Popular front OP, where are you? International Solidarity thread

No problem, here some more content

Here is the youtube channel:
youtube.com/channel/UCjvBN1r7UXXqmIbx_u7bIAw

Not even just cob houses, but real life construction tools and machinery. From beginning level forges and anvils to full on machine shops.

Hydro on a creek, windmill on a hill, solar panels, hell, even diesel anything and everything should be used to gain a personal autonomy

Checked. Thank you based dubs of shrek

I'm with you comrades.

That's really cool!
here are some more open source farming tools:
farmhack.org/tools

Have you thought about starting in the suburbs?

I did the math and I think if you use triangular planting in rectangular beds, 4ft by the length of the empty space. and companion planting you should be able to nearly double the output of your small farm, so a person on nearly 1/8th a acre. The average lawn size in America is a 1/3rd of a acre, and the average household in the us is ~2.5 Assuming ideal weather it should be plenty.

You could start a commune that buys members houses, grows food for members, operate a tool co-op, generates electricity, internet etc. for a fee. It would reduce starting capital and potentially allow for rapid expansion even to non leftists because of the economic incentive of not having to pay for your house utilities etc. You could then faze out collective fees over time.

If a member leave the commune then you could just democratically allocate their resources (house garden etc) to someone else who wants to join.

Was thinking about it, but I live within city limits, and the house where I live is like 1/4 of the whole lot, and a 4000ish square foot lot in the middle of a city is probably too small to do something. Its literally 1/10th of an acre. You need around 10-11 lots for a full acre. and in the middle of a city, that's expensive.

So I thought of looking for land at landwatch.com and setting up an RV or a van there and planting it all down. Maybe it will work, I don't know. We could set up a kickstarter or something like for the RDW thread. Does anyone know how that was done?

Niggaz need to learn to like to read.

I added a few touches to the manifesto, I'll post it in Riot so you guys can see

Also bump, I was starting to worry about the silence

What happened to the subplebbit?

tru tru

...

Here's an example from Zillow:
zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Coloma-Township-MI/395577_rid/0-20000_price/0-76_mp/globalrelevanceex_sort/42.236175,-86.342196,42.205665,-86.397128_rect/13_zm/

I took this image from Southwest Michigan. Super rural area but only 2.5hrs away from Chicago; what's more is that it's practically right on Lake Michigan. Literally prime real estate. Right next to the 196 expressway. Also has a local Amtrak stop at St. Joseph. You are literally in Michigan wine country. I've been there, it's super awesome. Some of the lots are available after a few month's pay, and I know that if we can fund a Holla Forums mention by RDW, we can do this.

The one thing you have to do is check for easements and shit, you want to actually be able to go to your land plot without somebody raising a stink about trespass, which is a bullshit crime anyway.

Literally RV's and some land. We could even show up Holla Forums that we are better at being them than they are; with a trailer park right on the lake, that will actually turn into something better later.

wouls there be any way any non burgers would be able to help?I will donate when a funding campaign starts,solidarity and all that shit,but it's not like I'm gonna up and be able to emigrate to join a commune in the states

I will be in Puerto Rico in a few months. I'm also a youngb&.

International Solidarity is really an org based quite closely around those two words. We're focused on supporting any endeavor that fights capitalism anywhere in the world. If you want to start a guerilla garden or if you want to start a revolution, we'll be with you every step of the way.

My idea for Puerto Rico was to spread word about socialism from the college I'll be studying at through activism, agitprop, social media.

My ESLtism is flaring up again. I don't follow. You pay a few month's rent and they give it to you? How much is the rent you're looking at? About a thousand? How much space is each lot? If we build microhomes for one person to live comfortably in the space of a large-ish mobile home, how many could we fit?

That reminds me. My grandma lives on a plot of land that technically wasn't connected to the neighborhood road behind her. Naturally, the resident(s) there didn't care and let her have her own little dirt trail up to that road. But they moved out and some petit-bourg doctor fuck who moved out to the countryside moved in, and he locked the gate she had built there. Fuck him.

Sincere apologies comrades, I made a post in the last thread about needing to take a week or so off but it might not have been seen before the thread slid off. My studies are quite a bit more intensive this semester than I was expecting, and the extra study time has eaten into the time I had to work on International Solidarity. My biggest priority right now is working hard to get on top of my studies so that I can shift my focus back onto the project. I'm hoping I can return to 100% activity in another week or so. In other news, I've been doing a little networking with the leftist group at my university when I've been able. If I'm lucky, maybe I can find enough good people to begin a chapter in my city. I'm also working on getting our first agitprop poster made up, and adding bits and pieces to my draft of the manifesto when I can. Anyways, I have a little more breathing room right now then I've had so I'll be checking in on the thread when I can, and probably making sporadic appearances on Tox. I'm back to studying, for now. I'm glad to see my post is taking on a life of it's own thanks to some dedicated comrades. Keep the momentum going, and long live International Solidarity!

Right now I need to find out how this will work in terms of needing how much funding and acquiring the means to obtain it. You can come here on a tourist's visa, I think, just don't overstay.

No, I mean purchasing outright as per here:
ranprieur.com/me/land.html
I want to buy around a few acres. This means a good couple thousand to buy, plus some taxes down the road, which will have to be surveyed and assessed later.
How many people will fit in one mobile home? 2-3 maybe, and each one will cost a decent amount even if 5-10 years old.

I don't want to buy something so out of the way, plus I need to know how good an investment it is in terms of amenities (does it have fresh water spring or well, is it waterfront property, does it have an easement for access so you can't get blocked off like your grandma, she has to petition for an easement in court, locals, quality and type of soil, etc)

I want to actually start a commune, which means buying land and posting myself on it with a few amenable comrades. The idea is knowing and planning everything out beforehand. That means purchase, planning what we are going to do with the land; hoe we are going to support ourselves and our message on it, planning our daily needs, expenses, and plan for further development.

We need to be able to grow our own food, which means land, water, seed or seedlings, tools to produce everything and tools to maintain it, as well as inventory and manage it all.

We need water, which has to come from either municipal sources or from a spring or river, which we will have to maintain and keep clean; as more people come, we will have to deal with their bodily wastes as well, we cannot foul our own nests here.

Speaking of nests, we need to be able to build a decent house once the RV's start getting cramped. We will need a barn for animals, storage elevators for crops, root cellars, whatever. We will need to build it ourselves. We will have to be able to build our own homes once the RV's stop being comfortable enough for all of us

Other consumer goods will need to be procured and replicated as well. We will need to make our clothes and wash them too. We will need a smithy, machine shop, biodiesel refinery, cybernetics core, additional pylons, whatever. The point is, we have to be able to replicate this situation provided we have sympathetic people who want to be able to do this themselves, and we have to be able to support them as well as a mutual node in the network.

This has to be planned well right from the start, otherwise we are wasting our time.

good to see you OP, you're still alive :^)
keep working at it.

Some more info from the same person:

ranprieur.com/misc/landtips.html

kek'd

as for human waste, it's a pretty handy resource to have that we could refine into more usable products. Faecal matter can be used as either a fertiliser for crops,it can be used to make bio fuels and the ammonia in urine actually makes it a good cleaning product and a key part of industrial fertiliser.

Food is going to be one of the most important parts of a self sustaining society,and we want to keep ourselves as self reliant as possible, so we need to produce it for ourselves.Now climate is going to be very important here and needs to be an important factor in where we set up,obviously states sounding the Mojave are out of the question as are high altitude areas and much of the deep south due to humidity on us as well as crops

.As for what to grow carbohydrates are a must,corn can be used for animal feed and as a good staple food ,some form of cereal crop like wheat would also be a good staple food,potatoes are great because they are tubers so we could have some form of vertical farming allowing us to more efficiently use space a last idea i had was a bit off the wall which is rice,rice feeds a fucking lot of people all over Asia so it can't be that bad of a crop for farming but I know a rice paddy needs to be submerged in about 5 inches of water.

Assorted vegetables aren't much of a problem we could have carrots,onions,tomatoes,strawberries and asparagus all of which practically nobody could fuck up and are reliable crops.doing some further thinking an orchard wouldn't be a bad idea with some apples,pears and cherries but trees are pretty big compared to their yield and block sunlight so we couldn't grow things under them.

one last odd idea I had to diversify our food source would be mushrooms.I used to have a friend who's dad in their basement had shelves and shelves of rotting wooden planks all covered in mushrooms and it seemed all you needed was some damp old wood and dark damp place to put them,some humidifiers could solve the problem if it isn't damp enough.Only problem is that I know mushrooms can be dangerous if you can't tell species apart but I assume we can get some spores of a safe kind somehow and just grow those.

we also need a flag in physical form we can fly off our buildings

You can use human feces for fertilizer but it has to be processed a bit first. I saw a book on this the other day "The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure"

A lot of usable product is lost when using corn and larger animals, you can feed chickens just left overs and they will compost it for you, it's pretty great.

I agree that common vegetables, are pretty important tho yah, and mushrooms is a pretty good idea imo.

also flags are pretty slig.

Have not read the wall of text, because I need to do my plant science homework. Just want to bump and say that this is 10,000,000 times more important and crucial to our movement overall than anything a march or black bloc action can ever do. The blocs have their job, and it's important, but they'll never be able to reach their full potential as an anarchist defensive unit, until we give them something to defend.

Leftypoland when?

this has great potential to bring up leftwing reputation. if we you get this rolling and have a good sized property you could welcome some homeless people to get new comrades and expand workforce. the possibilities are endless

what if pol builds its own autistvile and we have mini cold war in the us

if you ever do end up with hives, remember to start with at the very least 3. Odds are 2 of the 3 hives will die out in the first year

So aside from posting info on self-sufficiency and survivalism, what can we do to get involved?

The human aspect of our society needs to be set forth asap as everything needs to be shaped around how we live,work,manage and operate as an entity towards the outside world.

Now with such a small population as we would have direct democracy seems the best fit with a planned central meeting type deal once a day or whatever to keep everybody up to date on projects,inventory,and for people to speak their mind to the group as a whole airing problems and ideas.

Work is a big aspect.I think that we ought to make sure that people work on what needs to be worked on but also have time to invest in passion projects,people work best when they are emotionally invested in their work.So to allow for a balance of work we need done:passion projects:free time I suggest we divide the day into 3 slots.One where people are randomly assigned tasks,such as tending to the animals,watering the crops,gathering honey ect. that we all know are needed.Another block of time would be time to do the work you want,build some new sort of leisure infrastructure,work on a book,you know just do something productive for the group in the time not just sit on your arse.Free time is rather self explanatory,just do whatever the fuck,however to remain as productive as possible I do think that in the early stages where productivity is the difference between success and a total collapse we ought to set bedtimes and wake up times non mandatory but highly encouraged.

I don't think people have yet touched on the idea as how we present ourselves and how we operate with the local society. is onto some good idea with letting anybody in to help(really quick side point but I am very paranoid about COINTELPRO and reactionary wreckers) especially the needy,but we must impose our beliefs first and foremost,even at the cost of alienation.We also should be as charitable as possible and try to donate to the homeless shelters excess food,volunteer at shelters to spread the message and show we aren't an insular community but one which wishes to help all people as a whole.

This next point seemly like it might be contentious,I myself am pretty torn, but trade.Internet is not a growable or harvestable resource and anybody at the commune won't have direct income to pay for internet and I'm sure other resources I can't think of right now will need to be imported.so what do we do? do we export some goods like food or alcohol and re-invest the profits into such commodities we can't make?The internet is an invaluable propaganda tool that we simply can't overlook.However this would be self exploitation no doubt but I don't think we could be 100% self sustained.I also think a liquid cash reserve ought to be kept for times if a harvest fails or a food store breaks an food rots

A name would be nice as well.I can only think of corny shit right now like revolution hill or workers fields,which sound terrible, but we need a name that represents who we are.

we will need an initial fund raiser for land purchase as well as equipment so anything you could give then would help.

Propaganda is a great way to grow the community,just posting about it in online leftists spaces to whip up support could really help grow us.

I think we could also use money from exporting goods ,as I suggested here , to fund visas and flights could be a long term side project to help bring in people.The fact of the matter is the far left is sparse shattered and weak,people aren't going to believe in a dream like this unless we show we can bring ourselves together so while it might seem stupid to fund bringing people over,even for short term visas, we need to rally before we can spread

weak digits
watch THIS

Little Luxemburg, maybe?

Meh, I'm looking for something bigger than just dubs. I want real revolution. Come build it with me

I like the idea,but we might be confused with the country Luxembourg or it's only city Luxembourg city,it was a good idea.Associating ourselves with a known revolutionary is a good idea,lets just not pick a ML or MLM though we don't need muh Stalin/Mao opposition

...

Leon?
It could stand for Leon Trotsky or Daniel De Leon.
I dunno.

Trotsky was a tankie. Probably a bad idea.

Postan my manifesto draft:
docs.google.com/document/d/1Wi3kIlpV6HkW3ijgJTSLlIkKJT9eXSks233M2eczBkY/edit?usp=sharing

It's a pun. And that's what the Little is there for.
Wobblyville, maybe? "Debstown"? "Jefferson"? "Paine"?

debstown has a nice ring to it. Its friendly sounding too.

although i agree with in that perhaps we should not name it after someone as that only invites people that want to LARP ideological splits.

Which is why Wobblyvile is also listed.

I like Wobblyville and Debstown.

The best way to be able to defend against it and other things like infiltration is to deliberately avoid anything illegal at the moment. In fact, I would even go so far as to befriend and maintain a good relationship with both the rank-and-file and the brass of the local police force and sheriff's office, and possibly even the local judges as well.

Nothing works so well as a good-old-boy's network to keep you informed and out of trouble with higher-ups, and being an effective and reasonable aid during emergencies like a natural disaster is sure to get you into the good graces of your local "bureaucracy."

Why is this so important? Intel. It is said that natural disasters, the Yakuza deliberately organize a parallel network of disaster relief, sending out care packages and consigning heavy construction equipment and helicopters from the firms they control to aid the government in tight spots, and it is never publicly acknowledged, but it stands to reason that emergency services like the local police and fire departments coordinate with the Yakuza during such cases, even as their national justice ministry is conducting investigations against them. This buys the people's good graces and even voluntary cooperation from certain officials who need their "services." Hell, most of the intelligence work done today even for the US is outsourced to private firms. As far as I am concerned, we need all the institutional aid we can get :^)

IT hardware is dirt cheap, and so is the means of obtaining a connection. If you know where to look, computers can be had for free even. We can start using switched packet radio networks for inter-commune connectivity, and once we obtain the critical mass in terms of users, equipment and area coverage, we are a serious candidate for peering.

Intro to packet radio; base stations could be emulated by software defined radio also;
tapr.org/pr_intro.html
choisser.com/packet/

This is ancient technology, but by far the most scalable and reliable. All you need is a ham license, or if you know your way around boosting part 15 radio hardware capabilities, like making and installing better gain antennas, you will be set. If I can fire a ping across an area the size of 2-3 states in the midwest, we will be golden. We could literally be using the Unix and Internet of Stallman's glory days and it would still be ok for our purposes.

But before all that jazz happens, we will need the basics: food, water, shelter, power, transport, and the means to keep it well organized, inventoried and staffed. We are all still in the planning stages, let alone scraping the amount together that's necessary in this system to to bootstrap the whole shebang.

I really sugest you should stay away from automated clothing production. Clothes have quite a low demand since people won't be needing new shirts every week. Your machinery would stay of most of the time unless you go full porky. As far as i am aware there is no such thing as small sacle automated textile industry. The whole process of refining cotton or hemp fibers, rolling them , preping the loom, making the cloth and sewing (i probably even missed a few steps) is a multi milion dolar buisness with high product output.

It wouldn't be full porky, it'd be M-C-M in cooperative business.

As far as clothing ourselves there's lots of places to get fair trade clothing if needed. They cost more than twice as much, usually, but there's also clothes we already have and hand-me-downs to consider.

I like Debstown

the bit about Orwell being a socialist and animal farm being anti-authoritarian seems a bit waffly.open bits of a manifesto should be like hard hitting sound bites.
I do like
though

rest of it seems pretty good though

Thanks, I'll fix that.

Seems like it's between Wobblyville and Debstown. Debs was pretty nonsectarian and I haven't seen anyone take objection to him and the IWW might dislike the association, so Debstown might be what we settle on.

From what I know from anecdotal evidence, Marx himself engaged in a bit of financial speculation back in the day. Right now I have some positions in certain stocks that I hope to liquidate soon in order to buy some land, but can't yet because they didn't meet their sell orders. In the meantime I am working 2 jobs in order to scrounge up the cash to to buy the land and car, putting it all into the stocks in order to cash it out for the land.

Don't be afraid to engage the market for the time being, for it will soon fall apart. The USSR's biggest mistake was killing Bukharin and reversing the NEP; probably would have staved off much destruction. The faster we could collect enough cash to do this, the better.

Penny stocks work best: best short-term growth is penny stocks under 15 cents, 10 cents is even better. Do massive amounts of research into the stocks; if it has a contract with a larger company or the Department of Defense, even better. Once it grows 1 or 2 cents, you have practically gained 20% on a 10 cent stock, which is better than most mutual funds, faster and more accurate for our levels of information.

Screen by daily trade volume and market cap. Trade volume should be over 400000 shares in one day, market cap at least 20 million,
and has as much financial information published about it, as well as analyses in the investors journals.

Don't ever front anybody's cash but your own. You are liable for all losses and upside (your extra bonus if market does better than expected performance, which is your pay for services rendered) is limited.

Do this at your own risk. Work your jobs in the meantime if you have one. Once you have enough, pull out of the stock market and look at land. Don't let yourself become dependent on your job: golden handcuffs are still handcuffs.

landwatch.com/Sawyer-County-Wisconsin-Land-for-sale/pid/323370063

This is the kind of land you might want; 18 acres for $12k. It will take a lot of work; make sure it has a spring, decent access to water, close to a road or legal easement. I would like it a little bit more south though, for solar panels. Make sure it has decent soil quality too.

I am not trying to make this into some retarded /k/ innawoods shit, but to give you an idea of a possibility for our work. Are there any people over 20 who have jobs here who are interested in this?

good shit OP

One thing to consider is not to shelter yourself from the world, but to sing your successes to everyone.

Problem is we are all on this planet together, we all sink or swim together. If fuckheads half the world away pollute our atmosphere and we do nothing to stop this, it fucks us all. Something to keep an eye out for.

Would this be a sort of commune that keeps relations with other communes?

That's the idea. We want to build a network of like-minded groups and individuals who are connected enough to support each other with tools, labor and supplies in different areas and situations. We also want to a able to relate information to each other on our own terms using our own infrastructure in real time (based relatively on our technical capabilities).

Further down the road, I want to build a series of networks wherein we don't simply fuck around with tools just because, but that we are building means of production that need no input of labor besides maybe turning a few screws or punching a few keys on a keyboard. I don't want this to just be a lifestyle, but actually viable and scale-able to the size of a state or country. I want FALC, or at least practically existing FALC, where it is remotely operable and produces useful things that are then distributed. I want people to be involved with their own lives.

There is a Slavoj Zizek interview where he says that such a lifestyle for him would be boring, and that he would like one where all he would like to do is watch movies and write books, and everything else is abstracted. I like him except for that one bit, where he also apologizes for invisible state machinery where things get done without you needing to think about it. That's the mentality of a braindead crew member on the Nostromo who gets killed because he is so thoroughly alienated from his abilities and surroundings that he cannot defend himself form the xenomorph. Taking a liberty with psychoanalysis, the xenomorph is a symbol of the Other's phallus; if I do not build up my own strength and will to live, basically my own phallus, I will be destroyed utterly by the other, thoroughly raped by it. The lesson from the movie for me is that I must not simply dump all my strength into self-entertainment but into self-development; my fellow crew members depend on me to destroy the monster and outwit the corporate interloper seeking to capitalize on it.

As an aside, the beef I have with Alien, and Alien: Isolation is that on a particular level they pretend to be some sort of grotesque morality story based on some sort of "woman's strength" motif who destroys a monstrous faceless symbolic aggressor rapist, dehumanizing man-woman interaction by the fact that the woman is made to symbolize humanity while the men are weak or overconfident or both. In short, regardless of its immediate usefulness, I think it's shit. (Pipe bombs should be able to fucking maim or kill aliens, not scare them off. Fuckers don't even stumble when running into the blast at full speed).

What about already existing communities? I know there are a few at least.

Haven't checked yet, though I linked some here that are pertinent. The point is that we should do this also, with our attitude, knowledge, memes and ideology giving us some direction on its development.

Moreover, one good point of this project is that it has the possibility to show up Holla Forums, /k/ and a few other boards over such bullshit as /namibia/ or /sov/ back in the day. Holla Forums had the /namibia/ fiasco, and /k/ keeps dreaming about going innawoods, or setting up its ultimate fantasy, a metal gear solid style "Mother Base" where they could LARP as Big Boss and crew. The fact that some "leftists" have their shit together better than the fascist Holla Forumstards in order to set up a commune that supports itself better than any of their IRL projects could play out would make some serious waves across the chans.

We could play them like damn fiddles :^)

...

ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html

ranprieur.com/essays/dropoutcrit.html

Here is a good rundown of the reasons why and how dropping out should work, and how to do it intelligently in today's economy.

earlyretirementextreme.com/frequently-asked-questions

earlyretirementextreme.com/wiki/index.php?title=Frequently_Raised_Objections

earlyretirementextreme.com/on-living-well.html

Early retirement and living well. TBH if we put even 5 or 6 of us together in such a space, where half of us had jobs and the other half took care of the farm, or even built enough controllable automatic equipment where we could tend to our farm remotely, we could support each other to the point where we wouldn't need to ALL work at it, and we could even minimize the work necessary; mostly paying the necessary bills off of investment income, insulating ourselves from the bureaucratic bullshit of the local municipality while we work towards our revolution.

Bump.

To the poster buying land as soon as he can, good luck. The moment I'm earning cash I'll contribute as much as I can for as long as I can.

I'm positively surprised by this thread and the comments, lads. Except for this one:

How are you fellow lefties, eh? You are either a troll or pic related. Fuck off.

Random as in a lottery of tasks is inefficient. Person A might be assigned to task X and person B to task Y, and they would both rather have it the other way around. If you want to allow pairs to switch tasks, consider that there can be more complicated situations, A wanting what B has who wants what C has who wants… and so and Z wants what A has. If more complicated task trades are allowed, that doesn't mean that they actually occur and furthermore, it invites using money to do things less bureaucratically, which helps in the short term and undermines the community in the long term.

A better method is randomly drawing names and allowing them one after another to choose among tasks nobody has picked up yet. This avoids these loops. (This should also allow you to state an equal preference for tasks, in which case people after you can still choose from these tasks unless only one remains which is the one you get assigned to).

Another good method is using spliddit, which minimizes an egalitarian annoyance score based on individual subjective preference.

Rodinagrad.

This is one of the worst manifestos I've ever read, you didn't even proofread. 0/10.

It was already written for us:

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-to-our-friends#toc30

That's all we need.

1. The Commune Is Coming Back.

An Egyptian writer, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, wrote in the now-distant days of the first Tahrir square: “The people I saw on Tahrir Square were new Egyptians, having nothing in common with the Egyptians I was used to dealing with every day. It was as if the revolution had created Egyptians in a higher form […], as if the revolution had not only rid Egyptians of their fear but also cured them of their social defects. […] Tahrir Square became like the Paris Commune. The authority of the regime collapsed and the authority of the people took its place. Committees were formed everywhere, committees to clean the square and committees to set up lavatories and washrooms. Volunteer doctors set up a field hospital.” In Oakland, the Occupy movement held Oscar Grant Plaza as the “Oakland Commune.” In Istanbul, no better name could be found, already in the first days, than the “Taksim Commune” for what was coming into existence there. A way of saying that revolution was not something that Taksim might lead to one day, but its existence in actuality, its ebullient immanence, here and now. In September, 2012, a poor Nile Delta village, Tahsin, 3,000 inhabitants, declared its independence from the Egyptian state. “We will no longer pay taxes. We will no longer pay for schools. We’ll operate our own schools. We’ll collect our garbage and maintain our roads ourselves. And if an employee of the state sets foot in the village for any other purpose than to help us, we’ll throw him out,” they said. In the high mountains of Oaxaca, at the beginning of the 1980s, Indians trying to formulate what was distinctive about their form of life arrived at the notion of “communality.” For these Indians, living communally is both what sums up their traditional basis and what they oppose to capitalism, with an “ethical reconstruction of the peoples” in view. In recent years, we’ve even seen the PKK convert to the libertarian communalism of Murray Bookchin, and project themselves into a federation of communes instead of the construction of a Kurdish state.

Not only is the commune not dead, it is coming back. And it’s not returning by chance. It’s returning at the very moment the state and the bourgeoisie are fading as historical forces. Now, it was precisely the emergence of the state and the bourgeoisie that put an end to the movement of communalist revolt that shook France from the 11th to the 13th century. The commune, then, is not the chartered town, it’s not a collectivity endowed with institutions of self-government. While it can happen that the commune is recognized by this or that authority, generally after battles are fought, it doesn’t need that in order to exist. It doesn’t always even have a charter, and when there is one, it is quite rare for the latter to stipulate any political or administrative structure. It can have a mayor, or not. What constitutes the commune is the mutual oath sworn by the inhabitants of a city, a town, or a rural area to stand together as a body. In the chaos of 11th century France, the commune involved pledging assistance to one another, committing to look out for each other and defend each other against any oppressor. It was literally a conjuratio, and such conjurations would have remained an honorable thing if royal jurists had not set about in the following centuries linking them to the idea of conspiracy as a way of getting rid of them. A forgotten historian puts it in a nutshell: “Without association through oath, there would have been no commune, and that association was sufficient for there to be a commune. Commune had exactly the same meaning as common oath.” So a commune was a pact to face the world together. It meant relying on one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What was aimed for in this case was not an entity; it was a qualitative bond, and a way of being in the world. A pact, then, that couldn’t help but implode with the bourgeoisie’s monopolization of all the offices and all the wealth, and with the deployment of state hegemony. It was this long-lost, originary, medieval meaning of commune that was somehow rediscovered by the federalist faction of the Paris Commune in 1871. And it’s this same meaning that reemerges periodically since that time, from the movement of soviet communes—which was the forgotten spearhead of the Bolshevik revolution till the Stalinist bureaucracy decided to liquidate it—to Huey P. Newton’s “revolutionary intercommunalism” by way of the Kwangju Commune of 1980 in South Korea. Declaring the Commune is always to knock historical time off its hinges, to punch a hole in the hopeless continuum of submissions, the senseless succession of days, the dreary struggle of each one to go on living. Declaring the Commune is agreeing to bond with others, where nothing will be like it was before.

4. Taking Part in a Shared Power.

A commune can be formed in any situation, around any “problem.” The workers of the AMO factories, pioneers of Bolshevik communalism, opened the first communal house of the USSR because after years of civil war and revolution, they were sorely lacking in places to go for vacation. A communard wrote this, in 1930: “And when the long rains of autumn began to beat down on the roof of the collective dacha, under that roof a firm decision was made: we would continue our experiment during the winter.” If there’s no muh privileged starting point for the birth of a commune, it’s because there’s no muh privileged point of entry into the epoch. Every situation, if it’s engaged with in a focused way, brings us back to this world and links us to it, to its unbearable aspects as well as the cracks and openings it presents. In each detail of existence, the entire form of life is at stake. Because the object of every commune is the world, basically, the commune must be careful not to let itself be completely determined by the task, the question, or the situation that led to its formation and were only the occasion of the convergence. Thus, in a commune’s unfolding, a good threshold is crossed when the desire to be together and the power that comes from that outstrip the initial reasons for its formation.

If in the course of the recent uprisings there was one thing conveyed by the streets, beyond the dissemination of riot techniques and the now-universal use of gas masks—that symbol of an epoch that’s become unbreathable—it was the initiation into joy that’s equivalent to a whole political education. Over these last few years, there was no one, not even the shaved-neck assholes of Versailles, who didn’t develop a taste for the wild demonstration and the ruckus with the cops. Each time, the situations of urgency, riot, occupation gave rise to more than was committed to them initially in terms of demands, strategy, or hope. Those who went to Taksim to prevent six hundred trees from being ripped out soon found something else to defend: the square itself, as a matrix and expression of a power regained at last, after ten years of political castration and preventive dismemberment of every semblance of collective organization.

cont
What partakes of the commune in the occupation of Tahrir Square, the Puerta del Sol, or some American occupations, or in the forty unforgettable days of the Free Republic of Maddalena in the Susa Valley, is discovering that one can organize in so many domains that they can’t be totalized. This is what exhilarated us: the feeling of taking part in, of experiencing, a shared power, one that was unassignable and fleetineg invulnerable. Invulnerable because the joy that haloed each moment, each gesture, each encounter, could never be taken away from us. Who’s cooking meals for a thousand persons? Who’s doing the radio? Who’s writing the communiqués? Who’s catapulting rocks at the cops? Who’s building a house? Who’s cutting wood? Who’s speaking in the assembly? We don’t know, and don’t give a fuck: all of that is a force with no name, as a Spanish Bloom said, borrowing the notion without knowing it from the 14th century heretics of the Free Spirit. Only the fact of sensing that what one is doing, what one is living through, participates in a spirit, a force, a richness shared in common will enable us to be done with economy, that is, with calculation, measurement, with evaluation, with all that petty accountant’s mentality which is everywhere the mark of resentment, in love as well as in the workshops. A friend who had been camping for a long spell on Syntagma Square did a double take when he was asked how the Greeks would have been able to organize their food supply if the movement had burned down the Parliament and brought down the country’s economy in a definitive way: “Ten million persons have never let themselves die of hunger. Even if that might have caused a few skirmishes here and there, the disorder would have been tiny compared to the disorder that’s ordinarily the case.”

What characterizes the situation that a commune faces is that by giving oneself to it unreservedly, one always finds more in it than one brought to it or sought from it: one is surprised to find one’s own strength in it, a stamina and an inventiveness that is new, plus the happiness that comes from strategically inhabiting a situation of exception on a daily basis. In this sense, the commune is the organization of fertility. It always gives rise to more than it lays claim to. This is what makes irreversible the unheaval that affected the crowds that descended on all the squares and avenues of Istanbul. Crowds forced for weeks to deal on their own with the crucial questions of provisioning, construction, care and treatment, burial, or armament not only learned to organize themselves, but learned something that most didn’t know: that we can organize ourselves, and that this capacity is fundamentally joyful. The fact that this fertility of the street was not mentioned by any of the democratic commentators is a rather clear indication of its dangerous potential. The memory of those days and nights makes the orderly everydayness of the metropolis appear even more intolerable, and exposes its pointlessness.

refuse plastic cycling is not efficient at all, unless you happen to have a lot of "free" fuel like solar or wind.

That's further down the line, when we have the necessary equipment. Plastics like HDPE and PET are actually not that difficult to reform and recycle; I used to work in a plastics factory.

youtube.com/watch?v=-ObAN6aOciE
This is actually quite easy to source on ebay if you know what you are doing; it's a plasticorder manufacturing company that specifically enables quality control of plastics processes; old equipment from the 70s still works like new; cording of plastics could be useful in the manufacture of new feedstock for 3d printers; a small scale recycling cottage industry for direct sale to end users or on-site use by our commune network.

This is just one idea for our commune's work; everything can be done well if only we want to.

I agree, small-scale clothing production doesn't look feasible at all. What is feasible is having a communal storage people donate clothes to they don't want or need anymore and take clothes from if they want them (you still individually own your clothes, duh). In Germany, the Kommune Niederkaufungen does that. This is especially useful for children's clothing.

Another doable trivial thing is having some tools for fixing and modifying clothes and making cleaning rags out of clothes that can't be fixed.

bump

I've figured out a design for a relatively simple program that could be used to help structure real-world meetings of about six to thirty people. It has a bunch of features, among them the most minimalistic version of the distribution mechanism mentioned in the last thread. (Actually, I finished the document a week ago except for the brain-damaged placeholder name. I just could not come up with a good name.)

Problem is I can't program. So, anybody interested in doing it for free?

I keep thinking we either need to get BO to sticky us or get our own board.

These folks aren't very creative. It's always either this one:
Or, and much more often:
Just have a firm line on that shit. This also applies to heavy alcohol consumption.

I'm a programmer but I can't promise you anything. Just post your specs and someone (possibly me) will eventually write it and link back to their source code repositories.

I'm the OP, I'll do it, get on Tox and send it to me. It's the second ID int the first post.

OK, here it is. It really isn't particularly complicated. Just ignore the name, ahem.

This is not arbitrary, but all based on real-life experience btw. I have been in left groups for about a decade. Timer: In the local groups, there is usually one person who talks the most. And when these local groups send delegates to a regional meeting, many delegates show that they are not used to talking less or refraining from interrupting others. Community pot: I visited an income-sharing commune and they just had equal sharing. Before that, they had used some procedure with people stating wishes and then the amounts shrinking proportionally, but that had not worked out. (You exaggerate because you expect others to exaggerate, who expect that, and you expect that they expect that…) And the voting thing: First I advocated for rather complicated voting methods, but most people really don't have the patience for doing that. The only thing that has been ever used a bit was a more simple proposal.

Dude it's cause I'm a literal city poorfag. My parents have no money. I have no money. Buy all this shit and tell me where to meet and i'll scrounge up $200 and join the fucking commune. Until then I'm literally stuck with no land or resources
Please don't tell me muh bootstraps

I have the same probs as and in addition, I live on another continent. I think what you say makes a lot of sense, but I am looking for people who live roughly where I live.

I understand, but we have to start somewhere, and this is literally the most achievable goal if we were to go about it. I hate the bootstraps meme as well, but that doesn't mean we can't try.

City poorfag, go on craigslist and look for diesel vans: they can easily be converted into living quarters. People live in converted storage units all the time; this is only easier: youtube.com/watch?v=hJkBlqLJLWA

Can I ask which continents, if not countries, are you from?

Also TBH this video is fucking memeworthy. Gives me the keks.

EU.

It should be easier for you then, depending on where you are in the EU. Find a listing service that will help you.
htp://www.landwatch.com also has parcels in Europe and Asia to sell. Decently easy.

Country and number of entries:
Hungary (1)
Italy (2)
Slovakia (3)
Romania (3)
Latvia (3)
Greece (8)
Portugal (25)
Albania (43) OF COURSE.

If you guys were in the UK I'd be getting on a bus right now. TBQH I've saved a little money, if there was an actual commune going on I'd fly out to the US

Mate, communes already exist:
ic.org/directory/search/

For those who speak German, you can click on this: kommune-niederkaufungen.de/ (this commune is 30 years old) and check the right column if you want to spend a weekend there and get introduced to how it works. It's part of a network of communes in central Germany (in and around Kassel).

The Twin Oaks community in the US is about 50 years old.

bumb

bunp

bumping

A bit more about how the communes work in the middle of Germany. They are of the income-sharing type and do everything by consensus or some mildly modified version of it (like consensus minus two people), so doing anything takes ages. The ideological background of their development is vaguely left and greenish. Lots of people who watch their pronouns and lots of vegans. They are not fond of the current German green party, but they would have been at home in that party in the early 80s. So, they also have sympathies for left economic positions, unlike the current green party. I have hard the one in Niederkaufungen used to be rather technophobic, but around the year 2000 they got more tolerant of people using cellphones etc. They grow food, share cars and bikes, have some shared chores, and eat together.

Please read or write or do something, so there is actual content the next time you bump. (If the actual content takes a week or two, then just let the thread die and make a new one when you have something to say.)

I don't think that's a very good idea because this thread is naturally more slow paced than the rest of the board. Really we should be stickied or have our own board which is what /namibia/ and similar did.

Bump, not done with the thread yet

Next person who bumps without saying something informative must write the app.

So I've been thinking about my mani draft. You guys think it even needs any more? I think maybe it doesn't. The Declaration of Independence only had 1,320 words, this has 758. Maybe the next part can be about why we think socialism will be better, but we don't need 15,000 words like the Commie Mani.

...

nah

bump

bumbign dread :DDD

Are we going to meet in Riot again soon? We should figure out discussion topics and an agenda if we are

I hope so. Shit looks pretty dead rn

It's not dead, but sleeping :^)

What I realized is that the main reason why we have so little time to do leftist politics is because we are individually so busy with our lives. We are afraid of forming bonds lest they ties us into a larger community that we may not be able to leave: we are afraid they may tie us down, and the culture we are part of inculcates a massive fear of forming such bonds that may not be dissolved at any time: it is very hard to find individuals that we can tolerate, let alone share our deepest secrets and aspirations towards communism with.

That is the true essence of a commune: we can share our utmost selves with each other without mutual judgement, for we know that doing so will violate its very sanctity and the protection that it affords us. It is something more than even a Mafia family could provide: they have ranks and that causes massive backbite and internecine warfare despite their codes of silence and "brotherhood." We will deliberately not take positions of power to lead; rather we must serve each other mutually with the same respect. I discovered a foundation of this anti-hierarchical attitude here, which makes it the perfect place to start and recruit for communes and cooperatives.

This brings me to the subject of the commune: our group in popular-frontism project has no real way of surviving if we do not maintain daily contact or at least every other day, even if to plan something that would take a long time to build. This becomes much harder if we don't go on riot.im more often or don't tox. Tox looks like it's totally dead for all intents and purposes, and I haven't spoken about the commune to anyone here for at least a week and a half, maybe two. Everyone is busy with school, and I am strongly suspecting OP did this out of sheer boredom and is now fucking with us, regardless of school situations. It takes all of 2 minutes to bump a thread to show you are alive, but w/e.

In any case, the popular front project is still alive, and so is the potential to build a commune. Leaving aside selfish reasons why I would want a commune, it would mean that there is real revolutionary potential within Holla Forums to try to seize means of production and direct its use towards a goal that wasn't for pure personal profit, even i it meant obtaining it in a "legally capitalist" way.

We can hash out all sorts of actions and ops on the internet, but they won't have any meaning if we don't actually bring them to fruition. I keep getting distracted by all sorts of shit, and I feel like buying a panel van and living in one like pic related just to get some peace and quiet.

If you're going to buy a van to live in, I'd suggest a Class C if you've got the cash for it. Probably more comfy

...

How old are you and what are you doing right now with your life?

Yeah I was, but I didn't want the Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite vibe. Creature comforts are minimal for me: as long as I have a warm sleeping bag laid out on a carpet, I'm okay. I wanted a step van since I want something that wouldn't look like someone was obviously sleeping in it, plus a workbench/desk nd space to put my basic toolkit, later maybe attaching a trailer for bigger tools and supplies, maybe even have ourselves a convoy :^)

26 and I'm doing fuckall. Massively in debt because I lost my health insurance and failed out of college when I couldn't get my medication. Still too autistic to get hired, but apparently no longer autistic enough to get social security. I should probably make a try for autismbucks again, reverting to how I was in middle school, rocking back and forth and not looking people in the eyes and walking away from people mid-conversation, or stopping halfway through a sentence to think about something and pulling tard faces when I try to put the chaotic mess of impulses and emotion jumbling around my head into human language instead of outbursts of tard-rage. I just have a hard time going back there, mentally, partly out of pride in becoming relatively normal, and partly because it's a really painful state of mind.
Or I could just fucking kill myself, but I've wanted to die for seven years now and I can't bring myself to pull the trigger because I don't want to upset my family.

Also, what are all you other faggots doing on my personal blog.

Anyone care to explain what that means? second of all
A situationist point here: When marx said we had nothing to lose but our chains he was very right. Nowadays however we sadly have our images to lose.

I feel like we'd have much better chances on our own board for discussing and sponsoring the commune and related projects. I'd go with /debs/.

That's perfectly fine; I was barely keeping my head above water as well, only thanks due to my parents and a few good friends do I have the meager jobs that I have now. I have no health insurance either. I did a few things that I could call in some favors for but not much else.

I myself had a hard time relating to people and kept to myself most of my college career: almost got kicked out due to disciplinary issues but was able to avoid being made a total pariah and graduate early, but not with all of my papers intact, which made finding an entry level job in the field I wanted (software development) really hard. Right now I'm a substitute teacher/tutor saving up for that strip of land I could use to build a commune, but building up my github portfolio and collecting skills in the meantime.

You are fighting a really good fight, but there is one thing you are missing: you are still caring about what others think about you. Did you know that the Roman Empire was founded by a bunch of outlaws and social rejects that finally decided that they would not take anybody's shit anymore, and built themselves a society over 2000 years ago that still has a profound effect on society today? We have the same capacity.

The same thing you are doing, shitposting and waiting for someone to save us from ourselves.

The difference is at savior has already come; it is everyone here joined in a common effort, and it is up to you and everyone else here to join together to save each other. That is your ultimate goal. That is ultimately what I learned from Zizek's interpretation of Christ's death and resurrection, and the release of the Holy Spirit on Mary and the Apostles.

First let me give you some backstory:

Tiqqun is a journal advocating radical critique and analysis of today's leftist politics. It is rumored, or rather, alleged by the French government and the French Antiterrorist Police, the GIGN, to have been written by city and suburban ex-professionals who have literally given up/sold everything they have owned and tried to start a commune in Tarnac, a town in the French countryside. They come from the tradition of the autonomists, the situationists, and operaio: they realized they had to not only engage in political organizaton, but the had to totally engage themselves to win this: they realized that they, as graduate students, potential members of the precariat, had to engage in the most radical revolutionary politics, which meant the total throwing off of the chains of Capitalism; not just the obvious having to need a job, but subverting the capitalist biopolitical discipline of "work to buy food or starve."

Personal autarky was the answer. They had to work from the ground up.

Since they were rather well-organized and successful in their efforts to rehabilitate an old farm and start a general store co-op, a workshop, library and cafe, becoming a cornerstone of the community in the process in just 3 short years, especially in a rural corner of France that was the historic birthplace of the French Resistance, it is safe to assume somebody in the deep state noticed.

The shit hit the fan when some asshole threw a bare cable over the TGV lines and paralyzed the entire train network. Julien Coupat, a member of the Tarnac Commune, depending on who you ask, was with his girlfriend at the wrong place at the wrong time, or was engaging in sabotage of national infrastructure and was therefore a suspected terrorist.
The reason for this was that the group both lived by and advocated a lifestyle advocated by both the Tiqqun journal:
tiqqun.jottit.com
and by The Coming Insurrection
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Insurrection
Here is a VICE expose of the situation:
vice.com/en_us/article/vive-le-tarnac-nine-407-v17n4

Now, the lifestyle you were asking about is literally that: people defecting from society and disconnecting en masse from it to form a new society that allows them to be more free and self-sufficient. That already makes the State nervous, but what would really frighten the state and the malicious technocrats would be communes that could defend themselves, sending members like flying squads that could prevent police actions from taking place, providing mutual defense against the "Hostage Rescue Teams" that currently dominate doctrine of maintaining state power, blunting "the tip of the spear." A critical mass of communes would be able to counteract the force, and we would be better than the Bundys and the militiamen, since we have an actual goal towards which we could work, which is worldwide communism.

Who gives a fuck: we have the world and more to win.

Giving ourselves a board turns us into a target for Holla Forums. Staying on one thread lets us hide in plain sight.

Remember pearls before swine: don't throw pearls to swine, lest they trample them, then turn on you and tear you to pieces.

anyway
we could do a meetup and jump-start this right away, or work towards building it up from the ground up individually. Look through the thread in order to find info. We are not here to merely engage in a lifestylist escape from civilization, but we are going to actually build a comparable standard of living that frees us from Capitalist necessity.

ranprieur.com/misc/landtips.html
I can't shill this guy enough, he was the original inspiration.
I even found a forum someone made for him on Yuku:
dropout50394.yuku.com/

Either way, once we do this, it's going to put us on the map concerning the chans, and we are going need to be extra-specially careful in order to not get fucked sideways.