The speculation enriches more and more every day financial institutions and Real Estate market, by wasting territories and exploiting rural and urban lands. They let houses and buildings empty, while millions people are homeless and exploit the emergency for gaining new profit through construction business (through the so-called Social Housing program, for example). They build more and more to enlarge this business that generates profit for the same few persons. The fight in the city and metropolis for territories self-determination and fair and equal urban policies is a basic issue, nowadays. We have started with Stop Eviction actions but we want more than only defending. We seek for solutions for our needs and answers for our desires. We have conquered new spaces of resistance, we spread everywhere offensively. We do not demand for public policies only: we want to change our cities from the grassroots through social conflict, mutual aid and direct access to resources. We don’t need housing only, but also income, free transports, healthcare, free education, public services.
We fight for the transformation of our suburbs and cities in resistant territories where solidarity makes a new world and a new way of living the metropolis possible. We act by ourselves, we rely on our own political strength, not on politicians’ promises. We squat abandoned buildings and empty houses, in order to build solidarity experiences inside a society based on mutual aid. We denounce public institutions and corporations of Real Estate and banks through demonstrations and communication campaigns. We take back the public space, we activate and improve networks of struggle.
During this meeting we decided to propose, with an open call to every movements and activists, to join us in these two campaigns:
We invite everyone, collectives, networks, social centers, anywhere all around Europe and Mediterranean area and more, to take part in the network and take part in the week of action in their local area. We will organize conference regularly (first appointment in the Squatting Days of Hamburg) We ideally support all the local, national, transnational mobilizations against Real Estate and financial speculation for housing rights and for self-determination of different territories.
We express all the solidarity with the social movement, facing repression in Brazil and denouncing the dark side of the FIFA World Cup: evictions, corruption, gentrification.
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MEETING OF THE RESISTANT TERRITORIES IN EUROPE AND IN THE MEDITERRANEAN: THE CALL
Call for a Transnational Meeting of the struggle for the right to housing and income and experiences of mutual aid.
Never go back. For a common space of solidarity and conflict.
Europe has crumbled, chewed by jaws of global finance and obedient governments, ensuring the order for which few command and all other produce, chained to a situation of rampant insecurity that keeps anyone in her/his own place. The biggest scam of the crisis weighs heavily on the shoulders of those who live exploited, getting by from day to day to get salary at the end of the month. To get out we were told that there was only one road (again there is no further choice) of austerity, along with progressive eradication of surviving welfare state and the simultaneous growth of a huge non-progressive taxation that affects the vast majority of the population.
It’s the bitter fruits of that recipe of “rigor” we are supposed to chew now.
Although Neoliberalism has been showing us a complete failure, to identify a common enemy looks like something extremely complicated. Nation states do not count anything in front of global finance power, while boundaries exist only as regulators of the flow of migrant labor. Armored like a fortress, Europe has been eventually set on fire by armed conflicts: powers are settling their disputes loading them on our shoulders.
Resurgence of reactionary nationalism act on the discontent of those suffering, transforming hatred for the European Central Bank, the technocratic institutions of the Union, Merkel and the European political directorate: struggle for a better, a fairer world through social conflict for equality is likely to be superseded by the last trick available to power: the return to fascism, in all its shapes, the recall to the myth of small or large homelands.
If there is anything clear is that crisis and its neoliberal prescriptions of austerity and suffering, along with return to nationalism – the last way out, they say –, actually walk the same path and lead us in the same direction: the eradication of rights and freedoms on a global scale .
For years we have witnessed and taken part in North African uprisings, Spanish acampadas, until the Turkish resistance; for years we saw in the Euro-Mediterranean space explode the anger of those who no longer wants to accept the financial dictatorship. Now we feel more than ever the need for relational spaces and a common struggle. We think it’s time to seek together the way to follow, because we are more than sure we’re not going back, never. It is not looking at a past lacking of rights that we’ll emerge from the crisis .
We have no intention to lose the battle against those who fan the flames of war between the poor, clouding the view for those looking for an enemy, turning the fight against the power in a civil war of neighbor against neighbor, of the “natives” against migrants, of smallholders against the evicted ones, of those waiting for a popular home against those occupying an empty house … and even of one country against another.
They have carefully prepared the battlefield. They destroyed the public school, leaving it to the world market for a few pennies, making schools and universities only a functional tool for the needs of the labor market. Ignorant people is easier to control because those who do not have any access to education do not have any tools to understand the present and rebel.
They destroyed the city by gentrification processes, creating large dorm suburbia, around neighborhoods / showcase where you can eat and do business. The dimensions of social relations and autonomous self-organization in the heart of the city are fought and rolled back, cause where sociality is marketed a new source of profits is available, along with more successful tools to control people easily.
The insecurity has become a permanent feature of labor and, even more, of our lives as a whole. One in a thousand makes it into a system that want us to work for the crumbs that do not allow us to live in dignity, that puts us in a merciless competition for a few Euros .
In this context, we call for an appointment Europe and the Mediterranean groups that seek to build solidarity and rebel territories through the everyday reappropriation, claiming back everything meet the needs of 99%, through solidarity and mutual aid, or, in better words, creating spaces of freedom.
Now struggle for the right to housing is known as one of the main lands of conflict, useful for pulling down any barrier between students and unemployed workers, poor and former-middle classimpoverished inhabitants, old neighborhoods and new showcase neighborhoods inhabitants, enforcing a social mestizo social composition, first antidote to the emergence of nationalist and racist revival. A fight that consists of in practical use of the buildings abandoned by the insane logic of real estate speculation, in self-recovery, in the organization from below of neighborhood assemblies and networks against evictions, foreclosures and banking system voracity.
Regaining immediately possession of tools to satisfy a need, relate a solidarity community that begins to organize its own territory, weaving the struggles and social demands … these are the ingredients of the struggles that made the occasion for a mutual aid response to the crisis and, at the same time, for organization. The fight for the house shaped this struggles in the metropolis, being able to speak the same language of the struggle for the common good developed in countryside contexts, to give a target to the anger explosion in the suburbs as part of a European political project of liberation, building radical conflict and social agreement around the need to self-organize. And from this substance that we want to start.
In Italy, the network Abitare nella Crisi, has put in contact struggles that have found in mutual aid and reappropriation an alternative and a form of resistance from below to the crisis. This network has built demonstration on October 19th 2013, when more than 100,000 people marched through the streets of Rome besieging the corridors of power, claiming home and income for everyone.
From this experience, we propose a euro -Mediterranean meeting, to share the struggles, share experiences, practices and languages, to create synergies, reporting mechanisms and networks of mutual aid in an international dimension, in order to set a process of rebellion and solidarity without borders.
The meeting will take place in Milan from June 14th to 15th, with arrivals from 13th at the Area of Mutual Aid (Spazio di Mutuo Soccorso), Piazza Stuparich 18, where it will also be guaranteed accomodation.
