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If people can make it work for them, good on em.
If you’re considering it, maybe study some of those past attempts. Try to reason through the conditions and contradictions they faced, both material and interpersonal.
But, also, that don’t scale. I am a 21st century ape, just one cell in this organism called city. I don’t know how else to exist. There’s no folding this back in the bag it came in. Hundreds of millions of people aren’t just gonna start living agrarian lifestyles.
I’d like for this thing I am a part of to not be a parasite on the natural world, to strike some homeostasis within the overall biosphere before we totally tank it. Can we do that? Is it possible? That’s the really interesting question, as far as I’m concerned.
Maybe we can’t. Maybe “modern” ends, whethere all at once or the long drawn out decline over several generations. I’m fairly sure whatever happens after that, people will find some new/old/synthesized way to live. But for now, some of us have toilets. I think it would be nice if everyone could have toilets. And everyone’s children and everyone’s children’s children could also have toilets.
Please watch Wild wild country on Netflix. It really is an experience.
I can smell the patchouli from that picture.
The ones I’ve seen in real life have a tendency to become a bit culty.
I dislike the all or nothing aspect of a lot of them. It is hard enough to nail a single aspect of life. So imho it is better to have different groups for different aspects. As in you might have a housing co-operative, a co-operative work place, a utility co-operative, a bike sharing group and so forth. That makes it possible to not go and avoids being stuck in a group, which you really do not like. As in it is much easier to move to another place, then to do that and find a new job, organize transport and so forth.
this is my take on it too.
I don’t see why a group of people can’t pool resources and lvie collectively around shared values while also participating in many of the morrundane aspects of modern life.
like. Why couldnt half of the commune leave to go work and come back? And even if people sre living communally, how communal does it need to be, reslly?
I am not super knowledgeable on the subject but the little i know seems to indicate that there are always pepple that dont pull their weight - and maybe that is one of the big problems here? Trading the oppressive weight of obligation from contemporary urban living for the weight of obligation fron a more intimate communal setting seems very tit for tat.
then again I really don’t have much knowledge here. just observations from the outside.
Some communes do have members who work regular jobs. Ganas (new york) has many members who work outside the commune, as well as a number who work within it.
A few others I know of also have members who work regular jobs. Feel free to ask me more. I lived and worked at 3 communes, 2 co-ops, and have visited about 5 other communities.
this guy communes
We’ve been talking with friends about living on a cult-de-sac.
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.
There’s some successful communes in the Virginia mountains. Twin Oaks makes great tofu.
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’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.
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.
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.
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 the sort-of skilled labor I mentioned before as belonging at the periphery 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.
Many people love the idea but many people want the community to be how they think it should be and get annoyed about the community as it is and rage quit.
I lived at a couple, they have issues. Imagine being with roommates that you don’t agree with, but can’t change anything about it because of politics.
It amazed me how small non profit land projects could have such crippling bureaucracy.
My advice: know the people you will be living with for a long time, before you try.
They really need a leader and some basic rules imo. I’ve lived in communities too and they seem to attract lazy mooching types. I’d love to live in a functional one but I’ve yet to see that happen.
Odd how co-ops only work when people co-operate.
Leader was an archetype that was projected on certain volunteers. While there were rules, there were not clear outcomes after people broke them.
There were a few mooches when I was involved, but after I left they got high speed Internet, and now they have taken over.
I think the best chance is after civilization collapses. If you depend on each other to survive, that might stop the peak drama and petty interactions.
I’d like to in theory, but I have severe debilitating OCD, and I just don’t think I would be compatible with such a lifestyle.
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.
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.
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.
