Do we build community or do we engage with it?

Finding the best antidote to technofascist capitalism in philosophy

Pieter Bruegel, The Peasant Wedding, 1567

This week’s episode of Sandy and Nora put me into a philosophical mood. Sandy and I were searching for a word to describe the state of being where one’s real-life connections are obliterated, only to be replaced by for-profit, commidified (and often fake) online relations. That does a number on our brains, our senses of being and social solidarity. We failed to come up with a word though so if you have any ideas, let me know.

But in contemplating this for the past two days, I keep coming back to something that Sandy said — that will die if we try to live alone. I can’t remember if she said this on the show or in our hour-long talk after (sorry! Recording was off!) but it’s an observation that is both exceedingly obvious but also sometimes hard to see. We die if we are removed from community. We literally die if we’re forced to face the world alone.

So with these ideas running through my mind, I saw activist and scholar Hilary Agro post about her own reflections as she’s reading through the book Let This Radicalize You; Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba). She pulled out this page in particular and I had an ah-ha moment.

The notion that the antidote to capitalism is community is one that I share. I’ve said it hundreds of times in talks, I’ve written books that rely on this assumption. Sandy and I say it like every week, but when I saw it posted yesterday, it felt like a record scratch and it hit me: these are ideas from 15 years ago and for 15 years ago. We are past them already.

For activists, there are two key types of community. The first is the kind of community we have regardless of our politics. It is the community in which we live — the one that we don’t choose (our family, friends, relations) and that we do choose to an extent (our neighbourhood, our location, our work, our activities). Let’s call that latent community. And then, there is activist community — the one that we try to build to sustain our political lives. One is built around us and we engage with it and the other we actively try to build ourselves. The activist community draws its strength from the latent community. This means that activists have to work with what we have rather than pretend we can build something separate.

I am constantly asked about how to create the latter form of community but people rarely talk about their relationship with the former. As a proxy for a lack of latent community (though let’s be clear, a lack isn’ t absence — there is always still something there), many people seek to build activist community. And in so doing, activists sometimes combine the two. The two communities merge into one and it becomes a tangle of relationships, jobs, activism, leisure and lovers that for a time works — until you realize you’ve dated everyone, fought with everyone, tried everything and you’ve powerfully burned yourself out.

I don’t think that we can actually build latent community. We cannot choose which grocers to say hi to each Wednesday or which bus drivers we wink at. We can create new nodes in latent community and hope that it impacts enough others’ latent communities that we can grow our circle of friends and relations. But we can’t decide who comes to what soccer game or what kind of person passes us on the sidewalk every day at 8:03 AM. We can decide to engage with these people or not but we can’t organize our communities any more than we can organize the weather or what air we breathe. Social media teaches us that we can perfectly curate our communities and this is part of why it’s so poisonous. The beauty of community is that it is always there and it’s always changing and that we cannot control it. We can pick the apple from the tree or we can walk by and barely notice it, but the tree is always there

But that tree is sick and I think that is what activists are constantly bumping up against. Community is increasingly invisible. We have excuses for why we disengage or don’t engage so much. We prefer to stay anonymous. To not be stuck talking to the front desk guy or whatever. We don’t think too much about latent community because it’s also the source of a lot of our stress.

When I say to people that the most radical thing they can do is to create community, I assume that we can actually create community but this assumption is a dead end. Neoliberalism has obliterated communities, as I have written and said probably three thousand times, and so in the simplest terms, all we need to do is to re-build them, goes my logic. As simply, perhaps, as curating a friends list or a Facebook event or even creating a podcast.

But I think I’ve been wrong. I think that saying that building community is an important opposition to capitalism is an increasingly irrelevant argument. For Hayes and Kaba, here’s how they understand building community: “Concretely, what does it mean to build community? In simple terms, a community is a group of three or more people with whom we share similar values and interests and with whom we experience a sense of belonging.” This isn’t exactly right — community is both imposed and created but it’s mostly imposed. It’s imposed by virtue of our circumstances and impacted by economic, social and political forces that make it good and bad, annoying and necessary, damaged and hard to see. It is imposed on us whether or not we like it. Sometimes we need to bump up against community to feel it and then we can decide whether or not we want to engage with it. We can ignore it but it’s there regardless.

Activist community is created by those of us who understand the need to create it. But it’s always a subset of latent community and when a moment of political action happens, the vast majority of the participants will be from our latent, not built activist communities. It’s through latent community that we build mass movements and general strikes, not through our communities of shared values or feelings of mutual belonging.

Of course, it is possible to create community with shared values and interests and a similar sense of belonging, but values, interests and belonging are not static things; they grow, evolve and mutate. Community can be formed among people with none of these things in common, simply by virtue of working in the same office or waiting for the same bus or living on the same street.

In that sense, community grows simply out of existence (or in other words, material conditions). The community of people who use the same bus at the same time might have certain things in common but the only uniting factor is the bus. If the bus driver goes on strike, there is a latent structure that might be activated into taking action based on the collective need of people to leave from the same point of departure on public transportation. And maybe collective values and norms will evolve out of a situation like this. We can imagine a million different ways that latent community might be triggered into action just like there are a million different ways that it will be disjointed, deconstructed, confused and pushed out of action.

But here’s the point of departure for me — community is under attack by capitalism, yes, but saying this on its own like I have said for years isn’t sufficient. We engage in our own demise as well. We are constantly giving up the tools that we need to actually live in a community. Every time an interaction is eliminated, whether that’s because we drive a car solo or do curbside pickup or order through Ubereats or do self-checkout or we order everything online or we outsource our friendships to Facebook or Instagram or whatever, we obliterate another touchpoint to our latent community. We cause ourself harm. The bubble of community becomes harder and harder for us to bump up against. Who then, or how are we supposed to activate these nodes when we are undertaking the work of community building with a political end?

I think this stumbling block is cancerous for leftwing movements. We can’t see what we can’t see. It’s easy enough for me to say “build community” and sure, I’ve done my own work to create these spaces but when latent community is obliterated, we have nothing on which to build activist community. It all becomes theoretical. It’s why I hear from people all the time that they feel like they’ve tried everything to build community and nothing has worked.

Technofascism is closing the walls in on us. It’s replacing every point of contact we have with The Real with relationship management systems that exist to make someone a profit. And where 15 years ago we were still able to say that creating community could be an antidote to capitalism, we are so far in over our heads in the technofascist order that we can’t even see how to get ourselves out of it. We imagine that community is something we create rather than something that sits all around us; we can no more easily air purify ourselves out of wildfires, we can no more easily flood-proof ourselves out of floods, we can no more easily air condition ourselves out of extreme heat than we can build community ourselves out of technofascism.

So where does that leave us? It’s nihilism to belive that we can’t do anything to save ourselves and this is no time for nihilism. On an individual level, we can fight against the mental trauma that futile, technofascist existence creates by being intentional about living in latent community and looking for openings to build activist community. Believe me — a life of service to others does a body good. You can’t belong if you only take, as the passage above says. But at the macro, all this indicates that we’re going to have to smash technofascism if we are ever going to have any hope of surviving. There is no reform possible that will save us.

But the good news is that these structures are vulnerable. A cellphone outage, internet outage, power outage are all enough to have us revert to our 1870-selves. Just as fauna regrows the second that humans fuck off, humans can regrow if certain humans fuck off too. In the midst of any disaster, latent community is activated and people are cared for, especially while structures collapse. There’s hope in that — the strategic question is how to do we organize for something that we eager cling to?

I don’t have an answer to that but I do think I understand better the challenge that is before us. No man is an island indeed and no one can live by themselves. So how do we smash the things that are burying us all in our technotombs?