#Issue 1 | Beasts of Burden formatted

Beasts of Burden is a pamphlet published in 1999 by anti-state Communist groups Antagonism and Practical History. Quoting from the introduction:

This is a text which, we hope, faces in two directions. On the one hand we hope that it will be read by people interested in animal liberation who want to consider why animal exploitation exists, as well as how. On the other hand, by those who define themselves as anarchists or communists who either dismiss animal liberation altogether or personally sympathise with it but don’t see how it relates to their broader political stance.

While there have always been groups and individuals with feet in both camps, for the most part discussion between those involved in animal liberation and communists has been at a derisory level. ‘Debate,’ in so far as it exists, consists mainly of abuse and rarely moves beyond the level of comments like ‘wasn’t Hitler a vegetarian’ (actually not – he injected ‘bulls blood’ into his testicles, and does this mean you can’t be a communist and a house painter or an Austrian?).

We hope to prompt the beginnings of a real debate about the relationship between the ‘animal question’ and the ‘social question’. This text does not claim to have all the answers or to be the ‘communist manifesto’ for animals, but we think that it does pose some of the key questions. Over to you…

The pamphlet is well-written and makes a convincing case. As such, we’ve decided to format it and put it online for everyone to enjoy, download it here.

Two prominent critiques/reviews have been published, one by Undercurrent and one by Gilles Dauve. Antagonism and Practical History wrote replies to both of them, found here and here respectively.

#Issue 1 | Delirium

The possibility of madness is therefore implicit in the very phenomenon of passion.
(..)
People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.
(..)
But when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the lunatic, anticipating the macabre, has disarmed it.
(..)
At the opposite pole to this nature of shadows, madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first, because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning.
(..)
Up to the second half of the fifteenth century, or even a little beyond, the theme of death reigns alone. The end of man, the end of time bear the face of pestilence and war. What overhangs human existence is this conclusion and this order from which nothing escapes. The presence that threatens even within this world is a fleshless one. Then in the last years of the century this enormous uneasiness turns on itself; the mockery of madness replaces death and its solemnity. From the discovery of that necwhich inevitably reduces man to nothing, we have shifted to the scornful contemplation of that nothing which is existence itself.

Michel Foucault – Madness & Civilization

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
(..)
A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.
(..)
The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
(..)
But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.
(..)
We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.

Georges Bataille

#Issue 1 | Potentia

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

The History of Sexuality – Michel Foucault

34 | In both theory and practice, the modern State came into being in order to put an end to civil war, then called “wars of religion.” Therefore, both historically and by its own admission, it is secondary vis-à-vis civil war.

38 | The modern State, which purports to put an end to civil war, is instead its continuation by other means.

Gloss A: Is it necessary to read Leviathan to know that “because the major part hath by consenting voices declared a sovereign, he that dissented must now consent with the rest, that is, be contented to avow all the actions he shall do, or else justly be destroyed by the rest. […] And whether he be of the ongregation or not, and whether his consent be asked or not, he must either submit to their decrees or be left in the condition of war he was in before, wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever.” The fate of the communards, of the Action Directe prisoners or the June 1848 insurgents tells us plenty about the bloody origins of republics. Herein lies the specific character of and obstacle to the modern State: it only persists through the practice of the very thing it wants to ard off, through the actualization of the very thing it claims to be absent. Cops know something about this, paradoxically having to apply a “state of law,” which in fact depends on them alone. Thus was the destiny of the modern State: to arise first as the apparent victor of civil war, only then to be vanquished by it; to have been in the end only a parenthesis, only one party among others in the steady course of civil war.

39 | Gloss A: The modern State means, among other things, a progressively increasing monopoly on legitimate violence, a process whereby all other forms of violence are delegitimized. The modern State serves the general process of pacification which, since the end of the Middle Ages, only persists through its continuous intensification. (..) In order to become a political subject in the modern State, each body must submit to the machinery that will make it such: it must begin by casting aside its passions (now inappropriate), its tastes (now laughable), its penchants (now contingent), endowing itself instead with interests, which are much more presentable and, even better, representable. In this way, in order to become a political subject each body must first carry out its own autocastration as an economic subject. Ideally, the political subject will thus be reduced to nothing more than a pure vote, a pure voice.

40 | The founding act of the modern State—that is, not the first act but the one it repeats over and over—is the institution of the fictitious split between public and private, between political and moral. This is how it manages to crack bodies open, how it grinds up forms-of-life. The move to divide internal freedom and external submission, moral interiority and political conduct, corresponds to the institution as such of bare life.

60 | The jurisdiction of the imperial police, of Biopower is limitless, since what it must circumscribe and put a stop to does not exist at the level of the actual but at the level of the possible. The discretionary power here is called prevention and the risk factor is this possible, existing everywhere in actuality as possible, which is the basis for Empire’s universal right to intervene.

Gloss A: The enemy of Empire is within. The enemy is the event. It is everything that might happen, everything that might disturb the mesh of norms and apparatuses. Logically therefore the enemy, in the form of risk, is omnipresent. And concern is the only acknowledged reason for the brutal imperial interventions against the Imaginary Party: “Look how ready we are to protect you, since as soon as something exceptional happens—obviously without taking into account quaint customs like law or jurisprudence—we are going to intervene using any means necessary” (Foucault).

Introduction to Civil War – Tiqqun

Thesis 5 | When the biopolitical strike, sabotage and blocking converge the presuppositions for metropolitan revolt are created between them. Metropolitan insurrection becomes possible when the chaining together of specific struggles and the accumulation of revolts make a comprehensive strategy that hits (or overtakes) territories, existences, machines and devices.

Thesis 6 | Social centers, liberated spaces, houses and communized territories, should be to the political critique of the multitudes and transformed into new Mutual Aid Societies. Just as between the 18th and 19th centuries, these territorial aggregations could provide not only solidarity between individuals, mutuality between formsof-life and organization for both specific and general struggles, but also to the singularity’s and the community’s texture of conscience in that they are both oppressed and exploited. The Common, as a political act, is therefore born as a process in which the friendship and mutuality between those who are deprived transforms itself into a resistance commune.

20 theses on the subversion of the metropolis – Plan B Bureau

#Issue 1 | Bellum

1. War Happens | We know nothing of war, as they constantly remind us. War – always one and multiple – has been on our plates, since childhood, in what mustn’t go to waste. Th ey resented us for our presumed ignorance of war, as if we were ignoring pain or an illness, or simply as if this forever absent war was now over for good, and it had to be remembered as one remembers a dead family member. Through grief.

3. Rest in Peace | We know everything about war just like we know everything about prison, without having been there, since they are at the heart of “peace” and “free life,” already implied in them. Just as we know that nobody in our system is innocent, that only power relation exist, and that the losers and not the guilty are the ones being punished. Th at is why war has become someone else’s dirty job, which we are obliged to ignore. On every street corner they ask us to forget its possibility and its reality, to be surprised by it though never complicit in it. We are thanked in advance for our vigilance. Our choice is between collaborating in the social peace or with the partisans of terror. War is no longer concerned with us, we look at it and it doesn’t look back, it is too close. Its distance from us is not the same as that between a spectator and a football match, where we can still desire victory for one team and defeat for another. It resides in the limbo of things we would like to abolish. So we never have to take sides or believe that words have a weight that can be felt in the body, or that life has a meaning and that this meaning can also lead to its sudden end.

6.Visions of the World | Our consciousness now disarmed, we’ve been comfortably tucked into the nightmare of an illegible, deaf-mute present, in a territory marbled with anxieties. The cells in which the presumed guilty have been locked up and forgotten, the bare rooms with chairs and a desk where tortures result in confessions, these continue to exist, and even though we can’t see them, we perceive them. Th eir smell, their silence, their white lights populate the invisible, dministrative levels of everyday life. Th ey have not disappeared. The eternal night of the television news brings us this intuition along with images of the actual theaters of war. From the police stations, hospitals, motorways, schools, prisons, high-security zones and barracks, to the trucks, trains and planes exporting hatred in the name of war, or what we agree to call war – all these things fi ll us with fear. Because they contain us and we contain them.

Footnotes on the state of exception – Claire Fontaine

2. Definition | We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a war, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: his first object is to throw his adversary, and thus to render him incapable of further resistance.

War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.

24. War is a mere continuation of policy by other means | We see, therefore, that war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to war relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the art of war in general and the commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, war is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.

On war – Carl von Clausewitz

#Issue 1 | Man, Machine

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.

William Gibson – Neuromancer

Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand. They have lost faith in individual endeavour, and in natural force, of any kind.
(..)
Their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character.

Thomas Carlyle – Signs of the Times

the real danger is not that machines will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like machines

Sydney J. Harris

He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance.

Karl Marx – The Communist Manifesto

What is being argued is that techno-science, under pressure from [Capital’s red.] development, it’s paymaster, is overwhelmingly with improving
the operational efficiency of technological systems such that the human becomes irrelevant to the process. Development simply wants to continue expanding indefinitely and whatever restricts that internal dynamic merely registers as a problem to be overcome by ever greater levels of operational efficiency.

Stuart Sim – Lyotard and the Inhuman

If one wants to control a process, the best way of doing so is to subordinate the present to what is (still) called the ‘future’, since in these conditions the ‘future’ will be completely predetermined.

Jean-François Lyotard – The Inhuman

# Issue 1 | Thoughts, again…

The International Chamber of Commerce recognizes how societies are changing, with citizens speaking up and expressing their deep-felt concerns. However, in some respects, the emergence of activist pressure groups risks weakening the effectiveness of public rules, legitimate institutions and democratic processes. These activist organizations should place emphasis on legitimizing themselves, improving their internal democracy, transparency and accountability. They should assume full responsibility for the consequences of their activities. Where this does not take place, rules establishing their rights and responsibilities should be considered. Business is accustomed to working with trade unions, consumer organizations and other representative groups that are responsible, credible, transparent and accountable and consequently command respect. What we question is the proliferation of activist groups that do not accept these self-disciplinary criteria.

–From The Geneva Business Declaration, adopted in September 1998 by the leaders of 450 multinationals as part of the Geneva Business Dialogue.

Those that are against the G8 aren’t fighting against authorities democratically elected in their countries; they are fighting against the western world, the philosophy of the free world, the spirit of enterprise.

– S. Berlusconi, Le Monde, Sunday – Monday 22-23 July 2001.

#Issue 1 | Before the law, a parable

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment.

The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in sometime later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.” The gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try going inside in spite of my prohibition. But take note. I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I cannot endure even one glimpse of the third.”

The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The gatekeeper gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be let in, and he wears the gatekeeper out with his requests. The gatekeeper often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and many other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the gatekeeper. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.”

During the many years the man observes the gatekeeper almost continuously. He forgets the other gatekeepers, and this first one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the law. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud; later, as he grows old, he only mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the gatekeeper he has also come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the gatekeeper. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the gatekeeper. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The gatekeeper has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things considerably to the disadvantage of the man. “What do you still want to know now?” asks the gatekeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the law,” says the man, “so how is that in these many years no one except me has requested entry?” The gatekeeper sees that the man is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

Franz Kafka – Before the law

The gate of the law could in this parable be seen as a spatial metaphor for power in general, the promise of it’s accessibility always being accompanied by perpetual deferrence as the result of the gatekeepers. Following this deconstruction, one could see the countryman’s passivity and reluctance to enter in spite of the gatekeeper’s warnings as the reproduction of the gatekeeper’s authority. Despite the fact that the gatekeeper never physically (in a metaphorical sense, ofcourse) prevents the countryman from entering, he dares not pass through the gate.

Instead, the countryman prefers to devote himself to an endless downward spiral of futile pleas, prayers upon the deaf ears of the gatekeeper. He tries to persuade him with reason, he tries to bribe him with goods. In the end, he even know the most intricate details about the gatekeeper, down to the fleas in his fur coat. Yet despite all this, he never tries to confront the gatekeeper, instead internalising his authority to the point where he comes to see the gatekeeper as the ONLY obstacle on his way. In a sense, one could read this parable as a metaphor for the cyclic reproduction of the authority of the apparatus of power as a result of the initial refusal to break out of this logic through direct defiance of the gatekeeper.

A beautiful warning to all those who would seek to negotiate with power.

#Issue 1 | Some thoughts…

The beautiful snow-covered countryside quickly glides across the length of the window. The distance between V. and R., which was formerly a matter of a week, will now be traveled in less time. For less than an hour we are the occupant of a seat in any one of twenty identical cars of this train running at full speed, as are so many others. The orderly and, without doubt, optimal design of the seats unfolds in the abstract harmony of a dulcifying neon light. The train follows its rails and in this car, so quietly conformed to the idea of order, it seems that human reality itself follows invisible rails.
(..)
One day, closer attention is paid than usual to the collective silence of an underground metro, and one allows oneself to be overcome, behind the mutual ruse of contemporary habits, by a shuddering of one’s core, a primitive terror, vulnerable to all suspicions.

Tiqqun – Theory of Bloom

We can choose not to act, and that is the most beautiful reason for acting. We bear within ourselves the potency of all the acts we are capable of, and no boss will ever be able to deprive us of the possibility of saying no. What we are and what we want begins with a no. From it is born the only reason for getting up in the morning. From it is born the only reason for going armed to the assault of an order that is suffocating us. On the one hand there is the existent, with its habits and certainties. And of certainty, that social poison, one can die. On the other hand there is insurrection, the unknown bursting into the life of all. The possible beginning of an exaggerated practice of freedom.
(..)
Of course, the need to organise is something that can always accompany subversives’ practice beyond the temporary requirements of a struggle. But in order to organise oneself there is a need for living, concrete agreements, not an image in search of spotlights.

The secret of the subversive game is the capacity to smash deforming mirrors and find oneself face to face with one’s own nakedness. Organisation is the whole of the projects that make this game come alive. All the rest is political prosthesis and nothing else.

Anonymous – At Daggers Drawn

#Issue 1 | Some notes on the pace of the struggle

Throughout history, many words have been spoken about the programmes revolutionary groups should follow. For some, the revolutionary milieu should always act on it’s own whims, always seek the hardest direct confrontation with the powers that be and set the pace and intensity of the struggle for the rest of the masses in true vanguardist fashion. For others, the time is never right. For them there’s always a media-image to be considered, there’s always the argument that the “conditions just aren’t right yet”. In fact, both positions are problematic.

The former position is susceptible to an endless descent into conflict of ever-increasing intensity while at the same time losing the sheer mass-base to support the level of intensity it’s project requires. It is essential to control the pace of struggle , avoiding unfavorable engagements. After all, social transformation is a process involving society at large and thus requires the sheer force of mass and the sweeping away of social passivity. By focusing on high-intensity conflict at all times, even when there seems to be little to no social base for this level of confrontation, the revolutionary group is forced into the position of a milieu, an easily crushed and controlled clique of isolated evangelists.

On the other hand, the perpetual passivity of the latter position, commonly espoused by placard-waving activists and bureaucrats, leads to an endless cycle of inertia and entropy. The argument put forward by the proponents of ‘waiting for the natural pace of the struggle’ goes as follows:

“If we look at the intensity of the struggles waged outside of our milieu, we can see that any action that is more radical will surely alienate them. For if they were ready for this kind of action, wouldn’t they have undertaken it themselves”

The logical conclusion of this kind of reasoning, however, would be a total negation of the role of revolutionary groups. If all revolutionary groups are to wait for certain actions to occur before copying them, then what is the role of these groups? To follow mass-movements as a rear-guard?

This kind of logic also ignores the fact that the revolutionary groups are made up of working-class members themselves. Why do they value the intensity of the actions of the ‘general’ masses above those of working-class members of the revolutionary groups? That is not to say that the revolutionary groups should set the pace of the class struggle like some kind of visionary vanguard. Even if that would be desirable (which it is not), this would be an idealist fantasy. After all, it is material conditions that move the levers of history, not the sheer willpower of this or that group.

However, as Anton Pannekoek so correctly stated in “Persoonlijke Daad”, the pace of the class struggle does not resemble the marching of a military regiment, the pace and intensity being equal at all places, at all times. Historically some segments of the working class have had a more advanced revolutionary consciousness than others and the intensity of conflict differs throughout the social terrain.

For the revolutionary group to act like a ‘whip of the class struggle’, constantly raising the level of conflict until it cumulates in a revolutionary situation, what matters is the spread of actions rather than the particular intensity of a single action.

After all, the force of revolution is social and not military. Social revolution is achieved by societal transformation and is thus measured not by single clashes but by the extent to which the social order is disturbed and transformed, the extent to which our goals are achieved. No power can exist without the pseudo-voluntary servitude of those it dominates. General revolt disturbs this servitude and breaks the smooth-running cogs of the machine of domination. What matters is thus not the particular intensity of an action but the generalized spread of revolt.

For this reason, the intensity of actions matters only insofar as it supports the wider spread of such actions. At times it might be better to restrain oneself if this means that actions of lower intensity spread further amongst the working class. This is not to say one should be swayed by portrayals in the media , parliaments or other bourgeois institutions with which we have nothing to do. Our goal is to subvert their order and counting on their blessings for doing so would be utter folly. Neither should we bow to cultural hegemony and restrain our actions because dominant discourse ‘frowns upon them’. After all, it is to be expected that the actions of groups seeking to overthrow a given social order are ‘frowned upon’ by the discourse of that same order. Anything else would, again, be folly.

What we should consider, however, is the spreading potential of our actions amongst the social base of a given struggle. If we undertake a certain action and we suspect that it will set a ‘leading example’ surely to be followed by others it is to be undertaken, regardless of what ‘the media’ will say about it or if some will speak shame of it. We cannot pander to the lowest common denominator if we seek to raise the level of confrontation. If, however, our actions turn out to be too conflictual for the moment, continuing a raise of confrontation would only result in a quick and glory less defeat of a small group.

In the end, we can only analyze every given situation, it’s potential and experiment with actions and evaluate the results, constantly re-adjusting our strategy on the basis of practical experience rather than dogma bursting forth from theoretical bubbles spawned in the ivory towers of a few, whether those of the armed vanguardist or the placard-waving activist. The only pointers we can go by is the refusal of compromise or mediation of any kind and a focus on raising the general level of confrontation, the spread of revolutionary consciousness.

#Issue 1 | The poverty of Idealism: On the nature of struggle

The ‘Blijven Dromen’ weblog recently contributed in the discussion regarding the squatting ban, presenting an interesting and detailed analysis called ‘On contemporary squatting and what the future might hold for us’, offering their insights.

As the piece by ‘Blijven Dromen’ was written in English, in good internationalist fashion, we too shall write this piece in English.

Whilst we agree with a lot of the core arguments made in the piece we feel that there are several points that remain untouched upon. We hope that our critique contributes to the overall discussion regarding the squatting ban and strategy developed to maintain and improve the squatting movement. The article also draws from the critique of the state of the squatting movement put forward by Luca Voorhorst, a piece which served as an inspiration to our earlier piece (in Dutch) regarding the squatting ban called ‘Beweging en Marginalisatie’.

All discussion is put forward in a comradly fashion, not as an assault but as a critique aiming to contribute to the general discussion and the state of the movement.

It’d be fair to state that in the past decade there’s been a strong de-politisation within the movement where a rather big part does not affiliate itself with radical politics anymore and for another part has become merely an identity that complements a countercultural identity; to squat as to fulfil the expectations of a rebellious ‘radical’ and countercultural image. Squatting has become a commodity. It’s merely a way to live for (pretty much) free for some and is something that complements their ‘anarchist identities’ to others.

From:  On contemporary squatting and what the future might hold for us

As we argued earlier, the de-politisation of the Squatting movement has more often than not turned the associated politics into a form of ‘identity politics’, where ‘being a Squatter’ is the core point of reference. These hollow identity politics have often stood in the way of the development of consistent politics and effective strategy, instead focussing attention on a-political subcultural activities. This subculturalism, with it’s sole focus on parties,art,recreation and the like has in turn caused the Squatting movement to drift away from politics rooted in class-struggle experience and has thus alienated the movement from working-class reality.

This, in turn, has reduced the squatting movement’s potence as a revolutionary nucleus to below zero whilst at the same time severing it from the working-class, thus slowly but surely destroying it’s relevance and justification. A lot of the justification in favor of squatting put forward by the lobbyist wing of the Squatting movement is rooted in it’s value as a centre for the production of ‘alternative culture’, in essence it is argued that the movement is just another of the many ‘factories’ producing commodities to be consumed within the framework of liberal-bourgois society. Squatting today is rarely implemented as an assault on Capital’s logic, an assault on the absolutism of private property, even though this is where it’s relevance stems from in the first place.

As we discussed in ‘Beweging en Marginalisatie’, when Squatting is seen as a mere a-political subcultural activity, it has nothing to offer the working class that it cannot get from capitalist society. There is a whole array of identities to be consumed in the commodity-form offered by capitalist society. Turning the ‘squatters identity’ into just another subcultural identity, which is what a-political practice has done (albeit not on purpose), reduces the movement to an impotent ‘culture factory’.

If we, however, develop networks of material support from our Squats and organise them as centres of communal struggle (in whatever form it may present itself, from neighbouring tenant’s struggles against eviction to struggles against gentrification) they will develop organic links to the working class and their relevance will become apparent through their everyday function.

If this relevance is experienced in a material sense, a squatting ban or conservative propaganda isn’t going to convince the workers that an assault on private property such as squatting is a ‘bad’ thing. Apathy will fade away and the activity of squatting will have relevance it does not have now.

For why would the working class jump to the defence of a phenomenon it does not have any connection with, a phenomenon which doesn’t have any relavance in their everyday lives?

The core of the problem here is ‘Idealist’ reasoning versus ‘Materialist’ reasoning.

Idealist reasoning assumes people are motivated primarily by Ideas and ‘grand narratives’ whilst materialism assumes people are primarily motivated by their material conditions: a house to live in, food to eat, entertainment to enjoy, to laugh, to love, in short: to live. The struggle against Capital is therefor a struggle for the re-appropriation of life!

Both history and contemporary society show materialism is the driving force behind human action, whilst some individuals might be motivated by Idealism, such as much of the radical political milieu, this requires a long process of struggle that most of society isn’t exposed to on a regular basis. It is for this reason that radical politics have to be developed along a materialist line, squatting included, if they want to have any relevance to the working class and society at large. Thus, squatting should have something to offer the working class.

As another participant in the discussion regarding the squatting ban noted:

In a future with squatting criminalized, it will be very important though to push on with campaigns, connect to the neighbourhood around you and put the occupation of an empty building into a larger social context.

That this is true, becomes obvious when you analyze which squatting actions that were already criminal (429 cases) were successful.

In all cases that are known to me those were clear political actions with a strong connection to the neighbourhood and the broader social context of the real-estate mismanagement by the state and the capitalists.

To struggle from the isolation of a heavily barricaded house wearing balaclavas will yield you a lot of negative press (especially if you don’t release statements about the point you want to make) and the feeling that you fought the good fight, but there will be no victory and no achievement besides that.

From: Anonymous reaction regarding the Squatting Ban

For struggle to have relevance and potence, it needs to have a real existing connection to the class struggle where it occurs: within and from the working class against Capital.

The revolutionary process is about transforming social relationships and organisation in a sense that has relevance to everyday struggles, eventually cumulating in a counter-power capable of doing away with the old order.

Though when this is predominantly the case without a constant critique and attack (whatever shape that might take) on contemporary society then the building of this alternative culture has become an end instead of a means, something that exactly runs along the lines of the arguments that some more reformist-orientated groups have made in offence to the squatting ban and this is something that allot of self-proclaimed radicals claim to disagree with.

From: ‘On contemporary squatting and what the future might hold for us’

The core problem here is that most ‘means’ of the squatting movement right now are not oriented towards any ‘end’ because of a complete lack of serious political content, as argued before by, amongst others, both Luca Voorhorst and us.

The development of adequate means requires a consistent analysis and understanding of the struggle we wage. Only within a coherent framework can we develop means that will lead us anywhere out of this desert!

Any coherent framework, of course, has to be updated continually through mutually agreed upon positions, analysis and debate. This does not mean, however, that there is no necessity for this analysis. Without theory there can be no sensible practice and without practice there can be no adequate theory.

It is time to do away with the false dichtomy between the two.

It’s lost it’s radical potential by staying within the boundaries of what’s accepted by the state and in so lacking the ability to challenge people’s perception on what’s wrong with contemporary social and economic organisation as well as these very boundaries the state puts upon us. I feel the need to emphasise here that I’m not stating that no means are good if they’re legal. I’m just putting forth some arguments why I think the illegality of a certain means might challenge our entire society more, in some aspects, than legal means might do.

(..)

Welcome to the ‘wonderful’ world of the marginalised, where the mask of our great liberal democracy shatters in front of you, where you’re in constant conflict with the state.

From: ‘On contemporary squatting and what the future might hold for us’

Whilst we agree with the idea that ‘institutionalisation’ leads to pacification of a movement and propagates the dominant logic (that of Capital) into the movement, we disagree with the idea that ‘tearing away the veil of legality’ will lead to heightened conciousness and revolutionary potential.

We must first of all consider that the receiving end of state repression following the squatting ban will consist mostly if not solemnly of already politicised squatters, as the a-political segment will most likely have drifted of into another niche of society.

Even if the latter was not the case, the only ones subject to the experience of “the mask of our great liberal democracy shatter[ing] in front of you” will be at best a mix of a politicised minority and a subcultural identity, not the full working class or even a large segment of it.

If there are no connections between the squatting movement and the working class and the squatting movement has no relevance to the working class, they will not be subject to the negative effects of state repression.

If, however, a squat hosting a social centre functioning as a hub for community and worker’s struggle was to be evicated (say, in the middle of a strike) this would have direct impact upon the MATERIAL conditions of the working class, giving birth to a new subjectivity regarding both squatting and state repression.

It is from this ‘production of subjectivity’ that resistance is born. The refusal of real existing conditions under Capitalism (the high rent, cut wages, lost jobs, war, famine and general exploitation,etc) is the nucleus of struggle and tying in to this struggle by operating alternative structures that operate AGAINST Capital’s logic whilst at the same

time carving out space for a counter-power will be the spark that light the fuse of revolution.

Our focus of struggle should not lie with the practice-fetish of ‘direct confrontation’ (while we certainly recognise this may be necessary at times) as this is not a catalyst for social change, it does not relate to everyday struggle and poses itself as a ‘spectacle’ to which the working class is nothing but a spectator. No matter how dedicated, no matter how ‘tough as nails’, no militant vanguard seeking direct confrontation with Capital and the State is going to be victorious, not only because of a simple matter of force-politics but because:

The force of an insurrection is social, not military. It is collective struggle that will bring us victory: only the working class as the backbone of society can do this!

This is not a call for the fool’s pacifism or the reformist’s kneeling at the altar of ‘legality’ but a call for directed, tactical struggle free from a practice-fetish of any kind. We recognise the need for direct confrontation when it arises but it is not a revolutionary strategy as it cannot bring about social change.

Subjectivity is born from materialist experience and as such Radical Subjectivity and the desire for revolution is born from repeated, directed struggles against conditions inevitably arising from the capitalist mode of production.

Hence we, as squatters, as a political movement, should seek to expand struggle over the social terrain, creating an organic network of solidarity unified in it’s struggle against Capital, where every blow against one is felt by the whole!

Only then will Squatting have the relevance worth defending and a real chance at survival, regardless of any ban the impose on us!

Remarks:

(1) In response to this article, a remark was posted on Indymedia which we fully agree with and which deserves quotation here:

A very interesting article but just two or three initial points. You don’t seem to know if squatters are part of the class or somehow seperate, you seem to switch between the two. Some squatters may be self imposed lumpen proletariat but simply holding a radical critique and viewpoint of the state and capitalism doesn’t change your material position in class society or your relationship to the means of production. I’m pretty sure most squatters don’t own property or have other forms of income that means they don’t have to sell their labour to survive. State subsidised student money, social welfare or even the odd bit of money from their parents doesn’t change that. To think otherwise would be idealistic and not very materialist, which brings me to another point. A materialist analysis isn’t just about motivating factors but also about material experience of meaningful activity and struggle and how this informs/radicalises people which is why there is the importance for both theory AND practice as well as including as many people in struggle as possible. I’ve included a nice quote from an article on the importance of class analysis to struggle, link is below. That said, it is important we emphasise how our needs (and desires) are in opposition to the needs (and desires) of capitalism, because you know, sometimes the most simplest and basic of examples, approaches and understandings IS the most radical one.

“I have found that apparently minor disagreements on class analysis (such as whether teachers are middle class or working class) can turn out after much discussion to rely on very basic disagreements as to how the world is. In particular, disagreements on the nature of truth. Therefore it is necessary to start at a very basic level. My own understanding of the world is materialist. But I don’t plan to waste much time arguing materialism versus idealism. The opposing world views are so far apart that there is no common ground to argue from. I will state though that the world is made and remade by material forces not by ideas. For instance, it may be or may not be the case that your ideas change after reading this. But any such change would be totally irrelevant if your actions, your behaviour do not change as well. In any case, ideas are not changed merely by the reading of some article, but in the context of some wider experience. If that were not the case then everyone reading the same stuff would end up thinking the same thing, which certainly isn’t what happens.”

One other and closing remark, with regards a quote in your piece taken from elsewhere.

“In all cases that are known to me those were clear political actions with a strong connection to the neighbourhood and the broader social context of the real-estate mismanagement by the state and the capitalists.”

This is exactly the problem as outlined by Luca Voorhorst, the hollowing out of the radical political content of the squatting scene has meant that this space has been filled by reformist, leftist and social democratic political elements (what is called ‘conformist’ elsewhere). The problem is that we need more anarchist politics, less political action and more direct action. To put it another way, the importance of strong connections to the neighbourhood and a broad social context is obvious accompanied with an emphasis on housing as a meterial need and demand, however, within this we need to differntiate between anarchist demands and leftist/social democratic/conformist demands. Too often radical liberalism accompanied with some arrestable lobbying is considered anarchism, it’s not.
Anarchist demands are those which stress the concrete material needs of the class (wage demands, universal healthcare, housing etc, the length of the working day, through to a rejection of wage labour altogether!) whereas leftist, social democratic, conformist demands are those which stress how capital should be managed to accommodate the struggles to impose those needs (tax this! nationalise that!). It’s not the role of anarchists to point out the mismanagement of the state and the capitalists, it is about achieving/imposing those demands through direct action and self organisation.

We fully share the analysis with regards to the importance of class analysis (2). We do, however, stress that a fairly large segment of the Squatting movement is part of the working class. Whilst a significant segment is obviously lumpen (self-imposed or not), we should not extrapolate this to the entire movement. Our call for a political re-appropriation of the squatting movement is at the same time a call for the working class re-appropriation of the squatting movement as a tool in the struggle against Capital.

We also agree with the latter part of the comment stressing the necessity of class demands in a direct-action fashion contrary to parliamentary, reformist demands calling for a different way of managing Capital.

References:

(1) On contemporary squatting and what the future might hold for us / Blijven Dromen

(2) Class Analysis, for Anti-Capitalist Struggle / Prole.info Presents several interesting observations regarding Class Analysis and it’s use, though we don’t agree with all positions outlined in the article (Eg. regarding the class positions of Teachers,the nature of power,etc)