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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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).
and getting murdered is not remotely like losing interest in commune life and leaving.
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.
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.
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?
> 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
> 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”.
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.