Introduction

Protest camps occupy a unique position within collective action as they are not only the site of protest but they simultaneously double as home places (hooks, 1990; Roseneil, 2000); places where participants are fed, cared for and sheltered. Previous parts of this book have examined how protest camps manifest their protest in relation to space, and the ways in which they enable and nourish the assembly of diverse participants, creating coalitions of protestors that may form significant challenges to the status quo. In this part the focus turns inward, looking at practices of social reproduction and the re-creation of everyday life in protest camps and the politics which underwrites this.

A politics of social reproduction

It is important to first clarify that the constructions of many protest camps as home places is not simply an accidental side effect or by-product of this form of protest. Rather, it is often deliberately pursued and actively promoted as a social movement politics. In the case of many camps such politics takes inspiration from at least two significant political debates on the radical left.

First, re-creating the protest camp as home takes on the ‘question of organisation’, and in particular the notion of prefiguration (Breines, 1989; Pickerill and Chatterton, 2006; Day, 2005; Frenzel, 2014; Nunes, 2014). A debate of means and ends, or tactic and strategy, the question of organisation in left-wing movements goes back to nineteenth-century conflicts between anarchists and socialists. While socialists broadly aimed for the working-class organisation to capture state power and use this power to implement a socialist and communist order, many anarchists instead argued for a dismantling of the state in the process of revolutionary transformation (Gordon, 2008; Ward, 1973). In the political analysis of anarchists, political power had to be built from the bottom up, overcoming the authoritarian structures manifest in states with new forms of radically democratic organisation. The poles of vertical versus horizontal organisation were rarely this clear cut, and historically many socialists were engaged in attempts at creating new forms of alternative living from the bottom up, for example the alternative and utopian communities that formed in the nineteenth century by socialists such as Richard Owen (Miliband, 1954).