The Anarchist and the Animist #2: Mutual Aid
Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
If you missed last week’s Letter, Radical Hospitality, you might want to read, or listen, to that one first. That piece was a real letter to my comrade Sam Bliss, to which he promptly and eloquently responded. That response is included below. I was stirred by his letter to the point that sleep has proven elusive. The long nights are for writing, it seems. Look for a third installment in the next couple of days. Until then, I am honored to introduce a man of deep and abiding conviction. And funny, to boot.
With great care, Adam
Dear Adam,
Your letter-in-a-newsletter merited several readings and provoked much thinking. I too am quite excited to be accompanying you on this journey exploring the contours of what you’re calling radical hospitality from our anarchist and animist perspectives. You and I share the experience of spending the pandemic giving away food in projects that are not charities, or even organizations.
In my line of work—not employment, mind you, but work—we say solidarity not charity. This is the slogan of mutual aid. You have inspired me to think of mutual aid as neighborliness. And perhaps radical hospitality describes caring for those who live alongside you as a vocation, giving what we have until our very bodies are devoured like those of the generous ramps in springtime, offering themselves to the insatiable modern appetite for all that is wild, delicious, special, or consumable.
Radical hospitality, then, is a direction in which to orient ourselves rather than an attainable state or a feasible action. It is, like animism is for you, a practice. Anarchism is the same.
Your story about interacting with the woman who was to clean your parents’ motel room ends in a series of unanswered questions. In this public yet intimate correspondence, I do not know if you had intended for me to respond to them. Since they are the sorts of questions one could write several books on without coming to anything resembling an answer, I will only concur with your assertion that these are important things to consider: our relations, others’ labors, reciprocity, and so on.
One question, though, deserves some response. If the money I pay makes work for you, serving me, then I am not doing you a favor. That’s backwards. You’re the one laboring for me. Doing the hotel employee a favor would be to clean her home. Is that what you mean by radical hospitality?
When I read your letter, I bristled at the parallel you drew between your thirty-second limit to how long you can fully acknowledge the animacy of the landscape’s plants and stones, and my hours-long limit to how long I can treat my unhoused friends like real friends. Then today, just after we pack up Food Not Cops lunch and begin pushing a handcart full of leftovers and supplies back home—a transition that happens daily at two in the afternoon—a woman approaches asking for something. Call her Patty. She’s an acquaintance.
“Hi Patty,” I say. She went right into it.
“I need a sleeping bag. I’m so cold.” Patty’s been sleeping outside.
I cannot get her a sleeping bag right now. We don’t have any to give. I have the money but not the moment to go buy her a consigned one on Church Street. I need to walk back with two new orientees and teach them how we package leftovers and clean up after lunch. And there’s this guy Andrew with us, whom I just met, who I need to show around because he might caretake the Food Not Cops donation station infrastructure while I’m gone this winter. And I have to get out to the garden to harvest some roots and prepare the ground for the snow that’s forecasted for tonight, the snow that Patty will have to try to sleep through without a sleeping bag, in part because I am so busy making sure Food Not Cops can run smoothly that I lose sight of the purpose of the project, which is to get Patty a sleeping bag so she does not have to be so damn cold.
She does not have a phone number for me to let her know if someone else could get her a bag. She is not free to walk with our little cleanup crew to my house, where we do the dishes. She says she will come by in fifteen minutes. She does not.
Now I’m warm underneath a comforter, writing this, and she is probably outdoors, or hopefully crashing on somebody’s couch or floor. It is poor people who end up helping poor people when they really need it. Food Not Cops, by building cross-class relationships, helps resources flow from those who have plenty to those who have unmet needs, but we will only approach radical hospitality when nobody sleeps outside against their will, when our couches and floors are filled with the slumbering bodies of our neighbors.
I feel raw and vulnerable admitting that I have this several-hour limit, that I restrain my experience of siblingly solidarity with suffering comrades just to refrain from totally breaking down. It’s selfish. I erect the barriers of class, of “I’m inside my house and you don’t have one.” I don’t even realize I do it. It’s automatic. I protect myself from others’ poverty, lest it envelop me too.
I fear that ignoring homeless folks, like everyone else does, appears less cruel than forming friendships with impoverished people whom I could help far more than I am willing to. I fear I am only an anarchist outside the house.
I suppose I should define anarchism. It is standard to begin by clarifying that anarchy, from its Greek roots, means “without rulers” and is not about chaos or violence, even if most anarchists do appreciate a justified riot. Like you imply in your letter, Adam, anarchism to me involves recognizing the dignity and wholeness of everybody. Anarchists question the existence of jobs, like hotel maid, in which lower-class humans clean up the messes of upper-class ones. Are the activities of the moneymaking elite so vital that others should do their chores so they can fully dedicate themselves to their desk jobs and their after-work recreation?
But anarchism is more about freedom than equality. It’s the tendency to work toward eradicating command-and-obey relationships (outside of the bedrooms of people who do that sort of thing consensually, of course). Like animism or radical hospitality, it is not an end point; it’s an eternal struggle. We will not eradicate the government and its military one day and transition to living in a stateless society—revolutions in the past have tended to create stronger rulers, not weaker ones. Instead, anarchism is the practice of acting, as best we can in the current hellscape, as if we were already free.
For me, that’s giving away food. Sharing lunch among friends whose circumstances diverge greatly. Organizing without anyone in charge. Bringing, from your catering job, leftovers that your manager told you to toss out. Raising unfenced chickens in downtown Burlington. Acknowledging that my “unemployed” alcoholic neighbors might have more to teach me than I, a teacher at the university, have to teach them.
Patty is back. It’s eleven at night. I am outside to grab some bread from the Food Not Cops donation station—really it is more of a regifting depot—that sits right across the driveway. (Our eight-person household receives many gifts of food by hosting the receiving and warehousing infrastructure for this mutual aid project.) Patty has organized the public pantry to look presentable, work that must be done daily. She tells me she just wanders around at night, afraid she will die of exposure if she sleeps.
I go inside to grab her a blanket. It belongs to a housemate. They better not care if it doesn’t come back. I return to the donation station. Patty and I talk. She mentions that if she could just get ten dollars she could have a place to stay for the night. That strikes me as weird. Where can one get a room for ten dollars? I realize that this is where Burlington’s typical kindhearted liberal will stop and withhold the money, or give it away judgingly, sure that Patty will spend it on a soothing hit of her preferred substance. And then, I’ll add, the kindhearted Burlington liberal will return to their comfortable home to imbibe their own intoxicant of choice, wine or weed or Xanax or painkillers or Pornhub or Netflix or NPR. Mine’s beer. I think Patty’s into beer too.
“They give them needles and crack pipes now,” Patty says, referring to harm reduction programs that get safe supplies to drug users. “Why can’t they just give them the drugs, too, so I don’t get my stuff stolen all the time?” She’s implying that people steal to sell and then get high. People without houses are easy targets.
“I wish we could all get together and steal from the rich,” I say. “That would be more lucrative, and righteous.” But the rich have locked doors and surveillance systems and they mostly live miles away and the police exist more or less to protect their hoardings of wealth. So instead, people who need ten dollars as fast as possible to escape excruciating withdrawal symptoms just nab an unguarded bike or phone or sleeping bag and then sell it to someone else who’s desperate, or trade it directly for drugs.
I give Patty a twenty. Hopefully that’s good for two nights indoors. When someone asks for ten dollars at lunch the next day, I learn that at one of the motels where people with state vouchers for temporary shelter are put up, they are charging ten dollars a night to house one additional person in your room. The State of Vermont pays hotels and motels more than $100 a night to provide emergency shelter to someone who is otherwise unhoused. Those lodging establishments, I’m told, do not pay staff to clean their rooms or make their beds, as they do for non-voucher customers like your traveling parents, Adam.
I look forward to discovering where this dialogue leads us. I hope this contribution sparks something in you, as yours did for me.
Take care,
Sam
Leaning in, listening ... really listening.
Thank you Sam