P2P Foundation

* Learn basic manual skills — which also involve a great deal of intelligence and will stretch your mind, especially if you are in charge of your own work as part of a community or are self employed.
* Build communities that are grounded in producing your own stuff, and manage it all however most makes sense to you. Be in charge! Together!

It’s grounding, after growing up in the bizarre world of a highly complex civilization in which almost everyone feels like an insignificant cog in the machine. Few city or suburban folks today know how their food is grown or their house is put together. We can’t mend our own cars, plumbing, or electrics. I love that Chrisso doesn’t want to discuss the politics. He wants to do the work. Learn the skills. It’s the hands in the dirt, on the saw, in the smithy that ground you. I was a carpenter for twenty years for these kinds of reasons and it worked for me.

It’s also the relationships. When you get employed by a typical existing organization there is lots to learn about how to do relationships, but they are all pursued within parameters that are already set. This does make them easier. In an army or a corporation, everyone knows what to do to do well. I totally understand Chrisso’s desire to get rid of hierarchy. Sometimes you just have to reinvent things to make them your own — and maybe you really will reinvent them differently.

All I would say is that in my experience, hard as it is to learn how to compost, grow food, build a house, shoe a horse, run a windmill or many other highly complex homestead skills (I tackled just about all the building trades and “only” got good at some them), it’s a breeze compared to fashioning new relational and organizational skills. After some years in different collectives I left and went solo as a carpenter in part because I felt we all needed to grow up and become a whole bunch more mature as people before we could do anarchism or collectivism successfully.

But just as today you can go to classes in cool technical stuff like fermentation, solar power and permaculture which I heard nothing about in the 1970s, so you can learn all kinds of things that better people than me have developed around doing relationships and organization. By better people I mean ones who didn’t just throw their hands up in the air and say we’re all too immature to be collectivists yet, but instead worked hard at skills like empathic communication, interculturalism, capacity-based leadership, and so on. In getting rid of fixed hierarchies based on traditional sources of power one doesn’t have to go for completely flat organizations that are paradoxically prey to charismatic leaders and “the tyranny of structurelessness:” there are a lot more options to learn from now when you decide to do it yourself.

There is nothing in Chrisso’s email, even in the wider list of interests and skills he’s looking for, about birthing, raising kids, education, doctoring (apart from a mention of herbal remedies). That’s quite appropriate for the first stages of his project and I have no doubt it’s in his mind. But it’s around kids and health that alternative communities really have to work. There are fascinating memoirs of kids raised in the communes of the 60s and 70s, some of which were more functional than others.

And what about the effect on the capitalist system? If it truly goes into shock and meltdown from climate change and its own fragility, then we’ll need these skills. If it finds its way through to survival, it will only do so by changing. A critical set of changes revolve around learning how to situate ourselves appropriately in the eco-systems that sustain us, and what better way for many of us to learn that than through homesteading.

Of course, I think that shared rituals and expressions of the deepest meaning of life that the collectivists share, are another critical element.