Writing collectivizes individual memory; reading individualizes collective memory. The back-and-forth between them fosters the sense for history by unearthing potentials within the present, creating backdrops and foregrounds…
- Regis Debray, “Socialism: A Life Cycle” (2007)
Six months into Woodbine 3.0, we are launching a Substack. As part of our efforts to reimagine and redefine the project in its third iteration, we’d like to now take the time to develop a more regular writing practice. In between our events programming, podcasting, and other media and organizing efforts, we want to publicly share the various lines of inquiry informing our work, as well as more outwardly reflect on the last decade-plus of our experiments with Woodbine.
Our Substack and Patreon platforms going forward will mirror each other with the same written and audio content, so there’s no need to subscribe twice. The archives will be seasonally paywalled, so that we can build a subscription base to sustain Woodbine’s overhead expenses of rent, utilities, and insurance.
Last spring, when we decided to open up a new Woodbine events and meeting space, our vision was to give more attention to the wing of the project which emphasized strategic thinking, intellectual exchange, comradely debate, and shared learning. It became existentially urgent for us that our movements be able to convincingly explain why we are doing what we are doing; what our goals and political horizons are; and how we plan to collectively evaluate our successes and contradictions. This Substack hopes to continue our practice of reflective self-clarification first established by the Woodbine Research Group in 2015, and later manifested in our print journal The Reservoir in 2022.
The Cost of Living
Woodbine marked its 10-year anniversary in 2024 with a series of celebration parties, outdoor festivals, music and art shows, communal meals, and more. Towards the end of the year, when launching our annual crowdfunding campaign, we wanted to aim for more than just the reproduction of what we had already been doing. We wrote:
Beyond these short-term, immediate sustainability goals of just getting by, we also want to use this fundraising drive to share some of Woodbine’s bigger and longer-term dreams, if we had access to more resources. What would Woodbine look like if we could own a building of our own to experiment with and plan around? Or if we could rent an additional satellite space to give some of our programs more physical and calendar space to expand their outreach efforts… What if we could support many of our long-term and dedicated volunteers with regular stipends and coordinator fees, to free up more of their time to dedicate to Woodbine instead of the wage economy… Over the years we have produced a series of videos, texts, and podcasts, including most recently our print journal The Reservoir – what if we had more resources to expand this multimedia output?
Last summer these aspirations took a more intentional form, as we decided to shift our attention towards Manhattan. It’s worth emphasizing that we felt confident doing so because we knew that the neighborhood infrastructures we helped to cultivate would extend beyond us, thanks to the efforts of Woodbine alumni. This includes satellite projects like the Woodbine Football Club, the Ridgewood Community Garden, and the Ridgewood Farmshare, as well as the bookstores and cafes that were started out of our spaces. Most importantly, we welcomed the transition of Woodbine’s most recent location into the Ridgewood Commons, which continues to maintain many of our key neighborhood projects like the weekly community dinners, the food pantry, the Common Strength gym, and more.
In response to Woodbine’s 10-year anniversary calls for support, we were contacted by board members of a historic building in Ridgewood, to potentially explore a partnership in stewarding that property together. Over the course of several meetings we arrived at a preliminary understanding: in exchange for Woodbine taking on the building’s overhead expenses, utilities, and taxes, as well as committing to fundraise for its renovation, we would get shared use and programming access to its largely vacant 3 floors, as well as an ownership stake in the property. As spring turned into summer the negotiations progressed quickly and we were given keys to prepare for the move, while lawyers from both sides worked on multiple drafts of an agreement to spell out the terms of the partnership. In pursuing this new space, it was always our vision that only Woodbine’s public events programming and administrative offices would move into that new building, and that we would keep the 585 Woodward location dedicated to neighborhood mutual aid work.
As the summer progressed, however, that Ridgewood building opportunity ultimately collapsed, and it did so while we were already in the midst of handing over stewardship of our 585 Woodward space to new leadership. After some time, what might have otherwise been an organizational catastrophe we started to view instead as an exciting opportunity to completely rethink the future, scope, and goals of Woodbine. As we wrote in our 10 year anniversary call – and even more so once it was within our grasp – we found ourselves newly energized at the prospect of opening a new space explicitly dedicated to political and cultural programming.
External events gave our deliberations a newfound sense of immediacy and clarity. That June a State Assemblymember from Queens, a self-described socialist younger than most of Woodbine’s own leadership, improbably won the Democratic primary to become the mayor of the largest city in the United States. This signaled to us that perhaps we had been misreading both the mood and ceiling of possibilities within the city; or, at the very least, it was now worth us re-thinking our decade-long strategy of investing ourselves so singularly into just Ridgewood. Our thought-process went something like: if Zohran is able to take his vision of socialism from a peripheral district of Queens to the whole of New York City, maybe we should try to do the same.
This started a process of outreach, phone calls, meetings, and conversations with friends and comrades who had active projects, spaces, and businesses based in Manhattan, to hear all about their experiences with leases, brokers, landlords, audiences, communities, etc. Some actively encouraged us to pursue it, letting us know the real estate market was now no longer as intimidating as it might have once been.
In fact, we soon realized that, architecturally, the Manhattan real estate market was even more favorable due to a staggering amount of vacant upper-floor office spaces, something Ridgewood zoning has historically had very little of, even before Covid. Our previous storefront locations were priced for retail businesses, and those retail rates have been going up considerably while Manhattan’s office rates were going down.
Our next step was to try to find some organizational partners to go in on a new Manhattan space with. Though Woodbine’s modest budget could have afforded a small Manhattan space of its own, in collaboration with other co-tenants we could together rent a larger, nicer, and better-located space. Throughout the fall we went on to look at more than 50 spaces throughout Manhattan, building up an impressive step count from Chelsea to Chinatown.
In December we signed the lease on our current location, a full-floor 2200sf loft at the crossroads of two of New York City’s most iconic thoroughfares, Broadway and Canal Street. It’s on the 3rd floor of an elevator building, with enormous windows overlooking Lispenard Street, which has become one of the key hubs of Manhattan’s sidewalk economy of knock-off purses, sunglasses, earbuds, and whatever else. Woodbine shares the rent, calendar, and design footprint of the loft with two other media organizations. From this arrangement, Woodbine’s current rent in Tribeca is less than what we were paying in Ridgewood.
Woodbine on Broadway
Since opening Woodbine 3.0, our Research Group has been experimenting with the roundtable format, hosting presentations thus far on Municipal Socialism, Civil War, and AI Melancholy. By hosting roundtables, we try to split the difference between the open assembly and the reading group – and hopefully avoid the contradictions, frustrations, and pitfalls of each format. Our current aim is to host such discussions on a monthly basis, to encourage inquiry and debate on some of the moment’s most confusing and difficult social questions.
Since last fall, we have also hosted conversations with thinkers including Leopoldina Fortunati, Idris Robinson, Susan Buck-Morss, David Harvey, Sarah Schulman, Kathi Weeks, Michael Hardt, and Nancy Fraser. We’ve revived our monthly reading series Crush, curated by Suzanne Goldenberg, and have presented screenings of works by Waliid Raad and Frederick Wiseman, as well as premiered new documentaries on both Palestine and Rojava. Since August, we have released 28 new episodes of our podcast with guests including Molly Crabapple, Kazembe Balagun, DeeDee Halleck, John Holloway, Anthony Dest, Malek Rasamny, and George Katsiaficas, as well as discussions with Autonomedia, CrimethInc., and The Peoples Want. After being so militantly IRL for more than a decade, we’ve now reluctantly accepted that the podcast form offers us the opportunity to speak with comrades around the world, and to share those conversations globally. Finally, this spring we hosted special memorial events for recently passed comrades Ben Morea (1941-2026) and Loren Goldner (1947-2024).
Last month we hosted the 4-day conference “Lifehouses, Resilience Hubs, and Dual Power”, a long-awaited follow-up to 2022’s “A Gathering on Autonomy and Survival.” In part the Lifehouses gathering was a way for us to inaugurate our new space nationally, as well as to force us to build it out infrastructurally in order to properly host such an undertaking. It was also an opportunity to publicly assert our intentions with the new Woodbine: to facilitate such encounters of ambitious and strategic networking that ask the organizational questions of the moment with a wide and expansive group of collaborators.
Over the last dozen years, the space and project of Woodbine has experimented with countless organizational forms, collectivities, committees, working groups, and titles to manage the legal liabilities, financial commitments, administrative responsibilities, and curatorial stewardship of such an endeavor. These various assemblages have vacillated over the years in their formality, bureaucracy, opacity, and functionality. At present two of the co-directors from our previous location are carrying that work forward to Manhattan, hoping primarily to raise the bar on Woodbine’s outward programming.
The Woodbine Research Group – first initiated as the Autonomy Working Group from 2015-2016, and having operated consistently now since 2018 – presently functions as something between a programming committee and advisory board, and is made up of the presenters at our roundtables; the facilitators of our speaker series; the voices on our podcast; and contributors and editors from The Reservoir. We are neither a membership organization nor a friend group, and participation has historically come down to “time and precedent”.
Currently around 2⁄3 ‘s of Woodbine’s overhead expenses are covered by monthly contributions from supporters via Patreon and WithFriends (now known as Pools), some for as little as $5 a month. The 1/3 gap we try to cover with venue rentals, and we’re thrilled to now be able offer grassroots fellow-travelers an accessible and centrally located location for their programs. As ever, Woodbine’s goal is to build-up our base of monthly donors to cover the entirety of the space’s overhead expenses, so we can devote more of our fundraising efforts towards imagining and executing more ambitious new projects.
The Promise of Autonomy
In the spring of 2023, under the direction of president Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation published a report called Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves. As it would become more popularly known, ‘Project 2025’ spanned more than 900 pages, with more than 30 chapters, written by 40 contributors. At the time Donald Trump was still largely deplatformed by the media in the aftermath of January 6th, and had a seemingly unlikely path back to the presidency. But this group took seriously the task of collectively envisioning both a policy platform and political horizon for their wing of the conservative movement. The project became something of a national scandal, and we took notice.
Woodbine’s Research Group, wanting to prepare ourselves for what an improbable second Trump administration might look like, read and discussed excerpts of The Conservative Promise, and revisited Trump’s own campaign book from 2015, Crippled America. Together we also looked to authors ranging from Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Lauren Berlant, Murray Bookchin, Aimé Césaire, Melinda Cooper, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Guy Debord, Frantz Fanon, Silvia Federici, Michel Foucault, Eric Hoffer, Herbert Marcuse, Achille Mbembe, Wilhelm Reich, Cedric Robinson, Kristin Ross, Carl Schmitt, James C. Scott, and many others. Our study sessions were never led by a singular teacher, nor was the reading list arrived at in advance, with some preconceived program or party line. The texts and topics were often spontaneously chosen week-to-week by those present in the discussions, and the sessions were then publicly advertised for free participation. For us this was as much an attempt at shared learning as it was a way to meet and talk with anyone else in the city who might be struggling with these same questions. And to do so in person, in real time, outside academia, or any other professionalized, performative, and institutionalized settings where discourse presently happens.
The Woodbine Research Group’s current vision is not a symmetrical reproduction of something like the Heritage Foundation, but we will admit to being struck by the scope and ambition of their project. We have been just as much inspired by various unfunded, grassroots groups’ appropriation of the “think tank” form across free schools, independent media projects, hackerspaces, and DIY arts venues. We currently see ourselves as guided less by the traditional goal of ‘policy influence’ than by the aspiration to meet a widely felt need for something like cognitive mapping. In this sense, we’re reminded of the opening to The Invisible Committee’s 2014 book To Our Friends, published the same year Woodbine opened its doors:
Organizing has never meant affiliation with the same organization. Organizing is acting in accordance with a common perception, at whatever level that may be. Now, what is missing from the situation is not “people’s anger” or economic shortage, it’s not the good will of militants or the spread of critical consciousness, or even the proliferation of anarchist gestures. What we lack is a shared perception of the situation. Without this binding agent, gestures dissolve without a trace into nothingness, lives have the texture of dreams, and uprisings end up in schoolbooks.
To this end, the Woodbine Research Group has more planned roundtables, with the next session on “Migration and Cosmopolitanism” scheduled for the evening of Tuesday the 30th. We’re working our way back to a weekly podcast episode schedule, and the long-awaited third issue of our print journal The Reservoir will be published before the end of the year. If in 2022 our ambition for “A Gathering on Autonomy and Survival” was to be the start of Woodbine hosting semi-annual public conferences, we now hope to fulfill that goal at our new location, and have already started to think about the follow-up to Lifehouses.
Woodbine retained much of our library from both our previous locations, and recently added to it with a generous donation of titles from the estate of comrade Mitchel Cohen (1952-2026). This summer we plan to update our online library catalog to expand access to the collection. In previous years, Woodbine produced a number of videos and printed broadsheets for free distribution. Now with a renewed focus on our multimedia output, we have our sights set on both.
With this Substack platform, we hope to publish pieces that will both complement and critically reflect on our public programming. This will serve as an expansion of the work we have been able to do so far with The Reservoir, and it will allow us to produce texts faster and more informally, collecting research notes, fragments, drafts, lists, bibliographies, archival finds, translations, and more. Thanks to all who’ve shown up over the years, who’ve read along with our evolutions and shifting experiments, and who contribute in myriad ways to open up these new fronts.
“We’ll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production, this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds.“
-Deleuze & Guattari, 1972