Miles->> It's in having groups of people around you who support you through it, and having that contact with friends basically, who do support each other. Also for me, going from the road protests, which I'm still doing, to something more sustainable like permaculture projects and things like that. I find that that gives you a vision of the future that you can see you're not just against but you're for something as well.

Jess->> Yeah, I'm getting more involved in permaculture now as well. I'm still interested in doing protest kind of things, but yeah, you do burn out to an extent. I imagine I'll get more and more back into it again, but at the moment I'm doing more, I don't know what you call it, positive things. I think you do have to have a balance. You can easily lose sight of what you are fighting for, really, when you get drawn into the internal politics, when things go wrong, the stress, the shit, and everything like that. You do need to take your time occasionally. I mean it's a whole life time you're talking about here. And I think me sort of sitting back and taking a year or two out to do other things, I'm still on the same path. It's just part of the journey of life, I suppose, isn't it?

Miles->> There was that article that came out a while ago that tried to plot a course for what's happening now and for the people that are involved in stuff now. And mapped out the five or ten year prediction that everyone would either be an academic, social worker, in the nut house, or what was the other one? Permaculture plots. Saying, "Oh, I tried direct action ten years ago and it didn't work."

Alex->> I think that's sort of crass but sort of true in a lot of ways, actually. A real thing that we've got to grapple with, as individuals and as a movement, is avoiding burn-out and avoiding getting sucked back into the mainstream or sucked back into full-time careers, and steering some sort of path in between all of that. And it is very, very difficult. A lot of it definitely is taking a lower level of political activity.

Liz->> Yeah, just not overloading yourself, that's what I do. Now I actually know what I can do and I can't do, and I know I can't do certain things so I don't try and frustrate myself.

Jess->> I don't think it's necessarily a constant thing, I think you just go through phases where you wanna do something else and you have to attend to another part of yourself but you're still on the same path. I could never contemplate, you hear about that sort of permanent burn-out, where people do just turn their back on it completely, and go and get a proper job. I couldn't ever imagine that happening.

Liz->> I wouldn't get a proper job.

Jess->> I've been doing full-on direct action for years. Now I'm sort of doing a bit of permaculture, but I'll still be going back into doing direct action. I don't think I'm ever gonna go and get a fucking job or anything like that. I can't see that ever happening.

Alex->> It's too late for you now, I think.

Jess->> Well, it is [laughs].

Alex->> It really ties in the question of how we organize. And for me, the only way that it would be possible to do both are these sort of smaller groups, not hoping to expand the group up to ten thousand people in Brighton. But small, fairly closed or totally closed collectives that have some sort of procedure in knowing who's a part of them. And that works from preventing people from burning out or dropping out. It's much more face to face, you know if people are having a problem, you know if people are taking something on that they can't do.

Miles->> I think we're still all just stuck in the situation of being a counter-culture or a sub-culture or something. You have this inherent problem of sustainability if it's just youth counter-culture. Because, you have generations of activists in the '60s and '70s who could have been saying exactly the same sort of thing. I don't know what the generation is, it seems to be about fifteen years or something. Through various things that have happened, me and some other people have more contact with people who were anarchists and activists from the early '80s. And now some of them are making contact with us and getting back into things a bit more, or doing slightly different things. But that's not very long ago, really. So, we've got this really weird generational turn-over of ten or fifteen years. And people stop then, you know, go and get a job and get kids and buy a house. Which is very strange, really, because that's not the way that most struggle has been carried on for most of history. If you look at class struggles that have taken place, or you look at the Irish Republican movement, or things like that, you have the full spectrum of generations, you have kids, you have grandparents and everything, and it's a more community thing.

Ozzie->> But it's harder to let go of something when it directly relates to your everyday life in Northern Ireland, where you've constantly got the British Army and the RUC in your faces. I think it's hard to go, "Oh, you know, I don't do that anymore," throwing stones at the RUC because they're patrolling through your area.

Jess->> That's totally right. It's totally easy for a society like ours, a sort of leisure society, a spectacle society, whatever, to portray this kind of ecological action as a hobby you can get involved in if you want to. Whereas with something like Northern Ireland, it's gonna be in your face whatever generation you are. You can't get away from it, so all the generations are politicized. Whereas in what we're doing, you choose to go to a road protest camp, you know? M11 was completely different, it was all old grannies and everything up on that, 'cause it was going right through people's neighborhoods.

Alex->> Sometimes it's easier to paint ourselves worse than we actually are. Like, there are lots of things that have happened in the last x-number of years that have been much more cross-generational. It's quite easy to just think of the small group that you're involved with, and think, "Oh my god, we're all . . . ." Whereas if you look around, I don't think it's quite that bad. And I think a lot of the reason is not our fault. It's been the fault of previous political movements that got lots of people involved, and fucked them off and burnt them out, totally disillusioning whole generations of people in the course.

Ozzie->> One of the oldest people that was on the M11 was Dolly and she was like 93 when she got evicted, and she lived on Claremont Road, which was on the route. She'd been born in the top front room, and lived there all her life. She lived on the street right through all that, through the Blitz, through everything. Through the whole entire street becoming a complete painted-up fucking autonomous zone, with punks and nutters walking up and down the street and punk bands playing outside her door, and fucking loads of incredibly surreal shit happening. And she just took it in her stride.

Jon->> I think other people in other countries have said that that's really surprising, when they've gone especially on animal rights demos. And they see some quite up-for-it old women, especially. But also, it's not a question of how we've managed to get these people involved. It's also that there's an undercurrent of radicalism growing in Britain to some extent, and those who can get involved in struggles sometimes do. Old people who have pensions, who aren't working, can. Young mums who've got limited control of their time (even if they probably work more than workers), unemployed people can get involved, students can get involved. Children can get involved when they're bunking off school. And people who are in the career period of their life can't. And that's the largest bit, that's the generation that we're usually quite failing to get involved. It's something which is totally out of our control. It isn't a mistake we're making, it's not something we can really rectify. It's about the way this society's structured.

Alex->> Well, it's because it's activism taking place outside of the work place. It's not workplace struggle, which is the traditional main thing that's happened. Now it's like a job is a thing you do and then politics is something that happens outside the job. Whereas of course, mostly that wasn't the case.

Ozzie->> The generation gap thing isn't just to do with the age groups of political movements. The generation gap is a thing manufactured by robbing, alienating society. It's tied in with the lack of continuity in communities and the fragmentation of society. Maggie Thatcher said that there wasn't any society and she did her best to create no society. I find that old people are generally less conservative and less reactionary, because they can remember a time when the options for an economic system weren't whittled down to one.

Alex->> One thing that's repeatedly true is that making generalizations is utterly worthless, but going on to make one: I actually feel more connection with old people or middle aged people who were involved in stuff, or who remember things happening from the '60s, or even earlier. From when trade unions were a bit stronger and stuff like that. People who were Communist Party members in the '30s. It's always really interesting when you meet those people.

 

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• permaculture
  Permaculture is about designing sustainable ecological human habitats and food production systems. It is a land use and community building movement which strives for the harmonious integration of human dwellings, microclimate, annual and perennial plants, animals, soils, and water into stable, productive communities. More recently, permaculture has expanded its purview to include economic and social structures that support the evolution and development of more permanent communities, such as co-housing projects and eco-villages.
  
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