In the early hours of the 24th of August, the housing squat for refugees and migrants, Notara 26, in Athens was the target of an incendiary attack. The molotov and gas-bottle bombs caused serious material damage and could have killed the over 130 residents. Fortunately, the inhabitants responded quickly enough to evacuate the building, and then with the aid of the fire department, were able to extiguish the flames.
The attack bore all of the markings of the country’s fascist elements: to terrorise and murder migrants-refugees in a desire for ethnic and racial purification; to attack and terrorise, even kill, both greek and foreigner, engaged in no-border solidarity work with refugees; to hit at the heart of Athens’ Exarchia neighbourhood, where a significant anti-authoritarian/anarchist presence has established itself over the years, to show that the fascists can attack anyone, anywhere; to feed the raging xenophobia and hostility towards those who contest the power of State-Capital.
However, Notara 26, through the work of its residents and activists, the assistance of other refugee squats in the city, along with the broader anti-authoritarian and anarchist movements, continues … a continuity that is testimony to the courage and generosity of all of those who have committed themselves in this struggle of solidarity with the “refugee crisis” spawned by the violence in Syria and elsewhere.
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Occupy Wall Street: Sharing reflections on a fifth anniversary (1)
If Occupy Wall Street began with the occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City on September 17th, 2011, it quickly spread to other cities in north america and beyond, making it the largest “anti-capitalist” protest movement on the continent since the 1960s.
To describe Occupy as anti-capitalist is of course already to invite criticism, for the movement was and remains the subject of considerable criticism from more traditional “leftist” organisations who saw in it little more than the expression of a middle class discomfort before its own growing impoverishment. At best, the movement could inspire a renewal of reformist, social-democratic politics (e.g. the Bernie Sanders campaign within the Democratic Party), or disappear into self-satisfied irrelevance, due to a lack of political program and organisation (e.g. Slavoj Žižek’s criticism of Occupy).
Such readings of Occupy are however caricatural, for they rest upon a number of rather grotesque assumptions: that the notion of the “middle class” as a social agent is clear, when it is far from being so; that sociologically and/or economically, those who occupied public squares throughout the united states were all from the middle class, and that this class identity was the dominant political force shaping the course of the movement, when this is anything but obvious, if not patently false; that Occupy was a movement, and not a plurality of agents, movements, singular and collective, with very different aspirations, aims, methods, etc.; that what is an anti-capitalist politics is itself unambiguous, an idea that usually presupposes and suggests a rather mechanistic, linear understanding of social relations/processes, when any social formation is complex, including capitalism, with no single foundation or cause, and which cannot thus be contested and challenged by focusing upon one dimension of those relations (e.g. to address exclusively the relation between labour and capital as definitive of capitalism leaves aside all of the many social relations necessary for commodity/spectacle production and the reproduction of that supposedly central relation); that the distinction between reform and revolution is clear, both theoretically and practically, when it is not …
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