Originally published in print for the Houston Associated Experimental Press.
In the shadow of empire collapse, artists and organizers are leading visionary pursuits that will help us navigate toward alternative futures. The role that artists play in leading us to these divergent paths has always helped society see ways of being that could inspire transformation toward more liberating forms of co-existence.
The rise of collective formations in Gulf Coast arts and political circles, and in the imperial core more generally, is a sign of this trend in motion. We are fighting to envision ways of working together that redistribute traditional forms of power. We are feeling out ways to be together that our bodies and spirits remember from a time before the hegemony of settler colonialism and the global violence of racial capitalism.
Working in a collective way necessarily transforms us, requiring us to re-evaluate the boundaries of what’s yours and what’s mine. Over the last seven years, I’ve been part of starting multiple arts and political collectives, and over the last two years, I’ve participated in a number of accountability processes as a facilitator, mostly involving artists and community organizers working in collective formations. Through my experience, I’ve seen the challenges that manifest in collective work, and the beauty that comes from peoples’ true and genuine desire to be a part of deeper, more tangled, and transformative relations in community.
I first joined an artistic research group that I didn’t know would become a collective in 2019. Our earliest conversations centered on ideas of free improvisation and emergence which formed the basis of our shared values. Five years later, the same themes were at the center of our work, but our principles drifted apart which led to my leaving the group. It was heartbreaking, but I wouldn’t change anything about the experience. In the process of working with the seven other people in the group, I went through cycles of confidence and fear; I abandoned myself and found myself again; I searched in the dark for the softest edges of my boundaries; I was sharp when I shouldn’t have been. At times, I felt like I couldn’t do anything right. But I was saved by others, over and over, when they picked up my spirit, handed it back to me, and gave me new faith so that the cycle would start again.
Even before my first collective, I had studied open knowledge movements, Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the Commons, anarchist theory, direct democracy, and participatory research methods. But no amount of study could have taught me what I understood through embodied practice, that the revolution is in our relationships, and that each time we endeavor to form a part of a collective, we are practicing hope in a future that is interdependent, equitable, mutualistic, and responsive to the needs of an everchanging world.
As beautiful as collective work can be, it is not always the right formation for a given situation. Starting a collective takes a tremendous amount of invisible labor, weaving together relations, and adapting to the group’s needs. In some situations, a hierarchical formation might work better, for example for executing a specific, clearly defined project, or teaching something that only you know.
But a hierarchical way of working is the default form in the colonized world, where urgency implies effectiveness and force implies power. What I call a collective is any non-hierarchical formation — meaning a group with no leader or all leaders — working toward a common purpose. Collectives might form around a place like a school or neighborhood, or an affinity like sewing or woodworking. Collectives help people self-organize to share resources and labor.
From what I have seen as both a creator and joiner of collective formations, people start them for a very wide variety of reasons, not always political. People want to work with their friends, they want dignity in their labor, or most commonly of all they want to rewrite the script around power dynamics that they’ve experienced in past friendships or relationships. If the work of forming a collective is the work of sharing power, then we also need to address the issue of community safety and what happens when we get the recalibration wrong.
For multiple people I’ve met, the drive to start “their own” collective came from a past trauma around work or relationships that led them to want to do things differently. Often, they’ve started collectives without knowing exactly what that meant. There’s nothing wrong with that. Being open to not knowing is unequivocally a good thing and can be a source of light to others.
But every light has a shadow. Sometimes, someone who wants to share power with others is also afraid of being in the spotlight, and may claim more passive or covert forms of control in order to avoid being seen pulling the strings. Sometimes, someone who has made it their life’s work to fight against harmful systems has a hard time telling the difference between fighting the system and fighting just another person stuck in its dirty grasp, also trying to get free.
These patterns ultimately show us the stories we’ve internalized about what it means to be in leadership. Those of us socialized in coloniality have grown up around examples of leadership that, whether we realized it or not, created expectations in our heads about what it would look like to have agency and dignity in the world. We believe on levels deep within ourselves that we must speak loudly in order to be heard, or that we have to hide our mistakes in order to be trusted.
Because our beliefs about hierarchy and leadership are buried so deep within us, being part of a collective naturally makes us examine our deepest selves — to grow into individuals who can safely be with others, who can earn trust not by hiding mistakes but by practicing repair. And because the terrain of our inner worlds can be uneven, surprising, awesome, and terrifying, there is a certain amount of safety that we can establish with each other by creating containers for the parts of the work that we know will be difficult. We can set up guardrails around principles like openness, agency, and dignity, to be defined and protected through process, so that they’re there waiting for us when we need them.
The process by which collectives enact their principles, practices, or “rules” is called governance. “Governance” to most people sounds like board rooms and lawyers. But, call it what you want, participating in some version of it is essential to forming your part in a collective. Ultimately, asking people to work alongside you is asking them to trust you with their labor, which in and of itself deserves care and attention.
The best place to start when creating appropriate governance for your collective is the part that’s easiest to overlook; discussing things like values, practices, purpose, and ways of meeting or gathering that work for everyone in the group. In political organizing collectives, values may be connected to ideology or political alignment. And practices like direct action, mass mobilization, or mutual aid might be the ways that those values are enacted. While a wider range of collective formations may also have political values, they may have less explicitly confrontational practices, for example, practicing communal ways of eating, dancing, or making music together in order to enact their values.
I believe that practicing communal ways of being together that go beyond direct political mobilization is essential for helping us “become the People,” as Prentiss Hemphill says. The lack of respect for communal living that we witness in the belly of empire, for example through the criminalization of seed-sharing or privatization of public schools, makes it hard for many of us to imagine what a collectivist society could really look and feel like. That’s why it’s so important that collectives around movement, art-making, education, or food-sharing help us to build that embodied knowledge.
Overall, governance laid out through explicitly stated values and practices, and later procedures or sub-formations like working groups and committees, are the foundations for accountability. As an accountability worker, I’ve noticed that groups struggle more to resolve conflict when they don’t discuss the terms of their collaboration up front, when they don’t name the values they share. Because doing so creates a bridge of understanding where everyone’s participation is a signifier of their intent to work toward a shared purpose, and even just that basic mutual understanding can help bring people back from the edge in the midst of a conflict.
I’m inspired and moved by the emergence of the collective as a pathway for collaboration in our communities. Learning to work as a collective is nothing less than a future-building exercise, requiring us to place our hope in the seeds of trust and solidarity to grow in our relationships. Former political prisoner and Black Panther Party veteran Ashanti Alston said it best when he visited us in Houston during the celebrations around fellow veteran and comrade Veronza Bowers’ release after more than 50 years of imprisonment: “The work is what’s standing between us.”
The work of building a new world is addressing the things that keep us from being closer — gender disparities, racialized identity, unequal pay rates, or contaminated soil — the things that stand in the way of our ability to live freely, and therefore our ability to connect with others and receive love. Here, on the Gulf Coast, where multiculturalism thrives and the fossil fuel industry is booming, I believe is the perfect place for these experiments in hope and new forms of connection. Anything is possible, and I see it in our Houston collectives every day.
Notes:
Village politics. There is an idea of the future that draws from the past, not idealizing it with the understanding that the world we live in is as new as each day. But acknowledging that there is a way of being that our bodies ache to remember that is as old as the earth.
Living in a village or a community means different things in different cultures. I grew up like lots of other Houstonians, in a multi-cultural household, where I sometimes didn’t know which parts of my culture came from one side of the world vs. the other. Between the Soviet Union and Colombia, both of my parents came from collectivist cultures. I think that’s why I have always been drawn to be with others in a deeper way than what was offered to me by school or work institutions.
I’ve been a part of multiple collectives. I was part of the Shock Forest Group when it first started in a weapons factory in Amsterdam. It taught me what it means to create in a truly collective format, without credit or ownership, with a shared purpose to create works that would communicate the truths that emerged between us. When I came back to Houston, I helped start the Houston Abolitionist Collective with what I had learned.
Cooperativism can be embedded in culture.
