> I also think people are overestimating how much they’d enjoy their hobbies if they were jobs, or how much the suckage of their jobs is because of capitalism.
This is a fun intellectual discussion that I have with one of my kids! They have correctly noticed that capitalism is frequently horrible, and we have kicked around alternatives!
But my favorite parent argument is that this problem is hard, because *survival* is itself a giant grind. Or as I put it:
"We have woods! The woods contain tasty animals made of meat! Their hides would make good clothes! There are even a couple of water sources! We have some gardens, and space for several more. Now, in order to survive the winter, we'll need water, food, shelter, clothes and heat. Using just things we already own (many of them technically provided by capitalism), how far can we get? How much will this suck?"
My kid and I have played survival games, so we at least have a framework to discuss this. We would need to kill the deer, butcher the deer, preserve the meat for winter, cure the hide, turn the hide into clothes, build a shelter, and cut down trees and stack them into 5 cords of firewood. And so on. And yes, we could simplify things using a division of labor, because our various neighbors have farming plots and domesticated animals. So if so-and-so can do farming at 10x our scale, and the other neighbor has eggs, how would we make this fair for everyone?
Or for that matter, we have several excellent co-ops of various kinds in our region. But they don't serve everywhere that would make sense. So how does a co-op raise capital to expand to a new location? This is an interesting problem, and some of the local co-ops are very open to ideas.
And the natural outcome of this brainstorming is that:
1. Survival is a massive grind.
2. Division of labor is miraculous.
3. The problem solved (sort of) by capitalism is very real, very difficult to solve, and absolutely key for making the division of labor work.
Can we do better? Quite possibly! But if we try and we get it wrong, then things will probably go horribly wrong. So we would also want some kind of incrementalism (to give us an "undo" button), and some kind of cooperative governance so that we don't just put a slightly different set of assholes in charge.
FWIW, I absolutely support people voluntarily joining leftist communes and/or starting cooperatives. Maybe they'll be the ones to discover neat social technology that makes this all easier.
(And just to be clear, producer and consumer cooperatives can work really well, and they can absolutely participate in markets and large scale division of labor. Even governance has been mostly solved. One reason you don't see cooperatives everywhere is that they have few incentives to scale up, and their capital access is limited. So well-run cooperatives that know how to outcompete the capitalists often remain local.)
Source for leftist communes mostly sucking? Let me take the two biggest I know of, in Denmark - we used to be "commune capital" of the world, probably still are.
First is Svanholm. Around 100 people live there, adults and kids, on a huge farm You have to give up 80% of your salary to live there, but in turn you get communal childcare, fresh food, you can borrow cars and clothes and whatever you want. You also have kitchen duty, mucking the stable duty etc. Seems neat. It's pretty old and they haven't had a bunch of people calling it a cult or sucky, yet.
Second, much more famously and with a lot of info available in English, Freetown Christiania. Bunch of hippies (about 1000) in the 70's moved in on some land in the outskirts of Copenhagen no one was using. It's complicated, and of course now it's just nepotism who gets to live there because now it's on prime real estate and it's honestly shocking the Danish state hasn't done anything about it; but I wouldn't say it "sucks".
I think that long-term durable communes are mostly fine for people who like that style of living (the bad communes tend to fall apart after a few years). But they usually have a pretty high turnover rate as many people realize they don't like it. And in the U.S. we had a ton of communes in the 1960s and 1970s which collapsed in short order because of freeloaders, poverty, social drama, and abusive leaders.
I guess my take is that it's fine to be a monk if you want to be a monk but if someone is going "we should have a global Catholic revolution and make everyone in the world be monks! Wouldn't that be great?" I'm like uhhhhhh that sounds terrible actually surely we should just pay attention to everyone's revealed preferences not to be monks
I think that this is a loudness problem - leftist communes that suck produce a lot of noise because people leave and complain, leftist communes that don't suck just quietly get on with it and nobody outside hears anything about them. Eg many cohousing projects like Lilac in the UK
You alluded to this, but I think a lot of the "real jobs" rhetoric comes from people who (ironically) don't understand economics and have a childlike model of how jobs work.
Speaking loosely, I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated from "real work" (farming, say, or building trains) and "middlemen" (eg accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI personnel). "bullshit jobs" is another framing.
I think the last 200 years have been a resounding victory of the superiority of the middleman model. It turns out better models of coordination just is extremely important, much more so than direct improvements in "object-level"/"direct"/"real"/"authentic" work
Arguably the most successful (for a while pretty successful, less so later on) leftist communes in history were early kibbutzim in Israel. I don't know all that much about them in detail, but they didn't seem to suck in ways that Ozzy describes further down in the comment thread.
But of course they did not allow people to choose work they did, for example. You could state preferences, and highly skilled work was given to those with required skills, but the work was assigned according to the needs of the community, and people were rotated through unpopular/unpleasant tasks.
All that seemed to work well in a sort of "idealistic frontier" nation building context (leaving aside for now the ethics of the whole project given previous inhabitants of the land, of course) but not so well once the basics were achieved.
> Leftist communes have no other way to resolve the information problem, which is a major reason they’re so poor.
I don't think that's why? They tend to be very small, and so need less aggregation and do better with people talking to each other. The most obvious reason they're poor is lack of economies of scale.
I assumed that in that particular sentence Ozy was talking about, like, Soviet agricultural communes, not voluntary communes in liberal capitalist countries.
>>>"also think people are overestimating how much they’d enjoy their hobbies if they were jobs, or how much the suckage of their jobs is because of capitalism"
I entirely agree with both these. The first is trivial/obvious, the second is I think partially caused by the fact that ALL of critique of capitalism originates in early modernity and its sociology (and related disciplines) which EXPLICITLY emerged as, well, critique/reaction to the industrial/capitalist "revolution".
I also think that there's a Protestant work ethic thread to all that (to Marxism for sure) in that admitting openly that WORK (defined as something that has to be done -- so at least sometimes will be done when we don't want to do it) OFTEN SUCKS AS SUCH, and the capitalist features (alienation, exploration, appropriation of added value if you believe in that, etc etc etc) are ON TOP of that. In fact even work-adjacent "hobbies" (gardening, DYI) have quite a big suckage factors.
This reminds me of Cartoon’s Hate Her’s post on how people don’t really hate capitalism, they hate being not rich.
To massively oversimplify, allocation of labor (in any system, capitalist, socialist, anarchist, or otherwise) will have to consider three basic factors 1) what jobs are you good at 2) what jobs does society need done 3) what jobs do you enjoy doing. Quite bluntly, society as a whole only cares about factors 1 and 2, while only you care directly about 3.
> Finally, while most of the jobs listed are real jobs, the distribution of jobs is batshit. Three sex workers?
"How many sex workers should there be on the commune?" is also an economic calculation problem! I assume the discrepancy in responses has more to do with personality-type-driven correlations between interest in certain types of jobs and interest in posting on social media about living in a leftist commune. In any case, there's a lot of possible jobs and products of jobs in the world, it's extremely unrealistic to expect that any commune will be completely self sufficient in terms of every possible good or service its members might want - and as far as I'm aware, most people who do advocate for more commune living don't actually claim that communes must be completely self sufficient or are disallowed from trading with other communes?
This might just be my circle, but I don't think most people would call law or accountanting "bullshit jobs". I think people mostly use it to mean the fluffier office jobs, HR, DEI and so on. Pretty sure even the bluest of collars understand that somebody needs to do the accounting. Maybe I'm too optimistic?
> I also think people are overestimating how much they’d enjoy their hobbies if they were jobs, or how much the suckage of their jobs is because of capitalism.
This is a fun intellectual discussion that I have with one of my kids! They have correctly noticed that capitalism is frequently horrible, and we have kicked around alternatives!
But my favorite parent argument is that this problem is hard, because *survival* is itself a giant grind. Or as I put it:
"We have woods! The woods contain tasty animals made of meat! Their hides would make good clothes! There are even a couple of water sources! We have some gardens, and space for several more. Now, in order to survive the winter, we'll need water, food, shelter, clothes and heat. Using just things we already own (many of them technically provided by capitalism), how far can we get? How much will this suck?"
My kid and I have played survival games, so we at least have a framework to discuss this. We would need to kill the deer, butcher the deer, preserve the meat for winter, cure the hide, turn the hide into clothes, build a shelter, and cut down trees and stack them into 5 cords of firewood. And so on. And yes, we could simplify things using a division of labor, because our various neighbors have farming plots and domesticated animals. So if so-and-so can do farming at 10x our scale, and the other neighbor has eggs, how would we make this fair for everyone?
Or for that matter, we have several excellent co-ops of various kinds in our region. But they don't serve everywhere that would make sense. So how does a co-op raise capital to expand to a new location? This is an interesting problem, and some of the local co-ops are very open to ideas.
And the natural outcome of this brainstorming is that:
1. Survival is a massive grind.
2. Division of labor is miraculous.
3. The problem solved (sort of) by capitalism is very real, very difficult to solve, and absolutely key for making the division of labor work.
Can we do better? Quite possibly! But if we try and we get it wrong, then things will probably go horribly wrong. So we would also want some kind of incrementalism (to give us an "undo" button), and some kind of cooperative governance so that we don't just put a slightly different set of assholes in charge.
FWIW, I absolutely support people voluntarily joining leftist communes and/or starting cooperatives. Maybe they'll be the ones to discover neat social technology that makes this all easier.
(And just to be clear, producer and consumer cooperatives can work really well, and they can absolutely participate in markets and large scale division of labor. Even governance has been mostly solved. One reason you don't see cooperatives everywhere is that they have few incentives to scale up, and their capital access is limited. So well-run cooperatives that know how to outcompete the capitalists often remain local.)
Source for leftist communes mostly sucking? Let me take the two biggest I know of, in Denmark - we used to be "commune capital" of the world, probably still are.
First is Svanholm. Around 100 people live there, adults and kids, on a huge farm You have to give up 80% of your salary to live there, but in turn you get communal childcare, fresh food, you can borrow cars and clothes and whatever you want. You also have kitchen duty, mucking the stable duty etc. Seems neat. It's pretty old and they haven't had a bunch of people calling it a cult or sucky, yet.
Second, much more famously and with a lot of info available in English, Freetown Christiania. Bunch of hippies (about 1000) in the 70's moved in on some land in the outskirts of Copenhagen no one was using. It's complicated, and of course now it's just nepotism who gets to live there because now it's on prime real estate and it's honestly shocking the Danish state hasn't done anything about it; but I wouldn't say it "sucks".
I think that long-term durable communes are mostly fine for people who like that style of living (the bad communes tend to fall apart after a few years). But they usually have a pretty high turnover rate as many people realize they don't like it. And in the U.S. we had a ton of communes in the 1960s and 1970s which collapsed in short order because of freeloaders, poverty, social drama, and abusive leaders.
I guess my take is that it's fine to be a monk if you want to be a monk but if someone is going "we should have a global Catholic revolution and make everyone in the world be monks! Wouldn't that be great?" I'm like uhhhhhh that sounds terrible actually surely we should just pay attention to everyone's revealed preferences not to be monks
I think that this is a loudness problem - leftist communes that suck produce a lot of noise because people leave and complain, leftist communes that don't suck just quietly get on with it and nobody outside hears anything about them. Eg many cohousing projects like Lilac in the UK
You might argue that neither of these are really leftist communes, but then I'd like some examples of real leftist communes and why they suck
I think this is an excellent post that neatly separates the criticisms that have merit from those that don't. 10/10, no notes.
You alluded to this, but I think a lot of the "real jobs" rhetoric comes from people who (ironically) don't understand economics and have a childlike model of how jobs work.
Speaking loosely, I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated from "real work" (farming, say, or building trains) and "middlemen" (eg accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bureaucrats, DEI personnel). "bullshit jobs" is another framing.
I think the last 200 years have been a resounding victory of the superiority of the middleman model. It turns out better models of coordination just is extremely important, much more so than direct improvements in "object-level"/"direct"/"real"/"authentic" work
>you should argue with what people are actually saying, and not with the more convenient version of their viewpoint that you made up inside your head.
A general point that works as a conclusion to many essays.
Arguably the most successful (for a while pretty successful, less so later on) leftist communes in history were early kibbutzim in Israel. I don't know all that much about them in detail, but they didn't seem to suck in ways that Ozzy describes further down in the comment thread.
But of course they did not allow people to choose work they did, for example. You could state preferences, and highly skilled work was given to those with required skills, but the work was assigned according to the needs of the community, and people were rotated through unpopular/unpleasant tasks.
All that seemed to work well in a sort of "idealistic frontier" nation building context (leaving aside for now the ethics of the whole project given previous inhabitants of the land, of course) but not so well once the basics were achieved.
> Leftist communes have no other way to resolve the information problem, which is a major reason they’re so poor.
I don't think that's why? They tend to be very small, and so need less aggregation and do better with people talking to each other. The most obvious reason they're poor is lack of economies of scale.
I assumed that in that particular sentence Ozy was talking about, like, Soviet agricultural communes, not voluntary communes in liberal capitalist countries.
>>>"also think people are overestimating how much they’d enjoy their hobbies if they were jobs, or how much the suckage of their jobs is because of capitalism"
I entirely agree with both these. The first is trivial/obvious, the second is I think partially caused by the fact that ALL of critique of capitalism originates in early modernity and its sociology (and related disciplines) which EXPLICITLY emerged as, well, critique/reaction to the industrial/capitalist "revolution".
I also think that there's a Protestant work ethic thread to all that (to Marxism for sure) in that admitting openly that WORK (defined as something that has to be done -- so at least sometimes will be done when we don't want to do it) OFTEN SUCKS AS SUCH, and the capitalist features (alienation, exploration, appropriation of added value if you believe in that, etc etc etc) are ON TOP of that. In fact even work-adjacent "hobbies" (gardening, DYI) have quite a big suckage factors.
This reminds me of Cartoon’s Hate Her’s post on how people don’t really hate capitalism, they hate being not rich.
To massively oversimplify, allocation of labor (in any system, capitalist, socialist, anarchist, or otherwise) will have to consider three basic factors 1) what jobs are you good at 2) what jobs does society need done 3) what jobs do you enjoy doing. Quite bluntly, society as a whole only cares about factors 1 and 2, while only you care directly about 3.
> This reminds me of Cartoon’s Hate Her’s post on how people don’t really hate capitalism, they hate being rich.
You inverted this, you mean "they hate not being rich"! Also, link to the actual post:
https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/your-enemy-isnt-feminism-or-capitalism
And a followup: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/wanting-to-be-rich-isnt-the-same
I hate being rich, intelligent, friendly, good-looking, and modest.
Gah, typo on my part. Sorry, and thanks for the link!
> Finally, while most of the jobs listed are real jobs, the distribution of jobs is batshit. Three sex workers?
"How many sex workers should there be on the commune?" is also an economic calculation problem! I assume the discrepancy in responses has more to do with personality-type-driven correlations between interest in certain types of jobs and interest in posting on social media about living in a leftist commune. In any case, there's a lot of possible jobs and products of jobs in the world, it's extremely unrealistic to expect that any commune will be completely self sufficient in terms of every possible good or service its members might want - and as far as I'm aware, most people who do advocate for more commune living don't actually claim that communes must be completely self sufficient or are disallowed from trading with other communes?
"leftist commune which is also a brothel for people outside the commune" is kind of fun to imagine
"We believe in free love among our members and reasonably priced love for everyone else." 😉
This might just be my circle, but I don't think most people would call law or accountanting "bullshit jobs". I think people mostly use it to mean the fluffier office jobs, HR, DEI and so on. Pretty sure even the bluest of collars understand that somebody needs to do the accounting. Maybe I'm too optimistic?
David Graeber, who effectively coined the term, appears to have believed that most law and accounting jobs were "bullshit"
Law can be bullshit, but often lawyers solve real problems - even if the problem is that the other guy hired a lawyer.