this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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They work best and are most resilient as networks of smaller farms, co-ops, and communities.
Anyone saying they can't last or support the elderly is ignoring the Amish(among others, but I went with the the first too-big-to-ignore and surviving example that came to mind), and so long as they can support and raise children and young adults, they pass muster vs historical societies in ways that un-bridled capitalism flat-out doesn't. Same goes for the length of time a given commune lasts - individual farms and villages that last centuries without moving or significant change were far from the rule throughout history and pre-history.
You need semi-independent artisans and experts at the periphery(well, between individual communes, and able to form external/transactional/distant trade/relationships) as an interface and buffer, and even seasonal assistance for things like harvests - scale requires diversification and organic trade/distribution - but for some reason popular imagination all-but-stops at stalinism/maoism vs individual farms.
The whole notion that its a pipe-dream if it can't scale the same at all levels and from one end of the earth to the other is an unreasonable goalpost used to justify power grabs and the status quo.
I’m not sure the Amish are a great example of communes taking care of the elderly and disabled. In some communities (the Amish don’t have centralized leadership, so practices vary) it’s basically voted on by the men (and only the men) whether or not it’s worth it to pay for a community member’s medical treatment. If they decide not to, fuckin sucks to be you.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying broadly, I just think the Amish get given too many passes in general and have purposefully cultivated a false quaint image to allow it to keep happening.
Oh, the Amish are quite a good example because they maintain their cohesion through coercion and brain washing.
There's an argument out there that long lasting communes work out precisely because they require social sacrifices. Meaning that weird rituals and giving things up are what makes them hold together.
The idea is that by making sacrifices, you signal to the rest of the community that you will do your share.
Here's an older paper on it:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138608
This isn't 100% accepted by social scientists, though. Some newer papers cast doubt.
If it is true, then the good news is that it doesn't necessarily have to be Amish-level sacrifices and authoritarian control to get it.
Like I said, it was a lazy example on my part, but the medical care issue is both a failure of society at large, and an issue of triage that remains even in countries that provide free healthcare.
Yes, the male-only voting is its own issue, but whether its them or healthcare professionals alone deciding, privacy issues will prevent such decisions from being entirely fair, transparent, or democratic in almost any setup.
Personally, I'm only so hung-up on privacy as it takes to keep me out of prison, and even that's still broadly negotiable, but I'm not one to pry or pretend my priorities are for everyone.
Pay for treatment? Like with money?
Yes? Amish people have businesses, they make money.
But why would someone pay for treatment? Isn't that what taxes are for?
Oh, sorry, I didn’t get you were doing a bit. Although that does now make me wonder if there are Amish communities of any size outside the US, or outside the northeast US even.
I think the real problem isn't with the pragmatic aspects of scaling, but with sociocultural and interpersonal issues.
What do you do in a small commune when you eventually have 2 people who can't stand each other, but haven't committed any offenses that would justify removing one of them, and neither is willing to voluntarily give up the home they've built and leave? And what happens when that problem begins to spread?
Personally, if I couldn't stay friends with both, and there were no one clearly in the wrong, as in currently hurting the community, I would avoid both of them, or even leave the commune if that proved un-workable. I lean more towards the sort-of skilled labor I mentioned before as belonging at the periphery anyways:
Well it's less about how you would react individually, and more about how the commune as a whole would deal with the internal division.
In small interdependent groups, social breakdowns can cause the entire community to fail, because every member is an essential part of how the community supports itself and there are no backups for any skill set.
The bus factor problem applies if people start refusing to work with each other.
Communities shouldn't be able to fail like so. Your average stand-alone commune doesn't get that much bigger than a family-farm. The idea that everyone should have to lock-in to such an arrangement is kind-of toxic.
Don't approach the problems you're talking about from the perspective of a serf.
EDIT: On reading your link, you've hit upon precisely why I wouldn't encourage too deep an integration between artisans and single communes. Everyone in the commune should know how to make their commune work and who do go to outside the commune when specific tools or expertise are needed beyond their commune's residents.
No one person in a commune should be irreplacable or capable of taking the whole thing down in a way that prevents residents from being able to just up and leave.
Nobody said anything about serfdom.
Communities are always able to fail like so. A division between members can absolutely fracture any kind of social cooperation.
This isn't a commune, it's a compound. Or a live/work arrangement. Or just a cult, depending on how "we're all family here" they are.
This isn't a commune, it's just a town, or a village.
The whole concept of a commune is self-supporting, self-sustaining and to at least some degree self-contained. Also, frequently, self-absorbed.
The smaller the group is the more inevitable this is. At a very small size (less than 20 people), where the group is dependent on itself for food production, then just the loss of basic labor might ruin the group's ability to provide for itself.
If everyone just up and leaves, what was even the point of forming a commune? Again, what you're talking about is just a town. A primarily agrarian town maybe, but still just a town.
Congratulations, you missed any notion of nuance and scale in my original comment. A community is indeed much larger than a single commune, in much the same way a village is bigger than a farm.
If a given commune's members move to another commune, nothing is truly lost. The original commune is down to the two who hate eachother, or one will screw up enough to get forced out before that happens, so what? Eventually, new members will show, or nearby communes will take on the work and any resources no longer being utilized.
Meanwhile, you're insisting the whole setup requires twenty or so people, hell-bent on being insular and self-sustaining(near impossibilities for long-term survival in Western countries - the Feds will come calling), all under the same roof. These are ALL notions I rejected in my initial comment. A commune, and/or a community composed of communes and individuals/infrastructure hosting multiple communes, is more than a glorified polycule or a cult.
Don't look to me to defend the effigy you've decided to burn in your head. If you read my other comments, I've made clear that my own preference is to avoid en-meshing myself in any potentially dysfunctional, singular commune.
If we're going to extremes, I prefer the Beduins or Travellers to the setups you're concerned with "disproving" or whatever. Even though I called it a lazy example on my part, there's good reason I mentioned the Amish originally, and not the Branch Davidians or all the FLDS drama you can watch on TV. If you're so concerned about Jonestown, stop pretending that's the only setup out there, or that glorified polygamy with religious overtones is what people want from a commune.