What are y'all thoughts on Communes?

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 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.

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.

The ones I've seen in real life have a tendency to become a bit culty.

I can smell the patchouli from that picture.

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.
- 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?
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:

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.

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.
- 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.

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.

We've been talking with friends about living on a cult-de-sac.

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.

There's some successful communes in the Virginia mountains. Twin Oaks makes great tofu.

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.
- Obligatory.

I think building parallel systems is more important than communes, because communes don't scale well.

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.

Lived communally for years. It really depends on who else is living with you in the community because you must cooperate with them. The system works really well and I recommend anyone try out living in one for a while, but it's very different than living individualistically. That being said it can also work too well and you may find yourself not leaving or interacting outside the commune for weeks or months at a time and falling out of contact with the outside world.

I think they're cool but not viable for the vast majority of peopel.

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.

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.'

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.

If I were in my twenties I would be totally down

This is basically my endgame, but working on on couples/families from our friends who are really up for it.

As long as the commune takes collective action against flannel, I'm in.

But flannel is so practical and cozy. What's your preferred fabric alternative?
- Chambray, French terry, maybe corduroy, depending.