I’ve been thinking about the diy theory and practice of anarchism. Its useful, to a point, but needs to be examined.
Features of DIY
- doesn’t engage with people where they are - demands a change in lifestyle and values, demands adherence to a wide range of practices (dumpster diving, fare evasion, shop stealing etc)
- totalising - isolates ‘practitioners’ of diy within a small community; potentially disempowering because diy eschews any participation in ’straight’ society, ie getting a job, money, power.
- radicalising
- under theorised
- no plan or program for revolution;
- no strategy for how to deal with the eventual appropriation of the diy culture by capital. Maybe diy itself doesn’t need a contingency plan because it focuses on individual action; when co-option strikes, the cool crowd can outrun the mainstream, and those who become sucked into the mainstream are forgotten casualties.
- not sustainable,
- uses simple analysis that have a wide appeal,
- fetishises the ‘other’ - the impoverished working class, but a working class that doesn’t actually work and excludes itself from privilege
- kind of parasitic - if everyone dumpster-dived all their food, there would be no-one to fill the dumpsters with food.
- very youth-oriented, difficult for anyone with responsibilty to participate in the full diy lifestyle
- totally comodified - diy is a lifestyle that you can purchase whole
Some positive aspects of diy politics
- can confront and subverts the spectacle
- offers an immediate solution for some people to live outside a constrained capitalist culture (or at least in opposition to that culture)
- decentralised organising, which is good because its harder to crush, but can be difficult for ‘ordinary’ people to access.
- seems to sidestep the class basis for acces to privilege. (or does it? are diy practitioners working class, or are lots of them really middle class people who want to live like common people?)
