The significance of the Wandsworth site is (at least) threefold: firstly the innovative way in which the campaign moves the direct action movement on to a terrain where it can begin to expand its own agenda rather than being fixed within the imaginative structure provided by a opposition. It provides an active interrogation of what it is to live in this land in the late twentieth century celebrating events in English/British history which have often been ignored or dismissed in a way which can wrest some of the terrain of Englishness away from the right. Thirdly it begins to suggest ways in which the broad green movement can engage with urban politics linking environmental and social justice issues.

The direct action movement-its fractured and fluid nature often makes it better conceptualised as a disparate network- which burst into the nineties provoked by the governments road program and was incensed into uniting together by the Criminal Justice Act- has been characterised largely by responding (albeit in innovative ways) to the agenda of the government/ certain companies. The arguments of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci provide some suggestions as to how movements like the anti-roads can develop. Gramsci argued that advanced capitalist societies depend for their legitimacy on the

'spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group' (4.)

In the face of this analysis- the anti roads movement it seems is partially constrained by its position in struggle- and it is difficult for it to articulate and develop what it speaks for because it remains locked into opposing specific road programs etc.: though it is clear that alternative voices have forged spaces in which they can speak and crystallise like Squall: the magazine for (as)sorted itinerants. 'The Land Is Ours' occupation represents a significant development because rather than squatting land in the route of a proposed road- it has itself taken the initiative to define for itself which land and which issues are important. Through this it forms the germ of an articulation of an alternative hegemonic formation which connects disparate forms of struggle and begins to find spaces around which it can take a 'leading' role in society. This is not in the ­ narrow sense of providing ordinary political leadership but in the much deeper and wider sense of actively illustrating/forging directions in which society could take- rather than merely reacting to the direction which it is taking, through engaging with and trying to shape and educate the common sense of the age.

In the present situation the ideological project of Thatcherism has succeeded in making free market monetary values seem almost 'natural': the only and 'spontaneous' way in which the world is conceptualised- attaching this to a vision of a regressive society based around a fixed notion of the family. The Blairite Labour party is not working on a significantly different terrain and there exists a vacuum for the articulation of different ideas which can challenge the dominant values in innovative and inspiring ways. This is being partially filled by extraparliamentary movements like 'The Land Is Ours'. A fine example of this struggle is the way the campaign recaptures certain languages and gives them a different accent to the one with which they are usually encoded-e.g. the way it reclaims the 'stolen language of self help'(6) and re-articulates this in ways which breaks the attachment of the idea of 'self-help' to a wretchedly selfish and monetised individualism, but restores i t as one of the core ethics and values of a flourishing and socially aware alternative.

One of the most significant aspects of The Land Is Ours is the way it contests dominant interpretations of English/British history. The founding of the site at Wandsworth was timed to commemorate the post- war squatting movement: which in 1945 saw demobbed soldiers taking over disused barracks and military land. Celebrating this anniversary and events like the Digger's squatting of St George's Hill in 1649 is important because it challenges the official versions of English history as inherently uncontested- and not riven by struggle. Major landowners still derive legitimacy from the production of this idea of England as a 'green and pleasant land' where the status and territory of land owners was uncontested through representing the mass of the people as unchanging and inert, not active in the production of their own history or landscape.

This interrogation of the past and images of the past can go some way to offer a reinterpretation of what it is to live in England in late twentieth century and to realise the long tradition of dissent in Britain and the ways we can draw on that- and to wrest away the idea of belonging/patriotism from rightist/racist interpretations and give it different and more progressive inflections. There are however potential problems whic h have to be negotiated when working with these processes to ensure that this is done in a non- exclusionary way. There are the obvious undertones that can be drawn from the slogan 'The Land is Ours'­ in that one has to define 'ours' in a broad way-not substituting landowners with an ethnically absolute 'ours'. Efforts to reinterpret the past must be aware of Britain's 'long disastrous imperial march across the earth'(7.) and the ways that this still profoundly structures our society if they are to contribute to attempts to 'construct a more pluralistic, post colonial sense of British culture and national identity'(7a.): one only had to cross the Thames and see the monument to Lord Kitcheners campaign in the Boer war in South Africa- which brought the concentration camp into existence- to see why this is important.

Oppositional imaginations of the past must recognise and be informed by the ways that radical sensibilities/movements in England were not produced spontaneously from sealed notions of ethnicity like 'England' as some radical writers like E.P. Thompson through celebrating notions like the 'freeborn Englishman'(8.) tend to suggest. Rather they were shaped by transatlantic systems of cultural and political exchange. Eig hteenth Century London for example was one centre of a transatlantic slave trade ­ by 1780 London's black population was 10-20,000 and there were chaotic interrelations in radical politics and ideas between Irish people cleared from their land by the 'tragedy of enclosure'(9), black people ­ mainly ex slaves or sailors and London artisans.(10) Ignoring these interrelations feeds the potent image of an undivided English people used by Thatcherism to attack as un English 'alien insiders'­ the miners as the enemy within- and outsiders 'immigrants' who might 'swamp' our national culture(11.); an important construction to challenge since New Labour has also largely based itself on this construction. (e.g. Blair 'Britain can and will be a great country again' 'This is the patriotic party because it is the people's party.')

The ideological division between the country and the city is long standing and pervasively structures the contemporary green movement -even as this division becomes more blurred in reality it seems its importance as an ideological/ cultural division becomes more pronounced. The green movement has a rather disturbing tendency to root itself in the values of an imagined idyllic country side based in a rather rigid gaze to the past and to castigate the city as a virulent pathological excrescence which has corrupted our society- leading to a poverty of green perspectives on cities and a reticence to engage in urban issues. The struggles against the M11 link road in East London and the M77 on the South side of Glasgow were critical in that they brought together green and urban issues with direct action in important ways and established positions which The Land Is Ours was able to build upon.

What is absent in contemporary cities is crystallised by what the French urbanist Henri Lefebvre called the 'right to the city'. He conceives of this as a right to directing and shaping the character and direction of the city by forms of participation and appropriation which are distinct from the right to property.(12) This 'meandering cry and demand' is precisely it seems what is blocked to so many people by the omnipresent walls of property and the enclosure of public spaces which characterise many contemporary cities. The intertwining worlds of planning linked to local state administration and the planning of developers conceiving 'for the market, with profit in mind', creates an iron imagination which cannot escape a 'brutal functionalism' which would raze the entirety of the banks of the Thames into car parks, Sainsbury's and lu xury flats. This imagination creates a reality of the city which drifts above people's desire and right to appropriate and direct urban life for themselves without the mediation of profit.(13.) The Wandsworth site crystallised this desire, this demand for the city to become more than an entity divorced from its citizens/inhabitants lives. It acted albeit briefly and ambiguously as a node for the demonstration that through direct action people can begin to assert this right, illustrating that people can recolonise and begin to shape their own lived spaces and environments , rather than to have these lived spaces colonised and striated by abstract forces of planning and profit.

In reconstructing cities in a way which would facilitate their appropriation by their inhabitants it is crucial to recognise that cities are the result of interrelating processes working at many different scales. As Iris Marion Young writes 'a focus on distributions is insufficient if it ignores the broader structural and institutional context within which decisions are made.'(14.): one needs to look at the unjust processes which create unequal distributions of wealth, of access to decision making etc. Most other recent direct action has- struggled against the result of procedural injustice(s), e.g. the protest against the M77 was struggling against a road being built through a peripheralised and marginalised working class area diverting traffic away from a middle class suburb. The Wandsworth site is important since through its focus on questions like the ownership of land and on the way companies like Guinness are able to dominate structures like planning processes The Land Is Ours begins to untangle and illuminate some of the processes which exclude the felt needs and lived experience of local people especially working class and other people lacking cultural capital from shaping the direction of cities. It explored the possibility of using direct action to alter the processes through which unjust decisions are being made rather than just protesting against the unjust outcomes, through its critique of the planning process and also suggested imaginative ways in which access to that process can be broadened e.g. by involving kids.

Despite these points which suggest the importance of the Wandsworth site- I think its fairly universally accepted that the site itself had serious problems. I think there has to be an effort made to relate the internal problems of the site to the way that the campaign was cons tructed rather than leaving the internal problems of the site to be explained in terms of their own dynamic.

Writing discussing the site ­ notably articles by John Vidal and George Monbiot in the Guardian of October 16 stress the internal problems of the site ­ concentrating on 'how few pissheads it takes to wreck a site'. Its fair to argue that there were some fairly unpleasant people knocking around the site and people with mental health and drug/drink problems, including people pushed out of social services care etc.­ what I think must be resisted is the tendency for these people to be scapegoated as the reason why the site didn't work. Trying to create a community with and alongside people with such problems is a mentally and physically draining process- the very act of daily reproduction of a site like 'pure genius' in difficult social conditions is something which saps the energy of a community and makes it nearly impossible for it to have any positive direction. I still think there are more structural reasons in the formation and conceptualisation of the community which exacerbated tensions which would have existed in some form anyway.

One of the key differences of contemporary societies from the kind of societies which non-violent direct action was pioneered by writers/activists like Gandhi, is that they are increasingly 'Societies o f the Spectacle'­ societies characterised by a constant stream of disembodied images divorced from meaning.(15.) The implications of this for campaigns like The Land Is Ours is that they never cease to be conscious of having to orient their action to the eye of the media and letting their form of action being dictated by the need to conform to the desires of this eye- always risking becoming just another image in the raging stream of disembodied signs. The Wandsworth site was planned as a one week demonstration site which if possible would evolve into a community. This short time scale was necessary because of the limited time people could commit etc., it was an unexpected benefit when people were actually able to stay on the site and were not immediately evicted. This week long demonstration project, though, is vulnerable to depiction as a kind of 'eco-challenge Anneka': non-violent direct action as visual sound-bite.

Gramsci commenting on the ways in which ideas/movements gain popularity argued that those which acquired the greatest popularity weren't necessarily those which possessed the greatest clarity/coherence, but were often those that possessed a certain 'logical elasticity'(16) . The green movement with its bewildering array of inflections of opinions appears to be one such movement, and the direct action network etc is often no different. The attempts of the 'pure genius' site attempt to tackle problems of homelessness alongside problems of inner city ecology is it seems a symptom of this- not the objective which is important, but rather the clumsy way that it was done. It suggests a tendency which avoids deeply interrogating social problems, and the complex interrelations between social justice and ecology, suggesting that one can easily add social justice problems to an environmental concern and stir and quickly come up with an adequate solution. It becomes easy to drift into a situation where rather nebulous and problematic notions like community become 'flags of convenience' which disparate groups of people can become united behind- it being then not particularly surprising that what is created is not particularly coherent or successful.

One reaction to this is to advocate the formation of socially purifTo obtain media coverage The Land Is Ours had to do something 'different' which would capture attention­ which they did wonderfully­ but in doing so they created a condition from which it was virtually impossible to create a socially sustainable community. It isn't enough to create the material conditions needed for an ecologically sustainable community without at the same time­ providing the means for facilitating a socially sustainable community. There was too much of a na•ve projection that people could come in, form the bare structure of a community which they would then leave for an ill defined section of other people like 'the homeless' to fill. Though there was genuine commitment throughout the life of the site to being a pluralistic community which would enable homeless folk to build their own dwellings and gain a permanency denied to them elsewhere, the community was rapidly thrown together- lacking in the more organic ways that other communities, like some of the road protest camps have developed. This hindered the development of the minimum amount of sortedness and internal communication / democracy that a site has to have for negotiation of life there ­ and for some form of negotiated exclusion to work. It also rested on a very na•ve view of the conditions that homeless people face, expecting them to be able to adapt quickly to life in a very different situation- without any kind of consideration of drink /drugs use/abuse used to cope with homelessness and mental health problems and things like lack of direction/esteem etc., and the stresses that this would cause on the everyday life of such a community. It is pernicious to then blame these folk for the site's problems.ied communities (which in reality some of the road protest camps e.g. Fairmile in Devon approach). This is juxtaposed as the alternative to the image of lunchouts/brewcrew.etc. In wishing to transform our society we have to start from 'attending violently to things as they are in the present'. We start from socially divided communities and to create socially purified ones of our own is pernicious. Community does seem to have become a panacea for the contemporary green movement's notion of an alternative society. The 'pure genius' experience illustrates that we need to imagine ways of transcending existing notions of communities by realising that mediation by face to face relations is not necessarily liberatory­ small communities have immense potentiality for allowing the reproduction of the petty 'tyrannical bitterness' that pervades our everyday lives and that communities often form and cement their identity by exclusion and chauvinism.(16a.)

We also need to address the problems and inadequacies of a politics just looking at one microscale area in interdependent societies- and ways of offsetting tendencies to parochialism and chauvinism..

This needs to be done in a way which can be faithful to the need for militant concern and commitment to particular places. This perhaps suggests the idea of a ghetto territoriality which through its place in networks of flow s of people, techniques and ideas generated by direct action and other movements and through interaction with the areas which surround it would be constantly challenged and regenerated, rupturing the tendency to harden into fixed, petty chauvinism's and parochialism's. The place of a movement The Land Is Ours rather than parachuting in artificial communities overnight would be to facilitate more organic grassroots campaigns/formations. If emergent structures of internal democracy develop more organically and more securely ­ then action with those representing community in different forums can be more sinuously related with the needs and desires of people being 'represented'­ rather than in the Wandsworth case ­ where it seemed that the division between the imaginations and articulated needs of people and planners was at times reproduced within the campaign­ one activist spoke of his annoyance that people outside the community had been negotiating to build relatively expensive 'ecohouses' on the site when he had constructed his own dwelling for under £100, inspired by a Scandinavian design.

We live in societies in which the boundaries between people and nature are being constantly transgressed and broken down.(17.) One of the possible responses for the green movement in the shadow of such transformatio ns is to celebrate and find security in an imagined past of primeval 'nature' in which an equally primeval 'man' unproblematically located. The route this leads to is backwards to a regressive dream of communities which in reality were often suffocating.(18.) As Frantz Fanon demanded, there 'no question of a return to nature'(19.): .the task we face is the much harder one of envisioning 'a different and less hostile order of relationships among people, animals, technologies and land'(20.). This necessitates taking urban environments seriously and engaging with the complex forces which are shaping them in increasingly hostile and unjust ways. At best, sites like Pure Genius can become nodes which crystallise the demand for the right to the city, illuminating some of the hostile forces at work in our cities, and through direct action techniques like land occupation providing the starting point for an interrogation of and 'reconstruction of the boundaries of daily life'(21.); becoming nodes of the struggle to 'command and educate the common sense of the age'(22.) and move it in a progressive rather than reactionary direction ­towards values based on social and ecological respect; inevitably a slow and a molecular process but also an urgent one.

note:
This essay is based on limited involvement at the site and on a long discussion with one of the key activists who lived at the site in the hour before the eviction. It is also based on ideas developed in a dissertation written after living at Pollok Free State in Glasgow.

• Walter Benjamin (1973) Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era Of High Capitalism
• Blair, T. (1996) New Britain
• Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz
• Debord, G. (1967) The Society of the Spectacle
• Fanon (1990) Wretched of the Earth
• Freire (1993) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Gaythorne Hardy, Flora (and friend) November !996 seminar on Wandsworth at the department of
• Social and Political Science in Cambridge
• Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from Prison Notebooks
• Gramsci, A. (1985) Selections from Cultural Writings
• Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic
• Hall, S, (1988) The Hard Road To Renewal
• Haraway, D. (1989) 'Introduction' Primate Visions
• Haraway, D. (1991) Simians Cyborgs and Women
• Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of D ifference
• Lefebvre, H. (1996) 'The Right to the City' in 'Writings on Cities'
• Linebaugh and Rediker (1990) 'The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and the Atlantic Working
• Class' Journal of Historical Sociology. 3.
• Martinez-Alier, J. (1990) 'Ecology and the Poor: A Neglected Dimension of Latin American History'
• Journal of Latin American Studies..
• Thompson, EP (1968) The Making of the English Working Class
• Ward, C. (1985) When we Build again : Let's have housing that works!
• Williams, R. (1973) The Country and the City
• Williams, R, (1977) Marxism and Literature
• Wilson, E. (1991) The Sphinx and the City
• Young, IM (1993) 'Together in Difference' in Squire ed. Principled Positions.

References

• 1 Brecht Poems part three p.440
• 2 City of Quartz (1990) vintage
• 3 Walter Benjamin refers to Parisians living under Haussmann as becoming 'conscious of the inhuman character of the great city'. Benjamin (1973, p. 174).
• 4 Gramsci , Selections from Prison Notebooks p. 12.
• 5 This description of hegemony is culled from Raymond Williams' chapter on hegemony in Marxism and Literature
• 6 Colin Wa rd (1985)
• 7 Hall (1988).
• 7a Gilroy (1993, p.11)
• 8 this notion is celebrated by EP Thompson throughout 'The Making of the English Working Class'.
• 9 this phrase is used by Martinez- Alier (1990)
• 10 see Linebaugh and Rediker (1990)
• 11 see the introduction of Stuart Hall's Hard Road to Renewal for a brilliant discussion of Thatcherism's relation to and production of populist nationalism.
• 12 Lefebvre p. 158, 174
• 13 Lefebvre p. 84
• 14 I M Young cit Lake (1996) Antipode 28:2.
• 15 'In societies where modern conditions of productuion prevail life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles, Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation', Debord 1967 thesis 1.
• 16 Gramsci ' Selections from Cultural Writings p. 405 -406.
  Compare Jamesons phrase 'world capitalism is in evolution toward a system which is not socialist in any classical sense, on the one hand the nightmare of total control, on the other the polymorphous or schizophrenic identities of some ul timate counterculture'. Jameson, p. 92. Gramsci- it is not always the most coherent and intellectually rich movements which triumph. Indeed a movement often triumphs precisely because of its mediocrity and logical elasticity: anything goes and the most blatant compromises are possible and may well themselves be the cause of the triumph,.
• 16a see Young (1993)
• 17 Haraway 'A Cyborg Manifesto' in Simians Cyborgs and Women.
• 18 Elizabeth Wilson expresses her bewilderment at the uncritical canonisation of the vision of William Morris as expressed in 'Bringing the News From Nowhere' which she describes as 'suffocating'.
• 19 Fanon 'Wretched of the Earth' p. 253.
• 20 Harway (1989, p. 15)
• 21 Haraway (1990, p.181)
• 22 Hall (1988, p. 195).