I’ll be giving a short presentation on Mark Fisher’s work at ICA London on 29th May 2026, alongside artists Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, and economist Ann Pettifor.
Tickets are available here. The event is taking place alongside the exhibition Genuine Fake Premium Economy, which brings together three new commissioned works by Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison & Jasmine Gregory.
More info on the event below:
Writer Em Colquhoun, artists Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, and economist Ann Pettifor come together to discuss their various work on inequality.
Each speaker will present an area of their work relating to how we have been living with a broken economy, and how this era of rising inequality has laid bare myths of fairness, progress and meritocracy. Em Colquhoun will speak on Mark Fisher’s work, in particular Capitalist Realism and Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn will discuss Bank Job, a community art project and resulting documentary in which the artists bought up more than £1 million of debt owed by people in Walthamstow. Ann Pettifor will present on her new book The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet.
This will be followed by a discussion and opportunity for questions from the audience.
My partner’s trial is due to start on Thursday 4th June 2026 at Birmingham Crown Court. They are facing a charge of criminal damage for alleged involvement in direct action that took place at Moog Inc. in Wolverhampton.
Moog is a company that you might associate with synthesisers. That’s Robert Moog. He had a cousin, Bill Moog, who invented flight actuators for aircraft. The company that bears Bill’s name is Moog’s evil twin and has been involved in all sorts of bother. (I wish I was making this up.)
As one local resident pointed out, in an area that built airplanes to fight fascism in World War II, you now have a company arming a fascist nation in 2026. Bezalel Smotrich, at the very least, would be proud of that fact. Still, the UK government has not stopped these shipments.
The UK government claims to have suspended some export licences, but these do not apply to anything Israel actually needs; only the shipping of those items that the IOF could probably buy on Amazon. With regards to Moog’s role in the production of key components for the M-346 — components that no other company produces — Chris Bryant MP misled parliament and contradicted his own briefing when defending the government’s decision not to suspend Moog’s exports.
If any more proof of Moog’s indifference to international law were needed, a criminal investigation has recently been opened into the company’s shipments through Belgium — a country that has implemented a full arms embargo, which Moog appears to have wilfully ignored. But in the UK, it is my partner who is on trial.
My partner and three others have already spent six months on remand in prison, accused of doing what our government has refused to, which is upholding international law and ceasing their facilitation of crimes against humanity. Now the Moog 4 are facing even more time.
Please come to Birmingham Crown Court from June 4th to support the four defendants.
Photos from a recent demo outside the Old Bailey, in support of the Keysight 3 and the Brize Norton 5. There was some street theatre by Moi Ko, dramatizing the events of the Brize Norton action and its consequences:
In the early hours of the 20th June 2025, two people cut through the fence at RAF Brize Norton, a Royal Airforce base in Oxfordshire, and used electric scooters to spray paint two Voyager aircraft’s. The state alleges that the incident represented a threat to national security, and cause damage in the millions of pounds… despite this, the planes were spotted flying again 11 days later.
Moi Ko’s newest political street theatre production asks, why is state violence called security and resistance called terrorism?
A Slovene translation of my blogpost from January, marking the ninth anniversary of the death of Mark Fisher, has been published by Disenz. You can read it here. It was translated by Mišo Micic.
A lot has changed since January! If that wasn’t already obvious… A follow-up post, which is decisively more confident than the mournful tone of early 2026, can be read here.
Juno and I listened to music a lot together whilst they were in prison. I wrote about it for Vol. 2 of No Tags at the end of last year. Now that they’re out, we wanted to try and recreate that atmosphere for ourselves, but with new freedom.
First up, a mix Juno made of songs by ‘peace’ — a mysterious SoundCloud producer they were listening to a lot on release. After they put the mix together, we called each other on the phone and chatted about it whilst also introducing this thing we’ve been wanting to do.
Apologies for the audio quality during our opening conversation by the way, but the crunch is both familiar and apt, as it mediated the majority of our conversations for six whole months. Get used to it. We did.
It continues to surprise me just how relevant and prescient the work of Mark Fisher remains within the context of the political climate in the UK. Not that you’d think that by the passing dismissals that continue to circulate occasionally across social media… But there are many essays that Mark wrote in the 2010s that have never been read widely. Perhaps that is because they are, in many ways, “parochial”.
But parochial from whose perspective? Fisher may continue to resonate most with those living in the UK, but the spread of his work across the Spanish-speaking world continues to fascinate me. More often than not, Fisher is chewed up and misunderstood by Americans, unfortunately… And in speaking to a few Americans recently, I’m conscious of how they continue to be barely plugged into what’s happening over here (or anywhere else, frankly).
My interest in Mark’s work endures unwaveringly, but I am returning to him more emphatically at the moment, as his writings from 2015-16 are spookily prescient for the UK in 2025-26. His writings on protest, in particular, have helped clarify my own thinking about what is happening with various protest movements at work today.
New Consciousness Raised?
Eight months ago, I felt my political consciousness raised anew in orbit of the UK’s prison-industrial complex. I have struggled to get back into theory since, instead yearning for community organising like I never have before. But in returning to others’ words to try and understand recent experiences, it has been Fisher — much to my surprise, honestly — who has once again encapsulated the last year for me.
“To have one’s consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant”, he wrote in 2015: “it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted.” I have been relating to this profoundly. I’ve written about Israel-Palestine on this blog for years. I’ve never been ignorant to the existence of prisons. I have been to various protests, including protests against the UK government’s crackdown on protest rights. But after my partner was arrested for alleged involvement in direct action and remanded to prison for six months, my entire relationship to the world has shifted massively. In reading Mark, as I try to process the experience, it seems clear that something also happened to him in 2015. There was a shift — one ignored by many because it did not take place online.
Mark abandoned Twitter, moved into meatspace, and took to organising within the UK on a local and national level. His thought developed with new rapidity, but his old readership lagged behind, largely unaware of what was going on for him. If Mark became more parochial than before, this is likely why. Still, there are clear signposts from 2015, which remain available for all those willing to look past the distorting virality of ‘other’ essays…
Abandon Hope; Pick Up New Weapons
2015 was an interesting year for Fisher in many ways. He appeared newly radicalised by the electoral defeat of the Labour Party during that year’s general election. Earlier this year, on the ninth anniversary of Mark’s death, I returned to the blogpost written in response.
What had previously been a coalition government run by the Tories and the Liberal Democrats was transformed into a Conservative Party majority. I remember the election well – the most disheartening in living memory. But Fisher refused to give in to despair, because he recognised that despair and apathy is what the system wants most of all.
Reflecting on ‘capitalist realism’ – his most famous concept; a name given to neoliberalism’s cancellation of the future and its ‘naturalisation’ of capitalism as the only viable socio-economic system available to us (‘there is no alternative’) – Fisher wrote on his k-punk blog:
Capitalist realism is not about people positively identifying with neoliberalism; it is about the naturalisation and therefore the depoliticisation of the neoliberal worldview … To break out of this, you need a repoliticisation, and this requires a popular mobilisation…
There was some evidence of popular mobilisation at that time, in Fisher’s view. (He cites the SNP, but ten years on, this mobilisation clearly didn’t last.) Regardless, more clearly needed to be done to counteract the Tories’ victory, which “depended upon a popular de-activation.” But there was evidence of a new “popular enthusiasm – an enthusiasm that capitalist realism is set up to prevent emerging” — nonetheless. It may not have been strong enough to forestall the Tories’ ascendence, but it was still emerging. Something was rushing into view, Fisher argued; “something that, for a long time, there hasn’t seemed to be any glimmer of in England: the future.”
To encourage the emergence of a world struggling to be born, Fisher advocated for various strategies and tactics that are broadly uncontroversial: the development of “hub struggles” – like the Miners’ Strike – and the creation of new “social spaces” and “knowledge exchange labs”, where people can learn more about the nature of our system beyond the enclaves of higher education.
Most interesting to me, however, out of Fisher’s nine recommendations for encouraging popular mobilisation, is number seven: “Engage in forms of activism aimed at logistical disruption”. Expanding, Fisher writes:
Capital has to be seriously inconvenienced and to fear before it yields any territory or resources. It can just wait out most protests, but it will take notice when its logistical operations are threatened. We must be prepared for them cutting up very rough once we start doing this – using anti-terrorist legislation to justify practically any form of repression. They won’t play fair, but it’s not a game of cricket – they know it’s class war, and we should never forget it either.
Reading this in 2026, it is striking how prescient it feels. Exactly ten years after Fisher wrote these words, the British government has begun to use its counter-terrorism legislation to brutalise and disempower pro-Palestinian protest movements explicitly. What Fisher called for was direct action, and the authoritarian response to popular direct action movements has illuminated the class war engulfing Britain more glaringly than I can remember in my lifetime.
Direct action – a form of protest that does not seek recourse to influencing government policy through the pressure of civil disobedience, but rather acts directly upon capital’s logistical infrastructure – has a long and celebrated history in the British isles. The Suffragettes are the go-to example, jarringly celebrated in parliament at the same time as politicians today enact legislation that would have surely broken the Suffragette movement in the early 20th century. Indeed, today’s direct actionists are defamed as ‘terrorists’ and imprisoned under repressive counter-terror regimes that seek to isolate, disenfranchise and break apart ‘ideological’ movements on the grounds of their apparent ‘extremism’ and threat to ‘national security’.
The playbook will be familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of McCarthyism internationally, but the crackdowns within the UK in particular are unprecedented. The other day, for example, I attended the campaign launch for the Brize Norton 5 at Palestine House in London. Dr Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE International, spoke at length on the UK government’s new National Security Act 2023. The Brize Norton 5, accused of spray-painting RAF planes used to refuel Israeli jets mid-strike, have been remanded to prison since July 2025 and are the first to be charged under the new act.
A few nights earlier, Juno and I had been watching documentaries about the partition of Korea, and I was struck by discussions of South Korea’s own National Security Act, implemented in 1948 “to secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State.” Over the decades since, the Act has been adapted to stop its arbitrary usage, curtailing freedom of expression and enabling human rights abuses. In the UK, many suspect it will be a long time before we see similar powers put in place to curtail the abuses being enacted right now.
Korea is not the only historical example resonating with our present. The UK government in 2026 is willing to exert the sort of totalitarian crackdown on leftists as Italy did to break the left in the 1970s, for example — albeit for actions that pale in comparison to anything the Red Brigades ever did. Most damningly, these measures have been applied to pro-Palestinian activists almost explicitly, who object to British facilitation of a contemporary genocide as well as Britain’s long-standing support for Israeli apartheid. Far-right agitators, responsible for rioting and terrorising communities on racially aggravated grounds in 2024, face no such comparable repression.
The world Fisher expected to see, once the British left got its act together, is here. These crackdowns are not evidence of a coming defeat, however. The left has never felt more empowered in this country, and it is making gains not seen since a decade ago. This time, however, the left is also refusing to make concessions. Smearing anti-Zionists as ‘antisemites’, for example, doesn’t work anymore. Smearing them as terrorists won’t either.
Indirect Action
Fisher’s predictions regarding direct action and the repressions that would result from its tactical use are not the only prescient aspect of his 2015 blogpost. He insists that new narratives are also essential to support these logistical disruptions.
Capitalist realism isn’t simply a bricks-and-mortar system, after all; it is also a ideological regime that installs capitalism as the basis of all ‘common sense’. The rise of social media as a newly putrid battleground was something Fisher was tentatively excited about, before he abstained from the impotence of Twitter debates. In fact, the intensification of Twitter circle-jerks was a problem he identified much earlier than most. His essay “Touchscreen Capture” is one example of him critiquing the further entrenchment of neoliberalised communications technology in the 21st century.
In his blogpost following the 2015 general election, Mark raises the same argument. The contradictory delibidinising tendencies of addictive social-media platforms is an intensification of old PR exercises from the 1970s and ’80s. It’s all very intentional. “This is why the intensification and proliferation of the capitalist technologies of reality management and libidinal engineering in the 1980s was not merely some happy coincidence for neoliberalism; neoliberalism’s success was inconceivable without [new communicative] technologies”, Fisher writes. But he knew the solution wasn’t abandoning social media either. To do so entirely would only be to cede its possession to the right. He argues instead that communicative technologies must be used proactively, not reactively.
This is because logistical disruption must be coupled with narrative disruption. Logistics and narrativisation are two sides of the same coin for capitalism itself, after all. It is for this “reason that direct action, while of course crucial, will never be sufficient: we also need to act indirectly, by generating new narratives, figures and conceptual frames.”
Accelerationist Narratives
This tension between direct and indirect action was a focal point of Fisher’s work during the 2010s. I’ve previously written about how he despised the resurgent purity politics of an American left that took far too seriously the admonishments of the right.
These admonishments were common in orbit of the Occupy movement:
In the London Evening Standard, one columnist crowed that it “was capitalism and globalisation that produced the clothes the protesters wear, the tents they sleep in, the food they eat, the phones in their pockets and the social networks they use to organise.”
In an essay titled “Postcapitalist Desire” (and in the first session of his postgraduate seminar of the same name), Fisher highlights how the right’s claims of leftist hypocrisy don’t actually warrant being taken seriously. What Mark heard in these dismissals was little more than the sort of miserablism espoused by his former lecturer Nick Land, whose “theory-fictional provocations were guided by the assumption that desire and communism were fundamentally incompatible.”
If Land was nonetheless useful in the 2010s, Mark argued its for the way he identifies points of contention that the left needs better arguments to rebuke. He identifies three of these, arguing that Land’s writings
“luridly expose the scale and the nature of the problems the left now faces”, that is, “the extent to which [capitalism’s] victory was dependent upon the libidinal mechanisms of the advertising and PR companies whose semiotic excrescences despoil former public spaces”;
“expose an uncomfortable contradiction between the radical left’s official commitment to revolution, and its actual tendency towards political and formal-aesthetic conservatism”;
“assume a terrain that politics now operates on, or must operate on to be effective — a terrain in which technology is embedded in everyday life and the body; design and PR are ubiquitous; financial abstraction enjoys dominion over government; life and culture are subsumed into cyberspace”.
But Mark, like the rest of the blogosphere, went to great lengths to distance himself from his former lecturer. In fact, much of Mark’s 2010s writing demonstrates how inapposite and blinkered Land’s arguments are in the present, despite the fact Land has successfully seduced Silicon Valley losers into believing their wealth-generating shortsightedness is radical.
In this regard, whilst Land may have ultimately won out in narratively hijacking “accelerationism” for his own ends, Mark’s definition is far more interesting and aligned with his perspective on direct and indirect action when he writes:
I want to situate accelerationism not as some heretical form of Marxism, but as an attempt to converge with, intensify, and politicize the most challenging and exploratory dimensions of popular culture. [Ellen] Willis’s desire for “a social and psychic revolution of almost inconceivable magnitude” and her “quarrel with the left” over desire and freedom can provide a different way into thinking what is at stake in this much misunderstood concept. A certain, perhaps now dominant, take on accelerationism has it that the position amounts to a cheerleading for the intensification of any capitalist process whatsoever, particularly the “worst,” in the hope that this will bring the system to a point of terminal crisis. (One example of this would be the idea that voting for Reagan and Thatcher in the ‘80s was the most effective revolutionary strategy, since their policies would supposedly lead to insurrection). This formulation, however, is question-begging in that it assumes what accelerationism rejects—the idea that everything produced “under” capitalism fully belongs to capitalism. By contrast, accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits. Accelerationism is also the conviction that the world desired by the Left is post-capitalist—that there is no possibility of a return to a pre-capitalist world and that there is no serious desire to return to such a world, even if we could.
The impotence of Occupy
Mark’s ‘accelerationist’ position is important in the present context because he also uses it to intervene within the horizonalist contradictions that made the Occupy movement so impotent. In an essay titled “Indirect Action: Some Misgivings About Horizontalism”, Mark is critical of any leftist tendency that sees basic strategic planning and political organization as copying the modus operandi of the State. (This may sounds silly now, but 15 years ago, it was all too commonly heard.) Mark instead wants “to argue … that this rejection of the very concept of authority has been disastrous for the left.”
It has led to a kind of self-defeating and self-loathing marginalization and to an unwarranted faith in spontaneity and face-to-face interaction (an emphasis strangely at odds with the technological aspects of network culture, which have downgraded the importance of face-to-face communication). It has contributed to the left’s continuing failure to make any hegemonic headway, despite the spectacular discrediting of neoliberalism caused by the financial crisis. Never has, the word ‘curate’ been so widely used in cultural circles, but never has there been less confidence in the validity of the concepts inherent in curatorship: the linking of management with care and authority. In summary, the left’s disdaining of authority — and the concomitant embrace of ‘horizontalism’ — has done little to displace what I have called capitalist realism: the belief that capitalism is the only political-economic system that ‘works’, and that it is impossible even to imagine any alternative to it. In fact, rather than challenging capitalist realism, horizontalism has — at least in some respects — further embedded it.
The Occupy movement was an instance of raised-consciousness for a generation, but it was, unfortunately, toothless. The movement didn’t so much make demands as vague suggestions. It asked for alternate forms of democracy, corporate accountability, and reform. In fairness, Occupy was also a reckoning with a newly digital world. The lack of interest in authority may have also come from a feeling that people didn’t know what was to be done. Who did? Even Fisher writes with the benefit of at least 5 years’ hindsight.
Nevertheless, in reflecting on the Occupy movement for himself, Fisher was more forthright a few years later, when many on the left had yet to fully reckon with their late-00s failures. His (accelerationist) view was that no political project of resistance will achieve much of anything if it abstains from involvement with new communicative-capitalist infrastructures.
Trying to make sense of the logic of Occupy in hindsight, Fisher suggests that the “idea must be a kind of contagious withdrawal from the structures of the State, capital and the media, which will spread through lateral networks rather than via the ‘arborescent’ structures of mass media and parliamentary politics.” In that regard, it constitutes a contradiction: how can a movement spread through networks it is abstaining from? That’s not to say that posting alone will change the world — we know it won’t — but Occupy also demonstrated that not having a clear message or narrative made its forms of direct action ultimately inconsequential. Indeed, direct actions needs indirect action as its underside.
Mark continues:
If the aim is not to take over or even influence the State, then there must be a faith in the practical sufficiency of the movement itself. The point is not to direct demands towards, or protest against, an Other, but for the movement to constitute itself as an immediately effective collectivity. Yet, this faith in immediate – which is to say, unmediated – action betrays a lack of faith in the efficacy of indirect action.
Mark writes even more forthrightly on this topic in an essay entitled “Politics Beyond the Street: KP Brehmer and the Making-Visible of Capitalist Realism”:
‘How do you occupy an abstraction?’ McKenzie Wark posed this question in 2011, in the wake of the Occupy protests. It remains an urgent problem, especially now that the Occupy movement’s momentum has dissipated, and capital continues on its remorseless march. We’re now very aware that, far from threatening neoliberalism, the financial crisis of 2008-9 has led to the intensified form of neoliberalism known as austerity. We should also be aware of the limitations of the idea of taking direct action against capital. If capital is essentially abstract, then what would such direct action entail? Capitalism is a system of virtualities. It cannot be directly experienced, even if it conditions most of what we can now experience. (It may be difficult to conceive of what really occupying capital might involve, but we can be certain that capital occupies us.) Successful action against capital must therefore be of an indirect sort — it must involve challenging and replacing the machineries of mediation which impose capitalist reality upon us.
Lessons Learned
The pro-Palestine movement of the 2020s has achieved both of these things very successfully. It is the “hub struggle” uniting and expanding the left as a whole. It has brought the virtuality of the arms trade — anonymous UK factories idealogically and physically distanced from the atrocities they facilitate abroad — firmly into touching distance.
We have — in part, and even regrettably — Israel’s own insanity to thank for this. Israel’s genocide has revealed the horror of their exaggerated political system — that is, as the sharp edge of Western-imperial geopolitics overall — to a world that has been largely ignorant of its injustices for decades. Palestinian solidarity has never been more popular as a result, even if there is a lingering grief regarding how overdue that solidarity is. Grief aside, however, it is clear that various improvements have been made — improvements demonstrable given the fact that the pushback against them has been more authoritarian than anything seen so far this century.
The strength of the Palestinian solidarity movement is found in its infrastructural diversity. Activists, actionists, journalists, investigators, academics, social-media influencers, artists, writers, organisers, et al. – not only are all present in the movement, in active face-to-face communication with one another, but many individuals also occupy multiple roles at once. A vibrant communality offers the most vibrant glimmer of a communism to come. Movements that Fisher saw as lacking ten years ago, today seem to have learned lessons from past impotencies.
I still have my critiques. If I’m totally honest, I think the cultural arm of the pro-Palestinian movement continues to be lacking. Perhaps I’m just a bit worn out by hearing the same Lowkey, Bob Vylan and Macklemore songs on social media posts. I unfortunately don’t rate the music that highly — perhaps because the protest-music formula feels a little tired. (Their “official commitment to revolution” does tend toward “formal-aesthetic conservatism.”) But these artists have other strengths. They have used their cultural platforms proactively to become vital and visible spokespeople for the movement. Truthfully, many of them are better activists than they are musicians. (Kneecap may be the one exception that does it all with consistent aplomb.)
Beyond these musicians, the pro-Palestine movement has utilised social media very effectively, and we are also seeing a movement finally carving out a broader media ecosystem. Ten years ago, Novara Media was leading the charge in this regard, but they have since positioned themselves as an alternative media outlet in competition with the mainstream. As such, they have inserted themselves into a mainstream media ecology that has subsequently led to them making many of the same mistakes or orbiting the same talking points. Other outlets defer to their own authority and expertise instead, which they know outpaces that of the mainstream without giving a shit if they attract mainstream attention. (Matt Kennard was very good on this during the Brize Norton 5 panel discussion embedded above.)
Far from being self-maligned, a true alternative is offered that highlights just how moribund the legacy media — embroiled with the political establishment — has become. They supply an answer to one of the central questions that preoccupied Fisher in the mid-2010s:
How can the politics of street protest make any contact with the abstract structures of capital that appear to be immune to direct action?
A networked politics has since formed whereby footage of direct action goes viral on social media, leading to concerned citizens doing their own research. But the flow of information is not one-directional. Investigative journalists informed actionists who transform abstract structures into real-world locations.
New Blogtivisms
By way of an example, after the action my partner is alleged to have been involved with in Wolverhampton, I saw a video on social media highlighting the industrial history of the neighbourhood.
Gordon Dimmack is a blogger and resident of Wolverhampton. On August 27th, he travelled to the site where the action took place. Standing outside the gated factory, he began to share his thoughts:
I’m outside Moog Aircraft Systems in Pendeford in Wolverhampton, and the reason I’m here is because yesterday morning, in the early hours, four activists from the group Palestinian Martyrs for Justice broke in and allegedly caused a load of criminal damage. Because they say that Moog Aircraft Systems supplies training systems to Elbit Systems, a company in Israel; that trains the pilots to fly around in the F-35s above Gaza doing all these war crimes. And they say that this is a company that is complicit in that… in that system…
He stumbles.
I’m really, really unhappy about this. I’m gonna break… I had this whole speech that I was gonna do… And I’m gonna break from it and just talk from the heart.
This is a mile down the road from where I live. Pendeford, Wolverhampton – we have a deep pride in our history. All the companies around here, on this site and around here, like Doughty Bolton Paul’s and the Lucas Aerospace up the road – they were all companies and manufacturers that helped defeat fascism in World War II. We built the planes… Doughty Bolton Paul’s actually built a plane that fought in the Battle of Britain. And my grandad… My grandad actually built the rivets that put the Spitfires and the Hurricanes together; [the planes] that fought fascism in World War II.
And here we are now, with companies on the same sites profiting from [fascism]. I’m fuming! I am absolutely fuming. We have a deep pride in this area for our history of fighting fascism, of fighting the worst kinds of evil you can possibly imagine. We… I am deeply proud of it. My family is rooted in this history. All around this area there are mosaics and signs and even brickwork with pictures of Spitfires and Hurricanes, and the Doughty Boulton Paul’s plane. We’re deeply proud of it in this area, and now…
These companies that are sitting on the land that these great organizations once operated under are now supplying the very sort of evil that we fought against in World War II.
It was deeply affecting for me to see him at the site, overcome with emotion. Because, of course, he’s right. What’s worrying, though, is that Wolverhampton’s industries are not alone in subsisting on this kind of underhand complicity and active facilitation. (I’ve long been aware of a similar ideological obfuscation around similar industries where I grew up in Hull.) They are so many sites across the UK that warrant this level of scrutiny — and then some! Furthermore, what’s dangerous is that the romanticisation of these industrial sites has helped to enable that underhandedness for decades.
But a networked politics dismantles all of this. Both materially and ideologically, there is no peaceful space for business-as-usual. What has been hiding in plain sight is made newly visible. Direct and indirect action, far from being opposed, are now immersed in collaboration. The successes of this collaboration speak for themselves. For all the government’s draconian clampdowns on those mobilising for life, I cannot see them defeating them. All they have done is make new martyrs and elevate new spokespeople within the movement, inspiring others to take action until something changes.
Far from being parochially irrelevant in death, I’m left wondering once again what Mark would think about all of this leftist organising and activism in the present. If he was here, I think he’d be hugely impressed and pleased by what he saw.
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black.’
In a letter recently received from Jon Cink of the Brize Norton 5, he told me he was reading The Lord of the Rings. He is not the first prisoner for Palestine to have done so. Juno has spoken of Lord of the Rings memes shared by Lottie Head of the Filton 24 whilst they were in prison, who also found respite in Tolkien’s fantasy world.
The gentle spread of interest in Tolkien’s tales offered both a source of comfort and a reflection on camaraderie. At first, the shared preoccupation with Middle-Earth surprised me. Then, on my second trip to London to spend time with a bailed Juno, we watched Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Return of the King.
It was far too long and we started it far too late for the viewing not to be interrupted by my falling asleep. But I felt I was beginning to understand the appeal. A few days later, I turned to Tolkien’s books as well.
The epic story of Frodo and his friends is, by now, no doubt familiar to most — maybe overly familiar, in the manner that happens to all things which become engrained in popular consciousness.
We know the story and think little of it. It loses all novelty; its reading unnecessary since it feels like it has already been read collectively in advance. The renowned film adaptations, in particular, turn Tolkien’s narratives into a post-modern myth. But it is always so satisfying to read something overly familiar and see everything in it left out by the collective summary held above us.
I last tried to read The Lord of the Rings when I was 10. Emphasis on ‘tried’. The Hobbit was read to me as a bedtime story and I loved it. When Peter Jackson’s trilogy was in cinemas at the turn of the millennium, I set about reading the books for myself. But I didn’t get far into them. They were slightly beyond my reading comprehension and I remember I found them too much of a slog. But this didn’t dissuade me from a love of his world. I found other ways into it, and began to collect the stories all the same. I tried other tales – The Silmarillion, for instance — and I remember finding a first edition of David Day’s A Tolkien Bestiary in a local bookshop. It was quite an expensive book to buy a kid, but I asked to be bought it for my birthday all the same. I treasured it. I lived in that book.
Probably finding something deeply romantic in the descriptions of hobbit-holes lined with mathom and copious historical manuscripts — found, tellingly, in the prologue to the Lord of the Rings, which I did not get beyond — I liked to collect things from an early age. Old coins and old books beyond my grasp were mystical things. They felt all the more magical for my lack of understanding them.
There is that famous interview with Derrida in his book-filled home — I can’t find it now — where he is asked if he’s read the hundreds or thousands of books that line the walls. He laughs, saying a library of books you’ve read isn’t much worth having. It is better to have a library of books that one wishes to read eventually, or books that will take a long time to understand. My childhood bookshelf was a bit like that. It was lined with many books that felt mystical and which I would not fully come to appreciate until adulthood.
Twenty-five years later, I suppose it is finally Tolkien’s turn. I did not expect to return to Middle-Earth amidst a quiet habit of writing prison letters and despairing at the world. I am reading it now in a new light, knowing it has been savoured by those in prison for trying to disrupt an evil all too real. I am treasuring something profound within it.
The Fellowship of the Ring, as they name themselves, set out from Rivendell with a common cause — to destroy the One Ring and disrupt the spread of a Great Evil.
Many things are required of each of them individually to reach their shared goal, so the Fellowship is soon fragmented, separated and disconnected. They each go on wild adventures, but whenever they cross paths, they are eager to hear news about the others.
No matter what new struggles and challenges arise, taking each of them further and further away from their comrades, they never lose sight of the fact that their struggles are interlinked. Every victory is shared, as is every loss. They all share one Road:
[Bilbo] used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to…”
When I think now about those prisoners still locked inside — Sam of the Filton 24 and the Brize Norton 5 — as well as those currently on bail, who no doubt have a few ‘non-association orders’ between them, I think of a Fellowship fragmented but always linked, walking the Road.
It doesn’t take much time after entering Tolkien’s world to find its new resonances unsurprising. Peter Thiel and his ilk have long had a thing for naming their capital ventures after Tolkien’s evils.
Most are now aware of Palantir, named after the “seeing stones” used for surveillance. There is also Sauron Systems — a home security company. Anduril Industries, another ‘defense’ firm, bucks the trend by naming itself after Aragorn’s sword — a rare tribute to a force for good. Other financial ventures, from investment firms to private banks, take their names from Tolkien’s treasure-stuffed mountains or Elven or Dwarven holds.
It is fitting that bands of dissenters and actionists would see the spread of Thiel’s fantastical dystopia and, by contrast, see themselves in the wanderers and little peoples who take seriously the question of what to do with the time given to them. During the Filton trial, much was made of a comment by one of the actionists, who made the comparison, in a scuffle with Elbit’s mercenaries, between the Resistance and the Empire in Star Wars. There’s something about the Lord of the Rings comparison that is more moving, however.
It is an epic fantasy, yes, but its heart lies in the surprising fortitude of an unsuspecting people, who are emboldened to take on a power that dwarfs them — pun not entirely intended, since hobbits are dwarfed even by dwarves. They are emboldened not so much by want but need. Those who would be expected to intervene are preoccupied by their own affairs, like the High Elves who see themselves above the world of Men. Indeed, oftentimes, it falls to those, like the hobbits, who seem to be most distant, most at peace in some other corner of the world, to act. They are more successful than those with power precisely because intervention is least expected of them.
Tolkien himself admitted that his novels were informed by his experiences during the First World War, but he did not see Middle-Earth as an allegory for war-torn Europe. His experiences find their way inside his novels simply because they were his own experiences, and it is human to re-narrate those events that are most resistant to narrativization. In this way, his stories are true myths, straddling multiple purposes, including an escape from horror, but also as a way of narrating horrors anew.
It reminds me of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on myth and trauma. I was reading them recently as I try to make final corrections to my doctoral thesis.
In his long critique of psychoanalysis in Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss compares the psychoanalyst to a shaman, noting how the ‘treatments’ practiced by both are a kind of storytelling or performance, where the aim is always an ‘abreaction’ — a term that “refers to the decisive moment in the treatment when the patient intensively relives the initial situation from which his disturbance stems, before he ultimately overcomes it.”
In various cultures, shamans were performers of injury, in often spectacular and violent fashion. They would do whatever was in their power to re-enact a traumatic experience as it was lived in front of the traumatised. Lévi-Strauss continues:
the shamanistic cure seems to be the exact counterpart to the psychoanalytic cure, but with an inversion of all the elements. Both cures aim at inducing an experience, and both succeed by recreating a myth which the patient has to live or relive. But in one case, the patient constructs an individual myth with elements drawn from his past; in the other case, the patient receives from the outside a social myth which does not correspond to a former personal state.
Story-telling has this function already. If a shaman rehearses the story of an injury acquired, whether mental or physical, in order to ‘cure’ the individual, myths in general serve to alleviate traumas more collective. But what’s most interesting in Lévi-Strauss (and later Lacan) is how difficult it is to separate myths from traumas themselves.
To experience a trauma is to feel like one is experiencing “a living myth“, Lévi-Strauss says.
By this we mean that the traumatizing power of any situation cannot result from its intrinsic features but must, rather, result from the capacity of certain events, appearing within an appropriate psychological, historical, and social context, to induce an emotional crystallization which is molded by a pre-existing structure.
The Lord of the Rings has served this function in multiple ways throughout the first quarter of the 21st century. It is long overdue a newly traumythic appraisal.
Others have noted how The Lord of the Rings holds a traumythic sway over the millennial imagination. There was a brief summation of the moment Tolkien-fever swept the West around Y2K on Vox last year. Recalling the theatrical release of Peter Jackson’s trilogy and the real-world events of 9/11 and the War on Terror, which happened concurrently, Constance Grady writes how the first film
had a special resonance with its audience because of the moment in which it came out: a mere three months after September 11, 2001. It met an American audience ready and eager to throw themselves into the story of an epic battle between good and evil — one that good was definitely going to win…
It’s a conflation that has all the hallmarks of American superficiality, inexplicably imagining itself as the hero, despite all evidence to the contrary. After all, the drama of The Lord of the Rings is found precisely in its uncertainty, resulting from the pervasive sense that good’s triumph over evil is far from assured. Grady continues:
Tolkien’s TheLord of the Rings, with its pacifist hobbit hero, is frequently read as an antiwar tract. But to an American audience that felt newly vulnerable and desperate for revenge, Jackson’s Fellowship felt like a perfect allegory for why a “war on terror” was not just desirable but in fact necessary.
Writing in the New York Times in 2002, film critic Karen Durbin ran through the “accidental echoes” between the Lord of the Rings films and the war on terror: “Evil or ‘Evildoers?’ Sauron or Saddam? And how many towers?”
It all smacks of a grimly propagandist desperation to hitch reality onto a myth far from appropriate to an American manufacture of consent.
Even the well-meaning counter-reading towards the end of Grady’s article feels like grasping for some sort of convenient sense-making, as if any other mythical narrative could have served the same ends. Tolkien’s narrative just so happened to be the one made cinematic at that moment. It is a point that Grady observes in closing, finding that the persistent Tolkien references in Y2K culture no longer resonate as they may have done previously to the desperate:
Looking back, [the uncanny echoes] betray how difficult it was for anyone in America to see the world through any lens outside of 9/11 at the time — and how seductive it was to imagine oneself as part of a grand conflict that was both ethical and morally pure.
Overall, Grady reaches for some ambiguous nuance. Americans interpreted The Lord of the Rings as a war of good versus evil, although nothing is ever so simple as that. This is a banal truth — one just as applicable to Lord of the Rings itself, never mind the War on Terror. Indeed, Tolkien’s epic is less about good versus evil than it is about those who crave power and those who are wary of it in all of its forms. One of the primary reasons why it is Frodo Baggins who must carry the One Ring is that Gandalf, well aware of his own power, does not trust himself with it. Such immense power has a corrupting influence on all who might possess it. Better to give it to a hobbit, otherwise ‘powerless’, who can resist its corrupting allure far longer than others.
I have a long way to go on my own journey across Middle-Earth. I am only 100 pages into the 1000-page single-volume epic. But there is a great deal in it that I am finding calming already.
It has been a strange experience, over the last 8 months, to try and situate myself alongside an ordeal that is not strictly my own. My partner has faced the brunt of state violence in the form of the British prison system. I have only wandered by their side, offering whatever support I can — a veritable Samwise Gamgee, steadfast in my devotion to another’s burden. I don’t wish that to sound aggrandizing, whether of myself or others, but the image is a helpful one.
It has been disorienting to leave many comforts and habits behind over the last few months. I do not expect to ever return to them. Life has new priorities, which could not have been imagined a year ago. Nevertheless, the role adopted has been largely sedentary. It has felt oddly administrative at times. It is easy to see oneself as somehow lesser, somehow subordinated, in this position.
But at the same time, I have never before felt so much purpose. A supportive role is not diminutive. It takes as much love and fortitude to reorient one’s life around another’s burden as it does to carry that burden in the first place.
The experiences are of entirely different orders. My experience is my own; it is barely comparable to theirs or anyone else’s. But I long to meet others who know what it is like on this side of the struggle. I wonder what their hearts are like. I wonder if they mirror mine.
The role I take on is one that feels true to myself: to love and support others in what feels true to them. It solidifies a place in a fellowship, no matter how disparate that fellowship may be, and allows for taking one’s place upon the Road.
I think often of Bruno Bosteels’ foreword to Alain Badiou’s Philosophy for Militants:
While ordinarily this category carries echoes of stomping army boots and the whole arsenal of modern weaponry, such vulgar military connotations need not be the most relevant here. Perhaps equally important is the popular etymology that links the old Latin miles to mill(ia)-ites or millia passuum euntes — that is, ‘mile-goers’. We could thus say that a militant, simply put, is somebody who not only talks the talk but also walks the walk, or who goes the full mile.
We are militant upon the Road. We are ‘mile-goers’, and no matter whether we are locked in cells or anxious and alienated at home, we must remember that we do not go alone.
For yesterday’s article on ‘direct action’ on the Canary, I very much enjoyed talking to Kevin Blowe from Netpol.
In the course of our brief morning chat, he referenced Policy Exchange’s 2025 John Creaney QC Memorial Lecture, which was given by Jonathan Hall KC, the UK government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation and state threat legislation. It makes for quite extraordinary reading, not least because he notes how his separate roles as reviewer of terrorism and state threat are increasingly overlapping. In so doing, he offers backhanded insight into the ‘intellectual’ basis for the government’s confused and draconian approach to the repression of dissent and the ways it is attempting to justify its neo-McCarthyism.
The lecture fell outside the scope of the article, if only because I was already pushing the word count, so I wanted to unpack it here.
Subversion & Counter-Subversion
The lecture begins with Hall discussing explicit acts of ‘terrorism’ — the July 2024 Southport attack being the recent example used. Next, he considers why it is increasingly difficult to distinguish terrorism from threats to national security.
The most interesting part of this section — important for what follows — is Hall’s brief discussion of how ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ was once a novel concept but is actually very difficult to clearly determine. “I do not consider State Terrorism is a useful concept”, he says; “it does not accurately describe the threat posed by States.” This is because it is far from clear how much influence foreign states have on any ‘enemies within’ and how much they simply choose to exploit already-existing social tensions for their own ends.
It is in the final section where things get interesting, as well as logically murky. When addressing the role of judicial intervention in clarifying the contemporary nature of ‘terrorism’ and ‘national security threats’, Hall notes how judicial clarity is essential because
if judicial oversight does not comprise the correcting of errors by powerful ministers, then it may be harder for governments to pilot extraordinary measures through Parliament in response to national security threats.
I am not thinking about an emergency situation such as war…
I am thinking about the measures that may one day be needed to save democracy from itself. What do I mean? I am referring to counter-subversion.
‘Subversion’ is obviously not a new concept in this context, but the more dynamic forms it takes in the present necessitate new and dynamic responses to it, or so Hall claims.
Here, Hall says that ‘subversion’ refers “to slow-burn damage to national security rather than the more catastrophic potential of terrorism”. ‘Counter-subversion’, by contrast, refers to “defending the realm from internal dangers arising from actions of person and organisations which may be judged to be subversive of the State”.
Hall continues by acknowledging that “the very concept of counter-subversion” has fallen “out of favour”, because it is “associated with McCarthyism and some unjustified infiltrations of domestic protest groups by undercover police”. Nevertheless, he suggests that counter-subversive strategies are needed.
Difficulties arise when what he describes sounds like nothing other than neo-McCarthyism. It is further complicated by the fact that ‘some unjustified infiltrations of domestic protest groups’, for example, are both recent and relevant to contemporary state overreach.
Subversive facts
Broadly speaking, the issue Hall identifies is clearly relevant to those worried about foreign interference in national politics. As ever, this is only concerning the UK’s historical ‘enemies’, with no issue raised around the widespread interference of the Zionist lobby in UK politics.
It is hardly surprising that foreign intelligence services would be concerned about this, but the breadth of examples that Hall uses is striking:
If I was a foreign intelligence officer of course I would meddle in separatism, whether Scottish independence or independence of overseas territories or Brexit. I would encourage extreme forms of environmentalism, hoping that policies generated would damage my adversaries’ economy or at least sow discord or hopelessness.
I would sponsor Islamism and Islamist MPs and contentious foreign policy issues such as Gaza within politics. Social media would be a delightful playground for wedge issues. I would certainly amplify the lie that the Southport killer was a Muslim who arrived on a small boat, and relish where an attacker had previously claimed asylum.
I would ensure that the UK hated itself and its history. That the very definition of woman should be put into question, and that masculinity would be presented as toxic. That White people should be ashamed and non-White people aggrieved. I would promote anti-Semitism.
My intention would be to cause both immediate and long-term damage to the national security of the UK by exploiting the freedom and openness of the UK by providing funds, exploiting social media, and entryism…
Hall is quick to note that he has no “evidence of foreign involvement in any of the topics … listed”; he is only “thinking like an adversary.” In fact, “proving that the Foreign Hand is at work can be very difficult”. Nevertheless, paying heed to the possibility of such interference, he suggests that more should be done to counter it in advance. One response, he suggests, would be to strengthen “social resilience against disinformation,” or even advancing “a Cold War mentality that sniffs out subversion” — the latter surely being another euphemism for McCarthyism.
Hall continues on from this point in a manner that is slippery and ideologically blinkered. ‘Social resilience against disinformation’ might as well be inverted to mean ‘social resilience in favour of truth‘, and yet, he is also eliding the truths that exist at the heart of the social tensions he previously listed:
the UK’s history is littered with grave crimes against humanity, from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the unending consequences of the British Mandate of Palestine and the Balfour Declaration;
Hall’s insinuated perspective on ‘truth’ is reduced to what is ‘normative’, in the sense that what is ‘true’ is that which is deemed to be preferential for the British state itself. But this becomes an ignorant form of displacement regarding the difficulties experienced by British people which have arisen from the actions of the British state, both contemporary and historical.
To insinuate that none of these things are true — simply because they shine a light on the British state’s responsibility for the disenfranchisement of its own citizens, which is beneficial to foreign adversaries — is an extraordinary example of ideological deferral. This is made all the more apparent when we consider the bastions of ‘truth’ and ‘trust’ that Hall is grateful for:
Truth and resilience require a degree of trust in institutions where the UK is still lucky. The Royal Family, the jury system, the BBC (I think of its VE day coverage, as well as the snooker), the police and security services – domains of institutional trust in which the UK has incalculable advantages compared to the US.
Everything falls even further apart here — not least because the yankification of the UK media landscape is a well-established rot. More broadly, ‘trust’ in the royal family is in shambles and has been declining for decades. The government itself is planning to restrict jury trials, because it doesn’t ‘trust’ them to deliver the results they want in protest trials.
What all of this ultimately leads to is a presumption of ignorance with regards to a nation’s citizens. It’s a governmental rendition of that Principle Skinner meme: “Am I, the British government, out of touch? No, it is the citizenry that is being subversive!”
Governments thus throw their citizens under the bus, assuming that they do not have the ‘intelligence’ — understood in more ways than one — to make reasonable judgements as to their own beliefs and the risk of their exploitation.
Critiquing the West
Hall’s lecture reminded me of a peculiar problem I had back in 2020, which I’ve no doubt mentioned on the blog before.
Shortly before the publication of my first book, Egress, I found myself fielding media enquiries from Russia Today. First, they reached out to my publisher. Then, they contacted me directly. Eventually, they called me at my place of work. The latter was genuinely unsettling and inappropriate. I declined the offer repeatedly.
It was clear that the subject of the book and its contents were a secondary concern to the channel’s producer. Russia Today was obviously not interested in engaging with the finer points of interpretative contention that I was navigating in the late thought of Mark Fisher. As my publisher put it at that time, you could guarantee that Russia Today was interested in the book and Mark Fisher more broadly because he was critical of the West, and they could use those critiques for their own ends.
In the large, Fisher’s critiques of the West are incisive, insightful and accurate. I believe them to be true. The UK is a “boring dystopia“. I know that because I live in it. Indeed, one can recognise that statement as true without wanting one’s perspective on life in the West to be exploited by the propaganda machine of an equally dystopian national broadcaster… Just because Russia might want to amplify critiques of the West for its own ends doesn’t mean that those critiques are false.
Jonathan Hall KC doesn’t bother to make any comment on that though…
It’s only autocracy when ‘they’ do it
As Hall tiptoes around his recommendations for countering ‘subversion’, he both warns against the UK developing its own brand of autocracy whilst euphemistically advocating for it in the same breath.
“It’s one thing to take these steps in an autocracy but quite another thing in a democracy like France or the UK”, Hall says. “Our laws are based on general principles that apply to individuals equally”. But when there’s a group of people we don’t like, there are various ways in which we might undermine them. A group like the Muslim Brotherhood, by way of Hall’s example, might be “banned [on] the basis … that it met a general criterion such as terrorism, or legal criteria that we have yet to invent – separatism, or hateful extremism, or subversiveness.”
The suggestion that legal criteria for separatism or subversiveness be invented is alarming. It is the autocratic policing of political thought, not least those pesky Marxists who might subvert the West through their historical materialism. Hall buys into an ethical relativism that seeks to cast the UK in ideological amber. Never mind all your evidence of state violence, climate breakdown, inequality and subjugation, we don’t believe in all that here. The British are a notoriously boot-licking nation, but to somehow concretise that in law is a baffling self-own.
Thankfully, Hall acknowledges that, no matter how much the security services might be gunning for broader repressions, it is probably a fool’s errand to try and legally define ‘subversion’ or any other byword for what is taken to be ‘extremism’. “There are very many difficulties in achieving an appropriately clear legal test,” Hall says, “and the road to a legal definition of extremism is littered with wreckage.”
Everything is terrorism
What this government has been doing instead, over the year or so since Hall’s lecture, is utilising the rickety frameworks it has already put in practice. Indeed, the UK government doesn’t need a legal definition of extremism. It only needs to expand the repressions already emboldened by its counter-terror legislation.
This was a further point made by Kevin Blowe in our conversation yesterday, which also did not make it into the Canary article. The article’s provocation was simply that the government doesn’t understand what ‘direct action’ is, what it is for, or how it differs from other forms of (equally legitimate) protest. But Blowe added that of course the government doesn’t need a working definition of ‘direct action’. In fact, to formulate one would probably cause the state more problems.
As Hall argues, “if a sufficient definition [of ‘subversiveness’ or ‘extremism’] could be found, then new laws would need sufficient safeguard in the form of judicial intervention”. That sounds like a headache for civil servants and law clerks, so best to just work with what we have…
What we have is the Terrorism Act, the legal definition of which can be (and has been) stretched to cover various forms of protest and ‘subversion’.
The Terrorism Act is, of course, fundamentally racist. It is utilised broadly, but the ideological underpinning of the War on Terror is also baked into it. It has been much easier to apply its various draconian restrictions to black and brown people, and Muslims in particular. To use the Terrorism Act to cover pro-Palestinian protest — as has been happening more and more frequently, and exclusively; they don’t use this stuff on far-right protestors or rioters — is not much of a stretch in this regard. It is sufficient enough to paste it onto people deemed ‘Muslim-adjacent’ in their solidarities.
Judicial safeguards
This is how human rights and freedoms are being eroded in this country. This is the ‘intellectual’ foundation of the crackdown on direct action and jury trials.
Hall’s lecture, if ideologically muddled in its own right, falls back on the view that the judiciary has an important role to play in maintaining certain freedoms:
As a criminal lawyer by origin, my first observation is that the definitive choice between guilty and not guilty made by juries is [the] best and most widely accepted guarantee that laws against terrorism are valid. And when we come to – if we come to – counter-subversion measures, they will be accepted, if they are accepted, by allowing judges to decide.
This lecture is only one year old, but already we have seen how judges have been skittish about their role in proceedings. Clearly interfered with by the government, they have lubricate the crackdown on direct action and civil disobedience, particularly as expressions of pro-Palestinian solidarity. They are not protecting freedoms but allowing the government to wage its lawfare on citizens trying to hold them to account for their crimes in the only way they know how.
Hall might be trying to navigate the minefield of ‘subversion’ in the terms of UK intelligence officials and McCarthyites, but by privileging that perspective implicitly, we find an oh-so-British mask of ‘friendly’ bureaucracy pasted over policies that are, at their core, dictatorial and autocratic.
It is usually embarrassing to invoke Orwell in times like this, but it is hard not to think of him. The UK government does not have the monopoly on truth, nor does its puppet judiciary. If the UK wants to protect itself from foreign enemies, it should have thought about that when it stomped around the world making so many for itself. After an imperial age of the fuck-around, it’s starting to find out. Don’t call it ‘subversion’ when the UK continues to undermine itself for failing to take any accountability for its historic crimes, nor to initiate any remedies for the modern crimes it is complicit in.
Our neoliberal hellscape cannot jettison the ‘right to revolution‘ that even the father of liberalism, John Locke, advocated for. Some things need to be subverted. An increasingly dictatorial and autocratic British state is one of them.
Since 2023, Western governments have done next to nothing to stop Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Instead, they have preferred to maintain relations with rogue states under the guise of lucrative weapons contracts, all at the expense of their (and our) humanity.
Faced with this monolithic indifference, ordinary people have sidestepped negotiations with governments and instead chosen to act directly. Because that’s what ‘direct action’ means. It is a form of protest that sidesteps political negotiation… That’s it…
You’d think this was a simple enough concept to grasp. Unfortunately, as far as the British state is concerned, this definition might as well be written in Arabic.
My latest for the Canary, following the re-arrest of Qesser Zuhrah for allegedly “encouraging … the commission of [a criminal] offence” by posting the words ‘take direct action’ on social media. You can read it here.
Yesterday, I also wrote a short reflection on the chaos that engulfed the Green Party’s spring conference.
