Comradeship // Freechat

I like the idea of being sustainable, growing your own food, and living naturally. I used to dream about starting a commune or homestead, but now I’m starting to think the idealization of it is petty bourgeois and part of the settler mindset.

It absolutely is the settler mindset. Homesteading is an economically stagnant practice at best. Homesteading served a few historical functions. First, it was an outlet for the downwardly mobile classes of Europe (at first, just England) to escape the monopolization and enclosures of land. Now, all these Europeans coming over for their homesteads had to come out, take land that was developed by other humans, destroy it, terraform, and fill it with European taxa (honey bees, apples, grass, mice, and salad weeds like dandelions), settle it, and defend it from recapture. Homesteading has been an occupation and colonization tactic of people and nature from the start, and Jefferson's ideas turned it into a literal war tactic on Indian Country. In macro, homesteading was a way to have loyal settlers occupy territory for the high bourgeoisie to later expropriate. This takes the form of the land being seized on debt defaults, land sold to extractive (oil, mining) interests, land sold to real estate interests (suburbanization). Often times to pay the debts back the planters need to exploit the earth at greater and greater intensities, eating away at the soil environment until the land itself dies as in the case of the Dust Bowl (the victims of which, got free land seized in California and Washington from interned Japanese farmers).

Homesteading itself isn't a real economic practice, it serves a specific function in colonization (of people and environment) and can't exist independent from the larger market society. There is no way for it to be revolutionary, as it is an atomized form of the feudal village farmer, and only succeeded with the importation of outside labor (servants slaves and migrants). It's a yearning for the life of a yeoman (who's existence was a sign of Capitalism developing), and the greenwashing surrounding it calls back to not nature, but the total colonization of nature by man, in America it means turning a piece of Turtle Island into a model of Europe (looking at you, Solarpunk and Cottage Core).

Overall I think homesteading is poor use of land. We need collaborative and socialized food production so we can limit the amount of land necessary to meet the needs of our people. Homesteading as an escape from Capitalism is utopian and it failed over and over for the same reasons.

You can live off-grid if you are an able-bodied single between 20 and 40 years old with robust health and you don't care for anything else in the world. You would have to endure harsh conditions and lots of physical labour, you get little in return if at all, but it is physically possible.

However, this changes if you introduce other people to the equation. The issue isn't food, or even drinking water, it is things like heating, electricity, modern medicine, and sewage treatment. Children, pregnant women, elderly, sick, and disabled people require these things to boost their chance of survival. If you don't want an infant mortality rate of 0.85 in your homestead, you better allow young mothers visit a proper hospital. The issue is, at that point what you're doing is basically an amusement park attraction, a bubble of primitive society entirely embedded within the safety and stability of the modern world.

Worse still, building a society that largely made up of homestead communities is an AnPrim pipedream. It is the kind of shit to which you see civilisation regress in movies about a zombie apocalypse. The correct Marxist way to reach our ecological goals is to organise and develop a realistic plan to take control of society on top of its modern infrastructure.

As someone that lives on a commune, homesteading isn't real. At least in the imperial core of the US. It is nearly impossible to come out ahead homesteading in the US. Feed prices, hay, the back breaking labor of sowing and reaping entire fields just cannot compare with the affordability of the exploited labor of the third world, the factory farms, and the acres of hay fields.

Homesteading is a great way to learn skills and to build character, but it isn't profitable in the US without several people holding normal jobs on top of the work. You will in all likelihood drown. The reason you see all those white people on YouTube talking about their homesteads and how close it makes them feel to nature is because they got money coming from somewhere else, and as somebody who has met some of these people it's usually because they're landlords or incredibly overpaid for a remote job.

Urban farming also has it's drawbacks but I am less qualified to speak on that. What I will say is that you cannot get rid of rural farming and feed the cities, the land just is not there for it. The community gardens are great and a fantastic starting point, but you're not even close to making bread for a small household in the community garden plot.

Homesteading and traditional land practices are coming to an end, if we are not already there. Agricultural land use is now all about monocultures that grow a metric fuckton of grain. Maybe there's some orchards, those are less extractive. But traditional land practices are moving out of the way for tractors and excessive tilling and ploughing. Whenever I leave the farm all I see everywhere is shit land practices, people putting plastic in the ground to separate their beds from the disgusting peasant dirt under it, and invasive plants everywhere that no one bats an eye to, ecosystems out here are dying.

The ecosystems are dying but it simply is not sustainable to even do anything about it. Plus the land all belongs to the bourgeoisie who know the true value of factory farming and monocultures, making it prohibitively expensive for an eco- conscious proletariat. Even then when you do get the land, our sedentary imperial lives do not make our bodies strong for the labor we need to do, unlike the Zapatista comrades who can dig trenches for hours a day everyday. It destroys your body for years before it begins to feel normal. But despite all of this taking care of the land is a hellish feat that has to be done, lest we collect our grains from sand instead.

You'd never have enough bodies to defend it even if you did manage to take it. Do you have access to bombers, dogfighters, drones, or anti-aircraft embankments? Nah. None of us do. It's the same place I hit roadblocks trying to 'modernize' the concept of a true New Afrikan nation; is how do you set up shop in the Adversary's backyard and then keep what you took? 'Cause keeping it a buck, even NFAC wasn't managing that and to even get your foot in the door, you had to already own a rifle in the AR platform.

Likely a waste of time and effort, even if your only goal is to escape society.

While the idea of homesteading sometimes conflicts with my political work, I think there is room for homesteading in a socialist society. Especially in a way of urban or even rural farming with the focus on ending monocultures. We could even start commune like groups to provide for our people.

I myself dream of having a homestead one day. I'd love to be able to provide for myself, work on a piece of land and possibly share my work with others for free. I don't need a big house to live in and it would preferably be in nature.

My father in law recently bought a piece of land in the middle of nowhere in Sweden. We're going to build and renovate it with the family and homesteading may even be an option.

I... don't think it is, per se.

It kinda depends on the context; not really a planter class or settler mindset, but it depends on the time-period.

I remember someone at r/antiwork that did the maths and started producing food for sale in local markets as a single worker, reaping the value of his own work. Apparently, after a lot of work he was making higher than minimum wage.

But I can't find the link right now. I'll continue looking for it and update this if I find it.

In addition, what’s your opinion of permaculture? I’m going to one of the pyramid scheme classes soon, to see if there’s anything worth taking from it. From what I’ve heard by the anarchist critics at ‘poor proles almanac’ it’s basically the dogmatic imposition of a white dudes interpretation of a unique indigenous practice in Australia to the whole world. It seems like it’s probably better to just look at the practices of indigenous people from your specific region, rather than using general permaculture.