From Autonomous to Abolitionist Commoning: Connected and Caring Communities and Commons in a Solidarity Neighborhood in Berlin

Prefigurative practices of commoning of urban spaces were mainly analyzed from the perspective of anarchist or autonomous Marxism in the past. This debate paper sheds light on recent imaginations and prefigurations of a radically different future which have emerged from within anti-racist and racial justice organizing in cities with large racialized and migrant communities. Based on ethnographic research in the neighborhood Kreuzberg in Berlin which has been deeply transformed by migrant and refugee movements in the last decade, the article examines to what extent an abolitionist perspective on commoning has evolved which seeks to consider and counter the ongoing and past dispossessions, displacements, and divisions in racial capitalism. In the observed racialized and marginalized communities which gather around a collective neighborhood space and kitchen, a recognition of shared vulnerability and the importance of practices of mutual aid and care are central in reacting to social crises and inequalities in a way that transports an alternative imagination of social relations and infrastructures. In the process, various activist communities and groups across different social justice struggles become connected such as around housing, migration, and queer-feminism as exemplified by the researched groups International Women* Space, Sleeping-Place-Orga and Right-2-the-City. Their formation of caring and connected communities which share spaces and spontaneous support in the everyday point to possibilities of forming local and translocal solidarity communities and neighborhoods. At the same time, the awareness, accountability, and care needed for building collective, empowering, and non-hierarchical relations is a central concern and challenge for the communities living in a context of uneven precarities, repression, and violence. Nevertheless, through their experiments with abolitionist commoning, a radically different more democratic, diverse, and de-commodified vision of urban futures is built and enacted.