United Kingdom - Uri Gordon

Interview Details

• Region: Europe
• Language: English
• Interviewee: Uri Gordon
• Interviewer: Lesley Wood
• Date: 26 July 2023
• PGA Affiliation: European network
• Bio: Uri Gordon is an Israeli-born activist, author and educator based in the UK. Formerly an academic temp lecturer, he is not part of The Editing Cooperative. He is the author of “Anarchy Alive!: Anti-authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory” and numerous articles and book chapters on the political theory of contemporary anarchism. His work has been translated into 13 languages.
• Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bpytwh81fp2jjh3nctos5/PGA-Oral-history-Uri-Gordon-appoved.docx?rlkey=dcdvfimusb70mx45amathy5il&dl=0

Transcript

Lesley: So it is July 26th, 2023, talking to Uri Gordon. So how did you get involved with PGA?

Uri Gordon: I’d already heard about PGA in Britain when I came in Oxford to do my PhD. It was just after Prague (September 2000) and I’d been following that stuff a bit from Israel and coming in there was. I’m kind of started organizing very local stuff. Um, and at some point got sucked into this, uh, what I didn’t know at the time was a Trotskyist front group called Globalized Resistance. Which like people like myself and George Monbiot were in the original steering committee and they kind of forgot to invite everybody who wasn’t their people. And we did something local with that in Oxford. But later on I’d heard from one of my friends, a guy called Linden Farrer, who wrote “World Forum Movement: Abandon or Contaminate”, who was an anthropologist. So he was he was comrade of mine back then. He had mentioned the name and so on. And really I only kind of got into it through meeting through the pink and silver bloc in Genoa. Where I met a lot of the people who were involved had been involved in Prague. So it was yeah, it was very much a kind of European PGA that I that I got networked with. Um. And after Genoa. the next thing I think I went to was after the Brussels EU summit, I went to Leiden to a kind of European winter meeting.

Uri Gordon: I met some of the people there. And then got involved with the European network and ended up facilitating the final plenary at the Leiden European meeting. And then the affinity group from our Oxford affinity group people. I didn’t go that time, but they ended up facilitating the final meeting in Belgrade. The time after that. So that was that. There were already people like Vincent. I don’t know if you’d know Vincent Bouchard. He’s now at he’s like a string theorist in Calgary or something in Edmonton. I’m not sure exactly where. So he was a Rhodes Scholar at the time when he was in Oxford, and part of our group. But you know, I already knew people like Andrej Grubacic by that time. So that whole process of how the Belgrade people came in to do the next European meeting was kind of the time when I when I was involved. There was also a pre meeting that we did in Dijon (2006). I was in the Dijon meeting as well. That was hosted by Les Tanneries. Yeah, we got to meet some of the people from Oxford. They came over there. That was also the time where there came this guy from Evraziya. From Dugin’s people. He said he was from Ukraine, but and we didn’t really know who he was part of or what he stood for. You may have heard about this incident.

Lesley: I’m there’s some reference to it on the Wikipedia page. So what?

Uri Gordon: Right. So there was one guy who belonged to Evraziya who turned up at this meeting. Now. And as far as I understand, the organizers kind of sponsored him to get a visa for it because they didn’t they didn’t know what it was at the time. Right? They didn’t understand. It was basically Alexander Dugan’s outfit, but they didn’t know. So that was there at the June meeting. There were also people from, I mean, in Europe, it was largely people like the people from, from in Catalonia and Barcelona that were strongly promoting that. And beyond that, there were people like, you know Longo Mai network. It is a network of eco farms/eco villages. Longo Mai. So those people from there, and there were the kind of people who had different hats on. You know, the people who were doing in the media some of the time, the people who were doing all kinds of stuff who you would see there at these at these things. It was kind of the Dutch squatters we had, you know, people from Reclaim the Streets in London. There are people who had come out of that, you know, so someone who I knew who had been at the tannery in Dijon, one of the group there was in The Zad.

Uri Gordon: Later, people like JJ. Uh, Jay Jordan. Yeah. JJ was still in London at the time, I think. And you know, I would also consider people like Starhawk to be part of that network. Right. Because like she came over and Lisa Fithian. They came over a couple of times like Starhawk and Lisa. Lisa came to Evian to the G8. I brought her. I phoned her in America and, and I told her, look, this is happening. So she came across and of course Starhawk was with us in the G8 for, for Gleneagles. She came to do a permaculture course and where we planned the camp. Yeah she did a permaculture course for was like earth activist training course but she did it in England and was that was there where a lot of the people who were involved later in setting up the camp for the Gleneagles G8 protest camp at Stirling (2005). Got together and, you know, we kind of started setting up that camp. So for me, it was kind of the G8 summits that that punctuated my connection with PGA along with the European gatherings and winter meetings. Okay.

Lesley: So when I’d like to step back a little bit and talk about the activities, but what was PGA?

Uri Gordon: PGA is the hallmarks. Okay. That’s the identity of PGA for me. That’s what it meant to me. The way in which things ended up, which was sort of this constitutionalizing process and working on a document and everything, and that all kind of came to nothing, right? The kind of the kind of institutionalization that was starting to to happen there. It wasn’t built for that, you know. And I think that by the time of 2005, kind of the G8 in Scotland where the Dissent! network just took up the hallmarks, it didn’t need to be there, didn’t need to be any sort of networking activities, any people didn’t have to really know what PGA was at all. I think that it was different from thinking about the global network because PGA as a global network was global South based and led. And the people who started promoting it in Europe were people who, for the most part had been involved in some way in global South solidarity work, whether they had gone to the Encuentros. In Chiapas or just in Barcelona, where there was a European Encuentro or a lot of people who had organized the caravan of Indian Farmers Caravan 99.

Uri: So basically, like the way I got plugged in when we were in Genoa (2001). After the Diaz school attack. I sat down with Sergio, and Venus. I don’t know if… she used to come to demos with a big pink heart. She was always dressed like a pink fairy. She was a magical girl. And she had “love, respect and share the world” written on her heart. She was like a fixture in all of these. Last I heard, she was ill. I don’t. I don’t know if she’s still around. I don’t know who else was there. People came and I just sat there at the keyboard and we wrote that that declaration that came out of there, that ended with this quote from like, you know, ”to honor our dead. Not a moment of silence, but a lifetime of struggle.” But like, when we wrote, we wrote from the school basically the next morning. So it was the first kind of thing. And I just saw the list that Sergio put that on. He put it he you know, he put it on that list. Caravan 99. Um, and that’s, you know, which was kind of the unofficial contact list.

And the official contact email lists were only established at Leiden (2002). Like I think there was like PGA, PGA Europe Resistance, which was forever PGA Europe discussion and PGA Europe networking or something and not. And of course everything got duplicated and so on and so forth. But that’s where there started to be official list. Before that, it was kind of just this very kind of informal network of people. And the functional email list was that Caravan 99 email list. Yeah. On which were people from, you know, different countries in Europe who had been involved in the Intercontinental Caravan. Yeah. and some of them I also knew from Britain, people like Catherine Ainger. I think Jay Jordan was involved in that as well. Perhaps not. People like Fredericke Haberman in Germany. So, yeah, that was that network of people, basically. It was an informal network and it tried to become a slightly more kind of visible network because of transparency and this and that, and was kind of a sense that, you know, there was a group of people who had come had these connections. So but the whole thing kind of started phasing out, I don’t know, because it started to institutionalize more or just in parallel to that happening.

But like I said, you know, later when, for example, we had climate camp in 2006. I don’t remember which number it was, but like, you know, there were a few of the panels in which there were starting to talk about quite statist solutions and stuff like that. And then some more anti-capitalist people came together and we wrote a kind of open letter to the, to the neighborhoods, um, that whole kind of barrio system of organization. That’s a whole that’s a whole anecdote I can tell about that later. And we wrote that, we had a problem with how the climate camp is risking losing its anti-capitalist roots and so on and so forth. And we proposed to adopt the hallmarks as a set of, statements that were something to anchor yourself in. So for me, it was mainly the hallmarks that that were the kind of the identity of the network.

Lesley: Yeah, that makes sense. So which climate camp are we talking about?

Uri: This is, I think it was the one in 2006, if I’m not mistaken. Where was that? Well, I mean, God, I think it was the Kingsnorth camp. It might have been at a different one, though. I can’t tell you for sure, but it was one of those that’s.

Lesley: Super useful because nobody has spoken about this move to institutionalize. At around that point, most of the interviews I’ve done have been kind of in the earlier period.

Uri: Mean that the institutionalized bit happened. That was I think that was 2004 already. Like yeah, I mean the Leiden European meeting at EuroDusnie (2002). So around that there was a whole kind of process towards the final plenary that I don’t even remember what it had to do with like. It was it was kind of institutionalizing communication and coordination and stuff. But, I mean, looking back, it was, it was like a waste of energy.

Lesley: Was it in response to critiques of the support group?

Uri: Support group. Yeah, I think I think that’s sort of what may have been at the background. And it was, it was a sense that networks that people did not have feel that they had kind of access to. Coordination networks or just. I mean, I don’t think anybody was like monopolizing anything or anything like that. I think it was just part of the life cycle of global networks that we were not used to even understand, like because, I mean, transnational networks existed a lot already, but just the rapidity at which they were evolving because of the Internet and everything else was new to us. So I think there was there was that kind of attempt to go into a more kind of democratic, institutionalized direction. But I think there was a lot of energy that went into that. And then those tools, I mean, the lists remained active a little bit, but just the landscape of stuff just changed completely. Anyway, after that, I mean, summits stopped being this kind of event.

Uri: Um, the financial crisis hit the whole … generations changed. I don’t know. Some of us went off and started having kids or whatnot. Like things moved on. Yeah so that, that was the story there. I think one of the, one of the things that we’ve lost a bit from that period was the face to face networking, the face to face international networking that was going on at both at protest summits and at gatherings. I mean, I guess they still happen on a level that things like anarchist book fairs. So I think, you know, the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair, for example, which just happened now, brings together Greece, uh, so the Greeks and of course the Greek movement is very active. So the Balkan anarchist Bookfair is that kind of face to face thing. The Saint Imier meeting that just ended. Now you’ve been following that, right? Aware of that. So you know the meeting in St Imier. Okay, so there was right now it ended. There was a global, an international gathering in Saint-Imier, Switzerland.

Lesley: Oh yes.

Uri: Yeah. Yeah. Which is where the, the famous anarchist conference happened and so on and so forth. So it was kind of the, the bicentennial which was kind of last year, but it was Covid and stuff. So that just happened. I don’t know if anything particularly exciting happened there, but I know about it from people like Bernd Drucke from Grassroots Revolution, which is a anarcho pacifist paper in Germany who went to table there. So for me, like the anarchist book fairs right now are served part of that function, but like it’s explicitly anarchist and everything else. But you know, there is less of a north-south thing for sure. In Europe, that’s all left. But I think, in the last 15 years, movements have in a way receded into their national contexts. I think that’s very clear for everybody to see, you know, that dynamic of, you know, stuff kicking off in France or there’s like this rolling kind of wave that moves from country to country and from place to place. And that dynamic has replaced the kind of more pulsing kind of in and out kind of thing that used to happen when we had summits and we had, you know, that there was more of a sense of something coming together. And I think that’s stopped happening or is happening less. I think a lot of it is kind of as because social media and stuff has taken its place. But again if you look at something like the Greek anarchist movement, right or social center movement in Italy. There are much more face to face personal connections there, you know? Um, so, yeah, so that’s, that’s kind of the story about that, I guess.

Lesley: You mentioned something about the barrio system of organizing.

Uri: Uh, well, that was just like a sub story, right? That happened like this was because, like, the no border camps were also part of that. It was kind of a different network, but the no border network and like there were always people who were involved and had different hats on, like I said before, like in the media, like whatever else. So there was a kind of an interesting international meeting. It was a border camp, but it wasn’t on a border. It was in Strasbourg where I don’t know if it was called Frontex at the time, but where the European Border Agency was based. So we just kind of there was a park and there were demonstrations in the city and there was this and that. And then because the Argentina stuff had happened, then they decided to divide it into barrios. And then every day there would be a barrio meeting in the morning and a inter barrio meeting later. Right. But it wasn’t organic. It wasn’t a living neighborhood. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t. It was it was kind of that that kind of institutionalization on the on the kind of temporary protest camp level. And of course, these meetings, I mean, there’s there was a book came out sometime like Freedom is an Endless Meeting, something like that.

Uri: And to me, I think hell is an endless meeting. I don’t know, like probably not meeting in the same sense of meeting. Right. But like, you know, like a consensus decision making meeting can be excruciating. And it was trying to organize that and of course it was clunky and people. So there was something there. And then, you know, but we did emulate that for the G8 and for the climate camps. But what happened in the G8 was that people set up like their barrios as affinity groups that had come from somewhere, right? So there was the Bristol Barrio and there was the Scotland barrio and there was the London, they had like sub camps there. So it was actually people who knew each other. And of course there were clustered other people around them. But that also happened in the climate camp. Right. Having neighborhoods in the camp and that kind of thing for organizing protest camp, that was that was sort of very loosely inspired from Argentina. But not in not in that kind of, you know, it wasn’t on the organic level of a neighborhood community, right? It was this kind of an artificial construct and protest camp.

And, of course, very famously, who did this? I think it was someone from Longmai or. Yeah, It was it was one of the guys he made a t shirt. Because there was there’s a there’s that kind of, you know, the sleeping woman from I think it’s a Clifford Harper “I didn’t go to work today. I don’t think I’ll go tomorrow.” But that “I didn’t go to the Inter-barrio meeting today. I don’t think I’ll go tomorrow. Yes. Yes. And so, yeah, that that was the story about that. So yeah, I think there was like, in the time that I was there, there was a lot of that process of beginnings of semi institutionalization that, that I think were happening already when that kind of when that started happening. I don’t know if it again, I’m not drawing any causal link here but it went in tandem with the decline of the network.

Lesley: Yeah well mean that we understand mean that social movement theory suggests that that happens. One of the questions that I always ask is, you know, what did PGA do well and what did it not do well?

Uri: So I think I think what it did well was establish the hallmarks as a very clear political compass for what resistance from below and to the left looks like. Which was very clear in in being not Marxist, but also not only anarchist in a sense, right? It was it was very clear that this was not that. That this was not going to be absorbed into party politics, that it was that it was consensus based, that it was you know, it was it was this kind of I mean, it was anarchistic, of course, without being explicit about it. That’s kind of what my what my argument was all along. Right. That that PGAs was basically a global anarchist network without wanting to use the name, at least in Europe, that was very clear that, that that’s kind of it was, it was kind of maybe quasi anarchist or something like that. Right?

I mean, I just call that anarchism, right? I mean, I just call that. I mean these days I’m a bit more specific about what I refer to under anarchism. But I think the hallmarks were, were very good in that way. I think what it did was to create that clear anchoring of the global struggle in the developing world in the global South. Okay. It was a discourse that is similar to what people in the states of or in North America I’ve talked to, under accomplices versus as opposed to allies or discourse of joint struggle and the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians in that context.

This kind of solidarity that is fully appreciative of the asymmetry that is that solidarity that is constituted by asymmetry. And that understands the political implications of this asymmetry on whatever kind of particular situation that happens. So I think that that was something that was a very kind of clear mentality. So and I think it just performed the function it had, right? I think I think the things that didn’t do well were things that it didn’t really need to be trying to do like be a recruiting tool or become a network in itself rather than being something that kind of secondary level of connecting existing networks or switching.

Jeff Juris wrote about this the other network switching. So that the context for people. So you know I saw when I read how he wrote this and so yeah. “Okay now I understand what I’ve been doing, right? I’m a network switcher.”

I’m someone who can connect transnationally between Israel and the UK. And in terms of, No borders, Indymedia and a social center network. So to be a person for me meant to do that those kind of meta level networking activities. Under the hallmarks and with an understanding of the kind of global south nature of it. And the PGA as a network was really a loose network of people like me who were meta networkers. Supernode. Somebody called it once, but it’s not. It’s like it’s like network switches. It’s exactly what Jeff wrote. That’s to me that was what was special about PGA and what it did well. I mean I think what this kind of thing doesn’t do well in general is that it relies on individuals. And there isn’t a way to institutionalize it into impersonal institutions, which were the failed attempts to do it then. Right? And the reason that it doesn’t have continuity and the reason it relies on individuals is because it’s transnational and trans local and is not anchored in a barrio. A real barrio. Right. That I think that is exactly the kind of tension that that that is central to understanding the story that it that you know it is about individuals.

Lesley: It’s so interesting because this is just me talking for a second but the North American meeting. In Amherst, Massachusetts. There was, basically we were in some ways we were too doctrinaire. We were like, nobody can speak for PGA and it’s rooted in the global South. So there was this decision that was made that all of the representatives of North America to go to the Cochabamba conference, 50% had to be poor people, people of color, women, and it had to be regionally representative. And that worked in Canada to a certain extent, but it did not work in the US because of this tension. The people who were showing up were all the people who were told that they could not participate. Including myself. I helped to push for that because we really believed in this idea from the hallmarks of being grassroots like Uber grassroots. But. This tension was there. Is it interesting? I remember David Graeber being like, but shouldn’t just the people who want to go and was like, no, it has to be like it has to be grounded in the directly affected blah, blah, blah, which, you know, I still think is a good idea. But there is this, there’s this I think it’s.

Uri: A good idea for the struggle as a whole. Yes. Okay. A concrete networking activity, like. I don’t know. It’s. Yeah.

Lesley: Yeah. Anyway, interesting. What do you think the lessons are for contemporary movements?

Uri: I mean, this is where my own views on things come in because I think we’re fucked. I think we’re going to extinction. I think that we need to, we need to pivot over, over the peak and look down the abyss. And that completely flips everything. Social movements come and go and we just need to, to maintain and create, to keep anarchy. as in horizontality, as a human kind of way of interaction. And I think there’s a chance that anarchism would again become a mass ideology of the oppressed, but. I mean, the to me, like, the whole mentality of things should be, you know. Don’t have kids. If you have kids, try to not have grandkids. You know, we don’t get to free humanity and save the world. We’re talking about some kind working towards some kind of dystopian post-apocalyptic scenarios. And we need to figure out the role of a resistance in that where it never gets better. Maybe in that there are worse things than extinction, right? Like The Matrix, the Borg, you know, like there are, like, completely artificial, you know, the caves of steel. Asimov Like, completely artificial environments where a human slave society persists, you know, in on a dead planet. Right. So like totalitarianism on a dead planet. So to me, that’s where we’re going. So I don’t even know what else to say about, you know, about lessons in the future right now.

We have to look reality in the face and rethink. Like, I don’t think it means doing a lot differently. I think we have to forget about winning. I think we need to become a movement of liberation and survival and like, you know, we’re like the rebel survivors now. And it’s going to be on as usual, like, you know, in the interstices and on the margins. I think that what I’ve seen also is anarchists are like the dynamic I’ve seen is that over the last years, it’s like the anarchist movement has become has been this engine of innovation. Of language tactics, activities, forms of organization, etcetera. Which. Diffuse. Diffuse. And get picked up in the wider social movement arena and attach to less radical purposes. Right. So we’re seeing, you know, things today like seeing things like the whole kind of non-violent direct action become reattached to a politics of demand. With climate movements like Extinction Rebellion, just stop oil, right? Just doing disruptive things that are supposed to pressure. I think their whole kind of thing of inconveniencing the public and appealing to those in power is they should be doing the opposite. The way in which like assemblies have become around Occupy.

And this is a point that Keir Milburn brought up. More like a declarative kind of forum for people to express rather than decision making. You know, working groups and so on. So the assembly is something else. So for me, that’s what there is, right? I mean on the other hand what PGA or what that whole kind of period did very well which you know may have happened anyway. Elites don’t can no longer sell narratives that this is for everybody’s benefit. Right. Things are much more stark now that political and business elites and masculinity and heterosexuality all of these things are now kind of they’re on the back foot ideologically, which means that they’re coming more to resort to sheer violence and reaction. Right. So I mean the main thing that the anti-capitalist movement did was spark a reaction. That has been going on for the last 20 years. I mean, this is something we don’t always stop to tell ourselves. But I try to think from a vantage point of a historian a hundred years from now. Right. And it’s very clear that this is a period of reaction, of resurgence of religious exclusivism.

It was already clear. The reason I was an anti-capitalist to begin with was because I didn’t think there could be decarbonisation otherwise. Right. Like that. I was already there in you know, in 98. Yeah. Um, so for me, anti-capitalism was, was almost like even, even anarchism as a whole was just clear that’s the only framework within with which we can expect to prevent runaway climate change. And we failed. The Gulf Stream is about to reverse. The ice caps are about to melt. It’s all happening sooner than we thought. I mean, that’s the story. That’s the story. Okay. So, you know, I think that it’s not like we’re now trying to learn lessons for next time. And there’s kind of some kind of stable thing going on. We’re crashing and we’re never going to stop crashing for the next centuries. Okay. It’s downhill from now. Whether that whether that somehow peters out with some with humanity surviving on a living planet or not with humanity surviving in with some kind of continued tension between freedom and concentration? I don’t know. But the thing is, like what? What, what, what David and David wrote in in the Dawn of Everything.

That about that’s constant. That’s the way it’s always going to be as well, right? That’s that is the story of human history. Okay. It’s what we have learned in this in in our lifetimes is that it is not an exponential story. It’s a peak story. Okay. That’s what happened to the flying cars. We were not on that curve. We’re on this curve. I mean, yeah, things like software and so on and so forth are going to continue developing as things go right. But it’s not going to be Star Trek. We can see a lot from how our popular culture has shifted in and the kind of imagery futuristic fiction in general. Um, even in the mainstream, right. That shows us that there is there is sort of this gut level understanding that that’s what’s happening. But everybody is still in denial. And I think that, like, the anarchists have to snap out of that fucking denial now. Right? And then and then you have to go through like, you know, you go through your phases. What is it, The denial, negotiation, anger, grief, acceptance. And then you add action. But we have to internalize that first.

Lesley: Do you think the hallmarks still hold?

Uri: I think the values behind them still hold. But the part of the strength of the hallmarks is that some of it is implicit. For example, the rejection of the state is implicit in the hallmarks. Why? It says all institutions, agreements and governments promoting destructive globalization, which presumably means all of them.

You know, the hallmarks is a mobilization tool, but when you’re asking me what I think; I think the rejection of the state is something explicit as an anarchist. So, I think that there is in general a sort of broad orientation. Yeah. I mean when certainly when you when you zoom out to look at the big picture of the ideological landscape as an opposition to the dominant ideological forces today, there is still egocentric capitalism and religious fundamentalism. Then it’s clear that that’s an alternative to that. And I think that’s in the big picture. So in the big picture. Yes.

Lesley: I mean the structure emerged at a particular technological moment, a particular political moment.

Uri: I think a lot a lot of that period had to do with the novelty of digital communications. Honestly I think that was a lot what kind of drove the power of the network at the time was that people were kind of somehow instinctively savvy about how this stuff works and can be mobilized. And the and there weren’t tons of people getting paid to do that stuff in a way that pushes it towards existing power structures, right? So we didn’t have things like Facebook or YouTube or the kind of commercialized content pushing platforms. Um, with their own algorithms. All of that didn’t exist. So, it was much more the sort of Wikipedia or a stage of that. So the kind of web 1.0 thing and the novelty of that, on a mass public scale. So there were people on BBSes back in the mid 90s or in the early 90s.