03 2025

Insurgent Neighborhoods: Between Holey Space and Molecular Feminism

Sara Jiménez / Kike España

On April 5, 2025, a great constellation of mobilizations will take to the streets and squares of more than 30 cities in Spain, responding to a call that evidences the multiplication and proliferation of molecular revolts against the housing business. From Málaga, to A Coruña, Madrid, Seville, Valencia, Barcelona, Jérez, Santiago, Zaragoza, Cádiz, Ibiza, Granada, and many other cities, the streets will be filled again with this energy that is not only a response to the housing crisis, but a molecular recomposition of the neighborhoods in struggle.

Holing the city

Logistical capitalism and its financial (de)territorialization no longer operate with the trialectical simplicity proposed by Lefebvre between conceived, perceived and lived space[1], but more akin to what Deleuze and Guattari develop as a multiplicity of processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of capitalist axiomatics[2]. Before the city all frontal opposition - and all traditional forms of opposition - end up recodified between smooth space and striated space. But there is also another type of space, less known, which is the holey space, a type of intermediate space that turns against the city through a new informality of inhabiting what it traverses. Hence, the great challenge we have at present is: to hole the city in order to communize it. And how is this done? There is no road map to follow in this task, but it is clear that it is a matter of other things really passing through the city of logistical capitalism, of things passing outside its recognition, its representation and its integration in the forms of government of the State and the city. And these intermediate things are already happening on a molecular level: with blocks in struggle and on strike that are already organizing in many cities through tenant (and housing) unions, in land and housing occupations, in the maintenance of social centers, in the sabotage of logistical infrastructures by ecological movements, in anti-militarist and anti-racist responses, in transfeminist irruptions, in neighborhood experiences that make out of necessity resistance, in experiments that lovingly and insistently take care of every little hole we make in the city. Everything helps in this new recomposition to hole the city and communize the world.

If these practices continue to proliferate in the various peripheral cities of Europe, if the blocks still in the process of revaluation continue to be holed on a molecular level in order to generate challenges to the use of property as a financial asset, we will be able to open the conditions to produce insurgent neighborhoods. They will make of this tension a new form of life in struggle that is not exhausted in the block or the concrete housing, but in a reconfigured form of friction with the world. The mobilizations, actions and strikes to come are immersed in this dispute and their multiplication will depend on the capacities to continue feeding the strength of the struggles of the present.

In Málaga, logistical capitalism landed in a brutal way in the early 2000s to transform the city into an infrastructure for the attraction of tourist industries and rent-economy. The city is too far north to be a periphery and too far south to stop being one, in a frontier enclave where all the racist and colonial brutalism is strategically hidden so as not to frighten the tourist visitors who are replacing the inhabitants through the logistical adjustments of the tourist industries.

The agenda of struggles for housing and, therefore, for the support of life and its affective ecologies has been extended and constellated, in the recognition of a shared history that starts from real estate speculation and the capitalist tourist industry, from Málaga to other cities in Spain since the demonstration of June 29, 2024. This demonstration was not a parade of demands towards the State composed by the previous construction of a supposed political subject in its classic sense. It marked a definitive turning point in the transversalization of the struggles that went far beyond the sum of individual housing issues towards the politicization and collective weaving of alliances around the struggles for housing. As we live beyond the confines of the home, the struggle for housing is irreducible. The discomfort of work and the impoverishment of existence and the destruction of more than human ecologies have joined the collective problems and discomforts as fundamental points in these struggles. To witness this process is to account for the multiplicity of subjectivities and frictions with the logistics of capitalism, of the encounter with difference when there is nothing from which to differentiate: for the logistics of capitalism there are no subjects, and in the framework of the movements its decentering is nothing but good news for the assemblage outside of negativity and individualities. It points not only to the rebellious, collective imagination from the margins of what could be, but to its implementation.

Housing struggles are not only important to defend that housing is for living and that no one can be deprived of a roof over their heads, but also because it is a way to directly intervene in the mechanism of reproduction of the financial brutalism of logistical capitalism. Housing is a very important refuge for the profitability of financial assets that are being disputed by the tenant unions in practices such as the organization of disobedience in apartment-blocks in struggle. In the blocks, rent-paying is being collectively stopped - or paid less - but there are also a host of smaller strategies of dispute developing in the vertical properties that attempt to lengthen, hinder and impede the violent flow of capital that is extracted from tenants to continue to feed the rentier model of real estate ownership. All these strategies also contribute to something more important and profound, building a common force that slowly and molecularly proliferates block by block, portal by portal, house by house, holing the financial city asset by asset.

Little by little the conditions for a multiple rent strike are being established, the moment of maturation in the correlation of forces of the insurgent neighborhoods in which the blocks and committees pass from the struggle and the neighborhood to the strike. To reach this moment it is essential that the force built is not only numerous but subsistential, that it has the capacity to sustain itself and proliferate while the conflict increases. A true multiple strike will never be only about rents, even if this is its vector of entering and extending. By interrupting the flow of rents, the strike not only questions private property and the landlord's right to accumulate wealth without producing anything but also opens up a strategic vacuum: a territory where the common spreads and where insurgent neighborhoods experience new ways of inhabiting and sustaining themselves. The key to its potency lies in its capacity to proliferate and connect with other spheres of social reproduction, extending to the strike of debt, care, climate, anti-war, supplies, and the life of work and consumption. It is not, then, a punctual claim within the framework of law, but a sustained interruption of the urban metabolism of capital, an insurgent reappropriation of time, space and subsistence.

Intermediate spaces of feminist struggles

Already in 2022, the feminisms of the city, picketing towards the Feminist Strike of March 8, took to the streets with a banner that took a step in the direction of the staging of economic violence: "We don't live off tourism, tourism lives off us". The banner was carried through the most touristic streets of the city center and was addressed to all the workers who, with their labor power, greased, one more day, the abstract machine of global logistics.  It was not obvious in the city even in 2022, the connection between the feminist struggle and the economic violence that was established through the new forms of employment of human capital that extended far beyond the traditional work spaces. We pointed to the impoverishment of the conditions of existence in multiple senses: economic, but also vital, spiritual, affective existence. We were witnessing not only a change in the city, in its daily infrastructures, but also in its affective impact. The feminist struggle was inaugurating in that intermediate space, walking the streets, with the subtext, the question that was beginning to be formulated: what could be?

This intermediate space resists the parcelization and containerization of territories and subjectivities. Because it is not situated in the "in-between" as that space that logistics seems to abandon and leave to the fate of struggles. This in-between space is the space of radical imagination, of "life in the ruins" of capitalism and of "speculative engagement"[3] that does not stop at the analysis of what already is. According to María Puig de la Bellacasa[4] the in-between space - which comes from the work of Susan Leigh Star - is both a place of oppression and of possibility for alternative forms of life, knowledge and resistance. In the logistical elimination of subjectivity and its reduction to an uninterrupted flow of commodities and data, lines of flight are inevitably created. The molecularization of the feminist struggle is the transversalization of speculative engagement and the role of care in the creation of forms of life irreducible to the demand and welfare work of social movements. Molecularization implies a decomposition of subjectivities, as they had been, through the struggles. "Putting life at the center" implies composing oneself, inventing and struggling with marginalities. To listen to each other, to come together, to support each other is to rebuild ecologies in the spaces in between, to "strike" together when necessary. It is not waiting for what is to come, but putting it into the present.[5]

This is the daily life of the city's housing movements. Feminisms, beyond being present when they are expected - 25N (Day against male violence) or 8M (Feminist Strike Day) - multiply in a situated way in the struggles for life beyond the human and the urban, highlighting the importance of care (beyond paid or unpaid care work and beyond its moral and individual burden), and of the encounter. We come together not to design strategic state policies, nor to substitute them in their (infra)structural absence. Lives come out of the individual story to revolt and rebel in common. In the joy of building ourselves as friction in the face of the emergency and the capitalist suspension of life. A friction that opposes the affection that always resists and that remains, that is restored in each encounter to recreate what is imagined, what could be, in the practices themselves: temporary zones of autonomy, meetings between neighbors, picnics, demonstrations, neighborhood committees, strikes, popular parties, fantasies of sabotage. Multiple dispersed and rhizomatic processes. The struggle against logistical capitalism is not a frontal war, but one of (dis)positions and interruptions, of multiplicities, of fragmented and constant resistances, of molecular feminisms in the in-between space.

Intercommunalism

Since the dawn of modernity, international solidarity has been a fundamental pillar in the struggle against exploitation and domination. The International, the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War or the networks of support for the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century are paradigmatic examples of an internationalism that conceived emancipation as a common task. However, this model of solidarity, based on the idea of nations and delimited political subjects, has been put in crisis by financial brutalism, the mutations of logistical capitalism and the dynamics of planetary expulsion. The present moment demands a conceptual leap: the passage from classical forms of international solidarity to intercommunalism. This is not just a terminological adjustment, but a response to the radical transformation of space and time in the era of planetary urbanization, the climate crisis, brutal war regimes and the collapse of traditional forms of governance. Intercommunality is neither an action of states or cities nor a network of alliances between stable political actors, but an insurgent reconfiguration of cohabitation and repair on Earth. Nor is this something new, already in the late 1990s the anti/alterglobalization movement already tested a kind of abstract machine between movements that managed to function as a molecular insurgency.

Intercommunalism is not a simple network of support between dispersed struggles; it is an ecology that goes beyond political, economic and urban borders to articulate insurgency in a molecular constellation. Constellations of insurgent swarms, meetings of movements, counter-summits, federations of committees, brigades among many blocs in different cities, more fediverses and multiple and planetary strikes. Intercommunalism is a way of living in the ruins, in the sense proposed by Anna Tsing[6]: an art of survival beyond nostalgia, an experimentation with new forms of life and cohabitation in a devastated world. In the face of the brutality of capital, intercommunalism tries to communize what in reality has always been linked and does not belong exclusively to anyone. If classical internationalism was the horizon of a world to come, intercommunalism is the practice of subsistence in a world in ruins. In a planet marked by wars, climate crises, absolute financialization and the exhaustion of traditional models of resistance, the only viable form of struggle is that which assumes the radical interdependence of the human and the non-human, the local and the planetary, the living and non-lively matter. Intercommunalism is a planetary neighborhood, a cartography of insubordination, a politics of emergence that, instead of waiting for the collapse, tries to invent habitable worlds in the present.