Build the Lifehouse! Mutual care, movements and spiritual politics

One of my favourite interviews!

 I sit down with Adam Greenfield, activist and author of the book Lifehouse, for a deep discussion of his work, its underpinnings and its implications.

His book explores anarchist success stories for inspiration in the face of a ‘Long Emergency’ of climate and political instability, featuring classic case-studies like the Black Panthers, Occupy and Rojava among others.

Instead of just duplicating a book I’d love people to read, we delve as much behind Lifehouse as into it. We consider the ideas and realities shaping his thought: primarily a certain version of anarchism, but also an unusually askance and informed perspective on social movements in general, from Extinction Rebellion to Your Party to Collapse tendencies to the incipient Lifehouse movement itself. From there we reflect on the dynamics – at once highly personal and deeply structural – configuring today’s collective politics.

Throughout, Adam retains a deeply grounded orientation towards practicality and action, replete with unusually un-theoretical suggestions on the things we can do and the ways we can do in this chaotic context: chiefly a kind of practical spirituality, inquisitive politics, and a dash of conventional prepping.

Something I could have got into with Adam but didn’t is his plenitude of past lives: his stint in the US Army’s psy-ops unit (!), his work first implementing and then criticising information technology, and his study and writing on urban design. Maybe another time!

Snippets:

‘A movement is a way of avoiding doing the thinking and the work for yourself’

‘If your assembly does not have dispositive power over resources – I think it’s counter-productive. It is not you developing your muscles - it’s simply re-inscribing your own impotence. Because ultimately there’s this dynamic of supplication’

‘We’re here to care for one another! We’re here to care for one another and anything that expands our capacity to do that and to extend the frame and the fabric of our ability to care is something I’m interested in’

Writing we mentioned:

Gail’s Lifehouse piece: https://buymeacoffee.com/gailbradbrook/so-now-what

Tadzio Mueller’s leadership piece: https://steady.page/en/disrupt/posts/3f4ac939-b805-431d-93e7-b8ff498f4242

End music: Roses and Bread, sung by Penny Stone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZbkK6DGft0

Check out Penny's work! http://www.singlouderthanguns.com/

Follow me on Bluesky @douglasrogers.bsky.social‬ or Twitter at @writingDouglas if you're into that kind of thing