#1
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There is a fascinating trend within a select few online communities in their response to the utter depravity of work and life in late stage capitalism. Rather than resistance, the response is a complete rejection of community and creating a secluded enclave to protect themselves. They are almost all libertarian in their political orientation. This is a historical curiousity, I'm not aware of any other period of history where people with median household incomes have decided to opt out yet fully support the system that creates their conditions.

The Permaculturists

Notable examples:
www.permies.com/Paul Wheaton
David Holmgren
Sepp Holzer

The general idea is to work your ass off, buy land in a remote part of the country, and work to build it into a self-sustaining farm. Paul Wheaton lays out a strategy in "Building a Better World in your Backyard Without Being Angry at Bad Guys". You start off by working your job and reducing expenses as much as possible to buy land with cash. Once you have your plot of land, build a shack on it and continue to bring income in while building the infrastructure to sustain yourself on your farm. When possible, pull the rip cord on your job and utilize your resources on the land and your labor to fulfill your other needs.

Compared to the other communities, they have a much stronger ecology focus and a lot of the anxiety that drives them towards this particular adaptation strategy is seeing how capitalism ravages the environment, food quality, and overall quality of life. They tend to deeply distrust financial markets and investing as a path to independence, which is another major divergence from the other groups.

There are some permaculture intentional communities, but they tend to not do very well since we aren't socialized into sustaining close-knit communities. One example of one of these communities which has lasted for a lot longer is Findhorn in the UK.

Financial Independence/Retire Early

Notable examples:
Mr Money Mustache
Early Retirement Extreme
Reddit's financial independence community

A lot of the thinking within these communities is based on one common principle: the more money you save the less money you need from investments to sustain yourself.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/


So on a $50,000 a year income, if you're able to live off of $25k/yr, theoretically being able to opt out of the workforce is a 17-20 year journey. If you attain a $75,000 a year income, that's a 10-12 year journey. Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme is somewhat notable for sustaining a $7,000/yr lifestyle.

There is complete and unwavering faith that the meteoric rise of the stock market fueled by primitive accumulation of the earth's natural resources and superexploitation of the world's poor is going to continue forever. The path is to slash expenses, devote yourself to raising your income, and investing the difference until you're able to pursue fulfillment.

Digital Nomads

Notable examples:
The 500,000 van life instagram pages
Nomad Capitalist

For a lot of these people, the path to independence from working isn't in utilizing investments to sustain yourself, but rather separating your labor aristocratic income from the expenses of living in high cost of living countries. You live an upper-middle class lifestyle in Thailand, Malaysia, Georgia, etc on a lower-middle class income and utilize location flexibility to overcome obstacles. Popular jobs within this group are online businesses, teaching English, coding, etc.

The focus isn't on sustaining a certain cost of living, but working to pay your way and increasing your lifestyle with greater income. This is significantly different from the other two, which really seek to suppress expenses and focus on long-term independence.




One of the interesting things is that there isn't really a leftist space within these groups. The libertarian right has been able to capitalize on this desire to opt out of the madness. Part of it is that there is a sort of immorality associated within the left of opting out of work since the assumption is that the american working class is the revolutionary vehicle to socialism, and staying embedded is important. There is sort of an anarchist crimethinc trend that opts out of work, but it isn't done with any view towards long term sustainability.
#2
UNUSUALY COOL
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*runs up a moth-eaten swastika flag & every libertarian, permaculturist, transhumanist, Stirnerite, Makhnovite, post-leftist and futurist comes in with everything for a HUGE Heil Hitler*
#3
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It's unfair to lump perma with the other volks because if taken seriously that mode of life naturally makes one sympathetic to aspects of Marxism and third worldism. Although all three share a category of millions to billions of "useless eaters" who will perish when it all inevitably crashes, the definitions are key. For some permaculturists it's everyone not engaged in self-reliant agrigulture/hunting-gathering = most of the first world except them while Khoisan, Andaman islanders etc. are more likely to survive. Also the "it" that will crash is industrial civilization, not the postmarxist islamofeminist banking cabal + middle-class coastal acolytes.

The financial independence types are mostly disgruntled ex- IT & finance so tend heavily towards quasi-fascism with a few opting for Sanders or Warren. Finance/stat in particular is a field that can naturally inculcate a basic understanding of imperialist labour aristocracy via FX and dollar preference to those not overly fascinated by mainstream racialist expanded universes. Digital nomads (nice) or 3rd world concubine seekers/havers are imo the only one of the three not compatible whatsoever with any kind of left politics.

Re leftist disdain wrt unemployment by choice, idk if true anymore since a lot of currentaffairs/podcast/youtube left commentary take the Piketty line and run with it especially post-Trump. Then again it's unclear to me how that overlaps with the broader "resurgent" millenial SDP crowd. But in the era of twitch streaming can be a potential full-time job it's hard to say what "work" even means within empire's patrimonium petri.
#4
lies half the time
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perma is distinct from the others in that it seems more likely to draw an audience from folks who dabble in leftist circles though it bears mentioning its hypernym "prepperism" is omitted in the op. i would suggest this is a matter of historical coincidence due to greater acknowledgement of ecological crises by the vague left than among right-leaning libertarians. 'ill live on my farm and fuck everyone else' is not very far from 'fuck you got mine'
#5
UNUSUALY COOL
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i’m also not sure the economism-style idea of having to be employed to have a say holds a lot of power anymore on the Western left, and not just in the anarcho-teen lumpen-play-acting mode or the Jacobin-left-liberal “against work”, “luxury space communism” way either. like the Marcyite parties characterize their immediate goals nowadays as a coalition of the working class and other impoverished, oppressed & marginalized groups. and after all, Marx describes capitalism’s crisis as a point where the working class confronts apparently permanent wide-scale unemployment, the proletariat and proletarian values up against a stage of capitalism where the bourgeoisie declares the concessions of previous one-sided cross-class treaties unnecessary and void. extending that analysis to a current crisis of underemployment speaks to a lot of people imo. in a weird way, i think a lot of socialists are optimistic about right now being a point of severe crisis and because of that, of significant opportunity for a better future.

personally i think it’s important not to be a vulture about that though, both for your own soul and if you want people to hear you out. I’m not sure you could avoid it if you were trying to make inroads into groups where status and credibility depend on characterizing most everyone else on the planet as choosing to enter the slaughterhouse and as responsible for their predicted suffering and death, even when it’s just implied by a cheerful “anyone can do this!” position, and forget the large group among them who think most people are genetic trash and will conveniently cull themselves.
#6
UNUSUALY COOL
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it is kind of bleakly funny how correct Marxists turned out to be about the relation of anarchists to fascism, where on average, today’s self-described disciple of Makhno, just like your average Winston Churchill fanboy, is more likely than the average person to think Hitler has been unfairly slandered by historians.
#7
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Fair enough. I'm only talking about prep/doomstead blogs + comment sections I find interesting (example) which tend to be consistently anti-fascist on a standard good-faith lefty level. They're white and comfortable so would undoubtedly resist if pressed too hard from a Sakaian direction. They don't have or don't express any strong views about post-collapse politics beyond DSA family values within close knit isolated tribe/community. Economic models range from h/g to anprim with some durable 50s tech.

Basically "collapse" is the political/life larp setting for all 3 but a handful of preppers and permabear Warrenite fintechs approach a genuine rough draft class analysis that can be seized upon by anyone bothered enough (not me).

Also thanks to whoever upvoted my posts. Expected more hazing tbh so genuinely happily surprised. Season of goodwill and all that. Hoping everyone has a wonderful xmas and a great (albeit interesting) 2020!
#8
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i knew some permaculturists once they were quite nice and had a wind turbine, we ate cake and looked at plants together on their farm, the cake was chocolate, made with the blood and bones of periphery cocoa farmers, yet the juice was so sweet. core life

Edited by tears ()

#9
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The "financial independence" community is the worst. It spawns endless pyramid schemes and "get rich quick" scams that prey on people. Lots of poor kids fall for this stuff when they see a guy wearing the expensive shit they wish they could buy telling them all it takes is to work hard and buy their simple business success tips DVD for 200 dollars. One guy I used to know went far enough down the rabbithole to eventually figure out it was a scam and then immediately started trying to copy it. Last I heard, he put himself into serious debt trying to fool people into thinking he was rich and successful enough to buy advice from, and never convinced a single person.
#10
[account deactivated]
#11
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ialdabaoth posted:

'ill live on my farm and fuck everyone else' is not very far from 'fuck you got mine'



seems pretty dumb of these types to think you could weather the societal consequences of ecological clusterfuck within the bounds of property lines, lol. That being said, and maybe saying something extremely obvious, but it seems like a Good Thing if left people are practicing even basic self-sufficiency, on farms or in their backyards/basements. For the medium term climate change reasons but also disasters.. Katrina (/every hurricane) is an example how better 'prepped' fascists will take advantage of these situations for murder. How deep the politics of liberation actually run in your average left permaculturists is another question but so much rural space in the Americas is controlled by reactionaries, any counter seems desirable. Fwiw the only ones I ever knew were (white) Brazilian hippies...

#12
UNUSUALY COOL
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my favorite prepper guy was the Doomsday Castle guy. everyone in that entire heavily-armed county knew where his "castle" was, how many people would be there and that it was full of food & supplies. these little movements exist for one big reason, to show off for each other, and in this case pursuing that real goal, all by itself, proves their stated goal to be not a secondary aim but a bunch of complete bullshit.
#13
UNUSUALY COOL
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The "castle" metaphor, though, is worthwhile to understand just how absurd preppers are, even the ultra-rich hardened bunker types, because they're just attempting to recreate castles in the United States, but with the sole aim of defending against the rough contemporary equivalent of peasant uprisings in the "when the shit hits the fan scenario", a jack-off fantasy of race-war "lawlessness" in which one cracker with a shell-catcher will prove his worth through quick-cut action scenes and bullet-time, 360-degree spins.

Even if you take firearms out of the picture (lol), what was required to maintain a medieval castle against siege by the locals? What was always a constant accompaniment to those castles from, at the very least, the point their builders replaced wood with stonemasonry? What key system had to be maintained to prevent a large peasant uprising genuinely threatening a fortified estate?

A ban on the common man keeping martial weapons in his home.

Whoops...
#14
lies half the time
Post rating: +

spacegaucho posted:

seems pretty dumb of these types to think you could weather the societal consequences of ecological clusterfuck within the bounds of property lines, lol. That being said, and maybe saying something extremely obvious, but it seems like a Good Thing if left people are practicing even basic self-sufficiency, on farms or in their backyards/basements. For the medium term climate change reasons but also disasters.. Katrina (/every hurricane) is an example how better 'prepped' fascists will take advantage of these situations for murder. How deep the politics of liberation actually run in your average left permaculturists is another question but so much rural space in the Americas is controlled by reactionaries, any counter seems desirable. Fwiw the only ones I ever knew were (white) Brazilian hippies...


i know a number of back-to-the-land type folks who are decent people, p woke, though no less susceptible to the same sort of sucdem foolery as anyone else in the empire. i haven't gotten the impression that liberation is a motivating factor for many of them but there are a few who admit to a degree of cognitive dissonance on the question of land ownership & the role settlerism plays in their desire to be smallholder craftspersons. gun-liking is common among them, i hear rumors there's a john brown gun club in the area among the millennial farming crowd

id rather see mutually supportive communities than individualistic self-sufficiency

#15
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the syrian civil war seems to suggest that what survives in a doomsday situation are well-organized cities. but the preppers seem to believe the opposite despite all the evidence to the contrary. i would chalk it up to simple racism, which is probably a big part of it, but i also blame ted-talk types who give lectures about how the big thing today is "fragility" and that big, complicated things are actually fragile, and the solution is antifragility to deal with the black swans.

but the reason guerrilla operations work in rural areas relative to cities is because there's often only one road into guerrilla country. you block the road or otherwise mess with it and you can tie down conventional troops and prevent effective administration in a way that is much more difficult in a city, where there are lots of people and subsequently lots of roads -- and the cities are big, which makes them hard to surround and cut off, which is why any guerrilla force worth its weight in rubles is going to only go for the cities at the very end of a long campaign, or spring into action to disrupt things as conventional troops arrive, like what happened in paris in 1944 or ho chi minh city in 1975.

i mean, the state shuts down roads in the megacity which i call home for construction purposes all the time, and it's annoying but traffic generally get rerouted and is on its way. doing that in a rural area can cause significant problems. and sure, you can rob banks in cities, and people do all the time, and in a political context such a thing can cast doubt in the minds of the people about the government's effectiveness at dealing with the guerrillas, but otherwise it's mostly a nuisance. doesn't anyone read military history
#16
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trakfactri posted:

the syrian civil war seems to suggest that what survives in a doomsday situation are well-organized cities. but the preppers seem to believe the opposite despite all the evidence to the contrary. i would chalk it up to simple racism, which is probably a big part of it, but i also blame ted-talk types who give lectures about how the big thing today is "fragility" and that big, complicated things are actually fragile, and the solution is antifragility to deal with the black swans.



Resources have to flow in from somewhere. But, slums will precede ruins.

#17
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if we have learnt anything from thousands of years of human conflict its that isolated farmsteads are very safe from marauding warbands
#18
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in one ep of the doomsday preppers there was this guy who had spent millions of dollars to build his bunkermansion he aptly named "the alamo" and to fill it with supplies and guns and shit. then an instructor comes to teach him how to fire guns and when he fired once to demonstrate the prepper started crying because of the noise. the most masculine and heroic moment on tv
#19
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if only the doomsday preppers realized that the most important thing to protect their houses were not secret store-rooms filled with guns and portapottys, but the introduction of reciprocal legal and military obligations between a warrior nobility and their lord, a system of bonded corvee labour within a fief sistem and a divinely ordered hierarchy administered by a wealthy and powerful clergy
#20
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#21
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toyot posted:

anyway


#22
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Reminds me of late Evola when he realized that his advocated brand of traditionalist fascism was dead on the water for centuries and then decided to focus on being a weird Italian tantric sex hippie