Fragments towards a postsocialist networked commons: LeftEast as praxis

The media platform LeftEast has formally been around since 2013. Most people know of LeftEast as a website where they can read a range of writing from leftist perspectives from/and/about the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Bloc. But what lies behind it is a set of processes which are animated by the relationalities that produce and reproduce it, and to which it also contributes. In the fragments of conversation below, Mary N. Taylor and Mariya P. Ivancheva two members of LeftEast, open up a discussion on the process of producing and reproducing LeftEast as an element in a networked commons of the Left in the region, touching on questions of relationality, affect, cooperation, infrastructure, and the commons. In our dialogue we stress the relational part of building a dynamic commons that networks the regional new Lefts to one another, to parts of the old Left(s) in the region, and to comrades and formations further abroad. We reflect on the practice of encounter (encuentro), a term we have used to describe our summer convergences, but also to reflect LeftEast’s relational work. Seen in a relational light, even LeftEast’s website featuring articles that excavate the past and analyze and report on the present can be perceived as a conversation, or encounter.