There is resistance and there is creative resistance. Resistance is to stand up against a force, creative resistance is not just to stand up to a force, but to change its form and its direction, transform the outcome into realms that require imagination. From creative resistance can come the world we all desire.
Continue READING:At last some space. Notes on creative resistance, from a friend at the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination Creative Resistance
In 2001, I was in Argentina. The country had just defaulted on its debt, the great fear of the IMF and the finance world had come to pass – a government admitted it was bankrupt and could not do anything about it except refuse to pay. Today the fear haunting the boardrooms and the stock markets is that Greece, or the other ‘PIGS’ as they are now called (Portugal, Italy, Spain) – might go the way Argentina did.
One of the most beautiful things to emerge out of the crisis, beyond the everyday acts of resistance – the neighbourhood assemblies that ran their own services (hospitals, community kitchens, social spaces), or the occupied factories that managed their own jobs without bosses – was that one hardly ever saw an advert on a billboard – in fact all the billboards were blank, the advertising industry had no money. The streets were dotted with white facades, empty spaces that reminded us that there was a world outside of the dictatorship of the markets, a space where we could begin to reimagine what our real needs and desires were.
