Juggernaut Nihilism wrote:
I'm sure you've discussed ways to avoid the common pitfalls of every other commune that's ever existed - certainly ones bound not by a common religious vision, but primarily an economic one. Not being snarky... I'm interested.
That is by far the most difficult part to deal with. Many commune dwellers are transient and go from commune to commune, that resolves part of the problem.
However, there are any number of hybrids. For instance. Lets say I live in a small town. Now, my neighbors and I talk about how great it would be to have a woodshop. I have a scroll saw, you have a tablesaw,
Demon of Undoing has a chainsaw,
Nonc Hillare has the lathe and
Marcus has the sophisticated set of carving knives and chisels. We could build a shop on someone's land in a central location and each get a key and come to use the machine shop. Of course there will be a day when two of us need the table saw at the same time, but that's the sort of thing you work out in life. Our current paradigm doesn't account for all contingencies either.
A lot of communes end up being hippy sex cults, but that isn't the only form. There are a lot of pitfalls that can be faced, but the fact remains that leveraging resources cooperatively can result in a higher standard of living for all involved. Having grown up around poverty, I saw that a lot of poverty came as a result of people busting their obligations to one another and ultimately destroying trust. My parents purchased a hot water heater for the parents of some of my friends and then there was a falling out when one of their kids ran up sex lines on our phone bill, so you add $ 350 in phone charges to the $ 900 water heater and my parents essentially ate a loss of about $ 1200. The distinct lack of the community mindset in that transaction screwed everyone involved at the end because the longer term trust relationship that might have helped replace a refrigerator down the road was damaged. The Mother could have sent the son over to our house to do yard work at $ 6 an hour until he paid off the $ 300, but she didn't.
Your Lao Tse comment does have quite a bit of insight to it, because it is precisely this sort of unenlightened non-reciprocalism that produces poverty in the first place. In these sorts of scenarios where I am involved in these kinds of things, coming from the city, I often have more money and end up spending a fair amount in resources to contribute.
Our current paradigm is based off of the notion that you cannot trust the people around you to be reciprocal like that. It's unfortunate, but that's what holds back a lot of sharing in this world, and is why someone can have the drill someone else needs sitting in a closet doing nothing. I am fairly convinced that for most things the answer to our problems exists within a couple of miles of us at any given time.
Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.
-Alexander Hamilton