Pedro Levi Bismarck
The Community against the
State
The eviction of the Es.Col.A Project in Porto
The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer
be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between
the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between
whatever singularity and the State organization.
Giorgio
Agamben
I believe in the unbelievable, in
the magic things,
In the occupation of the world by roses
Natália Correia
There is nothing
worse to the ‘state’ than to see true democracy at work. And Why? Because it
recalls the ‘state’ itself that vaguely unformulated terror
present in its own origin: that the
self-management of the public thing and the construction of the community could
be done outside its limits and sphere of action (and, therefore, outside its
control). In brief: that society can be able, by itself, to substitute and make
what the ‘state’, the Town Council, the politics, were incapable of doing and
thinking. The police acts in defense of the ‘state’, because what is at stand
is the failure of the ‘state’ as ‘state’ and the sudden exposure of the wounds
of its apparently and trustful democracy.
The eviction of the
Es.Col.A Project from a small abandoned school in a Porto depressed area, it’s
an example of this fact. And only this open wound can explain the way Porto
Town Council managed this process. From the excessive use of force, to the
incapability of dialogue and to ideological prejudice, what grounds Porto Town
Council’s action is the awareness that the Es.col.A movement has replaced the
municipality in a task that it was not able itself to perform (or nor even
attempted to), leaving a school (and its community) for five years in a pure
state of abandonment.
We can lose ourselves
in many technical and, mostly, legal problems around this question, but the
theoretical and political fundament at stake is: for once, a community
organized itself around an educational and culture program, without the
necessity of the ‘state’, proposing a communitarian platform in a depressed
area of the city; for once, a community organized itself to react against the
city center abandonment and desertification and was able to do what the Town
Council always refused; for once, democracy had wings to work and, once more,
the Porto Municipality refused democracy.
Above all, the Porto
Town Council is the epitome of the authoritarian ‘state’ but absolutely
ineffective, that nothing has done and allows nothing to be done. And is this
same Council, that in its own defense uses the public property argument, that
no more than sixth months ago has sold the Miradouro da Vitória
(a public space and historical landmark) and has rented
all the main public infrastructures of the city (recognizing, at that time, its
non-vocation to manage them). It has been the Porto Town Council who has mostly
contributed to the spoliation of our physical and cultural heritage, who mostly
has contributed to the mediocrity of our urban environment. And, for that, the
dilapidation danger of the res publica, of
what is property of the community, is not in the action of the Es.Col.A
project, but on the contrary, in the whole political action of Porto Town
Council.
But in order to
inscribe this question in a real debate one has to situate the problem of the
Es.Col.A in the sphere of politics and not reduce it to a problem of law. The
tendency of the actual pragmatism that seeks to reduce everything to a problem
of law is the great danger that impends
over the emptying of politics. It’s the ethic that grounds the law and not the
law that grounds the ethic.
Most of all, what is
absolutely necessary is our capability to use all of this, once more, to think
what can and what is the essence of the everyday exercise of democracy; to
think how can we re-inscribe politics in the center of everyday practice and
reclaim what thirty years of economical growth, consumerism and well-fare, had
despoiled us, that is: our access to politics, our ability to think politics
and the ‘state’ as fundamental part of our life in community.
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