists’ and ­Palestinian
guerrillas. His latest book, The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence,
focuses on a discursive and analysis of insurrectionary anarchist networks.

Josep Lobera is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology of the Autonomous University

of Madrid (Spain) and in the joint programme of Tufts University and Skidmore College
(USA). His research focuses on the institutionalisation of protest movements and on attitudes
towards immigration. He is the co-editor of the Spanish Journal of Sociology and scientific ed-
itor of the biannual report on Social Perception of Science and Technology.

Martina Martignoni has completed her PhD at the School of Management, University of

Leicester. Her thesis, Postcolonial Organising: An Oral History of the Eritreans in Milan, explores
the politics of self-organising of the Eritrean community in Milan and investigates the in-
terconnections between postcoloniality, migration, difference and organising. Her research
interests move across migrations, oral history and autonomous political practices in Italy. She
has co-authored with Dimitris Papadopoulos the paper ‘Genealogies of Autonomous Mobil-
ity’ for the Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies.

Lateef McLeod is a disability justice activist who published a poetry book, A Declaration of
a Body of Love, and is working on a novel, The Third Eye Is Crying. He is a doctoral student at
California Institute for Integral Studies in their Anthropology and Social Change Program.

Mia Mingus is a writer, public speaker, educator and community organiser for disability
justice and transformative justice responses to child sexual abuse. Her writings can be found
on her blog, Leaving Evidence.

Pamela Palmater is a citizen of the sovereign Mi’kmaw Nation on the unceded territory
of Mi’kmak’i (Atlantic Canada) and a member of Eel River Bar First Nation. She is a lawyer,
author, social justice activist and former spokesperson and educator for the Idle No More
movement. She currently serves as an associate professor and chair in Indigenous Gover-
nance at Ryerson University.

Diego Parejo is an anthropologist and researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid

(Spain). His research focuses on the new European populist movements and on immigration
in highly diverse urban contexts.

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 Contributors

Sean Parson  is an assistant professor of Politics and International Affairs at Northern

­A rizona University. He is the editor of the book Superheroes and Critical Animal Studies: The
Heroic Beasts of Total Liberation and the forthcoming book Cooking Up Revolution: Food Not
Bombs, Anarchist Homeless Activism, and the Politics of Space. When not writing, teaching or
grading, he mostly spends his time hiking the mountains and forests of Northern Arizona
with his four-legged best friend Diego.

David Naguib Pellow is the Dehlsen chair of Environmental Studies and the director of
the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His
teaching and research focus on environmental and ecological justice in the US and glob-
ally. His books include What Is Critical Environmental Justice?; Total Liberation: The Power and
Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement; Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational
Movements for Environmental Justice and Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in
Chicago. He works with numerous organisations focused on improving the living and work-
ing environments for people of colour and other marginalised communities.

Maia Ramnath is a writer, historian, artist and activist based in New York City. The author of
two books and numerous articles, she has previously taught world history, modern South Asian
history and Asian studies at New York University and Pennsylvania State University. Both in
writing and in action, she focuses upon the intersection of anarchism and anticolonialism. She is
currently a board member of the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Chris Rossdale  is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of

Bristol. His research focuses on social movements, resistance and international political
theory. He has published in International Political Sociology, Millennium Journal of International
Studies  and  Globalizations,  and his book Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of
Subversion was published in 2019 with Edinburgh University Press.

Peter Seyferth. Dr. phil., political philosopher from Munich, tried to get elected to the
German Bundestag as a candidate of the Anarchist Pogo Party (APPD) in 1998 while fin-
ishing his MA in Political Science. The party’s slogan, ‘work is shit’, did not attract enough
voters, so he did a PhD on Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopias. Since then, he has taught political
theory and philosophy at universities and adult education centres. His last publication is an
edited volume on anarchist understandings of the state (Den Staat zerschlagen!).

Jeff Shantz  is a long-time activist in varied radical projects from the Ontario Coalition
Against Poverty to the Red Sparks Union. He currently teaches community advocacy, crit-
ical theory and corporate crime at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Metro Vancouver,
and Unceded Coast Salish Territories (British Columbia). He is a founding member of the
Critical Criminology Working Group radicalcriminology.org and The Social Justice Cen-
tre, Surrey. Jeff has written several books including Insurrectionary Infrastructures, Crisis States:
Governance, Resistance, and Precarious Capitalism, and Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online
Anarchy, with Jordon Tomblin.

Speaking of IMELDA is an intergenerational, London-based collective, which includes

former members of Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group (IWASG), who supported
women travelling to England for abortions between 1980 and 2000. The name Imelda was
originally used as a code name for abortion by IWASG, who also often wore a red skirt so

xv
 Contributors

as to be identified by women travelling. In reclaiming the name IMELDA and wearing red
in their actions, they pay homage to previous reproductive rights activists. They deploy in-
terventionist style performance to upend the pretence that Ireland is ‘abortion free’ by high-
lighting that people travel daily to Britain to access abortion. Their actions have been aimed
at breaking down the barriers that prevent women from speaking freely about abortion.
They operate against the shaming and silencing of those who have abortions, challenging
the stereotypes of the quiet and pure Irish woman. Sometimes audacious and often unin-
vited, their actions unapologetically declare the right to bodily integrity and reproductive
autonomy. They campaign to Repeal the 8th Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland,
which in 1983 legislated that the unborn foetus has equal rights to life as the mother. They
also campaign to enable access to free, safe, legal and local abortion services in Northern
Ireland where, unlike the rest of the UK, abortion remains illegal under the 1861 Offences
Against the Persons Act. They have been featured extensively in high-profile newspapers
and other publications and have presented in universities, conferences, events, exhibitions
and on radio.

Judith Suissa is professor of Philosophy of Education at UCL Institute of Education, L­ ondon.

Her research interests are in political and moral philosophy, with a focus on the c­ ontrol
of education, social justice, libertarian and anarchist theory, the role of the state and the
parent-child relationship. Her publications include Anarchism and Education: A P ­ hilosophical
Perspective (Routledge, 2006) and (with Stefan Ramaekers) The Claims of Parenting: Reasons,
Responsibility and Society.

Leah Temper  is a transdisciplinary researcher, activist and filmmaker with a degree in

communications science and a doctorate in Ecological Economics from the Autonomous
University of Barcelona. She is a deputy scientific coordinator of EJOLT, a global research
project that brings activists and scientists together to catalogue and analyse ecological dis-
tribution conflicts and confront environmental injustice, and the editor of The Global Atlas
of Environmental Justice (ejatlas.org). Temper has published in numerous journals and is the
co-editor of the book Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (Routledge). Her media work
includes short films such Life After Growth and Delhi Waste Wars, as well as blogs and news-
paper articles.

M. Testa, undercover antifascist blogger, has analysed the changing fortunes of the ­British
far right since 2009. He is the author of Militant Anti-Fascism: 100 Years of Resistance and
has written for the anarchist magazine Freedom and  for Anarchist Studies. His blog is at:
­m alatesta32.wordpress.com.

Jim Thomas  is the co-executive director at the Action Group on Erosion, Technology
and Concentration (ETC), which works to address the socioeconomic and ecological issues
surrounding new technologies that could have an impact on the world’s most vulnerable and
marginalised people. His background is in communications, writing on emerging technolo-
gies and international campaigning. For the seven years previously, he was a researcher and
campaigner on genetic engineering and food issues for Greenpeace International. Thomas
has extensive experience on issues around synthetic biology, geoengineering, transgenic
crops, data-driven technologies and nanotechnologies. He has written articles, chapters and
technical reports in the media and online as well as participated extensively in UN-level
technology governance processes.

xvi
 Contributors

Lisa Trocchia-Baļķīts,  PhD, serves as Scholar-in-Residence at Green Mountain Col-

lege in Vermont, USA, where she teaches and is engaged with curriculum design in two
­g raduate-level programmes: Sustainable Food Systems (MSFS) and Resilient and Sustainable
Communities (RSC). Dr. Trocchia-Baļķīts researches and writes about horizontal, decen-
tralised social structures, the diverse economies of bioregional food systems, the performance
of cultural food-ways, and self-organised, community-based food system social networks as
sites of radical social change.

Aurora Trujillo has a passion for the role that cycling can take as a motor to change the
world. As part of her PhD, she researched the political and cultural barriers to cycling be-
coming mainstream in the UK. She was also part of setting up and running Freewheelers
Bicycle Co-op in Lancaster, was a member of Bicycology and worked at the London Cycling
Campaign. She is currently taking a break from research and activism.

Bart van der Steen is a lecturer in Modern History at Leiden University, the Netherlands.
His research focuses on interwar labour movements and New Social Movements from 1968
to the present. His published works include Party, State, Revolution: Critical Reflections on
Žižek’s Political Philosophy (with M. de Kesel), A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives
on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s (edited with K. Andresen), Een Banier waar
geen Smet op Rust: De Geschiedenis van de Trotskistische Beweging in Nederland (with R. Blom)
and The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe, 1980–2014 (edited with
L. van Hoogenhuijze and A. Katzeff ).

Matthew Wilson  makes beer with Bartleby’s Worker Co-op and is currently based at
Nottingham Business School, researching other worker co-ops. His published work includes
Rules Without Rulers, published by Zero Press.

A. J. Withers is a queer, trans and disabled antipoverty activist and organiser who’s worked
with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty since 2000. He is the author of A Violent History
of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppressions in the Moral Economies of Social Working (co-authored
with Chris Chapman), The Healing Power of Domination: Interlocking Oppression and the Origins
of Social Work (with Chris Chapman), Disability Politics and Theory and creator of stillmyrevo-
lution.org. He is a PhD student in social work at York University and receives support from
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

xvii
 Acknowledgements

Enormous thanks to Natalja Mortensen for proposing this project and Maria Landschoot and
Charlie Baker for guiding us through the production process. Thanks, too, to Bernadette
Buckley and Giorgos Katsambekis for very helpful and encouraging comments on various
drafts of the introductory text. We’d also like to acknowledge the feedback we received
from one anonymous reviewer whose trenchant critique, while not encouraging, helped us
sharpen the arguments set out in the introduction. Above all, we would like to thank our
contributors, for their dedication, insights, engagement and forbearance.

xviii
 Introduction
Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

Aims and Scope

This collection is dedicated to the dynamic radical social movements that have mushroomed
since the late 1980s, and the social and political critiques and alternatives they have inspired.
The radicalism of these movements is broadly defined by the advancement of a politics that
challenges existing institutional arrangements, by an ethics supporting the disruption of the
status quo, and by the interaction of theory and practice. We do not explore frames of action
or cultures of protest, nor do we examine the socio-economic, cultural and political contexts
in which activism takes place, or the spaces allowed for the expression of transgressive ideas.
These are all well documented in a substantial and growing body of work (Flesher Fominaya,
2014; della Porta, 2015) and across the movement-facing research of academic journals like
Interface, Antipode, Social Movement Studies and The Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Instead,
the collection concentrates on the ways that radical politics is theorised through practice, and
on the perspectives of the actual groups who participate in radical politics.
The majority of our contributors are academic activists, who combine considerable ex-
perience of movement practices with scholarship and research. Our primary concern was to
invite specialists who are also participants in, or intimately connected with, the movements
and projects they discuss. While we have attempted to contextualise the radicalism of our
contributors’ essays, the ideological content of radical politics is deliberately left open. Thus,
rather than focus on conceptual or methodological debates, for which there is already a sub-
stantial literature, we invited our contributors to define their radicalism and to do so with
reference to movement activism. Contributors to this volume sometimes identify or locate
their positions or frameworks (for example, ecological, anarchist, feminist) but not typically
in order to focus on the elaboration of the conceptual markers that define them. For ex-
ample, in the case of feminism, contributors explore the campaigns that they are engaged
with: pro-abortion politics and safer spaces are two areas. As a result, the volume captures
the plurality and diversity of political activism, while weaving together ideas that are often
linked narrowly to particular currents of thought in conceptual and methodological studies.
In this way, the collection will hopefully give readers a sense of radical movements’ scope
while also outlining a set of responses, critiques, proposals and reflections on topics central
to radical politics today.

1
 Introduction

Many of our contributors are based in Western Europe or North America, but not ex-
clusively so. We have tried to make sure that different voices are well represented in the
collection and we have not systematically mapped voice to issue (women are not restricted
to areas of feminist politics). Nevertheless, while the scope of the collection is international,
the perspectives tend to be rooted in the North America and Europe. We hope that this lim-
itation has been offset by the inspiration that authors draw from the global movements they
discuss. The diversity of radical politics, the transnational character of protest cultures, the
internal complexity of global movements and the rapid shifts within radical politics all rule
against the presentation of a definitive or exhaustive collection. Our ambition is to present
a snapshot rather than a portrait of contemporary radical politics. The result is that we pass
over the analysis of some important inspirational movements such as Occupy or Black Lives
Matter and cover some less well-known political activities (for example, antipoverty cam-
paigning, antipysch politics, biketivism) alongside more familiar campaigns, for example,
climate politics and antimilitarism.
We have prioritised areas of politics that we believe have a significant presence or in-
fluence in activist movements. As well as thinking about the longevity of particular issues,
we are interested in highlighting the ways that movement practices have contributed to the
theorisation of radical politics – in highlighting how normative political theory inspires ac-
tivism and continues to feed back into it. Decolonisation and border politics are examples.
In order to capture the levels at which contemporary radical politics operates, we look both
at the politics of transnational networks and the activism of micropolitical organisations.
Similarly, we examine radicalism as it is practised in transgressive, antipolitical activism and
by groups seeking to achieve legislative changes through direct action: bed-pushing, art and
antipoverty activism.
In order to capture the dynamism and innovative practices of contemporary radical pol-
itics, the collection is structured around four themes: Critiques, Solidarities, Repertoires and
Transformations. Our aim is to introduce readers to some of the major issues motivating radical
activism and to show how these issues support a range of projects and networked practices,
before discussing the diverse and creative activities that activism involves and the aspirations
that it embraces. The sections are roughly equal. Because we asked our authors to address
common questions, there are some overlaps between the sections. Given the intersectional
focus of the collection, we welcome this and believe that the interplay perfectly captures the
dynamic, interlocking character of contemporary radical politics.

2
 RADICALISM
Situating Contemporary Movement Practices
Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

Situating Contemporary Movement Practices

Our aim in this chapter is to discuss some of the specific forces pulling on the concept of
radicalism. The view that radicalism is a chameleon concept is well established in the his-
tory of ideas. As Glenn Burgess puts it, there are ‘as many radicalisms as there are radicals’
(Burgess, 2006–7). Our central premise is that while the meaning of radicalism has always
been context-dependent and ideologically fluid, anarchism has stepped out of the shadows to
become the beating heart of contemporary left radical networks. The story we relate below
tells how anarchistic politics has moved from the margins to the centre of radical politics.
Our argument is that radicalism has the conceptual breadth to include anarchist currents and
that these have been sidelined because of the way that radicalism has taken its content from
particular historical movements. The recognition that anarchism is a key ingredient in rad-
icalism, associating radical politics with anticapitalist direct action movements, is a seismic
political shift.
An important body of recent scholarship has explored the construction of substantive
radical traditions (Burgess and Festenstein 2007; Calhoun 2012). We instead survey the
evolution of the concept, asking how radicalism was theorised at the cusp of the transition
from the age of ideology to the age of party politics and how anarchist ideas intersected with
it. The age of ideology usually describes the period following the American and French
­Revolutions when a political left-right spectrum began to take shape. The age of party
politics is used here to describe the reduction of the spectrum to three dominant ideologies,
liberalism, conservatism and socialism at the cost of other historically significant currents
of ideas including republicanism, Bonapartism, anticolonialism, feminism and anarchism
(Aiken, 1956; Schwartzmantel, 1998). Examining this transition enables us to recover an
anarchistic strand within the framework of radicalism and identify its hallmarks.
We then examine the post-war history of social movement activism to explore the asso-
ciative principles that left radicalism articulates. These have been shaped by a set of events
that have stimulated the rediscovery of a left-libertarian radical tradition. In sketching this
brief history, we note that democratisation is now a central theme in left radical politics and
that the practice of direct, deliberative, participatory democracy has been identified as one
of its outstanding features. The 2011 Occupy movement has helped cement this association

3
 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

(Graeber, 2013; Szolucha, 2017). We want to make two points in respect of this analysis.
First, that the concerns of the contemporary left radicalisms we examine are not wholly en-
compassed in a populist democratic framing. And second, that the theorisation of populism
as a left radical politics helps highlight the ideological divisions within it and the fracturing
of democracy along anti-elitist lines.
To do this, we first identify three associative principles of left radicalism. These are in-
tersectionality, horizontalism and direct action. We then turn to recent scholarship on left
populism. This adds another layer of complexity to the discussion of radicalism; yet, the
tendency of protest movement analysts to discuss anarchism as the major component of radial
left populism (Grattan, 2016; Gerbaudo, 2017) makes the populist-radical nexus difficult to
ignore. The populist lens narrows the scope of radical politics because it elevates concepts
of sovereignty and democracy to the forefront. In populism studies, the primary issues un-
der discussion are how ‘the people’ is or should be theorised and what values of democracy
populist movements promote (Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis, 2014: 1–15). It also leaves the
ideological distinctions between left and right populism unclear.
To explore the conceptual framing of left-leaning radicalism within populism, we exam-
ine three thick descriptions advanced by Margaret Canovan, Ernesto Laclau and F ­ ederico
Finchelstein. We abstract an anticonstitutional framing from Canovan, a concept of leader-
ship pertinent to the construction of ‘the people’ from Laclau and an organisational model
from Federico Finchelstein. By looking at the ways that populism can be radicalised, through
the anarchistic model we develop, we attempt to make the nature of this distinction clear.
Illustrating ideological distance between the populist left and right, we also seek to show
where normative thrust of the currents of ideas that animate contemporary radical activist
networks lies without enforcing rigid and distorting political designations upon them.

Radicalism
Kai Artzheimer notes:

Like many other concepts in political science, the notion of radicalism harks back to the
political conflicts of the late 18th and 19th century. Even then, its content was dependent
on the political context and far from well defined. Consequentially, being ‘radical’ has
meant different things to different people in different times and countries. Moreover,
radicalism is closely related, if not identical to a number of (equally vague) concepts
such as extremism, fundamentalism, and populism. As of today, there is no universally
accepted definition of radicalism, and, by implication, radical attitudes.
(Sage, 2011)

As some of our contributors mention, standard dictionaries define radicalism as pertaining

‘to the root or origin; original; fundamental; as a radical truth or error; a radical evil; a radical
difference of opinions or systems’ (Webster’s 1828). Radicalism is equally about starting
points, novelty and extremes. In both common parlance and politics, the responses that rad-
icalism provokes often reflect subjective judgements about the promise or threat that radical
prescriptions imply. As a political discourse, it is often associated with change, upheaval
and upset. Considering eating as a ‘kind of proselytising’, the Victorian novelist and satirist
­Samuel Butler warned against radicalism, advising that all ‘thoughts are more easily assimi-
lated that have been already digested by other minds’. Just as indigestion could be explained
by the ‘naughtiness of the stiff-necked things that we have eaten’, he suggested that it ‘may

4
 Radicalism

also arise from an attempt on the part of the stomach to be too damned clever, and to depart
from precedent inconsiderately’. Butler concluded, ‘the healthy stomach is nothing if not
conservative. Few radicals have good digestions’ (Butler, 2014 [1912]: 112–13).
In political theory, radicalism is linked strongly to the progressive programmes of pre-­
socialist democrats and the reform agendas of the early nineteenth-century utilitarians
(Halévy, 1928; Thomas, 1979; Scriven, 2017). Yet, the turmoil and upset modelled by the
great eighteenth-century revolutions account for the early and still common association of
radicalism with left politics. Radicalism had acquired this reputation by the early nineteenth
century, if not before, as self-described radical movements variously calling for democratic
reforms, civil liberties and the extension or protection of republican values sprang up across
­Europe and in America. By the 1840s, radicalism was linked with programmes of social as
well as political change and as its exponents fled Europe, radicalism took root in this form in
the new worlds as well as the old (Gollan, 1967: 15). In 1881, the antisocialist liberal academic
Maurice Block1 observed that ‘radicalism and radicals are applied to democratic doctrines
more or less advanced, and to their adherents’ (1884). Five years later, the journalist Henri
Rochefort defined ‘Radicalism’ as that ‘body of political doctrines which the Republican party
has constantly professed, and … [the] social reforms which it has unceasingly demanded’
(1886: 11). Like Block, Rochefort linked radicalism to a set of principles forcefully elaborated
in 1789 and believed that it had a stable ideological content. Even if radicals subsequently ad-
opted different labels and called themselves socialists, for instance, for as long as they faithfully
advanced the ideals expressed in the Revolution, they were radicals. Still listing ‘radicalisme’
as a neologism, the 1873 Dictionnaire De La Langue Française similarly connected radicalism to
the progressive programmes advanced by those who called themselves radicals. Radicalism
described the ‘system of the radicals, advocates of the complete reform of political society’.
Yet, the relationship of radicalism and post-revolutionary progressive or left politics was
always contingent. The emergence of European socialist and social democratic parties after
1848 caused self-styled radicals to reassess their convictions and as new currents of ideas en-
tered into the political fray, radicalism fractured. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are often credited
with stimulating a rightward drift in radical politics and with the radicalisation of conser-
vatism. From the late nineteenth century, the term radicalism became as firmly attached to
antidemocratic aristocratic political values as it had previously been to ­liberal-egalitarian
philosophical movements and progressive democratic traditions (Detwiler, 1990; Dahl,
1999: 51–59). Boulangism and Randolf Churchill’s Tory radicalism were two of its earlier
European manifestations; Rochefort was one of those who moved across the spectrum while
still remaining radical. In the 1870s, he had participated in the Paris Commune. Twenty
years later, he backed General Boulanger.
In the twentieth century, demands for root and branch change increasingly emanated
from both the left and the right. The 1932 Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française defined radi-
calism blandly as the ‘system or party of radicals’. Kurt Zube’s2 German-language interwar
almanac Radikaler Geist spoke to a progressive politics shaped by the embrace of new ideas
and subversive thinking in politics and the arts. Zube was radical in the sense that he en-
couraged social innovation and change. His aim was to open up ‘new perspectives’ and help
readers give ‘them completely different content’. Before the Nazis shut it down, his maga-
zine promoted the work of (amongst others) Brecht, Freud, Silvio Gesell, Herman Hesse,
Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Marx and Engels, Romain Rolland, Margaret Sanger, Max Stirner
and Stefan Zweig. As a radical, Zube endorsed critique, reflection, pluralism and socialistic
change (Zube, 1930). However, by this time, the far right was fully mobilised against the
liberal-social democratic centre and the revolutionary socialist left in large parts of Europe,

5
 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

and it was better-positioned to initiate fundamental radical transformations. Historians and

political scientists argue about the closeness of the relationship between nazism, fascism and
the religious right, but however the boundary-lines are drawn, all varieties of reactionary
politics are commonly labelled ‘radical’ (Copsey, 2016).
Early political scientists struggled to differentiate one type of radicalism from another.
Block introduced two measures for comparison. The first placed radicals as opponents of
absolutism at the extreme left of a political spectrum that centred on a tolerant, liberal core.
The second was based on political style or convention. On this scale, a radical was someone
‘absolute, in all opinions’ including those ‘in the monarchical as well as in the republican
party’. Pursuing a line of thought that appeared perfectly designed to muddle the politics of
radicalism, Block further noted that radicalism was ‘characterized less by its principles than
by the manner of their application’. Radicalism had the ‘character of the boy’. It was ‘enthu-
siastic, imaginative, to a certain extent generous, lives in an ideal world, pursuing a single
idea, and pursuing it frantically, without regard to the evils caused by the efforts to realize
it’ (1884). Block believed that the juvenile politics radicals practised were tempered by the
reforming programmes they promoted. But in the absence of any more precise measures,
this perceived overlap with liberalism could never be more than a happy coincidence. Block’s
contention that radicalism was as much about dogma and the manner in which change was
promoted as it was about policy innovation made it difficult to determine radicalism’s limits
and decide where the convergence with liberalism began and ended.
Radicalism remains a chameleon concept and the fuzziness of the correlation of style and
substance still resonates in modern scholarship. Familiarly contrasted with reformism, radi-
calism is used normatively to assess change agendas by exposing gaps between the perception
and the actuality of political programmes. Dolowitz et al. (1996: 455–70) use radicalism as
one of three ‘R’s’ to dissect Margaret Thatcher’s brand of conservatism and question the
novelty of the changes she introduced. Downey (2007: 108–90) similarly deploys radical-
ism to assess radical democracy, finding that recent articulations can appear ‘piecemeal and
­pragmatic’ and ‘naive and timid rather than radical’ (2005: 109).
The idea that radicalism describes politics on the margins also still resonates in contempo-
rary scholarship. There are two common trends here. First, radicalism is used as a synonym
for extremism. Specifically, radicalism is used to describe the combative politics of (usually
right-wing) political parties that compete for power to destabilise liberal-­democratic regimes
(Capoccia, 2005: 233). In a secularised, securitised world, radicalism is also tied to religiously
inspired terrorism. For example, the Islamic Supreme Council of America defines Islamic
radicalism as a form of ‘fundamentalism’ built ‘on the concept of political enforcement of
religious beliefs’ (n.d.). Second, it describes the activism of right-leaning antiglobalisation
and left-leaning alterglobalisation activists that are either partially or fully detached from the
institutional mainstream: marginal in another sense. As Cristina Flesher Fominaya notes,
radicalism is a moniker for complex political groupings that express fears about national
identity and diminished national sovereignty as well as those that rally around anti­corporate,
anti-austerity and pro-democracy campaigns (2014: 3–4).
The link between radicalism and antisystem grassroots activism, while not conceptu-
ally essential, opens up new perspectives on the familiar histories. Often bypassed in ac-
counts that focus on the radicalisation of emergent political systems, the antisystem currents
that Flesher Fominaya finds in today’s political landscape were nevertheless deeply rooted
in nineteenth-century radical movements influenced by anarchists. Craig Calhoun notes
that the first self-designated anarchist, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, found a following with
nineteenth-century American radicals, ‘artisans, outworkers and others’ who conjoined

6
 Radicalism

‘economic grievances’ with ‘appeals for social inclusion, and approaches to solidarity rooted
in craft and community’ (2012: 7).
In the early age of party politics, pro-anarchist ideas were frequently voiced by socialists
critical of those who identified as radicals, and so appeared to be antiradical and rightly
placed beyond its traditions. Yet, the distinctive marker of the pro-anarchist critique was
the focus on the elite institutionalisation of revolutionary values and their parliamentary
disappointment. These activists were critical of the political systems that radicals inhab-
ited, not the values that they claimed to advance. In this respect, they deserve to be placed
within the frame.
Unlike other radicals, those influenced by anarchism championed extra-parliamentary
action and were wary of campaigns that turned on demands for more political rights or
greater representation. Their view was that a narrow focus on institutional politics distracted
radicals from the real issues that confronted them. Joseph Lane3 explained: ‘the Radical
stands helpless, shouting loudly about the cost of Monarchy and the pension list’ and fails to
see ‘that this is a drop in the ocean compared to the robbery of the landlord and the capitalist
class’ (Lane, 1887). Similarly, admitting that radicalism was a byword for ‘the best and most
advanced opinion’ William Morris4 argued that radicals were deluded in thinking that they
could realise their demands for education, ‘a steady and tolerable livelihood undisturbed by
disgraceful wars abroad, or ruinous commercial crisis at home’ by ‘persisting in pushing’ for
change ‘at the polling booth’. Radicalism would only be worth something when the Radical
Party became the ‘Party of the People’. Yet, this was hardly a realistic prospect because it
entailed a complete reversal of practice: Morris urged radicals to work outside parliamentary
institutions and give up dreams of universal suffrage. He told their constituents to ‘take part
in affairs yourselves and don’t look on while your leaders pretend to work for you’. Leaders
and their rivals were either tyrants or hypocrites who would only manage exploitation rather
than fight for its abolition (Morris, 1994 [1884]: 47–49).
For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this anarchist-inflected critique of
parliamentary radicalism confined its exponents to the political wilderness. Today, the tables
have turned. The anarchistic commitment to organise outside the institutional framework
and coordinate activity through grassroots social movements and associations is an estab-
lished current within radical politics. In what follows, we plot some of the shifts that have
propelled anarchism from the sidelines to the centre ground of radical politics and identify
its conceptual markers.

Radicalism and Anarchism

It would be disingenuous to say that left radicals have habitually traced their roots back to
late Victorian radicalism, but not inaccurate to say that the traditions that left radicals have
constructed in the last fifty years chime with the forms of left-libertarianism that Morris
and others articulated. In the 1960s, Radical America, the iconic mouthpiece of the Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS), found one of the antecedents of their movement in the
early twentieth-century syndicalist union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
Not everyone agreed about the IWW’s record, but even those who judged it most harshly
acknowledged that it had left a potent anticapitalist, revolutionary legacy that fed into sixties
radicalism. The IWW was celebrated as ‘a brave and imaginative labor organisation that
once seemed as though it might pose a threat to the stability of American capitalism’. The
reason why New Leftists joined it in the 1960s was ‘primarily because it seems to offer a her-
itage of militant, dramatic warfare against the rules of America’ (Buhle, 1967: 6).

7
 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

Voices in the Occupy movement located themselves in longer histories. Tom Paine,
the great radical who ‘galvanized the attention, hopes and enthusiasm’ of eighteenth- and
­n ineteenth-century democrats (Calhoun, 2012: 6), re-emerged as a champion of ‘real de-
mocracy’ in literature on Wall Street (Graeber, 2013). Perhaps more immersed in the tra-
ditions E.P. Thompson discussed in The Making of the English Working Class, occupiers in
London variously found the lineages of their movement in the Magna Carta, the Levellers
and the Putney debates. Yet, Morris, too, interpreted the Magna Carta as a declaration
against tyranny and argued that it had contributed to the struggle against domination and
arbitrary authority (Morris, 1887).
Constructing histories is fraught with problems. In the case of Occupy, the identification
of ‘the people’ with the revolutionary campaign for American independence had the effect
of sidelining Indigenous groups in the struggle against re-colonisation. Yet, leading figures
within left radical movements have argued that their construction is an essential part of
transformative struggle. C.L.R. James, in a talk delivered in Detroit in 1967 and reprinted
in Radical America said: ‘when I was a boy I lived in Trinidad. My parents were Trinidadian.
We knew nothing about Africa except what we learned from the British. And what they
taught us was what they themselves believed about Africa – or perhaps what they wanted us
to believe’ ( James, 1968: 24). For James, the discovery and recovery of history was a tool for
empowerment. Following James, we argue that movement history tells us something about
the continuities of the currents contained within radicalism and the political aspirations of
left-leaning radicals.
The current convention is to treat the emergence of the New Left in the 1960s as the
noteworthy reference point for contemporary radicalism (Maecklebergh, 2012). However,
as Dan Berger remarks of the North American movement, this rendering of radicalism’s
modern history creates a misleadingly dichotomous picture of the 1960s as an era of creative
ferment and the 1970s as one of political quiescence, even desolation (Berger, 2010: 4). Cast-
ing aside this decade-based periodisation, Berger recommends taking a long view, stretch-
ing the ‘sixties’ into a period extending from the 1950s to the 1970s. This not only makes
better sense of the innovative transnational anticapitalist, antinuclear, antiwar and antiracist
initiatives that flourished after the evaporation of mass student and worker protests, but also
foregrounds shifts in liberal democratic politics that mobilised left radicals into action.
For Berger, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is the watershed moment for contem-
porary radicalism. Perceived as the culmination of a struggle that had raged throughout the
long sixties, his presidency marked the full retrenchment of post-war progressive politics.
As Berger argues, the attempt to ‘wipe out radical protest’ by the adoption of liberal do-
mestic politics during the 1970s gave way to the adoption of a fully reactionary programme
of ­economic neo-liberalism, nationalism and ‘aggrandized militarism’ (Berger, ibid.: 2–3).
A commentary in Radical America reinforces this analysis. The journal described the long-
feared 1980 election result as a confirmation of the ‘impact of the New Right [and] the
strength of a reaction that has been growing for some time’. The election meant that the
‘antigay, antifeminist, and racist campaigns of recent history have now been legitimized
under the banner of states’ rights, military supremacy, free enterprise, and religious funda-
mentalism’ (Radical America, 1980: 2).
On this reading, the ascendancy of the New Right did not represent a disappointment
of libertarian aspirations. Rather, it reaffirmed a familiar critique of power while simul-
taneously drawing attention to the significance of the global policy shift Reaganism rep-
resented. In 1966, the American anarchist and pacifist Paul Goodman had rejected the
idea that politics is ‘prudent steering in difficult terrain’. His view was that politics was a

8
 Radicalism

craft shaped by Machiavellianism: ‘how to get power and keep power, even though the
sphere of effective power is extremely limited and it makes little difference who is in power’
­(Goodman, 1966: 61). Reagan’s victory reinforced the anti-elitist thrust of this critique but
cast Goodman’s casual dismissal of the liberal democratic consensus in a new light. Radical
America (1981: 4) declared itself numbed and ‘chilled’ by the ‘scope of the electoral gains of
the conservatives and the frightening prospects – national and international, personal and
­collective – that their program portends’. The contributors had found the lesson of the sixties
in constant activist vigilance: ‘when social movements have been able to bring about pro-
gressive ­legislation, leaving the protection of the newly-won “rights” up to the government
can render the movement passive and make the reforms vulnerable to the shifting winds of
electoral politics’ (1980: 3).
The mobilisation against the conservative reaction led to the widely, if belatedly, ac-
knowledged anarchistic turn in radical movement organising and ethics (Epstein, 2001;
­Blumenfeld, Bottici and Critchley, 2013). It also involved significant shifts in the cultures
of left radicalism. Central to these was the increasing importance of radical democratic
­practices, recently seen in global movement activism through affinity groups, networks,
consensus decision-making and horizontal leadership cultures (Cornell, 2010). Murray
Bookchin captured the mood. Radicalising meant developing ‘libertarian institutions’ and
‘democratizing the republic and radicalizing the democracy’. It meant stopping ‘the central-
ization of economic and political power’ by means of building a ‘free municipal confedera-
tion of towns and cities and villages structured in a libertarian form’ (Bookchin, 1985: 29). If
the Zapatista insurrection of 1994 was not the seminal event for this reimagining of radical
politics, the global protests it inspired were certainly an incubator for democratic practices
through the social justice campaigns in the early 2000s.
Resisting the attempt of the Mexican government to remove land rights from Indigenous
peoples (demanded as condition of Mexico’s entry to the North American Free Trade Agree-
ment (NAFTA)), the Zapatistas declared war on the Mexican government ‘and the neoliberal
economic politics implemented since 1982’ (Gómez, 2016: 205). The demands they made
against the government brought forth assemblages that self-consciously refused uniformity,
championed autonomy and created global horizontal, leaderless networks based on affinity.
As Gómez notes, the Zapatista demands for ‘democracy, liberty, respect, land, dignity, and
autonomy’ that ‘resonated throughout Mexico and the world’ were not demands made of
elites or even against them. In mobilising against the ‘neoliberal Mexican state’ the ­Zapatisatas
importantly redefined ‘their relationship to the state’, the ‘balance between politics, culture
and rights and most notably, the meanings of citizenship and indigenous identity’ (Gómez,
2016: 205). Drawing attention to the imperial and colonial drives of Western politics, liberal
and socialist alike, the Zapatistas openly rejected the vanguard models of politics embedded
in Western liberalism and orthodox socialism. As Staughton Lynd explains, the Zapatista’s
spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, refused to step into the shoes of the enlightened elite
and also rejected the other dominant vanguardist model, proletarian dictatorship. Refusing
to ‘occupy the place from which all opinions will come, all the answers, all the routes, all the
truth’, Marcos denied the possibility of speaking and acting for ‘the people’ at all (quoted in
Lynd and Grubacic, 2008: 8). His blunt message was ‘I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards
of this planet’. This was the message he gave to the ‘Zapatistas’ critics’

We know that the Zapatistas don’t have a place in the (dis) agreement of the revolution-
ary and vanguard organizations of the world, or in the rearguard. This doesn’t make
us feel bad. To the contrary, it satisfies us. We don’t grieve when we recognize that our

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 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

ideas and proposals don’t have an eternal horizon, and that there are ideas and proposals
better suited than ours. So we have renounced the role of vanguards and to obligate
anyone to accept our thinking over another argument wouldn’t be the force of reason.
(Marcos, 2003)

‘By the 1970s’, Eladio Gómez argues of Chicana/o movements, ‘the language of civil rights
no longer sufficiently represented the political desires and demands of political movements’.
These movements were ‘now composed of constituencies that had new goals and targets and
employed a range of different tactics’ (Gómez, 2016: 4). Radicalism not only rediscovered its
antiparliamentary roots but also asserted an antiprogrammatic politics.
What are its significant features? We think that there are three: one is intersectionality, a
second is horizontalism and a third is direct action.
Associated with the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality has been understood in
terms of the ways that formal power – notably law – operates to reinforce social oppressions
(Crenshaw, 1989). In contrast, movement critique often involves contesting structural, but often
informal and/or normalised, hierarchical relationships which marginalised groups experience
as domination. The altered dynamic was apparent in the general statement of the Combahee
River Collective. This talked about the commitment to struggle against ‘racial, sexual, hetero-
sexual and class oppression’ and defined the Collective’s ‘particular task’ as the development
‘of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are
interlocking’ (Combahee River Collective, 1977). At the moment of Reagan’s victory, Radical
America argued in a similar vein that the success of the radical left was that it had ‘fumbled toward
an understanding of the ways that class, race, and sex interact in American society, and the ways
that the quality of individual lives reflects the contradictions of society as a whole’ (1981, 3).
For left radicals, these relationships reflect historical power advantages that are entrenched
in existing institutions. To give an example: in the late 1990s, activists involved in a wider US
‘reclaim the media’ campaign produced The Declaration of Media Independence in order ‘to build
meaningful participation from communities of color and indigenous communities to claim
the undeniable right to communicate – to liberate our airwaves, networks and cultural spaces’
(McGee et al., 1997: n.p.). The document emphasises the systematic exclusion of non-white
and non-male voices from public communications, and the undemocratic character of existing
constitutional provisions. The authors explain: ‘We are interested in more than paternalistic
conceptualizations of “access,” more than paper rights, more than taking up space in a crowded
boxcar along the corporate information highway’. Because media justice takes ‘history, culture,
privilege, and power’ into account, the authors also seek ‘new relationships to media and a new
vision and reality for its ownership, control, access, and structure’. They continue:

At the heart of our work is a rigorous power analysis, with race, class and gender at
the center … We need a unique space so that our communities can move forward the
visions and strategies for this work that are grounded in their own reality, which we
believe will lead our society towards a truly free and democratic media.
(ibid.)

The ambition, then, is not just to reconstitute formal decision-making bodies, but to recon-
struct social relations within grassroots institutions.
The second feature is horizontalism. This, as Laura Grattan argues, is a term adopted from
workers’ movement in Latin American, horizontalidad, to describe ‘experiments in constitut-
ing popular power’ (Grattan, 2016: 163). Democracy is a central component of horizontalism,

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 Radicalism

but as Maria Sitrin explains, it is distinguished by the quality of the relationships that flat
organising fosters and entails.

Horizontalidad is a new way of relating, based in affective politics and against all the
implications of ‘isms’. It is a dynamic social relationship. It is not an ideology or political
program that must be met so as to create a new society or new idea. It is a break with
these sorts of vertical ways of organizing and relating, and a break that is an opening.
(Sitrin, 2012: 32)

Because of its antiprogrammatic bent, horizontalism is also associated with movement diver-
sity. This was the idea that David Solnit (2004) advanced in the late 1990s: radicalism ‘is a
movement of movements, a network of networks, not merely intent on changing the world,
but – as the Zapatistas describe – making a new one in which many worlds will fit’.

Its common-sense principles and rebellious spirit have always been with us, but this new
radicalism is a dramatic departure from previous efforts to effect change. It transcends
simplistic generalizations about form or method: It has no international headquarters,
no political party, no traditional leaders or politicians running for office, and no uniform
ideology or ten-point platform. Rather, it takes many forms and expresses itself differ-
ently in different places and communities across the globe.
(Solnit: xii)

The final component is direct action. Like intersectionality and horizontalism, this can
be interpreted in different ways. The rejection of representative politics ties it to late
­n ineteenth-century anarchistic radicalism. The Do-It-Ourselves ethics that direct action is
also associated with is another feature common to historical and contemporary left radical-
ism. The innovation of modern radicalism, now one of its key components, is the idea that
activists create the social relationships they want to promote directly by their activism. David
Graeber describes it like this:

When protestors in Seattle chanted ‘this is what democracy looks like’, they meant to be
taken literally. In the best traditions of direct action, they not only confronted a certain
form of power, exposing its mechanisms and attempting literally to stop it in its tracks:
they did it in a way which demonstrated why the kind of social relations on which it is
based were unnecessary. This is why the condescending remarks about the movement
being dominated by a bunch of dumb kids with no coherent ideology completely missed
the mark. The diversity was a function of the decentralized form of organization, and
this organization was the movement’s ideology.
(Graeber, 2004: 84)

Solnit explained that this ‘common theme’ of the new radicalism is ‘the practice of letting
the means determine the ends’. He continued:

Unless the community or world we want is built into and reflected by the struggle to
achieve it, movements will always be disappointed by their efforts. Groups political parties,
or movements that are hierarchically structured themselves cannot change the antidemo-
cratic and hierarchical structures of governments, corporations, and corporate capitalism.
(Solnit, 2004: xiv)

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 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

To conclude this section, our argument has been that there are strong continuities between
the pro-anarchist forms of radicalism that emerged as antiradical movements in the late
nineteenth century and the currents of ideas that emerged in the 1960s as self-consciously
radical movements and which feed existing grassroots radicalism. Articulated as a response
to Reaganism and animated by insurrections against the imposition of neo-liberal policies
in degraded liberal democratic regimes, twenty-first-century left radicalism is a democratic
movement. In this, it diverges from nineteenth-century pro-anarchist anti­parliamentary,
antiradical radicalism. Yet, it operates through associative principles that challenge the
­f undamental elitism of representative liberal democratic systems, as those pro-anarchist
movements also did.

Radicalism and Populism

If present-day radicalism is frequently linked to a type of activism that is positively shaped by
mistrust of elite politics and politicians, recent literature on populism demonstrates that such
mistrust continues to have purchase on the right as well as the left. Populism describes an
anti-elite politics that manoeuvres for power within existing institutional frameworks as well
as for its dispersal without them. Populism, Grattan remarks, defies ‘firm theoretical grasp’
(2016:9). Tapping into a similar vein, Margaret Canovan notes that populism diverges from
other ‘ism’s’ in lacking a ‘common history, ideology, programme or social base’ (2004: 243).
Like ‘radicalism’, it has often taken its meaning from its alignment with a shifting left-right
political axis. Conflating radicalism with populism has often muddled political terminology.
Yet, the observed closeness of the relationship between the two offers a useful framework for
assessing contemporary left radicalism and facilitates consideration of what is at stake in the
pro-democracy politics that left leaning radicals promote. In this section, we explore some
recent approaches to populism in order to tease out the conceptual markers that will allow
us to further these tasks.
One driver for recent analyses of populism is the desire to detach the concept from its
specific manifestations. As Katsambekis explains, ideological conceptions derive core char-
acteristics of the phenomenon from particular instances of it. Since the 1980s, populism
has consequently been associated first and foremost with right-wing authoritarian move-
ments that issue highly personalised appeals to advance illiberal or antiliberal social agendas.
­Canovan (2004: 242) acknowledged that her view of populism could be extended to include
Tony Blair’s New Labour and the regime of Hugo Chavez but she also took as her starting
point Ross Perot, the 1992 US presidential candidate, Pim Fortuyn’s List, Pauline Hanson’s
One Nation Party in Australia, Preston Manning’s Reform Party in Canada, Jean Marie Le
Pen’s Front National, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party and Umberto Bossi’s Northern League.
For Katsambekis, this approach wrongly attributes ‘a predominantly moralist and ho-
mogenizing character’ to populism (2016: 391). In order to provide a ‘high level abstract’
definition, he theorises populism discursively, employing Ernesto Laclau’s work to identify
two ‘operational criteria’ (Katsambekis, 2016: 391). Populism is ‘articulated around the
nodal point of “the people”’ and it is rooted in a perception or ‘representation of society’ as
‘predominantly antagonistic’ and divided into ‘two main blocs: the establishment’ or elite
and ‘the people’ (Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014: 123). Kioupkiolis and Katsambekis
similarly observe that a central concern of populist research is to discover the degree to
which ‘the people’ emerges as a hegemonic or unified force and a second, related to it,
turns on the character of the antagonisms that democratic politics is expected to negotiate
(2014: 1–15).

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 Radicalism

This approach facilitates the close analysis of populist groups and parties and detaches
populism from the exclusive association with antidemocratic mobilisations. It also facili-
tates the inclusion of movements within the populist family that do not rely on charismatic
leaders or adopt top-down organisational structures. It frees populism from the contingent
shifts in the left-right spectrum, and so alleviates the problems that arise from the default
classifications of the phenomenon. Observing that ‘populism’ is often applied as a term of
abuse by critics standing outside the movements they brand, Margaret Canovan was moved
to designate the illiberal and antiliberal far right parties that had mushroomed in recent
decades as ‘New Populist’, precisely in order to distinguish them from other pro-socialist or
liberal progressive manifestations (ibid.: 243; 247). However, the discursive approach does
not overcome entirely the tendency to moralise populism. For example, Roman Gerodi-
mos’s discourse analysis of Greek anarchist movement publications concludes that ‘far left
populism’ is a ‘vengeful, violent response’ to representative systems that appropriate ‘agency
from the individual citizen’ by appealing to a ‘proto-totalitarian utopia’ (Gerodimos, 2015:
622). Moreover, it risks leaving open the identification of the ideological trends within pop-
ulism and their distinctive theoretical commitments.
Rather than present an abstract conception of populism, social movement historians have
opened up its history to identify ideological trends within it. The driver here has been to
challenge dominant associations with reactionary politics and models of charismatic lead-
ership. Nineteenth-century Russian populism is a familiar touchstone for theorists casting
about for an attractive alternative (Gerbaudo, 2017: 72–74),5 though apart from the clue in
the name, the links between this diverse set of revolutionary movements and contempo-
rary activist groups are far from obvious. Populism’s backstory has also been related more
broadly as a history of radicalism. Dating the association back to the European wars of re-
ligion, ‘the anti-Roman Catholic or Protestant agitations of the late middle ages and early
modern period’, Terrell Carver suggests that there is a long-standing relationship ‘between
radical politics and populist anti-elitism’ (2009: 53). English Chartism is identified as an-
other important early expression of radical populism (Canovan, 243). Calhoun describes
­n ineteenth-century American radicalism as a ‘populist politics’ (ibid.: vii). Examining the
history of the ­A merican People’s Party which emerged in the late 1870s as the progenitor
of modern US populism, Grattan uses the idea of ‘aspirational populism’ to ground populist
politics in radical democracy (2016: 4). This form of populism is ‘openly premised on its
ability to reach ordinary people’ and mobilises around a notion of democracy that ‘is not
defined by the existing institutions and procedures of liberal, capitalist governance’ (ibid.:
11). Gerbaudo coins the term ‘anarcho-populism’ to draw radicalism and populism together.
This blending of radicalism with populism can be slotted comfortably into the discursive
framework that Stavrakakis and Katsambekis propose, and it shines a light on the distinctive
organisational features of modern left populist movements. Yet, the radical politics we dis-
cuss in this collection emerges as a form of anti-elitis politics that promotes special modes of
participation and pursues particular logics of action to standard models of populism. When
it is collapsed into populism, this difference is lost and the problem of conceptualising radi-
calism is only referred back to other ideologically contested ground.
To remedy this problem, we explore the models of populism that Margaret Canovan,
Ernesto Laclau and Federico Finchelstein have developed. Not all these models fit within the
high-level definition that Katsambekis recommends. Indeed, Finchelstein defines populism
as a reactionary authoritarian politics. Yet in different ways, each reveals something about the
ideological gap between left and right populisms and helps reveal how populism intersects
with the radical traditions we want to explore.

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 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

Like Katsambekis, Canovan argues that populism’s signature tune is the invocation of ‘the
people’ to expose the illegitimacy of established elite power and the demand for its return
to its rightful custodians (Canovan, 2004: 247). The demand springs from a commitment to
the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea that lies at heart of democracy. Yet in populism, the
demand picks at a tension between citizens and their representatives. Canovan argues that
this tension is almost unavoidable because the mechanisms intended to integrate citizens into
democracy are so complex and removed from everyday life that they appear designed to rob
the people of its power. Populism thus expresses a disappointment in the existing political
order and populists perpetually return to it in order to expose the variance between the
promise of empowerment and the experience of representative democracy, and to assert the
people’s legitimate power against the sectional interests which appear to usurp it.
Canovan uses this general conception to argue that populism is at once antivanguardist
and redemptive. Antivanguardism encapsulates a rejection of progressive liberal agendas, but
it is systemically rather than ideologically specified: vanguardism is ‘built into liberalism,
socialism and feminism and is present even in modern conservatism’ (ibid.: 246). Populist
­a ntivanguardism thus represents a rejection of the view that ‘in the long run everyone is go-
ing to be liberated and made better off’ because the experts who occupy positions of power
are capable of ‘showing the way to the rest’ (ibid.). Populism redefines the progressive agenda
by challenging the vanguard, preaching renewal through the replacement of the dishonest,
inauthentic and self-serving professionals. This is populism’s redemptive quality.
The second model, Ernesto Laclau’s analysis of populism, centres on the construction of
‘the people’ as a social agent (Laclau, 2007: 118). While Canovan identifies three political
meanings extending from the Latin, populus (the people as sovereign, as nations and as the
commoners distinct from the ruling elite (2004: 247–8)), Laclau focuses on the antagonistic
relationship between a populus and a plebs. A populus is the ‘body of all citizens’ and a plebs is
the ‘underprivileged’. Their relationship is not fixed either juridically or ideologically. For
in populism, ‘the people’ has no given unity. Rather, Laclau argues, it is an identity in for-
mation, which comes into being when ‘a plebs claims to be the only legitimate populus’, and
‘wants to function as the totality of the community’ (ibid.: 81).
The identity that populism brings about proceeds from the demands that the plebs ad-
vances. This can be understood both as a request and a claim; the dynamics of populist
politics is explained by the transformation of one into the other (ibid.: 73). The process is
driven by the failure or inability of institutions to meet a plurality of individual demands.
The frustration bred by this failure hastens the symbolic unity of the people by triggering
its identification of the existing order as the institutionalised ‘other’. Laclau rejected the
criticism that this account of populism reifies the people. Responding to Slavoj Žižek’s ac-
cusation that it does, Laclau explained: where ‘there is a more permanent tension between
demands and what the institutional order can absorb … requests tend to become claims, and
there is a critique of institutions rather than just a passive acceptance of their legitimacy’. At
the same time,

when relations of equivalence between a plurality of demands go beyond a certain point,

we have broad mobilizations against the institutional order as a whole. We have here the
emergence of the people as a more universal historical actor, whose aims will necessarily
crystallize around empty signifiers as objects of political identification.
(Laclau, 2006: 656)

‘The people’ does not exist. It is constructed through its negativity in common opposition.

14
 Radicalism

Leadership plays a central role in the process, but not in a conventional manner. Stating
that populism ‘concerns the centrality of the leader’ (Laclau, 2007: 99), Laclau dismissed the
familiar idea that leadership amounted to an elaborate form of stage-management or crowd
manipulation. Structural analysis shows that when institutions collapse, the glue that once
held society together also dissolves. New assemblages come into being but only through
their naming. In other words, Laclau’s contention was that the unity of ‘the people’ does not
result from the internal development of the heterogeneous movements that coalesce around
unfulfilled demands. Rather, it comes from its symbolic identification. In Laclau’s words,
‘the popular symbol or identity actually constitutes what it expresses through the process of its
expression’ (Laclau, 2007: 99).
Unlike Canovan and Laclau, Federico Finchelstein presents an explicitly ideological con-
ception of populism. He examines the dominant modes of participation promoted in post-
war populist governments. Historicising populism, Finchelstein distinguishes a pre-populist
phase (running from Boulangism to the ascendancy of Karl Lueger, the early twentieth-­
century Viennese champion of political anti-Semitism) from its proto-populist expression in
post-war Latin America. On this view, populism describes ‘a form of authoritarian democ-
racy for the post-war world; one that could adapt the totalitarian version of politics to the
post-war hegemony of democratic representation’ (Finchelstein, 2014: 467). The experience
of fascism is central to populism’s appearance and so too is the perceived threat of com-
munism. But it differs from both. For Finchelstein, Peronism is populism’s exemplar. The
more-or-less marketised, egalitarian, participatory and nationalist regimes and movements
that have emerged since the 1980s, not only in Latin America but also across Europe, are
variations on this theme, often ‘crude imitations of the original’ capable of mimicking pop-
ulism’s ‘rhetoric and rituals’ but unable to produce the ‘autarkic industrialisation’ that once
mobilised ‘multiclass urban coalitions’ (Schamis, 2006: 21; 34).
These three thick descriptions illuminate a facet of populism that can suit both left
and right political agendas, but also help tease out the distinctiveness of the radicalism we
explore.
To begin with Canovan, Benjamin Arditi has already drawn out the illiberal politics that
extend from populist antivanguardism. As it plays fast and loose with established norms,
using the idea of the people as its nodal point, Arditi argues that populism rounds on ‘the
political and economic establishments and elite values of the type held by opinion-formers
in the academy and the media’ (Arditi, 2004: 136). As it does so, it ‘slips all too easily into
authoritarian practices’ by demonising the existing elite while keeping the concept of elitism
intact. It brings ‘a quasi-Hobbesian theory of political obligation’ into play (ibid.: 142). The
insight Arditi draws from Canovan’s analysis is that elitist and anti-elitist populists easily
turn a ‘classic exchange of obedience for protection’ into a ‘passionate allegiance to a polit-
ical grouping in exchange for jobs and security’. The people’s champions become ‘infallible
sovereigns’ whose decisions are ‘unquestionable because they are theirs’ (ibid.: 143).
As we have already seen, radical politics contains another option, an anarchistic option
that distinguishes elite rule from egalitarian and democratic norms. The left-libertarian
radicalisation of Canovan’s antivanguardist thesis turns on the generalisation of the critique
of the ruling class or elite. Instead of fixating on the disappointment with the progressive
agendas that Canovan associates with vanguardism, left radicals challenge its technocratic
premises. In this version of anti-elitism, there can be no replacement of corrupt elites with
peoples’ new, authentic champions, since the anarchistic option entails the eradication of
the power distributions that elitism assumes. From this perspective, elitism does not repre-
sent the factional degeneration of democracy or the corruption of the constitution, but an

15
 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

unacceptable alternative to democracy. A.J. Bauer’s (2012) reflections on the incommen-

surability of Tea Party populism with the populism of the Occupy movement capture the
difference:

The fundamental debate between the Tea Party and Occupy … has little to do with
the economy, per se, and even less to do with the horse race of contemporary electoral
politics. Rather, it is a debate in which two movements, each responding to a perceived
crisis in state legitimacy, seek to advance contrary alternative models of authority – one
rooted in the historical founding of the nation (i.e. the Constitution) and the other in
the contemporary and quotidian performance of political action in concert.

Laclau’s account of populism and the construction of ‘the people’ illuminate a second
conceptual fracture. Arditi’s work on Laclau’s concept of leadership fleshes out one pole.
Recalling Laclau’s arguments that ‘the symbolic unification of the group around an indi-
viduality … is inherent to the formation of a “people”’, Arditi explores the relationship
between the populus and the plebs to theorise the concept of leadership. In accordance with
Laclau, he acknowledges that the naming of the people does not refer ‘to actual persons but
to the name of the leader as a structural function’ (Arditi, 2010: 490). Nevertheless, naming
points in the former direction for the name is necessarily a singularity, and singularity, as
Laclau put it, leads to ‘identification of the unity of the group with the name of the leader’
(Laclau, 2007: 100). Likewise, populism does not ‘lead automatically’ to ‘actual ruling’,
but naming positions the plebs as the populus-to-be. The theorisation Arditi develops paints
populism as a contest for the right to rule in the name of the people, hinting at a process
of replacement rather than transformation. Indeed, Arditi compares the constitution of the
‘signifying totality’ to the formation of Hobbes’ sovereign. Arditi notes that for Laclau, as
for Hobbes, ‘without a leader there can be no “people” and therefore no politics either’
(Arditi, 2010: 490).
Miguel Vatter’s analysis of plebeian politics captures an alternative to this conception of
leadership, one which resonates with anarchistic radicalism. This reconfigures the relation-
ship of the plebs to the populus. While Laclau described the power relationship between the
populus, the ‘body of all citizens’ and a plebs, the ‘underprivileged’ as a rivalry for right to
function as the ‘totality of the community’, Vatter recovers a classical conception that recasts
this relationship philosophically as a disagreement about power and the rights it entails. In
a review of modern and classical republican democratic theory, Vatter admits the rivalry
between the plebs and the populus but argues that the plebs ‘distinguish themselves from the
populus because they struggle for a form of power … called “no-rule”’. This ‘is exercised
in the absence of the distinction between those who govern and those who are governed’
(ibid.: 244) and it points to a distinctive form of anti-elitism. Plebeian politics ‘understands
the constitution, and its division of powers, as that which makes possible a political life that
lies “beyond” the rule of the state and which places the achievement of equal law above the
achievement of unitary order’. Rejecting the ‘consensus of the law’, it advances the right to
‘an equal power to make law’ but not ‘an equal right to rule’ (Vatter, 2012: 256). The sover-
eignty that Arditi detects in Laclau’s notion of leadership is absent in this conceptualisation.
The third fracture emerges from Finchelstein historical modelling of populism. This
usefully outlines an ideal type that has seven features:

(i) an extremely sacralizing understanding of the political; (ii) a political theology that
considers the people as being formed by those who follow a unique vertical leadership;

16
 Radicalism

(iii) an idea of political antagonists as enemies who are potentially (or in fact) traitors to
the nation; (iv) a understanding of the leader as a charismatic embodiment of the voice
and desires of the nation as a whole; (v) a strong executive and the discursive, and often
practical, dismissal of the legislative and judicial branches of government; (vi) a radical
nationalism and an emphasis on popular culture, as opposed to other forms of culture
that do not represent “national thought,” (vii) and, finally, an attachment to a vertical
form of electoral democracy that nonetheless rejects in practice dictatorial forms of
government.
(ibid.: 468)

Finchelstein suggests that these features define populism. Scholars of populism like
­K atsambekis may disagree, yet the organisational model is instructive for our purposes. It
is also possible to treat it as the institutional foil against which grassroots social movements
have mobilised in the last fifty years. Insofar as the alternatives they advance can also be de-
scribed as populist, as Katsambekis, Grattan and others argue, Finchelstein’s ideal represents
only one possible type. Either way, the associative principles practised by current radicals
turn this model on its head.
Neither Grattan nor Gerbaudo lists the essential characteristics of an alternative model
of populism; yet, both outline some of its key features. Grattan uses Occupy to think about
aspirational democratic populism and identifies its hallmarks in the aversion to making de-
mands, a commitment to horizontalism, a refusal to ‘define the boundaries of peoplehood’ and
the adoption of consensus decision-making. Ploughing a similar furrow, Gerbaudo describes
anarcho-populism as ‘libertarian, participatory, or leaderless populism’ that ‘articulates the
neo-anarchist method of horizontality and the populist demand for sovereignty, the mass am-
bition of populist movements, with the high premium placed on individual participation
and creativity’ (Gerbaudo, 2017: 7). Our construction of contemporary radicalism suggests
a different theorisation, pointing to the rejection of sovereignty and the promotion of inter-
sectionality consistent with horizontalism.
To sum up, populism can be understood as a discursive strategy that turns on the idea
of ‘the people’ and which is rooted in a perceived antagonism between it and the elite. Yet,
it can be inflected in different ways to advance conflicting normative principles. There are
ideational trends within populism that resonate with the concerns and expressions of radical
movements, but attention to the distinctly anarchistic strain in left radicalism helps us iden-
tify three lines of fracture. One turns on normative values, a second on the constitution of
power and the third on the structure of governance. As will become clear from reading the
chapters in this collection, these associative principles can be understood and applied in di-
verse ways. They do not exhaust the theoretical ground of contemporary left radicalism. Our
argument is that they underpin the politics of contemporary radicalism and the democratic,
egalitarian aspirations that analysts of populism have explored.

Notes
1 Maurice Block was an economist and member of the l’Académie des sciences morales et poli-
tiques. His publications include the Dictionnaire de L’Administration Française (2nd edn. Paris:
­Berger-Levrault, 1877); Les Progès de la Science Économique Depuis Adam Smith (Paris: Gullaumin,
1890); and ‘The Progress of Economic Ideas in France’, Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science ( July 1893), pp. 1–33.
2 Kurt Zube (1905–91) also wrote under the name of Soleman. He was the author of An Anarchist
Manifesto (1977) online at www.panarchy.org/solneman/solneman.html.

17
 Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna

3 Joseph Lane (1851–1920) was involved in a number of radical clubs and projects before turning
to socialism and anarchism in the 1880s. See Nicholas Walter’s biography at https://libcom.org/
history/lane-joseph-1851–1920.
4 William Morris (1834–96) founded the Socialist League in 1884 to advance revolutionary
­socialism. Influenced by anarchism, he identified as communist. See the biography at https://
williammorrissociety.org/about-william-morris/.
5 Franco Venturi’s The Roots of Revolution (1983 [1960]) is the seminal history of the ­nineteenth-­century
Russian movements which shaped revolutionary politics in the period between the 1825 D ­ ecembrist
Revolt and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

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20
 Section 1

Critiques

We begin the collection with a section on critique in order to identify some of the
­antagonisms and oppositions that animate radical politics. Anti-oppression politics is often
used as the umbrella term to describe this critique (Désil, Kaur, Kinsman: n.d.), and this
section explores some of its facets. How is oppression understood by activists, and how do
their critiques of domination and inequality complement and challenge one another? These
are the central concerns linking chapters in this first section.
As it turned its interest in the 1990s to the sweeping changes associated with globalisa-
tion, political sociology tended to rest content with the truism that class politics and mass
parties had given way to a disjointed ‘politics of identity’. According to this logic, the class
antagonisms rooted in material demands and/or revolutionary socialism had given way to a
landscape populated by groups seeking redress for ‘post-material’ grievances and demanding
equal institutional treatment and sociocultural recognition within capitalist democracy.
The eruption of a globally networked movement against neo-liberalism around the turn
of the millennium revealed that other more significant processes had been taking place.
On the one hand, movements of rural and urban workers in the global south, who mobil-
ised against multinational corporations and neo-liberal policies, were often integrating their
original forms of feminist, ecological and epistemological critiques; hence, while material
and revolutionary demands were far from abandoned, they were no longer couched in tradi-
tional Marxian formulations. On the other hand, movements associated with ‘post material’
politics – from environmentalism to LGBT+ rights and beyond – had in fact been among
the first to articulate how systemic features of capitalism, as well as discrete concentrations of
corporate power, had shaped the conditions against which their protests, direct actions and
campaigning were directed.
Global activist networks have consequently displayed an increased awareness of the in-
terdependence of their struggles and the intersection among different axes of oppression
(Shannon and Rogue, 2009; Jeppesen, Kruzynksi, Sarrasin and Breton, 2014). The chapters
in this section clearly demonstrate the traction which these perspectives have gained, even as
radicals continuing to focus on particular causes or grievances in their practical work.
In the opening chapter, a collectively written contribution, the London-based Irish dias-
poric group Speaking of IMELDA reflects on its direct-action campaigns for r­ eproductive
rights in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Providing an overview of the
 Critiques

group’s history and explaining some of the actions the collective have undertaken, Speak-
ing of IMELDA uses the idea of ‘cutting loose’ to expound a form of radical feminism
that challenges gendered cultural constructions of the home state and experiments with
do-it-­ourselves aesthetics to develop creatively disruptive and empowering actions. Irish
republican history is an important touchstone for Speaking of IMELDA’s radicalism, and
the discussion shows how the collective interrogate the past and its disappointments to push
revolutionary initiatives in the present and for the future.
Will Boisseau offers a discussion of the animal liberation movement, which takes direct
action to save the lives of animals while causing economic damage to the industries that
exploit them. Having grown rapidly since its beginnings in the late 1960s, radical animal lib-
eration became a significant threat to corporations and its activists were heavily repressed in
the 2000s. The chapter considers the movement’s principal concerns and action repertoires,
before turning to the main concepts and political theories which relate to animal liberation
including ecofeminism, anarchism and critical animal studies. Despite its advances and risks,
animal liberation remains dogged with accusations that it represents bourgeois reformism
and the preoccupations of privileged individuals. In response, the newest animal liberation
activism focuses on concepts such as total liberation and the intersectionality of human, an-
imal and Earth liberation.
In his chapter on antifascism, M. Testa locates its radical manifestations among
­activists who both reject the ballot box effort to outvote fascism and disdain state inter-
vention, knowing that repression of fascists will invariably extend to their militant op-
ponents. Radical antifascists’ primary political space is on the viciously contested streets
of their towns and cities, but while their principal concern is to physically smash fascist
mobilisation, they also recognise the need to organise within their communities. Here,
the task is to put forward arguments based on class rather than race which show how
housing shortages, privatisation and underemployment are not the result of immigration
but of vindictive austerity measures. Militant antifascism therefore involves an openness
to cooperation with people whose politics may not be the same, but to whom the threat of
fascism is no less dangerous.
Chris Rossdale outlines a history of antimilitarism and discusses the politics of a num-
ber of antimilitarist groups to demonstrate the intersectional politics of contemporary anti-
militarism. Antimilitarism is analysed as a network of institutions, a body of values and a set
of practices. It draws on a range of traditions: anarchist, feminist, religious, anti-imperialist
and antiracist. The chapter shows how anticolonial and antiracist campaigns intersect with
antimilitarist peace activism and how religiously rooted pacifism fuels nonviolent grassroots
direct action. The chapter closes with two case studies – resistance to US military bases in
Okinawa and the Trident Ploughshares movement against nuclear weapons – which show
how the theoretical lineages identified earlier find concrete expression.
Bonnie Burstow examines antipsychiatry, psychiatric survivor and mad movements from
an anarchist perspective and as part of an intersectional anti-oppression politics. S­ ensitive to
the differences between these movements, the chapter explores their radicalism by (i) devel-
oping an antiauthoritarian critique of state-sanctioned professional practice and normalising
discourses and (ii) rejecting reforms directed at mitigating the worst excesses of established
psychiatric practice. Reflecting on the experience of antisanism activism, the chapter recom-
mends a model of radical activism that synthesises anarchist cultural values with the adoption
of strategic goals. And looking at the challenges that antipsychiatry presents to other radical
movements, it links radicalism to the willingness to confront the p­ ower-relationships that
emerge in the intersections of anti-oppression politics.

22
 Critiques

Leah Temper examines radical climate justice politics – a network of anticapitalist and
anti-extractivist movements fighting for ‘System change, not Climate Change’. Climate
justice activism includes struggles against oil and gas extraction, coal plants and fracking,
organising by the victims of floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, as well as movements fighting
for food sovereignty and access to resources. Based on the understanding that those least
responsible for the production of greenhouse gases are the most affected by the disruption
and chaos they cause, this radical approach draws attention to the colonial and gendered
dimensions of the climate crisis. Instead of the false techno-fixes poised to further exacer-
bate these inequalities, climate justice prompts us towards the proactive construction of a
post-petroleum society and a consideration of how the economy, energy, food and transpor-
tation systems can be radically rethought and redesigned.
David Pellow focuses on the possibilities for a deepening and broadening of social
­justice politics within radical environmentalism. Based on data gathered from fieldwork,
­interviews, archival analysis and participant observation, he argues that while environmen-
tal movements have a long and troubled history of racism, nativism, heteropatriarchy and
classism (to say nothing of misanthropy!), there are significant segments of these social for-
mations that have invested time and energy into reimagining their work, including the very
framing of the problem of the environmental crisis, along with strategies and tactics to ad-
dress it. The chapter suggests new ways of defining environmental justice politics, and new
ways of framing democracy and the polity itself.
In her chapter on radical research, Rebecca Fisher discusses the work of Corporate
Watch – an independent research and publishing group which campaigns against corpo-
rate power and spreads ‘information for action’. The group approaches its research with a
different ethic to the one prevalent in institutional contexts – from academia and media to
NGOs and think tanks. This ethic is defined by its commitment to, and position within,
struggles for radical social change, and by affirming the independence that permits such an
engagement. Rather than provide seemingly neutral analysis, expert advice or compromised
lobbying, Corporate Watch aims to take an active, autonomous and non-vanguardist role
within radical struggles.

References
Désil, J., Kaur, K. and Kinsman, G., ‘Anti-Oppression Politics in Anti-Capitalist Movements’, Upping
the Anti (1) online at http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/01-anti-oppression-politics-in-anti-
capitalist-movements/.
Jeppesen, S., Kruzynksi, A., Sarrasin, R. and Breton, É., Collective Autonomy Research Group/
CRAC, The Anarchist Commons’, Ephemera, 14 (4), 2015.
Shannon, D. and Rogue, J., ‘Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality’ (2009) at http://
anarkismo.net/article/14923.

23
 1.1
A RADICAL FEMINIST DIASPORA
Speaking of IMELDA, Reproductive
Justice and Ireland

Speaking of IMELDA

Introduction
This chapter situates the London-based, direct-action performance collective, Speaking of
IMELDA, within a tradition of alternative feminist Irish diasporic activist groups in ­Britain
who have campaigned for reproductive rights. By contextualising Irish feminist activist col-
lectives in London from the 1970s to the present day, we argue for the political efficacy
and vitality of the Irish feminist diaspora. Written collectively by members of Speaking of
IMELDA, the chapter maps the actions we have undertaken to challenge the restrictions
on abortion in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. We further detail our
attempts to raise awareness in Britain of the inequity experienced by Northern Irish women,
due to the rigid opposition to abortion maintained by dominant political parties in Northern
Ireland and the British government’s failure to uphold equal access to reproductive health-
care to all UK citizens.
We frame our actions as being influenced by what we are terming a ‘feminist diasporic
political radicalism’ – a form of radicalism that is informed by being ‘cut loose’ from the gen-
dered cultural constructs of the home state, enabled by our geographical positioning outside
of the island of Ireland. We further situate feminist diasporic political radicalism as being in-
formed by the untethered freedom of ‘loose women’ within our collective. We theorise the
idea of ‘loose women’ not only in terms of the looseness of our methods and aesthetics, but
in how, within our actions, this sense of looseness informs the specific approaches we use to
challenge oppressive cultural ideals of femininity. We argue that our actions are a messy al-
liance between art and politics; our loosely framed DIO (Do It Ourselves) aesthetics spill out
crudely from artistic representation into the political realm where they demand a response.
This chapter traces the influence of feminist diasporic political radicalism on activist
strategies. Throughout the chapter, we outline the strategies we have devised to act in soli-
darity with the ongoing battle for reproductive rights across the island of Ireland. First, we
outline the origins of Speaking of IMELDA and situate our work in relation to the past Irish
diasporic feminist activist groups that originated in Britain, in particular those focused on
reproductive rights. We then explain how our work responds to the religious fundamental-
ism influencing legislative restrictions on reproductive rights in Northern Ireland and the
Republic of Ireland. Following this, a discussion of our use of direct action and performance

24
 Radical Feminist Diaspora

demonstrates the ways in which the concept of ‘looseness’ is central to the methods we use
to subvert the constructs of femininity associated with Ireland. Finally, we outline how the
positioning of the tactics deployed by Speaking of IMELDA within the intersection between
culture and politics upsets the cultural hegemony of both Irish states.
Speaking of IMELDA is a collective comprised largely, although not exclusively, of Irish
women living in London. Our collective is comprised of a diversity of women of all ages and
from many walks of life, including those working in education, the creative arts, health, social
care and activism. Our collective history of activism spans reproductive rights, antiracism,
LGBTQI rights, anti-austerity movements in England and Ireland, Irish Travellers’ rights,
support for refugees and migrants and formerly challenging the human rights abuses by the
British Army in Northern Ireland, including supporting the rights of women political prison-
ers during the Troubles (1968–98).
The group was initiated by women who had emigrated from Ireland since 2000 with the
aim of challenging the legislative restrictions on abortion across the island of Ireland. In the
Republic of Ireland, the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution, which equates the life
of a pregnant person with that of an unborn foetus from conception, exerts a ‘chilling effect’
on the reproductive rights of women in Ireland (Amnesty International, 2015: 8). In the
North, access to reproductive health services is also heavily restricted, due to the failure of
the British state to extend the 1967 Abortion Act to Northern Ireland, alongside continued
political opposition to abortion within the Northern Ireland Executive.
Speaking of IMELDA was formally established in December 2013 following a meeting
at which Ann Rossiter was invited to speak about her activist history. A member of Speak-
ing of IMELDA since that meeting, Rossiter is also a former member of Irish ­Women’s
Abortion Support Group (IWASG), a long-time abortion rights activist and the author of
Ireland’s Hidden Diaspora: The Abortion Trail and the Making of a London Irish Underground
1980–2000 (2009).

Maintaining Links to the Past: Irish Feminist Diasporic Radicalism

Placing our actions in a historical context has been central to the ethos of Speaking of
IMELDA. From the outset, we have sought to retrieve and activate the work of our ­feminist
predecessors. For example, the name Imelda, a common girl’s name in Ireland, recalls the
work of IWASG – a group of activists who provided support to women travelling from
Ireland to England for abortions between 1980 and 2000. IWASG, discussed in more depth
later, used Imelda as a secret code word for abortion. This code word enabled Irish women
travelling to England for abortions to keep their plans secret so as to avoid stigma and, up
until 1992 when the right to travel for abortion was implemented, criminalisation. We use
IMELDA as an anagram for ‘Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion’.
We also wear the colour red in tribute to the work of IWASG, whose members sometimes
wore a red skirt, so as to be identifiable, when collecting women travelling for abortion at
train stations and airport terminals. Notably, we also harness the association of red with dan-
ger and the deviant sexuality of ‘loose women’. We see maintaining these links to the past as
crucial to removing the long-standing barriers to progress on reproductive rights in Ireland.
Such connections with past activism also make us proud and give us the commitment to
continue the work.
Up to 6,000 women from the Irish region continually travel to the UK each year to access
abortion services, often at considerable expense and stress. Furthermore, in 2013, the Irish
Republic implemented a fourteen-year prison sentence for women who have abortions in

25
 Speaking of IMELDA

Ireland illegally. This has dire consequences for women who take pro-abortive medication
because they cannot afford to travel or are not permitted to leave the country. We want
women in the Irish region, and more widely, to have control over their own bodies and
access to medical services which support their choices. In reclaiming the name IMELDA,
we wish to act in solidarity with women’s groups who have sought to counteract the inhu-
manity of state legislation in both Northern and Southern Ireland, while operating against
the silencing and shaming of women who have abortions.
Irish feminist activity in Britain stretches back to the early 1880s when branches of the
Ladies Land League, a proto-feminist organisation fighting against eviction and for land
reform in Ireland, were established in south London (Russell, 1987). Although there were
many factors and influences that differentiated the Irish and British social formations, not
least Ireland’s colonial position versus Britain’s imperial one (Cullen Owens, 1984:103–12),
interaction continued across the Irish Sea, and in Britain itself between native British women
and Irish émigrés, as feminist activism evolved into a social movement in the early 1900s be-
fore the advent of First World War, Ireland’s Rising against British rule in 1916 and the War
of Independence, 1919–21. These interactions between first-wave feminists were notably
in the areas of female suffrage and labouring women’s rights (Sylvia Pankhurst being a key
figure on the British side), thereby creating an early form of transnational feminism in action
(Murphy, 1989). This was also visible in East London suffragette newspaper The Women’s
Dreadnought (Pankhurst, 2016), it being the first British newspaper to report on the Dublin
1916 Rising and its aftermath.
With the arrival of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an Irish di-
asporic feminist identity took shape within the broad parameters of the Women’s Liberation
Movement in Britain, and against the backdrop of three decades of the Northern Ireland
‘Troubles’ (1968–98). Once again, there were factors and influences differentiating Irish
and British feminism. While bread-and-butter issues, such as reproductive rights, childcare,
equal pay and sexuality, were common to both, Irish feminism also faced the fallout from
an armed conflict in Northern Ireland including British military occupation (28,000 troops
at its peak in 1972), a bombing campaign carried out mainly by the Irish Republican Army
(IRA) in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland, and large-scale incarceration of men
and women in Northern Irish and British jails. Following the descent into armed conflict
in Northern Ireland, and coinciding with the rise of the women’s movement in the western
world, feminist groups, such as the Women on Ireland Collective (1973–74), the Women
and Ireland Group (1976–80) and the London Armagh Coordinating Group (1980–87),
were initiated mainly by Irish women around Britain. Primarily, their work involved high-
lighting the lives of republican women in their shattered communities in the conflict zones
in ­Northern Ireland, drawing attention to the treatment of women political prisoners, es-
pecially the practice of strip searching as a form of sexual harassment (‘Strip Searches in
Armagh Jail’, Women Behind the Wire, London Armagh Group, 1984) campaigning against
the Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974) and for the removal of British troops (Irish Women
at War: Papers from the Feminism and Ireland Workshop, 1977).
These feminist groups were open to all regardless of nationality or ethnicity. Non-Irish
feminists joined with their Irish sisters in campaigning in the British movement on the
various issues related to the Troubles, but their collective efforts failed to make a significant
impact due to ideological differences over militant nationalism, colonialism and religion
(Rossiter, 2017: 153–68). Despite international slogans of the movement like ‘sisterhood is
global’, a lesson well learned from the experience was that unless a global sisterhood is con-
sciously placed in its historical and political context, as it is in the notion of ‘intersectionality’

26
 Radical Feminist Diaspora

(the recognition of difference and the interlocking of systems of oppression), feminist soli-
darity is ‘shaky at best’ (Delmar, 1972; Mohanty, 1992: 74–92). After the Socialist Feminist
Conference on Imperialism and Women’s Oppression Worldwide (1980) and the mid-1980s
shift towards embracing a non-unitary experience of womanhood (Wallsgrove, 1985), so-
cialist feminism was better able to relate to the multiplicity of issues stemming from the
Troubles and the Irish national question.

The Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group (IWASG) 1980–2000

The formation of the IWASG (1980–2000) and the London-Irish Women’s Centre
­(1983–2012), both exclusive to Irish women, can be viewed as a response to the marginali-
sation of Irish issues in the wider feminist movement and to the ‘othering’ and essentialising
of Irish people in Britain during the Troubles. The London-Irish Women’s Centre, with
recognition and support from bodies such as the Greater London Council, set about artic-
ulating women’s perspectives, ultimately contributing to the shaping of an ‘alternative Irish
community’ in Britain (Rossiter, 2009: 53–74).
The London-based Irish feminists who set up the voluntary IWASG in 1980 were fol-
lowing a tradition of philanthropic work at ports and railway stations in Britain established
in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While lay and religious welfare agencies such
as the Legion of Mary (founded 1921) provided unaccompanied Irish females with practical
support, emanating primarily from a desire to flag up the grave moral dangers to which
women would be exposed in their new lives (Redmond, 2015: 55–76), IWASG’s concern
was directed specifically at pregnant women seeking a safe and legal abortion under the 1967
British Abortion Act. Such philanthropic and advocacy work has been described variously
as feminist voluntarism and ‘civic’ or ‘practice-focused’ feminism (Fletcher, 2015). Impor-
tantly, it implicitly subverted the obdurate, anti-abortion stance of both Irish states in thrall
to the Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant churches.
IWASG was a non-hierarchical feminist collective whose members defined themselves as
lesbian, bi or straight, from Catholic or Protestant backgrounds. They had working-class,
middle-class and rural origins in Northern Ireland or the Republic, or were British-born
second- and third-generation Irish. The all-Irish nature of the membership, rather than be-
ing ethnically exclusive by design, was a response to abortion seekers’ reports of the judge-
mental attitudes of their non-Irish hosts – an experience all too common during the thirty
years of the Irish Troubles and the one that would be recognised by members of the Muslim
community today (Casey, 2017: 213–26; Finch, 2017: 137–52), although probably not by
Irish migrants of the Celtic Tiger period. The Celtic Tiger refers to the unprecedented
economic boom during the 1990s, which followed the Republic of Ireland’s entry into the
European Economic Community in 1973 (now the European Union). During this period,
wealth was generated by the provision of tax breaks to foreign, largely American, companies
who set up in the Republic, alongside a disproportionate inflation in the housing market.
This period of prosperity ended with the global economic crisis in 2008 and the collapse
of the banks in the Irish Republic in 2010, which led to the acceptance of International
­Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU bailouts.
The services provided by IWASG ranged from helping to organise travel and escorting
abortion seekers to and from transport hubs, to making clinic appointments, sorting out fees
and providing hospitality and overnight accommodation in IWASG members’ homes. In
addition to fundraising and practical support, a lot of campaigning was directed at securing
legal changes in Ireland and the UK. By 2000, the combined impact of the Internet, mobile

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phones, the widespread availability of credit and the advent of cheap airline travel eliminated
the demand for help. IWASG closed down. In 2004, ESCORT, a Liverpool-based service,
set up in 1988, providing escort and accommodation services (Fletcher, 2015), also ceased.
However, the economic crash of 2008 impacted heavily on women with unwanted preg-
nancies in Northern Ireland and the Republic. The Abortion Support Network was formed
in London in 2009 in response to renewed cries for help and support (ASN, 2016). Although
not specifically an ‘Irish’ organisation, the Abortion Support Network dealing mostly with
Irish clients.
The positioning of Irish feminist groups in Britain allows for a greater freedom to critique
the boundaries of women’s roles in Ireland. Strategically, we form a diasporic radicalism. The
four current London-based voluntary groups concerned with Irish women’s reproduc-
tive rights – the Abortion Support Network, Speaking of IMELDA, the L ­ ondon-Irish
­Feminist Network (founded after the London-Irish Women’s Centre closed in 2012) and
the ­London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign (formed in 2016) – have come into existence
in the third-wave feminist environment. All use social media extensively and are connected
with pro-choice activists in both parts of Ireland and across the world.

Raising a Radical Diasporic Voice Against the Moral Regulation of Women

in the Republic of Ireland
While Speaking of IMELDA has duly harnessed social media to heighten our message, we
prioritise public interventions that are direct, loud and unapologetic. These actions have
sought to radically challenge the stereotypes of the quiet and pure Irish woman so imposed
by religious forces. For instance, in our first action, Speaking of IMELDA acted as dissonant
voices intervening in a conference in Camden attended by Catholic clergy on the subject of
faith and the Irish diaspora on International Women’s Day 2014. Here, IMELDA called upon
the so-called ‘radical and engaged’ church to take action on the silenced – but daily – reality
of pregnant people travelling abroad to access reproductive healthcare (8 March 2014 action,
2014). Not only did this action make vocal a rarely spoken issue, it also infiltrated a religious
space where women were able to serve an alternative role to that predetermined by church
teachings – that of activists, autonomous over their own bodies and selves.
Since the formation of the Irish State in 1922, the Catholic Church has been a dominant
political force in the Republic of Ireland. The interaction of church and state has not only
imposed Catholic teaching on all matters of policy – from education, to social security, to
health – it has also heavily infiltrated the social and cultural life of the Irish populace. This
has translated into the reverence of domesticity and subservience in women, motherhood
being valorised as a woman’s primary sexual purpose. Female purity, as Fischer (2016) notes,
became conflated with national identity. The Irish woman did not just represent herself;
she was the symbol of a pure, superior and – notably – Catholic Ireland. Any deviation
from this archetype was seen to tarnish not only the individual, but also to taint the ide-
alised nation state, which had been carefully constructed by the church. As such, ‘deviant’
acts – ­particularly those concerning female sexuality – were shrouded in guilt, shame and
secrecy. The Magdalene Laundries, mother and baby homes and non-consensual practices of
symphysiotomy (an outdated surgical procedure whereby the pelvis is severed during child-
birth that was replaced by caesarian section, which Catholic doctors revived in the Republic
between the 1940s and 1980s) were emblematic of this systematic maltreatment of women
(Inglis, 2005; Inglis and MacKeogh, 2012). Inglis and MacKeogh (2012) note that, despite
some waning of the Church’s influence, its long domination has left deep and enduring scars.

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 Radical Feminist Diaspora

Although the country has undergone significant social and economic shifts in recent decades
(for example, achieving equal marriage in 2015), restrictions on reproductive rights remain the
stronghold of a patriarchal, punitive and largely Catholic state. Such ideology is enshrined in
the Irish Constitution, which since 1983 has endowed the foetus with the same rights as those
of the pregnant person, charging the state with the vindication of the foetus’ rights. In prac-
tice, ‘vindication’ sanctioned, among other things, a court injunction in 1992, which forced
an underage victim of rape, whose family had taken her to the UK for an abortion, to return
to Ireland (known as the X-case). This court injunction was challenged on the grounds that
the fourteen-year-old was suicidal as a result of the pregnancy. Although the Supreme Court
ruling following the X-case asserted that suicide counted as a threat to life, this was not en-
acted in law until 2013 under The Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act (Houses of the
Oireachtas, 2013). Notably, this Act also put in place a fourteen-year prison sentence for those
who have an abortion illegally in the Republic. Despite the outlawing of interference in travel
to another jurisdiction for an abortion or the provision of information about services in another
state, the tentacles of the Eighth Amendment have continued to expand. In October 2012, a
miscarriage was not medically assisted because of the presence of a foetal heartbeat, so risking
the development of septicaemia, which resulted in the death of Savita Halappanavar. In 2014,
a suicidal and clearly vulnerable asylum seeker, pregnant as a result of rape, was cajoled into
agreeing to a caesarian section. Later in the same year, doctors cited the Eighth Amendment
as the reason that a dead woman, who had been seventeen weeks pregnant, was kept on a life
support machine until the courts ruled that the machine could be turned off (Carolan, 2014).
In October 2016, the Health and Safety Executive tried – again citing the amendment – but
failed, in a legal action to force a third-time mother to deliver by caesarean section.
In March 2015, Speaking of IMELDA humorously intervened in the London St. Patrick’s
Day Parade. This intervention into a long-established cultural event for the Irish diaspora, as
well as Londoners and visitors to the city, proved a radical articulation of the presence of the
issue of Ireland making England the legal destination for abortion. It also acted as a symbolic
challenge to the Catholic Church and the patriarchal culture underpinning it. A twelve-foot
puppet of St. Patrick, the first bishop of Ireland, garbed in green with his staff and mitre is rolled
out annually in the London parade and in 2015 was greeted by a fleet of IMELDAs wearing
red mitres and cloaks, as if female bishops had been permitted by the Catholic Church, and
shouting ‘down with Patrick-archy!’ and ‘stop in the name of choice!’ (IMELDA disrupts the
St. Patrick’s Day Parade, 2015). Catholic ideologies, which seek to moralise individual choices,
stretch far wider than Ireland alone. In September 2015, Pope Francis announced in a public
letter that, between 8 December 2015 and 6 November 2016, absolution would be offered to
women who have had abortions, so long as they expressed remorse and sought forgiveness from
a priest (Kirchgaessner, 2015). The interpretation of abortion as a sin that needs to be forgiven
is emblematic of Catholic ideology, where the shame lies not only in the act itself, but in failing
to properly conceal it and show remorse (Inglis and MacKeogh, 2012).
IMELDA reacted to the papal comments at a 2015 nationwide pro-choice march in
­Dublin. Dressed as bishops once again and reading from ‘the word’, we sharply contradicted
the Pope’s language and message. Definitively counteracting the hypocrisy that cloaked the
­papal comments, the speech linked the statement from the Vatican to the hypocrisy of the
Irish government in maintaining Ireland’s abortion-free character and offering the right
to travel as a substandard concession. IMELDA’s pro-choice bishops drew upon Ireland’s
troubled history, identifying the country’s lack of reproductive rights as emblematic of the
systematic punishment of women, which has been a feature of the State since its concep-
tion. The speech was definitive in its proclamation: ‘We do not need phoney concessions

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or absolution from those who have enacted such brutal misogyny against women in Ireland
historically’ (Solidarity Times, 2015). Here, we emphasised the autonomy vested within
Irish people, acknowledging the moral agency they held over their own bodies.
These actions are particularly radical in the context of Ireland’s blasphemy law. Introduced
in 2009, the Defamation Act carries a penalty of up to €25,000 for anyone who ‘publishes or
utters blasphemous matter’ in a manner intended to cause ‘outrage’ (Irish Statute Book, 2009).
IMELDA has directly challenged this law through highlighting the hypocrisy and misogyny
inherent in the Irish Church and state, both from their base in London and – importantly – at
home on Irish soil. In doing so, in relation to the country’s archaic abortion regime, IMELDA
offers a double challenge to church and state. Embodying a dissonant voice which speaks of the
oft-silenced reality of Irish abortions, we offer compassion to those who themselves have felt
symbolically bound by Church and state. Similarly, in playing with the ritual emigrants return
to Ireland each Christmas, we raise concerns for those forced to travel for abortions.
In 2014, we travelled by train and boat to Ireland, offering sups of choice from teapots
to fellow travellers reminiscent of the housekeeper Mrs Doyle in the well-known television
series Father Ted (A Sup of Choice for Christmas?, 2014). In Dublin, we made our arrival
known by hanging a huge pair of knickers outside Dáil Éireann (Irish Assembly), carrying
the message ‘women are not breeding machines’. This referenced the aforementioned case
of the clinically dead pregnant woman, who was being kept on life support, against her
family’s wishes. In 2015, we strolled around Dublin airport in our red costumes, dressed as
nativity-play angels, complete with red-tinselled halos. Holding up a sign that said ‘Welcome
Home IMELDA’, we drew attention to the fact that some of the arrivals would be returning
from having an abortion abroad, with resentment rather than love in their hearts for ‘the
old sod’. The disruption of tradition continued with the placing of a miniature model of a
Christmas angel decoration disguised as an abortion seeker with her trademark red suitcase,
into the airport’s Christmas crib. To ensure that the state would know that offence was in-
tended, we tied tampons dipped in red ink, to simulate menstruation, to O’Connell Street’s
Christmas tree – a centrepiece of Dublin’s festivities – and rounded off our return with a
rendition of pro-choice carols under the iconic Clery’s clock in collaboration with local pro-
choice activists (IMELDA in collaboration with the Choicemas Carol Singers, 2015).

‘We are not second-class citizens left to rot:’ Challenging Restrictions

on Abortion in Northern Ireland
Although it is the Catholic Church specifically which is credited with upholding cultures
of shame, secrecy and repressed sexuality in Ireland, its underlying teachings mirror closely
those of other Christian faiths. This is borne out in the Northern Irish context, where both
Catholic and Protestant regimes conspire to keep abortion illegal (Fletcher, 2001). Indeed, the
teachings of the Catholic Church in Ireland are emblematic of those of the Protestant faith in
Victorian England where women were expected to adhere to a higher moral code than their
male counterparts (Rowbotham, 1989; Inglis, 2005). Almost half of the population of North-
ern Ireland describe themselves as Protestant, Presbyterians being the largest group, followed
by Anglicans (Church of Ireland founded by Henry VIII in 1537), M ­ ethodists and small sects
such as Assemblies of God and the Plymouth Brethren. This identification with Protestant-
ism holds, even where significant minorities are not churchgoers and, indeed, may well be
atheist or agnostic. The conflation of ethnic identity with a religious affiliation is the product
of a political history stretching back to the Plantation (organised colonisation) of Ulster in
the early seventeenth century and the establishment of a Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland,

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 Radical Feminist Diaspora

thanks to the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in
1690. Archaic as these events may now seem, they nonetheless set in train an enduring belief
system asserting Protestantism’s theological and moral superiority over Catholicism, a link-
ing of Protestantism with Unionism (union with the British Crown and Empire), a bulwark
against Catholicism, and an imperative to safeguard the union. The construction of political
allegiances around religious identity has strengthened the power (paralleled in the Catholic/
nationalist community) of the Protestant Churches’ promotion of conservative views on social
issues, particularly in relation to the family, the role of women in society, sexuality and repro-
ductive rights. Furthermore, the Protestant Churches are integrated into the fabric of society
through the clergy’s involvement in secular life, whether at the social, personal or community
level. As Rosemary Sales (1999, p. 141) points out, this close ethnopolitical association makes
dissent a difficult prospect for many Protestants, believers and non-believers alike for fear of
being seen as ‘disloyal’ to their community. Interestingly, opposition to abortion and gay
rights has been one of the few areas of agreement between politicians and clergy across both
Protestant/unionist and Catholic/nationalist communities and traditions.
Currently in Northern Ireland, abortion can only be obtained if a doctor acts ‘only to save
the life of the mother’ or if continuing the pregnancy would result in the pregnant woman
becoming a ‘physical or mental wreck’ (Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission,
2015). Very few people are referred to have an abortion in Northern Ireland ( Jowit, 2016).
Most people needing an abortion travel to England and have to pay privately as they cannot
obtain it on the NHS. However, due to the fear and confusion surrounding the wording
of existing abortion legislation, alongside the hostile political environment, doctors and
health professionals are entirely unsure as to how they can advise people needing abortions
without facing prosecution themselves for doing so. For instance, Section 58 of the 1861
Offences Against the Persons Act, on ‘the offence of using drugs or instruments to procure
abortion’, states:

Every woman being with child, who, with intent to procure her own miscarriage,
shall unlawfully administer to herself any poison or other noxious thing, or shall un-
lawfully use any instrument or other means whatsoever with the like intent, and who-
soever, with intent to procure the miscarriage of any woman whether she be or be not
with child … to be kept in penal servitude for life. (Offences Against the Person Act
1861, The National Archives)

The consequences of these laws were recently demonstrated, resulting in the prosecution of
a young woman in Northern Ireland for taking the abortion pill in April 2016. The woman
was given a three-month sentence (suspended for a year) for accessing medication that is
approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and freely available to other women
in the UK on the NHS. This woman could not afford to travel outside of Northern Ireland
to access safe and legal abortion services and was reported to the police by her housemates
because they felt that she was not ‘remorseful’ enough (McDonald, 2016). Since then, an-
other woman who had been committed to stand trial for obtaining the abortion pill for
her ­fi fteen-year-old daughter because she could not afford to pay for a flight and private
abortion won the right to contest the decision to prosecute her (Gentleman, 2016). Were she
to be prosecuted, she could face life in jail if the judge has a strong anti-choice stance. It is
interesting to note that abortion cases are tried as serious criminal cases similar to murder
and are heard on indictment at the Crown Court. This indictment permits the judge wider
discretion in sentencing, which can be anything from life in jail to a suspended sentence.

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In response to the prosecution of the aforementioned woman who received the

t­ hree-month suspended sentence, we created and filmed the action, Game of Shame. Taking
the format of a game show, the Game of Shame demonstrated how the current law targets the
most vulnerable in Northern Irish society, particularly those who cannot afford to travel to
access safe and legal abortion services or those who are not permitted to travel due to their
residency status. The interactions between the contestants and game show host hold a mirror
up to the lack of concern for women’s welfare and human rights both within the current law
and the actions of those who push for increased sentencing of women. The Game of Shame
loudly declares the right of women to have agency over their own bodies and to be fully sup-
ported in making reproductive choices without moral condemnation (Game of Shame, 2015).
In 2016, we attended the first Rally for Choice in Belfast to stand in solidarity with activists
resident in Northern Ireland. Dressed as super ‘sheros’, we delivered a speech praising Diana
King, Colette Devlin and Kitty O’Kane, also known as the ‘Derry Three’ (Solidarity Times,
2016). In opposition to recent prosecutions, the ‘Derry Three’ handed themselves in to the
police for procuring the abortion pill.
As a diasporic voice, Speaking of IMELDA also seeks to raise consciousness in Britain
of the plight of Northern Irish women. In May 2014, we paid an uninvited visit to the Sec-
retary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt. Turning up unexpectedly to his advice surgery at
a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Farnham, we offered Mr Hunt advice on legislation change
(Speaking of IMELDA with Jeremy Hunt, 2014). We consulted with a lawyer who informed
us that a slight legislation change would at least allow women in Northern Ireland to have
an abortion on the NHS in England or Scotland rather than having to pay privately. During
this action, we presented Mr Hunt with bitten red apples with messages attached concern-
ing the travesty of justice impacting on Northern Irish women. Mr Hunt stuck to the line
that abortion is a devolved issue (under the control of Northern Irish Assembly and not the
Westminster Parliament).
In 2015, we raised awareness of the situation faced by women in Northern Ireland at the
Women of the World (WOW) Festival in London. We were not there as official participants
but as Jude Kelly, the founder of WOW, asks people to be activists each year at this festival,
we did not think she would mind our pop-up action. We were right: the festival staff even
provided us with a microphone and amp. We performed a Political Pageant with entrants from
England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Entrants were judged on their access to re-
productive care. Symbols from all countries adorned the entrants’ costumes (Imelda Pageant
8 March, 2015). Of course, the Northern Irish entrant, wearing a necklace made of cut-out
green shamrocks and red hands of Ulster, lost the political pageant. She s­ ubsequently marched
around the group in a rage banging her drum (reminiscent of the Orange M ­ arching Parades
in Northern Ireland), using Virgin Mary bottles as drum sticks (a reference to C ­ atholicism),
chanting ‘we are not, we are not, second class citizens left to rot’.

Reframing Femininity: Loose Methods and Loose Women

Speaking of IMELDA uses direct action and performance as an embodied method of pro-
voking pro-choice discourse in the public realm. We aim to bring the often silenced, but
very real issues impacting on women in Ireland into the public domain, thus challenging the
institutional confines that maintain these silences. In our campaign video The Quiet Woman
(2014), we challenged the valorisation of motherhood within marriage and domesticity as
the primary roles for women (as enshrined in Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution), by
playfully subverting the domesticated submissiveness of a character played by Irish actress,

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Maureen O’Hara, in the 1950s film The Quiet Man (Ford, 1952). In the video, we appear
dressed in our trademark red clothing, each wearing a headscarf and sunglasses, simultane-
ously referencing a 50s glamour-puss, a washerwoman and a revolutionary in disguise. We
then strung a washing line of knickers up in front of the Irish Embassy building in London
and polished the building with the knickers, all of which were decorated with pro-choice
slogans. The low-paid worker has been the valorised identity of the Irish in Britain, and in
this action, we made visible the vast numbers of Irish women engaged in domestic work
in Britain until the late twentieth century. The earthiness of the washerwoman, with her
rolled-up sleeves, metaphorically cleaning Ireland’s dirty secrets, while signalling her disgust
and contempt, poses a stark challenge to the shame heaped on women who were victimised
for pregnancy, poverty, sexuality and vulnerability in both Irish states. A group of IMELDA
washerwomen were photographed with Panti Bliss, the iconic Irish drag artist, prior to the
same-sex marriage referendum in Ireland. This act of mutual solidarity forged a new image
of how ‘femininity’ might be reframed outside of current patriarchal norms. Indeed, our
‘knicker-bombing’ of the Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny provides an apt example of our refusal
to comply with patriarchal ideals of femininity. Interrupting the Taoiseach’s party fundraiser
at the Crown Moran Hotel in London in 2014, we landed a pair of ‘knickers for choice’
bearing the slogan ‘Repeal the 8th Enda’ on his dinner plate (Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny,
served pro-choice knickers at fundraising dinner, 2014).
Our use of performance has been recognised as feminist Live Art practice and featured
at Live Art events, for example, alongside Are We There Yet?: Study Room Guide on Live Art
and Feminism by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), London (LADA, 2015) and
in the online exhibition, Live Art and Feminism in the UK, curated by LADA (2015) for
the Google Cultural Institute. The subversions of domesticity and patriarchal constructions
of femininity apparent within our actions are reminiscent of the aesthetics and strategies
used by feminist artists such as Martha Rosler and Bobby Baker, among many others. Lois
Keidan (2016, ‘What Is Live Art?’), Director of the LADA, London, notes that ‘Live Art is
not a description of an art form or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimen-
tal processes and experiential practices’. She situates Live Artists as operating ‘in between,
and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms’ (2016). Most certainly, our approach to
performance is experimental and situated at the periphery of more traditional practice. We
employ various methods of performance and theatre in our direct actions. For instance, in
the spirit of Invisible Theatre as developed by Augusto Boal where interaction lies in im-
provised public action, we interjected in the London St. Patrick’s Day Parade (St. Patrick’s
Day London, 2014) acting as women who had travelled from Ireland and asked bystanders
the way to the nearest abortion clinic. Influenced by live artists, performance artists from
the 1960s and the Situationists, who sought to break free of institutional confines and merge
art with life, we are equally interventionist in our use of direct action. We are inspired by
the aesthetics of performance-based activists, such as Pussy Riot, Sisters Uncut, Liberate
Tate and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. We not only perform in the public
sphere; we actively engage with situations as an interventionist strategy. In turn, the actual
world also intervenes and meets with our actions. Once we are in a situation, we improvise
in the moment, responding to the inter-group dynamic and the inter-social dynamic with
the people around us.
We use edited video of our public interventions as a means to heighten our impact, cir-
cumvent male-stream media and share our actions more widely. We equally use video as a
means of sharing strategies and methods that enable those, who might not be in a position
to be vocally pro-choice, to voice their dissent. For instance, The Quiet Woman video invites

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wider participation by encouraging people to decorate knickers with pro-choice slogans

and hang them up in public. Our cheap and cheerful, ‘loose’ and ‘DIO (Do It Ourselves)’
aesthetics can be replicated and improvised by others.
The concept of ‘looseness’ has several connotations within the methods and aesthetics of
Speaking of IMELDA. Our actions are loosely planned and improvised within their mo-
ment. The term ‘Loose Theatre’ is used by Margaretta D’Arcy (2005) to refer to her lifelong
work as a ‘guerrilla theatre activist’. In an article written by Speaking of IMELDA (2015) for
Contemporary Theatre Review, we situated our activism within the lineage of D’Arcy’s work,
alongside the work of first-wave feminist activists in an Irish context, such as the women in-
volved in the 1916 Rising and the Irish suffragettes. The term ‘loose’ is also used by ­Maggie
B. Gale (2015) to refer to examples of ‘women’s protest performance’. Gale examines the
‘gestural potential of women’s activist bodies as occurring in public spaces in which those
bodies are not socially, politically, or economically equal’ (Gale, 2015: 313). Drawing on
Sandra Lee Bartky’s concept of the ‘loose woman’, Gale outlines ‘the performative activism
of “loose” women’ as at once enabling a violation and affirmation of ‘social constructions and
projections of “normative” femininity’ (Gale, 2015: 314).
In parodying the cultural constructions of a domesticated submissive femininity, Speaking
of IMELDA, on the one hand, highlights these stereotypical ideals. On the other hand, in
our loose formations, aesthetics and diversity, we simultaneously transgress and unsettle these
oppressive social constructions. A loose woman has been used as a pejorative ­criticism – we
reclaim it as free and liberatory in a similar sense to the way ‘The Slut Walk’ protests appropri-
ated the derogatory labels applied to women to subvert the oppressive power of these judge-
ments. We enjoy the association of ‘loose women’ and revel in subverting it to our advantage.
This is evident in our Rogue Rose of Tralee action (2015) in which Speaking of IMELDA
parodied the format of the annual Rose of Tralee pageant on the streets of Tralee, an action that
ran synchronically to the main festival. The festival started in 1959 to bring Irish immigrants
back to Ireland and to support tourism in the rural area of Tralee. Focused on beauty and
personality, female contestants are attended by male escorts who vouch for their virtue and
personality. In our version, similar to the action we performed at the WOW Festival, the
winners were those who lived in countries with the best reproductive healthcare services.
Ms Northern Ireland and Ms Republic of Ireland were the tragic losers, deprived of the re-
productive choices available to their sisters living abroad. The action was reported by national
broadsheet, the Irish Times, which understood Speaking of IMELDA’s playful subversion of
national cultural institutions that proliferate patriarchal images of women ­(McTiernan, 2015).
On the other hand, the action also showed how national nostalgia in diasporic communities is
a yearning for the past, which is often at odds with the contemporary and future needs of Irish
women. As such, our ‘rogue roses’ not only parodied the construct of the hyper-feminine
‘lovely girl’, but also transcended accepted norms by speaking out about the lack of repro-
ductive rights afforded to women across the island of Ireland (Rogue Rose of Tralee, 2015).
The extent to which women are publicly policed was made apparent a year after our ac-
tion, when the Sydney Rose Brianna Parkins used her onstage interview in the 2016 pageant
to call for a referendum on the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, while wearing a red dress.
While her intervention was applauded by many, it was, predictably, criticised for politicising
this harmless ‘much-loved’ ritual. Similarly, Speaking of IMELDA is often told in response
to our performances that ‘it is not the time or the place’ to speak of abortion. While we
employ humour, parody and satire in our arsenal of ‘loose methods’, we are also proud to be
spoilsports, or killjoys to use the term as Sara Ahmed defines it in ‘Living in a Feminist Life’
(2010). For Ahmed, the killjoy is the one who speaks out and upsets the apparent acceptance

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of the status quo. She is following the advice of Audre Lorde, who warned that ‘your silence
will not protect you’ (Lorde, 1977 paper in Sister Outsider, 2007: 41), a pertinent reminder
to Irish women that the worst has already been inflicted on them and that speaking up can
hardly make matters any worse. Speaking of IMEDLA are killjoys just as Pussy Riot, the
Guerrilla Girls, Sisters Uncut, Black Lives Matter and Liberate Tate are. We speak up, we
speak out, we break the silence and we invite others to do so too.
Writing of the Rose of Tralee Festival and the now (thankfully) defunct annual pageant,
the Calor Housewife of the Year, Fintan Walsh, outlines the production of a ‘homelysex-
uality’, a domesticated, tempered femininity, which constitutes a ‘female sexual accent in
particular, emptied of depth, eroticism or even what might be understood as subjectivity’
(Walsh, 2009: 206). Within our public performances, we aim to unsettle domesticated fem-
ininity. We do this by maintaining space for the diverse individual identities, sexualities,
aesthetics and styles of group members to shine through. We purposely draw on the eclectic,
intergenerational and intersectional mix of women in our group. While we wear red in our
performances, members of the group self-fashion their red clothes in accordance with their
own taste and style. All of our actions are devised collectively in group sessions, drawing
on the expertise and, importantly, identities, of group members. Above all, Speaking of
IMELDA celebrates the collectivity of women coming together.

Monuments of the Past and Future: Intervening between

Politics and Culture
The collective and collaborative working practices established by Speaking of IMELDA,
alongside our refusal to quietly disappear into the diasporic ether, offer a retort to the Irish
state’s persistent attempts to exclude women from having agency within political and cultural
spheres. Describing the lack of a participative class within Irish political spheres, M
­ ichael D.
Higgins responded presciently to the Finance Bill 2011 in the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament)
paraphrasing the political scientist, Jürgen Habermas, ‘really you can’t invite people to be
bound by rules and bound by decisions in which they haven’t had a chance to consciously
participate’ (Higgins, 2011). Indicating the historical emergence of the Irish Republic in
1922 as a socialist revolutionary project as much as a project for independence from the
British colonial rule, Higgins stated his disappointment between what the manifesto for
Irish freedom, Poblacht na hÉireann, proclaimed and how those liberties have been upheld:

I feel that those who wanted Ireland to be independent would have envisaged a coun-
try in which there would be far greater distribution of power, that it wouldn’t just be
confined to the exercise of parliamentary democracy only. There is more to political
power than voting once every four or five years. There is the exercise of power in every
dimension of life and if a real republic had been founded, we should have been spending
decades extending and deepening political power (2011).

Further on and with specific reference to the Global Financial Crisis, Higgins declared in
this, his final parliamentary speech before successfully running for the office of President,
that ‘an enormous price is now already being paid for the broken connection between the
aspirations of the people of this planet and those who take decisions on their behalf ’ (2011).
Indeed, since 2011, the Irish Republic has witnessed a rise in cultures of dissent, from pro-
tests against the privatisation of water and the emergence of left-wing groups such as People
before Profit to the growing social movement for reproductive justice. In identifying how

35
 Speaking of IMELDA

the state was not operating dialectically with disenchanted public spheres, Higgins confessed
that administrative power was a kind of rarefied and hegemonic apparatus.
In 2014, after Higgins had become the President of Ireland, he made the first official Irish
state visit to the UK. This opened an opportunity for Speaking of IMELDA to highlight
how Ireland was making England the legal destination for abortion. The IMELDAs fretted
about staging an intervention that would face off with the most symbolically powerful rep-
resentative in Ireland. Higgins was respected in the group and had championed the repro-
ductive rights of women in Ireland. However, in his role as the President, he could not be
politically partisan. Additionally, as the symbolic head of the Irish state, the President repre-
sented national values that strategically needed to be challenged. We mapped his itinerary,
dressed in our traditional red and protested outside his appointments at the Irish Embassy and
a festival gala at the Royal Albert Hall in April 2014 (Irish Embassy, 8 April 2014). Inserting
the unspoken arrangements on abortion into the first ever official Irish state visit to Britain
felt risky at the time. The visit was seen in the Republic of Ireland as a coming of age in the
relationship between the former colony and the colonising power. Speaking of IMELDA
was therefore a cause of embarrassment to the Irish state and its reputation abroad and this
action was largely repressed by the mainstream media but reported briefly by RTE (the Irish
National Broadcaster) and the Journal (an online Irish newspaper). These tactics set Speaking
of IMELDA up as a ‘counter public’ (Warner, 2002) that tackled the political administration
on how Irish cultural values regarding women were reproduced. Ironically, in achieving the
participative effects invoked by Higgins in his appeal for the emergence of public spheres,
Higgins became the symbolic object of contestation.
Thereafter, Speaking of IMELDA began to contest cultural institutions and monuments
in which we could physically trace the symbolic reproduction of androcentric attitudes and
highlight how the symbolism of these institutions led to a hegemonic subjugation of women.
Examples of such institutions – as explored earlier – were the Rose of Tralee festival for ‘comely
maidens’ of Irish descent and the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in London, an event heav-
ily frequented by the Irish diaspora. Yet another was the 100-year commemoration of the
1916 Easter Rising which historically led to the emancipation of Ireland from Britain, and
in which the original revolutionaries envisaged a state where women were equal. These
institutions enact Irish popular culture at a liberal arm’s length from the state but work to
enculturate the following Irish values: the domesticated Irish female, favour for religious
patriarchies whose ‘moral cruelty’ (Haughton and Kurdi, 2015) has punished Irish women
and the Irish nation’s manifesto for self-governance while forfeiting any inclusion of female
participation in power. These events were intuitive interventions for Speaking of IMELDA
where the cultural norms of Irish life could be publicly examined both within our country of
origin (as in actions at the Rose of Tralee Festival and at the GPO building in Dublin) and out-
side it, in our adopted nation (London St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, 2014, 2015, 2016). By
broaching Ireland making England the legal destination for abortion as a discussion point at
public cultural occasions, we demonstrate how gender is usually erased as a concern in Irish
public spheres. In doing so, we conceivably critique models of public spheres as un-gendered,
recognising Nancy Fraser’s insights that the ‘gender subtext’ for Habermas’ reading of public
spheres is ‘unthematized’ (Fraser, 2013: 34).
IMELDA’s interventions interrogate Irish culture and how it represents itself in terms
of gender. We leverage cultural production for political ends: our cultural tactics interfere
with the representational logics of mainstream institutions by aiming to create cultural shifts
in popular opinion that may lead to legislative and political changes. Our work appears in
popular culture where an alternative expectation for Irish society and the explicit hope for

36
 Radical Feminist Diaspora

the repeal of the Eighth amendment can be shared with a broad public base. This is how we
view the intersections of culture and politics, aligning ourselves with Rancière who states
that a ‘community of sense woven together by artistic practice is a new set of vibrations of
the human community in the present; on the other hand, it is a monument that stands as a
mediation or a substitute for a people to come’ (Rancière, 2009: 59).
Attending to the actual monuments of the past and their capacity to mediate people to
come, our Easter 2015 action focused on Poblacht na hÉireann, the manifesto of Irish free-
dom delivered at the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin in 1916, the headquarters of the
Easter Rising. Rearticulating the contents of the document to account for female bodily au-
tonomy, Speaking of IMELDA performed in chains around one of the columns of the GPO,
costumed in the era of 1916 (Imelda chains herself to the G.P.O., 2015). The imagery evoked
the original socialist revolutionary claims for equality expressed in Poblacht na hÉireann,
but the action also took the notion of the monument literally by restaging a revolutionary
proclamation at the very site in which Irish national values were inaugurated 100 years ear-
lier. Echoing Higgins’ disappointment in the republic and acknowledging that monuments
are an embodiment of the future to come, IMELDA aimed to show the contradictory re-
lationship between monumentalised past hopes and present disappointments. In this way,
one of IMELDA’s cultural functions is to propose a realignment in the Irish Republic to
its originating principle that women are embraced equally. We situate our art activism as a
proposition for a ‘people to come’ and as a ‘monument to its expectation, a monument to its
absence’ (Rancière, 2009: 59).

Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated the vital role that feminist diasporic collectives such as ­Speaking
of IMELDA play in disrupting dominant patriarchal codes – both at home and in their adopted
nations. Being ‘set loose’, so to speak, in another jurisdiction has emboldened us with greater
freedom to act as radical members of the Irish diaspora and directly expose the misogynistic
norms of our home country to a new audience, in our trademark imprecise and liberated style.
Acting as one of many diasporic feminist collectives in England (both throughout history and
from across the globe), our actions challenge the ongoing issue of Ireland making England the
legal destination for abortion, while also highlighting the broader pattern of maltreatment
perpetuated against women by the Irish state. By nodding to radical diasporic networks of the
past (such as the IWASG), we maintain steady traditions of diasporic activism in protesting the
continued denial of bodily autonomy across the island of Ireland.
Our loose and experimental methods challenge some of the silences that surround abor-
tion in Ireland through brazenly subverting public spaces and traditional feminine identities
to make known the plight of Irish women. By intruding into areas and in forms that are
traditionally unwelcome in patriarchal structures, we give voice to – and indeed embody –
our dissatisfaction and broadcast the stark realities of the privileging of the unborn above
the living woman to a wider populace. Our style of action is radical in its demanding of a
response and forces situations to mould and engage with our interventions, in turn, enabling
us to respond and adapt to the situation and drive issues forward to new terrain. We engage
dissonant voices further afield through our employment of ‘do it yourself ’ aesthetics in a
manner which extends the reach of our message far beyond the boundaries of our home and
adopted nations.
Although aesthetically loose, the dangerous relationship between church and state for
women’s autonomy is a prevailing theme in our radicalism. Our engagement with, and

37
 Speaking of IMELDA

consistent confrontation of, religious symbolism in our performances serves to assert directly
the role that both Catholic and Protestant institutions have had in policing female sexuality
both North and South of the Irish border as well as internationally. Our all-island radicalism
has equally brought us into direct combat with statespersons both in Ireland and the UK,
and provided us with important opportunities to provoke those in positions of authority and
assert the rights of people across Ireland. We recognise and welcome our place in broader
channels of pro-choice and diasporic radicalism. By acting in solidarity with groups from
Poland, Spain, Central America and elsewhere, as well as engaging with others fighting for
bodily autonomy across Ireland and in the UK, we further the goals of radical feminist ac-
tivism, by extending the struggle for reproductive rights into broader global focus and boldly
asserting the power of female agency and action.

Final Note
Some advances in reproductive rights in Ireland have been made in the period between the
drafting of this chapter and its publication. Following the June 2017 General Election in the
UK, the Government’s very narrow majority was threatened when some Conservative MPs
announced that they would support an amendment to the Finance Bill by Labour MP, Stella
Creasy, calling for access to NHS abortions for NI residents. The Government introduced a
means-tested travel grant and access to free abortion for women travelling to Great Britain
for terminations.
The law on the importation of abortion medication to NI has not changed.
Following a referendum in Ireland on 25th May, 2018, in which two thirds of the elector-
ate voted to abolish the eighth Amendment, the right to abortion in the first twelve weeks
of pregnancy, for any reason, became legal in the Irish Republic on 1st January 2019. The
enabling legislation also repealed the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Act (2013).
In April 2018, Speaking of IMELDA went on a Referendum Road Trip in the South
West and West of Ireland, performing alongside sixty five local activists, singers, song-­
writers and film makers working for repeal. Four films recording these encounters reflecting
the deep and broad cultural change that was manifested in the referendum result are on our
website at www.speakingofimelda.org/referendum.

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41
 1.2
ANIMAL LIBERATION
Will Boisseau

Moral concern about the relationship between human and non-human animals has a long
history which extends to philosophers such as Pythagoras and the growth of Jainism,
­Buddhism and Hinduism. The first organised animal welfare societies emerged in Britain in
the 1820s, including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA),
which wanted animals to be treated ‘humanely’ while avoiding ‘unnecessary’ suffering, al-
though the RSPCA did not campaign against vivisection or the meat industry. The radical
animal liberation movement which aimed to undertake direct action to save the lives of
animals while causing economic sabotage to the industries that exploited animals developed
in Britain during the 1960s within the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) and expanded in
the mid-1970s with the formation of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).
Since the 1970s, the animal liberation movement grew to become one of the most signif-
icant social movements in Western Europe and North America; in the early 1980s, animal
liberation activists in the UK undertook ‘more direct action and caused more physical and
financial damage than the entire British revolutionary left put together’ (Law, 1982, p. 23).
The animal liberation movement inspired new generations of activists to broaden their ac-
tion repertoire. Radical environmentalists such as Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front
(ELF) took ‘inspiration and courage’ from the ‘ambitious direct action culture surrounding
the ALF’ (Tsolkas, 2015). New tactical advances were inspired by Stop Huntingdon Animal
Cruelty (SHAC), who worked as an above-ground group, while the ALF undertook illegal
direct action against the targets publicised by SHAC. It was partly the fear of these tactics
spreading to other revolutionary groups that led to an international state crackdown on ani-
mal liberation activism. In America, the FBI took extensive and costly action to try and halt
the rise of the ALF and ELF (Potter). In Britain, the convictions of animal liberation activists
under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act have been described by Corporate Watch
(2009) as ‘one of the worst injustices in the recent history of the UK’s political prosecutions’
(pp. 6–7). The repression, which in America included the imprisonment of a researcher for
refusing to testify to a federal grand jury (Scarce, 2005), has led to a recent decline in ­m ilitant
forms of direct action and a rise in educational work (Starr et al., 2008, p. 267). If the animal
liberation protest cycle which began in the mid-1970s with the formation of the ALF is ex-
periencing a trough in the mid-2010s, then the growth and mainstreaming of veganism may
be regarded as one unexpected residue of animal liberation activism.

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 Animal Liberation

Despite the advances made, and the risks undertaken, by animal liberation activists, the
movement remains dogged with accusations that it represents bourgeois reformism and that
animal activists are ‘predominantly middle class, overwhelmingly white and privileged, in-
sensitive to class oppression and the lack of diversity within their movements’ (Best, 2014,
p. 85). In response to these criticisms, new animal liberation activism focuses on concepts
such as total liberation and the intersectionality of human, animal and Earth liberation.
This chapter is divided into four key sections. First, we consider the principal concerns
of the movement; the second section considers the movement’s action repertoire; the third
section looks at the main concepts that uphold the current animal liberation movement; and
the final section considers the radical political theories which relate to animal liberation in-
cluding ecofeminism, anarchism and critical animal studies (CAS).
The chapter focuses on animal liberation groups who directly rescue animals from places
of abuse or cause economic sabotage to companies which profit from animal abuse. The
main groups we will consider are the ALF and SHAC. There are also many different animal
liberation groups, for instance, those who seek to cause physical harm to animal abusers
like the Animal Rights Militia (ARM), Justice Department and Animal Liberation Brigade
(ALB); those who focus on a single issue such as the HSA; prisoner support groups such as
Bite Back and the Animal Liberation Front Supporters’ Group (ALF SG); groups who pro-
mote nonviolent direct action and open rescue such as Direct Action Everywhere (DxE); in-
ternational direct action groups such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and groups,
connected with animal liberation, who promote veganism such as Food Not Bombs.
Before considering the movement’s key concepts, the distinction between the animal
liberation movement and groups associated with animal welfare and animal rights is worth
noting. The animal welfare movement, connected with the RSPCA in Britain and The
Humane Society of the United States in America, believes that animals should be treated
humanely while avoiding unnecessary suffering, a belief in animal welfare means that ani-
mals can still be consumed as food, hunted or used in experiments but that this should not be
done with gratuitous or unnecessary violence. An animal rights position, as represented by
groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), states that animals should
not be used instrumentally as a means to human ends under any circumstances (Singer, 1995;
Regan, 2004; Francione, 2010). Finally, an animal liberation approach accepts the premise of
animal rights, but focuses on the domestication of animals and has adopted tactics including
direct action and the liberation of animals. Steven Best (2014) explains that while liberation-
ists ‘often rely on rights-based assumptions while upholding abolitionists’ goals’, they also
aim to ‘free animals from captivity and to attack exploiters through various means’ including
diverse forms of direct action and economic sabotage (p. 82).

Concerns
The animal liberation movement emerged from the hunt saboteurs’ movement in Britain,
and as such, the hunting of animals for fun was the first concern of the movement. The ALF
widened the scope of animal liberationists to target the vivisection industry, and ultimately
the ALF aimed to ‘liberate animals from [all] places of abuse’, including laboratories, factory
farms, fur farms, circuses and pet shops, and to ‘inflict economic damage to those who profit
from the misery and exploitation of animals’ (ALF, undated b). Soon, animal liberationists
were concerned by the countless ways that animals are exploited by the ‘animal-industrial
complex’ (Twine, 2012). The animal liberation movement has broadened its concern to the
interrelation of human, animal and Earth liberation; this includes the connections between

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the meat industry and world hunger, and the links between the meat and dairy industries
and climate change. Of course, some human issues were always embedded within the animal
liberation movement, for instance, the first hunt saboteurs in Britain took pride in the class
conflict with upper-class hunters involved in sabbing.
The principal concern of the HSA in Britain is disrupting hunts in order to prevent the
fox, or other targeted animal, being killed. Hunt sabs act nonviolently but are prepared
to use self-defence if necessary. Hunts are often disrupted by activists spraying false scent,
perhaps using garlic water, calling off the hounds or otherwise distracting hunters (HSA,
1987). Activists involved in sabbing take great pride that their direct action makes an imme-
diate and visible impact, as one activist explained: ‘what you do in that day directly effects
something’s life, you know, quite often you’ll see the animal you saved, you’ll see it running
away… It’s still quite satisfying to know that what you did there and then saved that crea-
ture’s life’ (interview with hunt sab).
As we will see, it is often the experiences of activists in the field that shape the movement’s
political theory. In Britain, hunt sabbing has been an uncontroversial issue for the animal lib-
eration movement; such activism involves conflicts with the police, the class enemy and the
establishment. However, the issue of hunting becomes more controversial when it is carried
out by indigenous communities across the world for food and sustenance. There have been
fierce debates within the animal liberation movement about the hunting practices of indige-
nous peoples such as the Inuits and the lack of class awareness or intersectionality shown by
some animal rights activists.
For many activists who have felt compelled to take part in clandestine direct action, ‘there
is something about vivisection that strikes a deeper chord’ than other animal issues (Mann,
undated). It is not just activists, but theorists as well, who believe that vivisection is some-
what unique within animal advocacy. For Gary Francione (2010), ‘it is the use of animals
in medical research, above all other uses, that compels us to think carefully about the moral
status of animals’ (p. 4). Mark Rowlands (2002) argues that the issue of animal experimen-
tation seems unique because ‘the moral case for vivisection seems much stronger than the
case for animal husbandry. With animal husbandry then it is pretty clear that only trivial
human interests are at stake. But with vivisection, it could be argued that the human inter-
ests involved are genuinely vital ones’ (p. 126). Ultimately, Rowlands argues that humans
have no vital interest in vivisection. The antivivisection movement has initiated worldwide
campaigns which often focus on one company at a time which will be targeted by boycotts,
petitions, blockades, home demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns until they cut their
links with the vivisection industry. For instance, one global campaign has focused on Air
France, which is the last major airline to transport non-human primates to animal experi-
mentation laboratories.
Some animal liberation activists also engage in vegan outreach, which means encourag-
ing people to adopt a vegan diet by providing sample vegan food, often at vegan festivals
and fairs but also as part of wider political campaigns such as Food Not Bombs. Encouraging
people to become vegan or vegetarian has always been a significant part of the animal lib-
eration movement and since the mid-2000s (after the state crackdown on animal liberation
activism in the UK, USA and Europe), activists have placed great significance on this side
of their campaigning. Perhaps it is unsurprising that animal liberation activists have focused
on the meat industry because far more animals are involved in the meat and dairy industry
than are affected by vivisection or hunting. Eating animals is the most common relationship
that most humans have with other species, and ‘globally, 99 per cent of all domesticates are
commodities in animal agriculture… caught in relations of human domination that involve

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their exploitation and oppression’ (Cudworth, 2011, p. 106). Animal liberationists, and other
strands of the animal advocacy spectrum, believe that they must work with urgency to pro-
tect animals, not only because approximately 70 billion farm animals are now ‘produced’
for food worldwide every year, but because the planet is facing the worst extinction crisis in
65 million years, and at least 10,000 species become extinct annually (Compassion in World
Farming; WWF).
Animal liberationists are not solely concerned with ‘animal issues’; instead, the current
animal liberation movement has focused on the intersections of human, animal and Earth
oppression, often using the concept of total liberation. For instance, animal liberationists
highlight the damaging effect that the meat and dairy industry has upon global food distri-
bution and the environment. Animal liberationists, and other animal activists, are concerned
about a number of environmentally damaging aspects of livestock agriculture, including
erosion, air and water pollution, deforestation and fresh water scarcity. The most notable
connection is the contribution of the livestock sector to greenhouse gas emissions. The
­Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that ‘agricultural emissions account
for 10–12 per cent of the global total and that by 2030 agricultural emissions are projected to
grow by 36–63 per cent’ (Garnett, 2010, p. 36).
Animal liberation theorist David Nibert argues that people should go vegan because at a
time when half of the world’s population are living in water-stressed areas, most of the fresh
water of the world is being used for animal feed (Nibert, Entangled). Nibert also explains that
70% of all agricultural land on the planet is being used to produce animal products, whereas
a widespread move to a non-meat and dairy system would be more efficient in combating
world hunger (ibid.). Nibert also highlights that it is capitalism, rather than the meat and
dairy industry alone, which is the cause of systemic food injustices. Animal liberation activ-
ists, often influenced by anarchism and other leftist philosophies, have linked animal abuse
to a drive for profit and the greed that they see as inherent in the current system. Activists
have used these opportunities to challenge the primacy of free market economics. Anarchist
animal liberationists have also highlighted the fact that governments in Western Europe and
the USA provide large subsidies to farmers to maintain the animal-industrial complex.

Actions
Before looking at the key concepts and theories behind the animal liberation movement, it is
important to consider the action repertoire associated with these groups. This is significant
because such actions – most notably the use of direct action – represent a core part of the
movement’s collective identity. David Pellow (2014) describes the use of direct action in an-
imal and Earth liberation as ‘a defining feature of their cultures of resistance – those shared
understandings, ideas and knowledge that inform and support individual and collective
practices of dissent’ (p. 127). Alongside the use of direct action, we also consider the use of
consensus decision-making, affinity groups and a non-hierarchical organisational structure.
Such actions and structures link animal liberation with anarchist tactical and p­ hilosophical
practices.
Direct action, which is an ‘action without intermediaries, whereby an individual or a
group uses their own power and resources to change reality in a desired direction’ and which
demands ‘taking social change into one’s own hands, by intervening directly in a situa-
tion rather than appealing to an external agent (typically a government) for its rectification’
­(Gordon, 2008, p. 17), has traditionally been associated with anarchism, and anarchists ‘take
great pride’ in this connection (Franks, 2006, p. 115).

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 Will Boisseau

Direct action for animals is associated with the formation of the ALF in 1976, although
such tactics were developed during the 1960s within the HSA. By 1972, members of the HSA
‘decided more militant action was needed’ than the nonviolent disruption of hunts, and so
a small group of activists formed the Band of Mercy, who engaged in property damage in
defence of animals (ALF, undated, pp. 3–4). The Band of Mercy, named after a nineteenth-­
century RSPCA youth group, began their campaign by ‘destroying guns and sabotaging
hunter’s vehicles by breaking windows and slashing tyres’ (ibid.). The group, including ALF
founder Ronnie Lee, expanded their attention to other areas of animal abuse, and received
national attention by burning seal hunting boats and expanding their arson campaign to
pharmaceutical laboratories. Lee and fellow activist Cliff Goodman were ­arrested for this
liberation and sabotage campaign, and on Lee’s release from jail, the ALF was formed.
As the animal liberation movement’s use of direct action grew, it came to represent more
than just a tactic; instead, it became a ‘process whereby activists develop decentralized and
egalitarian politics based on cells, affinity groups, and consensus decision-making models’
(Nocella, 2011, p. 16). The animal liberation action repertoire emerged from the mid-1970s
from a process of trial and error, while individuals and groups built up confidence and trust;
although Ronnie Lee and the ALF founders also possessed ‘a good knowledge of the tactics
of other revolutionary groups’, Lee was particularly inspired by the Angry Brigade who were
an urban guerrilla group responsible for a series of politically motivated bombings in Britain
during the early 1970s (Mann, 2007, p. 51).
The earliest animal liberation tactics focused on directly sabotaging the apparatus used
in animal abuse; this included arson against hunters’ vehicles and breaking equipment in
industries which profit from animal exploitation. Animal liberationists also rescued ani-
mals directly from places of abuse to free the animals where possible, or place them in safe
homes when necessary. By the late 1980s, these tactics had led to the arrest and long-term
imprisonment of leading ALF activists, and some in the movement felt that a relatively small
number of animals were rescued for the high risks of imprisonment, and that companies
could swiftly carry on without long-lasting damage to their profits. In the 1990s, campaigns
were launched with the aim of closing down animal-abusing companies, such as Save the
Newchurch Guinea Pigs. In 1999, the Hill Grove Cat farm was forced to close after a two-
year campaign of pickets, property damage and liberations (Malle, 2002). Following this
success, SHAC was formed in November 1999. SHAC set a three-year target to close down
Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), the largest animal-testing corporation in Europe. SHAC
aimed to achieve this by directly targeting investors and business partners (Crimethinc,
2006). Throughout this campaign, the SHAC model was developed:

The idea was to focus specifically on the corporation’s finances, utilizing the tactics
that had closed small businesses to shut down an entire corporation. Activists set out to
isolate HLS by harassing anyone involved with any corporation that did business with
them. The role of SHAC as an organization was simply to distribute information about
potential targets and report on actions as they occurred.
(Crimethinc, 2006)

Animal liberationists would target these companies through office demonstrations, home
demonstrations, threatening phone calls and emails. The activists ‘would target compa-
nies until the point when they said they would stop working with Huntingdon’, and
would then move on to other targets (interview with activist). Through these actions, over
270 companies cut their links with HLS (Upton, 2011), and ‘the company’s share price,

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 Animal Liberation

worth around £300 in the 1990s, fell to £1.75 in January 2001, stabilizing  at 3 pence
by mid-2001’ (Crimethinc, 2006).
SHAC activists often participated in home demonstrations targeting people who profited
from animal abuse. SHAC ran a home demonstration campaign against Andrew Baker, the
principal investor in HLS. The home demonstrations provided an opportunity, like hunt
sabotage, to confront the opposition in their own territory and as such exposed ‘single-issue
activists to the interconnections of the ruling class’ (Crimethinc, 2006). Although SHAC
acted as an above-ground, legal body, who promoted information on their website with
the disclaimer that threatening actions should not be undertaken, SHAC activists received
lengthy prison sentences and this caused the group to disband in August 2014.
Animal liberationists have made use of affinity groups. The affinity group has become an
established anarchist approach, through which activists can ‘avoid the necessity of coordinat-
ing action, relying instead on a small, tightly knit group [typically between 6–12 members] in
which consensus is most readily available’ (Cohn, 2006, p. 205). The affinity group has been
regarded by animal liberationists as ‘better suited to carrying off daring and decisive a­ ctions’
which it would not be possible for ‘the masses’ to ‘accomplish spontaneously’ (Skirda, 2001,
p. 83). This small group structure lessens ‘the chances of internal hierarchies developing’ and
increases the likelihood of achieving consensus (Wilson and Kinna, 2012, p. 330).
Animal liberation has also been associated with consensus decision-making which
is a method of decision-making which is designed to produce ‘non-hierarchical and non-­
authoritarian’ outcomes ‘because everyone agrees’ to decisions (in theory, at least) (Wilson and
Kinna, 2012, p. 335). Meetings using consensus must be facilitated ‘to ensure everyone’s voice
is heard’ by using ‘tools and procedures’ to help groups ‘reach decisions in a collective way’
(ibid.). The use of consensus by animal liberationists connects the movement to anarchist the-
ories and tactics, because consensus has not only ‘come to be seen as a fundamental principle of
anarchism’, but for many anarchists, ‘consensus and anarchism are all but synonymous’ (ibid.).

Concepts
In this section, we consider the key concepts which shape the animal liberation movement;
these ideas both help inform activism and are shaped by activist’s experiences. The concepts
are speciesism, total liberation, intersectionality, opposition to the state, anticapitalism and
ecology.
The concept of speciesism was first used by Richard Ryder, and developed throughout the
1970s to situate animal exploitation alongside other forms of prejudice, such as racism and sex-
ism. The concept of speciesism suggested that it was irrational to use species membership as an
arbitrary cut-off for moral inclusion, when more significant characteristics, such as the ability
to feel pain, cut across species divides (Ryder, 1975, 2000). As Peter Singer (1995) explained,

Speciesism… is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of

one’s own species and against those of members of other species. It should be obvious that
the fundamental objections to racism and sexism… apply equally to speciesism. If pos-
sessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his
or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?
(p. 6)

Speciesism remains a significant concept for the animal liberation movement; however,
this is not to say that current animal liberation activists interpret the idea in exactly the

47
 Will Boisseau

same way as Ryder and Singer. In particular, many animal liberationists feel that Ryder and
­Singer’s version of speciesism does not fully take into account intersectionality. For instance,
­David Pellow (2014) rejects the original use of speciesism because ‘this is the kind of blanket
equivalence of oppression that is unhelpful for thinking about how power functions across
populations and for building coalitions’ (p. 44). David Nibert (2002) agrees that the view
that speciesism is simply a form of prejudice – ‘a view promoted by many advocates and
defenders of other animals’ – ‘hampers somewhat the analysis of the social structural causes
of oppression of other animals’ (p. 7). Animal rights theorists now often regard speciesism
as a system of oppression which shares overlapping features with other forms of oppression.
­Nibert (2002) explains that there are three elements of mutually reinforcing mechanisms
of oppression: first, economic exploitation of ‘the Other’; second, iniquitous social power
which is politically reflected and reproduced by the state; and finally, ideology which is
emergent from and reproduces economic relations.
The concept of speciesism has effected animal liberation activism in a number of ways. As
stated by Pellow and Nibert, it has caused rifts with other activist groups who do not see animal
exploitation as equivalent to racism or sexism. Animal liberationists who use the concept of
speciesism typically regard harm to animals as morally equivalent to harm to humans, and this
widens the tactical responses that might be used to defend animals. As ALF founder Ronnie
Lee (2010) argues, ‘[T]o say that the killer of a vivisector acted immorally, whereas the killer
of a Nazi people torturer didn’t, is to be guilty of speciesism. That’s because it would be saying
that the torture of humans merited more serious action than the torture of other animals’.
As this example makes clear, the concept of speciesism can be used to argue that violent
or coercive tactics can be directed at animal abusers as legitimately as against human abusers,
and this is reflected in the militant tactics of some animal liberationists.
The animal liberation movement is also informed by the concepts of total liberation and
intersectionality; both concepts have been adapted from ongoing struggles. Frantz Fanon
used the term total liberation to describe the intersecting struggle of colonised people and
working classes against colonial oppression. The use of total liberation to describe the con-
nections between human, animal and Earth liberation was developed by Steven Best (2014)
to argue that ‘human liberation is incomplete – as it would still be rooted in domination and
oppression – if it does not include these other facets’. Best’s theory is influenced by anarchist
thinkers such as Élisée Reclus, alongside more recent social justice movements such as ‘deep
ecology, eco-feminism and the Environmental Justice Paradigm’. David Pellow and Hollie
Nyseth Brehm (2015) believe that the concept of total liberation has emerged as a dominant
social movement frame due to the combination of radical environmental and animal rights
activists with ‘the politics of social justice’ (p. 186). According to Pellow and Nyseth Brehm,
anarchism is a central component of the total liberation frame, along with anticapitalism, sup-
port for direct action and ‘an ethic of justice and anti-oppression for people, nonhumans and
the ecosystems’ (ibid.). Total liberation is often understood as ‘intersectionality in action’, and
involves the development of ‘alternative ways of transforming social, political and economic
relationships and systemic structures’ (Nocella, White, Cudworth, 2015, pp. 12–13).
The concept of intersectionality relates to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) approach which
outlines the way that different social categories of power such as gender, race and class
­function in an overlapping way or rely on the same groundings such as dismissal of the ‘other’.
­Intersectionality could theoretically show how categories such as gender, race and class
­overlap, or focus on how intersectionality is experienced by an individual who is oppressed
in a variety of ways. Animal liberation activists often recognise that the first concept of inter-
sectionality is pivotal to understanding multifaceted systems of domination and attempting to

48
 Animal Liberation

resist them. An understanding of intersectionality helps to explain how these various forms of
oppression ‘intersect and are experienced as simultaneous, as opposed to the additive model
of experiencing differences’ (Fitzgerald and Pellow, 2014, p. 31). As David Pellow (2014)
explains, Earth and animal liberation activists believe that there are ‘multiple, interlocking
and reinforcing systems of inequality and domination’ (pp. 10–11). This understanding of
intersectionality is particularly developed by ecofeminists who explain how various forms of
systemic relations influence social life in different ways. The concepts of total liberation and
intersectionality are extremely important for the animal liberation movement because it has
led to a practical commitment to form solidarity alliances across social justice issues.
The animal liberation movement is anticapitalist. Many animal liberation activists believe
that the principle reason for animal exploitation is the drive for profit and the property status
of animals under capitalism. Bob Torres (2009) argues that the hegemonic order of capi-
talism means that society has ‘not only come to devalue our fellow humans and animals as
mere laboring machines, but we also are led to believe that this is the only option for human
survival and happiness’ (p. 6). Torres evokes the Marxist concept of the commodity fetish
to argue that capitalism has distanced customers from the products they consume to such
an extent that the commodity of meat is rarely connected with the living being who was
slaughtered to make the ‘product’ possible (p. 37).
Animal liberation activists have consistently highlighted links between the animal-­
industrial complex, capitalism and the state. Animal liberationists may take the anarchist view
of the state as a complex array of social and political institutions which uphold internalised
power relations and also have interests of its own; moreover, the state is a ‘psychological phe-
nomenon’ which creates a certain ‘way of thinking about the world and understanding social
organisation’ (Cudworth, 2007). Animal liberation activists argue that animal-­exploiting
industries are ‘sanctioned, protected, and funded by the state’ (Mann, 2007, p. 596). Indeed,
this seems to be the case when one considers the large subsidies granted to agricultural in-
dustries in Europe and North America. The UK ALF Supporters’ Group (2010) argued that

[t]he British Government has made it very clear that they are the friends of animal
research institutes and multinational pharmaceutical companies. This can be seen in
the way they have waived the rules and regulations in planning procedures, company
law and banking rules, amongst others, in the favour of these wealthy and powerful
institutions.
(p. 6)

Animal liberationists have combined their desire to end animal exploitation with wider
demands for social revolution. For instance, an ALF Supporters’ Group editorial in 2009
argued that

[a]nimal rights activists are well aware of the violence, lies and injustice of the lawmak-
ers. We have reached the state where we need revolutionary change. We have to sweep
out the old order of corrupt politics and corporations whose one guiding principle is to
keep their pockets full.
(p. 6)

As we have seen, the animal liberation movement is connected to Earth liberation and the
wider radical green and ecology movement and philosophy. The Earth and animal liberation
movements have united partly around their shared tactical use of direct action and belief in

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 Will Boisseau

total liberation. Earth First! activist Panagioti Tsolkas believes that the ‘cross-pollination
between anarchism, animal liberation and Earth First!’ is partly caused by influential ac-
tivists, such as Rod Coronado, who adopt these positions. Moreover, Tsolkas argues that it
was ‘the ambitious direct action culture surrounding the ALF’ which first lent ‘inspiration
and courage’ to radical environmentalists (2015). Animal liberationists may highlight the
environmentally damaging aspects of livestock agriculture, including the contribution of the
livestock sector to greenhouse gas emissions (Wirsenius et al., 2011). Animal liberationists,
combining these concepts, feel that only a radical and urgent resistance to capitalism and the
state, opposition to all forms of oppression and support for human, animal and Earth libera-
tion, can save the planet from complete environmental destruction.

Theories
The animal liberation movement has been influenced by different theories and continues to
feed back into the development of new radical political theories. The movement’s develop-
ment was partly influenced by the success of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, but this is not
to say that all animal liberationists would support a utilitarian position.
A growing trend of animal liberation scholar-activists is written and organised around the
CAS banner. CAS emerged as an independent field of scholarship during the 2000s to pro-
vide theoretical support to the animal liberation movement. CAS scholarship is not simply
interested in understanding the animal advocacy movement; instead, it also aims to promote
‘a holistic social justice struggle that includes and respects nonhuman animals’ (Nocella
et al., 2014, p. xxvii). The key concerns of CAS are support for direct action tactics, inter-
sectional politics, speciesism and total liberation. Many of these concerns were developed in
ecofeminist writings (Twine and Taylor, 2014). In particular, Carol Adams’ work The Sexual
Politics of Meat (first published 1990) helped develop intersectional theory to include other
animals. In fact, ecofeminist scholarship, particularly the works of Adams (1995) and Adams
and Donovan (1995), helped shape many of the themes and concerns of CAS, particularly
discussions regarding the intersectionality of oppression.
It is clear from the tactics, concerns, concepts and political cultures of the animal libera-
tion movement that the radical political theory it most closely interrelates with is anarchism.
And from the circled ‘A’ in the ALF symbol to the non-hierarchical affinity group structure
of hunt saboteurs and the opposition to the state and capitalism of the ALF SG, we know we
are witnessing an anarchist (or at least anarchistic) movement. Anarchists have traditionally
been able to include all forms of oppression in one overarching critique of state capitalism
and other forms of statist society, and animal liberation activists have informed the anarchist
movement of the intersections of human and non-human oppression. Anarchism is highly
open to intersectionality, ‘if not already characterised by it’, because anarchists challenge
multiple forms of hierarchical domination ‘around “race”, ethnicity and nation; caste, class
and wealth; formations of sex, sexuality and gender; colonialism, imperialism and warfare
amongst others’ (Cudworth, 2015, p. 93).
Anarchist animal liberationists are interested in the concept of speciesism when it is re-
garded as another socially constructed form of hierarchy which contributes to, and is fostered
by, hierarchical ways of viewing the world. Therefore, animal liberationists – including the-
orist Bob Torres – have contributed to Murray Bookchin’s (1991) work in seeing hierarchy
(meaning the ‘cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command’)
as more deep-rooted than the economic and political systems of class and the State (p. 4). In
light of this, anarchist animal liberationists – who focus on a previously neglected form of

50
 Animal Liberation

oppression – will be at the forefront of examining how the state relates to forms of oppression
that are outside capitalist relations.
Animal liberationists have seen state repression first-hand (Potter, Corporate Watch). How-
ever, anarchist animal liberationists have also been prepared to use bargaining positions created
by state structures in order to bring about benefits for animals. For instance, hunt saboteurs may
take police forces to court for unlawful arrest and ALF activist Barry Horne used his hunger
strikes in 1997 and 1998 to force political concessions. Animal liberationists are at the forefront
of tactical developments, and often feel that they have a special and urgent duty to use a diver-
sity of tactics to alleviate the suffering of animals. Animal activists feel this duty both because
of the extreme level of suffering inflicted upon animals, and because the animals themselves
are unable to formulate or prohibit any tactical suggestions, and so activists are wary of exclud-
ing any tactics on the animals’ behalf. Animal liberationists may believe that state structures
maintain animal abuse because ‘the physical, political, economic, ideological, and diversionary
power of the state support and build such entangled oppressions while giving such atrocities
legal and social respectability’ (Nibert, 2002, pp. 184–5). However, they have also recognised
that legislation acts as an important tactical means to bring about improvements as they con-
tinue to strive for more thoroughgoing revolutionary changes through direct action. Animal
liberationists realise that this is a time of urgency, for the future of the planet and for the peace-
ful existence of humans and other animals. In this time of urgency, they continue to adopt an
innovative and diverse action repertoire as they seek to liberate animals by any means necessary.

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 1.3
BASKING IN THE FIRE
Militant Antifascism as a Most Radical Gesture
M. Testa

Militant antifascists in Europe, USA and Canada have over 100 years of violent struggle to
reflect on, having faced ultranationalists, fascists, Nazis, neo-Nazis and a multitude of far
right groupuscules with more initials than members. Militant Antifascism is a broad and
fluid movement that rejects the ballot box approach to outvote fascism; that disdains state
intervention, knowing that heavy manners’ legislation against fascists will invariably be used
against them and whose political space is on the streets of their towns and cities which can
be viciously contested by the far right.
This chapter will show how radicalism is understood by activists in contemporary
­antifascist organisations; it will describe the various subcultures where many radical a­ ntifascist
activists come from; and it will put forward a class- not race-based explanation that the
­socio-economic crises in the first two decades of the twenty-first century are the result of
austerity measures imposed by a rich elite government backed by a privately owned news
media who have shifted the blame onto migration.
There are three distinct kinds of antifascism, by the state, by liberal or reformist groups,
or via militant action and we will give a brief summation of each. The principal concern
of militant antifascists is to smash fascism off the streets and physical presence, at marches,
meetings, pickets, demos and other activities, and involves time, money and effort. But
­m ilitant antifascism is not all so muscular: organising support in workplaces and commu-
nities, arranging benefit gigs and events to raise money for court costs, fines and petrol, as
well as prisoner support, all go on in the background, and are essential to successful polit-
ical activity. As is propaganda: with cheap technology and social media, militants can now
maintain contact with thousands of supporters, set up live feeds at conferences or counter-
demonstrations and communicate with others engaged in similar struggles across the world.
Antifascists come to a militant position by various routes, from other less aggressive
­antiracist organisations, left-wing groups, student or union activity, through anarchist and
far left groups, through animal rights and hunt saboteur activities, and through subcultural
scenes like the skinhead and punk music scenes. At time, antifascists have to cooperate with
people whose politics may not be the same, but to whom the threat of fascism is no less dan-
gerous. Finally, militants need an economic analysis of social problems and to put forward a
radical class- not race-based argument.

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 M. Testa

Migrants are accused of taking up housing, unfairly claiming benefits, overwhelming

healthcare and other public services, as well as ‘taking our jobs’, but housing shortages, bene-
fit cuts, the privatisation of health and other public services, mass unemployment, zero-hour
contracts and low wages are not because of ‘immigration’ as claimed by the right-wing press
and far right groups, but because of vindictive politicians and their decisions to extend ‘aus-
terity measures’ unnecessarily and continue to attack the living standards of the working class.

Introduction: ‘There Is No Freedom without Solidarity!’

According to the news media in the UK, an alarming increase in racist crimes was recorded
after Brexit and continued throughout the summer, with one attack in September 2016,
being particularly horrific: a white thug racially abused then physically attacked a pregnant
woman, kicking her in the stomach causing her to miscarry.
It seemed like politics in Europe and the USA were in a perpetual shift to the right, with
more intolerant and insular rhetoric, blaming migration and foreigners for every economic
and social problem. And it was not only politicians but media voices on TV, the web or in
newspapers, that were pushing this hostility, while in many cities and towns, on the streets
and in communities, there was also a rise in far right gangs, from Golden Dawn, the German
Af D (Alternative for Germany) or the English Defence League (EDL) and their multiple
splinter factions, attacking migrants, foreigners and political opponents.
However, in Greece, Germany and the UK, there are large groups of militant antifascists
who are ready to confront the ‘Euroskeptic, highly nationalist and far right parties’ and kick
them off the streets, a radical approach that dates back to the 1920s, when socialists, com-
munists, syndicalists and anarchists confronted fascist mobs with equal viciousness. These
antifascist militants also realised that accent and language now identified people as targets for
racists, and that ‘other Europeans’ were viewed with as much racist hostility as those with
different skin colour or obvious religious affiliation.

Militant and Other Antifascisms

This section will look at how contemporary militants continue the radical history of physical
opposition to the far right, and three different approaches to ‘antifascism’. First, though, it is
necessary to distinguish three types of antifascism that have emerged over the last century:
state antifascism, liberal or reformist antifascism, and militant antifascism. I will deal with
the first two before moving on to more radical positions, then look at some radically differ-
ing antifascist conflicts.
Between 1936 and 1938, British secret services were monitoring messages sent by ships
carrying munitions from Italy and Germany to General Franco’s forces in Spain, having
cracked the code with an early version of the Enigma machine, but this information was not
passed on to the antifascist Spanish Republicans who were being hammered by the contents
of the naval convoys. The conservative-led British state was monitoring fascist forces not
from any innate antifascist tendency: first, they were part of a non-intervention pact with
France, led by socialist leader of the Popular Front, Leon Blum, and second, they were more
fearful of the spread of Soviet communism and thought that Stalin controlling the antifascist
militia and army was more of a threat than Hitler or Mussolini, both of whom were supply-
ing Franco.
This bias is evident in one detailed history of the British secret service, 1909–49, where
there are no mentions of fascist leader Oswald Mosley, his British Union of Fascists (BUF) or

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 Basking in the Fire

British fascists in general. While Hitler et al. are briefly mentioned in passing, communism,
the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), the Soviet Union and Spanish Republic are
mentioned hundreds of times ( Jeffery, 2011).
In 1936, Mosley’s paramilitary blackshirts were banned from wearing political uniforms
which meant that the BUF swapped blackshirts for collared ones and carried on attack-
ing Jewish and left-wing targets as before. Then, in 1940, the British government rounded
up BUF leaders under Defence Regulation 18B, fearing that a fascist fifth column could
undermine the war effort at home. Mosley was jailed but later released. None of these ac-
tions were to do with the British state holding antifascist sympathies, but only a matter of
self-preservation.
In the 1980s, MI5 maintained surveillance of militants: Class War who were part of
Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who organised the Anti-Nazi
League (ANL), Militant and Youth Against Racism (YRE), and the Revolutionary Com-
munist Party’s Workers Against Racism and anti-deportation campaigns.
This indicates two things: that in the early 1980s, the radical left were focused on, and
more numerous than, fascist organisations; and that state agencies were concerned by the
far left much more than by the far right. After the 1979 general election brought the right-
wing Margaret Thatcher to power, and, more to the point, after several years of bruis-
ing ­confrontations with militant antifascists, the far right National Front (NF) went from
­increasing their electoral respectability to collapsing into bickering groupuscules, while a
nascent ­British National Party (BNP mark 2) and British Movement (BM) continued attacks
on left-wing paper sales, bookshops, meetings, demonstrations and gigs.
The state has continued its attempts to undermine the radical left and often act as provo-
cateurs, as exposures of undercover cops like Mark Kennedy in radical green circles showed
in 2011. Just because some dirty cops have been exposed, forcing the police to apologise, it
is unlikely that they have ceased their spying. The state prefers its own quietly sinister kind
of ‘anti-extremism’ by stealth, seeking only to maintain itself. Given this kind of history,
it would be self-defeating for militants to rely on any state that has continually tried to in-
filtrate, undermine and criminalise antifascist activities and must negate fascist provocation
themselves.
Historically, liberal antifascism has fared less well: bourgeois democratic institutions have
long faced the conflict between allowing fascists freedom of speech or legislating against
them, emphasised by the German liberals’ slogan about the Nazis before 1933: ‘We are so
liberal that we even grant the freedom to destroy liberty’ while leading Nazi Joseph Goeb-
bels also made his intentions perfectly clear: ‘We have come to the Reichstag in order to
destroy it. If democracy is stupid enough to reward us for doing this, this is the problem of
democracy’ (Ryan, 2001, 75). This is still a liberal conundrum, as Harris points out: ‘The
problem remains as to whether groups which openly abuse democracy in order to under-
mine it should have the same tolerance extended to them by the law, as they would deprive
others of it’ (Harris, 1994, 205).
For Harris, the Greeks managed to legislate by canny wording, as the 1975 Greek Con-
stitution states ‘that political parties must contribute to the untrammeled functioning of
democracy’ (ibid.) rather than operating to undermine it, although this has not stopped the
neo-fascist Golden Dawn securing seats in parliament.
Not only are liberal antifascists reformists, but they often collude with the state in or-
der to distance themselves from any violence. At an anti-EDL demo in Manchester, 2009,
anarchists and radical socialists were extremely critical of Unite Against Fascism (UAF) for
pointing out militants to police. In France, during the 2016 protests, reformist communist

55
 M. Testa

stewards from the CGT policed the anti-labour law demonstrations and tooled up with base-
ball bats and helmets to take on the anarchists and militant black bloc. Perhaps this statement
by UK anarchists clarifies the matter:

Anti-fascism, if it’s effective, is not just a problem for fascists, but a problem for the state
too. While liberal anti-fascists see no problem in reinforcing the state and aim to mar-
ginalise fascism through moral arguments, militant anti-fascists have a different agenda.
We don’t want things to stay as they are; we want people to fight for a better society.
(Key, 2005, 32)

For liberals, ‘the essence of anti-fascism consists of struggling against fascism while support-
ing democracy, in other words, of struggling not for the destruction of capitalism, but to
force capitalism to renounce its totalitarian form’ (Barot, 2001, 2).
Anarchist antifascists, in particular, do not see fascism as an isolated problem but as an
aberration caused by the failure of capitalism. Hence, they do not make demands for moder-
ate reforms: anarchists seek the destruction of the state in order to construct a society where
individual liberty coexists with communism and mutual aid.
Militant antifascism is a radical position that has to employ extreme and drastic methods
to counter the far right. ‘By “radical” I mean going deep down, below the obvious surface,
and seeing the most basic forces at work. And by “radical” I mean making the most extreme,
drastic, changes in how we look at things and what we do in action.’1 Militants have to un-
derstand that political violence is an unfortunate though necessary form of dissuasion against
opponents who are more than capable of instigating or reciprocating it.
Fascism has long fetishised violence: the physical over the intellectual; the martial over
the social; the hierarchy and order of subordination; and the uniformity, weaponry and
rhetoric of warriors. In the UK, the reality has frequently diverged from such idealism and
far right members have been exposed as sex offenders and perpetrators of domestic violence.
Militant antifascists must also engage in ‘contra-legal’ activity, and expect to disobey state
directives, bans, dispersal orders or prevention of access during demonstrations.
The majority of militant antifascist activities are in opposition to street-level provoca-
tions when the far right mobilises with marches or demonstrations. These are organised for
several reasons: to highlight or racialise an issue, i.e. immigration; to register dissent from
state policy, i.e. immigration; as a show of strength to either intimidate or provoke political
opponents; to generate publicity for an organisation or to gain support from voters for far
right political electioneering. Unlike reformist and liberal antifascists with their slogans and
party logos, many militants on counterdemonstrations, particularly anarchists, are not visibly
aligned to any organisation or public figures; they are not seeking electoral respectability;
they do not need favourable publicity for political programmes and are not out to capture
votes: they are there to confront and prevent fascist incursions into their communities.

Antifascist Action: A Global Struggle

The AFA banner is an international one, black with a white circle in the middle showing the
red and black flags of radical left solidarity, the AFA name beneath it. It was first unfurled in
Germany around 1932, when the Communist Party (KPD) organised militants into physical
force squads whose job was to protect workers’ activities and organise ‘action against high
rents, evictions and confiscations’, as well as pursuing a violent ‘fight against the National
Socialist threat in the neighbourhoods’ (Rosenhaft, 2008, 54).

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 Basking in the Fire

Since then, the design has been tattooed on militants, printed on clothing, sprayed on
walls, used as a book cover design and now flies proudly above the ranks of thousands of
­a ntifascists around the world. In the history of antifascism, different levels of intensity have
been required in the larger struggle against racist organisations, neo-Nazis or ultranation-
alists. By 2017, antifascists had been involved in protracted armed conflicts in Syria and
Ukraine, as well as violent street battles in Greece and the UK. These are very different and
complex situations, especially in Syria and Ukraine, where further confusion is caused by the
interventions of foreign governments, rogue militias and counter-insurgents. In Syria, mem-
bers of the progressive left-wing Kurdish militia are fighting against the Islamic State forces,
and have been joined by militant antifascists from many other countries who have also
flown the AFA flag over their positions. In the Ukraine, the armed struggle against Russian
ultranationalist aggression has been difficult and deadly, but Ukrainian antifascists resisted
and have flown the AFA flag over their lines also. The following section looks at these very
different scales of militant engaged in the struggle against oppression in all its forms.

Syria: Fighting for Socialism, against Fascism, in

the Rojava Revolution
In 2017, the fight against IS/Daesh in Syria had become an even more complex, dangerous
and shifting area of conflict with combatants covertly, and not so covertly, backed by inter-
national geopolitical and military interests. Militants from around the world travelled to the
Rojava region to join the People’s Protection Units (YPG) organised by the left-wing K ­ urdish
Democratic Unity Party (PYD) in the spirit of international antifascist solidarity but the
Women’s Protection Unit (YPJ) received more media attention. The mainstream press knows
little about radical history where women and men have fought together against imperialism,
patriarchy and fascism; the sans culottes of the French Revolution in 1789; the Spanish anarchist
Mujeres Libres; the French Maquis; or revolutionaries in Cuba, Vietnam, Ireland, Nicaragua or
Colombia. The images of the YPG/YPJ were also reminiscent of the Bosnian defence forces
in Sarajevo (1991–95), with their AK47s, camouflage and trainers. The red and black AFA
flag was raised in the Rojava by members of the International Freedom Battalion (IFB) who
formed the Bob Crow Brigade, named after the UK militant trade union leader.
But are Daesh fascists? The term ‘fascist’ has been appropriated or misapplied to des-
pots, crackpots and totalitarians who have little in common with twentieth-century classical
fascism which is characterised by a singular leader, a managed economy, social and sexual
conservatism, heavy militarisation and a convenient ‘other’ to blame for erosion of national
morale. North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq and Daesh have been called fascist despite their dif-
ferences regarding power structures, expansionism and economics. North Korea is an in-
sular nepotistic dynasty that keeps its citizens as a semi-educated urban peasantry; Saddam
committed acts of genocide against Kurds, Yazidis and others, and disenfranchised Shia’ah
Muslims with a brutality that also paralysed his co-religionists; Daesh have lacked a singular
totemic figure like Saddam or Kim Jong-Un with any longevity; they have occupied terri-
tory through fanatical violence but have no functioning semi-state like the Afghan Taliban;
and while fascist gangsters attacked opponents’ printing presses to create a monopoly on
information, Daesh may have elevated vicious executions into social media spectacles, but
any hope of a digital monopoly is unlikely.
Fascism’s economic model benefited both dictator and capitalist while enforcing an in-
dustrial class hierarchy to maintain the momentum of capital within that state and although
pan-European fascism responded to capital at that time but did not survive beyond 1945 once

57
 M. Testa

the economic context had shifted. Daesh generate capital from gangsterism, extortion, illicit
oil revenues and donations from certain states but wherever Daesh are based, a functioning
economy and legitimate business cannot go ahead: war is chaos and disrupts imports and
exports, while taxes levied on locals go towards military campaigns rather than education,
health or legal structures (all of which maintain and reproduce capital and workers). The
influence of Daesh may spread from North Africa to the Russian Caucasus, from Pakistan to
Europe, but there is no functioning state linking these areas into a singular economy. Their
influence may be wide but it is also diffuse.

Ukraine
In November 2013, when Russia annexed the Crimea in Eastern Ukraine, mass protests
were organised, some reaching 800,000. These turned violent, ultimately leading to the
resignation of President Victor Yanukovych who many accused of overseeing economic
decline, with inadequate wages and underfunded public services. His replacement, the right-
wing oligarch Petro Poroshenko, could hardly be welcomed by the left-wing activists who
fought in street battles against cops and later faced intimidation from pro-government fascist
gangs. In West Ukraine, there was widespread support for joining the EU, while in the
mainly Russian-speaking East, militias emerged, supported by Russian forces and Russian
materiel, which Putin denied. Cold War phraseology was thawed out and both the ‘Western’
Ukrainians and pro-Russians accused each other of being ‘fascists’. And there certainly were
fascists involved. On the pro-Russian side, far right mercenaries from America, Colombia
and Europe were bolstering the militias, with one American calling the Ukrainian Army
‘CIA backed Nazi scum’ (Walker, 2015).
In Western Ukraine, organisations like Azov Battalion, Right Sector and Bandera were
clearly fascist and ultranationalist, and used as militia in the armed conflict and then later as
street enforcers: in Rivne, December, 2015, fascist thugs assaulted a trade union activist; in
April, 2016, neo-Nazis attacked a commemoration in Odessa, while many who took part in
the right-wing coup gained influence in the new government.
In early 2015, on the front lines of the contested Donbass region, Ukrainian antifascists
were photographed with the AFA flag, slightly altered to read ‘Anti-Imperialist Action’ in
reference to Putin’s expansionist agenda. Activists in the UK organised support for The
­A nti-Fascist Committee of Ukraine to raise awareness of the complexities and ambiguities of
the war. Russia organised its own Anti-Fascist Committee which, bizarrely, included Nick
Griffin, former leader of the BNP, an example of how this confused and shifting political
situation refused any neat binaries of left/right or fascist/antifascist.
In May, 2014, the EU offered Ukraine financial support of $15 billion to stabilise the econ-
omy although this would be contingent on ‘reforms’ and a deal with the International Mon-
etary Fund. After their government took the stabilising package, the majority of Ukrainians
saw living standards plummet, public spending cut, national resources privatised and the econ-
omy opened up to larger outside interests. Despite continuing social unrest, the government
had little to offer but more austerity. Ukraine’s exhausted economy and shaken infrastructure
were now vulnerable to manipulation by outside interests, just as Greece had experienced.

Greece: ‘The Future Is Uncertain’

In Athens in 2013, Pavlos Fyssas, an antifascist musician, was murdered by a member of the
far right Golden Dawn party who was arrested near the site. Antifascist protests in the city

58
 Basking in the Fire

turned violent, solidarity demonstrations took place in many European cities and shortly
after, two members of Golden Dawn were shot and killed, with one other badly wounded.
Then, in September 2013, the socialist government brought charges against the leadership of
Golden Dawn in what looked like a government antifascist initiative to inhibit their growth.
As is often the case, far right parties in opposition can offer simple solutions to complex eco-
nomic problems that they do not have to actually act on, and that become attractive to voters
and Greece was no different.
In 2009, Greece’s debt crisis had reached a critical point and by 2010, general strikes,
demonstrations and riots increased in number. The bailouts from the European Central
Bank and the EU were contingent on successively severe austerity measures. By 2012, as the
economic crisis worsened, demonstrations became more militant. Prolonged austerity mea-
sures guaranteed a bleaker future and the resignation of Prime Minister George Papandreou
in 2012, and the collapse of the centrist government, saw popular support for anti-austerity
parties rise. This benefited the radical left but also boosted the far right and Golden Dawn
could claim 6.92% of the national vote. In the film Burning From The Inside, one activist said,
‘Greek fascists grew stronger because of the austerity measures. Social movements suffered
a defeat … and after, when ministers from Christian and Social democrats deliberately fired
up a discussion on immigration’ (Burning from the Inside, 2015).
As mass demonstrations continued to be violent, with street battles where anarchists and
radicals fought against fascists and police, it was little surprise that cops would side with Golden
Dawn. Police naturally tend towards authoritarianism, uniforms and violence against the left,
and in the 2015 election, which saw Alexis Tsipras of the radical left-wing Syriza party became
prime minister, it turned out that 50% of police officers had voted for Golden Dawn.
Not only did Tsipras have to deal with deteriorating economic conditions and mass unem-
ployment, but the 2016 refugee crisis also hit Greece harder than most EU countries. The ex-
tensive and complicated Greek coastline, an archipelago stretching across the M ­ editerranean,
and its proximity to the Middle East, made the country a primary destination for migrants.
Despite its own dire economic forecast, Greece still took in more refugees than richer EU
countries, but was clearly overwhelmed, with some places reaching crisis point.
Greek antifascists have been exemplary in solidarity with migrants stranded there, and
have distributed food, clothing and household essentials, organised free language classes and
held supportive meetings, demonstrations, gigs, cultural exchanges and other social events
to prevent migrants becoming isolated and vulnerable. In July 2016, leftist radicals took over
an empty hotel and turned it into homes for refugees. Examples like these show the kind of
social organisation possible within communities, supporting the desperate, while also fight-
ing fascists and the unwelcome attentions of the state.

UK 2017
As we have seen, antifascists are involved in highly volatile and dangerous conflicts, and as
stated earlier, militant antifascism is determined by the different levels of intensity required
when confronting the far right. For many militants, antifascism is a reactive force, escalated
or reduced to an appropriate level in order to confront the fascist threat. However, with in-
creasing strength, numbers and confidence, antifascists can become proactive, closing down
the far right’s political space and forcing them to withdraw from street confrontations.
As of 2016, despite 100 years of violent resistance, militant antifascism in the UK was rel-
atively benign compared to Ukraine or Greece. It is remarkable that there have been so few
fatalities: in 1974, Kevin Gately was killed when police attacked antifascists demonstrating

59
 M. Testa

against the NF and in 1979, Blair Peach was killed in a confrontation with police at an
­a ntifascist demonstration in West London. Gerry Gable, editor of Searchlight magazine,
downplayed UK antifascist violence saying that ‘the violence of most of these anti-fascists
was for the most part a punch in the nose or a kick in the balls, whereas the Nazis were into
killing or attempted murders’ (Renton, 2006, 172).
Throughout 2015 and 2016, UK neo-Nazis staged several provocative demonstrations
that ended in the worst violence seen for a long time. On 16 August 2015, a far right ex-
cursion into Liverpool ended up as an embarrassing disaster when the clutch of neo-Nazi
groupuscules found themselves surrounded by hundreds of locals and militants, before being
trapped in the train station as they were pelted with eggs, bananas and worse. A humiliating
photograph of a dozen or so fascists hiding behind a steel shutter in the luggage office, their
feet showing at the bottom, protected by a large amount of police was widely circulated.
Other fascists caught outside police lines found themselves outmatched by mobile groups of
militants. This was no ordinary antifascist demonstration with placards, paper sales and a
megaphone, but a large, spontaneous and successful response by the people of Liverpool who
had no intention of letting fascists march through their town.
On 30 January 2016, a far right demonstration took place in Dover that was one of the
few times when the two sides engaged in prolonged and vicious fighting. Even before the
demo started, there was a major clash when five coaches of antifascists and one of far right
supporters stopped at the same service station on the way, leading to arrests and police
preventing the coaches from carrying on to the demonstration. Despite heavy manners po-
licing, militants and neo-Nazis battled each other throughout the day, resulting in many
injuries and arrests. Members of the far right factions were filmed throwing rubble and
other detritus about, most of which landed on their own supporters, causing photogenic
head wounds for the mainstream media to publish and police to scrutinise. Although some
neo-Nazis wore masks, many did not and were happy to perform for the cameras, which
resulted in waves of arrests and harsh sentencing throughout that year: one fascist got seven
years for attacking a photographer, another got four and one of the ringleaders got two and
a half years. One antifascist was given four months but got out on appeal after a few weeks,
while another was jailed for twelve months. Arrests continued throughout the year and saw
many more fascists imprisoned.
True to the proverb ‘As a dog returns to its own vomit, so fools repeat their folly’, around
fifty neo-Nazis returned to Liverpool on 27 February 2016, this time managing to get out of
the train station before ending up surrounded by police for their own protection on the steps
of St. George’s Hall. There, objects and abuse flew freely as hundreds of locals and militants
surrounded them. One hapless group of Polish ultranationalists tried to join the main group
but were caught by militants and overwhelmed, only to fall out later with the English Nazis
over their Hitler salutes. Once again, this was a spontaneous, successful reaction by locals
and militants.
In April 2016, there were further confrontations and more than a dozen arrests at a Dover
demonstration, where once again the far rightists were kept under heavy police protection,
while antifascists, who outnumbered them at least three to one, tried to disrupt their march
by blocking the route. The day turned out to be a success for the police: they brought in
extra support and prevented large-scale confrontations between demonstrators; kept both
sides apart from each other most of the time; and arrested some neo-Nazis over the violence
in January, thus redeeming themselves after the embarrassing riot earlier that year.
On 28 May 2016, neo-Nazis organised yet another demonstration against immigration in
Dover. The local Tory MP wanted to ban it and comments on the local news website appeared

60
 Basking in the Fire

to support this. However, the day proved to be anticlimactic as only thirty neo-Nazis turned
up, two of whom were arrested, and the rest spent most of their time surrounded by police
whose high expectations of violence did not materialise. A neo-Nazi gig-organised venue
over forty miles away was poorly attended. The memory of recent violence did little to endear
the far right to the citizens of Dover or the truckers they were ostensibly supporting. Banning
orders, bail restrictions, lack of money and bottle meant that the size of the far right demon-
strations in Dover had reduced exponentially. However, this is not something antifascists can
claim as a victory: although reduced numbers at both Liverpool and Dover could look like a
lack of support for the far right and popular support for the left, this was a cumulative victory
for the state who took decisive action via the courts and large police actions, and although
antifascists could afford themselves a wee moment of schadenfreude, it was with the knowledge
that heavy sentences for the far right will inevitably be used against the far left at some point.

Tighten Up! Antifascist Subculture

This section looks at a subculture within a subculture, considering how music has played an
important role in militant antifascist politics. The various antifascisms attract many different
kinds of people for many different reasons, and militant antifascism is no different. How-
ever, it is possible to identify how contemporary activists can find their way into physically
opposing the far right.
People can come to militant antifascism through local, liberal antiracism groups or trade
union activities; radical socialist, Trotskyite or communist fringe parties; and, in the UK
particularly, from animal rights, hunt saboteur, squatter and anarchist groups. Also import-
ant are subcultural routes like the skinhead and punk music scenes. This is difficult to quan-
tify but we can trace the historical relationship in the UK between the punk, skinhead and
ska scenes, and militant antifascism.
In the UK, the black-clad anarchist style can be traced back to the stern English
­anarcho-pacifist collective Crass, whose radical antiwar/antistate/vegetarian agenda was
propelled by buzz-cutting guitars and military drumming. Many punks were radicalised by
Crass, however temporarily, while members of Crass had themselves been influenced by The
Clash. After 1977, as the music began to proliferate and evolve, many on the UK punk scenes
detached themselves from the initial amoral, political ambiguity of blank-faced nihilism or
wearing swastikas for shock value, and began to realise that a large, aggressive fascist party,
the NF, was increasing its presence on the street. Its thugs, along with neo-Nazi skinheads
from the BM, were attacking punk gigs, seeing them as viable, political targets. Nazis who
followed Sham 69 pretty much destroyed the band’s future through violence, while others
tried to break up gigs by left-wing bands. As Andy Gill from the Gang Of Four attested,
‘There were physical battles with skinheads. You’d get some of them turning up at gigs and
fighting with people’ (Reynolds, 2009, 113).
Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten said about the NF, ‘I deplore them. How could anyone
vote for something so ridiculously inhumane?’ (Birchall, 2010, 35), while many punks began
to support Rock Against Racism (RAR) and the ANL, both aligned to the Trotskyite SWP.
The Clash headlined one of the ANL’s carnivals; RAR gigs saw reggae bands and punk bands
touring under the slogan ‘Black & White, Unite & Fight’ and musical cross-­fertilisation like
feminist punks, The Slits, who mixed dub rhythms with splanky punk songs, and many other
bands put an obligatory reggae tune on their records. There was genuine unity between
punk and reggae musicians, while many alienated punks felt an ­a ffinity with black youth as
both were visually distinctive, frequent targets of police attention and subject to fascist street

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 M. Testa

hassle. RAR/ANL promoted antifascism in a diverse, positive way, with its supporters or-
ganising meetings, marches, demos, writing or selling fanzines, m ­ aking badges, fly-posting,
stickering, booking venues, hiring transport and hassling bands to commit.
Antifascists punks and black youth were not the only visible targets of fascist aggression:
paper sales, meetings and demos by leftist organisations, including the SWP which was one of
the largest and most active. The SWP began to organise squads of militants who were often
associated with local football or music scenes, to defend activists from fascist marauders. Bir-
chall writes that ‘the squads were in effect the all important physical force arm of the Anti-Nazi
League (ANL), launched in 1977 to counter the growing threat from the National Front.’ The
‘squadists’ organised regionally and began taking the initiative, kicking the fascists out of gigs
and engaging them at the street level. However, their increasing autonomy worried the SWP
Central Committee who ordered their disbandment and expelled the main participants. Some
of the squadists went on to form Red Action (RA), which was instrumental in organising AFA,
expanding militant opposition to the far right throughout the UK. AFA militants had clearly
learned from their time with RAR/ANL that successful, broadly supported antifascism needed
a multiplatform approach: AFA organised carnivals and gigs under the Cable Street Beat logo,
arranged fund raisers to pay fines and support antifascist prisoners, published magazines and
other propaganda and made a programme for BBC’s Open Space in 1993. The AFA network
covered the entire country, with each group having its own local identity.
The anarcho-syndicalist Direct Action Movement (DAM), now known as ­Solidarity
­Federation (Solfed), supported AFA – as did Class War, which drew in some of the
­anarcho-punks adrift from the Crass scene, and specialised in provocations like the War On
The Rich. Hann, half-jokingly, distinguished two dominant subcultures in AFA: ‘anarcho/
crusty types … who we nicknamed “Smelly AFA”’ and the ‘more casually dressed AFA mem-
bers who the Smellies nicknamed “Aftershave AFA”’ (Tilzey & Hann, 2003, 144). AFA was
fully operational from 1985 to the mid-1990s when the BNP, who had usurped the NF,
moved from street politics to electioneering, although the AFA Fighting Talk magazine con-
tinued to be produced for several more issues.
In 2017 in the UK, Anti-Fascist Network (AFN) is a mainly anarchist initiative that
developed in response to the sudden popularity of the EDL between 2009 and late 2013. Al-
though the EDL started a painful slide into entropy following the resignation of their leader,
several splinter factions emerged who were openly fascist and neo-Nazi. AFN states that they
are ‘non-hierarchical, will never work with the police and is not affiliated to any political
party’ (Anti-Fascist Network). AFN is usually at the forefront of activity in the UK, with
participants also involved in other political works: Brighton AFN is linked with the Cowley
Club, a radical autonomous centre that continues to host many punk gigs and fund raisers.

Stay SHARP!
The relationship between skinheads, casual racism and organised fascism is a prolonged
and complex one, and, as with any other subculture, there are significant differences in
beliefs, apparel and symbolism that are often only discernible to the initiated. Opinions are
divided: the Redskins, an SWP punk-soul band, had stated: ‘The misconception has always
been that skinheads were all right wing, which they were not. If you look at the Specials
audiences, the 2-Tone bands, Madness, there were a lot of skinheads, a lot of antiracist
skinheads and left-wing skinheads and socialist skinheads’ (Kowalski, 1986). While one
neo-Nazi band member wrote: ‘The [Chelsea] Shed End in the late ‘60s and early 70s was
skinhead city, Paki-haters every one. They embraced the politics of the far right, yet listened

62
 Basking in the Fire

to black music  … The Skinhead Moonstomp, Harry J and the Allstars … classic reggae
tunes’ (Ward & Henderson, 2000, 57).
Both opinions try to bend a shared, contentious history to their individual perspectives,
but at least they supply a binary of far left and far right skinheads, although the latter admits
the ridiculous contradiction regarding musical choice and racism. The two definitive books
on UK skinheads, Skinhead by Nick Knight (1982) and Skins by Gavin Watson (2007), both
­photographers, feature material from the late 1970s and early 1980s and only show a few
black and mixed-race gang members.
In 1982, some New York skins started up SHARP, or Skinheads Against Racial ­Prejudice,
to try to detach themselves from negative associations. Wearing the SHARP badge, which
featured the classic warrior helmet logo from Trojan Records, was an affiliation, a statement
of principle, rather than membership of a political organisation. It also served to re-­emphasise
the original skinhead connection with black London rude boys, ska and soul music. SHARP
skins are now prevalent in the USA, Europe and the UK and other skinheads in the USA and
have aligned themselves with RASH (Red and Anarchist Skinheads), or more local groups
like HARM (Hoosier Anti-Racist Movement).
Neo-Nazi skins started the Blood and Honour scene, which remains clandestine due to
harassment by antifascists and rejection by mainstream record companies and gig venues.
‘White Power’ music sounds like second-rate punk with Third Reich lyrics and a 4/4 beat.
Adherents wear a semi-paramilitary style of dress at odds with the more stylish wardrobe of
traditional skins. White power skinheads have tried to play down the influences of black mu-
sic (ska/reggae/soul) and ‘rude boy’ style on the original skinheads, while some have claimed
that being an antiracist skinhead is somehow contradictory, which only amplifies the reduc-
tionist views of outsider media. The UK and US punk and skinhead scenes overlap, as both
favour similar music. In the UK, The Oppressed brought the SHARP idea back from a visit
to the States. Original punks, The Angelic Upstarts, supported AFA in the 1980s and 1990s,
and singer Mensi presented an AFA TV documentary, Fighting Talk. Blaggers ITA were also
members of London AFA. In America, the Dead Kennedys’ classic song Nazi Punks Fuck Off!
seemed to sum it up for many punks and skins. Some punks have tried to remain apolitical
and the Cockney Rejects have been subject to fascist violence because of it.
In the UK in 1979, it was 2-Tone ska that united many skinheads, punks and rude boys,
in bands and in the audience: The Specials, The Beat, The Selecter fronted by Pauline Black,
and the early, heavier UB40 were all multiracial bands that mixed exuberance with political
comment. The 2-Tone label black-and-white graphics are iconic, and the irrepressible mix
of ska, reggae and punk has been adapted and adopted by hundreds of bands around the
world ever since.

A Class-Based Argument
This final section looks at how militants in the UK need to understand and put forward a
class-based argument, opposed to the race-based ones of the right wing, and see how eco-
nomics and populist racism become entangled and how migration is being blamed for the
effects of austerity measures imposed by successive governments.

Migrants Overuse Public Resources

After the banking crisis in 2007/2008, the government bought 83% of RBS for £45bn of
public money which, according to the National Audit Office, meant that the ‘unprecedented’

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 M. Testa

£850bn of support for the banks was ‘justified’ to head off the potential damage of one or
more of them going bust, and preserve people’s savings and confidence in the financial
system. Which means taking money from the poorest individuals who need it to survive
and giving it to the richest institutions, who don’t. The cost of this goes beyond quoting
numbers: it has had a sustained, traumatic effect on the working class as we can see with a
brief summation of UK austerity policy between 2008 and 2016. In 2008, the UK Prime
Minister Gordon Brown cut £20 billion from public spending and tax cuts, and began the
twenty-first century’s ‘Age of Austerity’. In 2010, the UK coalition government announced
a £40 billion plan of increased taxes and drastic cuts affecting public services, jobs, housing,
pensions and public sector wages. In 2012, the coalition announced an accumulation of £34
billion from welfare spending and increased Value Added Tax on consumer goods to 20%,
all of which negatively affected the marginalised, the unemployed and the lowest paid work-
ers. In 2013, home secretary Ian Duncan Smith said that benefits were far too generous and
aimed at cutting them by £20 billion. Then, in 2014, the coalition extended the period of
austerity until 2018, although this was abandoned by the Theresa May regime in July, 2016,
who stated that ‘we will no longer target a surplus at the end of this parliament’. While this
may have been a reversal of policy, it was not a reversal of misery: the accumulated cuts to
public spending of £120 billion over eight years had already impacted on the living standards
of the working class.

Migrants Sell Papers!

In 2015, the mainstream press printed headlines full of suspicion and fear: on 23 July, the
right-wing Daily Mail claimed that ‘swarms’ of migrants were desperate to get out of Calais
and into the UK then two weeks after reprinted the image of a dead Syrian child washed up
on a Turkish beach only to revert to their previous terminology of ‘invasions’ and ‘floods’ of
immigrants who were ready to ‘terrorise’ us. Daily newspaper headlines from 2015 up to the
Brexit referendum and beyond were frequently hysterical and matched the Leave campaign’s
‘Breaking Point’ poster that showed long queues of migrants poised to falsely claim bene-
fits and/or steal peoples’ jobs. Panicky reports were supported by selective use of statistics.
According to the Office of National Statistics, by the year ending March, 2016, 633,000
people had migrated into the UK, while 306,000 people had left it. The duration of any one
person’s stay will vary: some work short-term contracts or longer ones before leaving; others
stay, to set up a business or start a family with a ‘local’ partner. Therefore, the actual make-up
of the total is shifting and complex. In her 2016 conference speech, Home Secretary Amber
Rudd said that she intended to make firms register ‘international’ workers to stop foreigners
‘taking jobs British people could do’. Activists involved in the struggle against racism will
have heard this rhetoric before: Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown wanted ‘British Jobs
For British Workers’ in 2007, and the far right BNP agreed, but with the caveat that ‘When
we say it, we mean it!’

Migrants Cause the Housing Crisis

In December, 2012, then home secretary Theresa May said that ‘more than a third of all new
housing demand in Britain was caused by immigration’ and then in 2016 blamed the housing
market for being ‘dysfunctional’ and failing working people. Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Phillip Hammond, said that he would fund 15,000 new homes on unused public land and
give £3 billion in ‘loans to house builders to build another 25,000 homes by 2020’ which

64
 Basking in the Fire

was absolutely meaningless to the estimated 900,000 workers on zero-hours contracts, or

the 1.4 million on minimum wage (one of the lowest in Europe) and their dependents. The
government said that residents in housing associations may get the right to buy, which would
further reduce public housing availability. Austerity measures were imposed to deal with the
shortfall of money caused by government handouts to the banking sector, starting in 2008,
and this has resulted in enormous cuts to public spending, and migrants are being blamed in
the mainstream media for the effects of these economic decisions that have severely impacted
on the working class in the UK. Mainstream media also maintained hostility towards mi-
grants in the run-up to the Brexit Referendum and this populist racism helped the ‘Leave’
vote and data and numbers were selectively used to inflate fears of being ‘swamped’ or
‘flooded’ by migrants who have also been cited as causing a crisis in the housing market that
has actually been going for some long time.
In 2015, Yannis Varoufakis, the radical Greek economist, stated that ‘austerity is be-
ing used as a cover story to conduct class war’ (Stone, 2015). Bank bailouts, tax breaks
for multinational companies (i.e. bribes), tax cuts for the rich and individual tax dodg-
ers mean less money for public spending. Poor wages, longer hours, underfunding and
privatisation cause the NHS to be overwhelmed, not migrants. Low pay for teachers,
larger class sizes and shortages of facilities and resources are due to government policy,
not migrants. Local councils are strictly limited on how much they can borrow to build
new social housing, while building firms are given grants to build houses for the private
market. 42% of rented accommodation is substandard. This is down to government pol-
icy, not migrants.
Migrants do not impose ‘sanctions’ on disability benefits that lead to suicide and hardship.
Migrants did not create the need for food banks. Migrants do not pass laws that attack the
poorest in society; they are often the poorest in society. All of these things are what govern-
ments do, while blaming migrants for it.

Note
1 Wayne Price, email to the author, 2017.

References
Anti-Fascist Network ‘About’ https://antifascistnetwork.org/about/.
Barot, Jean, Fascism/Anti-Fascism, London: ‘In The Spirit of Emma,’ 2001.
Birchall, Sean, Beating the Fascists, London: Freedom, 2010.
Harris, Geoffrey, The Dark Side of Europe, Edinburgh: University Press, 1994.
Jeffery, Keith, MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2011.
Key, Anna, Beating Fascism: Anarchist Anti-Fascism in Theory & Practice, London: Kate Sharpley Library,
2005.
Knight, Nick, Skinhead, London: Omnibus, 1982.
Kowalski, Eva, Redskins Interview, London, 1986.
Renton, Dave, When We Touched the Sky, Cheltenham: New Clarion, 2006.
Reynolds, Simon, Totally Wired, London: Faber, 2009.
Rosenhaft, Eve, Beating the Fascists? Cambridge: University Press, 2008.
Ryan, Nick, Hateland, Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001, 75.
Stone, Joe ‘Austerity is being used as a cover-story for class war against the poor’, The Independent
25 September 2015 retrieved from www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/austerity-is-being-
used-as-a-cover-story-for-class-war-against-the-poor-yanis-varoufakis-says-10516247.html.
Tilzey, Steve & Dave Hann, No Retreat, Lytham: Milo, 2003.

65
 M. Testa

Walker, Shaun, ‘“We are preventing a third world war”: the foreigners fighting with Ukrainian rebels’,
The Guardian 24 September 2015 www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/24/ukraine-conflict-
donbass-russia-rebels-foreigners-fighting.
Ward, Colin & Chris Henderson, Who Wants It? Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2000.
Watson, Gavin, Skins, Shropshire: Independent Music Press, 2007.

Filmography
Burning from the Inside, dir. Marsia Tzivara, 2015.
Fighting Talk, AFA for BBC2 Open Space, 1992.

66
 1.4
THE RADICAL POLITICS OF
ANTIMILITARISM
Chris Rossdale

In 1917, the anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested in New York and subsequently jailed
for distributing information that told young men how they could avoid being drafted into
the US army and sent across the Atlantic to fight in the First World War (Goldman 1970:
598–623). In the early 1990s in the Philippines, a coalition of NGOs, environmental groups,
students, peace organisations and others, under the banner of the ‘Anti-Treaty Movement’,
successfully pressured the Philippine Senate to refuse to ratify the Military Bases Agreement
between the Philippines and the US, forcing the latter to withdraw its military personnel and
close its military bases (Yeo 2012: 35–62). And in 2009, the six men and women who would
later become known as the EDO Decommissioners broke into the EDO-MBM factory in
Brighton and used hammers to smash as much machinery as possible, causing over £200,000
worth of damage and halting the factory’s ability to supply the Israeli Air Force, which was
at that point engaged in a brutal campaign of bombing raids in Gaza.
These three examples, divergent in their means and particular aims, are united by their
opposition to militarism. Militarism is a social system of values and practices which promote
and underpin the use of military approaches to a vast range of situations. For radicals, it is a
system which provides legitimacy and energy to wars, imperialism and organised political
violence. As such, opposition to militarism has been an important feature of radical politics
and a key concern for radical movements for more than 150 years.
This chapter provides an introduction to the politics of antimilitarism. It is divided into
four sections. In the first section, I provide a more substantive account of what militarism
actually is, suggesting that it is useful to see it simultaneously (and co-constitutively) as
a network of institutions, a set of values and a series of practices. In the second section, I
highlight some of the political struggles in which antimilitarists are involved, outlining
both major areas of focus and more specific examples. Next, I turn to look at the theo-
retical influences and lineages which operate within antimilitarism. Making no claims to
be exhaustive, I focus on four particularly important traditions, these being anarchism,
feminism, religion, and anti-imperialism and antiracism. Looking through these theoret-
ical lenses also provides an opportunity to examine the terms of debates amongst antimil-
itarists, and I point towards some of these. In the final section, I look in more detail at
two case studies. The first of these concerns the struggles of people living on the Japanese
islands of Okinawa to resist the presence of US military bases on their land, and the second

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 Chris Rossdale

involves the Trident Ploughshares movement, a transnational network of activists who

take direct action to oppose nuclear weapons and other militarist infrastructure. These
case studies provide a closer look at the kinds of radical politics which have been discussed
throughout the chapter, while also showing how the theoretical lineages identified in the
third section find concrete expression and help us to better understand the radical politics
of antimilitarism.

What Is Militarism?
Militarism is best understood as the system through which military values and practices are
embedded within ordinary social relations, and through which societies legitimate and carry
out organised political violence. From this basic starting point, there are a number of different
ways in which militarism can be conceptualised, studied and resisted. Conventional accounts
have tended to focus on the ways in which military establishments have exerted (undue) in-
fluence over the political sphere, or on ideological principles which link the strength of the
nation to the maintenance of a strong military force (Finer 1962; Berghahn 1981; Brown and
Zanardi 2013). While these dimensions of militarism are undoubtedly important, radicals
are more likely to think in ways which recognise that those more visible features of milita-
rism are underpinned by a deeper penetration of military values and practices into the social
fabric (Shaw 1991: 4–28, 2013; Stavrianakis and Selby 2013: 13–14), structuring social and
political lives in ways which may not immediately be apparent and which are crucial for the
wider legitimation and normalisation of war, conflict and organised political violence. This
more sociological understanding of militarism has a number of dimensions – here, I suggest
that we can divide these into three broad and interconnected areas: militarism as a series of
institutions, militarism as a system of values and militarism as a collection of practices. After
introducing each in turn, I outline why it has been important for radicals to think about (and
oppose) militarism on these terms.1
Most understandings of militarism tend to emphasise how certain institutions connected
with the state, the military and arms production exert a significant degree of influence
on government policy and political life. While this is perhaps most obviously the case in
non-liberal states where there is a low degree of formal separation between the military and
the executive, the influence of militarising institutions on state policy in apparently liberal
states has been extensively documented ( Johnson 2006; Singer 2008). The best-known for-
mulation of such concerns comes from outgoing US President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell
address to the nation, in which the five-star general warned his country about the malign
influence of the ‘military-industrial complex’ which threatened to pursue its own interests at
the expense of peace, security and liberty. While Eisenhower was speaking in 1961, his con-
cerns are no less relevant today; the arms trade and private military companies continue to
exert significant influence on governments around the world, and military branches of state
remain powerful in both liberal and non-liberal regimes. Any critical account of militarism
therefore needs to involve an understanding of how these institutions function. However,
it would be limiting to view these institutions as the sole locus of militarism or to see them
as discrete entities which might be limited or restrained; this would be to miss the ways in
which they are embedded, draw legitimacy from and reinforce wider social structures. In
E. P. Thompson’s well-known formulation, ‘the USA and the USSR do not have military-­
industrial complexes: they are such complexes’ (1980).2
Beyond this focus on institutions, radicals concerned with militarism highlight how
­m ilitarism functions as a system of values and ideas. As Alfred Vagts writes,

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 Radical Politics of Antimilitarism

militarism is more and sometimes less, than the love of war. It covers every system of
thinking and valuing in every complex of feelings which rank military institutions and
ways above the ways of civilian life, carrying military mentality and modes of acting and
decision into the civilian sphere.
(1959: 17)

Most prominently, these systems of thinking and valuing concern the desirability and utility
of war and organised violence. The legitimacy of militarist institutions and the policies they
advocate depends on populations that believe that wars are (or can be) noble, just, natural and
effective. They also depend on a much broader system of values about the nature of power,
violence and humanity. For instance, Wolfi Landstreicher argues that

militarism is not just war as such. It is a social hierarchy of order givers and order takers.
It is obedience, domination and submission. It is the capacity to perceive other human
beings as abstractions, mere numbers, death counts. It is, at the same time, the domi-
nation of strategic considerations and efficiency for its own sake over life and the will-
ingness to sacrifice oneself for a “Great Cause” that one has been taught to believe in.
(2009: 85)

Others have pointed out that militarism also depends on ideas about the workings of gen-
der (in particular, the assumption that men are the natural protectors of women (Enloe
2004:  219)) and on racial prejudice and the benign or benevolent nature of imperialism
­( DuBois 1915; hooks 1995). These (and other) values function to legitimate and normalise
the status of militarist institutions and policies while closing down space for critique.
These values and ideas cannot be imagined outside of the array of everyday social prac-
tices which sustain them (and which they, in turn, work to reproduce). These practices serve
to cultivate communities and political subjects for whom militarised values and attitudes
attain the status of common sense interactions with the world. The most visible forms of such
practices are those which fix the status of the military in public life. These include public
rituals surrounding the commemoration of war and conflict, as well as those which celebrate
the ongoing role of the military as an essential component of the health of the nation. Large-
scale public rituals along such lines are frequently supplemented by a more general series
of injunctions to ‘support the troops’, whether through consuming certain products (Tidy
2015), supporting particular charities (Millar 2016) or refraining from criticising overseas
military action. However, militarised practices are not confined to degrees of support for
the military – indeed, there are few domains of social practice which are not militarised in
certain ways. For instance, many have highlighted the ways in which education is frequently
militarised – whether with respect to the kinds of citizenship values that are instilled, the
forms of aspiration that are encouraged or the kinds of history that are taught (Everett
et al. 2013). Others have pointed towards the militarisation of sport (Managan 2003), fitness
and health (McSorley 2016), entertainment (Bourke 2014: 159–219; Gee 2014) and so on.
Feminists have focused on the militarisation of familial and gender roles, which render
everyday life a site for the production and normalisation of (gendered) militarised subjects
(Cockburn 2012: 167). As with the discussion of values, the militarisation of these practices
intersects with other social forces and struggles – and so, for example, the militarisation of
citizenship runs alongside practices of nation-building, practices concerning the celebration
of the military often depend heavily on social and economic classes, and the militarisation of
recreation, education and fitness are highly gendered and racialised experiences.

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 Chris Rossdale

Militarism can therefore be understood in relation to particular institutions and policies,

to systems of values and ideas, and to everyday social practices. Clearly, the boundaries be-
tween these three dimensions are fluid, and it would be misguided to identify any of these
areas as the root of militarism; instead, a sociological analysis of militarism recognises the
ways these different aspects co-constitute to produce different forms of militarised social
relations. The particular forms militarism takes are therefore highly context-specific: how
militarism functions (and therefore how militarism might be resisted) change across time and
place. Despite that change, opposition to militarism has been a common theme for radical
movements and actors.
There are two major reasons why radicals have frequently chosen to focus their attention
on militarism. The first is that it allows a systemic critique of war, conflict and organised po-
litical violence, one that refuses to rest with identifying and opposing particular wars or acts of
violence, and which instead highlights how these particular events have their roots in wider
social structures and social relations. It does this while drawing in an analysis of imperialism
and racism, patriarchy, capitalism and nation statism, recognising how each of these gives
particular energy and context to militarism (without militarism being reducible to any). This
both sharpens a radical political analysis of how power and violence operate, and provides
opportunities to link struggles together through a collective opposition to militarism. The
second reason that radicals have tended to focus on militarism is that it opens spaces to link
these ‘big’ questions of war, conflict and social structure to more intimate forms of power
and domination. An important component of contemporary radical thought is the idea that
we cannot exist outside of or apart from oppressive structures, and indeed that we are always
to some extent complicit in their reproduction. Recognising militarism as a socially embed-
ded phenomenon allows radicals to resist large-scale social forces while contending with the
ways those same forces are present and open to challenge at an everyday level.

What Do Antimilitarists Do?

In this section, I identify a number of fronts on which antimilitarists oppose militarism.
These are by no means exhaustive, but they serve to demonstrate the ways in which a focus
on militarism connects together a range of issues. I show how these issues can be contested
in more and less radical ways, with more radical approaches signified by their opposition to
reformism, their moves to view particular aspects of militarism within their wider social
and political contexts and by their conception of militarism as simultaneously a matter of
institutions, values and practices.
Antimilitarists have been heavily involved in movements against war, conflict and the
direct exertion of imperial power. This frequently involves opposing violence that is being
inflicted on others by one’s own state, as has been the case with movements against the
Vietnam War within the US, against the occupation of Palestine by Israelis and against the
2003 invasion of Iraq by antimilitarists across the world. More commonly, it involves peo-
ple organising to resist violence directed against their own societies, whether by domestic
or international forces; prominent antimilitarist movements have organised on such terms
in Palestine, India, Tibet, Iraq and in countless other places. As well as opposing particular
wars and imperial relations, antimilitarists frequently target the infrastructural architecture
which supports such activities. Many of the most prominent antimilitarist campaigns have
focused on US (and NATO) military bases, with activists arguing that such bases (which are
frequently established without the consent of local people) strengthen US military power,
render the population around them vulnerable to attack and have a disastrous effect on local

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economic, cultural and environmental conditions. As such, antimilitarists have opposed

bases in locations including Guam, Japan, Ecuador and the UK (Natividad and Kirk 2010;
Cockburn and Ikeda 2012; Yeo 2012).
One of the central concerns of those involved in the sustained campaign against the
US base at Greenham Common, UK (1981–2000) was the decision to station nuclear
weapons at the site. Challenging the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons
has been a major focus for antimilitarist struggles in the past seventy years. Activists have
called attention to the ways in which nuclear proliferation radically endangers human
life while allowing certain actors to dominate the international arena (Hudson 2005).
Some of the key antimilitarist groups to campaign against nuclear weapons have included
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND, whose logo has become a near-universal
sign of peace), Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Plowshares Movement. While
the antinuclear movement has receded since the end of the Cold War (when hundreds of
thousands of people regularly demonstrated against nuclear proliferation), it remains an
important antimilitarist focus. This focus can be articulated in more and less radical ways.
For instance, the Greenham camp had a highly nuanced analysis which saw the problem
of nuclear weapons as ­indissociable from those of racism, the nation state and patriarchal
social relations, and as therefore necessitating radical political action and change (Kirk
1983; Cockburn 2012: 33–45). 3 In contrast, CND frames the issue in more straightforward
terms, as a stand-alone problem which might reasonably be addressed within the prevailing
political order (Hudson 2005).4
Another important target for antimilitarists is the international arms industry. The man-
ufacture and sale of weapons and other military equipment is an important enabling dy-
namic for conflict and political violence, and states with large arms industries (such as the
US, UK, Russia and China) are able to maintain their own military superiority while
ensuring international influence by supplying other states (Stohl and Grillot 2009; Chew
2012; Stavrianakis 2012). One major campaign against the arms trade has been the push by
a coalition of NGOs (including Amnesty International and Oxfam) to develop an Arms
Trade Treaty (ATT) through the UN; such a treaty came into force in 2014, and it prohib-
its signatory states from selling arms to other states if there is a risk that they may be used
to commit human rights abuses. While this has been hailed by some activists as a major
victory (Control Arms 2013), others have argued that the treaty actually reinforces a form
of ‘liberal militarism’, placing few new obligations on the actions of powerful states such
as the UK and US while legitimating the ‘humanitarian’ wars they have fought in recent
years (Stavrianakis 2016). Many antimilitarists have criticised the ATT on precisely such
terms, and have argued that a more radical approach to the arms industry is needed. One of
the most prominent groups making such a critique is the London-based Campaign Against
Arms Trade (CAAT), who campaigns for total abolition of the international arms trade.
CAAT works in solidarity with organisations and activists from societies under threat from
British-manufactured weapons, including Palestinians, Bahrainis and Kurds, in an effort to
limit British arms exports, while also working to challenge the wider legitimacy of the arms
trade (Rossdale 2019).
In recent years, antimilitarists have placed increased attention on the accelerating
­m ilitarisation and privatisation of policing and internal security forces. The War on Terror
and accompanying expansion of state security apparatuses has involved an expansion of sur-
veillance systems, border controls and police powers. Groups such as Stop Urban Shield in
the US have opposed the militarisation of police forces, arguing that the increase in the use
of tactics and equipment sourced from military contexts is leading to the (highly racialised)

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militarisation of communities (Stop Urban Shield 2016). In the UK, the NGO War on
Want has led a campaign against G4S, the world’s largest private security company, which it
accuses of escalating militarisation while profiting from conflicts around the world (Chang
2014); and while the militarisation of borders is by no means a new concern, European ac-
tivists working in solidarity with migrants and refugees have called attention to the intensi-
fying militarism of Europe’s borders (Akkerman 2016; Watch the Med 2016). Again, these
dynamics are framed in more and less radical ways. For instance, while Stop Urban Shield
situate their critique of police militarisation within the context of poverty and racism, and
call for responses embedded in community empowerment and mutual aid, Amnesty USA
have called on authorities ‘to foster representative, accountable policing’ and to ensure ‘due
process’ (Amnesty USA 2017).
Antimilitarists have also challenged the functioning of militarist institutions by disrupt-
ing military recruitment and conscription. The latter has been one of the most persistent
focuses for antimilitarists in the modern era; almost any attempt to raise armies by conscrip-
tion has been met by some level of resistance (albeit with varying degrees of organisation).
This has often been highly effective at weakening the military mobilisation of states, such as
in South Africa during the Apartheid Era (Conway 2012) and in the US during the Vietnam
War (Foley 2003). At present, anticonscription activists are particularly organised in Israel,
where military service is mandatory for all non-Arabic citizens over the age of eighteen.
Organisations such as New Profile work to support those who want to avoid serving, many
of whom then spend time in jail (Cockburn 2012: 65–68).
Conscription is far less common in 2016, and most states rely on volunteer armies.
­However, antimilitarists argue that recruitment processes are often highly duplicitous, of-
fering a rose-tinted view of life in the military, targeting young people (who are less able
to make informed decisions), and focusing recruitment efforts on communities with low
social mobility (Everett 2013: 61–93). Groups including Veterans for Peace (UK) work to
challenge the sanitised images of life in the military put forward by militaries in an effort to
hamper recruitment activities. Opposing military recruitment is often seen as an intensely
radical action, insofar as it explicitly refuses the idea of the state as a virtuous protector of
its citizens. Nonetheless, we can identify articulations which sit fairly neatly within liberal
political frameworks, such as campaigns against the recruitment of children into militaries.5
More radical positions, such as those adopted by Veterans for Peace, involve a wholesale
opposition to military recruitment that is intended less to reform the military than to un-
dermine or weaken it.
I argued earlier that militarism should be understood beyond its institutional config-
urations, and should be recognised as a socially embedded series of practices and values.
­A longside their challenge to institutions, antimilitarists work to highlight, subvert and
­resist these less visible but nonetheless integral features of militarism. Doing so is crucial;
­simply opposing institutions without challenging the social relations which provide those
institutions with energy and legitimacy is unlikely to lead to substantial change. For some
­a ntimilitarist organisations, undermining these values and practices takes place in tandem
with their institutional focus; for instance, the antinuclear and anti-arms trade movements
work hard to challenge conventional wisdom about the supposed utility of violence, and to
expose the incoherence of values which equate the possession of weaponry with peace and
security. Similarly, anticonscription groups such as New Profile and the End Conscription
Campaign in South Africa have highlighted how the legitimacy of conscription depends
on certain militarised understandings of gender and citizenship, which must themselves be
challenged as part of the fight against conscription (Conway 2012).

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Other antimilitarist groups place their focus more squarely on these diffuse values and
practices, rather than on particular institutions. The feminist antimilitarist organisation
Women in Black involves women around the world who hold regular public vigils, during
which they dress in black and stand silently in public spaces. While their vigils might focus
on particular issues (such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or nationalist violence in the
former Yugoslavia), they have sought to relate those issues to wider questions of patriarchy,
nationalism, domestic violence and so forth (Cockburn 2007). In the UK, one prominent
antimilitarist campaign focuses on the militarisation of Remembrance Day, a memorial day
established to commemorate soldiers who died during the First World War (and in subse-
quent wars). Activists have argued that the particular processes of commemoration, which
include the widespread wearing of red poppies, function more to glorify both war and
­British imperialism than to challenge it (Basham 2016). In response, the pacifist Peace Pledge
Union produces over 100,000 white poppies, which are worn in order to declare a public
refusal to participate in the militarist spectacle. The question of radicalism in relation to such
practices is complex. By itself, the wearing of a white poppy is not a radical act; indeed, inso-
far as it risks promoting a ‘clean hands’ attitude towards militarism and reducing militarism
to a system of value statements, the wearing of white poppies risks a certain conservatism.
The same might be said of public vigils. However, when mobilised alongside the kinds of in-
stitutional critique discussed earlier, these practices play an important role in the articulation
of a radical antimilitarism, precisely because they move beyond those institutional forms and
place attention on the values and practices which underpin and sustain them.
Antimilitarists also challenge militarist values and practices in more intimate and subtle
ways. It is a common practice in contemporary radical politics to recognise that resisting re-
lations of domination involves contending with the ways those forces are often present in and
reproduced through spaces of resistance. Radicalism in this context means not only contend-
ing with problems ‘out there’, but understanding that, at least to a certain extent, resistance
begins at home. This is one way of talking about prefigurative politics, the idea that radical
movements should seek to embody the change for which they are fighting in the means
used to achieve it. Antimilitarism has a long tradition of prefigurative politics, through
which activists have sought to avoid replicating militarised practices and values as they op-
pose militarism. This has involved working in non-hierarchical groups, using c­ onsensus
decision-making techniques, making nonviolence a central principle of o ­ rganisation, and
working to challenge racism, sexism and other forms of oppression (Rossdale 2015; 2019).6
More than this, it has involved the refusal to organise in a fashion which subordinates ev-
erything to ‘the Cause’ – that is, to guard against militarised ways of thinking about groups,
organisation and struggle. As Landstreicher argues, ‘to militarize this struggle, to transform
it essentially into a question of strategies and tactics, of opposing forces and numbers, is to
begin to create within our struggle that which we are trying to destroy’ (2009: 86). While
not all antimilitarist groups have an explicitly prefigurative dimension, and while the ­success
and failure of particular moves can be debated, it is important to recognise that antimilitarist
practice involves these more subtle dimensions even as it concerns those more visible features
discussed earlier.

Theoretical Lineages in Antimilitarism

The particular politics of antimilitarism have been based on and articulated through a
number of different conceptual and theoretical perspectives, which have determined both
what kinds of analyses and critiques of militarism have been put forward and what kinds of

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 Chris Rossdale

tactics and strategies have been developed in response. In this section, I outline four ­m ajor
political-philosophical traditions which have been influential within antimilitarism. While
the list is by no means exhaustive, it serves to demonstrate both the breadth of perspectives
on militarism as well as some of the debates amongst antimilitarists. These four traditions
are anarchism, feminism, religion, and anti-imperialism and antiracism.
Anarchism is a political tradition rooted in the opposition to systematic or illegitimate
forms of authority and hierarchy. Anarchists have tended to identify the nation state and
capitalism as the two most entrenched and violent forms of authority and hierarchy in the
contemporary world. It is on such terms that they have consistently and fiercely opposed
militarism, recognising both that the nation state and capitalism are underpinned by and
dependent on their ability to mobilise towards war, and that militarised social relations
are coterminous with entrenched forms of hierarchy and authority (Malatesta et al. 2005:
­387–9). They have also pointed out the ways in which militarism is highly destructive of
human autonomy. Rudolf Rocker argues that

Militarism is to be appraised first of all as a psychic condition. It is the renunciation of

one’s own thought and will, the transformation of man into a dead automaton guided
and set in motion from without, carrying out blindly every command without being
conscious of his own personal responsibility. In one word, militarism is the meanest and
most degraded form of that slave-spirit raised to the status of a national virtue which
despises all the rules of reason and is devoid of all human dignity.
(1937: 399)

Anarchism has played an influential role in the development of antimilitarist politics, both
with respect to the prevalence of analyses which link capitalism, the state and militarism
together, but perhaps more substantially insofar as major principles of anarchist organising –
including non-hierarchy, an aversion to representative politics and an emphasis on direct
action – have become a widespread feature of antimilitarist organising principles (Rossdale
2010, 2013).7 Part of anarchism’s particular force has been the persistent critique it has made
against left-wing or revolutionary projects which rely on hierarchical, authoritarian or co-
ercive organising principles; such projects may have noble ambitions, but will end up repro-
ducing domination (Bakunin 2005: 178). In the context of antimilitarism, such insights mean
that an anarchist lens remains attentive to and wary of the dangers of leftist militarism, that is,
of progressive or radical political parties and projects which mobilise militarised values, prac-
tices and forms of organisation, and which therefore help to reproduce a militarised world.
The impact of feminist thought and practice on antimilitarism has also been extensive.
Feminists have identified the ways in which wars and militarism are always underpinned by
patriarchal social relations, and argued that any effective opposition must account for the role
of gendered power relations in legitimating and normalising militarism. The main focus for
feminists has been on how militarism depends on, is constituted through and works to re-
produce particular relationships between masculinity and femininity (and between different
types of masculinity and types of femininity), all of these at some level institutionalising and
weaponising the subordination of feminised to masculinised subjectivities. They have placed
particular focus on how claims about the ‘protection’ of women has been central to the legit-
imation of all types of political violence (despite the fact that women and other marginalised
gender subjects are disproportionately likely to be harmed by conflict), and on how the cul-
tivation of militarised forms of masculinity plays a central role in the socialisation of young
men around the world.8 The recognition that war, conflict and organised political violence

74
 Radical Politics of Antimilitarism

cannot be understood outside of the everyday social relations which sustain them has been
central to the feminist understanding of militarism; feminists have perhaps gone the furthest
in uncovering how militarism operates in intimate and normal spaces in ways that ‘can make
everyday life feel like a battlefield’ (Cockburn and Ikeda 2012: 167).
Many antimilitarist groups have had explicitly feminist politics, through which they have
called attention to the relationship between patriarchy, masculinity and war, and worked to
support women (and men) resisting the gendered militarisation of their lives. The Greenham
Common Women’s Peace Camp was organised on explicitly feminist principles, with the
participants’ refusal to remain in their ‘proper’ place at home constituting a remarkable pub-
lic rejection of patriarchal and militarised gender roles. New Profile, the Israeli movement
which supports conscientious objectors, has an explicitly gendered analysis through which
it calls attention to the patriarchal attitudes which underpin the valorisation of soldiers and
soldiering (Cockburn 2012: 67–68). In 2010, War Resisters’ International, who campaign
for rights for conscientious objectors, published an anthology of accounts by women from
­Paraguay, Colombia, Turkey, Eritrea and elsewhere in which they detailed how their every-
day lives – as workers, mothers, soldiers and civilians – are militarised, and declared their
resistance to this militarisation (Elster and Sørensen 2010). Feminists have not stopped at
challenging the relationship between the state, patriarchy and militarism, and have focused
on the ways antimilitarist spaces can themselves be the site of oppressive and patriarchal
gender relations, challenging the assumption ‘that men in [peace movements] are some-
how different from other men and therefore exempt from oppressive behaviour and sexism’
­(Feminism and Nonviolence Study Group 1983: 44).
Religious thought and practice has had a major influence on how antimilitarism has de-
veloped, and for many antimilitarists, it is their religious convictions which give energy and
direction to their critique of and opposition to militarism, offering them moral codes which
stand opposed to the use of violence and which encourage them to work towards peace and
the pacific settlement of disputes. Examples of religious antimilitarism can be found in all
major world religions; prominent examples include Gandhi’s Hindu antimilitarism (Roy
2012: 219–30), the Khudai Khidmatgar movement’s resistance to British rule in India (which
was rooted in a nonviolent interpretation of Islam, Banerjee 2000: 145–66) and Catholic
Worker organisations in North America and Europe (Klejment and Roberts, 1996). All of
these movements have understood their religion in a manner which positions militarism as
immoral, unjust and even as straightforwardly evil.
Religious antimilitarism has been closely associated with pacifism, a philosophy which
maintains that violence is always illegitimate, even when used in the conduct of radical pol-
itics; this has led to some tensions across antimilitarist positions, particularly with respect to
the many anti-imperialists and anarchists who have hesitated to proscribe tactics that might
be used by people fighting oppression, even violence (Churchill 2007; Gelderloos 2007;
Rossdale 2019: 184–96). Debates here turn on what actually constitutes the more radical
position. For religious pacifists, in a world in which belief in the utility of violence underpins
manifold forms of domination, refusing to use violence is an intensely radical act. As the
antimilitarist Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan put it,

One is called to live non-violently, even if the change one works for seems impossible.
It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution.
But one thing favours such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything
for the better.
(1974: 52)

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 Chris Rossdale

For critics, an absolute insistence on nonviolence limits the range of tactics which are avail-
able to those fighting oppression, is inattentive to the dynamics of privilege which make
nonviolence a viable political strategy and introduces potentially authoritarian dynamics into
movements; or, to use Peter Gelderloos’ well-known formulation, ‘nonviolence protects the
state’ (2007). From this perspective, pacifism is guilty of a certain conservatism, while the
idea of ‘diversity of tactics’ holds more radical potential.
A fourth major tradition within antimilitarism has focused on the ways militarism has
been closely intertwined with the politics of imperialism and racism. Antimilitarists have
argued that the development of nuclear weapons and arms export industries, and policies
of foreign military intervention and occupation have been central pillars of imperial grand
strategy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While during the Cold War this criti-
cism was targeted towards the USSR as much as towards the US and its allies in the West,
today it is the latter group most likely to face these challenges. Antimilitarists argue that,
under the guise of liberal internationalism, dominant Western powers have sought to shape
the world in line with particular (neo-liberal) interests (Chomsky 2003). Beyond the focus
on grand strategy as a central feature of militarism, antimilitarists concerned with racism
and imperialism have highlighted the ways in which militarism is reproduced through hi-
erarchies of race (most commonly through some form of white supremacy) (Razack 2004;
Ware 2009, 2010; Thobani 2014; Inwood and Bonds 2016). As with the feminist critique of
­a ntimilitarist practices which fail to take account of gender relations, antiracist ­a ntimilitarists
have challenged movements to make antiracism an integral part of their activities. As far
back as 1915, W. E. B. DuBois recounts talking to a peace group: ‘I appealed to the last
meeting of peace societies in St. Louis, saying, “Should you not discuss racial prejudice as a
prime cause of war?” The secretary was sorry but was unwilling to introduce controversial
matters!’ (DuBois 1915: 712). More provocatively, bell hooks argues that ‘imperialism and
not patriarchy is the core foundation of militarism’, targeting her remarks at feminists in the
US who have failed to make anti-imperialism a core component of their activities (1995: 61).

Case Studies
The diversity of theoretical influences and political foci at play in antimilitarism means that
the particular nature of antimilitarism is dependent on and perhaps best understood through
specific contexts. In this final section, I briefly outline two case studies of antimilitarist cam-
paigns. For each, I identify what dimension of militarism is being opposed and highlight the
different intersections of theoretical and political concerns which animate the movements
involved.
My first case involves resistance to US military bases on the Japanese islands of Okinawa.
Despite making up only 0.6 of the land area of Japan (and containing only around 1% of the
total population), around three-quarters of the US military bases stationed in the country as
part of the post-WW2 security treaty are based on the islands (Cockburn and Ikeda 2012:
152–3).9 These bases have had a disastrous impact on local communities, who have faced
high levels of crime (including sexual violence) as a result of the bases, as well as environ-
mental destruction and pollution resulting from unexploded ordinance, depleted uranium
and other hazards (ibid.: 161). The Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Japan
has meant that US personnel have remained largely immune from prosecution for crimes
committed, even when suspects have been identified (ibid.).
The bases have been met with fierce resistance from local populations. At present, the
focal point for this resistance is the attempts to build a new base in Henoko to replace the

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 Radical Politics of Antimilitarism

despised airbase at Futenma. Local residents claim that this new base would have dire con-
sequences for both the local population and the marine environment. For more than fifteen
years, alongside supporters from the mainland (and some internationals), they have staged
protests, sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience. These have been successful in disrupt-
ing the development of new facilities:

When the workmen of the Defense Facilities Administration Agency (DFAA) arrived to
mount scaffolding on the coral reef, nonviolent direct action was launched, with people
swimming, diving and paddling canoes in the waters of the reef, while some occupied
the scaffolding. In September 2005, after ten months of confrontation, the DFAA qui-
etly dismantled its structure and withdrew.
(ibid.: 162)

Most of this resistance is coordinated by and carried out by local people, with some solidarity
from mainland peace movements. However, Cockburn and Ikeda argue that this solidarity
is limited, in a manner which can only be fully understood when understanding the colonial
and racial politics of the Japanese state.
Japan invaded and occupied the island kingdom of Ryukyu in 1609, turning it into
a vassal state. In 1879, the kingdom was incorporated into the Japanese state and re-
named Okinawa. The state imposed educational and cultural reforms to promote Japanese
­( yamoto) identity, marginalising Ryukyuan language and culture. As Cockburn and Ikeda
note, this colonisation and absorption is part of a wider history of racist domination in
Japan, in which the state ‘is continually represented in authoritative discourse as an “eth-
nically homogenous nation”, in systematic delegitimation not only of Ryukyuan but of
any other self-proclaimed minority identity’ (ibid.: 154). They go on to cite Okinawan
activists who suspect that, in order to make US military bases a non-issue in national pol-
itics and public consciousness, the Japanese state is happy to shift the burden of US bases
to Okinawa. Further to this, they feel that the mainstream peace movement has allowed
this move to happen, engendering a sense that ‘they will cry for Iraq, but not for us’
(ibid.: 165). It is therefore important to understand this case in the context of both imperial
and colonial frames.
It is also important to recognise the gendered nature of antimilitarist resistance in
­Okinawa. One of the focal points for antimilitarists has been the sexual violence that local
women have faced from US personnel. In 1995, three US marines abducted and raped a
twelve-year-old Okinawan girl, leading to mass protests against both the immunity of US
soldiers and the bases themselves. However, for feminist antimilitarists in Okinawa, the focus
is not only on violence perpetrated by the US military; such exclusive attention risks obscur-
ing the high prevalence of sexual violence carried out by Okinawan men (ibid.: 167–8). This
has been something that the mainstream peace movement has been far less keen to point
out, in a manner which problematically instrumentalises violence against women (which is
considered important only insofar as it can be used to challenge the US). As Cockburn and
Ikeda again argue, the

masculinized discourse of the mainstream movement can have the effect of further
exploiting the rape victim, making her body an object of the public gaze. Sometimes a
case of rape is used to legitimate a resentful polemic against “those” men trampling on
“our women”, and “our Okinawan land”.
(ibid.: 169)

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 Chris Rossdale

A feminist analysis therefore refuses the simplistic division of an antimilitarist ‘us’ and a
­m ilitarist ‘them’ and reveals more complex operations of power.
My second case study is the Plowshares Movement. This movement began in 1980 when
the ‘Plowshares Eight’ entered the General Electric plant in Pennsylvania, US, where the nose
cones for nuclear warheads were manufactured: ‘With hammers and blood they enacted the
biblical prophecies of Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) to “beat swords into plowshares” by hammering
on two of the nose cones and pouring blood on documents’ (Laffin 2003: 1, emphasis in origi-
nal). Since then, there have been over seventy-five Plowshares actions in a number of countries
(most of them in the US, Northern Europe and Australasia), all of which aim ‘to empower
ordinary citizens to peacefully tear down the machinery of violence and to build up respect
for fundamental human rights’ (Zelter 2009: 21). Most have focused on doing physical damage
to military equipment, and this has ranged from symbolic actions to those designed to cause
the maximum possible disruption – a dynamic that was introduced after the ‘Harriet-Tubman
Sarah Connor Brigade Disarmament Action’ cased $2.75m damage to a NAVSTAR military
satellite, ‘thereby challenging Plowshares and the wider disarmament movement to go beyond
symbolic witness in addressing the war machine’s key technologies’ (Laffin 2003: 49).
Plowshares actions have targeted nuclear weapons alongside conventional military infra-
structure. Activists often serve long jail terms as a result of these actions, viewing arrest, trial
and even imprisonment as an integral part of challenging the system. Because the actions are
often so spectacular, causing large amounts of damage and gaining widespread media atten-
tion, Plowshares actions (and their associated tactics) have been highly influential in North
America and Europe over the past thirty-five years.
From a theoretical point of view, we can see two major traditions running through Plow-
shares. The first is the influence of anarchism; the decentralised and non-hierarchical nature of
its organisation, the use of illegal direct action tactics and the general hostility to the state form
all take their cue from standard anarchist organising principles. Perhaps more notable than the
influence of anarchism is the importance of Christian Pacifism to the Plowshares movement’s
aims, principles and tactics. The founders of the movement, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, were
both Catholic ministers, and saw their antimilitarism as an indissociable feature of their religion.
Daniel wrote of the Plowshares Eight that, prior to the action, ‘[w]e passed several months in
reflection and prayer and discussion: a wearying but, as we judged, absolutely crucial process’
(1987: 291), and Philip claimed that ‘[b]eing imprisoned for one’s convictions is a Christian phe-
nomenon above all’ (1970: 185). While not all of those who take part in Plowshares actions are
Christians, the principles of the movement – and in particular the absolute insistence on nonvi-
olence as a feature of antimilitarism – are heavily influenced by Christian pacifist values. This
also shapes the symbols which are used in actions. For instance, while the practice of pouring
blood on weapons is most obviously an attempt to call attention to their violent nature, it also
‘calls Christians to remember the example of Christ, who gave his own life rather than shedding
the blood of others’ (Nepstad 2008: 62). Similarly, the Pit Stop Plowshares group, who in 2003
damaged equipment on a US military base in Ireland in protest against the war in Iraq, knelt
praying while waiting to be arrested.

Conclusion
The understandings of militarism and antimilitarism outlined in this chapter resist the com-
partmentalisation of either into ‘single-issue’ politics. Militarism is neither an issue nor a
discrete entity. Instead, we have to understand and contest militarism as series of social
relations that operate across a wide range of sites and struggles, located in and reproduced

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through a multitude of institutions, values and practices. Resisting militarism is therefore

not a particular campaign aim, but an ethos which runs through many different types of
radical movement. As this chapter has made clear, this resistance is directed, negotiated and
theorised in a variety of contrasting and often-interconnected ways.

Notes
1 For a fuller discussion of these points, see Rossdale (2019: 45–64).
2 C. Wright Mills makes a similar point when discussing the military power elite, who ‘are now
operating in a nation whose elite and whose underlying population have accepted what can only
be called a military definition of reality’ (1959: 198).
3 While Greenham Common was an explicitly feminist project, not all feminists supported the
camp. For some, it risked de-radicalising the women’s movement by rendering it vulnerable to
co-option by the male-dominated peace movement and by reinforcing harmful stereotypes which
equate women with peacemaking (Whisker 1983).
4 Notwithstanding attempts by some to drag them in more radical and anticapitalist directions
(Taylor 1987).
5 For instance, see Child Soldiers International (2016).
6 While these are all common features, not all groups adhere to all of these principles. In particular,
while many antimilitarist groups have an explicit commitment to nonviolent protest, others do
not. This can at times lead to tensions between different groups and organisations.
7 This is not to suggest that anarchism has a monopoly on non-hierarchical organising and direct
action tactics, nor that all using such tactics have been directly influenced by anarchism.
8 The literature here is substantial. The work of Cynthia Enloe has been particularly important in
developing feminist accounts and critiques of militarism (2000, 2004, 2010). Also see Hutchings
(2008), Higate (2003, 2012), Basham (2013), Cohn (1987) Conway (2012), as well as Rossdale
(2019: 65–68) for a fuller summary.
9 For this case, I am relying heavily on the account provided by Cynthia Cockburn and Naoko Ikeda.

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 1.5
FROM ‘BED-PUSH’ TO BOOK
ACTIVISM
Anti/Critical Psychiatry Activism
Bonnie Burstow

Introduction
Has institutional psychiatry and what it does to people (e.g. electroshocking, drugging and
incarceration) ever bothered you? Were you aware that there are huge liberation movements
which target it? While addressing each of the central themes in this collection (what makes
the politics radical, how it is theorised and what has influenced it?), such is the purview of
this chapter.
This chapter explores two highly interpenetrating movements – the antipsychiatry move-
ment and the mad movement – with special emphasis placed on antipsychiatry (the one
movement in the area consistently non-reformist in nature). While emphasis is placed on the
larger network of which each of these movements forms a part – for the activists involved
largely function together as a community – they are also looked at separately, for they have
a different politic and, as such, have at times been theorised as separate movements (see, for
example, Diamond, 2014). Mention will also be made of the psychiatric survivor movement,
a phenomenon that predates the mad movement, though which largely occupies the same
territory, with the designation ‘mad movement’, to a degree, functioning as a placeholder for
‘survivor movement’.
The chapter is written from an anarchist perspective. The standpoint taken is that of an
antipsychiatry activist/scholar who has been mobilising in these areas for decades. Central
questions posed are: What is antipsychiatry? What is the mad movement? What makes or-
ganising against psychiatry and/or against the treatment of the mad a radical politic? What
unique politics are involved? What strategies/tactics are favoured and why? What special role
has the social media come to play? How important are utopian visions to this politics and
why? And how are they prefigured in the activism itself?
As readers wend their way through the different strands of this activist world, they will
progressively come to appreciate at once its individuality, its radicalism and its relationship
to neighbouring movements (e.g. penal abolition). Important observations made and im-
portant realities which come to light are: both theoretically and practically, the movement in
question is intrinsically anarchistic. That is, it at once places the state in question, challenges
sanism (the prioritising of ways of thinking theorised as sane) and invites a different style
of organising. Liberal politics like human rights work and lobbying for ‘services’ inevitably

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enter in, forcing activists committed to an abolitionist politic to tread a fine line. Naming is a
pivotal part of the radical politic. And in the absence of a mass movement and an undisputed
leadership (the latter, less common in the postmodern world), the social protest involved is
necessarily decentralised, autonomous and non-hierarchical – with, paradoxically, even ac-
tions requiring tight discipline suffering when not approached accordingly.

Antipsychiatry
The term ‘antipsychiatry’ was initially coined in the UK by the coterie of ‘mental health’
professionals who coalesced around R. D. Laing (see Cooper, 1967). It referred to a more
progressive approach to people’s distress than what biological psychiatry offered/enforced,
that theorised people’s emotional problems as existential and political in nature, as opposed
to biomedical, and which prioritised communication and the creation of a less alienated so-
ciety. Subsequently, the term was applied to the theories of libertarian psychiatrist Thomas
Szasz, who demonstrated with great precision that the concept of ‘mental illness’ was mere
metaphor, and that it had no medical validity. Alongside Szasz were sociologists called label-
ling theorists, such as Goffman (1961), who traced the ways that psychiatric labels serve the
interests of the professions and industries associated with them and not the people subjected
to them. What began here is a war over ‘mental health’, repeated demonstrations of the
power wielded by the system, an insistence that personal and social control is being passed off
as help and an utter rejection of ‘mental health’ language and all it bootstraps into existence
(see Szasz, 1961, 1970; Burstow, 2015a). That said, alongside these, predating both of these,
and of singular importance is the psychiatric survivor liberation movement, which dates
back to the nineteenth century and earlier (see Starkman, 2014, pp. 27–37; Burstow, 2015a,
pp. 41–42). The figure usually associated with the start of this movement is Elizabeth Pack-
ard. An American ‘patient’ who had been confined by her theologian husband for years for
the purportedly grievous error of rejecting the religious tenet of the total depravity of ‘man’,
Packard, note, successfully challenged her confinement, stating:

It has always been my fortune … to be a pioneer … therefore I am called crazy …

I freely accord to … my enemies the right of opinion in believing me to be … insane …
and so long as these opinions do not lead them to trespass against my inalienable rights,
I have no right or desire to interfere with them … But since my opinion is as dear to me
as those of my enemies are to them and since we have no right to do wrong, therefore,
when the opinions of my enemies lead them to kidnap my accountability, by placing
me on a level with beasts for opinion’s sake merely, the law of self-defense compels me
to resist.
(Packard, 1865/1974:17; emphasis in original)

Theoretically speaking, the antipsychiatry movement today is largely founded on a com-

bination of Szaszian and survivor movement principles. To be clear, while no one denies
that people may have profound problems in living, may be even in dire need of help, what
is rejected – and rejected fundamentally – is the medical model, the language and the prac-
tices surrounding it, including what is traditionally known as ‘treatment’. Additionally
drawing on the pivotal work of researchers like Peter Breggin (see, for example, Breggin,
1991), activists hold that not a single physical indicator has been found for a single so-called
mental illness, and that treatments like the psychopharmaceutical ‘medications’ have been

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demonstrated conclusively to create as opposed to redress imbalances, moreover are modes of

social control, not help; and as such, they protest at once the ‘treatments’ themselves and
the misinformation surrounding them. Correspondingly, they object to the hegemonic de-
piction of survivors as dangerous. While the analysis and commitment go beyond this and
amount to a total rejection of the institution, members of the movement similarly reject all
involuntary confinement and all involuntary treatment – all of which is theorised as a human
rights violation. They likewise have long held that there is generally wisdom in mental states
currently dismissed as mad (for elucidation of this, see Chapter 9 in Burstow, 2015a).
The primary targets of the movement are psychiatrists, who wield this authoritarian
power, the state which authorises their practice and the businesses, especially the psychophar-
maceutical industry, that promote and benefit from it. The ultimate goals of the movement,
correspondingly, are the abolition of institutional psychiatry, the widespread acceptance of
difference and the creation of a more tolerant society with a ‘commoning’ of services – that
is, voluntary services (and voluntary only) arising from and vested in the community (for
elaboration, see Burstow, 2014a, b, 2015a). Subsidiary goals include eradicating poverty and
achieving disability accommodation – all of which involve networking and ongoing actions
with other groups
What joins antipsychiatry with the mad movement and the survivor movement are the
insistence on respect for human rights, the redefinition of services as only that which is vol-
untary, the prioritisation of psychiatric survivors’ preferences and interests, the celebrative
quality of many of their actions, the realisation that those deemed mad often have special
insights and the emphasis on freedom. What distinguishes it is that all antipsychiatry activ-
ists seek the total abolition of institutional psychiatry (and this distinction is crucial) not some
just part of it and not the mere ‘reform’ of the institution. This, in practice, would mean that
insofar as anything vaguely resembling psychiatry continued to exist, it would have no state
powers, no state funding or promotion and no authoritative ‘medical’ status. Additionally,
while the antipsychiatry movement is composed first and foremost of survivors, unlike oth-
ers in the area, this movement is not identity-based – hence, the existence of broad-based
coalitions comprised survivors, radical professionals, scholars, artists and members of neigh-
bouring movements.
To understand antipsychiatry politics, one needs to take in the pivotal rejection of reform-
ism. All people who organise against psychiatry but who are not abolitionists are reformers.
And reformers overwhelmingly want a gentler psychiatry, less use of biological ‘treatments’,
less frequent use of force and for psychiatry to play a less dominant role in the ‘mental health
system’. Antipsychiatry activists by contrast totally oppose at once the use of force, the ‘treat-
ments’, the tie-in with the state and the very existence of psychiatry as a ‘medical specialty’.
The case against reformism – and rejecting reformism is a defining feature of current
­a ntipsychiatry – is most fully articulated in Burstow (2014e). Herein, I make the case that
some things are so fundamentally wrong that they should be completely eliminated. Corre-
spondingly, I demonstrate that far from culminating in radical social change, all the other-
wise benign reforms throughout psychiatric history in the long run simply paved the way for
the eventual return and the intensification of biological psychiatry, and, as such, backfired.
And I conclude:

In this as in a microscope, we can see the problem of non-foundational reform. It is not

that there are no good tenets or good people involved. Indeed there are. Correspond-
ingly, it is not that progressive psychiatrists have no role to play in the initial transfor-
mation process for again, they do. However, in refusing to take seriously both the nature

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and the self-interestedness of the profession, reform (as opposed to revolution) leaves
intact an inherently problematic institution, legitimates rule by ‘expert’, and paves the
way for a return of biologism and of oppression with a vengeance.
(Burstow, 2014e)

The world’s longest standing and most active antipsychiatry organisation is Coalition Against
Psychiatric Assault (CAPA) in Ontario, Canada. Its mandate and an overview of its various
actions may be found on its website.1 While most organisations which challenge psychiatry
have an antipsychiatry contingent, unlike CAPA, few organisations are totally antipsychiatry.
Actions typically taken by antipsychiatry activists range from exposing the profession
through publications, whether it be books, blogs or survivor magazines (e.g. Phoenix ­Rising –
see Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto (PSAT)), to educational events, to speak-outs
(see Personal Testimonies, Inquiry into Psychiatry, 2005), to petitioning the state, to spirited
demonstrations (with the latter including marches, street art and theatre), to civil disobe-
dience, including sit-ins (for details, see Diamond, 2012, pp. 199–242). In all of this, an-
tipsychiatry activists pay special attention to language, consistently replacing institutional
designations like ‘mental patient’ and ‘medications’ with non-hegemonic terms like ‘psy-
chiatric survivor’ and ‘psychiatric drugs’ (for detailed elaboration of language, together with
recommendations, see Burstow, 2014c).
While many antipsychiatry activists do their activism without the guidance of an explicit
model, one model in recent years has provided appreciable guidance. It is called the attrition
model, was adopted by CAPA and is explicitly modelled on the attrition model of prison
abolition, which is itself predicated on the prioritisation of erosion as the means to abolition
(for an articulation of the attrition model for prison abolition, see Knopp, 1976; for the initial
theorisation of an attrition model for psychiatry abolition, see Burstow, 2014d). The under-
standing is that psychiatry, like the penal system, will not disappear overnight, but that it can
be eroded over time. What is provided by this model, to be clear, are not rules but touch-
stones. Loosely speaking, the invitation to activists is to actively engage in only those actions
or campaigns which lead in the direction of psychiatry abolition. Touchstone questions that
activists are invited to ask themselves in this regard are:

1 If successful, will the actions or campaigns that we are contemplating move us closer to
the long-range goal of abolition?
2 Are they likely to avoid improving or giving added legitimacy to the current system?
3 Do they avoid ‘widening’ psychiatry’s net? (Burstow, 2014d, p. 39)

(For an informative account of how CAPA used these questions to come to a consensus on
an action on which there was a disagreement, see Burstow, 2014d.)
Some final points without which readers new to the area would not understand the char-
acter of antipsychiatry activism: it is to a significant degree inherently celebrative, with people
operating like a community of people who are happy to be with one another. It welcomes and
accommodates difference, even when by ‘normal standards’, such a difference might be seen as
disruptive. And the movement is intrinsically non-hierarchical, largely operating via consensus.

Antipsychiatry as a Radical Politic

If one looks at the goals of antipsychiatry, it is clear that they are intrinsically radical in that
they are abolitionist and they aim at nothing less than the wholesale rejection of this system.

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Beyond this, they bear a clear relationship to anarchism. Note in this regard, there is at least
theoretically a total rejection of authority-over and a commitment to liberty. By the same
token, there is a total rejection of such concepts as ‘normal’ and the hegemony involved.
Correspondingly, antipsychiatry on the ground is activist and indeed anarchistic in that there
are no compromise solutions – unlike with reformists. In the attrition model, for example,
no action is advocated or seen as viable unless it can be demonstrated or theorised as some-
thing that would move society in the direction of psychiatry abolition.
Beyond this, what makes the politics fundamentally radical is the challenge to the state
and the implicit rejection of state powers. In this regard, the incarceration and the forced
treatment of survivors rest on and are ‘legitimated’ by two state powers – protection of the
peace and what is called ‘parens patriae’ – a sexist notion in which the ruler is seen as the
‘father’ of the country. To put this simply, while protection of the peace allows for intrusion
on the basis of people being deemed of danger to others, parens patriae allows for intrusion
on the basis of the person being considered of danger to themselves (for details on these state
powers and the use of them, see Burstow, 2015a). As an agent of the state, psychiatry is vested
with precisely this power. What, in particular, makes antipsychiatry inherently radical is
that it rejects this power of the state, and as such, implicitly at very least, calls the state per
se into question. What makes it, beyond this, inherently anarchistic is that the activism is
not predicated on reforming these powers or altering who is exercising power-over for it is
voluntary community solutions that are being looked to – not state powers, not authoritarianism,
not power-over.
Other factors that speak to the radicalism and indeed the anarchistic nature of antipsy-
chiatry activism are: it is about freedom and equality; it is utopian – that is, it incorporates
a sense of the type of society aimed at; it is prefigurative in that the treatment of members
by each other realises in embryonic form the type of society which is being sought; and it
includes playfulness and use of the arts – especially street art. Correspondingly, while there is
room for improvement to be sure, including making greater efforts at fundamentally incor-
porating an antiracist analysis, there is a long history of looking at intersectional oppression,
especially the intersection of mentalism, sexism and ageism.2 Moreover, it is ‘comparatively’
non-hierarchical and pluralistic, and it operates via consensus. (Most of the foregoing, I
would add, are attributes identified as features of the new anarchism or postanarchism by
theorists like Newman, 2011, Gordon, 2008, and Kinna, 2005.)

The Mad Movement

One could reasonably date the start of the mad movement as far back as the nineteenth
century, for mad politics has inevitably figured in the survivor liberation movement, with
repeated attempts made throughout history to reclaim words like ‘mad’ and ‘lunatic’. 3 That
noted, if looked at more narrowly, the mad movement officially began in England in 1999,
and it quickly spread – in particular throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa and to a
lesser extent Australia and Asia. The largest mad organisation in the world is MindFreedom
International – an organisation headquartered in the US.4 It unites affiliate groups around
the world, maintains and makes visible a roster of professional allies, and it has literally
­thousands of members.
The mad movement is predicated first and foremost on the rejection of sanism and a
celebration and embrace of the various states of mind in which people find themselves, in-
cluding those that might be conventionally seen as psychotic: all are seen as of value. As the
very name MindFreedom indicates, liberation is a prominent theme. Another expression

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used which captures the spirit of the phenomenon is Mad Pride; and so central is this con-
cept that the movement itself is commonly referred to as the Mad Pride movement (see, for
instance, Farber, 2012). According to the UK book which in essence announced the birth of
the movement (Curtis, Dellar, Leslie, and Watson, 2000), the gay liberation movement and
Black Pride inspired this reclaiming and reframing. And the hallmark event is the annual
Mad Pride Day, which in most locales has been extended to a whole week, so popular has
the celebration become.
Mad Pride week typically includes a very full roster of activities – some artistic, some
scholarly, some wildly celebratory, much of it recounting the personal history of people
deemed mad – unearthing what work they did, what their contribution to society and the
community around them were (for a landmark book in this area, see Reaume, 2000). Much
of it also pokes fun at ‘normal’ and ‘normals’. The choice of July 14 as the pivotal day is sym-
bolic, coinciding as it does the storming of the Bastille – which itself signals that Mad Pride
is not only a moment of culture appreciation but also a liberation movement. Symbolic of
liberation likewise is the singular activity which figures in Mad Pride Weeks everywhere –
the pushing of a hospital bed with a dummy in it through the streets – a now traditional event
fondly referred to as the ‘bed-push’. Herein, we see a symbolic act of liberation and escape
from tyranny, or to put this another way, an escape from institutionalisation.
Mad Pride is seen by everyone in the movement as a moment of affirmation and liber-
ation for the population traditionally deemed mad. Additionally, with some mad activists,
though far from all, it is also seen as redemptive for society more generally. In this regard, the
early advocates of Mad Pride saw Mad Pride as having a pivotal role to play in the necessary
job of world transformation, with the form it would take being mockery, anger, humour,
celebration and rebellion. Referring to the pieces in their own book, Curtis, Dellar, Leslie
and ­Watson (2000: 8), for instance, write, ‘These writings mock conformity, resist “nor-
malization” and refuse to be co-opted. They rejoice in Madness from a standpoint of anger,
humour, and rebellion’. The initial mandate statements issued by the leaders of the Icarus
Project – a mad activist group, a support group and website collective in the US – went fur-
ther, with its leaders more pointedly suggesting a special role for the mad. Indeed in the first
few years of operation, leaders of the group assumed a distinctly prophetic voice, writing:

There are so many of us out here who feel the world with thin skin and heavy hearts,
who get called crazy because we are too full of fire and pain, who know that other
worlds exist … A lot of us have visions about how things could be different and it’s
painful to keep them silent … Sometimes we get called sick and sometimes we get called
sacred, but however, you label us, we are part of making this planet whole.
(Quoted from Farber, 2012, p. 20)

The leaders of the Icarus Project are Sascha Altman DuBrul and Jacks MacNamara, and as
spelt out in Farber (2012, p. 16ff.), they initially saw the mad as uniquely positioned to heal a
sick world because of the special, or what DuBrul calls the ‘dangerous’ gifts which they pos-
sess. This represents a formidable conceptual shift from madness as a burden on the world to
madness as a gift to the world. Herein, as pointed out by Farber (2012), they were influenced
by figures like R. D. Laing, who depicted the world as opposed to the mad as sick, by the
Old Testament prophets, who were inspired by visions which led them to rail at the conven-
tional, also by Martin Luther King who stated in one of his sermons, ‘Everyone passionately
seeks to be well-adjusted … but there are some things in our world to which men of good
will must be creatively maladjusted … Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively

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maladjusted’ (quoted from Ghaemi, 2012). While as Farber (2012) points out, the Icarus
Project leaders have retreated in recent years from attributing a highly privileged place to
those deemed mad, residues of this position remain nonetheless. And the week of Mad Pride
is commonly dedicated at least in part to that more expansive vision, in certain instances,
it taking the name ‘Creative Maladjustment Week’ (see cmweek.org). Herein, a unity with
all other forms of ‘maladjustment’ is inherently being made, the idea being here that no one
should be ‘well-adjusted’ to ableism, mentalism, classism, sexism, racism, homophobia or
any of the other oppressions that characterise society. I would add that to varying degrees,
the position that the mad have special insight is also commonly held by antipsychiatry activ-
ists, a survivor/activist interviewee of mine stating,

My thoughts had roots in some kind of social consciousness . . . And I certainly don’t
claim that everyone who is crazy is having a fabulous spiritual experience or can neces-
sarily be useful to others, spiritually at that time. But very many people who go crazy,
or who become depressed, go through things that others would benefit from if only they
could listen to what those experiences were all about.
(Shimrat, quoted from Burstow, 2015a, pp. 237–8)

Unlike antipsychiatry adherents, members of the mad movement differ substantially among
themselves with respect to their beliefs about psychiatry and what should be done about it.
Some are antipsychiatry; others reject antipsychiatry and many see the overriding focus on
psychiatry as mistaken. Some fundamentally critique ‘psychiatric treatments’; some value
the ‘treatments’; some highlight research which shows that the so-called mentally ill have
no chemical imbalances; still others argue that the question of whether or not there is a
difference in chemistry is irrelevant. Some work within the system as peer workers or peer
researchers and others reject such practices as examples of co-optation. Insofar as there is a
basis of unity aside from the shared experience of being a survivor, it would be this: to some
degree or other, all see mad states and mad struggles as phenomena in which to take pride; all
want survivors’ rights defended; all want issues of survivor poverty addressed; most disparage
the untruth about the ‘treatments’ spread by those with power. Correspondingly, the most
vocal minimally tend to deeply oppose forced treatment and involuntary confinement (for
verification and a more detailed overview of both these commonalities and these differences,
see Diamond, 2012).
Common events in the mad movement include: the mounting of festivals and art events,
including mad theatre; the creation of mad scholarship; the identification and preservation
of mad history, running support groups; lobbying and petitioning governments; mounting
demonstrations; holding conferences, and in one case, and this conducted by MindFreedom
International, a hunger strike (see Diamond, 2012; Burstow, 2014b).

Mad Activism as a Radical Politic

It is clear what makes Mad Pride a radical politic. Both the utter rejection of the concept
‘normal’ and the reframing of madness from a social burden to a gift bestowed on society
are nothing short of a radical turnabout. Correspondingly, the unapologetic proclamation
of mad truth in the face of psychiatric hegemony, and beyond that, in the face of a multina-
tional pharmaceutical industry and a veritable army of professionals at work silencing that
truth, and the relentless creations of blogs, websites, festivals and campaigns that speak this
truth transparently constitute what philosopher Michel Foucault (1972 and 1980) aptly refers

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to as an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. Indeed, so utter is the turnabout in question

that mad activists are celebrating those very states that those with power most construct as
a malady and seek to ‘cure’. More generally, mad activists are challenging authoritarian ar-
rangements and standing up for freedom.
The politics in question, additionally, has a strong anarchist bent, indeed, and is in line
with what has been called new anarchism. In this regard, besides the antiauthoritarian nature
of what is happening and the insistence on equality/liberty – which is absolutely i­ntegral –
the mad movement is utopian in the sense that mad activism explicitly announces that a
very different world is possible. There is a rejection of the standard prioritisation of reason
over emotions: activists speak now in anger, now in anguish, now in mockery, now with joy
and now with humour. Pluralism in tactics, identity and belief also features in this anarchist
bent. Anarchistic as well is the carnivalesque nature of many of the events, the prioritisation
of culture, the frequent use of symbolic protest (as in the bed-push), the playfulness, the
deployment of the arts and the emphasis on the experimental and on prefigurative politics
(including the setting up of peer counselling).
I would add here that such anarchist tendencies are anything but accidental. What is
relevant in this regard, although most people in the mad movement would not identify as
anarchists, key leaders of the movement do. One of the two founders of the Icarus Project,
Sascha DuBrul, for example (see Farber, 2012), is a self-identified anarchist as well as the
founding member of a punk rock band. The cover of the book in which the mad movement
made its debut is particularly telling: it features the large anarchist ‘A’, intersecting with the
words ‘Mad Pride’.

A Broader View of the Radical Activism of the Anti/Critical

Psychiatry Network(s)
It would be a mistake to see either antipsychiatry or critical psychiatry groups as simply
acting in isolation. Long predating the WTO protests, but nonetheless in the anarchist style
which has been common in activism since this protest (for an analysis of such politics, see
Gordon, 2008), groups belonging to each of these movements routinely work together in
a pluralistic network. They likewise frequently work in loose coalitions with groups pri-
marily associated with other oppressions. CAPA, for instance, commonly works in concert
with parts of the feminist movement(s), correspondingly, has frequently been part of larger
antipoverty campaigns, has historically networked with such groups as Ontario Coalition
Against Poverty and was part of the Occupy movement/network in 2012. In this last regard,
for example, as an Occupy event, CAPA mounted a demonstration called Occupy Psychiatry
against the largest psychiatric facility in Ontario. This action additionally was conducted
in solidarity with Boycott Normal: Occupy the American Psychiatric Association (APA).5
Boycott Normal was, in turn, a mad movement initiative. The point is that antipsychiatry
activism and groups figure as nodes within larger networks, which are themselves decen-
tralised, weblike, shifting, non-hierarchical, antiauthoritarian and pluralistic – so typical of
current radical politics.
While this way of operating has become a standard feature of the new anarchism, signifi-
cantly, as already suggested, the modus operandi is not new to the groups which push back
against psychiatry. Survivor and antipsychiatry groups have for decades worked together in
loosely formed coalitions with groups such as prison abolitionists, feminist groups and groups
that coalesce around poverty. Correspondingly, while to be clear, it is critical that greater
attention be paid to intersectionality and to the integration of antiracist politics in particular,

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attention to the interactions of oppression has never been absent from the movement pol-
itics as historical indicators; see, for example, the antipsychiatry magazine Phoenix Rising’s
special issues on prisons, on women and on LGBTQ jeopardy (Phoenix Rising Collective,
1980, 1981 and 1990, respectively). That said, it should be acknowledged, nonetheless, as
demonstrated in Diamond (2012), that sexism, racism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism and
other oppressions continue to plague this movement – and tensions linked to these oppres-
sions inevitably play out in the politic. For example, men in the movement tend to interpret
expressions of anger as inherently justified, while women often experience anger as a gender
threat, and to the dissatisfaction of many of women, in such cases, the male interpretation is
overwhelmingly prioritised.
More narrowly, antipsychiatry activists, people who self-identify as part of the survivor
movement, people who identify as consumers, and those who call themselves mad routinely
work together, sometimes in loose networks, sometimes in support of a specific project or
action initiated by one of the groups, frequently in response to an ad hoc committee that
has suddenly coalesced around an issue. In this regard, while friction can occur, and while
both acknowledged and unacknowledged inequalities persist, especially those based on
ability and on status, as long as the centrality of survivors is respected in meaningful ways,
there is an acceptance and welcoming of all constituencies that come together to combat
psychiatry. By way of example, when CAPA mounted the first conference ever held on
how to organise against psychiatry – PsychOut – invitations to present were sent out to
a massive number of groups and individuals both locally and internationally who touch
on this area; correspondingly, despite the fact that the conference was mounted by an an-
tipsychiatry group, all but one of the keynotes invited hailed from the mad movement.6
Likewise, when mad scholars Brenda LeFrançois, Geoffrey Reaume and Robert Menzies
decided to co-edit a book on Canadian mad scholarship, they included a large number of
chapters from members of the antipsychiatry movement (see, for example, Diamond 2014;
Burstow, 2014c). Similarly, when Mad Pride rolls around in Toronto, all manner of groups
present, including antipsychiatry groups, in a decentralised fashion with everyone given
the freedom to mount and determine their own programme and specify their own location
for it.
Herein, we see the anarchist principles of co-participation, decentralisation and equality
coming together. Correspondingly, in what is minimally a prefigurative fashion, we begin
to see the emergence of aspects of the utopia or ‘better space’ that so many of us are trying
to build.

Zeroing in on Radical Actions in the Critical/Antipsychiatry Network

In the interest of conveying a sense of the type of radical actions that can happen in this net-
work, I would focus on two such actions. The first is a hunger strike put on by the mad move-
ment MindFreedom. The second is the Day of Worldwide Protest Against Electroshock.
Initiated and overseen by the Board of MindFreedom with the intent of revealing the
baselessness of psychiatry’s claims, the hunger strike, called a Fast for Freedom, was a
highly organised protest reminiscent of Gandhi. To the excitement of the entire network,
on 15 August 2013, six American psychiatric survivors began a hunger strike, vowing to
continue it until such time as they received an acceptable response from the APA. The
challenge to APA was to come up with even a shred of evidence that there is a physical
basis to a single ‘psychiatric disorder’. In support of the hunger strikers were academics and
professionals tasked with evaluating any evidence put forward by APA. Now in time, the

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APA indeed responded, but as anticipated, it failed to produce anything remotely resem-
bling evidence.7
That this was a radical action and reasonably successful one is clear. It was well or-
ganised, with health concerns attended to and with key players from both the survivor
network and the coterie of progressive professionals integrated; and while the media cov-
erage afforded it was limited, the reporting of it was positive. Moreover, the activism was
strategic, carefully tailored to double bind APA. The point is, as the strikers knew, there
is no such physical evidence, and so no matter what the APA did, it would look bad. That
said, the action eventually came to an abrupt halt. After the panel of experts responded
to APA’s highly inadequate response – and it was indeed so judged – the action was at
an end. Such a process contrasts sharply with successful historical nonviolent campaigns
such as the campaign to desegregate Nashville, where one form of protest (a sit-in at a
lunch-counter) was followed up by another, with the pressure for change continuing to
mount over time.8
I would add that when I discussed the limitations of this otherwise remarkable action
with one of the organisers, he informed me that he had intended follow-up but what he
proposed was deemed too dangerous by the board. Which leads me to some questions:

1 How successful and ultimately how radical can a radical action be if avoidance of risk is
prioritised?
2 If this action were more anarchistic and more decentralised so that other groups could
pick up where this one left off, would that have been preferable to an action that could
be stopped by a board decision? Or to put this differently, can what starts out as a tightly
disciplined campaign necessarily controlled by one group usefully be transformed in
time into a diffuse multicentred action?

The second action that I am highlighting, the Day of Worldwide Protest Against Electro-
shock, illustrates how well the network qua network can work and the non-hierarchical
nature of what can unfold. The action was initiated by three electroshock (ECT) ­survivors –
one in Cork, Ireland (Mary Maddock), and two in the US (Ted Chabasinksi and Debra
Schwartzkopff ) – two of whom identify as antipsychiatry and all of whom identify as mad.
Their invitation to antipsychiatry and critical groups and individuals around the world was
to join in a worldwide protest against ECT on 16 May 2015. All groups were totally free
to frame their own actions as they wished. A virtual page was quickly created, contain-
ing regularly updated information on what was being planned in each city. Eager to help,
Psych Rights (a legal group in Alaska) stepped up to the plate and created a page on a re-
lated website and invited people to contribute material which everyone else could use, this
action resulting in a mutually created ever-expanding resource page.9 Articles written by
individual bloggers likewise appeared on the website Mad in America, encouraging people
to join in (see, e.g., Chabasinski, 2015). Correspondingly, dozens of cities around the world
proceeded to hold their own unique protests, some via ad hoc committees that sprang up for
the purpose, some in the hands of established groups, most occurring in the streets, one in
a bookstore, a few involving theatre, with examples of cities involved being: Cork, Ireland,
Toronto, Canada, Montevideo, Uruguay, New York, USA, Santiago, Chile, Manchester,
England, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The Day of Worldwide Protest Against Electroshock was not a strategic action. Nonethe-
less, it was an impressive one that shows how the network working in loose coalitions can
orchestrate a truly global protest (not that Eurocentrism ever disappears).

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 Bonnie Burstow

The Special Role of Social Media in Anti/Critical Psychiatry Activism

As with most social movements today, social media plays a huge role in the work of these or-
ganisations and networks, has become, in short, the new face of both organising and educating
in these organisations and networks. Hence the abundance of websites, blogsites, Facebook
pages, YouTube postings and blog radio programmes.10 Blogsites have proved particularly
important, with the most significant of these being Mad in America.11 This ­particular site fos-
ters a huge roster of bloggers from around the world, some belonging to the mad movement,
some to the antipsychiatry movement, some are survivors, some are professionals, with the
site interactive, and with blogs ranging from personal stories (see Delano, 2014) to details on
how to use book activism to get authors in our network read (see Burstow, 2015b).
While the use of social media is highly significant for the work of this network generally,
it is absolutely essential for the very radical work of antipsychiatry for we are effectively shut
out by the mainstream. In this respect, while the mainstream press, for example, will to some
degree cover books that are critical psychiatry or upfront mad politics (and even then, note,
coverage is very limited), not so with antipsychiatry. The reason is clear: there is a unique
threat coming from antipsychiatry in that it constitutes a foundational critique of psychiatry
and of the related multinational industries (from which the media, note, receives funding).
Moreover, it represents a fundamental challenge to the state and its powers. And on some
level, the establishment knows this, also that antipsychiatry is gaining traction (for indicators,
see Burstow, 2015c). Hence the veritable freeze-out by the media.
A case in point: the largest of the anti-shock demonstrations in the Day of Worldwide Pro-
test was in Toronto; it was an antipsychiatry demonstration for which hundreds of press were
contacted. While there was some coverage of demonstrations in other cities, not a single press
covered the Toronto protest, despite the fact that not only was it the largest, it promised and
delivered on eye-catching spectacles like giant puppet heads. By the same token, when a press
conference was held in Toronto to announce the results of groundbreaking research which
substantially upheld key antipsychiatry claims, despite sustained outreach to the press, despite
the involvement of University of Toronto faculty and despite obvious draws (for not only were
the findings momentous, the panel included no less a person than a member of the provincial
legislature), not a single member of the ‘press’ turned up. Not that the no-show threw us.
Having suspected as much from years of antipsychiatry activism, the anticipation of that
no-show paved the way for a radical and democratising response. Activists rallied and created
what we called the People’s Press. Members of CAPA, in particular, turned up with cameras
and with questions that they were eager to ask. The press conference happened as planned.
Whereupon, the activists proceeded to mount highlights on YouTube.12 This radical act was
at once a strategic response, a democratising corrective and a prefigurative initiative, show-
ing one way that coverage might happen in a utopia.
Herein, I would add, we find a clear indicator of the very pressing need for social media
by groups who are fundamentally and uncompromisingly radical. Also an indicator of the
truly radical potential of the social media.

Additional Thoughts about the Critical/Antipsychiatry Network:

Why/How all Players are Needed
The mad movement is necessarily the pivotal player in the network, as is the survivor move-
ment more broadly defined. Here is a liberation movement, and here the prioritisation
of those most oppressed by sanism. To put this another way, here is the insurrection of

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subjugated knowledge (Foucault, 1972, 1980). That understood, insofar as substantial and
long-term political change is being sought, an absolutely essential player is antipsychiatry.
As can be seen by at once the rejection of reformism and the detailed attrition model, what
antipsychiatry offers are clearer political directions, some way of assessing actions and a foun-
dation that allows people to remain radical and avoid co-optation.
In this regard, as critical as cultural expression and celebration is, it is a feature which can
easily be accommodated by the state even while the state continues to grow ever more op-
pressive. A case in point is the decision of the city of Toronto to give official recognition to
Mad Pride or more markedly, the decision of the province of Ontario to fund mad movement
initiatives while simultaneously working to tighten state control of those deemed mad.13
By the same token, the substantial co-optation of the movement is no secret (see, for ex-
ample, Anonymous, in Burstow, 2015a, p. 257). Note in this regard, as discussed in Burstow
(2015a) in the UK, the substantial funding of peer initiatives has resulted in both less protest
and less radical protest, also with the rampant use of ‘mental health’ language. Significantly,
the co-optation is never of those who are antipsychiatry, protection arising from the fact
that the goals are clear, that both psychiatric and government languages are scrupulously
avoided (for a discussion of co-optation of and through language in the survivor movement,
see Burstow, 2014c) and because antipsychiatry never partners with and but rarely looks to
the state for solutions.
More generally, people combatting the current system need a stronger basis of unity and
a clearer direction than is currently found in the mad movement, without which ‘success’
cannot be easily accessed, and without which even the seemingly transparent symbols of
the mad movement begin to lose meaning. One indicator of this is the slippage which has
occurred with the bed-push.
As a test, about a year ago, I talked to four different mad-identified people who have en-
thusiastically participated in bed-pushes. All routinely enjoy the activity. However, not one
actually knew what the symbol meant. By contrast, every single antipsychiatry proponent
with whom I subsequently talked was clear about the meaning. Herein, we see the limitation
of the celebrative and the spontaneous.
Fortunately just as psychiatry identifies antipsychiatry as the biggest threat to its d­ ominance,
progressively more members of the mad movement have come to the same conclusion. This
helps to explain the recent upsurge of antipsychiatry within the mad movement, as evident
by the comments on antipsychiatry articles in Mad in America (see, for example, comments
in the comments section of Burstow, 2014b).
Such a shift represents the establishment’s worst nightmare. And herein, I would suggest,
lies the promise of an unstoppable radical politic.

Concluding Remarks: Some Implications for Radical Politics Generally

This chapter has introduced the network of people who organise against sanism and insti-
tutional psychiatry, in particular honing in on two highly important and interpenetrating
movements – antipsychiatry and the mad movement. It has shed light on the nature of each
and on the work of the critical/antipsychiatry network as a whole, making visible what
makes the activism radical, also, what detracts from the radicality. Rather than summarising
what has been stated, in ending, I would briefly touch on possible implications of the forgo-
ing for radical politics as a whole.
With the MindFreedom hunger strike, I introduced the possibility of following up a
highly focused action by a single organisation with collective and perhaps spontaneous

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actions by the networks as whole – a way of organising worth considering. A still more
important issue that has surfaced is the significance of including more classical anarchistic
elements in our protest.
In this last regard, as already noted, radical politics since the WTO protests have largely
been characterised by values such as spontaneity, tentativeness of goals, celebration, the pri-
oritisation of the cultural over the ‘political’ and the prefigurative over the strategic. As
invaluable as the shift is, the question which has arisen in this chapter is: Do we not also need
clear goals, clear focuses and disciplined actions? Or to put this in anarchist terms, just as we
need what has been called new anarchism or postanarchism (see Kinna, 2005; Gordon, 2008;
Newman, 2011), do we not also need more classical anarchism? And did not the collapse of
the Occupy movement itself demonstrate this?
To be clear, what I am recommending here is that we approach the new and the classical
not in the spirit of better/worse but as necessary principles/directions to hold in tension. One
possibility is seeing them in a dialectical relationship, perhaps envisioning different synthe-
ses. Another possibility is to understand them as different gears, both of which are needed
in radical activism. At which point, critical questions for any given movement are: What do
those gears look like in our movement? And how do we know when to shift gears?
One final observation: the very existence of the mad and the antipsychiatry movements
in themselves present challenges to all other radical movements. On a simple level, Mad
folk belong to all other movements and accordingly, there are times when radicals in other
movements need to reconsider their politics.
An example of a mishandling which might shed light on the type of shifts needed: in
a guest presentation to one of my classes, people in charge of security in Occupy Toronto
discussed how they accommodated psychiatric survivors who joined their encampment. Un-
fortunately, their primary example of good handling was this: people at the encampment
became progressively uneasy by the behaviour of a participating survivor. Whereupon, they
consulted a psychiatric nurse who was one of the protestors. Correspondingly, on her advice,
they got in touch with folk who, in turn, ‘urged’ the person in question to ‘go back on their
meds’.
Irrespective of whether or not cold-turkeying drugs were causing the behaviour that
worried people, this action points to the problematic existence of psychiatric hegemony even
within radical circles. Correspondingly, it highlights the importance of accepting differences
that radicals themselves tend to pathologise, also the importance of establishing protocols
whereby organisers turn to mad folk themselves for guidance on how tricky issues related to
their community might be addressed – for admittedly, they can arise – as opposed to turning
into ‘mental health’ practitioners.
Finally, a reminder that power within groups is never equal, and pre-existing power dif-
ferentials and relationships do not just disappear.

Notes
1 See https://coalitionagainstpsychiatricassault.wordpress.com/.
2 Note CAPA’s Mother’s Day marches, one of which is described at https://­coalitionagainstpsychiatricas
sault.wordpress.com/events/past-events/stop-shocking-our-mothers-and-grandmothers-2011/.
3 See in this regard messages still online from the 1990s group Lunatics Liberation Front at https://
www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01554.html.
4 See www.mindfreedom.org/.
5 For details on Occupy Psychiatry, go to CAPA website and see https://coalitionagainstpsychiatri
cassault.wordpress.com/events/past-events/occupy-psychiatry/.

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 From ‘Bed-Push’ to Book Activism

6 See http://individual.utoronto.ca/psychout/.
7 For these and other details, see www.mindfreedom.org/kb/act/2003/mf-hunger-strike/hunger-
strike-news.
8 For details, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_sit-ins.
9 See http://networkagainstpsychiatricassault.org/ElectroshockDocs.htm.
10 For an example of the latter, see www.blogtalkradio.com/talkwithtenney.
11 See www.madinamerica.com/.
12 See www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjtJvjDG4uM.
13 For one example of current new oppressive measures being considered – and this by a state which at the
same time trips over itself to ‘support’ Mad Pride – see Bill 95 and the commentary on it, at, respectively,
www.ontla.on.ca/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&BillID=3316 and www.­thebarrieexaminer.
com/ur/story/1050639.

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 1.6
RADICAL CLIMATE POLITICS
From Ogoniland to Ende Gelände
Leah Temper

In October 1990, chiefs and elders of the six Ogoni clans in the Niger Delta launched the
Ogoni Bill of Rights demandinsg resource control of their natural resources, the right of the
Ogoni people to self-determination and the right to protect their environment. The Ogoni
Bill of Rights never once uses the term ‘climate justice’; yet in many respects, the declaration
may be seen as a precursor of the radical movement for climate justice in that it demands
a halt to fossil fuel extraction, territorial and resource sovereignty, as well as reparations
for the environmental injustices and damages inflicted (Ojo 2016). Shortly after, in 1992,
the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) decided to focus its energy
on the three oil companies operating within the region: Shell, Chevron and the Nigerian
­National ­Petroleum Company. MOSOP presented the companies with an ultimatum – they
demanded 10 billion dollars in damages and royalties to the Ogoni people, as well as an
immediate end to the companies’ violence against the Ogoni region’s environment. If these
demands were not met, they threatened to rally the Ogoni people in widespread popular
resistance to the companies’ presence. By 1993, following mass mobilisations, Shell oil pulled
out of the region, leaving thousands of barrels of oil unexploited and reducing oil profits by
some 200 million dollars in that year alone.
MOSOP can be seen as the first movement to successfully stem the flow of oil in their
­territories – to literally ‘leave the oil under the soil’ (Bassey 2012). The mobilisation and r­ esistance
of the movement, led by Ken Saro-Wiwa (who was executed by the Nigerian d­ ictatorship), have
served as an inspiration that continues to inform the claims, strategies and tactics of radical
movements struggling to disarm the petro-economy and fossil capitalism until today ­(Temper
et al.,  2013). These movements now dot the globe, best described perhaps by the notion of
­‘Blockadia’, described by Naomi Klein (2014) as ‘a roving transnational conflict zone that is
cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting
to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines’.
Radical climate justice politics fights for ‘System change, not Climate Change’ refer-
ring to the need to overhaul the political and economic systems causing climate change.
In contrast to other forms of post-political environmentalism (Swyngedouw 2010) or
­carbon-counting climate activism, it is a movement that calls for structural changes to the
system, that is anticapitalist and anti-extractivist (Chatterton et al. 2013). It calls for energy
justice and brings attention to the climate crisis as one that is racist, gendered and can only

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be addressed by contesting ongoing processes of colonisation, exploitation and oppression.

At its core, climate justice is based on the understanding that those least responsible for the
production of greenhouse gases are those who are most affected by climate disruption and
chaos, and that these inequalities are being further exacerbated by the false solutions being
promoted such as carbon trading and offsets, renewable projects such as mega-dams, biofuels
and nuclear, geoengineering, and the green economy, including commodification of the
atmosphere, land and water.
While climate justice activism has parallels with the environmental justice (EJ) move-
ment and its history (see Pellow, this volume), climate justice distinguishes itself through the
truly global nature of the cause and impacts of climate change and the scale of the response
needed to combat it. This is because climate change brings to the fore the interconnectedness
of our shared environment and atmosphere as never before. At the same time, similarly to the
global EJ movement, it remains rooted in the specific struggles of frontline communities and
serves as a connecting thread between the disparate histories of resistance of those battling
environmental damage and dispossession across the planet (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). This
includes struggles against oil and gas extraction, coal plants and fracking, organising by the
victims of floods, hurricanes and tornadoes, as well as movements fighting for food sover-
eignty and access to resources. Finally, climate justice prompts us towards the creative proac-
tive social construction of a post-petroleum society and a consideration of how the economy,
energy, food and transportation systems can be radically rethought and redesigned.
This chapter first explains the historical and theoretical roots of the movement from a
global perspective. Second, it will focus on the movement’s primary strategies and tactics
and on the emblematic struggles that are defining radical climate politics today. In this, I
focus on the following defining principles: anticapitalism, energy justice, climate debt, anti-­
extractivism and leaving oil in the soil, and decolonisation.

Anticapitalist
A slow and painless ‘adaptation’ is not possible, what is called for is a ‘dramatic emissions
cuts in a manner that is both redistributive (from rich to poor and North to South, and
in the process male to female), and sufficiently shocking to economic structures and
markets that major transformations in production and consumption are compelled.
(Bond 2008)

Radical climate justice is by definition anticapitalist and intersectional. The climate

­justice framework recognises that people experience climate change along lines of social
and ­structural oppression: racism, sexism, transphobia, colonialism and class exploitation,
and forces us to confront the role of capitalism and state power in driving social oppres-
sion, ­economic injustices and ecological devastation. Thus, a Black Lives Matter protest in
­Britain in ­September 2016 blocked London airport, arguing that ‘the climate crisis is a racist
crisis’ because seven out of the ten countries most impacted will be in Africa, and black
­communities will be among the most impacted.
Radical climate justice is also informed by a metabolic understanding of the economy
which acknowledges that both the impacts from extraction of fossil fuels and those related
to climate change are concentrated on the most vulnerable populations and rely on ongoing
processes of colonisation. This understanding is informed in part by theories from ecolog-
ical economics and political ecology (Hornborg 1998). For example, concepts such as the
ecological debt owed from North to South, a demand born in Latin America in 1991 and

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further developed by Accion Ecologica in reference to Chevron’s activities in the Amazon

­(Martinez-Alier et al. 2014), and the theory of ‘ecologically unequal exchange’, draw atten-
tion to how the high material standards of developed countries are dependent on net ­t ransfers
of materials and energy from the periphery to the industrial centre. At the same time, the less
developed countries and regions exporting the resources experience a net increase in entropy
(disorder), leading to environmental disruption and degradation, as natural resources and
traditional social structures are dismembered (Hornborg 1992; Warlenius 2016).
From a metabolic perspective, environmental inequality is a result of both uneven access
to the basic sources of low entropy energy – solar and terrestrial or stored energy (such as
coal and oil) – as well as the uneven flows of high entropy wastes (such as carbon dioxide
and other pollutants) that are discharged from the economic metabolic system and displaced
onto the most vulnerable populations (Hornborg 1992). Such a socio-metabolic perspective
brings to the fore how conflicts over oil extraction, coal and fossil fuels, and over sea-level
rise, droughts, floods and tornadoes associated with climate chaos, are opposite sides of the
same coin. Global environmental and climate justice activists increasingly bring attention to
this interconnectedness between access to resources and risk, and between sources and sinks.
A radical politics of climate justice thus leads to a questioning of the basic configuration of the
global socio-metabolic system. The limited capacity of the atmosphere to absorb carbon high-
lights the insanity of an economic system based on endless growth on a finite planet. This leads
inevitably to the disavowal of an economy based on a false growth imperative and on prices that
do not account for environmental costs. It also raises a question about what an alternative post-
growth, post-petroleum society would look like and how to get there. This opens up potential
­alliances with those calling for degrowth, post-growth and décroissance (D’Alisa et al. 2014; ­Temper
et al. 2013), as well as other movements aiming for a transformation of the economic system.

Payment of the Climate Debt as an Impossible Demand

To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already
money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling,
fucking.
(Federici 1975)

The climate movement has repeatedly called for the payment of the climate and ecological
debt from North to South as reparations for overconsumption of environmental space, for
the damages inflicted by climate chaos, and for the construction of a post-petroleum society.
Climate debt is the idea that poor countries are owed various forms of reparations from rich
countries for the climate crisis and, further, that nature’s rights have also been violated and
there is a need to pay a debt for repairing the earth.
As discussed by Bond (2010), there has been some debate over whether this demand
promotes ‘the financialisation of nature and the indirect reliance on markets and monetary
solutions as catalysts for structural change’. In response to those who charge that demanding
payment for the environmental space and services that have been stolen and appropriated
from the South and from the subaltern without their permission is akin to pricing and objec-
tifying nature, Bond (2010) argues that

[i]f articulated fully, climate debt should cover not only the damages done by climate
change but also finance the South’s transcendence of extreme uneven development
associated with the world economy’s export-oriented operation. Payment of climate

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 Leah Temper

debt damages and ‘adaptation’ financing - if done properly - would ideally permit (and
compel) the Global South to delink from all manner of relations with the world econ-
omy that damage both the exporting economy and the climate: fossil fuel extraction,
agricultural plantations and associated deforestation, export-processing zones, vast
shipping operations, and foreign debt that forces further attempts to raise hard cur-
rency, which in turn reinforce the exploitative relationships that keep these countries
in such poverty.

Going further, I would like to propose that this demand is akin to the feminist demand
for ‘wages for house-work’ (Federici 1975). It is not so much a demand that can be as-
similated within capitalism but instead an impossible demand that aims to undermine the
ability of the capitalist system to continue appropriating environmental space for endless
accumulation and therefore one that threatens the functioning and existence of the cap-
italist system.
Similar to Federici’s argument for wages for housework (2012), the demand for payment
of the Climate debt as a means of struggle aims to demystify and subvert the role performed
for capitalism by extractivism, nature and the communities’ ecological and reproductive
labour. Just as the reproductive and caring labour of women has been invisibilised in how
it serves to perpetuate capitalism, climate debt serves to highlight the ecological labour
performed by nature as well as by subsistence communities that is appropriated for capitalist
accumulation.
However, communities are increasingly claiming recognition for this reproductive
labour and this demand can contribute towards a revolution in thinking and in social
power relations. For example, when farmers’ movement La Via Campesina organises
around the argument, that small farmers’ mode of reproduction and food sovereignty
‘cools down the earth’ (Martinez-Alier 2011) and when waste recyclers in Delhi claim
that they are reducing the waste stream as well as carbon emissions and that they, rather
than waste-to-energy plants, should be compensated for this work through the Clean
Development Mechanism; such histories of struggle form part of radical climate justice
politics.
By highlighting the contribution of their livelihoods and making use of ‘eco-political
capital’, such movements are not buying into the ideology of commodifying nature to save
it; they are rebelling against a capitalist system that continues to invisibilise their work and
nature (Temper and Martinez-Alier 2016). Demanding payment for ecological and repro-
ductive labour on these terms serves to threaten capital’s accumulation ability, which is only
possible through the exploitation, dispossession and contamination of women, nature and
marginalised communities.

Against False Solutions and towards Energy Sovereignty

Radical climate politics opposes all forms of financialisation and commodification of nature
and thus rejects carbon credits and mechanisms such as the UN REDD programme (Re-
duced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). Furthermore, radical climate
politics, in contrast to a more reformist and technocratic approach, refuses to accept a shift
to renewable energies as panacea for the climate crisis. This means acknowledging that a just
energy future transcends a simple technological shift and entails the construction of new
social systems.

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 Radical Climate Politics

Radical climate movements are increasingly engaged in the theory and praxis of energy
justice, sovereignty and democracy, which focus on energy systems placed under people’s
common control and using technologies compatible with such control, with a radical reduc-
tion in carbon dioxide and other pollutants.
Energy sovereignty (ES) has been defined as ‘the right of conscious individuals, com-
munities and peoples to make their own decisions on energy generation, distribution
and consumption in a way that is appropriate within their ecological, social, economic
and cultural circumstances, provided that these do not affect others negatively’ (XSE
2012). It also refers to ‘political projects and visions towards a just generation, distribu-
tion and control of energy sources by organised and conscious communities, provided
that these do not affect others negatively, and with respect for ecological cycles’ (Del
Bene et al. 2019).
At their core, energy justice and ES ask how energy can be redesigned and restructured
so that everyone can access the basic energy they need. The concept of ES raises funda-
mental questions about the purpose and use of energy: Energy for whom? Energy for what?
­(Ariza-Montobbio 2015) ES calls for a reclamation of energy as ‘a natural commons and
the basis of life for all’. This also means decolonising the universalising understanding of
Energy (with a capital ‘E’) as the abstract and uniform commercial generation of energy, and
as a function of capital accumulation, and differentiating it from the incommensurable and
contextually diverse uses of energy, with a small ‘e’ (Hildyard et al. 2012), able to adapt across
time and space to different ecologies and human geographies.
ES emphasises technologies which challenge capitalist social relations and the owner-
ship of the means of production. An energy transition to renewables that replicates the
same patterns of expropriation of local resources is already leading to considerable conflicts
across the global North and South (Avila, 2018; Del Bene et al. 2019) as land is grabbed and
communities are displaced, evicted and flooded, while power continues to become concen-
trated. Radical climate politics thus include movements that are contesting damaging ‘green
­technologies’ as well as movements that are actively creating alternative energy futures,
including the decentralisation, democratisation and municipalisation of energy, experiment-
ing with new technologies, as well as food sovereignty, permaculture and multiple forms of
energy provisioning.

De-carbonisation and Decolonisation

Radical climate justice is a de-colonial struggle that aims to disrupt and unsettle the various
means of extracting energy from colonised territories and peoples, whether through slavery
or through extractivism and accumulation by contamination. As the mobilisation against
the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016 showed, the fight is not only about
climate change, fossil fuels or water protection: it is in essence a struggle for sovereignty.
This includes territorial sovereignty and food sovereignty, as well as ES and energy justice.
An indigenous struggle that inspires in its ability to unsettle us is the camp of the
Unist’ot’en indigenous people in ‘so-called Canada’ who have been reasserting themselves
on their territory. In 2010, they built a cabin directly on the GPS coordinates of the pro-
posed route of the Pacific Trails Pipeline (PTP), which they refer to as ‘the trailblazer of the
prospective energy corridor that aims to traverse [our] territory’. The PTP would transport
fracked shale gas 463 km from British Columbia’s northern interior to a liquefaction plant
and export terminal on the coast called Kitimat LNG.

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 Leah Temper

Since 2009, the Unist’ot’en have been preventing trespass by industry and government
interests that aim to develop projects without their consent. They have delivered eviction
notices to Apache Oil, Enbridge and are currently fighting incursions by Trans-Canada’s
Coastal Gaslink pipeline stating that the companies are

not permitted onto unceded lands of the Wet’suwet’en; are not permitted to place their
greed ahead of Indigenous self-determination; are not permitted to destroy and exploit
the lands; are not permitted to disregard the safety and health of communities; [and] are
not permitted to disregard [our] Law!
(VMC 2015)

This strategy has claimed considerable victories, with numerous divestments and projects
remaining halted, not to mention how substantial support for this opposition to dirty oil
helped topple the pro-gas and -pipeline government in British Columbia in 2017. The de-
mands for self-determination made by the Unist’ot’en aim towards a structural transforma-
tion of colonial and capitalist systems of domination of nature and subjugated peoples (Bliss
and Temper 2018). Such movements, in the words of Taiake Alfred (1999), are informed by
‘a set of values that challenge the homogenizing force of Western Liberalism and free market
capitalism; that honour the autonomy of individual conscience, non-coercive authority, and
the deep interconnection between human beings and other elements of creation’.
The resistance of the Unist’ot’en does not depend on the state to grant rights to nature,
but upon communities asserting their environmental responsibility through direct action.
Their active spatial tactic of resistance, which regulates and physically blocks the move-
ment of capital and commodity flows through their territory, holds both instrumental and
symbolic power (Blomley 1996). It disrupts the flows of capital while creating a space for
the control and practice of indigenous economic and political authorities in the face of the
cultural and economic dislocation forced upon them (Temper 2019). This enables the cre-
ation of a living anticapitalist alternative, mutually informed by both an ancient system of
values guiding sustainable relationships with the material world, and a transformative pol-
itics of decolonisation that seeks to revalue, reconstruct and redeploy indigenous cultural
practices while deconstructing colonial and capitalist power structures (Napoleon 2013).

Ende Gelande
There’s something magical about sitting on top of an excavator and looking at the 66km 2
beautifully destructed landscape surrounding you, as accordion music from another si-
lenced digger reaches your ears, with in the background a rainbow coming out of yet
another halted coal-scraping monster in the distance. Almost like nature is saying ‘thank
you’.
– Participant in the Ende Gelände action (in CEO, 2016)

If the proto-climate justice was born in the Niger Delta in 1990 – perhaps the most polluted
and environmentally devastated place on the planet – it took some twenty-five years for ac-
tivists in the world’s most industrialised and richest countries to finally take up the mantle.
Today, from the UK Climate Camps to the ZAD (Zone a Defendre) camp resisting airport
construction in France, radical climate justice movements act as cultural laboratories exper-
imenting with new technologies, commoning and other ways of being.

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Beginning in August 2015, and again in May 2016, thousands of activists converged in
Germany’s Rhineland to stop the coal industry in its tracks (Buckland 2016; Rosewarme
et al. 2013). In 2016, up to 4,000 activists occupied the Welzow-Süd open-pit lignite
coal mine and aimed to shut down the adjacent Schwarze Pumpe coal-fired power plant
in the largest global civil disobedience mobilisation against fossil fuels ever. The action
was called Ende Gelände – Here and No Further.
The mine and plant, owned by the Swedish company Vatenfall, are Europe’s tenth largest
emitter of CO2. One of the short-term goals of Ende Gelände was to stop the impending sale
of the mining area by Vatenfall. Why, the movement questions, do the two richest countries
in the world – countries that claim to be dedicated to stemming climate change and to an en-
ergy transition – need to continue to produce and burn the dirtiest fuel on the planet? I­ nstead
of selling on the dirty liabilities, the movement argued, Vatenfall could have financed a social
phaseout of coal for the region and the costs of environmental reparation.
Ende Gelände was a huge success, forcing the plant to reduce its output by 20% over the
forty-eight hours of the mass action, with consequences for the German electricity grid.
According to John Jordan (2015),

The protest was direct action at its best. Not a symbolic gesture that just tells a story
and makes an injustice visible, but an action that targeted the very source of the
problem and stopped it in its tracks. The actual stopping of CO2 emissions them-
selves, the fact that the lignite coal – the dirtiest type of coal in the world – was not
dug out and burned that day, is what counts. Ende Gelände was a collective act of
resistance that for once felt proportionate to the scale of the emergency: catastrophic
climate change.

The action reignited debates in the German parliament about the sale, which e­ ventually
went through in October 2016. While Vatenfall initially expected to sell for 2–3 b­ illion
Euro, the company finally had to pay the buyer, Czech energy company EPH, 1.7 ­billion
Euro for assuming the ecological liabilities in the region. If Germany is serious about
its climate obligations, this implies that there is no future for lignite. A report by Cor-
porate Europe Observatory (CEO 2016) suggests that EPH’s strategy may thus revolve
around the hope for a big payout under the Investor State Dispute Settlement that awards
companies for losses due to environmental regulation in the public interest. Trade pacts
that lock us into ecologically suicidal behaviour in the name of profit thus highlight
the type of m ­ echanism that ensures government inaction in the face of climate change.
The ­strategy of Ende Gelände was, therefore, to contest both corporate power and such
inaction.
The movement’s motto in 2016 was ‘we are the investment risk’. In 2017, Ende Gelände
has set its sights on RWE, the second largest electricity producer in Germany, issuing the
following ultimatum:

Coal-based power generation is unjust. We from Ende Gelände are not prepared to
accept this injustice. We fight for a climate of justice. We have made this very clear by
blocking mines and power stations with the support of thousands. Because our actions
in the past were not sufficient today we issue an ultimatum. Decide today to stop coal-
based power-generation and close the open-cast mines and power stations! If you let this
deadline pass we will take into our own hands!

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 Leah Temper

Conclusion
This article has traced the birth and main principles of radical climate justice. It is a
movement born in the global South, whose tactics and claims have sought to counter
colonial dynamics and other forms of oppression and ecological devastation wrought by
capitalism.
While climate activism in the North has often assumed a more technical and post-­
political approach, the urgency of the situation and the increasingly visible impacts are lead-
ing to a rise in disobedience, defiance and resistance even amongst ‘civil’ society. In 2013,
the Sierra Club – a mainstream environmental lobbying group – committed civil disobedi-
ence for the first time in its 120-year history in a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline.
Meanwhile, normal middle-class folks in America have been turned on to ‘fracktivism’
and eventually into climate activists once they connect the dots. Networks of resistance to
the petro-economy are growing and operating along the entire chain of oil production. As
Terisa Turner has written in ‘Why Nigerian women are at war against Shell in Nigeria’, the
capitalist organisation of production and the oil market defined by the companies them-
selves can act as forces that unite those resident at the point of extraction and the consumers
of oil. They suggest that ‘When residents of oil producing communities stop production at
the same time as consumers boycott oil companies by refusing to buy their products, the
two groups engage in a simultaneous global “production-consumption” oil strike’ (Turner
and Brownhill 2004).
Remaining challenges for radical climate politics are to connect with the global work-
ing class and labour activists, transcending productive but still timid discussions of a ‘ just
transition’ (Stevis and Felli 2015). As Barca (2015) argues, this calls for the development
of an ‘emancipatory ecological class consciousness’, as well as a redefinition of the work-
ers’ identity. Climate movements also need to connect with the struggles of indigenous
communities and communities of colour fighting industrial pollution on their own terms.
The atlas of EJ (www.ejatlas.org) records over 2,200 cases of EJ conflicts that form part
of the same movement against environmental despoliation, degradation and dispossession
(Temper et  al. 2015). Carbon reductionism and a technocratic environmental approach
do not resonate with such movements – yet, a new ethic of care for future generations,
territory, water and all life can inform the creation of new alliances for sovereignty and
eco-sufficiency.

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 1.7
ECO-DEFENCE, RADICAL
ENVIRONMENTALISM AND
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
David Naguib Pellow

Introduction
How are radical environmental movements expanding and redefining the aim and scope of
their work to link concerns for the defence and protection of non-human natures to strug-
gles for social justice among aggrieved human populations? In other words, to what extent
are activists whom we might traditionally associate with a single-issue emphasis on ‘saving
the earth’ also integrating and reshaping those goals with greater attention to the politics of
justice for people marginalised, for example, because of their gender, sexuality, racial, mi-
gration/citizenship status, ability and/or indigeneity? In this chapter, I explore the promise,
tensions and possibilities for deepening and broadening of social justice politics within radi-
cal environmental movements. Based on data gathered from fieldwork, interviews, archival
analysis and participant observation, I argue that while environmental movements have a
long and troubled history of racism, nativism, heteropatriarchy and classism (to say nothing
of misanthropy!), there are significant segments of these social formations that have invested
time and energy into reimagining their work, including the very framing of the problem of
the environmental crisis, along with strategies and tactics to address it. The evidence pre-
sented suggests new ways of defining environmental and environmental justice (EJ) politics
and new ways of framing democracy and the polity itself.
The emergence of radical environmentalisms in the US, Britain, Australia and elsewhere
in the 1980s and 1990s marked a new stage in the evolution of ecological politics. This was
a moment punctuated by a discourse of radical analysis and action that we had rarely seen
in environmental movements until that point. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, segments
of these movements were converging around new ideas and tactics, producing a broader
discourse that linked ecology, social justice and anti-oppression within groups like the Earth
Liberation Front (ELF), which we also saw taking hold of and transforming groups like Earth
First! (EF!), which had historically been hostile to such ideas.
What sparked the development of this kind of movement? There are many answers to that
question, but the most obvious is the increase in reports of threats to planetary sustainability
and ecological health. Less obvious but perhaps more important influences include a new
discourse around the politics of social justice, which permeated other social movements, so-
cial change organisations and academic disciplines on university campuses beginning in the

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1980s and 1990s. Concepts like intersectionality, and discourses and actions concerning multi-
ple and linked oppressions and social privilege took hold in many of these spaces, and had a
noticeable effect on the language and practices of social movements in the US and elsewhere,
including environmental causes. The idea that we can no longer fully understand, analyse or
resist a single form of oppression in isolation from other forms materialised in feminist and
antiracist movements and academic circles globally, and we began seeing these ideas appear
in the writings, speeches and actions of radical environmental activists who soon moved
from a language of single-issue politics to multiple, interlinked issues around ‘rights’ and the
‘liberation’ of ecosystems and people. These new ideas were combined with tactics inspired
by liberation movements and efforts of previous generations such as the Diggers and Levellers
of Britain, slavery abolition, anarchist movements, Civil Rights, Black Power, Puerto Rican
Independence, the Weather Underground, Women’s Rights, Gay and Lesbian Rights, ACT
UP, and the IWW.
From Europe to Australia, to Latin America and the US, radical earth liberation move-
ments gained visibility and notoriety in recent decades, causing significant property and eco-
nomic damage to timber harvesting operations, power lines, elite housing developments and
ski resorts through arson, sabotage (ecotage) and vandalism. Through these actions and the
discourse that supports them, activists question what they view as the violence of capitalism,
state power, ecological destruction and multiple forms of oppression within human communi-
ties. And while these movements often reflect different emphases, there is a prime convergence
around the discourse of total liberation of ecosystems, non-human species and humans (Pellow
2014). The concept of total liberation stems from a determination to understand and combat
all forms of inequality and oppression. Therefore, these movements are radical because (1) they
seek to get at the root of the problem of our socioecological crises; (2) they tend to be adap-
tive, constantly evolving, dynamic, self-critical and self-reflective, rather than fundamentalist
or rigid; and (3) their goal is not to struggle with the aim of seeing their vision of the world
become dominant, but to struggle against dominance itself, in whatever form that might take.

Theoretical Perspectives
Radical ecological movements have articulated the view that there are multiple, interlocking
and reinforcing systems of inequality and domination that give rise to our social and ecolog-
ical crises, including state power, capitalism, speciesism, dominionism, patriarchy, hetero-
sexism, racism, classism and ableism (among others). These activists maintain that ecological
crises cannot be reduced to any one or two of these systems of domination; rather, they work
together to contribute to the problem. These activists articulate a vision of total liberation,
which sees inequality as a threat to life itself – for oppressed peoples, species and ecosystems.
Total liberation is a framework organised around the struggle against hierarchy and dom-
ination and is a response to global ecological and social crises. These movements organise
and mobilise in favour of symbols, metaphors, language, signs, representations, practices and
structures of equity and justice to do what social movements have always done: to imagine
and create a better world. Only this world would be based on the idea that inequality and un-
freedom in all their known manifestations should be eradicated. Total liberation draws from
and extends several theories of environment–society relationships, including ecofeminism,
political economy of the environment, and EJ, which I address later.
Ecofeminism’s basic premise is that the exploitation of ecosystems by human beings is a
reflection of exploitation among human beings. In other words, when we destroy ecosys-
tems, ecofeminists would argue that the root of that destruction is located in the way we treat

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one another. In particular, ecofeminists argue that the ideology that authorises oppressions
such as those based on gender, race, class, sexuality, physical abilities, etc. is the same ideol-
ogy that sanctions the oppression of non-human nature (Mallory 2009; Gaard 2011). That
ideology is the logic of domination, which undergirds and supports dualistic or binary think-
ing. Thus, ecofeminism challenges binary or oppositional thinking or dualisms that are often
associated with traditional Western thought (Macgregor 2006). For example, we have long
been taught to think of the following categories as oppositional: West versus East, ­European
versus Other, White versus Black, male versus female, coloniser versus colonised and human
versus non-human. In Western thought, these categories are traditionally thought to be op-
posites, discrete, fixed, homogenous and the first is superior to the second, thus reinforcing
and legitimating hierarchy and domination (Mack-Canty 2004). While ecofeminist theory
is inclusive of multiple categories of difference, there has been uneven attention to various
categories such as race and species. Even so, the implication of ecofeminist theory’s claims is
that greater social equality and democracy promote ecological sustainability.
Political economy of the environment perspectives focuses on the devastating effects of
capitalism on social and ecological systems locally and globally (O’Connor 1994; Faber 2008;
Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2008; Foster, Clark, and York 2010). These studies reveal
an ecological Marxist perspective in that when struggles over the means of production tend
to favour the capitalist classes, they also produce greater ecological damage and mass social
suffering. Relatedly, some social scientists have produced studies demonstrating that general
measures of social and political inequalities are correlated with levels of ecological harm
across societies (Downey and Strife 2010). For example, economist James Boyce finds that
the level of egalitarianism in a society may be one of the strongest predictors of the general
degree of environmental harm in that society. That is, societies exhibiting higher levels of
economic and political inequalities are characterised by higher overall ecological harm, and
the reverse is true for societies with greater egalitarian structures (Boyce 1994, 2008). This
body of research is of great importance for linking concerns over social justice to ecological
sustainability. Even so, much of it is rather narrowly focused on economic or political mea-
sures of inequality that fall short of capturing the complex ways in which inequality also
functions across race, gender, sexuality and species.
Finally, the Environmental Justice Paradigm (EJP) is a perspective that builds on much
of the conceptual orientation found in ecofeminism and political economy, focusing on
specific human populations suffering directly from ecological and social violence. The EJP
directs its attention to the urgent conditions that people of colour, indigenous populations,
women, immigrants, the working classes and the poor confront in the form of degraded
environmental conditions and threats to public health. In that regard, the EJP refuses a
strictly biocentric emphasis on ecosystems (that we see in Deep Ecology, for example) and
insists on centring social justice while advancing an effort to redefine environmental issues
as human rights and civil rights issues. As Taylor and others have amply documented, the
EJ movement emerged as a response to the mainstream environmental movement that was
dominated by ‘primarily White, middle-class activists who work in predominantly White,
male-dominated, environmental organizations’ (Taylor 2000: 551). The EJ movement and
the EJP developed largely in response to that limited demographic slice of the social fab-
ric, and featured organisations led and supported largely by working-class people, women
of colour, indigenous persons and immigrants. Some ecofeminists might rightly view the
EJP as paying insufficient attention to gender dynamics, since its priorities exist largely at
the nexus of the politics of race and class. The EJP is also limited because it combines ele-
ments of protest and demands for change with an underlying embrace of dominant political

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and economic institutions. In other words, this movement generally aims to push the state
and corporations to embrace some degree of EJ practice, while accepting the fundamental
legitimacy and existence of those institutions (Benford 2005). Even so, the EJP recognises
critical relationships between human inequality and environmental policy, and encourages
dominant institutions to begin addressing these issues.
The aforementioned theoretical frameworks are among some of the most pivotal intel-
lectual and political forces emanating from the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
ecology movements. These traditions emerged in the context of intensified industrialisation,
urbanisation and globalisation in a post-Second World War world. Building on this body of
sociological research and ideas from these movements, the total liberation framework broad-
ens and challenges the boundaries and assumptions of these traditions to encompass a wider
intersection of concerns linking social justice and ecological politics. Total liberation is a
response to global ecological and social crises and is a perspective articulated and debated by
activists from radical environmental movements.

Total Liberation
The total liberation frame combines important elements from other intellectual and political
paradigms to chart a new course for social movements confronting our global ecological and
social crises. The total liberation frame consists of an ethic of justice and anti-oppression
that is inclusive of all beings and ecosystems; an embrace of direct action tactics and support
for anarchism and anticapitalism. In the limited space of this short chapter, I focus only on
the first two dimensions (see Pellow 2014 for a more comprehensive treatment). Most other
prominent intellectual and political paradigms focused on ecological politics have stopped
short of linking systems of oppression and inequality across species and have generally only
called for moderate reform of political and economic institutions. In contrast, total liberation
is marked by ideas, discourses and practices focused on intra-human community dynamics
as well as relationships among human and non-human species and ecosystems and demands
systematic transformation in social structures and societies. In what follows, I explore the
possibilities and limitations of the total liberation framework, and conclude that these data
and this emergent movement framework suggest a number of new directions in ecological
politics that are relevant to scholars working in the fields of environmental studies, social
movements, critical animal studies, and ethnic and gender studies.

Radicals
When I use the terms ‘radical’ versus ‘mainstream’, I want to avoid setting up a binary of
movement types. I see environmental movements as consisting of many branches and trib-
utaries, including radical, progressive and mainstream, and that the same individual activist,
group and movement may often embrace elements of all three. But generally speaking, the
following is how I characterise these approaches: radicals seek to replace the existing political
and economic system with something entirely different using a range of tactics; progressives
work within the system, but they demand changes within that system and employ nonviolent
direct action and (sometimes) illegal tactical approaches; and mainstream groups work entirely
within the current system under the belief that it can be reformed from within. For example,
in the environmental movement, radicals would include EF! and the ELF; progressive groups
would include Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth; and mainstream groups would include
the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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One Earth First!er put it to me this way:

In biology, the radical of a seed is the germinating part of a seed. And…in Latin, it
means ‘root’. So I think for me, a radical analysis is to look at the root of a problem…
[But] I think what’s really defining as a radical is an insistence of real change.
(Interview with the author, fall 2009)

Another veteran EF! activist and attorney spoke at length about how, for him, ‘radical’ also
means the ability to be unconventional, self-effacing and self-critical:

…probably the key thing that’s always both attracted me to Earth First! and sustained me
is the happy sense that Earth First! is not a society of ‘true believers’. That, you know, we
used to refer to the disparate voices of Earth First!, or even the fractious voices of Earth
First. It was a place where you could scream and disagree, and where people didn’t take
themselves too seriously. And it was a place where people could be really self-effacing,
and regularly were, which is part of, I think, the radical humility of being a radical envi-
ronmentalist, and trying to recognize your place not at the apex of evolution but in the
swirl. So that’s why I always felt comfortable. So is Earth First radical? One thing it was
to me is radically literate and self-aware [and] self-critical. Earth First! was always that.
(Interview with Hollie Nyseth Brehm of the author’s
research team, 30 November 2009)

Total Liberation: Anti-oppression and Justice for Ecosystems and Humans

Environmental movements have rightly been accused of prioritising the protection of
non-human animals and ecosystems over the needs of human beings, particularly women,
LGBTQ folk, communities of colour, working-class populations, immigrants and indige-
nous peoples. While elitism and exclusion are certainly intertwined within the histories of
the environmental movements (Seager 1994; Smith 2005), members of the radical wings of
the movement have recently begun to grapple with issues like whiteness, racism, patriarchy,
social class inequalities, homophobia, nativism and social privilege. In other words, these
activists are integrating a serious social justice critique into their politics, which is a core
element of the total liberation frame. Many environmental activists are learning from the
difficult lessons of past (and ongoing) tensions with marginalised communities arising from
offensive and insensitive campaigns, tactics, language and behaviour by environmentalists
and they have decided that one of the most important approaches to movement building
should be developing anti-oppression principles and practices within their ranks. EF! for-
malised this idea with an official Earth First! Anti-Oppression Policy, which was published
in a 2007 edition of the Earth First! Journal and reads in part:

The Earth First! Journal editorial collective recognizes that the institutional, economic,
political, social and cultural dynamics of hierarchy, power and privilege that define
mainstream society also permeate the radical environmental movement. These dynam-
ics are expressed in various interlocking systems of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism,
classism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism, speciesism, etc.), which prevent equal access
to resources and safety, disrupt healthy communities and movement building, and
­severely—sometimes irreparably—harm our allies, our friends, our loved ones and our-
selves. Over the years, the Journal has featured a growing number of articles addressing

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the need to challenge these systems of oppression. This is a reflection of the editorial
collective’s understanding that implicit in our desire to stop the domination and ex-
ploitation of the Earth is a need to create communities that are free of oppressive social
relations. We understand that failing to address oppressive behavior not only weakens
our movement by alienating and further victimizing our friends and allies, it also calls
into question our commitment to a better world and our qualification as a radical move-
ment. For these reasons, the Earth First! Journal editorial collective has drafted this policy
of active opposition to oppressive behavior of all kinds within the editorial collective,
the Journal community and the pages of the Journal itself.
(Earth First! Editorial Collective 2007)

Reflecting similar sentiments, a group called the Cascadia Forest Defenders (CFD) an-
nounced in 2003 that it was withdrawing its support from the Fall Creek tree village protest
camp near the Willamette National Forest’s Clark Timber Sale near Eugene, Oregon. An
Earth First! Journal article explained,

At the heart of the issue is the fact that Fall Creek base camp participants have allowed
and will continue to allow people who have a recent history of sexual violence to par-
ticipate in the campaign. After a meeting was held to discuss these concerns, Fall Creek
refused to adopt an anti-oppression policy and requested to separate from CFD.
(Earth First! Journal 2003)

The Fall Creek tree village was one of the most famous of its kind. It was an extraordinary
network of traverses, platforms and other structures constructed by tree sitters protecting
the site from timber companies in the Willamette National Forest between 1998 and 2003.
Apparently, however, many activists there saw fit to reject anti-oppression principles and
practices.
In yet another upheaval, in May of 2013, the Earth First! Journal publicly repudiated Lierre
Keith and other leaders of the radical environmental group Deep Green Resistance (DGR)
when it was discovered that they had made or supported statements that were degrading to
transgender people. DGR and its founder Derrick Jensen have enjoyed notoriety within
radical environmental communities for supporting militant resistance and calling for the
dismantling of industrial civilisation in order to achieve ecological sustainability. Unfortu-
nately, they have always suffered from a lack of analysis of intersecting oppressions, so this
episode confirmed what many people had already suspected. Moreover, Aric McBay, the
primary author of the book Deep Green Resistance, also publicly severed ties with that move-
ment as a result. The Earth First! Journal decided to ‘no longer print or in any way promote
DGR material’ in response to DGR’s

…continued assault on trans people, with language and analysis that denies the strug-
gles of trans-people and even goes so far as to deny the value, worth and power of
their existence in radical movements, labeling trans people as somehow ‘not real’, or as
Post-Modern manifestations of individualism.

Furthermore, the Earth First! Journal made a formal request that DGR leaders ‘look deeper
into the issues effecting trans communities’ and ‘create gender inclusive workshops at future
DGR gatherings’. The EF!J response also quoted Aric McBay on this matter, who stated,
‘I left the organization at the beginning of 2012 after a trans inclusive policy was cancelled

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by Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith… transphobia–like racism and sexism and classism and
homophobia–is a poison that those in power use to destroy movements and ruin lives’ (Earth
First! Journal Collective 2013).
In addition to these policies and practices around anti-oppression, I found that in my
travels to various activist gatherings and conferences, I frequently heard the discourse of
anti-­oppression in casual conversations, at workshops, on panels and in the literature made
available. At the EF! Round River Rendezvous (RRR) in Oregon’s Umpqua National
Forest, there was a trove of literature on various topics related to social justice and anti-­
oppression. There was a pamphlet entitled ‘What is White Supremacy?’ and there were many
more newsletters and ‘zines on the subjects of Indigenous solidarity, genocide, feminism,
anarchism, the prison industrial complex and immigrant rights and justice (‘What is White
Supremacy?’ is a 1998 essay written by the renowned Chicana activist-scholar Elizabeth
‘Betita’ Martinez). At that same gathering, there was a grease board featuring a schedule of
workshops for the day, which included two sessions on anti-oppression, and sessions on queer
and Native solidarity. I saw this kind of literature and discourse at nearly every gathering I
attended during my fieldwork.
People of colour have long organised within radical environmentalist ranks. In a ­‘report
back’ from the 2008 EF! RRR, a group calling itself the People of Color Caucus wrote
‘We See Color and It Fucking Matters’. The report back includes a list of grievances that
seek to explain why ‘Earth First! is a predominantly white movement’ including ‘unchecked
white privilege’, ‘rampant cultural appropriation/fetishizing Indigenous cultures’ and ‘to-
kenization’. These are all problems for which the environmental movement and EF! have
­h istorically been notorious. What is different about this report back is that there are enough
people of colour to even have a caucus, and the EF! Journal’s editorial staff allowed or encour-
aged them to write this open letter to the movement. The People of Color C ­ aucus offered
numerous suggestions for moving EF! forward, including continuing to hold a­ nti-oppression
and antiracist workshops at the annual gatherings and insisting on a ‘more open conversation
and analysis of our movement’s culture’. They urged readers and fellow activists ‘to realize
that we cannot build a strong and powerful movement to oppose environmental destruction
without incorporating a deep understanding of the links between ecocide and all other forms
of oppression’ (People of Color Caucus 2008).
Since at least the early 1990s, gender politics has been a major theme in earth libera-
tion movements, with concerns focused on patriarchy and sexual violence within society as
well as within these activist communities. Many activists have responded creatively, with
workshops focused on anti-oppression principles, while some have made efforts to inte-
grate such principles into their campaigns and actions. Following an earlier group called the
Ecofeminist Front (which began around 2003), activists launched a working group within
EF! called Challenging Oppression Within (COW). A short time after that, the first Trans
and ­Womyn’s Action Camp (TWAC) was held just before the annual RRR in 2007. The
TWAC is an EF!-sponsored annual gathering designed to be a safe space for LGBTQ activ-
ists who have a growing voice and presence in radical ecology movements. That first camp
included workshops on tree climbing, road blockades and do-it-yourself gynaecology. As
the report back from that first TWAC stated, ‘In our opinion, TWAC was a step in the
right direction for the Earth First! movement, which has been criticized for its lack of trans
and feminist politics’ (Triple 2007). Just after the 2009 TWAC, I spoke with two male EF!
veterans about the movement’s gender politics. One of them, Doug, told me ‘This actually
was originally a problem with tree sits because of the close quarters that people live in up
in the tree, and the problem of oppression’. Another male EF! veteran, Dennis, agreed and

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recalled, ‘there were issues related to our society in general when some men don’t know how
to treat women. We did have sexual assaults on tree sits, so that was a real concern’ (author’s
interview with EF! veterans, July 1, 2009, Earth First! Round River Rendezvous, Umpqua
National Forest, Oregon. Tree sits involve setting up long-term camp sites high up in a tree
in order to prevent the cutting of [usually ancient or culturally significant] trees and forests).
Numerous activists I spoke with noted that making the links between the exploitation
of ecosystems or non-human animals and humans depended upon activists recognising the
role of privilege – including and especially their own – as humans, and as members of largely
white, middle-class social movements. Recently, a number of activists in these movements
have raised questions about the harm this privilege can do to a movement that is unable to at-
tract a diverse range of supporters and that ignores oppression within its own ranks. ­Veteran
EF! activist Storm Waters remembered how many activists in that movement’s earlier days
bristled at the call to embrace social justice politics. He recalled,

There was a lot of people who were basically indulging in their white, upper-middle
class, primarily male privilege who really didn’t want to confront these issues. It was
too much for them. And they were resistant to change. And I as an Earth First!er [felt]
that we need to be dealing with wilderness and biodiversity issues while at the same
time, confronting oppression within our circles simultaneously, or we will fail at both
simultaneously.
(Interview with the author, July 2009)

The total liberation narrative that emerges from the data I gathered on these movements
draws explicitly and implicitly from ecofeminist theory, from political economy and EJ the-
ory, and from the concept of intersectionality. The core claim here is that social justice for
humans cannot be delinked from justice for non-humans. Critical legal theorist Kimberlé
Crenshaw’s (1994) concept of intersectionality reminds us that various forms of inequality –
such as race, class, gender and sexuality – interrelate and work together to produce advantages
and disadvantages for people. Earth liberation activists articulate a theory of intersectionality
that expands that concept beyond the boundary of the human to include non-human species
and ecosystems. They contend that the unequal relationship between human societies and
ecosystems is reinforced and reflected in social inequalities among people. This suggests that
they wish to articulate a much more transformative model of intersectionality that moves
beyond the traditional set of categories and extends the focus on individual human beings
to link entire populations across species. These ideas are not necessarily new, of course. Karl
Marx recognised and decried the ways in which human labour and the earth are integrated
and exploited by the same system of appropriation. In a famous passage, Marx wrote,

All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the
workers, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing this fertility of the soil for a
given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility…
Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combi-
nation of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original
sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.
(Marx 1976: 637–8)

Regarding the inescapable fact that humans are but one species in a larger ecological chain
of being, Marx wrote,

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Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dia-
logue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to
nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
(Marx 1974: 328, emphasis in original)

This passage reflects Marx’s refusal to separate humans from nature, something that many
contemporary scholars are still struggling with, as the ‘nature/culture’ divide remains with
us in many quarters of the academy (Goldman and Schurman 2000). Sociologist John
­Bellamy Foster writes that Marx moved beyond this conundrum early on, as embodied in
his concept of metabolism – the intricate, interdependent systems connecting human society
to non-human natures (Foster 2000). Today, political theorists build on that tradition and
argue that ecological movements must extend their concepts of justice and the polity itself
beyond distributional concerns among humans to include non-human nature (Schlosberg
2007; Bennett 2009).
A focus on the interconnectedness of justice for ecosystems, non-human animals and
humans stems from the belief that social and ecological inequalities have similar root causes.
Leslie James Pickering is a former spokesperson for the North American Earth Liberation
Press Office and views all forms of oppression as linked and as the root cause of our ecolog-
ical crises: ‘If it were not for the capitalism, racism, sexism, and imperialism that the system
perpetrates upon the world and each one of us, then there would be no clear cuts, no vivisec-
tion, no Persian Gulf War, no Nike corporation’ (Pickering 2007: 2). Much of the literature
at activist gatherings my research team and I attended echoed these perspectives. For exam-
ple, a ‘zine we found at two of the movement functions we attended stated, ‘The same values
that perpetuate sexist violence and eco-cide also perpetuate genocide, racist violence, classist
violence, destruction of the earth, and the tearing apart of indigenous peoples and cultures’
(Wemoonsarmy. N.D., an anarcha-feminist collective dedicated to envisioning and realising
a radical restructuring of society’s gender and sexual dynamics).
The Cascadia Forest Alliance is a group of activists in the Pacific Northwest that embraces
total liberation. In their Disorientation Manual, they write:

This battle isn’t only for the earth. It’s important to recognize that we must challenge
the very mindset that allows the belief that it is an acceptable practice to exploit the
earth for profit. It is this same mindset that empowers the domination and hierarchy
so prevalent in our society. Our struggle isn’t only for the earth but also to destroy the
latent sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, trans phobia, and other isms and phobias
that play into the dominant paradigm. The people who exploit the environment are
the same people who help facilitate the exploitation of women, animals, workers, and
the like. It is one struggle and one fight for the earth, human rights, and animal rights.
(Cascadia Forest Alliance 2003)

Because We Must (BWM) is a collective of activists who refuse to restrict themselves to a

single movement label. The group’s slogan is ‘Animal, Earth, Human’. Its logo is a graphic
of a nondescript human form, an animal footprint and a leaf. This group embodies the goals
and discourse of total liberation. BWM was ‘founded on the idea that all forms of oppres-
sion and, in turn, the struggles against them, are intimately connected’ and that ‘the white
supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist culture that dominates the planet’ must be confronted
(BWM Mission Statement. Becausewemust.org. Accessed August 2011). Rylee is a part of
the BWM collective, and in a posting on BWM’s website, they stated, ‘I believe in total

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liberation. I want to better connect ideas of human, animal, and earth liberation to create
a more unified radical movement’ (Rylee 2011. Becausewemust.org. Accessed October 30,
2011). As the BWM mission statement and Rylee’s posting reveal, pushing the boundaries of
intersectionality through a total liberation framework leads many activists to conclude that
the borders that separate various social movements should be challenged as well. On this
point, Jeff ‘Free’ Luers, a celebrated activist who spent nine years in federal prison for an ELF
arson action, told us, ‘Well, I don’t really differentiate between movements. I think that all of
our struggles are interconnected, and there are certainly different facets of struggle, but the
bottom line is that we’re all struggling against the same monster’ ( Jeff Luers interview with
Hollie Nyseth Brehm of the author’s research team, 7 March 2010).
Thus, for these radical ecologists, the root causes of global ecological and social crises
are varied and numerous, but include the culture or mindset of domination that legiti-
mates hierarchical relationships within humankind and between humans and non-­human
nature. The total liberation framework therefore extends intersectionality into the non-­
human realm.

Total Liberation through Direct Action

Direct action is a core component of earth liberation movement’s tactical and philosophical
repertoire. It is a defining feature of this movement and its cultures of resistance – those
shared understandings, ideas and knowledge that inform and support individual and collec-
tive practices of dissent. There are many ways that activists approach direct action, including:
mobilising ideas, knowledge, symbols and bodies to prevent or support a particular practice
or policy; personal confrontation and property damage; and solidarity with other move-
ments and oppressed peoples. These actions are variously directed at the goals of securing
justice for ecosystems and people through grassroots organising. This section of the paper
reveals how radical environmentalists materialised the ethic of anti-oppression and justice
for all beings through direct actions.
Katuah EF! is a group of activists from East Tennessee who also work to draw links be-
tween various forms of oppression. In the 1990s, they successfully pushed the white suprem-
acist Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to leave the area and cease open recruitment. One member of the
EF! group discussed this action and how they collaborated with antiracist people of colour
organisations in this effort. He recalled, ‘that was a material antiracist action. And my friends
that were involved in the … predominantly African American groups [also protesting], they
knew that if they needed walkie-talkies, [needed] to start a soup kitchen, [needed] bodies,
whatever, that they could contact us’ (author interview with Chris Irwin, October 29, 2009).
The Katuah EF! antiracist work and collaboration are also significant precisely because it was
led by white environmentalists in the American South – a region that is typically viewed as
more openly white supremacist than anywhere else in the nation.
While the actions of Katuah EF! were public and above-ground, there are numerous
direct actions by groups like the ELF that reflect an effort to link justice for people, ecosys-
tems and non-humans that are illegal and underground. A March 2001 ELF communiqué
described an illegal action at the Old Navy Outlet Center in downtown Huntington, Long
Island, New York in which activists smashed several plate glass windows and a neon sign.

… This action served as a protest to Old Navy’s owners, the Fisher family’s involvement
in the clear-cutting of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest … Old Navy, Gap,
Banana Republic care not for the species that call these forests home, care not for the

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animals that comprise their leather products, and care not for their garment workers
underpaid, exploited and enslaved in overseas sweatshops … We will not stop.
(ELF communiqué, 5 March 2001)

Banana Republic and Old Navy are subsidiaries of the Gap and have long been the subject of
media reports and public concerns that many of their workers are under age (as young as ten
years old), underpaid, abused and forced to labour in unsafe, sweatshop conditions in Saipan
and elsewhere, and that the Mendocino Redwood Company (which is financed by the Fisher
family, members of which founded and own Gap, Inc.) uses toxic herbicides to clear-cut
redwood forests (see McVeigh 2007; Smithers and Ramesh 2008).
Other evidence of radical activists making the connection between anti-oppression pol-
itics and direct action abounds. The EF! Roadshow is a touring group of activists who visit
many different cities around the US to build support for campaigns and to recruit activists
to join the movement. During an EF! Roadshow stop in Minneapolis, the organisers of-
fered several workshops. The Native Solidarity workshop included a discussion of the links
between environmentalism and imperialism/colonialism. For example, when one of the
participants asked, ‘what is ecodefense?’, one of the organisers – Cee – answered ‘defending
the earth’. Another participant answered: ‘Resistance against colonization is ecodefense’. She
also stated that ‘when indigenous peoples resisted the first waves of colonization hundreds of
years ago, we should recognize that as ecodefense’ and ‘in terms of privilege and coloniza-
tion, you can’t be neutral. Inaction is action in favor of colonization’ (author’s field notes at
the Earth First! Roadshow, May 2009, Walker Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota).
In the summer of 2003, a forest defence action and tree sit began in the Willamette Na-
tional Forest near Eugene, Oregon, as a protest against the Straw Devil Timber Sale. The
US Forest Service was attempting to sell an ancient forest to two private logging firms and
the environmental community was ramping up efforts to reverse this decision. At the time,
only 5% of native forests were left standing in Oregon, so this was seen as an urgent case
for forest defence. What was unique about this particular occupation and tree sit is that it
was an ‘all womyn action’, led by a group calling itself the Ecofeminist Front who sought
to highlight the links between the domination of ecosystems and women. They wrote the
following statement:

…the womyn’s action is dedicated to building a community that is intolerant of all forms
of oppression. We are working to create a space of mutual learning and growth—a space
where we can conquer not only the demons of capitalism, patriarchy and indifference
that surround us but also the demons of oppression, self-loathing and fear that reside
within us. The womyn’s free state is a safe space where womyn can come and gain skills
and perspective…. It is our belief that the oppression of womyn and the destruction of
the Earth come from the same unsustainable need to dominate and control. The same
people who wish to take away our autonomy also wish to take away the last of the wild
beauty on Earth. As womyn, we cannot achieve liberation while the Earth is still in
chains. We need oxygen, clean water and the forest to survive. We need to be able to
walk around alone at night; we need our homes to be free of violence; we need a life
where rape, assault and oppressive attitudes are not the norm.
(Ecofeminist Front 2003)

Accompanying this article in the Earth First! Journal was a dramatic photograph of five female
activists wearing bandanas and carrying crossbows in front of a massive tree in the forest.

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At the third annual TWAC gathering in 2011, activists led an action that sought to un-
derscore their view that gender and sexual oppression are inseparable from human dominion
over the forests. Participants occupied the Oregon Department of Forestry office in Molalla
in solidarity with another ongoing defence action in the Elliot State Forest. The report back
was colourful, dramatic, and full of flair and humour:

Lady and trans folk, with support from our allies, occupied the office in pink fishnets,
underwear, and so much sass and glitter. Three folks locked down while the queer-
est takeover swallowed the hallways and main front desk….People draped themselves
around poles in front of the office, sissy-bounded, and temporarily stopped a logging
truck, causing a road closure. Chants included ‘Beavers and Divas are our natural allies’
and ‘We’re a bunch of queer fucks, we don’t want your clear cuts’. Three arrests followed
suit (the arrestees are now dubbed the Rebel Bitchez) and the office remained shut down
for the rest of the day.
(Lewddite Uprising 2011)

The politics of gender and sexuality continue to provide opportunities for earth liberation
activists to challenge social structures through their use of language, symbols and action.

Unresolved Tensions and Unfinished Business

Within radical environmental movement communities, even though activists are wrestling
with ecological and social justice politics, such efforts are always fraught with tension and,
frequently, disappointment. While many activists embrace the concept of total liberation,
many others do not. With respect to social justice politics, a number of activists with strong
progressive political views believe that some of their colleagues have gone too far by trying
to create and enforce a ‘politically correct’ culture. Specifically, a number of activists feel that
social justice and anti-oppression politics have dominated the movement and displaced the
‘more important’ goal of achieving strictly defined ecological sustainability.
Ben Rosenfeld has been an EF! supporter and legal advocate for many of the movement’s
most celebrated activists, including Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. He explained that he
views efforts to challenge offensive and culturally insensitive language within the movement
amounts to an ‘extreme political correctness and word policing that has gripped the move-
ment or at least the people who are kind of running it, which has alienated a lot of the older
folks in the movement’ (Ben Rosenfeld interview with Hollie Nyseth Brehm of the author’s
research team, October 3, 2009). He also wrote an article in the EF! Journal expressing his
dismay on this topic (Rosenfeld 2010).
Rosenfeld’s narrative regarding the generational divide among radical environmentalists
was something I heard repeatedly from the ‘over 30’ radical ecologist cohort. It was the
subject of many conversations about the politics of gender and sexuality in the movement
as well. ‘Colt’ is a veteran EF! activist and shared her frustrations with what she felt was an
overemphasis on recognising people’s differences in identity and life experiences:

…some of the transgender orientation right now is just kind of confusing and distracting
to me. Like, when I went to the Trans’ and Womyn’s Action Camp, I was happy that …
[they] had created a safe space for people. And I like any action camp teaching activist
skills as a space where they don’t feel like it’s too critical or too harsh or whatever. But at
the same time, there were certain people in the group who would insist every time we

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would sit down and talk together, everybody going through and telling us what their
preferred personal pronoun was. And that got really old…So that’s been kind of sticky
with me. Sometimes I think it’s too much emphasis.
(Colt [a pseudonym] interview with the author, 3 October 2009)

Similarly, ‘Dara’ worried that the focus on oppression sometimes becomes overpowering.
She stated, ‘The problem is that all these discussions about oppression take over instead of
being a part of a larger framework around campaigns’ (Dara [a pseudonym] interview with
the author, Autumn 2009).
Overall, these testimonies reveal that social justice issues remain important but con-
tentious topics of discussion and consideration within radical ecological movements. This
dynamic demonstrates that issues of social privilege and difference will remain with this
movement well into the future.

Conclusion
The data from my study of radical environmentalists and the emergent idea of total liberation
suggest a new direction in ecological politics that is relevant to scholars working in the fields
of environmental studies, social movements, critical animal studies, and ethnic and gender
studies. The evidence presented suggests new ways of defining environmental and EJ politics
and new ways of framing democracy and the polity itself. Specifically, if activists see the trans-
formation of human social relations and human-nonhuman relations – through confronting
all forms of hierarchy and oppression – as necessary to address our ecological crises, that
reflects a perspective that calls for a broader, antiauthoritarian and multispecies approach to
intersectionality and social change. Similarly, some political theorists now argue that ecologi-
cal movements must extend their concepts of justice and the polity itself beyond distributional
concerns among humans to include non-human nature (Schlosberg 2007; Bennett 2009).
The movements and activists considered in this chapter are radical in their views and ac-
tions because (1) they attempt to confront what they view as the root of our socioecological
crises; (2) they approach their craft with an eye to maintaining an openness to change and
new ideas, and an embrace of self-awareness and self-critique; and (3) their ultimate aim is to
bring into existence practices and communities that reflect a commitment to equality, equity
and non-hierarchical social relations.

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Boyce, James K. 1994. ‘Inequality as a Cause of Environmental Degradation.’ Ecological Economics 11:
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 1.8
‘INFORMATION FOR
ACTION’ – RESEARCH AT
CORPORATE WATCH
Rebecca Fisher

Corporate Watch aims to produce research for radical social change, to disseminate this
research and to support others in producing research for similar radical objectives. This
chapter aims to outline Corporate Watch’s approach to research as ‘information for action’,
some of the structures and processes we deploy to protect this approach, and how this differs
from the research produced in more institutional contexts. It is important to note that our
approach is neither monolithic nor static – the Corporate Watch collective includes diverse
views, and this text only represents one member’s perspective of Corporate Watch as it
currently operates.
Since its founding in 1996, Corporate Watch has become a reliable and long-standing
source of engaged, radical and rigorous research (as well as trainings and workshops). We
aim to do this without sacrificing either our independence or our political principles. Rather
than provide seemingly neutral analysis, expert advice or compromised lobbying, we aim to
take an active, autonomous and non-vanguardist role within social struggles. Since we only
speak for ourselves, we feel in a stronger position to remain faithful to this objective. At the
same time, our legitimacy is, and indeed should be, limited to this, and to the fact that we are
a small, unrepresentative and closed group, and not anyone’s or any movement’s mouthpiece.
With our organisational structure, an office space and meagre wages, we can devote time
and energy to tackle issues in depth – a luxury primarily afforded to research produced from
more institutional contexts, such as academia or the mainstream media. Paying ourselves
wages does create a difference between us and the many unpaid activists engaged in similar
activities and struggles, and we don’t pretend otherwise. But this is necessary to ensure that
we can carry on doing this work in the long term. This organisational structure does entail
constraints however – I do not wish to maintain that Corporate Watch’s independence and
freedom are absolute. We operate as a workers’ cooperative with named directors who could
bear some legal responsibility, and we receive funding from foundations to whom we must
report, funding that we need in order to pay the wages that sustain us, and which means
Corporate Watch can continue. Working in financially strained circumstances means that
these wages are not always high enough to ensure that all co-op members can sustain them-
selves without taking on extra paid work outside of the co-op. It also has an impact on the
diversity of the co-op in multiple ways. And as a workers’ cooperative, we must act as our
own employers, negotiating among ourselves our hours, wages and benefits. Due to scarce

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financial resources, this happens in ways which are not always as supportive as we would like
(such as paying ourselves low wages). These constraints all exert a sometimes-subtle influ-
ence on how we work, the language we use and the topics we cover.
Despite this more institutional element, however, we are independent from certain insti-
tutional contexts (such as academia or the mainstream and commercial media) which so often
neutralise, enclose and/or politically compromise the production of knowledge. Of course,
there are always exceptions within these contexts, and certainly many who work within
them make concerted and laudable efforts to overcome the institutional hurdles against pro-
ducing politically engaged and radical research. We do not wish to downplay or denigrate
these efforts; indeed, we frequently collaborate with other radical sites of knowledge pro-
duction, and we do not wish to draw firm barriers between inside and outside of institutions.
But here, I will explain briefly how we operate differently, to draw out how independent
research can play a critical and engaged role in social movements, despite receiving much less
fanfare, and thus visibility, legitimation and status, than more institutional research.

Why does Corporate Watch Exist?

Corporate Watch is a small, UK-based workers’ cooperative, which since 1996 has produced
a wide variety of investigative and analytical materials aimed at strengthening and resourcing
social struggles for radical change. It grew out of the UK anti-roads movements of the late
1990s, during which there emerged a need for engaged and independent research produced
from and for social struggles. It was thus part of an expanding movement experimenting with
and taking direct action for different ways of living, and a resistance to capitalist encroach-
ment into our lives, our selves and our environments. Corporate Watch took the corporation
as both a mechanism and an emblem of this encroachment and proposed to analyse it and its
workings. Since then, our basic aim has remained to provide ‘information for action’: that is,
research which supports radical, anticapitalist social movements and struggles, in which we
are embedded and to which we are committed. This research appears primarily in the form
of written publications and online articles, but also in our workshops, trainings and events,
which are often produced collaboratively. In what follows, ‘writing’ and ‘research’ serve as
shorthand for our work which includes these other, often more ephemeral, outputs.
Since we are independent from any institution, we are freer to produce the kind of re-
search we wish – rather than that deemed profitable, popular, or in line with someone else’s
strategy or agenda. We try to ensure that we write according to our politics and what we
think is most strategic in terms of producing transformative change. Our primary criterion
for choosing and evaluating our work is its potential for political and social impacts. We speak
as ourselves but also only for ourselves, representing no other body or opinion. We do not
have to conform to a particular language or discourse produced by any external institution
or authority, or earn the right not to do so. We do not have to evaluate, judge or measure
our work according to externally set criteria or methodologies. With no patrons, trustees,
editors or publishers, we are only directly accountable to each other. We are not a charity, so
the state-controlled charity commission cannot restrict how we use our funds. We apply for
grant funding when we can, in order to sustain the organisation, but do not produce work
we do not believe in simply because it is more likely to get funding. We also seek funding
through donations and subscriptions from those who value our work. We ­refuse all direct
state and corporate funding, while remaining vigilant about the potential for co-option by
(often state and/or corporate-allied) funding bodies. This freedom isn’t paid for with time
spent doing work we do not wish to do, or which is not necessary for the sustainability of

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the organisation. However, it is paid for with a financial structure that can be precarious,
leading to a concomitantly quiet voice. We do not have the clout or visibility of the well-
funded NGO, mainstream newspaper, larger publishing house or prestigious academic jour-
nal. Rather than constrain ourselves within institutional structures antithetical to our wider
agenda, in spite of the lavish resources they may offer, we research from within, for, and not
about social movements, in the hope that this research supports and is directly engaged with
the struggles against capitalism and oppression. We also try to do what we can to spread our
research skills and approach, with DIY research trainings and collaborative research projects
involving those taking radical political action. This all means various differences in the con-
tent, style, values and ethics of our research, which, even if theoretical in content, is directly
tied to practice, indeed, that is a practice in and of itself.

The Content of our Work

Politically, Corporate Watch is resolutely anticapitalist, anti-oppression and antistate. We
impose no hierarchy among these – while we tend to focus on capitalist systems of power
and exploitation, we recognise that the abolition of capitalism is unthinkable without also
bringing an end to other oppressive systems, such as racism and patriarchy, and that these
must be tackled simultaneously. Similarly, patriarchy and other systems of oppression are
reinforced by capitalist relations and systems of organising. We recognise that all of these
operate in diffuse and often cultural and interpersonal ways: capitalism is inside us, as much
as it is a system of economic relationships. This means that it must be confronted on multi-
ple fronts. It also means that we must develop cultures, practices and relationships of non-­
capitalist sociability.
These principles guide both the content of our research and its application. We choose
our topics based on a sense of what research we think is useful in combating capitalism
and building alternatives. With our active, continual and long-standing position and en-
gagement in social movements, we are well placed to spot where our research is needed,
and where it can be most useful. Sometimes, the topics we are working on already have a
groundswell of activist attention, which we wish to support (e.g. our migration-related re-
search); other times, there is a groundswell of activity which we feel is being insufficiently
or inadequately researched (e.g. unconventional fossil fuels); and other times, it is an area
which few people are addressing but which we feel needs exploration and action (e.g. nano-
technology). We also choose areas to work on based on our own personal interests (since we
won’t produce useful work if we are not enthused by it). This can range from investigative
research into particular companies, to the web of state/corporate and other players active
within a particular field, to analytical research into the wider structures of capitalist power
and oppression. Our aim is to bring out the structural forces and dynamics at play within
specific, concrete events or p­ rocesses, to inspire and deepen action against them. These can
be localised instances of corporate abrogation of power, such as the companies implementing
and profiting from the brutal border regime, to more theoretical investigations, such as an-
alysing the various mechanisms through which the financial system operates. We hope that
by combining the localised with the more general, while always being attentive to the cur-
rent situation, we can establish the connections between the two levels, as well as b­ etween
theory and practice.
This means that we can produce work which goes further than other, compromised or-
ganisations are usually willing to. Without trustees, members or state or corporate backers,
we do not have to pull our punches. NGOs typically have to tone down their materials in

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order to retain their ‘seat at the table’ within government lobbying circles (where in any case
their voice is likely to be drowned out by corporate interests). Here, I speak from experience:
this was precisely the reasoning I heard at the NGO where I used to work. Hence, what most
differentiates us from mainstream NGOs is our outspokenness. And unlike trade unions,
we do not have any particular sectors’ workers’ interests to protect, and so are free to take
multiple angles and positions into account. Also, unlike most academics, we are free to use a
directly engaged register, instead of speaking as outside, authoritative, objective analysers of
a particular topic, as is the norm in academic discourse. We do not have to speak ‘objectively’
about our topics of study, or feign neutrality to prove our authority by adopting the voice
of the detached, disinterested expert. Instead, we can admit to our many political and social
biases, speaking as active participants who seek to change the issues we are researching and
apply our work to this purpose.

Values
This commitment to transformative political change is difficult to maintain and push for
within more mainstream, institutional contexts. Moreover, we believe that this transforma-
tive change can only come ‘from below’. This is, of course, connected to our political prin-
ciple of being anticapitalist, anti-oppression and antiauthoritarian, since any imposed order
(i.e. from above) can only be repressive. This means that we do not believe radical change can
come from petitioning governments, corporations or other institutional structures of power,
since this serves to legitimate their power. Instead, we believe in the change that comes when
people organise autonomously and collectively to benefit themselves, their communities and
the planet. We prefer to put our energies into supporting and engaging with movements of
this kind, than with those which legitimate and perpetuate the power wielded by structural
forces such as the market or the state (e.g. consumer politics, liberal democracy).
Linked to this, we believe that we must experiment with creating transformative change,
with new cultures and ways of living, in the here and now. In pursuing radical social change,
neither the means nor the ends should be ignored, but that in fact their differences can be
effaced: the means can be the ends. While we are aiming for systemic change, we do not
believe that it will come through one, singular global event, like a revolution. Since power
does not only operate in any one central system, but through diffuse processes, values and
norms, it cannot be overthrown in one moment. Instead, we understand change as an on-
going process of destruction and creation, within society, the self and our relationships. So
we must act now, and experiment, rather than wait for the revolution. We cannot design
hypothetical and untested utopias in advance: to avoid replicating pre-existing oppressive
power dynamics, or instituting new ones, change must emerge from and extend beyond
the everyday, local struggles against oppression and exploitation, and from the experiments
with other ways to organise and provide for ourselves. For how can any of us know what
kind of society we will all need and want when our thinking, our very conception of what
is possible, is so conditioned by and integrated within the current structures, norms and val-
ues? In addition, the ‘wait for the revolution’ approach requires a vanguard – an elite section
of society directing and moulding social movements to bring about change – which is an
approach to social change that we believe should be resisted, and which cannot be justified
by any promised ends which can be quickly discarded. Change should not be created nor
imposed. And that means avoiding prescribing models for ways of living, for being designed
in advance these will be blind to the contingencies and particularities of the situation, and so
risk, again, producing a new ruling order to replace the old.

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With a view to enacting now the changes we wish to spread wider, we understand Cor-
porate Watch as an experiment in alternative ways of organising. As a workers’ co-op, we
share and rotate the tasks of running the co-op and conducting the research, avoiding des-
ignated and devalued roles such as ‘administrator’ or ‘fundraiser’ and the fixed division
of labour that so often creates hierarchies. We make our decisions non-hierarchically and
collectively in order to avoid the hierarchical management norm with its bosses, deputies
and subordinates, aiming to ensure that all voices are heard equally and in a supportive and
accountable environment. This is a key element of the ethics with which we produce our
research: since we have no hierarchy to move up in, there is no need to use our research
to make careerist attempts at one-up-man-ship or point-scoring, and no need to precisely
position oneself via self-serving critique or emulation of others. We also aim to treat our ma-
terial and collaborators with responsibility and care, in a way that is aligned with our wider
politics. For instance, unlike bigger organisations, we have no need or interest in the kind
of self-aggrandising that can diminish or fail to acknowledge the work conducted by others,
and we will always protect the anonymity of anyone who requests it.
Given that our broad aim is to produce more egalitarian and liberatory cultures, we also
try to integrate these values and ethics into our relationships. The personal is political after
all, and we acknowledge the need to acknowledge the power dynamics that operate within
and between us. Furthermore, it is only by experimenting with new cultures and ways of
living in the here and now that we can hope that they will spread and deepen. This requires
active listening, trust and an openness to both challenge and change, all of which must be
constantly worked at and not taken for granted. As antiauthoritarians, we are committed to
actively working against all oppressive hierarchies wherever they occur – macro and micro,
in society, within our own interpersonal relationships and inside ourselves. Of course, this
is a never-ending experiment that will be based on ‘trial and error’ and constant learning,
particularly since we have all been schooled under capitalism, patriarchy, racism, ableism,
heteronormativity, etc. Our conscious and unconscious learned patterns of thought and be-
haviour make this complex and difficult.

Style/Practice
In contrast to many commercial or mainstream media outlets, we do not pretend to be
neutral or impartial. We recognise that the supposed objectivity of the media, and other
research organisations, is a veil to cover inherent biases and we freely acknowledge our polit-
ical perspectives and principles. We are writing with an agenda – for radical, transformative
change – and make no bones about this.
In our materials, we aim to make sure that our language is relatively simple, clear and
well explained, basing our work on reliable and thorough investigations. We don’t pretend
that change, or writing to help produce change, is an easy process. It will necessarily involve
radically altering the tools and structures through which we view and speak about the world,
each other and our selves. This involves thinking both practically and philosophically, indeed
intertwining the two. However, we try not to assume audience knowledge about the issues,
concepts and terms we write about, and thus make our materials as clear and ‘accessible’ as pos-
sible, hopefully without being patronising or condescending. Too often, we find that research
produced within institutions speaks most keenly to others within those ­institutions – ­preaching
to the choir – and develops a particular and exclusionary discourse to do so. Although the pro-
cesses through which this happens are certainly not reducible to the institution, nor unavoid-
able within it, we find being outside institutions certainly helpful in this aim.

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This also includes embracing the unknown. We don’t claim the authority traditionally
proclaimed within institutional contexts. In part, this comes from our horizontal s­ tructure –
we don’t have the formally hierarchical relationships within our organisation which else-
where encourage proclamations of, and fights for, authority and recognition. While we
often write under individual names, to reflect our individual autonomy within the co-op,
we also write anonymously, or in the name of the co-op, as with a lot of other research pro-
duced from within social movements. While anonymity is sometimes necessary for reasons
of security, it is also helpful in moving away from the sense that knowledge is produced
by individual thinkers. Such individuals are always aided and supported by others around
them – no one is an island, after all. Moreover, explicitly collective knowledge production is
rarely granted equal levels of prestige. For this reason, we like to stress the role of collectivity
in producing knowledge. This is also connected to our recognition that we don’t have the
answers – only some tentative and propositional ideas among many questions. We do not
wish to direct any individual, collective or movement – we are not the vanguard! Further-
more, we do not wish to prescribe what action people should take. Our research does not
aim to provide explicit direction, and is written, we hope, without dogma. We realise that
we and the world around us are always in flux, and what is strategic in one situation may not
be applicable in another.
However, we do recognise that with our privileged position of being able to put the time
and energy into this kind of research, we have accumulated knowledge and information that
lend us some degree of expertise. While we wish to impart this knowledge, we do not wish
to do so in a way that creates the sense that we are the experts, or that our knowledge is supe-
rior to anyone else’s. Our knowledge is contingent, subjective and partial. Moreover, while
we have had the luxury of time to develop particular strategies and skills, we do not wish
to be seen as a service provider (an infantilising and pacifying model of working). Instead of
producing research to order, we rather work with others to spread the skills needed – let’s
‘Do It Together’! We thus endeavour to spread the techniques of our research, and learn new
ones, through our research trainings, where we have been assisting activists, campaigns,
community groups and individuals in investigative research, including how to read company
accounts and use of the Freedom of Information Act. The popularity of these trainings and
the high level of offers of help and requests for help with research we receive show that the
Do It Together model works! We hope this goes a small way towards encouraging more on-
the-ground, non-institutional radical research.

Beyond the Research

We direct our material not only to those who are self-consciously engaged in organised
political and social struggles, but to all those who are living with, struggling against and
finding ways to confront the impacts of capitalism and oppression day to day, even without
consciously thinking of themselves as ‘activists’. In reaching these audiences, we rely on
and support free and independent networks and alliances – such as radical bookshops and
­bookfairs, self-organised activists and social spaces – as well as putting all our work online
for free. We collaborate frequently with other sympathetic individuals, collectives, organi-
sations, within and without institutional contexts. And, where this is possible without com-
promising our message, we promote our research in more mainstream contexts such as the
media. The overall objective is to support an anticapitalist and antistate culture in practice –
by insisting on the validity and necessity of these non-institutionalised forms of knowledge
production and practice. Our work is not produced within ivory towers, destined only to

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be read by other experts; nor is it produced merely for demoralising and pacifying mobil-
isations and ‘clicktivism’. We work in areas where we think research is needed to support
and strengthen radical action and change, and we target that research where we think it can
make an intervention.

Successes, Challenges and Failures

Our most obvious success is remaining relevant, useful and hopefully true to our basic politi-
cal goal – providing ‘information for action’ – established when we were formed over twenty
years ago, in quite a different sociopolitical context. When we started, it was much harder
to come by basic information about companies but now it’s clear that our research needs to
provide much more than this. We have therefore broadened out – from uncovering corpo-
ration’s evasive tax structures hidden in the financial small print, to analysing the systemic
forces and processes which sustain corporate power and oppression.
Trying to produce strategic work which will help to galvanise resistance can involve an
impossible degree of clairvoyance – and our work does not always hit this mark (for in-
stance, the energy behind the anti-GM movement did not signal that there would be similar
amounts of energy against nanotechnology). But it is a challenge we accept, while remaining
attentive to the dangers of vanguardism. Working at Corporate Watch and sharing collec-
tive responsibility for its running can be complex and stressful, particularly with stretched
resources. We can too often feel as though the work involved in running and raising funds
for the organisation eats into the time and energy we have for the actual research. Keeping
both in the right balance is a constant challenge.

Conclusion: Different Knowledge

All in all, Corporate Watch aspires to create and promote knowledge that is produced outside
the institutional context, and for rather than about radical and transformative social change.
Such forms of knowledge are hard to find and hard to legitimate, in an environment where
your institutional status and the discourse this requires command respect more than the
‘quality’ of the research (which in any case can be based on dubious criteria such as academic
citations, rather than how useful it is, or what its political/social impact might be). This is a
necessary result of a society in which knowledge is policed, depoliticised and defanged (e.g.
by enclosure in academia or impenetrable language). We believe that knowledge is a crucial
weapon in our struggles against capitalism and the state: its production is inherently ­political
and we need to reclaim its production from those structures which serve to control and
neutralise it. This is not to dismiss all research produced from within institutions – merely
to indicate that there are many other sites which deserve visibility and legitimation. We
believe that Corporate Watch is one such site, and in our work we seek to strengthen the
non-­institutional production of knowledge which supports transformative change.

Key Corporate Watch Publications and Projects

DBFO (Destroy! Burn! Fell! Obliterate!) (1995)

The first stirrings of Corporate Watch and the only publication of Corporate Watch 1.0.
The DBFO booklet uncovered the companies, lobby groups and government departments
behind the Design Build Finance & Operate road schemes of the mid-1990s.

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 Rebecca Fisher

Squaring Up to the Square Mile (1999)

An activist’s guide book and map to the City of London and the how the finance sector
works. Written in collaboration with London Reclaim the Streets in the build up to the J18
Carnival Against Capitalism, when on June 18th 1999 London’s financial district was trans-
formed into a carnival for the day, interrupting trading and causing millions of pounds of
damage and questioning the divine right of capital to run the world. Corporate Watch was
fingered as one of the event’s organisers, leading to Corporate Watchers being hounded by
the right-wing press.

What’s Wrong with Supermarkets? (2002)

Still popular today, it exposes the immense power that supermarkets wield over the way
we grow, buy and eat food, and how they shape our environment, health and even the
way we interact socially. What’s Wrong with Supermarkets helped campaigners get to
grips with the reality of supermarket domination and why we must all start looking for
alternatives.

Corporate Law and Structures (2004)

Can corporations ever be a force for good in the world? ‘Not as they are currently struc-
tured!’ says Corporate Watch. A no-punches-pulled analysis of why company law is killing
the planet by ensuring that corporations are moneymaking machines for shareholders at the
expense of everything and everyone else. The report shows how the law provides companies
with protection originally intended for human beings while at the same time freeing them
from the liabilities faced by individuals. It concludes that single-minded and legally sheltered
corporations are able to prey on society and the planet while fostering an ideology that paints
them as ethically concerned citizens.

CSR (Companies Spouting Rubbish) (2006)

Corporate Watch’s latest heavyweight report on why, no matter how much we might love
to believe otherwise, Corporate Social Responsibility is a contradiction in terms. While
other organisations have criticised companies for not delivering on their CSR promises to
be socially responsible, Corporate Watch’s report pulls the whole mythology apart, exposing
the way CSR helps companies to: dupe the public; avoid regulation; disarm critics; bolster
their reputations; cosy up to governments; gain access to international summits; exploit de-
veloping country markets and continue their war on the climate. After reading it, one CSR
worker contacted us to say that they quit their job!

Targeting Israeli Apartheid: A Boycott, Divestment and

Sanctions Handbook (2011)
The result of in-the-field research in Palestine, Corporate Watch’s first book forensically
examined the Israeli economy industry in order to provide BDS campaigners with the infor-
mation to target the companies – including many based in the UK – who are profiting from
the occupation of Palestine. Information for action in its purest form.

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Demystifying the Financial Sector: A Nuts and Bolts Guide (2012)

Despite years of economic turmoil, the workings of the financial system are bewilderingly
opaque to many people (including most politicians, it seems!). With jargon deconstructed,
case studies explained and many of the myths about the city and its operations debunked, this
booklet was designed to give readers with little or no knowledge of the world of finance and
banking an accessible overview of its workings. It was the first of a three-part ‘Banking on
Crisis’ series, comprising a handbook, ‘Making Sense of the Crisis’ and a full-length report
on the Eurozone crisis.

Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent (2013)

Our longest book to date, and the most difficult to summarise! MDMD was a collection of
twenty essays, arguing that genuine democracy and capitalism are in fundamental contradic-
tion, yet mutually reinforce each other: that capitalism cannot be truly democratic, but must
make the claim to be democratic in order to survive. It explores how this paradox is sustained
via propaganda, manipulation of public opinion and the co-option, marginalisation and
repression of dissent. It exemplified our aim of bringing rabble-rousing ideas that are often
imprisoned within academic discourse to light.

Investigating Companies: A Do-It-Yourself Handbook (2014)

Anticorporate research has become more complicated with the proliferation of information
sources, but it is just as possible to do-it-yourself. Updating and expanding our previous DIY
Guide, this handbook shows you how to: look into a company you’ve got an issue with; find
and understand key pieces of information about it including reading company accounts;
make Freedom of Information requests; understand company law, ownership and financing;
get the most from searching the web; and find information out from the company, workers
and others affected by it. It is currently our bestselling publication.

Secret filming Inside Harmondsworth Detention Centre (2015)

In 2015, Corporate Watch obtained footage filmed by a detainee of conditions within
­Harmondsworth Detention Centre, run by outsourcing firm Mitie. The footage revealed un-
hygienic conditions within the centre that detainees were being locked in their cells for an extra
two hours per night, and a Home Office staff-member admitting that the reason detainees are
not allowed camera phones is because the government ‘don’t want the bad publicity that would
entail’. We hope our exposure gave the government some well-deserved ‘bad publicity’.

Underpayment of Workers in Homecare (2015–Ongoing)

Following our work on Mitie, whistleblowers within MitieHomecare came to us reporting
how since they would not be paid for their travel time their wages worked came to well
below the national minimum wage. Corporate Watch investigated as more and more care
workers came forward with similar stories, and together we exposed systemic underpayment
of staff, overall poor quality of care in the services and huge payouts to the owners, all of
which is typical of privatised public services. Several care workers have since taken legal
action and many have been awarded compensation.

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 Rebecca Fisher

Capitalism: What Is It and How Can We Destroy It? (2016)

Never prone to modest goals, we wrote an introduction to capitalism and asked how we
might bring about its ending. We explained how capitalism operates not only as an economic
system but as a culture of fear and passivity, shaping our values and desires. Although not a
step-by-step guide to taking down capitalism (forthcoming!), we do hope it will give you
some useful ideas.

A–Z of Green Capitalism (2016)

This clear and accessible resource explains the increasing tendency for corporations and
other institutions to present their – still environmentally destructive – activities as ‘green’.
The A–Z format, in which key concepts, ideas and trends are explained in alphabetical or-
der, exposes an important and relatively new development that those taking action against
climate change need to get to grips with.

The UK Border Regime. A Critical Guide (2018)

This book brings together Corporate Watch’s recent research on the “hostile environment”
against migrants in the UK, and the companies that profit from it. It also includes a lot of
new research and analysis, and looks at the history of recent migration struggles in the UK,
asking what has been effective.

References
Collectivo Situationes, ‘On the Researcher-Militant’, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivo
situaciones/en.
Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber, eds. with Erika Biddle, Constituent Imagination. Militant
­Investigations // Collective Theorization. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007.
Team Colours Collective, ‘A Collective Engaged in Militant Research to Provide Strategic Analysis
for the Intervention into Everyday Life’, – warmachines.info/home/main/.

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 Section 2

Solidarities

Our second section considers how activists connect struggles to develop frames of reference
for anti-oppression politics, and build solidarities across intersectional movements.
The term ‘solidarity’ is often used to designate the attempt to find coherence and mutual-
ity across society or subsets within it, with the evident risk of papering over significant cleav-
ages and antagonisms (Scholz 2008; Stjernø 2009). Our understanding, conversely, refers to
solidarity as a form of identification based on shared antagonisms and practices. This is most
often seen within a movement where individuals are prepared to take unified action and ac-
cept compromises to support their comrades, often with the material basis of communalised
resources. Yet, solidarity is also present and across movements, where those mobilising for
seemingly disparate causes find ways to support one another, declaratively and/or materially
(Krøvel 2010).
Coming to the fore in the latter context especially is the recurrence of concerns around
asymmetric power, unexamined assumptions and behaviours associated with privilege, and
the material and cultural complexities attending solidarity as conceived in the context of
difference. This applies both among radicals working to remove regimes of domination from
their lives, and when they act as accomplices to others’ uprisings. The disproportionately
white and middle-class background of many radicals concentrated in Europe and North
America requires us to take our own positionality into account in supporting the mobilisa-
tion of subaltern groups and to avoiding both a saviour mentality and the condescension of
revolutionary tutelage. Solidarity here is not equal: it recognises the leadership of the group
which has invited it. The implications have received wide attention in settler-colonial con-
texts as different as Canada and Palestine, as well as in European solidarity with refugees and
migrants.
The chapters in this section display a strong awareness of these asymmetries, and point
towards an account of solidarity which views practices of identification through an intersec-
tional critique, and allows us to approach solidarities from within the contingent realities of
social inequality.
Narrating a history of the Canadian government’s genocidal oppression of the Indige-
nous Nations, Pamela Palmater describes the grassroots Indigenous struggles organised in
response. Radicalism is problematised to highlight the ways that colonisers normalise their
own violence and outlaw the resistance struggles of their opponents. Indigenous peoples
 Solidarities

are radical to the extent that they organise against the settler government but are not the
­‘dangerous radicals’ it paints them to be. The radicals are the authorities who confiscate
Indigenous lands; suppress Indigenous cultures; and harass, disappear and kill Indigenous
peoples. Looking at the ways that recent grass roots resistance campaigns have been or-
ganised and conducted, the chapter explains why decolonisation is the linchpin of human,
environmental and social justice politics.
Maia Ramnath presents a brief history of colonisation, in order to place decolonisation
at the heart of contemporary radical politics. Colonisation is analysed as a regime of violence
linked to modernisation, capitalism, empire and racism. In terms of policy, it is felt in dispos-
session of land both for the exploitation of natural resources and to support Westernisation.
Resistance thus links Indigenous peoples’ resistance with Palestinian liberation struggles. As
a radicalising framework, decolonisation exposes the structural injustices that underpin in-
tersectional politics and the limitations of post-war decolonisation. Decolonisation remains
a lived reality and undoing it involves combatting the ideological and structural forces that
sustain it.
Radical disability politics is addressed in a roundtable discussion, in which A. J. ­Withers
and Liat Ben-Moshe bring six prominent disability organisers in Canada and the US into
conversation. This is introduced by a discussion of the tension between established disability
rights frameworks and intersectional frameworks, which stress the centrality of a­ nticapitalist,
feminist and cross-disability organising, as well as the necessity of valuing interdependence
and the intrinsic worth of disabled people (and everyone) outside of traditional labour econ-
omies. Within the roundtable conversation, key issues discussed are the radicalism of radical
disability politics, the omissions of disability in many forms of activism, the tendency for
disability organising to be single-issue and the contributions disability and a disability anal-
ysis can make to radical organising.
Claire English, Margherita Grazioli and Martina Martingnoni examine forms of ­m igrant
solidarity fostered by radical responses to the migration crisis. Using postcolonial theory
and concepts of hybridity and difference to explore the politics of migrant solidarity ­activism,
the authors then examine practices of Calais Migrant Solidarity, the collective established in
2009 at the end of the Calais No Border protest camp. The intersectional activism of CMS
is distinguished from the border politics of charities and NGOs to underscore the radicalism
of migrant solidarity and the distance between human rights and transnational discourses.
Yet, the experience of CMS also shows how solidarity activism radicalises by bringing new
perspectives to bear on political theory.
Claire Delisle’s chapter on prison abolitionism focuses on the link between c­ olonialism
and punishment, looking, in particular, at the organising practices of the International Con-
ference of Penal Abolitionism (ICOPA). Penal abolitionism is described as a theoretical,
strategic and grounded position aimed at the elimination of punishment frameworks and
attendant institutions (prisons, police and courts). It is also a response to the concept of
criminal justice realised through the period of global ‘Englishtenment’. Prison abolitionism
is thus linked to a wider set of practices, techniques and institutions that dehumanise and col-
onise: racism and white supremacy. Exploring internal debates and tensions at ICOPA, the
analysis shows how participants addressed their own colonial practices and gave those with
experience of oppression and criminalisation the central role in conference organisation.
Ruth A. Deller examines the notion of safer spaces to highlight the everyday experience
of insecurity felt by marginalised groups. Insecurity is analysed as a process of exclusion and
systematic denigration, understood from the perspectives of the marginalised. The chapter
explains and defends a range of policies promoted by proponents of safer spaces, notably

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statue-toppling, no platforming, trigger warnings and the promotion of inclusive language.

It explains the theoretical underpinning with reference to feminist and postcolonial think-
ing. Critiques of intolerance rooted in the defence of free-speech provide a major focus
for the analysis of radicalism. Against critics who are often in positions of power or enjoy
considerable privileges, the chapter shows how safer spaces both equip marginalised groups
to deal with insecurity and transform reality in the process. To the extent that safer spaces
politics challenge existing power relationships, it is radical.
Writing for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), A. J. Withers discusses its
antipoverty organising which has won important gains for poor people. For twenty years,
OCAP has organised poor communities using anticapitalist direct action. Emerging out of a
province-wide coalition demanding a raise in social assistance rates during a provincial elec-
tion campaign, OCAP quickly became an intergenerational, racially diverse organisation
made up of primarily poor and working-class people. Focusing on the lessons learned from
its experiences, the chapter discusses strengths and difficulties of poor people’s organising,
and the importance of addressing both individual and community needs, using disruption
and resisting demobilisation.

References
Krøvel, Roy, ‘Anarchism, The Zapatistas and the Global Solidarity Movement’, Global Discourse 1(2)
(2010): 20–40.
Scholz, Sally J., Political Solidarity (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2008).
Stjernø, Steinar, Solidary in Europe: The History of an Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

133
 2.1
THE RADICAL POLITICS OF
INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE AND
SURVIVAL1
Pamela Palmater

Introduction
The most radical thing that a person can do in Canada is to be born Indigenous. Being born
into any of the Mi’kmaw, Wolastoqiyik, Anishinabek or other Indigenous Nations means
that we are born into Nations struggling to heal from the devastating intergenerational
effects of Canada’s long history of genocidal policies against Indigenous peoples. Multiple
generations suffered through scalping laws, forced sterilisations, confinement to reserves,
starvation and the rapes, tortures and murders of children which occurred in residential
schools. Being born Indigenous means that we are born into an ongoing battle to both
resist the state’s ongoing assimilatory drive and survive its institutionalised racism. Modern
colonisation, like historical colonisation, includes the ongoing state and corporate theft and
destruction of Indigenous lands, waters and resources, as well as the violent intervention of
state police and military, on behalf of powerful corporate interests, to quell both Indigenous
resistance and ultimately Indigenous survival (Palmater 2017a). One of the primary ways that
the Canadian state has used to control the resistance of Indigenous peoples was to criminalise
every aspect of our identity, culture and subsistence, locking us into generations of abject
poverty. By criminalising our efforts to survive, Canada has educated its settler populations
to see Indigenous peoples as domestic terrorists. In so doing, it has created a portrait of our
quest for justice and peace as one of radical politics carried out by ‘rogue’ Indians that are
inherent ‘threats to national security’ (Barrera 2014a).
Since the time of contact, settler governments have viewed Indigenous peoples as less
than human, as barbarians, savages, heathens and pagans (Royal Commission on Aboriginal
Peoples 1996a; Paul 2006; Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015). By being different
in our appearances, languages, governance and legal systems, and spiritualities and prac-
tices, Indigenous Nations were vilified as dangerous – peoples that represented a radical and
terrifying departure from European norms (Deloria 1997, 1998; Fanon 2005; Paul 2006).
Indigenous identities, beliefs and worldviews were portrayed as radical by European powers
as threats to settler populations under the guise of Christianity, but were in reality, for their
own economic self-interests and empire-building agendas. The purposeful maligning and
dehumanising of Indigenous peoples was primarily about wealth and power (Alfred 2005,
2008, 2009; Manuel 2015). Colonial governments wanted full control over Indigenous lands

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for settlement purposes and control over natural resources for their own wealth generation
and Indigenous peoples stood in the way of that – legally, politically and physically (ibid.;
­Palmater 2015a).
In order to get Indigenous peoples out of the way, colonial governments enacted numer-
ous laws, regulations and policies to separate them from their lands and resources; cultures
and practices; and from one another. Any form of resistance from Indigenous peoples was
treated as a crime (Manuel 2015; Palmater 2015a). It has taken many decades of research,
advocacy and public commissions and inquiries to convince (some) Canadians that C ­ anada’s
treatment of Indigenous peoples was wrong. However, many are still convinced that it is
a shameful legacy of the past; has no connection to the problems of today; and the focus
should be on moving forward (Warry 2007; Monchalin 2016: 20–22). Attempts to histor-
icise Canada’s abuses include the many political apologies offered by governments and the
corresponding rhetoric around reconciliation and moving forward (Stewart 1998; Harper
2008; Duncan 2010; Selinger 2015). Yet, for Indigenous peoples, it is hard to get over some-
thing that has not stopped. Colonisation is ongoing and takes the form of impoverishing our
Nations to weaken resistance, preventing us from accessing our own lands and resources,
and the continued attempts to criminalise our attempts to survive as Indigenous peoples
(Palmater 2017a).
Today, many acts of Indigenous resistance against the Canadian state’s racist and abusive
laws, policies and enforcement actions are portrayed by the state to the Canadian public
as terrorism (Adese 2009; Dafnos 2014; Proulx 2014; Palmater 2017a). While Indigenous
­peoples have never issued any manifestos of violence or shown ill will towards ­Canadians,
signs of Indigenous resistance on the ground are often met with heavy and sometimes
­lethal-armed police and/or military responses (Linden 2007; Hill 2010; Roache 2014; see
also Belanger and Lackenbauer 2014). Canada has also engaged in the illegal practice of
surveilling ­Indigenous peoples and our activities, further violating our most basic demo-
cratic rights and freedoms (Norrell 2010; Mire 2014). Following a similar pattern from the
US and other G-8 countries, the federal government has used international developments
related to terrorism to enact its own antiterror legislation that focuses on the pathways of
resistance used by Indigenous peoples – assertions of sovereignty (our own), disruption of
the ­economy (resource extraction), interference with infrastructure (highways, bridges and
border ­crossings on our lands) and interference in diplomatic relations (collaboration with
other Indigenous Nations in the US and South America) (Proulx 2014; Palmater 2015a).
Since contact, Canada’s national security agenda has deteriorated from the original partner-
ship formalised in treaties which recognised us as military allies to treating us as domestic
terrorists and enemies of the state (Palmater 2015a, 2016).
Yet, Indigenous resistance against state oppression continues and has arguably ­expanded,
despite all the violent enforcement measures taken by the state to try to quell the ­resurgence
of Indigenous sovereignty through criminal laws, enforcement or other suppressive tactics
like targeted surveillance (Dafnos and Pasternak 2013; Diablo and Pasternak 2011). With
­Indigenous women leading the way, Indigenous grassroots peoples of all backgrounds –
­g randmothers, grandfathers, hunters, labourers, artists, lawyers and academics, together
with the support of non-Indigenous allies – have come together in a massive project of
­decolonisation. This massive social movement involves public education, community
­empowerment and activism centred on our inherent right to be self-determining and the
urgent need to repatriate and protect our lands and waters for the health and well-being
of our future generations (Saul 2014; The Kino-nda-niimi Collective 2014; Coates 2015).
­Grassroots Indigenous peoples are working together with youth, elders and leaders to kick

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the coloniser out of our heads with a view to paving the way for a massive cultural resurgence
which is land-based and focused on restoring our governments, laws, languages, cultures and
identities (Alfred 2005, 2008; Simpson 2008, 2011; Coulthard 2014; McAdam 2015). It is
about protecting our right to survive and thrive as Indigenous Nations and standing up for
the same core human rights and freedoms afforded to settlers.
In this way, the ‘radical’ politics of Indigenous peoples is not radical at all – but a con-
tinued reliance on our traditional values and beliefs to revitalise our cultures and identities;
reconnect with the land and ecosystems for our mutual health and well-being; and heal the
wounds of colonisation by empowering and lifting our people out of the system of oppres-
sion which keeps so many of our peoples in poverty, illness and depression (Simpson 2008,
2011). Indigenous peoples have cultural obligations to honour our identities and protect our
future generations from further suffering (ibid.; Palmater 2016b). We do not have a choice –
survival is a basic instinct of all human beings and is not at all radical. What is radical is
the state’s heavy-handed legal and political responses to Indigenous resistance and survival.
Despite political promises and apologies to the contrary, Canada refuses to let go of its death
grip on Indigenous peoples and our lands.
Yet, there are many challenges to our unity in resistance as Indigenous peoples. Our
Nations are at different stages of the decolonisation process and colonial thinking is unfortu-
nately, but not unexpectedly, deep-rooted in our Nations. Hundreds of years of colonisation
and oppression have left many Indigenous Nations socially weakened and politically divided.
This resurgence in resistance, which is deeply embedded in our cultures, has sometimes
been met with resistance from some of our own Indigenous leaders who act counter to the
interests of the people (Carlson 2013; Scoffield 2013; Canadian Press 2014). Their ability to
advocate on our behalf is sometimes compromised by the heavy-handed pressure tactics of
the state which uses funding for critical social programmes as the lever to pressure leaders
to support state initiatives or sign away rights. Similarly, unity in the resistance is often
challenged by divisions within the activist groups themselves who want to be recognised
as the leaders of the movement or who want to control the movement in some way. Even
those teaching others about decolonisation can fall victim to colonial thinking in relation to
power structures. Corporate colonisation is another challenge to this resistance movement,
as powerful corporate interests have become deeply embedded within the state’s economic
and power structures (Manuel 2015; Palmater 2017a). Unfortunately, there are cases of lead-
ers and advocates who end up ‘switching sides’ and working for the very corporate interests
they once opposed. In this context, Indigenous resistance to state and corporate oppression
is a challenge made worse by the fact that the basic survival of those in the movement has
reached crisis level (Anaya 2013; Commisso 2013).
Resistance and survival in this context is daunting. Canada’s current laws and enforcement
mechanisms are formidable barriers to grassroots action on the ground, while real threats to
Indigenous lives are not acted upon by the state. Thus, we face significant obstacles in main-
taining our levels of activism and resistance as basic survival needs often take precedence. We
must also find a way to address worsening socio-economic conditions, the high numbers of
Indigenous women and children that are disappeared or murdered, the theft of our children
into foster care at alarming rates as well as our increasing over-incarceration rates (Truth and
Reconciliation Commission 2015; Palmater, Pate, and Feminist Alliance for International
Action 2016). This requires that Indigenous activists and our allies must constantly adapt our
political strategies, both within our Nations and externally vis-à-vis the state (White 2016).
However, the new relationships created with non-Indigenous allies during the historic Idle
No More social movement in 2012–13, increased access to information and critical analysis

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provided by activists online, and a larger network of allies connected to one another via so-
cial media mean that we have some new tools for maintaining and reinventing our political
unity and advocacy even in the face of these challenges (ibid.; Pickerill 2003; Van De Donk,
et al. 2004; Earl and Kimport 2011; Gerbaudo 2012).
The state criminalisation of Indigenous peoples for their actions of resistance and survival
has not been adequately addressed in public discourse or settler history books. Instead, west-
ern histories tell a melancholy story of the inevitable, but accidental spread of disease, the
well-intended Christianisation and education of Indigenous peoples, and the unfortunate
struggles inherent in cultural difference (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996a).
This is not historically accurate nor has it been adequately challenged in modern academic
literature outside of Indigenous-focused studies. That is why this book is so important to
understanding the global rise of radical politics and the quest for social justice more broadly.
To this end, this chapter will provide a historical overview of the criminalisation of Indige-
nous peoples in Canada and highlight some of the state’s genocidal policies which continue
in modern forms. From this historical and legal context, the chapter will look closer at the
modern evolution of Indigenous peoples’ movements of resistance and survival as those who
are leading the movement and their ultimate objectives. This will be followed by a brief
overview of the state’s radical response to collective action and its impact on Indigenous
peoples. The chapter will conclude with some thoughts on what the future might hold for
Indigenous resistance and survival in Canada.

State Criminalisation of Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous Nations on Turtle Island (what is now known as Canada and the US) have lived
and thrived here since time immemorial. Our sovereign Nations had their own governments,
laws, economies and militaries. Contrary to the settler-created fiction of one race of Indians,
we were in fact Nations that were socially, politically and culturally diverse having their
own languages, traditions, customs and practices. While we have been severely impacted by
several hundred years of colonisation, our time ruling our territories as sovereign Nations far
surpasses this dark colonial phase. In modern times, historians, anthropologists, a­ rchaeologists
and politicians have all tried to limit Indigenous occupation of Turtle Island and make the
argument that we are as much immigrants as the settlers are in Canada (­ Flanagan 2008).
However, with each advance in science or discovery in archaeology, settler theories on lim-
ited Indigenous occupation in Canada and the US are discredited (Iacurci 2015; Ewen 2016;
Halligan, et al. 2016). The striking similarity and consistency of Indigenous oral histories,
creation stories, place names and teachings all speak of Indigenous origins on Turtle Island.
Settler claims to the contrary distract the public from the fact that whether Indigenous peo-
ples were born here or, at the very least, were here first by many millennia, we have always
and continue to claim these lands in Canada as our sovereign territories (Palmater 2015b).2
Even under colonial law, that makes Turtle Island ours, not theirs and that’s why treaties were
and are necessary to enable peaceful settlement and relations.
The state of Canada would not be possible were it not for the generosity, compassion
and political cooperation of the Indigenous Nations on Turtle Island. Indigenous Nations
in Canada were never conquered or defeated in any war (Royal Commission on Aborig-
inal Peoples 1996a). Canada’s very sovereignty (vis-à-vis other states) rests entirely on the
prior and ongoing sovereignty of Indigenous Nations (Palmater 2015b; St. John 2016). This
is because Canada’s sovereignty is an asserted one unlike the factual lived sovereignty of
Indigenous peoples. In vast territories where Canada has not obtained valid surrenders of

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land, Canada’s asserted sovereignty rests entirely on actual Indigenous sovereignty. In other
words, the state of Canada could not exist without Indigenous Nations – either practically
or in law (Barker 2006; St. John 2016). The state of Canada was only able to be settled
through an extended treaty negotiating process (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
1996a; Palmater 2016b). The treaties signed in the Atlantic region of Canada, for example,
were absolutely necessary to bring about peace and ensure the safety of new settlers. Those
treaties created military allies between Britain and the Mi’kmaw Nation, promising annual
supplies of ammunition to ensure our cooperation (Palmater 2016a, 2016b). Mi’kmaw trea-
ties never surrendered sovereignty or land. Despite this, even after the peace treaties were
signed, British officials enacted a proclamation which offered scalping bounties on the heads
of Mi’kmaw men, women and children to try to force us off of our lands (CBC News 2000;
Paul 2006, 2011). The Mi’kmaw Nation refused to surrender their lands and Britain was
forced to enter into additional treaties in order to keep the peace (Palmater 2016a). Canada
simply could not have carried on with the settlement project without our sovereign agree-
ments to live together as Nations in peace.
Today, those treaty and other good faith agreements form the very basis of Canada’s
democratic governing system. They are foundational documents included in Canada’s Con-
stitution Act, 1982 and are further protected in numerous international laws, declarations
and conventions which Canada has since supported, signed and/or implemented (Consti-
tution Act 1982; UN General Assembly 2007). Canada is not a legitimate state without the
recognition, respect and implementation of those agreements. While the numerous treaties
and agreements have different wording, they all boil down to three main pillars of the
­Nation-to-Nation relationship: mutual respect, mutual prosperity and mutual protection.
Indigenous Nations have lived up to their side of the bargain by sharing all we had with
settlers, by working cooperatively with settler governments, and by defending the Crown
in its international wars and military interventions as sovereign allies. The Crown has failed
to live up to its side of the bargain. It has failed to respect Indigenous sovereignty and failed
to share in and protect Indigenous lands and resources. Instead of protecting Indigenous
peoples, as agreed to in constitutionally protected treaties, Canada continues to harm them
(Alfred 2009).
From the earliest days of contact, colonial officials attempted to categorise the territory
on Turtle Island as terra nullius – empty lands not claimed by any humans. They did this to
dispossess Indigenous Nations of our lands and in so doing, had to treat us as non-humans
in order to justify any claim that these lands were not ‘claimed’ by anyone (Wolfe 2006;
Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia 2014; Manuel 2015). 3 The vilification, suppression
and elimination of Indigenous identity, culture and sovereignty became the overall pol-
icy objective of colonial governments (Paul 2006; Truth and Reconciliation Commission
2015). And all of it was done ‘legally’, i.e. with duly passed legislation enacted by colonial
governments (Isaac 1993a, 1993b; Venne 1981; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
1996a). The scalping bounties of the 1700s mentioned earlier are a good example of the
legalisation of murder of Mi’kmaw men, women and children in the name of settlement
and national security (Paul 2006; Palmater 2015b). It should be noted that these bounties
were placed on our heads after we signed peace treaties (Cape Breton University). Our
­elders tell us that our refusal to give up our sovereignty and lands meant that we lost much
of our population from scalping bounties (Paul 2006). National security, at that time, meant
protecting colonial interests in Mi’kmaw lands, resources and trade routes – known today
as economic and financial stabilities. But we resisted. We refused to surrender – despite the
‘legal’ bounty on our heads.

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From then on, colonial governments criminalised every aspect of Indigenous identities.
Early versions of the Indian Act outlawed our ceremonies and dances from 1884 to 1951
(Isaac 1993a, 1993b). So many Indigenous peoples had to hide their regalia and practice their
dances and ceremonies in secret (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996a; Truth
and Reconciliation Commission 2015). Criminals in our own lands according to settler
laws, they knew they had to break the law to protect our cultures for future generations.
After separating and subdividing Indigenous Nations into tiny and often relocated com-
munities called ‘reserves’, Indigenous traditional forms of government were replaced by the
Indian Act Chief and Council governing system (ibid.). Indigenous Nations became divided
into tiny bands now referred to as First Nations in Canada (and tribes in the US).
Despite this imposition of settler law, many Indigenous Nations resisted and maintained
our traditional forms of government as best they could, alongside legislated ones (Palmater
2016a). The Mi’kmaw Grand Council, for example, remains as part of the governing au-
thority of the Mi’kmaq – despite its lack of legal recognition under the Indian Act (Mi’kmaq
Association for Cultural Studies).
When Indigenous peoples tried officially to reject and resist these discriminatory laws,
Canada used the Indian Act to prohibit lawyers from representing us or help us to make legal
claims (Isaac 1993a, 1993b). To ensure that we could not gather in assembly with the rest of
our larger Nations, our people were legally confined to small reserves and could not leave
these reserves without an official pass from the Indian agent (Isaac 1993a, 1993b). These
policies were enforced by Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Po-
lice (RCMP) despite their lack of legal authority to do so (Daschuk 2013; Williams 2015).
Imprisonment of Indigenous peoples on reserve meant that our rights to gather in assembly
and/or advocate on our own behalf were effectively prohibited. Similarly, any intermarriage
between Indigenous women and settlers was encouraged for trade relations, but punitive to
Indigenous women and their children as they lost their right to belong to and live among our
communities and Nations (Palmater 2011).
Despite the protections negotiated in the treaties and other informal agreements, I­ ndigenous
peoples were often prevented from leaving reserves and engaging in traditional subsistence
economies to provide for their families, communities and Nations. The ‘Pass S­ ystem’ was
instituted in the 1880s as a means of controlling Indians and preventing acts of resistance.
During this time, they were forced to live on government rations which were never enough
to provide for everyone on the reserve (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996b;
Daschuk 2013). Malnourishment and ill health became rampant on reserves. Government
officials appointed to control reserves, known as Indian agents, also used these rations to
extort sex from young Indigenous women and girls (Razack 2002; Palmater 2017c). Police
officers often looked the other way or engaged in the practice themselves (Human Rights
Watch 2013; Palmater 2016c). These practices have continued over the years, where federal
and provincial governments enacted numerous laws and regulations to criminalise Indigenous
peoples who hunted, fished, gathered or used natural resources within our own traditional,
treaty, trapping or reserve lands to sustain ourselves (R. v. Simon 1985; R. v. Sioui 1990;
R. v. Sparrow 1990; R. v. Van der Peet 1996; R. v. Marshall 1999; R. v. Sappier, R. v.Gray 2006).
Though our ancestors had hunted and fished since time immemorial and despite the numer-
ous treaties which promised to protect our right to hunt and fish, we have been treated like
criminals, arrested, charged and our gear seized (Palmater 2016a). The only alternative was
to ‘skulk around the forest’ like criminals in order to feed our families (R. v. Powley 2001).4
The only way to survive was to break the law, i.e. act like criminals in the minds of settlers in
order to feed their families.

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Many other aspects of Indigenous lives were directly or indirectly outlawed like our
right to speak our own languages, engage in our cultures or be educated in our own tradi-
tional Indigenous knowledge systems by our elders. The Indian Act made it illegal for our
peoples to refuse to send their children to residential schools (Haig-Brown 1988; Trevithick
1998; Miller 1996; Fontaine 2010; Reagan 2010; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
­Canada 2012). In fact, if Indigenous children tried to run away, the RCMP would chase
them and drag them back to those schools despite the horrific abuse suffered in those institu-
tions (Royal Canadian Mounted Police 2004, 2011; Truth and Reconciliation Commission
of Canada 2012). Even some of the forced sterilisations of Indigenous women and little girls
were done through validly enacted legislation (Boyer 2006; Stote 2012, 2015). Just being
an Indigenous person was considered a crime worthy of sterilisation or death. Although
Indigenous languages were never officially outlawed, government policy was specific in its
intent to ‘kill the Indian in the child’ (Harper 2008; Truth and Reconciliation Commission
of Canada 2012). Sadly, Canada too often killed the child through various forms of torture
in residential schools (known as Indian boarding schools in the US) including rape, physical
and mental abuse, starvation, neglect and allowing others to medically experiment on Indig-
enous children (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2012; CBC News 2013).
These schools started in 1849 and the last one did not close until 1996. Given the fact that
Indigenous children had a better chance of dying in residential schools than Canadian sol-
diers had of dying on the field in the Second World War, it should be no surprise to find that
Indigenous families often broke the law to hide their children from Indian agents (Schwartz
2015; Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2015).
Although some of these laws are no longer on the books, modern laws are still used to
criminalise Indigenous identity and practices today. For example, the Mohawks tradition-
ally engaged in the growth, manufacture and trade of tobacco since long before contact
(Hache 2009; Sadik 2014). Today, because their lucrative business interferes with the eco-
nomic aspirations of settler corporations, their traditional activities are publicly condemned
by governments and non-native businesses as ‘contraband’ and/or the proceeds of crime and
have been made illegal (Poling 2012; Barrera 2013; Mire 2014). Standing up, as Indigenous
peoples have done since time immemorial, to protect the health of their lands, waters, plants,
animals and peoples has also resulted in their beatings, arrests, extended prison terms and/or
deaths (Linden 2007; Patten 2013). All of this is done under duly enacted Canadian law – yet,
the state fails to use its own laws to provide protection for Indigenous peoples. The crisis of
thousands of murdered and disappeared Indigenous women and girls in Canada is one of the
worst examples of government and law enforcement officials who consistently fail/refuse to
use current laws to protect them (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against
Women 2015).
Today, the criminalisation of Indigenous peoples has taken a drastic turn for the worse.
Now, even our own poverty – caused from generations of colonisation and oppression,
­Canada’s discriminatory laws and the theft of our lands and resources – is a reason to crim-
inalise us. Indigenous peoples are grossly over-represented in Canada’s prisons systems and
the Office of the Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers has been calling this a crisis for
over a decade (The Correctional Investigator Canada). Indigenous families who struggle to
provide food and warm clothes for their kids have their children stolen from them and placed
in foster care at rates higher than during the residential school phase (First Nations Child and
Family Caring Society of Canada v. Attorney General of Canada 2016). In Canada, half of all
children in foster care are Indigenous; yet, they only make up 4% of the Canadian population
(Statistics Canada 2011, 2016). In the province of Manitoba, 90% of all children in care are

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Indigenous (Globe & Mail 2015). Provincial officials use various laws and policies to ‘legally’
rob Indigenous Nations of our children which serves as a pipeline to being murdered, disap-
peared or exploited (Palmater 2017b).
Now, the ways in which Indigenous peoples resist inhumane and discriminatory treat-
ment have been labelled as ‘insurgent’ and ‘a threat to national security’ (Barrera 2014a). The
many ways in which Indigenous peoples and our Nations have peacefully asserted, lived and
defended our sovereignty and autonomy, together with our peaceful defence of Aboriginal,
treaty and inherent rights are portrayed by the state as acts of ‘insurgency’ (Department of
National Defense Canada 2008). Under Bill C-51 Canada’s antiterrorism legislation intro-
duced in 2014 which came into force in 2015, Indigenous public voices and communications
can be criminalised (Palmater 2015a). Private conversations – one of the few ways left to
support one another in social movements – can be monitored and collected as evidence
of terrorist activities. Indigenous opposition and resistance to real threats to Canada, like
clear-cutting of forests, strip-mining of farm lands and/or the contamination of critical
waterways, can be considered threats to national security as our resistance to these destruc-
tive corporate practices may interfere with Canada’s economy (ibid.; McCarthy 2015). This
makes Indigenous resistance and survival efforts increasingly more dangerous: in state pro-
paganda and laws against Indigenous peoples, we have changed from common criminals to
domestic terrorists. Our metamorphosis allows the government to suspend even the most
basic human rights and civil liberties to monitor, surveil and/or stop Indigenous activities.
Yet, we continue to rise up in resistance despite all the risks.

Indigenous Movements of Resistance and Survival

Indigenous peoples have always tried to work in good faith with settler governments. Since
contact Indigenous Nations have tried to work co-operatively with British officials through
the negotiation of treaties and engaging in trade. We also tried to maintain peaceful relations
with early settlers by showing them how to survive on the land in harsh winters and often
inter-married with them (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996a). When issues
did arise, Indigenous peoples often sent representatives to seek resolution with colonial offi-
cials and some, like the Haudenosaunee in 1921, even sent representatives overseas seeking
an audience with the Queen’s officials to resolve land disputes (Vaughan 2006; Johnson and
Pritzker 2007). Throughout the historical record, one can see numerous examples of Indig-
enous Nations raising concerns about the various injustices that were happening and their
attempts at peaceful resolution. However, once settlement took place, it did not take long
for colonial governments to change their Indian policy from mutual peace and cooperation
to dispossession and assimilation of Indigenous peoples (Royal Commission on Aboriginal
Peoples 1996a).
Canada’s Indian policy was based on two primary objectives: (1) to acquire Indigenous
lands and resources and (2) to reduce financial obligations to Indians it had assumed through
treaties and other agreements. The two primary methods of carrying out these objectives were
assimilation and elimination (Palmater 2014; Truth and Reconciliation ­Commission 2015).
Assimilation included the loss of ‘Indian’ identity through the Indian Act’s (de)­registration
­ anada’s
process (enfranchisement) and the loss of language and culture in residential schools. C
more insidious elimination methods included starving Indians with inadequate rations; of-
fering bounties for Indigenous scalps; forcibly sterilising Indigenous women and girls and the
many deaths in residential schools, prisons and foster care (Palmater 2014). While Canada has
always denied that it engaged in any acts of genocide against Indigenous peoples, Canada’s

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Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) which investigated the horrific abuses com-
mitted in residential schools found that throughout Canada’s history, it had, in fact, com-
mitted cultural, biological and physical genocides against Indigenous peoples (Truth and
Reconciliation Commission 2015). Yet, despite the significant loss of life, health and spirit,
Indigenous peoples were in no way passive victims of genocide. Even the smallest of children
engaged in acts of resistance in residential schools act as a testament to Indigenous strength
and resilience (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2012, 2015).
This strong will to survive and to resist the oppression and injustices committed against
our peoples and Nations is what has inspired historic and modern Indigenous movements of
resistance. In the early days of colonial administration, Indigenous acts of resistance included
breaking the laws enacted to suppress our languages and cultures. It was not an organised
movement as one might see today, but consisted of smaller, individual acts of resistance by
individuals with a strong sense of identity and loyalty to their Nations. This included small
children who spoke their languages in secret in residential schools; adults who hid their re-
galia from Indian agents and practised their ceremonies in secret; and heads of families who
tried to hunt and fish without being noticed so that they could feed their families. Although
these individuals were not acting in one large coordinated effort, similar acts of resistance
were being carried out by individuals from other Indigenous Nations all over Canada at the
same time. In this way, one could argue that Indigenous resistance is a natural reaction by
sovereign peoples to the injustice of colonisation, oppression, land dispossession and violent
attacks on their well-being – as opposed to an inherently political one. This is further bol-
stered by the fact that Indigenous resistance, while at times carried out by Indigenous po-
litical leaders, was also carried out in large part by children, elders and those not necessarily
engaged at the political level vis-à-vis the state.
In modern times, Indigenous resistance has continued at the individual or localised level
while at the same time taking on a more coordinated and national political dimension. After
several failed attempts to organise nationally after the First and Second World Wars, the Na-
tional Indian Council finally took hold in the 1961 to promote unity among all Indigenous
peoples and to try to advocate nationally on shared issues like the theft of our lands and the
failure to respect our treaty rights (Assembly of First Nations 2010). This organisation later
became the National Indian Brotherhood which focused on First Nation issues and was one
of the vehicles used to organise and respond to Canada’s 1969 White Paper on Indian policy
which threatened to eliminate Indian status, Indian reserves and treaties (Government of
Canada 1969). By that time, other regional advocacy organisations had also been established,
including the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA), which played the lead role in responding
to the 1969 White Paper. The IAA’s Citizens Plus: The Red Paper demanded that Indian status,
reserves and treaties be protected and furthermore that First Nations should be s­elf-governing
and able to access and benefit from their own lands and resources (Indian Chiefs of Alberta
1970). Shortly thereafter, the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood penned W ­ ahbung: Our Tomorrows
which echoed the same sentiments found in the Red Paper (Manitoba Indian Brotherhood
1971). It was clear at this point that Indigenous resistance was focused on self-determination
as peoples/Nations; access to/return of lands and resources; the full implementation of In-
digenous rights and treaties; the protection and revitalisation of Indigenous languages and
cultures; and the end of government’s discriminatory laws and policies. Early Indigenous
political advocacy had been fairly consistent on the core of its objectives.
While political organising was happening at the national and regional levels, Indige-
nous resistance movements at the community (First Nation) or Nation-based levels were
also starting to gain public attention. In 1981, the Surete de Quebec (SQ) (Quebec police)

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conducted violent raids on the Mi’kmaw people at Listuguj to stop them from controlling
their own fishery. As news spread, Indigenous peoples from other parts of Canada went to
Listuguj to help. This caught the attention of the media due to the heavy law enforcement
and multiple arrests which resulted in severe injuries to the Mi’kmaw people (Obomsawin
1984; National Centre for First Nations Governance 2010; Cities and Environment Unit
2013). In this case, the Mi’kmaq were asserting their right to fish and to manage the river
and fishery, as aspects of both their inherent right as a sovereign Nation on unceded terri-
tory, but also as part of Mi’kmaw treaty rights to fish. These rights had long been trampled
on by successive settler governments, thus inspiring the need to assert and defend them.
This would not be the only time we as the Mi’kmaw Nation had to stand up to defend our
rights. In 1998, the Quebec government tried to stop the Mi’kmaq from cutting timber
on our own lands again at Listuguj and selling it like the many non-Indigenous lumber
companies were doing (Young and Cantrick 1998). The Mi’kmaq had at all times wanted
to negotiate peacefully with the Quebec government but they refused, so the traditional
leaders blockaded a lumber company from logging on Mi’kmaw lands. They eventually
negotiated a settlement but not until Quebec had engaged in a smear campaign calling
Mi’kmaw traditional leaders ‘dissidents’ and implying that they were dangerous (Norris
and Cherry 1998).
In 1990, the Mohawks at Kanesatake took a stand to protect their traditional territory
and burial grounds from becoming a golf course by developers in the town of Oka, Quebec
(York and Pindera 1991; Obomsawin 1993). Despite having made their claims over their ter-
ritory since the 1800s and having filed an official land claim with the federal government, the
Mayor of Oka would not reconsider the plans for the golf club and a court decision allowed
the golf project to proceed. As a result, the Mohawks erected a barricade to protect their
lands and when this event hit the media, Mohawks from other territories and Indigenous
peoples from other First Nations went to Kahnesatake to assist. The neighbouring Mohawk
community of Kahnawake blocked the Mercier bridge in solidarity. The provincial and
federal governments responded swiftly and violently sending in the SQ, RCMP and the
military. The blockade lasted nearly three months until a settlement was negotiated whereby
the Mohawk lands would be returned to them. Equally significant was the profound effect
this stand-off had on Indigenous peoples all over Canada, many of whom took pride in
numerous media images of unarmed Mohawks standing up to Canada’s military in defence
of their lands. The high level of political solidarity coming from other Indigenous Nations
in Canada was a sign that Indigenous peoples were growing increasingly impatient with
decades of abuse.
However, the Mohawks are only one of many Indigenous Nations in Canada that have
unresolved land claims. In 1995, the people of Kettle and Stoney Point Ojibway First Na-
tions engaged in a peaceful information protest at Ipperwash Provincial Park – Indigenous
lands that had been expropriated without their consent to build a military base (Linden
2007). What had been a peaceful protest soon turned violent when the Premier of Ontario
ordered the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) to ‘get the fucking Indians out of the park’
which inspired the OPP to respond in kind by plotting: ‘We want to amass a fucking army.
A real fucking army and do this. Do these fuckers big time’ (ibid.). As a result, the OPP shot
and killed an unarmed land protestor named Dudley George (Edwards 2003). The resulting
inquiry into the incident found that racism against Indigenous peoples was ‘widespread’ and
a significant problem (Linden 2007). A promise was made to return the lands wrongfully
taken to First Nations, but no action on the part of government can bring back the fallen
land defender.

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Meanwhile in Gustafsen Lake, British Columbia (BC), the RCMP had amassed its own
army against a small group of Indigenous peoples engaged in ceremonies on their unceded
traditional lands (Warrior Publications 2011; Barrera 2016a). Although there was only a
tiny group of Indigenous peoples, known as the Ts’Peten defenders, engaged in a sacred
Sun Dance on the traditional lands of the Secwepemc Nation, Canada made history by au-
thorising one of the largest police assaults on a civilian population in its history. Hundreds
of tactical assault personnel, helicopters, armoured personnel carriers, explosive devices and
thousands of rounds of ammo were used against this small group to try to force them off
their traditional lands. The RCMP engaged in a ‘smear campaign’ against the defenders
and the media were prevented from accessing the defenders to hear their side of story (Hill
2015). The violent assault on the Sun Dancers cost Canada over $5 million and resulted in
numerous criminal charges. Many of these involved in this resistance were traditional or
spiritual people and elders, one of whom sought asylum in the US where he remains, unable
to return to Canada (Barrera 2016a). A US Federal court judge denied Canada’s request for
extradition of James Pitawanakwat on the grounds that his activities at Gustafsen Lake were
political and exempt from extradition laws. At issue here was not only the right to engage in
traditional ceremonies but to do so on their traditional lands which they had never ceded or
surrendered to Canada or the province of BC.
In Esgenoopetitj, a Mi’kmaw First Nation in New Brunswick, Mi’kmaw citizens
faced violent attacks, ramming of their fishing boats by law enforcement, brutal club-
bings and arrests for fishing lobster in our own territory even after they had proven that
their treaty right to fish was constitutionally protected at the Supreme Court of Canada
(SCC) ­(Obomsawin 2002). In Elsipogtog, another Mi’kmaw First Nation who was en-
gaged in an extended peaceful defence of our unceded territories against hydro-fracking
were surprised one day when the RCMP swat team came out in full force to escort the
hydro-fracking trucks onto Mi’kmaw lands and then violently attack and arrest the land
defenders (Schwartz and Gollum 2013; Ball 2013a; Roache 2014). This was despite the fact
that Mi’kmaw lands have never been ceded or surrendered under treaties. As such, we have
constitutionally protected Aboriginal title to those lands and the right to decide what does
and does not happen on them.
It is important to note that for all of the violent enforcements noted earlier (with the ex-
ception of Listuguj’s first event in 1981), section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 protecting
Aboriginal and treaty rights and land title had already been enacted (Constitution Act, 1982).5
This means that Aboriginal, treaty and land rights were already protected in Canada’s highest
law and should have been protected with as much force as was used to deny those rights. In
addition, the SCC had already delivered its decision in the 1990 Sparrow case confirming the
constitutional priority that should be afforded to Aboriginal and treaty rights, like fishing,
over all other interests (R. v. Sparrow 1990). While the Mi’kmaq have been frequent targets
of government abuse, First Nations all over Canada have been subjected to state violence,
arrests and/or state takeover of their First Nations for peacefully occupying and defending
their own lands, waters and resources. While there are far too many flash points to list in this
chapter, a few other examples across Canada include the Unist’ot’en against pipelines in BC
(Unist’ot’en; McSheffrey 2015), Algonquins of Barriere Lake against destructive logging in
Quebec (Defenders of the Land; Barriere Lake Solidarity; Pasternak), Mathias Colomb Cree
Nation against mining in Manitoba (Graham 2013; Small 2014), James Bay Cree against
hydroelectric dams on Cree territory in Quebec (Canadian Encyclopedia), the Inuit against
methylmercury contamination from hydro-dams in Newfoundland (specifically Labrador)
(Brake 2017), Aamjiwnaang First Nation against massive chemical contamination in Ontario

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(Shingler 2013; Amjiwnaang Solidarity), and the Mi’kmaq against gas companies polluting
rivers in Nova Scotia (Luck 2016).
What is common in each of these scenarios is the localised defence of Indigenous lands,
waters and/or resources from a particular corporate and/or state threat. Each involves citi-
zens from a particular First Nation and/or larger Indigenous Nation that is facing a particular
crisis. These land and water defenders include any combination of youth, men, women,
elders, traditional Indigenous leaders, elected First Nation leaders and/or Indigenous and
­non-Indigenous allies and supporters. They come from varied backgrounds and circum-
stances and may never have worked together previously. While some are activists who have
helped lead protests, rallies and defences previously, others have not. Some of the first to en-
gage are usually those who are being directly impacted by development, i.e. prevented from
engaging in their traditional activities like hunting and fishing, while others are concerned
about the ill health effects of the contamination or pollution from various development ac-
tivities. Some of the participants have strong traditional Indigenous knowledge about why
land defence is necessary to protect their Nation, while others may also have a formal educa-
tion and focus on the illegality of state actions on unceded lands, for example.
Although these acts of defence may develop very quickly in response to a trigger (court
case, imminent threat to land/water and/or a state decision), these situations tend to develop
organically after protracted periods of little or inadequate action on the part of either state
officials and/or elected First Nation leaders on a particular crisis issue facing the First Nation.
It is usually a combination of all of these factors that leads to the particular flash point. The
number of those engaging in the protest, rally or land defence usually increases in size as the
issue gains traction within the First Nation and/or when it gains attention from the media. In
addition to the local group, there are individuals, organisations and allies who may also travel
to join the defence or engage in acts of solidarity from afar. While they may not necessarily
share the same politics, the flash point usually has a unifying effect on the group – in the
sense that they often agree to set aside political differences for the sake of the specific cause.
The resulting media coverage of the event creates public and political pressures on both state
officials and First Nation political organisations to respond to the issue, where one or both
might have been silent previously.
Although regional or more localised First Nation political organisations may support a
protest from the outset, it is not uncommon in recent years to see certain national Aboriginal
organisations (NAOs) either silent about the protest or making neutral comments so as not to
appear adversarial towards the state – their primary funders.6 This is a recent departure from
the strong advocacy of these organisations when they were originally created. The Assembly
of First Nations (AFN), for example, is a political organisation primarily funded by the fed-
eral government and represents the 633 elected First Nation Chiefs in Canada. They are an
advocacy organisation and not rights holders like individual First Nations. Yet, their political
influence is significant at the national level vis-à-vis the state when compared to individual
First Nations and this sometimes interferes with localised issues. The AFN has faced signif-
icant and sustained criticism by First Nation elected leaders, traditional leaders, Indigenous
lawyers and experts, activists and grassroots Indigenous peoples in the last fifteen years or so
for its very public alignment with state governments and its failure to advocate aggressively
during periods of protest, rallies or defence (Barrera 2014b). Their repeated failures to act in
solidarity with individual First Nations indicates a marked departure from their past efforts
and has created a substantial political rift that has resulted in some First Nation elected lead-
ers pulling out of the AFN and calls for it to be disbanded. The AFN has fallen so far in fact,
that it is not only seen as co-opted by the federal government (Lukacs 2013; Diablo 2016),7

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but government documents suggest that it has acted as state informant for the RCMP against
Indigenous grassroots activists (Groves and Lukacs 2011; Lukacs 2013).
Unfortunately, the state’s public defence of the AFN, while disparaging First Nation
leaders who criticise the AFN’s inaction, has cemented the views of many that the AFN is
co-opted and cannot be relied on as part of the Indigenous resistance movement to assert
and defend Indigenous sovereignty and protect our lands and waters for the future (Diablo
2013; Barrera 2016b). The state’s continued oppression of Indigenous peoples and failure to
recognise our rights, together with the AFN’s failure to act in solidarity with the increasing
number of localised First Nation protests, has forced changes in the Indigenous resistance
movement. Sadly, the political transformation of the AFN from First Nation advocate to
agent of the state and police informant is evidence of the ongoing impacts of colonisation and
continued state abuse of power through its funding mechanisms (Tomiak 2016). Whatever
the root cause of AFN’s about-turn, its political betrayal is one of the primary reasons why
Indigenous peoples have moved away from the organisation.
Indigenous movements like Idle No More and the Treaty Alliance are based on alliances
of many First Nations coming together to support one another in both nationwide and
localised resistance activities – offering alternatives to the AFN and its close relationship
with state officials and law enforcement. The #NoDAPL movement out of Standing Rock
Sioux Nation is unique for its combination of Indigenous Nations from Canada and the US
and signifies a substantive move away from the NAOs that used to address these issues. As
discussed later, Indigenous resistance movements have the changed the dynamic between
Indigenous peoples and the state, and between Indigenous peoples and their own political
organisations, but at the same time have also created significant solidarity across the artificial
Canada–US border.

Nations Rising and Radical State Reactions

Canada’s genocidal history and endless broken promises are carried forward to present day
with successive governments that continue their discriminatory and lethal practices against
Indigenous peoples, while engaging in a political dance of distraction. All governments (fed-
eral, provincial and territorial) of all political stripes (Liberal, Conservative and New Demo-
crat Parties) are all equally guilty of genocide, the breach of Indigenous rights and corporate
collusion in the theft and development of Indigenous lands, waters and resources. With each
new federal election, there is a new party and new Prime Minister with many new promises
to improve the relationship with Indigenous peoples and address long-standing issues like
land claims and poverty. However, election after election, the state breaks more promises
than it keeps trying always to disguise its Indian policy behind flashy acts of tokenism. With
the advent of social media, Indigenous peoples have been able to inform, educate, empower,
inspire and organise in ways that were not possible before. This information has allowed
Indigenous peoples to rise together as Nations in solidarity to demonstrate a much stronger
political force.
Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in power from 2006 until 2015 –
nearly a decade of renewed oppression of Indigenous peoples; the imposition of paternalistic
legislation on First Nations against their will and the public vilification of First Nation
leaders (Palmater 2015c). Many labelled Harper’s term as a decade of war against First Na-
tions as he made renewed efforts to get Indigenous peoples out of the way of his aggressive
resource extraction agenda and drastically cut funding to political organisations so as to
circumvent our capacity to resist through usual political channels (Barrera 2015; Tomiak

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2016). Under Harper’s racist regime, socio-economic conditions of Indigenous peoples de-
teriorated, over-incarceration rates increased, the rates of Indigenous children in foster care
surpassed crisis levels, and the thousands of Indigenous women and girls being murdered
or disappeared were not addressed. In fact, not only did Harper deny that colonialism ever
existed in Canada (Ljunggren 2009), but when pressed on the crisis of murdered and dis-
appeared Indigenous women and girls, Harper said that it was ‘not high on our radar, to be
honest’ (CBC News 2014). It was this blatant racist attitude by the state, the certainty that
very little would ever change in Canada unless Indigenous peoples ramped up their efforts,
and the failure of the AFN and others to strenuously advocate on these issues that Indigenous
resistance morphed more solidly into a national grassroots movement.
Prime Minister Harper had greatly underestimated the ability of Indigenous peoples to
coordinate despite ongoing funding cuts. In the minds of many, Indigenous political organ-
isations had either stopped advocating or were co-opted by state and/or corporate funding.
So, grassroots Indigenous peoples rose up en masse under our sovereign power and pushed
back. Idle No More was a historic Indigenous social movement of resistance that ‘started’
in the summer of 2012 and maintained a very strong, public momentum for well over a
year (Palmater 2012). There is really no actual start date as everything that was done during
Idle No More had its origins in the long-sustained activism of Indigenous peoples and First
Nations mentioned in the previous section. There were actually many Indigenous men and
women conducting teach-ins and trying to empower their First Nations long before Idle No
More became a social media hashtag or appeared on posters.
The movement captured the media’s attention because so many grassroots people were
attracted to the name and engaged in nationwide resistance activities under the banner of
Idle No More – including those who were already engaged in acts of resistance or had par-
ticipated in protests previously.
Idle No More was an organic grassroots movement that involved thousands of Indigenous
peoples and their non-Indigenous allies all over Canada. It took many different forms including
teach-ins, rallies, marches, protests, round dances, public panels and speeches, written publi-
cations, YouTube videos and social media exchanges, and extensive and sustained mainstream
media coverage. While four women – Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson, Jessica Gordon and
Sheelah Maclean – are usually credited with the movement (Caven 2013), in the very begin-
ning, other key individuals like Tanya Kappo, Janice Makokis, Pamela Palmater and Sylvia
McAdam had all communicated via emails, texts, calls and Facebook messages about ramping
up teach-ins to fight back against Harper’s assimilatory legislative agenda (Hasselris 2013). This
much larger group all got together and started teach-ins specifically about Harper’s legislation
and started using the hashtag Idle No More to share videos of these teach-ins more broadly. It
was actually Tanya Kappo who started the hashtag #IdleNoMore (Curtis 2012; Fong 2013).
At the same time, Art Manuel, Russ Diabo, Taiaiake Alfred, Clayton Thomas-Muller,
Ellen Gabriel, Cheryl Maloney and many others continued their own panels and speaking
events on urgent Indigenous issues that they had done for many years previous to Idle No
More. In the beginning, several people, including Pamela Palmater and Sylvia McAdam,
were used as official spokespeople for Idle No More, but this only lasted a short time
(Donkin 2013). Once the movement gained attention, it very quickly and organically be-
came a non-hierarchical movement led by each collective of grassroots individuals from
all backgrounds: traditional leaders, some elected leaders, Indigenous academics, lawyers,
activists, artists and anyone who chose to join. Anyone could speak to any of the issues with
the media and engage in any resistance actions that had meaning for them as individuals and
their own communities.

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No one was at the head of the movement, nor did they control what activities took place
and where. Idle No More social media groups popped up all over the country and soon
activities were organised around local groups like Idle No More Toronto or Idle No More
Quebec with each using their own organisers as spokespeople for different events. There was
also no corporate or hierarchical structure and thus no requirement that those in the move-
ment share the same views or politics. This was sometimes very evident when various or-
ganisers disagreed about what level of resistance should be used. For example, some thought
it should only involve the sharing of culture, like round dances, while others felt strongly
that blockades should be used (Ball 2013b). That was the beauty of the movement – that re-
sistance could mean different things to different sovereign Indigenous Nations. While there
were some internal differences and alleged attempts by individuals to copyright the name
and control activities, for the most part, the vast majority of those involved downplayed the
internal politics and focused on the life and death issues at hand. The hashtag #IdleNoMore
became the slogan written on placards, stamped on T-shirts and chanted in the streets as In-
digenous peoples rose in solidarity against the racist Harper government and Canada’s long
history of oppressing Indigenous peoples. Even today, 100 different participants in Idle No
More would likely write 100 different histories of how it developed.
While the public aspect of Idle No More has faded from daily view, the work continues be-
hind the scenes with Indigenous lawyers, activists, organisers and grassroots citizens supporting
local and national efforts at resistance and social justice not just in First Nations, but in solidarity
with many non-governmental organisations like women’s rights, human rights, environmen-
tal, climate change and antipoverty groups. They have also worked with and in solidarity with
movements like Black Lives Matter and #OccupyINAC (Democracy Now 2016). Black Lives
Matter is a movement against the dehumanising of Black people and the ‘virulent anti-Black
racism that permeates our society’ (Black Lives Matter). It was inspired by the brutal murders
of Black men by police which occur all too frequently in Canada and the US. ­Occupy INAC
refers to the series of occupations by Indigenous peoples of the government offices of Indian
and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) (Ferreira 2016). They were trying to bring awareness to
the suicide epidemic in First Nations and the failure of INAC to provide adequate funding and
support to help alleviate the deaths of mostly youth. In both of these movements, Idle No More
members either actively participated or provided strategic support from behind the scenes. In
this way, modern resistance movements are finding ways to build solidarity across issues and
expand as social justice movements that involve and impact everyone.
A more recent movement, represented by the hashtag #NoDAPL, started as a local-
ised protest which led to a historic year of resistance in the US (No DAPL). This protest
originated in the Standing Rock Sioux Nation where they attempted to stop the Dakota
Access Pipeline from being built on their traditional lands and potentially impacting their
water sources. Although it is a movement born from the Indigenous Nations (tribes) in the
US, it was as much a movement in Canada and an unprecedented number of First Nations
in ­Canada publicly declared their political support for the Standing Rock Sioux Nation.
­Thousands of Indigenous peoples from both Canada and the US travelled to Standing Rock
to help defend their waters. The cause gained international media attention and was captured
and shared on social media by those on the ground so that the world could be witness to
the reality of state and corporate oppression of Indigenous peoples and their rights. Security
and/or law enforcement committed many acts of violence against men, women, youth, el-
ders and even journalists, including attack dogs, mace, beatings and water hoses. This was
accompanied by media smear campaigns by law enforcement trying to quell the rising tide
of public support. The situation at Standing Rock inspired support from Hollywood actors

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and actresses, politicians, influential thinkers and even some commentators in mainstream
media. People all over the world were engaging marches, rallies, protests, occupations and
other acts of solidarity to bring international attention to the both the cause (protecting
water from pipelines) but also to the violent response by state and law enforcement officials.
Despite being a movement from the US, the situation at Standing Rock also shed a light
on the growing political differences between First Nations and the AFN over pipelines gen-
erally. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) (the US version of the AFN)
came out firmly in support of Standing Rock and made public calls for action by the US
government. The AFN also made a statement in support of Standing Rock, though very
terse. This did not go unnoticed by Indigenous peoples in Canada who were upset that the
AFN would support Standing Rock, but refused to stand in solidarity with First Nations
in ­Canada trying to defend their lands against pipelines on the ground in the courts. The
National Chief of the AFN Perry Bellegarde came to be known as ‘Pipeline Perry’ for his
support of pipelines, oil and gas, even hosting an energy conference causing further divisions
among First Nation leaders (Tasker 2016). The result of these significant political failures on
behalf of the AFN and others over time was the birth of the Treaty Alliance, a formal alliance
between more than 100 First Nations in Canada and Indigenous Tribes in the US against
tar sands expansion and its related pipelines (Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion).
The Treaty Alliance is not a collective of individuals, nor is it a membership-based or-
ganisation or online petition. It is a unique movement based on the ancient Indigenous
tradition of forming confederacies, alliances and/or treaties between Nations (ibid.). This
Treaty has only Indigenous Nations as its signatories and so far, the vast majority of them
are from Canada, with BC and Manitoba having the largest number (ibid.). Some First
Nations, who have already led their own protests against development on their lands, are
also signatories including Standing Rock, Algonquins of Barriere Lake, Mathias Colomb
Cree Nation and the Mohawks of Kahnesatake, for example. The Treaty is described as an
expression of Indigenous laws specifically prohibiting pipelines, trains and tankers that are
part of the Tar Sands expansion and includes prohibition of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway,
Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain, Trans Canada’s Keystone XL, Enbridge’s Line 3 and
TransCanada’s Energy East pipelines. In their own words: ‘The allied signatory Indigenous
Nations aim to prevent a pipeline/train/tanker spill from poisoning their water and to stop
the Tar Sands from increasing its output and becoming an even bigger obstacle to solving
the climate crisis’ (ibid.).
The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC), which represents sixty-three First Nations in
Manitoba, has adopted a similar collective approach to opposing unilateral and potentially
harmful development on First Nation lands (AMC). This organisation stands out from many
other organisations for their legal intervention against massive development projects in soli-
darity with its member Nations. The AMC recently sought leave to file judicial review of the
federal government’s approval of Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline (Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs
2017). It is noteworthy that the province of Manitoba contains a large number of Treaty
Alliance Signatories and has a long history of Indigenous resistance at the individual and col-
lective First Nation and Treaty level. Other organisations like the Union of British ­Columbia
Indian Chiefs (UBCIC) also have a long history of being very active on the ground and in
support of their member First Nations against unilateral development on First Nation lands
(UBCIC). Their activities include petitions, marches, information sessions, protests and in-
tervention at the court level. BC also has a large number of Treaty Alliance signatories.
In addition to the Treaty itself, there is also a Solidarity Accord that can be signed by unions,
organisations and other groups specifically supporting the movement but also recognising

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the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples to govern and defend their lands (Treaty Alliance
Against Tar Sands Expansion 2016). The common goal is to oppose tar sands expansion and
to work towards a clean future. Increased public support and solidarity from non-Indigenous
groups and organisations seems to be a key feature of these larger resistance movements.
Their ability to help educate Canadians about important issues related to a healthy environ-
ment, addressing climate change, protecting water, human rights, equality and democratic
freedoms is a core aspect of making these movements relevant to everyone and gaining
support from people and organisations that did not previously support Indigenous protests.
While there are far too many First Nations and movements on the ground to cover in this
chapter, it is important to note the evolution in Indigenous resistance from almost exclu-
sively localised protests to a much more collective resistance which may involve many First
Nations and allies nationally and/or in a particular region. These movements have received
a great deal of support through online social networks, like the various social media tools:
­Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and dedicated websites, for example. However, increased
coordination and strategic planning on a larger collective level has seen a corresponding
increase in government surveillance – a radical state response to collective Indigenous resis-
tance movements. State responses to Indigenous resistance movements at the localised level
have always included surveillance and heavy-handed law enforcement. Many questions have
been raised about the legality of state surveillance without warrants or due cause. State sur-
veillance of Indigenous peoples includes monitoring the actions of individuals like Pamela
Palmater of Idle No More (Palmater 2015a), Cindy Blackstock of the First Nation Child
and Family Caring Society (Canadian Human Rights Tribunal 2013) and Clayton Thomas
Muller of Defenders of the Land and 350.org (Barerra 2014c). WikiLeaks documents shared
with the media further implicated Canada for spying on Mohawks with illegal wiretaps
(Norrell 2010). But the problem goes much deeper than surveilling individual activists. In-
digenous peoples collectively have been treated by government officials and law enforcement
in ways which either directly or indirectly state or imply that we are dangerous, violent,
criminals, radicals, militants, insurgents and/or terrorists.
State agents that have or are currently surveilling Indigenous Peoples and First Nation
communities, in addition to Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS), include (but
are not limited to): INAC’s Hot Spot Reporting System, RCMP Suspicious Incident Re-
porting, RCMP Integrated Security Unit, Integrated National Security Enforcement Team,
Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, Canadian Forces’ National Counter Intelligence
Unit and the RCMP’s Criminal Intelligence Aboriginal Joint Intelligence Group Reports
(Palmater 2015a).
All of these groups have at some time monitored, surveilled and/or collected intelli-
gence on First Nation leaders, organisations and individual activists in some way. It has
been demonstrated that these and other federal government bodies also interfere directly/
indirectly in First Nation politics and deny or reduce critical social funding in order to
control First Nation leaders who do not cooperate (Pasternak 2013). Former Indigenous
Affairs and Northern Development Minister Bernard Valcourt publicly declared Treaty
Chiefs as ‘rogues’ and ‘threats to national security’ (Barrera 2014a). Female leaders, tradi-
tional leaders and grassroots activists were especially demonised and marginalised by the
former Conservative government and right-wing-leaning media in favour of more moderate
Chiefs (Adese 2009; Proulx 2014; Palmater 2015b). Government control of our Indigenous
identities through law, policy, funding controls and public propaganda has maintained our
identities as dangerous and subhuman savages with more modern descriptors like criminals,
insurgents and terrorists. This self-serving ideology runs deep within federal and provincial

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governments and public at large. The following are just a few examples of how ingrained the
image of Indigenous as terrorist is in Canada’s institutions.
The Department of National Defense’s (DND) Counterinsurgency Manual lists Native
Americans (like Mohawks), alongside Islamic Jihadists, Hezbollah, Tamils, Mexican In-
dians and North Ireland’s paramilitary groups as ‘insurgents’ (Department of National
Defense Canada 2008). The manual goes on to describe them as ‘violent’ and ‘radical’
treating them like domestic terror threats. Although DND removed the specific reference
to Mohawks in the final version of its manual, the current version still lists common Indig-
enous political and resistance activities like: occupation, autonomy, cultural protection and
political control – as acts of ‘insurgency’. In other words, the core activities of Indigenous
Nations asserting, living and defending their inherent human rights to be self-determining
have become viewed as ‘insurgent’ and dangerous. It is important to note here, however,
that referencing DND’s list should not equate to an assumption that all other groups men-
tioned therein should properly be characterised as ‘insurgents’, as it is highly problematic
for DND to presume an entire race or ethnic group, such as ‘Mexican Indians’, for exam-
ple, as inherently dangerous.
There is no evidence to suggest that things have changed from an Indigenous struggle
for justice to domestic terrorism – except in the eyes of the state (Adese 2009; Proulx 2014;
Palmater 2015b). Another example which relates directly to anti-pipeline protests include
the report published by Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI) report on
Resource Industries and Security Issues in Northern Alberta which categorises Aboriginal-rights
movements as ‘violent resistance’ to industrial development and lists First Nations and envi-
ronmentalists as ‘saboteurs’, ‘eco-terrorists’ and ‘security threats’ (Flanagan 2009). It is nota-
ble that their publication specifically excluded any threats which may be posed by external
threats or ‘Islamic terrorists’ and focused exclusively on Canadian citizens. The report also
appears to blame the SCC for rendering decisions in favour of First Nations rights for cre-
ating a ‘fertile field for blockades’ (ibid.: 8). While the report uses a great deal of fear-based
assumptions, it largely lacks an evidentiary basis for their conclusions.
Their predictions and analysis have not been borne out in reality. For example, the ­CDFAI
report warned the government of the following ‘nightmare scenario’:

A nightmare scenario from the standpoint of resource industries in northern Alberta

would be a linkage between warrior societies and eco-terrorists.
Members of warrior societies would brandish firearms and take public possession of
geographical sites, while eco-terrorists would operate clandestinely, firebombing targets
over a wide range of territory.
(ibid.: 9)

Interestingly, it was right after this report that the massive Idle No More Movement was
born – the very scenario contemplated. Instead of the nightmarish death and destruction
predicted, the Idle No More movement remained a strong, but peaceful movement of unity
between First Nations, environmentalists and a broad segment of Canadian society. No
firearms were used, no violent threats or ultimatums were made, nor was anyone sneaking
around blowing up things.
Idle No More was so massive because it was peaceful and focused on public education
(The Kino-nda-niimi Collective 2014). Indigenous peoples have never advocated anything
but peaceful coexistence, respect for our autonomy and the fair and just resolution of our
claims.

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The MacDonald-Laurier Institute’s Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy
also seems to suggest that First Nation struggles may turn into a dangerous insurgency and
uprising (Bland 2013). The report describes Indigenous young men as a ‘warrior cohort’
and makes the unsubstantiated claim that First Nations see the economy and infrastructure
as vulnerable targets and further predict that ‘strategic, coordinated First Nations actions
against Canada’s economy will occur’ (ibid.: 2). Their nightmare ideations about Indigenous
youth and ‘armed confrontations’ led them to call on governments to ‘disarm’ the warrior
cohort. This report, like the others, supports the state’s construction of an ‘Indigenous terror
threat’ to justify unconstitutional laws to prevent any Indigenous interference with the econ-
omy (Adese 2009; Proulx 2014). It is quite clear that the state works in collusion with the
extractive industry to prevent information flow to and resistance from Indigenous peoples.
Radical state reactions to Indigenous resistance movements are grounded less in legitimate
concerns related to national security than to economic concerns around maintaining the
status quo imbalance of wealth and power.
State violation of Indigenous privacy rights through unjustified surveillance activities is
compounded when Canada shares this information with third parties, like energy companies
(Ismi 2013; Lukas and Groves 2013). Canada’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies
seem to act more like security for large corporations than serving and protecting Indige-
nous peoples and Canadians. In other words, the rule of law is conditional on perceptions
of race and Indigenous peoples are not included in that protection (Hickman, Poitras, and
Evans 1989; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1996a; Hamilton and Sinclair 1999;
­Linden 2007). Canadian officials, law enforcement, corporate interests and their wide array
of consultants have used these ideas to publicly vilify Indigenous peoples and engage in
what appears to be illegal surveillance of our people. It seems clear that the goal of Canada’s
­a ntiterrorism legislation and related surveillance activities is to quell Indigenous assertions of
sovereignty, independence and legal and political jurisdiction, as well as demands for justice
around treaty implementation, land claims and respect for Aboriginal rights.
Recent court cases which confirm constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights to In-
digenous ownership of our lands and our right to stop resource development seem to have
accelerated Canada’s national security agenda. The reality is that Canada does not have a
terrorism problem, nor is Canada’s national security at risk – at least not from Indigenous
peoples (Deen 2015). The real issue is that Canada is fearful of the growing Indigenous resis-
tance and demands to address inequality and a failure to address long-standing claims which
may act as an impediment to unfettered use and destruction of Indigenous lands, waters and
natural resources (Saul 2014).
Despite all the state fear-mongering, Indigenous resistance has always been and ­continues
to be strong but peaceful. It’s the threat to Canada’s extractive industries and fossil-fuel-­
reliant economy that is at issue here, and not any real threat to the lives of Canadians from
domestic terrorism by Indigenous resistance movements. How many Canadians have been
killed on Canadian soil from terrorism? Yet, how many Indigenous women and girls have
been raped, murdered or gone missing in Canada – sometimes at the hands of state offi-
cials (Palmater 2016c)? Canada needs a major reality check when it comes to the clear and
present danger facing the people living in Canada. That reality is that it is the state that has
interfered with the economy by forcing reliance on fossil fuels, not First Nations ­( Walkom
2015). When all the facts are on the table, it is Indigenous peoples who have suffered
­v iolence, rape, murder and ‘grave violations’ of human rights at the hands of the Canadian
state – not the other way around (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against
Women 2015).

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Conclusion
The only thing radical about Indigenous survival and resistance is the reaction of the state
of Canada to the resilience and persistence of Indigenous peoples to live and maintain their
identities. The radical politics used by state officials to dampen Indigenous resistance move-
ments have been consistent since contact. From criminalising Indigenous customs and prac-
tices to constructing terrifying public images of Indigenous peoples, the Canadian state has
done this in the name of wealth and power over stolen lands and resources. Ironically, the
only way that Indigenous peoples have been able to survive has been by acting as criminals,
i.e. breaking state laws to provide food for their families or maintaining important cultural
practices.
The public propaganda and misinformation tactics by the state and right-wing media
outlets can have devastating impacts on the work of Indigenous peoples and their allies
in civil society and non-government organisations. As mentioned earlier, the targeting of
­Indigenous peoples includes many peaceful leaders, activists, academics and even social
workers  – some of whom are publicly defamed by state officials in strategic and targeted
ways. The funding cuts to Indigenous advocacy organisations, increased use of law enforce-
ment and/or litigation against Indigenous peoples, public vilification of Indigenous leaders
and activists, together with increased state surveillance of Indigenous activities has multiple,
overlapping effects from weakening public support and creating internal community divi-
sions, to a reduction in organising capacity and an overall ‘advocacy chill’ (Eliadis 2015). In
addition, some of the tactics used arguably put Indigenous activists in harms-way when the
RCMP cut communications for young women activists or when media outlets publish per-
sonal information about Indigenous activists, as Sun Media did when they posted a Google
map of where I lived on television.
Yet, there persist many Indigenous individuals who, despite state intimidation, continue
to research, investigate, publish, educate and inform others on what is happening on Indig-
enous territories and how to act in resistance. Dr Taiaiake Alfred is a Mohawk academic
whose publications are followed by several generations of young Indigenous activists and
whose work acts as a guidepost to the best ways to decolonise and resist ongoing state oppres-
sion. Others like Russ Diabo, a Mohawk political strategist, advisor and author, focus on the
political aspect of the relation between Indigenous peoples and the state publishing the First
Nations Strategic Bulletin to keep First Nations up to date on critical political developments
and information to help decode state misinformation. Arthur Manuel from the Secwepemc
Nation was an activist and leader his whole life who left us with his life lessons in his book
Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Manuel 2015). Clayton Thomas Muller, a Cree,
travels the world trying to build solidarity in action to resist destructive extractive practices
and development on Indigenous lands.
Indigenous women are just as active. Cheryl Maloney, an Indigenous leader and activist,
has taken her resistance to the ground to protect lands and waters and recently won a battle
over Alton Gas. Sharon McIvor has sued Canada in court and won, and now pursues gender
equality for Indigenous women at the international level. Marie Battiste is a strong academic
who works tirelessly to help educate and decolonise young Indigenous and n ­ on-Indigenous
students. Sylvia McAdam, Tanya Kappo, Janice Makokis and other Indigenous women
helped lead and sustain the Idle No More movement and now work behind the scenes with
First Nations. Dr Cindy Blackstock continues her battle against state discrimination and
the theft of Indigenous children into foster care, as have the many families of murdered and
missing Indigenous women and girls.

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The common denominator in Indigenous resistance is the focus on sovereignty, justice

and well-being for all who live on Indigenous territories and a refusal to rely on either the
state or state- compromised First Nation organisations, like the AFN, to come up with solu-
tions. The Indigenous resistance movement is not just critical of state tactics, but also Indige-
nous organisations that are co-opted by state funding and political pressures – a strong signal
that Indigenous resistance movements have adapted. They know that it is not the political
terminology that is important – sovereignty, nationhood, peoplehood or self-determination.
What matters is asserting, living and defending Indigenous independence and social justice
on Indigenous territories that is the most important theoretical and practical aspect of Indig-
enous resistance to ongoing colonisation and oppression.
There is nothing radical about Indigenous peoples wanting to live in relative safety and
well- being and to enjoy and protect their territories from irreparable harm. The only thing
radical about Indigenous resistance movements is the state’s radical reactions to the rise of
larger collective movements. Indigenous peoples are not trying to organise a political coup,
they are not trying to sabotage critical social infrastructure, nor are they trying to hurt
anyone for religious reasons or any of the reasons real terrorists use to justify their attacks
on innocent civilians. In fact, Indigenous peoples are the last people on Turtle Island who
would want to hurt the lands, waters, plants, animals or other people living on Indigenous
territories. Many signed sacred treaties with the newcomers to protect one another and that
is exactly what Indigenous peoples are doing in their advocacy.
We also know from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report that Canada,
far from embracing Indigenous peoples, has committed cultural, physical and biological
­genocides against them. In so doing, the state has jeopardised the lives of all Canadians, and
indeed the planet, by choosing wealth over health and ignoring the responsibility we all have
for human and environmental justice. The least radical thing the state could do is recognise
and support Indigenous peoples to govern themselves and their territories so that we may all
have a future.

Notes
1 This chapter is dedicated to Indigenous warriors like Donald Marshall Jr., Arthur Manuel, Dudley
George and all our Indigenous brothers and sisters whose short lives were dedicated to defending
our Nations and our lands.
2 While some Indigenous scholars object to the use of the English word ‘sovereignty’ because of its
various political and legal interpretations, the concept can also be described as nationhood, peo-
plehood or self-determination. For discussion on problems with the word ‘sovereignty’, see Alfred
(2006) and Barker (2006).
3 The doctrine of terra nullius (that no one owned the land prior to European assertion of sov-
ereignty) never applied in Canada, as confirmed by the Royal Proclamation (1763), R.S.C. 1985,
App. II, No. 1.
4 R. v. Powley, [2001] 2 C.N.L.R. 291 at para. 37 trial judge: ‘If the Métis exercise their Aboriginal
rights without the benefit of a licence, they are not only putting themselves at risk of legislative
sanctions but they are forced to skulk through the forests like criminals as opposed to hunters exercising
their constitutional rights…’ (emphasis added).
5 Section 35(1) ‘The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are
hereby recognized and affirmed’.
6 National Aboriginal organizations (NAOs) include the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) repre-
senting 633 First Nation chiefs, Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP) representing Indigenous
peoples living off-reserve, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK) representing Inuit in northern Canada,
Metis National Council (MNC) representing the Metis Nation and Native Women’s Associ-
ation of Canada (NWAC) representing Indigenous women often excluded from the previous
male-dominated organisations.

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7 Martin Lukacs, ‘Assembly of First Nations, RCMP co-operated on response to mass protests in 2007’
(February 27, 2013), online: <https://martinlukacs.ca/2013/02/27/investigative-­article-about-afn-
collaboration-with-rcmp/> [AFN RCMP] cites Russ Diabo, an Indigenous policy a­ nalyst who used
to work for the AFN: ‘These exchanges with police are more evidence that the ­federal government
thoroughly co-opted the Assembly of First Nations under Phil Fontaine’. Russ Diabo, ­‘Federal Justice
Minister is Selling Decades Old Termination Plan as a New ‘Reconciliation’ ­Framework for First Na-
tions’ (July 22, 2016) issue 7, winter 2017 the volcano, online: <http://­thevolcano.org/2016/07/22/
federal-justice-minister-is-selling-decades-old-termination-plan-as-a-new-­r econciliation-
framework-for-first-nations-by-russ-diablo/> [Russ 2016].

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 2.2
ON DECOLONISATION1
Maia Ramnath

In the 2016 version of the film The Magnificent Seven,2 a cutthroat land speculator addresses
a gathering of hardscrabble local farmers in a frontier church. Contemptuously, he contrasts
the meaning of land as he sees it and as they see it, confident in his ability to impose his will.
To them, it is what they live, suffer and die for, the numinous focus of all their love, hope and
obsession. To him too, it is an obsession, but only in the form of its fungibility, transferred
into quantifiable packets of value in gold, which in accordance with the American theology,
he notes cynically, has further equivalent currency exchanges along a chain of signification
linking capitalism, progress and democracy as transcendent ideal. Thus, to obstruct the ex-
traction of resources and real estate surplus value is tantamount to opposing divine will itself.
The conflict to control the land is a contest of gods.
While clearly the townspeople are the intended sharers of viewer sympathies in this sce-
nario, the contest is not such an easy binary. Here is the self-determined local community of
rugged individualists versus a ruthless and insatiable corporate behemoth. But it’s not really
their land either to invest with sweat, blood, spiritual identifications and desired futurities.
Despite the legitimation of claim implied by the inclusion of an indigenous member among
the band of seven renegades who come together to defend the community (and a Mexican,
and a Korean, along with three whites including a southern veteran of the Confederacy, all
under the leadership of a Black man, recruited and supplemented by a rebellious woman),
nevertheless they are settlers. This neo-Western is an apt microcosm of an American my-
thology wherein even the most virtuous and multi-ethnically layered version of egalitarian
yeoman freedom was premised upon an originary dispossession.

What Is Radical about Decolonisation

If the language of decolonisation seems ubiquitous in recent years within the social move-
ment landscape, this is as it should be, given that the historical foundations of the societies
in which these movements dwell were built upon originary acts of violence – making literal
the blood sacrifices of legend buried beneath the walls of various castles and edifices, like
Tintagel or the Taj Mahal.
Some of the most crucial sites of antisystemic resistance in the world today are anti- or de-
colonial, although not always framed this way. In fact, to frame them this way is precisely what

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further radicalises them. Take, for example, the issue of environment and climate change,
growing in urgency: opposition to fossil fuel extraction and transport – oil, tar sands, fracked
gas, coal or uranium mining, nuclear waste – is in many cases located simultaneously at the
front lines of battles for indigenous sovereignty within a centuries-old geography of resource
expropriation, land claims and water rights. A decolonial perspective such as that provided by
the presence of indigenous groups at global climate summits, or voiced in North America by
organisations like Indigenous Environmental Network and Idle No More whose spokespeo-
ple identify a five-hundred-year continuity of anticapitalist, ­anti-imperialist resistance, is what
adds the deeper levels of racial and economic justice to environmental concerns, demanding
fundamental changes in the global economic and political structures.3
Or take the question of Palestine, urgent as ever in the past half-century: to identify this
as an anticolonial struggle, although commonplace throughout the global south, turns upside
down the way it is conventionally portrayed in the dominant western discourse. The erasure
of an analysis cognisant of settlement – as an act of initial assault that instituted a system of
long-term structural violence, asymmetrical power relations and systematic dispossession
of land, resources, culture, livelihood and even geographic nomenclature – magically ren-
ders aggression into defence, protecting civilised innocents from irrationally irreconcilable
hostiles.
I’ll return later to the parallels and relationships between these two cases, which are among
the most pressing sites of decolonisation visible in the world right now, and which connect
the newest and oldest manifestations of US imperial power projection. But first, without
getting mired in self-referentiality, decolonisation does call for explicit positioning of one’s
intellectual and activist pursuits in relation to colonial past history and present implications.
So I should begin by acknowledging my location: this was written on Lenape and Lakota
land, on, respectively, the eastern seaboard and north central plains of Turtle Island; by an
author with immigrant origins in South Asia one generation ago and northern Europe four
generations ago, employed until recently at a n ­ ineteenth-century land-grant university with
intimate ties to the military, while also engaged in on-the-ground organising on multiple
fronts with anticolonial goals, aspiring always towards more consistently decolonial methods.
That means that from this specific location, at the crosshatching of several layers of the
colonial grid, my reference points tend to be oriented towards the particular aspects in which
I am most embedded, at the risk of neglecting others. It’s also clear that there are sometimes
conflicts and contradictions between these aspects, and that given the complexity and multi-
plicity of colonial histories, observations made pertinent to one context may be problematic
for another. Nevertheless, I can only speak from where I am standing. Looking through a
decolonial lens from this vantage point, this is what I see.
Among certain circles – namely anyone from a community previously colonised and
racialised – the concept of decolonisation has been self-evident for decades. But for the
mainstreaming of the language, to the point where it too may require some decolonisation to
restore it to meaningful effectiveness, at least part of the blame on this continent may belong
to Occupy Wall Street.
The spread of this viral brand of 2011–12 (itself a spin-off of the viral brand of the Arab
Spring uprisings, combined with the inspiration of anticapitalist insurgencies in Greece
and Spain, and earlier encampments confronting neo-liberal austerities in the US) acti-
vated a counter-tendency from among its own internal critics, who took issue with the
implications of its rhetoric. If to ‘occupy’ something was being used to mean taking back
public space from the clutches of miniscule plutocratic elite, reappropriating common

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 On Decolonisation

goods from the logic of capitalism, then the concept of occupation was the wrong one.
To many Native Americans/First Nations peoples, radical people of colour, P ­ alestinians
or anyone else with an awareness of colonial history, or of the neocolonialism of today’s
global economy, the word ‘occupation’ invoked military incursion, subjugation and dis-
possession. If the intended meaning was restoration and liberation, why not speak of
decolonising, rather than occupying? Furthermore, calls to ‘occupy everything’, or even
to ‘reclaim the commons’, evoked a righteous sense of entitlement to claim territory,
while failing to recognise that these claims too were appropriative.4 Thus, this radical
movement was far less decolonial than it could have been and should have been. In any
case, the ‘decolonise’ language, beyond the ebb of ‘occupy’, has since proliferated into
wide familiarity.
There is a legitimate reason for the ubiquity of ‘decolonisation’, because colonisation does
underlie every aspect of the modern industrial capitalist world as we know it. Colonialism
has left its marks on culture, economy, politics, psychology, pedagogy, knowledge systems,
race relations, carceral regimes, industrial production and modern state formation, working
through all the modes of hard and soft power. Yet, we should be wary of evacuating meaning
from the term if over-applied to everything. Colonisation and decolonisation are rooted in
historical specificities, not theoretical concepts, and cannot be abstracted into all-purpose
metaphor. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang insist upon this point as well in their influential
article calling out the appropriation of the term to use for any social justice, antiracist, al-
ternative education, urban gentrification or anticapitalist initiative, as substitute for (and con-
venient evasion of ) addressing colonial realities (2012: 1–40). There are valuable structural
analogies to colonisation in many of these cases, but the distinction does need to be made or
we risk yet again erasing the material reality of the colonised.
The approach to any of these issues and structures may be radicalised by thinking of
them as components of decolonisation, in order to illuminate their multiple complex con-
nections to the historical processes by which, for example, colonies were used as laboratories
for testing new weapons and techniques of surveillance, discipline, biopower, policing and
­counter-insurgency, which were then circulated among other colonies and finally ­reimported
to become the standard in the metropole itself. Or by which conquerors have typically
­employed rape as a tool for subjugation, and education as a mode of cultural genocide.
By contrast, to detach such issues from colonial history deradicalises them. Efforts fo-
cusing on issues like gentrification, the prison-industrial complex, sexual violence or racial
justice only function as decolonial – that is, actively contribute to undoing past and present
effects of colonial systems, consciously subverting the behaviours, assumptions and structural
complicities that reproduce racial hierarchy, cultural hegemony and structural inequity – if
activists and scholars explicitly recognise their own efforts as embedded in the same ana-
lytical and causal field as these systems. Therefore, adding an awareness of history and its
structural, epistemic and psychological impacts to any issue is required in order to render
them into components of decolonisation, rather than merely colonial appropriations of the
language of decolonisation.
Likewise, decolonisation as a concept itself has to be historicised to retain its radical char-
acter as an actual rather than a theoretical process. And, a decolonial framework as a radi-
calising framework for analysis and strategy is by definition a deeply historical framework.
In some ways, applying a decolonial lens is much the same as applying a historical, which is
to say a deeply contextual, which is to say a critical, which is to say a quintessentially radical
lens: it goes to the root of the generative structures of contemporary realities.

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 Maia Ramnath

Decolonial history is a reclamation of the past, of memory and record, which literally
overthrows the master(’s) narrative of the present. Colonialism needed to rewrite the past in
order to legitimate itself by erasing the very memory of the conquered, or by painting them
as destined for natural extinction, unworthy of progressive futurity (whether by virtue of
alleged savagery or alleged decadence).
Furthermore, modern world history, as I understand it, is inseparable from colonial
­h istory – which means that it is also inseparable from the history of anticolonial strug-
gles for emancipation and self-determination. Walter Mignolo and other associated Latin
­A merican scholars in fact argue that modernity and coloniality should be understood as
virtual ­synonyms, as the obscrued and illumined sides of the same coin.5 In order to further
explain why decolonisation adds a radicalising dimension to many issues, then it is necessary
to recount some history.
The growth of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution would have been impossible
without the joint transformation of land, human bodies and labour into commodities. For a
primarily anticolonial (as opposed to a primarily anticapitalist) analysis (or in other words, an
analysis such as those based in a perspective rooted in colonised regions, and such as those
articulated by Asian and African leftists throughout the twentieth century), dispossession
rather than proletarianisation was the key ignition point for industrial capitalist modernity –
which is to say, emphasising the extraction of surplus from the expropriation of land rather
than the exploitation of labour. Of course, both were necessary components of an integrated
system.
The initial globality that we know as modernity was the result of the unprecedented
economic integration of Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Access to ‘New World’ re-
sources gave Europe the advantage it had previously lacked to dominate the Afro-Eurasian
ecumene – a dramatic upset by a previously marginal backwater of the ‘Old World’ (these
being obviously colonial designations). British industrialisation was built upon the steam-
driven machinery of mass-produced textiles, which devoured not just cheap coal but cheap
raw cotton. This was procured through a multi-continental complex of enslaved and dehu-
manised African labour working on American land seized by genocidal expropriation from
dehumanised prior inhabitants, for monocrop plantation production.6
Along with geographer David Harvey (and drawing upon earlier critical thinkers like
Rosa Luxemburg or C. L. R. James), we refer to this catalyst for capitalism as accumulation
by dispossession rather than primitive accumulation, to indicate that it was not an originary
singularity limited to the primordial past, but a process required again and again to bridge the
system’s inevitable metabolic rifts and resolve its crises through expansion. Thus, ­a nticolonial
primary resistance – fighting back against initial invasion and military occupation, defending
land and sovereignty against coercive settlement, dispossession and resource expropriation at
the new profit-frontiers of cash crops, ores, minerals, water, strategic topography, labour – is
still underway to this day; a truly postcolonial era does not yet exist.

What Are the Principle Concerns of the Movements Involved

with Decolonisation
Decolonisation requires resisting new appropriations of common goods, territory and re-
sources, countering each new suction of wealth outward and upward towards remote con-
centration, skirmishing along a moving frontier line of extraction which in many cases, not
coincidentally, matches the barrier of racialised difference. Structural and discursive location
in relation to this line of coloniality – akin to the ‘colour line’, namely the racial divide as the

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 On Decolonisation

primary contradiction identified by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk as ‘the problem
of the Twentieth Century’, and by A. Sivanandan (as immortalised by Asian Dub Foundation)
as synonymous with ‘the power line … the poverty line’ – is the crucial point differentiating
such expropriations from the structurally similar enclosures described by B ­ ritish Marxist
historians that turned European land-based agrarian communities into a landless industrial
waged labour force, removed from their extra-capitalist means of subsistence.
But decolonisation also requires more than that. Damages sown long ago have sustained
time-release effects. The racially structured modes of social engineering and control that
were used to justify settlement claims and mask surplus extraction mechanisms have left
their stamp on the global economic disparities and dependencies that distinguish the mu-
tually constituted ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds (i.e. the colonising global north and
colonised global south), on global food systems and commodity chains, on the vectors of
warfare, on the trajectories of migrants and refugees, and on the discrimination met by these
diasporic communities upon arrival. Every dysfunctional racial dynamic we now live with
is rooted in this history. (Not to mention our addictions to sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, to-
bacco, opiates and fossil fuels.)
The antithesis to colonisation, with its multiple historical emanations – at different times
from different centres by different logics with different goals in different places (Cooper and
Stoler, 1997; Cooper, 2005) – is not a single moment or single event, but rather a multilay-
ered, intersectional process of unravelling a totalising system and its entrenched effects. The
process exists contemporaneously at every phase of its life cycle somewhere in the world.
The layers include

• resisting new frontiers of colonisation;

• countering the persistent structures put in place by prior colonisation;
• healing the lingering effects of colonial damage and trauma to communities and
individuals;
• revising the national autobiographies of colonial states; challenging their historical blind
spots and self-delusions;
• restoring the dynamism of subjugated, damaged or near-obliterated cultures, languages
and knowledge bases.

Beyond anticolonial resistance then, decolonisation is also a more complex and sustained task
requiring the undoing of institutions, dismantling of structures, intervening in the narra-
tives and imagery of cultural representation. Since colonisation was carried out upon lands,
resource bases, bodies, minds, practices and discourses, all of these may become grounds of
decolonial action.
Restoration does not mean a nostalgic attempt to turn back the clock towards a cleaner,
purer moment before the destruction began, fixed into ahistorical stasis (which is how vig-
orous colonisers often like to portray those supposedly slated for obsolescence). But it does
entail – as Glenn Coulthard, Leanne Simpson, Taiaiake Alfred and other indigenous intel-
lectuals emphasise – reweaving the torn fabric of interrelationship among individuals, com-
munity (human and non-human) and place, grounded in the immanent spiritual ecology of
indigenous lifeways and practices (Alfred, 2009; Corntassel, 2012).
Decolonial restoration generates new growth on the apparently defoliated branches of
alternative social forms, intellectual and cultural traditions rooted in principles very differ-
ent from those of a colonial (imperial, capitalist, extractive, patriarchal, r­ acial-supremacist)
regime, although they may also find resonances and alliances with non-dominant elements

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suppressed or eliminated from within the regime’s own body. To revitalise subjugated
knowledge is not a choice between new ways and old ways, statically defined, but of alter-
nate ways that have both old and new existence as they continually unfold across a long time
span. Since colonisation artificially truncated the unfoldment of one of them, decolonisation
would entail mending the cut, allowing the unfoldment to resume in new contexts and
conditions.
So where do we see these efforts manifesting today? Even more important than a history
of colonisation is the contrapuntal history of decolonisation, taking into account the in-
terference patterns (convergent amplifications, frictions or collisions) among its subsequent
layers and differently located aspects.
Dane Kennedy periodises this history into several major waves of decolonisation, of which
the first took place in the late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Caribbean and South
America, with the Haitian and Bolivarian revolutions. We are overlooking here the settler
revolt of the slaveholding North American colonists for more autonomy from the British
mother country; their grievances, framed as ‘anticolonial’ resistance to tyranny and taxation
without representation, included chafing against restrictions on the ‘freedom’ to expand set-
tlement further westwards into indigenous lands. The resultant fledgling independent creole
republic almost immediately moved towards incremental takeover of the territorial claims
of the French and Spanish empires, and recolonised its southern neighbours by staking out a
sphere of influence to enforce their own prerogatives of exploitation, intervention, intensive
resource extraction and plantation production against rivals. From this point onwards, the
US was the dominant imperial power in the Americas.
Back in Europe, the high-imperial scramble for colonies on all remaining Asian,
­A frican and Oceanic territories from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century
set off an inter-imperial collision course to the First World War, the effects of which
dismantled the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires only to reassign their Near
­Eastern/Middle Eastern/West Asian territories to Britain and France. The war and its
aftermath catalysed self-determination struggles around the world including in India,
Egypt, China and Ireland, which intensified transnational solidarities among Asian and
African ‘oppressed peoples’ including pan-African, pan-Islamic, pan-Asian and pan-Arab
formations, often framed in relation to the Communist International and/or the League
Against Imperialism.
The Second World War was the death blow for the modern empires, unleashing the
next few major waves of global decolonisation. From the 1940s to the 1990s, decolonisation
mainly referred to the post-war spate of African and Asian national liberation struggles
resulting in the twenty-nine newly independent nation states constituent of the Bandung
Afro-Asian ideal and the framework of Non-Aligned or Third World solidarity.7 Even now,
most scholarship on colonial and decolonial histories, postcolonial theory and literature takes
these formations as the assumed reference point.
As the remaining European empires were dismantled, the turbulent front line of de-
colonisation (i.e. the track of the death throes of imperial rule) migrated from South Asia
to Southeast Asia and North Africa, then Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, radical wings
of black diasporic liberation struggles within the global north identified themselves with
­A frican decolonisation, while radical wings of white leftist struggles pledged antiracist and
anti-imperialist solidarities with Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba and Maoist China. By the early
1970s in the US, the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement (AIM), Movimiento
­Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA),8 Puerto Rican Young Lords and Asian-American
I Wor Kuen had all crystallised as militantly anticolonial formations.

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 On Decolonisation

However, a couple of neocolonial counterforces were also on the rise. For one thing, it
seems clear in retrospect that translating Third World decolonisation into nation state build-
ing was a disastrous mistake. The former colonial regimes’ governmental infrastructures and
administrative, legal, judicial, military and security apparatuses, taken over largely intact
by the new postcolonial countries, did not provide a fitting vehicle for the emancipatory
impulse that had generated the various forms of far more ambitiously transformative move-
ments. Furthermore, many of these new states had inherited not just colonial apparatuses
but colonial boundaries, mapped contingently by the limits of conquest, or arbitrarily in
the name of ‘efficient’ administration. These were often based upon presumptions of ethnic
exclusivity, despite the fact that the boundaries did not necessarily match up with different
ethnies’ homeplaces, cutting across their lived geographies so that groups such as the Kurds,
the Pashtun or the Rohingya became minorities in multiple states. Sometimes, it prohibited
previously existing nomadism or coexistence. The resulting partitions led to much bloody
misery and sectarian violence.
The postcolonial nation states have since perpetrated much quite familiar colonial be-
haviour upon their own borderlands and internal tribal populations: from disenfranchise-
ment and marginalisation combined with expropriation of land and resources (minerals,
fossil fuels, lumber, etc.) for capital accumulation, up to occupation by hostile forces granted
special powers with violent impunity in a legalised permanent state of exception (see, for
example, Khalil, 2015; Chakravati, 2010, 2012; Ross, 2014). Such have been the narratives
of Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Nagaland, Kashmir, the putative Khalistan and other regions
in relation to the Indian state; Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) and Baluchistan to the
(West) Pakistani state; Mindanao to the Filipino state; the Shan states to Burma; West Papua
and East Timor to Indonesia; and West Sahara to Morocco.
In short, the post-war waves of Third World decolonisation, though partially emancipa-
tory, failed to complete the mission, or even betrayed it. The transition to statehood was ul-
timately not just deradicalising but counter-revolutionary, perpetuating the same oppressive
functions that those structures had been designed to do under colonial rule, now under new
management. This is why such a transition to independence might have been considered
anti-imperial but not truly decolonising.9 To continue the work of decolonisation today
requires confronting the consequences of these states’ actions and the reactionary ideologies
that were also generated by the anticolonial dialectic.
Secondly, while the European empires in Asia and Africa were in retreat, US imperial
ambition surged forward, driven by the quest for economic, ideological, military and polit-
ical dominance around the globe, but above all by the strategic imperative to secure access
to oil in the Middle East. Control of fossil fuel sources and transport routes was defined as
essential to national security (and robust consumer capitalism). And in this, the US found
it convenient to build up an ally in the modern ethno-religious nationalist movement of
Zionism, which the decolonising Afro-Asian solidarity discourse viewed since 1948 as not
only an instrument of American interests, but an explicitly European colonising project that
aimed to supercede a civilisationally ‘backward’ West Asian population.10 The horrific victi-
misation of one people, the Jews of Europe, they argued, should not logically have provided
the justification for oppression of another, the Arabs of Palestine.
This sets up the context for linking these two most salient fronts of decolonisation today:
Palestine and indigenous North America. These are major foci for current radicalism both
because they are the flashpoints of crucial contemporary conflicts, and because they require
us to dig a layer deeper – that is, more radical, in terms of the depth of critical questioning
and the degree of fundamental epistemic and structural change required.11 Contemplating

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this level of decolonisation generates a very necessary discomfort of fundamentally unset-

tling everything about how we live and what we know.
A striking and very specific continuity of logic, methodology and legitimating mythol-
ogy bind the US and Israel, even deeper than the dovetailing of their political and strategic
interests. Activists and intellectuals are increasingly noting the parallels between Zionism
and the American national project. Countering the oldest and newest settler states brings
together the deepest and the highest, the most entrenched and the most urgent, the first and
the final frontiers of decolonial thought and action, juxtaposing the original scars with the
rawest wounds.
In recent years, indigenous North American activists and intellectuals along with other
committed activist-scholars of colonialism/postcolonialism have participated in delega-
tions to Palestine, and returned to speak powerfully on the parallels between these struggles
against settler colonisation. In the fall of 2016, the Palestinian flag could be seen snapping
in the fierce North Dakota prairie wind along the row of indigenous nations’ and tribes’
banners that formed the spine of the Oceti Sakowin water protectors’ encampment at the
Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Palestinian and Palestine solidarity groups had mobilised
regular caravans there from various parts of the country, expressing their recognition of that
struggle for sovereignty, land and water rights, as deeply akin to their own.
Both settler projects proceeded through a comparable pattern of violence, land acquisition
whether by dubious purchase or by direct military occupation followed by the metastasis of
fortified squatting, ethnic cleansing, mass transfer or segregation and incarceration of popu-
lations, repeated violations of treaties and international law, collective punishment, security
regimes restricting physical movement enforced by barriers, checkpoints, aerial surveillance
and heavily militarised policing. Stephen Salaita quotes historian Ari Shavit on ‘the differ-
ence between US and Israeli massacres. “About 100 years”’ (Salaita, 2016: 20).
In both the American and Israeli colonial regimes, European settlers, taking land from
prior inhabitants, justified their actions through rhetorics that have melded the teleological in-
evitability of modern progress with a divinely sanctioned messianic mandate, a s­ elf-fulfilling
prophecy by which settlers strive by acts of genocidal violence and displacement to make the
facts on the ground accord with the myth of terra nullius – the empty land awaiting its righ-
teous, predestined inhabitants.
The two locations complete a circle. Iberian conquest in the Western Hemisphere was
explicitly projected as a continuation of the Crusades, cloaking a quest for gold as god’s mis-
sion against the savage, whether Arab or Amerindian. It was no accident that the Christian
reconquest of Moorish Spain coincided with Columbus’s initial predatory landfall in the
­Caribbean. Subsequent British and French conquest justified itself through a different primary
logic: enlightenment rationalism declared land unclaimed for capitalist production as waste,
and therefore up for grabs by whoever demonstrated ownership by ‘improving’ it, rendering
it ‘productive’ of surplus value, while at the same time invoking Biblical Christian imag-
ery equating claims to the New World with claims to the Promised Land (not to mention a
­Protestant interpretation of material affluence as the outward sign of morality and godliness).
Here are interwoven two versions of the utopian impulse: the most sophisticated modern
technological paradise and the most pure and virtuous enclave for the end of times. Zion-
ism too contains both logics: a right-wing religious mission to reclaim god-given land for
a chosen people, and a left-liberal civilising mission to render land maximally productive,
technologised, surplus-generating. Twentieth-century Revisionist Zionism drew explicitly
on upon the precedent of nineteenth-century US conquest and policy of removal of natives
as model and justification for its own goals.12 And for the past half-century the US military

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habitually refers to the land it invades, facing stubborn resistance in hostile territory from
Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, as ‘Indian Country’ to evoke its nineteenth-century wars
of conquest.
Perhaps the main difference between the American and Israeli settler narratives is the claim
to primordial nativity; the latter case cites a connection lost through millennia of exile, ver-
sus the former’s claim to a Manifest Destiny unprecedented yet triumphantly fore-ordained
as a historical culmination. Nevertheless whether looking to past or future, both proclaim
the similarly exceptional status of serving as a beacon of enlightenment unto the nations,
whether in theological or secular terms. Such exceptionalism, which absolves perpetrators
of the originary acts of violence required to clear the space for such a wonderful thing to be
unfurled, also necessitates a continual effort of erasure whereby, shorn of context, resistance
to structural violence can be portrayed as aggression, and settler state terrorism as defence.
I believe that this is why the frequently encountered ‘PEP (Progressive Except Palestine)’
syndrome is so recalcitrant in the US: because indicting Israel in this way hits too close to
home. Logically, it requires questioning America’s own foundational self-image and legiti-
mating narrative. This cannot be borne, and so must not be seen. This is the epistemic event
horizon, the ultimate limitation on what may be spoken or even thought. But for decoloni-
sation in both places to occur, unmasking this shared myth is essential.

How Is the Politics of Decolonisation Theorised and What, If Any,

Influences Are Active in Decolonisation Movements?
It is perhaps less important to theorise the politics of decolonisation than to enact and man-
ifest them through the practices of history, literature, art and pedagogy. There is always a
relationship between scholarship and activism in decolonisation, because colonisation was
carried out on an epistemic as well as physical ground. Theory and practice are impossible
to separate in this context.
Educational institutions have historically been used as an important mechanism of sub-
jugation, assimilation and discipline. The field of anthropology has a notorious record of
treating cultural artefacts and bodies, living and dead, as dehumanised objects of scientific
study, while at the same time, domination of the narrative (through ideological apparatuses
ranging from archives to policies to pedagogy to popular media) has been deployed towards
erasure of the past and naturalisation of an unjust present order. Colonial regimes seek con-
trol of what is allowed to enter into the field of perception and cognition; hence for those
subjected to the threat of physical and/or cultural genocide, the significance of asserting vis-
ible presence in both art and protest, manifesting existence as resistance. However, it should
be stressed that battles on the discursive level are not a substitute for structural change, albeit
a necessary but insufficient component.
Given its location and orientation, academic postcolonial theory is not always the best
source of effectively decolonial thinking in action, although a decolonial intellectual tra-
dition does overlap with a canonical list of the politically engaged precursors, current
practitioners or interlocutors of ‘postcolonial’ criticism, such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar
Cabral, Aimé ­Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Albert Memmi, Achille
Mbembe, Edward Said, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Stuart Hall. Decolonial thinking is also
theorised/practiced under the banners of Africana critical theory, liberation theology and
liberation philosophy, cultural studies (Birmingham and Inter-Asian), South Asian and
Latin ­A merican subaltern studies, Women of Colour/Third World feminism, ethnic stud-
ies and indigenous critical theory.13

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 Maia Ramnath

But true criticality of theory means precisely its radicalism, its committedness to
praxis and intentionality towards social change. The bridging of scholarship and activ-
ism that characterises it then also requires redefining what counts as valid work within
the confining definitions of the conventional academy. This is not always feasible, as aca-
demic institutions grow more corporatised and neo-liberalised, and ever more tied to the
­m ilitary-industrial-research complex.14 The key thing for aspiring decolonial scholars who
attempt to wear both hats to remember is that ultimately the work they do in the academy
has to be oriented towards movements, rather than the other way around. They must remain
clear on which goals and interests they are serving, and to whom their work is accountable,
accessible and relevant.
The journal Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education and Society is a good example of an intel-
lectual production geared towards contributing to actual decolonisation, as opposed to mak-
ing it an abstract object of study.15 Other examples: there has been a good deal of overlap in
academic boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) mobilisation with participation in art and ac-
tivism initiatives like the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition (http://gulflabor.org/) and Decolonize
This Place project based in New York City (http://decolonizethisplace.org/), which link
neocolonialism in the global economy, imperialism, analyses of settler colonialism linking
indigenous struggles, Palestine, black liberation, migrant South Asian labour in the Persian
Gulf, the economic and cultural colonialism implicit in art and media representation. Many
of those involved played key roles in foregrounding the issues in political and academic dis-
courses, notably the controversial stand taken by the Asian American and American Studies
Associations in support of the Palestinian BDS movement.16
Meanwhile, much decolonial thinking, on-the-ground analysis, critique, strategising,
movement-based reportage, tactical discussion and creative expression emerge directly from
journals and websites, zines and pamphlets, Facebook and YouTube videos, addressing the
sites of conflict, resistance and decolonisation that are unfolding in real time.17
Let me return for a moment to the observation that addressing settler regimes today is the
next step for decolonial thought and action. Just as the addition of an anticolonial analysis
in general can radicalise the approach to other issues, an analysis of settler colonialism, in
particular, challenges already anticolonial writing and organising even further by pushing
it towards greater accountability for the very material and epistemic ground on which it
stands. Even other modes of social justice and critical theory/praxis can remain complicit
with ­settler-colonial structures when they hold back from this step.
For example, incorporating this analysis complicates the ways in which racial justice and
immigrant rights are spoken of in the US Radical claims for racial justice that transcend lib-
eral claims for civil rights demand recognition of the history of enslavement and its successor
forms of systemic white supremacy, through carceral discipline, political and economic ex-
clusion, segregation, etc. But as Coulthard, Jodi Byrd, Kevin Bruyneel and others point out,
in a settler state, even these claims can still be framed within the bounds of democratic inclu-
sion in, and recognition by, a settler state, the establishment of which existentially underlies
the very condition of possibility for all later claims on rights and equity within it (Bruyneel,
2007; Byrd, 2011; Coulthard, 2014).
Even an important strand of radical black liberation struggle, which has understood itself at
least since the 1920s as tied to an African diasporic network of global decolonisation, and since the
1960s as one among other Third World national liberation struggles, has the potential for settler
complicity. The ‘40 acres’ promise of Emancipation, quite reasonably justified purely on the basis of
the (Lockean or Marxian) labour theory of value, or the aspirational establishment of New Afrika
in the ‘black belt’ states of the old south, on the same grounds, would still require expropriation

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 On Decolonisation

from indigenous residents unless based upon a new dispensation of mutual a­ lliance.18 The sophis-
ticated historical and intersectional circulating among the current Black Lives Matter, BDS and
indigenous sovereignty movements suggests reason for hope.
Furthermore, each new stream of non-white, marginalised arrivants (Byrd’s term), even
those whose journeys have ultimately resulted from colonisation of their own places of origin,
must negotiate the meanings and requirements of their positionality within the coloniser/
colonised grid: whether to aim for assimilation into the settler/white supremacist structure
and its social imaginary, identifying with its hegemonic aspirations, or to attempt to oppose,
subvert, disrupt, challenge and dismantle it. Despite having been impelled by colonial history
into diaspora – whether as refugees or political convicts, by enslavement or indenture, or put
into motion by the dizzying neocolonial imbalances in global wealth concentration – they are
also placed, upon arrival, into various possible complicities with settlement.
There are other frictions or disconnects among different strands of radical (decolonial?)
theory/praxis, such as those between postcolonial theory and indigenous critical theory,
between postcolonial theory and leftist anti-imperialism, or between leftist anti-imperialism
and indigenous critical theory, though for different reasons.
One of the objections some indigenous critical theory has to some postcolonial theory is
the latter’s rejection of essentialism and emphasis on hybridity and strict social construction
as emancipatory concepts. Yet, these too can be used in disempowering and re-subjugating
ways, pointed out. As Coulthard, Arif Dirlik and others point out, no concept is implicitly
emancipatory in all contexts, and that an essentialism of the powerful may be different from
an essentialism of powerless – meaning perhaps something like Gayatri Spivak’s ‘strategic’
version, appropriate to those still enmeshed in struggle against an existential threat as op-
posed to dealing with its aftershocks.19
However, it may also be noticed that sometimes, once the tables have turned, the power-
ful continue to identify themselves as the powerless; or at least to claim the moral standing
of victimhood when they are actually in the position of dominant aggressor. Zionism and
Hindutva (far right-wing Hindu nationalism, in many ways its cognate) are cases in point.
To take the convoluted case of Indian nationalism, in both domestic and diasporic forms,
Hindutva aspires to equate itself to the aforementioned American/Zionist mould, and at
the same time to claim the (debatable) mantle of indigenous, place-based spiritual identifi-
cation with land, touting restoration of one (dubious) interpretation of Sanskritic tradition
as revitalising a lost precolonial culture, while at the same time linking this identification
to fascistic and xenophobic exclusivity and hyper-developmentalist ambition. Meanwhile,
the emphatically rationalist South Asian left tends to be suspicious of postcolonial/subaltern
theory for its scepticism towards enlightenment rationalism and scientific positivism, along
with its valorisation of pre-industrial lifeways and modes of production.20
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the European-based left despite its
emancipatory agenda also contributed to colonisation (and ecological destruction) through
its emphasis on progress and industrial development. Today’s international left faces an ex-
istentially inescapable need to envision a social future beyond the context of industrial mo-
dernity (albeit perhaps highly technological). Here again, the implication is that indigenous
critical theory/praxis has the capacity to further radicalise left anticolonial thinking in ways
imperative for the twenty-first century. A banner at a recent oil pipeline blockade equated
a future of indigenous sovereignty with a future of ecological sustainability. The implicit
message, angled towards an aerial drone’s-eye view, was that given a North American de-
colonisation, the alternative ethos and subjugated knowledge base in question happen to be
ones that could potentially save us all.

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 Maia Ramnath

Even so, colonial behaviours are insidious, as the bearers of such messages also point
out: the fact that some subjugated knowledge does contain skills, concepts and philosophies
containing possible keys to planetary and human survival reveals the importance of reflexive
vigilance at all levels lest we assume the right to expropriate or extract such knowledge with-
out asking or giving due credit, rather than letting the deployment, and sharing and teaching
of knowledge be guided by those from whom it originates and who have long guarded it.21
Today, a global neocolonial system layered upon the ongoing effects of older colonial
systems reveals many sites of intervention: every point of surplus extraction, every point of
racial control, is a potential point of resistance and decolonisation. How each one of us is
implicated in the histories and contexts in which decolonisation occurs depends on our lo-
cation, but we are all implicated. Contributing to decolonisation calls for an analysis of each
location and its particular accountabilities. For those based in settler regimes, decolonisation
taken to its logical conclusion could begin with the honouring of existing treaty terms, pro-
ceed through the granting of reparations and ultimately lead to the full restoration of land,
self-determination and sovereignty in that geographical space.

Is This Possible?

Can What’s Been Broken Be Fixed?

Is the destruction of environments and cultures, the loss of languages and knowledge, irre-
vocable? Not so long as there is anyone still fighting back, or still practising and reproducing
lifeways. People will always defend themselves against conquest and dispossession unless
totally annihilated – physically and culturally, existentially and epistemologically. But how
many generations would it take to reverse centuries of cumulative immiseration, impover-
ishment and imbalance in the global distribution of wealth, power and well-being?
Given all the plausible ways the world could end – by climate catastrophe, pandemic or
war, nuclear or otherwise – the immediate future needs to be concerned with decolonisa-
tion. This requires not just resistance but also recreation: of lost or erased names of people
and places on maps (since in some places, using the wrong map, or the wrong name, or the
wrong language, can be seen as an act of treason or a provocation to violence); of relation-
ship to place, entailing different kinds of relations among human and non-human beings; of
non-capitalist, non-fossil-fuel-intensive, non-resource-extractive ways of living.
Decolonising climate justice means foregrounding indigenous sovereignty concerns in all
deliberations. Decolonising racial justice and immigrant/migrant politics means acknowledging
the settler framework of the state within which such claims are made and arrivals absorbed or
shut out. Decolonising the framework of world peace means recognising American and I­ sraeli
occupations in West Asia as culpable for instigating and exacerbating geopolitical conflict.
Decolonisation would unsettle the foundation of the dominant institutions and episteme
of the world most of us live in most of the time. With its embeddedness in history, it carries
by definition a deep awareness of the past. But it carries by definition an equally far-reaching
awareness of futurity, in that its means are prefigurative and its ends dynamically revitalising.

Notes
1 Parts of this piece are adapted and expanded from my article in STRIKE! Magazine (2016). It also
builds further upon writings contributed to anthologies edited by Carl Levy and Saul Newman,
The Anarchist Imagination (Routledge, 2015); and Raymond Craib and Barry Maxwell, No Gods,
No Masters, No Peripheries (PM Press, 2015).

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 On Decolonisation

2 The Magnificent Seven (2016), directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Nick Pizzolatto and Richard
Wenk, produced by Village Roadshow for MGM and Columbia Pictures.
3 www.ienearth.org/ www.idlenomore.ca/.
4 In fall 2016, I cringed to hear a couple of white activists who had recently visited the by then
world-famous water protectors’ encampment at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North
Dakota reflecting delightedly how much it ‘reminded them of Occupy Wall Street!’ – as if OWS
had not itself been an echo of centuries-old camping techniques, participatory deliberative prac-
tices, collective modes of existence and pseudo-tribal cultural forms.
  For a collection of documents related to these debates within the OWS movement, see Amy
Schrager Lang and Daniel Lang/Levitsky, eds., Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
(New Internationalist Publications, 2012).
5 This premise builds on the fact that colonisation in Central and South America predated the
more conventional periodisation of the modern era that takes more enlightenment-based traits as
a starting point, therefore obscuring and distorting an understanding of colonialism, modernity,
logics of resistance and the conclusions of postcolonial theory. See, for example, Mabel Moraña,
­Enrique Dussel and Carlos Jauregui, eds., Coloniality At Large (Duke University Press, 2008);
Walter ­M ignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke
University Press, 2011).
6 This is comprehensively laid out by Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (Vintage, 2014); Lisa Lowe,
The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015). On New World slavery and the
development of capitalism, see the work of Edward Baptist, Robin Blackburn and Eric Williams.
7 Initially fronted most prominently by a cluster of Third World state leaders of international stat-
ure: Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Sukarno (Indonesia), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt), and Kwame
Nkrumah (Ghana).
8 Aztlan was the name for the pre-Colombian Mexican/Aztecan civilisation including the portions
of the US annexed from Mexico in the war of 1848. Chicanos claim indigeneity to the southwest-
ern quarter of what’s now the US.
9 The same may be true of tribal governments: leadership and law enforcement structures put in
place by the federal government under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 are not always
recognised as legitimate by all tribal members, who in some cases view them as corrupt and
self-serving, complicit with colonial regime and/or extractive industries, or prioritising the inter-
ests of state and capital over the interests of sovereignty and community. Again, the point is that
achieving an independent government is not necessarily the same thing as decolonisation.
10 This included the Jewish population who were actually indigenous to the region: the ethnic/
cultural divide within Israel between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi communities mirrors the European/
Arab fault line.
11 In fact [in ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ pp], Tuck and Yang define decolonisation in strictest
terms only as the dismantling of settler colonial structures, noncommensurate with other forms of
anticolonial struggle. They stress that repatriation of land and sovereignty to indigenous inhabi-
tants is related but not identical to anti-imperial conflicts elsewhere, such as those with regard to
military occupations, administrative, extractive or labour colonies. I would argue that it is not that
such things are in no way decolonial. They are to a degree, even if insufficiently and incompletely
so: they may do necessary service in undoing more superficial strata of colonisation even if not
penetrating as far as the base layer of settlement.
12 Salaita has extensively catalogued the rhetorical parallels in The Holy Land in Transit (Syracuse
University Press, 2006) and Inter/Nationalism. See in the latter, in particular, his comparison of the
rhetoric of Andrew Jackson and Vladimir Jabotinsky, pp. 71–102.
13 Such as historians Robert Young, Pransenjit Duara, Antoinette Burton, Catherine Hall, R ­ anajit
Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Patrick Wolfe, Mahmood Mamdani; political-historical-­
cultural theorists Reiland Rabaka, Cedric Robinson, Aijaz Ahmad, Eqbal Ahmad, Ania Loomba,
Paul Gilroy … and so many more.
14 On decolonising the academy, pedagogy and research, see (among a large literature) Linda ­Tuhiwai
Smith, Decolonising Methodologies (Zed Books, 2012); Sara Ahmed, On Being Included (Duke
­University Press, 2012); Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, The Imperial University ­( University
of Minnesota Press, 2014); Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber and Erica Biddle, eds., Constituent
Imagination: Militant Researches, Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007); bell hooks, Teaching to
Transgress (Routledge, 1994).

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 Maia Ramnath

15 http://decolonization.org/index.php/des. Established in 2012, its editorial staff and board include

many significant indigenous and decolonial scholar-activists. Editor Eric Ritskes explains its mis-
sion at https://intercontinentalcry.org/what-is-decolonization-and-why-does-it-matter. Accessed
16/4/17.
16 Strong voices in these efforts have included J. Kehaulani-Kauanui, Dean Saranillio, Sunaina Maira,
Robin D.G. Kelley, Angela Davis, Stephen Salaita, Andrew Ross, Jasbir Puar, Vijay Prashad,
Rashid Khalidi and Leena Dallasheh. In addition to their extensive bodies of scholarship and fre-
quent public addresses, some of the concerns, connections and arguments of the above-mentioned
projects are laid out in the pamphlet ‘Palestine Boycott Beyond’ by the collective Tidal: Occupy
Theory, Occupy Strategy. http://decolonizethisplace.org/zines/161104_Palestine_BLM_Boycott_
Arts_Zine_PrinterSpreads.pdf; and in materials viewable at http://artistsspace.org/exhibitions/­
decolonizethisplace; http://decolonizethisplace.org, and http://gulflabor.org. Accessed 16/4/17.
17 Two acutely practical critiques/proposals for decolonial activist practice: ‘Accomplices Not ­A llies’
Version 2: 5/02/2014, www.indigenousaction.org/accomplices-not-allies-abolishing-the-ally-­
industrial-complex; Liza Minno-Bloom and Berkley Carnine, ‘Towards D ­ ecolonisation and Settler
­Responsibility: Reflections on a Decade of Indigenous Solidarity Organizing’. C ­ ounterpunch,
October 3, 2016. www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/03/towards-decolonization-and-settler-
responsibility-reflections-on-a-decade-of-indigenous-solidarity-organizing. Accessed 16/4/17. See
also Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellow Bird, eds., For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decoloni-
sation Handbook (School for Advanced Research Press, 2005).
18 African and indigenous interactions in American history are complex, ranging from slaveholding
by the Cherokee to widespread absorption of runaway slaves by the Seminole, and intermarriage
in many communities not uncommon though largely invisibilised until recently. For illumination
of some of these variations, see the work of Barbara Krauthamer and Tiya Miles.
19 This refers to Spivak’s famous line from the 1988 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ on the strategic
essentialism of the subaltern, utilising identity categories of oppression as the tactical, contextual
basis of solidarity in order to counteract the relevant structures of oppression, but without endors-
ing an ahistorical, intrinsic essence.
20 It is indisputable that science has been used as a tool of colonisation in the past; it is equally indis-
putable that science can be used as a bulwark against the racism, xenophobia and climate change
denial by which colonisation is furthered in the present. Here is another iteration of the point
that no concept or epistemology is either implicitly emancipatory or inevitably oppressive in all
contexts.
21 See the educational resources available at www.nodaplsolidarity.net. Accessed 13/3/17. This site is
now defunct, but many of the same resources can be found in the Standing Rock Syllabus compiled
by the NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective, 2016. https://­nycstandswithstandingrock.
files.wordpress.com/2016/10/standingrocksyllabus7.pdf. Accessed 16/4/17.

References
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Alfred, Taiaiake. Peace, Power, Righteousness (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton (Vintage, 2014).
Bruyneel, Kevin. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations
(University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Byrd, Jodi. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (University of Minnesota Press,
2011).
Chatterjee, Piya and Sunaina Maira. The Imperial University (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Cooper, Frederick and Ann Laura Stoler, introduction to Tensions of Empire (University of California
Press, 1997).
Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question (University of California Press, 2005).
Corntassel, Jeff. ‘Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to De-colonisation and Sustain-
able Self-Determination’. Decolonisation 1:1, (2012), pp. 86–101.
Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin White Masks (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Indigenous Action Media. ‘Accomplices Not Allies.’ 2014. www.indigenousaction.org/accomplices-
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Kennedy, Dane. Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Khalil, Tasneem. Jallad: Death Squads in South Asia (Pluto Press, 2015).
Lang, Amy Schrager and Daniel Lang/Levitsky, eds., Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
(New Internationalist Publications, 2012).
Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015).
Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Duke
­University Press, 2011).
Minno-Bloom, Liza and Berkley Carnine. ‘Towards Decolonisation and Settler Responsibility:
­Reflections on a Decade of Indigenous Solidarity Organizing’. Counterpunch, October 3, 2016. www.
counterpunch.org/2016/10/03/towards-decolonization-and-settler-responsibility-­r eflections-
on-a-decade-of-indigenous-solidarity-organizing.
Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel and Carlos Jauregui, eds., Coloniality At Large (Duke University Press,
2008).
NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective. ‘Standing Rock Syllabus’. 2016. https://nycstandswith-
standingrock.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/standingrocksyllabus7.pf.
Ramnath, Maia, ‘An Anarchist Guide to Decolonisation’, Strike! 15, March 2016.
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Salaita, Stephen. Inter/Nationalism: Decolonising Native America and Palestine (University of Minnesota
Press, 2016).
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonising Methodologies (Zed Books, 2012).
TIDAL. ‘Palestine Boycott Beyond.’ http://decolonizethisplace.org/zines/161104_Palestine_BLM_
Boycott_Arts_Zine_PrinterSpreads.pdf.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation is Not a Metaphor’. Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Educa-
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 2.3
RADICAL DISABILITY POLITICS
A. J. Withers and Liat Ben-Moshe (eds) with Lydia X. Z. Brown,
Loree Erickson, Rachel da Silva Gorman, Talila A. Lewis,
Lateef McLeod and Mia Mingus

Introduction
A.J. and Liat: Like all radical politics, disability politics are always in flux as social contexts
shift. Unlike many strands of radical politics, however, disability issues have often been ig-
nored or marginalised within (other) radical theory; and, disability oppression has, at times,
been repeated or reinforced by many radical theories and praxis. There are many complex
reasons for this, including ableism/disablism on the left as well as the tendency towards
liberalism (and with it), white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism and cissism within main-
stream disability organising. It is because of the diversity of thought about and approaches to
disability that, as editors, we felt it would be most useful to demonstrate that diversity. When
we were approached by the Handbook editors, therefore, we decided to showcase the voices
of a variety of radical disability/social justice activists (or activist/scholars) residing in the US
and Canada in a conversation rather than provide our own partial assessment of where these
politics are at.
Before getting to the roundtable conversation, which took place in the spring of 2017, we
want to provide some context regarding the history of radical disability politics and some of
the ongoing debates within and between disabled communities. While there are many sites
of contention within radical disability politics, we will focus here on disagreements around
language, who can or is considered to be disabled and what the suggested paths to liberation
might be.
Radical disability theory (emerging from and then influencing social movements) is often
understood as emerging in the 1970s from the lived experience of disabled people in the
Global North. It was a shift in thought that diverged from, at least to some degree, the he-
gemonic views of disability as tragic, individual and part of the medical domain. This hege-
monic understanding is commonly called the individual model (Oliver 1996) or the medical
model (Elliott and Dreer 2007; Withers 2012).
The ‘radical’ frameworks emerging at that time include the social model and the rights
model of disability. The social model was primarily developed by physically disabled white
Marxists, many of whom were living in nursing homes and other residential institutions.
They theorised impairment (the physical condition that differs from the norm) as being
separate from disability (the physical/access and social barriers imposed on impaired people)

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 Radical Disability Politics

(Oliver 1996; Thomas 2004). In the US, around the same time, the rights model was de-
veloped by groups of primarily physically disabled white people. Understanding disabled
people as a minority group, as influenced by strands of civil rights movements, the disability
rights framework emphasises social inclusion and legislative protections against discrimina-
tion (Fleischer and Zames 2001; Jaeger and Bowman 2005). This framework also birthed
the independent living movement (DeJong 1979). Both models (social and rights) were later
applied, with differing success, onto people who were psychiatrised or labelled as intellec-
tually disabled.
For their time, both models marked radical paradigm shifts in some important ways.
However, they have been thoroughly critiqued for imposing their model of physical dis-
ability on other groups (Beresford 2004; Nabbali 2009), being patriarchal (Morris 1992;
O’Toole 2004) and maintaining white supremacy (Bell 2006; Ferri 2010). The disability
rights model also critiques disabled people’s lack of access to capitalism rather than capitalism
itself. Rights frameworks in general can be described as assimilationist rather than radical
(radical in the sense of transforming the root causes of oppression).
Other less discussed frameworks take a much deeper intersectional and transformative ap-
proach to understandings and organising around disability. Frames of thought and activism
(such as disability justice, Berne 2015; or radical disability theory, Withers 2012)1 stress the
centrality of anticapitalist, intersectional and cross-disability organising and the necessity of
valuing interdependence and the intrinsic value of disabled people (and everyone) outside of
market labour economies. These frameworks also call for community-based, organic (rather
than universal) accessibility, calling them ‘collective access’ (Berne 2015), ‘access intimacy’
(Mingus 2016) and ‘radical access’ (Withers 2012).2 Community-based accessibility, how-
ever, is about meeting the needs of community members in intersectional ways. This in-
cludes, for example, creating ‘safer spaces’ that combat oppression, ensuring financial access,
having child care, having active listeners, etc.
These transformative approaches also describe the social construction of disability ­(although
what has been termed ‘the radical model’ stresses the significance of this much more). These
intersectional radical frameworks call for people who are directly affected by particular injus-
tices in intersecting ways (mostly people of colour, gender non-conforming people and those
disabled and otherwise marginalised) to frame the demands and be the leadership.
Within all these approaches of disability organising and theory, there is no consensus with
respect to a number of basic issues, as evident in the roundtable conversation later. These
issues include how to call/name ourselves and our oppression. The terms ‘disabled people’,
‘non-disabled people’ and ‘disablism’ are preferred by those who emphasise the social model
of disability (Oliver 1996) and are the dominant terms used in the UK (with, at times, the
exception of ‘people with learning difficulties’). Those who emphasise rights and inclusion
tend to use ‘people with disabilities’, ‘able-bodied’ and ‘ableism’. These are used in the US,
which has a tradition based in the disability rights model (Goodley 2010). Those advocating
for the use of ‘people first language’ (as in ‘people with disabilities’) do so because they want
to emphasise personhood over disability status (Enns 1999), especially in relation to people
with intellectual disabilities (referred to in the UK as people with learning differences), who
aren’t often counted as equal citizens/persons.
Proponents of ‘disabled people’ terminology argue that ‘people first language’ unneces-
sarily separates disability from the people who embody it (Sinclair 2013). They also critique
the terms ‘able-bodied’ and ‘ableism’ for confusing ability (function or capacity) with dis-
ability (a socially imposed label) (Oliver 1996). Some also critique the term ‘able-bodied’
because it is physical disability-centric while, at the same time, erasing the actual capacities

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 A. J. Withers et al.

and capabilities of disabled people’s bodies (Withers 2012). Some scholars, however, differ-
entiate between ableism and disablism. ‘Ableism’ through this view is the imagined ideal of
‘the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human’ that we are all measured
against (Campbell 2008: 44) and not only the oppression that disabled people experience.
Crip is also a term that is used by some, especially those with physical disabilities or mobility
impairments who are a part of disability culture. The term comes from the derogatory name
‘cripple’ but had been reclaimed to indicate a sense of community and pride in disability
identity (Kafer 2013). Some also use ‘crip’ in a similar way to queer, as a systemic way of
critiquing and resisting normativity (McRuer 2006). It is therefore a self-identification (and
a form of critique as in the verb ‘cripping’) that is distinguishable from mainstream disability
identities and rights (Sandahl 2003).
Who falls under the disability umbrella is also a site of contestation within radical dis-
ability theory and politics. Deaf (Lane 2008), trans (e.g. Withers 2013) and psychiatric con-
sumer/survivor/ex-patients/mad people (Beresford 2000), to name a few, have all had a
contentious relation to the category of disability. In the roundtable below, we use ‘disabled’
expansively to also refer to Deaf, mad and other communities and identifications.
Within radical disability organising and theory, there has been an important shift away
from the single-issue politics of the 1970s towards intersectional organising. A number of
the authors in the roundtable talk about the necessity of this because, as Fellows and Razack
describe it, ‘systems of oppression come into existence in and through one another’ (1997:
335). Furthermore, as a number of the authors discuss, disability isn’t a discrete identity;
disabled people are also people of colour, queer people, women, trans-people and poor peo-
ple. Single-issue organising misses this intersectional component, as the contributors reflect
in regards to incarceration and institutionalisation, for example (for more on disability and
incarceration writ large, see Ben-Moshe, Chapman and Carey 2014).
The mainstream disability rights movement/s is often nationally focused, if not a part of
nation-building projects – legitimising the state as a just entity as certain disabled people are
brought into the fold of full citizenship (Withers, 2012; Spade, 2015). However, a focus on
disability justice also calls on radical activists to work transnationally (Gorman 2013). Dis-
ability organising should not simply stop at national borders, especially if we perceive a rights
framework as insufficient. There are many reasons to work transnationally, including the
reality that poverty and war are the dominant causes of disability globally (Erevelles 2011;
Puar 2017). Both of these are fed or led by colonial and imperial programmes of the Global
North. In addition, a decolonial framework that connects with Indigenous struggles would
also critique the legitimacy of nation states (such as Canada and the US) to grant rights as a
continuation of settler colonialism.
All of the roundtable contributors agree that social justice movements need to meaning-
fully include disability and this inclusion will make radical organising more meaningful and
relevant. Lydia Brown argues that some radical politics use disability as ‘a prop’ and ableism
within movements, including ‘patterns of abuse, erasure, and gaslighting’, is violence. In
response to this exclusion, Loree Erickson calls for the recognition of disability ‘as a neces-
sary and generative part of our lives, movements and social organization. It opens up vital
alternative ways of living and being’. Lateef McLeod calls on movements to recognise that
‘we can all contribute to the ultimate goal of liberation’; this, according to Mia Mingus,
‘necessarily change[s] our work and our goals’. There are, however, different (although not
mutually exclusive) approaches to end the oppression of disabled people. Talila Lewis calls
for ‘advocacy framework that cuts across identities and across movements’ in relation to state
violence, while Rachel Gorman argues that it is ‘material change’ that is needed.

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There are many active debates around language, identity and paths to liberation. Rather
than being a weakness, we hope that the below discussion demonstrates the vibrancy and
utility of intersectional and variant disability politics. Radical disability politics, although
often in flux and sometimes contested, can have significant contributions to make to broader
radical organising and radical thought.
What is (or what could be) so ‘radical’ about disability, disability politics and/or disability
organising (or Deaf culture/ neurodiversity/ madness/ crip or other related locations)? How
can disability be utilised as a radical political position and for what purposes? How does it
play out in your life, in your organising/activism?
Loree: When we recognise disability outside dominant frameworks not as a deficit, but
as a necessary and generative part of our lives, movements and social organisation – vital
alternative ways of living and being are opened. Radical disability politics and practices al-
low us to interrupt violent and damaging ideologies about bodies, difference, vulnerability
and power. Interdependence, as an example, a way of being and caring with and for each
other that operates from the belief that we all have needs, we all need each other and we
can all provide care, centres and celebrates difference and needs in a way that interrupts the
individualism, isolation, and normalisation so key to the operation of oppressive logics. Indi-
vidualism, isolation and normalisation join together to ensure that we remain disconnected
from ourselves and each other. One of the most insidious ways movements are undermined
is through the propagation of cultures of undesirability which create policies, environments,
structures and ideologies that tell marginalised people that we are disposable unless we are
consumable (e.g. rehabilitative and prison labour, medical and social work professions). These
cultures of undesirability manifest everywhere from immigration and reproductive policies
to who is deemed sexy. We are told that we are ‘less than’ and/or ‘too much’ to encourage
us to turn away from the very things about us that are different from the dominant culture
and hold the most potential for doing things differently.
Mia: Radical disability politics are inherently radical because it asserts that disability
and disabled people are important in our work for liberation. In an incredibly able-bodied
supremacist and ableist society, challenging the deeply entrenched belief that disability and
disabled people are not disposable, tragic and ugly burdens is radical – including within our
movements for social justice. Social justice movements do not take place in a vacuum and
many of our movements continue to support and actively perpetuate ableist notions and
practices. No matter who you are working with, you are working with disabled people and/
or you are working with people who will become disabled. Disabled people are one of the
largest oppressed groups on the planet and we are part of every single community; the po-
tential for mass mobilisation is profound.
Even within radical politics, disability continues to push the envelope and challenge us in
our thinking of what justice and liberation mean; what leadership means and what kinds of
bodies and minds get to be understood and respected as leaders; what political ‘work’ is and
how to reimagine ‘work’ and ‘labour’ that is not rooted in capitalism and ableism; and what
‘healing’ and ‘sustainability’ mean outside of able-bodied supremacy.
Radical disability political organising is liberatory, not only because of its political con-
tent, but even in the pragmatic and concrete work of simply bringing, for example, queer
and trans-disabled people of colour together to organise. The cross-disability work it takes to
navigate ableism and access to simply get disabled people in a room together is both a practice
in resistance and resilience. It is both resisting against the world we don’t want and simulta-
neously creating the world we long for. In a world that not only segregates disabled people
from society at large, but also intentionally divides people with different kinds of disabilities,

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the work to build disabled organising and community is nothing short of revolutionary. To
me, this is one of the most profound aspects of radical disability politics: it requires that we
not only fight against the dangerous systems in place (e.g. white supremacy, misogyny, col-
onisation), but that we also have to – quite literally – build anew because the world we live
in was never built for disabled people. The work it takes for disabled people to simply create
home is a study in creativity and building alternatives.
I think the political knowledge being put forth by radical disability political work is
cutting edge and gives us a political perspective that is deeply unique and that has so much
to offer to our broader work for liberation. Much of this knowledge is coming directly out
of disabled people’s everyday lived experiences and survival. The work to fight ableism has
implications for everyone, not only disabled people. The places where disability cuts across
and is at times indistinguishable from age, gender, race, mortality, class, trauma or sexuality
are ripe for cross-movement building work and has the potential to deepen and expand our
understanding of oppression and violence like never before. How can we live in such a vio-
lent and traumatising world and not talk about disability and ableism?
Rachel: In many ways, the concept of ‘disability’ – as it is mobilised through law, state
policy, education, workplaces and social services – marks the limit of inclusion. For example,
when dealing with the law, people who are declared ‘mentally incompetent’ cannot make
decisions about things that affect them, including the right to refuse potentially harmful and
violent treatment. In education, students who are found to have ‘an exceptionality’ can be
segregated for all or part of the day. Educational streaming, which is based on the premise
of dis/ability (although it closely mirrors class and race inequality), determines whether a
student can go on to further and higher education, and whether they can access work op-
portunities after graduating. So from the perspective of policy equity and formal rights, a
radical political position would take disability as a start point, as it is often the mechanism of
formal disqualification. At the same time, people who look or act in ways that are different
from social norms may experience exclusion in family and community contexts. So a radical
reimagining of family and community could start from the perspective of disability.
If we talk about embodied experiences of social inequality and social violence – for ex-
ample, settler colonialism, racism, poverty, precarious work and gender-based violence – we
find that one of the ways that people live in inequality is through differential outcomes in
health and well-being (including access to healthcare itself ). So if we are talking about any
kind of radical politics, we are talking about people’s embodied experience of inequality, and
we may also be talking about disability and disablement.
Finally, disability discrimination through medicalisation and medical violence is a partic-
ular way in which disabled people and/or people labelled with disability experience violence
through unnecessary, and/or coerced medical treatment. Reimagining healthcare and social
services from a disability-positive perspective would be quite radical, and it would get us
closer to having services that more people would find helpful and supportive and healing.
Talila: For myriad reasons, Black people, Indigenous and Native nations, people living
with little or no income, womxn and LGBTransQI people are all disproportionately repre-
sented in the class of disability. And so, the state’s systematic targeting of these communities
means that disabled people are being targeted – more specifically, multiply marginalised
disabled people are being targeted.
Too many move through politics, advocacy, life without acknowledging that it is im-
possible to address the perennial crisis of state violence without addressing society’s system-
atic failure to provide equal access to education, resources, healthcare and justice to people
with disabilities and people who are deaf. Indeed, the structural and systemic state violence

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perpetuated against communities of colour and educationally and economically disenfran-

chised communities has always been deeply rooted in at least, race, class and disability. As
such, ending this violence has always required not only an understanding of disability and
disability-based oppressions, but also a keen understanding of how disability exists and arises
in, and interacts with marginalised individuals and communities. More to the point, ending
this violence has always demanded that we understand how race-, class- and disability-based
oppressions interact with one another; and precisely how seamlessly each is interwoven into
social, political, economic and legal mores and codes – written and unwritten.
For example, many have begun important discussions about the grave harms our ‘educa-
tion’ and criminal legal systems visit upon many marginalised communities. However, there
is very little attention devoted to the injustices visited upon people with disabilities and deaf
people by the same systems. And it is a very rare treasure to witness political or advocacy
conversations about disabled or deaf people whose bodies are home to multiple marginalities.
And yet, people with disabilities are particularly susceptible to unjust encounters with and in
our education and criminal legal systems.
As an educator and attorney, I am horrified and heartbroken by just how little educational
institutions, ‘law enforcement,’ lawyers, judges and carceral administrators understand about
disability and care about disabled people.
Education institutions define education for some students as ‘special’ – cementing very
early on, that fundamentally flawed understanding of education, disability and humanity:
that such a thing as ‘normal’ exists. This enshrines ableism, audism and sanism into the very
fabric of society and into the hearts and minds of the youngest among us. Similarly, our legal
institutions profess to seek and mete out ‘justice’, but no marginalised or multiply marginal-
ised community has ever experienced justice therein.
Radical disability politics means naming that justice demands that we abandon education
and legal systems as we know them.
Lydia: Disability is about the body, perhaps more directly and explicitly than other cat-
egories of identity or experience. It’s possible to theorise gender while attempting to work
away from the body, for example, but you can’t do that with disability. You cannot engage
disability without confronting the body – the frail, vulnerable, traumatised, precarious, neu-
rodivergent, unpredictable, unruly, unstable, incoherent or noncompliant body. (I discuss
the ‘body’, but I mean a ‘bodymind’. Mind and body are not separate. As an autistic person
navigating anxiety and trauma, folks talk about my kind of disability as mental, meaning
non-physical, but autism, anxiety and trauma are woven into my physicality and embod-
iment. I only avoid using the word ‘bodymind’ because it feels too academic.) Disabled,
neurodivergent, mad folks are in every community and movement. Whether explicitly and
intentionally political or not, our survival in a world literally out to kill us – particularly
disabled folks targeted by multiple oppressions – is resistance and political.
We can’t talk about any oppression – like racism, transmisogyny, classism and adultism –
without addressing ableism. Ableism is both dependent on and necessary for every other
form of oppression to exist. Attending to disability is radical because it allows us to grapple
with our own and others’ bodies in all their complexities. That means rethinking whose (and
what types of ) labour we consider valuable versus lesser, disposable and forgettable; whose
performance of radicalness is praised versus inadequate or insufficient, whose traumas we
centre versus dismiss or erase; whose bodily narratives we consider acceptable versus whose
we consider threatening and undermining.
Lack of access, isolation and stigma – that is violence. Speaking out against state vio-
lence while ignoring the role ableism plays in its justification – that is violence. Recreating

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traumatising patterns of abuse, erasure and gaslighting (denying someone’s experiences) in

activism, community organising and social change movements (spaces supposedly commit-
ted to social justice) – that is violence. All of these violent patterns are tied to ableism, and
depend on marginalising people targeted by multiple forms of oppression. White suprem-
acy, rape culture and replication of capitalist hierarchies in organising all thrive on ableism.
­Silencing and marginalising people who can’t access college don’t know critical theory vo-
cabulary, can’t navigate toxic social dynamics and struggle to participate – these patterns
depend on ableism. (I say that as someone who experiences many privileges while also
experiencing many oppressions.)
We cannot do justice by anyone without working towards disability justice – there is no
reproductive, economic, racial or transgender justice; no dismantling white supremacy or
settler colonialism; without disability justice.
Lateef: Disability politics should be incorporated in the radical politics framework be-
cause the liberation of disabled people calls for the dismantling of the capitalist system. The
reason why we need the abolishment of capitalism is because it forces people to conform to
an able-bodied model to enter the workforce, to which some people with disabilities cannot
do. This creates a divide between the disability community and the rest of the populace
who are stigmatised for not being a worker in this economy. Specifically being someone
with cerebral palsy, I have seen how our system of capitalism has relegated me to a margin-
alised position. As a black man who does not speak orally and communicates with an AAC
­(Augmentative and Alternative Communication) device, I have been read as less competent
and autonomous than I actually am many times.
In the last few years, I have networked with other disability justice activists in the artist
collective, Sins Invalid, in developing a disability justice platform. We are trying to develop
an anticapitalist philosophy that centres on the experiences of LGBTQIA people of colour
with disabilities. In our collective intersectionality, we hope to address a pathway for liber-
ation for our communities. This is the same work that I also try to pursue in my graduate
programme. My main reason for entering my graduate programme at California Institute
for Integral Studies in the Anthropology and the Social Change Department is to find ways
to challenge and hopefully dismantle systems of oppression such as white supremacy, patri-
archy, sexism, homophobia and ableism that we face in this country. I feel fortunate to be
dedicated to do this work in a department that is dedicated to an anticapitalist critique of so-
ciety and the liberation of marginalised people in society. It is my aim to centre people with
disabilities in my study and to start to devise ways in which we can incorporate disability
justice in our cultural practices.
In what ways can non-disability-specific struggles for liberation from oppression be in-
formed by a radical disability politics? What about vice versa – what are some affinities and
also tensions or omissions between disability politics/culture/activism and other forms of
activism or political movements?
Loree: Just as we cannot peel apart the layers of who we are and the multiple and contra-
dictory meanings assigned to those differences and ways of being, we also cannot and should
not organise without attention to our complex personhood (Gordon 1996). The ways that
structural inequality targets us are always acting in concert. As Eli Clare (1999; 2003) so
elegantly captures in much of his work, we rarely know what exactly it is that the gawkers
are gawking at. How many of us have witnessed or felt the breaking apart that occurs with
single-issue politics? Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us that we do not live single-issue lives;
therefore, we must organise in a way that recognises our multiplicity and the interlocking
nature of structural inequality. One only needs to look at the harm and violence inherent

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to the Prison Industrial Complex and the overrepresentation of disabled people, Black, In-
digenous, people of colour, poor people and sex workers, which many in this roundtable
have spoken to, to recognise that white supremacy, colonialism, disablism and capitalism are
powerfully interconnected systems.
We can also look at what happens when disabled organisations organise from a rights-
based approach and work towards integration, without transformation. We see organisations
that specifically target the experience of incarceration within a given institution, for exam-
ple, nursing homes or psychiatric wards (sites that absolutely need dismantling), without
challenging institutional thinking and carceral logics that support the current flow of power.
People are moved from one oppressive institution to another. We can also see what happens
when mainstream disability rights organisations ignore the operation of white supremacy,
erasing the experiences and expertise of racialised disabled people and simply achieve condi-
tional improvements for those with relative privilege. Or, when antipoverty organising does
not recognise the connections between inaccessibility, job discrimination and compulsory
able-bodiedness in the life-crushing capitalist ideology of productivity above all else. Dis-
ability, rather than limiting our movements, adds necessary texture and complexity. Radical
disability organising recognises that all of our liberation is connected and keeps us, and our
movements, messy and whole – moving together.
Mia: I think many of our movements are grappling with this very question. Especially as
more and more disabled people disclose their disabilities and as more and more activists and
organisers become disabled or embrace their disabilities, they have always had, but never felt
comfortable enough to claim. Disabled people are already in social justice movements and
often we have learned to individualise and depoliticise our disabled identities and experi-
ences because of how effective ableism continues to be. Because the stigma around disability
is so incredibly intense, many people who are disabled do not identify as disabled. This is
especially true for those of us who have multiple oppressed identities because it can be im-
possible to identify as disabled when your survival depends on you denying it.
As the radical disability political community grows and more and more disabled people of
multiple oppressed identities refuse to leave our disabilities at the door, our political move-
ments will be forced to contend with their histories of exclusion, stigma and avoidance. To
me, it is vital that politically disabled people, not only descriptively disabled people, be at the
centre of this shift to be informed by radical disability politics.
It is important to remember that many movements may already be doing ‘radical disabil-
ity work’, but not calling it as such and are more well versed in ‘justice’ than ‘disability’.
Work with poor communities and/or addressing domestic violence within immigrant com-
munities and/or prison abolition work are already very much at the intersection of radical
disability politics, given that poverty, violence, trauma and prisons are key sites in not only
how people become disabled, but also where so many disabled people are located. So, for
many of these movements what is lacking is a strong analysis and understanding of disability,
ableism and able-bodied supremacy, as well as the practice of access and access intimacy.
I think about the example of healing justice work and how there is a growing number of
healers within that work who understand that there is no liberatory healing work without a
deep and historical understanding of how healing, cure and health have been used as weap-
ons against so many of our communities, including disabled communities, and how ableism
is a key part of the intersectional core of this.
In much of the cross-movement and cross-community works I have been part of, there
are so many similarities that different communities and movements share that can bring us
together. The work of interdependence, for example, has been crucial to, not only disability,

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but also building queer chosen family or kinship networks for poor and/or immigrant and/
or communities of colour to survive and has informed our organising.
I think one of the main tensions in all of this is the need for practice. Even though disabled
people are everywhere, disability is so segregated and individualised that many people either
don’t have experience with disabled people or are with the diversity of disability experiences
out there; or they also may not understand their experiences as ‘disabled experiences’ because
of how absolute the stigma surrounding disability is and how oblivious their able-bodied
privilege makes them.
Lateef: Black liberation can definitely be informed by a radical disability politics. Or-
ganisations like Black Lives Matter can definitely implement a disability justice framework
in their practices. Especially because a good portion of state violence and murder against
people of colour are committed on people with disabilities. Emmitt Thrower, working
with my friend, Leroy Moore, has documented this several times and has even wrote a doc-
umentary about the matter entitled Where Is Hope: The Art of Murder (2015). To fully address
this attack on our community, organisations like Black Lives Matter need to have people
with disabilities in their membership and leadership to fully advocate for the victims. See,
for example, the statement from the Harriet Tubman Collective regarding ‘The Vision
for Black Lives’ platform statement and its omission and dismissal of disability (Harriet
Tubman Collective, 2016). Likewise, there should be more networking and collaboration
between disability organisations and people of colour organisations to deal with the state
oppression that we experience. An example of this is when I was a part of a Sins Invalid’s
disability justice tutorial presented to the Brown Boi Project, which is a social justice or-
ganisation dedicated to politicising and organising LGBTQIA people of colour in the Bay
Area with their headquarters located in Oakland. That built a good working relationship
between the organisations with the Brown Boi Project learning strategies of how to orga-
nise in the disability community.
There still needs to be more education about how the disability identity is a politicised
identity in African American community. Many people see disability as an individual prob-
lem and not connected to a larger historical struggle. If people can make the connection of
how black people with disabilities contributed to the black liberation struggle in the past, it
can make a stronger argument about how temporarily able-bodied people and people who
have disabilities can come together in the African American community to work for all of
our liberation. However, from my perspective, this can only come about if African Amer-
icans in the social justice arena get rid of some of their fear and ignorance around people
with disabilities and disability issues. As with all communities under capitalism, there is
some shame and uneasiness fellowship with people who do not easily pair up to the ableist
image of what a ‘typical’ human is pictured to be. Only with honest dialogue within our
community can resolve these rifts and fears and work together for the liberation that we all
need to acquire.
Talila: Important and necessary conversations on race and justice cannot be fully had
without disability justice at their centre. People of colour with disabilities are hardest hit by
the overlapping structural inequality that exists within all of our institutions. We, therefore,
cannot avoid the fact that our communities experience common and overlapping oppressions
that require an advocacy framework that cuts across identities and across movements.
Common and interrelated struggles and liberation goals are just two of the reasons why
marginalised communities should be in constant communication and solidarity. For instance,
state-imposed and sanctioned violence including forced familial separation, enslavement,
genocide, mass incarceration, institutionalisation, theft of resources and criminalisation of

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existence is not new to marginalised communities in the US. Moreover, each of these com-
munities has been engaged in near-constant struggle against oppressive and violent systems.
As such, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBTransQI and Disabled communities, among others,
should be strategising and mobilising together because each community has unique perspec-
tives and contributions to continue to make to the freedom struggle.
Mia’s depiction of communities unknowingly being already deep in the trenches of rad-
ical disability justice work is so apt. Take mass incarceration, for instance. Disabled people
and advocates/attorneys have long since battled otherising, criminalisation and violence that
invite institutionalisation, forced labour, forced sterilisation and medical procedures, and
abuse of disabled people in ‘institutions’. So too have other disenfranchised communities
been long engaged in this same struggle – under the guise of ‘prison abolition’ – where we
find yet another brand of ‘institution’ swallowing up whole communities of disabled people,
committing all manner of violence against them, and creating disabilities in non-disabled
individuals en masse. It bears noting that these individuals are disproportionately people of
colour and otherwise marginalised individuals.
So much of most marginalised communities’ historic and present work regarding dein-
stitutionalisation, justice and healing already is steeped in the creation of innovative and
transformative policies and practices. Often however, some of the staunchest race, trans,
economic, immigration justice advocates unintentionally further disability-based oppres-
sions because of their failure to understand what I term ‘critical intersectionality’ and to
foreground disability justice.
This brings me to why it is so important to approach our advocacy in a more holistic
way – to understand disability justice as quintessential to reproductive, economic, racial
and transgender justice, as Lydia noted. We will never dismantle any oppressive institutions
if advocates, community builders and others who are in struggle do not name, analyse and
dismantle ableism. Ableism undergirds, depends upon and reifies every other oppression.
So, we will never deconstruct white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal imperialism if we
are not constantly working to unpack our own privileges around ableism, audism and other
disability-based oppressions. Ironically, those who attempt to dismantle oppressive systems
without acknowledging and unpacking these disability-centric privileges are contributing to
violence and oppression within their own communities and society writ large.
We must create disability solidarity within every movement, such that disability rights
organisations are working to advance intersectional justice, and non-disability rights civil
rights organisations are showing up for disability justice. Policy-wise, the same is true. When
will we see disability-positive and race-responsive education and legal policies? When will
education institutions engage in trauma-informed practices that centre the whole humanity
of our youth? When will we see actual innocence legislation that is disability-responsive,
requiring automatic review or overturning of convictions of Deaf or disabled individuals
who had absolutely no access to police, legal counsel or the court?
Until we can say now to these and many similar questions, we will continue to see shame-
ful injustice within education and criminal legal systems; and violence, poverty and mass
incarceration will continue to live here.
Lydia: As Mia Mingus discussed earlier, movements and work tackling disability already
exist, whether or not they’re using the language of disability justice. But, as Talila Lewis
reminds us, we desperately need our movements to be cross-identity and cross-community,
because those of us at the intersections (particularly Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous or
People of Colour; Queer, Trans, Asexual or Intersex disabled and deaf folks) are most tar-
geted by interpersonal and state violence.

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I often notice (usually non-disabled) folks in policy work talking about the crisis of mass
incarceration impacting folks with psychosocial disabilities/mental illnesses. After noting
disproportionate representation, they’ll insist that because prisons aren’t the right place, we
need to build psychiatric treatment facilities – completely missing the connection: institu-
tionalisation is incarceration. Psychiatric institutions and prisons exist for surveillance and
control, and engender the same violence.
Similarly, with increased reporting of mass shootings, and the usual rhetoric about ‘men-
tally unstable’ perpetrators (especially when they are white and non-Muslim, making it
impossible to Other them directly through white supremacy or Islamoracism), even people
on the left often blame gun violence on mental disability, neurodivergence or madness. They
take an issue about violence and impunity for similar acts (like police gun violence against
Black, Latinx and Indigenous disabled and deaf folks), and blame disability for it. Ableism
uses disability as a convenient tool for othering – ableism says that if we fix the ‘pathology’,
we excise the problem without having to grapple with racism, misogyny or police.
In reproductive justice, disability should be central, but is usually only a prop. If the
narrative is that pregnant people need abortion access in case of disabled foetuses; that the
tragedy of the Zika virus and Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoned water lies in the possibility
of causing new disabilities; that disabled people are incapable of sexual consent, but neither
capable of desire nor of being desired; that disabled people are automatically unfit to parent;
that it’s better to be dead than disabled … then we are failing. Reproductive justice must
mean disability justice, honouring our bodies as they are and not mourning or fearing the
shadows of undesirable, disposable bodies.
As Loree mentions, it is equally imperative for disability movements to examine how we
fail. I am often the only person of colour in a disability-related event, and that’s a problem.
I’m a fairly class-privileged, college-educated, light-complexioned East Asian from a nearly
all-white family. None of that makes me a less genuine person of colour, but it does mean
that white supremacy considers me more palatable, less scary and closer to whiteness – which
makes white people eager to tokenise me for those reasons. This reality is, however, only
part of a much broader white supremacy problem.
When resourced disability organisations (usually white-led) discuss police violence, they
focus on stories of white people like Robert Ethan Saylor or Kayden Clark while ignoring or
only mentioning disabled or deaf Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous or other People of Colour
killed by police. I often only notice discussion of race, disability and other identities of folks
like Tanisha Anderson, Korryn Gaines, Alfred Olango, Natasha McKenna, Kajieme P ­ owell,
Tawon Boyd, John Williams, Terence Crutcher, Chieu Di Thi Vo, Mohammad U ­ sman
Chaudhry, Reginald Thomas, Michael Cho or Stephon Watts (and many others) when among
other disabled and deaf people of colour. And despite my relative privilege, I am still threat-
ened when I dare speak in the face of erasure. This violence informs my work constantly.
We as disabled folks can and should talk about how every social movement erases disabil-
ity and ableism, but we have to clean our own house too. Disability justice means we have to
hold ourselves accountable – liberation happens when we all get free.
Rachel: I don’t know about radical disability politics per se, but having disability in my
life – in my own life, and in the lives of people in my close community – has taught me a lot
about resilience and long-term thinking. From my own involvement in liberation struggles
in the North American context, I see that we think only in the short term, and immediate,
and that we haven’t been able to sustain communities in struggle over the long term. Part of
the consequence of that is that we are missing even the most short-term history – we don’t
build on what happened twenty, ten or even five years ago.

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People in my life who I met in disability organising eighteen years ago are still in my
life – and while we are more or less dejected about the state of the world and disability pol-
itics, we have learned a lot from each other about long-term strategies for individual and
collective survival. We have also learned that symbolic rights are no substitute for material
change – state disability supports are far too low. From loved ones who have been accessing
these supports over the long term, I have learned that the stress is cumulative – the stress of
not quite making ends meet, the stress of constant administrative harassment and the stress
of random programme cuts all have real impacts on people’s long-term health.
If we are going to make radical change in the Canadian context, broader non-Indigenous
social movements have to learn how to be in it for the long haul. Many Indigenous and Black
organisers, and organisers in many national contexts in Africa, Asia and Latin America know
this already.
How does/can disability (again, writ large, including Deaf culture/neurodiversity/mad-
ness/ crip, etc.) affect the goals but also the form of radical politics? How does the presence
or absence of disability from radical policies transform the ways we organise, strategise and
push for liberation?
Lateef: Disability can redirect our radical politics focus to where we fight and advocate
for a society where all our identities are fully accepted. Radical politics will not advocate
for the lives of people with disabilities until people with disabilities get involved with rad-
ical politics. We as radical scholars with disabilities have to direct the conversation among
our colleagues on imagining the society where people with disabilities can prosper. Our
able-bodied colleagues will not work on our liberation without us, only we can develop the
way to our freedom.
There has been a disturbing trend where temporarily abled people decide policies for
people who have disabilities without talking to us to find out what we want. This follows
the culture troupe that is still prevalent in society that people who have disabilities are in-
competent and needs a temporarily able-bodied person to do most things for us. We do not
need able-bodied saviours to rescue us from our situations, but allies that can work with us
to accomplish the goals for our community. We need to refuse and dismantle these cultural
tropes and develop policies to change society to one where our bodies and contributions are
valued properly. We need temporarily able-bodied people to see that the liberation of people
with disabilities is in their best interest as well. So we have to work for liberation together,
which means that all the ways that we organise and strategise for our liberation must be ac-
cessible and fully welcoming to those of us with disabilities. What I mean is that not all of us
can go in the street and protest, but we can all contribute to the ultimate goal of liberation
in other ways.
Talila: In arguing for solidarity, many people like to note that ‘disability is the only pro-
tected class that everyone will join at some point in life’. While this is true, it misunderstands
the foundational underpinning of collective liberation – namely that you need not identify
with an oppressed community to fight to dismantle systems that impose violence against
them; and that all of our liberation is inextricably linked to the next person’s. We all have a
vested interest in ensuring equal and adequate protections for all people not because we are
like them or because our unborn child may be like them. We have an interest in dismantling
oppressions and systems of oppression because we exist.
I push back on the notion that the inclusion of disability is something ‘radical’. It should
not be considered radical to assert that we should consider disability in all things – all actions,
all systems, all reforms, all dismantling. The fact that this framework is considered ‘radical’
illustrates precisely how radical (i.e. extensive, total, far-reaching, complete, exhaustive, etc.)

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ableism is in our society. So central is ableism that the very assertion of the need to dismantle
ableism often is met with untold vitriol – even within ‘social justice’ and ‘deaf/disability
rights’ spaces. Several of the authors have made mention of this phenomenon.
All the contributors discuss dreaming, reimagining and reclaiming. These are part and
parcel of radical politics and disability justice. That is why this conversation is so important.
Disability justice allows us to re-envision the world – to remind people that like race, class
and crime, disability is a social construct. Disability justice reminds all of us that there never
has been and never will be a ‘normal’. Disability justice allows us to define education and
justice; decriminalise disability; disarm the police; divert all people away from jails, prisons,
institutions; deinstitutionalise those who are presently trapped in the violent, unforgiving
clutch of our institutions because society failed to provide meaningful support in the first
instance. Disability justice is deliverance, healing, love, liberation. Justice.
Lydia: Toxic ‘call-out’ culture (as the call-out tactic is so often co-opted and misused
by people with privilege and power) and privileged, fragile critiques of more marginal-
ised people’s rightful anger (leading to silencing and further outcasting); the hierarchy of
activism replicated from capitalism; and activist burnout and suicides – these are disability
problems. Addressing disability and ableism means addressing classism, racism and (trans)
misogyny. We’ve got to do the hard work to make space for harsh, emotional call-outs –
­especially, as Ashleigh Shackelford (2016) reminds us, by those often prevented from express-
ing ­themselves – and practice compassionate accountability that rejects instant disposability
(which also has its most pernicious effects on the most marginalised, as Porpentine reminds
us) and punitive criminal justice mentality (Heartscape 2015). We’ve got to affirm devalued,
erased and minimised labour, and recognise that our labour, whatever it is, is necessary,
­radical and militant – just as being in the streets, testifying at a hearing, presenting at a
conference or leading an organisation (Anderson et al. 2014). As my friend Mikael Lee con-
stantly reminds us, crip survival from bed is also resistance.
We’ve got to resist the binary of abused/abuser, and recognise that we all have capacity to
harm. We’re all learning and growing. Forgetting or not knowing doesn’t excuse harm but
shouldn’t necessarily mean further isolation and disposability either. We’ve got to recognise
all contributions and multiple tactics as vital. This means not attacking the person who found
solace and empowerment the first time they discovered academic words that matched their
life experiences, but no longer privileging their language and access over the work done by
folks who’ve never had the privilege of formal education either. It means being careful to
recognise who our movements and communities welcome and who those same movements
and communities exclude, because it’s always a question of access. Centring disability is
critical to sustaining our movements and addressing our own systemic problems, just as
anti-ableism is necessary to end all oppression. Talila has it precisely – refusing to address
ableism is complicity in oppression.
Mia: There is no liberation without disabled people. There is no collective justice if it
does not take into account the needs and realities of people with disabilities. I don’t know
how a disability analysis could not inform a radical politic. As someone who was disabled
since I was an infant and never was able-bodied, I have supported countless people who be-
come disabled as adults. Disability changes their lives – how could it not? So too, this is true
for radical politics. The literal presence (either in person or skyping someone into a meeting)
of disability and disabled people necessarily change our work and our goals because disabled
people are constantly navigating a world that does not want us to be part of it. The presence
of disability forces able-bodied people to confront their own internalised ableism whether it
is fears about mortality and dependence, or ugliness and undesirability, or unproductiveness

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and pace, or simply need and interdependence. And this is true on both an individual and
collective level for communities, movements, countries and entire regions of the world. Or-
ganisers would need to rethink their protests and make them more accessible, change their
goals to better reflect ‘all queer people’ or ‘all women’, create conference schedules and spaces
that allow for many different kinds of bodies, energy levels and learning styles.
A true integration of radical disability politics requires us to move slower and to create
more accessible language and to not turn away from the complex, often very challenging,
reality of disability within an ableist world. It is not a coincidence that just as disabled people
have been (and continue to be) denied access to the public sphere (e.g. employment, educa-
tion, community), we have also been denied access to political movements and communities.
If radical communities are serious about their commitment to a radical disability politic,
then they must be committed to the cultural, interpersonal and systemic changes needed to
fight and end ableism. As with any solidarity work, it requires a full commitment not only
in words, but in deeds as well, and not only when it is convenient. This, of course, changes,
not only your goals, but who you are as well because any true solidarity is simply another
word for love.
Rachel: One striking and enduring absence of disability in radical organising, including
disability organising, is the absence of people labelled with intellectual disability. Often,
parents of labelled people stand in for people labelled with intellectual disability – even when
they are adults – both in Canada and internationally. Even with the recent emergence of the
neurodiversity movement, the focus has been on arguing that people labelled with autism
do not have an intellectual disability. If disability movements centred people labelled with
intellectual disability, we might finally be able to take on the legal and social domination
of people who have been declared incompetent – including children, people labelled with
certain mental health conditions and people labelled with intellectual disabilities. We would
also have the opportunity to imagine more meaningful relations of community interde-
pendence, and to reimagine deinstitutionalisation so that it includes people living in group
homes, and half-way and rooming houses, as well as psychiatric and long-term care facilities,
and prisons.
Loree: A key component to radical politics is disruption of the status quo, of the taken
for granted organisation of things that benefits those with relative power and privilege. Dis-
ability is disruptive. It forces us to rethink everything and to keep revisiting and rethinking
because bodies and needs are always changing. As Mia discussed earlier, disability changes
us, radicalism changes us. One really important and powerful change that disability can
offer, particularly when politicised, is the opportunity to listen to our bodies and centre our
needs. Dominant ideologies all push us towards ignoring or covering over the very things
about us that make us different from the status quo. Needs not recognised as typical are seen
as limitations and tragedies rather than as possibilities.
As someone who has a body that needs other bodies to help me get out of bed, go to the
bathroom, organise my glittery things, eat and so much more has changed me and how I
think about care, bodies and needs. Also as someone who because of various structural lim-
itations (inadequate state funding, homophobia, etc.) has gotten my care needs met through
a collective of people from the various communities which I am a part of I am reminded
on a daily basis of how powerfully connected community building and care are and how
necessary it is to build relationship building and needs into the justice work we are doing.
Needs are actually quite central to most organising, after all the goal of most organising
is to envision and bring into being a world where all of our collective needs are met. And
yet, outside disability organising and theorising needs are rarely explicitly acknowledged or

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discussed. One of the most useful gifts radical disability organising offers is practice and skill
in thinking about and incorporating needs and care into everything we do. A thread run-
ning through many of the contributions is the overwhelming presence of isolation, silencing
and divisiveness in our movements. We need to build into our organising care and relation-
ship building. This can include changing the pace of our organising so that we make sure to
build in time and resources for self and collective care so that our movements are sustainable
as well as devoting resources to creating immersive accessibility that leaves no one behind.
Radical accessibility is crucial to creating movements where we move together.

Notes
1 While these are the published texts, both frames emerged out of ongoing, collective activism in
the US and Canada that began years earlier and cannot be attributed to a single author.
2 Universal accessibility, coming from universal design, creates a design standard for environments
and products that can be used by all people to the greatest extent possible (North Carolina State
University College of Design; see Hamraie (2017) for elaboration and critiques).

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Lorde, A., Sister Outsider (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984).
McRuer, R., Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: NYU Press, 2006).
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 2.4
MIGRANT SOLIDARITY IN
POSTCOLONIAL EUROPE
Challenging Borders, Creating Mobile Commons
Claire English, Margherita Grazioli and Martina Martignoni

Introduction
Today, migration is one of the main concerns of global politics: social inequality, war and
climate change are producing everyday people with the need (or the will) to move; globali-
sation and associated forms of communication have created the space for imagining a smaller
and nearer world, where moving and migrating can and must be possible for everybody. Yet,
the richest countries of the world are ‘protecting’ their borders, impeding freedom of move-
ment of those who, coming from poorer countries, want to enter. In recent years, Europe
and its (fluctuating) borders have come under particular scrutiny because of the intensity of
the flux of migrants forced to travel through ‘illegal’ and unsafe routes. Can migrant soli-
darity as it is currently organised confront these issues, as part of a radical politics? How can
migrant solidarity activism inform political theory? In this chapter, we will explore some
possible answers to these questions.
Various forms of activism have proliferated in response to the levels of poverty and con-
flict at the borders of Europe and in favour of the right to move freely between nation
states. Activists have devised various kinds of support for people on the move: camping
together at the borders; providing food, shelter and protection from hostile forces; appealing
to ­European institutions to let people move freely; ‘illegally’ crossing the borders alongside
migrants; engaging in various forms of collective organising; making European peoples
aware of migrants’ situation through videos, articles, pictures, public speeches, theatre, art
and many other forms of resistance.1 Activists who support freedom of movement are hetero-
geneous and come from different political traditions – from anarchism to Catholicism; also,
struggles around borders are multiplying and shifting, frequently because of the intrinsic
mobility of the conflict. This makes it impossible to speak of one movement or one struggle
around migration(s) in Europe. To the extent that it has the power to put in tension any ideo-
logical attitude to politics and to force activists to rethink what a political act is, the question
of migrant politics is surely a peculiar one – as we will discuss in this chapter. This is, in our
view, the radical impact of migration on activism and politics, and it is the starting point for
our research about what the radical politics of migrant solidarity can look like.
The chapter begins by looking at some of the theoretical influences that underscore rad-
ical migrant solidarity projects: the origins and foci of postcolonial theory; an approach to

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migrations as autonomous and questions regarding difference and hybridity. We then look at
an example, Calais Migrant Solidarity, and the tensions that emerge within these kinds of or-
ganising spaces. One tension concerns the limits of solidarity and what sets the work of trans-
national migrant solidarity collectives apart from the work of the charitable b­ order-workers;
another is the question of what kind of politics activists want to enact when engaging in
solidarity practices with migrants: ‘anticipatory politics’ and the ‘mobile commons’ will be
introduced here as possible answers to this tension. Finally, we introduce elements for think-
ing beyond solidarity and towards a political theory of migrants’ everyday practices. In par-
ticular, critiquing human rights and citizenship discourses, we look instead for an entry point
for a radical theory of solidarity as an everyday practice and existential modality.

Migrations in Postcoloniality
Migrant solidarity projects as a set of experiments in social relations are just one of many
similar attempts to re-express the activist organisational form as one that can incorporate
strategies militating against the legacies of colonialism and subsequent issues of racism and
power imbalances. Transnational migrant solidarity organisations represent many different
people from many different backgrounds and identities – these groups create a certain kind
of uneven space in which to organise collectively. The following sections will look at the
theories that underpin the possibility for solidarity between different subjectivities when
trying to create, maintain or defend the political space for mobility together.
The potential radicality and impact of migrant solidarity theories and practices cannot be
fully comprehended today without considering that the geographical and historical spaces
claiming ownerships of these forms of politics – those from European nations, in ­particular –
are strongly influenced by postcoloniality. This is a complex term with a number of dimen-
sions: first, it refers to the importance of the colonial period and its legacies in building the
western world, both materially and perceptually. Second, it describes the fundamental role
that anticolonial struggles – and anti-Apartheid and antiracist struggles – play in explod-
ing the inequalities of colonial and racist systems and, in doing so, in opening up global
perspectives on history and the present from places that have been labelled as ‘peripheral’.
Third, postcoloniality highlights the contemporary postcolonial composition of the former
metropoles – the geographical spaces of the coloniser countries, in opposition to the colonies
themselves – and therefore the active role of migrants in creating them.
Postcoloniality can be defined as the reproduction and diffusion of a ‘protean space’,
peculiar to colonial societies, inside the former metropolitan space (Fanon, 1961): a het-
erogeneous social space characterised by the coexistence on the same territory of different
ways of production, different work regimes and different historical temporalities. The global
diffusion and the eruption of this heterogeneous space, typical of colonial spaces, both in-
side and outside the western world, allows us to define our present as postcolonial (Mezzadra,
2008). We can also imagine the postcolonial as the implosion of geographical, historical and
political distances inside the same space. Elements once distant and separate collapse into the
same time-space; this creates heterogeneity and so challenges the boundaries of (supposed)
homogenous nation states.
The movement of people across borders is at the centre of this transformation. The het-
erogeneity stemming from migrations poses challenges to politics and in particular to radical
politics, inviting questions about the ways that difference should be understood and organised
and how different subjects come to act and struggle together. The issues posed by postcolo-
nial time – the movement of people across borders and the creation of heterogeneity – define

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the very radicality of politics around migrations, in particular autonomous politics involving
­m igrants and non-migrants. But how do migrant solidarity activists interpret this distinction
and how, in particular, do they understand migrants’ subjectivities and the role of migrations
inside social movements? The next section describes the theoretical approach to migrations
based on and nurtured by activists’ experience.

Autonomy of Migration
Migrant solidarity involves, among many other activities, facilitating the crossing of bor-
ders, investigating safe ‘illegal’ routes, the creation of transnational networks, and the con-
stant and daily work of defying migration policies that attempt to curtail mobility. Crossing
boundaries entails moving them, which means both reshaping the forms of control through
borders and moving borders to create more differentiations inside a space. Borders today,
and especially the borders of the European Union and the US, have to be thought of, first
of all, as crossed borders, as a relation between the autonomous mobility of people and state
control. Their nature is defined by the crossing of mobile people who, violating them, or
crossing them ‘illegally’, continuously move and reshape borders. Borders are, by definition,
porous and because of that they are responsive to the migrations of people (Papadopoulos
et  al., 2008: 162). In fact, one can say that borders are shaped by this response to the auton-
omous movements of people and then reordered and reshaped as migratory flows vary in in-
tensity and routes change in geographical location or mode of transport. Borders, therefore,
have to be thought as flexible tools because they change ‘making a world rather than dividing
an already-made world’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013: 59).
People migrating through the ‘Balkan route’ in the summer of 2015 illustrated this pro-
cess. Powerful images clearly showed thousands of people walking from Budapest to Vienna
on the highway actively defying – and reconstructing – the border (and its controls) in their
way. Migrant solidarity strengthens the autonomous capacity of people on the move, by
materially helping people sustain themselves by their self-organisation. The achievement
and the reproduction of the objective work through infrastructures of support are used and
combined to foster mobility (Larkin, 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013; Papadopoulos,
2014): cars, mobile phones, information on alternative routes, food, clothes, shelters, etc.
Ventimiglia, Calais and many other cities and villages across Europe have also witnessed
the organisation of groups creating the mechanisms to facilitate the movement of ‘undoc-
umented’ people. These political actions of solidarity between migrants and non-migrants
have the power to create autonomous transnational networks as well as to push governments
to answer and change policies designed to control the flux of migrants. These answers are
not uncontestable or unproblematic but still show how self-organised movements of people
across borders are capable of reshaping – even if only partially and temporarily – the debate
around migrations. Challenging national borders and migration policies through autono-
mous movement is therefore the first radical point of migrant solidarity practices.
For scholars and activists of migration, the autonomy of migration is intrinsic in the
movement of people. This approach looks at migrants as a multifarious composition that does
not simply react to the control and power confronting it, but operates as an autonomous cre-
ator and self-organiser (Bishop, 2012). It recognises that migrations are often self-organised
by migrants, their families and communities and not by institutions (Rodriguez, 1996), and
that they force central institutions of the nation state such as the border and citizenship to be
reshaped themselves (Moulier Boutang, 1998; Karakayali and Tsianos, 2005; Papadopoulos
and Tsianos, 2007; Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Mezzadra, 2011; Papadopoulos and Tsianos,

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2013; Martignoni and Papadopoulos, 2014). An autonomous perspective on mobility at-

tempts to see migration not simply as a response to political and economic necessities but as a
constituent force in the formation of polity and social life. It rejects understanding migration
as a mere response to economic and social malaise (e.g. Jessop and Sum, 2006). The auton-
omy of migration approach foregrounds the idea that migration is not primarily a movement
occurring within the spaces for action and voice defined by institutional governance. It
rather means that the mobility itself becomes an inherently political statement of presence,
and a social movement that subsequently forces constituted power to reorganise itself. The
autonomy of migration thesis highlights the social and subjective aspects of mobility before
control. Migration is autonomous, meaning that it has the capacity to develop its own logics,
its own motivation and its own trajectories that control comes later to respond to, not the
other way round (Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe, 2006). This does not, of course,
mean that mobility operates independently of control. Very often, it is subjected to it and
succumbs to violent state or private interventions that attempt to tame it.
And yet, migration(s) from this viewpoint are no longer seen as a phenomenon to be
treated exclusively from a humanitarian viewpoint or as a social problem. Migrants are
continuously showing that what they want above all is to be free to determine their own
future and that the first ‘human right’ (see below for a critique and contextualisation of this
concept) that should be respected is freedom of movement. This can be seen in various ways:
at the border between Italy and France, where migrants refused to apply for asylum in Italy
and instead crossed the border to either move again or settle down and build their future (see
Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013). And it can be seen in the camps themselves where offers
of blankets, shoes and cold weather shelters were rejected as insufficient to achieve what
migrants really need – mobility and open borders (this refusal will be explored further in
the case study about Calais). Migrants remain suspicious of humanitarian organisations and
charities, especially those linked to the state, because (as was noted in the recent example of
homelessness charities being complicit in rough sleeper deportations)2, they can be the kind
of organisation whose objectives rely upon locking them inside the tangles of the European
migration system.
The aim of migrant solidarity activists, unlike the charities, is to foster freedom of mo-
bility not inspired by a humanitarian spirit, but as a profoundly political movement, a con-
stituent movement able to defy postcolonial disparities and racisms, and national sovereignty
itself. In order to achieve this goal, activists have long worked on the need to create new
forms of organisation able to represent heterogeneity and to reinvent organisational forms
emerging from western social movements’ heritage.

Hybridity and Difference in Migrant Solidarity Practices

The radical stance of migrant solidarity practices resides in the need and practical effort to
build forms of organising that take heterogeneity, difference and mobility into consideration.
Migrant solidarity practices downplay geographical stability, social similarity or even homo-
geneity, and are at odds with radical political experiments in which shared time-space and
a shared social, identity or economic belonging are the basis for a collective action. What is
difference and how encounters among differences actually work are two active discussions
inside postcolonial studies. The key concept, and the one that has fuelled these debates in
recent years, is hybridity. For Homi Bhabha (1994), hybridity is conceived as the encounter
between two social groups with different cultural traditions and potentials of power and as
a special kind of negotiation and translation that takes place in a third space of enunciation

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(2009: xiii). Hybridity is the moment that cannot be translated in terms of the discourse of
‘cultural difference’; it is the disjuncture that ‘makes it possible for discursive authority to
be renegotiated, despite the asymmetrical relations of power’ (2009: xi). Bhabha describes
these spaces as occurring in the midst of the encounter between the colonised subject and
the coloniser where ‘the incalculable colonised subject – half acquiescent, half oppositional,
always untrustworthy’ (Bhabha, 1994: 48) – produces an unresolvable problem: the forma-
tion of a space where there can be neither the decisive victory of one over the other, nor a
combination of the two but a third entity. Bhabha and Robert Young (1995) focus on the
term ‘hybridity’ to describe the processes of cultural displacement of the postmodern subject,
of which the migrant could be said to be a paradigmatic figure.
At the same time, it has been claimed that this concept, theorised in order to critique a
dialectical and binary structure of power, risks neglecting the fact that power is no longer
organised in a symmetrical way. Hybridity should therefore be read not only as a ‘liberat-
ing’ movement but also as a ‘symptom’ of the establishment of a new form of domination in
contemporary globalised capitalism (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 137–59). Inside this economic
and political landscape, power has assumed the productivity of differences. In other words,
we need to be aware that, unlike the colonial power that needed to code hybridity in bi-
narism (orientalism) (Frenkel and Shenhav, 2006), contemporary forms of domination do
not have this imperative. Although only apparently and anyway always contained within a
codification, there has been a shift from differences as something to be repressed to differ-
ences as something to be exposed and valorised. The ‘weapon’ of hybridity against power,
then, would be a weak one, or at worst, it could even reinforce a power that has completely
assumed the productivity of differences or ‘normalise subjectivities in transnational and post-
colonial conditions by including them in shuddering multicultural societies’ (Papadopoulos
et al., 2008: 141).
The politics of difference and feminisms, in particular, have also raised the problem of
conceptualising difference, as it is a concept that oscillates between the possibility of defin-
ing freedom, distinctiveness and power and the risk of defining categories, essentialising
belongings and restricting freedom (e.g. Weedon, 1999). Difference is a concept that can be
employed in various ways and is highly determined by the political use we put it to. It can
be argued that the explosion of modernist binarisms has been replaced by a multiplication of
borders, based on a myriad of differences and intersections that are often functional to capital
(Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Yet, if the modernist paradigm based on sharp binarisms in
which differences were placed has been replaced by a rhetoric of hybridity and multicultur-
alism, it remains the case that the western world is continuously experiencing tensions and
conflicts around the impact of those binarisms – just think of the riots and protests in the
US against institutional racism and violence (Swaine, 2015) or the conflicts around Europe
and Islamophobia.
What shall we do with differences then? One option is to dismiss their relevance in or-
der to think about alternative and contesting forms of life. Postcolonial studies have shown
this by observing centrality of differences in history – and of historical difference – and by
questioning western colonialist and capitalist homogenisations of lives, production, space
and time. Ignoring such insights would be an error. We need, therefore, to embrace this
relevance, understand how power today embraces it as well and move towards an attempt
to think differences inside alternative forms of organising that disrupt the functioning of
power. We need to question how radical politics around migrations can be ‘postcolonial’
as an adjective, in a way that entails a demand for equality in conditions of inequality. This
demand is not that those excluded, marginalised or exploited are extended the same rights

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and obligations as dominant ‘races’ and classes. It is a demand for a re-articulation of the body
politic which transforms the conditions in which lives are lived, and the terms on which
subjects recognise each other and themselves (Devenney, 2007).
Migrants, as autonomous actors of our present, are makers of new routes, solidarities,
spaces and organisations. The encounter of differences – thanks to migrations today – opens
the possibility of rethinking political struggle and organisation. It is an occasion for a strug-
gle that is not only a gesture of solidarity towards someone who has less rights, but a fight for
a common horizon – although not homogeneous – that is to say the construction of a new
model of social life regarding everyone. This is what the politics of migrant solidarity and
migrant solidarity activists are experimenting with. The next section, drawing on an activist
ethnography of Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS)3 (see English, 2015), will look at the work
of transnational migrant solidarity collectives and particularly at what sets it apart from the
work of the more charitable border-workers (Rumsford, 2009).

Navigating ‘Charity’ and ‘Solidarity’ in Migrant Solidarity

CMS is an activist collective that was established at the end of the Calais No Border protest
camp in 2009.4 Some of the solidarity work it does could be considered charitable, and there
are ongoing arguments about how to locate the project alongside critiques of the big society5
and its model citizens. The list of activities currently being carried out includes: free English
classes, free basic legal advice, workshops running through the questions the UK Border
Agency may ask during the asylum application process, sleeping in front of the squats and
encampments (often referred to as the ‘jungles’) to prevent immigration raids; organising
demonstrations, producing myth-busting leaflets about what the International Organisation
of Migration (IOM) may actually provide to those agreeing to ‘voluntarily’ return to their
countries of origin rather than attempting to cross the Channel, and organising large-scale
meal provision when the charities take a summer hiatus. There are also informal activities,
such as buying ingredients to cook together with the migrants in the ‘jungles’ when invited
to do so. The group is constantly revising what is ‘too charitable’ to be considered solidarity
work and the tensions around this issue will be explored later. It is not the purpose of this
chapter to outline unilaterally what makes something charitable or political or an act of sol-
idarity, but to flag the navigation of these concerns as a major consideration when making
collective decisions about the priorities of migrant solidarity projects.
There are ongoing issues in CMS in finding ways to balance the so-called ‘political’
work with the desire to co-create spaces for collectivised forms of social reproduction to-
gether with migrants and local Calaisians. When British and European activists provide free
­English classes and legal advice, is this solidarity (an act arising from shared interests in accor-
dance with radical migrant solidarity theory), or a benevolent charitable act (using one’s own
power and influence to help the disempowered who cannot help themselves)? The argument
for free language provision is that if it is possible to create a space where everyone learns
something (language exchange, for example, allows activists to learn rudimentary Arabic or
any number of other languages), then perhaps it is an environment where we gain the skills
to thrive and endure together rather than simply administering assistance. Some knowledge
of both the English language and basic knowledge of immigration procedures are arguably
necessary if not in Calais, then certainly upon arrival in the United Kingdom – a point
reiterated by the migrants themselves – but, of course, language exchange classes and legal
information workshops alone do not construct the structures necessary to live in a borderless
world, especially when one language is that of the colonial global north and one is not.

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There are a number of overlapping projects run by CMS activists and the charities
in ­Calais, especially food provision, when the charities are on a summer break, and the
­d istribution of shoes and clothing donated to the group. It is by undertaking these more
‘charitable’ acts that it becomes clear that even when both kinds of organisations work at
full capacity, the needs of irregular migrants in Calais can never be met. These humanitar-
ian projects cannot provide a solution to the problems people face at the border in Calais
or elsewhere, as will be explained later in the third section of this chapter on human rights
and migrant justice. At the end of the Calais No Border Camp in 2009, a solidarity activist
asked if the migrants would like the makeshift bathroom facilities left in the camping area or
­donations of sleeping bags. The firm answer given by one young Afghan man was that they
did not need bathrooms or blankets they needed the activists to open the border!6 This re-
sponse begs questions about the potential of this kind of ‘political’ solidarity work to change
the social fabric of society, challenge cultures of racism and break down the possibility of
migrant destitution in Calais. It also invites reflection on the kind of charitable acts that are
required in the meantime practically to sustain migrant communities and contribute to a
process of transformation at the same time.

Living in Anticipation
The space – material and conceptual – that is inhabited voluntarily by activists and forcibly
by migrants becomes central in the reflection on the kind of politics that are created and
carried on. It is important to think about the kinds of spaces transnational migrant soli-
darity collectives create and what structures can be designed to enable a more collective,
democratic and equitable space in which to organise and reproduce ourselves. Who does
the work to make these spaces enjoyable? What role do migrants play in these spaces? Who
feels comfortable and safe and is it ever the case that one person’s comfort provokes another’s
alienation?
Those invested in cultivating alternative organisational structures and those that rely
upon hierarchies and externally imposed rules and controls, including anarchist and activist
groupings such as CMS, stress the need to craft a prefigurative7 or an ‘anticipatory’ model
of organising (Brown, 2011: 201), that is, one that could contribute to a more equitable
and democratic post-capitalist system. Prefiguration also involves the idea that a particular
­solidaristic ethos will emerge from the alternative structures and spaces that activists organ-
ise: organising in this way will develop and promote non-hierarchical cultures (Brown, 2011:
202). The hope is that individuals would take more responsibility for their own actions, so-
cial positioning or privileges and transform society both on a collective and individual basis.
CMS aims to create spaces where people coalesce around desire to constitute
­non-capitalist, egalitarian and solidaristic forms of political, social and economic organi-
sations alongside others. As such, it fits what Jenny Pickerill and Paul Chatterton refer to
as an ‘experiment in social autonomy, like social centres, convergence spaces and inten-
tional ­communities’, ­constructed through active resistance and the creation of alternatives
­( Pickerill and ­Chatterton, 2006: 730). During the No Border Camp in Calais in 2010, many
experiments in living together were carried out. In an interview about the Calais No Border
Camp with Joe Rigby, a migrant solidarity activist and scholar said:

There are less geographical borders, which also need to be challenged and broken
down, very intimate borders you carry round inside your head. In this I think the camp
had more success … But not all borders are physical, and it is really the confluence of

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physical and social borders which people suffer from. In the camp some of the social
borders which accompany physical ones were actively broken down. Some meetings
and discussions were held in four or five languages, and discussions, exchanges and
encounters occurred which disrupted the rhythms of everyday lives and the habituses
of the activist, the citizen and the undocumented. In facilitating this, the camp helped
undermine assumptions and preconceptions about different kinds of difference.
(Rigby, 2012)

The CMS collective often fails to ‘hold on to’ its organising spaces, due to constant police
harassment.8 As a result of their vulnerability to demolition, these collective experiments
cannot make spaces feel sustainable and fail to attract larger numbers of participants. This
is evident when examining the ‘social spatial forms of enclosure’ (Gordon, 2010), like the
jungles, the No Borders Office, the squats, food distribution centre. What does it mean when
the ability to build and sustain spaces to reproduce each other constantly risks having their
‘assets stripped’? (Woods, 2009: 769). One answer is to look to the ‘imperceptible politics’
of the mobile commons (Tsianos, Papadopoulos and Stephenson, 2008) and at the solidarity
work associated with it that is both non-normatively ‘political’ and caring.
Imperceptible politics describes a politics that we are not trained to perceive as ‘proper’
because they do not appeal to and they cannot be accommodated in the existing system
of political representation and of citizenship. These politics use the status of invisibility
in which often migrants are constrained to reinforce practices of solidarity, of knowledge
sharing, of networking and of care, creating a ‘mobile commons’ (Tsianos et al., 2012: 450)
that have the power to change the very conditions of existence for the participating actors,
as well as exerting a transformative power upon sovereignty. The shared organising spaces
in Calais can be considered as part of an ‘imperceptible politics’. Glimpses can be seen in the
stories that are told when cooking together, in the connections that are made on one side of
the border and then another and in the emotions that come forth when meeting old friends
in new places.
In Calais, shared organising spaces must be rejuvenating and reconstituting in order to
continue to nourish and encourage the involvement of those participating in these strug-
gles. This means caring for each other, thinking about what is possible together, theorising
individual and collective experiences of vulnerability and what we can learn from them
­(Institute of Precarious Consciousness, 2014), and undertaking discussion and action so that
a new kind of sustainable activist subjectivity can come into being, one that is reflective
about the ways activist praxis is influenced by the postcolonial context in which this work
is done. Calais is one example of borderland where mobile commons are nurtured and an-
ticipatory politics imagined. The many borderlands existing today – not necessarily located
at the border of states – are the spaces in which radical politics of migrant solidarity are ex-
perienced. What can we learn from them and what kind of political theory can be drawn?

Critical Solidarity: Moving towards a Political Theory

From the previous sections, we can draw two important points for sketching a political
theory of radical practices of solidarity towards (and more importantly, with!) migrants, so
as to help understanding the contemporary character of migration, and the rationale under-
pinning autonomous practices of solidarity in camps as Calais and other borderlands. First
is the way in which borderlands become the sites not only for contesting and resisting con-
temporary migration regimes, but also for inventing new forms of existence in the interplay

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of autonomy and coercion inside which mobile commons are developed (Mezzadra and
Neilson, 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013). Second, and following from this, is the
potential for new forms of existence to emerge from the imperceptible politics that underpin
autonomous organisational practices and the infrastructures devised to survive borders. On
the one side, borders have not simply a coercive power but a subjectivating power. On the
other side, the power of the border is contested by the generative potential of grassroots sol-
idarity practices that produce autonomous geographies even within a coercive and violent,
yet porous mobility regime (Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006; Vasudevan, 2015).
In order to provide the coordinates for structuring the theoretical framework of a radical
theory of solidarity practices, we propose a genealogical concatenation of concepts and spa-
tial perspectives, starting from the seemingly more blurred one: the border and postcolonial
locations in which solidarity work is undertaken, first of all, as symbols of contemporary
battlefields around freedom of movement. Second, as sites where we can observe on a daily
basis the entanglement of autonomy and coercion generating organisational forms, alterna-
tive forms of life in common, networks political strategies and tactics aiming at fostering
settlement, mobility and more in general guaranteeing dignity also to people on the move
(Linebaugh, 2008; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013). These forms of life not only recast
justice as a politics of matter (Stephenson and Papadopoulos, 2006), but also contest the very
fundamentals of national sovereignty with their irreducible creativity in circumventing bor-
ders proliferating far beyond national frontiers (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013).
The second passage of the genealogical concatenation addresses the contrast between the
situated experience of people challenging the borders and the universal grid through which
their experience is often conflated, as well as depoliticised: human rights. A critical analysis
of the fictionality of human rights will be proposed, vis-à-vis their attachment to the figure
of the citizen as the legitimate bearer thereof. The tensions between charitable activities
and solidaristic activities experimented in the Calais site will be used as empirical evidence.
The third and last passage will then address the paramount political subject expressing the
relationship between space and sovereignty, which is the citizen. Again, citizenship will
be critically deconstructed in relationship to the materiality of human and social rights in
a neo-liberal, post-welfare context where the dichotomy migrant/citizen does not suffice
any longer to account for the forms of intersectional, hybrid marginality experienced by
the seemingly more diverse subjects. The conclusion will address the relevance of using the
situated perspective of the border as a standpoint for questioning the theoretical and political
validities of the categories usually deployed in order to interpret social turmoil relating to
mobility. The scope, ultimately, is to contribute to the reflection upon autonomous forms of
solidarity, and increase the effectiveness of their material deployment as tools for fostering
mobility, settlement and overall social justice.
As for the issue of borders, autonomy of migration scholars (see the earlier section) has
widely debated the profound mutation of the materiality of the border in its globalised
articulations. Borders, nowadays, are not only epitomised by the wall, the detention camp
or even the borderline separating two sovereign territories (Nail, 2012), as in Calais and
Ventimiglia, even though these are all still extremely relevant for the violence they deploy.
Rather, the role of borders is to institutionalise uncertainty and precarity in the guise of
enforcing the constant threat of being deported. They ensure subjugation to exploitation,
segregation and social marginality (De Genova, 2012). The proliferation of borders – b­ eyond
nation state – in other words, is symptomatic of the establishment of a complex mass of
control devices, supranational entities and differentials points of entry that shape social re-
production. Furthermore, they criss-cross the likewise multifarious lines of subjectivation

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characterising individual and collective experience beyond nationality and race: ethnicity,
gender, migratory status, class and cultural background, skill levels and so on. An example
drawn from the borderlands of Calais and Ventimiglia could be the rhetoric aimed at seclud-
ing Syrian ‘authentic refugees’, supposedly more well-educated, highly skilled and moderate
in terms of religion from the migrants of other nationalities, depicted in public discourses as
less skilled, more needy, less worthy of being granted safe mobility and overall less ‘civilised’
and qualified for ‘integration’.
In a nutshell, borders are nowadays a mixture of differential regimes and locations ­(Sassen,
2015), aimed at attuning the movements of people to capitalist speed of flows and need for
labour (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013). They are designed by nation states as well as su-
pranational entities (Castles and Miller, 2009; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2011), and are genera-
tive of subjectivation processes, wherefore they establish ‘a specified stabilized circulation of
desired social and economic effects: profit, property, racial division’ (Nail, 2012). That is to
say, ultimately, that borders are biopolitical devices turning the body of the migrant into the
carrier of bordering enforcement, punishment and exploitation (Sassen, 2015). Yet, the role
of the border is neither univocal nor uncontested. No Borders and Anti-Raids campaigning
in the so-called ‘receiving’ countries produce practices of resistance and solidarity in eluding
control and aiding migrants with differential migratory statuses (from asylum seekers to un-
documented people) to juggle the grey areas of the system.
Indeed, as stressed in the previous sections, bordering devices are also the sites where un-
precedented forms of kinship, assemblages of subjectivities, organisational practices arise, at
the crossroads of the complicated interplay between subjection and subjectivation character-
ising the so-called ‘fabric of migration’ (Mezzadra, 2015). These practices and forms of life
show to what extent migrants’ autonomy exceeds migration management, designed accord-
ing to capitalist just-in-time and to-the-point imperatives for highly mobile, yet controllable
and selectable workforce (Moulier Boutang, 1998, 2012; Mitropoulos, 2007; Papadopoulos
et al., 2008; Andrijasevic, 2009; Anderson, 2010; Mezzadra and Neilson, 2011).
It is crucial to problematise and rethink solidarity in either its solely political or charitable
understanding, and to re-conceptualise it from the perspective of grassroots solidarity prac-
tices stemming from the complex interplay of autonomous and coercion influencing mobility
in the contemporary porous and diffused borders regime. Indeed, when it comes down to
migrants and solidarity, the privileged perspectives are either the ‘charitable’ one, imprinted
by the supposedly universal paradigm of human rights (Sassen, 2015), or, the one conflating
migrants’ autonomy with a sort of automatism in struggling against marginalisation (Papado-
poulos and Tsianos, 2013) and for ‘integration’ into the supposedly homogeneous space of the
nation and the citizen. The proposal here is to start from what is not pure, from those imper-
ceptible, non-conventional, affective politics of mobile commons, embedded in the everyday
practices that aim at enhancing mobility and settlement, producing space through alternative
organisational practices and challenging the mixed spatial and temporal constituencies of
borders and cities as well (Sassen, 2015). Indeed, autonomous practices of solidarity, as the
experiences of the jungle of Calais and the camp of Ventimiglia show, challenge borders,
readapt pre-existing spatialities and create new forms of existence that recast social justice as
politics of matter in everydayness (Papadopoulos, 2014; Vasudevan, 2015), beyond the limits
imposed by the institutional practice of solidarity, mostly limited to charitable acts exerted
within the frame of stated governmentality, and then hidden beyond the veil of human rights.
The next section will question the abstractness of solidarity when it is read through the
lens of supposedly universal human rights. It will instead harness the theoretical elements
outlined in the previous sections for proposing a radical theory of solidarity encompassing

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situated, affective and intersectional practices and existential modalities challenging the pro-
liferation of borders in everyday life.

From Universal to Situated: Solidarity and Everydayness

The idea that all people have human rights is the umbrella under which the vast majority of
institutional and grassroots claims of solidarity towards migrants, refugees and asylum seek-
ers has usually been extended. Indeed, they are generally supposed to be universal, whereas
human beings are supposed to be the enfranchised subjects thereof, and thus disembodied
of national, racial, ethnic, gendered, cultural, religious distinctions. Yet, as many authors
have pointed out, the universality of human rights is merely fictional. On the other hand,
the tensions and conflicts connected to migration display that human rights are not natural
features of each human being, whereas they are factually appointed to citizens, and dispensed
by nation states and international bodies to the members of the international community
they have designed (see Stephenson and Papadopoulos, 2006; Sassen, 2015).
Thus, first and foremost, contextualising solidarity through the vast array of quotidian
organisational practices claiming social justice instead of human rights helps to overcome the
impasse caused by the reference to the latter. Indeed, contemporaneity shows the paradox of
the political abuse of the notion of liberty, that is supposed to be universal, yet overlaps with
citizenship and legal statuses provided solely by liberal democracies. As our temporality is
benchmarked by states of exception to democratic cornerstones in the name of the war on
terrorism, defence of national identities against ‘migrant invasion’ and transfer of personal
freedoms in the name of securitisation, it becomes even more apparent that the deployment
of human rights is the pivotal form of exertion of sovereign power, as they are inherently
bound to the fictional, unitary figure of the national citizen (Agamben, 1995).
Moreover, it is necessary to question the mobilisation of human rights in its flattening
of universally intelligible categories away from subjective experiences that are inherently
bound to their situatedness, and from embodied practices of solidarity that stem in response
to intersectional regimes of subjectification and control (de Certeau, 1984; Stephenson and
­Papadopoulos 2006; Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013). Additionally, decoupling autonomous
practices of solidarity from the spectrum of human rights also encompasses problematising the
value of citizenship as the only enticing horizon for people on the move, as despite the connec-
tions to various entitlements to settling and moving freely, it may not always be the best option.
When it comes to the nation state, it is relevant to note that the definition of its prerog-
atives and conditions of co-optation has been the core of the theoretical speculation upon
modernity, as well as the space for pinpointing the spaces of political legitimacy. Thence,
its perspective has so far been the unquestioned lens for analysing the overall movements of
politics (Cuppini, 2015). Consequently, the citizen has been conflated with the utmost polit-
ical subject of modernity, enfranchised with rights, voice and agency, shaping the dichotomy
citizen/alien in the first place. In fact, when it comes to migration, this certainty also reso-
nates in the academic milieu, where formalised forms of organising (i.e. NGOs, parochial
structures, recognised political collective and so on) created by native social practitioners,
volunteers and activists tend to be privileged in the analysis. This effaces more impercep-
tible ways of creating commons, devised by subjects who are often mobile and irreducible
to reductionist paradigms and official forms of organising due to their status, professional
position, gender, ethnicity, cultural background, habits and so on. Finally, this often implies
delegating the voice and agency of migrants to legitimised actors or native activists, mostly
in the name of their status.

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This irreducibility to flattening categories corresponds to the hybridity we have addressed

in the previous sections of this chapter as the result of the existential modalities, autonomous
infrastructures and alternative politics arising from organisational practices devised in order
to foster settlement and mobility. Indeed, different types of mobile commons (Papadopoulos
and Tsianos, 2013) – from camping on a borderline like Calais and Ventimiglia to housing
squats inhabited by both native and migrant dwellers spreading in Southern Europe – show
how subjectivities and binary categories get subverted in everydayness. Indeed, they produce
mestizo identities and new assemblages of subjectivities in relation to situated spatial and
temporal arrangements (see Haraway, 1991; Anzaldúa, 2007). By the same token, the auton-
omous organisational practices stemming from these hybrid assemblages cannot be separated
from the time and space in which they operate (de Certeau, 1984). These practices produce
autonomous geographies (see Vasudevan, 2015) that unearth two prerequisites of the foun-
dational myth of the nation state: the supposedly fixed assemblage of territory and homoge-
neous community; sedentariness as one of the bedrocks of social cooperation, whereas the
borders designed in official maps are the outcome of the state’s violent effort to efface and
curtail movements as well as social unrest (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005).
Not only are borders proliferating and becoming more porous, they are also being chal-
lenged by mobility. Within a complex border regime where norms are established with the
sole purpose of curtailing freedom of movement according to capitalist requirements, it is nec-
essary to be clear that it is not acceptable to use humanitarian organisations and principles as a
shield for arbitrarily dividing migrants as ‘good’ from ‘bad’. This tension is epitomised in the
case of Calais’ so-called jungle, where the European Union, the United Kingdom and France
and a plurality of mixed actors (from NGOs to parochial associations and autonomous No
Borders network) exerted converging and diverging actions that questioned the materiality
and governance of the border, as well as the symbolic figures it presupposes. Indeed, what is at
stake in the Calais conflict, as well as in other European borderlands (from Ventimiglia to Ido-
meni) is the possibility of trespassing the border and enjoying the same freedom of movement
that is appointed to EU countries’ citizens as members of a supranational and multinational
entity that is constantly shaken by political turmoil questioning its role and legitimacy. Now-
adays, the right to mobility is regulated on a supranational scale (especially in terms of free
trade and circulation of goods in the EU case), but is also autonomously practised by migrants
through thick, yet ephemeral networks of solidarity. Finally, both migration management and
solidaristic activities operate not only through coalescing around national identities, but ac-
cording to intersectional lines of differential inclusion/exclusion (i.e. ethnicity, gender, class,
cultural and educational background, religion, sexual orientation and so on). Therefore, there
is the conceptual necessity to frame the materiality of mobile commons beyond citizenship, as
Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013) themselves suggest.
Following Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2013), we think this is not the case. We propose a the-
oretical framework for radical practices of solidarity that assumes the mobilisation of borders as
the starting point for overcoming the analytical grids provided by nation states’ subjective figures.
Secondly, we propose autonomous practices that foster settlement and mobility as the analytical
lens for problematising the subjective assemblages involved in juggling proliferating, porous and
mobile borders. First of all, our proposals entail discerning the situated, intersectional condi-
tions of marginality equating migrant and native dwellers in unprecedented ways. Secondly, we
propose to put under theoretical scrutiny the unprecedented ontological forms, and alternative
assemblages of social reproduction, stemming from the autonomous practice of intersectional
solidarity. Indeed, they cannot be conflated with marginality insofar as they create new subjective
figures that question the inner workings of citizenship, human, civil and social rights.

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Indeed, the current post-welfare crisis and austerity context contradict the conceptualisa-
tion of social citizenship as a progressive appointment of rights and possibilities of escalating
the ladder for those constructed as citizens on the grounds of their availability to sustain a social
pact based on ‘fair’ capitalist inequality (see Marshall and Bottomore, 1992; G ­ ibson-Graham,
2006). By the same token, those who are excluded from this status or incapable/unavailable
to fulfil expectations of capitalist social reproduction and exploit their full labour force as the
plurality of their human qualities are either silenced in the public discourse or conflated with
the dichotomy marginality-criminalisation. This is even more prominent in a post-Fordist
and post-welfare context, where mobile commons as practices enhancing mobility and settle-
ment get entangled with autonomous, prefigurative politics designed on a daily basis in order
to survive neo-liberal governmental arrangements (Mitropoulos, 2013; Vasudevan, 2015).
One example is the widespread phenomenon of squatting enacted by refugees and migrants
with differential status together with homeless Italian citizens in the metropolis of Rome, and
how it gets articulated within the public discourse (Grazioli, 2017).
Hence, urban movements aiming at recasting right to the city and social justice (see
­Lefebvre, 1996; Purcell, 2002; Merrifield, 2011) find themselves confronted with forms of
subjectivation and, above all, life in common (e.g. housing squats) that they experiment as
they are confronted with the double necessity of coping with compelling material deprivation,
and doing it outside of the residual, and increasingly inaccessible, social welfare framework.
As neo-liberal rationale erodes state primacy in distributing and managing resources, na-
tion states become increasingly incapable of reabsorbing social conflict through either political
representativeness or the use of welfare state for reconciling social unrest through the promises
of equalising at least the most unbearable injustices produced by the capitalist exploitation and
extraction of surplus by the overall social cooperation (see Marshall and Bottomore, 1992).
The fact that these forms of solidarity, life in common and grassroots resistance to n ­ eo-liberal
hostility (see Avallone and Torre, 2016), realised by migrants and native citizens out of un-
precedented conditions of proximity in marginalisation, do not produce generalised revolts
should come as no surprise for those analysing them without conflating migrants’ and natives’
experiences of material deprivation, pauperisation and exclusion with the sole category of
class. Also, the fact that migrants do not emerge as a new revolutionary avant-garde does not
undermine the political relevance of the ways in which they create networks of solidarity
capable of supporting their autonomous forms of life settlement and mobility.
On the contrary, these tensions and critical points shed light upon the partiality of the
analytical grids that scholars and activists usually deploy for analysing the turmoil occurring
on multiple sites and multifarious borderlands; first and foremost, the idea of the ‘citizen’ as
the bearer of rights appointed for exerting agency, voice and politicity in contraposition to
the disembodied ‘migrant’ as sheer voiceless, powerless, impolitical bare life. In a nutshell,
seemingly marginal practices of solidarities exerted by subaltern subjects shall not be dis-
carded as ephemeral, and then neglectable. Contrariwise, they can constitute the privileged
perspective for critically addressing the frame of citizenship and rights, and supporting the
effort of elaborating a theoretical framework capable of reading through the multiplicity of
autonomous practices invented on a daily basis for sustaining freedom of movement vis-à-vis
an increasingly pervasive border regime.

Conclusion
A radical theory of migrant solidarity affirms the importance of imperceptible politics and en-
counters occurring in everydayness among migrants and between migrants and non-migrant

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activists. These are practices that help migrants to move across the borders defying control
and assist their settlement despite the many difficulties caused by their migration status. Of-
ten, these politics are ‘imperceptible’ because they do not claim rights or appeal to the state
or humanitarian organisations, but they act autonomously and in the everyday. This radical
form of solidarity, we claim, wanting to create new forms of existence, moves beyond (and
in some occasions against) forms of solidarity informed by the values of human rights and
citizenship – that are clearly shown to be inconsistently useful in the postcolonial conditions
created by migrations.
The postcolonial condition is the context in which we are working to understand the
contemporary heterogeneity of forms of existence, rights and levels of citizenship cohabitat-
ing the same space. These multilayered spatialities and temporalities constitute the battlefield
where the resistance against the contemporary border regimes occurs. Migrants are active
subjects of these struggles as well as of radical solidarity practices that are often initiated by
migrants themselves. Conceptualising migrant solidarity entails considering heterogeneity
and difference as cornerstones for deploying effective organisational practices and crafting
genuine political alliances, as interpolated by intersectional politics and theories of difference.
Through the example of the work of CMS, this theoretical stance has been ‘tested’. In
particular, the description of the infrastructures created inside the camp has allowed us to
explore the tensions between solidarity understood as autonomous organising or charitable
support. The materiality of political solidarity as a set of practices challenging and transform-
ing the contemporary border regime and social fabric has thus been framed as anticipatory
politics. The latter have been conceived as the experimentation of organisational, political
and existential modalities coalescing around the necessity of resistance, and the desire to cre-
ate alternative ontological forms at the same time. Often though, as happened in Calais most
recently in 2016 after yet another eviction of the camp, the material assets and infrastructures
of anticipatory politics get stripped by the state, showing once again that the legacy of these
projects can only be in their fostering of a culture of shared social reproduction and mutual
aid rather than in any ability to maintain material infrastructures. We looked at the imper-
ceptible politics of mobile commons that sets the conditions for moments of excess (The
Free Association, 2011) and new ontological forms building solidarity as non-normatively
political and caring.
In conclusion, how does migrant solidarity operate as both a political theory and a form
of radical politics? Autonomous practices of migrant solidarity can be generative of coop-
erative forms of life and organisation that foster collective settlement and mobility, in con-
trast with the compelling individualist and competitive rationale of capitalist governmental
arrangements (De Angelis and Harvie, 2014). Grasping their deployment, though, requires
a continuous exercise of open-mindedness and confrontation with complex time and space
arrangements in order to grasp the innumerable, uncoordinated, yet cooperative actions
contributing to its continuous theorisation and enaction (Papadopoulos and Tsianos, 2013).
A radical theory of solidarity indeed is the one capable of mapping the autonomous geog-
raphies produced by migrants’ agency and voice, encompassing the plurality and hybridity
of everyday practices ignored by universal, generalising theories and fixed understandings
of borders and subjectivity. This work is an invaluable opportunity for scholars, activists
and social practitioners to analyse spontaneous and innovative forms of post-capitalist social
reproduction and cooperation, capable of transforming relationships and practices (Cooper,
1986; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Heyman et al., 2014) that allow for an imagining of migrant
solidarity beyond contemporary capitalist infrastructures and towards a freedom of move-
ment for all.

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Notes
1 See examples at www.calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com.
2 Full story available here: www.politics.co.uk/news/2016/09/15/homeless-charities-complicit-
in-rough-sleeper-deportations.
3 Calais Migrant Solidarity is a direct action-focused group initiated to show solidarity with mi-
grants intending to move to the UK, ‘legally’ or otherwise, and in principle it does not do human-
itarian/charitable work, though in practice this is often disputed (www.calaismigrantsolidarity.
wordpress.com).
4 Since this time, the British and French governments, often in coalition, have dismantled the
jungles, at times via seemingly mundane everyday acts such as spraying all the tents with pepper
spray so that they are uncomfortable to sleep in and have to be thrown away, other times in more
explosive and performative ways with bulldozers, destroying the full village infrastructures of
mosques, churches, stores, libraries and hairdressers. But the jungles are always rebuilt, just as the
movement of people keeps on coming (calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com).
5 According to Walker and Corbett (2013), ‘The “Big Society” draws on a mix of conservative
communitarianism and libertarian paternalism. Together, they constitute a long-term vision of
integrating the free market with a theory of social solidarity based on hierarchy and voluntarism’.
The Tory government initiative encourages citizens’ volunteers to run services that they believe
are worthwhile, allowing the state to withdraw from providing basic services such as libraries and
elder care allowing ‘market efficiency’ to decide which public services continue to run.
6 More about the No Border Camp in 2009 can be found in this interview with Joe Rigby (https://
libcom.org/library/interview-no-borders-calais).
7 Pickerill and Chatterton (2006:738) summarise prefigurative politics in the phrase ‘be the
change you want to see’, and see change as possible through an accumulation of small changes,
providing much-needed sense of hope. Part of this is the belief in ‘doing it yourself ’ (see McKay,
1998) or creating workable alternatives outside the state. Many examples have flourished em-
bracing ecological direct action, free parties and the rave scene, squatting and social centres,
and open-source software and independent media. Resources are creatively reused, skills shared
and popular or participatory education techniques deployed, aiming to develop a critical con-
sciousness, political and media literacy and clear ethical judgements (Freire, 1979 in Pickerill and
Chatterton 2006).
8 calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.org.

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 2.5
PENAL ABOLITION ORGANISING
Can New Courses Be Charted
by Troubling Privilege?1

Claire Delisle

Introduction
Penal abolitionism is a radical stance and its project is an ambitious one given the ubiquity of
punishment frameworks in place the world over. Its success depends on effectively commu-
nicating the perniciousness of criminal justice processes and practices; expanding abolitionist
conceptualisations of alternative responses to harm; organising resistance to punishment
through antiprison, antipolice and anti-criminal justice system campaigns. Communicative
strategies devised in the organising of such campaigns are both drawn from, and inspire,
scholarly and activist analyses. The goals are to show the injustice resultant from criminal
justice processes and practices and to highlight the merits of community, solidarity and an
understanding of power and oppression in working towards safety and security. Within
scholarly analyses, there remain blind spots in the treatment of certain issues related to end-
ing punishment, such as what to do with ‘the dangerous few’ and the abstract notion of com-
munity (Carrier and Piché, 2015, para. 5). Another occlusion that is common among some
is the connection between colonialism and punishment. At the International Conference on
Penal Abolition (ICOPA), this occlusion is a source of frustration for some participants. It af-
fects discussion within ICOPA where unacknowledged white privilege stands in the way of
grasping the extent to which our societies still function within a well-entrenched colonialist
paradigm, and how such a paradigm still colours our collective organising discourses and
practices. If penal abolition is grounded in respect, community, solidarity and equality, ab-
olitionists must prefigure these principles in their activism and scholarship, and in the spaces
they create for the purpose of sharing and learning from other abolitionists, their practices
and their intellectual work.
This chapter presents the racism/privilege dynamic among the scholars, activists and
survivors of state or social harm who are invested in prefiguring, theorising and practis-
ing abolitionism at ICOPA. First, penal abolitionism is presented as an alternative to the
punishment framework and highlights some of the work done by abolitionist theorists.
Then, some of the historical highlights of ICOPA are explored in order to showcase the
long-standing tension about race within the entity. I expose the current internal debate
about the role colonialism plays as an important analytical frame to theorise punish-
ment and about the necessity of examining racism and white privilege in interactions at

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the conference. I draw upon contemporary social movement scholarship, in particular,

as it relates to the World Social Forum (WSF) ( Juris, 2008; Conway, 2013) which has
opened up critically reflexive conversations about stubborn hegemonic epistemologies
and practices at work in social movements, and the merit of creating intentional space,
at the risk of losing openness ( Juris, 2008). I briefly discuss the benefits of focusing
on privilege as well as oppression. Finally, I explore mechanisms aimed at dislodging
language and action that hinder discernment of oppression and privilege, thereby ini-
tiating a praxis where grassroots groups feel ownership in respect of the direction of
the conversations and actions within ICOPA, which stand to open up the possibility of
creating a truly radical space. I propose avenues that may work in favour of charting new
courses that multiply opportunities to abolish laws, practices, techniques and institutions
of dehumanisation.
And I present how ICOPA 17 upended traditional conference elaboration by placing co-
lonialism front and centre, and calling directly on participants to consider its legacy.
Integrating counterbalances to traditional organisation and knowledge-sharing can foster
relationship, allyship, solidarity and motivation for struggle, a practice especially central for
such a project. This can only happen when grassroots groups play a central role in the con-
ference, thus enabling their voices and agency to contribute to crafting new understandings,
solidarities and ways forward to dismantle the punishment framework in toto. Those emanat-
ing from the grass roots are most apt to have suffered oppression and criminalisation, and are
thus well-placed to provide experiential knowledge that contributes, in an important way, to
our understanding of the inherent problems with the punishment framework.

Penal Abolitionism
Criminal justice is a paradigm that came into being during the enlightenment (Agozino,
2003), initially as a response to ‘demonic judicial processes’ (13) characterised by public torture
and execution (Foucault, 1987). Rational application of the law and the principle of equality
were introduced by Cesare Beccaria in 1764 in his Treatise on Crime and Punishment. So
absurd and dangerous did this appear to his detractors that the book was banned for 200 years
(Agozino, op. cit., 13). In western liberal democracies, criminal justice systems are still based
on this axiom. Justice is considered to have been rendered when the ‘offender’ is held to ac-
count by serving a sentence (jail, prison, community work, probation, etc.); and that justice
exists when all people are treated in the same way. Conventional analyses typically occlude the
macro-sociological dimensions of disproportionately criminalising persons who come from
marginalised groups in regards class, race, gender identity and ability, among others.
Penal abolitionism is a theoretical, strategic and grounded position aimed at the elimi-
nation of punishment frameworks, penal systems and their component parts including the
police, courts and corrections. It has been amply demonstrated by empirical and theoretical
research that on moral, pragmatic and strategic grounds, punishment for the transgression
of laws or for perpetuating harm against fellow humans does not hold the promise of satis-
factorily resolving conflict, protecting communities or stemming violence (see, for exam-
ple, Mathiesen, 1996; Christie, 2001; Golash, 2005). Moreover, the magnitude of state and
corporate violence, which is but rarely prosecuted, is considered to be far greater than street
‘crime’ (see, for example, Tombs, in Hillyard et al., 2004; Ward, 2004).
Several scholars have written extensively on why penal abolitionism is necessary. For
instance, Thomas Mathiesen (1996) tackled the punishment framework in terms of the il-
logical ‘balance of scales’ notion of justice (108–40) wherein he demonstrates how attaining

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justice through punishment is logically not viable because one cannot make an equivalence
between the degree of suffering incurred by the harm and the degree of suffering incurred
by the punishment (see also Golash, 2005). He also suggests that the concept of deterrence
is based on a fallacy. Deterrence is based on rational choice theory, but he shows that per-
petrators of harm do not engage in cost–benefit analysis when on the cusp of committing
harm (55–84).
Other scholars have focused on the relationship of punishment to colonialism. In
­Counter-Colonial Criminology, Biko Agozino (2003) makes the point that the roots of
the criminal justice system are intimately connected to enlightenment principles and to
colonialism:

It was at the height of the slave trade that classicism emerged to challenge the arbitrary
nature of punishment in medieval Europe, but this insight was not extended to enslaved
Africans who were arbitrarily victimised… However, it was not until the height of co-
lonialism in Africa and Asia that Europe discovered the new ‘science’ of criminology as
a tool to aid the control of the Other.
(15)

Acclaimed activist and abolitionist, Angela Davis (2000), examines the link between slavery
and the penitentiary. Drawing on Hirsch (1992), she argues that the prison has similarities
with the Slave Codes (Davis, 2000, 20). In fact, the prison industrial complex in the US is a
continuation of slavery (see also Wacquant, 2000). Saleh-Hanna (2008, 2015) shows further
the connection between colonialism, patriarchy, slavery and the criminal justice system.
Saleh-Hanna (2008) says penal abolitionism ‘recognize[s] that societies have existed and
were able to function without penal sanctions in the past, and thus contemporary society,
though mentally and structurally reliant on the penal system, is capable of functioning with-
out such a violent system’ (458). She offers a ‘penal abolitionist dictionary’ (459) wherein
she dispels certain myths and sets the record straight about what the concept entails. For
instance, under ‘responsibility’, she says the abolitionist notion of the term entails that ‘… all
persons who partake in violent, harmful behaviours should accept direct responsibility for
their actions in non-violent, non-harmful ways’ (461); unlike in the current system, where
perpetrators are put behind bars, and where ‘… the penal system claims ownership of their
actions and takes responsibility for their lives’ (ibid.).
In subsequent writing, Saleh-Hanna (2015) explores Black feminist hauntology. In her
interpretation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a novel about Fugitive Slave Laws in
­n ineteenth-century US, she discusses penal colonialism and proposes a ‘metamorphic liber-
ation’ of colonised and enslaved bodies:

what I present is an exorcizing framework that, to start, names the structurally abusive
nature of colonial race relations and the colonizing praxis of punishment that forms
its power… Black Feminist Hauntology can be applied to lands, systems, histories and
circumstances that, like European colonialism and chattel slavery, extend far beyond the
borders of [the United States].
(para. 6)

Beyond abolitionist scholarship, antipenal and antiprison movements around the world
mount campaigns and devise strategies for abolition. No New SF Jail Coalition in the
San Francisco (2017) area in the US is one local movement that successfully blocked the

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construction of a new jail and continues to fight against incarceration (No New SF Jail).
The Oakland chapter of the US abolitionist organisation, Critical Resistance, has created ‘an
initiative to engage Oakland residents in building community power and wellbeing without
relying on cops’ (Critical Resistance, 2017). In Spain, an entrenched anarchist struggle in
prison continues to flourish (Solar, 2016). Other countries also have active antiprison and
antipenal movements (see, for instance, WIPAN which is now the Women’s Justice Net-
work, and JusticeAction in Australia; Empty Cages Collective in Britain).

The International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA)

The only global and exclusively penal abolitionist gathering is ICOPA. The organisation
meets in a different location usually every two years with the aim of learning from different
struggles taking place on the ground; to help consolidate struggle in the jurisdiction where
the conference is held; to provide a space to hear from survivors of state or social harm;
to develop and further abolitionist theory; and to strategise penal abolition more broadly
(see actionicopa.org). The three-day conference features plenaries, panels, art exhibits and
performances, workshops and film screenings. It provides a space for the dissemination of
prisoner writing, and usually organises a rally or march to protest a local case of injustice
featuring the penal system.
ICOPA is organised by the local members. Typically, a person proposes their locale as the
next site, and if the plenary agrees, they begin to organise locally with help from past ICOPA
organisers. Some members have been attending ICOPAs for decades. Others are new and
unfamiliar to it. There is a mix of academics (students and professors), activists, ex-prisoners,
survivors of state or social harm and those close to the criminalised. There is overlap among
these categories, some participants belonging to more than one group. It is worth noting that
the academic contingent is preponderant, and often plays a central role in the conference’s
organisation and presentations.
Qualitative intersubjective analysis undertaken before during and after the fifteenth edi-
tion of ICOPA revealed the following concerns: decision-making and governance in an
entity with no formal structures in a context where academics have more resources; tension
around the emphasis on a critique of colonialism as a central plank in abolitionist thought
and around racism and white privilege within ICOPA. These two considerations are related.
The question of ‘voice’, and which type of participant has more or less attention from others
in ICOPA, is the one that has been raised at plenaries and during interviews (Delisle et al.,
2015). There is also the question of abolitionist purity, where those who favour reform mea-
sures to ameliorate criminal justice systems are viewed with suspicion (ibid.).
Some participants have called for a greater emphasis on the legacies of colonialism in
abolitionist analysis that engender and perpetuate unearned privilege, oppression and the
consequent criminalisation of certain groups; others conclude that such a colonialist anal-
ysis does not address the totality of abolitionist concerns. While a broad understanding
of colonialism can explain the motivation and practice of controlling undesirable ‘others’,
this line of inquiry is occluded for some who do not make the connections between colo-
nialism and all forms of oppression. Plenary and informal conversations at several ICOPAs
reveal this ­tension. Furthermore, there have been calls to undertake a process of conscien-
tisation (Freire, 1972) in order that participants with prized statuses become more aware
of others’ oppressions, the effects of these and of their own privilege; grassroots groups
­(especially groups made up largely of working-class people of colour and Indigenous people)
find meaning in taking part in ICOPA; subjugated voices (who more often are, or have been,

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criminalised) be emboldened and heard; unconscious and privileged zealousness be kept in

check, in order to build prefigurative relations of solidarity and struggle among penal aboli-
tionists internationally (Delisle et al., 2015).
Known as a conference-movement (Piché and Larsen 2010), ICOPA held its foundational
conference in 1983. The brainchild of Canadian Quaker and abolitionist, Ruth Morris, and
Dutch legal scholar, Louk Hulsman, it was conceived of as a space where abolitionist principles
could thrive by bringing together scholars and activists to share, strategise and learn from each
other. At the 1985 conference, held in Amsterdam, Canadian abolitionist Claire Culhane asked
where the prisoners were. How, she asked, could there be a prison abolition conference without
hearing first-hand from prisoners and ex-prisoners? (Delisle et al., 2015, Interview, July 11) So,
when the conference was staged in Montreal in 1987, organisers ensured that prisoners’ voices
were ­central. Prisoners attended, having obtained ‘Unescorted Temporary Absences’ from their
­penal institution, or their writings were read out by others. Former prisoners were also in
attendance. As a result of this conference, the primacy of prisoners’ voices was translated into
the creation of a peer-reviewed scholarly publication, the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, which
still thrives as a prized resource for antipenal scholars and activists alike. ­Contributions to this
publication are made exclusively by prisoners or former prisoners in keeping with its goals: to
provide scholars and other readers with a prisoner’s viewpoint on incarceration rather than re-
lying on scholarly or correctional perspectives. The critical publication provides its readership
with on-the-ground critiques of punishment, by those targeted by state violence.
Questions about racism, patriarchy, (cis)heteronormativity, ableism and class have figured
in ICOPA plenaries for a considerable number of years, though the focus here is primarily
on the question of racism. During the 2000 meeting in Toronto, a debate surfaced about
the lack of representation of people of colour within the group. While Indigenous people
were present, people of colour were not well represented. Angela Davis (2000) states that ‘…
the racial homogeneity of ICOPA, and the related failure to incorporate an analysis of race
into the theoretical framework of their version of abolitionism, is a major weakness’ (214).
Dylan Rodriguez (2000) goes further: ‘… I found that the political vision of ICOPA was
extraordinarily limited, especially considering its professed commitment to a more radical
abolitionist analysis and program. This undoubtedly had a lot to do with the underlying
racism of the organisation itself…’ (ibid.). It was said that organisers had failed to solicit input
and participation from major Canadian abolition groups made up mostly of people of colour.
One participant noted, ‘people were comfortable talking about how racist the system was,
but not able to confront the fact that ICOPA was dominantly a white space’ (Delisle et al.,
2015, interview July 14a). While the representation of people of colour was lacking, there
were a number of indigenous participants. This Indigenous participation is presented contra
the notion that racism exists in ICOPA.
In 2008, at ICOPA XII, a conversation took place at the closing plenary dealing with
race, gender, sexual preference and (dis)ableism. This led to the adoption of guiding princi-
ples that included the timidly phrased goal of reaching ‘the widest number of activist groups,
people who experience discrimination, youth and recipients of the carceral, and encourage
their participation as organizers, keynote speakers and presenters’ (Creating a scandal, 2008).
In the ICOPA 142 report, penalism is referred to as a construction based on ‘the legacy of
slavery and colonization’ (ICOPA XIV (sic) Report, 2012). At ICOPAs 15 and 16, held on
Algonquin territory (Ottawa) in 2014 and Quito, Ecuador in 2016, respectively, final ple-
naries once more focused on racism and white privilege within the entity. The organisation
that funds ICOPA reiterated their desire to see a fundamental change in the number of
people of colour fully participating at the conference. They asserted that the disbursement of

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monies for the conference would hitherto be dependent on efforts at decolonising ICOPA
(Statements by representatives of the Prisonless Society at ICOPA 14 and 16 final plenaries).
Some participants see the fact that ICOPA is a predominantly white space not as a manifes-
tation or indication of any inherently racist approach.
The staging of ICOPAs remains unproblematised with typically r­ esource-heavy white
academics in charge of their organisation. There are several reasons for this including the
practicality of obtaining institutional space at little or no cost. 3 Salient questions about
oppressive practices and unattended privilege have mobilised discussions, but have – to a
certain extent – fallen on deaf ears. This is sometimes because oppressed groups ‘… are
likely to have a heightened consciousness of their oppression, whereas those privileged
by prized statuses often remain blithely unaware of them’ (Pease, 2010, 19). Where such
consciousness does exist among the privileged, there remains an inability to mobilise the
participation of local grassroots groups at the organising level. If ICOPA is to be the nerve
centre for penal abolitionists worldwide, it must find appropriate and effective ways to
address this ongoing concern, in order to remain relevant.
ICOPA 17, held in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in July 2017, addressed the racism/­
privilege dynamic in no uncertain terms: the title of the conference was ‘Abolition and its
Ghosts: Historic Memory and Ongoing Struggles Against Colonialism and Slavery’. Intent
on centring the conference on the impacts of colonial conquest, the programme called on
participants to ‘reflect upon and work towards articulating the veto power position that white
supremacy holds at each point of the process required to birth and institute the repressive
­economic, cultural and gendering bodies of the criminal justice system’ (Saleh-Hanna, 2017).
The programme introduction continues: ‘… White supremacy, heteropatriarchy and ­Europe’s
imperialist economies … are issues that have plagued abolitionist thought and organizing
from its very inception’ (ibid.). It continues: ‘We encourage you to begin the process of facing
these ghosts so that you can begin to understand the impact they have had on our relationships
to each other and to this movement’ (ibid.). Grassroots groups – made up mostly of people of
colour – played a central role in organising the conference. Intentional space (see below) can
be orchestrated by groups who are traditionally more formal, or privileged, as a self-conscious
way to provide a central space to grassroots groups of colour. In the case of ICOPA 17, the
intentional space was fought for by people of colour and grass roots themselves.

The World Social Forum

As a confluence of worldwide social movements, the WSF is an international gathering of
activists opposed to neo-liberal globalisation ( Juris, 2008, 355). It began in Porto Alegre,
Brazil in 2001 and has produced several editions, mostly in the global south, although the
2016 edition took place in Montreal. Concurrently, there have been regional manifestations
of the WSF in different jurisdictions. Jai Sen (2007) characterises the WSF as a ‘… manifes-
tation of world civil politics’ (506), an ‘“open space”’ for the ‘“incubation” of movements’
(507), ‘not just a sidewalk, but a whole avenue, a boulevard’ (512), and a ‘global commons’
(ibid.). While being an open and non-directed space, there are nonetheless power struggles,
in part, because it is difficult for people (especially people from the global North) to let go of
hegemonic structures of power and practices (Conway, 2013).
The WSF began in response to current neo-liberal agendas exemplified by international
finance and trade organisations like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and the World
Economic Forum (Conway, 2013, 1; 6). Conceived as an open space, that is, non-deliberative
(9), the only prerequisite for participation is an opposition to neo-liberalism (ibid.). It gathers

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together social movements and individuals engaged in resistance to many forms of injustice (for
instance in regards gender, race, class, ecology and others) and meets once a year. Examining
some of the debates and conceptualisations of the WSF opens up a line of questioning that can
be helpful when considering the power dynamics in ICOPA. A robust literature has developed
which focuses on the workings of the forum itself. Among the critiques of the WSF is the no-
tion of hegemonic epistemologies. Since the writings about the WSF are largely authored by
white men of the global north, given their intellectual culture, a blindness to other forms of
knowledge and praxis is evident (20). Open space and a massive number of diverse participants
notwithstanding, Conway (2013) declares: ‘… the movements of the WSF are encountering
each other on a historically unequal playing field constituted by the coloniality of power’ (24).
Likewise in ICOPA, its roots, heritage and culture emanate from white, academic, often
male portions of the global north, and this results in a reticence to not only adopt a colonial
reading of punishment, but a stubborn resistance to considering interactions among ICOPA
participants as rooted in the colonial mindset.

Intentional Space
One strategy for troubling unacknowledged privilege in the US Regional WSF event in 2007
in Atlanta is the creation of ‘intentional space’ ( Juris, 2008). In order to rectify the lopsided
white, resource-heavy and middle-class participation in some radical movements (i.e. WSFs,
Occupy), the stewards of the US Social Forum (USSF), Grassroots Global Justice (GGJ),
targeted grassroots working-class groups with a majority of people of colour in their ranks,
for the initial organising call for the forum (359). The object was to ensure that grassroots
movements made up of oppressed groups played a central part and wanted to participate.
Intentional space a contrario open space can be seen as restricting certain ‘hegemonic’ voices.
Such an intentional space was seen as necessary because, as one USSF participant put it:

Having a nonhierarchical or horizontal collective structure doesn’t mean just having

an open circle for everyone to come in… It means having very intentional, deliberate
structures… If we just have an open space, our internalized privileges or oppressions or
entitlements come out.
(USSF participant, Juris, 2008)

So creating this type of intentional space upends the ‘highly institutionalized politics’ of tra-
ditional movements (labour, non-profit organisations), and the more ‘personalized’ politics
seen among middle-class activists (360). In addition, Juris argues, ‘… the communities that
are most directly affected by prevailing structures of exploitation and inequality are viewed
as the principal agents of social change’ (ibid.).
Such a preferential scheme of organising can appear to limit openness. Indeed, some may
invoke questions of fairness in such an approach. However, such a response points to the in-
ability to consider that hegemonic power relations actually require intentional moves to disrupt
privilege and to purposefully organise events and spaces aimed at equalising the playing field.

Oppression and Privilege

Mullaly (2002) proposes that the strategies to eradicate oppression are embedded in ­anti-oppression
practice, which can be used at personal, cultural and institutional levels. He suggests that new so-
cial movements are one avenue for challenging such relations of domination. Problematically,

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however, none of his remedies involve addressing privilege (Pease, 2010, 169). For Pease (2010), it
stands to reason that complementary strategies for addressing the reproduction of privilege include
a necessary step in the process of abolishing domination, whether it be racial, class, patriarchal,
(cis)heteronormative or ableist. One way is to challenge the normalisation of privilege; increasing
awareness of people’s privileges stands to alter this dynamic (170–1). Looking at social practices and
determining which of these contribute to oppression is a start. Once acknowledged, the work of
taking responsibility for one’s own contribution to the oppressive situation becomes a possibility.
One such strategy incorporates the development of a ‘pedagogy of the privileged’
­(Curry-Stevens, 2004, 2007 in Pease, 2010, 172). Inspired by Freire’s (1972) Pedagogy of the
Oppressed, Curry-Stevens offers a series of steps that may assist in developing an awareness of
one’s privilege, to looking at the structural dynamics in play, locating one’s self in the spec-
trum, gaining an understanding of the benefits that accrue to the privileged and knowing
the role one plays in contributing to the oppression of others (172).
Responses to privilege can occur in different ways. Sometimes, people avoid participating
in a space where those with prized statuses ignore their role in oppression, or are defen-
sive about their status, which is seen, for instance, in the remark ‘I’m not racist’. In other
cases, people from oppressed groups, once again, are put in the role of having to educate
the privileged on oppression and privilege (hooks, 1988). This may involve calling out the
unacknowledged privilege in a group or session. Often, it results in discomfort, frustration
and anger among the people who have prized statuses but do not grasp the unearned benefits
accrued to these statuses.

Avenues for Change

Anti-oppression and Pedagogy of Privilege Workshops

Potential avenues to dislodge the inequality rut in which entities such as ICOPA find them-
selves include establishing systematic workshops on anti-oppression and privilege, and decol-
onisation, in the conference programme; instituting ‘intentional spaces’ (see Juris, 2008) to
promote grassroots involvement and overcome marginalisation within ICOPA; and that past
and new organisers who work together towards the next edition be committed to ensuring
the primacy of these considerations. The format of the opening plenary of ICOPA should be
shortened in order to make room for an oppression-privilege workshop. This workshop can
also integrate a decolonisation component. Regular acknowledgement of Indigenous territory
(depending on the location) at the beginning of each plenary and each session is a helpful way
to instil awareness of the harms done by colonisation. In addition, purposeful workshops such
as ‘The Blanket Exercise’4 can be powerful reminders of the legacy of colonialist projects.
Traditionally, one of the opening keynote speakers is tasked with explaining ICOPA to
the people assembled at the plenary and reminding participants of past ICOPA highlights.
Addressing the tensions in ICOPA during this presentation would go a long way towards con-
textualising a number of debates. During the unfolding of the conference, delegates can con-
tinue to speak to issues and refer to the learning that took place during the plenary and/or the
workshop, and this can contribute to further understanding the privilege/oppression dynamic.

Intentional Space
ICOPA 15 participants were surveyed for their reactions to the conference. Among the re-
sponses, some concerned the oppression/privilege axis and the need for intentional spaces for

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participants. Participants wanted exclusive space to receive support from peers if triggered
by others’ oppressive statements in the sessions or plenary, for instance, a space dedicated to
people of colour, or to women. And some also signalled the need to have intentional spaces
that were dedicated to coordinating support and solutions for the loved ones and allies of
people currently incarcerated.
Intentional space in the sense in which it is used by Juris (2008) is different. But ex-
trapolating from the survey, it points to the need for such intentionality. Subjugating the
prominent voices in favour of a purposeful measure to give up openness so that individuals
and groups, who are part of oppressed communities, take charge of the event’s organisa-
tion and have a preponderant role in the conference presentations is one way to address the
hegemonic structures of power. This would not be new in ICOPA since organisers have
traditionally selected abolitionist presentations over proposals that contain a more reformist
tone (see Delisle et al., 2015), thereby limiting the openness of the space based on theoretical
considerations. Doing the same in regards to prioritising proposals from grassroots groups
composed of people of colour may predispose the event to new and different ways to under-
stand organising. It means that traditional ways of undertaking the tasks involved in bringing
an international gathering together may change. It may mean giving preference to speakers,
panel organisers and presenters who emanate from the oppressed groups to the detriment of
mainly white, mainly privileged participants.
‘ICOPA 17 was antipodal to regular conference organizing. The conference was or-
ganized by working class grassroots and academic people of colour and their allies, who
called for holding an ICOPA on the traditional lands of the Wampanoag nation (now New
Bedford, Massachusetts)’ (Saleh-Hanna, 2017). By constructing the conference around the
theme of colonialism and enslavement, it forced a reckoning with white supremacy, privilege
and consequent occlusions of the workings of criminal (in)justice systems. The programme
states: ‘Tying our theme to historic memory and histories of enslavement and colonial con-
quest, disallows us from engaging with penal abolition in manners that deny or minimize
the foundational properties of the problem at hand’ (ibid.).

Conclusion
As with other social movement spaces, ICOPA is straddling traditional ways of converging
with calls for new prefigurative practices that take into account subjugated voices in a mean-
ingful way. Such new practices, it is hoped, will have repercussions not only for advancing
abolitionist campaigns, but also on the ways in which penal abolitionism is theorised. Pur-
poseful strategies of this kind can positively affect the overall tenor of conversations within
the conference, abolitionist theory and abolitionist practice. The impacts of such strategies
aim for a more robust engagement with others, in a space that is respectful and understand-
ing of difference, a generosity of spirit and a heightened level of trust among participants.
Such praxis opens up the possibility of deepening abolitionist thought, and collectively cre-
ating new forms of argumentation.
A guarantor of making ICOPA truly radical lies in a commitment to forego ‘leading’
tendencies by those with prized statuses, in favour of embracing a commitment to let others
do the driving, others for whom oppression is a very real struggle they combat on an on-
going basis. This opens up the possibility of ICOPA becoming a radical space founded on
solidarity and prefigurative politics that can lead to creative breakthroughs in theory and
strategy geared towards abolishing penal systems. Can ICOPA craft a radical space dedicated
to finding language and action that confront key areas of dissension? Can ICOPA chart new

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 Claire Delisle

courses that multiply opportunities to abolish laws, practices, techniques and institutions of
dehumanisation?
Radicalism and social movement organising confront and resist unfair power differen-
tials in society. As such, a central feature of such activity involves an understanding of how
power works, both at the social and societal levels. It thus makes sense that if groups do not
adequately check power and privilege in their interactions, they risk reproducing the same
injustice that they fight to abolish. Addressing these issues should be an ongoing and normal
part of collective action. These questions reflect some of the concerns of ICOPA participants,
go to the heart of prefiguring a radical abolitionist stance and provide a direction for deepen-
ing theoretical considerations about radical organising, and abolitionist strategy.

Notes
1 This chapter is based on a qualitative collaborative research project. I wish to thank Maria
­Basualdo, Adina Ilea, Andrea Hughes and Justin Piché for participating in this project. Thanks
also to Ruth Kinna for the astute comments in the elaboration of this work.
2 A motion was adopted at ICOPA XII to change the numbering of conferences from Roman to
Arabic as the latter was considered more accessible to a greater number of people.
3 The only funds attached to ICOPA are usually dedicated to ensuring that those with lived experi-
ence of criminalisation are able to attend the conference, and are therefore reserved for their travel
and lodging. Academics are affiliated to universities where space can be obtained at little or no
cost.
4 The Blanket Exercise was conceived by a Canadian organisation, Kairos, in which workshop
participants stand on blankets, while a facilitator narrates the history of land-grabbing and the
institution of the Reserve system for Indigenous people in Canada. The folding of blankets into
smaller entities, while participants crowd onto ever-smaller blankets provides a powerful visual
for the unjust and harmful effects of relegating Indigenous peoples to ever smaller and inhospitable
portions of land.

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 2.6
SAFER SPACES
Ruth A. Deller

Introduction
In this chapter, I explore the notions of ‘safer spaces’ – places where people from different
marginalised groups can gather, speak and be resourced in safety. Safer spaces can be physical,
but they are also cultural – framed by a series of boundaries, principles and practices designed
to support members of the group(s) needing the safer space. I explore here some of the moti-
vations and underlying principles of safer spaces, and the roles they can play in radical politics.
This chapter focuses predominantly on examples relating to gender, sex, ethnicity, health and
dis/ability although the cultivation of safer spaces can also include practices such as creating
equality and diversity policies; providing appropriate dietary options for vegetarians, vegans,
members of different faith groups and those with food allergies or other medical conditions;
health and safety policies that ensure the physical safety of events and organisations, and
ethics policies that ensure appropriate research and professional conduct in a variety of con-
texts. I explore a number of ways safer spaces operate in different contexts such as education,
healthcare and political groups and consider their implications as spaces of resistance, mobil-
isation and care – as well as media debates over safer spaces and political activism.
I also reflect on the outcomes of four workshops (two in the UK, two in the USA) with
academics, educators and activists discussing issues of social justice and safe spaces and
sharing experiences of implementing different strategies. The number of attendants at each
workshop varied; in the smallest events, in the UK, there were around twenty participants
and in the largest, in the USA, around fifty, and in the other two events approximately
thirty to forty participants. A range of ethnic, gender and sexual identities were present
in all four events, although the majority lived in Western countries (some as immigrants
from places including India, Pakistan and Singapore). The ages of participants varied from
18 to 60.1
In the last few years, issues relating to ‘safe spaces’ have dominated newspaper headlines
around the world – as ideas and practices well established in political movements have in-
creasingly spread to workplaces, educational establishments and Internet groups. The phe-
nomenon of safer spaces and different aspects associated with these, such as trigger warnings
(TWs) and practices of inclusivity (e.g. gender-neutral language, diversity policies) have
garnered coverage and debate in both traditional and newer media outlets.2

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While media coverage of safe spaces often portrays them as a recent trend, practices of
creating safe (or rather, safer, as no environment can necessarily be completely safe) spaces
are not new to those involved in radical politics. Challenging dominant discourses and
power structures through activities such as ‘no platforming’, implementing TWs, estab-
lishing boundaries around meetings, privileging minority voices and creating protected
physical spaces have long been part of the ethos and praxis of feminist, queer and other
radical groups.
At the heart of creating safer spaces is the acknowledgement that, while the world is
not truly ‘safe’ for anyone, it is more dangerous for some than others. Gender, ethnicity,
sexuality, age, class, dis/ability and many other factors contribute to the status or priv-
ilege different individuals have within any society as well as their personal safety. The
types of danger vary, but can include violence, verbal abuse, bullying, exclusion, discrim-
ination, harm to property, inequality of access to services, resources or justice, emotional
trauma and even death. Harm may result from encounters between individuals, or it may
be embedded within institutionalised practices and customs that favour some groups over
others. It is worth noting here that within many of the debates around harm and safety,
the concept of ‘offence’ regularly recurs. Critics of safer-space practices often perceive
‘offence’ as distinct from ‘harm’; yet, it is often difficult to distinguish between the two
in practice. For example, when racist slurs are used against others, it is often difficult to
draw a clear line between ‘hurt’ and ‘offence’ in that person’s affective response. In this
article, I will, therefore, focus more on notions of ‘harm’ or ‘hurt’, except when discuss-
ing examples that specifically reference ‘offence’ – while acknowledging that this area is
far from clear-cut.
Safer-space practice is about understanding and prioritising the needs of the most a­ t-risk –
not as a way of sealing them off from the realities of life, but as a way of resourcing, equip-
ping and supporting people to meet those realities. It is about challenging and transforming
those realities. The direct action group Sisters Uncut explain: ‘Sisters Uncut aims to create
a respectful, compassionate and kind space… When we come together to organise in a re-
spectful and considerate way, we are creating the change we want to see in the world’ (Sisters
Uncut 2016). To give another example, Black Lives Matter states:

We are committed to collectively, lovingly and courageously working vigorously for

freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension all people. As we forge our
path, we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together
through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.
(Black Lives Matter 2017)

In many countries, we could argue that there have been a number of positive improvements
for members of groups that have historically been marginalised: the legalisation of same-sex
marriage; increased visibility and acceptance of trans and non-binary individuals; height-
ened awareness of a range of mental and physical health problems; public examples of ‘calling
out’ behaviour that could be seen as racist, sexist, homophobic and so on. Media, education,
healthcare and politics have all been shaped by equality politics in radical ways over the last
100 years and there is increasing recognition of the ways in which dominant groups have
marginalised and oppressed non-dominant groups. We could certainly argue that many
countries are now legally, politically and culturally safer spaces for those who have histori-
cally suffered systemic oppression.

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 Ruth A. Deller

Sadly, of course, despite these changes, there are still many ways in which even the most
liberal societies remain unequal and unsafe as others in this collection discuss. Some im-
provement in these areas does not mean all battles have been won. The Black Lives Matter
movement emerged during Obama’s presidency. As a response to the killing of (often young)
black men at the hands of white police, the movement is a stark reminder that the reality for
many black Americans is one in which they – and even Obama himself – are still subject to
systemic racism. As Morgan notes,

An exemplary black man was elected into the highest office in the nation - twice - and
not only was he subjected to the harshest, most racially-charged criticism himself, but
the day-to-day lives of black and brown people improved very little… When people
are already dying en masse, it is belittling to argue that it’s better than it was. If 1892
was the most violent year of lynchings in the United States -161 black people that we
know of were murdered - then what good does it do to tell black youth that things
are better if 258 black people were killed by police in 2016? The comparative lens
doesn’t hold.
(Morgan 2017)

Contemporary radical movements explicitly draw attention to the continuing insecurity felt
particularly in minority communities. Black Lives Matter says:

We are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways
in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are
talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and
dignity.
(Black Lives Matter 2017)

The Women’s March reiterates the point:

We must create a society in which women - including Black women, Native women,
poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, lesbian, queer and
trans women - are free and able to care for and nurture their families, however they are
formed, in safe and healthy environments free from structural impediments.
(Women’s March 2017)

Activists seek to carve out safer space at multiple levels – from the macro level of large-
scale campaigns and interventions that bring societal change, to the micro level of culti-
vating localised safer spaces within small communities. Many of the examples discussed
in this chapter are small-scale – individual educators and their students; activist bloggers;
sexual health centres. Others are networked groups campaigning to affect changes across
multiple locations, such as Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), an international movement call-
ing for the decolonisation of university campuses – including the removal of colonial
iconography.
What I present here is not so much a ‘how-to’, but a reflection on the complexities and
challenges of creating safer spaces, both in terms of the practical implications and the impli-
cations for challenging power and privilege. I focus here both on physical and cultural forms
of safer space, recognising that different contexts require different strategies.

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Safer Spaces and Physical Environments

In this section, I explore a range of ways that physical environments can be created or
modified as forms of safer space. 3 Physical forms of safer space may include modifications
to existing spaces to make them safer for a range of users; providing resources and spaces
solely for the use of one group (e.g. rooms, events, transport, festivals, hostels, addic-
tion support meetings, therapy centres). Other forms of physical safer space may include
neighbourhoods, cities or even countries that, while not necessarily ‘exclusive’ to one
particular group, offer freedom, sanctuary and a sense of community – e.g. districts that
have high concentrations of immigrant or LGBTQ+ residents and businesses (see Kenney
2001; Hanhardt 2013), or the idea of ‘cities of sanctuary’ (Darling 2010; Squire 2011) that
welcome refugees.
Although we might often think of safer spaces as being distinct spaces set aside for the
use of particular groups (and I will discuss such spaces later in this section), activists and
campaigners have a long history of highlighting that the built environment is often unsafe
for members of marginalised communities, and have sought to effect change. While there
is a growing awareness of the need to make buildings accessible for people with disabilities
(although there is still a long way to go here), physical environments and public spaces also
have gendered and racialised components that may not present the same physical barriers
as, say a set of steps would pose to a wheelchair user, but offer symbolic barriers instead.
For example, public toilets pose a number of issues when we think about safe and inclu-
sive spaces. Traditionally, public toilets have segregated people along binary gender lines
with traditional ‘male’ and ‘female’ designations. Accessible toilets, commonly marked out
with the wheelchair symbol, on the other hand, serve to de-gender people with disabilities
as well as reinforcing the idea that all people who might need such a facility use wheelchairs.
The binary-gendering of public toilets poses challenges for non-binary individuals who
either have to choose a gender identity for the purposes of relieving themselves or use the
disabled facility when they are not disabled – something not always possible, as in the case
of disabled toilets requiring a Radar key or similar to enter, nor desirable as it may prevent
a disabled person from using it. Gender-neutral toilets are slowly becoming more common-
place (see Sanghani 2015), although there are often cultural and practical reasons why these
are hard to implement everywhere.
However, even for those who identify as male or female, public toilets can prove chal-
lenging. In the USA, for example, there were a number of headlines in 2016 generated by
the idea of ‘bathroom bills’, such as North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy and Security
Act which requires individuals to use the toilets for the sex assigned on their birth certificate,
which means transpeople who have not had their birth certificate altered (and in some states,
this is only possible following full reassignment surgery) have to use the toilet of the sex on
their birth certificate, rather than the gender they identify as – thus meaning transwomen
have to use men’s toilets and vice versa. Furthermore, if users do not carry their birth certif-
icates, there is the chance people could be refused use of the bathroom even if they have the
‘correct’ genitals if they don’t look sufficiently ‘male’ or ‘female’. These bills often use the
idea of ‘safety’ as a justification:

The federal government’s mandate requiring Texas public schools to provide students
access to restrooms, showers, and dressing rooms based on an individual student’s inter-
nal sense of gender is alarming and could potentially lead to boys and girls showering

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 Ruth A. Deller

together… children receiving an education in Texas public schools and open-­enrollment

charter schools are entitled to a safe and secure learning environment, including when
using intimate facilities.
(Texas Senate Bill 6, cited in Ura and Murphy 2017)

The North Carolina act specifically removed ‘gender’ as a basis for safeguarding individuals,
replacing it with ‘biological sex’, and claiming that the bathroom policy was not discrimi-
natory because of this:

It is the public policy of this State to protect and safeguard the right and opportunity of
all individuals within the State to enjoy fully and equally… places of public accommo-
dation free of discrimination because of race, religion, color, national origin, or biolog-
ical sex, provided that designating multiple or single occupancy bathrooms or changing
facilities according to biological sex, as defined in G.S. 143–760(a)(1), (3), and (5), shall
not be deemed to constitute discrimination.
(General Assembly of North Carolina 2016: 5)

Despite the rhetoric of ‘safety’ as a rationale for these bills, many commentators note that
there is little-to-no risk to cisgendered users from transindividuals using the bathroom
aligning with their gender identity. For example, ‘CNN reached out to 20 law enforce-
ment agencies in states with antidiscrimination policies covering gender identity. None
who answered reported any bathroom assaults after the policies took effect’ (Grinberg
and Stewart 2017). The symbolic denial of transpeople’s experience in these bills acts
as a form of harm in numerous ways. In research conducted with trans and non-binary
individuals, Herman (2013) identified instances of bullying, verbal and physical assault,
stress, social exclusion and even urinary and kidney problems linked to their experiences
of using toilets.
The problems of space are not confined to toilets, however. Faces and bodies represented
in posters, banners and signs also play a role in signifying who is, and is not included in a
community – and architecture and artworks likewise have a role to play in creating the
culture of physical environments, from steps inaccessible by wheelchair users to statues cel-
ebrating only old white men, the way space is constructed both symbolically and practically
reinforces and normalises forms of injustice and discrimination.
Several student-led movements have recently highlighted racial inequalities on uni-
versity campuses. For example, the campaign I, Too, Am Harvard and its equivalents at
other universities, including Oxford, featured photographs from students from different
minority ethnic groups holding cards detailing some of the racist comments they had
encountered from others on campus. These students articulated how they found the
public spaces of the universities exclusionary and unsafe: ‘Our voices often go unheard
on this campus, our experiences are devalued, our presence is questioned – this project
is our way of speaking back, of claiming this campus, of standing up to say: We are
here. This place is ours’ (I, Too, Am Harvard 2014); ‘Students in their daily encounters
at Oxford are made to feel different and Othered from the Oxford community’ (I, Too,
Am Oxford 2014).
Another high-profile campaign, RMF, is an international movement calling for the de-
colonisation of university campuses – including the removal of colonial iconography, such as
statues of Cecil Rhodes.4 The two most publicised campaigns of RMF were its calls to top-
ple statues of Rhodes in Cape Town and Oxford. The former was successful, with the statue

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 Safer Spaces

removed in April 2015, while (at the time of writing) the statue in Oxford remains. As with
‘I, Too, Am…’, RMF highlighted systemic issues within universities that were compounded
by the presence of iconography such as the Rhodes statues in public spaces on campus, rein-
forcing a sense for black and minority ethnic students and staff that this space was not one in
which they were safe or welcome. Its aims included:

Tackling the plague of colonial iconography (in the form of statues, plaques and paint-
ings) that seeks to whitewash and distort history… Reforming the Euro-centric cur-
riculum … Addressing the underrepresentation and lack of welfare provision for Black
and minority ethnic (BME) amongst Oxford’s academic staff and students. RMFO is
about more than a statue. However, we believe that statues and symbols matter; they are
a means through which communities express their values. The normalised glorification
of a man who for so many is a symbol of their historical oppression is a tacit admission
that – as it stands – Oxford does not consider their history to be important.
(RMF Oxford 2015)

Movements like RMF have, at their heart, an agenda to highlight the way practices of mar-
ginalisation, discrimination and oppression are embedded into everyday life through the
physical environment, and that which may seem ‘normal’ and ‘everyday’ often represents
systemic inequalities. The responses to the movement from Oxford’s chancellor and vice
chancellor (who are both white) demonstrated a lack of willingness to engage with the issues
raised, instead criticising the students and, ironically, claiming that students were stifling
debate, while themselves refusing to debate the situation. For example, on Radio 4’s Today
show, the Chancellor, Chris Patten, said that, perhaps, the students who did not approve of
the statue ‘should think about being educated elsewhere’ and argued: ‘People have to face
up to facts in history which they don’t like and talk about them and debate them’ (cited in
Gayle and Khomami 2016), while vice chancellor L ­ ouise ­R ichardson wanted students to
‘appreciate the value of engaging with ideas they find objectionable … without forgetting
the traditions that bind us to our forebears’ (cited in Oxford University 2016).
‘Freedom of speech’ was cited as a reason for keeping the statue; yet, statues do not speak.
Other arguments cited the need to understand and respect history rather than erase it; yet,
such arguments have been thin on the ground when statues of Lenin, Hitler, Sadaam Hussein
and even Jimmy Savile have been removed from public spaces around the world. Indeed, the
toppling of statues is an act imbued with symbolism, and politicians and media have often
celebrated the act as symbolising change. As Rao observes,

It has been fascinating to watch pillars of the British establishment deride RMFO’s de-
mand for the removal of the Rhodes statue as an impingement on freedom of thought,
when in fact the British state and media have, in other contexts, treated the toppling of
statues as synonymous with the embrace of freedom … statues are never merely sym-
bolic, which is also to say that there is nothing mere about symbolism.
(Rao 2016)

This long history of statue-toppling as a symbolic act is precisely why it has formed a core
part of RMF’s call to action – something largely ignored by the movement’s critics.
As with many such arguments about ‘pampered’ students, the disregard for RMF’s griev-
ances and protests appears to be the alternative of ‘free’ speech. By characterising student
protest thus, those in power appear, instead, to be trying to silence debate and thus avoid

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 Ruth A. Deller

looking at the continued legacy of systemic privilege and oppression. RMFO spoke out
against this hypocrisy:

The new Vice-Chancellor, Louise Richardson, when asked about Rhodes Must Fall in
May 2016 responded by talking about ‘cosseted’ students and the need for free speech,
forgetting the fact that Rhodes Must Fall has always aimed to start a debate about col-
onisation, slavery and historical injustice at Oxford. It is the University that has tried
to shut down this debate. It is the University that has wanted to create a safe space – to
commemorate and thus valorise colonialism and slavery.
(RMFO 2016)

While I have thus far discussed attempts to make public spaces safer, there are examples of
activist groups carving out specific spaces to gather, be they online groups, or dedicated
rooms and buildings. Such congregating allows strategic visibility for marginalised com-
munities, as Kenney notes, ‘[v]isibility, in the context of gay and lesbian activism, has been
at the centre of collective attempts to confront the risk … Place works as both a physical
and social site of resistance and as a manifestation of shared meaning in specific contexts and
communities’ (2001: 15).
In the same vein, forms of activism such as public protests, marches, vigils and rallies are
often about creating temporal safer spaces in often unsafe public arenas. Through mobilis-
ing large numbers of people to gather with a common agenda, marches and other gatherings
attempt to reclaim space for those often marginalised by it. Chan (2004) notes that, for
example, the long-running women’s march Reclaim The Night ‘creates a space for women
only, where they feel strengthened by the sense of richness and connectedness with other
women. Women can have a sense of claiming the spaces which they have once thought of
as fearful such as walking the streets alone at night’ (p20. See also: Bhavnani and Coulson
1986; Hanhardt 2008).
Physical safe space can allow marginalised individuals to group together, both for mo-
bilisation to collective action and for collective care (Kenney 2001). It can provide sanc-
tuary and protection for victims of violence or respite and care for people experiencing
a mental health crisis. It provides those struggling with addictions a place to share their
experiences and support one another’s recovery. In many varied ways, physical safe space
offers a place of refuge, retreat and regrouping. Successful safer spaces enable users to live
more effectively in the wider world. For example, Garcia et al.’s (2015) work highlights
how safer spaces for black men who have sex with men, including specific spaces for those
with HIV, give users a sense of community while empowering them to live and thrive
when social and bureaucratic infrastructures fail them. Likewise, LGBTQ+ young people
studied by Richard Barry (2000) used their safer spaces as ways of exploring and own-
ing their identities and questioning the power and norms of the wider world, drawing
strength from each other.
Contrary to much of the criticism of safer spaces as places to ‘hide from ideas’ (Berg,
2015), safer spaces are not meant to be separate from the world around them; rather, they
offer space to return to and go from. Those who use safer spaces are usually fully aware of,
and engaged in, the so-called ‘real world’. It is the exposure to ‘real world’ prejudice, hatred,
violence, abuse and damage that makes safer spaces important as a way of tending to the
wounds caused by living day-to-day in that world.
In addition to the examples outlined in this chapter, there are many other issues surround-
ing the physical safety of spaces. At one of the workshops we ran in the USA, a university

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lecturer spoke about her fear for her physical safety and that of her colleagues and students
now that guns were to be allowed on campus (and, of course, both advocates and opponents
of guns use the rhetoric of safety and security to justify their position). As a Brit to whom
such a threat is entirely alien, I do not feel able to comment on how to stay safe in such a
context, although Firmin DeBrabander’s Do Guns Make Us Free? (2015) is an interesting
discussion of the issue from an American perspective.5
Whether through carving out rooms or venues for groups together, mobilising in public
for a march or calling for the gender, racial and ability inequalities in spaces to be addressed,
physical safer spaces can play an important role in supporting activists, mobilising the mar-
ginalised and, ultimately, securing changes to make all spaces safer for those who use them.

Setting the Boundaries of Safer Spaces

When it comes to safer-space practice, boundary setting is a crucial component, whether
we are talking about physical safer spaces such as specialist rooms, or more conceptual safer
spaces, such as online communities or activist groups. Establishing who can and cannot
‘come in’, and why, and agreeing what is and is not acceptable within the space contribute to
helping it feel safe for members.
In the workshops on safer spaces, one challenge many people spoke of was how to set
boundaries around safe space that were protective of those who needed the space without be-
ing hostile or unnecessarily exclusionary. Different groups adopted different strategies, from
focusing on participant identification – e.g. queer spaces with a policy of ‘if you identify as
queer, you’re welcome’ (and similar for women-only spaces), to specific boundary-marking
practices such as listing codes of conduct outside the entrance to venues and expecting en-
trants to abide by them. Many groups used identifiers such as flags and graphics to symbolise
the groups a space was designed for. Likewise, in online communities, boundary creation
occurred through practices such as users agreeing to terms and conditions, clearly worded
mission statements and, again, visual signifiers such as flags and icons.
Of course, while boundary creation serves ideally to protect members of a community,
it can sometimes be perceived as hostile or discriminatory, such as in the case of women/­
womyn-only spaces that exclude transwomen, the most famous example being the now
defunct Michigan Womyn’s Festival, which had a ‘womyn-born-womyn’ policy – meaning
those assigned female at birth. When it comes to enacting boundaries and process of inclu-
sion/exclusion, what is always at stake is power and identity. Excluding transwomen serves to
misgender them, and reinforces their status as marginalised outsiders. Cisgender women thus
exercise their power and privilege by excluding transwomen, which perhaps runs counter to
a sense of sisterhood or female solidarity.
In a similar vein, there have been numerous examples of feminist and queer spaces often
perpetuating other forms of ‘othering’ and exclusion through the dominance of white and
able-bodied individuals (Simons 1979; Lloyd 2001; Poynter and Washington 2005). Even at
one of the workshops we ran, where we thought we had established a culture of inclusiv-
ity which gave everyone a chance to speak, we encountered the challenges of intersecting
identities. A middle-aged white cisgender gay man clashed with two younger contributors
(one female and Asian; the other white and non-binary – their sexual orientations were not
disclosed). While their disagreement was merely on how to enact cultures of safer space,
drawing on their own experiences, they felt that he was using the power accorded to him by
his ethnicity, age and gender to speak over them and they became hostile towards him. He,
then, responded out of hurt, calling attention to his membership of a minority community

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(Irish Travellers) that had long suffered abuse on both an ethnic and class-based level and that
he, as a middle-aged gay man, had also suffered prejudices for this identity in ways that he
perceived younger queer people might not. Although we, as facilitators, attempted to miti-
gate the tension by allowing each of them to speak, the younger participants left the session
early and one of my colleagues spent significant time after the session talking with the man
concerned. This incident reminded us that, often, people’s experiences of discrimination and
hurt are never far from the surface, even in seemingly ‘safe’ environments.

Cultures of Safer Spaces

Regardless of whether we are referring to a physically bounded space or not, safer spaces
are about developing a culture in which members feel safe to belong, to speak, to gather, to
heal and to build from. All the decolonised campuses and gender-neutral toilets in the world
mean little if they are not accompanied by practices of inclusivity, respect and care.
Practices adopted in safer spaces vary according to context, but almost always involve
creating a set of guidelines or code of practice outlining the values of the space and the ex-
pectations of users. These, ideally, should be created by members of the group – although
in larger institutions such as schools or hospitals, this may be harder to achieve en masse and
may operate more at local levels (although campaigning for policy change is a huge part of
the work of radical politics).
Groups differ significantly in how they establish and practice their boundaries. For some
in the workshops, such as a young queer activist group, and an addiction recovery group,
these codes are pinned on walls, visibly reinforcing the formally presented boundaries and
values. Some of the teachers we spoke to asked their students to set the culture of lessons at
the start of the academic year – although varied in practice as to what extent this was for-
malised into a set of guidelines, code of conduct or similar.
However, there is more to creating and enacting cultures of safer space than writing
guidelines and policies. There are several practices groups can engage in to try and create this
safety. Some of these may be about applying legal or institutional regulations such as having
equality and diversity policies or complying with human rights legislation. But there are also
smaller actions, often on a local level, that can be adopted. No platforming, the adoption of
inclusive language and TWs are three examples discussed below.

No Platforming
One such action is the process of ‘no-platforming’ – a concept that has made headlines
in the 2010s as a result of the complaints that high-profile figures including writers Julie
Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulo, Australian second-wave feminist thinker Germaine Greer
and UK rights activist Peter Tatchell have been no-platformed and barred from speak-
ing at events, most notably at universities (Morris 2015, Sterne and Spargo 2015). No
platforming is a process whereby groups or individuals are denied permission to speak
in certain groups or venues. The National Union of Students (NUS), for example, has a
no-platform policy against extremist groups such as the British National Party and Hizb
ut-tahrir (NUS 2017).
There is a lot of misunderstanding about no platforming and speakers have sometimes
claimed that they have been ‘no platformed’ when in fact no policy exists. For example,
the oft-repeated claim that the NUS has an official no-platform policy against Julie ­Bindel,
because she ‘is vile’, is inaccurate (Lewis 2015). While individual university unions or

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groups within the NUS have separate no-platforming policies, the NUS as a whole has only
no-platformed organisations.
The safety issues with which no platforming is associated are also sometimes lost in public
debates. A 2015 Cardiff University students’ petition to stop Germaine Greer giving a guest
lecture due to her antitransgender views (among other things, Greer has said that transgender
women are not women (see McMahon 2015)) was all-too-often presented as a ‘campaign to
silence her’ (Morris 2015) rather than a legitimate criticism of her views on transpeople. The
event was not cancelled, although others have been. An event on ‘free speech’ featuring Julie
Bindel and Milo Yiannopoulos at Manchester Students’ Union (Sterne and Spargo 2015) was
stopped because the Union felt that their ‘views could incite hatred against both transpeople
and women who have experienced sexual violence’ and breach the safe space policy (Man-
chester Students’ Union 2015).
Criticisms of these protests almost always refer to the importance of ‘freedom of speech’.
Spiked Deputy Editor Tom Slater calls no platforming ‘a palpable threat to the founding
principles of the academy, and, by connection, democratic society’ (2016). However, one of
the fundamental problems with the deification of ‘free speech’ is that speech is rarely, if ever,
free. Structural inequalities continue to promote certain voices over others and therefore an
alleged ‘freedom’ inevitably means that the loudest voices tend to be those with certain priv-
ileges. Tatchell, Greer, Bindel and Yianoppolous all have access to a range of platforms via
the status conferred on them by their celebrity (as well as age, ethnicity, career background
and other factors); academics have status conferred on them by their roles and qualifications
and, of course, male, white, middle-aged cisgender and heterosexual voices remain the loud-
est in many contexts. As Ahmed puts it,

Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or when-
ever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative
contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power. I often describe diversity work
as mechanical work. We know a lot about the mechanisms of power when we try to
transform the norms embedded in a situation.
(Ahmed 2015)

Arguments about ‘freedom of speech’ need to also acknowledge the structural inequalities
and systemic injustices and abuses that facilitate the need for ‘safer spaces’ in the first place.
Often, such valorisation of freedom of speech merely legitimises the rights of racists, homo-
phobes and others to perpetuate prejudicial ideologies by presenting them merely as part of a
‘debate’ – and campaigners seeking to challenge this prejudice through protest, no platform-
ing or other forms of creating safe space are often characterised as bullying or unreasonable.
Such discourse only serves to further disempower those voices:

Transphobia and anti-trans statements should not be treated as just another viewpoint
that we should be free to express at a happy diversity table … When you have dialogue or
debate with those who wish to eliminate you from the conversation (because they do not
recognise what is necessary for your survival or because they don’t even think your ex-
istence is possible), then dialogue and debate becomes another technique of elimination.
A refusal to have some dialogues and some debates can thus be a key tactic for survival.
The presentation of trans activists as a lobby and as bullies rather than as minorities who
are constantly being called upon to defend their right to exist is a mechanism of power.
(Ahmed 2015)

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Inclusive Language
Part of the issue of ‘freedom of speech’, apart from the views being aired and those doing the
speaking, represents the problematic power structures of language itself. Making languages
‘safer’ by encouraging the use of inclusive terms and by identifying and ‘calling out’ slurs and
discriminatory language has long been a part of radical politics. As language expresses how we
perceive the world around us and communicate with one another, it is a powerful tool for mem-
bers of radical political movements. The transformation of language often takes place when
changes of practice adopted by small groups are disseminated into the wider world through rep-
etition, media and other communicative practices (see Cameron 1990; McKenzie-Mohr 2014).
What happens to language once it becomes more widely spread is never certain: ‘Once
new vocabulary takes hold beyond its movement – which is, after all, the intention – it is
taken up and activated by those with varying goals and interests and it is often reshaped as it
is used more widely’ (Devault 2014: 24). Changes in practice that become helpful to margin-
alised groups, such as the adoption of gender-neutral phrases, or the removal from everyday
language of racist slurs – to name just two examples – still operate within existing social
relations. Thus, there is no real control over how the initial disruption and transformation
will be used – it may not achieve its original aims.
It is also important to remember the varying social and cultural contexts in which
language has played a part and the contestations that result from deliberate disruptions.
In recent years, the phrase ‘person (or people) of colour’ (POC) has become increasingly
widespread as a catch-all term for people from a range of ethnic backgrounds. In the
USA, this term has become widely adopted in radical politics, first spread online before
becoming commonplace in the media and other cultural outlets. In the UK, there has
been a mixed response to the term. Indeed, in the latter part of the twentieth century, a
lot of work was done in public discourse to alter the language used to talk about ethnicity.
The term ‘coloured’ was denounced for its insensitive othering and the homogenisation
of different minority ethnicities under an unhelpful blanket term. In its place, it became
much more commonplace to refer to somebody as ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Asian’ or ‘mixed-race’
(although these categories, too, are highly reductive and imprecise as well as excluding a
range of identities that do not fit neatly into them). Other terms emerged in public dis-
course to deal with diversity: ‘ethnic minorities’ and, more recently ‘BAME (Black, Asian
and Minority Ethnic)’. Certainly, in discourse produced by UK businesses, large organisa-
tions and governments, these terms are far more prevalent than ‘POC’ or its variants. We
could make a similar point about the use of ‘handicapped’. In the USA, this is used in ev-
eryday life to refer to people with disabilities; yet, it is deemed offensive in the UK. So we
must be mindful that when we are using language that is seen to be inclusive or acceptable
in one culture, it may not always travel well.

Trigger warnings
The third of the most frequently debated aspects of safer spaces in recent years has been the
phenomenon of ‘trigger warnings’ or ‘content notes’ – a system of providing warnings for
content that might be deemed ‘triggering’ in different ways. The process of ‘triggering’
refers to something that might enact a response in trauma sufferers, such as panic attacks,
flashbacks or other unwanted symptoms, although its critics tend to characterise the term
as also encompassing hurt, offence or anger (Halberstam 2014; Lukianoff and Haidt 2015).

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TWs are commonplace on many parts of the Internet, including blogs, Tumblr, feminist
and LGBTQ+ sites and fan fiction archives, where content may be prefigured with a list
of TWs (e.g. for rape, violence, racist slurs). Content can also be tagged in some platforms,
such as Instagram, Twitter or Tumblr allowing users either to actively search out that con-
tent or blacklist it (e.g. tags such as #edchat which deal with conversations around eating
disorders).
Not all online environments use TWs, of course. However, many outlets offer other clues
as to the content of their articles. Jezebel, for example, does not use TWs, but ‘our headlines
and intro text are meant to clearly convey where the content of each post is heading’ ( Jessica
Coen in Moore, 2014). The reason TWs have become part of a wider media debate, how-
ever, is primarily due to stories about their use (or lack of ) in education.
The use of TWs has been criticised for infantalising students, giving them an excuse to
avoid complicated subjects: much of this criticism refers specifically to using TWs for liter-
ature or art (even though ‘trigger warnings’ are widely accepted when applied to film, TV
and video games, suggesting a perception of ‘harm’ that is different when applied to ‘high’
culture as opposed to ‘popular’ culture).
In the safer-space workshops, there was a range of practice in this area. One queer activ-
ism group used signs in venues detailing both their inclusion policy and ‘warnings’ for the
kind of topics that would be discussed at their events (in a similar way to warnings for strobe
lighting in concert venues). A blogger listed TWs before their posts and always provided
a ‘more’ button so that users had to actively click through to read the article rather than
coming across potentially triggering content. One psychology lecturer told students at the
start of term when they would be discussing topics such as rape, mental health, etc., so that
students could be prepared and were told that if the issue was ‘live’ for them, they had free-
dom to either not attend that week or leave if needed. A film studies tutor offered statements
in module handbooks about which films on the module contained sensitive or potentially
upsetting material. A secondary school teacher did not use TWs but did set parameters with
their class on how students would treat each other and handle talking about difficult issues
at the start of the academic year.
Participants discussed the complexity of personal triggers – at one event, a wall of post-
its revealed dozens of potential triggers from the obvious ones such as rape to perhaps more
unusual ones including seeing people eat meat. There were discussions about potential
­options  – databases of TWs that users could look up before reading a book or attending
an event; only providing warnings for common triggers such as rape/sexual assault, racism
or mental health issues; giving informal warnings but without labelling them as a ‘trigger
warning’ per se.
Others do not have a specific policy themselves, but allow students or group members
to create their own position on warnings: ‘I’ve never required student writers to use trigger
warnings, but I’ve kept the space open for them to respect the requests of their classmates …
a sizable number were very excited to have the conversation, something they reported had
been mocked by other creative writing professors’ (Lawlor in Milks 2014).
Of course, what is really at stake when it comes to establishing safer-space culture is not
whether or not TWs are adopted – or any other specific practice. The issue is about to what
extent communities and groups are inclusive, which almost always relates to the way power
operates within such groups. For groups to be truly radical, they need to create a culture
that celebrates, includes and listens to the most marginalised members of that group and that
ultimately prioritises people over principles.

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Safer Spaces in an Unsafe World

As I have discussed, there is a lot of hostility to ‘safer space’ practices. However, asking peo-
ple to simply accept that ‘life is triggering’ and criticising those who ‘take offence’, protest
against injustice or challenge oppressive and discriminatory aspects of culture simply seeks to
undermine their voices and agency. Such rhetoric only serves to reinforce a message of con-
forming to the status quo and accepting the inequalities of life. As Liv Little, editor-in-chief
of online magazine gal-dem, puts it,

I don’t get what they want to happen. Do they want people to be quiet and suck it up?
Do they want people to have breakdowns and be really unhappy and accept a political
system that doesn’t represent them?… A lot of offensive stuff is happening. Why should
people not be offended? People are offended but they’re using that feeling of being of-
fended to bring about change. Things are so dire sometimes that it’s necessary. If I want
to carve out a safe space, why shouldn’t I?’
(In Nicholson 2016)

Arguments made against safe spaces all too often delegitimise the voices of the people that
need those spaces. Asking people to simply ‘grow up’ and ‘get over themselves’ reduces their
experience to something that is trivial, childish or inconsequential. Often those who use the
argument of free speech do not understand that speech is rarely free – and that platforms and
power are not available equally to all. Many of those clamouring for safer spaces are simply
searching for a space in which they can be seen and heard. When their experiences, sen-
sitivities, traumas and identities are not only questioned, but rejected, their voices become
harder and harder to hear. Wrongly accused by the power of controlling the parameters of
communication, they become (or remain) controlled, subdued and disempowered.
Those seeking ‘safer space’ are often dismissed as demanding, oversensitive or ‘special
snowflakes’ (Nicholson 2016) afraid of life. However, as Roxanne Gay points out, those
who make these criticisms often are those ‘who are able to take safety for granted’ (2015).
Of course, the irony is that critics of such practices often act even more offended and hurt,
such as the famous example of President Donald Trump complaining on Twitter after Mike
Pence was booed during a performance of Hamilton that ‘The Theater must always be a safe
and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike
Pence. Apologize!’ (Trump, cited in Nagesh 2016).
This example may demonstrate that emotions run high on both ‘sides’ of these debates. At
one workshop focused specifically on higher education and safer spaces, I was in a peer group
discussing the Germaine Greer Cardiff example mentioned earlier in this chapter. This peer
group comprised a mixture of genders, ages and races, but we all shared the view that we
would be uncomfortable with inviting Greer to speak on topics relating to gender and sexual
identity, particularly where it was likely to make a significant number of the students feel
uncomfortable. We thought that it would be wise to consult with students first and either
to not invite Greer at all, or to ensure her position was countered. To us, it seemed a similar
situation to inviting Nick Griffin (the former British National Party leader) to a debate on
immigration or race.
However, the moderator of the session – a woman whose political and academic life had
coincided largely with the second-wave feminist movement – became quite agitated and
upset when talking to us about the situation and our perspective on it. She did not agree
that students’ opinions should be taken into account here because of a combination of the

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importance of the issues at hand and the status of Greer. Interestingly, she had not been
this strident when it came to discussing TWs, sexism or other aspects of safer spaces earlier
in the session – it was clearly this particular debate that struck a raw nerve for her. For this
woman, a lot was at stake emotionally. Reflecting on it later, it seemed to me like much
of this emotion came from the fear that the battles won by the second feminist movement
and the influence of Greer and her contemporaries at that time could be lost or forgotten
amidst the controversy around Greer’s more recent statements around transidentity.
This example illustrated starkly to me that what is at stake is not a matter of intellectual
debate. Were that the case, both second-wave feminists and student protesters would no
doubt realise that they share a desire to challenge the idea of binary gender norms and es-
sentialist ideas about masculinity and femininity – and may well mutually conclude that it is
possible to do this while also supporting the rights and experiences of trans and non-binary
individuals. But it is not about that – is about the affective experience of power, access and in-
clusion. The students in Cardiff protested Greer because her statements deny the existence of
transpeople and affording her a platform gives her power and could be seen to reinforce her
views. For my colleague, the issue was also exclusion – protests against Greer were felt as a
rejection of her generation of activists.
Just as in the example of the clash between the middle-aged gay man and the younger
female and non-binary individuals mentioned earlier in the chapter, both ‘sides’ bring with
them a plethora of felt experiences of hurt, inequality and struggle. Both groups have wres-
tled with powerlessness – and when they perceive a threat to what little power they do have,
this causes an affective response. Indeed, this is true of most situations discussed in this
chapter. Those who seek to retain statues of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford are as motivated by
affect as the members of RMF: there may be affective ties to the past, perhaps, or maybe to
architectural aesthetics. But the biggest issue at stake here is, of course, power. When activists
attempt to claim safe space for themselves, be that through taking over a room, marching
through a city or calling for a statue to be removed, they are threatening the status of those
in power – and the powerful will have an emotional response.
Safer spaces, as with most aspects of radical politics, cannot be discussed merely as a matter
of intellectual reasoning – these things matter to people because they have an impact on our
physical, emotional and mental well-being and are often embedded within the cultural, legal
and societal frameworks that govern all our lives. Without understanding each other’s lived
experience, we cannot meaningfully effect change. As Paulo Freire puts it:

revolutionary leaders commit many errors and miscalculations by not taking into ac-
count something so real as the people’s view of the world: a view which explicitly and
implicitly contains their concerns, their doubts, their hopes, their way of seeing the
leaders, their perceptions of themselves and of the oppressors, their religious beliefs
­(almost always syncretic), their fatalism, their rebellious reactions.
(2000: 182)

I am not saying that people’s hurts and fears justify their behaviours and attitudes. However,
it is only through remembering both our humanity and that of the people or groups we may
be in dispute with that we can ever possibly hope to achieve change. Let us take heed of
Freire’s reminder that, in order for our struggles to have meaning:

the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity, becoming turn oppres-
sors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both … Who are better

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prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive

society?… Who can better understand the necessity of liberation?
(2000: 45)

Even within radical groups, there can be dissent and members can hurt one another. The
history of feminism, for example, is littered with heartbreaking examples of racism and
transphobia. No safer-space policy is perfect. We will cause distress – what matters is our
commitment to one another and to changing our practices and attitudes where necessary.
Truitt argues that the term ‘accountable space’ may sometimes be more helpful:

Accountability means being responsible to oneself and each other for our own words. It
means entering a space with good intentions but understanding that we all screw up and
need to accept responsibility for our mistakes. It means being open to being called out.
It means acknowledging when others are triggered and when we feel pain and working
to learn and grow from this experience. And it requires something incredibly difficult,
a trust in those we share a space with that their intentions are good, that they mean well
just like we do, that we are all in a process of learning and growing and that making
mistakes is part of how this happens.
(Truitt 2009)

To create a truly radical politics means caring for one another – and it also means looking
after ourselves. The work of social justice can be emotionally and physically draining and
we will inevitably get knocked and bruised along the way. Therefore, we must remember
Lorde’s assertion that ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that
is an act of political warfare’ (1988: 131). Keeping ourselves safe will help strengthen us to
protect, and advocate for, others. Meg-John Barker, in a helpful comic dedicated to self-care,
lists mantras we should speak to ourselves, including:

• Looking after myself means that I survive in a world that doesn’t want people like me
to survive.
• Caring for myself demonstrates that people like me are valuable even if we are being
treated as though we were disposable.
• Self-care gives me the energy to resist (2017: 4).

Ultimately, to create a truly safe space is to become skilled at radical care, radical kindness
and radical love – of oneself, of one another and of the world which we live in: ‘And this
fight, because of the purpose given it by the oppressed, will actually constitute an act of love
opposing the lovelessness which lies at the heart of the oppressors’ violence’ (Freire 2000:45).
What is really at stake here, of course, is the cultivation of communities that are inclusive
and supportive – that equip people to fight for their place in the wider world, to seek justice
and enact change. Things like TWs, no platforming and diversity policies are merely mecha-
nisms that can be utilised within communities to enact their principles in practice. Inevitably,
we will cause one another harm in some way, whether intentional or not. As Harris helpfully
reminds us, ‘There’s virtually no way to create a room of two people that doesn’t include the
reproduction of some unequal power relation, but there’s also no way to engage in politics by
yourself ’ (2015). Creating a supportive culture is far more important than which techniques
are utilised in that creation. What is central is that everyone wants to feel that they matter;
that they can be heard; that they can have some power to impact the world around them.

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Notes
1 None of these events were recorded onto audio or video and so I discuss these examples by refer-
ring to things that were discussed in the sessions and to notes made by myself, my co-organisers
and participants themselves during each event (for example, there were a number of exercises in
which participants wrote things on post-its or flip charts), but I am unable to provide verbatim
quotes from individuals.
2 It is worth noting that the issues around safer spaces are not only debated differently in different
outlets (as one might expect, given the age and political leanings of different audiences), but that
media coverage also differs according to country. In addition, this is not an issue we can easily
frame in terms of left/right or liberal/conservative. For example, in the USA, much of the antag-
onistic discourse comes from right leaning movements, including the so-called ‘alt right’, whilst
in the UK, both left- and right-wing commenters have been notably critical of some safer-space
practices.
3 Of course, whilst there is insufficient room in this chapter to cover this area, environmental con-
cern and practices to conserve the planet represent another form of enacting safer space.
4 As this volume went to press, in August 2017, the issue of statues in public spaces made the news
once more. Following the decision to remove a statue of Confederate army general Robert E
Lee from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia, a protest against the decision by a group of far right
activists calling themselves ‘Unite the Right’ made news worldwide as a protestor drove a vehicle
into a group of antifascist demonstrators, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring
nineteen others.
5 It is also worth noting that practices ostensibly designed to make spaces safe from violence, such
as security checking for weapons and explosives, have all too often been used as excuses for racial
profiling, discrimination and unlawful arrests, violence and even killings – as the Black Lives
Matter movement (among others) emphasises. As Hanhardt puts it, ‘The increased attention paid
to security has revealed the disparate understandings of threat held among those considered repre-
sentative of and those marginal to the national body politic’ (2008: 62).

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 2.7
FIGHTING TO WIN
Radical Antipoverty Organising
A. J. Withers for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)

Introduction
The rich are consolidating global wealth. The world’s richest 1% owns half of global wealth
and the richest 10% owns 88% of global wealth. At the same time, the poorest 50% of the
world’s population owns below 1% of global wealth (Credit Suisse AG Research Institute
2015). But, even in the context of neo-liberal globalisation, poor people have made im-
portant gains. In South Africa, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign has prevented
hundreds, if not thousands, of evictions in Cape Town (van Erdewijk and Dubel 2012).
In Québec, Canada, over 1,000 Algerians gained immigration status through a specialised
process that was fought for by the Action Committee for Non-Status Algerians and No One
is Illegal (Lowry and Nyers 2003). Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) has won
7.5 million hectares of land for poor people (Friends of the MST, n.d.). A coalition of, largely,
working-class people of colour in New York City won oversight of the police and the legal
prohibition of racial profiling (DRUM, 2013).
Radical antipoverty organising is hard work and involves fighting an uphill battle; never-
theless, it has and can continue to win important gains for poor people and is an integral part
of the global struggle for social justice. In this chapter, I will discuss some of the strengths
and difficulties of poor people’s organising, primarily focusing on the lessons learned from
the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP). Using OCAP as an example, I will discuss
the importance of addressing both individual and community needs, using disruption and
resisting demobilisation.
For twenty-five years, OCAP has organised poor communities using anticapitalist direct
action in Ontario, Canada. OCAP emerged out of a province-wide coalition demanding
a raise in social assistance rates during a provincial election campaign. At a protest, John
Clarke, who would go on to become an OCAP founder, called the sitting Premier the ‘pov-
erty premier’ which stuck and helped swing the election (McCuaig 1990) in favour of a sup-
posedly social democratic party. The New Democratic Party (NDP) government enacted a
series of austerity measures which were profoundly detrimental to poor communities. While
much of the Left failed to take action against the NDP government, believing this was the
best that could be done, OCAP became a scrappy group unafraid to take direct action to im-
prove the lives of poor people. OCAP quickly became a Toronto-based organisation rather

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than a province-wide coalition. OCAP is an intergenerational, racially diverse (although

majority white) organisation made up of primarily poor and working-class people.

What Is Radical Antipoverty Organising?

A variety of organisations use the term ‘antipoverty’ to describe the work they do. The World
Bank (2016), for example, says ‘our dream is a world free of poverty’ even though it inflicts
poverty and misery around the world, particularly in the Global South (Klein 2007; Bateman
2010). There is nothing radical about this kind of ‘antipoverty’ work. ­Radical means ‘from
the root’ – fighting poverty at its root causes. Indeed, there is nothing ­a ntipoverty about
this work. Anticapitalist theory is fundamental to radical poor people’s organising because
capitalism both creates and relies on poverty. Dixon (2014) argues: ‘­capitalism is a system of
social relations based on dispossession, exploitation, and alienation for the benefit of a small
minority’ (67). Capitalism creates poverty and exploits workers. Consequently, groups actu-
ally working to eliminate poverty must also be anticapitalist.
Anticapitalist theory, however, has often been reductive – holding that the elimination of
capitalism is the fundamental or only change needed to end oppression. Opposing capital-
ism but upholding and/or supporting white supremacy, patriarchy, disablism, heterosexism,
cissism or other forms of oppression is not radical. Radical antipoverty organising emerges
out of the understanding that oppressions are interlocked. Fellows and Razack (1997) write
that this ‘means that the systems of oppression come into existence in and through one an-
other’ (335). They argue that sexism and racism enable class exploitation; I would also add
that disablism, heterosexism and cissism are interlocked with and enable class exploitation.
While eliminating the capitalist system is essential for eliminating poverty, it will not elimi-
nate the suffering of the groups of people who are currently poor. Other forms of oppression
must also be eliminated. It will also not fully eliminate the relations that create oppression.
Bannerji (1995) observes that oppression, like capitalism, is the result of social and economic
relations between people. It is only by ending these particular relations that they can be
eliminated.
Because oppressions are interlocked and relational, radical antipoverty organising often
involves organising around issues that might not usually be considered antipoverty work.
For instance, the OCAP often does anticolonial, migrant justice, antipolice brutality,
­antiviolence against women, antiwar and disability justice organising. This is also why Piven
and Cloward (1979), whose influential book Poor People’s Movements: Why they Succeed, How
they Fail I will be discussing extensively for its contribution to antipoverty theory and prac-
tice, dedicated a chapter to the Civil Rights Movement, although its primary issue was race
rather than class. The concepts of interlocking and relational oppression help frame contem-
porary poor people’s movements and the work that they do in areas that are not typically
considered antipoverty organising.
Of course, poor people do not generally join organisations with a pre-existing radical anal-
ysis of oppression or capitalism (and developing anti-oppression politics is a lifelong venture).
There can be significant tensions between diverse groups of poor people. One OCAP organ-
iser explains this attitude: ‘So if you are poor and you’re white it’s not the government’s fault
that you’re poor, it is that working class white people have their jobs stolen by immigrants’
(Henaway in Fortier, 2005, p. 97). In addition to migrant bashing, n ­ on-Indigenous people
often blame Indigenous people for their poverty because they perceive Indigenous people to
be receiving ‘extra’ resources (Acharya and Scott 2016). However, some poor people benefit
from the oppression of others. While Indigenous people aren’t the cause of non-Indigenous

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people’s poverty in settler states, non-Indigenous people are complicit in the injustices in-
flicted on Indigenous people, including poverty. Franz Fanon (2004/1968) demonstrates how
the working class in colonial states have an interest in maintaining colonialism, rather than
in aligning themselves with Third World workers. Colonial relations benefit people who are
a part of the colonising group, including those most disadvantaged in that group. In settler
states like Canada, settlers benefit not only from the exploitation of resources and labour in
colonised states but also from the very land and water used to sustain their existence.
Developing class consciousness among poor people who have settler, immigration and/or
racial privilege helps enable them to see their poverty as a result of capitalist social relations
rather than other poor people. It is necessary to shift the blame from migrants, Indigenous
people and other scapegoated groups who are also exploited and oppressed by these rela-
tions. Because of the injustices of colonialism and the subjugation of colonised people, an
­a nticolonial/decolonial politic is necessary for antipoverty organising in colonising states to
truly be radical.
Furthermore, it is with a broad community base that movements have strong founda-
tions to withstand decline or attack in to push ruling relations into concessions. Our work
is also based on the idea that OCAP organisers are a part of the communities in which we
organise – primarily as poor people, but also as neighbours and workers. We aren’t outsiders
and we know we are no better than the people we are organising with. We do not think
we know best what someone needs but we do acknowledge that we have particular kinds of
skills and knowledge that are an asset. Most of our organisers and members are or have been
on social assistance or low wage workers and we have an intimate understanding of how the
system works and the impact it has on people. The people who we are organising with are
not our ‘clients’; they are people with whom we are united in struggle.
Furthermore, radical antipoverty work links local struggles to broader global justice
movements. OCAP believes: ‘While continuing the colonization and genocide of Indige-
nous people here, Canada plays an imperial role on an international scale. It is integral that
our organisation chooses to support resistance to imperialism in Afghanistan, Palestine and
across the world’ (Clarke, 2010). In addition to OCAP’s organising work within ­a ntiwar
and anti-imperialism struggles in Toronto, OCAP has organised ‘reciprocal solidarity’
­(Fortier 2005: 52) demonstrations in support of disabled activists fighting institutional abuses
in Greece, tenants in New Orleans and South Africa, tent city residents in Japan, workers in
South Korea and Sri Lanka, and poor and disabled people in the UK and Palestine. When
OCAP was facing intense repression and criminalisation, solidarity actions to support us
were held by groups in Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Japan, the US and UK.
Finally, radical movements fight to win.1 Social movements, including antipoverty organ-
ising, are vehicles for change. If they have no intention to bring about meaningful change,
there is no reason for them to exist. Indeed, symbolic organising that simply works to register
dissent can impede the change that it purportedly advocates. In OCAP, ‘the extraordinary
durability of notions such as token protest and sedate accommodation have proven to be a
massive obstacle for us’ (Clarke 2003, p. 501). There are long-standing critiques of symbolic
protest or what Ryan (1998) calls protesting as ‘a form of catharsis’, that alleviates protestors
from their guilt ‘without posing a threat’ (139). An example is when a group of artists pieced
together a scarf they hoped would wrap around a square Toronto block to ‘raise awareness’
about homelessness. They got to feel very good about themselves but no change would come
of it. Some antiwar protests also fall into this category: people passively march through the
streets with no intention to make change but to feel better about themselves for having ‘done
something’. Drawing on and supporting Churchill’s (1998/1986) Pacifism as Pathology, Ryan

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continues: ‘clearly the state allows us to engage in these actions because they’re harmless or,
worse, because they reinforce the popular myth of Canadian democracy’ (140). Reinforcing
this myth is not benign. It works to legitimise and uphold ruling relations.2
Sometimes, however, what would be considered a symbolic protest in some circum-
stances is not in others. OCAP and other organisations who oppose symbolic protest for its
own sake may sometimes use symbolic protest strategically as part of a larger campaign that
is designed to win real gains.

The OCAP Organising Model

The ‘OCAP model’ combines mass mobilising with direct action casework as our way of
hooking the collective and individual, the systemic and specific, into one another. Mass mo-
bilising is the organisation of campaigns to win our collective demands. These campaigns
are generally longer term struggles (from a few months to years) and primarily focused on
increasing social assistance rates and shelter (including increased emergency shelter beds and
for homeless people as well as decent, affordable, accessible housing). This model evolved
out of work being done by the London (Ontario) Union of Unemployed Workers which
developed ways to respond to the treatments of poor people by, primarily, social assistance.
One of the Union’s founders, John Clarke, was also a founder of OCAP. The model was
also influenced by Wal Hannington’s (1936) organising accounts in the UK. After OCAP
was established, members found Poor People’s Movements by Piven and Cloward (1979) to
be a helpful resource. It focuses on historical poor people’s movements, particularly during
the Great Depression and welfare rights and civil rights organising in the 1960s. This work
helped solidify OCAP’s theoretical understandings of poor people’s organising and commit-
ment to coupling direct action casework with mass mobilising.
While the campaigns have shifted over the years, they generally prioritise issues of in-
come and shelter. OCAP believes that we can’t simply fight for sweeping social change,
including our demands of at least a 55% increase in social assistance and housing for all and
ultimately the overthrow of capitalism and oppression, without dealing with poor people’s
immediate needs. At the same time, only dealing with someone’s immediate needs, like a
welfare benefit or unreturned damage deposit, doesn’t do anything to change the systems
that keep poor people down. The way that we fight for people’s immediate individual needs
is through direct action casework. I will primarily focus on our direct action casework in
this section and discuss mass mobilising in the next.
The success of direct action casework, like all of our work, relies on the strategy of dis-
ruption. Poor people’s organising has particular limitations because we have so few resources
and so little individual power. There are a number of barriers to organising poor people.
John Clarke (1992) writes ‘oppression never fails to leave its mark on its victims’ (216) and
this impacts all aspects of poor people’s lives, including organising. Organising can be dif-
ficult with any group of people but with poor people, the lack of resources, access to elites
and exclusion from the political process intensify this difficulty. All of these barriers are
related to the social and economic marginalisation of poor people and result in poor people
not having ‘normal’ mechanisms to affect change. Consequently, poor people have to take
­‘non-normative collective action’ (Piven and Cloward 1991, also see 1979).
Because of our lack of resources and individual power, Alinsky (1971) argues, ‘Have-Nots
must build power from their own flesh and blood’ (127). Piven and Cloward (1979) main-
tain that collective disruption is the only way that poor people can win concessions from
ruling relations precisely because of their social status. It is through the collective refusal to

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cooperate with institutional life that poor people’s power can be enacted. Or as an ally of
OCAP said: ‘unionized workers can assert their strength by not being where their employer
wants them to be, but the poor can only have power by being where they’re not supposed
to be’ (in Clarke 2010, p. n.p.). Piven argues that ‘poor people’s cooperation tends to be
kept in place by rules’ rather than with economic power in an employer-employee relation-
ship (Miller and Piven 2012). Social assistance rules, tenancy rules, immigration rules and
criminal rules all work to regulate poor people and it is in breaking these rules that poor
people can make material gains. Poor people’s power is generated, then, through collective
disruption.
Disruption has been the cornerstone of OCAP’s strategy and tactics and, I would argue, this
is necessary for any antipoverty organising that hopes to be effective. Disruption can take any
number of forms. For OCAP, it has included the crashing of fancy governing party fundraisers
or press events – making speeches about the injustices the government is perpetuating, putting
forward our demands and, often, taking some food for ourselves. Because food, and the lack of
it, is so significant to poor people’s lives, we have disrupted normal grocery store operations by
protesting outside, bringing the tills to a halt and stealing food. We have occupied government
offices, city council, political party headquarters, the Provincial Cabinet Office and Minister’s
offices, refusing to allow business-as-usual to take place. We even shut down the tenancy
­tribunal – throwing a wrench in the government’s eviction machine for a day.
In the early 2000s, we engaged in a campaign of economic disruption designed to tar-
get the corporate backers of the Conservative government that had viciously attacked poor
people – including the criminalisation of panhandling and cutting social assistance rates by
22%. By that point, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly workers, had marched in the
streets against this government to no effect. Our logic was that if the Premier would not
be responsive to the people, we would attack the businesses that supported him and make it
too expensive to keep him in power. Along with groups across the province, we organised a
week of economic disruption around Ontario. The night before OCAP’s action in Toronto,
which involved a large snake march through the financial district, the Premier resigned.
In 2004, OCAP launched a campaign for full entitlement of social assistance benefits. We
sought to disrupt the system by using it against itself and strategically seeking ‘non-reformist
reforms’ (Gorz 1987). We gave people information about what they were entitled to and
backed them up with direct action casework or mass demonstrations as needed. Quickly,
we focused on the Special Diet benefit which gave people with health-related dietary needs
extra money for food. Our aim was to force a raise in social assistance rates by creating
a crisis in the system. We successfully created a crisis and multiple moves on the part of
both the municipal and provincial governments to curb or eliminate the benefit were de-
feated through mass organising. Through a variety of procedural changes between 2005 and
2011, the ­government was able to limit how and for what people got the Special Diet; never-
theless, the campaign won hundreds of millions of dollars for people on social assistance – a
win that is still paying out. Today, more than 100,000 people get some Special Diet money
than did before we began the campaign, totalling an increase of about $200 million a year.
Disruption as a tactic and a strategy cannot be divorced from the context that it is to be used in.
Strategic and appropriate organisational responses to local context are necessary for poor people’s
organisation’s legitimacy, relevance and success. Context also informs what groups can achieve.
Piven and Cloward (1979) argue ‘what was won must be judged by what was possible’ (p. xiii). In
a world in which social programmes are under attack and privatisation is rampant, keeping some-
thing (like the Special Diet) or diminishing the severity of a cut can be an important victory. In
a different social context, however, that significant win could be a sign of ineffectual organising.

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Social movements, including poor people’s movements, sometimes appear to explode out
of nowhere – this is very much about the context being organised in. Piven and Cloward
(1979) argue that movements spontaneously emerge. However, I would argue this under-
standing of movements as spontaneous works to make organising less effective. I adopt the
view that spontaneity is, rather, ‘properly understood as a rupture’ (Thorburn et al. 2012,
n.p.). While there are moments when movements erupt, triggered by some form of so-
cial breakdown, movements are sustained by organising. Indeed, ‘most struggles’, Choudry
(2015) argues, ‘emerge from the hard work of organising, incremental learning, lineages of
earlier movements, and efforts to organise together’ (9). Indeed, community rootedness is
not particularly important if one thinks that movements emerge spontaneously. However,
in rejecting the idea that movements emerge in out of spontaneous vacuums, based on the
historical and material evidence, organising and organisations become necessary and com-
munity rootedness is essential to both.
To be clear, while our model is amazing and it works a lot of the time, it is not a magic
bullet; it works for us but won’t necessarily work for other radical antipoverty organising.
While we have a basic framework, our organising adapts and evolves. Imposing a stagnant
and romanticised model is not a good organising strategy. While there are many lessons
that can be gleaned from our twenty-five years, the OCAP model of organising cannot be
applied like a cookie cutter.
Other organisations have worked to build on the OCAP model in ways that are ap-
propriate to their own communities. Groups including No One Is Illegal, a migrant jus-
tice group in a number of cities in Canada, and the London (England) Coalition Against
Poverty (LCAP) and Sudbury (Canada) Coalition Against Poverty (S-CAP) went on to
develop their own forms of casework. Their models were largely based on our work but de-
signed to be responsive to and appropriate for the communities in which they work while
also doing mass mobilising. Both No One Is Illegal and Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty
chose to use the term support work rather than casework (Kinsman, forthcoming; Walia
2013). Gary Kinsman (forthcoming), a founder of S-CAP, reports that they chose the term
‘support work’ in order to avoid ‘the clinical sound of “case” work’. Montreal’s Committee
for Non-Status Algerians and No One Is Illegal had a profound victory, as I mentioned
earlier. Immigration status was won for over 1,000 non-status Algerians through a mass
regularisation campaign (Lowry and Nyers 2003). This went on to influence OCAP’s mass
casework actions around the Special Diet and our thinking about group casework rather
than individual casework. This, I would argue, is evidence of the very real and active stra-
tegic conversation that happens between allied groups within the movement. This strategic
conversation has worked to strengthen casework in several cities, making not only each
organisation stronger but social justice movements more effective. In other words, while
OCAP has an organising model, we adjust and adapt it based on the social and political
contexts we find ourselves in.
Direct action casework bypasses formal legal appeal mechanisms.3 We refuse to work
through (often incredibly slow) official channels that are designed to keep poor people in
line. Instead, we use collective disruption to force the system to capitulate to us quickly.
What seem like rigid and unmovable bureaucratic structures to individual poor people can
become flexible and accommodating when groups of poor people collectively demand. In
OCAP, we reject passivity; we refuse to be submissive. Action is essential for us for a number
of reasons, not in the least because it is the only way that change can ever truly be won. Fur-
thermore, poor people are taught to be meek, to accept our lot; we refuse this role in OCAP
and view it as a purposeful construction in order to maintain the status quo.

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Sometime around 1999, welfare bureaucrats in Toronto initiated a simple policy shift.
From that point onwards, if OCAP brought a case forward, it was dealt with as quickly and
as quietly as possible. If our demand could be legally granted, it was. Almost overnight, we
went from welfare case actions being a relatively routine event in OCAP to them being
relatively rare (from what we estimate was a few times a month to a few times a year). We
soon saw a similar pattern with the Ontario Disability Support Program – the disability
­social assistance programme. This shift was a clear response to our success as an organisation:
social assistance bureaucrats did not want OCAP in their offices, they did not want business-
as-usual to be disrupted, they did not want other people on social assistance to learn what
we do and they certainly did not want people on social assistance to witness our victories.
This shift also fundamentally changed the way that most social assistance casework happens
in OCAP. Now, in most situations, we simply need to write a letter or make a phone call
in order to win what the person needs. The threat of disruptive action remains present and
ensures we can win a case much more quickly than it would take a legal clinic or agency.
The change in the approach to OCAP casework is an excellent example of how state con-
cessions are granted in order to demobilise resistance deemed to pose a threat. Poor people’s
organising can pose threats to government credibility – negatively impacting their electoral
prospects. But poor people can do more than threaten a particular ruling party; we can over-
throw the ruling class. From the government’s perspective, putting out small fires is far sim-
pler than letting them burn – building into a movement strong enough to topple the system.
Bureaucratic attempts to demobilise us by changing how they dealt with letters from
OCAP were an important indication of the organisation’s success but it also worked to
demobilise our casework programme (as it was intended to do). Direct action caseworkers
were, in some ways, turned into bureaucratic agents: into letter writers rather than protest
organisers. With the exception of flashpoints around the Special Diet and Housing Stabiliza-
tion Fund, we have been able to almost always win our social assistance cases without having
to engage in direct action. It makes casework fast and effective but it also means that some
people we work with simply see us as a social service organisation working for them rather
than as part of a political struggle and as working with them. For the most part, poor people
have been taught by the complex bureaucracy of the social assistance system (and housing
and labour and immigration, etc.) that they do not possess the skills to navigate appeals and
complaints on their own. Poor people have been taught to either give up or passively accept
expert assistance. Many people are confused by OCAP’s active resistance because it is outside
of their realm of experience.
It is our radical analysis coupled with the use of disruption that makes our casework dif-
ferent from a social service agency and it is what makes it effective. Disruption manifests in
a lot of different ways – from shutting down a welfare office until our demands are met to
picketing a business that withheld wages. The possibility for disruption is a basic principle of
OCAP’s casework: we only take on cases when there is a possibility that direct action and/
or disruption can be used. If the person we are working with does not want to use protest
tactics or if the only possible route for the case is through formal legal channels, it is not the
case for us. This is not to deny the injustice but we recognise that we have limited resources
and focus on cases that we can hook individual struggles into our ongoing collective ones.
The second key principle is that the case must actually be ‘winnable’. This is because we
refuse to take on cases simply for their symbolic drama or to register our dissent. OCAP
fights to win – and that includes casework. Here, the distinction between what is winnable
through individual direct action casework and what is winnable through broader organising
is important. When taking on the government, direct action casework has proven to be

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highly effective when policies have been unjustly applied. However, changing the policy
itself needs longer-term, larger-scale organising and mass mobilising. An example of an un-
justly applied policy is the denial of welfare to someone who is entitled to it while an unjust
policy is the one which says that people without immigration status cannot get welfare. Both
struggles are winnable but the first can be won through direct action casework focused on
that individual, while the second requires mass mobilising.
We also practice non-duplication: if there is a funded service that would do the same
thing we would do, we send people there. We have very limited resources and have never
collected a dime of government funding. If a legal clinic or agency is doing the same thing,
we need to conserve our resources (and if it is just paper pushing, chances are they would do
it better than us). This principle is also directly related to the disruption principle. However,
legal clinics and agencies do not use direct action, so if there is a possibility we would, we do
not necessarily see it as a duplication.
Another key principle of our casework, and the one we haven’t really written about else-
where, is trust. It is equally important that we trust the people who come to us and that they
trust us. Direct action casework is impossible without the trust of the communities we work
with because people will simply refuse to reach out to us – we will have no casework to do.
People need to trust that we will fight to win to respect them and their boundaries and to be
honest about what we are doing, why and what our capabilities are. With respect to us trust-
ing the people who come to us, it seems basic: we believe someone unless we have a good
reason not to. Poor people, especially people on welfare, are often depicted as liars, as lazy
and as fraudulent. At OCAP, we know that welfare puts people in the position of having to
lie (about income, about who they are living with, etc.) or starve. There is nothing inherently
honourable about choosing to go hungry over lying to an unjust system. We know that even if
someone has lied to social assistance, that doesn’t make them untrustworthy. For some people,
simply hearing the words ‘I believe you’ from an OCAP member is the first act of political
solidarity they ever experience. We make a political choice to believe the word of poor people.
That said, while trust is a good starting place, things can sometimes get messy. Some-
times, we take on cases without having the whole story – cases we would not otherwise have
taken on. Most of the time, this happens because the person did not understand everything
that had happened, not because of dishonesty. We also take on cases when people are really
upset, and rightly so, but they are unable to always give us all of the information. When we
have a good reason to be unsure about what we are told or when the person does not know
themselves, our response is not to send a letter threatening to do an action. We request in-
formation. Once we have all the files, we go from there.
The last key principle of our casework is that it has to be something that can further our
political aims. While OCAP wants all poor people’s lives to be better, we are a political
organisation not a charity. On any given day, someone calls the office asking for our help
with something that may be incredibly important but is in no way connected to our cam-
paigns. For instance, someone called us because he was upset that the provincial government
was changing the way tires were being recycled and it meant that he would lose his income
because of it. While we were sympathetic to him, this change was not linked to any of the
campaigns that we work on. Issues like that simply do not make sense for us to take on. If
we just took on every case that came to us, we would actually end up being less politically
effective because we would be spread too thin.
Poorly executed direct action casework fails to be strategic about these capacity and cam-
paign issues. It can lead to an organisation co-opting itself, turning itself into a bureaucratic
service agency that has abandoned its own politics in practice, if not in principle. It can lead

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 A. J. Withers for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)

to feelings of hopelessness. It has the real risk of leading to hunger, homelessness and/or de-
portation if done poorly.4 People doing direct action casework also have to know and be able
to handle the reality that, even if done well, it can still lead to hunger, homelessness and/or
deportation – we simply can’t prevent all of the violence of poverty through casework. Sys-
tems are unjust – sometimes we lose. Direct action casework is not something you can pick
up for a summer or be flaky about; it requires commitment and follow through.
That said, at its best, casework can strengthen, legitimise and ground an organisation.
It works as a form of research: people bring us their problems and that flags changes in the
system that need to be fought. What we learn through our casework can help inform and
guide our existing campaigns and point us in the direction of new ones we need to develop.
Direct action casework builds hope in poor communities – hope in resistance and in our
collective power. Direct action casework can result in relatively easy wins that can empower
and embolden people. A direct action casework win is an effective educational tool – both
about the injustices of the system and that victory is possible with collective action.

Winning to Fight: Demobilisation and the Struggle

against Pacification
Ironically, winning what you are fighting for, including partial victories, can have negative
consequences for movements, organisations and organising. This can be especially damaging
for organisations caught unprepared to manage their own successes. OCAP has learned the
necessity of working strategically, not only for victory but also beyond it in order to continue
to build struggle.
Victories, according to Piven and Cloward, are won by forcing ruling relations to con-
cede something. These concessions are designed to ‘channel the energies and angers of the
protestors into more legitimate and less disruptive forms of political behavior’ (1979, 30).
Consequently, concessions are won only when movements threaten elites and are ‘shaped
as much by elite ideas and interests as by movement demands’ (1979, 17 n17). For instance,
as part of a coalition, OCAP won 24-hour drop-in centres for women and transpeople in
2015 – an important victory. The City, however, used those spaces as a pressure valve for the
full shelter system which gave them the opportunity to further resist opening new shelter
beds. This strategy can be effective. Here, winning the very thing we are fighting for can
help reduce or diminish struggle. Thompson (2014) observes: ‘compromise and consent can
both pacify and embolden’ (513) and one cannot necessarily anticipate which it will be.
Importantly, the appearance of winning can have similar demobilising effects to winning
itself. Greene (2006) argues, ‘simply altering the nature of the problem, by taking action to
reduce the visibility and urgency of the grievance, may be as effective in dampening the
prospects for the emergence of more sustained forms of mobilization than if the authorities
took substantive remedial action’ (53). Partial or smokescreen victories allow the soothing
of public opinion and quietening of protest by ruling relations without enacting meaningful
change. If the relevant authorities provide the appearance of addressing the problem in a
serious and satisfactory manner, meaningful concessions may be sidestepped.
We have experienced how this demobilisation happens first-hand in OCAP. For example,
OCAP fought for more and better shelter beds for years and was successful in winning a City
Council resolution capping shelter occupancy at 90% to prevent overcrowding, the opening
of warming centres, 24-hour drop-ins for women and transpeople and a number of new
shelter beds (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty 2013) – all of which are significant victo-
ries. However, the City has never implemented the 90% cap on shelter occupancy, delayed

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opening the drop-ins and attempted to eliminate the warming centres. Furthermore, even
with the shelter beds OCAP fought for and was able to win, 1,000 shelter beds were cut from
the system between 2000 and 2015 (Lesley Wood, pers. comm.). As concessions are won by
poor people because they pose a threat to ruling relations, having effectively disrupted them,
there will always be a pushback against poor people’s gains.
Successes can also lead to the overwhelming of organisations and the depletion of organ-
isational resources. This upswing can then make it difficult to maintain the organising work
and organisation. For example, during the Special Diet campaign, OCAP was overwhelmed
with over 100 phone calls in a day by people trying to get access to the benefit (Palmer and
Heroux 2016). Significant wins can lead to strains within the organisation or community if
organisations are unprepared to handle them.
Achieving success can also lead to demobilisation through divisiveness. Rameau (2008)
argues that it can reveal ‘the problems associated with lacking political unity’ (69). It is
in trying to decide how to move forward after a success that underlying political differ-
ences emerge, making ongoing strategising and organising difficult. Dixon (2014) argues
that planning strategically rather than organising in continual crisis can help radical groups
ensure long-term and sustained organising. This could also help organisations navigate the
inevitable ebbs and flows of movement activity. However, Dixon also recognises that this is
particularly difficult with organising in communities that are often, if not always, in crisis.
Poverty is a crisis. So, grounded radical antipoverty organising will, at least sometimes, have
to respond to crisis and from crises.
Another potential demobiliser is the individualisation of a collective struggle which can
work to depoliticise an issue and to demobilise a movement. For example, OCAP worked
hard to maintain collective solidarity through our Special Diet campaign. Our tactic of hold-
ing group clinics helped build a sense of shared struggle among very diverse groups of poor
people. However, even strong solidarity could not overcome the fact that, at the end of the
day, individuals had individual special diet forms to be filled out and there was individual
amount of money allotted to each person. While our campaign won hundreds of millions of
dollars for poor people, it was not successful in forcing the government to raise everyone’s
social assistance collectively. When the Province imposed restrictions on the Special Diet to
curtail our successes, this tension grew significantly. Organising cannot always prevent the
state from attempting to individualise an issue but organisations can anticipate this and build
contingencies and solidarities in order to keep individualisation from demobilising a struggle.
Individualisation can be thought of as a form of (attempted) co-optation of individuals;
co-optation can also target organisations and campaigns. As discussed earlier, Piven and
Cloward (1979) warn against the creation of poor people’s organisations because they view
the co-optation of organisations as inevitable. They argue that organisations will become
obsessed with maintaining themselves and abandon their original principles and aims. While
it is definitely a danger, co-optation is not inevitable (also see Gamson 1975; Kinsman 1992;
Scott and Wood 2004; Rameau 2008). However, the form is not the problem. Indeed, or-
ganisations play the necessary roles of building and maintaining connections, consciousness
raising and mobilisation. For example, OCAP has organised for twenty-five years without
being co-opted or corrupted and is steadfastly anticapitalist and direct actionist.
We have, however, witnessed the widespread suppression of dissent or critique of govern-
ment practices among agencies that work with poor people. These groups, including drop-in
centres, shelters, food centres and healthcare facilities, used to routinely speak out against gov-
ernment policies that were hurting poor people. These agencies would frequently do outreach,
provide meals and bring delegations to and provide speakers for protests. Now, the support that

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 A. J. Withers for the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)

we have is off the books – sometimes, meals or meeting space is provided but it often can’t be
made public that this was the case. There are a lot of reasons for this but, at its core, it is rooted
in the way that the government administers funds. Organisations have become more business-
like, social work has become professionalised (replacing many workers who were rooted in
the communities served with middle-class social workers) and agencies have diminished their
political activity out of the fear that they would lose their funding – although this hasn’t actually
been the case.5 We think this is evidence of how elite funding, either through the state or foun-
dations, is used to demobilise resistance. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (2007)
put out an anthology called The Revolution Will Not Be Funded arguing that support from the
rich (largely through foundations) works to co-opt radical organising. For poor people’s organ-
isations, the issue of funding is particularly significant because of the lack of resources in poor
communities. OCAP has never taken government funds and has severed ties with or been cut
off by our funders rather than tame our tactics or demands (for more on this, see Coulter 2012).
The final demobilising tool I want to address is repression. OCAP has faced mass arrest,
the criminalisation of protest and persecution of our leadership. The purpose of this re-
pression was to suppress and/or destroy the movement we were building. However, it was
unsuccessful. OCAP’s Gaetan Heroux attributed our ability to withstand repression and
public vilification to the fact that ‘the base was too strong, the roots are too deep’ (quoted in
Thompson 2004, p. 96). We were able to turn the state’s own repression against it, mobilising
more public and vocal support than we had had before. This is why, writing about OCAP,
Greene (2006) notes that repression can create political opportunities for mobilisation.
There are cycles of protest that deeply impact organising and mobilisation (see Tarrow
1994). OCAP has endured through the rise and decline of upsurges in mobilising and dis-
sent. Organising is exciting and comparatively easy during periods of widespread activity
and much more difficult when it recedes. Resisting demobilisation and remaining active
when it is occurring are both necessary in order to quickly respond to crises and/or upswings
in movement activity.

Conclusion
Antipoverty organising work is slow, it is tedious and it is difficult. Even when we win, we
must struggle to get our victories implemented and ensure that we do not allow ourselves
to be demobilised. OCAP’s organising model couples mass mobilising and direct action
casework and works to help guide our organisation and continue to be relevant to poor
communities. Disruption allows people who have little political power as individuals to force
concessions and build collective strength and defiance. While difficult, when we successfully
build power through collective action, winning is possible. The state of emergency our com-
munities find themselves in makes winning urgently and absolutely essential.

Notes
1 This is OCAP’s primary organising slogan.
2 Dorothy Smith’s (2002) concepts of ruling relations are those that ‘coordinate people’s activities
across and beyond local sites of everyday experience’ (45).
3 This is not to be confused with legal application mechanisms. For instance, with respect to social
assistance, people have to make applications for benefits but, if denied, we do not follow the estab-
lished legal pathways.
4 OCAP used to do immigration casework. However, with the emergence of No One Is Illegal, a
direct action migrant justice organisation, we stopped doing this kind of casework.

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5 One exception to this is when the Canadian Arab Federation’s funding for English as a second
language instruction for newcomers was cut. This was done, by a racist federal government after
the group had been (unjustly) accused of supporting terrorism (The Canadian Press, 2016).

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 Section 3

Repertoires

This section focuses on a number of actions and tactics which activists deploy. While
­obviously covering only a very few examples, the selection attempts to convey the sheer
variety of radicals’ transgressive and transformative repertoire.
To pick up one of the themes explored in the introduction, direct action is a unifying
theme for this section – a ‘Do-It-Yourself/Do-It-Ourselves’ mode of politics where activ-
ists take social change into their own hands, intervening directly in a situation and seek to
either disrupt an injustice or create alternatives using their own power and capacities. This
is opposed to indirect means which appeal to (and thus legitimate) an external authority to
act on one’s behalf.
While the term itself is much older, its recent prominence can be explained largely with
reference to the rift that emerged during the alter-global protest wave between radical
groups and trade unions, NGOs and political parties (de Cleyre 1912; Carter 1983; Franks
2003; Graeber 2009). Here, radicals’ preference for direct action was intimately related to
their rejection of top-down organisation, lobbying and programmes to seize state power
in favour of anti-hierarchical and anticapitalist practices such as decentralised organisation
and decision-making by consensus. Also linked to direct action is the idea of prefigura-
tive politics – the insistence that the means activists use should demonstrate, in embryonic
form, the type of society they wish to create. Hence, the effort to identify and counteract
regimes of domination and discrimination (e.g. patriarchy, racism, homophobia and ableism)
in activists’ own lives and interactions, as well as in their repertoires of action. Dynamics of
mainstreaming and co-optation have meant that some of these efforts, in their broken trans-
mission to later cycles of contention, have become detached from their radical roots and now
appear in disfigured forms such as language policing. Yet, their importance on the radical,
direct-action end of the political spectrum, where they are clearly associated with agendas
for anti-hierarchical social transformation, has not diminished.
In his chapter on international nonviolent accompaniment, Patrick Coy examines
action which aims to secure increased political space for local experiments in radical politics.
By providing international observers to walk alongside local activists under threat, accom-
paniment seeks to deter potential aggressors, preserve grassroots agency and empower local
activists. The complicated intersections between international accompaniment and radical
 Repertoires

politics are examined, pointing out both the benefits and the pitfalls that can occur between
local actors and international observers.
Public performance interventions to reclaim space are at the focus of Mel Evans’s
chapter. It examines actions which radically reclaim and revivify public spaces to create
new potentials for dissent, transformation and structural change. In these actions, artists and
activists disrupt social norms to tackle massive corporate and government structures head
on. Using examples big and small, coordinated and spontaneous, the chapter picks out of
personal experience moments where the scope of the possible has broadened and lengthened,
whether set in the street, protest camps, corporate spaces and museums and galleries. In each
case, opening access to public space is an important site for collective action and building
community around key social issues.
Aurora Trujillo and Matthew Wilson examine radical bicycle politics which bring an
­a ntiauthoritarian, anticapitalist and ecologically committed approach to cycling and trans-
portation. Presenting the diversity of such political expression, the chapter argues that the bi-
cycle has frequently played a role in radical (and not so radical) social movements. ­However,
while old and new radical political struggles have often considered the bicycle as an intrinsi-
cally valuable object, it could be argued that its role has fluctuated along two axes. The one
tracks whether the movement focuses on mobility-related political aims such as promoting
cycling or opposing motor traffic in their own right, or whether it uses the bicycle as a sym-
bolic and/or practical tool to further non-mobility-related political aims, such as feminism
or environmentalism. The other axis is structurally focused and examines how overt and
encompassing the politics of the movement is.
Francis Dupuis-Déri’s chapter is dedicated to black blocs – a tactical formation in
which masked militants in black form part of a larger protest, sometimes fighting police
and/or damaging corporate property. Tracing the history of black blocs from the German
­Autonomen in the 1980s through the alterglobalisation movements of the 2000s to recent
years’ post-economic-crash mobilisations, the chapter explains the bloc’s aesthetics, tactics
and composition. Using the critique of violence to problematise the meaning of radicalism,
the chapter probes the gap between practice and theory to show the limits of black bloc rev-
olutionary action and explores how it nevertheless advances an idea of radicalising practice
through collective, autonomous organisation.
Jeff Shantz examines the radical online activism which has challenged state and corpo-
rate governance structures and sought alternatives based on openness, sharing, collaboration
and self-determination. Practices including hacking, whistleblowing and denial of service
attacks show novel tactical reach and anonymity. However, much of online activism has di-
rect antecedents in familiar activist repertoires. The collective, material practices of activist
groups working online, including TAO.ca and riseup.net, are based on radical perspectives
such as anarchism and feminism. While cyber activists have sought to realise its liberatory
potential, the Internet has proven to be a site of struggle, exposed to state and corporate
enclosure, surveillance and repression.
Josep Lobera and Diego Parejo consider significant innovations that have recently linked
radicalism to electoral politics. The development of radical left political parties (Syriza in
Greece) or the emergence of new political parties (Podemos in Spain or M5S in Italy) has
transformed perspectives on the traditional role of the radical left in government. Further-
more, these parties have brought new social demands to the electoral field, thus becoming
their contested representatives within the institutions. The chapter argues that the window
of opportunity for the emergence of such new actors was opened not only by the economic
crisis, but also by the preceding political crisis of representative disaffection. Against the

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 Repertoires

exclusionary politics emerging in European populist movements, the emergence of inclusive

social protest movements and electoral parties has allowed for the dispute about the social
construction of ‘the people’ to avoid displacement towards a cultural struggle associated with
exclusive populism.
Michael Loadenthal looks at underground insurrectionary cells which carry out direct,
unmediated attacks on the state and capital. Based on an ethic of informality, clandestinity
and temporality, cells exist in secret only as long as deemed necessary for a particular action.
Unlike social movement organisations and above-ground campaigns, the cells that populate
the insurrectionary milieu are not something to ‘belong to’ but something to ‘act through’,
a momentary assemblage of like-minded individuals united for a particular attack by vol-
untary association and through shared affinity. This chapter explores how the cell model,
the communiqué and the adoptable moniker allow for the creation of a globally dispersed,
decentralised, open-involvement movement united against capitalism, the state and those
who would seek to control it.
Sandra Jeppesen introduces four radical media practices: DIY media create communi-
ties of practice; community media anchor social movement analyses; protest media mobilise
using the snowball effect and global media develop international solidarity. These practices
create radical products and processes, empowering media-makers by amplifying systemically
silenced voices in horizontal organisations. Illustrated with contemporary global examples,
five radical media genres – print, audio, image, video and online – are mapped to four di-
mensions of media practice – movements, representations, structures and digital networks.
Debates within media movements are critically analysed, including the contradictions of
social media, and the challenges of sustainable funding.
In an interview Ramsey Kanaan tells how he came to set up AK and PM press, inter-
weaving his personal story with a frank analysis of the decline of radical publishing since
the 1960s. Kanaan’s view is that this decline reflects a deeper malaise in anarchist activism.
Distinguishing the anarchist movement from the anarchist milieu, he argues that anarchist
ideas have animated radical politics for at least the last forty years but that anarchists have
failed to construct robust institutions. Drawing on his experiences in AK press to illustrate
the political shifts within anarchism and, in particular, the rise of identity politics, he ex-
plains how PM confronts the pressures of commercial production as an anarchist worker’s
cooperative and continues in its efforts to construct viable, enduring anarchist institutions.

References
Carter, A. 1983, Direct Action. Housmans/Peace News, London 1983.
De Cleyre, V., ‘Direct Action’ [1912], online at Anarchy Archives http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/­Anarchist_
Archives/bright/cleyre/direct.html.
Franks, B. 2003, ‘The Direct Action Ethic: From 59 Upwards’, Anarchist Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, p. 15.
Graeber, D. 2009, Direct Action: An Ethnography. AK Press, Edinburgh and Oakland.

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 3.1
THE INTERSECTIONS OF
INTERNATIONAL NONVIOLENT
ACCOMPANIMENT AND
RADICAL LOCAL POLITICS
Patrick G. Coy

Introduction
Accompaniment was a part of human history long before humans started writing down
their experiences and stories. Eons ago, when members of a clan or a tribe visited contested
spaces like watering holes or wells, or when they undertook journeys along travel corridors
thought to be uncommonly dangerous, they would often be accompanied by others whose
added presence was thought to provide an additional modicum of security. Both historically
and today, nonviolent protective accompaniment takes many forms; its tactical repertoire is
bounded only by the limits of human imagination and ingenuity.
For example, when exiled political activists and human rights defenders return to their
homeland to test political openings and to take up organising again against oppressive gov-
ernments, they may be accompanied on the trip by high-profile international dignitaries,
whose presence may deter or at least internationalise any violent attacks. Such was the case
for Kim Dae Jung returning to South Korea in 1985. Whenever self-exiled indigenous rights
activist Rigoberta Menchu ventured to return to Guatemala in mid-1980s, she was usually
accompanied by volunteer nonviolent accompaniers from the non-governmental organisa-
tion, Peace Brigades International. Tonight when a woman student on a university campus
in South Africa or Serbia or Spain is walking home late at night, she may first place a call
to a free service for volunteer escorts to walk alongside her – often just fellow students who
care enough to lend their body and their time – increasing both her perceived and even her
real safety.
These examples of accompaniment are structured, deliberate, organised in step-by-step
fashion in advance, often with elaborate preparations to ensure that they are more likely to
provide the intended protections. But accompaniment initiatives also pop up instantaneously
in response to new threats and novel dangers.
The week in November of 2016 in which Donald Trump was elected US President af-
ter running a particularly divisive campaign, some immigrants and minority citizens were
feeling threatened and were being openly harassed, even on their daily commutes in the
New York City subway system. Kayla Santosuosso, deputy director of the Arab American
Association of New York, was asked on Facebook if she could find someone to accompany a

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Muslim woman who was repeatedly being hassled on her way to and from school each day.
So Santosuosso made a Facebook post and created a Google docs sign-up form to pair people
up by NYC neighbourhoods and their commuting patterns. Within four days, over 6,000
people signed up to be impromptu volunteer accompaniers for Muslims, people of colour,
LGBTQ folks and others feeling threatened during their daily commutes on public trans-
portation in New York City. This sort of community-based, impromptu response to threats
and danger is yet another face of accompaniment (Phillips 2016).
Radical politics is many things to many people. One thing most can agree on is that at its
core, radical politics is marked by the notion that responsibly minded citizens ought not to
wait for the local government, the national state or the international community to do the
proper thing and promote and protect human rights. Instead, it is up to individual citizens
to step into the breach on the local, national and international level and provide what is
needed to facilitate the creation of environments with more justice, more security and more
equality. Accompaniment rests on this very notion of direct and meaningful action, a notion
that is also central to radical politics. There are two complimentary tracks that run parallel
to each other in this shared approach. One is based on a profound respect for the agency
of the individual citizen; the other is tied tightly to a critique of state sovereignty in hu-
man affairs. Together, they imbue both accompaniment and radical politics with ­significant
power against the excesses of states and their unfortunately concomitant violations of human
­d ignity and rights.
Another way to understand accompaniment is to see it as a device or a tactic that local
nonviolent political activists may choose to use to expand their capacities and their effective-
ness. Sometimes, those providing accompaniment come from within the community itself.
In these cases, the accompaniers may be elders, clergy, mothers and grandmothers, faculty,
veterans, former gang members or all sorts of other kinds of community leaders who use
their position or authority in the local community to advantage and protect others who are
under threat of violence. Relying on local resources like this may occasion significant capac-
ity and empowerment possibilities.
Other times and often out of political necessity, the accompaniers come to the commu-
nity from the outside; their outsider status changes the political dynamics and the balances
of power. In those ways, it also impacts the calculations of would-be repressors, thereby
­benefiting and increasing the security of those local activists who have opted to receive ac-
companiment. The internationals or outsiders may be able to offer more or at least different
kinds of protection and security than locals can presently create for themselves and their
colleagues and neighbours. The dynamics of deterrence change.
While ‘transnational accompaniment’ is the more accurate term (Eguren 2009), the tactic
is generally known as international accompaniment and will be used here. The tactic of in-
ternational nonviolent protective accompaniment as it is now commonly practised in many
contested political spaces across the globe was largely pioneered in Central America in the
early 1980s by Peace Brigades International.

The Dynamics of International Nonviolent Accompaniment

Much of the Latin American region at that time was governed by oppressive military dicta-
torships infamous for their disregard for the rule of law and basic human rights. Safe political
space was hard to come by, dramatically restricting the kind of political work local citizens
could do without severe reprisal. These activists, long repressed by their own governments

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for engaging in local organising, community development, identity politics and other kinds
of political change efforts, discovered that they could often change the local political equa-
tion to their advantage by requesting and receiving accompaniment from international
non-governmental organisations.
International protective accompaniment relies, in part, on the Observer Effect for its pre-
sumed efficacy. The Observer Effect is the well-established principle that most of the time
most people modify, and especially moderate, their behaviour when they know they are
being observed. We know this to be true in our everyday lives in a variety of our personal,
routinised social settings, but it is also true in highly charged political spaces, sometimes even
especially so.
For example, when local activists in Guatemala and in El Salvador asked for and received
accompaniment from Peace Brigade International in the 1980s, they discovered that the
presence of international outsiders changed the behaviour of police and military and other
potential repressors towards their own populace. These local activists found that with inter-
national accompaniment, they could do more and different kinds of political work without
suffering the overt persecution to which they had been accustomed, including harassment,
illegal detention and torture, disappearance and even death (Coy 1993; Mahony & Eguren
1997). The political landscape shifted; the boundaries of safe civil space were expanded
through accompaniment. But it isn’t just the political landscape that changes.
Equally important, the empowerment individual local activists experience also changes
the cognitive landscape as the self-understandings of individuals and even collective identi-
ties of communities are altered. This, in turn, serves to embolden still others to reclaim their
political and economic agency in novel ways.
What does international accompaniment actually look like on the ground? A useful way
to understand international protective accompaniment is to first compare it to the more
well-known human rights promotion work of Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch (Hopgood 2007; Becker 2013).
Amnesty International, in particular, forged a new model in the 1960s by using targeted
letter-writing campaigns to ‘name and shame’ governments and their officials responsible
for violating the human rights of their own citizens. Here, the coordinated advocacy letter
campaigns and the actual letters themselves symbolically represented the international com-
munity of conscience and its concern for threatened local activists. The targeted nature of
this tactic, directed as it usually was at top-level decision makers in governments, militaries,
police and prisons, delivered impactful responses. It worked, in part precisely because of
whom it tried to influence. But that was also in some ways its Achilles heel.
First, governments learned how to adjust their repressive tactics and stymied the effective-
ness of the letter-writing tactic in the 1980s and 1990s by taking fewer political prisoners or
no longer openly assassinating opponents. They turned instead towards simply ‘disappear-
ing’ civil society activists, creating plausible deniability and thereby more easily deflecting
the pressure.
Second, the reliance on letters and written communication to promote and protect hu-
man rights is predicated on putting pressure on repressive systems’ top leaders – those who
either make the decisions or give the orders. But political repression and violence usually pass
through and rely on a lengthy chain of command. The order to intimidate, to pillage, to rape
or to kill passes downwards through many levels. Yet, it must eventually be put into actual
operation at the level of the individual perpetrator. Someone must do the deed.
What international protective accompaniment did was it expanded international
­human rights advocacy by putting actual bodies, i.e. uniformed international observers,

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into contested political spaces where local activists and their communities were reclaiming
agency through acts of radical politics. It complimented the top-level work by targeting
the entire chain of command, down to the level of the perpetrator of violent repression
(Mahony 2006).
In this model of accompaniment, international observers ‘armed’ with foreign pass-
ports, cell phones, cameras, uniforms and membership in a recognised international
non-­governmental organisation quite literally walk alongside local activists targeted for
persecution by state and parastate groups due to their political and human rights work.
They also open up dialogue with lower level and mid-level police, military and govern-
ment ­officials, explaining the work of international accompaniment, attempting to multiply
the observer effect in a cross-cutting manner up and down and across the entire chain of
command. In these ways, international accompaniment changes the considerations and con-
sequences would-be perpetrators face even while it expands the political space available to
local activists who are under threat for their work.
For example, the community organisers associated with the Negombo United People’s
Organisation (NUPO) in Sri Lanka who worked in the midst of extreme levels of politi-
cal violence during the ethnic conflict there often used PBI accompaniment to send two
­messages: one to potential attackers, and one to local community members fearful to orga-
nise themselves politically. When organising meetings were being held held at the NUPO
offices for various community groups, PBI observers would be present, sitting outside on the
porch. As one of the NUPO staffers put it:

When PBI is here with us, it decreases our fear and the fear of the people who come
to the center with the groups we animate. The violence here has gotten inside people;
it does not just operate on the outside, just kill the body. It also operates on the inside
through fear and kills the spirit of the people. But we see that we are not alone in our
struggle, and that helps us overcome that fear…The people see that this work is import-
ant and that others care about it.
(Coy 1997: 98)

The Goals of Accompaniment

International nonviolent protective accompaniment has at least four goals. First, it is meant
to deter possible repression. The international observers are trained in communication skills,
nonviolent intervention and de-escalation tactics and they are backed up by broad interna-
tional advocacy networks willing to apply citizen-based, economic, diplomatic and political
pressures of various sorts should the deterrence on the ground fail. Seeking to establish
and maintain the deterrence effect, the observers maintain regular communication with
local police, military, government officials and other possible sources of political repression,
explaining their presence and their work on behalf of human rights promotion and protec-
tion in the local context. They also explain, in advance, the political, economic and social
pressures they help bring to bear against repressors should deterrence fail and human rights
violations occur. Effective deterrence always relies on the clear communication of costs and
consequences, in advance, for proscribed behaviours by repressors (Mahony & Eguren 1997;
Coy 2001).
Second, the presence of international accompaniers walking alongside risk-taking local
activists provides much-needed moral and psychological support; it facilitates citizens being
able to overcome the debilitating fear and political paralysis that repressive governments and

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other human rights violators rely so much upon to deny political agency and to maintain the
repressive status quo.
For example, during the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, the 1994 Parliamentary elections
were critically important for increased prospects of eventual peace; unfortunately, wide-
spread election violence was predicted. Nonetheless, or in part because of the predicted
election violence, local Sri Lankan human rights defenders wanted to field Sri Lankan
election observers for the Parliamentary elections. This had two goals: (1) to ensure as
free and as fair of an election as possible; (2) to rebuild citizen trust in and ownership of
democratic processes. This was no easy task given that the elections were occurring in
the midst of a long-running ethnic conflict, rampant corruption and widespread human
rights violations by the government and by rebel groups. Recruitment of local election
observers – a key tool in rebuilding a citizen-based democracy – was badly hampered by a
pervasive fear factor.
When citizens have experienced past trauma due to their political activities, the trauma
tentacles may be far-reaching. This not only effectively constrains and restricts what an in-
dividual citizen is willing to do, but it hamstrings the development of civil society. In this
case, Sri Lankan election observers were fearful of even entering police stations to make their
reports of balloting law abuses, due to past trauma associated with the police. As Freddie
Gamage, secretary of the Coalition of Human Rights Organisations, put it to me: ‘We think
of the police station as a place where people should not go … Most people still have the fear
mentality about the police station because that is the place where people are condemned’
(Coy 1995: 10). Consequently, to combat this fear psychosis while still empowering civil
society, two grassroots Sri Lankan NGOs asked three International NGOs to provide inter-
nationals to accompany their local, Sri Lankan election observers. This changed the costs/
benefit calculation facing the domestic monitors, and yet maintained Sri Lankan control over
the election monitoring. Gunaratna Konara, the brave secretary of the Monaragala Human
Rights Organisation who, like Gamage, had personally experienced governmental repres-
sion, had no doubt as to the empowering effect of accompaniment: ‘The (election) monitor-
ing would not have been possible without the international escorts. Their presence made us
unafraid to go where we otherwise would not have gone’ (Coy, 1995: 11).
Third, international accompaniment strengthens the political networks so needed to ef-
fectively resist the excesses of state-based politics. The rich and thick connections that grow
between localised grassroots initiatives and supportive internationals strengthen the connec-
tive fibres that when woven together through accompaniment create an international com-
munity of conscience that serves as an antidote to liberal, state-based paradigms. A ­mutually
beneficial relation develops as internationals learn from the locals they are privileged to walk
alongside. There may be no better example of this dynamic than the Zapatistas in Mexico
and their profound influence on counter-globalisation networking.
Fourth, and equally important, when the international accompaniers eventually return
to their home countries, they bring with them new understandings about meaningful po-
litical engagement and the need for risk-taking (Griffin-Nolan 1991). Many are personally
transformed by the experience and become organisers for human rights, justice and peace in
their home communities and beyond. They also help build bridges, connecting their home
community and its policymakers with the local organisations they served through accompa-
niment. In these ways, they not only strengthen the international community of conscience
while serving as accompaniers but also expand it once they return home (Mahoney 2004).
The work of International Solidarity Movement and other accompaniment organisations on
the ground in Palestine demonstrates this point particularly well.

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 Nonviolent Accompaniment and Local Politics

Today, at least thirty-five organisations provide international accompaniment services

on request from local activists under threat in a wide variety of contexts. Some of the more
prominent and experienced organisations include Peace Brigades International, Witness for
Peace, Nonviolent Peaceforce, Christian Peacemaker Teams, International Solidarity Move-
ment and FOR Peace Presence. Since 1990 alone, these and other organisations have collec-
tively fielded accompaniment teams on six continents and in thirty-five different countries
( Janzen 2015). While these organisations share many values and approaches to accompani-
ment, they also exhibit notable differences in terms of how partisan or non-partisan they are,
the degrees of interventionism they will engage in and their adherence to local laws (for a
comparative analysis, see Coy 2012).

Agency, Accompaniment and Zones of Peace

A key dimension in radical politics is the claiming and maintenance of agency, both on the
level of the individual and on that of the local community. Agency is defined as being able
to make one’s own choices about how to order one’s social, political and economic affairs.
Notably, this includes being somewhat free of the confining restrictions of choices that are
associated with social structures. Put more simply, agency has to do first with having control
over one’s own actions; and second, agency also means being able to take an additional step
by having some reasonable chance of influencing the outcomes produced by one’s choices
(Hancock 2016). Put even more simply, agency means being able to choose, and having those
choices matter. Agency applies not only to individuals, but also to the small collectives and
local communities of which they are a part. Understood thusly, agency is obviously a critical
dimension to meaningful lived experiments in radical politics. In fact, we can’t have the
latter without the former.
A good example of how the agency inherent in radical politics operates and intersects
with accompaniment is in the creation of local Zones of Peace (ZoPs). In recent decades,
violent, armed conflicts have increasingly become intra-state civil wars, with various sorts of
insurgents challenging the state even while also challenging each other (Mazzei 2017). One
result of this trend towards intra-state violent conflict is the fluid nature of contested spaces
inside a country as the state and challenging groups vie for territories, for taxation powers,
for the ability to exploit natural and material resources, for control of both legal and illegal
commerce, e.g. drug production and trade, and for various kinds of political and economic
loyalties from the citizenry. The violence experienced in such settings by local citizens can
be sobering.
Communities are forced off of ancestral homelands, kidnappings, illegal detentions,
torture, political disappearances, and assassination are all used by governments and para-
militaries and drug cartels to force locals into compliance. Sexual violence is used as a tool
of terror, and forced recruitment into a conflict party are all too common aspects of many
civil wars. In addition, corruption and forced, ad hoc taxation schemes levelled on the local
population by multiple parties to the conflict add debilitating economic insult to serious
physical injury.
Yet amidst the doom and gloom is hope and promise that is born of local agency and the
practice of home-grown radical politics. The predictable panoply of difficulties that being
caught in the cross hairs of violent interstate conflicts creates for local communities have
resulted in the flowering of locally declared and locally managed ZoPs in many countries,
some with long-running civil conflicts, including Colombia, Philippines, El Salvador, Aceh,
the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere.

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 Patrick G. Coy

ZoPs are frequently conceptualised as being of two sorts: top-down, UN-declared and
administered ones; and grassroots-based, horizontally declared and administered ones where
local citizens create and maintain the Zone. In both instances, a primary purpose of the
ZoP is to create a territorial island of safety and security in a sea of violence. Here, we are
only interested in ZoPs of the second sort: the organic, localised versions marked by citizen
agency to control the present and future environment within which people are trying to
live without being victimised by the surrounding political violence. These ZoPs include not
only demarcated physical spaces but they are also social sanctuaries (Mitchell & Hancock
2007). The most robust models cultivate a sense of safe social space within which community
members work collectively together to create their own political and economic realities, and
futures. There are many hundreds of these ZoP operating in dozens of countries around the
world (Hancock & Iyer 2007).
These sorts of ZoP include saying a clear and ‘reactive no’ in the form of a ­community-wide
renunciation of any participation whatsoever in the civil conflict. But they also often in-
clude a ringing and ‘proactive yes’ said to the creation of alternative, c­ ommunity-controlled
political institutions and economic ventures. The proactive yes reinforces the reactive no;
indeed, it makes the reactive no feasible and meaningful in new and different ways. In the
Indian struggle for independence from Great Britain, Gandhi termed this proactive yes the
‘constructive programme’. He saw it as even more important than the reactive no, than di-
rect nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. As he put it: ‘The constructive programme
is the truthful and non-violent way of winning Poorna Swaraj [complete independence]. Its
wholesale fulfilment is complete Independence…Civil disobedience, mass or individual is an
aid to the constructive effort’ (Gandhi 1945: iii).
Combined, the constructive, proactive yes and the negative, reactive no give the ZoP
­viability and longer-term sustainability as an experiment in radical politics in a social and polit-
ical environment otherwise marked by the deep uncertainties that always travel with civil wars.
One such ZoP is the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado, which was founded in
1997 in the region of Uraba in the department or province of Antioquia in north-western
Colombia. Until its historic 2016 peace agreement, Columbia was wracked by the oldest
armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere, with 40+ years of civil war.
The Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado was founded by villagers in the region
who were caught up at various times in the many cross-currents of the violent conflicts rag-
ing between the Colombian government, right-wing paramilitaries and leftist insurgents.
These villagers had both the good and the bad fortune to live in a region known not only
for its lucrative banana plantations and export-focused cash cropping, but the one that also
has immense strategic significance situated as it is in extreme north-western Colombia where
South America meets Central America. A region marked by territorial competitions be-
tween militarised parties, arms smugglers and drug runners, it was a flashpoint in Columbia’s
decades long civil war. Warring factions vied not only for control of the physical region and
its associated economies, but for the cooperation, support and even loyalty of the local pop-
ulace. Life became intolerable.
While many families and communities were assassinated when they refused to relinquish
their land, or left the region under threat and became part of the massive numbers of inter-
nally displaced persons in Columbia, the founders of the Peace Community of San Jose de
Apartado decided to ‘stay put’ on their land (Masullo 2015). In 1997, when right-wing para-
militaries informed about 500 people from a cluster of villages that they had three days to
vacate their land or be killed, they banded together in an act of nonviolent non-­cooperation.
The original group of 500 were joined over time by another 1,000 from the region.

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 Nonviolent Accompaniment and Local Politics

They refused to be cowed or to cooperate; they declined to fight even while they rejected
flight. Instead, in an expression of radical politics, these villagers reclaimed their agency.
They declared themselves as wholly neutral non-participants in the conflicts, and exerted
control over their own territory by organising themselves in an alternative political and
geographic order where all weapons born by all parties were completely disallowed. They
rejected victimhood and reclaimed autonomy.
They declared themselves non-combatant civilians, publicly committed themselves and
the community to nonviolence, refused all cooperation with any armed group – notably in-
cluding both the police and the Columbian army – and organised themselves politically and
economically along lines of mutual respect, dialogue, small-scale economic self-sufficiency
and sustainable resource use, and even consensus decision-making (Chiari 2009; Gray 2012;
Mitchell & Rojas 2012).
All of that is a tall order. But equally notable is that in laying local claim and control to
these many arenas of life and space and resources and politics, this and other similar ZoPs are
also challenging the ultimate value of the state: its very sovereignty (Brown 2016). Viewed
in this way, a ZoP like this is one of the many faces of radical politics.
But managing to do this while navigating through a sea of militarised violence means
it is radical politics supreme. Indeed, the residents of the Peace Community of San Jose de
Apartado see the fact that they have successfully resisted various violent actors and been
able to maintain control over their land by using nonviolent action alone as their greatest
achievement (Zebechi, quoted in Gray 2012). Others apparently agree: the American Friends
Service Committee, a past recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, nominated the community for
the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Nonetheless, the Peace Community’s declarations as a ZoP have been frequently ­v iolated –
by both the government and by paramilitaries. While forced displacement, murders and
disappearances declined notably from 1997 to 2009 in San Jose de Apartado, other forms of
political violence continued, including threats, arbitrary detentions, blockades, harassment
and theft (Valenzuela, cited in Mitchell & Rojas 2012).
To mitigate these and related pressures while at the same time maintaining their agency
and their radical experiment in politics, the Peace Community of San Jose de Apartado
turned to international protective accompaniment by Peace Brigades International and to
the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Peace Presence accompaniment programme. This is an
excellent example of how local communities engaged in radical politics, including maintain-
ing control of their land and their lives, can increase their security and effectiveness by le-
veraging the extra power provided by international accompaniers. Over time, this increased
daily ability to exercise fundamental human rights, due in part to transnational accompani-
ment, also contributes to the strengthening of civil society and institutionalises democratic
practices and even democracy itself in organic ways (Henderson 2009).

Accompaniment and Radical Politics Intersections

One understanding of radical politics may argue that introducing international accompani-
ment into a community’s ZoP or into other similar situations where civil society ventures
are under threat compromises the radical nature of the local political experiment. Similarly,
many applications of international accompaniment have often relied on putting into the
field accompaniers from the north and the west; in so doing, they have at least engaged if
not relied upon the dynamics of privilege that frequently accrue to such accompaniers. Even
though those dynamics of privilege are exploited in order to expand safe political space for

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local activists, they still may serve to solidify rather than dismantle those same systems of
privilege and hierarchy (Coy 1993; Boothe & Smithey 2007). The problems here are obvi-
ous and not insignificant. The good news is that this pattern, which was prominent while
international nonviolent accompaniment developed in its early decades of the 1980s and
1980s, has always been heavily critiqued from within (Coy 2012). As a result, reliance on and
even engagement with privilege has been moderated by many organisations like Nonviolent
Peaceforce and Peace Brigades International and it continues to be subject to critical analysis
within many international groups doing accompaniment and solidarity work (Hackl 2016).
In addition, there are positive developmental aspects that must also be considered with re-
gard to the busy intersection of international accompaniment and local radical politics. First,
international accompanier organisations do not take over or gain control or even unduly
influence local political action. Local citizens engaged in political action remain the deci-
sion makers; they retain their agency. Of course, there have been isolated exceptions to this
principled pattern (Dudouet 2009), but they are the exceptions that prove the general rule.
Second, accompaniment organisations embrace an ethic of empowerment. They assidu-
ously avoid creating dependencies; most even refuse to provide material or humanitarian aid,
for example ( Julian & Schweitzer 2015). Indeed, most accompaniers see that they are not just
there to provide protection for local citizens; they recognise that another of their primary
tasks is supporting local ownership of all aspects of political life, including locally controlled
problem-solving initiatives of various sorts designed to address the causes of the conflict and
violence (Furnari 2015).
Third, while international accompaniment at times exploits the dynamics of the state-
based international system to deter, and to name and shame and pressure human rights
violators when its deterrence may fail, accompaniment is nonetheless carried out by civil
society-based international non-governmental organisations. Perhaps even more important
is the fact that both formal and informal grassroots solidarity networks are often intimately
involved in accompaniment as well. The independent, mutually supportive relationships that
are developed across state lines with local citizenry contribute to building a civil society that
can serve as an antidote to statism while contributing to local expressions of radical politics.
Fourth, mutually supportive relationships between local civil society and solidarity net-
works and international accompaniment organisations add stature and credibility to grass-
roots experiments in radical politics (Eguren 2009). On the one hand, that increased stature
may reduce future risks from governmental authorities (Martin 2009). On the other hand,
it may also inspire in civil society bystanders who have not yet found their political voice or
claimed their social place to create still more varied expressions of local agency and radical
politics. Examples of this abound and include rich expressions of solidarity, like Jewish Israeli
citizens taking up activism on behalf of the citizens of Palestine or white Americans taking
to the streets with Black Lives Matter to both protest and document police violence against
the black community.
Fifth, many of the international non-governmental organisations that provide accom-
paniment operate on modifications of a consensus decision-making model (Coy 2003).
Consensus decision-making aims for horizontalism that will erode hierarchies and weaken
structures of privilege. That is why, for example, consensus became a central pillar in the
radical experiment that was the Occupy movement in 2011 (Szolucha 2013). In this way,
accompaniment organisations using and modelling consensus decision-making are contrib-
uting to the larger experiments in radical politics.
Finally, the dynamic relationships that develop between the international non-­governmental
accompaniment organisations and the local expressions of radical politics are also a counter

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weight to the hegemonic nation state system; indeed, they challenge that hegemony and create
additional political openings for still other kinds of resistance (Maney, Woehrle & Coy 2005).
In these many ways, while accompaniment is a complicated, compromised and incomplete
expression of radical politics, it is most often an important and much-needed complimentary
expression of radical politics.

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 3.2
MAKING SPACES OUR OWN
Performance Interventions to Disrupt, Revive
and Reclaim Public Spaces

Mel Evans

Fighting for Territory

Wherever we go, corporations follow us: on the street, in our homes, in public spaces like
sports events and galleries. There’s no looking away. Via advertising, multitudes of consumer
products and their repetitive, zombielike shopfront visual presence on every street, these
several hundred brands owned by a remarkably short list of corporations are everywhere we
turn in post-industrial cities and towns. They’re always there. Invading our thoughts, per-
suading our desires and desperately attempting to convince us that ‘they are an essential part
of our daily lives’ (Klein, 2000), and that without them, our whole world would collapse.
And yet, so much of what we do among these spaces is not remotely reliant on the looming
figures that haunt them: when we grow food and prepare it, teach and learn, make and share,
even buy and sell. The corporate takeover of public life is omnipresent but not omnipotent.
When we pick a fight with a corporation, we seek them out too: in their headquarters,
their high street shopfronts, and where they sponsor public events and institutions. Any
physical or visual presence in urban public life becomes a stage for questioning and challeng-
ing the corporation’s wider set of activities anywhere in the world. The office desks and sales
checkouts become the frontline of everything corporations say and do, the border between
us and them, and which therefore serves as a site for our battles.
In cityscapes that are rapidly being gentrified and redeveloped, where every patch of
gravelly land and square foot of dusty floorboard is sold to the highest bidder, visual artists,
theatre-makers, performance artists and musicians alike increasingly struggle to find spaces
to make and share creative work. To make art in a time characterised by the corporate take-
over of public life is to embrace nomadism and its artistic lexicon: site-specific, promenade,
installation, digital content; whatever it takes to make work without anywhere to make it.
These three ingredients make for a dynamic mix: corporates seeking evermore exposure
and ways to build brand identity; artists thrown out on the street and activists looking for
opportunities to undermine corporate power and engage the public in social issues. In this
cat-and-mouse game, artists and activists have found ways to destabilise the corporate entity
in its public form, and in doing so, grasp at a new method of making spaces public. By engag-
ing audiences onsite and online in the sharing of performance and protest against corporate
misdemeanours, a functioning commons is being reclaimed.

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Whose Space?
The idea encompassed in the title of ‘the commons’ dates back to pre-enclosure England,
when land for common agricultural or festive use formed a centre point to social life. It is a
practice of land use which is continued by Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, despite ongo-
ing resistance to colonialism and the refusal to recognise land rights by settler colonial states
such as Brazil (see the Munduruku) and the USA (see the Standing Rock Sioux). Shared
space in which to gather remains desirable the world over, hidden as it is in raucous gather-
ings of young people in shopping centres, wistful hoverings of adults of all ages in galleries
and museums, on park benches and train platforms. Even during commuter claustrophobia,
the introverted among us still long to share space, to be together. The notion of public space
denotes this messier conflation of different powers, actors and messages. It is a dynamic
concept constantly being shaped to suit different agendas. Where Jurgen Habermas’ (1962)
construction of the ‘public sphere’ has been rightly critiqued as exclusive and elitist – because
Habermas focuses solely on the influence of upper middle classes on politics and social life –
ideas around the uses of public space especially but not exclusively in urban environments re-
main important. Their significance has, in contrast, evolved to be immensely more accessible
to diverse participants in community organising, political resistance and social movements
than Habermas’ original notion claimed.
For social geographer Doreen Massey (2007), places are temporary sites that hold contin-
ually changing representations of historical moments – a contested territory which is perma-
nently shifting rather than antagonistically fixed. In this understanding, the role of critical
intervention becomes necessarily short-lived with as much historical weight as the given
site’s more physically permanent structures. Once something has happened in a space, it will
forever haunt it. Massey warns to be ‘wary of certain forms of localism’; yet, she argues that
‘“place” would seem to have real and, maybe ironically in this age of globalisation, even in-
creasing potential as a locus of political responsibility and an arena for political engagement’
(Massey 2007: 208–9). Massey’s assertion offers an important entry point to reframing public
space for political artists and activists.
Corporate presence in public space by way of premises, purchases or advertising can feel
pervasive. For decades, the roadside billboard has been a favourite opportunity for social
comment or corporate critique, needing only the simple tool of paint in a pressurised aerosol
container and a catchy few words to bring about transformation. Graffiti is one strategy to
challenge the visual dominance of the billboard in public space, but parodying the entire
visual language of advertising steps beyond this to deconstruct the broader logic and meth-
ods of consumer capitalism. Barbara Kruger’s art and writing (2010) explores the interaction
between corporate messaging and peoples’ thoughts and ideas via public space. She under-
mines the advertisers’ techniques through parody. For Kruger, the public visual space is a
contested territory in which political philosophy can be fought and the ideas that inform our
thoughts, feelings and ways of life can be questioned, shaped or transformed. Kruger’s work
calls for a thorough and critical approach to aesthetics from artists and activists working in
the public realm.
Theatre and performance are important art practices shaping our understandings and
interventions in the scenes of everyday life. Theatre historian Marvin Carlson (1989)
writes, ‘the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance constitute the major historical period
when theatre existed as an important part of urban life without any specific architec-
tural element being devoted to its exclusive use’. While current black box theatres and
proscenium arch stages contain performance within a limited boundary, there was once

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a time when the drama unfolded fluidly within everyday contexts – not dissimilar to
street performance or fringe theatre. This older, alternative potential for participation in
performances in public spaces offers an opportunity to use public performance to disrupt
ordinary social roles.
The political convergence or action camp offers more permanent revolutions in the use of
public space when located in public settings. In ‘Protest Camps’, Anna Feigenbaum, Fabian
Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy (2013) explore the historical development of camps since the
1960s onwards and the political applications of setting up camps in carefully chosen sites.
Camps combine the countercultural with the everyday. For however long they last – days,
weeks, months or sometimes years – they provide a parallel universe structured by main-
stream culture and its critique. Taking over space and living together in it necessarily spark
exploration of alternatives, even though camps operate within the limitations of current
forms of social organisation.
So how do we radically reclaim and revivify public spaces to create new potentials for
dissent, transformation and structural change? How have artists and activists disrupted social
norms to tackle massive corporate and government structures head on? And how do these
practices offer scope to enliven politics, increase public engagement and push for wider cul-
tural shifts around social justice issues? Using examples big and small, coordinated and spon-
taneous, I will pick out from personal experience moments where the scope of the possible
has broadened and lengthened, set in the street, protest camps, corporate spaces and museums and
galleries. In each, the open access public space will emerge as an important site for collectivity
and building community around key social issues.
The following stories are windows into a much wider world of shape-shifting and cre-
ative confrontation that seeks to refresh the normal boundaries of protest and public life to
light fireworks for alternative thinking and doing. Each relate to the analyses of public space,
art, performance and protest as described by Massey, Kruger, Carlson and Feigenbaum,
Frenzel and McCurdy.

In the Street
Visual artist Barbara Kruger says her ‘cut and paste’ artistic practice was shaped by her early
experiences as a designer at a women’s magazine, and calls her time in the editing room
as ‘the biggest influence on my work’. Carol Squiers examines the relationship between
Kruger’s early career and her later work as an artist and concludes, ‘She began to pose ques-
tions about the construction of everyday life and the social mechanisms of consumption,
seduction, and control, which flowed as much from her experiences in fashion and lifestyle
publishing as they did from the critical theory she read’. This blending of content and form
in her source material was also to prove a rich vein of critical artistic process when she com-
bined critical ideas with the imagery of fashion advertising. Squiers continues, ‘The young
woman who hadn’t imagined herself as an artist took her experience at shaping fashion’s up-
beat enticements and turned it to her own artistic ends: to challenge, lampoon, and subvert
the protocols of power’ (Squiers 2010: 232). As Squiers describes it, Kruger turned the tools
of advertising and used it to parody the internal logic of consumer capitalism, adhering to
the form in order to fully expose it. Her stark white statements on bright lipstick red solid
backgrounds shout out their bold claims in direct address to or implication of the audience,
and are at once thoughtful, suggestive and confronting, for example ‘I shop therefore I am’,
‘Your body is a battleground’ and ‘In violence we forget who we are’. This is no ordinary
advert in the path of the passersby.

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 Mel Evans

Kruger’s artworks installed on billboards, bus stops and buildings interrupt the other-
wise closed text of urban street advertising. This kind of intervention reframes everything
around it and much of what the audience goes on to view that day and beyond. Exposing
the key features of advertising as a form enables the viewer to deconstruct everything else
on display around her. In 2007 on the shopping streets of Glasgow, some friends and I set
out to use performance techniques of parody to do something similar to Kruger’s disruptive
un-advertising.
It’s midday on a busy Saturday afternoon on Buchanan Street in Glasgow, the most central
and most upmarket pedestrianised high street in the place that prides itself in being known
as the UK’s second shopping city, however that is determined. The city centre is hilly and
­Buchanan Street descends gently offering stunning views of the hills lying eastwards above the
hats and heads of the shoppers as they jostle past bagpipe players, chuggers and each other – it’s
2007, before the financial crises and the austerity cuts, and everyone’s merrily consuming capi-
talism. Me, Beth and Tilly have a dare on: it’s sort of performance art, sort of direct action, but
mainly it’s a dare. We’ve walked past the mannequins in the shops hundreds of times, rolled
our eyes at their pale skin and pointy breasts, touting clothes that look good until you try them
on. We’ve queried their impact on young women’s sense of self, but we’ve never thought of the
mannequins as equally trapped in the social structure; we’ve never interacted with them before.
The dare is can you get in there with them, and how long can you stay? Beth goes first. She slips
into the display area having grabbed a t-shirt from the rack on her way in. She moves slowly,
she’s trained in physical theatre and mime, and quickly at her simple movements a few young
girls gather to giggle at something that they instinctively know is naughty and subversive. Beth
chats for a little with her mannequin friend and gets a good five minutes performance time in
before security catch up and send her on her way. She gives them a surprised look of ‘Oh am I
not supposed to be here?’ and the gathered girl gang uproars in laughter. I’m next and I opt for a
frozen revolutionary stance in a smart women’s clothing store’s khaki and denim shop window.
Security are on to me fast – turns out all the shops on the street share radio channels and our
antics have been passed down the chain – but it’s tricky for the guy when, as a mannequin, I
simply don’t respond to his request for me to leave. I can’t hear him. I’m made of plastic. He
continues his monologue arms folded across his chest, almost frozen and now part of the scene
himself until I activate and smiling, slip right back out of the shop. We carry on with our ex-
periments until we’re shunned from all doors with grinning faces of bemused guards who got
our descriptions and our game. And so it is that we switch streets, find Ann Summers, the dare
steps up a notch and Tilly and I find ourselves competing to see who can hold a freeze going
down on a mannequin on Sauciehall Street in Glasgow. Can’t be the first time it has happened?
Our dare played with gender roles, corporate space, consumerism and body image, and
was all built around a transgression that uprooted the sense of what could or could not hap-
pen for passersby, how things might or might not be in these worlds that we daily co-create.
We disrupted the sense that nothing can change, and that corporate control over our minds
and bodies was something we could playfully fight. By setting up a parody of femininity in
parallel to its normative construction, we were able to reveal a wider critical dimension, and
undermine the policing of gender roles via consumer capitalist stages in public life.

Protest Camps
In Doreen Massey’s analysis, place can be ‘one base, among many others, for collectivity’.
This succinctly provides the foundation for art and protest that takes the activity of dissent
beyond narrowly scripted marches and rallies and into new territories where co-creation and

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collaboration are necessary and centred – where the forming and practising of community
are fundamental. In this understanding, coming together in sites of antagonism or political
significance gives way to active democracy where it is incumbent on the participants to make
the event, thereby engendering a public life that is elsewhere narrower and more tightly
scripted in normative politics and cultures.
Climate Camp was both physical and imaginary; both practical and prefigurative; both
politically effective and politically inspiring. It happened annually from 2006 to 2010 in-
clusive, and in each instance bore the same trademarks: a week-long site occupation of land
on or next to a current or planned piece of fossil fuel infrastructure in which people lived in
an ecologically sustainable way, organised non-hierarchically by consensus, shared talks and
workshops to understand and consider the social politics of the environment, and planned
direct action on the root causes of climate change.
From coal power stations, to the planned third runway at Heathrow, the financial district
of London to RBS headquarters in Edinburgh, the camp sprung up, confronted security and
police, and created a welcoming, lively space of action, discussion and social change. Each
day at Climate Camp was packed: a neighbourhood meeting at 9 a.m., with participants
who live in your region of the country, making links and feeding in thoughts and ideas for
the main meeting at 9.30 a.m. – where if you’re a spokesperson for your neighbourhood you
head straight to, shape consensus decisions, bring back info for the noticeboard. From there,
a workshop on class war and climate change or DIY renewable energy, to an action planning
session, and don’t forget you signed up to chop carrots for lunch. By the evening, you’ve made
several new friends for life, soaked up some sun and felt the possibility of connection with kith
and kin seep back into your bones through your bare feet on the grass which one week later
will have been tidied to the last fag butt, when all that remains of your taste of utopia is a mass
of newspaper cut-outs of headlines proclaiming hippies have landed but content wise finally
forced to bring climate change and fossil fuel corporations into the main stories.
Alongside the full swathe of campaigning tactics utilised by aligned groups, the camp saw
huge successes: the shelving of government plans for a raft of coal plants, starting with the
initial target Kingsnorth; the halting – for some years – of Heathrow expansion plans and
eventually the phasing out of fossil fuel finance by RBS. The example of Climate Camp was
tightly mirroring its predecessor Horizone, the action planning camp in Stirling, Scotland
set up to target the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005. This camp was, of course, itself shaped
by numerous protest camp influences from Reclaim the Streets to Greenham Common
Women’s Peace Camp. Climate Camp later provided practical resources for Occupy London
Stock Exchange when various groups joined to set it up in response to the global call to ac-
tion by Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
The genealogy of camps is laid out beautifully in ‘Protest Camps’ by Anna Feigenbaum,
Fabian Frenzel and Patrick McCurdy (2013). In part, they lay the purpose of these endeav-
ours in social movements as founded in an attempt to resolve the problems of the present day
with a steer towards a radical or utopian alternative: ‘Protest camps are not simply mirror
images of a social order devoid of any relationship to the here and now. Indeed in protest
camps the tensions between antagonistic demands for a new beginning meet with the prac-
tical requirements of making things work in the present’ (2013: 220–1). This analysis speaks
to the application of the form by Climate Camp, both in its practice of radical horizontal
organising and tangible alternative renewable energy as visions for the future practised in the
here and now. This experimentation with visionary possibilities is vital to reclaiming spaces
for a public conversation around what our collective future might look like, and stepping
into practices of creating those futures more broadly and more often.

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Corporate Spaces
Privately owned public spaces are casually encroaching on the public urban environment
in cities with significant financial centres like London and New York. Accessible to all
but tightly monitored to police unacceptable entrants, dress, assembly or behaviours, these
locales are strict in both dull minimalist aesthetics and heavy-handed social conditioning.
These spaces are drafted by a different social script than many others, with a narrower set of
costumes, movements and participants expected to appear on the stage.
In his analysis of street performance in Medieval towns, Marvin Carlson describes ‘a sit-
uation allowing those producing a performance to place it in whatever locale seemed most
suitable meant that theatre could use to its own advantage the already existing connotations of
other spaces both in themselves and in their placement in the city’. The built-up environment
was understood as its own stage already: areas were used freely for public performance and sites
provided context understood by all involved. A familiarity with performance in public space
invited participation by all on the street, rather than the automatic audience formation com-
monly emerging around street performances today. This potential performance dialogue with
the cityscape and the participation in performances by its inhabitants was denied by the ascent
of royal power, however. Royal authority within cities form the later Middle Ages onwards as-
serted a different dynamic in public space: one of performance and audience, wherein the public
witnessed the royals’ power. Carlson notes, ‘the city was no longer available as stage primarily
for the separate scenes of citizens’ dramas but became rather the scene for the display of princely
power, at which citizens were present by sufferance – as spectators only’ (Carlson 1989).
The princely power now finds itself replaced by other objects of fetish and command.
Where Carlson noted the flexibility of the Middle Ages street for public performance lost
to royal authority, the new power’s control over the public realm occurs by the advertising
industry’s infiltration of our imaginations explored by artist Barbara Kruger. Present-day
areas owned by corporations extend this corporate influence to architectural and extralegal
limitations commanded through ownership. Beyond the lures of the shopping malls, areas in
London such as Canary Wharf, More London beside City Hall and Exchange Square in the
financial district all apply stricter regulations of corporate control of streets, pathways and
otherwise presumed areas of ‘public’ space.
In 2013 with Platform,1 I wrote and produced a piece of immersive site-specific theatre
made for the financial district of London, titled ‘Oil City’. For two weeks as part of the 2
Degrees arts and climate change festival, three performances took place daily in which au-
diences of ten, invited to follow the UBS bank’s dress code (BBC news, 2004), joined three
actors in a live investigation into the connections between the banks surrounding Liverpool
Street Station and finance for the expansion of the tar sands in Canada. The financial district
was reframed as theatrical stage, deconstructing the power and authority of its financiers as
they went about their daily business while on the same walkways, benches and bland cor-
porate art centred social spaces the group of interlopers critiqued the impacts of the banks’
operations far beyond their shiny glass walls. The piece turned the theatricality of power in
the financial sector against it, undermining the normalised authority of the big banks by re-
vealing its inner workings. Theatre critic Lyn Gardner described the experience: ‘It operates
intriguingly at the point where fact and fiction meet … It’s also a reminder that art and activ-
ism are close cousins: together, they can make connections’ (Gardner, 2013). In this case, the
work followed a somewhat medieval performance strategy by using the existing context as
a not only suitable site but indeed the subject of the performance. In doing so, the corporate
space was made more public by inviting members of the public into critical dialogue with

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this place that, through the financial crisis, debt and controversial and destructive project
finance around the world, affects every aspect of lives.
Oil company headquarters are a favoured and necessary target of coordinated dissent
around the globe. These smart clean offices are an aesthetic world away from the grime and
pollution of oil extraction, transport and refineries. Therefore, attempting the evoke this
distant cognitive dissonance in the physical space of the HQ has radical potential: it brings
all who interact with the place, be they staff, visitors or passersby, into more visceral sense
of what company they are in fact keeping. These corporate spaces located in capital cities’
­central business districts offer an important site for performance and protest that aims to
bring public attention to the real-world impacts made by soft taps on computer keyboards at
desks cleaned daily within the insulated walls of the buildings.
In 2007 during Climate Camp Heathrow, a group of seven climate justice activists closed
BP HQ in St James Square London for a day. Two of us had dressed in suits and chained our-
selves to a doorway to block it. From a pool of oily molasses, we wailed like two birds caught
in an oil spill and two businesswomen cornered by our own consciences. In 2010, Climate
Camp was held at RBS HQ in Edinburgh for a week of stand offs and a daily disruption of
business as usual. It is Shell’s monumental headquarters on the Southbank in London that
have received the most frequent and ardent statements of dissent to the companies’ activities
in ­Nigeria – by Platform, Social Action and others, in the Canadian tar sands, by the UK Tar
Sands Network and the Indigenous Environmental Network, and the Arctic, by Greenpeace.
Consecutive creative interruptions here by Greenpeace evoked the distant Arctic through
art, in the form of an enormous double decker bus-sized polar bear marionette, the part-bear,
part-ship creature known as Aurora, who vigilantly eyed staff in the first and second floor
offices in 2015 as the company attempted to drill for oil in the Arctic. Her presence there
followed a month of daily recitals of a ‘Requiem for Arctic Ice’ performed by numerous
musicians including Charlotte Church, who sang Dinah Washington and Max Richter’s ar-
rangement of Clyde Otis’s ‘This Bitter Earth’ and Richter’s own ‘On the Nature of Daylight’
(Greenpeace and Charlotte Church, 2015). After the two-month occupation of the place and
the imaginations of all who frequent it, and following a tidal wave of global resistance that
ranged from rig climbing to bridge blockades in the Pacific, Shell halted its drilling and with-
drew its plans from the table.
The confrontation between what is public and what is corporate that can take place in
both corporate-owned spaces and corporate headquarters brings the impact of multinational
corporations to come into scrutiny. These spaces become a stage on which the public interest
can be conjured or represented and as such a practice of creating public space emerges.

Museums and Galleries

Cultural institutions are a physical manifestation of a microcosm of the histories we are
told and the ways we frame and contain our nevertheless shifting cultures. Conservation of
­artefacts and art objects, by definition, fixes periods of time in box frames and glass contain-
ers. And yet, a conversation is going on in these spaces already in which dissent clearly has a
role: what are our ethics, how do they differ to those who came before us, what defines this
age? Any intervention that could be called protest makes a contribution to that conversation
at the same time as it objects to the content on display be that exhibits or corporate logos.
From 2010 to 2016, Liberate Tate made unsanctioned live art inside Tate galleries with a cen-
tral strategic objective of ending BP sponsorship of the institution (which it achieved in 2016), and
a set of broader aims of questioning the ethics of the art museum, exploring its potential as a site of

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public engagement and debate, and highlighting the various harmful impacts of the international
oil industry from ecological damage to environmental racism. In one performance, Time Piece,
in 2015, we stayed in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall overnight as part of a ­twenty-five-hour
durational performance exploring concepts of time, from that of geological time and the anthro-
pocene, all the way to gallery-opening hours. From a bibliography of publications on oil, art and
climate change, we transcribed texts in willow charcoal in a rising tide up the slope of the gallery.
Books included Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’, Vandana Shiva’s ‘Earth Democracy’ and Ursula
Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’. The performance lasted its intended duration when the police and
management concluded to refrain from removing us from the building after we assembled our
compost toilet in defiance of their shutting off access to the gallery toilets. By the second high tide
on the River Thames adjacent to the gallery, which marked the end of the performance, the floor
was awash with delicate patterns of words written by over a hundred performers, engaging the
interaction of thousands of visitors and millions of people online. A community was built – both
inside and outside the institution, through links with the Public and Commercial Services union
representing gallery floor staff as much as artists through online platforms – and this community
shifted the wider attitude and encouraged the board of Trustees to change.
Over the course of the campaign, the art collective made over sixteen such performance inter-
ventions, and inspired various groups in the UK, Norway, the Netherlands and North ­America
whose interventions and campaigns saw other victories, such as Statoil losing sponsorship con-
tracts with music festivals in Norway. The global movement for institutional liberation has grown
and diversified in its aims and practices over the years 2015–17. An important example in this
powerful movement is Decolonize This Place, an artist and protest organising space from which
an action at the American Museum of Natural History in New York was designed as a collab-
oration between NYC Stands With Standing Rock and the New York chapter of Black Lives
Matter. Inside the museum, the groups gathered around 250 people who took part in an alterna-
tive tour, critically reframing the racist content on display in the museum’s exhibits. The tour was
followed by a ceremony outside to cover a racist statue at the museum’s main entrance. In a call for
its removal, the participants chanted, ‘Respect. Remove. Rename’ (Gonzalez, 2016). The action
signified a global challenge to all involved in confrontations with gallery and museum ethics to
directly connect this work with a process of decolonisation of these institutions whose collections
and histories are so deeply connected to the stolen riches of colonialism, imperialism, the cultural
theft of slavery and the contemporary narratives that normalise white supremacy.
In both examples, the museum or gallery emerges as a particularly interesting site for pro-
test activity because of its distinct differences to the street and corporate physical structures –
and to the cordoned-off spaces belonging to activist communities be they social centres or
protest camps. Within cultural institutions, visitors and staff enter a liminal space: not one
which is in flux with the transitory mixed messages of the street; not a hyper-controlled and
aesthetically two-dimensional binary corporate space; not a ‘safe’, limited, intra-community
echo chamber over which activists hold complete jurisdiction, but a carefully curated yet
necessarily contested space in which rapid readings and critical visual analysis spark off on
the cue of the opening sliding doors. The public gallery becomes a space in which live ques-
tioning of social structures can be made possible, and in depth.

Conclusion
Public space has been politicised and instrumentalised in processes of cultural, social and
­political changes in various ways over centuries and decades. In today’s politics of fear
and polarisation, methods that bring people together and, in so-doing, build trust, resilience

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and solidarity are evermore important. At this time, all methods are vital, and the techniques
we use to remake and reframe these spaces will be necessarily more and more creative. The
reasons to make spaces public are: to hothouse ideas and relationships in the protest, demon-
stration or camp, to disrupt the corporate conformity of the street, to prick the status quo of
elite corridors of power and to revive dissent within the public cultural institution.
This is the ultimate potential of disruptive, creative, critical intervention: to invite us
each to transgress the rules of public space, and in doing so to open out radical political
possibilities. When we transgress together, new communities are built that can shift the pol-
itics and ideas in the wider culture. For artists, the challenge is to change spaces not simply
seek out a place to make art in. For artists and activists alike, it is surely better to be out on
the street than cocooned in an echo chamber. Without spaces of our own, we are fruitfully
forced into contact, connection and perhaps confrontation with the world, the environment,
the public, corporations – and that’s exactly where we should be.

Note
1 Platform is an interdisciplinary organisation working between the arts, research, education and
campaigning. Much of the work is based around the organisation’s articulation of the Carbon
Web, and the branches of supporting infrastructure that support and maintain the international
oil industry’s profitable operations. I worked in the organisation from 2008 to 2014 and remain an
active part of its network. www.platformlondon.org.

References
Carlson, Marvin. 1989. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. London: Cornell
University Press.
Climate Camp. 2006–2011. [online] Available at: facebook.com/climatecamp or see descriptions
­documented by the British Science Association. [online] Available at: collectivememory.­british-
scienceassociation.org/memory/camp-for-climate-action. Accessed 29 January 2017.
Decolonize This Place. 2016. [online] Available at: http://decolonizethisplace.org/. Accessed 29
­January 2017.
Feigenbaum, Anna, Fabian Frenzel, and McCurdy Patrick. 2013. Protest Camps. London: Zed.
Gardner, Lyn. 2013. Oil City: Review [online] Available at: www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/
jun/20/oil-city-review. Accessed 29 January 2017.
Gonzalez, Catherine. 2016. Respect, Rename, Remove!. [online] Available at: https://bitchmedia.
org/article/respect-rename-remove/activist-anti-columbus-day-tour-aims-decolonize-history-­
museum. Accessed 29 January 2017.
Greenpeace and Charlotte Church. 2015. Requiem for Arctic Ice. [online] Available at: www.youtube.
com/watch?v=2EMAhrnFGBQ. Accessed 8 October 2017.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1962. ‘The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society’ translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick
­L awrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989.
Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo. Toronto: Vintage Canada.
Kruger, Barbara. 2010. Remote Control: Power, Cultures and the World of Appearances. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Liberate Tate. 2010-present. [online] Available at: liberatetate.org.uk/performances/time-piece/­
bibliography. Accessed 29 January 2017.
Massey, Doreen. 2007. World City. Cambridge: Polity.
Squiers, Carol in Kruger, Barbara. 2010. Remote Control: Power, Cultures and the World of Appearances.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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 3.3
RADICAL BICYCLE POLITICS
Confronting Car Culture and Capitalism as
Root Causes of Mobility Injustice1

Aurora Trujillo and Matthew Wilson

After more than a decade of cycling being their primary form of transport, and having been
involved for as many years in both the radical and mainstream cycling worlds, one of us has
been forced to walk instead of cycle.

I have parked my loyal bike. My mental health is suffering and I need a less stressful
mode of transport, at least for a while. The extreme attention that is needed to cycle in
a city like London and the adrenaline rush and stress that it provokes is not tolerable or
beneficial for me at the moment.

This is not an exceptional situation. Cycling is too stressful and scary for many people in the
UK to even try. ‘I’d love to cycle’, a lot of people say, ‘but I’m too scared’; and understandably
so. Compared to many activities, cycling is, statistically, relatively safe. But, as Dave Horton
has argued, this statistical reality misses the crucial point that it is not simply the number of
incidents that ought to concern us; what also matters is how it feels to cycle. And the truth
is, under the UK’s current traffic conditions, cycling often feels dangerous, threatening and
unsettling (Horton 2007; Pooley et al. 2013). Recent studies on the frequency and impact
of incidents that do not result in the injury or death of cyclists but which do constitute ‘near
misses’ show that the often severe emotional consequences of these incidents deeply affect
how cyclists experience their journeys and their likeliness to continue cycling (Aldred 2016).

Inevitably Political: A Double-Axe Approach

Bicycle politics is about much more than bicycles and cycling. It is about the wider cultural,
political and economic value systems, as well as the material conditions, that cycling and
bicycles are situated in; it is about interrogating whether cycling is facilitated or prevented
by those systems and conditions and/or whether and how its promotion can be used to move
towards and shape new ones. No mode of transport is simply a mode of transport. Mobility
is deeply political. As Ivan Illich said, ‘Tell me how fast you travel and I’ll tell you who you
are’ (Illich 1974). Our mobility needs, how these needs are created in the first place, by
whom and for whom, and how we meet them, are not value-free questions that planners and
engineers can find neutral, technological solutions to. These are value-laden questions about

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which kind of society we2 want to live in, how we want to organise our lives, in the interest
and empowerment of whom, according to which values and in pursuit of which relationships
(cultural and economic) (Simmie 1974; Hayden 1981; MacGregor 1995; Thomas 2000). Do
we want a society in which a great majority of people find cycling too intimidating to even
try, or one in which everyone who wishes can enjoy the many benefits of cycling, including
improved mental health? Do we want a world in which commuting for hours every week
is normalised or one in which that time can be used in more fulfilling ways? A world in
which children cannot play outdoors for fear of being run over, a world in which people are
encouraged to stay at home to avoid high levels of pollution on the streets?3 Or a world in
which our streets are places to hang out and live, rather than mere corridors for motor traffic
or places to consume? Should the contribution of the car industry to the British economy
trump social equality and ecological needs? The list goes on.
Radical bicycle politics is about approaching the questions and challenges that bicycle pol-
itics poses from an antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, anti-oppression, ecologically committed
approach, one which also embraces a diversity of tactics to bring change. This, we assume, is
what broadly characterises radical politics.
With this in mind, the following chapter presents a diversity of expressions of contem-
porary radical bicycle politics, mostly focusing on the UK. As we will see, the bicycle has
frequently played a role in radical (and not so radical) social movements. However, while
old and new radical political struggles have often considered the bicycle as an intrinsically
valuable object, it could be argued that its role has fluctuated along two axes or spectrums.
One of the axes tracks whether the movement focuses on mobility-related political aims
such as promoting cycling or opposing motor traffic in their own right, or whether it uses
the bicycle as a symbolic and/or practical tool to further non-mobility-related political aims,
such as feminism or environmentalism. The other axis is structurally focused and examines
how overt and encompassing the politics of the movement is.
These axes cross each other forming multiple combinations. In reality, movements are
messy and often various aspects are present at different points in time in diverse and unpre-
dictable ways. The axes work, however, as an analytical framework.
The chapter will use this basic framework to explain a diversity of contemporary and
historical expressions of bicycle politics: older expressions of radial politics, such as the
­Situationists, Provos and early socialist and feminist movements; DIY bike workshops
and not-for-profit bike businesses, as spaces where alternative forms of economics, and
­a nti-oppression politics, are problematised and practised; the evolution of the Critical Mass
(CM) movement as a way to reclaim public space; global climate biketivism, where the bike
is used as a protest tool in grassroots environmental, direct action movements; the ­a nti-roads
protests of the 1990s, as the clearest anti-car movement in the UK’s recent h­ istory; grassroots
direct action cycling campaigning, which coexists with more mainstream c­ ycling advocacy,
creating an intersection of radical and reformist politics.
Some questions we will ask using the proposed double-axe approach are: How ­engaged
are DIY bike workshops in mobility politics? How overtly antiauthoritarian and ­a nticapitalist
is Critical Mass as a movement? Is it possible and desirable to create a more politicised and
explicitly anti-car cycling movement? Did the anti-roads movement of the 1990s have a
wider mobility politics?
In order to contextualise the different expressions of radical bicycle politics explained in
the chapter, we provide in the next section a brief analysis of the wider cultural, political and
economic value systems and of the material conditions that define the current state of mo-
bility in which cycling sits. It is a situation characterised by unequal power relations between

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different actors and visions of mobility and society. This will help us ground the use of the
analytical framework just exposed.

Cars4 versus People: The Traffic Power Structure

The easiest way to begin thinking about cycling in a critical and political way is to under-
stand that there is a clear hierarchy at play when it comes to transport policy (and, indeed,
any related policy areas, such as urban planning). The car sits comfortably and unchallenged
at the top of this hierarchy; it is enough to step outside our homes – especially if we live in
urban ­environments – to notice this. Cars are like the air they so relentlessly pollute; we are
surrounded by them to the point that we have grown entirely accustomed to them (Sheller
and Urry 2000; Vigar 2002; Urry 2004). Often, we barely register their existence. At certain
times, though, for example, when we experience near misses on our bikes, when a loved one
is killed in a car crash, or when wheelchair users, blind and deaf people tell us how they can-
not move around freely, we are starkly reminded of the impacts that a world built around the
car brings. Even then, we often rationalise these as tragic but unavoidable circumstances or
dangers. Having been normalised, the negative consequences of car culture are unlikely to be
seen by those experiencing them first-hand as a political wrong. Walking, cycling and public
transport, that is, people that choose or need to use those transport systems, are at the bottom
of the pile, pushed literally and metaphorically to the margins of our streets. As Planka.nu
succinctly put it, ‘the traffic power structure determines not only the relationship between car
and bus but also between human being and human being’ (Planka.nu 2016, 6). Recognition
of this fundamental inequality should lie at the core of any notion of radical bicycle politics.
This state of affairs, however, is not accidental, but the result of a gradual intensification
of the role of the car in meeting (and creating!) our mobility needs (Horton and Jones 2015).
The car was adopted and sustained as the dominant mode of transport overland by a series
of social, political, cultural, economic and infrastructural systems, values and assumptions.
This is what we call car culture (Gorz 1980; Ward 1991; Wolf 1996; Riechmann 2004, 2005;
Horton 2006a, 2006b; Paterson 2007). This domination is particularly noticeable in towns
and cities, although rural areas too have been dramatically reshaped, physically and cultur-
ally, in response to car ownership. Capital and associated powers, such as liberal states, are
what brought the car to this position and what allow it to remain unquestioned, despite
the incredibly damaging impacts that it is having on our lives and the planet (Engler and
Mugyenyi 2011, Planka.nu 2016), and the social injustices and inequalities that it is creating
(Sustrans, n.d.).
When people do consider the negative impacts of motor traffic, the most obvious issue is
that of climate change, perhaps followed by broader, vaguer notions of environmental de-
struction and pollution.5 But there are other impacts that are too often forgotten, if they are
considered at all, and that seem to remain (at least politically) invisible to us. Even the issue
of pollution, despite recent focus in the mainstream arena of organisations such as Clean Air
and Greenpeace ( Jones 2017),6 and direct action groups such as Stop Killing Londoners, is
poorly understood by many, and vastly under-acknowledged on a cultural level; think, for
example, of how present and powerful the discourse around cigarettes is, and then consider
that exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is estimated to have killed 23,500 people in the
UK alone each year; and small particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) caused the equiva-
lent of 29,000 deaths in the UK. The biggest source of NO2 and PM2.5 are diesel engines
­(Campaign for Better Transport 2014). The same engines are subjected to the emissions
scandal in 2015 (Corporate Europe Observatory 2016).

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More directly, 1,732 people died on UK roads in 2015 (Department for Transport 2015).
That is, 4.7 people a day. Serious injuries from Road Traffic Accidents stretch into the tens
of thousands every year, with 22,137 people seriously injured and 186,209 casualties of all
severities (Department for Transport 2015). Road injury is within the ten leading causes of
death in the world according to the World Health Organisation; 1.3 million people died as a
result of road traffic incidents in 2012, more than from cancer, for example.
The question of space is another much under-discussed problem; of course, it is impossi-
ble to separate entirely the infrastructure needed for cars from that needed for other forms of
transport, but it is equally not so hard to see, when we think of the vast road networks and
car parks that criss-cross the entire ‘civilised’ planet, that we have given over far too much
of that planet to the automobile.
Other, even less tangible, consequences stem from our car-centric culture. We hear
­ever-increasing concerns that we have lost a sense of community in our neighbourhoods;
that, for example, our streets are no longer safe, that we no longer know our neighbours and
so on (Appleyard et al. 1981). Yet rarely is the role that cars play in fragmenting the very fabric
of our lives explicitly acknowledged. Children no longer play on the streets; they feel unsafe,
and unpleasant, noisy and polluted places to be, so the idea of simply hanging out on them, of
chatting with our neighbours, becomes less possible and desirable. Add to this the increasing
dispersal of social amenities – for example, the local shop being closed and replaced with the
out-of-town supermarket (facilitated by car-centric society) and we have a world of atomised
individuals, stepping from one privatised box into another. Far from broadening our world,
the car has in some respects closed it off (Whitelegg 1997; Sloman 2006; Paterson 2007).
These issues are compounded further when we consider questions of inequality. It’s a
cruel paradox that those unable to afford a car are often the worst affected by them. For in-
stance, nearly all households with above-average income have a car but half of low-income
households do not (Department for Transport 2011), and it ought not surprise us that when
it comes to town planning, it is the poorer areas that are far more likely to find themselves in
the middle of large and busy road networks. Certain residential areas have become little less
than rat runs, with traffic, and even motorways, literally ripping their way through once-
closed communities. Poorer people are thus forced to endure the effects of heavy traffic – or
else they are forcibly relocated to make way for more roads (see Furness 2010, 59–60, for an
account of one striking example of this).
Despite this devastation, many of us have come to accept the inevitability, the normalisa-
tion, of cars; again, like air, it is hard to imagine a life without them. We may actually come
to believe in their necessity, their desirability even. However, this state of affairs – what we
refer to here as car culture – is neither inevitable, nor, we would argue, desirable. The car’s
position at the top of the transport hierarchy does not just lead to inequalities, it actively
excludes other ways of travelling; and it also actively shapes the way we think about travelling,
and why and where we travel. It has, in other words, restructured our world, physically and
mentally, in ways that are extremely damaging and exclusive. And, having done so, it has
made itself almost indispensable.
Why so much talk of cars in an article about bicycles? Well, because contemporary bicycle
politics, when focusing on mobility politics, is, in essence, a tug of war with car culture. In
the same way that one cannot talk about workers’ rights without referring to the bosses, or
slavery without acknowledging white privilege, we would argue that one cannot talk about
bicycle politics without acknowledging the role of motor traffic. Like so much else in this
world of ours, the car is a dream come true for a select few; for others, including those who
have no choice but to drive, it is a living nightmare. And, like real nightmares, it appears to

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be one we are facing with our eyes kept firmly shut. Whilst the car offers certain people a via-
ble and even desirable way to travel, it should come as no surprise that the transport hierarchy
reflects other social hierarchies; groups that are in one way or another socially marginalised
very often find this marginalisation continue on the road. And, let us not get enticed by the
narratives of green capitalism (Corporate Watch 2016). It is questionable whether ‘green’ cars
and driverless cars will achieve pollution- free (Paterson 2007) and incident-free cars. But
even if this was achieved, the other problems associated with the car still remain.
When we look at the impacts of car culture through the lens of power structures, we
realise how their dominance is not only the dominance of a certain mode of transport or
technology over another, but the dominance of the wealthy over the poor, the obsession
for economic ‘progress’ over planetary survival, the dominance of those who can access
and choose to drive over those who wish or need to cycle or walk and, more importantly,
be full and equal participants in the shared space that our streets could be, rather than the
corridors for motor traffic that they have become. In short, car culture is the dominance of
one political, economic and ethical approach to life over many others. How radical different
approaches to bicycle politics are hinges on which political, economic and ethical approach
they are based on and which view of the world they are striving for.

Expressions of Radical Bicycle Politics

With the aforementioned in mind, we now present the main expressions of contempo-
rary radical bicycle politics and analyse their political approaches and intricacies using the
­double-axis framework introduced earlier.

A Potted History up to the 1990s

Historically, the bicycle has frequently played a role in radical politics. In Europe, much of
the socialist and feminist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries em-
braced the bicycle as a symbolic and practical tool to further their campaigns (­Horton 2006a).
The bicycle provided a unique opportunity for autonomous mobility, allowing women and
the working classes to travel greater distances to find work, for example. It also allowed many
people previously stuck in inside cities to access the countryside, often for the first time. Es-
cape from the slums, however fleeting, came to symbolise a better, socialist world to come.
For feminists, the bicycle was, once again, a literal and metaphorical tool through which
women could enhance their all-too-limited freedom; as with the working classes, women
used the bike to travel independently, but the bicycle also had unexpected consequences with
regard to clothing. Women were expected to adhere to a strict dress code, which required
the wearing of skirts or dresses. Suddenly, they had an excuse for wearing other clothing,
opening up an avenue to reclaim their right to their own choices. For both socialists and
feminists, cycling mostly played the role of advancing other political values, such as freedom,
autonomy and independence.7 Regarding the first axes, then, these movements used cycling
as a tool to advance non-mobility-related aims. This may have been because car culture was
in its infancy then, and while being seen negatively by many, the car posed nothing like the
problems it does today; so the additional component of contemporary radical bike politics,
namely, its engagement with mobility from a political perspective and its opposition to car
culture, was simply not as relevant. Regarding the second axes, these movements offered a
very structured and overt kind of politics: socialism and feminism, and used the bike as a
symbol and a tool to elaborate on them.

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The bicycle re-emerged in numerous post-war countercultural movements, such as the

Autonomen, the Provos, the Situationists and a number of other European anarchist move-
ments in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. By this time, the car was already occupying a much
more dominant role in daily life, so unlike previous movements, these countercultural en-
gagements with the bicycle were often framed within an explicitly anti-car discourse. The
Situationists saw the car as a prime symbol of capitalism, a ‘pre-eminent consumer com-
modity’ that lay at the forefront of the subjugation of daily life (Furness 2010). The Provos
made similar charges. But they also went on to develop numerous tactics which are still used
by activists today; perhaps most famously, these Dutch anarchists created a project whereby
old, refurbished bikes would be painted white, and left out in the street for people to use.
The idea was simple: you could use the bike, as and how you wanted, but you could not
own it – when you parked it at the end of your ride, it was to be left for someone else to use
themselves. This scheme, which has been replicated in cities around the world, had two clear
agendas. First, to provide more bikes for people to use and, second, to challenge traditional
notions of use and ownership and to develop a new cultural logic to replace capitalist values
(Kempton 2007).
Not surprisingly, encouraging people to reject conventional notions of possession did not
sit well with the state or the corporate world, and the White Bike project was made illegal,
demonstrating very clearly what the Provos already knew – that the supposedly free market
quickly turns to state power when people use it to their own advantage.
Unlike many earlier socialists and feminists, who tended to look to the state as a means
by which a better society could be created, and who therefore focused their politics on the
mobilisation of people to join and vote for certain parties, the Provos drew on libertarian
socialist and anarchist ideas and adopted and developed a culture of prefigurative tactics, en-
couraging and helping people in the creation of new ways of living within, but against, the
dominant system. Whether contemporary radicals are aware or not of the existence of these
Dutch anarchists, much of what radicals do today in terms of prefiguration stems from these
early pioneers of prefiguration.
Regarding the two axes then, these movements had an explicit mobility-related politics,
as well as a structured and overtly anticapitalist and antistate politics.

DIY Bike Workshops8

DIY bike workshops have occupied a prominent place in the radical political landscape since
at least the 1990s (Carlsson 2008). Due to the broader political outlook of those involved,
these projects differ from conventional bike shops in numerous ways. Often growing out
of broader anticapitalist and anarchist movements, these bike spaces follow a prefigurative
approach, whereby workshops are run according to values, principles and behaviours which
those involved would ultimately like to see in the world at large. As such, they tend to ei-
ther be volunteer-led or established as non-hierarchical, not-for-profit social enterprises or
workers’ co-ops, and many will provide their services for free, for donations, or at a low cost.
Additionally, many of them have an ecological motivation and will therefore try to re-
duce their consumption levels, placing a high value on reusing and recycling, going to great
lengths to salvage bits from bikes that normal bike shops would simply throw away and re-
place with new parts. Many of them share a fundamental recognition that cycling, in and of
itself, has the potential to become one more component of the capitalist way of life. Bikes,
and all the related paraphernalia which comes with them, are becoming big business, and,
following the standard narrative of mainstream markets, they tend to be either overpriced

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and therefore inaccessible to many, or of such low quality that they quickly become broken
and unserviceable. And while offering many benefits once they are made, their initial pro-
duction also come with a high price tag in terms of their environmental and social costs. For
radical bike workshops then, the promotion of cycling comes with serious provisos, whereby
the entire lifespan of the bike, and not simply its use as a mode of transport, is considered to
be hugely important.
Bike workshops also form networks of mutual support and knowledge creation and ex-
change. In the UK, this is called ‘Community Bikes’, a network of radical bike projects
that aims to meet at least once a year to exchange practical knowledge and reflect on their
own development, progression and viability (almost always in question), as well as exploring
their relationship to the wider cultural, political and economic contexts. Two examples of
interesting initiatives that have come out of this network over the years are Common Wheel
and Bespoked Fringe 2017. Common Wheel was an attempt to form a more structured as-
sociation of bike projects that could form a ‘buying group’ to bargain with the big cycling
trade companies, which are responsible for the distribution of bike parts. The fact that these
companies hold immense power and that radical bike workshops are competing with main-
stream bike workshops which have more resources and hence more bargaining power means
that radical bike workshops end up paying more for the parts they need, or are even unable
to access many of them, putting them at a considerable disadvantage. The idea was that by as-
sociating with each other, their combined bargaining power would increase and workshops
with more resources could also support those starting out (in a similar vein to the Radical
Routes co-ops network). As well as an economic incentive, there was also an environmental
one, as radical bike workshops cannot choose certain more environmentally friendly options
from a market that does not offer them in the first place. Common Wheel aimed to encour-
age, or even create, more environmentally sound production methods. With regard to the
Bespoked Fringe 2017 and in the words of one of the instigators

Bespoked is a public show where boutique frame builders gather to display their bikes to
try and sell more of them to posh white men. I’d love if we could show the mainstream
UK bike public and media that there is another side to cycling […] I would like you to
display to the public your freak bikes, your earn-a-bikes initiatives, the shit bikes that
keep people moving. I want us to show our attitudes of self-empowerment through
tools, our outreach work with marginalised groups, our women and gender variant
workshops.
(Email communication, Community Bikes list)

As well as throwing down a challenge to capitalist economics then, radical bike shops also
place considerable emphasis on empowering those who use radical bike workshops; rather
than simply fixing peoples’ bike, and charging them for the service, bike workshops will
usually try to encourage people to learn those skills themselves, while offering the neces-
sary guidance, and providing information and advice. This project is an integral part of the
commitment to challenge the systematic and engrained power dynamics and oppression at
play in society. Many of these organisations make genuine efforts to question and change
this dynamics, including those that have traditionally been unwelcome in these spaces, and
providing a respite from the oppression people experience as women, non-binary, queer,
People of Colour and as a result of mental or physical problems.
While bike workshops are facilitating cycling and hence, in one respect, engaging with
mobility politics, they do not generally engage with the full range of this politics; their main

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activities are not overtly addressed at questioning the current transport system or questioning
car culture. In that sense, their politics is not strictly mobility-related when we are talking
about the first axis. On the second axis, their politics is quite comprehensive and has a focus
on anticapitalism and anti-oppression.

Critical Mass
Perhaps the most famous and far-reaching example of bike activism is CM (Carlsson 2002).
CM bike rides began in San Francisco in 1992, and have since spread all over the world;
Masses now regularly take place on the last Friday of the month in hundreds of cities. Fol-
lowing the cultural logic of many other forms of radical politics, CM is a network of global
autonomous groups situated, united by little more than the name and, to a greater or lesser
extent, a shared ethos. Even within a ride there can be multiple views around what the pre-
cise aims of the Mass are, or how it should be realised. Unifying riders, though, is the view
that cyclists ought to be free to ride without the dangers usually associated with busy roads,
and the safety-in-numbers of a Mass provides a temporary bubble where cyclists can, often
for the only time, experience what it might be like to live in a world not so dominated by
cars. For some riders, this is as much as can be hoped for, and demands or expectations are
limited to a desire to share the roads with cars; for others, Masses represent a more radical
vision of entirely, or almost, car-free cities. Either way, Masses undoubtedly, if only tem-
porarily, turn the tables on cars, often forcing drivers to give way while cyclists take the
dominant role.
While the rhetoric suggesting that CMs are unorganised and spontaneous events is
rarely, if ever, true, the logic behind such a claim is fundamental to the underlying phi-
losophy of Masses. Cars bring chaos to our cities on a daily basis; yet, this is entirely nor-
malised, and whilst drivers and the media might express frustration that this occurs, their
response is almost always to simply demand still more infrastructure for cars. The notion
that car driving is a disruptive activity, in and of itself, is rarely even considered. CMs often
need to be organised in the current transport climate but the reality they briefly create,
where cyclists are so predominant that they have the power to force cars to take a back seat,
is the one which, under different conditions, could well be the norm. Indeed, in cities such
as London, this is in fact happening; at times, cyclists merge into genuinely spontaneous
Masses, and the result is precisely what CMs aim to achieve – the validation, and normal-
isation, of mass cycling.
Responses to Masses, from car drivers and the authorities, vary considerably, but it is
worth noting briefly a classic position taken, which has ironically helped Massers define
their philosophy in a beautifully succinct way. Like other forms of protests, Masses are often
accused of disrupting traffic, and at times this reasoning is taken to its unjust but sadly in-
evitable conclusion, with Massers being forced off the road and even arrested. The response
from the CM network is simple: we are not disrupting traffic, we are traffic!
CM has a clear mobility-related political aim in relation to the first axis, as its aim is dis-
rupting the traffic power structure to open up space for cyclists, temporarily, but also with
the hope of this becoming the norm. On the second axis, their wider politics are complex
and unclear, differing from Mass to Mass and from individual to individual. However, fol-
lowing social media groups, such as London CM Facebook page, it is clear that anarchist and
anticapitalist politics, or even less radical forms of politics, are not central, and that, for the
most part, the main focus of the movement is that of celebrating cycling in opposition to car
culture, rather than questioning wider political issues.

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The UK’s Anti-roads Protest Movement of the 1990s

The 1990s saw the biggest opposition to road infrastructure and hence to cars in the history
of the UK (McKay 1996; Welsh and McLeish 1996; Wall 1999). Groups such as Earth First!,
Reclaim the Streets and many individuals and communities created the biggest direct action
campaign the UK has seen in decades, and can justifiably claim at least part of the credit
for stopping some of the most important schemes proposed by Margaret Thatcher’s govern-
ment’s ‘Roads for prosperity’ programme and eventually shelf the entire project, as three
quarters of the plans never got off the drawing board (Campaign for Better Transport 2012).
As with most radical politics, the anti-roads movement was a diverse network of activists,
with no overarching power structure, and hence no dominant political discourse beyond
the immediate opposition to the building of certain new roads; even here, it was not always
clear whether it was all new roads, or only certain projects, which were being rejected.
However, groups such as Reclaim the Streets and many individuals associated with Earth
First! were unapologetically anti-car and saw the fight against roads (and the car) as a wider
attack on capitalism as a system. Recollections from that time by those involved include
messages such as ‘In the rejection of mobility for its own sake there is an implied rejection
of the whole restlessness of capitalist modernity’ and ‘Claremont was not merely an attempt
to influence transport policy, narrowly conceived. Many of those involved are expressing a
much deeper social and cultural critique’. In the same recollection of events, this anti-roads
protester states ‘less striking, yet more insidious, the time has now come to declare war on
a more fundamental enemy: the car’ (Welsh and McLeish 1996). In that sense, the most
radical versions of the anti-roads movement had clear mobility-related aims in terms of
the first axis and, despite its diversity, a clearly anticapitalist and anti-establishment aim in
relation to the second axis. Whilst Earth First!, for instance, has retained its love of bikes
and a shared understanding that car driving and road building should be opposed, it has
focused on other equally problematic and destructive aspects of contemporary society and
capitalism, such as fossil fuels extraction and forms of extreme energy production. Sadly, the
Coalition ­Government’s new road building project announced in 2012, did not meet the
same opposition, even though it is as far-reaching as the one proposed in the 1990s (Cam-
paign for Better Transport 2012).

Climate Biketivism
Biketivism is the idea and practice of using bikes as tools for activism. This usually translates
into group bike rides to show the distance that can be travelled on a bike and to use the rides
as platforms from which to engage people and communities in discussions about radical
solutions to the multiple crises we currently face; as a form of solidarity with different front-
line communities nationally and internationally; as well as to strengthen the relationships
of those within the bike ride, often to form affinity groups that may take action later on.
Bikes are also being used as tools for protest and direct action, literally to serve as barriers in
confrontations with the police or to form blockades.
There is a long history of using long bike rides to draw attention to wider political causes.
This has historical roots in movements including the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
socialist movements mentioned earlier. Two members of the Clarion Cycling Club,9 for
instance, cycled from Glasgow to Barcelona in 1938. ‘Their aim was to collect money from
sympathisers with the Spanish Republican Government, and with the money to buy food
for the women and children of Spain. They hoped to raise about £70; in fact they raised

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over £300’ (Warren 2008). Seventy years later, in 2008, another ride was organised to com-
memorate this ride (ibid.). In the 2000s, the G8 Bike Ride, a group of sixty riders travelled
from London to Gleneagles (Scotland) where social movements gathered to oppose the G8 in
2005 (G8 Bike Ride). Their mission was to combine the excitement of cycling with activist
commitment: ‘not only is this the most environmentally sound way of getting there, but it
should be great fun and will provide excellent opportunities to network, show support for
various campaigns along the way, and to make plans for action on arrival’ (ibid.). That ride
gave birth to Bicycology. Active between 2006 and 2010, Bicycology ran workshops and
activities during three tours around the UK and one static week of events. The group aimed
to demonstrate the possibilities of using bikes in unusual and challenging ways and to engage
people in issues such as climate change, car culture, even capitalism and anarchism. Bicy-
cology also travelled to the Climate Camps and took an active role in them over the years
it was active. A recent reincarnation of these past versions of biketivism is Time to Cycle:
‘Time to Cycle mobilises to take action on climate crisis. We ride to raise awareness of these
issues, to share knowledge, and to build solidarity. We welcome everyone whose integrity
drives them to face the upcoming climate catastrophe and to take action to avert it’ (Time to
Cycle). Time to Cycle was part of the climate mobilisations against COP21 in Paris, and has
subsequently organised rides to Ende Gelande in Germany. Reclaim the Power camp actions
and a ride to support le ZAD in France (Time to Cycle/Past Rides). Other examples of UK
biketivism include the Ride to Mayo in Ireland in 2010 to oppose an oil pipeline, and recent
mobilisations against Heathrow airport expansion by Reclaim the Power. Often, these bike
rides have converged and merged with other international bike rides, as was the case of a
Spanish contingent joining the Ride to Mayo and the confluence of rides from different parts
of Europe in the case of the Time to Cycle ride to the Paris climate talks.
With regard to the axes, each instance of biketivism has engaged with transport politics in
different ways and to different extents, with Bicycology expressing a clear anti-car politics,
and Time to Cycle focusing more on wider climate goals. In terms of the second axes, all
have had an overtly radical approach to politics.

Transport and Cycling Campaigning: Lacking a Radical Approach

It is interesting that at the time of writing (2017), transport and cycling campaigning in the
UK is mostly the terrain of less politicised, reformist groups. Mainstream cycle campaigning
is encapsulated in national organisations such as the Cycling UK and Sustrans, though local
groups also play a key role. The London Cycling Campaign (LCC) is the most prominent of
these and the largest city-cycling organisation in the world. Other large key organisations
campaigning on wider transport issues include: Campaign for Better Transport, Road Peace
or Living Streets campaign on wider transport issues.
All of the aforementioned share a view of a world with fewer cars and more provision for
cyclists. Most of them challenge the car to some extent and some of them even speak about
equality issues, such as Sustrans’ Transport Poverty study mentioned earlier. In that sense,
they clearly engage with mobility politics in respect of the first axis. However, they do so
from a clearly liberal and reformist perspective, which does not fundamentally challenge the
political status quo, and which at best is very timid in relation to the wider political impli-
cations of mobility policies. What characterises these organisations in terms of the second
axis is their reformist politics, and their willingness to work closely with the state. Often
taking the role of government advisory or policy implementation bodies, these groups, un-
surprisingly, end up forming close working and financial relationships with government

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departments. It is clear that being so intertwined with decision makers, often relying heavily
on state funding, seriously compromises their independence and capacity to engage in trans-
formative politics. They also have little hesitation in forming alliances with business, big or
small, and generally see the commercial success of the capitalist cycling industry as a positive
advance for the advocacy of cycling.
Mainstream cycling campaigning either lacks an analysis of the powerful forces at play
behind governments’ decisions, such as the car, oil and media industries, or chooses not to
engage with that analysis because it is seen as ‘too political’. Of course, this type of cam-
paigning necessarily rubs against car culture; however, as liberal reformist organisations, the
aim appears to be the incorporation of cycling into the world as is, rather than questioning
the deeper roots of the problematic politics of transport and cycling. Such a strategy re-
volves around the view that what is needed is to convince the government and the general
population that there are better solutions for the majority of our transport needs than car
driving – whether by rational argumentation or by showing popular support via campaign
endorsement strategies.
Alongside these organisations, we find groups, mainly in London, such as Stop Killing
Cyclists who have a more radical stance. Stop Killing Cyclists is a grassroots group with a
direct action approach and which was born out of the frustration of what was perceived as
a too soft approach by mainstream organisations such as LCC. Their manifesto reads: ‘this
campaign intends to build a peaceful but more radical approach to fighting for safer infra-
structure for all of the city’s road users, though with a focus on cycling, within a framework
that drives the message home to those who really need to hear it’ (Stop Killing Cyclists).
Their self-proclaimed radical approach mostly refers to their tactics and form of organisation,
as well as the urgency of their demand on government. However, little is mentioned about
wider political and economic factors and the role that cars and car culture play in the current
transport system in cities such as London (The Ecologist 2014). Like mainstream transport
and cycling campaigns, this more radical approach falls into the mobility politics first axis
and into a liberal, reformist approach on the second, even if their tactics – of direct action –
are more commonly associated with political radical movements.

Conclusion
As we have seen, radical bicycle politics is fragmented and diverse. Different groups and
­collectives focus on different aims and represent different angles of a more general radical
political aspiration. Using the double-axis framework, we have been able to analyse the
different levels of engagement of the movements with mobility politics on the one hand and
radical politics on the other. We would like to highlight the moments when movements
have been able to combine a genuine engagement in radical mobility politics, with an overt
­opposition to the car and making the connections to wider radical politics. This was the
approach of the Situationists, Provos and Autonomen in the early twentieth century, the
­a nti-roads movement, Earth First! and Reclaim the Streets in the 1990s and of some bike-
tivism initiatives such as The G8 Bike Ride and Bicycology in the 2000s. Equally valuable
is the work of DIY bike workshops, CM or other forms of biketivism. They all have played
their role in advancing radical politics more generally and different aspects of a radical ap-
proach to mobility, such as an alternative to the capitalist cycling industry and the incredibly
important role of challenging privilege in order to build a truly equal and inclusive move-
ment and society, as well as demonstrating that the bike is a viable alternative to the car and
a very useful tool to oppose a wide range of injustices. However, given the mobility context

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introduced earlier in the chapter and the realisation that most outright mobility politics is
undertaken by mainstream groups or the ones which do not overtly engage with radical
politics, it seems important to question whether radicals should focus on those aspects and
engage with past strategies and targets.
We believe that a crucial part of a radical cycling movement must be to try to present
a counter-narrative to that of the car industry and car culture. When radically imagining
alternatives to car-based societies, we need to keep in mind a number of very important
things; first, that the rise of the car was not due to its inherent appeal but the result of a delib-
erate and deep collusion of industry and government (Planka.nu 2016); second, that people
who might argue for the car’s continuing role in our lives are likely to be those least affected
by such a decision (and that, conversely, those without access to, and/or who are more di-
rectly affected by cars, are rarely given a voice); and, finally, that to imagine a car-free world
is to imagine a world that is radically altered in multiple ways, with changes being made
both to the physical landscape, as well as to our cultural expectations, demands and desires.
However, whatever we may imagine of a future world, there are also questions of how
we get there or how we even begin to move in the right direction. But this question poses
us bigger questions about how social change happens and what tools and strategies, as well as
which targets, radicals should focus on. Which tactics should be used? Direct action? How
would this be articulated in this specific case? Is there a place for reformist politics? What is
the place of prefigurative and system change politics? These are all questions that movements
are constantly struggling with, and which are sadly beyond the scope of this chapter to an-
swer. What is undoubtedly clear is that transport and, therefore, cycling are deeply political
matters, and hence cannot be left unchallenged. They are not marginal or neutral, technical
problems, but the ones in which the forces of capital, the power of the status quo and the
marginalisation of those who fall out of it, as well as other issues of social and economic
importance are playing very clear and crucial roles and hence must be, in one way or other,
engaged with.
At the very least, we would argue that the radical (and indeed the not-so-radical) bike
movement ought to be more clear about what the root of the problem is, and more vocal
both about the multiple negative impacts of the car, and about the positive alternatives that
might arise if a drastic reduction in car use were to happen. The prevalence of attention
given to neo-liberal solutions such as ‘green’ cars (now so-called ultra-low-emission vehicles)
and taxation, specifically when addressing the pollution problem, demonstrates the extent
to which a significant number of problems caused or heightened by the car are still woefully
misunderstood, missed or seen as too complex to be tackled without disrupting the ideology
and politics of the current system. However, as we have seen, mass car driving, no matter
what fuel is used, can never be green or socially just.
Part of making this leap would be to challenge the interlinked ideologies of the motorcar
(Gorz 1980) and capitalism and the material realities they give rise to. As we have seen, the
cultural silence we find in relation to the car’s destruction is not accidental, but there is also a
great deal of noise being made too – about the freedom to drive, and the war on the motorist.
Attacking car culture is presented as a direct attack on personal freedom, and despite the ob-
vious counterargument – that people driving is an attack on others’ freedom – all too many
cycle advocates, and radicals more generally, appear to have been silenced by this grotesque
ideological manoeuvre. It is grotesque not only because the freedom of the car driver relies
on the dismantling of others’ freedoms, but also because it implies that the majority people
who do drive do so willingly. Without a deeper understanding of how multiple interrelated
phenomena would also radically alter in the event of a serious curtailment of car use, it is no

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wonder that people imagine losing the car in such a negative way. We may not know how to
get there or how exactly the world we want to build might look, but we should not shy away
from and be crystal clear about the values and material, social and economic premises of the
world we want to get to – and of the extreme, unjustifiable and high costs of the car-centric
and capitalist world we currently inhabit.

Notes
1 We would like to thank Dave Horton for his input and comments on draft versions of this article.
2 Using words such as ‘our’ and ‘we’ is complex and should be unpacked in the light of wider
and crucial issues of intersectionality, oppression, equality, inclusivity and participation, which
sadly we don’t have space to discuss here, but ‘our’ and ‘we’ should include everyone’s rights and
not just of those whose needs are promoted by the status quo or with current power to affect
decisions.
3 Cities such as London often reach levels of pollution so high that it is advisable for vulnerable
people to stay at home or not do much exercise. See Transport for London’s daily’s pollution mon-
itoring and advice here: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/air-quality-advice?intcmp=41599
and the pollution crisis declared by Sadiq Khan in London in January 2017 www.independent.
co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-toxic-air-alert-pollution-mayor-sadiq-khan-public-health-
emergency-latest-a7532941.html.
4 We will use cars, motor traffic and car culture interchangeably. It is important to highlight that
when we suggest cars, motor traffic and car culture should be challenged; we do not mean all cars
and motor traffic should be completely abolished, but rather that the system by which this mode of
transport dominates to the point of exclusion of any other ought to be radically altered. The num-
ber of cars and motor traffics that could be sustained in an alternative transport system is obviously
a debatable question but we would argue that this number should be reduced massively.
5 Transport accounted for 23% of the UK’s greenhouse emissions in 2014 (Department of Energy
and Climate Change) and Surface transport was the second source of greenhouses emissions in that
same year behind energy supply (Committee on Climate Change).
6 See, for instance, http://cleanair.london/ and www.greenpeace.org.uk/tags/clean-air-now.
7 Of course, this was also true of the car, but the relative affordability of the bicycle meant its ben-
efits were experienced by significantly greater numbers.
8 There are too many DIY bike workshops and projects to list here. It is easy to locate most of them
with a quick online search.
9 Named after the socialist newspaper, The Clarion, these were socialist cycling clubs who promoted
cycling whilst also using their cycling trips to distribute socialist propaganda.

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against the UK Roads Programme, Anarchist Studies, 4 (1): 27–44.
Whitelegg, J. (1997) Critical Mass: Transport, Environment and Society in the Twenty-first Century
(Northampton: Pluto Press).
Wolf, W. (1996) Car Mania: A Critical History of Transport (Chicago: Pluto Press).

Groups and Organisations

Bicycology, www.bicycology.org.uk/
Campaign for Better Transport www.bettertransport.org.uk/
Carbusters, http://carbusters.org/

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Community Bikes, UK (no public facing website)

Cycling UK, www.cyclinguk.org/
G8 Bike Ride, www.g8bikeride.org.uk/
Living Streets, www.livingstreets.org.uk/
London Cycling Campaign, https://lcc.org.uk/
Radical Routes, www.radicalroutes.org.uk/
Reclaim the Power, https://reclaimthepower.org.uk/aviation-flashmob-critical-mass/
Road Peace, www.road-peace.org.uk/
Stop Killing Cyclists, http://stopkillingcyclists.org/
Stop Killing Londoners, www.stopkillinglondoners.org.uk/
Sustrans, www.sustrans.org.uk
Time to Cycle, www.timetocycle.org/
World Free Car Network, www.worldcarfree.net/

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 3.4
BLACK BLOCS
A Complex Case of Radicalism
Francis Dupuis-Déri1

Introduction
The Black Bloc is a street tactic consisting of individuals masking their faces and wearing
black clothes in order to form a homogeneous group to express a radical presence within
a protest. There is no consensus about the legitimacy, relevance or effectiveness of such a
tactic. Nevertheless, it is advocated by radical activists from different but related networks:
anarchists and other anticapitalists, ecologists, antipolice activists, feminists and queers (who
also advocate the Pink Bloc). By ‘blocking up’, an individual publicly expresses her or his
radical political identity, while simultaneously dissolving as individual into the mass to cre-
ate a collective political actor. One Black Bloc participant described the tactic succinctly,
saying, ‘[t]he Black Bloc is our banner’ (Shantz 2011: 52). ‘Blocking up’ simultaneously gives
participants a sense of being invisible and anonymous within the group, and of being ex-
tremely visible (even too visible sometimes, when alone facing the police).
Most of the time, Black Blocs walk peacefully in mass demonstrations, holding banners
bearing anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian slogans, waving black (or red and black) anarchist
flags and chanting radical slogans, such as ‘A! Anti! Antipitalista!’ or ‘No Justice, No Peace!
Fuck the Police!’ But Black Blocs are also infamous for smashing the windows of banks and
multinational capitalist businesses (Gap, McDonald’s, Nike, Starbucks, etc.). And yet despite
the claims of many politicians, police officers, journalists and even social movement spokes-
people, these actions cannot be considered blind violence. Rather, the target is the message.
Black Blocs may clash with the police, either to show antagonism or to protect the demon-
stration from police violence. Blackblockers have been known to lob tear gas canisters back
at the police and to provide first aid to injured protesters. During the 2012 Maple Spring
movement in Québec, a female protester wrote on Facebook:

I didn’t hear anyone thank the members of the Black Bloc and the other radicals who had the
courage to put themselves between the police and the population… THANK YOU…
I refuse to condemn you… I hope you won’t have to intervene again. I would like for
your presence to be unnecessary… But you are actually the last defensive wall for people
trying to exercise their democratic rights.
(Emphasis added)

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While this is rare, a Black Bloc may also take action by itself, without any mass protest; for
instance, they may participate in antigentrification hit-and-run actions against expensive
new stores in formerly affordable neighbourhoods.
The relationship between the Black Bloc and radicalism is complex and often paradoxical.
There is a dialectical tension within the Black Bloc, by which I mean a fundamental oppo-
sition between a thesis (being radical) and an antithesis (not being radical) within the same
phenomenon of the Black Bloc. It all depends on who is speaking about whom, and on your
understanding of the meanings and practices surrounding ‘radicalism’ and ‘violence’.
Indeed, there are different constructions of radicalism, being framed in terms of types of
actions, political identity and aspiration, organisation, etc. As we shall see, critics of Black
Bloc-style organisation simplistically suggest that blackblockers are too ‘violent’ and there-
fore too ‘radical’, while blackblockers themselves may claim to be radical because they resort
to violence, or to be radical although their actions are not violent, or to be respectable com-
mon folks resorting to legitimate political force, or to be legitimate because their violence is
not violence, but rather symbolic deeds and artistic performativity. With regard to violence,
you can consider the Black Bloc radical or not, depending on your understanding of what
violence is, and also depending on how you compare Black Bloc actions to other expressions
of political violence today and throughout history. A person’s tendency to classify Black Bloc
tactics as radical or not also depends on their chosen definition of political legitimacy, on
whether they interact with allies or competitors (‘friends’ or ‘foes’) in social movements, and
on many other things besides.
Most of the time, however, the Black Bloc is experienced by its actors as the embodiment of
an individual and collective public expression of political radicalism, voiced against oppressive
systems including but not limited to capitalism, the state and the police. To be part of a Black
Bloc is, in itself, a subjective experience that fuels its participants with feelings of radicalism.
It might be somewhat addictive: once tasted, it draws participants back for more. It might
therefore lead to cynicism with regard to peaceful demonstrators in particular and ­day-to-day
activists in general. And yet, many politicians, police officers, journalists, academics and l­iberal
and dogmatic nonviolent activists share the view that the Black Bloc is the embodiment of
autonomous radical irrational outrage and consequently deserves to be neutralised.

A Brief History
Black Blocs first made an appearance during the Cold War in West Berlin, around 1980,
in protests by the Autonomen (i.e. anticapitalist and antifascist squatters) (Katsiaficas 2006;
Rahmani 2009). Black Blocs still take to the streets in Germany for various events, includ-
ing anticapitalist May 1st protests and antifascist demonstrations. The tactic spread across
national borders in the 1990s through the anarcho-punk music scene and through radical
activist networks such as the Anti-Racist Action (ARA) groups in North America.
The tactic has been very influential in the ‘alterglobalisation’ movement of recent
­counter-summit mobilisations, including those in Seattle (1999), Washington and Prague
(2000), Québec and Genoa (2001), Cancun (2003), Scotland (2005) and Toronto (2010).
Around 2000, the tactic was at the centre of a furious debate opposing ‘fluffy vs. spiky’ (i.e.
‘nonviolent’ vs. ‘violent’) activists, in a reiteration of a similar debate in the Autonomen
movement in the 1980s between the hippies or ‘Müslis’ (in reference to the healthy cereal)
and the punks or ‘Mollis’ (in reference to Molotov cocktails) (Katsiaficas 2006: 91).
During the meetings between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank (WB) in Prague in September 2000, activists divided the city into colour zones in

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an attempt to reduce tension and foster solidarity between factions using various tactics.
There was one zone for each ‘bloc’: the Black Bloc, the Pink and Silver Bloc and the White
Overalls or Tute Bianche. Although she participated in the Pink and Silver Blocs dressed
as a giant fairy, one activist from the Tactical Frivolity Collective made it clear that her
tactical choice should not be seen as a rejection of the Black Bloc. ‘What is violence any-
way when the State is like killing people every day, man. And the people in the World
Bank eat Third World babies for breakfast, so if they get bricked then hey, that’s their fault’
(Evans 2003: 293).
In the same spirit, the Montréal-based Anti-Capitalist Convergence (Convergence des
luttes anticapitalistes – CLAC) developed the principle of ‘respect for a diversity of tactics’
a few months later, in April 2001, during the Quebec City mobilisation against the Free
Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) Summit. According to this principle, activists
should respect each other’s goals, choices, desires, hopes and fears, and should express sol-
idarity instead of publicly condemning those who choose other forms of collective action.
This ‘respect for a diversity of tactics’ principle was proposed as a way to bring people
from diverse backgrounds and advocating different tactics together into a united (although
­a ntiauthoritarian and heterogenous) radical anticapitalist movement. CLAC’s main goal was
to open a safe space for practising Black Bloc tactics in a context where so many activists
saw such tactics as ‘violent’ and therefore as problematic with regard to both the security
and the legitimacy of the movement in the eyes of the public. Many such activists think that
in order to be effective, they must look respectable for the mainstream media and cultivate
approval in public opinion.
Because of its attention-grabbing and spectacular ‘violent’ deeds, the Black Bloc became an
icon of the alterglobalisation movement, or at least of its street demonstrations and its radical
elements. Black Blocs were on the streets for the anti-austerity protests in Greece in 2010,
the anti-cuts movement in London, the Indignados movement in Spain and the international
Occupy movement in 2011. They subsequently took action in the students’ strike in Québec
2012 and for various similar causes in 2013 in Brazil, Egypt, Tunisia and Turkey. In some
countries, blackblockers are known as the ‘hooded ones’ (koukoulofori in Greece; encapuchados
in Latin America).
The Black Bloc has become an icon of the young anarchist rioter, not only within the
­activist milieu, but for the mainstream media as well. Characters wearing black masks and
hoodies are seen rioting in various music videos (two examples are the songs Mosh by Eminem
and Indi Groove by Chinese Man). While the German Autonomen in the 1980 wore black
leather jackets as their collective symbol and uniform, many of today’s blackblockers wear
cotton hoodies. This countercultural statement mixing post-punk and post-grunge symbols
translates into a form of cultural and political identities born out of adherence to Black Bloc
tactics. Indeed, the black hoodie is now associated with political radicalism, as noted by Laura
Portwood-Stacer, New York City feminist and author of Lifestyle Politics and Radical Activism,

The symbolic cachet of the Black Bloc look transcends the time, place and ­bodies of ­actual
Black Bloc protests. Dressing on an everyday basis as if one is ready for such an event
is a way of indicating a kind of militant preparedness to fight - if only m­ etaphorically
or ideologically - when the need arises. The symbolism is all the more powerful when
one’s subcultural peers are well dressed similarly on a daily basis, with the c­ onscious or
unconscious message being something like, ‘together, we’ll be ready for the revolution
when it comes’.
(Portwood-Stacer 2013: 54)

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Being ready for a revolution, or more probably a riot, is clearly a priority for blackblockers.
They seem to be hoping for a riot, as two anarchists of the Calisse Brigade explained with a
poetic touch when protesting at the G8 Summit in Germany, in 2007:

Similar to love, a riot can sometimes take us by surprise when we think we are not
prepared, but if we have an open disposition, a riot, like love, will allow us to seize
opportunities and situations. It would be futile to say that we can prepare a riot, though
we can at least prepare for riots: do what it takes to help ignite the fire.
(Calisse Brigade 2007)

Black Bloc tactics have such a strong aesthetic that they may quite easily be co-opted by other
groups for their own aims, or even ‘hijacked’ by extreme-right radicals such as the neo-Nazi
German activists who call themselves ‘autonomous-nationalists’ or ‘anti-antifascist action
groups’. Since the early 2000s, these groups have organised Black Blocs in nationalist street
demonstrations, in which they wear dark glasses and hoodies and carry banners.
A more interesting example, politically speaking, of the appropriation of the Black Bloc
aesthetic was the decision of the women-only feminist collective Les Sorcières (the Witches),
to organise a Black Bloc in 2015 not for a street protest, but as an anonymous bloc walking
into the Montréal Anarchist Bookfair. Their aim was to protest against the tolerance for
sexual predators within the anarchist milieu. In their literature, Les Sorcières explained,

[w]e are coming masked today for the same reasons we mask ourselves in street protests:
for our safety. As survivors of aggression and their allies, we don’t feel safe and we don’t
want to be recognised in our own milieu. It is scary that we need to protect ourselves
here for fear of retaliation, the same way we protect ourselves from the police?2

This action echoes T-Bone Kneegrabber’s comments, who explained,

[y]ou can easily round up 500 black clad anarchists to fuck shit up at a frat house where
rapists live, but someone points a finger at a ‘progressive’ man and all of a sudden there’s
a process; all of a sudden she [the survivor] is being divisive… We, as ‘anarchists,’ hold a
society (that we do not have faith in) to a higher standard than we hold our friends to!…
Just because a man identifies as radical, does not make him an angel.
(Kneegrabber 2002: 38–39, emphasis added)

Black Bloc and Diversity

Black Blocs have been the target of criticism for being a boys’ club: an exclusively white,
middle-class, young male tactic, thereby embodying classism, sexism, racism and ableism.
In practice, different Black Blocs have had various levels of success in making themselves
inclusive to people of colour, women and queer people. This inclusivity is often dependent
on the cause for which the Bloc is demonstrating, the country or even the city. For instance,
Black Blocs in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are very different with regard to the proportion
of participants who are women, people of colour and poor youth from the favelas. With
regard to women’s participation in Black Blocs in North America, there appear to be more
women participants now than there were in 2000 (according to my own observation), not
only as street medics or scouts (both important tasks that often go disregarded), but also in
women-only Black Blocs on the front line of street protests.

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After the G20 Summit in Toronto, in 2010, Harsha Walia from the Vancouver collective
No One Is Illegal released the text 10 Points on the Black Bloc, in which she deals with the
issue of exclusion, including sexism, racism and ableism:

I don’t personally engage in black block tactics, but as a long-time community orga-
nizer and as a woman of colour, I stand in full and firm support of diversity of tactics
and in solidarity with those who are facing police repression during this time. […]
While I cannot speak for the personal motivations and intentions of those who engage
in black block tactics, I think the distance that I have from those tactics is somewhat
useful in this debate, because there is this idea that only those who engage in black
block actions support black block tactics. This is an attempt to marginalize and isolate
our comrades which I hope my presence here will counter. […]. One of the criticisms
of the black block tactic is that it’s undertaken by predominantly white males and
therefore is inherently oppressive to women of colour and Indigenous women in par-
ticular. As a woman of colour with a myriad of precarious systemic barriers including
precarious legal status and health – and I can only speak for myself – but I can say that
the black block tactic does not in itself oppress me or render me more vulnerable in
protest. So I’d appreciate it if other white men did not make such pronouncements
on my behalf.
(Walia 2010: 3)

On one occasion in Montréal, in November 2016, an old woman in a wheelchair passed

by a face-to-face deadlock opposing about fifty police officers and as many blackblockers
protesting in front of a theatre against a rock-metal band uttering anti-Semitic comments.
On the spot, the woman accused the blackblockers of being a group of thugs bringing chaos
into her neighbourhood. After a few female blackblockers explained the situation to her, she
decided to join the Black Bloc, masking her face with her black scarf, asking for a black flag
and chanting slogans with the bloc: ‘No fascists in my neighbourhood’.
According to Krystalline Kraus, who participated in a Black Bloc around 2001,

‘Blocking up’ to become the Black Bloc is the great equaliser. With everyone looking
the same - everyone’s hair tucked away, our faces obscured by masks, I’m nothing less
and nothing more than one entity moving with the whole. Everyone is capable of the
same. And the politics of ‘nice girls don’t throw stones’ is suspended, and I’m free to act
outside of the traditional ‘serve tea, not Molotov cocktails’ rules.
(Kraus 2002)

Such an understanding of the subversive potential of anonymity within the bloc leads some
adherents to conclude that the Black Bloc is a place where gender identities are radically
erased, suggesting, as did A. K. Thompson in 2008 that ‘you can’t do gender in a riot’.
As an example of Black Bloc practices that are inclusive of people of different genders and
orientations, during the anti-G20 protests in Pittsburgh in 2009, blackblockers walked
down the streets chanting: ‘We’re here! We’re queer! We’re anarchists, we’ll fuck you up!’
­(Avery-Natale 2010).
And yet, the Black Bloc is not a perfect milieu with regard to radical principles such as
liberty, equality, solidarity, diversity and inclusion. For instance, Krystalline Kraus laments
that ‘[with] machismo still running the streets – especially during a riot – what women have
to say often gets lost in the tear gas fog’ (Kraus 2002). A self-identified anarchist and queer

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woman who has been involved in several black blocs (mainly in Canada), underlines differ-
ences between the behaviours and approaches of men and women in a Black Bloc:

We [the women] talk more and generally leave more room for living the moment. There
are fewer preconceptions of what we aim to accomplish and more discussion of how to
go about it. We stick together and there’s much more communication when the decision
is being made in the street. Men are more individualistic. They don’t feel obliged to
come back to the group and can take off without warning. It’s ‘My top priority is me!’ I
call them ‘lone wolves’, whereas women form wolf packs.
(interview with the author)

Black Bloc and Radicalism: Violence and Terrorism

The Black Bloc has been called radical because it is ‘violent’; some sources in the French
­media even say that it is nothing other than pure violence or ‘ultra-violence’. According
to such a frame of thought, practice and action is the embodiment of political identity, and
therefore violent action embodies and expresses radicalism. For example, a few weeks before
the 2002 G8 Summit in Kananaskis, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)
made explicit reference to ‘radical Black Block elements that disrupted previous international
summits’ (in Fernandez 2008: 158, emphasis added).
Even blackblockers and their allies equate radicalism and violence, and therefore asso-
ciate the Black Bloc with radicalism because of its deeds. For example, with regard to the
­‘anti-cuts’ protests in London in March 2011, one blackblocker explained:

We had no idea of the numbers before the event on Saturday, and no idea it would be so
radical in its actions. The black bloc idea spread like a ripple through the march. As people
saw others in black, they changed into black themselves. Some marchers even left the
protest to buy black clothing.
(Moss 2011, emphasis added)

Such a definition conflating radicalism with violence is commonly shared by the media, of-
ficial authorities, security pundits and even activists. Such confusion is also at the core of the
public discourse about radicalisation and the perceived threat of what is referred to as Islamist
‘terrorism’.3 For instance, the new Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to
­Violence, in Montréal, Québec, provides this definition of radicalisation on its website: ‘a pro-
cess whereby people adopt an extremist belief system – including the intent to use, encourage or
­facilitate violence – in order to promote an ideology, a political project or a cause as a means of so-
cial transformation’ (emphasis added).4 Although this organisation was created to focus mainly
on Islamism and would-be jihadists in the global context of the ‘war against terrorism’, its chair
publicly explained that it also has, as a mandate, to monitor and prevent e­ xtreme-right and
extreme-left radicalisation, including anarchists (Scali 2015; Teisceira-Lessard and N ­ ormandin
2016). On February 2019, the organisation launched a video on its website entitled ‘To under-
stand the process of radicalisation toward extreme-left’. It tells the fictional story of ‘Jérémy’,
a ­‘vulnerable’ young student who joined a mysterious anarchist group, Radar. With his new
friends, he ends up burning down a bank automated teller machine. By the end of the video,
the narrator explains off camera: ‘Without realising it, Jérémy slowly radicalized itself toward
violence … Be pro-active, and communicate with us in absolute confidentiality if you are
concerned about some one’.

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According to the Canadian Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Vio-
lence, a process of radicalisation implies a ‘belief in the use of violent means to promote a cause’
and ‘the merging of ideology and violent action’ (emphasis added). Radicalisation is not necessar-
ily opposed to liberal or republican democracy, since ‘most of the progress in democratic societ-
ies has been the result of a certain form of radicalization’ (a reference to Martin Luther King and
Gandhi, famous and beloved radicals). The institution’s website goes on to state that ‘[r]adical
viewpoints only become a problem when they approve of, or encourage, the use of violence or
other forms of extremist behavior, including terrorism’ (emphasis added). Such an understanding
of radicalism recalls the ‘theory of extremes’ proposed by the Federal Office for the Protection
of the Constitution, in West Germany, which monitored the Autonomen and believed that
both the extreme left and the extreme right were threats to liberal democracy (Fourment 2014).
In the mainstream media, blackblockers have regularly been compared to and even confused
with Islamist terrorists, because they both target symbols of capitalism (the World Trade Centre
for Osama bin Laden’s jihadists; bank windows for the Black Bloc), or perhaps because black-
blockers as well as militiamen of the Islamic State wear black clothes and masks. Even within
the academic field, some experts view blackblockers as similar to other ‘terrorists’, Islamists, in
particular. For instance, political scientist José Pedro Zuquete wrote an article entitled ‘Men
in Black: Dynamics, Violence, and Lone Wolf Potential’, which was published in Terrorism and
Political Violence, a journal that has labelled itself ‘essential reading for all academics, decision
makers, and security specialists concerned with understanding political violence’ (Terrorism
and Political Violence, 2017). The author’s aim is to describe the ‘autoradicalization process’ of
a hypothetical lone wolf blackblocker and to analyse the process of becoming a leftist terrorist.
It is true that many young men may be driven to participate in Black Blocs when they see
the exhilarating direct-action tactics used by these groups (the ‘cool factor’ of being involved in
a Black Bloc). The aesthetisation of the Black Bloc’s actions as spectacular gestures may also ex-
plain why young men want to be part of the movement (portrayals of Black Block actions have
been called ‘riot porn’). And yet, Zuquete admits that the beauty of an ideology that divides the
world into friends and foes is not enough to attract people to the Black Bloc, not to mention
convert them into ‘terrorists’. What is necessary is an ‘emancipatory vision of violence, in which
violence is the solution for individual despair’. The author goes on to observe that ‘[u]sually there
is a psychological factor at work in the form of a disturbance or traumatic experience that com-
pels one to embark on a lone wolf action or campaign. […] In any case, the political becomes
personal. These dynamics make prediction a very unreliable affair’ (Zuquete 2014: 104–5).
Such comments echo those of long-time activist Micheal Albert in the aftermath of
­Seattle in 1999, and those of French scholar Marc Lazar after the actions of the ‘cortège de
tête’5 in France during the Spring 2016 mobilisation against Labour Law reforms. Albert’s
analysis of the Weather Underground in the US and Lazar’s study of the Italian Red Brigade
both warn about the risks associated with blackblockers going underground and resorting to
deadly ‘terrorism’ (Albert 2001; Lazar 2016).
These confusing analyses of radicalism and its relationship with violence raise the ques-
tion: What is the extent of the Black Bloc’s violence, anyway? First, no armed struggle has
emerged after almost forty years of Black Bloc actions. While it is true that in the past, an-
archists attempted and perpetrated deadly attacks on many heads of state and were involved
in revolutionary armed struggles (Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Cuban, etc.), these examples
of anarchist activism all involved far more violence than any actions of our modern Black
Bloc, and used far more deadly weapons than the stones, clubs, empty bottles and slingshots
that are used today (along with the occasional firework and petrol bomb). Today, the most
violent (and therefore most radical?) anarchists are a group of anonymous Italian activists

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mailing bombs (the group has yet to cause a casualty), along with a group of Greek militants
of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire who are standing trial for shooting a businessman in the
legs with a gun. With Greek activists calling for armed struggle from their prison cells, these
anarchists can be considered more violent (and arguably more radical) than any Black Bloc
on the street. Although one may ask if today’s anarchists should resort to armed struggle, it
is obvious that contemporary anarchism is a nonviolent, or at least non-lethal movement,
especially if compared to its own history, and to other contemporary social movements
(­a nti-Islam, anti-abortion and the so-called ‘involuntary celibates’ for instance).
Indeed, the Black Bloc’s so-called violence is much closer to nonviolent civil ­d isobedience –
blocking, sabotage, etc. – than it is to any ‘armed revolutionary’ movement, never mind the
deadly mass violence of many nation state governments, which have perpetrated such acts
as colonialism and genocide, extermination camps, ‘total wars’, carpet and atomic bomb-
ing of cities, drone strikes, and police brutality. In comparison to the history of almost any
nation state on the planet, the Black Bloc’s deeds barely register on the scale of political
­v iolence. Indeed, Brazilian scholar Pablo Ortellado argues that in the context of the US in
the 1990s and 2000s, Black Bloc tactics fit, from a theoretical point of view, within the tra-
dition of civil n ­ onviolent disobedience. These tactics are all about committing transgressive
actions while avoiding causing pain to any living being (with the exception of well-armed and
­well-armoured cops), in order to draw the attention of the public, the media and the police,
which often react in ways that are symptomatic of systemic violence (Ortellado 2014: 284–6).
Although radicalisation is often conflated with violence even by academic specialists of
social movements (Tarrow 1989), sociologist Marcos Ancelovici is right to raise doubts about
such an association. In reference to trade union mobilisations, Ancelovici states

Such an assumption is problematic because the public significance of a given mode of

action is historically, politically, and institutionally situated. It becomes meaningful and
thereby exists socially insofar as it is inserted into a hierarchy of symbolic structures in
terms of which it is - together with all the acts to which it is related and contrasted -
­produced, perceived, and interpreted. A barricade, picketing, the occupation of a fac-
tory, or a sit-in, will not have the same meaning and significance in all places at all times.
(Ancelovici 2011: 133)

Following Ancelovici’s line of thought, it might be said that an open debate about the extent
of Black Bloc radicalisation might help us better understand the contemporary symbolic and
material power relationship between progressive and conservative and reactionary forces. If
the Black Bloc has anything to tell us about this power relationship, it is that the capacity for
collective action by today’s ‘radicals’ who wish to confront the system face-to-face is limited
to rioting for a few hours.
Black Blocs disrupt the status quo by making trouble in the streets and are viewed in
the media as militant rebels, often stealing the media show at events such as collective legal
actions and the official ceremonies in international summits. And yet with the exception
of these types of symbolic disturbance, Black Bloc actions do not disrupt the system or its
institutions (except for potentially increasing road traffic for a few hours and interrupting
the business of a few banks and corporations). Thus, if radicalism in tactics translates to rad-
icalism in political ambition, the Black Blocs are not truly very radical, considering the gap
between their claims of smashing the state or capitalism, and their actual deeds.
Nevertheless, Tammy Kovich, who participated in a Toronto-based Black Bloc in 2010,
stated that peaceful mass demonstrations are also quite useless:

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The pacifist position is accepted without question, while advocates of more aggressive
tactics are put on the defensive. We need to turn the debate on its head - given the sever-
ity of the situation we face, in light of the pervasive nature of the systems of domination
and oppression that we oppose, and acknowledging the pressing need for an intensifi-
cation or our struggle, we need to begin asking ourselves if non-violence can be justified.
(Kovich 2011a: 136)

The Black Bloc is what extreme-left radicalism looks like today when compared to pacifist
activism. And yet, neither group can claim to achieve much with regard to disrupting the
global state and capitalist system.

Downplaying Radicalism
Some blackblockers try to downplay their so-called radicalism by presenting themselves as good
and reasonable citizens in order to negate the perception that they are a bunch of irrational
young troublemakers with no political ideas or principles, moved only by the desire to smash
things for the sake of smashing them. Indeed, many people have claimed that blackblockers
are irrational thugs and mentally unhinged troublemakers. For instance, after the 2001 G8
Summit, an anonymous resident of Genoa stated that the ‘vandals and radicals’ had ‘no specific
target in view but simply wanted to destroy things’ (Blanc 2001). Others claimed that black-
blockers are ‘criminal anarchists’. According to these critics, blackblockers are apolitical actors
or parasites who ‘hijack’ legitimate protests, as was claimed by detective Kory Flowers of the
Greensboro Police Department in North Carolina in an article entitled ‘Understanding the
Black Bloc’, published in the online web-journal Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine.
By claiming to be good and reasonable citizens, blackblockers seek to wrong-foot their
critics in mainstream social movements, such as American liberal intellectual Chris Hedges
who described the Black Bloc as a ‘cancer’ during the Occupy mobilisation. And he is not
alone; many people think that blackblockers are the cells of a cancerous tumour undermining
the legitimacy and force of a movement. It has even been suggested by well-known opinion
leaders from major social movements that they be excluded or neutralised by ‘peace police’
activists, or by the police itself. Pierre Jasmin, former chair of Artists for Peace (Québec),
stated that the police ‘should have the right to search, arrest, file and detain during the time
of the protest … protesters from the Black Bloc fringe’ ( Jasmin 2013: 624). From an even
more extreme ‘antiradicalism’ perspective, a few days after the 1999 Seattle protest, United
People’s Ole Fjord Larsen suggested, in reference to the hypothetical upcoming protests, that

[t]he coordinating group of the participating organizations must to an even higher de-
gree […] prepare the demonstrators for knocking down and turning over to the police
any unwanted hooligans. Even if a hooligan should be killed, it would be very little loss
as compared with the daily rate of 20,000 dead children due to corporate rule.
(Larsen 1999)

In an attempt to defuse these criticisms,6 blackblockers regularly publish manifestos, ­communiqués

and letters claiming that

[m]ost folks … who have used Black Bloc tactics have day jobs working for nonprofits.
Some are schoolteachers, labor organisers, or students. Some don’t have full-time jobs, but
instead spend most of their time working for change in their communities. They start urban

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garden projects and bike libraries; they cook food for Food Not Bombs and other groups.
These are thinking and caring folks who, if they did not have radical political and social
agendas, would be compared with nuns, monks, and others who live their lives in service.
(Black 2001, emphasis added)

In their communiqué ‘Who Is the Black Bloc? Where Is the Black Bloc?’, the Italian
­Autonomous University Collective claimed, in 2010, that ‘the faces behind the scarves … are
the same faces that pay your rent for derelict houses; the faces you look at when asking to sign
work contracts of 500 euros a month … They are the faces that submit dissertation proposals
and who you force to mention your boring texts … they make your cappuccino with froth …
They are the ones whose life-blood is being sapped by precariousness, whose lives are shit,
and they are tired of putting up with it’ (Autonomous University Collective 2011: 130).
During the 2012 Maple Spring movement in Québec, an activist group whose name
translates to ‘Anarchists Among Many’ published a ‘Manifeste du Carré noir’ (Black Square
Manifesto), with this opening assertion: ‘We are women and men. We are students. We are
workers. We are unemployed. We are angry. […] We do not infiltrate demonstrations, we
help organize them, we bring them to life’ (Des anarchistes parmi d’autres 2012). Moreover,
Black Bloc communiqués and manifestos often state that smashing a window is not a violent
deed, since there is no pain at stake. In other words, violence is only about living beings.
Another way to dispute the claim that blackblockers are too radical is to think about their
actions not in terms of ‘violence’, but of performance art. Artist Marc James Léger and scholars
Maxime Boidy and Jeffrey Juris suggest that what matters are the ‘symbolic-expressive’ aspects
of such performative violence, which ‘produc[es] concrete messages challenging global capi-
talism and the state’ and ‘generate[s] radical identities’ ( Jeffrey Juris, emphasis added).

Radicalisation of the Debate about Capitalism and Democracy

Some scholars recall that in its deepest meaning, the word radicalism refers to ‘a political anal-
ysis focusing on the root of an issue’ (Dufour et al. 2012). According to my interview with
a Quebecois woman who had participated in several Black Blocs, ‘[w]e are in a period when
there is no possibility of a revolution’, and so ‘[w]e do what we can to radicalize the debate and
to reach people so a more radical politicization can come about’ (emphasis added). According
to Swiss political philosopher Nicolas Tavaglione, ‘Black Blocs are the best political philos-
ophers of our times’, because though their actions, they ask society to make a ‘choice as old
as Europe: freedom or security’ (Tavaglione 2003: 4).
Like other forms of political action, the Black Bloc is also radical in the way it is organised
and structured. With regard to the ‘prefigurative characteristics’ of the Bloc, Tammy Kovich
comments:

It is absolutely true that smashing a window does not begin to approximate the acts
required to create a new society; however, there is more to a black bloc than the smash-
ing of windows. The bloc, as a pulsing body on the street, is organized horizontally.
Decisions are made on the ground by all participants … The picture of the bloc from
the outside is very different from the reality and experience on the inside; the ethos
of the black bloc is one of solidarity and collective care … Crucial to the project of
creating a new society is creating new ways of being, interacting and organizing with
each other.
(Kovich 2011b: 17–18)

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We might then surmise that the Black Bloc is radical, since ‘radicalism may be measured in
terms of level of autonomy and difference with regard to traditional spaces of political in-
volvement’ (Sarrasin et al. 2012: 142). In light of this, it is important to recall the Black Bloc’s
origins in the 1980s among the Autonomen in Germany, for whom political autonomy meant
non-collaboration with official institutions (state bodies, political parties, labour unions, me-
dia, universities, etc.), as well as individual and collective autonomies in the decision-making
process (Katsiaficas). In terms of autonomy, inner organisation and the decision-making pro-
cess, Black Blocs are approximately as radical as other so-called ‘prefigurative’ experiences
including Pink Blocs, autonomous activist collectives, revolutionary gardening and food col-
lectives, self-managed working or housing coops (autonomous media, etc.), squats, etc.

Notes
1 The author wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Observatoire sur les profilages
(CRSH) and the translator Ellen Warkentin, who helped him with regard to the English language.
2 To watch a video about the action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8Qk4S9oAH4&fea-
ture=youtu.be ; to read their flyer “Agresseur-e-s dehors !”: http://www.lessorcieres.org/agresseur-e-
s%20dehors.pdf.
3 I use the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ in quotes because they are ideologically loaded terms.
Indeed, it is extremely rare to find a reference in the mainstream media of Europe or North
­A merica about State terrorism (drone strike, carpet bombing, torture, etc.), and it seems really dif-
ficult for the mainstream media to label mass murders perpetrated by white males against racialised
women as terrorism (Butler 2015). See Mélissa Blais (2014) and Mélissa Blais et al. (2010) for an
analysis of the public discourse about the December 6, 1989 ‘Montreal Massacre’, in which a man
shot to death fourteen women at École polytechnique, claiming that he hates feminists.
4 https://info-radical.org/en/search/
5 The ‘cortège de tête’ was a group of approximately 1,000 people walking at the head of the trade
union’s mass demonstration. My estimate, for the June 14 protest, was that there were perhaps 300
well-organised blackblockers and another approximately 300 people who were not wearing black
but who were equipped with defensive kits to deal with tear gas (scarves, goggles, water, etc.). The
rest of the cortège walked in solidarity with this bloc. The ‘cortège de tête’ did not disband, despite
several violent charges by police riot squads. This mass of people offered a safer space for blackblock-
ers to use their tactics of choice (i.e. painting graffiti, smashing windows, attacking the police, etc.).
6 It might also be an attempt to enlarge the definition of the radical collective subject, following the
tradition of the autonomia movement in Italia and Germany: it is no more only the ‘proletariat’,
since it also encompasses the unemployed, the student, the woman working at home, etc. (thanks
to the anonymous woman who raised this issue during the conference ‘The Subversion of Politics’,
at Université du Québec à Montréal, April 7, 2017).

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ONLINE ACTIVISM
Jeff Shantz

Radical activists have pursued visions of political autonomy, sovereignty and community
in online practice. They have used it to challenge state and corporate governance struc-
tures and sought alternative social relations (based on openness and self-determination).
Very early on, anarchist perspectives became a key framework for online actors and provided
crucial guidance for the development of cyberspace – both for those who envisioned the
Internet and those who participated in it. Indeed, although this has been under-examined
and ­under-theorised, it could be said that the development of the Internet and the place of
anarchist ideas within early debates around it played a large part in revitalising anarchist
ideas in the last decade of the twentieth century. Arguably, this happened alongside or even
before the alternative globalisation movements which broke through to public consciousness
following the Seattle blockades in 1999.
Through the Internet, online activists created spaces of inter/action that could thrive be-
yond the realm of traditional powers, particularly nation states. Of course, the Internet has
proven to be a realm of struggle, like any other in state capitalist contexts, and corporations
and states have moved quickly to enclose the online (imagined) commons through various
mechanisms of surveillance, control and repression, advertising (ideology) and monetarisa-
tion. This has led some commentators to speak of struggles over cyberspace as new enclo-
sures, hearkening to the struggles over the natural commons that marked early capitalist
development. Despite the early hopes, radical activism has never been certain nor even likely
in cyberspace. Yet, it continues to thrive in diverse ways.

Online Activist Organisations

Early intersections and networks of hacker activists converged around the Chaos Computer
Club (CCC). The CCC was founded early on in the digital age, in 1981. It is one of the
most durable and influential community organisations addressing especially the security and
privacy aspects of contemporary technologies, particularly in the German-speaking world.
CCC is Europe’s largest association of hackers, with an estimated 5,500 members. It is or-
ganised in a decentralised manner, with twenty-five so-called Erfakreisen (regional hacker-
spaces) and many more smaller groupings, the ‘Chaostreffs’. The many physical hackerspaces
in and around Germany share a common bond with the CCC through commitment to their

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stated hacker ethics, as discussed later. This distinguishes them from those who crack systems
to steal information for personal gain or pleasure or to damage for purposes of competitive
advantage.
CCC has been active in developing and disseminating analyses of a range of both techni-
cal and social issues. Their overarching focus has been on surveillance, privacy, freedom of
information, hacktivism and data security. Towards this end, they produce occasional pub-
lications on specific themes and issues. In terms of activism, the CCC organises r­ eal-world
campaigns and special events, as well as active lobbying. Their technical work involves
anonymising services and communication infrastructure. Their hacker congress, an orig-
inal one still held on an old school face-to-face conference basis, is quite large and well
attended. The CCC has hosted this annual Chaos Communication Congress since 1984 and
still edits its publication Die Datenschleuder. Many of the women hackers who participated in
the CyberFeminist International (meetings held in Rotterdam) were from the CCC. The
­CyberFeminist International targeted both patriarchal structures of oppression and exploita-
tion of labour within the cyber industries and cybernetic capitalism, and the marginalisation
of women within hacking movements and cultures. Women in the CyberFeminist Interna-
tional focused very much on issues of production and reproduction within hacking spaces
and prioritised the organisation of work (recognising unequal distributions of labour within
hacking and alternative media spaces).
The oldest autonomous service provider in Europe is the ECN (European Counter
­Network – ecn.org). The ECN provides free email accounts, mailing lists and websites to
organisations, activists and movements that are explicitly involved in a range of social strug-
gles, including around issues of human rights, freedom of speech and information freedom
in Italy and Europe. Years before sites such as YouTube and Vimeo were created, ECN pio-
neered a platform called NGV at which people could upload and share video of relevance to
social justice struggles. Notably, especially in a context of growing far right movements in
Europe and beyond, the ECN has espoused an explicitly antifascist politics and prioritised
work with antifascist and anti-Nazi movements across Europe. Beyond technical services
and support, the ECN provides physical space and material resources to political and social
organising centres.
In the North American context, one of the early influential online activist groups was
TAO Communications, formed in Toronto, Ontario in 1996. Sometimes sourced in ­eastern
philosophical underpinnings ‘tao k’o tao fei chang tao’, and shifting explanations of its name
as an acronym play on words (The Amazing Orangutans, Tasty Apples and Oranges), TAO
was from the start an explicitly anarchist grouping (even ‘The Anarchy Organisation’) which
sought to build real-world organising spaces as well as provide online resources and skills.
TAO was explicitly syndicalist in its orientation, understanding its members as tech workers
in a tech economy, which they sought to confront and abolish. TAO eventually formed a
job shop of the Industrial Workers of the World (‘Communication and Computer Work-
ers, ­Industrial Union 560’) as an expression of their commitment to workers’ control and
­abolition of wage slavery. TAO provided labour as a gift to militant antipoverty organisa-
tions like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, and its members were instrumental in
the formation of anti-borders and migrant defence movements in Canada. A TAO worker
seeded the ‘No One Is Illegal’ meme within North American organising after attending a
Next Five Minutes conference in Amsterdam where members of the Berlin-based ‘Kein
Mensch Ist ­I llegal’ and Paris-based ‘Sans Papiers’ movements simultaneously gathered with
many international hacktivists. Through initial outreach via old print mailing lists and zine
networks, the online publication of A-Infos was established through TAO, and continues

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publishing news ‘by, for and about anarchists’ in twelve languages at ainfos.ca. An early
adopter of the Debian flavour of linux, TAO served as an incubator and seedbed for other
radical online groupings, many of which have gone on to outlive the originals. One such
­offshoot is Resist.ca, which has provided web and email resources for a variety of anarchist
and non-authoritarian activist groups and individuals, particularly on the West Coast of
North America. After a re-organisation in 2003, the Toronto TAO collective reformed un-
der the OAT acronym, ‘Organizing for Autonomous Telecommunications’.
Another active group, and the one that formed alongside TAO, is the Mayfirst/People
Link. Mayfirst/People Link began life as NYC TAO, similarly to Resist.ca which was once
TAO Vancouver. MayFirst/People Link (mayfirst.org) identifies as a politically progressive,
member-run and -controlled organisation that works to redefine the concept of ‘Internet
Service Provider’ in a collective and collaborative way. This is, like TAO, an attempt to
break down the division between producers and users/consumers, aiming to make use and/
or service provision mutually educational. Emphasis is placed on knowledge and skill shar-
ing. May First/People Link’s formal members are organisers and activists. In their model
of organising, they have collectively chosen to elect a Leadership Committee to maintain
operations between meetings and to give some continuity to organisational practices. They
organise internally as a cooperative among active members. These active members pay dues,
buy equipment and then share the organisational equipment for websites, email, email lists
and other active Internet purposes. Mayfirst/People Link was targeted by US federal author-
ities for a server seizure in 2012.
Perhaps the most active and widespread organisation in the North American context to-
day is Riseup Networks (riseup.net). Riseup provides online communication tools for people
and groups working explicitly on liberatory social change, with more than six million users,
operating over 14,000 mailing lists and running on servers which are not in the cloud, but
employ full disk encryption and are fully secured under their control, and regularly publish
a ‘canary statement’ regarding their refusal to cooperate with subpoenas or search warrants.
With a strong set of political principles, Riseup also consistently defends its users from sur-
veillance through its ‘zero knowledge’, ‘no logs, no masters’ policies, which includes person-
ally encrypted email storage and full disk encryption. They don’t require a phone number
nor home address to sign up, but rely on an invite code system in order to use Riseup services;
so, if you lose your password and your recovery code, you’re out of luck. The emphasis is on
providing resources that will be used in actions supporting liberation movements and actions
against exploitation and oppression. Riseup seeks to create democratic alternatives to corpo-
rate resources and practices self-determination within its collective network by controlling
their own secure means of communications. They also provide regular security updates to
users and actively work to produce new, secure infrastructures, such as their VPN services.

Anonymous
Arguably, the most famous and impactful example of online radical activism, certainly in
popular culture, is Anonymous. With their Guy Fawkes masks and cryptic videos, these
hacktivists have forged a striking image and reputation. The name Anonymous refers to a
decentred, loose affinity group of online activists and hackers. Their decentred structure
means that they are largely formless and structureless in reality and practice, not only in
image. As communications scholar Gabriella Coleman suggests, ‘Anonymous is a little bit
hard to define, because it’s a collective name that anyone around the world can take’ (quoted
in Early Edition 2015). Anonymous activists share primarily an action orientation and an

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identity. They express important shared narrative practices, and symbolism. They hold up
a banner that can be adopted by diverse users as needs and circumstances arise (Shantz and
Tomblin 2014). By their very nature as an anonymous grouping that seeks privacy and to
avoid surveillance, their members are largely unknown, nameless and unidentifiable.
Anonymous activists carry out their activism through a mix of what might be viewed as
newer and older tactics, from denial of service attacks and hacks to whistleblowing or public
shaming. In DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, overwhelming traffic is directed
to a specific website, causing the server to shut down and leading to economic damage.
Whistleblowing has included circulating confidential documents and information, such as
the anarchist Jeremy Hammond, who is currently serving prison time for his involvement in
Anonymous’ 2012 hack of the private intelligence firm Stratfor and then releasing the infor-
mation, which included states’ collaboration to criminalise dissent, via WikiLeaks (Shantz
and Tomblin 2014). More recently, Anonymous has turned to doxxing – the exposure of
offending individuals’ identity by publicly releasing their names and private information
such as phone numbers or home addresses.
Coleman notes that Anonymous initially gained notoriety for Internet pranks ‘for the
lulz’ and established themselves early with ‘Project Chanology’, a series of protests and dis-
ruptions targeting the Church of Scientology. Since 2008, they have turned to direct ac-
tion and political campaigns, projects and interventions that are more serious in intent and
design. Among the issues Anonymous has prioritised are censorship, surveillance and free
speech. Since the emergence of Black Lives Matter, Anonymous has actively supported com-
munity movements opposing police violence. ‘Operation Ferguson’ provided resources for
protesters speaking out and mobilising against the racist practices of the Ferguson police
force, responsible for killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown in August 2014. Anonymous
has also worked to dox officers involved in the killing of civilians and to counter police mis-
information aimed at blaming the victims.
In one particularly significant and effective action, Anonymous took responsibility for
shutting down the websites of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), the
Canadian government’s spy agency. This was done as an appeal for Canadians to oppose Bill
C-51, a particularly repressive piece of legislation that became law as the Anti-Terror Act of
2015. The Act contains provisions that give CSIS investigative powers, allow for pre-­emptive
arrest and enable the criminalisation of the so-called bad thoughts alone (that is, media posts
that the state interprets as supporting or promoting acts that the state views as terrorist, rather
than actual commission of terrorist actions), as well as economic activity such as strikes,
­boycotts or blockades. The Act also extends the scope for repressing protests, particularly
against energy projects in Canada. The DDOS attack was brief lasting only a few hours.
While primarily viewed as an online phenomenon, Anonymous activism also occurs in
the material world, as in the case of Indigenous activist James McIntyre against the British
Columbia government’s plan to build the Site C dam. With the RCMP killing of James
McIntyre in 2016, Anonymous announced that McIntyre was the fourth of its members to
be killed by security forces around the world in four years.

Anarchy in Cyberspace
Early crypto-anarchy theorist Peter Ludlow suggests that anarchism became such a central
topic of interest in cyberspace in part because the widespread availability of certain technol-
ogies renders certain anarchist ideas not only possible but perhaps inevitable. As he argues,

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‘cryptography and related technologies like anonymous remailers and electronic cash may
undermine the concentrations of power that we are currently familiar with (nation states,
for example), thus allowing us to take on substantially more individual responsibility’ (2001:
xvii). This also relates to the emergence of new, possibly utopian, governance structures, as
‘the Internet provides the opportunity for utopias to emerge in various remote corners of
cyberspace’. The public Internet continues to develop through a convergence of accessible
technologies and anarchic self-directed practices.
Yet, these self-governing practices are perhaps more ambiguous than is generally rec-
ognised. While some certainly create opportunities and possibilities for opposition to state
and corporate modes of regulation and control, others play into and reinforce neo-liberal
forms of governance and obedience. The refusal of corporate and state interaction, and ex-
ploitation is accompanied by new forms of exploitation and spreading commercialisation,
and the development of commercial subjectivities among Internet ‘users’.
New technologies and resources can carve out space for activities beyond the control of
nation states and corporations. The Internet facilitates the spread and connectivity of virtual
communities, which in some sense anarchism has always been. That is, there is no anarchist
homeland or hereditary anarchism. Anarchism, like other voluntary groupings, consists of
intentional networks though they have historically been face-to-face, more integral. The
Internet has grown through the spread of virtual communities and reinforces the types
of arrangements anarchism, as for other subaltern or subterranean groupings, has always
comprised.
From the early days of the Internet, commentators have espoused the affinity between
the Net and anarchism. These commentators and many practitioners saw the Net as a form
of actual anarchy in action due especially to the apparent absence of an external, imposed
authority and the self-direction, autonomy and liberty expressed in Net practices.
Even as the authorities have made their impositions felt more really and forcefully (in
commercialisation, monetisation, subpoenas, surveillance and the end of net neutrality in the
US), for many the real, true form of the Internet remains anarchy. And many are willing to
fight for the Net as a space of anarchy and to oppose the authoritarian interlopers.
In the early days of the Internet, many believed that anarchist principles of autonomy
and resistance to hierarchy and centralised authority were embedded in the horizontal
and decentralised protocols of its basic design. With the rise of the ‘walled gardens’ of
Facebook, and the concentration of network control into fewer and more centralised plat-
forms such as Amazon and Google however, the increasingly forceful push of corporate
control has enmeshed even nation states into relinquishing their supposed ‘net neutrality’
and revealing their subservience to the demands of capital. At this time, it’s not an easy
struggle for those who are pushing for a radical redecentralisation of the Internet and they
do so often outside and against the waves of mainstream users, creating community mesh
networks, open-source-encrypted virtual private networks to tunnel and hide traffic, and
other methods to provide anonymity, like the TOR onion layer. They are developing
currencies, social contracts and new relationships built on the blockchain, an encrypted,
distributed ledger system that is causing many to rethink the possibilities of a resurgence
in resistance to centralised banking authorities. While many are willing to fight for these
distributed protocols, the main interests driving the growth of cryptocurrencies are not
oriented towards international solidarity, but rather the wealthy hiding their money in tax
havens, delinking labour from organisation and building intensified platforms for exploita-
tion and narco-trafficking.

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 Jeff Shantz

Collective Organising Online

The notion of ‘online organising’ may invoke caricatures of anarchism as an individual mode
of rebellion showing little commitment or accountability to others. To be sure, identities
like Anonymous, floating signifiers that can be claimed by anyone who wishes to do so are
emblematic of this form of action (to which could be added clicktivism or twitter activism).
It would be a mistake, however, to limit the extent of online radical organisation to indi-
vidualised (ephemeral, temporary, immaterial, distant, etc.) forms of virtual action. From the
beginning of radicals’ involvement in cyberspace (which dates back to the very emergence
of the public Internet itself ), they have pursued collective actions through material organisa-
tion. This has included material (real) world, old school, organising on a face-to-face basis in
actual immediate contexts, often in rather traditional forms such as affinity groups, activist
collectives, workers’ cooperatives and so on. And it has taken place in physical organising
spaces (in clubs, community centres, anarchist infoshops, etc.). Online resources and net-
works become tools (or weapons) depending on context.
Very quickly given the nature of the Internet, collectives and groupings in dispersed lo-
cales found each other, connected and federated online. The forms of organisation within
the federations may have been largely ethereal and online but this is not the entire story.
Radical collectives online often, and more of than is generally supposed, regularly held,
and hold, gatherings and conventions in which members of diverse collectives have trav-
elled to a specific locale to meet, socialise, strategise and develop their shared organisa-
tional capacities.
For years, TAO rented an office in a mid-century office building in downtown T ­ oronto,
right in the heart of the emerging new technology and media district. Few could have
guessed that a thriving anarchist collective held regular meetings in a historic building sit-
uated midway between CityTV and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) head-
quarters. Meetings were held at least once a week with a half-dozen, or more, members
regularly in attendance. The space was also something of a meeting space and organis-
ing centre for local anarchists as well as people involved in campus organising, antipoverty
movements, and union organising.
TAO’s online work was always viewed as part of broader, and deeply rooted, community
organising. As such, TAO workers provided labour and technical education and insight to
numerous local community and workplace movement groups. They also provided logistical
support and communications infrastructure for larger mobilisations and actions, including
civil disobedience, protests and demonstrations, eviction defence for tenants, housing squats,
occupations, anti-deportation defence and other direct actions. TAO also lent equipment
to groups organising their own actions, often lower income groups who could not have
otherwise afforded it. TAO also provided equipment and training to anarchist spaces like
the Anarchist Free Space and Free Skool which could not have accessed such material and
knowledge otherwise.
The supposedly ephemeral realm of online organising has given rise to very real, and rel-
atively durable, movement infrastructures. These have in many cases outlived the collectives
that produced them in the first place. Many of these infrastructures are now into their second
decades, having lasted as long as the public Internet itself and become essential components
of anticapitalist and antistatist projects. These infrastructures have provided resources and
connectivity for, in some cases, literally millions of people across several continents. Many
have given rise to multiple original projects, from activist archives and discussion fora to
newsletters, hacking groups and more.

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Process
It is less often remarked that the format of online discussion is in many ways anathema to
preferred anarchist processes of deliberation and debate. Anarchists generally prefer face-to-
face discussion and consensus processes of decision-making. The Internet, on the contrary,
is, by definition, not face-to-face (not physically anyway) and discussion often tends towards
monologue and assertion rather than constructive dialogue and consensus.
All of the acknowledged problems of online discussion are perhaps magnified in relation
to anarchist organising practices. Among these problems are the lack of nuance in online
discussion and the fact that moods do not come across well over the Internet. At their best,
anarchists are particularly attuned to the well-being of participants and go out of their way
to facilitate participation and create conditions conducive to active involvement by all. This
includes paying attention to inclusive language, and practices of respectful, active listening.
It also involves awareness of privilege among speakers (gender, racialisation, linguistic, eco-
nomic, etc.). These are more difficult to pursue online. Meanings can be easily misinter-
preted; moods can be misread or missed completely. Humour is culturally and site-specific
and may not travel well. Anger can flare and the so-called flame wars can erupt without
warning. Empathy does not come readily.
Worker cooperatives and (progressive, ethical, etc.) hackteams have also been developing
many new forms of collaborative groupware and ‘teamwork’ apps which try to address this.
Again, Riseup Labs has been instrumental in releasing open-source software, like Crabgrass,
which fosters collaborativity and productive sharing capacity. Distributed, decentralised so-
cial media is the goal of projects like GNU Social, Mastodon and Diaspora… these seek to
‘treat censorship as damage and route around it’ while avoiding the ‘gated communities’
exclusion of Facebook proprietary protocols. While corporate solutions like Slack and Wire
offer secure real-time chat and file sharing, one might also refer to LOOMIO: one of the
Occupy comms groups out of Wellington, New Zealand, in fact formed a worker cooper-
ative to develop and distribute their group decision-making software when they wanted to
translate the four basic hand signals of consensus to online organising. They wanted a tool
to assist in turning the open-ended meetings of larger, physical, assemblies into proposals
that could be carried out in practice. An aim is transparency and horizontal decision-making
through real, vital consensus-building processes.
Cyber anarchist collectives like TAO, as part of their organising practice, consciously
work to overcome, or at least address and reduce, the gender division of online practices
and the dominance of technical activities by males. This includes opening to transfolks and
transhumanists. Over the past two decades, important horizontalist critiques and inclusive
tactical communications’ work has been developed in women-led and/or trans-identified
hackspaces, for example, CyberFeminist International in 1998 in Rotterdam (gathered prior
and alongside one of the historic Next Five Minutes gatherings in Amsterdam) and the Old
Boys Network (women-identified critics of nettime discussion list), Studio XX in Montreal
and looser networks or smaller collectives. Many of the makerspaces have also had intense
and transformative struggles over male domination in the tech sector.
The AnarchaFeminist Hackerhive out of Noisebridge in San Francisco and the many
strong women out of the CCC can be mentioned here. As a small minority of the free
software hacker community, women have constantly had to organise together to fight to
establish and defend such spaces for further inclusivity and training. There was also much
discussion about toxic masculinity and rape culture within the free software movement after
the accusations against Jacob Appelbaum in 2017.

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Collectives have sought gender parity and collectives like TAO have had equal or greater
involvement by women-identified members relative to men in their collectives. And women
have been active in all regards, whether ideological production, online presence, program-
ming, hacktivism, media work, writing and publishing, space maintenance or meeting
facilitation.

Hacker Ethics
Hacker ethics refer to core values stressed within hacker cultures and communities. Key
principles include access, freedom of information, collective collaboration and making posi-
tive contributions to social life. These ethics are geared towards guiding practices of sharing
of information as a positive social value with benefits to communal development.
The formal term of ‘hacker ethics’ is believed to have been coined by Steven Levy in his
book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (2001). Early hackers at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), in the Tech Model Railroad Club, espoused key values and
practices that would form a basis of hacker ethics.
Key aspects of hacker ethics identified by Levy are: sharing; openness; decentralisation;
free access to computers and social improvement, including democratisation. This is a strong
distrust of authority. There is a critique of economic, political and social bureaucracies that
tend to impede or restrict information for their own purposes (Levy 2001).
Access is the key in people gaining skills and experiences. Free exchange of information
allows for greater creativity and improvement or rethinking of practices and systems.
Richard Stallman, whom Levy has referred to as a ‘true hacker’, developed the free soft-
ware movement with others who pursued hacker ethics in their practice. Free software
advocates assert especially the hands on imperative in pursuing free and open software. In
their view, this is crucial in allowing access to source code used to create software, allowing
it to be further understood, shared and worked on. This can allow for greater accessibility
to information, and to learning, participatory practices and democratic decision-making.
The hands-on initiative in hacking has resonance with anarchist and punk notions of
do-it-yourself (DIY). For hackers, getting your own hands on things, taking them apart and
seeing first-hand how they work, increases understanding, contributes to demystification
and increases possibilities for creativity.
Where there is a restriction on information and access, the hacker ethics advocate and jus-
tify opening it up, removing restrictions and getting your hands on it. They stress that they
are not seeking to harm users. They distinguish themselves from those who crack systems to
steal for personal gain or to trash or damage for the sake of personal gain or pleasure. This
distinguishes them from corporate spies, identity thieves or government operatives. Now,
there is a discussion of encouraging White Hat hacking and discouraging Black Hat hacking.
The hacker ethics also stress community and collaboration. In early hacking, there were
real-world, geographically based communities where collaboration took place in person, as
in the labs at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley, for example (Levy 2001).
That, and the need for it, has lessened with the widened availability of the Internet. Devel-
opments are still collaborative, of course.
Stallman asserts hacker ethics as community ethics more broadly, a sense of right and
wrong guiding hacker practice. Key in this is sharing knowledge with those who can benefit
from it (Stallman 1996). It is about getting people the needed resources that would other-
wise go to waste or be squandered (Stallman 2002). Stallman notes that hacking itself does
not imply certain ethics (one cannot assume hackers are acting for good or community

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betterment, for example), but hacking does often encourage thinking about ethical issues in
acting (Stallman 2002).
Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen proposes as hacker ethics on lines of communitarian-
ism. He emphasises enthusiastic and creative sharing of skills with a community of common
purpose. He stresses intrinsic motivations (recognition, inner drives and purposes, personal
satisfaction, etc.) rather than the extrinsic motivations of capitalism (pay, wealth, avoidance
of punishment, etc.). Social hacking is based on care for the other (as in ­vegetarianism) and
sharing, rather than the proprietarian systems of private capital. One’s work is shared as part
of collective efforts towards collective social advancement (Himanen 2001).

Surveillance Capitalism
Surveillance capitalism relies on maximised user involvement to generate and monitor data.
Philosopher Byung-chul Han poses Big Data as a new perfection of Bentham’s Panopticon.
Searches and clicks are stoned, observed and recorded. Big Data records thoughts and desires
in a way Bentham’s Panopticon did not (Han 2017, 62). It manages not only to watch over
human behaviour but to subject it to psychopolitical steering (Han 2017, 55). It is an efficient
form of control. It is suggested that it allows for data totalitarianism. State and market merge
in data mining and elections. Data are purchased and micro targeting deployed to influence
voters. This is psychopolitics driven by data (Han 2017, 62).
Social media, which many view as an important activist tool, is a key part of this. Social
media has been a financial boon for capital (in ads and sales, for example). It has also allowed
law enforcement the collection and organisation of large quantities of data. It innovates pos-
sibilities for surveillance, tracking and control of specific populations. And, in a way distinct
from disciplinary surveillance, people are encouraged to give up their information freely
and voluntarily. Social media blends surveillance with self-expression and social networking,
pleasure and self-motivation.
Self-measurement and self-monitoring are deployed to enhance performance (Han
2017, 60). Today’s subject is ‘an entrepreneur of the self ’, and it practices self-exploitation
and self-surveillance (Han 2017, 61). In Han’s dire terms, ‘The auto-exploiting subject car-
ries around its own labor camp; here, it is perpetrator and victim at one and the same time’
(2017,  61). Big Data can access desires we did not even know we had. It can make them
known and develop a psychopolitics around them. These unconscious desires can be ren-
dered exploitable. Big Data is Big Business. It is a commercial practice. It is the merging of
the market and the surveillance state (Han 2017, 65).
In a contested Anonymous communique in 2011, one that generated much debate, a call
was put forward for the destruction of Facebook. It raised concerns about questionable as-
pects of social media, especially surveillance prospects. At that time, Facebook had at least
800  ­m illion users. Facebook, Twitter and Google have all been subjects of Federal Trade
Commission complaints over their mishandling of users’ information (Tucker 2013, 293).
Data mining has been used by police and intelligence agencies. Post-secondary institutions
have used social media to surveil student activists and faculty critics. Social media posts have
been used by Rightwingers to target critical faculty and some have lost their jobs on that basis.
Tucker identifies four crucial problems with social media. (1) Information is not secure.
It is controlled by corporations which sell it to other corporations and share it with govern-
ments. (2) The amount of information and possibilities and its analysis are massive. (3) User
profiles are, what he terms, self-generated intelligence dossiers. (4) Social media extends and
accelerates the mapping of social networks (2013: 290–1).

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 Jeff Shantz

FBI surveillance of Myspace led to charges against environmental activists Eric M

­ cDavid,
Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner. The infamous 2006 case US vs. Eric McDavid et al.
showed that the government monitored the accounts of Jenson and Weiner in tracking
­radical environmental activism and support for such activism. The government used infor-
mation from this surveillance to portray them publicly as ‘eco-terrorists’. Myspace pages,
blog posts, comments and friend lists were used as evidence by the government (Tucker
2013). Weiner infamously agreed to cooperate with the state and testify against her co-­
defendants. ­McDavid was sentenced to about twenty years in prison in part on the basis of
evidence on Jenson’s Myspace page. McDavid did not even have a page of his own.
The case of Aaron Barr shows another example of state-corporate surveillance. Barr, the
CEO of HB Gary Federal, used social media sites to map networks of hackers with a plan to
expose and name Anonymous activists. He created fake Facebook and Twitter accounts to
‘friend’ people he viewed as connected. When Anonymous hacked his computer system and
blew the lid off his plan, it came out that HB Gary Federal was contracted with the US gov-
ernment as well as with the Chamber of Commerce (to target unions) (Tucker 2013, 302).
There are also issues of censorship and ideological framing. Facebook and Google have
created systems of surveillance and censorship in which they collaborate with state agencies.
Machines are trained to collaborate with intelligence agencies of the US government. Con-
tent can be flagged and blocked before it is even posted. These are not announced and are
unknown to users unlike open systems of censorship.
In light of the developing panopticon of surveillance capitalism, some activists call for
the abandonment of social media as run by the main social media companies. While recog-
nising some communications’ opportunities of social media, it is suggested that the costs are
too high.

Beyond Novelty
As the Internet becomes more and more a sphere of commercial and state activities, it be-
comes a crucial realm for antistatist and anticapitalist organisers. There is no question, and
has not been for some time, that the Internet is a central sphere of capitalist development and
state surveillance as well as of human social interaction, one of historic consequences.
The Internet has gone from being a means of human engagement, a tool, to a form or,
an expression of, human engagement itself. The medium is more than the message. It has
transcended being mere medium almost entirely. It is now social relation.
From the beginning, while many saw, hopefully, a sphere of unfettered human activity,
interaction and freedom, anarchists saw the Internet as a crucial site of social struggle – even
before this was sensed by most media analysts and certainly by the public at large, but that it
would be crucial to recognise the human social organisation in new forms of that struggle.
It is in this sense that the old adage which TAO activists maintained, and expressed publicly
in various venues, makes even more sense today: that the Internet does not exist. (With the
Riseup corollary, ‘no logs, no masters’ which carries the hope of zero-knowledge network
provision with secure, encrypted ‘perfect forward’ secrecy, to establish shared, distributed,
defended movement resources.)
Too much popular discussion, and academic analysis alike, has tended to focus on the
supposed novelty of online activism. Whether the focus is on Anonymous or earlier man-
ifestations of hacking or WikiLeaks or denial of service attacks (DDOS), the emphasis has
been overwhelmingly on novelty. While there are, to be sure, novel aspects of online activ-
ism (particularly in the reach of tactics, means of hiding identities that might otherwise be

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criminalised, etc.), much of online activism has direct antecedents in fairly familiar activist
repertoires. Anonymous and hacking have antecedents in forms of sabotage. WikiLeaks ex-
tends and innovates practices of whistleblowing, Denial of service actions represent forms of
civil disobedience such as sit-ins or blockades.

Connectivity
What is perhaps most notable and new about the Internet is the reach it has given to rad-
ical organisers and ideas. It has provided an unprecedented means for the dissemination,
promotion and, significantly, explanation of diverse radical ideas and projects. It has also
opened access, even to long-time radical activists, to heretofore hidden, obscured, inacces-
sible, forgotten activist histories, documents and ideological products (essays, newspapers,
zines, speeches, etc.). It has also opened important channels for communication and alliance
building. The Internet has provided a means for bringing together previously far-flung rad-
ical individuals and collectives in ways that allow for acknowledgement, support, solidarity
and concerted actions.
It is hard to overestimate the role of the Internet in the late twentieth-century revival
of radical activism, and particularly anarchism, in North America especially. It seems clear
though that much of the development of radical activism over the last twenty years is owed to
online organising of various sorts. This is so even at the level of communication alone. Prior
to the spread of the Internet, in the period of the 1980s for example, communication with
radicals in other areas was confined to information read in limited numbers of small maga-
zines, journals and zines as well as through correspondence with their publishers and authors.
The other source of communication came through occasional meetings with travellers from
other areas. Even these latter opportunities were limited if one was not living in areas where
there was an existing social space where folks from afar could land, connect with and meet
local activists. In the absence of free spaces, bookshops or infoshops, isolation could be stark,
leaving even local radicals unknown to each other.

References
Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London:
Verso.
Early Edition. 2015. ‘Anonymous: What Is It and How Serious Are Its Threats?’ CBC News. July 21.
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/anonymous-what-is-it-and-how-serious-are-its-
threats-1.3160906.
Han, Byung-chul. 2017. Psychopolitics. London: Verso.
Himanen, Pekka. 2001. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York: Penguin.
Levy, Steven. 2001. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Penguin.
Ludlow, Peter. 2001. Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shantz, Jeff and Jordon Tomblin. 2014. Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online Anarchy. London:
Zero Books.
Stallman, Richard. 1996. ‘MEME 2.04’ memex.org/meme2–04.html.
Stallman, Richard. 2002. ‘The Hacker Community and Ethics.’ www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-hack.
htmi.
Tucker, Evan. 2013. ‘Who Needs the NSA When We Have Facebook?’ In Life During Wartime: Re-
sisting Counterinsurgency, Kristian Williams, Will Munger, and Lara Messersmith-Glavin (eds.).
­Oakland: AK Press, 289–312.

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 3.6
STREETS AND INSTITUTIONS?
The Electoral Extension of Social
Movements and Its Tensions

Josep Lobera and Diego Parejo

In recent years, radical forms of political innovation have appeared in the electoral field, most
intensely in Southern Europe. These include the creation of new parties, influence over tra-
ditional parties and new forms of political articulation. These activities have distinctive roles
in different countries, but similarities can also be analysed.
The financial crisis that erupted in the US aggravated existing political crises and disaf-
fection. As Zamora-Kapoor and Coller (2014) point out, the increasingly weakened role of
the State, combined with its subordination to the demands of the European Union’s austerity
policy, led to unpredictable consequences.
In this context, the development of radical left political parties (Syriza in Greece) or the
emergence of new political parties (Podemos in Spain or M5S in Italy) has transformed per-
spectives on the traditional role of the radical left in government (Olsen et al. 2010). Further-
more, these parties have brought new social demands to the electoral field, thus becoming
their legitimate (or illegitimate) representatives within the institutions.
We will address two hypotheses in this study. The first is that the window of opportunity
that has opened for the emergence of new political actors in the electoral field is not only
marked by the economic crisis, but also by the political crisis of representative disaffection
that was developing before it (Lobera 2015, 2019). This disaffection was motivated by a
dominant bipartisanism in Greece and Spain (Rodríguez 2013, 2016; Iglesias 2015a, 2015b;
Katsourides 2016).
Our second hypothesis presents the existence of an inclusive populist model. Against the
exclusionary politics emerging in European populist movements – UKIP, Front National,
Vox, Golden Dawn, etc. (Mudde 2015) – the emergence of inclusive social protest move-
ments has allowed for the dispute about the social construction of the ‘people’ to avoid
displacement towards a cultural struggle associated with exclusive populism (Mudde and
Rovira-Kaltwasser 2013; Žižek 20161).
This chapter is divided into three parts: in the first, we analyse the distinct types of
radical political innovation that have emerged, and the sociopolitical context that has fa-
voured them. In the second, we analyse the political changes that have occurred in Spain
and Greece, as the maximum exponents of the dynamics examined in this chapter. Finally,

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 Streets and Institutions?

we analyse the characteristics of new parties, specifically Syriza and Podemos, based on three
dimensions (materialist, political and symbolic). The emergence of these new parties is con-
nected to previous theoretical frames.

Radical Innovations in the Electoral Field: The Electoral

Extension of Protests
Despite responding to different political and social contexts, the last decade’s protest cycles in
diverse world regions have some common characteristics. Their dynamism and organisation
respond to an ‘emerging model’ of social movements, called by different authors ‘network
social movements’ (Castells 2012: 213), ‘on-line multitudes’ (Sampedro 2005), ‘network-­
system’ (Sánchez-Cedillo 2011) or ‘network-movement’ (Monterde 2013: 294). The growth
of political dissatisfaction in contemporary democracies, aggravated by the economic crisis
in some regions – especially in Southern Europe – resulted in an increase in ‘orphan voters’
who were more willing to identify with new social movements (Lobera 2019).
In this context of double crisis (political and economic), new types of protest move-
ments emerged that were not based in strong pre-existing organisations, but rather in a
process of decentralised, social media-based, ‘swarm’ style self-organisations: #SidiBouzid in
­Tunisia, #15M in Spain, #aganaktismenoi in Greece and #OccupyWallStreet in US in 2011;
#YoSoy132 in Mexico in 2012; #PasseLivre in Brazil and #OccupyGezi in Turkey in 2013.
These years were characterised by very high levels of social mobilisation. Despite their many
differences of cultural and economic contexts, all these movements certainly have points in
common. They are part of a new cycle of contention where engagement and conflict are
directed towards neo-liberal economics, liberal democracy and the institutions that promote
them (Hughes 2011; Flesher Fominaya 2017). Nevertheless, not all of these mobilisations
had the same electoral impact and, of course, not all of them resulted in the emergence of
new political parties with significant influence in the electoral field, as in Spain and Greece.2
These movements succeeded in developing a collective identity and sharing connective
frameworks. They could be qualified as reflexive, which is to say that they possessed a signif-
icant power of persuasion in public opinion, as well as a capacity to raise normative contro-
versy around previously unquestioned issues (Melucci 1989; Laraña 1999). Thus, they acted
as ‘agencies of collective significance’, spreading new ideas in society (Snow and Benford
1988; Gusfield 1994). These centred on traditional political parties’ inability to represent the
will of the citizens and respond to the grave economic crisis that affected their countries.
This would be of paramount importance for the subsequent changes in political systems,
since these mobilisations were not one movement, but rather acted as a sounding board, giv-
ing form to a new ‘consensual dissent’ shared by millions in their countries (Sampedro and
Lobera 2014).
On the one hand, these movements performed a cultural task by building and advanc-
ing new repertoires of protest and cultural practices. On the other hand, they performed
an instrumental task, managing to popularise core demands such as institutional transpar-
ency against corruption and government responsiveness, as well as more democracy and
socio-economic justice. The power of these ‘reflexive organizations’ (Gusfield 1994) lies not
in their organisational potential, but also in their capacity to persuade citizens of the veracity
of their mobilisation and to get support for the solutions they promote (Laraña 2009).
The ‘reflexive convulsion’ that these movements produce is not electorally inert, but rather
has sensible impacts in the electoral field. Protest can be interpreted as a non-­institutionalised

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 Josep Lobera and Diego Parejo

form of political impact (Kaase 2007: 789). Thus, it is not surprising that a protest movement
can – and that part of it desires to – extend itself towards the field of political representation.
This extension can be multifaceted, from influence in the regeneration of existing parties,
through the active promotion of voting patterns, to the creation of new political formations
(Lobera 2015).
This electoral extension, however, does not resolve the tensions among the participants of
the protest movements themselves. Although the protesters agree on the objective of influ-
encing institutional politics, they have different opinions on how to actualise that goal. The
drivers of the 2011 mobilisations mistrusted the classical parties and demanded non-party
participation, in Greece as much as in Spain. As Vogiatzoglou points out for the Greek case:
‘the party and organizations’ members were obliged to refrain from openly referring to their
political identity. This characteristic gradually changed in time, as the movement became
more and more politicized’ (2017: 110). In the Spanish case, several activist sectors expressed
their fear of the co-optation of the movement (Calvo and Álvarez 2015), as well as being
trapped within the margins of what is simply considered to be electoral (Rodríguez 2016).

Changing in the Voting Patterns in Greece and Spain

One of the principle concerns of these movements is to have an effective impact on in-
stitutional policy while simultaneously generating changes in public opinion through the
development of new frame alignment processes. The data show that protest movements in
Spain and Greece have been successful, both in their extent and intensity at the moment
of mobilisation. However, in the cases that we have analysed, success in the street does not
usually reflect immediately in the electoral contest (Lobera and Rogero 2017).
In 2011, the 15M movement in Spain boosted a pre-existing electoral boycott campaign
called No Les Votes (‘Don’t Vote for Them’).3 No Les Votes began during the municipal and
regional elections on 22 May 2011. Aside from in the Autonomous Community of Madrid,
where the protests had a measurable effect on public opinion surveys and in the electoral
result, the electoral repercussions were minor. The movement carried on into the general
elections in November, where the effect was most pronounced among left and centre-left
voters. This dispersed the vote to alternative parties and buried PSOE, which had not re-
ceived so few votes since the Transition (Bosco 2013:21).
In Greece, the signing of the Memorandum by Yorgos Papandreu is considered to be ‘the
final blow to PASOK’s socialist character’ and the beginning of a period of social contesta-
tion. This included twenty-seven general strikes (Katsourides 2016: 95) against the struc-
tural adjustment plan entrusted to Greece by the Troika (Central European Bank, ­European
Commission and the International Monetary Fund). Following Syriza’s spectacular ascension
in the 2012 elections, the formation of a coalition between PASOK and New ­Democracy
(ND) to instate the European Memorandum represented a solidification of the cleavage
between pro/anti-memorandum camps (Katsourides 2016:96) and between old/new par-
ties ­( Tsakatika 2016). These strengthening relationships displaced, as they did in Spain, the
cleavage between the left and right. Additionally, several Greek analysts affirm the key role
of Syriza’s turn to a populist discourse.
Tables 3.6.1 and 3.6.2 show the electoral results in Spain and Greece, respectively. In
these, we can observe the strong increase in support for the radical left in Greece and a surge
in support for a Spanish alternative populist party in the 2014 European Parliament elections
(Pavía et al. 2016). The effect of electoral dissatisfaction was observed to be asymmetri-
cal in left-right terms, with greater effects seen in social democratic parties (Keating and

316
Table 3.6.1  R
 esults in Spanish elections

Support for the European

General Support for the 15M Autonomic and local General protesters’ arguments. parliament General General
election 2008 arguments. June 2011 election 2011 election 2011 October 2012 election 2014 election 2015 election 2016

Popular Party (PP) 39.9% 58% 37.5% 44.6% 61% 26% 28.7% 33%
154 seats 186 seats 123 seats 137 seats
Socialist Party (PSOE) 43.8% 88% 27.7% 28.7% 88% 23% 22% 22.6%
169 seats 110 seats 90 seats 85 seats
Podemos – – – – – 7.9% 20.7% –
69 seats
United Left (IU) 3.7% 90.9% 6.3% 6.9% 94.7% 10% 3.6% –
2 seats 11 seats 2 seats
Ciudadanos 1.1% – – – – 3.1% 13.9% 13%
40 seats 32 seats
UPyD 1.19% 68.8% 2% 4.7% 81.1% 6.5% – –
1 seats 5 seats
UNIDOS PODEMOS – – – – – – – 21.1%
(Podemos+IU) 71 seats

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the Spanish Ministry of Interior at http://www.infoelectoral.mir.es/
 Josep Lobera and Diego Parejo

Table 3.6.2  Results in Greek elections

General General General Local European

election election May election June election parliament General election General election
2009 2012 2012 2014 election 2014 January 2015 September 2015

ND 33.5% 18.9% 29.7% 26.3% 22.71% 27.8% 28.1%

91 seats 108 seats 129 seats 76 seats 75 seats
PASOK 43.9% 13.2% 12.3% 16.2% – 4.7% 6.3%
160 seats 41 seats 33 seats 13 seats (PASOK-DIMAR)
17 seats
KKE 7.5% 8.5% 4.5% 8.8% 6.09% 5.5% 5.6%
21 seats 26 seats 12 seats 15 seats 15 seats
LAOS 5.6% 2.9% – – – – –
15 seats 0 seats
SYRIZA 4.6% 16.8% 26.9% 17.7% 25.58% 36.3% 35.5%
13 seats 52 seats 71 seats 149 seats 145 seats
TO POTAMI – – – – 6.6% 6% 4.1%
17 seats 11 seats
ANEL – 10.6% 7.5% 3.2% 3.46% 4.8% 3.7%
33 seats 20 seats 13 seats 10 seats
XA – 7.0% 6.9% 8.1% 9.4% 6.7% 7.0%
21 seats 18 seats 17 seats 18 seats
DIMAR – 6.1% 6.2% 3.8% – – –
19 seats 17 seats

Source: Compiled by the authors using data from the Hellenistic Ministry of Interior at http://www.ypes.gr/en/
Elections/

McCrone 2013; Lobera and Ferrándiz 2013). In this context, these parties are not generally
seen as ‘parastatal agents’ (Van Biezen and Poguntke 2014: 214) or as a sufficient and effective
option for solving the problems citizens face. This aspect is most significant in the case of
Greece. The signing of the European memorandum and the coalition with the ND sent PA-
SOK’s share of votes plummeting from 43.9% in 2009 to 4.7% in the January 2015 elections,
in which Syriza triumphed.

A New Electoral Space: The Populist Hypothesis

McAdam and Tarrow (2011) propose an analytical framework of electoral contest, focusing
on processes that show a reciprocal relationship between social movements and elections.
This specifically regards social movements that amplify protests during the election period
and social movements that strategically use elections to gain political power. Sociologist
­Emmanuel Rodríguez argues for a significant connection between social movements in Latin
America and the development of populist governments, ignited through strong social move-
ments or picking up their slack when these weakened (2013: 299). However, there is more
to the ‘populist moment’, understood as the rapid convulsion of the electoral field, than the
collective action of social movements. Studies on populism, with specific intensity and focus
on Latin America (De la Torre 2010; Mudde and Rovira-Kaltwasser 2013; Stavrakakis et al.
2016), note the development of charismatic leaderships where civil society has already retro-
ceded. Such charismatic leadership is present in both Syriza and Podemos (Stavrakakis 2015;

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Katsambekis 2016), as well as in related municipal political parties in Madrid and Barcelona
such as Ahora Madrid, with Manuela Carmena, and Barcelona En Comú, with Ada Colau.
There exists a time frame coming after the break from the cycle of protests and the cre-
ation of new frameworks for reflexive movements to oppose traditional parties, a ‘populist
moment’. In that moment, the emergence of charismatic leaderships allows for the develop-
ment of a new electoral option that would bring in, at least apparently, the main proposals
developed during the protest cycle. This rapid growth has occurred in Spain, Greece and
Italy, in different ways, and it is not exempt from organisational and ideological problems.
The characterisation of the new emerging parties in the ‘populist moment’ has not been
­evident. At the beginning, the ‘antisystemic’ category or ‘radical left’ category was adopted. The
former has often been applied to parties that challenged established party systems (Sartori 1976;
Keren 2000). Even Iglesias used this category several times to describe his own organisation
(Iglesias 2015b, 38–39). However, the ‘antisystemic’ concept cannot be applied rigorously to
these new parties – the main objection being that they do not oppose electoral democracy itself.
Rather, they are populist alternatives in the sense used by Laclau (2005), who states that
social antagonism has returned to politics in a context where the right and left compete
for the concept of ‘the people’ (Errejón and Mouffe 2015). This competition is divided
between two perspectives, exclusionary and inclusionary. Podemos and Syriza adopted the
latter (Katsambekis 2016), steering away from an exclusionary perspective based on cultural
fundamentalism (Stolcke 1999), which seeks to build the idea of ‘the people’ around an
organic community that excludes the migrant (Errejón and Mouffe 2015: 98). Thus, left-
wing populism in Europe ‘emphasizes egalitarianism and inclusivity rather than the openly
exclusivist anti-immigrant or anti-foreigner concerns of right-populism (i.e. its concern is
the demos not the ethnos)’ (March 2012: 122).
Unlike Podemos, whose roots can be traced back to the 15M movement, Syriza was
essentially a collection of mostly radical leftist groups that came together in early 2000,
but gained popularity after Greece plummeted into debt (Katsambekis 2016). As discussed
earlier, the party turned to inclusive populism, not for moral reasons, but for economic and
political ones. As Katsambekis explains, to Syriza the populist category ‘the people’ is a
pluralist concept: ‘the people’ are the working class, the middle class, the LGBT movement,
young people, feminist movements and so on. Podemos shares this inclusionary approach
and its leaders have repeatedly stated it. For example, Pablo Iglesias states: ‘these immigrant
workers, no one has the right to call you foreigners in Spain’ (Iglesias 2015b: 184).
In Greece, the increased popularity of an extreme right party has prevented the total dis-
placement of the ‘left-right’ cleavage by the ‘people-elites’ one (Katsourides 2016: 96). ­Voters
who support Golden Dawn (GD) in Greece have high levels of disaffection not only with
politics but also with democracy. They also openly support the use of violence (­ Lamprianou
and Ellinas 2016), particularly against immigrants (Dinas et al. 2016).
Conversely, Podemos enjoyed an undisputed space to construct the concept of ‘the peo-
ple’ during its early years in Spain (Errejón and Mouffe 2015; Iglesias 2015a, 2015b). In her
dialogue with Errejón, Chantal Mouffe questioned whether this discourse could work as
easily in other countries. She argued that if Podemos’s leaders were to confront Marine Le
Pen, they could not simply say ‘we are the people’ (Errejón and Mouffe 2015: 99), since the
Front National has already appealed to ‘the people’ in its discourse. Indeed, after the rise of
the independence movement in Catalonia, there have been a patriotization of the political
discourse in Spain. Particularly since 2017, traditional (PP) and new parties (Ciudadanos and
Vox) have moved to the center of their political discourse the concept of the Spanish pueblo,
used from a nationalistic perspective.

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Similarities and Dissimilarities between Podemos and Syriza

The dots linking Syriza with Podemos seem fairly obvious in their early years. Both parties
shared discourse and political practice, led the movement of the new European left and
shared the stage in rallies. We can identify three dimensions (material, political and sym-
bolic) in the demands of both organisations: eliminate austerity politics, end the ‘bipartisan’
system and preserve citizens’ dignity (Katsourides 2016:101).

Material Dimension
Both Syriza and Podemos support the restructuring of external debt, advocate for progres-
sive state intervention in the economy and support tax reform and anti-austerity measures.
Syriza seeks to raise income taxes on yearly earnings over 500,000 euros, secular-
ise Greece (ending special favours to the Church), cut military spending and military
­operations, create a mandatory minimum wage, nationalise banks and fund initiatives free
child meals and housing for the homeless. It also wants to restructure the national debt so
that bailout money from the European Union would be used to fund some of their social
welfare initiatives.
Initially, the Podemos economic platform included ‘a basic universal wage for all citizens’
(instead, there will be more state aid to those in poverty), the nationalisation of ‘strategic
sectors of the economy’, the lowering of the retirement age to sixty (instead, it will drop
from sixty-seven back to sixty-five) and the cancellation of the Spanish state’s debt (now
the party is in favour of renegotiation, a cue most likely taken from Syriza). These ideas no
longer appear in the Podemos platform.
Instead, after the 2014 European Parliamentary elections, its platform included progres-
sive taxation, the establishment of a public bank, the repeal of the Popular Party’s labour
reform, a thirty-five-hour week and a tax on selling and buying operations on the stock
exchange. Many of the proposals would be funded by ending rampant tax evasion and the
establishment of a level of taxation similar to the average rate in the EU.
Electoral tactics have led both parties to a certain deradicalisation of many of their
­proposals, adapting them to a contested electoral space. During the 2016 electoral cam-
paign, Podemos claimed to be a Social Democratic party. These electoral tactics have led to
­ideological tensions within the organisations, overlapping with leadership tensions.

Political Dimension
Both parties focus their political dimension on ending bipartisanism and giving ‘the people’
more of a voice, tapping into public discontent with how democracy functions.4 Even if their
supporters are mainly leftists, they focus on the political discontent with traditional parties
rather than on classic left-wing ideological questions.
Syriza was a bottom-up ‘social movement’, made up of many left-wing parties ­( Katsambekis
2016; Katsourides 2016). It brought together several different identities such as feminists,
­a nticapitalists and especially those concerned about the environment. At the beginning, its
identity was mostly about being radical and against the establishment-European elite.
Conversely, Podemos was created ‘top-down’ – in opposition to the 15M spirit of hor-
izontality and popular assemblies. It thus went beyond movimentismo and its motto ‘There
are no shortcuts’, linked to the Italian workerist tradition. The Podemos hypothesis claimed
that the electoral field can also be a space for the articulation and construction of new

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political identities. Their leaders and activists strategically use social media and television
to disseminate their political discourse. Iglesias himself defends this strategy, arguing that
people do not participate in political parties in Spain, but they would affiliate with TV
channels (2015a, 2015b).

Symbolic Dimension
Syriza appealed to Greeks by simple empathy for the recuperation of their dignity, which
they felt had been robbed by the intense economic crisis and, by extension, by the E ­ uropean
Union (Stavrakakis 2015). Syriza links symbolically with the National Liberation Front
(EAM for its acronym in Greek) and to particular events that occurred during the resistance
period against fascism. As an example of this, the presence of a resistance hero, Manolis
Glezos, in some Syriza meetings can be interpreted as a clear appeal to dignity against aus-
terity imposed by present-day Germany (Katsambekis 2016; Tsakatika 2016). We can find
similar past references to dignity in speeches by Pablo Iglesias and others on the night of 20
December 2015, after the general election results.
The Greek people were promised to be Syriza’s first priority, even in the international
arena. This makes the party even more appealing, and people identified with it in a way
some may call charismatic (Stravakakis 2015: 277–80). Syriza represented a voice and in-
spired hope that had been missing at a time when many Greeks were feeling powerless. It
appealed to their humanity and common goals of reclaiming dignity and being more inde-
pendent from the European Union. This position, as that of Podemos, is not so much about
Euroscepticism as about questioning the pillars on which the European Union is founded.
As della Porta et al. (2017: 230) point out, ‘the issue was not the country’s participation in the
EU, but the EU itself, a social versus a neoliberal Europe’.
Podemos puts more emphasis on moral discourse: ‘unjust laws’, ‘indecent elites’ and ‘de-
cent people’ (Iglesias 2015b: 179). ‘The people’ is identified in moral and s­ ocio-economic
terms, because ‘the people is diverse’ (Iglesias 2015b), while ‘the caste’ is used for corrupt pol-
iticians and businessmen. The slogan ‘We are not antisystem, the system is anti us’ p­ erfectly
sums up the symbolic approach taken by Podemos: a corrupt minority that uses great eco-
nomic and political power to subdue the decent majority, the people.

Tensions and Transformations

The populist moment is a moment of exceptionality, a window of opportunity to extend
protest to the electoral field over a new, consensual form of dissent. However, in this populist
hypothesis, a separation with the original social movements takes place, as well as a certain
deactivation of the movement based on tactical electoral reasons – a deactivation going be-
yond the cycle of the protests. There is, then, an intrinsic tension in this populist moment,
between activism in the streets and its institutional extension, between the logics of collec-
tive action and populist action.
Core activists in 15M and the Greeks Indignants promoted new ways of organising and
‘doing’ politics and democracy. They have often been linked to the autonomist workerist
tradition and anarchist movements (Rodríguez 2013, 2016; Monge 2017), which proposes
that a strong civil society can subvert social relations and transform them on the margins of
the state. In fact, the populist hypothesis proposes the change of political institutions from
within by playing in the electoral field with new tactics and taking advantage of the frame-
work of the new social movements to reach cross-sectional majorities.5 This leads to a greater

321
 Josep Lobera and Diego Parejo

level of ambiguity and a lack of explicit radicalism in the electoral proposals, in order to adapt
them to a ‘rapid and effective electoral warfare machinery’, as Errejón describes it.6
Chantal Mouffe (2013) reduces this tension through her concept of ‘agonistic politics’,
where antagonism itself is reduced: from the ‘other as an enemy’ to the ‘other as an adver-
sary’ that can be respected. This point of balance becomes a knot of tensions, however, when
internal power dynamics come into play within the organisations themselves. Both Syriza
and Podemos experienced extraordinarily rapid electoral and organisational growth. This
growth has not always occurred in a harmonious way, causing leadership rivalries at all or-
ganisational levels. These rivalries often leverage the tension between street and institution
in the struggle for internal power.
Positions thus are established within the parties: those closer to the street are more radical
in their approach to confrontation; while others who are closer to electoral tactics utilise
seemingly more cross-sectional approaches among potential voters. Narratives are developed
to justify these internal rivalries and power struggles: ‘they are not with the streets, they are
sold to institutionalization’; ‘they are not pragmatic, they will never win in the electoral field
with such explicit radical proposals’. These narratives are continually used to strengthen or
conquer positions within these very young organisations.
These main narratives tend to binary frames, allowing various groups in conflict within
the party to be recognised (‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘the ones closer to street, to the essence of the
movements’, ‘the ones closer to pragmatism, to the electoral victory’). They create at least two
political ‘families’ within the party, two ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983: 15) in the
sense that most of their supporters will never meet or even hear of each other, yet recognise
themselves as a part of the matrix of belonging. At the same time, these two narratives gen-
erate distrust of the ‘others’, the inner ‘enemy’. The development of these narratives of ‘streets
or institutions’ generates tension among the participants and, therefore, reinforces leadership
positions. Leaders in both subgroups identify these two predominant narratives and employ
them in their discourses to legitimise their actions and their leadership within the party.
The resolution of the ‘street-institution’ tension is complicated. First, because it fulfils
functions in the struggle for leadership in these rapidly growing organisations. Second, be-
cause populism is fundamentally reactive, contrary to radical emancipatory praxis which is
proactive (Žižek 2009: 61). Podemos and Syriza have already faced internal crises that have
shaken the formations and still cannot be considered concluded. In the case of Podemos, the
Second Citizen Assembly of Vistalegre (February 2017) consolidated the leadership of Pablo
Iglesias over Íñigo Errejón. The narrative of ‘more street’ came out stronger in this case. The
party proposed ‘a chain of transmission’ between the institution and the street, ­‘democratizing
and integrating, meeting again with social movements and becoming a mobilizing agent’.
In the case of Syriza, despite having revalidated the government after the elections of
September 2015, the referendum on the EU memorandum caused the party to split, with
Popular Unity emerging from the Eurosceptic wing of the party (Tsakatika 2016). Shortly
after, Syriza’s youth wing also broke with the party as a result of the acceptance of the third
memorandum (Syriza Youth Central Committee 2015).
Over the past year and a half, the Tsipras administration has been heavily contested in
the streets for its austerity policies. It has faced three general strikes and lost a significant
amount of its electoral support – down to 16% and surpassed by ND (25%). As of 2017, Alexis
­Tsipras’s approval ratings as the prime minister are at an extraordinary low of 12%.7 The pop-
ulist tension in Greece is flowing into a fragmentation of the inclusive populist movement,
potentially weakening its advantage over exclusivist options like GD, which could reach 8%
in an election.

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In addition to this, we can observe two risks frequently associated with the use of the
concept of populism. First, as Jacques Rancière (2014: 120) suggests, the use of this term by
the traditional parties is aimed at discrediting its political rivals. In this context, the term
‘populist’ is associated with ‘demagogue’. Second, as Stavrakakis (2015) points out, there is a
risk of including under the same label divergent policy options, such as GD and Syriza, and
pervert in this way the analysis of left-wing, egalitarian and inclusive populist movements.
The question remains: streets or institutions? In the Spanish case, alternative routes
out of this dilemma have been opened in the form of Popular Unity Candidacies (PUC).
With the important but not hegemonic participation of Podemos, these candidacies were
­constituted for the local and regional elections of May 2015, obtaining triumphs in the
main Spanish cities. They were constituted out of social movements linked to 15M, and
to campaigns to protect public health, education and civil rights. They took the form of
an ‘instrumental party’ establishing open primary processes for the election of candidates,
being more participative and horizontal than Podemos during those same electoral cam-
paigns. The PUC continued to carry the intrinsic tension between streets and institutions of
the populist moment; nevertheless, during their early years in the main Spanish town halls,
this tension was slightly less strong because they were perceived to be more closely related
to social movements than Podemos and Syriza. Finally, in the last years of their first term,
the street-institution tension has strongly affected some of these PUC, articulating internal
conflicts around these narratives. This was particularly the case of Ahora Madrid, where
the leader (Manuela Carmena) advocated “more institutionalization” in an internal process
with multiple fractures.
Each specific national context generates a specific context of mobilisation. In the case
of the new parties, moreover, the specific moment in its development stage is determinant
for its analysis. The exceptionality of the populist moment makes the landscape of all these
parties susceptible to change rapidly. Speeches and strategies are subject to abrupt changes in
the conjuncture of communication and political organisation. In this context, the intrinsic
tension between the forces of institutionalisation and the forces of mobilisation will be a
central element in the analysis of the evolution of these parties in the near future.

Notes
1 In this sense, Zizek’s approach concludes that before the absence of leftist mobilisation, the class
struggle was displaced by a struggle that placed exclusion and culture as its centre (2016: 67).
2 It is important to note that a certain transnational diffusion of these social movements did take
place (Castells 2012; Voulgarelis 2012; Tejerina et al. 2013; Flesher Fominaya 2014; Romanos
2016; Díez 2017). This transnational diffusion ‘was not only ideational’ in relation to the agency
component of the collective action frames; it also ‘included forms of action such as occupying the
main square of the city with the aim of achieving a certain permanence’ (Romanos 2016: 114).
3 No Les Votes (‘Do not vote them’) was a ‘grassroots anti-campaign’ aimed at the main parties (PP,
PSOE and Convergència i Unió) which at the same time called for people to vote for alternative parties.
4 In Spain, in June 2011, 70% did not feel their interests represented by any political party and
83% considered that who really command in the world are no longer the states but ‘the markets’
(Lobera y Ferrándiz 2013:51–52).
5 The doctoral thesis of Pablo Iglesias (2008) was an appeal to an autonomist movement to being
able to renew itself and open up new opportunities for social change. Later, Iglesias (2015b) him-
self acknowledged that the development of Podemos implies a revision of his own thesis (2015b).
6 Público, 23/10/2014, available at: www.publico.es/actualidad/construir-maquinaria-guerra-­
electoral.html.
7 See survey results in http://greece.greekreporter.com/2017/02/01/new-poll-shows-new-democracy-
10-2-ahead-of-syriza/.

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 Josep Lobera and Diego Parejo

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 3.7
CELLS, COMMUNIQUÉS AND
MONIKERS
The Insurrectionary Networks of
Antistate Attack

Michael Loadenthal

Introduction
Spanning over a century, the insurrectionary spirit of anarchism has been on the forefront
of direct, unmediated attacks on the state and capital. Insurrectionary praxis is based on an
ethic of informality, clandestinity and temporality, and as a result, its cells exist in secret
only as long as deemed necessary for a particular action. Unlike social movement organisa-
tions and above-ground campaigns, the cells that populate the insurrectionary milieu are not
something to ‘belong to’ but something to ‘act through’; a momentary assemblage of like-
minded individuals united for a particular attack by voluntary association and through shared
­a ffinity. While the modern cell networks gained visibly in Europe around the ­m illennium,
their rapid replication has led to similarly styled formations in dozens of countries from the
Americas to Asia.
This franchised replication is aided by the use of adoptable monikers – static labels used
to associate an attack with others, and to ideologically tag them as insurrectionary. Of-
tentimes, these are acronyms whose names communicate the politics of the attackers, such
as the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), Interna-
tional Revolutionary Front (IRF) as well as older, not explicitly insurrectionary monikers
such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF). The use
of moniker-linked attacks, which form into a campaign of sorts, is a distinctive feature
of the insurrectionary cells. For example, in June 2013, a Greek cell of the FAI bombed
a ­vehicle belonging to a prison director overseeing the incarceration of comrades. This
attack marked ‘act one’ of the Phoenix Project, and would be followed by thirteen addi-
tional attacks, spanning eight countries over a twelve-month period. The Phoenix Project
highlights the strength of the adoptable moniker, as through its usage, an arson targeting
an Indonesian hotel and the sabotage of Italian fuel pumps can be united into a shared,
global effort, and not understood as disparate acts of lone wolves. This chapter will explore
how the insurrectionary anarchist networks utilise the cell model, the communiqué and
the adoptable moniker to allow for the creation of a globally dispersed, decentralised, open
involvement movement united in its rejection of capitalism, the state and those who would
seek to control it.

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The Informal Anarchist Federation

Though a variety of direct attack networks, monikers and individual cells have emerged
since the postmillennial reinvigoration of the urban guerrilla, the strategy and momentum
of direct, antistate attack was carried forth most notably by the Informal Anarchist Feder-
ation [Federazione Anarchica Informale]. The FAI has been linked to attacks dating as early as
1999, but its current, internationalised, adoptable moniker form emerged around 2004 in
the Italian city of Bologna. In 1999, the network sent mail bombs to the Greek embassy in
Rome, a tourism office in Madrid and a branch of Citibank in Barcelona (Hanrahan 2013).
Subsequently, pre-2003 FAI bombs targeted newspapers, churches, courts, police, prisons
and other targets located in Western Europe, largely in Spain and Italy.
In describing one’s enrolment with the FAI, convicted militant Alfredo Cospito states:

One becomes part of FAI-IRF only at the very moment he/she acts and strikes claim-
ing as FAI, then everyone returns to their own projects, their own individual perspec-
tive, within a black international that includes a variety of practices, all aggressive and
violent.
(Cospito 2014)

The FAI, like other adoptable monikers, is united by an aesthetic, and a broad set of ethics.
The individual cells form, carry out attacks and announce these strikes widely through
communiqués and intra-movement publications, which, as opposed to communiqués, are
intended outwards to circulate amongst the movement’s networks. In exploring the history
of the FAI, one can note the informality of the network, as well as its proclivity for unme-
diated, direct forms of confrontation carried out through clandestinely organised strikes on
state and corporate targets.
In the final days of 2003 (29 December), as part of the FAI’s ‘Operation Santa Claus’, two
letter bombs were mailed to Europol – a Europe-wide police data centre – headquartered
in The Hague, and to the head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet. Tech-
nicians defused the Europol bomb, and German police discovered the IED sent to Trichet
in the bank’s mail room. Both bombs were postmarked in Bologna. One day prior, a third
mail bomb exploded at the Bologna home of Romano Prodi, the heard of the European
Commission, and former Italian Prime Minister (1996–98, 2006–8). According to FAI com-
muniqués, this was the third bomb to target Prodi that week (BBC 2003b). Two previous
explosions occurred in trash receptacles, and the third IED, the one delivered with the mail,
was assembled inside of a book and addressed to Prodi’s wife. The book bomb, according to
Prodi, ‘[produced] a big flame but without an explosion’ (BBC 2003a).
The next day, a fourth letter bomb was mailed, this time to the headquarters of Eurojust, a
European policing agency. The IED did not explode and according to officials was the work
of the same network (BBC 2003c). Additional IEDs, also originating in Bologna, were sent
to the president and vice president of the European People’s Party, as well as to Gary Titley,
a British Labour Member of the European Parliament. Titley called the bombings an ‘attack
on democracy… [likely] from an Italian anarchist group’ (BBC 2004). In response to the six
mailed IEDs, the Italian city of Bologna halted the delivery of parcels from the region to EU
institutions (BBC 2003d).
The FAI (2003) explained their motivation in a communiqué entitled ‘Open Letter to
the Anarchist and Anti-Authoritarian Movement’. This document serves to announce the
FAI to the world, to begin to develop its methodology for attack and to communicate with

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sympathetic allies in the producing of future attacks. According to some historical accounts
(Cospito 2014), the letter is a signpost marking the real emergence of the FAI global net-
work. In the text, the network claims responsibility for the attacks, calling their targets the
‘repressive apparatus that plays the democratic farce and that will bring the main characters
and institutions to the new European order’ (FAI 2003). The attackers quantify their en-
emy as ‘the various police departments … a prison system … bureaucrats and politicians’,
proclaiming:

Attack and destroy the responsible for repression and exploitation!

Attack and destroy prisons, banks, courts and police stations!
Revolt is contagious and can be reproduced!
Social war against capital and the State!
(FAI 2003)

The FAI describes their network as ‘a federation formed either by groups of action or by
single individuals, in order to go beyond the limits implied in single projects and to experi-
ment the real potentialities of informal organization’ (2003, 3). The communiqué goes on to
describe the network’s interpretation of ‘informal’, ‘anarchist’ and ‘federation’ and discusses
strategy, organisation and other questions of practicality.
Following the Bologna-based bombing campaign, the FAI expanded, forming compo-
nents such as the ‘Armed Cells for International Solidarity Brigade’ which continued to mail
explosives (2 April 2004, 10–11 December 2004), the ‘Metropolitan Cells’ which detonated
IEDs in Milan (29 October 2004) and numerous joint formations, such as the FAI/‘July 20
Brigade’, and the FAI/‘Crafts and Fire Cooperative’, which detonated IEDs targeting police
and prisons (3 March 2005). These cells operated in the Italian cities of Bologna, Genoa,
Rome and Milan, and were responsible for at least sixteen explosive attacks, with security
sources estimating the network’s composition to be 50–250 individuals (Marone 2014). Ac-
cording to pro-FAI movement historians, between December 2003 and December 2006, the
network carried out ‘7 revolutionary campaigns … [and] 30 incendiary and explosive attacks
on things and people’ (Anonymous 2006). These bombs targeted courts, police buildings
and individual officials such as Mayors and corporate directors.
Years later, the FAI would prove to be long-lasting, sending additional parcel bombs
including:

• 15 December 2009: Director of Centre for Identification and Expulsion, an immigra-

tion detention centre, in Gradisca d’Isonzo, Italy.
• 16 December 2009: Bocconi University in Milan. c. 28 March 2010: Headquarters of
the Northern League, a right-wing political party in Milan. The device injured a postal
worker.
• 23 December 2010: Embassy of Greece in Paris.
• 23 December 2010: Embassies of Chile and Switzerland in Rome. These devices injured
two.
• 30 March 2011: Nuclear company Swissnuclear in Olten, Switzerland. This device in-
jured two.
• 31 March 2011: Barracks of Italian paratroopers deploying to Afghanistan located in
Livorno, Italy. This attack injured one soldier severely.
• 7 December 2011: The Chief Executive of Deutsche Bank. The device was intercepted
in Frankfurt.

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• c. 9 December 2011: Josef Ackermann, director of Equitalia state tax collection agency
in Rome. This attack seriously injured Ackerman.
• 9 April 2013: La Stampa newspaper in Turin, Italy.
• 10 April 2013: Europol offices in Brescia, Italy.

Of its scores of attacks, the most infamous is likely that which occurred on 7 May 2012. On
this date, a cell of the FAI was responsible for the non-fatal shooting (i.e. ‘kneecapping’)1
of Roberto Adinolfi, the fifty-six-year-old chief executive of Ansaldo Nucleare, an Italian
nuclear company affiliated with defence/aerospace firm Finmeccanica. The masked attackers
fired three times, shooting Adinolfi in the knees from atop a motorcycle, as the target left his
Genoa home. The shooting of Adinolfi was claimed via a four-page communiqué – as the
‘Olga Nucleus’2 (2012) cell of the FAI-IRF – received on 11 May 2012 by an Italian newspa-
per. A year after the shooting, the FAI named the attack as part of ‘Operation Hunt the Spy’
(Hornby and Rossi 2013) linking it to the 2013 bombings of La Stampa and Europol. The
three attacks were rhetorically linked in the communiqué, noting:

[Europol] provides the forces of order with equipment such as microchips, micro-­
cameras and other technological wickedness…[and] ‘La Stampa’ [is] always ready to
corroborate the frame-ups of the carabinieri [Italian military police] and police, espe-
cially when they strike those who are at war against the state.
(FAI/IRF Damiano Bolano Cell 2013)

In September 2012, two male individuals, thirty-five-year-old Nicola Gai, and forty-six-
year-old Alfredo Cospito, were arrested in Turin and linked to the crime via surveillance
footage, wiretaps and textual analysis of the communiqué. The two individuals were con-
victed and imprisoned for a combined sentence of twenty years. Their sentence was assigned
a ‘finalità di terrorismo’ [purpose of terrorism] condition due to the antistate politics of the
shooting.
With similar regularity to its IEDs, FAI cells have used timed improvised incendiary
­devices (IIDs) such as the ones that ignited under the cars of the Lord Mayor of Bristol,
Geoff Gollop, and Tory Councillor Kevin Quartley (7 November 2011), claimed by the
FAI’s ‘Class Terror’ (2011) cell. Despite being conservative functionaries within the British
state, the two men expressed shock that they were targeted. Lord Gollop stated, ‘I am at a
total loss why anyone would want to do this. I have got absolutely no idea what the motive
could possibly be’ (The Bristol Post 2011). Councillor Quartley expressed similar sentiments
stating, ‘I’ve got no idea why this has happened’ (The Bristol Post 2011).
While the FAI was established in Italy, like other moniker-based networks, it was quickly
exported as an internationalist model. In June 2012, police arrested eight individuals in Italy,
one in Switzerland, and one in Germany, all accused of affiliation with the FAI/IRF. In at
least one case, an Italian judge issuing warrants charged the accused with ‘subversion, ter-
rorist conspiracy and international terrorism’ (Hooper 2012). State officials noted presumed
links between the arrested FAI members and the Greek CCF. As the imprisoned members
of the Greek network stated in their letter to the Italian FAI, ‘The Informal Anarchist Fed-
eration travels over borders and cities, carrying with it the momentum of a lasting anarchist
insurrection’ (Ekonomidou et al. 2012). By 2014, cells of the FAI had claimed attacks in a
variety of countries beyond Italy including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Greece, Indonesia,
Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Spain, the UK and the US. Also, while the FAI
name would be combined in endless combinations with the CCF, IRF and others, it was

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also regularly used in conjunction with the ALF/ELF monikers, such as an attack in Moscow
(around 21 February 2012) where a group ignited two IIDs to burn cellular phone towers in
an area popular with hunters.
Around September 2011, two Italian FAI nodes operating since 2004 – the ‘Artisans
Cooperative of Fire and Similar (occasionally spectacular)’ cell and the ‘20th July B­ rigade’ –
­released a lengthy statement entitled, ‘Do Not Say That We Are Few’ (2011). In this
­document – termed a ‘contribution to discussing communication, organization and armed
struggle at the dawn of a new era’ (2011) – the authors claim responsibility for several mail
bombs, express solidarity with the CCF and discuss an international campaign of insur-
rectionary direct action. The anonymous authors speak of the deterritorialisation of their
network, writing:

Many things have happened since we launched the proposal for an ‘Informal Anarchist
Federation’. Today, thanks to the sisters and brothers of the ‘Conspiracy of Cells of Fire’,
who have re-launched it, the ‘FAI/International Revolutionary Front’, the ‘FAI/Global
Network’, the ‘International Network of Action and Solidarity’, the ‘Informal Anar-
chist Federation–Global Network’ has become reality with their one thousand names.
A reality that needs to grow up especially now through the instrument of informal
organization on a worldly level and thanks to a federation of action groups. Dozens and
dozens of cells, nuclei, movements, individual comrades, united by a clear and strong
horizontal and widespread pact of mutual aid, wage war on the existent in a chaotic and
destructive way.
(FAI-IRF Artisans Cooperative of Fire and Similar (occasionally spectacular)
and FAI-IRF 20th July Brigade 2011)

Following this, the statement details the names and national locations of thirty-six cells
spread across nine countries: Italy (12 cells), Mexico (9), Greece (8), Chile (2) and 1 each in
Indonesia, Russia, Peru, the Netherlands and England.
Succeeding the shooting of Adinolfi, and in response to repeated attacks targeting
­Equitalia  – the Italian tax collection agency – the Italian Ministry of the Interior reas-
signed 18,000 officers to ‘security detail’ (Delaney 2012) and carried out a series of police
raids, arresting eight, and serving warrants to already imprisoned (and infamous) anarchist
militants Gabriel Pombo Da Silva 3 and Marco Camenisch.4 Since its emergence, there have
been at least nine individuals (Loadenthal 2015, 465–7, 2017) arrested in connection to FAI
attacks, though in general the network has been resistant to disruption. Because the FAI’s
attacks have tended to avoid injury, the network’s actions have been consistently ‘underes-
timated’ (Marone 2014) by both police and academics. In a report to the Italian parliament
by the Ministry of the Interior, the FAI is described as the ‘most dangerous form of domestic
non-jihadist terrorism in the country’ (Marone 2014); yet, Muslim non-state actors still re-
ceive far more ‘focused intensity’ (Winfield and Gatopoulos 2010) from police. Nonetheless,
according to Europol, ‘attacks by far-left and anarchist militant groups jumped 43 percent
in 2009 [compared to 2008]’, and have doubled since 2007 (Winfield and Gatopoulos 2010).

The Phoenix Project

The global insurrectionary networks are organised through a decentralised model drawn
from the larger anarchist praxis. The roles played by antiauthoritarian, horizontalist poli-
tics in the moulding of leftist networks have been the subject of much scholarship. Gordon

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(2008, 14–15) described the generalised anarchist milieu as ‘network of informal ­interactions
between a plurality of individuals, groups and/or organisations…on the basis of a shared
collective identity’, viewing this ‘movement’s architecture’ as ‘a decentralised global n ­ etwork
of communication, coordination and mutual support among countless autonomous nodes
of social struggle, overwhelmingly lacking formal membership or fixed boundaries’. Such a
­description is applicable to the insurrectionary milieu, which can be understood as a subset or
derivative of the larger anarchist tendency. For the insurrectionists, international c­ ampaigns
of attack are coordinated through a diverse, virtual exchange of ideas played out via the texts
of communiqués and claims of responsibility.
To accurately portray this organisational tendency through a modern insurrectionary
example, we can examine the 2013–2015 Phoenix Project. The campaign began on 7 June
2013, when a cell identifying with the CCF-FAI/IRF moniker claimed responsibility for
a bomb attack in Athens. The targeted vehicle belonged to Maria Stefi, the director of the
prison where members of the CCF were being held. The cell was quick to claim the attack
‘as a display of genuine solidarity with our ten imprisoned brothers and sisters’ (CCF-FAI/
IRF, Consciousness Gangs-FAI/IRF, and Sole-Baleno Cell 2013). Interestingly, the IED
disrupted a period of inactivity for the CCF, as the authors write:

After almost two years of silence throughout the Greek territory, the CCF returns.
Maintaining a common front with the…FAI cells (‘Antifascist Front’, ‘Unscathed Cell
of Vengeance’, ‘Lone Wolf Cell’, etc.)…we support and strengthen the international
conspiracy of the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front.
(CCF-FAI/IRF, Consciousness Gangs-FAI/IRF, and Sole-Baleno Cell 2013)

The re-emergence of the CCF moniker and the reinvigoration of this network were por-
trayed as the rising of the phoenix. The attackers called the bombing part of the Phoenix
Project implying that the incident was not a single occurrence.
Less than two weeks later, the ‘International Conspiracy for Revenge/FAI’ (2013a)
claimed responsibly for the second Phoenix Project attack – the bombing of a car belonging
to a ‘hated prison guard in Argos, Greece’. A few days later, in what the attackers called
‘Phoenix Project –Act Two’, the third in a series of attacks in Greece occurred, similarly
targeting the vehicle of a prison worker. Around 22 June 2013, the ‘FAI-International Con-
spiracy for Revenge’ (2013b) – the same moniker which claimed the second Phoenix attack –
blew up the car of a prison guard whom they accuse of abuse, intimidation and bullying,
writing that ‘the enemies of freedom have names and addresses’. The communiqué addresses
the issue of prison abuse and uses the text to further expand on the internationalist network,
stating:

The new anarchist urban guerrilla is not a means of struggle, it is our existence itself.
All the rest which does not promote the continuous anarchist insurrection is ideological
cowardice.
FAI (Informal Anarchist Federation) in cooperation with the Conspiracy of Cells of
Fire aims to create a diffuse network of direct action cell in the Greek territory which
will strike where the enemy does not expect it. Small autonomous flexible armed cells
watch, collect info, sometimes cooperate sometimes not and choose the moment of sud-
den attack. Only in the attack is there life. We are anarchists of action, chaotic, nihilist,
egoists, godless, we are the carriers of the black flags of anarcho-nihilism.
(International Conspiracy for Revenge/FAI 2013b)

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 Michael Loadenthal

A few days after this communiqué was issued, expanding on and articulating the networked
reality of the FAI, the Phoenix Project internationalised.
On 26 June 2013, insurrectionists in Jakarta, Indonesia carried out an arson attack tar-
geting the Sheraton Hotel. The arsonists labelled their attack ‘Phoenix Project – Part 3’ and
noted that they acted as ‘[their] decision to respond to the call from our Greek comrades’
(International Conspiracy for Revenge/FAI-IRF and Anger Unit 2013). In their closing
remarks, the authors encourage further continuation of the campaign writing ‘Let’s make
the Phoenix project as an international project for revenge!’ signing the communiqué the
‘Anger Unit of the International Conspiracy for Revenge/FAI-IRF’ (2013), once again util-
ising that shared moniker and adding a new service unit. After the attack in Jakarta, at least
thirteen more attacks would occur, totalling seventeen Phoenix Project attacks (in nine
countries: Greece, Italy, Germany, England, Czech Republic, Russia, Chile, Mexico and
Indonesia) as of 3 January 2016 (Loadenthal 2015, 475–7; Anarchist Arson Attack Cell ‘Fire
and Consciousness’ FAI-IRF 2016). Following one such attack, the authors summarise the
intent of the campaign writing:

Project Phoenix is a punch in the gut. A punch in the gut because the new anarchist
urban guerrilla is here and tears down the desires of all these worms to terminate our
actions. Old groups are activated and new are created, with the promise to give life to
the nightmares of authority and its subjects.
(Commando Mauricio Morales/FAI-IRF 2013)

From the brief history of the Phoenix Project, one can see the deployment of adoptable
network monikers to claim cell-level responsibility for attacks while simultaneously demon-
strating coordination and ideological affinity within larger movement-level initiatives. We
see monikers deterritorialise, adapt, grow and change. From one initial challenge and call
to action, cells around the world attack, and in doing so, develop a decentralised campaign
of sorts.
Borrowing from the work of anthropologist Jeff Juris, Gordon points out that anarchist
networks most often do not seek traditional social movement ‘recruitment’ but instead the
reproduction of networks through a ‘horizontal expansion and enhanced “connectivity”’
(ibid.). In describing the structuring and strategy of the global network of attack, the authors
describe these horizontally connected networks and state:

We coordinate our attacks through the FAI/IRF international network…FAI/IRF is an

international conspiracy of anarchists of praxis…It gets rid of the smell of mold that has
settled in anarchy seen at amphitheaters, and fills the air with the smell of gunpowder,
black anarchy, nighttime, explosions, gunshots, sabotages. This explains why the Inter-
national Revolutionary Front of FAI and Conspiracy is on top of the anarchist dangers
list as cited in recent Europol reports.
Diffusion and informal organizing within the new anarchy into autonomous cells of
direct action are what really scare the police of the whole world. Therefore, the State
and the enemies of anarchy do not easily forget the anarchist militants who are held
captive under their prisons’ authority.
(CCF-FAI/IRF, Consciousness Gangs-FAI/IRF, and Sole-Baleno Cell 2013)

This has been the method, which originated in Italy, and rapidly spread to Greece, Mexico
and nearly thirty additional countries. More than two and a half years after the initiation

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 Cells, Communiqués and Monikers

of the Phoenix Project, combatant cells were still carrying the model forward. In a com-
muniqué issued in April 2015, the authors state that their IID attack targeting an office of
Microsoft was carried out as a ‘contribution to the comrades of Czech FAI/IRF suggestion,
who burned a police car and suggested the creation of an international action project named
“Let’s Destroy Repression”, modelled on the “Phoenix” Project’ (Combative Anarchy, FAI-
IRF 2015). A few days later, yet another Phoenix Project-linked attack was claimed, this
time the arson of a meat company’s office in Chile.

The Ethics of Insurrectionary Attack

Clandestine insurrectionary cell networks like the FAI are not unified by any manner
of codified system of association, but rather demonstrate affinity by carrying our sim-
ilarly styled attacks, and framing these actions through recurrent themes. In trying to
best describe what an insurrectionary cell is, one can review the attackers’ claims of
­responsibility – often termed a communiqué – to try and excavate these thematic tropes.
Though a great deal of diversity exists within the networks, the insurrectionary ethical
worldview can be usefully understood in terms of eight themes: the promotion of attack
as a strategy, advocating ‘social war’ to engage in generalised contestation, a rejection of
identity politics in favour of a form of radical intersectionality, a rejection of managed dis-
sent through the vehicle of the Left, a rejection of reformism and democratic politicking,
a promotion of illegality, a keen awareness of impending ecological crisis and the negative
effects of technology and industrial civilisation, and finally, the embracing of an individu-
alist, ego-driven spirit of wildness.
According to the most recurrent thread of insurrectionary agreement, what defines the
tendency is its promotion of attack as both a strategy and an ethic. In a 2009 essay, pro-­
insurrectionary proponents write:

Our [insurrectionary anarchist] subculture has come to emphasize the attack. We are
compelled to act immediately, despite the sheer impoverishment of our revolutionary
context. We cannot wait until the ‘right moment,’ the progression of capital is too rapid
to spare even one more second. To the quiet satisfaction of our most intelligent ene-
mies, the ethos of attack has come to imply a neglect of a developed long-term strategy.
We of course understand that every recruiting center, police station, and real-estate
­development needs to be razed as soon as possible.
(Til it Breaks collective 2009, 17)

According to advocates, the forces of domination must be confronted through a direct

attack that is immediate, continuous and spontaneous. An individual only learns how
to act through experimentation, and thus anyone is capable of acting in furtherance of
greater freedom through the deployment of easily reproducible tactics targeting whatever
available localised manifestation of the enemy. Second, the wider conflict with the state
and capital takes the form of a social war, which seeks to create points of rupture in the
sociopolitical order through exacerbating existing tensions, dissatisfactions and sites of
alienation in society which are produced by power and control. Third, in locating the
enemy one must move beyond identity-based politics and seek a more all-encompassing
idea of intersectionality wherein the goal is confrontation with ‘The Totality’ and total
liberation (A Gang of Criminal Quees 2008). This understanding is based on a rejection
of domination, not specific systems of oppression such as sexism, racism or homophobia.

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Therefore, the battles of the non-heterosexual and those of the non-white are inextricably
linked as they both resist top-down power.
Fourth, forms of protest and contestation must be unmanaged, temporary and outside
of the Left’s traditional conceptions of social movements. This rejection of representation,
mediation and ritual must be recognised in all aspects of praxis. The prized model for insur-
rection is thus the fostering of informal, temporary collectives of individuals, allied through
friendship and ties of affinity. Fifth, the insurrectionary vision for social change rejects re-
formist measures and Western liberal notions of democratic participation. Reformists are
seen as the enemies of radical social transformation, despite being commonly portrayed as
allies in resistance. Sixth, insurrection is inherently illegal, and embraces a heritage of an-
archist illegalism and criminality including expropriation, assassination and the rejection of
civil engagement. Seventh, the influence of the ecological crisis is ­apparent in the insurrec-
tionary agenda, along with primitivist critiques of domestication and technology. Finally,
the insurrectionary milieu seeks to be constituted by individualists, acting in their own
right, informed by a sense of wild egoism. The notion of ‘the wild’ runs throughout this
understanding and evokes an untamed, pre-capitalist worldview.
Taken as a collection of values, these components constitute a basis for insurrectionary
affinity. They are gleaned from thousands of brief texts, authored at the level of the cell,
typically following some transgressive act of antisocial, antistate and/or anticapitalist attack.
The insurrectionary actor speaks via the mechanism of the communiqué, and utilises the
space created by a temporary disruption to the status quo. In doing so, the actor further
develops the political analysis of the wider milieu, and creates another page in the fluid,
amorphous, canon. The community of insurrectionary networks meets at these points of ideo-
logical, rhetorical and strategic affinities, and it is constituted and reproduced on the basis of
this affiliation.

Full-Time Professional (Revolutionaries) versus Part-Timers

One additional distinguishing characteristic of insurrectionary networks, and the cultural
realities they promote, is the notion of a non-professional, un-specialised, full-time revolu-
tionary. This notion is distinctive from older Marxist-Leninist forms of vanguardism, as well
as from the strategic vision advocated by classical proponents of guerrilla warfare such as Che
Guevara, Régis Debray and Mao Tse-Tung. This contends that from the proletarian masses,
a vanguard cadre emerges, and it is this cadre that organises the masses and leads it in com-
bat with the state. To borrow language from the 1970s-era, American, militant, vanguard
known as the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), this would involve a ‘cadre
organization’ facilitating an ‘active mass base’ movement as a ‘division of the International
Liberation Army’ (Ashley et al. 1970, 88, 90).
In this model, the participant leaves their civilian life behind, and through paramilitary
preparations, becomes a soldier in a Marxist army. For Leninists, ‘The vanguard elite are…
not just a theoretical category to explain the development of political strategies, but a specific
grouping of special individuals who must be identified and trained distinctly from the broad
mass of the population’ (Franks 2010, 106). The vanguard-cadre model with a unified, cen-
tral organisation was furthered by urban guerrilla movements such as the WUO – described
as a self-styled revolutionary vanguard (Kroes 1974, 87) – who spoke of the ‘revolutionary
youth movement’ ‘requiring a cadre organization … toward the creation of a unified revolu-
tionary party’ (Ashley et al. 1970, 88–9 [emphasis added]). This form of centralisation and

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 Cells, Communiqués and Monikers

professionalisation aimed at militants’ full immersion which separated the activist from the
militant, and the revolutionary from the guerrilla.
This facilitated organising of the masses via an intentionally constructed minority is an
essential difference between the Leninist-styled fighting organisations of the 1960s–70s and
the insurrectionary networks of today. Lenin assumed that the suffering proletariat already
possessed a readiness to revolt and that the role of the vanguard was not to incite, but to or-
ganise these masses for revolution. Therefore, under Lenin’s logic, all of the proletariat were
potential ‘full-timers’ but only the vanguard had reached the required level of consciousness
to become mobilised. This is different from the insurrectionary understanding, which posits
that the masses do not possess a pre-eminent analysis of alienation and domination and that
it is the role of the underground to display the possibility for revolution through political vi-
olence. While Lenin presumed that those under the yoke of capitalism would be radicalised
by their position, the insurrectionaries argue that systems of control and coercion obscure
this oppression and disincentivise the oppressed to organise and strike.
The urban–rural divide further exaggerates this binary – fully immersed militant versus
part-time activists – as difficulties arise when urban-based movements attempt to build,
maintain and conceal large memberships, a task more suited to rural organisations. One
member of the Italian Red Brigades described this twenty-four-hour guerrilla immersion
as ‘a hidden life at all times’… [an] ‘all-absorbing and highly demanding’ (Orsini 2011, 48).
Within this strategic organisation, some movements stratified their combatants (Wolf 1981,
21) into ‘regulars’ – full-time militants who lived underground – and ‘irregulars’ (Meade
1990, 51; Orsini 2011, 50–51), who appeared to live normal lives in the world of legality.
Furthermore, for professionalised units like the RB, militants existed apart from the larger
community, their family and other unaffiliated individuals. The brigadists were to live sep-
arate from their immediate family, children and those not in the fight in an ultimate act of
isolationist self-­denial that even restricted sexual contact (Orsini 2011, 51) to the coordina-
tion by the Brigade’s technocrats. In a study on radicalisation authored by the Asymmetric
Warfare Group of the US Army (2010, 49), the authors report that ‘anarchy ideologues’
(i.e. anarchist-­identifying revolutionary activists) are specifically prone to severe breaks with
pre-existing social networks after dedicating themselves to a lifestyle of revolt, noting that
this shift ‘represents a complete break with society, requiring an underground existence’.
For the vanguardist, highly organised networks of armed cadres, one’s desires were subor-
dinated to the struggle, their joy traded for duty and sacrifice. For those embedded in profes-
sionalised vanguardist models, this self-denial is all-encompassing, intentionally segregating
and non-negotiable. One Italian fascist militant, the ‘political and military mind of the
Movimento Politico Ordine Nuovo (MPON)’ (Orsini 2011, 263) spoke of this experience as
a professional, underground utiliser of revolutionary violence:

You have to break contact with all those you had left behind: friends, family, boyfriend
or girlfriend….[emotional ties] had to be eliminated or removed. Because when you’re
being hunted, when you live underground, you can’t allow them. You can’t allow your-
self anything.
(Orsini 2011, 264)

This modus operandi of self-denial, martyrdom and a sense of obligatory duty is abandoned
in the neo-insurrectionary model. Additionally, at the level of organisation, contemporary
attackers abandon the two-tiered taxonomy – separating ‘full time militants’, also known as

335
 Michael Loadenthal

‘professional revolutionaries’, from those who lived ‘normal lives’. As imprisoned members of
the CCF explained in their self-reflective publication, ‘The Sun Still Rises’:

The CCF, instead, proposes informal organization of tightly-knit groups of friends in

which specialization is levelled by generalization of skills and knowledge, and in which
daily life and intimate relationships are not separated from the practice of revolt. This is
the revolutionary as diffuse guerrilla and the guerrilla as insurrectionist.
(Tsakalos et al. 2012, 2)

This logic is repeated by the authors of The Coming Insurrection who speak of ‘what is political
in friendship’, rejecting the ‘neutral idea of friendship understood as a pure affection with
no consequences’ (TIC 2007, 98). Here, the social ties of friendship are a powerful unifying
force; more powerful than the membership lists and donor records of the NGO or grass-
roots movement.
The modern insurrectionary movement can be thought of as engaging in an anti-­
authoritarian form of warfare. The goal of these neo-guerrillas is not to lead the masses or
direct the antistate war through a vanguard, but those burning banks and slashing tyres
function with the hopes that their ‘propaganda of the deed’ will demonstrate not only an
anarcho-praxis, but also the feasibility of attacking an enemy as stoic and rigid as the modern
neo-liberal state. This strategy exposes an often-critiqued aspect of insurrectionary theory
typically represented as ‘steps towards the revolution’, and mockingly expressed in a variety
of forms such as:

1 Break a window, light a fire, detonate a bomb….

2 Write a communiqué
3 Circulate your communiqué
4 ?????? [insert unknown series of steps here]
5 Live the insurrection!5

This recurring critique, delivered in the form of a snarky message board comment or out-
right joke, is formulaic: it contains an element of insurrectionary tactics (e.g. break a window,
light a fire, glue a lock), the production of a communiqué, and ends in insurrection. Quite
obviously, this approach skips over the quite necessary period where isolated attack leads to a
system-level response and the victory against the state. This is an often-maligned breakdown
in the insurrectionary strategy which stands in stark contrast to Marxist (e.g.  Guevarian,
Debrayian) programmes which are predictive in their understandings of the steps from at-
tack to revolution. Instead of offering such a strategy, insurrectionary theory coalesces more
closely around a shared set of tactics. In their discussion of militant social movements, the
anonymous authors of CrimethInc. write ‘different formats for confrontation [i.e. tactics]
encode different power relations and forms of social change within them’ (CrimethInc.
Ex-Workers’ Collective 2014). This is precisely why insurrectionists base their tactical array
around their shared organisational ethics, most notably informality, spontaneity and direct
(non-mediated) interactions with power. Therefore, one can understand the insurrectionary
approach as a collection of tactics more than a central strategy; yet, all is informed by a jointly
constituted and globally shared set of ethics.
Thus while insurrectionary action can be seen as the production of a focal point for
antisocial, antistate and anticapitalist resistance, it rejects the centrism, hierarchy and
­leadership-reliance embedded in Guevarist methods. It also abandons artificial separation

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 Cells, Communiqués and Monikers

between an underground and above-ground life and the self-sacrificial, militarised ethos
of duty and ‘giving one’s self ’ to the revolution, in favour of a struggle grounded in the
joy of an antisocial, confrontational attacker. An imprisoned member of the CCF writes,

The urban guerrilla of another time was one of hierarchy, martyrdom, and leninism.
It claimed to be the vanguard of the coming revolution, while always maintaining a
patronizing view toward others which inevitably led toward fantasies of centralized
power. The new guerrilla avoids these pitfalls…[for] the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire,
self sacrifice is rejected, along with orthodoxy and hierarchy in all its forms…What we
see is the implementation of insurrectionary anarchist methodology within the context
of guerrilla warfare. While criticisms of armed struggle, militarism, and guerrilla war-
fare are central aspects of insurrectionary anarchist critique, these have thus far been
a response to the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla warfare of the 60’s and 70’s, with its au-
thoritarian communist rhetoric and joyless, sacrificial practices. What shows its masked
face now is something more horrible: an insurrectionist guerrilla with contempt for all
leaders and vanguards, whose revolt is as inextricably linked with the joy of life as it is
with the urgency of our situation.
(Tsakalos et al. 2012, 2)

Here, we see that members identifying with the CCF moniker align themselves squarely
with this new insurrectionary tendency, one that rejects the ‘authoritarian communist [and]
joyless sacrificial practices’ of bygone urban guerrillas. This is not to say that the model
ignores the risk of capture, imprisonment and death faced by those acting against the state.
While this cannot be denied when clandestine actors are building explosive devices and con-
fronting police, the aim is to avoid sacrificial acts that may lead to capture and instead focus
on damaging the target while avoiding the repression of the state. For the insurrectionists,
there is no utility in martyrdom, as it removes an individual from the arena of struggle.

Conclusion
The insurrectionary cell, as both a structural and strategic formation of clandestine political
networks, is both novel and aged. It should be understood as emanating from centuries of
militant political contestation on the part of anarchists advocating propaganda of the deed and
has taken a remarkably modern formulation with the popularisation of digital communities.
For moniker-based networks such as the FAI, their international campaign of attack against
the state and capital would not have been possible before the age of the Internet. This is not to
say that insurrectionary politics and underground networks could not exist – as they clearly
could and have – but rather that the methods the FAI has grown into are decidedly modern.
The campaign of the Phoenix Project provides insight into a series of strikes, coordinated
through these digital networks, and linked through a shared moniker. In this case, an in-
surrectionary cell in Greece attacked the car of a prison director, followed by another attack
in Greece two weeks later. In this second attack, the car of a prison guard was attacked.
Following the second attack, it took less than four days for the next strike, proving for the
FAI the viability of their campaign. On 26 June 2013, only nineteen days after the campaign
was announced, allies of the Grecian cell in Indonesia set fire to a Western hotel chain, and
claimed the arson in the name of those who stuck against the prison officials. At least thirteen
additional attacks, all claimed by self-described cells of the FAI, and all in the name of the
Phoenix, followed the Indonesian arson targeting the Sheraton. This series of sixteen attacks

337
 Michael Loadenthal

demonstrates the modern insurrectionary praxis and approach: carry out your own attacks
through clandestine, self-organised, informal cells, and follow this up with a communiqué,
distributed online, which explains your reasoning. Within this communiqué, urge readers to
continue the struggle by attacking as well. The wider ethics of informality, illegality, volun-
tary association, and a rejection of social movements and institutionalised politics in favour
of unmediated attacks, distinguishes insurrectionary cell networks from all other forms of
contentious politics and clandestine networks. They are decentralised, non-hierarchical and
do not require outside support from a state sponsor or quasi-state bureaucracy.
Finally, it is important to remember the function – broadly speaking – of political vi-
olence. Political violence, including terrorism, militant protest, industrial sabotage, armed
expropriations, etc., all belong to a continuum of methods of social change. At one end are
passive methods such as withdrawing one’s consent, followed by illegal pacifist means such as
nonviolent civil disobedience. Towards the middle are traditional methods of change such as
electoral politics, sanctioned demonstrations and letter writing which ultimately rely on the
institutionalised violence of the state. Finally, on the end opposite pacifist means are those
methods of sociopolitical contestation described as militant or terroristic. These include the
use of arson, explosives and other means to harm one’s opponent, create spectacle and bring
attention to one’s critique and analysis. In this manner, all political violence – but especially
that which creates fantastical images and interruptions to the daily functioning of society – is
a form of politics. As philosophers debate whether warfare is a form of politics, or politics is a
form of war, insurrectionary cells continue to take matters into their own hands and engage
in direct combat with the state regardless of the odds. Therefore, the practical function of in-
surrectionary networks must be understood to play two distinct roles: the first to financially,
politically and spiritually disrupt, oppose and damage the forces of the state, capitalism, etc.,
and the second, to force the state and the wider populace to interrupt their lives for a mo-
ment, and consider the revolutionary analysis offered by their fiery communiqués.

Notes
1 The use of ‘kneecapping’ (gambizzazioni in Italian) was common among the RB active in ­1970–80s
Italy.
2 The ‘Olga’ namesake is a tribute to Olga Ikonomidou, an imprisoned member of the CCF net-
work in Greece.
3 Gabriel Pombo Da Silva is an anarchist militant who was involved in revolutionary bank expro-
priations since age fifteen. After being imprisoned in Spain, he escaped in 2004. While trying to
flee to Germany, he was discovered at a border crossing and exchanged fire with security forces.
No one was injured in the shooting but Da Silva was arrested and convicted of attempted murder
and kidnapping. He is currently serving thirteen years.
4 Marco Camenisch is an anarchist militant currently imprisoned for murder. Camenisch was in-
volved in radical environmental movements prior to his arrest and had served time for industrial
sabotage and other actions targeting power stations. After being arrested in 1980 for sabotaging a
Swiss power station, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. In 1981, he escaped along with five
other prisoners. During the escape, a prison guard was shot and killed and a second injured. From
1981 to 1991, Camenisch went underground, and on 5 November 1991, Italian security forces ar-
rested him. Upon capture, Camenisch opened fire wounding one soldier, and was shot and injured
in the process. In 1992, he was sentenced to twelve years for the shooting and the sabotage, serving
nine years in solitary confinement. In 2002, he was extradited to Switzerland, and in 2004, sen-
tenced to seventeen years in prison for the alleged killing of a Swiss border guard in 1989.
5 A nod to this style of prescriptive strategy can be seen in the Invisible Committee’s recommenda-
tions for strategy as outlined in their four stages: ‘Get going!’, ‘Find each other’, ‘Get organized’
and ‘Insurrection’ corresponding to Chapters 10, 11, 12, and 13, respectively.

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 Cells, Communiqués and Monikers

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 3.8
RADICAL MEDIA
Sandra Jeppesen

Introduction
Radical media are central to the promotion of radical political ideas and actions, including
developing and sharing radical analysis and discourses including the representation of mar-
ginalised or silenced voices, on the one hand, and by mobilising and reporting on conten-
tious social protests and other direct actions, on the other. Radical media activists are thus
key to the propagation of radical social movements, engaging in media and other activism
from positions rooted within movements with whom they share social habitus, alternative
values, organising practices and political vision. While some scholars suggest that radical
media is a niche form of media with a small audience-reach limited to those already active
in radical social movements, Jeppesen et al. (2014) have found that radical alternative media
have several different objectives, the first two related to propagating ideas, and the second
two related to mobilising actions.

Discourses
First, radical media makers often create small-scale or Do It Yourself (DIY) media projects
such as zines or flyers which are shared among small groups primarily with the objective to
create safe(r) spaces, scenes and communities of practices. Second, in creating community
media with an anchor point, a media project can generate radical political analysis to influ-
ence or radicalise a broader related movement, e.g. an anarchist-feminist collective whose
radio programme influences the mainstream feminist movement.

Actions
Third, protest media that are oriented towards mobilising the public to participate in mass
movements or mobilisations can use the snowball effect, producing and sharing media vi-
rally to reach a wide audience. Fourth, global media strategies are used in multi-linguistic or
visual forms that can support the development of international solidarity movements. This
range of strategies, from small and local to large and global, demonstrates how radical media
are not one thing, but rather radical media practices develop out of and respond to everyday
needs within radical political social movements.

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 Sandra Jeppesen

Given these four objectives, Chris Atton (2002) has found alternative media focus on two
specific dimensions of media production: product and process. The product is the media
output or content, from print and radio to video and online media, whereas the process is the
way in which media producers organise themselves and structure their projects. Both prod-
uct and process or structure challenge hegemonic or dominant media constructs and power.

Product
Content in radical media products is oriented towards radical social transformation, on
­multiple issues from austerity and capitalism to gender, sexuality, feminism, antiracism, co-
lonialism, disability, LGBTQ+ liberation, climate justice, border issues, police brutality and
more, including ways in which many of these will play a role in any given issue. The content
is distinct from alt-right news in that it is oriented towards social justice, and from fake news
in that it is oriented towards the truth.

Process
The process is the way media production projects are organised, how decisions are made
and ways in which alternative values are put into practice. There is a strong influence of
social anarchism and autonomous Marxism in radical media, shaping media practices that
include horizontal structures, power-sharing, task rotation, skill sharing, mentorship, anti-­
oppression practices and consensus decision-making. This contributes to social justice through
the empowerment of participation in at least two ways: first, by developing a voice for the
voiceless, and second, through horizontal organisational and ownership practices, establishing
­counter-power processes crucial to radical politics, which are discussed elsewhere in this book.
Controlling the means of production of representation (process) and the representations
themselves (products), radical media shifts the sphere of the possible. Producing new and
innovative visual, textual, aural and digital discourses to challenge dominant regimes of
truth, radical media activists are simultaneously developing alternative value-based equitable
relationships in practice. Moreover, directly challenging structures of domination, they cre-
ate alternatively and sometimes experimentally structured media and arts production groups,
networks, formats, platforms, work methods, outputs and institutions. Furthermore, in ad-
vocating for revolutionary social transformation with a counter-power strategy, media activ-
ists express opposition to power structures but they also build media networks that challenge
‘the very survival of the power structure’ (Downing, 2001, xi). This is key to understanding
the revolutionary aims of radical media – it is not directed towards creating new content or
democratising media through increased participation, which are liberal political goals, but
towards challenging the very survival of dominant media structures, and thereby reclaiming
media power.
Given this basic understanding of the objectives of radical media, it is important to un-
derstand four key dimensions of contemporary radical social movement media repertoires
of communication: being rooted within radical social movements that attack the dominant
power structures in society; organising in experimental anticapitalist forms that challenge
dominant media structures; developing radically transformative discursive and representa-
tional forms; and engaging in translocal and transmedia mobilisation networks to reclaim
digital media power.
This chapter maps out five key media genres – print, audio, image, video and online –
considering how they are reconceived by radical media practitioners. It critically analyses

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Table 3.8.1  Key analytical dimensions of radical media by genre

Social movements Representations Structures Digital networks

Print Autonomous Radical discursive Anticapitalist Open editorial

journalism formations editorial collectives platforms
Audio Community radio Voices of ‘the voiceless’ Pirate radio hordes Radical podcasts
mobilisations
Image Activist art, posters Radical image formations, Radical community Culture jamming,
comix art spaces memes
Video Livestreaming Radical activist Video activist Sousveillance
protest documentaries collectives
Online Connective action Transmedia mobilisations Translocal Technopolitics
mobilisations

Source: Table devised and complied by the author.

how each radical media genre engages the four key dimensions outlined earlier: social move-
ment participation, anticapitalist organisational forms, transformative discursive representa-
tions and reclaiming digital networks (see Table 3.8.1). It then considers emergent debates,
focusing on unresolved challenges, contradictions and tensions.

Print

Autonomous Journalism
Radical movements have long published autonomous journalism in independent news-
papers, pamphlets and flyers, to develop and disseminate analysis around specific issues,
mobilise and cover activist campaigns and protests, and otherwise participate in social
movements. Autonomous journalists report on and support social movements, playing the
role of activist and journalist simultaneously. They write articles providing critical analysis
of movement issues, produce media content to support mobilisations and engage in di-
rect actions as well as direct-action reporting from the perspective of protesters. Globally,
there are many independent radical newspapers and magazines that might be considered
autonomous journalism. The Bristol Cable in Bristol, UK is an autonomous newspaper that
reports on local community issues, focusing on housing, racism, austerity, poverty and
more. In Canada, Briarpatch is a long-running radical political magazine that reports from
a radical left perspective with an emphasis on collective organising. Indigenous Rising Me-
dia is an anticolonial news site that reports on social movement actions of the Indigenous
Environmental Network, focusing on Indigenous mobilisation against resource extraction
on treaty lands, demonstrating links between climate justice, colonisation and land rights.1
Self-reporting allows activists to tell the truth about their movements and communities
from an insider perspective. In intentionally reporting from an overt subject position, they
disrupt the claim that journalism is objective, challenging the closed, top-down power
structures of dominant or mainstream media systems. There are also important models of
solidarity journalism based on the principle of foregrounding the voices of those affected,
with allies in positions of relative privilege making space for those in marginalised or si-
lenced communities to produce media ( Jeppesen, 2016), and respecting the leadership of
local communities (Sunkel & Girvan, 1973).

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 Sandra Jeppesen

Multi-issue Radical Discursive Formations

Reporting from within radical social movements and marginalised communities, media
activists generate new discursive formations through developing alternative media frames,
or ways of thinking about and discussing issues. Mainstream media perpetuates a discur-
sive regime of truth, repeating and entrenching the dominant or accepted way of think-
ing about issues, whereas radical media challenges these regimes of truth by revealing
their assumptions, and providing a range of alternative perspectives from the viewpoint
of people with different experiences and social locations within society that often are not
interviewed or do not have access to representation in mainstream media. This includes
reporting on multiple issues, and revealing ways in which they are connected and related
to each other, helping to develop common ground among many groups who can act in
solidarity once they see how their issues and therefore their achievement of liberation are
linked. For example, Brand is an anarchist magazine produced in Stockholm, Sweden,
since 1898 on radical political movements covering many different issues related to social
class, oppression and liberation, promoting pacifism, reproductive rights and free love in a
historical context, and more recently in 2000 writing about riots and other direct actions.
Covering each of the issues mentioned here has led to writers from Brand magazine being
charged with criminal offenses. This criminalisation of autonomous journalists reveals
how crucial the construction of antiauthoritarian discourses is in challenging unjust laws
and illegitimate power.

Intersectional Anticapitalist Editorial Collectives

Radical media reject the editorial structures typically found in journalism or news organ-
isations, with a top-down hierarchical structure. Mainstream media ownership models are
shaped by corporate convergence and vertical integration, meaning that a few corporations
control various forms of media – from telecommunications, cell phones, satellites and ISPs
to newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and online platforms. Not only does this limit
the viewing choices and thus global democratic debate on issues, it is also organised in top-
down structures that will influence media content. Counter to this, radical media organise
in often much smaller local editorial collectives where decision-making is shared among
all members, writing is done collaboratively engaging strategies such as peer skill sharing
and mentorship for new writers, and administrative tasks may be rotated or shared among
participants. For example, zines, or small self-produced magazines, were printed and widely
distributed, along with their music, by the Riot Grrrl movement from the 1990s. These
zines were created by small groups of Riot Grrrls working together on designing, writing,
copying and distributing them. Riot Grrrls were explicitly anticapitalist and feminist in
their content and organisational styles. However, these kinds of small-scale productions
can often not offer any pay for the labour required to produce them, as they reject capitalist
advertising or profit motives. In Barcelona, XNet addresses the unpaid labour challenge by
generating funds to liberate media activists by providing them with a full year of sustain-
able income. Not constrained by the capitalist labour market, the ‘liberated’ media activist
is then free to support radical media and social movement projects. Horizontal organising
structures can challenge structures of oppression and power in mainstream media; however,
they have also been critiqued for not offering enough checks and balances against informal
power hierarchies, or providing enough structure for accountability and responsibility to
be transparent.

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Open Editorial Platforms

While most online mainstream news platforms offer some form of audience interactivity
such as commenting, reposting or sharing content previously produced by paid professional
journalists, autonomous journalism platforms operate somewhat differently. Content is pro-
duced voluntarily by unpaid unprofessional or semi-professional writers and journalists who
may not know each other or the people maintaining the platform, but who nonetheless
share ­political and social values as well as radical social movement objectives. Platforms are
designed according to open editorial principles, so that anyone can post an article that they
have written that they feel is appropriate to the platform. Often, there is no moderator, or
only modest moderation to remove hate speech. One of the earliest such open editorial
platforms that has been well documented is Indymedia, which came into existence in late
1999 to support and report on the Seattle anti-WTO activist mobilisations which included
­counter-summits, trainings and multi-day street protests. Indymedia was one of the first
websites to provide live updates from protesters in the streets, and as such they were able to
contradict and challenge the mainstream regime of truth regarding the mobilisations, which
was largely sensationalist and inaccurate. Indymedia is still in existence in some global lo-
cations, such as Indymedia Athens which has been reporting on the Indignados of Greece
movement from an anarchist perspective. But in other locations, it has fallen dormant, or
been modified to take other shapes, such as the Media Co-op in Canada which is a multi-­
stakeholder ­cooperative originally with four chapters across Canada, and a n ­ ational editorial
collective that produces and distributes the Dominion magazine as well. Open ­editorial plat-
forms struggle with issues such as hostile alt-right articles and trolling, p­ articularly feminist
news being trolled by aggressively misogynist comments, and anticolonial ­a ntiracist news
trolled by racist anti-Indigenous comments. The tension remains unresolved in terms of how
to create an open editorial policy without censorship, and how to deal with hateful trolling
which is a pressing question for this genre of radical media.

Audio

Community Radio Mobilisations

Radio broadcasts are considered easier to produce than either print media, which requires
writing and literacy skills, or video, which requires expensive equipment and editing skills.
Non-corporate, not-for-profit radio stations, including community and campus radio, have
historically been used by communities to further local aims, mobilise political actions and
build community. For Clemencia Rodriquez (2001), access for community members to pro-
duce citizens’ media allows them to engage in civic action, challenging neocolonial capitalist
power structures. Building on her work, Bailey, Cammaerts and Carpentier (2007) propose
four key dimensions to radical community media: they serve a community, function as an
alternative to mainstream media, forge links with civil society and civic action from grass-
roots movements to policy change, and work as a partially visible rhizome. For example,
in Colombia, community radio has been used to develop political consciousness, mobilis-
ing people to take action in their communities, engage in networking opportunities with
neighbours through in-person interactions at the radio station, revealing the radical political
functions of community radio beyond broadcasting (Murillo, 2003). Similarly, Radio Alice,
which operated in Bologna in fascist Italy in the 1970s, brought people into the nearby ra-
dio station to broadcast public debates and promote civic action contesting fascism in Italy.

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‘Radio Alice actively challenged listener passivity and encouraged its audience members to
become engaged in direct speech on the airwaves through relaying live call-ins aimed at un-
leashing strategic reports from the barricades, along with the unfiltered rage of protesters in
the streets and the poetic laughter of the insurgent imagination in flight’ (Langlois, Sakolsky
& van der Zon, 2010, 6). In this sense, community radio functions as a public square to
broadcast and amplify community conversations geared towards organising direct action and
broadcasting from the scene of that action, directly challenging both media and state power.
Due to transgressive content, community radio often faces repression by the state. Radio
Alice, for example, was shut down and many activists arrested, charged with sedition (6).

Voice of the Voiceless

In terms of its function in generating transformative discursive representations, community,
campus and other types of non-profit radio stations serve as the ‘voice of the voiceless’. Com-
munities that have been silenced, misrepresented, stereotyped or otherwise rendered voiceless
by the regime of truth in a city, town or region can use broadcast radio stations to foster local
voices, develop local skills in radio programming and production, and nurture leadership ca-
pacities. Speaking their own truth, communities create alternative discourses through conver-
sations that they have together, and radio serves to amplify those conversations. For example,
Radio Bubble, in Athens, Greece, broadcasting from its own café, served as a key organising
hub during the 2011 anti-austerity protests, challenging the dominant discourse of the main-
stream media about the inevitability of financial bailouts, and providing alternative economic
discourses such as cooperative social economies, and mobilising people to take action against
austerity measures (radiobubble.gr). While in Brazil, the MST or landless rural workers move-
ment, active since the 1970s, has used local radio stations broadcasting from schools, their
movement has also built to transmit important information not just about the movement to
build consciousness around land use issues, but also to provide information regarding local
seed distribution, road closures and other infrastructural or logistical information pertinent
to the everyday life of their communities (Sartoretto). As Arundhati Roy indicates in the epi-
graph to this chapter, voicelessness is not natural or inevitable, but political and intentional on
the side of the powerful who attempt to control discourse. Non-profit radio provides a space
where people can quite literally speak together, combing to voice on the radio about what is
happening in their communities, and develop the capacities to make change.

Pirate Radio
Pirate radio famously made an appearance in the cult classic, American Graffiti, where a DJ
known as Wolfman Jack broadcasts music and aphorisms illegally from an unknown lo-
cation. Where broadcast licences are not available, controlled by the state or prohibitively
expensive, people have turned to pirate radio, broadcasting using home-made transmitters
that can fit into a small tin, and thus can easily be transported to protests, located in a mov-
ing vehicle such as a car or bike, or hidden and moved to evade authorities. Pirate radio
is an ‘unlicensed form of radio broadcasting that relies on the airwaves for transmission’
(Langlois, Sakolsky & van der Zon, 2010, 3) that embraces ‘the radical imagination and the
practice of direct action’ (4), evading regulation, administration and sanctions by providing
an entirely autonomous alternative. Its small size, easy construction and portability make it
particularly appealing to activists wanting to set up temporary communications’ alternatives.
Pirate radio was particularly prevalent in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, where activists set

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up longer-term offshore radio stations on boats as an underground method of transmission,

with programming ranging from radical political movement discourses to transgressive mu-
sic genres. In the alterglobalisation movement in the 1990s and early 2000s, we saw evidence
of ‘the nomadic radio pirate strategically broadcasting the location and movements of the
police to global justice activists during the heat of confrontation in the streets [that] engages
in direct action by occupying the airwaves’ (Langlois, Sakolsky & van der Zon, 2010, 4).
While this tactic is now also used by livestreaming protest, discussed below, pirate radio has
the advantage of still being viable if the state blocks or throttles the Internet during protests.

Podcasts
Today podcasts, or radio-like audio programmes streamed over the Internet, have emerged
as a hybrid media form where people can easily record and upload interviews or other types
of programming for a global audience. A noted podcast engaged in decolonising media on
the east coast of Turtle Island (Canada) is Pjilasi Mi’kma’ki or Welcome to Mi’kma’ki, a
bilingual Mi’kmaq and English podcast produced by a Mi’kmaq woman among communi-
ties engaged in anti-fracking activism in Elsipogtog.2 The podcast covers issues such as the
Sixties Scoop (the removal by the Canadian government of thousands of Indigenous chil-
dren from their homes in the 1960s to be placed and raised in the homes of white people),
title and treaty rights, the art and cultural relevance of baskets, and Indigenous governance
models. By self-producing this knowledge from a position rooted within the community,
deeper knowledge can be produced and shared with a broader audience. The use of the
Mi’kmaq language develops trust and comfort levels among the interviewees, and recentres
Indigenous experiences and voices largely absent in mainstream media. The Sixties Scoop
podcast, for example, was picked up by various regional and national media, and the issue
has now gained traction in the public sphere. As part of the radical media repertoire of com-
munication, this particular podcast is rooted within social movement organising, exploring
cutting-edge forms through its integral use of two languages and original soundscapes.
Moreover, it generates new discursive and cognitive frames for understanding the deeply
damaging impact of colonisation on children removed from their homes, thereby furthering
anticolonial movements and decolonising media. Like pirate radio, podcasts operate as tem-
porary autonomous media zones, carving out their own discursive political spaces outside
the regulatory frameworks of TV and radio broadcast, transgressing national borders, and
challenging media dominance by commercial radio.

Image

Activist art Posters

Posters put up in public spaces are used to promote radical ideas, mobilise social movement
actions and as an outlet for creative expression. Challenging the capitalist logic of the art
world and the utilitarian logic of some political organising, artist collectives and cooperatives
produces art with social messages, as well as organising their artistic production in more
liberatory, horizontal forms. Image-based systems produced by activists challenge the domi-
nant image systems of mainstream media, with respect to social class, race, gender, sexuality,
beauty myths and more. They are also used to both inform and mobilise activists to partic-
ipate in political protests or events such as anarchist bookfairs. While this traditional mode
of mobilisation often serves as the public face and aesthetic of social movements, it has not

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always been respected by radical activists and non-political artists alike. Activists often ques-
tion the importance of art, labelling it an elite capitalist pursuit, while artists often critique
political art for being too dogmatic. As Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland, members of the
Just Seeds Artists’ Cooperative, explain, ‘as anarchists, we have seen our politics denigrated
by other artists; as artists, we have had our cultural production attacked as frivolous by ac-
tivists’ (2007, 3).3 Just Seeds has produced a series of posters, for example, called ‘Celebrating
People’s History’ that depicts social movement struggles from the past and present. These
posters produce alternative histories or histories from below through images that challenge
dominant discourses on political issues.

Comic Journalism
Comic journalism is an art form frequently used by media activists to mobilise transforma-
tive discursive visual and textual representations. It subverts the expectations of comics by
creating political and historical content, while also subverting the expectation that politics
should be represented in formal texts. Joe Sacco, who first came to public attention with his
critically acclaimed political graphic novel, Palestine (1997), has pioneered the form, building
on the work of the underground comics scene (Worden, 2015). Culture jamming and polit-
ical comic artists transform radical discourses into visual representations that combine print
images with text to challenge hegemonic discourses and framing of issues. The comics collec-
tive, Dotterbolaget, is a radical queer transfeminist network of comic and graphic novel artists
in Sweden (Dotterbolaget n.d.) that supports opportunities for their members to engage in
creative cultural labour. A Dotterbolaget member, an indigenous woman from Chile living
in Sweden, has engaged with members of the local immigrant community in her town to
generate testimonials of their experiences around sexual violence, which were then sketched
out as a comic with three versions of text in English, Swedish and Spanish. This comic
challenges the silence, stigma, self-blame and victim blaming in experiences of sexual abuse,
while integrating images and text, making it easy to read across cultures and literacy levels.
Moreover, it engages new cognitive and discursive practices rooted in social movements en-
gaged in intersectional politics considering sexual violence and sex work as often-racialised
gender oppression in the context of social class, race, immigration and colonial relations.

Arts Collectives and Spaces

Radical political artists tend to organise themselves into collectives and arts spaces that reject
not just the commercial imperative of artistic production but also the enforced isolation, and
the concept of the lone genius artist, embracing instead practices of collaboration and re-
source sharing. In the US, for example, there is ‘a growing community of radical artists [that
includes] The Drawing Resistance traveling art show, the Beehive Collective poster project,
the Celebrate People’s History poster project and the Street Art Workers’ (Stern 2007, 105).
Many articulate the tension of wanting to make art against capitalism and having to survive
in a capitalist economy. Courtney Daily, for example, would prefer to ‘give things away or
trade’ (as cited in Stern, 2007, 106); Swoon says, ‘I hate the idea of what I am making being
narrowed down to its value as an object for investment or sale’ (as cited in Stern, 2007, 106);
Josh MacPhee argues that ‘art should be affordable to people that are interested in it’ (as
cited in Stern, 2007, 106); and Chris Stain says that ‘art becomes soulless and loses its value
when produced for commercial purposes’ (as cited in Stern, 2007, 106). Artist collectives
challenge the individualist ideology of consumer capitalism by working cooperatively to

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produce artwork, sharing resources and eschewing the gallery system of elitist hegemonic
art production and consecration. In Canada, the Ste-Emilie Skillshare is an example of a
community arts space that was opened up by a small collective of antiracist queer and trans
antiauthoritarian activists in Montreal to provide space for antiracist organisers to make art
in support of social movements ( Jeppesen et al., 2016). Serving as both a safe space and a
creative workshop, artist collectives radicalise ownership forms and organisational structures
of studios and the gallery system. Moreover, they attempt to find ways to share their work for
free, through barter and gift economies, or by exhibiting it for free in public spaces.

Culture Jamming and Memes

According to Leah Lievrouw, culture jamming is one of five activist genres covered in her
book, Alternative and Activist New Media (2011). It operates in the social domain of popular
culture, particularly targeting corporate advertising, and takes the form of appropriated im-
ages and text that subvert the designer’s original meaning with the objective of humorous
cultural critique. Mark Dery refers to culture jamming as hoaxes that jam the empire of
signs, and includes ‘media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics’
(1993) in the mix. Guerrilla semiotics is a term first coined by Umberto Eco (1987) to de-
scribe fighting back against dominant culture at the level of decoding signs and signifiers.
Culture jamming has its roots even further back, as Lievrouw argues that ‘what makes cul-
ture jamming distinctive as a genre of alternative/activist new media is that it “mines” main-
stream culture to reveal and criticise its fundamental inequities, hypocrisies, and absurdities,
very much in the tradition of Dada and the Situationists’. Memes are a very specific form of
culture jamming that reference a whole host of cultural signifiers turning them towards a re-
coded message, or what Jonah Peretti calls ‘micromedia’ (2001). While culture jamming has
‘a degree of subversive power’ (Lievrouw, 2011), it is open to reappropriation by mainstream
media, and subject to ‘the fragmentation and rapid turnover of ideas, images, and discourse’
(Lievrouw, 2011). Adbusters magazine, the Billboard Liberation Front and the Surveillance
Camera Players, who culture jammed magazine ads, billboards and surveillance cameras,
respectively, remain classic examples of this form of radical media.

Video

Livestreaming Protest
‘Video is increasingly used to communicate dissent’ (Widgington, 2005, 107). Livestreaming
of protests has become a mainstay in the radical repertoire of communication. Reporting and
providing live commentary, video activists use technologies to document protest from the
street, where the live-streamer is also participating in the protest. The livestream broadcast is
thus not just a media tactic but also a protest tactic – a protest media tactic. Like the Mi’kmaq
podcast, being rooted in the movement fosters authenticity and trust, closing the distance
between the reporter and the reported. Ferguson Black Lives Matter (BLM) livestreamed the
2014 protests against the police shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown by a white
police officer. Livestream activists, such as hip-hop artist and Clemson communications pro-
fessor Chenjerai Kumanyika, participated in the demonstrations, livestreaming footage as
protests unfolded. While livestreaming protest, activists maintain a constant video uplink,
interact with audience members on the livestream channel and post the livestream link on
social media using hybrid media forms to garner a wider audience. Kumanyika’s livestream

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of the 2014 BLM Ferguson protests generated over twenty-thousand views (UMassAmherst,
2015; Kumanyika, 2015, 2016a, 2016b). This is a quintessential example of rooted reporting
from within a social movement. Engaging a team of media activists in multiple locations, it
reconfigures experimental technologies to propagate counter-hegemonic antiracist public
discourses, reframes issues of anti-Black police brutality from the perspective of those di-
rectly affected and recentres marginalised or silenced voices largely absent from mainstream
media. It also encourages viewers to participate in the action, by joining the protest, posting
the link on social media or contributing live comments.

Activist Documentaries
Like livestream footage, activist documentaries provide alternative image-based narratives
on issues that contest the current political and discursive regimes. Documentary has ‘always
claimed a particular place for itself in the process of media citizenship’ (Dovey, 2014), provid-
ing space for civic engagement through the creating of more authentic image systems. Shift-
ing towards the digital media ecology, digital documentaries generate greater participatory
frameworks that ‘constitute dynamic, mobile, generative experiences’ for audience members
as they ‘can be linked to, liked, forward, promoted, posted’ (Dovey, 2014). Moreover, ‘The
online documentary is contingent, mutable, dynamic: its meanings generated through the
user’s interactions with it’ (2014). Our Planet TV, for example, in Tokyo, Japan, has been
producing documentaries since 2001.4 Their mandate is to produce documentaries that dis-
tribute information ‘from the citizen’s own standpoint’ (About Us). They worked with di-
rector Oguma Eiji on the documentary film Tell the Prime Minister (2015) that provided an
inside look at the antinuclear movement after the Fukushima reactor meltdown caused by
the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. This film innovatively integrated crowdsourced
digital footage found online, including footage by videographers from OurPlanetTV, to
create a collaborative grassroots documentary. The post-Fukushima antinuclear movement
included a diverse array of social groups: ‘These included farmers and fisher folk confronting
radioactive contamination, housewives alert to the radioactive contamination of foodstuffs
and the special risk to infants and children, intellectuals critical of nuclear power in an
­earthquake-prone nation, and other social groups’ (Eiji, 2016). The diversity of perspectives
in the crowdsourced-footage documentary benefits from shifts towards participatory, collab-
orative production. Traditional political documentary producers and collaborative crowd-
sourced footage such as Tell the Prime Minister can reframe dominant discursive regimes by
circulating images and voices from global social struggles.

Video Activist Collectives

‘It’s important to note that an activist video is not by definition a documentary film that
tries to capture a slice of reality by following real people through real events’ (Widgington,
2005, 112), as formats, styles, contributors, objectives and organising structures vary greatly.
Many video activist collectives organise themselves horizontally. Integrated into grassroots
non-hierarchical social movements, video activists engage in similar organising strategies
and structures. ‘Video activism reaches beyond video making. It also delves into the pro-
cess of organizing by forming collective structures to assist in the production and distribu-
tion of activist videos’ (Widgington, 2005, 105). At video activist film screenings, such as
those organised by Cinema Politica, ‘the largest volunteer-run, community and campus-based
­documentary-screening network in the world’, the format of the screening challenges the

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film industry’s capitalist logic. Entry is free or by donation; activist groups table outside
the cinema with flyers, posters, zines, books, patches and other media; and participants ap-
pearing in the film may be present at the screening as they themselves are activists there to
discuss how people can support their movement. Video activist collectives thus challenge the
mainstream capitalist logic of the film industry, organising as anticapitalists; producing social
change through more socially just image systems and changing social relationships from the
ground up by bridging the distance between who appears in films, who participates in social
movements and who has access to representation. Closing this gap is a direct challenge to
Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ where images seen on-screen are critically analysed
as distant mind-numbing representations of constructed desires impossible to reach, thus
crushing the viewer’s capacity for desire and even life itself.

Sousveillance
Radical activists have long used photography and video activism to document direct ac-
tions, using footage of arrests to exonerate activists in court. Citizens also use video cameras
to document police violence, starting with the controversial case of Rodney King, a taxi
driver whose beating by four LAPD officers in 1991was filmed by a community member in a
nearby building, forwarded to a news station and shown worldwide. One of the earliest cases
of police sousveillance by bystanders, the video nonetheless was insufficient to convict the of-
ficers. With the advent of ubiquitous cell phone cameras, media activists have been using re-
verse surveillance or sousveillance to hold the police accountable for their actions (Abu-Laban,
2015; Stole, Williams, Mitchell & Pandell, 2016), reversing the act of putting citizens under
surveillance by turning the eye of the camera on the powerful. The police shooting of Alton
Sterling on July 5, 2016 followed by the police shooting of Philando Castile on July 6, 2016
were both livestreamed to social media. The people close to the victims were powerless to
prevent the death, but documented unfolding events, images which generated media power
and mobilised widespread protests (Stole et al., 2016).5 Functioning in the digital domain,
sousveillance reclaims the storytelling function of mass media by distributing a direct account
of events, circumventing not just the editorial gatekeeping and framing function of main-
stream journalism but also bypassing police spokesperson structures that can hide actions be-
hind the blue line, the so-called brotherhood of police unions and internal self-investigation.
Sousveillance has also been used by a group at Goldsmiths University in London, UK to show
wrongdoing by those in positions of power in the case of the ‘left to die’ boat – a refugee
ship in the Mediterranean ‘in which sixty-three migrants lost their lives while drifting for
fourteen days within the NATO maritime surveillance area’ (Forensic Architecture, 2012;
Heller, n.d.). A data justice research team was able to use this surveillance data to implicate
NATO and other ships in the area. ‘The Forensic Oceanography report turned the knowl-
edge generated through surveillance means into evidence of responsibility for the crime of
nonassistance’ (Forensic Architecture, 2012). Forensically analysed state surveillance data
were used to charge the state with wrongdoing in sixty-three refugee deaths.

Online

Connective Action
New affordances of participatory culture in the era of digitisation include affiliation, ex-
pression, collaborative problem-solving and circulations ( Jenkins, 2006). These lend

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themselves as well to social movement mobilisations that can be participated in by millions

of people who do not know each other, have a language in common and will never be at the
same event. Nonetheless, the mobilisation frames and political demands and actions will
be synchronised and coordinated through participatory culture. Bennett and Segerberg
have found that the pre-network-society logic of collective action has been supplanted by
what they call the logic of connection action (2012). Their study of the Indignados or 15M
movement in Spain was based on a rejection of political parties, unions and other powerful
groups, and a turn towards ‘the richly layered digital and interpersonal communication
networks centering around the media hub of Democracia real YA!’ (Bennett & Segerberg,
2012, 741) and the on-the-ground organising of protest camps in the squares, what Paolo
Gerbaudo calls the hybrid strategy of ‘tweets and the streets’ (2012). Eschewing collective
action frames, these new digital protest networks instead provide ‘interactive digital media
and easy-to-personalize action themes’ (742) such as the Indignados or ‘indignant ones’
of the 15M movement, or ‘We are the 99%’ of the Occupy movement. These connective
action frames are then powerfully mobilised through social media distribution, and some
groups in Spain such as XNet were able to both establish an emotional or affective connec-
tion for participants, and to hack the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter to create trending
topics on these two and other social media platforms. Further digital opportunities include
website organisations, event notices, distribution networks and reposted links, among oth-
ers (753). These online strategies provide not just media networks but participatory struc-
tures for communicative action that are peer to peer and face to face rather than top-down
and authoritarian.

Transmedia Mobilisations
The theory and practices of connective action take it as given that activists will have r­ ecourse
to and be engaged in producing a multiplicity of media genres, types and styles. These can
be both analogue and digital, and they can be produced by anyone in the movement, and
shared hand to hand in person or peer to peer online. This multiplicity of m ­ edia, Costanza-
Chock notes, is transmediated: ‘Transmedia mobilization involves engaging the social
base of the movement in participatory media making practices across multiple ­platforms…
­produc[ing] multimodal movement narratives that reach and involve diverse audiences’
(Costanza-Chock, 2011, 113). Transmedia mobilisations create, share, remix, repost, com-
ment and redistribute all genres of media, ‘strengthening movement identity formation
and outcomes’ (113). For example, photocopied anarchafeminist zines may be scanned and
uploaded to an activist blog or website as a downloadable PDF, and then shared via Face-
book, linked via Twitter, images can be shared on Instagram, etc. The Occupy movement
is an excellent example of how this works: ‘Media practices within Occupy are marked by
extensive offline, analogue, poster and print based, and “low-tech” forms of media produc-
tion, in parallel with cutting-edge technology development and use (autonomous wireless
networks, hackathons, creation of new tools and platforms). In many cases, Occupy activists
make and circulate media elements across platforms (including analogue media forms and
channels)’ (Costanza-Chock, 2012, 378). Transmedia mobilisations are a form of intensify-
ing collective intelligence where the discursive shifts and new knowledge produced in total
are much greater than the sum of the parts. As activists at distributed geographical locations
engage with each other’s multimodal media repertoires of contention and communication,
global movements benefit from and contribute to the collective shift in the dominant re-
gime of truth.

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Translocal ‘Banner’ Mobilisations

This global collective shift is also reflected in what Uri Gordon calls ‘banner’ movements, or
movements organising under the same banner (Gordon, 2008, 12–15) where activists ‘may
be on the other side of the world, but they do not require a club, a party, or a shared ideo-
logical frame to make the connection’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, 753). The exchange of
ideas, movement frames, analysis, political demands and action repertoires results in what I
am calling translocal mobilisations, defined as a local social movement action that is part of a
global mobilisation using recognisably similar repertoires of contention and communication,
and shifting them to suit their specific local situation. SlutWalk is an example of a feminist
translocal mobilisation that first emerged in Toronto, Canada in 2011 after a police officer
told women at York University that to combat rape they should ‘avoid dressing like sluts’
(Carr, 2013, 24). Toronto activists organised the first SlutWalk against rape culture – defined
as the predominance of social attitudes and behaviours that normalise sexual harassment,
abuse and rape – with subsequent SlutWalks in over fifty cities. For example, in Delhi,
India, to protest targeted rapes of call centre workers, educated women or women who go
out at night, as well as other issues such as female infanticide and honour killings, activists
organised a SlutWalk campaign demanding that women have the right to safety and respect.
However, protesters were encouraged to dress ‘normally’, dropping the locally controver-
sial emphasis on the so-called slutty clothing (Carr, 2013, 26). Similarly in London, UK, a
group called ‘Hijabs, Hoodies & Hotpants’ joined a breakaway march within the SlutWalk
protest, with participants emphasising that rape ‘has absolutely nothing to do with what
you wear, and loads of women that are covered head to toe get raped’ (Lim & Fanghanel,
2013, 9). The banner of SlutWalk thus spreads as a translocal mobilisation, with critiques of
global rape culture translated into locally powerful messages and movements. Structurally,
nobody owns SlutWalk; rather, many groups have taken up this banner to mobilise on their
own terms in ways that have challenged not just global rape culture but also the dominance
of Western liberal feminism.

Technopolitics
Technopolitics can be defined as ‘a complex blend of technological knowledge and digital
expertise used for radical political purposes with the technology itself seen as a site of con-
testation’ (Treré et al., 2017, 413). Technopolitics emphasises antiauthoritarian or anarchist
horizontal social processes utilised within the free culture, open source and hacker move-
ments, while extending radical activist technological practices engaged by programmers,
social media platform users and other so-called freedom technologists (Postill, 2016). While
some technopolitics activists focus on hacking the Facebook, Twitter and other algorithms,
others emphasise movement ownership of ICTs including social movement websites. The
Spanish Indignados are well known for their technopolitics practices (Toret et al., 2013).
They used collaborative authoring strategies, where online document sharing enabled activ-
ists to co-author documents without being co-present to develop analysis, discuss policy and
more, attributing new knowledge and ideas to the movement, thus challenging the enclosure
of knowledge by sharing it for free and not claiming individual authorship, ownership or
copyright, rejecting the notion of activist superstars or intellectuals and instead focusing on
collective intelligence. Some groups participating in the Indignados also used Titan pads
to take minutes at general assemblies, providing publicly accessible documentation of col-
lective decision-making. Most importantly, activists have long asserted the importance of

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movement ownership of digital media platforms; building on this, technopolitical strategies

emphasise ownership models of websites, blogs and platforms, so their work does not profit
capitalist media conglomerates. ‘By creating independent communication infrastructure,
activists seek to contribute to the efforts of contemporary progressive social movements
to shape the world according to principles of justice, equality, and participation’ (Milan,
2013, 2). This ownership model usually also means that the radical media outlet or platform
will be organised in an intersectional anticapitalist way, against hierarchies, with consensus
decision-making, task rotation, skill and resource sharing, and often a great deal of unpaid
communicative labour, disavowing the economic imperatives of mainstream media.

Conclusion: Radical Media Contradictions and Challenges

The Contradiction of Social Media

The Benefit of Participation

Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and Twitter, facilitate inter-
active media content production and distribution among millions of users worldwide. They
offer a sense of empowerment through participatory interaction, and have been touted as key
to the success of movements such as the Arab Spring being dubbed the ‘Twitter Revolution’
by some. For example, in the Greek Indignados or Aganaktismenoi movement, the original
call to occupy Syntagma Square in Athens went out in a Facebook post, and one of the main
sites of mobilisation and debate was the Facebook page of the Indignados of Syntagma Square.

The Exploitation of Capitalist Ownership

Based on Antonio Negri’s concept of the social factory, media activists understand digi-
tal media ‘as a form of free labour exploited and appropriated for capital accumulation by
corporations, brands and advertising’ (Dovey, 2014). For example, when users post content
on Facebook, they assign its copyright to Facebook, while generating personal metadata
through the social reward system of Likes, which is mined, aggregated and sold to advertisers
(Cohen, 2013). Facebook generated $17.1 billion in ad revenue in 2015, and in 2016, it made
$5.2 billion in the first quarter (Seetharaman, 2016), 80% from mobile ads (Kokalitcheva,
2015).6 Thus, social media activists directly generate profits for social media corporations,
without receiving any payment for this work. Moreover, they are directly supporting a cap-
italist political economy of social media through their movement work against capitalism.
Social media labour has a gendered and racialised dimension, as women, queer and trans, and
people of colour turn increasingly to social media as their voices are excluded from main-
stream media; however, their work risks being appropriated for the profit of white males
( Jeppesen et al., forthcoming).

The Threat of Police Surveillance

Social media users are vulnerable to police surveillance, as dialogues, debates, action plans
and personal locations are publicly available on platforms, and have been scraped by the po-
lice to trace and prosecute activists. ‘The dangers posed by public discussions, organisations,
and networks being observed, monitored, archived and censored by corporate enterprises
have serious implications for cyber activism and for social movement organizing online’

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(Flesher Fominaya & Gillan, 2017, 389). Sometimes, this plays a role in predictive policing,
informing decisions to pre-emptively arrest protest organisers before mass convergences.
Social media data can also be invoked in court cases against activists.

The Success of Algorithm Hacking

Technopolitics activists in the Spanish Indignados discovered how the Facebook and Twitter
algorithms worked, developing and sharing coordinated plans to collectively exploit or ‘ride
the algorithm’, so that their posts and reposts would go viral. These practices were skill-
shared horizontally, making them available beyond the small sphere of tech-savvy activists
(Toret et al., 2013; Treré et al., 2017).

The Challenge of Sustainable Funding

Radicalising Resource Strategies

Rejecting most forms of advertising, radical media projects need to develop resources
through nontraditional sources and practices. Using digital platforms, some turn to crowd-
funding, with specific guidelines to ensure funding is consistent with the political content
of their media. Other media collectives will engage in ethical advertising, partnering with
groups they share values with. Yet, others will engage in resource sharing with like-minded
groups, tabling at each other’s events, sharing offices or mentoring new activists in media
production, horizontal processes and anti-oppression practices.

Disavowing the Economic

Pierre Bourdieu (1993) argues that avant-garde producers will often disavow the economic
imperative of cultural production, preferring to produce for an engaged audience who are
also producers, and eschewing the need to make money from their work. In radical media,
this disavowal has two implications: first, the media producer must have an outside means of
economic support, and second, there are non-capitalist avenues for producing, distributing
and valuing media. Not legitimated by mainstream journalist organisations, radical media is
self-legitimating, dependent on a produser audience, a radical political community that gen-
erates and consumes content.

Paid vs. Unpaid Labour

Disavowing the economic means some radical media projects consider media production a
labour of love, rather than paid employment. Strike, for example, an alternative journalism
project in London, UK that produces both a website and a newspaper, do not pay people for
media work, as they believe people should write for strictly political reasons. Other proj-
ects, such as the Bristol Cable, a radical newspaper produced in Bristol, UK, believe that it
is important to pay alternative journalists; they generate funds through monthly sustainer
donations as small as £1–2 and are continuously increasing the number of hours per week
they can pay employees for. Some projects incorporate anti-oppression or decolonisation
politics into their decisions regarding who should be paid for media labour. For example,
Ricochet Media in Canada, an online news source, ran a successful Indigenous Reporting
crowdfunding campaign as a decolonising media practice.

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The Controversy of Grants

Some alternative media producers can sometimes gain access to public or private grants to
fund their projects on a temporary basis. These grants are controversial for several reasons.
Media activists who are antistate might question the legitimacy of the state as a funder
for their work, as it may limit their capacity to critique the state, or in other words, their
political media content would have to be toned down or they might risk losing their fund-
ing. Media activists with critiques of corporate or private funding schemes might similarly
question the ethics of the funder and their potential demand to censor or control editorial
output or organisational structures. For example, Indymedia was at one point offered a
substantial grant from the Ford Foundation; however, the international network came to
consensus to reject the funding as they had serious critiques of the ethics and politics of
Ford (Lievrouw, 2011). On the other hand, some media projects find that grants are an
excellent way to access short-term funding for specific initiatives, and moreover they may
believe that taxpayers should fund alternative media organisations. For example, Ricochet
Media in Canada was successfully able to access funds from the City of Vancouver to report
on homelessness in the city. Some media activists find grants very difficult to access, and
have experienced racialised and/or gendered biases in the selection process and outcomes
( Jeppesen et al., 2018).

Conclusion
What emerges in this brief sketch of the five genres of radical media and their approaches
to social movements, representations, structures and digital networks is a complex series of
critiques of the current media ecology undertaken through radicalising and perhaps even
revolutionising media production practices. Rather than orienting themselves towards the
economic imperative of mainstream media, radical alternative media do not just focus on
generating alternative representations in content. They contravene and call into question
the so-called objectivity of representation touted by the mainstream, support social move-
ment representations, develop organisational structures focused on self-determination and
horizontalism, and engage in participatory digital networks from grassroots power-sharing
perspectives. The VOID Network in Athens, Greece offers an excellent example of this.
In existence for more than thirty years now, they operate with the objective of generating
excellent cultural outputs that can effectively showcase the talents within their community.
They do this through organising massive cultural events such as hip-hop or techno shows
with thousands of participants, and by developing community-owned and -run infrastruc-
ture, such as squatted theatre spaces, thereby developing social or sharing economies that
are community rather than profit-oriented and generating prefigurative explorations of the
possible or ‘an image from the future’.

Notes
1 http://indigenousrising.org/.
2 https://pjilasimikmaki.wordpress.com/.
3 justseeds.org.
4 ourplanet-tv.org.
5 cinemapolitica.org.
6 statistia.com.

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 3.9
ANARCHIST PUBLISHING
An Interview with Ramsey Kanaan
Ramsey Kanaan

The interviews were conducted on August 23 and September 11 2017.

Part 1. The Publishing Landscape c. 1960 to the Present Day

Ruth Kinna:  How did you get involved in publishing?
Ramsey Kanaan:  In 1979 I discovered punk rock and politics. That politics was anar-
chism. What drew me to punk rock and anarchism was very similar. I had a fairly nu-
anced view of what anarchism was by the time I was 13. I could not only define myself
as an anarchist but I was also aware that I was an anarchist as opposed to a Labour party
supporter or Marxist. I did not come from a political family except that from being a
toddler onwards I grew up in a house full of books and I was always encouraged to read.
While I decided I was an anarchist I hadn’t read anything about anarchism as such, but I
had read a wide variety of literature. By the time I was 13, I had read many of the classics
of literature: Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Camus, Aldous Huxley. I’m assuming it
was my interpretation of that canon of classic literature that gave me my definition of
anarchism and demarcated me from other left and right groups.
Punk rock was the first form of music that I actively listened to. Punk rock was a
weird mix of being mainstream and not mainstream. All the bands were all on Top of the
Pops.1 I grew up watching the mainstream bands: UK Subs, The Damned, The Clash,
Crass. And they were also all on Radio 1,2 albeit John Peel.3 Britain was unusual because
punk rock also had a national music press: New Musical Express, Sounds, Melody Maker.
They covered even the more radical underground stuff.
The important thing is that punk had this whole DIY, so-called do-it-yourself
thing. This is actually an incredible individualist misnomer, because it’s not doing it
yourself, it’s quite the opposite: it’s actually doing it in concert with others. DIY meant
doing one’s own concerts, media, the rebirth of the fanzine, underground literature;
putting out your own records. I was an active part of that very politicised subculture.
Looking back on it, the politics of anarcho-punk, the politics of Crass4 had little to
do with anarchism. It was an angry, very articulate militant liberalism – meaning they
were very big on single issues. Crass pretty much popularised CND but the issues that
they took were middle class issues: they were vegetarian, they were against war. Their

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concept of anarchism was woolly, at best, and their interactions with the anarchists at
that time were minimal and mutually hostile. But Crass were a gateway drug.
My first encounter with anarchist literature was on a CND march in 1979. It was
a copy of Xtra!, a very inflammatory, incendiary publication, explicitly anarchist with
an anarchist politics, what you’d now call a direct action politics. I bought it because
it was sold by punk rockers: whatever the problematic of those subcultures, they were
gateway drugs to me.
Because I was in a band, I was involved in these underground distribution and dis-
semination networks. We produced our own music and more important for me, in terms
of publishing, literature. We were being interviewed by fanzines and very early on I asked
for copies to sell. In 1980–81, I became the guy who walked around with a poly bag sell-
ing fanzines. Purely by chance I was in London at a Crass concert with my poly bag and
I saw some guys from Housmans5 tabling the event. It seemed like a better way of selling
literature than the plastic bag so I began pestering them with my questions. From then on,
I went down to London every school holiday and hung out at Housmans.
Housmans really was, for me personally and for the wider anarchist milieu the linch-
pin. It’s difficult to overstate its importance. It was the hub for the dissemination for radical
literature in the UK. Not only did they have two full floors of radical literature, they were
a major distributor. They imported radical books from the States. They were the distribu-
tor for Black Rose, Black and Red.6 They disseminated Society of the Spectacle in the UK.7
Not only did they have physical space and distribution, they also did publishing. A lot
of it was Tolstoyan, peace activist literature but several of the individuals who worked at
Housmans did publishing of their own. These guys were doing all the things I had ever
fantasised or dreamed about or hadn’t yet imagined was possible. In a very real sense they
mentored me in the ways of distribution and publishing. And they enabled me. The first
things I published as AK Press were co-publications with some of these people.8 If it hadn’t
been for Housmans, AK wouldn’t have existed. Nothing ever happens in a vacuum.
RKi:  Can you tell me about the publishing environment?
RKa:  This was all happening in the early 80s at the tail end of the 60s when there was some-
thing like 52 or 54 self-identified radical bookstores in the UK. These were booksellers
with brick and mortar store fronts. In the early 80s Edinburgh had a generic radical
bookstore called The First of May,9 it had a women’s bookstore and it had an antinuclear
bookstore. This was replicated in major and minor cities all over the UK. Today in the
UK, there are maybe six such self-identified radical bookstores left.
Radical literature, in fact, any and all literature, rises and falls with social move-
ments. If you look at history, the first great outpouring of literature, both radical and
reactionary, was the English Revolution. Not only did the English civil war produce
the Digger tracts and the Leveller tracts it also produced a whole range of writing in
reaction to that, Royalist tracts. The next great outpouring of literature was around the
French Revolution. At that time Tom Paine’s Common Sense sold 100,000 copies in the
UK alone. That’s in a population of about 6 million, the vast majority of whom were
illiterate. That’s astounding. It would be astounding today. Edmund Burke was equally
a bestseller. The same is true in France. The period before and after the Revolution
produced in a massive outpouring of literature. In the late nineteenth/early twentieth
century, [Peter] Kropotkin’s best-selling pamphlet, An Appeal to the Young, also sold over
100,000 copies.
The last great upsurge of social movements was the 60s. The 50-odd UK book-
stores that existed in the 1980s were the end result of the massive social movements of

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the 60s and the 70s. These engendered the radical literature they sold. Before there was
a women’s movement, there wasn’t women’s literature. It didn’t exist conceptually or
physically or any other way. Before there was gay liberation there wasn’t any gay liter-
ature. The concept didn’t exist. Not only did the movements of the 60s and 70s create
all these ideas, they also created a literature and then, typically, they had to create the
means or the wherewithal to disseminate them. There was a growth of independent
publishing and then the growth of independent distributors and the growth of these, in
effect, movement bookstores. Ever since then, social movements and the left in general
have been in decline. During our lifetime, all of our active lives, it has been fighting
these defensive, rearguard actions, trying to hang on to the gains made by these social
movements.
RKi:  How have things changed since you started?
RKa:  Publishing, of any stripe, is never commercially viable. It’s always subsidised by
­someone – universities, the state or wealthy individuals. Newspaper publishers, of the
left or the right, put up their money to publish. Publishing was always known as the
gentlemen’s profession because it was always subsidised by rich gentlemen, irrespective
of their political persuasions. Whatever publishers did – whether it was for the Left Book
Club10 or Paine or whatever – they published for the cause. The cause could be self-­
advancement or social justice but publishing meant that you put up the dough.
There were three stages to the mortal wound to media in general and publishing
in particular. First, in the 80s, most famously with Rupert Murdoch, big corporations
started buying up publishing houses. These venerable institutions used to be indepen-
dent publishing houses and hence used to subsidising it. Partly because of that, partly be-
cause it’s not commercially viable it was always very badly paid – hence a lot of women
were always involved in publishing. So in the 80s when the big bastards moved in and
started buying up everything the first thing they did was send in the accountants and
then they suddenly realised that it’s actually not commercially viable. The concentration
in publishing was typical: mergers and acquisitions are never expansions, they’re always
contractions. People get laid off. The first big blow to publishing in the 80s was that,
with the concentration of many independent publishers to a few big ones, everyone was
laid off, including the authors.
The old logic of publishing was that you were investing in the ideas, you were in-
vesting in an author. You hoped that the authors would break out on their third novel,
hence you’d build their career, their reputation. All that went out the window. If authors
were selling a couple of thousand books a year that’s wasn’t making the publishers any
money, they cancelled the contract and put the books out of print. That was an attack
on the way things had been done previously, for 100 years.
Second, the same thing happened in terms of distribution and dissemination: it was
the rise of the chain bookstores. In America, it was Barnes and Noble and Borders, and
in the UK, it was Waterstones. They not only opened up on the high street opposite the
old bookstores, they also aggressively discounted books and, to get the customer base,
initially did the things that independent bookstores used to do because it was popular
at the time. So in the 80s, Waterstones would be full of Gandhi biographies because
the film had just come out. Stuff that you could previously only get at Housmans or
wherever was suddenly available on your high street. You could get your gay literature,
you could get your feminist literature. You could buy Marge Piercy, Ursula le Guin. Of
course, as soon as all the independents had gone, Waterstones stopped carrying this stuff.
So there was an attack on the supply side.

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Third, publishing is based on the rise and fall of literacy. Understandably, across the
world and throughout history, radical movements have always placed a great prize on
­literacy – translating the Bible from Latin to make it available to everyone or taking control
of the printing press to disseminate propaganda. The reason that radical ideas are fucked
at the moment and the media in general is completely fucked is because the lack of social
movements, the constraints put on these different forms of subsidies and the fall in adult
literacy. This fall is both in real terms, in literal terms, because of education, teaching and
so forth (the average person that goes to prison has the reading age of an eight year old), and
also in behavioural terms. The fact is that people no longer read.
The idea that Amazon killed the book trade is not true. The rise of the Internet was
the final nail, though it was already walking wounded by then. The average age of people
consuming media keeps rising. If you were in America 10–15 years ago the average age of
someone who listened to the radio, read a book, subscribed to a magazine, was fifty-five.
That’s the average age. The typical age is actually much higher. The problem is not just
that people are not reading anymore, but they’re not listening either – people don’t listen
to music ­anymore. In the year 2000 before downloading became ubiquitous, when CDs
were still king and hundreds of millions of CDs were sold every year in America, CD
sales were outstripped by video games. More people were consuming video games than
there were listening to music, of any genre, whether Beethoven or Crass. The average
person under forty was doing neither, nor listening to the radio. They were playing video
games. This has only got worse. In America, figures for total book sales in the last ten years
(meaning in all formats, e-books and hardcopy), have fallen in every single category, every
category of fiction, whether its romance, science fiction, literature and every non-fiction
category: academic, trade, general. It’s fallen every year for the last ten years. So when I
say people are not reading, I mean that in a literal sense. And this is at the same time that,
with the digital age, there’s more stuff than ever before. There’s millions of books being
published every year and less and less of it being consumed.
RKi:  How have these changes affected what you do?
RKa:  Over the last thirty-five years, during the period when all these disasters have hap-
pened in the industry, PM11 sales have pretty much remained the same. When I first
started publishing in the early 80s the average print run of an AK Press book was some-
where between 2000–4000 copies. That is still the case today. The difference is how we
are able to sell them.
In one sense publishing is easy and it’s become easier with the advancement of
­technologies  – the desktop publishing revolution and then going digital made things
easier. If you’re willing to take the time, energy and effort it’s not difficult to produce
something that’s really good. The role of the publisher and the challenges of a publisher
are twofold: one is to find the good stuff – the curatorial role; and once found, to make
it as good as it can be. The other is dissemination. How do you get the good stuff out
there? The answer is a social movement. That means finding venues. In the days when
there were still record stores we were very successful in selling our literature in there.
We’ve been very active in tabling at rock concerts – ­Housmans were doing it long before
I was – we went on tour with bands, attending bookfairs.
RKI:  Some people would say that the anarchist movement is healthier now than it has been
since the sixties. You seem to be suggesting that this is misleading?
RKA:  Anarchism since the 60s has been the only game in town for young people. The main-
stream left, the parliamentary left, the extraparliamentary-Leninist left has basically
been irrelevant. Crass boasted that they kick-started or revitalised CND. And I think

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that’s not an empty boast. Punk rock in the 80s energised and politicised a generation –
my ­generation – but that has continued and anarchism has been the only game in town
for the last forty years. Compare the London Radical Bookfair, which was a pretty quiet
affair in 2017, to the ­A narchist Bookfair and it’s probably ten times the size in terms of
attendees and two or three times the size in terms of people tabling at the venue.12 And
the same is true in America. But the problem that anarchism has faced since the Second
World War is its inability to actually organise and to institutionalise.
In terms of radical publishing, the 60s had these institutions. It had its independent
distributors, its independent publishers, its independent bookstores. Virtually all of them
have gone. So the fact that anarchism is the only game in town has actually been despite
anybody’s effort. When we publish, when we are able to disseminate that strikes a chord.
When we organise a bookfair people come to it and when we attempt to organise and
when we do actually organise, it’s wildly successful. Whether it’s the sales of Class War,13
whether it’s the Anti-poll tax movement, whether it’s the J20.14 When anarchists actually
organise it usually big and it’s usually pretty damn successful, as opposed to when the rest
of the left tries to organise.
My crowning achievement is boring persistence. AK and now PM have succeeded
because I’m willing to do it, able to do it and still doing it. But I can’t think of many
other institutions, if a publishing house is an institution. We on the left are still trun-
dling along with institutions that were built decades before, typically by members of the
Communist Party or the Quakers. Housmans only exists because the Quakers bought
the building 100 years ago. Anarchists have had successes but we’ve built very little.
RKi:  What should anarchists be doing?
RKa:  Any student of anarchist history will tell you that the Spanish Revolution and the
Spanish anarchists were successful only because they spent forty years organising and
building institutions – Ferrerian radical education, building the union structures, the
neighbourhood organisations – so on, at all levels.15 Whether it’s building your publish-
ing houses, your means, your wherewithal to do anything comes through slow, patient
building of institutions and structures.
The reason that the SWP in the UK or the ISO16 in America gets thousands of
recruits every year – even if they leave after nine months – is because they have the
structures, typically on university campuses. People who are interested in radical stuff
can gravitate towards them. If you’re interested in anarchism, what do you do? Where
do you go? How d’you find out about it? I found out about it because I was a voracious
reader and my entry into politics was through punk.
One of the bizarre things about punk rock it that it remains that gateway drug into
politics. People who were not born when Crass had already broken up (1984) are dis-
covering radical politics through that gateway. But there’s only so much you can do not
collectively, and that’s the fundamental problem of anarchism.
In the 60s and 70s the mainstream was really into anarchism. But the mainstream is
interested in anything that we sell. At lot of what we call anarchist classics were originally
published by big publishers Anarchy in Action by Colin Ward, The Floodgates of Anarchy, Blood
in My Eye by George Jackson, Abbie Hoffman. These were published by big publishers. In-
sofar as anarchism is popular again, sure The Guardian will feature anarchists as columnists,
sure David Graeber is lauded as the great man. I think that’s great that David Graeber can
write for The Guardian. I wish there were more sane voices in the mainstream. But let’s be
honest. The only reason they’re there is because anarchism is flavour of the month.
RKi:  So the problem is not the lack of anarchists, but the failure to build lasting institutions?

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RKA:  The first thing I did when I came to America was organise an anarchist bookfair. The
San Francisco anarchist bookfairs rapidly became the world leader because there were
already loads of anarchists here. It became the single biggest bookfair in the Bay Area. It
dwarfed mainstream ones. It was a focal point – because the milieu already existed. This
vibrant milieu has never been a movement. It has produced certain great things, it has
coalesced sometimes. But it has never undertaken any serious organising except for the
short-term situational change.
The Anti-poll tax movement didn’t just come from nowhere in the 80s. It came out
of ten years of organising having some structures in place. Anarchism had three national
organisations in the UK: Direct Action Movement, Anarchist Federation17 and Class War,
which was at the time a federation, membership organisation. We had anarchist groups
in most places. So when we started in Edinburgh we appealed to our comrades and it did
spread like wildfire because it could spread. There were organisational structures, even if it
was only two guys in each town. Occupy also came on the back of anarchist and anarchist
inflected organising in the mid-90s which had a high point in Seattle. It was the benefi-
ciary of these decades of organising.
The milieu has completely failed to build any sort of institutions on any level or
scale or lasting import. It’s pathetic how little anarchists have done. It’s sad. There are
a few individuals who are able and willing to do certain things. Without them, there’s
nothing there. The milieu would remain. Interested individuals will remain. Other
than these sometimes spectacular successes, which are situational – Seattle, the poll tax
movement, J20 – or whether it’s certain individuals putting in the effort to organise
a bookfair we’re talking realistically about a handful of people. Without them, what
you’re left with is the situation the anarchist movement’s always been in: there’ll al-
ways been the occasional writer published by the mainstream like Colin Ward or Paul
Goodman.18 There’ll always be the occasional incredibly dedicated individuals – the
Albert Meltzers and Stuart Christies – who are battering on in the wilderness, trying.19
But that’s been the history of anarchism when it’s not actually a mass movement. And
a mass movement only comes through building these institutional structures: the trade
union, the lasting physical spaces. There are the odd oases but the fact that we can name
them shows that we’re talking about a handful of people and an even smaller number
of actual institutions. These things rise or fall on a tiny handful of people. That’s a sad
thing. That’s not to champion the individual. It’s not a great man view of history, it’s
the reality of what we’re dealing with. And we’re dealing with that because there is no
wider movement, as opposed to the milieu, or the infrastructures to act and engender
that wider movement. It’s the classic chicken and egg situation.

Part II: Anarchist Publishing

Ruth Kinna:  How is PM organised?
Ramsey Kanaan:  The people who started PM press eight or nine years ago all came out
of AK Press and our experiences there explains how we choose to organise PM as we do.
RKi:  How was AK organised?
RKa:  AK was set up as a workers’ cooperative, which is a legal entity in the UK and it
doesn’t exist in America. Being a co-op in the UK means that you have a legal struc-
ture and a framework but we tried to be more principled in the way we organised.
There were three ‘rules’, ingrained in our bye-laws (which themselves have nothing –
­necessarily – to do with being a co-op, or not)

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One was ‘one-person-one-vote’. At the time, in 1990, the current so-called anar-
chist obsession with consensus didn’t exist, certainly not in the UK (why it’s suddenly
become a tenet of anarchism is beyond comprehension as far as I’m concerned). In terms
of direct democracy, the principle was one-person-one-vote.
The second principle was that everyone was paid the same. So working within the
strictures and confines of capitalism there was an attempt to recognise that everyone’s
labour was of equal value and to practice the idea of each according to needs.
The third was that there are no owners. We had shares, because that’s part of being
a co-op in the UK. But we were a self-managed workplace. In 1994, when we decided
to set up a sister organisation in the US, we set up as a regular corporation and also had
to issue shares. When you joined AK press, you were given a share, and when you left
you had to give up that share. That was how we protected the integrity of AK press as
a political project, ensure that it couldn’t be taken over and that no one was able to buy
up all the shares.
RKi:  How well did the principles work in practice?
RKa:  Those principles are fantastically important, but they don’t help you deal with the nitty-
gritty of cooperation; and there were certain issues that came up through the process of
working which we had to deal with and which affected our organisation.
Some stemmed from the attempt to work as a self-managed political project within
the strictures of capitalism – coping with the economic imperative. AK and also PM press
are run as commercial ventures. We are purely commercial, capitalist organisations, in that
banal sense. And that brings in a whole bunch of pressures and tensions – because much
of what we actually publish and distribute is not commercially viable. It means that there’s
always a balancing act between trying to do stuff that is more commercially viable and the
more political material. Typically, perhaps understandably, the more commercially viable
stuff is less ‘radical’. AK Press’s best-selling books were those that would appeal to a more
mainstream audience. That doesn’t mean that their content is worthless, but effectively it
means that they’re dealing with more liberal democratic issues and concerns. There’s al-
most a direct inverse relation between sales and politics, and particularly anarchist politics.
Anarchist primers sell very well but a book on a more specialist theme won’t sell. One of
the books we published early on, the first ever translation of Nestor Makhno’s writings,
didn’t sell.20 We printed 2000 copies in the early 1990s, and when I left AK 10–15 years
later, we hadn’t sold the run. No one is interested in one of the most famous anarchists, not
even in the movement let alone in the outside world. No one actually cares about Makhno
or wants to read Makhno. So there’s always that problem, that tension.
The commercial imperative creates other problems, too. Part of it is that if you’re
not paying the living wage then there’s a high turnover and it’s virtually impossible to
recruit anyone. People with marketable skills can get better paid elsewhere. So you’re
reliant either on young people who are enthusiastic but don’t have any skills so to speak,
and typically don’t have the most sophisticated politics (because they’re young and none
of us is born perfectly formed); or you’re reliant on forms of internal subsidy or self-­
exploitation: working long hours, or you have a partner who’s much better paid, or you
have a lucky rent situation. That’s not a really a strong framework on which to build
an organisation which can survive the ups and downs of boom and bust capitalism, let
alone support the long-term work and effort required to build a movement.
RKi:  How were these pressures felt internally in AK?
RKa:  Internally, there was a whole set of pressures that arose partly in reaction to the external
circumstances. One person one vote is fine in theory but in practice it raises a lot of red flags.

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The most obvious is how you weigh or gauge knowledge, experience or interest. Some folks
don’t even care what they’re voting on. The reality was felt in AK’s management.
RKi:  Can you give me an example?
RKa:  When I left, AK was eleven people in America; in terms of small radical projects,
it was a big organisation; too big to have every person vote on every aspect of your
business: you don’t want eleven people bickering over what’s the best cover design for a
particular book – you don’t have time. So there was always some specialisation, a divi-
sion of labour. The ­M ichael Albert Parecon job-rotation was never part of AK because it
was not considered to be practical.21 We took a more bluntly Fordist model and we each
had different responsibilities in the production line, producing and distributing books.
The collective was involved in all the broader decisions: can we afford to hire some-
one? can we afford a wage-rise? do we want to have a wage-rise or pay for health care
(which in America you have to pay for)? What books are we going to publish and what
books are we going to distribute? Those were the collective decisions and they affected
the overall health and wellbeing of the organisation.
In my time (things might have changed since) we developed a system which was to
have two readers for each manuscript. Those readers would report to the wider collec-
tive on the book’s merits using three criteria: political content (is it worth us doing, is it
important?), the quality of the manuscript (is it well written, will it take us a lot of effort
to polish this rough diamond into a jewel?), commercial potential (is this something we
can sell?). These three criteria are weighed against each other: we might have the most
important collection of anarchist poetry in the world, but if we can’t sell it, because we
can’t sell poetry, it might not be right for us; or we might think that something that has
no commercial value is so vitally important that we’ll do it anyway, or it’ll take us a hell
of a lot of work, but that work is worth it.
Each reader would give a report and that might take ten minutes each. So on the
basis of a twenty-minute report to the wider collective everyone, including the two
readers, would vote on whether to do the book or not. These votes would be based on
virtually no discussion and, in the case of the other nine votes, virtually no knowledge
other than the recommendations of the two readers. What would often happen was that
the readers were really gung-ho on it and they just would be outvoted. That raised the
question about how you weigh interest, aptitude, experience?
RKi:  Would you say that the editorial decisions were the major cause of tensions?
RKa:  There was another dynamic that grew up within AK. That arose because the majority
of people who ended up working at AK had very little experience. They weren’t neces-
sarily young, though that was often the case, but they had very little experience of the
book trade or how publishing and distribution works. This spawned a majority culture
which was that everyone was able to do everything and that experience or knowledge
doesn’t really matter. In parallel to this, the second majority culture that grew up was
about identity politics. This played out in AK as a commitment to build a ‘healthy col-
lective’. This became the primary goal of the political project and it meant that we had
to have a diverse collective.
In practice it meant that we would no longer hire self-identified heterosexual white
males. We had one young woman who said that she thought anarchism was stupid at the
interview, but she was still hired on AK’s majority vote because she was a queer woman
of colour and that was important for the health and diversity of the collective. The fact
that she said that she thought anarchism was stupid didn’t make any difference. It was
irrelevant.

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RKi:  How did all these experiences of organising in AK affect the structure of PM?
RKa:  PM came from the minority faction in AK. That faction was made up of the three longest-
serving, most experienced folks. I’m not saying we were the best, or that we were necessarily
right. But there’s only so long that you can be outvoted before it’s time to move on.
What we learned was that one of the many tensions and problems of the self-­
managed workplace is about self-management. If you don’t have a hierarchical structure,
you have to decide how to self-manage. You have to think about how you deal with
discipline: how do you deal with someone who doesn’t do what they’re told (meaning,
what has collectively been agreed on)? What do you do when someone comes in late
every day and is late for a collective meeting?
When this happened at AK, our initial response was to use the daily collective meet-
ing and in the case of one particular member, for each of us to say, in turn, that we no
longer wished to work with that person. That’s not a good way of dealing with issues of
management or discipline. And as a result of that we instituted a more formal, codified
structure which basically just replicated what the rest of the capitalist world was doing:
two written warnings and you get fired. This became part of the rules of AK’s governance.
Having struggled with all this for decades, when we started PM, we retained the
one-­person-one vote and the rule that everyone was paid the same but, crucially for us,
the decision we took away from the experience at AK was that we were only going to
work with people that we knew.
In terms of ownership, we pay no dividends on shares but there are two owners
with five shares each. Part of the PM culture is that we have virtually no meetings:
we’re all spread out across the world. We talk individually and sometimes collectively,
but there are no collective meetings and that’s by design as well as by the accident of
distribution. It means that the coordination is overseen by two of us and we take some
of the smaller decisions or decide when to take these to the larger group.
We’re totally transparent. Not only is everyone paid the same but the data bases,
invoices and everything we do is all in the cloud. Everyone has access in real time from
wherever they are in the world. If people wish to check things out for themselves, if
people wish to be involved in certain things, they have the same means as anyone else.
There’s no group decision about whether to pay a wage rise when it’s clear from the
financial figures (that are open to everyone) that we can’t afford it. But when we can in
principle think about wage rises, there is a big discussion. We have talked about whether
to pay higher wages or pay for health care.
People are involved in the editorial decisions as much as they want to be and that
will depend on their particular interests, desires, areas of knowledge or expertise. But
two of us are the linchpins and we do most of the editorial acquisitions. There’s a lot of
back and forth between us and with the other people in PM, particularly when we’re not
sure about projects or when we need special advice. But in the end, we’re the linchpins.
We use the same criteria adopted in AK to decide what to publish. However, those
decisions are more diversified and much more informal and they don’t necessarily in-
volve the entire group. In terms of politics, PM is modelled like an affinity group rather
than a consensus group.
RKi:  It seems from the website that PM seeks to foster close relationships with authors, is
that a conscious policy?
RKa:  Yes, and for two reasons: political and commercial. The political is that while we have
to sell products to pay our wages and pay our rents, the products actually mean something
to us. So we have a vested interest in selling as many of those products as possible. We’re

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not just looking for the next bestseller. In mainstream publishing, resources are always
directed to the next bestseller. We wish we had more bestsellers but because we also have
another criterion: when we publish something we think it’s worth putting out into the
world and we want as much of that world as realistically possible to interact with that
product. We have a political reason for putting extra effort into authors and we have a
commercial reason because, with the collapse of regular way of selling books, these other
ways of selling books are pretty important. It’s not that we want to make the author work
harder for us, because that’s easier for us. We want the author, ideally, to collaborate with
us to make it better for everyone. And we try and involve the authors as much as they
want to be. We want to encourage and enable our authors to get to get out into the wider
world so we help with setting up events, coach authors how to speak in public and so forth.
RKi:  PM promotes itself as a publisher of radical, Marxist and anarchist literature. How do
you understand those terms and their relationship to each other?
RKa:  ‘Radical’ is a horrendous term. It means nothing. It’s like ‘revolutionary’ or ‘intersec-
tionalism’. Nevertheless, it projects an image. AK was an explicitly anarchist publisher.
In terms of getting anarchism out to a wider world, we felt in PM that that was too
limiting or off-putting in terms of public perceptions. Second, in terms of what was ac-
tually published by AK or PM, the vision was considerably broader than just anarchism.
Personally, too, my influences are far wider. As far as mainstream perceptions were
concerned, PM was trying to have a bit of truth in advertising. Combining anarchism,
Marxism and radical is a way of being all encompassing and non-sectarian.
RKi:  What’s the ambition of PM press?
RKa:  Since there’s not a strong, vibrant anarchist movement, what we’re doing is keeping
the flame alive, trying to shape as best we can, trying to interact as best we can. That’s all
we can do. We can’t have a movement if we operate in a vacuum of amnesia. We’ll spin
our wheels forever and go nowhere. There’s a difference between activism and actually
building movements.
RKi:  Which books would you take to a desert island?
RKa:  E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. I must have read that book
cover to cover about six times. Feminism had a huge influence on me as a kid, even
though in retrospect some of it seems quite reactionary or liberal: nevertheless, read-
ing The Women’s Room by Marylin French, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauviour,
probably more important and better, reading the novels of Marge Piercy and Ursula le
Guin had a profound impact. Reading the anarchist classics – Kropotkin, Malatesta,
­Goldman – was like common sense, they confirmed what I was already thinking. Read-
ing feminist literature really got my brain going, as opposed to just nodding. Then in
my later teens reading Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky really got me going and
at the same time reading socialists: reading all the prefaces to Bernard Shaw’s works (the
preface to Androcles and the Lion was the best take down of Christianity I’d ever read).
Of the more contemporary authors, probably my favourite writer after E.P. Thompson
is Maurice Brinton, another ex-Trot who remained until his dying day viciously anti-­
anarchist. But The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control is probably the best book I’ve read on
the Leninist coup and the Russian Revolution.
Taking a holistic view, I think anarchism is really good in much of its tactics, strategies,
theories; the role of the individual and collective action. A lot of the Marxist stuff is good on
different kinds of organisation and more importantly, economics, where anarchism’s always
been a bit weak. Also Marxists, unless you’re Colin Ward, have been much better at using
that Marxist prism to analyse other aspects of society. There is a Marxist view on literature,

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numerous views, in fact; and that’s very rare in anarchism. Emma Goldman wrote about
theatre, there were various anarchist in the 60s that wrote about crime and punishment;
Colin Ward is a shining beacon, looking all over the map. But often the Marxists are much
better at looking at daily life, lived reality through that Marxist lens.

Notes
1 Top of the Pops was a weekly chart music programme which ran on the BBC between 1964
and 2006.
2 Radio 1 was established in 1967 as part of a reorganisation prompted by the success of pirate radio
and it targeted a youth audience with playlists largely dependent on national record sales.
3 John Peel (1939–2004) was a broadcaster whose nightly programme on the BBC was celebrated for
its eclecticism and unorthodoxy.
4 See the Facebook page maintained on behalf of ex-members of the band www.facebook.com/pg/
crass/about/?ref=page_internal [last access 6 December 2017].
5 Housmans is a radical book shop in London, www.housmans.com/ [last access 6 December 2017].
6 Black Rose Books was set up in 1970 http://blackrosebooks.net/ Black and Red started in 1968
www.blackandred.org/pages/about.html [last access 6 December 2017].
7 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Greg Adargo (Black and Red 1977 [1967]) online at
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm [last access 6 December 2017].
8 AK Press was founded in 1987 by Ramsey Kanaan. www.akpress.org/ [last access 6 December
2017].
9 First of May was a bookstore and meeting place. For a recollection, see http://eotdt.org/index.
php/the-word-bank/297-the-first-of-may-bookshop [last access 6 December 2017].
10 Left Book Club was set up to promote socialism in 1936 by Victor Gollancz. A new Left Book
Club was established in 2015 www.leftbookclub.com/history/ [last access 6 December 2017].
11 PM Press founded at the end of 2007 and publishing in Oakland, California http://pmpress.org/
content/index.php?topic=about [last access 6 December 2017].
12 London Radical Bookfair is organised by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers www.radicalbook-
sellers.co.uk/?page_id=245; the London Anarchist Bookfair has been running since 1981 http://
anarchistbookfair.org.uk/ [last access 6 December 2017].
13 Class War is the newspaper of the UK anarchist group Class War, first published in 1983 http://
anarchistbookfair.org.uk/ [last access 6 December 2017].
14 For the Anti-Poll Tax Movement, see the article at Libcom https://libcom.org/history/1989-1990-­
opposition-poll-tax. For J20, see www.disruptj20.org/about/ [last access 6 December 2017].
15 Francisco Ferrer was an educationalist and anarchist, executed in 1909. For Ferrer’s account of
the Modern School, see The Origins and Ideas of the Modern School, trans. Joseph McCabe online
at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/francisco-ferrer-the-origin-and-ideals-of-the-modern-
school [last access 6 December 2017].
16 The SWP is the Socialist Workers Party www.swp.org.uk/. The ISO is the International Socialist
Organisation http://www.internationalsocialist.org/ [last access 6 December 2017].
17 For a history of the Direct Action Movement, see Kate Sharpley Library www.katesharpleylibrary.
net/x69qfd. For Anarchist Federation, see www.afed.org.uk/ [last access 6 December 2017].
18 For Colin Ward (1924–2010), see Stuart White, ‘The Incremental Anarchist’ in Radical Philosophy,
161 www.radicalphilosophy.com/obituary/colin-ward-1924%E2%80%932010 and Paul ­Goodman,
(1911–72) Robert Graham, ‘The Emergence of New Anarchism’ www.radicalphilosophy.com/
obituary/colin-ward-1924%E2%80%932010 [last access 6 December 2017].
19 For Meltzer, see Stuart Christie ‘Albert Meltzer, anarchist’ Kate Sharpley Library, www.radical-
philosophy.com/obituary/colin-ward-1924%E2%80%932010. For Stuart Christie, see the entry in
Matthew Wilson and Ruth Kinna ‘Key Terms’, in Kinna (ed.) Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism
(Bloomsbury, 2014).
2 0 Nestor Makhno, The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays (Edinburgh & Oakland: AK
Press, 1996).
21 On Parecon, see Znet www.akpress.org/struggleagainstthestateandotheressays.html [last access 6
December 2017].

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 Section 4

Transformations

In this final section, we consider some of the ideas and visions that animate radical activism.
What kinds of alternatives are radicals aiming to advance? And how have these been honed
over time?
To be sure, radicals today are more reluctant than ever to suggest detailed programmes
and blueprints for what should replace class society, hierarchical government and intersecting
regimes of domination. Unlike utopian socialists (and Soviet planners), radicals have tended
to privilege repeated, concrete experiences of social struggle in which the tension between
aspirations and experience is continuously worked out, and to emphasise the necessarily
emergent and unexpected qualities of any social arrangements that would emerge through
an unconstrained process of self-organisation (Davis and Kinna, 2014). This explains the
tendency to view ‘revolution’ as a present-day process and potential dimension of every-
day life not as a one-off event; the emphasis on the imperfect and experimental nature of
alternative-building (however sustained and collective) and the widespread endorsement of
pluralism, heterogeneity and iconoclasm in the production of alternatives.
This section, then, offers critical accounts of several major sites at which radicals have
been experimenting with alternatives in practice. Between them, the chapters portray to the
richness and diversity of such initiatives, and the divergent perspectives that have come to
interact in their production. They also seek to interrogate the connections or disconnections
between such initiatives and more thoroughgoing social transformation, and between their
local dimensions and the often-global dimensions of the structures against which they posit
themselves.
Peter Seyferth provides an overview of historical and contemporary Marxist and anarchist
thinking about work and its abolition. Comparing different approaches within Marxist
and anarchist traditions, Seyferth shows that work is an essential component of exploitation
and/or domination, not an aspect of social relations corrupted by power relations that can be
somehow improved or transformed. Explaining the lack of mass anti-work movements, the
chapter finds the possibilities for revolutionary change in the complementarity of Marxist
policy-led reforms and anarchist direct action.
Emily Charkin and Judith Suissa develop a radical conception of education based on
an overview of historical and contemporary experiments. This involves a commitment to
critique dominant norms, practices, values and institutions of existing society and to offer
 Transformations 

alternatives. Radicals have sometimes pioneered learning practices designed to confront

power relationships between learners and instructors, but the radicalism of alternative edu-
cation lies in the recognition that education is not a neutral tool or technique for learning but
a moralising instrument. Education is part of a process of socialisation that sustains types of
social relations. It is radical, then, to the extent that it is transformative of the exploitative re-
lationships that prevail. Radical educators offer alternatives which challenge existing power
relationships and encourage other modes of living.
In his chapter on the politics of dumpstered food, Sean Parson explores the ability of
Food Not Bombs, an anarchist homeless food organisation that serves vegetarian dumpstered
food for free for all who are hungry, to ‘decommodify food’. The chapter begins with a his-
torical and theoretical exploration of the commodification of food before engaging with the
concept of the ex-commodity. Food Not Bombs formed out of antinuclear and ­antimilitarist
movements but grew into a network of groups whose free meals became identified with
­anticapitalist protest. The chapter examines how FNB groups use the ex-commodity as part
of a broader politics of decommodifying food and undermining the capitalist food system.
Focusing on left-libertarian social centres in Italy, Luca Lapolla’s discussion of urban
community activism presents social centres as a concrete radical alternative to mainstream
society. It illustrates how they serve as contexts for applying left-libertarian principles such
as direct democracy, self-management and mutual aid and combining them with a strong
­a nticapitalist critique. The chapter examines the generational changes in social centres,
which reduced the presence of theory in practice, and highlights the importance of place
and memory in the lifespans and politics of social centres.
Jim Donaghey resents an analysis of anarchism and popular music to examine radical
culture. Rejecting approaches that identify radicalism with particular aesthetics or formats
and showing how radical tropes, ideas and themes are reproduced through mass marketing,
the chapter defines radicalism with reference to alternative anticorporate, grassroots produc-
tion and distribution systems. Do-It-Yourself ethics provides the model for radical cultural
production. Yet, radicalism also involves recognising the impossibility of detaching radical
from mainstream culture and the diversity of radical subcultures. Building ‘cultures of resis-
tance’ through networking and solidarity is essential part of transformative cultural practice.
And the aim is not to construct a new dominant culture but to support new relationships of
non-domination across subcultural groups.
In an interview Jim Thomas considers what a radical politics of technology would look
like that could link disparate struggles against specific applications like GM crops, geo-
engineering and nuclear power. Essential features of such a politics include: a rejection of
‘techno-fix’ approaches to problems such as hunger or climate change, which leave social and
economic structures unquestioned; a critique of how new technologies promote corporate
concentration and power, including across disparate industries now linked by platforms like
genetics or nanotechnology; and leadership by indigenous and peasant movements from the
global south, whose own knowledge and technologies are often far more conducive to social
equality, local autonomy and genuine ecological sustainability.
Lisa Trocchia-Baļķīts examines a decentralised, leaderless local food movement in
­Athens, Georgia to analyse the revolutionary potential of alternative food production.
­Radicalism is defined in terms of transformative potential: the power to introduce practices
that challenge existing patterns of consumption and the cultures of production that sustain
them. An important part of the food movement is ‘entrepreneurial’. Its modest aim is to
provide consumers with ethically sourced alternatives to the food manufactured through
agribusiness. The genuinely radical part of the movement creates a new social ecology by

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 Transformations

constructing community networks that are horizontal, autonomous and based on mutual aid
and complex reciprocity. This radical food movement fosters cooperative social relationships
that are essential to social change.
Bürge Abiral’s chapter looks at the promises and limitations of Permaculture – an ap-
proach to systems design widely applicable to sustainable food production, shelter construc-
tion and resilient communities and economies. The chapter argues that the truly radical
promise of Permaculture may be undercut both by the flexibility it provides for practice, and
by the need for educational and economic capital for its application. The case study of the
Permaculture community in Turkey demonstrates that while tied to social movements, its
radical ethics may remain in the background. In such situations, Permaculture activism may
become a matter of proving its viability as a cultivation technique in rural compounds, or of
lifestyle activism in urban centres.
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Anthony Fiscella provide a critical overview of the
concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘radicalism’ to develop an anticolonial conception of ‘religious
radicalism’. Focusing on Indigenous anticolonial traditions, nonviolent antimilitarist and
egalitarian Christian groups, and the activity of marginalised groups seeking to organise
new ways of living, the chapter links radicalism to the rejection of dominant orders, the
adoption of cooperative, solidaristic values and practices and the commitment to life stories
that acknowledge superhuman forces. Noting the intersections across apparently religious
and non-religious radicals involved in contemporary movements, the authors question the
usefulness of the construction of religion to discuss radicalism and recommend the adoption
of an alternative grammar that facilitates intercultural exchange, learning and dialogue.
Narrating a history of European squatter movements from the 1970s using movement
materials, Bart van der Steen finds the radicalism of squatting in the subcultures it fosters.
Squatters advanced a radical critique of representation; class domination and inequalities of
wealth, power and knowledge. Squatters were centrally involved in resisting technocratic
urban gentrification projects and in antinuclear and antiglobalisation struggles. As a prac-
tice, squatting reflected a wider commitment to direct action, adopted to disrupt existing
political regimes. The chapter describes how squatters negotiated internal conflicts to deal
with everyday transgressions but also to confront power asymmetries based on class, race
and gender. Plotting the emergence of the movements from the student politics and guerrilla
activism of the 1970s, it also examines contested debates about the conception of politics and
the ways that shifts in global politics have rebounded in squatter movements.
Finally, Laurence Cox considers activist sustainability – the challenging question of
how people – especially people who lack power, wealth and/or cultural privilege – can be-
come and remain active and radical political subjects. The chapter discusses issues that appear
in a range of practical dimensions including legal support and prisoner solidarity, alternative
livelihoods, challenges to discrimination and hate speech, informal economic support and
international solidarity. In its broadest sense, sustainable activism is a process that involves
participants remaking themselves and their relationships to one another, as they remake the
world around them.

Reference
Davis, Laurence and Ruth Kinna (eds.). Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester: Manchester University
press, 2014).

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 4.1
ANTI-WORK
A Stab in the Heart of Capitalism
Peter Seyferth

Rejection of the work regime is neither ubiquitous amongst nor confined to radicals. But
those that radically turn against work argue that it is a relationship of exploitation, submis-
sion and alienation that has to be abolished. Indeed, there is a long history of worker resis-
tance against drudgery, starting from Luddite sabotage, later tamed by unions, nowadays
appearing more silent as absenteeism. There are two complementary radical frameworks of
anti-work. On the one hand, neo-Marxists criticise work ideology and demand a universal
basic income (UBI) from the state. On the other hand, anarchists reject the state and focus
on direct resistance action against work.
One of the core elements of modern domination is work. Without work, capitalism and,
arguably, the state would be impossible. Anti-work radicals argue and struggle for the aboli-
tion of work, which is, in their view, a precondition for freedom from domination. Work is
a praxis and a power machine that acts on intersecting social identities, as Fineman (2012: 3)
has observed: ‘Today, pecking orders of who does what kind of work remain in all parts of
globe, heavily influenced by social class, education, wealth, gender, race, age, or ethnicity’.
Alongside the paid jobs that appear in the Gross National Product and are often held by priv-
ileged people (mostly skilled, white, healthy males), there are several other kinds of work that
are even more frustrating, dangerous and demeaning while yielding less resources (or none
at all) and thus have to be done by underprivileged people: domestic labour, voluntary work,
black economy (13). Although each of these activities could theoretically be done due to its
intrinsical value – if the respective worker happens to attribute such a value to the activity –
most work is regarded as means for some external good: as a necessary evil.
Ethical attitudes towards work vary wildly from appreciation to rejection (5), so to mo-
tivate people to work, work has to meet the needs of people (10–12). Since many jobs fail to
do so, there have to be mechanisms to force people to work. The easiest way is to deprive
those that do not work from what they need and want, be it food and shelter or status, power
and dignity – although even those that do work often lack many of these essential goods. If
one must work to survive, one can and will easily be exploited. Emancipatory radicals deal
with the (at least potential) evils of work in quite different ways: some aim at improvements
within the sphere of work; others strive for the abolition of work itself. The better-work/
anti-work cleavage cuts across the usual dividing lines of radical traditions. In the following,
I will first show the ambiguity of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century radical thinkers

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towards work. Second, I will sketch the transformation of work regimes in the second half of
the twentieth century and assess worker’s everyday resistance to it. Third, I will present the
theories of several anti-work neo-Marxists. Finally, I will highlight central points of anar-
chist anti-work agitation. My aim is to shed light on the differences of anti-work radicalisms
while making plausible why one might want to abolish work.

Radical but Ambiguous Stances Over Work in the Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries
The most widely known critic of capitalism, Karl Marx, stated in his early manuscripts
of 1844 that the oppression of workers is not just a case of economic exploitation, but also of
­human estrangement. On the one hand, the worker is alienated from the product of his work (it
does not belong to him but to the capitalist). But on the other hand, ‘estrangement is manifested
not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity, itself’. Thus,

labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his
work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but
unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body
and ruins his mind.
(Marx, 2009: 30)

Work seems to be a vile thing. One might expect Marx, being an infamous radical, to reject
work altogether. But Marx’s theoretical attitude is quite ambiguous. In the third volume
of his Capital (posthumously published in 1894), he indeed seems to contrast freedom with
work: ‘the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by neces-
sity and mundane considerations ceases’. Too bad that this is impossible, for Marx. People will
have to work ‘in all social formations and under all possible modes of production’, including
communism; there always remains ‘a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development
of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can
blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis’. The best thing to hope for is thus a
‘shortening of the working-day’, made possible by increased productivity (Marx, 2010: 571).
Consequently, Marx’s most successful followers (Leninists and Social Democrats) sought to
appear not only worker-friendly, but also work-friendly. They adhered to a strict work ethic
and imposed it on their subjects whenever they took state power. The culmination of this
was the Stakhanovite movement that tried to maximise production without cutting working
hours from 1935 onwards, but already in 1879 August Bebel (1904: 275) was quite clear on
this point: ‘So soon as society is in possession of all the means of production, the duty to work,
on the part of all able to work, without distinction of sex, becomes the organic law of socialized society’.
It is plausible to attribute Marxism’s fondness of forced labour not only to its inherently
authoritarian utopian vision (where coerced work is one tool of the dictatorship of the party),
but also to its official rejection of bourgeois lifestyle and social stratification. Indeed, the ruling
classes of all times showed a distinct odium for work. This attitude may have been stronger
with the nobility in antiquity and the Middle Ages than with the robber barons and misers of
capitalism, but the unequal distribution of productive and leisured activity is similar.
An example of the aristocratic devaluation of work can be found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s
thought, especially from 1878 to 1882. For him, dirty work is a true vice that interferes with
the desire for autonomy because it accustoms workers to repetitive petty goals that are easy
to achieve. Insofar as it does so, work polices and subdues. Individuals become overwrought

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and their spiritlessness impedes cogitation. Thusly, idle time is experienced as boredom by
workers; idleness is suitable only for artists and thinkers who need it for their creative work.
Consequently, Nietzsche demands a robust division of humanity into two species: many
‘slaves’ with menial jobs, and a few freemen with aesthetic duties that do not occupy more
than one-third of a day.1
This kind of attitude was not uncommon amongst anti-egalitarians. No wonder, then,
that Bebel (1904: 275) cried: ‘The silly claim that the Socialist does not wish to work, that he
seeks to abolish work, is a matchless absurdity, which fits our adversaries alone. ­Non-workers,
idlers, exist in capitalist society only’. Similar ideas appear in Paul Lafargue’s famous 1880
essay The Right to be Lazy. The capitalist class appears to be ‘settled down into absolute lazi-
ness and demoralized by enforced enjoyment’. Unsurprisingly, ‘[t]he sight of the miserable
conditions of life resignedly accepted by the working class and the sight of the organic degra-
dation engendered by the depraved passion for work increased its aversion for all compulsory
labor and all restrictions of its pleasures’ (Lafargue, 2010: 14). Like Nietzsche, Lafargue relies
on ancient Greek and Roman thinkers (5, 21–22). But unlike Nietzsche, ­Lafargue was a
socialist, and unlike Bebel, he harshly criticised the notion that ‘the proletariat, betraying its
instincts, despising its historic mission, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work’ (5).
He contrasted the ‘noble savage’ that does not yet know work with Europe’s workers, ‘our
miserable slaves of machines’, and identified work as ‘the cause of all intellectual degeneracy,
of all organic deformity’ (4). In the end, Lafargue demanded that the proletariat ‘must re-
turn to its natural instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness’ (10), which in practice,
means: ‘It must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the
day and night for leisure and feasting’ (11). This would be made possible by technological
progress. In a similar vein, Bertrand Russell, in his 1932 article In Praise of Idleness, speculated
on the emancipatory possibilities of Taylorism (Frederick Taylor’s highly compartmentalised
and deskilled division of labour which imposed strict factory discipline and was vividly ex-
emplified in the Tramp’s experience on the assembly line in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic,
Modern Times): ‘If at the end of the war the scientific organization which had been created
in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work had been preserved, and the hours
of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well’ (1932: 554). All this is not far
from Marx’s claim that with automation, the realm of necessity could be reduced – without
completely abolishing work.
What about those socialists that valued freedom over parties and discipline? The anar-
chists, too, have had ambiguous attitudes towards work. Like most other socialists of his
time, Peter Kropotkin embraced technological progress and shorter working hours, e.g. in
many articles published from 1886 to 1890. But to this question of efficiency, he adds the
question of everyday joyous experience. Factories are needed (and possible) that are ‘so well
managed that it would be a real pleasure to work in them, if the work, be it well understood,
were not to last more than four or five hours a day, and if every one had the possibility of
varying it according to his tastes’ (Kropotkin, 1907: 144–5). Work has to be agreeable, and
this includes housework, because ‘a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words Lib-
erty, Equality, Solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half
humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other
half ’ (154–5). Therefore, Kropotkin attacks the division of labour by gender and/or skill
differences and calls for the abandonment of ‘any system of wages’ (212). To be entitled to
the products one needs, it should be irrelevant how long or how qualified one has worked
before; otherwise, a dividing line between new classes would be erected (205, 207, 210–13).
The principle of distribution should not be wealth or work, but need; the work necessary for

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the satisfaction of needs should be minimised and as varied as possible (223). Using Adam
Smith’s example of the smith that is ‘sentenced for life to the making of heads of nails’,
Kropotkin illustrated the frustration, emptiness and disempowerment such divided work
imposed on workers (232–3). His alternative vision entailed all people freely working half a
day, spending the other half in artistic or scientific activities and retiring at the age of forty
(Kropotkin, 1998: 187). This stands in stark opposition to Marx’s or Russell’s ideas.2 It must
not be misunderstood as appreciation of idleness, though: Kropotkin (1907: 197–199) was
sure that people hated and tried to avoid work only when it stifles them; to suppress this cause
of laziness through the revolutionary restructuring of work in a meaningful and rewarding
way would end idleness without the need to punish sluggards.
Sadly, this emancipatory strategy towards necessary work and its avoidance has not always
been followed by anarchist activists. Take as an example the CNT/FAI industrial policy
during the Spanish Civil War 1936–39. Spain seemed to be an underdeveloped country
to many Spanish anarcho-syndicalists who, consequently, glorified work as emancipatory
and actively promoted industrialisation, as Michael Seidman (1991: 42) has observed. One
of the CNT leaders, wartime Minister of the Economy Diego Abad de Santillán, ‘noted
approvingly that Taylorization had eliminated the “unproductive movements of the indi-
vidual” and had increased “his productivity”’ (45); he ‘underlined the necessity of eliminat-
ing “parasitism” and of providing work for all. Work would be both a right and a duty in
revolutionary society, and he approved the old saying, Those who do not work, do not eat’
(46). This is quite the opposite of Kropotkin’s anti-Taylorist strategy; but in the civil war
situation, a productive military industry seemed to be essential. ‘The new elite of union mil-
itants employed both old and new techniques of coercion to make workers labor harder and
produce more’ (96). This led to manifold forms of resistance against work: absenteeism, fake
illnesses, lateness, strikes, theft, sabotage, slowdowns, indiscipline and indifference (8). The
CNT reacted with harsh punishments; their Minister of Justice, Juan García Oliver, even
initiated ‘concentration camps’ with forced labour which were lauded by CNT militants as
‘progressive’ because they replaced torture and were designed to change the prisoner’s soul
and values in a productivist way (99). But the workers themselves did not stop to resist work.
Seidman speculates that ‘the way to eliminate resistance is not by workers’ control of the
means of production but rather by the abolition of wage labor itself ’ (17).

Transformation of Work and Silent Resistance to Work

So both Marxists and anarchists have a critical view of capitalism but are ambiguous about
one of capitalism’s core features: work. At least, this was the case in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. But work has changed since then, hasn’t it? The ‘scientific man-
agement’ of Frederick Taylor, initially adopted to increase productivity through decreasing
worker’s shirking, has evolved into a largely automated and computerised industry – but
a process of deskilling is still in force, stripping workers (even in the tertiary sector) of
pride and dignity (Fineman, 2012: 56–57). Workers react to this by inventing their own
work practices, sometimes by informal self-organisation (including punishing too produc-
tive co-workers), and sometimes just by bitter humour (58–59). Attempts by managers to
use workers’ resistant tactics for profit optimisation – imposed ‘fun’, job ‘enrichment’ or
forced ‘empowerment’ (59–62) – rarely have emancipatory outcomes. ‘For example, having
stripped out layers of supervision to save costs, empowerment can appear as an excuse by
management to intensify work, pushing more work and responsibility onto relatively fewer
people, often for no extra reward’ (62). In spite of the health risks of long working hours,

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some workers adopt a ‘presenteeism’ – constant presence – for fear that not constantly be-
ing seen at the workplace risks career or job security (63–64). Others choose the opposite
strategy: downshifting, i.e. switching to jobs that demand and pay less. This is ‘a radical
response to the emptiness that some people feel as they chase ever more goods and services’
(66), but it suits only those with a certain level of wealth. If working less is involuntary,
it is called ‘underemployment’ and often results in demoralisation, stress and illness (106).
Similarly, unemployment does not free the worker from the necessity to work, only from
the possibility. It is very widespread today and it serves as a threat to job holders. Today, you
do not want a job because you like the job – you want it because joblessness is made highly
inimical to good life. And nonetheless, people flee work in astonishing numbers, entailing
much research on absenteeism. According to an official report, sickness absences cost the
UK economy £15 billion in lost output, £9 billion in financial costs for the employers and
£13 billion for the state – every year (Black and Frost, 2011: 14). This is the result of the 140
million working days lost per year in the UK. ‘This equates to 2.2 per cent of all working
time, or 4.9 days for each worker each year, and is broadly comparable to many other devel-
oped countries (the United States, France, Germany and the Netherlands have similar rates)’
(19). This report ‘is premised on the fact that work is good for health in most cases’, at least
when work is ‘good’ (18). Let’s put aside the incredibleness of this ‘fact’ for a moment and
consider how these many sickness absences can be explained. One might think, after all,
that if there was something wrong with the workplace, workers could use regular methods
of industrial action to improve the situation without questioning the work regime as such.
But a meta-analysis of eighty-two workplace ethnographies (covering 160 years in Britain
and the US) showed that strikes occurred in approximately 21% of the cases, while absen-
teeism occurred in 45% of the cases (work avoidance at the workplace: 57%; social sabotage:
43%; playing dumb: 27%; theft: 20%) (Roscigno and Hodson, 2004: 22). While collective
resistance (i.e. striking) is positively correlated with the presence of conflict and unions at
the workplace (unions without conflict actually lessen the likelihood of strike action), in-
dividualised resistance like absenteeism does not have these requirements and can be used
by workers in many circumstances (29, 31, 34). Because ‘collective and more individualized
forms of resistance are not mutually exclusive in terms of their emergence or the factors that
drive them’ (33), absenteeism is an obvious and commonplace tactic of class struggle that
opens the door for anti-work action.
Absenteeism is notoriously difficult to study because it is a ‘mildly deviant behavior’, so
people will not always tell the truth to researchers ( Johns, 2003: 159); for statistical analyses,
‘there are simply far too many intervening factors (known and unknown)’ (Hoxsey, 2010:
553). All findings cited below should therefore be read with caution – not least because their
normative stance is to get as many people to work as much as possible. Shi and Skuterud
(2015: 403) have shown that a rising recreational quality of the weather increases short-term
sickness absence. Since good weather does not make people sick, it is plausible to assume that
skipping workers can think of better things to do than work. By taking a sickie, workers
express their preference for less hours of work (Livanos and Zangelidis, 2013: 494); it is their
‘labor-leisure choice’ (Lusinyan and Bonato, 2007: 477), made in a direct action rather than
by pleading to superiors. It has to be noted, though, that this direct action happens in the
framework of labour laws and often results in salary continuation, so it is not a valid indicator
for deliberate anarchist attitudes. Although not enough attention has yet been given ‘to the
meaning and role of absenteeism from the absentee’s perspective’, it can be said that there is at
least ‘a modest link between absenteeism and job satisfaction’ (Hackett, 1989: 246). Workers
often dislike their job and thus try to avoid it.

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Why do so many people hate their jobs? Unfair payment can be a reason: job satisfac-
tion is the highest when the workers are neither underpaid nor overpaid – but absenteeism
is the lowest when the workers are overpaid (because that makes them compensate the
guilt they feel through working more) (Sauer and Valet, 2013: 145–6). If the managerial
goal is not workers’ satisfaction, but their attendance, an ‘unequal wage structure can be
­efficient to some degree’ because ‘[a]bsenteeism is negatively correlated with absolute wages,
­relative wages, and hierarchical levels’ (Pfeifer, 2010: 59). Logically, not all can be paid
­relatively better or ranked higher, and to increase absolute wages for all amounts to inflation.
­Dissatisfaction with the job can sometimes be compensated with job involvement: Wegge
et  al. (2007:  81) found that absenteeism is high only when both job satisfaction and job
­involvement are low; van Yperen and Hagedoorn (1996: 370–1) showed that if, contrariwise,
job involvement is high, workers’ intent to leave is low – that holds especially for deprived
workers whose payment violates equity norms. It remains somewhat unclear which working
conditions can increase job satisfaction or job involvement. Beblo and Ortlieb (2012: 89)
pointed to ‘lack of autonomy’ and ‘work-related relationship with colleagues and superiors’
as factors for increased absenteeism. But for many jobs, it would be principally impossible
to improve on these factors, as anti-work thinkers emphasise. Many pro-work researchers
therefore count on repressive measures. An intolerant group absence norm leads to a lower
intent to report sick (van Yperen and Hagedoorn, 1996: 370–1); consequently, work groups
should have enforcement mechanisms for attendance ( Johns, 2003: 175). As Lusinyan and
Bonato (2007: 477) lament: ‘With imperfect monitoring, the decision about sick leave is
ultimately left to workers, and moral hazard arises’. Lechmann and Schnabel (2014: 386–7)
have observed that self-employed workers are less often absent because they monitor them-
selves (so no ­principal-agent problems apply) and they do not have the same protection as
­employees. Lusinyan and Bonato (2007: 478–81, 492, 496, 502) identify full employment,
generous unemployment insurance, employment protection and sickness benefits – as well as
too long working hours – as causes of absenteeism.
Contemporary empirical research has not yet found definitive reasons for the work de-
fiance that impedes capitalism’s profiting. But it has shown the difficulties of making work
‘good’, the non-profitability of workers’ legal protection and the tendency to turn to repres-
sive methods of practically forcing workers into their place, the workplace. Since at least
the 1980s, radically undogmatic Marxist and anarchist thinkers have turned against the
streams of productivism in their respective traditions, formulated harsh critiques of work and
sketched anti-work theories and practices. Let us now turn to them.

Neo-Marxist Anti-work
André Gorz stands at the vanguard of contemporary neo-Marxist anti-work thought. He
analysed the transformation of work regimes in developed countries and argued that the
neo-liberal order has already abolished work on a massive scale, but in a way that is exploit-
ative and dominating, forcing everyone to fight each other for vanishing employment. In
contrast to the productivist tradition of orthodox Marxism, he claims that ‘[i]t is not this
abolition we should object to, but its claiming to perpetuate that same work, the norms,
dignity and availability of which it is abolishing, as an obligation, as a norm, and as the ir-
replaceable foundation of the rights and dignity of all’ (Gorz, 1999: 1). Taylorism/Fordism
had to totally repress the self-organisation, ingenuity and creativity of the workers because
it understood them as sources of rebellion; the new regime of Toyotism/Post-Fordism treats
these as ‘a resource to be developed and exploited’ (30). Hence, everyone is forced to sell

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their personality, to commodify their selves. One has to show a particular state of mind,
a willing disposition: ‘eagerness’ (43). The professionalisation of pleasant and attentive at-
titudes ultimately poisons the arts of living because now even a nice smile falls under the
suspicion of hypocrisy: it could be the ‘commercial smile’ or ‘standardized, superficial bon-
homie’ of salespersons (70–71). Gorz’s criticism points not just to a hollow lifestyle, but to
a profoundly political struggle for power because ‘the unfettered power capital has assumed
over labour, society and everyone’s lives depends precisely on “work” – not the work you do,
but the work you are made to do – retaining its centrality in everyone’s lives and minds’ (53,
see also 58). So, capitalism has an ‘ideological hold on people’s minds’ by refusing income
from activities that are not ordered and paid for by others, and thereby persuading people of
the ‘imperative need to work’ (72).
Other neo-Marxist thinkers like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams or Michael Hirsch
build on and expand Gorz’s critique. Typically, they emphasise the odd effects of high pro-
ductivity. This should make classic demands of the left achievable (provided that distribu-
tion will be changed by reform or revolution), but it, in fact, worsens the workers’ plight
by increasing the threat of unemployment. The liberal notion of ‘freedom of contract’ has
become an absurdity as neo-liberal state policies have transformed welfare to workfare –
basic social rights have been supplanted by compulsory work (Srnicek and Williams, 2015:
1–2, 93, 100–104; Hirsch, 2016: 10, 14, 40, 76). Hirsch exposes contemporary work society
to be a Platonic order. In his Republic, Plato (1991: 111 [433a]) claims that in the just state,
‘each one must practice one of the functions in the city, that one for which his nature made
him naturally most fit. […] justice is the minding of one’s own business and not being a
busybody’. This is precisely the opposite of Gorz’s (1999: 73) alternative to the wage-based
society: ‘multi-active life’. But according to Hirsch, today’s developed countries follow the
Platonic idea: everyone has to have a work position they identify with. The economic exis-
tence and social status of the individual depends on a lifelong full-time job. Since there are
not enough such jobs, the Platonic order makes individuals accept economically meaningless
occupations, sometimes by threat of a debasing exclusion, and sometimes by sheer force.
On the one hand, this is necessary to reproduce the hierarchy of classes, professions and
genders. On the other hand, this work does not add value to the economy (Hirsch, 2016:
16–17, 20, 46, 59–66, 74). So, it is purely ideological: a cultural hegemony upheld by an al-
liance of capital, unions, social democracy, state apparatus, media and academy. Progressives
should re-enter the fight over the definition of reality, over what we take for granted. Hirsch
theorises the hegemony of work with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘symbolic violence’ (22,
27–29, 68–69, 104, 177); Srnicek and Williams stick to Antonio Gramsci’s older but similar
concept of ‘hegemony’ for their analysis. ‘The fact that so many people find it impossible
to imagine a meaningful life outside of work demonstrates the extent to which the work
ethic has infected our minds’ (Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 124). This has an almost religious
quality: ‘The central ideological support for the work ethic is that remuneration be tied to
suffering’ (125). They concentrate on the genesis of neo-liberalism’s hegemony, from the
Mount Pelerin Society through networks and ideological infrastructures to palpable policies
and politicians – and propound a similar counter-hegemonic strategy to eventually arrive at
a world without work (52–67).
The neo-Marxists discussed here approve of imagining future alternatives to work soci-
ety, but do not give many details. Gorz (1999: 77, 78) aims at ‘the multi-activity-based soci-
ety’ where ‘everybody will engage in a range of different activities and modes of membership
of the society’. Srnicek and Williams (2015: 85–86) want a ‘post-work world’ that is ‘not a
world of idleness; rather, it is a world in which people are no longer bound to their jobs, but

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free to create their own lives’. Hirsch’s (2016: 251, 43) ‘utopia of an egalitarian and variegated
society’ promises ‘an equal freedom of, in, and to work. Ultimately, it is about free access to
and equal recognition of all forms of work’.3 However, the neo-Marxists rather focus on
transformative strategies, especially the role of the state in the counter-hegemonic emanci-
pation from work. Since this is a fight about the definition of reality and since the state (as a
‘bank of symbolic capital’) produces and enforces categories of thought, it is crucial how the
state understands its function, argues Hirsch (27–32). In the case of the creation of jobs being
perceived as the state’s mission, the state is made undemocratic; in the other case, if the mis-
sion is to eliminate useless work, a lot of reforms are obviously necessary: wealth, working
hours and skills have to be redistributed justly; social security, individual freedom and dem-
ocratic sovereignty have to be provided without force. From this follows voluntary social
self-organisation (9, 11, 103, 105). Similarly, Gorz (1999: 100, 21) has already advocated the
state to create free space and thus the possibility of independent activity, financed by some
sort of Tobin tax that presupposes the state’s willingness to overpower financial capital. And
Srnicek and Williams (2015: 108) demand ‘non-reformist reforms’ that push capitalism be-
yond its acceptable parameters; such reforms would be, for example, more state investment,
research devoted to technologies that replace workers, higher minimum wages, support for
labour movements, reduction of working hours, etc. (112–14). These n ­ eo-Marxists agree on
one central state policy to be the key for emancipation: a UBI. It is a means ‘to free them [the
recipients] from the constraints of the labour market. The basic social income must enable
them to refuse work and reject “inhuman” working conditions’ (Gorz, 1999: 83). Its signif-
icance ‘lies in the way it overturns the asymmetry of power that currently exists between
labour and capital’ because with it, workers ‘have the option to choose whether to take a job
or not […] A UBI therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of wage labour, partially decom-
modifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between labour and capital’
(Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 120). It saves the workers from blackmail by the state and
capital, grants more autonomy regarding time and lifestyle, enables activities that make sense
but are not profitable, changes power relations between employers and employees, and ulti-
mately quits the Platonic order (Hirsch, 2016: 101, 111–17). Alas, the UBI is a tool that could
serve the capitalists as well (and has been demanded by neo-liberals), as all four neo-Marxists
hasten to concede. If it is set below the breadline, its recipients are still forced to accept all
kinds of jobs – then it is just a subsidy for capitalists who offer jobs no one would do without
compulsion (Gorz, 1999: 82; Srnicek and William, 2015: 119; Hirsch, 2016: 102). It remains
unclear how this danger could be averted; one may only guess that the neo-Marxists assume
that the government that fulfils their demands will withstand all well-funded lobbying ac-
tivities and elections from then onwards.
This is where the neo-Marxists most obviously deviate from anarchists. Although they
appreciate the absenteeism and even rebelliousness of workers who hate work and ennoble
the surplus population with titles like ‘revolutionary subject’ or ‘vanguard’, it is ultimately
the state, preferably represented by left-wing populist politicians, that has to set things right
(Gorz, 1999: 40, 63–64, 79, 110; Srnicek and Williams, 2015: 47, 114, 156–60; Hirsch, 2016:
230–1, 243–4). Srnicek and Williams (2015: 11, 22–23, 26–29, 32, 35) explicitly position
themselves against the ‘contemporary anarchist-tinged politics’ of the contemporary left.
This tendency of ‘horizontalism’ or ‘folk politics’ as exemplified by Michael Bakunin and
Peter Kropotkin in the past and by small anarchist movements analysed by Uri Gordon
today face a barrage of Srnicek’s and Williams’s criticism: it is too exclusive, too small, too
­harmless – in their view ‘evidence shows that hierarchical organisations are crucial in de-
fending movements against the state’ (33). But, from an anarchist perspective, the fault of

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classical Marxism is that these hierarchical organisations tend to become wielders of state
power themselves; this is why, so many neo-Marxists are quite critical of taking power now-
adays. Following Gorz, who, in passing, mentions some Proudhonists and Paul Goodman
but ultimately claims the indispensability of the state (1999: 84, 110), Hirsch (2016: 227)
argues for a ‘radically anarchic position of individual autonomy’ without actually embrac-
ing anarchism. Almost like Kropotkin, he demands to politically abolish the divisions of
work (both in the paid and unpaid spheres), the cause of most forms of social and gender
­h ierarchies (240). For him, criticism of the work society is only emancipatory if it is also
a radical criticism of domination (247). All this is typical for anti-work anarchists, but for
Hirsch, the state must not be destroyed, but appropriated in a radical democratic way (251).
Some neo-Marxist anti-work arguments are wholeheartedly hostile to the state, notably
the Krisis group’s Manifesto against Labour (1999). Here, the state is seen as a derivative of la-
bour; a state-controlled UBI is thus rejected; generally, ‘the opponents of labour don’t want
to take the control centres of power, but want to switch them off’ (Krisis, 1999). The Krisis
group developed its theory on the grounds that ‘Marxism itself was not sufficiently radical in
its critique’ (Trenkle, 2001). Krisis dismisses the classical class struggle of unions and parties
whom it perceives to be part of the ‘labour camp’ (i.e. those that fight for work). On the one
hand, Krisis (1999) promises that ‘[m]arket and state, institutions (once) alienated from hu-
man society, will be replaced by a graded system of councils, from town district level to the
global level, where associations of free individuals will decide about the flow of resources in
letting prevail sensual, social, and ecological reason’. For Wildcat, a syndicalist circular with
tendencies towards communism, this is a sign of Krisis’s individualist anarchism (H., 1999).
On the other hand, for Krisis (1999), ‘[o]nly an explicitly formulated critique of labour along
with a corresponding theoretical debate could bring about a new public awareness; the lat-
ter being the indispensable prerequisite for the constitution of a social movement that puts
labour critique into practice’. This is a sign of Krisis’s Leninism, and its supposed intellec-
tual superiority over the masses who lack the proper consciousness, according to Wildcat’s
­a nonymous author (H., 1999).
Anarchist Leninism seems to be a contradiction in terms. Let’s have a look at those en-
emies of work that actually self-identify as anarchists to shed some light on the differences
between anti-productivist neo-Marxists and anti-productivist anarchists.

Anarchist Anti-work
The two most obvious differences between the neo-Marxists and the anarchists are the
­latter’s rejection of hierarchical organisations (like the state) and their focus not on theory but
on resistant action. Surely, anarchists develop theories, too. But by consciously ­devaluating
even their own theories, they shun the dogmatic scholasticism they see in Marxism. From
this follows a multiplicity of anarchisms that are to some extent internally contradictory.
­A nti-productivism is notably strong in the primitivist and insurrectionist currents of
­a narchism, which are also notoriously hostile to academic theory. John Zerzan (1999: 133)
stresses that ‘our many compromises and accommodations with a grisly world are the real
field of our effort to break free, more so than merely stating our ideas’. In this field, Marx has
failed totally, both personally (with his ‘ruling-class mentality’ bringing misery to his fam-
ily; 138, 133) and politically (with the ‘gradualist, collaborationist, and highly statist’ nature
of his demands, essentially accepting the misery of capitalist development; 135). Zerzan’s
main point of criticism of work, capitalism and civilisation itself is the alienation inherent
in them. Alienation is also a central term of Marxist theory. But ‘Marx’s overriding concern

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with externalities – principally economic crises, of course – was a trademark of his practical
as well as theoretical approach; it obviously reflects his slight regard for the subjectivity of the
majority of people, for their potential autonomy, imagination, and strength’ (138).
So, Zerzan focuses his own observations of work precisely on these bottom-up resistance
practices that are typically devoid of theory. In a series of articles published from 1974 to
1986, he tells the story of unruly struggles against industrialism. From the mid-eighteenth
century onwards, artisanal freedom is pressurised by the rising capitalist factory system.
Against this, ‘[a]bsenteeism, as well as turnover, […] was part of the syndrome of striving to
maintain a maximum of personal liberty’ (100). The height of this resistance was ‘the wide-
spread revolutionary movement’ of the machine breaking Luddites (105) that was almost
anarchist: ‘the Luddites organized themselves locally and even federally, including workers
from all trades, with an amazing, spontaneous coordination. Eschewing an alienating struc-
ture, their organization was neither formal nor permanent. Their revolt tradition was with-
out a center’, although it ‘was not a completely egalitarian movement’ (109). Zerzan draws
a sharp contrast between, on the one hand, machine breakers, rioters and insurrectionaries
‘who mounted the most extreme forms of opposition’ (117) and, on the other hand, the la-
bour movement organised in parties and unions. The latter helped shape the factory model
of society (that itself reproduced the prison model), fulfilling the factory owners’ wish for ‘a
more subdued populace’ (118, 129). Hereby, ‘the union became the effective agency for sup-
pressing workers’ direct action against speed-up or other grievances’ (181). By reducing class
struggle to wage bargaining, the unions separate the workers from autonomous control over
the working conditions. Because they are mainly interested in member fees and often strive
to control the workers by ‘closed shop’ arrangements (so that, just like the bosses, union
officials can fire unruly workers), unions are actually instruments of domination and not the
right place to start fighting. Zerzan is sure most people feel deep inside that ‘the falseness of
trading away one’s life in order to purchase things is a transparently barren death-trip’ (233).
He cites a great many examples of disenchantment, withdrawal and resistance to work: ab-
senteeism, turnover, employee theft, illness, drinking, drug-taking, suicide, stress, job burn-
out, misuse of on-the-job time, sabotage (208, 213, 217, 219, 222, 223, 228, 231–2, 245, 246,
248, 256, 258). But Zerzan’s criticism goes much farther. Disenchantment, withdrawal and
resistance also turn against everyday life: declining civic virtue, increasing shoplifting, an
immense prison population, tax cheating, child arson, insomnia, emotional disability, lone-
liness, depression, anorexia, bulimia, gambling, refusal of literacy – an intentional aversion
to the whole of modern life (217, 246, 247, 257–8). ‘The possibility that the impoverishment
of daily life might even render work relatively satisfying, due to the vacuum of substance
elsewhere, is rendered unlikely by technology’s progressive degradation of work. There is no
area of authenticity, no place to hide, and no one can miss this commonplace’ (257).
Zerzan was himself a union official in the 1960s. His turn away from organised left-
ism and towards a broader anti-work and even anticivilisation attitudes was inspired by
­anarcho-primitivist Fredy Perlman’s (1983: 37) conviction that ‘[l]abor is always forced labor’
and that the Stone Age was some kind of Garden of Eden; it was civilisation that turned ‘the
Garden into a forced-labor camp’ (258). Zerzan (1994: 16) adopted this view that ‘life before
domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual
wisdom, sexual equality, and health. This was our human nature, for a couple of million
years, prior to enslavement by priests, kings, and bosses’. The enslavement has taken the form
of division of labour, which is deeply alienating. ‘The relative wholeness of pre-civilized
life was first and foremost an absence of the narrowing, confining separation of people into
differentiated roles and functions’. This social stratification has been a central idea of ‘key

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ideologues of civilization’ since Plato (147). But the division goes even deeper – its initiation
coincides with the ‘dissolution of the original unity between humanity and nature’ (Zerzan,
1999: 37). This split makes humans into alienated beings that have to use abstract symbols
(time, language, number, art, etc.) instead of directly interacting with their environment. It
was the implementation of agriculture that brought this estrangement to humanity. Agri-
culture is ‘the end of life as mainly sensuous activity, the embodiment and generator of sep-
arated life. Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception and are known
as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated himself ’ (73).
Before the neolithic revolution, work was inexistent. Since then, life quality deteriorated as
repression and alienation increased, especially in the course of industrialisation. Because the
‘[d]ivision of labor embodies, as an implicit purpose, the control and domination of the work
process and those tied to it’ (118), it has to be overcome. For Zerzan, this does not only entail
the abolition of work, but of all alienation and thus of civilisation itself.
It remains somewhat unclear how this may actually be done. Bob Black (1991), in his 1986
essay The Abolition of Work, proposes a ‘ludic revolution’ that creates ‘a new way of life based
on play’. In the 1980s, Black (1992: 11) learned of ‘the idea of zerowork. I’d already been
brought close to it by such writers as Fourier, Morris and Kropotkin when I discovered John
Zerzan’s studies of work refusal’. Like Perlman and Zerzan, Black (1991) is convinced that
‘work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production’, which is ‘the source of nearly all the
misery in the world’. Work degrades workers by discipline (‘surveillance, rotework, imposed
work tempos, production quotas, punching-in and out, etc.’), and makes them dumb and
habituated to hierarchy, even in their free time (which is ‘mostly devoted to getting ready
for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work’). Work, in the
end, is deadly – it is ‘mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most
of the people who read these words’. Black attributes most deaths by cars, industrial pollu-
tion, alcohol, drugs, cancer and heart disease to work, because ‘[e]ven if you aren’t killed or
crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from
work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work’.4 Work steals workers most of their
time, even if nothing valuable is produced in working time. Actually, ‘most work serves the
unproductive purposes of commerce or social control’. Therefore, useless and pernicious
work has to be cut down massively. Insofar as work serves useful purposes, it has to be trans-
formed into ‘a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from
other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products’. Black takes
inspiration from Charles Fourier. Most necessary and useful activities are attractive to many
people – at least from time to time, as long as they are done without compulsion but in enjoy-
able circumstances. This also evokes William Morris’s utopia of work turned into artisanal
handicraft (in his News from Nowhere).5 Black agrees with Zerzan that technology does not
save labour: ‘When productive technology went from hunter-gathering to agriculture and
on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished’. But Black
does not want to do away with all technology. Contrary to the neo-Marxists cited earlier,
he agrees with Morris that technology should play just a small role in this transformation.
Yet, Black’s quite optimistic outlook has a different flavour from Morris’s: ‘An optimal sexual
encounter is the paradigm of productive play. The participants potentiate each other’s plea-
sures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the
ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads
to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful’.
A series of anti-work articles written by the insurrectionalist anarchist Alfredo M.
Bonanno (1987–1995) are much bleaker and more militant. He distances himself from most

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other anti-work activists and theorists, asserting he does ‘not feel any nostalgia for lost pro-
fessionalism’, being ‘even less interested in elaborating libertarian alternatives to grim fac-
tory work or intellectual labour’, and going so far as to decry ‘the abolition of work or its
reduction to the minimum required for a meaningful happy life’ (Bonanno, 2009: 6). Not
even the substitution of work with play satisfies Bonanno, because ‘none of that escapes the
essential rules of work seen in terms of the global organization of control’ (8). Traditional
anti-work strategies have mostly been recuperated by capitalism, so they ‘have now become
normal procedures for capital itself ’ (9). Like Zerzan, Bonanno decries alienation (14) while
deeming Marxist ideas useless (27) and criticising the unions for their participation in busi-
ness decisions, whereby they abandon more militant activism and essentially pursue ‘com-
plete social pacification’ (45). Even self-managed co-ops are too peaceful and impotent and
therefore not revolutionary enough (17, 38). ‘So we see that work cannot be abolished pro-
gressively: we need to approach the problem in a destructive manner’ (8). Bonanno mainly
discusses two strategies: sabotage and bank robbery. They are destructive, but not even they
suffice: sabotage cannot destroy the worker identity, and robbery can become a full-time
job – in Bonanno’s experience (as a convicted robber talking to other prison inmates), the
crucial problem is to know what to do with all the money (10–11). So, ‘the essential part
of any project to destroy work is creativity taken to the maximum possible degree’ (10).
Bonanno calls this ‘projectuality’ (‘progettualità’) – having a ‘project in terms of life’, or
rather inventing this project ‘by reflecting upon what one wants to do with one’s life and
finding the necessary means to realise it, without working’ (11). Wolfi Landstreicher (2003)
explains ‘projectuality’ as a prefigurative autonomous direct action that is explicitly aggres-
sive, an ‘active refusal of alienated existence’ and ‘the reappropriation of life’. Referring to
Bonanno, Landstreicher gives a definition: ‘anarchist projectuality is the practical recogni-
tion in one’s life that anarchy is not just an aim for the distant future, an ideal that we hope
to experience in a far away utopia. Much more essentially, it is a way of confronting life and
struggle, a way that puts us at odds with the world as it is. […] When we make the choice to
cease to be a cog, when we make the choice to break the machine rather than continuing to
adjust it, passivity ceases and projectuality begins’.
Arguably, the publications of the CrimethInc. ex-worker’s collective combine such a
projectuality with Black’s ludic revolution. CrimethInc. positions itself at the post-left end
of the anarchists’ spectrum. The root of the collective is anarcho-punk (notably the band
Catharsis). According to Thompson (2004: 109), CrimethInc. ‘began as Brian D[ingledine]’s
personal zine, Inside Front, and began operating as a collective only in 1996’. In Inside Front,
personal accounts of travelling and dropping out are prevalent. Dingledine (1996) explains
why he refuses to work: ‘When I don’t work for them, they don’t get to use my labor to
perpetuate the status quo. When I don’t receive an income from them, I don’t have capital to
give back to them for them to use to perpetuate the status quo. And most of all, my time and
energy are mine to be used to fight against them, rather than to support present conditions’.
Similarly, the later CrimethInc. collective asserts that because it is the combined labour and
consumption of all workers and employees that powers the system, resistance cannot be a
part-time hobby of people who work full-time to maintain it (CrimethInc., 2004: 8). The
revolutionary purpose is not just quitting jobs, but ‘deserting and ultimately destroying the
class system itself. […] a universal rejection of all possible positions within the social order,
in order to create classless communities’. So, CrimethInc.’s class struggle is a struggle against
class as such (9). Consequently, ‘[w]e shouldn’t base our solidarity on shared attributes or
social positions, but on a shared refusal of our roles in the economy’ (CrimethInc., 2011:
250). Instead of dropping out, it would sometimes be better to use the resources of your

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position for revolutionary purposes and interrupt the system in your position until they fire
you (349). ‘Not working is only half the battle, and not the important half, at that. The real
question is what you do instead. […] You only discover what interests you by engaging with
the world, and in capitalist society, employment and consumption can seem like the only
ways to engage. As you cut down on these, replace them immediately with new projects,
with the things you dreamed of doing when you didn’t have a moment free’ (CrimethInc.,
2005: 582). This could be volunteering in community groups (or inventing them), making
a project out of enjoying oneself, learning, exploring, following ideas – and being hap-
pily and proudly unemployed, so as to radicalise the community one comes from (582–3;
cf. CrimethInc., 2004: 9). The CrimethInc. collective criticises (neo)-Marxism for making
­radicals try to look like the mainstream, so as to influence it in revolutionary ways; dropping
out, by contrast, creates many alternative ways of life, thereby challenging the dominant
order (CrimethInc., 2006: 13).
To have energy to fight the system, one needs food, shelter and other resources, of course.
CrimethInc.’s most popular strategy for non-symbolic assaults on the system and no-work
sustenance at the same time is theft from corporations. Shoplifting (as well as dumpster div-
ing and squatting) not only rescues resources, it also gives the feeling of freedom and power;
it is an attack on consumerism, and it is better than boycotting, because it directly harms
the corporations (CrimethInc., 2001: 237–9; cf. Dingledine, 1996). But stealing individually
without revolting will not interrupt the status quo – so stealing should be part of building
community (CrimethInc., 2011: 276, 278). The hope is that fighting and stealing and living
determinedly and desirously might be infectious, so others join in to reclaim the resources
of the society, ultimately leading to transformation (CrimethInc., 2001: 256). The collective
invites the reader: ‘Join us in making the “revolution” a game; a game played for the highest
stakes of all, but a joyous, carefree game nonetheless!’ (192) This sounds quite hedonistic, but
at least in later publications, CrimethInc. does not demand that everything is fun or easy;
fighting work is hard work (CrimethInc., 2011: 38). And in spite of the individualistic  –
­often even Stirnerite – flavour of much CrimethInc. literature, the struggle against work is
one that requires massive support networks and connections between disparate social circles.
These should not be organisations with homogenous membership, but coalitions of ­solidarity
­between anticapitalist people of all walks of life (CrimethInc., 2004: 9).
The basic unit of direct action is the affinity group: ‘the affinity group/cluster/spokescoun-
cil model is simply another incarnation of the communes and workers’ councils that formed
the backbone of earlier successful (however short-lived) anarchist revolutions’ (CrimethInc.,
2005: 31). One can experiment with many formats: ‘a self-defense league, a thieves’ ring, a
secret society for revolutionary consciousness’ (CrimethInc., 2011: 347), ‘a labor union of the
unemployed’ or, more generally, ‘local infrastructures for distributing things people need’
(CrimethInc., 2005: 584, 580; cf. 2004: 9; 2001: 78, 165, 253, 255). ‘It might be that “dropping
out” and “mobilizing the working class” are not opposite revolutionary strategies, after all – so
long as dropout communities stay humble and connected to other sectors of society, they can
contribute to a feedback loop of revolutionary ambition and tactics’ (CrimethInc., 2006: 18).
Like Zerzan, the CrimethInc. collective attacks factories and unions (CrimethInc., 2011:
91–97). The evils of modern society alienate people from each other and the environment
and so make life dull, meaningless and vile. Meaning and pleasure are crippled by cultural
restraints that therefore have to be fought (CrimethInc., 2001: 155). But the collective ap-
pends that the ennui and disorientation of the middle and upper class point to a poverty
inherent of the western lifestyle as such; today’s problems cannot be reduced to class conflict
alone (81). Work is a chief obstacle for the best possible economic security, which is ‘being

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part of a long-term community in which people looked out for each other, a community
based on mutual assistance rather than financial incentives’ (CrimethInc., 2011: 34). Earning
money is very costly: one has to become efficient and compliant, until ‘following orders
becomes an unconscious reflex’ (CrimethInc., 2004: 8). Morally, work is disastrous because
the economic system makes responsibility too expensive – most injustices have been carried
out by employees (CrimethInc., 2011: 35); economically, ‘work makes people poor’ (25); and
psychologically, ‘instead of enabling people to achieve happiness, work fosters the worst kind
of self-denial […] we become commodities’ (31; cf. CrimethInc., 2004: 9).
CrimethInc.’s criticism of work does not ground on high theory, because ‘[t]he idea that
you need a complete understanding of the economy to come to any conclusions about it just serves
to silence people’ (CrimethInc., 2011: 41). So, the collective drafts a simple model of the
economy that categorises the many positions of people in regard to work, all of which have
reasons to despise and fight work: capitalists, exploited, excluded (42). ‘So we all, rich and
poor, must band together to transform our situation’ (CrimethInc., 2001: 81), and ‘[t]his will
take different forms for different individuals, according to the classes they are escaping and
the details of their lives’ (CrimethInc., 2004: 9). Of course, that is too simplistic. But ‘the
point isn’t to be right, but to be dangerous’ (CrimethInc., 2011: 349).

Conclusion
At the anti-work end of the radical spectrum, there are notable differences between ­neo-
Marxists and anarchists. The former rely on the state and its power to redistribute wealth
and organise necessary work. To prevail upon state authorities to carry out anti-work poli-
cies (like a UBI), anti-work neo-Marxists try to change hegemonic public opinion through
theoretical leadership. The anarchists, on the other hand, rely on the direct actions of indi-
viduals and small groups to build networks among themselves without ossifying into formal
organisations; the state is deeply mistrusted. Therefore, anarchist anti-work ­literature is much
more likely to be inflammatory and action-oriented than focused on theoretical coherency.
Politically, there is the possibility of dividing a strong anti-work movement (should such a
one come into existence – at the moment, the resistance is mostly acted out by isolated indi-
viduals and groups and without revolutionary consequences) by granting the n ­ eo-Marxists
some reforms while making the anarchists appear as mindless, extremist ­hooligans. But
the two strands of radicalism offer complementary not contradictory s­ trategies. And most
points of criticism against work (alienation, exploitation, violence, degradation, submission,
etc.) are at the core of both Marxist and anarchist anti-work radicalism. Coalition-building
should be possible, even if serious reservations remain valid.
Ursula McTaggart (2009: 35) makes ‘the scandalous suggestion that socialists should be open
to working with, speaking with, and taking seriously the positions of a­ narcho-primitivists’,
including Bob Black (36); and even, the outspokenly anti-anarchist neo-Marxists Srnicek
and Williams (2015: 163) are open to coalesce with horizontalist (i.e. anarchist) groups when
they assert: ‘The divisions between spontaneous uprisings and organisational longevity,
short-term desires and long-term strategy, have split what should be a broadly consistent
project for building a post-work world’. The anarchists, having negative experiences with
Marxists and in danger yet again of being used as cannon fodder for what is ultimately
another state project, are much more reluctant. But they also build pragmatic coalitions.
Although the Anarchist Federation (2015a), for example, ultimately seeks to abolish work
(3) and is highly critical of unions that ‘become a layer of management with the main task of
controlling our ability to take collective direct action’ (26), it nonetheless advocates mainly

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workplace strategies typical of the classical (if militant) worker movement. Many anarchists
have joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), including David Graeber (2013)
who lambasts ‘bullshit jobs’. The IWW (2017) emphasise that they are neither anarchist nor
non-anarchist, but ‘open to all workers’. The IWW is a union that – not through petition
but through direct action – aims at legislation that significantly cuts the work week (IWW,
2013). This is, expectedly, regarding the constituency, reformist, but at least the Anarchist
Federation (2015b) can grudgingly live with that.
Anti-work is radical because it aims at the radix, the root of exploitation and domination in
capitalism. This is what differentiates anti-work from industrial action: it is not just a fight for
better exploitation (higher wages for the workers) and for a more humane domination (safer
workplaces and friendlier bosses), but for the abolition of work as such. Anti-work is a political
and cultural struggle. As a political struggle, it tries to wrest power from the superiors – this
can become a dirty fight with violence (burning factories, using state authority) and compro-
mise. But as a cultural struggle, it tries to build up new awareness and new practices – and
this can be a beautiful act that inspires revolutionary association and facilitates free creativity.

Notes
1 Nietzsche’s thoughts on work are unsystematically scattered throughout the aphorisms of his mid-
dle creative period. Here, I compiled what I found in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Morgenröthe
and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1999a: 231–2, 234, 299, 312–13, 346, 623–4; 1999b: 173, 329, 408,
556).
2 Obviously, the famous description of life under communism in Marx’s and Engels’s The German
Ideology (‘in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can
become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus
makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning,
fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, with-
out ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic’. Marx and Engels, 2000: 12) has some
similarities to Kropotkin’s mixture of fields, factories and workshops (and, in fact, leisure). But
while for Kropotkin (1998: 197), this vision is ‘already possible, already realisable’ because the
technologies exist and just have to be decentralized (and, of course, expropriated), Marx and En-
gels prefer a centralization of politics and production that makes the ‘withering away’ of the state
very unlikely and a non-dominating industrial management virtually impossible. The difference is
thus that Kropotkin depicts a concrete, immediate goal, whereas Marx and Engels speculate about
a far-future magical land they do not really believe in.
3 At the moment, Hirsch’s book is available in German language only. Therefore, all ­English-language
citations are translations by me.
4 Most of Black’s description fits paid work and domestic labour alike, even if it only refers to the
former. Domestic workers may not have to commute as much, but they, too, are in danger of being
killed in traffic accidents (while going to the mall or the kindergarten) and often use dangerous
substances to forget about their plight. An additional danger for them is abuse by brutal spouses.
5 Here is not the space to discuss the role of work in anarchist (or, in Morris’s case, libertarian so-
cialist) utopias. Suffice it to say that it is expectedly as ambiguous as anarchism’s (and generally,
socialism’s) attitude towards work. In Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), technology has only a
minor role in production; industrialism has yielded to a pastoral agriculture and an artisanal work
that is as fulfilling as art or play. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s first utopia, The Dispossessed (1974), the
anarcho-syndicalist planet Anarres is so barren that industrialist productivism seems to be inevita-
ble; consequently, the struggle for efficiency in the management of work engenders a bureaucracy
that seriously endangers freedom. But in Le Guin’s second utopia, Always Coming Home (1985),
technology has almost been abandoned by the future Stone-Age people Kesh; they do not like
to work and are so lazy that they just eat with spoons – they do not want to clean more cutlery.
And in Chris Carlsson’s After the Deluge (2004), a full system of voluntary work that maintains a
gift economy and frees (almost) everyone from unwanted drudgery or (work-related) alienation is
described.

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 4.2
RADICAL EDUCATION
Emily Charkin and Judith Suissa

Introduction – ‘Politicising’ Education

In March 2003, it was widely reported in the British media that hundreds of school students
had missed classes to take part in the mass rallies taking place across the country against the
US-led invasion of Iraq. Head teachers and education policy officials interviewed in the press
were quoted as condemning the students’ actions, with some head teachers locking the gates
of their schools after they had discovered students leaving the premises during break-time.
The deputy head of Fortismere School, a state comprehensive in North London, where sixty
pupils were found to have left school to attend the rally in central London, was quoted as
saying that he was ‘horrified by the pupils’ actions’ and that ‘It is irresponsible and dangerous
to do this. The organisers are sixth-formers but many of the children who have gone with
them are younger. They should be in school’ (BBC, 2003).
These comments would have been anathema to the radical educators we will consider in
this chapter. While there are significant differences and even tensions between the variants
of radical educational practice that we discuss, what they share – and what makes them, we
argue, ‘radical’ – is both the conceptual starting point from which education, as a social process,
is always, in some sense, ‘political’ and the utopian impulse to challenge and improve upon
dominant social and political values through the creation of educational alternatives. Indeed,
as Brian Simon (1972) notes, the radical tradition in education sees educational change as a
key aspect of radical social change.
It is both challenging and urgent to defend this politically substantive notion of radical
education in the contemporary context.1 As Michael Fielding and Peter Moss, contemporary
advocates of radical education within the state school system, have argued, we are living
under a ‘dictatorship of no alternatives’ and a climate in which ‘the political and ethical have
been drained out of public discourse on education and schools’ (Fielding and Moss, 2011:
1, 21). This nihilism is manifested in policy debates which are dominated by technical ques-
tions about ‘what works’ and ignore moral questions about ‘what matters’.
Even those who are critical of the current schooling system tend to forget that the
near-ubiquitous model of universal state-funded compulsory schooling and the wider polit-
ical structures within which it is constituted are a relatively recent and contested invention
from the second half of the nineteenth century. We have forgotten what Quentin Skinner

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calls the ‘battles behind the apparent certainties’ and are ‘bewitched’ (Skinner, 2002: 6) by
our current educational arrangements. This chapter explores some of what Skinner would
call the ‘different possible worlds’ revealed by radical educational ideas and practices (ibid.).
Radical education is not only neglected but sometimes demonised in an era in which
teachers and schools across Europe and America are under pressure to join a ‘fight against
radicalisation’ under the banner of fighting global terrorism, an ‘anti-radicalisation’ agenda
that, as Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock have forcefully argued, is part and parcel of
the neo-liberal ideology dominating the provision, content and control of schooling in many
Western schools, and that is ‘leading to the abandonment and undermining of the radical tra-
dition in education at precisely the time it is needed most’ (Sukarieh and Tannock, 2016: 3).
This chapter, therefore, seeks to defend an account of radical education which embodies
a set of political commitments to substantive values such as freedom, equality and justice,
and that regards social institutions, amongst them schools, as subject to constant question-
ing, challenges and deep-rooted change in the interests of bringing about a more just, less
oppressive form of social and political life. This account does not imply a simplistic notion
of ­education as a means to bring about political ends, but rather reflects the point that, as
­R ichard Johnson notes, ‘in the political-radical mainstream, politics and education went
together in a complicated web of means-ends relationships’ ( Johnson, 1979: 97).
In the following discussion, we aim to uncover and interrogate some of the ways in which
radical education practices from the past and present continue to challenge some fundamen-
tal ideas about education, politics and social change.
Many of our examples are small, experimental schools and communities set up outside of
and, often, in antithesis to the values and approaches of the state system. However, we rec-
ognise that in certain times and places radicalism has also played out within the state system.
This can occur both at the level of innovation within individual institutions and in wider
campaigns. Examples are the struggle for universal free schooling in a historical context in
which education was often the preserve of a privileged elite, or the comprehensive move-
ment in England in the 1960s, which, as Brian Simon has argued, was originally a ‘grass roots
movement in Britain, the first schools being established in the late 1940s or early 1950s by
certain advanced local authorities in opposition to government policy and advice … a hard
and difficult process, disturbing deeply engrained vested interests, and for some, quite trau-
matic’ (Simon, 2005: 147). The radicalism of these initiatives in their historical contexts can
easily be forgotten as they are co-opted to more conservative and authoritarian agendas and
as the notion of ‘public’ behind a commitment to public educational provision has, in many
Western capitalist states, been eroded.
Many of our examples are drawn from the past, partly because it is more possible to iden-
tify what is radical with historical perspective and partly as a reflection of the hostility of the
current context to radical educational practices. However, we also recognise contemporary
examples of educational spaces where radical practices of alterity and resistance persist – in
spite of – or perhaps partly, as a result of – difficult times.

What is Radical Education?

The aforementioned discussion suggests some important distinctions that will help to clarify
when it makes sense to describe particular educational practices as ‘radical’. One such useful
distinction is that between pedagogy and education. As Robin Alexander notes, commenting
on Brian Simon’s seminal 1981 paper ‘Why No Pedagogy in England?’ (Simon, 1981), the
word ‘pedagogy’ ‘still does not enjoy widespread currency in England’ (Alexander, 2004: 9).

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In contrast to its usage in the continental European tradition, where the term ‘brings to-
gether within one concept the act of teaching and the body of knowledge, argument and
evidence in which it is embedded and by which particular classroom practices are justified’
(Alexander, 2004: 10), when used in English, ‘pedagogy’ has a fairly narrow meaning, ‘to
equate with the practice of teaching’ (ibid.).
‘Education’, on the other hand, is a far broader and, critically, an inherently evaluative
term, encompassing ideas about value and worth, at least in the analytic sense developed
in Richard Peters’ classic account (Peters, 1966), according to which, unlike the case with
related terms such as ‘learning’, ‘training’ or ‘instruction’, it would be conceptually inco-
herent to say that someone had been educated but had not changed for the better. This
analytic distinction is useful as it enables us to clarify why it makes sense to consider certain
educational projects radical, in keeping with a broad definition of radicalism whereby, as Paul
McLaughlin puts it, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, ‘To be radical is to seek (practically
or theoretically) to uncover and uproot the roots, foundations or origins of a problem or a
project’ (McLaughlin, 2012: 19). On this view, to educate someone is necessarily to act with
a certain intention, oriented towards bringing about a desired state of affairs; whereas ped-
agogy, understood as a set of teaching practices, cannot on its own, without this intentional
context, be construed as ‘radical’.
Thus, the radicalism of the tradition of Critical Pedagogy associated most famously with
Paulo Freire consists, in spite of its name, not in a particular set of classroom techniques
and practices. Rather, it is the underlying commitment to challenging oppressive structures
and relationships, and the belief that coming to a consciousness of oppression through edu-
cational encounters can and will lead to a commitment to ending it, which makes Critical
Pedagogy radical. Indeed, while Freire’s work reflects the insight that there is no such thing
as a politically neutral educational process, contemporary theorists and practitioners of crit-
ical pedagogy have repeatedly warned against the danger of reducing Critical Pedagogy to
a technique or a method rather than seeing it as an ongoing political and moral project (see
Giroux, 2013).
The aforementioned analysis can help to understand how it is that in certain times and places,
pedagogical practices, for example participatory styles of teaching, student-led ­project-based
learning or peer assessment, may be labelled ‘radical’ without being truly radical in the political
sense. Likewise, focusing on the pedagogical approaches and practices that often characterise
experimental, alternative forms of education may allow us to lose sight of the political outlook
and motivation behind these alternatives, and thus of what made them radical.
In the contemporary context, we can find examples of innovative pedagogical practices
that are often promoted as ‘radical’ new ways of ‘improving learning’ in their departure from
traditional institutional schooling and classroom pedagogy, such as Ken Robinson’s endorse-
ment of the ‘flipped classroom’ pioneered by online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
provider the Khan Academy, or Sugata Mitra’s proposals for getting rid of traditional class-
rooms and teachers and replacing them with a ‘School in the Cloud’.2 However, these exam-
ples are not radical in the wider political sense in which we explore the term in this chapter.
The flip side of this argument is that many radical educational movements may adopt,
perhaps surprisingly, traditional pedagogical methods and practices. It is an empirical ques-
tion beyond the scope of this chapter whether or not the commitment to radical social
and political changes is enhanced or impeded by particular pedagogical relationships and
practices. However, it is certainly the case that many radical educational movements have at
times used pedagogical practices that on the surface seem fairly conservative. For example,
Rebecca Tarlau documents in her studies of the Landless People’s movement in Brazil how,

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as part of their endeavour to radically change public education in pursuit of a radically differ-
ent social world, activists and educators within the movement occasionally use pedagogical
practices, such as ‘strict discipline, mandatory work schedules and celebrations of socialist
struggles’, which many would regard as morally questionable (Tarlau, 2015: 26). Similarly,
in Summerhill School, one of the most famous radical educational experiments (see below),
while children are free to choose whether or not to attend lessons, the lessons take the form
of fairly traditional teaching of standard curriculum subjects.
We suggest, therefore, that the ‘radical’ nature of radical educational experiments consists
in their underlying commitment to both critiquing the dominant norms, practices, values
and institutions of existing society, and in positing an alternative. The associated pedagogical
practices may or may not be a well-thought-out element of this alternative. As we explore
later, these tensions between pedagogy and political commitment, between means and ends,
and between the posited ideal society and the current social institutions, in which its condi-
tions are created, are reflected in the variety of educational experiments that constitute the
broad tradition of radical education.

Anarchist Education
Educational experiments within the anarchist tradition offer an important challenge to un-
examined assumptions about the role of the state in education and, perhaps, the clearest ex-
amples of how education in schools and communities can be part of a wider vision for social
and economic changes.
In a time when the role of the state in education is taken for granted, we need to remind
ourselves of a radical tradition that dissented from the idea of mass state provision of education
from its earliest days. William Godwin, the early anarchist theorist who wrote of ‘the evils of
national education’ in his 1793 text ‘Enquiry Concerning Political Justice’, argued that

The project of national education ought uniformly to be discouraged on account of its

obvious alliance with national government. […] Before we put so powerful a machine
under the direction of so ambiguous an agent, it behoves us to consider well what it is
that we do. Government will not fail to employ it, to strengthen its hands, and perpet-
uate its institutions [… ]
(Godwin, in Marshall, 1986: 147)

This position, while most closely associated with the anarchists, was also held by J.S. Mill,
the forefather of modern liberal theory, who vehemently opposed the idea of universal state
education, on the grounds that it was ‘a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly
like one another’ (Mill, 1991 [1859]: 117).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this critique of state schooling and of
the state itself – at least the capitalist, hierarchical, militaristic state – translated into the set-
ting up of anarchist schools and communities, most of which were established by educators
and activists affiliated with the movement of social anarchism, the strand of anarchist theory
and practice associated with early socialist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael
Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, who emphasised the values of fraternity, equality and mutual
aid. As historical accounts of these early anarchist schools make clear (see Avrich, 2006;
Smith, 1983), they were generally set up as part of anarchist communities. The work of the
school was an integral element of the daily life of the community, whether through partici-
pation in the self-governing structures and activities of self-sufficient farming communities

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such as Stelton, New Jersey, founded in 1915 (see Avrich, 2006: 241–311) or through serving
as community centres for political activism, adult education and cultural events, such as The
New York Ferrer School, founded in 1911 (see Avrich, 2006: 75–121).
The rejection of the idea of a neutral education as both conceptually incoherent and
­politically dangerous – a position that, as we argued earlier, is a central feature of ­radical
­education – was forcefully articulated by Franciso Ferrer, the founder of the Escuela M
­ oderna
in Barcelona, perhaps the most famous and influential of the anarchist schools (Avrich, 2006).
In 1904, Ferrer declared in the school’s prospectus:

Neutrality in the school can be nothing but hypocrisy … We should not, in the school,
hide the fact that we would awaken in the children a desire for a society of men truly
free and truly equal, a society without violence, without hierarchies, and without priv-
ilege of any sort.
(Ferrer, 1909: 6)

These anarchist schools also allow us to explore and problematise the distinction between
education and pedagogy discussed earlier. It appears that most anarchist schools were charac-
terised by innovative pedagogical practices such as learning-by-doing, student-led learning,
a rejection of traditional student-teacher relationships and the absence of corporal punish-
ment. These practices were often shared with other libertarian and progressive educational
experiments, as we discuss later. However, the impetus behind the adoption of these prac-
tices was not a commitment to libertarian or progressive pedagogy per se, but a political
opposition to the unequally structured, hierarchical capitalist state and the institutional form
of education designed to mould children to fit into and sustain it. One could argue that, in
their rejection of the idea of neutrality in education and their adoption of a substantive cur-
riculum, where children were explicitly taught about the evils of capitalism, militarism and
religious dogma, and encouraged to value solidarity, internationalism and mutual aid, these
early anarchist schools were far from libertarian or child-centred, at least in the sense asso-
ciated with early progressive thinkers such as Rousseau. In fact, Rousseau’s romantic view
of the child was ridiculed by social anarchist thinkers like Bakunin (Suissa, 2006: 10, 28),
not out of any hostility towards child-centred educational practices, but because he rejected
the social ontology behind Rousseau’s position, which assumed a pre-social human nature
rather than the contextual account of human nature developed by the social anarchists (see
Morland, 1997).
One could argue that it is precisely the insistence that human society is ‘the real starting
point of all human civilization and the only medium in which the personality and liberty
of man can really be born and grow’ (Bakunin, in Morris 1993: 87–88) that explains the
anarchists’ support for forms of education that, rather than emphasising the absolute freedom
of the child, emphasise the substantive moral and political values underlying the school as a
microcosm of an alternative society.
The early anarchist schools, such as Sebastien Faure’s La Ruche and Ferrer’s Escuela
Moderna, were committed to the principle of integral education, so that children not only
studied academic subjects but also learned crafts and practical skills – both in the school
workshop and garden, and in visits to factories and laboratories (see Suissa, 2006: 80; Avrich,
2006). These aspects of anarchist education were clearly similar to the wider progressive
movement’s emphasis on ‘learning by doing’, a notion most famously associated with the
work of John Dewey (see Dewey, 1916, 1938). Yet rather than being promoted to provide a
more effective form of learning, their rationale was an explicitly political one. As Kropotkin

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and Bakunin argued, the goal was to ‘raise manual labour to the place of honour it ought
to occupy in society’ and thereby to challenge what they viewed as the pernicious division
between ‘brain work’ and ‘manual work’, which reflected the structural inequalities inher-
ent in the capitalist state (Kropotkin in Ward, 1974: 180). An example of how these political
ideas ran through the curriculum, pedagogy and organisation of these anarchist schools is
given by Robert Louzon (quoted in Smith, 1983: 42) who describes a lesson in arithmetic
based on children’s experience of work in a foundry, where the children were given informa-
tion about the number of employees, their status and their earnings, and then asked to work
out the answers to questions about their yearly average and difference.
These schools were animated by a vision of a society free of the oppressive structures and
institutions of the present. They, therefore, treated the children as the prospective creators
and inhabitants of such a society. Ferrer wrote:

Having practised the coeducation of boys and girls, of rich and poor – having, that is to
say, started from the principle of solidarity and equality – we are not prepared to create
a new inequality. Hence in the Modern School there will be no rewards and no punish-
ments; there will be no examinations to puff up some children with the flattering title
of ‘excellent’ to give others the vulgar title of ‘good’, and make others unhappy with a
consciousness of incapacity and failure.
(Ferrer, 1913: 55)

Here, we see how the rejection of examinations and rewards stems not from an enthusiasm
for a particular pedagogical approach as being more effective at bringing about learning; nor
from any reliance on empirical evidence or psychological theories, but from an avowed com-
mitment to a substantive set of moral and social values that, the social anarchists believed,
could and would underpin and sustain the self-governing libertarian socialist society of the
future. The school was to embody a microcosm of this society, explicitly challenging the un-
derlying values of the current state and offering an alternative through its ethos and daily life.
Although the anarchist society hoped for by these educators has not yet arrived, Paul
Avrich’s research on ex-pupils of anarchist schools in America in the twentieth century does
suggest that ‘the great majority appear to have carried away a strong co-operative and liber-
tarian ethic, a spirit of mutual aid and individual sovereignty which has remained with them
throughout their adult years’ (Avrich, 2006: 385). There are also ongoing anarchist educational
experiments with a similar orientation – in schools, universities, home education groups, adult
education and in wider social movements. For example, the Paideia school in Spain describes
how it ‘is first and foremost a political project; an intervention in capitalist society with the
ambition of contributing to its radical overthrow’.3 Similarly, the Free Skool Santa Cruz, part
of a network of explicitly Anarchist free schools across North America and Canada, describes
itself as ‘a grassroots educational project beyond institutional control’, stating ‘We see Free
Skool as a direct challenge to dominant institutions and hierarchical relationships’.4
In the current climate, the explicit target of the anarchist critique reflected in these exper-
iments is often less the state and its control of educational institutions, and more the pervasive
language and ideology of neo-liberalism and corporate interests that have increasingly come
to characterise the governance and content of education. For example, the recent Antiuni-
versity Now project, started in London in 2015, continues the radical educational positions
embodied in the work of the anarchist theorists and practitioners discussed earlier, in their
commitment to ‘challenge academic and class hierarchy through an open invitation to teach
and learn any subject, in any form, anywhere’.5

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Free Schools in Britain and America

The anarchist educational movement has been closely connected to a wider libertarian and
progressive movement in education which, in the twentieth century, spawned numerous
small, private schools, including the relatively long-lived Summerhill in the Suffolk coun-
tryside in the UK, founded in 1921. Summerhill is perhaps the school most likely to come to
people’s minds as an example of a ‘radical’ educational experiment. However, Summerhill
and other private schools like it sit somewhat uncomfortably with the radical tradition that
regards ‘fundamental social change as a core goal of education’ (Sukarieh and Tannock,
2016: 6) since they do not espouse an explicit political agenda, and charge fees which are
prohibitive for some families.
Summerhill’s founder, A.S. Neill, avoided any overt political or moral messages in Sum-
merhill’s materials and teaching, out of a conviction that ‘If left to himself without adult
suggestion of any kind, [the child] will develop as far as he is capable of developing’ (Neill,
in Lamb, 1992: 9). One could therefore see Neill as subscribing to the view, rejected by the
social anarchists, that there can be such a thing as an education that is politically neutral, and
of endorsing a Rousseauian view of a benign, pre-social human nature. However, one could
also read his insistence on freedom as the only desirable and legitimate form of education or
upbringing as itself a political statement. In other words, Neill can be seen as taking an im-
plicit political position, both in his implementation of democratic practices in the day-to-day
governance and running of the school community, and in his insistence that ‘children must
determine their own values, in culture as in morality’ (Hemmings, 1972: 35). In today’s
political climate, Neill’s insistence that real democracy requires individuals to be granted
the freedom to make their own decisions about their lives, that this kind of freedom has to
be experienced from childhood in order to be realised and that it is the absence or indeed
denial of such genuine freedom to individuals that is responsible for all manner of social ills
can indeed seem politically radical.
A similar perspective is echoed in the statements by the staff and founders of Sudbury
Valley School, founded in 1968 in Massachusetts, USA. Although Sudbury Valley, unlike
Summerhill, is not a boarding school, its creators see it as a community of children and
adults where the emphasis is on providing an environment in which children can ‘develop
the ability to direct their own lives, be accountable for their actions, set priorities, allocate
resources, deal with complex ethical issues, and work with others in a vibrant community’.6
Thus while not advocating a substantive curriculum, and possibly, as we suggested earlier,
being less overtly motivated than early anarchist educators and Critical Pedagogues by the
view of education as a central aspect of radical political change, educators within the free
school movement are nevertheless committed to a participatory view of democracy and
individual liberty. They thus offer a radical challenge to the liberal democratic ideas argu-
ably reflected in and reinforced by dominant forms of state schooling. Like Neill, Sudbury’s
founders believe that

The only way to accustom children to democracy is to practice it […] To take people
you’ve been pushing around for twelve years in the authoritarian environment of tra-
ditional school, and sit them down for fifty minutes of talking about this being a free
country, and what freedom is about, and what their rights are, is laughable.7

Summerhill has also been an inspiration for many other experimental private schools in the
twentieth century. In particular, during the Second World War, a number of schools were

397
 Emily Charkin and Judith Suissa

set up not only as an attempt to provide an alternative education but as a kind of political
response to the horrors of the War. John Aitkenhead, founder of Kilquhanity in Scotland
in 1940, describes how in its early years, teachers were drawn to Kilquhanity as a ‘moral
crusade’ embodied in an ‘international school promoting the arts and eschewing violence’
(Aitkenhead, 1990: 8). In the same year, Kenneth Barnes set up Wennington School in
Yorkshire based on a manifesto which positioned the school as part of the ‘foundations of a
changed and just society within the scope of the common people…’ (Barnes, 1980: 3) and a
stated aim to achieve a ‘classless society’ (Barnes, 1936).
Later in the twentieth century, the Free School Movement in Britain and the USA in the
1960s and 1970s also connected educational experiment to social change. Political radicals,
such as Paul Goodman (1911–1972) and Ivan Illich (1926–2002), argued for the ‘disestablish-
ment’ of schools as part of a wider critique of the ‘schooled’ society (Illich, 1971). They argued
for non-institutional alternatives which would ‘serve personal, creative and autonomous in-
teraction’ such as ‘learning networks’, ‘mini-schools’, ‘store-front schools’, ‘co-operative work
schemes’ and home education. Goodman also argued for an environmental view of education
based on ‘incidental’ learning rather than pedagogy (Goodman, 1970: 1). Therefore, he ar-
gued for wider societal reform since he claimed that contemporary society was ‘deficient in
worth-while goals that could make growing up possible’ (Goodman, 1957: 12).
First Street School (1964–66) is a good example of a ‘mini-school’ developed within this
climate as an explicit attempt to put radical ideas into practice in a deprived area of New
York. It was funded by private donations so that ‘in practice we were a public school, open to
whoever in the neighbourhood cared to come’ (Dennison, 1969: 29). In the journal Anarchy,
Dennison, who was a teacher at the school, positioned the school as an antidote to the ‘dehu-
manization of the public school system’ (Dennison, 1967: 70) with voluntary attendance and
a pedagogy based on ‘reality of encounter’ and the primacy of relationships not of ‘teachers’
and ‘pupils’ but adults and children and children and children (Dennison, 1967: 74). He de-
scribes in some detail the ways in which these relationships were prioritised, for example, the
curriculum at First Street School was ‘talk, talk, talk’, eroding the usual boundaries between
teachers and pupils such that they were involved with the realities of each other’s lives.
Dennison also positioned the school as a small but practical attempt to challenge wider
inequalities and injustices:

Against all that is shoddy and violent and treacherous and emotionally impoverished in
American life, we might propose conventions which were rational and straightforward,
rich both in feeling and thought and which treated individuals with a respect we do little
more at present than proclaim from our public rostrums.
(Dennison, 1969: 7)

As with many radical educational experiments, it was short-lived. The school had to close
after two years due to lack of funding. However, Dennison argued that the school ‘made a
great difference in the lives of some few children’ (Dennison, 1969: 30) – and also with the
parents who, in ‘banding together’ to support the school, developed ‘new relations’ and ‘to
some small extent, turned the neighbourhood in the direction of community’ (Dennison,
1969: 268–9).
The contemporary situation for free schools is a mixed picture. On the one hand, these
kinds of small-scale experiments continue to emerge – albeit sometimes under-the-radar as
part of a growing home education scene. On the other hand, such schools tend to position
themselves as part of an ‘alternative education’ movement, emphasising a more holistic,

398
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child-centred view than that seen as characterising mainstream state schooling, rather than
as part of a radical political movement. These ‘alternative’ schools thus include Montessori
and Rudolph Steiner Schools. Meanwhile, the term ‘free schools’ has been hijacked by the
current UK Conservative government as a term for its new policy to fund schools initiated
by parents and communities and funded by central government and businesses. We have
argued elsewhere that there is nothing ‘free’ about the ‘free schools’ which have so far
been supported and opened under this policy (Charkin, 2011). In fact, they tend to rein-
force the existing purposes and values of mainstream schooling, an inevitable consequence,
­perhaps, of the application and approval process for such schools, which rests entirely with
the ­central government.

Radical Education at Home and in Communities

In the contemporary context, perhaps the most significant and controversial challenge to
state hegemony in education is the increasing numbers of home-educating families, in coun-
tries where home education is legal such as the UK, USA and Australia. In the UK, numbers
are estimated at between 50,000 and 150,000 and in the USA, around 2 million (Kraftl,
2015: 8). Numbers are hard to estimate because home-educated children are, to an ex-
tent, under-the-radar of state monitoring – part of the motivation for some home-educating
families who value this freedom from state control. From a numbers’ point of view, in the
current context, home education represents a far greater challenge to the status quo than
democratic, free or anarchist schools.
Motivation for home education is extremely varied – including families who opt to
home-educate in order to fast-track their children academically or to raise their children
with particular religious values – and can seem anything but radical. However, in many
cases, it can be understood as a contemporary expression of the kinds of radical educational
and political ideas expressed in the small, free schools of the 1960s and 1970s described
­earlier – with an emphasis on higher levels of freedom and control over their own lives for
the children and their families. Helen Lees, Editor of the journal Other Education, has argued
that home education is the ‘greatest anarchist style “people power” scenario relating to ed-
ucation that there is’ and that ‘it is perhaps politically and socially structurally close to the
philosophical underpinning of anarchist education without outwardly declaring anarchist
politics’ (Lees, 2014: 25). Lees’ interviews with home-educating families suggest that while
most parents do not have an explicit political agenda, nevertheless, ‘it takes a certain frame
of mind to go against the grain, to not do what everybody else does’ (Lees, 2014: 98). John
Holt, a champion of home education in America in the 1970s, connected home education to
social change by arguing in the first ever edition of Growing Without Schooling, a newsletter
for home-educating families, that ‘we are putting into practice a nickel-and-dime theory
about social change, which is that important and lasting change always comes slowly, and
only when people change their lives, not just their political beliefs or parties’ (Holt, 1977: 1).
Home education has been criticised by some advocates of radical education, as part of a
wider undermining of the school ‘as a unique and vital public institution’ and an ‘invaluable
site of encounter, exchange and relationships between citizens’ (Fielding and Moss, 2011:
88–89). However, home-educating families can have an explicit commitment to their role
as active citizens in the community and public sphere which underpins and works alongside
their decision to home-educate. The experience of self-organisation can be empowering and
lead to a kind of radicalisation in more political spheres, as Peter Kraftl has described in his
book on the Geographies of Alternative Education. British home educators gathered together to

399
 Emily Charkin and Judith Suissa

lobby parliament about threats to home educators’ freedoms through the Badman Review
in 2009 (Kraftl, 2015: 110). They also take part in political action relating to wider issues
such as refugee camps and environmental issues. Kraftl found that political beliefs ‘bubble
under’ the practices of alternative education and that there is often an ‘implicit influence
of anarchist thinking upon the smallness of scale and interpersonal relations that are key
to many alternative learning spaces’ (Kraftl, 2015: 111–13). Even those families without an
explicit political agenda can tend to be closely connected to their local community (outside
of the school) because local libraries, swimming pools, parks and community spaces act as
important alternatives to school in their weekly routines (Sheffer, 2008, 231).
The practice of home education can also lead to a kind of grassroots collaboration be-
tween families as they actively create spaces to meet their needs. In some ways, these groups
represent a radical alternative to top-down, state provision of children’s education and care.
For example, in the UK, home-educating communities have created groups and spaces such
as the three-days-a-week ‘home education annex’ called A Place to Grow in Stroud ­( Lucas,
2015); the Self Managed Learning College in Brighton; and The Otherwise Club in L ­ ondon,
a community group for home-educating families (Safran in Webster, 2008).8 These places
are shaped by the social and educational needs of the families and children who attend and
are characterised by high levels of parental involvement, mixed age groups, freedom from
state inspection, democratic or ‘community’ meetings, children setting their own projects
and goals, and use of domestic or community spaces.
Ian Cunningham, who founded the Self Managed Learning College, explicitly posi-
tions its work as part of a tradition inspired by primitive hunter-gatherer anarchies and
­K ropotkin’s Mutual Aid. He argues that ‘democratic education needs to be based on the more
natural processes of living that we humans need rather than how democracy has evolved at
the macro political level…it is not about replicating nation state processes and structures.
It has to be emancipatory and liberatory’ (Cunningham, 2011: 1). In practice, the children
and adults are part of non-hierarchical learning groups and a regular morning meeting. He
contrasts the values embodied in these structures of the learning centre with a more indi-
vidualistic direction of travel in wider society, exemplified by ‘fashionable’ classes such as
‘mindfulness’ (Cunningham, 2016).
Home education, as reflected in government ambivalence and/or hostility in some coun-
tries, represents a growing challenge to the hegemony of state provision and control. While
we acknowledge the tensions posed by home education around issues to do with parents’
rights and the rights and interests of children (see Reich, 2002), we would argue for regard-
ing the practice as potentially ‘radical’ in the sense that it can represent a challenge to dom-
inant social and political structures and institutions.

Radical Education within the State

The anarchist, small-scale free schools and home education groups described earlier all
position themselves very clearly outside of the state and often claim that they could not
survive within it. However, neither the mere fact of their removal from state control nor
their rejection of the curriculum or pedagogical practices that characterise state schooling
renders educational alternatives ‘radical’. For example, the independent school sector in
England comprises many institutions which, while free to experiment with a range of
pedagogical approaches and innovative curricular design, do nothing to challenge and,
it could be argued, even reinforce the hegemonic ideology of the capitalist state. And
the American radical educator Jonathan Kozol argued in the 1970s that even supposedly

400
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progressive schools operating outside of the state sector were a ‘dangerous and dishearten-
ing phenomenon’ which ignored or even reinforced inequalities and structures of oppres-
sion (Kozol, 1972: 10).
Whether or not radical education, as part of a broader goal for radical social change,
requires a total disengagement from the institutional form of (state) public education is an
open question, and one which is, in fact, reflected in the tensions and shifts within some
radical social movements themselves. Thus, Rebecca Tarlau has documented how the Land-
less People’s Movement (MST) in Brazil underwent a shift in their position in the late 1990s
when, having initially invested their educational energies into setting up informal, popular
education projects as an alternative to the public school system, they ‘began to realize that
transforming public schools was necessary for the movement’s social and political goals’.
As Tarlau points out, the activism of the MST within public schooling in Brazil, through
teacher training programmes for example, not only led to changes in curricula and peda-
gogical practice that enabled the inclusion of children from marginalised communities into
the public school system, thus meeting some of their political demands for recognition, but
also shifted the debate about the very nature of public education in society (Tarlau, 2015: 6).
The history of radical education in Britain contains significant examples of radical ideas
and practice within the state sector, such as Braehead (1957–68), St-George’s-in-the-East
(1945–55), Prestolee (1919–52), Risinghill (1960–65) and Stantonbury (1974–). In these ex-
amples, the daily life of the school constituted an attempt to challenge the dominant social
values of competitiveness, hierarchies and individualism and to enact a more participatory,
democratic and collegial form of social interaction. In practice, these schools went against
the practices of mainstream schooling and the expectations of parents and teachers by avoid-
ing corporal punishment and competition. Instead, they sought, as Bloom, head teacher
of St George’s put it, the making of a ‘consciously democratic community’ (Bloom, 1948:
120–1) in which the children would learn to ‘live creatively not for themselves alone, but also
for their community’ (Bloom, 1949: 170).
The head teachers at these schools saw their work as part of a wider campaign for social
change. As Mackenzie, head of Braehead (1957–68) and Summerhill Academy (1969–74),
secondary schools in Scotland, wrote: ‘if you are going to create a new society, it is in the
schools that you must begin’ (Mackenzie, 1970: 14). He argued that ‘it is the task of the
Left, in education as in politics, to win freedom in the battle against the authoritarians’
­(Mackenzie, 1977). Bloom’s wider aim was for children and adults to experience and practice
‘just relationships with persons’ (1952: 142, 136) and O’Neill in Prestolee sought to create a
space in which ‘pupils otherwise destined for a life in manufacturing, were encouraged to see
beyond their immediate horizons’ (quoted in Burke and Dudek, 2010: 204).
These historical examples demonstrate, as Bloom argued at the time, that working
within the state has its ‘limitations’ but that ‘progressive education is possible’ (Bloom,
1949: 170). Even today, Michael Fielding argues that these historical examples, albeit few
and far between, allow the radical movement to ‘contest the dictatorship of no alternatives’
(2011: 1) and ‘insist on the practical possibility of another reality, of living life as it might
be’ (2011: 2–3).
In short, to the extent that radical educational practices are integral to radically differ-
ent visions of what society can look like, it is possible – although arguably more and more
difficult within the current instrumental, competitive and centrally controlled schooling
regime that characterises most capitalist states – to enact such radical practices even within
schools provided by and controlled by the state. This is because, as John Yandell and Adam
Unwin put it in their book, ‘despite the best efforts of neo-liberalism, classrooms – all

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classrooms  – remain extraordinarily complex places [and] places where work gets done,
where transformations happen’ (Unwin and Yandell, 2016: 137–8).
Many radical educators working within the state education system, especially in the field
of social justice education and antiracist education, identify with the Freirian tradition of
Critical Pedagogy which, understood as a political project rather than a set of classroom
practices (see above), has clear affinities with the radical movements discussed earlier. Al-
though Freire’s original educational practice and theory was developed not within schools
but with adults in community settings outside the school system (Freire, 1970), the theory
and practice of critical pedagogy, developed both by Freire himself and by theorists and
educators who brought his work into a North American and European context, have been
hugely influential as part of a movement of radical education that is often most prominent
within the public school system. Proponents such as Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe have
argued for defending the radical democratic potential of schools and for teachers’ role as
‘transformative intellectuals’ (Giroux, 1988; Kincheloe, 2004) challenging, through their
work in classrooms, the hegemonic values and discourses of contemporary capitalist society.

The Future of Radical Education?

Our account of radical education has emphasised the common underpinning view that rad-
ical social change is both desirable and possible, and that educational processes are never
neutral. The critical and utopian flavour of the type of experiments in alternative educa-
tional provision that we have described briefly here is captured in Paulo Freire’s remark that
‘[p]rophetic thought, which is also utopian, implies denouncing how we are living and
­announcing how we could live. It is, for this very reason, a hope-filled form of thought’
(Freire, 2004, 105). Possibilities for such denouncing and announcing, and the gradual
­political transformations that they open up, can happen, as our discussion has illustrated, in
all sorts of pedagogical practices, spaces and relationships.
To the extent that critical teachers in inner-city schools, social movement activists, youth
workers, home-schooling communities and practitioners in democratic schools and learning
centres are all engaged in creating pedagogical spaces in which to question, challenge and
critique dominant ideas about individual flourishing, social institutions and political systems,
and to explore possibilities of creating something better in the interests of human freedom,
equality and dignity, they should be recognised and supported as part of an important and
long tradition of radical education.
In an era of universal state schooling, radical educational experiments and projects have
been characterised by a set of inescapable tensions: between the demand for equal access to
knowledge and education and the critique of state control of educational provision and dom-
inant conceptions of knowledge; between the demand for greater democratic participation
and strengthening of local democratic control of education, and the enthusiasm for small,
private experiments in democratic education outside the state sector; between the commit-
ment to the values of individual autonomy and freedom and the promotion of a substantive
curriculum; and the related tension between a rejection of all forms of domination and an
espousal of a form of pedagogical authority between adults and children.
Our discussion of historical and contemporary examples of radical education has explored
the ways radical educators embodied and navigated some of these tensions, problematising
the assumption that there can be such thing as neutral educational provision. Above all, these
examples remind us how educational experiences and processes reflect political ideas about
what society is and what it could be.

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Notes
1 Most of the examples we discuss here are taken from a Western context. We are aware of the lim-
itations of this perspective, but our analysis is largely based on the historical and political contexts
of Western models of universal state education, and our examples reflect this context.
2 www.khanacademy.org/, accessed on 31st October 2016, www.theschoolinthecloud.org/, ac-
cessed on 31st October 2016.
3 http://autonomies.org/ru/2015/03/anarchy-in-the-school-escuela-libre-paideia/, accessed on 31st
October 2016.
4 see http://santacruz.freeskool.org/content/list-other-free-skools-north-america, accessed on 31st
October 2016, http://santacruz.freeskool.org/content/about-free-skool-santa-cruz, accessed on
31st October 2016.
5 http://antiuniversity.org/, accessed on 31st October 2016.
6 from www.sudval.org/essays/082016.shtml.
7 www.sudval.org/essays/082016.shtml, accessed on 31st October 2016.
8 http://college.selfmanagedlearning.org/.

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 4.3
THE POLITICS OF
DUMPSTERED SOUP
Food Not Bombs and the Limits of
Decommodifying Food

Sean Parson

Most people that I have met have a knee jerk reaction to dumpstered food.1 In graduate
school, I regularly dumpstered food – for both political and survival reasons – and whenever
I told a colleague that I had done so, they expressed disgust. From their perspective, the food,
by being thrown away, had transformed from food to waste. In effect, they defined food as
acceptable based entirely on where the food was procured: food that was purchased was good
and healthy (especially if it was from the organic grocery store), while dumpstered food (even
the dumpster from that same organic food store they loved) was tainted. Undergirding their
logic around food was the ideology of contemporary consumer capitalism, and clearly the
more money food cost, the better it is.
Alex Barnard in his book Freegans: Diving into the Wealth of Food Waste in America refers to
the thrown away produce gleaned from dumpsters as ex-commodities (Barnard, 2016). This
idea of ex-commodity, which will be discussed in more detail later, helps understand the
intense reaction from the public to the eating of dumpstered food. To Barnard, ‘the hysteri-
cal response most people have to the idea of eating ex-commodified food – fears that are far
quite removed from the real risks involved – illustrate how, under advanced capitalism, we
have come to equate all “waste” with “pollution”’ (Barnard, 2016: 21). The idea of disgust
being linked to waste goes much deeper though, as Silvia Federici showed in her discussion
on the role that manners played in the development of capitalism. She wrote: ‘Many prac-
tices began to appearing daily life to signal the deep transformation occurring…The body
began to inspire fear and repugnance’ (Federici, 2014: 153). During the period, the politics
of bodily practices – eating, procreating and excretion – became unseemly and, somehow,
unnatural. Chad Lavin in Eating Anxiety expands on this notion highlighting that we, in
society, produce ideological apparatus that regulate our relationship to food and also help
us define the political values and assumptions we make about the world (Lavin, 2013). The
ideas of waste and disgust are socially constructed terms that cannot be viewed outside of
the context of social power and ideology. Likewise, the resistance to these social norms and
policies emerges from and is embedded within the same network of meaning.
In this chapter, I am going to engage with the politics of dumpstered food while ex-
ploring the ability of Food Not Bombs, an anarchist homeless food organisation that serves
vegetarian dumpstered food for free for all who are hungry, to ‘decommodify food’. This

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chapter begins with a historical and theoretical exploration of the commodification of food
before engaging with the concept of the ex-commodity. Following that, I will provide an
overview of Food Not Bombs and then examine the ways that the network of group uses
the ex-commodity as part of a broader politics of decommodifying food undermining the
capitalist food system.

The Commodification of Food

Radical environmentalist and eco-anarchists have, historically, focused intensively on the
process of farming around 10,000 years ago. In the common eco-anarchist reading of this
process, which they borrow heavily from Rousseau (1992), the development of agriculture
began a process of centralisation that was essential for the development of the state. Agricul-
ture, in effect, shifted traditional gatherer-hunter and village societies into sedentary-state
structures around hierarchies, inequalities and domination. For instance, Rousseau famously
wrote, in his essay Discourse on Inequality, that

The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this
is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil
society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race
have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out
to his fellow men: ‘Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits
of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’
(Rousseau & Cress, 1992)

Agriculture, here, is linked with property and led to the end of natural equality and the
development of social inequality. We damned ourselves when we planted that first fenced
in field. But Rousseau is not alone. Anarchist Murray Bookchin in The Ecology of Freedom
argued that with agriculture emerged domination and from there increasing social divisions
of labour led to the rise of priestly and military classes (Bookchin, 2005). In effect, the state
emerged from the inequality developed by the agricultural revolution. Similarly, to the cha-
grin of Bookchin, Anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan also critiques agriculture, and the pro-
cess of plant domestication (as well as the earlier development of representational thought) as
being a big shift in human society, a shift that has led to lead to ecological, social and political
collapse (Zerzan, 1999, 2012). If eco-anarchists are correct, then focusing on the process of
farming and food production provides valuable insights into the dehumanising and destruc-
tive aspects of contemporary society.
A commodity, according to Karl Marx, is any product that has both exchange and use
value. By use value, Marx merely meant that a product provides a certain level of joy and
happiness for the person who consumes or uses it. By exchange value, he means that the
product can be traded for a certain number of other goods. This second form, the exchange
value, is the most important aspect of the capitalist economy, and cannot exist without
the development of a market system. Throughout human history, not all products were
commodities as there were times when goods were not traded or sold at high numbers.
According to David Graeber, the primary economic relation between humans prior to the
development of hierarchal state structures was the gift economy. In a gift economy, people
trade and exchange and share goods as gifts, not as bartered objects (Graeber, 2011). In many
ways, this early gift economy resembled aspects of Marx’s famous mantra for communism
‘from each according to ability to each according to need’. This early system of shared goods

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developed close-knit societies and limited social and economic hierarchies. To Marx, and
most radical thinkers, the early communisms of humans needed to be destroyed and broken
in order to allow the development of markets, commodities and with it the accumulation of
capital and wealth.
Agriculture led to a boom in human population globally, and concentrated people
within certain areas. The growth in a dense human population and the hierarchies that
developed between farmers, owners and skilled labourers was central to the production of
the earliest civilizations. Describing this history, Fredy Perlman gives a mythopoetic ac-
count of the state-Leviathan, the mythical monster of biblical and Hobbesian imagination.
To Perlman, these sedentary and hierarchal war machines conquered the hunter-gatherer
and nomadic peoples in the region developing larger and larger civilizational structures. In
this way, both war and agriculture were linked in the first instances of massive colonisa-
tion (Perlman, 2010). But even though food was an essential aspect of the developing state
system, it was not yet a commodity because farmers often produced their own food, often
being required to give up a percentage of what they grew as a tribute to the master. Since
a large percentage of people at that time were involved in food production, this meant that
most people produced their own food needs via a subsistence process, and often traded
and shared excess food in a gift or barter system. At the core of these earlier food regimes
were farmers producing food for their own need, or for the food’s use value, and not for
the exchange value. The development of a food regime based primarily on exchange value
only developed with the rise of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As
feudalism in Europe died and commons were enclosed, a massive influx of new labour filled
the cities and laboured in the growing factory economy. In a dance between population
growth, scientific discovery and economic need, over time production was mechanised and
industrialised in the city and lagging slowly behind the urban industrialisation was agricul-
tural and food production.
Since the development of industrial capitalism, there are a handful of different food re-
gimes that the core western capitalist nations have passed through, from the early slave la-
bour system of the early North and South American economy to the neo-liberal food regime
that we currently exist within (McMichael, 2009; Pritchard, Dixon, Hull, & Choithani,
2016). Each of these regimes expresses a period in which there was a stable connection and
relationship between capital, labour and food production. Each followed, or mirrored, the
overall trend of capitalist development. The most massive transitions in food economy and
politics happened during the Second World War in the US, when centralised development
and planning were essential to maintain the food production needed to feed soldiers during
the war. The result was full industrialisation of the food system: the seed production, the
watering and maintaining of crops, the production and raising of animals, the harvesting of
crops and the slaughter of animals, and the production networks (Fitzgerald, 2003). From
this moment onwards, nearly every aspect of contemporary food production was structured
to maximise efficiency and exchange value and with that the concentration of food pro-
duction into large corporate hand. The result is that factory farming dominates the poultry
(72%), egg (42%) and pork (55%) markets and four large corporations control over 75% of the
global grain market. The massive economic power of corporate industrialised food produc-
tion has shaped the global production of food, even at the local level as smaller or local farms
are primarily linked to a larger global commodity market that structures and constrains their
own behaviour, which is why local food, farmers’ markets and niche ethical markets have
become some of the only means for small local farms to compete. These niches are not a
critique of the commodity form of food but are, instead, a symptom of it.

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If eco-anarchists are correct and that the production of food played a central role in the
development of sedentary societies, and with it the state and, later, capitalism, then contem-
porary radical activists and thinkers need to engage with the current food regime and work
to undermine the logic of capitalist food production. The next few sections are attempts to
do just that, while focusing on the food political project of Food Not Bombs.

The Ex-commodity and Decommodified Food

Alex Barnard referred to the food dumpstered by Freegans, a person who attempts to limit
the negative impact of their food consumption by procuring most of their food from dump-
sters or urban foraging, and Food Not Bombs activists as ex-commodities. To Barnard, this
produce and canned food are ex-commodities because they tend to be otherwise healthy and
safe food products that are thrown away for a range of reasons – from fruits and vegetables
with unsightly blemishes, to food being past its premature ‘sell by date’, to a loop hole in the
tax plan that allows stores to get tax credits for food waste. What this means is that the food
that is often grabbed from the dumpsters hidden behind grocery stores throughout the coun-
try is, for the most part, no different from the commodified food inside the store (Barnard,
2016: 13–14). The commodified food in the store was created due to its exchange value (the
amount that a product makes in exchange for another) and not its use value (how much value
people get out of consuming or using the good) in order to maximise the capitalists’ profits.
As Barnard highlights, Marx in Capital vol.1 argued that capitalism is a ruthless efficient sys-
tem that attempts to squeeze as much surplus labour out of the workers and the machines at
their disposal by cutting wasted time and standardising the process. But as Marx in Capital
vol. 3 started to realise, as capitalism increases its efficiency and cuts wages, there becomes a
crisis of overproduction as more is produced than can be consumed. This is, generally the
problem that currently exists within modern capitalism.
The throwing away of food, for Barnard, becomes one of ways that modern food pro-
duction keeps the price of food elevated enough to make a profit. In a sense, the donation
of some food allows for the creation of an artificial exchange value that allows for increased
capitalist profits. In addition to just throwing away food, agricultural corporations have
used changes in law to commodify donation food and recuperate profit while keeping prices
elevated. The tax code changes and federal Good Samaritan laws passed during the 1970s
allowed corporations to donate unused food for tax breaks (Poppendieck, 1999). Corporate
food producers benefited from surplus food stocks as a result, because it allowed them to
construct a new economic market to be formed around the disposal of food. The mas-
sive food bank storage centres, distribution networks and transportation systems that have
emerged in the wake of the legislation make this evident. These networks, as examined by
George Henderson, are essential by-products of capitalism’s need to develop an exchange
value for discarded food – allowing wealth accumulation to exist even with their waste.
The problem is that

…individual firms or enterprises—lets say, food producers and sellers—accumulate a

surplus of commodities that cannot be gotten rid of through normal channels of com-
modification without devaluing a portion of their remaining commodities…With the
rise of food banking since the 1980s, a so-called secondary market has arisen through
which food producers and sellers can recoup some value from the devalued surplus by
selling it off at a discount to food bankers.
(Henderson, 2004: 491–2)

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Thus, by finding a financially viable alternative to their waste food, capitalists can keep their
‘marketable food’ at inflated prices. In effect, food producers constructed a new market to
dump their surplus products. This expanded network, especially with the increased federal
funding to support it, acted as a backdoor profit-making process for large agricultural and
food-producing corporations.
Modern food capitalism keeps prices elevated through, in part, a two-pronged approach
of disposing of and donating food. This process is an intentional plan to offset the crisis
of overproduction that currently exists within the food system. Throwing the food away
allows for them to keep an artificial scarcity and the donation allows them to receive tax
breaks and credits, and therefore recuperate additional economic gain out of a small subset
of the food they plan to dispose. If, on the contrary, all wasted food was provided for free to
those who are hungry, so argues the actions of Food Not Bombs make, the entire logic of
the commodity food market would be put into crises leading to the potential to shift food
from, rhetorically and morally, being a commodity to being a right. How do they do this? In
my experience working with many Food Not Bombs chapters, most of the chapters engage
in the following process: a few days before the weekly meal service, activists with the local
chapter organise either bike brigades to dumpster produce from local grocery stores and bak-
ers or send people to local groceries to grab donations. The food is usually stored at a central
meeting place – often an activist’s house but sometimes a community centre – where, on the
day the meal is going to happen, activists meet up, democratically decide which vegetarian
dishes are going to be made and then cook them together. Following that, activists transport
the food to a local park by either bike or car, and set up a free picnic where hungry people
line up to grab food, and eat with the activists.
When it comes to food politics, the dumpstering project of Food Not Bombs can be seen
as an attempt to radically decommodify the entire food system by providing an alternative
narrative, and practice, of democratically and freely produced and distributed food. This net-
work, as the next section will show, attempts to undermine the commodity logic of food by
providing ‘ex-commodities’ for free to all those who are hungry. By turning what capitalism
calls waste into health and nutritious food, Food Not Bombs, attempts to alter the relation-
ship people have with food – moving that relationship away from market relationships.

Not Feeding the Revolution? A Short History of Food Not Bombs

Food Not Bombs formed out of the antinuclear movement of the 1980s and linked hunger,
the violence of structural poverty, with the bloated military budget and militaristic culture
in the US. The group, which started in Boston, developed and grew into a network or or-
ganisations throughout the 1980s and 1990s, partially due to increased media presence, and
the development of a radical and large chapter in San Francisco, who regularly conflicted
with the City of San Francisco from 1988 to 1995. During this period, which spanned two
mayoral administrations, over 1,000 activists were cited or arrested for distributing food
without a permit, violating a court injunction or resisting arrest. The media attention helped
the network develop and grow and by the end of the decade, Food Not Bombs had around
400 chapters throughout the world.
It was also during the 1990s that Food Not Bombs networked its politics beyond the
­antinuclear and peace movements to the broader anarchist and social justice movement.
During this time, Food Not Bombs meals became commonplace at protests in the US. In
North America, Food Not Bombs chapters worked together in 1999 to coordinate food ser-
vices for the WTO protest in Seattle, and the iconic image of a clenched fist holding a carrot

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 Sean Parson

has been seen in nearly every major left-wing protest since, including the massive protests
opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the public occupations of parks during the
Occupy movement. The wide-ranging roots of resistance that Food Not Bombs has watered
have been referred to by Richard Day as typifying the politics of ‘groundless solidarity’ (Day,
2005).
During the 1990s, Food Not Bombs also became associated with contemporary ­anarchism,
and is now one of the most recognisable anarchist groups in the world. While originally the
group was not explicitly anarchist, these tendencies thrived during their early years p­ artially
because of the influence and importance of anarchist principles within the ­antinuclear move-
ment out of which they developed (Epstein, 1991). The San Francisco chapter, which had
large numbers of anarchist organisers, as well as strong connections with the underground
punk scene in the Bay area, helped develop this connection. Chris Crass, a San Francisco
Food Not Bombs organiser from 1993 to 2000, most succinctly highlighted the connec-
tion between them and anarchism in his short but influential article ­‘Non-Violence and
Anarchism’:

Anarchism is movement for a society in which the violence of racism, sexism, homopho-
bia, capitalism, and coercion are removed from our daily lives. Anarchism is the belief in
a world without war and economic poverty. Anarchism is a philosophy and movement
working to build cooperative, egalitarian human relationships and social structures that
promote mutual aid, radical democratic control of political and economic decisions, and
ecological sustainability. So how does this apply directly to FNB?
(Crass, 1995)

In answering the latter question, Crass argues that the principles of Food Not Bombs
­(nonviolence, animal rights, consensus and direct action) are all explicitly anarchist prin-
ciples. He asserts that even though anarchism is often misunderstood in public debates, the
group should explicitly view itself as part of this wider movement. This article was widely
circulated and has become influential in Food Not Bombs and anarchist circles.
In embracing nonviolence, Food Not Bombs has constantly contrasted their politics
with the institutional and structural violence of neo-liberalism and austerity politics. As
co-founders, Keith McHenry and C.T. Butler stated

Globally, we continue to spend more time and resources developing, using, and threat-
ening to use weapons of massive human and planetary destruction than on nurturing
and celebrating life. By spending this money on bombs instead of food, our government
perpetuates and exacerbates poverty’s violence by not providing food for everyone in
need.
(Bulter & McHenry, 1992: 72)

As this quote shows, Food Not Bombs understands poverty as a form of structural violence.
While the violence of poverty is not as spectacular as bombs and bullets, it is just as horrific
in its impact. Thus, poverty, hunger and gentrification are seen as topics that any nonviolent
movement must confront.
Our current food and economic system does not just perpetuate violence against hu-
mans, the commodification of food causes enormous violence to non-human animals and
the natural world. As David Nibert (2002) persuasively shows, our current economic and
social system has institutionalised violence against non-humans, following the logic of

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violence that occurs with all oppressive relationships, naturalises and justifies this repres-
sion. To Nibert and others within the animal rights community, non-humans experience
extreme violence in nearly all aspects of their lives – from the forcible separation of chil-
dren and mothers to the horrific treatment they receive during their lives, to their eventual
slaughter. Food Not Bombs, by typically serving only vegan or vegetarian food, is taking
a strong stance against the violence needed to ensure that meat, dairy and eggs arrive on
our plates.

Food Not Bombs and the Act of Food Resistance

The last section on Food Not Bombs’ history and the aforementioned description combined
highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of the Food Not Bombs project when it comes
to the goal of confronting the capitalist food system. Food Not Bombs provides a radically
unique food relief and homeless support programme, one that actively engages in, at least,
four incredible important practices. First, Food Not Bombs actively works to undermine
the distinction between volunteer and client that is central to most charity organisations by
sharing food, having many homeless activists involved in the group and setting up a more
communal space. Second, they emphasise democratic practice, and view cooking and serv-
ing food as a collective and social process. Third, it is the way that they use as few purchased
foods as possible, trying to make everything out of ‘ex-commodified’ food both to lower
costs and to provide a powerful form of ‘propaganda by the deed’. Fourth, activists with
Food Not Bombs work to cook only vegetarian meals (with the exception, in my experi-
ence, of the salmon not bombs chapter organised in Fairbanks, Alaska during the Occupy
protests, which was also a decolonial response to both western veganism and anarchism)
for both health concerns – vegan food is less likely to go bad in a hot dumpster – and for
political reasons – as the production of meat, dairy and eggs requires a large amount of vio-
lence. In effect, Food Not Bombs provides a democratic, solidaristic, supportive service that
exemplifies the vision of mutual aid. Finally, Food Not Bombs queers the line between the
public and private spheres by providing free public meals (as well as working to defend pub-
lic encampments) in public space. As Kathleen Arnold (2004) and Leonard Feldman (2006)
both noted, the private/public divide is essential to the logic of the liberal political subject.
Food Not Bombs defends the homeless, who, due to their status, have to engage in private
behaviour – eating, sleeping, drinking, intimate relationships, urinating and defecating – in
public spaces – parks or sidewalks.
That said, there are serious limitations to their approach taken by Food Not Bombs when
it comes to confronting the reality of the commodified food system. First off, and most
clearly, the scale and scope of commodity food are too large for any form of localised grass-
roots politics to threaten it. The food system is now a global corporate network that has been
expanded and defended through the process of neo-liberal economic globalisation. There
has also been a process of recuperation in which larger agricultural corporations have pur-
chased and hidden their involvement in ‘niche’ food markets such as vegan foods, natural and
organic foods, and the like (see Alkon & Agyeman, 2011; Alkon, 2012; Patel, 2012). In many
instances, when it comes to exploitation of animals and labour, local and non-corporate
farms have had to borrow and use the industrial process used by their larger cousins, mean-
ing that even some local food production is not necessarily better in practice. This is why
Ryan Gunderson correctly argues that local food movements, ethical consumerism and other
attempts at alternative food networks are limited in their ability to enact the change they
wish to see (Gunderson, 2014). At best, Gunderson argues, local experiments in alternative

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 Sean Parson

food distribution systems – like Food Not Bombs – provide a symbolic boon, showing that
alternatives to capitalist food distribution are, in fact, possible. However,

small-scale alternative food projects, creation of niche markets, and the adjustment of
some individual consumptive habits are certainly not enough to create an ecologically
sustainable and socially just food system. For sustainable food production to free itself
from alternative status and to become the norm, a total restructuring of our current
social formation may be needed due to the constraints of capitalism outlined above.
(Gunderson, 2014)

In a similar way, Food Not Bombs provides a symbolic example of an alternative institution
but much like the commune movement, and other attempts at alternative institutions, the
impact tends to be relatively localised.
Secondly, there is a core tension within Food Not Bombs between providing as much
food for free as it can and confrontation and conflicts with dominant institutions. Often
times, these two desires are mutually exclusive, as direct conflicts with the state limit the
effectiveness and ability of local chapters to provide food, but not always. For instance,
during the height of the conflict between Food Not Bombs and San Francisco, the chapter
was still providing free meals twice daily – an amount which, since the conflicts ended,
it has not been able to emulate. More times than not though Food Not Bombs chapters
attempt to limit their conflict with the state and engage in what Olin Wright calls inter-
stitial politics. Interstitial politics looks to build resistance institutions within the cracks
of the dominant order effectively building a new world in the shell of the old. At its best,
the interstitial approach allows for institutions and counter, dual power structures, to
develop but more is needed for social transformation; there is a need for conflict with
the dominant institutions, what Wright calls ruptural (Wright, 2010). The balance be-
tween Interstitial and ruptural is a constant problem for local Food Not Bombs chapters
and often, the conflicts that do emerge are not the result of Food Not Bombs actions but
government crackdowns.
Third, the political project of Food Not Bombs can best be seen as part of what Don
Mitchell and Nik Heynon call ‘geographies of survival’. Geographies of survival are complex,
and sometimes illegal, practices that the poor need to survive. This can include dumpstering,
squatting, petty theft, public encampments, foraging, recycling, public transit loitering, etc.
(Mitchell & Heynen, 2009). For many urban homeless residents, Food Not Bombs is another
spot in a large archipelago of survival that they often traverse on a daily basis. Unlike many
of the other islands in this archipelago, Food Not Bombs is openly political, providing cri-
tiques of local politics, capitalism and militarism. What is less known is how well the groups’
political values and messages lead to a process of empowering and radicalising of homeless
residents. In my own experience, many of the people who come to meals, while generally
enjoying the meal, conversation and politics of the local chapter, do not leave with radically
different political views then when they first came nor are they more likely to become politi-
cal organisers or agitators. If the politics of Food Not Bombs does not radicalise and organise
the homeless what do they do?
According to a homeless San Francisco critique of Food Not Bombs in the 1990s, Geof-
frey McDonald

This is supposed to be empowering. In truth, the relationship of homeless individuals to

the group is parasitic. It could hardly be otherwise: for the homeless, life is a desperate

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 The Politics of Dumpstered Soup

scramble to stay alive. While there is nothing radicalising about their misery, for FNB
activists, identification with the plight of the homeless is a source of righteousness.
(McDonald, n.d.-a)

This critique, that Food Not Bombs actions satiate the desires of middle-class activists to
appear altruistic by feeding the homeless, is in my estimation too harsh (as many Food Not
Bombs activists are homeless or formerly homeless).Yet it prompts an important and provoc-
ative question: do the actions of Food Not Bombs constitute a radical critique of capital via
the process of decommodification or is this work part of an ethical politics, similar to the
‘bourgeois socialism’ Marx and Engels critiqued in the Communist Manifesto?
Finally, one can critique the priority that Food Not Bombs gives to the process of
distribution over production. By focusing on taking ex-commodities and distributing
them through a gift economy, Food Not Bombs attempts to undermine the entire logic
of ‘food as commodity’ by showing that it can be distributed for free, and that via waste
alone, capitalism provides enough to feed the hungry. But if we think of the capitalist
food system as largely dependent on the exploitation of labour – throughout the process –
is expropriating the waste a logic process to undermine this system? Once again, Food
Not Bombs critic Geoffrey McDonald writes that while it is true that a massive amount
of food goes to waste

… The problem of hunger in the United States--like that of homelessness--is not re-
ducible to distribution of the surplus; it is a logical consequence of the profit system
itself. Food that cannot be sold at a profit is a loss for the capitalist, whether large-scale
or small. The real surplus that capitalism generates is in labor, that is, in people who are
unable to sell themselves to the rich and thus can’t purchase the means of survival. The
homeless, as Peter Marcuse put it, are ‘the surplus of the surplus.’
(McDonald, n.d.-b)

In essence, his critique is that Food Not Bombs confronts the capitalist food industry by tak-
ing the ex-commodity and using that as a weapon to undermine the logic of the commodity
form more generally, but this is a limited approach since the structure of capitalist econo-
mies is founded on the exploitation and maintenance of a surplus of labour in the process of
production and that homelessness is a by-product of this system. In effect, to McDonald, if
you want to end homelessness, you have to end the exploitation of workers in the process of
production, a strongly Marxist and anarchist response.
McDonald’s critique is somewhat valid but takes Food Not Bombs as an isolated group
and not an intended larger network of radical organising around labour, distribution, hous-
ing, etc. To round out the view of McDonald Kropotkin’s perspectives on poverty, capital-
ism and revolutionary politics in ‘From Expropriation’ balances out the critique in place. In
this piece, Kropotkin states that the core of capitalism is poverty, as poverty is essential to
creating the needed surplus labour to fill the factories and enrich the owners of capital. In
discussing this, he wrote that ‘when there is no longer any destitute there will no longer be
any rich to exploit them’ and that when poverty is addressed that ‘No one will volunteer for
the enrichment of your Rothschilds’ (Kropotkin in McKay, 2014: 518). Of course though,
Kropotkin was not arguing that poverty could be addressed simply by revolutionising and
providing the free distribution of services, though expropriation of bread for distribution
will be essential to the revolutionary case, but also by the worker and community expro-
priation of industry and housing as well. To Kropotkin, distribution and production both

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 Sean Parson

are essential in the maintenance of capitalism and, if anything, the interconnected nature of
capitalism means that

all is interdependent in a civilized society; it is impossible to reform any one thing with
altering the whole. On that day when we strike against private property, under any one
of its forms, territorial or industrial, we shall be obliged to attack all its manifestations.
The very success of the revolution will demand it.
(Kropotkin in McKay, 2014: 520)

In effect, both Kropotkin and McDonald are arguing slightly different, though I think in-
terconnected points. Both of them are exploring the root causes of capitalism and theorising
the location of struggle and action. With McDonald, he views homelessness as an essential
and related product of capitalism – in that capitalism keeps a surplus population for labour-
ing and a pressure valve – while Kropotkin is exploring the process that forces the poor, the
destitute and workers in general to sell their blood and sweat to capitalist producers. In this
regard, both are correct – homelessness is a result of capitalist economic need and people are
embedded in the capitalist system because there are no other accessible means for people to
garner the goods and services that they need to survive. The lesson from both McDonald
and Kroptokin is that the focus on any single issue will not be enough, what we need is not
a revolutionising of the system of food distribution, but a revolutionising of the entire food
economy – production, transportation, distribution. This is also though a critique of Mc-
Donald, as the focus on production is also not enough.

Conclusion
Food Not Bombs and its public meals provide an important and essential role in the radical
political movement and in the geographies of survival that the homeless and poor rely on.
The network provides a radical urban food relief and homeless rights organisation that does
not turn ex-commodities into health meals while also confronting and struggling against
state’s attempts to criminalise and harass the poor and homeless. That said, there are lim-
itations to what they, as a network, can do via the process of decommodification of food
to actually confront the capitalist food system. At best, their dumpstered meals provide an
essential institutional support that can nourish and inspire resistance and solidarity, while
at their worst, the process can be a self-aggrandising process of middle-class, mostly white
punks showing their bona fides. On average though, the networks’ actions are somewhere
in the middle – between feeding the revolution and stroking the ego – and we can see the
meals as a form of propaganda by the deed, showing that an alternative way of gleaning and
serving food exists and providing grassroots and practical skills in decentralised and demo-
cratic institution building. Of course, expecting one group (or network of groups) to create
the revolution by distributing soup made out of distressed produce is holding them up to an
impossible standard.
Capitalism has, echoing the sentiments of Guy Debord, found ways to recuperate re-
sistance into a stable and continual system of capitalist growth. Local, organic, free-range,
vegan. All are fully incorporated in the leviathan of Agro-food. As such, there is no silver
bullet type solution but instead a variety of different techniques and approaches are needed to
attack and confront at a multitude of locations and with a range of differing tactics. A focus
on just Food Not Bombs and their attempt to turn ex-commodities (distressed food) into a
meal and provide it free as part of a gift economy shows some of the strengths and weaknesses

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of radical attempts to alter food distribution networks and the attempts of resisting the food
commodity by undermining the logic of food as a commercial product. Learning the lim-
itations of one approach provides insight into what other forms or organisations and groups
are needed to compliment an overall strategy. While goliath was taken down with only one
rock, to destroy capitalism, we will need mountains of them, or maybe in this instance a
mountain of dumpstered bagels.

Note
1 A dumpster is large trash receptacle. The British terms are skip and skipping.

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 4.4
SOCIAL CENTRES AS RADICAL
SOCIAL LABORATORIES
Luca Lapolla

Introduction
Can social centres be the sociopolitical counterpart of workplace-based syndicalist organ-
isations aiming at ‘forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old’
­(Industrial Workers of the World 1905)?1 If syndicalism searches for alternatives to capitalism
as the dominant socio-economic system, can social centres be radical social laboratories in
which activists and citizens experimentally implement alternative solutions to organise soci-
ety? In this chapter, I will try to answer these questions by drawing mostly on interviews with
people involved in British and Italian social centres between the 1970s and today. I will inves-
tigate case studies from the British cities of Bristol and London, and the Italian cities of Bari
and Milan. The reason for this time frame is that it is only during the 1970s that the modern
concept of a social centre took shape, although sometimes under different names. Moreover,
I have decided to focus on Britain and Italy because social centres developed along different
lines in each country, reflecting different sociopolitical contexts. By analysing the radical
aspects of social centres, their relation with the wider radical world and some of the problems
that affect them, I aim to present modern social centres as ‘radical social laboratories’.

What Is a Social Centre?

The term ‘social centre’ has been used to identify different experiences in different times.
Here, I will focus on modern-day social centres – those that emerged as a by-product of the
countercultures and subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s. Such are the experiences that Stuart
Hodkingson and Paul Chatterton described as ‘turn[ing] unused or condemned public build-
ings and factories into self-organised cultural and political gathering spaces for the provision
of radical social services, protest-planning and experimentation with independent cultural
production’ (Hodkinson and Chatterton 2006:306). In addition to this, I will here illustrate
how social centres embodied – more or less consciously, and with clear ­limitations – concrete
Left-libertarian alternatives to our contemporary society based on principles such as profit,
authority and individualism.
Yet, the same term was used to identify places that diverged greatly from these defini-
tions in late nineteenth-century Britain and US, as well as in 1950s Italy, when the term

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first appeared. Then, social centres were an instrument in the hands of the ruling class to
maintain class and social tensions under control. Italian centri sociali (social centres) origi-
nally denoted community centres run by municipal authorities (Mudu 2013:63; Ibba 1995).
Similarly, in Britain, social centres were clubs, classes and institutes, whose function was to
help ‘young men and women … be so full of healthy and useful effort that there shall be no
room for what is unworthy and mean’ (Hogg 1892:9–14). In America, both Progressives and
reformist socialists backed social centres, which were mostly urban schools that in the eve-
ning became recreational, social and civic spaces (Weston 1905; Perry 1912; Curtis 1913:80).
­Progressives  – like presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson – used them to achieve ‘a
socially efficient society’ by helping children and adults ‘make the right use of their [leisure]
time’, and ‘Americanising’ newly arrived migrants (Stevens 1972:18–25). The socialists, on
the other hand, aimed at entertaining and educating all citizens ( Jozwiak 2003:13). For them,
social centres had a normative role comparable to that of early nineteenth-century Sunday
schools aiming to ‘render [the children of the poor] honest, obedient, courteous, industrious,
submissive, and orderly’ (Thompson 1963:401). Like Sunday schools, social centres partic-
ipated in the training of new docile generations of citizens and workers. This is confirmed
by a St Louis librarian reporting on a group of anarchists frequenting the local social centre:

[T]he brand of anarchism that they profess has grown perceptibly milder since they
have met in the library. It is getting to be literary, academic, philosophic. Nourished in
a saloon, with a little injudicious repression, it might perhaps have borne fruit of bombs
and dynamite.
(Stevens 1972:24)

This does not mean that there was no radical version of ‘mainstream’ social centres at the time.
Both in Britain and in Italy, in the nineteenth century, appeared radical spaces for socialising
and organising political action, such as anarchist clubs (Moses 2016), radical workers’ clubs,
mutual-aid societies (Woodcock 1962:447; Marshall 1993:489) and case del popolo (People’s
Houses) (Degl’Innocenti 1984; De Michelis 1986). Spaces that were real reference points to
local workers and radicals. Besides carrying out a pragmatic function and hosting recreational
activities, these spaces became ‘hubs of lively political participation and debates’ (Editorial
Staff 1989:8). Although the latter examples used various denominations, their spirit and actions
characterise them as precursors of contemporary social centres, whereas nineteenth-century
social centres were certainly not. Hence, for my analysis on ‘radical social laboratories’, I will
consider spaces that, rather than simply using the expression ‘social centres’, promoted the ex-
perimentation of radical solutions to overcome the capitalist/neo-liberal society.

What Is Radical about Social Centres?

In 2007, Saul Newman reflected on a redefinition for ‘radical politics’ to suit the contempo-
rary age of ‘post-politics’, in which ‘the global neo-liberal consensus is shared by the parlia-
mentary Right and Left alike (an ideological distinction that has become, at the formal level,
largely meaningless)’. A global scenario aggravated by the resurgence of the Far Right, the
appearance of religious fundamentalism and the ‘violent reassertion of the authoritarian state
under the dubious pretext of “security”’. Within this context, Newman identified the emer-
gence of a new radical politics focused on ‘a non Statist, anti-institutional form of politics
that rejects traditional modes of party representation, eschews Marxist economism, and yet
remains faithful to the ideals of unconditional liberty and equality’ (Newman 2007:3, 17).

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 Social Centres as Radical Social Laboratories

Can we apply Newman’s definition to social centres? Social centres vary greatly de-
pending on factors such as political affiliation and organisational modes, which renders it
extremely difficult to generalise (Dines 1999; Bregman 2001). From informal chats with
people involved in the social centres’ movement, the legal status of a space is often a decisive
sign of its ‘radicality’. Lucy Finchett-Maddock seems to adhere to this categorisation, as she
defines squatted centres as ‘practice-based communities’, and the rented/owned spaces as
‘counter-institutions’ that ‘ease the pressure on those in power by providing voluntary social
services’ (Finchett-Maddock 2008:21, 30). Certainly, occupying abandoned buildings is a
radical act, as it is a form of direct action that defies the institutions.2 Yet, I will highlight
how also rented/owned social centres can be radical, according to Newman’s definition.

Squatting Communities
Squatting was widespread in 1970s Britain and Italy. In mid-1970s London, 40,000–50,000
people were squatting – often taking over whole streets and neighbourhoods, which behaved
like ‘decentralised urban self-managed communit[ies]’ (Coates 2012:295). The Italian squat-
ting movement was the only one in Europe, with the Dutch, to keep pace with the British,
as masses of students and southern workers moved to the industrialised cities of centre-north
Italy (Gimson 1980:216–18).
Throughout the 1970s, intensely squatted areas fulfilled the function of spaces to social-
ise and radicalise. A former squatter and old anarchist militant who asked to be named as
Stroppy Old Git highlighted that such areas

functioned as social centres, with loads of things going on, according to people’s inter-
ests. All sort of stuff happened in squatted streets, like Huntley street. It depended on
who was there. Including just hanging out, street parties. Who would need to set up a
social centre in those days? And it wasn’t just for squatters. … The need for social centres
only really arose when people [became] more scattered and you [didn’t] have focal points
with squatted blocks or squatted streets, or intensely squatted areas.
(Stroppy Old Git 2016)

Freedom from rent – continued Stroppy Old Git – and thus from a stable job to pay the
rent meant that squatters could use their time differently. He, for one, became involved in
‘lots of things which are anarchist in their whole politics’, such as the Advisory Service for
Squatters, the revolutionary libertarian group Big Flame and later the radical environmental
group Earth First! and the direct action collective Reclaim the Streets (RTS). Squatters had
also time to organise and defend their own interests as a movement, he added, because they
attended the meetings of council housing committees – whereas, he concluded, ‘all that died
away … I think the squatters’ movement lost its capacity to … leave muddy footprints in the
corridors of power’ (Stroppy Old Git 2016).

Occupied Social Centres

The first self-defined social centres appeared around the same period in the suburbs of Italian
metropoles, where post-1968 disillusioned youths – mostly underpaid temporary workers,
but also unemployed people and students – suffered from the absence of spaces to socialise.
Nanni Balestrini and Primo Moroni reported the experience of Vincenzo from Limbiate, in
the Milanese hinterland. There, to overcome the ‘problem of free time’ (perceived as a time

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for ‘boredom and alienation’), young people gathered on the benches near the local train
station, since the local cafes ‘kicked us out because [they saw us as] long-haired, drug addicts,
and especially because we didn’t consume much’. Day after day, they met to talk and spend
time together, until they grew in number and started desiring ‘something more’ because –
they thought – ‘we’re too young to accept to rot here’. Hence, they discussed those issues
together, and set up the circoli del proletariato giovanile (proletarian youth clubs), which fostered
the creation of centri sociali (social centres) by occupying abandoned buildings such as houses
and factories as a form of direct action (Balestrini and Moroni 1997:509–18).3
Social centres spread in Italy. By the end of 1977, they numbered around fifty in M ­ ilan
alone, with up to 7,000 people participating in their self-managed activities (Ginsborg
1990:382). In those years, squatting had become an increasingly popular answer to the hous-
ing problem, especially in the industrialised cities of central-northern Italy. In 1976, a group
of Milanese anarchists combined the two issues – housing and social spaces – and occupied
two buildings in the Ticinese district, an area that Pino – one of the anarchist occupiers –
described as dangerous, with old overcrowded flats lacking water or heating, and external
shared toilets (Pino 2015). Antonio M., a member of the anarchist group Bandiera Nera
(Black Flag), explained that their aim was both to provide housing for destitute families and
to give local anarchist groups a place to meet (Editorial Staff 1976a).
One collective, formed mostly of young anarchist workers and southern squatting families,
managed both occupations – Conchetta and Torricelli – which hosted two social centres,
a ‘barter shop’, a housing committee, a libertarian students’ and workers’ committee, and a
healthcare workers’ committee. The latter contributed to the refoundation of the historical
anarchist syndicate Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) (Editorial Staff 1976b; Pino 2015). The prox-
imity with radical activists contributed to the politicisation of the working-class squatters, who
endorsed the adoption of libertarian principles to regulate their communal life. More recently,
the social centre of Conchetta – refounded as Cox18 – also demonstrated its influence over
the neighbourhood, as its activists taught direct action tactics to local residents, who lamented
the high volume of traffic and pollution. Together, they organised meetings and blocked via
Conchetta (Cox 18, Archivio Primo Moroni, and Calusca City Lights 2010:47–64).

Rented Social Centres

Similar results, however, were achieved by a non-squatted precursor of social centres – the
­comitato di quartiere San Pasquale (CdQ, San Pasquale neighbourhood committee). In 1973,
­local residents had rented a street-level venue in the working-class area of San Pasquale in
Bari. It started as a self-managed after-school club, but a group of young ­a narcho-communists
joined in 1974 because they considered its ‘contents and methods objectively libertarian’,
although it remained non-confrontational and limited to single-issue campaigns (Organiz-
zazione Rivoluzionaria Anarchica n.d.). An activist, Nicola Laucelli, described it as ‘like
a ­present-day social centre, but well-rooted in the neighbourhood’ (Laucelli 2009). Like
current social centres, they promoted events, such as concerts, theatre shows and film clubs –
all with a strong political focus (‘about [working-class] daily problems’), as they aimed to
radicalise the neighbourhood (Comitato di quartiere San Pasquale 1976).
They engaged in counter-information and conscientiousness-raising activities among the lo-
cal residents, including explaining changes in housing laws (Organizzazione Anarchica Pugliese
1974b; see also Comitati di quartiere rioni San Pasquale e San Marcello 1978). Activists Pina
Buttiglione and Luciano Sepe remembered that local women ‘believed that a civil wedding
wasn’t valid’, and practised illegal ‘abortion [as] the normal contraceptive’ (Sepe 2009; Buttiglione

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 Social Centres as Radical Social Laboratories

2010). Therefore, they provided information on their bulletins, promoted a petition to legalise
abortion, opened a free clinic for women and organised weekly women-only m ­ eetings to ‘dis-
cuss their problems’ (Comitato di quartiere San Pasquale 1976). The neighbourhood participated
in the CdQ’s activities and, as in the case of Cox18, went through a process of radicalisation.
Some residents started frequenting the meetings of the anarchist group, and many took part in
the occupation and transformation of an abandoned villa into a kindergarten (­Caggese 2009;
Laucelli 2009; Sepe 2009). The experience of San Pasquale was so successful that residents of the
neighbouring San Marcello district opened a twinned CdQ (Comitato di ­quartiere San Marcello
n.d.; Nucleo Promotore “Comitato di quartiere rione San Marcello” 1977).

Social Centres as Radical Hubs

Depending on the interests/competences of the activists, and on needs of the local commu-
nity, social centres developed a range of social and cultural activities. Bristol-based Kebele
evolved from a squatted house into a space with a vegan café, a bike workshop, an allotment,
a service of radical information and publications, different forms of art, and numerous events
and meetings with speakers and artists (Kebele collective n.d.). Whereas, the Barese Fucine
Meridionali hosted debates, punk concerts, alternative theatre experiences, film clubs and
other initiatives that attracted ‘a multitude of people’ (Arcangelo 2015).
In addition to this, a social centre also works as ‘a hub, a base, or a centre for the wider alterna-
tive community to socialise, organise activities, discuss, debate, argue, get pissed, watch films …
a living example of [radical] politics in action’ (Tim 2015). As the activist Gennaro confirmed,
Fucine was the ‘base … but all the [political] initiatives were in the city’ (Gennaro 2015). Social
centres contribute to the wider political scene by ‘provid[ing] a sense of something alternative that
is happening and ongoing’ (Tim 2015). Like a catalyst, they attract other radicals, who contribute
to the further radicalisation of an area, as in the case of the London-based Ex-Grand Banks. One
of its founders, Alessio Lunghi, stated that its opening drew activists and squatters who occupied
other places in the Kentish Town area – ‘so, at a point we had four spaces’ (Lunghi 2016).
As Cox18 and CdQ San Pasquale have demonstrated, one last radical and probably most
significant contribution of social centres is the politicisation of local communities. To achieve
this, activists use social and cultural events to attract ‘ordinary people’ and introduce them to
practices that embody libertarian principles like self-organisation, anti-hierarchy, direct action,
anticapitalism (Lunghi 2007). Thus, the Ex-Grand Banks attracted many local pupils, who –
proudly affirmed Alessio – could have otherwise entered local gangs – and ‘some are still active,
socially and politically’ (Lunghi 2016). However, events and activities are necessary but not
often sufficient. The squatting community of Claremont Road in East London radicalised many
among both squatters and local residents, as they all united with long-term campaigners and
anarchist activists against the construction of the M11 link road. Living side by side and experi-
encing the repressive face of the state helped residents overcome their prejudices against s­quatters/
activists, who could also share their analyses and tactics with the residents (Carolyn 2016).
Despite the defeat of the No-M11 campaign, that experience created a network of radi-
cals, who kept working together on this and other issues. For instance, they revitalised the
RTS network by drawing on their Claremont road experience, which united joyful street
parties and the nonviolent struggle to reclaim urban spaces for the people rather than for the
cars or other infrastructures of capitalism. Such a combination of direct action and commu-
nitarian fun was successful, and the network became a national phenomenon that peaked
with a 10,000-people street party that paralysed the City of London during the global carni-
val against capital on 18 June 1999 (Carolyn 2016).

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Squatting/occupying can appear as a radical act in itself, but the experience of centres like
CdQ San Pasquale proves that rented/owned spaces can be just as radical. In fact, squatting/
occupying can even be reactionary, as in the case of the neo-fascist Italian organisation
CasaPound – famous for squatting houses and occupying social centres ‘for the exclusive
use of citizens of Italian nationality’ (Di Tullio 2006; Ferrari 2011; Vereni 2015:153). More
indicative of the radical character of a space is the ability to enact radical politics as a part
of its everyday life. The social centres I presented earlier embodied Newman’s definition of
radical politics by creating spaces that aim to challenge the state and its institutions. They
are examples of alternative societies based on the principles of self-management, equality,
direct action and direct democracy. Besides providing social and cultural services to (­usually)
deprived areas, social centres can function as a gateway for people into radical politics. More-
over, they can become hubs for activists to meet and organise political activities, and – even
after their demise – activists can draw on those experiences to develop new movements.

How Is the Social Centres Movement Theorised and Influenced?

For both personal and academic reasons, I have had the chance to speak to people involved in
current and previous experiences of social centres. What emerged from such conversations is
that social centres’ activists privilege practice over theory. Nevertheless, their actions are in-
fluenced by contemporary events and by the theoretical debates developed within the wider
radical scene. In this section, I want to explore some of these relationships and their effects
on the social centres’ movement.

1970s: Between Spontaneism and Radical Theories

The subcultures and countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s – sets of alternative values
that reject and aim at replacing the hegemonic ones – had a fundamental role in the devel-
opment of social centres (Yinger 1960). Unsatisfied with parliamentary politics, masses of
young people embraced – more or less consciously – the anarchist principles of direct action,
­self-management, equality and prefiguration.4 British squatting communities embodied
such principles, although people squatted for diverse reasons. Many were simply homeless
­people in need of shelter (‘working-class and under-educated … without shock-absorbers’),
while others were political activists (mostly from radical ‘groupuscules’). The latter, like
Ron ­Bailey and Jim Radford, aimed to be an example to follow, and sometimes managed to
politicise others (Walter 1969). There were also middle-class students and ‘­highly-educated
artist dropouts’ who – according to former squatter Josefine Speyer – often considered
themselves anarchists. Yet, they spent a lot of time talking of ‘music, art, philosophy, but
no politics. You just saw [politics] as a load of crap’ (Speyer 2016). Overall, British squat-
ters formed communities that anticipated social centres’ themes, such as direct action and
­self-management. Overall, besides a minority of so-called politicos, squatters often adopted
a pragmatic approach that eschewed political theorisations.
The influence of countercultures was strong in Italy too, although there, the young stu-
dents and workers involved in the emerging phenomenon of social centres were generally
more politicised, as Italy, in general, presented a higher level of political activism. From the
late 1960s, the confrontation between radicals and state/reactionary forces had transformed
violence into an integral element of the political discourse (Ginsborg 1990:379–83). Through-
out the 1970s, the Autonomia (autonomous movement) developed which united Workers’
Autonomy, Metropolitan Indians and women’s movements (Katsiaficas 2006:17–27).5 Their

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shared trademark was the ‘refusal of work’ – hence, the adoption of tactics that included
sabotage, absenteeism and self-reductions (Bianchi and Caminiti 2007:51–52). Squats and
social centres were often hubs for radical groups, free radio stations and alternative publi-
cations, which helped autonomist tactics and principles take root within the social centres’
movement (Gimson 1980:216–18).
Another influential movement for Italian social centre activists was anarchism, which
former squatter Erri recognised as ‘an important reference point’ (Erri 2015). As in the
case of Conchetta, anarchists promoted the practice of squatting and opening social centres
(Editorial Staff 1971). I interviewed some of those anarchists and noticed that – unlike the
British self-proclaimed anarchist squatters – their direct actions often came from theoretical
reflections following the rediscovery of classic anarchist authors. The anarcho-communists
of CdQ San Pasquale became involved in neighbourhood committees – as well as in the
students’ movement and workers’ unions – because they aimed to apply platformism and
Malatesta’s ‘gradualism’ (Dadà 1984:137; Lapolla 2011:85–148).6 Therefore, they used CdQs
as a strategy to ‘help proletarians raise their consciousness’ and connect them ‘with the class
movement [and] the broader anti-capitalist struggle’ (Organizzazione Anarchica Pugliese
1974a:14–15). Both autonomi and anarchists demonstrated a clear interest in theoretical re-
flections. However, little remained of such a theoretical preparation when, at the end of the
1970s, a wave of repression hit the radical movement.

Punx: Regenerating Social Centres

In the early 1980s, most Italian social centres were either closed by the authorities or faced
Riflusso (ebb), as most activists quit any political engagement and often sought escape in hard
drugs – while a minority joined the armed struggle (Bianchi and Caminiti 2007:41–60).
The few surviving social centres turned into places for partying and heroin consumption
(Editorial Staff 1989:9). A different type of ebb hit Britain too, as Thatcherism alienated a
generation of angry and non-conformist youths. Punk music and its mottoes (‘do it your-
self ’, ‘no future’, ‘against all authority’) seemed to address perfectly the rage and rebellion of
that generation that had lost all hope in transforming mainstream society. The punk move-
ment started spreading in Britain around 1975, while it was only in 1977–79 that the first
­self-declared punks appeared in the streets of big Italian cities like Milan, where becoming
a punk symbolised a reaction to social homogenisation, invasive police control, suburban
council estate ghettos, heroin and criminality (Consorzio Aaster et al. 1996:109).
Punks filled the void left by the ebb by opening Centri Sociali Occupati Autogestiti (CSOAs,
Self-managed Occupied Social Centres). This second generation of social centres started in
central-northern Italy, as punks escaped suburban ghettos in search of places to meet, rehearse
and play their music. They evolved into gateways to activism for disillusioned young peo-
ple, as punk music treated themes such as self-management, antimilitarism and ­a ntifascism.
Moreover, CSOAs helped regenerate the phenomenon of social centres by spreading the
concepts of self-production and Do-It-Yourself material, like cassettes and fanzines (Edito-
rial Staff 1989:10–11). Such material facilitated the circulation of ideas within the movement,
and social centres became places generating grassroots culture, DIY politics and unconven-
tional lifestyles (Philopat 2006:111).
Punks also helped broaden the focus of radical politics by supporting themes like ecology
and antispeciesism. The punk movement was heterogeneous, with symbols spanning both
anarchist circle-As and nazi swastikas. Many punks had a ‘spontaneous libertarian spirit’,
which favoured a collaboration with anarchists. Several punks openly embraced anarchism

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and started calling themselves ‘punx’ to distinguish themselves from the rest of the movement
(Consorzio Aaster et al. 1996:112,113). Exemplary is the case of the Virus – the first punk
social centre – which opened in Milan in 1981, near the anarchist squats and social c­ entres
of Correggio, Conchetta and Torricelli (Mosca 2012). Punks and anarchists co-organised
anti-heroin concerts at Conchetta, and numerous punx participated in the early 1980s
mass-protests against nuclear missiles at the newly opened NATO base of Comiso, in Sicily
(Pino 2015). Then, in 1988, the ex-Virus punx – evicted in 1984 – even refounded Conchetta
as CSOA Cox18 together with activists involved in grassroots syndicalism and in the radical
bookshop Calusca. The arrival of punks ended the period of semi-inactivity that Conchetta
had experienced after most squatters moved out, having accepted the offer of council flats
(Cox 18, Archivio Primo Moroni, and Calusca City Lights 2010:26; Cox 18 n.d.).
In Britain too, punks had an enormous influence on the social centres’ movement. In fact,
they contributed to its foundation together with squatters and radical activists, although so-
cial centres were then called Autonomy Clubs. Among the first were the Autonomy ­Centre
in Wapping (1982–83), Centro Iberico in West London (1982) and the 1 in 12 Club in
­Bradford. The 1 in 12 was founded in 1981, and still exists today as ‘a group of people who
work together to promote certain political ideals and social change; [and] a members so-
cial club’ (Bradford 1 in 12 Club Constitution n.d.). Their political action has focused on
unemployment, antifascism and animal liberation, and they periodically host live music,
book fairs, fanzine conventions, discussion groups, films, debates and political workshops
(Hodkinson and Chatterton 2006). Like in Italy, such spaces facilitated the politicisation of
punks and squatters – although in a less structured way compared to those of the 1970s – and
influenced the wider radical movement with new themes. As the former squatter and punk
Bibi confirmed, ‘It was almost uncool to take [politics] seriously or think about it, but at the
same time everyone was very political. We all used to go to protests about everything, from
gay rights and animal rights to the anti-Poll Tax’ (Bibi 2014).7

The Influence of Global, National and Local Contexts on

CSOAs and Infoshops
In the 1990s, the British and Italian experiences of social centres diverged further, as the wider
radical scenes focused on different issues. Britain went through a new surge in activism, es-
pecially against the road and airport expansion programme, and the Criminal Justice Act of
1994. The Act gave the police new stop-and-search powers and introduced ‘criminal sanctions
against travellers, ravers, festival-goers, public assemblies and political protests’, thus affecting
mostly youths and radicals (McKay 1998:61). What emerged was a new generation of activists
that blended radical environmentalism with anarchist direct action and the ‘party and protest’
attitude of rave culture. People inspired by the Earth First! movement and by Hakim Bey’s
concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZs) led to the occupation of rural and urban ar-
eas threatened by road expansion, and revitalised the RTS network.8 At the same time, Italian
social centres experienced a new expanding phase after a national wave of protests by students,
who used CSOAs as meeting and organisational spaces, and even as ‘social enterprises’ (spaces
with an economic dimension to provide social services). However, radical ecology, the so-
called new rurality and the defence of the commons spread in Italy only from the early 2000s,
together with the peak of the antiglobalisation protests (Membretti and Mudu 2013:76–81).
In the early 1990s, British radical environmentalists opposed the building of roads they
deemed ‘non-necessary’ and spoiling the rural landscape – beginning with the M3 extension
in Twyford Down, Hampshire, in 1991–92. Later, they integrated environmentalism with

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the issues of ‘housing, pollution and use of “community” space’. The turning point was the
‘No M11-Link’ campaign in 1993–95, when the area of Claremont road in East London
faced the demolition of houses and green areas for the construction of a link road (McKay
1998:102; see also Wakefield and Grrrt 1995). Claremont road evolved into a squatting com-
munity with plenty of spaces to socialise, create art and engage in political activism, like a
squat café offering cheap and usually vegan food.
Squat cafes and infoshops became a common sight in the British cities with a lively squat-
ting scene such as London and Bristol. Besides serving food, squat cafes worked as social cen-
tres, since they also hosted DIY cultural events and represented a ‘living example of anarchist
politics’ (Hodkinson and Chatterton 2006:306–7). Similarly, infoshops fulfilled the role of
social centres, as they provided radical activists with useful information and meeting spaces
(Solidarity Federation 2016). Kebele, in Bristol, started as a squatted building in 1995, but
when the initial anarchist squatters – also involved in RTS – realised that the building had a
‘far greater [potential] than just providing a place to live’, they opened both a squat café and
an infoshop (Barry 2015).
Like in Britain, anticapitalism became increasingly central to the politics of I­ talian ­social
centres, which increased in number – especially in the northern cities (Mudu 2013:71–75).9
What is peculiar of the Italian context is that the expansion of CSOAs was fuelled by
a national student movement – the so-called Pantera. In 1989–90, the Pantera protests
and occupations against the education reform politicised thousands of students, who later
continued their radicalisation process swelling the ranks of the social centres’ movement.
CSOAs also became more antagonistic, as right-wing parties gained momentum. The
collapse of the Eastern European bloc and the nationwide political scandal Tangentopoli
(Bribesville) had caused the disappearance of Italy’s historical parties.10 This prepared the
way for the growth of Silvio Berlusconi’s populist party, the racist Northern League and the
neo-fascist National Alliance (Sassoon 1997:186). Within this new political context, jour-
nalists and politicians likened social centres to terrorist hideouts, and repression followed.
Many CSOAs were threatened with evictions, but activists usually took to the streets to
resist such attempts.
CSOA activists became involved in heated debates on the opportunity of entering into
agreements with municipalities or landlords by agreeing to be relocated or to pay a rent
to avoid evictions, which is what up to half of social centres did in 1998 (Mudu 2013:70;
Cox 18, Archivio Primo Moroni, and Calusca City Lights 2010:xxiii). In a climate of both
expansion and repression, social centres’ activists also debated various ways to unite and
redirect the movement, such as the need for a national coordinating organism. They also
rediscovered the importance of moments of collective theoretical reflection, as the move-
ment’s principal reference points remained anarchism and Autonomia, with the addition of
the ­Mexican Zapatista movement. The latter became particularly influential with its com-
bination of traditional Left-libertarian themes – like self-management and anticapitalism –
with alterglobalisation (Wu Ming 2001).
Zapatismo represented the beginning of the shift, among 1990s radical activists, towards
a politicised but more composite identity. Most of the activists I have met and interviewed
had difficulties in defining their own political identity, but I noticed that post-1990s so-
cial centres’ activists tended to reject classifications tout-court. They perceived old political
definitions as ‘outdated’. According to Gennaro, the Bari-based CSOA Fucine Meridionali
openly aimed to be ‘a common house for all movements’. Thanks to their composite politi-
cal ­identity – he continued – that Fucine became a regional radical catalyst and maintained
positive relations with social centres across the country (Gennaro 2015).

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With the global spreading of the alterglobalisation movement in the early 2000s, s­ ocial
centres perfected their role as organisational hubs for the wider radical movement. In
fact, the opposition to capitalist globalisation and its symbols reinforced the movement by
creating or strengthening activist networks, even though state repression hit once again.
The London-based anarchist collective Wombles (2001–06) launched in Britain the first
­self-defined social centres ‘based on experiences from around Europe and especially Italy’,
since they considered squat cafes and autonomy clubs to be self-segregating spaces for r­ adicals
(L. 2007). It was at the Prague mobilisation against the IMF and World Bank in 2000 that
Alessio Lunghi and other Wombles first made contact with Italians involved in CSOAs.
They later visited several social centres in Italy, which inspired the creation of spaces like the
Ex-Grand Banks in 2004.
Both global and national phenomena had direct repercussions on the discussions and ac-
tions of social centres. Fucine, for instance, shaped its politics around the Zapatist discourse
on alterglobalisation, but also emerging national issues like immigration, anti-prohibition
and precarity. Yet, equally influential were themes at a local level, such as the presence of
abandoned and dangerous places in town, including a former asbestos factory in the heart
of Bari. To this, Fucine’s activists reacted with a series of ‘flash-occupations’ to draw media
and citizen attention to the problem (Arcangelo 2015). The same happened at Kebele, whose
creation and development were the result of a combination of forces at different levels – from
the emergence of the transnational alterglobalisation movement to the British anti-roads
movement, but also local elements like the radical reputation of a place and the presence of
local radical networks. As Tim confirmed, Kebele benefited from the existence of a radical
milieu in Bristol because of the city’s broader image as a ‘radical place’, which attracted
many activists. In addition, other local radical projects – like an anarchist mixed-gendered
football club  – created a mutually supportive environment (Tim 2015). Such experiences
demonstrate that theoretical debates – like that on TAZ or alterglobalisation – play an im-
portant role in the delineation of social centres’ politics. Also important are other radical
experiences, whose example, support and memory can inspire and influence social centres.

The Problems of Social Centres

When I interviewed the Barese former-activist Arcangelo, he declared that one of the rea-
sons behind the foundation of CSOA Fucine Meridionali in 1994 was the creation of ‘a
model for the alternative society we wanted’ (Arcangelo 2015). As we have seen in the
previous section, there are many different factors favouring the foundation and development
of a social centre, whereas others can hinder this process. In this last section, I will identify
and analyse some of the principal problems social centres have faced as this will explain why
many social centres – such as Fucine – failed to become that model of alternative society.

Repression
Among the external factors preventing social centres from succeeding is the hostility of
authorities, who – to quote the activist Carolyn – often send ‘undercover police to spy on
the movement and to try and repress it’ (Carolyn 2016). In particular, what she referred to
was the recent case of undercover agents who infiltrated the British radical green move-
ment ( Jones and Wilson 2015) – a practice so widespread that activists usually refused my
interviews or treated me with distrust, and often asked me to use pseudonyms because they
stated: ‘we need to protect ourselves from infiltrators, telltales [and] journalists’ (Francesco

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and Ruggiero 2014). An understandable paranoia that I observed when, during an assembly
at the Barese CSOA Ex-Caserma Liberata, some activists explained to me that the ‘tense
atmosphere’ I had noticed was due to their recent discovery that the police had tapped them.
They claimed receiving a full transcript from a previous activist-only meeting. This fear can
also negatively influence a social centre by creating an ‘under siege’ feeling, and leading the
activists to turn in on themselves.
Another classic tool of repression is eviction. One solution, when possible, is that of en-
tering into agreements with the owner of the premises – usually either people or firms or
local/national authorities. This is, for instance, what allowed Kebele to be a radical hub in
Bristol for over twenty years, as Kebele’s activists formed a housing cooperative that pur-
chased the building in 1998 (Kebele collective n.d.). However, this is not always possible or
convenient, as the 1977 Greater London Council (GLC) amnesty shows. When the majority
of the 7,000 London-based squatters in over 1,859 GLC properties accepted to be rehoused
or regularised, the entire radical movement suffered a setback (Wates and Wolmar 1980:89).
The radical network of communities fractured, and the time squatters dedicated to activism
diminished now that they needed jobs to pay their rents (Stroppy Old Git 2014).
Other squatters – like those in Freston road, Notting Hill – wanted to remain in an area
and with people they felt attached to. To defend their community, Freston road squatters
declared independence from Great Britain as the Free Independent Republic of ­Frestonia
­( Wates and Wolmar 1980:91–94). Former Frestonian Shelley Assiter admitted it ‘was a pub-
licity stunt … because otherwise we were not being heard’. An action that attracted television
crews and changed mainstream society’s view of squatters, who – in Shelley’s opinion – used
to be seen as ‘the lowest of the lowest’. As a consequence, they managed to remain in the area
and to participate in the renovation project. According to Shelley, this victory – together
with the absence of a common room – led to a more individualistic attitude and a decrease
in their participation (Assiter 2016).

(Self)-Segregation
For a social centre to become a successful model for an alternative society, decisive is also the
type of relationship it establishes with its neighbourhood and the city. It must function as a
‘port of call’ for non-activists rather than as a ghetto for subcultures and militants, as feared
by the Wombles collective. Yet, the relation between activists and ‘ordinary people’ has often
been problematic because of subcultural, political, cultural, ethnic and class-based reasons.
Gennaro lamented that, in mid-1990s Bari, Fucine’s relation with ‘the surrounding
houses was awful … they threw at us bottles full of frozen water! … Many saw us as aliens –
weirdos with green hair and dogs’ (Gennaro 2015). It was surely unhelpful – as Arcangelo
declared – ‘to host gigs every weekend [with that] huge and constant hustle and bustle’
(Arcangelo 2015). Twenty years later, in 2015, Barese citizens showed little enthusiasm for
another CSOA: Ex-Caserma Liberata. Rather than hostility towards an exuberant subcul-
ture, many local residents distanced themselves on political grounds. A man with an interest
in local politics told me that, after experiencing a strong excitement for the ‘recovery of this
beautiful space’, he distanced himself from the CSOA because of a ‘muddled’ organisational
process, and an internal ‘closed group’ of activists functioning as the real decisional organ-
ism (Frank 2015). One of Ex-Caserma’s activists also said that people complained for their
consensus-based decision method, which they called time-wasting, and she admitted that
another local resident told her: ‘I wish you’d never occupied [Ex-Caserma]!’ (Carmen and
Tony 2015).11

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Less-politicised or ‘ordinary’ people often feel uneasy about the very idea of walking into
a social centre, especially if it is squatted/occupied. They can be discouraged from cross-
ing a threshold that is both physical and psychological, as walls with political murals and
doors kept locked to avoid evictions are charged with ‘symbolic meanings, defining areas
of authorities’ (Samson 1992:26). A way to overcome this barrier is organising initiatives to
attract the local residents. The Barese CSOA Villa Roth offered in 2011–14 a social vegetable
garden, a library, football matches for children, acoustic concerts and experimental theatre
shows (Dossier Villa Roth Occupata 2014). This time, the neighbourhood welcomed the
social centre, but when the CSOA was evicted in 2014, none of them joined the demon-
strations or showed active solidarity. According to activist Carmen, local residents saw Villa
Roth as ‘a community centre … a provider of services’. In other words, the social centre
had failed to politicise them (Carmen and Tony 2015). Equally problematic can be the more
cultured and politicised frequenters – usually students or white-collar workers – who behave
like ‘rule-breakers by night and “integrated” by day’, and intend social centres as ‘places of
cultured and socialising entertainment’ (Consorzio Aaster et al. 1996:137).
Kebele’s activists lamented a similar situation, although in this case the barrier was ethnic/
cultural. The Bristol-based social centre is in the multi-ethnic area of Easton, but activist
Barry acknowledged that there are ‘more white people that come to Kebele than I would
like’ (Barry 2015). The only exception, said Tim, is the bike workshop on Wednesdays,
when there are mostly ‘Somali and Afro-Caribbean and Asian kids … [who] can’t afford a
new bike’. The participation of the local non-white population is limited to the occasional
‘consumption’ of the space, with no political involvement. In Tim’s opinion, this reflects the
wider anarchist/radical movement in Britain that ‘is largely white … [despite the] refugees
and asylum seekers solidarity, and antifascist/antiracist work’ (Tim 2015). This does not
mean that ethnic minorities are not radical, but simply that they probably have different
priorities and perceive a predominantly white space as an obstacle.
Another obstacle to the active participation of local residents can be class. For example,
CdQ San Pasquale’s activists claimed that many residents frequented the space, but they
admitted: ‘people consider the committee as an organisation to go to in order to have their
problems solved’ because they were accustomed to delegating (Comitato di quartiere San
Pasquale 1976; Sepe 2009). The political participation of San Pasquale residents was often
limited to single issues. Former CdQ militant Gennaro Gadaleta Caldarola admitted this
happened because mostly middle-class activists and largely working-class residents lived two
different realities: ‘We were young and full of ideas, but we weren’t inside the reality people
lived in’ (Gadaleta Caldarola 2010). In Pina Buttiglione’s opinion, this situation alienated the
working class, who had ‘fewer cultural instruments to understand these ideas, and … urgent
needs to satisfy instead’ (Buttiglione 2010).

Internal Issues
A challenge to the role of social centres as models for a radical society can also come from
their internal composition. In particular, politics, class and (sub)culture have often been prob-
lematic for the cohesion of the collectives managing social centres. Ex-squatter Tom Osborn
believed that squatting produces a classless society, as squatters leave their old social position
behind by learning from each other (Osborn 1980:186). However, Stroppy Old Git remarked
that class division is still evident between people in need of accommodation and those he
called ‘middle-class arty-farty wankers’ (Stroppy Old Git 2016). Class-based division is pres-
ent in social centres too, as Arcangelo mentioned a fracture between the components of

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CSOA Fucine Meridionali – the politicised and the ‘lumpenproletariat’: ‘Individuals on the
edge between legality and illegality, with a difficult background, even with prison experi-
ence’. As the two components could not overcome this fracture, Fucine did not survive the
following split. A lesson Arcangelo learned the hard way, as he said: ‘Today I’d avoid the frac-
ture. Nobody realised what we were going to lose … We were defeated’ (Arcangelo 2015).
In 2010, the activists that opened the CSOA Ex-Mercato Occupato in Bari replicated
­Fucine’s mistake when, as Carmen explained, a ‘class-based split’ emerged between squatters
(‘coming from the street, less-educated’) and activists (educated middle-class students) over the
commitment towards the management of the space (Carmen and Tony 2015). This example in-
troduces two related issues that can also endanger the survival of social centres: the loss of radical
memory and activists dropping out of active politics. Authoritarian repression – like arresting
activists and evicting social centres – certainly hinders the transmission of knowledge between
generations of activists by closing the gateways to radical activism. But so does the dropping-out
of experienced activists, due to either their falling back to mainstream society, or ‘burnout’.
Arcangelo experienced both. After months of heated arguments with the other occu-
pants, he and other activists started a political organisation – Red66 – but they brought
­Fucine’s tensions with them, and soon individualism took hold of Red66 activists. Tired of
that environment, Arcangelo first fled to Germany to experience the techno-rave move-
ment, and then – back in Bari – he opened a radical publishing house and bookshop. Now in
his forties, with a full-time job and a family, he justified his lack of involvement in current
social centres because ‘if you have an evening off, you must decide: “Shall I go to the assem-
bly or stay with my son?”’ (Arcangelo 2015).

Conclusion
I opened this chapter asking if social centres could be radical social laboratories, in which
activists and citizens experiment and implement alternative solutions to organise society. To
answer this question, I have first reflected on the meaning of social centres and of radical poli-
tics. Then, I explored some key radical elements of social centres, such as their role as a hub for
activists and a gateway into political activism for ‘ordinary citizens’. I illustrated the relation
of mutual influence between theory and practice – as social centres’ activists interact with the
wider radical movement on multiple levels – and highlighted some common characteristics
holding social centres back. In addition, by focusing on case studies from Britain and Italy, I
also showed the effect of the spatial context – with local, national and global dimensions all
affecting the development of the social centre. Despite the differences, though, what emerged
from this analysis is that radical social centres share an active commitment: they all experiment
with alternative socio-economic relations centred around principles like self-­management,
direct action and equality. They can thus be seen as ‘radical social laboratories’. Yet, to success-
fully propagate such experiments on a larger scale, they need to develop a cohesive but open
and flexible collective; enter a mutually supportive network of radical experiences; involve
and politicise new generations and local residents by adapting to their needs – when suitable –
without becoming a provider of social services; and, most importantly, be resilient.

Notes
1 ‘[S]yndicalism is explicitly anticapitalist, antilandlordist, and antistatist, and envisages the union
structures as the building blocks of a self-managed, stateless, socialist order’ (Schmidt and van der
Walt 2009: 22).

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 Luca Lapolla

2 Direct action: ‘action which … realises the end desired, so far as this lies within one’s power’, as op-
posed to ‘delegating others’ (David Wieck in: Ward 1996:12).
3 I refer to ‘occupying’ as a generic term for taking possession of a property without permission, and
‘squatting’ for residential occupations.
4 Prefiguration: when ‘the means are consistent with the ends’ (Franks 2006:17, 97–100).
5 Workers’ Autonomy believed in ‘raising the level of struggle within the state apparatus’, while
Metropolitan Indians were Situationist-like creatives who dressed as native Americans.
6 The so-called Platform was a 1926 document by Russian anarchist exiles, which distinguished between
‘specific organisation’ (the political group) and ‘mass organisation’, such as neighbourhood commit-
tees and student associations, in which anarchist militants could cooperate with working-class people
‘to realise … the social revolution’ (Convegno Nazionale dei Lavoratori Anarchici 1973). ­Malatesta’s
‘gradualism’ stated: ‘[s]ince one cannot convert all the people at once …, it is necessary to find a way to
realise as much anarchy as possible amidst people who are not anarchist’ (Malatesta 1982).
7 The Poll Tax was a flat-rate tax on every adult, without reference to their income or resources. It
was introduced in Britain between 1989 and 1990 by the Thatcher conservative government, and
replaced by the Council Tax in 1993 after mass opposition and riots.
8 TAZs are the embodiment of a never-ending indirect guerrilla against the State: a collective lib-
erates an area, then dissolves before the State can crush it and reappears somewhere or sometime
else (Bey 1993:14).
9 To this contributed the social conservativeness of the South, youth migration towards more pres-
tigious northern universities, and the presence of organised crime exercising a direct control over
the territory.
10 Tangentopoli unearthed a deep-rooted situation of political corruption, and was followed by a
nationwide judicial investigation that led to a series of incarcerations and suicides of politicians
from all major parties and businessmen. Following the fall of the Eastern communist regimes,
the old Italian Communist Party lost its traditional influence trying to restructure itself as an
­up-with-the-times social-democratic party.
11 Decisions by consensus require ‘non-adversarial and patient discussion, valuing everyone’s
voice and concerns’, as everybody involved in the decisional process has veto power (Gordon
2008:70).

References
Arcangelo, Interview on Fucine Meridionali. February 2, 2015.
Assiter, Shelley, Interview on Frestonia. February 25, 2016.
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 4.5
DANCES WITH AGITATORS
What Is ‘Anarchist Music’?
Jim Donaghey

Introduction
Robin Ballinger argues that ‘[m]usic is neither transcendental nor trivial, but inhibits a site
where hegemonic processes are contested’ (in Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 14) – in other
words, music matters. However, music (and culture more widely) is often viewed as being
of minor importance within social movements, as something coincidental rather than fun-
damental. Consideration of anarchism and music contributes to an understanding of the
complex relationships between culture and radical politics more widely, while challenging
those narrow conceptions of radicalism that fail to take cultural aspects into account. This
chapter points to the core role of culture (and music) in social movements, and the rec-
ognition of this importance across a wide spectrum of anarchist perspectives. The chapter
then considers evaluations of ‘anarchist music’, identifying the aspects which are too easily
recuperated by the State and capital (such as aesthetics and lyrics), and highlighting those
aspects which contain radical transformative potential (such as Do-It-Yourself or DIY produc-
tion processes – though this is necessarily marginal in character and scope). A transforma-
tion is not a fixed entity; it only operates in relation to an a priori situation. Evaluation of
‘anarchist music’ in terms of transformation is therefore alive to shifting contexts, and does
not impose a particular set of criteria – yet, it still usefully problematises any claim of a
particular music as being ‘anarchist’. However, no form of music (in terms of its aesthetic
or production process) is entirely immune to co-optation, and it is argued here that music’s
radical transformative potential is most fully realised, and most resilient, when engaged
within a culture of resistance.

Culture
At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening … a young boy
took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear
comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly
not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the
way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the
Cause.

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I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own
business … I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for an-
archism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the
denial of life and joy … If it meant that, I did not want it. ‘I want freedom, the right
to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things’ … I would live my
beautiful ideal.
(Goldman, 1934: 56)

The aforementioned quotation from Emma Goldman1 is often expressed in condensed form
as: ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution’, and highlights an oft-repeated tension in the an-
archist movement around cultural expression. For the purposes of this chapter, Goldman and
the young comrade represent two poles of this dispute: the chastising young comrade rep-
resents those who insist on a ‘serious’, materialist anarchism based on a reductive economis-
tic philosophy; and Goldman represents anarchisms which also embrace the ‘non-material’
aspects of society, such as revolutionary agency2 and culture. ‘Culture’ is a broad term, un-
derstood in different ways depending on its context – theatre, literature, art, sport, dancing
and music are denoted in a narrow use of the term, but ‘culture’ understood in a wider sense
may also express the sum of human (or other animal) social activity, from tool usage and
forms of language, to how societies organise themselves. Rudolf Rocker3 discusses culture
in this wider understanding, arguing that ‘a culture … is in its innermost essence anarchis-
tic’ (1937: 353). He argues that culture ‘has grown organically’ and ‘knows no subterfuge’,
while ‘States create no culture’; so therefore, culture and the State are ‘in the deepest sense,
irreconcilable opposites’ (Rocker, 1937: 283, 81). Rocker understands culture as developing
in a bottom-up, popular manner. He was writing in the early 1930s in a period when mass
culture was only just beginning to appear, and while it is possible to point to cultures which
fit with Rocker’s understanding, the trajectory of the twentieth century throws up a litany
of cultures which are in no sense anarchistic. Rocker does identify this in his distinction
between ‘nationalism’ and ‘culture’, but later critiques, such as those of Antonio Gramsci4 or
the Situationists,5 recognise more explicitly that culture is manipulated and even generated
by the State and capitalist institutions in a top-down manner to influence society in ways
that they find beneficial – encouraging national pride, obedience to authority and insatiable
consumerism, for example. This recognition of culture as a potentially oppressive force is
expressed by numerous anarchist writers and groups. For example, Murray Bookchin6 (1995:
52) writes that ‘[c]apitalism swirls around us – not only materially but culturally’ – the logics
and behaviours of capitalism are engrained in society beyond the level of economic transac-
tion. Class War7 identify mass culture as oppressive and as operating to preserve the State by
stopping ‘those at the bottom from revolting’:

for advanced capitalism to work effectively, the workforce has to identify and agree
with the aims and values of the capitalists … modern capitalism and the State have to fill
people’s minds with the ‘right’ ideas, and deny the validity of those ideas that question
the status-quo.
(Class War Federation, 1992: 52–53)

Most contemporary anarchists recognise this potentially oppressive manifestation of cul-

ture, but culture is not solely a tool of the State and capital. As Harold Barclay (1997: 36)
points out: ‘a culture is only manifest through the individual behaviour of its participants
and in no culture are those participants clones. In every system there is variation in terms of

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behaviour and interpretation of behaviour. And this situation provides then the opportunity
for conflict’. So while culture can be oppressive, and it often is, the terrain of culture is not
closed-off from struggle. This ‘culture war’ is recognised as being of key importance by
many anarchists (though it is important to add, not by all). Reclaim the Streets! co-founder
John Jordan argues (in McKay (ed.), 1998: 130) that ‘cultural values … are at the centre
of the global ecological and social problems … If the problem is one of values – a cultural
­problem – it therefore requires a cultural response’. CrimethInc.8 follow a similar tack: ‘re-
sisting capitalism isn’t just an economic matter but also a cultural one, involving a shift in
values and practices’ (CrimethInc. Ex-Workers Collective, 2011: 323). The mass culture
engendered by capitalism and the State is otherwise termed as ‘hegemonic’ or ‘mainstream’,
and outside of this, there are ‘subcultures’ and ‘countercultures’ which embody different
values and practices, though often with significant overlap with the dominant mass culture.
Anarchists, according to Laura Portwood-Stacer (2013: 7), ‘can only be understood … as
both subculture and movement’. Indeed, this aspect of Portwood-Stacer’s analysis of the con-
temporary anarchist movement in the US readily applies to historical anarchist movements
as well. Chris Ealham (2005: 35) points to ‘a specifically anarchist counter-culture … in
the barris [of Barcelona]’ in the years preceding the social revolution and Civil War in Spain
(1936–39). He writes that the

CNT9 was just one element in Barcelona’s growing proletarian public sphere, an alter-
native grassroots social infrastructure comprising newspapers, cultural associations and
social clubs. The other key institution was the ateneu (atheneum), a popular cultural and
social centre … [which] organised a wide choice of leisure activities, such as theatre,
choral and musical groups.
(Ealham, 2005: 41)

Through this,

the CNT was able to influence an oppositional working-class culture and help to mould a
relatively autonomous proletarian world view during a time when, elsewhere in Europe,
the advent of new forms of mass culture, such as football and music halls, was beginning
to erode and dilute socialist consciousness.
(Ealham, 2005: 43)

Albert Meltzer10 identifies the same cultural emphasis and engagement ‘in the life of the
local community’ by syndicalist unions in Italy, Germany and Argentina (2002: 8). Ealham,
using Situationist and Gramscian terminologies, understands this oppositional culture as ‘a
kind of counter-spectacle with its own values, ideas, rituals, organisations and practices …
a counter-hegemonic project’ (2005: 43). Today, the term most often used by anarchists to
describe this strategy is ‘culture of resistance’.
But this understanding of anarchists as ‘cultural activists’ (Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995:
9) is, for some, contentious, with cultural resistance ‘often seen as a retreat from more direct,
“effective” forms of political confrontation’ (Portwood-Stacer, 2013: 8). As avant-garde an-
archist violinist Norman Nawrocki puts it,

too many anarchists tend to downplay if not denigrate the role of ‘culture’ in our fight
for a new world, and thus, refuse to give active support or credence to those who try
to develop and practice through self-expression a new anarchist aesthetic – musical

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 Jim Donaghey

or otherwise. ‘Where’s the struggle?’ hardcore, culturally-challenged anarchoids often

protest, as Emma Goldman screeches, kicks off her dancing shoes and rolls over in her
grave.
(in O’Guérin (ed.), 2012: 62)

These ‘hardcore, culturally-challenged anarchoids’ do not understand culture as part of the

struggle, which is conceived as being fought solely on the grounds of economics or ‘Politics’.
‘Politics’ is understood in various ways depending on its context – in some senses, everything
is political in its effect on society, but Wilhelm Reich warns specifically against ‘[t]he fetish
of “politics”’ understood as ‘diplomatic exchanges between the representatives of great and
minor powers which decide the fate of humanity’ (which might otherwise be termed ‘capital
P Politics’ or ‘politicking’). Reich argues that ‘politics’ is alienating for the ‘political layman
[sic]’ who ‘rightly says that he [sic] doesn’t understand anything about it’ (1973: 44). Reich’s
solution is ‘to cut through the inextricable knot of bourgeois politics, by ceasing to imitate
it and opposing it with the basic principle of revolutionary politics … to democratise and
simplify politics and make it accessible to everyone’ (1973: 48). This simplification and de-
mocratisation entails the politicisation of ‘private life, fairs, dance-halls, cinemas, markets,
bedrooms, hostels, betting shops! Revolutionary energy lies in everyday life!’ (1973: 73).
This foreshadows the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ which dissolves the boundary
between the domestic and the public spheres – but crucially here, it also emphasises the cul-
tural aspects of revolutionary struggle (dance halls and cinemas), eschewing the narrow un-
derstanding of ‘politics’ for a much broader and encompassing definition. The contemporary
US anarchist movement (and indeed those elsewhere) provides an example of this broader,
culturally inclusive understanding, where, in Portwood-Stacer’s (2013: 7–8) analysis, ‘cul-
ture and politics are co-constitutive; to resist one is to resist the other’, and likewise, Uri
Gordon (2008: 4) describes contemporary anarchism as a ‘political culture’. Murray Bookchin
too, even in the midst of his anti-lifestylist polemic (1995: 9 f.n.), identifies the ‘anarchic
counterculture during the early part of the hectic 1960s [as] often intensely political’.
The writers and groups referenced in discussion of culture thus far come from a wide
spectrum of diverging anarchist perspectives and traditions,11 but coalesce in (loose) agree-
ment in terms of the seriousness with which culture (in its ‘narrow’ definition) ought to
be taken by anarchists. Those anarchists who reject culture entirely are a minor fringe in
the movement, and generally speaking their objection to ‘culture’ boils down to a personal
distaste for a particular aesthetic, while they, of course, still engage in cultural activities at a
practical level.
So culture is crucial, even while it is contentious, and consideration of culture and music
is essential in understanding any social movement.

Music
Focusing closely on ‘anarchist music’ allows an examination of the tensions and complexi-
ties which surround the wider relationships between anarchism and culture. Petesy Burns,
an anarchist punk musician (in O’Guérin (ed.), 2012: 50), argues that the ‘combination’ of
anarchism and music ‘can be a potent force for change’. This ‘force for change’, this radical
transformative potential, is a fruitful framework in consideration of anarchism and music – an
evaluation of music can be made in terms of its social impact, or the potential thereof.
Perhaps the most directly transformative aspect of music is its ability to inspire and radi-
calise. Nawrocki celebrates this potential:

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 Dances with Agitators

this magical musical moment was a turning point in their life and marked a renewal of
commitment, a blossoming of consciousness, a pivotal psychic insight that reaffirmed
their anarchist convictions and practice. Thanks to the music, one more pair of arms for
the barricades, one more match for the fire, one more point of resistance on the map
towards freedom.
(In O’Guérin (ed.), 2012: 65)

Wilhelm Reich,12 writing in the 1930s, pointed to the same potential, recognising ‘[f ]olk
song and dancing as a spur to revolutionary feeling’ (1973: 58). Reich argued that the emo-
tive power of music could be instrumentalised for revolutionary ends:

everywhere where the bearers of the coming revolution live their lives; by means of good
folk music, a folk dance, folk-songs utilisable by the revolution, already ­a nticapitalist in
themselves, appropriate to the feelings of the oppressed, they can create, disseminate and
plant in peoples’ feelings that atmosphere which is bitterly necessary for us to make the
broadest of masses sympathetic to the revolution.
(Reich, 1973: 58)

Crucially, Reich considers folk music (taken to mean popular music written, performed
and enjoyed by ordinary people on a peer-to-peer level, rather than the narrow generic
descriptor it occupies now) to be ‘already anticapitalist’, and inherently so. Reich does not
explain what it is about folk music that is necessarily anticapitalist – but possible elements
could be some particular lyrical content, non-capitalist production processes, inclusive and
democratic norms of performance, or even the aesthetic form of the music. Robb Johnson, a
contemporary anarchist folk musician, argues that some music forms engender an anarchistic
aesthetic, pointing to ‘the radical element to creativity’ in 1930s jazz or 1960s pop wherein
‘the very form itself is the revolutionary agent’ even when ‘typified by primarily a-Political
content’ (in O’Guérin (ed.), 2012: 55). Here, the actual musical arrangement, the sound and
feel of the music, is identified as the transformative aspect, and avant-garde and experimental
musicians engaged with anarchism would make a similar case in terms of radical aesthetics.
The breaking-down of the barrier between audience and performer is a core ideal in genres
and scenes such as punk and hip-hop, and also folk, jazz and many avant-garde music forms.
This is a further example of an aesthetic anarchistic musical impetus in its radical democra-
tisation of music performance.
However, evaluation of ‘anarchist music’ in terms of aesthetic or performance is not
entirely convincing. The aforementioned examples cover a widely diverse range of musical
styles and performance approaches,13 and while they contain elements which are arguably
anarchistic, it is difficult to assert that any aesthetic is inherently or exclusively anarchist, or that
their anarchistic elements result in any radical transformative potential. Nawrocki agrees
that ‘[t]here is certainly music that inspires anarchist thoughts, inclinations, and the desire
for full and total, absolute and unrestrained social evolution here and now’, but, pointing to
the experience of anarchist punk band Propagandhi, ‘this same music can also fuel unthink-
ing drunken frat boys’ (in O’Guérin (ed.), 2012: 63). The anarchist intent behind a musical
aesthetic does not prevent it from being misinterpreted in ways that are completely antithet-
ical to anarchism. And in a similar logic, no aesthetic is immune from capital co-optation.
The influence of capitalist production will be discussed in more detail later, but in terms of
aesthetic, consider the blast beats and demonic roarings of grindcore/extreme metal band
­Napalm Death. Their deliberately abrasive aesthetic developed in the anarcho-punk and

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DIY UK Hardcore scene of the late 1980s, but despite their decidedly counter-normative
sound, they have released music with the major corporate label Sony Music Entertainment
through imprints such as Columbia, Relativity and Century Media. Even clearly expressed
oppositionalism through lyrics is open to (perhaps wilful) misinterpretation, as, for example,
when former Tory Prime Minister (and Eton alumni) David Cameron announced that The
Jam’s ‘The Eton Rifles’ (1979) was one of his favourite songs (Radio 4, 2008). The Jam’s
Paul Weller was duly horrified, shaking his head with disbelief and asking: ‘Which part of
it didn’t he get? It wasn’t intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps’ (in
Wilson, 2008). Johnny Marr of The Smiths was similarly appalled when Cameron expressed
affection for his band, publicly stating on social media: ‘David Cameron, stop saying that
you like The Smiths, no you don’t. I forbid you to like it’ (Marr, 2010). But, as Marr’s hu-
morous tweet reveals of course, no amount of protest by the artist can prevent such warped
interpretations of the original intent of the music – the music’s radicalism can be completely
demolished in the subjective process of interpretation by the listener.
To be clear, there is no aesthetic prescription for anarchist music; any attempt to define it
solely on the basis of sound or style is fruitless. Any aesthetic that is identified as ‘anarchist’
is immediately undercut by non-anarchist manifestations of that same aesthetic – but in
an even more fundamental sense, it shouldn’t be possible to identify an anarchist aesthetic.
The musical forms, genres and scenes associated with anarchism are myriad,14 which is to
be expected since anarchism itself is highly amorphous and ill-defined. As Boff Whalley of
anarchist band Chumbawamba puts it, ‘[r]adical and libertarian music, by its nature, can’t be
defined musically’ (in O’Guérin (ed.), 2012: 81).
This is not to say that aesthetic considerations are irrelevant in discussion of ‘anarchist
music’, but the theme of ‘radical transformation’ emerges as a more useful evaluative tool.
Three main evaluations of ‘anarchist music’ will be made here: (1) music which espouses an-
archist ideals, perhaps even without the intention of doing so, but which is produced and dis-
tributed within mainstream/capitalist cultural frameworks; (2) music which is produced and
distributed through alternative, non-capitalist and anticapitalist networks (DIY) whether or
not it is explicitly anarchist or espouses anarchist ideals; and (3) music which emanates from
within the anarchist movement itself, promotes or supports anarchism explicitly and forms
part of an anarchist culture of resistance. These evaluations are not intended as some kind
of ‘anarchy test’ or a set of qualifying criteria, but to help develop an understanding of the
relationships between anarchism and music, and as a result, the wider relationships between
anarchism and culture.

Accidentally Anarchist Music

In an opposing corollary to David Cameron’s subjective appropriation of the Jam and the
Smiths, Nawrocki (in O’Guérin (ed.), 2012: 61) asks whether ‘occasional musical “acci-
dents”, unintentionally anarchist in spirit or content, but perceived as such by listeners,
count as ­“anarchist music”?’ For example, the core anarchist tenet of freedom is a repeated
trope in many genres of music. Even in the most vapidly banal lyrical use of ‘freedom’, with
no anarchist intent whatsoever, there is nothing to prevent listeners attaching an anarchistic
­interpretation – a lack of didactic content allows scope for any number of interpretations. Even
­specifically, radical/transformative themes such as revolution, provide fodder for banal l­yrics.
For example, the 1999 UK Number One single ‘Because We Want To’ (Honey To The B,
(Innocent, Virgin [EMI], 1999)), by short-lived pop sensation Billie, contains r­ eferences to
revolution, freedom and self-empowerment. Taken at face value, there are clearly radical

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elements to the lyrics here – they could even be reasonably interpreted as anarchistic. While
Billie’s call to revolution was not heeded on a society-wide level (and, to be sure, there was
no real revolutionary intent behind the track), it is impossible to rule out at least some grain
of radical transformative potential. Capitalism is, in many senses, a totalising system, seeking
to monetise all aspects of society – but it is not total. Even though the lyrics have been es-
sentially voided of their substantive content, merely to posture as ‘edgy’ in pursuit of record
sales, there remains the possibility that someone hearing Billie’s ‘revolutionary’ lyrics might
take them entirely seriously, despite their decidedly unrevolutionary context.
In any case, as Ballinger points out, ‘[u]nderstanding the politics of music from a text-
based analysis is particularly problematic’ (in Sakolksy and Ho (eds), 1995: 17). The scope
for interpretation is just too subjective to be analysed with any usefulness, especially in
the banal lyrics of most commercially oriented music. Ballinger (in Sakolksy and Ho (eds),
1995: 17) asks an insightful question in this regard: ‘what might “protest lyrics” be in social
contexts where the very language of struggle has been co-opted?’ In the case of Billie’s
‘revolutionary’ verse, co-optation is clearly at work. ‘Because We Want To’ was distrib-
uted via celebrity millionaire Richard Branson’s label Virgin, which was owned by EMI,
and subsequently absorbed into Universal Music Group (one of the remaining ‘Big Three’
corporate music industry behemoths). So, the production processes behind Billie’s ‘revo-
lution’ are in no sense revolutionary, because no matter what the ‘accidental’ potential for
transformation within the lyrical content (minimal though it is), Universal Music Group
makes a profit – corporate capitalism is the ultimate beneficiary. This seriously prob-
lematises any transformative claim made of ‘accidentally’ anarchist music, but corporate
influence has an even more direct impact in terms of copyright infringement claims made
against content uploaded to the Internet. Gil Scott Heron said that the revolution would
not be televised (‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ (Flying Dutchman, 1971)),15
and it seems that it won’t be streamed online either – a version of The Beatles song ‘Rev-
olution’ uploaded to YouTube is replaced with the message: ‘This video contains content
from UMG_MK,16 who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds’ (appended
in a much smaller font with, ‘Sorry about that’).17 Universal Music Group profits from The
Beatles’ ‘Revolution’ (2008) just as it profits from Billie’s, and it actively curtails the free18
sharing of these songs through an ideology of private property rights and an opposition to
free access to resources – the interests and activities of Universal Music Group are clearly
antithetical to anarchism.
The lyrical allusion to ‘revolution’ by Billie and the Beatles does not by any sensible
measure equate them with ‘anarchist music’ – but there should be no expectation for this to
be the case, and neither Billie nor the Beatles make any claim otherwise. The point is that,
even while music which ‘accidentally’ conjures up broadly anarchistic themes could be in-
terpreted as potentially transformative, this is seriously problematised, and often completely
undermined, by the production processes behind these songs, which is very often inimical
to anarchism. Songs explicitly referencing anarchy or anarchism carry more expectation
in this regard – their lyrical invocation is far more particular, but again, this is far from
­straightforward. Consider, for example, the song titled ‘Anarcho-Syndicalism’ (Oakland’s
Tight – Hella Tight (Round Whirled Records, 2010)) by Carne Cruda, a ‘Post-Latin’ ska outfit
from Oakland, California. It is almost entirely instrumental, except for a reverb-laden voice
sample (which sounds like Noam Chomsky) repeating the phrase ­‘anarcho-syndicalism’.
Carne Cruda’s website describes the band’s members as a ‘roster of Capitalism-smashers’ who
find that ‘playing booty-shaking Latin and Caribbean music is far superior to working for
The Man’ (www.carnecruda.com/about-us), but these instances of radical rhetoric are fairly

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 Jim Donaghey

anomalous against the background of frivolous lyrical tropes, such as their current single
‘I Love You More Than Tacos’ (Round Whirled Records, 2016). Again, basing analysis on
the lyrical expression of a band is not a decisively insightful approach, but while the band is
on a small independent label, they also happily promote their music on Apple’s iTunes, and
there is no evidence of any further connection to anarchism or anticapitalist ­production prac-
tices or distribution networks. So even though Carne Cruda explicitly references a ­relatively
niche anarchist strategy, in this context ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ is just a curio with an aurally
pleasing arrangement of syllables, and the radical transformative potential does not tangibly
exceed that of Billie’s ‘Because We Want To’.
Perhaps the best-known lyrical use of ‘anarchy’ is the Sex Pistols’ 1976 single ‘Anarchy
in the UK’ (EMI, 1976), and indeed, punk is amongst the musical genres with the widest
and deepest connections to anarchism. However, even here, the expression of anarchism is
decidedly vague – in the opening lines of the first verse, the pronunciation of ‘anarchist’ is
mangled to rhyme with ‘anti-christ’, and the closing lines identify the task of an ‘anarchist’
as ‘Get Pissed, Destroy’. The musical impetus of constructing rhymes is, for most musicians,
a more important concern than providing an accurate portrayal of a political philosophy
(and there is no expectation that it should be otherwise), but in terms of production and
distribution, the single version of ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was released on major label EMI, and
the album version (on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (Virgin, 1977)) was
released on Virgin, both now subsumed under Universal Music Group. It would be easy to
write off the Sex Pistols’ ‘anarchy’ as just empty posturing, engineered by manager Malcolm
McLaren to sell more trousers from his overpriced Kings Road shop and ultimately prof-
iting the corporate music industry, but it had an undeniably substantial impact, and was an
important influence behind the explosion of DIY punk bands, including many which were
(and are) explicitly anarchist. Penny Rimbaud, co-founder of anarcho-punk progenitors
Crass, exemplifies this:

I first heard the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy in the UK’ [with Steve Ignorant] … and although
we both felt that the Pistols probably didn’t mean it, to us it was a battle cry. When
Johnny Rotten proclaimed that there was ‘no future’, we saw it as a challenge. We both
knew that there was a future if we were prepared to fight for it. It was our world and it
had been stolen from us. We set out to demand it back.
(Rimbaud, 1998: 216)

Despite remaining firmly within mainstream, corporate production practices, the Sex
­ istols’ ‘accidentally’ radical transformative potential was realised in the subsequent devel-
P
opment of a fiercely politically committed anarchist punk underground, which has spread
globally and thrives to this day. While ‘anarchist music’ that is produced and distributed
through ­non-anarchist production processes is still deeply problematic, the fact that it con-
tains at least some radical transformative potential cannot be ignored – and this applies to
Billie, the Beatles and Carne Cruda, as well as the Sex Pistols. As Steven Taylor argues (and
as the example of the Sex Pistols appears to confirm): ‘the commodification of an original
artefact may dilute the impact of the pure product, but it doesn’t render it meaningless.
Given wide distribution, a particular commodity may inform and influence the mass culture’
(2003: 13). Taylor’s comment is arguably even more salient in the case of bands and musi-
cians who emerged from DIY and anarchist-engaged music scenes, but ‘sold out’ to major
labels and corporate production processes. ‘Anarchist bands’ such as Chumbawamba (who
signed to EMI in 1997) or Against Me! (who signed to Warner Music Group imprint, Sire, in

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2005, having previously signed to Fat Wreck Chords, which was distributed by Sony BMG,
in 2003) can reasonably be argued to have ‘diluted their impact’ as a result of ‘selling out’,
but any new fans acquired in their foray into the corporate music industry are also likely to
encounter their previous DIY output as a result, and with it an exposure to the DIY anar-
chist music scene from which these ‘sellouts’ emerged. They act as a form of gateway from
mainstream commercial culture into alternative, underground culture – and this relation-
ship highlights a key point: cultures of resistance stand in opposition to mainstream capitalist
culture but they are not isolated from it.
However, this is not to say that underground and DIY cultural communities are grateful
to sellouts for bringing increased exposure to their music scenes – far from it. Todd Taylor
of Razorcake zine writes that ‘every artist from Hole to Rage Against The Machine who said
they were going to bring the machine down from the inside … lied or [was] delusional. The
machine has paid them well and they’ve since shut their fuckin’ mouths about toppling the
industry’ (in Razorcake #39, quoted in Dunn, 2012: 234). Sandra Jeppesen also recognises
engagement with the corporate music industry as fatal to music’s radical transformative po-
tential, arguing that the influence of ‘corporate production or control … be[ing] co-opted
or recuperated by the mainstream … takes the powerful message out of punk (or anarchism,
protest, hip-hop etc.) and sells it back to people, emptied of its former meaning’ (2011: 29).
The perceived sell-outs by ‘anarchist bands’ such as Chumbawamba and Against Me! were
met with repercussions from the DIY community. Chumbawamba member Boff Whalley
writes that

The history of anti-Chumbawamba rhetoric from self-described anarchists would fill

half my house … Sell outs! How dare you claim to be anarchists and yet participate in
the consumerist commodification of art! There’s even an EP19 of songs available about
the band featuring songs with choruses of ‘Chumbawamba, you’re shit!’
(In O’Guérin, 2012: 80)

Against Me! signed to major label imprint Sire records in 2005, but it was signing to Fat
Wreck in 2003 (from the independent label No Idea) that sparked the fiercest reaction.
According to Against Me!’s singer, Laura-Jane, MaximumRockNRoll columnist Bill Florio
called on the band’s fans to:

come to the shows and pour bleach on our T-shirts and merch – just this insane ranting
and raving in his columns, saying that we were the fucking devil … While we were
playing, [someone went] out and slashed our tyres. They weren’t even trying to hide
it that they did it. They were just like, ‘Yeah, we fucking slashed your tires [sic], you
fucking sellouts’.
(Nguyen, 2007)

Whatever the arguments around the degree to which these bands ‘sold out’, or the imagined
consequences of doing so, the visceral reaction from their former DIY music communities
makes a clear point – sellouts are not tolerated. DIY represents an alternative economy, or-
ganised along ethics and values distinct from the mainstream corporate/capitalist industry,
and as Alan O’Connor notes,

If successful bands simply leave this underground for the major labels the autonomy
of the entire field is weakened. Imagine if these bands instead used their popularity to

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strengthen independent labels and their distributors, independent promoters and com-
munity space, zines and the whole punk underground.
(O’Connor, 2008: 24)

The ‘alternative economy’ represented by DIY is damaged when participants sell out – which
explains why ‘selling out’ is viewed so negatively, despite the potential to take their radical
message to a wider audience.
So, in terms of ‘accidentally’ anarchist music, it is impossible to write off at least a de-
gree of radical transformative potential. This is seriously problematised by the underlying
non-anarchist production processes and distribution networks – this point is made starkly in
the case of ‘anarchist musicians’ who sell out, where the impact of music that actually has an-
archist intent behind it is diminished and undermined by mainstream capitalist production.

DIY (Do It Yourself)

The issues around selling out demonstrate that production and distribution are key concerns
in any analysis of the radical transformative potential of ‘anarchist music’. Tim Yohannan
(1945–98), founder and long-time editor of influential DIY punk zine MaximumRockNRoll,
argued that ‘[i]n the long run … what’s important about punk is not the lyrics, what people
say, but what they do’ (interviewed by Turner, in Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 181), Kevin
Dunn quotes Walter Benjamin 20 to make a similar point:

What matters … is the exemplary character of production, which is able, first, to induce
other producers to produce, and, second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal.
And this apparatus is better, the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that
is, readers or spectators into collaborators.
(Benjamin, 1934: 777, in Dunn, 2012: 234)

Dunn (2012: 234) therefore argues that ‘being DIY and independent is far more effective than
talking about being DIY and independent. It is a form of cultural production that can turn
passive consumers into producers in their own right’. So DIY is transformative in its capacity
to expand the field of DIY production, at the expense of mainstream capitalist production.
DIY ethics and production are recognised as transformative by anarchists too, and this
extends far beyond the realm of music production. As anarchist historian George Woodcock
(1912–95) put it, ‘“Do-it-yourself ” is … the essence of anarchist action, and the more people
apply it on every level, in education, in the workplace, in the family, the more ineffective
restrictive structures will become and the more dependence will be replaced by individual
and collective self-reliance’ (Woodcock, 1986: 421). More DIY production means less cor-
porate capitalist production and less State control, and in this respect, DIY is oppositional
and radically transformative.
Bound up with the contention around culture and anarchism discussed earlier, DIY is
often associated with ‘lifestylist’ anarchisms. This is an oversimplified and sectarian view,
and an emphasis on DIY in fact extends across the spectrum of anarchist political perspec-
tives. Among those who might be identified as ‘lifestylist’, George McKay (1998: 14) argues
that ‘DiY’s most consistent historical and theoretical antecedents lie in anarchist thought and
practice’, while Portwood-Stacer (2013: 31) notes: ‘The DIY principle can be, and is, applied
to almost everything anarchists consume’. DIY is also reflected in the anarchist mutualism/
co-operativism advocated by the likes of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,21 or, more recently, Colin

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Ward,22 and Sean Martin-Iverson identifies ‘autonomous “Do-It-Yourself ” forms of cultural

production [as] a prefigurative politics of praxis, as workers struggling against the imposition
of work’ (Martin-Iverson, 2014: 10). DIY extends beyond typically ‘lifestylist’ perspectives
to also find expression in anarchisms which are at the furthest remove from ‘lifestylism’, for
example in anarcho-syndicalist and labour union strategies. Jack Kirkpatrick describes the
Industrial Workers of the World 23 as a ‘scrappy little DIY union’ (in Ness (ed.), 2014: 246)
and Geoffrey Ostergaard (1963) describes the anarcho-syndicalist implementation of direct
action as a ‘grass-roots, do-it-yourself kind of action’ (in Ward, 1987: 141).
So, DIY clearly has a grounding in anarchism and this extends across the spectrum of an-
archist political perspectives, but, as in the previous section, it is informative to analyse DIY
music forms in terms of their radical transformative potential, or even the extent to which
they embody an already achieved radical transformation.
Invoking a classic revolutionary socialist demand, CrimethInc. (2006: 3) exhort their
readers to ‘seiz[e] all the means of production you can get your hands on’, but CrimethInc.
elsewhere (2008: 113) challenge the materialist assumptions behind this demand by asserting
that ‘culture is the ultimate means of production, the one that produces human life itself …
it can be seized and shared like any other!’ In terms of seizing the means of production and
distribution of music, DIY practitioners have achieved some success. Ballinger argues that
‘[d]evelopments in music technology and mass communications have … facilitated networks
of alternative music like rap and punk, and create the potential for a transnational opposi-
tional culture’ (in Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 19). CrimethInc., who themselves emerged
from the anarchist punk scene, argue that this oppositional culture extends into production
as well: ‘Underground punk bands released their own records and established their own
venues, setting up an alternative economy based on “do-it-yourself ” networks and anticapitalist
values’ (2011: 325). These ‘anticapitalist’ values are chiefly expressed (and are evaluable) in
two related ways. Firstly, DIY music producers are concerned with minimising price (and
often eschew profit entirely) – these DIY ‘business’ ventures are ‘a failure in commercial
terms’ (Thompson, 2004: 150). Charging too much money for DIY-produced commodities
or events invites an accusation of ‘selling out’ just as much as actual engagement with corpo-
rate industry. Secondly, DIY production is viewed as ‘a passion rather than a job’ (O’Connor,
2008: 80) which establishes a ‘challenge to alienated labour’ (Martin-Iverson, draft c. 2014:
11), which Martin-Iverson marks as an ‘especially’ important aspect to being genuinely DIY
(draft c. 2014: 10). The concept of ‘alienated labour’ comes from Marxist theory, and argues
that a core aspect of capitalism is the separation of the producer from the products of their
labour. This is related to profit, since if a DIY producer is not making money, they are un-
able to pay others to produce on their behalf, and they are unable to ‘take a cut’ or cream off
the profit, as would be the case in the ‘normal’ terms of economic exploitation in capitalist
production. So, DIY practice means that the producers themselves engage in unalienated
labour and are directly connected to their product, and, further, means that DIY producers
cannot employ alienated labour.
In punk, and other DIY music scenes, these non-capitalist production practices are rec-
ognised as being explicitly oppositional and anticapitalist. As Thompson notes, ‘the corpo-
rate music industry stands in for the whole of capitalism, for it is when they confront the
major labels’ business practices, music, and bands that punks best understand themselves
as opposed to capitalism’ (2004: 4). Through these anticapitalist modes of production and
distribution (by minimising or eschewing profit, and rejecting alienated labour), and by es-
tablishing their own networks of commodity exchange, DIY music forms represent a form
of ‘anarchy in action’. Thompson points to the prefigurative aspect of DIY punk, in which

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he identifies ‘the seeds of a society in which collectives own the means of production and
produce for non-commercial ends’ (2004: 78), or to quote the preamble of the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), they are ‘forming the new society within the shell of the old’
(Brown, 1990: 19).
However, this DIY production remains largely at the level of representation – it is not
easy to sidestep the totalising influence of capitalist social relations, and this limits the suc-
cesses of DIY production. The independent networks and alternative economies created
through DIY music production and distribution are not isolated from the wider capitalist
economy. Despite the fringe successes of DIY networks, the means of production and distri-
bution are still in capitalist hands, producing for profit rather than to meet social needs. To
evade this would mean either producing no commodities whatsoever (as might be observed
in folk music’s emphasis on direct communication and non-commercialism), or seizing all
means of production, in a way that penetrates vertically downwards through the economy –
for music production, this would include the oil rigs which extract the raw materials for
vinyl records and plastic CDs and tapes, the oil refineries, the delivery trucks (and then also
the raw ­m aterials and factories to build the delivery trucks) and so on up (and across) the
production chain until an entirely ‘vertically integrated’ DIY economy could be realised,
independent from capitalist production.
Because DIY networks are inescapably connected to capitalist production, DIY producers
cannot evade the alienated labour carried in the overhead costs of their ‘punk businesses’,
despite attempts to distance themselves from profit. Even if a DIY producer keeps prices to
an absolute minimum, making zero profit, with no price markup whatsoever, they are still
passing on the alienated (exploited) labour contained in the price of everything sourced
from the non-DIY economy. The vinyl for records, the sound system for a gig, the paper
for advertising material, the delivery companies, the computer manufacturers and Internet
providers – these are all (at present) non-DIY, and all entail alienated labour and profit. If
DIY producers were to sell commodities at a loss or give them away for free, this still would
not fully negate the profit of non-DIY producers and the alienated labour they employ, since
the loss would inevitably have to be paid for by the DIY producer themselves, which in all
likelihood would be money from a ‘day job’ engaged in alienated labour. The taint of capi-
talist production can be passed on, but not eliminated.
The marginality of DIY’s successes in taking over the means of production means that, as
A. K. Thompson notes: ‘DIY ethics must come to terms with the fact that – at p­ resent – it
primarily represents people’s intention to become direct producers. In truth, most of what
actually gets “produced” remains representational in character’ (2010: 22). Stacy T ­ hompson
concurs that ‘the economic practices of [DIY punk do not] … fully succeed, if success
means a complete, if local or temporary, overthrow of the capitalist mode of production’
(2004: 81–82). Fredy Perlman 24 writes that the kind of anticapitalist production represented
by DIY: ‘can only [be done] marginally; men’s [sic] appropriation and use of the materials
and tools available to them can only take place after the overthrow of the capitalist form
of activity’ (2002: 11). Hubert Lagardelle,25 from a revolutionary-syndicalist perspective,
recognises the essential weakness of economic resistance which remains at the margins of
capitalism: ‘it is only by seizing the instruments of labour, by making itself the exclusive
owner of the factories, workshops, etc., that [the working class] will assure its emancipation’
(2011: n.p.). A recognition of DIY’s limitations is not to say that DIY is not worthwhile or
­t ransformative – it prefiguratively points to alternative economies, and to some degree em-
bodies this ­a lternative, while providing a material infrastructure for cultures of resistance,
as will be discussed later.

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However, more than simply being limited in its opposition to capitalism, it has been argued
that DIY production practices in fact bolster capitalism. William K. Carroll and Matthew
Greeno (in Fisher (ed.), 2013: 123) write that rather than challenging capitalism, DIY music
subcultures merely supply more markets and consumers: ‘Each subculture and identity group
offers a niche market to corporate capital. As market principles invade culture they absorb and
commodify the voices of subjugated groups within the chain of production and consumption’.
Martin-Iverson points to the pervasiveness of capitalist social relations in the Indonesian punk
scene, arguing that ‘[w]ith the growing commercialisation of the scene, punk autonomy has
been harnessed to a neoliberal, entrepreneurial independence which reproduces precarious-
ness and class exploitation within the scene’ (draft c. 2014: 6). DIY, especially when it fails
to eschew profit and alienated labour, reproduces capitalist social ­relations – these producers
become capitalists. As CrimethInc. (2011: 88) put it: ‘like the magnate in miniature … [they]
ha[ve] to internalise the logic of the market, taking its pressures and values to heart’. Tom
Frank (in Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 111) argues that ‘rebel ideology … has fuelled business
culture ever since the 1960s … [a] long, silly parade of “countercultural” entrepreneurship’.
So, it is possible for DIY to be co-opted into a neo-liberal capitalist framework, especially in
the subjectivity of small-scale entrepreneurs. In this view, an apparently anarchistic produc-
tion practice is no more immune from capitalist co-optation than the anarchistic aesthetics
discussed earlier. But, in the final evaluation, Martin-Iverson (draft c. 2014: 10) argues that
‘DIY production is a form of anarchist prefigurative politics, aimed at the active production of
alternative social values rather than simply making demands or expressing opposition’. ­Despite its
limitations and vulnerabilities, DIY is essentially radical and transformative. McKay (1998: 27)
is insightful when he comments: ‘maybe we should be talking less of Do it Yourself than Do it
Ourselves’. This shift from individualised to cooperative production is key to resisting capitalist
co-optation and expanding the field of DIY production.
So, ‘accidentally’ anarchist music was argued to be seriously problematised by its underly-
ing production processes – but even production practices like DIY, which are understood as
anarchistic, are limited and an evaluation of DIY as ‘anarchist music’ is not straightforward.
As suggested earlier, DIY production and anarchistic aesthetics are most clearly evaluable as
‘anarchist music’ when tied to anarchist political philosophy, and this is observable in anar-
chist cultures of resistance.

Cultures of Resistance
Examples of music forms which emanate from the anarchist movement include: the samba
bands and drum corps that feature at protests; the sound systems that thump late into the
night at squat parties or are loaded onto specially welded bikes for Critical Mass rides; gigs
and records which raise funds for anarchist causes such as prisoner support, Food Not Bombs,
and specific anarchist campaigns, groups and unions; music events which provide the social
setting for activists to meet, relax, talk and (of course) dance. Echoing the Emma Goldman
quote near the start of the chapter, Earth First! and IWW organiser Judi Bari (1949–97)
argued that, ‘as an individual, music enriches your life. So, if a movement is going to go
anywhere, there has to be some joy in it. It has to be something people want to do’ (in-
terviewed by Sakolsky in Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 173). But music is more than just
the backing-track to the anarchist movement; it is the vibrant cultural glue that holds the
movement together. As Bari puts it, ‘a movement that’s held together with music is way
stronger, it’s going to survive a lot more, inspire people a lot more’ (interviewed by Sakolsky
in ­Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 173). This isn’t to say that a musical or cultural focus replaces

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the multifaceted aspects of struggle for social transformation – but it does augment them.
Music is an important part of cultures of resistance – and taking ‘culture’ in its narrow inter-
pretation, as discussed earlier, it can be argued that many music forms are themselves a form
of resistance culture.
However, there is a sense that culture is not ‘political’ (and certainly not ‘Politics’ or poli-
ticking) – this is at the root of dismissals of culture by some anarchists, but is also recognised
by those attuned to culture’s radically transformative role. Discussing DIY and culturally
active groups in Anarchy in Action, Colin Ward points out that

None of them fits into the framework of conventional politics. In fact, they don’t speak
the same language as political parties. They talk in the language of anarchism and they
insist on anarchist principles of organisation, which they have learned not only from
political theory but from their own experience.
(Ward, 1996 [1973]: 137–8)

As Steven Duncombe (1997: 175) puts it, ‘the politics of culture never announce themselves
as political … the politics expressed within and through culture become part of us, get under
our skin, and become part of our “common sense”’. This ‘unannounced’ aspect is key to the
radical transformative potential in cultures of resistance – the transformation of ‘common
sense’ arguably has a more fundamental impact in society than shifts in mere ‘politics’ or
‘economics’. Class War makes this very point: ‘We believe that our ideas must become part
of peoples everyday lives, not just a reaction to a hostile economic, social or political envi-
ronment’ (Class War, c. 1991: n.p.).
The building of cultures of resistance is expressly argued as a core strategy by numer-
ous writers and activist groups from a range of anarchist perspectives. But as CrimethInc.
(2011: 323) warn, ‘culture can appear “different” and even oppositional without actually
challenging capitalism at all’; so, resistance stands as a crucial and defining aspect of anar-
chist cultural activity and organising. These cultures are ‘resisting’ against the dominant
culture (or intersecting cultures) of bourgeois capitalism, patriarchy, racism, heterosexism,
statism, nationalism (etc. ad nauseam). This widely ranging resistance is evident specifically
within music as well, for example CamBagMag’s songbook Four Chord Revolution. Songs
of Protest. Sing n Fling with chord diagrams (1987) covers a whole range of issues including
squatting, solidarity with South African and Namibian prisoners, Nicaragua, apartheid, the
Diggers, anti-Thatcher, asbestos, anticops, anti-McDonald’s, and is accompanied by infor-
mation and links to numerous anarchist groups and campaigns, including Black Flag, Class
War, ­Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, Direct Action [probably indicating the Direct Action
Movement], West Midlands Hunt Saboteurs and Anarchist Communist Federation. Class
War are explicit about this oppositional aspect of cultural resistance: ‘Capitalists dominate
and control most forms of cultural production … and recreate popular cultural activities
infected with THEIR ideology. Because of this an essential part of revolutionary politics
is to develop a revolutionary culture of resistance’ (Class War no. 47, c. 1991: n.p.). And,
for Class War, this opposition must be unerringly confrontational and uncompromising –
­cultures of resistance must make ‘demands that the ruling class cannot even contemplate,
let alone fulfil’ (Class War ­Federation, 1992: 76). Similarly to Reich’s identification of an
already ­a nti­capitalist folk music tradition, Class War views it as ‘essential to promote and
strengthen the working class culture that already exists’ (Class War Federation, 1992: 76), and
again, a similar argument is made by Bookchin (1995: 21), who celebrates ‘the rich culture that
was created by revolutionaries over the past centuries, indeed by ordinary working people’.

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Ballinger points to these same oppositional, resistant and culturally constructive aspects in
music specifically, asserting that ‘oppositional music practices not only act as a form of resis-
tance against domination, but generate social relationships and experience which can form
the basis of a new cultural sensibility and, in fact, are involved in the struggle for a new culture’
(in Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 14).
An oft-cited example of music in the anarchist movement is found in the IWW.26 Daniel
O’Guérin (2012: 3–4) discusses the IWW’s ‘tradition of folk songs and poems that aroused
solidarity among workers in struggle or kept their stories alive around the camp fire’. Bari
identifies this instrumental aspect of music, describing it as ‘a really good organising tool.
It gives the whole thing a kind of spirit; it really fuels the movement in a lot of ways’ (in-
terviewed by Sakolsky in Sakolsky and Ho (eds.), 1995: 173). In this vein, Class War sought
to instrumentalise music in their ‘Rock Against The Rich’ gigs and tours of the late 1980s
and mid-2010s. Their rationale was based on a belief that rock music could ‘be a force in
bringing people together for organised resistance’ (Class War c. 1988: n.p.). So in addition
to individual enjoyment and social cohesion, music also plays a practical role in cultures of
resistance. These cultures serve as a bedrock from which more specifically focused resistance
movements can spring. As CrimethInc. (2009: 74) argue, ‘A sustainable space that nurtures
long-term communities of resistance can ultimately contribute more to militant struggle
than the sort of impatient insurrectionism that starts with confrontation rather than building
to it’. As discussed earlier in the chapter, the CNT in Barcelona in the early 1900s provides
a historical example of this function of resistance cultures.
However, anarchist cultures of resistance are distinct from Gramscian or autonomous
Marxist counter-hegemonic projects, because the point is not to replace the dominant cul-
ture (or cultures) with a new dominant culture. As CrimethInc. (2006: 17) put it, ‘radicals
should never conflate offering paths to liberation with promoting their own subcultures. It
should never appear that, like those who speak of converting the masses, our goal is to assim-
ilate everyone else’. Portwood-Stacer (2013: 63) quotes Adam Tinnell, who in an ‘anarchist
fashion’ blog argues that

With such a diverse politic as anarchism, being interpreted and enacted in ­thousands of
­d ifferent cultures around the world, not to mention the contributions of a­ narcha-feminism
and queer anarchism, it’s totally unacceptable to let one or two subcultures dominate the
look and the feel of this movement.
(Tinnell, 2009)

However, while music and culture are necessary aspects of radically transformative or revolu-
tionary struggle, and may in some respects be prior to other forms of struggle, this is not to
say they are pre-eminent or sufficient in isolation. As Nawrocki puts it (in O’Guérin (ed.),
2012: 67), ‘rock ‘n roll, anarcho or not, just isn’t revolution. We always saw our daily work,
our cultural contribution, as only a small part of the equation’. Cultures of resistance cease to
be effectively oppositional when they become ‘anarcho-ghettos’ into which activists recede.
As in the discussion of DIY, earlier, an attachment to anarchist political philosophy is essen-
tial in maintaining the resistant and radically transformative aspects of cultures of resistance.

Conclusion
In writing this chapter on ‘anarchist music’, there was a temptation to proffer a list of music
forms which ‘qualify’ as anarchist. However, any such list would have been severely skewed by

447
 Jim Donaghey

my own aesthetic preferences, and by the music forms to which I have been exposed. I am in no
position (and nor is anyone) to prescribe what music people should enjoy making or listening to.
Rather, this chapter has sought to explore possible frames of evaluation behind the com-
plex question: ‘what is anarchist music?’ The key interrogation here has been the potential
for, or realisation of, radical transformation. This interrogation of radical transformative poten-
tial has been applied to ‘anarchist music’ in terms of ‘anarchist’ aesthetics, ‘anarchist’ lyrics,
‘anarchist’ DIY production practices and ‘anarchist’ cultures of resistance. This has not been
to present a static definition of what constitutes ‘anarchist music’, but to present an evaluation
which teases out some of the key issues in the relationship between anarchism and music, and
between anarchism and culture more widely.
It is hoped that this chapter might influence the reader’s own evaluation of ‘anarchist mu-
sic’ in terms of music consumption and music-making – but for an immersive and engaged
evaluation, the surest approach is to Do It Yourself.

Notes
1 Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an anarchist activist famous for her fiery orations. Much of
her activist ‘career’ was in the US, but she was also a first-hand witness of the aftermath of the
­Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the Spanish Revolution in 1936. Her writings have
been influential in the anarchist and feminist movements. A useful introductory text is Anarchism
and Other Essays (London: Active Distribution, Zagreb: Što čitaš, 2014 [1910]), which includes a
brief autobiography and includes several key writings – available free at: https://theanarchistli-
brary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays [accessed 22 October 2016].
2 Revolutionary agency refers to the idea that social change must occur concurrently with a change
in the mindsets of the individuals that make up that society. See, for example, the writings of
Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), such as Revolution and Other Writings: a Political Reader ed. and trans.
Gabriel Kuhn, (Oakland: PM Press, 2010), available free at: https://libcom.org/files/Landauer_
Revolution_and_Other_Writings.pdf [accessed 22 October 2016].
3 Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958) was an anarchist writer and activist. Forced to leave Germany in the
1930s because of the rise of Nazism, he was involved in organising Yiddish-speaking tailors in
the East End of London, and eventually made his way to the US. Among his most popular writ-
ings is Anarcho-syndicalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989 [1938]), available free at: https://libcom.
org/files/Rocker%20-%20Anarcho-Syndicalism%20Theory%20and%20Practice.pdf [accessed
22 October 2016].
4 Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was a Marxist and founder of the Communist Party of Italy. An ex-
cellent introduction to his key concepts can be found in Roger Simon, Gramsci’s Political Thought:
an introduction 3rd edn. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2015).
5 See especially Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994) [1967], available free
at: www.antiworld.se/project/references/texts/The_Society%20_Of %20_The%20_Spectacle.
pdf [accessed 22 October 2016].
6 Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) was an anarchist writer based in the US. His early work devel-
oped key contemporary themes such as ‘social ecology’ but late in his life, he moved away from
anarchism to espouse ideas under the rubric of ‘libertarian municipalism’ (see Social Ecology and
Communalism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007)), which has found contemporary resonance with rev-
olutionary groups in the Kurdish region of Rojava (see Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism
(Cologne: International Initiative, 2011), Can Cemgil and Clemens Hoffmann, ‘The “Rojava
Revolution” in Syrian Kurdistan: A Model of Development for the Middle East?’ IDS Bulletin,
47:3 (2016), 53–76, and Yagmur Savran, ‘The Rojava Revolution and British Solidarity’, Anarchist
Studies, 24:1 (2016), 7–12).
7 The Class War Federation is an anarchist activist group that formed in the UK in 1986, though
the Class War newspaper was first published in 1982 as a way to expose politicised punks to
class-struggle anarchism. Their most recent incarnation is the Class War Party, which fielded
candidates (albeit subversively) in the 2015 UK General Election. See: www.classwarparty.org.uk/
[accessed 22 October 2016].

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 Dances with Agitators

8 The CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ collective is a loose collection of anarchist activists, writers and
propagandists, primarily based in the US, which emerged from the punk scene in the 1990s.
9 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo or National Confederation of Labour, a prominent ­anarcho-syndicalist
union founded in 1910, which, though banned by Franco during the Fascist dictatorship, remains
active. See: www.cnt.es/ [accessed 22 October 2016].
10 Albert Meltzer (1920–96) was an anarchist activist in Britain, and co-founder of Black Flag news-
paper and the Kate Sharpley library and publisher.
11 For example, Bookchin is notorious for his anti-lifestylist polemic, and Meltzer and Class War
have also been outspoken against lifestylism, while Portwood-Stacer defends ‘lifestyle activism’
and CrimethInc. are frequently identified by detractors as lifestylists – yet in terms of culture,
there is broad agreement (even if they would be wont to admit the similarity).
12 Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was born in Austria, but moved to the US to escape Nazism, and was
a pioneering psychoanalyst, especially in the field of sexual liberation. He also wrote on political
themes from a Freudian–Marxist perspective.
13 For more on some of the numerous manifestations of anarchist culture, see: Jesse Cohn, Under-
ground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011, (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2014).
14 To aid the reader’s own exploration of ‘anarchist music’, some music forms commonly associated
with anarchism include: folk, hip-hop, punk, hardcore, ska, reggae, Oi!, grindcore, death metal,
dance musics (such as grime, dub-step, rave and techno), jazz, avant-garde/classical, pop, samba,
Greek rebetiko, Mexican corridos, Krautrock.
15 Latterly distributed by RCA and currently owned and distributed by Sony Music Entertainment.
16 The UK arm of Universal Music Group, based in Milton Keynes (MK).
17 www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrkwgTBrW78.
18 In the case of YouTube, ‘free’ content is paid for with reams of advertising – effectively selling your
attention to corporate companies.
19 The record in question is titled Bare Faced Hypocrisy Sells Records/The Anti-Chumbawamba EP (Rup-
tured Ambitions, Propa Git, 1998).
20 Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was associated with the Frankfurt School philosophers, who took an
unorthodox approach to Marxism, and were especially concerned with cultural issues. ­Benjamin
died while trying to escape the Nazis.
21 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) was the first self-described anarchist political philosopher.
22 Colin Ward (1924–2010) emphasised the already existing anarchy observable in activities such as
squatting and many other aspects of life which are organised away from the interference of the
State or corporate capitalism. See: Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action (London: Freedom Press 1996
[1973]), available free at: https://libcom.org/files/Ward_-_Anarchy_in_Action_3.pdf [accessed
24 October 2016].
23 The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or ‘Wobblies’) is a union founded in the US in 1905,
which has many commonalities with anarcho-syndicalism, and counts many anarchists as mem-
bers. See: https://www.iww.org/ [accessed 24 October 2016].
24 Fredy Perlman (1934–85) was an author, lecturer and IWW member. While he did not de-
scribe himself as an anarchist, his writings have been influential in anarchist circles, especially
Against His-story, Against Leviathan (1983), available free at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/
fredy-perlman-against-his-story-against-leviathan [accessed 24 October 2016].
2 5 Hubert Lagardelle (1874–1958) was an early proponent of revolutionary-syndicalism, which
was a forerunner of what is now known as anarcho-syndicalism. However, he later became
a fascist sympathiser and took a post in the Vichy government in France during the Second
World War.
26 A digital transfer of a 1954 record of IWW songs is available free at: https://archive.org/details/
SongsOf TheWobblies [accessed 24 October 2016].

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Discography
Billie, ‘Because We Want To’, Honey To The B (Innocent, Virgin, 1999).
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Git, 1998).

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 4.6
TECHNO-POLITICS
An Interview with Jim Thomas, ETC Group
Jim Thomas/ETC Group

Uri Gordon:  Would you like to start by describing some of the groups or movements that
organise around a radical politics of technology?
Jim Thomas:  I think I would start by saying that there is not yet a radical technology pol-
itics movement, and that it is incipient in other movements. It’s interesting to look at
the fragmented ways in which radical movements, and civil society movements more
broadly, grapple with technology. I think it is less helpful to talk about a movement
as such, and better to think of it in terms of radical technology politics as they feature
in various struggles. So, for example, on the one hand, there are questions around
­openness  – open source, open technology, whether it’s about hacker movements, in-
cluding biohackers, or the maker movement and so on. Those struggles are sometimes
disconnected from those who take on questions of technological power and control as it
affects questions around risk and precaution. There is clearly theorised work about tech-
nology more generally that has come out of movements against GM crops, industrial
agriculture, toxic chemicals and nuclear power. Then, there’s the movement against
militarism and military technology. And then, there is a whole indigenous critique of
how technology is used as a colonial, imperial force. And finally, of course, critique of
technology features in more broadly anticapitalist, anti­corporate struggles and in cli-
mate justice and environmental justice discourse.
A lot of these things don’t connect very well, it’s important to say. Much of
civil society does not have a very obvious place to start, or even any set of obvious
questions towards technology that are broadly socialised. There is a lot of good the-
oretical, including radical theoretical, work that is not effectively shared between
movements. What we commonly see are very site-specific fights on specific technol-
ogies and sometimes specific technology platforms, where an existing movement goes
up against the technological machine. For example, isolated fights over fracking, GM
crops, mobile phones and vaccinations, where often a technological critique is created
in isolation and in partial ways. What is only beginning now is the attempt to link
across all these technological fights to find the common drivers, common opponents
and common agendas.
Part of what I think will make this clearer is the ‘convergence agenda’ that elites
are pushing very hard on. The World Economic Forum calls it the ‘fourth industrial

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 Jim Thomas/ETC Group

revolution’; for years, it has been called ‘converging technologies’. Artificial intelligence
and automation trends are bringing that convergence to the fore. The captains of cap-
ital are now the heads of technology firms, that is increasingly obvious, and they are
increasingly seeing technology as the way to move forward the interests of capital, even
more so than trade agreements or rewriting governance laws – since technology can
bypass a lot of that.
UG:  Does this have to do with the convergence of biological, computer and materials
technologies?
JT:  Well the idea of converging technologies that has become traditionalised in the last
decade is that of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information
technology and neural technologies. That gets configured in different ways, whether
GRAIN – Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Nano, or BANG – Bits, At-
oms, Neurons and Genes. The World Economic Forum titles it as the ‘fourth industrial
revolution’ and it is becoming really obvious in the current AI bubble how there is a lot
of excitement about flexible manufacturing and robotics, which is taking off in a big
way. In fact, talking about convergence in this way misses the fact that it’s a convergence
of corporate sectors and economics as much as of technological platforms. At the same
time, you’re moving decision-making into technological solutions, apps basically. ‘Don’t
worry be ‘appy’. There is an app for everything and in governance terms, you can shrink
engagement including democratic engagement in decision-making and say ‘we will just
deploy one technological app after another’, all of which have to be made and developed
researched and tested and produced for money.
So a very important discussion that needs to take place in civil society and social
movements is the one around the so-called solutions. Evgeny Morozov has done some
great work around ‘solutionism’ and it applies to the techno-driven language which many
NGOs unthinkingly use in this respect. The interesting thing about him is that he comes
from that ‘open world’, ‘digital society’ agenda, and in his book To Save Everything Click
Here, he poked at the idea that we can turn all social problems into solvable, engineerable
solutions. This idea that comes from Silicon Valley that everything can be reduced to a
solution gives the idea that the challenges we face are kind of glorified maths problems.
UG:  Meaning they’re technical and managerial rather than social and political?
JT:  Right – and the implication is if we can find the technical engineering solution it can be
resolved, and we can move on. Of course, what we are facing are not math problems, what
we are facing are situations which are historical, cultural, social that are about power in-
equities. The way you address that is through political action and people having to engage
with each other – but all of that is swept aside when the answer becomes a technological
solution. Climate change has been turned into a technical maths problem about CO2 in
the air and the solution is that we have to install solar panels and we have to take out car-
bon dioxide. But climate change is nothing like that, climate change is really about our
civilisation and how we have inequitably shared resources over time while deliberately
arranging everything around a fuel source that enables monopoly. But instead we are told
that it is an inefficiency problem as long as we can technologically and financially solve it.
UG:  So what would be an alternative perspective? Thinking of agriculture, for example.
JT:  Certainly, peasant movements like the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) and Via
Campesina are encouraging a move towards agroecology and agroecological systems,
which is recognising that indigenous technology already has answers. These sort of
complex diverse technological systems we would call wide-tech - rather than hi-tech.

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 Techno-politics

UG:  ‘Technology’ in the sense of land management practices that have existed for centuries?
JT:  Yes. Often technology is captured by popular imagination, especially in the global
North, as exogenous technology that comes from elsewhere and is given to you from
on high. But every civilisation is innovating from below at all times. Innovation is
one of those words that have been captured and hijacked for a very specific narrow
technoscience, but it is also what farmers and indigenous people do all the time.
One of the tasks we find ourselves doing at the ETC Group is trying to point to in-
digenous innovations as innovation, as science and technology, and agroecology is a
perfect example. But of course, it is always going to be local and diverse. We always
talk about ‘3D innovation’: diverse, decentralised and democratic. Those are the in-
novation systems that really exist and really deliver, including peasant agriculture and
agroecology.
While agribusiness and agritechnology companies are saying that they are moving
to ‘precision agriculture’ or ‘climate smart agriculture’ based on further hi-tech interven-
tion, the response from peasant and food sovereignty movements is that we already have
agroecology – it exists, we can show it, it’s all over the place. And if your concern is about
climate change, it already is low carbon. If your concern is about hunger, it’s already
feeding people. If your concern is about the impact on nutrients, it’s already cycling nu-
trients. However you cut it, this diverse decentralised set of technologies and approaches
is meeting every one of these needs.
UG:  And how does this conflict between opposing agendas manifest in practice?
JT:  It goes all ways. On the one hand, there’s direct action like landless peasants from MST
and Via Campesina trying to close GM tree plantations in Brazil and turn them into
agroecology centres, and there are other direct confrontations with corporate projects
and technologies. On the other hand, there’s the effort to try to get this language into
institutional settings. So now the concept of agroecology, for example, is beginning to
appear in discussions and documents from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation,
the Committee on World Food Security and the International Panel of Experts on Food
Systems. It’s an interesting contrast to the way the mainstream climate movement has
gone, which was to demand renewables, meaning a set of technological solutions that
is not socially grounded in the same way agroecology is. Agroecology is really a set of
social technologies.
UG:  Do movements in the global South link these critiques of exogenous technologies to
colonialism?
JT:  What gets linked clearly is the new high technology, the technosciences. GM crops and
GM tech are very closely linked to colonialism because they come with monoculture
projects that are taking land away, with systems where the seed is no longer controlled
by peasants but large companies. This is not only through patents on seeds or plant
breeder’s rights, but also simply that seeds brought in through industrial agriculture are
not adapted to diverse small farmer ecology. They are high-input seeds that are designed
to be part of a monocultural operation. Certainly, GM seeds were designed for mono-
culture, originally with the ­A merican prairies in mind so that Monsanto, Dupont, Syn-
genta and so forth could sell them to large industrial operations. A herbicide-resistant
GM crop implies a large growing area where herbicide is sprayed, and was developed for
monoculture corn or soy or cotton. It can’t be co-planted with other crops that don’t re-
sist this herbicide and it only makes sense in a high-input system where you’re using one
crop. The same for GM crops that produce their own pesticide, where the assumption

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is that you want ‘clean’ fields – once again, you’re talking about a monocultural system
since this crop is going to kill all the biodiversity around it.
Here, one of the most interesting fights surrounds climate smart agriculture, or
‘climate ready’ traits. So you have crops being developed where the stories from the
biotech and agribusiness companies are that we are making crops to feed the world, be
able to resist floods or deal with drought or more saline soils because of desertification,
and therefore we are providing for expanded food production in the South, and they
are looking at the South particularly. The reality is what they are doing is allowing
monoculture crops to move onto land where monoculture crops couldn’t go before.
Monoculture crops didn’t do very well on saline soil, and monoculture crops didn’t do
very well in drought systems, on the so-called marginal land. That is where peasant and
agroecological systems still held sway. In effect, the best land has already been taken for
plantation agriculture but on marginal land, it’s harder to one-size-fits-all agriculture;
you need to have seeds which are more locally adapted and systems which support the
soil in other ways. All of this is done by peasant agriculture and not done very well
by industrial agriculture. So from the peasant point of view, climate-ready crops and
so-called climate-smart agriculture are about adapting industrial agriculture crops to
take over more of their land. So it’s a technology that enables further land grabs from
peasants and indigenous people, a colonial and imperial behaviour and does nothing for
the systems that are in place. But to the North, it’s sold as ‘here is how we are helping
create more food for the world’ – although these monoculture commodities are not
what feeds the world.
UG:  It strikes me that a critique of technology which emphasises power inequalities, en-
croachments and colonialism is quite different from techno-critiques based on precau-
tion, hazard and risk.
JT:  I think, in part, this is a difference between North and South responses; we just talked
about GM technology but with other technologies too. We see that very clearly sur-
rounding geoengineering – meaning deliberate and large-scale technological interven-
tion in the functioning of earth systems. The South sees it as a power play about control,
and especially military control, while the North sees geoengineering as a technical risk
that could go wrong if something unexpected happens. Of course, both things are true
and it’s an interesting interplay between what happens if it works the way it’s supposed
to – which creates a colonial power play – and what happens if it doesn’t work the way
it’s supposed to – where you still probably have a colonial power play going on but also
unexpected physical things too.
Geoengineering has always been a potential weapon; there is a long history of
weather warfare and military weather modification. A lot of political leverage comes
with being able to credibly say that by making a specific intervention in a climate sys-
tem, you can get a predictable output somewhere else. So, for example, if by putting
sulphates in Northern latitudes around Iceland you can ensure greater or lesser mon-
soons around Sub-Saharan ­A frica, that gives you serious regional power and that should
be chilling. But more importantly, I think it is about derailing the climate agenda. Any
real joined-up action around climate change involves changing industrial systems and
infrastructures. When this agenda began to rise, the first response of the fossil fuel in-
dustry was denial, and that worked for a certain period of time but not really anymore.
So the second response is to put forward a false technical solution that supposedly allows
us to maintain high emissions and avoid real change. I think it’s here that geoengineer-
ing is the big distraction. Whether it works or not doesn’t matter – it’s how you change

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the agenda by putting it forward. We see this again and again in these big promethean
techno-fix narratives and to their credit the climate justice movement has been leading
in pointing out the phenomena of ‘false solutions’.
It’s similar with GM crops. Looking back twenty years, Monsanto said they were
going to have hundreds of different GM varieties and be a massive part of the food
system. None of that has happened and really, because of such massive resistance, they
ended up releasing relatively little. On the other hand, it was a huge success because in
the process they bought out lots of seed companies and concentrated them, so Monsanto
is now one of six companies that controls chemical, agrochemical and seeds technolo-
gies right across the food chain. In that sense, the GM technology was hugely successful
regardless of whether or not it really made it into agriculture. And we’re now looking
at three further mergers: Monsanto-Bayer, Dow-DuPont and Syngenta-ChemChina,
all structured around the next set of technological developments, data-driven preci-
sion agriculture or ‘digital farming’, so corporate concentration is becoming even more
extreme.
UG:  So let’s talk about alternatives to corporate concentration. Do you see any hope in the
idea that an open-source ethos could be applied not only to software but to more material
technologies?
JT:  I don’t regard the various maker, biohacker and open-source movements as particularly
radical. If you go back to the 1850s, there was a massive growing movement of chem-
istry hackers in Western Europe, young people who were trying to develop synthetic
chemistry in their own homes, equivalent to garage inventors. For example, you had
people like William Perkins, in the UK, who came up with the chemical version of the
colour indigo. And that really rolled back the patent movement, particularly in Ger-
many, so you could say there was an anti-monopoly, grassroots, bottom-up movement
that seemed to be doing successfully what the current open-source hardware move-
ments want to do. Yet once they worked out the core technologies through this open
and free approach, then capital reasserted itself and those people set up what were to
become BASF, Bayer and what ultimately became IG Farben, the most highly concen-
trated company in the beginning of the twentieth century.
Every new technology platform needs a period of openness and freedom to work out
what it is about, work out what its killer apps are and how it will function in a capitalist
system. You also see that with the Internet. Apple was part of a home brew computer
club. I find it similar with biohackers, this growing movement using biotech in an open-
sourced way with all the genetic parts being accessible, sharable, not patented and so forth.
There are biohackers with very strong anticorporate sentiments and often a well-theorised
understanding of the problems of monopoly, but much of this movement is ultimately
driven by privileged individuals arguing for greater freedom to operate - wanting to mas-
ter the technology and then be able to set up start-ups. For capital, that’s great. You need
that time of openness, but once you sort out the basic technologies, then capital moves in
and closes everything down again.
UG:  Would you say the same thing about the free software movement?
JT:  Yes, because I see a unidimensional movement that doesn’t engage well with an actual
material politics of technology, in the way that Ivan Illich talked about it, understanding
that technologies have social relations built into them, that there are elite technologies,
undemocratic technologies that are inherently authoritarian. The hacker ethos says ev-
erything can be made democratic as long as you hand it to enough people and that’s just
not true. The underlying politics of the technology itself will reassert themselves and

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that understanding is just missing in the free software movement as I observe it – there’s
no critique of computers per se.
Something like 3D printing is also a really good example. Whoever is going to
­benefit most from 3D printing on a large scale is whoever controls the data, and to
control data you need to have large data processing and storage capabilities. Those are
capital and ­energy-intensive, so it is always going to be an advantage for corporations
and ecological ramifications. It feels to me like that excitement in the 1960s that we
were all going to control our TV stations through community television. Well you can
set up your community television or Indymedia sites but the Internet or TV as a whole
is not going to be controlled by ­Indymedia. On balance, it is going to be a corporate-­
controlled environment moving forward the interest of capital. You have these small
sites where communities feel that they are using it for themselves but overall the direc-
tion of that technology is towards capital. The excitement about biohacking and 3D
printing and blockchains and so on certainly doesn’t come from peasant or workers’
movements in the South.
Southern movements often very clearly articulate that they want technology that is
driven by their own indigenous and traditional knowledge systems. A small but really
good example was when it was found that genetically modified corn had contami-
nated the centre of origin in Mexico, and traditional peasant communities were very
concerned about this contamination. The question was what to do about it, and you
had sympathetic scientists from the North saying that DIY genetic labs could be set up
where corn could be tested for contamination. The communities discussed this and said
no, because that was moving to a technology system that was not based on indigenous
knowledge – it required external expertise about genetics, external capital to keep the
labs going, so the political economy of that solution did not fit with their own knowl-
edge and ways of doing things. In the end, the communities said, instead let’s work out
the traditional way to protect maze systems: we are going to look more closely at the
cobs of maze, which look familiar and unfamiliar, and make sure we save them the way
they always were.
UG:  Does this kind of technological assessment help move from specific struggles towards a
broader movement around the politics of technology?
JT:  I think so. Technology assessment as such has been around for many years; some govern-
ments have technology assessment bodies connected to their parliaments, many of which
have been defunded but some are coming back. Now, we have been involved with many
civil society groups to try and create regional technology assessment networks, what we
call TAPs – Technology Assessment Platforms where a range of different groups come
together to track what the emerging technologies are, what technologies matter across
different issues and then put them through a social, economic, cultural and risk assessment
together. But this is coming from people’s knowledge and drawing on experiments in par-
ticipatory technology assessment like citizens’ juries or community knowledge exchanges.
For the ETC Group, that is really important, building up the practice of social movements
to assess technologies in a broad and multi-criteria way. This kind of participation helps
move towards a view of technology as an object of political engagement.
UG:  What other actors apart from peasant movements offer a radical critique of technology
and technology practices?
JT:  The disability rights movement has an extremely good critique of technology because
they are consistently excluded from technology, whether it is just getting on buses or
the Internet, they have a very good sense of how building a technological infrastructure

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implicitly includes or excludes certain kinds of people. The disability rights actions
around things like access really go to the core of how technology engages, chooses and
pushes forward structures of power. With workers’ rights, there are also interesting de-
velopments. The traditional labour movement has engaged with technology on the level
of risk, but now there is bound to be more engagement because of how flexible robotics,
automation and AI are taking off. Where previously you had robots, in the car industry,
for example, they’d do a single operation. With flexible robotics, tasks are reprogram-
mable and a whole factory can potentially change its manufacturing from one day to the
other depending on the data it’s given. So again, this is an opening for workers to engage
with technology politics on a deeper level.
So going back to where we started, currently you have skirmishes over specific
technologies: GMOs, nuclear, fracking, mobile phones or whatever. They get so far in
a technological critique and then go back to the specifics of their own issue. But with
newly emerging technologies, movements are often better able to cross-pollinate and
connect to other fights and other critiques. When everything is coming into being, it’s
an open space politically; there is a lot to fight for and there is a lot of ground to gain.
This is the space where you can articulate struggles in terms of technological power as
such, and begin to push back on those broader terms.

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 4.7
THE REVOLUTION UNDER
THE TABLE
On the Social Ecology of the Local Food
Movement in the US

Lisa Trocchia-Baļķīts

Since the first decades of the twentieth century, the US began investing in food produc-
tion strategies that would enable it to feed a growing and increasingly urban domestic
population, as well as its allies in Europe during two world wars. Since that time, it has
established a reputation as ‘the world’s “residual supplier” of agricultural commodities,
the one place to turn to in emergencies’ (Rosenfeld 1974, 19). The deeply resonant belief
among its citizens that ‘America feeds the world’ empowers a tenacious grand narrative.
Constructed in the post-WWII rhetoric that framed the US as the most powerful nation
on earth, for many, the task of providing food for the world continues to stir up a sense
of moral pride in capability.
This narrative conjures values of benevolence and responsibility that overlook its origins
in a calculated political and paternalistic approach to humanitarianism intentionally allied
with strategies for economic dominance (Fousek 2000, 68). The ‘feed the world’ narrative
fails to recognise that nearly half of the largest crop raised in the US, corn, goes to the
­production of fuel, not food, and that the type of food exported to the rest of the world
does not address adequate nutritional needs (Charles 2013, 2:12; 3:27). Further complicating
the ­psychology ­behind the persistence of the grand narrative is the current reality that over
­forty-two ­m illion people in the US live in food-insecure households (Feeding America
2015). Still, the idea that American farmers have the moral responsibility to feed the world
animates a form of patriotism that takes pride in dominating global agricultural markets and
justifies pushing production methods towards higher and higher yields.
In practical terms, this kind of growth in the agricultural sector has been achieved at
the expense of smallholder diversified farms, by exploiting homogeneity in both plants and
animals (a requirement to realise the benefits of economies of scale), and through the use of
cheap labour, energy-intensive systems, petrochemicals and genetic manipulation.
The ‘feed the world’ grand narrative plays to the contemporary agricultural policies of
the US, which have matured within the framework of neo-liberal ideologies and under the
formidable influence of corporate control of the structures of food production, aggregation,
processing, transportation, distribution, marketing and consumption – otherwise known as
the industrial food system. Because the US maintains a position of significant economic and
political influence around the world, which includes shaping global liberalisation through

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the agricultural policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
(The Thistle 2000), the industrial food systems model has become globally dominant.
Enter the counternarrative: there is now a shift in consciousness arising from the grass
roots in countries around the world. In response to a growing awareness that the industrial
food system is inextricably linked to global environmental, economic, political and social
systems, citizens are resisting the inherent lack of ecological sustainability, economic equity
and social justice found within the dominant food systems model. This resistance, which I
refer to here as ‘the local food movement’, is remarkably powerful precisely because it is de-
centralised, yet focused. In this leaderless movement (Latham 2016), resistance is created by
a common understanding of global food systems issues, often shared through self-organised
networks of communication and exchange, but notably shaped by the culture of place.
In many countries, including the US, extraordinary and culturally unique examples of
the local food movement are manifesting in significant ways. As a diverse and place-based
project, the local food movement is manifesting as farmworker solidarity, as attention to
food resiliency and preservation of biodiversity through seed saving, as the nurturing of
heritage animal breeds and organic and/or permaculture food production, and as policies
and approaches that address hunger and poor nutrition, equal access to food, and global
fair trade arrangements. While these are necessary and positive developments and without
doubt relevant to my thesis, providing a detailed analysis of these very visible and material
outcomes is not my primary focus. Here, my intent is to take a closer look at the framing and
infrastructure of the local food movement in the US, and, in particular, to cast a critical eye
over the widely popular idea of a ‘food revolution’ in a cultural context.
Talk of a ‘food revolution’ is commonplace in the US. Following a campaign ­championed
by British chef and restaurateur, Jamie Oliver, one now finds Hollywood celebrities, A­ merican
non-profit organisations, philanthropic foundations, food writers, chefs and elected gov-
ernment officials actively encouraging a food revolution. There are food revolution public
conferences, cookbooks, websites, songs and at least one major university campus which
actively promotes ‘food revolution day’.1 Even Walmart, the world’s largest retailer (Gensler
2016), donated one million dollars to the Wisconsin-based urban agriculture organisation,
Growing Power, for their work supporting a ‘Good Food Revolution’ (Milwaukee Business
Journal 2011). Throughout history, the call for revolution has been issued from the fringes
of society; yet, it seems obvious today, in the US, that advocating for a food revolution is
not considered to be particularly radical. Recognising that the local food movement in the
US is also situated well within a capitalist structure (at least in terms of a revolution being
defined as the replacement of an established order), it begs an equally obvious question: is it
at all revolutionary?
As I move through this subject, I consider the ways the local food movement has set a
table with what appears to be delicious alternatives to the products of the industrial food
system, but it has also clearly laid out the food revolution with consumerism in mind. In con-
versation with individuals who are actually creating food systems alternatives (in this case,
food producers regarded as leaders in the local food movement), I demonstrate how systemic
problems are beginning to reveal the limitations of basing change on a recipe sourced from
the capitalist power cookbook. To this end, I am compelled to take a look under the table,
to discover what of revolution might be found in the oddments. I suggest that it is in the
unnoticed spaces where one can find indicators of a more radical revolution in process. It is
here where the overlooked social structures that are more horizontal than hierarchical, and
more cooperative than competitive point to significant shifts in how people relate to one an-
other. Excavating beneath the table reveals unexpressed diverse economies and pericapitalist

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associations performing within the dominant economic structure. The implication is that
what can be gleaned from underneath the food on the table may, in fact, constitute the most
exciting and promising potential for resistance to the corporate-controlled industrial food
system, as well as transformative social change.
To begin, it is helpful to examine how the local food movement in the US is framed.
The rhetoric and initiatives that define it support entrepreneurs and enterprise solutions,
the creation of direct markets, the building of strong regional food economies, local wealth
creation and growth, increased food security and, of course, more consumer choice. ‘Buy
Local!’ is the battle cry of the revolution and the mantra, ‘Vote with Your Fork’, is meant
to connect citizen-eaters with the sense of enacting democracy. From a communications
perspective, this language brings into focus the extent to which a ‘market-as-movement’
strategy (Pollan 2006) has manifested. Furthermore, this type of framing is provocative
enough to prompt questions regarding co-option strategies by the dominant paradigm in
maintaining hegemony. While I feel that an expansive discussion on this point is just be-
yond the scope of my purpose here, relevant are ideas that examine where power resides in-
side the social ecology of a food system, and how liberated social and economic spaces may
differ from those on which specific ideologies have been imposed. Within a capitalist-based
local food movement-as-alternative, such as in the US, the potential for revolutionary
change – which might arguably be realised through the free association of people and the
recognition of the value in diverse economies (Gibson-Graham 2008, 5) – is mitigated and
de-incentivised by an alternative food system structure embedded within commodified re-
alations (Hinrich 2000, 301). The difficult irony to accept for many – perhaps even heresy
to a few – is to suggest that the language and conceptual frame of such a revolution acts at
cross-purposes to its goals. The counternarrative used to define the movement represents
a cultural construction that continues to support the dominant economic system, one that
is impossible to disentangle from the very systems of oppression associated with the most
negative impacts of the industrial food system model. In this sense, and in simple terms, I
characterise the alternatives offered on the table of the local food movement in the US as a
‘revolution’ located in the privilege of capital.
That said, I feel compelled to note that if the local food movement is simply a sprout
growing from capitalist roots, it does not negate the good that has come from it. There are
many examples of capital transformed into successful programmes that educate the public
about food and nutrition, and, in very real ways, improve the environment, the quality of
life in targeted communities and the health and well-being of animals consumed as food.
My focus here, however, in deconstructing the idea of an American food revolution, is not
to dispute or chronicle the material outcomes of the local food movement; rather, it is to
consider a context in which an entrepreneurial-based model for food system’s change can
affect transformative social change. It is with this in mind that I examine the potential of
considering a social ecology of the local food movement in the US and suggest that the most
radical revolution may actually be emerging from under the local food table. I explore the
idea that the truly revolutionary aspect of a new food systems consciousness is not simply
the availability of products representing socially just and environmentally sound alternatives
to those produced by the industrial system, but a consciousness that transforms pure con-
sumption into a moral element of understanding the transformative power of community
and citizenry. I offer that within the local food movement, it is the social ecology itself –
the cooperative relationships and the diverse economic structures formed by networks of
­citizens – that remains under-valued and under-theorised in food systems scholarship as an
important site of radical social change.

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Within a local food paradigm, the emergent self-organised social networks between food
producers and citizens perform as critical spaces for cooperation and resistance in a country
where there is no strong association with socialism, and where there is robust persuasion
for activities that privilege individualism, profit and competition. In the pages ahead, I pro-
vide examples of self-organised local food praxis from my research in Athens, Ohio, where
the ‘ground truth’ of the revolution looks like solidarity networks, cooperation, horizontal
organisational structures, complex reciprocity, autonomous zones, radical earth care, biore-
gionalism and mutual aid. These activities and behaviours are demonstrated not only in and
among the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio; the social ecology of the local food
movement in the US is dense and interconnected nationally through purpose and people.
To illustrate this point, I share other parallel activities found around the country that are
emerging from self-organised local food networks.
To explore this topic in its richness, I believe it is helpful to imagine the social ecology
of the local food movement in the US as a complex adaptive system. Situating the social
within theories normally reserved for the activities of molecules and atoms in a quantum
physics context is actually not so far afield. Systems in a complexity paradigm are considered
to have many independent entities interacting with each other in many ways and on many
scales. In the abundance of these interactions, the system as a whole performs ‘spontaneous
­self-organization’ innovating and adapting to challenges (Waldrop 1992, 11). In this para-
digm, all actions that emerge from local experience have value for their generative ability
to co-create change on the macro level. Characterising the social ecology of food as a living
concern – in this case, by suggesting that it is a socio-environmental ecology of decen-
tralised networks – complex links are revealed between the social relationships embedded
in cultural, economic and political ideological systems. This, in turn, illustrates associations
between what it is people eat as a factor determining the future of the planet, vis-à-vis ex-
tracted fossil fuels and mined minerals; energy use; biodiversity; and the subsequent quality
of air, soil and water as commons.
Within these networks, motivated by the desire to change the food system, individuals
tend to cooperate in activities that strengthen the local food community. From a n ­ etworked,
community-based perspective, exploring innovations and adapting to disruption at each
step create iterations of change that are enabled and facilitated at the most basic level through
cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid. Because the idea of supporting ‘­ local’ over global
and industrial is central to the movement, these networks also begin to f­ unction at differing
scales, reanimating ideals of bioregionalism, or a ‘socio-­geographic space’ ­( Kloppenburg
et al. 1996, 37). It is through the social relationships within c­ ommunity-based local food
systems that a bioregional praxis is radically reordering and ­reclaiming ­geographies and
culture, challenging labels, straight lines and artificial, politically expedient borders. In
this way, social networks are prefiguring new ways of ­honouring and protecting the com-
plexity and interdependencies between biotic and abiotic ­communities  – that is to say,
the living and non-living parts of an ecosystem. As ‘systems thinking’ within the local
food movement becomes the baseline strategy for moving away from segmented indus-
trialised processes, a self-organised, socially co-created bioregional dynamic becomes a
critical indicator of important changes in values and identity. Cultivating bioregionalism
is, as authors McGinnis, House and Jordan write, a form of creating an ‘ecology of shared
identity’. They describe it as ‘a practice performed by a community that extends its identity
to biospheric life as manifested by particular places; a human community which begins to
define itself through its continuity with and immersion in ecologial systems’ (McGinnis,
House, and Jordan 1999, 212.)

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When considered collectively, on a national scale, the types of prefiguration I discuss sug-
gest my central (and provocative) question: if the social ecology of the local food movement is
modelling an environmental consciousness, cooperation, solidarity and diverse economies, is
the local food revolution actually building capacity for radical transformative social change?
The well-polished wooden bar between us is made from a plank of local, sustainably harvested poplar.
It’s a long, curvilinear slab, the topplaned smooth to reveal beautiful shades of deep brown and gold. Art
Oestrike, owner of Jackie-O’s Tap Room, Jackie O’s Pub and Brewery, and Jackie O’s Barrel Ridge
Farm (the businesses all named to honour his late mother, Jackie, but with an obvious nod to the celebrity
association), invites me to sit on one side of this handcrafted bar at the Tap Room. He remains standing
on the other. Technically, we are doing an interview at 8:30 in the morning, but Art is multitasking
between his iPhone, checking cash register receipts, chatting with staff, keeping a watchful eye on an elec-
trical project initiated in the back of the room and brewing coffee. Finally, placing all of his attention on
pouring the dark, locally roasted, fair-trade, shade-grown organic coffee into a tall Jackie O’s pint glass,
he stops to talk … but not for long.
Art Oestrike owns businesses located in Athens, Ohio, home to one of the most successful and
long-standing local food economies in the US (Kellogg n.d.; Meter 2011; Ackerman-Leist 2013). He
is representative of a brave new wave of serious business people – food producers and entrepreneurs –
deeply committed to the idea of ‘local’. Art explains to me how he understands the craft beer market in
this country as being locally driven and how he considers the business model he employs as ‘walking the
walk’. He portrays this as what makes Jackie O’s a national leader in the local food/craft beer movements.
He describes ten years of sourcing locally and defines this as buying close to home, and from local farm-
ers, when possible. Aside from owning a farm from which he is able to source food for his restaurant, he
cultivates relationships with area food producers to fill the gaps. Malted barley is not available locally yet
(he has a plan!), nor are there hops on the scale he requires, although he does purchase from local growers
what he can. He says, ‘If we can buy something within twenty miles, we tend to do it. If not there, it’s
within 300 miles, and if not there, it’s a North American product. And if it’s not there, I’d rather go to
Europe than elsewhere’.2
Art’s practices for ‘buying local’ raise a critical issue primary to any discussion of a local
food revolution. What precisely is local? Interestingly, the definition of local is widely con-
tested within the movement itself and variously defined across the country. Art’s businesses
are located within the smallest local food initiative in the US, known as the Athens 30 Mile
Meal.™ The concept of a thirty-mile meal originated as a branding-initiative intended to
market culinary and agri-tourism along with ‘local foods earning opportunities for farmers,
food producers, food markets, food events, and local food enterprises’ (The 30 Mile Meal
2010). Within this intentionally constructed foodshed, citizens are able to obtain an ample
variety of locally grown and produced foods, everything needed for a balanced, if not gour-
met, meal. This includes everything from grains and flours, beans and nuts, to vegetables,
meats, cheeses, breads and pastries; from fermented and wild-harvested foods, eggs and milk
products, to craft beers, wines and distilled spirits. For the people living within the Athens
30-mile foodshed – which just happens to be located outside of densely populated urban areas
and in one of the most biodiverse ecoregions on the planet (World Wildlife Fund 2016) – a
narrow definition of what is local makes sense. In other parts of the country, there are radius
configurations that extend well into the hundreds of miles; however, studies show that most
consumers consider local food to be grown within 100 miles of their homes (DeWeerdt 2009).
Certainly, there has always been a strong sense of local and regional food in the US. As a
country of immigrants, food and foodways reflect many cultural influences, as well as agri-
cultural responses to local climates and specific geographies. The wines of the Napa Valley
in California, cheeses from Vermont and Wisconsin, Maryland crab cakes, chillies from

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New Mexico and Virginia ham are just some examples of regional foods that are celebrated
and considered to be local specialties. As such, they also represent a significant foundation
for regional tourism. The difference with the local food movement is that it is not one food
or several that constitute the identity and economy of a region; rather, the goal is to develop
a more complete food system.
The local food movement is focused on creating infrastructure for the production and
distribution of a wide variety of foods. While the foods may still reflect local cultural pref-
erences, be sustainably wild-harvested, or the product of working creatively with land and
weather limitations, the idea is to ‘re-localise’ community-based systems that were lost to
the industrialisation process. This attempt is one of creating regional food security and of
local wealth creation. For example, very few communities in the US have locally run grain
mills or meat-processing facilities. These have long been in the control of large food cor-
porations and removed from any community context. The local food movement engages
in building new infrastructure, creating direct markets for farmers and food producers so
that options to bypass the corporate structure are multiplied. This keeps money circulating
locally, establishing strong community-based local economies. A local food system liber-
ates citizens from their dependence on large corporate food entities, making communities
more food-secure and autonomous. When farmers have direct relationships with citizens
and local businesses, and access to local mills and processing facilities, it opens the way for a
more sustainable, agroecological approach to farming. The objective is to free farmers from
corporate contracts and the expectation of super-high yields, which are only made possible
by monocropping and the use of genetically modified seeds, chemical herbicides, pesticides
and fertilisers. For animal farmers, local markets and infrastructure mean opportunities to
raise and process heritage livestock breeds, free of the growth hormones and antibiotics, and
to engage in pasture-based, or free-range, practices. In these ways, the local food movement
encourages personal relationships and systems of food production, processing, distribution
and consumption that centre on communities. It is in this context that the ‘miles from home’
construct emerged. The ‘mileage’ variances in defining what is local can be accounted for by
obvious environmental differences in a nation as large as the US. There is no ‘one size fits all’.
The popularity of a mileage-based definition of local gained traction as the case was made
for how shorter supply chains begin to address environmental concerns over the amount
of fossil fuels used to get food from its source to the dinner plate. Studies at the Leopold
Center for Sustainable Agriculture revealed that food, as part of the industrial system in the
US, travels an average of about 1,500 miles (2,400 km) to reach the consumer (Pirog et al.
2001,14). These data serve as a powerful conceptual tool for illustrating how industrialised
systems of production and distribution are contributing to CO2 emissions. As well, the vast
distances between ‘farm gate-to-dinner plate’ have been established as factors that impact
taste and nutrition (Frith 2007, 3).
Despite ongoing discussions regarding the definition and parameters of local, for the
­purposes of exploring what holds revolutionary promise in the local food movement in
the US, I suggest that the simple act of asserting alternative geographies in this process is
the most salient. Emplacing an ecological, sociocultural consciousness within a temporal
and spatial awareness is a creative process inspiring new ways to consider inhabiting one’s
­‘life-place’ (Thayer 2003, 3). Bioregionalism, as a grassroots initiative, supports relation-
ships and codifies systems that are outside government-established boundaries. This is a
revolutionary act, and one that is manifesting a new set of values. For example, the Athens
30-mile bioregion unifies and defines an area that includes seven counties and two states.
This type of bioregional framework holds the potential for citizens to actively challenge

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economic and political forms of governance and organisation that limit the protection and
allocation of resources to arbitrary frameworks determined by the state.
I see Warren near the dairy case at the supermarket in Athens. He is cheerful and energetic, stocking
the shelves with yogurt, milk and heavy whipping cream. This is not the usual place one might encounter
the owner and CEO of a successful food business, but Warren Taylor, owner of Snowville Creamery, is
cut from different cloth. I get a generous hug and although I have known Warren for many years, his pro-
fuse enthusiasm is in no way reserved for close friends only. I haven’t seen Warren in at least six months,
but he tells me immediately, without prompting, almost as if we were picking up a conversation we had
been engaged in a few minutes ago that local food producers are ‘up against the wall’. He characterises
large retailers as having ‘predatory monopolies’ which keep sustainable local food enterprises from being
economically viable. He says, ‘Here’s what no one is talking about: We are all working our tails off, and
nobody is making any money’.3 Warren is an organiser and an activist and he has convinced a group of
local food producers to get together to talk about the topic nobody wants to address. They have met only
once so far and he invites me to come to the next meeting.
In the enthusiasm to support a local food revolution, the economic problems faced by
food producers rarely rise above a level of media density saturated with positive examples of
entrepreneurship. Perhaps attributable to the propensity for Americans to valorise the entre-
preneur, to cast the capitalist system as accessible to all, to tout hard work and innovation as
the means to realise economic success, the media highlight stories that emphasise the ‘up-
side’ of the local food movement. In many cases, the success stories are perpetuated by the
same producers who find that they fall short of making a living wage, of securing affordable
medical benefits for themselves and their employees after a decade or more of depending
on local direct markets, growing food using sustainable and organic practices, or owning a
community-based food business.
In many ways, it is understandable why farmers are complicit in perpetuating stories the
media like to tell. Maintaining a strong positive counternarrative is a critical part of construct-
ing the space for possibility and an essential piece in building support for c­ onsumer-dependent
change. Reinforcing success within an established socio-economic metric is a vital part of
what it takes to influence food policy, as well as to secure financial support from foundations
and lending institutions. For those farmers and food producers heavily invested in the local
food movement, maintaining a story line that communicates ‘this can work’ is critical. This
is true to the degree that across the US, many of the players in the local food movement are
reluctant to identify that, in fact, there is an elephant sitting on the local food table. The
elephant has always been there and it is easier to grow accustomed to it, to look past it, than
to admit that the success of the entrepreneurial-based local food movement in the US is one
bound by the bottom-line profit and unending growth constraints of capitalism. To look the
elephant in the eye is to admit that the construct for creating a sustainable alternative food
system is ultimately at odds with the values that animate it.
However, it is the context of promoting the local food revolution and championing ‘en-
tremanureship’ that the successes of a strong local food economy continue to be celebrated
in the media, with communities like Athens, Ohio featured as the vanguard. Athens is the
county seat of a rural area in the southeastern portion of the state, culturally and geograph-
ically part of the federally designated Central Appalachian region (Appalachian Regional
Commission, n.d.). In a region where generational poverty looms large, an intentional
sustainable community development strategy has been cooperatively supported for over
forty years. The concept is to provide entrepreneurial opportunities through an asset-based
focus on direct marketing for farmers and on creating the infrastructure for the produc-
tion and marketing of value-added local food products. With one of the first ‘kitchen

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incubator’ facilities in the country, Athens created a model for building a cooperative local
food economy now emulated by other communities around the country. At present, there
are over 200 such incubators that help to reduce the obstacles to food entrepreneurship in
thirty-nine states, just over half being in urban areas, and the others in suburban and rural
areas (Wodka 2016, 4).
In Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-First Century, Mark Ritchie calls Athens ‘one
of the most exciting and dynamic local food systems in the country’ (Ritchie 2002, 96),
and the region’s food economy has been characterised as ‘a national model of sustainable
community development’ (Olson 2002). The Athens Farmers Market, operating year-round
with over 100 vendors and contributing an estimated $3 million dollars annually into the
local economy,4 is cited as one of the top ten farmers’ markets in the nation (Thomas 2006).
Athens, a community of just under 25,000, was profiled in the well-respected Utne Reader
magazine, as one of three places in the world engaged in ‘some of the brightest ideas in the
local food movement’ (Olson 2002). An Athens couple, Michelle Ajamian and Brandon
Jaeger, were included in the same magazine in 2010 as part of the feature, ‘25 Visionaries
Changing Your World’ for their regional food systems infrastructure work developing Shag-
bark Seed and Mill (Olson 2010). Ken Meter, one of the most experienced food systems an-
alysts in the US, commented that ‘Athens sets the tone’, referring to the strategy of building
cooperative community-based food business clusters, and stated that this is ‘the best vehicle
for rebuilding the American economy’ (Meter, 110).
Accolades such as these occupy prime space atop the table of the local food revolution.
These are the success narratives meant for public consumption. These are the stories that in-
spire and encourage localised alternatives to the industrialised food system. Yet, does a strong
local or regional food economy equate to a revolution (and a sustainable alternative) when
success and failure remain bound within the precarity of capitalism? No matter how local
the kale one eats, how much love and sunshine chickens enjoy, how organic the fields are
where farmworkers spend their days, if the business of offering local, just, environmentally
restorative food is not one that can compete successfully in a growth market, it will fail. It
is, as Murray Bookchin characterises it, ‘the brutally competitive imperative of grow or die’
(Bookchin 2007, 20). Sooner or later, the local farmer or food producer will be faced with
the pressures of growth in order to remain viable. They will run up against what Warren
Taylor describes as ‘predatory monopolies’, the rapacious and impenetrable food systems
fortresses constructed by concentrated transnational corporate interests. Warren talks about
retail giants, such as Kroger and Walmart,5 and the tightly controlled distribution networks
that allow them to put a full gallon of milk on hundreds of grocery stores’ shelves around
the state of Ohio for only ten cents per unit. He rightly questions how it is possible for local
food producers to remain competitive in this environment. His company, Snowville Cream-
ery, as an independent producer, is forced to deliver their product themselves, limiting how
many stores they can reach. The cost of this added expense – necessary if Snowville is to sell
any milk at all to Ohioans – must be passed to consumers at nearly a dollar added to only a
half-gallon of milk.6
By any stretch, this isn’t a fair playing field. I can extend the illustration of limitations
faced by local food producers to include how corporate control limits consumer access to
nutritious food if a comparison of the products themselves is considered. Snowville Cream-
ery milk is produced by pasture-based, grass-grazing methods and by cows with 100% A2/
A2 genetics.7 The cows are never exposed to GMO feeds or forage and they are not treated
with rbST (bovine growth hormones). The milk is not homogenised (the cream naturally
rises to the top) and it is ‘pasteurized at the lowest legal temperatures, resulting in milk that

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tastes sweet, clean, and delicious’ (Snowville Creamery 2016). This type of product stands in
stark contrast to the type of milk produced by cows on ‘factory farm’ confinement lots; yet
because of the monopolies controlling production and distribution, many consumers will
never have the opportunity to see Snowville products on the shelves of their local grocery.
Of those who do, economic realities will determine who is able to pay more per gallon for
the privilege of taking a half a gallon home.
The idea that consumers are given more choices through direct markets is a talking point
for the local food movement. But, at the end of the day, the biggest corporate food systems
players determine what a consumer can choose – not to mention the limits of choice based
on one’s food budget. Given these realities, it seems hard to argue that the food revolution in
the US, in its present configuration, is anything more than a parallel business track – a new
market for privileged consumers – and ultimately limited and controlled by large corporate
food monopolies.
My analysis, after nearly twenty years of local food systems work, goes back to (or begins
with) the elephant sitting on the local food table – a metaphor, of course, for the incredible
weight the dominant economic structure has on the movement. Because the elephant has
been there since the beginning, even the alternative economies of the local food move-
ment (emergent, promising and innovative pericapitalist mechanisms), by the necessity of
attaching themselves to the behemoth, are mostly invisible within its shadow. The elephant
refuses to acknowledge that these alternative economies are present, much less, credible.
The local food movement is reluctant to acknowledge the elephant, so the notion of diverse
economic structures as viable mechanisms for change is also dismissed. While a particular
value system may have constructed the local foods’ table, and can rightly claim satisfaction in
many of the good offerings laid upon it, the weight of the elephant has created a precarious
balance. It cannot, however, be asked to get up and leave. To do so would tip the table tip
over completely.
Would such an act qualify as the real food revolution? Does the local food movement need
to push over America’s dinner table to create space for a new food system? There have long
been arguments that revolution rises from the ashes of destruction. However, as I have men-
tioned, I am more inclined towards complexity theories that suggest change is continuous,
emergent and co-created. If the food system is to be considered as a complex adaptive system,
then there are new ways to understand how change happens. In a complex system, if the
table remains upright and accessible, and the elephant continues to be a dominant presence
on top, then it is necessarily part of that system. The elephant is, itself, contributing to the
proliferation of independent interactions taking place within the system that move it away
from dominance and into balance.
Along the rim of the table, beneath where the elephant sits, is where creativity and in-
novation ‘are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most
entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown’ (Waldrof 1992, 12). This is known, by
complexity theorists, as ‘the edge of chaos’, a zone where the complexity of interactions en-
gages the forces of inertia and mayhem in adaptive responses. Change in a complex adaptive
system happens here, at the edge of chaos. As M. Mitchell Waldrop writes,

The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly gave way to
the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of Soviet com-
munism suddenly gave way to political turmoil and ferment; where eons of evolutionary
stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformations.
(Waldrop 1992, 12)

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Many would argue that the local food movement is emerging from within a post-capitalist
construct, which is to suggest that the current capitalist system has now crossed the apex of
its arc of dominance. If change in the system is conceived of as a function of complexity, then
it is at the edge of chaos where interactions between a new local food movement and the old
industrialised system will build more synergistic and horizontal structures. The emergent
pericapitalist phenomena found at the edges of the local food movement represent examples
of what J. K. Gibson-Graham describe as a ‘queering of economic identity’ by establishing
infrastructure that acts to disrupt capitalism’s relatively unchallenged ideological density
(Gibson-Graham 2001, 264).
Values are very clearly at the forefront of the local food movement. The very act of prob-
lematising the industrial food system is an expression of the values not present within it. To
articulate how a neo-liberal agenda creates globalised and corporate-controlled food systems
is to reaffirm the values that are being oppressed as a result. By characterising the local food
movement as a decentralised complex adaptive system, the range of interests expressed by its
affinity groups, concerns such as food justice, food sovereignty, food safety, food politics, en-
vironmental restoration and resiliency, animal health and welfare, reach into all sectors of so-
ciety. In its simplest form, the work of these affinity groups emanates from experience-based
value-expressions regarding human life, dignity, culture and community. Present in local
food system activity is the attempt to validate cooperation, diversity, kindness and the neces-
sity of being good stewards of the planet and to all living things.
In the matter of the food we eat, where it comes from, where we eat it and the rela-
tionships between those with whom it is (or isn’t) shared, food values are performative on
multiple levels. Food engages with ‘multisensorial embodied ways of knowing in human
interaction’ (Pink 2015, 18). As such, food constructs a sense of home, community, culture
and morality. Shared values about food among people are what holds the deepest promise for
radical and transformative changes and I posit that it is within the social ecology of the local
food movement that values are resonating in their interconnectivity. In this roiling, radical
solidarity is emergent.
Sitting here, amid the bodies engaging with local food, I am compelled to attend to the affective, what
I intuit as an environment that summons a deep solidarity of purpose. I feel authenticity and a sense of
place and community in the forward-leaning postures of those reading the corkboard by the door. It is
tacked with colourfully askew papers announcing local food and health-related activities – workshops,
movies, lectures – as well as a flyer from a farm selling Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
shares, noting that it now accepts government food benefit cards issued to low-income households. There
are posters explaining the local time exchange (alternative currency) initiative, an appeal to reduce energy
consumption with a number to call for free compact fluorescent light bulbs, and information on protests
being planned against fracking on nearby National Forest land. As the door opens and closes, the papers
flutter like prayer flags dispersing and intermingling this atmosphere of shared values in the air.
Tucked back in from a busy street, the Village Bakery feels vibrant, not because of the commerce taking
place, which is brisk, but because of the interactions between people and the emotional space this creates
just inside the door. I notice open smiles, eye contact and soft, light touches between hands exchanging
currency. There are interactions between young and old. The space between bodies is close enough to feel
an amplification of curiosity and anticipation about what will be eaten. I taste community in my own
food. This is what a local food network feels like. There is a din of animated conversation punctuated
with laughter, and I notice more often than not, as people come and go, the door is held for those who are
passing in spontaneous acts of kindness. In this space, there are more hugs than handshakes.
In this witness, I reflect on my discussions with the food producers in this same community. When I
ask them, each and every one – without dropping a beat – says that they absolutely support each other

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when it comes to purchasing what they need, even if they know they could get that good or service for
much cheaper through a national distributor or a large corporate entity. Across the board, they recount
the ways they cooperate with each other. In any other business context, these ‘others’ would be the com-
petition. I marvel at that. Will this strategy be the doing-in of the local food movement, or will it be the
radical human element that makes it all work? I question them about how this does work, in terms of
market-share pressures and making a profit. Not one of them deviates from the sentiment expressed by
Art Oestrike when he told me. ‘It’s just the right thing to do’.8
The values of the local food movement create a solidarity of purpose. Solidarity, how-
ever, for all we hear of it, remains a slippery concept. Heckscher and McCarthy describe
solidarity as ‘a rather neglected academic topic’ in that there is ‘little understanding based
on how it is created or how it has changed’ (Heckscher and McCarthy 2014, 628). Perhaps
as an illustration, they submit a decidedly non-academic definition of solidarity as, ‘what
you are supposed to do when your community engages in collective action’ (Heckscher and
McCarthy 2014, 629). In a community context, then, solidarity may arise from deep feelings
and as ‘not fully brokered’, as Judith Butler describes it. Perhaps this is a consequence of
complexity, where ‘ethical questions are invariably implicated in social and economic ones’
(Butler 2015, 23, 152).
Nonetheless, I believe that there is a deeply affective component to local food systems
solidarity. It makes me think of the definition that comes from the Sandinistas (members of
the former Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua): ‘Solidarity is the tenderness
of the people’ (Power and Charlip 2009, 3). Although what is carried out in the name of
solidarity can certainly range from empathy to violence, the Sandinista definition captures
the sense that solidarity is action expanding from a set of moral principles. Rebecca Todd
Peters describes solidarity as an ethic that offers ‘a moral foundation for building a new set
of economic, political, and social relations that respond to the very real needs of a planet in
crisis…’ (Peters 2014, 99).
If, in fact, as Heckscher and McCarthy suggest, ‘the main source of solidarity is in daily
social relations’ (Heckscher and McCarthy 2014, 629), what could be more everyday than
food? In fact, it may be in nurturing solidarity through our everyday food encounters –
within and between bioregions, and from the values that have come to constitute the local
food movement – that a kind of clarity necessary to differentiate ‘superficial change from
structural change’ will emerge (Holt-Gimenez and Wang 2011, 95).
If the local food movement in the US is cultivating social ideals that create solidarity, if
this solidarity continues to support the praxis of cooperation, mutual aid and self-organising,
if it is creating new social and economic identities, if it is facilitating more inclusive and
resilient relationships between people and the natural world, then I believe local food net-
works can be considered radical in the US. It is conceivable, in this context, that these local
networks (socially woven webs of solidarity praxis which now cover the nation) represent
‘a non-centralized, growing rejection of the current state and capitalism’ (Born 2013), and
perhaps might even be characterised as ‘a slow motion general strike’ (Holland 2011). It is
my theory that just under the table, across urban and rural lines, the social ecology of the
local food movement is forming autonomous social structures based on ‘solidarity and co-
ordinated action rather than on contractual and commoditized relationships’ (Lockie 2012),
and in this, building revolution.
In Athens, Ohio, like many other communities across the US, there are examples of how
community-based citizen food networks are facilitating valuable structures that push against
normative practices. To begin, it is worth mentioning that not all structures holding radical
space perform outside the mechanisms of market capitalism. It is important to emphasise that

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capitalism is not a monolithic or segregated economic form. Capitalist and ­non-capitalist

modes ‘interact in pericapitalist spaces’, and in terms of an embodied food revolution, it may
be most helpful to consider in a strategic context the spaces where capitalism depends to
some degree upon non-capitalist elements (Tsing 2015, 65).
Consider the local farmers’ market, clearly an extension of market capitalism and a site
some might regard rather benignly in terms of revolution. While there are a number of valid
reasons why most farmers in the US are not accumulating wealth from farmers’ markets
­(expanding on them here will take us too far from the point of mentioning this example), the
theory of facilitating direct markets – that is to say, supporting opportunities for ­one-to-one
relationships between farmers, food producers and citizens – creates opportunities for farmers
to escape from the economic exploitation of ‘middleman’ distributors and retailers. As well,
direct markets create spaces that eliminate the oppressive arrangements of contract farming.
These contractual arrangements with corporations, which in many cases are the only viable
option for farmers of livestock, dictate everything from what breed of animal the farmer
must raise, what types of structures must be constructed to house the animals, to the sched-
ules for administering hormones and antibiotics. Contracts establish what brand of feed must
be used and in what amounts, the conditions under which the animals are raised, how long
the animals will live and most importantly, how much money the farmer will be paid for
assuming nearly all the risk. Contract farming is most common in large-scale animal pro-
duction scenarios, but they act to reduce farmers to employees, subtracting the wisdom and
value of generations of embodied farming knowledge from their identities. The same might
be said of commodity farming. This type of agriculture demands large-scale m ­ onocrop
production requiring farmers to incur heavy debt and a devotion to corporate-prescribed
protocols that include genetically engineered seeds and the use of petrochemicals to remain
viable in the market. In this sense, structures such as farmers’ markets that support direct
relationships between farmers and consumers are at least a start at dismantling corporate he-
gemony. They offer farmers a path, in partnership with citizens, to reclaim their autonomy
with the promise of establishing more ecological harmony in agricultural production.
The direct relationships nurtured at farmers’ markets are also social opportunities to cul-
tivate meaningful relationships with, if not respect for, those who may otherwise circulate
outside one’s everyday social sphere. The feeling of ‘knowing your farmer’9 does more than
provide a sense of food security in communities. The affective results of inclusive relation-
ships based on trust create a very functional form of solidarity.
In the US, there are certainly other expressions of solidarity networks that work within
traditional market structures. Very much alive within these activities are principles of
­self-organising, mutual aid, cooperation and voluntary non-hierarchical associations. For ex-
ample, there are food buying clubs that apply the purchase power of citizen cooperatives to
either bypass the markups and choice restrictions of dealing with retailers, or to collectively
support local or regional food producers. In Athens, there are several ‘buying clubs’ that
have been in existence for decades. They are self-organised by groups of individuals, usually
neighbours or friends, who place orders with a regional food distributor to get products that
are either unavailable from local retailers or food producers, or are only available regionally
at retail prices higher than through a distributor. In several cases, buying clubs are organised
around the purchase of produce from a local produce auction, which directly supports local
farmers. Participation in these buying clubs is horizontal in nature, usually free to join and
without monetary compensation for leadership roles. Through a consensus process, partici-
pants agree on who will take orders, where the shipments will arrive and in the case of bulk
items, participants cooperate on how these will be divided.

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The notion of horizontalism, or ‘horizontalidad’, a concept that emerged in Argentina

in 2001,10 as a response to the collapse of the monetary system is a form of solidarity present
in the CSA movement. CSAs are a type of buying club that allows citizens to self-organise
cooperatively in economic support of specific farmers and food producers. Throughout the
country, this is a popular means for providing local food businesses (anything from small
organic farms to mills and distilleries) with much needed and difficult to obtain capital,
enabling them to work outside of the debt structures and restrictions of traditional financial
institutions. Mutualism, as a value of local food networks, is demonstrated by the willing-
ness of citizens to pay ‘up-front’ for food products they will receive later. The upfront cash
infusion becomes capital for the business to invest in production. This is remarkable because
there are no guarantees in this scheme. Crops can fail, leaving the citizen-investor with no
return whatsoever. I suggest that this type of behaviour is an exemplar of ‘the tenderness of
the people’, a sort of alien logic to status quo values that stress individualism and gain from
exploitation. CSAs are an exercise in empathy (should the crop fail), trust and cooperation.
This is the profound kind of solidarity that emanates from the belief that co-creating a
vibrant community with a strong local food infrastructure is simply the right thing to do.
Community is nothing, if not a natural form of caring for each other. Natural caring
has been described as ‘the human condition that we, consciously or unconsciously, perceive
as “good”’ (Noddings 2013, 5). Much has been written about community gardens in this
context – the emotional, social and health benefits people get from their associations with
this type of activity (Alaimo et al. 2016), has inspired their proliferation across the country.11
Community gardens are spaces where people come together, many times across age, gender,
race and class divides, and often times in the shared effort to hold green space in urban ar-
eas. These experiences lead to the formation of relationships of trust that stem from acts of
cooperatively working in a shared space. At a very basic level, what happens in these gardens
creates informal social networks that add depth and density to the capacity of the local food
movement.
One expression of community gardeners building social capacity in Athens began with
searching for a way to avoid wasting the ‘extra’ vegetables they grew. Gardeners organ-
ised a project, cooperating with a local non-profit organisation, which established ways to
make it easy for community and home gardeners across the city to donate their produce to
food-insecure families. The project became extremely popular and eventually grew into a
bioregional effort that includes a presence at local farmers’ markets and produce auctions.
Not only can community and home gardeners contribute fresh produce, they can contribute
money to buy food at an ‘after the market’ rate. This gives farmers a viable option for the ‘left
over’ items they did not sell at market and would not otherwise be able to sell at full retail
price. As well, it is an easy donation for shoppers at the markets who are encouraged to buy
two and donate one. In 2015, this project, now known as the Donation Station, provided
nearly 90,000 lbs. of fresh produce to the charitable food system, augmenting the shelf-stable
and highly processed foodstuffs received by the food-insecure in the region through food
banks and pantries.12
Outside of these more mainstream activities of the local food movement, there are exam-
ples of how strong social networks use diversity and technology as an asset, building capacity
for a non-monetary, cooperative society based on the right to food for all citizens. In Athens,
as in communities in California, Vermont and elsewhere, there have been s­ elf-organised
and crowd-sourced maps created and made publicly available that list food-producing trees
and plants located on public property. In most cases, the fruit is usually not used and is
available for free to anyone for the picking. The use of social media in these efforts is a

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network-weaving endeavour, linking individuals locally, as well as across the country who
are interested in food democracy, food security and food justice issues.
Activism is central to these types of local food networks. The praxis of activist networks
can push against the law, as well. Just this side of legal, many citizens have come together to
find loopholes that will allow them to express their rights to food sovereignty. In many states
in the US, the sale of products such as raw milk, or certain fermented products, is against
the law. Citizens who maintain these foods should be allowed for nutritional, medical or
even cultural reasons, and form underground trade and barter networks, so that no money
is exchanged, and therefore, no laws are broken. There are also ‘herd share’ initiatives that
are structured like CSAs, but take advantage of provisions in the law that allow the owners
of dairy livestock to consume the milk that comes from that animal. With a herd share, a
farmer sells ‘shares’ of a goat, or a cow, and in return, all the ‘owners’ are legally permitted to
consume the raw milk that comes from it. In many cases, citizens ‘sell’ items like contraband
raw milk or cheeses openly at farmers’ markets or other such events, but they are clearly (and
clearly deceptively) marked as ‘pet food’ or ‘not for human consumption’ (Godoy 2011).
Disrupting the ability of the government to regulate the kind of food communities are
legally permitted to consume has also created instances within the local food movement
where the laws have been successfully challenged. In 2015, claims of food sovereignty and
community rights resulted in the passing of a ‘Local Food and Community Self-Governance
Ordinance’ by an overwhelming margin in Bingham, Maine. Bingham is at least the six-
teenth town in that state to pass such an ordinance.13 This type of open defiance of federal
law, accomplished through a democratic process by citizens who advocate for alternatives in
the food system, is a powerful expression of solidarity. It highlights the agency of an empow-
ered citizenry to resist government policies created, in many cases, to satisfy the pervasive
lobby of dominant ‘Big Ag’ and corporate food systems interests. If the potential for revolu-
tion is to insist on participatory democracy, then it can be found here, and facilitated by the
self-organised networks of citizens engaged in local foods’ praxis.
I find it interesting that in Athens, in many ways, the political expression of the local
food movement is beginning to manifest through the election of government officials who
are also local food producers. The current mayor of the City of Athens (a former member
of the area food policy council and a farmer raising specialty crops for local breweries and
restaurants), as well as a county commissioner (a goat-farmer, wild foods entrepreneur and
specialty local food producer) have managed on a political level to champion economic
development issues that serve the interests of all, but very definitely support the growth of
a local food economy. Beyond this, and because of the influence and visibility these indi-
viduals have in these particular positions, they are also taking leadership roles on energy
and environmental issues that ultimately relate to the capacity for farmers to produce food
sustainably. Because these are elected officials, I understand this to be an example of the ways
social capital, earned by virtue of enacting the values of the local food movement, can be
spent in other sectors of society.
A profound example of this comes from the account of a protest action in Athens County
in 2014. I suggest that this event highlights the most significant argument for the generative
and performative capacity of local food movement social networks to create radical, trans-
formative change. Opposed to the issuance of permits that allow for storing the toxic fluid
wastes from the process of fracking for shale gas in an open pit facility, eight individuals (who
were part of a larger protest) engaged in a nonviolent direct action at the site and were ar-
rested. These eight were also high-profile participants in the local food economy – business
owners, food workers, farmers and food producers. ‘The Athens 8’, as they became known,

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 Lisa Trocchia-Baļķīts

were strongly supported by the community for their actions, which brought widespread me-
dia attention to the issue of the health and environmental risks associated with the process of
fracking. Their activism to safeguard community health and well-being, and specifically, to
protect the water and the natural ecology of the region was a performance of solidarity with
the values held in common by the environmental and local food movements. They success-
fully raised public awareness of an environmental issue through the goodwill and trust they
had earned as farmers and food producers.
This example illustrates the fluidity of boundaries. It demonstrates how food issues in-
tersect with political, environmental and economic issues in a very social context. As such,
it constitutes the radical potential in the social ecology of the local food movement – what
I hold to be the capacity for transformative social change emergent in these interconnected
webs of relationships. The values of the local food movement that embody justice, equality
and environmental restoration and protection are weaving webs of solidarity based in the
affirmation that democracy must be participatory and that democracy must prevail over the
interests of corporations. These social networks are finding power in unity, cooperation,
self-organising, mutual aid, in non-hierarchical voluntary associations, and in relationships
that foster complex reciprocity. I suggest that in the ground-truth of these actions, the praxis
of these values, in the structural, under-the-table happenings in the local food movement in
the US, one finds the radical ‘politics of effective togetherness’ (Thrift 2008, 22). And here,
there is revolution.

Notes
1 As part of a sustainability initiative focused on education and awareness, Stanford University par-
ticipates in the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation’s Food Revolution Day. http://rde.stanford.edu/
dining/education-awareness.
2 Art Oestrike in a personal conversation with the author, June 2016, Athens, Ohio.
3 Warren Taylor in a personal conversation with the author, September 2016, Athens, Ohio.
4 Leslie Schaller, Director of Programming at the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks, in
a personal conversation with the author. October 24, 2013.
5 Kroger is the second largest retailer in the US and Walmart, the largest retailer in the world. Wahba,
Phil. 2016. ‘5 Surprising Things You Don’t Know About Kroger’. Fortune. ( June). ­Accessed
11/5/16. www.fortune.com/2016/06/22-kroger-fortune500/.
6 Warren Taylor in a personal email correspondence with the author, September 29, 2016.
7 Information sourced from the Snowville Creamery website, and supported by scientific studies,
suggests that the original form of casein protein found in dairy milk was A-2 beta-casein. Most
commercial milk production comes from cows with A-1 beta-casein, a genetic mutation. Pre-
liminary studies suggest that milk with A-1 beta-casein (which contains a peptide called BCM7)
may be linked to Type 1 diabetes as well as negative effects to the central nervous system and
cardiovascular system. A-1 beta-casein may also be responsible for symptoms of milk intolerance.
www.snowvillecreamery.com/health.html.
8 Art Oestrike in a personal conversation with the author, June 2016, Athens, Ohio.
9 ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ is an initiative of the U.S. Department of Agri-
culture in support of local and regional food economies. www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/
usdahome?navid=KYF_COMPASS.
10 Marina Sitrin has written extensively on the concept of horizontalidad, stating that ‘Horizontal-
idad is a social relationship that implies, as it sounds, a flat plane upon which to communicate’.
www.marinasitrin.com/?page_id=108.
11 The American Community Gardening Association estimates that there are 18,000 community
gardens throughout the US and Canada. www.communitygarden.org/resources/faq/.
12 The Donation Station is a project of the non-profit organisation, Community Food Initiatives. In
2015, 86,991 lbs. of produce and local food products were distributed to food pantries and agencies
in Appalachian Ohio. www.communityfoodinitiatives.org/donation-station.

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13 ‘Sixteenth Main Town Passes Food Sovereignty Ordinance’. Farm-to-Consumer.org. July 10, 2011.
www.farmtoconsumer.org/blog/2015/07/10/sixteeth-maine-town-passes-food-sovereignty-
ordinance/.

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 4.8
PERMACULTURE AND
ECOLOGICAL LIFESTYLE
A Restricted Radicalism?1
Bürge Abiral

‘So you’re working on permaculture? I thought it was a middle class thing!’ exclaimed a
fellow scholar in a conference I attended at the University of York in 2014. I had given a
presentation that same day on permaculture, an ecological design system and a philosophy
of action used and promoted to create sustainable livelihoods. My talk focused on the life-
style and anti-consumption strategies employed by permaculturists in Turkey. The comment
came out almost depreciatively, as if permaculture as ‘a middle class thing’ could have little
connection to the title of our conference, ‘Resources of Resistance: Production, Consump-
tion, Transformation’.
In fact, my colleague had a valid point, albeit one that I had not necessarily dismissed
in my talk. As a term newly entering the vocabulary of urbanites, permaculture was little
known in Turkey when I started my Master’s research in 2014, except among educated peo-
ple from middle and upper-middle classes. Over the one and a half year in which I conducted
my research, many people I interacted with in my daily life inquired about the topic of my
thesis. Most often, they had no idea what permaculture is. Otherwise, several people who
were already acquainted with permaculture told me that they had seen the term in a café in
Cihangir, an upscale neighbourhood in Istanbul that became gentrified starting in the 1990s.
They were referring to a hipster-style café which hosts the books published by Sinek Sekiz,
an ecologically oriented publishing house that printed Bill Mollison’s Introduction to Perma-
culture in Turkish (Mollison 2012). This random acquaintance with permaculture among
urbanites I interacted with indicated the relative visibility of permaculture in alternative yet
stylish spaces in Istanbul, and conversely its possible invisibility in others.
Two years later, I presented another chapter from my MA thesis, this time on apoca-
lypticism and hope in permaculture circles, at the annual meeting of the American An-
thropological Association. I mentioned in my talk that permaculture appealed especially to
middle- and upper-middle-class circles in Turkey and emphasised the privileged positions
of those who identify as permaculturists. After the panel, an anthropologist working in the
highly politicised Dersim region in Turkey approached me to share an ethnographic instance
from her field site. In a meeting of revolutionaries, permaculture had been discussed and
people had come to the conclusion that she conveyed to me: ‘Permaculture is actually revo-
lutionary!’ Her criticism of my talk implied that my assertion of permaculture’s middle-class
appeal would dismiss its revolutionary potential.

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 Bürge Abiral

I start with these different perceptions of permaculture, as people from various walks of
life relayed to me in conversations, not simply because they show the differential under-
standings that permaculture conveys at large – at least in Turkey and in the UK – but also
because they point to a theoretical conundrum: how to establish the radicalness of perma-
culture? Is it simply a middle-class movement that remains limited in its reach and scope and
does not concern itself with the plight of farmers, or is it a ‘revolution disguised as organic
farming’, or ‘as gardening’ as some suggest, carrying the promise of larger societal change
(Babbs 2012; Alexander 2016)? What prospect does it hold, if at all, as a global movement
in our contemporary moment in which the world’s agriculture is highly privatised and
industrialised?
Permaculture is an all-encompassing approach to systems design which recognises the
interrelatedness of different spheres of life, and which deals not only with sustainable food
production, but also with self-sustaining shelters, self-sufficient communities and resil-
ient economies. A holy book for permaculturists, Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designer’s
Manual outlines in detail the ethical, social and ecological groundwork for all things re-
lated to permaculture, from landscape design to methods for organising community and
building resilience. In the very first pages, Mollison sets the tone of the book as a call to
action. He writes,

The world can no longer sustain the damage caused by modern agriculture, monocul-
tural forestry, and thoughtless settlement design, and in the near future we will see the
end of wasted energy, or the end of civilization as we know it, due to human-caused
pollution and climate change.
(Mollison 2002, i)

Surely, these words sound quite radical. The call that Mollison made years ago found fol-
lowers worldwide, and today permaculture is a global movement of people who imagine
a future of degrowth and a reversal of the capitalist and consumerist world order. Yet, the
local articulations of this movement vary. In Turkey, for instance, being a permaculturist, in
addition to giving courses and spreading permaculture as a worldview, often remains limited
to lifestyle activism and anti-consumption strategies.
Within the existing literature, permaculture is often discussed uncritically, as unproblem-
atically radical (for a very early exception, see Furze 1992). In their introduction to the edited
collection titled Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and
Ecovillages, anthropologists Joshua Lockyer and James Veteto (2013) describe these three
movements as ecotopian (ecologically utopian) for positing ‘imaginative responses and viable
alternatives’ (1) to current socio-economic and environmental injustices, and oppose them,
albeit implicitly, to the politics of protest, which they seem to find ineffective and seek to
‘move beyond’ (6). Indeed, permaculture suggests ‘an alternative paradigm of development’
(Veteto and Lockyer 2013, 96) which challenges many assumptions about human-nature
relationships and which proposes local solutions to global problems. Yet, closer analytical
scrutiny needs to be given to the model of social change proposed by permaculture, one that
‘emphasizes individual personal responsibility and voluntary action [with] a relative lack of
interest in influencing policy or large institutions’ (Ferguson and Lovell 2014, 266).
The observations that I started with demonstrate, in other words, the two ways in which
permaculture is discussed in public and academic discourses. On the one hand, some people
see it as a novel and radical project, yet fail to criticise its limits and shortcomings. On the
other, it is dismissed as a ‘middle class thing’ that carries no potential for change. In this

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chapter, I seek to find a middle ground that critically assesses permaculture’s radicalness
without dismissing its promise. By the term ‘radical’, I use the dictionary definition of ‘go-
ing to the root or origin’ of a problem. Of course, this usage entails an ability to promote
positive societal transformation, a structural change at the macro level. In discussing per-
maculture, however, it may be useful to distinguish between its theoretical promise and its
practical application. At first glance, the theory of permaculture presents a radical critique
of the neo-liberal world order. Yet, theory also informs practice; while the techniques that
permaculture introduces may help people become self-sufficient in food production, and
show substantial promise for food sovereignty and food security against the monopoly of
transnational capital, they also allow for ample flexibility. As a result, while permaculturists’
aspirations are radical – as they wish to enact substantial change in the world at a large scale –
the effects of their actions remain restricted. Even though permaculture provides a radical
critique of the current agro-food system and capitalist world order, it does not transform into
structural change.
In this chapter, I focus on two factors that I identify as limiting the radicalness of per-
maculture: the flexibility that permacultural theory provides for practice, and the need for
educational and economic capital for the practical application of permaculture, which keeps
it rather restricted to middle and upper-middle classes in many countries. I begin with
a ­detailed description of permaculture and of its conceptualisation of social change, and
describe the process of becoming a ‘certified’ permaculturist. Then, I zoom in on the per-
maculture community in Turkey, as a case study which demonstrates that even though
permaculture has radical proposals with regard to organising as communities at the grass
roots, these may remain in the background. In a country like Turkey, permaculture activ-
ism becomes a matter of proving the viability of the cultivation technique in rural com-
pounds, or of lifestyle activism in urban centres. I then turn to the literature on lifestyle
activism to discuss how lifestyle becomes a space of action and what promise it holds in
­permaculture. I conclude with considerations of permaculture experiments elsewhere in
the world, ­emphasising permaculture’s potential, one that currently remains unrealised for
larger social change.

Permaculture Worldwide: The Why and the How

Permaculture is an ethical landscape design approach introduced in the 1970s by Bill ­Mollison
and David Holmgren in Australia, in order to provide an alternative integrated system of
livelihood that cares not solely for humans, but for all beings. In the words of Mollison,

Permaculture (permanent agriculture) is the conscious design and maintenance of ag-

riculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of
natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing
their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable
way. Without permanent agriculture there is no possibility of a stable social order.
(Mollison 2002, ix)

Developed as a reaction to the destructive effects of the hegemonic global economic order
and industrialised agriculture which have been destroying the soil and local/indigenous
knowledge(s), and threatening independent food systems, permaculture originates from the
counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Lockyer and Veteto 2013). According to
David Holmgren, ‘permaculture was one of the environmental alternatives which emerged

479
 Bürge Abiral

from the first great wave of modern environmental awareness, following the Club of Rome
report in 1972 and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1975’ (2002, xvii). In their review of the lit-
erature on permaculture, Ferguson and Lovell characterise it as ‘an alternative agroecology
movement’, and describe how the design system relates to the movement and the ethical
principles: ‘Permaculture is (1) an international and regional movement that disseminates
and practices (2) a design system and (3) a best practice framework. The design system and
best practice framework are contextualised by (4) the worldview that is carried by the move-
ment’ (2014, 255). In other words, the term permaculture connotes all at the same time a
movement, a design system, a practical framework and a worldview. The decentralised struc-
ture of the movement makes it grow in both formal and informal networks.
The permaculture movement maintains close relations with the ecovillages’ movement
(Lockyer and Veteto 2013), with several ecovillages adopting the principles of permaculture
(Dawson 2006; Burke and Arjona 2013). It has also given rise to other movements. In 2004,
for instance, permaculture designer Rob Hopkins initiated the Transition Town Movement
in the United Kingdom and founded the Transition Network in 2006 in order to encourage
communities to become self-sufficient to buffer the effects of peak oil and climate change
(Neal 2013). Other design systems such as holistic management, initiated by Allan Savory
(Savory and Butterfield 1999; 2016), resemble permaculture, as do other movements such
as those around voluntary simplicity (Maniates 2002b), Slow Food (Leitch 2000; Andrews
2008), Slow City (Pink 2008) and off-grid living (Rosen 2010; Vannini and Taggart 2015),
to name a few.
Mollison’s official life narrative as it appears in the first few pages of A Designer’s Man-
ual is often relayed in permaculture courses to give a sense of his multilayered background
and character. The ‘father’ of permaculture was born in 1928 in a small fishing village in
Tasmania, Australia. He worked in various professions during his lifetime, including as a
baker, wilderness researcher, fisherman, environmental psychologist and biologist. In 1954,
he worked as a wildlife manager and conducted fieldwork and long-term observations of
various plants and animals. In 1974, he developed the concept of permaculture with his
student David Holmgren and devoted his life to further improving and spreading the design
system after leaving the university once and for all in 1978. He then started to give perma-
culture courses all over the world. Mollison and Holmgren together devised an education
system by which to spread permaculture and developed the curriculum of the Permaculture
Design Course (PDC). They also established the Permaculture Research Institute (PRI) in
Australia, the main institution of permaculture, which was later also established in other
countries through formal affiliation, including in Turkey.
In his A Designer’s Manual, Mollison suggests that permaculture, as an ethical practice,
combines modern and indigenous knowledge and wisdom, and highlights how social change
would occur through the coming together of individual and collective actions. He empha-
sises the need to take action in the present to recover what is lost, and suggests permaculture
practice as the way out of ecological crisis. The book outlines the three basic principles
permaculture is based on: ‘care of the Earth, care of people, and setting limits to population
and consumption’ (Mollison 2002, 2). Over time, the highly contested last principle came
to be articulated variously as the distribution and return of surplus, or ‘fair share’. M
­ ollison’s
ethical codes are complemented by twelve design principles outlining key approaches to-
wards designing sustainable landscapes with low external input: ‘Observe and Interact’,
‘Capture and Store Energy’, ‘Obtain a Yield’, ‘Apply Self-regulation and Accept Feedback’,
‘Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services’, ‘Produce No Waste’, ‘Design from Pat-
terns to Details’, ‘Integrate Rather Than Segregate’, ‘Use Small and Slow Solutions’, ‘Use

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and Value Diversity’, ‘Use Edges and Value the Marginal’ and ‘Creatively Use and Respond’
(Holmgren 2002, viii).
The idea of imitating natural processes runs deep in permaculture design. Observing
ecosystems, interacting with them, evaluating any feedback and then acting in accordance
with natural processes is the key. Practitioners who will design a landscape are usually ad-
vised to observe the area for a year, and only then create their design plan. Yet, this recom-
mendation is rarely followed, as it would take a lot of time and other resources to engage in
such detailed observation. As Mollison acknowledges, ‘Nothing we can observe is regular,
partly because we ourselves are imperfect observers’ (2002, 71). What he proposes is then a
general understanding of natural patterns as flexible ground rules to follow. While these ba-
sic guidelines would pertain to any physical design of space, permaculture also involves the
organisation of communities. This is what some people call ‘social permaculture’ or ‘social
design’. Even though Veteto and Lockyer define permaculture as ‘an ecotopian methodol-
ogy’ (2013, 11), the worldview that is propagated through permaculture accompanies the
design system. Permaculture then provides ‘a conceptual framework for the evaluation and
adoption of practices, rather than a bundle of techniques’ (Ferguson and Lovell 2014, 264).
Mollison’s famous aphorism ‘Though the problems of the world are increasingly com-
plex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple’ – often rephrased as ‘The problem is the
­solution’ – points to the belief that ‘the solutions to environmental and social crises [are] both
simple and known’ (Ferguson and Lovell 2014, 266). The last chapter of A Designer’s Manual,
named ‘Strategies for an Alternative Nation’ (or as in the table of contents, ‘The Strategies of
An Alternative Global Nation’), also known as ‘Chapter 14’ among permaculturists, outlines
the blueprint for building a global permaculture network which, while existing within the
capitalist economy, would strive to remain as independent from it as possible by establishing
food sovereignty and self-sufficiency in all kinds of production. Mollison suggests a plethora
of strategies to devise alternative systems of invisible structures – ‘the intangible elements
necessary for the healthy functioning of a system’ (Brock n.d.) – from bioregional organi-
sation and local consumption, to the creation of local currencies and alternative banks. In
the chapter, Mollison suggests an alternative definition of ‘nation’ as ‘a people subscribing
to a common ethic’ (2002, 508; emphasis removed), thus implicitly suggesting the erasure
of national borders and nation states through the establishment of morally connected self-­
sufficient communities. Yet, one need not necessarily start an ecovillage to practise perma-
culture. The design system can be applied in diverse settings; for instance, a family can grow
food in their balcony or garden using permaculture principles and reduce their dependence
on outside consumption. This flexibility allows practitioners to start small and do whatever
they can with the resources available at their disposal.
In his Manual, Mollison places special emphasis on personal responsibility for Earth re-
pair. He writes, ‘Although this book is about design, it is also about values and ethics, and
above all about a sense of personal responsibility’ (2002, 1). He thus suggests a move away
from traditional forms of engaging in politics towards the reclamation of individual and
communal responsibilities for self-empowerment and change:

The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those
who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their
own food, energy, and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We
should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help
us, and devise ways to help ourselves.
(2002, 506)

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Mollison suggests a move away from the politics of protest and traditional forms of organ-
ising to instead take the future of Earth repair in one’s own hands. Preaching cooperation
and creativity, he envisions permaculture practice as having the potential to appeal to a
wide range of people regardless of their religious beliefs and political affiliations, as long
as they subscribe to the ethical principles of care. When it comes to practise, however, this
conceptualisation of social change as available to everyone and possible at all costs does not
necessarily recognise the structural obstacles that may prevent people from participating
in the movement. Differently put, the theoretical and methodological flexibility put forth
by Mollison disables permaculture and many of its practitioners from recognising different
forms of structural violence that need to be addressed.

The Process of Becoming a Permaculturist

The flexible and seemingly decentralised structure of the permaculture movement is reg-
ulated through a centralised system of expertise recognition, managed through the PRIs
worldwide and the PDC. The PDC is a seventy-two-hour official training that covers a set
curriculum summarising the gist of A Designer’s Manual, almost always taken with a fee.
Prospective permaculturists are inundated with novel information during this intense course
and learn the details of what it means to design a landscape. Usually, PDCs take place in a
rural compound and last between 10 and 14 days, allowing the participants to experience
communal and ecological living situations, both of which are important aspects of perma-
culture. As such, they act as rites of passages and provide a real conversion experience, a
transition in a person’s life from a passive to an active state whereby she is trained to think
and act permaculturally. At times, however, classes are offered in cities, and the training is
spread to seven weekends. Online classes are also available. PDCs end with a practical project
for which participants design a space according to permaculture principles.
When a student graduates from the PDC, she receives a Permaculture Design Certificate,
which certifies her expertise and gives her the legal licence to use the term ‘permaculture’ in
her designs. Practitioners have estimated that there were between 100,000 and 150,000 PDC
graduates worldwide in 2011 (Tortorello 2011). This licencing system is not uncontested
within the permaculture community, as for some it represents a capitalist logic of ownership.
Yet, most permaculturists would defend the need for certification and patenting in order
to prevent people from using the name of permaculture for purposes that would oppose its
ethical principles, i.e. full-blown capitalist enterprises or profit-making courses.
While the PDC constitutes the first step to become a permaculture practitioner, there
are further formally recognised training opportunities, such as internships in permacul-
ture farms. One of the most popular internships takes place in Zaytuna Farms, famous
instructor Geoff Lawton’s farm in Australia, where permaculturists learn to practise the
different aspects of permaculture, including taking care of animals, growing food forests
and ­community-building, for around three and a half months, again for a considerable sum
of money. Smaller, more specialised courses are also offered post-PDC, such as rainwa-
ter harvesting, detailed compost methods and disaster relief. Overall, even if courses were
free, permaculture disseminates through educational activities which require a penchant for
learning in classroom settings as much as on land, and the acquisition of further knowledge
through a self-initiated learning process with books and videos. These means may not be
accessible to many, as they require free time, literacy and access to technology. What I de-
scribe here is, of course, a generalised version of the learning process, and may vary from
one setting to another. In the case that anthropologist Abigail Conrad (2014) explores, for

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instance, some farmers in Malawi apply permaculture to their fields without necessarily re-
ceiving formal training, as they acquire knowledge mostly through observation and social
learning. Therefore, the process I describe here may be most relevant for those who have no
prior farming knowledge.
Ultimately, a practitioner may go through the Teacher Training Course offered by the
PRI and build a professional profile (see https://permacultureglobal.org/users). This pro-
file system encompasses the formal trainings one has gone through, almost replicating the
formality of the mainstream educational system. Some PDC teachers are affiliated with the
official PRIs; others work independently. While these trainings are recognised to reflect a
practitioner’s stages of expertise, the permaculture community commonly acknowledges
the significance of on-site practice. Internships are significant for that reason. Some perma-
culturists go on to establish their own farms and start practising permaculture on their own
land. Some also work as permaculture consultants, advising others in their farms.

The Case in Turkey

As part of permaculture’s worldwide proliferation, Turkey has seen its spread, even if on a
modest scale, in both urban and rural areas. The country’s first encounter with permaculture
was in 1990, when permaculture instructor Max Lindegger gave a PDC in Hocamköy, a ru-
ral ecological initiative in central Anatolia. Hocamköy did not live to last, and permaculture
remained rather dormant until 2009 when several people simultaneously set out to organise
workshops and courses on the topic, training others to become permaculturists. That same
year, Marmariç Ecological Life Association, a non-governmental organisation and ecovil-
lage initiative in an abandoned village near Izmir, decided to implement permaculture in
its compound and started a project supported by the UN Global Environmental Facility’s
Small Grants Programme (Marmariç Ekolojik Yaşam Derneği 2011). In 2011, the permacul-
turists at Marmariç officially established the Permaculture Research Institute of Turkey. As
the number of practitioners increased with time through PDCs, some went on to become
instructors; therefore, the total number of courses and workshops offered in Turkey has been
increasing almost exponentially for the past several years. The Gezi protests, which erupted
in 2013 against the demolition of a public park in Istanbul and the oppressive power of the
governing Justice and Development Party, also became a turning point for permaculture’s
visibility. As protestors engaged in solidarity and urban gardening experiments during the
occupation of the park, the term ‘permaculture’ became more widely known.
In Turkey as elsewhere, many stages of the official permaculture training require eco-
nomic resources and free time. In the summer of 2017, a fourteen-day PDC at the Perma-
culture Institute of Turkey costs 2,900 Turkish Liras (about 600 GBP) – almost double the
gross monthly minimum wage. Many permaculturists stress that scholarships are available
and that some people have access to the PDC for free for that reason; yet, criticisms against
the high pricing of this course abound. There have been efforts to decrease and waive this
fee, among them a municipally subsidised free PDC organised in Bursa in 2015 by instructor
Taner Aksel.
Currently, the most commonly known farms that identify themselves as permaculture ini-
tiatives are Marmariç, Kızıltepe and Aksel’s Belentepe. These initiatives are chiefly intended
to prove permaculture’s efficacy as a cultivation technique, and serve as spaces for hosting
PDCs, other courses and internships. Unfortunately, there is not much communication or
interaction between settler permaculturists and small-scale farmers, limiting the spread of
permaculture to people whose profession is farming. Interviews with permaculturists living

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in the countryside reveal that farmers in their locality often perceive them with suspicion,
criticise their curious approach and do not see permaculture as a feasible alternative to con-
ventional farming. Permaculturists, however, believe that once they prove permaculture’s
viability, especially to the extent of making some financial profit, farmers may join them.2
Of course, settling on land, whether to set up a permaculture farm or to grow a small gar-
den in a village, requires considerable initial capital. Those who for financial or other reasons
do not switch to a rural lifestyle come together in cities. In Istanbul, Permablitz served as a
gathering hub for permaculturists and those who were interested in learning about the de-
sign system between 2012 and 2013. Based on a counterpart model in Australia, Permablitz
involved a day in which people gathered together to design someone’s garden, usually one
of the participants. These gatherings were a way for recent PDC graduates to practise their
knowledge, and for new volunteers to get engaged with permaculture. They also served as a
recruitment ground for future permaculturists, as many volunteers later went on to take the
PDC. Permablitz was succeeded by another urban initiative, the Istanbul Permaculture Col-
lective. This initiative organises courses and workshops in diverse practical skills including
composting, beekeeping, soap- and cheese-making, and ecological healthy cooking.
The majority of permaculturists in Turkey are working-age adults who already possess
educational and economic capital. The younger ones are likely to rely on their parents’ capi-
tal to engage in permaculture, from the stage of attending courses and workshops to, if they
do so, buying land and settling on it. That most permaculturists in Turkey are from middle
and upper-middle classes is surely related to the political and economic developments in the
recent history of the country. Turkey experienced several military interventions over the
last fifty years; the 1980 coup d’état most severely interrupted political opposition and paved
the way for a neo-liberal economy. These developments have often been associated with a
subsequent depoliticisation of youth and public discourse. It is true that state violence and
fear increased the stakes for political participation after the 1980 coup, but more accurately,
it was people from a certain class background that were, in the words of sociologist Demet
Lüküslü, ‘socialised in a largely unopposed system of neo-liberalism’ (2005, 34). Being in-
tegrated into a rising consumer society, they remained sceptical even towards the limited
available means of political participation. Middle and upper-middle classes, instead of aspir-
ing for political change, were now moved by aspirations of upward mobility, consumption
and personal happiness.
If the permaculture movement in Turkey has thus far failed to cross class lines and to
extend from the middle and upper-middle strata to economically underprivileged sections
of society, especially peasants, it also has not been successful in crossing ethnic lines, and
to cooperate with other social and political movements, especially the Kurdish movement.3
Contrary to my initial expectations, some of my permaculturist interlocutors grew up in
previously ‘revolutionary’ families, and had themselves been involved in leftist organising,
yet later quit their respective organisation or group. Still, the majority fell under the category
of ‘depoliticised’ in their university years, meaning that they had little to do with politics as
such. Therefore, permaculturists’ current lack of engagement with other forms of organising
in Turkey derives either from previous involvement with and disillusionment about leftist
politics, or from lack of familiarity with other forms of organising. The latter stance also
involves a mistrust and bias not only against the left, but also about politics in general. In a
context in which most channels of involvement in grassroots politics were either closed or
deemed inappropriate or futile, permaculture made sense as a way of acting in the world.
This is because its special emphasis on individualised actions leading to collective change
fit well with the dominant neo-liberal paradigm in Turkey whereby youth developed an

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alternative understanding of political participation that accentuated individual choices (see

Neyzi 2001; Lüküslü 2005). In this context, the flexibility of permaculture allows people to
establish lifestyle as a space of action due to structural constraints. I now take a closer look
at such lifestyle activism.

Lifestyle as a Space of Action

At the time of my fieldwork, several of my interlocutors had already transitioned to a rural
lifestyle, which to a great extent requires radical changes in one’s comfort level and con-
sumption habits. Almost all countryside-based ‘permies’ grow a small portion of their own
food, procure the rest from other local and preferably sustainable producers, and engage in
permaculture experiments in their land to serve as models to others. Some live with other
people, also experimenting with communal living situations, while others experience rural
life with their significant others or by themselves, all the while keeping in close contact with
other back-to-the-landers in their area.
For permaculturally trained urbanites, however, moving to a village may not be an op-
tion right away for reasons including lack of economic capital and lack of community with
whom to start a permaculture initiative. If one has a garden, which is quite exceptional in a
metropolis like Istanbul, one can always design it according to permaculture principles, and
start to grow one’s own good in the city. If not, even a small balcony may suffice. If growing
tomatoes and peppers in one’s balcony is not that convenient, there are always simpler plants
and herbs such as basil, mint and parsley, which can be easily grown in small pots in the
kitchen. As one permaculturist put it during a presentation at an environmental gathering,

We’re in the city, we consume, but what’s important is to change our options a little bit
more, I mean, even if you can’t do anything, start little by little or start to grow things,
your tomato, your pepper, I don’t know, your parsley, if you grow only parsley, then you
won’t be buying that from the supermarket, at the least.

This reasoning echoes permaculture’s emphasis on starting small within the possible range
available to a person. A permaculturist can also raise earthworms in a tub or aquarium, to
will turn her leftover food into compost. These little red worms (eisenia fetida) reproduce
quickly and are so popular in the permaculture community that during get-togethers, per-
mies jokingly compete over whose worms are the most numerous and the healthiest.
Myriad other ways in which permaculturists who live in Istanbul can do something revolve
around consumption. They can bake their own bread or ferment their own yogurt, kefir
and pickles instead of buying them. On a more collective level, they can participate in ex-
change and barter networks such as Zumbara, a time bank where people exchange services
on the basis of time instead of money, and Eşya Kütüphanesi (Library of Stuff ), a platform
where participants borrow and lend their goods, including electronics, clothes and musical
instruments. A permaculturist in Istanbul can always acquire her clothes from the barter
markets. Even when buying produce, there are organic markets or consumer cooperatives
that directly buy from the producer. These have also been proliferating in Turkey, bringing
together concerned urbanites and farmers who produce food without using agrochemicals.
This direct exchange whereby small-scale farmers receive the worth of their labour,4 some
believe, may encourage other farmers to produce ecologically, if not permaculturally.
At times, these small actions can turn into bigger campaigns. For instance, the Slow Food
chapter in Turkey started in 2010 as an organised consumer campaign against the sale of

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bluefish under 24 centimetres. Fish caught and sold under this size have not yet produced
offspring, thus increasing the threat of extinction in Istanbul’s waters. The campaign co-
incided with another campaign by Greenpeace Mediterranean that drew attention to the
catch of small fish in general. Slow Food activists thus created an influential lobby for policy
change and petitioned the authorities. While the campaign proved effective in bringing civil
society actors together and pushing for change, the new regulation increased the catch length
from 14 centimetres to only 19, still not adequate to allow for the fish to reproduce. Even
so, together with the Greenpeace campaign, Slow Food pointed to the potential impact of
consumer movements on supply and production. This action perspective is epitomised in
the word ‘prosumer’, a combination of ‘producer’ and ‘consumer’, coined by futurist author
­A lvin Toffler in 1980 and co-opted by the Slow Food movement (Toffler 1980). Its coun-
terpart in Turkish is ‘türetici’, a combination of ‘tüketici’ and ‘üretici’. The idea behind the
word itself is often articulated when permaculturists link their consumption practices to
their possible effects on the production of market goods, energy and so forth.
Sociologist Mike Featherstone (1987, 55) argues that lifestyle connotes ‘individuality,
self-expression, and stylistic self-consciousness’. Accordingly, ‘one’s body, clothes, speech,
leisure pastimes, eating and drinking preferences, home, car, choice of holidays, etc., are to be
regarded as indicators of the individuality of taste and sense of style of the owner/consumer’.
This ‘reflexive project of the self ’, as described by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991, 5), is
intricately tied to one’s consumption choice and everyday habits. Scholars in various fields,
including sociology, environmental studies and marketing, have conducted research on the
relationship between alternative consumption practices related to lifestyle choices and their
political repercussions through concepts like green consumption (Czarnezki 2011), polit-
ical consumerism (Micheletti 2003; Micheletti and Stolle 2008) and commodity activism
(Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee 2012). These analyses mostly focus on the US or European
countries, where alternative consumption and green living practices have been spreading
since the 1970s (Maniates 2002a), along with awareness of environmental problems. Some
scholars almost uncritically acclaim such lifestyle practices and their potential to bring about
cultural, social and political changes (see, e.g., Czarnezki 2011). Others, however, harshly
criticise individual acts of green consumption for laying responsibility on individuals and
ignoring the structurally produced and enhanced economic and political causes of environ-
mental problems (Maniates 2002a; Schutz 2009a; Schutz 2009b; Maniates 2012). An early
critic of this trend was Murray Bookchin, who, despite his earlier emphasis on holistic and
non-instrumental approaches to radicalism (1979), became a harsh critic of ‘lifestyle anar-
chism’, arguing that ‘If ‘simple living’ and militant recycling are the main solutions to the
environmental crisis, the crisis will certainly continue and intensify’ (Bookchin 1989, 22;
see also Bookchin 1995).
According to Maniates, several factors contributed to the mass individualisation of re-
sponsibility to free the world from environmental ills, including the rising conservatism in
the US in the 1980s and the then-president Ronald Reagan’s ‘doctrine of personal respon-
sibility, corporate initiative, and limited government’ (2002, 53). While these political and
economic developments are partially responsible for the spread of individualised solutions,
Maniates also blames the appropriate technology movements of the 1970s, for they redi-
rected responsibility from governments to individuals, while also convincing governments
and corporations to invest in technological advances to ‘save the world’. According to media
and communication scholar Tania Lewis, a ‘growing cynicism regarding political will in
relation to environmental issues at a state and federal level’ is also a possible reason for which
people turn to green practices (2015, 2).

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While these criticisms unquestionably raise valid points, few studies take on an ethno-
graphic lens and focus on the motivations of people who deliberately engage in alternative
consumption patterns. Communication scholar Laura Portwood-Stacer’s (2013) study of
anarchists in the US is one of the few exceptions, in its attempt to understand the mean-
ings and practices associated with lifestyle by scrutinising consumption patterns, personal
style and practices of sexual nonconformity. Through her close encounter with anarchist
groups, Portwood-Stacer offers a nuanced analysis that goes beyond the either/or divide.
Discussing the kinds of meanings associated with lifestyle changes and emphasising that an-
archists combine lifestyle with other political strategies, instead of giving up on the latter, she
­argues that ‘the strategic deployment of lifestyle tactics pursued by radical activists is not the
same as the a-strategic preoccupation with the self encouraged by neoliberal ­ideology’ (6).
Giving a detailed account of the different lifestyle strategies that US anarchists employ,
­Portwood-Stacer argues that while some strategies serve for ‘personal gratification’, ­others
confirm one’s ‘moral rectitude’, while others work to enhance ‘social communication’. While
some are used towards ‘activist intervention’, some become ‘identificatory ­performance’. All
in all, ­Portwood-Stacer shows that lifestyle tactics are not always necessarily about inducing
change, but they may, in some instances, serve that end, and they always serve one or several
of these other purposes.
The recognition of the very similar context in Turkey, which I have described in the
previous section, does not therefore mean that lifestyle strategies are simply a capitalist
co-optation of dissent, and that permaculturists are merely serving neo-liberal ideology.
Such an approach would not only refuse to acknowledge the subjectivities of permacul-
turists who strongly strive to live ethically and thus influence others for larger change,
but would also ignore the specific interruptions they manage to make into neo-liberal
discourses. Critiques of lifestyle activism, for instance, often do not make an analytical
distinction between the greening of consumption and a significant reduction in consump-
tion. In other words, they criticise the turn of consumers to green or fair trade products,
as Maniates (2002a, 58) puts it, ‘feeling bad and guilty about far-off mega-environmental
destruction, and then traveling down to the corner store to find a “green” product whose
purchase will somehow empower somebody, somewhere, to do good’. All the permacul-
turists I interacted with, however, are well aware of the dangers of green capitalism and
constantly criticise it. Instead of buying into these marketing strategies which do more
harm than good, they significantly reduce their consumption and seek out alternative
consumption routes. While many permaculturists who live in cities would also mostly buy
organic, they acknowledge that organic agriculture bears its own problems. As a design
system that values diversity, permaculture positions itself against all types of monocultural
agriculture, whether organic or not.
Criticisms of lifestyle activism also work to create binaries between the personal and the
collective, the individual and the institutional, and constantly articulate these as d­ ichotomous
categories. Permaculturists, however, strive to forge links between the two, by, for instance,
organising collective events and appealing to municipalities for local change. There is a con-
stant recognition that the success of lifestyle activism overall depends on the collective, that
is, on other people’s actions. If everyone engages in these types of ecologically aware actions,
then the world might change; they constantly repeat. While the assumption that everyone
may engage in these actions sounds at first naïve, this statement also recognises its own fail-
ure. On the one hand, then, there is a strong desire to change the world through one’s own
actions, while, on the other, many permies recognise the difficulty, if not the impossibility,
of doing so.

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While lifestyle activism in and of itself may not enable structural change, it can provide
a ground on which to build collectivities at moments of opportunity. For instance, when
protestors occupied Gezi Park in 2013, some immediately established a vegetable garden at
one corner of the park. The few groups that engage in community gardens and sustainable
food production in the city, some of which are permaculturists, thus made a statement that
linked the reclaiming of public space to sovereignty over food production. Permaculturists’
existing networks and experience also served to organise people, both during the occupa-
tion of the park and in its aftermath. For example, there were calls to avoid shopping malls
during the protests, as it was a mall that was planned in place of the park. As one of the
permaculturists put it, ‘People kept saying, “Don’t go to malls.” [My friend] and I thought,
“Ok, you keep telling them not to go to the malls,” all the time something based on not
doing, alright, but what are they gonna do? That’s what we need to tell them ‘cause they don’t
know any alternatives’. This speaker was active in organising barter markets as part of the
neighbourhood forums that became prominent after the police brutally ended the occupa-
tion of the park. In these forums, alternative economy experiments proliferated. In addition,
permaculture activists have been influential in revitalising several urban gardens in Istanbul,
and thus reclaiming public space after the Gezi protests. These examples suggest that per-
maculture organising around lifestyle and consumption can provide possible resources in
times of otherwise unexpected political events. If permaculture does not right away change
social practice, it prepares a basis for future engagements when opportunities arise. It carries
the potential to transform into politically effective action under the right circumstances.
This contingency, however, also means that permaculture may never materialise into larger
change, a condition which is openly recognised by many permaculturists.

Conclusion
‘[Permaculture] came into the picture [in Turkey] as a very petit bourgeois thing, (…) I’m a
little disappointed ’cause it works in fact a bit like a hobby gardening thing here’, told me one
of the permaculturists I interviewed. In this view, gardening was not working as a revolution
in Turkey, as it was supposed to be, but as a ‘petty bourgeois’ ‘hobby’. The disillusionment
expressed by the permaculturist only arises because he had seen something inherently radical
and revolutionary in permaculture. Thus, his statement simultaneously points to permacul-
ture’s radical potential and its failure. However, the recognition of this failure does not pre-
vent permaculturists from constantly asserting permaculture’s potential. The utterer of this
sentence is one of the people who do not give up emphasising permaculture’s necessity in the
world today. Many of the permaculturists in Turkey often refer to examples elsewhere in the
world to justify permaculture’s feasibility and potential success, including the crisis-induced
rise of solidarity economies in Greece (see Rakopolous 2014); Geoff Lawton’s ‘Greening the
Desert’ project in Jordan whereby a particularly dry and saline landscape was transformed
into a productive one (see ‘Greening the Desert’ 2007); and the rise of urban agriculture
in Cuba. Oftentimes, these references may be misleading, however. As scholars point out,
while coming out of necessity, urban agriculture has been a state-sponsored project in Cuba,
incorporated into a patriotic revolutionary discourse, and did not even potentially challenge
the status quo (Premat 2009; Gold 2014).
Even though permaculturists in Turkey believe that adoption of permaculture by more
people, especially by farmers, would be one step towards larger change, research in Malawi
shows that permaculture adoption by a number of peasants as a cultivation technique did not
necessarily lead to a structural change in the agro-food system in the country (Conrad 2014).

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Instead, permaculture adoption, when compared to conventional farming, creates a buffer

against malnutrition and food insecurity in Malawi, but does not completely solve these
issues. Together with a positive effect on the nutrition and health for farmers overall, it im-
proves farmers’ adaptive capacity to climatic and economic vulnerabilities, yet with effects
remaining limited to the household level.
Critics blame permaculture for being focused on individual solutions. It is accurate that
Mollison’s recommended path for social change starts at the individual, and such view does
not always recognise the structural obstacles that may prevent people from participating
in the permaculture movement, such as lack of capital or free time for learning (Furze
1992). Conrad (2014, 85), too, writes, ‘I suggest that the methods that many permacul-
turalists promote are neo-liberal because of the emphasis on individual action and respon-
sibility’. Throughout this chapter, I tried to complicate the suggestion that permaculture
is neo-­liberal. The methods put forth by permaculture texts are not neo-liberal in and of
­themselves, as there is much emphasis on prefigurative and collective grassroots organising
and action as delineated in A Designer’s Manual. However, these methods are by default in-
terpreted and put into action in a neo-liberal context, such as in the post-coup Turkey, with
individual solutions taking precedent. This incongruity largely arises from the methodolog-
ical flexibility inherent in permacultural theory. Together with the problematic of unequal
access through paid courses and workshops, permaculture’s radicalism thus remains limited,
and only exists as a potential. The task ahead then, as Furze (1994, 154) insightfully writes,
should be ‘to ensure [that] the potential is realised’.

Notes
1 I would like to thank Hira Doğrul and Uri Gordon for their insightful comments on the chapter.
2 It is important to mention here that it takes up to several years to set up a landscape completely
according to permaculture principles. According to some permaculturists in Turkey, this temporal
lag is one of the reasons why they have not been able to prove permaculture’s viability to other
farmers in their locality. The claim that permaculture can be commercially profitable because of
the low input it requires may be challenged by Conrad’s (2014) study of farmers in Malawi: while
farmers who switched to permaculture became mostly self-sufficient, thus independent of the
market, permaculture practice mostly provided for their household needs, and did not necessarily
bring any commercial gain.
3 This seems to be not much different from the situation in the US where the permaculture move-
ment is predominantly white (Ferguson 2014). Even though I have heard bits and pieces about pos-
sible cooperation between permaculturists and the Kurdish movement, there is no collaboration to
date.
4 Farmers often receive more profit in direct exchange with customers than what they receive after
selling their produce to wholesale commissioners.

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Berghahn Books.

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 4.9
‘RELIGIOUS’ RADICALISM
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos and Anthony T. Fiscella

Introduction
As long as there has existed hierarchy and domination, the oppressed have engaged in resis-
tance and sustained egalitarian relationships in the face of such domination. However, what
qualifies as ‘radical’ resistance, as ‘religious’ relationships or as ‘religious radicalism’ depends
on the perspective of the observer. For instance, ‘religious radicalism’ might describe either
a ‘radicalism’ in the sense of an extreme position (on any number of issues) which also has
‘religious’ attributes, or a ‘religious’ claim which also happens to come across as ‘radical’ (in
the sense of more extreme, more deeply passionate and committed than common examples).
Indeed, the semantic coverage of both ‘religious’ and ‘radical’ overlaps where both can be
taken to mean a certain kind of zeal or passionate commitment.1
Turning to etymology does not narrow and sharpen the focus a great deal either: ‘radi-
cal’ points to the roots (Latin radicalis and radix = roots); hence, a ‘radical movement’ could
be taken to refer to a movement that seeks to change something at its root rather than
merely superficially; and ‘religion’ is often considered to refer to something that socially
binds people together (Latin religare = to bind together) as opposed to something that
atomises social groups into individuals each out for their own self-centred gain. Taken
together, this would seem to point to ‘religious radicalism’ as referring to a deep-rooted
commitment to something which binds people together. However, etymology can be in-
terpreted in different directions too. For instance, ‘religion’ could be read as pointing to
a binding obligation with God. The etymology of ‘religion’ is also quite contested: some
argue that it derives from re-legere = to read again. Clearly, therefore, ‘religion’ and ‘radi-
calism’ are both slippery terms.
It is therefore not surprising that studies ostensibly addressing ‘religious radicalism’ have
focused on very different kinds of examples depending on the inclination of the scholar. For
instance, some scholars have focused on US-based movements such as Christian Identity,
neo-Nordic pagans, Children of Noah and the Anti-Cult Movement (Kaplan 1997), as well
as on Islamists in the Middle East such as the Taliban, Hezbollah and Hamas (Berman 2009);
some have posited ‘religious radicals’ in contrast to ‘religious conservatives’ and ‘religious
liberals’ in a US context (Dreger and Adkins 1991); others speak of a ‘radical conservative
socialist’ Buddhism in Thailand (Zöllner 2014) and others still have discussed examples

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of ‘religious radical’ individuals and groups that are largely antiracist, anticapitalist and/
or broadly aligned with anarchist critiques of dominant orders (McKanan 2011, Raboteau
2016).
Partly due to limited space and partly mindful of the types of radicalism discussed in
this volume, this chapter focuses on the latter among the aforementioned categories: groups
which can be described as both ‘religious’ and ‘radical’ in the sense of anti-oppression and
anti-hierarchical, and which have presented fundamental challenges to dominant social or-
ders (Christoyannopoulos 2009, Wiley 2014). This includes fairly predictable examples such
as Christian or Muslim ‘radicals’, but not to be overlooked are also Indigenous, communal
and so-called ‘primitive’ cultures that pose challenges to the dominant order. That such
Indigenous traditions and philosophies often contain a ‘religious’ element is both a factor
in their frequent neglect and a reason why they deserve a central role in discussions of ‘reli-
gious radicalism’. Clearly, however, discussions of ‘religious radicalism’ could justifiably be
expanded to include a broader variety of fairly different ‘radical’ and ‘religious’ phenomena.
Here, we contribute to such discussions with only a small selection.
One of the aims of this chapter, therefore, after providing a critical overview of the
concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘radicalism’ and in particular after settling on a broader under-
standing of ‘religion’, is to present a number of examples of what might be characterised as
‘religious radicals’ that stand in opposition to hierarchy and oppression. Three types of ex-
amples are considered: Indigenous traditions which stand as radical alternatives to colonial
orders (e.g. Tonga, BaMbuti, Lakota); nonviolent currents within dominant regimes that
challenge central pillars of those regimes such as the military, property or hierarchy (e.g.
Catholic Workers, Plowshares and liberation theologians); and marginalised people in the
process of negotiating alternative life-organising stories within nation state contexts (e.g.
the Zapatistas, the MOVE Organization and Womanists). In presenting these examples,
our second aim is to inform reflections on the following questions: what is radical about
these groups of ‘religious radicals’; what are their principal concerns; how are their views
and activism theorised; and what, if any, influences are active in the movements under
discussion?
Underlying our presentation of these examples is an argument that what is most inter-
esting with these groups and their ideas is not whether or not they qualify as ‘religious’ or
even ‘radical’, but the degree to which their visions, practices and holistic worldviews contest
dominant orders with principles of egalitarianism, nonviolence and inclusive diversity. That
is, arguably the most ‘radical’ examples put forward a way of seeing and being in the world
which provides an alternative to dominant orders which can be described as ontological,
deep-rooted and total.

Problematising Definitions
The implication behind the title of this chapter is that there is a subset of ‘radicalism’ which
is appropriately labelled ‘religious’. It seems pertinent to start by unpacking some of the prob-
lems with some of the assumptions that underlie such a label – assumptions that arguably are
widespread among many of the likely readers of this book. In exploring these assumptions,
we seek to open up the landscape by putting forward a perspective premised on a number
of arguments which are often overlooked in mainstream social and political science. Given
our limited space, we cannot resolve all the issues that this gives rise to here, but at least we
can give a taster to angles of analysis which are likely to be unfamiliar to many Western
commentators.

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There are at least four claims which our limited discussion of definitions hopes to sub-
stantiate to some extent. It is worth spelling them out at the outset to clarify our main po-
sitions. First, there is an anti-‘religious’ bias in Western leftist thinking which stems partly
from an ideological framing (or at any rate a simplistic categorisation) of ‘religion’. Second,
this bias was co-constituted, both historically and philosophically, in tandem with European
colonialism. Third, closer attention to much of what was excluded in the process uncovers
countless examples of ‘religious radicalism’, indeed a long history of resistance to colonial-
ism, oppression and hierarchy. Fourth, Western categories and assumptions about ‘religion’
therefore need unpacking, especially by ‘radicals’ opposed to colonial and neocolonial hier-
archies and institutions.

‘Religion’
The term ‘religion’ is particularly problematic. This is in large part because of the assump-
tion, arguably implicit in some of our own use of the aforementioned term, that there ex-
ists something called ‘religion’ as distinct from ‘politics’, ‘law’, ‘science’ or ‘culture’. This
is a distorting lens in a vast majority of cases. Not only is such an assumption unique to
­European languages, but it was not a common assumption even in Europe prior to the 1700s
­(Cavanaugh 2009, Dubuisson 1998/2003, Fitzgerald 2007, Josephson 2012, McCutcheon
2003). The now widespread notion that there is a sphere of life that can be identified as ‘reli-
gion’ and separated from other spheres of life is a product of the modern, colonial European
mindset: both colonialism and this framing of ‘religion’ as a separate sphere occurred in
the same era, for overlapping purposes and due to interlinking causes. Fitzgerald goes even
further when he writes that ‘[t]he ideology of religious studies’, that is, as a separate sphere
of study, ‘defines both modernity and colonial consciousness’, a consciousness which he ex-
plains is then reproduced each time we frame our analysis through its terminology (2007: 26).
Although scholars and laypersons outside of religious studies often use the term ‘religion’
as if there were some self-evident meaning, there is no consensus among religious studies
scholars (nor legal scholars, for that matter) on how to define it or even which traditions and
groups might be considered ‘religious’. Depending on the scholar or study, anything from
football clubs to Buddhist meditation, from Star Wars fans to Labour Party activism may or
may not be regarded as ‘religious’. Besides, the exact definition and limits of ‘politics’ have
also evaded scholarly consensus (is it based on power, conflict-resolution, distribution of
resources, territorial sovereignty, appointment of decision makers and/or organising public
values?). Yet, the casual assumption that ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ are clearly definable and
best kept separate is entrenched both in the mainstream public discourse and among many
academics.
Furthermore, it is commonly accepted by scholars that ‘most people in the world are re-
ligious’ (Graham and Haidt 2010; Johnson 2012; Randal and Argyle 2005).2 If one were to
follow this line of thinking, assume that ‘radicals’ are fairly evenly spread across the planet,
and furthermore assume that ‘radicalism’ does not preclude ‘religiosity’, then it would follow
that many, if not most, ‘radicals’ would also likely be ‘religious’. Without consensus on how
‘religion’ is defined, this admittedly does not tell us much, except perhaps that ‘­anti-religious’
leftists would be mistaken to expect all leftists to be ‘non-religious’ or all ‘religion’ to be
right-wing or reactionary. There is, after all, a degree of prejudice and bias against peo-
ple who identify as ‘religious’ (or seem to do so) in some leftist contexts. Prejudice need not
be accurate to be real and to lead to concrete bias. Just as Islamophobia can result in violence
against Sikhs who are mistaken for Muslims, ‘anti-religious’ prejudice can lead to bias against

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persons and traditions regardless of whether or not they are ‘religious’ and regardless of
whether the category of ‘religion’ is useful.
History is more complex than prejudice tends to allow. Syndicalist militias killed priests
and nuns during the Spanish Civil War due to the Church’s collaboration with fascists and
elites; yet, a few decades prior, Father Hagerty, a Catholic priest and revolutionary commu-
nist, wrote the preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World. Hagerty was far from a soli-
tary example of Christians fiercely advocating social justice and equality: Gerard Winstanley
and the Levellers in 1600s England rooted their opposition to state and capital in Bible-based
understandings of justice; the German Peasant rebellions of the 1520s (including the com-
munist preacher Thomas Müntzer) and the Münster commune of the 1530s were both led by
Christian revolutionaries; and radical insurrectionists Nat Turner and John Brown were both
guided by their Christian faith, as was Harriet Tubman. Other more recent examples include
Quakers and Unitarian Universalists such as Florence Beaumont, Alice Herz and Norman
Morrison who self-immolated in opposition to the US war against Vietnam, and contem-
porary Christian anarchists such as the Jesus Radicals, a mainly US-based community coor-
dinated through an eponymous website. Many armed anticolonialist movements across the
Muslim world were led by supposedly quietist Sufis. Prominent social movement leaders of
the twentieth century, such as Zeinab al-Ghazali, Malcolm X and Mohandas Gandhi, were
rooted in faith communities of active resistance. Across the world today, people in faith com-
munities are leading struggles against colonial orders, corporate power and state persecution.
Not only does stereotyping ‘religion’ tend erroneously to position the so-called ‘believers’
on the ‘right/authoritarian’ end of the ideological landscape, but it conceptually ignores all
non-state cultures, traditions and philosophies outside this landscape. We wanted to avoid
the same tendencies furthermore narrowing the parameters of scholarship on ‘radicalism’.
Critics have argued that many European anarchists, in other words even those who are
among the more receptive to non-state cultures, also have this blind spot, not noticing the
‘religion’ in those they feel affinity for, and instead locating it elsewhere. In other words,
even anarchists can struggle to think outside the dominant framing of ‘religion’ inherited
from colonialism and the Enlightenment, obsessing instead about one particular kind of
‘religion’ they want to passionately oppose (see, for instance, Lagalisse 2011). Among many
European anarchists, the Enlightenment as a philosophical starting point and set of assump-
tions about ‘civilisation’ has been taken for granted despite the underlying colonial relations
that facilitated developments such as ‘rationality’ and ‘freedom’ (Fiscella 2015). Furthermore,
their very conception of ‘religion’ (see, for example, Bakunin’s God and the State which took
statist variants of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as prototypical of ‘religion’) has
been conceptually rooted in worldviews constructed by white colonialist-era philosophers.
That is why political scientist Cedric Robinson, for example, criticised European anarchists
for not actually envisioning a new society but merely ‘rearranging the ideas of that bourgeois
society’ (Robinson 1980: 215).3 As H. L. T. Quan, political theorist and filmmaker, put it,
‘despite its claim of heresy, anarchism in the West remains faithful and obedient to the on-
tologies and life-worlds that gave birth to it’ (2013: 125).
In contrast to European anarchist thought, Robinson pointed to non-European exam-
ples of anarchist praxis. One example of such praxis might be Rastafarians who ­advocate
­‘radical freedom and liberty of the individual’ on the one hand and ‘a strong sense of
­collectivism, communalism and community [and] anti-capitalist, anti-materialist ethos’
on the other (­ Barnett 2002: 54). Robinson himself specifically cited the stateless Tonga
as a case of ­non-European anarchist praxis. To follow the Tongan example, according to
­Robinson, would imply the dismantling of political authority and replacing it with systems

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of interconnectedness, inclusivity, mythology, kinships, brotherhoods and sisterhoods and

‘perhaps, with an authority which identified order and responsibility in terms of the indi-
visibility of things’ (1980: 200). Yet typically, that which has been translated into European
languages as ‘religion’ (and as a consequence been dismissed or overlooked by anti-religious
critics) has encompassed for Indigenous peoples the entirety of life – including governance
and social relations in general. As Native American studies scholar Jack Forbes wrote,

The life of Native American peoples revolves around the concept of sacredness, beauty,
power and relatedness of all forms of existence. In short, the ethics or moral values of
Native people are part and parcel of their cosmology or total world view. Most Native
languages have no word for ‘religion’ and it may be true that a word for religion is never
needed until a people no longer have it. … Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion
is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religion is what we
do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we
think – all of these things – twenty-four hours a day. One’s religion, then, is one’s life, not
merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived. Religion is not prayer, it is not a church,
it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, it has little to do with what white people call ‘reli-
gion’. It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment
on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we
dream of being famous, that is our religion … the massive federal center for experimen-
tation with animals on Staten Island is a church, the Pentagon and CIA complexes near
­Washington, DC, are churches, etc. Many people often pretend that they can escape
from the consequences of their own acts, but Native philosophy teaches differently.
(2008 [1979]: 15–16, italics in original)

In order to reconcile such a broad-ended and anticolonialist approach to defining ‘religion’

with the academic quest for a precise and coherent use of terms, we conceive of ‘religion’ in this
broad sense as subsumed under the category of ‘life-organising stories’ – all partial and holistic
narratives as well as cognitive frameworks that are used to orient individuals and groups in re-
lation to the world and one another. This would include everything from Catholic meditation
to Buddhist sacraments, but also anything from academic rituals to electoral procedures, from
astrophysics to children’s fairy tales. This broader understanding of the ‘religious’ therefore
opens up the landscape of ‘religious radicalism’ to examples we will be considering further later.
Three important points here are worth noting. First, what is interesting is not whether or
not a story is falsifiable but the ways in which any given story helps people organise and ori-
ent themselves (and their stories) in relation to one another. That is, the claim of ‘scientific’
stories versus ‘superstitious’ stories obscures the more interesting dynamics of how interre-
lated stories sustain certain social orders. Second, the claim that a story is ‘religious’ does not
provide much explanatory power about life choices. In other words, it may be easy to divide
people into categories of ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ or ‘Muslim’ versus ‘Buddhist’ but the
labels do not necessarily tell us anything at all. For example, French-Lebanese author Amin
Maalouf wrote: ‘You could read a dozen large tomes on the history of Islam from its very
beginning and you still wouldn’t understand what’s going on in Algeria. But read 30 pages
on colonization and decolonization and then you’ll understand quite a lot’ (2001: 66). Third,
similarly, even within stories purportedly based, for example, on the teachings of Jesus or the
Buddha, we learn little by characterising them as ‘religious’ or ‘non-religious’, but we learn
more by examining whether a given set of stories have been crafted, edited and developed by
elites and imperial interests or by grassroots actors who tied those stories to simpler lifestyles

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both different from and in opposition to domination and oppression. Subsequently, rather
than asking whether or not certain life-organising stories are ‘religious’ or not, we can ask
if they are connecting people to one another and to all living beings and the ecosystems we
share or if they lead to and are built upon traditions of division and domination.
While this understanding of ‘religion’ is broad, it provides a base for subcategories and
greater specificity that, unlike typical understandings of ‘religion’, can be truly ‘universal’
precisely because all cultures can relate to the idea of stories that provide central refer-
ence points for orienting individuals within that culture. The lines of distinction do not
fall between ‘faith’ and ‘fact’ or ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ but along various genres of stories:
‘short stories’ that address only one or two aspects of life, ‘anthologies’ that bind together
various narratives with themes, ‘terror stories’ that cultivate fear and distrust, ‘news stories’
that inform about social developments, ‘authoritative stories’ that expect compliance with a
dominant narrative, and so on. In any case, rather than propose a stable and final definition
of ‘religion’ or ‘life organising stories’, this chapter primarily aims to provide examples of
groups and ideas that often get less detailed coverage partly because of broader assumptions
shared across wider ‘European’ societies about the significance of such ‘religious’ groups.

‘Radical’
The word ‘radical’ also raises difficulties. Depending on the context and assumptions of the
reader, the term might evoke any number of prototypical images: a person of colour, a white
person, a male, a female, a genderqueer, an Islamist, a Communist, a peace activist, an armed
militant, etc. In other words, our thinking about ‘radicalism’ is shaped by socially condi-
tioned factors and assumptions that lead us to privilege certain types of actors over others for
earning the label: ‘radical’. As prominent academic voices are not representative of the popu-
lation at large, the dynamics of skewed individual perspectives within academia can exclude
a large number of people from the very dialogue about what might constitute social change
or justice and how they ought to be strived for. In the examples we selected below, we tried
to include frequently excluded voices, but we inevitably were forced to leave out many too.
The Journal for the Study of Radicalism might be a reasonably representative starting point
for a definition given that it draws together scholars specialising in radicalism. Its approach
is ‘to loosely define “radical” as distinguished from “reformers”, to mean groups who seek
revolutionary alternatives to hegemonic social and political institutions, and who use violent
or non-violent means to resist authority and to bring about change’.4 This definition might
sound consistent with both common conceptions and the etymological source of ‘radical’; yet,
it belies the fact that some of the earliest uses of ‘radical’ in a political sense referred to ‘radical
reformists’, whereas today ‘radical’ and ‘reformist’ are typically considered to be opposites. Nor
does radical necessarily imply anti-elitism or revolutionary inclination. For example, Noam
Chomsky and others have used the term ‘radical’ to refer to corporate capitalism and its ravag-
ing effects on democracy and social order.5 Hence, an important question could be: radical in
relation to what? After all, the ‘hegemonic social and political institutions’ and ‘authority’ that
radicals oppose will change according to context.6 In many cases, these changes are rooted in
basic needs and responses to oppression rather than overarching theories or academic literature.

Examples of ‘Religious Radicalism’

Having now discussed some of the difficulties inherent in using terms such as ‘radicalism’
and especially ‘religious’, we can now provide a variety of examples that might qualify as

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‘religious radicals’ in the sense of life-organising stories which stand in marked contrast to
dominant social orders, and in the process begin to reflect on their main concerns and the
way in which they think about their radicalism. Of course, thousands of groups could have
potentially been considered. The limited space means only a small selection could be listed.
They were selected according to two main criteria: first, they might justifiably be considered
‘radical’ in that their ideas and practices seem to present serious epistemic and/or structural
challenges to the functioning of domination and colonial/capitalist-oriented societies; and
second, they might justifiably be considered ‘religious’ in the broad approach outlined by
Forbes: that is, their life-organising stories and social practices are interwoven with all major
aspects of life including governance, the nature of existence, relationships to animals and
earth, conflict resolution, ethics and so on. Groups and ideas were also selected according to
taste: that is, we, the authors, find these groups interesting and worthy of discussion.

Indigenous Traditions
Many Indigenous societies include those cultures, traditions or social contexts whose very
existence, paradigms and lifestyles function as examples of powerful ‘radical’ alternatives to
dominant orders including coercive governance and competitive individualism. C ­ entring
‘radical’ social change upon Indigenous peoples simultaneously decentres all ­colonialist-based
models from nation states to anarchist theory, from banking to Das Kapital. That they are
suffused by life-organising stories and cultures that position them in larger cosmologies and
holistic worldviews integrated into their daily life is what would qualify them as ‘religious’
according to Forbes. If nothing else, the very question of land and ownership of the wild
which is central to colonialism requires the annihilation or assimilation of Indigenous peo-
ples and their claims to the land. Indigenous people power implies, therefore, a core threat
to social orders built upon the legacy of colonialism.
Common principles among Indigenous communities include building small-scale societies
based on mutual aid, shared obligations, minimal technology and violence, and maximum har-
mony with surrounding ecosystems. Turnbull observes in his research on the BaMbuti in the
Congo: ‘Pygmies dislike and avoid personal authority, though they are by no means devoid of
a sense of responsibility. It is rather that they think of responsibility as communal’ (1968: 125).
According to Turnbull, their faith was in the forest and in one another. Conflicts tended to
be resolved with a minimal amount of violence. Indeed, they had minimal technology, mini-
mal depletion of resources, minimal bureaucracy, minimal hierarchy and minimal destruction.
Their simple living and harmony with their environment can be found in other Indigenous
peoples. For example, Kate Luckie of the Wintu Nation in the 1920s is recorded to have said:

When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we
don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down trees. We
only use dead wood. But the White people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill ev-
erything. The tree says, ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it
up. The spirit of the land hates them … Everywhere the White man has touched, it is sore.
(Forbes 2008: 14)

While Indigenous peoples anywhere present a particular challenge to nation states at the
very core of their legitimacy and territorial claims, the Indigenous peoples of the US pose
a particularly strong challenge to dominant orders precisely because the pillars of dominant
orders in economic, political, cultural and military terms are located therein. In other words,

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the proximity of Indigenous peoples in the US to the core pillars of global power marks out
their ‘radicalism’ as particularly ‘radical’ in their context. Furthermore, their struggles against
domination did not start in the eighteenth or nineteenth century but have been going on
for far longer, and this endurance grants deeper roots to their legitimacy and to the threat
they pose to the dominant order (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014). Hence, if there is a radical challenge
posed to imperial domination by Indigenous peoples, the existence, claims and traditions of
Native Americans pose a greater threat than, for example, the Saami in northern S­ candinavia
or even the Natives of the Basque region. This means that colonial orders have a greater
interest in obscuring, obstructing and attacking their gains – even at the level of recognition
and acknowledgement (formal and informal). Russell Means, a co-organiser of the ­A merican
Indian Movement, has pointed out that the very identity of Indigenous peoples (he refers to
‘American Indians’) is rooted in the European creation of such terms and that to speak accu-
rately and indigenously, one would only be able to say Oglala, Brulé, Diné, Miccosukee, etc.
Thus, it takes great effort to not become Europeanised for this and other reasons. Yet once
language is Europeanised, the lens through which one sees and through which discourse
takes place similarly becomes Europeanised. Indigenous paradigms become eradicated in
‘indoctrination mills’ (Means’ term for ‘schools’). Subsequently, leftist ‘radicalism’ is hardly a
solution: ‘Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection
of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. … Industrialization is fine and nec-
essary. How do they know this? Faith. Science will find a way’ (Means 1991: 76–78).
Much could also be said about the way in which much European science, anthropology
in particular, imposed a colonial understanding of entire Indigenous cultures which is frag-
mented. The label ‘religion’ was then imposed on specific aspects fragmented out of what
was a total and interconnected way of life. Indigenous studies scholar Kim Tallbear, for in-
stance, remarked that the Dakota word that has been translated as ‘spirituality’ or ‘religion’
actually means ‘in relation’.7 To be in relation with land, animals and people is a very direct
phenomenon that does not necessarily imply a mystery God, belief in an afterlife, an imma-
terial ‘soul’ or some future salvation (and even if it did, the point is that ‘religion’ for these
cultures puts relationships at the core, irrespective of specific theological beliefs). It does im-
ply a certain stewardship and care for the relations that one maintains in life and relations that
people are dependent upon. Significantly, it implies that there is no such thing as an isolated
individual. Rather, each person is part of a web of relations, an interdependency with others
from which one’s personal identity cannot be disentangled.
Theoretically, the most recent development is a growing recognition within academia
for the long-standing relevance of decolonial perspectives. From the popularity of Frantz
Fanon’s analysis of racism and violence as essential pillars of colonialism to Linda Tuhiwai
Smith’s description of how ‘scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonial-
ism’, institutions based on white academia have become increasingly critiqued from within
(1999: 1). As Walter Mignolo has observed, the role of ‘religion’ is central to the cosmology
of colonialism: ‘The history of knowledge-making in modern Western history from the
Renaissance on will have, then, theology and philosophy-science as the two cosmological
frames, competing with each other at one level, but collaborating with each other when the
matter is to disqualify forms of knowledge beyond these two frames’ (2009: 164).
While some scholars have emphasised that decolonialisation therefore begins in the mind
(hooks 1994, Waziyatawin and Yellow Bird 2012), others have insisted on the centrality of land
claims and Indigenous sovereignty (Tuck and Yang 2012). In either case, these are fundamental
challenges to core tenets of colonial orders (even within social justice movements such as Occupy
or environmental movements which tend to conceptually ‘occupy’ Natives out of existence).8

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Nonviolent Alternatives within Dominant Orders

History is full of radical social change developing from people organising nonviolently from
within nation states or imperial societies. Within Muslim contexts, one might mention
Heba Raouf Ezzat’s theoretical blend of anarchism, social democracy and Islamic civic or-
ganisation, Ali Shariati’s call for a classless society in Iran, or the weaponless ‘peace army’
of the Khudai Khidmatgars (‘servants of God’) led by Abdul Ghaffar Khan in India. Within
other traditions, one can mention: Thich Nhat Hahn and Engaged Buddhism; Starhawk
and other pagan activists in the global justice movement; Gandhi’s Sardovaya Movement;
magick traditions and genderqueering through Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and others; and
activists within Transcendentalist and Theosophical circles such as Henry David Thoreau
(who popularised the idea of civil disobedience) and Annie Besant (socialist, feminist and
anticolonialist activist). However, the focus here will be on those who have applied a very
different approach to the teachings of Jesus than those who used those same teachings to
enslave, conquer and colonise.
There are many examples of such radical offshoots emerging from within Christian
­contexts. From the celibate Shakers led by Mother Lee to the single mother Frances Ellen
­Watkins Harper – simultaneously Unitarian and African Methodist Episcopal – who ­organised
against white domination and patriarchy in nineteenth-century US, to the earliest Christians
who refused military service and shared their belongings, current-day Christian commu-
nists such as the Bruderhof, who share their wealth among themselves, and ­neo-monastics
such as Shane Claiborne who choose lives of simplicity and communal living while working
for social justice in poor neighbourhoods, there is a long legacy of radical Christianity that
­non­v iolently challenges interpretations of scripture that wed church power to the power of
states and ruling classes (Bradstock 2002). Our focus here is on three such radical currents, all
still active today: the Catholic Workers, Plowshares and liberation theologies.
The Catholic Worker movement was co-founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter
Maurin. Their radical vision was to produce a cheap newspaper for ordinary people that
would provide radically antimilitaristic and anticapitalist news and establish communes in
the city as well as the countryside. The urban communes or houses of hospitality would
welcome the poor and homeless into their walls for food and shelter. The rural communes
would provide alternatives to industrialised society as well as grow the food to be provided to
their fellows in the city. Inspired by Kropotkin, Tolstoy, the Industrial Workers of the World
and the gospel of Jesus Christ, Dorothy Day set about to do what she could to resist what she
described as ‘this filthy rotten system’ (Riegle 2012: 142). Yet, resistance was only one part
of the Catholic Worker praxis. As Peter Maurin pointed out, their mission was to help cre-
ate a world in which ‘it’s easier to be good’ (ibid.). Today, there are more than 190 Catholic
Worker communes across the world run by Catholics and non-Catholics. They continue to
take part in antimilitaristic and anticapitalist campaigns as well as prefigure communities of
mutual aid and hospitality to the destitute (including refugees).
Closely associated with the Catholic Worker movement is the Plowshare movement that
gained notoriety in 1980 and continues today with the specific aim of doing direct n ­ onviolent
actions against the military industrial complex. Its roots go back to the late 1960s. In partic-
ular, on 17 May 1968, nine Catholic activists broke into government offices in Catonsville,
Maryland, removing hundreds of draft files, and then burning them with homemade napalm
(saving all of those young men from being drafted for the war). They included the Berrigan
brothers, who would later be involved in the first ‘Plowshares’ action proper: on 9 September
1980, with a group of six others, they trespassed onto a nuclear missile facility in King of

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Prussia, Pennsylvania, where they damaged nuclear cones (‘turned them into plowshares’ as
prophesied in the Bible) and poured blood onto various documents. There have been over
seventy Plowshare actions since then. These actions have always rooted their radical opposi-
tion to the military machine in Biblical tropes, both in their theorisation of their action and
in the symbolism chosen in those particular actions.
One of the most popular and widespread radical movements in Christian contexts is that
of liberation theologies which, depending on your proclivity, could be traced back to Moses,
Jesus Christ, Bartolomé de las Casas, the Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops in
1968 or Chimbote, Peru earlier that same year (Gutiérrez 1988: xviii). Alternately, Gustavo
Gutiérrez wrote in A Theology of Liberation in 1971 that liberation theologies take their root
in the unjust death of countless poor and oppressed throughout history. The Second Vatican
Council (1962–65) with its modernising directives, emphasis on communal equality and
support for local autonomy certainly helped facilitate the popularisation and spread of liber-
ation theologies throughout the world. In particular, base ecclesial communities such as the
many that sprouted up in Brazil became local tools for lay people to interpret scripture out
from their own needs and the ‘preferential option for the poor’ (a phrase originating among
liberation theologians and repeated by Popes John Paul II and Francis). In such contexts,
‘sin’, for example, is interpreted as social injustice and ‘a breach of friendship with God and
others’ (Gutiérrez 1988: 24). Rather than theorising theology ‘from an armchair’, liberation
theologies expressed new ways of doing theology. In general, liberation theologies tend to be
not so much theory as outgrowths of solidarity and active commitment to people who are
poor and marginalised (Rowland 1999: 4). Yet, written documents have played an import-
ant role as well. In 1965, Dom Hélder Camara, a bishop from Rio de Janeiro, organised a
group document signed by 15 bishops from Asia, Africa and Latin America during the end
of Vatican II that described ‘the people of the Third World’ as ‘the proletariat of today’s hu-
manity’ and insisted that ‘the gospel demands the first, radical revolution’ wherein ‘wealth
must be shared by all’ (Smith 1991: 16). Many liberation theologians such as Camara and José
Miranda equated Christianity with ‘true’ socialism and communism – meaning antiracist,
antisexist, antiauthoritarian systems of sharing the wealth. As Gutiérrez put it,

[t]o support the social revolution means to abolish the present status quo and to attempt
to replace it with a qualitatively different one, … not only better living conditions, a
radical change of structures, a social revolution; [but] much more: the continuous cre-
ation, never ending, of a new way to be human, a permanent cultural revolution.
(Emphasis in original 1988: 31, 21)

Marginalised People Organising New Stories

A third type of example concerns a few select groups and individuals who are drawn from
marginalised peoples struggling to retain autonomy within nation states and/or create viable
alternatives. Some of them may seem ‘radical’ in the spirit of Malcolm X who declared, ‘I
believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won’t
let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion’ (1970: 142). Some may not
seem ‘radical’ in a full revolutionary sense; yet by articulating their own voice, they implic-
itly threaten the status quo which has consistently relegated them to the margins.
For example, Vine Deloria, Jr was a Native American whose father and grandfather were
both Episcopalian preachers and he himself acquired degrees in law, political science and
theology. At the same time, he was tremendously critical of racism and colonial dominance

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as well as the entire epistemological paradigm upon which European nation states and capi-
talism are constructed. In Deloria’s words,

The people who maintain the structures of science, religion, and politics have one thing
in common that they don’t share with the rest of society. They are responsible for creat-
ing a technical language, incomprehensible to the rest of us, whereby we cede to them
our right and responsibility to think. They in turn formulate a beautiful set of lies that
lull us to sleep and allow us to forget about our troubles, eventually depriving us of all
rights, including, increasingly, the right to live in a livable world.
( Jensen 2008: 249)

Similarly, one might mention any number of long-standing cultures such as Bedouin or ­Berbers
in North Africa who have maintained relatively technologically advanced societies without
prisons, police, and who apply mediation and councils of elders rather than courts and govern-
ments to provide social order (see Barclay 1982). One might also see Jewish ­people who have
historically been excluded from dominant cultures. Amnon Shapira, doctor of ­Bible Stud-
ies, has argued that anarchism remains embedded in Jewish scripture in a number of ways –
whether in the way Jewish communities were originally egalitarian and ­non-centralised, in the
critique of how power corrupts, in the preference for kingship of God rather than human rule,
and so on.9 Indeed, there is hardly a shortage of historically radical Jews from Emma Goldman
and Martin Buber to Noam Chomsky and Gustav Landauer. More recently, Michael Lerner of
the Jewish social justice journal Tikkun has made radical calls such as for the ‘elimination of na-
tional boundaries and all restrictions on immigration’ and ‘a non-violent revolution’ including
a ‘Global Marshall Plan’ requiring the wealthiest twenty countries to donate 1%–2% of their
annual GDP for the next thirty years to end global poverty (Lerner 2015: 19).
Three examples of ‘new stories’ that we shall consider in a little more depth are the Z
­ apatistas,
the MOVE Organization and Womanist authors. The Zapatista National ­Liberation Army
(EZLN) appeared before the world on January 1, 1994 when they made a spectacular in-
surrection in the Mexican state of Chiapas. This was the same day that the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had come into effect. And just as NAFTA had been many
years in the making so too had the Zapatistas been training for years albeit hidden from public
view. They had been not only training militarily but also democratically. They routinely held
democratic referendums with local people in Chiapas in order to be guided by their will as to
when and how an insurrection ought to take place. When people determined that the time
was right, they struck and caught the Mexican state off guard. The Zapatistas then soon put
down their weapons, emphasising that a military showdown was not their aim. Their aims,
instead, were (and remain) peaceful autonomy for Indigenous peoples and justice for all mar-
ginalised and poor people in the region. They see themselves as part of a global struggle against
neo-liberal policies, the influence of corporate power, authoritarian party politics and rampant
racism towards Indigenous peoples, and they want to do this from the bottom-up. As one-time
spokesman Subcomandante Marcos said,

We do not struggle to take power, we struggle for democracy, liberty, and justice. […] It
is not our arms which make us radical; it is the new political practice which we propose
and in which we are immersed with thousands of men and women in Mexico and the
world: the construction of a political practice which does not seek the taking of power
but the organization of society.
(Flood 2001)

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Despite poverty and continual harassment by the Mexican state and paramilitaries, certain
regions in Chiapas have remained under Zapatista control, and have managed to flourish
through their own system of direct democracy.
Most accounts of the Zapatistas do not tend to discuss their ‘religious’ aspects. This can,
in part, be ascribed to an ‘anti-religion’ attitude among much of the Zapatista supporters
in Northern European-based cultures such as the US and Canada. For example, Lagalisse
(2011) documented a speaking tour of two Zapatistas in which the more ‘religious’ woman
speaker was gradually marginalised by organisers and audiences, while the more ‘secular’
male was given centre stage. Indeed, there has been much lost in translation as supporters and
critics from dominant cultures looked on at evolving movements in the South, and wrote
their stories in European language. Yet, the approach of the Zapatistas is reminiscent of a
quote by Mujeres Creando in Bolivia who stated, ‘I’ve said it [before] and I’ll say it again
that we’re not anarchists by Bakunin or the CNT, but rather by our grandmothers, and that’s
a beautiful school of anarchism’ (Lasky 2008: 18). This approach is not rooted in European
theory but in Indigenous terrain and tradition. It does not exclude Europeans, but it does
not privilege them either. Moreover, with Chiapas hosting Protestants, Catholics, Mayan
traditionalists and (more recently) Muslims in ways that constitute ‘a multifaceted complex
of competing and overlapping cults’ that often include women in prominent roles (Gossen
[1999] 2013: 184), describing Zapatista life-organising stories and practices is not easy. In a
famous quote, Subcomandante Marcos explained his ‘true’ identity as follows:

Marcos is gay in San Francisco, black in South America, an Asian in Europe, a ­Chicano
in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets
of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a paci-
fist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, a gang
member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, and, of course, a
Zapatista in the mountains.
(Lasky 2008: 8)

It is characteristic of this approach that Subcomandante Marcos stated his age as ‘518’ – the
number of years it had been since the beginning of European interference in the Americas.
In sum, the Zapatistas managed to fuse European-based socialist activism with indigenous
perspectives on direct democracy and grassroots organising.
Another example of a ‘radical’ new life-organising story is the MOVE Organization. In
this case, a mixed ethnic group of urbanites espoused a lifestyle and belief that bore strong
similarities to those of many Indigenous peoples with a critical view of technology, the state,
economics and dominant conceptions of ‘religion’. MOVE was founded in Philadelphia by
John Africa in the early 1970s with the aim of educating people on the evils of the ‘system’
by which they meant the entire technological complex and all that has made it possible.
MOVE members also see violence against any creature (including bugs) as violence against
one’s self. They were the first group in the US to combine earth liberation and animal liber-
ation philosophies as well as the first US group to hold an animal liberation protest (in 1974,
prior to the 1975 publication of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer or the 1976 formation of
the Animal Liberation Front). They were violently repressed by city authorities in 1985 when
Philadelphia police infamously dropped a bomb on MOVE’s row home, burning down an
entire city block and killing eleven people in the process.
John Africa taught that the only legitimate government was the government of self and
that all ideologies and administrations – whether liberal, communist, capitalist, fascist or

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socialist – were all hallucinations. States were depicted as gang leaders who terrorised people
across the planet and MOVE’s mission was to enlighten people to this and dismantle both
industry and external forms of government. True law, according to MOVE, was ‘natural
law’ – provided by nature – equally applicable to all people (such as the need to breathe or
drink) and eternal as opposed to laws made by humans that are constantly subject to change.
Their ‘religion’, MOVE members will say, is simply life. ‘Mama Nature’ herself was God and
when each of us supposedly dies, the actual process is simply one of cycling back to earth.
One person who has spoken out on behalf of MOVE and against the violent actions of
the police is the author, Alice Walker. Walker is also the person who, in 1983, coined the
term ‘womanism’ in reference to black feminism that has some key distinctions from white
feminism. Layli Phillips explained the new approach in The Womanist Reader:

Womanism is a social change perspective rooted in Black women’s and other women
of color’s everyday experiences and everyday methods of problem solving in everyday
spaces extended to the problem of ending all forms of oppression for all people, restoring
the balance between people and the environment/nature, and reconciling human life
with the spiritual dimension.
(Phillips 2006: xx)

The ‘spiritual dimension’ that she has articulated also happened to be very much in line with
the type of philosophy articulated by John Africa. Walker has written: ‘I seem to have spent
all of my life rebelling against the church or other people’s interpretations of what religion
is – the truth is probably that I don’t believe there is a God, although I would like to believe
it. Certainly I don’t believe there is a God beyond nature. The world is God. Man is God.
So is a leaf or a snake’ (cited in Pinn 2012: 125–6).
This is reminiscent both of John Africa’s statement that ‘God is as common as dirt’10 and
Buddhist statements about the Buddha being found in ordinary places – even dung. Both
Walker and MOVE speak of a single God in the feminine form. Both regard this single God
as the essence of all existence as manifested in what most people call ‘nature’ unsullied by
technology and human interventions. Both of them tie this commitment to active resistance
to imperial orders and their subsequent pillars of colonialism, racism, capitalism, industrial-
ism and militarism.

Reflecting on ‘Religious Radicalism’

Having now evoked a broad variety of examples of ‘religious radicalism’, we can return to
some of the core issues upon which each chapter in this book was invited to reflect. With re-
gard to the questions outlined in the beginning, the first section noted that the term ‘radical’
is not unproblematic and varies according to context and observer. However, a distinction
between ‘radicalism’ and ‘reformism’ has been echoed here to refer to those who are more
committed to significant and holistic change of society.
Indigenous cultures and their way of life have been characterised as ‘radical’ here insofar as
they threaten the dominant order by the very alternative they present to it and by continuing
to survive parallel to it. This includes entire societies whose traditions are testimony to the
possibility of life without prisons, police, militaries or bureaucracies. Their languages and
traditions carry codes, values and paradigms that bring them in inevitable and fundamental
conflict with the many facets of the dominant way of life. They could be seen as ‘religious’
because they could be subject to ‘anti-religious’ bias through their use of terms such ‘God’ or

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‘Great Spirit’, their acceptance of revelation as a form of knowledge, and/or the holistic and
interwoven character of their life-organising stories. The question here is not whether they
are ‘religious’ or not but how ‘anti-religious’ bias, because of both its prejudiced conception
of ‘religion’ and its shared origins with colonialism, has often resulted in them being omitted
from ‘typical studies of radicalism’. They are premised upon life-organising stories which
colonial and anti-religious mindsets have a tendency to dismiss too quickly.
The other examples cited earlier have been regarded as ‘radical’ due to their deliber-
ate point of departure from dominant cultures, a contestation relative to their original
­positionality. Moreover, because their contestation is egalitarian, anti-domination and
­a nti-hierarchical, they are on the left of the usual political spectrum, despite being ‘reli-
gious’. For instance, with those nonviolent groups who based their actions on the teachings
of Jesus, what is ‘radical’ is their contestation of two major pillars of the dominant right-
wing order: private property and organised violence. They are ‘religious’ in the sense that
they too are subject to ‘anti-religious’ bias in the context of ‘radicalism’ due to their use of
terms such as ‘God’, their dependency upon scriptures such as Gospels and their collabo-
ration with or membership in institutions identified as ‘religious’ by themselves or others.
These and the other examples considered earlier nevertheless all exemplify ‘religious rad-
icalism’ by raising the voices of marginalised peoples up against dominating, hierarchical
and anti-egalitarian orders even as they are forced to negotiate their lives within nation
states and dominant cultures.
With regard to the second question (what are the principal concerns of those move-
ments?), given how varied a set of examples of ‘religious radicals’ we considered (and there
are, of course, many, many more), any set of principal concerns will remain quite broad
and vague about the specifics: they tend to emphasise cooperation rather than competi-
tion, egalitarianism rather than hierarchy, sharing rather than hoarding, gender and ethnic
equality rather than patriarchy and white supremacy, and nonviolence rather than milita-
rism. They also share a determination to either directly (by confronting) or indirectly (by
prefiguring alternatives) oppose the existing order which is perceived as unjust, violent,
inauthentic and in tragic disharmony with global ecology. Finally, they are all committed to
raising their own marginalised voices and/or the voices of marginalised peoples with whom
they are in solidarity.
As for the third question (how their politics is theorised), the theorisation of the politics
of the activism of each of those groups varies significantly from group to group. Yet in all
cases, there is some reference point to life-organising stories based on principles which in
their eyes are larger than human-based constructs. Whether those ideas are presented as
God, Life or Earth, the stories are broader than mere anthropocentric concerns. ‘Theorisa-
tion’ here consists in large part in the affirmation and protection of these alternatives in the
suffocating cacophony, repression, discrimination and indoctrination of dominant cultures.
Yet, the lack of formal academic theory is also one common trait of this type of ‘radicalism’.
Emphasis on ‘theory’ can result in a shift of power towards academic scholars and the elitist
language of academia. Rather than submit to the primacy of written word as a predeces-
sor to action and societal change, many of these examples prioritise direct action. As John
­A frica of MOVE stated, ‘Application don’t need no conversation’ (Africa 1994: 1). Similarly,
­liberation theologians have long argued that theory is subordinate to action and that the first
act for a committed theologian is not to theorise about God or politics but to take an active
stand on the side of the oppressed. Still, in terms of the Catholic Workers, Plowshares and
liberation theologians, ‘theorisation’ of their activism is articulated in relation to their inter-
pretations of the teachings of Jesus as decidedly peaceful, antiwar, antistate and communistic.

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Womanists, in turn, took their theory directly from their experience of being excluded by
dominant white feminist and male antiracist discourses.
It might be worth comparing the answers to these three questions with those of ­‘radicals’
who would neither typically describe themselves, nor typically be described, as ‘religious’.
The concerns for injustice, materialism, individualism, ecology, property and state violence,
to name a few, are concerns that intersect across ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ radicals.
Whether categorised as ‘religious’ or not, radical communities tend to construct moral
frameworks that challenge the roots of hegemonic violence and injustice by resisting the
practical and theoretical premises upon which that order is founded. To distinguish between
radicals here as ‘religious’ or not remains a problematic act which carries with it a significant
dose of colonialist thinking. We do not mean to resolve this difficulty here, but merely to
reiterate it and be respectful of its implications.
At the same time, those life-organising stories that might be characterised as ‘religious’ and
‘radical’ do tend to have certain general characteristics that are relevant for radical struggle.
First, they tend to conceive of relational and holistic systems wherein struggle for justice is
part of larger commitments and traditions. Second, they tend to utilise concepts of sacredness
that transcend economic calculations – particularly in relation to the commons which provide
opportunities for people and animals to fulfil their needs (water, land, air, food, etc.). Third,
they often engage some sort of semiotic marker such as ‘Creator’, ‘Life’ and/or ‘God’ which
seems to both facilitate holistic thinking, evoke appreciation for the sacred, manage long-term
intergenerational goals and connect each person to cosmological and social narratives that bind
their broader identities of animal and human communities, earth and the entirety of existence.
Notably, in relation to radical struggles, these ultimate markers or signs of fundamental ded-
ication indicate a loyalty to social and/or existential orders that are distinct from and more
important than any possible loyalty to a state (and often they are antithetical to the state).
Thus, ‘religious’ radicals can be described as aligning themselves with various l­ife-organising
stories that remain critical of dominant orders. They tend to display a sense of obligation to try
to address this and they may demonstrate a willingness to commit significant sacrifices to that
end. Again, though, much the same could be said of non-‘religious’ radicals too. Perhaps, then,
instead of classifying particular groups as ‘religious’ and often paying less attention to them as a
result, all ‘radicals’ might consider borrowing from the grammar of ‘religious’ radicals, working
together on common concerns, and learning patiently from each other and on an equal footing
about each other’s life-organising stories and cultures.

Conclusion
This chapter has argued that dominant approaches to ‘radicalism’ are so embedded within
dominant orders that what often qualifies as prototypical for ‘radical’ risks ignoring the ‘rad-
icality’ of Indigenous stateless societies and egalitarian cultures upon whose backs and land
dominant orders have generally been constructed, as well as others who might be dismissed
as ‘religious’ without questioning problems inherent in the very concept of ‘religion’. This
chapter has therefore conceived of ‘radicalism’ by focusing on these ­oft-excluded cases and
placing Indigenous cultures at the core of what it means to be ‘radical’.
This chapter has also argued that ‘religion’ is a particularly problematic category espe-
cially when posed as mutually exclusive in relation to ‘politics’, an act which removes entire
sets of life-organising stories and cultures from conversations about governance, power and
popular decision-making. Nor does the dichotomy between ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’
radicals necessarily tell us much about whom we are talking about. Indeed, there are as many

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differences between so-called ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ radicals as there are among mem-
bers of each category. Rather than determine who is or is not a ‘religious radical’, this chapter
has aimed to provide several possible examples to broaden the topic, and has queried the very
terms ‘radical’ and especially ‘religious’ in order to expand the spectrum of discussion. After
all, including formerly excluded people might be precisely what should be expected from a
‘radical’ approach to research about ‘religious radicalism’.

Notes
1 This sense of ‘radical religion’ as ‘true believer’ seems to underlie the conception applied by Jeffrey
Kaplan when he has written about the topic (2016: 11).
2 There is also some empirical support for this assumption. According to the 2012 Global Index
of Religiosity and Atheism by WIN-Gallup International, 59% of the world self-identify as ‘re-
ligious’, 23% as ‘not religious’ and 13% as ‘atheists’. By 2015, the numbers had actually risen
with 63% self-identifying as religious, 22% self-identified as not religious and 11% as atheist.
See Win-Gallup International, www.wingia.com/web/files/news/14/file/14.pdf (2012), respec-
tively, www.wingia.com/web/files/news/290/file/290.pdf (2015). Another prominent ­survey
source, Pew Research Center, stated in a 2010 study: ‘Worldwide, more than e­ ight-in-ten
people identify with a religious group.’ See Pew Forum www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/
global-religious-landscape-exec/.
3 Until Quan (2013), Robinson’s discussion of anarchism (1980) had been ignored by anarchist
scholars and activists.
4 The Journal for the Study of Radicalism, http://msupress.org/journals/jsr/ Accessed 15 October 2015.
5 See, for example, some of Chomsky’s recent statements published on Alternet, 5 March 2013 or 5
December 2015.
6 Although we wrote this chapter about ‘religious radicalism’ because we have previously writ-
ten about Christian anarchism (Christoyannopoulos 2010, 2016) and Islamic anarchism (Fiscella
2009, 2014), respectively, we decided however not to focus on our previous material (e.g. Tolstoy,
taqwacore) and open up for a broader discussion about how ‘radicalism’ is conceived.
7 Quote taken from Kim Tallbear’s presentation on 21 March 2016 at Undisciplined Envi-
ronments, the International Conference of the European Network of Political Ecology in
Stockholm.
8 Occupy Oakland is particularly interesting in this regard in that there were more Natives involved
in it than in many other Occupy sites, and Occupy Oakland was also a site where N ­ atives were
critical of the name ‘Occupy’. See, for example, Queena Kim, ‘The Campaign to “Decolonize”
­Oakland: Native Americans Say “Occupy” Terminology Is Offensive,’ Truthout, 28 ­December 2011
www.truth-out.org/news/item/5786:the-campaign-to-decolonize-oakland-native-­a mericans-
say-occupy-terminology-is-offensive.
9 Drawn from Shapira’s English translation of his work in Hebrew entitled Religious Jewish ­Anarchism
(Or: Does the Jewish Religion Sanctify State Rule?) 2013.
10 John Africa, ‘On the MOVE: Quotes from JOHN AFRICA.’ FIRST DAY 15, p. 2.

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 4.10
HOW POLITICAL IS A POLITICAL
SUBCULTURE?
The Paradoxical Place of Politics within
the Squatter Movement

Bart van der Steen

Introduction
The squatters’ movement emerged in Western Europe in the early 1970s and traces its roots
to the student and youth revolts of the late 1960s.1 The combination of a massive housing
shortage and large swaths of vacant houses in many of the larger cities of Western Europe led
radical youths to try and solve the former problem with the occupation of the latter. From
the mid-1970s onwards, squatting also spread to smaller cities and even provincial towns. In
the 1990s, squatting spread to former communist states in Eastern Europe.2
From the beginning, squatters were a colourful mixture of political activists and youths
from alternative scenes. Some of those involved saw squatting mainly as a political means
to raise awareness of issues such as the housing shortage and the destruction of historical
sites. The political horizon of most political activists was more encompassing, however.
It was based on anarchist ideals which were at the forefront of anticapitalist, ecological,
antimilitarist and feminist activism. Other squatters saw squatting as a practical means
to solve individual housing problems and to provide cultural space. For them, squatting
was a means to overcome homelessness, but also to create spaces for alternative music, art
and socialising. As a result, squatting acquired a distinct subcultural character in which
do-it-yourself-attitudes fuelled an urge to experiment and move beyond mainstream cul-
ture. A third group did not make a strong distinction between politics and subculture and
felt attracted to both.
Radical politics, alternative culture and practical action against homelessness thus came
together and even merged within the squatter movement. They made up three different
currents within the movement, although there was a large degree of overlap. The same goes
for the identities of those involved. Some squatters were mainly (or even mostly) interested
in anticapitalist direct action, while others were in it ‘purely’ for the parties or the shelter
that squats provided. Mostly, however, squatters were sympathetic to all three goals, albeit
in varying degrees. Still, these differing goals and identities could lead to strife or even
(physical) conflict, for example, when subcultural attitudes infringed on political norms.
Conceptually, the overlap raises the question what squatters truly form: a political move-
ment, a subcultural scene, both or something entirely different? Answering this question has

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implications for the concepts, sources and methods we use when researching (the history of )
squatters.
In this chapter, I claim that there is a political squatter movement, even though the role
of politics within squatting is contested. Because this movement organises informally, fo-
cuses on direct activism and merges politics and subculture, it should not be researched in
a traditional way. Research on squatter politics has little to gain from a focus on communi-
qués, political statements and conference reports. Instead, I argue, research should take into
account the above-mentioned characteristics of the movement and focus on the way politics
take shape within squats and squatter groups; how they are developed, practised and com-
municated and how squatters experience political activity. This chapter explains why such
a focus is preferable over more traditional political history approaches and offers hints as to
how such a research can be conducted.
The squatter movement has left its mark on many European cities and even on European
culture. Squatter activists played an important role in struggles against technocratic urban
renewal in the 1970s and 1980s, in protests against nuclear energy and nuclear weapons in
the 1980s, in the antiglobalisation movement of the 1990s and the antiwar and anti-­austerity
movements since 2001 and 2008, respectively. Underground music and lifestyle currents
such as punk and techno house trace their origins to the squatter movement. In many cities,
boroughs with a strong squatter presence have become tourist hotspots – Kreuzberg in Berlin
and Christiania in Copenhagen are only two of the best-known examples.3
The subcultural nature of squatter politics has become a distinguishing feature of the
movement. In the squatter movement, radical politics and subculture merge. Some claim
that this feature explains the movement’s enduring existence. Others, however, identify it
as a source of weakness. According to the latter, the subcultural element has impeded the
movement’s political strength. Since the movement mainly organises youths, the turnover is
high and movement learning processes are continuously disrupted. Furthermore, since many
are attracted to the movement’s subcultural elements, a large part of the movement is either
uninterested in or even hostile to political theory (Geronimo 1992; Ziere 1992; ­H illenkamp
1995; Duist 1986; Ruyter 1986a and 1986b; Schwarzmeier 2001). The place of politics within
the movement is thus contested. At the same time, there is a distinct kind of squatter politics,
with a specific political programme, organisational culture and action repertoire.4
Squatter politics can best be characterised by its radicalism. First of all, political squatters
are radical in their political analysis in the sense that they focus on the root cause of social
and political conflicts, which is that society sustains a high degree of inequality when it
comes to wealth, power and knowledge. At the same time, squatter politics is radical in the
sense that it denounces traditional ways of political representation, dialogue or compro-
mise. Instead, it focuses on direct action as a way to subvert political routines. Finally, the
movement is radical in that it criticises internal power relations and aims to demolish inner
movement hierarchies. Over time, the movement has grown to become increasingly aware
of class, race and gender inequalities within the movement, although this does not neces-
sarily mean that it has been capable of dealing with them in a generally satisfactory way.
Rather, it is the negotiating between radical ideals and coarse realities that cause debates
or conflicts. Reconstructing these conflicts offers a way to analyse the social and political
outlooks of squatter activists and inner movement dynamics – more so than its often more
general political statements.
Next to arguing for a distinct research method, this chapter investigates the politics
and political philosophy that drives squatting and explains the paradoxical place of politics
within the movement. In doing so, it focuses mainly on the overtly political currents within

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the movement. The difference between ‘squatting’ and ‘political squatting’ is made explicit
in Germany, where one can distinguish between squatters and autonomists, the latter being
more explicitly political. In other countries, such as Denmark and the Netherlands, such a
subdivision is rarely made in wording, although it exists in practice (Steen 2014a, 3).
The first part of the chapter uncovers the origins and development of squatter politics
and reconstructs the movement’s struggles to balance its political and subcultural parts. The
second part investigates how this double nature has influenced the inner life of the squatter
movement. To do so, it focuses on moments in which politics and subculture clashed within
squatted places and social centres.

A Movement Focused on Practice

Researching the politics and ideology of a social movement such as the squatter movement
poses specific challenges. It is very different from researching a political party. In the latter
case, one can base oneself on the texts of leading party intellectuals, party manifestoes and
electoral programmes to reconstruct the party’s ideology and its behaviours. The squatter
movement does not have a national organisation or governing body, and no regular con-
ferences where programmes or manifestoes are passed – it even lacks clearly visible leading
intellectuals, since programmatic texts are generally published anonymously or signed col-
lectively by a group (Katsiaficas 2006).
Some have deemed autonomist Marxism, or operaismo, the guiding philosophy of the
squatter movement, and have identified Tony Negri as one of its leading philosophers
(Kraatz 1986; Balestrini and Moroni 2002; Wright 2002; Turchetto 2007). Although au-
tonomist Marxism has a certain influence on parts of the squatter movement, it would be an
exaggeration to equate squatting with autonomist Marxism. Within the squatter movement,
interest in Marxism and labour struggles has generally been marginal.
Rather, it has been accepted generally within the movement that squatting is first of
all a practice. Moving into a building or organising the collective occupation of a larger
construction first of all requires practical knowledge: how to get in, how to keep unwanted
people out, how to isolate the roof, how to fix the plumbing, etc. Even political interven-
tions and campaigns, such as protests against urban renewal projects, or the construction
of a road or nuclear power plant, can be framed as thoroughly practical: the organisation
of blockades, demonstrations and acts of sabotage all are foremost dependent on practical
and organisational skills. This, next to the previously mentioned subcultural nature of the
movement, has led many observers and even squatters to state that there are no political
ideals driving the movement.
This attitude can be illustrated by the squatter handbook. In many countries where
squatters are active, squatter handbooks are circulated. These texts rarely dwell long on
the motivations to squat and focus instead on the how. Guides provide thoroughly practical
information about squatting and securing a building (Lucy Finchett-Maddock 2014, 221–2;
Geronimo 2014, xvi–xvii).
The fact, however, that the act of squatting needs little or no explanation, that it can
be adopted by various groups and that it spreads easily does not mean that there is no pol-
itics behind it. Rather, these politics are often implicitly acknowledged or assumed to be
well-known. The politics of the squatter movement can be abstracted from its practices, by
­looking (i) at the historical development and roots of the movement, (ii) the way in which
the squatter movement delineates itself from other movements and (iii) the way in which
major controversies are played out within the movement.5

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The primary source material for this analysis has been gathered mainly from squatting
and autonomist activism in (West) Germany and the Netherlands in the 1980s. The discus-
sion also draws on secondary literature about the movement in other European countries.6

The Crystallisation of a Political Movement

The squatter movement has multiple points of origin. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, radi-
cal activists in the Netherlands and West Germany lamented the conservative and oppressive
political culture and claimed autonomous spaces to experiment with new ways of life and
living together, free from the taboos, prejudices and often violent repression of alternative
lifestyles in mainstream society. The Vietnam War and other anticolonial struggles, next to
debates about the connections of ruling politicians, government and business officials to the
Nazi era provided a global and national framework in which oppositional, critical and non-
conformist behaviour became linked to radical oppositional politics (Schildt and Siegfried
2006; Reichhardt and Siegfried 2010).
In the Netherlands, squatters soon started to focus their political attention on protests
against urban renewal projects that aimed at levelling historical boroughs and on interna-
tional solidarity with what was then referred to as the Third World (Duivenvoorden 2000;
Kadir 2014). In West Germany, some groups were inspired by wildcat strike movements
in Italy and made attempts to organise unskilled labourers and migrant workers. In places
such as Frankfurt and Hamburg, these groups were also involved in squatting campaigns
­(Frombeloff 1993; Ebbinghaus 2003, 2007; Arps 2011).
The squatters’ movement emerged in the wake of the decline of the student movement
and was heavily influenced by this development. As the student movement declined, some
of the radicals within it redirected their energies to the rediscovery of pre-World War rad-
ical currents in Western Marxism. Soon however, the stereotype of the radical intellectual
emerged. This described the person who wrote cryptic texts while refraining from prac-
tical activism – a negative image of the radical that had a lasting influence on the squatter
movement.7
Others focused their energies on building up neo-Leninist parties, often of a Maoist incli-
nation. Although nowadays generally forgotten, these parties attracted hundreds of activists
in the Netherlands and even thousands in Western Germany. It is estimated that in the 1970s
between 100,000 and 150,000 people in Western Germany were for a longer or shorter
time involved in a Maoist party or related organisation. By 1980, most of these projects had
faltered, but not without thoroughly traumatising a number of highly vocal veterans, who
lamented the strict party discipline, the fetishising of ‘the worker’ and a party culture that
tended to make members’ personal needs subservient to that of the party organisation.8
A third group that grew out of the student movement strove to avoid the twin trap of
intellectualism and party politics, and aimed to strike a real blow at capitalist power. These
anti-imperialists formed armed underground groups that sought to undermine corporate
and state power through kidnappings, bank robberies, bomb attacks and even executions.
The most infamous became the Red Army Faction in West Germany and the Red ­Brigades
in Italy, although similar groups were formed in almost all Western European states. As
their actions became more violent and murderous, popular support for them decreased,
thus initiating a vicious cycle of evermore violent and unpopular armed attacks (Aust 2008;
Kraushaar 2008).
While the three main heirs of the student movement pinned their hopes on abstract knowl-
edge, the party/proletariat or the Third World, the radical feminist movement emphasised

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the need to live political ideals as a way to avoid alienation.9 According to this view, ­politics
had to be tangible, concrete and direct. Consciousness-raising – through theatrical and
­mediatised actions and internal group discussions – became key, as did the commitment
to give everyone involved a voice. Horizontal forms of organisation, in small local groups,
were adopted as standard. In creating a network of women’s houses, bars and book stores, the
feminist movement laid out an organisational model that the squatters’ movement would also
soon adopt (Notz 2004; Melzer 2012, 2017).
Finally, the squatters were influenced by the massive and at times radical forms of protest
against the construction of a series of nuclear power plants in Western Germany in the 1970s
and 1980s. Hundreds of thousands of protestors were mobilised by campaigns against nuclear
installations in Brokdorf, Gorleben and Whyl and elsewhere. These protests included both
peaceful actions and gatherings, and militant demonstrations, sabotage actions and the occu-
pation of building sites. Political parties and trade unions tried to keep the protests peaceful
and under their control, but they were only partly successful. To squatters, these protests
showed that there was potential and support for radical activism and that the position of
traditional left or liberal left organisations was weak. Squatters soon positioned themselves as
the militant wing of the antinuclear movement (Grauwacke 2003; Geronimo 2012).
The 1970s thus witnessed the evolution of the squatter movement into a new kind of
radical movement. As their political profile crystallised, especially in opposition to other
groups and parties, their political horizon also broadened. Next to squatting and the struggle
for autonomous spaces and the protection of historical sites, the squatter programme ex-
panded to include international solidarity, ecology and feminism. The movement developed
a strong aversion to party politics, became committed to the feminist ideal of living politics,
horizontal organisation and direct action. Its strategy focused on radical protest against both
corporate and government actors and included militant demonstrations, occupations and acts
of sabotage. Although militant demonstrations could give way to riots and sabotage actions
could result in property damage, the movement generally refrained from targeted violence
against individuals, thus drawing a clear line between itself and the armed urban guerrilla
groups like the RAF.

Autonomist Squatting in the 1980s

The first wave of squatting reached its height by the mid-1970s. By the end of the decade,
however, the movement was on the rise again. In 1979, for example, cautious attempts were
made at squatting in Amsterdam and West Berlin. In 1980 and 1981, respectively, eviction
attempts by the police led to days of rioting in both cities. In the following months, squat-
ting spread rapidly throughout both cities and the rest of the country – a development which
was accompanied by more police interventions and resulting riots (Bodenschatz 1983). In
1981, Amsterdam counted more than 206 squatted houses, while West Berlin counted 165
squats (Raad 1982, 14; Grauwacke 2003, 40). The willingness of the squatters to defend their
squats with force and confront the police head-on impressed contemporaries (Mak 1980;
­Wetenschappelijke Raad 1980; Hofland 1981; Jugendwerk 1981; Enquete-­Kommission
1983). Images of militant squatters, wearing leather jackets, balaclavas and motor helmets,
appeared in the newspapers and soon became a staple of European protest culture. The
­m ilitant squatter movement also became known as the autonomist movement and was espe-
cially strong in West Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark.
The renewed militancy was, in part, the result of the coming together of squatting and
punk. While squatters provided space for punk concerts, practice rooms and gathering places,

514
 How Political Is a Political Subculture?

the punks provided the squatter movement with a militant aesthetic and attitude. Thus, the
music historians Goossens and Vedder mention how ‘the sandals and Afghan jackets were
replaced by Mohawks, army boots and black leather jackets’. According to them, ‘it may go a
bit too far to state that punk was responsible for the hardening of the squatters movement …
But at the same time it is remarkable that the militant squatter manifested itself after the punk
and squatter movement had formed an alliance’ (Goossens and Vedder 1996). As dozens of
new houses were squatted, thousands flocked into the squatter movement. Not all of them
were motivated by radical politics, but politics did play an important role in the movement.
For many, entering the squatters’ movement was the beginning of a political learning pro-
cess. One veteran activist remembered how his group adopted the name ‘autonomist’ be-
cause ‘we could not really choose between communism and anarchism and it seemed a good
compromise to call ourselves simply “autonomist”’ (Schulz 2010).
Through informal meetings and public gatherings, the movement’s media – consisting of
dozens of magazines and pamphlets – and (inter)national contacts, ideas and experiences were
exchanged. The text that comes closest to a foundational document was the text ­‘Anarchie
als Minimalforderung’. This appeared in the magazine radikal and was the result of a meet-
ing between West-German and Italian radicals (Anarchie 1981). The text specified that the
autonomist movement was not to fight in the name of others, as the Maoists had done, but
only for itself. It further laid out that the movement was not to articulate any political de-
mands that could be fulfilled by those in government, since this would result in co-optation
by the government. It however did not say much about forms of organisation, political goals
or action repertoires. By this time, these were considered to be well-known.
While some autonomist squatters were driven by classical anarchist ideals, these were
certainly not shared by all. Classical anarchism, as articulated by Bakunin and Proudhon,
was deemed old-fashioned, tame and too intellectual. The attitude was summed up by an
autonomist in the late 1990s, who stated: ‘They (anarchists) are scared of us because we do
the kinds of things they only talk about’ (Katsiaficas 2006). At the same time, other political
ideologies, such as anti-imperialism, have not become dominant either. Although there is a
political ideal that drives squatting, it is often left implicit.

The Paradoxes of Implicit Rules

In practice, libertarian ideals form the heart of the movement’s politics and philosophy, as
it sets out to confront and attack all forms of political, economic and cultural inequalities.
It aims to do so in a confrontational way, not by working for compromise but by principled
acts of protest and/or resistance. These ends are achieved by organising in local, horizontal
groups. Interregional coordination takes shape via networks of groups. The movement’s
repertoire ranges from traditional political means such as picketing to radical forms of ac-
tion such as militant demonstrations and sabotage actions. The same libertarian ideals guide
the internal life of the movement. Squatters set out to replace the hierarchies, taboos and
violence that shape personal contacts in mainstream society by more egalitarian, caring and
honest ways of living together ( Jeugd en Samenleving 1981; Marge 1986).
These ideals tie the movement together, but certainly do not ensure a life without con-
flicts, since neither politics nor living together is ever without conflict. When it came to
politics in the 1980s, the main conflicts revolved around informal hierarchies and militancy.
Although the movement adhered to horizontal forms of organisation, many groups and even
cities knew informal leaders. The adversity towards formal ways of organisation made the
hierarchies within the groups all the more unclear. The debates about hierarchy became even

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more intense when groups or individuals pleaded or opted for controversial (militant) forms
of action. With hindsight, it is clear that the autonomist movement had a clearly defined
action repertoire, but throughout the 1980s, there was a fear – both amongst observers and
activists – that some may cross the line, going over to armed struggle.10 Here too, the lack
of any clearly defined rules was one of the causes of continuous debate – although it must be
said that the movement also drew strength from its seemingly ‘limitless’ action repertoire;
had it clearly defined its repertoire from the outset, it would not have been as threatening to
the authorities. Finally, the practice of confronting the authorities in a militant way led to
criticism because it stimulated some to assume macho or all too masculine attitudes (Haunss
2004, 131–90; Op den Camp 2013).
Within squats and social centres, the ideal of creating free spaces clashed with prac-
tical problems that resulted precisely from this absence of rules. Many squatted places
went through an initial phase in which ‘all’ were welcome, ‘everything’ was possible and
‘­everyone’ tolerated each other. Soon, however, rules were agreed upon with regard to bills,
chores and behaviour. In many cases, this process developed relatively smoothly and peace-
fully. Some even claim that they were truly socialised within the movement. Thus goes the
story of Henk Borst, a difficult young man, who had spent most of his youth in boarding
schools. After his return to Amsterdam in 1980, he spent his days on the streets, sleeping
with his parents, with friends or in squats. ‘It was the riots that attracted me’, he stated later,
‘I was not political at all’. His drug use and resulting behaviour, ‘stealing and ego-tripping’,
led to conflicts and even fights with other squatters. Even so, he would later claim that the
squatter movement ‘saved’ him. Here, he learned the skills of a construction worker and was
introduced to social skills he had not picked up earlier: ‘The squatters accepted you, even
when you were a petty thief. There were more like me, I was not the only one’ (Poppe and
Rottenberg 2000, 84–89).11
However, not all experiences were as positive. As the movement evolved, norms grew
stricter and tolerance for antisocial behaviour diminished. Transgressive behaviour did not
only include drug abuse, stealing, ego-tripping and physical assault, but could also lead
to sexual violence against women. In June 1984, a woman was molested and raped in the
squatted Hafenstrasse in Hamburg. The other squatters responded with violence against the
perpetrators, not knowing what else to do. The tragedy led to intense debates among the
West-German radical left, but the squatters of the Hafenstrasse mainly felt ‘horror’ and ‘pow-
erlessness’ (Amantine 2011; Borgstede 2013; Küllmer 2013). In 2013, one squatter stated: ‘Up
to now it has not been dealt with properly, neither publicly nor internally’ (Küllmer 2013,
76). In Amsterdam, in the early 1980s, the Wyers squat evolved into a venue that during
the weekend ‘would sometimes attract eight hundred people’. Jaap Draaisma was a squatter
who would later remember how heroin users and pushers claimed a floor and ‘completely
uncontrollable individuals would come directly from the train station to Wyers’. After a
woman was molested and raped within the building, the squatters took matters more firmly
into their own hands. Draaisma: ‘We were forced to organise evermore. A security team was
formed. We then disbanded the heroine-club and rehoused the junkies in other collectives;
others were evicted and housed elsewhere. It was heartbreaking’ (Poppe and Rottenberg
2000, 14–21).
In both cases, the main traumas were caused by the fact that women were molested within
squats – places that were supposed to be free of the oppressive and violent behaviour associ-
ated with mainstream society. The traumas were however intensified by the fact that squat-
ters had up to that point not imagined this possibility, or reflected on how to deal with these
kinds of transgression. In practice, the movement responded by increasing social control and

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exclusion of those who did not conform to the norms within squats. In 1986, two veteran
Amsterdam activists remarked that the number of ‘internal evictions’ far outnumbered the
number of ‘official evictions’ (Lovink and Spek 1986). In other words, people who caused
trouble were removed from squats – by the squatters themselves. This situation was however
only rarely reflected on. These developments also came at a time where the squatter move-
ment’s expansion had ended and its claim to space was diminishing. In Amsterdam, it was
very easy to get or get into a squat in 1980/1981. Thus, one squatter remembers: ‘I took the
cargo tricycle, moved my stuff and I lived there’. When another squatter went to Amsterdam
in 1983, looking for a place to live, he found out that all squats were full or closed to strangers
(Wietsma 1982, 20–22; Luchteling, 1997).

Autonomism and Its Discontents

By the end of the 1980s, the autonomist movement had grown more aware of the position
of women within the squatter movement and within squatted social centres. In the 1990s,
several groups advocated a politics to combat sexual violence within the movement, by mak-
ing the names of accused perpetrators public and demanding that other groups exclude the
accused from their networks. This strategy was controversial and did not become a standard
practice within the movement (Haunss 2004, 149–69). On the other hand, social control
within social centres did increase and focused on preventing assaults on women. Occasion-
ally, jokes are cracked about the strictness of social centres, which is especially ironic given
the fact that the squatter movement emerged with one of its goals being to overcome the
overly restrictive and prudish nature of mainstream society (Biskamp 2017). The rules are
however testimony to the movement’s commitment to feminist politics.
From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, another debate within the movement focused on
the organisational structure of the movement, with critics lamenting the movement’s focus on
campaigns and actions and its neglect for concerted attempts to move towards a more devel-
oped political theory or permanent organisation. In Germany, West-Berlin autonomist activists
established just such an organisation under the name Fels (Für eine linke Strömung – for a left
current), while autonomist antifascists also tried to set up a nationwide organisation (Geronimo
1992, 1997; Fels 2011). While Fels remained active until 2015, the nationwide antifascist or-
ganisation disbanded in 2001. Overall, the autonomist squatter movement viewed the attempts
to form nationwide permanent organisations with interest, but did not support them en masse.
A major point of division within the German movement since 9/11 has been the question
of how to relate to the military conflicts in the Middle East. Traditionally, the autonomist
movement had been critical of Israel and the US and supportive of Palestine and its allies.
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a significant part of the German radical left grew criti-
cal of traditional anti-imperialism, and instead pleaded for support of Israel and the US in
their struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. These debates had a lasting impact on the
­German autonomist movement, but went by relatively unnoticed in other countries (Mohr
and Haunss 2004; Ogman 2013).
The main focus of the autonomist movement in the 1990s became antifascism, which
included both counterdemonstrations and blockades of marches by extreme right groups,
but also more general activism for radical left causes (Birchall 2010; Hann 2013; Testa 2015;
Copsey 2016). Antifascism became especially important in Germany, both amongst autono-
mists and anti-German activists, even though they underpinned their antifascist activism in a
different way. From the late 1990s onwards, the autonomist movement has played an import-
ant role in mobilisations against international summits of the G8, the IMF and the European

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Union (Grauwacke 2003, 203–38; Rilling 2008). While the autonomist movement’s main
strength was in Northern Europe in the 1980s, the movement now has an especially strong
presence in the Southern Europe (Schwarz 2010; Dalakoglou and Vradis 2011; Harvey 2012;
Mason 2012, 2013; Cattaneo and Tudela 2014; Kritidis 2014).

Politics in Movement
In 1995, when autonomist activists organised a conference in Berlin, the left liberal ­Tageszeitung
asked: ‘How long will the autonomists remain?’ (Rada 1995) Around the same time, the
­social scientist Ruud Koopmans predicted that the autonomists would stick around, but
­a rgued that they had lost their role as politically significant actors (Koopmans 1995, 210–14).
Ten years later, however, the autonomists played an important role in the ­a ntiglobalisation
movement. Currently, they play a leading role in anti-austerity protests in Greece, Spain
and Italy. Historically, the significance of the movement cannot be denied. Apart from the
political and cultural impacts mentioned in the introduction, it has been estimated that in the
Netherlands alone, 50,000 people at one time or another lived in a squat between 1965 and
1999. The city of Amsterdam acquired 200 squats during this era, thus legalising them and
adding them to the social housing stock (Pruijt 2004; Duivenvoorden 2000, 323).
The autonomist squatter movement is driven by a specific political philosophy, but it is
often underdeveloped and remains implicit. To reconstruct, analyse and discuss its political
philosophy, it is therefore more useful to focus on the development of the movement and
the way in which it delineated itself from other actors. The advantage of such a method over
focusing on political statements and pamphlets is that it provides a more nuanced, detailed
and historically contextualised image of the movement’s political outlook.
An even more promising way of examining squatter politics is to focus on the activi-
ties of the movement and the specific conflicts and controversies it confronted. Through
the reconstructions of controversies, it becomes clear which political opinions and attitudes
were generally accepted and which were more controversial. By focusing in detail on how
conflicts over social or political issues within squats or within the squatter movement played
out, one can move beyond mere political statements and assess what specific statements or
decisions meant in practice.
The digitation of newspapers and other sources makes it ever easier to research social
movements from home or from the office. The history of squatting in Berlin and a number
of other European cities has been visualised in digital maps that allow for browsing both
over time and space in the city.12 Social movement researchers have, however, warned against
an excessive focus on newspaper and mainstream media in researching social movements
(Eilders 2001; Haumann 2005; Zelizer 2008). Many squatter and autonomist movement
publications have not been digitised, and many individual experiences and recollections have
not yet been documented.13 Focusing on these sources will produce an insider view of the
movement and give voice to those who were involved in it. Such an approach from below
seems fitting for a movement that traditionally rejected officialdom and formal organisation.

Notes
1 I would like to thank Knud Andresen, Albertine Bloemendal, Ruth Kinna and Irina Pulyakhina
for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this text.
2 This chapter focuses on squatting in Europe, and more specifically on squatting in (West) G
­ ermany
and the Netherlands. For a European survey and guide to the main literature, I refer to: Steen
2014a and 2014b. See also Katsiaficas (2006) and Pruijt (2012).

518
 How Political Is a Political Subculture?

Already before the fall of communism, there were attempts made at squatting, albeit often in a
less public or overtly political way than in Western Europe. See for this Grasshoff (2011).
3 On squatting and tourism, see Owens (2008) and Blechschmidt (2007). Strongly related to
these developments are debates between squatting and gentrification. For this, see Holm (2010);
Häussermann (2002); Kuhn (2014).
4 Classic histories that are sympathetic to the movement are Katsiaficas (2006) and Geronimo
(2012).
5 Those who are interested in a more traditional approach towards political history can rely, for ex-
ample, on position papers, conference texts and documentations. See, for example, Anarchie (1981);
Arbeitsergebnisse (1987); Drei zu Eins (1993); Autonomie-Kongress (1997); Wantok (2011).
6 Throughout the text, references are included as advice for further reading. Next to the references
in endnote 2, this text relies on the following studies.
For Germany: Anders (2010); Haunss (2008); Manns and Treusch (1987).
For the Netherlands: Duivenvoorden (2000); Kadir (2014); Owens (2009); Adilkno (1994).
7 This sentiment was among other articulated by the popular Hamburg punk band Slime in their
song ‘linke Spießer’, which appeared on their album Alle gegen Alle (1983). There it went: ‘Always
critical and political / Marx and Lenin on the bedside table / But you’ve got something against
clashes / And you happily make room for the police. … And when we become aggressive / You
are all suddenly conservative’.
In German, the lyrics are: ‘Immer kritisch und politisch / Marx und Lenin auf dem ­Nachttisch /
Doch ihr habt was gegen Rabatz / Und macht den Bullen gerne Platz … Und werden wir mal
aggressiv /Seid ihr auf einmal konservativ’. See also: Ryser (2013).
8 On Maoism in Western Germany and the Netherlands: Kühn (2005); Koenen (2001); Baum
(2010); Beekers (2005); Verbij (2005).
For contemporary reflections by party veterans, see Wir warn die stärkste (1977); Schlögel et al.
(1981); Zomeren (1994).
9 This concept was summarised in the slogan ‘the personal is political’ and in many ways precursor
to the prefigurative politics propagated by Occupy activists. See Graeber (2009).
10 Only in Frankfurt on 2 November 1987 did a demonstration end in a deadly shooting of police
­officers by an autonomous activist. In the wake of this tragic and unique action, the local a­ utonomous
scene was not only repressed but also faced disintegration as many activists no longer identified with
the movement. For a discussion of the shooting and its aftermath, see Geronimo (2012).
11 Jan-Henrik Friedrichs has reconstructed how squatters in Zurich during the 1980s tried to de-
velop new and less repressive ways of dealing with drug addicts within the movement, which
set them apart from squatters in other cities, who often tried to exclude drug abusers. See
­F riedrichs (2016).
12 These maps can be found under http://berlin-besetzt.de and https://maps.squat.net/en/cities. See
also: Aquilera (2016).
13 A number of personal recollections and interview books have been published. See among other:
Stand der Bewegung (1995); Langer (2004); Poppe and Rottenberg (2000); Wietsma (1982); ­Adilkno
(1994); De stad was (1998); Luchteling (1997).

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 4.11
SUSTAINABLE ACTIVISM
Laurence Cox

Introduction: Sustainable Activism as a Radical Concern

Human beings struggle to survive, not only physically as ‘bare life’ but as beings with a
‘wealth of needs’, in search of dignity and who want to be happy. Not in every society, but
certainly in societies which are based on the economic exploitation of human labour in
many forms, on unequal power relations grounded in the physical coercion and exercise of
authority against weaker groups, and on cultural hierarchies which position many people as
subaltern, the struggle to survive as a fully human subject is also a struggle against existing
social relationships.
It is sometimes said that under these circumstances, survival is itself a radical act. If
this was automatically true, radical movements would be far stronger than they are: in
practice, people often struggle to cope at the expense of those closest to them, or at the
expense of other subaltern groups; they can enter into all sorts of clientelistic and collab-
orative relationships. They can direct their aggression not at those who are exploiting,
oppressing or stigmatising them but into domestic violence, addictions, fundamentalist
religion, racism, misogyny and many other attempts to cope, or to survive, at other peo-
ple’s expense. It is partly because these forms of (misplaced) struggle to survive are so
widespread, and so ‘obvious’ in our kinds of societies, that sustainable activism – not only
seeing beyond these, but acting beyond these and doing so consistently – is an impressive
and fragile achievement.
In this chapter, I want to make a smaller claim: that sustainable activism is a radical achieve-
ment. To become, and remain, a member of a community or social movement whose strug-
gle actively challenges dominant relations of power, economics and culture is radical in the
sense of durable participation in the attempt to transform these relationships.1
I want to go further and suggest that sustainable activism in this sense is far more radical
than the simple production and consumption of radical opinions, whether on social media or
in academic papers. Opinion politics can simply reproduce existing social relationships if it
not carried out as part of the classic radical tasks of agitating (attempting to convince the un-
convinced, which starts by communicating with them and not only within one’s own opin-
ion community); educating (discussing with others who are already engaged in struggle and
attempting to develop their movements) and organising (which should need no explanation).

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‘Radical’ has no meaning if it is not tied to action of some kind; and the attempt to sustain
agency is of equal importance to attempts to develop and widen it.

What Is Sustainable Activism?

From one point of view, sustainable activism can be defined simply as the attempt to become,
and remain, effectively involved in collective political agency. We can start with Geoff Eley’s
observation that democracy, in the sense of

free, universal, secret, adult and universal suffrage; the classic civil freedoms of speech, con-
science, assembly, association, and the press; and freedom from arrest without trial … was
achieved nowhere in the world during the nineteenth century and arrived in only four states
before 1914 – New Zealand (1893), Australia (1903), Finland (1906), and Norway (1913).
(2002: 3)

As will be fairly obvious, virtually no states before this period were democratic in anything
remotely approaching this sense; and we might reasonably ask how far ‘the classic civil free-
doms’ can really be said to be available in countries like the present-day UK or US, let alone
Mexico, Turkey or India. It is, of course, true that state power was shaped very differently
in pre-capitalist societies, and we can identify moderate degrees of self-government on the
part of, say, Russian peasant communities or various social groups in medieval India; how-
ever, these were typically structured by high degrees of traditional action and often included
strong internal power relations tied to gender, ethnic and religious membership, age and
marital status, economic position and so on.
In other words, within the class societies that have dominated the world for the past
several thousand years, it has been an exceptional situation when most people have had any
significant say in the main decisions that affected them. Of course on the margins of these
societies, there have been significant stateless societies; some self-governing communities of
pirates, deserters and the like; and some revolutionary situations. The struggle to become,
and remain, a political agent in this context has thus historically been a huge challenge, if by
agency we mean something more than clientelism, acts of violence on behalf of the powerful
and wealthy, and so on. It is only within living memory that fascist dictatorships have been
(provisionally) beaten; that most of the globe has ceased to be divided up among a handful
of empires; or that (most) state socialisms have collapsed. Eley’s very minimal definition of
formal democracy is thus a rare flower.
Within these formally democratic contexts, however, political agency outside the narrow
boundaries defined here – including much or most social movement activity – has routinely
been treated as threatening (and has in some cases actually been so) to dominant power relations,
the economic structures they defend and the cultural hierarchies erected around them. Active
attempts to assert democratic participation, from the Chartists through to popular resistance
against fracking, and from the struggle against domestic violence to the self-assertion of indige-
nous communities, consistently meet with a high degree of opposition in all three dimensions.
State repression (formal and informal) needs no introduction to anyone involved in radi-
cal movements and those which employ confrontational strategies. The economic price paid,
whether in terms of dismissal or unemployment, the financial costs of prioritising movement
activities or the simple costs of maintaining movements, can be very high. Those who iden-
tify with existing cultural routines and ‘normality’ may also take opportunities to attack
those who question them, in forms ranging from violence to exclusion.

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Since most people – particularly those in communities in struggle and many of those
motivated to take part in radical movements – lack the economic, power and cultural privi-
lege to deflect such attacks painlessly, their ability to keep going and sustain their activism is
regularly put in question. These costs are often targeted not only at activists but also at their
families, towards whom they may have all sorts of different (financial, care, parenting, etc.)
responsibilities; and they undermine activists’ ability to sustain their networks and support
one another. In some contexts, all of this can lead activists to a more or less conscious strat-
egy of putting those who are seen as having least to lose, those who can most easily absorb
such costs or those who are believed least likely to be attacked in the most visible positions
(most dramatically in international solidarity contexts where Northern volunteers cannot
be targeted in the ways that are routine for local activists). There is something to be said for
each strategy, but also familiar downsides in terms of the internal politics of class, gender,
ethnicity and so on.
While the phrase itself is only used in some traditions, sustainable activism in the sense
used here is a major concern for most movements and communities in struggle. Newcomers
have to be enabled to overcome these hurdles; existing participants have to be supported;
networks and communities have to be defended; knowledge and connections have to be
protected and extended; movement presence in different areas of society has to be fought for;
and learning and generational transmission has to be worked on. These can be thought about
in terms of legal support and prisoner solidarity, economic networking or creating alterna-
tive ways of making a living, challenging various forms of discrimination and hate speech,
celebrating movement struggles in ways that make the hardships of the present meaningful,
informal support to families under pressure, international solidarity and many other ways.
Movements that do not work on making activism sustainable (whatever language they
use) will not last. They will run out of participants, fold under pressure or turn into some-
thing more compatible with dominant social relationships – a publication, a lifestyle, an
academic niche and so on. This does not always mean that they think about sustainability
consciously: they may have arrived at viable solutions some time back and have found a way
of transmitting those across generations. Nonetheless, the work still needs to be done.

… and Prefiguration?
Many radical movements and communities engage in a greater or lesser degree of prefigura-
tion. Put more historically, it is not always possible to maintain a sharp disjuncture between
who we are, how we act now and the world we hope to see without wider political, military
or employment structures that support this kind of compartmentalisation. It is a backhanded
tribute to the relative success of social movements at creating new kinds of state, or inserting
themselves within effective ones, that prefiguration has become a stronger demand in recent
decades and scepticism towards instrumental strategies has grown.
The experience of winning universal suffrage and welfare states, legal battles for citizen-
ship or against discrimination, national independence and ethno-religious states, conflicts
over language and consumption and the like are widely experienced as ambiguous successes
in terms of popular power. In most cases, the populations that benefit from these – and that
often inherited them as the gains of previous struggles – do value these gains, at least for
themselves (and even despite the platforms of parties they may vote for). But the credibility of
the armed vanguard, the radical lawyer, the political party, the NGO, the religious crusade
or the campaign to change cultural symbolism is eroded as much by its external success as
by its opponents.

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When there were few if any of these experiences to look back on, it could be reasonably
believed (for example) that getting the vote, changing how people spoke, writing new laws,
winning national independence, enshrining religious values in the constitution, educating
people and so on would change everything. We now know from long historical experience
that it is not that easy; these struggles win something, but not as much as is promised, and
often more for leaders than for grassroots activists, let alone the wider constituency they
mobilise.
In this sense, the belief that the future will justify all the sacrifices of the present has be-
come harder to sustain credibly, at least within social movements from below.2 Communities
and movements fighting for more equal economic, political and cultural relationships are
now more likely to want to see some link between how we organise now and the alterna-
tives we are struggling for. Sustainable activism, then, in the sense of movements and com-
munities which do not treat their participants as ultimately expendable, has become a more
explicit focus in internally democratic movements than in forms of organisation modelled
on military or religious structures.

Sustainable Activism in Different Movement Contexts3

Activist sustainability means very different things in different contexts, because the dimen-
sions which are difficult to achieve vary hugely. In previous work, I have identified three
aspects of this difference: social inequality and the situation of different movements’ core
participants; institutionalisation and how different movements interface with the structures
of everyday life; and how movement cultures sit within the wider society.

Social Inequality
What dimensions of personal sustainability matter most to different participants in different
times, places and social contexts? This is above all a question of social inequality and of how
individuals are located within their local social order.

Everyday Survival
This covers the issues that people need to cover in order simply to keep going in terms of
their everyday social situation. It includes people’s health, physical and mental energy and
vulnerabilities; how much they are physically and socially dependent on other people, along
with their caring and workplace responsibilities to other people. More generally, it includes
how far their living and working situation, family and personal networks support participa-
tion in movements or make it difficult to maintain. For most people most of the time, these
are fundamental – and by definition nobody can sustainably ignore them. But depending on
who one is, different issues will stand out as problematic.

Movement-Relevant Resources
By this, I mean the things that people need to manage in order to be able practically to en-
gage in movement activity. People have to manage time and money pressures and the other
ways in which class, gender, race and so on make it easier or harder to engage in movement
activities. Access to the different means of communication, transport, practical organisation
and so on is unevenly distributed in unequal societies, while in different contexts, there

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are also different expectations around public activities, and the cognitive and political tools
involved may be more or less easily available. It is certainly possible to create new kinds of
movement participation and contest the social order in creative ways that work better for
people in different situations; or put another way, people will always work with what they
have. At the same time, ‘they do not do so just as they please’, but in a world not of their
own making where participation in politics is very uneven and often very limited. Hence,
movements often have to strike a difficult balance, consciously or otherwise, between en-
abling participation (for example, through education and training programmes) and having
an immediate impact on wider power relations (with people who are already familiar with
the activities involved).

Emotional Sustainability
People can have their everyday life more or less under control and have the resources they
need to engage in social movements, without doing so – or without being able to handle
­doing so emotionally. In some political traditions and supportive movement cultures, as well
as some class, ethnic or religious cultures, there are established, socially supported ways of
being in the world that make it relatively easy on a personal level to ‘be an activist’. There are,
of course, many different ways into the skills and supports for emotional s­ elf-management,
handling one’s own mental health and dealing with violence and conflict. At its most basic,
few people find conflict entirely easy, and a stable emotional relationship to conflict is an
important aspect of activist sustainability.

Movements and Everyday Life

Different movements interface with everyday life and social routines in different ways. Put
another way, someone’s movement participation can be primarily a job, an identity, a part
of their everyday culture or a dimension of their working life; and these different situations
affect individual activists but also shape movements insofar as most movements have a centre
of gravity in one or other of these (perhaps a characteristic of a truly powerful movement is
its presence across multiple dimensions). Each of these brings up different issues in relation
to activist sustainability:

Workplace-Based Movements
Peasant and labour struggles are naturally workplace-based, while other types of activism
(e.g. some aspects of resistance to fascism) can also be centred here. In workplaces, the key
issues for sustainability obviously include conflict with managers and landowners, relations
with other workers (e.g. solidarity vs scabbing), workplace ‘custom and practice’, whether
people value the job they do or see it simply as a means to earn money and so on. Even some-
thing as simple as knowing how to picket and respond to pickets can be a source of stress, or
conversely routinised and well-understood all round.

Community-Based Movements
Some movements naturally tend to organise within people’s residential or social ­communities –
working-class community organising, GLBTQI activism and many ethnic or religious move-
ments, for example. Some of the particular sustainability challenges here come from the

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situation of the community as a whole (coping with poverty, oppression, cultural stigma and
so on), while others come from other forms of organising within the community (e.g. reli-
gious, gang, business).

Professional or Full-Time Activism

In some kinds of movement situation (parties, unions, media, NGOs and so on), many or
most activists are employed by movement organisations. The challenge is then how to make
sure that the stress involved in keeping the organisational show on the road (shaping conflicts
into particular institutional routines) and dealing with everything else that arrives in the
door of highly visible organisations does not take over from the wider motivations for action.
When activism is professionalised, workplace issues and tensions take on a very particular
character, and there can be strong tendencies towards internal (self-)exploitation.

‘Leisure’ Activism
Finally, some kinds of movements take place outside where most of their participants work
and live, in the social space otherwise occupied by leisure activities. Obviously enough, this
sort of activism sits awkwardly in relation to everything else that might be going on in peo-
ple’s lives, so that isolation, guilt and burnout can become particular problems.
These different situations represent different forms of institutionalisation (or lack of it).
Institutionalisation, together with routinisation and social normalisation, has effects on many
other aspects of sustainability. The sort of work involved, the routine risks and conflicts en-
countered, the most common emotional and mental health challenges, and what individuals
(or other activists) are good at dealing with and responding to and what is unsupported vary
hugely between these different kinds of setting.

Movement Activism in the Wider Society

The history of different movements, and the state of struggle in different societies at different
times, means that participants can find themselves more or less at odds with the world around
them. As activists, they may be more or less supported in the rest of their lives, facing ongoing
conflict with family and friends, workmates and neighbours, school or religious community.
In fact, their own activist biography is likely to be shaped by how the movement ‘sits’ within
the wider society:

Long-Standing Movement Cultures

In some cases, movements have not only lasted for generations but they are widely repre-
sented within a wider culture and large sections of the community can be expected to get
involved at times. Some activists may be more or less literally born into movement families,
while for others there are well-understood and easily managed ways of joining movements,
learning and finding mutual support. Either way, such situations are particularly likely to
offer viable emotional repertoires (not to mention community rituals, biographies and so
on) that support movement participation. Some ethnonationalist or radical left cultures may
approximate this, such as republicanism in some parts of Northern Ireland or the Italian left
for much of the post-war period.

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Supportive Classes or Cultures

A slightly weaker case is where most people in a given class or culture are not themselves
active but there is nonetheless general support for those who do get involved in movements,
so that it is a fairly well-understood, and moderately unproblematic, role to adopt. This has
been the case for some radical religious groups like the Quakers, some US black communi-
ties and some parts of the European working class in the twentieth century.

Moments of Generational Transformation

The big waves of movement mobilisation, such as that at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s,
bring what can feel like a whole generation of young people into movements, marking a break
from their parents as well as from pre-existing institutions, even those nominally in the same
movement. For this first generation, their participation involves a far more radical shift in rela-
tion to who they have been brought up to be, something which may not be so evident in later
generations. Examples might include feminist and GLBTQI activists in this period, who often
had to rediscover their movements’ prehistory because of the lack of available connections at
the time. Over time, these situations tend to become easier to live with, if only because of the
large numbers of other people struggling with – and discussing – the same kinds of tension.

Newly Formed, or Fundamentally Marginal, Movements

Lastly, where movement participation involves a break not only with one’s family and wider
cultures but also with one’s peers, producing a sustainable movement culture essentially
amounts to the challenge of producing a new counterculture. Such movements can strug-
gle to institutionalise themselves and become subcultural in the sense of largely consisting
of young adults, meaning that they have failed to solve the problem of how to live with
movement participation in later life. Along with this, the intensity of the cultural tensions is
often hard to sustain emotionally. Much animal rights activism seems to follow this pattern,
with older (let alone second-generation) activism being rare. In other cases, such as Deaf or
trans activism, the nature of the issue itself may make a breach with one’s culture of origin
particularly likely but entail a much longer-term involvement, and often the construction of
activist personas and narratives within the movement geared to this kind of transformation.

It is obviously hugely important in terms of the sustainability of activism whether it is a fam-

ily expectation, one respected (or at least familiar) choice among others, a breach with older
generations or a standing reproach to one’s whole culture. This dimension overlaps with
wider issues of ‘habitus’, in Bourdieu’s (1977) terminology. What sorts of emotional reper-
toires and expectations go along with activism in different local, classed or ethnic cultures?
What kinds of activist roles and personas are recognised? Is political participation understood
by others as a statement of morality, of personality or of career? How do people live with
particular kinds of situations (martyrdom, unemployment, fame, family conflict)?

Reflections
These different dimensions are obviously interconnected in any practical situation: the so-
cial situation that movement participants find themselves in shapes the kinds of organi-
sation they prioritise, while the longer history of movement success or failure (or at least

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institutionalisation) shapes how other people within their social world relate to them. How-
ever, these dimensions vary so widely as between different movements that most general
statements about activist sustainability fall quite far of the mark.
Understandably, most activist writing (and most research geared to an individual move-
ment) focuses on the aspects of sustainability that are most challenging for participants (or
would-be participants) in that particular movement, and treats these as defining sustain-
ability in general, without seeing the dimensions which are relatively unproblematic for its
members (or more exactly which can be handled by existing routines, whether these belong
to the wider culture or to the movement). Of course, as the discussion of how activism re-
lates to the wider society suggests, different movements also operate with a greater or lesser
degree of cultural radicalism, and a greater or lesser acceptance of conventional kinds of
interpersonal and collective relationships. These things, in turn, impact greatly on activist
sustainability, when everyday culture is intolerable on a personal level (a GLTBQI person in
a homophobic culture, for example) or when activists’ emotional stability depends on ‘not
rocking the boat’ in their own social world.
These point to a wider problem: in a world shaped by oppression, exploitation and stig-
matisation, activists’ personal lives can be very squeezed for many reasons, and they often
have to make movements work for themselves to some extent, even if only in the sense that
much of their human contact, friendships or relationships happen there. In other cases, a
movement may be thoroughly interwoven with everyday care and reproduction; it might
offer employment possibilities (or indeed lead to being blacklisted). The challenge, in other
words, is how to make the movement live and work in people’s lives but without this means
becoming an end in itself.
Much academic and activist analysis takes for granted the ways in which participation
in a given movement sits easily within the existing world – professionalisation, cultural
conservatism, in-group behaviour, reliance on dominant forms of power internally – and
highlights what is problematic for group members. It is important, particularly from a radical
perspective in which we do not take the simple existence of movements as an end in itself,
to remain wary of this and ask after the shadow side – while recognising that for movements
to survive at all, they may not be able to afford to resist and transform all social relations at
once. This is particularly true when their participants are poor, relatively powerless, cultur-
ally stigmatised, physically vulnerable or otherwise struggling to cope with everyday life, let
alone movements. Conversely, it is no critique of the most demanding approaches to activism
to say that they may be more accessible to those who have the resources to engage in them.
We do know from history, and some present-day examples like Chiapas or Rojava, that this
is not an absolute, and movements of the most oppressed can at times be the most radical on
these dimensions too – when they are truly mass movements.

Our Common Activist Heritage

The first part of this chapter presented activist sustainability as an important dimension
both of surviving as a decent human being in an unjust society, and especially of the ongo-
ing struggle for meaningful democratic participation. The second section showed just how
much is involved in these achievements, but also argued that – depending on movement
participants’ social situations, how movements are institutionalised and how participation
sits within the wider culture – activists will experience different patterns of what threatens
sustainability, so that there is no easy checklist of ‘sustainability issues’ that works across all
movements and all times and places.

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However since any given movement experiences a concrete set of problems in relation
to activist sustainability, activists develop situation-specific ways of thinking about these
problems, as well as strategies to resolve these particular issues. Without any pretence of ex-
haustiveness, I want to explore a few relatively common approaches. I relate each to one or
more concrete movements, not because any individual approach is the sole property of the
movements mentioned (or because everyone in the movement in question subscribes to that
approach) but simply because no strategy for activist sustainability really makes sense outside
of a concrete movement context.
Still, in the wider picture, each of these approaches represents important aspects of human
flourishing (or, more darkly, how these are attacked in our societies). Radical movements,
then, should treat all of these as our common heritage, as well as thinking about what is spe-
cific to other people’s struggles as well as (a harder challenge) to our own.

Challenging the System

Movements and ideologies which focus on the bigger picture – Marxists and anarchists, fem-
inists and GLTBQI activists, anticolonial and radical black liberation approaches, etc. – often
point to the extent to which it is structural features of contemporary society that get in the
way of activist sustainability. This is a centrally important point – the very reasons we strug-
gle are also among the things which make the struggle hard – and it can be easily missed in
approaches which place all the responsibility for sustainability on movements’ own internal
organisations and require added efforts from activists.
At the same time, this approach is sometimes used to dismiss concerns with sustain-
ability as mere self-indulgence, with the added implication that they express a sheltered
life or the luxury of privilege. This is a familiar sound from the leaderships of organ-
isations structured around a very high activist turnover – recruiting, using and losing
participants ‘for the greater good of the organisation’ – which are therefore threatened
by any attention given to the actual experience of membership. It is also familiar from
advocates of a macho, ‘ just do it’ approach to movements, for whom these are implicitly
feminine or weak concerns that get in the way of ‘real’ (high-octane) activism. This
position is, of course, in turn, the privilege of those who are not struggling with the
effects of trauma, for example.
There is also a more privileged and at times more liberal version of this refusal to look in-
wards: as various forms of feminism, Marxism, gay studies, Black studies, etc., have entered
the academy or the media, they have often become individualised and professionalised. In
their own lives, their advocates have relatively high rewards compared to most of those on
whose behalf they speak, but often lack the time and energy to respond to the needs of other
participants other than financially. The logic of both media and academic activism, too, is
often towards a relentless emphasis on structure and the avoidance of serious discussion of,
or engagement with, popular agency and its discontents.
Of course, there are also honourable exceptions in all of these camps. However, a seri-
ous recognition of just how deep-seated and damaging are the structures we are up against
should logically also entail thinking seriously about the challenges of developing and sustain-
ing movements for the long haul under these circumstances, not refusing to think about the
problem. Structural constraints will indeed constantly erode our individual and collective
capacity, and it is indeed an illusion to think that we can achieve ideal movement-internal
relationships this side of a massive change in social power; however, we will not get there if
we do not pay attention to supporting each other.

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Conversely, what those with a shorter historical memory often forget is just how transfor-
mative large-scale collective action is, including in terms of sustainability. Oppressed people
who become political agents find themselves recovering a sense of pride and dignity, of
power and voice in the wider society; they transform themselves and each other in the pro-
cess of making another world and find a sense of real possibility absent in previously trapped
lives. What can be hard to achieve in a small group over years can sometimes be achieved in
mass struggle in ‘weeks where decades happen’ (Lenin).

Survival-Oriented Solidarity
In disadvantaged communities, there is often no real dividing line between the everyday
forms of mutual aid that people rely on to get through the week or to get through hard
times, and activist solidarity. This underpins one of the strengths of mobilisation in such
contexts: people are mobilised in families, in streets or neighbourhoods, in workplaces, in
churches, in ethnic groups – the same social relationships that they are tied into for everyday
survival. Conversely, these relationships tend to be what determines movement involve-
ment, and powerful forms of internal clientelism can develop under patriarchal or ‘notable’
leadership, prioritising the interests of the latter. When internal power relationships are less
hierarchical and more participative, such community-based struggles can be both radical
and very hard to defeat, precisely because of the centrality of sustainability to their organ-
ising relationships.
In these situations, activist sustainability consists first and foremost of everyday survival:
­person-to-person or collectively organised financial help for individuals; sharing food and
goods; ‘caring labour’ in all its many forms; listening and emotional support; advocacy to help
people deal with powerful institutions; and practical support around life crises such as sickness,
bereavement, unwanted pregnancy, unemployment, eviction or imprisonment. Well-organised
community activism often goes beyond this to organise training and education that supports
people to become political subjects, from literacy and voter registration to media training and
assistance in setting up formally registered organisations. As Nilsen (2010) has observed, these
strategies are often successful at lower levels of the political system (becoming citizens) and in-
effective at higher levels (substantive change in power relationships). They often follow a logic
of brokerage whereby community members are encouraged to engage with formal institutions
along approved lines – lines which have worked for professional activists and upwardly mobile
activist families, but which are less effective at resolving large-scale structural inequality.
However to note the potential pitfalls around, this form of sustainability in no way changes
the historical fact that very large numbers of people – majorities in many s­ ocieties – find
themselves forced to depend on self-organised mechanisms of mutual aid. The real question,
then, is not whether this is a good thing but how best to organise it. Nor is it any surprise
that activism in such contexts is geared around an extension of these relationships – ‘activist
mothering’ in Nancy Naples’ (1998) neat phrase, whereby the black and Latina community
activists she studied on the US East Coast extended their own care work both to the wider
community and more specifically to the younger women activists they mentored.

Coping with Criminalisation

The legal and prison systems are explicitly designed as repressive apparatuses, intended to
punish those who challenge the state, including those who resist what they see as unjust
laws. In earlier periods, liberals, democrats, nationalists, suffragettes, anarchists and socialists

533
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all found themselves at the sharp end of the same monarchical, authoritarian or colonial re-
gimes; in parliamentary democracies, at least this experience had been comfortably relegated
to origin myths by the first four of these, until the recent authoritarian turns in majority
world countries from Turkey to India.
For today’s radicals, however, the experience of state repression remains a live one,
whether challenging the institutions of neo-liberalism, resisting wars, fighting for animal
rights, resisting biopolitical attacks on women’s and GLTBQI bodies, challenging po-
lice killings or defending the earth. Many of our best people still find themselves going
through the courts and prisons. This process is hugely challenging for the individuals
targeted, in many different ways, and movements which regularly encounter legal repres-
sion usually develop more or less effective legal and prisoner support structures, designed
to support the individual through what is intended as an isolating and dehumanising
experience.
But the costs of repression are not only felt by the individual: in movements where the
police only stand limited chances of actually securing convictions on substantial charges,
they can raise the costs of activism substantially by campaigns of low-level harassment (arrest
without charge, repeated trials on minor offences or constant deferral of trial dates) as well
as through surveillance (sowing distrust and forcing activists to spend time on countermea-
sures). All of this is felt by the targets’ family and friends, and in some contexts, their neigh-
bours or workmates can be mobilised against them.
This is more or less consciously theorised in different contexts: often, movements build
successful counternarratives which valorise the victims of repression and use visible cases of
injustice as a source of outrage, mobilisation and radicalisation. When handled well, this can
force the state to back off; when handled badly, it can lock movements into an emotional
dynamic of intensifying conflict which simultaneously isolates them from the wider popu-
lation, and provide police and security forces with a permanently available justification for
increased funding and sharpened legislation. This was one of the main internal criticisms of
European and North American urban guerrilla movements in the 1970s and 1980s, reviving
an older left critique of conspiratorial organisation.

Direct Action and Coping with Trauma

Partly because of this, many radical movements have repositioned their activism on a
terrain which limits the scope for state repression within normal legislation and enables
them to seek support from a much wider population. This is the case, for example, for
much ecological direct action and more radical traditions within alterglobalisation and
anti-austerity activism in the global North. The state, in turn, has often (not always) read-
justed its focus, with an increased attention, in particular, to forms of non-lethal v­ iolence
and intimidation in the physical confrontations that often characterise these forms of
activism (such as summit protests or protest encampments). It is hard for activists to ef-
fectively prevent, or even gain retrospective satisfaction for, beatings, ­pepper-sprayings,
sexual assault, kettlings, spying of various kinds, even in extreme cases such as the UK
undercover policemen who had long-term relationships and in some cases children with
activists – and hard for legal successes in these areas to prevent repeat performances, ex-
cept where the police and security services have also suffered a substantial loss of public
legitimacy in the process.
Consequently – and because these movements have recruited widely, often among young
people with no previous background in movements – activists have had to work hard at

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recognising, learning about and responding to trauma, in particular. Often interacting with
the many other forms of psychological damage inflicted by oppressive social relationships,
trauma and PTSD can have sharp and sudden effects on activists’ capacity to engage in
movements, or to do so productively and in ways that are not damaging to others. Activist
trauma support groups, networks and resources have thus become an important feature of
many movement contexts.

Psychological
At a less extreme scale, burnout and other mental health issues such as depression, iso-
lation or addiction are widely experienced in some social movement contexts (as in our
societies more generally). In the nature of things, radical movements involve a huge
personal effort against very powerful opponents, with limited chances of success and of-
ten few immediate rewards. This situation is not a happy one psychologically unless it is
managed effectively, for example, with a supportive movement culture which notices real
effects on the world, develops enjoyable relationships between participants and a strongly
positive sense of the value of the movement and its activity, and it is unsurprising that
participation takes its toll.
By their nature, too, movements appear to some people suffering with mental health
issues as a place where they may be able to make friends, have an effect on the world and
express the things that are important to them – or, in less constructive ways, ‘act out’ their
mental health issues, from aggression through paranoia to personal aggrandisement. Most
movements do not seek to police their boundaries tightly, and for obvious reasons activists
rarely want to exclude people for behaving in ways different from the mainstream norm.
However, this does not mean that movement participants are necessarily always equipped to
recognise and respond to mental health issues.
Thus as far back as the 1970s, women’s and GLTBQI movements have worked on various
aspects of mental health, both in a problem-solving approach, aiming to rework existing
forms of therapy and counselling for participants, and in a constructive approach, aiming to
create new ways of living well, group rituals and alternative identities (Ernst and Goodison,
1993). Here, the ‘consciousness-raising’ approach, Paolo Freire’s reworking of the normally
transformative effects of the collective self-expression of subaltern groups into a form of adult
education, became radicalised and generalised: movement participation became simultane-
ously a space for rethinking one’s self in relation to others. This model has been highly influ-
ential in subsequent movements, in a wide variety of different forms, and has been adopted
far beyond activist contexts.

Prefigurative Approaches
Ecological and radical-spiritual activism too often seeks to remake activist subjects within
the process of mobilisation, in ways that go beyond the purely political. ‘Cultural radicalism’,
in Epstein’s (1991) neat analysis, is a particularly precarious project because of the attempt
to remake its own psychological and interpersonal basis, in a sense to rebuild the boat while
sailing in it. As many readers will know from their own experience, there is huge transfor-
mative potential in certain kinds of activism, and it is entirely possible both to challenge
power relations radically and to unpick one’s inner allegiance to those relationships. Usually,
this is best done in a relatively trusting but high-intensity small-group context, such as a

535
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camp or occupation, where time and depth of relationships permit a collective remaking of
selves and rethinking of interactions.
From the movement point of view, a decisive question may be how much collective
preparation – for the pressures of conflict and in terms of prefiguring a different way of
being – the group has engaged in before this kind of confrontation, and how much time
is available for subsequent processing. A shared religious basis can often provide this kind
of support in advance, while once the group is thoroughly formed, it is not uncommon for
members to create institutions (intentional communities, social centres, political or publish-
ing projects) intended to make it possible to continue the new way of being with one another
while simultaneously challenging wider social relationships.
Of course, the pressures are often great: we are often drawn to cultural radicalism because
of our own disjunctures with existing social relationships, something which in our society
often exacts a high psychological toll, or may arise from underlying trauma, etc. Confronta-
tion with powerful others, and small-group dynamics, can also make such situations highly
unstable; for example, successful long-term intentional communities are the exception rather
than the rule, and are often based either on religious commitments, sexual and family rela-
tionships or successful economic projects.
Prefiguration thus logically draws on the particular tools of such contexts. Practices such
as meditation, service to others, vegetarianism and other forms of food politics, artistic cre-
ativity and ritual can all be organised in ways that place the group or community at the
centre while infusing its movement activities with deep personal meaning. They can also
enable the ritualisation of confrontational activities: as forms of asceticism, as performance
art or as displays of mutual commitment. Sustainability in these contexts, however, is a par-
ticularly fragile achievement, which often has to be invented again to work for each specific
context, while people who fall out of the group can struggle to sustain the transformed sense
of themselves in a world which does not treat them that way.

Cultural Survival
Finally, indigenous communities, in particular, can often find themselves in situations where
the struggle to sustain themselves as indigenous and as communities is put in peril by the forces
they are fighting against, and where movement mobilisation can offer a way of revitalising
and restating cultural ideals which have often come under heavy attack from other societies
and may also need reworking for a new situation. This is one reason why indigenous groups
have often been such effective opponents of extractivist projects (drilling, mining, logging,
etc.): if the project goes ahead, and the wider processes it symbolises continue, their young
people are at risk of becoming migrant labourers, losing their language, abandoning their tra-
ditional economic activities and cultural practices, etc.: in other words, ceasing to be active
members of the community. The alternative to resistance, in other words, is often to accept
becoming a racially despised shanty-town population – though Zibechi’s (2010) remarkable
ethnography of El Alto shows just how much is actually preserved in such situations, includ-
ing for radical struggles.
Such situations often pit different agendas for sustainability against one another: among
Native Americans, for example, conservatives and cultural radicals may both assert the
value of tradition and culture but with very different inflections. Gender and sexuality can
pit patriarchal customs against young people’s struggles for self-assertion and acceptance.
Well-meaning organisers who want to bring mainstream education, technology and emo-
tional practices may wind up undermining more creative attempts to assert local rationalities.

536
 Sustainable Activism

Put another way, indigenous communities are characterised in the modern world by their
coexistence with more powerful societies, economies, states and cultures, and the viability
of different strategies for sustainability often depends on how much agency the community
is capable of asserting under these circumstances.
Nonetheless, it is clear that there is an extraordinary political and personal strength avail-
able when communities are capable, even partly, of standing outside dominant social rela-
tionships, an experience that is well worth reflecting on for other movements, even though
the situation cannot be replicated.

Conclusion
In the very broadest sense, activist sustainability represents the challenging question of how
people lacking power, wealth or cultural privilege can become and remain active and radical
political subjects. Those who highlight the need for structural resolutions of this problem are
not wrong in saying that some of these problems can never be fully resolved within existing
social forms. The chicken-and-egg problem, though, is that it is precisely such movements
that are needed to overthrow existing social forms, so that sustainability and democratic
participation are always likely to be a work in progress until movements have overthrown
class society, patriarchy and the racialised world order. That process will, as I think this argu-
ment makes clear but we can also see from the experience of successful revolutions, involve
participants remaking themselves and their relationships to one another as they remake the
world around them.
In the meantime, activist sustainability is a wheel that will continually be reinvented, or
more exactly a challenge that will always be rediscovered as part of the necessary learning
process of movement participation. We will always be scrambling to keep up with the chal-
lenges we meet in this area, starting from the very real problem of recognising and naming
the difficulties. In the process, hopefully, we can come to treat ourselves and each other less
in line with mainstream social and cultural relations and with more radical forms of relation-
ship and emotion – solidarity, compassion, mutual support, comradeship and a wider interest
in one another’s flourishing as full human beings.
The discussion above has highlighted some of the tensions and complexities of different
approaches, at times critically. But the power and importance of activist ­s ustainability –
even when the attempt to achieve it ‘goes wrong’ somehow – arise b­ ecause human
beings will and do struggle to meet their needs in the most challenging circumstances.
In this  sense, activist sustainability is an irreducible aspect of any attempt to change
the world.

Notes
1 Radicalism under this definition can of course be right-wing radicalism, in the sense of attempts
to create a different, and more exploitative/oppressive/culturally hierarchical world. In the pres-
ent context, however, I am only interested in those movements and communities which are
pushing in the opposite direction: logically enough, their attempts at sustainability work very
differently.
2 One of the defining features of social movements from above (Cox and Nilsen, 2014) is the
way in which they draw on existing cultural hierarchies, forms of power and economic arrange-
ments. The distinction between privileged leaders and useful idiots is often alive and well in these
movements.
3 This section draws on the discussion in Cox (2009).

537
 Laurence Cox

References
Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cox, L. (2009) ‘Hearts with One Purpose Alone? Mapping the Diverse Landscapes of Personal
­Sustainability in Social Movements.’ Emotion, Space and Society 2: 52–61.
Cox, L. and Nilsen, A. (2014) We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight
of Neoliberalism. London: Pluto.
Eley, G. (2002) Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. Oxford: Oxford
­University Press.
Epstein, B. (1991) Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Non-violent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ernst, S. and Goodison, L. (1993) In Our Own Hands: A Book of Self-Help Therapy. London: Women’s
Press.
Naples, N. (1998) Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty.
New York: Routledge.
Nilsen, A. (2010) Dispossession and Resistance in India: the River and the Rage. London: Routledge.
Zibechi, R. (2010) Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

538
 Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

ableism 178–91 74, 78; anti-psychiatry and 86, 89, 94; bicycle
abortion 24–38, 188, 420–1; absolution for politics and 281; black blocs and 293–300;
29–30 education and 394–9; insrrectionary 326–38;
Abortion Support Network 28 migrant solidarity and 200; music and 443–8;
absenteeism 377–9, 423 online activism and 303–10; Permaculture
abuse: of animals 43, 46; of disabled people 184, and 487; publishing and 359–69; radicalism
190; of indigenous children 140; and safer and 7–12, 15–16; radical media and 341–8;
spaces 228; sexual 26, 76–7, 112–13, 135, 231, religious 495, 503; squatting and 515; work
261, 348, 353, 516–17 and 374–7, 381–8; see also Food Not Bombs;
access: to abortion 24–38; to digital technology social centres
308–13, 482; disability and 179–92, 225–6; Ancelovici, M. 298
to food 461, 467–8; to funding 356; to Angelic Upstarts, The 63
indigenous lands 135, 142 Animal Liberation Front (ALF) 42–3, 46,
affinity groups 9, 45–7, 284, 305, 308, 367, 49–51, 326
386, 469 antiauthoritarian see anarchism; authority
Africa, J. 503–5 anticapitalism 7, 49, 98–9, 123–4, 166, 184,
African Americans 186, 213, 223–4, 504; see also 240–9, 281–4, 342–4, 425, 437, 443–4
Black Lives Matter Anti Capitalist Convergence (CLAC) 293
agency 13, 32, 35, 204, 27, 212, 234, 257, 261–4, antifascism 53–65, 304, 517
323n2, 448n2, 525 Anti Fascist Action (AFA) 55, 56–8, 62–3
agriculture: agro-ecology 454–6, 465, 480; Anti Fascist Network (AFN) 62
animal 44–5; domestication and 384, 406–7 anti-imperialism 75–6, 168, 173, 513–17
Ahora Madrid 319, 323 antimilitarism 67–79, 337, 409–10;
Aitkenhead, J. 389 feminist 75–6
Alexander, R. 392–3 Anti-Nazi League (ANL) 55, 61–2
Alfred, T. 147, 153, 167 anti-productivism 377–82
Algerians 240, 245 antipsychiatry 82–94
alienation 61, 83, 241, 333, 335, 374–5, 382–7, antiracism 53–5, 61–3, 76, 90, 116, 168, 195,
423, 443–5, 514 212, 349–50; see also ethnicity; racism
alterglobalisation movements 6, 292–3, 303, 347, Anti-Racist Action (ARA) 292
426, 518 anti-roads movement 122, 277, 284, 426
Alternative for Germany (Af D) 54 arson 46, 116, 332–3, 337
Amsterdam 215, 304, 309, 516–18 assemblages 205
anarchism: animal liberation and 47–50; Assembly of First Nations (AFN) 145–6, 149
antifascism and 56, 62; antimilitarism and Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs 149

539
 Index

Athens, Ohio 464–70 Brown, J. 495

attrition model 85–6 Buddhism, Buddhists 42, 494–6, 500, 504
audism 183, 187 built environment 225
austerity 59, 64–5, 206, 240, 320–2, 346 Burning from the Inside (film) 59
authoritarianism 15, 59, 74, 76, 337, 375, 457,
502, 534; in education 392, 397; see also Calisse Brigade 294
anarchism; vanguardism Canada: alternative media 343–55; indigenous
authority 16, 74, 86, 102, 124, 126, 139, 198, peoples 101, 134–54; social assistance 246–7;
257, 272, 307, 332, 402, 495–8 tar sands 272; see also Montréal; Ontario
autism 183, 191 Coalition Against Poverty; Québec; Toronto;
autonomia see marxism Vancouver
autonomism (Germany): black blocs and 292–3, capital, capitalism: accumulation 100–1, 166,
squatting and 515–18 354, 407–8; animals and 43, 49; climate
Autonomous University Collective 300 and 98–102, 284; colonialism and 165–6;
autonomy: bodily 37–8, 117; indigenous 151, corporate 123, 130, 291; cultural production
168; individual 74, 102, 126, 385, 402; of and 434–5, 443–5; disability and 184–5;
migration 196–7, 202–3 fascism and 56–7; food and 406–9, 413–14,
autonomy clubs 424 469–71; green 130, 280, 487; migration
Avrich, P. 394–6 and 203–6; radical publishing and 265;
surveillance 311; technology and 457–8;
Bakunin, M. 74, 381, 394–6, 495, 503, 515 work under 375–81; see also anti-capitalism;
BaMbuti 493, 498 consumerism
Barcelona 284, 319, 327, 344, 395, 435, 447 care 191–2, 228, 236, 300, 531
Barcelona En Comú 319 Cascadia Forest Alliance 115
Barnes, K. 398 Catholic Workers 75, 500, 505
Battiste, Marie 153 Center for the Prevention of Radicalization
Because We Must (BWM) 115 Leading to Violence (Montréal) 296–7
Berlin: black bloc 292; squatting 511, 514, Chatterton, P. 200, 417
517–18 Chomsky, N. 368, 497, 502
bipartisanism 314, 320 Christiania 511
Black, B. 384 Christianity, Christians 30, 78, 134, 137, 170,
black bloc 291–302 261, 368, 373, 492–3, 495, 500–1
Black Lives Matter (BLM) 35, 98, 148, 173, 186, church: abortion and 28–30; vs. religion 496
223–4, 264, 274, 306, 349–50 Clarke, J. 240–4
Blackstock, C. 150, 153 Clash, The 61
blockchain 307, 428 class: middle 109, 114, 217, 359, 413; 428–9,
Blood and Honour 63 477–8; struggle 21, 43, 63–5, 382–3; working
Bloom, A. 401 64–5, 109, 241–2, 280, 386, 420, 435, 446
Bologna: bombings 372–8; Radio Alice 345 Class War Federation 55, 62, 363–4, 434, 446–7,
Bonanno, A. M. 384–5 448n7, 449n11
Bookchin, M. 9, 50, 368, 406, 434, 436, 446, clicktivism 308
448n6, 449n11, 467, 486 Cloward, R. 243–9
borders: 37–8, 71–2, 130, 169, 194–207, 304, Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault (CAPA) 85
465, 481, 502 coercion 48, 74, 182, 202–3, 375, 377, 381
Borst, H. 516 Colombia 262, 345
boundaries: movements’ 116, 331, 525, 535; colonialism: Americas 135–9; culture and 165–7;
safe spaces and 229–30; social 267, 398, 436; iconography of 226–7; incarceration and
see also borders 213–14, 217; Ireland 26, 30, 36; Japan 77; post
Bourdieu, P. 355, 380, 530 168–9, 173, 195, 197–8; religion and 494–6,
boycott 44, 89, 128, 172, 316, 186 498–9; settler 137–40, 170–3, 242; technology
Brazil 216, 240, 242, 268, 294, 298, 315, 346, and 455–6; see also decolonisation, Fanon, F.
393, 401, 455; see also Landless Workers’ Comitato di Quartiere San Pasquale 420–3, 428
Movement communique 116–17, 300, 311, 326–38
Brexit 64–5 communism: communist parties 54–6, 61, 363,
Bristol: bombings 329; Bristol Cable 343, 355; 430n10, 448n4; Soviet 54, 337, 468
see also Kebele concessions 29, 51, 248–50
Brown, G. 64 Conchetta/Cox18 420–1, 424–5

540
 Index

Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) 377, diversity: of activism 1, 2, 11, 25, 254, 333, 371;
435, 447, 449n9, 503 biological 456, 461, 463, 479, 481, 487; lack
conscription 72 of 43, 294–6; policies 222, 230, 263; of tactics
consensus decision-making 9, 17, 45–7, 73, 51, 75, 277, 293, 295
85–6, 263–4, 271, 309, 342, 354, 365, 410, Do It Yourself (DIY): art and culture 37, 359,
427, 430n11, 471 423–5, 440–5; bike workshops 281–3; media
Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF) 298, 326, 341; research 129; software 210
330–1, 337 domination 10, 48–9, 108–9, 116–17, 333, 406;
consumerism 269–70; Copenhagen 511 see also intersectionality; total liberation
Cospito, A. 327–9 Dover 60–1
Crass 61, 359–60, 362–3, 410, 440 Draaisma, J. 516
Creative Maladjustment Week 88 dropping out 385–6
CrimethInc. 46–7, 336, 385–7, 435, 443, 445–7
criminalisation: of abortion 25, 31; of Earth First! 42, 50, 107, 111–14, 117, 284, 419,
antifascism 55; of disabled people 183, 186–7; 424, 445
of indigenous people 137–41, 150–2; prisons Earth Liberation Front (ELF) 42, 107, 116, 326
and 211–16 Ecofeminist Front 117
crip, cripping 180–1 ecology: animal liberation and 48–9; climate
crusades 170 and 98–104; eco-defense 107–19; ecological
Cuba 488 crisis 333–4, 406, 435, 480; ecosystems
108–11, 114–17, 479, 481, 498; social
Day of Worldwide Protest Against 448n6, 462–4
Electroshock 90–1 education: child-centred 395; colonial 77,
Dead Kennedys 63 137, 165, 171; critical pedagogy 393, 402;
deaf 182–3, 187–8, 530 democratic 397, 400–1; disability and 182–3,
Debord, G. 351, 414 187, 190–1; free schools 396–400; higher
decolonization 136, 153, 163–76; campus 226–8; 182, 224–34, 311; home 398–400; integral
climate and 101–2; religion and 496, 499; see 395; libertarian 395–7; militarised 69, 77;
also colonialism Montessori schools 399; permaculture 480,
Deep Green Resistance 112 482–4; progressive 395, 401; public 25, 42,
Deloria, V. 501–2 77, 135, 151, 533; residential schools 140–2;
demobilisation 248–50 Rudolph Steiner schools 399; safety in 226,
democracy: apatistas and 502–3; disaffection 233–4
with 314, 319, 334; in education 397; elections: Canada 146, 240; Greece 59, 316–23;
liberal 8–9, 12, 124, 129, 163, 204, 212, Spain 316–23; Sri Lanka 260; UK 38, 55,
260, 278, 297, 315, 334, 365; populism 448n7; US 8, 305
and 4–6, 14–17; radicalism and 10–11, 411, empowerment 14, 135–6, 147, 257–8, 260, 264,
436–7; technology and 454–5, 457; see also 282, 354, 37, 399, 412, 473, 481
horizontalism emotions: 83, 89, 201; activism and 528–30;
Denmark 512, 514 safer spaces and 234–6; traumatic 223, 276
Dennison, G. 398 English Defence League (EDL) 54–5, 62
Derry Three 32 environmental justice 98, 104, 107–10
Dewey, J. 395 Errejón, Í. 319, 322
Diabo, R. 147, 153 ethics 48, 104, 110, 116, 125, 273–4, 357, 397;
diaspora: Irish 24–38; African 168, 172–3 consumer 411; hacker 310–11; insurrectionary
direct action: 11, 253; animal liberation and 333; of Permaculture 479–82; work 374–5,
45–7, anti-militarist 74, 78; anti-work 380; see also Do It Yourself
378, 388; casework 243–8; digital 306; ethnicity: colonialism and 69; Ireland 30; Japan
environmental 102–3, 116–17, 277–8, 284–6; 77; language and 232; Sri Lanka 260; UK
feminist 32–3; squatting as 419–22, 512 428; see also genocide; identity; indigenous
disability 178–90; 225, 241–2; see also abuse; peoples; people of colour; race
access; capital; criminalisation; education; European Union 27, 196, 205, 314, 320–1
identity; inequality everyday life 14, 69, 75, 204, 227, 232, 268–9,
disruption 29–30, 44, 72, 77–8, 102, 135, 191, 346, 383, 422, 436, 527–8
232, 243–7, 270–5; models of 178–9 exclusion 10, 27, 35, 111, 125, 169, 180, 182,
distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks 190, 205–6, 225–6, 229, 235, 268, 279,
306, 312 294–5, 319, 422, 458–9, 497, 517, 535

541
 Index

exploitation: animal 47–9; colonial 166, 168, Greenpeace 71, 110, 273, 278, 486
242; economic 374–80, 413, 443–5, 471–2; Greer, G. 230–1, 234–5
environmental 100–2, 112–15, 261; self 311, Group of Eight (G8): bike ride 285–6; Genoa
365, 529 2001 summit 292, 299; Gleaneagles 2005
summit 271; Kananaskis 2002 summit 296;
fascism 6, 15, 53–66, 237n4, 294–5, 321, 335, Rostock 2007 summit 294
345, 422, 425, 449n25, 495, 525 G7/G8 see Group of Eight
femininity 33–5, 74, 270 guerrilla 46, 327, 331–7
feminism 2, 24–38, 89, 100, 198, 353, 513–14; Gustafsen Lake 144
anti-militarist 75–6; black 213, 504;
ecofeminism 49–50, 108–9, 113–14; see also Habermas, J. 35–6, 268
gender; identity; transphobia Hagerty, T. (Father) 495
Ferrer, F. 363, 395–6 Halappanavar, S. 29
Fielding, M. 391, 399, 401 Harper, F. E W. 500
Finchett-Maddock, L. 419, 512 Harper, S. 146–7
First Street School 398 Hedges, Chris 299
food: animals as 44–5, 407, 410; local movement hegemony 380–1, 447, 497
411, 461–74; poverty and 244; sovereignty hierarchy 10, 11, 47, 50, 69, 74, 109, 111, 125,
100–1, 455, 473, 481 278–9, 337, 344, 381–2, 396, 406, 505, 515;
Food Not Bombs 43–4, 300, 405–16, 445 see also anarchism; authority; horizontalism
Foucault, M. 88–9, 93, 212 Higgins, M. 35–6
fracking 97–8, 101, 104, 144, 164, 347, 453, 469, Hindutva see nationalism
473–4, 525 Hirsch, M. 380–2
Frankfurt 328, 513, 519n10 Hitler, A. 54–5, 227
freedom of speech 55, 227, 231–2, 304 Hodkingson, S. 417
Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) homelessness 243, 411–14, 510
293 horizontalism 9–11, 17, 126, 217, 264, 271, 300,
Freire, P. 214, 218, 235–6, 393, 402, 535 309, 320, 342–4, 381, 471–2, 514–16
Frestonia 427 Hunt Saboteurs Association (HAS) 42–4, 46
Friends of the Earth 71, 110
Fucine Meridionali 421, 425–6, 429 Icarus Project 87–8
Für eine linke Strömung (FelS) 517 identity: disability and 180, 185–6; gender 26,
35, 118, 225–6, 295, indigenous 136–42,
Gabriel, E. 147 national 6, 30–1, 77, 204–5; political 45,
Gandhi, M. 75, 90, 262, 297, 361, 495, 500 293–3, 320–1, 425, 510; populism as 14–15
gender 36, 69, 74–5, 109–10, 113–15, 118, Idle No More 136, 146–8, 151, 164
183, 225–6, 270, 295, 309–10, 536; see also Iglesias, P. 319, 321
feminism; identity; transphobia Illich, Ivan 276, 398, 457
Genoa 292, 299, 328–9 imperialism see anti-imperialism; colonialism
genocide 57, 113, 115, 141–2, 146, 154, 165, 171, incarceration see prisons
186, 242, 298, 384 inclusivity 232–3, 294–5, 309, 319, 470–1
George, D. 143 Indian Association of Alberta 142
Gerbaudo, P. 13, 17, 352 indigenous peoples: Aamjiwnaang First
German Peasant rebellions 495 Nation 144; Algonquins of Barriere Lake
Germany: climate politics 102–3; see also black 144, 149; climate politics and 101–2;
blocs; squatting; Berlin Elsipogtog 144, 347; Esgenoopetitj 144;
Al-Ghazali, Z. 495 Ipperwash 143; James Bay Cree 144;
Godwin, W. 394 Kahnawake 143; Kahnesatake 143, 149;
Golden Dawn 55, 58–9, 314, 319 Kettle and Stoney Point Ojibway Nation
Goldman, E. 67, 368–9, 433–4, 436, 448n1, 502 143; Lakota 164, 493; Listuguj 143–4;
Goodman, P. 8–9, 364, 398 Mathias Colomb Cree Nation 144, 149;
Goossens, J. 515 Mi’kmaq 139, 143–5, 347; Mohawk 141,
Gordon, J. 147 143, 151, 153; resistance movement 134–54;
Gorleben 514 revitalization 136, 142, 168, 173–4, 536;
Gorz, A. 244, 278, 287, 379–81 Secwepemc Nation 144, 153; spirituality
Greece 58–9, 242, 293, 314–16, 318–20, 322, 496, 499; Unist’ot’en 101–2, 144
329–32, 337, 345–46, 356, 488 Indignados 293, 315, 352–5

542
 Index

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Lafargue, P. 376

Wobblies) 7, 304, 388, 417, 443–4, 495, 500 Laing, R. D. 83, 87
inequality: disability and 182–4; ecology and Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) 240, 346,
108–10; within movements 527–8; transport 393, 401, 454–5
and 279 Landstreicher, W. 69, 73, 385
Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) 326–3, Larsen, O. F. 299
337, 339 leadership: 181, 235, 257–8, 305, 461, 495, 527,
infoshops 308, 313, 424–5 533; indigenous 136, 143, 145–7, 150; party
institutionalisation: of persons 87, 186–8; political 318–19, 322; populism and 15–17
7, 217, 263, 322–3, 338, 363, 529, 530–1 League Against Imperialism 168
interdependence 181, 185–6, 191 Le Guin, U. 361, 368
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 27, 216, leisure 375–6, 378, 485–6, 529
292, 426, 461, 517 Lerner, M. 502
International Revolutionary Front (IRF) 326–7, Les Sorcières (The Witches) 294
329-3 Levellers 8, 108, 495
intersectionality 10–11, 26, 35, 43–4, 48–50, LGBTQ+ 27, 113, 118, 182, 187, 225–30, 233,
86, 89, 98, 114, 116, 131–2, 179–81, 187, 202, 282, 295, 348–9, 354, 361, 366, 447
204–5, 333, 368; see also domination; total liberalism: antifascism and 55–6; militarism and
liberation 68, 71–2; radicalism and 3, 5–9, 13–14; see also
Invisible Committee, The 338n5 democracy
Ireland, Irish 24–38; eighth constitutional liberation theology 171, 500–1, 505
amendment 29, 34; northern 24–34, 151, 529 libertarianism (right) 38, 208n5
Irish Women’s Abortion Support Group lifestyle 269, 293, 335, 375, 380–1, 449n11, 485–8
(IWASG) 25, 27–8 Liverpool 28, 60–1
Islam: Islamophobia 198, 494; jihadism 6, 57–8, London 8, 26–9, 33, 98, 128, 271–3, 283,
151, 188, 296–8; radical politics and 27, 57, 285–6, 288n3, 353, 355, 360, 363, 391, 396,
75, 168, 224, 257, 493, 495–6, 500, 507n6 400, 421, 424–7
Israel 67, 70–2, 75, 128, 170–1, 174, 175n10, London-Irish Feminist Network 27–8
264, 503, 517 luddites 383
Italy 54, 197, 328–30, 332, 345, 417, 417–30, 513
McAdam, S. 147
Japan 76–7, 350 Maclean, S. 147
Jasmin, P. 299 McIvor, S. 153
Jesus 496, 500–1, 505 Mad in America blog 91–3
Jesus Radicals 495 mad movement 82, 86–9
Judaism, Jews 55, 169, 175n10, 264, 502 mad pride 87–90
Juris, J. 216–19 Magdalene Laundries 28
Makhno, N. 365, 430n6
Kappo, T. 147, 153 Makokis, J. 147, 153
Katsiaficas, G. 292, 422, 512, 515 Malatesta, E. 74, 423, 430n6
Khan, A. G. 500 Malcolm X 495, 501
Kilquhanity 398 Maloney, C. 147, 153
King, M. L. 87, 297 Manitoba Indian Brotherhood 142
Kneegrabber, T. 294 Manuel, A. 154
knickers 30, 33–4 Maoism 168, 513, 515, 519n8
Koopmans, R. 518 Marcos see Zapatistas
Kovich, T. 298–300 Marshall, D. 154
Kraftl, P. 399–400 marxism: autonomist 319, 321, 342, 422, 425,
Kraus, K. 295 512; theory 49, 109, 167, 172, 178, 368–9,
Krisis 382 375, 379, 382, 418, 443, 447, 499; see also
Kropotkin, P. 360, 368, 376–7, 381–2, 388n2, communism; vanguardism
394–6, 400, 413–14, 500 Marx, K. 5, 114–15, 375, 382, 388n2,
Küllmer, H. 516 406–8, 519n7
Kurdistan, Kurds 57, 448n6, 484 May, T. 64
Means, R. 499
Labour Party (UK) 12, 38, 64, 327 mental health 83–4, 93, 191, 228, 233, 277,
Ladies Land League 26 528–9, 535

543
 Index

Middle East 168–9, 492, 517 Pantera student movement 425

migration, migrants 25, 34, 54, 56, 59, 63–5, participation: 10, 13, 17, 35–6, 272, 294–5, 309,
130–1, 172–4, 194–207, 240–2, 245, 250n4, 323, 342, 350–2, 401–2; see also inclusivity
256, 319, 348, 351, 464, 502 parties see elections
Mill, J. S. 394 patriarchy 33–7; cybernetic 304; and
MindFreedom 86–7; hunger strike 90 environment 113; militarism and 74–6; see
moniker 326–37 also feminism
Montréal 215–16, 245, 293–6, 309, 359 Pellow, D 48–9
Morris, W. 7–8, 18n4, 384 people of colour 113, 116, 186–8, 215–16, 219,
Mosley, O. 54–5 232, 240
MOVE 502–3 performance art 33–5, 267–74, 300, 536
Mujeres Creando 503 Perlman, F. 383, 407, 444
Müntzer, T. 495 permaculture 101, 461, 477–9
mutual aid 207, 330, 394, 396, 411, 463, 470–1, Phoenix Project 330–3
498, 500, 533; see also Kropotkin P. Piercy, M. 361, 368
Pink (and Silver) Bloc 291, 293, 301
National Congress of American Indians 149 Piven, F. F. 243–5, 248–9
National Indian Brotherhood 142 platform (OPAC) see Makhno, N.; Malatesta, E.
nationalism: far right 57–8, 60; Hindu 173; play, playful: actions 29, 32, 34–5, 86–7, 89, 118,
Irish 26, 31; populism and 15, 17; Zionism 269–70, 349; vs. work 384–6
169–70, 173 Plowshares 78, 500–1
Native Americans see indigenous peoples Podemos 314–15, 317–23
NATO 70, 351, 424 police see violence
Nazism see fascism political economy 109, 354, 458
Negri, A. 354, 512 populism: parties 314–23; racism and 63, 65;
Neill, A. S. 397 radicalism and 12–17
neo-monastics 500 Portwood-Stacer, L. 293, 435–6, 442, 447, 487
networks 11, 91; digital 303–7; social media 28, poverty 64–5, 99, 134, 140, 285, 320, 387,
53, 92, 137, 146–50, 283, 311–12, 315, 321, 410–13, 418, 466, 500–1, 531; poor people’s
349–55 movements 89, 185, 240–50
neurodiversity 183, 188–9, 191 Prague 292, 426
Newman, S. 418 praxis: decolonial 172–3, 212–13; food 470,
Nicaragua 446, 470 473–4; insurrectionary 334–8
Nietzsche, F. 5, 375–6 prefigurative politics 73, 86, 89, 94, 174, 200,
No Dakota Access Pipeline (No DAPL) 141, 206, 208n7, 211, 215, 219, 253, 271, 281,
146, 148–9, 170, 175–6, 274 300–1, 356, 385, 422, 443–5, 464, 489, 514,
No M11 Campaign 421, 425 526, 535–6
nonviolence 43–4, 73–8, 213, 256–65, 298–9, primitivism 334, 382–3, 387, 400, 406, 493
338, 410, 500–5 prisons, incarceration 26, 31, 43, 46–7, 78, 140,
No One Is Illegal 245, 295, 304 185, 188, 211–20, 258, 328–9, 331, 377,
no-platforming 231 385, 533–4; see also abuse; criminalisation;
North Korea 57 violence
professionalization 250, 334–6, 380, 531–2
Occupy movement: 8, 16–17, 271, 164, 293, 299, Proudhon, P. J. 6, 394, 442, 515
315; 352, 411; Occupy INAC 148; Occupy Provos 281
Oakland 507n8; Occupy Psychiatry 89, 94 psychiatric survivor moment 83–5
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) 89, punk: anarchism and 440–1; antifascism and
240–50, 304 61–3; Black Blocs and 292–3; Do It Yourself
Oppressed, The 63 economy of 442–5; Food not Bombs and 410;
Ortellado, P. 298 hacking and 310; music 436–7; politicizing
influence of 359–60, 363, 385; squats/social
pacifism 8, 61, 73, 75–6, 78, 299, 338, 344 centres and 423–4, 514–15
Packard, E. 83 Pussy Riot 33, 35
Pakistan 169, 222
Palestine, Palestinians 70–1, 73, 128, 131–2, Quakers 215, 363, 495, 530
164–5, 169–72, 242, 260, 264, 348, 503, 517 Québec 123–4, 240, 291, 293, 299, 300; see also
Palmater, P. 147, 150 Montréal

544
 Index

queer see LGBTQ+ 516; Kebele (Bristol) 421, 425–8; Ticinese

The Quiet Woman 32–3 (Milan) 420; Wyers (Amsterdam) 516
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) 55, 61–2, 363
racism: 47, 54–5, 61–5, 76–7, 98, 113, 134–5, social media see networks
147–8, 176n20, 195, 200, 215–16, 223–6, social war 328, 333
232–3, 274, 306, 345, 499; 501–4; see solidarity 24, 27, 38
also antifascism; antiracism; ethnicity; solnit 11
nationalism South Africa 72
radicalism (concept) 4–17, 56, 73, 85–6, 163–5, South Korea 256
181, 183, 191, 241, 263, 292–3, 296–300, 322, Spain: civil war 54, 284, 363, 377, 435; elections
387–8, 392–3, 418–19, 463, 486, 497, 499, 315–16, 319; Reconquista 170; see also
511, 524 Barcelona; Indignados
Rastafarians 495 Specials, The 62–3
Reclaim the Streets 128, 271, 284, 419, 435 speciesism 47–8, 50, 108, 110–11, 423
Red Action 61–2 squats: cafés 425–6; 516; migrants’ 205; squatter
Red Army Faction (RAF) 513–14 movement 510–22; see also social centres
Red Brigades 335, 513 squatter handbook 512
Redskins, The 62 Sri Lanka 259–60
religion, religious: 31, 203, 235, 526–30, 536; Srnicek, N. 380–1
anti-militarism 75; fundamentalism 6, 8, 24, Standing Rock see No Dakota Access Pipeline
27, 418, radicalism 492–507 state, state power: 16, 29–30, 49, 55–6, 78,
repression see violence 84–6, 93, 135–8, 145–6, 152, 180, 189,
reproductive labour 100, 533; see also care 207, 208n5, 261–4, 332–4, 381–2, 401–2,
reproductive rights 24–38, 188 406–7, 434, 533–4; see also anarchism;
resources, natural 97–9; 135, 138–42, 151–2, criminalisation; violence
164, 166–9, 261, 263, 343 stigma 25, 183–6, 348, 524, 531
revolution: agricultural 384, 406; Bolivarian Stop Huntingdon Animal cruelty (SHAC) 42–3,
168; English 360; food 461–74; French 5, 46–7
57, 360; Haitian 168; industrial Irish 35–7; strike 59, 306, 316, 322, 378, 470, 513; hunger
Russian 368; social 49, 430n6, 448n1, 501; 51, 90; students’ 293
Spanish 284, 363, 377, 435 students see education, higher
Rhodes Must Fall 224, 226–8 subculture: 422, 427, 435, 445, 447, 510–19;
Rock Against Racism (RAR) 61–2 antifascist 61–2
Rocker, R. 74, 434, 448n3 subjectivity 35, 74, 195, 198, 201, 205, 307,
Rojava see Kurdistan 445, 487
Rose of Tralee 34–6 Sudbury Valley School 397
Rossiter, A. 25–7 Sukarieh, M. 392, 397
Rousseau, J. J. 395, 397, 406 Summerhill 397
rupture 245, 333 surveillance 55, 135, 150, 152, 188, 297, 303–7,
Russia 13, 18n5, 57–8, 368, 430n6, 448n1 311–12, 349, 351, 354, 534
sustainability see agriculture; ecology; emotions;
sabotage 43, 47, 108, 298, 313, 326, 338n4, 378, food
383, 385, 514 Syriza 59, 254, 314–16, 318–23
St. Patrick’s Day 29, 33, 36 Szasz, T. 83
Seattle 11, 292, 297, 299, 303, 345, 364, 409
self-management 365, 267 Tactical Frivolity Collective 293
Sex Pistols 61, 440 Tageszeitung 518
shame 28–33, 186–7 Tannock, S. 392, 397
Shapira, A. 502 Tarlau, R. 393–4, 401
Simon, B. 391–2 Tavaglione, N. 300
ska 63, 239, 449n14 Taylorism 376, 379
Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice technology: climate and 100–2; colonialism and
(SHARP) 61–3 170, 453; digital 53, 306–8, 310, 351–4, 362,
Slime 519n7 443; politics of 353–4, 453–9, 486, 503–4;
Slits, The 61 work and 376, 383–4, 388n5
social centres 419–30; Ex-Grand Banks techno (music) 356, 429, 511
(London) 421, 426; Hafenstrasse (Hamburg) theft, shoplifting 386

545
 Index

Third World 168–9, 171–2, 242, 501, 513 Vedder, J. 515

Thomas-Muller, C. 147 Vietnam war 70, 72, 495, 513
Tikkun ( journal) 502 Villa Roth 428
toilets 225–6 violence: activists’ 43, 48, 53, 56–61, 292–3,
Tolstoy/Tolstoyan 360 296–301, 326–38, 422, 513, 516; bombing 26,
Tonga 495 46, 67, 151, 297, 298, 326–31, 513; military
Toronto 90–4, 148, 240–6, 295, 298, 68–73, 169, 298; police 42, 143–4, 224, 250,
304–5, 353 258–60, 306, 379, 426–7, 503, 534; structural
totality 14, 16, 333 108–9, 169, 171, 182–4, 186–8, 212, 410–11;
total liberation 45, 47–50, 108, 110–11, see also abuse; nonviolence
114–16, 333 voluntary action
Trans and Womyn’s Action Camp (TWAC)
113, 118 Walia, H. 295
transphobia 112–13, 231, 235–6; see also Walker, A. 504
LGBTQ+ Wennington School 398
trauma 182–5, 232, 260, 513, 516, 534–6 White Overalls (Tute Bianche) 293
Treaty Alliance 149–50 Williams, A. 380–1
trigger warnings 232–4 Wilson, N. 147
Tsipras, A. 59, 322 Winstanley, G. 495
Tubman, H. 78, 186, 495 womanists 506
Turner, N. 495 WOMBLES 426–7
women’s houses 514
Ukraine 57–8 women’s march 224, 228
Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs 149 work, workers 21, 64–5, 104, 114, 116–17, 129,
unions: labour 7, 124, 243–4, 274, 298, 304, 242, 304, 374–88, 413–14, 418–20, 459,
377–8, 383–7, 420, 435, 443, 514; student 467; see also anti-productivism; exploitation;
230–1; see also Confederación Nacional del unions
Trabajo; Industrial Workers of the World World Bank (WB) 216, 241, 292–3, 426, 461
Unitarian Universalists 495, 500 World War: First 26, 67, 73, 142, 168;
universal basic income 381–2 Second 110, 140, 142, 168, 336, 397, 407,
urban renewal 511–13 449n25, 513
utopianism 13, 86, 89–90, 124, 170–1, 271, 307, WSF 212, 216, 217
371, 375, 381, 384, 385, 388n5, 391, 402, 478 WTO 89, 94, 216, 345, 409

Vancouver 295, 305, 356 Zapatistas (EZLN) 9, 11, 260, 425–6, 502–3
vanguard, vanguardism 9–10, 14–15, 124, Zerzan, J. 382–4, 406
126–7, 334–7, 375, 381–2, 526 Zionism see nationalism
Varoufakis, Y. 65 Zuquete, J. P. 297

546