As people worldwide develop new tactics to refuse the subjugations and humiliations imposed on them in the name of austerity, an archive of resistance is re-emerging into view. It details the present, as evanescent as it is, and generates connections to past struggles. It is what we might call the an-archive, an archive of the desire for a fairer life, which we might call a world without hierarchy. Or anarchy.

Has any nation in the developed world been more damaged by neoliberalism than Ireland? When I visited after the 2008 crash the sense of despair was palpable. It’s all the more remarkable, then, to see the success of the campaign to resist the so-called “household levy,” a quaint-sounding term that attempts to disguise the fact that it is in fact what one might call an “austerity charge.” Each household is supposed to pay 100 euro (about $130) in advance of a more onerous property tax to come next year. As of this writing, only about half of Ireland’s households have complied. No doubt the authorities will try and claim that getting just over 50% is somehow a victory.

5000 demonstrate against the tax--note the Occupy banner top right

It’s clear, though, that no-one anticipated this refusal because the tax process is voluntary. As there is no existing register of households, each is supposed to register themselves and then pay. It says much about the hierarchical culture of Ireland that it was just assumed that this would happen.

The refusal brought a  predictable response from former Celtic Tiger booster economist Jim Power:

If we go down the road of breaking the law because we believe it to be unfair, we will create a total disrespect for the law and the logical conclusion is that we will gradually descend into a state of anarchy.

For the aptly-named Power and his ilk, this anarchy is the worst imaginable state, the war of all against all. The actions taken by the majority of the Irish people suggests that an anarchy in which laws are consensed, and the quality of life of the multitude is the determining factor, might indeed be just what they want. And they are not alone.

It’s very interesting to see how widespread the global contempt for the solutions proposed by austerity has become and how the desire for an alternative is reviving long-forgotten precedents. Over the last couple of days, activists in Tahrir Square, Cairo, have set about demolishing the walls built by the Egyptian military to contain and separate the square from the rest of the city.

The wall comes down

In these photographs by Mosha’ab El Shamy, the familiar Tahrir coalition can be seen, toppling a wall that had been brightly graffiti-ed by star artists of the new street art movement.

Celebrating the collapse

Graffiti by Kaiser on the separation wall, Cairo

Such photographs now become part of the resistance archive that is being rediscovered and recirculated at the moment. I have already posted some examples of the photographs of past May Day actions in Union Square. Gavin Brown today posted a photograph of a rent strike in London from 1959:

3500 refuse higher rents in London, 1959

Such organized rent strikes were a common tactic of radical city life from the 19th century on. Here’s a painting by the Parisian genre artist Louis Léopold Boilly known as The Movings from 1822, showing a typical scene on the day that rent for the next quarter fell due and many of the city’s working classes were forced to move.

Boilly, "The Movings" (1822)

I like these kinds of genealogies that lead us from present-day actions to the now canonical archives of a certain modernism. This moment of quiet dignity, a refusal to pay a rent that could not be afforded, is the backdrop to the more celebrated Paris of the dandies, the courtesans and indeed the revolutionaries.

I draw energy from these past and present reconfigurations of everyday life, the archive of a set of claims that laws should be fair and that a certain anarchy should indeed prevail.