From: pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Newsgroups: sci.econ
Subject: Small Communities (Re: Wage Slavery)
Date: 6 Apr 92 17:53:17 GMT
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle

In article <9204052014.AA05137@xuucp.ch.apollo.hp.com> nelson_p@APOLLO.HP.COM writes:
>
>  No concrete instances of a society structured along lines 
>  consistent with the variety of Marxism espoused by Mr.
>  Langer have been shown to exist in a stable form.  

   [ ... ]
>                                              [ ... ]    But during 
>  this century there have been, worldwide, HUNDREDS of small "intentional
>  communities", communes, kibbutzes, and so forth that were quite 
>  consciously organized along democratic marxist lines and these
>  have not, in general, proved terribly successful either.  Commun-
>  alistic communities have a long and rich history.  I would suggest
>  that anyone interested in the topic start with _Heavens on Earth_
>  (Mark Holloway, Dover press, ISBN 0-486-21593-8), a history of such
>  experiments in North America up to the end of the last century.
>
>  These sorts of experiments do not typically fail because the 
>  local villagers come by with torches and pitchforks and tear the 
>  place down.  Rather they typically self-destruct in anywhere
>  between a few years and a generation because their underlying 
>  assumptions about human nature run afoul of concrete reality.

As a dedicated reader of community histories, I'd add a proviso to
Peter's description of typical self destruction. Although the failures
of the majority of small intentional communities is something that
needs to be remebered, its more interesting to me to wonder why some
of them do work. From the most recent round of attempts in the USA,
both Twin Oaks (Richmond, VA) and The Farm (TN) are still in
operation, doing well economically, and retain many of their important
distinctive characteristics. How did they manage this, when so many
others failed ? 

On the other hand, one also needs to be careful not to pay too much
attention to the 19th century US examples that collapsed due to their
inherent own design (such as zero-birth rates). One can get better
examples by looking at the parallel but non-intentional communities of
the Amish and Mennonite communities, particularly those around the
Lancaster County, PA region. Although their particular mode of social
organization is complicated by (1) religious belief and (2) US federal
and state government interference, these communities are doing well in
most senses. They are not "marxist", "socialist" or "communist" in the
sense of having explicitly adopted these -ism's as working strategies.
Nevertheless, they do manage to demonstrate both some of the strengths
and some of the weaknesses of these -ism's in a way that economics
never does.

As a final note, one can wonder a great deal about the impact of
intentionality on community success. There is no clear lesson from
recent US history (a nice example because its all so recent and
relatively well documented) on whether or not intentional communities
do better or worse than circumstantial ones. Many of us are living in
cities that were started as intentional (and commercial) communities,
yet we now find ourselves in a very circumstantial social environment,
lacking in most of the cohesive elements of a more intentional system.

-- paul

-- 
"what various paths are followed in distributing honors & possessions" 
Computer Science Lab, University of Washington 	<pauld@cs.washington.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.econ