Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New York
Comments Off on Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New YorkThursday — 02.14.13 — Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New York
Contents:
1. About this Thursday
2. Evening Outline
3. Commoning in New York
4. A Note on Food
5. A Note on Love
6. Further Readings and Related Articles
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1. About this Thursday
What: Discussion
When: Thursday February 14th 6:00pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all
We would like to invite everyone to a discussion and evening organized with our friends from Making Worlds.
The event builds upon existing discussions that we have each organized over the last few years around the common(s) and more recent discussions in which we have tried to imagine collectively different modes of pairing struggle and antagonism to capitalism with formal/informal processes of mutual aid, collective care and cultivation of the common(s).
The questions are basic ones concerning the processes of destruction or privatization of the basic premises of life (food, water, air, genes, seeds, ideas, language, learning, land, …) and include the material needs of being able to collectively reproduce our lives in struggle. They also revolve around the capacity of this change in climate (both ecologically and socio-politically) we are living through to posit or propose alternatives to state (public?) or corporate (private?) control of life.
The evening will unfold in two parts.
The first part of the evening is a conversation with Isidro Lopez and Alexa Bradley who are currently participating in the development of commons charters. Isidro Lopez will discuss his involvement with Observatorio Metropolitano and the “Carta de los Comunes”, a Commons Charter for the city of Madrid [Spain] elaborated collectively in 2011. Alexa Bradley will be discussing her current work with the Great Lakes Commons Initiative, a broad organizing effort to catalyze a cross border citizen movement to put human need, ecological survival and democratized decision making at the center of the Great Lakes governance.
More generally, commons charters are documents created by communities seeking to take back control and care of their livelihoods and environments. Among examples, we discover The Magna Carta’s often overlooked Charter of the Forest written in 1066 by the commoners of England demanding their right to use the land for their common needs: grazing, wood for cooking, peat for fuel, and fishing rights to name a few. In recent years, different initiatives throughout the world have recovered these kinds of documents, as is the case of the Carta de los Comunes (Madrid, Spain), and the Great Lakes Initiative (US-Canada).
After this first part, we will take a break for some food (see below for more information).
The second part of the evening, we will try to resume the discussion focusing on some initiatives or efforts that could potentially address these concerns in New York, Madrid and beyond (see note on commoning below for more information).
We will also be joined by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis and other friends with whom we began a more public exploration of some common concerns with ‘Beyond Good and Evil Commons: Debt, Economic Crisis and the Production of Commons’ in the summer of 2011.
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2. Evening Outline
Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New York
and
Reclaiming a Common(s): Social movements, Ideas, Initiatives from Commons charters to Communal Kitchens to an Apo-capitalist City-zens´ Rescue Plan
6:00 doors
6:30 – 8:00 Part 1: Intro to the context of today’s commons inquiry w/ discussion on The Great lakes Commons Initiative (Bradley) & Madrid City Commons Charter (Lopez).
8:00 – 9:30 Part 2: Dinner – Revolutionary Love & continuing the inquiry: Reclaiming a common(s) in the city / building meshworks of mutual aid
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3. Commoning in New York
Before the end of last year, we organized an event attempting to consider how the self-organized relief effort post-sandy and the occupation of wall street made evident not only a social/political desire to resist the violence of capitalism, but also to common our knowledge, and our different abilities to produce qualitatively different social relations, spaces, and lives.
Thus, we would also like to open up this discussion of commons charters to consider different commoning initiatives in New York and beyond which could be inter-linked into a durable and palpable relief effort or rescue plan – not post-hurricane, but post-capitalist realism – that is, after abandoning one’s conscious or unconscious commitments to a reality that is constructed upon the most insidious notions of “human nature”, value, freedom, democracy, productivity, extraction, debt, …. .
We hope this discussion can not only continue this reflection but also bring together existing proposals or initiatives.
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4. A Note on Food
For those who would like to contribute to dinner in some way, you can prepare something to bring and share, or alternatively bring bread, cheese, olives, nuts or vegetables that can be eaten raw, or bring something to drink. Avoiding packaged/processed foods will be appreciated.
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5. A Note on Love
Fortuitously, this gathering is taking place on St. Valentine’s day, a day which had at a particular historical juncture associated itself with love. Rather than ignore this association in the hope of distancing from religious or commercialized overcoding, we thought it interesting to invoke the notion of love, or even revolutionary love as a reference point for the evening.
In late 2000 and early 2001, we organized a series of readings and discussions around different notions of community and questions of love entered those discussions. Among the many readings at the time, we read some chapters from a book that had just been published by bell hooks on love. In introducing the book, ‘all about love: new visions’, she attempts to focus on an idea of love that would be associated with action rather than a thing or object, a verb rather than noun. She then proceeds to outline the many dimensions and spheres that one could cultivate a relation to love. Some years later, we discussed with Michael Hardt the possibility of organizing a molecular seminar together and he suggested organizing around the notion of love. This gathering never manifested in the space, but the questions about a political notion or relation to love remains intertwined with questions which continue to be at play in our struggles, questions of community, commons, commoning, communisation, mutual aid, …. They are also questions which implicate relations to desire and how desire is social and socialized, channeled, and today increasingly colonized.
We outline these considerations, because they are intrinsic to our experiences of the last several years of political tumult and upheaval and they point to the shortcomings of excluding affective dimensions animating our struggles, making them sustainable, and also always vulnerable. This evening’s discussion may not be about these particular questions, but these questions will be there in the background and hopefully trace out one trajectory of a common inquiry which may be to come.
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6. Further Readings and Related Articles
Carta de los Comunes (in Spanish; Madrid)
(free download – a donation is recommended – at the bottom of the page)
http://traficantes.net/index.php/editorial/catalogo/otras/La-Carta-de-los-Comunes.-Para-el-cuidado-y-disfrute-de-lo-que-de-todos-es
The Great Lakes Are Declared a Commons (Onthecommons.org)
A diverse group of activists from both sides of the border declares the lakes a common endowment
http://onthecommons.org/great-lakes-are-declared-commons
The Spanish Model
by Isidro López & Emmanuel Rodríguez
http://newleftreview.org/II/69/isidro-lopez-emmanuel-rodriguez-the-spanish-model
Crises, Movements and the Commons.
by Massimo De Angelis.
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/deangelis_crises.htm
A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the crisis of neoliberalism and question of the commons
by George Caffentzis
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/caffentzis_globalization.htm
Two Charters, Chapter 2 from “The Magna Carta Manifesto”
by Peter Linebaugh
http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/linebaugh_two_charters.pdf
Defending, Reclaiming and Reinventing the Commons
by Maria Mies & Veronika Benholdt-Thomsen
http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/mies_benholdt_defending_reinventing.pdf
On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides by Anarchitecture (two perspectives interweaving theories on the commons, with practical examples, propositions, and analysis.)
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/
For Former Conversations and additional resources please see
Beyond Good and Evil Commons
A seminar with Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, & David Graeber
http://www.16beavergroup.org/silvia_george_david/
&
http://www.makingworlds.org/
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16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004
Post SANDY TRAINS:
4,5 — Wall Street
2,3 — Wall Street
J,Z — Broad Street
A,C — Fulton Street
1 — Rector Street
R — Rector Street