Rant excerpted from an email.

The problems that I’ve seen in survival planning at a community level come from trying to streamline costs by creating implicit bureaucratic systems of control. We’ll have a water team, that takes money from a budget, and Does Water. Farming team that Does Farming and so on.

But, in practice – and I urge you all as strongly as humanly possible to check this for yourselves – communes are incredibly difficult to organize, inflexible, conflict-ridden bureaucratic nightmares for the most part. Resource sharing and labor sharing for the “communal life” TURNS OUT TO BE THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION.

Do not think of this as being “we’re all in this together” because then the questions of *governance* – who owns the resources, and who manages them – becomes the hub of community life. Central planning and so on then rapidly eat all the resilience and good will.

Far, far better for infrastructure to be scaled household by household whenever possible, and the excess costs eaten. If next door’s water filter breaks, and you want to share, by all means, but it is critical that essential infrastructure is owned at the individual level whenever humanly possible. Otherwise you wind up having to build, for *every single system* a governance and ownership structure that allocates resources and responsibility, and – as far as I can tell – that is incredibly problematic in the places it has been tried.

The crux of this is that survival is an individual endeavor. The medieval villages were ruthlessly independent, individual-driven places. Yes, there was a blacksmith, and he charged cold hard cash or goods and services for every transaction. Yes, there was a miller, and he took 20% off the top of your grinding job.

I urge everybody to look at the “effort to results” ratio of the commune movement, with it’s emphasis on sharing. As far as I can see, they’ve spent so much time haggling about consensus and trying to be efficient by sharing that they’ve gotten next to nothing done in spite of so many talented people sinking their entire lives into these efforts.

Hence my conclusion: the family is the unit for everything that can *possibly* be done on a family scale. For the few things where the cost gradient is just too high (i.e. well drilling – we’re not doing one well per family) the resources need to be either so abundant that no resource allocation is necessary (i.e. river water) or market driven. Market-driven means the resource has an owner, possibly chosen by lottery or changed every year or something who is responsible for purchase and operation of the hardware at hand, and can charge a fee for the job.

Grain milling is an example. You do not want people to use the grain mills carelessly. Feed a pebble through one carelessly, for example, and your community just lost access to a completely irreplaceable resource. So you have a miller, who’s job it is to make sure that grain mill works, and stays working, because that’s his livelihood, and he’s going to take much better care of it than bored teenagers send over there to mill the grain on the communally owned grain mill.

This is *not* an egalitarian model. It’s not a “we’re all in this together” model as many of the gun-toting survivalists have with their rigid chains of command and so on.

This is an authentic village model, in which individual households club together for mutual defense and for access to each-other’s skills, but in which property is owned individually except for a few resources like the well.

Cannot stress this enough: intentional communities return very, very little result for huge resource investments. Serious nightmare. Far better to deal with the family level, and extend notions like individual property rights and resource ownership, and make sure that the *fundamental* agreements over land and so on keep things balanced at a communal level, rather than relying on an essentially “socialist” approach to village management.

I’m not against community. But I am against the bureaucracies which control resource and labor sharing in communities, and the resulting irresponsibility and disengagement which are the banes of every resource sharing community I know of. That problem is far too difficult to solve in a survival setting, and my suggestion is that it be *avoided.*

In my model, the family is the basic unit of resource sharing and resource control. It *is* less efficient, **on paper.** But, in practice, try having three families share a car for a year, and tell me you wouldn’t rather have spent the money on a vehicle.