The Anarchist and the Animist #4: The Ship
Greetings Friends and Neighbors,
I miss my friend Sam dearly, and so I was glad to receive this letter in the mail(electronic mail) with a photo attached. Sam has helped me to find the courage to write a book, and I thank him for that. This letter is the fourth in a series that begins back HERE. I know that Sam labored over this one, and it comes with a very strong recommendation from me. He transcribed some beauty here. I have been writing about a longing for the Old Country, and Sam writes this one from over there. Barcelona, in fact, where his wife Marina’s family lives. Take a look at the photo and you may notice that those aren’t Burlington pigeons. If you’d like to respond to Sam, you can do so by replying to this email. I will forward it on to him across the pond. He will be there for two more months writing his graduate dissertation on non-market food networks in Vermont.
With great care,
Adam
Dear Adam,
You ask me a question in your last letter. It must be important; the italics are in your original text. “If we have ample information about our complicity in patterns of ecological and social violence, why don’t we just stop participating? What keeps us from jumping ship?”
Indeed. The “ship” is the infrastructure that perpetuates this harm to humans and everyone else. It is the mix of technology and social structures that urban theorist Lewis Mumford called the Megamachine. Fossil fuels, hierarchy, money, and science. Markets, machinery, and nation-states. At my suggestion, you call the ship modernity in your letter.
This “complicity in patterns of ecological and social violence” comes with being on board the ship. The violence is clearcutting forests for strip mines and draining wetlands for factory farms. It’s caging livestock, polluting rivers, underpaying laborers, working them to death, replacing them with machines. Anything to turn the land into commodities into currency faster and more fully. Anything to get goods to consumers more cheaply. Anything for a killer deal on the thing you need.
What keeps us from jumping ship is that it is hard to even imagine alternatives and maybe impossible to construct them here in the heart of capitalism. What other option is there?
You propose that we can practice for the day when we leave the ship behind, before or while it sinks, by playing make-believe that it does not exist here and now. For example, you and I both like to go about our days pretending to live in a world without grocery stores. Sure, we still end up ingesting plenty of beings whose bodies have lined supermarket shelves—coffee or tea, plus treats that housemates and friends purchase and then share with us. Yet this choice, to inconvenience ourselves by procuring nourishment without Hannaford or Price Chopper or even the local co-op, begins to prepare us to live without such enormous industry and infrastructure. It forces us to start building makeshift rafts that might serve us (or others) someday when we live off the ship, by choice or not. Boycotting grocers is a small way in which “we just stop participating” already.
Today, I feel hyperconscious of how abstaining from shopping affects me because in the last three weeks I have done more shopping than in the previous three years combined. I am at my in-laws’ place in Barcelona. As I draft this letter, we just made it through the three-day feast that kicks off Christmas: Nochebuena (Christmas Eve), Navidad, and Sant Esteve (the 26th, a holiday here in Catalonia). In the preceding days, my spouse Marina and I were sent with long lists and little autonomy to purchase ingredients from about a dozen different small shops, market stalls, and supermarkets.
Some stops on our spree were far more fun and social than American grocery stores. The lady selling us animal bones told us how, and how not, to make broth correctly. The folks at the veggie stall from which Marina has been buying produce since she was a toddler knew the origins of each potato variety and recommended one to roast with the Christmas Eve lamb. Marina asked about their mother, who used to sell produce there.
The supermarkets we visited were not much different than those in the United States, though, and we had to go to several in search of specific products and good deals. (I guess one-stop shopping does not exist where there are scores of places to buy groceries within walking distance.) These bigger stores with multiple brands of everything imaginable evoked a familiar dizziness and shortness of breath. My head throbbed. I got grumpy. So many choices, all of them the result of harm to laborers and the land. It would be more efficient to just drink gasoline directly than burn seven calories of fuel for each food calorie that makes it here. This place is designed to get me to buy more than I’ll eat. They throw away so much perfectly good food; I saw it in their organics bin last night. City hall passed an ordinance about not giving me a plastic bag at the checkout but every item here is pre-wrapped in plastic. More than once I just walked out, overwhelmed, without having acquired what I came for.
I think these supers are displacing traditional ways of acquiring grub. Half the stalls in the neighborhood marketplace are abandoned. Everyone else shopping there has gray hair and will be dead in a few decades. We were happy to support these vendors, even when the food is more expensive here than elsewhere.
Yet, compared to my usual habits of obtaining food that’s not for sale at all, even this old market and the surrounding small shops feel weirdly limitless, coldly transactional, and disconnected from the human and non-human labors that mustered nourishment from fields. We trade money for food and go on our merry way with it, free from further obligations to any retailer, trucker, farmer, breeder, herd, field, or watershed.
Abstaining from food shopping, as you well know, forces us to organize other ways to feed ourselves. In my case, that has meant not just gardening and chickens and dumpster diving and the food shelf, but also community initiatives for producing and sharing nonmarket food. When I am in Barcelona, I take part in a group called La Xarxa d’Aliments—which means, roughly, “the nourishment network”—that involves “recycling” the leftovers that neighborhood bakeries, fruiteries, and other shops set aside for us every Tuesday, and then divvying up the spoils among the group’s participants. Back home in Burlington, I share daily lunch made from rescued ingredients with a mutual aid group called Food Not Cops. Brush Brook Community Farm was another example.
These collective projects can go further than our individual pretendings toward constructing—or learning to construct—lifeboats that might keep many people afloat in a future where much of modernity has collapsed or been dismantled. By feeding each other without charging money or doing paperwork, we are enacting a world without the ship. We relearn how to harvest from our environs and share the bounty that results. We navigate giving generously and receiving graciously instead of Venmoing each other the same $20 back and forth in hopes it might absolve us from owing anyone anything. This sort of dress rehearsal for a different reality goes by the name prefigurative politics.
My friend Shashank Poudel wrote recently—in an unpublished essay that I got to read because I happen to teach a course he took this semester—that we cannot prefigure a world without the market and the state because these dominant entities permeate our projects. Food Not Cops makes lunch from recovered food that was originally grown for market, after all. We raise money to buy tents and sleeping bags from cutthroat capitalist businesses like Walmart and Outdoor Gear Exchange and then distribute them to neighbors who are without shelter. Our project would not exist without the state, at least not in its current form, because we exist in opposition to it—hence the “Not Cops” in Food Not Cops. We are part of a worldwide movement called Food Not Bombs that scholar-participant David Boarder Giles describes as “anarchist soup kitchens.” To combine Shashank’s terms with your own, Adam, we give food away within and against the ship.
Still, I believe that pretending is worthwhile. Like I wrote you before, we are practicing the skills and habits of mutual aid, of caring for and about each other, of what you call being in a village together. Even if we cannot imagine life beyond the ship while we are still onboard, the open ocean will certainly ask us to be proficient in these practices.
For the poor and the unhoused, preparing for a ship-free existence is not a choice. The ship’s economic functioning involves throwing some people overboard, so to speak. With no familial village to keep people afloat, the water is frigid and there are sharks. In this sense, Food Not Cops already supports community members in maintaining their heads above water through recovering refuse from the extravagant vessel and fashioning rafts out of boards peeled from its hull. Perhaps I have sailed too far asea with this metaphor.
What I mean to say is this: it is the market economy and the police apparatus imposing it that keep impoverished people from accessing what they need in the first place. Burlington has sixty or so second homes sitting empty, at least a dozen vacant buildings, over one thousand units on Airbnb, and even more unused bedrooms in the oversized houses of well-off folks. The storefronts lining Church Street are teeming with down jackets, handwarmers, ibuprofen, phone chargers, pizza, cough drops, hot coffee, and every other important item that broke and homeless people lack, all aesthetically and temptingly on display. What keeps moneyless individuals from accessing these need satisfiers is that they do not have money, and products have prices. That is how markets work. All things are property, and if the things you need do not belong to you then you must buy them. If you just take what you need, someone will make a call that results in the arrival of a uniformed man with a gun and a nightstick and the authority to use them in defense of the sanctity of private property.
The ship extends hospitality to those who can afford it.
At Food Not Cops, we like to tell ourselves a story in which we provide an alternative to philanthropy and state assistance, a parallel system in which the food is a gift—solidarity not charity. We function differently than other groups that help the poor and unhoused. Unlike organizations and bureaucracies, when someone asks for something at Food Not Cops, nobody has to ask a superior for permission to use group funds for it, or ask the requester to fill out forms or show documentation that they are poor. We just go buy it for them at Walgreens across the street.
But in practice we are a complement, not a substitute, to charities and government programs: neighborliness patching up holes in our society’s tattered safety net of nonprofits, churches, and social services. We get people phone cards, backpacks, sleeping bags, and other items that no charitable program or state agency gives out. Instead of assuming that charities or bureaucracies or companies are going to relieve our neighbors’ suffering, we are trying to remember how to take care of each other as fellow human beings. That part is not pretend. It is a practice.
So my friend Shashank is right: Food Not Cops could not exist with the market and the state. We challenge markets by giving gifts, and yet rely on markets to purchase things we cannot find in dumpsters, make in kitchens, or get donated easily. We challenge hierarchical assistance programs by trying to treat each other as equals, and yet we give away food and goods in large part because we live in a maddeningly unequal society. Many of us have more than we need and others of us have unmet needs. The fact that many of today’s needy would actually be quite materially wealthy by historical standards makes the whole thing even harder to understand.
In his book A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People, activist-anthropologist David Boarder Giles argues that the global Food Not Bombs movement basically organizes the waste the market economy discards to nourish the people the market economy discards—and people who want to discard the market economy. Everything we do is of and from and because of the ship, all tangled up in the very structures we are condemning. And so life off the ship remains elusive, inconceivable, and a little frightening.
Again, I will defend our pretending. To some extent, modern capitalism only continues to exist because we all wake up every morning and make capitalism by performing our roles as wage laborers, managers, investors, accountants, shoppers, entrepreneurs, compulsive email checkers, and so on. The state—and this state of affairs—gets its power not just by coercion but by consent; true mass disobedience would cripple it. You write, “I am proposing that ‘the rulers’ we want to overthrow aren’t any more real than the ship’s captain or even the ship itself.” Performing an imaginary life without the ship while we are still on it helps overthrow the imaginary rulers inside us, even if we cannot know what life is really like off this cursed yet comfortably familiar vessel.
At Food Not Cops lunch, for one hour each day we create a marvelous micro-world, what anarchists call an autonomous zone, in which food is not for sale and there are no police enforcing property rights and other made-up rules. It feels unfamiliar. Newcomers struggle to know how to be helpful and how to get help in a space where nobody—and, in a sense, everybody—is in charge. People who want to volunteer and people who need a sleeping bag both show up and ask, “Who works here?” And we say, “Nobody” or, “Everybody.” (A police officer once asked who was in charge at a Seattle Food Not Bombs feed and someone replied, “You are!” Everybody but the cop was amused.)
Through practice, we learn how to offer what we have and request what we need directly to and from each other instead of an intermediating authority. Slowly, middle-class people learn how to treat unhoused people as full humans rather than bundles of need, how to see those folks’ outdoor beer cans and public drug use as only aesthetically distinct from the alcohol and weed and pills we have stashed back home. (Having one’s own lunchtime Labatt helps humanize that habit.) Homeless comrades, for their part, can be slow to learn how to treat their more economically fortunate friends as real friends and not just founts of resources. We are unused to being real neighbors.
I can’t stay away from Food Not Cops. I participated in probably 900 of its first 1,000 days. In the first year of the pandemic, before vaccination, I warehoused ingredients and washed dishes in unhurried solitude, pleased to be of service at home. Now, convivial cooking and cleaning crews turn work into play in several kitchens around town. At lunch, I laugh, hug, tease, listen, learn, and cry. In the summer we play instruments. In the winter there are snowball fights. I often give away things I meant to keep. I once handed a cold stranger my gloves without realizing they were my only pair. Persons who are nearly penniless do the same, routinely giving their only $5 or their last cigarette to a suffering street sister or brother. By performing a different sort of economy—that is, one without markets or bosses—we practice different skills and ways of relating to each other. We cannot know if we are prefiguring life off the ship, but we are certainly creating something I prefer to the status quo. Four weeks into my stay in Catalonia, I miss the daily feeds, the friends, the joking, even scraping accumulated black gunk from our ancient oven so it stops smoking every day when heating up lunch.
If the ship-building impulse is civilization, then what is the raft-building impulse? Is that what you mean by “village,” Adam?
I will end by insisting that, while it is true that we may have imaginary cops and bankers and bosses inside us that radicals of my persuasion work to eradicate through practice, there are real rulers. They have names and addresses. From a more-than-human perspective, they might have names like Sam and Adam. But I am referring to landlords, warlords, bank executives, oil barons, media moguls, weapons dealers, police chiefs, heirs to fortunes, the unelected heads of the U.S. Department of anything, computer-programmer billionaires who declare themselves experts on how to address disease and deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. People in these positions have the power to shut our projects down if they come to truly threaten the ship. We cannot dethrone these royals entirely just by pretending they don’t exist, right?
Give and take care,
Sam