Federated Ecovillages & Steps Towards a Modern Cybersyn

Thoughts on how we can create federated and interconnected ecovillages, create networks of semi nomadic housing, and use technology to help us make it happen.

Shits fucked. That’s easy enough to say right now. We’re living through collapse across many domains; economic, social, and environmental (To name a few). And that’s why we have to make the alternative a reality. Instead of a world built on exploitation, domination, and extraction, we can make the future into a world built on cooperation, equity, along with eco-system and social-system regeneration. There’s a diversity of tactics and ways to go about things, but I wanted to bring up some ideas that might fit within that broader world of ideas and might be steps we can take to decouple ourselves from the capitalist system while also building the alternative systems needed to live better lives.

Free housing collectives, Dual Power, ecovillages, and climate refugees

What is Dual power?

A situation where there are two powers – a democratic one developed by poor and working-class people (defined by direct democracy), and the other one capitalist (defined by domination) – coexisting and competing for legitimacy during a transition away from Capitalism.

-Black Socialists in America

What that means is building the world we want to see in the future, right now. Taking the steps to make things happen that will get us closer to the collective goal. And things don’t have to be monumental to create broader change. Dual power is a good compass to look at the future, and see that we can build the alternative within the current systems.

One way to get closer to liberation is to take away the proverbial carrot that is being dangled in front of us by capitalists and the systems and groups they use to maintain control. What do we all work for anyways? Food, water, shelter, transportation, the ability to live happy and healthy lives. At the moment all of that is gatekept by wealth and money. You need to make enough money, sell enough of your labor (or exploit others for profit), to make sure that you can survive. And millions of people aren’t surviving because of how this system works.

So to decouple ourselves from these exploitative systems, we can use the framework of dual power to gain food, water, and housing autonomy ourselves.

One way might involve banding together and creating a community land trust, a commonly held property pool, possibly funded by a community credit union. Basically pooling funds together to purchase the land needed to build these projects. You start to see the interesting contradictions because on one hand, we are wanting to decouple from the capitalist system, but on the other, we are forced to use capital to buy things like land and supplies. This is a very temporary step.

We collectively make decisions within a CLT to say for instance buy land. Thinking of the future of climate change it might be a good idea to buy land within areas that will see lessened impacts in the future. Another option is buying existing buildings and areas like apartment buildings and vacant lots to use for these experiments. This land should also be given back to the indigenous people of the area, so not only can we experiment with new ways of organizing society but also ensure that indigenous people get their stolen land back while we work alongside each other to restore an ecosystem destroyed by the powers who stole it.

Next will be building housing autonomy, building affordable housing, but not just affordable, but sustainable housing as well. There are ways to build homes that capture and reuse rainwater, use passive heating and cooling, and are extremely cost-effective to build because they use natural materials. Or to retrofit existing homes to be more reliable and more sustainable. The goal is to start making homes and giving them to the community members for free. You help someone else build their home, and they help build yours. A circular system of shared responsibilities and relationships.

With free housing comes building food and water autonomy, that means growing our own food on small scale micro farms, all the way up to collectively run, larger scale farms that supply many communities. Capturing rainwater, slowing water to replenish water tables to use wells, these tactics will help us get access to free clean water.

We get one step closer to not participating in the capitalist system at all.

@hydroponictrashShout out to @anser.methus for the OG video. Talking about a really cool plan for digital nomadic villages that can very quickly turn into amazing models for nomadic eco villages. #solarpunk

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Let’s say there are multiple communities, they can be federated and connected with each other. Communities might use time banking systems (denton.timebanks.org is a great example of this) where communities can request and offer goods and services without the need for monetary exchange.

Free and collective housing, while facing a changing climate

So far we have participated in a community land trust, bought land to build new sustainable homes or retrofitted existing areas and are giving housing away for free thanks to the collective labor of everyone in the community. There is a good reason to create communities like this, especially in areas and regions that might not get the worst that climate change has to offer. The idea is to create bastions of a better future that can quickly scale and meet the needs of climate refugees. As the climate changes there will be a large influx of people away from coastal areas, and the extremely hot areas, into more temperate ones. We would do better to prepare, to create these societies of autonomy, so everyone can have access to the things they need. The alternative to that, is to follow the current path of white supremacist capitalism. Climate refugees will be met with resistance. Especially if they can’t afford to move and live in different areas. Building a world without capital, without monetary need, is a matter of life and death really. We can choose to take the money and be met with fascism, or we can separate from it, collectivize, and work together.

Federated Ecovillages, Ecocommunities, and Bioregions

We are building more experimental communities like this, and retrofitting existing areas to follow the same ideas. Moving away from profit-driven commercial agriculture and creating widescale bioregion specific farming practices, informed by indigenous people who know the land, the plants, and the environment. But it’s not just small scale personal garden plots, though they are very important, but community-level agriculture, based in sensible practices like we find in agroforestry, indigenous practice, and permaculture. Rural areas aren’t just agricultural sacrificial zones for cities like they are now, the rural and urban blend, and have to live in coexistence. In cities we can’t expect our food to only come from rural and largely exploited workers, the work would be spread out, balanced between urban gardens, community gardens and farms, larger scale regional permaculture farms, into even larger and distributed ways of growing food.

These communities can come together in a federation, like how we can see in the Zapatista movement in Mexico, or in ideas found in Democratic Confederalism like in Rojava, Syria. There is a balance of collective power, along with community autonomy but with a common agreement that we are here to live, help to regenerate the ecosystem, and we are here to work together along with the earth.

While building resilient, cooperative communities, we can also build the resilient, cooperative infrastructures needed to live. We can create community micro grids comprised of a wide range of energy sources based on local conditions. We can use things like biogas digestors to create fuel without exacting fossil fuels. Active solar can be used to power homes, and even more importantly passive solar can be used to heat our homes and communities. This is scratching the surface and needs it’s own chapter entirely. But you see where this is going. This includes things like community networks, and regional communication networks using something like a mesh network, or radio. These infrastructures free us from the capitalist and exploitative systems, food, water, shelter, communication, and transportation all get decommodified only due to us building the alternative and changing our social relations and how we interact with each other.

The idea is that communities can form and share resources, creating their own networks of power, sanitation, and communication. When one community who is better adapted to produce something like corn, needs access to computers, another community who has access to old machines can step up and meet those needs without monetary exchange. Only the exchange knowing that we are living happier and better lives by sharing resources.
Community defense can also be part of the resource sharing, creating a federation of communities who look out for each other and protect each other and the land from extractive capitalists, their police henchmen, fascists, and those who wish harm on others. Collectively we can form community defense groups not just to stop the violence but defend against climate disasters and create emergency plans during natural events like floods, tornadoes, fires, etc, to defend the land and the people who inhabit it.

These interconnected communities can build networks of information to make things easier to share. Community and regional databases can be created to act as a virtual stockroom and warehouse, keeping track of the resources that are at hand. When people request things from the network such as specific food, clothing, tools, the collective database can be queried to see who in the federation might have extra stock, and move things where they need to go. Ultimately this is about connecting these communities within a federation, to share not only resources but information and knowledge.

A modern Cybersyn

In 1971 in Chile, Salvador Allende and the people of Chile wanted to create a distribution system to help run the economy. This economy would be based on the needs of working people, run, owned, and operated by the people, in a democratic and fair way. Using ideas from cybernetics, the average person participated within the system, being a check on how things ran by giving their opinions. These opinions would influence how and why materials, goods, and resources were moved. It was a system to somewhat automate what we are talking about here, how do you manage an economy across many people that doesnt’t directly need money to work? How do the workers that own the means of production balance the fair distribution of things without a central or democratic wing determining things for people, instead how does that balance with collective and individual autonomy? This was an experiment to see how socialism could innovate, change from the other routes other socialist countries were taking at the time, towards centralized (sometimes totalitarian) power, while giving the power back to the working class and citizens while also maintaining a fair distribution of power, goods, and services? All with very basic and almost obsolete even for the 70’s , teletype machines?
Well it started to work, and for a short time the Cybersocialist project was working. What ended it? Well ask yourself what group always appears to fuck things up especially when it comes to radical change? The CIA, and fascist forces within Chile at the time. The CIA backed the Pinochet regime, a fascist who eventually created a military dictatorship within Chile, killing an imprisoning any members of the previous socialist government, and killing the potential of this way of thinking of economic and social relations. Watch this video for more information.

After watching that, you can see the possibilities of a new form of Cybersyn. Imagine what that network would look like with modern computers and technology. That can all be done. We don’t need any bullshit like blockchain tech either, it all can run on open-source, freely available software, using old hardware destined for the scrapyard.

We can create community wide databases to get a baseline idea of what resources are out there, and how much a community normally produces. This info gets shared on community and regional networks that combine with other community databases. All of this can be run with off the shelf computers, chained together through mesh networks or data can even be streamed long distance over radio. These databases can also show what is available in community tool libraries, what is needed in other places.
A timebanking model can keep track of requests, who needs what, and alert people on where to move resources most efficiently. Instead of centralized groups who make decisions in a top down fashion, this would be button up. Maybe community economists would be elected from each community to help maintain the system.

When climate refugees need homes, food, water, those baselines can be examined and scaled to see how many homes need to be built, how much extra food needs to be grown, what the environmental impacts are, and their mitigations. Then we can organize things to have homes for people when they need it. Show them that this alternative society isn’t like the old one, people won’t want to go back to working for a wage. They would own their work and the means to do that work, they would see the productive power of their labor to help themselves the community, and the ecosystem at the same time. They can have a voice that matters in a consensus-based and democratic system. They can find out that people don’t have to fight to live, but cooperate.

Things can change.

It isn’t people moving to farms, it’s creating a mass movement

People moving out to the country to create individual ecovillages isn’t the answer. What we are talking about here is treating ecovillages, ecocommunities, and ecocities everywhere. These changes require mass movements to change the social, economic, and political conditions everywhere. Dual power is a method to get the dominos started, to tip things in the right direction where you are. That means if you live within a city, creating these conditions locally by occupying vacant land, homes, and spaces that can be used instead of sitting vacant only for profit. Creating the conditions within a city with direct action, tactical urbanism to do things like create bike lanes, do traffic calming, cut curbs and create ramps and infrastructure for the disabled, taking over abandoned lots and turning them into permaculture gardens. Creating housing cooperatives and buying back land from speculators to create affordable housing by economic force. Or by creating tenant unions to strike back at greedy landlords. In a suburban setting, you can get rid of your lawn and replace it with native wildflowers and native plants. Create permaculture and agroforestry gardens even in a subdivision. Do whatever you can to decarbonize your home, insulate it better to withstand heat, use passive solar to heat water instead of fossil fuel powered gas water heaters.

I can’t list everything here without writing a book but you get the idea, there are actions that need to be taken and can be taken even in a dense urban area to get things closer to the end goal.

Dual power to build mass movements

So while we can take smaller steps with a diversity of tactics, the goal is to show the alternative growing everywhere, to change the social outlook of what is possible by actually carrying out these programs and actions. Building a mass movement is easier when you can meet peoples needs, and show them that an alternative system can work. Building a mass movement is easier when you can feed people for free with fresh and locally sourced food, when you can house people for free in safe housing and ecologically minded housing, when you can ensure everyone has access to clean drinking water.

All of this is made easier by buying the autonomous infrastructure that creates the baseline for mass movements to build. No one wants to listen to a political speech. Give them free food, water, and shelter, don’t just tell people what’s possible - show people what’s possible.

Things won’t be sunshine and rainbows

All of these ideas as a direct threat to capitalist order and the system that is used to maintain control. By creating autonomous infrastructure we are decoupling from the systems of power that force us to take part in capitalism. I offered examples earlier like the Zapatistas, Rojava, Chile and the Cybersyn idea, and MST. Along with previous experiments like the CNT-FAI during the Spanish civil war and the early Soviet workers unions.

But keep in mind that the systems that be will not allow alternative to really thrive. You can see first hand that Chile’s alternative was so dangerous to the hegemony of US power in Latin America, that they had to do a military coup to stop it from happening. The Zapatistas started as an armed rebellion group. Rojava exists while in the Syrian civil war. MST has to battle the Brazilian state in both social and sometimes armed rebellion. In all of these cases we have to be realistic in seeing the backlash from capitalists and imperialist systems.

If we want these experiments to live on, we have to take power away from the existing system. They can’t starve a population that’s already being fed. They can’t evict a population that is already living in their own autonomous homes. So their last resort will be violence. Do I personally know what to do in that situation? No. But we can look at previous and current movements to see what might work. Ultimately creating global ecovillages means building mass movements that take power away from the current system enough to cripple it from attacking. It means not only creating federations of production, but also of defense, across the board, from every city, from every small town, from every region.

Change can and will happen

What I wanted to show was starting from where we’re at now, and how we might get to a better place. Not by individualistic action, but by collective action. Starting small, starting with diverse tactics from a broad range of ideas, and building that into something bigger. It’s not just about creating one ecovillage. But creating a federated, interconnected, cooperative, and regenerative global ecovillage by rebelling against the system, cooperating, and taking power back for all people. City by city, small town to large town, region to region, all of them eventually connecting. Why? Because we are meeting each others needs and the needs of the ecosystem.

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On a personal note, this is my general goal and mission in life. To make something like this happen. If you want to call it ecosocialism, ecoanarchism, solarpunk, whatever, you get the general idea. Pretty soon my wife and I are thinking of making a life change and getting land to experiment on, and bringing in other people interested in doing the same. I don’t want to just talk about these things, I want to do them. And if you are on the fence about things, dreaming of a better future - take whatever steps you can to make them happen, look around, and see if there are others. We can work together to build a better future.