https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Now-Story-American-Utopianis...
It did sound pretty appealing when I read it to live in a more primitive way and have to deal with less of the stresses of modern life. It would require a very different set of skills than I have now, though.
I could see communes or something like them coming back as a way of sharing the cost of purchasing land. Where I live, houses are pretty expensive and rural land is only available in large (also expensive) lots. A group of people could conceivably pool their resources to buy a large lot in the countryside and then put up an apartment building (assuming the local zoning laws have any exploitable loopholes that allow that sort of thing).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Good-Life-Nearings-Self-Sufficient-Li...
Strangely enough, I grew up singing this song in a commune that did not fail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities
This is generally executed as Co-Housing, these days.
>> "the communities they created"
So the objective was to start a community, which you say they did.
Go on something like IC.org (communes like to call themselves intentional communities). If you dig into them, most of the listings do not seem to be for successful, thriving endeavors.
Perfection is not required for one system to be better than another.
Communes don't work. Most never get off the ground. The ones that do rarely make it longer than a decade. And there are basically none that have lasted longer than a century (the only group I am aware of in North America are some sects of Mennonites).
Whereas essentially the entire developed world lives and thrives without the concept of communal property (outside of marriage).
Most of these cults/communes don't make it past the first decade. The longest lasting ones rarely make it past a century.
So far "capitalist individualism" seems to have a better track record than that.
Capitalism has already been around forever :)
It just wasn't until Adam Smith that we had a word for it, or could describe it.
Outside of Imperial power - which by the way always represented a tiny portion of state power (the King had a nice castle, and theoretically absolute power - but the taxes raised were pretty small part of GDP, also, if you didn't live directly near the king, he couldn't exactly bother you. Also remember up until Napoleon - if a King wanted to invade somewhere, he could hardly conscript, usually he had to pay armies of mercenaries).
So even in ancient times - regular trade was the basis for most economies.
Much of Europe, for example, was feudalist until around the mid 17th century. To put it simply, the king owned all the land, and those who lived on it were divided into those who worked, those who fought, and those who prayed. Under no reasonable definitions could this be considered capitalism - even Marx viewed feudalism as the order coming before capitalism.
Only if you define it in a way which is so loose as to be tautological.
There have been a wide variety of resource allocation mechanisms throughout history, and it wasn't until relatively recently that any of them could really be described as "Capitalism".
Until recently capitalism has been a small fraction of production but it's existed much longer.
If you have currency, banking, credit, merchants raising capital, private property protections, rule of law, labour at some cost - towards projects ... then it's basically capitalism.
The Romans had all of that to lesser or greater degree.
There are no examples of centrally planned economies working out on any scale.
Communism is a completely dead idea, it's an effete academic concept only. That game is over.
Successful group ownership of a business by the workers is pretty common; it just has to stop short of a commune.
The only successful societies with anything resembling fully-shared ownership are those which can't accumulate much of anything.
I say this not to defend ultra-liberal capitalism or anything, but rather to point out that utopias tend to be very artificial (and therefore short-lived) constructs.
1. You seem to be implying that ultra-liberal capitalist societies abound. I disagree to the extent that most economies/political-systems incorporate social elements that tend to push the dial back towards resource sharing. I do, however, concede that there has been a trend towards liberalism in recent decades, but this is accompanied by increasing social instability. I don't see how your comment constitutes a counter-point in this respect.
2. It's not really artificial given the two priors discussed above:
a) accumulation of wealth (and the subsequent inequalities in entrains)
b) low social trust
This is one take on UBI I haven't seen before--directly channeling collective money back into the local economy.