This is the second post of a series of essays that we share exploring the troubled relations of anarchism and architecture, or, stated differently, the possibilities of an anarchic dismantling of the masters’ command of space. In the instance, we share an essay by , of 2004, published by The first essay of the series may be found here.
The beginning spills through city veins
Into the arteries
And under powers poison clouds
We move like the shadows
Through the alley ways
Through nightmares bought and sold as dreams
Through barren factories
Through boarded schools
Through rotting fields
Through the burning doors of the past
Through imaginations exploding
To break the curfews in our minds
Our actions awaken dreams of actions multiplied
A restless fury
Once buried like burning embers
Left alone to smolder
But together stacked under the walls of a dying order
All sparks are counted
Calloused hands raised in silence
Over the bonfire of hope unincorporated
It’s flame restores tomorrows meaning
Across the graveyards of hollow promises
As gold dipped vultures pick at what is left of our denial
And the youngest among us
Stare at us stoned like eyes determined
And say
Death for us may come early
Cause dignity has no price
At the corner of now and nowhere
Anywhere
Everywhere
Tomorrow is calling
Tomorrow is calling
Do not be afraid
Zack de la Rocha
Michael Taussig, writing about Occupy in New York City, said that with the movement, politics “as aesthetics is back”. As something of an explanation, he cites Jean-François Lyotard: “A successful attack on the belief in necessity would inevitably lead to the destruction of kapital’s very main-spring.” (40) To speak of an aesthetic politics, or of politics as art, is not to imagine political action with accompanying folklore or agitprop; art as confectioner’s sugar sprinkled over what is truly serious. Taussig saw in Occupy, and herein lay its radicalness (along with that of all of the occupy movements of the last five years, one may add), a struggle that was not only about income inequality and the corruption of democracy. In Taussig’s words, it “is about the practice of art, too, including the art of being alive.” (18) Life lived as art, as an aesthetics of existence, reveals the socially necessary as contingent, profanes the sacredness of norms, laws, authorities. It imagines and renders possible the making and re-making of life, suspending imposed obligations. It does not destroy what is in place, but holds it in abeyance, revealing that it need not be so, and that one might prefer to do things otherwise.
An aesthetics of existence is not by itself revolutionary, but it opens a liminal space and a present/now time outside or within the fissures of administered, controlled economic and statist space-time. Being betwixt, between, those in this new space-time occupy a magical reality where novel ways of being in the world emerge, erupt, in intense gestures of individual and collective self-creation: politics becomes art, as art becomes politics.
But communism is not an idea; it is a process, and the only things capable of mobilizing fidelity to it are the concrete activities of which it is composed. If we want to locate the ways forward for the blocked movements of the present, we should look to the activities of the participants, the practices of struggle that might be extended, elaborated and transformed. Organization is not a thing, in this sense, but an action.
A last word, when there can never be one, as the ties that bind society forever twist and turn, giving life to new forms, and calling for or calling up new ways of protest, resistance and rebellion. The wave of square occupations in these grey days of autumn 2016 seems to have waned: questions and doubts haunt those who propelled them; failure and violence defeated those who have withdrawn. And yet, these same occupations reveal much about our times, how power constitutes and re-constitutes itself in contemporary capitalism, and how or what forms of resistance may show up the cracks in the reigning regime. A further reflection …
Theorising social movements is a hazardous adventure; even more so when these movements reject “representation”, which can be taken to include “theoretical representation”. Without anyone being able to speak “for” or “on behalf of” Occupy, for it lacks leaders or representatives, the movement can only be heard “through the coordinated voices of assembled discussion and potential consensus – through the general assemblies”. (53: Bernard E. Harcourt, “Political Disobedience”, Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience) Theory in this instance is thus radically fragile, trapped between a need for external perspective and imaginary and, may I say, ethical identification with the movement.
An experiment in theorising Occupy (libcom.org 23/10/2011) …
We have begun to recognize that for our movements to work and thrive, we need to be able to socialize our experiences of grief, illness, pain, death, things that now are often relegated to the margins or the outside of our political work. We agree that movements that do not place on their agendas the reproduction of both their members and the broader community are movements that cannot survive, they are not “self-reproducing,” especially in these times when so many people are daily confronting crises in their lives.
Silvia Federici
Silvia Federici discusses the Occupy Movement and the struggles of social reproduction to challenge capital. What follows is an interview with Max Haiven originally published with Znet/ZCommunications (26/11/2011) …
Occupations and the Struggle over Reproduction
Silvia Federici is a veteran activist and writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Born and raised in Italy, Federici has taught in Italy, Nigeria, and the United States, where she has been involved in many movements, including feminist, education, and anti-death penalty struggles. Her influential 2004 book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, built on decades of research and activism, offers an account of the relationship between the European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the rise of capitalism. Federici’s work is rooted in a feminist and Marxist tradition that stresses the centrality of people’s struggle against exploitation as the driving force of historical and global change. With other members of the Wages for Housework campaign, like Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and with feminist authors like Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Federici has been instrumental in developing the idea of “reproduction” as a key way to understand global and local power relations. Reproduction, in this sense, doesn’t only mean how humans reproduce biologically, it is a broad concept that encompasses how we care for one another, how we reproduce our physical bodies depending on our access to food and shelter, how culture and ideology are reproduced, how communities are built and rebuilt, and how resistance and struggle can be sustained and expanded. In the contest of a capitalist society reproduction also refers to the process by which “labor power” (i.e. our capacity to work, and the labor force in general), is reproduced, both on a day to day basis and inter-generationally. It was one of the main contributions of the theorists of the Wages For Housework Movement to Marxist feminist theory to have redefined reproductive work in this manner. In this interview, an extended version of which will appear in a forthcoming issue of Politics and Culture, Federici reflects on the Occupy movements, their precedents and their potentials.
Peter Gelderloos (Counter Punch 14/10/2011) analyses the spanish 15M and the north american Occupy movements, drawing comparisons and contrasts. At the heart of his reading is the contention that what is, or was, most radical in both was the creation of autonomous spaces of collective self-management, beyond the rhetoric and restricting practice of civic rights, real democracy now, the 99% versus the 1% …
Reflections for the US occupy movement
After the courageous revolts of the Arab Spring, the next phenomenon of popular resistance to capture the world media’s attention was the plaza occupation movement that spread across Spain starting on the 15th of May (15M). Subsequently, attention turned back to Greece, and now to the public occupations spreading across the US, inspired by the Wall Street protests.
The function of the media is to explain interruptions in the dominant narrative, not to spread lessons useful to the social struggles that generate those ruptures. As such, it is no surprise that they respond to the strategically important moments before and after these mass gatherings with a news blackout.
While the central plazas of the cities of Spain are no longer occupied, in some places the momentum of May continues with force. Particularly in Barcelona, a dynamic struggle continues to evolve, including a heterogeneous and broad group of people in weekly neighborhood assemblies, protests, hospital occupations, road blockades, fights against mortgage evictions and housing repossessions, and solidarity demonstrations against the inevitable repression.
… communism will be material or it will be nothing. It will be a set of immediate practices, immediate satisfactions, or nothing. If we find discipline and organization, it will come from what we do, not what we think.
Research and Destroy, 2011
North america’s Occupy was part of a much broader protest movement, a movement that finds its emblematic beginnings in the “Arab Spring”. And if what they seemed to share and what animated them was a way of doing politics, through the occupation of public squares, they also shared a common limitation, the inability to move beyond the square occupations, to lay the material basis for a fundamentally different way of life freed from Capital (commodity production, wage labour, consumption), the State and their conditions of reproduction.
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Occupy Oakland exemplified what for many was the most radical expression of the north american Occupy movement, a radicalness that speaks of the political history of the city. Having begun with a protest camp at Frank H. Ogawa Plaza on October 10, 2011, re-baptised by the protesters as Oscar Grant Plaza after a young man who was fatally shot by Bay Area Rapid Transit Police in 2009, the camp was cleared out by multiple law enforcement agencies on October 25, 2011, and again on November 14th, after a second occupation.
Occupy Oakland was also fundamental in the organisation of the November 2nd, 2011 Oakland General Strike that shut down the Port of Oakland, an action repeated on December the 12th. Police again cleared the protest encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza on November 14, 2011. The last occupation at Snow Park was cleared on November 21, 2011. Occupy Oakland has continued however to engage in political activity.
We share below two texts, the first, Occupy Oakland General Assembly’s October 26th proposal for a city wide general strike (a strike whose ambition was not limited to shutting down “economic” sites, but extended to the whole city, as a radical social strike), followed by a letter to the Occupy movement, from participants in Oakland, attempting to clarify and explain some of the questions around corporatism VS capitalism, pacifism and what the so-called 99% actually is.
Text from a flier produced by US anarchist group Crimethinc (07/10/2011), for participants of the Occupy movement.
Support and solidarity! We’re inspired by the occupations on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country. Finally, people are taking to the streets again! The momentum around these actions has the potential to reinvigorate protest and resistance in this country. We hope these occupations will increase both in numbers and in substance, and we’ll do our best to contribute to that.
The Space and Time of Utopia
Reflections around the concept of utopia, on the 500th anniversary of Thomas Moore’s Utopia, reflections that echo earlier thoughts on the time and space of revolution.
In revolution, everything happens incredibly quickly, just like in dreams in which people seem to be freed from gravity.
Gustav Landauer
I
“It’s not so easy writing about nothing.” (1) And utopias are nothing. We of course owe the name to Thomas Moore, who combined the general negative Greek ou, transliterated into the Latin u, with the Greek topos, place, to construct utopia. In early correspondence with Erasmus, both had referred to it as nusquama, from the Latin adverb meaning “nowhere”. (2) And Guillame Budé, another of Moore’s contemporaries, and addressing himself to Moore in a letter, had understood “utopia” to be called udetopia, or “neverland”, from the Greek for “never”, a temporal reference that would be captured in the 19th century term uchronia, meaning no-time. (3) Beyond both place and time, how then could “utopia” be any-thing? And what is this no-thing that can be imagined, spoken of, celebrated and vilipended, belonging to some to the very nature of the human,(4) and at the same time, to others, being the source of our greatest modern political tragedies (totalitarianism, death camps, gulags and the like). (5) And in this last instance, it is utopia’s very nothingness that is held responsible: “All the evil comes, whether it has to do with the classical forms of utopia or its contemporary manifestations, from utopia’s refusal of the human condition, its flight beyond history, its negation of time.” (6)
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