We were tipped off to Cooperation Kentish Town (Facebook site and Twitter account also) on social media. On investigation, and from reading this blog on the Freedom website, we find that it’s a striking community-power response to the recent general election.

One of the organisers, Shiri Shalmy, explains their intent this way:

The idea is that, while fighting racism, we need to create spaces of tolerant cooperation; that fighting fascism on the streets means that we are too late.

We should have not given it an opportunity to emerge in the first place, through embedding intuitive antifascism into all our interactions, and through creating opportunities for people to discover and articulate this through action…

…Rather than the usual lefty tropes of endless meetings, written analysis pieces and performative street action.

The food co-op is a direct response to all this. It is an autonomous, self organised, self sufficient, non hierarchical space for radical social reproduction.

It is operated by its members and relies on them for its growth and sustainability. It’s an invitation to practice cooperation through meeting the day to day material needs of the community.

With its collectivised, free childcare, it’s a feminist space (because when women organise in the community, the community is gonna be fine). It’s a space where new skills are developed and new friendships are forged.

It’s practical solidarity at the grassroots level, away from parliament and the Guardian but also away from the anarchist sphere and the traditional lefty spaces.

Throughout the blog, the organisers of Cooperation Kentish Town are extremely aware of the level of disillusion about politics they face :

We decided early on that none of this needs to be explicitly articulated when we get to organising. Not because we don’t trust people to understand (they already know it!) or because we want to somehow sneakily radicalise people (they already have little faith in mainstream politics).

But because we are not here to lecture people or, worse, set them on some (our) right political path, there are no votes to win or salaries to defend; nothing external to gain. Any success will belong to the community itself.

We know that people struggle with household costs and are forced to buy expensive, low quality food, while there is what seems like an endless supply of free, healthy food making its way to food banks but is out of reach for people not on the breadline.

At the same time, squatted social centres get evicted within days, while council owned community centres stand empty due to funding cuts.

These two, seemingly unrelated, factors are both the result of the same problem (neoliberal capitalism manifest through austerity, scarcity and price hikes) but, combined, they are also the solution.

The plan is simple: a food co-op on the estate will involve local people coming together to source and distribute free produce from a local charity [Cooperation used the Felix Project via Refugee Community Kitchen].

A membership fee of up to £2 a week will secure purchasing additional supplies in bulk – toilet paper, rice, washing up liquid, etc. – thus significantly reducing the price per unit. We estimate that members will be able to reduce the cost of their weekly shop to those £2.

In addition to the weekly subs, members will contribute around an hour of work per week – researching, ordering, receiving, unpacking, weighing, repackaging and distributing products.

In order to allow parents to take part, members will take turns to organise and facilitate free childcare at each co-op organising session.

This means that members will, in addition to making a saving on food costs, get to spend an hour a week collaborating with neighbours, learning new skills and bringing a desolate space back into community use.

That’s their plan - and it seems to be working out very well. Again, the mode of approaching people appears crucial. “It seemed extremely important that the event shouldn’t come across as a charity project targeting ‘poor people’ but as an invitation to join a collective action, regardless of needs”:

We provided good quality food for around 40 households. We made sure that people picked up (or were delivered) food they knew how to cook, but also received fresh vegetables they wouldn’t normally be buying (including pre prepared salads, if they were unlikely to prepare fresh veg). We introduced people to new vegetables, if they were curious, and imagined interesting ways to prepare them.

We talked about our kids and our pets and about memories of the area. We discussed social issues (mostly vague concerns around immigrants, in line with the election results - no speeches were made). And mostly, we chatted about what a long term, sustainable, collective food project could look like on the estate.

The general feedback was brilliant. People were happy about the free food and excited about new possibilities for the community centre (which used to be the heart of the community before all the funding dried out).

I am confident that the Free Food Larder would lead to more activities on the estate, beyond the establishment of the co-op, and to increasing local organising, resilience and resistance.

More here. Very interestingly, the organisers of Cooperation Kentish Town seem to have some ambition to scale this beyond the North London area. They’ve created a platform website, www.mutual-aid.uk, which seeks to set up food coops in Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Hackney, Falmouth and Tower Hamlets.

We are fascinated by this level of autonomy and self-determination in communities. Particularly, the ways in which they are extremely sensitive to the alienation residents feel about traditional politics or authorities. And answering that by seeking to build “action spaces” (or what we might call “citizen action networks”) around social or convivial needs/desires.

That Cooperation Kentish Town comes from an explicitly anarchist tradition is a matter of investigation and interest to us - and according to the Bloomberg business website, not just us either.

As Pankaj Mishra writes there, commonplace language “confuses anarchism with disorganization”:

It should be remembered that anarchist politics is one of the modern world’s oldest, if little remembered, political and intellectual traditions. Today, it best describes the radical new turn to protests worldwide.

Anarchist politics began to emerge from the mid-19th century onward, originally in societies where ruthless autocrats were in power — France, Russia, Italy, Spain, even China — and where hopes of change through the ballot box seemed wholly unrealistic.

The anarchists — one of whom assassinated U.S. President McKinley in 1901 — sought freedom from what they saw as increasingly exploitative modes of economic production. But, unlike socialist critics of industrial capitalism, they aimed most of their energies at liberation from what they saw as tyrannical forms of collective organization — namely, the state and its bureaucracy, which in their view could be communist as well as capitalist.

As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the pioneering thinker of anarchism (and robust critic of Marx), put it:

To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so

For many anarchists, the state, the bureaucracy and security forces were the deepest affront to human dignity and liberty. They sought to achieve democratic freedoms by a drastic reduction in the power of the hydra-headed state, and a simultaneous intensification of the power of individuals from below through coordinated action.

Democracy for the anarchists was not a distant goal, to be reached through vertically integrated political parties, impersonal institutions and long electoral processes. It was an existential experience, instantly available to individuals by jointly defying oppressive authority and hierarchy.

They saw democracy as a permanent state of revolt against the over-centralized state and its representatives and enforcers, including bureaucrats and the police.

Success in this endeavor was measured by the scale and intensity of the revolt, and the strength of solidarity achieved, rather than by any (always unlikely) concession from the despised authorities.

This is also how protesters today seem to perceive democracy as they struggle, without much hope of any conventional victory, against governments that are as ideologically driven as they are ruthless.

A successful food-coop in Kentish Town points to considerable prospects for an updated, kindly anarchism