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. Starting some farm in the wilderness is very reminiscent of the western frontier, and the homestead act which I am myself a beneficiary of. We don’t need more socialists leaving society, we need more urban farming and an end to monoculture.
What do y’all think about it?
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.
Cottage core is definitely petty-bougie, but what’s your problem with solarpunk? I’d like to see some vertical forests here. My model for solarpunk and China(high-speed rail, eco-cities), not Europe.
That one Chobani commercial is still a cornerstone in the Solarpunk “movement”, at least on social media (where I expect it lives and dies). There is a “de-advertised” version where someone took the time to remove all of the references to the dairy magnate. There is no criticism of the environment depicted in the art being full of colonizing species, only derision in it being produced by Chobani. This is worrying because the settlers in the settler states, even the “environmentally conscious”, can’t even imagine a form of living alongside nature, only a continent sized homestead. Environmental collapse is more than just carbon emissions and asphalt, the environments of the Americas have been collapsing ever since the colonizers came and exterminated tens of millions of bison, tens of millions of beavers, wolves, dammed rivers that wipe out salmon populations. It’s problematic that people here don’t know what nature actually looks like, especially those who play around with “revolutionary aesthetics”.
I wouldn’t really call it “problematic” to not know what nature actually looks like. Nature isn’t virtuous by itself. The only problematic part is the tragedy of the scope of environmental destruction needed for people to not know what nature looks like.
We absolutely should avoid monocrops and a colonization mindset, but the fundamental ideas of SolarPunk aren’t those things.
It’s problematic that settlers in a settler colony don’t know what the environment looked like before their ancestors colonized the land. I’m not saying nature in the abstract but the specific environments of the Americas that were destroyed due to homesteading and colonizing. They want a return to “green” but that “green” is imported flora and fauna.
They can brainstorm all day but when it comes down to praxis, if they are reproducing settler Colonialism of the environment, they are a problem. If Solarpunks in the colonies don’t have an intimate understanding of their local native species, they are just colonizers, not much better than people who keep their lawn green.
Edit: relevant image I just ran into
That ad is a nightmare. Vast patches of monoculture and tons of robots in the ecological “utopia.”
It’s also just… meaningless. It’s full of literal magic, like creating miniature clouds to water your garden. It’s eye candy, not anything -punk.
“Living in harmony with nature” for colonial corporations is when you have so much control that you decide when it rains.