kind of wish I could get hype about communes as a concept but the thing is I think there's a huge blind spot around specifically power dynamics, agency and accountability which gets lost in utopian thinking
which is to say that yes in an ideal world a commune would have solid accountability and protections in place to tackle abuse and coercion
but we very much don't live in an ideal world and time and again I keep seeing people both in communal living situations and in less full-on activist and organising communities just sort of. plough on in the assumption that a) nobody in their community will be abusive and b) they'll Figure It Out if it does happen, they have all the Good Transformative Justice ideas and knowledge and resources!
For the record, this is a great summation of why I'm not an anarchist: because fundamentally, I think the best way to balance the conflicting needs of safety and connection is to have external structures that can be totally separate from our personal and communal chosen bonds. If you give that impersonal structure the power to enforce a common law, you end up reinventing a state. It doesn't have to be a capitalist state--personally, I like socialism--but you do end up there if you remove the element of choice. Sometimes certain things need to not be optional, like whether someone who leaves a community is entitled to their financial share, or whether we take care of people who are so broken that they become wildly unpleasant to interact with.
Thing is, you don't need malice to create an abusive situation. You don't need to construct a narcissist or a person who is always an abuser or even someone who doesn't love the person they're hurting. Conflicts, deeply dysfunctional situations, and abuse happen even in well meaning groups of generally altruistic, honest individuals, especially when people are operating beyond their individual thresholds in terms of the physical, cognitive, and emotional labor that they are trying to provide.
In particular, it is extremely common for people with complex trauma to feel that they are valuable only insofar as they can provide valuable labor to the community so they aren't easily replaceable, which generally winds up making them load-bearing community members... load-bearing community members who are relatively prone to meltdowns if they split or burn out. Which is common: if you think your only value is your labor, you can't withdraw that labor if you run into your reserves or you lose your community, so burnout with this particular pathology is quite high...
(I'm talking about me, by the way, and maybe a dozen other people I know, with varying levels of self awareness and determination to Not Do That. It's a common, common sort of person, especially in circles that care sincerely about building a more just world. It's not always a story that ends badly, but the rails are there.)
You cannot select these issues out of your community by only letting the right people in. They will pop up, no matter what you do. Even if you can magically make sure that everyone in your community is 100% honest and sincere and intends the best, you will find yourself in these situations. At these times, what matters is what you do about it--and as with any emergency, what you do when it gets real bad is strongly influenced by what you do when things are only a little bad.
Ohhhh my god man shut up. Even if we're not capable of utterly removing harm we absolutely are capable of building societies that undercut systems of abuse and silencing. We just have to acknowledge that those things are always a risk and not get complacent in ignoring the possibility of them. It just takes work and care, which a doomery 'oh who cares we might as well die' response makes less, not more, likely to happen.
We can be kind to each other. We can take collective responsibility for people's wellbeing and happiness. We do it all the fucking time! That's what friendship is!
and in an entirely honest and forthright and not patronising way: I am legitimately incredibly sorry if you haven't experienced the human capacity for non-abusive relationships, bc I know I didn't until my late 20s and it sucks.
but to build non-abusive societies we have to believe they're possible and that sounds woo but it's true. Like, until I had non-abusive relationships modelled for me I had very little ability to confront or criticise abuse because I didn't think there was another option on the table. Same goes on a sociocultural level. yeah there's abuse in every community but how they handle it and the harm it creates is different and we can learn from that and build on it. and we do that by acknowledging that the harm and the pain and the abuse is there, why it happens and is allowed to continue, and what works to minimise harm or prevent it.
no it's not going to be perfect! it's never going to be perfect! people are people and they will fuck up and rub each other up the wrong way and have conflicting needs and sometimes, even in the best society, act out of malice. there's always going to be pain. but there doesn't always have to be systematised abuse or lack of support or normalisation if we're willing and able to put the fucking work in instead of wanking on about the inevitable evil of mankind.
bluh bluh bluh there's no good people we're all shit and evil abluh bluh bluh
shut the fuck up I love people. people harm each other constantly but not because people are Inherently Evil but because people are complex, reactive, overwhelmable and injured. people aren't cartoon villains (even though much of what some people do is cartoonishly villainous).
we're worth saving! we're worth loving! we're worth putting the work in to make people better to each other! we as a species don't 'deserve extinction' we have a responsibility to ourselves and the world to do better! we have to actually put in work instead of pulling the old 'I can't help it I'm just Bad' line. that's a fucking copout. we're not intrinsically bad. we're not intrinsically good. we're not intrinsically anything. we face a lot of seemingly intractable problems and it's up to us to figure out ways to chip away at them because what else is the point of being here if not to make things a wee bit less shit?
do you not believe in healing? do you not believe in joy? do you not believe in care? sometimes they're thin on the ground but they're fucking out there! and we can make there be more??? that's the point!
Oh good you said it so I didn't have to. Fuck! I saw the same thing in my notifications and I just--good grief! The very fact that we're having this damn conversation, about harm mitigation even when it's hard, that should be your reality check that it's not all hopeless despair forever! That should be the reminder that humans are trying to do better by one another, not a cue to descend into despair!
People aren't bad, just messy. It's hard to always predict the consequences of our actions and it's hard to keep our emotions in check and sometimes when our environments get overwhelming we stop being our best selves. But that doesn't mean that our best selves don't exist! It just means building in supports so that when we're all tired and ten minutes from meltdown and no one was trained for any of this, we can collapse on those supports for a minute while we sob it out and get ourselves back under control. It means building in guidelines so that when we're overwhelmed and scared we can find our way back into the light. It means building in systems like creep feeders so that small, vulnerable individuals can access resources that they might otherwise be accidentally shoved out of. We can work together to design an environment that has structures that reduce harm, even when conditions get tough.
We gotta build harm reduction approaches into our systems and philosophies, not pretend that goodness and badness are intrinsic traits of individuals. Harm reduction was invented by people grappling with addiction, but it's an excellent principle for building community structures or public health initiatives more generally: sometimes people are gonna do stuff that is not ideal, and what we collectively do about that should focus on reducing the long term harm of those behaviors rather than trying to moralize humanity into perfection. That philosophy was built by addicts and queers burying the thrown - away bodies of their friends and lovers and families in the middle of the AIDS pandemic at its worst: hardly a situation that seems tailor made to produce optimism. And yet they built something that helps us all forge pathways towards something better on top of creating programs that reduced the spread of diseases and kept one another safe. Doesn't that mean anything?
Just cause the work is hard doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Just because the system is imperfect and we disagree a lot doesn't mean we can't get somewhere better. We've already made so much progress relative to where we started! There's this book called A Good Time to Be Born by Perri Klass that talks about how humanity looked at fucking child mortality, an inescapable scourge we had carried for all existence, and decided to do something about it--and then did. Think about that! We're doing so much better than we used to!
The whole conversation makes me think of the parallel conversation my friend @findingfeather has been having this week from a historical perspective: we forget how far we've come because we idealize the past. When you look carefully at the realities of the past, you see how hard we have collectively worked to make a better world. Sure, it's not perfect and it never will be. Sure, it takes lifetimes of effort and plenty of mistakes to struggle towards better. But we muddle along together despite it. That's the human condition!
