Next weekend Firestorm will be hosting author David Vaina for an in-person conversation with local Appalachian organizers about his new book "On-Ramps to a New Civil Society: Mutual Aid at the Edges of the Anthropocene," an autonomist reimagining of labor, value, mutual aid, and revolution. They'll discuss the present moment of institutional decline, where a political void has emerged in addressing our collective needs, and how mutual aid can contribute to the development of a radically new society.
Learn more and find copies of "On-Ramps to a New Civil Society" at https://firestorm.coop/events/3331-mutual-aid-revolution-a-conversation-with-david-vaina.html.
#MutualAid #DualPower #MutualAidDisasterRelief #HurricaneHelene #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)
But Russian anarchist and scientist Pëtr Kropotkin had a different idea. After years observing wildlife in Siberia, he argued that mutual aid—not competition—is what ensures survival, resilience, and evolution.
This post kicks off my mutual aid series, exploring how solidarity and reciprocity can help us build equitable, sustainable communities outside capitalist logic.
What a world. #Capitalism "externalizes" costs to the point where the costs are "externalized" into our own bodies.
With #Trump & #Musk seeking to crash the #economy & decimate #socialsecurity, the #GOP in #Congress shouts #USA while the #Democrats pray for mid-term #elections. Trump received less than 50% of the votes for his "mandate".
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-musk-intentionally-crashing-economy
While #DonaldTrump & his minions now openly tell #Ukraine to cede land & people to #Russia, Ukrainian #socialist Hanna Perekhoda explains why "The fight for #freedom in Ukraine is intimately linked to the global struggle against #fascist forces" like #Trump & #Putin.
#Resistance must be politically #independent of the #neoliberal corporate #Democrats as well as the #far-right #Trump #Republicans.
Western society, possibly even global society, has to be rebuilt.
Luckily, it's all coming to pieces, so you don't have to do the tearing down part.
Start doing the building part now.
@sz_duras #DualPower: Building Alternative Structures Creating self-managed institutions like worker co-ops, community assemblies, and mutual aid groups can gradually replace existing power structures. As #CorinneMorelDarleux suggests, these grassroots efforts challenge centralized authority. #Ecosocialism #CommunityEmpowerment #AlternativePolitics
@log @RickiTarr I'd love to see/start a conversation among bunches of us in similar jobs about how to #DualPower our way out of these jobs that keep capitalism chugging along, killing people and ecosystems. Seems like there is simply no juice, so umph, no spoons left after work and daily maintenance to do what needs doing. Any thoughts?
CLIPS: Independent Politics 101 (2023) with Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwKDw8hfImk&list=PLDTC9USV5d-Eu1nOOZvs-Cg0-uea_xjQd&pp=iAQB)
CLIPS: #GreenParty 101 Session 2 (2022) with Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX3wtgfHFRE&list=PLDTC9USV5d-HECS_e-naOy9FiK9B0KZGZ&pp=iAQB)
CLIPS: #GreenParty 101 Session 1 (2022) with Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uU6SQdhxmk&list=PLDTC9USV5d-GzOw_TVANt91ietYfGOqFe&pp=iAQB)
CLIPS: #Ecosocialism 101 Session 3 (2022) with Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwoTkEzaWU8&list=PLDTC9USV5d-FnBIGUnY9tQNElv4TL_qzO&pp=iAQB)
CLIPS: #Ecosocialism 101 Session 2 (2022) with Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZNRxgJHyEw&list=PLDTC9USV5d-FJB9d1XTJxl1Vt-Z-SepKe&pp=iAQB)
SESSION CLIPS: We are working on getting our 101 sessions broken into clips that are more easily digestible & referenceable. Accompanied by Chris Blankenhorn & @thegreengarret.
I have a proposal for a Europe-wide* experiment, that aims to bring together the movements around solidarity and ecology in order to build up the material infrastructure.
I'm looking for collaborators, please DM me, and please boost this toot!
Here it is briefly:
We try to raise 50 000 000€ over about 5-10 years and give that money as 1000 gifts of 50k€ each to new collectives for setting up housing cooperatives and land communes. The main vehicle for the fundraiser would be crowdfunding with focus on a high volume of small, recurring donations.
For example, this could be achieved with 200 000 donors, donating 5€/month on average for 50 months, or 4,17 years. That's 250€/person over four years.
Each recipient collective would make a legal pact with us or a trusted third party to ensure that the property will not be sold back to the market for financial gain. Additionally collectives would go through screening to ensure alignment with a shared vision.
*Even though internationalism on a global scale is important, I believe it makes sense to focus this effort geographically, to be able to have location-connected synergies between collectives.
In the end we would have boosted the 'ecosystem' with a network of maybe 10-30k members and created 1000 hubs for social and ecological organizing. Additionally, we would have built up a network of Commons, that can help us gain a better understanding of this new, old, paradigm.
The leftist space is full of ideas and people with motivation to work and organize together, to try new forms of living and care, to grow food and to steward the land. I want to see this potential realized, but I'm afraid most of it will not happen unless we cooperate on a broader, international scale to push things forward.
The need for self-governance and the democratization of fedi culture is clearly indicated by the current democracy deficit of the status quo. The controversies resulting from the upcoming Mastodon feature upgrades tell the tale.
The initial and unilateral introduction of the upcoming search capability - rumored to have been a demand of Meta - took the form of a single all-or-nothing toggle which would actually have removed existing functionality for users who opted out. The sensibilities and consent concerns of fedi-folk from smaller instances and marginalized communities were only considered after an outcry.
Though a more amenable alternative was provided, there are still serious concerns about the performance toll of these new functionalities on small and self-hosted servers. They are now mainly being beta-tested on megaservers, which means negative impacts both technical and cultural may only become apparent when it's too late to reverse course.
14/20
When referencing the democratic potentials of the fediverse, it's important to note that inspiration is not to be found in the competitive, bureaucratic electoralism of liberal democracy, but rather the horizontal consensus-based process of radical direct democracy.
The fedifam structure would facilitate a go-to democratic framework for attaining consensus between communities on moderation conundrums. At the moment, these regular crises tend to sprawl out in random threads, with the directly affected and indirect stakeholders perhaps able to chance upon them or not.
And what about intra-instance democracy, to redistribute agency within the community itself? This post - the second part of a rather long essay on the fedifam idea - sketches out a speculative scenario of "democracy as a protocol", baked into the software.
https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/110707707012210965
13/20
Critical to the understanding and acceptance of this model is the horizontal distribution of power. This is consistent with both the Zapatista and Rojava programs. Envision now a series of three concentric rings, with the individual instance as the smallest ring on the inside, the caracol the biggest on the outside.
The instance should have exactly as much agency as it does now (or perhaps in certain ways, even more). No capacity currently under the control of the instance is ceded to the outer rings of the fam and the caracol. Those rings are quite deliberately limited in their functionality, with the biggest being the most limited; their very purpose is to augment and devolve agency back in to the locality of the community.
This is the only chance for a construct of this nature to facilitate direct democracy and avoid hierarchical creep.
12/20