EDITORIAL

Welcome to the third Obecność Letter. In this Letter we mourn and celebrate the sad passing of our friend and comrade Marina Vishmidt. 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, the letter by Noah Brehmer draws attention to a more fundamental legacy that Marina leaves us with: a strategy of belonging to the historical party. Additionally, this letter contains info on our first pamphlet and an account of its launch in Krakow where we met Underground Diasporic Committee for the Dispersion of Abomination. Joeseph Grim Feinberg of UDCDA contributes a statement on behalf of the group and their new video work “Declaration of Independence of Diaspora” [8:22m] circulated on our platform. Finally we, the Obecność Editorial comment on the Anarchist Book Fair Riga and the emerging leftist ecology that gave life to it. 

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Noah Brehmer, Letter to the Historical Party — Memorial for Marina Vishmidt.

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

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2.

Dabartis editorial, Introducing Kawkab Hassan on Liberating the Levant

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!

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3.

Joeseph Grim Feinberg, Rehearsing Our Autonomy:
“We aren’t theirs, and it isn’t for them to say where we are. We only belong to the world”

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.

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4.

Dabartis Editorial, The Movement to Come: Notes on the Riga Anarchist Book Fair

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.