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 urbanization, 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 organization 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 stigmatized politics of state-socialism.
Emerging from a process of thinking together, The Commonist Horizon 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.
PRODUCT DETAILS
Edited by: Mary N. Taylor & Noah Brehmer
Publisher: Common Notions
ISBN: 9781942173717 (print)
ISBN: 9781942173816 (eBook)
Published: January 2023
Format: Paperback
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Page count: 192
Subjects: Cities / Urbanization / Eastern Europe
About the editors
Mary N. Taylor is a militant researcher whose praxis is grounded in anthropology, urbanism and dialogical art. She works with the internationalist East European platform LeftEast, and the affiliated roving summer school hosted by different social movement formations in the ‘post-socialist’ region; Brooklyn Laundry Social Club, and KnowWastelands Community Garden.
Noah Brehmer is a political theorist, cultural organizer and founding member of Luna6. He cofounded the Lithuanian critical media platform Life is Too Expensive. He’s published in Blind Field Journal, LeftEast, Mute Magazine, Metropolis M and OpenDemocracy.
Advance Praise
"At the frontline of struggles inside disaster capitalism, commoning emerges as the social force of renewal, opening up horizons just when we felt so claustrophobic. The Commonist Horizon celebrates the emergence of possibilities thus opened up, but without avoiding the hard questions about urban space and power, questions that need to be raised to allow us keep walking.“ —Massimo deAngelis, author of Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism
“Editors Mary N. Taylor and Noah Brehmer are critical thinkers who have successfully linked anticapitalist social struggles in their social activism and their writing—from Brooklyn to Budapest. The Communist Horizon raises questions I have been struggling with for some time: How do we change our fundamental relationship to land? How do we engage social movements to connect globally and resist the transnational power of corporations and state governments? Taylor and Brehmer have affirmed the international collaborations that many of us are involved in is the road to the realization of a Right to the City, a true and long-overdue urban emancipation. The Communist Horizon will quickly become a must-read for radical urbanists in all parts of the globe.” —Rob Robinson, Special Advisor at Partners for Dignity and Rights, NYC and Faculty in the Graduate Program; Design and Urban Ecology, Parsons New School
“The Commonist Horizon shows the complicated relationship between capital and the movements organized against it. It analytically engages with the context and practice of everyday struggles of building institutions that serve communities and nature alike. It inspires and informs people fighting against enclosures worldwide and tells an unfamiliar story of commoning in Eastern Europe.”—Márton Szarvas, member of the “Helyzet” Working Groups for Public Sociology and Solidarity Economy Center, Budapest
“Amidst the ravages of global capital and its brutal dispossessions, the need to reconsider the liberatory potentiality of the commons could not be more pressing. Heeding this call, The Communist Horizon looks to commoning pasts, presents, and futures from Eastern Europe—a region where socialist experimentations have long flourished but also a place that has borne the weight of capitalist shock therapy, predatory debt formations, and vicious gentrification. Centering activist movements and analyses that push back against these contemporary enclosures, this timely book offers hope for commonist futures already here.” —Erin McElroy, cofounder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
“A compelling book that illuminates key aspects of building new urban forms of living together, The Commonist Horizon features examples from the frontline fight for the right to housing in Eastern Europe as well as other locations in a constellation of rebel cities. The collection offers a hopeful outlook for continuing to imagine and reinvent our struggles as urban crises compound. As these activist thinkers show, the collective efforts of social movements lead the way in the fight for the right to housing. ¡Si Se Puede!” —Plataforma de Afectadas por la Hipoteca (PAH), Spain
“The Commonist Horizon offers comprehensive, up-to-date insight into the struggles against the logic of capital accumulation and highlights the paradigm of the commons as a potentially transformative strategy to do it. The book’s uniqueness lies in its focus on the former post-socialist region. By putting these often-neglected areas’ struggles for commoning into the spotlight, the volume shows how the remainders of a failed attempt to realize communism can be seen as resources for those fighting for a commonist horizon. With its easy-to-access writing style and its lexicon section, the volume can also serve as an entry point for those meeting the paradigm of the commons for the first time.”—Kristof Nagy, editor of the Hungarian anticapitalist journal, Fordulat, member of the “Helyzet” Working Groups for Public Sociology, and Assistant Professor, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
“In exploring frameworks of space and power, The Commonist Horizon points toward the importance of deconstructing narratives around the commons. This timely collection is a collective work in every sense that articulates a multitude of urgent critiques that push for major shifts in social movement thinking and frameworks of action in relation to the landscapes of our lives and concepts of the commons. From the Balkans, to London, to New York City, this work challenges contemporary social movements to deconstruct cultural narratives around land, the city, and possibilities for alternatives to colonial racial capitalism to not be shaped by political, cultural, and economic imperatives coded by a collective post-Cold War cultural hangover. Instead, The Commonist Horizon encourages a collective reading, engagement, and encounter with alternatives experimentations and policies around housing and the land in eastern political worlds that western hegemonic power has attempted to completely discredit—alternative practices that can help guide us to challenge the modern wave of neocolonial capitalist enclosures, and to enact actual possibilities of radical and inclusive frameworks of the commons today.” —Stefan Christoff, author, musician and host of Free City Radio
TABLE OF CONTENTS
As If this World No Longer Existed: Reflections on Divestment and Commoning in the Post-Socialist Regenerate City
From the Neoliberal City to Disaster Capitalism—From Commons to Unenclosure byAnthony Iles
3. Cities and Solidarity Economy in Eastern Europe—Agnes Gagyi and Zsuzsanna Posfai in dialogue with Mary N. Taylor
Reclaiming Care in Urban Commons—Carenotes Collective
Anti-eviction Commons in Serbia —From Dispossession of Yugoslav Housing Commons to Commoning as a Temporary Social Infrastructure in Serbia—Ana Vilenica