Care, Institutions and Anarchism- “Security takes many forms.”
I have been reading stories, stories of family, as so much of literature is about, that universal theme of care, love, or the absence of it, violence sometimes in its place, the brokenness and the longing to be whole. I feel like we long to be something else, that we are broken, broken by institutions and systems where we are numbers to be used and manipulated for short term gain for a small few.
And that’s where care and radical love provide possibility.
I know of love and care, not only from reading stories but also as taught to me as the many moments in school of politeness, respect, the Golden Rule, the holding of hands while crossing the street. And later, as romantic love, marriage and children. The family. Bringing the casserole at gatherings during times of loss. Deep friendships and of going to funerals in support. Those life experiences have taught me that we are messy, complicated, broken and yet at the same time, full of grace and wonder, full of surprises.
And yet, the care in the circle of family and close friends is not enough. Through what feels like a time right now of great instability and fear, a way forward is care and radical love practiced in greater circles. A way that is present now and has been in the past. A way that is a practice, a doing of care.
From a recent reading of The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow:
“The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter....they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery…For anyone who has grown up in a city full of rough sleepers and panhandlers- and that is, unfortunately, most of us- it is always a bit startling to discover there’s nothing inevitable about any of this…the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms.”
In addition to this explanation and example, that practice of care can be called and understood in many ways: mutual aid, the caring economy, a deeply rooted foundation of many religions and beliefs and even in Anarchism, which I will get to later.
This care, this radical love, embraces our common messiness, our differences, our humanity and expands the idea of care through family as care for community.
I’m not talking about what we understand as groups or labels right now, such as the radical left, socialism, communism, Marxism or libertarianism. I think our institutions do not serve us, are broken, because they are not designed to serve us, but themselves. And I wouldn’t want what we have now to be replaced by another system that is also controlling. Perhaps what I am talking about is freedom and democracy but not how it is currently practiced. Perhaps I am talking about a little bit of Anarchism.
I believe we are responsible, smart, good and creative enough to manifest new institutions without the current institutions we have, an anarchist belief. I’m not saying that altering the institutions we have isn’t a way forward as well, but I think that perhaps the whole framework of their purpose isn’t working. I have tried fighting for a short period of time an institution (a public school system) for change through activism. There were some wins and losses. But I’m tired of yelling to deaf ears, tired of waiting, tired of fighting power. Perhaps we don’t need to wait for permission, wait for someone in power to listen. Perhaps we can make those institutions irrelevant through the participation and attention in new institutions.
By Anarchism, I also mean that each of us can govern ourselves together without coercion or hierarchy. And the multiplicity of means to do that can be stability. A little bit of chaos is harder to be co-opted and a multiple ways of moving forward lends itself perhaps to meeting the needs of more people, of allowing space to create and to imagine new ways of living. You may see those possibilities as radical or utopian but they have already existed in our tens of thousands of years of human history. There is not a linear predetermined line of where we have been to where we are going. We have agency.
I don’t think a large manifestation of new institutions or new frameworks will happen quickly, not in my lifetime or my child’s. But I and we have opportunities to practice and create through care. Automotive Free Clinic is one example. There are many more that I have seen, such as co-housing, co-ops (housing, grocery, homeschooling, child care), growing and sharing food… Hopefully this is has been helpful in your thinking about possibility. And may our future imaginings manifest the care and abundance so that we feel whole and we want to stay.