Autonomous social center

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Autonomous social centers are self-organized community centers in which anti-authoritarians put on voluntary activities. These self-managed spaces, often in multi-purpose venues affiliated with anarchism, can include bicycle workshops, infoshops, libraries, free schools, free shops, meeting spaces and concert venues. They often become political actors in their own right.

Contents

The centers are found worldwide, for example in Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom. They are inspired by various left-wing movements including anarchism and intentional communities. They are squatted, rented, or owned cooperatively.

Uses

Autonomous social centers vary in size and function depending on local context. [1] Uses might include an infoshop, a radical bookshop, a resource centre offering advice, a hacklab, a café, a bar, an affordable gig space, independent cinema or a housing co-operative. [2] As well as providing a space for activities, these social centers can become protest actors in local issues such as gentrification or megaprojects. [3] [4] Alongside protest camps, social centers are projects in which the commons are created and practiced. [5]

History

Western anarchists have long created enclaves in which they could live their societal principles of non-authoritarianism, mutual aid, gifting, and conviviality in microcosm. [6] Some of these community sites include Wobbly union halls (1910s, 1920s), Barcelonan community centers during the Spanish Revolution, and squatted community centers since the 1960s. They share a lineage with the radical intentional communities that have periodically surfaced throughout history [7] and are sometimes termed Temporary Autonomous Zones [6] or "free spaces", in which a counter-hegemonic resistance can form arguments and tactics. [8] Anarchists outside the class-struggle and workplace activism tradition instead organize through autonomous spaces including social centers, squats, camps, and mobilizations. [9] While these alternative, autonomous institutions tend to exist in transience, their proponents argue that their ideas are consistent between incarnations and that temporary institutions prevents government forces from easily clamping down on their activities. [10]

A free, or autonomous, space is defined as a place independent from dominant institutions and ideologies, formed outside standard economic relations, and fostering self-directing freedom through self-reliance. These nonhierarchical rules encourage experimental approaches to organization, power-sharing, social interaction, personal development, and finance. [11] Social centers can be squatted, rented, or owned cooperatively. They are largely self-maintained by volunteers and often close for reasons of burnout and reduced participation, especially if participant free time wanes as their economic circumstances change. [12]

Italy

Askatasuna social centre in Turin, 2016 Askatasuna torino.jpg
Askatasuna social centre in Turin, 2016

Since the 1980s, [13] young Italians maintained self-managed social centers (centri sociali) where they gathered to work on cultural projects, listen to music, discuss politics, and share basic living information. [14] By 2001, there were about 150 social centers, set up in abandoned, squatted buildings, such as former schools and factories. [15] These centers operate outside state and free market control, [15] and have an oppositional relationship with the police, often portrayed by conservative media as magnets for crime and illicit behavior. The Italian cultural centers were sometimes funded by city cultural programming. [14]

United States

In the United States, autonomous social spaces primarily take the form of infoshops and radical bookstores, such as Bluestockings in New York City and Red Emma's in Baltimore. [12] Since the 1990s, North American anarchists have created community centers, infoshops, and free spaces to foster alternative cultures, economies, media, and schools as a counterculture with a do-it-yourself ethic. These social spaces, as distinguished from regional intentional communities of the midcentury, often seek to integrate their community with the existing urban neighborhood instead of wholly "dropping out" of society to rural communes. [7]

United Kingdom

The rise of social centres in the United Kingdom as cultural activity and political organizing hubs has been a major feature of the region's radical and anarchist politics. [16] For example, the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford provides a café, a children's play area, a bar, an infoshop, large meeting areas and concert spaces. [17]

Infoshops

Street view of an infoshop in Barcelona Infoshop.jpg
Street view of an infoshop in Barcelona

Infoshops are multi-functional spaces that disseminate alternative media and provide a forum for alternative cultural, economic, political, and social activities. [18] Individual infoshops vary in features but can include a small library or reading room and serve as a distribution center for both free and priced/retail alternative media, [19] particularly media with revolutionary anarchist politics. [20] While infoshops can serve as a kind of community library, they are designed to meet the information needs of its users rather than to compete with the public library or per-existing information centers. [21] For alternative publishers and activist groups, infoshops can offer low-cost reprographic services for do-it-yourself publications, and provide a postal mail delivery address for those who cannot afford a post office box or receive mail at a squatted address. In the 1990s, available tools ranged from no-frills photocopiers to desktop publishing software. Besides these print publication functions, infoshops can also host meetings, discussions, concerts, or exhibitions. [19] For instance, as activist video grew in the 1990s, infoshops screened films and hosted discussion groups that, in turn, encouraged debate and collective action. [18] The infoshop attempts to offer a space where individuals can publish without the restrictions of the mainstream press [8] and discuss alternative ideas unimpeded by homophobia, racism, and sexism. [22]

Organized by political activists, infoshops are often independent, precariously self-funded, and unaffiliated with any organization or council. They too are often staffed by their own self-selected users as volunteers [21] and like the anarchist media they distribute, operate on inexpensive, borrowed, or donated resources, such as secondhand computers and furniture. [23] As a result, infoshops and other marginal institutions are often short-lived, with minimal income to pay their short-term leases on rented storefronts. [24] Infoshops sometimes combine the function of other alternative venues: vegetarian cafés, independent record stores, head shops, and alternative bookstores. [19] But foremost, infoshops disseminate information, serving as library, archive, distributor, retailer, [20] and hub of an informal and ephemeral network of alternative organizations and activists. [25]

A panoramic view of the interior of the Lucy Parsons Center in Boston, United States. Lucy Parsons Center panoramic.jpg
A panoramic view of the interior of the Lucy Parsons Center in Boston, United States.

Free schools

Anarchists, in pursuit of freedom from dogma, believe that individuals must not be socialized into acceptance of authority or dogma as part of their education. [26] In contrast to traditional schools, anarchist free schools are autonomous, nonhierarchical spaces intended for educational exchange and skillsharing. [27] They do not have admittance criteria or subordinate relations between teacher and student. Free schools follow a loosely structured program that seeks to defy dominant institutions and ideologies under a nonhierarchical division of power and prefigure a more equitable world. Classes are run by volunteers and held in autonomous social centers, community centers, parks, and other public places. [28]

Free schools follow in the anarchist education lineage from Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer's Escuela Moderna and resulting modern school movement in the early 1900s, through the predominantly American free school movement of the 1960s. [29] The American anarchist Paul Goodman, who was prominent in this latter movement, advocated for small schools for children to be held in storefronts and to use the city as its classroom. [30]

In one example, a free school in Toronto grew from the closure of a countercultural community café with the opening of an anarchist free space. It sought to share ideas about how to create anti-authoritarian social relations through a series of classes. All were invited to propose and attend classes, whose topics included: 1920s love songs, alternative economics, street art, and violence against women, though the longest running classes introduced anarchism and related politics of syndicalism and libertarian socialism. The course instructors served as facilitators, providing texts and encouraging participation, rather than as top-down lecturers. The free space also hosted art events, parties, and conversational forums. Other initiatives were short-lived or nonstarters, such as an anemic lending library and free used goods table. [31] Another free school in Nottingham found skillshare-oriented classes with more traditional pedagogy more popular than sessions on radical education. [32]

Similar to free schools, free university projects are run from college campuses most prominently in Europe. Organized by volunteer student collectives, participants in these initiatives experiment with the process of learning and are not designed to replace the traditional university. [33]

See also

Related Research Articles

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Anarcha-feminism Movement combining anarchism and feminism

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Infoshop A space that serves as a node for the distribution of political, subcultural and radical information

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Self-managed social centres in the United Kingdom Self-organised anti-capitalist communal spaces in the UK

Self-managed social centres in the United Kingdom can be found in squatted, rented, mortgaged and fully owned buildings. These self-managed social centres differ from community centres in that they are self-organised under anti-authoritarian principles and volunteer-run, without any assistance from the state. The largest number have occurred in London from the 1980s onwards, although projects exist in most cities across the UK, linked in a network. Squatted social centres tend to be quickly evicted and therefore some projects deliberately choose a short-term existence, such as A-Spire in Leeds or the Okasional Café in Manchester. Longer term social centres include the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford, the Cowley Club in Brighton and the Sumac Centre in Nottingham, which are co-operatively owned.

Anarchism in Canada spans a range of anarchist philosophy including anarchist communism, green anarchy, anarcho-syndicalism, individualist anarchism, as well as other lesser known forms. Canadian anarchism has been affected by thought from the United States, Great Britain, and continental Europe, although recent influences include a look at North American indigenism, especially on the West Coast. Anarchists remain a focal point in media coverage of globalization protests in Canada, mainly due to their confrontations with police and destruction of property.

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Queer anarchism, or anarcha-queer, is an anarchist school of thought that advocates anarchism and social revolution as a means of queer liberation and abolition of hierarchies such as homophobia, lesbophobia, transmisogyny, biphobia, transphobia, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and the gender binary. People who campaigned for LGBT rights both outside and inside the anarchist and LGBT movements include John Henry Mackay, Adolf Brand and Daniel Guérin. Individualist anarchist Adolf Brand published Der Eigene from 1896 to 1932 in Berlin, the first sustained journal dedicated to gay issues.

The Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh, also known as ACE, is an infoshop and autonomous social centre in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was founded in 1997, although it follows on from previous groups.

121 Centre was a squatted self-managed social centre in Brixton, south London from 1981 until 1999. As an anarchist social centre, the venue hosted a bookshop, cafe, infoshop, library, meeting space, office space, printing facility, and rehearsal space. Organisations using the space included Food Not Bombs, Anarchist Black Cross prisoner aid chapters, an anarcho-feminist magazine, a squatters aid organisation, and an anarchist queer group. Regular events at 121 Centre included punk concerts, a women's cafe night, and a monthly queer night. The centre kept a low profile and was one of the longest-lasting squats in London.

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Anarchist criminology

Anarchist criminology is a school of thought in criminology that draws on influences and insights from anarchist theory and practice. Building on insights from anarchist theorists including Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, anarchist criminologists' approach to the causes of crime emphasises what they argue are the harmful effects of the state. Anarchist criminologists, a number of whom have produced work in the field since the 1970s, have critiqued the political underpinnings of criminology and emphasised the political significance of forms of crime not ordinarily considered to be political. Anarchists propose the abolition of the state; accordingly, anarchist criminologists tend to argue in favour of forms of non-state justice. The principles and arguments of anarchist criminology share certain features with those of Marxist criminology, critical criminology and other schools of thought within the discipline, while also differing in certain respects.

Anarchist bookfair exhibition for anti-authoritarian literature and anarchist cultural events

An anarchist bookfair is an exhibition for anti-authoritarian literature often combined with anarchist social and cultural events. They have existed since at least 1983, beginning in London, and are held either annually or sporadically. Some have speakers or other events related to anarchist culture.

References

  1. ↑ Lacey 2005, p. 292.
  2. ↑ Trapese Collective 2007, p. 218.
  3. ↑ Piazza 2016, p. 499.
  4. ↑ Casaglia 2016, p. 489.
  5. ↑ Pusey 2010, p. 184.
  6. 1 2 Shantz 2012, p. 124.
  7. 1 2 Shantz 2012, p. 125.
  8. 1 2 Atton 2003, p. 57.
  9. ↑ Franks & Kinna 2014, ¶14.
  10. ↑ Atton 2010, p. 49.
  11. ↑ Atton 2003, p. 59.
  12. 1 2 Noterman & Pusey 2012, p. 194.
  13. ↑ Atton 2010, p. 53.
  14. 1 2 Downing 2000, pp. 293–294.
  15. 1 2 Klein 2001.
  16. ↑ Franks & Kinna 2014, ¶34.
  17. ↑ Lacey 2005, p. 297.
  18. 1 2 Atton 2010, pp. 47–48.
  19. 1 2 3 Atton 2010, p. 47.
  20. 1 2 Atton 2003, p. 58, 63.
  21. 1 2 Atton 1999, p. 24.
  22. ↑ Atton 2003, p. 63.
  23. ↑ Atton 2003, p. 62.
  24. ↑ Atton 2010, pp. 48–49.
  25. ↑ Atton 2010, p. 48.
  26. ↑ Shantz 2012, p. 126.
  27. ↑ Noterman & Pusey 2012, p. 182.
  28. ↑ Noterman & Pusey 2012, pp. 182–183.
  29. ↑ Shantz 2012, p. 127.
  30. ↑ Shantz 2012, pp. 127–128.
  31. ↑ Shantz 2012, pp. 128–130.
  32. ↑ Noterman & Pusey 2012, p. 184.
  33. ↑ Noterman & Pusey 2012, pp. 184–185.

Bibliography

Further reading

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