Hurricane Sandy devastated communities—people created inventive methods of mutual aid, creating a ‘Lifehouse’
In his book Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield shows that ordinary people are capable of organising themselves and running their own lives even in the most difficult circumstances.
Greenfield became part of the Occupy Sandy initiative during New York’s Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Occupy Sandy had about 700 core members and around 60,000 volunteers. It delivered 20,000 meals per day to people across the city.
The storm flooded homes, wiped out power and communications networks and left elderly people stranded in high rise buildings with no lifts.
Occupy Sandy was very effective at delivering aid to people, despite its relative lack of existing infrastructure and funding. The established emergency response agencies didn’t respond to people’s needs. The Red Cross apparently showed up with a van, announced that “hot soup” was available—and left having fed no-one.
Greenfield volunteered simply because it was needed, and this can be a liberating experience. During the early days of the Covid pandemic, people organised in their local areas to deliver food and other vital supplies. In the wake of fascist riots, people got together to clean up their cities.
Mutual aid, outlined by Greenfield, is provided without questioning whether someone is “deserving” of support. It doesn’t create a binary between giver and receiver where the giver is always in a position of power over the receiver. Instead, it aims to liberate people from these dynamics.
Importantly, mutual aid projects could empower people by tapping into their capacities to create change and give them confidence in their own abilities.
The Black Panthers organised free breakfast programmes in the 1970s. In Greece, solidarity clinics and health centres were set up during the financial crisis of 2011. This provokes Greenfield’s question—could there be “an entire system of governance based on the same principles that underwrite the success of mutual care”?
Greenfield is influenced by the ideas of Murray Bookchin. Bookchin argued that society should be reorganised along more communalist lines with networks of participatory citizens’ assemblies replacing the capitalist state. He also recognised 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 focused on localised assemblies to replace any centralised state.
But Greenfield acknowledges that, while movements can describe themselves as leaderless, people always take on 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 more fundamental difficulty with communalist movements is that in practice they have never been able to bypass 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 is no longer able to develop its experiment in democratic autonomy.
Greenfield imagines a whole network of what he calls Lifehouses—centres that could provide energy and distribute donate supplies. 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 heats and conditions get worse, we might still find a way to look after each other. But this latter part of the book brought to mind the saying that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”.
We might be glad to have recourse to the lifehouses “when the moment of need arrives”. But the human cooperation and ingenuity that Greenfield describes could also be harnessed to build a political movement capable of stopping climate catastrophe and confronting the capitalist state.
Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire by Adam Greenfield (£9.60) Available from bookmarkbookshop.co.uk
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