Socialism, is it making a comeback?

[Uben]

Bear with me here, because I am not very educated on the subject, but this is just what my logic tells me.

I lived through the sixties here in America where we saw a rise in communes, you know, those darn hippies living together, sharing resources, practicing free love, nudism, etc. I don't think it was so much out of necessity as it was preference back then. Just a bunch of people with like minds who wanted to share life together without the constraints of puritanic beliefs. Yeah, they were ridiculed and frowned upon by the church-goers because they did not follow traditional values.

I submit that we are being driven by the republicans and the uber-rich back into this way of life. People are going to have to band together and pool resources to survive. Living in a commune, growing your own food, and sharing the work seems to me to be the only recourse for a large sector of Americans who cannot find work, cannot survive in urban settings, and are looking for a way out. I haven't seen a movement yet, but logic tells me it's coming. Working for "the man" aint gettin it!

Communes do not rely on government resources and they do not contribute to the sustainment of said resources. They are outcasts who decide they can do better on their own...and they can!

Do any of you have this same feeling that we are on a course to bring back communes? I see no recourse. Repubicans want us to conform to "their" way of life, ie workin for da man, paying taxes to protect them and their "stuff", while they quietly amass their fortunes and enjoy capitalistic freedoms.

[Turbineguy]

1. Only in the ga-ga-land inhabited by teabaggers.

And they don't know what it means.

Communism is fine, as long as it is voluntary. In the end people are driven by rewards. It doesn't have to be money, but it has to be something.

[KharmaTrain]

2. Communes???

I haven't seen my friends hoping in vans and heading to the California desert lately. So not sure what you're suggesting here.

What I see us dealing with these days is a class war where the rich and rushpublicans have deregulated things that led to massive corruption and cronyism, while it was fed to the public as a virtue..."greed is good". This country became selfish in my lifetime...looking out for their own best interests ahead of others and in many cases this meant resenting anyone who tries to take things I have...the tenet of the "modern" rushpublican. They live in fear and hate of others who "threaten" the selfish lifestyle of inclusion and "superiority".

I laugh when I hear wingnut throw around the terms "socialism" and "communism" cause their ignorance always shows. They've been fed a lifetime of "horror stories" of "big government"...and that's due to the threat government has to corporate power. Yet, when their town floods or they need unemployment or other assistance, the hand can't come out fast enough.

What we're seeing from the right is a political temper trandrum on steroids. They're totally out of power and their party has ruptured...the only thing that holds them together now is hate and divisiveness. The funny thing is so many are so conflicted these days I honestly don't think most know what they stand for...just spew talking points about "liberty" and "freedom"...also words they have no clue as to what they mean.

Cheers...

[Silent3]

3. In countries with much lower mean incomes...

...I don't see that communal living has been a very popular solution, although there is more living in extended families, and perhaps more "community spirit". If much lower standards of living don't drive large adaptation of communal living elsewhere, why would that be likely to happen here?

Apart from that, when you look back over the history of the US, all of the ups and downs of it, what is it that makes so many people react as if they're practically certain that every downward slope is part of an inexorable downward trend? Especially one that THEY have been planning for us all along?

EDIT: I think when I posted the above response to the OP, the title of the OP mentioned communes, not socialism.

[Uben]

5. No

The original title was "Socialism, and why they hate it" I edited the title because I did not really address why they hate it.

[greymattermom]

9. Indians

Very communal. They have a clan organization and will help new arrivals get started. A family of two physicians I know provided housing, food and a job for their nephew's friend for over a year. He just arrived in the country, was picked up at the airport, and started his job with a place to live already arranged.

[LiberalLoner]

4. I see what you are saying, in a sense...rop

I do think that the only way most of us will survive is to have several different families pool their resources together, live in the same house, grow a garden, etc. Even then things might get pretty bad. I started reading about Peak Oil about six years ago and started thinking about how bad things might get in my lifetime. I don't really know for sure how things are going to play out, but there are just so many swords hanging over our heads and then we have the corporations taking over too which will mean always less for us.

I think the young people are getting pretty disillusioned. They know that there ought to be more to life than working two or three crappy jobs for low pay and having crushing debt.

I think if we are lucky, this is how it will play out - with people banding together for survival and maybe even bringing back a sense of society and common good. If we are unlucky, it will continue to be dog-eat-dog with the unlucky starving and or freezing to death.

I don't know what our future will look like but I have a sense that things are going to get even harder.

[jwirr]

16. I think as times worsen families and their neighbors will pull together

to survive but I don't know if this can be called socialism. I am old enough to remember this kind of living just after the Great Depression. I was very young but both grandparents lived in easy reach, all the aunts and uncles and their families were within 15 miles of us and our neighbors helped each other in the farming - baling, harvesting and such. That is what I see happening more than communal living.

[Ishoutandscream2]

34. +1.

I am working my ass off to pay off my house and have a place for my children to live if things don't get better. I can imagine other families doing something similar to this as well.

[greymattermom]

6. Rooming houses

In the 60s many of us shared big houses to save money and for the free life style. Now, my daughter lives in a Victorian mansion near a University that was built in the early 1900s as a rooming house for visiting faculty. Everyone has their own room, and they share cleaning and cooking. For $25/week she has all the food she could want as they buy in bulk. It's great because they have people from all over the world who teach each other their recipes. It's also great because there is an owner who takes care of the common bills and can make sure things get done. There are no extra cable, internet or heating bills as those are common, so it's a cheap way to live. In my mind this is the new way of living for singles, a revival of an old custom. She has privacy but she's not alone.

[RKP5637]

8. +1, n/t

[RKP5637]

7. I think we might see a more stringent attitude toward "buy buy buy" even if

not needed. I do think we might see more people sharing more resources if the temperament of several people sharing a house, for example, works. Hopefully, eventually, the masses will get a clue as to what the republicans are about and dump 'em... The concept of a family working together does not always have to be bloodline related IMO.

I watch HGTV sometimes... an annoying program with their "buy buy buy" corporate sponsors, but they need the revenue, of course, to air the show. People walk into really nice houses, for example, appliances aren't stainless steel, or a year or two old, and the ignorant buyers say, "Oh, those have to go," and similar nonsense. I think we well might see a more frugal and sensible way of live.

[Bluenorthwest]

10. The replies on this threat amuse me. The answer is yes.

The answer is yes for those who are smarter. I see people on the thread speaking of 'living in one house' and blah, blah, blah. Well, they are behind the curve. A Manhattan co-op is a collective of sorts as almost no one can own a building there. But you can own an apartment, a cooperative it is called.
The term of choice in the 21st is 'intentional community'. Such communities range from the sort folks on this thread envision, living off the land, sharing chores and space in a rural farm setting to buildings made from scratch to be shared by people who have six figure buy ins. They range from 'pooling to survive' to 'cooperating so we can live in paradise'. Some are very basic. Some are not basic at all.
But they call them 'intentional communities' and under that umbrella comes many different sorts of communities.

[onehandle]

11. It's an eventuality. nt

[ThomThom]

12. What you are saying is America's brand of freedom is not really freedom

One problem with communes is who buys the land if everyone is out of work? I see extended families living together now in tiny apartments earning what money they can, getting food from food pantries and sharing to live the best they can in urban areas. I think we will see more of this, even among non-family members. But land and farm communes in rural America is getting harder and harder to do. Big companies are buying up ever bit of farm land and even making sharecroppers out of the families that owned the land for generations.
It is not freedom when society tell you how to live and requires you to work for corporations, buy everything from corporations and support corporations that are not democratic in anyway shape or form. We need more worker owned business, group living arrangements where everyone shares the responsibilities and chores instead of capitalism's slavery.
We are losing the commons and even the understanding of the commons. We are being sold to big business a little at a time.
If you want to form a commune do it while people can buy in and still have money to invest. Some states do not even allow this kind of contract between people to be made.

[Ozymanithrax]

13. Will we turn on, tune in, drop out, wear flowers in our hair, seek out communal life styles...

Imagine this...outdoor toilets...no flush...just dump, wipe, and sprinkle lime in the hole...

Now, if you really intend to eat, plant a really big garden and spend 6 to 8 hours making sure that sucker grows, seven days a week.

Running produce stands. That was one of the primary ways for communes to make a living, run a produce stand for 12 hours a day. There were also a couple of good restaurants run by communes. But it takes a lot of work.

Babies...my experience with commune was lots of babies because there was lots of of sex.

Computer, what computer... Computers are expensive, so if all you need is love, and vegetables, say good buy to this. Same with cell phone, ipads, and all the other accoutrement's. Facebook and backbreaking field labor are not compatible.

Communes were fun, but they are anathema to the modern life style. They appealed, at the time, to the young and idealistic who didn't mind a bit of discomfort. It was fun to sit around a campfire, smoke a little pot, and discuss the difference between Trotsky and Lenin after a day of back breaking work.

[tabasco]

31. Is it your opinion that all communes are inhabited by marxists and hippies?

LOL.

[Ozymanithrax]

33. Th ones that I was associated with were...

[dana_b]

14. Dancing Rabbitt

http://www.dancingrabbit.org/

I remember seeing this commune on Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" and thought 'wow- that's a lot of work!"

It would be hard to work a job and do the true commune. If you are talking about more and more people living in the same place then yeah. I can see that. My family has talked about it. If times get too bad for any or all of us, we would live together. That's what families should do. i'll bet there is more of that going on now.

[lunatica]

15. Communes are different form Community based living

But the reasons for the growth of both are very different. Communes weren't very prevalent and were pretty uncommon and were an experiment that fizzled out for the most part, though with alternate forms of energy now they might survive better. Community living has been prevalent throughout history and just recently (in the past 150 years or so) it was abandoned for the industrial revolution and the outgrowth of its existence and growth. But I can definitely see a cultural reaction of downsizing back into a community lifestyle, even if it looks quite different physically that it used to. The ability to become a self sustaining community is more feasible today with new energy technology.

And with the ability to create vertical farms the ability for a communities to exist, even in large cities is becoming more possible.

[protocol rv]

17. Very romantic, but not likely

I'm not in the USA, but I think your idea of "communes" and all that is a tad impractical, romantic, and probably comes from a young mind? you don't have to be in a commune to avoid working for "da man". Also, a corporation happens to be a commune - it's just that the owners happen to be the ones who own it, and the workers work in it. Sometimes the workers can own a piece of the action. But in modern life, it's necessary to have large organizations to accomplish large tasks. A commune of sandaled hippies isn't about to built an Airbus 380.

[Tailormyst]

18. When people know what socialism really is and can put aside the manufactured fears

then they comes to find socialism is what most civilized people want. The problem is the rampant propaganda telling us that greed and power are more important then anything else and that only the strongest and most cut throat deserve the best in life.

Not quite sure how great the communes are in a wide spread type plan, but socialism as found in western Europe is the way to go.

[protocol rv]

19. I'm highly educated, and I despise socialism

But I consider socialism to be what they had in the Soviet Union. Having a national health care system isn't socialist in my view. But then, the USA Republicans seem to be so extreme.

I don't think Western Europe is socialist. In those nations, the means of production are largely owned by private corporations and individuals. The only difference between Europe and the USA, as far as I can tell, is that in some European nations they have much better national health care, and they have a tad more ownership by the state of some companies which are privately owned in the USA (this happens in France and Norway, for example).

Socialism, as practiced in truly socialist nations, means ownership by the state of the means of production and commerce. This of course is non-sense, and leads to poverty and ruin. It also allows the government to gain too much power, which means socialist nations always evolve into dictatorships, usually involving personality worship and long lived tyrants. Cuba is an excellent example.

[SocialistLez]

27. Socialism is about the workers

http://www.dsausa.org/pdf/widemsoc.pdf

"Doesn't socialism mean that the government will
own and run everything?

Democratic socialists do not want to create an all-powerful government bureaucracy. But we do not want big corporate bureaucracies to control our society either. Rather, we believe that social and economic decisions should be made by those whom they most affect.

Today, corporate executives who answer only to themselves and a few wealthy stockholders make basic economic decisions affecting millions of people. Resources are used to make money for capitalists rather than to meet human needs. We believe that the workers and consumers who are affected by economic institutions should own and control them.

Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.

Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods."

I suggest you read the whole link.

[RKP5637]

30. +1, What I think too... n/t

[patrice]

35. An even greater struggle over the meaning of this word is beginning.

Strategically, it makes a great deal of sense for certain political factions in this country to create the understanding that there is one exclusive definition/manifestation of Socialism: the means of production are owned by the government.

That understanding is the point from which many alternatives will be attacked and criticized even though those alternatives are no where near being government ownership. If they can be characterized that way, it will serve the purposes of those who are resisting the changes we need.

Watching the DU lately, it comes to mind how interesting it would be to search it for the number of instances in which "the government owns the means of production" is repeated as the SOLE definition of Socialism, how many instances repeated by how many posters. I think the campaign to destroy common understanding of the concept of Socialism is already under way in the rhetorical war that roils around all of the issues and you can see some of those skirmishes here on the DU.

[BeFree]

36. well

Look at your definition:
"the government owns the means of production"

And let's give it a truthful addition:
"the government owns the means of production of roads, schools, police, fire, parks, justice, etc. etc."

America's greatest successes are in the socialism field.

[patrice]

38. It's not my definition. I see the government as one type of collectivity that can, and as you point

out, successfully DOES engage in socialism.

My point is that what makes socialism socialism isn't a government, but a collectivity which invests in itself and shares the benefits of that investment, as well as the costs of those benefits, and which can also take many other forms of collectiveness, not just that single form of collectivity known as government.

But I DO agree with you that (as long as we don't yield that it is THE ONLY form of socialism) we should not run from government owned and operated socialism, in part because of, as you point out, the SUCCESSES and also because we don't want to abandon those successes to the inroads of Privatization on grounds of what some characterize as failure, but which is, rather, antagonism and canabilization of the government by the so-called private sector.

[Scruffy1]

37. What they had in Russia was never socialism

If you are highly educated then you must have read "Revolution Betrayed". But I don't really want to go into a prolonged discussion because in America it is impossible to discuss Socialism over the noise of the anti-red paranoia propaganda machine of the last fifty years. Besides which I have a headache.

[amborin]

25. +100

[RKP5637]

26. +1, In terns of more cooperation and less capitalistic greed for greed's sake! n/t

[LWolf]

20. Socialism can't make a comeback in the U.S..

It's never been the economic system of the U.S. to begin with.

People banding together to pool resources because they can't survive otherwise under the current system is not socialism.

[patrice]

21. You will find that most people, including Dems, will avoid that word like the plague.That's FEAR.

[patrice]

22. It might be useful to establish that there is Socialist and then there is also Socialism.

Related concepts, i.e. they share some essential characteristics, so they are the same but they are not identical.

And, yes, i do believe that some forms of co - operation will become more generalized, not communes in most cases, but some other forms of shared benefits and costs that are not profit driven.

The word "co-housing" (google it and also google "intentional communities") has been around for a while and, though middle-to-upper-middle in most existing applications, the concept could be generalized to other economic situations.

[patrice]

23. As you explore this concept, notice how often a certain absolutist meme is repeated:

"ownership by the state of the means of production"

To believe that Socialism is limited to this and ONLY this application, 100% ownership by the government/state, is the same thing as to say that only 100 proof white lightning is alcohol. It is also, therefore, to assume that outfits like the Mondragon Co-operative is not Socialist.

[patrice]

24. P.S. Expect to see more of this meme as Karl Rove et al get their next Lie Machine up and running

[SocialistLez]

28. I've heard socialist

organizations are seeing an uptick in membership but it's nothing to get all excited about.

Socialists have a LONG way to go, unfortunately.

The right-wing has brainwashed loads of people. The Dems aren't much better.

[WillyT]

29. Here's A Site For You All To Check Out:

Intentional Community is an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision.

This web site serves the growing communities' movement, providing resources for starting a community, finding a community home, living in community, and creating more community in your life.

Link: http://www.ic.org/

Directory: http://directory.ic.org/

Looks like these are growing in popularity.

:shrug:

[Greyhound]

32. They never went away, you just stopped hearing about them.

Oregon, for example, is home to two of the oldest, most successful communes in America, and there are others in almost every state.

It just doesn't suit the needs of fascism to advertise the fact that people can and have dropped out of the system they didn't make and won't live under.

[KonaKane]

39. Socialism was never here to begin with.

That has to be a prerequisite before a "comeback" can occur. The problem with "socialism" in the American mind is that hardly anyone knows exactly what it means. It has been successfully branded as a red herring, some term used to alarm and immediately instill with fear even though no one can really tell you why. Harry Reid was right, we need to supply the right wing with dictionaries because none of them have a feint clue what socialism really means.

Simply put, it is the ownership and management by the state of all means of production. The USA has never come close to that, although it is true we have some socialistic elements to our governance, and long may it be so. Environmental regulations, food safety, federal roads and infrastructure, public education and things of this nature. I would not want to do without them and in the core of their black little hearts, the teabaggers don't either.