(voices of resistance from occupied london)

“Images contaminate us like viruses” (Paul Virilio)

If texts in this journal were images, the article on the Gwangju uprising would be a flashback. Prior to discussing current urban struggles we needed an image from the past to confirm the hypothesis: Resistance and revolt can only be integral to a system that produces inequality, exploitation and misery.

What Virilio calls the integral accident is an accident that can, potentially, work for us. From Durban to Paris and from Gwangju to Copenhagen people always would - and will still - organise, resist and revolt. This is the true TINA (There Is No Alternative): To break social consensuses and survive, to revolt and live.

European streets might seem to be running out of steam - but then what was Copenhagen all about? Paris? Thessaloniki? Madrid? The question is no longer of whether revolts light up more or less often, the question is about the nature of such revolts and where we place ourselves within them.

Hardly surprisingly, the revolted of the banlieues
seem to have “a lucid comprehension of the political exploitation that power can make of them” - such discernment
is sorrowfully missed in our ranks. “There hardly exists an accessible place where only Power can be hindered or “Images contaminate us like viruses” (Paul Virilio)attacked”: And yet we attack, at the most inaccessible places, at the most unsuitable of times, when they are most protected.

Whatever images of our action get channelled through corporate media are increasingly set to fulfil the media’s very own lust; our action has to be supplementary to the image of our opponent - and that’s what it becomes. Is our action contaminated by the image?

Truly effective struggles are un-image-nable (not unimaginable!) The fascinating grassroots work of the Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban’s shack settlements has been, in its most part, unsuitable for media purposes. The Abahlali have launched an attack against the neo-liberal paradigm on an everyday level and leave the media machine hungry for an image depicting the clash - there must be a lesson for us there somewhere._

*Issue Three of the journal is coming out in mid-December (honest!) and is a London-special, themed “Life in the Occupied City”. Submissions, comments,
whatever: occupiedlondon[at]riseup.net