Το Grassroots Economics Foundation (Ίδρυμα Οικονομικών Από Τα Κάτω) είναι μία οργάνωση στην Κένυα που εργάζεται για να ενδυναμώσει τις τοπικές κοινότητες να αναλάβουν δράση για τα δικά τους μέσα διαβίωσης και το οικονομικό τους μέλλον. Η Grassroots Economics επικεντρώνεται στην ανάπτυξη της κοινότητας μέσω της οικονομικής ενδυνάμωσης μέσα από προγράμματα κοινοτικών νομισμάτων. Εκατομμύρια ανθρώπων σε κοινότητες χαμηλού εισοδήματος έχουν αγαθά και υπηρεσίες για εμπόριο, αλλά δεν έχουν πρόσβαση σε μετρητά ή σε πίστωση. Αυτές οι τοπικές πρωτοβουλίες χρειάζονται έναν τρόπο ανταλλαγής αγαθών και υπηρεσιών χωρίς να βασίζονται σε εθνικά νομίσματα ή πιστωτικές γραμμές υψηλού επιτοκίου. H καθιέρωση ενός κοινοτικού νομίσματος, μηδενικού κοινοτικού επιτοκίου που υποστηρίζεται από δίκτυα πωλητών, αγροτών, βιοτεχνών και σχολείων, καθιστά δυνατή και προωθεί την τοπική ανταλλαγή.

Η Caroline Dama μάχεται για την χειραφέτηση των γυναικών. Μέσω της οργάνωσης Grassroots Economics, επιδιώκει να ενδυναμώσει κοινότητες χαμηλού εισοδήματος και σχολεία να εκδίδουν τοπική αμοιβαία πίστωση στην Κένυα.

Το FairCoop είναι ένας ανοιχτός παγκόσμιος συνεταιρισμός, αυτο-οργανωμένος μέσα από το διαδίκτυο, ο οποίος παραμένει εκτός κρατικού-εθνικού ελέγχου.

Ο στόχος του είναι να κάνει τη μετάβαση σε ένα καινούριο κόσμο, να μειώσει τις οικονομικές και κοινωνικές αδικίες ανάμεσα στους ανθρώπους, και την ίδια στιγμή, σταδιακά να συνεισφέρει στο νέο παραγόμενο οικονομικό πλούτο που θα είναι προσβάσιμος σε όλη την ανθρωπότητα σαν κοινό αγαθό.

Το FairCoop υποστήριζει ότι η μετάβαση σε ένα πιο δίκαιο νομισματικό σύστημα είναι το στοιχείο κλειδί. Γι’ αυτό το λόγο, προτάθηκε και το FairCoin ως το κρυπτονόμισμα πάνω στο οποίο βασίζει τις δράσεις αναδιανομής των πόρων του και το χτίσιμο ενός νέου παγκόσμιου οικονομικού συστήματος.

Το FairCoop αποδέχεται το κάλεσμα για ολοκληρωμένη επανάσταση.

Είναι ένα κάλεσμα σε όλους εσάς που αντιστέκεστε στην κυριαρχία και στην υποδούλωση, ένα κάλεσμα για να ενωθούμε κάτω από μία συνειδητή προσωπική και συλλογική δράση, για τη βελτίωση και την ανάκτηση όλων των κεκτημένων και των αξιών που μας επιτρέπουν να ζήσουμε μια ζωή από κοινού. ‘Ενα κάλεσμα για την κατασκευή νέων τρόπων οργάνωσης και δομών σχετικών με όλες τις πτυχές της ζωής μας, που θα διασφαλίζουν την ισότητα και τη δικαιοσύνη όσον αφορά στην κάλυψη ζωτικών αναγκών.

Δίκαιες σχέσεις που στηρίζονται στην ελευθερία
Αυτο-οργάνωση και κυρίαρχες λαϊκές συνελεύσεις
Δημόσια και κοινά αγαθά
Επανάκτηση της κοινής περιουσίας ως ένα κοινό αγαθό, κάτω
από κοινωνικό έλεγχο και ιδιοκτησία
Χτίσιμο ενός συνεργατικού και αυτο-διαχειριζόμενου δημόσιου
συστήματος με αμοιβαία υποστήριξη
Απελευθέρωση της πρόσβασης στην πληροφορία και τη γνώση
Μια νέα οικονομία που στηρίζεται στη συνεργασία και τις στενές
σχέσεις
Αρμονία με το φυσικό περιβάλλον και τη ζωή

Η τέχνη του FairCoop στα ελληνικά βρίσκεται εδώ:
https://fair.coop/el/faircoop/ https://fair.coop/el/principles/

Civil Disobedience and active Self Organization of the Economy-
Occupied theater Embros (Riga Palamidi 2 -Psiris area- Athens)
Wednesday 21/6 at 21.00

Grassroots Economics Foundation is a Kenian organization which works for empower local communities to take charge of their own livelihoods and economic future. Grassroots Economics focuses on community development through economic empowerment via community currency programs. Millions of people in low income communities have goods and services to trade, but they lack accessible cash or credit. These local initiatives need a way to exchange goods and services without relying on scarce national currency or high interest credit lines. By introducing a Community Currency, a zero interest communal credit backed by networks of vendors, farmers, craftspeople and schools, it enables and promotes local exchange

Caroline Dama is a strong believer in women’s empowerment. Her organization Grassroots Economics, seeks to empower low income communities and schools to issue a localized mutual credit in Kenya.

more info
http://grassrootseconomics.org/

Fair.coop is an open global cooperative, self-organized via the Internet and remaining outside nation-state control.

Its aim is to make the transition to a new world by reducing the economic and social inequalities among human beings as much as possible, and at the same time gradually contribute to a new global wealth, accessible to all humankind as commons

Fair.coop understands that the transformation to a fairer monetary system is a key element. Therefore, Faircoin was adopted as the cryptocurrency upon which to base its resource-redistribution actions and building of a new global economic system.

Faircoop embraces the call for integral revolution

A call to all of you who resist being dominated and enslaved, to get together under one conscious personal and collective action for the improvement and recovery of the qualities and values that enable us to live a life together, as well as the construction of new organizational forms and structures in all aspects of life to ensure equality and equity in the coverage of vital needs.

Equitable relationships based on freedom
Self-organization and sovereign popular assemblies
Public and commons
Retrieve common property as the common good, under popular possession and control
Build a cooperative and self-managed public system from mutual support
Freeing up access to information and knowledge
A new economy based on cooperation and close relationships
Cooperate with life and nature

more info
https://fair.coop/el/

The post Κοινωνικη Ανυπακοή- οικονομική αυτοοργανωσή στην πράξη-ομιλία / Civil Disobedience and active Self Organization of the Economy- Occupied theater Embros Wednesday 21/6 at 21.00 appeared first on Void Network.

In a better world, there’d be no reason to write this. In that world, plastic bags would be outlawed, rednecks would voluntarily stop driving those obnoxious Ford F-350s and the yogis in yuppie neighborhoods would stop believing that a hybrid SUV could save the planet. But that’s not the world we live in.

In this world, when push comes to shove, most of us are too comfortable to care, too polite to speak out. With so much at stake we need to rediscover something we lost along the way: our anger.

I’ve been around a while now and all I can say is that everything has gotten worse. Deforestation. Species extinction. Overfishing. Melting glaciers. CO2 through the roof. We won a few symbolic victories here and there, but the big picture is total loss. And that’s why this isn’t your standard a-better-world-is-possible-peace-and-love-we’re-all-in-this-together-be-the-change-you-want-to-see circle jerk that has become the cachet of an entire generation of professional activists.

I’m a child of the “awareness generation,” the one who grew up learning to reduce, reuse and recycle. I remember first learning about global warming and climate change in high school in the 90s. Back then it was called the Greenhouse Gas Effect. Most of my early environmental knowledge came from classroom videos about acid rain, slash-and-burn logging in the Amazon and the hole in the ozone layer. There was also the slogan “think globally, act locally” plastered across my Social Studies 11 class wall. Those of us who cared two cents about anything believed in that mantra religiously, even though by that point almost everything around us—the school supplies, the clothes on our backs, even the food in our stomachs—came from across an ocean.

At the same time that we were learning to be more conscientious about our market choices, the global bazaar was pried open by the WTO, NAFTA and GATT trade regimes, effectively eliminating any possibility we had to make truly environmental choices. Before we were even old enough to know about our carbon footprint, it was already ten times that of a kid in the developing world. Meanwhile, our history books were full of inspirational Gandhi, MLK and Mandela quotes, all driving home the point that change, even revolution, was sentimental, nice, easy, positive. The first time the cops threatened to arrest us at an environmental protest, we shit our pants. Turns out positivity has its limits. And that’s exactly how we got into this mess.

There’s nothing worse than interorganizational bitching, especially among environmental campaigners and NGOs. We’re like a bunch of abused children taking out our frustrations on each other when we should be unified and directing our focus elsewhere. But since we don’t have the collective gumption to stand up to the man, we squabble among ourselves; it’s the only way to release the impotent rage we all feel. Even so, I have this to say: every time I see one of my environmental heroes jump on the corporate bandwagon to say some stupid-ass shit about how there are no sides in the climate struggle—how pessimism is an affront to the imagination—my heart breaks.

Recently, best-selling environmental author, TED talker, anthropologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Wade Davis went down that road. In an interview with a Vancouver newspaper he reflected proudly on his days as an energy company consultant, saying, “In all these resource conflicts, there are no enemies, only solutions.” This kind of well mannered sweetness, in the face of such a violent problem, is our greatest problem.

So if we’re going to get serious about disrupting an increasingly apocalyptic horizon, we’ve got to challenge the feel-good Hallmark sentiments that inundated my generation. We have to say fuck the TED talks, with their sincere but vacuous optimism. Fuck the positivity gurus claiming the world is not dying, it’s only changing. And fuck environmentalists willing to play nice with Big Oil and Big Energy, saying things like: “you’re not going to stop the tar sands. It’s naive to think you can,” as Davis recently proclaimed. This type of thinking sounds a lot like those fearful souls who thought apartheid was too entrenched to defeat, that Big Tobacco was too rich to take on, that austerity was too fixed to shake—that there’s nothing you, or I, or we can do in the face of a multi-trillion dollar industry. Truth is, nothing on this Earth is inevitable.

Last year, I watched in amazement as a group of radical First Nations scholars brought down the house in Vancouver at an academic conference called Global Power Shifts. Rather than reply with academia’s standard response when confronted with a social issue—“that’s problematic”—they had the guts to take a stand. One in particular, Dr. Glen Coulthard of the Yellowknife Dene, delivered a paper saying that folks on the front-lines of land, climate and environmental battles in Canada are tired of being told not be angry; that given the ongoing process of colonization, theft and exploitation, anger is not only the natural response, but the only moral response.

What he hinted at was a resurgent anger. Deep Anger. The type of anger that overturns tables, defends the weak from the strong, would rather die than live on its knees. Most mainstream environmentalists don’t like this kind of language. It means you have to do more than sign a petition. It means you can’t count miniscule corporate concessions as victories. It means you have to let yourself unravel a bit.

In our culture, anger is seen as impolite, brutish, violent and indulgent. It’s politically incorrect. It makes people squeamish. We’re afraid of anger like we’re afraid of obsessive passion and overt eroticism. Anger is dark and dirty, but Deep Anger is a form of empathy, care, even love.

Psychologists explain that anger is a natural and appropriate response to violating behavior, to situations where our boundaries have been crossed. Not having a say in whether or not ecocide is going to happen—and being asked to participate in a calm and nice debate about whether or not the tar sands should expand or not—is a violation of our boundaries. Yet somehow, we’re expected to smile and keep our imaginations open as if positivity were the goal of the movement.

The great irony is that, despite our civilization’s claim to reason, there is a deep irrationality, a fatal blind spot blocking out emotion and sanity. We’re so deeply in denial about what is happening to our planet that we’re risking our own extinction.

Unless humanity breaks through the denial, unless we start to get angry—fuckin’ angry—then we won’t ever be able to accept the challenge at hand. We won’t ever be able to rise up and face our planetary reality … we won’t ever be able to fight … and we won’t be able to win.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/113/deep-anger.html

The post Deep Anger! We need to rediscover something we lost along the way. — by Darren Fleet with Stefanie Krasnow (Adbusters mag.) appeared first on Void Network.

Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties anarchists face on a day to day level is that of finding reliable comrades with whom to carry out ongoing projects of revolt that are integral to their lives – projects that go beyond the customary formulas that can be found everywhere (Food Not Bombs, Critical Mass, collective businesses…). These formulaic projects develop easily because they require little thought. For the same reason (no real need to think) most anarchists seem to have little problem with spontaneous one-time night activities. But it is difficult to keep any sort of ongoing project in which a combined practical and theoretical effort is necessary going. Such projects demand an continuous assessment of what we are doing and why we are doing it in terms of our revolutionary desires, our relations with comrades and other people and the reality we are facing. They keep on calling our lives into question and provide no comfortable place to rest and say “I am content, I have it all together, I have no need to struggle with myself.” I think we all fear this.
For most anarchists, anarchy and revolution remain abstractions external to them, because their own lives remain external to them. They do not see their life as a totality and so they do not consider what they want to do with it on that level. So they don’t ever feel the need to create practical projects as an outgrowth of a life of revolt involving ways of relating that reflect the world they desire. This is not simply a matter of personal failing on the part of individual anarchists. There are concrete social reasons why people usually fail to get beyond this point of thoughtless activity. The social reality in which we exist forms its own totality and imposes it on our lives. Recognizing this imposed totality in a direct way would place an ultimatum before us that few of us are ready to face, one that demands looking the horror of our present world in the face and choosing to oppose it in its totality. It is easier for us to break our lives down into separate incidents, events, spaces and moments in order to avoid facing the full significance of this imposed totality. But this totality is that of the state and the market, the intertwining rule of wealth and power. And it imposes itself precisely by breaking our lives down into separate pieces, unrelated moments, alienated fragments. So our tendency to protect ourselves in this way plays right into its hands. Separated in this way, the incidents, relationships, activities and moments of our lives have no real meaning for us as individuals. So this tendency toward fragmentation is something we need to battle in every moment.
But to fight it, we need to try to understand how it operates on a concrete level. It is the reality of our daily lives, the endless parade of meaningless interactions and activities in which we are forced to participate: working, paying rent, buying and selling, paying bills, dealing with the presence of cops, bureaucrats, bosses, landlords, etc., etc. All of this together makes us dependent on the totality of the social order and at the same time transforms us into atoms that mainly seem to bump into each other randomly due to circumstances beyond our control in the meaningless, ceaseless movement of commerce. In the United States, an ideology has grown around this that absurdly goes by the name of “rugged individualism”. The absurdity is dual. First of all this ideology defines “individuality” precisely in terms of this atomized existence in which each one is nothing more than a cipher, equal to and separate from every one else in their nothingness. Secondly, these atomized beings that are the “individuals” of this ideology are made absolutely dependent by a social order that defines their lives as a competition for the same petty ends, thus guaranteeing their ongoing identity and separation. There is certainly nothing rugged in such abject dependence. The aspect of social fragmentation that this ideology seeks to justify – atomization –may play a major part in our inability to create real projects of affinity together that spring from our own lives, particularly if its ideological justification has penetrated into our own ways of conceiving individuality.
It seems to me that we still often perceive things in a fragmented and atomized manner. We look at work, the payment of rent, buying and selling, etc. as separate problems and come up with solutions such as work avoidance, squatting, shoplifting and dumpster diving, etc. (all fine things to do, mind you, but only in a context of the total conscious creation of our lives in revolt against this world). Since we perceive the problem in a fragmented manner, we look upon fragmented, often solitary, activities as solutions, and our practice remains one of getting by within this society. So there needs to be something deeper behind our projects, something that recognizes the totality of the enemy we face and the totality of what we desire on a concrete level. This begins with grasping our lives as a totality of our own. But what does this mean?
From Stirner, we get the clue that each of us must be our own basis, and from Vaneigem we get the further clue that this requires a “reversal of perspective”, in other words, turning around to look at the world from a new perspective – our own. But these clues remain useless if we continue to conceive of individuality in the way this society does, as something abstract and isolated, as some mystical “nature” within each of us, completely separated from the relationships that make up our lives. If we see individuality in this way, we will not be able to grasp the totality of our lives, because we will lose all the relationships, interactions and historical and social realities that weave into who we are and who we are becoming. The concept of individuality that this society imposes stands as a crystalline and pure object outside of all relationships, but real concrete individuality is, in fact, a relationship. I become who and what I am in relation to Esther, Dave, Tiger, Susannah, Mary, Ivy, Anais, Membrane, Brendan, Brandon, Avram, Mandy, the woman at the coffee shop, the preacher in the church my parents made me attend, my parents themselves, the cops, the state, the economy, the technological apparatus, etc., etc. None of these relationships determines who I am, but all play a role in how I create who I am. A relationship is not a crystalline statue. It is an activity, a movement in course. And so this is also the nature of individuality. I do not want to be misunderstood – my individuality is not ever imperfect or partial. It is always whole, but that whole is a movement – a dance, if you will, with others – and is therefore never finished. Its end could only be in death.
Thus, I could say that my individuality is a dialectic between myself as a being who desires and acts and the environment through which I move (including all the personal and social relationships I am involved in directly or indirectly). Realizing this dialectic on a practical level – the reversal of perspective – means looking upon all these relationships either as enhancements of myself, thus worthy of encouraging and strengthening, or as obstacles in my way, which I will strive to remove from my life, destroying them if necessary. The totality of this society acts to bury the awareness of this dialectic. By attaching individuality to sacred (i.e., private or collectively “owned”) property (as an identity bought both figuratively through competition for prestige and literally as identifying merchandise), this society places it outside of us as human beings and so undermines our awareness of the dialectic between ourselves and the world around us. As sacred property, individuality is not our activity, but a thing outside of us which we must purchase, which means we must competitively strive for it. But as I indicated above, this competition atomizes and homogenizes us, thus completely undermining true individuality.
It might be easier to understand the difference between the conception of individuality as economic property and that of individuality as relational activity by looking at the trait of strength. In this society, strength is a kind of private property. It is the individual’s capacity for defense, for armoring her or himself, for standing alone against the world. As such, it is limited and measurable, and therefore easily depleted. This conception can create some twisted dynamics between individuals. People often seem quite willing to nurture the weakness of others, offering a kind of personal charity that maintains the other in their weak state and maintains the nurturer’s role as the strong provider. Of course, such relationships are two-way, and the process is largely unconscious. So there is no use in trying to place blame. Nonetheless, such relationships maintain the private ownership of strength for the one providing the “nurturing”. And if strength is indeed private property, if it is simply one’s capacity to withstand external attacks and to stand alone against the world, it makes sense to act this way. While one can indeed be another’s hero, using one’s own carefully guarded strength to protect them, one can never truly act as their comrade or accomplice, breaking down the boundaries between individual strengths so that they can intertwine with and enhance each other. Since anarchists desire a different social reality, we need to develop a different conception of strength, one that is based on the refusal of atomization, on the discovery of the enjoyment and wealth that we can find in each other. This means recognizing that strength is not a commodity in limited supply for which we are competing, but is rather something that increases when shared. It is not a question of self-defense and standing alone against the world, but rather of our capacity to realize our desires within the world in relation with others. In this sense my strength is indeed my own, but not as private property with its boundaries; rather it is my individual capacity that perpetually challenges and expands itself. As such it is not weakened, but expanded when I combine it with that of others whose aims intersect with mine.
Recognizing individuality as a relational, dialectic movement, rejecting the idea that strength – and similar traits such as love, freedom, etc. – is limited private property to be held in reserve and protected, it becomes clear that grasping one’s life in its totality in order to fight against this society means grasping all the relationships that make up one’s life. Of course, this is never a finished task. The social reality that surrounds us perpetually intrudes and imposes itself. So this is something we can only do in ongoing revolt against this society. But the ongoing battle to grasp one’s life requires a high level of awareness. We need to examine each and every relationship we participate in, not moralistically, but to determine whether it is helping us practically to build the life we desire. Since we are not looking for “purer” ways to survive, but are rather striving to grasp our lives as a totality we create, it may be that the sorts of projects we decide to carry on against this society can be accomplished more readily if we have a steady residence – and in the present social context this may mean paying rent or buying a house. We may need money or specific tools to carry out our projects and may use a job, disability or other welfare bureaucracies to get these things. There is no use in lamenting or moralizing about this. What is important is to know precisely why we make the choices we do in terms of how we are desire to create our lives and our projects of revolt.
But this brings us back to the area of our relationships with each other. If the lives we wish to create are lives together, if we want to build comradeship, practical affinity and mutuality, then we need to communicate in a straightforward manner so that we can make intelligent choices. This goes against everything this society instills in us. Trained to view everyone as a rival, we build up unconscious defenses. Thus, we have a tendency to use manipulation rather than straightforward communication, to dance around each other rather than with each other. If supposed comrades and accomplices constantly dance around each other, unconsciously manipulating each other in order to get what they want, no one will ever be able to make intelligent choices, since all of our choices will be founded on illusion. Yet this is how we are taught to relate – it is the basis of negotiation and compromise. But how can practical affinity, comradeship, complicity and mutuality ever come from this? We frequently have to deceive and lie to our enemy – the power structure and its lackeys – but since we are striving to create life together in a different way, we can’t relate to each other like this. To build affinity and mutuality, we need to be clear with each other about our needs, desires, capacities, aspirations, dreams and what we are willing to offer each other in the mutual realization of these things. Lives, strengths, struggles and projects can only intertwine in a mutually beneficial way when everyone involved is straightforward about their aims and desires, and thus provides a real basis for affinity.
Revolution is not just a bunch of atomized ciphers throwing themselves against the walls of society; it is individuals, discovering themselves as such, coming together against a common enemy, finding ways to intertwine ongoing struggles. The history of insurrection shows this to be true even where there is no evidence that potential for this awareness existed before the uprising. Those of us with a conscious desire for a different world need to be willing to make an effort to relate differently now. This means developing practical relationships of affinity. Affinity is too often looked upon as something abstract: we have similar ideas, therefore we have affinity. But if we cannot transform these shared ideas into concrete projects, into a real intertwining of lives and struggles in a focused manner, then our supposed affinity is just another meaningless spook haunting our heads. Thus, we need to recognize our strength in each other, and put effort into each other for mutual strengthening, rather than offering charity to each other and nurturing weakness. To me, this is where Stirner’s union of egoists and Kropotkin’s mutual aid come together.
So if we want to grasp our lives in their totality to enjoy them fully and make them weapons against the totality of this society, we need to understand how to relate in ways that enhance each one’s individuality. In this light we should consider a few things: What is practical affinity? Isn’t it a real knowledge of each others’ ideas, dreams, desires, capacities, aspirations and needs that permits us to come together on a projectual basis, intertwining our rebellions? And this requires us to talk with each other without hidden agendas. What is comradeship? Isn’t it the willingness to have each others’ backs in a practical way, to wager ourselves on our comrades, because they are our wealth, our joy in life? What is complicity? Isn’t it the recognition of a specific intertwining of projects where it makes sense to join forces to accomplish a specific aim – the recognition on the immediate level of struggles and rebellions coming together? And what is mutuality? Isn’t it a reciprocity that does not weigh or measure, in which all involved recognize each other as sources of strength, enjoyment, and the only kind of wealth that matters – the fullness of life? Brought down to the practical level we need to ask ourselves: Are our relationships our own creation, or the product of unconscious habits instilled by this society? Are they really mutually strengthening and expanding? Are we creating and enhancing the wealth of life and joy in each other? Are we multiplying our ferocity against this authoritarian, money-based civilization by intertwining our lives and struggles? If not, we should question why we have any sort of relationship. Because the point is not that we owe something to each other. We don’t. The idea of debt is part of the economic framework of this society. The point is that the best way to fully enjoy and grasp our lives and to fight against this society is to make every moment, every activity and every relationship significant in the creation of a unitary life to the extent that we are able. And until we destroy the society that imposes its reality on us at every moment, this will be a constant struggle and challenge, requiring a high level of awareness and mutual effort.
I would like to discuss all this more with people who are willing to put a concerted effort into overcoming the various ways of thinking and acting that spring from the fragmentation and atomization this society imposes, who are willing to put in the effort to become ongoing creators of their lives, relationships and struggles together, who are ready to pursue ongoing projects of revolt together, projects aimed immediately at attacking specific factors of this society that stand in our way here and now and that expose the nature of this society in its totality.


source: https://sites.google.com/site/vagabondtheorist/life-as-totality/life-as-totality

The post “Life as Totality” by Vagabond Theorist appeared first on Void Network.

The post “Contemporary Nihilism” an essay On Innocence Organised / by ADILKNO, the foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge appeared first on Void Network.

Prison is only apparently the exception to the rule: crime given vent to or innocence punished is in fact the totality of society where everyone punishes each other for the offense of being there and where anyone who thinks is pierced by this question at least once a day: “Why have they put me here? What have I done?” and the terribly obsessive desire for escape is just like that of prisoners. Maybe even more intense.
The evolution of the penitentiary system with the construction of so many new spaces for punishment has a significance beyond that of “more humanity and reeducation” rather than retributive suffering. The distance, the separation between the city and its prison—which has always been very great—decreases, because the inhabitants of the city increasingly resemble (through work, family, universities, hospitals, discotheques, theaters, stadiums) prisoners of a model prison who are granted occasional leaves (weekends, holidays, “white” weeks) with the obligation of returning on specific days with no room for error.
Even the “promenade” is a mirror of the city within the prison and of the prison within the city. The people guarded on their pedestrian islands, enclosed by flowering bushes as walls, going sadly and monotonously in and out of shopping centers, loaded with useless but obligatory purchases. The people watched by video cameras in the shops and outside, forced to pass through metal detectors to enter a bank, constrained to stamp a railway ticket, whispering at every instant that ignoble secretion of personal identity that is the fiscal code, invention of the gulag. Do you believe this is very different from a prison?
I can see the courtyard of Newgate—where the prisoners in pajamas march around in rows in a circle in the famous Doré incision—once again every time I walk through any pedestrian island, special project of mayors preoccupied with having an aromatic aroma, an edenic glade, within the immense urban prison they administer. Have we really emerged from the courtyard of Newgate? Have we completely given it up, or only taken that marked pajama to the laundry?
The edenic model inspired the providential inclusion of parks—which in name still carry the memory of Paradise (park is a contraction of paradise, Persian pardesh =garden)—in the emerging urban hell. These parks would later be degraded with the name of “green zone”. But what did these deceptive patches of paradise really change anyway? The urban glade (avenue or public garden) is not forest, freedom, refuge, free play of the spirit among lives different from the human; it is nothing but human images and, in an increasingly brutal manner, human images signify that which we most abhor: walls that enclose and constrain, jail.
The new prison construction (less somber, sometimes more breathable) was begun by the fascist regime (experimentally, in small cities) in order to reduce the distance between city and prison, destined to form a single, compact, totalitarian poison. We see the prison of Orvieto, built in 1936, the year of the greatest fascist triumph, no different from the Italian Bar, the University of Rome or any youth hostel…But the model totalitarian city, with urban envoys lined up in exchange for liberation from malarial anopheles, was Littoria (Latina) where the prison, built in 1939, is an anonymous service building, a true and proper outpost of the future outskirts. And a modern condominium on the outskirts endures widespread prison conditions. From the ground floor to the penthouse, the cooking is the same everywhere: spaghetti—steak—salad—dessert, just like in a regular prison.
The difference is that the family in the condominium doesn’t throw away much food, preserves the leftovers, cooks with more intelligence. The prison, like the barracks or the hospice, wastes a great deal and cooks the same things in a vile manner. No one would ever lick those plates, so often returned full.
Among the traits of liberal democracies at the beginning of this century, this marvel still exists: though specific prison conditions may change in any possible way, in the unstoppable degradation of life in common and of sociality in general on the outside, in the abandonment of the city to degenerative cities, nothing can be done to impede this inevitable transformation of the totality of the urban environment into a prison that has been immersed in the electronic for sometime, filled with typical prison slavery like rape, sexual extortion, the exchange of favors that ends up being more important than monetary exchange.
At any place in the city, at any hour of the day, millions of urban prisoners watch the same things on television as those prisoners who have been sentenced in a trial and those who are held in custody awaiting trial. The judges themselves do the same, cheering in the same way for a goal by their soccer team.
Today all urban space is watched, controlled, patrolled, feared, distrusted, perpetually threatened. In the name of security, it has gradually reached the point of the creation of an absolute technological-military prison. One can say that this long war will only cease in order to abandon its place to a kind of monstrous prison as an extreme form of “necessary” protection. And this is happening under a democracy that tries to appear powerless, under the egalitarian rhetoric with which it cloaks itself, to prevent—since this is what it wants and needs in order to conserve itself—every city of its dreams from becoming a maximum-security prison space (thus without respite) where the circulation of individuals increasingly resembles the circling of the prisoners round and round that courtyard with the high windowless walls where the poor exhausted footsteps resound in cadence.


source: http://devibody.blogspot.gr/2010/02/walls-of-city.html

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