Read Your Mind: In Dialogue with p0litrix

But diagnosis is incomplete. Julz posits: “A lot of the books I stock aren’t just diagnosing how we got here,” she says. Instead, p0litrix is motivated by the belief that a revolutionary future has already been thought up, in the writing of thinkers before us and among us. 

Accessibility to these ideas and public critical discourse is the primary difference between knowing the tools exist to demand an alternative reality or remaining politically lost and disassociated without the means to understand why. 

In short, “p0litrix is an invitation to learn and discover the better than this”. Whilst p0litrix focuses on disseminating information and provoking critical thinking, both of which are continuously suppressed by oppositional groups, change needs community—to imagine a different system with—and to imagine it working. 

 p0litrix’s 3rd pop-up, and 1st party was on Valentine’s Day, raising $1250 for Sisters Inside. Artists Loz, frontrightspeaker, R Rebeiro, hairclip, Margot Petrie, Ava McDermott, Alice Fault Kill and Hydra Pyxis, and the movie, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, set the tone. The party was for “max borrowing and min haters”, inviting attendees to engage with and borrow from the p0litrix vault of countercultural texts, in a setting of transcendent music and community. 

“When the library is full of people, it feels exciting. It feels almost like we’re flirting with change,” Julz says. 

Julz and I discuss how direct action, mutual aid and moments of political agency such as protesting on the streets, studying political zines from previous movements or being moved by a documentary film are evidence of society’s desire and instinct for something better. Whilst editing this article, Dukkana, another local community library on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country, hosted Readers and Writers Against Genocide’s afternoon of poetry and resistance with Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, Palestinian author Micaela Sahhar and Goorie, Koori poet Evelyn Araluen. Such moments of sharing form kinship and are why spaces like Dukkana and p0litrix have a galvanising quality, rousing us from malaise or complacency, and reconstituting feelings of isolated disillusion into united action.

In reducing barriers to learning, p0litrix encourages acts of self-teaching and fills the gap left by (often) elitist academia by loaning readable yet radical information. There is no institutional obstacle—anyone can walk into p0litrix, for free, with the assurance that the books are a collective and mutual asset. 

It’s safe to say that p0litrix is not an entirely physical space, even if it operates as one; p0litrix works off a system of knowledge based on communal exchange. It is a model championed by revolutionary thinkers, such as Tyson Yunkaporta, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis and bell hooks.