:
: : As RD aptly noted, 'small-is-beautiful' intentional communities can not hope to produce medicines (to cite but one example).SDF: Agreed -- tho nationalized medicine might help in the short-run...
: ADD:
: They must buy outside the community. And because they're so beautiful, they don't possess the industrial productivity to produce and distribute any products 'competitively.'
: Therefore they end up working FOR the capitalists.
SDF: Yeah, so? I still don't see this "weakening the revolutionary resolve" thing. What revolutionary resolve is there to be weakened? Are all attempts to find a "way out" of capitalist alienation "weakening the revolutionary resolve" merely because they don't ignite revolutions tomorrow? (This would be a good place to re-quote Calhoun, tho I've done that to death in merely getting your attention, Mr. Vanguard...)
I don't see how joining a commune would be incompatible with revolution; this notion that communes merely rationalize the status quo appears to me to ignore the real role of ideology in the creation of human patterns of existence. Sure, global capitalism sells cheaper than independent communities, undercutting them all -- but communities which are TRYING to create some buffer between themselves and the global "race to the bottom" in wages are MORE LIKELY TO OPPOSE CAPITALISM when the shit hits the fan, aren't they? Sure, communes are a "middle-class movement" -- so is intellectual Marxism, should we dismiss that too? Don't intellectual Marxists work for the capitalists? Which capitalists do YOU work for? (I work for state-funded schooling.)
Shall we dismiss babies because they're not adults yet?
Doesn't the struggle for socialism START with the struggle to identify and model the preliminaries to socialist behavior? Sharing, anyone?
Let's turn it around: does typing a lot of chat about revolutionary resolve on a BBS with 10 or 12 regular posters "weaken the revolutionary resolve" merely because it doesn't ignite a revolution tomorrow, and what's more isn't it really just another bourgeois debate club, one worthy of the creation of tenured radicals with university positions (we're pretty damn smart, at least I have a PhD), and thus worthy of our condescension? I doubt the Trilat are afraid of us in the least...
