London Notes: autonomist magazine #1 1992

LONDON NOTES is about...

London... metropolis, isolated subjectivities, police, repression, Docklands, enclosure of spaces, enclosure of life, the annoying lights of the West End, Bank, the City, a financial knot of global exploitation. London... demonstrations, riots, scattered moments of proletarian appropriation, squats, occupations, anti-fascism, anti-racism, widespread “fare dodging" on the tube. London... the territorial diffusion of proletarian antagonism, and at the same time the need to accelerate and catalyse the circulation of this antagonism through the diversities of the proletariat's experience.

Notes... fragments, bits and pieces, scattered leaps of subversive thought, drive toward coordination and organisation, in thought, in practice, in the material condition of our antagonism, of our organization. Notes... notes rooted in the certainty of our subversion and in the need for its socialisation. Notes... attempt to grasp the material conditions of our power; conditions now different from before. Notes... musical notes, carnevalesque dimension of the class struggle.

London Notes comes out essentially for two reasons. First, as the need of a group of comrades in the autonomist area, who come from different experiences, to make sense of the conditions of the class struggle at this time. Second, as a contribution to the acceleration and circulation of these struggles through the diffusion of international autonomist material.

We put emphasis on the condition of the class struggle as opposed to meaningless voluntaristic calls for "class struggle", so much, heard in many radical circles in Britain. We emphasise the condition of the class struggle at this time because we recognise the importance of the economic, social, and cultural transformations following capital's reaction to the waves of worldwide struggles of the 1960's and 1970's.

This editorial is not the place to interpret these transformations in an analytical sense. Too little space, which could result in a simplistic and dogmatic list of phenomena. Different interpretations, which we draw from the international arena of antagonist publications, will be offered in the pages of this magazine, in this number and - hopefully - in the numbers which will follow. For those who wish to debate, the debate is open.

These Notes are published in London by comrades involved in the antagonist movements of this metropolis. London therefore becomes the starting point of our reflection on the condition of the class struggle at this time. But the scattered character of the struggles, the weakness of the links among them, the stagnating circulation of our subversion and of the constituting elements of new social relations is a problem which touches the class antagonism at every level of the territorial and geographical organisation of capital's despotism. London Notes therefore is obviously not only about the class struggle in London.

A final note to be read as a disclaimer. London Notes is obviously not a party, nor an organisation with an official line. London Notes is just a magazine with a political soul. If we can define a common agreement among us it is this: we put emphasis on the autonomous grass-roots nature of the class struggle, and on the autonomous grass-roots struggles of each section of the working class (waged and unwaged), against any top-down imposition of a program in the name of the working class, and against any subordination of the needs of the marginalised sections of the working class.

We hope you may find this interesting. Grazie e buonanotte.

London May-June 1992

Contents:

CLASS COMPOSITION AND AUTONOMY

• American Rebellion
• Women Against Demographic Control
• Migratory Flow, Class Composition, and Struggle

LONDON NOTES

• Squatting and Social Housing
• 1642: The London Wall
• Strategies to Enforce Student's Work

INTERNATIONAL MEETINGS

• Report on Venice Conference
• International Camp in Palestine
• Discussing Class Composition in Paris

AND

• Notice Board
• European Counter-Network News - from Britain