Where the Sidewalk Cracks, Part 2: Interstitial Insurrection
Continued from Part 1: Ricochet Resistance
Guerrilla Dissent
“From this society—from this state of affairs, people must detach themselves. They must detach themselves quietly, without shouting or riots, indeed in silence and secrecy, not alone but in groups, in real ‘societies’ that will create, as far as is possible, a life that is independent and wise.”
— Nicola Chiaromonte
Having withdrawn our energy from the system, to where should we direct it? Bradova argues that our energy is best spent not waging war on the global industrial capitalist system, but growing a different way of life—resilient communities structured on a partnership model of relations, grounded in power-with rather than power-over. And I use the word “growing” here intentional, and not “building”, because it isn’t something that can be planned, utopian-style. It has to evolve though myriad experiments and adaptations, starting with the most humble of beginnings.
And it is nothing less than a whole new way of life that is called for. Most revolutionary programs of today suffer from the same flaw as revolutionary programs of the past: The problem isn’t that they are too ambitious; it’s that they’re not ambitious enough. Writing in 1969, at the height of the American counterculture movement, Theodore Roszak observed how old-guard radicals condemned young people for withdrawing into bohemian communities. “Be responsible,” they urged, by which they meant giving energy to political action, organizing laborers and political coalitions, registering voters, sitting-in, demonstrating, etc. The problem, observed Roszak, is that these activities aren’t enough to constitute a way of life.
“The activities are noble enough. But they are, at best, only episodic commitments. Run them together as one may, they have not the continuity and comprehensiveness demanded by a way of life. And it is a way of life the young need to grow into, a maturity which may include political activity, but which also embraces more fundamental needs: love, family, subsistence, companionship. Political action and organizing cannot even provide a full-time career for more than a handful of apparatchiks, let alone a pattern of life for an entire generation.
“So how do you grow up? Where is the life-sustaining receptacle that can nourish and protect good [community]? The answer is: you make up a community of those you love and respect, where there can be children, and, by mutual aid, three meals a day scraped together by honorable and enjoyable labor. Nobody knows quite how it is to be done. There are not many reliable models. The old radicals are no help: they talked about socializing whole economies, or launching third parties, or strengthening the unions, but not about building communities.”
— Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969)
As much as possible, this work should be done under the radar of the dominator overculture. The best defense, says Bradova, is the defense of a revolution that has already come. There will still be times when we must stand up and fight openly, even when there is no hope of winning—for honor, for love, just for the sheer sake of being human. But this is inadequate as a strategy, much less as a way of life.
In an era when the power of both the state and non-state capitalist actors vastly overwhelms the power of any resistance, Bradova invites us to consider the successes of guerrilla campaigns of the past. Historically, states have been ineffective at responding to guerrilla warfare. “Guerrilla dissenters”, like guerrilla combatants, would first of all choose the ground they want to fight on and then withdraw when the conditions become unfavorable to resistance, knowing that it is better to live to fight another day.
Adrienne Maree Brown, former director of the Ruckus Society and author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, suggests we learn from the example of mycelium, the vast interconnected underground network from which mushrooms emerge. Mycelium connects to the roots of trees and other plants, allowing them to share nutrients and information to the betterment of the entire ecosystem.
If we adopted a mycelium model, then we would see public forms of dissent as necessarily ephemeral and contingent, like mushrooms that pop up unexpectedly when the conditions are right and disappear just as quickly. Meanwhile, the real work would be going on underground, spreading quietly, making connections, even—especially—during times of public inactivity.
The form guerrilla dissent takes would also reflect this subterranean structure. Rather than reflecting the world which we want to resist, it would reflect the world we want to grow: “The vaster the mycelium, the more extravagant the fruiting bodies arising from the fertile undergrowth. Freed from the need to make the show into something big and lasting, we can play.” Bradova imagines “guerrilla theaters, carnivals, flashmobs, encampments, and many other unique happenings …
“Forget about boring marches and angry, futile protests. These showy, one-of-a-kind, playful excrescences bring fun and creativity to the streets, and draw people from all walks of life to join in. They are a play of light and color and sound; ephemera. Cut loose, cut loose from the dreary quotidian! Just like we have taught one another when and how to use nonviolence, we can teach each other to spark joy. Show the passers-by you’ve got something special; contagious, ebullient, irresistible.”
— Vera Bradova, “Mycelium Wisdom”
Viewed from this perspective, the Occupy protests of 2011 take on new meaning. The movement has often been criticized for a lack of a coherent demand and for failing to achieve political change. But perhaps these are the wrong measures. Perhaps what was important about Occupy wasn’t whether it “accomplished anything”, but what changes it signaled which were happening beneath the surface, beneath the notice of the established political channels. What might the Black Lives Matter event I organized have looked like, if instead of being a reaction to the Blue Lives event, it had grown organically out of a real community of diverse people supporting each other in every aspect of their lives?
In the Cracks
“Everywhere the concrete of control paved over the goodness of the heart, the Dandelion Insurrection sprang up through the cracks.”
— Rivera Sun, The Dandelion Insurrection
But what does it mean to operate “under the radar” in an era of mass surveillance and ubiquitous capitalist culture? To where should guerrilla dissenters withdraw in an age when there are no frontiers? How do we walk away from Babylon (to use Bradova’s term), when Babylon is everywhere? There is “no exit.”
The experience of Ted Kaczynski is a cautionary tale. Kaczynski, before he became the Unabomber, was a young assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkley. In 1969, he resigned and moved to a cabin he had built in a remote part of Montana with the intention of living off the grid and reading political philosophy. When he felt there were still too many people near his remote cabin, he would go for a two-day hike to a favorite spot, a plateau that opened onto a view of a beautiful ravine with a waterfall. But in the summer of 1983, he discovered that a road had been built through the spot. Civilization had found him. In that moment, the Unabomber was born.
In his book, Crack Capitalism (2010), John Holloway writes about spaces which exist within the capitalist overculture, but within which an alternative way of life might still grow, a life which is not subordinated to the logic of capital. To borrow the language of many religious traditions, these “cracks” are in, but not of, capitalism. These spaces already exist. “The world, and each one of us,” says Holloway, “is full of these cracks.” We must find ways, he says, of recognizing them, expanding them, and connecting them.
What are these cracks?² And can they actually exist within a capitalist hegemony where everything and everyone is commodified, even resistance? We might think of temporary autonomous zones, spaces where a different world may be prefigured, spaces like Occupy, Burning Man, or Rainbow Gatherings. But I think these are more like the dandelions and fungi that can grow out of the cracks, not the cracks themselves.
In Seeing Like a State (1999), James C. Scott writes about the capacity of empire to understand the cultures it assimilates. He calls this “legibility”, and it gives some insight into the character of Holloway’s “cracks”. When empire can “read” another culture, then it can assimilate it. When empire cannot “read” the culture, then it works to render it “legible”. The process of making something legible means simplifying, abstracting, and standardizing it according to a utilitarian and universalist logic. In modern times, that means the logic of capitalism.
One of the examples Scott gives is the attempts by states to “sedentize” nomadic pastoralists. Another example is the transformation of wild forests with a rich diversity of species into orderly stands of only the most marketable of tree species. In other words, it is monoculturization, applied both to humans and other-than-human beings. These attempts inevitably fail, at least in the long run, because they don’t account for the complexity of human and more-than-human nature. And that’s when the cracks appear. And as the inexorable collapse of global industrial capitalist civilization continues, these cracks will grow.
Interstitial INsurrection
"That's how we're gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love.”
— Rose Tico, Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi
It’s in those cracks that we live our authentic lives. They are characterized by specificity, locality, diversity, complexity, holism, embodiment, relationality, sacrality—all of the things that are illegible to the capitalist state. And the life that grows there is both fragile and resilient, like a dandelion, both common and mysterious. It is irreducible to mathematical formulae or objectifying language. It is uncontrollable, wild. It is ubiquitous, and yet practically invisible to capitalist eyes. These cracks are the spaces which emerge when two or more people genuinely connect and form a relationship free from exploitation and domination. When we are in those spaces, we are outside of capitalism—whatever our actual spatiotemporal location.³
It’s not that our authentic encounters cannot be transformed into exploitative relations by capitalism. Capitalism spreads everywhere because we carry it within ourselves. “The real power of capital is right here in our everyday lives—we re-create its power every day because capital is not a thing but a social relation between people ...” (“Give Up Activism”). Friendships are turned into social media connections and professional networks. Sexuality is turned into sport, eroticism into pornography (from the Latin prone, to sell), and sensual pleasure into stimulation. Sharing your life with another person is turned into a legal contract and patriarchal control. Meaningful labor is turned into bullshit jobs. Communion with the more-than-human world is turned into suburban lawns and tourism for the privileged. Religion (from the Latin religare, to bind together) is turned into megachurches and New Age spiritualities-for-sale.
And yet, we know better. Deep down, we feel that something is lost in the translation. Something essential. But it can be recovered. Because, just as we carry capitalism within ourselves, we also carry the cracks within us too. “The world, and each one of us,” says Holloway, “is full of these cracks. … In one respect we are, in effect, people who have to sell their labour power in order to survive. But in another, each one of us has dreams, behaviours and projects that don’t fit into the capitalist definition of labour.”
Finding these cracks requires withdrawing, turning away from the Spectacle (even when the spectacle is protest), away from our screens and myriad distractions (even political news feeds), away from business and busy-ness (even when the busy-ness is activism), refusing the logic of capital and power-over (even seizing power for the proletariat), and opening our whole selves to the vulnerability inherent in every encounter with another being, whether human or other-than. This is what Martin Buber calls “the most intimate of all resistances—resistance to mass or collective loneliness”.
“Open up more and more power-sharing spaces between you and other human beings. Some for a few minutes, some for a lifetime. Open up the realm where souls connect. That is the new frontier—explore it together. Such relationships, rich in attention and trust, wield magic and restorative power of their own. Such relationships are the embers of another way of being with each other, waiting to be stoked into flame.”
— Vera Bradova, “How to Leave Babylon”
I admit, talking about spaces for genuine human connection as a form of resistance can seem touchy-feely, naive, or even counter-revolutionary. But everything I have experienced as an organizer over the last decade leads me to believe this is essential—and it is often what has been missing in my own work.
“Why speak of thriving and love where there are so many massive, urgent problems that need to be confronted? To write about the potential of trust and care, at this time in history, could seem like grasping optimistically at straws as the world burns. But durable bonds and new complicities are not a reprieve or an escape; they are the very means of undoing Empire.”
— Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, Joyful Militancy (2017)
Far from being a quietist or introversionist retreat into the “private sphere” (if such a thing even exists under late stage capitalism), this is rather a politicization of all of our interactions, even the most quotidian.⁴ It is a breaking down of the barrier between organizing and everyday life. Holloway writes that social change is not produced by activists, but by ordinary people. It is “the outcome of the barely visible transformation of the daily activities of millions of people.” It is not the work of global movements or the nonprofit industrial complex. It is small work. It is intimate work. It is the work of a lifetime, or several.⁵
“The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. … Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution. This revolution is nameless, like everything springing from lived experience. Its explosive coherence is being forged constantly in the everyday clandestinity of acts and dreams.”
— Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life: Impossible Realisation or Power as the Sum of Seductions (1967)
This is a different kind of resistance, an “interstitial insurrection”—from the Latin interstitium, meaning “the space between”, and insurgere, meaning “to rise up”. We pagans know something about these in-between spaces, the liminal (though we are not immune to capitalism’s counterfeits either). It is in these spaces which me must root our resistances, and to that we must continually return to find our resilience.
These spaces are not sufficient by themselves. This cannot be emphasized enough. We must grow them into another way of life—small resilient communities, capable of adapting to the shock of environmental change and economic collapse, each one experimenting with alternative ways of doing what we need done: co-ops, gift economies, communing, community governance structures, permaculture food systems, community gardens and community meals, alternative birthing, alternative education, child-care networks, sewing circles, re-skilling and skill trades, barn/house raisings, community festivals—all rooted in a culture of partnership. But all of this begins with the “cracks”, the interstices, which open when a few people decide to be together in a different way. Without this, nothing is sustainable.
Interstitial insurrection isn’t susceptible to the same problems as other forms of resistance, which Bradova lists (see above). It’s not a power-grab, so there’s no danger of stepping into the shoes of the oppressors. It can’t be commodified; though capitalism continually manufactures shallow and insidious substitutes, the real thing can be discerned. The myriad manifestations of interstitial insurrection can (and will) be smashed by the powers-that-be again and again, but its real work is going on underground, largely invisible to power. And it does not give energy to the opposition—as so much of my own activism has—but instead feeds a different way of life we want to grow.
The capitalist state will continue its colonization. It will try to cover the world in concrete. And yet, inevitably, the cracks will open and the dandelions will emerge. The capitalist state will come along periodically with its fossil fuel-powered lawnmowers to cut them down. But the cracks will remain. The cracks will grow and multiply. And one day, the dandelions will inherit the Earth.
Notes
² Paul Kingsnorth articulates what I think is the same question somewhat differently: “What languages does the Machine not speak?” His answer:
“… ways of seeing and communicating which Machine culture downplays or ridicules, but which every traditional society before modernity’s advent understood and worked with. That means myth, religion, practical expertise founded upon physical work, rooted imagery, holistic conceptions of life, communication with non-human beings, poetry, complexity, questions that do not have answers, questions which are not questions at all. It means seeing time as a circle, not a line, life as a process, not a puzzle to be solved, death as a part of that life, not an enemy to be defeated. Sometimes—horror of horrors—it means embracing unknowing. It means learning to stop and be silent.”
Paul Kingsnorth, “The Language of the Master”
Update: Over a period of a few years, Paul Kingsnorth’s political orientation has shifted from Green anarchism to proto-fascism. While it is impossible to draw a bright line marking when this occurred, I do not endorse Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. COVID and his conversion to orthodox Christianity appear to have accelerated his slide to the right. See here for more on this. (Jan. 1, 2023)
³ This is similar to Mikhail Epstein’s concept of “transculture”, which is the experience of dwelling in the lacunae, the spaces between cultural demarcations, from which a new culture may emerge. According to Epstein, exploiting these lacunae requires shifting from a “vertical” paradigm focused on grand narratives and power(-over) to a “horizontal” paradigm focused on the ordinary and everyday and on collaborative creativity. See Mikhail Epstein and Ellen Berry, Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (1999).
⁴ This is the realm of what James C. Scott calls “infrapolitics”. In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), Scott argues that oppressed groups employ strategies of resistance that often go unnoticed by their oppressors. While they may appear to be acquiescent in public, beneath the surface they challenge their domination in myriad ways, largely invisible to the powers-that-be.
“If formal political organization is the realm of the elites (for example, lawyers, politicians, revolutionaries, political bosses) of written records (for example, resolutions, declarations, news stories, petitions, lawsuits), and of public actions, infrapolitics is, by contrast, the realm of informal leadership and non-elites, of conversation and oral discourse, and of surreptitious resistance. …
“Infrapolitics is, to be sure, real politics. In many respects it is conduct in more earnest, for higher stakes, and against greater odds than political life in liberal democracies. Real ground is lost and gained. Armies are undone and revolutions facilitated by the desertions of infrapolitics. De facto property rights are established and challenged. States confront fiscal crises or crises of appropriation when the cumulative petty strategems of its subjects deny them labor and taxes. Resistant subcultures of dignity and vengeful dreams are created and nurtured. Counterhegemonic discourse is elaborated. Thus infrapolitics is … always pressing, testing, probing the boundaries of the permissible.”
— James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990)
⁵ In an interview with Emergence Magazine, Paul Kingsnorth speaks about the very small ways people challenge things:
“I think actually that that’s what the work is—people doing things at really quite a small level—at a personal level—doing their small work.
“I think that what I used to believe (arrogantly, probably)—that we could work together to create some grand new story for humanity—was just foolish. But that doesn’t mean that lots and lots of small stories don’t come together to form something bigger, which I think is probably how it always works. If enough people are questioning the way the world works and the values we have and the stories we tell ourselves, then what they will start to do instead will start to add up to something. …
“I always come back to the same answer, which is that those of us who can do what we can should just do it without any expectation that it’s going to lead to a quick world-changing solution, because I don’t think it is. It’s more a sense that—those of us who can, building refuges, protecting what we can protect, telling the stories we can tell, trying to look for truth—if that’s what we’re doing—and hoping that that can be passed down generations as things go on. It’s a long process. …
“I don’t think that this is something that we are going to turn around in a generation or two. I think it’s just slow work, so we will just do what we can do.”
— Paul Kingsnorth, “The Myth of Progress”
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, PrayWithYourFeet.org, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.