This week’s post will be exploring the implementation of anarchist practice within a trade where the subtle workings of patriarchy and capitalism appear to be particularly pronounced: the world of automobile mechanics.

Meet Jess, who will be guiding us through the first part of our journey…

I met Jess during an arduous search for a decent motorcycle mechanic who wouldn’t rip me off…

A friend of mine connected me to Jess, and, to my surprise, I found out that she was more than just a good mechanic. She was also an activist practicing a very alternative kind of garage to what one may be accustom to…

She responded promptly, and invited me to her anarchy garage. I had recently delved into a heap of anarchist literature, and was super excited to experience some anarchy in my everyday life so soon after reading into it.

I wondered, what could Jess and her garage tell us about the mechanics of anarchism, as well as motorcycles?

Jess started the garage after a serious motorcycle crash, a traumatic incident which she decided to channel into something transformative… She used her compensation to acquire an armoury of tools – which gave her the resources she needed to start the Anarchy Garage.

She told me how the birth of her garage largely emerged from her desire to maintain her own bikes and help her friends. She also wanted to combat the “gatekeeping” of mechanical knowledge, which women disproportionately suffer from.

(Indeed, it was precisely my awareness of the likelihood of me experiencing exclusion and mistreatment in the industry that lead me to her garage in the first place!)

Jess was very aware of the “toxic” nature of the industry, especially in relation to women. She found that women simply couldn’t win: if they don’t display mechanical knowledge they are often patronised and exploited, and if they do they are greeted with hostility.

(Interestingly, Jess reported many mechanics seeming “almost angry” when she reveals that she very much knows what she’s talking about when visiting them for specialist equipment…)

However, that’s not to say that the garage was exclusively for women. Indeed, everyone was invited to learn and share at the Anarchy Garage. Despite this, Jess told me how 90-95% of the garage users were women and non-binary people. She also told me how she was quite surprised that so many of her male friends continued to visit unaffordable, untrustworthy mechanics; despite knowing about her project.

Moreover, as Jess pointed out herself, mechanics can operate as gatekeepers to valuable knowledge. This knowledge is needed in order to keep our vehicles running well and roadworthy…so that means that they actually have quite a signifianct amount of control over your mobility.

In a world where the ability to move is extremely political – that is to say, who has the right (or power) to move, and how fast and to where. This has significant implications for our everyday lives and reveals a lot about how power works in society. (Check out a great short video from Tim Cresswell discussing the significance of mobility).

For example, in this case, having a vehicle not only gives you (often faster) access to many destinations, it also gives you higher chances of employment. So anyone who holds any knowledge that can facilitate that, is in the position of quite a considerable amount of power. The majority of those people are men. (Women only constituted 12% of the automobile mechanics workforce in 2016).

Some mechanics sure do seem to take advantange of that. They reel off a load of long words or acronyms, and many of us just smile and nod before handing over the cash…

One can also begin to consider the power relations involved when considering how we fuel automobile vehicles…which again, is an industry very much dictated by men. It has also been noted that the consumption and extraction of fossil fuels is also very much associated with (a particular kind of) masculine identity, and the impacts of climate change caused by these activities are often disproportionately suffered from by women.

Indeed, there is much to be said about gender, the environment and the fossil fuel industry… but let’s get back to the anarchy garage now!

So what do we normally do when we go to a mechanic? Well, firstly, we often pay far too much money.

Secondly, we often drop our vehicles off, and then continue to go about our day – totally unaware of the entire process. For all we know our mechanic could be sat drinking tea laughing at our incompetence….but hey, what are you going to do? It’s your transport…it’s how you get to work each day…just deal with it….right?

Well actually it appears that there are other options. Contrary to the business as usual, Jess invites us to be a part of the process: she invites us to bring our vehicles to the garage while she fixes and services their vehicles with us.

Not only does this allow for a far greater deal of transparency – as well as some great conversations to enjoy throughout the duration – it also equips visitors with the knowledge and confidence to fix and maintain their vehicles by themselves in the future.

Moreover, while most mechanics would greet you with a hefty bill at the end of the day, Jess offers her services in exchange for skill-swaps. This means that service users can trade their own skills and knowledge in exchange for learning how to fix and maintain their own vehicles. Alternatively, some people choose to “pay” her for her services in favours – from cooking her meals, to providing her with haircuts and tattoos!

Sometimes these skill swaps would stretch beyond those engaging with the garage: for example, if a someone is unable to provide a particular service Jess is interested in, they can swap a skill or resource that they do have with another friend who would then offer the desired service or knowledge to Jess.

Here we see an enactment of what Peter Kropotkin called “mutual aid” (which basically means helping one another). This involves people relying on each other – rather than the state – and supporting one another by trading resources, skills, care and understanding. This constitutes what many Anarchists would consider to be one of Anarchism’s key principles.

“I call it my Anarchy Garage because it is anarchy at a basic level: everyone looking after everyone“ – Jess

This a fantastic way to engineer a sense of community. I’ve met some wonderful people already during my visits to see Jess at the garage, and skill-swapping is a great way to give eachother time – a much more personal asset in comparison to cold hard cash.

Skill-swaps can also empower individuals through the knowledge and skills they have – which, as many of us may have realised, often doesn’t translate directly or very fairly into money. Skill-swapping and mutual aid is also a clever way to boycott the monetary system, which, of course, is one of the key components of the mechanics of capitalism…(a kind of mechanics that Jess is really not into!)

Moreover, the only money that visitors (may) spend is on parts that need replacing, or particular tools. However, often buying new parts and tools isn’t even necessary…In fact, as I experienced during my own visit, Jess often makes and adapts parts or tools from an impressive collection of scrap… So here we see a wonderful, resourceful alternative to the impulse to simply consume another tool from Halfords.

Nothing is really wasted at Jess’s garage: if scrap can’t be adapted to be fitted on vehicles, it can be made into sculptures and costumes instead… (actually, there is much more to be said with regards to sustainability when people are maintaining their own vehicles too!)

“If you haven’t got a tool, you can always make a tool!” – Jess

At the Anarchy Garage, all scrap has the potential to become a part of something again…

Before The Garage: Custom-Build DIY Culture

Now that you know a bit about how the Anarchy Garage works, I would like to use the end of this post to explore a beautiful “tangent” that Jess took us on. This actually tells us a bit about some social movements in the past, and how the state has responded to these kind of movements.

Before opening the Anarchy Garage, Jess endured a career in the mechanics industry for many years. She enjoyed mechanics, and speaks warmly of her upbringing passing spanners to her father who taught her the ropes from a young age.

However, despite the patriarchal nature of the industry, Jess was very much inspired by other women – as well as her father. She told me how she grew up around the custom-build scene in the 1980s, which involved people customising their motorcycles to match their own unique tastes and uses. Jess has many early memories of inspirational women who had fully customised and built their own vehicles.

We talked about how the custom-build scene seemed very much connected to other DIY movements at the time. For example, the squatting scene, New Travellers, DIY rave culture…all of which seemed to be characterised by new ways of living and being together as people took many areas of social life into their own hands. These social movements were united by – as Mackay put it – a “utopian desire” for a different, fairer world. But, unlike the word “utopia” may suggest, people really were assembling new worlds and ways of living in response to dissatisfactions with the “status quo.”

While this kind of thing had been going on for a while, there seemed to be a real peak of these counter-cultures and social movements during the 1980s and 1990s.

My PhD research has involved a consideration of how some aspects of these movements seemed to possess what could be interpreted as a general anarchist “spirit” or “mood.” For Anarchism in its purest form is arguably not a rigid ideology, but more of a way of being or feeling. This “mood” seems to be very much characterised by a desire for freedom and difference – the two being intrinsically connected. So here is a unified desire for difference, or diversity: the freedom for people to make their own paths in the world. The freedom of choice.

Interestingly, these cultures of DIY resistance seemed to be united in another way: by the way that the state proceeded to respond to their existence. For example, by 1986 the Thatcher government introduced the first Public Order Act. This created notions of criminal trespass, increasing the control of the use of space in the UK. This had significant implications for DIY social movements, including travelling communities, squatters, ravers and protesters, who were creating waves at the time.

During the same year, The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations were introduced, which tightly controlled the way vehicles were made and used. This has had a significant impact on the potentialities of custom-build.

“…anything that is outside of the lines has been crushed even more by each successive government.” – Jess

Jess also explained how the automobile industry responded in other ways to inhibit customisation and self-provided care and maintenence. Firstly, it became significantly more expensive to buy motorcycle parts. Jess told me how it usually works out cheaper now to buy a pre-made motorcycle in its totality, than to buy individual parts and assemble it yourself.

There were also significant material changes made, as physical obstructions were incorporated into the design of vehicles. For example, access to vital components would be placed in deliberately hard-to-reach places or would be covered with plastic. One can also consider the introduction to exclusive diagnostic equipment, which mean that even someone as skilled as Jess has to sometimes visit an “official” garage to diagnose problems with vehicles.

So, in a sense, we have been denied access to sustain and customise our vehicles to a large extent – or indeed, our mobility – which has been increasingly controlled through these policy and material arrangements.

Through the mechanics of capitalism (and our vehicles) we are being fastened tightly into “the system…” Our power to move is in the hands of those who can acccess the repair and maintenence of our vehicles…(our power to stay at home or fix our vehicles on the side of the road is also in their hands…)

(It is worth noting here that the politics of mobility is not just concerned with the power to move…but also the power to stay still. For what we are talking about here, again, is freedom…and choice.)

It could be suggested that state power appears to be characterised by an attempt to homogenise: to make everything and everyone the same.

Indeed, it is much easier to control what is predictable and replicated…

One can consider how counter-cultures that value diversity relate to the the work of George Ritzer, who talks about “Mcdonaldisation” to describe how much of contemporary society ressembles the workings of a fast-food restaurant.

He explains how more and more areas of social life are rendered homogenous in the name of efficiency and predictability, which is great for rolling out an international business model and gaining greater control over employees and consumers.

He also talks about the movement away from human workers to computers…as unpredictable people are replaced with computers that work the same and do what they are told…(you can consider the use of diagnostic technologies we mentioned earlier).

While this is arguably great for productivity and profit, it’s arguably pretty dehumanising and degrading; and in a Macdonaldised world, quantity is privileged over quality…

(Please note: this is just a glimpse into what is a many-sided phenomenon, so please read into this more if you are interested in Ritzer…there’s a nice 10 page intro here. He even mentions the automobile industry on page 378.)

However, as Foucault said, “where there is power, there is resistance.”

It could be said that the cultures of resistance mentioned earlier seem to have been characterised by an attempt to preserve or claim back diversity, individuality and our abilities (or power) to customise, control and maintain our own lives.

The state certainly didn’t seem keen to tolerate them, so perhaps they really did pose a threat.

Of course, this is not to say that DIY movements have or had no flaws…but some of the underlying principles – diversity and freedom – certainly seem worth protecting.

Interestingly, Jess told me how as a teenager she wanted to work for the state to make a positive difference on the world. However, she was told that it was unlikely that she would ever be able get a job with them, because her father had already been put on a government register for publishing “subversive content” in a custom-build magazine called AWOL.

The magazine included articles and pictures of custom build motorcycles, with advice and info for readers to help them customise, maintain and fix their own vehicles. The magazine also included some very critical articles about the way in which society was being run… we’ll let you connect the dots.

Here we see a copy of AWOL: “Alternative Ways of Life”

http://magazineexchange.co.uk/cw/awol-magazine-volume-1-no.1.html



So in conclusion…Jess spends her days dismantling automobiles. She also dismantles systems of oppression by changing her own daily practices as a mechanic. She contested the business as usual she had grown tired of, and demonstrated that not only can women be sick mechanics…we can all practice working alternatives to capitalism in the here and now.

I hope that you have enjoyed the first blog post, and please do contribute any questions or comments!

(Sorry to keep you all waiting, I have been campaigning and dealing with general life type things…)