Communal forms of “inhabiting” or “sharing usage”—particularly of the land—are directly political in a way that allows us to break with modalities of ideology and identitarianism.
[…]When people of starkly different backgrounds and beliefs come together pragmatically on an everyday basis to perform the tasks and devise the ever-shifting agendas of a territorial occupation, something like a polemical political community is created. Composition begins when people of different origins, with different ways of thinking, different histories and relations to the land, different skills, and sometimes vastly different risk tolerance decide to act together, under the presumption of equality, to defend a territory. A new collective subject—the result of mutual displacements and dis-identifications and the action of equals as equals—is produced, essentially, through practice, through creative, shared engagement in building, defending, and sustaining the life of the occupation day by day. The product of a massive investment in organizing life in common, composition dispenses with the kinds of exclusions based on ideas, identities, or ideologies so frequently encountered in radical milieus, the whole tired sectarianism of the history of the left. As such, it is a manner of making a world, the weaving together of a new kind of solidarity—one where the unity of experience counts more than the divergence of opinions, and one that amplifies, as well, Kropotkin’s conviction that solidarity is not an ethics or a moral sentiment but, rather, a revolutionary strategy, and perhaps the most important one of all.
Kristin Ross, Composition, e-flux, Excerpt from The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso, 2024)
