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The Commonist Horizon: Futures Beyond Capitalist Urbanization
May 26, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm BST
Book Launch: The Commonist Horizon: Futures Beyond Capitalist Urbanization
Edited by Mary N. Taylor & Noah Brehmer
How do we move from defensive tactics that respond to the latest stages of capitalist urbanisation, to transformative, strategic revolts, attacking the root causes and putting into practice alternative forms of urban life? One proposal for such a revolutionary alternative to capital’s organisation of our lived environment has been the commons, wherein inhabitants communally control the multi-faceted conditions that make up their daily reproduction.
As a district behind the train station in the post-socialist city of Vilnius, Lithuania faces gentrification, an autonomous community center there has sought to use commoning to resist. Taken up in the former state-socialist Eastern Bloc, commoning practices are embraced as a method for criticising the vicious wave of enclosures that began after the fall of state-socialism while at the same time not relying on the heavily stigmatised politics of state-socialism.
Emerging from a process of thinking together, The Commonist Horizon (co-published by Common Notions and Lost Property Press) features five interventions by movement thinkers. Beginning in the post-Soviet city of Vilnius, the dialogical process stretches outward to two other formerly state-socialist countries, and then beyond. Speaking from their experiences in social movement formations, the authors take up the lived experience of building what might be called urban commons, offering insights on the conceptual and political potentials and limitations of this terminology and associated practices.
Book editor Noah Brehmer will be joined by contributor Anthony Iles, with writer and editor Josephine Berry Slater for a critical discussion of contemporary commons, enclosures, capitalist urban planning and how to disrupt it.
https://www.commonnotions.org/commonist-horizon
http://luna6.lt/naujininkai-commons/discussions
Lost Property Press has emerged over the past couple years around the movement space Luna6 in Vilnius. The press is an attempt to support the production of “anti-books” by fostering communal, militant and mutinous research processes. Lost Property hopes to foster frank reflections on the struggles and contradictions faced when putting such anti-models into practice – self-critically navigating experiences of enclosure, academic appropriation, projectification, labor exploitation and hierarchy in the neo-liberal social landscape our movements, books, and revolts enviably arise within and hopefully against.
Lost Property Books will be available at the event. For more on the press and its books see: https://lostpropertypress.com/