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Comment by toasterlovin | Hacker News Reader

But isn't the common thread that all of these groups ultimately failed?

Perhaps the point of communes is not to convert the whole world forever, but to create the world you envision around yourself. Temporality becomes real only when one has a vantage point in the future and through written record. That it did not last until this very moment does not make a commune or a set of any conditions any less real to the people who participated in it. So I don't think one can say that they "failed", they actually succeeded.

We can choose to define our terms however we want, I guess, but the bottom line is that these communes all set out to start some kind of community and the communities they created no longer exist. In my book, that is a failure to achieve the objective.

>> "[They] all set out to start some kind of community"

>> "the communities they created"

So the objective was to start a community, which you say they did.

Call it an experiment. Sure the communities failed, but they succeeded in giving insightful social data.

Less sizable communes survive to at least some extent. I work in the Ann Arbor area and I hear from my coworkers that there's a lot of them around here, farther out of town where the land is cheap. I don't know any details personally, though, so I don't know where they range from what you'd really consider a "commune" through to "a fancy homeowners association" or "coop with a hippie-friendly label". Partially I post this to solicit anyone who does know better to contribute.

But the fact that there always seem to be communes in existence doesn't imply that they are successful. All it means is that there is some baseline portion of the population who are interested in the idea of living communally and who then start communes.

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.

In the long view of history, all societies will fail. Is three generations of success enough to qualify it as a success? I don't know. But it's subjective to say it failed.

But that's like saying Mars isn't necessarily a better planet for humans than Earth because eventually the entire solar system will become uninhabitable.

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).

Capitalist individualism will ultimately fail too. Nothing lasts forever.

Care to elaborate?

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, when not regulated, tends to increase inequality. This will, eventually, lead to instability and a societal reset.

We've tried almost entirely unregulated capitalism. Inequality increased, but only up to a point. It didn't increase without bound.

Capitalism doesn't need to be perfect in order to be a better system for organizing a society than communism.

OTOH, communism doesn't need to be perfect to be better than unregulated capitalism.

Before that we had other systems that lasted just as long. Mercantilism had a good run for 3 centuries.

As long as there is resource scarcity and property rights, capitalism is a stable proposition. I think you'll find some physical issues with eliminating resource scarcity, and I'd rather not give up my right to own things.

"Capitalist individualism will ultimately fail too."

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.

>Capitalism has already been around forever :)

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".

Not literally forever but you could describe ships bought by private money for private profit by merchants in ancient Rome as capitalism. Capitalism is, fundamentally, the private ownership of the means for production with the owners receiving the fruits of that production directly and the workers being compensated by that owner, and the capitalists using their excess profits to create more means of production. I'm not sure how you could define capitalism such that it includes everything we describe as capitalist in the modern world while excluding Roman merchants.

Until recently capitalism has been a small fraction of production but it's existed much longer.

"There have been a wide variety of resource allocation mechanisms throughout history"

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.

>Capitalism has already been around forever :)

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.

And most people likely thought that there couldn't be other forms of society. Divine rights of kings.

The Amanas (mentioned downthread) are still around.

Sure. But according to Wikipedia, they abandoned communal ownership of property in 1932. Seems like the common thread is still that all attempts at fully communal systems fail sooner or later.

Successful group ownership of a business by the workers is pretty common; it just has to stop short of a commune.

It's possible that they fail because they have to operate against a capitalist backdrop.

It's also possible (and, I would argue, more probable) that they fail because for any sedentary peoples, the accumulation of material wealth is inevitable, and such accumulation is unequal. Thus, some degree of "capitalist individualism" grows organically out of sedentary societies.

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.

Ultra-liberal capitalism is also very artificial

Respectfully, that's a very loaded statement, as evidenced by the absence of a clearly-stated point. My reaction is twofold:

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

Again, this should not be interpreted as a defense of ultra-liberal capitalism, but I think it's so entrenched precisely because it follows naturally from the aforementioned preconditions.

It's also wrapped up in the move from hunting and gathering to farming. Hunting is relatively random and while skill plays a role you can't rely on it. Also excess meat won't last too long so why not share? Farming is more reliable and when bad luck hits it often hits an entire group at once. And it involved more unpleasant labor to farm a lot of food meaning incentives become more important.

I know of one [1], the Bruderhof, that maintains communal ownership of property and has existed for almost 100 years. It's not easy to do, though, so perhaps an exception that proves the rule. They do have some thriving businesses that make surviving in a capitalist world possible [2]. [1] source: I was born and spent my childhood there [2] http://www.communityplaythings.com/ http://www.rifton.com/

The anabaptist religious movements are fascinating. There are Mennonite sects in the US and Canada who live communally and have also lasted a relatively long time.

There's a large Mennonite colony just south of the Amana colonies in eastern Iowa. Apparently, they have little interaction (not that they hate each other, they just don't do business together), but we'd see them both. In Iowa City, we'd see Mennonites in town, actually shopping at Wal-Mart and the like. The Amanas were a much rarer sight unless you actually went to the Amana colonies (which we did regularly, because the restaurants there are some of my favorite places to eat ever).

One interesting thing from the aforementioned (or below-mentioned) wikipedia entry for the Amana Colonies is that they adopted the notion of a basic income (of $25-$50) to be spent at village stores, keeping the money within the community.

This is one take on UBI I haven't seen before--directly channeling collective money back into the local economy.

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