Vi plundrade för allas skull. Vad SVT missar i sin nya serie är att Piratbyrån egentligen inte handlade om upphovsrätt – utan om att skapa en kultur som kunde störta kapitalismen. En söt doft av jästa sopor vilade över centrala Budapest. Från denna heta sommardag minns jag annars bara en spårvagnsresa i sällskap med ett par svenska bekanta som också råkade vara där på tågluff. Troligen inleddes…

Returning from the riots in Gothenburg during the 2001 summit of the European Union, activists in Stockholm begin casting around for ways to initiate struggles closer to home. At first, the prospect is overwhelming: when you’re trying to confront the system in its entirety, where do you start?

   Meanwhile, the rates in the Stockholm subway increase from 450 kronor to 500. One day, perhaps en route to a meeting, a young activist narrowly escapes being ticketed for fare evasion. Like most of her friends, she simply can’t afford the new rates, and has to risk her luck leaping the turnstile every time she goes out. Most of the time she gets away with it—but if they catch her next time, it will cost 1200 kronor.

   She reflects on how many others must share her plight, each waging an individual guerrilla war against the transportation authorities. There’s a union for everything in Sweden, it seems—but when it comes to the day-to-day tactics by which people actually survive, they still have to go it alone.

   There’s an idea. A fare-dodgers union.

   Hundreds of people join up. The dues are 100 kronor a month, a savings of 80% on the government rate for transportation, and if you get busted the union pays your fine. More importantly, fare dodging is no longer an isolated activity, but a collective revolt. Fare-dodgers see themselves as a social force, taking pride in their actions and inviting others to join in; the union also warns commuters of the movements of ticket enforcers, giving them added incentives to skip the fares even if they don’t become dues-paying members. Rather than trying to persuade others to join in their activism, the founders of the union have found a way to bring people together on the basis of the resistance they were already engaged in: now every fare-dodger is a potential revolutionary, and sees herself as one.

   After a few months have passed and a few members have been busted for evasion, it turns out that the union is operating at a profit. With the extra funds, the organizers produce glossy propaganda urging the public to join them in an all-out war on public transportation fees, and begin brainstorming about their next step. What other fault lines run through Swedish society? How can other individual revolts be transformed into collective power—not in order to bargain with the authorities, but to defy them?

[For more on the fare-dodgers’ union, see www.planka.nu.]

Here’s an exceprt from a 2014 New York Times article about the organization, which seems to be going strong today:

The agency that operates the metro system, Stockholm Public Transport, seems to have grown increasingly discouraged, especially after the failure of a recent investment in taller gates to stop the fare-beaters.

“We could build a Berlin Wall in the metro stations,” a spokesman, Jesper Pettersson, said. “They would still try to find ways to dodge.”

This is how we ride. FREE PUBLIC TRANSPORT!

http://planka.nu/vad-tycker-vi/rapporter/the-traffic-hierarchy/