Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New York

뚝딱뚝딱 2013. 2. 20. 23:17


6. Further Readings and Related Articles 요체크. 언제 다 볼 수 있을지 모르겠으나 ㅠ 일단 킵.



[seizing_building_commoning] NYC Fwd: Thursday -- 02.14.13 -- Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New York



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sixteen Beaver 
Date: Thursday, February 14, 2013
Subject: Thursday -- 02.14.13 -- Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New York
To: generale@16beavergroup.org



Thursday -- 02.14.13 -- Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid,
with imaginings for New York

Contents:
1. About this Thursday
2. Evening Outline
3. Commoning in New York
4. A Note on Food
5. A Note on Love
6. Further Readings and Related Articles


___________________________________________________
1. About this Thursday

What: Discussion 
When:  Thursday February 14th 6:00pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all

We would like to invite everyone to a discussion and evening organized
with our friends from Making Worlds.

The event builds upon existing discussions that we have each organized
over the last few years around the common(s) and more recent discussions
in which we have tried to imagine collectively different modes of pairing
struggle and antagonism to capitalism with formal/informal processes of
mutual aid, collective care and cultivation of the common(s).

The questions are basic ones concerning the processes of destruction or
privatization of the basic premises of life (food, water, air, genes,
seeds, ideas, language, learning, land, ...) and include the material
needs of being able to collectively reproduce our lives in struggle. They
also revolve around the capacity of this change in climate (both
ecologically and socio-politically) we are living through to posit or
propose alternatives to state (public?) or corporate (private?) control of
life.

The evening will unfold in two parts. 

The first part of the evening is a conversation with Isidro Lopez and
Alexa Bradley who are currently participating in the development of
commons charters. Isidro Lopez will discuss his involvement with
Observatorio Metropolitano and the “Carta de los Comunes”, a Commons
Charter for the city of Madrid [Spain] elaborated collectively in 2011.
Alexa Bradley will be discussing her current work with the Great Lakes
Commons Initiative, a broad organizing effort to catalyze a cross border
citizen movement to put human need, ecological survival and democratized
decision making at the center of the Great Lakes governance. 

More generally, commons charters are documents created by communities
seeking to take back control and care of their livelihoods and
environments. Among examples, we discover The Magna Carta’s often
overlooked Charter of the Forest written in 1066 by the commoners of
England demanding their right to use the land for their common needs:
grazing, wood for cooking, peat for fuel, and fishing rights to name a
few. In recent years, different initiatives throughout the world have
recovered these kinds of documents, as is the case of the Carta de los
Comunes (Madrid, Spain), and the Great Lakes Initiative (US-Canada). 

After this first part, we will take a break for some food (see below for
more information).

The second part of the evening, we will try to resume the discussion
focusing on some initiatives or efforts that could potentially address
these concerns in New York, Madrid and beyond (see note on commoning below
for more information).

We will also be joined by Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis and other
friends with whom we began a more public exploration of some common
concerns with 'Beyond Good and Evil Commons: Debt, Economic Crisis and the
Production of Commons' in the summer of 2011.



___________________________________________________
2. Evening Outline

Commons Charters: From The Great Lakes to Madrid, with imaginings for New
York
and 
Reclaiming a Common(s): Social movements, Ideas, Initiatives from Commons
charters to Communal Kitchens to an Apo-capitalist City-zens´ Rescue Plan

6:00 doors

6:30 - 8:00 Part 1: Intro to the context of today's commons inquiry w/
discussion on The Great lakes Commons Initiative (Bradley) & Madrid City
Commons Charter (Lopez).

8:00 - 9:30 Part 2: Dinner - Revolutionary Love & continuing the inquiry:
Reclaiming a common(s) in the city / building meshworks of mutual aid



___________________________________________________
3. Commoning in New York

Before the end of last year, we organized an event attempting to consider
how the self-organized relief effort post-sandy and the occupation of wall
street made evident not only a social/political desire to resist the
violence of capitalism, but also to common our knowledge, and our
different abilities to produce qualitatively different social relations,
spaces, and lives.

Thus, we would also like to open up this discussion of commons charters to
consider different commoning initiatives in New York and beyond which
could be inter-linked into a durable and palpable relief effort or rescue
plan - not post-hurricane, but post-capitalist realism - that is, after
abandoning one's conscious or unconscious commitments to a reality that is
constructed upon the most insidious notions of "human nature", value,
freedom, democracy, productivity, extraction, debt, .... .

We hope this discussion can not only continue this reflection but also
bring together existing proposals or initiatives.



___________________________________________________
4. A Note on Food

For those who would like to contribute to dinner in some way, you can
prepare something to bring and share, or alternatively bring bread,
cheese, olives, nuts or vegetables that can be eaten raw, or bring
something to drink. Avoiding packaged/processed foods will be appreciated.



___________________________________________________
5. A Note on Love

Fortuitously, this gathering is taking place on St. Valentine's day, a day
which had at a particular historical juncture associated itself with love.
Rather than ignore this association in the hope of distancing from
religious or commercialized overcoding, we thought it interesting to
invoke the notion of love, or even revolutionary love as a reference point
for the evening.

In late 2000 and early 2001, we organized a series of readings and
discussions around different notions of community and questions of love
entered those discussions. Among the many readings at the time, we read
some chapters from a book that had just been published by bell hooks on
love. In introducing the book, 'all about love: new visions', she attempts
to focus on an idea of love that would be associated with action rather
than a thing or object, a verb rather than noun. She then proceeds to
outline the many dimensions and spheres that one could cultivate a
relation to love. Some years later, we discussed with Michael Hardt the
possibility of organizing a molecular seminar together and he suggested
organizing around the notion of love. This gathering never manifested in
the space, but the questions about a political notion or relation to love
remains intertwined with questions which continue to be at play in our
struggles, questions of community, commons, commoning, communisation,
mutual aid, .... They are also questions which implicate relations to
desire and how desire is social and socialized, channeled, and today
increasingly colonized. 

We outline these considerations, because they are intrinsic to our
experiences of the last several years of political tumult and upheaval and
they point to the shortcomings of excluding affective dimensions animating
our struggles, making them sustainable, and also always vulnerable. This
evening's discussion may not be about these particular questions, but
these questions will be there in the background and hopefully trace out
one trajectory of a common inquiry which may be to come.



___________________________________________________
6. Further Readings and Related Articles

Carta de los Comunes (in Spanish; Madrid) 
(free download - a donation is recommended - at the bottom of the page) 
http://traficantes.net/index.php/editorial/catalogo/otras/La-Carta-de-los-Comunes.-Para-el-cuidado-y-disfrute-de-lo-que-de-todos-es

The Great Lakes Are Declared a Commons (Onthecommons.org)
A diverse group of activists from both sides of the border declares the
lakes a common endowment 
http://onthecommons.org/great-lakes-are-declared-commons

The Spanish Model
by Isidro López & Emmanuel Rodríguez
http://newleftreview.org/II/69/isidro-lopez-emmanuel-rodriguez-the-spanish-model

Crises, Movements and the Commons. 
by Massimo De Angelis. 
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/deangelis_crises.htm

A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the crisis of neoliberalism and
question of the commons 
by George Caffentzis
http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/caffentzis_globalization.htm

Two Charters, Chapter 2 from “The Magna Carta Manifesto”
by Peter Linebaugh
http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/linebaugh_two_charters.pdf

Defending, Reclaiming and Reinventing the Commons
by Maria Mies & Veronika Benholdt-Thomsen
http://sduk.us/silvia_george_david/mies_benholdt_defending_reinventing.pdf

On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros
Stavrides by Anarchitecture (two perspectives interweaving theories on the
commons, with practical examples, propositions, and analysis.) 
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/

For Former Conversations and additional resources please see 
Beyond Good and Evil Commons
A seminar with Silvia Federici, George Caffentzis, & David Graeber
http://www.16beavergroup.org/silvia_george_david/
&
http://www.makingworlds.org/



: