Archiving from Below Discussion Series: Archiving as a communist inventory? with Agit Press
March 26 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm GMT
Sooner or later everything gets recuperated by our political enemies. Despite their warnings even the situationists were unable to escape this fate. Obviously, we don’t give up on militant ideas despite their capture, however we do need to take account of practices and tactics that we inherit from past movements, so as to assess their utility against present needs and constraints.
In this sense movement archives are not only repositories of communist history but can act as a way of constructing an inventory of the present movement. While archives often illuminate the intellectual history of the communist movement(s) – their theoretical and ideological debates, their statements, their policies and their campaigns – they also contain a record of practices- the strategies and tactics that animated everyday activity. As such, archives are a vital resource for the living movement. They are a toolbox – containing a wide range of tactics and strategies that must be unearthed and tested against our present realities.
How then can archives be structured to achieve this aim?