The Little Horde

by Blackian Ludic Abolition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The toilet at the Ungovernable Book & Bicycle Collective, on Grant Street in Buffalo, had been out of order for eleven weeks, and it was out of order by consensus.

Nobody had decided to let it clog. That would have taken a decision, and at the Ungovernable a decision cost more than anything in the shop, the Kropotkin included. This is what had happened. At the general meeting on the last Thursday of July, Juniper Haas brought a proposal to abolish the cleaning rota. The rota was a laminated sheet thumbtacked to the inside of the bathroom door, seven names down the side and seven chores across the top, and Juniper had observed, correctly, that it was a schedule of compulsory tasks enforced by shame, or a job description without the paycheck. In its place she proposed a Care Commons, in which members would attend to the space "as capacity and desire allow," with a whiteboard where they might record, voluntarily, what they had attended to.

Under the Points of Unity (fourth revision), a proposal to change a standing practice suspends that practice until the proposal is decided. The rota came off the door that night. Then Leonard Szymanski blocked the proposal.

Leonard was sixty-one. He had been an anarchist since 1979, which meant he had been an anarchist longer than he had been anything else: a husband, a typesetter, a resident of Erie County, a man with all his own teeth. He ran the zine rack. He had blocked eleven proposals in four years, each on principle, and it was rarely the same principle twice. On this occasion he said that "care" was a word the bosses had stolen from the nurses and the nurses had never got back, that a Care Commons was the rota in a hemp shirt, and that while he would not stand in the way of abolishing the rota, he would lie down in front of whatever replaced it. Juniper pointed out that he was, procedurally, standing in the way of abolishing the rota. Leonard said that was the beauty of process. Juniper, who was facilitating, wrote BLOCK on the butcher paper and drew a circle round it, and the circle stayed on the wall for eleven weeks like a halo over a saint nobody prayed to.

So there was no rota, because it was suspended, and there was no Care Commons, because it was blocked. The whiteboard was hung anyway, out of a budget line approved in June for something else, and on it someone wrote in green marker WHO IS CLEANING THE TOILET?? Below that a second hand wrote WHO IS ASKING? Below that a third hand drew a circle-A, which answered neither question but was felt to be in the spirit.

The toilet held out for a fortnight. In the third week it ran slow. By the fifth it did not run at all. By the seventh the members had come to an understanding, never minuted, that the bathroom was where the unsold back issues of Fifth Estate were kept, and that anyone from the public who asked would be sent two blocks down to the Tim Hortons. The bathrooms there were cleaned every two hours by people paid the state minimum to clean up after strangers, and they were spotless. Every Tuesday somebody in the group chat pointed out that this was a contradiction, and every Tuesday somebody else put a heart on it.

---

Dorothy Ferenc was nine. On Thursdays she came in with her mother, Renata, who worked the register from four to eight on a sliding scale that in practice only slid down. Dot did her homework in the children's corner, under a poster of Lucy Parsons and a beanbag that had been donated in 2017 and had been leaking ever since. When her homework was done she was bored, and when she was bored she went looking for something disgusting, which is the oldest form of research there is.

On the third Thursday in October she found the bathroom. She moved two boxes of Fifth Estate, lifted the lid, and looked in for a long while, like a geologist promised a gravel pit and shown a canyon.

Then she went and asked her mother whether there was a plunger.

There was. It lived under the sink in the back kitchen, where Food Not Bombs cooked on Sundays, and it lived there because it was nobody's job to put it anywhere else. Renata, who was ringing up a copy of Mutual Aid at pay-what-you-can (the customer could, it turned out, manage two dollars), said she supposed so, and not to touch anything. Dot took the plunger and touched everything.

The plunger did not work, but Dot did. She learned three things in twenty minutes that are not in the Points of Unity, any revision. A plunger works by pressure, not force. The cup has to be under water, or all you are doing is slapping the toilet. And the first stroke has to be gentle, because the first stroke pushes air, and air comes back. She learned the third one last. The bowl made a sound like a cow pulling its foot out of a bog and stayed full.

She dried her arms on a T-shirt from the free box, went to the computer at the register while her mother was arguing with a man about whether a bike pump was a loan or a gift, and typed toilet wont unclog with plunger. That was how she learned the word auger, which she liked very much. It sounded like something a wizard would carry.

Rinaldi's Hardware, three doors up, had a closet auger for $34.99. Dot did not have $34.99. The Mutual Aid jar on the counter had sixty-one dollars, a Canadian quarter and a button that said I'D RATHER BE NAPPING. Dot took out thirty-five dollars, wrote an IOU on the back of a flyer for a workshop called "Decolonizing Your Compost," signed it DOT, folded it into the jar, and went.

The man at Rinaldi's showed her how it worked, because nobody had ever told him not to. The auger was a three-foot steel shaft with a crank at the top and a coiled cable inside, sheathed in rubber at the elbow so it would not scratch the porcelain. You set the bend in the bowl, you cranked, and the cable went down into the trap and round the curve where the clog lives. When it stops, the man said, don't force it. Back off a quarter-turn and feel for it. It'll tell you what it is.

It told her it was flat, and stiff, and folded. She cranked. It bit. She drew the cable back up hand over hand, slowly, the way the man had mimed, and out of the throat of the toilet, wrapped twice in steel and black with eleven weeks, came a square of plastic about the size of a playing card.

She took it to the kitchen sink and rinsed it, then unfolded it, four times, until it was a sheet of laminated paper with seven names down one side and seven chores across the top.

Behind her the toilet gave a long, deep, theological gulp, and the water went down.

Who had folded the rota into eighths and flushed it, on the night it was suspended, was never established. Nobody asked, because asking would have been an accusation, and the Ungovernable did not make accusations; it made safer-space agreements. It was the only piece of direct action the collective had taken all year, and it had been taken against the collective.

---

Juniper Haas came in at half past seven for the Spaces & Access working group and found the bathroom door open, the boxes moved, the toilet clean, the lid up, the floor mopped (badly), the rota drying on the radiator, and a nine-year-old washing an auger in the kitchen sink and humming.

Juniper did not shout. Juniper had not shouted since a training in 2021. She went to the whiteboard, under WHO IS CLEANING THE TOILET?? and WHO IS ASKING? and the circle-A, and wrote, very neatly, DOT. Under that, after some thought, she wrote: IS THAT OK? Then she put the matter on the agenda for the next general meeting, which under the Points of Unity required seven days' notice, so that the toilet could go on working for a week before anyone decided whether it was allowed to.

It went on working. People used it. They came out looking guilty, as if they had eaten a sandwich they had not been offered.

---

The general meeting was held the following Thursday at six, on folding chairs in the front room, between Philosophy and Bicycle Maintenance. Juniper facilitated. Teo Gallardo, who was twenty-four and kept the stack, kept the stack. Marguerite Vosburgh, who did the finances, brought a cash box and a face. Leonard sat by the zine rack with his arms folded, a habit he had got into because it saved time. Renata sat near the door with the expression of a mother called into school. Dot sat on the leaking beanbag, drawing a horse.

The collective used hand signals, as all such collectives do. They have taken over the decision procedures of a Quaker meeting and a handful of signs from a sign language, and kept neither the silence of the one nor the grammar of the other. Twinkling fingers meant agreement. A triangle meant a point of process. A C meant a clarifying question. Crossed forearms meant a block, and nobody made that one lightly, except Leonard, who made it the way other men tip their hats.

Juniper opened by naming the land, then the purpose of the meeting, then her own discomfort. "We have a situation," she said, "where a member of our community, who is a minor, has performed maintenance labor in our space without a process."

"It's not a member," said Marguerite. "It's a member's child. Members are defined in section two."

"A community member."

"The community isn't defined anywhere. That's why we have section two."

Teo put up a hand and was put on the stack, and since he kept the stack he was first. "I want to name," he said, "that what we have done here is reproduce, in a liberated space, the gendered domestic division of labor, and that we have reproduced it in a child."

Twinkles from two chairs.

"I'm not reproduced," said Dot, without looking up from the horse.

"Nobody said you were, sweetheart," said Renata.

"He did."

Juniper made the gesture that means let's hold that, a sort of downward patting, the way you calm a dog.

Marguerite had the jar. Thirty-five dollars had been taken from Mutual Aid and an IOU left, and while she personally had no objection to the toilet, the Mutual Aid fund existed under section five to aid members of the public in material need, and the question before the meeting was whether a toilet could be in material need.

"It was," said Leonard.

"It's not a member of the public."

"It's the only thing in this building that's been mutually aided since Labor Day."

Juniper wrote MUTUAL AID — SCOPE? on the butcher paper and drew a box round it, because a box meant parking lot and a circle meant block, and she did not want to confuse the paper.

The real business, as everyone knew, was not the money. Teo stated it with care. If Dot had done unpaid labor for the collective, the collective had exploited her. If the collective paid her, the collective had an employee, and the collective had no employees under section one ("We are not a business; we are a practice"). It was also illegal, probably, to employ a nine-year-old to clean toilets in the State of New York, though Teo would want to check, because he did not want to defer to the state on the question. Therefore, he said, the only ethical course was that Dot should not do it again, and that the toilet should be cleaned by a member, under a process to be developed.

"What process?" said Marguerite.

"The Care Commons."

"That's blocked."

"Then the rota."

"That's suspended."

"Then," said Teo, with the dignity of a man walking backwards into a lake, "we need a working group."

Renata put up her hand. Juniper, who held that a parent's voice must always be heard, especially when it was not on the stack, took her out of order.

"She liked it," Renata said.

There was the silence that follows when someone in a meeting says something true and nobody has a hand signal for it.

"I don't think we can center what she liked," said Juniper gently. "She's nine. Desire at that age is very socially constructed."

"Desire at every age is socially constructed," said Teo, who had read a book.

"Then why are we asking anybody what they want?" said Marguerite. She had read the same book and come away with a different grievance.

Leonard unfolded his arms. People noticed, because it happened about as often as a solar eclipse and was considered a worse omen.

"Two hundred years ago," he said, "a French traveling salesman named Charles Fourier, who hated every job he ever held, sat down and asked a question none of you people have asked in eleven weeks. He asked who likes to get dirty. And he looked around and the answer was children. Kids love filth. They love mud, they love slime, they love anything that makes their mothers scream. So Fourier said: fine. In the new society the dirty work goes to the kids who want it, nine years old to fifteen and a half. Sewers. Privies. All of it. He called them the Little Hordes. They had their own slang and their own uniforms, and they rode to work on little ponies." He looked at Dot. "And he said, and I'm quoting, 'It is for childhood to preserve the social body from this contamination.'"

"Fourier," said Teo, "was a utopian socialist."

"Fourier was a lunatic," said Leonard. "He thought the oceans would turn into lemonade. But he was the only lunatic in the nineteenth century who noticed that some people enjoy the things other people call work, and that the trick is to stop calling it work and let them get on with it. Marx never noticed. Bakunin never noticed. This collective, which has two copies of each of them in the back and no plunger anybody'll admit to owning, hasn't noticed either."

"There was a pony?" said Dot.

"A small one."

Dot drew a smaller horse beside the first.

Juniper waited out the twinkles, of which there were none, and said that she appreciated Leonard's contribution and the historical context it offered, and that she wondered whether the meeting could find its way toward a proposal. She proposed one herself. The meeting would approve the thirty-five dollars retroactively as an extraordinary expenditure, without precedent. It would form a Youth Participation Working Group to develop, within ninety days, a policy on the involvement of minors in the life of the space, which the general meeting could then adopt by consensus. And pending that policy, minors would refrain from maintenance activities.

Teo offered a friendly amendment: that Dot be invited to sit on the working group, "because nothing about us without us."

"Do I have to?" said Dot.

"Nobody has to do anything here," said Juniper.

Dot considered this. She had been at the Ungovernable every Thursday for a year, and she had formed her own view of how true it was.

"Is the kitchen sink anybody's job?" she said.

It was not. The kitchen sink drained slowly, and had done since the spring, because every Sunday the Food Not Bombs volunteers poured the frying oil down it with the dishwater. Food Not Bombs was an autonomous project that used the space under a solidarity agreement, and nobody from Food Not Bombs was present, so the question could not properly be raised, and Juniper said so. She was still saying so when Dot got off the beanbag, picked up a bucket and a flashlight from beside the radiator, and went into the back.

Teo made a triangle. "Point of process. Can a participant leave while we're deciding about them?"

"She's not a participant," said Marguerite. "Section two."

Juniper asked for a temperature check on the proposal. Hands rose to various heights, to show how lukewarm everyone felt. Then she asked, as she was bound to, whether there were any blocks.

Leonard crossed his forearms.

There had been something like peace in the room, the peace of people about to adjourn, and it left.

"Leonard," said Juniper. "What are you blocking?"

"The working group."

"You can't block a working group. It's a working group. It doesn't do anything."

"That's why," Leonard said. "It'll take ninety days not doing anything, and on day ninety it'll bring back a policy, and the policy will say a nine-year-old girl can unclog a toilet if she's filled out a form, attended an orientation and been supervised by a member who's taken the training. And then she won't want to. You'll have turned it into a job, and she'll do it like a job, which means she'll stop. And then you'll say there's no interest among youth, and you'll be right. I'm blocking it. Write it down. Draw your circle."

Juniper drew the circle. It was the second on the wall that year, and both were his. When the facilitator's notes were written up afterwards, Marguerite pointed out that under the Points of Unity a single member's block was the only power in the building that anyone could exercise without first getting everyone else's permission, so that the nearest thing the Ungovernable had to anarchy was one bad-tempered typesetter saying no. Nobody twinkled that either.

Leonard stood up. He said he needed to use the facilities, and in eleven weeks it was the first time anybody had said it of that room with a straight face. But he did not go to the bathroom. He went to the back kitchen.

Dot was flat on her back on the linoleum with her head and shoulders inside the cabinet under the sink. The flashlight was propped on a can of chickpeas and pointing mostly at the ceiling. She had the bucket set under the trap, and she had got one of the two plastic slip nuts loose with her hands, and she was working on the other with her tongue between her teeth.

Leonard lowered himself onto the floor in stages, with the noises of a man of sixty-one, took the flashlight off the chickpeas and pointed it where she was working.

"Lefty loosey," he said.

"I know."

The second nut gave. The U of pipe came away in her hands, heavy and sloshing, and she tipped it into the bucket. Then she reached two fingers into the stub of the drain and drew out, slowly, the way the man at Rinaldi's had shown her, a gray, glistening rope of fat and rice and something that might once have been kale, a foot long and still coming.

She held it up into the light.

"Look at it," she said.

From the front room came Juniper's voice, asking whether anyone was willing to take on note-taking for the working group that did not exist. Leonard kept the flashlight steady, kept both hands on it, and looked.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Blackiānō Lūdicae Abolitiōnis Simulācrō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Blackian Ludic Abolition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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