Sunday — 12.20.20 — Thirty Fourth Testing Assembling
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CONTENTS:
0. Call to Groups / Spaces
1. Note from Paths to Autonomy
2. Note from 16 Beaver
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0. Call to Groups / Spaces
This Sunday, we will merge our weekly assembly with another, based out of Lithuania, called Paths of Autonomy (http://luna6.lt/paths-to-autonomy/en.html). They have proposed that we use this announcement to invite groups, movements spaces, collectives to join together this week in order to share experiences, strategies, questions in the struggles for building autonomy, sustaining our physical and less physical collectives under pandemic conditions over this last year.
We hope that this will be an occasion and part of a wider effort in the coming year to attempt to weave some of these processes together.
If you are part of a space/group/collective that may be interested in joining, or simply would like to join the assembly, please write us at mai [AT] 16beavergroup.org.
Confirmed groups/spaces joining will be MAMA based in Zagreb, MayDay Rooms in London, and Luna 6 in Vilnius, and Social Centre Emma, Kaunas.
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1. Note from Paths to Autonomy
Complementing our discussion on the communisation of daily reproduction and decolonisation of our shared spaces under pandemic conditions, Slater’s text offers some generative thoughts on how we may foster communal subjectivities in Left milieus without fear, separation, and individualization. He criticizes the assumed understanding of any personal or cultural expression as “bourgeois individuality” and shows how, indeed, groups can also be very much “individualized”: by the participants becoming competitive “experts” who, instead of creating an environment of shared learning, turn their spaces and groups into territorial sites of self-assertion and dogma.
Howard Slater “Evacuate the Leftist Bunker”
https://16beavergroup.org/pdf/slater_evacuate_the_leftist_bunker.pdf
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2. Note from 16 Beaver
For 33 weeks, we have been organizing a series of assemblies to demarcate together concerns, questions, perspectives on the various struggles we are involved and implicated in, and to think what this moment of the pandemic reveals, obscures, clarifies, complicates, and affects in the ways we may reaffirm our worlds in common.
Despite the obvious challenges, restrictions, wars, state, corporate, police violence; communities and collectives have found new ways to reconfigure spaces and temporalities of solidarity, fugitivity, care, forging new paths of autonomy and communality. In light of these efforts and a growing sense that there is no return to the pre-existing conditions; many questions pose themselves. Some of these questions are situated and grounded in the conditions we each find ourselves in. Other questions concern how we may weave together our various spaces, groups, studies, fields, struggles precisely in this moment when such trans-communal efforts seem least plausible and yet most necessary.
How can this time of limited mobilization of bodies be used by all of us to strengthen our capacities to conjoin our struggles? Especially, in this interregnum of a pandemic, post-pandemic reality … and as the promise of vaccination becomes synonymous with renewed efforts to anesthetize everyone into propping up the colonial, patriarchal, racist, capitalist, biocidal, ecocidal, and geocidal processes
– which underpin contemporary/dominant political, economic, social arrangements and relations
— which have prompted the virus to migrate into human bodies
— which the virus, by all its affects/effects, has brought us closer to sensing and searching for ways to arrest, strike against
We have been imagining over the last months in what ways we could attempt — as various spaces, groups, assemblings, communities, movements situated in disparate contexts — to conjoin our studies, struggles, strikes. And we would like to see this impulse to converge various spaces/groups from our comrades in Lithuania as one step towards this potential.