Ungdomshuset and the three abscissas

“Make plans. Be ready.”
(from the statement of the Ungdomshuset social center, 27 Febuary 2007)

Recently, observing the European conflicts from within, we stated (on Claims!) that the new global struggles, local antagonisms, and metropolitan resistances, had acquired such a plan of consistency that they have precise characteristics of an increasing continuity - even in the differences that every event brings with it. The level of continuity of the struggles shows itself as a subversive diagram that is crossed by three abscisses, determining their shape and quality, their being singular and common at the same time.
The resistance of the social center Ungdomshuset of Copenhagen, in the heart of the Old Europe, confirms these quality and, better yet, re-proposes them, constructing and qualifying another level of struggle, which strongly indicates the collective reasoning on common good and on the metropolitan space. The protagonist are young postfordist proletarians, as intelligent as autonomous, and as creative as subversive. The three abscisses are, above all, three lines of subjectification and therefore – and only after – an indication of the terrain on which new machines of social conflict are built today. The first abscisse is that which indicates the actual struggles as fruit of a multitudinous movement, or struggles expressed by a combination of irreducible differences, unrepresentable with the old harness of modern politics: which political party or unions could ever “represent” the revolt of the brothers and sisters of Ungdomshuset? Furthermore: what “representative political agency of movement” could ever express the richness of the singularities that excess in the streets of Copenhagen, demonstrating an intelligence and a resistance force that is such just in its being a multitude of singular, beautiful bodies?
We have finally arrived at the breaking point for which both one and all have to take sides, because the exodus is on the way... and the fires of Copenhagen, like those of the French Banlieues, the still of tambourines of the Val di Susa and the roar of Vicenza are here showing the way... The multitudinous struggles are irresolvable enigmas for any political agency but, at the same time, designs easily coded by all those who are reasoning, living, and fighting with another logic, another system of reference that serves to deconstruct every system, with a potentia that is active sabotage of every power.
The second abscisse is designed in the European metropolises as the cooperation in and between the struggles and then also in the case of Copenhagen it is evident that it is a virtuous intersection of differences, both citizen and European, that animates the entire struggle and lets it win. It is in fact just as evident that even if they were able to pull down the walls of Ungdomshuset, Ungdomshuset wins! And it wins precisely expressing its own subjectivity across the biopolitical connections that it planted in Copenhagen and in the living imagination of the whole of Europe... Everyone percieved the social center as a common good, as an affirmation of otherness and resistance to the destructive winds of liberalism. So, everyone took to the streets and constructed barricades. Social democracy in Europe is dead, autonomy is alive! The third abscisse is the insurgent aspect with which struggles, once reached the maximum force, expresses.
As the danish comrades say “this is just the beginning,” but every beginning, in reality, shows a history and an accumulation of experience that explode when biopower attacks the common good, which is life itself. At that moment, insurrection is legitimized. When life itself becomes fire, stones and barricades it claims is own dignity, constructs another concept of rights, another society. The Common is nothing other than this productive intersection of lives adfirmation of everyone’s right to happiness.
Concerning sisters and brothers of Ungdomshuset, once more, we feel the fire that makes us as brothers and sisters, we feel the taste of the Common, the force of autonomy, dignity and resistance. Ungdomshuset is any place where that fire exist, that force and that resistance.
That, and only that, is the heart of Europe.

translation by: Global Europe