europe.pgaconference.org

vision of a practical solidarity network between squats and other autonomous zones

goals

giving personal motivation and inspiration to people to participate in autonomous space activities, by making them more familiar and kind of attached to one (or more) such project(s). this includes special facilities and ways of life to be experienced at a special place and of course the cultural context (especially important in relation of eastern & western europe).
sharing skills and mutual learning by both guests and hosts.
as the new wave of repression hits the european squatting scene, it becomes more and more important to know each other's struggles, get familiar with the people and spaces that could be attacked by the state or the owners.
this is all true, but it's necessary to add some more: the network of autonomous spaces is important not just because the possible attacks of the authorities (political, economical, whatever else), but because these places can become more and more autonomous only if they don't cut themselves off from each other, but cooperate, share information, skills, and everything else that must be shared, without too much transportation (for economical and ecological reasons).
another goal is that this network, based on solidarity, mustn't be a closed circle, but open to new initiations, new groups, and help them to establish their own local autonomous zones, no matter if it's for living, for a local community or for the big, anonymous public or more of these, no matter if they are temporary, permanently, or... permanently temporary :) autonomous.
this last thing is more important than one would think: if you already have an autonomous space, you have more possibility to make people join you, you can show them practically, what are they joining to, so that you can have more people to resist when there is the threat and you have to struggle to keep it. but when you're one step before the beginning, it"s hard to keep even the hard core together: there is no place where you could surely meet, you always have to search for meeting places one or two days before it, there is no stable base physically - in space and time, and in people - and mentally. this makes a lot of people traveling or sometimes even moving out from these cities and countries to those places that already have more tradition in the movement, more squats etc. and the leftover people are angry on these emigrants as long as they are so much fucked up that they also move out from the original starting point. and then comes the next generation... (this can explain a bit our personal motivation...)

means
autonomous zone projects (squats, social centers, community farms, etc.) assist to people who want to spend a longer time (possibly a few months) at other projects in order to learn about the local struggles, to help with whatever actual project that autonomous zone has in focus at the agreed time, and to get familiar with a way of life the guest is probably not used to.
each participating project becomes a starting point for people who want to travel to another region to visit another project. participating projects are also encouraged to host people due to their needs and capacities.
people are only sent to another project when they bear trust from the sending side – still this is no warranty but a kind of recommendation. agreement between the guests and the hosts includes some assistance by the sender project: this means, with this recommendation the hosts can have more trust in the guest, and be better prepared to host someone who is actually interested in the issues they work on. (it often happens that no real connection can be born because the hosts are somehow overwhelmed by random visitors, so it all remains on the level of squat tourism.)
for all this to be made real, it would be useful to use one or more of the already existing solidarity networks between autonomous spaces (squat.net, conaction.tk, tsolife.org, intersquat france, and more), to avoid multiplying the efforts. it would be also nice to see how these already existing networks could be interconnected and to strive for a better coordination.

and strictly practical...
there is a database to be born about european squats and autonomous zones, it should be accessible under squat.net soon. it will contain information about the a.z.'s themselves, about their needs for skills, their facilities (i.e. what can be done there) and their capacities of hosting people (how many, for how long time, when).
there will be a question form that the ones who want to be guests should fill. there could be a proposed form which can be changed by each local project, for their own needs (= if you want to ask extra questions or think that some are not important for you as a host to know, just transform it). it can include skills to be offered, description of motivation, expectations, etc.
no travel costs are covered by any side. try to hitch hike.
participation in the local activities is required. guests can take their share of the goods of the project they are hosted at (to be agreed, but basically it's about covering their needs: food, shelter, possibly clothing). if someone refuses to participate, can be just sent back (or wherever). in this case, the sending side should be contacted for their information. (sometimes it happens that someone is driven out from one place and starts to spread rumours that help conflicts to arise. it is always better to talk about problems overtly than just leaving them.)
it's nice to get some feedback (guests to the senders) even during the time of being there. this can be a motivating factor for guests who will return to their home and work on projects inspired by their experiences.
very nice, but... this idea builds the trust upon institutional means which mechanisms doesn't really make a difference from the Bolshevik state or for example from the EVS (European Voluntary Service)
according to the description, you must have a sending side, so an already existing group or space, that accept you. this means that you can only join the network if you already joined.
the database of the already existing autonomous places hasn't appeared yet. I've seen parts of it, decentralized notes. the database involves the problem of conspiracy: if we collect all the addresses of the movement and update it regularly, we give a really big help for the secret police! just to put this problem out as a question mark...
the note about the squat-tourism is totally true and relevant: when a group have to deal with a lot of unexpected guest, after a while they don't want to spend time even with those who contact them before and have more motivation to meet than just having a sleeping place for free and drinking beer for free or for less money than in the tourist zone.
therefore the network that I imagined is based on more personal communication. we don't give away our addresses (just if somebody really want to), just give email contacts and the city it refers to, if we are on the inviter's side. and the network helps both the already existing places in any case of necessary, but the other big goal has to be to help those groups that are the beginning: something like a squatters caravan. for example if there is a city, like Budapest, we are only 5 to 15 people who really want to squat, we already did some squatting actions but without any long lasting results. (the only long lasting result was our anger.) so we look around and see 10 cities that are close enough to Budapest to travel to us in one day by hitchhiking, so invite all the people, individuals and collectives to come to and support with practical resistance, in the house or in front of it. hoping that in a few weeks we can get in a more stable position (for that, the local group have to look for a building that seems good for that), later on we go to those cities that are close enough and need some similar help.
if in a greater region there is the need for more people for a certain amount of time (maybe around a month or so) it could be a whole year's squatters caravan: the group goes each month to a new city, take a place and those stay there who have chosen the building so that they can and want to keep it afterwards. so the people are rotating, new people are coming, and those who quit from the tour can make solidarity actions in there own space and spread all the information which they have - but not through institutionalized means but from people they already know personally!
personal motivation for pushing this idea...
we are from eastern europe, hungary, which is no fertile ground yet for any alternative ideas. though some people try to live their lives in kind of an alternative manner, it's not organized, and such attempts remain isolated. many of them can't stand this isolation any longer and just give up or get “normal” again↓. seeing examples of how it works in other regions can inspire people to take the experience back home, and setting up an organized way for the exchange puts some responsibility on the persons not to keep it for themselves but try to expand it and help their fellows to build up local solidarity networks that are hard to imagine in such a hostile environment without seeing that it can really work or at least having someone who got some experience already in it. and for westerners, it could be an interesting experience to see what can be done when there is no movement background for such activities, when there is no tradition for it and experiments and/or courage are needed to establish something.
... or some of them goes abroad as I told before. the guy who were writing this text last year is thinking about moving out from hungary. we were part of the same collective 'til the end of august, and we all ended up not as a collective but as a 'separative' and everyone of us is thinking about either leaving hungary or becoming passivist. this is a problem not because of our loved home or nation but because if everyone who is thinking different from this mainstream capitalist life, leaves to those places where there are already a lot of comrades, then there will be islands without getting informed about the struggle, and there the movement will be killed before its birth.
maybe those from eastern and southern europe already understand this a bit: our first squatting actions were inspired by some travelers western-european experiences, and the whole hungarian movement is a copy-paste process, even the NGOs (pasted by first of all Soros foundation), and all the grass roots movement (okay, some workers movement is not western copy, but russian and so on). the problem is not copying itself, but the blindness of it: don't thinking about the local circumstances for a second, just making the same functions in the squat that we saw somewhere else.

what we expect
even if people are not interested in making this idea a european-wide effort, we will try to build partnerships with autonomous projects continent- and possibly worldwide. anyone who would be interested in developing a partnership please get in touch.

ak57 d.i.y. khommunity khlub
here stood the old address of are base (literally too: it was a basement). the main thing that it's not enough to give our (?) contact to you or others, but everybody have to be contact with everybody (or at least one mail address from every group) and it's only worth to organize this caravan or network when there is the serious need and will from all the people joined it, from enough places of Europe and the world.

so anybody can join me if want to, but there's really nothing to join yet, it would be much better if we would join to each other more and more practically. that's why I don't propose any common action, decentralized in space or in time, but fixing it in any way. it would only be another eventual, that"s why superficial and spectacular, casualized event or series of events.

hajni
from the (non)hungarian (non)anarchist (non)collective...
ovis.bp@gmail.com
ps: to tell the truth we're planning to start a new collective, and it seems that we could have a small physical base, a flat, and maybe some place that is open to the street, so that we can organize ReDistro (something like Kost-nix-laden in Austria, or Freeshop in other places) and an Infoshop and a Hacklab, but mainly because we run out of people I'm not sure if we will be that much successful that we could at least begin it... so we need more, conscious people who are not afraid to communicate...

vision of a practical solidarity network between squats and other autonomous zones

*goals

giving personal motivation and inspiration to people to participate in autonomous space activities, by making them more familiar and kind of attached to one (or more) such project(s). this includes special facilities and ways of life to be experienced at a special place and of course the cultural context (especially important in relation of eastern & western europe).
sharing skills and mutual learning by both guests and hosts.
as the new wave of repression hits the european squatting scene, it becomes more and more important to know each other's struggles, get familiar with the people and spaces that could be attacked by the state or the owners.

means
autonomous zone projects (squats, social centers, community farms, etc.) assist to people who want to spend a longer time (possibly a few months) at other projects in order to learn about the local struggles, to help with whatever actual project that autonomous zone has in focus at the agreed time, and to get familiar with a way of life the guest is probably not used to.
each participating project becomes a starting point for people who want to travel to another region to visit another project. participating projects are also encouraged to host people due to their needs and capacities.
people are only sent to another project when they bear trust from the sending side – still this is no warranty but a kind of recommendation. agreement between the guests and the hosts includes some assistance by the sender project: this means, with this recommendation the hosts can have more trust in the guest, and be better prepared to host someone who is actually interested in the issues they work on. (it often happens that no real connection can be born because the hosts are somehow overwhelmed by random visitors, so it all remains on the level of squat tourism.)
for all this to be made real, it would be useful to use one or more of the already existing solidarity networks between autonomous spaces (squat.net, conaction.tk, tsolife.org, intersquat france, and more), to avoid multiplying the efforts. it would be also nice to see how these already exisiting networks could be interconnected and to strive for a better coordination.

and strictly practical...
there is a database to be born about european squats and autonomous zones, it should be accessible under squat.net soon. it will contain information about the a.z.'s themselves, about their needs for skills, their facilities (i.e. what can be done there) and their capacities of hosting people (how many, for how long time, when).
there will be a question form that the ones who want to be guests should fill. there could be a proposed form which can be changed by each local project, for their own needs (= if you want to ask extra questions or think that some are not important for you as a host to know, just transform it). it can include skills to be offered, description of motivation, expectations, etc.
no travel costs are covered by any side. try to hitch hike.
participation in the local activities is required. guests can take their share of the goods of the project they are hosted at (to be agreed, but basically it's about covering their needs: food, shelter, possibly clothing). if someone refuses to participate, can be just sent back (or wherever). in this case, the sending side should be contacted for their information. (sometimes it happens that someone is driven out from one place and starts to spread rumours that help conflicts to arise. it is always better to talk about problems overtly than just leaving them.)
it's nice to get some feedback (guests to the senders) even during the time of being there. this can be a motivating factor for guests who will return to their home and work on projects inspired by their experiences.

personal motivation for pushing this idea...
we are from eastern europe, hungary, which is no fertile ground yet for any alternative ideas. though some people try to live their lives in kind of an alternative manner, it's not organized, and such attempts remain isolated. many of them can't stand this isolation any longer and just give up or get “normal” again. seeing examples of how it works in other regions can inspire people to take the experience back home, and setting up an organized way for the exchange puts some responsibility on the persons not to keep it for themselves but try to expand it and help their fellows to build up local solidarity networks that are hard to imagine in such a hostile environment without seeing that it can really work or at least having someone who got some experience already in it.
and for westerners, it could be an interesting experience to see what can be done when there is no movement background for such activities, when there is no tradition for it and experiments and/or courage are needed to establish something.

what we expect
even if people are not interested in making this idea a european-wide effort, we will try to build partnerships with autonomous projects continent- and possibly worldwide. anyone who would be interested in developing a partnership please get in touch.

ak57 d.i.y. khommunity khlub
1074 budapest, dohàny u. 57. (ring 128 at the doorbell, then find the basement on the right of the courtyard)
http://ak57.zpok.hu
ak57@indymedia.hu
sms +36 20 488 8629
(if you come for a visit, please write us 2 weeks before you arrive. thanks.)