What are your thoughts on Bolo’bolo? Is it well known in your circles?

To me, it’s one my literary and theoretical bases that I keep coming back to. Sometimes just to skim trough it and dream :D I see enourmous potential there.

While I know quite a few people that know the book - or at least of it -, it feels like it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

  • WuxinGoat@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I also think that bolo’bolo should be more widely read. It’s really well written and really thinks through how an alternative society could work, it often feels like an Ursula Le Guin book to me. It’s critique of both capitalism and state communism as the Work Machine is pretty great.

    I think its spot on about the size of community that’s best for humans (a few hundred), and I like that each bolo is based around some guiding principles, I often think that’s important for a community to stick together.

    It’s obviously not perfect or an exact blueprint but its great food for thought and I wish other plans for alternate societies were worked out in engaging detail like bolo’bolo

    • awa@midwest.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      P.M. has also written several novels! I not sure whether any were or are being translated.

      For those who speak German: I really enjoyed the ‘Die große Fälschung’-series.

  • danteScanline@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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    1 year ago

    It’s a classic but i’m also a critical enjoyer. I enjoy it on two levels: It’s kind of practical! A lot of it sounds pretty reasonable, seems to be in line with how i see people working together and the pressures of economics wrecked by distributed mass action. But I also enjoy it as a fantasy story, one person’s mad dream with lots of humor and absurdity built in. Having a timeline for the creation of your utopian society taking less than 10 years and mapping it all the way a thousand years into the future with the breakdown of that society is somehow cosmically funny.

    That said there’s also a lot I don’t like now that i’ve read more theory and criticism from people outside central europe. a lot of the ideas he has are kinda primitivist / of the noble savage. as mentioned somewhat in his updated notes there’s a lot of odd ideas about ‘other cultures’ outside of the A/B deals, aka the “the third world”. There’s some weird colonial white guy attitudes in there.

    Also the idea that people couldn’t be excludable from bolos is very dangerous, radical scenes have huge problems with rapists and other abusers maintaining strong positions for years because of rape culture attitudes very much still present in our larger culture. It’s a rough complex thing to deal with but it’s surely not going to get better if you can’t even ask that your abuser be kicked out of the group home you share.

    Still, there’s some banger quotes:

    Reformists tell us that it’s short-sighted and egoistic to follow just one’s own wishes. We must fight for the future of our children. We must renounce pleasure (that car, vacation, a little more heat) and work hard, so that the kids will have a better life. This is a very curious logic. Isn’t it exactly the renunciation and sacrifice of our parents’ generation, their hard work in the ’50s and ’60s, that’s brought about themess we’re in today? We are already those children, the ones for whom so much work and suffering has gone on. For us, our parents bore (or were lost to) two world wars, countless “lesser” ones, innumerable major and minor crises and crashes. Our parents built, for us, nuclear bombs. They were hardly egoistic; they did what they were told. They built on sacrifice and self-renunciation, and all of this has just demanded more sacrifice, more renunciation. Our parents, in their time, passed on their own egoism, and they have trouble respecting ours. Other political moralists could object that we’re hardly allowed to dream of utopias while millions die of starvation, others are tortured in camps, disappear, are deported or massacred. Minimal human rights alone are hard to come by. While the spoiled children of consumer society compile their lists of wishes, others don’t even know how to write, or have no time to even think of wishes. Yet, look around a little: know anybody dead of heroin, any brothers or sisters in asylums, a suicide or two in the family? Whose misery is more serious? Can it be measured? Even if there were no misery, would our desires be less real because others were worse off, or because we could imagine ourselves worse off. Precisely when we act only to prevent the worst, or because “others” are worse off, we make this misery possible, allow it to happen. In just this way we’re always forced to react on the initiatives of the Machine.

    • awa@midwest.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      Bolo‘bolo is a alternative - some might say utopian - social structure, that was layed out by P.M. in the 80s. In a nutshell the concept they offer/have developed aims for autonomy, diversity and resilience through a (voluntary) network of autonomous and (semi-)selfsustaining communities (‚bolos‘), each of the bolos being their own cultural entity. They do this however in a really interesting way, which - to me - makes it pretty unique: They coin new concepts (i.e. ‚bolo‘ and ‚ibu‘) instead of using established terms (‚community’ and ‚individual’) and thus break with the old assumptions these terms carry. This approach makes it way easier to approach than the topic might suggest. Readers will most likely note though, that it was written in the 80s, as much of the critique of the status quo is pointed towards disciplinary societies rather than societies of control.

      • vxnxnt@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Sounds pretty interesting, but honestly it just sounds like regular anarcho-communism to me. Maybe it’s a good introduction though?

        • awa@midwest.socialOP
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          1 year ago

          I understand your view, I think. It might be caused by my brief summary though. Bolo‘bolo differs from ‚traditional‘ anarcho-communism - at least as I understand it - in a key aspect. Or maybe it specifies traditional an-com?

          Besides the new terminology, which allows a fresh approach, I see the difference in the diversity/flexibility of social organizations within the bolos (internal organization may or may not align with traditional an-com notions like collective ownership etc.) as well as these organisations ‚fluidity‘ over time. Each ibu and every group of ibus is/are free to choose their own ideology and value systems. To me this is an interesting approach to solve the tensions individual/community. What fascinates me, is the pragmatism the concept shows by allowing for diverse communities with different internal arrangements to coexist and interact.

          If you know any theorists you advocate this approach, please share :)

          And also its just fun to read and discover whats behind all those new terms :D

          • vxnxnt@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            That definitely sounds intriguing. Their concept of diversity and flexibility also sounds a lot like the idea of free association. In any case, the book definitely sounds worth a read!

            If you know any theorists you advocate this approach, please share :)

            Honestly, I’m not that well read in anarchist theory, other than a surface level understanding. I do plan on reading a lot more though! Kropotkin, Berkman, Rocker and Malatesta are already on my reading list.

            • awa@midwest.socialOP
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              1 year ago

              You are correct. ‘Free association’ is indeed a central element of bolo’bolo. Bolo’bolo tries it assist the freely associated ibus and bolos by providing a framework for structuring and scaling their respective organizations. It also considers linguistic and other cultural elements, which the concept of ‘free association’ - as I know it - doesn’t necessarily do.

              EDIT If this topic interests you, you might want to add Murray Bookchin to your reading list. His philosophy is pretty close to Bolo’bolo and highly relevant in the present climate crisis.