8 ms·

> the co-op has the authority through consensus to legally force someone off the commune So first it's important to point out that in self-organized communitie

> the co-op has the authority through consensus to legally force someone off the commune 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?

JPKab 5y ago
"Why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you?" 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.
- netcan 5y ago
  There are actual, real discrimination implications to self governing communities. Forced eviction isn't likely to be the problem, but selective admission is. 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.
  - lowkey_ 5y ago
    > 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? 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.
    - netcan 5y ago
      As I said, I think in the current context of a handful of eco villages, evictions are probably very rare. Admissions OTOH, aren't rare. 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.
      - exporectomy 5y ago
        > racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction. 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.
        southerntofu 5y ago
        >> 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 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.
  - bsanr2 5y ago
    >Does that mean selective hiring needs to end? 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.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      In France, since 2006 all corporations with more than 50 salaries have to accept anonymous CVs in order to make discrimination harder. It's nearly not enough to tip the balance (and certainly does not address toxic workplace culture) but it's a good start.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > Every selective admissions process has the potential (probably history) for bigotry. 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.
- pasquinelli 5y ago
  yes, and they succeeded in exclusion of minorities, and they were not cooperative communities. 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.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  yeah and look how quickly every urban city went to hell when those rules were abolished.
jlmorton 5y ago
> why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you? 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?
- pkdpic 5y ago
  Aren't we already allowing / building increasingly large homeless refugee camps?
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    Not in the US. Occasionally, some effort to make a homeless camp livable is talked about but the powers-that-be still act to do the opposite, first the make homeless camp a hellhole and then kick everyone out to re-appear elsewhere.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      Isn't a livable homeless camp a shanty town? Is that really something to aim for as the long term solution? Personally, I like the freedom it gives residents but it also gives them health and safety problems and people are generally awful at protecting themselves from that.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    That's not the answer to the homelessness. There's plenty of housing everywhere just sitting by to drive speculation. Building ghettos/camps is just for giving rich people good conscience that they don't have to see homeless people when they go out on the street.
- 5y ago
jollybean 5y ago
"what's the alternative?" 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.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > 'Free thinkers', bent on re-thinking civilization, can be surprisingly authoritarian. Authoritarians usually use the existing legal system to oppress 'free thinkers'. It's the minority, the fringe, that get oppressed.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Authoritarians usually come from the fringe and change the system of power, i.e. Castro, Qaddafi, Stalin, Mao etc..
    - wolverine876 5y ago
joe_the_user 5y ago
I live in an apartment by myself. I cook and eat by myself. 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).
- chiefalchemist 5y ago
  I'd like to add, the police get called for things that aren't law enforcement related. But we don't have alternatives, do we. And that is unfortunate. 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).
maxerickson 5y ago
People are coming at it from a different direction than you, asking why anyone would join a community where they don't quite have property rights. 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. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

JPKab 5y ago

"Why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you?" 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.

netcan 5y ago
There are actual, real discrimination implications to self governing communities. Forced eviction isn't likely to be the problem, but selective admission is. 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.
- lowkey_ 5y ago
  > 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? 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.
  - netcan 5y ago
    As I said, I think in the current context of a handful of eco villages, evictions are probably very rare. Admissions OTOH, aren't rare. 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.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      > racism or other bigotry in admission. Almost never around eviction. 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.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        >> 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 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.
- bsanr2 5y ago
  >Does that mean selective hiring needs to end? 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.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    In France, since 2006 all corporations with more than 50 salaries have to accept anonymous CVs in order to make discrimination harder. It's nearly not enough to tip the balance (and certainly does not address toxic workplace culture) but it's a good start.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Every selective admissions process has the potential (probably history) for bigotry. 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.
pasquinelli 5y ago
yes, and they succeeded in exclusion of minorities, and they were not cooperative communities. 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.
fidesomnes 5y ago
yeah and look how quickly every urban city went to hell when those rules were abolished.

jlmorton 5y ago

> why on earth would you be allowed to live in a place where nobody wants to live with you? 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?

pkdpic 5y ago
Aren't we already allowing / building increasingly large homeless refugee camps?
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  Not in the US. Occasionally, some effort to make a homeless camp livable is talked about but the powers-that-be still act to do the opposite, first the make homeless camp a hellhole and then kick everyone out to re-appear elsewhere.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Isn't a livable homeless camp a shanty town? Is that really something to aim for as the long term solution? Personally, I like the freedom it gives residents but it also gives them health and safety problems and people are generally awful at protecting themselves from that.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  That's not the answer to the homelessness. There's plenty of housing everywhere just sitting by to drive speculation. Building ghettos/camps is just for giving rich people good conscience that they don't have to see homeless people when they go out on the street.
5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

"what's the alternative?" 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.

wolverine876 5y ago
> 'Free thinkers', bent on re-thinking civilization, can be surprisingly authoritarian. Authoritarians usually use the existing legal system to oppress 'free thinkers'. It's the minority, the fringe, that get oppressed.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jollybean 5y ago
  Authoritarians usually come from the fringe and change the system of power, i.e. Castro, Qaddafi, Stalin, Mao etc..
  - wolverine876 5y ago

joe_the_user 5y ago

I live in an apartment by myself. I cook and eat by myself. 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).

chiefalchemist 5y ago
I'd like to add, the police get called for things that aren't law enforcement related. But we don't have alternatives, do we. And that is unfortunate. 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).

maxerickson 5y ago

People are coming at it from a different direction than you, asking why anyone would join a community where they don't quite have property rights. 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. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm