Description
We are a collective of seven adults and two babies. We have been living in a farm located on Le Plateau de Millevache (700m alt., Limousin, central France) for one year. Some of us grew up in cities, others in the countryside.
The forests that cover the surrounding hills once sheltered one of the first units of the French Resistance during World War II. Fifty years ago, the teacher of a nearby village refused to serve when he was drafted for the War in Algeria. The war memorial in another village is one of the few pacifist memorials in France: after World War I people decided to engrave "Maudite soit la guerre" ("Damned be war") on it. Since then, it's said that people here do not allow themselves to be pushed around. Since the seventies, people have regularly come from cities to settle in this land and try out more autonomous ways of life: shared bulk buying, self-built housing, alternative press, organic farming, cooperative sawmill, diverse sorts of non-monetary exchanges (swap, bartering...), etc.
We are interested in the spirit of these practices for its political content, even if this content is not explicitly stated. The social networks associated with these practices have also been a great help to us in settling in the area.
We draw from it, as we feed it, something to enforce our collective project: we are beginning to obtain autonomy with respect to the capitalist system and the state. For many reasons, the countryside is an appropriate place for this; so we came here. More than food self-production (in the farm there are currently seven goats, four beehives, rabbits and poultry, a big vegetable garden, a bread oven and some of us want to start cow-milk production), we also need to organise on a larger scale for everything that is more difficult or less interesting to produce at home such as clothes, means of transport, books... While necessary, this quest for material autonomy is not for us an end in itself. In variable proportion according to individuals in the collective, the objective is (1) to dismantle the capitalist system, (2) to make it possible to build a life free of the constraints imposed by our integration with the capitalist economic system and by conformity to State rules, (3) to create appropriate conditions in order to free ourselves from reasoning and behaviour embodied by years of education. We have thought out our internal organisation in order to limit personal specialisations and to favour sharing of skills and knowledge. The collective's members rotate the daily tasks (milking the goats, washing up, account keeping, yoghurt and bread making, etc.). Decisions are made by consensus during weekly meetings.
Our move to the countryside is not only politically motivated. It is also a result of discontent about town life: primarily concern about pollution and lack of space. Some of us like to say that concrete is an insulator; it cuts those who live in it off from the source of their means of subsistence (energy, food...). They add that town is not appropriate for life. Our countryside is also a place where there is space to live and a community spirit to make a better life. The way we choose to live allows those who want to, to find a rhythm and a pace of life that suites them. They can fully feel spring starting up and the pause announced by the arrival of winter.
Having said this, many questions still arise. Among them: How do we organise the relationships between individuals, pairs and the collective? What education for the kids? How to get the necessary money without the constraints imposed by the outside world? How to exchange without trading with people close to us? How to balance between our will to avoid personal specialisation on one hand and to ensure quality and continuity in things we do on the other hand?