The Revolution Will Be Pamphletized
And come join us at a local contributist meetup!
Wondering what happened to contributism? The short story is, we decided to go local. Last summer, shortly after we shifted our efforts from the pure writing project that was The Contributist Reader into something more community-oriented (and launched contributism.org and hosted a few events), a few of the writers here all serendipitously found ourselves moving to the Bay Area at roughly the same time. We took this as a sign and opportunity to engage on a more personal scale. Could we build community more effectively by engaging with our real life neighbors rather than connecting solely over the internet? In any case, wouldn’t it be more contributist that way?
Since then, we’ve met regularly locally, and spent some time thinking about how we want to engage with our community, and the world around us. We’ve refined our ideas a bit, and thought carefully about our messaging. Ultimately, we decided we wanted to start two initiatives: the Contributist Pamphlet Series, and Contributist Meetups.
The Contributist Pamphlet Series
As we noted in our intro series, contributism can be hard to describe, because, like capitalism, it encompasses a lot of interconnected things. It’s a descriptive lens that explains the ways people and societies operate, but also a prescriptive lens that advocates for new ways they should operate. It’s in tension with capitalism in some ways, but it’s not exactly opposed to it; in fact, some of us have come to describe it as a more efficient capitalism — it incentivizes productivity in much of the same ways, but it structurally cuts out the hoarders at the top.
Anyway, we’ve found that, instead of trying to explain the whole thing at once, it’s most effective to just tell one piece of the story at a time, through parable, essay, and illustration. So we’re writing pamphlets – little zine-sized booklets that each capture just one aspect of contributism, in about 10-15 pages.
We aim to write a couple dozen of these over the next year or so, in sets of three or four, each organized around a specific topic area or target audience. We’ve started with a three-pamphlet series called Contributism for Everyone. We’ve begun distributing them for free around Stanford’s campus and in Oakland.
On the back of each pamphlet is a QR code explaining how to find more pamphlets. The best way to do so is through a pamphlet swap at a local contributist meetup.
The Contributist Meetups
The other initiative we’ve started here in the Bay Area is a spin on community organizing called contributist meetups. These are public community events, in which we serve our community in some FARE (free, active, relational, and effective) way. This month, we have two events planned: we’ll be going fruit picking on Stanford’s campus and donating the produce to a local food pantry, and joining the Trash Falcons for a trash cleanup at Lake Merritt in Oakland.
After we serve, we’ll do a pamphlet swap, where you’ll give your pamphlet to someone else (if you have one) and get a new one to read. The purpose of every event is to build community while engaging in some form of giving — the ultimate humanizing act.
If you’re in the Bay Area and want to join either event, or a future one, find more details on our website: contributism.org/meetups. And if you want to be kept up-to-date on future contributist events and developments, join our Discord!
I love this idea! Makes me wish I were closer. Great job!