Prefiguring community

I’m preparing to move across the country, and I’m taking this opportunity to think about what to change about my life. Actually practicing my politics and values, I realize now, will require me to spend much more time:

• getting together for dinner (and games, and singing, and dancing, and...) with people every single week — maybe even more often than that
• watching other families’ children
• helping neighbors with their home and garden projects (and, let’s be honest, fixing their computers)
• gardening and giving away every piece of produce that would be eaten by somebody else

Even though it will certainly come at the expense of:

• canvassing, phone banking, door-knocking, etc.
• showing up for protests
• organizing reading groups
• attending any sort of meetings

I’ve been calling myself an anarchist for all these years, and I feel like a colossal hypocrite for putting so much of my energy into fighting (occasionally viscous fights) to make “leftist” spaces “more prefigurative”¹ while I neglected building more of the kinds of relationships that are going to get me through the coming decades.

My last post was all about feeling isolated as a parent, but I’m trying to express something different here (but not entirely unrelated).

Because, those issues notwithstanding, I have made fantastic friends in this city, and I will miss them dearly. I think I’m recognizing a need to push some of the social bonds that I currently only reserve for friends further out, into “my community” — and I suppose is what a community actually is.

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[1] “Prefigurative politics are the modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group.”

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