Utopian communities are useful, in the sense that they're social petri dishes that let us run experiments that would be unbelievably destructive to attempt in t

Utopian communities are useful, in the sense that they're social petri dishes that let us run experiments that would be unbelievably destructive to attempt in the wider world. It is through the failure of various communities that we know, to a decent-enough approximation, how far you can scale egalitarian labor schemes. It's how we know how communal living arrangements tend to fail. Dunbar's Number [1] and similar ideas were largely derived based on real-world experience in nontraditional social structures (some of which were companies, e.g. Gor-Tex, not communes). I think it's important to look at even "failed" attempts at utopian living through the lens of an experiment. Even if the outcome wasn't what was intended, we still learn something in the process, and that knowledge is valuable in the wider world as we work more incrementally. The danger is when we allow people to run their social experiments in vivo instead of in vitro. A few dozen people choosing to share property and responsibilities and income based on a fringe socio-political philosophy is fine, assuming they're all consenting adults, and might lead to valuable knowledge. A few dozen people attempting to force that same model on an entire population is worth killing them all in order to prevent. Utopianism in the context of people freely choosing how they want to live is a great thing; it is the cooption of putatively "utopian" ideas by violent revolutionaries, and their use of those ideas to gain followers who ought to know better, that has been an extremely deadly combination. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number