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

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.

Typically they either are started by cults, turn into cults, get co-opted by cults, or collapse under their own weight.

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

@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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.