Format: on Shaninka campus and online
Language: Russian, English
Moderators: Georgii Vakulko (independent researcher), Jan Kutukov (independent researcher), Ksenia-Ruth Guseva (independent researcher)

"As anarchists we are not the seed of the future society in the shell of the old, but merely one of many elements from which the future is forming" – in these words, the anonymous 2011 paper “Desert” criticises the messianic view of anarchism. Today, libertaires appeal less and less to ‘universal human nature’ as the ‘basis’ for anarchy. But is there a valid alternative to the global, universalist project of anarchism? How do we realise ourselves as an ‘element of the future’ among other social trends if we discard vulgar progressivism? We suggest beginning by carefully assembling our own local project, conscious of its origins, affiliations, and horizons.

As Maria Rachmaninova and Stanislav Yatsenko (2024) write, ‘the construction of the social whole in anarchism starts from the bottom upwards, from the community to the federation of communities’. Therefore, we aim to further cultivate and comprehend those manifestations of the libertaire that we managed to register during our section last year, those manifestations that occurred to be ‘closer’ and connected to us by transboundary networks; that constitute our community or the prototype of a community federation. Experience of cooperatives and pedagogical projects, visions of a liberated city, libertaire optics in cinema and video games, the intertwining of anarchism and existentialism, histories of civic movements and autonomous zones, and much more.... This rich polyphony would now like to unfold into an assembly, a space of equal polylogue aimed at bottom-up constructing communal worlds and our own public sphere.

Within such an assembly, we want to rethink together the categories of society, space, development and the good, to revisit the accepted narratives of history and methodology that we use in everyday life and in the academy, to question common sense and to discover the liberating potential in what our eyes are used to slipping past. And with that, to understand: how to proceed? How to situate and reproduce our shared project of the libertaire within the conditions, environments, economies, and knowledge systems around us? This year, we are focusing on the autonomous exploration of territories: from thought spaces localised in the internet and in the academy to cities and the suburbs. In the words of the Invisible Committee (2009): ‘every practice brings a territory into existence’.

Within and beyond the time available before the conference, we propose to launch several labs, the results of which we will report at the section. Pull the assembly through building something together with projects close to our hearts - the David Graeber Institute, the Compost Cooperative, Egalité publishing house and Akrateia magazine.

Last year our section credo was a quote by David Graeber: ‘The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently'. Today, the latest collection of his essays published so far (Graeber, 2025) is entitled with this same quote. Having had the experience of prefiguration, collective grasping and co-configuration, we invite you to join in and construct our past and future together again differently.

All important information about the section will be posted on the Telegram channel.