I keep wanting to form some kind of housing cooperative for people seeking refuge from abusive situations, seeing as how there’s currently fuck-all meaningful resources for adult survivors of childhood abuse. I know that despite this being completely nonviolent, legal, voluntary, and well-intentioned operation, that most people won’t care or will actively support when some extremists decide to infiltrate and sabotage that effort. Manufactured consent and all. Why does nobody else do things like this? What has prevented the vast majority of other American leftists from simply crowdfunding their own communes, leaving the larger economy, and building their own means of production so that they aren’t dependent on the rest of the world for permission to build systems of mutual aid?
This isn’t necessarily from the US system, but I’ve known people from attempted communes. They often fall into a problem of turning into cults.
Internal security is often a bad problem too, like you said you wanted to provide resources for survivors of childhood abuse, but communes aren’t immune to that issue if children are involved. You need tight internal security in order to prevent abuse from occurring, especially because people can build up dependencies inside of communes.
But yeah, out of the three people I’ve known who were in communes, all three turned into cults and that doesn’t seem to be an anecdotal issue from stuff I’ve read. I guess there’s just something about the conditions right now that lend themselves towards cult formation when you’ve got a bunch of people who deliberately cut themselves off from society. You have to get people to believe in something greater than themselves and come together to do real things together, real and difficult things, like actual work of building houses, doing agriculture, waste management. Actual jobs without the normal western capitalist promise of money or security. You’re telling people they’re starting from the absolute bottom of society, and will possibly stay there as long as they live there. And so you’re going to attract either weirdos or people interested in some project the commune is doing, like I don’t know, solar power or some type of bean cultivation.
I know it’s not scientific or precise to say communes attract weirdos that are more prone to become cultists, but that’s been my primary experience with them. It’s hard to get people corralled and cooperating unless they’ve got a good reason to be there, or at least a reason they can believe in.
Also, people who have serious disabilities or medical issues that require dependency on the capitalist healthcare system? They’re by default not going to be interested in commune living.
To add onto this, turning into a cult becomes more likely the more you are physically isolated from mainstream society, and the more sudden and stark the change from nonmember to member is.
Turning into a cult becomes WAY more likely if there is an official religious affiliation.