I’ve just finished reading Lifehouse by Adam Greenfield. The essential premises are that (1) We can’t do anything much about the climate crisis at this point, we’re in for a long emergency, and (2) That local grass-roots mutual aid projects are best suited to dealing with crisis, and do contain a glimmer of hope for a more just society.
Greenfield goes through a history of mutual aid projects, looking at their effectiveness in crisis (Occupy Sandy, and Commonground in New Orleans) and at the moments of just society they have created (Rojava, the Black Panthers, Solidarity Clinics in Greece, Barcelona en Comú). His take on this is not starry eyed, as he explores the political underpinnings such as Bookchin, and isn’t shy about airing their dirty laundry.
He finishes up by proposing “Lifehouses” which are local mutual-aid drop-in centers combining a range of different resilience features for material needs, and run democratically using general assemblies. He’s proposing the very real need of these to save lives, the opportunity of this to become a relevant strategy as we move into the long emergency, and the effect on us and society in undertaking this kid of mutualist organising.
I’m inclined to agree with many of his thoughts to a degree at least. His analysis of how fucked we are with the climate crisis is probably true, although he argues that it’s freeing and clarifying to stop fighting and focus on resilience (in a solidarity based way, he isn’t suggesting survivalism). I don’t agree, I think that’ll be psychologically bad for most people, and that it’s a more human response to fight to the end. But I do agree that working on mutual aid and resilience, and starting the work of building better worlds ourselves is complimentary to that fight and gives us energy and resources.
Socialists, as you can imagine, criticise the book (eg here and here for ignoring the state and it’s ability to crush such projects. Greenfield does touch on this problem any points out the state’s repressive power and willingness to use it, but doesn’t really present any solutions.
There’s a lot of good stuff in this book. I learned a bunch about Bookchin, and I found it motivating to read such clear-eyed analysis of how bad stuff is going to get on many fronts (I know that I’m odd that way). I’m not willing to give up fighting to lower emissions or rein in billionaires, but I also agree that we need these resilience locations and programs and there’s a massive benefit to them being grass-roots and horizontally scalable. I hope that what we’re doing with RAD housing continues to incorporate some of these ideas.
If this book does one thing particularly well for me, it’s that it consistently speaks congruently with the reality of the crisis we face, which to my mind makes it more useful than 99% of the material out there.