Margriet Smulders, Fruits de Rococco
I woke up this morning wild-eyed after a few hours of broken sleep, downed two stiff cups of tea, applied for ten Trader Joe’s jobs in the NYC metro area, submitted my name for the waiting list of a Portland co-housing apartment complex, wrote and called no fewer than a thousand landlords in Ithaca, read that Cornel West is running for president, raved to my long-suffering comrade for 90 minutes under the summer sun. Now I’m gently crashing, the softest wave on Manderley’s forbidding beach.
There were seven cops and a police dog roaming the backyard, but they’ve since been driven off by a hail storm. I got an apartment in Ithaca and two job interviews in NYC at the same time. Some orbiting rock must have stationed direct because things are happening.
I love my 12-step fellowship. We collectively debride our wounds, and it doesn’t solve everything, but it surely solves the agony of terminal uniqueness. In some ITAA meetings we read from tech-critical books like The Chaos Machine, but more often it’s simply the AA or NA daily reflection. I laughed with great gusto at this one:
I’m more than figuratively bankrupt, but we’re here to seek life-promoting solutions. “Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us,” having attained class consciousness, having moved away from tech and towards our fellows, having exercised reasonable frugality and reciprocal mutual aid, we may still find we need to earn money. How then to do so in a way that harms ourselves and others as little as possible?
Marlee Grace wrote this great essay, “The annoying act of telling people what you do.”
“I am ok with being a cheesy pep talk queer cheerleader on the fringe of the art world. I am ok with being a morning pages head who loves to talk about permission and writing. I am learning to love telling you a million times about everything I do because I hope it reminds you you can to. Remind you both that you can do the thing you do and that you can share about what you do. The people who want to be in your orbit will find you. And the people who think you are too annoying will leave.”
It’s wonderful if we can do more things in the wide world, but okay if we have to resort to the world wide web. Wonderful if we can make a living by making things with our hands, but okay if we revert to waged labor. The economy may collapse one day, but it hasn’t collapsed today. The grid may go down one day, but it’s not down now. We’re being realistic about the problems at hand without cracking under the pressure of totalitarian fearmongering. One of the fun consequences of ITAA is that I play a game of figuring out how to do something I used to do with a screen without a screen. Consulting the condensed OED, scrounging a deck of cards from the kitchen drawer, setting a battery-operated alarm clock, writing in a notebook. I recently discovered a movement of people teaching marketing without social media (how swiftly we return to the old ways!)—on a podcast, of course, but that’s okay. This is a delicate weaning. It’s tempting to be a bankrupt idealist, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to wash dishes for the rest of my life because I don’t want to market a newsletter (or whatever fine artifact of expression).
I now understand that the coercive control at my old workplace caused me to become psychologically regressed; it’s taken nine months to recover. And while here acknowledging a lifetime of submitting to the ruling class and ideology as dangerous to our psyches and society, I just signed a lease for a market-rate apartment and accepted a full-time job—though at least I’ll be part of a bargaining unit. I’m only a couple months from homelessness; fear and isolation drove me back into the arms of convention.
But it’s okay. We’ll find our allies and create a parallel polis in good time.
“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system [and who has] no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.”1
I found an old list and noticed that perhaps only the last two entries are immediately doable, all the others require dedicated cooperation, considerable capital, and/ or an application/ initiation process.
live in a vehicle
join a monastery
get or create a remote job and live as a ‘digital nomad’ in a place with a lower cost of living
expatriate to a place with a social safety net/ free healthcare/ low cost of living
unionize
buy an apartment building with friends
buy land with friends
join an income-sharing intentional community
start or join a worker-owned business
go to church or join a mutual aid org
grow food in one’s yard or on public land
The alternatives may not be easy, immediate, or all-encompassing, but they’re certainly no harder or riskier than grinding it out in some corporate, academic, or factory lockup. A friend said something like—radical politics and entrepreneurship can’t be reconciled, but we have to reconcile them anyway. I watched Peter Santenello’s tour and was struck by the fact that the East New York projects are a close-knit co-housing community. With community gardens, a common house, and formal internal governance, they’d be well on their way. Even without those things they implement informal internal governance, neighborliness, and small-scale entrepreneurship. A man grilling corn and chicken on the street explains that for every plate purchased, he gives one away.
We owe each other something, but it’s hard to say exactly what. I was discussing Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save with a friend, and she suggested that those of us one disaster away from living under a tarp shouldn’t be giving our last lone dollar to build a well or buy a mosquito net. Part of me agrees, part of me doesn’t. Isn’t this the reason we have a society, to take care of redistributing funds? Isn’t this why a third of my paycheck has disappeared for twenty years? Can’t the state or the rich or nonprofits staffed by salaried employees take care of it? But here on the ground where society isn’t working, we have to stop theorizing and yank the drowning child from the pond, grill an extra drumstick for our neighbor.
“Parallel structures could grow in unnoticed, small-scale, day-to-day work, things we mostly think of as non-political, which could then also give citizens a sense of independence, freedom, and agency in their daily lives.”2
I’m starting Kristen Ghodsee’s Everyday Utopia for next week if you’d like to read along. You may know her as the author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. See you then!
The Ron Finley Project sent me a ‘seed bill’ and free access to MasterClass. The request form is here.
Della Duncan, alternative economist and host of the Upstream podcast, offers right livelihood coaching by donation. I’m starting at the end of June. Find her contact information here.
This is one of the most delicious curries I’ve ever eaten, and the ingredients (including several cups of brown rice) cost under $5.
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Václav Havel
https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/2021/9/5/parallel-polis-czech-native-american