Paths toward Utopia: Asserting the Commons against Enclosures
Workshop presented at the Mobilizing and Organizing from Below Conference in Baltimore, MD, June 1-3, 2012. For more coverage, go to http://indyreader.org/mobconf.
As the do-it-ourselves occupations that have swept across the globe from Egypt to United States are proving, direct democracy and cooperation are becoming powerful everyday experiences for millions, with people self-organizing everything from food to general assemblies. This compelling and quirky, beautiful and at times messy experimentation has cracked open a window on history, affording us a rare chance to grow these uprisings into the new landscape of a caring, ecological, and egalitarian society–a world of our own collective making and doing. This workshop will draw out some of the promise as well as dilemmas of the occupy moment in North America, focusing specifically on the implicit and at times explicit anticapitalist and antistatist lived practices of “the commons.”
Cindy Milstein, a collective member with both Interference Archive and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, is the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press) and coauthor with Erik Ruin of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism (PM Press).
If you’d like a copy of the book, you can order it from either:
PM Press, https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=412
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, http://www.justseeds.org/erik_ruin/07paths.html
Or ask you favorite anarchist, radical, or independent bookstore or autonomous space to carry it (if they don’t already).
If you’d like to review the book, get in touch with PM Press for a review copy. And send me the link to your review when you’re done.
If you’d like me to do some public speaking on this and other subjects, especially if you can pitch in for travel costs, send me an email: cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com.
