Guest
Liam Barrington-Bush
Helping keep neighbourhoods undesirable. Hip-hop. Anarchism. Community is the answer.
This week’s guest is Liam Barrington-Bush, a Bristol-based activist who helps organisations think more like people, and has loads of real-world experience of how people can govern themselves, build their own systems, and get closer to achieving what they want, without having those systems handed down to them.
After years of community activism and disillusionment with political systems, Liam discovered that people were capable of remarkable things when they weren’t being told what to do. Mark and Liam discuss the way the Internet has enabled or changed activism, but allowing information to spread to places that wouldn’t ordinarily be affected or invested. They also examine what happens after the dust has settled.
Argentine Occupy Factory movement
In the early 2000s, the Argentine economy tanked, and capital fled, so a number of factory workers began to challenge the notion of why they needed bosses in the first place, forming democratic assemblies to determine how to run the factories and even what they should produce.
Following mass unemployment in Spain, a group of bloggers put together a manifesto calling for a demonstration. Thousands turned up, making camp in a Madrid square, and refusing to leave. The protests turned into a political movement with the English-translated name of “We Can”.
People’s uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico
In 2006, a teachers’ strike was exacerbated by the Mexican government dropping tear gas from helicopters onto the strikers. Although public will wasn’t initially behind the teachers, protests began to form in reaction to the government’s heavy-handed approach. Protesters eventually ousted the police and military forces from the city of Oaxaca, built their own barricades against the country’s military, and started holding twice-daily community assemblies.
In the mid 1980s, the then USSR was relaxing its laws on free speech in the hopes of quelling unrest. Meanwhile in Estonia, fear and anger over the dumping of phosphorite led to protests in which people would gather and sing Estonian protest songs. The movement spread to other baltic countries, until 1991, when Estonia regained its independence from Russia.
In 2015, Liam was involved with a community in Barnet, London, who were fighting eviction and forced relocation to housing outside of the city. Once evicted, property developers who owned the buildings would make the flats unliveable, by destroying fixtures and fittings, so as a group, the remaining residents decided to occupy and rebuild the homes, together, as a way of demonstrating that these properties were still fit for purpose. Within days, people who’d been forced to relocate banded with the current residents, community members and squatters, using whatever they had to hand to give the properties the attention they needed and maintain dozens of them as homes for over 7 months.