Intergalactic Meeting between Space Struggles

From the borders to the streets we live on, we see our space more and more controlled. State capitalism divides, develops, surveils, evicts, imprisons, and paves over our lives and our horizons. To control and exploit everything that exists. But many are organising to live differently, scurrying into the nooks and crannies of industrial-capitalist society to create free experimental spaces to struggle against a system in crisis.

Rural and Urban Spaces in the Grip of State Capitalism

Urbanisation, metropolisation, gentrification: abstractions that describe a very concrete reality. That of cities more and more crowded and polluted, of movement more and more controlled by a combination of surveillance technology and the growing militarisation of the police. That of cities in permanent expansion, whose governments would like nothing more than to link up in immense megalopolises, gobbling up agricultural land and wild spaces. That of cities more and more segregated by class. In the centre, luxury, sterilised quarters where nothing exists but the possibility of overconsumption, in order to forget the nothingness of bourgeois existence. On the outskirts, the poor quarters conceived and thought of as Indian reservations, spaces of relegation and imprisonment.

But capitalism’s grip on space isn’t limited to the city. Rural space is also being devastated by the city’s advances; decimated by dreary housing developments, criss-crossed by high tension power lines, overshadowed by industrial estates. Through the destruction of hedgrerows and compulsary purchase orders, the land is concentrated in the hands of a few agri-giants for whom working the land is a succession of mechanised operations. Intensive agriculture, recourse to chemical products, animal feeds, certified seeds, and GMO’s are ravaging our countryside and profoundly undermining the transmission of traditional skills. This unyielding emphasis on output and productivity, as well as state subsidies renders impossible any form of self-sufficiency or rural autonomy.

Free Spaces

In these unliveable cities, some are attempting to create spaces in which it is possible to escape the alienation of waged work, the omnipresent market, dominant media propaganda; spaces whose very existence puts this world into question. They reclaim vacant housing to create collective living spaces, transform empty lots into gardens.

They are places for meeting and organising, or as sanctuaries for the unemployed, the marginalised, migrants, for all those rejected by society or who reject it themselves.

In these mutilated landscapes where industrialised landscape finds itself at an impasse, some collectives organise to reclaim the land, create collective farms on land occupied, let, or bought. Cultivated land where vegetables grow without pesticides, where animal power is not a relic of the past, where animals aren’t caged in overcrowded, disease-ridden factories, where sowing seeds is not an industrial process. Land whose fruits are shared collectively, to become as self-sufficient as possible.

Behind the facade of an implacable system exist different forms of resistance, numerous individual and collective attempts to re-appropriate territory in the grip of market forces, and take back control or our space, our time, and our lives.

Our desire is to meet each other, to support each other, to share skills and (who knows?) build new means of communication, exchange, and co-ordination for a revolutionary movement with many homes between which we must create working relationships.

An invitation to link up and densify the archipelago of DIY spaces, of individuals and groups, to articulate these free spaces with different struggles against state capitalism on our land, in our environments, and in our daily lives.

From 5-11 March, just before the end of the winter truce*, the beginning of the state offensive against liberated spaces in the name of sacrosanct private property. In La ZAD, an area in struggle against the growth of the metropolis, 20 km north of Nantes, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes.

Program

Day One: Urbanisation and Unliveable Cities workshops and discussions about current occupations and possible or existing offensives in these spaces

Day Two: Rural Struggle and Occupation workshops and discussions about autonomy, collective property, and occupation

Day Three: Evictions, Repression, Facing the State workshops and discussions about ways of individual and collective resistance against police and the justice system

Day Four: Freedom of Movement: Migrations and Nomadism workshops and discussions about anonymity, cladestinity, illegalism, and administrative invisibility

Day Five: Debrief