Art Workers’ Guild
6 Queen Square
London WC1N 3AT
11:00 AM
In this inaugural talk for the 2026-2027 session of the New School of the Anthropocene — subtitled “Talking Anarchy When The Council’s Still A Thing” — I get into an issue that has tended to vex the autonomous-organizing initiatives I’ve contributed to during the thirteen years I’ve lived in the United Kingdom. That issue is the curiously persistent tendency I perceive on the part of residents to defer to the perceived prerogatives of state organizations and officials, even to the extent of approaching existential questions from a posture of anticipatory compliance.
From hyperlocal mutual-aid efforts of the COVID-lockdown period, to abortive attempts to organize community microgrids, off-grid emergency communication networks and harm reduction initiatives, to village-scale citizen-response exercises planning for a “thousand-year flood,” I have found the possibilities of self-organization hemmed in at every turn by firmly-entrenched beliefs and assumptions about what the state allows, what it prohibits, and what it will “surely take care of” in extremis.
It’s always possible, of course, that I am not the right person to convey the utility or value of autonomous self-provision to the particular groups of interlocutors I’ve encountered in each of these cases. But otherwise this pattern has been so consistent that it’s left me unable to conclude anything other than that communities in the UK are in no way prepared, materially or psychically, for those many foreseeable situations in which the state simply will not be there for its subjects.
How did we get here? What might we still do about it? And what does the would-be autonomous organizer need to be prepared for, when both the conceptual vocabulary of mutual aid and the instinct to organize in collective self-defence seem to remain so very far from immediate recourse in these isles? Join me for this discussion, and let’s get into it.
Closed to the public. A small number of attendees may join the event as my guests; please do get in touch via the contact form if this is of interest to you.