Who
are you? What do you do & why do you do it?
How did you first get involved?
South Downs Earth
First!
mp->> So, who are you all, what do
you do, and how did you first get involved?
Jon->> I've been involved in Earth First! (EF!)
and at the moment June 18th stuff, and the Anarchist Teapot.
Jess->> I've been involved in hunt sabotage, animal rights, that kind of
thing for about the past fourteen years, and I try and stay out
of all this other stuff but can't help but get involved.
Liz->> I used to be involved with animal rights
stuff and ecological direct action in Germany, and I've moved
here in the last two years, and am mostly involved with the Anarchist
Teapot.
Ozzie->> I'm Ozzie.
mp->> What do you do?
Ozzie->> Oh, I'm just Ozzie.
Tom->> I'm Tom and I'm a jack of all trades and
not very good at any of them. I do environmental direct action
basically.
Alex->> I'm Alex and at the moment I'm mostly involved
in putting out Do or Die,
and I've been involved in various other things along those lines,
EF! type stuff, and the Anarchist Teapot. I was up in London
for the last year and half or two years, and I was involved in
RTS while I was up there, that sort of thing.
Jon->> I was politicized by being brought up by
my mum, who's quite radical. That's how I got involved in direct
action and campaigns really, and I kind of dropped out of school
to do that.
mk->> What was your mum involved in?
Jon->> Not really so much involved in many political
things, just brought me up quite radically, involved in cooperative
stuff, organizing, and so on.
Jess->> I grew up in a village in the middle of
nowhere and basically nothing made much sense until someone lent
me a Crass
record [everyone laughs]. And it all started from there. I spent
months and months locked away in my room reading various pamphlets
and following up the references in the back of these pamphlets
and reading more and more. Then I moved to London and started
squatting and it all snowballed from there, really.
Liz->> Yeah, I grew up in a small town as well.
A lot of really rich kids were going to my school and they kind
of labelled me as, I don't know, fuck knows, a communist or a
trouble-maker from the start anyway, without me really being
that. So, that kind of pushed me into it.
Jess->> Gotta live up to it, eh? [everyone laughs]
Liz->> Live up to it, yeah. I called myself a revolutionary
before I knew what it was, really.
mk->> You were involved in animal rights first?
Liz->> Yeah, in the direct action sense. But it
was after I went to marches, demos, anything that was accessible.
There wasn't very much accessible. I ended up in a weird Marxist-Leninist
youth group for a while because that was the only accessible
group, and they were shit. Animal rights was an issue that was
getting a lot of groups going around then, and so I joined one
of them.
Jess->> It's kind of the same here, when you talk
about why I got involved in animal rights first off. When I first
started getting into this stuff the main things happening in
this country were the big CND campaigns, nuclear disarmament
stuff, and I'd go down to Aldermaston and Greenham Common and
there'd be all these big marches at Aldermaston. But you felt
very, very powerless because they were huge marches with loads
of people telling you what to do. And what you shouldn't do,
more importantly. And there was the Greenham Peace Women who
were more autonomous but it was very women-only and so I didn't
drift into that of course. But this was before the days of road
protests and EF! in this country, so the main thing to get involved
in that you actually felt a sense of empowerment was stuff like
hunt sabbing where there's just small autonomous groups, organizing,
getting out there, doing it. And you come home at the end of
the day and you feel you've really achieved something. And it's
also building such a sense of a close-knit group relying on each
other, networking with all these other groups around the country.
And that was far, far more empowering, there was no leaders as
such.
And so I pretty quickly drifted away from the anti-nuclear thing
that was just a matter of turning up and being shepherded around,
and far more into the stuff that was full-on. You could really
actually get involved, do some really good action, you came home
buzzing from it, which was something that hadn't happened before.
Going to school in the middle of nowhere, it didn't happen much,
getting that buzz out of something. And so this really inspired
me. And then I got better and better at it, and been doing it
for years. And then all that road protest stuff came along. I
went to one or two of the very early ones, but I was kind of
put off because it seemed like taking a step backwards at that
time. 'Cause it was full of what I would call really naive hippies
telling me to be nice to policemen and things like that, so after
a brief foray into that I went back into doing the sabbing kind
of thing. But I know it has changed a lot now, and I'm a lot
more inspired by what people are doing now with the EF! type
stuff. Since that's taken off really in this country, there's
been a whole resurgence, and it seems that everyone is on the
same par with the hunt sabbing elite now. [Laughs]
Jon->> Finally worked our way up to your level,
have we?
Jess->> Yeah. [Laughs]
Alex->> I think the thing about stuff being accessible's
really true, because a lot of people growing up in a lot of places
there isn't anything. So if you feel vaguely dissatisfied or
radical, loads of people just end up in the SWP or whatever, because it's just what's immediately
available.
Jon->> Me too, the first group I got involved in
was, to my eternal shame, Youth CND. And that was simply because
it was the only group that ever did any stalls in the entire
of Eastbourne, which was a very grim town about twenty miles
east of here. And I think that's why those organizations get
lots of people and other groups don't, because they're out there
and we're usually not.
Tom->> The first group that I got involved with
was Youth CND as well. Even more extreme than that, they were
the only political group that bothered to respond to any letters
that I wrote or phone calls that I made, other than Greenpeace.
Jess->> I don't think so much now, now that there
is such a vast mushrooming of the direct action movement, but
certainly ten years ago if you went anywhere, the SWP were there
in such numbers and so visible, with all the placards and things.
They've got funding, they've got all this homogenous literature
and everything, so it looks like it's a big national thing. And
so if you're someone who's just feeling disaffected and wanting
to become radical, it's very easy to think that they're the main
thing around, the main alternative to anything. And of course
it's just a hierarchical load of rubbish. But I think their importance
is certainly far less now, there's certainly far more EF! and
animal rights groups. All that sort of thing is far more visible
now. So, it's easy for people to just ignore them now, they're
a lot smaller in this country than they were.
Alex->> Certainly true in Brighton anyway. I mean,
Brighton's just weird because the sort of Trotskyist-left groups
seem to be smaller and more insignificant than they are in a
lot of other places in the country. Whereas the sort of anarchist,
EF!, direct action stuff seems to be much more significant. I
don't think it's true of a lot of other places. They do just
fulfill this role of just fucking things up, don't they? Like
at universities they're often really present, and in your local
town or whatever. Then people join up with these groups, and
they're there for six months and they get pissed off and then
they never do anything ever again.
Liz->> It's 'cuz they're made to sell crap papers!
Jon->> I was more or less active before the Criminal
Justice Bill marches but it did certainly push me over the edge
a bit. And that helped a lot, paradoxically, because it was brought
in just to quell people. But the Criminal Justice Act and the
marches made everybody come together, which was really good.
- Anarchist Teapot
Started in Brighton
in 1996, with the grand idea that serving free tea and providing
a place for people to hang out and chat would create positive
social relations and overcome the alienated relationships imposed
by capitalism. They've squatted a series of spaces, organized
an anarchist local history tour, provided food for a direct action
conference, and held a Critical Mass on the beach. They've also
set up a reading room and info-shop. Their motto is: "To
have free minds we must have free tea!" Anarchist Teapots
are brewing in other towns around the UK, too.
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- hunt sabotage
Incredibly dangerous
form of direct action where activists engage in the interruption
of fox hunts and other types of hunting by confusing the hounds,
blocking the passage of hunters, scaring off the intended animal
victim, and otherwise physically preventing the quarry from being
pursued and killed. Dangerous because you can end up being the
quarry instead, yahoos with guns & hounds on your tail -
not fun!
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- Do or Die
Excellent jam-packed
Earth First! journal, with an explicitly internationalist scope. Put
out by the lovely folks of South Downs EF!, among others. Highly recommended.
See the resources page for info on how to get the latest
issue, or see the index for a link to their website.
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- Crass
Groundbreaking
punk band of the early 70s? Crass wrote with power & passion
of the injustices & hypocrisies of modern industrial life,
& affirmed the necessity of resistance & revolution.
Check out their Christ: The Album for a good intro to
their music & art.
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- SWP (Socialist Workers Party)
Borg-like commie
group. The bane of many a protest & organizing attempt. While
no doubt many a good soul is involved in the various SWPs around
the world, their cult-like & often histrionic adherence to
Trotskyist ideology makes them damn near impossible to talk to
about anything coherent.
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