No.1 January 15th, 2024
EDITORIAL
In the first letter, we introduce the initative 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.1.
The Beginning of a Conversation
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.
Own nothing! A call for responses to “Looting”
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.
Notes from gatherings at Agit (Berlin) Autonomous Fair (Wroclav) and Luna6 (Vilnius)
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.