Microsolidarity and belonging: how to build new communities

We caught up with Richard and Natalia from Enspiral, a New Zealand-based network of self-organising companies that have been working without bosses since 2010. We talked about communities, belonging and our changing relationships with each other.

How do people belong now? Is there a crisis in belonging?

Natalia: Last year, as we traveled around the UK, my sense was that there was a clear longing for belonging. We have community, so it was really interesting for us to see how in Europe, although there’s so many more people, this sense of actually being connected to others was not very strong. This was particularly true for a lot of people who would be quite radical or progressive: they still didn’t have that sense of being part of a community.

Richard: I felt like for a lot of people it was as if belonging is like a magical fairy and we are all here praying that it turns up. What people don’t seem to realise is that belonging is just like a product or process. It’s quite deterministic. If you come to the same group of six people six times every six months and you share some kind of intimacy, you’re going to belong.

The early labour movement was founded on a kind of collective smaller scale community building and organising. How do you think the work you’re doing compares to this?

Richard: Work is political. While we’re at work, politics comes into action. It’s also about people solving the problems that are in front of them. You find that abundance is created when you just coordinate people with shared interests. But compared to labour movements of today, there’s a few important differences to our work. One of them is about what happens at scale. As soon as you have hundreds of thousands or millions of people, there is so much distance between the worker on the shop floor and the organiser in the head office. They live in different worlds and the solidarity at that point is stretched really thin. It’s an imagined community instead of an actual community. Smaller scale organising is much more appealing to me than having some kind of large scale thing like a political party. 

The country is so divided at the moment. How do you think we can build a politics that could try to heal those divisions?

Richard: I know that from our friends in Spain and Barcelona, they have had some successful gains in the last five years using coalitions. They call it “complicated majorities”. The idea is that different groups form around one issue, for example housing. On this issue we agree we’re going to form a coalition and allow each other to be different but mobilise our distinctive capabilities. When the housing issue is resolved then we disband, and then the next issue comes up and we form a different coalition. That’s really uncomfortable for some people and the Anglo-Saxon left is really bad at allowing difference. It becomes this purity mission that everyone must conform. It might be good for developing a political consciousness but it’s bad for actually organising communities.

Natalia: I totally agree with what you’re saying about the structures that we have today in society. They don’t help us. It’s about how we recreate those structures on a local level. How do we build society between the three of us here? We are building society. Creating new spaces for connection can help us overcome division. At some point there’s an “us” and there’s an “other” but the “other” stops being the “other” when you actually meet them, when you get to know who they really are, what they care about, their story. They might have different thoughts but we’re still connected as we’re still part of the same community. There are a bunch of these initiatives around the world that are trying this like dinner table gatherings or just community encounters and meet-ups. Whatever it is that gets people into the same room to discuss not just politics but where they can find common ground. Free food always helps.

What are your thoughts about how groups can manage difference?

Richard: I wrote an article called the beautiful trap of belonging, which argues that we’re in a crisis of belonging at the moment where we don’t have enough of that feeling and therefore when we get any of it we go off the deep end. It’s like our society has been parched for so long that we have an obsessive tribalism and we start defining ourselves by the negative space around us. I hope we can get to the next stage, which is creating a kind of belonging that doesn’t come at the expense of others. It becomes okay to disagree because you are actually enriching this community through your difference. But that’s a stage you can only get to through practice. I work within a co-op – a good example of where you are trying to govern a shared resource and you have to manage difference in that space. I certainly didn’t wake up that way. It was a competency that I developed through practice.

Natalia: For me, belonging is actually a deeper thing. Being a member of the Labor Party or whatever that identity is, is not actually belonging. I belong to others. I don’t belong to a name or a brand or a label. I think because there is this lack of belonging people think at least I can get attached to that identity and have a little flavour of the belonging effect. Brene Brown did a lot of research on belonging and trust. She found that people who have a sense of actually just feeling that they belong in the world could then belong to other places and be part of a different community without feeling that they lose that connection. For her that sense of true belonging is what gives you the space where you can actually disagree and manage difference. Where you can say, I disagree with you and that doesn’t matter.

Richard: It’s been helpful to think about belonging at different scales. In some cultures they have a language for this. There’s the depth of belonging to myself that I accept myself. Belonging to the earth that I’m on. Then there’s partnership, and then there’s the crew of friends that are really tight. It’s kind of like these are ever increasing circles. If I have my four, five or six different circles of belonging and say a partnership breaks down, then I’ve got these other ones that are going to look after me. I have a kind of resilience because not all of my connection is to one person or group. People can actually have quite an abundance of different levels of connection.

I agree a lot of these wider circles have been lost. There’s a strand within Labour thought that socialism is about protecting our relationships with each other from capitalism. Do you agree?

Richard: When I was thinking about microsolidarity, I was thinking that we have to outcompete the current models that are on offer for individuals working in the gig economy and vicarious capitalism, and actually that’s not a very high bar to cross. All you have to do is provide people with some improvement to their precarious, anxious reality and you’ve got the material to grow a movement that’s not based on pure virtue but actually giving people something they need. We’ve been travelling for six months and I got home and bumped into someone I know called Sophie. I told her I actually needed a place to stay that night. She says, of course you can stay, and makes me a lovely dinner. So I had my accommodation and food sorted out because I’m in this web of relationships of trust. It’s a kind of shared bank balance we have through trust and friendship which allows the surplus that exists to be shared.

There’s something about the practice of helping each other out that makes us closer and the the most sustainable happiness comes from helping other people. Microsolidarity is about just giving people the format where they can practice helping each other. We’re doing that because we’re motivated by a spirit of love and connection not for personal gain or greed or selfishness. It becomes like a mini bubble of reality that’s outside of this crushing capitalist individualist norm, where we get to practice it. I think so much of my resilience and confidence from knowing that I have that network behind me. It’s not just that I’m receiving it but I’m also contributing.

Natalia: I’m just going to touch a bit on that learning new ways of being together because that is a big part of this. Social change is about learning new ways of being together. There’s a lot of learned behaviour that we all have that I think needs to be renewed and rethought. One way to learn new forms of behaviour is in the interpersonal space. So if we start from the interpersonal and we go from the personal to a smaller group let’s say the dinner table, we already come with new set of behaviours and we’re modelling that to others and others are learning by being with us. Then if we scale that up into a slightly larger groups of “interconnected crews”, as we’re calling them, they become a “congregation” and that’s the way for me to scale it up. The idea came from the fact that we have a small consulting company called The Hum that helps people to figure out new ways of doing things in the workplace. Now we’re looking at how we can apply these learnings to other people’s personal spaces and relational spaces outside the workplace. So part of the microsolidarity thing is taking all of those concepts that we learn from the workspace into building those communities of belonging.

There actually might be a lot of microsolidarity within our movement that we maybe forget about. Face to face interaction is important. Do you think that there’s a difference between how people relate to each other online or offline?

Richard: I won’t do the long story about my childhood but basically my first friends I found online and now most of my friendships are maintained online. I feel that connected to many people across the globe, people that I really love and trust. I think there’s a set of behaviours and skills involved in how to actually maintain those relationships. Probably most people don’t have the skills to communicate well online. And the way that Facebook works is to just play on your needs for meaning and connection and that’s extremely damaging. There are kinds of technology that are really liberating and empowering, based on a different set of values that are about the common good.

Natalia: I think you learn the skills of how to be online with others. Technology, in a way, is a tool and you choose how to use it. But online platforms are currently wired in a way that they’re actually using us. I think that’s a tricky space to navigate and that’s where we need to be self-aware. Digital tools definitely help me maintain my connections and my sense of knowing the others. Even if it’s just a little simple text that I send to my friends when I’m overseas. That’s very useful. But still I feel that the connections are built face to face. I don’t know if I can build a strong relationship with someone that I only see online once in a while. Or that I only chat to and I don’t I don’t even know what their full body looks like. I don’t know what what the feeling of that hug is.

Richard: I want to add another little point, which is that in my experience of the web over the last few years, there has been the collapse of meaning and collective conversation. Just like reading articles or going on Facebook, sometimes it’s hard to for us to understand each other. I’m really into podcasts all of a sudden. It’s that form of dialogue, that long form especially – I’m really into ones that are unedited, just like a conversation between two people. You actually get to hear some of that human being; you get into some context.

Natalia: That’s one of the things I think is a skill you need to use when you’re online –  escalating the bandwidth when you need to. So if you’re having a conflict with someone you don’t just keep on sending ranty messages, you say hey do you want to jump on a call and actually see each other faces and be able to interact in a better way.

This is a shortened extract from a longer interview, which you can read in full here.

This piece was commissioned by Labour Together, which is guest editing LabourList this week.