[WarmWash]

It's a great idea that never works. Never. Inevitably you end up with people who do the absolute bare minimum to qualify for "the communal take" and a small cadre of power players who carry many multiples of their weight. Eventually the strong players get sick of carrying, and the whole thing collapses.

You can have pockets of like minded individuals who understand the give and take, happy communes (which also seem to inevitably collapse, but I digress), however it is comically naive and foolish to think that it can scale to a societal default. Unless you start killing all the detractors and dead weights. Which is where it often goes...I'll stick with an economic democracy based system (people independently vote with their dollars for what they like/want).

[throwaway27448]

It's hard to say if it never works if all you know is greed and incompetence

> Inevitably you end up with people who do the absolute bare minimum to qualify for "the communal take" and a small cadre of power players who carry many multiples of their weight. Eventually the strong players get sick of carrying, and the whole thing collapses.

What are you citing from? It seems like you're just describing our current model of society rather than the one you say you're criticizing

[ahhhhnoooo]

I've fed and housed people for decades, provided transportation, donated skills, and rehabilitated wild lands. The people who receive the benefits from that didn't do anything to get them. They simply needed them. If I have extra and you need some, you can have some. Simple as.

Most people want to contribute, pay it forward, or give in their own way. Almost no one wants to do nothing to give back. (Usually, the people who do are the people who have been stepped on their whole lives, and by receiving aid it buys them a chance to rest. Once they've rested, they tend to help out where they can.)

I guess I'm going to believe my decades of lived experience with mutual aid over some stranger telling me things I've observed sustaining themselves are impossible.

[WarmWash]

OK, that's great and respectable.

But you don't address the core problem which is "How do you handle the people faking (often even faking out themselves!) the need for selfish gain?" and "How do you handle the people who see others lying for gain, and they themselves convert from the helpers to the helped"?

Most people just sweep this under the rug, because it is an obvious and fatal flaw in the system. It's also ideologically uncomfortable that powerless people (have nots) can be just as shitty and morally awry as powerful people (haves).

The world shouldn't be a place devoid of charity and helping out those who need it. In fact it's critical to maximizing society for everyone. But building a system with those ideals being the center pillar is backwards, because it puts the rewards before the work. A side spoke of support? Sure. But the center framework? Doesn't work, and there are ample examples, because every kid votes to get cookies first with the promise of eating their veggies later.

[ahhhhnoooo]

It's really important to differentiate mutual aid from charity. They are very different.

Mutual aid is about building community and then sharing your excess with that community. My extra food is not going to random humans, but rather to people I know. Maybe not well, but we know each other. Charity goes out to strangers. You are giving something away, but not building community. Charity doesn't build resiliency, imo, the same way mutual aid does.

I eat the same food I'm serving alongside the people I'm feeding. This is precisely to build that community - I'm not just a faceless person, I'm someone they know.

And how do I cope with people taking more than their fair share? You accept inefficiency. I cannot tell you how many times I've watched someone take food, and immediately walk to the trash and throw it away. Feels bad, but I've got more to share, and because that's a member of my community and not a stranger I can ask them, "Hey, what's up, bud? Didn't like the food, or...?"

And when someone goes to take a huge pile of food, they often look around and realize, "Wait, all the other folks nearby need this food too. Maybe I'll just take a few, because I know who I'm leaving an empty table for."

But you know what? It's really pretty rare. I've seen it, usually when new people show up, or when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis, but whats much more common is people looking at each other and going, "You got enough, brother? Can you share? Sure, let me grab one for you."

You are accurately describing difficulties with charity, imo, though others might disagree with me on that of that. Add community to it, and the calculus changes quite substantially.

[WarmWash]

The problem is that communities are grossly inefficient.

Look at what happened when big box stores came to local communities. "We are a community" goes out the window when walmart milk is 30% cheaper than Mom and Pop milk. Why? Because massive centralized operations are inherently more efficient, and they can leverage that efficiency to offer the lowest prices. And people on the whole will always, always, always, shop for the best deal.

Look, I'm someone who spends weeks every year in Vermont, which is the last place in the US that still has "community" focused living (if you have never been, it would be magical for you). No big box stores, no strip malls, no franchise chains, all local farms, local businesses.

But you know what the truth is? They are all dead broke with stagnant industry and a total dependence on outsiders bringing in money to keep their "community living" theme park alive.

[ahhhhnoooo]

Inefficient, probably, but remember that you are operating within a system where people need to shop for a deal. There are other systems one can consider. And don't think of community as a single local place, but rather multiple interlocking sets of people. I'll give an example.

One of my communities is farmers. Farmers get paid ~$7 for a bushel of grain (~50lbs). Those same grains can cost $5/lb at the grocery store. When I buy from the farmer, we've settled on a rate of $18/bushel, or <$0.50 per pound. I turn around and feed people for free with this. 50lbs of barley or wheat or whatever is an enormous amount of food, and $20 is a cost I can absorb every few months.

So, now two communities that I'm a part of benefit - the farmers earn more for their product, the hungry eat for free. The farmer community doesn't have to know the hungry community. And the only financial input is purchasing the grain for FAR less than retail, and without every middleman taking a cut.

Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread hypothesizes that if we gave the farmer everything they needed to farm and live comfortably, the farmer would give away the grain. If the grain was free, we'd have people make bread and feed others for free. (This part is at least partially true, because I know I do it, and I'm not the only one who does.)

People like making stuff. People like sharing.

I'm trying to find an in to a biodiesel community, to see if I cannot connect them as well, benefiting the farmer community and giving food and material to the biodiesel community. Haven't connected there yet.

Don't think of this as small town isolationism, but rather a distributed system of syndicates producing and sharing their excess with others who have a use for the excess. Makerspaces on a grand scale, with the resources of many, many people.

[WarmWash]

>everything they needed to farm and live comfortably

We discovered long ago that farmers in Brazil have much much lower standards for "live comfortably", because they don't have first world neighbors swimming in a first world life.

Most people aren't aware that Bernie (once again back at Vermont, heh) was/is (I'm sure he still is, but definitely hides it for obvious reasons) an ardent supporter of tariffs. Knee cap the Brazilian farmers so American farmers can charge more and "live comfortably".

Which is nice, but ultimately is just nationalistic hypocrisy. People are forced to pay more for food so that they can artificially hold up farmers in the US. That might feel good, but on a humanitarian level, it's crippling to Brazilian farmers who are just as human as American ones. Export the economic loss to poorer countries...how first world

Well, ok so we can erase the hypocrisy and flatten the global economic terrain. But then we are all living like the farmers in Brazil, an upgrade for many billions and a massive downgrade for maybe a billion.

Very noble, but good luck getting anyone in the first world to actually vote for that.

[throwaway27448]

Again, it seems like you're describing capitalism. We can only carry parasites for so long before people realize they contribute nothing to society. One must work to earn their bread! Most of us on this forum distinctly do not