Communes

user, why don't communes become more successful? What about the idea of buying a bunch of land out in the middle of nowhere and starting a socialist city/community?

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I dunno man, would you give up your job and all your money and most possessions to go live in the woods with people you don't know? Not to mention probably having to travel away from your home area to do it? The only commune I'd ever want to join is some cool industrial collective of 500+ people but that's a fantasy.

implying anyone here has either

Which is exactly why we can't afford to start a commune. Cest la vie.

We've a hundred and fifty years of fourierist/owenite communal experiments and the overwhelming majority of them have failed. it's a failed strategy akin to the co-op fetishism people like Richard D Wolff peddle.

Oh, come on, it was given only one serious shot it was the First International before Marx hijacked it; after the Hague Congress's split, most member organizations followed Bakunin, who represented a direct development of Proudhon's thought, and left for the St Imier International, which unfortunately died as well soon after
It works well when expanded to large scales and supplemented by syndicalist praxis and a network of ideological institutions like internal affinity groups of the most radical members (see: FAI combatting reformism in CNT, leading to Catalonia's communization in 1936).
In fact, we should seek to combine the building of commune-like structures such as those of mutual aid in poor neighborhoods with large coops to act as supplying associations (proto-communes produce surplus, cooperative acts as a mechanism to give away this surplus and buy extra stuff which the proto-commune needs). Rely on radical industrial unionism to extract concessions from the bourgeoisie in terms of worker-owned capital* to be aggregated into the whole network. Eventually, some proto-communes will have almost all inputs be from within the network and therefore become true communes.
*in some feudal systems, peasants would work their own land to feed themselves for a time and then work the lord's land for a time to feed him. Why not have a similar system where the workers, instead of demanding higher pay (which is akin to a peasant asking in the other type of feudal system to have to give less grain to the lord out of what they've produce), demand that part of the proceeds from a firm's capital goes directly to them and is owned by a collective association of the employees (but is still integrated into the rest of the system). I'm not calling for ESOP, I'm calling for workers's collective ownership of a portion of the physical means of production which constitute part of a firm's total capital (capital being referenced here in the Marxian sense, of course).
Cooperatives aren't the end goal here, but rather are simply good praxis. Many tactics which are petty bourgeois lifestylism on their own could be remarkably effective if they had a steady source of funding and centralized coordination with decentralized control.

This.

Communes are a fucking meme.

So if you want items like toothbrushes or pencils you'll have to buy them, it requires billions to actually produce everything you need. How do you get this money? You'll have to produce something and exchange it. If you wanna live off farming (to provide yourself and be able to exchange on the market) you'll have to be able to compete with big, efficient farms who can sell their produce for cheap.

You really are better off simply living under capitalism than trying to escape it with a small group of people. Capitalism has reduced (and keeps reducing) the socially necessary labor time so you're really wasting your time if you try to maintain your commune farm as a source of income. Wage labour is actually more efficient.

the problem is you get loads of hippies who end up stealing your weed

speak for yourself nigger

thecanary.co/2017/05/24/manchester-set-become-second-city-ban-sun-appalling-response-concert-bombing-tweets/ some good news

we just need a big porky who can give us some land

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we could ask daddy soros, we've done a lot of shilling lately.

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The medieval commune-city was extremely successful, presiding over one of the most explosive periods of technological growth ever and laying the foundations for what good would come in the 17th-19th century but got fucked by those feudal robber barons

Different social organizations are suited for different material conditions. Besides, I thought most anarchists were in agreement that Stalin's "Socialism in one Country" was a silly concept. Why wouldn't socialism in one town be even sillier?

There's more than just "workers should own the MoP" to socialism, than just that.

Petit bourgeois need to be fucking gassed

Dude I know let's just all suck dick for a living instead.

I already thought of that but your mother had the market cornered

kek

First step is to teach yourself a skill and start building capital.

Then, with your friends, start a co-op around that skill. Build capital and share the wealth.

Next, use capital to start and train new co-ops.

Repeat until everyone in the area is hired at a co-op and making nice money.

If anyone has any books or know of any for starting a co-op please let me know.

There's been and are a few examples here and there although there's always the fundamental problem of trying to establish something in the very economic system it objects too
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commune#Communes_around_the_world

In the 19th and 18th centuries, American countries were hosts to a shitload of colonies started by all manner of utopian or social agitator. As you might guess, they didn't tend to last long.

I'm sorry if I can't name any right now, it's been age since I last read about them, but the internet must have plenty of information.

Sure, why not? Every independent, spontaneous group formed around performing a single general task (one for propaganda, one for self-defense, one for automobile production, one for farming, etc.) sends a delegate to a general council. Here, nothing is decided and information is merely discussed and transmitted back down the line, with choices being made face to face. Action is inseparable from values. If a group is going to split because it can't be sustained, let it split and keep enmity down. At most and at least, there must be a binding ethic of opposition to state and capital - everything else, in theory and praxis, is negotiable. Discipline between action groups to maintain order and effectiveness must be achieved through their collective bargaining - if one group's own role is hurt by another's ineffectiveness and counterproductivity, they must self-advocate and bargain with the defective division until they either acquiesce and change or are expelled (or worse). Thus, it makes no distinction between OWS-style consensus democracy-loving hippies or their accompanying FBI infiltrators and agent provocateurs - they are, from the practical standpoint of the movement to abolish the present state of things, both saboteurs of it. The composition and purpose of the organization is determined by virtue of its emergently-conscious desire to eliminate capitalism. Communes preferably (and potentially cooperatives if those don't work out) would be needed regardless to provide a mechanism for production which forms the basis of growth.

Left unity implies a democratic stagnation of ideological development directly contra both Proudhon and Marx, a stopgap which doesn't work in the short run and destroys the Left in the long run. Sectarianism is, in fact, the same as it; one sets the basis for the other, and one cannot be had without the other raising its ugly head. This proposal of systematizing the transformation of praxis into theory is the precise opposite of it.