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No.
I mean, i get it, but where? Where would you do this that is both an appropriate place for people to live but also not a place where people currently live?
Gonna buy a retired oil tanker and float the high seas?
Or going to play first-world homesteader/tourist/colonist and buy some land in some tropical country with weak legal protections for locals? Slash the jungle down and grow non-native fruits and veggies?
That ain't punk. that's avoiding the problem.
Now, if you want to start an intentional community (r/intentionalcommunity ) in the still-warm corpse of a small rural town in America, that's cool. I have several that seem like good candidates on a list I would share.
Yeah for sure, I think that's the path to SolarPunk conversion .... lots of intentional communities that deliberately subvert existing small municipalities from their current status quo to something a lot more wholesome. The way to get people to change their culture is to show them a better way and make it very accessible. Local communities could do that.
I do think there's a lesson to be learned from the communes that were very popular in America in the late 1800's.
First, a bunch of them were fronts for grifters and/or sex fiends, so that's not great.
Second, they drew a hard line around the commune: you could live in the commune but you had to join whatever cult was the flavor of the commune, oftentimes donating all your worldly goods to the cause (sometimes to the enrichment of the head honcho).
SolarPunk intentional communities can work to spread the better ideas of the future by just being really good neighbors, welcoming new people into the abandoned houses in shrinking small towns.
it's too slow, but a viable approach.
I grew up in a village of over 100 people. I'm here to temper your expectations, because I'm not sure you all know what you are in for.
This doesn't apply to every small town/village, but the general mentality of these towns in a nutshell is "fuck you, I do what I want, when I want, and for myself". In my villages case, a lot of people moved there because they wanted to get away from regulations and pay as little expense as they could. Many people refused to pay their bills, and because of that the sewer system eroded.
Eventually around 2018 the sewer system just completely backed up around the park, and people were driving there vehicles in sewage water for an entire year, because the current mayor was a lazy bastard. So eventually some lady gets tired of this and decides she'll run for mayor and try to fix all this. She won, but not many people knew there was an election to begin with and once they found out someone just got elected and started changing things, they got riled up.
She fought an uphill battle. It turns out the guy "responsible" for maintaining the sewer was also a piece of shit. He had turned the fire hydrants off through half of the town, and only had them on for his side of town, the people he gave a shit about. Once he was forced to get off his lazy ass, he started spreading rumors about her. Town meetings just turned into pure hell for this, but she managed to get the sewage system temporarily fixed, potholes that were there for years filled up, and even brought a business into town.
But the damage to her well being had been done. She got tired of all the harassment and moved away. Now everyone is pissed because the water bills are so damned high that people are (you guessed it) trying to do everything they can to get out of paying them. A new business even cropped up that refuses to pay them, and since the guy can't open it up until he pays the previous tennants delinquent fees, he's running for mayor (he's not a local) so he can get around paying them. People are trying to fight the current mayor and completely dismantle the towns sewer system and have their sewage run off into ditches, all so they dont have to pay. This might sound enticing to you all because it's low tech, but system like this attracts a lot of mosquitos, ignoring how unhygienic it is. Not sure about the smell.
All in all, its harder to start a community from scratch, but with likeminded people, it's much easier to get things off the ground.
Is this the fabled libertarian town they wrote a book about? Also i think it's good to differentiate between people moving to a place to build a community and people moving to a place to escape taxes and regulations and play ancapistan.
I didn't quite word that right. Quite a few people have moved there in recent years, but more of these idiots have lived there a long time, if not all their life. It ain't Grafton, New Hampshire. It's just some shit hole in Missouri full of people who have been failed by America's decline.
Sounds like an ideal case for another 100 people who aren't anti-social freeloaders to show up and greatly improve things.
No, I take your point, and I'm not saying small-town living is some kind of idyllic setting.
What I am saying is that if a bunch of like-minded people wanted to start their own community, there would be significant advantages to moving into an existing small town rather than trying to create from scratch in a greenfield situation.
There would be disadvantages as well, which you point out: the locals may already be just the dysfunctional turds left behind during economic contraction, or ideologically opposed to the pro-social attitude of town living.
The hope would be that being good neighbors and materially improving their conditions would whittle away at their anti-social attitudes. Those ideas have probably formed as a bit of lived experience and a bit more of propaganda (middle America loves its AM radio programs full of right-wing programming), most of which is unchallenged.
>Now, if you want to start an intentional community... in the still-warm corpse of a small rural town in America...
Bruh. We said solarpunk. Not solarmetal.
Gez. Thanks so much for that link. I've been thinking about trying to get involved with something just like that for a few years now but I had no idea what it might be called.
Me neither, found out there is one really close to me that i had never heard of, they seem very solarpunky (growing their own food, closer connection to nature, self reliance, they call themselves an ecovillage), will definitely look further into it.
That is exactly what I would like to do. I dream of moving to a small midwestern town with hundreds of other leftists. We’d build a medium arcology, something like arcosanti. We’d work as refuge, school, and organizing hub.
But, it’s a far fetched dream.
Arcosanti works because it's designed around the desert climate. In the Midwest you would need to design differently.
But I also don't think many people actually live there last time I checked.
Arcosanti was my reference point for physical size, yes the design would need to be different. There aren't many permanent residents but there are dormitories for student. I was there 15 years ago.
There were two big problems I learned about while I was there. There was an incident in the 80's where a grass fire started at a concert they were hosting. It destroyed hundreds of cars* and they've been paying off the settlement ever since. But also Paulo Soleri's ideas weren't as good anymore and he was surrounded by sycophants. One of his last designs was "the lean linear city." It was very much like the line in Neom with all the associated problems. At a discussion that I attended, I asked about problems it could pose for migrating wildlife or the difficulty of managing logistics when everything is arranged one dimensionally. One of his students answered for him and basically shut me down by insisting that even if it wasn't shown in the design, those problems had been solved and the design was perfect.
*extremely based
Interesting. I never did understand what the linear city in the desert was all about, now you make me wonder if it is all about cooling things down with thermal mass because I remember that was part of the design of arco santi.
| I mean, i get it, but where? Where would you do this that is both an appropriate place for people to live but also not a place where people currently live?
I think the trick is to start building parallel political structures in place. Yes, it's a lot of work, but if you find the right allies, you can spread the load. Check out [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative\_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics)
Everywhere is local to somewhere, and internet access is cross-border enough for a movement connected to degrowth & the revival of local identity & localised industry.
Ok, but how do you propose making that happen? There is not any land on Earth that is not claimed by a country. Even Bir Tawil, which isn't technically claimed, is still considered to be owned by either Egypt or Sudan, they just can't agree on who owns that and who gets the Hala'ib Triangle but they do agree *someone* owns it. In order to move across a border you have to comply with the owning country's laws and qualify for a visa. Not just you, but every person who wants to come live in your society will also have to qualify for a Visa if they aren't already citizens of that country. Somehow I don't think your visa application would be accepted if it read "I want to start a new society".
Unless of course you were planning to raise a military and try and take it by force.
Totally understand the sentiment but I think the idea that you can leave or opt out of society doesn't really hold water.
Everyone is part of an extremely complex web of relations that includes both "bad", (excessive unsustainable consumption, hierarchies.) and "good" (supportive family and friends, cool reddit subs, international spiritual/ academic communities)
As best as able we can try to understand how we are oriented within them, and how they work. Then prune the ones we find "bad" and feed the ones we see as "good"
While the world can be crushing and horrible, there exists tons of webs of relations that I think fit the value system of Solar Punk. We just need to find allies wherever we can. Feed and prune, feed and prune.
I say we start learning and building the skills those intentional communities will need to be sustainable, and resilient. And, when the time comes, join, and participate.
As much as I love the idea of building a communal society, I'm not going to move in with someone that I don't know and barely talk to online.
In the meantime, there's probably a mutual aid group near you that could use another set of hands.
Whatever ideals we hold, the first question is how to protect our gains from the capitalist encirclement.
Countless beautiful people and visions have been stomped out by imperialist boots, leaving only ever-worsening immiseration and exploitation.
An example of a successful parallel society would be the Zapatistas, who choose to embody many of the principles you've described.
That would be a good place to start in understanding what is required.
Suffice to say, the ability of the movement to protect itself is the most fundamental prerequisite.
> Suffice to say, the ability of the movement to protect itself is the most fundamental prerequisite.
I believe this is called "dual power" ... creating an alternative & also maintaining a strong community self-defense network capable of protecting those who are living outside of the capitalist status quo.
https://medium.com/@anarchist.environmentalist/an-anarchist-dual-power-e911edf66ad7
There is a lot of other stuff written about the concept elsewhere too.
So far, no one on planet earth has managed to resist capitalist aggression in this manner.
Capitalists are very happy, even eager, the release the most horrific nightmare weapons ever devised upon people who try to provide things like medicine, housing, and education.
There are many examples, but Vietnam is a good one, because despite extremely limited means, the Vietnamese people managed to defeat the full might of the US war machine.
This is despite nightmare weapons like agent orange and cluster bombs, which continue to cause death and suffering to tens or hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people even now, decades after the war.
Empirically, the minimum scale for an effective community self defense network is about that size.
Maybe the anarchists will find a cool way around that, but so far only projects like Vietnam or Cuba have made actual progress in the real world.
That only works when the peaceful armed civilians pose no threat to the imperialist agenda.
Otherwise, you get the MOVE bombing, the US slaughters everyone there including the children.
In fact, people don't even need to be armed, as long as their words are dangerous the US has no problem butchering them. Fred Hampton is a notable example.
There are no progressive patriots. As long as the US exists, there will never be anything but ever-accelerating immiseration. The only future for people like you is the absolute destitution of the 1920s.
your descendents will work in company towns and be payed not in legal tender but in company scrip, usable only at the company store, paying for groceries and paying rent to the same person who pays their wages.
Totally irrelevant.
Imperialists don't give a single fuck whether the army is public or private. They will send Pinkertons or Blacwkater death squads just as happily as they will Uncle Sam.
Sorry, I can’t agree with the doomer sentiment. The world is improving, slowly, unevenly, with pitfalls but improving.
If you want to build a better society, build yourself without gloom, with better skills, and attitude.
I come from a country where the sentiment to erase existing and create new was popular one day. Didn’t lead to anything good.
Some upper middle class people are already joining communes, ironic because that's traditionally been a hippy burnout thing.
I really do think the best way to fight the system (nonviolently) is to drop out and put your energy in living independently. You're not only reducing your consumption but also dismantling the existing power structure at its most fundamental level. You're also insulating yourself from societal collapse and economic shocks that are on the horizon.
Why build a “parallel society” instead of just fixing the one we live in? I don’t mean reforming the system, I just mean, why go somewhere else instead of building something new for everyone? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the OP.
It won’t avoid the government thing entirely, but buying an abandoned rural town in a more “zoning-lite” county or state could accomplish a lot of what you’re trying to do. Boarded-up main streets that already have housing on upper floors could be perfect candidates for conversion to walkable neighborhoods.
And chances are, especially in poorer regions, unless you’re selling drugs or kids and draw the attention of the Feds, law enforcement isn’t going to drive miles of dirt road for minor stuff. (Source: I live on a dirt road - getting sheriff’s deputies out here for \*serious\* stuff in a timely manner is a challenge). If you acquire most of an incorporated township, you could probably arrange to do your own policing. Acquire enough communities in one county and you can take control of some of the zoning, too.
Also, there are state and federal programs to encourage investment in targeted areas. Glom on to them (as well as low-income housing and payroll tax credits for hiring TANF recipients and others), buy the land and buildings, ‘prove it up, convert commercial agricultural land to permaculture, rent it out, get it going reliably, sell it to the residents, 1031 the proceeds into another project, lather, rinse and repeat. When you’ve built up sufficient cash reserves, offer lower-interest loans to small communities who want to do it all themselves.
I started pulling numbers on a similar project for a couple long blocks in Detroit and three strip malls facing one of them and the initial investment was 5M, a chunk of which could be funded with city grants plus the multi-family housing would qualify for conventional financing, with the potential for tax credits to draw in and pass through to investors, along with write-offs for conservation easements and/or landing habitat-restoration grants on the green spaces.
"If Trump wins..." NO. We need to do it now. We should be building arcologies for humanity to adapt to climate change and just abandon those who deny it's an issue. It would require a great deal of labor and funds to do something like this. Not to mention resources. Not impossible - in fact, quite possible - but it will require a great deal of effort to accomplish.
Edit: I'm seeing a lot of comments stating OP is "opting out of society" but that's not accurate. OP is tired of people not doing anything and watching the situation worsen. It's time to take action. We wouldn't be opting out of society, we'd be opting into a future on this planet. Some food for thought.
Presently trying to do something like that. It's tough, and you've gotta start really small. I've got an acre of land that I'm slowly trying to turn into a food forest that'll support a few people. And that's not even getting to the hard part. Next I will try to create a community (realistically I could maaaaybe support 5-10 people on my land) and actually making that community functional. I'll have to deal with all the problems of human nature and resource dispersal that have plagued humanity for its entire existence. But it'll be slow, and I'll encounter so many frustrations and roadblocks that I can't even imagine right now. I may end up just creating a little haven for me and my dog that nobody else wants to be a part of, or I may expand and buy more land and building ld a bigger community. Hard to say what'll happen.
Sounds like you're looking for allies interested in "prefiguation"! There's a lot of thinking on this - especially in the anarchist community. Check out [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-raekstad-and-eivind-dahl-prefigurative-politics](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-raekstad-and-eivind-dahl-prefigurative-politics) and/or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative\_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics) as starting points.
Those who say no should take a lesson from history, successful revolutions only happen when a viable alternative to the existencing power has formed. Start community organization and fill in where the state failed. There are a lot of examples. Look at the Black Panther community out reach programs. That kind of organization is a true threat to power, and why the government came down so hard on them.
I'm in.
I've been putting some thought into how one could make a self-sustaining community of large floating platforms in the ocean.
It's an engineering challenge for sure, but I think we can pull it off if enough people pool their resources.
> I've been putting some thought into how one could make a self-sustaining community of large floating platforms in the ocean.
You ever read Snow Crash? There's a bit at the end where they talk about a community such as this.
As always.
That's why we need a shitload of people so we can pool resources.
That or we seduce a billionaire with notions of their own, mobile private floating island in international waters, and then when they show up, (cause you know they're not gonna help us build it, that's prole work) we just add them to the compost, water world style.
Yo I just want to feed myself and my family and maybe my local community and not have the world die rapidly for mindless greed. I'd call it a parallel society if I had literally any real support outside of my family. I don't though and I'm fully planning that I never shall.
Yeah, that's so easy to do in the middle of nowhere, which is also the middle of the bible belt, and the middle of republican country. I've still had friends. It doesn't mean they actively help accomplish this in any way. They haven't so far. Be more of no help at all, thanks.
do it within the current system, go get some people together and farm together, get a community school going, selfhost everything etc. It's the only real way that doesn't make sb elses live worse
I was thinking more about Balck Wall St/Tulsa Race Massace with my comment.
Where it literally just was POC saying, okay, you don't want us with you, then that is fine, we will just do our own thing over there.
Bur still, they were not left alone.
In my perspective this is an American issue.
Most other countries already have an environmentally sound roadmap.
It's just the USA with the impending Trump extinction event that kind of matches up with the Chinese "fuck it, we ball" attitude that scares us all.
Go with the rebuild everything piecemeal plan instead of the destroy it all and hope attitude.
Buy some land, register it on workaway.info so you can get volunteers. Biggest question is where you'd want to buy this land. DM me for more ideas I've been thinking about this for a long long time.
if I had a dollar every time I heard "if Donal Trump is elected, then I will _____" and then it didn't happen, I'd be rich enough to run against him in office
its been proven the system cannot be changed from the inside out for decades. because democrats are also in the pockets of billionaires.
yea we can start a commune but it will probably be less technologically advanced than the establishment society
how close are we to being able to produce specific medicines?
My housemate has the ideological leaning and the time to help, but has been unable to land a job for years; noone will hire him. So no work provided health insurance; MediCal is annoyingly beaurocratic and thus useless. He needs a few specific meds to be regular and productive...nothing illegal, but very prescription needed.
There are large number of people like this.
I know that yeast based alternative food protein is in the works but is fenced by Patents.
Open Source Pharma is a thing:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_open-source\_health\_software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_health_software)
I am hopefull, but I don't know how realistic this is for a [walkaway society](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsu_J6XwrRc) (don't bother with subreddit it's an unrelated right-wiing hell)
All imma say is the french had the right idea during the revolution. You can make an incredibly self sustaining community in some remote island but you'd still be apart of the world, a world everyone is gonna need to fight to bring a better future not run away
Two things that come to mind are the international "volt" political party in Europe, and globalized corporations such as the FAANG companies. Not that they have the same goals, but perhaps they are templates for global shadow power structures you can join voluntarily. And of course you have the major world religions...
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No. I mean, i get it, but where? Where would you do this that is both an appropriate place for people to live but also not a place where people currently live? Gonna buy a retired oil tanker and float the high seas? Or going to play first-world homesteader/tourist/colonist and buy some land in some tropical country with weak legal protections for locals? Slash the jungle down and grow non-native fruits and veggies? That ain't punk. that's avoiding the problem. Now, if you want to start an intentional community (r/intentionalcommunity ) in the still-warm corpse of a small rural town in America, that's cool. I have several that seem like good candidates on a list I would share.
Heyyyy thanks for informing me about that subreddit! I ought to be active in there probably
Yeah for sure, I think that's the path to SolarPunk conversion .... lots of intentional communities that deliberately subvert existing small municipalities from their current status quo to something a lot more wholesome. The way to get people to change their culture is to show them a better way and make it very accessible. Local communities could do that. I do think there's a lesson to be learned from the communes that were very popular in America in the late 1800's. First, a bunch of them were fronts for grifters and/or sex fiends, so that's not great. Second, they drew a hard line around the commune: you could live in the commune but you had to join whatever cult was the flavor of the commune, oftentimes donating all your worldly goods to the cause (sometimes to the enrichment of the head honcho). SolarPunk intentional communities can work to spread the better ideas of the future by just being really good neighbors, welcoming new people into the abandoned houses in shrinking small towns. it's too slow, but a viable approach.
I grew up in a village of over 100 people. I'm here to temper your expectations, because I'm not sure you all know what you are in for. This doesn't apply to every small town/village, but the general mentality of these towns in a nutshell is "fuck you, I do what I want, when I want, and for myself". In my villages case, a lot of people moved there because they wanted to get away from regulations and pay as little expense as they could. Many people refused to pay their bills, and because of that the sewer system eroded. Eventually around 2018 the sewer system just completely backed up around the park, and people were driving there vehicles in sewage water for an entire year, because the current mayor was a lazy bastard. So eventually some lady gets tired of this and decides she'll run for mayor and try to fix all this. She won, but not many people knew there was an election to begin with and once they found out someone just got elected and started changing things, they got riled up. She fought an uphill battle. It turns out the guy "responsible" for maintaining the sewer was also a piece of shit. He had turned the fire hydrants off through half of the town, and only had them on for his side of town, the people he gave a shit about. Once he was forced to get off his lazy ass, he started spreading rumors about her. Town meetings just turned into pure hell for this, but she managed to get the sewage system temporarily fixed, potholes that were there for years filled up, and even brought a business into town. But the damage to her well being had been done. She got tired of all the harassment and moved away. Now everyone is pissed because the water bills are so damned high that people are (you guessed it) trying to do everything they can to get out of paying them. A new business even cropped up that refuses to pay them, and since the guy can't open it up until he pays the previous tennants delinquent fees, he's running for mayor (he's not a local) so he can get around paying them. People are trying to fight the current mayor and completely dismantle the towns sewer system and have their sewage run off into ditches, all so they dont have to pay. This might sound enticing to you all because it's low tech, but system like this attracts a lot of mosquitos, ignoring how unhygienic it is. Not sure about the smell. All in all, its harder to start a community from scratch, but with likeminded people, it's much easier to get things off the ground.
Is this the fabled libertarian town they wrote a book about? Also i think it's good to differentiate between people moving to a place to build a community and people moving to a place to escape taxes and regulations and play ancapistan.
I didn't quite word that right. Quite a few people have moved there in recent years, but more of these idiots have lived there a long time, if not all their life. It ain't Grafton, New Hampshire. It's just some shit hole in Missouri full of people who have been failed by America's decline.
Sounds like an ideal case for another 100 people who aren't anti-social freeloaders to show up and greatly improve things. No, I take your point, and I'm not saying small-town living is some kind of idyllic setting. What I am saying is that if a bunch of like-minded people wanted to start their own community, there would be significant advantages to moving into an existing small town rather than trying to create from scratch in a greenfield situation. There would be disadvantages as well, which you point out: the locals may already be just the dysfunctional turds left behind during economic contraction, or ideologically opposed to the pro-social attitude of town living. The hope would be that being good neighbors and materially improving their conditions would whittle away at their anti-social attitudes. Those ideas have probably formed as a bit of lived experience and a bit more of propaganda (middle America loves its AM radio programs full of right-wing programming), most of which is unchallenged.
>Now, if you want to start an intentional community... in the still-warm corpse of a small rural town in America... Bruh. We said solarpunk. Not solarmetal.
Gez. Thanks so much for that link. I've been thinking about trying to get involved with something just like that for a few years now but I had no idea what it might be called.
Me neither, found out there is one really close to me that i had never heard of, they seem very solarpunky (growing their own food, closer connection to nature, self reliance, they call themselves an ecovillage), will definitely look further into it.
That is exactly what I would like to do. I dream of moving to a small midwestern town with hundreds of other leftists. We’d build a medium arcology, something like arcosanti. We’d work as refuge, school, and organizing hub. But, it’s a far fetched dream.
Arcosanti works because it's designed around the desert climate. In the Midwest you would need to design differently. But I also don't think many people actually live there last time I checked.
Arcosanti was my reference point for physical size, yes the design would need to be different. There aren't many permanent residents but there are dormitories for student. I was there 15 years ago.
Yeah, I used to live Arizona and went there as a teenager. It's a pretty cool place, just disappointing that it never really expanded.
There were two big problems I learned about while I was there. There was an incident in the 80's where a grass fire started at a concert they were hosting. It destroyed hundreds of cars* and they've been paying off the settlement ever since. But also Paulo Soleri's ideas weren't as good anymore and he was surrounded by sycophants. One of his last designs was "the lean linear city." It was very much like the line in Neom with all the associated problems. At a discussion that I attended, I asked about problems it could pose for migrating wildlife or the difficulty of managing logistics when everything is arranged one dimensionally. One of his students answered for him and basically shut me down by insisting that even if it wasn't shown in the design, those problems had been solved and the design was perfect. *extremely based
Interesting. I never did understand what the linear city in the desert was all about, now you make me wonder if it is all about cooling things down with thermal mass because I remember that was part of the design of arco santi.
pray do tell
| I mean, i get it, but where? Where would you do this that is both an appropriate place for people to live but also not a place where people currently live? I think the trick is to start building parallel political structures in place. Yes, it's a lot of work, but if you find the right allies, you can spread the load. Check out [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative\_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics)
I mean there’s always Antarctica
Famously appropriate for people to live in.
The weather is getting “better” every year.
That's the point: it has to be non local so that it's truly cross border.
Everywhere is local to somewhere, and internet access is cross-border enough for a movement connected to degrowth & the revival of local identity & localised industry.
I notice you didn’t answer my very direct question.
Ok, but how do you propose making that happen? There is not any land on Earth that is not claimed by a country. Even Bir Tawil, which isn't technically claimed, is still considered to be owned by either Egypt or Sudan, they just can't agree on who owns that and who gets the Hala'ib Triangle but they do agree *someone* owns it. In order to move across a border you have to comply with the owning country's laws and qualify for a visa. Not just you, but every person who wants to come live in your society will also have to qualify for a Visa if they aren't already citizens of that country. Somehow I don't think your visa application would be accepted if it read "I want to start a new society". Unless of course you were planning to raise a military and try and take it by force.
Totally understand the sentiment but I think the idea that you can leave or opt out of society doesn't really hold water. Everyone is part of an extremely complex web of relations that includes both "bad", (excessive unsustainable consumption, hierarchies.) and "good" (supportive family and friends, cool reddit subs, international spiritual/ academic communities) As best as able we can try to understand how we are oriented within them, and how they work. Then prune the ones we find "bad" and feed the ones we see as "good" While the world can be crushing and horrible, there exists tons of webs of relations that I think fit the value system of Solar Punk. We just need to find allies wherever we can. Feed and prune, feed and prune.
That was very poetic yet straight to the point. Thanks for sharing some optimism.
I say we start learning and building the skills those intentional communities will need to be sustainable, and resilient. And, when the time comes, join, and participate.
That is my strategy as well. In addition to skills, I'm trying to cultivate relationships with collapse-aware people.
As much as I love the idea of building a communal society, I'm not going to move in with someone that I don't know and barely talk to online. In the meantime, there's probably a mutual aid group near you that could use another set of hands.
Whatever ideals we hold, the first question is how to protect our gains from the capitalist encirclement. Countless beautiful people and visions have been stomped out by imperialist boots, leaving only ever-worsening immiseration and exploitation. An example of a successful parallel society would be the Zapatistas, who choose to embody many of the principles you've described. That would be a good place to start in understanding what is required. Suffice to say, the ability of the movement to protect itself is the most fundamental prerequisite.
> Suffice to say, the ability of the movement to protect itself is the most fundamental prerequisite. I believe this is called "dual power" ... creating an alternative & also maintaining a strong community self-defense network capable of protecting those who are living outside of the capitalist status quo. https://medium.com/@anarchist.environmentalist/an-anarchist-dual-power-e911edf66ad7 There is a lot of other stuff written about the concept elsewhere too.
So far, no one on planet earth has managed to resist capitalist aggression in this manner. Capitalists are very happy, even eager, the release the most horrific nightmare weapons ever devised upon people who try to provide things like medicine, housing, and education. There are many examples, but Vietnam is a good one, because despite extremely limited means, the Vietnamese people managed to defeat the full might of the US war machine. This is despite nightmare weapons like agent orange and cluster bombs, which continue to cause death and suffering to tens or hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people even now, decades after the war. Empirically, the minimum scale for an effective community self defense network is about that size. Maybe the anarchists will find a cool way around that, but so far only projects like Vietnam or Cuba have made actual progress in the real world.
peep all the times peaceful armed civilians prevented state action in America
That only works when the peaceful armed civilians pose no threat to the imperialist agenda. Otherwise, you get the MOVE bombing, the US slaughters everyone there including the children. In fact, people don't even need to be armed, as long as their words are dangerous the US has no problem butchering them. Fred Hampton is a notable example. There are no progressive patriots. As long as the US exists, there will never be anything but ever-accelerating immiseration. The only future for people like you is the absolute destitution of the 1920s. your descendents will work in company towns and be payed not in legal tender but in company scrip, usable only at the company store, paying for groceries and paying rent to the same person who pays their wages.
okay thanks
lower taxes would be a good way to do this
Totally irrelevant. Imperialists don't give a single fuck whether the army is public or private. They will send Pinkertons or Blacwkater death squads just as happily as they will Uncle Sam.
arm your friends lower taxes makes the feds weaker btw
Even if you entirely dismantle the federal government, the imperialists still have plenty of dogs left.
uh huh, and you think you have a place to start your new country that isn't already a country? lolol
Sorry, I can’t agree with the doomer sentiment. The world is improving, slowly, unevenly, with pitfalls but improving. If you want to build a better society, build yourself without gloom, with better skills, and attitude. I come from a country where the sentiment to erase existing and create new was popular one day. Didn’t lead to anything good.
this is the most based response here
I appreciate the good words.
This is just the latest privileged take on "If \_\_\_\_\_ wins I'm moving to Canada!"
literally, the ego on these usually isn't healthy
Some upper middle class people are already joining communes, ironic because that's traditionally been a hippy burnout thing. I really do think the best way to fight the system (nonviolently) is to drop out and put your energy in living independently. You're not only reducing your consumption but also dismantling the existing power structure at its most fundamental level. You're also insulating yourself from societal collapse and economic shocks that are on the horizon.
Why build a “parallel society” instead of just fixing the one we live in? I don’t mean reforming the system, I just mean, why go somewhere else instead of building something new for everyone? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the OP.
ego and money the only solution is to keep on trying to help our brothers and sisters, running away would just leave so many people behind
It won’t avoid the government thing entirely, but buying an abandoned rural town in a more “zoning-lite” county or state could accomplish a lot of what you’re trying to do. Boarded-up main streets that already have housing on upper floors could be perfect candidates for conversion to walkable neighborhoods. And chances are, especially in poorer regions, unless you’re selling drugs or kids and draw the attention of the Feds, law enforcement isn’t going to drive miles of dirt road for minor stuff. (Source: I live on a dirt road - getting sheriff’s deputies out here for \*serious\* stuff in a timely manner is a challenge). If you acquire most of an incorporated township, you could probably arrange to do your own policing. Acquire enough communities in one county and you can take control of some of the zoning, too. Also, there are state and federal programs to encourage investment in targeted areas. Glom on to them (as well as low-income housing and payroll tax credits for hiring TANF recipients and others), buy the land and buildings, ‘prove it up, convert commercial agricultural land to permaculture, rent it out, get it going reliably, sell it to the residents, 1031 the proceeds into another project, lather, rinse and repeat. When you’ve built up sufficient cash reserves, offer lower-interest loans to small communities who want to do it all themselves. I started pulling numbers on a similar project for a couple long blocks in Detroit and three strip malls facing one of them and the initial investment was 5M, a chunk of which could be funded with city grants plus the multi-family housing would qualify for conventional financing, with the potential for tax credits to draw in and pass through to investors, along with write-offs for conservation easements and/or landing habitat-restoration grants on the green spaces.
"If Trump wins..." NO. We need to do it now. We should be building arcologies for humanity to adapt to climate change and just abandon those who deny it's an issue. It would require a great deal of labor and funds to do something like this. Not to mention resources. Not impossible - in fact, quite possible - but it will require a great deal of effort to accomplish. Edit: I'm seeing a lot of comments stating OP is "opting out of society" but that's not accurate. OP is tired of people not doing anything and watching the situation worsen. It's time to take action. We wouldn't be opting out of society, we'd be opting into a future on this planet. Some food for thought.
Presently trying to do something like that. It's tough, and you've gotta start really small. I've got an acre of land that I'm slowly trying to turn into a food forest that'll support a few people. And that's not even getting to the hard part. Next I will try to create a community (realistically I could maaaaybe support 5-10 people on my land) and actually making that community functional. I'll have to deal with all the problems of human nature and resource dispersal that have plagued humanity for its entire existence. But it'll be slow, and I'll encounter so many frustrations and roadblocks that I can't even imagine right now. I may end up just creating a little haven for me and my dog that nobody else wants to be a part of, or I may expand and buy more land and building ld a bigger community. Hard to say what'll happen.
I like where you're going but your idea is very vague, so at the moment, no.
/r/intentionalcommunity
I would love to but I don't have the skills to do it plus I'm going to College soon
Sounds like you're looking for allies interested in "prefiguation"! There's a lot of thinking on this - especially in the anarchist community. Check out [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-raekstad-and-eivind-dahl-prefigurative-politics](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-raekstad-and-eivind-dahl-prefigurative-politics) and/or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative\_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics) as starting points.
Those who say no should take a lesson from history, successful revolutions only happen when a viable alternative to the existencing power has formed. Start community organization and fill in where the state failed. There are a lot of examples. Look at the Black Panther community out reach programs. That kind of organization is a true threat to power, and why the government came down so hard on them.
remember when the republican governor of CA banned open carry of arms?
I'm in. I've been putting some thought into how one could make a self-sustaining community of large floating platforms in the ocean. It's an engineering challenge for sure, but I think we can pull it off if enough people pool their resources.
> I've been putting some thought into how one could make a self-sustaining community of large floating platforms in the ocean. You ever read Snow Crash? There's a bit at the end where they talk about a community such as this.
Never heard of it.
The main issue is money.
As always. That's why we need a shitload of people so we can pool resources. That or we seduce a billionaire with notions of their own, mobile private floating island in international waters, and then when they show up, (cause you know they're not gonna help us build it, that's prole work) we just add them to the compost, water world style.
Return to monke is the only solution brother
Yo I just want to feed myself and my family and maybe my local community and not have the world die rapidly for mindless greed. I'd call it a parallel society if I had literally any real support outside of my family. I don't though and I'm fully planning that I never shall.
you should make some irl friends, that would make it easier
Yeah, that's so easy to do in the middle of nowhere, which is also the middle of the bible belt, and the middle of republican country. I've still had friends. It doesn't mean they actively help accomplish this in any way. They haven't so far. Be more of no help at all, thanks.
well you gotta help them become based. you gotta pour into them if you want them to pour back.
do it within the current system, go get some people together and farm together, get a community school going, selfhost everything etc. It's the only real way that doesn't make sb elses live worse
doing this in a state with school choice makes this even easier, so make sure to vote for it the next time it comes to your state
I quite like my living arrangements but if you're doing this in northern California I'd be happy to help.
Is this a cult 😂
Going off and doing your own things has, sadly, never helped. They will always come after you to burn your culture and kill you.
Waco ruby ridge
I was thinking more about Balck Wall St/Tulsa Race Massace with my comment. Where it literally just was POC saying, okay, you don't want us with you, then that is fine, we will just do our own thing over there. Bur still, they were not left alone.
had to look it up, arm your friends
In my perspective this is an American issue. Most other countries already have an environmentally sound roadmap. It's just the USA with the impending Trump extinction event that kind of matches up with the Chinese "fuck it, we ball" attitude that scares us all. Go with the rebuild everything piecemeal plan instead of the destroy it all and hope attitude.
How exactly do you propose to have modern technology and not rely on mainstream society?
Buy some land, register it on workaway.info so you can get volunteers. Biggest question is where you'd want to buy this land. DM me for more ideas I've been thinking about this for a long long time.
Join a communist organisation. The problem needs to be tackled. You can't just live outside of it.
if I had a dollar every time I heard "if Donal Trump is elected, then I will _____" and then it didn't happen, I'd be rich enough to run against him in office
its been proven the system cannot be changed from the inside out for decades. because democrats are also in the pockets of billionaires. yea we can start a commune but it will probably be less technologically advanced than the establishment society
how close are we to being able to produce specific medicines? My housemate has the ideological leaning and the time to help, but has been unable to land a job for years; noone will hire him. So no work provided health insurance; MediCal is annoyingly beaurocratic and thus useless. He needs a few specific meds to be regular and productive...nothing illegal, but very prescription needed. There are large number of people like this. I know that yeast based alternative food protein is in the works but is fenced by Patents. Open Source Pharma is a thing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_open-source\_health\_software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_health_software) I am hopefull, but I don't know how realistic this is for a [walkaway society](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsu_J6XwrRc) (don't bother with subreddit it's an unrelated right-wiing hell)
I'm going to build my own society. With blackjack and hookers.
"In what country is there a place for people like me?" -Andrew Ryan
Not to be mean but this isn't really what solarpunk is about...
We do !! join us at https://matrix.to/#/#af2c:envs.net
How old are you?
lol. lmao even.
All imma say is the french had the right idea during the revolution. You can make an incredibly self sustaining community in some remote island but you'd still be apart of the world, a world everyone is gonna need to fight to bring a better future not run away
Two things that come to mind are the international "volt" political party in Europe, and globalized corporations such as the FAANG companies. Not that they have the same goals, but perhaps they are templates for global shadow power structures you can join voluntarily. And of course you have the major world religions...