Thoughts on communes

[Americancommi]

Do you feel that communes are effective and if so what should be done to create the best one.

[Sacha]

There is a fundimental problem with a commons based system and that is that every person must have equal distribution of all aspects of the communes property and activites.

If every person in the commune had one sheep and one person wanted one more sheep, then every person must have one more, even if everyone agrees that it would be okay if that one person has two and the rest don't. That is to say that every person must gain a sheep and everyone must want a sheep at the same time.

Upon giving that person alone, another sheep, he is then extracting more resources from the community and thus has a greater impact then rest of the people causing an imbalance in the system.

The other problem with this is that all people also need to agree that person can't have an extra sheep, including the person that wants it, in order for the decision to not hold an opposite balance of power.

All people must not desire extra, but only need it when a communal need is expressed. If one person in the group deals with sheep and another with cows, there needs to be a ground to compare the value of each of these resources to keep the community fair.

Commons systems are delicate.

[Cult of Reason]

I think Sacha is misunderstanding what communism is. It would not be a situation where people have exactly the same stuff. It would be one where everyone gets what they need. If you need more food than others (due to faster metabolism or more strenuous manual labour) then you will get more food than others if you ask for it.

You would not give an office worker and an athlete the same amount of food, would you?

[OkaCrisis]

Haraldur is right.

And technically all of the sheep would be held in common, so the herd would be as big as the commune needed it to be, and no one person could claim ownership of more or less sheep, and therefore no one could have their 'larger herd' eat up more resources than anyone else's.

I feel that communes are the most efficient way to sustain populations, and are far less 'delicate' than the world as it is run today. For example, using the sheep again, under capitalism, each individual will horde as many sheep as s/he can in order to hold the largest possible 'market share' of that good, giving them the ability to set prices to maximize profit. These prices don't actually reflect the true cost of producing the good though (usually in terms of environmental degradation that often results from mass production), or the real supply of it. The only thing the price of anything reflects is its value on the market, in terms of shares, money and profit.

This eventually leads to a situation where we will have consumed and degraded huge amounts of necessary resources, because they have been horded and sold at unsustainable rates to populations who are driven to over-consume (i.e. eating 3 meat meals a day), meanwhile other populations around the world (especially in Africa, where much cattle is grown for American export) suffer from famine, disease and poverty. Vast tracts of African savannah are being overgrazed and are turning into desert. Vast tracts of trees are cut down and sold for lumber. The oceans today house 10% (!) of the population of marine wildlife that lived there 100 years ago. All of this in a world with a growing population!

This is delicate. It's unsustainable. In collective, communist societies, instead of profit being the driver of production, need will be. Things won't be produced that aren't needed, and things that are needed will be produced at sustainable rates, by parties interested in the production of that good, not by capitalists, interested solely in profits.

[dislatino]

i have a question, when does society decide that the need of somone is too much? i would imagine there could be people who ask for for more than they need, how is this issue resolved?

[Cult of Reason]

Originally posted by [email protected] 17 2006, 05:20 PM
i have a question, when does society decide that the need of somone is too much? i would imagine there could be people who ask for for more than they need, how is this issue resolved?
There are several solutions.

One is that if Communism is established in the First World (which would probably be a technate, I will post about this when I finally make a topic about Anarchist Technocracy) there would be an abundance of goods and services.

The second is that there is a physical limit to what you can consume.

[emokid08]

I agree with Haraldur and Okacrisis. Unfortuantely they said what I was thinking, wish I had something to contribute, but they hit it on the head.
:D