Introduction

Radical social centres have never disappeared from our streets and neighbourhoods, with a network of these centres enduring cycles of emergence and collapse over the last five decades or so. Surging into life through a community’s struggle to meet its needs or fighting on through the will of a committed core, squatted buildings and rented shop-fronts have enabled diverse formations to forge these novel spaces of antagonism. These sites become invested with myriad hopes that other ways of living and organising might be possible - however briefly, or imperfectly. Lying on a spectrum of related projects, social centres sit alongside squats, community and worker centres, free health facilities, radical infoshops, and food and housing co-ops, all of which exist to foster solidarity in the constituencies around them.

The mid-2000s and early 2010s saw a notable resurgence of these social centres on a national scale, as a new generation took up the form, with aspirations that their own alternative ‘spatial fix’ to capitalist immiseration might bolster their movements, or provide refuge from increasingly hostile conditions.¹ The political vocabulary to mobilise around these centres has transformed decade by decade, from the ‘autonomy centre’ of the 1980s to the language of shared ‘commons’ and ‘commoning’ of the 2000s, but some fundamental targets have remained the same: reclaim space for the local community, offer resources to groups outside of prohibitive market costs, and facilitate political activity.²

We have, however, not seen a major uptake of new radical social centres over the last decade. Occasional and on-going flurries of localised activity are certainly apparent across our cities and towns, just as we indeed see the closure of many long-running social centres. With a decidedly adverse legal and financial environment, and perhaps the slow disappearance of the generational political culture helpful to organise and sustain these spaces, radical social centres remain a steadfast and vital resource in a number of places, but have a comparably small presence in the UK as a whole.³

Yet, with other institutional turns having come and gone, their edifices crashing down or silently detonating, we must ask what role social centres are playing, once again, in the possible recomposition of revolutionary currents. The conditions which make these spaces both possible and powerful ebb and flow, and social centre projects always face the challenge of mapping onto the struggles within social reproduction which are unfolding through and around them. The social centre form is an old one, but as waves of social and political recomposition take place, they are a site through which new political approaches can be experimented with. The worker centre scheme explored through the rest of this issue is one such experiment.⁴ Social centres have necessarily been engaged in struggle within and against work, and often dedicated considerable resources to this terrain, but as the UK has a less prominent tradition of worker centres as seen elsewhere, particularly across North America, it remains a form to be trialled at length in our contemporary context.

As the Brixton Black Women’s Group expressed it back in the 1970s, social centres provide a ‘permanent base in the community’ through which political work can be conducted and otherwise ignored social needs begin to be met, whether through offering focused legal and welfare advice, or as a forum for organising and uniting around shared experiences.⁵ With interminable debates over the merits and limits of digital platforms as a means for movement building getting us nowhere, and in the face of racist, Islamophobic pogroms across the country in recent months, the urgency of defending, and constructing new, long-term environments through which communities can cohere, gravitate and foster face-to-face relations is evident.

They are, of course, no panacea. Never escaping debate or derision, radical social centres have faced the same disputes time and time again. Is the labour of reproducing the space a fetter on activity that might be done otherwise? How can this labour be distributed fairly, and democratically? Should those involved work toward purchasing the space, or reaching agreement with the owners or the State - and does this risk a political pacification? How do we ensure the inclusivity of our space, and combat cliques?⁶ For a generation of comrades, social centres - and their issues - were a permanent, ubiquitous background to their organising and social lives, but given the often ephemeral nature of these spaces, and their uneven distribution across the UK, they have not always been easy to learn lessons from.

Notes From Below has consistently drawn upon a heritage of thought and struggle from Italy’s worker militants, but one element of this tradition not as regularly engaged is that of centri sociali. The social centre movement in Italy has not only helped sustain, if not always uncontroversially, broad revolutionary activity across the country over the last half century, but has similarly provided fruitful dialogue with a parallel movement in the UK. Carrying on this conversation, we spoke recently with militants involved in Askatasuna, a long-running social centre in Turin, about the development and political outlook of their project. Suggestive of both the limits and complications of the social centre movement in meeting the current crisis - particularly in attempting to relate to worker organising - the following interview highlights a number of topics hopefully useful to any place-based organising project.

While touching upon always relevant themes of how to navigate intense state repression or support an intergenerational sharing of experiences, the central thread of the discussion is the question of how a centre gets embedded in a community, as a trusted site of political agitation and practical solidarity. Cautious of any notion that radical social centres offer a definitive ‘outside’ to capitalism in our everyday lives, the importance of inquiry to this process is made particularly apparent: simply having four walls is not enough, and a collaborative process which actively supports the needs, desires and possible political orientation of local communities is needed for a centre to get rooted. Social centres are often built out of necessity during specific political conjunctures, and with the passing of these foundational contexts, centres might evolve into new shapes, face repression and be forced out of action, or become plagued by the burn-out characteristic of organising within and against our perpetual crisis. A process of re-orientation through collective investigation is one which, ideally, facilitates a dynamism in social centre work, allowing it to move and grow between different eras.⁷

Interview

What role have the centri sociali played in Italian radical politics?

The Italian social centres movement has its roots in the end of the 1970s, in a turbulent period characterised by militant activity from a range of autonomous political groups. These social centres emerged in city peripheries, like in Rome and Milan, as younger parts of the proletariat and local neighbourhood began to occupy spaces that could meet their social needs - providing space to gather, express themselves, and socialise. This was partly inspired by a counter-cultural concern with a right to have fun, enjoy yourself, and to build alternative, radical cultures through art and music. This paired with a need for a dedicated physical space for political organising, somewhere to prepare for demonstrations and political actions. They also provided a base through which housing and neighbourhood struggles could be conducted, particularly for the auto-reduction of electricity and water bills. These different political and creative currents inter-mingled, as a punk culture fused with more explicitly political, militant networks that were building forms of self-organisation. Social centres have, in this way, always facilitated a diverse range of activities, and always been tied to a number of divergent meanings.

They are also not unique to large cities, where there can often be a dozen or more sites, but are also present in small towns and villages. In each place, a social centre fulfils a different function and builds a different identity, some aiding political recomposition of local movements, and others more so as places which provide support to local people. We therefore have understood these centres in a dual manner; both as a political tool, and as a place for political expression. There is a constant, open dialectic between these different roles.

For some it is a site of organising and activity, and for others it is a place to be preserved at all costs, because your identity and liberty is rooted in this space. Social centres, when they are well-established, may come to signify something more than just the building itself, representing a particular form of collective organising and radical culture. They are recognised not only by the activists involved, but by the public, and the government as well. They become a key site through which communities relate to and struggle against the police, the national government and various state sectors. We fight to preserve these spaces because of what they represent, as forces against the state and capital.

What does the political activity at the social centres look like?

The political identity of social centres varies from site to site. We, at Askatasuna, proudly present a hammer and sickle out in front. It’s not something to hide or shy away from, it helps make explicit a particular relation to the context which you are engaging in, and clarify the nature of your political stance. The key question of politics in a social centre is how organisations can come to understand the social needs in its local environment, and how it can help to move struggles over these needs into processes of mobilisation and conflict which are capable of contesting capitalist forms and practices.

Our practice is guided by a process of inquiry, in which we try to understand the situation around us, and what is possible within it. It requires really living within and through the social reality of your city and its different communities. It means trying to relate to the forms of crisis unfolding around you, and the forms of exclusion and violence which different parts of the working class around you are experiencing, and the resistance they pursue. There are the continual chains of recognising the space around a social centre, undergoing inquiry, organising around these issues, and building political subjectivities which can guide these political struggles. Our method of inquiry, specifically, is drawn from Romano Alquati and his notion of co-research, as applied to forms of social reproduction within a metropolitan context. In short, this is a three-phase process: first, is that of a pre-inquiry, of collecting data and information about the phenomena or composition of people you want to understand and engage. Second, is making an informed hypothesis about the composition you are engaging with, and want to organise within. Third, is the co-research itself, as a process of inquiry and collaboration with those within the composition itself, and engaging in the process of struggle that they are undergoing. This is to be a continuous, circular process, of always adjusting hypothesis through inquiry, and one which does not see its study as reliant on a fixed object, but rather as an active, changing subjectivity which is to be part of the research itself.

Social centres have a unique political effect of bridging the differences and gaps between communities, gathering people into a collective struggle which creates different ways of existing together, understanding one another, and traversing social conflict side by side. These spaces become a common site, and mark a shared opposition. This is true of social centres as it is of picket lines in front of factories, or on the streets against evictions. You can breach the separation imposed on you, and come to recognise common enemies - who is on the other side of the picket, who is out there working against your shared space.

The physical space of a social centre may too have an immediate, spatial politics, in how it works against a logic of capitalist reproduction and accumulation in our towns and cities. When we build and defend social centres, we are defending urban space against the threat of increasing rents, gentrification and the social violence of clearing out working class communities. Social centre networks are often home to possibly hundreds of squatters, providing them space for living and reproduction, and as a means for many hundreds more to access and contribute to a form of solidarity which helps meet certain needs. We see this most prominently in how social centres offer resources for the organising amongst migrant communities, excluded as they are from social support elsewhere.

What kind of role do social centres play in the development of radical politics?

We need organised spaces and political organisations to help develop perspectives across the short, medium and long term. There are always autonomous struggles unfolding within the working class, in agitation at the level of everyday life and built upon immediate needs, that can develop through short and medium terms. However, it is not always simple to develop from these struggles longer-term political perspectives and strategies. Political organisations and rooted spaces like social centres are necessary to help translate and crystalise struggles over needs into social conflict. Social centres act as a form of a chain of transmission between the working class and political organising; it helps to translate the explicit demands and the implicit politics of those demands. We need these links to keep political organisations bound to and responsive to the needs and experiences of working class communities.

We have historically, for example, seen forms of organisation which immediately try to engage head-on with the state and capital, being drawn into conflict and repression by the state and its apparatuses of control, without understanding the social needs and struggles of the working class around it. Social centres help to mediate conflict and antagonism with the state, and what the different segments of the working class are experiencing and trying to organise around.

The organisation which Askatasuna has contributed to over the last 20 years, alongside other social centres and political movements, is called Autonomia Contropotere - Autonomous Counterpower. Autonomy and Counterpower - these constitute our political method and political programme. We work to understand, through inquiry and participation in struggles, how different activities and behaviours within the working class may be potentially, if not explicitly, antagonistic with capitalism. Then, we have to help develop forms of organising which deepen those practices of insubordination, helping them evolve into broader forms of struggles. There needs to be a constant exchange between these two processes. That is why we conceive our organisation as a sort of two-level tier: which keeps the ‘mass’ activity of the working class in a relation of understanding and support with a ‘vanguard’ of political activity. We would say we need neither a “structured” party nor forms of radicalism which are “dissolved” in the working class, but an organisation capable to articulate a dialectic and a relationship between a sometimes hidden, but we think potentially always present mass attitude of refusal and sabotage against capitalist reproduction, and the open, visible forms of political activity.

There are three elements of an effective organisation, as we see it. First, It has to be a mass organisation, and to maintain relationships with the working class as always possibly a revolutionary subject. Second, it must work toward becoming a total organisation - it must be concerned not just with a single sector or site, but with every field in which the working class lives, be that in the productive sphere or on a level of social reproduction. The political value of a social centre also lies in organising beyond single sectors or around single issues, as they help to organise struggles across society at large. We should articulate ourselves on a universal basis, and be capable of intervening in every field, by working through these processes of inquiry and organisation. Third, is that we should be centred around conflict and antagonism as it is developing; as the needs of our communities do not always immediately develop into coherent political struggle, we should be working on translating conflict into political terms and activity.

Social centres are therefore places of counter-power, where social needs which the Italian state and broader society cannot, and will not, support, are able to be met. Against the demands of capitalist accumulation, we strive to meet the demands of housing and reproduction which so many of us cannot achieve on our own. We either try to fulfil them directly, not help build movements which impose demands and generate pressure on the state to fulfil them. The political identity and aspirations of the social centre is often guided by and subordinated by these immediate needs.

How did Askatasuna develop as a social centre within Turin?

To understand the development of Askatasuna, we have to make sense of Turin. From the 1950s onward, Turin was transformed by the rapid, intense development of major factories, particularly the famous Fiat automobile factories, which made the city into a particular link in the chains of value which underpin capitalism in northern Italy. This expansion of a Fordist model of capitalist labour and production was to be met with a parallel growth of very intense struggle, shaped, in particular, by the migration of workers from the south of the country. A grand history of combative worker organising has therefore left its mark on the city.

By the 1990s, however, Turin was to face a fate familiar to many similar European cities at the time - severe de-industrialisation and the socio-economic transformations that come with it. Capitalism today, indeed, still has not quite found the place through which to re-absorb and manage the enormous workforce that was expelled from the industrial work in this period, and as a result, Turin today still has amongst the highest unemployment rates in northern Italy, and particularly high rates of youth unemployment. Askatasuna emerged in 1996 from this context of rapid social change and a recomposition of the city’s working class, as the productive and reproductive landscape of the city was profoundly altered.

Askatsuna itself started as a mixed-use squat, through which different autonomous movement groups could come together to organise politically. Any social centre and squatted space goes through different cycles of struggle, as its role and identity shifts and grows. Askatasuna has been re-shaped, in particular, by its relationship to the NoTav movement in the nearby Susa Valley.

A first key moment was the development of the centre and its political activity before and after the G8 gathering in Genoa in 2001. In the years prior, the city’s radical, autonomous currents had become both increasingly antagonistic to the left-wing parliamentary party of the time, for example, attacking it for its role in legitimising the NATO bombing in the Balkans, and begun to push beyond the older forms of organising which had survived from the 1970s and 1980s and were still centred around industrial worker struggles. Through its involvement in clashes at demonstrations and its growing political work, the police attempted to try and evict the social centre. The eviction was successfully resisted, and through this process, it was clear that Askatasuna had become a significant force and presence politically, recognised as a threat or issue by the state. By 2001 and the counter-G8 demonstrations, it was clear that Askatasuna stood alongside other formations like the Tutti Bianchi as a new emerging form of counter-power and disobedience.

How has Askatasuna related to the NoTav movement?

When we talk about the Val di Susa, we must be clear that we are not speaking about an idyllic, pristine valley. It’s a valley which has existed and been shaped as a periphery to the industrialisation of Turin in the post-war period, so has suffered through the same processes of industrial build-up and post-industrial decline like Turin itself. There is therefore a complex composition of workers; those who have worked in relation to the factory economy, those who managed to find or build other jobs, a significant unemployed population, and then also agricultural workers.The fight against the Tav railway grew out of this very varied composition of workers and their distinct political and social cultures, as with local workers who retain a residual peasant and mountain culture. The relationship between these different segments of the working class in opposing the railway has therefore taken on different identities and methods of resistance, and Askatasuna has been one element engaging in this network of resistance.

We understand how important the NoTav movement is in two ways. We see that the railway development reveals how capital is trying to reproduce and extend itself today, and pursue forms of accumulation in de-industrial contexts through the development of logistical infrastructures. Understanding what is happening in the Val Di Susa helps us make sense of the current cycles of investment and financialization which are shaping capitalism in Italy today. It is thus a model of contemporary capitalist development.

We recognise that activity in the valley also serves as a possible model for organisation and the building of mass movements. There have been forms of radical environmentalism from below existing alongside more traditional types of top-down environmental pressure which have attempted to prevent the railway, revealing the NoTav movement to be more than a simple NIMBY-ist project of people solely concerned with their local area. In engaging the NoTav movement, we have had to come to terms with sharing a political space also inhabited by the Lega Nord, by Catholic structures and so on. This has meant working out how to engage with political elements we had no alignment with, either ideologically or organisationally. There, too, was a long history of far-left organising in the valley, which left an imprint across the valley.

The point, for us, was how to build toward forms of recomposition in this concrete situation and with a concrete program that could work through this constant process of conflict and consensus between diverging groups and communities. The point was not to secure consensus amongst all those involved, or that all would have to accept every type of direct action or means of organising, but that we could ensure a productive dialectic between radical and less-radical groups, and sustain the movement at large.

After 30 years of constant activity and struggle, fluctuating between moments of what seemed like victory to periods where the construction has continued and defeat has been felt by some, the role of Askatasuna, particularly in recent years, has been as a more radical, agitational component within this broader NoTav movement. Askatasuna has in this way been recognised by the state as a particular threat, as a propulsive force in the movement which helps to push things forward. The forms of repression which have developed in the last decade or so to disrupt and disarticulate the movement against the Tav have been highly combative, and they have been increasingly applied to militants around Askatasuna and related movements.

The state has been focused on undermining the mass movement, criminalising many of those involved and destroying the links which make it possible. The state, for example, has attempted to construct a binary of ‘good’ resistance and ‘bad’ resistance, which was to de-legitimise more radical activity, and isolate it from the rest of the NoTav movement. In a similar vein, we have seen this kind of isolating tactic apply to different parts of the population, demonising young migrants and using the law to suppress them.

How has the social centre related to the experiences of worker organising?

In our attempts at direct intervention to worker struggle, since the end of cycles of struggles around Fiat factories and in a post-2008 climate, we have not found a general approach that we could apply, or found a generally satisfactory way of relating to workers’ struggles. There are clear examples where we have been able to relate social needs that the centre can engage to workers’ struggles; for example, when logistics workers have been in struggle in their workplaces, but also suffering from a lack of access to housing, we have been able to unite and bind struggles across production and reproduction, facilitating access to housing and also supporting their activity at work.

We’ve attempted a number of experiments and distinct approaches over the years, a number of which are worth mentioning. First, in building a relation to struggles across the logistics sector and interacting with SI Cobas, the union which has been organising workers across this sector. Specifically, with workers in neighbourhood markets selling fruit and vegetables, alongside drivers who move these commodities. We tried to support their picket lines - which have historically involved very intense and violent clashes with the police - but this was never able to generalise across the city. This was reliant on a particular moment in logistical organising, which has now in a way rescinded, partly due to how quickly the organisation of labour has shifted and changed, which makes organising and building relationships much harder.

Second, is our attempts at organising in relationship to workers across hospitality, in tourist work and bartending and restaurant work. This meant trying to organise with a composition primarily of university students and young people, who are working to support themselves through their studies.They work in very harsh conditions, with poor contracts or no contract at all. We have to increasingly work alongside this group of workers as the neighbourhood around Askatasuna has transformed from; from a large working class neighbourhood to one more bound up with university students and workers (the number of students moving through and living nearby has likely doubled in recent years). We focused on trying to support struggles around wages and conditions on the one hand, and securing legal contracts on the other. However, after a couple of months, we recognised the limits of trying to massify these campaigns and practices of struggle and refusal. We recognise, however, that we have been able to get a sense of things through this process of inquiry - in understanding the chains of value that structure this hospitality economy, the increasingly factory-like quality of this labour, and the possibilities of insubordination for workers. The difficulty of this project has pushed further our efforts of using inquiry across the neighbourhood.

Third, and most interestingly, has been our attempts to organise and engage forms of work which cross over social reproductive labour - in healthcare. There has been a considerable number of strikes and mobilisations across this sector over the last ew years, and they’ve shown impressive degrees of organising and capacity; but we also recognised a difficulty in intensifying the struggle politically and developing a means of improving certain demands and programs. So, after Covid, we had a clear perception that we lacked a comprehension of the medical-industrial complex in the city and how it regulates healthcare, and so went onto launch a line of inquiry in this sector. There is an acute issue across the country because Italy has a very old and ageing population, and so it’s a growing industry which will be of increasing importance in the coming years. We saw that two forms of intervention were possible around this struggle; the first around salaries and wages, and the second was around the broader industrialisation of the system and the transformations in the work that this entailed.

We could see constant negative developments in healthcare services and the quality of care due to changes in the work. From the intensification of healthcare visits that were just 15 minutes per person to the construction of massive specialised, healthcare hubs in cities, we could see a closer integration of healthcare into factory-like conditions, where health is transformed into a capitalist good or commodity like any other. These changes have facilitated a new relationship between doctors, health workers and patients, which develops new types of contradictions and tensions. We see, in particular, the growing tensions between care-givers who view their work as an ethical duty toward patients, and the reality of ever-declining conditions of work and service. The reality of capitalist valorisation comes into view through the struggles of these health care workers.

We have therefore been trying to support, encourage, engage and organise healthcare and strike action in this field, both across public hospitals and in private healthcare, and trying to better understand the changes that are underway and what this will look like into the future.

What does the current state of social centre organising look like, and what’s on the horizon?

We do see that we are perhaps at the end of the cycle of social centre struggles in Italy, in a particular way, and recognise the limits of the organisational form that this can have for us. We recognise this in two ways; first in terms of the composition of people that come through and organise itself in the social centre, and secondly, that the specific phase of young, proletarian workers which used to recognise themselves and their identity in social centres from the 1970s onwards, and that this is longer the case. Social centres relied upon a kind of alternative culture and aspiration towards separate forms of life and activity which is no longer as prominent, or possible any more. Counter-culture no longer expresses itself through the kinds of music or art that social centres could support, and thus draw in less young people. We also see that social centres are less capable or useful to support other sectors of society, or articulate their interests.

Post 2008, we have also seen the emergence of other political forms, particularly in populist politics, which has transformed political life and activity in Italy. We have found that trying to reconstitute and recompose forms of politics which used to work through the social centre is also no longer an option. Specifically, for Askatasuna, there has been over the last year a major shift and change, which we think partially responds to this change in the overall utility of social centres for political activity. Askatasuna remains a squatted site of autonomous activity; however, we recently entered into agreement with the city council to transform certain parts of it, the garden and open spaces at its base, into a recognised ‘bene commune’ or common good for the neighbourhood and city.

This emerged from a situation in which the centre as a whole was nearing eviction and total repression, given its relation to Tav and other struggles, with the state trying to destroy the project as a whole. We thus worked through a long period of political reflection, weighing up the consequences of an eviction and what this would do to the resident movements, and what we can offer as a space. We recognised that struggling against the eviction would be more costly and destructive than accepting some agreement with the local council - denying the state the ability to disarticulate our movement and destroy our premises for organising. We may not have made this decision 10 or 20 years ago but the mass movement of social centres is weaker now than it was then, so our decision was different. Preserving the social centre as an infrastructure is of greater value than the effects of resisting an eviction would have been.

We also understood that this negotiation with the local council would amplify tensions between the local government and the national government; with Meloni in power, we could draw out tensions between her movement of the far-right and the neoliberal centre-left of the local government. The decision created obvious confusion and incapacity amongst the judiciary, the interior ministry, and the local police. This change in status has also enabled us to interact with certain groups and communities who had been sympathetic, supportive, but not able to engage with us in more extensive ways due to the legal and social risks of doing so. This decision has enabled us to therefore build new sets of relations, as well.

Nonetheless, of course, we carry on the struggle and defence of the site. We value the social centre both as it facilitates the preservation of certain types of antagonistic organisation, but also as it is a physical space which helps us enter into the dialogue with the class contradictions in the neighbourhood and the different elements of the local area we want to organise and struggle alongside. The social centre facilitates an inter-generational sharing of knowledge and experience, as movement veterans help establish a tradition through which younger militants can make sense of their own activity. Each generation has its own forms of political subjectivity, bearing the imprint of the moments through which it became politicised, and this range of experiences helps fuel debate over strategy. We see this, in particular, with the NoTav movement, that it’s not just young militants on the marches, but many generations, people with their kids and older people too. From this, we can build different forms of sociality, different modes of acting with one another.

Historical memory is an essential tool in how it helps to define a political identity, and in how it lays out forms of practice and models of activity. It helps to build a style of politics and activity. We see, in particular, social centres as very important sites of memory in anti-fascist activity and how to practise conflict and defence against the government, against the police, and the fascists.History is a tool like any other, which guides us toward different organisational forms and experiences. We can understand the different cycles of struggles from the 1970s, 80s, 90s and long term struggles like the NoTav in the val de susa. Social centres help to keep these memories alive and breathing, and establish a political identity out of these particular histories. Of course, we must be careful not to be trapped within the cages of memory, and just try to reproduce their forms through remembrance. We can try to apply old methods and means, but if they don’t work, they don’t work. Social centres also help us to understand how the conditions of the working class have changed, the political moment has shifted, and the language around it has evolved as well.