The Spores of Resistance
The mycelial model · Direct action · Our communities
The Spore Theory describes how patterns persist and propagate. This document is that theory applied to the thing in front of us: how ordinary people hold ground in their own streets while a politics of cruelty looks for somewhere to root.
Fascism is not an argument to be out-argued. It is an opportunistic organism. It establishes on depleted ground — on loneliness, on precarity, on a town with nothing open after six. It does not need to win a debate. It needs a vacancy.
Which changes the work. The question is not how do we defeat it. The question is how do we make this ground unavailable to it, and keep it that way for years.
Cruelty establishes where the ground is thinnest. Tend the ground and there is nowhere left to root.
Mycelium has no head. Cut it anywhere and the remaining threads re-route within hours. This is not a metaphor for organising — it is a description of the only structure that has ever survived sustained pressure.
Practically: no single organiser who holds every contact, no single chat that holds every plan, no single venue that holds every meeting. Redundancy is not inefficiency. It is the whole design.
In a mycelial network, carbon and phosphorus flow from the trees that have surplus to the seedlings in shade. Nothing is banked. Nothing is earned first.
A community practising this looks like a food table, a lift to an appointment, rent covered without a form, childcare without a rota. Fascism recruits from abandonment. Mutual aid removes the vacancy before the recruiter arrives.
People who are exhausted, hungry, sleepless and isolated are not weak — they are under-resourced substrate. Cruelty takes hold fastest where the ground is thinnest.
So feeding people is organising. Rest is organising. A regulated nervous system is not a luxury adjacent to the work; it is the precondition of anyone being able to do any of it for longer than a season.
Mycelium does not remove a competitor by force. It arrives first, colonises the substrate, and leaves nowhere for the other thing to establish.
The equivalent is unglamorous and slow: the library that stays open, the community kitchen on a Thursday, the allotment, the choir, the football club, the stall in the market. Every occupied hour of public life is ground that hostility cannot claim.
A spore that will not germinate on hostile substrate has not surrendered; it has withheld the thing the substrate needed. Refusal is resistance in its dormant mode — the landlord's form unsigned, the raid unassisted, the neighbour not reported, the rumour not carried.
It costs almost nothing and it is remarkably difficult to defeat, because there is nothing visible to move against.
Fruiting bodies are expensive and brief. A network that is always visible is always spending. A network that is never visible never propagates.
Read the ground: the march, the public meeting, the letter with two hundred names, the counter-presence on the day it matters. Then return to the quiet work. The alternation is the strategy, not a compromise.
Burnout is how movements end, far more often than opposition is. Mycelium survives because no single strand carries the whole load and because dormancy is permitted.
Build the rota that lets someone step back without shame. Keep the friendship that outlasts the campaign. What persists between the visible moments is the actual organisation.
Learn the names of six households on your street. Cook more than you need. Keep one public room warm and open. Know which neighbour is on their own and knock. Say the plain thing out loud in the group chat when the cruelty starts, and say it without heat.
None of this photographs well. All of it is substrate work, and substrate work is the only kind that compounds. A network built this way is already assembled on the day something is needed of it — which is the entire point, because you cannot build one that morning.
Because a nervous system in permanent alarm cannot organise, and a community of exhausted people cannot hold anything for long. Recovery is not a retreat from the work — it is the condition that makes a decade of it possible.
Re-terroiring is this practised on one body at a time. The Spores of Resistance is the same reading, practised on a street.
The underlying theory sits in The Spore Theory of Evolution and Resistance, the weekly practice in The Spore Report, and the wider argument in the thesis.
No centre to remove. No vacancy to fill. Only ground, tended by the people standing on it.
Para la gente. — The Radical Apothecary.