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Social Centers are Better than Centers for Social Work!

The text is a reflection on self-organized social work in autonomous spaces, focusing on its meaning and function in the construction of counterpower. The author begins with a consideration of the depoliticized status assigned to care and self-organized social work which marks them as irrelevant, secondary, and personal activities that do not contribute to the political community and concludes with a feminist redefinition of the notion of politics and political activities. The main part of the text focuses on community organizing as a key form of struggle against expropriation and domination, and also considers different forms of organizing autonomous structures to satisfy the needs of autonomous spaces and the political potential for the transformation of subjectivities. Autonomous spaces are defined in the article as political havens from outside oppression (following bell hooks’ idea on homeplace as a site of resistance), functioning as spaces for decentralized autonomous infrastructures that offer security and a point of departure for organizing against the mechanisms of hegemonic power. The reflection concludes by employing the concept of the revolution in reverse (following David Graeber) and demonstrates an attempt to re-conceptualize the revolution, which is initiated with infrastructure, encounters, conversations, emotions, interpersonal conflicts, and invisible self-organized social work, which can have a destitutive (de-constructive) effect. The text is intended for all readers, but also contains valuable ideas for people who are building communities in autonomous spaces, helping them to become conscious of the meaning of self-organized social work, reclaim its political status and organize it in a transformative, liberating way.

 


Article inside journal

Issue No. 270 - Autonomous Factory Rog
Source
Časopis za kritiko znanosti
Numbering
2017 , volume volume 45 , issue issue 270
5,00 € each (incl. tax - DDV)
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