Oh no, this isn't me sadly. I recommend following them though, its a couple who lives on a sailboat and makes extremely DIY software among other things
Pretty amazing results
Sorry I should have explained more. It's definitely on the philosophical side but he's been living in a self constructed and worked on boat for decades, a true DIY-er in that sense. Maybe it's actually a little too far out as it's not a singular project so feel free to remove if you want.
Vadim is a great teacher and the whole go magic video series is fantastic, really wish i had these ten years ago
hilarious and pretty legit
ooops, forgot i could be doing that. thanks
It's good! but 'revolutionary praxis' is not gonna be compatible. A big change over the last 100 years or so has been a general turning away from the concept of revolution for many anarchists, including communist ones, though that doesn't mean everyone has excluded the concept fully.
while large scale movements and collective projects etc are all fine and good, it's also good to not get caught up in identifying with them. "I'd give it all for The Collective" etc. Things should serve us as far as we can get use from them, and be easily discarded when they no long work for us. This means any collective undertaking should be easily dissolved when it becomes more a burden than a help to those who operate it. We can organize ourselves to fight our bosses, to strike our rent against landlords, to feed and protect ourselves, but those organizations aren't "Real" things without the people to operate them.
It's a classic but i'm also a critical enjoyer. I enjoy it on two levels: It's kind of practical! A lot of it sounds pretty reasonable, seems to be in line with how i see people working together and the pressures of economics wrecked by distributed mass action. But I also enjoy it as a fantasy story, one person's mad dream with lots of humor and absurdity built in. Having a timeline for the creation of your utopian society taking less than 10 years and mapping it all the way a thousand years into the future with the breakdown of that society is somehow cosmically funny.
That said there's also a lot I don't like now that i've read more theory and criticism from people outside central europe. a lot of the ideas he has are kinda primitivist / of the noble savage. as mentioned somewhat in his updated notes there's a lot of odd ideas about 'other cultures' outside of the A/B deals, aka the "the third world". There's some weird colonial white guy attitudes in there.
Also the idea that people couldn't be excludable from bolos is very dangerous, radical scenes have huge problems with rapists and other abusers maintaining strong positions for years because of rape culture attitudes very much still present in our larger culture. It's a rough complex thing to deal with but it's surely not going to get better if you can't even ask that your abuser be kicked out of the group home you share.
Still, there's some banger quotes:
Reformists tell us that it’s short-sighted and egoistic to follow just one’s own wishes. We must fight for the future of our children. We must renounce pleasure (that car, vacation, a little more heat) and work hard, so that the kids will have a better life. This is a very curious logic. Isn’t it exactly the renunciation and sacrifice of our parents’ generation, their hard work in the ’50s and ’60s, that’s brought about themess we’re in today? We are already those children, the ones for whom so much work and suffering has gone on. For us, our parents bore (or were lost to) two world wars, countless “lesser” ones, innumerable major and minor crises and crashes. Our parents built, for us, nuclear bombs. They were hardly egoistic; they did what they were told. They built on sacrifice and self-renunciation, and all of this has just demanded more sacrifice, more renunciation. Our parents, in their time, passed on their own egoism, and they have trouble respecting ours. Other political moralists could object that we’re hardly allowed to dream of utopias while millions die of starvation, others are tortured in camps, disappear, are deported or massacred. Minimal human rights alone are hard to come by. While the spoiled children of consumer society compile their lists of wishes, others don’t even know how to write, or have no time to even think of wishes. Yet, look around a little: know anybody dead of heroin, any brothers or sisters in asylums, a suicide or two in the family? Whose misery is more serious? Can it be measured? Even if there were no misery, would our desires be less real because others were worse off, or because we could imagine ourselves worse off. Precisely when we act only to prevent the worst, or because “others” are worse off, we make this misery possible, allow it to happen. In just this way we’re always forced to react on the initiatives of the Machine.
generally i would just say do what seems right between you, only you can decide what's good for yourself.
but this might also be interesting: Inside Mexico’s Anti-Capitalist Marketplaces https://inthesetimes.com/article/mexico-capitalism-marketplace-alternative-currencies-pesos-economy-profit
deciding the relative value of things is deeply personal and very important if we care about individual people! it's not capitalism to not want to trade away beans for steak if you can make steak at home easily, or maybe you're happy to take a 'bad' trade because the person you're trading with needs some extra help.
you're right that basically no one did 'classical barter' trading apples for oranges directly, but there are numerous examples of people freely trading in credit (debt) over a variety of timescales and social systems.
it's not hierarchical to decide for yourself what you want and what you're willing to give up in relation with other people, in fact i'd say understanding the necessity of that is a fundamental part of anarchism.
where exchange gets tricky is when it's coerced, or the circumstances surrounding it are coercive. if there's an authority figure putting a gun in your back demanding money every month for the privilege of living in your own house, then trading with others to "earn" that money will definitely be a bad situation for you. it's the specific enforcement of properties as we know them under capitalism that's the problem, not exchange in the abstract.
love all of these art posts!
Yeah he's a favorite of mine too! I feel like he's pushed so much forward in the domain of actually useful economics, but is largely unheard of outside of the market anarchist circles. Have yet to read exodus, but it's on my list.