“There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.”
— The Broken Teapot, Anonymous
I see this quote so often and to be honnest, I HATE IT. Not the first part, that part is okay. But this part:
Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most
extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels,
losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same
as dying.What this literally says is: we don’t have communities because we aren’t dependent on each other for our survival. The punishment isn’t high enough. We aren’t coercively forced to stick together no matter what.
If that’s a ‘real’ community, then yeah, no thanks, I’ll pass.
Mourning the time when communities were more solid because exile was
deadly sounds a lot like mourning the time when marriage lasted a lifetime
becausedivorce was highly stigmatized and women didn’t have access to income. In both cases, people stayed together because there was more effective coercion. Which is, ya know, not good. Don’t romanticize that.
I want better communities. I want activist communities where we support people going through hard times, even if they last for years. Communities where housing and feeding each other and picking someone up at night when the bus got cancelled is something you do even when you’re pretty tired yourself. I want communities where we put effort into helping each other become better people at our own pace, instead of relying heavily on call-outs that require an immediate appropriate response to avoid exile. I want communities that embrace imperfection.
But I want us to build those communities because they’re good places to live. Not because we’re coerced into them.
tuckerswash said:
Personally I read this as more of a “we
need to focus on addressing and solving intra community issues as
priority over kicking people out,” vs a “never kick people out.”
But the “excommunicate instead of talk
to” is a SUPER relevant point. People use issues they have (that are
usually resolvable or at least addressable first) as excuses to further
fracture the communities we have because they want that more than they
actually want the problem solved.Yeah, that’s sort of part of what the first part of the quote is about. I absolutely agree with that part. My problem is only with the second part of the quote which romanticizes coercion and heavily implies that coercion is what makes ‘real’ communities.
I think maybe it’s less a reference to “back in the good ol days” and more of a reference to communities being life sustaining. We have a lot of people nowadays who die from a lack of community, from a lack of the web of mutual aid that keeps us alive. People can’t pay medical bills and don’t have a reliable community to provide that support, we work in unsafe conditions because we don’t have the community to build unions and fight it. Not having a community still can very much mean death if you don’t have it for all but the most privileged
What you’re saying is absolutely true, but that seems like the absolute opposite of what this article is describing. I have tried to look at ‘The Broken Teapot’ from all angles and I can’t read it as anything but a
reference to “back in the good ol days”. It’s just so explicitly written that way.
Where it says “members
move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler” it describes activists with high levels of independence and a failure of communities related to that independence.
Where it says “Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them.” it says that individuals without that independence are better at having communities. There’s no ambiguity in the text there.
If the author meant anything else, they did a very bad job at writing. I could go for some wishful thinking about what the text might have meant but I’m more inclined to take the text at face value and go ‘yeah, no, this is a bad idea’.
QueerAnarchism 