Design for Revolution

   – the Design

Design

The Design for Revolution starts here: here as in this place on the des4rev web site, and also here as in where I live, which is in Britain. I shall build this up carefully, step by step. (Or see latest.)

1: ‘Our Inheritance from the Past’, an extract from Britain and the Beast (1938). 23/9/06

2: There are examples around the world of the pre-capitalist village community being the highest form of human social life. This is a big subject which I shall come back to, but for a taster of how controversial that statement is, think about Marx saying that the Indian manifestation of the village society, ‘that unresisting and unchanging society [with] no history’, had to be destroyed to make way for capitalism, which is what he (kind-of) thanked the British Empire for. (K. Marx, ‘The Future Results of the British Rule in India’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, The First Indian War of Independence 1857-1859 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), pp.32-8.)

3: Consider the concept of symbiotic evolution, and exosymbiosis vs. endosymbiosis. (Frank Ryan, Darwin’s Blind Spot: Evolution Beyond Natural Selection (New York: Texere, 2003), p.114)

4: Take human society to include humans plus plants, animals, place, and flows in and out. Apply the concept of symbiotic evolution to human society, and see how it relates in particular to the pre-capitalist village community. You will see that such a community can be thought of as having been exosymbiotic verging on endosymbiotic, and you realise that capitalism has been a retrograde step in evolution, having destroyed the highest form of life on earth – taking ‘highest’ to mean most complex and most recently evolved. 24/09/06

4: ‘Serial endosymbiosis theory’ for ideas. 30/09/06

5: Socialism negates virtuality. 12/11/06

6: Socialistic experiments. 13/11/06

7. Beware – be aware – of false consciousness. 15/11/06

8. Design for Revolution involves combining desirable features from past, present and whatever we can dream up – but selectively. The idea of local communities is attractive in many ways, with land being cultivated in common, but not in the old ways, if there is much truth in the old records, such as those on Open-Field Agriculture. 15/11/06

9. Design for Revolution has to begin on the ground.
The first and most important stage is to investigate and facilitate home and local food. 21/11/06

10. Meanwhile discussions continue: the sine qua non of socialism 26/11/06

11. Are permaculture and anti-capitalist/anarchist ideas coming together in Spain? Escanda 4/3/07

12. How can attitudes and ideology change? Why are they so resistant to change? New site: Habitude, 9/4/07

13. New hope of lifestyle changers and revolutionaries coming together? World in Common discussion on workplace struggle, 19/7/07

Latest:

14. Village as Basic Unit, 16/10/07

15. This paper about the Zapatistas calling for a ‘Third Intergalactica’ has been put around various discussion forums. It is a superb summary of the present situation in terms of global power relations and the global movements of struggle and resistance, so in case it disappears I am putting it on this site. 17/11/07

16. A link to a video was posted on the World Socialist Movement forum saying that anarchists ‘don’t believe that we can achieve a Socialist dream’. The video is called Dead Society, and is a wake-up call not just for socialists. 18/12/07

17. Paul Ekins, A New World Order, Conclusion, 26/12/07

18. ‘What are the new emerging worldviews that underpin sustainable communities?’, 5/01/08

19. Is Friends of the Earth really its Foe? An exchange with MS, of Exeter FoE, 22/3/08

20. ‘Elephant traps’, 23/4/08

21. The ‘New’ Plants For A Future, 23/8/08

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