Networked Possibilities

by Raven

I talked in my post on Social Change for What? about a future of diversity, a future with many, many possibilities, communes/income-sharing communities among them.  I talked about a future where many folks lived in communities but many others didn’t.

I also talked about what communes had to offer folks in other types of communities.  In this post I want to talk about things that the communes have to offer folks who might not live in a community and how we can network all these things together to create a different and diverse society.

Income-sharing communities are all about sharing.  Not just income, but most things.  Twin Oaks, for example, has lots of things members share.  Two that I often point out are clothes and bicycles which at Twin Oaks come in what I refer to as Public/Private Options.  Taking the sharing out of the communes might involve creating what has been called “libraries”.  Not just libraries of books, but libraries of other things.  Tools, for example. 

I was already thinking about all this when I read someone’s self description and they mentioned being a “library socialist”.  Intrigued, I looked up library socialism.  While the concept is involved and uses legal terms like “usufruct” and “abusus”, the basic notion is what I wanted to put out about creating libraries for sharing.  “Library socialism … offers another means of distributing goods, both capital and consumer. It provides a way to make us all much more affluent on average, distributing goods and services to where they solve the most needs, not just to where they generate the most profits for a few. And by sharing items, it means that fewer items can satisfy the wants of a society completely.”  That’s exactly what the communes are all about.  The only difference that I can see is that these folks aren’t living together.

Beyond sharing libraries, I see a society that uses a lot of barter and/or the gift economy.  I think that things like Freecycle and giveaways and “Really Really Free Markets” are important beginnings for this.

A third way of sharing is sharing time/skills/and other nonmaterial things.  There are already things like time banks and various types of skillshares around where people do this.

Finally, there are mutual aid networks.  Mutual aid networks have been around for a very long time but when the pandemic hit, they became a lot more active.  One definition of mutual aid is “getting people to come together to meet each other’s needs, recognizing that as humans, our survival is dependent on one another.”

My question is, what if we did it all?  What if we replaced our current militarist, white supremacist, patriarchal, corporate capitalist society with something that supported and encouraged communal living but had lots of living alternatives and local networks with many forms of libraries, barter and gift economies, really free markets, lots of time and skill sharing and mutual aid networks, plus worker owned cooperative businesses and small business, all in a variety of cultures, and supportive of a great variety of beliefs and lifestyles.  Something that benefited everyone rather than a privileged few.

It would be a mess, right? But what a rich, vibrant mess.  I see it all as being (to use adrienne maree brown’s phrase) ‘Interdependent and Decentralized’, that is, there is no centralized government or corporation (or community), but this is not a world that is individualized either.  Rather, we would depend on each other.  To this I would add that it would be cooperative (of course) and networked, but also modular, diverse, and redundant.

I think these last three are important to create a resilient society.  Modular means that the pieces can come apart.  If something happens to one community, place, or family, they can leave the network without everything else falling apart.  Diverse means many things that I talked about in my Social Change for What? post but it also means that everyone doesn’t need to do everything.  With a diversity of people and skills and many other things, we are stronger.  Finally, redundancy is one of the things that makes us stronger.  When there are several different people, groups, businesses, communities all doing the same thing, again, if something happens to one, there are many more doing whatever is needed.  The phrase “Two is one and one is none” is used in prepper circles and apparently in the military as well.  

A society that is cooperative, diverse, networked, decentralized, interdependent, modular, and redundant would be, I believe, a society built to last.  And if you want to see how it could work, check out the communes for a small scale version of this.