and it moves

onward and forward projects go. Went yesterday evening to a meeting of the Karlshof people who started a year ago a project for non-commercial agriculture. The idea of the meeting was to see what had been done and how we - people who want to support the project and the idea of a non-commercial life in general - could all contribute to its development. There were about 30 people there, including R, who is with me in the preparation group for the autonomous seminar on solidary economy, and lived on Karlshof for a little while.

I wrote to Karlshof a week or so ago to see whether they'd be ok with me showing up for three or four weeks in June. One of the 8 people had answered that it would be basically fine - but I still had a problem with the fact that I didn't know the people's faces and didn't feel like I'd really found the entrance point to the network. Finding the entrance key to social network is always a bit of a random process.
As I arrived yesterday, I saw a few faces I'd seen in other similar meetings, but no one I could go up to and start chatting comfortably with, until R showed up. And then, as the meeting started and we gathered topics we wanted to talk about, I started feeling more comfortable with the whole situation, more like I was in the right spot. I mentionned the Buschberghof example near Hamburg, who do community supported agriculture, and in fact nobody knew about it but many found it interesting, among others to have as an example of how such projects CAN function, in spite of people's scepticism.
We had a small break and I tried to play table football with V, the Karlshof guy who had replied to my email, before I revealed myself as the email writer. I was embarrassingly bad at the game, but it didn't matter too much. V stated again that coming over wouldn't be a problem, that I should just send an email with an arrival date.
I talked with another guy who knows of a similar project near Madrid. It would be really interesting if I could get the contacts and go there too. Another girl from Poland was also interested in the Madrid project and would be going this summer. We exchanged contacts, and perhaps we could go down together. My months of freedom are really taking shape, it feels great.

As for the Karlshof non-commercial agriculture project - the Berlin people are going to meet for a leisurly self-organised brunch in two weeks' time to discuss how we can organise the distribution in the city and see what else we can do.

I exchanged details with a few people and left to meet up with L, who has just come from Paris for the weekend, at the McPlanet congress. Kath was also there but left just before I arrived, as she was too tired. We seem to be experts at sending one another sms and making out meeting points but then not managing to make it to the meeting. Was good seeing L again, as well as many of the other people from the berlin environmental scene that I've been seeing randomly a few times a year for the past several years. I used to find it uncomfortable beeing amidst these groups because I do not belong to the organisation they are all in and I used to feel excluded by the perceived strong group identity. Now none of this matters anymore.

Full day again today - chaotic meeting of the seminar preparation group this afternoon, and several events in the evening. In a way, I'm started to be as socially busy as I was during my erasmus semester in 2001 - which is good because it makes me feel a lot more at home in Berlin, and wanting to come back to continue working on the projects I'm getting involved in. But I'm also getting a little scattered. Oh well, some balance will come in.

the long march to emancipation

Trying to free one's self from the overdomineering market structures is a long and complex process. It starts with a moment of criticism linked to a particular sector or product. Some examples one can take as a starting point of unhappiness with the market could be

• Software: "I dislike Windows because they've systematically and unfairly gained a monopolistic position leaving millions dependent from them";
• Food production and distribution: "I dislike large supermarkets because they use their overly powerful position to force the agricultural sector to move towards gigantic farms, pushing prices down and buying only large quantities, disregarding environmental and social consequences";
• Labour market: "I dislike the labour market because I am made to compete with others in order to sell my working force and my time for absurd activities that I often do not find relevant, or even positive, for society."
  

Other examples could include more generally political institutions, hierarchies at the work place or else where, the production of clothes and other consumer goods, electricity production etc. - anything that we are made dependent of but have negative social and/or environmental impacts.

From then on, if the person formulating the critique wants to live according to their ideas, there starts a long process of emancipation. As I'm experiencing it, it is a Very Long Learning Process. The first step to this emancipation starts within: Deciding and slowly accepting which goods and which habits one can do without. I suppose most people have a lag like I do, a lapse of time of varying length separating the moment of realisation (I shouldn't buy that much meat, it contributes to deforestation and supports industrial food production) and the moment when the perception of the problem has been internalised so that the decision can actually become a personal priority, destroying the original perceived need (in this case moving from "I shouldn't" to "I don't even think about buying meat").

My march to emancipation is slow but has been making steady progress, especially in the area of consumerism and waste production. I not only do not buy meat anymore (or on those super rare occasions I do, it comes from regional organic farms), I've stopped eating meat outside of my flat as well (I had absurdly continued to eat meat at the Uni-cafeteria or whenever I ate out - meat that was sure to come from damaging industrial production). Nor do I eat fish. I've stopped buying anything that came in overly excessive and unnecessary packaging, such as sweets, yoghurt pots (I buy yoghurt in re-usable glass jars or even in re-usable glass bottles), pre-packed vegetables. All drinks (juice, milk) come in re-usable bottles. I obviously do not use plastic bags to carry my shopping home (my organic shop doesn't have any, one has to come with one's own cloth bag). I have stopped buying products that have travelled half the world. I've been getting electricity coming from renewable, non-nuclear, non-coal sources for the past two and a half years. And now that I'm joining the food coop, I will use own containers to get detergents and cleaning products as well.

It did take me several years to reach this point but I have internalised all decisions so that I can count on the sustainability of my new habits. But there's still loads I could and can and will do. I've been trying to install Ubuntu on my computer for the past several weeks (unfortunately my CD-drive started malfunctionning just as I got the idea, so I've not been successful so far), and I've only now started to be more consistent about using OpenOffice instead of word. Working with the group for regional agriculture is also part of these efforts - it's obviously a lot more demanding to try organise alternative logistical structures for food distribution than just rely on those that already exist. But that in itself cannot be the justification for not doing anything (to get back to the slavery example - it was a lot easier to rely on the economic system functioning thanks to the slave trade rather than try set up something else). I've decided to be a lot more stringent as regards avoiding planes and planning my travels. And then there are all those other areas I need to free myself from, such as the unnecessary and counterproductive job, but also all the knowledge I need to gather in order to be more independant from anonymous opaque structures - repairing, doing, producing. Not that I want to be able to do everything that I need myself, or that I find dependence in itself bad. As I said before, I'm perfectly fine with labour repartition - but I'd like to have some links, non-anonymous ties with the networks that are in charge of producing what I use.

And why did I write all this? Not because I want everybody to feel guilty about their waste-producing, environmentally and socially destructive behaviour. I'm in it with you. If everyone lived like me, we'd still need 1,4 planets. But I do want to push people to reflect just how much destruction they are willing to accept as being done on their behalf, and just how far they are willing to go to bring their acts closer to their ideas. And then we can perhaps swap tips...

En attendant le 22 avril

en voilà une nouveauté, je vais essayer de me plonger dans le bain français en attendant les élections. Donc, et comme mon français s'est largement détérioré au cours des dernières années, et pour des raisons plus aléatoires et instinctives qu'explicites et logiques, je vais, en attendant le 22 avril, et surtout le 6 mai, écrire en français.
Doux jesus sainte mère. Quelle folie. Elle s'en repentira. Et elle ne tiendra sûrement pas le coup, de toute façon. On va bien rigoler.

Except yours

I spent all of yesterday afternoon at my institute's library reading John Burnheim's practical proposal to reform parliamentarism towards anarchism via what he calls Demarchy (meaning more participative and less bureaucratic government structures). He is on the programme of my interesting class on Demokratietheorie and I'm glad I took this class this semester with this professor - one of the last to present himself as belonging to the marxist-hegelian tradition. The texts we have are often very close to Utopian thinking - in the sense that thinkers, authors, tried to make proposals for political structures to offer "real" democracy, as opposed to the Parliamentary Elitocracy or Oligarchy.

I keep being bothered by that one line my ex boss said back in November when I told her about this class (she'd asked me what I was doing this semester). "Nah this is where we see how far from reality theory can be..." If there is one area where theory has a visible and direct impact, it is the thinking of institutions and the organisation of society. Where do our constitutions come from? I was too baffled by her remark to react appropriately and thus keep the remorse of not having helped her develop a more open and creative conception of "Democracy".

I took a break from my reading, note taking and thinking, and went upstairs to the cafeteria for a coffee. It turned out I didn't have enough money on my cafeteria card, nor were the 50 cents left in my pocket sufficient to cover the coffee. The lady hesitated but seeing as there was little she could do with the coffee, she told me to be careful next time and let me go. I put on my Most Embarrassed Face and thanked.

I chatted with two guys who were in my project class last year. One is now unenthusiastically writing his final thesis and can't wait to start working "and get some money". He agreed that most of the careers we aimed for were solely based on social status, and I said I had abandonned all interests in that and didn't want to have a job. They looked at me funnily and said I'd have to find a way of financing myself though. I gave the example of Longo Mai, and the more silent guy eventually said that was the sort of thing he could imagine doing too. The first one said it did sound ideal, but experiments weren't his thing. "Growing up in East Germany was enough in terms of experiment for me". I found that a weird conception of "experiment" (isn't our present system also an experiment?) but said I could understand that not everybody wanted that sort of lifestyle.

We got to talk about our Project papers. I couldn't really remember what they had chosen as topics, nor could they remember what the other one had done. Both excused themselves by saying there'd been so many presentations of research projects that they really couldn't remember any of them. Then they both looked at me and said "actually, except yours". They'd found it'd sounded so concrete, well done and interesting, and I'd shown so much enthusiasm, that they had been both impressed. I was flattered. No need to immediately mention the fact that the paper didn't exactly turn out how I'd planned.

Turn left

I went to a podium discussion tonight at the Latin America Institute with extra-parliamentary German academic idole Uli Brand and a woman I'd never heard of before, Juliana Ströbele-Gregor. She is more into details, he's into concepts. The discussion was on "left" wing movements in Latin America between State and emancipation. There were all sorts of thoughts and ideas that I found interesting, but one question suddenly jumped up to the front of my continuous string of questions floating in my head:

How do people become left wing?

And by left wing, I don't mean institution-loving socialdemocrats, nor do I mean pessimist frustrated authoritarian revolution-loving left intellectuals. I mean experimentierfreudige people geared towards emancipation, solidarity, openness, and generally believing in the creative potential of humans to build an alternative, a better society.
Another one of those biographical socio-psychological political questions I keep having. Suggestions welcome.