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strategies for change 151 was the Pure Genius squat, set up in 1996 on a patch of derelict land owned by Guinness in Wandsworth, South London. The squat was turned into an ‘eco-village’, permanently inhabited by between 50 to 100 people. Pure Genius could neither resolve the shortage of housing in London nor remedy the ecological damage sustained by the city, and to this extent the protest was symbolic. Yet the squat raised these issues through the press interest it generated; and to the extent that the squatters demonstrated the possibility of an alternative way of life, it was a practical response to a particular situation. Sabotage is a well-known form of direct action, once pioneered by syndicalists and now assuming new forms. One is ‘hactivism’ or cyber activism. It includes the jamming or infiltration of computer systems and the subversive use of domain names to attack wellknown corporate brands: Starbucks is a favourite. Another form of sabotage is monkeywrenching. Monkeywrenching is particularly associated with eco-anarchists and it describes a form of non-violent direct action. Unlike traditional saboteurs who attempted to clog up production processes, monkeywrenchers ‘act heroically in defence of the wild to put a monkeywrench into the gears of the machine that is destroying natural diversity’. This ‘safe, easy, fun, and … effective’ activity includes tree spiking, the disabling of road-building equipment and the sinking of whalers. 61 Back in the towns, anarchists encourage urban climbing and wall protests, ‘unreality TV’ – performance for CCTV cameras – and culture jamming through subvertising or adbusting – the defacing, reshaping and overpasting of billboards to challenge corporate gloss. A sales pitch for Rover simply reading ‘Enjoy’, was subverted with the addition of: ‘more pollution’. To give another example, an advert for a Hyundai miniature which read ‘Amuse the kids, Park it sideways in the garage’ was subvertised with ‘and leave it there’. Advertising hoardings are not subvertiser’s only targets. Creative use of green felt pens to highlight and transform the ‘buck’ in ‘Starbuck’ and the ‘off’ in ‘coffee house’ helps to take some of the shine from the corporate logo. Other anarchists create spoof ads: one idea for vodka pictures a name-tagged foot in a morgue with the slogan ‘Absolute on Ice’ underneath. Following a similar logic, anarchists produce placards urging ‘bomb poor people’, ‘bombs not bread’, ‘money is my life’. Reclaim the Streets (RTS) have pioneered the street party as a form of direct action against the car, consumerism and segmentation of public life. The action involves whole neighbourhoods, thus drawing new audiences to the campaign whilst simultaneously
152 anarchism: a beginner’s guide helping to revive local community networks. RTS argue that these illegal actions often wrong-foot the authorities because they emphasize the extent to which anarchism fosters collective responsibility, communality and fun. Whilst some class-struggle anarchists denounce RTS campaigning as middle-class posturing, others point out that RTS actions have mobilized effective mass support for old-style workers’ struggles. civil disobedience Civil disobedience is usually defined as an act of non-violent resistance (even in the face of violence) to a specific injustice for which participants anticipate arrest. The definition distinguishes civil disobedience from direct action: a monkeywrencher who attempts to disable bulldozers covertly wherever they are found is engaged in direct action, whilst a monkeywrencher who commits the same act publicly and in order to frustrate a particular building scheme is performing an act of civil disobedience. Like symbolic and direct action it is popular with non-anarchist as well as anarchist protestors. However, in contrast to non-anarchist civil disobedience, anarchist civil disobedience does not imply an acknowledgment of the state’s legitimacy. To the contrary, anarchists disobey with the long-term commitment to its overthrow (some anarchists prefer the term ‘social’ to ‘civil’ disobedience in order to emphasize this difference). Civil disobedience is associated with four particular writers and activists – Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King – and takes two forms. For followers of Thoreau civil disobedience can take violent or non-violent forms. In 1859 Thoreau famously defended the murder of five unarmed pro-slavery settlers by the abolitionist John Brown as an act of civil disobedience. In Thoreau’s view, each individual should decide what constitutes appropriate action. In contrast, Tolstoy, Gandhi and King rejected violence. Indeed, Tolstoy not only believed that violence was immoral, he specifically rejected the appeal to conscience as a justification for anarchist terrorism. There was, he believed, an intimate relationship between the means and ends of revolutionary change such that an act of violence was more likely to perpetuate than overcome an injustice based on the exercise of violence. Gandhi adopted a similar view. One of the outstanding features of his Sarvodaya movement was that means are never instrumental, but always end-creating. 62
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contents Acknowledgements vii intro
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acknowledgements A number of people
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chapter two anarchist rejections of
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chapter three anarchy We have alway
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Page 186 and 187: index 177 Farrow, Lynne 119 fascism
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