The Barricade – Utrecht

The English version of this text is below.

Gisteren hebben wij pizzas gebakken. Ondertussen reflecteerden we op werken als solidariteitskeuken in de maand maart. Dit zijn onze eerste reflecties en gedachtes.

De Barricade bevindt zich in een nieuwe positie. Zoals de meesten van ons, hebben ook wij ons moeten aanpassen aan nieuwe tijden van isolatie, distantie en eenzaamheid. Jarenlang hebben wij het concept van ‘collectiviteit’ voortgezet, waaronder: collectief koken, collectief eten, collectief lezen of simpelweg samenkomen en ervaringen uitwisselen. Hiervoor gebruikten wij een grote, fysieke plek, waar velen langskwamen elke zondagavond. Door de nieuwe overheidsmaatregelen heeft onze gebruikelijke plek al een maand lang de de deuren dicht. Onze bijeenkomsten zijn verplaatst naar digitale platforms, waar wij manieren proberen te vinden om onze politieke overtuigingen voor te zetten. Daarnaast koken een paar van ons nog in de ACU keuken, maar nu onder andere omstandigheden dan hoe wij normaliter onze keukenactiviteiten zouden omschrijven en uitvoeren.

Sinds de sluiting van de horeca en het verbod op het samenkomen van grote groepen, zijn veel plekken in Utrecht gesloten. Dit zijn vooral commerciële bars, cafés en restaurants, maar ook een paar belangrijke plekken die kwetsbare groepen in Utrecht voorzag van de nodige basisbehoeftes zijn dicht. Ook het Smulhuis, een plek die elke avond een maaltijd gaf aan een grote groep mensen die niet of moeilijk toegang heeft tot goed eten, is in overleg met gemeente Utrecht dicht gegaan voor een deel van de bezoekers. Wij begrijpen de redenen hiervoor, maar zien hiernaast ook welke problemen dit met zich meebrengt. Naast dat het een kwetsbare groep mensen wederom op straat zet, zien wij weinig tot geen gemeentelijk ingrijpen hiervoor, noch enige vorm van kritische media aandacht omtrent dit probleem. In plaats van dat de gemeente haar verantwoordelijkheid oppakt in tijden van crisis, heeft het besloten haar beste joker op tafel te gooien: Nederland is een ‘participatiesamenleving’. Zoals de overheid het zou omschrijven, staat dit voor een samenleving waarin iedereen die dat kan, verantwoordelijkheid neemt voor en actief bijdraagt aan zijn of haar eigen leven en omgeving. Of zoals de critici het liever verwoorden: de ‘zoek het zelf maar uit’ samenleving.

ACU is veranderd van cultureel-politiek centrum tot solidariteitskeuken. Zeven dagen per week worden er take-away avondmaaltijden uitgedeeld voor mensen die niet of moeilijker toegang hebben tot goed eten. Elke avond maakt de keuken rond de 60 take-away dozen voor iedereen die het nodig heeft. De Barricade kookt nog altijd op zondag en geeft onder andere zelfgemaakte pizzas uit via de voordeur van het ACU. Aan de ene kant is het een fantastisch project en bewonderen we alle tijd en energie die veel vrijwilligers in de solidariteitskeuken steken. Aan de andere kant is het vreemd om plotseling deze verantwoordelijk op ons te nemen en vragen wij ons af: is dit hoe solidariteit er werkelijk uit ziet, of worden wij hier nu genoodzaakt de rotzooi van de gemeente op te ruimen? Onrechtvaardigheid is nog duidelijker in tijden van crisis, en het is nog helderder te zien waar het vooral plaats vindt en wie hier voornamelijk de dupe van is. Deze onrechtvaardigheid is niet nieuw, het is altijd al gaande geweest en wij zijn er van overtuigd dat, zolang vrijwilligers bereid zijn deze problemen maar weer op te knappen, de problematiek nooit bij de wortels zal worden aangepakt.

We zijn al een maand verder sinds wij onderdeel zijn geworden van een solidariteitskeuken die maaltijden uitdeelt. Al zijn wij blij nog te kunnen koken en erkennen wij het privilege dat wij nog gepermitteerd het huis uit kunnen, willen wij toch een paar contradicties uitlichten die wij afgelopen maand zijn tegengekomen. Ten eerste willen wij onderstrepen hoe afhankelijk de gemeente blijkt te zijn van vrijwilligersinzet. De gemeente verbergt zich achter een, naar hun mening, goed excuus dat zij sommige kwetsbare groepen op straat niet kunnen helpen, namelijk: door landelijk beleid is het voor de gemeente verboden deze groepen te ondersteunen. Sterker nog: zij kunnen boetes verwachten, mochten zij deze groepen wel steunen. Daarom gaat de gemeente uit van vrijwilligerswerk en inzet van individuelen om de rotzooi op te ruimen waar zij zelf ‘niet aan mogen zitten’. Als collectief vinden wij dat, in plaats van dat de gemeente uitgaat van vrijwilligerswerk en hun verantwoordelijkheid zo wegwuift, zij moet eisen dat dit landelijke beleid moet worden herzien. Zolang er instituties als gemeentes zijn, dragen zij de verantwoordelijkheid om voor iedere burger in de stad te zorgen. Wanneer de gemeente niet de moeite doet om dit waar te maken, maar voornamelijk opereert als controlerend en bureaucratisch orgaan, vragen wij ons af in hoeverre de burger werkelijk wat heeft aan dergelijke instituties.

Daarnaast heeft de solidariteitskeuken een verbazingwekkend portie media aandacht gehad. Er is niet veel gaande in deze tijd naast de projecten die mensen zijn gestart om anderen te steunen, dus wij begrijpen ook dat het oog al snel valt op de solidariteitskeuken. Zo ook stond het marketing team van gemeente Utrecht onlangs op de stoep van ACU om een promotie video te schieten over hoe ‘Utrecht verbindt in tijden van crisis’. Hun eerste vraag: ‘wat zijn de vrijwilligers hier aan het doen?’ Het antwoord: ‘wij doen het werk dat de gemeente niet oppakt, namelijk: een goede maaltijd geven aan mensen die er zelf niet of moeilijk toegang tot hebben’. Het meest ironische aspect van het interview: om vragen te krijgen van een betaald medewerker van de gemeente, over hoe wij het essentiële werk oppakken dat de gemeente niet doet, geheel onbetaald en op vrijwillige basis. Wij willen niet worden omschreven als een liefdadigheidsproject dat goed doet voor anderen; wij verrichten al vier jaar dit werk in de keuken en zo ook in tijden van crisis. Dit is geen heldendaad, dit zijn onze politieke overtuigingen die wij omzetten tot handelingen. Wij willen geen complimentjes van de gemeente. Wij willen dat de gemeente zelf verantwoordelijkheid neemt voor deze taken.

We voelden de noodzaak om deze eerste reflecties publiekelijk te delen, omdat wij vinden dat vooral in tijden van crisis het belangrijk is om licht te schijnen op de kromme en oneerlijke werkwijzen van instituties, zowel op nationaal als lokaal niveau. Wij zullen blijven koken op de zondagen, omdat wij de noodzaak inzien van de solidariteitskeuken en wij het een waardevol project vinden om te steunen. Al zullen wij werken op grond van onze principes: als een collectief geïnspireerd door wasbeertjes en anarchisme. Wij zijn niet een liefdadigheidsproject.

Pizza and Participatiesamenleving: first reflections on working as a solidarity kitchen

Yesterday we made home-made pizza. Meanwhile we reflected on participating in a solidarity kitchen project during the month of March. These are our first reflections.

As the Barricade we found ourselves in a new situation. Like most people, we had to adapt to these new times of isolation, distancing and solitude. For many years we pushed the concept of collectivity, that is: collective cooking, collective eating, collective reading, or simply coming together and share experiences. For this we used a large physical space, where many people visited every Sunday evening. With the new governmental measures in place, our usual space has closed its doors to the public for already a month. Our meetings have moved to digital platforms, where we discuss how to still push our political standpoints. Apart from that, some of us are still cooking in the ACU kitchen, but under a different framing than how we normally describe our kitchen work.

Since the closing of horeca and the prohibition on meetings with large groups, many spaces in Utrecht have closed. These are mostly commercial bars, cafes and restaurants, but also some important spaces that provide basic needs for a more vulnerable group of people in the city. Also the Smulhuis, a space that provided dinner for people who have less access to food, has closed for part of their visitors in agreement with the gemeente (municipality of) Utrecht. We understand their reasons for closing, however, we also see what problematic effects this brings about. Next to that it leaves a group of vulnerable people out on the street, we also see little to no municipal intervenience to solve this problem, nor any critical media coverage about this situation. Instead of the municipality taking up the responsibility it should take in these times of crisis, it decided to play its best joker: the Netherlands is a ‘participatiesamenleving’ (participatory society / big society). As the government describes it, this means that everyone who has the ability to contribute socially to its surroundings, should take up this responsibility and act upon it. Or, how the critics prefer to frame this concept: ’figure it out yourself’ governing.

ACU has changed from a cultural-political centre, to a solidarity kitchen that hands out free take-away meals. It’s open 7 days a week and provides people who need food and have less access to it with a decent evening meal. Every evening, the kitchen produces around 60 take-away boxes for anyone who needs it, and we as Barricade still cook on Sunday, now handing out home-made pizza through the front door. On the one hand it’s a great project, and we fully acknowledge all the time and effort that many volunteers have put into it. On the other hand we find this sudden responsibility very questionable and wonder whether this is what solidarity looks like, or whether we are simply covering up the mess the gemeente leaves us with, out of emergency. In times of crisis, injustice becomes very clear and it’s easy to point out who mostly suffers from it. This injustice is not new, it’s been there even before the pandemic and we are sure that, as long as volunteers are willing to cover up for these problems, it will never be addressed at its very core.

It has been a month now since we started operating as a solidarity kitchen making take-away meals and, as much as we are happy and privileged to be permitted to go out of our houses and cook, want to share some of the contradictions of the ‘participatiesamenleving’ we have encountered. First of all, we want to underline the dependency of the gemeente on volunteer based projects. The gemeente hides behind an, in their opinion, valid reason to not help certain vulnerable groups out on the streets: they are simply not allowed to do so due to national governmental regulations. If they would help these people, they will be fined. Therefore the gemeente depends upon volunteer-run groups and individuals to clean the mess they are not ‘allowed’ to clean. We as collective think that, instead of depending on volunteer work and carelessly justifying their lack of responsibility as a result of these national regulations, the gemeente should put more effort in demanding a change in these very regulations. As long as institutions such as the gemeente are still in place, they should be the ones taking care of their citizens. If the gemeente is not making the effort to do so, but now mostly operates as a controlling and bureaucratic entity, we wonder what value such institution is giving its inhabitants in the first place.

Secondly, the media attention the solidarity kitchen got was striking. As not much is going on these days apart from projects people have started to support others, we understand that attention is easily attracted. Likewise, the marketing team of gemeente Utrecht decided to show up at ACU’s front door to shoot some video material for a promotional video on how ‘Utrecht is connecting people in times of crisis’. Their first question: what are the volunteers doing here? Answer: doing the work the gemeente is not doing, which is, providing people with food who don’t have access to it. Most ironic part of the interview: being interviewed by a paid worker of the gemeente Utrecht, on how you are doing the essential work the gemeente is not doing, on unpaid, volunteer basis. We do not want to be framed as a charity that does good to others: this is something we have been doing for four years and yes, in times of crisis we are still doing this work. This is for us not a heroic act, but a political standpoint we have always been pushing for. We don’t want any compliments from the gemeente for this work, we want them do take up their responsibility themselves.

We felt the necessity to share these first reflections publicly, as we think that especially in times of crisis, it’s important to expose and criticise the unfair ways of how institutions operate, be it on national or local level. We will stay in the kitchen and continue cooking on Sundays, as we think the solidarity kitchen is a good and necessary initiative to be part of. However, we operate under our framework: as a collective inspired by raccoons and anarchism. We are not a charity.

On Wednesday April 1st we had a second online assembly, (after the first one we had) here are the notes from what was discussed in the hope that, even if super-incomplete, they might be of help to other people.
In general we ended with a call to everybody of reclaiming the public space in these times of physical distancing using any possible tactic. We encourage any action that goes in this way, like the one below.

At the start, people expressed their feelings of going back and forth between the need of acting and apathy or despair towards the situation. Some of the issues contributing to people feeling down were the realization that this situation will last for long, and that therefore a lot of things people were looking forward to were not going to happen in the end, and of course the lack of interpersonal contact. Someone also mentioned the feeling of being overflown with too many broad political analyses without the possibility of directly acting on stuff. On the other hand some people had also some positive feelings mostly about perceiving that people are starting to act and still pushing for a radical leftist point of view.

Then we discussed some thoughts that people had about the current situation, to later move more concretely on things that we can do now and how to frame a leftist narrative in these times.
About the current situation, somebody mentioned how an external crisis, such as the corona-virus pandemic, is also resulting in a strong resistance to capitalism. We see many examples of mutual aid, solidarity and self-organisation rising up all over the world, that are undermining the usual rhetoric that wants us competing with each other, and putting under pressure the principles of a system that puts profit over people.
For example, in the Netherlands, people are starting to realize that a lot of underpaid jobs are the ones that are really needed right now (healthcare workers, cleaners, supermarkets’ employees, teachers…).

We also see neoliberal politicians contradicting themselves constantly to still keep a human face, like for example Boris Johnson stating the other day that “there is such a thing as society”, despite his tatcherian views of brazen individualism (“there is no such thing as society”), this coming few weeks after the same British prime minister was advocating for eugenicist plans of herd immunity.
The same trend we see with VVD retracting constantly what they say. First, for example, affirming that freelancers (ZZP’ers) chose to be self-employed and as such they should face the costs of it in times of crisis, then stating (after lots of criticism) that nobody will be left alone. The same thing happened with the discussion in the EU over eurobonds and financial measures to support Southern European countries, where the Dutch minister Hoekstra has been heavily criticized even by major Dutch economists, and had to retract there again. Beside these and other examples, however, it seems like Rutte and the VVD are being very careful with the things they say, and also saying things that they would have never said before. This is contributing to a big group of people in the Netherlands having trust in the way the government is dealing with the crisis, and it seems even that the VVD is rising in the opinion polls. We do see such a trend as worrying since the way the Dutch government is dealing with the crisis is very questionable and we think that it’s important to expose them.

We also discussed quite a bit the imperialist perspective that is coming out of many speeches by the Dutch government, manifested for example in a certain feeling of being untouchable, in thinking that the pandemic could never hit a country like the Netherlands that bad. This overconfidence on the impossibility of this crisis coming puts all our bodies at risk. The same perspective was also noticed in the overuse of the term ‘intelligent’ or in phrases such as ‘something that the responsabile dutch people can do’, implying that other countries didn’t have responsible people, or that their policies were not intelligent.

We then discussed briefly the example of Ede where small-scale markets were forced to close while big supermarket chains are the ones that can stay open. In general there’s the feeling that small food shops are less visited than before, and even if we didn’t discuss this further, we think it’s important to find ways to address this issue. We also discussed the situation where a lot of people are finding themselves confined in their nuclear family unit, having to deal with problematic dynamics and at the same time unable to rely on their usual support networks. Also this is a topic that we would like to go back to.

The second part of the assembly was mostly focused on how to best frame a leftist narrative as a response to this crisis. We recognized the importance, in this context of general confusion and despair, of using a positive framing instead of an angry one, in order not to overflow people with negative messages. Being already full of worries and sadness people might not be very open to receiving them.
Nevertheless, we also shared some frustrations regarding certain positive messages that we hear and see all around us way too often these days, only focusing on ‘being together’, vague solidarity and so on. The heart-lines distributed in houses in Lombok to connect the neighborhood through harts hanging from the windows was brought up as an example of this. Messages like this one are very empty, since society is not equal and people are not all affected in the same way. Sharing love messages without political intentions of change won’t do much sadly.
One of the good ways proposed to address this and at the same time confront the hypocrisy of politicians is that of using humor, possibly including statements used by politicians themselves.  Another one was the tactic of reclaiming mainstream slogans and discourses filling them with a political meaning. An example of that has been the action of Leiden voor14, where messages of vague support to supermarket employees that were going around having been linked to the campaign to raise the minimum hourly wage (see here). More about Détournement and Cultural Jamming can be read on Beautiful Trouble.

Yesterday we had an online assembly to discuss together the current situation of the Corona-crisis in the Netherlands, how this is affecting us and other people around and what we can still do.
It was a nice opportunity to listen to each other and we also had a good response from other people that joined us. In a society that wants us isolated not just now, but even when there’s no necessity of physical distance, it is so important to create spaces to connect and collectivize thoughts, and now more than ever.

In the following we put down some notes from what was discussed in the hope that, even if super-incomplete, they might be of help to other people.

We started by sharing our personal feelings about the situation. Feelings of worry and confusion were mentioned by many people. It was also noticed by many how this crisis was making more visible the social injustices that are already present in the society. The fear was there that these conditions might only get worse, and people were torn between hoping that these moments might lead to some systemic change and just despair or fear that things will just go back to how they were before this whole thing started.
Also, as people are seeing their economic situation under threat, some felt the tension between on one hand needing to ask for help from the state and on the other hand just wanting the system to collapse.

Then we started talking about the current situation and three topics were discussed more in depth.
We started talking about how the Dutch government and the mainstream media have been framing the corona-crisis. We have been seeing a lot of criminalisation of individual behaviour and for example using people’s ‘anti-social behaviour’ as scapegoat for a change in policy and measures that were taken way too late. This all without considering the situation of people still needing to leave their house to go to do completely non-essential jobs just to keep the economy running. Activities the suspension of which has never even been mentioned so far.
This is similar, despite the obvious economic and political differences, to the situation in Italy, where people are still forced to work in sectors like the weapon industry putting their health at risk everyday, while at the same time there is an increasing militarisation of the streets and criminalisation of people who leave the house even just for a run alone.
We discussed ways to counter this narrative and also to raise awareness on workers’ conditions (also those same workers who are now hypocritically called ‘heroes’ whose working conditions and salaries have been victims, like those of many other workers, of unstopped budget cuts and other neoliberal reforms).

Then, starting from our situation as Barricade collective, we reflected a bit on what does it mean to offer help at this moment in the ‘Participatiemaatschappij’. Since two weeks we have been part of the Solidarity Kitchen, an effort that was set up to respond to some of the consequences of the measures: namely that many places where a lot of homeless and undocumented people usually got a meal had to close their doors, leaving them without any. Beside the usual tension that we feel between a certain charity work versus mutualism, we also reflected on the fact that the gemeente was not taking any responsibility and indirectly putting volunteers to work without having to care about their own safety nor about the safety of people without a home.
Once again here, the pandemic is only exposing something that was already there, that is the policies of ”Participatiemaatschappij’ (also known in the UK as “The Big Society”), a set of neoliberal policies put in place to hand out the disappearing welfare system more and more to institutionalized volunteers organisations. A twisted kind of people’s self-management, since there is no real autonomy from the state, the state just drops its responsibility on certain aspects of welfare while still keeping the control in the end.
We reflected on the necessity of exposing this contradiction.

The last point we discussed was the necessity of making radical leftist ideas accessible and understandable to everybody, yet again a renown problem but one that becomes more necessary now. It was underlined with many examples the general disconnection that there is between activists and a big part of society, especially the one that might need support in this moment. An example was made with the huge number of support projects sprouting online with many people ready to help and very few people asking for help. Online communication does not make it accessible to everybody and moreover it is typical of online platforms to reinforce self-enclosed bubbles, the probability of reaching people outside of our circle in this way is quite low.
We also discussed the necessity of finding ways to reclaim the public space, in these times of isolation, by spreading relevant information in different ways.

With these ideas in mind we concluded the meeting, we’ll try to put some stuff in practice (as always) and see to continue creating spaces online as a way to collectivize reflections and community care.