Communities that Abide—Part IV: Causes of Failure

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Up until now in this series my approach has been to present what works: the set of practices which, when put together into a package, allow communities to last a long time—in some cases, for many centuries. Many readers found this exposition useful, while others found some of the practices disagreeable. This week I will now take the opposite approach, and concentrate on what has been proven to not work, or to work very badly. In a follow-up to the previous post, which expounded on the superiority of communism in both production and consumption when it practiced at the scale of the commune, I now present a chapter I rather freely translated from Peter Koropotkin's Anarchy , which explains how such experiments fail socially in spite of their initial success in achieving self-sufficiency.
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