The thread is lost; the labyrinth is lost too. Now we do not even know whether we are surrounded by a labyrinth, a secret cosmos, or random chaos. Our beautiful duty is to imagine that there is a labyrinth and a thread. We will never find the thread; perhaps we find it and lose it in an act of faith, in a cadence, in sleep, in the words that are called philosophy or in mere and simple happiness.
Borges (The Conspirators)
Hebra is a free, egalitarian and anti-authoritarian community, built on the foundations of solidarity, self-management and direct contact with the earth, where the main thing is the human group and the least is the architecture. Our objective is not to share a flat or building, it is the social revolution. That is why Hebra is neither a housing cooperative nor a cohousing project, but a community life project where we experiment with the conviction that horizontal relationships and solidarity among comrades are the basis from which the world is changed.
Our idea of revolution takes shape in the political aspect, in a society without a State, without hierarchies or institutions based on electoral representation, and in the economic aspect, in a self-managed society in which both the means of production and the product of work are common goods and each person gives according to their capacity and takes according to their needs. There can be no equality in any society if some rule over others, nor if some have more resources than others.
But there can’t be truly transforming projects if there is no emotional union between those who carry it out. Intergenerational coexistence in communities like Hebra is the means of cultivating those primordial relationships -affectivity, love, care- without which these tranforming projects are irremediably dehumanized.
In short, Hebra is a double-edged sword:
a) on the one hand, it serves to realize ourselves completely as persons, to satisfy all our individual needs, not only material but also psychological, affective, etc., within a community free of authoritarianism, competitiveness, consumerism, sexism, exclusion and other capitalist scourges.
b) on the other hand, we use it for combat, almost as a chemical weapon. We pretend to be contagious, to expose with facts that there is another real and tangible way of live and transform and that the practical example is like a virus reproducing itself all over the world.
This is not to say that we want incessant clonations of Hebra. Nothing would be more monotonous and boring. Nor do we want unlimited growth of Hebra. In fact, we have set ourselves a limit of one hundred people. Our idea of a new society would be an immense network of free communities and autonomous projects freely associated with each other and linked to each other by free agreement. A self-sufficient whole that is recognized in the interdependence of the parts, solidary, involved in the struggles against all authority and all injustice, recoverer of all the positive that humanity has invented and surpasser of all the negative.
Hebra is, deep down, only what its name indicates, a simple thread that will have to join many others in a universal network that will tear down this selfish and miserable society in which we live to replace it with the new one.