Bastards of Utopia (excerpt)

8/9/2019 Bastards of Utopia (excerpt)

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C O N T E N T S

AC KNOW LEDGM ENTS ix

GUIDE TO VIEW I NG C OM PANION VIDEO ONLINE xv

Introduction 1

1. Grassroots Globalization in National Soil 28

2. Uncivil Society: NGOs, the Invasion of Iraq,

and the Limits of Polite Protest 62

3. “Feeling the State on Your Own Skin”:Direct Confrontation and the Production of

Militant Subjects 99

4. “Struggling for What Is Not Yet”:

The Right to the City in Zagreb 148

5. The Occupy Movement:

Direct Democracy and a Politics of Becoming 174

Conclusion: From Critique to Afrmation 204

NOTES 223

R EFER ENC ES 249

INDEX 273



I N T R O D U C T I O N

In May o 2003 an unruly “bicycle caravan” snarled midday traffic in Zagreb.Be ore police could respond to the unannounced protest, a ew masked activ-

ists scarred the açade o the Ministry o Foreign Affairs with antiwar gra -ti. Numbering no more than orty, the caravan was the latest in a series oactions protesting Croatia’s support or the ongoing U.S.-led invasion o Iraq.Official Croatian support allowed U.S. De ense Secretary Donald Rums eldto include Croatia in both the “Coalition o the Willing” and “New Europe”—those compliant once-socialist states he contrasted avorably with the “OldEurope” o (antiwar) France and Germany. Be ore the caravan could reachthe U.S. Embassy, armored Range Rovers blocked its orward progress. Ac-tivists bunched together, ringing their bikes to orm a imsy de ensive bar-rier. As a plainclothes officer pointed out whom to arrest, a dozen police inriot gear waded into the small crowd. Soon bulky “RoboCops” were draggingprotesters toward a prisoner van. Pero—one o my most important collabora-tors—was detained (watch “Down with Fortress Europe”).

Shortly afer his release, I spoke with Pero at his jam-packed apartment.He sat among stacks o silk-screened -shirts (“No War Between Nations, NoPeace Between Classes”) and large rolls o “Enough Wars!” campaign post-ers that read, “We’ve been through war and we wouldn’t wish it on anyoneelse.” Pero reported, “Tey knew almost everything about me.” During hisinterrogation, police con ronted him with a bulging security dossier. Teyknew Pero was affiliated with the Anti ascist Front, the Zagreb Anarchist



2 BASTARDS OF UTOPIA

Movement, and Food Not Bombs. Tey knew he played bass in the anarcho-punk band AK47. Tey even knew he was sleeping with Vanja. At this, Perosmiled slyly and noted, “Tat is not current in ormation, however, and re-ects badly on the capabilities o the state security apparatus.” Furthermore,despite all the intelligence gathering, he concluded, “Tey did not understandanything about my politics.” Te detective just kept demanding: “What po-litical party are you affiliated with? Who are your leaders? How many o youare Serbs? Which embassy is unding your activities?” “It was,” Pero said,“like he thought I was one o those ucking NGO-niks!”

In other words, though Pero is a declared anarchist, the police did notseem to understand that their questions were utterly at odds with the way thathe and his ellow activists conceived o their politics: in ormal, antiauthori-tarian, antinationalist, and sel -organized. Te misguided interrogation re-ects more than a police orce poorly trained in radical political theory. Teundamental gap between Pero’s politics and the police’s understanding othat politics highlights the emergence o an activism in the ormer Yugosla- via with aspirations and practices starkly different rom those amiliar to thedetective. Teir radical political commitments made these activists the un-

anticipated—and unwanted—offspring o the preceding socialist and con-temporary neoliberal-nationalist eras.Tis narrative ethnography—and the interactive video archive that ac-

companies it, including scenes like Pero’s arrest—embodies the experiencesand political imagination o this generation o radical activists in the or-mer Yugoslavia. Following individual participants rom the dramatic rise andeclipse o transnational globalization protests in the early 2000s through theOccupy Movement o 2011, the book asks what it means to be a lefist afer so-cialism. In a territory one activist described as the “ground zero o lefism’sde eat,” activists’ responses to this question articulated undamental critiqueso the transition rom socialism to market-oriented liberal democracy, in-cluding the ambivalent role o NGOs in this transition. Tis book is also anethnography o postsocialism in a wider sense, one not limited to “New Eu-rope.” Te collapse o state socialism, which oriented much o the interna-tional lef during the twentieth century, precipitated a crisis o radical politicsglobally. Around the world new movements struggled to undamentally re-imagine radical politics. My collaborators’ response was to shun utopian endsand centralized authority o any kind. Instead, they embraced orms o directaction that modeled change “here and now”; experimented with new ormso direct democracy; and devoted much o their energy to developing indi-



IN T R O D U C T IO N 3

vidual and collective subjects with radical social and political desires. Just aew years be ore Pero’s arrest, I would have been as puzzled as his interroga-tor to encounter radical activists—especially ones highly critical o NGOs—in what was Yugoslavia. How had activists broken with the dominant right-ist politics I had come to expect rom the region? How had they developedradical lef political sensibilities and desires in such a territory?

The End of Socialism and the Formationof New National States

o explain why I pose these particular questions, and why I look or answersin the specic places I do, I must return to late July 1990 and my arrival in thecentral Serbian industrial town o Svetozarevo, where I was to spend a year asa high-school exchange student. A relatively modest provincial city o ortythousand, Svetozarevo was best known or its heavy cable actory.

In stubborn reaction to the anti-communism o my U.S. public educa-tion, I went to Yugoslavia because I was captivated by socialism. I was convinced—certain in my thin knowledge o Yugoslavia—that the country’srelative personal reedom, “socialism with a human ace,” and “worker sel -

management,” made it pre erable to the Soviet satellite states o the WarsawPact. I learned my rst phrases o what was still, just barely, the unied Serbo-Croatian language—not yet divided into Serbian and Croatian and Bosnianand Montenegrin—on the nal leg o the journey, ying rom Prague to Bel-grade. At age 18, I knew just enough to hope I was going to a socialist utopia.

So I was caught off guard when, shortly afer I arrived, images began toicker across the amily television screen o armed Serbs setting up road-blocks and seizing control o rural sections o Croatia, one o the six ederalrepublics that constituted the Socialist Federal Republic o Yugoslavia. Nordid I know how to respond when my host ather explained that Serbs were victims o a vast anti-Serbian conspiracy within Yugoslavia. Only when I at-tended a November rally in the town center, organized by Vuk Drašković’sSerbian Movement o Renewal (SPO), did this growing conict begin to seemlike more than a strange abstraction, more than images rom somewhere araway.

My classmates rom gymnasium skipped school en masse to attend. Teytranslated the promises to de end ethnic Serbs in Croatia to me. Tey trans-lated the chants: “Vuk: bring the salad, there will be meat—we’ll slaughter theCroats!” (Vuče, daj salate—klaćemo hrvate! ). Some in the crowd waved knivesoverhead. Te massacres did not begin, however, until spring. By the time




I boarded a plane or Frank urt on July 5, 1991, the country I had grown tolove—and, i I am honest, also to hate—was no more. As I ew rom Belgrade,ghting was at its peak in the northwestern republic o Slovenia. Tat rstten-day war, the least destructive o the armed conicts that marked Yugo-slavia’s dissolution, was almost over. Croatia, Bosnia, and then Kosovo wouldollow. More than one hundred thousand would be killed. Millions would bedriven rom their homes.

Since that year, I have spent a good part o my li e trying to grasp whathappened to Yugoslavia. I have wondered how I, and others around me, oughtto have responded to the crisis. Initially this involved collaboration and re-search, both in Yugoslavia and abroad, with what is usually called civil so-ciety. In 1992, I volunteered with a support and mutual aid network or youngconscientious objectors rom Yugoslavia who were living illegally in Amster-dam. In 1993, I worked with Veterans or Peace—an antimilitarist organi-zation o U.S. veterans—on a program to evacuate injured Bosnian childrento Portland, Maine. Te hope was to highlight the human cost o the war orAmericans who otherwise experienced the war as a set o images rom some-where ar away.

During 1995, I collaborated with and researched the Belgrade Circle, anassociation o antinationalist intellectuals in Serbia, who, at the height o theSerbian siege o Sarajevo, openly opposed Serbian aggression. Unable to re-turn to Serbia because o international sanctions, in 1996 I headed to Zagreb,Croatia, where I have continued to conduct much o my research ever since.Te war had ended only a ew months earlier, and the Anti-War Campaign oCroatia was supporting minority Serbs’ return to the rural homes rom whichthey had been driven only a year earlier. Troughout these years, I was consis-tently struck by the courage o those Serbs and Croats who resisted the over-whelmingly dominant logic o ethnic war. Tey were a small minority swim-ming against a riptide o nationalist exclusion, sometimes at great personalcost. For the ounders and staff o these human-rights and peace organiza-tions—what were collectively known as “civil society,” or sometimes moremodestly as the “civil scene” (civilna scena)—NGOs were the embodiment oall that was hope ul in their societies’ politics.

Like many lef-leaning ex-Yugoslavs, however, I was dogged by a naggingsense o ineffectiveness during those years. Te problem was not only thatantiwar initiatives were too weak to prevent the un olding tragedy. Only themost delusional optimists in the region believed—once the wars had begun in




earnest—that they could do much more than set a counterexample. Most eltthey could only challenge the widespread belie thatall Serbs,all Croats, orall Bosniaks were advocates o war and intolerance. Te sense o inadequacywas o a different order. My misgiving was that dissidents ofen shared un-damental assumptions with the political orces they criticized, even sharedsome o the key belie s underpinning the ethnic conict against which theywere deployed.

First, while some dissidents developed uninching critiques o the domi-nant politics o nationalist hatred—despite being treated as traitors in theirsocieties’ mainstream media—they did not typically challenge the underlyingconception o “the people” and “the nation” on whose behal the nationalistsclaimed to act. Ironically, critics o nationalism sometimes asserted that thenationalists had betrayed the nation’s true interests. In this and other ways,they rein orced the idea that therewere national interests. Indeed, at times,antinationalists seemed to be an alternative national elite waiting in the wingsor their opportunity to rule (Razsa 1996).

Second, most opponents o extreme nationalism, war, and ethnic vio-lence believed that these phenomena were retrograde, primitive, rural, and

“Balkan.” What was needed, most agreed, was to “return” Croatia to its right-ul path toward Europeanization. Tey blamed the nationalists or theircountry’s isolation rom the West. Ironically, most critics shared with mostnationalists the sense that their country was, or at least should be, European.Nationalists, or their part, ofen saw their states as bulwarks against the East,the last wall o de ense against a Muslim—or a Muslim and Orthodox—East.In the classic ormulation they were Antemurale Christianitatis, the protec-tive walls o Christian Europe against the barbarians. I was troubled by howeven critics’ ormulations rein orced the hierarchies implicit in this centralopposition between Europe and the Balkans, the very hierarchies aroundwhich much o the violence was organized ( odorova 1997; Razsa 1997a,1997b; Bjelić and Savić 2002; Razsa and Lindstrom 2004).

Anthropologists have long viewed such hierarchies with considerableskepticism (Douglas 1966; Fabian 1983). And with each return to the or-mer Yugoslavia, I was less convinced by explanations o the crisis that drewon a series o related oppositions: Europe/Balkan, West/East, urban/rural,and civilized/primitive. I was becoming increasingly discomted by Westernanalyses o the violent dissolution o Yugoslavia as rooted in the innate eth-nic hatreds o the Balkans (Kaplan 1993) or their underlying civilizational




antagonism (Huntington 1996). Not only was the inherent discriminationo the Europe/Balkan ormulations objectionable; such interpretations ob-scured what was actually taking place in the ormer Yugoslavia. Rather thanattributing it to a Balkan tendency, I was coming to believe that the violencemight be better understood as the region’s ultimate Europeanization (Žižek1994:13; odorova 1996; Razsa 1997a; Hayden 2000; Razsa and Lindstrom2004). “Ethnic cleansing” was nally and denitively dismantling the multi-national, multicon essional tapestry o Yugoslavia’s ethnic inheritance romthe Habsburg and the Ottoman empires. Both the ederation o republics andthe ethnic diversity within each o those republics were being razed in avor ostate projects, each with a sovereign nation/people (narod ) at its center. Tiswas not then the inherent chaos o the Balkans but the supremely modern po-litical logic o the ethnically dened nation-state—a violence that owed moreto Herder and Hegel than ancient tribalism (Hayden 2000).

Finally, while I was not nostalgic or Yugoslavia’s socialism—any promisethat system had offered was thoroughly hollowed out by the time I came toYugoslavia in 1990 —I nonetheless elt a loss associated with the country’sdissolution. My nostalgia was not only or the relative ethnic peace o social-

ist Yugoslavia, though one could not help but view that aspect o Yugoslaviawist ully during the wars o the 1990s. I also elt the loss o the utopian hopethat had underwritten the Yugoslav project. From the vantage point o the1990s and 2000s, it was hard to conceive o a period when some Yugoslavshad imagined themselves masters o their own ate, agents who could remakethe world in new, more just ways. But indeed, despite their peripheral Balkanstatus and largely rural population, Yugoslavs organized the most success ulWorld War II anti ascist resistance movement, ounded a multinational statedespite interethnic bloodletting omented by Western powers, orged an in-dependent socialist state afer breaking with Stalin at the height o his power,and developed a unique worker sel -managed economy. In short, I was notspecically nostalgic or the object o Yugoslav socialists’ political hopes—thesocialist state and economy—but or political hope itsel .

In the polarized conditions o 1990s ormer Yugoslavia, one had starklyand aggressively opposed choices. Tese choices, however, were highly cir-cumscribed and did not admit to much political hope. One could align one-sel with the populist-nationalist party in power or with the marginalizedand vilied moderate parties and NGOs that sought to promote the politicsand values o Western liberal democracy. Even leaving aside or a moment




the constraints imposed by ethnic conict, the global conditions in whichthese new states achieved independence curtailed political aspirations. Tiswas not the post-World War II era o newly independent ormer coloniesdreaming o ashioning their own unique paths to modernization and devel-opment, the period when Yugoslavia’s rst president, Josip Broz ito, oundedthat central institution o anticolonialism, the Non-Aligned Movement, to-gether with India’s rst prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; Indonesia’s rstpresident, Sukarno; Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser; and Gha-na’s rst president, Kwame Nkrumah. By the 1990s, socialism was dead, theend o its history declared (Fukuyama 1992). Indeed, perhaps nowhere elseon earth was the triumphalism o neoliberalism’s market orthodoxy morestrident than in Eastern Europe (Eyal 2003). Te horizons o political possi-bility were, there ore, extremely narrow. Tose who opposed the wars o Yu-goslav succession, inso ar as they could muster any hope at all, aspired to ap-proximate the liberal democracies, “rule o law,” and market economies othe West.

A New Radical Leftism

Tese preoccupations—the role o national sovereignty in the dismantlingo Yugoslavia, the loss o political hope, the dominance o a single neoliberalmodel in the postsocialist world—were still very much on my mind when I re-turned to Croatia in 2001. I wanted to make a lm about how contemporaryCroats remembered—and, as was more ofen the case, orgot—the WWIIPartisans. Te Partisans’ anti ascist resistance—in many ways the most suc-cess ul in occupied Europe—had unctioned as socialist Yugoslavia’s oun-dational source o legitimacy. I believed, there ore, that current attitudes to-ward them would provide rich material or understanding how people madesense o both the preceding socialist state order as well as the current nation-alist-liberal one.

By late July, I had completed most o the shooting or a documentary lmon the Partisans (Razsa 2001) and was immersing mysel in archival oot-age, including the legendary Partisan epics that were the preeminent pro-ductions o Yugoslav cinema. When two Croatian riends, lef-leaning butnever particularly politically active, invited me to what they promised wouldbe an interesting event—a “Noborder Camp”—I was wary o being divertedrom my Partisan research. I eventually acquiesced because the camp wasonly a two-hour drive away, near the intersection o the Hungarian, Slovene,




and Croatian borders. I did not know that this camp would serve as a stagingground or the imminent protests against the G8 in Genoa. Nor did I knowthat I would meet the Slovene and Croatian activists—including Pero—whosedeeds, words, and riendship would inspire my research, lmmaking, and ac-tivism or the next dozen years. Gathered with a motley assembly in a decrepitsocialist-era campground or three days, I ound mysel surrounded by mem-bers o Ya Basta!, an Italian Zapatista support group turned union or the un-employed, an Austrian street theater caravan, a Slovene anarcho-syndical-ist union, and Croatian anti ascist youth. Tere were workshops on “migrantrights,” “a Europe without borders,” and “resistance to neoliberal global capi-talism.” Activists collaborated in border protests, public education and out-reach, civil disobedience training, and theatrical per ormances outside a de-tention center or migrants arrested trying to cross into the European Union.

At the end o this long weekend, I traveled on to Italy with new Croatianacquaintances in their wheezing Yugo—the much maligned Yugoslav auto-mobile export. In rieste we embarked on the “G8 Express,” transportingprotesters to the Genoa summit where political leaders rom the world’s mostdeveloped economies were gathering. As the train zigzagged across northern

Italy—Mon alcone, Venice, Padua, Milan, Bologna—we stopped to pick upnew bands o protesters at each station, many equipped with helmets, home-made armor, and Plexiglas shields. When the Carabinieri, Italy’s paramilitarypolice orce, blocked these rein orcements, the train would empty and occu-pants would sit down on the tracks—effectively closing all lines into the cityin which we ound ourselves at that moment. Te Italians did not return tothe G8 Express until their comrades were released and we were permitted tocontinue on our way. On the train I met dozens o ex-Yugoslavs, a ew Serbs,but mostly Croats and Slovenes. A ew seemed, like me, stunned by the open,estive, yet con rontational militancy o our Italian hosts, most o whom iden-tied with the Italian tradition o autonomist communism that was hostileto party discipline. But many ex-Yugoslavs squeezed their way through thestanding-room-only train, catching up with old riends, sharing stories romrecent anticapitalist demonstrations, and debating the relative strengths othe militant tactics o the Black Bloc, more commonly associated with anar-chists, and utte Bianche (White Overalls), more commonly associated withautonomous Marxists. For the next three days, these travelers would partici-pate in the largest and most militant European protests in a generation. Hun-dreds o protesters would be beaten and hospitalized. One young Italian—




who, I could not keep mysel rom thinking, was similar to Pero in manyways—was shot in the head and killed by the Carabinieri. Suddenly the lefwas tumultuously, disruptively alive (watch “Genova Libera”).

Global Postsocialism

For this new generation o activists rom the northwest o ex-Yugoslavia, ac-tivists o Pero’s generation, coming o age in the midst o these militant Eu-ropean protests against neoliberal globalization, civil society had very di -erent associations than it did or those involved in the 1990s antiwar andhuman-rights organizations. Tis younger generation saw in NGOs pro es-sionalization rather than voluntary initiative; compromising dependence onoreign unding rather than autonomous sel -organization; and ritualized,polite expressions o dissent rather than creative direct action. By care ullytracing shifing attitudes toward, and struggles around, civil society,Bastardsof Utopia offers a critical new understanding o the vicissitudes o postsocial-ist democratization. While many scholars—like those rom the civil scenesin Zagreb and Ljubljana—hail civil society as a prerequisite or any success-ul transition to democracy (Almond and Verba 1989; Putnam et al. 1993),

ew scholars have addressed the implicit and explicit critiques emerging romwhat one young activist termed the “uncivil society” o radical politics: un-ruly, impolitic, and undamentally skeptical o regimes o state and nationalcitizenship. As an ethnography o grassroots activism,Bastards of Utopia contributes to the critical scholarly reassessment o the Western promotiono “democratization” (Rivkin-Fish 2008; Caldwell 2012; Hemment 2012) andthe larger postsocialist “transition” in ormed by my collaborators’ radical po-litical imaginations. Indeed, activists’ practices and political sensibilities—in-cluding their of-repeated (and undamentally anthropological) slogan “An-other World is Possible”—were a re utation o the teleological assumptionsthat structured rst socialism, and then the transition rom socialism to mar-ket democracies (Verdery and Burawoy 1999; Brandtstädter 2007). Tey werealso expressions o undamental political hope that would have been unimag-inable a ew years earlier.

Tis study is also an ethnography o postsocialism in a broader sense,one not limited to those territories once governed by socialist regimes. Aferall, there were global repercussions when Eastern Europeans dismantled cap-italism’s primary rival afer 1989: the triumphal dominance o “ ree mar-ket capitalism” and a single neoliberal model o development. Te political




lef lost the utopian telos that had oriented it or much o the twentieth cen-tury, precipitating a pro ound crisis o the political imagination (Holloway2002). Tis book explores my collaborators’ response to this crisis, seen intheir experimental efforts to con ront local neoliberalization, affirm a distinct vision o social justice, and also reckon critically with the pain ul revolu-tionary legacy o state socialism. Te struggles o activists in Croatia and Slo- venia, the ormer Yugoslav republics where I conducted most o my eldwork,were echoed elsewhere—in Mexico (Nash 2001; Holloway 2002), South A rica(Gibson 2006), North America (Graeber 2009), and Western Europe (Juris2008; Maeckelbergh 2009)—by those movements that were ofen glossed asthe “anti-globalization movement” in the North American press (Friedman1999). Inso ar as globalization stands in or the inevitability o a global mar-ket economy ( rouillot 2003) or the rise o global corporate power (Korten2001), this is not a misnomer. Tis is the hegemonic notion o globalization,associated with a specic political project—the Washington Consensus pro-moted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and U.S.reasury—which included the promotion o privatization, trade liberaliza-tion, deregulation, export-oriented production, and reductions in social ex-

penditures (Williamson 1989).Tere are, however, a “plurality o globals that emerge and come to restin different guises, locales, and per ormances,” (Kahn 2014:14) and the move-ments with which I collaborated were themselves thoroughly transnational,richly linked to one another across borders. My collaborators traveled toLondon, Porto Alegre, Chiapas, Barcelona, and more recently unis, to par-ticipate in and learn rom contemporaneous movements. Activists insistedon describing their efforts as “globalization rom below,” “grassroots glob-alization,” or “alterglobalization.” Tey were, in other words, undamen-tally transnational and antinationalist, to a degree I had not observed amongthe NGOs o the 1990s. So while Khasnabish, not incorrectly, objects to theclaimed universality o “global movements,” insisting instead that thesemovements are more accurately described as transnational rather than trulyglobal (2013)—what, afer all, is ully global?—I opt to call this the “alterglo-balization movement” here. Tis term acknowledges that there are multipleand conicting globalizations as well as a subjective aspiration within thesemovements to transcend national limits, both geographically and ideologi-cally. As I explore in the next chapter, one o the reasons Zagreb activists weredrawn to the alterglobalization movement was that it offered them a path be-




yond what one activist described as the “nationalist claustrophobia” they ex-perienced in Croatia.

Nonetheless, despite the numerous interconnections and parallels amongmovements, there is a particular urgency—and poetic justice—to listening orlocal responses to the question o what it means to be a lefist afer socialismin a territory that actually experienced state socialism, a socialism that wasdismantled with a singular ury in Yugoslavia. Pero’s generation o radical ac-tivists answered this question by disavowing state power and adopting anti-authoritarian organizational orms. Tey shifed away rom an emphasis on auture utopia and toward a commitment to orms o practice, away rom endsand toward means. In particular they embraced direct action, understood asan intervention against existing conditions in a way that pregures an alter-native (c . Graeber 2002:62). Tis pregurative politics ofen ocused on ex-periments in direct democracy, a trend that only intensied with the recentOccupy encampments (Razsa and Kurnik 2012; Juris and Razsa 2012).

How, one wonders, did this new generation o activists—most only a ewyears younger than those I met in the peace movement o the 1990s—develop such different political sensibilities? How did they cultivate radical po-

litical hopes in the in ertile soil o postsocialist and postwar Yugoslavia? Teirradical sensibilities were not simply a logical consequence o subscribing toradical ideologies, nor were they the accidental byproducts o activist expe-rience. Te cultivation o radical subjects, who not only questioned domi-nant political trends but also had strong desires to challenge them—who werewilling, as Pero was, to ace arrest and police beatings—was central to ac-tivist politics. In part this emphasis on cultivating radical desires ollowedrom activists’ understanding o the political, which they viewed, like manycontemporary anthropologists, as permeating every aspect o lived experi-ence rather than remaining a discrete sphere o electoral politics or “affairs ostate.” Many o my conclusions emerge rom the interaction between my an-thropological sense o the political and their activist sense o the same. Teircommitment to direct action extended beyond con rontations with publicauthorities, such as those around the bicycle caravan, into the politicizationo daily li e. Beyond affirming the eminist insight that the personal is po-litical, activist practices implied a subjective turn, in which they sought to in-tervene in their sel -understandings and in the constitution o their very de-sires (Razsa and Kurnik 2012; Razsa 2012b). Te subjective turn embodieswhat critical theorists Hardt and Negri describe as a counterpower, the alter-




native production o subjectivity, which not only resists power but also seeksautonomy rom it (2009:57).

Put another way, i the Marxist and anticolonial movements o the twen-tieth century centered on seizing the state—and with it the means o produc-tion—my collaborators struggled to seize the means o producing themselvesas subjects. Activists’ appropriation o technologies and practices o subjecti- vation is perhaps seen more clearly in a concrete example, such as their use odigital video, in particular their engagement with the ootage o physical con-rontations with the police they sometimes called “riot porn.” In most videosassociated with human-rights campaigns, suffering bodies are represented asinnocent victims (McLagan 2005). In riot porn, by contrast, activists soughtout, watched repeatedly, valorized, and emulated images o insubordinatebodies con ronting state violence. In act, activists in Zagreb watched a se-ries o such videos the morning be ore they set out on the bicycle caravanthat led to Pero’s arrest. Whereas biopower, as Foucault ormulated it, pro-duces docile bodies (1977), activists explicitly sought to produce unruly bod-ies, bodies prepared, even desirous, o con rontations like those generated bythe bicycle caravan.

Video and Bastards of Utopia

Video is more than an empirical and analytical thread woven through thisbook. I have used the technology to trans orm my methods, to embed myeldwork in activist struggles, and to represent my research ndings, thusopening a number o productive reciprocities between scholarship and po-litical engagement.Occupation, a documentary I produced about a three-week sit-in or living wages or service workers at Harvard University (Razsaand Velez 2002), helped convince activists I could be trusted to participate inand document their activities. And while there was little interest in my ethno-graphic writing project, lming protests trans ormed my presence or manyo my collaborators into a constructive (and comprehensible) part o activistli e. In act, activists soon demanded that I record most actions—as they didduring the bicycle caravan (see gure 0.1). Video, there ore, played a crucialrole in my incorporation into daily li e and became central to my method-ology, as I shot extensive video “eld notes.” More than a mnemonic device,as images are sometimes reductively understood in anthropology, video pro-oundly inuenced my perception and thinking. Watching and discussing

video ootage with participants and others proved a revealing way o elicit-ing reections on what actions meant locally and transnationally (c . Cowan




1990; Herz eld 2004:92–93). Afer the bicycle caravan, or example, activistsgathered to watch and rewatch—and discuss at length—my ootage, askinghow the protest appeared to nonparticipants and how they might be more e -ective in the uture. Video is as important to the representation o my eld-work as written ethnography. Drawing on two hundred hours o video shotover seven years, I codirected and editedBastards of Utopia (Razsa and Velez2010), about everyday li e and radical politics in Zagreb. More subtly, workingin video encouraged me to be attentive to orms o observation I might haveotherwise neglected. Ofen, anthropologists listen or the discursive— or ourin ormants’ words—to the detriment o our other senses ( aylor 1996).

Working in a visual medium attuned me to dimensions o social li e notexpressed in language, such as gestures and space, as well as the sensory, a -ective, and embodied aspects o protest—the very dimensions o activists’

video practice, or example, that were crucial in cultivating embodied de-sires. Te conclusions I reach here are deeply indebted to this submersion in visual methods, my own and my collaborators’ alike, and indicate that video

Figure 0.1. Te author records as police arrest activists at a Zagreb demon-stration against the U.S.-led invasion o Iraq. Zagreb, May 2003.Photo by Markos.




can trans orm the sensoria o ethnographers as well as activists. Finally, these video methodologies, and the presence o my own camera, along with thoseo activists, indicate how my own knowledge production came to be woveninto the abric o activist struggle, reection, and political articulation. Assuch, my eldwork is one example o what has been called “militant research”(Colectivo Situaciones 2003) or “militant ethnography” (Juris 2008), in whichthe researcher both seeks to study as well as contribute to social struggles. Inany case, any knowledge produced by my research emerges rom this partici-pation in activist struggles and in dialogue with movement knowledge pro-duction.

Te integration o text with video also made possible unexpected anddistinctive scholarly insights. First, due to my collaboration with lmmakerPacho Velez, I am present as a “character” in many scenes in the documen-tary. Tis means eldwork itsel is opened to observation, an especially com-pelling and rarely explored orm o reexivity that allows the reader-viewer toconsider my ethnographic methods and the specic ethical dilemmas o myeldwork. Second, anthropologists have produced only a hand ul o ethnog-raphies and lms based on common eldwork. Especially rare are pairings o

a companion book and lm organized around the same themes, events, andcharacters. Tis means that readers o this ethnography have the opportu-nity to explore the distinct representational potential and limits o text and video as media.

Working in lm also comes with risks, however. Te three activists at thecenter o the eature lmBastards of Utopia—Dado, Fistra, and Jelena—obvi-ously had to relinquish anonymity when they agreed to collaborate with Pa-cho and me to make the documentary because their aces appear and theirnames are heard throughout the ootage (watch “Opening”). Tey did notmake this decision lightly—and there were scenes that were not included inthe nal cut because they exposed activists to risk o arrest or right-wing vigi-lante attack. In the interest o protecting those aspects o their lives that Dado,Fistra, and Jelena did not want exposed, while also striving to bring the lmand book into close alignment, I have crafed three composite characters,Pero, Rimi, and Jadranka. Tey share many characteristics with Dado, Fis-tra, and Jelena respectively, but they also have characteristics and experiencesthat are drawn rom the lives o other activists in the Zagreb scene. In otherwords, as Dado put it when I discussed this representational strategy: “As longas a cop or a skinhead reading it knows that Pero isn’t me, that I didn’t do allthe stuff you say he does, then it sounds good to me.”




An Ethnography of Anarchists

My intensive collaboration with the cluster o Zagreb activists who partici-pated in the making o the lm, especially the three main “characters,” lef adeep impression on my research, even on my world view. Despite the suspi-cion generated by the close police surveillance activists aced, we ormed closerelationships, and when I returned home to the United States I continued towatch and rewatch the ootage o the time I spent with them. In the course oyears o editing, I watched some scenes hundreds o times, coming to knowevery gesture, every phrase, every moment o silence, by heart. So it is not sur-prising that these activists came to gure so prominently in this book. Teirprominence is more than a coincidental byproduct o the lm, however. Overthe course o my eldwork, these activists inuenced the kinds o questions Iwas asking and there ore the knowledge I generated—and they helped to re-solve an inescapable methodological problem inherent to studying alterglo-balization movements. During my years in the eld, I worked with a broadrange o activist networks in the northwest o the ormer Yugoslavia, espe-cially in the activist hubs o Zagreb, Croatia, and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Tese

militant actions, video collectives, NGOs, alternative publishing projects,subcultural scenes, citizens’ initiatives, and protest movements were all, indistinctive ways, involved with transnational networking and collaboration.Te range and intensity o these ows—that is the networked character o the“movement o movements”—meant that any given activist in Zagreb or Lju-bljana was only one or two degrees o separation rom a staggering array oother initiatives. It was this rich connectivity that posed a methodologicalchallenge: Where did the movement begin and end? Tere was no discern-able center within this nearly boundless web o interconnections. Even withinZagreb, or example, the movement had no denable edge, ading off by de-grees into other domains: ree-sofware development, critical art practice,punk music subculture, new age spiritualties, and, yes, even NGO initiatives.

Other ethnographers o alterglobalization have grappled with the diffi-culty o dening a discrete object o study within geographically dispersed,dynamic, and decentralized networks, and each has developed specicmethods appropriate to his or her theoretical, ethnographic, and politicalconcerns. InNetworking Futures, Juris (2008) approaches this sel -consciouslyglobalizing movement rom the locally grounded perspective o the activistnetworks in Barcelona—perennially a key node in the movement. Resistingthe tendency to etishize the network as essentially positive or rei y it as an




already existing object, Juris’s ethnography is a description o the concretepractices “through which decentered networking logics are produced, re-produced, and trans ormed within particular social, cultural and politicalcontexts” (2008:11). InTe Will of the Many, Marianne Maeckelbergh alsoocuses on practices—directly democratic decision-making in her research—but rather than choosing to ground her ethnography in a single location, sheollows the practices themselves, crafing a undamentally transnational eldsite across movement convergences where these political practices are en-acted, such as counter-summits (2009). While questions o transnational net-working and direct democracy are important to any account o contemporaryradicalism, the questions I address are different in emphasis. Namely, how didactivists develop radical views, disobedient desires, and unruly sensibilitiesin a territory dominated by nationalist and right-wing politics? How have ac-tivists rethought what it means to be a lefist afer socialism? What enabledthe imagining o new political possibilities and the creation o subjects pre-pared to pursue those possibilities? o answer these questions—and to havea strategy to sharpen my attention in the vast complex o interwoven webso movement activity—I ocus closely on the experiences o my key collabo-

rators. o be sure, I draw on the spectrum o other activists and movementsI encountered during orty-two months o eldwork in the northwest o theormer Yugoslavia between 1996 and 2011 to contextualize the Zagreb scene.My parallel eldwork in Ljubljana, Slovenia, especially with the activists whoorganized the Noborder Camps, was an especially important counterpointto what was happening in Croatia. Primarily, however, I trace the intercon-nections throughout the region by ollowing my Zagreb collaborators as theytravel to protests, con erences, and trainings. In addition to Genoa and theNoborder Camps, a number o transnational opportunities presented them-selves during eldwork: the European Social Forum in Florence, where rep-resentatives rom social movements, lefist parties, and NGOs met to discusscontinent-wide priorities; the ounding congress o the Anarcho-Syndical-ist Initiative o Serbia, which drew activists rom throughout the ormer Yu-goslavia; Eastern European protests in Prague against NA O expansion; anddemonstrations against the European Union in Tessaloniki, Greece (watch“War and Sabotage”). I also ollowed the currents o the movement as they in-tersected with my collaborators’ lives in Zagreb as speaking tours they orga-nized or attended; anzines they read; calls to action they made and heeded;independent videos they watched, screened, and made; visiting activists theyhosted; traveling punk bands they promoted; and digital communications




they read and wrote. In other words, their subjective experiences are not onlya central ocus, they also help to orm the methodological limit o my re-search, a means with which to chalk off a segment o the otherwise immea-surable abric o the alterglobalization movement.

Te activists o the “Zagreb scene”—including homeless teens, anarchistpunks in their twenties, and activist-researchers in their thirties, orties, andfies—mostly described themselves as antiauthoritarian lefists o one stripeor another. Te Slovenes with whom I worked were largely inspired by themilitant legacy and theoretical innovation oOperaismo (or Workerism), theautonomous and nonparty Marxist movement that was especially strong in1970s Italy and was revitalized in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In Croa-tia, on the contrary, the dissolution o the Socialist Federal Republic o Yu-goslavia in the early 1990s was much more violent and the anticommunismmore pronounced—any affiliation with Marxism was stigmatized. While an-archism has come to have a power ul grip on the lefist imagination since theend o the Cold War, even usurping the place that Marxism held or the rad-icals o the 1960s (Epstein 2001; Graeber 2002), it was nonetheless unusualthat nearly all o Zagreb’s radicals drew on the anarchist tradition (Razsa

2008). As much o this book ocuses on the practices o sel -declared anar-chists like Pero, and because anarchists are among the most misunderstoodand vilied o political actors, it is worth dwelling or a moment on what an-archism meant to my collaborators and how it is related to the ideas that an-imate this book.

Rendering anarchist politics intelligible is complicated by a number oactors, not least a tradition o dismissive scholarship, perhaps even, as somehave argued, an inherent antipathy between academic and anarchist prac-tice (Graeber 2004:66). Historical research on anarchist movements, or ex-ample in Republican Spain, which many see as the apex o twentieth-centuryanarchist politics, is symptomatic and echoes many contemporary misread-ings o anarchism. Key historians represented Spanish anarchism as highlymoralistic in character, even as reecting a millenarian anaticism that owedmuch to the Catholic aith it condemned (Brenan 1950). Similarly, inPrimi-tive Rebels, Eric Hobsbawm argues that anarchism was “a orm o peasantmovement almost incapable o effective adaptation to modern conditions,”a rejection o the “evil world” and an embodiment o the “primitivism” and“ritualism” typical o social movements lacking modern orms o party orga-nization and discipline (quoted in Maddox 1995:127). Many who dismiss con-temporary anarchism do so in a style that echoes the attitudes o scholars o




early anarchism, while also drawing on the rhetoric o market triumphalism.Tey see anarchists as Luddites and at-earthers who resist an inevitable eco-nomic global order (Friedman 1999:A26). Tese dismissals o anarchism, Icontend, are in part the product o a persistent developmentalism, especiallythe notion that the state is the ultimate instantiation o modernity and reason(Herzeld 1987:11–12).

I one can speak o an anarchist movement in Croatia, it consists o per-haps ve hundred activists, the majority, though by no means all, o whomare based in Zagreb. Tere were no ormal anarchist organizations—nomembership rolls, no registration with the state Office o Associations, noneo the oreign, religious, or state unding that sustains the Croatian nongov-ernmental sector. What did exist was a variety o in ormal groups, projects,and initiatives that worked on a range o issues: anti ascist, anticapitalist, an-timilitarist, ecological, eminist, peace, and mutual assistance.

Anarchists in Zagreb would, i asked directly, articulate a utopian visiono anarchism that approximated a dictionary denition. Tey would describeanarchism as the “abolition o all government and the organization o societyon a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to orce or compulsion”

(Oxford American Dictionary 2005). Dražen, a Zagreb-based anarchist in hislate twenties, contrasted his politics with Marxism, insisting that anarchismwas not an ideology or him the way that “Marxism was or most commu-nists.” Indeed, as he expressed it in an essay on anarchist politics,

anarchism as such is not so important to me. Horizontal organization, soli-darity, mutual aid, love o reedom or all individuals who respect the reedomo others, tolerance, sel -initiative, and other aspects o anarchism . . . present,

in act, a method, a method o everyday behavior and living that I try, more orless success ully, to share with those around me (Šimleša 2005:6).

Te ocus, with ew exceptions, was not then on an eventual utopian telosor on a revolutionary rupture but on a process o riddling the contemporaryworld with alternative practices.

Politics as practice and process was conceived o asdirektna akcija (directaction; see gure 0.2). For Zagreb’s anarchists, direct action could be steal-ing the ag rom the headquarters o the neo ascist Croatian Party o Rightsat three in the morning or it could be eeding the homeless with collectivelygathered and prepared ood (watch “Food Not Bombs”). Again, direct ac-tion can be dened as a rejection o a politics that appeals to governments to




modi y their behavior, in avor o physical intervention against state power ina orm that pregures an alternative (Graeber 2002:62).

Notwithstanding the academic antagonism toward anarchism, one coulddescribe at some length the shared eatures o anthropology and anarchism.Both emerged in their modern orm in opposition to the social Darwinism othe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kropotkin 1902; Boas 1911).More recently, there have been proposals or the conjoining o anarchism andanthropology (Orgel 2001; Graeber 2004). Indeed, as Graeber points out, an-thropologists have long studied tribal societies that maintained order outside

Figure 0.2. Patches such as “Direktna Akcija” (Direct Action) were popularwithin the anarcho-punk scene and were ofen sewn onto the clothing oZagreb activists.




the state and could, there ore, be use ul in demonstrating the sheer range ohuman possibilities (2004:16). It is or this reason that anarchists have ofen“prospected” in the ethnographic record or models o nonstate sel -gover-nance and egalitarian social relations (Robinson and ormey 2012).

For the purposes o this book, two common eatures o anarchism andanthropology are signicant. First, anarchists proved to be particularly com-pelling collocutors in thinking ethnographically about both neoliberalismand the orms o resistance it engenders. Like anthropologists, anarchistsunderstand the political not as a separate sphere, but as permeating every as-pect o social li e. In this spirit, I am attentive in this book to activists’ effortsto remake daily li e through squatting (watch “Jelena’s Mess”), scavenging(watch “Per ectly Good Cheese”), graffiti (watch “Honk or Police”), sel -ed-ucation, and the organization o an “autonomous” social and cultural exis-tence. Indeed, more than simply a politicization o everyday li e, it is this un-derstanding o power that animates those orms o activism that constitutewhat I am describing as a subjective turn, in which one o activists’ goals isthe production o new political subjectivities and new ways o li e (Hardt andNegri 2000; 2004).

Second, anthropology and anarchism are dedicated to orms o practicethat provide an important corrective to the political and scholarly tendency totreat theory or ideology as somehow more original or transcendent than ordi-nary practice.Fieldwork in anthropology anddirect action in contemporaryradical politics “en orce a dialectic o theory and practice” that sheds lighton o the “ rail provisionality” o theory and ideology (Herz eld 1987:x). Inshort, both anarchism and anthropology, at their best, apprehend social li ein an antiessentialist and processual manner, grounding this understandingin the everyday rather than in theoretical/ideological abstraction—anotherreason or bringing these two traditions into dialogue. Tat said, anarchistsare as vulnerable to the temptations o moral absolutism, reication, and un-damentalism as anthropologists are to their scientic analogues—positivism,empiricism, and scientism. Just as anthropology’s effort to overcome ethno-centricism is never complete, anarchism struggles with its own essentialisms,or example, vanguardism and reied conceptions o the state as a mortalenemy. Tis persistence o essentialism is not a reason to dismiss anarchistsas hypocrites any more than it is to dismiss anthropologists. It is rather anopportunity to recognize that anarchism is a human endeavor, embedded insocial li e, and ripe or ethnographic study and analysis. In the course o my




eldwork it also became clear that the anarchist tradition demands critical re-ection about anthropological knowledge production.

From Critique to an Affirmation of Alternatives

I have chosen to emphasize rather than conceal the ways my research wasconducted within the growing tradition o activist anthropology (Hale 2006;Goldstein 2012, Low and Merry 2010) and militant research (Sukaitis et al.2007; Juris 2008; Colectivos Situaciones 2009). Te synergizing—even dove-tailing—o research and activism was clearest during my eldwork. Afer all,participating in the daily li e o the community we study—in my case, learn-ing about activist li e by squatting, meeting, graffiti-writing, scavenging, pro-testing, and debating—ts squarely within the anthropological tradition oparticipant observation. Regardless o any synergies, committed participa-tion was a precondition o access to daily li e; activists would not have toler-ated a nominally objective observer who constantly lmed and questionedthem during a period o intense police surveillance and criminalization.

Figure 0.3. Te press made wide use o video recordings that activistsshared with them o Pero’s arrest, including this series o images and quo-tations. Te excerpt at the center o the article reads: “In the recording it isclear that the police behaved brutally to the protesters as they screamed:Tis is Croatia!” Jutarnji list, May 11, 2003.




Again, I do not want to hide behind these primarily research-centered argu-ments: I also tried to nd ways or my research to contribute to the struggles Istudied. Tis reciprocity is perhaps most easily seen in activist appropriationso my video recordings. For example, my recordings o Pero’s arrest were usedextensively by activists, including as evidence against the official on the scenewho ordered police intervention. Activists circulated my recordings to keymedia outlets, highlighting ootage that directly contradicted the official’sstatements to the press about the arrests (see gure 0.3). He was eventuallyorced to resign when he was proven to have lied to journalists about his role.

Te relationship between activism and other aspects o my research, espe-cially academic publishing—including this book—is more ambivalent. Schol-arly writing typically rests on individual expertise and authorship, whichsit uneasily with activist commitments to antiauthoritarianism and demo-cratic participation, and some would even argue scholarly writing constitutesthe privatization o collectively generated knowledge. Tat academics writepredominately or specialized journals and presses—the primary basis orthe individual author’s pro essional advancement (c . Juris and Khasnabish2013:27–28)— urther limits contributions to activist struggles. For these rea-

sons and others, riffing on the classic anarchist slogan o “No Gods, No Mas-ters,” the CrimethInc. Collective penned the essay, “No Gods, No MastersDegrees” (2007). Cognizant o these tensions between militant research andscholarly publishing, I have adopted a number o strategies to try to bring theresearch and representation o my scholarship into a more coherent politicalalignment. I produced the lm, in part, to be sure my research was accessibleto a wider audience—and activists have made use o the lm in a range osettings.

With an eye to making this book politically relevant—despite my collab-orators’ complete lack o interest in my publishing plans—I have watched oropportunities to contribute to the tradition o critical anthropological writ-ing on neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Ferguson 2006; Ong2006). Specically, I draw on activists’ interventions in daily li e, building ontheir resistance to develop a locally grounded—though also transnational—critique o what Claus Offe (1991) has termed the “triple transition” o EasternEurope rom state socialism. Tis includes the ormation o new nationalstates rom what had been multinational ederations, the transition to a mar-ket economy, and the transition to democracy.

In chapter 1, “Grassroots Globalization in National Soil,” I documenthow my collaborators embraced anarchist politics ollowing the widespread




violence o Croatia’s “War o Independence” and in response to the ar-rightnationalist and neo ascist politics that accompanied Croatian state orma-tion. Many o my closest interlocutors, like Rimi and Pero, narrated theirpoliticization, especially their antinationalism, as a direct response to the violence o Croatia’s secession rom Yugoslavia. Tey told o Serbian riendshounded rom school and older brothers returning rom the ront lines withchilling stories o atrocities. Some even insisted that their commitment toanarchism—their investment in a politics o organizing beyond and againststate authority—derived rom these early lessons about the violent nature othe state. Tey developed an antinationalist subculture in an effort to resistincorporation into the body politic o the nation-state, speaking an ethnicallymixed dialect, marking public spaces with alternative meanings, ghting as-cist youth, and staging antinationalist rituals.

In a similar spirit o critical anthropology o transition, I turn in chap-ter 2, “Uncivil Society: NGOs, the Invasion o Iraq, and the Limits o Peace-ul Protest,” to how Zagreb’s anarchists con ront “democratization” in post-socialist Croatia. I ocus on the local protest campaign sparked by the U.S.-ledinvasion o Iraq, which was part o the largest international peace movement

in history. Particularly revealing were the struggles or control o the EnoughWars! campaign, waged between the radical younger generation and thosewho came o age politically within the human-rights and peace organiza-tions ounded in the 1990s, many o which still received much o their und-ing rom the U.S. Tese struggles evince much about the nature o civil soci-ety’s role in democratization and why younger activists were alienated romit. In contrast to the ormal institutions o civil society, which are ofen seenby scholars o democratization as the vital tissue o a democratic culture—and the precondition or success ul democratic transition—I explore the con-tribution to be gleaned rom the uncivil society o the younger generation,who are unruly, impolitic, and undamentally skeptical o regimes o stateand national citizenship.

In chapter 4, “‘Struggling or What is Not Yet’: Te Right to the City inZagreb,” I narrate activists’ efforts to establish a “Free Store” in a ormer ac-tory—one o their most direct con rontations with the third o the transi-tions: marketization and privatization. Returning rom major transnationalprotests with the desire to do more local organizing, a ew dozen activists,operating under the name “Te Network o Social Solidarity,” broke into andoccupied, or “squatted,” an abandoned actory. Tey proceeded to clean andrenovate the space be ore opening the Free Store and community center. As




the international grocery chain next door made plans to tear down the com-plex to make room or additional parking, activists saw the space as an idealone in which to intervene against the commercialization o the urban land-scape around them.

While critical insights about neoliberalism generated by activist engage-ments are central to this book, I have nonetheless come to see critique as hav-ing distinct political and theoretical limitations. Tese limitations have comemore sharply into ocus in the light o the prolonged global nancial crisis,especially with the whole new wave o popular mobilizations it has sparkedbeginning with the Arab Spring, then continuing with Wisconsin and theOccupy Movement in North America, the antiausterity movement in Eu-rope, and numerous other “global uprisings” rom Chile to Israel (Juris andRazsa 2012). Te existing order has been challenged in ways not seen since1968, or even 1848 (Mason 2013). Skepticism o neoliberalism—even capi-talism itsel —has become widespread, especially across Southern and EasternEurope, where the crisis has been particularly acute. Te crisis o neoliber-alism’s legitimacy has not, however, ended the crisis o the political imagina-tion I experienced afer Yugoslav socialism’s collapse: it remains very difficult

to imagine an alternative to the present political and economic order. In thiscontext, urther critique is inadequate; indeed it may only conrm neoliber-alism as the primary rame o re erence (Razsa 2013). What is needed insteadis the affirmation o alternatives. Troughout this book, I nd ways to movebeyond what James Ferguson has called a politics o “the antis” (2010:166), apolitics which only denounces: antiglobalization, anticolonialism, and antin-eoliberalism (c . Rethmann 2013). I tease out the implicit political, social, andeconomic alternatives embedded in my collaborators’ practices. I describe theways they craf themselves and others as political subjects committed to pur-suing these alternatives.

In this affirmative spirit, I not only emphasize the ways that my collab-orators, or example, re used the nationalist culture that predominated oryears afer the war but also show the ways they actively participated in theproduction o an alternative transnational community. Tey collaboratedin a whole web o initiatives that transcended national borders, not least byborrowing tactics developed elsewhere. Rather than only reject “nationalculture,” activists affirmed a do-it-yoursel (DIY) culture. Tis reected anunderstanding o culture as a participatory eld o struggle, o culture asa domain or making meaning—and new political subjects. Similarly, mycollaborators in Croatia and Slovenia rejected the touchstones o liberal de-




mocratization—electoral politics and civil society—and instead struggled toenact direct orms o democracy in the antiwar campaign and in almost ev-ery initiative they undertook. Activists not only rejected private property,the central concept o neoliberal transition, they also modeled an alternativeorm o property by squatting a ormer actory and trans orming it into a so-cial center. In addition to democratic collective management, the Free Storebecame, or however brie a time, “a common.” It was repurposed to serve asocial good and reorganized around exchange based on mutual aid ratherthan prot. It sought the support o the wider neighborhood and city or itsde ense rather than relying on a legal title, and was open to all who saw itsmission as an important one or Zagreb.

As I discuss in chapter 3, “‘Feeling the State on Your Own Skin:’ Sub- jective Experiences o Militant Protest,” even the most oppositional o prac-tices—the countersummit—pregured other possible political utures andother social relationships. I describe the experiences o activists participatingin large con rontational protests—the most visible public mani estations othe alterglobalization movement—with special attention to the ways that vio-lent encounters with the state affected their interpersonal relations and senses

o sel . I trace the paths o Jadranka, Pero, and Rimi as they traveled to massprotests against the European Union in Tessaloniki, Greece. I argue that themost physical con rontations were expected by activists, and at times evenrelished because they conrmed anarchist belie s in the violent nature o thestate. At the moment when the instruments o state violence were turned onprotesters—tear gas, rubber bullets, helicopters, and armored vehicles—thestate became most palpable; protesters elt the state on their own skin. Experi-ences o a global movement were also at their most visceral, what one activistcalled “love at the barricades.” Tese experiences, which generate pro oundsubjective trans ormation, may have been one o the most overlooked and sig-nicant consequences o participating in such collective struggles.

o be clear, a turn to the affirmative does not imply that we surrenderour critical aculties—that we simply “romanticize resistance” (Ortner 1995)and ignore the contradictions, limitations, and internal divisions o activistpolitics. In Tessaloniki, or example, con rontation became so intense thatit bordered on civil war, necessitating the secrecy and relative isolation othe most militant activists—who hurled an estimated ten thousand Molotovcocktails at the police. I consider whether the organizational possibility o the“movement o movements”—requiring collaboration among quite differentconstituencies—may have been compromised at the very moment when its




existence seemed most sel -evident, when the “us” and “them” o movementand state were at their starkest. What is more, the re erence to video ootageo con rontational protest as “riot porn” was part o an activist critique, in aeminist register, o the etishization o violence among activists. Tough thisootage was used in important ways by activists to prepare themselves emo-tionally or the “low intensity state terror” (Juris 2008:162) to come, imageso political violence nevertheless valorized hegemonic notions o masculinityassociated with ideals o physical strength, courage, emotional passivity, andcompetiveness (Connell 2005; c . Sian 2005; Razsa 2013). Tough most ac-tivists, especially on the anarchist scene, understood themselves to be emi-nists, these gendered tensions persisted within the movement, across a rangeo interactions and initiatives—including especially between Jadranka andRimi—and they cropped up repeatedly during my eldwork.

Te fh chapter, “Te Occupy Movement: Direct Democracy and a Poli-tics o Becoming,” is based on nine months o new eldwork, conducted sincethe documentary lm was completed, with, among others, the Slovene activ-ists who organized that rst Noborder Camp where I met Pero. Te OccupyMovement in Slovenia provides a critical comparative perspective on my ear-

lier research. Whereas activists in Zagreb spoke in pregurative terms, o“being the change you want to see in the world,” those around Occupy Slo- venia described engaging in activism so that you would be trans ormed, sothat you would “become other than you now are.” Occupy Slovenia activ-ists’ sel -conscious decision to sidestep political institutions and con ront -nancial ones directly, establishing an encampment in the square in ront othe Ljubljana Stock Exchange, echoed other protest movements o 2011 inNorth A rica, Southern Europe, and North America. Tey also paralleledother movements in embracing direct democratic methods in response to aperceived crisis o electoral politics. As the name “Occupy Slovenia” as wellas activists’ preparatory trips to unisia and Spain indicate, protesters re-mained committed to transnational coordination and cooperation. But therewere also innovations in activist practice that set Occupy Slovenia apart romcontemporaneous campaigns like Occupy Wall Street or the earlier alter-globalization struggles o the 2000s. In particular, activists came to workclosely with a range o migrant and minority activists. Rather than strivingor ethical purity as Zagreb activists had, activists associated with OccupySlovenia tried to organize activism so that it would be open to the participa-tion o and trans ormation by activists with very different experiences thantheir own.




In conclusion, I reect at more length on radical politics and the turnrom a critical to an affirmative anthropology. I consider the implications omy collaborators’ emerging political imaginaries and the practices that em-body and sustain them. Crucial to all their efforts has been activists’ com-mitment to direct action and direct democracy, as well as what I describe asthe subjective turn—the struggle to develop individual and collective subjects who are antagonistic to dominant social relations and yearn or radicalchange. In this changing emphasis, we can discern a new terrain o struggle,which extends out rom daily practice across the wider social landscape—butat its center is a struggle over the constitution o hopes and desires. Given thecontinuing crisis o the political imagination, in which, despite years o per-sistent economic crisis, it seems so difficult to imagine alternatives, I arguethat scholars, i they truly wish to contribute politically, must move beyondthe critique o neoliberalism and toward the affirmation o political alterna-tives. My ocus here on the affirmative versus critical stakes o scholarship—and more generally the theoretical and political implications o radical ac-tivism—should not give the reader the wrong impression, however. Tis is anarrative ethnography, ollowing closely the lives and political development

o a small group o activists, especially Rimi, Pero, and Jadranka, over morethan a dozen years as they pursued their hopes and desires within the vola-tile transnational dynamics o alterglobalization. I this book makes any po-litical contribution whatsoever, it is because they were willing, at great per-sonal cost, to model that other orms o cultural, political, and economic li eare possible. Tey have pushed me, there ore, to return to anthropology at itsbest: the exploration o other ways o li e, ways o li e that seem unimaginablerom within the current order.

* * *Be ore you begin to read about activist li e in Zagreb—and interventions

in the urban landscape o national culture in particular—you might nd itruit ul to get a more sensory “ eel” or the city. You can experience morningat the central armers market (watch “Vegetable Central”), get a taste o theless quaint but much vaster Zagreb ea market (watch “Antler Salesman”),tour the city center by unicular and tram (watch “Rails”), or explore the city’speriphery o endless high-rise neighborhoods by car (watch “Wheels”), andsee the increasingly ubiquitous shopping centers (watch “Big Box Stores Growlike Mushrooms”). In any case, welcome to Zagreb, at least the particular Za-greb that emerges through my collaborators’ critical engagement with theircity.

Documents

Bastards of Utopia (excerpt)