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.

Most of the cultures in the non-colonial solarpunk universe – written about here, here, and here – are also in your crappy universe. The Merina, the Marra, the Māori are all there – but with more dignity, able to look anyone in the eye as an economic and cultural equal.

Yet technology has also created newer cultures not seen on Terra. These new groups couldn't but follow the only pattern they know: living in mutual aid groups self-sufficiently within the ecological limits.

One such neo-tribe is the Cloud Nomads. Sky Truckers. They emulate the traditional nomadic groups that surround them, but with the new addition of solar-powered airships.

Their ships are solar-powered, taking advantage of the higher solar irradiation found at high altitudes. The typical ship is similar in size to the LCAT60T airship in your universe. That means is has about 60 metric tonnes of lifting power. About 65% of this is for hauling cargo. The rest? That's home. Your home in the clouds. An airship might be home to about 22 people: their bedroom, bathroom, shared kitchen all lightly lifted by a helium-hydrogen mix.

Everything must be light. We love balsa wood. Some furniture is made using tensioned bits of fabric and rope. Light and airy. As a crew member, you are allowed 1000kg (less on some ships) for everything: that's your bed, your water ration, your body, everything. Better bring an e-reader.

We like silk, it's is a part of our lifestyle. From the year 2031 onwards, we start to use a lot of spider silk the biopunk guild has learned how to produce. We use it for clothing and rigging, and in the construction of our ships. Spiders are creatures of the sky.

Karl Marx said: "Trading nations, properly so called, exist in the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, or like Jews in the pores of Polish society."

This world doesn't depend on trade much, yet there is some. Sky Truckers play an important rôle in that trade: bringing goods to spots that aren't easily reached by sea or other means. Other cultures are nearly totally self-sufficient. The Sky Truckers a little less so, they are Marx's intersticial tribe. They are self-sufficient for energy and water, but only half so for food. Cloudmen depend on landlubbers for some food, heavy industry, and of course for their ships to be built. Yet they harvest the food of the sky as much as they can: it would be unthinkable to not feed yourself.

Some cultures live by a sacred river that gives them life. The cultures of the Sahara manage their qanat through the generations. Skymen have no rivers or wells: they live on clouds. Their ships can unfurl a mesh net like the wings of some immense mechanical bat, and fly through a cloud, filling its tanks with the purest of water. (These tanks are only big enough to hold a few days' water: lightness is always on their mind.)

Eat the sky. Ancient Greeks ate lots of species of birds, including mallards, pigeons, blackbirds, larks, sparrows, and cranes.

You idiots hunted the passenger pigeon to extinction but our world did not. They're a reliable food source when our wanderings take us to North America.

We go to Africa in June-August and participate in the quelea hunt with nets deployed from our ships. For small birds, the trick is to remove the head and feet and then cook 'em whole; you can eat the bones 'n' all: just crunch it down! The stewing softens those small bones anyway.

There's also edible pollens in the air, and technology in later eras allowed these to be sucked up efficiently. A high pollen count is 10g per m³ which is really quite a lot of food if you think about it. This PDF says they "found the most pollen at 600 meters" – up in the realm of the Cloud Nomads.

This culture is the least 'permanent' of all cultures in the solarpunk world. Typically, people follow this lifestyle for a few years in their 20s and then go home. It is an exciting life because we travel to festivals bringing equipment in and out, travel to disaster zones delivering emergency aid. We are young, able-bodied people, good with knots and rigging, good with our hands.

The gliders in the cargo deck become lifeboats in the worst-case scenario, but normally they're used on hunting trips. I love to take my glider out from the bottom deck and hunt big game high in the sky. The Southern screamer is an "excellent flier and soarer" and has as much meat as 1½ chickens. (It is eaten somewhat in your dumb universe too.) The most coveted game is the whooper swan, the Canada Goose. Mallards are also pretty good. Radar helps us find game. Eating swans and pigeons might seem weird to you, but it wasn't to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, for example.

The pattern of nested mutual aid groups is universal. Among Bedawin down below on the ground, several 'bayt' form a 'goum'; among the Yolŋu, several 'Ḻikan' confederate into a 'Bäpurru'. Here in the sky, you and your shipmates help each other with cooking and loading/unloading cargo, while your fleetmates support you in other ways. A typical fleet has 28 or 29 airships, each averaging 22 souls. You probably don't have a doctor on your airship with you, but your fleet has a doctor. One ship has the shared Fabrication Workshop (pictured above). One ship has the nightclub.

We can cover 2000km in a day when we need to, or more if the wind favours us. A fleet can haul 1000-1100 metric tonnes (28-29 ships with 30-40 tonnes of cargo). When we show up, we can set up a festival in 72 hours, evacuate 4000 people from a disaster area. That is our power, that is our contribution to the wider world. In return, they provide us the things we can't get in the skies. This agreement is formalised at the highest levels of the democratic federal assemblies.

Our storytelling nights are rich with wild stories of UFOs, as well as tales of the roc and Pouākai. One guy in my fleet claims he has seen the 'jellyfish UAP' you might have heard about.

I've posted about this world before here and here.

It's an alternate history. Colonialism never happened in the first place. The world remained tribal, and traditional cultures remain strong. But 21st century tech develops. There is a lack of capitalism and exploitation.

I downloaded these pics from the multiversal interwebs:

Traditionally nomadic cultures – such as this Australian bushman – remain nomadic in the 21st century. But their lives are made easier by technology. Under capitalism, developing technology keeps some people poor but increases the wealth of a few. In the solarpunk, non-colonial world, people use tools like this off-road tricycle to make their traditional lifestyles easier.

North American cultures follow the still-great buffalo herds. They use offroad vehicles that run on gasified biomass they harvest as they go. These vehicles are no faster than a horse. That guy on the right? I guess he's a tourist from a traditional European country; he's visiting his friends. They'll speak the Esperanto-type language to each other.

This picture was taken in a subway station in Cahokia.

This is a typical sight in the northeast megaregion. This is what the longhouses of the Haudenosaunee people look like in the 21st century.

The fishing cultures of North Europe live within the ecological limits. Some fish are still wild-caught, providing 5-10% of the diet. Others are farmed in open ocean farms. Members of a large (town-sized or city-sized) tribal confederacy have the customary right to harvest from these waters, and manage the wild stock and the farms as a commons.

My post linked above discusses guilds. One guild that exists, alongside doctors, tailors, and microchip-fabricators, is the Soapwitch guild. They have knowledge of local wildflowers, oils, and that sort of thing. Their job is to provide soap, perfume, toothpaste etc. for free to members of their tribe (instead of Unilever and Colgate doing it for profit). It's their tribe's reciprocal obligation to give them food, shelter, protection, etc.

I've had this idea for a while now of a Universe where Earth is destroyed but the Cold War Continues on Humanity's new home, based on the Verse from Firefly. An early point of divergence is the Survival of Salvador Allende and the success of CyberSyn.
No one is exactly sure the cause of the End of the Earth, only that for the two decades proceeding Humanity's exodus the planet was wracked by increasingly devastating volcanic and seismic activity. In the 80's scientist across the globe began looking for a place to flee, to save even a fraction of humanity from the intensifying devastation. The System was discovered during this period, a massive compound Solar System consisting of 5 giant suns orbited by a dozen proto-stars each in turn orbited by nearly a hundred planets and twice as many moons. News of this discovery led to the race to send Humans to The System. Three projects began development under NATO, The Warsaw Pact, and The Non-Aligned Movement. These massive vessels were built over nearly a decade a assembled in Orbit. An agreement was made to limit the number of original colonists of each ship to 10,000, with more ships to come in the future. No more would ever come. The technology of the time meant the journey to The System would take about 57 years to complete. Generations would be born and die aboard the ships, never to see The System. The worlds that each ship finally touched down on were inhospitable worlds with only the ingredients for one day supporting life. The original shelter of mankind in The System was made of deorbited pieces of their original ships, the hab blocks, reactors, hydroponics and more forming the original Arcologies on the worlds. Here the long work of Terra forming began. For the next 300 years Humanity explored and expanded across The System. the new home worlds of Unity (NATO now known as the Union of Planets), Rebirth (NAM now known as the Rebirth Accord) and Cradle (Warsaw Pact now known as the New Peoples Republic) were turned into Shirtsleeve worlds requiring no survival gear. Each faction began colonizing other planets and moons in The System, while each of the large asteroid belts surrounding the home worlds became home to large "belter' communities. Each faction maintained contact with Earth despite the decades their messenger probes took to reach Earth. Conditions on Earth continued degrading with more and more sporadic communication until 280 years after arrival the last probes to ever arrive from Earth spoke of Apocalypse and Upheaval. This began the "No-Contact" Era becoming year zero of the standard calendar. Around 70 NC each faction had made contact with the other two. While originally met with celebrations on many of the worlds of The System, this would be the beginning of the competition and strife in The System.

Thank you for reading my Infodump , if you have any questions or comments they are welcome.

In many ways the world of Muzhchina LA Mushina is about domination and subservience, both on a national level and on a gender level. But what I haven't talked about a lot here is the interpersonal level and the lives of those who inhabit this world.

Helene Batova is a slightly above average Burgunian who suffers under their political system. She's obviously very proud, but also cold to those around her. She thinks of herself as very mature yet often acts rashly, like when Pierre was grating on her with his enthusiasm for aviation. Deep down she did not really believe Andre's accusations against him, yet she cut off all contacts with him anyways. As she matures she constantly believes herself to have finally become a responsible adult, yet constantly learns that she's still far from grown.

In what has to be one of the least kinky aspects of MLM she eventually keeps Andre, now her lover, on a leash, as if to secure her control over him. She is only fooling herself and doing a poor job of it; Andre's power over her and the abuse he inflicts gradually breaks her in the years following her disconnection with Pierre. She could move to the Orenland occupation areas to find a life where she would be respected for her sex, yet her blind nationalism without being able to see through class relations chains her to Burgune. Even so she eventually manages to build her prototype of an aircraft, but ends up crushing both of her legs on her test flight due to sabotage that was aimed at Pierre, no less. Even when he takes care of her during her recovery, she can't find it within herself to love him because of what she's driven between them herself.

In contrast Zhigao is a much happier woman, from Xibei, which is basically China. While her entire family is dead, and she's heavily injured when she barely escapes to Burgune with the skin on her back, she's happy. According to her philosophy, as long as she's done the best she could, then there's no reason for her to lament her fate. And she still has plenty of loved ones to cling to: Fang Zheng (her boyfriend, still in Xibei and alive due to smoothened relations between the NPA and monarchy), and Pierre as well as his friends. Of course, she's a very sloppy person in her daily life, though determined (seen through the handkerchief she sewed with Zheng's name that Pierre finds while she's semi-conscious off the train), and she semi-secretly desires to be taken care of. And the young men and women she organizes with are truly her friends who would (and did, when she first was ordered to escape to Burgune due to her age) die for her, while many of Helene's 'friends' are quick to abandon her, if not outright manipulative.

At least during the first half of MLM, the culture within the NPA is much more open, with outright revolutionary factors flourishing, while Burgune is a typical conservative monarchy with a heavily oppressive society, weak to outsiders but harsh to its own citizens. Just through these two women alone, it's easy to see how big of an influence where you've grown affects the characters.

The living memory of Saerdastia is one of war and revolution, cataclysm and plague and famine, great upheavals, genocide, unrest, and incredible wonders unlike any seen by prior generations. The youth of today, those born after the establishment of the Age of Peace, do not recall the cruelty and folly of the nobles, their short-sighted and petty ambitions, the horrors of the great wars that followed, the hunger, the chaos, the rage, the despair. They are told to remember those who paid the price of mortal ambition, and who paved the way for the time of plenty and stability they know now, but it's different, remembering, rather than simply seeing it in a mirror.

The simple times before, messy though they were, were slow-paced and predictable. The rich hoarded their riches, wars were waged, crops were grown, trade and commerce flowed, all the various mortal races found ways to coexist even as they clashed. All know the legends of the ancient times, the elves who enslaved everyone with their ordered magics and machines that performed wonders on command. They're told of the rebellion, when the primitives rose up as one and chased the elves into their cities, who hid behind their glowing shields and never came out again. The elves are gone, and so are their glowing shields, but their cities remain, and the wreckage of their machines besides. It was a humble alchemist's assistant who first saw the potential in something as simple as a child's toy, a floating pentad of crystal spheres arranged within the empty space of a simple wire cradle. A curiosity his master had acquired in a card game. The balls would clack together, the force of the first transferring to the last, setting up a physical chain reaction that reversed this and then repeated it, all without the spheres losing their levitational force.

His master disregarded this, the story goes; he was in pursuit of the philosopher's stone, after all. A much more noble pursuit. The apprentice grew frustrated, and fled in the night, stealing the cradle toy and a number of other elven artifacts and lab equipment besides. He studied the crystals, made of aerynite, a curious alchemical substance known for its odd magical storage properties, but it was, like the toy, largely seen as a curiosity, too fickle for much practical use.

The elves clearly knew better. He studied its properties, figured out how to align their structures in the way the elves had, and eventually, he found a way to control the storage, release, and transformation of the essences within. Inside of a year he had a functional levitation engine, and knew how to build more. Knowledge of his devices spread, and he grew rich, and richer still selling his findings to others, allowing this technology to proliferate. Other techniques arose from experimenting with the crystal's properties, and those of the elven machines.

Alchemists and magi were able to reverse engineer many of the elves' incredible wonders: crystalline aerynite-infused "sprites" that levitated matter and manipulated essence to perform a variety of tasks, programmed by elven command glyphs; humanoid golems and flying mechanical scarab spies they could slot into to manipulate from afar; magic mirrors capable of showing flat images and eventually three-dimensional illusions near-indistinguishable from the real thing, and crystal needles that stored these images and sounds; greater and more powerful levitation engines capable of carrying massive airships; scrying devices that could see through solid matter; speaking stones that carried voices instantaneously over great distances; energetic shrouds like bubbles that could be adjusted to hinder or halt light, sound, or matter; weapons like lightning casters and fire sprayers, ice bombs, gravitational reversers, flensing rays that strip away matter layer by layer, cutting beams, and other horrible things barely understood but all-too-eagerly wielded by would-be conquerers and religious crusaders.

The result was predictable: widespread war and upheaval. Kingdoms smashed into each other, consolidated, slaughtered one another, and eventually the noble class started to shrink. Knights were torn to shreds by new weaponry, and martial prowess gave way to conscripted peasants with lightning scepters and flensing cannons in hand, often as dangerous to themselves as the enemy.

Society rapidly evolved in its wake. Mages grew wise to the rules of science and experimentation, constantly seeking an edge over enemy kingdoms. New theories of economic function and development, ways to exploit natural resources, manufacturing, labor exploitation, and exciting new social theories to justify slavery and ethnic cleansing. The most notorious innovator was a necromancer lord so vile his name was struck from history books, and all needle recordings of his experiments on living prisoners, corpses, and undead (mindless and otherwise) are classified and kept out of circulation. Still, he revolutionized medicine, introduced cell theory and germ theory, and discovered methods of limb replacement and rapid healing that are still used to this day. He also developed the method of breaking the Holy Church's anti-undeath protection that they bestowed upon their loyal soldiers, which was instrumental in shattering the loyalty of their ranks and ending their multi-front genocidal holy war. Too late to save the hobgoblins, or most of the orcs and goblins, but it was enough for the dwarven corporate lord to sweep in and wipe them out to seize their mines and treasuries.

The abuses heaped upon the lower classes reached a breaking point. Bit by bit, a revolutionary coalition formed among defectors from various armies. Conditions deteriorated for decades before finally, those who would eventually become known as the Keepers of the Peace gained a pivotal edge when they seized control of the Thunderhead fleet of ships; nightmarish iron-clad flying vessels covered in rods and prongs that manipulate lightning, mobile hurricanes capable of leveling cities with enough concentrated power. This gave them the edge needed for lesser cells to successfully revolt and begin the Great Purge, hunting down any of noble blood and those who served them willingly, eventually fully wiping out all the nobles. Victory was bittersweet; the continent lie in ruins. Farmland was destroyed and unusable far and wide. The druids had gathered their strength and summoned a massive intelligent bed of brambles, which strangled the city of a king who had cut down a sacred forest, tearing out and devouring the minds of those who choked to death on its thorns. The brambles grew massive and they remained hostile to any who would approach, blaming all for the horrors inflicted on nature. A massive maelstrom of never-ending lightning tore apart anything that tried to approach the northern sea. The Necromancer left behind the Deadlands, a peninsula that is all that remains of his self-destructed kingdom. Anything dead there rises up and tries to kill the closest living thing it can sense. The walls keep people out and the land and skies are regularly cleansed, but most people don't want to think about how the borders are still growing by a half-inch or so every year. Nomadic peoples fled to the cities; races that once had bitter blood feuds were forced into close quarters, the peace kept by the revolutionaries who'd killed the nobles and now struggled to keep order in the wake of the wars.

The wars wiped out half the population. Famine and plague and banditry wiped out half of those who remained. In the end, it was the magi who saved everyone, and thus bought their absolution for their part in destroying the known world. Time manipulation was another weapon that had been used in the war, but they created a system of machinery that was able to simulate a closed loop of cultivation at rapid speeds. In this way they were able to rapidly grow at first only mushrooms, but soon enough actual staple crops and eventually even fruit and spices and simple, small animals for meat. The famine was done with practically overnight, and rebuilding began. The Maelstrom and Deadlands are being contained, the repopulation and rebuilding efforts have been ongoing for several decades now. Various societies are adjusting to the aftermath.

The Demodocians (bat people) who fled underground are emerging again, the Dzeturi (bug people) have ceased their extreme isolationism and settled their own internal turmoil enough to function, trade, and slowly restart immigration. The orcs and goblins have joined together as a single nation with widespread and disparate holdings, and pride themselves on having many children. But many orcs and goblins live among the humans and dwarves and halflings and kobolds, who tend to keep to the walled city-states, working in factories or time farms. The druids expand the brambles and accept refugees, and maintain an easy truce with the Keepers by securing lands to restore to their natural state, a process that will take centuries. The Keepers recruit from all walks of life but tend to draw heavily from orcish, human, and dwarven stock. Orcs, humans, goblins, and halflings regularly mix families together, something almost unheard of in prior generations. But nowadays, everyone knows all too well that everyone is simply a Mortal; everyone dies. They've seen it. And they try to impress this upon their children and grandchildren, but among Mortals, old habits die hard. Wealth begins to accumulate, cruelties are tolerated, racial divisions fettered with sputtering feuds over wealth ignite despite laws mandating an end to racial war. The world is messy, as it always was, but at least there's no nobles now. It's a brave new world, there's capital to be made and opportunities to seize. There's no way people will repeat old mistakes.

so i had a dream where a group and i were magically summoning like, liquid stone and by-hand forming it into walls--this is clearly half-baked and inefficient--so how would YOU make or enhance construction processes using magic, sci-fi technology, or fictional materials?

Once you learn how to understand and apply historical materialism and break out of capitalist canards like the myth of barter, it becomes much easier to come up with the things that make societies feel evolving, nuanced, and alive: internal struggles, subcultures and countercultures, political movements, economic bases, social mores and customs. That, plus having a variety of real-world examples to draw from to avoid falling into the trap of capitalist realism.