Shutting Down the Machines of Destruction: Possibilities for Agrarian Life on the Protest Blockade

Abstract

AbstractThe protest blockade is one tool for seeking liberation from the state while living within it. I offer a critical analysis of the protest blockade in agrarian struggles for land and life in Indonesia and beyond. I specify my discussion with a retelling of a Sumatran land‐back movement of smallholders and landless workers who twice turned to the blockade to reclaim their land from a plantation company. I consider how these blockades and others in Sumatra and Borneo created direct‐action power, thereby expanding people's possibilities for livelihood and autonomy in landscapes of extraction and exploitation. Blockading action is a process that unfolds from within as activists challenge the legitimacy of their rulers and set out to create more emancipatory spaces and territories. When protestors blockade the bulldozers, logging trucks, and other machines of capitalist exploitation of workers and ecologies, they seek to disrupt the infrastructures and commodity flows of the dominant political‐economic order as well as open up new agrarian possibilities. These protest blockades are central to the anarchist, Indigenous, and decolonial politics that motivate direct‐action protests across the globe.