Direct Action Tactics Research Articles

<O/ No Power but Deaf Power \O>: Revitalizing Deaf Education Systems via Anarchism

Deaf education is an incoherent macrosystem whose sub‐systems—e.g., biomedical vs. sociocultural institutions—contradict. Unreconciled tensions cause stagnation, not regeneration, and harmful dissensus in deaf educational sub‐systems. To revitalize deaf education, address these contradictions, and eliminate incoherence, we posit that a deafled systemic transformation of deaf education is necessary; furthermore, we argue it may best be realized through theories and actions constitutive of anarchism. To this end, we synthesize four thematic loci where anarchism overtly aligns with constructs immanent in deaf communities. First, collectivism is necessary for survival in anarchist and deaf communities toward shared goals including equity in education, social labor, and politics. Second, mutual aid is integral—like anarchists who work arm‐in‐arm, deaf individuals and groups exhibit uncanny solidarity across political, cultural, technological, linguistic, and geographical boundaries. Third, direct action tactics overlap in both groups: When facing internal or external threats, both communities effectively rally local mechanisms to affect change. Finally, both groups exhibit a stubborn, existential refusal to be subdued or ruled by outsiders. Reframing systemic dilemmas in deaf education via anarchism is a novel, beneficial praxis that’s only been tangentially explored. Centering anarchism in deaf education also generates succor for ongoing struggles about sign language in deaf communities. Toward the horizon of radical equality, our staunchly anarchist analysis of deaf education argues that to guide deaf‐positive system change neoliberalism is inert and neo‐fascism anathema.

It’s your world too, you can do what you want”: the role of subcultural activism in Stop The City protests (1983-1984) and its implications for political protest in Britain’

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of subcultural activism in the Stop the City Protests (STC), 1983-1984. It shows how protestors broke with the consensual approach of overarching political organisations, chiefly the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), using direct action tactics to shut down the City of London, which was emerging as a strategic centre for globalised capitalism. STC is shown to be on a continuum with the radicalism of the preceding decades, with bands, including Crass and Poison Girls bridging the gap to anarcho-punk. This article innovates by combining official evidence, in the form of police briefing notes, with ‘ground-up’ activist materials and fanzines, to evaluate the approach and ideology of the protestors and the police, thereby tracing the increasingly intolerant policing methods that were adopted during key political battles of the 1980s, including The Miners’ Strike and The Battle of the Beanfield. Questioning the extent to which Thatcherism was the hegemonic project of the 1980s, it demonstrates how STC was at odds with the contemporaneous corporatisation of political activism, and thereby provided a model for the road protests and Reclaim the Streets movement of the 1990s, and fed into the anti-globalisation and environmental movements of the 21st century.

Working together to survive and thrive: The struggle for Black lives past and present

This article examines Black leadership through the generations as a multifaceted struggle for Black lives led by ordinary Black people working together to end anti-Black violence and systemic racism for the affirmation of their humanity. At the center of this examination is the latest phase in a long struggle for Black lives, which has been branded as a Black Lives Matter movement. This new movement for social justice developed from past struggles and during the aftermath of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, 2014 Ferguson uprising, and 2020 George Floyd uprising. For the author, this new struggle is Black Americans most recent “walk of life” that stretches back to the movements for self-determination, anti-enslavement, and civil rights during the American Revolutionary period (1764–1789). Central to this new struggle is the blending of nonviolent direct action tactics with the use of digital technology and the inclusion of people who previously functioned on the margins of the civil rights agenda. This struggle is addressed, first through an exploration of where Black-led community organizations have been since Trayvon’s death, and second, by examining what is currently being done during the aftermath of the death of Breonna Taylor up to mid-September 2020.

Looking ‘for a fight rather than a cause’: (De)legitimization of resistance to gentrification in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Negative implications of gentrification have been continually recognized over the past several decades, prompting varied forms of resistance in cities around the world. However, gentrification has also been more recently framed in public discourse as a beneficial and constructive process, grounded in examples of ‘revitalizing’ centres. These contrasting positions introduce underexplored tensions in how different interests approach gentrifying environments in an urban area, particularly with respect to the impact of resistance movements. Using Hamilton, Ontario as a case study, I consider how acts of resistance to gentrification and displacement are perceived and (de)legitimized by local residents, business owners, and others, focusing on the recent emergence of direct action tactics across the inner city. Applying concepts of antagonism, hegemony, and transparent space, I explore dominant values in a context of municipal-led revitalization as portrayed through discourse on resistance to gentrification in central Hamilton. This analysis draws primarily on news articles and Twitter responses pertaining to prominent instances of gentrification-related resistance in Hamilton between 2016 and 2018, supplemented by interviews conducted in early 2018 with representatives from local community organizations. The paper finds three discourses through which antagonistic relations emerge and the (de)legitimization of gentrification-related resistance occurs: violence, entrepreneurship, and productivity. The dismissal of certain acts of resistance in residents’ and others’ responses can be connected to their contestation of dominant ideals of revitalization and the contrived simplicity of gentrified space. Importantly, this delegitimization includes the invalidation or minimizing of underlying concerns and imperatives. These findings have implications for mobilizing collective responses to address inequities of gentrification.

Abolish rent!

‘Homes for all’ is, rightly, the prevailing strategic slogan in the USA tenants’ movement. As a tactical slogan, however, it is time that ‘abolish rent’ replaces ‘decommodify housing’. While ‘decommodify housing’ importantly points to the social problems of rental housing’s status as commodity, full decommodification is a complex process requiring transformation not only of the selling and renting of housing for money but also the processes of housing production and management. This complexity makes decommodification as a tactic an obscure process and consequently an ineffective slogan for agitating tenants because of its distance from their everyday struggles. ‘Abolish rent’ instead points toward generalizing direct action tactics already essential in the struggles of housed and unhoused tenants, tactics like rent strikes and squatting. To generalize rent abolition necessarily includes fully decommodifying housing, but in connecting immediate tactics to long term strategy, I contend that ‘abolish rent’ is a more effective slogan.

Frontiers are Frontlines: Ethnobiological Science Against Ongoing Colonialism

Ethnobiologists are capable of making transformative scientific contributions when they participate in localized direct actions and acts of colonial dissent. Direct action tactics like blockades, protests, and re-occupations of territories are often used as (alternative) approaches for marginalized and disenfranchised communities who face expensive and oppressive justice systems. As natural resource extraction and development in settler nations continues to have uneven impacts on Indigenous Peoples and communities, this research reviews the long history of resistance to colonial expansion on the “frontier” of northwestern British Columbia, Canada. Currently, an emergent trend for legalizing and legitimizing resource extraction in rural and frontier communities is through consultation and impact assessment processes. These processes can undermine scientific rigor and hierarchies of knowledge that undercut Indigenous Peoples' knowledge, and rights to use and be on their territories. Using ethnobiological research methods to fuse cultural and natural scientific prescriptions of land use, we consider how cultural resistance camps—primarily Lelu Island, but also Madii Lii—are troves of Tsm'syen and Gitxsan experiential knowledge and cultural exchange, while resisting powerful and well-funded liquid natural gas (LNG) development in traditional territories. Ethnobiologists working in these contexts are challenged to support and stand behind their Indigenous colleagues to transform the frontier into a frontline and foster rigorous scientific research alongside Indigenous resistance.

“The Last Great Strike”: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America by Ahmed White

Reviewed by: “The Last Great Strike”: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America by Ahmed White Henry Himes “The Last Great Strike”: Little Steel, the CIO, and the Struggle for Labor Rights in New Deal America. By Ahmed White. (Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2016. 416pp. Paper $29.95, ISBN 978-0-5202-8561-3.) In contemporary society, one would be hard-pressed to believe that an event such as the 1937 Little Steel Strike ever took place. The history of the strike often reads like a work of fiction with its accounts of industrial espionage, aerial confrontations, brutal fisticuffs, bombings, gun battles, and an outright massacre. Indeed, nothing of its kind has been seen since; hence, the title of this work, “The Last Great Strike.” Although the strike plot could have easily been dreamed up in the mind of a brilliant author of fiction, the 1937 Little Steel Strike was unfortunately not a work of fiction. Instead, the strike, according to Ahmed White, is “a complex and sobering story, untold, that speaks essential truths about the New Deal and the place of unions and labor rights in modern America” (6). White divides the book into three sections. Part 1 is a well-written secondary source account of the open-shop era from the Homestead strike of 1892 to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. Although academics already trained in the intricacies of the open-shop era would find this section unnecessary, it nevertheless offers the novice reader a strong accounting of the open shop in steel, establishing the context needed to understand the strike. Part 2 focuses strictly on the strike itself, and is by far the strongest section of the book. Before this study, the historiography of the 1937 Little Steel Strike was fragmented. White, drawing on those earlier sources and adding new archival research, weaves together a compelling narrative of how the strike progressed throughout the disconnected towns and cities across the nation’s industrial heartland. From the small steel-producing town of Monroe, Michigan, to the blood-soaked industrial fields of south Chicago, to the deadly battlegrounds of northeast Ohio, White masterfully reconstructs the history of this brutal conflict. In the final section of the book, White attempts to chart how the Steel Workers Organizing Committee’s (SWOC) defeat impacted the union in the post-strike years. He analyzes the union’s reaction to the defeat, [End Page 100] arguing that SWOC’s international leaders worked to limit direct action tactics, preferring instead “legal and political action as effective alternatives to ‘direct action’” (246). This section is not as persuasive as the previous two sections, and at times unjustifiably paints SWOC leaders as the saboteurs of some unrealized revolutionary moment. The book’s primary strength is its accounting of the strike itself. More than any other study on the Little Steel Strike thus far, White’s narrative is the broadest in scope and most comprehensive. However, the book stumbles in the third section. In the estimation of this reviewer, the third section tends to portray the rank-and-file steelworker as more radical and revolutionary than he actually was.1 Moreover, White argues that upon losing the strike, SWOC leaders abandoned “aggressive large-scale shop floor and street-level organizing” tactics for a strategy that focused on winning union recognition through the National Labor Relations Board and the courts (274). Indeed, after the failed strike, the union often fell back on a legal strategy; however, there is evidence that suggests such an approach was not necessarily top-down driven. For example, at the 1940 SWOC convention, SWOC president Philip Murray cautioned convention delegates not to rely too heavily on the law, asserting, “and somehow or other the workers and many of the employees in and around these plants, instead of indulging in ordinary, militant campaigns of organization around the properties say, ‘Oh, let’s wait and find out what the National Labor Relations Board is going to do and what the courts are going to do,’ relying entirely too much upon the Board and not putting enough pep into it ourselves.”2 Murray believed...

Direct Action and Drug-Related Harm: Affinity-Based Tactics in the Founding and Development of the North American Harm Reduction Movement

This article asserts that anarchist-inspired direct action tactics have played a fundamental role in the development of interventions ostensibly intended to reduce drug-related harm. Drawing from observations collected during the author's participant-observation-based ethnographic fieldwork endeavors in Canada and the U.S., the article interrogates several aspects of harm reduction philosophy and practice, including (1) The establishment of needle and syringe programs, (2) The development of autonomous local, national and international organizations by and for people who use illicit drugs, and (3) Direct drug/service user involvement in harm reduction policies and programs.

Apparatuses of occupation: translocal social movements, states and the archipelagic spatialities of power

There has recently been an abundance of scholarly attention in geography to the assemblage‐like nature of contemporary social movements. While assemblage theory has rightly emphasised the performative, translocal, discursive‐material and affective aspects of social movements, less attention has been focused on the way these flexible assemblages territorialise power and attempt to order social activities in place. Through an analysis of contemporary anti‐militarisation protests in Okinawa, this paper interrogates how translocal social movements use direct action tactics such as the occupation of land and sea spaces to not only resist state power, but to produce their own governance over places. Driven by different globally circulating normative perspectives on the value of national security versus personal security, these social movements have engaged in contests with states over the construction of military facilities and the practice of military activities in local environments. Analysing Foucauldian and Deleuzean perspectives on governing apparatuses, this paper investigates the spatial practices of both Okinawan social movements and the American and Japanese governments to demonstrate how occupation functions as a tactic of political praxis for both state and non‐state actors.

From cyborg feminism to drone feminism: Remembering women’s anti-nuclear activisms

By the 1990s the dynamic array of creative direct action tactics used against militarised technologies that emerged from women’s anti-nuclear protest camps in the 1980s became largely eclipsed by cyberfeminism’s focus on digital and online technologies. Yet recently, as robots and algorithms are put forward as the vanguards of new drone execution regimes, some are wondering if now is the time for another Greenham Common. In this article I return to cyborg feminism and anti-nuclear activisms of the 1980s to explore what drone feminism might look like today. I examine how anti-nuclear protesters infused affect and techné, creating innovative images of, and tactics for, material resistance. I argue that Greenham women’s cyborg feminisms arose from their material entanglements with the military base. In their efforts to reveal and undermine the national and imperial myths upon which warfare is based, protesters re-imagined technological possibilities based upon a global accountability for ‘earthly survival’.

Blockadia Rising: Rowdy Greens, Direct Action and the Keystone XL Pipeline

TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline has encountered opposition from Indigenous peoples, landowners, and environmental activists across North America. Cropping up wherever extractive projects such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and tar sands expansion are found, Blockadia (Klein in This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2014) is a roving, transnational conflict zone that has become host to the showdown between environmental activists and the fossil fuel industry. Utilizing increasingly confrontational direct action tactics such as marches, mass arrests, lockdowns and blockades, “rowdy greens” such as 350.org are seeking to address climate change by taking to the streets, while other groups such as Tars Sands Blockade take to the trees to obstruct oil sands infrastructure projects. With the battle over Keystone XL still undecided, President Obama is faced with a crucial decision: approve the pipeline and allow further state facilitation of corporate crime within the fossil fuel industry, or reject the project and reaffirm the vital role of mass social movements in creating change.

John porter lecture: waves of protest--direct action, deliberation, and diffusion.

The book Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action After the WTO Protests in Seattle argues that the process of diffusion is dependent on social processes in the receiving context. The most important in social movements is an egalitarian and reflexive deliberation among diverse actors. The book traces the direct action tactics associated with the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 and how these spread to activists in Toronto and New York City. It shows how the structure of the political field, racial and class inequalities, identity boundaries, and organizational and conversational dynamics limited deliberation among activists, and thus limited the diffusion of the Seattle tactics. By constraining the spread of the Seattle tactics, this slowed the global justice movement's wave of protest. In this paper, I explore the application of and implications of this model of protest tactic diffusion to the recent Idle No More mobilizations.

Book review: Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress, by Steve Early

Steve Early Save Our Unions: Dispatches From A Movement in Distress, Monthly Review Press: New York, NY, 2013; 343 pp: 9781583674277, $79 (hbk) Those looking for an analysis of recent trends and events in the USA's beleaguered trade-union movement will do no better than Save Our Unions, by the long-time union organiser, socialist, and labour journalist Steve Early. Save Our Unions is not another dreary look at declining union membership and concessionary agreements. Nor it is a rerun of the by now superannuated debate between the 'serving model' and the 'organising model' as the universal salvation of organised labour in neoliberal America. Rather, Early turns an experienced and critical eye on what is actually happening beneath the conventional industrial relations radar. In this highly readable volume, we find not only fading confidence in labour-management co-operation schemes, but the new forces implementing different approaches meant to fit situations that unions have not always found familiar. Early in the book, we meet the 'unorganised' fast food workers who struck at McDonalds and other major chains in cities across the USA in 2012 and 2013. Though supported by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they were not union members, and nor were they seeking traditional union recognition or formal agreements from their employers. Rather, they have merged into a movement known as 'Fight for Fifteen', demanding a US$15 minimum wage. No doubt the long-range goal is union organisation, but the methods are more those of social movements than those of traditional trade unions. Similar tactics have been used by workers in the huge concentrations of warehouses at the centre of the USA's reshaped just-in-time logistics system, found near Chicago, Los Angeles, and in New Jersey. Again with some backing from unions, these workers have formed their own workplace organisations, and have taken various levels of action to win small gains and grow. In seeking possible ways out of organised labour's decline, Early also looks inside the more conventional unions; offering a history of the rank-and-file rebellions that have often appeared in US labour history. Starting with the Miners For Democracy in the 1970s, which threw out the corrupt leaders of the United Mine Workers, the author takes us through the 1990s, when the Teamsters for a Democratic Union-backed reformer Ron Carey beat an equally corrupt clique in one of America's biggest unions. Both rebellions eventually saw grassroots mobilisations beat back attacks by powerful employers for a time. Early also looks at more recent rank-and-file upsurges in large local unions of the Teamsters, Communications Workers, and Machinists, among others. All these rebellions reveal a strong desire for change from below, and an ongoing, possibly accelerating trend. Most notable of these was the 2010 victory of the grassroots Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in the Chicago Teachers Union, the second-largest local teachers union in the country. This electoral overthrow was followed by one of the best organised strikes in recent years, when in 2012, more than 27,000 teachers beat back most of the tidal wave of neoliberal 'reforms' proposed by the mayor and backed by the Obama administration. What all of these rank-and-file movements have in common is a commitment to union democracy, a rejection of the labour-management co-operation ethos of the last three decades, a greater willingness to employ militant direct action tactics, and the construction of dense workplace organisation--in other words, a turning away from the norms of US 'business unionism'. …

Occupy Dame Street as slow-motion general strike? Justifying optimism in the wake of Ireland’s failed multitudinal moment

Discussing their hopes for a horizontalist mode of politics, Hardt and Negri envision a grand, kairotic event that will announce the ‘becoming prince’ of the multitude. This article reflects on this idea in light of the strategies and discourses of Ireland's Occupy Dame Street (ODS) activists. Starting with a brief account of the rise and fall of the ODS movement, as it struggled to engage the political imagination of a nation beset by financial crisis, the article explores the extent to which the actions of the movement conformed to ‘multitudinal ideals.’ It suggests that, in a way, and quite unconsciously, dominant factions in the movement came to embrace a kind of ‘event politics’ of their own – a turn which posed a barrier to the movement's success, in a way with which occupy movements elsewhere simply did not have to contend. Taking this story as an opportunity to reflect on the place of the event in Hardt and Negri's work, the article then discusses two alternative approaches to horizontal politics. Turning first to Eugene Holland's concept of the Slow-Motion General Strike, we find a more experimental and piecemeal approach to social transformation. This approach, it is concluded, has the virtue of retaining Hardt and Negri's enthusiastic rejection of hegemonic thinking while avoiding becoming caught up in a debate over the relative merits of passively waiting for a constitutive event over reform or revolution. That said, in Ireland at least, there is a certain danger that a ‘chronological’ approach can cede too much, especially in a time of general neoliberal expropriation of public space. With this urgency in mind, a second position is staked out. While in some ways reasserting the importance of kairotic time, this position borrows from anarchist understandings of public space, and puts a strong focus on tactics. As the article concludes, the actions of ODS-affiliated activists to expose the blatantly undemocratic operations of the country’s National Asset Management Agency by occupying vacant commercial properties in Dublin suggest a continuing relevance for direct-action tactics in Irish public space.

Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives by Natalie A. Naylor

Book Reviews 125 and direct action tactics from Italy to the United States, to their children, who would embrace labor reformism. The Red Scare profoundly changed the Italian American experience as many learned to cling to white racial privilege and the entitlement it carried as a means to gain economic stability and legitimacy as Americans. This evolution is a particularly interesting narrative in understanding the rise of American conservatism and raises a couple of compelling questions: Where did this radical spirit go with the rise of the Cold War? Did the grandchildren of these immigrants join the New Left later in the century? But these are not questions Guglielmo attempts to address rather she highlights the role Italian women had in American radical labor activism. She argues that the value of this history comes not only from understanding immigrant women’s radicalism but that cross-racial, class, and ethnic organizing was once a virtue among American workers and the recent abandonment of it has doomed the entire American working class. Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives. By Natalie A. Naylor. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012, 192 pages, $19.99 Paper. Reviewed by Christine Neejer, Michigan State University Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives could have easily been a dry account of elite women’s activities. Natalie A. Naylor avoids such a pitfall and instead assembles an engaging collection of biographies that encourage us to rethink Long Island women’s connections to local and national historical narratives. Naylor positions women at the center of her local framework, allowing readers to see significant historical events, such as the American War for Independence and the fight for women’s suffrage, through the perspective of Long Island women. Naylor also uses her work to challenge male-normative practices of local history. She argues that historians of Long Island have downplayed or ignored women, assuming men’s experiences alone tell the region’s story. Naylor does not aim to discount the significance of men’s experiences, but 126 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY rather encourage readers to rethink what counts as significant and to recognize the value in studying the ordinary. Naylor uses a variety of sources, including newspapers and local histories , to engage in two projects. First, she brings the stories of famous women into the history of Long Island. She devotes chapters on the First Ladies, wealthy philanthropists, and business innovators who had ties to the area or used their influence to improve it. Naylor pays particular attention to the arts, highlighting women novelists, painters, and architects who were influenced by and worked on Long Island. Secondly, she unearths the lives of women who never achieved fame or significant attention from historians. Naylor’s work shines in this respect. She uses the lives of everyday women to illustrate how Long Island women were not resigned to the domestic sphere but actively engaged in community life throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. They established schools, administered medical care, coordinated women’s clubs and activist campaigns, and hosted meaningful community events among many other activities. The book makes a particularly striking historiographical addition to the study of women in science and technology. Naylor discusses lesser known women such as Elizabeth Shoemaker, the first in a line of Long Island women who served as lighthouse keepers starting in the 1820s, and Joan Druett, one of many nineteenth-century ‘sister sailors’ who assisted in navigation and medical care on whaling and merchant ships. One of the most striking historiographical additions of the book is Naylor’s discussion of Long Island women’s role in the history of flight. With few mountains or trees, the Hempstead Plains were an ideal training ground for this new technology. Naylor explores the history of Long Island women pilots in depth, including Harriet Quimby, who in 1911 became the first woman to earn a pilot’s license and Amelia Earhart’s famous Ninety-Nines organization . Naylor expands this analysis to World War II with her engaging discussion of women such as Jackie Cochran, one of 1,100 women who served as test pilots. Naylor represents a...

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2011 Terrorist attacks’

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2011 Terrorist attacks’

This is What a Police State Looks Like: Sousveillance, Direct Action and the Anti-corporate Globalization Movement

Activists across the globe have increasingly incorporated digital communication technologies into their repertoire of direct action tactics to challenge state and corporate power. Examining the anti-corporate globalization protests at the September 2009 Group of Twenty (G-20) meetings in Pittsburgh, this paper explores how activists used sousveillance and counter-surveillance as direct action tactics to make excessive force by police more visible to the public. Collaborative endeavors such as the G-20 Resistance Project, the Tin Can Comms Collective and independent media centers provided activists with the necessary tactical and strategic communication networks to coordinate direct actions during the G-20 protests. Through the use of surveillance technologies widely available to the public such as video cameras, cell phones and the internet, activists created an environment of permanent visibility in which the behaviors of police were subjected to public scrutiny. The images captured by anti-globalization activists raises a salient question: Is this what a police state looks like?

Jeffrey Shantz, Active Anarchy: Political Practice in Contemporary Movements

Jeffrey Shantz, Active Anarchy: Political Practice in Contemporary Movements. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011, 180pp. $us 60.00 hardcover (978-7391-6613-0). In Active Anarchy, Jeff Shantz details number of case studies that demonstrate the influence of on contemporary social movements. Although the case studies provide somewhat limited scope--they stem from the late 1990s and early 2000s and focus almost exclusively on activities in Toronto, Canada--Active Anarchy is useful contribution to number of recent sociology texts that underline the participatory and egalitarian principles that have made prominent influence on movements that aim for radical social transformations. To contrast with typical caricatures of as menacing and chaotic disorder, Shantz provides detailed analysis of anarchist practices. He illustrates the nuanced and principled commitment of anarchists in their efforts at organizing, publicizing, and putting their bodies on the line (p. 112). Grounding contemporary case studies in literature from the classical anarchist tradition, Shantz relates how anarchist movements are motivated by sentiments of mutuality, conviviality, affinity, and affection (p. 127) that aspire to build new communities and institutions. Unlike the fictitious anarchist menace often promoted by police and media, anarchist movements are better exemplified by their commitment to others through community building, an opposition to violence (state and non-state), and respect for life and freedom. Active Anarchy aims to detail what Shantz calls anarchy. He says that rather than take an approach that views as political or revolutionary movement that 'enters into' specific social struggles, I address those anarchists who emphasize the immanent anarchy in everyday practices of mutual aid and solidarity (p. 2). Shantz avoids discussions that are overly-theoretical or uncritical celebrations of by offering case studies that demonstrate how draws on previous traditions but can also innovate and experiment (p. 153). In focusing on practices of everyday anarchism, he positions his work against many of the recent ethnographies on in the global justice movement. Shantz argues that much of the focus of academic literature on is simply a jumping off point for discussions of political theory (p.3) or as a metaphor for anti-globalization politics more broadly (p. 24). While Active Anarchy pays tribute to many of the new manifestations of anarchism, Shantz is skeptical towards political expressions of that take the shape of lifestyle-politics. He is careful to acknowledge some positive elements of new movements, but his identification with struggle anarchism is prominent throughout the text; so much so that there are points in his narrative where his primary antagonists are not capitalists, or the church or the state: they are contemporary anarchist writers like David Graeber and Richard Day. These authors (and others) have detailed the influence of within the Global Justice Movement, relying on complex analysis of power and domination that places class within mix of oppressive structures and practices of contemporary capitalism. Shantz clearly disagrees with their lack of class struggle emphasis. Shantz cautions against the lifestyle-oriented politics of affinity, noting that some contemporary writers have ignored the renewal of explicitly class-struggle oriented forms of that have emerged recently as contemporary anarchists come up against limits in the politics of affinity (p. 42). To underline the class-struggle practices of everyday anarchism, Shantz explores number of anarchist-inspired projects; from long-term free schools and info shops, to short-term black blocs and street reclamations. Throughout seven case study chapters, he examines the limits and possibilities of affinity-based organizing and consensus decision-making processes, and provides ethnographic accounts of DIY politics, punk movements, book making, dumpster diving, and direct action tactics. …

Radical environmentalism in an age of antiterrorism

This paper examines how antiterrorist laws and rhetoric have targeted the radical environmentalist tactic of ecotage, directing the increased law enforcement powers of the US ‘war on terror’ against this form of resistance and conflating in the public mind a tactic that inflicts only property damage with one that aims its violence against innocent persons. Despite significant differences between ‘eco-terrorism’ and genuine terrorism, this association threatens to undermine the public case for environmental protection upon which direct action tactics rely, creating a strategic dilemma for radical environmentalists. Should they continue to endorse ecotage as a viable tactic in defence of nature? Might they face a backlash if attacks upon property engender violence against persons? Can radical environmentalism dissociate itself from terrorism without diminishing the movement's appeal or compromising its radicalism? On the other hand, is ecotage publicly defensible, can the principled distinction between harm to property and harm to persons be maintained in practice, and should radical environmentalists concern themselves with making such a defence? This chapter considers that strategic dilemma along with the underlying normative issues that it involves, ultimately arguing for the importance of principles in theory and practice while acknowledging various difficulties in maintaining them.

Philadelphia's Lords of the Docks: Interracial Unionism Wobbly-Style

In the early twentieth century, several thousand Philadelphia longshoremen organized themselves into a powerful, durable, and effective labor union. These men, who proudly belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, proved willing and able to employ the Wobblies’ direct action tactics to improve their lives. Perhaps even more impressive is that Local 8 was one of the most, perhaps the most, racially inclusive union of its era. Few institutions of any sort at that time in America could claim to be more committed to interracial, multiethnic unionism than Local 8. For ideological and pragmatic reasons, Local 8 stood for racial and ethnic integration on the waterfront. Uniting a diverse workforce was essential to the union's success. Indeed, the union collapsed when Local 8 was split along racial lines. This article looks at the rise and fall of the Progressive Era's most integrated union.