How To Build Radical Community
This article is an adaptation of a video I originally published on my YouTube channel.
Art by Cinta Vidal
Loneliness is on the rise. Parenting is tougher than ever. Friendships have become harder to maintain. And do your neighbours even know your name?
Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
It’s usually grouped with the rest of those vaguely African wisdom quotes circulating on your parents’ Facebook, like “A roaring lion kills no game” or “The axe forgets but the tree remembers.” The proverb is meant to communicate the importance of community in childrearing, but when shortened, “it takes a village” can refer to the mutual aid found in community that all of us require to thrive.
The question is: Where is “the village” today?
“Villages” still exist. I’m not denying that. Some folks enjoy vibrant extended families, live in tight-knit and active neighbourhoods, or ground their social lives in a place of worship. If you have an involved and supportive community around you, more power to you. But for many, there appears to be a growing absence of genuine community these days. We’re isolated into overburdened household units and expected to handle all the ups and downs of life alone, with a price tag on all the ways we could be connecting. Friendship becomes therapy. Mentorship becomes life coaching. Shared meals become take-out orders. Childcare becomes yet another expense. And with long work hours limiting our free time and the cost of living crisis making it harder than ever to make ends meet, it’s no wonder that there’s an epidemic of loneliness.
Community is a crucial component in overcoming our compounding crises, but reclaiming it in full, without the constraints of our rulers, requires no less than social revolution. We’ll begin by revisiting the village of the past, and then sketch out a radical vision for the future of community and how we can start building it despite the system that places capital over connection.
What Was The Village?
In the absence of direct personal experience with the richness of fully realised community life, we can look to the past for inspiration. No matter how factual, every telling of the past comes with a degree of myth-making, as we select, frame, and interpret the facts of the past according to our perspective. I strive for accuracy and balance, but nobody is immune to this. So keep this myth-making in mind and remember that there’s always more to the story as I share this account of pre-colonial African “communalism.”
According to the (highly generalised) historical narrative written by anarchist Sam Mbah, the pre-colonial African village was communal in the sense that it involved every individual in the organisation of community affairs. Shared access to land, shared social produce, gift exchanges, and strong ties of kinship defined “the African village,” ensuring that everyone could meet their needs. Surpluses and crafts could be exchanged within and between communities, thus distributing the wealth of resources from one region to another and vice versa for their mutual advantage.
The village treasured the leadership of elders. Such leadership was not in all cases based on authority over others, but often simply the recognition of their wisdom and experience, lending them good judgement in the settlement of disputes. Elders took part in the shared labour and enjoyed the shared product of that labour, more or less, just like everyone else.
There were no written laws or police forces. Justice for transgressions like theft, killing, or rape came from within the community itself. As the entire village and those outside it were part of a web of mutual interdependence, an individual’s offence against another had effects that reached beyond the two of them alone, risking shame and consequences upon the perpetrator’s entire household, kinsmen, and extended family.
Village solidarity was further reinforced through the age-set system—a social structure that brought people together across family lines. Adult men were typically grouped into two broad categories—elders and young adults, the latter deferring to the former, and they moved through these stages together with the shared responsibilities, values, and consequences that came with them. Groups of young men would team up to do farm work, build roads, clean public spaces, help with burials, and assist in harvesting crops—not just for themselves, but for anyone in the community who needed support. Women may also have had their own age-set organisations, though their roles and influence varied depending on the society.
African communalism was not some perfect anarchist utopia. These were predominantly human economies, as anthropologist David Graeber would describe them: their focus was less on accumulating capital and more on the creation, destruction, and rearranging of human beings. Social sanctions often included sanctions against those accused of “practising witchcraft.” There was a strong social obligation to marry and have children, which meant you could be viewed with suspicion if you remained single and childless. In some manifestations of this African communalism, women had a pretty low status, perhaps among the many wives of a single man, while other manifestations were distinctly matrifocal.
This generalised account of village life cannot factor all nuances, edge cases, and non-African examples throughout history, but it does give us a broad strokes picture of what we may be missing out on today due to the ways our social lives have been fractured over generations. African communalism persists in some parts of the continent, but the rise and spread of states; the apocalyptic consequences of the slave trade; the later imposition of European colonialism and enclosure of property; the consequences of independent nation-building, ethnic conflict, and imperial meddling; and the pursuit of capitalist modernity for the sake of development have eroded their relevance today.
The “Radical” Village
Thanks to our globe-spanning supply chains and Internet access, we’re supposed to be more connected, but our society seems more fractured and our selves more isolated than ever before. This fragmentation is enforced materially, through our precarious labour and living conditions, but it’s also enforced ideologically. We’re expected to be self-sufficient, responsible for our successes and failures alike, all on our own. But in reality, we are interdependent. Always have been.
So, how do we overcome this isolation?
Considering current circumstances and systemic barriers, I don’t think we can resign ourselves to villages-as-usual. We’ll need to build a radical community. Our imagination should never be limited to what has been, but history can be a source of inspiration.
For over 2,000 years, roughly from 500 BCE to the early 20th century, the peoples of a mountainous region of Southeast Asia known as Zomia consciously organised themselves to evade state control and domination of their communities. According to anthropologist James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), these peoples have managed to avoid the rule of valley-based states not solely through geography, but rather through their adaptations. Instead of staying in one place and becoming vulnerable to state surveillance, taxation, and conscription, Zomians relocated their settlements often and engaged in shifting cultivation, meaning they didn’t grow their food in the same place every year. Rather than growing state-preferred staple crops like irrigated rice, they grew tubers, which were easier to hide and escape taxation. They avoided centralised leadership, continuously reinvented their ethnic identities, and lived in small, hidden, and scattered settlements, all of which made it harder for states to control them. Since these communities were zones of refuge, often composed of runaways of slavery, war, and state-borne crisis, it’s no wonder that they’d ferociously maintain their autonomy by any means necessary.
While today’s technologies of control threaten Zomia’s autonomy, I still think there’s wisdom to be gleaned from its state-resistant history. They understood that autonomy is a continuous pursuit, not a static destination. Just as they never stopped adjusting their living and growing patterns to stay outside the state’s reach, we can also aim to be as fluid and adaptive as possible through the ongoing transformation of our community groups and ties. I don’t think the Zomian strategy of avoiding literacy and roughing it on the margins should be our strategy for resisting the state today. But by practising basic security culture and resisting the bureaucratic forces that may co-opt our community engagement, we can similarly limit our legibility in the eyes of the system. That might involve limiting our communication on mainstream social media and organising mutual aid in ways that don’t rely on the non-profit complex.
We can take similar lessons from the history of marronage. As brilliantly identified by geographer and abolitionist Celeste Winston, Black communities resistant to oppression have historically sought collective freedom through the creation of maroon geographies—what she calls the places of refuge beyond the status quo of slavery (or modern policing). For those unfamiliar with the term, marronage refers to the act of escaping enslavement, or more expansively, authority as a whole, and establishing autonomous, oppositional communities. The continuous pursuit of freedom found in the practice of marronage has long been a source of personal and strategic inspiration for me as a Trinidadian anarchist. In How to Lose the Hounds (2023), Winston draws from that same well of history to define marronage as a way of being and building community that is invaluable even today, as we co-create and lean upon our own spaces, narratives, economies, and conflict resolution practices beyond and against the system’s violent logic. That may mean building social centres, retelling oral histories, reviving the sou-sou for survival, and mediating conflicts without police intervention.
Taking both the example of Zomia and the practice of marronage into account, you should have a sense of what I mean by building a radical community, and not villages-as-usual. Our community building must be adaptable to ever-changing circumstances. It must be resistant to legibility and incorporation into the system. It needs to be a place of refuge, physically and psychologically, for those facing oppression. It must be consciously outside of and opposed to the system and everything it entails. I’m not talking about simply launching yet another intentional community. That’s a nice lifestyle choice for some, but in practice, it can fall short of its noble intentions. I’m talking about creating radical networks in the spaces we’re already in and pushing them “off the grid,” away from their dependency on the system. So not severing ties with the rest of the world, but instead reshaping those ties on new terms.
How To Gather?
Alright, so these vague platitudes sound nice and all, but what do you actually do to get started?
Well, building community requires bringing people together, but if you’ve ever interacted with people before, you’d know that gatherings don’t always work out for the best. So maybe we should better understand what it takes to gather effectively first. Thankfully, Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering (2018) has just what we need to get started. It’s not a radical text by any means, but it does provide some solid advice for gatherings of all sorts. By becoming what she calls an artful gatherer—someone who can create meaning and connection in groups where everyone’s different—we can bring people together to transform the way we live.
So, what will help us create connection in our gatherings?
First, it’s necessary to define a clear purpose. We need to gather with intention, not simply default to the category of event we’re hosting. As a community draws closer together, more casual and aimless encounters will weave their way into everyday life. But when you’re just getting started, when the village is lacking, you need a solid foundation to build upon. Bringing your neighbours together for the first time might involve having a barbecue, hosting a potluck, or organising a sports day. A radical community might get its start at a protest or an infoshop. In any case, you need a purpose that is sharp, specific, and bold. Perhaps it’s “to forge alliances between the elders and the youth in our community”, or “to prepare for the next hurricane before it happens”, or “to steal back joy from the jaws of burnout,” or “to connect with the land we share.”
With a clear purpose comes boundaries that must be created to honour that purpose, which will determine who may be included or excluded. While inclusion can be a positive impulse, it isn’t always applicable to the situation. You need to take steps to guard such spaces from surveillance, co-optation, sabotage, derailment, and burnout. Think of these boundaries not as a wall, but as a membrane that will let in what nourishes us and keep out what harms us. Not every gathering is a space for debate. Not every gathering is meant for education. Not every gathering is compatible with every person. Thus, to protect the integrity of the gathering, being an artful gatherer requires us all to exercise leadership, not in the sense of authority over others, but in the sense of influence, guidance, and responsibility.
The spaces in which we host our gatherings also matter. If we wish to prefigure the world we seek here and now, then at least some of our gatherings should reflect that. They should break away from the world as is and create an alternate reality where people can experience what else is possible. For example, tactical urbanism can be a way to temporarily transform the built environment of a neighbourhood in a way that reflects the will of the people who live there. It may involve painting bike lanes and crosswalks, planting gardens, changing the speed limit, or removing hostile architecture. A block party can be a dual-purpose gathering, as it brings people together for fun while potentially disguising this sort of DIY urbanism action.
Our gatherings should also seek to accommodate those we are trying to reach. Parents may need a dedicated childcare space. Those with disabilities may need accommodations according to their needs. And everyone appreciates comfort, so be thoughtful about how you incorporate food, lighting, and furniture. Beyond designing our spaces, we might also design our time differently. We might decide to forgo the traditional event schedule and opt for listening to the rhythms of our bodies, resting and eating when needed instead of when scheduled. All of these efforts can give people a sensory experience of what else is possible for the world to be.
Finally, be sure to end gatherings with intention: share final thoughts, invite reflection, and make commitments for next steps so that people leave with a sense of transformation. Parker’s artful gathering is a lifelong practice, but by keeping these guidelines in mind, we can begin to develop more meaningful and impactful gatherings that create the foundation for radical community.
Beyond events, depending on your circumstances and skills, there may be other ways to accentuate community building. Consider starting or getting involved in a club or sports team. Establish a community garden, makerspace, or library of things. On their own, these things are not particularly radical. But you need to build trust in each other before you confront the state. Develop solidarity before you go on strike. Establish relationships before you seek to educate. Build the networks of care that will make supporting social revolution possible. Remember that the village in practice is often an ongoing network of favours, so extend a hand and see who meets it.
A Brief Note on the Economics of Community
Much of the reason we lack community today is due to the marginalisation of the gift economy. When we depend on paid services and distant strangers to meet our needs, the bonds of obligations, favours, gifts, and gratitudes upon which community is built cannot flourish. Community cannot flourish. Paying for everything we need may make us feel independent, but it leaves us bereft of the social satisfaction every individual needs to thrive. Being in community means embracing interdependence. As Charles Eisenstein wrote in Sacred Economics (2011):
“Community is not some add-on to our other needs, not a separate ingredient for happiness along with food, shelter, music, touch, intellectual stimulation, and other forms of physical and spiritual nourishment. Community arises from the meeting of those needs.”
As we are immersed in times of widespread economic instability, perhaps we can reawaken the spirit of the gift as a solution, to emerge from the cave of scarcity and connect with community as a result. As Eisenstein says later on “If you want community, you must be willing to be obligated, dependent, tied, attached. You will give and receive gifts that you cannot just buy somewhere. You will not be able to easily find another source. You need each other.”
The Pitfalls of Community
Alas, building community is not all sunshine and roses.
Some circumstances make it significantly more difficult than others, like living in certain suburbs or all the way out in the sticks. It’s harder, but not impossible. You’ll have to improvise to make such hostile spaces more amenable to connection. Start by building a relationship with just one neighbour and creating small nodes of connection that can slowly grow into a larger network. Try starting a book club, a repair cafe, or a front-yard stuff swap. You’re likely not the only one yearning for connection. Just try not to get discouraged.
I also want to caution against the idealisation of community itself. Humans are social animals, but that doesn’t mean that our societies always work for the individuals that compose them. Hurt, inconvenience, and misunderstanding are part of life and community, no matter what social media therapyspeak tells you. And the village will annoy you sometimes. You might wish you could leave the WhatsApp group. Or worse. Many communities can be inaccessible, prejudiced, toxic, suffocating, conformist, and even abusive, especially for the disabled and neurodivergent, racial or religious minorities, atheists, queer folk, and all the others who don’t quite “fit in.” Sometimes people have to leave “community” to survive.
On the flip side of that experience, I’ve seen some people treat community as the be-all and end-all of their politics. They seem to anthropomorphise community and elevate its will above all else, as though there is some virtue in the majority of an area that automatically justifies its impositions. But I don’t think we should take on such a totalising view of community. I get why a person who feels deeply atomised and alienated by our status quo would find community so appealing, but for all its merits, community should not be seen as sacred. Sweeping aside domination and abuse for the sake of maintaining “community” just elevates this social construct above the people who actually compose it. And if you’re an anarchist like I am, that’s a big no-no.
We need to protect ourselves and others from harmful actors. We need boundaries. We need free association. I’ve spoken before about free association as a foundational principle of my anarchist philosophy. Free association means you choose who you’re associating with and on what basis. You come together with others because it makes sense, because it meets a need, or feeds a desire, not because you’re subject to authority. And if it stops working, you don’t have to associate on that basis anymore.
Let’s be clear about what we mean by community, because the same term can be used to mean very different things, and can often carry those multiple meanings at the same time:
Community might simply refer to your people. Friends. Family. The neighbour who bakes you bread on the weekend. This is community as a network of relationships, based on mutual care and shared interest. When people yearn for community, this is usually what they’re missing. Community might also refer to the territory in which you reside. The neighbourhood. The literal village. The apartment block you share with a hundred other tenants. Often when we speak of building community, radical or otherwise, we’re talking about converging these two meanings: creating strong networks of relationships in our immediate, physical space. So far, my mentions of community in this script have been based on one or both of these meanings. But sometimes “community” is used in a different way, to uphold a polity, and this is where we run into some problems.
When it’s all you’re accustomed to, it’s very easy to maintain the habit of seeing society through the lens of polities. Polities are political units that turn social relations into something legible, bounded, and governable. They assign rights, duties, and privileges to their members, and concentrate decision-making in some authority—be it a boss, a prime minister, or a “community democracy”—that claims to represent or act on behalf of the whole. Polities brush over and marginalise the complex and diverse needs and interests that the individuals within them have for the sake of unitary action. Rather than embracing the fact that people are shifting constellations of needs, affinities, and relationships and being flexible enough to reflect that reality, the polity-form treats them all as permanent members of a singular political body that must perpetually exist and act as one.
But anarchism asks us to think differently. Free association is based on the recognition that:
All individuals seek happiness through the satisfaction of their needs, and they need to be free to satisfy their needs.
The ideal goal of society is to ensure and increase the happiness of its members. Most societies have failed at this because they have not afforded all individuals the freedom to satisfy their needs, but have instead privileged some individuals over others.
Thus: The best form of society is that which brings us closer to this ideal goal by affording us all equal freedom to satisfy our needs.
“Society” or “community” exist for the sake of the individuals that give them life, not vice versa. This isn’t to say that individuals should persist in isolation, but that the bonds that unite people should be flexible, natural, freely accepted, and freely broken instead of rigidly imposed by artificial constructs. Under free association, groups don’t form and then decide what to do; they form, split, merge, and dissolve based on their interests, goals, or needs. The act of association is the decision—it is the point of consensus upon which further action can be taken. The minutiae of their shared actions can then be coordinated based on available information and expertise, resource and labour constraints, and their responsibilities to others beyond the group. These groups may stretch across time, lasting for hours or decades, and they may stretch across distance, so that people who have little in common with their neighbours beyond their shared space may be more involved in associations that touch every corner of the globe. If shared consent is no longer there, that group or member of that group is no longer there either.
The beauty of it is that even if you and I disagree on xyz, we can still work together on abc. Association and dissociation aren’t all-or-nothing. Conflict and collaboration can coexist even between two people. What free association does is ensure that our groupings are honest and fluid. That they continue to reflect, rather than obscure, our actual interests. If people disagree, they group accordingly and coexist, find compromise, or develop an alternative solution where needed.
Thus, in anarchy, the community-as-territory may not be “governed” by a community-as-polity, but it will be the terrain upon which various communities-as-networks-and-associations encounter and interact with each other. Makes sense?
Of course, community also extends beyond the social and economic dimensions of human relationships. It’s important to root our revolutionary villages in the land and ecosystems we’re part of as well. I’m still looking into some of the ways we can develop alternative economies that are so rooted in building social-ecological synergy, but perhaps most vital to that shift is the return of the commons.
It’s clear that “the village”, as it was, is no longer there for many of us. In some ways, this absence is a deeply felt tragedy. It’s difficult to go through life alone. But in other ways, if past communities for you have meant marginalisation and toxicity, then loneliness has been your reprieve. It bears repeating that humans are social animals, but our world is making it harder than ever to find the relationships that work for us.
I believe that through free association, we can create ever-evolving villages that meet our needs, desires, and interests and enable us to help others do the same. I believe that by striving toward this “anarchy,” by creating this social revolution in our social connections, we can overcome the domination of authority. It will take many villages to raise a new world, and we may not build the whole village overnight, but perhaps we can start with just one brick.
All power to all the people.
Peace.
