Call by the Interkiezionalen for the Mietenwahnsinn-Demo at 23.05., 1pm Potsdamer Platz
May 2021 and yet another project nears eviction, yet another space receives its court date from a state seemingly intent on the elimination of all emancipatory structures. A state which has the audacity to revoke the Berlin rent cap in the middle of a pandemic, proving spectacularly that the interests of capital will always take precedence over people’s needs, and that reform will always fail.
When we fight for our spaces, it is not only our subcultures, our countercultures or our comfortable bohemian existence we fight for; rather, as pre-figurative realizations of our ideas -mutual aid, solidarity and self-organization- our spaces represent a step towards a city without landlords, without police, politicians or any form of exploiters or abusers and a collective answer to an atomized existence and the commodification of human necessities this current attack springs from.
Isolated within the walls of our projects, these ideas become meaningless, alienated and cease to exist. It is only by seeing the fight for our spaces as the fight against every eviction, every new startup in our kiez, every post rent-cap backpayment, standing together with every struggling renter, priced out family or rough sleeper, that we truly defend our projects and give meaning to our ideas, that they can spread beyond our walls.
This means freiräume not as ends in themself, as buildings within which we can remove ourselves from society, but rather as places from where we can further intervene in our surroundings, open ourselves to other struggles and attack the nature of property itself.
As market forces and state agenda attempt to alienate our projects from the wider city, atomizing them and attempting to depoliticize them while evicting one after the other, now more than ever we must not retreat into ourselves. Now is the time to open our doors and take to the streets, in solidarity with the myriad intersectional struggles in our city. When we exist only as four walls, we are weak, we are easilly evicted and we are lost. When we exist as projects interconnected with our neighbours, our comrades, our kiezes and our city’s shared struggles, where we can constantly fluctuate and develop, we are strong.
A struggle against the housing crisis and a punitive state decision is not a struggle for reform or a recognition of state legitimacy, but is a struggle for our spaces and the neighbourhoods they belong to, against the city of the rich and against property and capital itself.
Lynch the landlords! (Dead Kennedys)
Freiraume fur alle!
Interkiezionale Meeting-Point: 1pm historic traffic light Potsdamer Platz or at the “Enteignen, Vergesellschaften, Selbstverwalten” Hochtranspi
German version here
