January 13th, 2024
In the 4th Letter of Dabartis, we announce the release of our publication “Languages and Peoples” as well as publishing three letters of response that followed gatherings in Warsaw, London, Vilnius and Copenhagen. The publication was the first fruit of a collaboration between Dabartis and Nieczytelne, that has been brewing for some time. It features a multi-language translation (RU, PL, LT, EN) of Agamben’s essay “Languages and Peoples”, accompanied by our collectively written afterward . Finally we announce our release of an audio recording of a recent talk in Vilnius: “Poppies and Daffodils: Jewish anti-Zionist Solidarity and its Absence” . All of this is prefaced by a New Year greeting from a friend, a response to the circulation of a Palestinian translation of omnia sunt communia and a call to embrace what is common between us today. The friend’s Étrennes (gift) questions the modalities of linear time that contribute to the continuation of the catastrophes of the present.
1. كل شي مشترك بينا / A New Year Étrennes.
2. Letter from Here (London) on ‘Hereness’.
3. A cautionary note on romanticizing the outsider (from Copenhagen).
4. An Unexpected Tide. A Letter from the Palestinian Solidarity Occupations in Poland
1.
Today we are tasked with building and rebuilding a world in common, not only in the ruins of European civilization—with its fateful employment of universality through the enterprises of Christianity and enlightenment—but also of the internationalist traditions of modernity.
To further this task requires a fidelity to the maxim: كلشي مشترك بينا.."Everything is in common between us" a recent translation by a Palestinian comrade, of Omnia sunt communia “all things are to be held in common”. This, a popular communist slogan that originated in the latin translation of The Acts of the Apostles, marks for us a radical calling. Let us seize the now of this shared moment in time. Let us break the bonds asunder of the forces of annihilation today: let us cast away their yoke from us.
In New Year Étrennes one will enjoy a certain charting of a way forward and a way back—“a return that is utterly new”. If time’s commensurations are now stripped bear as but an enterprise of the flag’s conquest, our friend asks: what could it mean to embrace a commonality in time that would affirm its “spinning, wobbling, abundant, aberrant” durations as the world’s shared, yet immeasurable, breath?
The Étrennes is available here
![]()
warmly,
The Children of Cain
2.
Dear friends,
In the recent Languages and Peoples discussion and launch at Mayday Rooms in London we took up the publications task of approaching the possibilities of an oppositional displacement of the nation-state and sovereignty by more diasporic and fugitive modalities of ‘hereness’. My intention is only to thread together some of my notes as well as other observations and questions that were raised during the meeting as a contribution to an ongoing conversation.
London is simultaneously the ideal site for such a discussion and also a place where the efforts of embodying such displacements seem to dissipate. Ideal, since its heterogeneous mix of structurally racialised peoples and global languages, jargons and their constitutive palimpsest of (non)identities seem to make the post-Imperial metropolis a confirmation of the insubstantiality of languages and peoples. A point of dissipation, or disorientation, since in the midst of the potentially convivial babel of London the possibility of a non-national sense of belonging can evaporate into a neutralised placelessness. This placelessness, rather than offering a line of flight from national belonging at times seems to only better set up the uprooted socius for moulding into a nation.
These two tendencies awkwardly reinforce one another. The moulded nation is both omnipresent in London, with its concentration of the traditional institutions of state power and vacuous Royal ritual, as well as being starkly absent and continuously uprooted by trans-national migration and capital flows. The proletarianised, service-based grind of day-to-day economy and the transnational forces of capital, the related intensive commodification of city-space and stark extremities of wealth and poverty, are the focal points around which the city and most of its inhabitants rotate. Yet, all of this is the capital (in both senses of the term) of the UK and its political economy. Still, a certain hollowness is attached to both operations—a sense pervades that both machines are running on empty.
Languages and Peoples is useful here in advancing the notion that the contradictory interpellation of languages, peoples and nation-states could be approached as a kind of knot. Or, perhaps, given the intertwining of these entities in the shape of war, the genocide in Gaza, and the likelihood of a greater, global war, as an ever tightening noose around the present. A noose that is tightened through the bloody opposition of global forces; its vitality sourced in the atrocities of biopolitical, capitalist modernity.
As we turned to the problematic of destroying this noose, an emphasis was placed upon Agamben’s ideas of a ‘break’ or ‘interruption’. It’s worth noting that this is how his theoretical exposition develops both in this essay and more widely in his work. Such ruptures serve to make visible what is taken for granted, what seems to simply provide the invisible framework for existence. This is done in Languages and Peoples through what Walter Benjamin termed a dialectical image, wherein the past comes into an explosive juxtaposition with the present and illuminates its conflicts and contradictions, as they ‘come to light for an instant’. Agamben juxtaposes the practice, unearthed by Alice Beck-Ho in the book The Princes of Jargon, of the usage of jargon or argot by the Roma and the associated ‘dangerous classes’ of the middle ages to delineate a people illegible to the nation-state. This usage of language embodies a certain kind of de-subjectification, an elision of the identity posited by political authority between the substantial identity of a people and language as a marker of this identity. Such argot is the fugitive use of language. In Agamben’s reading this lesson ‘of a class of outlaws’ reveals just what language is—a jargon that is put to use—and also reveals that a people is far less substantial than the grandeur of national language would suppose. That this is, ultimately, a fiction of the state. For Agamben, this strips the nation-state of the substantial identity of its language and People, the glorious shroud laid over more mundane elements such as territory, blood and soil, population, etc.
It was noticeable how this discussion around the possibilities of anti-national communities occurred in a site that holds an incredible archive that bears witness to attempts by anarchists and communists to construct such a politics through the workers’ movement, the international working class. Whether or not this political subjectivity is completely emptied of significance for undoing the nation-state remains an open question, even if the prognosis of the decline of the ‘old’ workers’ movement seems to suggest this is the case. Dabartis’ focus on ‘hereness’—with part of the genealogy being that of the Labor Bund—seems in itself an intervention responding to the decline of the classic political identities of the working class. As such, the thought and practice of ‘hereness’ opens towards urgent speculations on what internationalism may look like in the here and now. A here and now where the majority of the global population are proletarianised without the positive accreditation of the workers’ movement. So, this remains one of the central questions for anti-capitalist politics today. A question made even more urgent by the crisis ridden persistence of capitalism and the catastrophic spiral of environmental destruction and war it is now in. Perhaps, the concept of a diasporic ‘hereness’ is a way of thinking this without indulging in the search for the new, hegemonic political subject that the left loves so much. What remains open is just what such non-national communities would hinge upon, what form they might take beyond the circles of radical politics.
Questions were raised about the role of images and the spectacle. Is it possible to see in ‘hereness’ a refusal of the logic of the image as some kind of propaganda or a spectacular ideal to be lived by proxy on a screen, or as a national mythology? It is worth noting how the far right utilised the capacity of reticular internet based communication to manifest a certain kind of political diaspora that has circulated its own ‘truths’ in the form of lies such as ‘the great replacement’. The Pepe the Frog meme, for instance, became a global signifier of multinational—obviously, not non-national— fascism. Is there a use of images, in opposition to this, that might be anti-national?
This relationship between images, and their imagined communities, as political ‘strategy’ raises certain questions for ‘hereness’, in turn, conceived as a politics against abstraction. Might this, as was raised in discussion, lead to attempts to distinguish between an authentic ‘hereness’ and imagined communities that fail such a test? Does Agamben’s slightly mischievous use of the history of a ‘class of outlaws’ risk succumbing to a kind of militancy that would dismiss the supposedly inauthentic? How do diasporic communities of people of colour fit into the problematic of hereness? Also, might a diasporic ‘hereness’ not be something more emergent through events, conflicts and chance as much as overtly anti-national militancy? Questions were also raised about the role of affectivity in both language and ‘hereness.’ Is the use of language, as a collective subversion, an expressivity that carries an affective charge that might not just reflect politics but also embody what is at stake? And what affects circulate around the question of the nation-state within capitalism and its alternatives? Might defeat, dread and depression combine with their passional opposites in what has been termed an ‘affective class’ in the articulation of ‘hereness’?
Best wishes,
Anacharsis Cloots Deputation.
PS.
We can also happen onto the Here and Now in the strangest ways; it’s never far from us.
- Ernst Bloch, ‘The Fall into the Now’, Traces.
I read a story, apparently of Eastern European Jewish origin, that seems to have some bearing on the questions raised by Languages and Peoples, both Giorgio Agamben’s essay and the afterword: In the prayer house of a village, a rabbi asks his friends what they would wish for if an angel appeared, since the angel can grant any wish. One wishes for a daughter and not a son, one wishes his toothache would go away, another wishes for a son and not a daughter and the rabbi wishes for the many coloured leaves of autumn to never fade. There is also a beggar, present only through the charity of the rabbi, who says: ‘I wish to be the ruler of a great, wealthy empire. As emperor I have many palaces and castles and am adored by my people. I have one particularly luxurious palace, adorned in flags and filled with treasure and in this I happily sit and pass just laws, day after day. Then, there is a war and disaster strikes. My armies are defeated, the people hate me, my enemies gather outside the palace. Stripping off my luxurious robes and crown, I escape and flee to another country where nobody knows me, free and unencumbered of my former role. Then, eventually, I find myself here.’ There is a shocked silence, then the rabbi laughs and says, ‘How curious, to wish all that again! And how empty your riches and power were. Is there anything you really wish for, now?’ And the beggar replies, ‘A shirt, this one is old and ragged’. And so, laughing, they give him a shirt.
The philosopher Ernst Bloch, who tells a version of this story in his book Traces, describes the final twist in the tale as both a ‘bad joke’ and a sudden transition to the now, here in the present moment, in the prayer house. The shock of the beggar as ex-emperor is a transition to the messianic ‘Now as End’ in Bloch’s formulation. Perhaps, to elaborate on this in terms of hereness, a now wherein the riches, power and entitlements of a previous national identity—and nobody embodies this as much as a sovereign—are stripped away in the at times overwhelming actuality of here, where needs and desires have more immediacy. The beggar in the story is emblematic of such a relinquishing of the accoutrements of identity, sovereignty and by extension citizenship that such a shift entails. Almost an image of the stateless people Agamben discovers in the historical genesis of the Roma and their compatriots, the medieval ‘dangerous classes’, who undid national language with clandestine jargon and state identity with destituent ambiguity. The tale the beggar tells might in coded jargon be the tale of how to blur legibility as beggar, emperor or citizen of this or that nation. The story as a story—or parable, or even ‘bad joke’—suggests a use of language that opens out a perspective beyond that of it being used to affirm an identity, as national or otherwise. It also suggests the entanglement of living and thinking together, of the sheer materiality of hereness that might constitute a form-of-life. What is left for us is the question of just how such prosaic entanglements might also give rise to a hereness that challenges the nation-state. The forms these might take in the midst of the catastrophes of the present.
Today we are tasked with building and rebuilding a world in common, not only in the ruins of European civilization—with its fateful employment of universality through the enterprises of Christianity and enlightenment—but also of the internationalist traditions of modernity.
To further this task requires a fidelity to the maxim: كلشي مشترك بينا.."Everything is in common between us" a recent translation by a Palestinian comrade, of Omnia sunt communia “all things are to be held in common”. This, a popular communist slogan that originated in the latin translation of The Acts of the Apostles, marks for us a radical calling. Let us seize the now of this shared moment in time. Let us break the bonds asunder of the forces of annihilation today: let us cast away their yoke from us.
In New Year Étrennes one will enjoy a certain charting of a way forward and a way back—“a return that is utterly new”. If time’s commensurations are now stripped bear as but an enterprise of the flag’s conquest, our friend asks: what could it mean to embrace a commonality in time that would affirm its “spinning, wobbling, abundant, aberrant” durations as the world’s shared, yet immeasurable, breath?
The Étrennes is available here

warmly,
The Children of Cain
2.
Dear friends,
In the recent Languages and Peoples discussion and launch at Mayday Rooms in London we took up the publications task of approaching the possibilities of an oppositional displacement of the nation-state and sovereignty by more diasporic and fugitive modalities of ‘hereness’. My intention is only to thread together some of my notes as well as other observations and questions that were raised during the meeting as a contribution to an ongoing conversation.
London is simultaneously the ideal site for such a discussion and also a place where the efforts of embodying such displacements seem to dissipate. Ideal, since its heterogeneous mix of structurally racialised peoples and global languages, jargons and their constitutive palimpsest of (non)identities seem to make the post-Imperial metropolis a confirmation of the insubstantiality of languages and peoples. A point of dissipation, or disorientation, since in the midst of the potentially convivial babel of London the possibility of a non-national sense of belonging can evaporate into a neutralised placelessness. This placelessness, rather than offering a line of flight from national belonging at times seems to only better set up the uprooted socius for moulding into a nation.
These two tendencies awkwardly reinforce one another. The moulded nation is both omnipresent in London, with its concentration of the traditional institutions of state power and vacuous Royal ritual, as well as being starkly absent and continuously uprooted by trans-national migration and capital flows. The proletarianised, service-based grind of day-to-day economy and the transnational forces of capital, the related intensive commodification of city-space and stark extremities of wealth and poverty, are the focal points around which the city and most of its inhabitants rotate. Yet, all of this is the capital (in both senses of the term) of the UK and its political economy. Still, a certain hollowness is attached to both operations—a sense pervades that both machines are running on empty.
Languages and Peoples is useful here in advancing the notion that the contradictory interpellation of languages, peoples and nation-states could be approached as a kind of knot. Or, perhaps, given the intertwining of these entities in the shape of war, the genocide in Gaza, and the likelihood of a greater, global war, as an ever tightening noose around the present. A noose that is tightened through the bloody opposition of global forces; its vitality sourced in the atrocities of biopolitical, capitalist modernity.
As we turned to the problematic of destroying this noose, an emphasis was placed upon Agamben’s ideas of a ‘break’ or ‘interruption’. It’s worth noting that this is how his theoretical exposition develops both in this essay and more widely in his work. Such ruptures serve to make visible what is taken for granted, what seems to simply provide the invisible framework for existence. This is done in Languages and Peoples through what Walter Benjamin termed a dialectical image, wherein the past comes into an explosive juxtaposition with the present and illuminates its conflicts and contradictions, as they ‘come to light for an instant’. Agamben juxtaposes the practice, unearthed by Alice Beck-Ho in the book The Princes of Jargon, of the usage of jargon or argot by the Roma and the associated ‘dangerous classes’ of the middle ages to delineate a people illegible to the nation-state. This usage of language embodies a certain kind of de-subjectification, an elision of the identity posited by political authority between the substantial identity of a people and language as a marker of this identity. Such argot is the fugitive use of language. In Agamben’s reading this lesson ‘of a class of outlaws’ reveals just what language is—a jargon that is put to use—and also reveals that a people is far less substantial than the grandeur of national language would suppose. That this is, ultimately, a fiction of the state. For Agamben, this strips the nation-state of the substantial identity of its language and People, the glorious shroud laid over more mundane elements such as territory, blood and soil, population, etc.
It was noticeable how this discussion around the possibilities of anti-national communities occurred in a site that holds an incredible archive that bears witness to attempts by anarchists and communists to construct such a politics through the workers’ movement, the international working class. Whether or not this political subjectivity is completely emptied of significance for undoing the nation-state remains an open question, even if the prognosis of the decline of the ‘old’ workers’ movement seems to suggest this is the case. Dabartis’ focus on ‘hereness’—with part of the genealogy being that of the Labor Bund—seems in itself an intervention responding to the decline of the classic political identities of the working class. As such, the thought and practice of ‘hereness’ opens towards urgent speculations on what internationalism may look like in the here and now. A here and now where the majority of the global population are proletarianised without the positive accreditation of the workers’ movement. So, this remains one of the central questions for anti-capitalist politics today. A question made even more urgent by the crisis ridden persistence of capitalism and the catastrophic spiral of environmental destruction and war it is now in. Perhaps, the concept of a diasporic ‘hereness’ is a way of thinking this without indulging in the search for the new, hegemonic political subject that the left loves so much. What remains open is just what such non-national communities would hinge upon, what form they might take beyond the circles of radical politics.
Questions were raised about the role of images and the spectacle. Is it possible to see in ‘hereness’ a refusal of the logic of the image as some kind of propaganda or a spectacular ideal to be lived by proxy on a screen, or as a national mythology? It is worth noting how the far right utilised the capacity of reticular internet based communication to manifest a certain kind of political diaspora that has circulated its own ‘truths’ in the form of lies such as ‘the great replacement’. The Pepe the Frog meme, for instance, became a global signifier of multinational—obviously, not non-national— fascism. Is there a use of images, in opposition to this, that might be anti-national?
This relationship between images, and their imagined communities, as political ‘strategy’ raises certain questions for ‘hereness’, in turn, conceived as a politics against abstraction. Might this, as was raised in discussion, lead to attempts to distinguish between an authentic ‘hereness’ and imagined communities that fail such a test? Does Agamben’s slightly mischievous use of the history of a ‘class of outlaws’ risk succumbing to a kind of militancy that would dismiss the supposedly inauthentic? How do diasporic communities of people of colour fit into the problematic of hereness? Also, might a diasporic ‘hereness’ not be something more emergent through events, conflicts and chance as much as overtly anti-national militancy? Questions were also raised about the role of affectivity in both language and ‘hereness.’ Is the use of language, as a collective subversion, an expressivity that carries an affective charge that might not just reflect politics but also embody what is at stake? And what affects circulate around the question of the nation-state within capitalism and its alternatives? Might defeat, dread and depression combine with their passional opposites in what has been termed an ‘affective class’ in the articulation of ‘hereness’?
Best wishes,
Anacharsis Cloots Deputation.
PS.
We can also happen onto the Here and Now in the strangest ways; it’s never far from us.
- Ernst Bloch, ‘The Fall into the Now’, Traces.
I read a story, apparently of Eastern European Jewish origin, that seems to have some bearing on the questions raised by Languages and Peoples, both Giorgio Agamben’s essay and the afterword: In the prayer house of a village, a rabbi asks his friends what they would wish for if an angel appeared, since the angel can grant any wish. One wishes for a daughter and not a son, one wishes his toothache would go away, another wishes for a son and not a daughter and the rabbi wishes for the many coloured leaves of autumn to never fade. There is also a beggar, present only through the charity of the rabbi, who says: ‘I wish to be the ruler of a great, wealthy empire. As emperor I have many palaces and castles and am adored by my people. I have one particularly luxurious palace, adorned in flags and filled with treasure and in this I happily sit and pass just laws, day after day. Then, there is a war and disaster strikes. My armies are defeated, the people hate me, my enemies gather outside the palace. Stripping off my luxurious robes and crown, I escape and flee to another country where nobody knows me, free and unencumbered of my former role. Then, eventually, I find myself here.’ There is a shocked silence, then the rabbi laughs and says, ‘How curious, to wish all that again! And how empty your riches and power were. Is there anything you really wish for, now?’ And the beggar replies, ‘A shirt, this one is old and ragged’. And so, laughing, they give him a shirt.
The philosopher Ernst Bloch, who tells a version of this story in his book Traces, describes the final twist in the tale as both a ‘bad joke’ and a sudden transition to the now, here in the present moment, in the prayer house. The shock of the beggar as ex-emperor is a transition to the messianic ‘Now as End’ in Bloch’s formulation. Perhaps, to elaborate on this in terms of hereness, a now wherein the riches, power and entitlements of a previous national identity—and nobody embodies this as much as a sovereign—are stripped away in the at times overwhelming actuality of here, where needs and desires have more immediacy. The beggar in the story is emblematic of such a relinquishing of the accoutrements of identity, sovereignty and by extension citizenship that such a shift entails. Almost an image of the stateless people Agamben discovers in the historical genesis of the Roma and their compatriots, the medieval ‘dangerous classes’, who undid national language with clandestine jargon and state identity with destituent ambiguity. The tale the beggar tells might in coded jargon be the tale of how to blur legibility as beggar, emperor or citizen of this or that nation. The story as a story—or parable, or even ‘bad joke’—suggests a use of language that opens out a perspective beyond that of it being used to affirm an identity, as national or otherwise. It also suggests the entanglement of living and thinking together, of the sheer materiality of hereness that might constitute a form-of-life. What is left for us is the question of just how such prosaic entanglements might also give rise to a hereness that challenges the nation-state. The forms these might take in the midst of the catastrophes of the present.
3.
Salut,
In Copenhagen, while planning a discussion at BCAB on the recent republication of Agamben's “Languages and Peoples”, with an afterword by Dabartis and Nieczytelne, I briefly raised the issue of the orientalist strands in the text. The core question was if the “Gypsies” as a stereotyped other, provide us only with a romanticized figure of salvation—especially when contrasted with the now collapsed figure of the international worker, as one comrade pointed out. Such concerns can be generalized to various figures and figurations of statelessness that we may seek when building foundations for a coming politics that is liberated from the nation-state, its People and Language, and the whole national order of things. Isn’t there a certain romanticism of the “outside” here that risks turning out both ethically and intellectually questionable?
Thinking the matter through, I came across Carlo Salzani’s article “Agamben e gli zingari” (published in I filosofi e gli zingari by Leonardo Piasere & Gianluca Solla (eds.), 2018), in which he argues against those who accuse Agamben of romanticizing the oppressed by claiming that his treatment of Gypsies in “Languages and Peoples” is purely formal. Instead of a people or a figure, Salzani sees the Gypsies serving as a paradigm for Agamben, which—according to Agamben’s own definition—is purposed to “constitute and make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context” (“What Is a Paradigm?” in The Signature of All Things: On Method). As Salzani explains, the paradigm of Gypsies, combined with that of argot, is there simply to break the nexus Agamben recognizes “between the existence of language, grammar, people and state.” The point is in creating an interruption that could open a space for different experiences of language and political subjectivity. In other words, it is solely the otherness—and thereby not the essence(s)—of the Gypsies that constitutes the paradigm’s liberating potentiality. Salzani’s conclusion is that for Agamben the figure of the Gypsy only “appears in negative and remains hidden in the unknowability to which Western culture has condemned it.”
“Languages and Peoples” was first published in 1990 in the magazine Luogo Comune under the title “Parole segrete del popolo senza luogo” (“Secret Words of People Without Place”). Its content is practically the same as in the version later published in the collection Means Without Ends—and now by Dabartis and Nieczytelne—with the exception of the last sentence that has been left out of those following . It goes: “The book of Alice Becker-Ho is not an essay on socio-linguistics, but a political manifesto.” At the first glimpse of her book this might not be especially manifest, but as Agamben explains early in his text: “Although Alice Becker-Ho maintains herself within the limits of her thesis, it is probable that she is perfectly aware of having laid a mine—which is ready to explode at any given time—at the very focal point of our political theory.” In other words, it is left to Agamben—and perhaps to us too—to seize the opportunity for theorizing. As Agamben explains the matter himself: “What is at stake here is not to evaluate the scientific accuracy of this thesis [stemming from Becker-Ho] but rather not to let its liberating power slip out of our hands.” Becker-Ho’s claim that “Gypsies are our Middle Ages preserved; dangerous classes of an earlier epoch” might be scientifically questionable, as Salzani also notes, but as Agamben operates in the politico-philosophical sphere that’s not really his problem.
But what about the romantic temptation towards the “outside” then? Does Salzani’s reading provide us, too, a nice pretext to avoid it, if we only show a bit more sensitivity in framing it? Or should we instead accept some romanticism in our desire for something else than the repulsive “inside” we have to face and, again, just try to show some concern in how to manifest it? Either way, the question appears as a political one in its core, but at the same time it leaves an aporia: it doesn’t really matter what one chooses, as long as the choice is realized in the right way. As true as this might be, it is hardly satisfying.
Instead of trying to untangle the knot, let’s just cut through it: we cannot really live through “others”, but only ourselves. However, could we, positing ourselves against the “inside”, eventually recover our own otherness? Indeed, if we are to follow Agamben’s own premise that “all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot”, then let’s swallow the consequences and start acting accordingly. This must be central for the “condition of co-unbelonging”, to follow the witty formulation in the afterword of the Dabartis and Nieczytelne publication. In my reading, this togetherness without belonging (understood as being the propertyof a place) fosters a community that reduces the importance of the origins of its members by emphasizing their shared existence here and now. The subsequent questions the authors pose are mainly of a technical nature, like: “How can we develop a truly common way of understanding each other? How can we nurture and strengthen our commitment to our co-unbelonging? How do we make sure that there exists a strong feedback loop between our diasporas and localities?”
Allow me, to finish, to seize the last one. In the third part of the afterword, the authors refute the “local radical milieus” as “imagined communities” that create a false sense of belonging to a “movement” and opt instead for “various radical gatherings, congresses, festivals and book fairs”. I recognize the parochial tendency that local milieus can often have and understand how refreshing the international gatherings can be, but in themselves they hardly constitute a less imagined community in terms of a movement that would have tangible effects on the conditions of everyday life. Especially, when we return back to where we came from.
As a historical parallel, the setting resembles the somewhat general conclusion made when the so-called anti-globalization cycle was about to reach its end, that is, in the second half of 2001, according to my chronology (the summit protests of course continued, but the sense of a real opening disappeared at the G8 meeting in Genova and the aftermaths of 9/11 sealed it permanently). It became clear that despite all the fun and games—and some successes too—the event-hopping wasn't in itself able to provide considerable changes in the conditions of our quotidian lives. And without these changes the “movement” would turn increasingly holographic—as I guess it did. The following frame, dominated by the global anti-war mobilization, had somehow even less space for generalizable considerations about feedback loops between different strata. In this regard, the current pro-Palestine movement seems to have much more potential. The authors of the afterward don’t fail to notice that.
The Palestine movement can – and at least, occasionally, surely does – romanticize the "other". However, what I think is significant in it, is the relationship it manages to show to hereness—a quality I found missing in the so-called anti-globalization movement. This relationship is manifested in local actions such as occupations, that for me show an understanding of the interconnectedness of "there" and "here". For any real solution there (beyond the states and their numbers), a lot has to have already changed elsewhere—including here.
Well, I’ll leave you with these fragmented thoughts.
All the best,
n.n.
4.
The Palestinian Solidarity Occupations began, in Poland, on the 24th of May, at the tail-end of of the Student Intifada’s global occupation movement. The fact that they did was a small miracle. One occupation would have honestly already been enough, but there were three, across three different cities! Poland isn’t really attuned to the rhythm of global uprisings, so the appearance of the Palestinian movement was a surprise even—or maybe especially—for the most politically active people. It was a shattering of an illusion: that of a disconnected Poland, a periphery where nothing happens. While some people still argue against the occupations from a peripheral position—arguing that Polish universities aren’t as involved in the slaughter of Palestinians as American or Western European ones—I think that if one thing is clear, it’s that such eventsas Palestinian resistance call for a fidelity that doesn’t respect geopolitical bias. Being against genocide has to be absolute and doesn’t deal in relativities. Such an absoluteness was the moving sprit of these occupations.
Breaking with a trite localism—that some activists still espouse—what was practiced was an ethical commitment that shattered the distinction between what is local and global. It’s not a matter of “thinking globally, acting locally”, but a manner of acting that cannot but be global. By this globality, I mean less a spatial expansiveness than a politics that performs its interventions on the highest levels and intensities. For instance, occupations’ delegates making appearances in MSZ (Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and in Sejm (Lower House of the Polish Parliament) to pressure Universities from above. As well as pressure from below: taking part in international BDS conferences, and the occupations’ capacity to create a kind of “organic internationalism”, by being a place for encounters with Student Intifada participants from other countries. Thus they demonstrated their continuity with Palestine, in that their locality was in fact a potentiality to being global.
***
Of course this doesn’t mean that the occupations weren’t constrained by their local circumstances. There were still factors such as: the lack of a tradition of radical organizing; the relatively small pool of potential participants; and more general differences in character of Polish Universities compared to Western ones. The occupations were noticeably “less militant” and the path that they took was for the most part one of dialogue with the university authorities, in hopes of calling their bluff when it comes to their own proclaimed values—such as the institutional policies of being apolitical and that of academic freedom. Only the Warsaw occupation decided on a point-of-no-return-escalation. This took the form ofa road blockade of the main university campus—which forced the hand of the authorities, who scandalously called the cops, welcoming them on University grounds. The occupants were unfortunately kicked out during the second day of the blockade, unable to mount a force sufficient to resist the police. Meanwhile, the occupations in Kraków and Wrocław won some concessions. These included university rectors issuing statements on the Israeli genocide in Gaza (although never actually using the word “genocide” in them)ethics commissions being created and the allocation of spots and funding for Palestinian students.
To be clear, the apparent lack of militancy isn’t necessarily something that must be looked down upon. True militancy sometimes doesn’t look “militant”but apart from that it’s also a matter of discussion to what extent we should emulate the tactics of Western movements. As I heard from one occupant:“they (activists and militants) for too long have thought that they’re like the West”, when in fact theyfaced different obstacles which a hasty escalation wouldn’t help with. In fact the “lack of militancy” could be instead viewed as opening a terrain for other targets, namely the quite successful mapping of the institutions’ political and legal grey areas. This enabled them to gain ground from a position of relative weakness.
***
Ultimately the occupations posed a number of important political questions. How to further a politics that obstinately places itself in-between a global protest wave and a localized event? How, while being true to transnational ethical commitments, to act meaningfully where one resides? How not to give in to mere imitation of western politics, but instead to develop political intelligence, sensibility and strategies that are effective even when the tide of struggle is low while speaking the same truth?
The occupations helped us to imagine a politics of “co-unbelonging”, as we formulated in the recent publication with Dabartis. To inhabit our peripheral localities while refusing toresign ourselves to peripherality and thus to impotence and oblivion as the plaything of bigger fish. Whether it means developing ways of thinking that go beyond the Western paradigm and its historical imputations; refusing our helpless geopolitical positionings; or taking up global fights in our own unique ways—the important thing is to build up our capacity to act; to seize an agency that is still denied to us.
Salut,
In Copenhagen, while planning a discussion at BCAB on the recent republication of Agamben's “Languages and Peoples”, with an afterword by Dabartis and Nieczytelne, I briefly raised the issue of the orientalist strands in the text. The core question was if the “Gypsies” as a stereotyped other, provide us only with a romanticized figure of salvation—especially when contrasted with the now collapsed figure of the international worker, as one comrade pointed out. Such concerns can be generalized to various figures and figurations of statelessness that we may seek when building foundations for a coming politics that is liberated from the nation-state, its People and Language, and the whole national order of things. Isn’t there a certain romanticism of the “outside” here that risks turning out both ethically and intellectually questionable?
Thinking the matter through, I came across Carlo Salzani’s article “Agamben e gli zingari” (published in I filosofi e gli zingari by Leonardo Piasere & Gianluca Solla (eds.), 2018), in which he argues against those who accuse Agamben of romanticizing the oppressed by claiming that his treatment of Gypsies in “Languages and Peoples” is purely formal. Instead of a people or a figure, Salzani sees the Gypsies serving as a paradigm for Agamben, which—according to Agamben’s own definition—is purposed to “constitute and make intelligible a broader historical-problematic context” (“What Is a Paradigm?” in The Signature of All Things: On Method). As Salzani explains, the paradigm of Gypsies, combined with that of argot, is there simply to break the nexus Agamben recognizes “between the existence of language, grammar, people and state.” The point is in creating an interruption that could open a space for different experiences of language and political subjectivity. In other words, it is solely the otherness—and thereby not the essence(s)—of the Gypsies that constitutes the paradigm’s liberating potentiality. Salzani’s conclusion is that for Agamben the figure of the Gypsy only “appears in negative and remains hidden in the unknowability to which Western culture has condemned it.”
“Languages and Peoples” was first published in 1990 in the magazine Luogo Comune under the title “Parole segrete del popolo senza luogo” (“Secret Words of People Without Place”). Its content is practically the same as in the version later published in the collection Means Without Ends—and now by Dabartis and Nieczytelne—with the exception of the last sentence that has been left out of those following . It goes: “The book of Alice Becker-Ho is not an essay on socio-linguistics, but a political manifesto.” At the first glimpse of her book this might not be especially manifest, but as Agamben explains early in his text: “Although Alice Becker-Ho maintains herself within the limits of her thesis, it is probable that she is perfectly aware of having laid a mine—which is ready to explode at any given time—at the very focal point of our political theory.” In other words, it is left to Agamben—and perhaps to us too—to seize the opportunity for theorizing. As Agamben explains the matter himself: “What is at stake here is not to evaluate the scientific accuracy of this thesis [stemming from Becker-Ho] but rather not to let its liberating power slip out of our hands.” Becker-Ho’s claim that “Gypsies are our Middle Ages preserved; dangerous classes of an earlier epoch” might be scientifically questionable, as Salzani also notes, but as Agamben operates in the politico-philosophical sphere that’s not really his problem.
But what about the romantic temptation towards the “outside” then? Does Salzani’s reading provide us, too, a nice pretext to avoid it, if we only show a bit more sensitivity in framing it? Or should we instead accept some romanticism in our desire for something else than the repulsive “inside” we have to face and, again, just try to show some concern in how to manifest it? Either way, the question appears as a political one in its core, but at the same time it leaves an aporia: it doesn’t really matter what one chooses, as long as the choice is realized in the right way. As true as this might be, it is hardly satisfying.
Instead of trying to untangle the knot, let’s just cut through it: we cannot really live through “others”, but only ourselves. However, could we, positing ourselves against the “inside”, eventually recover our own otherness? Indeed, if we are to follow Agamben’s own premise that “all peoples are gangs and coquilles, all languages are jargons and argot”, then let’s swallow the consequences and start acting accordingly. This must be central for the “condition of co-unbelonging”, to follow the witty formulation in the afterword of the Dabartis and Nieczytelne publication. In my reading, this togetherness without belonging (understood as being the propertyof a place) fosters a community that reduces the importance of the origins of its members by emphasizing their shared existence here and now. The subsequent questions the authors pose are mainly of a technical nature, like: “How can we develop a truly common way of understanding each other? How can we nurture and strengthen our commitment to our co-unbelonging? How do we make sure that there exists a strong feedback loop between our diasporas and localities?”
Allow me, to finish, to seize the last one. In the third part of the afterword, the authors refute the “local radical milieus” as “imagined communities” that create a false sense of belonging to a “movement” and opt instead for “various radical gatherings, congresses, festivals and book fairs”. I recognize the parochial tendency that local milieus can often have and understand how refreshing the international gatherings can be, but in themselves they hardly constitute a less imagined community in terms of a movement that would have tangible effects on the conditions of everyday life. Especially, when we return back to where we came from.
As a historical parallel, the setting resembles the somewhat general conclusion made when the so-called anti-globalization cycle was about to reach its end, that is, in the second half of 2001, according to my chronology (the summit protests of course continued, but the sense of a real opening disappeared at the G8 meeting in Genova and the aftermaths of 9/11 sealed it permanently). It became clear that despite all the fun and games—and some successes too—the event-hopping wasn't in itself able to provide considerable changes in the conditions of our quotidian lives. And without these changes the “movement” would turn increasingly holographic—as I guess it did. The following frame, dominated by the global anti-war mobilization, had somehow even less space for generalizable considerations about feedback loops between different strata. In this regard, the current pro-Palestine movement seems to have much more potential. The authors of the afterward don’t fail to notice that.
The Palestine movement can – and at least, occasionally, surely does – romanticize the "other". However, what I think is significant in it, is the relationship it manages to show to hereness—a quality I found missing in the so-called anti-globalization movement. This relationship is manifested in local actions such as occupations, that for me show an understanding of the interconnectedness of "there" and "here". For any real solution there (beyond the states and their numbers), a lot has to have already changed elsewhere—including here.
Well, I’ll leave you with these fragmented thoughts.
All the best,
n.n.
4.
The Palestinian Solidarity Occupations began, in Poland, on the 24th of May, at the tail-end of of the Student Intifada’s global occupation movement. The fact that they did was a small miracle. One occupation would have honestly already been enough, but there were three, across three different cities! Poland isn’t really attuned to the rhythm of global uprisings, so the appearance of the Palestinian movement was a surprise even—or maybe especially—for the most politically active people. It was a shattering of an illusion: that of a disconnected Poland, a periphery where nothing happens. While some people still argue against the occupations from a peripheral position—arguing that Polish universities aren’t as involved in the slaughter of Palestinians as American or Western European ones—I think that if one thing is clear, it’s that such eventsas Palestinian resistance call for a fidelity that doesn’t respect geopolitical bias. Being against genocide has to be absolute and doesn’t deal in relativities. Such an absoluteness was the moving sprit of these occupations.
Breaking with a trite localism—that some activists still espouse—what was practiced was an ethical commitment that shattered the distinction between what is local and global. It’s not a matter of “thinking globally, acting locally”, but a manner of acting that cannot but be global. By this globality, I mean less a spatial expansiveness than a politics that performs its interventions on the highest levels and intensities. For instance, occupations’ delegates making appearances in MSZ (Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and in Sejm (Lower House of the Polish Parliament) to pressure Universities from above. As well as pressure from below: taking part in international BDS conferences, and the occupations’ capacity to create a kind of “organic internationalism”, by being a place for encounters with Student Intifada participants from other countries. Thus they demonstrated their continuity with Palestine, in that their locality was in fact a potentiality to being global.
***
Of course this doesn’t mean that the occupations weren’t constrained by their local circumstances. There were still factors such as: the lack of a tradition of radical organizing; the relatively small pool of potential participants; and more general differences in character of Polish Universities compared to Western ones. The occupations were noticeably “less militant” and the path that they took was for the most part one of dialogue with the university authorities, in hopes of calling their bluff when it comes to their own proclaimed values—such as the institutional policies of being apolitical and that of academic freedom. Only the Warsaw occupation decided on a point-of-no-return-escalation. This took the form ofa road blockade of the main university campus—which forced the hand of the authorities, who scandalously called the cops, welcoming them on University grounds. The occupants were unfortunately kicked out during the second day of the blockade, unable to mount a force sufficient to resist the police. Meanwhile, the occupations in Kraków and Wrocław won some concessions. These included university rectors issuing statements on the Israeli genocide in Gaza (although never actually using the word “genocide” in them)ethics commissions being created and the allocation of spots and funding for Palestinian students.
To be clear, the apparent lack of militancy isn’t necessarily something that must be looked down upon. True militancy sometimes doesn’t look “militant”but apart from that it’s also a matter of discussion to what extent we should emulate the tactics of Western movements. As I heard from one occupant:“they (activists and militants) for too long have thought that they’re like the West”, when in fact theyfaced different obstacles which a hasty escalation wouldn’t help with. In fact the “lack of militancy” could be instead viewed as opening a terrain for other targets, namely the quite successful mapping of the institutions’ political and legal grey areas. This enabled them to gain ground from a position of relative weakness.
***
Ultimately the occupations posed a number of important political questions. How to further a politics that obstinately places itself in-between a global protest wave and a localized event? How, while being true to transnational ethical commitments, to act meaningfully where one resides? How not to give in to mere imitation of western politics, but instead to develop political intelligence, sensibility and strategies that are effective even when the tide of struggle is low while speaking the same truth?
The occupations helped us to imagine a politics of “co-unbelonging”, as we formulated in the recent publication with Dabartis. To inhabit our peripheral localities while refusing toresign ourselves to peripherality and thus to impotence and oblivion as the plaything of bigger fish. Whether it means developing ways of thinking that go beyond the Western paradigm and its historical imputations; refusing our helpless geopolitical positionings; or taking up global fights in our own unique ways—the important thing is to build up our capacity to act; to seize an agency that is still denied to us.
June 26th, 2024
Welcome to the third Obecność letter. In this letter we mourn and celebrate the sad passing of our friend and comrade Marina Vishmidt. Additionally, this letter contains info on our first publication, updates and insights from recent activities, as well as a video and text contribution from Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. The video and publication are available above.
1. Letter to the Historical Party — Memorial for Marina Vishmidt.
2. Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant.
3. Rehearsing Our Autonomy: “We aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world”.
4. The Movement to Come: Notes on the Riga Anarchist Book Fair.
1.
Marina was involved from the beginning in conversations on the idea of Obecność. She provided erudite and well-informed advice on the concepts and ideas involved in our early efforts to “circulate autonomous forms.” As well as showing gratitude for her role in this and as a contributor to Obecność, this letter by Noah Brehmer draws attention to a more fundamental legacy that Marina leaves us with: a strategy of belonging to the historical party.
The network I encountered through and as Marina lacked cult leadership and master pedagogues, political cliques, and intellectual mafias fighting over territories and prestige as the officiated representatives of class and political interests. The bonds Marina persistently cultivated with me—and with so many others—can be evoked as a form of political belonging that echoes Marx’s account of the historical party: a network of comrades dispersed throughout the class struggle. This entails a correspondence between militants brought together on a common and equal ground to share strategies of revolt and their concrete, historical, developments as lived experiences. The historical party, as Marx noted, “is no school.”
Despite our correspondence almost never taking any public form, and being valorized as such, Marina remained profoundly committed to our decidedly nonprofessional exchanges of thought. These came to center on contemporary social movements, questions of class composition, and autonomy. Even while her life in London became increasingly busy, grinding and absorbing, Marina held a magnificent ability to steal time for such conspiracies. A theft, I’m well aware, that could only be consistently perpetrated with the help of her friends, her partner, union comrades and fellow travelers of the historical party. A few years ago she introduced me to the concept of obstinacy—a notion of historical agency within conditions of dependency—in Negt and Kluge, and Marina’s path of class struggle evoked a great deal of this. One of the many expressions of this was in her militant commitment to the non and para institutional correspondences of the historical party.
Finally, I begin to ask myself and ask you what the particular significance of our historical party is? For me the correspondence with Marina, as one of my most significant bases of belonging to the party—which I now share in various ways with some of you—has been integral to thinking and practicing a communist form of life. A way of thinking and knowing the world that is radically situated in the concrete positionality of the historical totality. What I’m trying to say here is that the correspondence form that Marina cultivated, in its capacity to welcome intimacy and the personal, uniquely situated theorizations of the world within the concrete instances of their historical compositions. It is often noted that there is no theorizing the totality outside the totality, but it is far less emphasized in much of the Marxist communist camp—in which Marina remained firmly situated—that this in turn means navigating the domain of affect and the haptic particularities of singular lives in their struggles. Marina was critical of the misogynistic and didactic impulses that inform certain imperatives to gain an absolutizing knowledge of the object of reality (mechanistic periodizations), so as to liberate these theoretical imperatives from such limitations. She was equally critical towards the new paradigms of institutional care, which she saw as amounting to “the ruthless denial of political questions in favor of an etiolated ethics of care that somehow always affirms market subjectivity.” The correspondence form of the historical party, by contrast, is properly speaking dialectical. It is knowledge as a concrete-abstraction and as a violent negation directed toward the totality of capitalist determinations in historical revolts. As Anthony Iles aptly recounts in his own memorial and celebration:
“For Marina, everything was up for scrutiny and transformation. She believed and practiced that to think and speak about something was to transform it, whether ideas or relations, requiring a responsibility to actively refashion the object until it not only gave up its essence and name, but further until it was rendered completely plastic.”
Marina guided me over the years as I drifted deep into the noise of life with all its miseries, its beauties and truths. We theorized together the division of labor in the kitchens I worked at in Phily, a knowledge that would integrally help me as I began to cultivate the skills to organize a hospitality sector solidarity network with friends in Lithuanian. We broadly conspired together about the idea of communism, certainly not a world where all labor becomes artistic! Marina tirelessly helped me with my writing, as someone who was not connected to a university environment. Her incisive edits, references and always critical summations were integral to my ability to do militant research all of these years.
To conclude for now, I share a passage from our comrade Andreas’ memorial:
“No matter how painful it is to continue without one of our shining lights, as Goldman declared: ‘No, Durruti is not dead! He is more alive than living … He lives in us for ever and ever.’ Marina is more alive than living, and our struggles are stronger for it, because she put the whole world in there, in her work, in her friendships, and in her commitment to revolutionary horizons.”
Also see:
The Conditions of Possibility: Tributes to Marina Vishmidt, by Mute Collective
Marina Vishmidt: 1976–2024 by Andreas Petrossiants
Marina’s Cues, by Kerstin Stakmeier
2.
“Amidst the chaos of economic crisis, geopolitical realignment, climate change and state failure, emerged the conditions to foster rebellion. The prior decades had eroded the legitimacy of the parties of reform. By the beginning of the forties, some form of mass protests, riots, and armed movements had erupted on every continent. [...] Increasingly over the course of the decade, these insurrections took on a communist character. The first communes to rise out of the wreckage were in the Levant (2041) and in the Andes (2043). These insurrections became models for communization as more and more nation-states fell into disarray. The first commune of East and Central Asia emerged in Xinjiang in 2045, and the first commune of South Asia emerged in Chennai in 2047. The fall of China and India, enormous forces in Asian politics and economics, marked the end of nation-state power on the continent.”
Recorded on September 20, 2067, in Brooklyn, and released on May 1st, 2024 during a demo in Krakow, the broadsheet “Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant” wishfully announces news of the future as though it were the present: Palestine liberated and global empire abolished. We publish this broadsheet amidst rapidly unfolding events in Palestine and beyond. The emergent international solidarity movement, a response to the unthinkable horrors and catastrophes of the latest imperial genocide, is an outburst of radiant paths of autonomy and international solidarity. We can only hope that our reality meets and outpaces the time-lines of O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s sci-fi account.
The content of the broadsheet was taken from the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Published by Common Notions Press the broadsheet is a collaboration.
Print copies are currently available in Poland at Spoldzielnia Ogniwo (Krakow) and with Niecztelne Illegibles, in Copenhagen at the Book Cafe, as well as Luna6, Vilnius. It will soon be available at 56a London. For a digital copy scroll down, to pick up your own copies get in touch!
Marina was involved from the beginning in conversations on the idea of Obecność. She provided erudite and well-informed advice on the concepts and ideas involved in our early efforts to “circulate autonomous forms.” As well as showing gratitude for her role in this and as a contributor to Obecność, this letter by Noah Brehmer draws attention to a more fundamental legacy that Marina leaves us with: a strategy of belonging to the historical party.
The network I encountered through and as Marina lacked cult leadership and master pedagogues, political cliques, and intellectual mafias fighting over territories and prestige as the officiated representatives of class and political interests. The bonds Marina persistently cultivated with me—and with so many others—can be evoked as a form of political belonging that echoes Marx’s account of the historical party: a network of comrades dispersed throughout the class struggle. This entails a correspondence between militants brought together on a common and equal ground to share strategies of revolt and their concrete, historical, developments as lived experiences. The historical party, as Marx noted, “is no school.”
Despite our correspondence almost never taking any public form, and being valorized as such, Marina remained profoundly committed to our decidedly nonprofessional exchanges of thought. These came to center on contemporary social movements, questions of class composition, and autonomy. Even while her life in London became increasingly busy, grinding and absorbing, Marina held a magnificent ability to steal time for such conspiracies. A theft, I’m well aware, that could only be consistently perpetrated with the help of her friends, her partner, union comrades and fellow travelers of the historical party. A few years ago she introduced me to the concept of obstinacy—a notion of historical agency within conditions of dependency—in Negt and Kluge, and Marina’s path of class struggle evoked a great deal of this. One of the many expressions of this was in her militant commitment to the non and para institutional correspondences of the historical party.
Finally, I begin to ask myself and ask you what the particular significance of our historical party is? For me the correspondence with Marina, as one of my most significant bases of belonging to the party—which I now share in various ways with some of you—has been integral to thinking and practicing a communist form of life. A way of thinking and knowing the world that is radically situated in the concrete positionality of the historical totality. What I’m trying to say here is that the correspondence form that Marina cultivated, in its capacity to welcome intimacy and the personal, uniquely situated theorizations of the world within the concrete instances of their historical compositions. It is often noted that there is no theorizing the totality outside the totality, but it is far less emphasized in much of the Marxist communist camp—in which Marina remained firmly situated—that this in turn means navigating the domain of affect and the haptic particularities of singular lives in their struggles. Marina was critical of the misogynistic and didactic impulses that inform certain imperatives to gain an absolutizing knowledge of the object of reality (mechanistic periodizations), so as to liberate these theoretical imperatives from such limitations. She was equally critical towards the new paradigms of institutional care, which she saw as amounting to “the ruthless denial of political questions in favor of an etiolated ethics of care that somehow always affirms market subjectivity.” The correspondence form of the historical party, by contrast, is properly speaking dialectical. It is knowledge as a concrete-abstraction and as a violent negation directed toward the totality of capitalist determinations in historical revolts. As Anthony Iles aptly recounts in his own memorial and celebration:
“For Marina, everything was up for scrutiny and transformation. She believed and practiced that to think and speak about something was to transform it, whether ideas or relations, requiring a responsibility to actively refashion the object until it not only gave up its essence and name, but further until it was rendered completely plastic.”
Marina guided me over the years as I drifted deep into the noise of life with all its miseries, its beauties and truths. We theorized together the division of labor in the kitchens I worked at in Phily, a knowledge that would integrally help me as I began to cultivate the skills to organize a hospitality sector solidarity network with friends in Lithuanian. We broadly conspired together about the idea of communism, certainly not a world where all labor becomes artistic! Marina tirelessly helped me with my writing, as someone who was not connected to a university environment. Her incisive edits, references and always critical summations were integral to my ability to do militant research all of these years.
To conclude for now, I share a passage from our comrade Andreas’ memorial:
“No matter how painful it is to continue without one of our shining lights, as Goldman declared: ‘No, Durruti is not dead! He is more alive than living … He lives in us for ever and ever.’ Marina is more alive than living, and our struggles are stronger for it, because she put the whole world in there, in her work, in her friendships, and in her commitment to revolutionary horizons.”
Also see:
The Conditions of Possibility: Tributes to Marina Vishmidt, by Mute Collective
Marina Vishmidt: 1976–2024 by Andreas Petrossiants
Marina’s Cues, by Kerstin Stakmeier
2.
“Amidst the chaos of economic crisis, geopolitical realignment, climate change and state failure, emerged the conditions to foster rebellion. The prior decades had eroded the legitimacy of the parties of reform. By the beginning of the forties, some form of mass protests, riots, and armed movements had erupted on every continent. [...] Increasingly over the course of the decade, these insurrections took on a communist character. The first communes to rise out of the wreckage were in the Levant (2041) and in the Andes (2043). These insurrections became models for communization as more and more nation-states fell into disarray. The first commune of East and Central Asia emerged in Xinjiang in 2045, and the first commune of South Asia emerged in Chennai in 2047. The fall of China and India, enormous forces in Asian politics and economics, marked the end of nation-state power on the continent.”
Recorded on September 20, 2067, in Brooklyn, and released on May 1st, 2024 during a demo in Krakow, the broadsheet “Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant” wishfully announces news of the future as though it were the present: Palestine liberated and global empire abolished. We publish this broadsheet amidst rapidly unfolding events in Palestine and beyond. The emergent international solidarity movement, a response to the unthinkable horrors and catastrophes of the latest imperial genocide, is an outburst of radiant paths of autonomy and international solidarity. We can only hope that our reality meets and outpaces the time-lines of O’Brien and Abdelhadi’s sci-fi account.
The content of the broadsheet was taken from the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, by M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Published by Common Notions Press the broadsheet is a collaboration.
Print copies are currently available in Poland at Spoldzielnia Ogniwo (Krakow) and with Niecztelne Illegibles, in Copenhagen at the Book Cafe, as well as Luna6, Vilnius. It will soon be available at 56a London. For a digital copy scroll down, to pick up your own copies get in touch!
3.
Obecność circulates a new video work “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora” [8:22m] by the Prague-based Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. It is accompanied with a reflection by member Joe Grim Feinberg on the release of the Declaration as part of an action with Der Bund on May 1st in Krakow. In the following he explores the questions this performative rehearsal of autonomy raises on the relation between states and diasporas generally.
A band of us descended on Krakow, to join the city’s May 1st march. This was specifically to join its Jewish bloc, organized by elements close to the Jewish Labor Bund. The latter is a historically monumental force of Diaspora leftism in Europe, recently revived. We traveled from Vilnius, Berlin, London, and Prague. Why? To say that Diaspora is here. Do, דאָ. And it is marching forward. And it is not just about Jews.
May 1st is the world’s day to celebrate resistance, the day of all the workers of the world. We marched beside the Palestine solidarity bloc, saying: Diaspora is all over the world.
We’re not floating on clouds in the sky or in some faraway place that claims to be our home. Like the last words of the Yiddish partisan song “Zog nit keynmol”: mir zaynen do. We’re here. We are here and other people are there in Israel (the occupied territories). We refuse to let them justify their being there by promising to make us be there too. We aren’t there. We’re here. And some of us here prepared a “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora.” We announced this at an event after the march and released a video recording made by the clandestine committee that prepared the declaration. With this declaration, made on International Workers Day, we wanted to make it plain: we aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world.
Diaspora means: our home is where we are. Some of us may force states to secure our rights to be where we are. Some have to struggle against states that deny those rights. But the independence of Diaspora means we need no state to justify our being here. But why should Diaspora be independent? Diaspora is inherently opposed to separation, except under extreme circumstances. But the circumstances are extreme. Israel does not allow Diaspora to be Diaspora. Additionally, it makes Palestinians into a growing diaspora without granting them the right to independence. By declaring independence, we declare the autonomy of Palestinians and Jews everywhere, no matter what the states say.
However, declaring independence is, in itself, never a solution. It is only a way of more adequately posing a problem. The problem is to figure out how to be where we are and how to make it so others can be where they are: it is the question of autonomy. And this means being more than just here. We are here, mir zaynen do, but “do” is a kind of here that is also still there. We have to remember the there that is a part of here. But we should never be there without also being here. We are here and there, where we are and where we might be.
The Bundist ideal of doikayt was not imposed to keep people where they were, or to enclose people in an exclusive here, as if it were enough for them, and as if it were for them alone. Doikayt was invoked to let people dream without having to flee. To let them take trips to the clouds so that they could build their lands a little higher when they came back down.
There’s nothing wrong with taking trips to the clouds or excursions to promised lands, as long as we remember that promises are only promises and clouds are only clouds. As long as we still judge our clouds, whatever fantastical shape they take, by how much they rain. And as long as we still judge our lands by the life that they allow to grow on them.
Diaspora, etymologically, means the spreading of seeds. Seeds grow in soil but they scatter again. They know centers, stems and trunks, not borders. Diaspora has many centers. We sometimes call them “Jerusalems.” Salonika was once “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Vilnius “the Jerusalem of the North.” One place that definitely is no where’s Jerusalem today is Jerusalem. Perhaps someday Jerusalem could become the Jerusalem of Palestine, but it isn’t yet, and because of what Israel has done to it, it hasn’t been for a long time now.
Diaspora is here and Diaspora is there too. Israel and Palestine are Diaspora in equal measure. The more Palestinians are exiled, the more Israel becomes a land of exile, and no structure built on exile can be anybody’s home. But if Exile gives way to Diaspora, where people can be where they are, people can begin to be at home again.
Meanwhile, we’ll be building up our own Diaspora here. Not just for Jews. Jewishness is one of many paths to Diaspora. Jewishness is a legacy some of us claim because it is a way of being here without being only here—which is to say, without being whatever the rulers of this place declare that here should be. Jewishness does not have to be about being Jewish. It can be about not having to be fully and exclusively any one thing. The nation-states declare themselves complete and exclusive and pure, and the Jewish legacy answers, alongside other diasporic peoples: “No you aren’t, because we’re still here.”
This is also the legacy of the workers’ movement. The nation-states worship at the altar of the Bourgeoisie and Capital, which makes nations in its image. These states forget that they have also made workers, which they kicked out of Eden. They declare their Eden complete and pure without the workers, but the workers’ movement says: “No you aren’t complete, because we’re not done, and we’re still here.” Mir zaynen do.
4.
It was surprising for us all to hear word of the sudden appearance of a new movement of autonomy in Latvia. Well, surprising since over the past decade of movement activity in the Baltic territories, Latvia has been particularly inert. Besides an older initiative that holds a little space where Zapatista coffee is sold—an isolated tendency running on a seemingly indiscernible impetus from the past—and faint murmurs of Tiqqun followers on a farm, there has been little comradely connection to note.
The new grouping was in part mobilized into action by the recent genocide unfolding in Gaza. They speak of this as an “unprecedented protest for Latvia” with “many new comrades” joining the movement (you can read their full founding letter here). Yet, more than merely a spontaneous response to Gaza, one can discern the roots of this movement in older organizing precedents, found in Riga’s counterculture camp. This was a kind of Eastern European dissident infused artistic bohemia centered around entities like the infamous bar, bookshop, and press Bolderaja. While drawing from the countercultures’ infrastructures (both material and intellectual) the new composition marks an exciting break with them in grounding itself on a politics that sets its goals around more global and radical questions than the immediate existential task of living freely in your daily life. But rather than foreseeing this as a conflict of approaches, one can only hope that these two tendencies continue to learn from one another. That is, achieve their respective goals of connecting the region to international revolutionary movements, while developing new, more effective, strategies for truly practicing the kinds of autonomy the counterculture flirts with in its more fantastical, short-lived, expressions.
The book fair itself was well organized and attracted comrades from around the region and even a handful from far outside it. One can only hope that this will be the first of many fairs in Riga to come. The only critical commentary to note was that the urban tour of “leftist history”, informally organized by a few comrades, omitted the participation of Jews in the city’s radical history and even, alongside Roma, their very existence. That is, until the very end of the tour when we happened to stumble across a Roma museum which prompted our guides to note in passing the former existence of both of these minorities. The omission feels significant at a moment when we are fighting against a zionist ideology that is fundamentally founded on this very erasure of Jewish diasporic histories.
Obecność circulates a new video work “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora” [8:22m] by the Prague-based Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. It is accompanied with a reflection by member Joe Grim Feinberg on the release of the Declaration as part of an action with Der Bund on May 1st in Krakow. In the following he explores the questions this performative rehearsal of autonomy raises on the relation between states and diasporas generally.
A band of us descended on Krakow, to join the city’s May 1st march. This was specifically to join its Jewish bloc, organized by elements close to the Jewish Labor Bund. The latter is a historically monumental force of Diaspora leftism in Europe, recently revived. We traveled from Vilnius, Berlin, London, and Prague. Why? To say that Diaspora is here. Do, דאָ. And it is marching forward. And it is not just about Jews.
May 1st is the world’s day to celebrate resistance, the day of all the workers of the world. We marched beside the Palestine solidarity bloc, saying: Diaspora is all over the world.
We’re not floating on clouds in the sky or in some faraway place that claims to be our home. Like the last words of the Yiddish partisan song “Zog nit keynmol”: mir zaynen do. We’re here. We are here and other people are there in Israel (the occupied territories). We refuse to let them justify their being there by promising to make us be there too. We aren’t there. We’re here. And some of us here prepared a “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora.” We announced this at an event after the march and released a video recording made by the clandestine committee that prepared the declaration. With this declaration, made on International Workers Day, we wanted to make it plain: we aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world.
Diaspora means: our home is where we are. Some of us may force states to secure our rights to be where we are. Some have to struggle against states that deny those rights. But the independence of Diaspora means we need no state to justify our being here. But why should Diaspora be independent? Diaspora is inherently opposed to separation, except under extreme circumstances. But the circumstances are extreme. Israel does not allow Diaspora to be Diaspora. Additionally, it makes Palestinians into a growing diaspora without granting them the right to independence. By declaring independence, we declare the autonomy of Palestinians and Jews everywhere, no matter what the states say.
However, declaring independence is, in itself, never a solution. It is only a way of more adequately posing a problem. The problem is to figure out how to be where we are and how to make it so others can be where they are: it is the question of autonomy. And this means being more than just here. We are here, mir zaynen do, but “do” is a kind of here that is also still there. We have to remember the there that is a part of here. But we should never be there without also being here. We are here and there, where we are and where we might be.
The Bundist ideal of doikayt was not imposed to keep people where they were, or to enclose people in an exclusive here, as if it were enough for them, and as if it were for them alone. Doikayt was invoked to let people dream without having to flee. To let them take trips to the clouds so that they could build their lands a little higher when they came back down.
There’s nothing wrong with taking trips to the clouds or excursions to promised lands, as long as we remember that promises are only promises and clouds are only clouds. As long as we still judge our clouds, whatever fantastical shape they take, by how much they rain. And as long as we still judge our lands by the life that they allow to grow on them.
Diaspora, etymologically, means the spreading of seeds. Seeds grow in soil but they scatter again. They know centers, stems and trunks, not borders. Diaspora has many centers. We sometimes call them “Jerusalems.” Salonika was once “the Jerusalem of the Balkans.” Vilnius “the Jerusalem of the North.” One place that definitely is no where’s Jerusalem today is Jerusalem. Perhaps someday Jerusalem could become the Jerusalem of Palestine, but it isn’t yet, and because of what Israel has done to it, it hasn’t been for a long time now.
Diaspora is here and Diaspora is there too. Israel and Palestine are Diaspora in equal measure. The more Palestinians are exiled, the more Israel becomes a land of exile, and no structure built on exile can be anybody’s home. But if Exile gives way to Diaspora, where people can be where they are, people can begin to be at home again.
Meanwhile, we’ll be building up our own Diaspora here. Not just for Jews. Jewishness is one of many paths to Diaspora. Jewishness is a legacy some of us claim because it is a way of being here without being only here—which is to say, without being whatever the rulers of this place declare that here should be. Jewishness does not have to be about being Jewish. It can be about not having to be fully and exclusively any one thing. The nation-states declare themselves complete and exclusive and pure, and the Jewish legacy answers, alongside other diasporic peoples: “No you aren’t, because we’re still here.”
This is also the legacy of the workers’ movement. The nation-states worship at the altar of the Bourgeoisie and Capital, which makes nations in its image. These states forget that they have also made workers, which they kicked out of Eden. They declare their Eden complete and pure without the workers, but the workers’ movement says: “No you aren’t complete, because we’re not done, and we’re still here.” Mir zaynen do.
4.
It was surprising for us all to hear word of the sudden appearance of a new movement of autonomy in Latvia. Well, surprising since over the past decade of movement activity in the Baltic territories, Latvia has been particularly inert. Besides an older initiative that holds a little space where Zapatista coffee is sold—an isolated tendency running on a seemingly indiscernible impetus from the past—and faint murmurs of Tiqqun followers on a farm, there has been little comradely connection to note.
The new grouping was in part mobilized into action by the recent genocide unfolding in Gaza. They speak of this as an “unprecedented protest for Latvia” with “many new comrades” joining the movement (you can read their full founding letter here). Yet, more than merely a spontaneous response to Gaza, one can discern the roots of this movement in older organizing precedents, found in Riga’s counterculture camp. This was a kind of Eastern European dissident infused artistic bohemia centered around entities like the infamous bar, bookshop, and press Bolderaja. While drawing from the countercultures’ infrastructures (both material and intellectual) the new composition marks an exciting break with them in grounding itself on a politics that sets its goals around more global and radical questions than the immediate existential task of living freely in your daily life. But rather than foreseeing this as a conflict of approaches, one can only hope that these two tendencies continue to learn from one another. That is, achieve their respective goals of connecting the region to international revolutionary movements, while developing new, more effective, strategies for truly practicing the kinds of autonomy the counterculture flirts with in its more fantastical, short-lived, expressions.
The book fair itself was well organized and attracted comrades from around the region and even a handful from far outside it. One can only hope that this will be the first of many fairs in Riga to come. The only critical commentary to note was that the urban tour of “leftist history”, informally organized by a few comrades, omitted the participation of Jews in the city’s radical history and even, alongside Roma, their very existence. That is, until the very end of the tour when we happened to stumble across a Roma museum which prompted our guides to note in passing the former existence of both of these minorities. The omission feels significant at a moment when we are fighting against a zionist ideology that is fundamentally founded on this very erasure of Jewish diasporic histories.
March 21st, 2024
In this letter find notes from a discussion responding to a screening of Spaces of Exception; an open call for the anarchist bookfair Riga; an exploration of the relation between hereness and Benjamin’s concept of now-time; and finally some updates on the circulation of Looting.
1. Notes from the Spaces of Exception screening in Vilnius
2. Updates on Looting
3. Invitation to the Anachist Bookfair Riga
4. Hereness, jetztzeit, tämänhetkisyys, "this-momentness"
1.
At the end of Februrary we gathered for a screening and discussion of Matt and Malik’s film Spaces of Exception. The following notes are from the introduction to this discussion, which invited everyone to consider together adjancencies between the (recently demolished) roma ghetto, contemporary refuge camps and “zones of exclusion” on the border of Belarus; as well as the historical jewish ghetto of Vilna. We also took the time to compare the differences in the public response to spaces of exception in Ukraine to those in Palestine and elsewhere; starkly coming to terms with what hinders solidarities between peoples who face, in many ways, shared conditions—racism.
Somehow we don’t often encounter comparisons between histories of state violence and even genocide. Each case, we like to tell ourselves is an aberration, a monstrous and exceptional deviation from the so called humanitarian foundations of the nation-state. In comparing the experience of the native and the refuge, the film importantly brings this discourse into radical questioning. We are asked: does the nation-state, at its core, truly embody the humanitarian values it claims to? Or should we begin to consider its other possible foundations: that the state-form as a genocidal form in and of itself—a guardian of private property, a vehicle for violent, imperial, expansionism, ethno-supremacy, and resource extractivism.
Matt and Malik nicely introduce the concept of “spaces of exception” in their film to help us understand these genocidal foundations of the state-form and the manifold ways communities organize themselves against it. Spaces of exception are territories where the rule of law is suspended. These are spaces where the state can enact power over subjects without limit or accountability. And we can find such spaces all around us. From the migrant detainment facility down the street; to the now universal existence of prisons where individuals are violently torn from their communities and alienated from their basic human rights; to refuge camps, concentration camps, ghettos, reservations and warzones; the exception, as Carl Schmidt said, appears to be the rule.
Yet, rather than casting the inhabitants of these not so exceptional spaces of exception as helpless victims, the directors are careful to focus on the vitality and agency found in these communities. The native and the refuge are both excluded from the world — the world of the state, of rights, of citizenship— and are makers of worlds. And these worlds of resistance, the directors challenge us to believe, are informed by needs and desires far greater than the desire for a nation state. What these communities offer is a radically alternative practice of inhabiting the earth. An inhabitation that critically defies our understanding of borders, property, jails, labor, nuclear families, and many other categories of belonging we have inherited by the history of the imperialist nation-state.
2.
Looting is now availble at Hopscotch Berlin. Looting is also circulating at Biblio Cinètika and La Social in Barcelona. You can also get copies at Luna6 and Eureka in Vilnius. In March, friends from Vienna continued the Looting conversation in Europe with editor Jose Rosales in an event called Looting and Totality.
3.
A new group of anarcho-syndicalists in Riga, Latvia has released an open call to join them May 24–26 for the first ever anarchist bookfair in the city. Call is here: https://www.anarchistfederation.net/anarchist-bookfair-in-riga-latvia/
At the end of Februrary we gathered for a screening and discussion of Matt and Malik’s film Spaces of Exception. The following notes are from the introduction to this discussion, which invited everyone to consider together adjancencies between the (recently demolished) roma ghetto, contemporary refuge camps and “zones of exclusion” on the border of Belarus; as well as the historical jewish ghetto of Vilna. We also took the time to compare the differences in the public response to spaces of exception in Ukraine to those in Palestine and elsewhere; starkly coming to terms with what hinders solidarities between peoples who face, in many ways, shared conditions—racism.
Somehow we don’t often encounter comparisons between histories of state violence and even genocide. Each case, we like to tell ourselves is an aberration, a monstrous and exceptional deviation from the so called humanitarian foundations of the nation-state. In comparing the experience of the native and the refuge, the film importantly brings this discourse into radical questioning. We are asked: does the nation-state, at its core, truly embody the humanitarian values it claims to? Or should we begin to consider its other possible foundations: that the state-form as a genocidal form in and of itself—a guardian of private property, a vehicle for violent, imperial, expansionism, ethno-supremacy, and resource extractivism.
Matt and Malik nicely introduce the concept of “spaces of exception” in their film to help us understand these genocidal foundations of the state-form and the manifold ways communities organize themselves against it. Spaces of exception are territories where the rule of law is suspended. These are spaces where the state can enact power over subjects without limit or accountability. And we can find such spaces all around us. From the migrant detainment facility down the street; to the now universal existence of prisons where individuals are violently torn from their communities and alienated from their basic human rights; to refuge camps, concentration camps, ghettos, reservations and warzones; the exception, as Carl Schmidt said, appears to be the rule.
Yet, rather than casting the inhabitants of these not so exceptional spaces of exception as helpless victims, the directors are careful to focus on the vitality and agency found in these communities. The native and the refuge are both excluded from the world — the world of the state, of rights, of citizenship— and are makers of worlds. And these worlds of resistance, the directors challenge us to believe, are informed by needs and desires far greater than the desire for a nation state. What these communities offer is a radically alternative practice of inhabiting the earth. An inhabitation that critically defies our understanding of borders, property, jails, labor, nuclear families, and many other categories of belonging we have inherited by the history of the imperialist nation-state.
2.
Looting is now availble at Hopscotch Berlin. Looting is also circulating at Biblio Cinètika and La Social in Barcelona. You can also get copies at Luna6 and Eureka in Vilnius. In March, friends from Vienna continued the Looting conversation in Europe with editor Jose Rosales in an event called Looting and Totality.
3.
A new group of anarcho-syndicalists in Riga, Latvia has released an open call to join them May 24–26 for the first ever anarchist bookfair in the city. Call is here: https://www.anarchistfederation.net/anarchist-bookfair-in-riga-latvia/
4.
In the process of translating doikayt into our own here(s) and now(s), the question of what it essentially conveys and what aspects of this conveyance we wish to politically emphasize sharply arose. Whereas in the Lithuanian translation we decided on “the present” as indicative of the “here and now” of struggle from where one stands, the Polish translation wavered between this —obecnosc — and powszechnosc ["commoness"], which placed emphasis on the outcomes of this hereness as a making-in-common of the many against both the unifying territoriality of the nation-state and the separations imposed by capital. Initially taking a similar course as the Lithuanian, a critical question arose on the Finnish translation.
The first option, nykyisyyttä, is grammatically the singular partitive case of nykyisyys that could be translated as “present”, especially in the sense when the word is used to refer to the current era. In its partitive case nykyisyys turns into some more or less clearly defined element, feature or phenomenon that belongs essentially to “our days”.
In his article “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism” David Rosenberg1 tends to embrace this set of meanings in his emphasis on the "hereness" aspect of doikayt by defining it through diaspora: “There where we live, that is our country.” I don’t think this is incorrect, but there might be more to it than just that – or at least I hope so. Most likely it’s not Rosenberg’s intention, but I see in such a definition a risk to understand the matter in the terms of a “happily ever after” of integration. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz follows this path with the definition given in her book The Colors of Jews: “Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong.” Fair enough, of course, but this feels quite a diluted version of what the concept has historically meant – and could potentially mean here and now. Indeed, it doesn’t do justice to the Bundists’ revolutionary internationalism, which it's commonly associated, nor the potentiality of “nowness” contained in the concept either. Understood along these lines, nykyisyyttä points implicitly towards a passive acceptance of the course of current affairs; I hear similar conclusiveness in it as when we say “that’s just how it is” or “it is what it is”.
Against this tradition of nykyisyyttä as a kind of harmonious national rooting, we could emphasize its potentiality for creating ruptures with(in) the continuity of history. We could see here similarity to Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (“the here-and-now” in his theses on the Philosophy of History), which it seems to resonate. This here-and-now is so concentrated it is about to explode. Juxtaposing his historical materialism with the Jewish tradition, Benjamin recounts how "the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. [...] This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter." This shouldn't be understood as indicating passivity, as Löwy also notes in his Fire Alarm: "it is not a matter of awaiting the Messiah, as in the dominant tradition of rabbinical Judaism, but of bringing about his coming." In other words, it's all about "direct action on the historical plane". The goal might be, as Löwy claims, "to hasten the end of time", but I am not sure how important it eventually is. What matters more is the present moment, here and now, which might be the last.
Encountered in these terms, hereness would than ground itself on a revolutionary triple negation:
1. not the "thereness" of salvation’s here of an elsewhere (the zionist telos).
2. not the conservative here as a mere affirmation of what has been inherited to us by the past (cultural nationalism and integration).
3. not the "not like now" as a here of this place but not of this time, which places redemption as something distant I.e. an apocalyptism for which one must accept present sacrifices (e.g. revolutionary socialism).
Hereness insists that change cannot wait and calls for a "different here and now". A living communism of revolutionary class struggle, waged under and against the belongings ascribed to us by sovereignty and tradition. What could then be an alternative? In the Finnish edition of "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Jetztzeit is translated as nyt-hetki (“now-moment”), but intuitively I think perhaps tämänhetkisyys (“this-momentness”) could be closer to what is indicated by doikyat.
And rather than designating the form of life expressed here as a uniquely Jewish practice of inhabitation, we can see dabartis as but one contribution to an intensely variegated history of stateless, communist, internationalist, antifacist, ways of organizing ourselves. After all, the very core of jewish hereness designated an opening of my life, my struggle, my community, onto the universal terrain. From the Bund's central role in the founding of the RSDLP; to the decision of Jewish revolutionaries to join the international front against facism in Spain; disasporic jews contributed their lives and their knowledge to an anti-imperialist movement we are the inhertiors of today.
Another thing, not less interesting, would be to think further the autonome concept of here-and-now, which I connect first and foremost to various practices that can be seen to reflect the ‘immediate commuism’ – or ‘communization’ in the terms of another tradition – but of course also to the principled opposition to attentisme of the traditional far-left parties and even to the whole Grand soir itself. As far as I know, this hasn’t been theorized that much, but that isn’t necessarily a totally bad thing; eventually autonomy is primarily a practical matter, or that’s at least how I understand it.
In the process of translating doikayt into our own here(s) and now(s), the question of what it essentially conveys and what aspects of this conveyance we wish to politically emphasize sharply arose. Whereas in the Lithuanian translation we decided on “the present” as indicative of the “here and now” of struggle from where one stands, the Polish translation wavered between this —obecnosc — and powszechnosc ["commoness"], which placed emphasis on the outcomes of this hereness as a making-in-common of the many against both the unifying territoriality of the nation-state and the separations imposed by capital. Initially taking a similar course as the Lithuanian, a critical question arose on the Finnish translation.
The first option, nykyisyyttä, is grammatically the singular partitive case of nykyisyys that could be translated as “present”, especially in the sense when the word is used to refer to the current era. In its partitive case nykyisyys turns into some more or less clearly defined element, feature or phenomenon that belongs essentially to “our days”.
In his article “Jewish Alternatives to Zionism” David Rosenberg1 tends to embrace this set of meanings in his emphasis on the "hereness" aspect of doikayt by defining it through diaspora: “There where we live, that is our country.” I don’t think this is incorrect, but there might be more to it than just that – or at least I hope so. Most likely it’s not Rosenberg’s intention, but I see in such a definition a risk to understand the matter in the terms of a “happily ever after” of integration. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz follows this path with the definition given in her book The Colors of Jews: “Doikayt is about wanting to be citizens, to have rights, to not worry about being shipped off at any moment where someone else thinks you do or don’t belong.” Fair enough, of course, but this feels quite a diluted version of what the concept has historically meant – and could potentially mean here and now. Indeed, it doesn’t do justice to the Bundists’ revolutionary internationalism, which it's commonly associated, nor the potentiality of “nowness” contained in the concept either. Understood along these lines, nykyisyyttä points implicitly towards a passive acceptance of the course of current affairs; I hear similar conclusiveness in it as when we say “that’s just how it is” or “it is what it is”.
Against this tradition of nykyisyyttä as a kind of harmonious national rooting, we could emphasize its potentiality for creating ruptures with(in) the continuity of history. We could see here similarity to Walter Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit (“the here-and-now” in his theses on the Philosophy of History), which it seems to resonate. This here-and-now is so concentrated it is about to explode. Juxtaposing his historical materialism with the Jewish tradition, Benjamin recounts how "the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. [...] This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter." This shouldn't be understood as indicating passivity, as Löwy also notes in his Fire Alarm: "it is not a matter of awaiting the Messiah, as in the dominant tradition of rabbinical Judaism, but of bringing about his coming." In other words, it's all about "direct action on the historical plane". The goal might be, as Löwy claims, "to hasten the end of time", but I am not sure how important it eventually is. What matters more is the present moment, here and now, which might be the last.
Encountered in these terms, hereness would than ground itself on a revolutionary triple negation:
1. not the "thereness" of salvation’s here of an elsewhere (the zionist telos).
2. not the conservative here as a mere affirmation of what has been inherited to us by the past (cultural nationalism and integration).
3. not the "not like now" as a here of this place but not of this time, which places redemption as something distant I.e. an apocalyptism for which one must accept present sacrifices (e.g. revolutionary socialism).
Hereness insists that change cannot wait and calls for a "different here and now". A living communism of revolutionary class struggle, waged under and against the belongings ascribed to us by sovereignty and tradition. What could then be an alternative? In the Finnish edition of "Theses on the Philosophy of History", Jetztzeit is translated as nyt-hetki (“now-moment”), but intuitively I think perhaps tämänhetkisyys (“this-momentness”) could be closer to what is indicated by doikyat.
And rather than designating the form of life expressed here as a uniquely Jewish practice of inhabitation, we can see dabartis as but one contribution to an intensely variegated history of stateless, communist, internationalist, antifacist, ways of organizing ourselves. After all, the very core of jewish hereness designated an opening of my life, my struggle, my community, onto the universal terrain. From the Bund's central role in the founding of the RSDLP; to the decision of Jewish revolutionaries to join the international front against facism in Spain; disasporic jews contributed their lives and their knowledge to an anti-imperialist movement we are the inhertiors of today.
Another thing, not less interesting, would be to think further the autonome concept of here-and-now, which I connect first and foremost to various practices that can be seen to reflect the ‘immediate commuism’ – or ‘communization’ in the terms of another tradition – but of course also to the principled opposition to attentisme of the traditional far-left parties and even to the whole Grand soir itself. As far as I know, this hasn’t been theorized that much, but that isn’t necessarily a totally bad thing; eventually autonomy is primarily a practical matter, or that’s at least how I understand it.
January 15th, 2024
In the first letter, we introduce Dabartis and announce a call for responses to “Looting.” We also include notes from a film screening in Wrocław, a reading in Berlin and a silkscreen workshop in Vilnius.
- The beginning of a conversation
- Own nothing! A call for responses to “Looting”
- Notes from gatherings at Agit (Berlin) Autonomous Fair (Wroclav) and Luna6 (Vilnius)
1.
A few years ago the idea of doikayt (hereness) was seeded in a conversation between a few friends on autonomy and the politics of its inheritance in our movements. Historically conceived by Eastern European jews to enact the “we” of political existence as a practice of multiplicity and immanence against the genocidal imperative of the nation-state. We were struck by its resonance with the forms of life being conceptualized against this very genocidal supremacy by Palestinians and other stateless peoples today. And asked:
“Do we need to invent new concepts today in the way the Bund invented doykayt as encapsulating an affirmative desire for a life in common and fighting fascism at the same time. Can we also look into various histories to find and reclaim these ways of conceiving a common life? How can we start thinking further and putting into play those concepts? We, as autonomists, as communists, as anarchists, as whatever we want to call ourselves, as those who are interested in a world-in-common, a world of a here-and-now, a world-in-a-revolutionary becoming. What is it that we need to invent, create, recover and what is the need for it, what moves us to create it. And what is that revolution or even revolutionary organization when it is centered at the level of a form of life?”
Obecność is an invitation to join this conversation, to contribute to the urgent need of circulating and propagating a “life in common” and “fighting a facism” that risks now, perhaps more than ever, the destruction of our world, the destruction of Palestinian life—a destruction we must see more broadly as the threat of the erasure of anti-imperialist life in general.
Tämänhetkisyys is a research organ, a circulator, and a mender between autonomous forms. More than a distributor or producer of research, Dabartis can be approached as an effort circulate autonomy in its myriad forms. Its name, translated and transfigured in its encounters, will be shaped by those that join it—evading capture as one value, signifier, need or territory.
A few years ago the idea of doikayt (hereness) was seeded in a conversation between a few friends on autonomy and the politics of its inheritance in our movements. Historically conceived by Eastern European jews to enact the “we” of political existence as a practice of multiplicity and immanence against the genocidal imperative of the nation-state. We were struck by its resonance with the forms of life being conceptualized against this very genocidal supremacy by Palestinians and other stateless peoples today. And asked:
“Do we need to invent new concepts today in the way the Bund invented doykayt as encapsulating an affirmative desire for a life in common and fighting fascism at the same time. Can we also look into various histories to find and reclaim these ways of conceiving a common life? How can we start thinking further and putting into play those concepts? We, as autonomists, as communists, as anarchists, as whatever we want to call ourselves, as those who are interested in a world-in-common, a world of a here-and-now, a world-in-a-revolutionary becoming. What is it that we need to invent, create, recover and what is the need for it, what moves us to create it. And what is that revolution or even revolutionary organization when it is centered at the level of a form of life?”
Obecność is an invitation to join this conversation, to contribute to the urgent need of circulating and propagating a “life in common” and “fighting a facism” that risks now, perhaps more than ever, the destruction of our world, the destruction of Palestinian life—a destruction we must see more broadly as the threat of the erasure of anti-imperialist life in general.
Tämänhetkisyys is a research organ, a circulator, and a mender between autonomous forms. More than a distributor or producer of research, Dabartis can be approached as an effort circulate autonomy in its myriad forms. Its name, translated and transfigured in its encounters, will be shaped by those that join it—evading capture as one value, signifier, need or territory.
2.
What form does political belonging take for those expelled from the dominant nomos of the nation-state? While Dabartis was prompted by the particular strategy of hereness as response to this question, history will tell us that the very idea of the commons – understood as a stateless practice of the earth’s inhabitation – was articulated by those vastly excluded from the state. Starting from this thesis, we call for a response to “Looting”, a booklet that features a conversation between Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott and Vicky Osterweil (mod) Editors: Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales.
The contributors’ see Looting as more than an isolated tactical practice, but as the expression of “black socialities” antipolitics. Destituting capital’s violent imposition of need as a “laboratory of managed depletion” looting gives expression to forms of life in absolute antagonism to the modern institution of private property and the civil subject of politics. Through looting, the contributors open a conversation on how this schism with the dominant topos of politics could be conceptualized as a destituent practice of communism. Against a restitutional politics: reappropriating what was unjustly seized through an alternative measure of state making; the authors explore destitution as a qualitative transformation in our very understanding of the self as property.
Dabartis is circulating copies of “Looting” in Europe and we call for groups and individuals to respond to the booklet. If you would like to pick up a copy for your infoshop, social center, bookshop or for personal use, please get in touch. You can also find copies at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin and more locations soon.
3.
Activities began with a screening that Niecztelne (Illegibles) hosted at the Autonomous Book Fair last September in Wrocław, Poland. The film, Sashko Protyah’s 100% OFF (2022) looks at looting movements in Mariupol during the Russian siege in 2022. The film addresses how the crisis of capitalist governance in Mariupol—but also across Ukraine—has led to a massive outgrowth of mutual-aid, looting, and other practices that defy the holy laws of private property and profit; pointing to the possible path of communization as a practicable living alternative to the peace time return of Neo-liberal rule.
At Agit we collectively read excerpts of Looting and had an opening conversation on the basic themes of the book. The following are some notes from the conversation:
Genovese’s importance for the American Autonomist movements thinking around antipolitics as minor-modalities of everyday resistance.
The question of what a reader is and how to politically engage with a text not as a consumer but partisanlly, is approached as involving a kind of looting and communalization of the position as co-conspirator in a conversation.
We also picked up on the question of “need” in politics and how even some of the most militant practices found in demos like vandalising banks and shops remain within a certain austere militancy, only smashing capital but refraining from enriching oneself in these acts … the call for the desecration of politics as a desecration of the political as a domain of reason, intellect, and higher spirit. The emergence of needs as a central matrix of political sense.
The question of what the aesthetics of black sociality is in Silvia Wynter’s work. Mattin introduced it as a semiotics … was perhaps made more concrete in the case of Move where the “antagonism” between blackness and property is found to not only be a matter of the possession of things but the values tied to their correct maintenance and procurement. Move smashed the sidewalks around the houses. And kinda rejected the role of modern citizens, following hygiene standards and such.
The idea of destituent politics. Where it came from … Argentina and how it circulated around lately. How framing it from the standpoint of black sociality puts a different spin on things. Someone said it's a very privileged position this anti-politics of destituency and than left the space.
We ended with thinking around the question of the call for the inheritance reparations of the destituent over reparations as a counter-appropriation and an affirmation of the accumulation relation.
At the community resource center Luna6 in Vilnius we participated in a silkscreen workshop. Together with friends from a number of initatives we made bags, patches and posters that included an image from Looting, the dabartis logo, as well as some Palestine liberation propoganda.
What form does political belonging take for those expelled from the dominant nomos of the nation-state? While Dabartis was prompted by the particular strategy of hereness as response to this question, history will tell us that the very idea of the commons – understood as a stateless practice of the earth’s inhabitation – was articulated by those vastly excluded from the state. Starting from this thesis, we call for a response to “Looting”, a booklet that features a conversation between Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott and Vicky Osterweil (mod) Editors: Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales.
The contributors’ see Looting as more than an isolated tactical practice, but as the expression of “black socialities” antipolitics. Destituting capital’s violent imposition of need as a “laboratory of managed depletion” looting gives expression to forms of life in absolute antagonism to the modern institution of private property and the civil subject of politics. Through looting, the contributors open a conversation on how this schism with the dominant topos of politics could be conceptualized as a destituent practice of communism. Against a restitutional politics: reappropriating what was unjustly seized through an alternative measure of state making; the authors explore destitution as a qualitative transformation in our very understanding of the self as property.
Dabartis is circulating copies of “Looting” in Europe and we call for groups and individuals to respond to the booklet. If you would like to pick up a copy for your infoshop, social center, bookshop or for personal use, please get in touch. You can also find copies at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin and more locations soon.
3.
Activities began with a screening that Niecztelne (Illegibles) hosted at the Autonomous Book Fair last September in Wrocław, Poland. The film, Sashko Protyah’s 100% OFF (2022) looks at looting movements in Mariupol during the Russian siege in 2022. The film addresses how the crisis of capitalist governance in Mariupol—but also across Ukraine—has led to a massive outgrowth of mutual-aid, looting, and other practices that defy the holy laws of private property and profit; pointing to the possible path of communization as a practicable living alternative to the peace time return of Neo-liberal rule.
At Agit we collectively read excerpts of Looting and had an opening conversation on the basic themes of the book. The following are some notes from the conversation:
Genovese’s importance for the American Autonomist movements thinking around antipolitics as minor-modalities of everyday resistance.
The question of what a reader is and how to politically engage with a text not as a consumer but partisanlly, is approached as involving a kind of looting and communalization of the position as co-conspirator in a conversation.
We also picked up on the question of “need” in politics and how even some of the most militant practices found in demos like vandalising banks and shops remain within a certain austere militancy, only smashing capital but refraining from enriching oneself in these acts … the call for the desecration of politics as a desecration of the political as a domain of reason, intellect, and higher spirit. The emergence of needs as a central matrix of political sense.
The question of what the aesthetics of black sociality is in Silvia Wynter’s work. Mattin introduced it as a semiotics … was perhaps made more concrete in the case of Move where the “antagonism” between blackness and property is found to not only be a matter of the possession of things but the values tied to their correct maintenance and procurement. Move smashed the sidewalks around the houses. And kinda rejected the role of modern citizens, following hygiene standards and such.
The idea of destituent politics. Where it came from … Argentina and how it circulated around lately. How framing it from the standpoint of black sociality puts a different spin on things. Someone said it's a very privileged position this anti-politics of destituency and than left the space.
We ended with thinking around the question of the call for the inheritance reparations of the destituent over reparations as a counter-appropriation and an affirmation of the accumulation relation.
At the community resource center Luna6 in Vilnius we participated in a silkscreen workshop. Together with friends from a number of initatives we made bags, patches and posters that included an image from Looting, the dabartis logo, as well as some Palestine liberation propoganda.