Prioritizing in the face of the social avalanche

via A las barricadas, English translation by Anarchist News

ALB Noticias.- Today the FAGC has briefly reappeared on twitter to summarize its activity during these months of pandemic. We reproduce the tweets that you can see with their interactions here. We are happy to hear from this group which is so combative and indispensable.

Greetings comrades. First of all, thank you very much for all the affection and for thinking so much about us. Overwhelming, but it pleases us a lot. Our silence in rrss (only in rrss) has been due to a matter of prioritizing before an avalanche of setbacks… We’ll explain.

It has been an accumulation of a mix of personal, social and militant issues. The FAGC is a tiny group, with a few veterans and a drove of new people who have just started militancy at the worst moment: a pandemic with social isolation included

The FAGC does not abuse the use of assemblies, but it does need close contact in some of its different projects and that has been a very uphill battle, especially in the orchards and in the "Consultant’s office for precarious women" (with many people without connection any type).

A couple of comrades have become mommies (a text is needed that exposes the bleak aspects combining “adult life” and militancy), others have not been able to reconcile work, family and militancy. Others have fallen ill (surgeries included). The rest of us have tried to hold up the shanty town however we could.

Maintaining a food self-sufficiency project, working collectively in our gardens, in the face of police harassment (despite of wearing masks and keeping a reasonable distance), has been tricky.

Threats of fines (we haven’t received any yet) for working the land in small groups while multitudes celebrated barbecue parties on neighboring farms. The Covid has been a great pretext when it comes to criminalizing projects linked to poverty.

Maintaining a physical space where comrades without resources could tell us their problems in the workplace has been another odyssey. How to make a video call with someone who has been without data for weeks? How, with someone who is working on the street trying not to get caught by the gestapo?

However, the issue of migration has been the element that has collapsed our militancy the most. Our projects (assistance and housing) have been saturated like we never imagined. Necessity has broken protocols and self-management has had its trial by fire.

Health crisis, brutal media and street xenophobia and lots of desperate people. A horror movie, but with real lives and suffering. And it's not over yet. We do what we can, but it is not and will not be easy. The necessary resources are in the hands of inept...

In terms of housing we have had the luck of counting with the Tenants Union of Gran Canaria, who have admirably led this front. We have continued to intervene in various Strike Committees, but we have had to prioritize a lot given the magnitude of urgent work in projects such as “Las Masías”.

Many things have remained pending: talks, texts, prologues, round tables, debates, etc. A thousand apologies to all of those who have failed in these matters (despite having made the commitment), but in this war we have had to choose life, because they were taking it from us...

If we disappear again, do not worry. We will keep existing, even if you don't see us on the screen. This August the FAGC turns 10 years old and the plan is to reach our first decade, at the least. When we decide that we can’t go on any longer, we will announce it as it deserves it. We’re holding on for now.

We live in a real dystopia (the dystopia is the present, the next 5 minutes, without the need for zombie apocalypse, nuclear wars, or such things), a global humanitarian emergency like it has not been seen since 1945.

We are witnessing the moment when a broken capitalism refuses to leave the stage of history. And in order not to do so, it will blow up whoever it takes. Thousands of evicted people for whom staying on the street is illegal, refugees whom no one calls, forgotten in ports

Workers without a contract who sneak out to work, hoping that the night will not come when someone will ask for their pass. Overcrowded migrants against whom a narrative of hate is woven in order to initiate an electorally profitable escalation of violence.

While the “regular” workers give up leisure, living together, sharing, protesting and their health. While every day they are forced to get into a bus and park their children at school because the only legal thing is to produce and consume.

And the State, the guarantor of this capitalist dynamic of exploiting workers’ increasingly unsustainably "longer" lives to their core, uses all its police and judiciary to persecute those of us who are looking for air. That’s how we’re doing.

But we have no other choice. Breathe, my people. As one comrade (to whom we send a big greeting and wish he gets well soon) says: "If they forbid us to breathe, they will only achieve one thing: that we disobey, at least 12 times a minute." Big hugs to all.

There are 3 Comments

glass half full: surviving precariousness with dignity through liberating common resources and mutual aid
glass half empty: self-managed bureaucratizing of poverty, using the co-administration limited common resources as a means to exhaust the energy of its administrative human resources
the whole truth: it's both depending on how you look at it.
what else is there? there are worse alternatives. are there better ones? probably this question isn't helpful.
free housing, a community garden to supplement subsistence (while you risk your life going to your menial gigs) can't get any better, living the dream. no, no one is claiming that, this is a grounded (bleak) reality, not a pie in the sky dream, not a beautiful idea. we can't afford delusions in this present dystopia. keep it together, you can make it til august, and then: mission accomplished.
what else can we learn from thriving long-running sustainable living and mutual aid projects? there is much yet to learn from the hard earned wisdom of this collective , regularly shared through their twitter account. students of ZADs, tenants unions, land projects, pay attention.

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