Whose Streets? Their Streets (For Now)

Prendiamoci la Citta, Milan, December 3, 1976.

Have social and political movements relinquished the city, or rather the claim on how to reimagine it during moments of unrest, disobedience, and protest? Of course, collective assembly, whether spontaneous or planned, is just one component of the larger process of collectively reappropriating social space. Not every protest can be a riot, and not every riotous expression carries over into a new horizon, making certain demands felt. Assembling with a shared purpose, however, can stake a claim on “places of life.”1 To do so, to paraphrase Marina Vishmidt, the city must be taken as a contingent nexus of value, amenable to rearrangement, expropriation, and abolition.2

Marching in New York City in April from Washington Square to Foley Square, students and faculty shouted “Free Palestine,” “We need teachers, we need books, we need the money the billionaires took,” and “ICE took our students, we want them back.”3 One might be struck by the incongruence between these righteous demands and the general compliance of the demonstrators, even before the much-maligned slogan “Whose streets? Our streets” was broadcasted while protest marshals coolly deliberated with a group of cops about how best to cross the street without disrupting traffic. A more evident investment in reclaiming the city was on display when more than fifty NYU professors moved their classes outside “to protest the University’s lack of commitment to protect international students in the face of the Trump administration’s attacks.”4

The first issue of the Internationale Situationniste (1958) asserted: “It is necessary to understand that we are going to be taking part in a sprint between free artists and the police to experiment with and develop the use of the new techniques of conditioning. The police already have a considerable head start.”5

“Conditioning” here refers to postwar (cybernetic-inflected) visions for mediating the progression from formal decolonization to neocolonial economic paradigms, as well as rapid industrial development during which, per Eric Hobsbawm, much of the world suddenly left the Middle Ages. Advertising (and consumption), ideological consolidation (“historic compromises”), economic hierarchization, anti-communist quid pro quo (the Marshall Plan), and the expansion of the role of the police and incarceration as “fixes” for capitalist crisis—all these served to slowly transform the postwar city into what it is today: a vast network of surveillance technologies, sunken investments, and the locus of financialization. It’s no accident, then, that since the 1970s, more and more of the brightest flashes of confrontational activity with capital have taken place at urban sites of capital’s circulation, taking the form of blockades, “autonomous zones,” riots, and mass looting. “Surplus danger, surplus information, surplus military gear. Surplus emotion … The crucial surplus in the moment of riot is simply that of participants, of population,” writes Joshua Clover.6

I don’t want to pen yet another critique of the reformism “in our heads” (to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari’s “fascism [is] in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior”), dating it back to the “failures” to forge solidarity between ostensibly disparate demands or the post-history dominance of ideological standardization. While acknowledging that gathering on the streets to utter slogans does perform the function of warding away individualization and depression, it must be admitted that it can also foment fatalism and resignation. Is a feel-good parade all we can muster?7

In solidarity, I want to ask why we tacitly give up the city as a terrain for political imagination, thinking instead of the streets as unchanging and permanently enclosed theaters of sanctioned dissent. Is the answer just repression—of course the shockingly violent repression of the Gaza solidarity encampments can’t be taken lightly—or is there a deeper concession on the part of social movements? There’s a lot of complicated reasons informing the decision to abide by a state-sanctioned march/rally choreography: legitimate fear of police violence, the desire to include a wider composition of participants, and the fact that certain groups (nonprofits, professional academic organizations, unions) may want to appeal to a “rules-based order” of sanctioned disobedience that fascists are often the first to profit from disregarding. But these are questions of tactics. What about the larger question of strategy and imagination?8 What is the place of the city (viewed not as a point on a map, but rather as a spatialized confluence of surplus populations, surveillance apparatuses, and mass social wealth hoarded as commodities) in an anti-fascist strategy, even in the short-term?

I think we can take a cue from the various extraparliamentary groups and autonomist movements acting in Italy in the 1970s, for whom intervention into the urban fabric was a strategic choice for overcoming horizontal differentiations between different subjects exploited by capital. As Sergio Bologna puts it in his signal autonomist text “The Tribe of Moles,” the young proletariat of that period began from the idea of “city planning as a space of intervention in class dynamics.”9 Putting some of Italian workerism’s earlier “discoveries” into militant practice, extraparliamentary groups like Lotta Continua (Continuous Struggle) set the stakes of cross-sector collaboration, describing how more specific fights (feminism, youth movements, housing struggles) are related. As they write in their mythic text summarizing the urban action of the early seventies, the “unified struggle around housing has been the pre-condition of the extension of the fight into other areas, such as transportation, health, and prices.”10

I’m not saying that today’s movements must copy the Situationists or Lotta Continua, bringing cobblestones and volantini (flyers) to a postindustrial gunfight—one that Phil Neel describes as taking place “between the opacity of the riot and the hyper-transparent jubilation of Occupy.”11 Rather, I’m suggesting that in our most basic attempts to confront a developing (late) fascist-neoliberal order, our view of the city shouldn’t be restricted to half-hearted claims to being “ours.” Nor should the city be treated merely as a stage upon which assembly lacks the performative power to bring something about. Rather, it should be acknowledged as a collection of infrastructural connections embedded in what only appears to be a cohesive whole, where the “right” to the city is enunciated not idealistically but materially. As a flyer accompanying mass auto-reduction (the collective underpaying for consumer goods and services) actions in 1970s Milan put it: “The goods that we have taken are ours, as is everything that exists because we have made it with our exploitation.” The city, too, is made with our exploitation, even more so today in the era of “austerity urbanism.” The streets are “ours” because we make them with our labor and build our communities there.

For Henri Lefebvre, coiner of the slogan “right to the city,” the postwar street as an everyday site of assembly has its pros and cons. On one hand, it’s the gathering place par excellence. On the other, these meetings, he concedes, are often fleeting: “In the street, we merely brush shoulders with others, we don’t interact with them … The street prevents the constitution of a group, a subject; it is populated by a congeries of people in search of [… consumption].”12 But maybe Lefebvre’s critique of those interactions is burdened with a specific postwar baggage: an urge towards Marxist synthesis and totality, which is today overshadowed by the neoliberal pact of nonconfrontation, corporatized identity, and distributed carcerality. Indeed, in those interactions on the street, even if fleeting—perhaps because they are fleeting—the city ceases to exist as a perceptually unified entity and becomes ripe for reconfiguration. The question is not whether the streets are “ours,” even if we have made them with our exploitation. It is, rather, how we take them back, how we constitute that “we,” and more pointedly, what we take and what we heave into the landfill.