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There’s some successful communes in the Virginia mountains. Twin Oaks makes great tofu.
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.
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.
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’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.
Honestly, communes are a great idea. And I think communal living and working should be more common. But utopian communes tend to shake out in one of three ways that don’t appeal to most people.
First, they end up religious. Of course, there are the death cults. But better examples might be things like Amish villiages, or jesuit or buddhist monasteries. And if you aren’t religious, these probably won’t appeal to you.
Next are the utopian communes. These tend to be started by overly optimistic young people and hippies with more drugs than sense. They tend to self destruct due to personal conflicts and free rider problems.
Finally, there are the practical communes. These are the ones which survived their utopian phase by learning about having strong boundaries and excluding free riders. However, as the years go on and the utopian energy fades, these communes often end up populated by those who are competent but generally have a dim view of society and their ability to integrate into it. This lack of optimism and desire to chase opportunity leads to these communes being quite poor. And so they limp along on the edge of survival, churning through optimistic young people who come each year, work for the season, and then become disillusioned with the lifestyle. Occasionally one person arrives who threads the needle of competent but disillusioned, and with these infusions the commune can limp a little longer.
The fact is, if you find a group of people who are both optimistic and competent, they will probably also not feel the need to formally make resource or labor sharing agreements, nor to cloister themselves from the world. They will simply function as informal groups of friends who may lend each other help, live together, or start businesses together.
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.
Historically, they almost always involve some kind of sexual shit that ends up being their downfall
How’s this different to anything else ? All religions for example, business and on and on.
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 skilled labor anyways
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
