Post-Communist Grounds: In Search of the Commons

Post-Communist Grounds. In Search of the Commons’ is a collection of  interventions seek to explore and activate practices of commoning in post-communism in a range of genres and media forms, with a specific interest in developing experimental aesthetic practices.

This volume seeks to re-orient discussions about the commons away from prevailing frames of analyses, which tend to ‘assume that emancipatory ideas of commons and commoning come from the West’ (Vilenica, 2023).  On par with this supposition is the devaluation of experiments in commoning situated elsewhere that engage different historical experiences of struggle against enclosures. This includes not only various efforts of organizing reproductive labor, public infrastructure, or free time during state socialism across the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’, but also the experiences of anti-imperialist, agrarian, and anarchist struggles and revolts in these regions that may as well have predated or, as it were, outlived the formation of socialist states. The volume brings together contributions that depart from differently constituted ‘post-communist grounds’ to reshuffle and remix their composition, setting them in productive relation to questions that define our present-day: from an intimate engagement with the feminized experience of labor emigration in contemporary Georgia to the disappearance of spaces of everyday creativity in Poland to accounts of the challenges of internationalist organizing on the Left today through the prism of the collective LeftEast. While some of the contributions engage historical and archival materials from different contexts, none of them employ a reifying approach towards the past. Instead, each works with different materials, media, or modalities of writing – from poetry to illustration, from essay to collage to movement score – to chart alternative coordinates in our present and future grounds of coming together.

(PDF version freely available online)