What about for people who wanted to live the way of the hermit? I am talking about the one who is being fair and reasonable on zone and location, not some lunatic.
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I like the idea of towns (or neighborhoods, in larger cities) organizing communally
... To live – does it not mean to have indomitable faith in victory?
What about for people who wanted to live the way of the hermit? I am talking about the one who is being fair and reasonable on zone and location, not some lunatic.
I originally wrote this in another thread. It was more geared toward children, but I think it applies here as well:
Children are not capable of being fully autonomous early on and need guidance and help. This is not to say they are unthinking robots, but they do need to be taught how the world works. I am entirely comfortable with "violating my child's autonomy" by grabbing him if he's about to run out into the street, (politely) taking things from him in a store and placing them back on the shelf, or not allowing him to play with the large assortment of chemicals people keep under their sinks. What should be discouraged is the authoritarian and demeaning parenting that many people use, approaching their duty as a parent as a prison guard or police figure. There will always be a need for a certain amount of "authority" over those that are not yet capable of taking care of themselves. The problems the family unit faces these days is more a lack of respect for a child's ability to process these situations and grow to understand them without talking down to them, yelling at them, or hitting them.
As for the notion that children should not be influenced by their parent or guardian, but rather society...I think that ignores the diversity of human thought. A communal society does not mean the end of different approaches, thoughts, and attitudes toward living. If anything I would agree with Oscar Wilde and say a society under socialism would be more diverse and individualistic. You are not going to have a set standard for society to raise a child by. Certainly the consensus society has on certain matters would deter most people from abuse, as it does now, but the notion that doing away with family units would eliminate the complex relationship between guardians and children ignores human diversity too much.
I have a feeling that a society under socialism or communism would not see the end of the family unit so much as an extension and furthered development of it, where we view more and more people as part of our family or community. Simply because children are not confined to one style of guardianship does not mean that some won't choose to primarily live with one person, and others may prefer to "bounce around". Again, children are every bit as diverse as the rest of us.
I refer you to what I said:
I think two parents is preferable though.
Ivan "Bonebreaker" Khutorskoy16.11.2009"We won't forget, we won't forgive"
Yeh, we call that communism.I like the idea of towns (or neighborhoods, in larger cities) organizing communally
Ivan "Bonebreaker" Khutorskoy16.11.2009"We won't forget, we won't forgive"
Definitely an interesting post. I just wonder, though, how far the developement of emotional bonds is dependent upon the value that our culture at large places on them, and as such whether such an environment could present a viable alternative to the family.
As long as the economic family (contracts and generally male-determined division of labour in the home) goes the way of the dinosaur, I don't care what social fancies concerning "families" arise, as long as they aren't the product of "bourgeois feminism" like that of some posters on this board.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
I think TC asks some really good questions and I think some of the responses are interesting.
Rather than responding to anyone though, I'll raise a different, but related point. (
The thing that communal living as a long-term situation brings to my mind is the use of the current family structure to enforce social rules. Of course, Levi-Strauss's work on the incest taboo comes to mind as an important example of a social regulation that exists to encourage certain types of behavior (exogamy and the control of reproduction). So for me, I think the advantages of living communally would not be simply to not reproduce bourgeois ideology, as TC correct points out, but it could also fundamentally transform the forms of relationships in society.
Again bringing in an anthropological perspective, it occurs to me that families are even more fundamental to society than the economy or politics. Or, better said, the family is a building block upon which are build most other systems. Kinship and family are/were more important to the functioning of primitive societies than abstracted concepts like money. So if we fundamentally changed the form of the "family," intentionally and voluntarily, I think it opens up a wide range of possibilities for different kinds of socialization. Like TC suggests in her OP, collectives of different needs/desires could fit people better than living as they do now. I think they could also engender exactly the kind of solidarity-based relationships that are necessary to maintain a communist society without enforcement from above by a repressive apparatus.
Someone who's talked about this in a more strategic way, as opposed to the theoretical discussion we're bringing up, is James Herod in his hit-and-miss book Getting Free. I'd suggest that folks check out his sections about collective living and how it can, with really not that much work, be attempted today on a wider scale than the cooperative movement is undertaken. I think that, as an added strategic bonus, in my experience with housing cooperatives, the solidarity and cooperation that are required for collective living engender an added focus on organizing and a springboard for action. Be it simply more frequent discussions of theory/strategy/tactics or the more concrete benefits of having a space where meetings can take place and collective materials can be kept, collective housing helps us today. In this way, maybe we could see it as prefiguring the different socialization that I mentioned by being an active mechanism to promote solidarity.
