blan means foreigner; blacks from the USA are blan

a pity it was NOT rent-free

A couple of quotes from Kropotkin that might help your researches:

• “Volumes and volumes have been written about these unions which, under the name of guilds, brotherhoods, friendships and druzhestva, minne, artels in Russia, esnaifs in Servia and Turkey, amkari in Georgia”

• “Only now, when hundreds of guild statutes have been published and studied, and their relationship to the Roman collegiae, and the earlier unions in Greece and in India,[FOOTNOTE: Very interesting facts relative to the universality of guilds will be found in “Two Thousand Years of Guild Life,” by Rev. J. M. Lambert, Hull, 1891. On the Georgian amkari, see S. Eghiazarov, Gorodskiye Tsekhi (“Organization of Transcaucasian Amkari”), in Memoirs of the Caucasian Geographical Society, xiv. 2, 1891.] is known, can we maintain with full confidence that these brotherhoods were but a further development of the same principles which we saw at work in the gens and the village community.”

Good

Ok so it’s starting to come together:

1st to 6th centuries – the Barbarian-Roman dialectic

The Gallic Wars were a stalemate (rather than a comprehensive Roman win).

Therefore the barbarian mode of production Kropotkin described remained influential in France and Britain. A paper (DOI: 10.1007/s10814-015-9088-x) talks about how commonage is a pre-Roman influence on Roman and post-Roman Britain. The Visigothic Code (Spain, 642AD) combined Roman and Germanic law, showing that there was a dialectic between those two in that era. Germanic Law means popular assemblies and tribes (i.e. mutual aid groups) and compensatory justice (no cops, no jails). So that Roman-barbarian dialectic existed in Terra, and the Roman aspect led to feudalism. If we tip the Roman-barbarian dialectic to the barbarians, that has knock-on effects.

Because the Roman order doesn’t dominate France and Britain, if Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity, it doesn’t spread the religion. Gallic France, Anglo-Saxon Britain, etc remain pagan. Polytheistic paganism is a more compatible superstructure for a decentralised mode of production; monotheism is more compatible with worship-the-lord and tribute-the-clergy feudal production.

(I haven’t talked about religion much, but the world is pagan rather than Abrahamic in case that wasn’t obvious)

Class conflict in ‘The Middle Ages’

This is when guilds start to emerge (in both Terran history and the alternate history). Let’s look at some classes that exist and their class interests

Good guys for the purposes of our story here:

• Barbarians. People with a vested interest in the barbarian mode-of-production. Huns, “The Teutons, the Celts, the Scandinavians, the Slavonians, and others”, the Russian mir. Their class-interest is to avoid enclosure, avoid anyone coming in imposing tax/tribute/surplus-value-extraction from them. The Chechens, the Turkic tribal confederacy, etc.
• Peasants. Their material interest is to keep production as independent as possible. An example is Terran history of where they succeeded is Friesland. Prevent enclosure.
• Craft guilds. Similar class interests to peasants really (the hammer to their sickle): keep production as independent as possible.

Bad guys –

• Aristocracy. They try to extract surplus value from the peasants and craftsmen. Where the post-Roman and feudal order exists, they exist. Where it does not they do not.
• Clergy. Pretty much the same as the aristocracy. They are much weaker in this world, not worth mentioning. (The Church is antagonistic to clans because they want people depending on the Church: “It has been argued that kinship ties were relatively weak in western Europe, perhaps as the result of deliberate policies by the medieval Catholic Church to weaken them”)
• Merchant guilds. ‘Bad guys’ here because they are what became the bourgeoisie. Must smash. Their class-interest is doing things like enclosure

It makes perfect sense why the proto-bourgeois merchants, aristocracy, clergy have antagonistic interests to the barbarians and peasants.

Fitting the class guilds on to the side of the clans and against the merchant guilds is harder, but maybe I can make it work.

First problem with making the class alliance is that guilds don’t historically side with clans: “guilds did not develop in the British Isles in the early medieval Celtic lands where kinship ties dominated… Tine De Moor argues that weakened family ties were a vital precondition for the spectacular growth of guilds”. Second reason is that craftsmen could be aligned with, not antagonistic with the proto-bourgeoisie, who could give them funding and markets. This is ameliorated if you remove the profit-motive: if the economy is moneyless, based on mutual aid obligations, the craftsman isn’t interested in a bigger market. (The barbarian “blacksmith, who, like the blacksmith of the Indian communities, being a member of the community, is never paid for his work within the community” isn’t interested in ‘making more sales’.)

A series of wars between these two in the Middle Ages ends in the destruction of the merchant and feudal classes. One cool idea is it becomes a war-on-two-fronts for the emerging feudal and bourgeois system; they have Celts to the West (because Julius Cæsar failed to wipe them out), and to the East they have Turks, Huns, Chechens, the Nomadic Empire. A Celt-Khan vice-grip crushes kings.

The half-feudal-half-free people within what was the Holy Roman Empire – groups like the Old Swiss Confederacy, the Frisian Freedom, and peasant republics like the Republic of the Escartons – saw the writing on the wall and sided with the barbarian confederacy. That is in their interest. Basically all the mediæval people Kropotkin liked allied against all the mediæval people Kropotkin did not like.

Europe’s contact with America and Africa in the Age of Sail

Contact is made between the confederated tribes of Europe and the confederated tribes of America. They both have a mode-of-production where they produce locally, rather than extract/exploit. They have no material reason to come into conflict. (In Terra, where they were all about extraction, they did.) You have democratic Europeans (democracies like the folkmoot and þing) meeting democracies like the Haudenosaunee. They start bartering and intermarrying a little. The dominant mode-of-production in Europe isn’t exploitative, so instead of committing genocide Europeans start wearing moccasins because moccasins are comfy as fuck let’s face it.

Similarly, plenty of cool, chill societies in Africa like the Igbo that are based on mutual aid. "It is therefore obvious from the way societies like the Tiv, the central Igbo, and the Dagaaba were organized that they were well aware of the political structure of the centralized systems, but tried to eliminate them as much as possible… such ethnic societies as the Tiv and Igbo of Nigeria, the Nuer of Sudan, the Somali, and the Bedouin Arabs throughout North Africa… In general there were no officeholders; only representatives of groups.". So when Europe and Africa start making more links (in the 1400s), it is European tribal confederacies without an extractive economy, and without a religious imperative to convert/subjugate heathens.

Europe’s contact with India and China

Now the above doesn’t explain why East Asia would follow the same pattern, but a similar thing happened in Terran history: the treaty of Westphalia established nation-states and later the entire globe was nation-states. Similar here but with tribal confederacies.

The Great Divergence

The guilds want to train apprentices in every newly-contacted country to spread their influence. This serves as a technology-transfer mechanism. Industry is not nationalistic: there is an inter-national transatlantic class of engineers: the guild. It is into that world that the steam engine comes. Technology doesn’t give Europe a competitive advantage, because technology gets spread.

“We have known for quite some time that guilds and guild-like institutions were not limited to medieval and early modern Europe, but existed in other societies too – in China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, India, and elsewhere”

• George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London – https://archive.org/details/cu31924030086692 – on page 2 and 3 he mentions there were guilds in China and India but he doesn’t go into detail

• There’s a book called Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean that you can find on Annas-archive

• There’s a book called The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem that you can find on Annas-archive

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed the post!

What should I ask my contact in the multiverse about next? Preferably don’t focus on the negative.

Next post be about –

• The three moneyless economic mechanisms: mutual aid, contract, and n-sided computerised barter.
• Maritime. The world has many traditional seafaring cultures.
• Some particular region? You choose. (e.g Māori New Zealand, the Arctic cultures, North America
• Solarpunk householding: heating fuel, storage cellars, composting toilets, community gardens
• The formal political structures. The equivalent of the U.N.
• Legal systems and dispute-resolution. Law without lawyers, cops, or prisons. What happens to murderers and thieves? I’ve researched the history/anthropology of this a lot.

this is clearly half-baked and inefficient

No it’s great! Lava hardens into rock, so if you shape/form/mould it when it is lava, then it solidifies into the shape you want.

There are lots of ways of making things that rely on the thermoplastic effect: you shape it when it’s liquid, then it hardens and you’re done.

If the wizard could bend/conjure lava into any shape, he would be a useful man to have on your construction crew.

This model requires more labour-time – that’s the downside. But labour is saved in other places, like the absence of bullshit jobs… this world just produces less… That also saves labour. Building 10 cars in a Local Motors way might be as labourious as 100 cars in a big Toyota factory.

Oh and then planned obsolescence:

• Say you’re a capitalist. Your duty is to maximise sales. Is it in your self-interest to make the shirt that wears out in 1 year or 5 years?

• Say you’re a community tailor. Your duty is make sure everyone in your local tribe has sufficient clothing (use-value). Is it in your self-interest to make the shirt that wears out in 1 year or 5 years?

Things are made more durable. This reduces the amount of labour and production to be done overall.

Oh my you’re asking me about all the bad things in a utopia.

Obviously there was a full-scale industrialization of some sort given the technological parity with our timeline.

That word ‘scale’… scale is a big theme. Yes there was full technological development, but the scale is all different:

Terra: Gigantomania, go from a spinning wheel to “a spinning mill containing 10,000 mule spindles”, because the guy profiting from production wants more, bigger.

Solarpunk: Instead of the Industrial Revolution, call it a Tool Revolution. Here the spinning jenny, the spinning mule etc. were invented around the same time as Terra but never went gigantic. People had textiles in 1700 , they just spent long boring hours making them. By 1900 a spinner is, say, 50 times more productive than in 1700. That freed up a lot of time. The goal was not the biggest possible profit; the goal is to provide use-values without excessive burden.

You can rank industries like this:

<------------------------------------------------------->
labour-intensive                        capital-intensive
small scale            medium scale            huge scale
skilled workers                         deskilled workers
local                                           alienated

In this universe, everything is shifted to the left. But not everything is wayyyy on the left. That would be impossible.

Take the most centralised, most capital-intensive industry of all: microchips. In Terra, one chip fab costs $20 billion to build, and operates with almost lights-out manufacturing.

This hackaday article talks about a guy who managed to make microchips at home. A follow-up article said, “there’s a small group of hackers more interested in making the chips themselves. What it takes the big guys a billion-dollar fab to accomplish, these hobbyists are doing with second-hand equipment, chemicals found in roach killers and rust removers, and a lot of determination to do what no DIYer has done before”.

I’m not saying their chips were good quality, or those guys will replace factories. But it’s a proof-of-concept. Integrated circuits can be made outside of centralised industry, and that means anything can be.

In the solarpunk world, it’s midway. Not five plucky hackers, not an Intel factory either. Instead an organised guild of 5,000 engineers develop manufacturing techniques. They train makers to set up workshops in every city.

Food production is hyperlocal. Chip Fabrication is merely local: maybe a chip fab for each 1,000,000 person confederacy. Manufacturing is right-sized, not so downsized you lose the ability to do high-tech.

This model requires more labour-time – that’s the downside. But labour is saved in other places, like the absence of bullshit jobs.

To take the word ‘scale’ in a different sense: yes this world just produces less steel, less energy, fewer cars, would have a lower GDP if you measured it. That’s solarpunk. That also saves labour. Building 10 cars in a Local Motors way might be as labourious as 100 cars in a big Toyota factory.

Was there ever serious ecological crisis, locally or intentionally?

Locally yes, e.g. the moa was hunted to extinction. Internationally maybe not.

Also, what do you imagine global population is at? I would guess it’s substantially smaller than our timeline, maybe just one or two billion?

It’s smaller than our timeline, but more than two billion. There are cities: it’s not all hunter-gatherers and farmers.

Did that ever threaten to produce capitalist class dynamics?.. I’d also love to hear about what conflicts did and do exist, what political theories developed around them, and how they were or weren’t resolved… Do pre-capitalist class dynamics persist or were those dismantled, and if so, how?

Conflicts: revenge feuds, and raids. Many cultures don’t have war but do have raiding. Raids are part of Indo-European cultures going back 7000 years. They’re smash-n-grabs that don’t escalate to war. As material conditions get better, agricultural yields go up, the incentive for these go down.

Many traditional societies are classless, while some have slavery, some do not. People from no-slavery cultures find others savage and shocking. Not all slavery is morally equivalent; in some cultures it would be forbidden to use corporal punishment on your slave, or to have sex with your slave.

Globally it’s really egalitarian, but there is a little inequality here and there. Just like it’s overall really decentralised, but with a little centralisation.

Right-o. I should have got that.

thank you

Your links are broken, at least for me

Designing a solarpunk world. I wanted people living within the ecological limits in every biome: arctic, tundra, jungle, sailing the sea, sailing the sky in airships, under the sea in submarines. This last one posed a massive problem because submarines are extremely power-hungry, and that’s incompatible with the low-energy-use theme of the world. But I didn’t want to give up the Zissou vibes by erasing the submarine-tribe.

I was stuck on this for months, then had a breakthrough when I discovered an obscure technology called underwater gliders. They are AES (actually existing submarines) that use hardly any energy, can even harvest enough from ocean thermal differences to cruise the oceans perpetually hanging out with friendly dolphins. The glider system “gives the glider the ability of renewing its onboard energy stores by harvesting environmental energy from the heat reservoir of the ocean, specifically from the temperature differences of the cold deep water and the warmer surface water (available in 80% of the world’s oceans). Ranges of 30 000 to 40 000 km, circumnavigating the world, then become conceivable.”

The existing ones are small drones. But a paper with (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16649-0_12) has a section titled ‘Size effects’ and bigger would be better. And the paper already linked has a whole chapter discussing scaling effects.

That was a great breakthrough because I went from “Submarines are poewr-hungry nuclear behemoths” to “Submarines use basically zero energy” and did it with proven tech. The tradeoff is that you have to glide up and down, and the floor will be at a 4° tilt a lot of the time, which could be annoying.

I am fascinated by the similarities … like how nations formed confederations eg. the Haudenosaunee

Right! Exactly! Three similarities we see over the world –

• Tribal confederacies. The Caledonians in Scotland, various Pashtun confederacies in history, various North American ones.

• Small tribal units and big ones. Among the Mapuche, several lov formed a rehue. Among the Māori, whānau confederated into larger hapū; hapū confederated into larger iwi. Among the Bedawin, several bayt formed a goum.

• Tribal assemblies: þing among the Nordic folk, veche in the Slavic world, sangha in India, becharaa among the Semai, Jirga among the Pashtun

• Community halls or ‘third places’: the mudhif of the Marsh Arabs, the Toguna of the Dogon, Bulgarian Chitalishte, Caravanserai of the desert people

• Managed commons: the tabu of the Hawai’ians, the hima of the Arabs

• Customary law, often with restorative justice: xeer in Somalia, coutume in France, pashtunwali, Albanian kanun. Law without cops of a Babylon-type centralised state.

So I think it’s somewhat valid to generalise that there exists a pattern called ‘tribal’, and then it’s interesting to generalise that to the whole world. Was it historically universal? No of course not, but no other model was either. The Westphalian nation-state emerged and became dominant, I’m imagining what if tribal confederalism became dominant?

I agree

Firstly, thanks for engaging!

I feel like, at first, you need to address a kind of Columbian Exchange. The easiest way to start seems to be Viking contact with the Americas being more in depth, transferring Iron Age technology along with some beasts of burden.

So the horse is native to America. “By about 15,000 years ago, Equus ferus was a widespread holarctic species. Horse bones from this time period, the late Pleistocene, are found in Europe, Eurasia, Beringia, and North America”. One of the tweaks I’m making in the alternate history is that the American horse never became extinct. (In fact, it became extinct in America, was domesticated in Eurasia, and then the domestic version was reintroduced to America.)

There may also need variance in the role of the state and religion in managing the various technae.

This is a world without the Westphalian nation-state. Yknow the way in the boring world, the Westphalian nation-state became the main thing? That didn’t happen here. It is still the tribe. And tribes confederated in a way I didn’t detail yet. As for religion: that’s also different, mostly animist or pagan, never Abrahamic.

Australia

Here’s a cool map of Australia: https://i.ibb.co/PWB1Nhy/map-221445.png

I think Australia could be almost fully hunter-gatherer, because of its low population density.

The trickiest bit about Australia is the architecture. There really doesn’t seem to be much evidence of indigenous architecture. The book ‘Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley: the Aboriginal Architecture of Australia’ gives some attempt.

Australia generally had no class distinction: https://d-place.org/parameters/EA066#1/30/153

And no slavery: https://d-place.org/parameters/EA071#1/30/153 , https://d-place.org/parameters/EA070#1/30/153

People are more nomadic than settled: https://d-place.org/parameters/EA030#1/30/153 (This is generally a difference between the world I’m building and the mundane world; a large percentage of people live nomadic lives, including in North America, Central Asia, etc.)

Nomads move about 14 times a year: https://d-place.org/parameters/B013#1/29/169

Move about 100km a year at the coast, 500km inland: https://d-place.org/parameters/B014#3/-29.38/144.14 (The Gidjingali, to give a counterexample, are a sedentary people, probably because there’s good fishing there)

No money: https://d-place.org/parameters/B033#1/29/169 (This is a major point about the world I’m building; there’s no money. There’s an economic system of duties and perks.)

Possum cloaks: https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/possum-skin-cloak

Bush tucker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tucker

So my version of Australia is mostly nomadic hunter-gatherers, but they have solar panels, batteries, vehicles. When they go on their huntgather walks, they use vehicles like this – in actual fact they made it work with just walking (no wheels), so with a vehicle like that it should work and be easier. Another thing that would be important around the world I’m building, but especially in Australia is airships: they’re solarpunk, use very little energy, don’t require roads.

South America

South America divides broadly into three cultural zones: the Andes where’ve got groups like the Inca, the Amazon where you’ve got groups like the Tupí-Guaraní, and the Southern Cone where you’ve got groups like the Mapuche. Here’s the broad map

Here are two more detailed maps: 1, 2

Generally no class distinction in the Amazon: https://d-place.org/parameters/EA066#1/30/153

Southern Cone people include people of the canoe, the Mapuche with their trademark hats with brims, and people whose lives are tied to llama-alpaca herds.

The Incans had a welfare state and sophisticated agriculture, with lots of root crops: obviously the potato, also other lesser known ones like maca.

Caribbean

Taíno + Arawak + Carib people. They eat the hutie. Mangroves are an important ecosystem

North America

Map of broad cultural areas.

• In the desert southwest, you have people of the pueblo, who live in large stone cities. Chaco Canyon is a pueblo-city corresponding to the conurbation of mundane Vegas, Phoenix, etc. They did lots of underground architecture; in my world you would descend into a stone passage with those vibes to catch the subway.
• On the plains are people of the buffalo. This is the best example of my point that thriving culture requires thriving ecosystems. They are nomadic, following the herds. They can use motorvehicles for this. The ‘chickee’ is a waystation on the plains, and they use it to recharge vehicle batteries, etc. A truck stop, basically. The tribal confederacy is responsible for its upkeep.
• Inuit culture in the far north
• South of that, subarctic people like the Cree, where it’s still cold enough to wear a lot of fur.
• Northwest coastal people such as the Tlingit and Salish are characterised by plankhouses and totem poles.
• East of them (but not as far east as the buffalo-folk) you find sedentary people like the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. Their agriculture is based on the Three Sisters. Their architecture is earth-covered.
• The area around the Great Lakes has people like the Haudenosaunee. They are sedentary rather than nomadic. Saukenuk is a major city. Their architecture is bark-clad longhouses (the size of apartment-buidlings, in my world).
• The mound-builder culture is the culture of the southeast. In the hot parts (Florida) they go about in loincloths. Cahokia is their major city; it’s interesting to think about a 21st-century Cahokia, where city-blocks are mounds, and there are bicycle-lanes between the mounds, and you enter a earth-and-wood tunnel in a mound to catch the subway.
• In California, the acorn is the staple food. You can think of Californian food as fishing+acorns+insects. A weird 1951 paper (doi:10.1525/aa.1951.53.4.02a00050) talks about how Californians had the Protestant work ethic. Here’s a beautiful map of California

Generally no class distinction in North America: https://d-place.org/parameters/EA066#1/30/153

North America is not the population centre of the Americas; central America is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas