I hope you’re on the mend. I credit the jokes, outrage, and commiseration of my coworkers with maintaining sanity this week.
I made a list of helpful articles at the end of the post, although Daniel woke me up last night because I was “whimpering,” so perhaps we all need a little break from the information-bearing screens.
I assumed Harris would win based on…nothing. A vague calculation that the youth/ Boomer liberals/ educated working class/ union members/ racial and sexual minorities outnumbered hillbillies and billionaires. Or that most Americans, as evidenced in the comment sections of true crime videos, want lawbreakers stringently punished. Or that Donald Trump as a concept is boring and dated, and as a person is senile and execrable.1
In any case, most of us now find ourselves with civic disaster and civic involvement top of mind, so let’s have a series on beautiful and enlivening social experiments, starting with ‘library socialism.’
The phrase was coined in 2019 by Shawn and Aaron of Srsly Wrong in this episode, which has highly imaginative twists and skits, genuinely good ideas, and also a kind of softness and fluidity (like the opposite of a harangue or the finger-pointing of ideologues) that we need right now. It’s not cynical, nor is it hand-wringing, nor abstract and hopelessly theoretical, nor trotting out a dull pragmatism. If the podcast were an astrological sign, it would be Libra.
We all know how public libraries work: you provide proof of residency, get a library card, and are then permitted to check out any available book from the collection of books the library owns. There’s many other public goods available: bathrooms, computers, printers, internet, the specialized knowledge of librarians, interlibrary loan, quiet and temperature-controlled study areas, classes and workshops. The Newburgh library had a seed library inside an old card catalog—library within a library!
Tool libraries are less common but not entirely unheard of—check out this probably not comprehensive but still very cool map of tool libraries around the world.
Here’s Asheville’s tool library, thriving and providing all sorts of useful things as they rebuild their city.
Okay, so I’m jazzed about the content of this podcast, but podcasts are not my favorite format, so I keep turning it off to listen to sounds of the late autumn countryside (leaves crunching, apples falling, turkey vultures flapping) and indulge in elaborate fantasies. Why can’t there be libraries for…everything? Of course there will be questions of where objects are housed, how they’ll be maintained, and who facilitates the lending.
But doesn’t a shoe and clothing library sound dreamy? Isn’t Air BnB a library of sorts corrupted by capitalism? What if the dwellings were nationalized or the site demonetized, and all those homes became accessible to be ‘checked out’ for free? I’m remembering a trip I took with Chad during which we couch-surfed with a couple in Newport, Rhode Island. It was somewhat nerve-wracking to anticipate staying overnight with strangers outside of any network of acquaintances, but they cooked us dinner, we brought wine, and it turned into a delightful, convivial experience. So I did a search and found this site, BeWelcome, which appears to be completely free and volunteer run.
My God, are the seeds of utopia already planted?
As a lower middle class person who fell to the level of the working poor, and has now dropped below the poverty line, I can assure you there’s almost nothing worth privately owning. I still comb Zillow for little cabins with mountains attached, it’s hard to break the back of that most persistent of fantasies, as though owning a home could subvert mortality. Outside of cities with good public transit and bike shares, private transportation is important. But just think of all the things we use for only a short time in the span of a year or even the span of a lifetime—kitchen appliances like a breadmaker, everything to do with a child’s infancy, tents and camping equipment. I have a ladder I used a couple of times to hang curtains, a cat fountain Miloš and Colette have rejected, a humidifier and air purifier bought for a different home with different interior problems. They’re in perfect condition, and I’d be only too delighted to donate these items to a shared library of things. I can give them away using Craiglist or Freecycle, but it’s the prospect of possibly needing them once in the coming years that prevents me from doing so, and I think many people have attics, basements, and garages full of such suppositional items. This has ecological implications, the difference between the manufacture of one shared lawnmower per block versus one for each household.
I still have half the podcast to listen to, and there are even tantalizing new words like ‘usufruct,’ to unpack, but I’m thinking of another example, a woman with a chronic health condition who posted on our neighborhood Facebook page suggesting everyone with health concerns band together to help with dog-walking, grocery shopping, rides to town, and the like. Isn’t this like a lending library of labor? Of course it’s just neighbors helping each other and doesn’t have to be systematized or labeled COMMUNISM or whatever. But, what if….
“Library Socialism changes the relationships fundamentally between human beings. Property relations are relations between human beings. For me to own the pen I'm holding doesn't mean that me and the pen have the relationship. It's me and everyone else having a relationship about the pen. Pens are inanimate. They can't have relationships. The reason I specify that is that the problem of inequality and property relations is a social problem. It's the relationship between people. And the transition from this society to the next is primarily a change in the relationship between people.”
Hot damn! I think this makes me so happy because it turns the whole world into an intentional community. It changes the orientation of life from me struggling and striving to prove that I should be allowed to live in a house and eat food to everyone having the basics and everyone sharing the extras. I hope you don’t mind if I spend some more time in the coming weeks exploring these ideas.
I wonder if part of the heartbreak of the outcome of the election (forgive me for wording this clumsily) is that many of us are eager to give up the fantasy of a private pleasure garden for greater collective freedom and safety. We only ask that wealthy liberal Democrats cling less tightly to their roles and possessions, and lean into the humanism they espouse, that Republicans cling less tightly to policies of dominion and lean into Christ’s teachings. When the rubber hits the road (is this the expression?), most of us are moral, most of us want to help, most of us want to reduce suffering and live in a world that is kind and just. I’m not sure why this only becomes fully realized and apparent during emergencies, but if any of you have read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, let us know her observations.
Centering or cathartic post-election media:
Heather Cox Richardson:
Nathan Shuherk:
Beck:
Olurinatti:
Peco:
Amod Sandhya Lele:
˚ · . ig: mjbuffett
˚ · . my favorite books: bookshop
˚ · . letters to the editor: thelaboringheart@gmail.com
˚ · . one-time contribution: @moodclimate
˚ · . if wishes were horses
late Middle English (in the sense ‘expressing or involving a curse’): via Old French from Latin execrabilis, from exsecrari ‘to curse’