A personal story, a universal path

I have to be clear about where I’m coming from, as I’m standing in what might generously be called an undefined position. Not because I have no position, but because I’ve spent a very long time in the messy bit of history that nobody has ever managed to define: grassroots DIY direct action. It’s a long history, a lot of people have been building things, breaking things, occupying things, squatting things, filming things, publishing things, arguing about things and occasionally setting fire to things. The problem is that when you later try to write the history down, everyone suddenly wants to know what the movement was. What was the ideology? Who were the leaders? Where were the foundations? What was the organisation? And that’s where things get messy, because nobody agrees where the foundations are. Lets look at an example: so you get this enormous argument about protest camp bridge-building, one person says the bridge needs a proper political foundation, another says it needs a…