Our refrain becomes repetitive: capitalism cannot be reformed because a system of oppression, appropriation and exploitation cannot be fundamentally altered by state authorities that are not only beholden to it, but are an expression of it. The illusion to the contrary was once known as social democracy. And if this latter could be held up as an example of how such reforms were once possible, these reforms were far more the children of state responses to radical anti-capitalist militancy than to any will to reform by the state and only possible through the violent primitive accumulation of global capitalist uneven development.
Not fighting for nature, but nature fighting back: Okupying trees in the ZAD of Roybon
The okupation of forests, river valleys, peasant farm lands through the constitution of autonomous, self-managed self-defense communities, as resistance to capitalist infrastructure development, have become emblematic of france’s ZADs. If the ZADS of Notre-Dames-des-Landes and Testet call forth memories of older struggles such as Larzac, or the more recent No-Tav movements in italy and elsewhere, there is in their nature something more radical that takes them beyond simple environmental or ecological movements that seek to preserve “nature” against technology or development. At the heart of the ZADs are autonomous, horizontal collectives and the rejection of a set of binaries that so often haunt environmental politics: nature/culture, country side/city, primitivism/development and the like. They are not self-perceived as okupations to defend nature, but an expression of “natural” life against capital that can only exists through the expropriation and destruction of all that lives. In the “state of exception” that reduces all of us to bare life, we discover all that ties us, that reveals our relations, to living nature. The ZADs then are grains of sand in the circulation of capital, islands of resistance that can resonate across heterogeneous territories of uneven economic and technological development-exploitation; they are spaces of a future now.
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