Scenes from the class war in spain: okupation and resistance

Social movements form around problems. We don’t mean this in a simple functionalist fashion, as if there is a pre-existent problem which then produces a social movement that, in turn, forces the state or capital to respond and solve the problem. Rather, social movements produce their own problematic at the same time as they are formed by them. … As we try to formulate the problematic, we create new worlds. This is what we mean by ‘worlding’: by envisaging a different world, by acting in a different world we actually call forth that world. It is only because we have, at least partially, moved out of what makes ‘sense’ in the old world that another world can start to make its own sense.

The Free Association

Some six months ago, a movement of house occupations began in the small town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz). Initially without coordination or exposure, the movement now extends to eight collective occupations of buildings constructed with speculative interest and never inhabited, and home now to some eighty families.

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Rebellion/revolution as war

(All art by Bilal Berreni – Zoo Project)

Our movement … is in the first place a negative movement, a movement against identity.  It is we who de-compose, we are the wreckers.  It is capital which constantly seeks to compose, to create identities, to create stability (always illusory, but essential to its existence), to contain and deny our negativity.  We are the source of movement, we are the subject …

John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power

Let us think not of class as a fixed social category or identity, as a component part of a social system. For as so conceived, the constituent classes of any given social system are integral to it.

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Paths to utopia in andalusia: Marinaleda

The Left must position itself as much to the Left as possible and therefore it has the need to aspire to Utopia, understood not as a chimera, but as the right that people have to dream, and by means of struggle, to see their dreams become reality. … The Left must be Utopian and it must invite people to dream and to make their dreams reality. If the left does not do that, then it is part of the system.

Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo (mayor of Marinaleda), Les Sentiers de l’Utopie

Marinaleda is radical experiment in autonomous, collective self-management at the level of a small Andalusian town. Initiated in the late 1970s, the experiment begins with the electoral conquest of the municipality and the subsequent delegation of that power to a general town assembly, the occupation and appropriation of a large agricultural latifundia, to respond to the populations’ basic economic needs, and the development of industries connected with agricultural production, and the organization of a multitude of social and cultural services, all of which make Marinaleda unique. None of this is not said blindly, nor is it proffered with the intention of offering up a model. Revolutions are made in movement; they are processes in which the aims gain life in the very means employed. Marinaleda is not a finished utopia; it is a possible path towards greater freedom and equality.

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For Charlie Haden

The music in this album is dedicated to creating a better world; a world without war and killing, without poverty and exploitation; a world where men of all governments realize the vital importance of life and strive to protect rather than to destroy it.  We hope to see a new society of enlightenment and wisdom where creative thought becomes the most dominant force in all people’s lives.

Charlie Haden, New York, May 1969 (original liner notes from Liberation Music Orchestra)

If we remember Charlie Haden with his passing (11/07/2014), it is not to bury him, but to celebrate his creativity, his music (with Ornette Coleman, the Liberation Music Orchestra, the many duets, and so much more) and his ethical-political commitment.  If art is not reducible to politics, there is no art without political resonance; and there is no politics in the deepest sense of the term which is not also creation.  Haden’s music lived on this line; not a border, but a threshold between two inseparable worlds, worlds thereby rendered freer and more beautiful.

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Critical engagements in spain’s 15th of May movement

Spain’s 15th of May movement, born in 2011, is one of the most significant political and social movements of our time. Its promise has been great. But also its weaknesses, weaknesses which those quick to condemn movements in the name of some kind of radical ideological purity have not hesitated to proffer. These last however are not our concern. 15M continues, not though as a unified movement, which it never was, but as a complex of initiatives, acts, and resonances that generate and sustain realities that often openly contest State-Capital. And thus it remains crucially important to understand the trajectory of the movement and possible paths that remain open to it. What follows is a critical and committed reading of the movement by Jesús García Rodríguez that originally appeared in Ekintza Zuzena nº 41, Bilbao, 2014, and which we present here in translation.

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Abaixo a copa capitalista: The games of brazil’s world cup

The metropolis is a terrain of constant low intensity conflict, of which the occupation
of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus are the culmination points. The city, for soldiers,
was for a long time a place to be avoided, or perhaps to beseige; the metropolis on
the other hand is perfectly compatible with war. Armed conflict is merely another
episode in its constant self-reconfiguration. The battles waged by the great powers
are like incessantly repeated policing tasks in the black holes of the metropolis –
“whether in Burkina Faso, the south Bronx, Kamagasaki, Chiapas or the
northeastern suburbs of Paris.” These “interventions” aren’t really so much aiming
for any victory or to restore order or peace, but rather they are performed in the
maintenance of the great enterprise of forced “security” that’s always/already at
work. War can no longer be isolated within time, but is diffracted in a series of
military and police micro-operations to ensure security.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

The official games are over. The trophy and medals have been given to the triumphant; the officials have departed either content in the halo of nationalistic sentiment or smitten by the shame of national defeat; the media has left for other circuses; the stadiums echo their silence … and behind them all, in the shadows of so much light, people oppressed and dispossessed.

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In praise of a riot: The Stonewall Inn insurrection, 1969

(The Battle of Stonewall, Sandow Birk)

(In memory of all of the gays, lesbians, bisexuals, trans, queens, sex workers and hustlers, blacks, hispanics, whites, employed and unemployed, who resisted on the 28th of June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, New York City, against the police of racist, heterosexual, zenophobic Capital) 

… for my strength is made perfect in weakness.

Paul, 2 Corinthians 12:9

… gay liberation does not just mean reforms.  It means a revolutionary change in our whole society.

Gay Liberation Front, Manifesto

There is no intrinsically radical/revolutionary sexuality.  And there is no sexuality which is not invested by dispositions and apparatuses of control.  Thus sexual transgression is inherently ambiguous: rebellious in its violation of norms, of the “heterosexual matrix” (Judith Butler), or of “hegemonic masculinities/femininities (Raewyn Connell), it nevertheless speaks no truth (there is no sexual truth – Michel Foucault).  Sexuality exists in the liminal space-time of strategies and techniques of capture, of appropriation, that produce truth, bodies, subjectivities.  To then avow/live a radical sexuality is always but a moment in the games of power through which sexualities may simultaneously erupt as well as be channelled and disciplined.

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Taking the banks in Catalonia

Croire au monde, c’est aussi bien susciter des événements même petits qui échappent au contrôle, ou fait naitre de nouveaux espaces-temps, même de surface ou de volume réduits. … C’est au niveau de chaque tentative que se jugent la capacité de résistance ou au contraire la soumission à un contrôle. Il faut à la fois création et peuple.

Gilles Deleuze, Contrôle et Devenir

Okupation make take many forms and spaces. Land, factories, squares and streets, buildings, houses have all been ohupied in struggles against State-Capital … and now in Catalonia, banks. As the banks reap profits in times of fat speculation, they command evictions when austerity is imposed to secure profits. No more fitting target then, at least symbolically, for okupation than the creation of anti-capitalist social centres.

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Rebel neighbourhoods: Carabanchel, Madrid

There are cities where particular neighbourhoods guard a memory of past disobedience and rebellion. They were in the past often referred to as working-class neighbourhoods, or quartiers populaires, to employ the French expression. They recall that past however not as something distant, to be relived only sentimentally, but rather as a living past that keeps possibilities open in the present, possibilities of contestation, protest and insurrection.

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The games of dispossession: FIFA’s machine of capture

The FIFA World Cup circus is about to begin in brazil.  And while millions are earned in match after match, we can turn our eyes away from the spectacle, even if momentarily, to see some of what has made it all possible and what sustains it.

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