Kitchen Council Communist Manifesto

What is a Kitchen and why is it part of liberation?
The Kitchen is not just a location of wage labor. The kitchen is a location of unwaged social reproduction. The kitchen is also a nexus of community.
When the kitchen functions, it is a productive center for institutions and counter-institutions. The kitchen is a central location of conviviality but it can also be a central location of tyranny.
All of leftwing politics has struggled over (an issue that trans woman anarchist scholar Zoe Baker has highlighted in the work of Errico Malatesta) the contradiction between means and ends.
The kitchen is both a means and an end. Cooking is an activity that can exist for pure unmodified utility but it can also produce commodities or crafts which can garner exchange value.
Cooking can be a site of horizontal organization but it can also be the infrastructure for group presence in opposition to capitalist/militarist occupation of land.
The kitchen sits at the conjuncture between the maintenance of daily existence and the maintaining of spaces meant for greater projects like revolution or profit.
Liberating the kitchen of its domination is the liberation of the global proletariat but it is also a liberation of the habitual daily and hyper local.
But hierarchies, tyrannies, and power all control the kitchen. And without a fre e kitchen, the kitchen cannot make food which is a product of free passion. An unfree kitchen is a kitchen where all work occurs in a condition of austerity.
Furthermore, an exploited oppressive kitchen environment cannot be part of any project for liberation and cannot be useful infrastructure.
The task is simple: liberate the kitchen and liberate the world. But how?
Discussion questions:
How have kitchens been misused by commerce and the institution of family?
What are some new idea for how we can use a kitchen for revolution?
Why are places that feel free and accountable more able to achieve great things. Think about a safe collaborative project you engaged in that was successful. What was collaborative about it? What was successful?
II. What is a Kitchen Council?
Spontaneity is the form of organization that the German Dutch Marxist sect known as council communism champions. Spontaneity is a way of being in the world unrestrained.
The kitchens of future social movements will organize with planned spontaneity. The kitchen is a daily model of spontaneity. When one ingredient is lacking, substitutions happen. Measures are improvised. More importantly, spontaneity is a practice of ever developing playful experimentation.
The kitchen council is a group of worker s not organized in a union or party but organized around political affinity.
Kitchen councilism involves reimagining patriarchal and capitalist divisions of labor within the kitchen such that neither ownership nor patriarchy structure the kitchen. Kitchen councilism prefigures the spontaneity and organization that workers have always been capable of in moments of crisis.
Some models of kitchen communitarian diffusion of control are the potluck model where different dishes are brought together, the committee of Elders model where a group of the willing and traditionally coerced into kitchen work come and occupy the space and the meal sign-up where cooking is a voluntary shift, to this group we can also add sortition by drawing straws aka (which CLR James highlights in Every Cook Can Govern as) isocracy.
All of these methods of dispersing work in a kitchen are spontaneous structures which workers implement out of necessity and embodied knowledge.
Spontaneous kitchen organization need not follow a doctrine to be entirely an embodiment of anarchist and Marxist politics.
The workers know in their bodies what to do to organize their spaces without patriarchy, bosses or politicians telling them what to do.
The kitchen council is a collective relationship between all the members of the kitchen that is always in the process of reflection and evolution.
The collectivized ways of certain kitchen communities constantly re-examine how to become more inclusive.
Kitchen Councils in their spontaneous grass roots formation will become more inclusive the more people are included in them.
In my organizing networks, I have seen kitchen councils spontaneously take on the organizational thinking of the queer people using them, the disabled people using them and the anarchists using them.
Discussion questions:
Have you ever organized a kitchen outside of a work or family context?
Have you and your friends ever gotten together to make a meal?
How have you seen decisions made in a kitchen be made more equitable through a diffusion of authority?
III. How do kitchen councils change on a macro and micro scale?
The kitchen council takes root in social movement spaces that are not the capitalist world of work and are not the patriarchal world of home.
The kitchen council due to its spontaneous nature does not need to codify or taxonomize the ingredients or the people involved.
The kitchen council recognizes absolute codifications or taxonomies which might be used in patriarchy or capitalism to control circulation are instead barriers to the organic spontaneity of the kitchen grouping.
The kitchen council dispenses with occupation or craft based divisions of labor and often supplies its own more equitable terms. In queer social movement spaces, the lead cook is sometimes called “kitchen top”. But this distinction does not accompany a “kitchen bottom” designation. Instead, a person just becomes kitchen top through coming up with the meal plan.
Members of the kitchen council are accustomed to patriarchal and capitalist divisions but consciously and spontaneously reflect and operate distinctly.
The sourcing of materials has a real effect on the true principles upheld by and the spontaneity practiced by kitchen councils.
When tools, kitchen, foods and art as well as purpose are furnished organically by the community, the kitchen is free to be wild and communal.
A wild and communal kitchen is a kitchen that interjects hyper-locally and globally through its redesign of space against capitalist and feudal isomorphisms.
When structures of decision for what to cook, what kind of meals should be offered, what kind of props should be in the kitchen and the general use of space are subject to group spontaneity but are guided by a commitment to global liberation, new things are possible.
When the kitchen exists for a bigger social movement purpose than just eating in one small moment, it also has more power to operate differently locally.
Discussion Questions:
How have collaborations caused you to work on things outside of your skill set ?
What are some new categories or roles in a kitchen that have emerged from your specific context?
Have you ever decided to work together with someone in an unplanned way? What did that look like ?
IV. Cooking as self activity: phenomenology of infrastructure
cooking involves a play of elements: fire, water, air, ice and plant matter
When the working class are able to synthesize the pieces of their cuisine without time pressure from coercion and without the threat of homelessness, food play is unleashed.
Food play is a spontaneous development that occurs when food production is not controlled and regimented but instead hybrids and synthetic forms come into being out of the variety of experiences in the community
When workers get together and combine their culinary knowledge which comes from their experiences cooking in both private and public contexts, cultural differences are revealed and a blending of cultural approaches occurs in the concrete work.
Phenomenology in the Husserlian and Merleau Pontyan as well as Marxist varieties has been about the composition of the concrete out of masses of sense data guided by language.
The collective making of food changes the nature of conviviality from a reproduction of the social forced upon a gendered sub-class into a moment of social inter-relation between worker realities.
Ethnic traditions, religious shibboleths, allergies, all come out in the food making process.
When we cook together we have to deal with the reality of each other’s bodies in space and in time together.
Mastering food collaboration prefigures other kinds of collaborations across disparate bodymind spaces and times.
The creation of a concrete emancipatory thought on food is of great importance to the practical demands of having meetings between people. If we can gear our thinking toward creating an ideal structure for food collaboration, that structure can be used across social movement contexts.
From leftcommunist thought we gain the concept of the temporary use agreement or usufruct. Usufructuary relations in the kitchen allow all objects to be shared for temporary amounts of time and imagines replenishment as part of the organizational process of sortition.
The circulation of traditions, disciplines and food knowledge via the concrete process of kitchen collaboration is the material unfolding of the future of food.
The sharing of techniques, recipes and foods not to mention culinary tools prefigures broader communizations of skill and techniques as well as possessions.
Discussion Questions:
Have you ever played with hot and cold in a sink or bath? Have you ever played in the mud as a child ? Can you think of ways that you have played with multiple temperatures or props or elements?
Can you think of ways to play with opposite elements that make a temporary sculpture or unique mixture?
Can you think of how different meals have been planned to include a balanced set of elementally associated foods or a balanced set of temperatures?
V. How to organize a kitchen council
A kitchen council is organized by people who will help cook and who adopt at least one shared political stance on how that cooking works.
A kitchen council cannot be less than 3 people but the kernel of a kitchen council organization surely starts with a conversation between 2 people.
3 people amount to a grouping that can make collective statements and push for initiatives.
Once those three or more people have been found, the kitchen council can write or formulate a collective statement on how cooking should be done.
Once a collective statement has been written, meetings should be planned for how to ensure that cooking in that kitchen can be done in keeping with said statement.
When one kitchen council has been founded, it can connect to other groupings of people to ensure its principles can be made manifest in the broader world.
Discussion Questions:
Have you ever gotten a group of professional contacts to work together ? What does that look like?
Have you ever written a collective document for a small grouping? What does that look like?
Have you ever tried to collaborate on a writing or creative project ? What is that like ?

VII. Reciprocities between eaters and cooks: accessibility as a practice of care
Each time food must cooked for a group of people, whether it is just for the evening or for a week or month of presence, some people do more cooking than others.
Separations between eaters and cooks, when they are absolute, can destroy kitchen convivialities.
A set of techniques and practices must be set up to assure communication between eaters and cooks.
The demand of accessibility has challenged the absolute autonomy of those taking on cooking work.
Cooks when they admit the realities of allergies and disabilities, must learn a new spontaneity based on suspending practices for embodied reasonings.
Simultaneously, as accessibility is recognizing needs of eaters, the kitchen must be accessible for cooks.
The ask of accessibility is a form of care from the eater and the cook.
Just as much as cooks make the food accessible to the eaters via communicating which foods were cooked with which allergens. Or just like when cooks let some people skip food lines when there are accessibility reasons to do so; eaters must make cooking workable through gratitude.
The sharing of gratitude is a practice of accessibility and of care.
When eaters of food do gestures to thank the cooks like tapping their plates, they make cooking more accessible emotionally by making cooks feel appreciated.
Discussion questions:
Has a kitchen you have been involved in ever made efforts to cater to the needs of people with allergies? What could better allergy planning look like ?
Do cooks you have been around receive gratitude and appreciation from the people they cook for? What could better practices of food gratitude look like?
Have you seen reciprocity between cooks and people being cooked for? How can that improve in a radical context?
VIII. Tierra/Comida: food as a sensory incarnation of connection to land
Capitalist alienation (as described by Marx in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) separates us from the land.
Food is a tangible connection between our bodies and the land around us.
When the food we eat is processed and is native to and exported from other places, we are alienated from the food of our biome.
Liberatory food practices have to be based in a conscious connection between the bioregion and the food being eaten.
When we eat food foraged or farmed around us, we connect to the bioregion.
Jewish rituals used specific foods to remember specific histories.
Communists or anarchists invested in transcending the binary between urban and rural can use food to help root people in their bioregion.
Our food will always be a product of the land. Whether our food is a product of land we recognize or not is up to us.
Humans use their senses to connect them to land and its power. Food is an enhanced way to connect to the land via senses of touch, smell and taste.
The rural life experience of low income workers or peasants always meant a link between food and the land they lived on.
Urban people have forgotten the importance of their connection to the land.
The unity of the urban and rural that Bolshevism professed to offer but never took shape can be found instead in food rituals that unite those part of them with the land.
Discussion Questions
When have you felt connected to the norms of your regional climate? Do you eat any food from your local area?
If you are from an urban area, are you friends with people from a rural area? If you are in a rural area, are you friends with people from an urban area? What differences do you find yourself adjusting to in the process?
Have you ever visited a farmers market? What do you like or dislike about it?
IX. Comida/Libertad: food as an organizing tool
Each moment of social life should be a moment to rest and refuel.
While capitalist dominated life is a life of managing engineered scarcities, revolutionary life thrives in the potential for abundances built of collective unities of fragmented use values.
All organizing should do more than fill us with words or ideas. Organizing should revive our neglected bodies.
Food is a key part of connecting people and building or running organizations or sustained worker presence in any location or conversation.
Theorizing food is an important part of the work many recent left books about organizing have done.
Books like class power on zero hours and other texts that maintain communist principles but turn to the concrete day to day struggles are immensely important in this time of media spectacle.
Thinking about how to make food in a way that does not fall into either tyrannies of structurelessness ( detailed by Jo freeman) or into vanguardist bureaucracies (mentioned by Otto Ruhle) is a key task for the future of liberation.
Understanding how to mediate food in collective social movement contexts is not a task that will be completed in this manifesto.
The conversation begins with how to use food and kitchens to organize in a more spontaneous but principled way.
Meetings, potlucks, picketts, strikes, occupations of land or space and autonomous land projects will all require food.
But how can food histories rife with exploitation be mobilized for the project of building new institutions for a world after currency?
We must first cultivate intentional food cultures where we can and then link those food practices to the frontlines of current movements to abolish tthe present state of things.
Food production from land projects must connect to uses of food in unions and political parties.
Food production in mutual aid must be interwoven with foods used to keep insurrectionaries alive.
Food can be a connective infrastructure between parts of different movements.
Discussion questions:
Have you ever discussed politics over a meal? How does the meal you are eating effect the topic of discussion?
Have you ever cooked in a social movement context? How does the food contribute to the politics involved?
How has food offered a way to connect with people in your life?

X. Tierra Comida Libertad: eating together with the land until we are free
When we eat together, we can work together.
To eat together, we must cook together.
When we cook in a way that connects us to each other and the land, we build an infrastructure that allows us to act together.
The journey of all revolutionaries is to find out how we can act together to liberate the oppressed.
The project of working together to cook has to be made revolutionary through its connection to the land.
Worker thought about cooking must not be consumed in taste or aesthetic or cooking products.
Our thoughts about cooking should orient around how we can use food and its connection to the land for liberation.
Food is not a given, and neither is our future.
Every day we must work to feed ourselves according to practiced recipes that we improvise upon. Similarly, each day we must fight for liberation based on communist principles that we implement in unique ways.
When we eat in ways that connect us to the land around us, we become less alienated and separated from ourselves and our communities.
When we maintain real connections to the land and community, we have more to fight for each time capital and the state attack.
Eating together is building together. Eating with the land is loving the land.
When we eat with the land, workers become more connected to the more impoverished peoples who have depended on the land.
Foraged foods are a reminder of how close we are to subsisting on the land in the event of mass economic crisis.
Food from local farmers is part of a direct connection to the land that predates capitalism and may outlast capitalism as well.
We can eat together in ways that induce belonging but can also be useful events for building communist or anarchist organizations.
Discussion questions
What are the similarities between revolutionary organizing and cooking ?
What kind of cooking methods would you use in the event of a massive crisis?
Are the foods you eat native to your region? Have you thought about which foods you might eat from your region if supermarkets went out of business ?