We Are Still in the Testing Phase

by Raven

I have a long time interest in social change.  I’ve often talked and written about communities as “laboratories for social change”.

Unlike a lot of radicals, I’m not interested in getting rid of the horrible things we are dealing with.  I don’t want to defund the police, abolish prisons, or smash the state.  I think that getting rid of stuff only creates a vacuum which allows other things to emerge which might be just as bad or worse.  I’m interested in replacing the police, replacing the prisons, and replacing the state.

I’ve been inspired by the Buckminster Fuller quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  I’ve also been further inspired by quotes from two system thinkers.  John Gall claimed that “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.” Kevin Kelly said something similar. “The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.”

Communities (along with various kinds of cooperatives, land trusts, local economies, sustainable living laboratories like Living Energy Farm, and many other small scale alternative models) can be examples of those “simple systems that work”.  But my reason for referring to them as “laboratories” is that at this point, we don’t always know what’s going to work.  I think that Twin Oaks (for all its problems and it has quite a few at this point) is an example of communism that works.  It’s been working for over fifty-five years now and is still going along.  East Wind Community has been its version of this for forty-nine years this year and Acorn just turned thirty.  Glomus Commune that I just left is in its eighth year of farming and sharing.

Unfortunately, this is a small number of functioning communes.  The failure rate of new communities is very high and income-sharing communities are at what I’ve been calling a low ebb.  Obviously, if we knew a formula to create new communities that was fairly successful, we would have a lot more of them, but we are still in the trial and error phase.  This is why at one point I listed ten good reasons to try to create new communes.

With climate change and a lot of social problems at an all time high and seemingly accelerating, I know folks want to have more working alternatives faster, but I think that pushing the process is a recipe for disaster.  I’ve said that urgency is what got us into this mess, it’s not going to get us out of it.

This is why I’ve adopted Joanna Macy’s three part model for social change.  My version of it is we need all those protests and demonstrations and direct actions (which Joanna Macy calls “holding actions”) to give us time to build the “structural alternatives” (communes, co-ops, etc.) and figure out how to make them work reliably as well as to let people know about them (to, as Joanna Macy says, shift “perceptions of reality” or, basically, educate folks).  I truly wish that the communities were ready to provide a replicable model that could be widely distributed, but at this point we are still learning how to do it.  At this point we are still in the testing phase.  Which is why we need to build more communes.