Independence and self-sufficiency are cancer
The ideology of self-sufficiency and independence, whether on an individual level or a community level (as localism) is a cancer, and it's annoying how much even anarchists buy into it.
"Oh no I'm depending on someone else who specializes in food growing for my food."
"Oh no my community needs to import goods from other places"
"Oh no division of labor and specialization."
The amount of people that seem to want to go back to everyone having to farm their own food for instance is so annoying, because people that advocate for that are either people who enjoy it for its own sake (usually because they were brought up doing it, but there are also those who adopt it), at which point it's just someone attempting to force their hobby lifestyle onto other people who will almost certainly not want to live that way for the same reason some people have a hobby making furniture but the rest of us don't want to have to make our own furnature, or, on the other hand, people who don't actually use growing food as a means of actually supporting even a significant fraction of their food intake, so they think that their little basil and tomato gardens give them a good idea of how to do it, and what it'll be like, but it doesn't. Growing food fucking sucks; when it's 94° outside and you're weeding the garden so that the mint doesn't try and eat the tomato plants, or spending ho then try and tell me that this is an improvement. And let's be real: among leftists and even post-leftists, it's 95% the latter kind of person. Even those that move to the countryside, buy a farm, and start growing food and maybe farming chickens or whatever are really, fundamentally, larping: they're not actually fully supporting themselves with this typically, they're just doing it because it makes them feel like they're doing something to get "back to the land." It's like someone who plays paintball talking about how good they'd be in war or something.
And this isn't even to mention the practicality of abolishing industrial farming in favor of individualized or even local food-growing. It's deeply unclear whether many communities or individuals would have the space for it, especially in cities, so there's the end of urbanism right there, and even if they could find the space, it would almost certainly drive up food costs and increase scarcity and decrease food variety.
A lot of anarchists might say that the end of urbanism is a good thing; they seem to get really mad at the idea that one place such as an urban center might on a net import food from another place, as if that's somehow inherently exploitative. What they're somehow not realizing is that maybe that urban center might be able to produce things that the more rural areas couldn't or simply don't happen to, that they could provide in return that are worth the food? It's like they've never heard of the basic concept of trade.
Not to mention how beliefs like this make you talk! They basically turn you into a fucking Tylder Durden talking point machine:
In the world I see - you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
This is exactly precisely the sort of thing Margaret Killjoy talks about in several of her writings that I've read on anti-civ and urbanism without cities — about letting the infrastructure and civilization around you decay intentionally into moss and tribalism (she specifically seems to advocate a form of tribalism even while claiming explicitly to reject it), and instead of producing new things, spending your life dumpster diving and scavanging, and viewing that as the praxis and ideal life "post revolution." It's really not self aware at all about how the fundamental assumption is that interdependency and mutually beneifical deal-making, and diversity in skills and desires about what we want to do for a living, are all weak or dangerous or restrict our freedom in some way, because we all need to be self sufficient sigma males (but leftist) or tribes (but progressive). It's this same ideology of individual or small community, self-sufficiency and back to the land, the cyclical economy stuff that fascists push, just repackaged in like a transfem anarchist lingo.
Whereas for me, I don't see interdependency as weak or dangerous. The interdependency that comes from accepting division of labor and specialization and market economies and globalization and all of the gifts that capitalism has given us — despite capitalism itself being evil — actually grant us more degrees of freedom than they take away, because they gives us access to — at least in theory, absent the bullshit jobs and artificial increases of work that capitalism creates — far, far more free time and material resources and far more choice over what we do in order to sustain our lives. Every dependency you have, on community, society, technology, all the machines that humans build, increases your degrees of freedom, because it increases your power to do things you never could have done before, acts as a prosthesis for you. You just have to make sure power imbalances don't grow. — and it is possible to create that interdependency in such a way that associations act as extensions of the power of their members instead of caps on them. Where that interdependency creates a mesh network of relations that actually make hurting or controlling others even more difficult because everyone depends on everyone else. We only experience interdependency as a taking away of autonomy under capitalism because of the centralization that it also brings with it.
The interesting thing to me is that there are two ways to interpret the fact that people have been having concerns about the pace of life, technology, and transportation, having nervous breakdowns and feeling mentally overtaxed, having questions about the commodification or obsoleting of art due to generative machines, and wondering whether tech and society and the market are the products of or threats to human nature, or both, since 1910.
One way is to go the primitivist route and say that this proves it was all a mistake as far back as those problems stretch, and we're only making it worse, stacking mistake on mistake the longer we refuse to treat the root issue: that humans can't evolve fast or far enough to adapt to the machine we've created (or that they're inherently wrong, that we shouldn't want to adapt).
The other way is to say that we adapted to bicycles and cameras, and we can adapt to these new changes too — and in fact it's worth doing, so that we get the chance to transcend human nature as we've known it, to co-evolve with our creations, and to do what they enable us to do.
For myself, I only see one of these as a live option. Our desires, expectations, our very cognitive processes, have all been fundamentally shaped by tech, society, and markets. We could never truly want to undo or throw away what we've created, except in a toursity idealized sense that is itself predicated on us not knowing what it would mean to do so due to the conditions precisely created by them. And we could never create a way to enforce and maintain, across the distributed adaptive system that is the world, such a discarding, a "proceeding on without." — (quoting myself from elsewhere on this blog)
This first part is an important starting point that's a tough pill to swallow for a lot of primmies and totally lines up with what some friends of mine have learned from the flirting they've done with prepping (or better qualified as preparedness). They've started listening through some of Margaret Killjoy's Live Like The World is Dying podcast, and one of her early episodes is a Q/A about how she lives offgrid on a shared land project:
Even simple things like having a shower especially with hot water become sprawling, constant projects. Setting it up is hard – there's prerequisite infrastructure you need for it too, power and water (there's a reason we have a grid). Oh and shit breaks. Pipes can freeze and burst in many climates, especially since the shower is outdoors.
Her story of how she built the thing and maintains it and deals with ongoing problems really impressed upon me just how hard those lifestyles are and how it doesn't even necessarily imply you're more independent. You still rely on global supply chains to supply your homebrew cottagecore life.
And this is why the idea of independence and self-reliance is a cancer. For better or worse, basically everyone on this planet has a life to a great extent that is based and relies on innovations of at least the past 100 years, and on the specialization and trade with others, and your choice is to either accept that and find a way to maintain it by better means, or to reject that, but understand that literally no one will ever want to join you, and you're artificially hamstringing yourself, and it's just not practicable, not sustainable, less reliable (because it's more brittle; global distributed trade systems are highly adaptive!), and it doesn't really give you any more autonomy.
It is understandable, as our civilization hurtles towards the unknown abyss, however, to have gotten anxious about having a very narrow skillset, and to let that drive you to want to generalize, to be somewhat capable of self-relience and self-protection. But that shouldn't be the goal, that should be the last resort, and you shouldn't focus all your time on that. The way another friend puts it is best I think — you want to be T shaped: broad knowledge in a lot of things, deep knowledge in one or two areas.
None of this is to say I'm against decentralization as a general principle. I'm very much for it! Taking individual self-sufficiency and strictly community-local production as goods in themselves, instead of just means to a greater goal of autonomy, freedom, and better living for all, is what I'm actually against. Having local communities, municipalities, cities, counties, or other geographic units produce something can aid decentralization, which can equalize power dynamics and promote resiliancy to supply shocks; but on the other hand, you can use trade to equalize power dynamics, if both parties have something they see as equally valuable that they're getting from the other; likewise, being able to pull manufacturing from a variety of sources, even if they're far away, can actually increase resiliancy in case something goes wrong, or there are unforeseen demands, in a local economy; not to mention that resiliancy and equal power dynamics must be weighed against efficiency, possibility, and most of all what communities just happen to be good at or want to do (influenced by culture, geographical location, whatever). The law of comparative advantage seems relevant here. Everyone can gain from trade even with far away places. Balancing these should be the focus, not rigid decentralization or localism. Maybe communities, like individuals, should be T-shaped too: able to provide for their basic needs locally if necessary, while much more specialized in certain fields, but not rigidly focused on either.