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If you just joined one and did stuff, I’d try it, but all the ones close to me demand payment, like it is some holiday retreat. It’s hard to find the real ones within all the hustler noise.
They never last because people change and when you get old enough, it becomes impossible to contribute a “fair share” of effort and generally the people who have been there for years didn’t save up enough money to survive outside of the commune.
Community is however a viable option and is much easier to join and leave
Agreed, I think we should focus on having tight communities and from there creating easy (maybe scalable?) ways to engage in cross community skill sharing, resource sharing, and solidarity
I suggest investing in a local library (lending out tools and more), community gardens and establishing fruit/nut trees all around
well, it depends on the culture of the commune but let’s skip this and i’ll just focus on commune as a tool
if it’s used as a tool for escapism, good but it will never scale and ‘‘everyone should be in one’’ it’s just impossible
if, like i dream, it’s used as a tool to offload work of a group of people to allow them to make better politics because being much more resilient to capital swings, cool af u.u
obviously it’s not binary and what i described it’s not even a model with 2 opposites, but i wanted to focus on these cases
weird in betweens like project kamp are very interesting but I still think they focus too much on the being indipendent rather than using the commune as a tool for “greater” scope.
I think building parallel systems is more important than communes, because communes don’t scale well.
Typically they either are started by cults, turn into cults, get co-opted by cults, or collapse under their own weight.
I’m not joining unless I get to be the cult leader.
Is it the trolley problem, but you’re the one strapped to the rails instead of at the lever? AKA the veil of ignorance tests?
They work best and are most resilient as networks of smaller farms, co-ops, and communities.
Anyone saying they can’t last or support the elderly is ignoring the Amish(among others, but I went with the the first too-big-to-ignore and surviving example that came to mind), and so long as they can support and raise children and young adults, they pass muster vs historical societies in ways that un-bridled capitalism flat-out doesn’t. Same goes for the length of time a given commune lasts - individual farms and villages that last centuries without moving or significant change were far from the rule throughout history and pre-history.
You need semi-independent artisans and experts at the periphery(well, between individual communes, and able to form external/transactional/distant trade/relationships) as an interface and buffer, and even seasonal assistance for things like harvests - scale requires diversification and organic trade/distribution - but for some reason popular imagination all-but-stops at stalinism/maoism vs individual farms.
The whole notion that its a pipe-dream if it can’t scale the same at all levels and from one end of the earth to the other is an unreasonable goalpost used to justify power grabs and the status quo.
I think the real problem isn’t with the pragmatic aspects of scaling, but with sociocultural and interpersonal issues.
What do you do in a small commune when you eventually have 2 people who can’t stand each other, but haven’t committed any offenses that would justify removing one of them, and neither is willing to voluntarily give up the home they’ve built and leave? And what happens when that problem begins to spread?
Personally, if I couldn’t stay friends with both, and there were no one clearly in the wrong, as in currently hurting the community, I would avoid both of them, or even leave the commune if that proved un-workable. I lean more towards skilled labor anyways
Well it’s less about how you would react individually, and more about how the commune as a whole would deal with the internal division.
In small interdependent groups, social breakdowns can cause the entire community to fail, because every member is an essential part of how the community supports itself and there are no backups for any skill set.
The bus factor problem applies if people start refusing to work with each other.
Communities shouldn’t be able to fail like so. Your average stand-alone commune doesn’t get that much bigger than a family-farm. The idea that everyone should have to lock-in to such an arrangement is kind-of toxic.
Don’t approach the problems you’re talking about from the perspective of a serf.
EDIT: On reading your link, you’ve hit upon precisely why I wouldn’t encourage too deep an integration between artisans and single communes. Everyone in the commune should know how to make their commune work and who do go to outside the commune when specific tools or expertise are needed beyond their commune’s residents.
No one person in a commune should be irreplacable or capable of taking the whole thing down in a way that prevents residents from being able to just up and leave.
Nobody said anything about serfdom.
Communities shouldn’t be able to fail like so.
Communities are always able to fail like so. A division between members can absolutely fracture any kind of social cooperation.
Your average stand-alone commune doesn’t get that much bigger than a family-farm.
This isn’t a commune, it’s a compound. Or a live/work arrangement. Or just a cult, depending on how “we’re all family here” they are.
I wouldn’t encourage too deep an integration between artisans and single communes. Everyone in the commune should know how to make their commune work and who do go to outside the commune when specific tools or expertise are needed beyond their commune’s residents.
This isn’t a commune, it’s just a town, or a village.
The whole concept of a commune is self-supporting, self-sustaining and to at least some degree self-contained. Also, frequently, self-absorbed.
No one person in a commune should be irreplacable or capable of taking the whole thing down
The smaller the group is the more inevitable this is. At a very small size (less than 20 people), where the group is dependent on itself for food production, then just the loss of basic labor might ruin the group’s ability to provide for itself.
in a way that prevents residents from being able to just up and leave.
If everyone just up and leaves, what was even the point of forming a commune? Again, what you’re talking about is just a town. A primarily agrarian town maybe, but still just a town.
Congratulations, you missed any notion of nuance and scale in my original comment. A community is indeed much larger than a single commune, in much the same way a village is bigger than a farm.
If a given commune’s members move to another commune, nothing is truly lost. The original commune is down to the two who hate eachother, or one will screw up enough to get forced out before that happens, so what? Eventually, new members will show, or nearby communes will take on the work and any resources no longer being utilized.
Meanwhile, you’re insisting the whole setup requires twenty or so people, hell-bent on being insular and self-sustaining(near impossibilities for long-term survival in Western countries - the Feds will come calling), all under the same roof. These are ALL notions I rejected in my initial comment. A commune, and/or a community composed of communes and individuals/infrastructure hosting multiple communes, is more than a glorified polycule or a cult.
Don’t look to me to defend the effigy you’ve decided to burn in your head. If you read my other comments, I’ve made clear that my own preference is to avoid en-meshing myself in any potentially dysfunctional, singular commune.
If we’re going to extremes, I prefer the Beduins or Travellers to the setups you’re concerned with “disproving” or whatever. Even though I called it a lazy example on my part, there’s good reason I mentioned the Amish originally, and not the Branch Davidians or all the FLDS drama you can watch on TV. If you’re so concerned about Jonestown, stop pretending that’s the only setup out there, or that glorified polygamy with religious overtones is what people want from a commune.
I’m not sure the Amish are a great example of communes taking care of the elderly and disabled. In some communities (the Amish don’t have centralized leadership, so practices vary) it’s basically voted on by the men (and only the men) whether or not it’s worth it to pay for a community member’s medical treatment. If they decide not to, fuckin sucks to be you.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying broadly, I just think the Amish get given too many passes in general and have purposefully cultivated a false quaint image to allow it to keep happening.
Pay for treatment? Like with money?
Yes? Amish people have businesses, they make money.
But why would someone pay for treatment? Isn’t that what taxes are for?
Oh, sorry, I didn’t get you were doing a bit. Although that does now make me wonder if there are Amish communities of any size outside the US, or outside the northeast US even.
Oh, the Amish are quite a good example because they maintain their cohesion through coercion and brain washing.
There’s an argument out there that long lasting communes work out precisely because they require social sacrifices. Meaning that weird rituals and giving things up are what makes them hold together.
The idea is that by making sacrifices, you signal to the rest of the community that you will do your share.
Here’s an older paper on it:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138608
This isn’t 100% accepted by social scientists, though. Some newer papers cast doubt.
If it is true, then the good news is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be Amish-level sacrifices and authoritarian control to get it.
Like I said, it was a lazy example on my part, but the medical care issue is both a failure of society at large, and an issue of triage that remains even in countries that provide free healthcare.
Yes, the male-only voting is its own issue, but whether its them or healthcare professionals alone deciding, privacy issues will prevent such decisions from being entirely fair, transparent, or democratic in almost any setup.
Personally, I’m only so hung-up on privacy as it takes to keep me out of prison, and even that’s still broadly negotiable, but I’m not one to pry or pretend my priorities are for everyone.
I think they’re cool but not viable for the vast majority of peopel.
Me and my partner have been wanting to start/join one for the last decade, but life is complicated and we’re bad at talking to people.
They’re hit or miss, and it’s a lot of miss. My partner’s mother did the hippie commune thing in the early 70s, and she quit when she got super sick and they were all more interested in getting high than getting her to the hospital.
It’s not unlike finding a good D&D group, it’s all about the people involved. Shitty people have the mierdas touch, everything around them turns to shit too.
When I was younger I really liked the idea of communes, but now I think intentional communities are more practical and avoid some of the worst aspects of communes.
The difference, to me, is communes typically collectivize all aspects of life - religion, culture, economy, working for a business owned by the commune and sharing property in common, and so on - and this not only isolates people from the surrounding community, but creates a dangerous power imbalance because of how much power the commune’s leaders hold over every aspect of its members’ lives.
Basically, I think a commune is what you get when you try to run a community like a family. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of abusive families out there.
But communes are only a subset of intentional communities.
In an IC, you don’t have to share in any particular religious or philosophical belief system, you don’t have to give everything you own to the group, you just have to want to live a lifestyle more sustainable and more closely connected to other community members than your average suburb or apartment building.
And you buy into the community and start contributing to common spaces and common meals and that’s that.
You don’t lose your home and family if you criticize the commune’s leader. You don’t have to hide your doubts about the commune’s philosophy for fear of punishment. The community has a bunch of different income sources and doesn’t fall apart if one communal business fails. There’s no charismatic leader who, to give one completely hypothetical example, preys on teenage girls and gaslights their parents into thinking his dick is God’s will. Power imbalances are limited because the power the community’s leaders have over its members is limited.
This distinction between communes and intentional communities is so important - the power dynamics make all the diffrence in sustainability and preventing abuse, plus you can actually maintain your autonomy while still benfiting from shared resources.
@Crazycookie Imo very hard to maintain intergenerationally. Tend to end up with de facto leadership that’s frequently people who like to lead for problematic reasons, even when the premise is consensus.
I dated a guy who spent part of his childhood on [The Farm](The Farm (Tennessee) - Wikipedia https://share.google/Qygnr43R6gFX23nd6) in Tennessee in the '80s, where his mother was a nurse. He said it was like Lord of the Flies, just herds of unsupervised little kids doing whatever they pleased 24/7, and I mean way beyond the latchkey kid stereotype of unsupervised kids, which I was in the '80s myself. He hated it because there were no adults that were really in charge, no discipline when the kids hurt each other, food was scarce, school lessons were a joke, etc.
I think like so many other things, the idea of a commune draws in certain types of people, and some of those people are lazy free-loading assholes. I think they’re a good idea, but the lazy fuckers ruin it for everyone else.
there’s only a very small fraction of communes that actually work and they need very specific people. There’s one I can think of that sells beaded hammocks or something that has actually been successful long term. But who knows that might just be because of a few central figures holding everything together.
it’s more reasonable to reconstruct an old timey village vibe or a family/clan focused community.
personally a commune sounds like my own personal hell. I like privacy and people minding their own business. I wouldn’t mind being surrounded by my close friends though. even then I would probably kill them after half a year if I had to see them every day.
It’s the human version of the most common form of organisation. Lion prides, baboon troupes, bison herds, wolf packs. It’s the same concept: getting together to pool resources and knowledge to have a better life than going it alone. Most of the problems come from human fantasy. It won’t make everyone overflow with rapturous joy every moment of every day. It won’t be a cakewalk. But the collective power of a group of likeminded people working together has a ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ effect. As long as it can be maintained, it’s better quality of life than being alone in the world and freer than being part of a large scale society. Its only weaknesses are the primary reasons so many people don’t live like that: human unsatisfiability and military weakness. Even if you start with a great group, to maintain it you need the next generation and someone always is born or introduced who doesn’t hold the values of the group, and wants the group to change to suit what they want. And if it doesn’t self destruct, its size is limited, and can be conquered by a larger group focused on the values of their ‘leaders.’
Please watch Wild wild country on Netflix. It really is an experience.
