Chapter 12 - Around the People's Kitchen

Section Notes¶

Protests around the World¶

• Overview of O’Brien’s various personal experiences with protests

• Different protest camps handled social reproduction differently

Insurgent Social Reproduction¶

• Protest camps make social reproductive labor visible

• When families participate in (longer-term) protests, they stop operating primarily as a private household

• Frantz Fanon, “The Algerian Family”

  • Algerian struggle against French occupation affected family dynamics

  • Upending patriarchal power

Communes Under Racial Capitalism¶

• Comparing & contrasting commune form vs. protest form

• Revolutionary limitations of commune form

• Reliance on settler colonialism

• No scalability

• Hippie commune experience: preexisting relationship to wealth eventually manifested again, despite best efforts

Sexual Assault at the Protest Camp¶

• Protests also have many incidents of violence, bigotry, oppression just like the rest of society

• Racial, sexual violence abound even at protests

• Dealing with violence collectively

Communization¶

• Communization theory: insurgent social reproduction becomes daily social reproduction

• Potential strategies

  • Strategic occupation of farms, hospitals, stores, other infrastructure; expanding outwards

Quotes¶

"Protest camps ave no pretensions to avoiding instability. Instead, they embrace a degree of tension with the surrounding world. Because they do not rely on ownership, steady jobs, or state approval, they are unable to consistently reproduce themselves within the restrictive terms of capitalist society. For food or supplies they rely on teither theft or a gift economy of donations from local businesses and individuals. They are generally illegal in various ways, in direct combat with state forces, courts, and police. They require an enormous quantity of uncompensated collective volunteer hours, often from people who depend on the camp for their material survival while organizing.

“This antagonistic relationship with the surrounding economy and state can also allow these camps the possibility of resisting many of the internal contradictions inherent to the private household. Within the protest camp, little is owned by an individual or private family. Even if some activists have greater access to donors or wealth, this rarely significantly alters the material conditions of living together at camp. A protester’s material survival does not typically depend on maintaining relationships with any single individual who has disproportionate access to resources. Living at a camp is still conditional but depends on a broader range of relationships to multiple people engaged in shared governance and collective process. If a protestor hasn’t been thrown out of the group by multiple other people, they are likely to be able ot eat at the canteen, find a tent to sleep in, a workshop to sit in on, and a few others to connect with. Protesters may move in and out of the camp in a relatively fluid way, visiting for brief periods or staying for months. Though a number of these factors may differ in a strictly hierarchical guerrilla camp, insurgent social reproduction broadly shifts the basis of survival from individual and familial resources to shared practices.” (pp. 210-211)