Saturday, April 13 2013, 7PM
The Brecht Forum
451 West Street, New York, NY 10014
$3 Suggested Donation
All are invited to an open communal dinner and potluck at the Brecht Forum this Saturday. We’ll be cooking a simple vegan meal, but encourage others to bring food as well: fruits, vegetables to cook or eat raw, breads and cheeses, wines and juices, chocolates, sweets, etc., whatever you want to bring, cook, share with others. We’re asking for a small $3 suggested donation to help cover the costs of the food we’ll be cooking.
This is a chance to give ourselves the time and space to eat and talk and meet each other without it being tied to another event or program… We need camaraderie, conversation. We like cooking and would like to reproduce relations built around our coming together to eat. In the process we hope to directly counter the social fragmentation, isolation, loneliness and depression that seem more and more to be part of our everyday lives.
We organized an open dinner at the Brecht Forum in February, and the hope was and is to initiate and encourage a series of communal meals in different neighborhoods and spaces around the city, outside of those models controlled by the church and state, often characterized by forms of activism or voluntarism based around charity. Ultimately we desire to move towards sustaining ourselves outside of the state and market relations, achieving material autonomy, and abolishing money, hunger and loneliness.
We will continue to do these dinners ourselves on a monthly basis, but questions remain around finding each other, finding the food, finding the spaces with the capability and disposition to host such gatherings. How can these meals, these practices, proliferate in New York City, how can we support each other, coordinate our efforts and resources?
We are interested in forms of politics that take seriously our very reproduction, our needs, as a basis for our self-organization. A politics which recognizes that to organize collectively around our needs with our friends, comrades, lovers, roommates, neighbors, co-workers and family members will become the basis for our communes, that our revolutionary cells will necessarily be based around affinity to each other and the lives we live together as we struggle for communism.
The need for doing this should go without saying, as there is no shortage of writing, talking, and analysis of austerity, crisis, neoliberalism and privatization. What we are proposing is a different strategy of resistance to the vulnerability and precarity that make up our lives today.
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Don’t eat alone. Don’t eat standing up in your kitchen. Don’t eat while riding the subway. Don’t eat walking from the bodega to your house. Don’t eat sitting in front of Netflix or Facebook. Don’t forget to eat because you are too busy or distracted by this civilization. Don’t let the pain and misery of everyday life get you down. We can take care of each other, we can struggle together. We can gather, cook something, something tasty, something nutritious, something nice, in an ad hoc kitchen, prepared with love. Imagine looking across the table at people you actually like, or who intrigue you, someone mentions something you’ve also been thinking about, or would like to, something about real life, about that day or week, something sad or empowering, false or true. And imagine wanting to come back, and that people want you to.
AFFECT 