The inspiring way of life cannot avoid the state

Reviews and culture

Author Adam Greenfield demonstrates the power of mutual aid and community networks, but they do not have the power to fundamentally change society

Hurricane Sandy devastated communities – people created inventive ways to help each other, creating a ‘house of life’

In his book Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield shows that ordinary people are able to organize and lead their own lives even in the most difficult circumstances.

Greenfield became part of the Occupy Sandy initiative during Superstorm Sandy in New York in 2012. Occupy Sandy had about 700 core members and about 60,000 volunteers. It delivered 20,000 meals a day to people in the city.

The storm flooded homes, destroyed power and communications networks and left elderly people stranded in high-rise buildings without elevators.

Occupy Sandy was very effective in providing relief to people despite the relative lack of existing infrastructure and funding. The established emergency response agencies did not respond to the needs of the people. The Red Cross apparently showed up with a van, announced that “hot soup” was available, and left without feeding anyone.

Greenfield volunteered simply because it was needed, and that can be a liberating experience. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, people organized in their local areas to deliver food and other vital supplies. Following the fascist uprisings, people came together to clean up their cities.

Mutual aid, emphasized by Greenfield, is given without questioning whether one “deserves” support. It does not create a binary between giver and receiver, where the giver is always in a position of power over the receiver. Instead, it aims to free people from these dynamics.

Importantly, mutual aid projects could empower people, harnessing their capacities to create change and giving them confidence in their own abilities.

The Black Panthers organized free breakfast programs in the 1970s. In Greece, solidarity clinics and health centers were established during the financial crisis of 2011. This prompts Greenfield’s question – could there be “a whole system of government based on the same principles that underpin the success of mutual care”?

Greenfield is influenced by the ideas of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin argued that society should be reorganized along more communist lines, with networks of participatory citizen assemblies replacing the capitalist state. He also recognized the need for a better relationship with the natural world.

The Kurdish enclave of Rojava in northern Syria tried to put Bookchin’s ideas into practice by building a society centered on localized assemblies to replace any centralized state.

But Greenfield acknowledges that while movements may describe themselves as leaderless, people always assume leadership roles. Leaders are not necessarily a problem. But the election of leaders must surely be more democratic than one that falsely presents itself as leaderless.

The fundamental difficulty of communalist movements is that, in practice, they have never been able to circumvent the existing state. The Paris Commune of 1871 was an inspiring example of direct democracy, but it was violently suppressed by government forces. Rojava was attacked by Turkish forces in 2018-19 and can no longer develop its experiment in democratic autonomy.

Greenfield envisions an entire network of what he calls Lifehouses — centers that could provide energy and distribute supplies for donations. He knows that capitalism will not provide a solution to the climate crisis, but he has a pessimistic assessment of the future.

It might be comforting to read that as the planet warms and conditions worsen, we may still find a way to take care of each other. But this last part of the book brought to mind the saying that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

We may be glad to have recourse to the houses of life “when the time of need comes.” But the human cooperation and ingenuity Greenfield describes could also be harnessed to build a political movement capable of halting climate catastrophe and confronting the capitalist state.

• Lifehouse: Taking of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield (£9.60) Available from bookmarkbookshop.co.uk