Another Spring theme - how strong, cosmolocal communities can build a parallel polis - echoed by Adam Greenfield's concept of "lifehouses"

Another Bella Caledonia question around our Spring launch: “How does the parallel polis – as a dual power – relate to the state?” We are brewing up a direct answer - and in the meantime, here’s our work on a “parallel polis”. But also, there are definite answers to this in the writings of Adam Greenfield, whose forthcoming book “Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire”.

Here’s the blurb:

How to reclaim power in a time of perpetual crisis

We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?

Using examples from the Black Panthers’ “survival programs,” the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organised polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair — a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.

Reviews

Knowing we can't rely upon governments, corporations or elites to protect us from the ongoing disasters we now face, above all climate change, Adam Greenfeld movingly celebrates the grass-roots mutual aid and caring collectivities that have sustained people through past calamities.

Aware that such self-organised, compassionate caring is more needed than ever today, Greenfield's vivid, erudite and persuasive prose outlines the many ways in which people can, and for their own survival must, work together confronting the challenging goal of creating local autonomous communities, or Lifehouses, now necessary for enduring the storms ahead. An inspiring text in pessimistic times.

—-Lynne Segal, author of Lean on Me: A Radical Politics of Care

When three emergencies -- climate, political and social - build together into the storm of our present we need to start thinking from the ground-up. In this we have no better guide than AG. Lifehouse constructs a much needed, hands-on strategy for urban care. Read it and start planning.

—-Eyal Weizman, author of Hollowland

Here, on his Mastodon account, Adam references a report on a right-wing conspiracy, and uses that to muse on the need for networks that develop autonomously:

Sure, this wannabe-Gilead stuff sounds goofy AF, but *fortune favors the prepared mind*. These troglodytes have an existing network. They have capital. They have a more or less clear sense of what they want to do, and the order they want to do it in. And you better believe they will have a sufficiency of people willing to do the foot-soldiering. We mock them at our peril.

What have we learned, from a review of past moments of catastrophe both natural and fully anthropogenic, other than that it’s the formation with the existing network that’s able to enter the chaos and define it to their advantage? This is as true of Occupy Sandy as it was of, say, the Chicago Boys in Chile.

We (for relevant values of “we”) will always be operating at a disadvantage so far as capital and the application of force are concerned, and probably also suffer from a comparative lack of consensus about what it is we’d ideally like to achieve. So we need to start talking to one another *now* about what vision we’d like to see brought to fruition, across the usual communal divides that sever us one from another.

We need to forge the heterogeneous networks that are robust *because* they are heterogeneous, yet also allow us to collectively enact some affirmative vision of human liberation against the backdrop of a wounded ecology.

Situationists used to say “the haçienda must be built.” It is in this sense, sure, but also something far more concrete that I now suggest: the Lifehouse must be built. We’re going to have to build it ourselves, together, and we’re going to have to preserve it against the Gileadists if that’s what it comes to. That’s the only part that scares me.

…The book is supposed to offer the reader concrete, empirically-tested ideas about how individuals and communities can survive the coming decades of climate-system collapse with values of care, dignity and justice intact…

I argued that the end of securing survival-with-dignity for the greatest possible number required not so much innovation, especially not technical innovation, as a painstaking sifting of past experiences, to retrieve the practices, methods and tactics that had helped people and communities under pressure survive moments in which everything was arrayed against them.

So originally, I imagined the book as a compendium of primarily *spatial* tactics, from squatting and the organization of community land trusts to the Segal Method and WikiHouse, all of which were to have been “salvaged” from the historical context or moment in which they first appeared…

More here. And for cognate discussions on this site, see our work on CANs, and on the Parallel Polis.