As the Internationalist committee for the defense of the Community of Squatted Prosfygika, we have followed the recent development of struggle for housing all over Spain with hope and fire in our hearts. Last Saturday, October 3rd, demonstrations took place across the country, drawing hundreds of thousands of people, with more than half a million in Madrid. Calls for social action are multiplying across the country with a force that shows no sign of abating, but rather channels the collective anger over institutional failure. We are in an unprecedented moment of political and social radicalism, where the masses accept and share the criticism directed at the progressive governing parties for their inaction and empty rhetoric- as well as the reactionary, racist, and proto-fascist offensive by the right in response to the events in Ceuta. The pent-up rage following at least 18 years of housing crisis and eight years of inaction by the progressive government is now being organized and elaborated by the respective Unions and Syndicats, calling for a general strike in november.
As housing is in the center of the ongoing struggles in the respective localities, we bear witness to the movement being agile in maintaining a flexible stance while avoiding attempts at co-optation by political forces, particularly those in the government. Thus, a new cycle emerges with tremendous potential around the issue of housing and a capacity for engagement that will not only bring more people to the streets, but open up a new level of political discussion on a societal level.
Developments like these pour the foundation to build counterpower. To govern without running for elections. To the countless already existing proposals of neighbourhood based solutions for housing, of Squats, Socials centers and communities from the below, they are fertilizer. After the Victory of the Hungerstrike of our comrades Aristotelis Chantzis and Suzon Doppagne – who have put their lives on the front lines of the battle for a liberated Community in the Center of Athens, housing and organizing more than 400 people from 27 different nationalities – we have seen and felt how a struggle, if it is a collective one, can shift the paradigm of what is possible and what isn´t. And in times when the institutional left is in retreat, fascism and authoritarianism is on the rise, we must reclaim the interest of the people from the below and provide agency through collective self defense. No party label, which has monopolized the “Workers will” or the “Peoples interest”, has managed to provide an appropriate solution to housing crises across Europe, and so we must constitute one. We must work at every moment to achieve forms of organization that are not limited to the elections or parliamentary play, but rather aspire to form active and engaged communities, opening political spheres beyond the superficial layer of housing. We stand in unwavering solidarity with the Unions and Syndicates calling for the general strike in November, seizing these rapidly changing times to make leaps in putting the demands of the people forward.
HOUSING IS A RIGHT, VICTORY TO THE GENERAL STRIKE
FROM PROSFYGIKA TO SPAIN, HOUSING STRUGGLE EVERYWHERE
