Editorial from our summer issue, a rare all-colour one, out today with the theme of Our Power – looking at how anarchists and the working class can and have resisted the rightwards ratchet of capitalist politics
~ The issue includes an interview with Toby Shone on prisons and resistance, and retrospectives on Reclaim the Streets, anti-war actions and the 2010s surge. We also feature Red gyms, PIP and disabled organising, thoughts on power from below, and an extract from our new title Physical Resistance on British anti-fascism—as well as book reviews and the Freedom Crossword.
Here is the opener from today’s edition
The other day I cleared the leaves away from my small patch of garden. It’s a project where I reclaim a public lawn and turn it into a wildflower meadow. After a long winter the faint fingers of small growing things were starting to peek out of the dusty soil.
Two years ago this was nothing but a desolate space, a biological desert, but now the wild flowers were starting to return. And I felt powerful. Without me, without the small actions I took to reclaim this soil from the monoculture known as ‘lawns’ these flowers would not exist.
That does not mean I am now the master of these flowers: I’m using my life’s energy, my power, to give them room to grow. Sometimes I also need to push back against the forces that want to destroy them; but I refuse to set up a fence. When liberating and using our power we need to make sure we do not become another kind of limitation that exercises power over others.
We all have gardens of one kind of another. Through our everyday tasks we all participate in this kind of exercise of “power”, and pushing against power, although it may look very different. Often it doesn’t get called power at all. For this edition of Freedom we asked contributors for times they felt “powerful”, they made things happen.
One of the hardest places to fight against power is prison. It’s an institution designed to take you and make you powerless. But when we spoke to Toby Shone about his experience of being a political prisoner, he spoke about how it was possible to push back against violent raids by the guards. “The next day the whole wing refused to go back into their cells after the early morning unlock hour. As a cacophonous and unruly mob we demanded the return of seized items”. “This led to the screws backing off”.
Even in the most difficult situations we can build power together and push back. Another way in which social power can try to exercise control over us is through the separation and misery that disabled people face. We spoke to Millie Wild about organising against benefit cuts and building power together.
Publishing this newspaper is also a way we try to reach out and build togetherness, so we can all be more powerful. Anarchy means being against authority and against sources of power, but scholars often draw a distinction between power-with, where we all become more able to achieve our desires, and power-over, which exists to stifle others and exploit them.
To return to my rewilding project, if I tried to plant or to train the wild flowers that would mean there would no longer be any wild flowers any more. Anarchist organising dares us to become more powerful while at the same time letting go of any tendency to hold too tight and control.
We need to trust and respect each other’s power if we are to build it together, side-by-side. We are all wild flowers.
Likewise, if I use my power to control you or to make you act in a certain way I don’t have a comrade any more, I don’t have a fellow-human at my side, instead we become stuck in a destructive spiral of one person trying to hold tight to their power-over, and the other one pushing back with their resistance.
So let us, side by side, wild and thriving, appreciate the ways in which we are powerful. Our dandelion roots break through concrete like weeds. Our caring hands foster life.
Even the most authoritarian societies in the world depend on the mutual aid and the caring hands of powerful mothers, of people who fall in love, so that life can continue. We are power generators, we are the working class that keeps the lights on. Without our immensely powerful love the world would end.
Anarchism is about recognising this, cultivating it by giving it space to flourish, but not enclosing it in fences. We hope the discussions in this edition can also be a place for wild flowers and powerful love to flourish.
We hope they will help you to enjoy and build your own power. So that our mutual aid and our cooperation can spread, become the normal way of doing things – even while we must be vigilant to protect it from the lawnmowers who want to cut us down and turn us into a deadened monoculture.
How are you powerful today?
