The "guerilla composters" of Sunnyside, Queens, planted their flag on a rare vacant parcel on 45th Street, a stone’s throw from the famous Sunnyside Gardens Historic District. Their Instagram handle “resistance is fertile: compost capitalism,” merits a chuckle from this old trekkie. As I entered the lot on a cold but bright Saturday morning, small groups of volunteers were tearing up paper and food scraps into smaller bits that would feed the three composters set up on the site. The regular group, self-educated composters, comprises more than its fair share of anthropologists which came as a lovely surprise to me, personally speaking. It gave a whole new meaning to the participant observant vantage, amongst those already expert in fieldwork and that particular methodology.

Some quick stats were shared. The lot was taken over by the neighborhood in June 2020 when they broke the locks with the help of a community garden group in neighboring Long Island City and set up their palettes to fill the composting gap left when the city’s services, at the Sunnyside Farmers Market were shut down due to budget cuts. As Memo Salazar, another neighbor and community advocate, writes in the Sunnyside CSA Newsletter, a sister mutual aid group:

“Sunnyside has become such a hotbed of Composting during our pandemic, it deserves its own major news story! In lieu of that, here's an important update. If you're wondering how you can get more involved with your community, THIS is how!”

Informally christened the guerilla composters, the group later came to an arrangement with the owner of the site and with Sunnyside Community Services to allow them to run the composting plant. These arrangements are vital since the operation requires investment in equipment and in time as well as a sense of permanence so that the site can last through the temporal cycles of composting. Time, of course, is volunteered and Saturday mornings are an open day, when neighbors can walk over to help at the site and bring their scraps over. A core group keeps things running during the week, has access to a lockbox and keeps an eye on things generally. This core group was always present on Saturdays and there share a sense of solidarity over a common purpose. Within a few months, the site has grown in capacity though it cannot, of course, fill the gap left by the city’s program which used to collect food scraps at the local farmer’s market.

Just as the food pantries and fridges were keeping food from going waste by cultivating new distribution channels, the guerilla composters are creating new channels out of landfills and into community agricultural projects. K, one of the volunteers at the site explored her own involvement with the group. She welcomed the community composting project, which she heard about at the local farmer’s market where another volunteer was handing out flyers. She would normally bring her compostibles over to the market where the city was collecting two to three thousand pounds each week. The segregation of compost was “a reminder and an opportunity to deal with my own waste,” K said.[1] She also remarked that not having to deal with waste was one of “blessings of modern society” but that “Americans, including myself, treat it as a way to disengage with the waste we create.” Listening to K, I was jolted once more by the general lack of engagement with waste in New York city. NYC generates more than 25,000 tons of municipal solid waste per day, compared with around 8000 tons per day produced in Mumbai. While it may seem like comparing apples and oranges, there is no doubt that Mumbai’s waste workers and informal recyclers, who themselves lead precarious life at the edges of the landfills, contribute more than a little to these vast differences in number. Thus the subjective transformation that K alluded to, which may seem commonplace in many other parts of the modern world is in fact a culturally significant observation.

Equally important is the ethos that the guerilla composters are builder and the politics that they confront in their attempts to do so. K talked about how she was excited when flyers were distributed by another key volunteer at the farmer’s market, inviting neighbors to participate in an insurgent action, breaking the locks and entering the vacant lot where the composters are now set up. Of course in the light of the actions on Capitol Hill on January 6th 2021, we may well choose to use another phrase such as reclaiming the commons (even though the lot was someone’s private property!) to describe their action. K recalled how some people in the neighborhood objected to the tactics of breaking the locks and so the group had to quickly establish consensus around the act of lock breaking as an overture to negotiations with the landlord and forming an alliance with the Sunnyside Community Services, a local non-profit. K understands that “we would not have been here if people did not approach this in a shocking way…” This is politics on the fly, a radically speeded up decision-making process that the pandemic seems to have encouraged in all kinds for spheres from dealing with food insecurity to composting to vaccine production.

K recalled that those who objected to the guerilla tactics wanted it to be a DIY initiative that would arise from a community conversation and there were one or two people who wanted to do themselves, without having to take over the property. But composting is not an activity that can happen at the individual scale – it calls for an investment in time, space, skills and strength in numbers, which is what the guerilla composters had to work hard to develop. As they work together they must remain constantly vigilant against hierarchies developing within the group. They must work to maintain open communications across a group of nearly 200 active members. Membership is earned through action and volunteering and not merely by joining a service. It is both like and different from a civic infrastructural network in that it does not require entitled citizenship, only participation and action within a frame developed openly and repeatedly iterated.

As a work in progress, the composting community is also a pedagogical space that strives to educate the public, necessarily one of neighbors, in the ethos of neighborliness and solidarity but using different opportunity to distinguish themselves from service-providers. A recent Instagram post featured a photograph of a bag of scraps carelessly thrown over the fence of the composting site.

There are no distinctions here between service providers and users and, as a platform, the compost site is an apparatus that sutures the gap between “desubjectification” and “subjectification,” a gap identified by Agamben in his essay “What Is an Apparatus?” As Agamben explains, “a certain process of subjectification corresponds to every apparatus.” Agamben’s understanding of the concept of apparatus in turn draws from Foucault, who used the term dispositif to name a heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, regulations, forms and knowledges together constituting a technology of government.

Agamben argues that “what defines the apparatuses that we have to deal with in the current phase of capitalism is that they no longer act as much through the production of a subject as through the process of what can be called desubjectification. A desubjectifiying moment is certainly implicit in every process of subjectification… But what we are now witnessing is that processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification become reciprocally indifferent, and so they do not give rise to the recomposition of a new subject, except in larval, or, as it were, spectral form… Hence the eclipse of politics, which used to presuppose the existence of subjects and real identities (the workers’ movement, the bourgeoisie etc.)…”[2]

If we take what Agamben argues as a general tendency promoted and intensified by platforms that capture everyday urban life and acts even at ever smaller scales, we might see the depth of K’s insight about connecting to her waste stream as the re-birth of a consuming subject as a composting subject, a novel form of value creation for the self in times of civic infrastructural collapse. Perhaps this is what accounts for the group’s enigmatic byline to their Star Trek inspired tagline resistanceisfertile: compost capitalism.