The long way to Nowhere

Last week I started reading for my theorising side again. Anna would come to my place in the morning, we'd make yoga and meditation, then start working, she in the corner behind me, me at the desk. Because she was there in the room with me, I really remained concentrated on my reading and didn't, as would otherwise doubtlessly have happened, go up to the fridge every twenty minutes, nor check my emails, no get lost on aimless internet quests. I read and took notes. Then we would eat, and eventually Anna would cycle up to her girlfriend's - and more often than not, Johannes would then come over.
On Saturday evening, Anna and I went out to the collective cafe Tante Horst for a glass of wine and olives, and we started discussing our utopias, the paradoxes in them, and how to get there and what to do with the present system. Johannes later arrived and joined in.

Political utopias.
Anna and me at the kitchen table one afternoon. I've been reading a text on the legitimacy of political authority, trying to reconcile both the principle of fundamental equality of people and the principle of freedom with political authority.
I wonder: Does the political organisation he defends as indispensable to guarantee institutions to protect people's rights have to be hierarchical? State-like? How do we, wannabe anarchists, think of deal with the protection of people in our utopia?
I realise: In my utopia, everybody is an enlightened anarchist - meaning everybody has enough self-respect to respect everybody else, uses the means of non-violent conflict solving, refuses the idea of a small number of people deciding what is right and what isn't.
What about international affairs, Anna asks?
What international affairs... if we're talking utopia, then the utopia is everywhere, and there are no states, so no "international relations". People from various communities interact, of course - but there is no overabusive consumption pattern requiring big contracts for weapons and pipe lines and other resources.

Right, Anna says.
Right, I say.
And we both say: The problem with this is - well, let's be honest, one of the problemS - is that it's a totalitarian system. Everybody, but everybody, has to be convinced that the system is the best there is for it to work.


And then I fall into frustrated melancholy as I think: my utopia is no good. the present system must be the best there is after all.
Hang on a minute, no! It WOULD be if it weren't for the systematic exclusion of undocumented people (legal racism), their exploitation within Europe, the exploitation of people and natural resources outside of the rich world for the comfort of said rich world (that's you, and me, and you, and you too), and the repression, the hierarchy and power fixation of the system, and andand.
So back to square one. What we have has some good sides, but it's got plenty of pretty heavy rotting shit too.

And as I vent out to Johannes during our midnight walk under the clear skies, I ask, frustrated: so should I become a Realpolitikerin after all?
But no. Party politics can't be the way to get to my better world.


And Anna reminds me: we don't have to imagine that everything has been destroyed and our utopia is starting with nothing. We have to think what we want to keep of what there is.
And Johannes reminds me: We all make mistakes! Accept that you will make mistakes on the way to your utopia, cos if you can't accept that, you'll never leave the spot you're at now. Being afraid of mistakes is paralysing. There are always good excuses for not wanting to change your world.
And Edgar Morin reminds me: "Renoncer au meilleur des mondes n'est pas renoncer à un monde meilleur".

For today, my utopia looks pretty much like that.

Enter the Tina Zone

Being in the Parisian banlieue brings in a violent contrast to the experiences I've had over the previous weeks. I spent most of my time in collective, self-organised, non-hierarchical structures before arriving here - with and by people who want to create as much freedom as possible for themselves, but (necessarily) have a sense of responsibility for the community they live in.

Here, I look out on the street and see one standardised little house after another filled with a standardised four-people family, one standardised street among millions in the region, where life is spent working from Monday to Friday, taking the bins in and going shopping on Saturday, working on the garden on Sundays. Repeat. Work, consume, forget; work, consume, forget. Theses houses propagate and ingrain the image of the accepted social ideal - buying a house, having a family, getting a job, making money to get a fancy car, or a flat screen TV, eventually both, fly for one-week holidays to exotic places one will never get to know. And then die. The reproduction of the life pattern is taken for granted. The knowledge that all around, there are streets after streets of family living according to the same pattern secures the impression that There Is No Alternative, incorporates the Tina-principle. The banlieue is one vast, self-reproducing Tina-zone. A Tina-zone that encourages fear and mistrust. The family-house is the only bubble where people feel at home. Everything beyond that, perhaps with the exception of the immediate neighbours, is at best suspicious, at worst dangerous, thus destroying part of the social fabric.

In this zone it is hard to think that people could actually choose NOT to spend their life working to get money - but perhaps work for some ideal, or for one's personal development - and have a fulfilling life without all the pre-packed goods that supermarkets have to offer, with little dependence on money. Hard to think that people could want to not live in exclusive family structures but with people who share their ideals and with whom they can organise their lives.

Being here, I was remembered why I left this place, although back when I left I didn't necessarily find small-family structures socially destructive. There is no room for alternatives, no room for self-organisation here. I was thinking it's a shame and "we" (someone...) should actually do something against it, instead of fleeing. What a challenge that would be, considering how all exchanges are based on money, how there is no land to secure some food-independence, how there is absolutely nothing - no alternative book shop or centre of any kind - to create a network, a web with. It would all have to start from scratch, in an area where people wouldn't see the point of self-organisation. They find modern capitalism comfortable, and accept the fact that their comfort is based on social and environmental exploitation - if they ever think about it.

This and texts that I have been reading lately (among others on Trapese) make me more and more interested in popular education - also in theatre of the oppressed - as a way to reach out beyond the movement and initiate critical thinking, politicisation, and, modestly, step by step, cultural change and activism. It's taken me a long time to reach the door-step of activism. There's still a lovely way to go. And plenty of escapes from Tina-zones...

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.

Beautiful day!

I've just come home from a gorgeous day out - and the gorgeousnessity of it hit me as I stepped back into the flat and realised I had been outside in the sun all day, playing on the grass being a kid all over again. I spent no time at my desk, no time on the computer, no time in-doors - all these things that usually take up most of my days. And it was all play and fun, although of course for a serious matter...
I and some twenty other people trained to become Rebel Clowns... My friend M was there, and a bunch of other people I knew and was surprised to see there. We started at 11 and the agenda that our main trainer B wrote on the flip chart looked something like that:
- presentation
- games
- break
- games
- rebel clowning theory
- pause
- games

And so it went. We played monsters, we played silly walks, we played building human machines, we sang and screamed and ran and shouted and mimiked and danced and got out of breath and laughed. Then we had breaks, we ate and drank and talked. And then it started all over again. After that, a bunch of us went off to have a beer on the canal to get the last of the sun - and it felt nice to have a different entry point into people I got to know in serious contexts. It's a lot easier to feel comfortable with people after you've spent an afternoon playing kid with them. We all wondered why we didn't play anymore, why we usually met up in cafes or bars and talked instead.

It goes on tomorrow. I'm feeling super exhausted already. Mustn't forget to go vote before.

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...

the devil is round the corner

On Tuesday I had a lovely afternoon with my friend M. whom I hadn't seen in a few weeks as we had both been busy with other things. We talked a lot, had an early afternoon brunch, went for a walk in the sun, sat along the canal talking some more, and started trying to make our card for the Ulenkrug people much too late, so that we didn't finish it.
Talking with M. is always so comfortable - she is a very good listener as well as talker, she encourages people to talk, and we share a lot of common conceptions. I can imagine us two part of a life-project, an intentional community, one day. In the mean time however, one thing she said got me thinking on a track I don't like at all. She said she'd started calculating how much life cost once you're not a student anymore, and whether she would manage with a part-time job. The part-time job is where everything goes click. I decided for myself that I would not seek wage labour after my studies, nor freelance for that matter. And the solution for that is to move into an political intentional community.
M. on the other hand hasn't completely abandonned the idea of a Normal Job, although obviously she would prefer not being forced into these structures. The difference there is that she wants to stay in Berlin, and the structures for emancipating one's self from the wage system are not in place in the city. Not yet. And I started to realise that there are several projects I would like to contribute to organising, among others the ever attempted and for now abandonned "City-countryside-river project" (Stadt-Land-Fluss) - an intentional community with the river Spree linking a part in Berlin and a part in the countryside, the countryside community being in charge of producing food.

The group that was originally trying to implement the Stadt Land Fluss project eventually split up shortly after a suitable piece of land had been found and acquired north of Berlin. This piece of land is now used for another similar project producing non-commercial agricultural products (for now only potatoes and seed-oil, the project is still very new), i.e. agricultural goods that are not sold but shared and given in exchange of e.g. work on the farm or donations.

With our present Food Coop project to try and strengthen rural life in the region, I came to several ideas, including that of founding a non-commercial food-coop next year. And I just started appreciating the political energy and activity there is in Berlin, and how good it would be to contribute to the setting up of structures allowing people to live without having to separate their political principles from their private (i.e. non political) life.

And so it was that the devil promptly jumped on my right shoulder. What if I decided to stay in the city and set up such structures with M and other people? I would need a part-time job too. Part time, because full-time only robs one of precious time in exchange of unnecessary money. I don't like this idea.

of voluntary simplicity

My mood varies according to what sort of person I dialogue with. Dialogue and communication has become a central feature of my development, and conversations with people who share some of my ideals give me strength, while conversations with others leave me frustrated, feeling caged up. I feel more idealist, more radical, less patient with those who haven't reached this point in their thinking, longing for practical actions building an alternative, longing for those social networks that will give me the energy to do so.
It was good to meet up with M. again after the christmas break. I saw her on Monday evening, Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon and we had long conversations each time. We have now reached the friendship stage and we share so many conceptions of what we want our life to be that it's always heart warming to talk with her. She and a flatmate of hers have decided to launch their Project 2015 which would involve building up a linked town-countryside community. I said I'm in. She lent me all her books on Utopia research and alternative community. I like the fact that we have one book in our communal property - the history of Longo Mai we got at Ulenkrug.

Cooking dinner yesterday with psychology-student C. also reinforced my optimism. She is also a utopist who believes in alternatives to most widespread conceptions of what "normal life" is. She was enthusiastic about the idea of my seminar on political utopia, and we talked about it for a while. She thought part of it could be used as a creative workshop to let students define what their own utopia is. I find the idea interesting as it would fit in the progression of my plan - What theorists thoughts, what practicioners did, what do you want to do? It would be too much to have a whole creative session, but I'll keep the idea in mind. We discussed the theory aspect for a while, and she also reckoned the context in which utopias were developed was definitely important to be able to compare with our present situation. Unfortunately she probably won't be here next winter. I would like to get all sorts of people involved in this project, create a real dynamic around it, at least have them prepare bits of it with me. Mister Big and Important's expertise in intellectual history and linking ideas across disciplines would definitely enrich the theory part.

Sharing a belief in the possibility of creating one's own utopia isn't the only link I've found that keeps me interested in talking with people these days though. Last weekend at Sweet A's party I talked for a while with her school friend M2. [using only the initial of names to keep everyone's anonymity is probably more confusing than anything. Perhaps I should just start making up other names.] M2 isn't an explicit utopist although she does long for something other than a life spent working one's self to death for a boss. But what we most strongly shared was a common attraction for self-made everyday goods - the satisfaction one gets from eating or using something one produced. I don't really understand why it seems to senseless and ridiculous to most people. In turn, I don't understand why the idea of sitting in an office producing reports that serve no purpose for society doesn't appear absurd, ridiculous and senseless to most people. It's not that I don't think labour repartition is a good thing - it's more that I don't see the point in producing goods that do not cover anybody's real needs. And also that I don't want to specialise and have only one profession for the rest of my life. I want to be a farmer, a carpenter, a researcher, an architect, a photographer, a thinker, a traveler, an educator, a musician...

Of course, one person's Real Needs and priorities are different from another's and I'm not hoping that everybody will suddenly think "Hey cool man, let's live in the countryside and produce most of what we need!". But I do find it important that everybody sees what priorities and principles they have, and what is really important to them - and start making steps towards living accordingly. I can accept a certain amount of what others would call 'deprivation' (no tomatoes all year round! No goods that have traveled half the world? As little prepacked and overpacked goods as possible - not supporting supermarkets and big chains - ...) because to me they are not deprivations but logical consequences of my priorities - to live as little as possible off the unnecessary exploitation of others and of the environment. However, I've always felt that voluntary simplicity and partial self-sufficiency had a certain charm, even before I had any explicit political principles. I wonder where it comes from.
Here's an interesting link to keep those french speakers around occupied (thanks to my old friend Xa for mentioning the movement to me a few years ago).