regrowing communal life – part 1 (bifold zine)
(Re)Growing Communal Life:
Preparing the Soil for Revolution
by Cybele
Introduction
“Nature is an elastic wall that multiplies the velocity of the stones we throw at it. Death doesn’t bounce back in the same proportion, but rather enforced. There is a war between the system and nature. This confrontation can’t take either nuances or cowardice. Either you are on the side of the system, or on that of nature. Either with death, or with life.”
– Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano
Growing the Soil
There is a phrase popular in organic gardening: “Don’t grow the plant; grow the soil.”
Injecting raw unmediated chemicals – synthetic fertilizers – into soil to expedite the growth of crops is a ubiquitous practice in industrial agriculture. It is highly destructive, and leads to a continual degradation of the soil quality with every crop cycle, dwindling the amount of arable land on our planet. This adversarial sensibility towards nature aims to sidestep all the natural cycles which encourage healthy plant growth by treating agriculture as an engineering problem, rather than a natural process driven by interlinking, interdependent communities of microbes, fungi, insects and other friends, which collectively have the effect of maintaining a stable, healthy chemical balance in the soil for plants to prosper in season after season, year after year, generation after generation. To “grow the soil”, we must instead be stewards of the cycles which maintain this balance, promoting the health of each component of the community of Lifeforms comprising the soil.
This fundamental principle in gardening is a microcosm of an ecological sensibility, and can be viewed as a lens applicable to other spheres of Life as well. The soil for social revolution, too, must be cultivated. With impending ecological catastrophes looming over us all; with the myriad social crises we contend with today; with the condition of our collective psyches being drained by the present order of capitalist modernity, leaving so many of us wilted and unable to gather ourselves enough to fight back against our degradation, we need to examine the conditions that yield healthy, resilient communities prepared to stand up to the ravenous machine of global capital, which threatens to bleach the soil of this planet beyond all hope of redemption – both literally and figuratively.
We must grow the soil.
Our Blood / Impulse of Resistance
An appropriate place to begin this examination may be an analysis of Communal Life.
Communal Life is central to what it means to be human. As Lifeforms, we seek and beget other Life. As social animals, we seek community bonds. Not only does it instill in us a sense of unity and purpose, it is also necessary for our stability and survival. It is what makes us human.
In short, Communal Life is the web of formal and informal social bonds and relations of mutual aid which act as a wellspring for material stability, collective prosperity, and a personal sense of purpose in Life. It is the natural inclination of humans and the foundation of our being. It is natural evolution’s striving towards ever-elaborating complexity, creativity, autonomy and interdependence expressed in human association. It is the condition of indigenous societies and that of our ancestors of the Neolithic Era. It is the impulse that has driven the continuous lineage of resistance against social hierarchy ever since its inception in gerontocracy and patriarchy many millennia ago. And it is the sacred fountain of hope and promise for our continued existence in a future worth living in, and fighting for. Central to it are democratic decision-making, a mutual sense of responsibility to ensure every community member’s needs are met, and assertion of collective autonomy & community resilience in the face of adversity.
Synthetic Blood
There is no more potent eviscerator of Communal Life than capitalist modernity: the hegemonic cultural climate of capitalism, founded on endless personal accumulation, thoughtless consumption and rugged individualism, it is its polar opposite. As opposed to — indeed, in opposition to social bonds and communal responsibility, it erodes these ties and instills in society ever greater degrees of alienation, atomization, material insecurity, hopelessness and meaninglessness, projecting an empty world of solipsistic cogs in an absurd and futile machine.
A material and ideological system founded on limitless growth, greed, selfishness and ever-increasing economic stratification, capitalist modernity has been chipping away at this heart of society at breakneck pace for nearly two centuries, the climactic iteration of the long legacy of social hierarchy. The result is the current state of our society, where love is anathema, principles of mutual aid are forgotten and supplanted by exclusively transactional relations, and our very notion of meaning in Life has been replaced with a vapid ideal of incessant empty consumerism through the false images and deceit of advertisement.
The organic lifeblood of our society has gradually been substituted for a sort of synthetic blood, rendering us spiritually anemic and unable to understand ourselves or each other, much less organize against the perpetrators of this monumental scheme. If we desire to survive, to defend the essence of our humanity, to reclaim both collective material well-being and a personal sense of meaning and purpose, we must protect, nurture, embody and regrow Communal Life from the ground up in the face of forces which aim to defile it completely.
Digging Up Revolution
With each passing day, the consequences of capitalism’s ravaging of the Earth become increasingly palpable, and in our alienated, soulless, overworked society drained of meaning, direction, care and hope, it is apparent now more than ever that we are also in a battleground which mirrors and intertwines with the struggle for a materially just and ecologically harmonious society: a personal and spiritual struggle to re-establish the cultures and modes of interpersonal relations of our ancestry in a new, regenerated form suitable for our own present-day contexts. In other words, to use Abdullah Öcalan’s terminology, we must not only revolutionize the material culture of our society, we must also revolutionize its ideological culture – not only its material basis, but its qualitative experience.
This revolution is as necessary for our spiritual survival as it is for success in our material revolution — as we prefigure the dual power structures of the society we’re fighting to create, we must also prefigure the culture of this society, from its values to its customs, arts, aesthetic sensibilities, rituals, relationships, roles and institutions. It is concerned as much with drawing from our past and learning from the indigenous peoples who have held onto this ancestral knowledge as it is boldly forging something radically new; a future founded on the rediscovery of our past.
It’s true. The topsoil of our society has become desertified. But we must not underestimate the land we are on. Deep down, beneath the arid and vacuous sands of capitalist modernity, lies our rich and elegant legacy: the Neolithic Era; Communal Life. Our assignment, then, is to dig up and reestablish what hierarchical civilization has spent millennia trying to bury.
Dancing Around Death
All around us are consumerism’s traps, synthetic will-o’-wisps which aim to seduce us into backsliding into comforting delusions and idle diversions which render us more like inert minerals than Lifeforms with agency, or things which might question and challenge power structures. We must dance around these pitfalls of consumerism engineered to distract us from the path of Life, so that we don’t slide down the path of lifelessness and become its passive, uncritical co-perpetrators.
The tension between capitalist modernity and Communal Life is irreconcilable. Every action we perform and every choice we make is an affirmation and contribution to either one or the other, from the way we pass our time to the food we eat to the things we seek to the means of acquiring the items we need. As Zapatista Subcomandante Galeano says, “Either you are on the side of the system, or on that of nature. Either with death, or with life.”
So, how do we side with Life in capitalism’s war on nature and, by extension, Communal Life? We must ask ourselves this question in every decision we make, however seemingly minute or grand, if we truly desire to cultivate a radical ecological counterculture of the ecological society we’re building. It is an open-ended question with a plurality of valid answers in different material and social contexts, but here, we will explore it in some broader strokes and also discuss some specific examples and implementations, to set our sights on the elusive horizon of utopia and align ourselves with Life in this decisive struggle.
In Part I, we will begin our exploration of some of the potential elements and characteristics of this project by discussing the moral heart of Communal Life: Radical Care.