Building Communities of Care and Liberation

We need to build better communities of care and support, desperately.

With how our society keeps refusing to acknowledge the pandemic (Covid levels are so high in my state right now that it’s dangerous to go out), it makes existing with other people even harder, and often disabled, marginalized folks like me get left behind. It shouldn’t be that way. It feels like the Left is so caught up with reacting to the Right’s evils, that we’ve forgotten how to build up communities of solidarity and liberation.

We should be engaging in collective community care. We should be building that together and not eating up the isolating consumerist culture that late-stage-capitalism throws at us.

We need more media networks focused on building up communities of care and communities based on liberation. We need more support (monetary, housing, basic needs, etc.) for our most vulnerable and to build that up for all people. We need to create alternate ways of giving and receiving that does not fall prey to the consumerist demands of capitalism, such as repair libraries and libraries of things as well as more intensive library systems. We need to support alternative ways of being that is focused on care, agency, creativity, cooperation, and liberation.

The Right built up a powerhouse with its grassroots initiatives to an alarming extent, and it’s how this mess we’re in got worse. Part of their ‘success’ lies in the media empires, book deals, community support, and in-group terms, verbiage, symbols, beliefs, and ideas. The Left has, instead of doing the same like we used to do prior to the 70s through today, needs to create an alternative that is just as extensive — a microecology of communities centered on liberation and solidarity rather than hate and fear.

Yes, we must tear down the racist, transphobic, xenophobic, ableist, homophobic, colonialist, sexist system; but, we must also build up an alternative. We can do both at the same time. This isn’t an either/or, and right now? We desperately need stronger communities of care and liberation, because things are going to get worse if we don’t stop all oil and coal use, if we don’t stop the rise of fascism, if we don’t stop the genocides. Climate change is currently intensifying the suffering, and those in power are using that intensification to consolidate fascism and oppressive systems.

In the “Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism,” John P. Clark wrote:

“Over the past generation of radical social theory, we have heard a great deal more about the ‘microphysics of power’ than we have about the microecology of community. The dominance of the former approach is, I think, less a reflection of the inherent superiority of poststructuralist analysis than a symptom of the defensive nature of oppositional culture in our time. A heavy focus on the ‘physics’ of the system of power, and the depiction of social action in terms of various ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’ shaped largely in reaction to this system betrays a certain level of capitulation to a dominant mechanistic, objectifying order. There has been a widespread assumption — not only among post modernist and poststructuralist theorists, but also among political activists — that the historical destiny of opposition is essentially a future of permanent struggle against the system of power. For many, the highest aspirations of oppositional culture seem to lie in small tactical gains within a fundamentally immovable system and in forms of enjoyment and creativity possible through struggles within the vast labyrinth of power.”

Here Clark calls out the reactionary politics that the Left has fallen into, where we’ve lost that sense of community and instead react to the horrors with ‘strategy’ and tactics’ without laying a groundwork of community to support one another through our process of dismantling a harmful system. This reactionary politics views the system as immovable and a fact of life, when it is anything but.

He writes:

“The ideology of permanent struggle embodies some important truths about our creative resources in the face of dominations, but unless these truths are placed within a larger, more affirmative problematic, they easily become a recipe for disillusionment and nihilism. Such a larger problematic underlies the microecology of community. This approach undertakes a careful exploration of the nature and possibilities of community at the molecular level of society, and directs our hopes and efforts toward a project of regenerating human society and liberating human creative powers through engagement in that project. It sets out from the assumption that society, no matter how mechanized and objectified it may become, always remains an organic, dynamic, dialectically developing whole, the product of human creative activity in interaction with the natural world of which it is an inseparable part. Society is shaped by human thought, imagination, and transformative activity, and is not least of all, the result of the kind of primary relationships that humans beings enter into with one another.”

Here Clark describes how community and the relationships we build with another shapes society. Without community and building relationships with one another, we fall prey to the false idea that liberation is only a struggle against domination — an oppositional strategy. Except, that’s not the full picture. Liberation is never just about a struggle against opposition. Liberation is about creating a community beneficial for all, an alternative to the dominant oppression, as well as a strategy/tactics that dismantle the oppression. It’s a multifaceted approach that builds up more than it tears down.

Clark continues:

“It has been suggested that the most immediate concern in a renewed radical politics must be the creation of strong, thriving communities of solidarity and liberation. Such a form of community is one that is engaged deeply in the quest for communal freedom…”

Our freedom cannot be realized without community.

“It is the process of replacing a system of domination of the person and community through force, violence, and coercion with a system of voluntary, mutualistic cooperation. It is the process of replacing the domination of the person and community through exploitation, manipulation, and instrumentalization for the sake of power with a system of personal and communal self-realization. And it is in the process of replacing the domination of the person and community through alienation and objectification with a system based on agency, self-determination, and free self-expression.”

Chapter 6 of The Impossible Community, John Clark

In the above quote, he contrasts the Right’s dominating systems and communities against what the Left ought to be building. By building up this alternative community, we can overtake and tear down the harmful exploitive, oppressive, and bigoted systems and replace it with our more just, loving, creative, equitable, sustainable, and cooperative communities. He provides a crucial call out on progressives, who have failed to build that community-foundation:

“The respectable Left long ago decided that this discourse [of liberation] was too dangerous, and decided to label itself and its aims as ‘progressive.’ It is no secret that ‘progressive’ was invented in part as a euphemism for ‘liberal,’ the political orientation that dares not speak its name. But the term has also become a generic label for virtually anything that is vaguely to the Left, or begins to look Left in a political culture increasingly dominated by the Right. Thus, the rise of ‘progressivism’ has been an eminently regressive development. The abandonment of terms such as ‘women’s liberation,’ ‘Black liberation,’ and ‘gay [LGBT] liberation,’ has coincided with the marginalization of the remnants of what were once called ‘freedom movements,’ and the co-optation of their issues by the dominant political interests. In the end, the discourse of ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ has largely been conceded to conservatives and right-wing ‘libertarians,’ with lamentable consequences. The dominance of the negative, individualist concept of freedom as ‘being left alone’ goes almost unchallenged, while the positive, social concept of freedom as collective agency and participation in many-sided communal self-realization is seldom mentioned. It is in this context that the concept of the communities of solidarity and liberation takes on crucial importance.”

Chapter 6 of The Impossible Community, John Clark

This callout is really needed because we have ceded far too much to the Right in regards to terms, communities, and approaches to society. If we truly wish to stop the rise of fascism and its subsequent genocides and oppression, then we need to do more than just react to the bad. We need to tear down at the same time we build up our own grassroots communities.

Clark continues:

“It is essential that we look for inspiration for the emergence of such communities not only in certain neglected chapters in the long and diverse history of radical and revolutionary movements, but also in contemporary examples of grassroots, community-based social reorganizations across the globe. It is crucial that we understand how the successes of reactionary movements (and most notably those of the religious Right) have resulted in large part from their achievements in community buildings, in grassroots organizations, and in the creation of organizational forms that fulfill primary social needs. We must understand the way in which both successful liberation movements and successful reactionary ones have created small communities that embody a highly articulated set of values, ideas, beliefs, images, symbols, rituals, and practices, and integrated these communities into a large social movement.”

Chapter 6 of The Impossible Community, John Clark

Here Clark points out how the Left has neglected to examine the radical and revolutionary movements — especially those in the Global South — created a strong, liberatory community in their fight against oppression, and it is how they won those fights. Such as the ‘Arabic Spring’ that happened a decade or so ago, where strong communities of liberation toppled dictators. It wasn’t reactionary politics that did that. It was a strong community built on solidarity and liberation, that provided for one another’s primary needs, while also sharing a common foundation that intensifies that sense of belonging and collective care.

This is what we need to be building. This is what the Left desperately needs if we want to defeat the rise of the Fascist Right and their genocidal campaigns. Our foundation of care, solidarity, agency, communal self-realization, creativity, and liberation exists in the communities we build with one another, and provides us with the strength in which to stand up and tear down the systems of harm and oppression.

So let’s keep working on building that, okay?

Thanks for reading this essay.