I keep wanting to form some kind of housing cooperative for people seeking refuge from abusive situations, seeing as how there’s currently fuck-all meaningful resources for adult survivors of childhood abuse. I know that despite this being completely nonviolent, legal, voluntary, and well-intentioned operation, that most people won’t care or will actively support when some extremists decide to infiltrate and sabotage that effort. Manufactured consent and all. Why does nobody else do things like this? What has prevented the vast majority of other American leftists from simply crowdfunding their own communes, leaving the larger economy, and building their own means of production so that they aren’t dependent on the rest of the world for permission to build systems of mutual aid?
This isn’t necessarily from the US system, but I’ve known people from attempted communes. They often fall into a problem of turning into cults.
Internal security is often a bad problem too, like you said you wanted to provide resources for survivors of childhood abuse, but communes aren’t immune to that issue if children are involved. You need tight internal security in order to prevent abuse from occurring, especially because people can build up dependencies inside of communes.
But yeah, out of the three people I’ve known who were in communes, all three turned into cults and that doesn’t seem to be an anecdotal issue from stuff I’ve read. I guess there’s just something about the conditions right now that lend themselves towards cult formation when you’ve got a bunch of people who deliberately cut themselves off from society. You have to get people to believe in something greater than themselves and come together to do real things together, real and difficult things, like actual work of building houses, doing agriculture, waste management. Actual jobs without the normal western capitalist promise of money or security. You’re telling people they’re starting from the absolute bottom of society, and will possibly stay there as long as they live there. And so you’re going to attract either weirdos or people interested in some project the commune is doing, like I don’t know, solar power or some type of bean cultivation.
I know it’s not scientific or precise to say communes attract weirdos that are more prone to become cultists, but that’s been my primary experience with them. It’s hard to get people corralled and cooperating unless they’ve got a good reason to be there, or at least a reason they can believe in.
Also, people who have serious disabilities or medical issues that require dependency on the capitalist healthcare system? They’re by default not going to be interested in commune living.
To add onto this, turning into a cult becomes more likely the more you are physically isolated from mainstream society, and the more sudden and stark the change from nonmember to member is.
Turning into a cult becomes WAY more likely if there is an official religious affiliation.
Legally? the cops are going to be looking at and around your commune for drugs so they can use it as an excuse to try to shut you down.
True, or plant them.
Back in the days of Marx and Engels this was known as Owenism and there’s a critique of it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It has been tried, including in the US.~~For a more modern critique check out https://kites-journal.org/2021/11/01/revolution-has-vanished-replaced-with-fantasies-of-dual-power-counterpower-base-areas-abolition-and-other-bottom-up-bourgeois-democratic-illusions/~~
Basically you can’t just cut yourself off from the capitalist system, and trying to create cooperative structures that coexist outside of capitalism just turns into better conditions inside the system for the members of your coop while dampening revolutionary consciousness. When you try to turn those structures into revolutionary vehicles they run into problems.edit: oops damn shouldn’t have posted the mutual-aid-isn’t-communism take in the c/mutual_aid, that’s what I get for sorting by new
Honestly, I don’t want it to be a revolutionary vehicle for the whole system, I’d rather just help people escape – and if we can prove firsthand that mutual aid works and we can insulate society against manipulation and power grabbing, maybe normal people would see it as a possibility for once. I think our country is bound too tightly by its shared cultural mythology to do anything meaningful. Expecting to fix the whole world, seems to me like a fool’s game. Even while people recognize the abuses of the economic upper class, their minds are closed to understanding the cultural upper-class, composed of successful psychopaths and their sycophants leading everyone else by the nose. Such a culture cannot be fixed, you can only help people escape and survive until everyone else’s illusion collapses sufficiently for them to adapt to the danger they were unwilling to see, which may not even be possible on a large scale in today’s world.
You would have thought 10 years ago, that if everyone learned the most powerful people in the country, the ones who lead politicians, were involved in CSA / trafficking, everyone would lose their shit and force the system’s hand to at least assert this one basic moral expectation – right? Turns out that is not the case. They can manufacture consent for everything up to and including that. It’s a lost cause at that point. There is no future in trying to convince people who don’t wanna be convinced or helped imho
Reading the article, it looks like the main criticism is that this sort of work doesn’t directly help the revolution. If you’re planning to do this just to help people you should be fine, it probably won’t help bring about communism but you will be helping real people that need help and need it now.
But if you agree that such activity isn’t building for the revolution and still decide that’s what you should really be spending your time on, then you are a liberal.
I don’t think so? If revolution turns out to be unfeasible due to the speed of modern technological advancement fueling pre-existing power structures, and betterment by reform is off the table due to the mounting power of propaganda, leftists need to be more creative about their praxis. Creating a lifeline for migrants and refugees to get back up on their feet and live within an economically democratic community seems like the only praxis that can help anyone, based on what I’ve seen.
I think arguing that revolution is impossible so we should just focus on helping right some of the most egregious wrongs, also counts as liberalism…
We can work towards revolutionary change, but the fact is your entire life will go by and you will never see a real revolution. Waiting for revolution is the leftist equivalent of waiting for the day Jesus returns to earth.
Well not all of us can be as pure a leftist as you are. I look forward to seeing your progress in building communism.
Bro I’m just asking you to join us figuring out the right approach. You don’t have to be defensive about the fact we don’t have a vanguard party yet, but pretending that we can just keep doing what hasn’t worked before is just not the way to go.
Neither is calling someone a liberal because they want to create a democratically run commune for people in need. That’s way too much direct action for a liberal and requires a ton of work and any knowledge gained on living sustainably with a group of like minded people would be useful to any revolutionary group, especially when things are in flux post revolution when things will probably be very precarious. While it may not be building the revolution, there are things that can be done to support it: if everyone is busy building the revolution you’ll starve to death after it happens
