It was 4 a.m. on March 31st, and it was raining outside, when the state's puppets, with their armored vehicles painted with oppression, surrounded and violated the Laboratorio Urbano Popolare Occupato, the L.U.P.O. gym in the heart of Catania. More than 11 years of occupations by diverse groups and eight days of permanent protest by hundreds of people who, over time, demonstrated solidarity amid differences, affinities, mistakes, victories, love, repression, and struggles.
The L.U.P.O. wasn't just an occupied physical space; it could also constitute a healing process. Yes, exactly, but not the institutional, medicalized, top-down, sold-off kind, made up of psychotropic drugs, compulsory medical treatment, or beauty treatments to fit the latest capitalist trend; we're talking about a radical, shared healing, rooted in relationships and values. In a society that has systematized performative exploitation, abandonment, and solitude, self-managed spaces today represent a concrete counterpractice: places where life is measured not in terms of productivity or speed, but in terms of intensity, connection, and possibility.Mark Fisher spoke of the difficulty of imagining alternatives to capitalism, of that suffocating feeling where "there is no alternative" becomes a mental horizon even before it becomes an economic one, the nihilism that leads you to lock yourself inside a refuge from which you look out with hatred and fear. Spaces like L.U.P.O. challenge precisely this perceptual cage. Not because they offer a perfect model, but because they make another organization of life visible, tangible, and habitable. They are interruptions of capitalist realism, fissures in which one experiences a sociality not mediated by the market, but rather by ideals of freedom and anti-authoritarianism. But their strength lies not in their exceptionality. It lies in their fragmented nature.
As David Graeber suggested, anarchy is not a project to be realized in the distant future, but a constellation of already existing practices, disseminated throughout the present. Fragments of autonomy, moments in which people decide to organize themselves without hierarchies, without impositions, without waiting for authorization. Care, in this sense, becomes the connective tissue of these fragments: what allows them to exist, to endure, to transform.
Caring, in these contexts, means many things at once: listening, supporting, sharing resources, creating safe spaces, addressing conflicts without resorting to authority. It also means failing, starting over, learning, and getting back up. It is an imperfect practice, but a living and human one. And it is precisely this vitality that makes it incompatible with the logic of profit and control. Today's capitalism, on the contrary, empties care of its meaning, transforming it into a performance, into invisible or underpaid labor, into individual responsibility. It tells you that you must "feel good" while destroying the material and relational conditions for doing so. It isolates, violates, creates precariousness, deceives, and then medicalizes the discomfort it itself produces so it can then sell you its useless cure.
Self-managed spaces reverse this dynamic. They don't treat symptoms by adapting people to a sick world, but rather attempteven if only for brief momentsto build less sick microworlds. They are laboratories of possibility, but also refuges, survival networks, places where the burden of existence is redistributed. This is why they are so frightening to those who have given up and those who want to control the life of obligation; because they show that dependence on institutions and the market is not inevitable, that we can organize ourselves, support ourselves, and live otherwise. And every time this possibility takes shape, then it becomes urgent for those in power to neutralize it, clear it out, erase it.
But the cure that was created at L.U.P.O. is not contained within its walls. It cannot be. It has passed through people, has sedimented in relationships, has changed perceptions and desires. It's already elsewhere, already circulating, ready to reemerge. And this is where the structural limit of repression lies, and of these ridiculous evictions of occupied spaces that we continue to witness at an incessant pace.
Yes, of course, the monsters of capitalism can demolish their own concrete with their machines, the homes of Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, or even one, two, or a hundred occupied buildings here, but they cannot dismantle a practice once it has become a shared experience in souls and bodies. They can close off a place with a thousand barriers, but they cannot prevent what has been learned there from being reproduced in other contexts, in other forms, perhaps less visible, but more widespread.
Let us remember that the real threat to the existing order is not the occupied space itself. It is the capacity that space had to create autonomy, to teach cooperation, to make care a collective responsibility, to generate life, equality, love, and anarchy. Every self-managed space is a fragment of another society. Not a happy island, but a testing ground. Not a model to be replicated, but a practice to be reinvented. And their multiplication does not follow a linear logic: it happens by propagation, by contagion, by desire, by love. The L.U.P.O. was one of these fragments. Not the first, not the last! The L.U.P.O. was a crack in the system that allowed you to see beyond the darkness. Now there are 10, 100, 1000 cracks within each of those souls, anarchist or otherwise, who have learned to see through and beyond the darkness of the advancing nothingness.
And as long as there is even a crack in the asphalt of the present, as long as there are bodies willing to meet outside the logic of profit, as long as care continues to be practiced as a political and collective gesture, no eviction will truly close what has already been opened.
In this sense, the demolition of occupied spaces is not necessarily a loss: it can also constitute an unexpected release of energy. No, it's not romanticism, it's strategy. Containers are broken, free energies are released that perhaps had remained concentrated in the shelter for too long, held back, protected, sedated in the comfort of a place.
Its demolition has actually released antibodies for this society. Antibodies that function not as a passive defense, but as a widespread intelligence. They are practices, languages, and attentions learned over time that now circulate without a center, without walls to delimit them. They graft themselves onto neighborhoods, into daily relationships, into conflicts, contaminating other spaces, other lives. They don't seek to integrate into the system: they penetrate it, undermining it from within. What remains after the bulldozers are more dangerous for this sick system than what was there before.
Like any living organism, the social body is never completely controllable, and these antibodies act precisely there, in its fault lines, preventing domination from becoming total, preventing adaptation from turning into resignation. They are minimal yet radical gestures: a network of mutual support that emerges, a shared practice that spreads, a refusal that becomes collective, a practice of listening without judgment. They don't make noise like the bulldozers of power, but they work over time, transforming what they touch, like perennial water. And the more they are dispersed, the more difficult they become to neutralize, because they no longer inhabit a place made of bricks and mortar: they inhabit people.
And when care becomes a body, a relationship, and a shared memory, it can no longer be evicted. It becomes a persistent presence, a force that reemerges, adapts, and resists. When care spreads as a practice, it asks permission from nothing: it transforms, like a powerful explosion, everything it encounters.
My idea of anarchy (not necessarily an example) isn't made of noise, bombs, screams, or violence; my idea of anarchy whispers in our ears. It's an idea that multiplies in the complicity of kind and reciprocal glances, of hugs and mutual aid, of practices of equality, but also of desertion, sabotage, and resistance. My anarchy is pure skepticism that allows me to look at even the things I'm most certain of with the eyes of one who knows there are millions of other possibilities. In this transitional society that normalizes violence, humanizes monsters, and isolates us within our fears, what is more conflictual than kindness, love, the joy of complicity in battle? I'm an anarchist. I'm not interested in killing anyone, not even kings or queens; they're all already dead inside me. And I'm not interested in wasting time shouting insults at the guards. I haven't seen the guards in a while. So, I wonder what's the point of shouting into the void, hoping for a response? It wouldn't be conflict, but collusion and entanglement.
Today, the L.U.P.O. has emerged from the concrete, but now it's in the streets, it's in the scattered sound of that ping-pong ball on its tables where children used to play (never enough), it's in the hands and hearts of its comrades, it's in its protest poems engraved on the city walls.
Concrete is always concrete. The L.U.P.O. is free to transform itself.
Gabriele Cammarata
https://umanitanova.org/attenti-alla-l-u-p-o-catania-lo-stato-sgombera-lesperienza-si-moltiplica/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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