Autonomies

On November 17th was announced another okupation in Madrid and the creation of a new Self-Managed Okupied Social Centre.  The new okupation now carries a name: the CSOA Raíces, or Roots.  Roots, because radical, because okupations contest the very foundations of the State-Capital: private property, law, hierarchical authority, inequality, because they spread without control, overcoming obstacles, sustaining ever new life.

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The fractures of modern society are many.  The factory/latifundia of the 19^th century have been replaced by the 21^st century city as the space of contestation.  The proletariat is now inclusive of workers, as well as of the precarious, the homeless, the immigrant and all of those made expendable by the violence of State-Capital and who contest that violence.  Amidst the serpentine front lines of this war, where enemy and foe have become ambiguous, urban okupations, as efforts to carve out spaces of autonomy in the heart of the beast are crucial.  That they may be comprised by ambitions of legalisation or cultural utility is undeniable (many of Italy’s okupied social centres offer examples of such compromise). But then all instruments of battle may be so compromised.  Yet acknowledging the risk, okupied social centres play a potential crucial role in the rebellion against capital.  And thus the effort of the State’s to put an end to them where they most self-consciously seek to contest State-Capital.

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