By Ryan Fatica

On May 29, 2020, the fires spreading across the country after the murder of George Floyd touched the dry kindling of ongoing racial apartheid, pandemic-nurtured discontent, and a faltering economy incapable of disciplining the general malaise of a capitalist wasteland carved out of the northern reaches of the Sonoran Desert in Tucson, Arizona. The fire in Tucson was mostly metaphorical in late May, although a dumpster bearing the message “Fuck the Cops, Black Lives Matter” was set ablaze and pushed into the middle of East Broadway while businesses and banks were smashed during rolling battles with the cops throughout downtown. That night, and in the nights to follow, a multiracial crowd of malcontents gave this sleepy city a wake up call that, despite the best efforts of a local power structure to lull it back to sleep, continues to energize those eager for alternative visions of Tucson’s future.

One week later, lightning struck the Catalina Mountains at the northern boundary of the city, igniting acres of invasive grasses growing up alongside palo verdes and ancient saguaros not adapted to seasonal wildfires. The grasses (Cenchrus ciliaris, Pennisetum setaceum), planted throughout the twentieth century for cattle grazing and in an attempt to control erosion, dried up in the summer sun to create a ticking time bomb of wildfire fuel unlike anything the ancient desert had ever known. Throughout the summer of 2020, as the conflagration ignited by America’s five-hundred-year history of racialized bloodletting and systematic desiccation of human dreams burned in cities across the country, the Big Horn Fire’s ring-shaped perimeter burned in supernatural ecstasy 9,000 feet above Tucson like a divine corona marking the site of the advancing apocalypse or of the coming redemption–the result is still to be seen. Fueled by an intractably warming climate, the fire subsequently tore through nearly 20,000 acres of forest in the mountains north of the Tucson valley before it was finally contained.

In the wake of this tripartite catastrophe of urban insurrection, anthropogenic ecological chaos, and plague, a burgeoning resistance movement began to find its voice in Tucson with mutual aid projects, direct action groups, and alternative infrastructure movements popping up or finding new strength throughout the city.

As has been widely noted, social movements proceed in waves that come crashing down and then recede. Getting caught up in the flow and crash is blissful, while the recessions can leave one gasping for air on an alien shore. Depression, chaotic drug use, compulsive partying, and even suicide are the usual indicators. There is, however, an alternate path for dealing with the “very short interval of rest which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of the second act of the movement,” as Marx put it, that involves reflection and analysis, engagement in local struggles, and building up the infrastructure necessary to support political movements and alternative ways of life. This article seeks to contribute to that alternate path.

What follows is an attempt to analyze one such project and to offer some ideas that I hope might deepen some of its experiments. The BCC (originally the “Blacklidge Community Collective” but, since its move from Blacklidge Drive, more accurately an orphan initialism) is a community center or social center or “hub for experimental autonomy,” as some participants put it, located in the Sugar Hill neighborhood in central Tucson. It opened in 2019 as a result of the efforts of a multiracial crew of teenage punks whose musical and social ambitions had outgrown the house show format and who wanted a public venue for music, and for distributing zines and harm reduction supplies. I focus here on the BCC to ground a vision locally, but the ideas expressed here could apply to a project that currently exists, or could soon exist, near you, anywhere. 

In Spring 2020, as a result of the bold initiative of one or two young dreamers, the project moved to a larger building where more was possible, catching the tail wind of post-uprising energy. After a plague year without public events, the space took off in 2021. At present in mid-2023, the space has perhaps 200-300 people who cycle in and out of its open doors and a core of 50 or more who regularly participate in the projects housed there.

The power of the BCC is that it actually exists. As such, it gives those involved in it an opportunity to ground their political visions in their actual lives, immediately. It provides an alternative to some kind of waiting—for a new compromise with capitalism, for a Green New Deal, for revolution, for the coming insurrection, for the perfect community, for utopia. It provides the space to ground experiments in other ways of living or other forms that lives could take—other forms of life—outside the hegemonic norm.

In a city, like all modern American cities, organized around private consumption and plagued by gentrification and the continual erosion of public space, a problem presents itself: how can we begin to build lives outside the constant quest for money and the patterns of private, atomized consumption that currently envelope us? I think the BCC offers some opportunities for beginning to answer this question.

I hope to offer a brief analysis of one problem currently eviscerating this city as well as much of the planet—the institution of private property—as well as a potential experiment in an alternative I think the BCC is well positioned to engage in: an experiment in holding things in common, in making communism real in our lives, if only in a limited way.[1]



DIAGNOSIS: PRIVATE PROPERTY (OR DOMINIUM) AND ALIENATION

The form of life that’s hegemonic in this time and place is deeply sick. Forged through brutal colonial expansion, the forced assimilation of immigrant populations, the death machine of racial apartheid and rampant post-war consumerism, this uniquely American form of life is a spiritual sickness borne by the virus of domination that eats its host from the inside, leaving them hollow. It’s a set of empty gestures, fake smiles and vacant stares, false rites of passage through a life of perpetual adolescence spent one-click shopping.

This form of life is not uniform and it doesn’t affect us all the same; instead it’s a complex ensemble of practices, some of which we might be able to keep, some of which will need to be transformed, and many that will need to be rejected entirely. It’s also not omnipresent: everywhere we look, other forms of life are sprouting or being revived from ancestral memory, and being destroyed or hollowed out and incorporated in a constant cycle of innovation and repression.

The aspect of this form of life I’m setting my sights on here is the economic realm and its manifestations in our social, political, psychological, and spiritual lives. It’s the part of the American ideology that posits us as isolated economic units fully responsible for our survival. I think it’s devastating to a human life to try to live that way, and I want to stop doing so immediately. It’s not a vague or abstract notion, it’s not a goal that can be left to a future society—it’s a daily misery that I’m not willing to keep sacrificing my life to. It’s the reality that I’ve participated thousands and thousands of times in the ritual that takes place in front of a cash register and only a few times in collective rituals intended to honor the mysteries of the cosmos.[2] It’s living in the emotional dissonance created by the realization that the material things in my intimate sphere—things I touch and use and come to love—are soaked in the blood of people far away.

It's called capitalism, but it might be more useful to seek precise terms for the nexus of practices, exploitative relationships, institutions and methods of production and exchange that make capitalism up. Following David Graeber’s diagnosis of the problem with the concept of “the state,” capitalism is a set a practices that came together at a particular moment in history (many of which, of course, long predate that moment), which are constantly shifting and evolving and which we could at least imagine coming apart in a variety of ways. Since the economic boom of the post-war era, the global economy has been increasingly incapable of producing the levels of growth that defined life for previous generations. Our current moment, defined by the economic crashes of 2008, is marked by increasing precarity for the working class, a super-concentration of wealth by a small group of oligarchs, and increasing disillusionment with America’s founding myths.

One such myth is private property, the curious notion that the earth must be carved up and owned by individuals or groups of individuals and that ownership must be legally codified and enforced through violence. It’s one of the pillars of the liberal tradition, the philosophy that grounds American politics right and left, from Republicans to Democrats to the so-called “progressive” opposition.  It’s one of the limits contemporary opposition movements seem to have trouble thinking beyond.

Groups of people have conceived of property in a variety of ways throughout time, occupying all parts of the spectrum between holding all property “in common” and holding all property privately. America’s rigid notions of private property have their intellectual and legal roots in Roman law, which had a particularly troubling notion of property relations. Property, in the Roman conception, is a relation of absolute domination: the ability to destroy a thing without repercussion. It’s the freedom to exert power over objects and human beings who are defined as objects.[3]

In the liberal tradition—codified in the writings of thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes—freedom is conceptualized as ownership over one’s own life. To be free is to “possess” one’s life and to thereby have the ability to prevent others from “trespassing” upon it. Political theorist and socialist C.B. Macpherson described this condition as “possessive individualism.” In the liberal tradition, Macpherson writes,

The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself. The relation of ownership, having become for more and more men the critically important relation determining their actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities, was read back into the nature of the individual.[4]

The notion of absolute dominion over property defines our very relationship to the world around us, including other humans—who are seen as competitors for resources at best (in modern capitalism) and objects to be treated as property at worst (in slavery) or as somewhere in between (in modern wage slavery)—and even ourselves. In our society, private property posits us as isolated beings with dominion over material things and in competition with all others for resources. According to modern economic theory, which has extended to many other fields of inquiry, we are each isolated economic units seeking to maximize our gain while minimizing our expenditure of energy and resources. While certain social safety nets are provided by the liberal democratic system, their use is widely seen as a failure—a deviation from the ideal state of economic autarky.

This way of conceiving of property results in widespread injustice, from starvation in marginalized regions of the world to the management of economically unnecessary “populations” through policing and prisons. It is a major motivation behind the collective insanity that is currently plowing us full bore off the cliff of climate catastrophe.

Loyalty to private property tethers leftist dreams to the American death machine, trapping us within the limited horizon of higher wages, improved working conditions, and the freedom to consume while climbing the ladder to nowhere. The hope of a new Fordist compromise–that we may someday strike a bargain with those who own the means of production so that we can get a bigger piece of capital’s pie–still marks the boundary of most leftist ambitions, as if better behaved corporations and more effective redistribution of wealth could resolve America’s social ills. The liberal dream of fairly compensated labor and kind-hearted technocratic elites keeping the economy burning while we “ethically” consume marks an imaginative limitation the American left is currently unable to think itself out of.

Even for those with decent jobs, health insurance and a Netflix account, there is more to a human life than our daily existence in this society suggests.[5] The best tool I’ve found for diagnosing this sickness is the concept of alienation—which was recently reformulated by the German philosopher Rahel Jaeggi. She writes, “a social form of life is alienated (or alienating) when individuals cannot identify with it, when they cannot realize themselves in it, when they cannot make it ‘their own.’”[6] The result of living with the knowledge that the real substance of human life has been robbed from you is the condition of alienation in which the world presents itself as meaningless, as something we can’t identify with, as something we’re not part of. The lives of the majority of people in this time and place are structured around humiliating jobs or careers at which they sell the best parts of their daily life in order to survive or accumulate material possessions. In this life, the mechanics of my day present themselves as not chosen by me. My choices become reified—they take on an existence that seems to supersede my individual choices and which presents itself to me as alien. My life feels like something I did not make. The world appears to me to be grinding along without or despite me and I feel powerless to influence it. “A distinctive feature of the concept of alienation,” writes Jaeggi, “is that it refers not only to powerlessness and a lack of freedom but also to a characteristic impoverishment of the relation between self and world.”[7]

Alienation has many origins, and it would be an oversimplification to attribute them to one particular institution or juridical construct. Further, the complex set of relations and institutions that make up the modern capitalist system are so thoroughly intertwined that it would be impossible to trace the implications of each in isolation. The goal here is not to posit the one correct methodology or point of entry for solving all the problems faced by our species, nor to assert that there is any simple way to unravel the complex nexus of domination and exploitation we live under. I am, however, arguing that there is a concrete connection between a conceptual framework for life that positions us as radically alone—the basic condition of homo economicus—and the desperation I feel after a long day of fulfilling someone else’s goals or in the “poor, butchered half-lives” lived by so many.[8]




A SLIGHT DIGRESSION ON SOCIAL CHANGE AND OUR CURRENT IMPASSE

The reader might object that I’m presenting these systems (capitalism, private property, the wage) as things that we do or ways we live—as forms of life—rather than as systems of domination that have been imposed upon us. The society we live within is not the result of individuals choosing from a variety of forms of life on offer, but the result of the power relations under which we live. It’s composed of a complex apparatus of systems and institutions designed to dominate us and stamp out alternative ways of being and living. Challenging the hegemony of this system won’t just involve trying out new options—those new forms of life will need to be fought for. Through the fighting, we’ll carve out room for new experiments.

But the hegemonic American form of life isn’t just the walls of the cage, it also affects the self trapped inside. It invades the worlds I imagine possible, it shapes the way I view myself and others, and it restricts the realm of the imaginable. As Michel Foucault described, the modern state not only governs citizens, but also creates them as subjects by imposing upon them restrictive notions of who they are. These notions become internalized and limit the potential for experimentation and growth. The process of revolutionary social change involves not only destroying systems of domination, but remaking ourselves and our forms of life in the process.

In putting a spotlight on the American form of life, I’m attempting to address what appears to me to be holding back current social movements from pushing beyond the horizon of liberalism and from boldly experimenting with alternatives. Despite the fact that insurrectionary situations have become more common globally in the last decade, and an increasing number of people seem to be disillusioned with the world as it is, our efforts to confront power currently seem to lack the capacity to imagine new worlds. It appears to me that we are faced with a crisis of imagination.

Although the factors creating revolutionary situations are many and are driven by the material conditions that undergird them, I think we can say for certain that forms of life begin to come apart when:

1. They lose their validity, resulting in a critical mass of the population no longer believing in their underlying myths (the American Dream; that hard work pays off; that elections mean democracy; that this continent is justifiably occupied by the U.S. government);

2. People can imagine other ways of living, other means of getting the things they need to survive and of organizing themselves and;

3. Those other ways seem more valid.

We have to start answering the question, “How else could we live?” right away. In imagining new worlds, we can draw on our subcultural experiments, our ancestral traditions, our imaginations, and our histories of resistance as starting points. Alternative forms of life grow from human creativity, ancestral memory, and deviance faster than any apparatus of domination can smother them out. Moments of insurrection, of heightened social struggle, of ruptures in the flow of quotidian existence, create windows in which we can spread our visions of a different life, try them out, and modify them as we go.

When a temporary autonomous zone pops up in liberated territory, it will be more powerful if a portion of the participants already have experience in self-organization, conflict management, and cross-cultural solidarity. When we have the opportunity to surpass the nightmare of the grocery store where all the food is locked away and commodified, we need to know the systems of food distribution and cooperative food production that will replace them, or at least be able to imagine how they will come about.

Italian theorist and communist revolutionary Antonio Gramsci identified the war of position and the war of maneuver. The war of maneuver is the process by which we physically confront and seek to overcome the systems of domination we live under. In the last decades, urban insurrections and Indigenous land occupations are two forms this war has taken. They have reached a critical mass of participants, managed to directly confront agents of the ruling apparatus and, in many ways, they have been successful in moving large scale social conflict forward despite resulting in temporary defeats.[9]

However the war of maneuver can’t be separated from the war of position, through which revolutionaries build alternative models for new worlds and struggle to make their ideas hegemonic. Through experimentation and through spreading their ideas, revolutionaries expand the realm of “common sense”—of what is considered possible and reasonable by the population. The war of position involves experimentation in alternative forms of life and the construction of new ways of organizing and relating to each other on which we slowly seek to depend more and more. Rather than trying to impose just one new form of life, the war of position (for anarchists or autonomists at least) involves cracking open the homogenous crust of society to make room for many alternative experiments to flourish. A world, as the Zapatistas put it, where many worlds fit. 



EXPERIMENTATION: THEORIES OF USE

The BCC, as well as any similar structure across the country, presents an opportunity for creative collective experimentation with alternative ways of conceptualizing the use of things. Under the regime of legally codified private property, the BCC is a non-profit entity composed of a board and members that can own and lease things in furtherance of its mission under the rules codified in its bylaws. But how do we conceptualize what we are doing at the BCC among ourselves? Who “owns” the things the BCC purchases or comes to possess? What laws, rules, or norms control our use of the space the BCC rents and the things inside it?

Contrary to the Roman juridical norm (which posits ownership as a relationship between a person and a thing), a claim of ownership is a relationship between people—a collective agreement about the use of a material thing. If I believe I own my truck or my laptop, what’s really happening is that I have formed an agreement, codified in law, about the use of those things. These agreements are about inclusion and exclusion: who can and cannot make use of a thing. Although the Roman conception of property is the one we’ve inherited, other societies have established other collective agreements about the use of material things, homes, waterways, and territories which have regulated their usage without implying the right of abusus—the right to destroy a thing under your control.

Experiments in alternatives are all around us—in current and historic practices of free people, in current and past resistance communities and subcultures, anywhere the excluded have banded together to ensure collective survival.

One example was articulated by Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben, who has written about alternative theories of use articulated by the medieval Franciscans, who, according to him, sought “to think life as that which is never given as property but only as a common use.”[10] This example may provide a helpful structure for deepening our discussions around property and use.

According to Agamben, the Franciscans, embedded within Roman concepts of legal property rights, recognized five forms of relationship to material things: proprietatem, possessionem, usumfructum, simplicem usum, and simplex facti usus (ownership, possession, usufruct, simple use, and simple de facto use).

Ownership (proprietatem or dominium) is defined as the legal right of full control over a thing—this includes the relations of usus (the right to use a thing possessed), fructus (the right to profit from the fruits of a thing possessed), and abusus (the right to destroy or alienate a thing possessed, which includes to sell it). Using the example of the BCC, our landlord’s relationship to the building we occupy is a relationship of ownership in which he maintains the right to use, profit from and even destroy the building as long as his actions fall within the terms of our lease agreement.

The word possession (possessionem) in Latin comes from the words potis (“able”) and sedeō (“sit”) and refers to the legally codified right to occupy a property or possess a thing. Possession may best describe our legal relationship to the building that houses the BCC. Under the terms of our lease, we are “able” to “sit” on this property, but we do not have the right to destroy it or sell it, and our right of possession may be ended at any time within the terms of our lease.

The combination of the rights of use (usus) and the right to profit from the fruits of something (fructus) create usufruct (usumfructum): the legally encoded right to use and profit from a material thing without the full legal right to destroy, sell, or even fully possess it. One example of usufruct is the Mexican ejido system, through which communities held pieces of land “in common,” which were legally owned by the Mexican government. Communities could live on the land and grow food on it, from which they could profit, but they did not legally own the land and could not sell it or even fail to cultivate it. Neoliberalism effectively ended the ejido system in 1992, leading to the Zapatista Revolution in Chiapas.

Simple use (simplicem usum) is the legally codified right to use a thing while neither fully possessing it nor profiting from it. Describing simple use, 13th-century Franciscan Hugh of Digne wrote, “Conserving one’s nature does not in fact represent ownership of food and clothing, but use; moreover it is possible always and everywhere to renounce ownership, but to renounce use never and nowhere [proprietati ubique et semper renunciari potest, usui vero nunquam et nusquam]. The use of things is, therefore, not only lawful, but also necessary.”[11] For the Franciscans, simple use described the monastics’ relationship to the clothes they wore and the food they ate—things they could use to survive but did not personally own, could not sell for profit and in regard to which the legal right of possession doesn’t quite make sense.

The concept of simple de facto use (simplex facti usus) was introduced by Pope Nicholas III in 1279 in his bull entitled Exiit qui seminat (He Who Sows Went Forth).[12] Nicholas sought to define forms of use that are not codified within law, but are rather “presented as paradigms of purely factual human practice lacking any juridical implication.”[13] The defining feature of simple de facto use is a way of relating to material things that lies outside of both ownership and law, or as Agamben puts it: “a form-of-life, a human life entirely removed from the grasp of the law and a use of bodies and of the world that would never be substantiated into an appropriation.”

Despite these noble sounding goals, Agamben points out that Nicholas’ entire argument was nested within a juridical framework—the monastics could achieve this relationship to material things only because their possessions were legally owned by the Church. The Franciscans sought what they called “the highest poverty,” an arrangement in which they merely used things without ever owning them. In reality, the order did use and control the use of a variety of things (food, land, buildings, etc.) but these things were technically owned by the Holy See, rather than the mendicant order itself. One might argue that this was merely a superficial denial of ownership rather than a true renunciation it.

Nonetheless, the Franciscans present an example in which a group of people form a collective arrangement about the use of material objects while an overarching structure maintains legal possession over those things, leaving its members to agree among themselves on their use without claiming ownership. In this way, they may provide an example for our use of things at the BCC.

The BCC exists within a society dominated by private property. I’m not particularly interested here in ideas of a “post-revolutionary” utopia in which all things are held in common, although I do wish to experiment with ideas capable of building new worlds. Ultimately, I’d like to ask how, immediately, a group of people such as ourselves can experiment with alternative notions of property and with holding things in common; with building lives involving only use or even, if we can imagine it, simple de facto use—a way of using things in regard to which we claim no rights, seek no legal justification, and therefore do not rely upon state violence to enforce. To treat our use of material things with as little claim to ownership as we treat the air we breathe: as a thing we use while making no claim over, which comes and goes in a realm beyond monetization or ownership.

Although we can scrutinize the power dynamics at play in the project, the BCC is a legal entity that exists apart from each of us and through which our individual capacity to profit is extremely limited. By placing certain things in the ownership of this structure (our office space, our books, our screen printing supplies, our pots and pans, the food we grow in the garden), we give up an element of control over them and cede some of our power to a collective body. In so doing, we take an immediate step toward a life less dominated by private property—trapped, even as we currently are, within the juridical frameworks of our society.

The Franciscans maintained an existence within this space of dissonance between what they believed and how they explained their actions to the prevailing legal entities. This is a sort of two-faced maneuver (we could call it the Janus strategy) in which a revolutionary community can both explain itself in accordance with the juridical norms that surround it while also articulating internally a competing conceptual apparatus for its actions. As this strategy develops, it could become a sort of dual power (or, for the autonomist, a multi-power) situation, in which competing centers of power and norms of property and law coexist within a single territory. As the American form of life increasingly fails to cast its spell upon us, alternative frameworks gain legitimacy, and the need to explain ourselves in terms of isolating notions of private property become less and less. A Janus strategy could replace a position of purity, in which finding ways of strategically accommodating one’s projects to the reigning economic order is seen as failure instead of resilient adaptation.

Living in such a posture, the Franciscans operated within a sphere of fiction which contained nonetheless the seeds of a messianic transition they maintained as inevitable.[14] Or conceived another way, they lived out an alternative reality in hopes of living into being the world to come. What would it look like to create a fictional realm in which we live out the property relations we desire while actively seeking to make them more real? What would happen if we eventually forgot they were fictions? Would we be willing, then, to fight for them?

What would it look like to imagine a life involving only use? The Franciscans defined poverty as “the voluntary abdication of ownership for the Lord’s sake” and imagined a life in which the use of material things necessary for maintaining one’s life (food, clothing) was not defined as ownership of those things, but merely use.[15] To the Franciscans, only use was considered necessary for survival.  If we imagine a version of these ideas of use stripped of their rigid asceticism and their humility before a patriarchal god, a vision of a communism we can use begins to emerge—one in which each person uses the things they need to live without claiming any legal right to do so.

What if the BCC and other social centers or cooperatives across the country held other things we need, not only a building and its resources, but cars, houses, hospitals, and land? Would it be possible to build a shared life together beyond the tyranny of struggling to survive as isolated units, of collecting and owning things?