Patchwork Harmonies, Part II: Radical Democracy in Practice—Toward Polyphonic Organizing
Introduction: Composing in the Ruins
What does it mean to organize when the world refuses coherence—when every coalition carries the ghosts of dissonance, every alliance the memory of fragmentation? This is not a question for the faint of heart. It marks the threshold between theory and practice, the liminal terrain where the work of making kin, building new forms, and resisting totalizing narratives begins anew.
In “Patchwork Harmonies,” we touched upon how Anna Tsing’s polyphonic assemblage and the deep relational wisdoms of our ancestors frame coalition not as unity, but as a generative cacophony—a world where many melodies, histories, and futures entwine without collapsing into sameness. But how do we bring this theory to bear on the stubborn soil of daily life? How do we enact the radical potentials, not just adumbrate them?
To answer, we must draw from new wells. David Graeber’s radical theories of democracy urge us to abandon the fiction of universal consensus, replacing it with practices of direct, egalitarian action—democracy not as government, but as lifework, a never-ending process rooted in mutual deliberation and the rejection of imposed authority. Anna Tsing’s further essays and collaborative ethnographies push us to listen for the arrangements that make life possible amidst capitalist ruins. Donna Haraway, meanwhile, calls us back to the “art of living on a damaged planet,” insisting that staying with trouble is not a retreat, but an invitation to speculative, boundary-crossing kin-making.
This is just the beginning of an inquiry—a polyphonic field guide for organizers ready to wade into the dense tangle of patchwork harmonies. What follows will be as patchy, as experimental, and as wild as the coalitions we seek to build.
Radical Democracy as a Way of Life
Graeber writes, “democracy is not a specific form of government invented in Athens, but a principle as old as human intelligence—a spirit to be practiced, not merely codified”. The task, then, shifts: our aim is not uniformity, but full and equal participation, achieved through collective deliberation and the refusal to call armed men to quash dissent. The radicalism of this promise—the never-ending process—shapes means, ends, and scale.
From Occupy Wall Street to municipal assemblies in Barcelona, Graeber’s praxis shows that democracy flourishes in the absence of coercion: in circles where everyone can be heard, where decision-making is iterative and no one voice can dominate perpetually. Such forms are patchy, necessarily unfinished, and forever susceptible to tension. But this is not a failing—it is democracy alive.
To put theory into practice is to honor the tangled rhizomes of real communities: building spaces where improvisation, consultation, and persuasion matter more than dogma, and where conflict is not suppressed, but metabolized and remade.
Graeber reminds us, “the means matter as much as the ends. You will never achieve the world you dream of unless your methods prefigure it—unless your organizing is already a model for the future you wish to make.” This is the ethos that animates polyphonic organizing: every meeting, every decision, every process is an experimental laboratory for democracy.
Anna Tsing and the Methodologies of Patchwork
If Graeber gives us the “how” of participatory democracy, Anna Tsing supplies the texture—the intricate, uneven landscapes where law, economics, and ecology entangle in unpredictable ways. Her work insists that patchiness is not a liability, but the condition for possibility: “Life—amidst ruins—is composed in fits and starts, in alliances that can only be understood through careful, collective listening”.
Tsing’s later projects, like the Matsutake Worlds Research Group or Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, elaborate this ethos into a methodology: research itself becomes polyphonic, a gathering of many kinds of expertise, voices, and story. In fieldwork and in coalition, this means letting boundaries blur—welcoming not just scientists and artists, but neighbors, healers, and spirits of place.
Patchwork organizing, then, is ecological as much as political: each group, each practice, each site carries its own pattern of disturbance and renewal. To build coalitions in such terrain means honoring contingency, teaching ourselves to adapt as conditions shift, partners come and go, and victories remain partial.
In practice:
Co-designed research protocols that value plural expertise.
Resource mapping led by communities, not outside experts.
Decision-making systems that expect breakage and repair, not endless stability.
Tsing asks us to remember: the world is not one grand system, but a tangle of broken chains and half-finished symphonies. The polyphonic assemblage is a living invitation to build within this patchiness—to make kin not just with people, but also with trees, fungi, and forgotten ruins.
Donna Haraway and the Ethics of Speculation
If patchwork is where praxis happens, Donna Haraway gives us language for inhabiting the mess. Her “art of living on a damaged planet” and the practice of “making kin, not babies” ask us to stretch our politics beyond the human—to build coalition as multispecies, more-than-human entanglement.
Haraway’s speculative work makes it clear: staying with the trouble is not resignation, it is the opening to invention. Coalition, in her sense, is never finished—each gathering is a site for new stories, new responsibilities, new risks.
Haraway’s kin-making in Staying with the Trouble is not genealogical, but intentional: “We become-with each other through acts of care, encounter, rejection, transformation.” Her urge to “compose”—to make something new out of the ruins, rather than simply mourn what’s been lost—mirrors the improvisation found in both Graeber and Tsing.
In practice:
Coalition-building with nonhuman allies—river, fungus, machine, ancestor—recognized as political participants.
Storytelling and scenario-making as central tools for organizing.
Meetings held outdoors, at the crossroads of species, where the rules of deliberation attend to the needs of more-than-human kin.
Radical organizing is, for Haraway, always speculative, always playful and somatic—a refusal to let the future be dictated by past catastrophe alone.
Grounded Polyphony: Case Studies and Practical Innovation
Radical democracy does not exist in theory alone. Across the globe, groups have worked at the stubborn, fertile edges of possibility—finding ways to enact the patchwork harmonies described by Graeber, Tsing, and Haraway. These experiments, always contingent, always incomplete, give texture and hope to the work of organizing polyphonically.
Brazil’s Civil Society Resurgence
The fall of Bolsonaro in Brazil, and with it the slow renewal of legislative and civic counterweight, is not merely a story of one election. What stands out is the persistent layering of community activism, art intervention, feminist organizing, and Indigenous rights campaigns that refused to wait for national consensus. This was democracy as Graeber imagined it: mobile, iterative, imaginative, with autonomous networks—landless workers’ collectives, queer communities, mothers against police violence—each occupying their distinctive patch while learning to listen for the harmonies that could, for a moment, emerge between them.
Senegales “Patchwork” and Decentralized Opposition
Senegal’s resistance to deadline delays and creeping autocracy points to the resilience of polyphonic opposition: student groups, religious communities, feminist unions, and regional associations all stepping forward without consolidating around a single spokesperson or party. When leaders were imprisoned or banned from elections, new ones rose—young, dynamic, improvisational—showing the “lines of flight” Tsing and Deleuze predicted.
Mutual Aid Networks during Catastrophe
The COVID-19 pandemic reawakened “disaster collectivism:” networks of neighborhood mutual aid, supply pods, artists’ kitchens, and renters’ unions that outperformed many state agencies in speed, flexibility, and inclusion. In New York, the Bay Area, London, and the Philippines, these assemblages shifted as needs changed, welcoming new members, dissolving and reforming without ever passing through the bottleneck of traditional hierarchical leadership.
The common thread: no single organization or theory dictated practice. Instead, innovation came from acting “with, not for,” centering care, tending to conflict, and welcoming the friction of difference as a source of learning rather than a threat to stability.
Boundary-Pushing Models: Toward Unimaginable Coalitions
Radical polyphony, truly put into practice, invites us to build coalitions we cannot yet name. Graeber’s call to “imagination as direct action” and Haraway’s kin-making philosophy open the door for boundary-pushing collaborations:
Debt Abolition and Liberation Finance: Inspired by Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, communities are forming debtors’ unions to break credit traps and form economic kin ties invisible to dominant systems. These are not only financial innovations but social ones, fracturing the binary of debtor versus lender.
Ecotones as Organizing Zones: Tsing and Haraway urge us to build alliances at “ecotones”—where river meets shore, agricultural land blurs into wild forest, digital meets analog, ancestors dream into present bodies. Organizing here means letting more-than-human kin into the calls: river defenders, fungal networks, stray technologies, ghosts of the dispossessed.
Trans-local Feminist and Queer Networks: Drawing from trans and feminist organizing in South Korea, Argentina, and Oakland, groups are turning away from rigid NGOs and instead weaving webs of support (legal, medical, psychic, spiritual) that cross borders and species—a true coalition of the possible and the not-yet-imagined.
Polyphonic Frameworks for Practice
To move from theory to practice requires not only inspiration, but new, living frameworks. Recent radical democracy literature urges organizers to abandon “identity-blind” models and instead build inclusivity, reciprocity, and mutual care as central pillars. The following frameworks, drawn from Graeber’s prefigurative methods, Tsing’s ecological fieldwork, and Haraway’s speculative kin-making, offer practical tools for cultivating genuine polyphonic assemblages:
1. The Assemblage Circle
Gather not by category, but by affinity and difference: artists, scientists, parents, healers, land defenders, digital activists, nonhuman presences.
Structure meetings with rotating facilitation, honoring knowledge from all directions.
Invite friction, tend disagreement with active listening, and document the trouble as fertile ground rather than failure.
2. Resource Mapping and Patchwork Budgeting
Use community-led mapping techniques to track resources, skills, and social commitments—beyond monetary budgeting.
Allow patchiness: Some groups bring space, others labor, some offer tech, others ritual. Avoid smoothing differences; work interdependently.
3. Kin-Making Rituals and Ecotonal Alliance
Design rituals to welcome new voices/species/ancestors into the fold. Convene in ecotones—riverbanks, thresholds, market squares—where border-crossers are at home.
Storytelling and scenario-building with all participants, nonhuman included, imagining futures and naming collective responsibilities.
4. Mutual Aid and Liberation Finance
Create debtors’ unions and mutual aid pods, practicing economic self-defense as coalition work.
Rotate leadership and stewardship of resources. Document and repair inequities as they appear.
5. Deliberative Ecologies
Adopt the “deliberative ecologies” model: acknowledge varied webs of relationship, encourage plural transactions, embed intersectional analysis throughout.
Let coalition-building be as much about care, vulnerability, and presence as about consensus, strategy, and goals.
Imaginative Methods: Boundary-Pushing Experiments
To organize innovatively, experiment with methods that push at the boundaries of what coalition can mean:
Host speculative fiction salons, inviting organizers to imagine the next ten, fifty, or thousand years of their work, and design new practices from those scenarios.
Build coalitions with ghosts and futures—create ancestor consultation groups and “futures councils” where previous, present, and possible members deliberate together.
Create open-source toolkits for patchwork governance, inviting remixing, re-interpretation, and cross-local fertilization.
Turn coalition meetings into theatrical, poetic, or ritual gatherings—not only for efficiency, but for deepening presence and generative disruption.
Practice abolitionist organizing with the “one foot in, one foot out” model—working simultaneously inside, outside, and across formal institutions.
Conclusion—Stepping Into the Polyphony
Radical organizing demands humility, improvisation, and continual risk. To put theory into practice, we must learn to welcome the imperfect, the dissonant, the yet-to-be-accepted, and the unimaginable. The future of polyphonic assemblages lies in our refusal to let difference become division, our commitment to tending the trouble, and our willingness to build coalitions with all beings—human, nonhuman, present, and yet-to-come.
Let us practice the art of living and organizing on a damaged planet, making kin, building coalitions at unlikely crossroads, and listening, always, for the next note in the patchwork harmony.
References
Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016.
Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Day, Richard J. F. Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005.
Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014.
Graeber, David. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland: AK Press, 2009.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
Haraway, Donna J. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984.
Lundström, Markus. Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument. Oakland: PM Press, 2023.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009.
Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Nelson, Alondra. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, et al. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
