I keep wanting to form some kind of housing cooperative for people seeking refuge from abusive situations, seeing as how there's currently fuck-all meaningful resources for adult survivors of childhood abuse. I know that despite this being completely nonviolent, legal, voluntary, and well-intentioned operation, that most people won't care or will actively support when some extremists decide to infiltrate and sabotage that effort. Manufactured consent and all. Why does nobody else do things like this? What has prevented the vast majority of other American leftists from simply crowdfunding their own communes, leaving the larger economy, and building their own means of production so that they aren't dependent on the rest of the world for permission to build systems of mutual aid?
Uhh, the big one is that it's very costly and once you've sunk your money and resouces in, it's hard to get out. Like if you decide you actually hate those people how do you get all the money you put in out so you can pay for a new place? You don't. You're sol. You're stuck.
This isn't necessarily from the US system, but I've known people from attempted communes. They often fall into a problem of turning into cults.
Internal security is often a bad problem too, like you said you wanted to provide resources for survivors of childhood abuse, but communes aren't immune to that issue if children are involved. You need tight internal security in order to prevent abuse from occurring, especially because people can build up dependencies inside of communes.
But yeah, out of the three people I've known who were in communes, all three turned into cults and that doesn't seem to be an anecdotal issue from stuff I've read. I guess there's just something about the conditions right now that lend themselves towards cult formation when you've got a bunch of people who deliberately cut themselves off from society. You have to get people to believe in something greater than themselves and come together to do real things together, real and difficult things, like actual work of building houses, doing agriculture, waste management. Actual jobs without the normal western capitalist promise of money or security. You're telling people they're starting from the absolute bottom of society, and will possibly stay there as long as they live there. And so you're going to attract either weirdos or people interested in some project the commune is doing, like I don't know, solar power or some type of bean cultivation.
I know it's not scientific or precise to say communes attract weirdos that are more prone to become cultists, but that's been my primary experience with them. It's hard to get people corralled and cooperating unless they've got a good reason to be there, or at least a reason they can believe in.
Also, people who have serious disabilities or medical issues that require dependency on the capitalist healthcare system? They're by default not going to be interested in commune living.
To add onto this, turning into a cult becomes more likely the more you are physically isolated from mainstream society, and the more sudden and stark the change from nonmember to member is.
Turning into a cult becomes WAY more likely if there is an official religious affiliation.
Plus, at least in my experience, a lot of these projects have one or two charismatic people who are holding the whole thing together, and if they don't accidentally a cult the whole thing falls apart if they lose interest.
The more people who are involved in the community's executive functions, the more stable it is. :kropotkin-shining:
I've never met anyone whose commune project succeeded or lasted more than a few years. Housing coops where the residents own the building but don't have to like each other seem to be much more successful.
Back in the days of Marx and Engels this was known as Owenism and there's a critique of it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It has been tried, including in the US.For a more modern critique check out https://kites-journal.org/2021/11/01/revolution-has-vanished-replaced-with-fantasies-of-dual-power-counterpower-base-areas-abolition-and-other-bottom-up-bourgeois-democratic-illusions/Basically you can't just cut yourself off from the capitalist system, and trying to create cooperative structures that coexist outside of capitalism just turns into better conditions inside the system for the members of your coop while dampening revolutionary consciousness. When you try to turn those structures into revolutionary vehicles they run into problems.edit: oops damn shouldn't have posted the mutual-aid-isn't-communism take in the c/mutual_aid, that's what I get for sorting by new
Honestly, I don't want it to be a revolutionary vehicle for the whole system, I'd rather just help people escape -- and if we can prove firsthand that mutual aid works and we can insulate society against manipulation and power grabbing, maybe normal people would see it as a possibility for once. I think our country is bound too tightly by its shared cultural mythology to do anything meaningful. Expecting to fix the whole world, seems to me like a fool's game. Even while people recognize the abuses of the economic upper class, their minds are closed to understanding the cultural upper-class, composed of successful psychopaths and their sycophants leading everyone else by the nose. Such a culture cannot be fixed, you can only help people escape and survive until everyone else's illusion collapses sufficiently for them to adapt to the danger they were unwilling to see, which may not even be possible on a large scale in today's world.
You would have thought 10 years ago, that if everyone learned the most powerful people in the country, the ones who lead politicians, were involved in CSA / trafficking, everyone would lose their shit and force the system's hand to at least assert this one basic moral expectation -- right? Turns out that is not the case. They can manufacture consent for everything up to and including that. It's a lost cause at that point. There is no future in trying to convince people who don't wanna be convinced or helped imho
Reading the article, it looks like the main criticism is that this sort of work doesn't directly help the revolution. If you're planning to do this just to help people you should be fine, it probably won't help bring about communism but you will be helping real people that need help and need it now.
But if you agree that such activity isn't building for the revolution and still decide that's what you should really be spending your time on, then you are a liberal.
Well not all of us can be as pure a leftist as you are. I look forward to seeing your progress in building communism.
Bro I'm just asking you to join us figuring out the right approach. You don't have to be defensive about the fact we don't have a vanguard party yet, but pretending that we can just keep doing what hasn't worked before is just not the way to go.
Neither is calling someone a liberal because they want to create a democratically run commune for people in need. That's way too much direct action for a liberal and requires a ton of work and any knowledge gained on living sustainably with a group of like minded people would be useful to any revolutionary group, especially when things are in flux post revolution when things will probably be very precarious. While it may not be building the revolution, there are things that can be done to support it: if everyone is busy building the revolution you'll starve to death after it happens
Calling attention to people's errors in thinking and inviting them to change their mind is often considered by communists to be a pretty important part of combating liberalism and generally a good thing.
I don't know what to call it if you think that I shouldn't critique a strategy Engels critiqued in the 1800s. Maybe I should just wish you luck with your own strategy.
I agree it's a good thing to discuss what can be done to create a revolutionary environment and to think about the pro's and con's of different kinds of actions. I don't think it's productive to dismiss something outright because there are historic critiques of such an action, especially in environment those critiques were not made in.
I'll admit I don't read as much theory as I should so I don't have primary knowledge, but I can't imagine that communists in history would call alienated folks seeking to live together and pool their skills and labor to support themselves in a system that has cast them aside counter revolutionaries. Especially if the alternative is to maintain ideological purity by living on the streets and accomplishing just as little for the revolution while also punishing their bodies and not gaining any useful skills for after a government is toppled and society becomes very different
Much of Engels' work drew directly on Lewis Henry Morgan as a primary source.
Between that and how we have made informative advances in biology and psychology and sociology, I will drag Engels day in and day out, thank you very much.
A vanguard party has failed many times, especially in the imperial core, where the capitalists in power have been absolutely running circles around democratic-centralist orgs for 80 years.
There's a big difference between "has not worked before" and "cannot work". You cannot make a universal argument based on critically limited empirical evidence.
The other thing about the vanguard party approach is that it demands proletarians to dedicate their lives to something that there's no guarantee they'll see the payoff from. It's the riskiest investment, with a low expected value. With the communization strategy, you erode the territory and reach of capitalism, and while there's still a big question of how to tie the whole movement together as a revolutionary force, this is a challenge rather than an impossibility.
I don't agree that "such activity [building communes] isn't building for the revolution". In fact I think that revolutions don't just happen because of "heightened contradictions", they happen because there are social networks in place and resources and capacities built up to make the push when an opportunity presents itself.
I was being condescending not defensive. I'm well aware of the many failings of western leftism.
join us figuring out the right approach
Fine, I'll bite. Who's "us" that I should be joining. What US leftist organization are you a part of that is currently figuring out the right approach?
I don't think there's a national organization that's figuring out the right approach, but everyone can be critical of what they're doing and try to push their orgs in the right direction or pull the best members into something better. I'm also not in the right location to work with them but I think the work of Dare to Struggle in New York is a step in the right direction and something for aspiring communists to learn from.
https://daretostrugglenyc.org/2022/12/25/summation-of-dare-to-struggle-fall-2022-jacob-riis-water-crisis/
I don't think so? If revolution turns out to be unfeasible due to the speed of modern technological advancement fueling pre-existing power structures, and betterment by reform is off the table due to the mounting power of propaganda, leftists need to be more creative about their praxis. Creating a lifeline for migrants and refugees to get back up on their feet and live within an economically democratic community seems like the only praxis that can help anyone, based on what I've seen.
I think arguing that revolution is impossible so we should just focus on helping right some of the most egregious wrongs, also counts as liberalism...
We can work towards revolutionary change, but the fact is your entire life will go by and you will never see a real revolution. Waiting for revolution is the leftist equivalent of waiting for the day Jesus returns to earth.
No offense but I really hate that comparison. The 20th century isn't that long ago and a lot of those revolutionaries and attempted revolutionaries wrote a lot about their experiences. There's very little "we got Jesus to come back and here's the lessons we learned" writing from the last 150 years.
"There are symbolic elements, which have become ingrained in Western Marxism, that were smuggled in as contraband from Christianity."
This article was difficult for me to read when I came across it, and gave me a lot of grappling to do.
Not sure who would drink cyanide over a commune failing, that's more of a cult thing. But I definitely see the risk of overreach you're talking about. I'll keep it in mind. It seems like something that can be avoided with enough vision and cooperation with social scientists.
Depending on where you are there's a good chance of getting harassed by the local CHUD population. My aunt was involved in a commune in Indiana and they were getting threats before anyone even figured out their ideological leaning.
Indiana is a land of contradictions. There are a lot of fascists there but there are also a lot of anarchists, and it was one of the 3 states where the Socialist Party was strongest.
If you buy a lot of land in bumfuck they will leave you alone as long as you don't harass/steal from people outside of your commune. Plenty of people do it.
Building your own means of production is another matter. It is extremely difficult and requires a lot of technical knowledge. The type of people who have that sort of knowledge are usually better off than the average joe. Those types have "made it" so to speak in our society. Why would they abandon their privacy and stability to try and create a commune with a bunch of strangers?
Legally? the cops are going to be looking at and around your commune for drugs so they can use it as an excuse to try to shut you down.
Yeah it's been tried at least a few times, doesn't mean it can't work, but it requires a ton of work and cooperative spirit that's honestly probably infeasible for especially USians to have considering everything is optimized to create competition between individuals.
Historically, the anarchists of Home, WA were charged with violating the Comstock act for distributing seditious literature and skinny dipping. They were also harassed by the nearby town of Aberdeen. This lead to a division between "the nudes and the prudes" (they were united on the seditious literature) leading to the split and eventual downfall of the commune.
So, that?
But they did get to see speeches by Emma Goldman and William Z. Foster before they went so I think it was worth it.
There's a lot of different questions here. Let's take a crack at 'em.
Housing cooperatives, intentional communities, and communes are not quite the same thing as each other. Every commune is an IC and every IC has cooperative housing, but this doesn't go the other way around. Even Bernie is known for paving the way for land trusts in Burlington. Do you want a sort of affordable housing nonprofit, or do you want an income-sharing and wealth-sharing community, or something else?
"Why don't American leftists just crowdfund their own communes?"
Mostly because they don't realize or accept that it's a thing they can do. They have the motive, but lack the prompt and a recognition of their ability. In my experience it seems like you can duck your head around any corner and find people with a strong desire to escape capitalism. One of your questions (what do you do about people dogpiling on you as soon as they find out about you) kind of answers another of your questions (why do I not see this sort of thing everywhere). Lots of these things keep a low profile. It's kind of like a communist version of the Fermi Paradox. Just a few months ago I got in contact with a leftist land trust less than 200 miles from me. They maintained a lot of stipulations about not drawing publicity.
Probably the best way to find these places is by talking to other leftists IRL. Of course, they'll need to be the kind of leftist that actually does networking and connects with other leftists, not the kind that just sticks their thumb out and hopes for the Revolution to pick them up. The number one way to poke your head underground is to participate in struggles. If you have the ability to, I recommend you visit the Atlanta Forest occupation. I cannot guarantee any outcome but I promise you there are lots of good contacts there to be made.
I have a friend who's more of an expert on the matter of cohousing than I am. One thing he told me recently that I really held onto was "be wary of having a living arrangement where everyone is unpacking/dealing with the same kind of trauma". It was an argument for diversification, against concentration.
Building your own means of production is an interesting issue. The most I've heard of a single entity building up the MoP is the Twelve Tribes, and they're kinda culty, even if they do have very extensive vertical integration. Theoretically, if you were to build up an alternative economy within the borders of the USA, and the governmental apparatus correctly identified you as something limiting its power, it could use any and all of its tools (eminent domain, executive orders, phony charges, police action, National Guard) to eliminate you. But that assumes that the capitalist apparatus is coherent and unified and intelligent.
Perhaps what we have to do is analogous to what China did under Deng: plant ourselves deeply, make ourselves indispensible to the American economy such that any attempt to uproot us would be massively self-destructive. Homesteading is most certainly not a profit-maximizing endeavor, and millions of Americans are homesteaders; yet we don't see the government cracking down on homesteading to wring more profits out. I think collective homesteading, that maintains revolutionary integrity while keeping a low profile, is a good strategy.
despite this being completely nonviolent, legal, voluntary, and well-intentioned operation
My biggest personal piece of advice to contribute is to not try to be the only game in town. You need to be prepared for people and groups who are incompatible with each other, and to either orient yourself towards one and not the other, or to provide multiple spaces where they won't clash. Also if you have one space that is where a lot of radical activity is concentrated, you'll become a sort of boogeyman or "usual suspect". There is safety in spreading out a bit, and interspersing with people who are outside your group or peripheral to it.
That, along with a non-confrontational orientation, should be enough for the feds and most of the chuds to leave you alone. You may have to put some efforts into PR. But the bigger threat is actually internal factors. Reactionary forces in this country (and others) have relied a lot on the pressures of activism and late-stage capitalism to wear down activist circles. There will be people who have a bad experience with you, peel off, and become your haters; you can minimize this but you cannot avoid it entirely.
People who have lived "in community" echo that the perennial problems are about drinking, drugs, dogs, and dishes. Another issue is the dynamics of dating. Relational drama can tear apart organizations. This is more prominent in rural settings where your pool is severely limited, and less prominent in urban settings. The reason why people buy land in the country, though, is to not be constrained by zoning codes and busybody neighbors.
I would conclude that the external pressures are higher in the city, and the internal pressures are higher in the country.
Federation of egalitarian communities search around for that. Seemingly they are ignored and do their stuff
Based on my meandering studies of history, I think that the more success you have the quicker they will murder you
