im never on here but

I run a mobile library in Athens and our soc media pops the fuck off so u should follow me there 

twitter.com/refugeelibrary

https://www.facebook.com/refugeelibrary/

on the right to the city

more research proposal shitposting

so the core idea here is that space matters. where we are and where other people are and how we can get from place to place and how the spaces we dwell in are BUILT and what that FEELS LIKE in our bodies and what it means - that all matters. how we are moving about and dwelling and shit; that influences our lives. that defines us, creates us anew. we build stuff but then stuff builds us.

in which case, understanding how the production of space produces and forcloses different politico-economic formations is important. capitalism couldn’t have happened without cities, industrialisation NEEDED land enclosure, it needed London and Manchester and Glasgow just as right now it NEEDS Mumbai and Shanghai and the sprawling slums of Rio. This is the spatialisation of late capitalism. That’s the Marxist insight - that we gotta understand and reconfigure the city if we’re going to have any hope of resisting its current brutal mechanics. 

That’s what Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ is all about. that if the city is built in the interests of capital then it will be planned and laid out in a way that is  really good for making lots of money but really bad for the workers who are exploited to make that happen. that’s why you have workers getting up at 4am to get the g-train all the way into manhatten in order to staff the coffee shops and clean the floors and drive the subways that get rich new York up at 7am - cos the city is not operating in their interests. There are very few cosy inside spaces in manhatten to take a free break or chill with your kids after they finish school or (shock horror!) organise a meeting in without paying hella dollar because space is organised for maximum capital extraction, not for maximum community involvement or maximum caring possibilities or maximum political mobilisation. 

that’s why the squat is so passionately adored by Marxists with an interest in space. You take people chewed up and discarded by capitalism and denied of spatial rights and pushed to the periphery and instead of rolling over, instead of giving up, we steal it right back. we say ‘fuck you’ to those grammars that seek to destroy us and reappropriate privately owened but unused space, and in it remake space in the interests of care and comfort and cooperation, not capital. Networks of squats arise and for some, the city is remade; the right to the city is enacted.

That’s true of Athens. it’s got a long and glorious Marxist-anarchist history and hella squats, like in a lot of  European cities. (Squatting in the global south is far, far more common and often termed ‘slums’ and less fetishized in the Marxist imaginery because it seems more brutal and desperate and without choice). As an increasing number o fmogrants moved in, some began to participate in the squats. They're preferable to the spatial segregation and abandonment of the camps, where people are quarantined like infected rats miles away from community centres or services. So there’s huge celebration there - David Harvey visited one, City Plaza, and gave a talk about how they are remaking the city. 

But it’s too easy to romanticise. Because some of the precariatisation of migrants, particularly refugees who feel trapped in Athens s they are unable to travel to where they want to be (usually Germany or Britain) leaves people without sense of connection or desire for their current location. People simply don’t want to be there. The squats are evicted, yes, but that isn’t the only problem they face: there are fights, violence, sexual violence, robbery; it can drive people crazy. People who’ve been through such trauma, trying to work it out together while also wanting to fucking run from where they are and never look back, drawn on by the cruelly optimistic desire for A Better Life in the West.

Then there’s the mafia. Loads of people have written about squats (and some about Athenian squats in particular) in terms of resistance to neoliberal agendas and the state. But few want to deal with their interpellation with the underground economy - perhaps because its too unsavoury and ruins the political message and perhaps because it’s too dangerous. Either way, the mafia’s stronghold on the squat politics of exarcheia hold the key to understanding a lot of the social formations and spatial practices that arise there. An investigation of it is essential to understanding the local situation, but also will speak to the burgeouning and vivid debates surrounding borders, cities and precarity more generally. 

notes on borders and precarity

notes notes notes

precarity is a state of being in which you have an threatened, ambivalent, insecure access to what is deemed to be ‘the good life’ (Berlant). Borders are controls on population movement. So borders, aggressively policed by richer countries in the global north, produce a class of precarious people by deeming them ‘undocumented’ or ‘illegal’ (Anderson, Sharma, Wright, 2011). If you’re, say, a refugee seeking asylum in Athens then the border is not just an object that prevents you moving towards the object of your desire (like Berlin or London) - it’s a policing practice that puts you in a certain category. It makes your life precarious by threatening you with deportation and arrest at every turn.

The squats in Athens are a response to the precarity produced by the intense policing practices of fortress Europe. Its also a response to the intense economic austerity that has left an increasing number of Greeks without homes. And its a historic Anarchist resistance practice, a ‘fuck you’ to the state by disregarding the law and living where you can. 

Some people argue optimistically that precarity is always both a system imposed upon you and a response of resistance: this Butler-ian idea that as you become dispossessed (of land, of a job, of a way of life) you become dispossessed of the normative ideals (that invested your heart with faith in systems of private ownership, that shackled you passionately to your shit job, whatever) and brings you together with other precariat, ready to resist. Look here to Butler’s well-known work ‘Precarious Life’ (2006) or Hardt and Negri’s hope for an anticolonial ‘multitude’ (2000). But Standing (2011) is not optimistic about the prospect for change; he sees a precariat ‘at war with itself’. The yellow jackets, the Gezi park protests, the sans papiers movement, the central American migrant caravan; these are aberrations, not manifestations, of the depressing norm in which precarity, and particularly migrant precarity, robs you of your ability to sufficiently mobilise against the powers that grind you down.

So how do we mobilise against precarity? How are people already doing it? What can we learn from the yellow jackets, from Gezi park, from Syntagma Square? We gotta stop imposing solutions from above and look at what has been successful elsewhere. No amount of government lobbying is going to be as useful as mobilising from the ground up. If it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for the earth.

on precarity

notes for a research application