[P2P-F] Fwd: The False Defences Of Utopian Thought

ideasinc at ee.net ideasinc at ee.net
Wed Nov 9 04:43:39 CET 2011


I happened to stumble onto the fact that the Twin Oaks Intentional  
Community in Louisa, Virginia /US  was started in the early 70's and  
remains fully operational. It was interesting to me that their commune  
accounting system is very, very post-Keynesian, and it seems to have been  
put together by people with liberal arts degrees, not econo-wonks.  
Generally speaking egalitarian projects tend to have an open door that  
seems to invite dysfunction and the dystopia in at the same time. The  
mythologizing of democracy seems to have a similar effect.  Tadit





On Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:30:22 -0500, Kevin Carson  
<free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 1:30 AM, Michel Bauwens  
> <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
>> having lived in 3 (failed) communes myself, I would question any
>> interpretation that only blames outside pressures ..
>
> Michel:  The problem is that communes are voluntarist efforts,
> lifestyle choices, that operate against the economic and material
> currents of outside society.  Corporations have just as many dickheads
> and narcissists in them as communes.  So why don't they go belly-up as
> a result of normal human foibles?  The answer, I think, is that
> structural conditions tip the balance in a particular direction.
> Human society was organized primarily into  localized economies,
> demographically stable communities, extended families, etc. --
> basically the kind of stuff the commune movement tries to replicate,
> against the spirit of the age -- and that pattern survived despite the
> dickheadedness and narcissism of its human raw membership because the
> state didn't have its thumb on the scale in favor of centralism and
> hierarchy.
>




More information about the P2P-Foundation mailing list