Rob: I recently did an interview with Keith Farnish. He wrote a book called Undermining, where he lists all kinds of ways that undermining can be done in the contemporary western world so I really found it interesting to see that you were talking about how this is the way that it has been done historically pretty much in standing up to power.
JS: We can distinguish I think, what's interesting about the things I'm talking about is that they do not announce themselves as public acts. Right? That is, they are kind of under the radar and also they're not necessarily organized. There's not some institution with office holders, or mobilizing people to protest. So it has a kind of invisibility about it. There are other forms of protest that are more public, but don't rise to the level of explicit demonstrations.
Let me give you an example, it's one of my favorite examples actually. During the solidarity period in Poland under Marshall Jaruzelski, when the Poles wanted to demonstrate their dislike of the government, but open action was impossible, some people in the city of which in Poland got the idea that they would, precisely at 6:00 p.m. every evening, which is when the government news broadcast, which they thought were all lies, came on. They would step out their door to make it clear they weren't listening to their radios and TVs and take a promenade for exactly a half hour, which was the length of the government news broadcast. They did it with their hats on backwards. And so, you had this spectacle of at exactly six o'clock hundreds of people in block after block in which, stepping out their door with their hat on backwards and taking a promenade for exactly a half an hour.
Now, what was the government to do? It wasn't illegal to take a promenade and it certainly wasn't illegal to have your hat on backwards either and yet you can imagine how thrilling it was in a sense for this public display of dislike of the government and its news broadcast. It energized a great deal of Poland and spread throughout many other cities. The government then responded by declaring a curfew at six o'clock so that everyone had to be inside in an effort to kill this protest and within a week the Poles had figured out that the thing to do was to take their television and take it to the window at exactly six o'clock and have it broadcast out into the streets where only the security forces were since it was a curfew and let them listen to the government lies but not to listen to it at home.
So, here's an example not of poaching or of desertion, here's an example of a kind of public activity that is, if you like, partly covert. Everybody understands what it means, but it is not a public declaration of war as would be, let's say, throwing rocks at government offices and so on. So that is a kind of public infra-politics as well that is often possible in authoritarian regimes.
I'm sure you've come across the name of Gene Sharp who was a kind of hero of the Arab Spring because lots of people in the Middle East knew his work. He has produced something of an encyclopedia of these everyday forms of public resistance that I would recommend to your readers.
Rob: Oh right. Yes. He's somebody I've been trying to get on the show. He doesn't do interviews I don't think.
JS: He's pretty elderly now, but his books, I think they're called Non Violent Resistance, right, are very much worth anyone's time or trouble.
Rob: So you describe in your newest book, Two Cheers for Anarchism, the idea of a work to rule strike. This seems to be another example along the lines of this Polish response. Can you talk about the work to rule strike and the French cab drivers example as well?
JS: Sure, so what's interesting I think about the work to rule strike is that it reminds
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