So what is Solidarity Prepping?
From the Collapse Club Library: https://publish.obsidian.md/collapseclub/Prepping/Solidarity+Prepping+-+An+Introduction#Examples
“Being prepared is an antidote to fear. If we are prepared, we have the “ability to act” during a crisis. We are not helpless, at the mercy of circumstances and other people’s actions. We reclaim our agency and our independence. And when we have managed our fear, we can resist the forces of domination and division that threaten to take control of our societies.
Solidarity Prepping is not about an imaginary future when things will “return to normal.” It’s about the present, when our society is collapsing and when crises are appearing with ever-increasing frequency. Being prepared lets us live better today, because we have put our fear to rest. And if a crisis does happen, we can respond better in that moment.”
“The organizers of Kollapscamp, Tadzio Müller and Scully (Cindy Peter), advocate self-education and social organizing among leftists to respond to disasters and political repression. Their program includes skills such as growing food, advanced first aid, off-grid power, radio communications, and self-defense. Most important are the relationships formed while learning these skills. Also, having fun is central to the concept: Kollapscamp included a workshop called ‘Having sex while the world burns.’ See blogs from Tadzio and Scully. [German]”
Solidarity Prepping: Why I Will Keep Explaining What Solidarity Prepping Is.
“Solidarity Prepping is founded on NVDA, Survivalism, Collapse Club, Just Collapse, Sufi philosophy, and Radical Acceptance.”
Core Principles of Solidarity Prepping
Solidarity prepping (or positopian prepping) is a community-focused approach to disaster readiness that emphasizes mutual aid, resource sharing, and long-term sustainability, rather than isolation and self-defense.
Traditional “survivalism” often focuses on individual hoarding and fortifying a bunker against others. In contrast, solidarity prepping operates on the belief that humanity’s greatest asset for survival is cooperation.
- 👥 Mutual Aid: Building strong local networks to ensure no one is left behind during a crisis.
- 🌱 Regenerative Practices: Sharing knowledge on community gardening, seed saving, and water harvesting.
- 🛠️ Skill Sharing: Teaching neighbors medical first aid, amateur radio operation, and mechanical repair.
- 🏗️ Dual-Use Infrastructure: Developing resources that improve daily life today while building resilience for tomorrow.
- 🌍 Inclusivity: Ensuring preparation plans actively include vulnerable, elderly, or disabled community members.
Key Differences in Approach Between Traditional Prepping and Solidarity/Positopian Prepping
| Feature | Traditional Prepping | Solidarity / Positopian Prepping |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Focus | Individual / Family survival | Household/ Neighbourhood / Community resilience |
| Security Strategy | Fortification and weaponry | Social cohesion and trust, coupled with community-based defense |
| Resource Model | Stockpiling and hoarding | Distributed networks and skill-sharing as well as stockpiling |
| View of Future | Sudden Dystopian collapse | Slow deteriorating climate & ecology requiring achievable adaptation |
The key difference between Solidarity/Post-Apocalyptic Preparedness and Mainstream Prepping (with notable exceptions) lies in politics and beliefs. The majority of doomsday mainstream preppers have a preconceived idea that collapse will be sudden and dystopian. They struggle to conceive a slow decline. They largely ignore or dismiss climate change or think it’s BS.
Where to Start
- Meet your neighbors & do a skills audit: Know who has medical skills, tools, and other skills: survival skills, food growing, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, chainsaw operators.
- Map local resources: Identify nearby freshwater sources, community gardens, solar power installations, boreholes.
- Organize tool libraries: Share expensive equipment such as power tools & generators. (NOT Chainsaws).
- Host skill-share days: Identify those who can teach: Survival skills and strategies, Food Growing, food preservation, basic sewing, bike repair. Use public spaces for this.
- Centralize Drinking Water Production: Safe water processing is safer if done centrally based on the Solidarity Prepping Model and by skilled practitioners.
- Learn to Scavenge Resources: I have been scavenging from skips all my life; even now I get food from a Hipster shop skip.
- Identify People with Survival & Search and Rescue Skills: People with survival and search-and-rescue skills in your community group are an asset because they bring a rare level of resilience and resourcefulness.
- Everyone Should Learn First Aid: The entire community should have basic 1st aid qualification
Positopian Preparedness
Everything that Solidarity Prepping Is NOT: “Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet “preppers,” a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7319408/
Solidarity Prepping is the opposite of everything the Far-Right Prepper is. The Solidarity Prepper isn’t just looking for an alternative “to the neoliberal security state”; we live it daily. Mainstream prepping is a consumer pastime, often dependent on gadgets and products that can help them survive a short-term collapse, in the hope that a stronger, more authoritarian state takes control. There is often a disconnect between what they fantasize about and what they can realistically achieve in the paradigm they inhabit. For example: Wanting to live in community off the grid, but being unable to sort out personal differences in the way that hippies seem able to without resorting to violence. They are aware that survival in community is necessary but seem unable to achieve it. They despise wokeness, without seeing that tolerance, diversity, and inclusion help build bridges between people.
Solidarity Prepping: Why I Will Keep Explaining What Solidarity Prepping Is, because it’s important that people ignore the assumptions: “Plucky humans roaming the post-collapse landscape.” (another projection) Not something I have ever advocated, even though I have written posts about it: Post-Agricultural Collapse: Human Survival Is Dependent On Nature Survival, But Will Humans Hunt and Gather?
“While the idea that humans might hunt and gather, in the wake of civilization collapse, might seem romantic, I find this unlikely due to the lack of skill, knowledge, and the resistance to change from diverse corners of society, including those who claim to want radical change but really only want to reform capitalism. Reformed Capitalism, is still Capitalism, whether it is run based on Celtic, Roman, neoliberal, or Marxist Ideas of Capitalist ethics or not. It is more likely that the final days of this civilization’s collapse present any opportunity for human survival; it will be luck whether anyone with the skills to survive will be there to help, and survival will be more a matter of luck than skill.”
As for the speculative science: Our hunter-gatherer future: Climate change, agriculture and uncivilization. “Climate models indicate that the Earth could warm by 3°C-4 °C by the year 2100 and eventually by as much as 8 °C or more. This would return the planet to the unstable climate conditions of the Pleistocene when agriculture was impossible. Policies could be enacted to make the transition away from industrial civilization less devastating and improve the prospects of our hunter-gatherer descendants. These include aggressive policies to reduce the long-term extremes of climate change, aggressive population-reduction policies, rewilding, and protecting the world’s remaining indigenous cultures.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328719303507
I suspect this notion terrifies some people, especially those lacking the most basic skills, like growing food, and now we have to adjust to a new way of growing food to suit the post-Anthropocene climate. A global climate beyond 1.5°C will be characterized by heatwaves every summer, droughts, and an ever-increasing probability of AMOC collapse. AMOC collapse will destroy agriculture in Northern Europe. Any food we grow in Britain post-AMOC collapse will be at a micro scale.
“Being prepared is an antidote to fear. If we are prepared, we have the “ability to act”
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