December 2009! Our Utopias versus your Profits! Action month for autonomous free spaces and against repression! Time has come for an uncontrollable movement…
This is an appeal/invocation to all of you who have been affected by repression and foreclosure(exclusion) or who feel solidarity for those who have, to all small groups and left communities/, artists and activists. It goes out now because the last weeks have been very tumoultously, so many things were happening, not just in Berlin, but also in many other cities and countries. It’s almost the same procedure over and over again: The minute people allow themselves room for a free space to work collectively on new ways of living and fighting together, State is fighting back with Its repression organs. Evictions, arrests and law cases turn up on the pale. No matter if it’s Erfurt, Magdeburg, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden or Oldenburg: in the capitalist reclamation logic there is no space for free space. We have had enough of it – so now it’s time to fight back together!
The situation in Berlin…
In the early morning hours of November 16th Tobi was arrested close by two burning cars. He is being suspected of having burned those cars and is in detention while awaiting a trial now. The same afternoon the police ran into two house projects in Berlin: Liebig14 and Liebig34, people were locked in their rooms and beaten up, there were almost no witnesses of the razzia, the cops were rowdily as usually. One week later Brunnenstraße 183 was evicted illegally. The whole house was smashed by the cops, all windows broken out, the house made impossible to live in. 40 men, women and kids are sitting on the street now.
There was a quick answer responding to that: 3 big solidarity demos, lots of solidarity actions in Berlin and other cities. Many people have been arrested during that, there has been a spoken out arrest warrant against at least two people. Berlin really ressembles a city overtaken by the police, sending-offs being given to random people, small groups being persecuted, people on streets being controlled and searched, vans of cops and civil cops everywhere.
The same time parts of the media badgers pretty strong against the left scene and the house projects: The arrest of Alex was demanded by the Springerpresse, Tobi was judged too early, his face and name being printed on the front pages, combined with the demands/calls to finally clear up those “terror nests”. This is just one of the points in the state’s campaign against “left-wing extremism” which is supposed to isolate the left scene and equalize it with the neonazi structures.
It was obvious that repression like that would appear after the left scene has hold lots of demonstrations and many actions were going on about gentrification and free spaces over the past years to keep those topics in peoples minds. All over the last months the police and judiciary of Berlin repeatedly admitted their helplessness against militant actions, they made a fool of themselves and transferred the job to solve this problem to politics. They were also complaining about several different actions receiving the sympathy of a majority of the population. Which is not a big surprise at all as our politics do not only refer to the left house projects but also a big amount of people living in the innercity districts! It is not just us suffering from gentrification and upgrading and the therefore appearing suppression, but also the majority of people living in those innercity districts! While pauperism is increasing in Berlin, there is also an explosion of rents taking place. There are many parts of society being affected by societys increasing interest in profits and there is also lots of protest against that like the worldwide squatted universities show.
Badgering against the house projects is one thing – pretended political compromises another one. In Berlin we are confronted with the higher and higher climbing rents and gentrifications from all sides right now. First of all that is a success – but it also means danger. That means the danger of the following political strategy: the people being affected are supposed to be appeased/satisfied with some tiny little changes of the laws concerning the rents, the daily and nightly resistance is supposed to be isolated just to be smashed by the cops and the state. We don’t let them isolate us! We don’t let them try to appease us!
Further more…
Not just Berlin is heating up concerning the free spaces and other emancipatory movements. There are also other cities where resistance is organized on different kinds of levels, houses are in danger, are squatted and evicted, free space movements revive in many cities, people fight repression, suppression and observation. In Hamburg has a just recently squatted house been evicted during free space demonstration and a raid against Rote Flora is being prepared by the media. In Erfurt the Topf und Söhne territory, which was a squat for a long time now, has been evicted with a crazy amount of cops, the silent squatting of Kegelheim which followed was ended violently the evening of the announcement.
In the Netherlands there has just been passed a law which criminalizes the whole squatter scene and illegalizes squatting and also the support of squatting. The pass of that law can also be counted as a “success” of the media badgering and a lack of solidarity that should have been shown after the announcement. In Lodz/Poland there has also been a brutal razzia in the squat K50. The well-know squat Milada in Prague was evicted.
Whether Erfurt, Hamburg, Vienna, Magdeburg, Münster, Wilhelmshaven, Oldenburg, Prague, Lodz, Berlin or Dresden – it is the same shit, the same repression everywhere…
Because where people fight against the capitalistic measures getting worse and worse, those people are in jail for getting involved with fighting for their utopias of a better world. In case a movement gains in importance, there is always repression following/fighting back to isolate the movement, criminalize it and brake it like in Berlin now or in Greece last year. We have to fight that and show solidarity!
Supra-regional action month…
We want to call on you to take part in our action month for our free spaces and against repression with your possibilities and resources. We think it is important to see the whole context and show solidarity, but also act local to enlarge our structures, gain experiences and be uncontrollable. We cannot afford big demos in Berlin or Hamburg right now. We hope that there is gonna be a similar movement starting like after the eviction of Ungdomshuset, where there have been solidarity actions taking place in more than 20 cities showing the greatness and diversity of our movement. Besides actions we want to call on you to communicate your perception of free spaces to others, what does it mean to build up an alternative youth centre in eastern Germany or elsewhere, where are the differences in between projects in bigger and smaller cities, how do these spaces develope? The aim is to collect as many articles and stories as possible and make all of them together into one brochure.
Whatever it is, theater on the street, an information event, Reclaim the Street, spontaneous demos, creating new free spaces, flyering, public cinema, concerts in public space, tramparties, going for nightwalk, solidarity parties…find some forms of action and we all together show that we’re done with that shit.
Dates: The action month is starting RIGHT NOW and we will have a special VV on January 3rd to discuss how to continue!
New Year’s Eve – take part in the lokal antirepression and antijail demos!
Send your reports and everything else to: wba-actionweeksATriseup.net
Uncontrollable, diverse, subversive, creative – we create a hot winter!
wba.blogsport.de
