The former mining town of Bentley, just north of Doncaster in South Yorkshire, is among the most deprived 10% of areas in the UK. Life expectancy is 10 years lower than the national average. This is partly due to high rates of nutrition-related diseases such as childhood obesity, heart disease, diabetes and cancer – all of which are directly linked to food poverty.
Food is a central weapon in capitalism's war on the poor. As grime and punk duo Bob Vilan put it: Health is an asset (A 3-minute musical manifesto on food, health and power):
“Kill a child with 2 pounds of chicken and chips
Is this a war tactic against the poor?
Slave wages don't save wages
I can't imagine eating fresh fruit with my face on the floor.”
In capitalism, lives only matter to the extent that they increase profits. Capitalist societies are habitually abusive towards anyone who is not actively producing, consuming, selling, marketing, or protecting capitalist interests. The young, the old, the poor, and the marginalized are supported to the extent that they remain potential cogs in the economy, or that money can still be made from supporting them (in the case of the poor and unemployed, their very existence is a threat to people not breaking the rules if they become poor or unemployed themselves). Increasing profits from the care system is a central element of the current strategy to bankrupt local authorities, and all but the most core services are privatized for capitalist profit.
But capitalism can never “care”. Its end goals of profit and growth do not allow for prioritizing things like well-being, happiness, fun and compassion over money. In fact, a care economy is the very antithesis of the capitalist money/debt economy, and that is exactly why anarchists need to fight to build it. The state, while an integral and crucial part of the broader capitalist economy, has also proven incapable of providing an adequate level of care for human beings. No one is coming to save us. If we want a better, braver, brighter, happier and greener world, we must build it ourselves.
Luckily, there are people across the country who are doing just that. Eight years ago we founded Bentley Urban Farm (BUF), an anarchist-led, upcycled community market garden project, in direct response to the issues of food poverty and food deserts in Doncaster. We taught people how to grow their own food in raised beds they built from waste material, and even purchased some of the produce they grew for BUF's veggie box scheme.
Our mission has always been to protect people from the poverty caused by capitalism and the state through education, direct action and mutual aid.
Ironically, we, self-described anarcho-pragmatists, are doing this on land “owned” by the council. Years of ideologically driven economic restructuring in the name of “austerity” have caused cracks in the system, allowing us to start building alternatives to capitalist greed and paternalistic state solutions. This could be an agreement with a local authority, like we have with BUF, where we tick various green boxes for the council and it’s OK to do more overtly anarchist work on council-owned land. Or it could be a more traditional anarchist solution, like the newly established Sheffield Action Resource Centre (ShARC), which occupies large swaths of abandoned local authority land in the name of socio-political change and residents’ benefit.
Neoliberalism created a political vacuum that left communities yearning for alternative politics while at the same time creating a physical opportunity to build grassroots movements for change. Tony Blair showed himself to be a staunch heir to Thatcher's neoliberal legacy, and his work “Inheriting Thatcher's policies”In the 1940s, one of the first things New Labour did was to politically abandon traditional working-class “Red Wall” communities, such as the former mining community of Doncaster. He used John Prescott, the equivalent of New Labour's hapless cartoon character Andy Capp, as his spokesman, to tell us that we “Everyone is middle class now.”As if simply adopting a different class perspective was a solution in itself.
The far right has been much better at exploiting this political vacuum than the left: overtly through populist parties such as the BNP, UKIP and Reform UK, or covertly through the conspiracy-driven alt-politics that dominates social media threads and is promoted in publications such as: light.
People who are attracted to conspiracy theories are not necessarily attracted to overt right-wing ideology. They are far more likely to be disillusioned, traumatized, or simply aware of the urgent need for social change that capitalism's overlapping crises have created. If, like many on the authoritarian left (who have little regard for the chaotic realities of life in working-class communities), we simply dismiss them as fascists or madmen, we can hand them over to the right for the sake of ideological purity. Instead, we should offer living examples of real social change to counter baseless propaganda.
Our mission as anarchists is to live our beliefs in the messy, imperfect, and often uncomfortable reality of everyday life. “kitten”) builds on BUF's work to create new ways of meeting basic needs for communes and entire communities, to show that capitalism is not the only option. With the long-term goal of creating an equitable, income-distributive, anti-capitalist, anti-oppression eco-commune for up to 200 people, we need to create more autonomous and environmentally responsible systems with shorter supply chains to meet needs such as food, energy, shelter and care.
These systems cannot, and should not, exist in isolation: they act as bridges connecting communes, the wider community, and the outside world. The networks of cooperatives needed to make this happen give us the opportunity to create solidarity economies at the heart of economically marginalized communities, and show entire communities that we don't need capitalism or the state to survive or even thrive.
Similarly, the Kurdistan Freedom Movement values women and youth when it comes to decision-making because they are the furthest removed from patriarchy and therefore in the best position to offer alternatives to it. Those in communities that are furthest removed from the economic benefits of capitalism have the least to lose and the most to gain from building alternatives to the capitalist system. The abandonment of these communities, both economically and politically, by the purveyors of capitalism only makes change even more likely.
The authorities who are supposed to look after these communities have repeatedly proven that their lives do not matter. It is our job to prove that the authorities and the system they represent do not matter to those of us who live in marginalized communities. To borrow a Crass phrase, there is no authority other than us.
Every act of self-governance, from community gardens to social centers, worker cooperatives to people's assemblies, is an act of resistance to a system that sees human life, and life in general, as a resource to be ruthlessly exploited until what little remains of that life no longer matters. Anarchists recognize that even the most well-intentioned authoritarian structures inevitably become self-serving over time, and that organizations will always be more important than individual lives.
Anarchism also recognizes that freedom and social equality go hand in hand. No one is free until everyone is free. Changing society requires courageous individuals to free themselves from the chains of capitalism's bondage, but it is the creation of solidarity economies, mutual aid networks, and autonomous zones that makes long-term individual freedom possible. If you want a free society, you must fight to liberate yourself. If you want to liberate yourself, you must fight to liberate society. In other words, revolution is the art of making something important for yourself.
So put this paper down (actually, better yet, share it with your neighbors!) and let's start closing the cracks in capitalism. Every act of solidarity, no matter how small, tells people that they matter. Every act of rebellion tells the authorities that they don't matter.
If you want a social and personal revolution but don't know where to start, join ACitN. For more information, check out our website.
~ Warren Draper From the North Commune
A shortened version of this article appeared in our Summer 2024 issue. Freedom Journal.