Amongst this population, men, women, animals, age, sex, health, sickness, all seemed communal; everything fitted together, was merged, mingled and superimposed; everyone was a part of everything.
Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris
The struggle of okupations in the city is part of the war against the appropriation and accumulation that are at the very heart of capitalism. On the 11th of June, one of Madrid’s most emblematic and active okupied social centres was evicted by order of local city authorities, El Patio Maravillas. Only one response to such state actions is fitting: okupation! At the end of the same day, the Patio collective okupied a public building that had been sold to a private real estate company a year before, but which has remained unused. (12/06/2015: Tercera Informacion, Periodico Diagonal) The “court of miracles” will thereby continue …
Fighting capitalism on every front: A lesson from france
We share below a review by Paul Cudenec of a book on the resistance to the building of the Sivens dam project in southern France, a resistance that came to be known as the ZAD of Testet. And we do so because of the conviction that the experiences in france around ZADs are of enormous importance to radical politics today. That is, they point to the need of understanding this politics not as a contest between powers, but as a refusal of the power of State-Capital and resistance to it through the creation of autonomous forms of life. The book is entitled Sivens sans retenue: Feuilles d’automne 2014, and is published by Editions La Lenteur of Paris.
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