openhagen

UNIVERSITETET ER EN FABRIK - STREJK! BESÆT!

ask — 2011-03-22T18:07:35Z

openhagen erklærer sin uforbeholdne støtte til de københavnske universitetsbesættelser som modsvar og alternativ til varegørelse og afdemokratisering af vores fælles produktion af viden. Vi er ingens råstof. Vi er alle studerende!

Teksten kan også hentes som pdf. her

- Blog

RETTEN TIL BYEN

ask — 2011-02-17T16:36:50Z

Den 26. Februar inviterer openhagen til debat i cafeen i Folkets Hus med forfatter og aktivist Peter Birke fra Hamburg. Her vil Peter blandt andet fortælle om arbejdet med at opbygge netværket Recht-auf-Stadt i Hamburg, og de problemer, udfordringer og muligheder, det har ført med sig.

Som svar på ekstreme sociale og økonomiske omvæltninger samt benhård kontrol og repression, har urbane sociale bevægelser i en række metropoler verden over de senere år samlet sig under parolen ‘retten til byen'.

Alt fra kampen for et sted og bo i kriseramte amerikanske byer til folkelige kampagner mod upopulære megaprojekter har benyttet sig af denne idé om retten til byen som ‘arbejdsslogan og politisk idé' (David Harvey). Men hvad vil det sige? Hvad betyder det at have retten til byen? Hvis ret og hvilken by er det præcis, vi taler om?

Arrangementet finder sted fra 16-18 i Café Under Konstruktion, Folkets Hus

Peter Birke er ud over at være en del af Recht-auf-Stadt-Netzwerk ansat på Universität Hamburg, redaktør på Zeitschrift Sozial.Geschichte Online og har blandt andet redigeret bogen Besetze Deine Stadt – Häuserkäpmfe und Stadtentwicklung in Kopenhagen om kampen om Ungdomshuset i København.

- Blog

BZ din by!

ask — 2011-01-12T13:17:41Z

Af Anders Wohnen

BZ er en måde at komme hjemløshed til livs, det er en måde at give liv til tomme bygninger, at skabe sociale og kulturelle ikke-kommercielle projekter, der normalt anses for urentable. BZ skaber boliger for dem, som ikke har råd til at bo i byen. BZ skaber sociale og kulturelle rum i en by, der er bliver mere og mere asocial og kulturelt strømlinet.

Så hvorfor er der ingen, der besætter i København? Der burde være grunde nok til at gøre det. Livet i byen er blevet ubetaleligt for mange. Boligpriserne er helt ude af proportion, luksusbutikker og dyre cafeer skyder op overalt, mens alternative rum, som ikke baserer sig på forbrugerisme og ejendomsret, forsvinder. Hvor skal man gå hen, hvis man ikke vil shoppe, men bare hænge ud, hvor skal man gå hen, hvis man bare vil være til? Hvorfor, spørger jeg, er der ingen der besætter i København?

Selvfølgelig har en stigende kontrol og repression samt omfattende ejendomsspekulation gjort det vanskeligt, at opbygge en egentlig BZ-bevægelse i København, ja, vanskeligt at besætte i det hele taget. Vanskeligt at indtage et rum uden at blive kylet ud på røv og albuer i løbet af no time. Vanskeligt men ikke umuligt. Det burde efterhånden stå klart for enhver, at huslejeprisernes himmelflugt og den ekskluderende forbrugskultur, som har overtaget vores by, er uholdbar. En BZ-bevægelse burde have et stærk moralsk kort på hånden. Det handler om at spille kortet rigtigt.

Og så handler det om at gentænke mål og midler i kampen om retten til byen. Lidt simplificeret kunne man måske skelne mellem to former for BZ. Dels findes der, den form, hvor mennesker indtager en bygning eller et byrum, som de ikke har ejendomsret over, fordi de ganske enkelt mangler et tag over hovedet, fordi de mangler et sted at være, et sted at bo. Derudover kunne man tale om en mere entreprenøriel form for BZ, der indtager rum, for at skabe rammerne for sociale og kulturelle non-profitprojekter for radikal politik, debat og aktion samt betalelig underholdning, mad, sociale servicer osv.

I København er de to kampe i dag totalt adskilte. Vi har de sidste mange fokuseret ret ensidigt på kampen for sociale centre. Vi har fokuseret på Ungdomshuset, på Folkets Hus, på Bolsjefabrikken. Vi har glemt at forbinde kampen for alternative steder og frirum med et fundamentalt krav om et billigt sted at bo, et krav om et tag over hovedet. Uden dette krav bliver vores sociale centre alt for lette at inkorporere i en kommerciel agenda for den kreative by. En by, der har så hårdt brug for denne type entreprenøriel kultur til at profilere sig i den globale konkurrence mellem byer som Berlin, New York, Tokyo osv.

Hvis vi kan lykkes med at genforene kampen for sociale centre og frirum i byen med kampen om retten til et sted at bo, kunne vi have en virkelig stærk sag. Bystyret i København vil så gerne have alternative steder og kultur, de vil gerne have kreative unge til at gøre byen spændende og ‘edgy'. Vi må insistere på, at hvis de vil have det, vil vi også have et ordentlig sted at bo i byen, vi vil have ret til at bruge byen på vores præmisser og ikke blot udfylde kommunens eller det private erhvervslivs behov. Og vi vil have en ordentlig løn for det vi skaber, og vi vil have det for alle.

At kræve et hus til alternativ kultur passer så fint ind i den pengemaskine, som byen blevet de senere år. Men at kræve et hus til alternativ kultur samt andre måder at bo og være sammen på, andre måder at tænke og tale om politik på, andre måder at være til på i det hele taget som bryder fundamentalt med den måde, som byen tænkes i dag − det er et potentielt sprængfarligt krav. Vi har ret til byen, vi har ret til at være i den, bruge den og forme den på vores præmisser uden at have røven fuld af penge. Ved at besætte vores by, kunne vi kræve denne ret.

Hvad må der gøres?

1. Vi må kortlægge tomme, uudnyttede bygninger og steder i København og gøre denne oversigt tilgængelig for alle.

2. Vi må opbygge et netværk og en kampagne, der sætter fokus på brugsret og deltagerdemokrati. Vi kunne kalde denne kampagne for “Retten til Byen”. (Dette spørgsmål om retten til byen, kræver naturligvis en lang række svære diskussioner og forhandlinger, for eksempel spørgsmålet om hvis ret, vi taler om, når vi taler om retten til byen. Dem må vi tage. Dem er vi nød til at tage – på den hårde måde.)

3. Vi må begynde at indtage tomme rum i byen og indrette dem, så de passer til vores behov og ønsker. (Det er klart, at det er langt vanskeligere at opbygge et socialt rum, hvor vi både bor og producerer end for eksempel at organisere en aktion eller en fest – for eksempel kan der nemt opstå hierarkier i brugsretten, når nogen rent faktisk bor i i disse rum. Men det bør ikke afholde os fra at gå i gang med det samme, at begynde at eksperimentere her og nu – på den hårde måde.)

4. Vi må bruge denne BZ-bevægelsens mulige genkomst som en anledning til at begynde opbygningen af ny slags by – en by, der har mennesker i centrum frem for profit og pamperi.

BZ din by!

The City is Our Factory

2010-11-25T13:09:57Z

Aktivisten og billedkunstneren Christoph Schäfer holder oplæg om bypolitik, kunst og aktivisme i Hamburg i Folkets Hus, 3. sal lørdag d. 27. november kl 15.

Christoph Schäfer er en konceptuel kunstner og aktivist med virke i Hamburg. Siden begyndelsen af halvfemserne har han arbejdet med urbane problemstillinger, og hvordan byen kan ændres ved hjælp af kunst som politisk redskab. Hans arbejde tager udgangspunkt i detaljerede observationer af hverdagen og er udviklet ud fra et bymæssigt vokabularium.

Som en del af Park Fiction projektet som er en nyskabt park i Skt. Pauli, er han engageret i udvikling af nye subjektiviteter i byen og i kollektive og alternative definitioner af det offentlige rum. Med Park Fiction deltog han i den internationale kunstudstiling Documenta 11 i 2002. Et år senere organiserede han den internationale konference 'Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space' (med Margit Czenki og Christiane Mennicke). Som gæst på Saraj Media Lab har han forsket i uregelmæssige bosættelser i megabyer Delhi og Kolkatta. I samarbejde med Max Mueller Bhawan producerede han værket Melrose Place_d i Bangalore, der beskæftiger sig med den gensidige påvirkning af teknologi, medier og det urbane felt. Hans videoinstallation Hoang's Bistro omhandler en voksende vietnamesisk skyggeby i Leipzig i relation med 'the shrinking cities' i Østtyskland. Hans TemacaféSaloon La Realidad åbnede i Kunsthaus Dresden i 2006. Siden 2008 har Christoph Schäfer været en del af "Es Regnet Kaviar" (Det regner kaviar) - Action Network against gentrification" og beboer-organisationen NoBNQ. I 2010 producerede han et "Anti-Monument for den Røde Ruhr hær" i Essen og Dortmund. Hans første bog med tegninger og tekster "The City is Our Factory" blev udgivet i år af Spector bøger Leipzig.

Arrangeret af Openhagen.net

Pxrat-cd release fest!!

slashg — 2010-08-18T08:22:18Z

– Se mere på facebook

INTERSQUAT – Festival i Berlin i september

ask — 2010-07-01T09:25:20Z

INTERSQUAT – Festival in Berlin from 10th until 19th of September 2010

Let's come together to provide a base for discussions, introducing different thoughts, initiating meetings, linking each other, developing new perspectives and creating a self-determined and autonomous free space from 10th until 19th of September 2010 at the Berlin INTERSQUAT Festival.

Being inspired by other INTERSQUAT-Festivals, which took place at different locations all over the world, we want to develop our utopian ideas at the INTERSQUAT festival in Berlin with you together. The possibilities to live a self-determined life are gradually being restricted. Many of the existing structures of squats and autonomous spaces are strongly threatened to become extinct. As a result more and more spaces disappear and with them the attached chance to organize ourselves, to discuss, to exchange experiences and to develop alternatives to given structures, go also.

From our point of view, it is necessary to criticise capitalism, leadership and the ruling structures in an all-embracing way. Hence we want to discuss about alternatives, experience the exchange and reflect on counter-structures against discrimination of living beings. Free spaces are spaces where all creatures can live without being discriminated because of gender, skin colour, sexuality preferences, money or other inequalities created by society. Since all kinds of repression are present in our daily life, it is important to create and preserve spaces where such constructed inequalitites are not only accepted, but are discussed and reflected. Those spaces should enable us to live and act out our own identity and make it possible to freely evolve our ways of life. We try to live by detaching ourselves from those repressions and social constructions, making people aware of them and sensitive to them.

The so called gentrification will catch up with all of us if we don't make a stand against it. The process of “upgrading” cities does not just force squats and autonomous spaces all over the world to give way to profit-making projects. New houses are built and old buildings glance in a gleam of light after being profitably refurbished, rents are rising as a consequence. As a result, people with low wages and those who are discriminated by the structure of society are being moved to the outskirts. Movements working against this social injustice are often criminalized. Moreover through repressive measures their possibilities to act is muted. The festival provides space to link and solidarise with each other and to be able to act against repressive measures in a more effective way.

Within a diverse and powerful frame the festival offers enough space for self-organized actions, discussions, workshops, information events, exhibitions, music and art as one way to protest and develop ideas. There will also be a free flea market which is supposed to make a breakthrough the capitalistic understanding of money values and prices.

Topics to be talked about could be: How does gentrification show up in different cities? Whats the situation of squats and autonomous spaces all over the world? How can we network in a more efficient way? How can we reach stronger solidarity with our forms of protest and actions?

Since the discussion about free spaces is extremely complex and often includes a variety of subtopics, the festival will provide space for discussing these subtopics as a matter of course, e.g. anti-sexism and the negotiation of leadership.

Of course sexism, racism, all other kinds of discrimination, and the transfiguration of hierarchical structures are neither tolerated nor accepted on the festival!!!

Let us share our ideas and imagination of a free and wild life. The festival grows with you! If you want to do a workshop or an information meeting, initiate a discussion, show your music, art or if you have some ideas or topics for the festival, write to us at: intersquat-berlin@riseup.net

Bring your tents, ideas and your unstoppable wild passion!

openhagen university på Overgaden 26/6-15/8 2010

jeppe — 2010-06-25T14:04:09Z

På udstillingen "Danmark 2010 - en vejledning til nationen for 'verdens lykkeligste folk'" på Overgaden opstår openhagen university for en kort stund. Med et gør-det-selv kursus sættes der skarpt på Irakkrigen og Danmark som krigsførende nation. Her følger kursusbeskrivelsen og kursusplanen:

Det er ikke noget vi tror. Vi ved det

Danmark som krigsførende nation i et globalt perspektiv

Gør-det-selv studiekreds

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know.” Donald Rumsfeld

Hvad ved vi egentlig om krigene i Afghanistan og Irak? Hvad ved vi om krig i det hele taget? Formålet med kurset er, at belyse spørgsmål om krig i det 21. århundrede fra forskellige vinkler. Økonomisk, politisk, socialt. Hvad er krigens årsager, dens konsekvenser og på hvilke måder legitimeres den i dag?

Vi har til dette gør-det-selv-kursus sammensat en række tekster, der mere eller mindre direkte har spørgsmålet om krig i kølvandet på 11. September og invasionen af Afghanistan og Irak som omdrejningspunkt, for herigennem at samle et værktøjsbælte af ideer og begreber, der kan ruste os til bedre at forstå Danmark som krigsførende nation i 2010.

For hvad handler det om? Det handler om at vælte en diktator. Det handler om masseødelæggelsesvåben. Det er en del af ‘kampen mod terrorisme'. Det handler om at forsvare demokratiet. Sådan i bestemt ental. Den danske statsminister troede ikke blot, at der var masseødelæggelsesvåben, han vidste det. Det giver ingen mening at diskutere med den slags løgne.

En kritisk tilgang må hæve diskussionen og undersøge perspektiverne i den nuværende globale geopolitiske situation. Vi må kigge nærmere på krigens hvorfor og hvordan i dag med særligt henblik på udarbejdelsen af alternativer – ikke blot til krig og konflikt, men også i høj grad til de sociomaterielle strukturer, der indrammer og afføder krig i det 21. århundrede.

Kursusplan

1. Krig som primitiv akkumulation

David Harvey, “Accumulation by Disposession” fra The New Imperialism

Naomi Klein, “Iraq, Full Circle: Overshock” fra The Shock Doctrine

Forslag til diskussion:

Hvilken rolle spiller krigsførelse i det neoliberale globaliseringsprojekt? Sammenlign herunder Harvey og Kleins forståelse af primitiv akkumulation i forbindelse med krig.

2. Demokrati og undtagelsestilstand

Jacques Rancière, “Of War as the Supreme Form of Advanced Plutocratic Consensus” fra Dissensus (2010)

Jean-Claude Paye, “The State of Emergency as the Empire's Mode of Governance” (2004)

Giorgio Agamben, “The State of Exception as a Paradigm of Government” fra State of Exception (2005)

Forslag til diskussion:

Paye, Agamben og Rancière påpeger alle, hvordan krigen bruges til, eller har som sin effekt, at underminere henholdsvis demokrati og retssikkerhed. Hvori består deres argumentation for denne kritik, og i hvilken grad er det tale om en samstemmende analyse mellem de tre?

3. Imperiet eller ny kolonialisme?

Tariq Ali, “Recolonizing Iraq” fra New Left Review (maj/juni 2003)

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, “War” fra Multitude (2004)

Forslag til diskussion:

Diskuter i hvilken grad krigen i Irak kan ses som en fortsættelse af vestlig kolonial praksis eller hvorvidt, der er tale om en ny geopolitisk situation.

4. Fra alterglobalisering til antikrigsbevægelse

Aufheben, “A phenomenal anti-war movement?” fra Aufheben #12

Franco ‘Bifo' Berardi, “The warrior, the merchant and the sage” uddrag oversat fra Il sapiente, il mercante, il guerriero: dal rifiuto del lavoro all'emergere del cognitariato (2004)

George Caffentzis, “Respect Your Enemies - The First Rule of Peace” (2003)

Forslag til diskussion:

På baggrund af hvilke argumenter mobiliseredes der til de omfattende protester mod krigene i Afghanistan og Irak i starten af århundredet, og hvordan kan disse protester siges dels at adskille sig fra og dels bygge videre på alterglobaliseringsprotesterne fra omkring årtusindskiftet?

5. Grunden til at vi er civiliserede og de er barbarer

Slavoj Žižek, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category” fra Violence (2008)

Wendy Brown, “Subjects of Tolerance: Why We are Civilized and They are Barbarians” fra Regulating Aversion (2006).

Forslag til diskussion:

Diskuter ideen om liberal tolerance og dens rolle i forbindelse med krigene i Irak og Afghanistan. Hvordan kan vi i forlængelse heraf forstå de voldsomme ydmygelser i Abu Ghraib og deres masserepræsentation?

6. (Post)Moderne Krigsførelse

Eyal Weizman, “Urban Warfare: Walking Through Walls” fra Hollow Land: Isreal's Architecture of Occupation (2007)
Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption” fra Theory and Event (10:2, 2007)

Forslag til diskussion:

Diskuter hvordan fjenden konceptualiseres i nutidens kamp mod ikke-statslige voldsaktører, samt hvilke militære strategier, der udvikles til at svare på dette fjendebillede.

7. Stat, suverænitet & krig

Michel Wieviorka, “New Paradigm of Violence” fra Jonathan Friedman (red.), Globalization, the State and Violence

Antonio Negri & Eric Alliez, “Fred og Krig” fra Karin Hindsbo & Mikkel Bolt (red.) City Rumble
Mikkel Thorup & Morten Brænder, “Staten og dens udfordrere  vold som terror eller krig” fra Antiterrorismens idéhistorie

Forslag til diskussion:

Hvilken rolle spiller antiterrorisme historisk i opbyggelsen af nationalstatens voldsmonopol, og kan man i dag ane en lignende bevægelse mod en ny suverænitetsform i den globale ‘krig mod terror'.

8. Danmark som krigsførende nation

Statsministeriet, “Pressemøde den 21. marts vedr. Irak. Statsministerens indledende bemærkninger”

Folketinget, “Forslag til folketingsbeslutning om dansk militær deltagelse i en multinational indsats i Irak”  Forslag samt debat på webarkiv.ft.dk

Forslag til diskussion:

Diskuter med udgangspunkt i de foregående tekster beslutningsgrundlaget for Danmarks deltagelse i Irak-krigen.

Sammenlign Danmarks rolle med de andre aktører i krigsalliancen / Hvilken rolle spiller Danmark i Imperiet?

Overvej evt. alternativer til nationalstat, kapitalisme og krig.

openhagen university v/ Tina Helen, Jeppe Wedel-Brandt & Ask Katzeff

Speculating on Housing

ask — 2010-06-16T12:20:59Z

by Anthony Iles

Illustration by Rachel Baker

Preamble/Intro

This ongoing proseexperiment uses fiction to think through the present housing situation in London after the financial crisis.

Connecting struggles against gentrification, inflation and privatisation, the Egg, a phantom organisation, seeks to intervene in the crisis by updating existing tactics as well as inventing new tricks of its own. Through the vehicle of fiction as speculative thought it tries to test a number of possible scenarios and actions as radical responses to the crisis.

There is and has been a housing crisis in London for over 15 years. At the same time the financial services sector, the primary profit-making industry in the UK, has been plunged into crisis through it's interweaving of new financial products with a boom in housing speculation. Homeowners have been re-using their houses as credit cards (re-mortgaging) and banks have been re-packaging mortgage debt to leverage huge sums of cheap liquidity for further speculation on the world market. Since 'the' crash, UK government response has been a series of bank bailouts, quantitative easing (printing money to facilitate lending) and lowering interest rates to stimulate the housing market. In 2009 the whole house of cards is still tumbling down and a carnival of values is in train.

An earlier version of the story, 'The Bloody Hamper', was written for the Happy Hypocrite magazine, August, 2009. Elements of this text were distributed as a pamphlet 'Speculating on Housing' at Undoing the City, May 2009.

Thanks in particular to Alessandra Chilá, John Cunningham, Megan Fraser, Maria Fusco, Chris Jones, Fanny Lacroix, Monsier and Frére Dupont, Max Reeves, David Panos, Tim Savage, Benedict Seymour, Keston Sutherland and John Wollaston for inspiration and support.

TEXT BEGINS

Gav, Penny, Ayanna and Rag are in the Palm Tree, a pub in Mile End park, East London. The Palm Tree was the last in a row of buildings to survive aerial bombing of the area in World War II.

Gav: The Egg is a phantom organisation... it's an idea, it's not something you can join.

Penny: But what's the point of a group you can't join. What does it do? What does it have to do with us and our work?

Gav: The Egg has nothing to do with work! If anything it undoes any compulsion to do.

Ayanna: Sounds just elitist nonsense to me. Where's your head at these days Gav? I mean where have you been – you've not been to any of the meetings these days, No Borders, the G20 organising meetings. I mean fuck, you didn't even come to the G20 at all. Where's your commitment Gav?

Gav: Fuck all that. I'm so past it all. I got fed up of all the misplaced recognition, false dueness, the spectacle, the ideological kettling, the fucking lifestyle of it all, the reformism, the lazy thinking.

Penny: So I get it, you've invented a phantom organisation so that you can play chief, so that you don't have to put up with other people's stupid opinions! You're a fucking elitist wanker Gav.

Gav: Fuck it, fuck it I knew I shouldn't have told you about it. I knew you lot wouldn't understand.

Silence for a few minutes as Gavin, (hurt), stands nursing his beer.

Gav: Listen guys. I'm sorry. I really want you to understand this idea and get behind it. I'll try to explain. The Egg is an idea, but its also more than that. The Egg acts upon what isn't acted upon, what is ignored in the activist scene, in politics. We have this problem in the activist scene that our politics is reactive, our actions defensive – against new laws, against police repression and so on. The Egg is about exacerbating the contradictions and conflicts. Its about...

Penny: This sounds like Class War redux...

Ayanna: ...Nah Penny... let him speak. Go on Gav, I wanna hear this.

Gav: ...It's about seizing upon this crisis, deepening it, making it pregnant with change. The Egg doesn't recruit and it isn't clandestine either. The Egg is present as potentiality, it would turn the inside of our politics out – but it never gets actualised. What sounds like a turning away and inwards is actually an opening out. The Egg is real, in many ways it's more real than the IWW or the GMB, some activist campaign or whatever.

Rag: Are we gonna bomb shit? Totally fuck the system?

Gav: (laughing)... Shut up Rag. I'm serious. The Egg is a proposition, its a structure for thinking some things through, a carrier or vehicle if you like, but I've got other ideas too... lets go outside.

The crew heads out into the garden. Gav gestures towards the huge blocks of nearly finished luxury flats on the other side of the canal from the park and group sits down on the grass directly opposite one of the blocks. 'Fucking cunt stables' Rag offers nonchalantly, echoing the graffiti he has taken to daubing on luxury flats around Brick Lane.

The group discusses the housing situation after the credit crunch – thinking through the campaigns they have been involved in; occupations, community campaigns to save Queen St Market, Defend Council Housing. Ayanna raises the reformist nature of these campaigns. She suggests that even with these limits, 'its always good to get involved... y'know meeting real people'. Gav agrees, 'yeah there is the necessity of acting in real situations with all their contradictions, but I don't know about “real people”: I mean what the fuck is a real person anyway! I'm not, I don't know if I want to be one!'.

Breaking the silence Gav gestures again, 'the flats...' Penny second guesses him, 'you wanna squat them?'. 'Bagsy the penthouse' she shouts, beaming at the others.

Ayanna is riding the Docklands Light Railway train passing through Deptford. The landscape is typically post-industrial, battered by recent regeneration, most the built fabric is obscured by billboards and placards promising new buildings and new residents. The odd church or cathedral-like factory juts above the grey horizon and below small winding roads around the docks and light-industrial units have been reduced to mud tracks by the intensive transport of construction materials. As the train cuts a curve across the neighbourhood close to where she grew up and left home as a teenager, Ayanna's thoughts turn to her dad and his struggles.

He was a union militant in the 1960s as a West Indian bus driver. Whilst there were strikes on he was popular, active, full of energy constantly running to meetings, house to house to communicate news, write and distribute literature. Yet, beyond this role he never had many friends in the neighbourhood. His work kept him out of the pubs and really the white guys at work never wanted to hang around him outside of picket lines and meetings. Later, after they'd moved down to Lewisham, Ayanna's mum got involved in anti-fascist community organising. Her dad never wanted to get involved, somehow he fully supported her mother but he'd never attend demos or meetings. Too much violence, he said. He didn't see race as the premise for political activity. Arguments used to rage in the house 'til all hours.

As Ayanna grew up this domestic conflict had formed her identity and her politics, she understood her mum and followed her, but she'd never understood fully why. On the one hand her dad identified as a worker, but on the other, outside of work he couldn't seem to see any politics. He couldn't see any politics in himself only in his situation at work.

One of her dad's campaigns in the early 1960s was an attempt to get the bus companies to recognise 'Busman's stomach', a condition by which bus drivers suffered stress and gastric problems due to long hours spent sitting still over a running engine.

Ayanna thought of the contradictions between this social resistance to work – its intimate bodily character – and the ordered masculinity and bureaucracy of organisation around it. This to her was the key to her dad's own contradictory sense of himself – as a worker he fought against work, but outside of it he was lost. She thought of this division through two figures – Artaud and Stalin – the permanent revolt of Antonin Artaud contrasted with the paternalism of Stalin. She empaphiseded with Artaud's visceral speech and aspired to the same immediacy of gesture and emotion that he flung about and embodied. She imagined her dad as Stalin with stomach cramps. Onwards her thoughts drifted to Amadeo Bordiga's fame as the last person to insult Stalin to his face and survive. He had addressed the great dictator as 'Il Bufo' – the buffoon. There are no more dictators to insult, no organised workers parties to subvert or berate for their conservatism, but where had all that energy gone? Where had those tensions transported themselves?

Ayanna pondered on how the Egg might apply itself to this divide in the militant tradition. Should the split be resolved or merely deepened, made coarser and more present? How could the body be brought in again, not as expressive of identity but of struggle, rebellion and suffering life? As these thoughts developed Ayanna began to jot down notes on her forearm in black biro, it would be exactly this question that she would apply herself to at the next meeting. She felt animated. She'd never really been into Gav's plans, usually finding them too esoteric and impractical. Somehow this one was doing it for her, chiming with something that she'd been working through in her head herself.

As the unmanned train steered silently into Canary Wharf Ayanna felt something moving inside – organs, parts and senses swept ahead to meet accelerating thoughts – a pull like a current by which old ideas begin to loosen and flow in new directions.

the locals have the blotchy pallor of cave-dwelling consumptives – Unknown Glasgow city politician

At the beginning of the first meeting Rag is on fire: 'Right, first we start with this idea of 'the locals'. I hated all that shit around Queen's Market – 'locals this, community that ... I mean, why identify with a regeneration agency-made pariah? First of all communities are built upon exclusion, they need recognisable limits to function. Not only do those limits exclude, but there's a violence that patrols their perimeters. The best moments in that campaign were when people opened up and talked about the repressive self-policing that circulated in their immediate social world – how glad they were that the occupation had exploded some of that. Secondly, whenever we spoke in the terms of community and rights that we were already defeated. I'm not doing anything in the name of community ever again.' As the four activists debated their problems with past and future operations Rag would explain how, as he grasped it, the Egg could produce the spectre of an imagined community, but one which offers only anonymity and temporary shelter to its adherents – 'an operational space, not an end in itself'.

Penny disagreed with Rag's harsh dismissal of what for her was the first time she'd been involved with people struggling for immediate improvement of their own conditions. Taking something back. She said that she too had trouble with the word 'community', it rolled off the tongue of politicians and privatisers as easily as off those of anarchists but seemed to pass most people by. Loose thoughts on stuff she'd been reading around 'immunisation' – something about how exclusionary communities could be thought in biological terms. Turning to the recent global pandemic of swine flu, Penny wondered if the others too recognised it as a disciplinary device acting most directly on the poor and weak.

They talked over Giorgio Agamben's description of the biological foundations of the organisation of the cities around two diverging disciplinary models – the treatment of leprosy and the control of the plague. The paradigm of leprosy is one of exclusion: lepers must be moved outside the city and a neat division between outside and inside needs to be established. The plague was a different model: those afflicted by it cannot be excluded and the city is divided into areas; each area, street and home is then placed under strict surveillance and control.

Later they would explore the idea of illness and seek ideas for how to put Penny's talk of 'using illness as a weapon' into practice. Did Agamben's ideas mean accepting weakness and sickness, bringing it into the city again, bringing it into their politics?

They'd agreed early on they didn't always feel the need to carry out every idea and make it a practical instrument, Gav was very wary of this, but each of them found they could personalise this idea – relate it to their own experience of what Penny, when she'd talked about her eczema in the pub, had called her 'social leprosy'.

Each of them had found something of their own bodily disgusting or socially punishable at some point. Whether it was Rag's dislike of hygiene, his green hair and self-inflicted piercings or Ayanna's early experience of the medicalisation of her sexuality by her mum or Gav's relationship to his brother's downs syndrome. They thought about how they each used these relations of exclusion to orient themselves to the world differently. Was there advantage to be taken, could these be used to force the world to reorient itself towards them on their own terms?

Ayanna brought up Busman's stomach and the thoughts she had been having about this struggle around the suffering working body. She pointed out that although throughout the 'boom' official unemployment had remained low, this hid a sickly demographic of two million on incapacity benefit. Incapacity meaning incapacity to work, incapacity to 'get along' – two million British subjects leaning on the State to prop them up through otherwise unbearable lives. Inadmissible forms of life – the medicalisation of the refusal of work.

Penny responded: 'So, the point is rather than propping up some repressive social form or trying to save something which has been lost, instead we should think about how we can go on the offensive? How can we dynamise these mutations in subjectivity and resistance? How can we make shelter and power as feral and sick subjects in need of nothing but further disrepair?'

As usual Penny's enthusiasm was in disproportion to her earlier distrust for the new. They all laughed. 'Nice one Penny! You're on one! You killed it.' Rag scoffed and staggered off. 'My round'. When Rag returned with the drinks they got down to more concrete business, discussing the occupation of the luxury flats. They agreed on a plan begin scoping out the canal and river for likely targets, checking access and security, making lists and meeting again to decide who to involve.

Like the sons of Freud's mystical primitive father, who after uniting in homosexual bond find the strength to kill him, but are then overtaken by remorse and establish in memory and substitution for the father the totem, the phallic fetish, so the homosexuals who meet in liberation groups are largely powerless against the attack from the superego that immediately assails them, and find themselves forced to establish in their midst leaders, phallic and charismatic figures who “command” them, personifying the authority of the superego that binds every individual member of the group with a sense of guilt.

Ayanna threw the pamphlet down in the corner of the room and began scrabbling through her bag looking for a cigarette filter – there were always plenty of them floating about the bottom of her rucksack. As she smoked she stared at the stark black lines of the now upside down cover of the pamphlet – 'Towards a Gay Communism'.

Ayanna didn't think much of Freud, but she loved Mieli and was chuffed to find him rounding on the group. She'd long suffered the tyranny of groups, through her mum and dad's activism she'd been habituated to group situations since a small child. Oddly reassuring yet also somehow inhibiting for her. She always felt she'd have to escape groups before she could become herself – a self that she could fully command.

Ayanna had identified as queer since she met her first girlfriend at 15, but like every other political scene she'd been through, there was always some sort of unquestioned consensus that weighed on her, which made her want to disrupt and question the group. Groups invent themselves on common assumptions and she felt that for that commonality to work, too much difference had to be suspended. More and more she found she could better explore her own infinite capabilities to be differently with the stream of lovers, sometimes strangers, with whom she shared her bed, than these lefties who identified so closely together and squeezed out any challenge to their collectivity.

Now, as she continued to think through the previous night's meeting she felt there really was the possibility that the Egg could be a vehicle of exodus from what to her was a tired and restraining scene. They'd begun to discuss in common not only their politics but how they actually felt their way through them – singularly and collectively. She knew that if the Egg was to realise this possibility it would need to move beyond the small self-selecting group that had formed around it. Ayanna felt strongly that they would have to round on themselves to destroy and re-make what had brought them together. She'd have to make some moves if she was really going to really test this form. Picking up Mieli's pamphlet again Ayanna quickly jotted out some points on a piece of paper to take with her on tonight's mission. While they waited in the shadows of the yuppie hutches she'd try out some ideas on Gav and Rag. She knew she could have some fun with Rag – he'd always enjoy a bit of dyke banter, but in reality he was up tight about questioning the supposedly solid foundations of his own heterosexual status. She headed out the door. This was going to be difficult. Difficult fun. Ha!

Ayanna, Gav and Rag had been hiding out for hours, waiting for the security shifts to change so they could record the hours the guards rotated.

They were on a mission together, Ayanna, Gav and Rag, but Ayanna had a second mission. She wanted to puncture the separation between the conversations leading up to the action and the practical task of getting in the building. Now was the time, and thus exactly the awkward time to bring up some difficult thoughts. She'd brought her notes from Mieli and was winding up the other two by bombarding them with her thoughts on Mieli's Gay Communism: 'Gav, read this: “the object of the revolutionary struggle of homosexuals is not that of winning social tolerance for gays, but rather the liberation of the homoerotic desire in every human being.” That means... rather than you two having some liberal responsibility to tolerate me and my “perversions”... it's actually the other way round. I, through the practice of my desire, liberate you!'

Gav raises his hands to his head. There was not really space to entertain such a gesture and the other two didn't really register it or take any notice. Rag: 'Thanks Ayanna! So I can just carry on as before shaking hands with the unemployed and you'll do the liberation bit! Cheers! Thanks a lot... now that's liberation baby.'

'Quiet'. The group held still for a moment. They stared at each other beaming, enjoying the power over themselves that it took them to hold in the laughter and maintain calm. When the stillness seemed to have overtaken their bodies again Ayanna continued to unravel her notes and fill the other two in on how Towards a Gay Communism went to work on groups. Gav waited patiently before responding, 'Obviously there's a...' 'Wait!' Ayanna interrupted, 'NOTHING IS EVER FUCKING OBVIOUS!'.

Silence. And they all breathe in again. Gav says, 'delete that word'. He breathes deeply, before beginning again stuttering. '... t t there's a strong tradition of communists who became disaffected with groups and turn themselves to the task of internal critique. Jacques Camatte, Sam Moss, Debord even... you get this from anti-psychiatry too. Gangs, council communism, the working class, schizophrenia – each provided the promesse de bonheur, the sacred or profane form. The question of organisation is ultimately not resolvable, but it could be that the destruction wrought by internal critique is productive. Prompting splits, an endless secession rather than endless revolution. Though we are constantly being duped into believing in, and identifying with images of individuals which are not ourselves – we are duped into thingness, yet the revolutionary organisation also does not provide an answer in the dissolution in the crowd, the singular identification does not speak poverty to the richness myriad possible alternative attachments...'

'...There he is. Duck you sucker!', Rag whispers as Gav finishes his short sermon.

They would wait another hour in silence before speaking again. After this intermission they went to work. Rag takes total control. Leading them along an unfinished ditch at the side of the building, they followed the curved grey wall tightly to the back of the building away from the canal and the bright lights checking the entrances, door sizes, locks and windows. At the far southern corner of the building next to an unfinished pit with a drain at its base they find a door ajar and slip inside.

The next day Gav and Rag are sitting in an Irish pub in Stoke Newington, the kind of place where everyone looks conspiratorial, they blend in with the furniture. Rag's relating his experiences with sound systems he used to run with in the 1990s, Desert Storm and Exodus. '...cos there we're plenty of conversations during quiet times, but when we had stuff to do we didn't wait to think about it all that much, it was always just a question of where, when and how to get in. Brute force...' he laughs, '... and a bit of canny timing that's gonna do the trick.'

Reminding Rag they not here for idle chatter, Gav wants to know how they're going to defend the building once they've got in. They've enough people to get in and they know the entrances they're going to use, how to get the security off their backs for enough time to seal the place... Gav stands up, 'I know. We use a flash mob. I'll call a flash mob outside the Comedy Cafe – 400 people dressed as clowns miming the words to the Beatles “Hard Days Night” should provide enough of a distraction to get in. After we're in we'll send down a crew to bring the clowns in and party. At noon a massive banner drop off the top of the building. The banner says “Here we make ourselves anew – Free Housing for All!”. That's it!'

'Great', Rag mumbles '...but still way too Leninist for me'. He strolls off to bar. Gav calls him 'a cunt' under his breath. Presage the first split.

End of the night. Gav and Rag are standing waiting for buses going in opposite directions.

'After a step forward comes a split' Rag says, and turning seeing his bus rolling up the road, 'good to start with a split then. I'm off... you know everything about how to get into the building now, but I'm not down with your plan. I got my own. I'm going to approach it from another direction. I'll be in touch.'

Rag doesn't go far, but as far as the others are concerned he's gone for good, they break off all contact. He visits another building further up the canal, The Pinnacles, the building is finished, but the garden, car park and reception have not yet been completed and it looks like work has been abandoned long ago. None of the retail units around the base of the building are occupied. Rag counts 11 flats out of 90 flats occupied.

The next day he calls the company who manages security for the building. He calls the developers themselves, then the agents who manage the building for the developers. To each he puts a simple proposition, that he 'live in the building and occupy a few flats, decorating each one and giving the impression they are lived in'. From the agents he gets an appointment to meet one of them on site the following Tuesday.

Inspired by Melville's scrivener, Bartleby, Rag is on a mission to invest himself into the building as a recalcitrant employee – at first this takes a lot of groundwork, but in time he's able to make of his body a costly blockage

Initially it's just Rag, but it's not long before he smooths an entrance for others. He notices a shortfall in the cleaning services and manages to persuade the agents to take on an Ecuadorian cleaner – someone he met at his weekly adult learning classes – in exchange for a small broom cupboard and less than minimum wage Adolfo sweeps the corridors, landings and stairwells of the Pinnacles. He's surly and uncommunicative, barely exchanging a syllable with any of the other staff or residents, but when he and Rag are in private he opens up about his past in Ecuador and alienated present in London.

Officially Adolfo's staying in the broom cupboard where the cleaning products are kept, but since Rag's got three flats and by now, the second month, he's managed to purloin the keys to a further 10 vacant flats, Adolfo has his pick of places to crash out in, listen to the radio and read. By the end of the second month he begins to make a garden in one of three flats Rag is charged with making look as if inhabited. Adolfo fills the bath with soil purloined bag by bag from nearby building sites. Ferns and horsetails spill out of the bathroom and form a leafy curtain across the entrance hall, light fittings support vines and small mushroom trays spill from bedside cabinets and wardrobes.

In the coming months Adolfo will turn the flat into a rainforest – an uncommon meeting of species – blackberry plants brought from Lidl mix with seeds and fungus he's received in care-packed parcels from relatives. A reddish algae elsewhere found only in Ecuador and perhaps some few colonial botanical gardens stains the glass plates surrounding the balconies. The sprinkler system is tampered with to trigger regular rainfall every 12 hours. One day Rag notices a small plaque on the inside of the door 'Jardim Botanico Entropico' he reads. Sweet.

Kevin on the top floor isn't like the rest of the residents, a retired carpenter who's taken some sort of massive payout as a result of an industrial accident, he quickly clocks what Rag is up to. He's one of the most stalwart residents, having berated the developers for failing to fill the building, he's happy that Rag's giving this empty shell the semblance of life.

The developers had claimed they weren't getting enough revenue through maintenance to pay a receptionist. Kevin goes direct to Rag with a cash offer to find a receptionist £150 a week and 'she's got to be nice looking'. Rag thinks about the other crew, but decides to keep his distance for the time being.

He remembers Azurre the Pugliese architect he met raving in Southern Italy last summer and gives her a call. She's in London alright and not impressed with the money, but when Rag explains it's a kind of 'project' and mentions an interesting outcome, she's persuaded. 'Fucking beats working in an architects office for triple that money. It's unbelievable what they've been asking of me there, I've been working most weekends til 10 and besides, they are fucked, not enough work on the books to see them six months into this crisis! Che paranoia!' Azurre drums out all her hates and spleen for the industry, but also this firm in particular (MJT). 'They've got a top name, but their stuff is just cheapo sub-Adjaye' as far as she's concerned. She'll quit that day, she'd been waiting. It takes her exactly five minutes to delete all the CAD files she'd been working on, type out a two-line email of resignation, collect her stuff and head out the door.

Rag's happy, Azurre's got no need to be told what to do or what the plan is. Rag knows she'll make her own.

Rag and Adolfo are sitting on the decking over the canal opposite the Palm Tree pub watching the sun go down. This is their usual end of the day ritual and it usually passes in silence except on Sundays when an elderly gentleman in a motorised wheelchair rocks up and sees out the sunset booming music from the back of his vehicle. To Rag's surprise Adolfo opens the conversation. 'I'm thinking about my garden... Mr Arbour made the sign for me... I'm always thinking about my garden these days'. 'Whilst I'm looking at the pub and thinking I should have a palm tree in my garden, I'm also thinking of another garden.' Rag has learnt the art of pause hanging around this surly cleaner-gardener. He waits quite a while, until a swan below them has slowly floated by and the air has cooled slightly, before asking, 'And which garden would that be? Is there another garden in the world as beautiful as this one?'. Adolfo tells him about the other garden, the one he is thinking of, the one Pizarro's conquistadors found in a temple in Tumbes in the territory now called Colombia. 'This garden was made from silver and gold, mined by the sweat of the natives and fashioned into flowers and plants by the temples' finest craftsmen.' 'What happened to it?' Rag asked hastily, despite having already guessed the answer. Adolfo looks up at him with a look of mock surprise, 'The Spaniards melted it down and transported it across the ocean. Of course, with everything else.' Adolfo goes on, Rag is amazed to hear more words spring from his mouth in one evening than in the sum of their conversations over the last months, 'My garden is dedicated to the memory of that garden at Tumbes, but my garden works in the opposite direction. It does not spring from labour, but from entropy. It does not dissolve into value and universal equivalence. It poisons value and destroys it, it is particular and never equivalent to nothing... never.'

With Azurre taking care of things front of house, Rag retreats to one of the more isolated flats at the back of the building. With no canalside view and overlooking the unfinished gardens full of bags of cement, these were the cheapest and least desirable. Rag's got plenty of space to make as much noise as he pleases undisturbed, he's planning to go to work on something that's been a long time percolating. On the far wall of the apartment lean nine full length mirrors collected from nearby empty flats. To it's right Rag has plastered the wall with fragments of broken glass and mirrors he's found in skips and on other sites. In amidst the broken glass wall are bits of tiles, broken CDs and ribbons adding to colour to the disorienting play of reflections. Rag has rigged up one of the CCTV cameras to a Hard Disk recorder and each night he stays up till the early hours reciting political speeches dressed in a range of costumes; from drag to commedia della arte, workwear and high fashion, African and Trobriand masks. He delivers Jerry Rubin's speech outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago dressed as a Wild Man, the Marquis de Sade's 'Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans' in the costume of a petrol station attendant and the Arabic translation of Valerie Solanas' S.C.U.M Manifesto dressed as explorer Wilfred Thesiger. The great work is the recitation and recording of the 'Putney Debates' delivered in comic voices, make up and various costumes over the course of eight nights.

Rag spends the daytime lounging on the sofa snorting Ketamine and reviewing the previous night's video footage. He thinks of these performances as out of body experience, time travel and a total exorcism of all prior political histories and rituals. While he's laying this material to rest without peace he's also putting himself through intense fragmentation – a complex and generative game between selves which become increasingly distant and unrecognisable.

Four months have passed since the small group initiated by Ayanna, Gav, Penny and Rag made plans to occupy an empty luxury housing block located by Mile End Park called Pan's Court. Rag dropped out immediately before the plan was carried out, but the others, joined by marginal groups from the activist fringe and myriad lost individuals constantly turning up on their doorstep, have successfully 'held court' through the initial police harassment, seen off gangs of heavies sent by the building's managers and established themselves as a rebellious and ludic community wedged between the deprivations of crumbling post-war state-built housing and the luxury-in-ruins of a decade of speculative building.

Ayanna, Gav and Penny's execution of the plan had worked more or less perfectly – the flash mob had distracted the security for long enough for a small group to get locks on the front door and close all other exits. That was enough for legality to be established but they still had to deal with the cops. The first few days were easy, with a rolling party in the centre of the East End there were plenty of bodies to keep the cops at bay, but tired and surrounded by the detritus of 3 days partying, when the first confrontations came on Monday morning things didn't go so smooth. Plenty of plain clothes police had been at the party and they seemed to have a good scope of the building and an idea that this was not the normal party – trash and leave type job, but something more long term. However, as soon as they'd settled on a plan, and in the weeks leading up to its execution, Ayanna and Penny had worked hard to pull together a coalition of groups from the activist scene and local area to fill and use the building. An emergency text-out and a few phone calls brought between 20 – 30 people in the first half hour and within an hour there was often a crowd of 50 or so. After this the security was good and the cops realised they didn't have much chance getting near the building in a hurry, let alone with vans and equipment. Pan's Court was one of the first of a cluster of luxury blocks to be 'completed' beside the canal and facing Mile End Park. The block was entirely empty when the crew moved in and before it was an enormous trench surrounded by fencing. Access was via a mud track which met the end of a short alley onto Roman Road. For the first few days the developers' security guards had remained in their huts at the entrance to the mud track, but they cleared off when things had started to get really messy on the second day of the party. A few cider-fuelled crusties set fire to one of their two portacabins. Penny and some of the people from the sound system put it out before the fire brigade came, but the same group of crusties made a blockade at the main entrance with the remains of the blackened tar-encrusted cabin for the duration of the party. Throughout the night they tried to charge whatever entrance fee they think they can get away with – ranging from 5quid to 'give us that can then'. Nobody challenged them, not even the local kids who hung around the fringes of the party making trouble. When they cleared off on Monday morning, someone had the bright idea of setting up in the other of the two portacabins. Within a few days the occupiers of Pan's Court had got the basics of a small café running out of there and it doubled as a lookout on the street and thus the first line of security. It was a pain keeping the lookout face manned, but in retrospect, as well as being a good point of contact with labourers working on the surrounding sites, it turned out to have been the vital measure that had saved the whole place from early eviction.

The block is occupied by a floating population of between 40 and 100. An assembly has been established for each floor and each assembly meets more or less irregularly, taking responsibility to report to the large weekly, and eventually, monthly meetings and once the basic standards of waste management, electricity, water and energy provision have been established each assembly manages their floors on whatever basis they see fit.

Ayanna, Gav and Penny are in Gav's flat at Pan's Court after September's monthly meeting – an assembly of assemblies. It's late, they are all wired and each of our characters almost tastes the dry bitterness in Ayanna's voice when she spits:

'You never fuckin said it... we were going to have a meeting about “speculating on housing” and we never had it. We agreed this right from the start and we never had the discussion in the first place, you've never even tried to raise it!' Gav counters, rebounding almost mechanically to the confrontation but without much substance, 'There's just still so many people in the place I'm not sure about. I feel like I could talk to a few, sound out the ideas, but trying to insist on something concrete and meaningful with so many people, it would end up completely deformed and distorted.'

Ayanna again, but now less fiery: 'We never had the chance to talk things through. Just moved straight into occupying a place, barely thinking about it first. And when I say 'we' its a pretty stable we isn't it, just the same old gang isn't it and who are we exactly? That guy and his fucking pamphlets, he really pulled us off the rails. I mean, it's not just him who wrote this, but what the fuck have we been doing in this mess but remaking ourselves as heroic examples?'.

Ayanna especially baulks at the authority each of them wields almost purely from having been in the occupation from the beginning, but it effects the temper of the others too. Gav shies away from most it, almost dissociating himself from any responsibility for what has been established. He gets so tired of being asked what to do or what is allowed by the newcomers, that he's adopted an almost ghost-like presence in the block. The muppets who turn up and expect to be told what to do... even worse are the active types who turn up and want to tell everyone. He never attends any of the parties or workshops, he sleeps all day, works and reads at night and roams the local area in the early hours of the day. This gives him minimal exposure to the other occupants, which is how he prefers it... Penny and Ayanna had expected this. Each find something regal in Gav's remoteness and constantly admonish him for it in small ways, trying to trip him up somehow. So much discussed along the way, the anticipation of such problems had been the very foundation of the egg – and the promise to make everything new. But something still escaped proper articulation.

Gav: In many ways the discussion has already happened, or is happening.

Ayanna: Not good enough. False immediacy wotsit. Cobblers. Plus that getting involved with that fucking author guy was such a bad idea.

Penny: I agree, no good for us at all, wrong move. I'm glad we've broken off from that. Still I've got some ideas about what to do about that situation later, but first lets press on with what is actually urgent. Gav? Are we going to talk this through? Or what?

Gav: Ok. It's hard. Things I wanted to talk about back then have already shifted quite a bit. In fact we're not in the same place at all. My thinking is... My feeling is now, I mean it's changed. People gather around an event – you need an action to draw people together. Like the way a word is a bridge thrown between myself and another... it is territory shared... and an action can be the same – it's the start of a conversation not its end. People are getting on with it, y'know they are getting on... But, I mean, at the same time I admit somehow we got things mixed up. Wrong.

Penny: You pushed it! You showed us the flats! I mean why do we always have to do the action before the thinking? What are we always doing wrong?

Gav: There. Always administering blame that's what's always wrong.

Penny: It's not just me!

Gav: It's us. There. Right there and no wonder others feel no interest for us. That's it... administering blame and guilt – carrying culpability with us everywhere. What are we doing? Enough. There's no need for this. What's wrong with us? Is it just us or is it everyone?

Ayanna: No justice. Just us! Right? We! We... are just so fucking confused.

They break up with laughter

Penny: Where's Rag. We need him right now. I mean he was right to go, but we need him back, – he'll know how to change things. Instinctively. He is change.

Gav: Yer right. You're goddamn right. But that's not all. We've trapped ourselves. There's things which haven't been said. First we're going to discuss the situation. We'll call a proper housing meeting at the Court. Next we've got to get back in touch with Rag. Then we're going to decide what we do next – sorry, no we're not... We're going to do things differently from now on. First I depose myself. I am banned from leading or directing a meeting... Next... and most importantly... we're gonna have a laugh.

Laughter

The crew work the rest of the night back at Gav's 'office' space at Pan's Court, discussing who to contact and sending emails. They hammer out a rough sketch of who they are and what they want to talk about, but tailor it to the groups and individual activists they want to get in touch with. Mostly it's Penny and Ayanna's personal touch which has the final say, both of them have good relationships with a whole bunch of people who have been involved with different campaigns. They all feel there's no need just to contact people who are most active now, but instead try to find people who reflect a rich history of engagement and disengagement with activist and community politics across the previous 10 or 20 years. Gav doesn't get out much, a total fear of strangers even writing to them. At the end of the night he's done so little that under the pressure the girls pile on him to contact Rag, he crumbles and sends a humble SMS:

'hey mate, you are missed here. You were right, friendship is a gift which can't be taken back... call. Gav'

Continuing his nightly rituals, Rag has by now assembled a library of tapes, of gestures and affects.

He had formed a kind of den built from skipped ceiling tiles as a secondary stage of isolation from the penthouse. Video equipment, mirrors, building detritus litter the apartment. Rag persevered with the development, through his play, of an absolute inauthenticity. Previously Rag had found any contrivance or artifice meaningless decoration, hating theatre and fiction, in particular the annoyingpsychologisation of fictive figures. He had never been able to conceive of a work detached from life. Rag's performances attended instead to the matter of making himself an ass in a lion's skin and a king of nothing – pushing the inhabitation of other poses until they be, through his body, forced to impart the real. At present the real was taking the shape of scar tissue forming inside Rag's lungs from the asbestos dropping off the roof of the cave and onto the table where he cut his Ketamine. Ambivalent about his imminent end, he chopped out fat lines of K spelling out the various names for the possible conditions that might in time be responsible for his demise; Pulmonary fibrosis, Mesotheliomas, Asbestosis. Musing on this proximity between his own bodily mortality and endless of the death of the subject he was staging. When Rag heard the alert of an SMS he couldn't read actually the display properly, but knew it could only be Gav. Dropping the bloodstained £20 pound note next to the piles of off-white dust Rag stumbled to the corner of the room heaving a glass sheet onto the oak and glass coffee table, with the glass he squashed down the drugs, tobacco and money on the table. Sealing it all in with a few metal clips around the four corners before lumbering off to bed.

Penny takes one of her tours of the building she enjoys at least weekly. She's used to floating about between scenes, priding herself on being welcome, if not always comfortable, anywhere that people come together.

Wearing army slacks, sandals and a giant woollen cardigan, something between a rug and a cloak, Penny drifts through the corridors and walkways of Pan's Court. Initially the flat's we're modelled on dormitories, with narrow corridor space and five separate blocks, but with only a third of the actual flats lived in residents realised they could easily knock down partition walls, break locks and doors and make bridges between facing balconies. Penny hasn't visited yet, but apparently between the fourth and fifth floors some of the occupiers have knocked through the floors and air ducts to make vertical access between flats and use of wood burning stoves viable. She makes a mental note to pick up some cakes from the Brickbat Bakery later and visit those floors later this week. On the ground floor a series of unfinished retail units have been re-fashioned as meeting halls, a cinema and a crèche. Most of the spaces are run by the individual assemblies related to the layout of the blocks, but lately more open groups have formed and taken over the running of at least two of these spaces. This is the case with the crèche, it's a project between a few of the mums in the flats and local single parents. Last time Penny was there, they were having a meeting about opening up the crèche to a wider range of ages and introducing home schooling groups and so on. It seemed they would have to dispense with the name 'crèche', someone suggested 'distributed learning centre' but all agreed that sounded too New Labour and phony. Penny's proposal was to rename the centre The Great Learning, as far as she knew they were still mulling that over, she quietly hoped they'd go for it. Another group she'd heard about was the so-called 'Potlatch Block', they were quickly developing an aura of militant secrecy amongst the occupants of the flats, and Penny was determined to check them out. They'd moved into the last space in the row underneath block five – it was the roughest space still available, with one outer wall practically unfinished, no door and some breeze blocks piled bare, without cement. Penny enters under the canvas shelter covering a brick barbecue and through an improvised PVC curtain which acted as a door into the space. Ethernet, telephone and electricity cables dangle from the ceiling... and on the right hand wall a huge black sheet hangs, white Hebrew lettering cut out of cloth stitched to the black background.

צדקה

Trestle tables in front of the banner support literally heaps of food. Some neatly piled and grouped; bread, tins, etc. Some just in bags containing odd coagulations of different food types, cheese moulded around yoghurt and packets of ham. From the ceiling two smaller banners hang bearing the statements: 'Politics here is death' and 'Everyone is cheated, but not equally!'. It's a strange scene, something like a social centre but with a weird formality to the way the space has been ordered. There is mess, but the container for it possesses rare harmony.

It is quite dark when Penny enters and she barely notices two figures in the room. One is crouched at the end of the long row of trestles, slowly sorting crates of vegetables stored there. Another body lies supine on a couch in the far left corner of the room. 'Hello', offers Penny. 'Hi' replies the vegetable sorter, barely glancing over his shoulder. Penny steps back slightly to survey the scene, but her focus falls still on the activities on the figure crouched under the table. 'We've been making' says the figure on the couch, apparently not stirring from his position. 'Sorry?' Penny turning and walking towards the couch. 'We've been up late making' the figure replies sliding down on his back onto the floor and stretching his arms out then rub his head. Penny strolls over and places herself in one of the battered chairs facing this sofa. 'Hello, I'm Penny' she stares warmly at the figure waking himself. 'And. What, may I ask, have you been making?'. The guy stands up and offers his hand. 'Greg', 'That's a sort of funny question. You could say we've been making things, or trying to make things... of which we know not what they are.' Big grin from Greg as if he was looking to be asked that, he stretches a bit more and shuffles over to the trestles. 'D'you wan some coffee?'. Penny, a bit spellbound, not just by the answer she is given, but also now she notices that the guy's accent is neither exactly Californian, nor Irish, as she'd at first thought, but has an almost West Indian lilt to it, sing song somehow, light. 'Yes, I'd like that' Penny replies, immediately pleased with herself for keeping a lid on all the questions that his enigmatic answer stirred and, she hoped, she'd get to ask after the coffee was made.

Penny spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon with Greg. He'd explained the Hebrew banner and some of the principles that the Potlatch block had gathered around. The lettering on the banner spells the Hebrew word, Tzadekah, it means gleaning or charity. In Old Testament times it had worked as something like a law by which a part of each farmer's estate or harvest was left for the poor to help themselves too. Some instances of the practice still operated today, but modern observers had more or less conflated the practice with the giving of charity. Greg explained how he interpreted the word and its history – as a history of taking rather than giving. He explained how he was working with the potlatch block to realise aspects of a gift economy at Pan's Court and in the surrounding area. They would soon have a free shop, a free kitchen, a free larder and so on. When Penny referred to what he was doing as an 'economy of kindness' Greg got quite agitated, 'it's not about charity, or even self-help', he insisted. The point was not so much to produce a parallel economy as to fundamentally undermine the capitalist economy, its patterns of production and consumption. Animated by the coffee, Greg summed up: 'By drawing on these traditions; theft at work, la perruque, coin clipping, cabbage, commoning, tapping the admiral, but also developing rituals and a culture of ways through, we want more, much more than mere survival, we're hungry, playful and festive parasites, we'll abuse our host and dance on its graves'.

Ayanna is taking time out of the city to visit her mum out in Norfolk. She's trying to take a breather from some of the madness at Pan's Court, but after some days spent cementing the feeling of a physical distance she begins to stay up late on her laptop, keeping in touch.

For a month now Ayanna hass been having weekly IRC dialogues with Steve from the Potlatch block. He was an early casualty of the crash, a junior trader, originally from Braintree, he still speaks the lingo – fast material dirty banter. A hobbyist mathematician with no qualifications, Steve was always stung that he'd never fit the management's notion of a quant, neither educated nor eccentric enough. Nonetheless he'd followed the crisis ruthlessly, the latest developments in derivatives, the complex mixture of soon-to-be 'toxic' debts in collatoralised debt obligations. For the two years leading up to the coincidence of the smoking ban and the crash, Steve had become a lounge expert in the pubs of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, eschewing the creeping incursions of neon and leather sofa adorned bars, he'd in his own small way tried to take the message to the people – what he thought of as his people – the cab drivers, chippys, market traders and scaffolders those two-years-solid-saving-and-pile-the-money-into-a-mortgage-in-Ireland previously feckless and fuck-it-all brethren who'd suddenly come under the delusion that they too could get something out (a little pile) of this neighbouring gilded square mile. He'd made calculations of his own about when the crash might actually happen from 2 years before it actually hit the press, but despite the accurate modelling he'd missed something, it hadn't been pure numbers – you'd add up the numbers and at any calculation 'the excess challenged the absolute distribution of risk across the system', but it held a good six months over what he'd expected. Steve put this down to politics – he'd used what he'd learnt from day traders, quants, economists but even allowing generous leeway for hidden state actors fire fighting by flooding the markets with 'helicopter dollars' something else kept the system running on empty. Steve's conclusion was that there was something else holding it together and 'magic it ain't'. Habituation, exuberance, politricks, there was an outside to the system which he'd previously not been able to see, but once he turned from it it didn't become any clearer. To save himself from going mad obsessing over it all he'd dropped his former interest, let go of the Financial Times subscription and simply drifted through the crack houses, squats and brothels of East and South London till he arrived here. Some guy at a warehouse party had offered him pills at a party, shouting 'CDOs, SIVs, pills, ekkstaaasy'. 'fuckin toxic mate, I got the funny money fer some o that' Steve replied. He liked the joke, they had a laugh thinking up more fiendish crisis-related brands for the cheapo chemical balms that were in circulation in those early days of a massive fall in quality and rise in demand in the post-crisis scenes that were developing. After the party they'd caught a fry-up in Pelicci's on Bethnal Green Road and the dealer invited Steve to crash at Pan's Court – 'me brother's crew set-up a place down there on the canal... is s wicked' the two of them strolled down Roman Road together and Steve quickly became part of the floating population.

- - Begin transcript irc.freenode.net channel #haidasitin 09/12/2010 - - -

[2010-03-09 03:33:03] *** now talking in # haidasitin
[2010-03-09 03:33:03] *** topic is tactics – ways
[2010-03-09 03:33:03] *** set by Ayanna on Tue Mar 08 23:52:14 2010
[2010-03-09 03:33:03] *** channel #haidasitin mode is +n

[2010-03-09 03:33:03] *** channel created at Tue Mar 08 09:42:21 2010 [2010-03-09 03:33:04] [freenode-info] why register and identify? your IRC nick is how people know you. http://freenode.net/faq.shtml#nicksetup

[2010-03-09 03:33:06] Tactics are extensions of self into the world. You shouldn't understand what you do as expressions transmitted to a receiver. That would presume an end point and that you are 'saying something' that could be understood and accommodated. Rather, think of means without ends. Pure means.

[2010-03-09 03:33:55] : That all sounds very abstract...
[2010-03-09 03:34:59] ... Thas? a bit rich coming from you geezer! King of math-abstractions! Think about it. What authority do you observe? Remember this from the New School Occupation in New York last year?

Demands are incredibly stupid: they say nothing about what we really want, of the transformation we really need. Making demands means that we define ourselves in relation to the given order of things and in dialogue with those in positions of control.

[2010-03-09 03:37:02] To carry out an action which simply stops and delivers itself to the door of existing authority, strengthens existing authority through reciprocity... what if your doings didn't observe an authority at all?
[2010-03-09 03:37:28] ReciWhatsy!...
[2010-03-09 03:37:49] Love it darlin. I propose something practical and smart and you come on like a fuckin intellectual. Party political bollocks, sit on my fat one. Beeatch!!!
[2010-03-09 03:41:01] Sorry Steve, but you've a lot to learn. And don't ever use that language on me. I'll cut it off mate, swifter than you can calculate Bear Sterns losses.
[2010-03-09 03:44:59] *** st3ve quit (Read error: 54 (Connection reset by peer))

Pause. Hours go by. Steve goes out for a walk gets a can of beer, sits by the canal and phones his family. No warmth from dad as usual. He's just worried, but not about Steve, he's worried about his shares and the stocks Steve had advised him to pull out of six months previously. It seems there's been a rally on the markets. Steve reassures him its all just 'irrational exuberance'. The markets are fucked and that's it, best to sit tight in gold.' Anyway, haven't you got better things to think about?' Steve ponders, as much to himself as to try to deflect his father's stress. After the phone call is over Steve wanders back. He hopes Ayanna's still there – her shift as moderator on the IRC ended half an hour ago.

[2010-03-09 06:43:36] *** st3ve ( stv_judge@68-175-94-155.manc.com) joined
[2010-03-09 06:46:18] Ok. Run it by me again...
[2010-03-09 06:47:19] Back are you?
[2010-03-09 06:47:39] I'm back and I'm proud ;-)
[2010-03-09 06:50:37] You know this?
[2010-03-09 06:50:48] %0|%0
[2010-03-09 06:51:36] What's that?
[2010-03-09 06:52:51] It's called a forkbomb. Here's another, this one's by my friend Jaromil – post-exodus rastaman.
:()[ :|:& ] ;:
[2010-03-09 06:54:51] Pretty, isn't it?
[2010-03-09 07:05:14] That's not exactly how your average computer scientist would understand forkbombs, but yeah I see the beauty in that. Now what's all this got to do with the price of fish?
[2010-03-09 07:05:57] Well, I've been thinking all day how to explain and this seems a good place to start... something we both understand. So tell me what you know, how does a forkbomb work?
[2010-03-09 07:06:22] Forkbombs... multiply processes.
[2010-03-09 07:06:58] ...!!!
[2010-03-09 07:07:09] ... what?
[2010-03-09 07:08:10] Sorry, enormous fucking pigeon just flew straight into my window! ...
[2010-03-09 07:08:32] Mimesis and alterity? Repetition and difference? You get me now?
[2010-03-09 07:09:03] Oh god, please can you just stick to something without the nonsense theory-talk? Rewind my selector.
[2010-03-09 07:11:01] Mimesis means copying – learning through copying. In culture mimesis is considered low, venal, yet through copying and repetition we arrive at difference, mutation the new. Look at computers – copying is everywhere.
[2010-03-09 07:12:45] So now you're saying we should repeat the same old shit. I thought that's what you were having a go at me about. [2010-03-09 07:14:07] Come on now. Less literal please. Think about the forkbomb. What are it's qualities?
[2010-03-09 07:15:44] Repetitive. Recursive. It's simple, but it builds from an action repeated until it that action swamps all the action and infrastructure around it.
[2010-03-09 07:17:27] Right! Now we're talking. Now think about that as tactics... the forkbomb doesn't work on externalities, but interiority – it calls itself and extends itself by repeating and multiplying itself only. Pure means... you see. Do you see how we can use this to think about our actions. Our tactics. Our social relations?

- - end transcript irc.freenode.net channel #haidasitn 09/12/2010 - - -

Ayanna and Steve carry on talking into the night, dropping the usual combativenessich has up until now characterised all their exchanges online and off. Steve ends he can't keep up the banter and still get to the sense of exactly what Ayanna's trying to tell him. He drops it, recognising how this language has formed a hard shell distancing him from others and he lets down his guard a bit. He's pleasantly surprised to find Ayanna doesn't take this as weakness, she lays out the basis of her problems of Steve and the Potlatch block's approach. Its not that she doesn't admire the ideas – she just wants to push them further,beyond what they'd all imagined was sufficient before the crisis. The conversation ends when Steve starts to fling some new ideas up and Ayanna suddenly grows tired. She doesn't think he's totally got it, but he's got something. He'll not think about propaganda or press again as part of the actions. He'll think of the actions as a form of self-address, of communicating themselves through each others articulation in action. Steve starts to get soppy declaring love and call Ayanna 'sista'. Ayanna tells him to cut the crap and signs off sweetly.

Accidents happen. Happy accidents manifest.

It's late. Sick yellow street lights illuminate his way as Gav crouches and crawls crab-like chalking an egg shape around the perimeter of Tesco supermarket. The base of the egg forms a neat semicircle cutting through the car park, crossing and bisecting the gridded outlines of the parking spaces. The shape Gav has drawn is not immediately apparent from the grounds of the supermarket, but its arc is enough to hint at a call to assembly. Tracing the southern circumference next to a bus stop on Roman Road, Gav has scrawled the word EGGJA in well-spaced capital letters.

Once he's done, Gav legs it to the Pinnacles knowing that from the roof he'll have the best position to check his work. Entering through the basement fire exit stairwell and running up the unfinished concrete steps, he stops by the penthouse flat to drag Rag out of his early evening K-hole. The pair of friends stand on the roof of the apartment block admiring Gav's drawing.

The outline of the egg is more or less visible, circumventing three sides of the supermarket building. Lines cross the tightly confined plant beds running up walls and onto the pavement again only to curve and converge in a point at the back of the 10 foot security fence which encloses the plastic refuse skips. The same skips into which residents of Pan's Court dive each evening searching for edibles. Gav proudly pronounces the written word, 'EGGJA... EGGJA. It's Icelandic for to incite, to sharpen, we use it in the sense of to egg someone on. Nice, eh?'

Rag, reluctant to follow Gav's drift into familiar pedantry, stifles any admiration, and grins turning to him, 'You is a good egg mate.' Then patting him on the shoulder in mock military formality, 'So, what's it all in aid of? I mean what's going off? I've seen loonies and black block types turning up at Pan's Court all week. Tell me please you're not the captain of all this?' Expecting something like this, Gav is ready with his response: 'Absolutely not. I only went to the first meeting to find out the date of the action. Some of the kids have been coming to Ayanna's workshops, I've been throwing some ideas around, but that's it. The rest is up to the kids – that's my contribution right there, incitement and sharpening, that's all. Now let's get some kip ready for the morning's fireworks.'

Gav and Rag sleep up on the roof warmed by blankets, red wine and Adolfo's weed. There's activity throughout the night over at Pan's Court with small parties of two or three making short runs back and forth between the occupied building and Tesco, sometimes dropping small bags of tools and materials in the verges surrounding the supermarket, sometimes venturing into the fenced refuse yard for reconnaissance purposes. At dawn the pair wake up, well aware that this is going to be a special day. Everyone is ready.

A group, apparently dressed as druids, form a semicircle on the lawn in the central courtyard of Pan's Court. For the last two weeks they've been collecting packing boxes from IKEA, Tesco and Habitat from the basement of the building and surrounding bins and skips. From these, the druids have built large crude models of skyscrapers, signature modernist and post modernist buildings. These buildings are lined up against the East horizon from which the sun will soon rise. The druids kneel facing the horizon making incantations before the miniature skyline. Some of their murmured lines drift upwards:

For the limbs of the god were made to tremble, all of them in turn.

Without affection and not mixed together.
Heaped together in greatness.
If there were no limit to the depths of the earth and the abundant air, as is poured out in foolish words from the mouths of many mortals who see but little of the all.
Swift-darting sun and kindly moon.

It shines back to the City with untroubled face.
The kindly light has a brief period of shining.

A borrowed light, circular in form, it revolves about the earth, as if following the track of a chariot.

And night the earth makes by coming in front of the lights.

And many fires burn beneath the earth.
(The sea) with its stupid race of fertile fishes.
The sea is the sweat of the earth.
(Fire darting) swiftly upwards.

At midday a group of dancers begins to weave its way from the courtyard of Pan's Court, crossing the bridge over the canal in single file. The dancers move to the sounds pumping out of a fridge on improvised rollers rigged up with two active speakers, a generator and an iPod gaffer-taped to its side. The sound system pumps out Baile Funk, Kuduru, Senegalese and Ivory Coast Rap; the dancers carry djembes, whistles and coloured plastic horns. Some of them have costumes, cheaply produced imitations of those worn at Notting Hill Carnival. They are accompanied by a small crew of tramps who wave cans of Polish lager and sometimes join the fray spinning, stumbling and leering. A few of the dancers stand by, at the back, keeping the tramps away from the children's part of the procession, whilst the dancers at the front are happy to play to the tramps, shaking hips, arses and breasts, only to lurch away again and back into formation. It might be called a procession but it's pretty chaotic and formless until it reaches the destination.

As the crowd snakes up the steps onto Roman Road and into Tesco's car park, a troupe of eight choreographed dancers slip into formation and begin to prance forward crouching and shaking their hands at their sides, then clasping their arms to their chests before falling and rolling on the floor in mock agony. The moves are part of the Bird Flu dance, popular in the Ivory Coast. The troupe has been learning the steps over the past month from videos on YouTube. DJ Lewis' signature track, 'Grippe Aviare', booms out followed by M.I.A.'s 'Bird Flu', as the procession led by the eight dancers advances towards the main entrance of the supermarket.

While the dancers continue to cast shapes on the asphalt of the car park, a second procession, dressed sombrely in black jeans, T-shirts and hoodies enters from the left, marching parallel to the long front of the building's façade. These skinny, pale, tattooed and pierced teenagers make up the self-styled Vegan Martyrs Brigade: a parodic tribute to the suicidal militancy of some Islamist and Leftist groups. At the front two kids hold a banner aloft, 'THE BLOODY HAMPER', behind them another banner proclaims 'ALL IS LABOUR – ALL IS FLESH' and between these two banners members of the brigade are armed with rocks, crowbars and baseball bats. Near the back a crew pushes trolleys stocked with breeze-blocks, flags, and balloons filled with lemon curd, jam, honey and red paint. At the entrance to the supermarket two security guards stand, one a nervous white guy on his radio with his colleague, a thickset Ghanaian, both staring at the dancers twitching lightly now and then in time with the rhythm. It's already too late when the two security guards notice the second block, who by now are already at the entrance. The security guards simply step back out of the way as the front-line steps towards them to let in the block and the trolleys. Four members of the Vegan Martyrs Brigade nonchalantly escort the security guards through the car park and into the smoking shelter provided for supermarket staff where they will hold them for the duration of the attack.

Inside the supermarket the Vegan Martyrs Brigade are joined by members of the Potlatch Block who until then had been milling about inside posing as shoppers. Once the security guards are taken care of, both groups begin to raid the shelves. Empty trolleys are filled with meat products: whole chickens are brought out and thrown to the dancers in the car park. In the frozen food section, tomato and ruby orange juices are poured into the freezer cabinets until the aisle resembles a mortuary scene. Once their trolleys are full with packaged flesh, the Vegan Martyrs Brigade ram-raid the meat counter smashing its glass front and covering the delicatessen with paint and detritus. They go on attacking the cash tills and spraying graffiti on the walls behind the counter until the entire section is smashed and wrecked.

A group from the Potlatch Block produce tablecloths and fold-out tables and place them in the aisle, and adorning the tables with candles, cheeses and fine wines, they invite panicked shoppers and cash till attendants to picnic at Tesco's expense. The rest of the Potlatch Block continues to go to work on the shelves; at first emptying, then re-stocking them with all manner of bizarre fetishes, both ready-made, and fashioned from combinations of materials from the supermarket with objects they have brought with them in rucksacks. Potatoes are pierced with pencils to resemble naval mines, courgettes are wrapped in the gold foil removed from Easter Egg packaging, sliced disks of aubergine are fashioned into coins with gold and silver marker pens, avocados are scooped out, their skins packed with mince, and all this is heaped back onto the shelves.

Once the vegetable rack is emptied, members of the Potlatch Block erect an effigy of gross fecundity personified: the Egg Lady. She's huge, with gauche ketchup make-up, covered top to bottom with fresh eggs, plants and drenched in milk from the dairy section. Wax, ribbons and saffron liberally drip from her pumpkin head, and at her feet joss sticks scorch the paper plastered over her chicken wire frame.

Twenty minutes into this intense flurry of activity police begin to arrive. Upon a signal from the entrance, the Vegan Martyrs Brigade make a hasty exit, sabotaging the vast generators at the rear of the supermarket, setting fire to bins, then wheeling them into Roman Road to give them enough time to split up and disappear. Inside the supermarket there is so much confusion between the ordinary shoppers now turned looters, estate kids who have turned up specifically to loot, and the remaining members of the Potlatch Block still stuffing their faces and filling the shelves with mess, that few arrests can be made. The police try to restore order by pushing everyone, staff included, out of the supermarket. They are pelted with eggs fruit and avocados stuffed with mince by bystanders, but otherwise meet little resistance. Many shoppers leave with basketfuls and even trolleys of goods indifferent to whether or not they have been paid for.

END

Fiction for full disclosure

ask — 2010-04-02T12:04:16Z

- en serie af interview om den postkapitalistiske by fra år 2013

af Jaya

Den følgende række af interview blev udført i august måned år 2013 et sted på Sjællands vindblæste østersøkyst. Fire interviewpersoner primært fra København og rundt omkring i Europa blev hver for sig ført til dette øde sted, for at opnå den kombinerede effekt af dels at se byen udefra og dels en vis grad af fremmedgørelse over for de vante bekendtskaber. Vores mål var at opnå den størst mulige indsigt. Den forblæste kyst tilskynder ikke til forudfattede svar. Stedet forhindrer de interviewede i at læse svarene på vores spørgsmål i arkitekturens tekst og i deres venners øjne. Det, der vil blive præsenteret, er de usminkede beretninger fra overlevende fra de seneste frontlinjekampe, der raser rundt omkring i Vesteuropas byer. Alle er de blevet stillet de samme fire spørgsmål, og hver af dem svarer ud fra deres egen overbevisning.

Interview med Anna-Lyse Propagandersen

Anna-Lyse er blevet beskrevet som værende blandt 'lederne' i en af de mest berygtede autonome grupper, der er aktive for tiden — en titel hun utvivlsomt vil protestere imod. Hun er ikke desto mindre kendt for sin aktive produktion af analyser af aktuelle begivenheder og mistænkes for at stå bag de anonyme statements fra 'The Furious Fusion of 9' efter deres aktioner mod en række regeringsbygninger. Hun har base i Berlin, København og Warszawa, men har på det seneste tilbragt længere tid ude på landet rundt omkring i Europa for, som hun selv formulerer det, at forstå forbindelsen mellem urbane og rurale kampe. Her taler hun imidlertid om den nuværende situation i København, Danmark.

Jeg kan forstå, at du har været involveret i de kampe, der finder sted i byer over hele Europa, lige så vel som du til tider har deltaget i de sammenstød, der har fundet sted på landet i løbet af de seneste år. Mine spørgsmål vil imidlertid koncentrere sig om byen, idet hvert geografisk sted er unikt på sin egen måde, og byen er i fokus i denne serie af interviews. Mit første spørgsmål til dig er af generel karakter. Hvordan vil du beskrive den urbane kamp, der udkæmpes i øjeblikket?

Der er ingen tvivl om, at vi nu står over for en regulær global krig. Mens lokale regeringer rent faktisk har ført denne globale borgerkrig mod deres befolkninger på lavt blus i mange år, står vi nu over for et vendepunkt, hvor tingene står mere klart end nogensinde. Men lad mig begynde med begyndelsen. Da flygtningelejren lige uden for København blev åbnet af kammerater med eksplosiv kraft, og folk blev befriet, smeltede de fraktioner, der længe har været under opbygning i dette land sammen i en fælles front. Det var med andre ord en begivenhed, der gjorde det umuligt ikke at vælge side. Folk, som har forsøgt at undgå politik ved at antage et universelt humanitært standpunkt, er blevet tvunget til at indse, at den humanitære position ligger i ruiner, og sådan har det faktisk været i mange år, så langt tilbage som den 11. september 2001, vil jeg påstå. Behandlingen af migranter i dette land og i resten af Europa gør det tydeligt, at ingen anses for uskyldige, alle er under mistanke, så alt imens den politiske sfære er eroderet og management har taget over (styring af økonomien, af sikkerhed, af befolkninger etc. [forkortet af red.]) viser dette, at intet kan undslippe det politiske. Der er ikke noget udenfor. Men der er et brud nu, hvor frontlinierne er blevet trukket op, frontlinier, der skærer gennem nationale grænser, splintrer byen, og som har selve fremtiden som indsats. Vi er mange, der hovedkulds har hilst denne kamp velkommen, en kamp, vi drømmer om vil føre til Den Postkapitalistiske By.

Hvordan vil sådan en postkapitalistisk by tage sig ud?

Lad mig først og fremmest gøre det klart, at byer i det store hele er blevet bygget som infrastrukturer for magt og kapital. Disse urbane områder må destrueres eller drastisk transformeres. Der er nogle af os, der i øjeblikket er i færd med at destruere eller frigøre os selv fra fortidens byer, hvor vi i så lang tid er blevet holdt fanget. Hermed mener jeg både den kapitalistiske bys forestillede såvel som rent fysiske bånd. Steder som tidligere har været låst bliver brudt ind i, ideer, filosofier og mentaliteter, der tidligere har domineret bliver nu hacket og undermineret: Med det mener jeg det vestlige imperiums by, som er blevet udviklet på baggrund af Oplysningen — byen for fornuft, organisering, rationalitet såvel som deres falske idé om frihed, lighed og retfærdighed, der i virkeligheden bygger på slaveri, underkastelse og uretfærdighed. Alle deres ideer og værdier er først og fremmest afhængige af og afgrænsede til økonomiens almægtige sandhed. Og vi har alle været denne guddoms slaver alt for længe.
Indsatsen er høj, det, der er på spil, er vores fremtid. Vi er nødt til at gøre kampen permanent, en kamp uden vej tilbage. Vores by bliver postkapitalistisk. Kapitalismens æra er nu endegyldigt forbi, og det er op til os at sikre, at det forbliver sådan.

Du har skrevet mange tekster og statements om, hvad der skete en bestemt dag for ikke så lang tid siden under et regeringsstøttet angreb på en kirke, der skjulte en stor gruppe migranter. Hvordan påvirker en sådan begivenhed efter din mening byen? Set i lyset af forsøget på at skabe en postkapitalistisk by, hvilken slags urbant rum produceres der så her?

Ligesom The Weather Underground forsøgte at 'bringe krigen hjem' i USA tilbage i 1960erne, forsøger vi at bringe urolighederne hjem i dag. Ligesom det lykkedes for grækerne for få år siden gennem måneders konstante kampe at ændre deres byers urbane struktur for altid. Disse kampe holdes i live i vores kollektive hukommelse og afspejles i vores erfaringer og begær. Den terror, som er knyttet til fattigdom, udbytning og krig i det urbane Syd, støttet af vores, nej, ikke vores, men regeringerne på den nordlige halvkugle, som jeg ikke vil kalde mine egne, kommer nu hjem. Uro i form af økonomisk kollaps på grund af de grænser, vi sætter for økonomisk ekspansion, uro i form af hjemligt kaos, idet nationalstater indser, at den nationale identitet er langt fra homogen, og som derudover udfordres af en myriade af andre identiteter og subjektiviteter: Folk, der ankommer til disse byer som en konsekvens af krig og terror i det globale Syd. Konsekvensen af de vestlige regeringers handlinger banker nu på deres døre, og hvad der er vigtigt netop nu, er at blive klar over, hvilken side du er på. Tager du regeringernes parti, køber du den nationale myte om det frie, rationelle og lige samfund? Eller erkender du, at regeringen aldrig er på vores side, at vores såkaldte lighed er på bekostning af den totale underkastelse og eksklusion af andre, at rationalitet og frihed udelukkende er til for at tjene økonomien?

Tilbage til spørgsmålet. Hvordan har denne begivenhed formet byen, og hvilken slags rum producerer den? Den skaber et anti-urbant rum. Et rum som er fuldstændig penetreret af staten, som ikke har nogen autonomi, ingen frihed og intet af det, jeg kalder 'skygge'. Skyggen er der, hvor forskellen skjuler sig, til den er stærk nok til 'at komme ud i lyset' og udfordre normen, stærk nok til at ødelægge eksisterende fængsler, fysiske såvel som mentale og følelsesmæssige. 'Skyggen' er ekstremt vigtig for byer. Den er det sted, hvor friheden begynder, hvor forskelle mødes og bliver noget andet. Men det er også et sted, der er sårbart over for statens blændende lys og årvågne øje. En stat, der ønsker, at alt er synligt, og at alt underlægges dens kontrol. I denne og andre sager i den seneste tid, bliver det klart, at den danske stat forsøger at reorganisere byen, for at genvinde den fulde kontrol over territoriet. Den fejler dog med et brag, fordi tilstrækkeligt mange mennesker har fået nok og ønsker en anden slags by. Det er den krig, jeg taler om.

Afslutningsvis vil jeg gerne spørge dig, om byen og dens rum kan produceres forsætligt? Og hvis ja, hvordan har du i sinde at gøre det?

Der er en vigtig pointe, jeg gerne vil pege på, og jeg tror det er vanskeligt for folk at forstå – man kan kun sige så og så meget om, på hvilke måder man ønsker sig, at tingene var anderledes. Hvert eneste ord fanges i den urbane produktionsmaskine og gøres til et salgsargument. Dette er vigtigt at forstå. Diversitet som praksis indfanges og omdannes til diversitet som marked eller diversitet som noget, der kan sælges, som noget, der kan tiltrække investeringer og så videre. Det er det, jeg taler om. Og lad mig i forlængelse heraf gøre det klart, at sprog og teori netop af denne årsag kun kan bringe os et stykke af vejen. Hvad med det urbane rum? Det er forbundet med sproget, sproget som en måde at producere på, promovere, markedsføre og sælge rum på. Hvornår vil produktionen af rum nogensinde høre op? Kan vi gøre dette på en anden måde, hvor rummet ikke produceres, fordi, helt ærligt, så er produktion og selve økonomien netop det, vi forsøger at afskaffe. Kan vi af-producere det, der er produceret? Kan vi, mere præcist formuleret, terecudorp? Vi må terecudorp neimonokø eller måske bare destruere den som t
r o e
c p
u e h
t

Hvad? Undskyld Anna-Lyse, kan du gentage det? Jeg er ikke sikker på, jeg forstår, hvad du siger.

              y n
    o
                                                        e
                                                                                    m

                                                                                                  c
Sådan vil vi gøre det. Destruere sproget, holde op med at producere rum og leve det i stedet for. L
ev
                            e d
I
                                                                      is o
              rd              e
                                          r                                          e v
il

Anna-Lyse, kunne du måske forklare lidt mere? Jeg er ikke sikker på, at det du gør nu, er det du lige kaldte 'at leve' snarere end 'at producere'. Jeg er ikke sikker på, at du kommer nogen vegne ved at destruere…

SHA! US kmi

kma kama wA

li
                                                                         ive
                            a              ga
                                                                                                                I
     n                                              KMde
                            con

st r
Anna-Lyse, seriøst. Set fra mit synspunkt producerer du stadig, selvom du producerer noget, der er ganske ubrugeligt for mig og mine læsere. Kunne du måske gå lidt mere i detaljer med denne taktik, før du fortaber dig i den?

u

n
Anna-Lyse, du bliver nødt til...
OOOOOOOOH, aaaaaaaaaa,
a a a a

                                                 s s s sh sh sh tsi tsi tsi!

              Kma!
                                                                                  K k k o
                                                          t s
                       r

lo
Ok, så er det nok. Jeg tror, vi er nødt til at slutte interviewet her. Jeg forstår ikke længere hvad du siger, og det gør mine læsere heller ikke. Tak for din tid og dit indblik, Anna-Lyse Propagandersen.

Interview med Pete Believer

Pete Believer er aktivt medlem af studentergruppen Studerende for en Radikal Fremtid, der opstod som en koalition mellem danske gymnasier som svar på en række skolereformer, der blev implementeret af regeringen i 2011. Gruppens aktiviteter har primært rettet sig mod dele af reformen, såsom privatisering, øget overvågning og nye indrapporteringsmetoder særligt rettet mod studerende med muslimsk eller immigrantbaggrund. Disse sager har dog udvidet sig til også at gælde spørgsmål om økonomisk retfærdighed i byen, og dette er pt det område, hvor Pete er mest aktiv.

Hvordan vil du karakterisere den urbane kamp, som udkæmpes i øjeblikket?

Denne kamp er en kamp om byens fremtid. En kamp om vores fremtid. Vi er nået frem til et potentielt revolutionært punkt, og vi danner alliancer og organiserer os for at gøre dette til en praktisk realitet. Vi danner alliancer med vores kammerater, der er migreret til det her land, hvoraf nogle blev befriet under den aktion mod flygtningelejren, der oprindeligt startede denne bølge af konflikter. Og vi danner alliancer på tværs af aktive grupper for at skabe komitéer og koalitioner, for at påbegynde arbejdet med at bygge vores fremtid. Vi arbejder både på gaden og omkring nogle af de hverdagskampe, der må kæmpes, såsom bolig, arbejde osv. Så den kamp, der finder sted, kan defineres som én, der vil afgøre, hvordan byer vil fungere i fremtiden – intet mindre, mener jeg, er på spil. Så det er vigtigt, at vi fortsætter med at organisere os og arbejde på et praktisk niveau mod denne fremtid, samt at vi ikke endnu en gang lader statens og kapitalens autoritet få kontrol med byen. Jeg tror, det er sådan, jeg vil betegne denne kamp. Der er masser af detaljer at forholde sig til, men overordnet set står kampen mellem dem, som kæmper for frihed, og dem som ønsker at vende tilbage til den gamle måde at gøre tingene på.

Er en postkapitalistisk by mulig? Og hvordan ville den tage sig ud?

Ved du hvad, jeg har hørt en masse skepsis omkring hele denne her idé om den postkapitalistiske by. Men skeptikerne er dem, som aldrig gør noget, hvis du ved, hvad jeg mener? De folk, som aldrig går på gaden, dem, der bare snakker og brokker sig men ikke organiserer sig, og som slet ikke gør noget på et praktisk plan. Jeg ved ikke, om det er fordi, de er bange. Den postkapitalistiske by kan være mange ting. Så det er vigtigt, at vi har kontrol over situationen og sørger for, at den postkapitalistiske by er en by, der er fri for udbytning og slaveri. Og i øjeblikket organiserer vi os, for at finde ud af, hvordan produktion og distribution vil finde sted, og vi er særligt fokuserede på distributionen af det urbane rum. Det er det område, jeg mener, vi har arbejdet mest på, og som vi allerede har indstiftet i praksis – en anden form for rumlig distribution i byen, som ikke er baseret på kapitalens bevægelighed, men på behov, begær og fællesskab. Ikke fællesskab i den forstand, at du nødvendigvis bor i områder med folk, du har noget til fælles med, men fællesskab i den forstand at bortset fra behov og begær på et individuelt plan, så er der et større hele, der skal tages højde for. Så med fællesskab mener jeg kommunikation og fælles beslutningsprocesser. Det arbejder vi allerede på ved at gå uden om kapitalkontrol over rum gennem besættelser osv. Men statskontrol over det urbane rum er stadig et stort problem for os. Altså, man kan se det sådan, at staten har taget kontrol med det urbane rum, efter at kapitalen har fejlet. Jeg har ikke sovet i nat på grund af angreb på to besatte huse, som vi måtte forsvare. Det er rimeligt sindssygt for øjeblikket!

Og nu til et mere specifikt spørgsmål: For nylig fandt et regeringsstøttet angreb sted mod en kirke, der skjulte en stor gruppe migranter. Hvordan påvirker dette set med dine øjne byen? Og hvilken slags urbant rum producerer det set i lyset af den postkapitalistiske by?

Altså, det påvirker byen på den måde, jeg lige har beskrevet. Staten er gået ind og har taget kontrol med en stor del af byens rum efter det finansielle krak for nogle år siden. Og denne begivenhed er blot endnu et udtryk for dette. Jeg mener, jeg var der, og det var mine venner, der blev trukket ud af kirken. Jeg sov ikke i dagevis i den periode, vi holdt møder hele tiden, forsøgte at organisere flere folk – det var virkelig en krisesituation. Man kan vel nærmest sige, at det udmatter byen. Fordi vi pludselig skal forsvare de tilbageværende huse, som vi allerede har samtidig med, at vi prøver at hjælpe vores venner i kirken. I sidste ende kunne vi intet stille op. Vi var mange i gaderne og mange har mærket konsekvenserne. Depression, du ved. I Flere uger efter. Man får ingen søvn, spiser uregelmæssigt. Det var slemt.

Kan det urbane rum efter din opfattelse produceres forsætligt? Og hvis ja, hvordan tænker du at gøre det?

Det kan det, det urbane rum kan produceres, det vil det blive, og det vil føre til frihed. Det må dog gøres på et praktisk niveau, det kan ikke bare konstrueres teoretisk. Vi er oppe mod noget, der ikke engang har et sammenhængende teoretisk grundlag. Og som vi ikke udelukkende kan besejre på et teoretisk niveau. Du ved, der var mange år, hvor folk ikke tog nationalister og racisme alvorligt. Alene fordi det er så vanvittigt, når man tænker det igennem. Men problemet er, at nationalisme er noget følelsesmæssigt. Så du kan argumentere alt det, du vil, og have sund fornuft og alt, der er godt, på din side, men så snart den person, der er nationalist har bare den mindste negative oplevelse med en sort eller en muslim, vil de sige "Ha! Der kan du selv se. De forbandede muslimer, eller sorte" eller hvad det nu lige er. Det, jeg siger, for nu at vende tilbage til dit spørgsmål, er, at nationalisme nødvendigvis må blive mødt på et praktisk hverdagsniveau, og jeg tror det samme gør sig gældende, når det kommer til reorganiseringen af produktion, distribution osv. osv. Hvad er det?! I vandet derovre? Nå, det er vel en stor fisk. Hvor var jeg … jo, det urbane rum må omorganiseres. Og vi er rent faktisk i gang med at gøre netop det, at opbygge lokale organisationer, der har til formål at overtage og transformere bygninger og åbne dem for progressivt brug, og jeg mener, at vi virkelig gør fremskridt. SHIT! Undskyld, jeg så den der fisk igen. Jeg tror, det er en fisk. Ok, så produktionen af nye urbane rum må foregå nedefra, og vi står nu over for en virkelig stor udfordring… shit mand, det ser ud som om den kommer tættere på – det ligner mere en gigantisk ål! Øh ja, så jeg mener, at vi virkelig udgør en reel trussel mod den magt, der AAAARGH HVAD SATAN! Shit shit shit shit HJÆÆÆÆÆLLLPP AAAAH AAAAAAAAAARGGH Aaaaargmkdsmmblbmmmm spldrrrghmmm

…

Jeg kunne ikke gøre andet end at se til, mens han blev fortæret. Jeg havde på fornemmelsen, at det ville ske. Han var for tæt på vandet og råbte lidt for højt. Det var en skam, for han havde den entusiasme, som så mange andre mangler. Jeg fortryder, kære læser, at jeg ikke advarede ham noget før.

Interview med Karen Labourer

Som lærer på et børnehjem i midten af København var Karen Labourer i de sene 1990'ere og i begyndelsen af det nye årtusinde dybt involveret i den såkaldte 'antiglobaliseringsbevægelse'. Efter den gruppe hun var aktiv i for ti år siden brød op på grund af politiske uenigheder, dedikerede hun sin tid til det, hun betegner mere langsigtet social forandring. Det følgende er hendes bud på Københavns nuværende tilstand.

Mit første spørgsmål er bredt, og jeg vil gerne spørge dig om dine personlige erfaringer såvel som bede om en overordnet forståelse af de seneste begivenheder: Hvordan vil du beskrive den kamp, som udkæmpes i øjeblikket?

Vil du have mig til at fortælle hele historien i detaljer? Ja? Ok, altså, grundlæggende er der sket det, at denne her gruppe for nogle år siden sprængte den ene side af det her flygtningecenter i stykker, for at hjælpe folk derinde til at flygte. Og det eskalerede på en måde en masse spændinger, der var blevet bygget op gennem længere tid her i landet. Med opfordring fra den danske regering blev der grundlagt en særlig europæisk politienhed under navnet the Humanitarian Search and Secure Suspects. Et ret forfærdeligt navn. Samtidig støttede Dansk Folkeparti dannelsen af, ja, civile værn, som på en måde tog sagerne i egen hånd. De er dybest set bevæbnede racister støttet af dele af regeringen. Så du kan nok forestille dig, med Københavns radikale miljøer i mente også, at antifascistiske grupper også hurtigt greb til våben.

Men jeg er træt af folk, som tror, at politik kun finder sted i gaderne. Jeg mener, midt i al balladen, er der også dem, der, ja, der bare ikke kan være ude i gaderne, gå til møder og aktioner hele tiden. For mig er mit arbejde vigtigt. Det er min måde at bidrage til en eller anden form for forandring. Og det samme gælder for dem, som har familier og andre forpligtelser, der gør det svært at være på gaden hele tiden. Jeg siger ikke, at det er en undskyldning, det jeg siger, er dybest set, at denne kamp, som du kalder det, altså, den udkæmpes også på andre niveauer. Der er vigtigt arbejde, som bliver gjort i det lange løb på forskellige arbejdspladser rundt omkring i landet, på skoler, hospitaler, fabrikker… vi har jo også konfrontationer der, ik? Og med det mener jeg konfrontationer i den forstand, at vi arbejder med folk, der er meget forskellige fra, ja altså, fra en politisk subkultur, om man vil. Og det at skulle arbejde med folk, som er meget forskellige, lærer dig ting, ting, som du ellers ikke ville lære, hvis du brænder dig selv ud i gaderne og til møder hele tiden, kun omgivet af dine venner dybest set.

Nogle forsøger at introducere ideen om en postkapitalistisk by. Hvordan ville sådan en post-kapitalistisk by efter din mening se ud?

Der er nogle, der tror, at ved at være antikapitalistisk, så kommer resten af sig selv. Og desværre tror jeg, at det også er tilfældet med dem, som arbejder på at skabe en postkapitalistisk by. Ser du, mange af de mennesker, der er involverede i forskellige politiske sager såsom miljø, de kampe, der finder sted omkring immigrationsspørgsmål for tiden og så videre, de forbinder automatisk kapitalisme med disse sager, som om at man ved at afskaffe kapitalisme også afskaffer forurening og løser problemer med racisme og fascisme bare sådan uden videre. Jeg tror da på at tingene hænger sammen. Selvfølgelig gør de det. Men… altså et eksempel kunne være, at ikke alle migranter er progressive og antikapitalistiske, ikke alle migranter er fattige og undertrykte, så hvad betyder det, at overtage deres kampe, som om det var ens egne? Dybest set at sætte en mærkat på dem, hvor der står "migrant", så de på en måde bliver en undskyldning for at kæmpe mod ens egen regering. Jeg tror, folk skal være forsigtige med de her ting, for at undgå at spille et politisk spil med andre menneskers liv. Men altså, tilbage til spørgsmålet – jeg mener at den postkapitalistiske by også bør være post-en-masse-andre-ting. I hvert fald hvis den skal bevæge sig i en progressiv retning. Hvad der for mig er mere vigtigt er, at det ikke er noget, der udelukkende kommer til at ske gennem gadekamp, men gennem dramatiske forandringer på arbejdspladsen og folks hverdage, altså gennem arbejdere. Og også mødre og fædre, ungerne [hvis hverdagspraksisser også påvirker ting (red)]. Det jeg siger er nok, at det er virkelig vigtigt på dette tidspunkt med en bevidsthedsændring og ikke kun ændringer af politiske og økonomiske systemer. Det er det, jeg mener med post-en-masse-andre-ting frem for bare postkapitalisme.

For nylig fandt et regeringsstøttet angreb sted mod en kirke, der husede en stor gruppe migranter. Hvad var din oplevelse af dette? Hvordan påvirker sådan en begivenhed byen? Hvilken slags urbant rum skaber den?

For mig at se påvirkede den byen sådan, at den endnu engang eskalerede tingene til et niveau af undtagelsestilstand. Og i en undtagelsestilstand involverer en masse mennesker sig og sætter alt på spil, de sover ikke, spiser ikke ordentligt, men er fuldstændig opslugte af den aktuelle kamp. Hvilket for mig dybest set betød, at jeg ikke var der, at jeg ikke forsvarede kirken mod angrebet, jeg var skyldig i at få mine daglige måltider, at sove ordentligt og i at passe mit arbejde midt under en undtagelsestilstand. Men jeg er ærligt talt også træt af undtagelsestilstande, og da dette skete havde jeg allerede for lang tid siden besluttet mig for at fokusere på mere langsigtede projekter og undgå disse konstante afbrydelser af, du ved, altid en aktion her, et møde der. For jeg mener virkelig, at mit dagligdagsarbejde er vigtigt. Hvad nytter det ikke at sove og spise ordentligt, at udmatte sig selv som om man dyrkede en eller anden form for ekstremsport, når det i det lange løb, ja altså, det slider dig bare op, og du ender med ikke at have noget tilbage. Undskyld, det var vidst en lidt personlig reaktion. Det er bare det, at de her intense og voldelige situationer sker efterhånden ret ofte. Der er meget at holde møder om, meget at modsætte sig og aktionere imod. Men jeg kan bare ikke altid lade det forstyrre de her mere langsigtede ting. Undskyld, tilbage til spørgsmålet. Hm. Der er meget, man kan sige om det her. Jeg er ikke helt sikker på, hvad du mener med spørgsmålet om, hvilken slags urbant rum sådan en begivenhed skaber… Men den påvirker da byen, selvfølgelig gør den det. Men hvordan, hvordan påvirker det byen, hvordan påvirker en undtagelsestilstand en by? – Den spiller ofte på folks frygt. Og for tiden er der særligt frygt for, at danskerne skal miste deres identitet, at vores værdier er truede af immigranterne, som fremstilles, som om de har fundamentalt anderledes værdier. Og der er frygt for, at fordi kapitalismen, altså som vores styrende økonomiske system, ikke er kommet sig oven på sin nedtur, at der simpelthen ikke er noget tilbage, der er sammenhængende, hverken national identitet eller økonomisk system. Det er folk bange for. Byer er steder med en masse forskellige mennesker, så når disse styrende systemer er i fare, bliver folk bange for, hvad der vil ske i byerne. Fundamentalt set bange for, at uden noget til at styre forskellene i byen, vil den eksplodere i kaos. Det er det, jeg hører på arbejdspladserne. Det er grunden til at den nuværende regering ikke bare er blevet sat fra magten, jeg mener, efter alt hvad den har gjort på det seneste, det er simpelthen, fordi folk er bange for hvilket kaos, det ville føre med sig, fordi de ikke ser nogen anden sammenhængende identitet for sig end den danske eller nogen anden økonomisk struktur end kapitalismen. Men altså. Det er den slags by, som jeg mener, er ved at komme til syne: En hvor du enten bare arbejder, spiser og sover, fordi du ikke kan se noget alternativ og er bange for at ødelægge den smule sikre struktur, der måtte være tilbage, eller du kaster dig hovedkulds ud i oprøret og dedikerer dig selv til det. Men det er ikke det, jeg vil. Jeg ønsker et rum, hvor jeg kan arbejde langsigtet på at transformere nogle af de måder, vores by fungerer på – samtidig med at jeg også holder min krop og hjerne frisk, ja, og sund. Det er det, jeg ønsker.

Afslutningsvis vil jeg spørge dig, om du mener at byen og det urbane rum kan skabes forsætligt? Og hvis ja, hvordan har du så tænkt dig at gøre det?

Det tror jeg, det kan, jo. Byer skabes af mennesker. Grundlæggende handler det om balancen og distributionen. Men der er mange faktorer, der spiller ind. Og en af de vigtigste er: Er der rum til at gøre det? Er der rum til at være i, tage del i og forme byen? For mig at se er det ikke tilfældet for tiden. Det jeg mener, er at, altså, på et tidspunkt fandtes der en masse hverdagsrum, der var åbne og frie, rum hvor politik, socialliv og det at skabe alternative måder at leve og gøre ting i byen på, om man vil, fandt sted. Alt det forsvandt for nogle år siden. Det sidste "åbne rum", mener jeg, blev lukket ned i omkring 2011. Og siden da har byen været sted med isolerede arbejdspladser, private hjem og forbrug – eller oprør som den eneste måde at bryde ud denne situation … væk fra det forbandede samlebånd. Jeg har kæmpet for at skabe små lommer i mit arbejde, hvor noget andet kunne opstå, det er det, jeg har brugt mine kræfter på. Det var et bevidst valg, at arbejde på netop det, frem for at tage del i en oprørsk subkultur, men det er blevet tydeligt for mig, at der ikke længere er noget rum, jeg kan operere i. Du ved, i det her land kan du enten være en produktions- og forbrugsmaskine eller en oprørsmaskine. Jeg er ikke interesseret i at være nogen af delene. Jeg vil ikke være en maskine. Det er svært, du ved. Ikke let. Pis. Virkelig ikke let. Jeg har fået nok, du ved. I næsten et år nu, har jeg ventet på at der skulle ske noget, der kunne overbevise mig om at blive her, men jeg ved sgu ikke længere.
Pis.
Undskyld. Jeg … Jeg græder virkelig sjældent.
Ahem, hrhm …
Dårlig timing, sådan midt i et interview! Pinligt. Jeg … Jeg vil bare … du ved.
Giver det mening? – Det jeg siger? At … at …
pis. Det er sgu svært.
Ok, undskyld, det jeg prøver at sige er: Giver det mening, når jeg siger, at jeg virkelig ikke kan finde noget rum her? Og der er ikke plads til noget, der tager tid, noget, der ikke er øjeblikkeligt … og til at være …
til at være en maskine dybest set.
Jeg taler om et rum, der er åbent, et rum der på en eller anden måde ligesom er mellem mit hverdagsliv og denne her kaotiske opstand. Noget … på en måde noget mellem det ikke at risikere noget og være blind, og det at risikere alt. Det har jeg bare ikke lyst til.
Måske skulle jeg bare tage af sted nu. Måske var det … pis.
Det er virkelig ikke let.
Måske var det …
simpelthen det.

Hør, jeg håber det, jeg har sagt, var det du var ude efter. Jeg tror jeg bliver nødt til at gå.
Jeg … jeg har brug for et sted, hvor jeg kan trække vejret.
Det her er ikke til at holde ud!
Det er jo klart.
Jeg har brug for et sted, jeg har brug for en åben by, hvor jeg kan gøre noget. Jeg bliver nødt til at tage af sted. Det er klart nu.

…

Kunne du måske følge mig til båden? Jeg bliver nødt til at tage den båd, tage af sted. Jeg kan ikke det her mere.

Jeg fulgte Karen Labourer de to kilometer til havnen. Jeg ved ikke præcis, hvor hun besluttede sig at tage hen, men jeg har en fornemmelse af, at hun tog den rigtige beslutning. Måske var det virkelig den eneste beslutning, hun kunne træffe – at tage af sted.

Interview with Philip Scepticson

Philip Scepticson er journalist med base i København, London og perioder Ceuta, Beirut og Latakia. Han beskriver sig selv som en pragmatisk kyniker. Sceptisons karriere begyndte i Indymedia, og han har siden arbejdet som freelance jounalist, særligt med fokus på immgationsrelaterede hændelser i førnævnte byer. Det, der først og fremmest interesserer ham, er forholdet mellem Islam og Vesten, og han er kendt og til tider hadet for sine ligefremme bemærkninger om følsomme spørgsmål om identitet, nationalitet og religion.

Jeg kan forstå, at du har et ganske omfattende lokalt kendskab til det, der sker i byerne rundt omkring i Europa for tiden. Hvis vi indtil videre fokuserer på København, hvordan vil du så beskrive den urbane kamp, der finder sted der for øjeblikket?

Jo altså, det, der sker er, at du har de venstreorienterede og anarkistiske fraktioner, hvoraf nogle er bevæbnede, du har de parlamentariske racister, de bevæbnede (vanguardist) racister og så lov-og-orden regeringen. Tingene eskalerede af flere grunde, såsom økonomien (eller manglen på samme) og det faktum, at flere og flere muslimer er kommet til landet, hvilket de danske racister opfatter som en trussel. Og da flygtningelejren blev sprængt i luften, gik folk dybest set amok rundt omkring i deres små grupper. Alle mente, at begivenheden netop understregede deres holdning eller sådan noget. Både til højre og venstre. Du ved, højrefløjen mener, det er bevis på, at alle migranter er kriminelle, særligt muslimer, som generelt associeres med, ja altså, sprængstoffer nu om dage. Så selvom den gruppe, der sprængte lejren i luften alle var kridhvide danskere, var der én, som jeg mener er halvt palæstinenser, og det var altså bevis nok for den forbandede højrefløj på, at en hel islamisk mafia var ved at planlægge en invasion eller sådan noget. Og så er der venstrefløjen: For dem beviste det først og fremmest en dannelse af 'nye revolutionære subjekter', migranterne, ligesom regeringens voldsomme svar understøttede en venstrefløjskritik af den siddende regering. Regeringen er racistisk, regeringen er udemokratisk, regeringen er hensynsløs, uansvarlig og uanstændig, jeg kunne fortsætte i det uendelige med disse utrolige åbenbaringer. Jeg bliver altid lige overrasket over, hvor selvretfærdig venstrefløjen kan være i situationer som denne. Og utroligt, hvordan de højlydt kan proklamere sandheder, som har været alment kendte på en meget fysisk og virkelig måde af andre i årevis. Sandheden om at regeringen aldrig er på vores side. Så denne episode bekræftede ligesom alle de her forskellige bevæbnede og ubevæbnede gruppers eksistens. Det er dybest set den situation, vi står over for. Alle taler om det, som en krig om byerne. Jeg ved, at der foregår lignende ting rundt omkring i Europa, og at det er ved at udvikle sig til en slags spredt guerillakrig.

En hel del grupper synes at have samlet sig omkring ideen om den postkapitalistiske by. Hvordan kunne sådan en postkapitalistisk by tage sig ud?

Av, altså ud fra det, der sker for tiden, og ud fra det jeg ved om, hvad de forskellige grupper er i stand til, tror jeg, det ville blive totalt kaos. Hvis nu vi for eksempel forestiller os, at en eller anden radikal venstreorienteret gruppe på en eller anden måde fik magten over hæren og byen og omgående lige pludselig afskaffede kapitalismen. Jeg tror, det ville blive forbandet voldeligt og føre til kaos. Der er ganske enkelt ingen grupper i øjeblikket eller enkeltpersoner for den sags skyld, som, efter hvad jeg ved, har nogen ideer til alternative former for organisering eller i det mindste bare velfungerende disorganisation. I nutidens byer har vi et miks af folk med vidt forskellige holdninger og praksisser, og altså ud fra hvad jeg kan se, så er det eneste organiserende princip indtil videre økonomien – og lov og orden. Økonomi, stat og politi. Tag dem væk og ja, ser du, problemet er, at folk så skal finde nye måder at håndtere nogle helt grundlæggende problemer på, såsom forskelle mellem mennesker, konflikter, distribution, produktion, og listen fortsætter. Jeg siger ikke, at tingene fungerer godt for øjeblikket. Jeg støtter folk, der ønsker at sprænge endnu en flygtningelejr i luften, eller byens centrale shoppingområde, men hvad så? Hvad sker der efter eksplosionen? Ingen har nogen fucking anelse. Det er grunden til, at jeg ikke involverer mig for tiden men holder mig til at tjene lidt penge ved at rapportere om begivenhederne.

Jeg mener ikke, du var tilstede og rapporterede fra denne begivenhed, men for nylig fandt et regeringsstøttet angreb sted mod en kirke, der skjulte en stor gruppe immigranter i København. Hvordan påvirker det byen? Hvilken slags rum producerer en sådan handling fra regeringens side?

Du har ret, jeg var der ikke. Jeg opholdt mig i en af junglerne [uformel border camp for migranter(red.)], den på grænsen til Bulgarien, for at rapportere. Der er ikke nogen grund til, at jeg opholder mig i København for øjeblikket, der er rigeligt med medier her, hvilket betyder, at der ikke er meget historie at komme efter for mig. Men med hensyn til junglerne – aktivister og folk fra Indymedia vil nok rive hovedet af mig for at sige det her, men nogle af de folk jeg mødte, altså, jeg ville helst ikke have dem til at flytte ind i den by, jeg bor i. Du har alle de her grupper, der laver kampagner på vegne af disse mennesker, på migranternes vegne, og jeg ved godt, jeg nærmest lyder som en højrefløjsavis, når jeg siger det her, men ærligt talt, nogle af de her folk… – altså for eksempel var der denne her fyr, jeg mødte, stinkende rig og var flygtet fra Iran af politiske årsager, og derfor måtte han gemme sig i junglerne indtil han kunne krydse grænsen, hvor han sikkert ville blive modtaget i limousine og i øvrigt være ganske tilfreds med at leve under et kapitalistisk system og sikre sig, at grænserne blev forsvarligt lukkede efter ham, så der ikke kunne strømme flere immigranter til. Det, jeg siger er, at jeg har en masse erfaring med at lave solidaritetsarbejde fra da jeg var ung og idealistisk, men så indså jeg, at ingen af de her mennesker, som jeg 'solidariserer mig med' ville gøre det samme for mig. De bruger mig som den hvide vesterlænding, jeg er, for at fremme deres egne mål og er i øvrigt ligeglade med, hvad der sker med mig senere hen. Så jeg har truffet det meget praktiske valg, at jeg kun vil solidarisere mig med folk, som jeg i det mindste bare er en smule enig med på det politiske plan. Hvorfor skulle jeg risikere liv og lemmer for folk, jeg dybest set ikke kan li', folk som er røvligeglade med, hvad der sker med mig, efter jeg har hjulpet dem? Det misser sgu lidt hele pointen med solidaritet og bliver til fucking velgørenhed i stedet.

Ok, det var et sidespor. Men det er en vigtig pointe, som jeg kun kommer med på grund af de anonyme omstændighederne for dette interview. Men i forlængelse heraf tror jeg, at sådan en begivenhed spiller ind i forhold til alle de involverede gruppers ambitioner, altså lige bortset fra dem, som rent faktisk kommer noget til i processen, migranterne, som er blevet smidt på porten, blevet fængslet eller er forsvundet. Men alle som påberåber sig noget i forhold til angrebet på kirken, har højst sandsynligt som en følge heraf været i stand til at styrke deres egne positioner. Og den måde, som sådan noget påvirker en by på er, at det polariserer den. Eller i dette tilfælde fremhæver det vel blot en polarisering, som allerede var der. Det urbane rum, som denne begivenhed producerer, som du formulerer det, er med andre ord en, hvor staten har hævdet sin magt gennem sit – jeg vil ikke sige magtmonopol, da nogen næppe kan siges at have monopol på magtudøvelse for tiden – men snarere statens monopol på kontrol med rum. For det er en anden vigtig pointe, at der hele tiden spændes ben for ethvert forsøg på at få kontrol over det urbane rum til aktiviteter, der udfordrer staten, udfordrer de produktivkræfter, der er så afgørende for statens reproduktion. Dét er det urbane rum, der produceres. Statskontrollerede urbane rum med kortvarige, men dog hyppige strømme af optøjer, der aldrig når at fæstne sig i byens rum. Det betyder vel så, at der heller ikke er nogen mulighed for organisering hinsides det at lave optøjer…

Afslutningsvis vil jeg gerne spørge dig, om du mener, at det urbane rum og byen kan produceres forsætligt? Og hvis ja, hvordan forestiller du dig så at gøre det?

Det gør jeg ikke. Jeg har ikke tænkt mig at producere noget urbant rum. Jeg tror dog på, at det kan produceres forsætligt, og at dette præcis er, hvad kapital, regering og planlæggere – både professionelle og amatører, – har gjort hele tiden. Men som jeg sagde før – den postkapitalistiske by er ikke mit projekt, faktisk så, vent, var det min arm, der lige faldt af?? Pis, jeg vidste det ville ske på et tidspunkt. Jeg har ikke meget tid. Hvad, du er ikke med? Du skal ikke se så skræmt ud, mand, jeg ved, hvad der sker. Min holdning, eller mangel på samme, betyder at der ikke er noget, der holder sammen på mig længere. Så for hurtigt at besvare dit spørgsmål før jeg går fuldstændig i opløsning, lort, mit ben, øjeblik, jeg bliver lige nødt til at sidde ned. Det jeg siger er, at jeg ikke har et bestemt projekt, alle de projekter jeg har set, og det gælder ofte dem med de bedste intentioner, er latterlige, ubrugelige og ynkelige – de er i bund og grund skadelige, voldelige og fulde af ideologiske dogmer. Pis, min arm. Jeg ved jeg lyder kynisk, men tro mig, min beslutning er praktisk, de nuværende omstændigheder taget i betragtning. Det samme er det faktum, at jeg er ved at gå fuldstændig i opløsning. Den fremtid, du taler om er fucked, fuld af vold og latterlige kampe om ressourcer, magt, prestige, det samme som altid, ugfh, mit hoved er ved at falde af… Ja'r hxar ikh nnogt hrråb, ja'r hxar ikh nhogt at tzilbyde dhen by, du tzaler om anhet endh diizse zidste zkeptizke oggh krritizke orrd. Ahhgh! Hxjælp, hxold mhit hxoved! Mbl, ok, altså, de sidste ord, mine sidste skeptiske ord, det er sjovt, når man tænker på, hvad jeg lige har fortalt dhhig, mxen ja'r hhåber dxe vhil whære nytzige hi dxine frrahmtzidige prrojxekter. Ja'r hhxåber, dhet vxil vhirkhre. Jrr hxåber bhyerrrne vil…

Jeg tror , at min interviewperson snarere talte til mine læsere end til mig, da jeg ikke har noget at skulle have sagt i den sag. Jeg var ked af på den måde at se min sidste interviewperson forsvinde, og håber, som han gjorde, at disse ærlige ord, som jeg har fået med på vejen fra Anna-Lyse Propagandersen, Pete Believer, Karen Labourer og Philip Scepticson, vil være til nytte for fremtidige mere lovende projekter.

it's (still) all National

jens — 2010-02-28T14:19:41Z

I dagene fra 1. til 5. december 2009 indtog Asyl Dialog Tanken (ADT) Skuespilhusets lille scene under festivaltitlen It's all national og skabte en ramme for debat, kunst og underholdning i relation til integration, migration og asylpolitik.

Søren Rafn teoretiserer over arrangementets præsentations- og diskussionsdel, The integration dilemma, i artiklen Alting og intet er nationalt. Læs mere

Tekst, film og billeder fra Jens Pfeifers præsentation Integration starts (and ends) in the camp. Læs mere

Noter og punktnedslag fra Carsten Juhls præsentation The cosmopolitan city between language and mother tongue, suburb and hinterland. Læs mere

Nation, globalisering og tændstikmænd – tavletegning fra Jeppe Wedel-Brandts præsentation A History of Violence - Globalization, Migration, and the Nation State: Why Nationalism Loves Migration and Nationalists Don't kan ses på billedet ovenfor.

- Blog / Biopolitik, Racisme, Mobilitet