permaculture

["Frances and David" <fdnokes@hotmail.com>]

I'm looking forward to reading this through, and savouring its varied 
aspects.
In the meantime, I'm sharing a few points it's sparking.

* Humans, spending umpteen + years in varying states of dependency on their 
elders, have, in that way, a limited amount of choice, as we learn, at the 
hands of a specific set of elders in a specific community, what it means to 
be human and how to live...
* 'life is sweeter, closer to the bone'  -- heavy contrasts, as per your 
Ukranian example below, is often the catalyst to uplifting change.

Looking forward to reading this. Apologies for responding after skimming. 
(My day is calling me!)

Have a great day!
Frances



-----Original Message----- 
From: Lawrence F. London, Jr.
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 7:58 AM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Communalism

On 1/24/2013 2:23 AM, Frances and David wrote:
> a friend that I discuss these issues with pointed out one distinction:
> whether or not the 'collectivism' is voluntary or forced.

"It is at least theoretically possible for a federation of communes to
include communes which do not practice communalist rules of property,
which is to say, that the overall national government may be a
federation of communes, but that private property rather than
communalist property is the order within each such commune."

A lot was not clear in the Wikipedia article; I think they assumed you
had done some prior reading
and were informed on the subject. What originally interested me was the
survival mode migration to some sort of makeshift
governance/management system that the Ukrainians used when faced with
the growing power of Lenin/Stalin/Red Army, all of which threatened
their quality of life, even existence. They seem to have come up with
some sort of communalism and overall collectivism to serve their needs,
that of a rural agrarian society
comprised of homesteads, hamlets, villages, towns. This provided a way
to exchange goods and provide for all; of by and for the people who
lived there. Don't forget that the Ukraine was considered the
breadbasket of a vast region that included Russia. Some of the land
involved was part of the Black Earth region that extended from Ukraine
to Siberia.
Somehow the Social Democrats in Germany and Russia were supportive of
local efforts to achieve self sufficiency, autonomy, sovereignty,
independence. I guess these were seen as the original Marxist Communists
though locally they may have been in essence
socialists/collectivists/communalists, i.e. roll your own. Of course
Lenin and Stalin and the Red Army completely eradicated the original
communists, assumed their name, coopted their movement and converted it
to a totalitarian military dictatorship retaining the so called
collectivism in order to enslave everyone involved in any kind of
production of goods to serve the party elite and their friends. My
knowledge of this is laughable but the interest is there.

As for your question, just talking off the top of my head, collectivism
was achieved by consensus as a way to organize and create infrastructure
amongst local agricultural zones, naturally formed out of need for
exchange of goods and equipment between farms and villages in close
proximity to one another, i.e. those groups participating in a
communalist system wherein personal property ownership was observed,
according to tradition. The collectivist part was simply a means to
organize all the zones operating under a communalist system to create an
economically and socially effective whole, serving the needs of all the
people, connecting one communalist zone to all the others for supply of
goods and services throughout.
This overall system of governance or management would be mandatory but
flexible, i.e. it could be altered, augmented or reduced according to
the needs of the people in the regions involved. This system served the
people; Stalin's Soviet system eliminated private ownership of property
and forced national distribution of locally produced goods, complete
with its corrupt elements,; everyone worked for The State, not for
themselves and their countrymen. Here's something a friend emailed me on
this topic:

Re-read this from Wikipedia which makes things a lot clearer:

"However, in practice, many experiments in utopian socialism did
implement internal rules of communalist property
ownership in the context of federated communalism. It is at least
theoretically possible for a federation of communes to include communes
which do not practice communalist rules of property, which is to say,
that the overall national government may be a federation of communes,
but that private property rather than communalist property is the order
within each such commune."

Murray Bookchin:

"While originally conceived as a form of social anarchism, he later
developed Communalism into a separate ideology which incorporates what
he saw as the most beneficial elements of left anarchism, Marxism,
syndicalism, and radical ecology. Politically, Communalists advocate a
stateless, classless, decentralized society consisting of a network of
directly democratic citizens' assemblies in individual
communities/cities organized in a confederal fashion."

"This primary method used to achieve this is called libertarian
municipalism which involves the establishment of face-to-face democratic
institutions which are to grow and expand confederally with the goal of
eventually replacing the nation-state."

In present day context I suggest that the only workable way forward is
to establish highly functional communes, communities (like the Amish,
Shakers, Mennonites, Anabaptists), eco/perma/intentional/green
communities that ally themselves with:
"face-to-face democratic institutions which are to grow and expand
confederally'.

My plan for a distributed national and international product and
services production, marketing and distribution network would help all
of this along significantly. Private property ownership and personal
sovereignty are mandatory. Empowering a collectivist system of
management of communalist nodes to function as designed would also be
mandatory, again to serve the immediate and long range needs of the
people.

LL
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