Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

6
Cracks break dimensions,
break dimensionality.
Perhaps the most obvious way of thinking of cracks i in sp[lt' i11
terms: 'Here in the Lacandon Jungle (or in Oaxaca, or in EI Aito,
or in this Social Centre, or in this occupied factory, r in t'his
autonomous municipality) we shall not accept the rule of ca pita l
or the state, we shall determine our own activity.'
It is sometimes argued that territoriality is crucial to h'
development of the new movements of rebellion in the I a t
twenty years or so. Thus Zibechi:
Establishing a territorial base is the path taken by the Sem Terra [the
landless peasants of Brazil], through the creation of an infinite number of
little self-governed islands; by the indigenous of Ecuador who expanded
their communities to reconstruct their ancestral 'ethnic territories' and by
the Indians in Chiapas who colonised the LacandonJungle ... This strategy,
which originated in a rural context, began to establish itself among the
fringes of the urban unemployed: the excluded created settlements on
the edges of the big cities by taking and occupying land. In the whole
continent, several million hectares have been recovered and conquered by
the poor, causing a crisis of the instituted territorialities and re-modelling
the physical spaces of resistance. From their territories, the new actors
develop long-term projects, central to which are the capacity to produce
and reproduce life '" . (2008: 25)
The latter point is crucial, because it provides a material base
for the movement towards autonomy (ibid.: 135).
There is no doubt that the creation of a territorial base for
developing different social relations, whether this base be the
Lacandon Jungle, the settlements of the landless peasants in
Brazil, or a social centre in Milan, can give a particular strength
to movements of negation-and-creation. There is, however, a
27