All Public goods should be free. This includes public transportation, education, healthcare, food and housing access, libraries - book or things or repair libraries, parks, commons, utilities - water, gas, etc. Hell, even internet. These need to be accessible to all people regardless of income, place, nationality, etc.

Profits are part of the (white supremacist/ableist/colonialist) capitalist system that requires constant growth, and our planet cannot handle constant growth. We live on a finite planet, and capitalism is making the planet inhabitable to all life. So we should tear down the profit model entirely.

Instead, we ought to establish a system that relies on what the people need, and craft plans that meet those needs. We can then use that data to craft longer term plans so we can invest resources and goods into the future too.

(Yes, this is very much a simple explanation of a Participatory Economy, which is built upon local worker and community groups, where the people have the power to decide rather than any central government. Robin Hahnel has a good book that shows how possible this is and how to efficiently do it to meet the people's needs and desires.)

We need to stop thinking in terms of profit, and start thinking instead in terms of community needs.

We need to break capitalist's hold on our imaginations.

#AntiCapitalist #ParticipatoryEconomy #Anarchism #PublicGoods #PublicTransportation #Accessibility
#CommunityCare

I think the reason I love solarpunk so much is twofold:

1. Solarpunk recognizes that our environment plays a huge role in our we survive. Adapting to our environment and working with nature not only protects us but also keeps the environment thriving for future generations. Technology is only used to assist people and the environment - not for profit.

2. Solarpunk definitely has a degrowth sort of approach to the economy. How society is rebuilt in a solarpunk world tends toward anarchist communes, participatory economies, library economies, and anti-capitalist modes of existence. Solarpunk is perfect for what Arturo Escobar calls the Pluriverse (taken from the Zapatistas of Chiapas description of a better world).

These ideas heavily influence how I build Elivera, my world-building project (that is the setting for majority of my stories).

I wrote a manifesto of my Solarpunk ideas here: https://cohost.org/TheBirdWrites/post/859437-my-solarpunk-ethos

What are your thoughts on solarpunk, fellow Mastodonians?

#Solarpunk #RandomThoughts #Degrowth #Anarchism #ParticipatoryEconomy #Pluriverse #LibraryEconomy

#Solarpunk

I've been expanding on some of my articles in my WorldAnvil for my Elivera world.

Today I'll talk about the Sunik Nation: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/elivera3A-the-lost-ones-aidanbird/a/sunik-nation-article

It is also has one of the first cities to appear on Elivera after the liberation of humanity and the time of Silence. Supki, the capital of Sunik nation, is built inside of a mountain, which each level a built above the last, with the top-most level built at the mountain top and open to the sky; this project took generations. Much of Sunik nation is mountainous, so many communities are built similarly. Sunik has open borders.

One of the primary goals of the Sunik nation was to explore a participatory economy coupled with a library economy.

#ParticipatoryEconomy requires councils of everyday people like you and me who work together to plan, adjust based on incoming data, and adapt our work based on it. All people are given what they need to survive regardless of whether they are able to work at all. No one gets left behind in this economy.

Some of the biggest influences I had come from reading Cedric Robinson, Robin Hahnel, Project Drawdown, #DisabilityJustice (Sins Invalid), #TransformativeJustice models, Andrewism's Library of Things and Solarpunk YouTube Essays, Arturo Escobar, Solarpunk zines, and the Zapatistas of Chiapas.