Beyond Hope

“he uses a designer’s eye to find the correct scale at which we can begin practically building structures for dignified collective survival in the face of what he calls the “Long Emergency,” and perhaps, begin planning a counterattack”

“The framework of the Long Emergency offers a useful reconceptualization of the entire sequence of climate change”

“Greenfield’s proposal — the construction of “lifehouses” — is neither a rigid formula nor a panacea. Rather, it proposes a new way of viewing the spaces discarded by our decaying society, and for developing strategic forms of action for their appropriation and collective usage that operate at an appropriate scale and temporality”

“the real stakes of shared life in our neighborhoods”

“And so we find ourselves at a moment of decision. What can we do now, to make our way through the terrifying set of conditions we’ve inherited? What choices are available to us?”

“despite their superficial differences, all of these strategies share some deep qualities in common. They are all indirect: they leave you moored in your life, standing by, doing nothing to develop your own capacities.”

“This leaves us with one final possibility. We can act — directly, immediately, locally, without waiting for the state or any other institution to undertake our defense”

“social history of squatting”

“Ours to Lose, Amy Starecheski tells the story of the electricity-generating stationary bicycle set up on the sidewalk outside C-Squat on Avenue C, which supplied power to a bank of phone chargers during the extended outages that followed Superstorm Sandy”

“Over these days and weeks, the sidewalk in front of C-Squat was the most obvious place for people experiencing a sharp, sudden disruption of their way of life to seek out useful information, the comfort of fellowship and vital material support”

“As the unfolding reality of Earth system collapse increasingly intersects with the organized abandonment of our communities, and the complex systems we rely upon for the maintenance of everyday life prove to be far more fragile and contingent than we’d ever understood them to be, many of us will have more and more need of settings like this”

“What I believe our troubled times now ask of us is that we be more conscious and purposive about creating them in our communities — each one provisioned against the hour of maximum need and linked with others in a loose, confederal network. I call them “Lifehouses.””

“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”

“one of the problems that always vexes those of us who believe in the assembly, and similar deeply participatory ways of managing our communities, is that these types of deliberation are often a hard sell. Most of us are exhausted, for starters. Our lives already hem us in with obligations and prior commitments, situations that require our presence and undivided attention”

“the stewardship of collective services”

“If a Lifehouse can be somewhere to gather and purify rainwater, the nexus of a solar-powered neighborhood microgrid and a place to grow vegetables, it can also be a base for other services and methods of self-provision — a community workshop, a drop-in center for young people or the elderly and a place for peer-to-peer modes of care like the “hologram” Cassie Thornton derived from her experience of the Greek solidarity clinics to latch on”

“If mutual care needs a site, and so does collective power, then that site should draw out and strengthen the connections between these ways of being in the world”

“It is imperative in this that we avoid any suggestion of planning or pre-defining something that must emerge organically from people’s own priorities and decisions”

“Everything important about this idea must be worked out in practice, in the light of local experiences, local struggles, and local values”

“we cannot imagine the Lifehouse as something that stands alone. Each one needs to be linked with others in some confederal structure, so they can distribute some of their burdens across the network in moments of acute pressure, and in this way bear up under what might otherwise be an intolerable load”

“A Lifehouse, even a large-scale network of Lifehouses, is not the revolution”

“All a Lifehouse can ever do is give people a space in which they might realize a vision of social ecology, tending to themselves and the planet by practicing and experiencing solidarity, mutual care, and self-determination”

“this may itself prove to be a form of slow repair and, should it propagate widely enough, a healing of the damage done”

“any Lifehouse will, at best, remain what scholars of these things call a “heterotopia of resistance”: a space organized outside, apart from, and in opposition to the main currents of a society”

“everything about the discussion that follows concerns actions we take in our own backyard”

“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”

“a wildcat infrastructure of care, drawing on the best that is in us, to shelter the most vulnerable among us, at the very moment we need it”

“In her great novel of “ambiguous utopia,” The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin has her protagonist, the heterodox physicist Shevek, form a “syndicate of initiative” with his partner and a few allies at just such a moment of decision”

“The members of a syndicate of initiative speak for no one else. They act only in their own names, guided solely by their own assessment of the moment and what it requires. They take upon themselves the full responsibility for acting and remain accountable for their choices in the face of opposition that seeks to undermine everything they endeavor to achieve. But what they do redefines the parameters of the situation they contend with”

“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”

“let us organize our own syndicates of initiative and together build the Lifehouse”

“Let’s start with what is closest at hand, build outward from there and link our efforts with those of the others who have set themselves the same task”

“Let’s let go, finally, gratefully, of all our vain hope for the future and use that energy instead to undertake the work — the necessary work — of care, of repair, of survival”

“the powerful generally cannot tolerate and will not simply let people pursue even the humblest projects of autonomy and self-determination”

“From Vienna’s Karl-Marx-Hof in 1934 to Barcelona in 1939 to Rojava in 2019, in fact, just about any time a space has emerged in which even modest numbers of people have managed to organize the necessities of life on their own initiative, those spaces, those people, and all their hopes have been crushed by force of arms”

“Nothing is too petty in this respect. No radical effort is too small, local, or unassuming to escape hostile notice, and no activity so self-evidently benign that some attempt will not be made to disrupt it — not even feeding the hungry. FBI agents circulated ginned-up kompromat to San Francisco businesses in a largely successful attempt to “impede their contributions to [the Black Panther Party] Breakfast Program.”7 City building inspectors, accompanied by police, threatened the volunteer staff of the youth-centered nonprofit Chicago Freedom School with fines of up to $1,000 a day for “preparing and serving large quantities of food without the proper retail food establishment license,” because they bought pizza for teenagers who’d been tear-gassed while protesting the murder of George Floyd.8 The Houston Police Department continues to cite Food Not Bombs activists, issuing fines amounting to an unsupportable $23,500, for the sin of furnishing free meals to the homeless.9 The State of Georgia indicted activists protesting the “Cop City” police training center in South River Forest under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, characterizing each tranche of reimbursement for kitchen supplies among them as “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”10 It probably shouldn’t surprise us when agents of the state harness every institutional, regulatory and legislative means at their disposal to undermine alternative projects and seal off the spaces in which they might grow”

“But as the pressures of the Long Emergency intensify and the competition for resources tightens, I think it’s a fair bet that the attempt to furnish care will itself attract the kind of violence that was previously lavished only on (actual or perceived) threats to the dominant order”

“If a mutual care effort manages to persist for long enough in holding any space at all, the odds are that someone somewhere will eventually be moved to oppose it by force”

“So long as it confines itself to the more stereotypically feminized aspects of care work and social reproduction, that effort may — may — be tolerated. But even then, there are no guarantees: even something as beloved and broadly supported in the community as Occupy Sandy was attacked, and whoever was responsible in that case was perfectly willing to firebomb a church”

“So even in the case that, against all odds, we are actually able to create Lifehouses and in them make common cause against the future bearing down upon us, our efforts can’t end there. The implacable truth is that such communities must organize and prepare to defend themselves, or stand by in helpless acquiescence as they and everything they love are made to perish from the Earth”

“history is uncompromising on this point, and it is something that everyone embarked upon the politics of care must ultimately reckon with. This is the grim thing, the lesson of Golden Dawn and COINTELPRO, of Daesh and the vigilantes of Algiers Point: there is little point in sheltering bodies from the undirected chaos of the storm if you are not also prepared to protect them from those who specifically mean to do them harm”