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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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I don't think doomerism or anti-natalism are serious positions, but I will not have leftist prepping lumped in with them! The imperial core is collapsing and that's going to be really hard to live through without at least some knowledge about canning, solar panels, gardening, rainwater collection, repair, and how to shoot a gun.
What distinguishes lefty prepping from the normal rightist variants is a focus on building community before it's too late, and that's literally how we'll build a future. In fact, prepping on the left comes from a belief that there is a future, it's just going to be hard (not even forever, just long enough that the power might go out).
Prepping is literally working for tomorrow, like???
It's the 'this will get worse before it gets better' position. That does seem rational and I am tempted to prepare for the worst too. One issue I see with that position is... if you build yourself a little life raft you probably aren't as concerned as you should be about the sinking ship.
That's why the emphasis has to be on community prepping. If you build a life raft for yourself you aren't really taking the sinking ship seriously imo - we sink or swim together. We'll get through the hard times together with community gardens and communal power generation and repairing each other's things, not by becoming isolated weirdos entombed in little bunkers.
In Sweden leftist prepping groups call themselves „Preppa Tillsammans“ which means „Prepping Together“. The idea now has some followers in Germany as well. They call it „Solidarisches Preppen“ (Prepping Solidarily).
Imho these can easily be the roots of a solarpunk future. Bottom up, local, self sufficient.
Solarpunk for me has always been, at its roots, an anarchist ideology that espouses the tenants of mutual aid and bottom-up, horizontal community structures to build a self-sufficient, sustainable society. That's the "punk" part of solarpunk.
That’s the beauty of prepping solidarily: people understand it right away (especially in the context of climate crisis and as a form of civil disaster relief or protection) but are not scared by „dirty words“ like anarchist or communist. They’ll learn it eventually.
Build it, let them experience the results of praxis first hand, give them a chance to be a part of it to get a see internal politics in action, then it becomes hard for them to deny the validity of the ideology behind it after they put the dots together.
Yeah, I see what you're saying, but I think my point still holds. I'll update my analogy. You have some people that'll jump in your raft with you. So now everyone with access to the raft isn't as concerned as they should be about the sinking ship?
Most people don't like the ship anyway. Perhaps the raft can be scaled up so that it's a ship in itself and everyone who wants to can get on.
But at that point, what's the problem? The problem the OP is describing is one of hopelessness and not having a vision for the future, but the very act of building these life rafts and cooperating on the rafts to build community is itself a vision for the future.
The vision of the future is everyone working together and overcoming the dangers ahead. Prepping can be an act of hope.
I think the biggest issue around doomerism is the framing. Everyone frames it as if we should just accept that society is doomed and give up, but that's not what it is about. Doomerism is about accepting that society as we know it is doomed if we continue doing what we are doing.
Yet saying this isn't a call to give up and let it happen. It's a call to wake up and realize we have to dig deep and fundamentally change how we are doing things.
Things are hopeless in our current society, so we need to work to change into one that can have hope for a bright future. To do that requires letting go of the old one.
Right, but it's still 'it's going to get worse before it gets better' and if you're okay and the community you care about is okay, then you may not care if the ship is on a collision course and will sink even though there's a lot of people that don't have the means to get off.
Why would anyone prep if they didn't care the ship is on a collision course? It seems like they care a lot! That's why they prep!
The issue you're seeing seems to apply to everyone who isn't prepping, so it doesn't really seem like this is a problem that's caused by prepping. Normal people think everything is going to be fine and don't worry that the ship is on a collision course.
Also, you're thinking of community as some kind of exclusive thing, like a walled private community or something. It can't be that way if the goal is to survive. Normal people don't get to pick who is part of their community, it just sort of happens based on where we live and work and such. Building community means bringing in the people who don't have the means, not excluding them because they can't afford the entrance fee to the bunker or life raft. We don't have the luxury of being so selective.
Grab the steering wheel? That's what the article was getting at. People who are prepping have already written society off. Attempts to repair and rectify are not made in earnest, instead smaller scale alternatives are sought with the naive idea that the facists will just ignore you.
Communal prepping is about building a new society, not abandoning it.
This society has been rotting and has had multiple holes put in it over the decades. Grab the steering wheel? The engines are already choking with water, people are drowning on the lower decks right now. This is a sinking ship, not one on a collision course. Even if we got rid of the morons steering the ship into the rocks and tearing holes in the hull, it wouldn't change the deeper structural problems that the ship has had since it was built.
Community doesn't have to be small, either. Communities can federate, after all. By your logic, why didn't you stay on Reddit and try to repair the ship before it sunk instead of escaping onto this life raft?
And who said anything about naively ignoring the fascists? Why do you think I said people should learn to shoot guns?
I'm sorry I got caught up arguing a very specific point that you just made. You're already in the raft and I'm trying to fix the ship. Thanks for your help.