The Berlin-based collective “Abolishing the Borders from Below” began its activities in autumn 2001 and was formed by a handful of East-European migrant anarchists and political and counter-cultural anti-authoritarians. From the very beginning our activities were focused on both socio-political and counter-cultural aspects, while the anarchist principles of non-hierarchical structures and decision-making processes were taken as the common ground for all our activities. Resisting the rules of capitalistic, parliamentarian and other doctrines dominating all aspects of social relations today, we decided on promoting anarchism as the possible alternative; an alternative to the social-systems based on competition, segregation, obedience, exploitation and violence.
In these few years of activity, the collective has managed to create, and continuously improve on, a regular anarchist publication with quite a wide popularity among various spectrums of anarchists around the whole continent (and beyond). The publication has the same name as the collective itself and its full name is: Abolishing the Borders from Below – an Anarchist Journal from Eastern Europe. That is why many people believe we are specifically a magazine publishing collective. Actually there are other projects we have been involved in over the years. We built up (namely!) and opened our office in Berlin, which serves as a meeting space for other anti-authoritarian leftwing groups and which also has a small libertarian library with a focus on Eastern Europe. AbolishingBB has also organised solidarity actions, informative meetings, exhibitions and other political and cultural events. From the very beginning we have cooperated with other anarchist groups, projects and campaigns both locally and around the world, especially in Eastern Europe. Depending on our limited capabilities we have always tried to give our support to various local and global struggles fighting against all kinds of oppression, each time trying to enrich these struggles with an anarchist perspective.
Since the very beginning, the collective has tried to confront and consciously exercise one of the biggest issues of an anarchist perception of social relations, which are the mutual-relations between freedom & preferences of individual and the concept of collectivism. During this time we have been through and created various forms of cooperation within our group, some were better than others. Learning from our own mistakes and enjoying watching the progress within our praxis seems to be two common parts of AbolishingBB reality. Remaining faithful to our intuitive understanding of anarchism as a process under permanent construction (which we are part of) we have never considered this process to be finished.
