> [!summary] Progressive Summary > This book reinforces the importance of the practices that I've adopted - Sociocracy, NVC, Offers and Needs Markets, Gift Economy, Mutual Aid. Lifehouses are refugias of collective care and self-governance. # Structured Notes ## Definitions jineology - Rojavan theory of feminism (from *jin*, the Kurdish word for "woman") Schelling Point - a solution that people tend to choose by default when there is no communication (eg meeting at Grand Central Station at noon). It was introduced by Thomas Schelling in his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter 1 - The Long Emergency Legislatures and private interests continue to make decisions that are incompatible with a survivable future. The most incremental, hesitant, market-friendly measures to protect the environment are routinely thwarted. A hot climate is already baked into our future. What is uncertain is how we will deal with the 2nd and 3rd order effects. These will "in fairly short order, exceed the capacity of our social, technical, political, and economic systems – in other words, what many of us would think of as planetary civilization – to contain them." 2nd or 3rd order effects might be things like supply chain disruptions affecting basic materiality. Eg the kinds described in Conway's [[Material World]]. > The greater part of that civilisation's familiar ways of ordering everyday reality, whether enacted through mechanisms of state or market, will not survive. > The Long emergency is my name for the period we've entered together, set off by climatic instability, but ultimately far larger than that alone. It consists of an extended excursion from everything we recognise as normal, of as yet unknown duration and resolution, during which many of the systems and structures that currently shape our lives will be flung to pieces by the force of events. As long as it lasts, we will be compelled to take on a much greater share of the responsibility of caring for ourselves than most of us are accustomed to, as individuals and communities both. ### Chapter 2 - Mutual Care Mutual aid was first coined by Kropotkin in 1902. > Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW! Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. > – Big Door Brigade (https://bigdoorbrigade.com/what-is-mutual-aid/) The defining value of mutual aid is **horizontality**. > It is the refusal to impose, observe or respect any sort of power relation between a person who is extending help and a person who requires it. This is the fundamental quality that distinguishes mutual aid from other models of voluntary, nonstate service provision, like charity. Mutual aid is also systemic. > Mutual aid starts from the recognition that exposure to risk falls unequally across the population, and aims at nothing less than transforming the circumstances that produced the inequality in the first place. It aims, in other words, at liberation. > If Kropotkin had seen collective, cooperative practices undergirding the everyday life of communities just about everywhere, for most of us those habits have long since been overwritten by systems of state and market. In modern times, the instinct towards cooperation only seems to reappear in times of the most acute peril, when all of that falls away. The terrible gift we're offered in these moments is a chance to practice all those capacities for self-organisation that are so badly underdeveloped in our ordinary, late-capitalist lives. ### Chapter 3 - Collective Power #### Murray Bookchin [[Murray Bookchin warned about greenhouse gases more than a decade before White House memo]] Murray Bookchin identified the planetary crisis as caused by the "social pathologies" of patriarchy, statism and capitalism. > Social ecology is the first body of thought I am aware of that links the planetary crisis to the alienation we suffer as individuals and communities via their common causal factor of domination. Bookchin identified a set of "preconditions for human survival": - anarchist concepts of a balanced community - face-to-face democracy - humanistic technology - decentralised society > If we wanted to survive, he argued, and to preserve the kind of healthy ecosystem in which we might all thrive equally, we would have to undertake the work of reorganizing society and all its institutions so as to eliminate the possibility of domination – either of nature by humanity, or of any human being by another. > Power that is developed through electoral means can evaporate that way, too. Everything you built can be wiped away in a heartbeat, the moment a sufficiently motivated opponent is sworn into office. ### Chapter 4 - Beyond Hope #### Some hard truths > 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? > > We can buy less, and that more locally, in the hope that in aggregating and responding to our purchase signals, the market will commit itself, permanently and worldwide, to a low-carbon production pathway. > > We can vote, in the hope of electing legislatures and governments committed to real climate action and able to see their policies enacted as binding law. > > We can protest, in the hope that legislators will note and heed the will of their constituents, and that governments and transnational bodies can be pushed toward a more aggressive defense of the planet, whether they were elected or not. > > We can engage in civil disobedience, in the hope that we can convince enough of our fellow citizens of the lateness of the hour, and that they, too, will be motivated to do something. > > We can engage in the sabotage of extractive industries, in the hope that their calculus of return on investment can be shifted, and that shareholders will tire of plundering the Earth for so little in the way of gain. > > We can work toward the revolutionary seizure of power, in the hope that we will succeed in time to take meaningful action on climate, and that our success will inspire other would-be insurgents to undertake and accomplish the same, everywhere. > > We can entrust our fate to technical means, in the hope that someone somewhere will invent a way of safely decarbonizing the atmosphere, or reflecting the sun’s heat back to space, or stabilizing the ice sheets where they are, or really all of that. > > Each of us is free to commit to any of these courses of action, or—at the risk of some incoherence—even all of them at once. They are all based on a self-consistent theory of change of one sort or another. But 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. They act with delayed effect: however long they take to work, we can be reasonably sure that it is not soon enough. They are wildly contingent on the coordinated efforts of others, depending on the energy, conviction and incorruptibility of human beings beyond our reach or ability to influence, and their capacity to cooperate with one another at scale. > > Finally, there’s no guarantee that any of them will work or even produce any measurable results at all. You could invest every iota of your life energy in any of these strategies for change for the rest of your days on Earth and move the needle on climate not at all. > In dark times, we need to be able to see the impact of our actions to keep despair at bay. We need to feel like there's some more or less direct gearing between the choices we make together and the concrete extension of shelter to those in danger. We need, in other words, to feel our power. That only really becomes possible when the questions we are deciding involve things that are close at hand. > As we've seen, 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. #### What is a Lifehouse? It is a place that combines the functions of mutual aid and collective power. It should be a place where enough people can gather. Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson reckons that this should be "one-fifth of the total population in a defined geographic area." It should be a Schelling Point, a "node of unconscious communication". > 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. > We may not always have the energy or the wherewithal to travel very far to "participate," even if we're convinced in the abstract of the value of doing so. If the place of assembly is right in our immediate neighborhood, though? And we happen to be going there *anyway*, to charge a phone, pick up the kids, return a borrowed dehumidifier, or simply seek shelter from the heat? Then the odds that any one of us will get meaningfully involved in the stewardship of collective services increases considerably. > 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. I am unclear whether the following is practical. Perhaps it's more realistic to think of these as resources distributed across a neighbourhood: >This means furnishing every cluster of 100 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 centre for the physically vulnerable. It should be able to purify enough drinking water, and generate enough electric power, to support the surrounding neighbourhood when the ordinary sources of supply become unreliable. And it should be staffed, on a 24/7 basis, by volunteers who know the neighbourhood and its residents well and have developed a sense for the matters that concern them most. This I agree with completely: > The value of such a place extends past the material to the social, psychic and affective. If the lifehouse can be somewhere to gather and purify rainwater, the nexus of a solar-powered neighbourhood, microgrid, and a place to grow vegetables, it can also be a base for other services and methods of self-provision – a community workshop, drop-in centre 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 with the Greek solidarity clinics to latch on. It can be all those things at once, provisioned and run by the people in its catchment area. I like the use of the phrase "catchment area" here. A great example of a "peer-to-peer" mode of care is the Camerados movement - https://camerados.org/what-is-camerados/ > 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. #### Technologies of permanent recourse > What is best of all, then, is to rely wherever possible on ways of doing and being that are robust to disruption because they are fundamentally simple and hardy. These are what I call "technologies of permanent recourse." They are tactics developed in and for hard times and circumstances, they broadly remain available to us even under significant stress. They aren't based on finicky, high-maintenance components, don't have lots of external dependencies, do not rely on a persistent availability of an extended supply chain, and can largely be built up and repaired from those resources we already have ready to hand. > > They favour, electromechanical means over electronic ones, mechanical means over those, and passive, organic ones wherever feasible, and can therefore tend to be labour-intensive, as opposed to capital-, equipment-, energy-, or computation-intensive. They can be turned to surprisingly sophisticated ends, including refrigerating food and filtering enough drinking water for a neighbourhood. Above all, they aren't owned by anybody: the methods underlying them are literally common knowledge. # Quotes # References [Kropotkin 1902 - Mutual Aid](zotero://select/items/1_JB784AUS) [Akuno 2017 - Jackson Rising](zotero://select/items/1_63KULBIN) [Spade 2020 - Mutual Aid](zotero://select/items/1_4WNADH2V)