In January of 2023 an activist named Manuel “Tortuguita” Paez Terán was shot 57 times by Georgia State Patrol troopers during a multi-agency raid on an encampment in the Weelaunee (or South River) Forest, Atlanta. Police initially claimed that the killing had been in self-defence and that Tortuguita had shot first. Later, evidence would suggest that the officers’ story was a fabrication.
Tortuguita was taking part in a forest occupation that had begun in response to the announcement of a $90 million police training facility. First proposed by the Atlanta Police Federation in 2017, and approved by the City of Atlanta in April 2021, the complex, even in most conservative estimates, would be the largest of its kind in the US, including military-grade training facilities, dozens of shooting ranges, and even a mock city where police could practice urban warfare. This latter element caused Atlanta residents to nickname the proposed facility ‘Cop City’, and the campaign against it soon became known as #StopCopCity.
Not only a demand, #StopCopCity is a vibrant movement acting in opposition to these plans, and in defence of Weelaunee Forest. As with many social movements, #StopCopCity has developed both in response to and in spite of increasing repression from the state, which Representatives Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib described as “one of the most extreme cases of government overreach, oppression, and violence in recent years.”
In the four years since these plans were announced, authorities have consistently sought to criminalise opposition to Cop City. 42 people have been charged under domestic terrorism legislation; 61 have been charged under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act.1 These charges carry the possibility of five to twenty years in prison. Additionally, as Grace Glass and Sacha Tykco reported in N+1, officials in Atlanta have used underhand tactics – including voter suppression technologies – to invalidate a petition signed by over 116,000 Atlanta residents asking for a public vote on the facility. (For reference, turnout for the 2021 mayoral election was 78,643). #StopCopCity organisers have been successful in framing these acts of repression as an extension of the same authoritarian approach that underpins the facility itself.
The movement, according to Glass and Tycko, is made up of “socialists, communists, autonomists… artists, utopians, weirdos,” as well as “basically normal” people (“carpenters, baristas…special-ed teachers”). Together, they have successfully deployed a range of tactics, including door knocking, signature collecting, film screenings, sabotage, tree spiking,2 phone banking, window-breaking, and fundraising concerts. That this has been achieved without succumbing to fractious arguments about which tactics should take precedence over others should not be overlooked.
#StopCopCity is one of the most significant political formations of the 21st century so far. It is a continuation of both the George Floyd uprisings and the struggle to prevent climate breakdown; it has been able to mobilise a broad coalition around radical demands, involving large numbers of people in a diverse set of activities. This has been difficult to achieve elsewhere, and for this reason alone, the struggle over the Atlanta forest should command significant attention amongst the international left. Where radical movements are often marginalised, #StopCopCity possesses an organisational breadth and depth which it wields in opposition to state infrastructure. This means that the struggle against Cop City is instructive for movements facing similar dynamics elsewhere: how did the movement come to be? How can its innovations be expanded and translated across other struggles?
It is the significance of the forest itself, in addition to the skill and intelligence of the organisers, that has made it possible to organise such a wide coalition under a set of demands much further to the left than anything on offer electorally in the US. As Glass and Tycko point out, the history of Weelaunee Forest is the history of American violence. Having been seized from the Muscogee people in the early 1800s, the area was occupied by the Key family, who operated a cotton plantation using enslaved labour It was then sold to the City of Atlanta, who established a prison farm on the land. Despite this painful history, the residents of Atlanta now have an overwhelmingly positive relationship to the forest, which they rightfully see as a shared community asset.
In her writing on the Atlanta struggle, Kristin Ross references David Harvey’s notion of the “either/or” dialectic, explaining that the “forest outside Atlanta will continue to be a forest, or it will become a militarised training ground”.3 To construct on this land would require a huge amount of environmental destruction, threatening the forest’s role in several ecological systems. Sometimes described as one of the ‘lungs of the city,’ Weelaunee helps to improve Atlanta’s air quality while providing flood protection and environmental cooling. Whilst the new facility is continuous with the histories of racial capitalism that run through the forest, the upheaval required to build it requires a rupture within the equilibrium of a community. A moment where the smooth-running state apparatus becomes more apparent because it needs to work more vigorously.
#StopCopCity is a popular movement. But rather than meeting this popularity with concessions, state actors have relied on violent repression and bad faith denial. This is emblematic of a broader shift in the state’s approach to discontent and social unrest in recent decades. One of the more obvious expressions of this shift is the state response to widespread public opposition to ‘Israel’’s genocide in Gaza. Police batons have swung in synchronisation with the chattering of media talking heads who swear that it’s actually totally necessary to blow up hospitals with civilians inside. Self-proclaimed liberal institutions have warped in defence of a wildly unpopular course of action. The removal of forest defenders in Atlanta and the destruction of student encampments in solidarity with Palestine bear a striking similarity. The image of Democratic National Convention delegates putting their fingers in their ears as protestors read aloud the names of dead Palestinian children mirrors the callous arrogance of the local Atlanta government in the wake of Tortuguita’s murder.
In both instances, counter-terrorism legislation has been used as a means of criminalising opposition. In Britain, Palestine Action activists have been arrested under counter-terror laws for sabotaging assets belonging to the ‘Israeli’ arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. Prevent, a government surveillance programme introduced as part of the ‘war on terror’, continues to target racialised communities, especially people from Arab or Muslim backgrounds, whose pro-Palesinian and anti-imperialist sentiments are distorted as forms of terroristic activity.
The climate movement has also been met with increasingly severe forms of repression. British climate activists continue to receive custodial sentences for non-violent forms of protest. Most notably, Just Stop Oil activists recently received record sentences for planning to peacefully block a motorway, after a trial so dubious that the UN Special Rapporteur intervened. (These sentences were reduced on appeal.) In June 2023, the French government criminalised involvement with Les Soulèvements de la Terre (SLT), a militant climate organisation. This came soon after the police responded to a mass act of sabotage with violence, leaving scores injured, two people in a coma, and one person without an eye. (The criminalisation was annulled by the Council of State in November 2023.) Also in 2023, police in Germany descended on the village of Lützerath, whose residents were evicted and resettled to enable the energy company RWE, owners of a nearby mine, to access the coal that lay beneath their homes. Thousands gathered in opposition to the mine’s expansion, and many were injured as the police cleared the area.
In many of these cases, the governments in power are those that make claims to civility and democratic values. The Democratic and Labour parties have overseen authoritarian responses to social unrest whilst trying to maintain an ever-thinner veneer of liberal respectability. It is important to resist attempts by these parties to present themselves as bulwarks against a slide towards authoritarianism. Whilst their opponents on the right might want to get there more quickly, we need to recognise this authoritarian shift as occurring at the level of the state, and consistently across the electoral spectrum.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore distinguishes between states and governments by describing the former as “a territorially bounded set of relatively specialised institutions that develop and change over time in the gaps and fissures of social conflict, compromise, and cooperation.” Governments, on the other hand, should be seen as “the animating forces—policies plus personnel.” She describes the function of the state as being to “maintain, through consent or coercion, supremacy over all other organisational forms in the social order.”4 Whilst the specific tactics may vary, the desire for supremacy is consistent across administrations, and so is the investment in the infrastructure necessary to do so.
Returning to Atlanta, Micah Herskind describes Cop City as “the Atlanta ruling class’ chosen solution to a set of interrelated crises produced by decades of organised abandonment in the city.” While there is a longstanding precedent of states seeking to police their way out of social crises, Cop City represents a relatively novel development in this process.
Innovations in policing and prisons usually follow on from periods of intensified class conflict as the ruling class seeks to find new ways of crushing oppositional movements and offsetting the effects of crises inherent to the capitalist mode of production. We can see earlier versions of Cop City’s fake urban training environments deployed after other highpoints of struggle. In 1968, in the wake of the civil rights movement, the US army constructed Riotsville, an antecedent to Cop City made up of fake buildings used in the training of police and military personnel. Stuart Schrader explains that “realistic scenario-based training is colonial in origin, a gift of the waning British to the ascendant US empire”. Similarly, following the 1980s highpoints of working class militancy, such as the miners strike and uprisings in Black communities, Britain imported to domestic policing methods developed in the colonial contexts of Kenya and Ireland by figures like Frank Kitson. With all this in mind it’s important to situate Cop City within a cycle of resistance that reached its peak with the George Floyd uprisings of 2020.
In the prison system there also exist cycles of rebellion and innovation. Vigorous attempts to repress the Black liberation movements in the 1960s led to a period of revolt throughout American prisons in the 1970s, as Black militants continued to organise whilst they were imprisoned. Orisanmi Burton explains that the Long Attica Rebellion “names a protracted accumulation of rebellion that circulated within and beyond New York prisons for at least thirteen months prior to what ultimately culminated in Attica prison between September 9 and 13, 1971.”5 What culminated at Attica, specifically, was that incarcerated militants overthrew the prison regime and created, if only briefly, a totally different social order within its walls, before being met with the full barbarity of the US state. Burton explains how the “use of incarceration to ‘solve’ the problem of urban rebellion created conditions for a new problem: carceral rebellion.” This led in turn to the need for new forms of repression and pacification in the carceral context, which required a series of innovations in prison administration. Cop City seems to be one of the ‘solutions’ being offered in response to the urban rebellions of the last decade. If this is the case, then the #StopCopCity movement is a new kind of ‘problem’ for the state.
Schrader observes that Cop City reflects a move away from occupying urban areas in favour of maintaining “a thin, less visible presence.” By “turning winnowed ranks and cratering public approval to their advantage, [police] operate on the protocol of the lightning raid, appearing and disappearing quickly, without making a commitment.” These conditions are not unique to Atlanta, and neither is the allure of a facility like this. More cop cities are planned across the US, such as the even larger facility being proposed in Baltimore. These projects are “pushed as schemes to boost cities’ credit ratings and reconfigure neighborhoods […] while also being fetishised and funded by corporate leaders eying the rising tide of anti-systemic discontent.” The diminishing requirement for public approval goes some way towards explaining the willingness of Atlanta officials to push through the facility, despite so much resistance.
There are parallels here with the challenges that confront British policing; growing budgets, diminishing recruitment levels, and dwindling public confidence. The innovations we see in Atlanta are an attempt to reformulate policing in the face of these conditions, and so perhaps we will see something similar emerging in Britain too. British and American policing have been intertwined since the emergence of ‘civil policing’ in the nineteenth century, and techniques have circulated between the two ever since. These organisations collaborate across borders and translate approaches to fit their respective contexts.
Adam Elliott-Cooper has spoken of the “policy feedback loop” whereby “governments, in one way or another, look to resolve the problem of prison ineffectiveness with prison expansion.” Despite Labour’s gestures at sentencing reform, the incarcerated population continues to grow (as it has done rapidly since the 1990s), and earlier this year the Government redoubled its commitment to increasing prison capacity, with a plan to create 14,000 extra prison places. In December of 2024 it was reported that the government had set aside over £2 billion to build prisons and update current facilities. With this feedback loop set to continue we should be trying to predict the strategic openings it may create.
The solutions offered by the institutions of policing and prisons in the face of social conflict always bring with them new opportunities for rebellion. If we hope to contest state power we need to be attentive to the novel terrain that emerges in each specific moment of development. The different kinds of infrastructure produced by the circulation of police tactics, feedback loops of prison expansion, and ever-harsher border regimes all carry with them different dynamics and political valences. Our task is to be alert to these differences, and to translate insights from Atlanta into other points of conflict.
The Bibby Stockholm barge attracted a huge amount of scrutiny throughout its lifespan. The floating prison, deployed off the south coast, was put in place to detain people who had come to Britain seeking asylum. It was constructed by the firm Bibby Marine, which has its own historical links to the slave trade. The barge was beset by a range of safety concerns, including overcrowding, fire hazards, and a contaminated water system; and in December 2023, Leonard Farruku, a 27 year old musician from Albania, committed suicide whilst imprisoned on the boat. The incoming Labour government announced in July 2024 that it was discontinuing the scheme – for cost-cutting reasons, rather than humanitarian ones. By the end of November, the last prisoners had disembarked, and at the end of January it was towed away from its mooring and returned to its owners.
During the 18 months of its operation as a floating prison, both the far right and the left made attempts to politicise the unpopularity of the barge. But despite admirable interventions by Just Stop Oil and local anti-racist campaigners, a movement comparable to #StopCopCity did not emerge in Dorset. It is worth reflecting on why this was the case.
Firstly, the conditions we can see in Atlanta, such as a large base of militants centred in a nearby city, were not present in Portland Harbour. Additionally, whilst the barge was an eyesore, it wasn’t catastrophically destructive to the local surroundings in the same way as the proposed Atlanta police facility. Finally, the decades-long campaign of othering and dehumanisation directed by the British state towards those who seek asylum may have played a role. Whereas many Atlanta residents can reflect on their own experiences of police violence, people in Dorset might be less likely to identify with the struggles of people seeking asylum in Britain.
The sites of several new prisons in England might be better places to launch an oppositional movement. In 2020, plans were announced to build a series of new facilities to accommodate the growing prison population, two of which – HMP Fosse Way in Leicestershire and HMP Five Wells in Northamptonshire – are already operational, with HMP Millsike (East Yorkshire) due to open this year, and a second Leicestershire site, near Market Harborough, under construction. Many of these plans have been met with resistance. In Market Harborough and Buckinghamshire, the Government has had to force through its proposals in the face of strong local opposition. Local residents in Lancashire are seeking a judicial review after Angela Rayner overruled a planning decision against a third prison in their area. Perhaps this tendency reflects a form of nimbyism commensurate with a reactionary world view. More importantly, it shows that, regardless of their broader views (and most of the new and proposed prisons are in Conservative constituencies), most people don’t want this kind of infrastructure in their communities. The task, as articulated by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is to move from “not-in-my-backyard to not-in-anyone’s-backyard.”6
These facilities continue to appear, in increasingly contentious locations, provoking opposition, and creating opportunities to intervene. However, the contradictions and frustrations generated by these facilities will not manifest an oppositional movement by themselves. Only by applying political pressure will we be able to stress and potentially break the loose coalition of consent required for the maintenance of these forms of infrastructure. This can be achieved by remaining sensitive to grassroots opposition, highlighting the relationship to other ecological frustrations, and productively engaging with the sense of crisis that permeates these projects, and the prison system more generally.
It is not only carceral infrastructure that invites opposition. The current Labour government has begun pushing to change planning laws to make it harder for local communities to oppose unpopular infrastructure of all kinds. Starmer and Reeves’s strategy has thus been described as “a growth-oriented vision of the economy conducted by authoritarian means”. Whilst many of these projects lack the overlapping meanings of Cop City (environmental and carceral), these proposals add to the likelihood that widespread discontent could coalesce around a piece of unpopular infrastructure, in a way that would allow for a radical and broad coalition to be built, and given the “authoritarian means” side of the Starmer-Reeves strategy, such discontent would, necessarily, involve a sharp contradiction with the state.
At the moment, the expansion of Heathrow Airport (with similar expansions at Gatwick and Luton also under consideration) presents an opportunity to build such a coalition. Reporting in the Financial Times suggests that the expansion process could destroy 750 homes and a primary school. Local residents, already suffering from noise and air pollution, are pushing back against the worsening of these conditions, whilst climate groups are mounting opposition on the basis of the carbon impact of the expansion. The proximity of these developments to larger militant networks in London may offer a better opportunity for sustaining opposition.7
Abolitionist and ecosocialist demands are often framed as impractical and out-of-touch with ‘the British public’, especially outside of major cities. Whilst this is true in that relatively few people directly identify as abolitionists or ecosocialists, the construction of new carceral and carbon-intensive infrastructure tends to be very unpopular, whereas many of the demands put forward by these movements are incredibly popular (investment in social care, schools, nationalisation of utilities and de-commodified housing). There has also been a steady decline in public confidence in the police, and and the British public consistently prioritise spending on the NHS over funding for the police. The police aren’t popular, even if policing remains so.
Similarly, growing numbers of people in Britain view climate change as one of the most important problems the country faces. There is a latent eco-socialist tendency fermenting in large swathes of the British public. By this I mean people who haven’t read Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, but have seen Chris Packham’s Channel 4 documentary Is It Time to Break the Law? People who understand the urgency of the climate catastrophe and are beginning to question what constitutes acceptable political action. People who are rightly angry at water companies releasing sewage into our waterways and oceans, and who feel frustrated at the never-ending decline in public services.
All of this is to say that, whilst abolitionist and ecosocialist tendencies remain marginal in many ways, there exists the potential for them to represent these broad sentiments and to unify the widespread discontent of the public. However, if we are to achieve this, a shift in approach is required. #StopCopCity is instructive as to what this shift might look like. We should also look to other historical examples of organising in opposition to unpopular infrastructure that were able to build power beyond the usual constituencies.
In 1971, militants supported farmers in opposing the expansion of a military base in the Larzac region of southern France. They did so by occupying the land and developing practices of communal living that sustained resistance to the proposed expansion. Contemporaneously, in Sanrizuka, Japan, an encampment was erected to oppose the construction of Narita airport, bringing together local residents and militants from across Japan’s cities. In his account of these encampments, Michael Hardt writes that a “key dynamic of the struggles at Sanrizuka and Larzac was the composition of sustained alliances, uneasy at times, between rural residents living at or near the site and radical militants from the cities, often students.”8 He goes on to explain that, despite disagreements within the coalition, the fact that people actually lived together over a period of years made it possible to overcome these differences and sustain their struggle against the state. It is important to note here that this political disagreement and coalition-building occurred almost entirely in person (as opposed to online.)
It is also worth noting that, as Hardt reports, “radical militants generally deferred to the residents’ association,”9 an approach that jars with histories of entryism on the British left, in which a group of militants effectively takes over a struggle and directs it according to their goals, which may or may not coincide with those of the community or group being ‘entried’. In the movements studied by Hardt, as well as in #StopCopCity, contradictions didn’t simply disappear, and nor were they ignored; instead, by living in close proximity to one-another these disparate coalitions are forced to develop forms of compromise and conflict resolution. This is the difficult balance required for longer-term place-based struggles. Writers such as Phil Neel and Hugh Farrell have argued that, in the face of reactionary political formations based on racial and gendered forms of exclusion, left should draw on the “experiential and ethical force” of a movement defined by inclusivity and a commitment to struggle itself.
In Larzac, the military base expansion was abandoned; in Sanrizuka, the airport was eventually built, after long delays. Despite the divergent outcomes, it is significant that the groups that made up these resistance encampments were, as Hardt says, “transformed by the encounter”.10 This transformation should be understood as the engine of these movements. Instead of being bound by workplace or theoretical unity, these struggles formed new and innovative combinations due to the way they were bound by a specific place.
We see a continuation of this mode of struggle in “ZAD” (zone à défendre, zone to defend) struggles in France, including the successful prevention of plans to build an airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, north of Nantes. Kristin Ross explains how the history of the Larzac was reconfigured in the wake of this new victory, writing that this encampment was “no longer seen as an afterthought of the long 1960s, or the last gasp of countercultural energies.” Rather, “the ZAD’s victory made the Larzac and its struggle perceptible again”.11
Victory for these place-based struggles does not simply lie in preventing the projects they oppose. It also comes from making new forms of struggle possible, developing and circulating tactics amongst international networks, and empowering people who might otherwise never experience political agency in their everyday life. They’re also successful because they enable people to direct their frustrations towards the state, instead of allowing them to be captured by reactionary currents. It is important that relatively marginal and radical tendencies on the British left are not afraid to engage directly and in person with unfamiliar constituencies. Those with experience door-knocking for Labour under Corbyn will be well aware of the difficulties and necessities of bypassing the media and online spheres of communication in order to deliver a message directly.
When high-profile figures on the British left admonish abolitionist or ecosocialist politics as out-of-touch, they usually do so without constructive organisational critiques. Attacks are usually delivered online or in the media. Often these figures may feel as though they are being forced to defend a policy that doesn’t resonate with the experiences of ‘the British public’. But what is ‘the British public’? Most people hold complex and contradictory political opinions and sentiments, which are then flattened and narrated by a hostile media into an imagined representation of a uniform British public. There is a temptation for ostensibly left-wing commentators to shore up their own credibility by appealing to this representation, admonishing the ‘wackier’ aspects of the left, which often come in the form of bad-faith renderings of abolitionist and ecosocialist proposals. However much they may imagine themselves as appealing to this representation of the public, they are in actual fact appealing to the media class which produces this representation.
Despite the difficulty in presenting these ideas in a hostile media environment, the task of articulating abolitionist and ecosocialist politics within our own communities remains fruitful. The left does not make progress by sacrificing these commitments on the altar of corporate media platforms, ensuring an increasingly successful but co-opted pundit class. Rather, it does so by developing the organisational capacity to present these politics in person, translating them into the context of generalised discontent and localised frustrations.
Struggles over unpopular infrastructure imposed by authoritarian means can provide unique opportunities for militants to bypass the hostile media sphere and talk to people about something that is experienced more directly. For this to work, it is essential that militants allow themselves to be transformed by these moments of encounter, as in Atlanta, Sanrizuka, and Larzac, without abandoning their commitments. We have to be able to sit in rooms and relate to each other’s experiences without succumbing to the temptation to abandon our radical proposals.
Regarding prisons and asylum infrastructure specifically: if communities that oppose these projects on ‘nimbyist’ grounds can be brought into conversation with the people who are victimised by these systems, it might be possible to overcome the dehumanisation that is targeted at incarcerated populations. Similarly, when a vision of ecosocialist transformation is able to involve people as active participants, as opposed to receptacles of a top-down plan, it is much more potent. This requires coordinated and confident organising practices that are able to manage discomfort, conflict, and hugely varied levels of political commitment. It also requires larger activist networks based in cities to support and collaborate with smaller networks in towns and rural communities.
In a recent social media thread, Kai Heron, echoing EP Thompson, argued that “when we organise, we do not find a revolutionary subject lying dormant in society, waiting for the Good News of their structural place within the world-system,” but rather “the eco-socialist subject will be present at its own making. It will be made, if at all, in the crucible of struggle, as the effects of socio-ecological decline become unbearable for wider and wider segments of the world’s working classes.” There is no singular group, community or class fraction that will unlock the key to transforming society. Part of our challenge, in Britain as in Atlanta, is to work with what is available.
We need bigger movements that are able to coordinate people in more sustained forms of political action. We should not allow the increasingly fractured employment market or the false binaries of private home and public sphere to determine the limit of our coalitions. As the state responds to crisis, it blurs and breaks those fault lines, creating new terrains of struggle. As we’ve seen in Atlanta, geographically specific conflicts can offer innovative ways of binding and sustaining oppositional struggles in this fractured context. That is not to say that land-based struggles should supersede tenants’ and workplace struggles, but that these moments of rupture offer a moment of coherence, extending beyond specific workplaces and neighbourhoods, and articulating a vision of the future sorely lacking from our collective horizon.
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A form of law designed to be used against organised criminal enterprises. ↩
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Tree spiking is the practice of hammering material into trees to sabotage chainsaws if they try to cut them down. ↩
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Kristin Ross. 2024. The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life. London: Verso, p.75. For an exposition of the ‘either/or’ dialetic, see: David Harvey. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.164-75. ↩
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Craig Gilmore. [2008] 2022. ‘Restating the Obvious’. In Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (eds): Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. London: Verso, p.262. ↩
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Orisanmi Burton. 2023. Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Berkeley: University of California Press, p.9. ↩
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore with Craig Gilmore. [2003] 2022. ‘The Other California’. In Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano (eds): Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Edited by. London: Verso, p.256. ↩
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See, for example, the last wave of resistance to Heathrow expansion, particularly Grow Heathrow, which was organically linked to activist and militant cultures in London and elsewhere. These links went both ways: London housing and community groups supported, and were supported by, Grow Heathrow. ↩
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Michael Hardt. 2023. The Subversive Seventies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.183. ↩
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Hardt. The Subversive Seventies, p.183. ↩
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Hardt. The Subversive Seventies, p.185. ↩
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Ross. The Commune Form, p.33. ↩