David Harvey at Occupy London

Here’s a video of David Harvey speaking on November 12th at the occupation at St. Paul’s. The full transcript can be found here.

Judith Butler on Precarity and Fiscal Crisis

An interesting new piece by Judith Butler in Greek Left Review on the political response to ‘fiscal crisis’.

Some excerpts include:

“…neo-liberalism works through producing dispensable populations; it exposes populations to precarity; it establishes modes of work that presume that labour will always be temporary; it decimates long-standing institutions of social democracy, withdraws social services from those who are most radically unprotected – the poor, the homeless, the undocumented – because the value of social services or economic rights to basic provisions like shelter and food has been replaced by an economic calculus that values only the entrepreneurial capacities of individuals and moralizes against all those who are unable to fend for themselves or make capitalism work for them.”

“…the call on the streets is precisely not to “fix” this fiscal crisis, but to insist that the dismantling of neo-liberalism is imperative for the renewal of radical democracy.”

The Housing Question

Really interesting CFP (courtesy of crit-geog):

Call for Papers, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2012, New York, February 24^th – 28^th

The Housing Question Revisited

Session Organizers:

Henrik Gutzon Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

Anders Lund Hansen (Lund University, Sweden)

Gordon MacLeod (Durham University, UK)

Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh, UK)

The year 2012 marks the 140^th anniversary of the publication of the article series by Friedrich Engels, which subsequently was published as the pamphlet The Housing Question.  Whilst less renowned than some of his other writings, the pamphlet has nonetheless proved highly influential to the work of numerous analysts of the urban process under capitalism, particularly in enabling a critical investigation of accumulation strategies, speculative landed developer interests, displacement dynamics, struggles over property rights, and the tension between use and exchange value with respect to urban land and housing.  Of course, for Engels, the housing question was never just about ‘housing’ per se, but about the injustices produced by the underlying structure of socio-political interests constituting capitalist urban land economies and policies, and the role of what he called ‘bourgeois socialists’ in reinforcing that structure.  Far from waning in the period since Engels was writing, the injustices he so clearly identified appear to have steadily expanded in scale and intensity, not least if we consider the contemporary urbanization of China, India, Africa and the ‘Middle East’ and ‘Far East’, and the massive displacement of working class people occurring in the name of economic growth, urban renaissance and modernization.  For example, in an influential essay in New Left Review in 2008, David Harvey draws on Engels’s pamphlet to make connections between the forms of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in 19th century Paris and mid-twentieth century New York and those taking place in cities like Mumbai and Shanghai today.  Harvey’s essay surely marks an important stepping-stone for further critical analyses, which could prove especially timely in light of the current global financial and economic crisis; one that was intricately intertwined with the housing question through the introduction of financial instruments and innovations in various sectors of housing.

In assessing the enduring relevance of Engels’s contribution, one crucial aim of this session to begin forging a conceptually rigorous approach towards locating the economic and political relations that shape a range of domiciliary forms – gentrification, slum developments, ghettos, condo verticality, gating, and suburbs in all their shapes (pristine, distressed etc) – which at times remain analytically separated in so much research.  In this spirit, we invite theoretically salient and empirically grounded contributions from scholars working on the following topics, where revisiting The Housing Question proves analytically and politically progressive:

-       Rethinking housing, ‘land’ and ‘property’

-       New modes of urbanization and habitat

-       Urban futures: ghettos, gatings, gentrifications, slums

-       Non-profit/social housing – what’s left?

-       Urban commons – what’s left?

-       Housing questions: justice/injustice

-       Urban revolutions: bourgeois and insurgent

-       Housing, land and the state

-       From financial looting to squatting

-       Values of use and exchange: excavating mobilities/Immobilities

Contributors are invited to submit a 250 word abstract by 16^th September to one or more of the organizers:

Henrik Gutzon Larsen (hgl@plan.aau.dk)

Anders Lund Hansen (anders.lund_hansen@keg.lu.se)

Gordon MacLeod (Gordon.MacLeod@durham.ac.uk)

Tom Slater (tom.slater@ed.ac.uk)

From Housing Crisis to Radical Urbanism: Reflections on Squatting

Over two weeks ago I posted a piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site which explored the coalition government’s plans to criminalize squatting subject to a brief consultation period. The main thrust of my argument was twofold:

1)    That plans to criminalize squatting would simply exacerbate a growing housing crisis in the UK. Squatting should be seen as a necessary coping strategy in the face of an highly uneven and exploitative housing market.

2)    That the proposed ban also betrays a more sinister logic that seeks to legislate against various struggles for social justice in our cities. The impact of a ban on the use of ‘occupation’ as a legitimate tactic of protest must therefore be carefully considered.

The piece was greeted by shrill jeremiads about the sanctity of private property. It was never my intention to romanticize squatting nor am I a ‘right-on’ academic hoping to secure some cheap activist points. I am a cultural and historical geographer who is working on a book-length project that explores the history of squatting in Berlin. The book is based on detailed archival and ethnographic research and is driven by a commitment to recovering the complex history behind various attempts to develop more just and equal spaces in our cities. To do so, also demands a fidelity to my source material and it was in such a spirit that I posted on CIF.

In the remainder of this post, I would like to respond in two ways to some of the more negative comments which I received. First, I would like to briefly explore the relationship between the law and squatting. Second, I would like to reflect on the nature of the current housing crisis in the UK and how squatting might prompt us to think differently about urban living. In a follow-up post, I will examine the complex historical geography of squatting in the UK and elsewhere and critically interrogate the relevance of squatting and other occupation-based practices within wider ‘right to the city’ struggles. For the sake of clarity, I have organized the rest of the post as follows:

1) The law and squatting

It is not surprising that the proposed new law has been deliberately constructed to defend the interests of “hard-working homeowners” against squatters. And yet, as Richard George rightly points out in an excellent piece in New Left Project, existing legal provisions already do a good job of protecting home-owners. George is also right to flag up the significance of Section 6 of the 1977 Criminal Law Act which protects occupants of a property from violent forcible entry by non-residents including owners. That a new law would give non-resident owners the same rights as displaced residential occupiers will only make matters worse. As George writes, “instead of bringing both parties before a judge, which gives tenants a chance to prove they’ve the right to be there, often-complex housing issues would be dealt with on the doorstep, further inflaming an already heated situation.”

It is hard, in this context, not to view the planned legislation as ideologically-driven and, as such, dependent on shoring up a commitment to the untouchable rightfulness of private property. I have more to say about this in a moment but I think it is important to insist on the sufficiency of existing legislation. What concerns me here is the potential use of the law as a ‘tool’ or ‘weapon’ that could be used to defend the parlous state of housing in the UK. This kind of legal ‘revanchism’ is a very worrying development and has, in my view, become a defining feature of the neo-liberal city with its increasingly iniquitous set of geographies.

2) From Housing Crisis to Re-thinking Property

There is a pressing housing crisis in the UK. The evidential particulars of the current crisis have recently been set out to great effect by Stuart Hodkinson in a piece in Red Pepper. As Hodkinson points out, the current market has been effectively paralyzed by its own internal contradictions. Rates of repossession and homelessness are on the rise. A concomitant slump in house building completions has put further pressure on the private rental market. For example, rents have already risen by over 7.3% in London over the past year and average rents have topped £1000 for the first time. And all of this is to say nothing of the serious cuts to housing benefits and other frontline services and the impact that this will undoubtedly have on the existing crisis. At the same time, it would be misleading to simply reduce the current UK housing crisis to a catastrophic failure of the global finance system. Housing inequality, so Hodkinson argues, has always been a systemic feature of capitalism and the incessant ‘creative destruction’ of our cities has, in turn, been central to the expansion of capitalist accumulation. In Hodkinson’s own words, “[capitalism] continually condemns significant numbers of people to housing misery, and periodically blows up into a wider crisis.”

My own ongoing research in Berlin has, in this context, shown that there is in fact a direct relationship between economic crisis, housing precarity, and intensified squatting. Similar conclusions have also been drawn with respect to the history of housing crises in London, Paris, and elsewhere. It would seem to me that the criminalization of squatting would only give further support to a failed pro-market model of housing driven by profiteering and speculation. Alternative housing solutions are therefore needed – Hodkinson talks of a “cross-tenure approach”  – and the everyday practices of squatters might offer some possible ways of addressing the housing question. Squatting should perhaps be seen as a both a necessary protest against precarity and a constituent protest for alternative ways of living together in increasingly divided and unequal urban settings. It is time to challenge long-standing pieties about the virtues of private property and to think creatively about notions of collective property. This is not to suggest that squatting offers the only long-term solution to the housing crisis in the UK, but that it does offer an alternative and autonomous set of practices that may help us to rethink how we want to live in our cities and in so doing build a more radical and just urbanism.

Part 2 will look at the everyday histories and geographies of squatting in England and elsewhere and the relevance of occupation as a legitimate protest tactic. 

Luddites Conference: Podcast Available

Via Infinite Thought and available here. Looks really excellent!  Speakers: Peter Linebaugh, Anna Davin, Iain Boal, TJ Clark, Esther Leslie and Dave King.

The Luddites, without Condescension
A Conference on the 200th Anniversary 
of the Frame-breakers’ Uprising

In the Spring of 2011 Birkbeck will host a one-day conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the uprising of the handloom weavers in the dawn of the industrial revolution under the command of the mythic General Ludd. Even though the movement was sparked by skilled artisans, “luddite” has ever since been a byword for technophobes facing backwards and mindless rejection of progress. The conference will gather historians of luddism and others interested in what in 1800 was called “the machinery question”, to consider not only the historical luddites, urban and rural, but also contemporary movements of direct resistance, north and south, to capitalist modernization – for example, anti-nuclear movements, opposition to agricultural transgenics, resistance to big dams. The concluding session will address the issue of modernity itself, its model of temporality and the assumption that history is future-directed.

Bifo, Agamben and a New Round of Student Occupations

1. Bifo on critical pedagogy: A rousing and provocative talk by Bifo at the Brera Academy in Milan (see here for entire transcript). A couple of excerpts:

I would like to talk about something that everybody knows, but that, so it seems, no one has the boldness to say. That is, that the time for indignation is over. Those who get indignant are already starting to bore us. Increasingly, they seem to us like the last guardians of a rotten system, a system without dignity, sustainability or credibility. We don’t have to get indignant anymore, we have to revolt.

And:

Arise. In the dictionary, the word ‘Insurrection’ is described in different ways. But I stick to the etymology. To me, the word insurrection means to rise up, it means to take on ourselves our dignity as human beings, as workers, as citizens in an uncompromising way. But it also means something else. It means to fully unfold the potency of the body and of collective knowledge, of society, of the net, of intelligence. To entirely unfold what we are, in a collective way. This is the point. Those who say that insurrection is a utopia are sometimes cynics, sometimes just idiots. Those who say that it is not possible to revolt, don’t take into account the fact that, to us, almost everything is possible. Only, this ‘almost everything’ is subjugated by the miserable obsession for profit and accumulation. The obsession for profit and accumulation led our country and all European countries to the verge of a terrifying catastrophe, into which we are now sinking, and we should realize we are already quite far into it. It is the catastrophe of barbarism and ignorance.

2. Giorgio Agamben Lecture: Agamben is speaking at Kingston University on March 28th. Details below:

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy
Kingston University London
Monday 28 March 2011, 6.00-8.00pm
‘What is a Commandment?’
Giorgio Agamben, Visiting Professor, Philosophy, University of Paris 8
Venue: Clattern Lecture Theatre, Main Building,
Penrhyn Road campus, Kingston University
The event is free and will be followed by a reception

3. UCL Occupation: UCL students have gone back into occupation. They are occupying the university registry in solidarity with staff. A statement has been released here. As I type, I learn that Goldsmiths students have also occupied the Deptford Town Hall (further occupations continue at Aberystwyth, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester). For those of you who may be interested, a documentary of the UCL occupation that took place during the autumn term is soon to be released. Here is a trailer:

‘Right to the City’ Presentation in Berlin

I’m off to Berlin next week to give a presentation at the Regenbogenfabrik (former squat, now alternative social centre and housing project in Kreuzberg). It’s the 30th anniversary of the project and I’m very excited to be able to take part in the celebration. The winter and spring of 1981 marked something of a high point in the squatting scene that emerged in West Berlin in the late 1970s/early 1980s and the Regenbogenfabrik was first squatted on March 14, 1981. While the recent clearing of Liebig 14 has been seen by some as yet another body blow to the activist community in Berlin, I believe that it is still possible to forge other different spaces in the city. I will be speaking to the relationship between the history of squatting in West Berlin and a renewed ‘right to the city’. I’ve included the poster for the talk below for anyone who happens to be in Berlin. The poster should really read ‘auf die Stadt’ rather ‘an der Stadt’ though I suppose one could use the latter as well.

Les Sentiers de L’Utopie/Paths Through Utopias: Film Screening

I wish I could make this. The film looks great. I’ve been told that the screening is already booked up so it might be tricky to sneak in. The French version of the film and book are available for free at http://www.editions-zones.fr/

Paths Through Utopias

Friday 11th March,  6.30pm Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Sq.

Free and open to all (English Subtitles).

“Blurring the fluid boundaries between present and future, documentary and fiction, Paths Through Utopias is a utopian road movie exploring a post-capitalist Europe. Shot during a 7 month journey in 2008 visiting ten utopian experiments, the film is half of the book-film project published in France by Editions Zones.

From the direct action Climate Camp set up illegally besides Heathrow airport to a hamlet squatted by French art punks, occupied self-managed Serbian factories to a free love commune in an ex Stasi base, this magicorealist travelogue transports us to a parallel universe where money is worthless and private property has been abolished.”

Film by Isabelle Fremeaux (Birkbeck), John Jordan and Kypros Kyprianou.  Music by Isa Suarez.  Book by Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan.

The details of the screening are courtesy of Birkbeck. Further details of the project can be found here.

Jacqueline Rose on Rosa Luxemburg, LSE (March 22)

This looks fantastic (details courtesy of LSE):

‘Freedom is always freedom for the one who thinks differently’ – Rosa Luxemburg for our times

Gender Institute and The Ralph Miliband Programme public lecture

Date: Tuesday 22 March 2011
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
Speaker: Professor Jacqueline Rose
Chair: Professor Anne Phillips

“In this lecture Jacqueline Rose will argue that Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy increases in importance by the day, that as a Marxist and woman she can uniquely teach us about the relationship between political struggle and the life of the mind, and that the implications of her thought resonate through the assault on education under the present UK coalition government to the seemingly interminable conflict in the Middle East.”

This lecture coincides with the launch of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg and The Jacqueline Rose Reader.

This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis. For any queries email events@lse.ac.uk or call 020 7955 6043.

Fight Back: New Book on UK Student Protests Released

One of the many lessons of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is that the very being and becoming of protest and revolution is necessarily bound up with a process of self-reflection. “Proletarian revolutions,” for Marx, constantly engage in self-criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again” (Marx, 2010 [1869, 2nd ed.]: 150).

Amidst accusations of factionalism and recent criticisms of the treatment of the current NUS president (for an excellent riposte see), it is comforting to see that the student movement in the UK has returned, if you like, to the task at hand and engaged in a process of composition, organization, and reflection. It would have been much easier to cash in the activist Nectar points and call it a day. Instead, we see the assembling of new connections and trajectories that have the potential to create constituent spaces of debate and dissent. Perhaps, I’m just stubbornly optimistic. Whatever the case, I do hope that the recent release of Fight Back, an E-book on the student protests, will open further points of contact and solidarity as well as stimulate healthy disagreement and vigorous discussion.

All the details of the book can be accessed here. A book launch will be held on March 2nd (all the details here)