Saturday — Call For Common(s) Course — Defending Rockaway — Discussing Occupy 2.0
Comments Off on Saturday — Call For Common(s) Course — Defending Rockaway — Discussing Occupy 2.0Saturday — 06.14.14 — Call For Common(s) Course — Defending Rockaway —
Discussing Occupy 2.0
0. About Saturday’s Call for the Common(s) Course
1. Defend Rockaway: Creating a Zone of Struggle this Summer and Fall
2. Occupy 2.0: People’s Climate March September 2014
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PLEASE NOTE:
A fire took place on the ground
floor of our building last month. We
are still being cautious and limited
with what we are organizing in the
space.
We have been told that things are ok
and our floor can be occupied, but
since we are not sure, we write this as
a courtesy especially for those with any prior
lung condition, asthma, or sensitivity.
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0. About Saturday’s Call for the Common(s) Course
What: Common(s) Course Call / Discussion
When: Saturday, June 14th, 3:00 PM (Part 1 of 2)
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
Who: Free and open to all
A Call: this Saturday we would like to invite all who have been following
the Common(s) Course for an afternoon of discussion, a reconvening, and a
collective reimagining of our processes as we move forward into the summer
and beyond. This conversation will be followed up with a second related
meeting for which we have posted a separate entry below.
In the fall and winter and spring we engaged in an intensive conversation
to produce a broad framework for commoning the city, and withdrawing from
the community of money. If we erred, we erred on the side of discourse and
discussion. But our hopes have always been to create a common ground of
thinking and critique for creating and conjoining to processes practices
in the city and beyond.
How to envision and situate these processes of commoning in the face of
structures always read to capture and absorb them into existing frameworks
and logics? How to avoid all the interesting work being done around
common(s) from becoming neoliberalism plan B, especially when we recognize
more so than ever that “there is not planet B”?
Our conversation(s) — and whatever efforts we have engaged in — have
focused on various platforms and structures of collective affinity and
mutual aid, solidarity, and commoning the means of subsistence in an urban
context. We have considered money as a social relation and explored
potentials for withdrawing and inventing different forms of relation and
different modes of coinciding desires.
Furthermore, we asked one another how to reclaim urban space for
autonomous use. How to create the infrastructures and processes of
subsistence in an urban context, producing rhythms, customs and rituals
for collective inhabitation in a process of reclamation of our daily
lives? And how to share our diverse experiences after the events of these
previous years.
Potentially this takes on a variety of forms — including various local
initiatives to (self) organize housing, food,
education, care, and
other spheres of social reproduction outside of the market and state: from
the common kitchen or social space to the solidarity health clinic; from
autonomous learning spaces or autonomous institutions as alternatives to
the corporate university, to the reclamation of public lands for communal
use. We have touched on each of these platforms as a beginning. What ties
these initiatives or “plateaus” together is our shared perception that no
other alternative is possible, that to overcome the separation and
isolation and desertification of capitalist modes of reproduction, we must
reclaim our urban spaces and explore new modes of collective and common
life.
“Reclaiming” or “claiming” is more than just a metaphor to reverse the
incursions that occur in our capacities to reproduce our own lives.
Turning our gaze outwards and focusing on local initiatives and struggles,
where the process of producing spaces of autonomy and mutual aid are
already occurring, means constructing new structures of affinity, new
conjunctions, and new modes of perception.
We would like to carry this forward in an open forum to discuss the ways
in which we can diversify and experiment in processes of commoning and
common life, and also to start a process of bringing together the diverse
initiatives and experiments being conducted through the city, which we
hope to be focused on in upcoming meetings at the space and in the city
and nearby countrysides. Initiatives to common, or bring under communal
control, spaces and resources and infrastructure throughout the city are
already underway in Harlem, in the Rockaways, in Sunset Park, in
Ridgewood, and elsewhere, and we invite those participating in these
projects to join us for the discussion, bringing and sharing diverse
projects and ideas.
We hope this session will open up other directions for the common(s)
course. And introduce further facets that will be shared and tended to by
a group interested in exploring practices and processes in their
materiality and in the fabric of the city.
Below, we have further notes about the second part of the evening.
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1. Defend Rockaway: Creating a Zone of Struggle this Summer and Fall
When: Rockaway Call / Discussion
When: Saturday June 14, 6:00 PM (part 2 of 2)
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
Who: Free and open to all
Resistance in the Rockaways
This Monday, construction began on the Rockaway Delivery Lateral Project,
a pipeline that will bring hydro-fracked “natural gas” into New York City,
furthering our material complicity in the decimation of rural land and
water and the exacerbation of the global ecological crisis. Recently,
discussions have taken place with residents of the Rockaways, urban
gardeners, and Native American groups whose activities, lives, and sense
of place will be disrupted by construction and the pipeline, as well as
activists who have exhausted avenues for intervention in the regulatory
process but remain fervent in their opposition to the project.
This Saturday we hope to involve more people and networks in a
conversation about building long-term resistance in the Rockaways,
comparable to struggles against infrastructure in Europe (No TAV in Italy
http://libcom.org/history/italy-brief-history-no-tav-movement, struggles
against gold and copper mining in Greece
https://antigoldgr.wordpress.com/, and the ZAD in France
http://zad.nadir.org/?lang=en) as well as recent indigenous resistance
against extraction in the United States and Canada
(https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/).
What kinds of relationships need to be developed with residents of the
area immediately affected by the pipeline, as well as those affected by
the forms of extraction it promotes, in order to build a movement that can
last for longer than a few hours, days, or weeks? How can resistance to
the project coalesce with struggles residents are already engaged in
against gentrification and exploitative development and for affordable
housing, alternative economic models, and resilient building? How can the
struggles against the pipeline be animated and sustained? And how to
create, as have the longer-term struggles that currently inform our sense
of what is possible, a relationship and sensitivity to place already felt
by residents, gardeners, indigenous groups, and others?
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2. Occupy 2.0: People’s Climate March September 2014
On the horizon for this nascent movement is a call that has been put out
by 350.org and other groups for a major convergence (“the largest single
event on climate that has been organized to date”) in New York September
20th-21st in advance of the United Nations Climate Summit called by UN
secretary Ban Ki Moon on September 23rd
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/a-call-to-arms-an-invitation-to-demand-action-on-climate-change-20140521
http://peoplesclimatemarch.org/
The call puts those hoping to resist in the Rockaways in a similar
position to the whatever singularities and commoners responding to
Adbusters’ call for a “Tahrir moment” on September 17th over the summer of
2011.
In this case, a mainstream organizations has framed a march around a broad
platform of demands addressed to world leaders for more sustainable
management of the global economy. The call presents an opportunity to
frame our responsibility to human and non-human life in terms of territory
and resistance rather than economic management and political
representation, in terms of our material capacity to sustain ourselves
autonomously from the State, Capital and in resistance to its
infrastructure (often where the two – Capital and State meet).
As the Occupation of Wall Street opened up a space that gestured at the
possibility of living otherwise, we would hope Defend Rockaway would
become a space in which reproducing life in the absence of corporate
agriculture, fossil fuels, pipelines, private property, rent, wage labor,
and political representation would become a real possibility, one that
could spread to other parts of the city and beyond.