A little banana bread goes a long way [or, Practicing a #JustCollapse]
By Tadzio Muller [translated from the original, Solidarity collapse policy 101]
…while the preparation was complicated and the overcoming was great, the actual practice, what I actually did, was quite banal. I walked through the house twice, knocked on about eight doors, and had five conversations, none of them particularly long. Now I know everyone, soon we’ll invite them to drink mulled wine, then it’s on to the next organizational step: house group on WhatsApp or Signal. I.e.: getting started in the practical neighborhood takes a lot of effort, but at the same time it is totally easy.
Last Sunday I did something completely new for myself, something that cost me quite a lot of effort, but at the same time I was enormously satisfying: I finally got to know all my neighbors. How I did that, and what happened in the process, I would like to tell you about it. This text will be about neighborhood, more precisely, about my very first baby steps on the path of solidarity neighborly organization. It will be about a topic that I talk about again and again, but in which I am the exact opposite of an “expert”: I am a total beginner in the question of mutual aid and community activism, and I am pretty sure that I am not the only one. Hence this perhaps somewhat strange text, which in essence will not be about much more than the fact that I have a few pieces of homemade Banana bread in the house, and talk to a few people about it. Just a neighborhood.
To some of you, the post will seem silly: if you yourself are well connected in your house/neighborhood/region, if “neighborhood” for you is not just the area in which you live, but an everyday practice of communication with the people you live with somewhere (instead of: next to whom you live), then you will be able to communicate with the people you live with somewhere (instead of: next to whom you live), then in a text, in which a bourgeois social scientist man- and outsidersplains your everyday practice, finds little new. Instead, you will read ultra-cerebral endless sentences about things that are “quite normal” for you (for once, I don’t mean the word “normal” pejoratively), shake your heads at how insanely alienated I am from my immediate surroundings, and ask yourself why you waste your time having someone explain to you how fascinated they were to find out that 2 + 2 = 4. If you are one of these people, you are my personal heroes, and yes: this text will probably not be particularly enlightening for you. Thank you for reading this far.
Real-existing neighborhood
But if you are a bit like me on this issue, then you may like to talk about “neighbourhood”, just as older leftists like to talk about the “workplace”, as a place where we can organise ourselves with other people, where we can talk to people who do not belong to our “bubbles”, where political subjects capable of acting can emerge. Many of us may talk about “neighborhood”, but we often experience it completely differently: I usually only experience my neighbors as the people I have to rush past because they climb the stairs in the apartment building more slowly than I do (it may not surprise you totally that I always run up stairs – do you have any idea how much time you waste climbing stairs at walking pace?), or as a source of noise, or even, in home delivery capitalism certainly the most common kind of neighborly interaction when they pick up packages that the parcel carrier has left with you.
Seriously: I’ve been talking about community activism and solidarity-based neighbourhood help for at least a year (since my time with Pär Plüschke and his solidary preppers in Stockholm), but I have no idea at all, no practical experience of how neighbourhood really works as a lived practice.
I had been subconsciously aware of this “gap” in my political (or maybe even social) socialization for a long time, but the fact that I noticed it really clearly, with red warning lights and such, was when I saw the wonderful radio feature “How to turn neighbors into disaster responders: Prepping in solidarity” by Fritz Tietz for the first time. Tietz, a freelance journalist in northern Germany, was inspired by my story from Sweden last year to put my theses on solidarity-based neighbourhood help into practice in his small village in southern Hamburg, to see what is actually possible in terms of social practice, beyond the somehow (at least outside depressive phases) always quite optimistic imagination of a Berlin communist.
The result is a really nice, reflective contribution, which above all does not do one thing that I have done so far, at least implicitly: it does not romanticize “neighborhood”, but begins with the real-existing neighborhood in which Tietz lives (full disclosure: I am also in the contribution, Tietz invited me to a joint pizza-baking-and-collapse-discussion-event). That surprised me a bit at first, since Tietz lives in the village, and in the urban imagination the village is constructed as a place of an ideal society, of deep-rooted subjects, of intact neighborhood relationships.
But anyone expecting village romance in such a feature will be disappointed: Tietz tells us quite honestly that even after decades (!) of living next to each other, he simply does not know most of his neighbors, beyond the shortest interactions over the respective garden fences. He reminds us that social relations based on solidarity are not automatic in the atomized post-postmodernism of capitalism, that we have been experiencing again and again for decades that we do not need such relationships. Concrete example: if I can also buy eggs, butter, sugar, sour cream and flour at the Späti on Sundays, I don’t have to ring the bell next door to scrounge the proverbial cup of sugar to bake the morning waffles, I can just hop down to the Späti and buy sugar there with much less hassle.
“Hell is other people”, or: Society is exhausting
Wait, to what extent “less hassle“? After all, I have to get out of the house, onto the street, maybe I even have to walk another one or three blocks until I arrive at the Sunday morning open Späti (or kiosk, or pump hall, or water house, or whatever you call it), plus the sugar costs there, etc., etc.
Well, in the sense that we live in a society where one of the favorite clichés about young people is that they would rather get an enema with chili oil than make a phone call or accept one. In which the worst thing you can do in the elevator is to talk to another person (it’s similar in subways). In which more and more commercial acts do not require any human interaction at all. In which we have learned that other people are exhausting, or at least can be very easy, a source of overwhelm (emotional, ethical or practical), sources of additional stress, of demands, of needs, of humanity. And let’s be honest, we already have enough to do with our own needy humanity and human neediness, and that of our absolute neighbors, to want to deal too closely with that of the people who in the end happen to live next to us/ride the elevator/ride the subway/queue at the supermarket checkout.
In another time, before neoliberalism, Sartre wrote the famous sentence “Hell, these are the others” in the play Closed Society. I’ve never read the play, but if I’ve googled correctly, it means a specific kind of presence of the other, namely the constitution (or destruction) of one’s own subjectivity through the objectifying, judging gaze, and thus the incredible power of the other over me. In neoliberalism, I would go one step further and add that the mere presence of the other as a real being with real desires, needs and abilities already becomes hell, because even without the judging gaze of the other, we always feel bad towards others, because their presence reminds us of how lacking in solidarity, how overwhelmed and distant we have become from each other in the meantime.
Hell is other people, because their mere presence reminds us of how shit we’ve become. Because they make demands, because they criticize, because they improve, because they help, because they love, because they cough, breathe and laugh. Humanity makes us feel bad because we as a society, and therefore also as individuals in it, have basically become so inhuman, if we understand “connectedness” as the basis of the human condition.
And that’s exactly why it’s easier, less hassle, to get the missing sugar for the Sunday waffles at the Späti than to ask a neighbor about it. With the first you can pay, with the second you have to talk. In our society, it is clear to most people what is easier. Add to this sociological macro-trends such as the individualization of biographies, the fragmentation of the political field, and even an unorganizable sequence of collectivity-allergic, fully atomized subjects, and it may become a little clearer why so many of us struggle to live real “neighborhood” in the substantive sense: because in most cases we neither needed nor wanted it.
A very short defense of the subculture/scene/bubble
I’m taking this “people are stupid / the majority of us don’t want neighbourhood relationships” to the extreme here to reflect on why it is so difficult for so many people, including me, to take this seemingly simple step, just to talk to their neighbours. Take Wolf and me – both left-wing, both gay, in my case also left-wing radical. Wolf is the one of us who earns less, and yet he would rather get the sugar from the Späti on Sundays than go to the neighbor’s because he is shy, and you know, North Germans and human contacts and so on. I’m the one who talks about neighbourhood all the time, but whose entire social environment is recruited from two subcultures, the gay and the radical left. Both of our lives are basically designed in such a way that we don’t have to have any direct, verbal contact with, for example, right-wing haters outside of commercial interactions, if we don’t want it to – and it’s no coincidence that they are designed that way.
Why is there a “queer” district in every big city – in Berlin Schöneberg, in Hamburg St. Georg, in Cologne the “Bermuda Triangle”? We just don’t want to have to justify ourselves in every interaction, feel questioned and delegitimized, or even threatened. The same applies to left-wing radicals, feminists, climate activists in terms of subculture and bubbles, and I even notice that I am withdrawing somewhat from the left-wing radical and climate bubbles, because they are no longer “on message” enough for me when it comes to collapse, and I already have too many interactions with people with whom I have to deal with a lot.
And that is the core: the necessity of confrontation. Yes, I understand that one of the most important skills we can acquire in collapse is the ability to deal with others without it immediately turning into conflict, i.e. the ability to communicate outside one’s own bubbles. I just want to point out that the existence of bubbles, of subcultures, of scenes, is also a reaction to the fact that some groups feel stressed and threatened by interactions with the normality, often the normal madness of the majority society. To this, and in the longer term to the disappearance of social milieus such as workers’ settlements, in which resistant subjectivities are produced and reproduced, the reaction was the development of “own” spaces, and we must take this fact seriously, instead of simply ignoring it with a “hey, now everyone in the neighborhoods!” Otherwise it will be like the thing with the 70s left-wing leaflets in front of the factory gates…
Neighbourhood: Experience report of a layman
… where the leftists both overwhelmed themselves and mostly annoyed the workers. For me, it’s about developing realistic offers of action that make people capable of acting in a disaster, not about overwhelming people even further with even more “you should do that too”. Not because it is not right, but because people react to constant overload in the way we are currently experiencing in society as a whole.
So, despite subculture and neoliberalism, despite “no idea how” and “phew, that sounds pretty exhausting” now again: neighborhood. How few of us live in real life became clear to me at a meeting in Berlin-Hellersdorf, where a lot was about solidarity-based neighborhood help and neighborhood work, and in the end it became clear that only one of us had actually walked around his whole house and talked to his neighbors. We celebrated him like our hero, and in addition to Fritz Tietz’s radio feature, it was this conversation that motivated me to walk through the house this Sunday with banana bread and knock on doors.
The overcoming, I have to say, was enormous, which is one of the reasons why I had talked about this plan at an event and on social media several days before, in order to build up an external expectation that would then motivate me in case of doubt (which takes us back to hell ;)). I had to prepare myself in several ways:
- Banana bread: Food is always a good way to talk to people
- a conversation guide: no, that’s not true, just an introductory sentence that wasn’t even particularly well formulated. “Hi, I’m Tadzio, I live upstairs on the 4th floor with my husband. Why am I ringing your doorbell? Well, there’s a lot of shit happening in the world, so it’s good if we know our neighbors.”
- A plan on how to continue: with an invitation to drink mulled wine on a still undetermined Advent Sunday.
Oh yes, and if you don’t follow us on social media, you don’t know that we start with an Irish coffee every Sunday we spend together, so there was also a bit, um, emotional lubricant to facilitate the conversations.
I was really nervous, and it took me quite a while to motivate myself. Then I didn’t know where to start: at the bottom? Above? I dunno, what’s better? Finally I rang the first doorbell, bad luck at first – no one at home. Second door, other side. A young woman who has been living here for a long time opens the door, we already know each other a bit (as usual mostly from exchanging packages). She doesn’t seem particularly interested in long-term disaster planning, but that’s only secondary for the time being. This is about establishing contact, and when she gives her two sons two pieces of banana bread, and says that this is now their breakfast, I thought to myself: very good, the banana bread was actually helpful. And people who like children tell me that you can get in touch with parents very well through the children, though I wouldn’t know where to start ;).
Third door: an American woman opens the door, I don’t know her, but Wolf has already told me about her. She’s still tired (I’m just such a nasty early riser), but immediately jumps on the idea of networking in the house. When I heard about “catastrophe is increasingly going to be a permanent state of affairs, and we should…” she just holds her hand up to stop my torrent of words, and just says “look, we just re-elected Trump, I get the point about permanent catastrophe”.
At the fourth door, which is opened, I notice certain subcultural resonances. The apartment feels a bit upscale-left-alternative, and when I start again with my “the catastrophe is coming”, there is a lot of nodding, and the nice neighbor, whom I didn’t know yet, says the careless sentence: “I’m completely in line with you.” Oh, comrade, if you knew what you were buying with it;)
Now I come to the 4th and 5th floors, to the condominiums above. Here the reaction is completely different, here it is more likely to be fended off. One of my neighbors, funnily enough the one with whom I have the most contact, even mentions Tietz’s radio feature, but then immediately begins to complain – in an uncharacteristic conservative-old-man-performance – about how “judgmental” and “exclusionary” the contribution was, which of course also meant my little banana bread intervention.
I got a similarly dismissive reaction in the attic loft apartment, and it was these two that brought me to Sartre: if I understand correctly, the two of them basically felt morally overwhelmed by my proposal to build a community of solidarity, felt that they themselves would not be able to do community at all (most people who say they don’t need other people, are above all insanely bad at dealing with other people), and therefore react dismissively and slightly aggressively to the suggestion of collectivity: “don’t ask me to do something you know i’m not capable of!”
A few final thoughts
Pooh. Very long text, complicated topic for me. And I really wanted to do it in such detail, because I have the impression that many of you, like me, need some help before you finally start living “neighborhood” a little. I hope I haven’t lost too many, close it quickly.
Firstly, while the preparation was complicated and the overcoming was great, the actual practice, what I actually did, was quite banal. I walked through the house twice, knocked on about 8 doors, and had 5 conversations, none of them particularly long. Now I know everyone, soon we’ll invite them to drink mulled wine, then it’s on to the next organizational step: house group on WhatsApp or Signal. I.e.: getting started in the practical neighborhood takes a lot of effort, but at the same time it is totally easy.
Secondly, the first discussions on the lower floors were positive, those on the upper floors were rather negative. I think this is less about objective class situation (owner/tenant?) than about subjective attitudes to, for example, collectivity. I would describe the two who reacted critically as liberal conservatives who are uncomfortable with the mere idea of community. Such people are difficult to organize, they will only stir when they have a direct need. Others, for whom the thought of community does not melt the ethics center, are basically open to organizing on this question.
Third: all open discussion partners had already had the idea of doing something similar themselves. I hope to build on this commonality while drinking mulled wine…
Which brings me to the end. Forgive me for the excessive length, it is not due to my knowledge, but to my ignorance in this matter.
Just Collapse 