One has to wonder what the rest of the US would look like if we could kick someone out of their neighborhood and force them to sell or give up their home simply because we didn’t like them. The possibility for authoritarian attitudes seems high.
So first it's important to point out that in self-organized communities a ban is the most drastic measure that can be taken against someone. It's not exactly the option thrown in the air when there's any kind of neighborhood conflict.
Then, it's a feature not a bug. It requires consensus: why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you?
Also worth considering, what's the alternative? Calling the cops? Besides any question of autonomy in regards to the State, how would that help? What would cops do that the commune can't? Would it be more humane to incarcerate the undesired person? To assassinate them?
You might want to step back and take a deeper thought about this. We aren't very far removed from redlining and all manner of restrictions on where people live.
But even stepping back from mindless restrictions based on race, sexuality and religion, this is even problematic with objectively undesirable elements, like the homeless.
Lots of states and localities would love to make homelessness illegal. Many of them already toe that line. But what is a homeless person to do if each and every city outlaws their presence?
Will we build giant homeless refugee camps in the country's interior?
the situation is: in a co-op living arrangement the community can kick someone out by consensus.
someone says: why should you be allowed to live somewhere if the community wants you out?
you respond talking about redlining and de facto criminalization of homelessness. but these things happened and are happening not in the context of a cooperative community.
so by comparison you have a co-op that can banish someone if the community decides on it collectively, and you have a status quo where other forces can also banish a person.
i don't get what you're getting at.
They absolutely could be. A cooperative community full of racists might very well attempt to kick out people of certain races.
> you have a status quo where other forces can also banish a person.
Ah, see, but we don't have that status quo. Nobody can kick me out of my apartment, as long as I keep paying rent. And that paying rent part, isn't even strictly something that would get me kicked out, in certain places!
There are tons of laws and rules and regulations that very much prevent people from being kicked out of places.
> i don't get what you're getting at.
What he was getting at, is that it should be obvious that just because a majority of people want someone kicked out, that this might not be a good reason to actually kick them out!
EX: if a majority want to kick out certain races, we, as society, should prevent that majority from democratically excluding certain races.
So, in other words the answer to the question of "why should you be allowed to live somewhere if the community wants you out?" is because we live in a society, and in that society we want to prevent racists from kicking people out of where they live, even if they kick them out democratically.
Just to be clear, consensus is intentionally very different from a simple majority system - the way that most of the historical racist systems have perpetuated.
It’s certainly not impossible for these things to exist in a consensus based environment, but it’s a different beast.
Ok call it a consensus then. We as a society, want to make laws, that prevent certain communities from enacting a "consensus" to kick out certain races from where they live.
I'm definitely not convinced that laws can protect people from injustice. Rules can if they're consented by everyone (while laws are imposed by a minority of self-serving politicians).
In some communes i know, an overtly racist person would not dare to join because there's already established people of color in the community and a strong commitment to various forms of decolonization. In others, they may slip in, but will get very rough feedback if they're open about it. Of course racism can be more low-key and normalized and i've seen my share of that, but that's definitely not welcomed either in most communities. I'm not saying racist communities (racism being part of their identity) don't exist, but i've never seen any one and i'm personally not interested to see one... (though to be fair i'd much rather have them live their dream white patriarchal life in a corner rather than try to impose it on everyone else)
It's definitely valid for a commune to recognize as a goal to fight against racism. It can take many forms, but just like any fundamental principle it must be decided early on and approved by consensus in order to become part of the commune's essence if you will. Of course, if you build a so-called apolitical community (such as a property-based housing coop) and don't take a stand, then you're doomed to repeat the same schemes and mistakes we witness everyday around us in society. Of course political communes make mistakes too, but there's always times and venues to address the issues and learn from the mistakes.
PS: A consensus is not a majority. One dissenting person can break a consensus, while 45% can fail to break a majority.
like Galileo Galilei,a large number of great people who were ahead of their time were persecuted, prosecuted, burned at the stake, or worse. Life is more than a popularity contest, people have rights even if everyone hates them.
I do not take issue with the co-op having this condition - maybe they need everyone to gel together for their village to work. However I agree with the OP that if this were to become a common clause, it would cause even greater inequality and discrimination than we have today.
How can 90 people discriminate against a group of 10 people if every adverse action against one person requires the other 99 to agree? This system makes abuse much more difficult than the system we have now.
I was just studying a case where a person was accused of a crime, and there was a massive media campaign slinging dirt at him. He needed several people to testify to his innocence, but everyone was afraid of being associated with him and of consequences that might have for their career. He was sentences to 8 years in jail.
On appeal the media crazy died down, so the folks did testify, and he was acquitted, but he spent two years in jail for no reason.
"All of these are criticisms of heavily centralized power strucrures. It's not like everyone in Italy had to come to a consensus to burn someone at the stake."
You are contradicting yourself - lynching and burning people at the stake are local decisions. They happen when there is no centralised power.
Centralised power structures usually follow rules, however flawed they are. Clauses like this don't even have rules, they can just remove you because they hate you.
A local power is still a centralized power compared to a system where everyone has to agree on a decision. In this case, priests and local police were instrumental in creating and maintaining the environments where these things happened. And I seem to recall that there was a certain international organization putting people on trial and then burning them.
Your argument is basically that we need to set up some people with way more power than other people, so they can protect the least powerful people in the society from abuse. Then we set up rules and hope people in power do what they're "supposed to". Sometimes that works out for some people, but as a general principle it's completely backwards. A better idea would be to distribute power more equally to everyone, so that they don't have to wait around for the favor of the powerful.
All these civil rights examples seem to conveniently gloss over the century when our federal government explicitly supported slavery and the decades when that government did nothing about lynching. That's not because the federal government wasn't powerful enough - it commands the armed forces. It was because the constituency affected by these things didn't have enough power to make the government change it's policies.
People seem to think that democracy is the ticket and that anything decided by the democracy is the best we can do, but liberalism will elevate anti-authoritarianism above the will of the people, as a majority is no less capable of authoritarianism than a dictator.
Homeless people are sensible and capable people, not "objectively undesirable elements". Also, no one is essentially "homeless" like one is assigned a race or gender based on certain physical characteristics. Homelessness is the disease of a society which has no respect for humans whatsoever, and in which the number of empty dwellings far outweigh the number of homeless people.
Many self-organized communes are built by people who were previously homeless or living in squats. Yes, of course that includes queer and colored folks, and people of different religions. In fact, some previously-homeless folks can be very helpful to a community because they're often used to various forms of mutual aid and doing the best we can with what we have (hacking around stuff).
> But what is a homeless person to do if each and every city outlaws their presence?
We're talking about autonomous communes based on various forms of affinity, not centralized power structures. That's a very different topic.
I may be wrong, but i'm tempted to believe even in most cities, if there were any actual form of democracy, most people would choose to help the homeless (at least in the popular neighborhoods, as research has shown empathy decreases with wealth) because the solution is easy: just take the empty apartments and place homeless people in. Problem solved. As easy as 1-2-3 if you don't care for this tiny piece of paper called "property title" which in our cultures is deemed more important than actual human lives. If that sounds way too radical for you, how about giving some space for people to build their own housing? Many homeless people would be happy to build something if there were not angry blue-uniformed psychopaths tearing it all down whenever they liked it.
But in this topic, we're talking about collective housing on the countryside, which is very adapted for formerly-homeless folks. First, because after years on the streets it can be frightening to suddenly have a place of your own where you have to stay alone. Second, because having people around can help with many physical/psychological/material problems. Third, because taking part in a collective project such as building a commune can be very empowering. Fourth, because getting closer to nature is soothing, especially after a long time struggling for basic survival in the concrete jungle.
But please remember we're talking about a small commune without a mayor, and where consensus (100% of people agree!) is required to kick someone out. It's not exactly kafkaian tyranny. If anything, the rules we're used to on a daily basis are much more unjust and violent. Like the one that says if you don't have enough imaginary numbers (money) to give to an arbitrary person (landlord) then heavily-armed puppets (cops) will tear down your door and evict you at gunpoint. That's the kind of ordinary injustice and violence which does not exist in free communes.
If you still think excluding someone from a community is oppressive, you might want to take a step back and look around you at the evil barbarism lying at the roots of capitalist society.
Private property.
With a few municipal bylaws.
All under the jurisdiction of an actual legal framework, with a Constitutional foundation.
...
As the commented noted - and what is apparent in the video, these places are a bit more culty than they are secularly civic.
'Free thinkers', bent on re-thinking civilization, can be surprisingly authoritarian.
Especially absent the many constraints of regular society, and trying to pursue some kind of 'ideal', then a kind of authoritarianism takes over - sometimes 'top down' i.e. by the 'founder' (i.e. Walt Disney), or the inner circle, or more competitively among the rank and file
If there isn't an overt hierarchy - it will form on some other subtle basis.
If you thought that 'nosy neighbours' were an issue in small towns, try one of these places.
When the 'living space' gets conflated with so many other cultural issues, then existential debate ensues perennially. It may not exist as 'overt, direct conflict' but rather in the minds of the adherents.
I think it's why so few of these places actually exist - we really do value our privacy and the freedom to work and do as we please.
I certainly am glad that some of them exist, but I think they are better framed as legal municipalities, with some specific bylaws that are more objectively clear, where they otherwise stay out of people's lives. I think a lot of people would go for that.
Authoritarians usually use the existing legal system to oppress 'free thinkers'. It's the minority, the fringe, that get oppressed.
It's important to point out that popular revolts are often anti-authoritarian, fighting for freedom and equality for all. Such is the story of the Paris Commune, the Makhnovtchina, the Spanish revolution, the Chiapas zapatistas uprising...
Most of these revolts for change have been crushed precisely because new people have been placed in power, and that's why most communes seek to explicitly abolish power structures and level the game for everyone to take part in decision-making. Some people call that democracy, others call that anarchy, depending on their political background.
Authoritarian tendencies can still exist in a free commune, but it's counter-balanced by the absence of centralized power structures (police, prisons, government) to make other people's lives miserable, and usually by a political culture that power corrupts even the best people and therefore we should fix our problems ourselves without hoping for a messiah to come and fix stuff for everyone else.
That Mao said he was fighting for 'freedom for all' is completely besides the point, if in fact he was actually fighting for totalitarian control and mass murder.
"these revolts for change have been crushed precisely because new people have been placed in power,"
No, they failed because they were never quests for freedom in the first place.
How many times does that experiment have to repeat itself for people to dismiss with that delusion?
I'm not comparing communes, to Mao, but I am saying that they are culty and have authoritarian tendencies way beyond what we have in regular societies. In culty situations, many of your personal views are scrutinized and you're pressured to 'be and think' a certain way. They have the power to excise you because you don't fit the mould.
In regular society, you're generally free to be whatever kind of fool you want on your own land.
Then why do we have cops, tribunals, prisons and military? Why do people decide for others and have an armed wing to detain or exterminate those who dissent? Isn't that an obvious example of authoritarianism?
You may be confusing authoritarianism (hierarchical power structures) with totalitarianism (the State has total control over individuals). Although our western "democracies" are not far-off from totalitarianism: as history has shown, "human rights" only exist for the well-off, and the people in power will not hesitate to use manipulation, torture and terrorism as means of exterminating political dissent. On this topic, you can read about CointelPro [0] in the USA or more generally about counter-insurgency doctrines [1].
Those do not define authoritarian, unless you redefine the word. By the new definition, everything but anarchy is 'authoritarian'.
Marxist-leninists and maoists typically don't claim that, at all. They advocate for a "dictatorship of the proletariat", which is what led to the fork of the First International between the anarchists and the marxists. You may be interested to read some anarchist critiques such as Emma Goldman's "There is no communism in Russia" or "Trotsky protests too much".
> No, they failed because they were never quests for freedom in the first place.
That's what the new powers-that-be (eg. Lenin/Mao) have rewritten history to be, claiming the quest for freedom was a petit-bourgeois concern and it was all about building a strong "Workers State". However, most revolutions historically had some libertarian (in a left-wing understanding of the concept) tendencies and were very horizontal in nature. You may be interested for example to read about the Russian revolution, which initially was a direct democracy experiment (based on local assemblies called soviet), before a well-organized minority party (the Bolsheviks) seized power and massacred every dissenting voice (which took a few years).
> I am saying that [communes] are culty and have authoritarian tendencies way beyond what we have in regular societies
That's not my experience with self-organized communities at all. If anything, there's a lot more room for personal autonomy, and a much greater tolerance for individual quirks. Most squats and communes i've lived in or visited over the years were populated mostly by people our society explicitly rejects for failing to adhere to norms (neuro-atypical, trans, people of color, anarchists..). Therefore we tend to have more empathy and openness about everyone's weirdness.
> In regular society, you're generally free to be whatever kind of fool you want on your own land.
I'm tempted to agree, but i have to point out first that this is only true to the extent that you are recognized by the State as owner of "your own land", which requires considerable resources/wealth most people don't have. A commune is based on an anarchist understanding of property where you own your house because you inhabit it (usage-based property), not because a piece of paper says so.
Of course the state can revoke property titles at any time via expropriation schemes (see also: NDDL ZAD). And even if you own the land, specific regulations may apply to prevent you from leading your life however you see fit. For example in France, it's illegal to live on DIY housing with cut-off from the electricity grid; it's also illegal to be visibly naked from someone else's property or from public space; etc.
Moreover, living alone as an individual owner has its quirks. You're free to live however you want, but you still greatly depend on other people for basic resources, services and maintenance. A community usually has the same upsides as individual living, but also has a greater share of skills and resources to face issues and find solutions without relying on the capitalist system (greater autonomy).
Maybe we can say that authoritarians use the system to control things; totalitarians build a system of only themselves (or their party, such as the Soviet and Chinese Communists).
If I want some sort of (eco or otherwise) community, what I'd want is some sort of communal kitchen where people cook in shifts and eat together. Now, if I'm jerk, people could kick me out of the communal kitchen and I'd have to eat at home again but I'd continue to have a home (If I kill someone or something, that's a different matter).
So the commune where they kick you out of everything definitely isn't the only way to do things and none of the communes I know of with these sorts of strictures are actually very tolerant.
Also worth considering, what's the alternative? Calling the cops?
I'm not a fan of calling the cops (especially for random crap) but if you're in an organization within the US and you don't call the cops when a cop-requiring-crime happens, you're in big trouble. I should remind you, this isn't a hypothetical post-state world/organization, this is a group that exists today and has to follow the constraints the state places on it (and I suspect it does).
That said, from the swell of defund the police, there have been refernces to establish other groups aside the police (e.g., for someone having a psychological / mental health episode).
I would wonder immediately about the Tyranny of Structurelessness, where a senior member of the community deciding they don't like someone maybe ends up being enough to take 'drastic' measures.
I have no doubt this exact phrase was uttered hundreds of times in the 1950s by redlining commissions justifying the exclusion of minorities from subdivisions.
That said, reactions here are pretty hyperbolic... jumping to a very extreme conclusion that therefore communal villages are bad.
Every selective admissions process has the potential (probably history) for bigotry. University/school admission, mortgage approval, job hiring. Does that mean selective hiring needs to end?
The same laws apply to everyone, imperfect as they are. illegal discrimination is still illegal. If eco villages start representing a major part of society, and >1% of people live in them, then I am sure that we'll have this discussion. I don't think this is iminent.
There's a very big difference between being rejected from a university, and being expelled from your home because your neighbors dislike you.
I don't see how you make the comparison — the problem we're pointing out is being evicted, not selective admission as you're reframing it to be.
The cause of being expelled, would be that everybody thinks you should be expelled - not that no one 'likes' you. Framing the judgement as resting on private preferences, on likeability, diminishes common humanity which should be generally at large and is crucial to the persistence of any group. A viable community group will include members with tolerance and good judgement who would deny a consensus to expel without good cause. If such qualities are absent (completely so! to enable bad consensus) no amount of individual rights will make up for their absence.
Of course they will. My neighbors can't get me kicked out of my apartment complex, because of my race, no matter how much they want that to happen.
And if my landlord attempts to do that, I might be able to get a big monetary settlement out of it, depending on how many mistakes they make, while going about that.
The same is true in any self-organized community i know of. If anything, it would probably generate an invitation for the complaining neighbors to try and find some better suited place for them to live. That is because the only communities i've visited were very much antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist. And despite all the instances of racism i've seen with my eyes (we are after all, all chidren of one of the most racist countries on earth), i've never seen in a community the kind of racial segregation and hatred i've seen on the streets of big french cities.
I mean, i could imagine some white supremacists setting up a community. But they would not let the rest of us in in the first place, and certainly wouldn't require a consensus to cause harm (whether psychological or physical) to their enemies. In a barbaric society where prison or death sentence are supposed forms of justice, it can appear that excluding someone from a community is simply a matter of personal preferences or bigotry. However, having to part ways with someone because they're harming your community and there doesn't appear to be ways to resolve the problem, is a serious concern that you may have to deal with sooner or later whether you like it or not. But proposing to exclude someone for a trivial matter would instantly raise red flags as an authoritarian manipulation scheme.
Life in a commune is not comparable to life under a nation-state in most regards. Your neighbors in a commune are not just people who happen to live nearby, they're people you live with. And certainly there's no landlord to deal with who have unreasonable power over others :)
Alright cool. So then we agree that communities, democratically or not, should not be allowed by society to just kick people out, based on a "consensus" vote, for all circumstances.
We agree that such communities, should be prevented, using the force of law, from engaging in certain actions, such as kicking people out based on their race, even if it is done democratically.
And we should agree that allowing people to be kicked out, for any reason, is not a feature. Instead it is a bug. Such as if those people democratically kick out certain races.
And this whole argument of "why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you?" is a bad argument, such as in the circumstance of people wanted to kick out people based on race.
And when you ask "what's the alternative?", the alterative is individual rights, that prevent communities from kicking people out of where they live based on race, even if it is democratic.
And the "more humane" way of handling "undesirable" people is a system of individual rights, that prevents communities from kicking people out of where they live, based on characteristics such as race.
Neither does this place. It can only happen by consensus: that is, if everyone agrees. Not some majority, but everyone.
Obviously the question of what were to happen to your shares if you did get kicked out is unanswered, but aside from that, if you want to be able to continue living somewhere where everyone hates you enough that they are all calling for you to get kicked out, then maybe this community isn't for you, you can have that by living basically anywhere else. If you're even a little involved in the community, then it would be pretty difficult to get everyone else to work against you to kick you out. If every one of my neighbours were to conspire against me right now, where the houses are privately owned, I bet they could get me to leave by being hostile enough.
I do agree that a system of individual rights might be a more appropriate model for handling this, but I also don't know their full set of bylaws.
Ok, and if everyone uses a "consensus" to kick someone out, based on race, that should not be allowed, and the government monopoly on violence, should be used to enact legal arrests or fines on those people/communities.
The law should come in, and prevent this group from kicking people out, based on race, even if they have "consensus".
> then maybe this community isn't for you
Maybe communities that are engaging in actions that break individual rights, that are protected by law, should be shut down by the government, or arrested, or fined, for breaking anti-discrimination laws.
Then do you really want to live there? At this point, it becomes important what the rules say happens to your shares if you're kicked out, they did not explain this in the video.
> The law should come in
> that are protected by law
It does. These people aren't above the law. You are free to challenge them in court if you feel your are being discriminated against.
> should be shut down by the government, or arrested, or fined, for breaking anti-discrimination laws.
And if it happens, maybe they would be. Until they actually break the laws, by kicking someone out or otherwise breaking anti-discrimination laws, they haven't broken any laws. You are equating "their internal rules would allow them to" to them actually doing it. They aren't and haven't (she said they've never kicked anyone out and would do it only in extreme cases). So why are you so hung up about something that's never happened? Their internal rules cannot override state or federal anti-discrimination laws and you have the same recourse there as you do anywhere else: you bring them to court for breaking the law.
If that’s not enough guarantee for your comfort then the solution is to not buy a house there. Nobody is forcing anyone to live there, if they’re not comfortable with the community or it’s rules.
No, it is not a good thing for people to be allowed to using illegal discriminatory practices. Such groups should be fined or shutdown by the government legal system.
> Its a privilege to be in the group not a right
Discriminatory practices are banned in many places, and you do not have the right to discriminate based on race, for things like housing, in many places.
Such practices should have the government sent on you, who should hopefully arrest or fine you, for illegal discrimination based on race, and that is a good thing.
> judged unlawful and prosecuted when appropriate by other authorities
Ok and current anti-discrimination laws, that exist in many places, are a good thing, and if they got prosecuted for that illegal behavior, that would be good.
Ok, so then you agree that are current discrimination laws are a good thing, and should be applied even to communes, such as if they discriminate illegally against certain races, even if it was done via "consensus".
Thats what I am talking about, regarding anti-discrimination laws.
Anyway I do wish you the best with your concerns. I do believe prejudging people as little as humanly possible dis/regarding race, class, everything and in carefully focused anti-discrimination laws. But I feel there is considerable danger to do more harm to human relations and attitudes than good, with laws which prosecute too bluntly or frequently between individuals relationships. I think people should resolve differences through the courts as a last resort, as legal justice is very expensive and prone to error. So that would be why I have not been answering your prompts in the affirmative, though they have been stimulating :)
All the best'
My previous reply > I expect it would often be very hard to tell in practice what the eviction is based on, as a community are unlikely to admit - sometimes even to themselves, that their conflict with the 'evictee is rooted in a particular banned prejudice. A common defense and rebuttal for a group accused of kicking someone out over their race - would be that they were aware of their race when they accepted them into the group (!) Perhaps that's why I'm not so alarmed at the possibility of people being uprooted by racists in these communities that you seem to be - where racism is a problem in them it will hardly result in evictions, it will result in barring entry. When you think cynically about what groups of others are capable of, there is no end to villainous possibilities, but others are capable of being better than we ourselves are, as well as worse.
Meanwhile, this also corresponds to reality. In places where planned communities of various sorts exist, there is occasional tension around racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction.
I realise that the possibility of eviction is uneasy for some. If so, don't live there. Meanwhile, 99.9% of actual evictions are in rental context. Sometimes this can happen gated communities. For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people.
As to which is worse... housing, education and employment are all pretty important.
Could that be because the victims of eviction are individuals without the political power of a whole race and its supporters behind them? Obviously evictees are not happy being evicted or they would have left voluntarily.
> For some reason, the commune context especially terrifies people.
My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life. Slavery sounds scary too even if it involved the same practical lifestyle as conventional work. Prison sounds scary, yet many people spend all day just sitting at home doing nothing more than they would do in prison anyway. The feeling of freedom is often more important than actually exercising that freedom.
> My guess is it's the lack of personal freedom and and lack of accountability for those who can control your life
Usually, building a free commune is precisely a practical attempt at tackling these issues and not having someone "who can control your life" but collective decision making to empower everyone to the extent possible.
Practical example: some people live a noisy lifestyle, others can't bear noise. You seem to suggest that in a free commune one individual's freedom to make noise would outweigh others' expectations of calm, or the opposite. In practice, a commune would gather feedback from its members and propose to rearrange the disposition of housing so that everyone is happy and comfortable.
Liberal society rests upon the idea that one's individual freedom competes (and stops) with another one's. Anarchist society considers that freedom is not a scarce resource, and one's freedom is complemented by another's. If we take time to study issues as a collective, we can find better solutions for everyone involved.
Collective intelligence is a thing. For example the french government started a "citizens council on ecology" (or whatever would be the translation) where ordinary people spent time with researchers to come up with solutions. And they've come up with a platform for ecology more advanced than even the Green party would dream of. Of course, the government then flushed all those good ideas down the toilet because they're just puppets of the industrial capitalists.
Try to find a realistic interpretation of what I said instead of something so transparently ridiculous. In other words, argue in good faith. There's no point engaging with someone if you try to misunderstand them.
Of course, but communes like that typically don't have a language test to be admitted. There's usually a common set of objectives and rules for the coop that you have to agree with, and that's about it. Sometimes, there's not even a formal interview process or any form of question. You just end up living there because you somehow arrived there, people are friendly and there's place to stay.
That's not to say everyday racism is not a thing in free communes. Who could claim to do away with racism when growing in some of the most racist countries on Earth like USA or France? But autonomous communes like this are usually correlated with other forms of social struggles than simply "enjoying nature", and it's not like these problems can't be faced.
Positive action for admission in squats and communes is not unheard of. It was for example documented in Seth Tobocman's autobiographic "War in the neighborhood" comics about squatting in NYC in the 1980s.
In all honesty, I'm of the opinion that job recruiting should involve an objective "required skills" floor, and then a lottery for all who meet it. It'd been known for some time that hiring is very difficult to do objectively and often has similar outcomes wrt retention as sheer chance. Luck plays a massive role in opportunity and accomplishment, and a systematic acknowledgment of this might do well to readjust people's attitudes towards how professional accomplishment squares with economic dignity.
redlining was a policy of banks. people in a community didn't vote for it. would they, had there been a vote? no one could say, but the point is it wasn't up to them.
so by my reasoning there are fewer vectors for discrimination with a co-op.
There’s other issues like what a Marketplace episode[1] went over recently where the system is effectively built to screw over some segments of the population into losing their land and home.
We still have not done any amending of the horrible tragedies that have gained more mainstream awareness in places like Tulsa Oklahoma, Wilmington North Carolina, and likely other places. We just continue to let the status quo remain today.
Imminent domain coincidentally never seems to affect or bother the very well off.
> US would look like if we could kick someone out of their neighborhood and force them to sell or give up their home simply because we didn’t like them
The US and world at large are so far from not being close to what you describe those. Sure the exact wording you used may not happen [much] any more. That doesn’t change the many similar not much better situations happening. Nor are past examples of authoritarian abuse and the actions you stated rectified. The status quo normally remains.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/02/983897990/how-jacob-louds-lan...
"In the last hundred years, heirs' property laws have contributed to the loss of millions of acres of Black-owed land."
In practice it rarely happens, and you are forced to sell your shares and move out. Basically you still cash out your apartment.
No one can forfeit your place/apt as that would be illegal.
It happens all the time. Homeless people, for example, are regularly kicked out of neighborhoods, etc., for no reason but being unliked (and I've heard the excuses, such as the universal one about 'human feces' - and I've been to clean encampments that were dismantled the next day using those excuses. If you're in a city, I suggest seeing for yourself). eople who don't fit, for example for economic or racial reasons, are harassed, and sometimes with little support from authorities who are a creation of the majority. The UK and US both have had, not long ago, practices and policies of administratively, extra-judicially, harassing immigrants, legitimate and undocumented (possibly still true in the UK, and in the US to some extent).
It's nothing unique to cooperatives. Given the self-selected nature of cooperative members, I would guess it would happen less.
Possibly, but I don't think you can point to an "aha!" clause and come to a conclusion.
These things aren't deterministic. A village like this isn't strictly defined by its rules. The people there, and the culture they develop are they biggest factor. A religious oriented community will not be like a socialist one, or like one formed by former college friends.
Rules can be unimportant, but communities aren't legible like that. A "please leave" clause can be used totally different depending on the people involved.
In any case, consensus-based systems tend to get mocked and reduced quite a lot. The thing to understand about these ways of making decisions is that it's premised on the existence of a community of people and a culture of making decisions this way. It doesn't necessarily work at an AGM or whatnot, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work anywhere.
To be fair, one should be able to "sell" his/her shares at market value.
Also related to this particular "expulsion", the practice was in use since ancient Greek times, and called "ostracism" [0].
Also, “it can take place at most once a year, and only for one person. In this it resembles the Greek pharmakos or scapegoat…”
Something something René Girard.
Because I've been working on a hypothetical idea for a while now that's kind of weird version of a commune. A facility that is autonomous and self-sustaining in which the facility and its infrastructure is owned and run by one person, but the community that it houses is governs itself.
The person who runs the facility has the authority (only in very, very extreme cases) to evict people but mainly, the ideal is that the community would police and govern itself, evicting problematic members of their community.
I just have no idea what the legal feasibility evicting someone is in this hypothetical situation.
Does not regular HOA (the US is choke full of those) fine and or eventually force you out if your blinds are wrong shade of green? I am not sure about the exact details as when I was looking for a house it is my first criteria - "no fucking HOA".
[0] https://homeguides.sfgate.com/can-condo-association-evict-ow...
That can mean "marginalized for some non-criminal reason". Sounds disgusting.
What separates the two are the social norms they operate under.
I'd also like to remind everyone that in many shared living spaces, landlords have the power to kick anti-social people out - and the fewer tenant protections there are, the less oversight they are subject to.
My concern is the kind of problem that happens in abusive workplaces, school bullying, abusive relationships, etc. Without rules, the powerful people slowly edge the victims out by always finding something they're doing "wrong". The victim may even believe it and keep trying to please but eventually be expelled anyway.
I assume this is part of the appeal. The group over individual rights.
The greater good