The Commune is a Johannesburg based not-for-profit community-centered and collectively-run bookshop.
They have selected books that reflect their collective commitment to revolutionary politics and cover everything from grassroots social movements, decolonialism and environmentalism to queer theory, disability studies and prison abolition, with a healthy dose of art and poetry. Their hope is to become a meeting space, an useable archive, resource and intellectual commons for those interested in an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist, decolonial, feminist and Pan-African future.
Being a radical safe space means that they work, play and love towards a future that contains more possibilities than the present, in which each of us are constrained, violated, objectified and exploited in different ways by various forms of hierarchy and domination. It’s easy to describe their values in the well-worn language of what they’re against but they prefer to practice a new language to hear echoes of the world they’d like to live in. When talking about their values, then, they prefer to use words like freedom, equality, mutual aid, solidarity, direct action, consensus, voluntary cooperation and compassion. Instead of simply throwing these terms around to signify their politics, they try to prefigure them in their everyday activities, whether it’s in how they reach decisions, how they collaborate to get the dirty work done or how they interact with the broader contexts they’re situated in.
COUNTERSPACE 