read:
'No Trespassing- squatting, rent strikes & land struggles worldwide' by Anders Corr (2009)
KEY ideas
Division between class struggle and activism (during the 1999 WTO actions in Seattle)
Affinity Groups - (I now know what this means, and I wonder what it's like to be part of one..)
Communities decomposed by Capital (I don't know what this means explicitly, but I imagine it to mean where gentrification and major corps buy up land and buy out businesses so jobs decline, public spaces are taken, and money is leached out of the community run services)
Community development corporations (CDC) - gentrifying areas in the city by supporting grass roots and community based tools for urban planning and policies, can do more harm than good by duping people into thinking that they have been given more autonomy whilst facilitating the states knowledge of community facilitation and giving it more power to quash any radical organising.
a VICTORY
&
http://takebacktheland.blogspot.co.uk/
housing crisis:
2 pronged action needed
- autonomous uprising of tenants and precarious homeowners (how would this look? how might it be spurred? what resources are needed?)
- willing non-profits and community organisations assist with direct confrontation (potentially in betrayal of their funding resources
crisis of care:
as state defunds social services, pushes the unpaid work of childcare, elderly & disabled care onto women. These attacks undermine the overall composition of the working class in these ways:
discontinuation of welfare payments, development of workfare, decreased access to birth control & women's healthcare, increased violence against women, the re-imposition of the nuclear family and a larger discourse aimed at erasing the gains won by women's struggles. (55:2011)
it will unweave community cohesion and neutralise the working class' ability to build on struggles.
read:
'The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community' - Maria-Rosa Dalla Costa (1975)
CARE - and the divisiveness of anarchist circles/queer identity politics - leads to the 'inability to seek relationships across movements'
Harmony Goldberg's contribution in 'Uses of a Whirlwind' about navigating funding options as a non-profit organisation and what is considered acceptable resistance in the face of exploitation.. (toe-ing the line of acceptability to be able to do what you need to do as well as continue the longevity of the funding..)
the alinsky model
criticised for being too focused on specific gains and reforms rather than seeing those reforms as elements of a much larger revolutionary vision. espousing uncritical understandings around 'equal opportunities for all' (maybe even encompassing assimilationist politics?) when many don't want to be equal participants in a destructive neo-liberal state...
political activism becomes too inward looking and self limiting as to who and what an activist is - alienating the wider populace from joining/linking up with shared struggles. Self marginailisation is reinforcing for identities, and helps to ensure continued status as rebel, whilst simultaneously guarding against any generalised movements.
IT IS A QUESTION OF REPRODUCTION
how can our movements centralize their own reproduction and organise around questions of the continued gendered nature of reproductive labour, social reproduction and the commons, and move towards self reproducing movements?
as long as capitalism continues to exploit primitive accumulation and enclosure to open new markets and find unpaid labour, we a are a long way away from self reproducing models of community organisation.
PHEW
Chris Carlsson "Capital does co-opt but not everything we do in our free time in immediately co-opted by capital"
REPRODUCTION is an area for centralisaton, reconstruction and rethinking furtherance of movements.
Kaethe Weingarten - Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Everyday
we can: have support groups, zine projects, discussions around experiences, realities and foster a culture of solidarity.
REMEMBER
the unnamed silent organising that goes on across all groups, in the lunch breaks, the car sharing, the support networks we have interpersonally - it is our human need to organise outside of the states control.
creating community - ...'is not simply the process of recognising people as they are but acting collectively on what we want to become'
ENCOUNTER / DIALOGUE / INQUIRY
BUT
How do we, (me, my new friends) as transient members of the local communities we nestle ourselves into for varying amounts of time build up this rapport, and shared focus, desires, goals, struggles?
Radical community organising works from a position of building LONG TERM organisations, and practices, rather than a slew of reactive gestures.
NEED TO
Locate emergent new worlds and weapons amongst us, creating encounters and cross pollination -
(all a bit romantic)
WHERE WE MOVE is a question of WHAT WE WILL BECOME
the paralysis of total awareness redirected into intimate, up-close and small processes of becoming.
read: Deluze & Guattari 'A Thousand Plateaus'
"many orchids have evolved to resemble species of wasps; wasps, in turn, pollinate their respective orchids out of desire, attraction, and pleasure. The two are an assemblage: a relationship that requires contact, resonance, and dialogue, connecting with the flows of everyday life and lives that flow into one another, corporeal and affective, desirous, productive, and reproductive. It is not so much that the wasp and orchid 'need' each other in this relationship: rather, they "become other" in encountering each other.* They construct new forms of life through their relationship.
*mimesis
the wasp and the orchid challenge us to move away from current activist mentalities, accentuated even further in the crisis: 'the world is in trouble! We gotta do something right now!" Becoming necessitates a different focus in our organising: AFFECTS, DESIRES, COMUNING, ENGAGING IN ENCOUNTER AND DIALOGUE. here is where new subjectivities, arrangements, and relationships arise, leading to new possibilities of what we could be.
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