‘Stop staring up, start looking down’, reads the slogan currently doing the rounds on London buses, courtesy of expert desire manufacturers M&C Saatchi. As part of an ad campaign promoting tours to the top of the latest addition to the city’s skyline, the Shard, the underlying message is non-too subtle and unashamed in its candour. ‘Hey plebs! Unable to afford a house anywhere in the capital, let alone a mega-apartment in Europe’s tallest building? Drown your sorrows by paying for a trip to see how the other half live!’ Or perhaps more accurately, in accordance with popular lexicon, the other 1%. I can’t help but be reminded of the somewhat sadistic catchphrase  from the 1980’s TV quiz show Bullseye- ‘Come and have a look at what you could have won!’

Though the omnipresent phallus that is the Shard is a highly visible architectural metaphor for the Government’s continued shafting of the country via its austerity clusterfuck, there is a less visible ‘spatial practice’ (to reference Lefebvre once more) whose power to simultaneously shape the city and give people back some semblance of ‘right’ to it is often obscured by security fencing and tabloid scare stories. The practice to which I refer is arguably as old as private property itself, and takes a myriad of forms in response to the conditions in which it occurs. The subject of my polemic rambling is of course squatting, and more to the point, its recent criminalisation by way of section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders (LASPO) bill of 2012, which made squatting in residential properties in England and Wales a criminal offence. A crime for which one can now receive a custodial sentence of up to six months and a fine of £5000.

You may already be aware of the last minute amendment to the LASPO bill that resulted in this new law, thanks to the right wing media furore which provided the dirty curtain behind which it went to work on lubricating the bill’s passage into legislature. Sensationalist headlines spewed forth, straw men were brought to life (or perhaps simply dusted off and resurrected), and squatters were forever cast as dirty feral scroungers. Worse even, at least for a while, than long term welfare claimants, the 21^st century’s undeserving poor and regular tabloid punch bag. That squatters aren’t claiming housing benefit and instead finding their own solution to the UK’s deepening housing crisis was a fact lost in the sustained siege on truth which focused exclusively on the (often ‘foreign’) crusties waiting to squat your house the moment you left for your romantic citybreak/hospital appointment/trip to the corner shop. Indeed it was only last week that the Evening Standard attempted to kill two birds with one lamentably pernicious stone, by weaving its anti-squatting stance with an equally bigoted anti-immigration story, in claiming that half of the people arrested under section 144 have been Romanian.

Omitted also from this quagmire of quasi-debate was the fact that should the above scenario actually transpire, and a squatter were to displace someone from their home or a property they were about to move in to, under the existing Criminal Law Act of 1977 they would be committing a criminal offence- thereby giving police the right to remove them immediately. 160 lawyers and other legal professionals made this point in a joint letter to the Guardian back in 2011. When responding to the Government’s ‘consultation’ prior to section 144’s introduction, even the Metropolitan Police stated that the previous law was ‘broadly in the right place.’ Contrary to the dominant media discourse of widespread ‘home stealing’ which served as the well chewed stick that obedient politicians gleefully chased, only ten respondents out of some 2200 actually claimed to be ‘victims’ of squatting. Indeed, 97% of those that did respond were opposed to the new legislation. ‘Consultation’ in this instance, as in the example of the Heygate, appears to have been a mere box ticking exercise designed to reassure those quaint souls who still place some shred of misguided faith in the concept of democratic procedure. Who knew…?

****

Thus far this all seems a little retrospective and as such, now sadly moot. However, in order to mark the six months since LASPO’s introduction, Squatter’s Action for Secure Homes (SQUASH) has released a report which analyses the effects that the legislation has had, calling into question its efficacy and consequently, its necessity. Backed by MP’s, peers, lawyers, academics and homeless charities, the report places the anti-squatting law in context against the backdrop of recession, austerity, rising homelessness and the housing crisis, and concludes with a call for its complete repeal. In support, Labour MP John McDonnell has tabled an Early Day Motion echoing this demand, and SQUASH are urging people to write to their MP asking them to add their name to McDonnell’s proposal. This comes mere weeks after Tory MP Mike Weatherley tabled his own EDM calling for an extension to section 144 to encompass commercial buildings, thereby criminalising squatting completely. The SQUASH report articulates clearly how, in the midst of the aforementioned media frenzy, section 144 was ‘snuck through the back door’ (as John McDonnell puts it) by only being debated by MP’s at the bill’s third hearing- preventing thorough scrutiny and debate at committee stage, a vital part of Parliament’s  normal legislative procedure.

After several months of painstaking FOI requests, the SQUASH report reveals that so far the only people convicted under section 144 have been otherwise homeless people occupying derelict and abandoned property. Figures released by homeless charity Crisis which are also included in SQUASH’s report show that 40% of single homeless people have at some point resorted to squatting. Despite having no prior convictions Alex Haigh, 21, and Michael Minorczyk, 27, are currently serving 12 and 15 weeks respectively, simply for seeking shelter in completely empty and disused buildings. This is an important point as it belies the original rationale behind the legislation, and furthermore reinforces the point that squatting advocates have seemingly been making for ever- that there is a clear difference between an empty, disused and abandoned building, and one which is lived in or used regularly. Not however, in the eyes of the new law. As such it is evident that in stark contrast to the logic that supposedly underpinned the law’s introduction, section 144 is thus far not being used to protect homeowners. Rather, it serves to protect a notion, an ideal. That of liberal property rights, and by extension the actors that choose to exploit such an ideal and profit from keeping buildings deliberately empty. In the process it is persecuting the most vulnerable- those who have little choice but to squat, and would otherwise be rough sleeping.

This point was driven home in demonstrably tragic fashion when it emerged last month that Daniel Gauntlett, a 35 year old long term homeless man, froze to death on the doorstep of a derelict house in Kent after local police had warned him against using it to sleep in. Whether they cited section 144 directly is unclear, though as the SQUASH report reveals, it is a non-notifiable offence for the majority of UK police authorities, meaning that many forces aren’t even obliged to keep a record of its use. Despite appeals for him to do so, Mike Weatherley MP declined to comment on the incident, instead preferring to issue a tired tirade of stereotypical guff, simultaneously accusing all squatters of being ‘web savvy anarchists’, who at the same time apparently desire a return to a ‘dysfunctional medieval wasteland’. That his Government’s austerity program seems to be achieving the latter goal in spectacular fashion appears to be an irony lost on the Rt. Hon Mike Weatherley.

In conclusion then, I suppose that this article should be read as a call for an increased spatial awareness. Not in the same way that M&C Saatchi propose though. Most of us don’t have the means to simply ‘start looking down’, and more to the point, perhaps wouldn’t want to. Nevertheless, ‘developments’ like the Shard, and decidedly less visible ones like that which will replace the Heygate Estate continue unabated, with the increased ‘decanting’ of Fred Manson’s undesirables to the periphery as a result. It is important that our spatial awareness joins the dots between opposition to development schemes that further marginalise large swathes of the urban population, and the anti-squatting law. Both are attempts to regulate, control and restructure the urban landscape in accordance with a specific ideological agenda. As is this months housing benefit ‘reform’, the full and lasting effects of which are yet to be felt, as more and more people are unable to continue living in the areas they have built their lives in.

Legislation like section 144 prioritises exchange value over actual use-value, and allows property speculators to profit whilst literally hundreds of thousands of buildings lie empty and unused. Enough to offer every rough sleeper in Britain a roof should they want one, and then some. Section 144 further cements the dichotomy that neoliberalism’s aggressive commodification of urban space imposes- that of city space as either productive or consumptive, with seemingly little room to manoeuvre in between.  Squatting is one such tactic which refutes such a distinction, existing in the cracks between the two, and prising open space in which the use value and potential of urban areas can be fully realised, and creative, collective solutions to the housing crisis which rely on neither the state or the market can be explored and embraced.

You can read the SQUASH report here, and petition your MP to sign John McDonnell’s EDM via this link. If you would like to do even more, there are lots of empty buildings in the UK, as mentioned. Just saying… spatial awareness.

_________

Matthew Fish is a member of the Squash Campaign

| Florence Scialom |

The fact that globalisation has an impact on people’s lives in the UK is undeniable while the desirability and level of this impact is still very much up for debate. After spending the last few months in Totnes — a small yet increasingly well-known town in Devon, UK — I have spoken with many people seeking practical ways to connect to their local area so that they do not have to rely so heavily on sprawling global supply chains.

There are many good reasons for this engagement with the local, such as to help minimise reliance on the excessive use of non-renewable energy supplies, to raise awareness of the conditions under which goods are produced, and to enable people to make direct social connections with their community. These considerations can have an impact on many areas of people’s lives in Totnes, and they are particularly tangible when looking at issues around food.

Food is central to our existence; we all rely on it to live. Yet how many of us truly know where our food has come from, what has been involved in its production, and what is contained within it? The mass-production and depersonalisation of food is epitomised in the modern-day supermarket experience. As consumers, many people have become accustomed to eating packaged and processed food and have little awareness of how it came to sit on the supermarket shelves. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture continues to erode and distort the diversity of our food chains, and a massive amount of what is produced continues to be wasted.

Most of us are well aware of these problems, but often it is hard to know where to start with tackling such wide, systemic issues.

During the time I have been living in Totnes I’ve noticed that a strong contingent of people avoid the supermarket chains’ attempts to dominate consumption habits. Further, some people and community groups in Totnes actively participate in creating more sustainable, versatile and resilient local food systems.

There is a wealth of community-run food projects engaging with this topic in different ways, many under the Transition Town Totnes (TTT) umbrella and others spreading beyond it. Initiatives such as TTT’s Nut Tree project seek to “add to the availability of local food on our doorsteps”, and have planted and continue to manage 300 trees to date. TTT’s Incredible Edible group develop pockets of un-used land in town to make “public spaces beautiful food resources”. The public are encouraged to freely pick the crops grown on the Incredible Edible sites across Totnes, encouraging an ethos of social and environmental connection through food.

Totnes Development Trust’s Gardening for Health project enables the local Doctor’s surgery to prescribe gardening sessions where volunteers are led by qualified gardeners to grow food in a council-owned garden. Another local community project, Little Bo People, provides locally and ethically sourced meat through rearing sheep on the local Castle meadow. This enables people in the community not only to gain an awareness of where their meat comes from, but also to participate in how it is cared for. This project is now seeking to diversify their work into caring for chickens, bees, and fruit trees.

I have also attended a foraging workshop as part of TTT’s Skillshare programme. There are regular foraging courses in Totnes, with many people taking advantage of this abundant free, fresh food. Those people running these kinds of initiatives in Totnes are aiming to grow as much food as possible for themselves in a celebratory, collective and open way.

In addition to the community-growing projects I have also seen initiatives seeking to engage the larger players in food markets – producers and retailers – to strive for more local and accountable food systems.

The Food-Link project being run by Transition Town Totnes is a great example of this. The project “seeks to strengthen the links between local producers (within a 30 mile radius of Totnes) and the retailers and restaurants within the town”.

This work has helped uncover some common barriers to local food supply. One issue that has been highlighted is that when one looks at what can be eaten locally the diet is quite heavily based on meat and dairy, which requires far more land and energy than other food production methods. Some crops that could be grown for human consumption are often being used as animal feed or are not being grown at all due to the lack of adequate processing facilities in the area.

To tackle this issue the Food-Link project is exploring the staple crops that are not currently grown locally for human consumption but could be — such as grains, legumes, edible oils and nuts — and looking at what processing facilities would be needed to make this easier. From these types of activities a picture begins to emerge of how practical engagement can have a real effect on food systems and people’s consumption habits.

The level of engagement around food production and consumption from some people and groups in Totnes seems to be changing attitudes in many ways. Those involved are engaging with nature, and adapting their expectations about food: its availability, its appearance and where it comes from.

Well-known academic and activist Vandana Shiva recently spoke to a rapt audience in Totnes about how “food is the currency of life” and how we need to reclaim ownership from mass agricultural corporations over what is grown, what we eat, and what goes into our food. Her talk certainly did not fall on deaf ears; there is an infectious enthusiasm that surrounds some people’s engagement with food systems here in Totnes and many are actively working towards positive change. My time here so far has increased my faith in the power of small-scale local action enabling a butterfly effect of positive change. For me, personally, it has also motivated a rethink of my own consumption habits. I look forward to putting these new ideas into practice in the area in which I live.

____________

Florence Scialom is a Masters student at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She is living in Totnes for three months as part of her research into local economies and (alternative measures of progress outside of) economic growth.

During her time in Totnes she is volunteering with a new project called the Network of Wellbeing (NOW).

To stay in touch with Florence you can follow her on Twitter @Flo_Sci

Top image is of a group of volunteers at a community plot in Totnes and the second image is of a  foraging skillshare, given by Dave Hamilton. Both images by Annie Laymarie of Transition Town Totnes Skillshares.

| Marina Sitrin |

Introduction

On the night of the 19th (2001) while the news was on television and the middle class was at home watching, seeing people from the most humble sectors crying, women crying in front of supermarkets, begging for or taking food, and the State of Siege was declared, then and there began the sound of the cacerola (the banging of pots and pans.) In one window, and then another window, in one house and then another house, and soon, there was the noise of the cacerola … The first person began to bang a pot and saw her neighbor across the street banging a pot, and the one downstairs too, and soon there were four, five, fifteen, twenty, and people moved to their doorways and saw other people banging pots in their doorways and saw on television that this was happening in another neighborhood, and another neighborhood … and hundreds of people gathered banging pots until at a certain moment the people banging pots began to walk.

(Sitrin 2006: 22)

Argentina: a crack in history – 19 and 20 December 2001

Hundreds of thousands joined the cacerolazo on 19 and 20 December 2001 in Argentina, and continued in the streets for the days and weeks that followed. Within two weeks five governments had resigned: the Minister of the Economy being the first to flee on 19 December, with the president rapidly following on the 20th.1 The institutions of power did not know what to do. On the evening of 19 December a state of siege was declared, reverting back to well-established patterns of state power and violence. The people were breaking with the past, with what had always been done: they no longer stayed at home in fear, they came onto the streets with even more bodies and sounds – and then the sound of the cacerolazo found a voice, a song. It was a shout of rejection and a song of affirmation. Que Se Vayan Todos! (‘They All Must Go!’) was sung, and sung together with one’s neighbor. It was not just a shout against what was, but it was a song of affirmation sung together by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. ‘Ohhh Que Se Vayan Todos, que no quede ni uno solo’ (‘They all must go, and not even one should remain’). People sang, banged pots, and greeted one another, kissing the cheeks of neighbors whose names had been discovered only recently. People were seeing one another for the first time. It was a rupture with the past. It was a rupture with obedience. It was a rupture with not being together. It was the beginning of finding one another, oneself, and of meeting again.

The 19th and 20th was a crack in history upon which vast political landscapes unfolded. Revolutions were created – revolutions of everyday life. Throughout history, in numerous places and various eras, there are moments like 19 and 20 December 2001 in Argentina, when the ways in which we see things drastically change: something occurs that allows our imagination to open up to alternative ways of seeing and being, opening cracks in history (Zapatistas). These openings can come from any number of places, from natural disasters to rebellions, strikes, and uprisings.

This book addresses what happens in the wake of this rupture, and how the often-inspiring moments that emerge in that space can become lasting, transforming rupture into revolution. When formal institutions of power are laid bare, as often takes place in the moments of a crisis, people frequently come together, look to one another, and create new supportive relationships (Solnit2005, 2009). These can be some of the most beautiful moments, and moments of the greatest solidarity, that we ever experience. However, what happens repeatedly is that after a period of time, these new relationships are co-opted by institutional power and our previous ways of relating return. How can we prevent this? Under what circumstances is this less likely to occur? How can we bring about moments where history breaks open, where our imaginations are freed and we are able to envision and create new landscapes towards new horizons?

Around the world communities and movements are successfully creating everyday revolutions in social relationships. The autonomous social movements in Argentina are one of these many movements. This book examines what has been taking place in Argentina over the past ten years so as to help us glimpse what alternatives are possible. In particular it looks at the question of rupture as an opening for new social relationships, and asks how we can not only open up a space for new ways of being in a crisis, but continue to develop these relationships. This book shows what has worked in the Argentine experience, what has continued to transform people and communities, and what some of the obstacles have been to an even deeper, longer lasting, and more transformative revolution. The overarching question of what success means is at the heart of what is addressed within these pages.

This book will examine concrete experiences, and I will argue that what allows rupture to continue as revolution of the everyday is a combination of the following:

• horizontalidad – a form of direct decision making that rejects hierarchy and works as an ongoing process;

• autogestión – a form of self-management with an implied form of horizontalidad;

• concrete projects related to sustenance and survival;

• territory – the use and occupation of physical and metaphorical space;

• changing social relationships – including changing identity with regard to the personal and collective;

• politica afectiva – a politics and social relationship based on love and trust;

• self-reflection – individual and collective, as to the radical changes taking place and how they break from past ways of organizing; and

• autonomy, challenging ‘power over’ and creating ‘power with’ – sometimes using the state, but at the same time, against and beyond the state.

Taken together, these new social relationships, grounded in concrete experiences and social creation, form a new way of being, a new way of relating and surviving, and do so in a way that is successful – as defined by those in the movement, measuring this success by dignity and the creation of new subjectivities. Many autonomous movements and communities around the globe are prefiguring the world that they wish to create, that is, creating the world that they desire in their day-to-day relationships. Many use the language of prefigurative politics to describe this relationship.  Prefigurative politics, as it sounds, is behaving day-to-day as much as possible in the way that you envision new social and economic relationships: the way you would want to be.

Worldwide these are not small ‘experiments’, but are communities that include hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people – people and communities who are opening up cracks in history and creating something new and beautiful in the opening. These new social relationships have existed, sometimes for many years: enough time to have children born of the new experience who speak as new people. The specific example I use is Argentina, in part because of the diversity of backgrounds of the movement and its participants, from class and social diversity, to political and experiential.

From cracks to creation: the emergence of horizontal Formations

In the days of the popular rebellion people who had been out in the streets cacerolando (banging pots) describe finding themselves, finding each other, looking around at one another, introducing themselves, wondering what was next and beginning to ask questions together. They also spoke of this new place where they were meeting, one without the forms of institutional powers that previously existed. Five governments had resigned and the legitimacy of the state was a question.

The Que Se Vayan Todos occurred, many of those in power left, and now the question was what to do in this opening. There is no documentation or exact memory recorded by those participating in the neighborhood assemblies as to how they began; but what is remembered is looking to one another, finally seeing each another, gathering in the open, and forming neighborhood assemblies. The feeling of no te metas (‘don’t get involved’) was melting away, and a new meeting was emerging (this will be addressed in detail in Chapter 2).

The social movements that arose in Argentina are socially, economically, and geographically diverse. They comprise working-class people taking over factories and running them collectively; middle-class urban dwellers, many recently declassed, working to meet their needs while in solidarity with those around them; the unemployed, like so many unemployed around the globe, facing the prospect of never encountering regular work, finding ways to survive and become self-sufficient, using mutual aid and love; and autonomous indigenous communities struggling to liberate stolen land. All of these active movements have been relating to one another, and constructing new types of networks that reject the hierarchical template bequeathed to them by established politics. Part of this rejection includes a break with the concept of ‘power over’: people are attempting to organize on a flatter plane, with the goal of creating ‘power with’ one another (Colectivo Situaciones 2001; Holloway 2002). Embedded in these efforts is a commitment to value both the individual and the collective. Simultaneously, separately and together these groups are organizing in the direction of a more meaningful and deeper freedom, using the tools of direct democracy, horizontalidad, and direct action. Together, what is created is a revolution of the everyday. Even with the changes, challenges, and decrease in numbers in many movements, this revolution continues, quietly perhaps, slowly perhaps, but it is walking. The movements in Argentina, and the new relationships and articulations of the process of creation there, have become a point of reference for many others around the world: from a network of Greek assemblies collectively translating the oral history of the Argentine movements and organizing dozens of conversations about the experience in 2011, to the US Occupy movements using horizontal language, whether it be horizontalism or

another derivation, to describe what they are creating; and in the movements that emerged in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and other parts of Europe and from 2010 onwards, speaking of the forms of democracy that they are constructing as horizontal.

__________

Marina Sitrin holds a PhD in Global Sociology and a JD in International Women’s Human Rights. Her work focuses on social movements and justice, specifically looking at new forms of social organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics, and new affective social relationships. Her first book, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, is an oral history based on the then emergent autonomous movements in Argentina, published in Spanish (Chilavert 2005) and English (AK Press 2006). While much of her recent published work has been on contemporary social movements in Argentina, she has worked throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, and Japan. Her current research includes the global mass assembly movements, specifically in Greece, Spain, and Egypt.

Her new book Everyday Revolutions: Autonomy and Horizontalism in Argentina is published by Zed Books.

| Anthony Davidson |

With the coming food price crisis we need a social, local food industry to replace the corporate, profit-led, national food industry.  There are some ways we can protect ourselves from price hikes with the help of Social Enterprise BigBarn whose mission is to divert some of the £120b spent with supermarkets to local producers and retailers with massive social benefits to all. 

BigBarn was set up by a 5th generation farmer who noticed the onions he sold to a middle man for £130/ton on a Tesco shelf for the equivalent of £850/ton.  This happened every year and is the same for most food products, including milk.

Twelve years later 7,000 local food outlets have an icon on BigBarn’s local food map with more signing up every day.  460 have set up online shops in an Amazon-style online MarketPlace and 90 other websites have the map and MarketPlace on their websites to help more people find local food and build a new local food industry.

Thousands of consumers visit BigBarn every day and some have even joined the food industry through BigBarn’s Crop for the Shop scheme where consumers can sell their home-grown food through participating retailers.

So what about the coming food crisis?  Experts are already predicting a large rise in food prices as rain in this country has caused fungal disease in wheat crops, and in America, drought has reduced Corn yields leading to a sharp rise in all grain prices. These rises will soon increase the price of bread and cereals and then meat, as the grain to feed animals rises.

Most agree that it is extremely irresponsible of governments around the world not to stockpile grain for times like these: Grain stocks will be at their lowest since 2007 with only enough for 72 days consumption.

So after you have told your local MP to store more grain, here are some ideas on how we can protect ourselves from global price increases:

1. Buy local seasonal food

It’s important to avoid buying any food that will be affected by global commodity prices.  Unfortunately, any animals fed grain (chickens, pigs, some cattle, some sheep) will also see prices rise.  So find meat from animals fed on grass, which will have more flavour and have a great deal less dangerous fats. Other products like potatoes and seasonal veg should be the same as usual, so buying local and direct, significant savings can be made.

2. Make your own bread

Bread prices will rise as the cost of wheat rises. The price of a loaf, however, will rise much more than the flour ingredient and you will also be able to avoid all the additives in bread. For more on Real Bread visit Sustainweb or to buy flour visit the BigBarn MarketPlace.

3. Eat less meat or cheaper cuts

To buy grass fed meat and cover the extra costs of food you may not be able to do without, like pasta, cut down on the amount of meat you buy, or get cheaper cuts.

A grass fed, well hung, topside of beef from your local farmer, or butcher, will be cheaper and much better than a supermarket sirloin joint, (that was mooing in an intensive stock shed the day before).

To find your local meat producer or butcher type your postcode into BigBarn local food map page

4. Grow your own 

This makes food really cheap food and a possible earner when you sell your excess via BigBarn’s Crop for the Shop scheme

Watch the video about the Crop for the Shop initiative in schools on the BBC

5. Buy in bulk

Buying in bulk will often mean a wholesale price 50% of retail.  Why not get some friends organised and share your bulk purchases?

6. Cook

Anyone who can read, or even watch a video, can cook. ‘Cook’ means converting cheap, fresh, local, season, healthy, ingredients in to great meals.

You can make 10 times the quantity of vegetable soup for the same price as one can of a well known brand soup.  And end up with a healthier meal.  Ready meals in the supermarket might look cheap but are NOT. For a video recipe see the BigBarn KIS (Keep it Simple) Cookery video page 

These are exciting times: Let’s get enthusiastic about food and help build a long lasting, sustainable, local, food industry.

________

Anthony Davidson is founder of Big Barn an Amazon-style market place for small producers.

| Santiago Zabala |

As Slavoj Zizek said, “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe” is probably the most urgent existential emergency we face today but this threat cannot simply be overcome by joining movements or green parties; it must also be accompanied by an appropriate philosophical understanding of plants.

This is probably why the philosopher Michael Marder has recently decided to take on the philosophical obligation to criticize a deplorable alliance between the liberal capitalist states and metaphysical philosophical impositions that consider the environment as something that must be manipulated for our own purposes.

Although he is not the only philosopher in history to work on this problem, his recent commitment to this problem (as his books, articles, and debates demonstrate) merits our attention if we recognize we are also plants in some way. This was actually the view of Pascal and Nietzsche. While at first in the Pensées he said “man is a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed,” Nietzsche in his notes of 1872-73, pointed out how the “plant is also a measuring being.” While the first clearly recognized we are or at least belong to the realm of plants, the second acknowledge the existential nature of plants, that is, their effect on us. In order to understand Marder’s theoretical operation, it is necessary to outline the one of the philosophical projects within which his efforts stand: “pensiero debole,” “Weak thought.”

Weak thought was first formulated in 1979 by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and has since become a position common to many hermeneutic philosophers including, among others, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, and many others. This philosophy has always focused in weakening the tie between politics and metaphysics, that is, power and Being. This is probably why weak thought, contrary to other philosophical positions such as analytical philosophy or structuralism, has not developed into an organized system because of all the violent consequences such systematization always entails.

The violence of systems is often expressed through metaphysical impositions, aiming to submit everything to their own measures, standards, and agendas. But as the philosophy of the “weak” (which claims the right of the oppressed to interpret, vote, and live), weak thought does not only follow a logic of resistance, but also promotes a progressive weakening of the strong structures of metaphysics. Weakening, similarly to deconstruction, another philosophy Marder subscribes to, does not search for correct solutions wherein thought may finally come to rest, but rather seeks theoretical emancipation from truth and other concepts that frame and restrict the possibilities of new philosophical, scientific, or religious revolutions.

These revolutions, as Thomas Kuhn explained, are the indications that science shifts through different phases and, instead of making “progress toward truth,” changes “paradigms.” But just as science, so too philosophy, religion, and other disciplines constantly change paradigms, such that the older theories become different, though not incorrect; in this “postmodern” condition truth does not derive from the world “as it is,” but from the effects responsible for its condition, namely “effective history.”

Contrary to some critics of weak thought, such emancipation does not imply a simple refusal of metaphysics, which would inevitably produce another variation on metaphysics, but rather, as Heidegger said, a distortion or twisting in order to distance us from its frames. This distancing does not indicate a general failure or “weakness of thinking” as such, but, instead, the possibility to develop all the hermeneutic potentialities of philosophy. Hermeneutics has traditionally defended the weak and, thus, the right of different interpretations to take place. What binds together weak thought and Marder’s investigations are the political motivations of hermeneutics.

Although it’s the weakness of Being that allows Marder to expose a philosophy of vegetative life free from our categories, measures, and frames, such freedom would be useless if it were to imply a non-hermeneutical concept of nature. After all, nature has always been framed as a normative concept both when it came to vegetal life and when it was bearing upon existence itself, determining how we should act and be regardless of our differences. This is why Marder presents his investigations as a call to give prominence and visibility to vegetal beings, taking care to avoid their objective description and, thereby, preserve their alterity. The challenge is to let the plants be and appear in the context of what, from our standpoint, entails profound obscurity, which, throughout the history of Western philosophy, has been the marker of their life. (Plant Thinking, 2013)

This is also why, in contrast to the previous metaphysical-philosophical accounts of vegetal life, where the essence of plants is determined only by applied and imposed categories, Marder suggests that we conceive of this essence as radically different from everything measured in human terms because plants are “not only are but also exist” as he also explained in an article last year. It is their existence that allows us to imagine our relation to plants not in terms of our “world” facing a “non-world”, but in terms of an interaction of two worlds: “ours” and the “plant-world”. Building upon the existential consequences of great continental thinkers, his philosophy is not of the plant but for the plant and, in this way, it is opposed to previous metaphysical positions. More significantly, Marder’s philosophy of vegetal life distinguishes the Being of plants from the beings themselves, that is, from the ontic categories the metaphysical tradition has always imposed on them. Following both Heidegger’s and Derrida’s destructions of the metaphysical tradition, Marder demands “an infinite loosening up, a weakening of the self’s boundaries, commensurate with the powerlessness (Ohnmacht) of the plants themselves”.

In responding to the end of metaphysics by weakening the ontic categories of vegetal life, Marder far from demonstrating that they were wrong, is implying that they were constrained politically, for instance, in being exclusively regulated by the “capitalist agro-scientific complex”, which is exploiting plants beyond any measure that could be drawn from the environment. His philosophical operation will advocate a political emancipation from this complex, as a result of the hermeneutic political philosophy touched by the Being of plants—the Being which is not an entity, but rather “a collective being,” a body of “non-totalizing assemblage of multiplicities, an inherently political space of conviviality”. Marder nicknames this political space “vegetal democracy,” which is not very different from the ecological political initiatives the so-called “marginal” governments of South America are activating. Just as these environmental political initiatives are constantly discredited and undermined by capitalist-run democracies, so metaphysics opposes such uncomfortable philosophical positions as weak thought, of which Marder’s philosophy is an outstanding example.

____________

Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona.

His books include The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2008), The Remains of Being (2009), and most recently, Hermeneutic Communism (2011, coauthored with G. Vattimo), all published by Columbia University Press.

First Issue: £3.95

Order now (at the bottom of the page) and receive the magazine the week beginning April 15th 2013.

Our first issue features filmmaker and activist Leah Borromeo writing about her film Cotton: Dirty White Gold and why 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995 — one every 30 minutes.  Fergus Walker of the Fife Diet — Europe’s largest local food movement — talks about how engineering and design (his People-Powered Flour Mill) can be used for social change, and organiser and lawyer Marina Sitrin explains how members of the Argentinean Recuperated Factories movement have recently supported Greek workers to transform their factories into cooperatives.

As a response to the global food waste scandal — with up to 20 million tonnes wasted in the UK every year — the Feeding the 5000 team explain how we can get involved in the Gleaning Network and join the ‘Arable Spring’. In an interview with journalist Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, he talks about how the work of the Tax Justice Network undermines the argument for austerity and how tax avoidance is central to our global economy, while resistance to this offshore industry is captured in the efforts of the activists US Uncut in Karin Hayes’ film We’re Not Broke.

As the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq passes we look at Peter Kennard’s shocking and unsettling photomontages from @earth and a founding member of Stop the War Coalition, Chris Nineham, argues the importance of taking to the streets to let our leaders know how we feel about war.

The magazine will also feature regular columns from climate campaigner John Stewart and from the social reporters of the Transition Network who will keep us updated with these movements.

We also have a recipe from The People’s Supermarket London and an open source beer recipe for you or your favourite brewer to try.

Every quarter we will be giving 10% of our magazine sales to a community-based project and this issue will be supporting the inspiring Brixton People’s Kitchen who create meals from food waste and sell them on a pay-what-you-can basis.  They are currently working on a building a mobile kitchen!

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh

April, 2013

After publishing 9 issues online and an illustrated book of selected articles and interviews we are taking a giant leap and adding a regular print edition to our publications.  The quarterly magazine will be a useful resource full of articles, interviews and illustrations as well as practical information like recipes, Open Source beer recipes, how to make breads, vegetable growing guides and D.I.Y projects like upcycling old clothes and furniture.

STIR is a nonprofit, reader-supported effort, so we need your help to get the magazine off the ground and pushed out into the hands of community organisers working in energy, food, farming, education, currencies, engineering, publishing and more. And every time we publish an issue we will be giving 10% from our magazine sales to a community-based project to support the inspiring work of people all over the UK and beyond.

Subscribe today and receive 4 issues per year!

• UK Readers – £16 (includes p+p)

• Europe Readers – £24 (includes p+p) via Paypal stirtoaction@gmail.com
• USA & Rest of the World – £30 (includes p+p) via Paypal stirtoaction@gmail.com

Our first issue is nearing completion, ready for publication in April 2013. It features filmmaker and activist Leah Borromeo writing about her film Cotton: Dirty White Gold and why 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1995 — one every 30 minutes.  Fergus Walker of the Fife Diet — Europe’s largest local food movement — talks about how engineering and design (his People-Powered Flour Mill) can be used for social change, and organiser and lawyer Marina Sitrin explains how members of the Argentinean Recuperated Factories movement have recently supported Greek workers to transform their factories into cooperatives.

As a response to the global food waste scandal — with up to 20 million tonnes wasted in the UK every year — the Feeding the 5000 team explain how we can get involved in the Gleaning Network and join the ‘Arable Spring’. In an interview with journalist Nicholas Shaxson, author of Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World, he talks about how the work of the Tax Justice Network undermines the argument for austerity and how tax avoidance is central to our global economy, while resistance to this offshore industry is captured in the efforts of the activists US Uncut in Karin Hayes’ film We’re Not Broke.

As the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq passes we look at Peter Kennard’s shocking and unsettling photomontages from @earth and a founding member of Stop the War Coalition, Chris Nineham, argues the importance of taking to the streets to let our leaders know how we feel about war.

The magazine will also feature regular columns from climate campaigner John Stewart and from the social reporters of the Transition Network who will keep us updated with these movements.

We also have a recipe from The People’s Supermarket London and an open source beer recipe for you or your favourite brewer to try!

Join us for the launch at Crate Brewery in Hackney, London on 20 April 2013!

STIR: Volume One is now available to buy! Get your hands on a limited copy of our first published collection of articles and artwork.

At a moment when alternatives are not obvious to all and most responses to austerity are all too predictable, this crowdfunded collection of articles and interviews from the first years of Stir Magazine — www.stirtoaction.com — looks at how inspiring and innovative groups are taking cooperative and community-led ideas from the margins to the mainstream.    

Simon Critchley discusses practice and theory and the importance of the Occupy Movement; Raj Patel argues that we should be demanding the world we can live in and not the world that the food industry can accommodate itself to; Derek Wall presents gift and commons-based economies as alternatives to the Market/State duopoly; David Bollier looks at how we can stop the private plundering of our common and public wealth; Nina Power analyses a decade of protests and riots and argues that we should be actively seeking to overturn a system that makes them necessary; Marianne Maeckelbergh is excited by the rise of horizontal decision-making in Occupy but looks at the problems with the process; Glyn Moody reviews the battle between copyright and the internet and the responding digital militancy; and James John Bell and J Cookson explain how campaigners need to move past sounding the alarm and into effective solutions.

More than 160 people were involved in getting this book authored, edited, illustrated, designed, crowdfunded and published.

Artwork by the JustSeeds Artists Cooperative, the Occupied Times’ Alex Charnley, radical illustrator Edd Baldry, and many others.

Edited by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh and Abby McFlynn of Stir Magazine.

Jim Rogers is a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer at the School of Communications, Dublin City University, Ireland. Jim’s recent research interests focus on how the music industry has negotiated the transition to digital. It points to many fundamental continuities in terms of how the industry operates, despite the perception of a ‘digital revolution’ bringing transformation to the domain.

Jim is the author of The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age — a forthcoming book [early 2013] from Bloomsbury Academic. Bloomsbury offers this summary:

“This book challenges the conventional wisdom that the internet is ‘killing’ the music industry. While technological innovations (primarily in the form of peer-to-peer file-sharing) have evolved to threaten the economic health of major transnational music companies, this book illustrates how those same companies have themselves formulated highly innovative response strategies to negate the harmful effects of the internet. In short, it illustrates how the radical transformative potential of the internet is being suppressed by legal and organisational innovations. Grounded in a social shaping perspective, the book contends that the internet has not altered pre-existing power relations in the music industry where a small handful of very large corporations have long since established an oligopolistic dominance. Furthermore, the book contends that widespread acceptance of the idea that online piracy is rampant, and music largely ‘free’ actually helps these major music companies in their quest to bolster their power. In doing this, this book serves to deflate much of the transformative hype and digital ‘deliria’ that has accompanied the internet’s evolution as a medium for mass communication.”

Our interview covers three broad themes:

1. the actual state of the music business amidst the hue and cry over file sharing and the decline of CD sales. More specifically, what are this business’s current practices and profitability?

2. the intersection of music and the technology involved in music making and how that is both distinct from and linked to the technology of computers and the internet. (for example: digital signal processing, midi, hard disk and software based recording, as opposed to: file sharing, hacking, digital distribution via internet, etc.)

3. IP regimes, criminalization of file sharing, assessing “threats”, real and imagined. Is “piracy” a boon or a curse for musicians and audiences? Is copyright doomed? What new opportunities present themselves as a result of the internet? And for whom?

RFE Episode Seven: music, technology and capitalism, an overview of current developments. An interview with Jim Rogers

Download Mp3

Music:

Novalima: Mamaye from the CD Karimba
Kassin & Berna Ceppas: Kapakiao from the CD ComFusoes 1 From Angola to Brazil
Ebo Taylor:  Ayesama from the CD Appia Kwa Bridge

In 2001, Argentina experienced the largest sovereign debt crisis in history.  As a result people’s bank accounts were frozen and workplaces were closed and asset-stripped – most Argentinians lost everything.  However, the response didn’t take long to come: bartering systems emerged that involved somewhere between 3 to 8 million people and workplaces were recuperated by formers workers who transformed them into co-operatives. In her new book Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina Marina Stirin retells her experiences of neighbourhood assemblies, the rise of the recuperated workplaces, and how horizontal decision making has become the popular form of organising responses to neoliberalism.

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Your new book Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina traces Argentina’s recent history from its sovereign debt crisis in 2001 through the bartering systems that emerged and the workplaces that were recuperated. The public’s demand, “They all must go!”, expressed a radical shift from parliamentary politics towards participatory democracy.

The financial crisis in 2001 obviously wasn’t the first crisis in Argentina’s history. What could begin to explain the different response?


Marina Sitrin: There are a number of things that can help explain the difference in response. One is the depth of the crisis: While there had been crises in the past, this was a growing crisis where privatization had reached a tipping point. In addition to this was the moment of the Cacerolazo, where protestors banged pots and pans. The government also froze people’s bank accounts and this was the spark when people began to realize how deep the crisis was. The government feared that there would be a run on the banks, like in 1930s America, and people would withdraw all of their money and devalue the currency.

That is on the issue of economics, though, and I guess you are asking why the new political form emerged in that moment? I think this is a really important question and we can begin by placing Argentina in the context of social movements that started in the mid-90s, particularly with the Zapatistas. We’ve also seen many forms of autonomous organisations form all around the world, but especially in Latin America. Then as we move towards the end of the ’90s, a big part of the conversation was the rise of social justice movements such as the anti-IMF.

I think Argentina is part of this global experience rejecting institutions of global finance and, in turn, rejecting the course of action that looks to them to solve our problems, and even not wanting them to even if it was possible. I think this is where the shift in Argentina comes from in a global context, but in terms of Argentina itself, in the book I talk about the group HIJOS – the children of the disappeared – who started organizing in the ’90s. You can see the roots and forms of horizontal organization, direct democracy and direct action in their work, as would also be seen after 2001 in groups like the unemployed.

History is a very tricky subject because one could go on and on about all the different connections that are probably true and, at the same time, none of them have to be necessarily or absolutely true. In Argentina you could look back to the late 1800s and early 1900s and find there was the largest Anarchist-Syndicalist movement in the Americas, at least, and in terms of publications probably the most in the world during this period. At the time workers were taking over parts of the South of Argentina, running workplaces and running towns.

This is a part of the history, but at the same time we have to ask does that have a direct connection with what happened in 2001, and also question why it didn’t happen earlier. I don’t know. I think history can have an influence on our imagination instead of the idea that something happened at some point in history and we are now attempting to replicate it.  There are a lot of examples like this in Argentina, and there is also, if you look at the political forms that emerged after 2001, a rejection of a lot of political forms that is consistent with what’s been taking place in Latin America, and now with Occupy and the movements in Greece and Spain.  These movements are essentially rejecting the political party formation, hierarchical forms of organising and looking to institutions of power to answer people’s problems or demands.  Rather, people are coming up with their own alternatives together and this is a big rejection of party politics and the guerilla struggles of the ’60s and ’70s.


JGF: You argue that the co-operators and neighbourhood organisers are wrong to ignore the attacks of academics. However, Naomi Klein praised the fact that “the theorists are chasing after the factory workers, trying to analyse what is already in noisy production.”

When a philosopher turned up to speak to the students in ’68 they said, “Sartre, be brief”. It seems that those in Argentina would not even have the patience to say, “be brief”.

Apart from being an obvious justification for writing the book, why do you think they should be so worried by the industry of commentary?


MS: Well, I think it is important to engage with some of the high-profile public intellectuals and academics, especially when there is so much disagreement with them.  The reason for this, unfortunately, is because it is their voices that predominate.  So if it’s an academic voice that is heard speaking about the movements and they are saying the movements are dead and have no horizontal processes, I think this does a huge disservice to the movements whose voices don’t get shared in the world.  I think it’s also important in terms of the historical record, but also because there is increasing repression of autonomous movements around the world.  When it comes to mobilizing support and defence on behalf of the movements it is important to have as many allies as possible.  So, some of it is just strategic and the other part is the historical record.

Now, I don’t think anyone should spend too much time engaging with them but I cannot tell you the number of times I do presentations, one just a few weeks ago, and someone with authority said, “I’m an academic whose spent time in Argentina studying the recuperated workplaces and they are completely consumed by the government and they’ve been shrinking over the years in number”.  That is completely false and I’m not even sure where he got his information.  I then had to politely tell him it was completely false and give him citations of how he could find out the real information.

Spreading that misinformation, though, doesn’t help anyone, and it also doesn’t help those in Thessaloniki, Greece where there is a recuperated factory now. Those in the movements had been mobilizing and were shown the film The Take, as well as the oral history book I had done on the first few years of the movements in Argentina, which had been translated in Greek. So they had been really engaged with the idea of recuperated workplaces and it succeeded in one place called ?? in August.  Then, in September someone from the recuperated workplace movement from Argentina came to Greece to help share their experiences.  Had the workers in Greece believed this experience had only happened for a few years and then completely failed, they may not have tried it.  The disturbance that misinformation can do is huge.


JGF: In your conversations with those involved in recuperated workplaces and neighbourhood assemblies, many fiercely resisted being called “political” and would refer to themselves as “protagonists”.

While it’s a critique of the “revolutionary party” — say in its Russian or Chinese incarnation — it is also of the exclusion of people that occurs in every single form of representative governance.

Do you think what is happening in Argentina is part of a global movement towards self-governance?


MS: Absolutely, and I think the recuperated workplace movement is one of the best examples of this impulse and desire, I’m hesitant to say instinct, for self-organisation that comes from a combination of necessity and reaction to what came before.  Interestingly, though, it is not coming from an ideological place, which, I think, makes this historical moment (say through the mid-90s to today) different.  People are no longer only rejecting institutional power and the state and creating horizontal forms but are doing it through self-organisation, and not because some book said this is how you make a more free society.  Instead it has come through the process of organising out of a real crisis and necessity in places like Argentina and Greece but also in other places where the crisis hasn’t hit as deeply.  This form of organising, self-organising, is about asking to be left alone to do it and it is going on everywhere.  What is most inspiring to me is in places like the recuperated workplaces where they say, ‘We’re not political’, and in the US in the anti-foreclosure movement, based in the neighbourhoods, where a lot of times it’s just neighbours who get together and say, ‘Who is expecting to be foreclosed? Let’s have a BBQ in someone’s backyard and talk about how we are going to defend the houses’.  These people are not going to protest outside of the banks, or at least not at the beginning.  The first thing they do is make sure people stay in their homes and support each other.  This, I think, is a growing phenomenon.

Zanon Factory Meeting

JGF: This resonates with the Transition Network — a decentralized group of people responding, primarily, to the environmental crises around climate change and peak oil.  Whilst it started from a certain scientific approach, which is undoubtedly important, one of the co-founders said that he was surprised that that the biggest shift had been a cultural change.  Through neighbourhood organisations — known as ‘Transition Streets’ — people started to associate with each other again and used this collective activity to approach these environmental problems in turn.  It seems that things start to happen when we start associating on a local level and not only in response to scientific facts or political statements.


MS: I think this subjective change, which is also a material change, is so much more powerful.  Keeping your neighbours in their home, stopping people from getting evicted, or running a factory together in a co-operative way changes social relations.  I don’t want to say it empowers, because empowered is a word from the old forms of organising, but people say they feel happier and they feel power with each other.  The rejection of the ‘political’ isn’t just a rejection of political parties but also of a certain way of doing politics. It is more about social relationships where we can discuss how to stop an eviction at a neighbourhood BBQ, and this has a different kind of sentiment.  At Zanon, now called FaSinPat (‘Factory without Bosses’) in the South of Argentina, so much of the organising before they took over the factory was at football games where they were building relationships with one another on a very human level.


JGF: One challenge to self-governance and non-state organisations is the arrival of someone who is perceived as a better political leader. The election of Obama had the effect of reinvesting hope in mainstream politics —  if only for a short while — and the election of Kirchner had the same effect in Argentina.

You talk about the divisions caused by Kirchner’s election in relation to the Madres de la Plaza Mayo. Don’t you think there is a difference between the organisations that have formed since 2001 and their relationship to the state, when compared to the Madres de la Plaza Mayo who formed in opposition to a particular regime (in this case the Dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla)?


MS: The response from the more autonomous movements has been quite mixed.  They’ve managed to maintain a form of self-organisation and autonomy and I would also include the recuperated workplaces and unemployed in this.  It got very complicated when the Kirchner government came into power and not only because the government was offering people material things that they needed but because of some political changes. It is important to understand the history of the dictatorship in Argentina during which more than 30,000 people disappeared and all the governments up until Kirchner passed a law saying let’s all forgive and forget.

You have to remember that at this time there were still thousands and thousands of people who were involved in the military and acts of torture during the dictatorship still living freely in society, and this is how Argentine society was supposed to move forward.  So, when the Kirchner government started prosecuting and doing some very important symbolic acts early on, it resonated with everyone.  This didn’t mean that people had an orientation towards the state but found it was really difficult, as a movement, to be against the state when the state is taking a really important course of action whilst also acknowledging the fact that only the state is in the position to prosecute thousands of people in this particular historical moment.  This gained some popularity for the government and made things a little bit confusing.  Then there was the question of material support and the government, responding to ‘They all must go!’, offered material support to restore some sort of legitimacy to the state.  They also went after campaigners and leaders to come out as supporters and even take positions in government — it was a very disorientating time.

Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

All of that said, there were movements, it is important to say, who said we will have absolutely no contact or engagement with the state. Theoretically this is a good position but practically it’s not because sometimes the state wants to have a relationship with you and you can’t control it — in the example of repression.  However, this was also a reflection that the movements were beginning to have themselves, and beginning in 2009, members of the unemployed decided to have some contact with the state.  Not in the sense in which this is where change happens but more orientated towards the Old Left’s argument, which I think is a truism, which argues that since the wealth of the state is ours, how do we get some of that back without getting caught up in the state’s agenda? So that is one of the most important lessons and one of the most interesting things that is happening in Argentina now: how movements are continuing to self-organise, continuing to maintain autonomy but yet finding ways to get certain resources from the state they might need but only on their own terms – it’s complicated!

It’s easier for the recuperated workplaces to do this but, then again, they also have a very broad network that if the state withdrew its support they could borrow from each other or barter. It is more difficult for the unemployed movements.  However, what they’ve been doing to maintain their agenda, whilst also receiving from the state, is to first start building homes, for example, and then rather than make a demand on the state to come and build the houses, they will instead ask for a list of materials.

It is still an ‘in progress’ moment but I think it is so important for us in the movements, when we are struggling for self-organisation and autonomy, that we find ways of getting our wealth back from the state.


JGF: In the UK we are at a completely different starting point — a heavily centralized society that is used to the state meeting our needs (remembering that the state is just an abstract way of us collectively meeting our own and others’ needs).  Other countries that are not used to the state’s involvement in education and healthcare provision already have alternative infrastructures to meet those needs.  So, it’s a different challenge for every community.


MS: It’s true.  For the UK and parts of Scandinavia it is a much more difficult question.  In the US, or Latin America and other parts of the world, people don’t expect the state to meet their needs anyway.  It is much easier to move away from the state when it is not your point of reference because we were never their point of reference.


JGF: Most of the book explores the emergence and practice of horizontal decision-making in Argentine society. The neighbourhood assemblies that used this method could number in the hundreds and the general assemblies in the thousands.

It’s not a process without its problems — sometimes down to the inexperience or intentions of its participants. What examples did you see of improvements and innovations to the process, and in what ways did its users creatively contain disruptive and unfriendly forces whilst retaining their values of democratic inclusion?


MS: It’s a great question having seen it in Occupy so much and all over the world.  There were a number of things that Argentines did and do in assemblies that I think are really useful in making a more democratic space.  In Argentina they started with a very loose structure and then began to have a little more structure.  Whereas in the in the US we were overly concerned with structure and forgot to be human beings — it was more about the rules than the actual dynamics and ideas for why you have certain structures.  So the Argentines moved in the opposite direction from being really flexible to having certain structures.

Flexible spaces are really important in assemblies, and when someone was excessively talking it was dealt with, over time, through social pressure instead of enforcing a rule.  It wasn’t the facilitator saying, ‘You must be quiet!’, but the group as a whole.  Over time, this idea that we have to be really polite with each other, not disrespect the person and always look to the authority of the facilitator actually shifted to become a lot more horizontal.  People would do everything from turning their backs on the speaker — one of my favourite stories — because the facilitator would say, ‘You’ve taken up to much time and other people must be given the time to speak, please stop’, but they would continue.  So other members of the assemblies would turn their backs and have other conversations and then speaker would stop because no one was listening to them.  Instead of seeing this as some moral rejection it would take seriously the fact that if we only have two hours and one person is taking 15-20 minutes then they are taking the time of lots of other people.

Objecting out loud was also a successful strategy especially with old left political parties who were really disruptive in the neighbourhood assemblies.  In the beginning, the old leftists considered the recuperated workplaces a form of petty bourgeois owners.


JGF: Self-exploitation was another charge.


MS: Yes! (laughs) And neighbourhood assemblies were just people who wanted to have their money back.  These people lost everything and were hungry and so I am not sure how outrageous it is that they wanted their money back.  Anyway, like academics but much worse, they were coming towards with their predetermined dogma.  Then they realised that the assemblies involved 100,000s of participants in urban areas who were having assemblies of assemblies in parks and went in to try and dominate the space.  They did this by excessively talking and pushing certain things on the agenda and it took quite a while for people to learn how to shut them down — by turning their backs or just shouting at them.  They had a really negative effect and that’s one reason used to explain the decline of neighbourhood assemblies even though there were more.  Since then, when members of political parties come and try to dominate a discussion, people will not only call them out but say, ‘We know what you’re up to and we’re not going to let you do it’.  It’s not just a ‘polite not polite’ because people in the US are afraid to say, ‘I know you are a member of Trotskyist group and you’re not here to participate.’

In Greece, similarly, this is one of the lessons they learned when they were in the neighbourhoods, after Syntagma Square, and someone would get up to speak and say, ‘I’m Kostos’, and people would yell, ‘No you’re not, you’re Kostos from the Communist Party’.  It’s not that the person cannot speak but it’s making it really clear who they are and from what position they are speaking.


JGF: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the level of self-regulation in these groups.  A problem that occurs within groups that organise at a distance from the state is that they are subject to certain abuses and exploitations — theft and sexual assault, for example — and it becomes a really important question of how to deal with them without resorting to the state or police.  You refer to this in the book and give examples of different experiences.  Could you talk about them and how successful they were?


MS: Yes, self-regulation or alternative adjudication.  I saw this happen in quite a few different spaces.  The spaces where this occurred were largely geographical and territorial: where collectives owned a building, where the unemployed were on a strip of land, or in a workplace.  I’m not sure this means it can’t work in other places but I only saw it work in those places where there was a geographic boundary.  There were many conversations that were really new for the movement and people would come to the assemblies and retell how something happened to them like sexual violence or a robbery.  We would then have to figure out how to adjudicate the matter and there wasn’t a written rule how to do it, but there was commitment by the group to try and solve conflicts together.

In one instance it looked very much like the things I’d read in Circle Justice coming from indigenous traditions in the northern parts of the Americas and now Canada.  One young woman who had been assaulted came to the assembly with allies who supported her and the young man (who was accused) with his friends.  Then we had a discussion to decide what to do about it.  In this case, it wasn’t even clear to the young man that what he did was sexual violence — women’s oppression is often that deep where it comes to the point that when a women says no, that’s what she’s suppose to say.  This is basically the direction this discussion went and it was partly about educating the young man and his friends, who were of a similar opinion, and then figuring out what would work for the two individuals but also the assembly.  It was decided he needed help but also that he could not return to that space until he had received help from social workers.

There are many examples of where this alternative adjudication worked successfully but I would also like give a note of caution: It takes a lot of time for movements to achieve this, and we have to, but I would also advocate for having some formal structures for how some of it can work.  This is because it takes a long time, not only the minutes you participate in the assembly, but also the emotional time.  What is most beautiful about the movements is the new social relationships based on trust, love and affect.  If we are building these relationships and then there is a violation from someone within the group, especially a core participant and not just a young kid who comes to a party, it can be extremely disorientating and upsetting.  So mechanisms that can deal with these problems in advance are really important.

Also, I think what’s beautiful about these new relationships is also leaves us vulnerable to political police, harassment and worse because, if (hypothetically) someone who is a leader violates this trust (and is paid by the police), it can cause so much disruption within a movement.  This is somewhere where our relationships make us strong and vulnerable simultaneously.


JGF: Finally, the crisis took place in 2001 and the Argentinean public didn’t take its time to respond. What is happening now just over a decade later and it is cause for hope?


MS: Absolutely! There are more recuperated workplaces and there has been a huge increase since 2009 (there are probably about 350 now).  To be clear, a recuperated workplace is not just the workers and their workplace but also the community.  There are many layers of support and participation in the workplace and it becomes like a community centre where it is used for popular education, alternative high school programmes, and all kinds of things happen.

You don’t have the neighbourhood assemblies on the same scale but a lot of the organizers are now teachers in alternative high school programmes.  The unemployed movements, the more autonomous ones, are organising on the basis of maintaining their agenda and are struggling with that — even though it is cause for optimism.

Then, there is the international mining company that is trying to blow apart the mountains all across Argentina and in every town and village people are organising in assemblies, using horizontal decision-making.  They don’t physically allow the exploitation of the land — this is women and their bodies keeping the military and dogs at the bay.  At the same time, this is not only protest against because they are using assemblies to self-organise.  So there is definitely reason for hope.

One last thing: As people come together to organise, the vast majority start from the assumption that it will be horizontal.  There is no political party program, still no orientation towards the state, and people talk about it like it’s a given.  One of the things young people have been calling themselves, and I think it’s really beautiful, is HIJOS of the 19^th and 20^th.  Even the children who were young at the time of the rupture in 2001 — the financial crisis and the response ‘They all must go!’ — are saying that it’s this new form of politics that informs them and I see that as incredibly inspiring.

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Marina Sitrin holds a PhD in Global Sociology and a JD in International Women’s Human Rights. Her work focuses on social movements and justice, specifically looking at new forms of social organization, such as autogestión, horizontalidad, prefigurative politics, and new affective social relationships. Her first book, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, is an oral history based on the then emergent autonomous movements in Argentina, published in Spanish (Chilavert 2005) and English (AK Press 2006). While much of her recent published work has been on contemporary social movements in Argentina, she has worked throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, and Japan. Her current research includes the global mass assembly movements, specifically in Greece, Spain, and Egypt.

Her new book Everyday Revolutions: Autonomy and Horizontalism in Argentina is published by Zed Books.