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7 Street-protests and emotions: a temporary unity ‘When a debate ends we meet in the streets’ As we headed towards the march, I was warned, ‘you’ll be crying from the start’. True to form, the tear gas onslaught began in earnest. Instinctively, I wanted to run to escape from the fast-forming plumes, but as the tear gas canisters hit the pavement, a paradoxical calm breezed through the anarchists and anti-authoritarians around me. As veteran activists, they mechanically covered their faces for protection and lit small fires to counter the noxious gas. Betrayed
constitution. 2 Anarchy in Athens The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been reinvigorated in recent years. Its public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible, replete with rioting, barricades and Molotov cocktails. Away from the intensity of the street-protests and the glare of mainstream media, however, its militants implement an anarchist and anti-authoritarian praxis of which the outcomes are less visible. These militants are feeding the hungry and poor, protecting
The Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement has been reinvigorated in recent years. Its public protests and battles against the Greek state, police and other capitalist institutions are prolific and highly visible, replete with rioting, barricades and Molotov cocktails. This book is concerned not so much with anarchist theory, as with examining the forces that give the Athenian anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement its specific shape. The author draws on Alberto Melucci's (1995a) work on collective identity, while offering a first-hand, ethnographic account of Athenian anarchists and anti-authoritarians in action, based on his time there in 2011 and 2013, living, squatting and protesting within this milieu. In the course of the chapters of the book, the author argues that varying shades of anarchic tendencies, and ensuing ideological and practical disagreements, are overcome for the most part in (often violent) street-protests. Athenian anarchists and antiauthoritarians are a pertinent area of research because of both their politics and their geographical location. There is the whole 'rise of anarchism throughout the activist world' phenomenon, visible from Seattle to Genoa, Quebec City to São Paulo. Anarchist and anti-authoritarian social movements are prominent actors in resistance to the current phase of capitalism in multiple, global locations. Throughout Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and the Antipodes, radical resistance to neo-liberalism often has an anarchist and/ or anti-authoritarian cast.
by stating that opposition to government policy should not turn into a ‘psychodrama,’ we have termed our application of Situationist psychogeography to street protest psychoprotest . 8 We make use of the early writings of the Situationist International and the Lettrist International in order to advance a cultural analysis of protest activity. While the city of Montreal has been working for decades to brand Montreal a city of festivals and urban spectacle, the student psychoprotests revealed the forms of repression that are at work in a system of neoliberal
6 The anarchist and anti-authoritarian space: tensions and tendencies ‘Don’t smash the ATM … here’ There are flickers of antagonism that often precede that combustive moment when a protest march turns into a violent street-protest. These can take the form of catalysts like a chunk of marble crashing through a window here or a trunk of wood shattering an ATM (bank machine) screen there. For one particular protest, the explosion had to wait a minute, interrupted by a middle-aged woman calling from a balcony as the march passed by. ‘Oχι εδώ’ [Not here], she
the dissemination of knowledge of the scrutinised legislation left transitional applicants well informed and educated of the potential impact for well over a year before the Act was actually implemented. This is a point that has remained overlooked in the historiography.15 Although the street protests are rightly observed as spontaneous and as part of a movement that escalated as it gained momentum, the foundations of this action lay in this much longer campaign which was being orchestrated in the depressed regions. In the north-east of England, as early as November
Britain £9.24 billion. 4 From the very beginning the decision to go to war had been controversial. There was considerable media criticism, Cabinet resignations and large-scale street protests. In January 2003 a poll by The Guardian suggested that public opinion was 43 per cent against intervention in Iraq with only 30 per cent in favour, compounded by the failure to receive international backing in the form of a United Nations Security Council resolution
centred in the four Ps: the direction of the Peace Process, policing reforms, protesting at contentious parades, and the welfare of republican prisoners. As a specific challenge to the constitutionalism of Sinn Féin and its pervasive political and social influence in republican areas of Northern Ireland, RNU activist repertoire was limited. Without contesting elections, it has been restricted to street protests, and, with a much smaller activist base, these have rarely been given much attention by either the mainstream media or wider republican sphere. It may have built
Unemployment and the State in Britain offers an important and original contribution to understandings of the 1930s. This is the first full-length study of the highly controversial household means test introduced by the National Government in 1931. The means test was often at the centre of public and private debates about unemployment, and it generated the largest examples of street protests in the interwar period. The book examines the construction of the image of the means test and claims that it worsened the position of the long-term unemployed. The idea that the test led families to separate, malnutrition and ill health to increase and suicide rates to escalate ensured its lasting significance politically and culturally. How the unemployed responded to the measure and the wider impact of collective action is a central theme of this book. Through a comparative case study of south Wales and the north-east of England the nature of protest movements, the identity of the unemployed and the wider relationship between the working class, local authorities, the police and the government is explored. Based upon extensive primary research, this study will appeal to students and scholars of the depression, social movements, studies of the unemployed, social policy and interwar British society.
September 2015 result reflects the voters’ will, electoral turnout was remarkably low. It is significant that only 55 per cent of registered voters had their say, suggesting that voters have electoral fatigue or have little faith in any of the parties competing for power. Conclusion 151 As for the anarchists and the anti-authoritarians, the focus of direct action has momentarily shifted. Insofar as further engaged fieldwork is necessary to apprehend the reality on the ground, 2015 did see a marked decline in the visible mass street-protests of the recent past. While