Chapter 3: Trust and Responsibility as Common Notions

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

—Ursula K. Le Guin[93]

Do not be afraid

Do not be cynical

Continue to trust yourself and others

Continue to dream of collective liberation

—scott crow[94]

Perhaps it is more important to be in community, vulnerable and real and whole, than to be right, or to be winning.

—adrienne maree brown[95]

Trust and responsibility as common notions

It is clear that capitalism—administered by left- and right-wing governments—is a disaster for people, non-humans, and the earth. However, cynicism and disillusionment do not necessarily lead to revolt or struggle. Empire’s capacity for decentralized control no longer relies on legitimacy or faith. We do not have to believe capitalism is good for us, or that the state will help and protect us, so long as we remain enmeshed in Empire’s radical monopoly over life, from schooling to law to the built environment that surrounds us.

In this chapter, we suggest that trust and responsibility are emerging in Empire’s cracks. This is not about one way of trusting or a fixed set of responsibilities, but about the proliferation of different forms. A lot of what we get at in this chapter comes from carla’s longstanding involvement in youth and kids’ liberation movements, which fundamentally upend some of the basic assumptions embedded in many forms of organizing. To create intergenerational spaces where kids can thrive means holding space for play and emergence by warding off the twin pitfalls of individualism and conformity. This requires nurturing a baseline of trust, responsibility, and autonomy. We also draw on other movements that we have learned from and been challenged by, including Indigenous resurgence, transformative justice, and anti-violence, all of which emphasize the importance of relationship-based trust and responsibility.

Many of the most militant movements and insurrectionary spaces have emphasized trust as an indispensable part of their capacity to resist Empire and defend their insurgent forms of life. For instance, speaking of autonomous spaces carved out by anarchists in Greece, Tasos Sagris has suggested that “the main organizational form in Greece is friendship. We believe that friendship will be revolutionary. Very close, very good loving friends, that like each other, that spend their lives together, they trust one another. This is a part of the insurrection.”[96] Similarly, Marina Sitrin argues that “groups that are grounded in trust and affect tend to be more militant. This is especially true for the recuperated workplaces in Argentina, and they reflect directly upon this. Knowing one another and working together for years built up a trust that helped when the time came to defend their workplaces physically (with molotovs, slingshots, etc).” Across North America and beyond, many Indigenous peoples are clear that their militancy stems from a responsibility to protect Indigenous land and life, animated by grounded normativities that we explored in the last chapter.

So what does it mean to nurture trust and responsibility? What do these concepts even mean today? Often trust is a catch-all word that suggests there is only one all-or-nothing way to trust, and this is part of the problem. Similarly, responsibility can be turned into a reductive set of stifling norms or duties. We want to walk with these questions: are there different kinds of trust? What makes it possible to trust people up front, without knowing them well? What does a joyful responsibility look and feel like? How can trust and responsibility be conceived and lived in ways that are open and enabling, rather than being imposed as fixed moral duties?

We suggest that these transformative capacities are not based in rigid ideologies or fixed ways of being. Joyful transformation is nurtured through what Spinoza called common notions: shared values and sensibilities that are flexible and based in relationships with human and non-human others. The concept of common notions has been elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and by a current of contemporary radical intellectuals in Spain and Argentina, including Sebastián Touza, whom we interviewed for this book.[97] Touza’s work explains that we might experience joy—a growth in our powers—as a sudden flash, but be unsure what made it possible or how to support more joyful encounters and relations. This is the passive experience of joy. The passage from passivity to activity happens through the formation of common notions: people figuring out together what sustains transformation in their situations, and how to move with it and participate in its unfolding. Common notions can never be a fixed way of doing things or a guarantee that things will go well. They can sound idealistic but in fact they are the opposite: they are pragmatic sensibilities, material conceptions that arise out of embodied, mutually enabling face-to-face relationships. Touza writes,

This is because, in Spinoza’s ethics, to have notions in common, people require more than the sole agreement between the rational ideas that come out of their minds. Common notions are formed in the local and concrete terrain of affects that emerge in the encounter between bodies. A common notion is a bond formed by reciprocal affect. Joy enables a leap beyond the world of sad passions.[98]

Common notions are slippery because like joy itself, they emerge from concrete, unique situations. To share them with others whose situations are composed differently, then, is precarious and fraught. Detached from the circumstances and practices that birthed them, common notions can turn into moral commandments or stagnant habits, rather than ways of relating that remain alive through struggle and care.

As common notions, trust and responsibility are emergent values connected to specific practices, movements, and forms of life. A learned trust—in situations, in others, and in one’s own capacities—is in this sense an unfolding process. To trust in transformation is to undo fear and control. Similarly, the forms of responsibility we are discussing are not enshrined in law and formal agreements, but emerge instead through a sense of feeling invited to participate in the world, care for others and be cared for, support and be supported.

(Mis)trust and (ir)responsibility under Empire

Working through trust and responsibility is difficult because both of these words have been so thoroughly colonized by Empire. An important place to begin, we think, is with the ways that Empire sows mistrust and destroys our capacity for collective responsibility by making us dependent on its destructive, depleting, violent ways of life.

Many people’s impulse is to mistrust others from the start, and it makes sense, given that many of us have been living Hobbes’s dream, made real, for centuries. Most everyone we know has been touched by some kind of oppression and abuse, and Empire’s oppressive divisions often lead people to betray even their most intimate relations. For instance, feminists have coined the term “gaslighting” to get at a common patriarchal dynamic that undermines the perceptions of women and femmes by second-guessing, explaining away, and denying their experiences and insights. Gaslighting can be subtle and unintentional, but as feminist writer Nora Samaran explains, it is particularly insidious because it undermines people’s trust in their own capacities:

If you think of the power, the strength, the capacity to effect change that women who trust themselves are capable of, what we are losing when we doubt ourselves is an indomitable force for social change that is significant and therefore, to some, frightening. In other words, our capacity to know ourselves is immensely powerful.[99]

All forms of oppression seem to have this tendency: racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, ageism, colonization, and other systems of oppression contort people’s insights, experiences and differences into weaknesses or deny them outright. For this reason, the emergence of trust can be a powerful weapon, which is being recovered all the time through struggle.

For many of us, mistrust in ourselves and others started when we were kids, and in a lot of cases in our homes. When they’re really young, kids are curious, open, vulnerable, and capable of radically trusting those around them, and this tends to get sucked out of them from many directions by Empire and the kinds of hierarchical and competitive relationships it promotes. One of the most damaging forms of distrust is built into modern disciplinary institutions, and schooling in particular. As organizer and scholar Matt Hern writes,

At school children are always monitored, and schooled parents believe that they should similarly be constantly monitoring their offspring, in the name of safety. The last decades of this century has seen an exponential growth in concern for children's daily safety, particularly in cities, and most parents I come into contact with want to keep a very close eye on their kids. This is a laudable concern, and one I share, yet I have a deep suspicion of the equation that safety = surveillance. There is a threshold where our concerned eye becomes over-monitoring and disabling, an authoritarian presence shaping our kids’ lives.[100]

Hern is not singling out certain parents as oppressive, and he implicates himself in this, too. He is pointing to the collective inheritance of a way of life that divorces people from their capacities to trust each other. The model for inculcating these values was (and is) intense discipline and control: kids are encased in concrete for over a decade, trained to sit still, memorize, and obey authority. As the political theorist Toby Rollo has argued, it is no coincidence that colonization, racism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism all tell stories that constitute oppressed and dispossessed people as children.[101] Empire conceives its Others as untrustworthy and lacking maturity, health, morality, knowledge, civilization, and rationality, and so they have all been targets for education, confinement, and control—or for total eradication and genocide.

Empire’s radical monopoly over life

Ivan Illich was a prominent radical intellectual in the 1970s, but aside from his radical critique of schooling, is not well-known today. For Illich, modern schooling was only one of the many ways that dependence was being entrenched—a dependence not only on capitalist production and consumption, but on a whole violent, industrialized, disciplined, and controlled way of life. His concept of radical monopoly points to something more systematic than the control over a particular market by a particular firm. Instead, radical monopoly gets at the way that Empire monopolizes life itself: how people relate to each other, how they get around, how they get their sustenance, and the whole texture of everyday life. A world built for cars forces out other ways of moving, and modern building codes and bylaws make it impossible and illegal for people to build their own dwellings, or even to live together at all if they cannot pass as a nuclear family. Modern medicine does not just create a new way of understanding the body: its scientific understanding is premised on a radical monopoly over health, and the subjugation (or commodification) of other healing traditions. To be healthy under Empire is to be a properly functioning, able-bodied, neurotypical individual capable of work, and to be sick often means becoming medicalized: isolated, confined, and dependent on strangers and experts. Law, policing, and prisons monopolize the field of justice by enforcing cycles of punishment and incarceration, forcing out the capacity of people to protect each other and resolve conflicts themselves. The rise of industrial agriculture has been accompanied by a loss of the convivial relations surrounding subsistence: the connection to the growing and processing of food, the intimacy with ecosystems and seasons it entails, and the collective rituals, celebrations, and practices that have accompanied these traditions. Empire’s infrastructure induces dependence on forms of production, specialized knowledge, expertize, and tools that detach people from their capacities to learn, grow, build, produce, and take care of each other.

Since Illich wrote, these monopolies have folded into ever more diffuse and generalized forms of control, sunk deeper into the fabric of life. Deleuze called this new form of power taking shape over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries “control societies.”[102] Rather than telling people exactly what to do, this mode of power regularizes life, calling forth certain ways of living and feeling, and making other forms of life die. Surveillance no longer ends when one exits a particular institution: through social media, smartphones, browsing histories, and credit cards, surveillance is ubiquitous, continuous, and increasingly participatory. We are enjoined to share, consume, and express ourselves, and every choice feeds back into algorithms that predict our habits and preferences with ever increasing precision. The performance of self-expression is constantly encouraged, and as the Institute for Precarious Consciousness writes, “Our success in this performance in turn affects everything from our ability to access human warmth to our ability to access means of subsistence, not just in the form of the wage but also in the form of credit.”[103] Under this apparatus, there is little room for silence, nuance, listening, exploration, or the rich subtleties of tone and body language. Anything too intense or subversive is either incorporated or surgically removed by security, police, or emergency personnel. Class, anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, ableism and other structured forms of violence are coded into the algorithms that make everyone a potential terrorist, thief, or error. Even those who are supposed to enjoy the most—those who can afford the newest screens and the most expensive forms of consumption—are inducted into a state of nearly constant distraction, numbness, and anxiety.

Perpetual individualization obscures the crushing collective effects of Empire. When this form of control is working, interactions are hypervisible, superficial, predictable, and self-managed. To be constantly mistrusted and controlled is also to be detached from one’s own capacity to experiment, make mistakes, and learn without instruction or coercion. To internalize the responsibilities of neoliberal individualism is to sink into the mesh of control and subjection. The responsible economic subject owns her own property, pays her own debts, invests in her future, and meets her needs and desires through consumption. She is individually responsible for her health, her economic situation, her life prospects, and even her emotional states. These forms of subjection make it difficult to imagine—let alone participate in—collective alternatives. From the dependence on armed strangers to resolve conflicts, to the hum of an extraction-fueled world, to the glow of screens that beckon attention, to the stranglehold of policy and bureaucracy, to the intergenerational violence and abuse that permeate lovers and families, Empire is constantly entrenching dependence on a world that makes joy, trust, and responsibility difficult.

It is not a question of revealing this to people, as if they are dupes. Struggling amid these forms of control means grappling with their affective hold on us and our daily lives. Anxiety, addiction, and depression are not merely secrets to reveal or illusions to dispel. Preaching about Empire’s horrors can stoke cynicism or ironic detachment rather than undoing subjection. One can still feel bound and depleted, despite one’s awareness. Empire’s subjects are “free” to be mistrustful and resentful of the system under which they live. One can hate Empire as much as one wants, as long as one continues to work, pay rent, and consume. There is no simple correspondence between intentions and actions, as if the problem is simply figuring out what to do and doing it. Undoing subjection is not about conscious opposition, or finding a way to be happy amid misery. Challenging Empire’s radical monopoly over life means interrupting its affective and infrastructural hold, undoing some of our existing attachments and desires, and creating new ones.

Towards conviviality

Most people who have lived through any moment where formal institutions of power go away, or are forced away, agree with this point. When left alone, when left with one another, people turn to one another and use forms of mutual aid and support. The wake of the break is a beautiful opening up of possibility.”

—Marina Sitrin[104]

At Empire’s edges, in its cracks, people are finding each other, recovering subjugated knowledges, revaluing their own traditions, pushing back against discipline and control. In dramatic uprisings and slow shifts, people are reconnecting with their own powers and capacities to make, act, live, and fight together. Conviviality is the name that Illich gives to ways of life that promote flourishing, which are being squeezed out by Empire:

I choose the term “conviviality” to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.[105]

Illich’s conception of conviviality resonates with the relational form of freedom we explored in the last chapter. Conviviality names the creative relationships that emerge between people and their material surroundings, sustained by grassroots trust and responsibility.[106] In other words, it is Illich’s name for joy sustained by common notions. Conviviality helps clarify that joy is not simply something felt by an individual, but the effect of enabling assemblages of bodies, tools, gestures, and relationships. It is not about a utopian future or a romantic past, but about breaking from dependence on Empire’s stifling infrastructures. This is most evident after natural disasters and during insurrections, when some of Empire’s radical monopolies are dramatically short-circuited.

While these situations often trigger elite fear-mongering and fascist vigilantism, they are also spaces where joyful and convivial forms of life blossom, as people discover—in haphazard, decentralized, and emergent ways—how to live without Empire’s crushing monopolies. Here is what one anonymous participant had to say about their experience of the uprising in Cairo, Egypt, where people famously took over Tahrir Square:

Cairo was never more alive than during the first Tahrir Square. Since nothing was functioning anymore, everyone took care of what was around them. People took charge of the garbage collecting, swept the walkways and sometimes even repainted them; they drew frescos on the walls and they looked after each other. Even the traffic had become miraculously fluid, since there were no more traffic controllers. What we suddenly realized is that we had been robbed of our simplest gestures, those that make the city ours and make it something we belong to. At Tahrir Square, people would arrive and spontaneously ask themselves what they could do to help. They would go to the kitchen, or to stretcher the wounded, work on banners or shields or slingshots, join discussions, make up songs. We realized that the state organization was actually the maximum disorganization, because it depended on negating the human ability to self-organize. At Tahrir, no one gave any orders. Obviously, if someone had got it in their heads to organize all that, it would have immediately turned into chaos.[107]

Similar accounts can be found by people who have lived through disasters and insurrections throughout the world. For example, the upwelling of autonomy, experimentation, and joy was palpable in the Argentinean uprising that began in 2001. While corporate media and politicians framed it as a chaotic, short-lived riot, Marina Sitrin has shown how autonomous forms of life have endured, despite challenges, for over a decade.[108] Workers have taken over factories and learned to run them collectively, without bosses, through a process of autogestion, or worker self-management. This is not merely a transition from top-down factory production to cooperative production, but a process of transformative struggle in which whole neighborhoods defended factories against police and capitalists. Similarly, the neighborhood assemblies that formed through the uprising have created new ways for people to resolve conflicts and support each other without relying on the state.

Anywhere that Empire’s form of life is suspended, emergent capacities to live otherwise rush in. Through struggle and experimentation, people formulate problems and respond to them together, taking responsibility for collective work and care, and bonds of trust take hold.

Rebecca Solnit speaks to the emergence of conviviality and joy amid disasters in her book A Paradise Built in Hell:

In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressive savage human being has little truth to it.[109]

Solnit documents and interviews the survivors of several disasters, including earthquakes and hurricanes, economic collapses, and terrorist attacks. Consistently she finds that in the wake of disaster it is mainly elites who panic and resort to violence. Furthermore, bureaucratic disaster relief tends to entrench misery and despair. At the same time, in the midst of intense suffering and pain, large numbers of people engage in mutual aid and solidarity. In fact, many people reflect on their experiences of earthquakes, hurricanes, and even bombings as joyful experiences in the Spinozan sense, in which they feel more alive and connected to others. Without top-down organization or bureaucracies, they coordinate food and medical supplies, take care of injured and sick people, and defend themselves in ways that are decentralized but not disorganized.

Why is there joy in disaster? Solnit suggests that it is because Empire’s debilitating monopolies on life are suspended: “If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act in another way.”[110] Solnit is not arguing that we should wish for disasters. What her argument exposes is that everyday life under Empire is already a certain kind of ongoing and seemingly intractable disaster, in a world where distraction, anxiety, individualism, and dependence have become normalized. What is enlivening about disasters is the emergent capacity they unleash for trust, responsibility, care, and simply being present and feeling connected.

The upwelling of conviviality and joyful forms of life is only one tendency among others in situations where control is abated. Alongside these are other tendencies: waves of sexualized violence, hoarding, bunkerism, fascist vigilantes, intimidation and violence from military and police, and desires for control based in fear and mistrust. To reinstall its rhythms, Empire must turn these moments into situations of extreme deprivation and violence so that its subjects can only experience the suspension of control as a horrifying prospect. The bubbling up of decentralized, convivial forms of life must be crushed as quickly as possible and “order” must be restored. In this sense, Empire’s means of counterinsurgency include not only police repression but also the liquidation of emergent orders, the stoking of divisions and terror, and the reinstallation of individualizing and isolating forms of life. People go back to their jobs, their houses, their smartphones, and control returns.

But never completely. A key question is how to keep these relations alive in everyday life, even as Empire’s stultifying rhythms are reimposed. Among the stakes in these struggles, as we have suggested, is their potential to elicit responsiveness as people are drawn out of themselves and their routines. In an interview with Naomi Klein, Leanne Simpson insists that responsibility and reciprocity are the alternatives to settler colonial extractivism:

Naomi: If extractivism is a mindset, a way of looking at the world, what is the alternative?

Leanne: Responsibility. Because I think when people extract things, they’re taking and they’re running and they’re using it for just their own good. What’s missing is the responsibility. If you’re not developing relationships with the people, you’re not giving back, you’re not sticking around to see the impact of the extraction. You’re moving to someplace else. The alternative is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s relationship, it’s responsibility, and it’s local. If you’re forced to stay in your 50-mile radius, then you very much are going to experience the impacts of extractivist behavior. The only way you can shield yourself from that is when you get your food from around the world or from someplace else. So the more distance and the more globalization then the more shielded I am from the negative impacts of extractivist behavior.[111]

To be more responsible and self-reliant in this way is not to inhabit the neoliberal ideal of the individual, nor an isolationist independence. Protecting ecosystems and non-human life from devastation is often cast in terms of conservation, austerity, or a new mode of management. But these tendencies exist in tension with the grassroots recovery and reinvention of ways of living that support human and non-human life, through ongoing and intimate contact with natural processes. This is not about protecting a separate “environment” but nurturing forms of life that persist through interdependent relationships: soil, water, plants, and animals are not resources to be exploited or managed, but an interconnected web that people can participate in and enrich. As people regain intimate contact with the places where they live, they get to know the way the water flows when it rains, the plants that grow up together and how they are used by birds and wasps and bees, the way that the sun warms a south-facing slope where different plants thrive.

This brings abstract concepts like climate change and biodiversity loss down to a practical scale, felt through interactions with the sensible world rather than intellectualized through statistics. Supporting these relationships might entail intense grief and rage: one discovers that a childhood hideout among trees has been paved over; the absence of once-familiar birds and bees is felt; one finds cancerous fish and dried-up creeks. There are overwhelming and heartbreaking changes taking place, and being connected to communities of plants and animals makes it as painful as it is nourishing. It is from this place that joyful responses to ecological catastrophes are emerging. Not happy or optimistic responses, but capacities to respond to the horrors in ways based in lived and ever-changing relationships.

Emergent trust and responsibility: three examples

Indigenous struggles

In North America, the recovery of responsibility and interconnectedness is expressed most deeply and forcefully in Indigenous resurgence and other struggles where people are reasserting a profound land-based knowledge, revaluing traditions that have accrued through generations of reciprocal relationships with land. It is no coincidence that Indigenous peoples have been behind the most durable and militant resistance to ecological devastation, including pipelines, dams, logging, tar sands, fracking, and other forms of resource extraction. To be immersed in a web of reciprocal relationships is also to feel the responsibility to protect that web.

The Unist’ot’en Camp, for instance, is an Indigenous-led project that for years has been successfully resisting proposed fracked gas pipelines that would cross the territories of the Wet’suwet’en people in British Columbia. The grassroots Wet’suwet’en people leading the project have been clear that they are not protesting pipelines but reasserting their traditional responsibilities to take care of their territories, and reestablishing traditional protocols for entry. Several years ago, they created a checkpoint and began turning away those working for surveyors and others involved in pipeline construction, while inviting thousands of supporters onto their territories. Mel Bazil, a long-term supporter and a Gitxsan relative of the Unist’ot’en clan, speaks to the power of these land-based responsibilities:

It’s a reciprocal culture; it never really ended … To share that knowledge outwardly to other grassroots folks—migrants and grassroots settlers, as well as other Indigenous nations—it’s been very, very powerful to see our people come together. Not just in the face of devastation and destruction, but to survive and to understand each other.[112]

Not only have they been successful in halting pipeline construction; in the process, the Unist’ot’en Camp has constructed permaculture gardens, a healing center, and hosted annual action camps where hundreds of Indigenous and non-Indigenous supporters come from across North America (and elsewhere) to connect with each other, explore affinities, and deepen networks of trust and mutual support.

Similar processes are taking place at other camps across territories claimed by British Columbia and beyond, including the Madii Lii Camp and Lax Kw’alaams’s defense of Lelu Island, both part of a network of frontlines committed to stopping pipelines and fracked gas expansion. Furthermore, as we write this, there is a local and worldwide proliferation of solidarity actions, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Among non-Indigenous people, we also see expressions of land-connected responsibilities in the spread of communal gardening, environmental and climate justice, permaculture, regenerative farming, grassroots bioremediation, resistance to resource extraction, and animal liberation struggles, among others. Many of these struggles are simultaneously fighting the ecological devastation of Empire and its brutal forms of control and exploitation while making space for convivial forms of life.

Anti-violence and transformative justice

This renewal of collective responsibility and trust can also be seen in feminist, anti-violence, and transformative justice movements that address interpersonal violence in ways that undo the monopoly of policing and courts. A crucial insight from these movements is that listening to, believing, and trusting survivors of violence is powerful, undermining a culture that normalizes violence and blames survivors of rape and abuse for the ways they have been hurt. The capacity of survivors to trust themselves and each other is often the beginning of community-based responses through which people take collective responsibility for confronting and transforming patterns of violence.

The work of these movements has led to a proliferation of networks of mutual support and care, and the creation of alternatives to police, courts, and prisons that exacerbate violence and oppression. In North America, these initiatives have been led by BIPOC women, Two-Spirit, queer, and trans people, in particular, whose communities have been targeted with criminalization and incarceration since the inception of policing and prisons. As INCITE! and Critical Resistance organizers write,

The reliance on the criminal justice system has taken power away from women’s ability to organize collectively to stop violence and has invested this power within the state. The result is that women who seek redress in the criminal justice system feel disempowered and alienated. It has also promoted an individualistic approach toward ending violence such that the only way people think they can intervene in stopping violence is to call the police. This reliance has shifted our focus from developing ways communities can collectively respond to violence.[113]

In this context, “transformative justice” (TJ) has emerged as an alternative to “restorative justice” models. Its emphasis on transformation is based on the insight that—especially among Black and Indigenous communities—violence is structural and institutional, without a baseline that could be “restored.” Instead, as lawyer and anti-violence organizer Rachel Zellars explains, it works pragmatically from existing relationships to interrupt institutional and interpersonal cycles of violence, disposability, and punishment:

[Transformative justice] centers Black women’s experiences of violence while resisting the notion that speaking about violence detracts from organizing: men who cause harm can be understood simultaneously as effective or well-loved organizers and as perpetrators of misogynistic violence. In this sense, TJ is open-armed – naming violence committed while leaving room for those who have caused harm to be accountable and to come back into the fold.”[114]

Transformative justice and anti-violence are also linked to struggles for migrant justice, anti-gentrification, and prison abolition. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, women refugees created an informal support group and drop-in center for those in their community facing domestic abuse, which led to a cooperative catering business and a childcare network that helped address the poverty and isolation that was recreating the conditions for violence.[115] In 2004 anti-violence advocate Mimi Kim founded Creative Interventions, an organization dedicated to sharing grassroots responses to interpersonal violence and lessons from these attempts.[116] Forged in alliance and conversation with prison abolitionist movements, they encourage reliance on friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers as alternatives to professional services or policing. Their flexible approach acknowledges that people may want to remain in their relationships or the places where they live, centering the needs of survivors while working towards the transformation of the situation that led to the violence.

By enacting alternatives to cops and courts, these initiatives nurture autonomy in place of racist, heteropatriarchal institutions, undoing the culture in which both survivors and perpetrators are made disposable and institutional violence is obscured. Everyone we know who is involved in these efforts to end cycles of violence can attest to how fraught, messy, and difficult they can be. They do not always go well. Nonetheless, this is the kind of “freedom” discussed in the last chapter: the capacity to work on relationships, to become more active in undoing oppressive patterns, and to nurture and deepen trust and collective responsibility.

Deschooling and youth liberation

A third convivial current is deschooling and youth liberation, and the proliferation of alternatives to schooling that are led by kids and youth, including those who are in school. The Purple Thistle, co-created with youth in Vancouver, Canada, has been a vibrant example of this: it nurtured a space for youth not only to hang out, but to experiment and learn together without being controlled and supervised, to take collective responsibility for running the space, and to build strong bonds with each other.

The youth-run projects included a community garden, screenprinting, photography, graffiti, zine publishing, discussion groups, filmmaking, animation, film nights, a radical library, sound and music recording, graphic design, fiber and textile arts, and more. These initiatives were emergent, based on people’s desires and priorities. carla was the “director” of the Thistle from 2009 until it closed in spring 2015, but her job was basically to do the bulk of the paper work, support and mentor when asked, and to work as kind of matchmaker connecting youth to mentors and apprenticeships both formal and informal. Overall, carla’s role as director was to function as an anchor to support the fluid and flexible relationships at the heart of the Thistle. Other adults also supported the Thistle as anchors, co-directors, and mentors, but all day-to-day decisions were made by the youth-run collective and the various pods that sprang from it. As Matt Hern, Thistle co-founder and director before carla, said of the project,

I like to think of the Thistle as being really easy in the way that school is hard and really hard in the way that school is easy. So, you go to school for example, or you go to a workplace, or you go to many institutions, you know exactly what you have to do, you know what's expected of you, you don't really have to think a whole lot. And that's nice sometimes; you just walk through it: essentially just follow orders and do what you're told and you'll be fine. So it's really easy in lots of ways. It's also very difficult because that's really hard for most people, and because you fight against it and you resist, but the Thistle turns that on its ass in lots of ways. So it's really easy because no one is telling you what to do, you can do whatever you like, you can come and go as you like, you can figure out how you can access it. So it's very easy but it's also very difficult, ‘cause that's a tremendous kind of responsibility.[117]

The Thistle can be understood as a counter-institution, a flexible container where the participants themselves shaped roles and responsibilities in an open, experimental way. Such counter-institutions can prefigure trust and conviviality, creating space where these ways of relating can be tried out, become patterns and habits, and eventually take hold in new communities and projects.

Many of these relationships ran outside the walls of the Thistle, but were nevertheless vital for creating webs of care and mutual aid. For example, when individuals or groups found themselves in dicey or difficult situations, folks could lean on each other rather than call the cops. Often this meant supporting someone to get the care they actually needed instead of being thrown into the criminal system. Other times it meant creating space for accountability to take hold. These forms of trust and responsibility never crystallized into a public website, handbook, or formal organization; they were relational and ad hoc. We think that people are doing this all the time. In fact, in order to keep it safer for many to engage in these ways, and to hold onto these values as common notions, institutionalization or publicity is often avoided.

The power of baseline trust

I think we cannot have any kind of trust in a mass of 100 million individuals, they will produce the horror. But if we bring everything to the human scale, to the communities, to small groups of people, then we can really trust that the people will have the wisdom to discuss and to generate consensus.

—Gustavo Esteva[118]

We have argued that Empire’s institutions are a ceaseless attack on conviviality, and we want to hold onto emergent forms of trust and responsibility as common notions. In this context, we want to share an excerpt from our interview with Kelsey Cham C.:

carla and Nick: Can you talk about the potential of trusting folks up front, and how you saw it play out at the Thistle?

Kelsey: Yeah totally, I think that’s awesome. Actually I think you [carla] were one of the first people to actually trust me without even knowing me. And I was like what the hell? Why? Why? How do you know I’m not gonna just fuck everything up and run away and steal a bunch of money and go? How do you know that? But in trusting me, I was like, holy shit: I trust this situation and this collective twenty times more and I want to give back to it because I’ve been given this opportunity to do something that I’ve never been able to do before, which is awesome. But I have been thinking about trust and how with trauma we build all these walls and we start to mistrust everything—I have a pretty hard time trusting people—there’s a point where I’m like this is too personal and too intimate and now my walls are going to go up. I was sitting and thinking about how it’s probably one of the best ways to break down the walls of the system is to break down the walls around each other first, and I think the only way we can break down those walls is with trust. And that’s the core thing you said.

Joyful militancy and trust, and compassion, and humility are all tied together: in other cultures, traditional cultures—I don’t know a lot about this—but from what I know, older Indigenous cultures have these ideas of respect, humility, compassion, and I think in karate I’ve seen it and it’s funny because karate is a martial art, a fighting tool, and one of the things that we learn is that we have to love everyone including our opponents. And that’s the toughest thing to say in this community. People are like, “what the fuck, how can you say that, you can’t just love your abuser.” And it’s true, I can’t just let go of everything. It’s not that, it’s being compassionate, I think, to situations.

carla and Nick: Can we have the expectation of trust up front? Is it an alternative to the idea that trust always needs to be earned?

Kelsey: Yeah that’s like our society: you gotta earn everything; you earn money, you build trust, and respect. You gotta prove to me that I should trust you, or respect you. And that’s an interesting point; I have a tough time with that, trusting people. But I think it’s a feedback system: probably the more you allow yourself to trust people initially, probably the more well-reciprocated that will be. I felt it: you trust me and I didn’t understand it. That’s how fucked up our system is. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, or to harm you, I didn’t understand how someone could trust me without knowing me first.[119]

At the core of this conversation is the potential—never an obligation or guarantee—of trusting people up front. In a practical sense, it’s our experience that when people offer trust up front, most people rise to the occasion. Without turning it into a commandment that everyone should follow, we want to affirm the ways that expanding up-front trust can be transformative and enabling. It can feel strange and scary to be in situations where people think well of us and trust us to do our best, without having to “earn it” or “prove it,” but it also can be incredibly freeing, making us feel more capable. This is a trust not only in individuals, but in unfolding processes with open-ended potential, without fixed rules. In this sense, it is trust in joy: in emergent capacities to increase collective powers of acting.

But what does this look like? It happens in all kinds of subtle, relational ways. One of the things that made the Thistle different from many other youth projects was that everyone in the collective had keys to the space and were free to use them anytime. No one had to go through a formal interview process, or sign over their life to have a set. Many bureaucratic procedures like this are based in distrust, as are many radical spaces that replicate institutional norms of Empire. But this up-front trust also entailed responsibility: it required that folks met regularly to check in, talk about how things were going, and so on. These practices helped to create an environment of shared connection and kindness, a space filled with friendship and mutual support, and ultimately a place to build community.

When we have been involved in movements, spaces, and forms of life imbued with this sense of trust, along with a fierce sense of mutual responsibility, we have noticed that it gave us an ability to be brave, to try new things, to be vulnerable, and to take risks. This is not a politics of “let’s all get along” pacifism. Writing in the context of collective resistance to evictions in the United States, Sitrin argues that trust is intimately connected to direct action:

It is not only about changing relationships and “feeling good” but inextricably linked to direct action. It is about creating the alternatives that we now desire and need. It is using the base of trust so as to occupy homes and prevent foreclosures and evictions, all the while knowing that to call on one’s neighbor means they will come out and support you—as has been done many hundreds of times throughout the US in only the past few months. People doing eviction defense in support of their neighbors even speak of how they might not have “liked” that particular person, but that they “felt” a connection to them and cared so much about what happened to them that they were risking possible arrest by putting their bodies between the marshals and the person’s home. From these relationships, in dozens and dozens of neighborhoods and communities across the country, networks of support and care have been formed. Neighbors go door-to-door to let others know that they can (and will) be defended if they need it, and also to just share stories, food, and support.[120]

These conceptions of care, trust, and openness are not new ideas. On the contrary, Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Prakash argue that what they call hospitality—a radical openness, generosity, and trust in others—is common among many traditions that have not been lost to bureaucratic institutions, industrial dependence, and other trappings of “development.” Among those less entangled in Empire’s radical monopolies, hospitality remains alive:

Common people learn to trust each other and be trustworthy in ways that are rapidly vanishing among the “social minorities.” Their common faith is seldom deposited in abstract causes or phantoms, like human kind. Instead, it is entrusted to real men and women, defining the place to which they belong and that belongs to them. Rather than the private hope and public despair of the “social minorities” (some hope for their personal lives, no hope for public affairs) …we usually find expressed among them a common hope in their own capacity to deal with their predicaments, whether good, bad or indifferent. Given that condition, they can be both hospitable and responsible.[121]

The notion of hospitality is not just about welcoming guests; it connotes a sensibility of trust based on people’s sense of their capacity to face the world together. Being held in this way also enables people to be open to strangers: not simply “tolerant” but capable of open-ended encounters, generosity, and curiosity. To encounter a stranger and be open to difference in this way is not at all the same as tolerance. Liberal tolerance treats individuals as atomized entities who are required to put up with each other, with the state as a universal arbiter. Hospitality starts not from rights-bearing individuals but from a sensuous and lively world, composed through common notions that have evolved to sustain joy or conviviality. To be “hosted” is to be allowed to encounter a world, to be invited into it. For the same reason, it is not individuals who are trusting; there is no self-enclosed individual who “chooses” to trust, but bundles of relationships in which the capacity for trust is activated and drawn out of people.

This is not a romanticization of “premodern” or “preindustrial” cultures, but a recognition that Empire’s radical monopolies are uneven and contested. Esteva and Prakash insist that people are always recovering, sustaining, and reinventing convivial forms of life. This can be seen in insurrectionary spaces, in disasters, in a whole multiplicity of projects and struggles: anywhere that people find the capacity to formulate problems together and carve out some wiggle room from Empire’s monopoly over life.

Infinite trust and responsibilities?

Trust and responsibility are composed differently based in the contexts from which they emerge. They can be conceived as a set of questions, including the capacity to selectively extend trust across the divisions of race, class, sex, gender, colonization, ability, age, and other forms of oppression and division.

There are good reasons why trust may be difficult. Distrust is often based on experiences of abuse, violation, or being used or taken advantage of. A lot of women, genderqueer, and trans folks don’t trust cis-gendered men; people of color are often wary of white people, and Indigenous people refuse to trust settlers. These are not ideological prejudices, but strategies of survival.

Moreover, to talk about trust and responsibility can sound naïve or just plain stupid in a world in which individual responsibility is callously imposed and so much violence happens to trusting people. At the same time, we want to recognize that people are constantly building trust across these divisions, in ways that open potentials for new relationships. In this sense, a crucial component of joyful militancy is a collective capacity to build, maintain, and repair trust, which may entail taking responsibility for harm, disrespect, or complicity with Empire in ways that we may not have anticipated. Richard Day suggests that many anti-authoritarian currents today are animated by what he calls “infinite responsibility”:

This means that as individuals, as groups, we can never allow ourselves to think that we are “done”, that we have identified all of the sites, structures, and processes of oppression “out there” or “in here”, inside our own individual and group identities. Infinite responsibility means always being ready to hear another other, a subject who by definition does not “exist”, indeed must not exist (be heard) if current relations of power are to be maintained.[122]

In this sense, the questions of what we are responsible for, whom we are responsible to, and what we can be held accountable for are always open, ethical questions. This does not mean that they will be completely revised at any second, but that they are never completely fixed, held open by an ethical responsiveness. Responsibility is infinite in the sense that it is unbounded: we can harm each other in unforeseen ways, and infinite responsibility gestures at the potential of remaining responsive to this. As a way of furthering this line of thought, responsibility could be broken apart into response-ability. Writer and facilitator Zainab Amadahy writes,

Responsibility in this sense is not a burden but something that actually enhances our life experience. The word literally means “ability to respond.” In the relational framework we might understand responsibility as the ability to respond appropriately – that is, for the common good. In this sense, responsibility is seen as preferable to individualism, which doesn’t really exist.[123]

This “common good” is not an abstract good based in Western morality. For Amadahy, it is based in attunement to human and non-human relationships and the capacity to support them. Following this line, responsibility is ethical rather than moral. As soon as answers to these questions become permanent, the ethical moment is gone, and one cannot be responsive to relationships in motion.

Like all common notions, trust and responsibility are not guarantees that things will go well, or that oppression and violence will not happen. Trust, hospitality, and openness are precious and important precisely because they entail incredible courage and risk, especially in the context of Empire, with its many layers of violence and control. For this reason, Esteva and Prakash write that “nothing is more treacherous than that which violates hospitality.”[124] To be open and vulnerable entails the risk of being hurt and betrayed in ways that we cannot be if we are on guard or closed-off. Pointing to the need for openness is not an injunction to remain open to everything. Instead, it is another open-ended ethical question about where, when, with whom, and how to be open and trusting.

Holding common notions gently

Trust and responsibility are slippery for a number of reasons. They are not simply the result of rational thinking, or even a combination of theory and practice, because they are implicated in affect: they come out of thinking and feeling the transformative encounters with our own power and the powers of others.

This is part of why it is so important to hold onto trust and responsibility as common notions rather than prescriptions. Common notions emerge from the upwellings of joy that make them possible, as people (re)learn together how to nurture convivial forms of life. To turn trust into an imperative is to rob it of this potential. Still, even among the people who generated them, common notions can be converted into rigid doctrines that drain away joyful transformation, rather than supporting it. This happens when certainty arises about the only way forward; when “trust me” and “take responsibility” become injunctions. This turns them into dead words, lifted from the tangle of transformative movement that brought them into being. Common notions can only be held gently, as flexible ideas whose power lives within the relationships and processes they sustain.

The slippage from common notions to set principles is all too common among radical movements and milieus, especially in North America. We think this slippage is connected to the phenomenon of rigid radicalism that we discussed in our introduction and explore more deeply in the next chapter.