worldbuilding
worldbuilding snowflake • 2 weeks ago • 100%

🥺👉👈 Could I get some help with the historical materialism of my worldbuilding?

The solarpunk tribal world is detailed here, here, and here.

I built the world because it's what I wanted to see in the late-20th to early-21st century. But it's weak on the question of how that came to be. So I thought some theory-experts might be able to mutual-aid me 😉

Why did this world come to be?

  • Economically: A moneyless world where labour is organised by kinship obligations and local cultures are self-sufficient for the basics.

  • Politically: Öcalan-style democratic confederalism: your local folkmoot or veche makes local decisions. They send representatives to the country-level popular assembly, they in turn send representatives to the continent-level popular assembly, and they in turn send representatives to the world-level popular assembly which does things like stops wars from escalating. Russian doll democracy.

Ok I think I've laid out the question well enough now: why did the economy become/remain moneyless and clannish, and why did democratic confederalism become powerful? And how can this be explained in terms of class struggle? Let me know if there's confusion and I'll edit.


Now, towards an answer –

  • Actually a lot of the inspiration for it all came from Mutual Aid Among the Barbarians, and less so Mutual Aid in the Mediæval City: clans living together helping each other. Comrade K mentions "The Teutons, the Celts, the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, and others", and the chapter is largely about the Russian mir. So should I say they struggled against Roman/feudal systems and won, beating out manoralism that later became enclosure and capitalism?

  • Another thing I could use: around 1100AD in America, Hiawatha creates the Great Law of Peace and the Iroquois Confederacy with five tribes and later added a 6th.... What if in the alternate history this confederated more and more tribes and became really huge? But that's not historical materialism.

  • The first reply I ever got said, "I feel like, at first, you need to address a kind of Columbian Exchange"... but what if instead of crossing the Atlantic, they cross the Pacific?? So it's an exchange between say Chinese societies and ones like the Tlingit.

  • I have lots of other little historical tidbits that could force to the tribal side of the dialectic: Pashtun with their jirga assemblies, Chechens as free and equal as wolves, the stateless Igbo, and many others.

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