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Comment by smolder | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure where you are drawing the line between organization and collective. I don't think there is such a clear separation, or much of a distinction at all. When I get a job at a company, yes I'm doing it in self interest, but I still make sacrifices to that group as part of my participation. Is it an ability to come and go independently and form or be part of different organizations that you think makes those non-collectives?

My counter to that is that free markets allow for all sorts of coercion by organizations that harms individual freedom and prevents new organizations from succeeding. You get a join-us-or-lose situation, as you can see playing out with hyper-consolidation of various industries.

Your premise that free markets translate into individual freedoms is limited to those freedoms that dominant organizations can't directly coerce you out of exercising or lobby/collude to take away from you.

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Let me put it another way. In a free market, any group is free to start a commune. In America, many thousands have been created.

They all failed.

People try it. After a few months, within a couple years, they tire of it and leave, and the commune collapses.

What that strongly suggests is communes are just incompatible with human nature.

> What that strongly suggests is communes are just incompatible with human nature.

I really don't understand how this conclusion follows from your premises. Even assuming that you're right and that all US communes failed, what does this have to do with human nature?

By the same token you could say that people tried to be gay in Nazi Germany, but they all died, therefore it's against human nature to be gay (maybe my example is a bit strong, but hopefully you get the point).

> tried to be gay

and getting murdered is not remotely like losing interest in commune life and leaving.

It seems I didn't get my point across, so here's an explicit statement:

The fact that certain human institutions or behaviors face strong opposition in certain contexts doesn't say much about human nature.

w.r.t. your example, this would mean that the failure of communes in the US doesn't say much about the failure/success of communes in other places/times. Nor does it say much about human nature in general.

Why wouldn't a diverse society that allows people to freely join and leave communes, and those communes are not successful, say a lot about human nature?

Setting the US aside for a bit, how do you explain the success of the kibbutzim movement [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

Simple. The Israeli government gives them money to make up for their failure to be self-sustaining. Money they tax from the capitalists.

> incompatible with human nature

A commune will inevitably fail if its members are allowed to leave at will. Because individual productivity of people varies, in time the most productive members will grow dissatisfied with the way the rewards are distributed and quit, the commune remaining stuck with the moochers.

It is human nature, just like in another great example, the Tragedy of Commons.

Why are the most productive members dissatisfied with the distribution of rewards, though? Is some kind of an ideal distribution part of human nature, or is it maybe learned from the environment you grow up in? If a more equal distribution was the norm in our culture, they might not get dissatisfied.

People have tried to indoctrinate children with equal distribution. It doesn't work. It doesn't work no matter what the person believes.

A simple gedanken experiment will illustrate. You and Bob are stranded on an island. You and Bob agree to form a commune, and share equally in all the food gathered.

Bob figures, why work, when TFYS is working hard and will split what he gathers with Bob.

Is TFYS going to be dissatisfied that he does all the work and Bob does nothing?

You have not provided any proof, merely a hypothesis.

> It is human nature, just like in another great example, the Tragedy of Commons.

As far as I know the commons worked quite well for many centuries, until enclosure that is. Just a brief look at [1] yields:

> A commons failure theory, now called tragedy of the commons, originated in the 18th century.In 1833 William Forster Lloyd introduced the concept [...]

> However, his argument has been widely criticized, since he is accused of having mistaken the commons, that is, resources held and managed in common by a community, with open access, that is, resources that are open to everyone but where it is difficult to restrict access or to establish rules. In the case of the commons, the community manages and sets the rules of access and use of the resource held in common: the fact of having a commons, then, does not mean that anyone is free to use the resource as they like. Studies by Ostrom and others have shown that managing a resource as a commons often has positive outcomes and avoids the so-called tragedy of the commons, a fact that Hardin overlooked.

[...]

> While the original work on the tragedy of the commons concept suggested that all commons were doomed to failure, they remain important in the modern world. Work by later economists has found many examples of successful commons, and Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel prize for analysing situations where they operate successfully. For example, Ostrom found that grazing commons in the Swiss Alps have been run successfully for many hundreds of years by the farmers there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons#Tragedy_of_the_commons

Nonsense.

https://www.ic.org/

Communes predate America.

The more likely story is free markets collapse under weight of adversarial greed and need communes to bail them out. Where would American airlines be at right now left up to free markets? We've socialized their losses and privatized their profits like so many ither examples.

It shows 264 communes worldwide. Not a very impressive number out of 7 billion people. I looked at a couple at random, and they were very small.

> Communes predate America.

You're right. Jamestown was a commune. They starved. The Pilgrims' first year was spent as a commune. They starved.

> Where would American airlines be at right now left up to free markets?

They were shut down by the government lockdowns and travel bans. Whether or not the lockdowns are a good idea, the damage they caused are not the fault of free markets. Do you propose that communes thrive under lockdowns?

Do you consider Amish people to live in communes? I wasn't aware they all failed. Or is only the failed ones that end up a commune in your dictionary?

This axe you're grinding is getting hella sharp. Can't believe you failed to bring out the 'millions of deaths' because of communes this time.

> Do you consider Amish people to live in communes?

Nope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish

I see no mention of sharing equally. They own property, run small businesses, pay income taxes, etc. They do help each other out, but that is not the same thing as sharing everything equally.

> In America, many thousands have been created.

> They all failed.

> [...]

> What that strongly suggests is communes are just incompatible with human nature.

All things in the material universe are impermanent, communes exist in the material universe, ergo communes are impermanent.

But many of those started in the US have not yet failed, and some have lasted several decades. So the actual evidence doesn't even show that communes are incompatible with American-style capitalist context, much less “human nature”.

I looked into an American commune someone here claimed that was the longest lived American commune. It was, on paper. In actuality, almost nobody stayed more than 2 years. The commune was simply good at attracting new members to replace the ones who faded away.

What is great about America, though, is the free market allows anyone to set up a commune. You're free to join one, and free to leave one. You and everyone else who downvotes me in this thread is also free to make or join a commune.

I doubt any of you will, though.

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