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Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Lifehouse, Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield

Lifehouse:Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield (on OpenLibrary) was a much anticipated book here, and it was better than I expected.

For someone well versed in how much of a mess the world is in (even more so than when I read it late last year) the first section is something of a recap, but it's handy to have the overlapping crises pulled together in one place. After that there's a healthy history of the ways folk have built more equitable structures of living, and the power brought to bear against them in response by the rich.

And then some sketches of a possible future, and ways we can look to get there. I think the notes from a proto-lifehouse that I wrote, in response to an earlier article on the idea from Adam, still captures a lot of my thoughts on it; but there are a few asides among my dog-eared pages from reading the book.

I can recommend it. And I'm always interested in meeting fellow/potential lifehouse-keepers, particularly local ones.

Page 5

It's that doing something that I want to spend the rest of this book exploring—both the commitment to local, self-organized action itself, and everything it opens up for us, in a time when so much else about our lives feels like it is shutting down.

Page 15

Nobody can do that for us. We have to do it for ourselves. This book is about what happens when we let go of hope, stop waiting and start doing.

Page 52

[Writer of essay "How Complex Systems Fail" Richard] Cook observes that, whatever safety mechanisms they may have been equipped with, what all such systems have in common is that they are kept within safe operating margins via the continuous adjustments of human operators. This seems commonsensical enough. But what he argues next is somewhat startling: these adjustments are invariably in the nature of a "gamble." Whatever decision is at hand, it will always be a bet made about the future in the presence of imperfect information.

[...]

In his essay, Cook says one other interesting thing about complex systems, which is that it is quite possible for them to "run in degraded mode" for extended periods. That is, they are so well defended by their many layers of backups that they can accumulate damage for many years before hitting the point of absolute breakdown. They simply go on working, without their operators or anyone else necessarily realizing the extent to which everything under the hood has corroded away to nothing.

The most obvious example of this in societal terms is the Soviet Union, which continued to maintain a certain façade of robustness even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and indeed right up to the point of its dissolution on Christmas 1991.

Page 64

The legacy of [Occupy Wall Street] was evident in the incredible speed at which the relief effort [of Occupy Sandy] took shape: it was because of the social connections, and the trust for one another, that activists had forged in the course of those ecstatic and difficult weeks in the park that they were able to stand up the sprawling networks of sites and activities so very quickly. It was evident in the the immediate sophistication of the logistical systems they organised at each of those sites, which owed something to the pop-up infrastructure of the makeshift society formed over the fifty-nine days and nights in Zucotti. And it was most evident of all in the set of values that guided the relief efforts—which should surprise no one, given that they were the selfsame values, held by a group that included many of the same people.

Likewise the way that the loose network of maker and makerspaces could respond to the pandemic. Existing social connections and organisational practices from group projects.

Page 69

They went into the housing projects and up to the darkened floors, keeping faith with the places, and the people, other relief workers evidently found so daunting. And rather than presuming that those they came across were victims in need of rescue—and offering them generic aid packages in response, as a Red Cross outreach worker might—the members of OS field teams treated them as peers and equals, the ones who knew better than anyone else what their actual needs consisted of. Each interaction between a volunteer and someone affected by the storm therefore started not with an assumption, an assessment or a judgement, but with a question: "How are you doing?"

No attempt was ever made by Occupy Sandy to sort bodies into those that were deserving of care and those that were not, the way other relief organizations did. Nobody involved with the effort would ever ask for proof of address, a Social Security number or any of the other documentation required by government agencies like FEMA before they'd furnish aid. Nobody made you fill out paperwork just to prove that you were who you said you were. OS volunteers offered assistance to anyone who asked, whatever their immigration status, whichever side of the law they were compelled to operate on.

There was a fundamental respect for people's autonomy in all of this, not to mention their dignity. It was one of the qualities that most sharply differentiated Occupy Sandy from the Red Cross or the National Guard, and it emerged directly from the principled distinction between mutual aid and charity.

Page 83

But it nevertheless gave voice to a conclusion that was becoming increasingly hard to avoid: that if no real relief from their troubles was forthcoming, despite all the Head Starts and VISTAs a wealthy society could dream up, Black people would just have to set about organizing that relief for themselves.

Page 87

This was the genesis of Free Breakfast for Children, the People's Free Food Program and all the many other ways in which the Panthers proposed to care for the people. "All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution."

Page 102

(The economics of such projects were further bolstered when members of parliament representing the radical-left party SYRIZA agreed to tithe 20 percent of their salaries to the support of solidarity initiatives.)

Solidarity among the Greeks, and the sort of example you'd like to see from more politicians.

Page 105

Here scott crow's description of Common Ground's understanding of the people they worked with as "active participants in the struggle to make their lives better" was echoed virtually word for word, inscribed in a practice that defines mutual care about as well as anything could.

This, then, was deinstitutionalized care, responsive to the needs of a population laboring under all the physical and psychic assaults of Crisis. All of the practical knowledge involved in setting up a clinic that worked this way, and running it on an ongoing basis, was shared through the solidarity network: how they went about securing the resources they needed, what kind of maintenance was required by the more delicate equipment, when and under what conditions they pursued alliances with other local actors, even how they physically laid out their spaces.

Page 110

Even at its most complete, the care that people accessed through the state was always contingent, conditional on a government remaining in power that was willing to undertake robust and continued investment in the national health. Any faith that such conditions might persist into the indefinite future was a faith misplaced.

Page 112

At least, this is the deeper lesson for the Long Emergency: lifesystems must be designed so that they're as robust as possible to fluctuations of the underlying political or economic order, because fluctuation is all we are likely to know for the foreseeable future.

Page 122

Bookchin named this Communalism, with a capital C, in explicit allusion and homage to the Paris Commune of 1871. Communalism was designed around a set of "preconditions for human survival," among which were "the anarchist concepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology and a decentralized society." Taken together, these would constitute nothing less than "a new politics structured around towns, neighborhoods, cities, and citizens' assemblies, freely confederated into local, regional, and ultimately continental networks."

Page 130

If nothing else, the ability to participate in consequential decisions helps to shift the psychological locus of control, however incrementally, from external to internal. The world is no longer quite so much something that happens to you, and that you have no choice but to accept, but something you can intervene in, concretely and directly. The ability to act upon the world in this way is in itself palliative of the awful helplessness in the face of events that characterizes our time.

But it's also about something even larger than that. For the feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young, justice is more than merely a question of the equal distribution of goods. It is a condition in which "action, decisions about action, and provision of the means to develop and exercise capacities" are accessible to all. This is why the practice of deliberative assembly isn't simply about getting together to vote for one or another among the options before us. In helping us build our capability for collective self-determination, and giving us a venue in which we might employ it, the assembly is, as directly as it is possible to be, concerned with the achievement of justice.

Page 132

Rather than concentrating the power to decide in a single leader, or tightly sharing it among a party cadre, horizontalism distributed it across everyone motivated enough to show up and participate. Sometimes, the decision logic employed was the pursuit of full consensus, at others a simple majority vote. But materially, this looked much the same, wherever on Earth you happened to encounter it: people gathered in a rough circle, often in a courtyard, clearing or public plaza, visibly and volubly discussing the matter before them.

Page 134

For many participants, myself included, this tide of protest [of Occupy and the "movement of the squares"] constituted the first time in our lives that our subjective experiences of the world were reflected in mass political action of any sort. We had grown tired of being told that politics would only ever amount to the choice of the least-worst option and that the best we could ever expect to achieve was the most tepid and incremental sort of reform.

Page 146

With a population of somewhere between 2.5 million and 5 million, and persisting in some form from July 2011 to the present, Rojava appears to be modern history's largest-scale and longest-running example of a place where order was achieved in the absence of a state, where decisions of real material consequence were made by ordinary people sitting in assembly.

This is already extraordinary enough. But what is still more extraordinary, and what particularly commends it to us in our time of troubles, is that the people of northern Syria achieved this with their world on fire, amid circumstances of the most terrible devastation. And what is most extraordinary of all is that so little is known about it outside the region, even now.

Page 157

In such a mediation process, the members of the peace committee—none of whom needed to be legally qualified, many of whom remained untrained by anything except experience—gathered an alleged perpetrator, their victim and any witnesses in a series of informal conversations, which ordinarily took place in homes or other noninstitutional locations. There they would collectively attempt to determine what had taken place and what, if anything, could be done to repair it. Perhaps the most unfamiliar aspect of this is that it odes not rely upon the adversarial framing common to Western systems of jurisprudence, in either common-law or Napoleonic varieties: there is neither prosecutor nor defense. The emphasis is placed, rather, on consensus and on a collaborative search for measures of redress and rehabilitation that can be agreed to by all parties.

Page 158

Should the members of a commune- or neighborhood-level peace committee for whatever reason not be able to achieve agreement, they were able to invoke a larger-scale form of public safety administration, known as the "justice platform." These convened anywhere up to 300 people to hear cases, drawn from "related communes and councils, civil society organisations [and] social movements," and were considered to be the final arbiter short of the formal court system. Due to their size, these more often resorted to a majority-vote-decision rule than the strict pursuit of consensus, but the spirit in which proceedings were conducted was the same: the search for a resolution that all parties could live with.

Page 161

The lesson appears to be that if you can build something that tangibly improves the scope of agency experienced in daily life, people will flock to it, whatever reservations they may hold.

Page 167

The fundamental idea of the Lifehouse is that there should be a place in every three- or four-city-block radius where you can charge your phone when the power's down everywhere else, draw drinking water when the supply from the mains is for whatever reason untrustworthy, gather with your neighbors to discuss matters of common concern, organize reliable childcare, borrow tools it doesn't make sense for any one household to own individually and so on—and that these can and should be one and the same place. As a foundation for collective resourcefulness, the Lifehouse is a practical implementation of the values we've spent this book exploring.

Page 168

Then the odds that any one of us will get meaningfully involved in the stewardship of collective services increases considerably.

Just like the phone chargers on the table outside C-Squat, think of the infrastructural provisions as the "killer app": the compelling proposition that pulls people into the Lifehouse. But the deep value is in the other voices we encounter there.

Or as we phrase it: "come for the 3D printer, stay for the community".

Lifehouses would be most useful if we thought of them as places to help us ride out the depredations of neoliberal austerity now, as well as the storms to come. This means furnishing every cluster of a hundred or so households with access to a structure that's been fitted out as a shelter for those displaced from their homes, a storehouse for emergency food stocks and a heating-and-cooling center for the physically vulnerable. It should be able to purify enough drinking water, and generate enough electric power, to support the surrounding neighborhood when the ordinary sources of supply become unreliable. And it should be staffed, on a 24/7 basis, by volunteers who know the neighborhood and its residents well and have a developed sense for the matters that concern them most.

This is part of my work at DoES Liverpool. It provides a commons for the means of production, which helps me earn a living, but it is also partly prepping for whatever crises are heading our way. We have a way to go to reach the level of capability laid out above, although if (and it is understandably a large if) we had access to the Internet, or enough warning to acquire the relevant information on it, we could spin up some of it when needed.

I'm not sure about the 24/7 staffing of the Lifehouses. I'm not sure it's necessary, particularly before an acute crisis arises; and when one does, that will shift the priorities and possibly the availability of the volunteers to allow a just-in-time provision of greater access. Maybe that's a difference between how you'd run one now, and how it would operate as the Long Emergency develops.

Page 174

The mutual aid slogan has it that "audacity is our capacity."

[...]

Being able to draw upon the resources of a properly outfitted Lifehouse has surprisingly deep implications. A community that is able to house, feed and care for its members, furnish them with clean water to drink and generate enough power to heat or cool them will find that it is broadly robust to the consequences of decisions made elsewhere. It is effectively autonomous.

This is not the same thing as autarky, or total self-sufficiency, which is in any event never truly achievable. But a degree of self-reliance in these matters does afford a community significant room for maneuver in a world that is otherwise defined by the constraints it imposes. Become resourceful in these specific ways, and the ability of others to place limits on your freedom of action is sharply circumscribed. You can participate in larger networks or decouple from them at will, without affecting your underlying capacity to provide for your neighbors.

Page 175

In hard times, then, what we're really after is a distributed structure, in which independent capacity and decision-making authority reside in every local node in the network, and each is free to connect with any or all of the others, on a horizontal, peer-to-peer basis.

Page 185

One way would be for each community to develop some capacity for "autonomous production," or what the theorist Jason Adams glosses as "local production for local use, outside the bounds of the wage-labor system." In concrete terms, this turns on access to a workshop furnished with a usefully broad range of machine tools and equipment, from drill presses to TIG welders to sewing machines, ideally co-located with other facilities in the Lifehouse itself.

[...]

The answer may lie in the volunteer-run workshops that already exist in most big cities, which rather uninvitingly tend to be called "makerspaces," "hackspaces" or "fablabs".

[...]

Just as important, the global maker community nurtures within its membership the hard-won knowledge of how to use these tools safely, efficiently and well. And that knowledge tends to drive a set of politics that are broadly consonant with the aims of a Lifehouse network.

Page 187

The values of open access, solidarity and self-reliance held by so many in the maker movement make them obvious as prospective partners in any Lifehouse-based production workshop.

Page 200

If we want to build ourselves a refuge against the hard times to come, then, at least one way of doing so seems clear. We don't have to imagine the revolutionary seizure of state power, or some deus ex machina event that wipes the slate clean and allows us to begin anew. All we need to imagine is a meshwork of Lifehouses spanning the land, each one a place where people come to avail themselves of sanctuary, restoration, sustenance and solace, each one managed and governed by the people who use it. If this is in some ways an ambitious vision, it's also one that is comparably modest and achievable.

Page 201

But here I want to invoke what I earlier described as "the great secret of Occupy Sandy," a quality that we know from the testimony of people involved is something it shared with Common Ground, the Greek solidarity clinics and the communes of Rojava above all: taking initiative in this way feels wonderful. Taking concrete action in defense of our communities—doing something about the situation we find ourselves in and exercising collective power over it—is reparative in itself and a specific for the numbing dread that otherwise gnaws at us in this time of storms.