Reclaiming the Commons

Transcript

people's energy is very Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi. Uh we will start and try to bring people in because I think they're waiting for it to start for their energy to trickle into the room. So I'm going to begin by making announcements. The first announcement is about the kitchen. So, we recognized that uh one of the people that had volunteered for the morning shifts did clean the kitchen, but a lot of people after that ended up making breakfast, which means we dirtied the place again and never actually cared to clean that up for the chef to begin

cooking at 10 a.m. to start preparing lunch. Which means if we are having breakfast, we also need to make sure that we are cleaning up after ourselves and ideally finish the breakfast before 10:00 a.m. so that the kitchen is actually free for large pot cooking. Yes, you agree with me. I know. I know. Um so I would request everybody and if you see other people in the morning that probably don't know that we are responsible for cleaning up for ourselves encourage them. Yes.

So exactly like that you go and tell them that that we have to clean up after ourselves >> with that. Uh I will let Kian start the keynote. Welcome. Kian and I met in very funny way over the email like most people in 21st century these days do. We were introduced by friend of friends who said that we need to talk and uh we did speak and I found very beautiful friendship in this human being and I'm very grateful that you're here and I'm super excited for your talk. So um okay well do you hear me like this?

How close do I need to be to them? Okay, it's a very Okay, this is Bork. She's also saying hi and being part of the lecture apparently. Uh, sorry for the interruption, but let's take this as a kind of refreshing stuff. Pia, come here. Okay. Um, so, okay, this is a really unsensitive mic. So, okay, I have to kind of stick it to my lips, which is uh, okay, weird, but okay. Um, thank you for the invitation. I've arrived here uh, yesterday evening and I immediately switched on my kind of ethnographers's head in a way because I wasn't really sure what to expect here.

Like of course I read the homepage and Nina told me a little bit about it but I still arrived here and I I found it really refreshing because it half felt very familiar in this kind of communal organization self-organization vibe but then there's much more tech and programming around that in the circles I'm usually traveling and I had some sparse conversations here and there and I'm still p picturing uh what your common thread is and I'm really excited and I hope that my talk which is rather coming from a perspective of a philosopher who is interested in ecological activism and anarchism is is fruitful to you. Um since I also am not really sure what your backgrounds are

and I assume they're quite diverse. I am not sure how much I can presuppose and how much I can't. So I'm a traveler between worlds. In some words I speak the word primary accumulation is something which is boring to people because they know it. It's a kind of central Marxist terms for people who are not that much into Marxism. They don't know it at all. Um so I'll um just trying to feel into the situation where I feel this needs explanation and this is what I can just assume. But um please stop me when you don't get a concept. um maybe not all the time because I think there's also a beauty in listening uh without understanding everything because you never understand everything of a

book of the world of anything. Point taken [laughter] um but I'm still very sensitive to this that I'm not sure um how how much I can presuppose how much I need to explain here. Um, I've thought it's maybe interesting for you uh to tell you a little bit who I am and what my interest is in because I'm a strong believer in the feminist standpoint theory. So that nobody has a kind of universalist claim to truth but that everybody comes from a specific standpoint.

Uh I'm born and raised in Vienna. I've lived most of my life in Europe. I have decided a decade ago to try to avoid flying which means my perspective is quite eurosentric. I I try to look elsewhere but since I try to restrict uh my fossil fuel consumption that's why most of my examples will come from Europe at least the first 10 examples I'll talk about. Um I have always been kind of hovering between what is called philosophy, what is called activism and what is called art. And I always more felt them like as concepts which I'm posted from above in a way. And you and you know to live in a capitalist bourgeoa life you have to put it into

one box. So what are you doing? Is it activism or is it art? Is it philosophy or is it art? You know these kind of things. I always found it more interesting to just do what a kind of intuition, what an interest, what a curiosity is leading me to and then find the form which other people understand. And so I've actually started with music a lot. I've been a raver. I got politicized in the kind of Berlin rave scene. Uh I'm queer. I'm very interested in occupations which happened in the rave community. My first book was also about a very notorious club in Berlin, Burkhine. Maybe some of you know it.

where I got kind of interested in many things but among others what is the desire to become a machine because I went there every day every weekend taking drugs quite a lot following the rhythm of a machine in an old industrial hall for a day and just like you know following the rhythm of a machine and this desire what what what is the desire to become a machine was interesting to me I was also interested in how clubs are maybe a strategy of neoliberal co c co-option of uh political potential I saw at the time which then was put into clubs and kind of was contained which I found more and more sad and um on the side of this I was always really interested in of course ecology

um well we live at the end of the holosene um the holosene is what's called the geological epoch uh which lasted the last 11,700 years so since the last ice age um there was a climatic metastability which allowed humanity to develop agriculture, cities, everything thereafter and all indications point to that we have left this zone of comfort and what's before us is unknown. Um, some people quite hastily uh call what we're in now the entroposine.

Probably some of you have heard it. I find this a bit grandiose as a term to call uh the next epoch at the very beginning after a species which has caused the end of the last epoch and it's not at all sure will will stay that long if you know what I mean. So um I'm more following Donna Heroay and others in seeing the if we want to call it entropy scene as a as a time of upheaval and change and so it's we are in a time where we can expect uh collapse and decline and shifting baselines for the next centuries and we'll have to kind of uh form new ethos new forms of living accordingly.

uh the sapatistas uh who are very important for my political understanding call this period the storm and I keep coming to this that we're in the live in the period of the storm and we have to live with that storm which will you know ravage uh for another couple of centuries I guess before a new metastability is found and um of course uh this situation is not the let's say most happiest most merriest situation and I've kind of I grew up with ecology becoming a mainstream topic in the last decade let's say with Fridays for future and so on um where I really noticed okay from being a fringe topic it kind of entered the mainstream there was a

moment of euphoria and um then a huge backlash happened um and at the moment this is of course a short version we're living authoritarian protofascist backlash which is very actively fighting against the little steps we've already taken and trying to destroy any condition for any meaningful uh transformation we would require to be part of the next meta stability to call it like this. Um and so my work is interested in this in how to create empowering feelings in this time of climate collapse. Um so I'm working as an artist. Um there's a question um I'm Yeah. Yeah.

Mhm. [crying] >> Mhm. So to give one very concrete example which we're already feeling um the Gulf Stream is probably collapsing at the moment. The Gulf Stream funneled warm air to Europe which made Europe um unusually warm for how high northern it is. Um it will fall apart. The heat

wave of the summer is uh probably a symptom of it. Um the Gulf Stream doesn't end. you know an oceanic stream doesn't end from one uh year to the other. It takes decades and centuries and of course you know an oceanic stream going from what is called South America to Europe uh has so many contingent factors to it that change in other things. Uh the Gulf Stream itself is collapsing because of the melting ice caps um because the ratio between salt water and sweet water is changing. So the suction effect from the polar caps is stopping and we're now seeing the effects and this will lead to Europe um having much harsher winters much colder

winters which will probably uh bring the harvesting lines. So where a usual clear harvest is quite possible much more thousand than it is now and will upheave other things. But this is really, you know, the talk of um generations will only see the really hardcore effects of this in 2011. Um but also um if you look at the climate crisis from a decolonial perspective, it's not something which has started 1990 or with industrialization.

If you follow indigenous people like the sepatistas, they say their word has ended with 1492 when uh the Americas were conquered or what the westerners called Americas. And uh this so this shift and this intrusion of uh stable human diverse life forms has already started and this storm for the sapatistas has already started around there. So um this is the kind of ethos that I think is now with huge delay also entering Europe that you know we I think we as modern Europeans we have this very individualist can do attitude from we can do everything um within a day within our lifespan and just thinking as task

of generations is something that many indigenous practices have much more in and I think it's a wisdom that we will have to find and we are finding at the moment um because it is a long duration crisis which maybe to say the last thing before I continue with my talk is what makes a reaction to the climate crisis so difficult because so we talk about the climate catastrophe and you know when we think of catastrophes we rather think of a volcano erupting or an earthquake so it's a kind of event which happening happens and then we are quite accustomed to react to it you know um the climate catastrophe is not like this it's not like and then things change and we can help each other, we can build

structures and so on. It's more this like slow grinding of normality which is catastrophe and uh so how and and so it can get very easily invisibleized because it is the normality um we're interested in and this is a good segue to uh return to my talk. [laughter] Um I'm happy to respond to these things since I don't know where we stand here. I'll also we will keep we have to keep it uh limited so that we're not just fuzzling like this but that I can keep a somewhat straight line but I'm happy to bend it somewhere. Um uh so my my second last book was about the car. As I said, I'm really interested in machines and

our love for machines. And I think the car is maybe one of the central metaphors to understand our relation to the planet because not only our ideas of space, how do you get there? When you ask somebody how far is it, especially in rural zones, they tell you it's five minutes and they usually don't mean five minutes by foot, but five minutes by car. Um but also you know the hetronormative family model it's no coincidence that there's five seats in the car. Uh our entire um uh uh goods based economy uh is contingent in its current form on the car facilitating transport everywhere. So I'm really

interested in this not as a machine as itself but as a producer of a certain lifestyle which this is the segway normalizes a certain relation to the planet which is colonial which just sees uh the environment as a given where we drive to you know like um there's this saying that on the weekend you go to nature to relax and of course you go there by car to a national park because the cities are so shitty and so industrialized that way. So this and of course you go there by car. So I'm really interested in the normalization which is being enacted and produced by machines as the car which even make um what appears to be solutions part of the problems. So we want to protect nature and of course we only see nature as the

beautiful peaks around here which we want to protect but we don't really think about you know the ants and the trees right next to our house in the city if it's if it's a city we're living in. So we are exter externalizing this and we cannot even think that maybe our entire understanding of life as being contingent on supermarkets on globalized um food chain and so on uh is something that could be transformed as well. Um, and uh, after having written this book on the car, which is of course quite pessimist as you could probably imagine, I was really interested in thinking how can we find utopias out of this. Um, and

um, I'm also an activist. So I'm around in the climate movement, in anti- street fights, in anti-car fights and other occupations. And um since uh 2021, I think you can say that at least in the German speaking areas, the climate movement has witnessed an insane decline. So you had uh hundreds of thousand people on the streets in the uh 2010s. Now you mobilize a couple of hundreds. Um and uh this led me more and more to go to France where not the same degree of demobilization happened. um which is due to one specific fight that I will focus my talk about and which is also

the topic of my last book which is in German. It's called so if some people want to read up more details uh I can pass it around afterwards. Uh for those who don't speak um German, the best English book is called Nature Defending Itself by my good friends J. Jordan and Isabel Frimmore. Um I'll pass them around. I'm just giving them a sources for you in case you want to then learn more about the Zad and the movement around it. Um, those who saw the movie yesterday um already maybe had a rather visceral rather joyous sensorous idea maybe of what the Z movement is about and I'll try to tell you the political history of it. Uh, and then what I take from it as

a utopian political project for the future. Um, are there any questions so far or should I move to the next chapter? Um I'm interested in in in something that an uh German Marxist philosopher of the last century calls I'll say it first in German the utopian stream of warmth which is a very beautiful sentence which is utopias might not be needed to be fully realized but if you have them in your mind they can creates some stream of warmth which attracts you to move in a

certain direction where things might feel a little better in a way and block says that the idea of communism had this effect on many agents in the last two centuries. No matter what you think about communism or the totalitarian uh semi- genocidal real socialist states like Soviet Union, the idea of communism still produced this utopian stream of warmth. And uh I think we can say that at least since the fall of the Berlin wall, this stream of warmth has epted down. And um I would say the just to finish the sentence I would say the current dictum is there is no alternative uh dictum imposed by

Margaret Thatcher the um very new conservative uh prime minister of UK in the 80s who was famous for destroying labor unions and any strikes. Um and uh with this neoliberal wave of Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and so on um capitalism was imposed as the only possible economic system. And uh I'll come to your question in a second. Um and uh currently um most political scholars say that capitalism doesn't really as a system have the force of conveying to the people like this is the system I

want to live in. and this is great. I want to live here. But people are rather like there is no alternative. We just I just have to do my job and then I can at least, you know, watch Netflix in the evening. Something like this. So it's rather a pessimist pragmatism that leads us to identify with capitalism because there is no alternative. And so I'm interested in what could create a new utopian stream of warmth in these times of climate collapse um where maybe we shouldn't move back to the old Marxist idea of communism which sees you know industrialization of everything as a solution because industrialization you know has climatic consequences and so on but where else can we find them and I'm

as a political thinker more interested in concrete rete fights and concrete struggles which are already happening than just you know thinking of an ide idea which sounds abstractly and nicely in my head but has no real basis. So I'm rather looking into concrete struggles and try to extrapolate from them what is the utopian potential the utopian stream of warmth you can see in them people already see in them and how can you prolong this stream of warmth um and before I'll now move on to the zad um which is this place for me um There there was a question.

>> Okay, wonderful. Cool. Yeah, I think that's that's that's always the thing with these questions that often I answer them in the next few sentences. Um okay. Um so um I thought um so I'm I'm I'm a big fan of course of the Zad movement and I like uh scenes and all this stuff. Most of them are in French, but I still thought uh I just pass them around because they have nice images and they convey the sense of what uh I'm talking about in a way. So just skim them, don't read them, but just look at the images while I'm presenting this place to you so you have

a more profound feeling. There's like really plenty of books here and you can just pass them around. there is also a map of the Zad newly done this year. Um I'll also pass this one around. Um, desad uh, Z A means zone adra, zone to defend in French and is a stretch of land, um, which is about 17 to 5 kilometers um, in the northwest of Na in Britany.

So, northwestern uh, France. Um, I'll leave this for for a sip of water before I continue. So in this field um in the 1970s uh in the last decade um the French state declared Assad which at that time didn't mean son defra zone to defend but son ammon which is mean which kind of is a special administrative zone which usually the state imposes to construct large fossil infrastructure. So um expropriation is a

word as a kind of scary word for bajgeoa state but actually the state always expropriates to build highways to build airports etc. Um the zad as a zh modif was a tool by the state imposed on this territory in the 1970s to expropriate the smallcale farmers there and built the third biggest airport of France. Um this of course uh raised immediate resistance by the local neighbors by ecoactivists which already existed in the 70s and the farmers there um which organized the resistance in the first three decades um um on an administrative level. So they

went to the courts. Um um I'm also having a bit of focus problems with I'm sorry [laughter] but uh so yeah uh 70s uh the state planned to do this airport. The local residents tried to avoid this on juritical jurical traditional and administrative levels for the first 30 years which created a sort of hibernation state there which is very interesting because since this was already declared a um no development

happened there anymore and so since the 70s in France like in most of Europe large scale agro industry in industry happened everywhere. So the small historical farmlands which in Britany is called Bkash which is a very small cultivated landscape of hatchland which um parcels out from uh old uh swamp land little fertile ground where you can grow crops and where you can make your cows graze and so on. This very beautiful, very small scale landscape was destroyed almost everywhere in Britany but not in the Zad because it was already declared a future airport zone. So it stayed like

this in this beautiful old way and everywhere around you have these like large ass fields where you know monocultures grow in their ecoidal way. You have mice for large scale industrial farming and so on. not in this place. Uh which was a happy coincidence because in 2008 um all uh court uh instances were run through and the state uh had a new government again and uh now made serious with trying to build that airport which led to the declaration of a climate camp and then to the occupation of the space.

The last two remaining farmers which resisted expropriation uh invited them in into the farm houses into the territory and about 500 people came there, built tree houses, built all sorts of cabans and little houses and just reinhabited the space to defend it against the airport project. Um and stayed there uh for the next 10 years. Um which is quite interesting. um because um the French state tried uh to evict that space uh for three times all the time with the biggest police force since 1968. So the last pseudo

revolutionary time and people who know France a little bit the French police is not a lot of fun. Um they use like um tear gas grenades which um can easily chop off your hand if they hit you in a wrong way. So this is basically paramilitary warfare you have to lead if you occupy a territory against the police. Um but since this territory was still this old-fashioned hatchland with a lot of swamps with a lot of very thorny forests around it was perfect for Korea warfare and the police never was able to control the territory but was repulsed three times and um all the streets going through it were barricaded.

you you have the books um passing around. There's a lot of images of how it looked there during this occupation zone. Um and of course this created a big big scandal in the media and all of France talked about it. At this time Zad which was no longer the states term but the anarchist term zona deandra which I think is already quite interesting to note that anarchists managed to like reclaim a very boring bureaucratical term and say yeah it's it's a zad but you know it's a zona defra. Um and the media talked about disad and of course the politicians tried to all call them you know stinky anarchist good for nothings and eotterrorists and

whatn not but it didn't really work so much to impose their narrative because all the neighbors were around it. There were the grandmothers from the neighboring villages camping with the punks who were squatting the old farm houses. So you had alliances which seemed impossible there which also made it very difficult for the police to evict the place because they said they never knew what to expect. you know, yeah, you shoot tear grass grenades at punks, but you don't shoot them at granny's from next villages. And if you don't know what to expect, it's very difficult for police to evict the place.

And so this diversity of people made that fight really strong and stay there. And um the media of course made a huge fuss about it and the zad became something like one of these key fights that everybody in the nation knew about. Zad today is in the dictionary um in the French official dictionary. You can look it up. Every child knows about it. Um, there's comic books about it. There's rap songs about it. There's even a Disney Plus film about it now. Uh, released two years ago. It's really but I still recommend watching it.

It's a kind of, you know, Betaluchi kind of revol revolutionary fetishism, but it still has its propagandistic purpose, I guess. Um I'm also saying this that um from a concrete small fight it became a symbol all across France and also reaching over the borders to anarchist circles everywhere that this is a tactic that works in a way. It's really interesting what's happening here. we can create a balance of power that manages to kick the state and capitalism out of the territory and we can try to live there. And this is really interesting because um the movements I'm involved with very rarely

come into this um beautiful situation of not only being against something but also having the time to ask yourself the question what are we actually for you know so this of course also started being against an airport and uh I've been part of many occupations and usually you get evicted quite brutally quite soon so you just end up being against that airport against that highway way against that data center and so on and so on. But to actually be able to stay there in a really beautiful territory which is old common land for 10 years allowed activists and everybody there to think like what are we actually working on here and this is I think really where the magic of the Zad really started because they said we are

updating the common. Uh so this is um an old traditional farmland where people created an environment over the last centuries which is actually more biodiverse and more stable than before. So Britany used to be a quite aid um swamp plant and because of human collaboration with many other animal and plant species they managed to um create a landscape which is more fertile, more biodiverse and so on. and agro industry, urbanization and so on destroyed these kind of landscapes um in most of France but there's still patches of it and the idea is like we need to

learn to reinhabit this as a common a common which does not only entail humans but also animals plants bacteras and so on to try to create this kind of new metastability from a small scale for the future like trying to find a future um in the storm to to use that sapatista slogan. Um there's uh two slogans um from the ZAD uh which became slogans for the movement kind of everywhere which I think are very indicative for the spirit behind it. Uh one is and I always say them first in France French and then

translate them. def we're not defending nature we are nature defending itself um which uh I think is a really beautiful twist um to get out of a still rather colonial modern nature conservation idea of we humans are the protectors in a kind of patriarchal way of poor fragile nature um they're trying to undo this with saying no no no we are part of nature and we're you over, you know, modern order in a way.

And uh the imagery of the movements which are emerging out of the Zad uh the most famous one is called the Zulfa um which you can translate as the earth uprisings and they often play with the imagery of um earthquakes, flood waves which they are part of. So um I see in the Zad as a really strangely alluring attempt to identify with the catastrophes that swamp away our modern toxic lifestyle and build another more sustainable commoning kind of lifestyle afterwards. And this slogan we're nature defending itself stands for this in a way. Uh which leads people to do crazy actions um like building these like

large ass wooden structures and go on demonstrations with them and the wooden structures are birds or um hedgehogs. Um there was an action I was part of in in Mont Pilier where they were protesting against a new highway project and they built this five meter big hedgehog out of uh wood and carried it on the street uh as a revenge of the hedgehog on the street because you probably know how many hedgehogs are killed on a street like this. Um, and of course it's completely bollocks to do these kind of things because you know police repression is right there and it's maybe a bit tricky to just carry everything like this. But there's also a magic

there's a certain madness which defies just rational calculation but it's really fun to actually do this and the police is also really like what the are they doing? Um and I think you know um leftist politics often has this problem of just being rational and I don't think rationality is very sexy you know to mobilize people and so these kind of actions are interesting to me. Um, another among many examples I can give is an action they did uh at the last eviction attempt uh 2018 where they called for everybody who feels entitled to protect this land to come with a stick they have adorned themselves like a wooden stick and stick it into into the swamp land there with a vow to come

back when it's evicted to protect it in a way and uh you ended up having 30,000 sticks in the land um which is beautiful images and they were all adorned point and so on. And of course the also the last eviction attempt by the police uh was a failure. And these sticks hover still hover around as this kind of totem objects and you still see them at new occupations all over France. And some people say that security forces are really afraid of them in a way because they signify something you know some other life in a way. And um this leads me to the second demo slogan of the Zad which is another end of the world is possible. Um so in the German speaking area there's

just now really starting a discourse about collapse. So that the 1.5 degree goal of the Paris Accords is over like you know we won't be able to ma maintain the holos scene as I've said in the very beginning but we are in the times of the storm. So what the sapatistas figured out in the 90s and indigenous people started figuring out 500 years ago in Germany we're slowly getting there that we're in collapse. Um I would say France has arrived there at least 15 years earlier and this another end of the world is possible is part of the slogan that it's not about that ecopolitics is not about preventing the end of this world but actually this world as a capitalist world created by individualization

by marketization of everything is the problem and this one needs to end to allow for plural words everywhere to emerge in a way and the sees itself maybe as the first really pertinent and successful expression of this kind of strategy in Europe and this is maybe important to say that uh this is not a movement which originates from Europe it's I think something which sources you can't trace back because I would say they are indigenousled um and indigenous people have resisted colonialization since colonalization happened um but I think um to come back to the decline of the utopian stream of

warmth I was mentioning with the falling apart of uh real socialist communism as it was called in the Soviet Union that um the left really had to kind of reconfigure their orientation like what is being left now if we no longer believe the Soviet Union is defending a leftist cause which of course didn't start in the '9s but um this was the definite end and I would say, and I'm not the only one, of course, that really the most um important and influential event which forms the contemporary left is the Sapatista uprising in the 90s in Japas, Mexico. Um, how much do I need to say about the Sapatista uprising? Um,

just to Okay, who who just to check the weather temperature? Who who knows what the Sapatistas are? Okay, cool. Um, the sapatistas sapata was actually a peasant revolutionary in the Mexican revolution in the 1910s. Um, but I'm not going to talk about the Mexican revolution in the 1910s. Um, but it was uh reactivated as a revolutionary movement in the 1990s in a province called Chapas in Mexico. um as a reaction to the negotiations of the North American uh free trade deal NAFTA um where uh small peasants which were

mainly indigenous uh were uprising and were saying yab basta it's enough uh we are no longer following uh your capitalist globalization we are for alter globalization so we're for global globalizing human knowledge and not for globalizing human trade. Um and uh took up arms and uh freed uh most of the province of Chapers from Mexican state control um and uh led to a wave of solidarity um and the first event which was really then being called the anti-globalization movement by the media. As I said,

usually they call themselves alter globalization because they're not against globalization per se. They're just globalization of goods. So it's for free movement of people, not for free movement of goods. Um which then led also to world trade organization protests. The first big one was in Seattle in 1999, then Genua and so on. Uh so the Zapatista movement is uh an indigenous le resistance movement which is saying we are claiming land which is traditionally ours and we are reclaiming our old traditional life forms um that are much more equipped to create a a synergy and a symbiosis with the environment which is stable and

sustainable for the long run. Um so whereas you could say um classical Marxist communism uh would see industrialization as a necessary step towards communism. So let's say at least the orthodox marks would say that um bourgeoa industrialization is an important step. So the French Revolution was important in order to then allow the workers to take over the factories and create a communist means of production. Um which didn't work out so well in reality. I think we can maybe agree and I don't have the feeling there's dogmatic

Marxists in the rooms. [laughter] Um um this fetishization of technological progress of industrialization was then more and more identified as a problem that maybe the commoning the communism uh we see is not in the technological future but maybe we can find it everywhere in the past in the present in the future but we it's not you know a technological progress we have to achieve um and the Zapatista movement was maybe the first one which was really claiming we indigenous led people are kind of protocommunist communities. Not meaning everybody needs to live like sapatistas, but everybody could claim territory in a similar way

because the earth is very diverse and very different at different places. And so the lifestyle and the forms of nutrition and the form of taking care of a land and the form of society and family structures and sexuality and so on is very different in the south Mexican jungle than from an Alaskan semisty from a central European landscape from Britany and so on. So life forms can be very different but they maybe should reclaim their own lifestyles and re-update them rather than think that one modern lifestyle is good for everywhere in a way. And to loop back here, I would understand uh the ZAD movement as maybe the first

really pertinent project in Europe to try to do this against the state and claiming there are traditional life forms that maybe we can still learn from which um are more pertinent, more sustainable in the long run to create a a better future and a new meta stability on this planet. what next? Um, thank you.

You keep on referring to the common while we so far have talked about the commons. would you care to elaborate? >> Um, so with the common I'm referring to a historical term um which in German you would translate as the almena um which um you could probably date back even before but which is usually dated to to feudal European medieval times.

um where not um the large chunk of humanity wasn't part of a market economy but was organized in small villages which organized the land around them and the produce they produced to feed themselves as a common in a way that that's the common I'm referring to and um the idea is to reclaim this form of Land property is probably the wrong word, but relation to land. Not to go back to feudal times, but to still undo the relation of a private individual to a

chunk of land, but rather see it as a commun communal thing. >> That is to me still I'm I'm an economist. Uh to me that is still in line with uh Arina Astramm's uh work around the commons as like that the forest next to the village is the prototypical commons that is very easily explainable or that that is usually drawn on to to explain commons. Um I've come across the the difference between the common as a sphere of uh uh reproduction that allows uh acting outside of capitalist relations. I've come across that mostly in the context of Italian autonomists who speak of the

common and do not follow Austramm really or or have a wholly different uh uh uh conceptualization of the common and also different politics around radical politics around uh preserving and building the common as a as a sphere that sustains anti- capitalist struggle as well which in in the economist sense of of Austramm Austramm kind of out of politics. >> Thanks for this. That's really orients my where I'll move my talk now. That that's wonderful. Um so maybe first I'll say I rather prefer to talk about commoning as a project I'm interested in not the commons. Um because I don't want to see an end in itself. I I think that

can be easily misused. But the process of commoning something in a time and a land which is so colonialized by private property is something interesting in a way. Um but of course the mainstream direction is still to more privatization to more automization. Um I'm quite in line with the Italian autonomous tradition of of the commoning I would say with Ferici with Negri and so on. Um I think what separates them from Boston and other people is of course the anti- capitalist pension. Um because I think Federici for example says this very well

that of course um capitalism needs commons to work out because capitalism is not at all a sustainable form of uh reproducing uh reproducing the means of subsistence which in capitalism is always outsourced to sapon people. So federichi would say what is called women usually have to do with the reproductive labor uh that is outside the market sphere which is exploited in order for capitalism to work. So the worker, male worker can be exploited in the factory because the woman has to stay at home and you know

keep the household, cook the meals, um feed the children and so on. That's a classical idea. Um what >> for example um yeah like we had that last week actually quite >> in-depth exploration of how capitalism depends on extracting from common appropriating uh free >> cheap nature. >> Exactly. And uh so um there is a sentence in in in this book where nature defending itself which is from two inhabitants of Dad. Um, can we just keep the door closed so Bork is not escaping?

um, which I find very strong. It's, um, let me think that I can get it right. Utopias without resistance become laboratories for the new spirit of capitalism. Um, and I I I like this quite a lot. Um, and this is why I'm more interested in occupations which then try to form a commoning practice rather than yeah, commons which try to emerge from buying land. I know this is a place like this and I'm in solidarity with it, but I think there is more strength in trying to radically oppose it to the current

order because the current order has a lot of good strategies to co-opt commons um to leave up privileged bubbles which can even let way for new forms of accumulation of wealth of value and so on. And I like the idea that there really needs to be the resistance in a way. So Jane Isa the authors of this book uh marked the point that there needs to be a yes and a no in every fight. Like if a fight is only a no, this easily leads to polarization, atomization, burnout, uh depression and so on. If it's only a yes, it risks becoming just a new laboratory for the

new spirit of capitalism. And this combination is the interesting trick to perform I think. Um and uh I think the Zad is one manifestation of it. There's of course uh many different manifestations because again although capitalism tries to homogenize our our planet a lot, there's still a lot of diversity around it and strategies can look very different um for commoning everywhere. Um this could lead me I'm not now in an impro improvising mode and just responding to you so I could give you some examples where I also see commoning happening in different forms at the moment which I find quite interesting.

I >> this focus on resistance as well as innovation if you want. Interesting. And uh I guess that this is somewhat of a novelty or or a lesser uh uh talked about aspect of commoning here in this context because typically conversations I can recall uh try to stay away from resistance and from getting stuck in resistance but rather uh you know moving in a way moving with energy and giving it new direction

rather. than trying to to res just resist it. And that yes, of course, is also a somewhat depoliticized stance. Uh and I personally have felt throughout the last year uh being drawn back into radical politics or at least into the mindset of of also enacting resistance. >> Yeah. And uh I'm still wondering working on uh uh uh how to translate that into my work here. So far we have consciously stayed out of controversy because we are new here.

Conservative mayor we need his support. So for fairly pragmatic reasons I tried to keep low profile. I tried to keep low profile until now and now just I feel a desire in me to stop being uh uh so easy. >> And that's a fascinating question and I we can talk about this more privately because I'm really interested in the Alps at the moment as a territory to reclaim and I'll say more about this later. Um but and I think a riddle I'm really yeah I'm obsessed with at the moment is do we need an enemy to create a movement. So

of course the traditional farmers which lived here there for generations in Britany would have never created an alliance with the stinking anarchists from Na if there wasn't the airport project. You know if you have a common enemy it's very easy to create alliances. Um because nobody wants a airport next to their village, you know. Um if you don't have that, how to create these alliances is a very very tricky thing. Um just to say more about the resistance thing. Um and reconfiguration the movement I find very interesting in France is that autonomy is kind of defetishized. You know, we still call it the autonomous

zone and so on, but people usually don't say this is they usually say this is not about autonomy here. The is not an autonomous place where we just want to, you know, escape capitalist reality and grow our food and tend to our chickens and, you know, live a kind of organic paradise for a couple of hundred people and that's it. In a way, um, we know capitalism is fine with this as long as we are white and have passports and don't do nasty things. um they don't want to be autonomous. They say they are retreating to maximize their zones of friction with the current order. And I think this is a really interesting shift of perspective that uh

activists, however you want to call it, don't try to only claim autonomy from the state, but rather create new positionalities where you can attack better from in a way. Um and um so the Zad is not just a place where people now live in the commons, tend to the cows, have a blacksmith, have a farming utility, have a rap studio, have you know all these kind of things. They're also one of the places where basically all movements convene outside of state um surveillance um because the state is being kept out there. It's where it's the movement base of the sort of moda which is the biggest direct action group in France at the moment

messing up trying to mess up all of France. Um and um it's feeding the movement. So it's also the idea of how dependent or independent can you become of money. So, can you do more activist work if you need to pay rent for your apartment in a city and you know need to buy your food in the supermarket and you need a couple of thousand euros to just get by or can you organize organize yourself in a committing structure where you need much less money and have much more freedom to move actually and I think this undoing of the correlation of freedom with money is very valuable and

I think this is Also what I see is to come back to this utopian stream of warmth that I think this is also where I see it becoming something more than a minoritarian project that because the Zad is now a pop icon in France. Every child knows about it. There's a Disney series. It also has this allure of more freedom. Not as in I earn all my money and then I can have this cool apartment in Paris, but rather I live together with people. I need less money but I'm more free because I need less money in a way. And uh this is interesting for every individual I think and uh creates a lot of allure. Many many people visit the zad. This is not the only zad in France. They have popped up everywhere.

The French state panicked. Um they're training not deant which is the name of this place twice a year to prevent other zads from popping up. Um so uh there there's now a special police force trying to pre prevent new arts in of the state but there's still a couple and they are very attractive to many people of course not the majority but they still create a utopian stream of warmth a lure of hope which I find very interesting where many people who come from the cities who want to change something but don't know how they go there and they feel more enabled there and I think this is really interesting in a time which is so ridden by darkness and collapse and fascism and um splintering into more atomized unities.

Um yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um yeah. So there is a this topic of resistance and you know reclaiming and of course this you know how do we scale this to um to reasonable kind of alternative and what does that require and how would the system react to this being expanding. So it feels that there is an an um like the scaling of this is kind of limited by the the space that

that basically the other the the system has already kind of like um tooken took over. I don't know if maybe we can make a a more kind of like historical um reference of anorobic system on earth and aerobic system on earth. Right? There is a moment in which the anorobic system created oxygen as a byproduct and all of a sudden it was a catastrophe because the whole thing was full of oxygen but that was also the oxygen opportunity of hey now here we are right. So we build on top of the catastrophe. So can we see this current system as the catastrophe

from which we can build on top right not against? And so can we recreate within the system maybe across private property a choice of creating a common? So we're creating a common through associating with each other and so we can release our dependency on money and external external system with each other while there is no police at our front trying to kick us out of our own house. Right? Can you see uh an opportunity there?

>> It's a beautiful thought. Just as a fun thing, I recently learned about the cabon, the area, the epoch of earth when trees formed their bark. Uh um and there was no organism who was able to digest that. And so we had a lot of trees lying around. Nobody could digest them. And this is now what we use as coal. [laughter] And then some, you know, fungi developed to to digest it. And then we got this. But so yeah, waste is often a place for innovation as oxygen is as the plankai which died to create fossil capitalism for us in the form of oil and so on and so on. Um uh I'll now land this in in this epoch

uh to [laughter] scale it a little bit into human uh time scales. Um I think scaling is always important to or there's a temptation in scaling to fall into the trap of a generalized universalization. So you take the Zad there and say how can we apply this everywhere. I I rather see it like a viral spreading according to needs. So, for example, two years ago, I led a workshop in the Zad um because I'm an anti-car kind of person.

Uh how could we free the Zad from cars because they're still using cars because it's rural, they still want to go to noun sometimes and so on. And uh some comrades of mine there are really frustrated by this and we just had this three-day workshop of how to free ourselves from cars. Of course, this didn't lead anywhere, but we had a lot of fun in like planning cable cars, self-built, and so on. Um, but we also got the idea that of course we don't want to go back to the medieval ages, but we want to reappropriate technological means of production in ways that seem fine to us. And so, we thought it would be so nice if we would have cha next to us. Um, Chica Nen is a a car factory in Florence, Italy, which was occupied in 2019 when it was taken

over by a British hedge fun um to basically dismantle the factory and outsource it to Southeast Eastern Asia. And then the uh union occupied the factory. It was a factory building parts of Maserati and Fiats. And the workers didn't only occupy uh the factory to say uh we want to keep our jobs. They also said like we know we're in a climate crisis. We know what we're producing, but we also we know what else to produce. And so they switched production um from car parts to solar panels and um cargo bikes. Um they're still up and running. They're still struggling hard. Um and we thought it

would be nice to have such a factory next to us, you know, and then we could create this alliance and they provide us with vehicles we need which don't make us dependent on the globalized car industry and so on. So I think this kind of scaling I'm interested in what could we find which serves certain purposes of already existing structures in a way and then scale from there. Um, in regards to your your private property question, um, I'm an anarchist which is strangely interested in legal text. Um, which is not usual. I think uh, there's this comrade of mine, she's called Saravanukam, and she's a professor for philosophy of law who wrote a book inspired by the Zad on uh,

reformulation of property laws. Um and uh the interesting thing about law is of course it's never clear. We think of law as a you know a strict rule but of course courts always tend to need to interpret it one way or the other. And um law texts grew over time. They're often patchworks from old Frankish law, old Roman law, new revolutionary law in France for example. And so it's always a question of reshifting interests in a way. And so what Saga does is really interesting is she's like saying so this art it's cool place how could we create a legal form that recognizes this place not as an individual property because

the French state at the moment only recognizes individuals and this is human individuals couldn't own property um but individual humans that can own an individual land and she's thinking how could um a place be owner of itself in a way. >> Mhm. And uh she's saying that we don't need to invent anything a new because people already had this problem. Uh and she's going back to like 13th century closter laws. Um where monasteries had the problem that um monks die out and sometimes the monasteries are still there. Who's then owning that monastery in a way? And so, uh, back in like old medieval law texts, you find

this notion of monasteries owning themselves in a way. And this is still part of legal tradition in France. And so, she's just saying, we could take this up again and say, yeah, we're using this in order to understand the ZAD in a way and propose this as a form of law. And, um, this is what I find really interesting about the I'll make the short now because it's a new question, but there's many innovations like this. There's for example the forum voil a place uh a think tank very in inspired by the zad which is trying to make this kind of planification of how to create whole regions free from cars in a way forum v mobile is their name

and uh this is still all in the shelves we're still in a very reactionary phase of government in France um there will be an election the next year where we will have most likely final election between the fascist party and the leftist party against um and the interesting thing about LF the leftwing party is that um they're very close to the movement and they take up many of these ideas coming from the movement and so there is a chance that even within the French state there might be possibilities to get certain hacks like the old cloister laws back into action. And this of course would

facilitate the creation of new sads in really interesting ways. This is utopia. It most people in France you would talk to would of course rather say it's probably going to be Le Pen and then we have a fascist government in France and we'll have to see what we do. But I think it's still interesting to observe this because if it comes to a showdown between Le Pen and Melon, Melon being the leftwing candidate, it's gonna be interesting what the so-called center is going to decide for. Um yeah, thank you. Yeah. Uh I have a question really I think on following up on what Roberto said because um I think this is this is awesome to have those ad and to me like they play an important role

which is kind of moving the overturn window you know to show what else is possible uh but at the same time indeed like how is that sustainable we saw the movie yesterday um and and you know I was asking the question like okay do they ever go to need do they ever need to go to the hospital and then they will go to the hospital but then okay who is paying for that hospital right and what is the contribution of that community to make sure that that hospital is sustainable and you know so it can work on a few instances like the one that we have today but then the question indeed is how do we scale that um so that we can have a more symbiotic relationship between the current system and the new it's all about this idea of transcend and integrate

um because if we fully go opposite direction it's great as a proof of concept uh But how can we now? Okay, we went too far with capitalism 100%. I would argue that that is probably going too far the other way. I mean, or at least it's not just possible for millions of people to live that way because we're going to have to find ways to rebuild society and rebuild, you know, all of those services that we need, including healthcare. >> Um, there's of course several answers I can give you. I'll first give you the easy answer then I'll try the hard answer. Um the easy answer is that in capitalism care work is being segmented into a

special segment. So you go to the hospital if you need care work. It's not part of an everyday practice which creates much more ailment and disease which creates a lot of disease in a way. And of course it's also part of a revolutionary project to create conditions of life which produce less sickness. Uh that's the utopian part of it. uh but might be a long way going there. Um but I think still it's important to keep this in mind that uh the system produces disability. the harder answer to this question is I think the question of scale that under current conditions at least in the European in most of the European Union we haven't managed to organize enough

people uh to self-organize enough people that a hospital makes sense. The biggest self-organized communities are 200 people at the moment in France. you division of labor is not a problem you know and I think for a hospital you would at least need a community of 10,000 people in order to have enough division of labor to make that possible because 200 people can you know grow their own food can um support struggles can do their own blacksmithing can manage the forests but a hospital is a very complex undertaking so I think it's a question of scale and um there is good historical and contemporary examples that care work can work better without capitalist uh structures. In Athens, um

hospitals were taken over. Um during the short uh period when Catalunia was anarchist, hospitals worked pretty well according to sources. Um so there's possibilities of course. Um I guess the best case in point is Rojava um western Kurdistan and autonomous uh area which is now under heavy siege by uh the no longer Islamic state Islamic state government of Syria. um but they have uh done uh uh healthcare in a in a very feminist and very proactive way but at the same time being capitalist also I've never been there but the sapatistas are also said to have a very valuable um

healthcare system so I I think care work is actually much more intrinsic to a anarchist communist commoning what however you want to call it project than to capitalism which produces disability and then outsources it into shitty wage labor. Um I I've noticed uh that shitty I mean underpaid. Sorry. Not that I I I that it's not misunderstood that I say this is labor, but it's just underpaid.

Like we pay managers a lot and uh healthcare workers way too little. That's what I mean by shitty. Um, I've noticed across your talk that many of the things you Well, first off, thank you. I I feel like all your points were presented very thoughtfully and clearly. Um, I did feel that across all the domains that you touched on, um, a similar difference in the way I think about them and I would love to for you to convince me otherwise. So um [laughter] uh examples of that are I don't I'm not an anarchist.

I don't believe that uh capitalism is the problem. I believe that the extreme end point of capitalism that you might call technofudalism is the problem. I do not believe that cars are a bad thing. I believe that the misacounted externalities of cars are the problem. Um, so across all of these domains, uh, you you might say that I'm I have a bit more moderate views. Um, but I am open to the possibility that maybe it's just because I don't fully understand how the anarchist alternative might work. So I'm curious to hear.

>> Okay. this is a long conversation. We can have >> Yeah. Oh, are we nice? >> Actually, yeah. But you don't have to go into that, but I I think that the same point holds for AI. My position on AI. >> Yeah. >> Like I don't say that it's a good thing, but Okay. Yeah. Anyway, >> I mean, >> yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think then first we would have to talk what do we understand as capitalism because I think it's quite a fuzzy term.

I would understand capitalism to make it simple with two factors. Uh one is that you can accumulate an unlimited form of private property. Um so there is this um conscious obusciation between possession and property. Um that is usually a category which we don't know to separate in capitalist system. Um I'm possessing my apartment but I'm not the proprietor of it because I have a rent contract of it. I'm in possession of it currently but I'm not the property owner of it. The property owner is the guy I'm paying the rent to.

And I think this distinction is really important because when people hear expropriation, they are always afraid their apartment and their car is going to be taken away from them as long as they're possessing it, meaning they're using it in a regular way. This is not what expropriation is about. expropriation is about um undoing the possibility for people to buy 10,000 apartments in Berlin for example and rent it out under controlled conditions over to to get gain for it. So um this is the just giving the little so that we know what we talk about. I think this is a problem. This is what Bruno famously says is property is theft. it's uh stealing the possession of other people

to and their means of reproduction. And the other element of capitalism I would say that I'm opposed to is the assumption that the market is the best tool to organize human life everywhere. So I'm not saying the market is wrong per se. Markets have existed everywhere in most of human civilization and have worked really well. But um capitalism is forcefully and violently imposing market orders everywhere in order to accumulate wealth. And those two tendencies need to be fought back against that. That's what my anti- capitalism is. Um

so >> go ahead. Um how um okay if the it seems to me that if you're saying that uh the ability of people to accumulate unlimited wealth and assets is something to be stopped to be halted limited somehow. that implies that the need for some level of ruling of public institution or or some way for to for for it to come

out with a with a governing approach. So is that compatible with the anarchist side? Well, anarchism is not the absence of governance itself. Governance. Um, wow. So this is again like how to land it from very general things into concrete practices. Um I would say the current legal order is a capitalist one which is uh structured in a way to benefit the owning class and uh socialism as we have it in Europe and still a very frail and declining form is trying to keep up a middle class to feel aligned with the

capitalist class. um with reaping a little benefit in a way but I don't think we can think of any state in current times that is actually able to regulate this and I think there's much more rules like private property laws to start with which are benefiting uh the 1% to use a populist uh word for for it. So I think the absence of these rules are um actually very beneficial. So I mean I I this like term anarcho capitalism which MLE and other lunatics are claiming I find really uh hilarious because uh if I I'm not sure what an what's

anarchist about them because I'm pretty sure they would want to call the police if we squat their properties. Um [laughter] so um if we really uh want to uh get less rules, we'll not really need a police anymore and then we'll just take the villas of the rich people which are empty anyways uh for most of the time and we'll continue from there I think. So I think rules can help as a intermediate way and of course societies will always form rules and change rules for themselves but I think the current state form is um so much in symbiosis with capitalism that for me is hard to think of it as a end but as a means it's it's pretty useful.

I think you're just starting to address kind of the question I was going to ask it seems to me I'm getting a little bit confused sometimes with the difference between capitalism and the state because you're talking about violence and the police. Well, that's the state. So, and and even under the Soviet Union, you had a similar level of of violence and coercion that's being um put in place by again the state. So, uh, yeah. So, I I think I would just love to hear kind of a little bit more, um, clarification on why the problem is always capitalism. And don't get me wrong, I I think that capitalism as it

stands right now is you don't acrue 10,000 apartments or massive amounts of land without the support of the state. I mean, look at Elon Musk. would be where he's at right now without huge [snorts] government contracts from the US government. So I think that's like there's always that that inner interchange there. >> My point is on that. >> I think last week we had a talk by uh Adam Arvdson um historian on pretty much uh uh what is capitalism? What do we call it? and he started to go from individual capitalist to capitalist sectors maybe that are organized according to

capitalist uh uh um accumulation which China for example has. But yet China does not have uh or is debatable whether it is a capitalist society where the maxim of capital accumulation at any cost uh is internalized um and is hedgeimmonial. So that even even the the victims of accumulation would argue for it. That that's hetermony, right? So um and then like the step from a capitalist sector to a capitalist society goes through capturing the state and wielding it as a force to ensure uh capital

accumulation. And of course a legal system in a of a state that is captured by capital interests uh will output uh uh laws that uh further capital accumulation and that remove any hindrance um to that. So that that was one thing I wanted to to put in here. We we were there last week already and I but I also wanted to um talk like mention briefly because you you touched upon uh monasteries that is actually a very interesting uh uh narrative metaphor that is developing here uh over the last year already but uh now more uh uh pointedly uh over this last 10 days or so uh Deca is a proponent proponent me

Michelle uh Lorenzo uh Vitalikin as Well, uh this notion of monasteries not as a place to withdraw to from the world but as as places holding knowledge and uh pro being providing alternative institutions in times of tumult or during storms. I would align myself with the position of DECA and um I grew up in the cold war in Autobun which is um center of the military-industrial complex I would say and it felt like in between a military

base and a civil place. Yeah. So auto which is MBB message belom now ERS uh daza changed its name but a lot of [clears throat] arms are designed there. Um okay. Um I actually if you would have me choose between capitalism and socialism or communism I would choose capitalism with with a second delay. Yeah. But I see like now the offspring of like how would you say extreme capitalism and also

you keep on repeating this um quote from an a stream of warmth. I totally object that there is no stream of warmth coming from a system. It always comes from human beings. And um let's say I want to use the metaphor um communism has um um killed about 110 10 million people. Think of the rouge, think of mouse excesses and so on and so forth. Um, if you have a if you would bring a new drug to the market for people who are freezing that supposedly make them feel

warm and then tens of thousands of people die from the drug, would you say, well, it's it's still a good drug. We just have to um change the recipe for it. >> Okay. Um, where to start? Well, this is the reason why I'm identifying as an anarchist and not as a Marxist communist. Um, if you read Emma Goldman, if you read Alexander Bachman, Emma Goldman had to migrate from the US to the Soviet Union 1918.

She was 20 years earlier than the first Baja critics of the communist uh before Stalin. She saw where this is going extremely wrong. Anarchists were also the first to be really killed by the Soviet Union. So I think that what today is associ associated with communism meaning Soviet Union, maybe China, maybe Cambodia and so on is the biggest damage to the leftist project we've ever witnessed. I would not say it was a communist project. very debatable obviously but that's just my stance and that's why I'm an anarchist because I think anarchists have been the most lucid on seeing where this is going even before capitalists did um

about the the system the stream of warmth I think it's an idea it's a as Emma Goldman says it's a beautiful idea in a way which emits that stream of warmth it's not a system it's that's also why I'm saying commoning it's a process it's not wanting to arrive somewhere it's wanting to move. Um yeah. Um then I now try to hover slowly to the state capitalist state at capitalism question and that confusion is widespread. I I would rather be um careful with people who have it clear.

What is the state and what is capitalism? I think that's one of the big questions in political debate in the last two centuries. How how are they the same? How are they acting in union? How are they also different in a way? Um the problem is we don't have a clear definition of the state and capitalism. Um you could maybe say that you know Marx Bakun and a couple of others at least are authoritative sources on what we then could call communism. Um nobody really put out a theory of capitalism. And then people thought that's a good theory. Let's do it like this. that uh was a system that emerged out of a colonial power relation in yeah the UK first and uh then spread into

privileged patches of the earth more and more. Um the role of the state um is very different according to which historical time and which state. I mean, we call Austria state, we call the United States a state, and we um call um Venice in the 16th century a state. Um there it's pretty difficult to put them into one category, but we still call them a state. Um >> Austria and historical Venice I think

don't have the monopoly on violence. I mean our Supreme Court is is in is in in in Luxembourg not in Austria for example. Um yeah but but um um but I would say to to make this quick because um so historically the state uh served in the development of capitalism as enforcing with violence the frontier zones um genocidal warfare against indigenous people everywhere for settler colonialists squeezing and killing social unrest from

workers and peasants everywhere from the peasant revolution in the 1500s to worker riots yesterday. Um so since uh capitalists by their capital by their medias and so on have disproportionate power over the state can wield its direction usually and historically has been so most of the times. Of course there's also agents in the state which can at least lessen the impact of capitalism sometimes. Um so it's not a clear-cut thing I would say but in general the state has been brought into alliance with capitalism

and what we usually call the nation state is seen in most political theory as a necessary prerequisite for capitalist development. Although I many people say and I'm not decided on this that we have left this phase with neoliberalization at the moment um many leftists argue that we would have to go back to the nation level to counter free trade deals the European Union is for example um and acting and so on. Uh so it's not that clear who who is the agent in a globalized trade system. Um and of course you especially like a small state like Austria or like Switzerland you can

wield in interesting ways if you create a battle power his history shows that if you manage to do that the US army usually marches in as you saw in Chile as you saw Nicaragua and so on. So there's a limit to how how frequently you can move. Yeah. Yes, that's great.

>> Do we have any final questions before I show everyone the QR code? As far as I'm also interested in the legal side and as far as I understand there are laws there for bodies that belong to themselves like the association for the common good and as far as like metoer syndicard or meat house syndicard is going in Germany they've just formed a company with certain internal regulations within the system and they're doing well. They are creating like housing that's taken away from the speculative

market. is the best strategy. >> Yeah, >> I have a hard time to even tell you if I'm I would identify with communism or not. um has now a bit unrest here. But um yeah, here

I'm happy with this fizzling out, but um the question was what what is my definition of communism? And um I'm I'm as I just said, I'm not sure if I would identify as a communist. I I'm I'm a relational theory, so I I I don't uh cling to any term specifically, but I think it's always interesting in relation. Like if I talk to stern old-fashioned Marxists, I would definitely not call myself a communist. In other circles, it's pertinent, I would say. Um historically um the left which was divided between anarchist, socialists and Marxist to put it into three levels they all had the same goal which was called communism at

that time meaning communalizing the means of production and subsistence in a way. Um the difference was the means like what what are the means uh to achieve that in a way um if you go along with this historical 19th century definition I think it's easy to still call yourself a communist with the historical baggage of the 20th century that uh this person uh mentioned it's get getting harder I've I've spent quite a lot of time in Eastern Europe and if you use the communism word people immediately are shutting off and for very good reasons. Um, so I think it's again it's very relational. Who who are you talking to? I totally understand

that people in Romania don't want to hear anything about communism anymore and that that term is not needed. I mean if it's about creating better conditions of life where we can self-govern ourselves and manage uh survance in this conditions call it like you want I would say and um as I said many indigenousled projects are super interesting and uh in their time horizons are millennia older than the ideas of KL Marx or another white guy like this, you know. So, you could call it a Watson Watson practice in what's

today called um British Columbia or something, you know. It's it's it depends on on the place in a way. Um and um yeah, I want to give some more like examples how things could look elsewhere, but I think there's no more time to this, but I'm happy to discuss this over lunch and so on. And uh I'm not sure what the >> Cool. Okay. Yeah. Anyone