Recipe for Utopian Trajectory
Often I’m asked what people should do about the climate, crisis, or how to get started on Library Socialism. This is my attempt to answer that question from August of 2023, between gulps of wildfire smoke and while limiting my use of tap water during a drought, in a hot office with a fan pointed at my face.
It’s clear that the climate crisis is the most resonant global issue of our time, a ticking time bomb blowing up in our faces in slow motion, and a genuine existential threat to every human being on this planet.
It’s also clear that our technological context is also unprecedented, giving us the ability to communicate, collaborate, and share globally at a faster degree than ever before, to share information and collaborate in new ways, against a backdrop of a variety of ever-growing tools to surveil and oppress (some of which oppressive tools and the liberatory tools are even the same tools.)
The vast majority of the people I talk to have trouble with time management and making room for potentially stressful and combative activist work. Others go hard for months on end and then burnout with barely a thank-you card from the proletariat. In political spaces big personalities often dominate ahead of a focus on the actual issues at hand. These contexts and others have played into my thinking as I’ve worked to develop these ideas.
The following is built with the assumption of starting from the smallest level, and working one’s way up. Each suggested tactic can be taken on by a small relatively informal group successfully at one end, but has the ability to grow into a larger institutionalized project with many participants at the other.
Library Socialism’s strategic framework is that there are three categories of radical political action- narrative practice, prefigurative practice, and institutional practice, which need to be brought into harmony. The goal is to analyze the inherited context you’re working in and adapt a cohesive and mutually reinforcing mixture of these different strategies in a way that is holistic and more than the sum of its parts. This practical framework for the current day builds from that analysis.
SHARING INFORMATION, BUILDING NARRATIVES
Our primary square one goal is to convince as many people as possible that a social transformation towards a Library Socialist society is a desirable change and a possible change. This is necessary but not sufficient, it takes work to change the world as well, however, it’s an indispensable and primary goal.
Just to be clear, there is no requirement we convince literally everyone, there is only a requirement that we convince a significant portion of people, and then convince a sufficient fragment of them to act. That is what will enact short-term change, and that is what can enact a transformation of society too.
The lowest cost, highest impact, square one tactic that Library Socialists should engage in is a new form of study group, oriented on the climate crisis and social transformation, using the internet as the medium of intellectual collaboration, with the goal of communciating our needed transformation.
Through wikis, chat rooms, and social media platforms, different pods can try what they like, (even google docs might be enough by itself!)- we can form groups of like-minded individuals who orient significant time to mutually studying the climate crisis and the politics of climate. These library socialist hiveminds can come to their own conclusions, work collaboratively, and enrich their own understanding of our predictament we’re in. Some are already doing this.
By using collaborative hubs to have a shared online library, curated and collaborative, we can refine our knowledge and make sure we’re orienting our actions and narratives with peer-checked facts.
Then, we not only work to study the crisis and potential solutions, but we engage with people outside the group to test and play with the rhetorical strategies to determine which are most resonant, what is persuasive, and how to push public opinion, one person at a time.
We don’t delude ourselves that this is sufficient, but it is necessary. Participating in politics is having conversations, and we should strategize about which conversations to try to have together.
So, we distill facts, we create (or borrow) talking points, and then say them to our neighbour or coworker and see what they say. In real life. Library socialist smalltalk. It’s a bit strange at first but anyone can do it, every now and then. It’s some combination of art and science. Then we report back to our library socialist hivemind.
The climate crisis has posed a particularly hard public communications challenge, as it’s often associated with loss in quality of life to comply with the limits of the climate. We need to actively experiment with the people around us, try out different messages, share different facts, and test the waters for the success of the long-term movement. We know that the vision of a directly democratic ecological society that takes cues from the lending library is an appealing vision. But making that vision appealing in a variety of contexts is something that people know about their own contexts better than I can guess.
This doesn’t mean that we censor ourselves to flatter them, or change our values to be popular. We’re not just taking the temperature, we’re always pushing the utopian conversation forward. But it’s a dance, and we can teach each other how to play our cards right and move the needle.
We’re not starting by proseltyzing about the reorganization of society (although you’re welcome to do whatever you want in life.) Our first goal is starting with talking about the ecological crisis and trying to engage people. There is no mandatory amount, no limits against talking to friends, families, or strangers. It’s up to you when and where you try it out. Be yourself. Some people may choose to skip this step, although I hope most do not. Every conversation helps raise the temperature by keeping the issue on people’s minds.
We could probably do a library socialist hivemind on a larger scale, in an organized way, by a peer-to-peer institution to great success, but this vision is designed to be something which can start at the smallest level possible. It’s something that anyone can do right now, with even just a friend or two.
This collaborative climate knowledge commons, an asynchronous study group with an advocacy tilt, at the smallest level, is a foundational strategy of library socialist development and engagement. These groups can be formed anywhere at any size, they can merge or split, they can be casual or intense, they can form coalitions with others or share platforms. They can trade information. But it can start with a few people working by themselves. There is no single proper process. There is only a direction, a trajectory, towards conscious revolutionary knowledge collaboration in whatever sized groups are available.
The more we have the better. Every person that seriously commits to deepening their understanding of the climate crisis and social crisis in an organized way, and commits to communicating with others about it in their families and community, is doing important work in itself. It’s something anybody can do now. If you don’t understand the climate crisis and the solutions to the crisis as much as you’d like, and you’d like to contribute, message some friends and try it out.
HELPING EVERYBODY AND BEING NICE
We want to help people. When we help people we feel good. Helping people can give us the energy to keep going. So, we propose prioritizing helping people as a means of engaging them on the climate crisis. Our goal isn’t to convert people to an ideology, it’s not to sell memberships or newspapers. It’s to find things to do that are helpful, and use that goodwill to start conversations about climate change, mitigation and transition, and sometimes, library socialism.
Our ultimate prefigurative goal is a confederation of complementary community aid organizations who have a very good reputation and a very large reach.
There are infinite possibilities, but the following are some particularly resonant prefigurative institutions for library socialist ethics in the climate crisis. Each can be approached at varying scales, even with just a few people, cascading up to large city-wide institutions.
- Emergency response and information related to climate events like wildfire smoke, heat waves, and freak snowstorms is a high-impact organizing event in a climate crisis, with a low ongoing cost to maintain. A local group which doorknocks or letter-drops to provide information on how to minimize risks in these events, or does things like shovel and salt streets where cities drop the ball, creates a lot of goodwill very easily, and it naturally produces the climate conversations that lead to library socialist conversations.
- Community tool libraries and circulation clubs are something powerful which can start small (like neighbours on a street, or members of a club) but have unique power to utilize the socio-material basis of library socialism as an engine for the politics of abundance. Participants benefit from the program through access to tools and other circulable items, and from that, are brought into a utopian conversation about what that means for society.
- Digital filesharing is a massive social phenomenon of public importance. We propose that public-facing filesharing depots and technologies are a profound organizing opportunity for technically adept Library Socialists to prefigure a digital commons. The creation and maintenance of digital tools, even if by just curating existing platforms for other activists, is a critical component to a harmonious and functioning confederation.
- Sharing food is a universal token of bonding and decency, and collaboration’s dividends can often make coming together advantageous. There are many options where pooling food resources makes everyone richer: you could organize community potlucks, hand out free streetcorner beans, facilitate bulk food buying clubs, facilitate sharing of unused lawn & garden space with community gardeners.
- Community democratic assemblies can be a powerful tool for organizing for common needs, especially where there are outside threats that unite a community. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it may be some time before they can be used to their full efficiency and potential. Doorknocking may be another democratic method which can paritially substitute the face-to-face factor with a lower risk. In an ideal scenario the two would both be used in ways that enrich one another.
These five categories are just a small sample of the possibile grassroots institutions which could collectively form an ecosystem of library socialist community care, while engaging politically on the climate crisis. In our ideal scenario, a wide variety of explicitly library socialist community groups would be in confederation with one another in any given city, feeding resources and referrals back and forth, providing a wide suite of benefits to the public which foster goodwill and a high level of public awareness on climate as well as political solutions.
This starts with a group of people doing just one of these things, and talking to more people, and then, eventually, seeding more people picking up other parts of the whole, other areas of the city, or other roles in the community care mutual aid space. If groups like this already exist, collaborate with them, and find your own niche.
None of us can do all of these things. But everyone has capacities, connections, and the ability to do some piece of the puzzle. If you’re somewhere where no such organizations exist, you can start the first one and do something incredible. If there is a handful of organizations, we can then confederate into a climate-oriented political body, and begin to act in continuity with one another, recruiting new activists, and splitting off into new working groups for an expanding roster of projects.
This trajectory is bound up deeply in the development of a cognitive and narrative space through the hivemind projects, and can be a means to continue our experiments with rhetorical strategies.
As we’re representing an organization, especially if it’s a Library Socialist organization then we want to have short, pleasant, interactions with a large amount of people. We want them to be aware of us and think we’re decent folks. We want to help as many people who will take our help. We want to engage on climate crisis and transforming society, while taking interest cues from them. Some will leave with a good experience, others will sign up to volunteer, others on a mailing list, and every now and then someone will start their own project.
What is most important is that all of these tactics be politicized, explicitly, towards the end of remaking society along social and ecological lines. To produce a prefigurative usufructian project is insufficient in itself, it must also be politicized towards the end of Library Socialism. The political practice of Library Socialism is not just any library, any time, for any reason. It’s a programme of political engagement and mutual aid which includes the development of usufructian institutions, aimed at a transformation of our world towards a democratic and ecological library society, built on usufructian relations.
CONFEDERATING THE HELPERS
We have a sort of natural drive, it seems, to split and make new groups, and to want to pursue and develop our own strategies. What would be desirable is a system which allows splitting while using a charter to create an ecosystem of complementary and mutually reinforcing ecology of tactics. What’s often mistaken for the effectiveness of authoritarianism is actually the effectiveness of someone being allowed to act without permission over their own business. The times that democracy has it’s most critical reception is in the places where ineffective processes slow action. These are surmountable problems, and where community assemblies are regularly practiced, there are many effective ways to delegate and shape participation so it’s efficient and participatory.
There is neighbourhood democracy, and there is also the political democracy, the democratic processes of the political aidgroups who are in confederation. I’ve become increasingly convinced that confederation, which is often thought of as a late-stage movement, better belongs near the start of the process, with multiple small groups who are tightly knit internally coming together on equal terms to negotiate working together on an ongoing basis. This way the confederative aspect is part of the organization’s development, with an embedded sense of bottom-up autonomy. It may be preferable to have three six person organizations making their own decisions on everything related to their own work than one 18 person organization which discusses every aspect of all three projects.
A perennial thorn in my side in political work has been the backseat driver, who shows up at a meeting seemingly just to throw wrenches into momentum, second-guess the underlying principles at work, and try to veto things they have nothing to do with. Worse are the people who hoard decision-making power for themselves, creating obtuse processes that prevent people from taking their own action and slow everything to a crawl. Both are addressed in this framework, by my estimate.
This early-confederation-of-small-groups model is an elegant way to ensure that the work comes first, in addition to building institutional memory about confederation which will be necessary to achieve stability in at the highest scale and level of organization.
It’s through a stable confederation of a growing number of growing groups that we have a chance to intervene in the transformation of society. These prefigurative interventions are groovy for the work they do, but they also build power. Across the entirety of a successful confederation, you could have hundreds or thousands of activists, and contact lists of tens or hundreds of thousands of supporters and beneficiaries. That is people power. It can be leveraged to get institutions to change.
But that’s also not the only form of power we have. It’s also the case that a significant number of supporters or even activists have roles in institutions that can be used to advance our politics at various times. Sometimes it is the case that institutions have resources they may sometimes share with us, if we play our cards right, for the purposes of doing our work. There are many types of people power, that when working in concert, can reshape the world.
How institutions can be made and remade to work for us, step by beautiful ecological step, next time.
NEXT UP: PART 2, INSTITUTIONAL TRANSFORMATION
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