Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible

by Kevin Van Meter

Behind the smiling faces of cashiers, wait staff, and workers of all sorts, a war is being planned, usually without the knowledge of official political and labor organizations. Guerrillas of Desire begins with a The Left is wrong. It's historical and current strategies are too-often based on the assumption that working and poor people are unorganized, acquiescent to systems of domination, or simply uninterested in building a new world. The fact is, as C.L.R. James has noted, they "are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention": pilfering, sabotaging, faking illnesses, squatting, fleeing, and counter-strategizing. Kevin Van Meter maps these undercurrents, illustrating that everyday resistance is an important factor in revolution and something radicals of all stripes must understand.

Kevin Van Meter is an activist-scholar based in the Pacific Northwest. He is coeditor of Uses of a Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States.

Genres: Nonfiction

264 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Kevin Van Meter is an organizer and independent-scholar based in the Pacific Northwest. He is author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible published by AK Press, amongst other works. As an activist, organizer, and public intellectual, Van Meter’s efforts focus on reading the struggles that circulate in the United States, mutual aid and working-class self-activity, the refusal of work and everyday forms of resistance. Dr. Van Meter holds a PhD in Geography,
Environment and Society.

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a thesis and reads like one. So if you have an aversion to how academia ruins people's writing, as I do, you'll have to get over that part. That said, it is a good quick overview of the history of capitalism and resistance to it (with a US bend). I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that people resist all the time in many ways and not primarily as part of identified movements. I like the idea of defining people by their resistance rather than what kind of work they do or don't or whether or not they fancy themselves some kind of activist. I love the parts about how nonprofits, unions, and other official movements have been blocks. My main criticism would be that, while this book is strong on what resistance really is, it leaves you hanging when he starts to think about what that means for how we organize. Maybe instead of trying to redefine "organizing" it would be better to dump the idea altogether. I hope there is a sequel that is much less academic and focuses on what it really means to the idea of organizing if people are resisting all the time and don't even necessarily need coordinators, much less leaders.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been the most exciting and interesting book I've read in a while! Even my quibbles/critiques are just part and parcel of loving it so much!

Van Meter does something very important here: Beyond being another book on protests, organizing, or "The Revolution," this is a book on everyday resistance to work and capitalism. He makes the important point--so often overlooked--that poor people and the working class are *already* resisting and engaging in mutual aid, just not in the forms typically recognized by academic Leftists and organizers. What's especially exciting is that this highlights something that we can (and are) doing now: resisting the regimes of work in our everyday lives. His call to highlight, circulate, and amplify these stories of resistance gives me something concrete to add to my praxis.

A few quibbles and critiques: He overuses the word "decompose" (as in, "decomposing the working class"), to the point where it loses meaning. Find another metaphor. Some of the early chapters on theory are rather academic and involve obtuse quibbling about definitions (and I'm an academic and a philosophy guy). He seems to have an unjustified bias against "prefigurative politics." As far as I can tell, his critique is that prefigurative politics are ahistorical, non-contextual, static, and ineffectual (p. 150). However, I would say that prefigurative politics can be aware of their social and historical contexts, they can change and evolve (including after the revolution makes conditions "fundamentally different"), and prefigurative politics do at least as much as everyday resistance does to effect change, with having the similar advantage of making life more livable in the meantime. He says everyday acts of resistance "are not consciously prefiguring a new world," but nor are they consciously attempting to start a revolution. Means can have meaning and value within themselves. His disdain for means matching the ends is concerning to me, as this is how we veer towards replacing a capitalist mode of domination with a Marxist/communist mode of domination (the Russian Revolution, for instance). Perhaps here, he tips his hand as a "Marxist autonomist" rather than an anarchist, as he misses/disagrees with a key point of anarchism versus any form of Marxism. Anarchists disagree with Marxists by saying that a dictatorship (even of the proletariat, or, rather, self-appointed party leaders) can never produce a truly free, egalitarian society.

Still, this book gave me so many good things to think about, so many thoughtful quotes, from specifics of resistance by slaves, peasants, factory workers, to the role of nonprofits in protecting the state and capital during the diminuation of unions, to the shift in today's economy to "affective jobs," where workers are no longer just expected to create a product but also an experience for the customer, which is a further burden of the regime of work.

Please, read this book, argue with it, learn from it, and love it, as I did.

[Andrea Fiore · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Everyday resistances, practices of mutual aid and refusal of work, and overt forms of rebellion are mechanisms of a new society in formation. This is not to suggest that such actions prefigure or predetermine a post-revolutionary society, but they point to the constant presence of a possible world."

"Historical and current strategies on the Left and in radical movements are predicated on the assumption that working class and poor people are unorganized and not resisting. Hence the role of the activist, organizer, and insurrectionist is to activate, organize, and educate a disengaged population through various initiatives. Illustrating that everyday resistance is a factor in revolution and a form of politics, maintaining that its effects on overt rebellion and crises are measurable, requires the reversal of this assumption. Working class and poor people - as slaves, peasants, and workers in the industrial and social factory - are already organized and resisting."

"For capitalism the working class is simply labor power. Cleaver argues in Reading Capital Politically that the "working class as working class - defined politically - exists only when it asserts its autonomy as a class through its unity in struggle against its role as labour-power. Paradoxically, then, on the basis of this distinction, the working class is truly working class only when it struggles against its existence as a class. The outcome ... is not the creation of a pure working class after the revolutionary overthrow of capital but rather the dissolution of the working class as such."

"The working class is "dynamic, forcing, at times, capital to redefine itself and develop along new lines". Resistance and rebellion of the working class as an active subject necessitates capitalism's reorganization of the production and reproduction process."

"Accordingly, class is neither a structural component of the economy nor a sociological category. Seeing class as structure limits the working class to a mere position within the economy rather than a dynamic force."

"Thompson appreciated the complexity of class relations and wrote: "If we stop history at any given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these [people] over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by [people] as they live their own history, and in the end, this is its only definition". For Thompson class is relational, defined by and expressed collectively, philosophically, and organizationally through relationships within the working class itself and with the bourgeoise (alongside it or against it)."

[Redpoet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first review below says this book comes from an anarchist perspective, I disagree. It comes far more from an autonomous Marxist perspective. There is not a whole lot out there which without necessarily saying it or making a big deal out of it explains what autonomous Marxism actually translates to in the actual world. Anyway, this books emphasis on everyday resistance and how that relates to larger collective more defined revolutionary struggles makes it a very important read. The struggle against capital and the class struggle, and the autonomous struggles of many kinds which occur every day is generally overlooked. I am too lazy to write much more about it. I will just say I very much appreciated the book and highly recommend to anyone interested in such things as how we understand the world and build a new one without worrying about things like vanguard parties and States.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

An articulate and thorough history of resistance from an anarchist perspective, introducing a helpful theoretical framework and key concept/metaphors for analyzing the way forward. I found myself wanting to read a sequel, immediately, one which hopefully Van Meter or another comrade will write soon: using this framework to look at current resistance practices in detail.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guerrillas of Desire provides a great history of the revolutionary resistance movements against Capitalism, and the possibilities for a sustained movement against it, that can ultimate lead to a better alternative for human interactions, relations and subsistence.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote a review for this book and it's available on the Institute for Anarchist Studies website here.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

review forthcoming! important book.

[Rohit · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat odd combination of "PhD dissertation" and "baby's first Autonomist Marxist book", half of it is written as an accessible introductory text for somebody just getting into radical left theory and strategy, and the other half is academic theoretical jargon that's probably inscrutable to anybody who isn't already versed in Marxism.

Anyways, there is some decent stuff in here for a beginner (and to the author's credit they straight-up state that you can skip the theory chapters, or try to return to them after the other chapters), but its also dragged down somewhat by anarchist dogmatism. Which is also why I think they totally fail to articulate the vision of how "everyday resistance" can actually lead up to a revolution

[Joe Xtarr · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited for this book, but felt disappointed by it. It's fairly stuffy and academic, so that'll be a turn off for a lot of people. I don't know what I gained from it overall. The whole middle section seemed redundant and less historically exploratory than I had hoped. Do we not all know that slaves revolted? Maybe that's not common knowledge. The whole book might be summed up as: embrace autonomous worker and community solidarity, be flexible, and don't try to commandeer grassroots movements (looking at you, State-Socialists and Liberals!)

I don't subscribe to some of the autonomist Marxist ideas about the working class, but that didn't prevent me from engaging with the arc of the book. Overall, it left me feeling kind of "meh".

[Rafael Munia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books of the year, and one of my favorite books on the topic of anarchic politics.
The book finds a good balance between Organizing Praxis and Theoretical Rigor. The book is necessary to help the anarchist movement (and any political movement, for that matter) that Theory does not stand in the way of "political practice", but actually makes it more efficient, more comprehensive, and more accurate.

[Scott Neigh]

A book with some useful and important ideas, but one I was not as able to like as I'd hoped. It sets out to demonstrate that everyday resistance has been historically pervasive and crucial to successful struggle, and to argue that movements in North America today need to do more to understand how everyday resistance is happening now and to nurture, support, and centre that resistance rather than prioritizing abstracted notions of 'correct' politics. It draws primarily from anarchist and especially autonomist marxist resources to do this.

The book is organized into a couple of chapters of theory at the start laying out its main concepts, three chapters tracing the broad trajectories of histories of slave, peasant, and worker struggles respectively (with an emphasis on keeping the everyday level visible), and then a final couple of chapters applying this theory and history to movement debates today.

I think the task this book takes up is an important one, and I broadly agree with the stance of starting from resistance that is already happening. I agree that autonomism offers some quite useful tools in this respect, and that it is largely underappreciated by folks active in movements on this continent today. And I have great respect for efforts to produce movement-grounded theory outside of the academy. Unfortunately, I think this book is kind of uneven and could have been executed more effectively.

For instance, I think the theory chapters are quite uneven. Some of what they present is quite useful. Another subset I found a bit tedious, but mostly because I was already familiar with the ideas, and I think presenting them works in terms of what the book is trying to do. But some of it was clearly presenting ideas that mattered a lot to the author but in ways that did not fully convince me of that significance. And a few bits were just weird – I'm thinking most obviously of the section with a bizarre genealogy of the concept of "white privilege", but there were others. Those bits aside, I wonder if putting more emphasis on finding a way to make it all flow a bit more organically would have helped.

The history chapters covered useful ground, but I didn't find them all that engaging – and I am someone who really enjoys reading history, especially movement history, when I have the opportunity, even when it is about an era or a struggle that I'm already familiar with. I think my relative disengagement was related to the degree of abstraction required to cover so much ground in just a few short chapters, and to the fact that this was history being deployed primarily to support an argument, which is understandable but which doesn't always make for the most compelling way of relating to the past.

And I felt like the engagement with contemporary questions at the end of the book was, well, similar to the earlier parts of the book: Some useful stuff, certainly, and I definitely support the overall conclusion that movements in North America need to be way better at starting from the ways in which ordinary people are already engaged in struggle of various sorts and at various scales. But a lot of what led up to that felt like it was rehashing ground that is already well-trodden on the left and so wasn't all that interesting, and/or felt like interventions in longstanding and contentious debates that were just too brief and too abstracted from actual movement practices to shed new light or to reframe them in productive ways. In a way, I think it needed more attention to grounded examples. I really appreciate the strong insistence in the book that the kind of engagement with what people are already doing can't come in the form of an easily applied recipe, but rather must involve getting out there and doing a lot of listening, a lot of respectful dialogue, and a lot of hard thinking. But I think given that's the case, it would be a more rhetorically engaging and more politically convincing to make the case for movements built via the nurturing and amplification of already-existing everyday resistance if it went through in rich detail and with lively storytelling some contemporary examples where people are actually doing that.

Anyway. I'm glad I read it because it is useful for something I'm working on, and I do recognize that some of the book's choices were made with a somewhat different reader in mind so it's possible I'm being too critical. It is certainly a useful contribution in a direction that I support, and I hope it sparks a lot of discussions. I just maybe wish some different choices had been made in how it was written.

Also reviewed on my blog: https://scottneigh.blogspot.com/2019/...

[Toby Mustill · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has two major flaws: 1. It begins with a clear statement that it is written from an autonomous communist perspective (a bit of a contradiction in terms if you ask me). 2. It is written in a highly academic format that will put off most, I struggled in parts and I have a university undergraduate degree.

However, there are some interesting concepts which are presented and there are many interesting conversations about how different progressive forces can work together.

Is it worth reading? Maybe, if you’ve read all else that you want to read, you have an academic mindset, and some patience.

[Kate Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

i can't tell if i lost steam midway through, or the book did, or some combination of the two. but the beginning hooked me and i ultimately found it to be a worthwhile (if dry at times) read -- a rigorous and grounded exploration of what it means to be a revolutionary today and how we can learn from past practices of everyday resistance to make our methods of struggle, relationships, and modes of organizing life more meaningful

[Rocky · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The task of the revolutionary is to produce new kinds of relationships between human beings. Such a generative process begins in the actually existing struggles of the working class: in every day resistance, the refusal of work, mutual aid, and self-activity.”