Abstract

US American communes are as old as the country itself. The earliest communes were for the most part religious in nature, while a more recent wave was the hippie communes of the mid twentieth century. The goals and impact of the communes has not always been consistent. However, on studying the communes as a distributed experimental ecosystem, a different perspective begins to emerge. Communes and intentional communities constitute experimental societies, where humans gather to explore new ways of making decisions, collective organizing and alternative forms of hierarchy. Famous examples of experimental communities include Oroville, Twin Oaks, Arcosanti, Damanhur all of which have shown us different ways of living and being. Here I describe both digital and analogue aspects of how these communities form "collectives of collectives,” which, beyond their individual spaces, comprise entire ecosystems of communal experiments that demonstrate diverse examples of humanity’s potentiality and sociality through deeply collaborative networks.

These ecosystems explore ways of bringing future possibilities into the present, living and manifesting a ‘prefigurative politics.’ They form decentralized collectives of self-governing communities, experimenting within and across homes and a range of social phenomena, from the creation of new economies, sharing, and collaboration, to language, aesthetics and writing styles. The vision that emerges is a forged root/rhizomatic like structure with no center or top down control, that provides mutually assured alternatives to the economy and the state. Organically forming collectives of collectives are brought together by some metric, whether it be geography, shared values, shared online platforms, financial collaboration. Many of these networks are shared and overlapping, and the borders between them are ever-changing and amorphous.

These endeavors are set in contrast to the often more visible coliving models that achieve media coverage for their emphasis on affordability, plug-and-play social circles and low maintenance lifestyles: many communes are intentional autonomous zones, reserved for behaviors and principles of anarchism such as mutual aid and challenges to hierarchy and management. Traditionally, autonomous zones have also served as places to learn about these traditions and theories, but also to act as cultural and behavioral experiments.

These projects are discussed both in terms of both Walter Benjamin’s general strike (“a means of disengagement and the avoidance of violence”), and Eugene Holland‘s slow-motion general-strike (Holland, 2011), as non-violent means to getting beyond our dominant systems of control. Holland proposes a gradual and slow-motion creation of alternative ways of being that would ‘Seek out actually existing alternative modes of self-provisioning... and also develop new ones; walk away from dependence on capital and the State, one step, one stratum, at a time, while... continually develop[ing] alternative practices and institutions to sustain the movement’. We also set the activity in the communes, commoning, in light of the ‘autovalorizzazione’, or self-valorization (H. Cleaver, 1971) set forth by the autonomists movement, to describe the production of goods and services for their actual and mutual use, rather than for the purpose of profiteering.

Introduction

: communalism : ˈkɒmjʊn(ə)lɪz(ə)m,kəˈmjuːn(ə)lɪz(ə)m / noun [a principle of political organization based on federated communes]

Communes - social experiments, anarchist futures in the present

Intentional communities include, communes (income sharing, eco villages where sustainability is the focus, urban housing cooperatives, residential and community land trusts, student cooperatives and cohousing projects (Smith, 2002). Historically, these communities have been sites of exploration of new relationships, alternative family structures (Aidala, 1989). For many, intentional communities are a platform for experimental societies, where humans gather to explore new ways of making decisions, collective organizing and alternative forms of hierarchy.

The history of the American communes is beyond the scope of this paper, however it is worth noting that the roots of American communes are largely religious. This seems important as many modern- day communes and intentional communities appear to lack this theme. Some of the earliest American communes were comprised of religious sects such as the American shakers, and after these appeared a more varied selection, which included additional sectarian and non-religious communes. Following this, the hippie era ensued, bringing once again a different cultural set to the communes. Historically then, it follows that the purpose of many communes centered around religious principles and goals. The ideas and work of Fourier (1996) was also a key part of US communal efforts and influenced many of the next 100 years of communes and experimental communities.

Certainly, the later generations of communes displayed a wide range of values, ranging widely in their approach to private property and communalism, approaches to sex, love and relationships, and governance structures. The communes of today are less religious but also appear to be deeply value oriented and intentional around different principles and commitments. For a deeper exploration of these topics see (Thies, 2000).

A dearth of investigations of the communes speak to ‘success’ as a metric, and various analyses have been deployed to this end. Success is often defined as time survived/maintained, extent of replication or success according to a community’s own metrics. Thies (2000) reports on 281 American communes between 1683 and 1937, finding that factors affecting success included being a religious sect, inducing commitments from their members, allowing some degree of private property and anarchic governance. Today however, the fellowship of intentional communities and associated directories, only include communes that ‘do not advocate violent practice or do not interfere with their members’ freedom to leave their group at any time’, which might exclude many of the religious communes of the past (Fellowship for Intentional Community Directory 2000;13). Arguably todays communes are different from yesterday’s communes as they are not centered around all members sharing possessions and wealth. Some argue then that today’s communes should be termed intentional communities. Perhaps unlike previous generations of communes, today’s intentional communities are living and using the tools of the privatized world in order to achieve their goals. A brief look at the media narrative around modern day communes or intentional communities suggests that communes have grown up. Gone are the days of the hippie commune growing vegetables— today’s communes are comprised of young professionals experimenting with social structures and chosen family (Thornton, 2015). For the purposes of this paper, we will use the terms modern-day communes and intentional communities interchangeably.

The goals and impact of the communes has not always been consistent. However, once you start to look at the modern-day communes as a distributed experimental ecosystem, a different perspective is revealed. Together, they explore ways of bringing future possibilities into the present, living and manifesting their ‘prefigurative politics’ (Cornish, Haaken, Moskovitz, & Jackson, 2016). The modern- day communes are a decentralized collective of self-governing communities, experimenting within and across houses with all aspects of social interactions, from the creation of new economies, governance experiments (Agnew, 2016a, 2016b) sharing, collaboration and language (Agnew, 2018b). Together they have forged a root/rhizomatic like structure with no center or top down control, that provide mutually-assured alternatives to the economy and the state. They are organically forming collectives of collectives, brought together by some metric, whether it be geography, shared values, shared online platforms or financial collaboration. Many of these networks are shared and overlapping.

A dearth of investigations of the communes speak to ‘success’ as a metric, and various analyses have been deployed to this end. Success is often defined as time survived/maintained, extent of replication or success according to a community’s own metrics. Thies (2000) reports on 281 American communes between 1683 and 1937, finding that factors affecting success included being a religious sect, inducing commitments from their members, allowing some degree of private property and anarchic governance. Today however, the fellowship of intentional communities and associated directories, only include communes that ‘do not advocate violent practice or do not interfere with their members’ freedom to leave their group at any time’, which might exclude many of the religious communes of the past (Fellowship for Intentional Community Directory 2000;13). Arguably todays communes are different from yesterday’s communes as they are not centered around all members sharing possessions and wealth. Some argue then that today’s communes should be termed intentional communities. Perhaps unlike previous generations of communes, today’s intentional communities are living and using the tools of the privatized world in order to achieve their goals. A brief look at the media narrative around modern day communes or intentional communities suggests that communes have grown up. Gone are the days of the hippie commune growing vegetables— today’s communes are comprised of young professionals experimenting with social structures and chosen family (Thornton, 2015). For the purposes of this paper, we will use the terms modern-day communes and intentional communities interchangeably.

The goals and impact of the communes has not always been consistent. However, once you start to look at the modern-day communes as a distributed experimental ecosystem, a different perspective is revealed. Together, they explore ways of bringing future possibilities into the present, living and manifesting their ‘prefigurative politics’ (Cornish, Haaken, Moskovitz, & Jackson, 2016). The modern- day communes are a decentralized collective of self-governing communities, experimenting within and across houses with all aspects of social interactions, from the creation of new economies, governance experiments (Agnew, 2016a, 2016b) sharing, collaboration and language (Agnew, 2018b). Together they have forged a root/rhizomatic like structure with no center or top down control, that provide mutually-assured alternatives to the economy and the state. They are organically forming collectives of collectives, brought together by some metric, whether it be geography, shared values, shared online platforms or financial collaboration. Many of these networks are shared and overlapping.

Here we describe two of these partially overlapping networks of communes, and argue for an alternative way of looking at success. Success is not just the survival or ‘thrival’ of the individual commune, but the continued evolution and development of a larger ecosystem in which the loss or dismantling of one, does not destabilize the larger rhizome. That is, in considering the broader structure, the loss of one node, is not necessarily an indication of the health of the broader organism— in fact, it may be a sign of healthy evolution.

Autonomous Geographies & Experimental Societies

The world needs social experiments, both on small and large scales, if we are to explore and prepare for the next phase of social formations. Famous examples of experimental communities include Oroville, Arcosanti, Damanhur all of which have shown us different ways of living and being. Cultural evolution is a key part of human civilization, and for evolution to take place, as we have learnt from genetics, we need to have some mutation for adaptation to occur. For this reason, it seems vital that there are explorations in social structure and cultural norms. Most models of behavioral evolution are premised on the assumption that individual actors imitate their successful neighbors, and only model a small degree for random variation. It has recently been shown that by increasing randomness and reducing imitation, very different outcomes can be seen, in this case maximizing cooperation. These small mutations are modeled on the genetic mutations, however in cultural evolution and social learnings, exploration probabilities can be high. As the authors state these high exploration probabilities “may turn into an important and decisive factor for the evolutionary fate of the system” (Traulsen, Hauert, De Silva, Nowak, & Sigmund, 2009). Thus, we argue that these spaces for social exploration are key in transitioning our social formations, and should be valued in their own right and not only measured in terms of individual, subjective notions of success or singular impact.

There are entire overlapping ecosystems of these experimental communities, which go beyond their doors to reveal diverse examples of how humans can live and create their social world, not in isolated pockets but rather in deeply collaborative networks. These ecosystems might be small and distributed, but as we have learned from nature, distributed ecosystems can be powerful forces. The largest organism in the world is a honey fungus known as Armillaria solidipes that spans over two miles in Oregon, USA. Here we argue that the communes follow a similar structure and can be studied not in isolation but as a distributed organism. Here we present two partially overlapping examples of decentralized collectives of intentional communities that span distinct geographical scales. The Embassy Network (“Embassy Network,” n.d.), which is an international collective of intentional communities, and Haight St Commons (“Haight St Commons,” n.d.), a Bay Area centered collective of intentional communities.

There are around five community houses that fall into both of these collectives of collectives. The Embassy Network is a collective of at least eleven intentional communities. The founding house, The Embassy San Francisco was formed in 2013 in a 7,500-square-foot San Francisco Edwardian mansion in the lower height part of San Francisco. Here, the majority of residents have full time jobs (perhaps a stark difference to the San Francisco communes of the previous generation), but residents gather to cook, run the community space, and work on their impact projects. Communal income generation (Agnew, 2018a; Schingler, 2016) is also a feature of many of these communes, which allows the funding of socially relevant projects and support. Residents share communal food, space, and some commodity items such as tools, communal cars and a small shared wardrobe. The house hosts numerous events ranging from salons and discussions, music and queer events and support circles. This is just one of the many nodes in this network that together produce and cultivate a diverse range of cultural activities. A key factor here is that all of these events are free and open to the public. The Embassy Network identifies as ‘communities experimenting with culture and commoning’.

One of the other spaces is the Red Victorian, a 22-bedroom Victorian hotel in Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. This space has cycled between various iterations of mixed-use commune and coliving hotel, and similarly, is home to a vast range of cultural events. The weekly academic lecture series, known as the Red Victorian Lectures, have hosted over 600 speakers on a diverse range of topics over 4 years.

A common theme in the spaces that comprise the Embassy Network is hosting short and medium term guests. These guests keep fresh ideas flowing through the spaces, hold residents accountable to their values, transmit and help iterate on shared values, as well as inspiring the creation of other houses within the network. Guests also form nomadic human bridges between physical locations, which is a crucial role for such a geographically diverse network of communes.

A third commune in this network is known as Sigil. Sigil was imagined in 2018 but only created in early 2019. This is an intentional community built around the needs of returning citizens. These are individuals who have served life sentences in California prisons, and been one of the few to be found suitable for parole. These individuals are all on parole and need to be able to live within the constraints of parole terms, which include residing within the city limit, one of the most expensive cities in the world. Here, this community comprised of both formerly incarcerated and non-formerly incarcerated individuals centers around Embassy Network values of transformative justice, experimentation and creating alternatives to the carceral system.

After many years of iterating, evolving and co-creating, the houses of the Embassy Network are a unique blend of co-living spaces that blend commune, hostel, public gathering place, and third spaces. One resident describes network life as being "immersed in a state of learning, sharing, and mutual support with others, [being] intentional with how I construct my everyday environment. And [using] space as a platform for exploring new approaches to how we organize ourselves as humans." (Pratka, n.d.)

All three of the Embassy Network spaces described, also fall into a second layer of communities known as Haight St Commons. Haight St Commons formed in 2016 as a decentralized collective of collectives in the Bay Area. Their goals have been to 1. Get to know each other and each others’ communities, to share learnings, spaces and resources, to provide mutual aid, and to make the communes visible to the outside world. The final number of communes in this collective is ever changing but is presently around 30. The wider group comprises around 700 individuals living in and amongst these and other houses. Their governance is doocratic (Agnew 2016a) and decentralized, such that anyone can propose and host a meeting, propose changes, events or new projects. Their aims include experimenting with and building parallel economies and to leverage their collective surplus to enact the changes they wish to see in the world. This includes helping other communities to get off the ground. Projects and collaborations that have come out of Haight St Commons are varied – they have a voluntary radical fund, work with local schools, they have an in print, hand delivered newsletter and an online alternative. They are the subject of media and documentary footage. They have built an online presence, and distributed applications for newcomers to enter in and apply to live in the communes.

Alternative economies & self-valorization in the communes: the slow-motion general strike

In contrast to the coliving models commonly depicted by the media, many of the communes that comprise these networks are autonomous zones, where people come together to manifest their values, to experiment with home, culture, norms and behavior. A key difference between many for profit coliving models and the communes, is that the communes are not managed by external parties, they are self-determined entities. For some this is about sociality and bonding, for others about mutual aid, collectivization and politics. Autonomous zones are spaces reserved for behaviors and principles of anarchism, such as mutual aid and challenges to hierarchy and management. Traditionally, autonomous zones have served not only as places to learn about these traditions and theories, but also to act as cultural and behavioral experiments. None of these projects are declaring that they have the answer for how to live, they are in continuous processes of reinvention and learning. They are creating “communities of fate”, “forming the structure of the new world in the shell of the old” (Shantz, 2005). Unlike many of the for-profit models, which are aimed at scaling, the communes celebrate a diversity of structures, attitudes and approaches within their ecosystem. “It may be, in fact, that it is the very nature of anarchy that we shall always be building the new society within whatever society we find ourselves” (Ehrlich, 1996).

Communes, like many autonomous zones, aim to nurture organic relations with their local community, and to serve and build with more than just themselves. These spaces thus also serve as behavioral incubators of sorts, where communities build new skills for non-hierarchical living and collectivity. The communes go beyond simply living together; for many of them, they are also forming ways of exchanging value— new economies. In-situ production of tangible value and alternative mechanisms of exchange are key aspects to the tapestry that weaves the communes together. They create life with and for each other, in a way that challenges capitalist modes of production.

The parallel way of life carved out by the communes demonstrates a number of concepts that have been articulated by theorists and academics over the years. Walter Benjamin describes the general strike as “a means of disengagement and the avoidance of violence,” and Eugene Holland goes on to describe the ‘slow-motion general-strike’, as non-violent means to getting beyond our dominant systems of control (Holland, 2011). Holland proposes a gradual and slow-motion creation of alternative ways of being that would ‘Seek out actually existing alternative modes of self- provisioning... and also develop new ones; walk away from dependence on capital and the State, one step, one stratum, at a time, while... continually develop [ing] alternative practices and institutions to sustain the movement’. In many ways, the communes are doing just that.

Similarly, the Italian autonomists coined the term ‘autovalorizzazione’, or self-valorization (Cleaver, 1971), to describe the production of goods and services for their actual and mutual use, rather than for the purpose of selling /turning a profit. Certainly, the diverse activities of the communes constitute a great deal of mutual self-valorization. On any given night of the week, there are lectures, discussions, emotional support groups, yoga, musical performances, jam sessions, men’s groups, programming sessions, financial literacy development, pot lucks, all for free, or donation based. Some of these groups are working on ways to free each other from work, or forms of basic income, such that individuals who wish can contribute to the amplification of the communes.

Financial solidarity is a key theme in both networks of collectives. The houses of Haight St Commons have run a collective fund over the last two years, to which individuals voluntarily contribute on a monthly basis. This fund is allocated by a team who decides which projects and cases fit their stated values. To date, this fund has been used to help seed an intentional community house for formerly incarcerated individuals, and renovate a community woodshop with the aim of running free skill- sharing workshops for the community.

Howard Ehrlich described a concept known as the transfer culture (Ehrlich, 1996), an attempt at future worlds right here amongst the status quo, the old world, an experiment in future made in the present. More specifically, a transfer culture is the manifestation of the ideas, processes, behaviors, skills and activities that are needed to help humans transition from the current social formation to the incoming one. It seems then, that the communes and the richness that they are creating in the streets of our cities, are fulfilling many of these ideas. They are a distributed transfer ecosystem where we can test alternative ways of being.

The ecosystem of communes, embody multiscalar, multicentric strategies that cross spaces and times, constituting in-between and overlapping spaces. The politics of these spaces of late is decidedly post-, as opposed to anti-; postcapitalist, postgender, postcarceral. Communal activities comprise a balance of resistance and creation, suggesting elements of both exit and voice, are taking place within these spaces. The activities of the commune combine ‘spectacular protest and everyday life’ (Pickerill & Chatterton, 2006) and in doing so explore workable alternatives to life beyond capitalism, something they refer to as ‘everyday communisms’.

Negri described self-valorization as ‘the building of revolutionary subjectivity through workers’ opposition to capital and realization of their own authentic needs’ and more recent work has suggested that we are in a time with a “newly configured global proletariat – whose radical potential to subvert capital’s networks of information and accumulation awaits the discovery of its correct organizational form” (Harrison, 2011). Here we suggest that the collectivization in the communes constitutes mutual empowerment and the formation of new subjectivities. A type of power as depicted by Arendt as the ability to act in concert, to be empowered, to be a property of the group: “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of some- body that he is “in power” we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name”. (Arendt, 1970)

A goal for the communes is to create space for the critical inquiry and transformation of social reproduction, which speaks to this collective power, a form of anti-individualistic individuality which is central to collective living (Gee, 2003). As de Angelis puts it “.. the subjects of this movement, the commons, are not here understood as individual subjects, but as already systemic subjects within which individual subjects are already socialized” (Angelis, 2017).

A crucial element to note in considering the activities of the communes as alternatives to capitalism is how the activities of commoners and communards relate to capital in the outside world. De Angelis speaks to the idea that a commoner is only a commoner when participating in and reproducing common wealth. That the commoning act is a relational one, that can be disrupted by entering in and participating into the world of capital: “Commoners are not objectively, but relationally defined – so the commoner who abandons the sphere of commons and enters the sphere of capital or the state, just disappears, magically turned into working commodity, labor-power, employee, civil servant, administrators, consumer at whatever level of significance we are looking for, even if that had the same body and knowledge. The commoning recursive loop is broken, at least momentarily.” It stands then that perhaps the communes and the commons, for those who participate in them, constitute a parallel and alternative social and economic system, at least for the time whilst actors are embedded in them.

There has been much work focusing on the role of the family under capitalism. Whilst the family is a cell that relies on non-capitalistic modes of production, history has shown that it has propped up the dominant capitalist modes of production within which the family operates. Domestic labor and the production of the home has long been unpaid labor, and it has been famously pointed out that if we were to pay for the work of home production, capitalism would crumble. At the extreme end perhaps is family capitalism, exemplified by the private family firm (Jones & Rose, 1993). This is not an insignificant contribution; in the US, one third of Fortune 500 companies are family controlled. It is hard to know whether the communes will serve a similar same role in our economic system. It is possible that communes may replace or exist in parallel with the family, in the bolstering of capitalism. Recent work has attempted to discern the impact of modern-day intentional communities. A survey of 1302 intentional communities sent out in 2014, revealed a great deal and the author concluded that intentional communities “have the power to change our world for the better while providing many additional benefits to our personal well-being” (Kenny, 2014). Yet it remains unclear what the trajectory of impact here is and perhaps only time will tell.

"In facing up to the many profound crises of our time, we face a conundrum that has no easy resolution: how are we to imagine and build a radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change? Our challenge is not just articulating attractive alternatives, but identifying credible strategies for actualizing them. 'Commoning' refers to acts of mutual support, conflict, negotiation, communication and experimentation that are needed to create systems to manage shared resources. This process blends production (self provisioning), governance, culture, and personal interests into one integrated system. Commoners are focused on reclaiming their “common wealth,” in both the material and political sense. They want to roll back the pervasive privatization and marketization of their shared resources—from land and water to knowledge and urban spaces—and reassert greater participatory control over those resources and community life. They wish to make certain resources inalienable— protected from sale on the market and conserved for future generations. This project—to reverse market enclosures and reinvent the commons—seeks to achieve what state regulation has generally failed to achieve: effective social control of abusive, unsustainable market behavior." (Bollier, 2012)

Thus, it seems fair to say the these rhizomatic and fractal communes do begin to undo some of these aspects of capitalism through their shared production of intellectual, physical, and emotional commons, to creating spaces where there is participatory control over resources gained in or via means of the dominant capitalist system, such as income or food. The complex relationships that communes and commoners have with capitalism, their need to engage in some regards with it, and their ability to create present futures that negate it result in an unclear future for communes as a singular alternative to capitalism, yet it is undeniable that they offer at minimum the seeds of alternatives to current capitalist systems.

The distributed, rhizomatic and fractal structure to the commune ecosystem

So what is it about the structure of this ecosystem that is so interesting? My claim at least is that this structure of organization, which seems parnarchical (Gunderson & C. S. Holding, 2002),  supports both local autonomy and self governance, and widespread and global collaboration. First of all, the larger ecosystem of communes is a decentralized polycentric structure: As mentioned earlier, there is no central government for the communes, they are self-governing and decentralized in their governance and decision making. Individual houses may be internally hierarchical, and small pods of communities might also have hierarchical relations, but the overall system has no government nor center.

Where distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a decentralized way of coordinating to create value, distributed autonomous support organizations (DASOs) are voluntary, permissionless community led organizations, open to all who have the shared goal of creating better social safety nets and social systems. The social fabric of the communal ecosystem provides mutual support and aid, from informal groups, to organized and regular mutual aid and self-help groups, a recovery squad who focus on helping with substance and drug dependency, men’s groups and consent confessionals. The communes have therapists, social workers, medics, some communes have built solidarity funds and revolving loans for those in need of financial aid, there are dedicated funds for those who wish for professional psychological support. Within houses, there are a variety of systems for dealing with emotional ecology, and across houses you see remote helpers given the explicit role of being an external source of support to mediate through hard situations. In this way, and under these conditions, it is possible revolutionary subjectivities are being formed.

These decentralized forms of social support have the benefits of being both voluntary alternatives and emergency measures, as in a form of insurance that kicks in when needed, which serves to reduce perverse incentives. By dint of their decentralized structure, these systems are harder to be used as a lever of central power. More importantly perhaps, they bypass bureaucracy and politics, and instead are voluntary, self-organizing, and self-determined. These systems are affordable, and in this case entirely free. They target isolated needs and build custom solutions that take into account local social norms and individual economic circumstances. These are systems that support community, as they rely on local trust networks and earnt reputation systems, where reputation operates as a currency of trust. These are just some of the many factors that decentralized support systems offer that state-based systems fail to provide.

Secondly, and relatedly, the ecosystem of communes is rhizomatic: There are multiple, non- hierarchical entry and exit points. There are multiplicities of relations and collaborations which arise and die organically, there is flow through these connections between communities but it is informal and not homogenous. There is no central reference point within the ecosystem, yet local areas of dense connections emerge in certain spaces, and tight long-distance connections (elastic ties) thrive in other spaces of the rhizome.

It is well known that many aspects of mammalian social organization displays fractal properties (A, Alexander, & I.M, 2008). Human societies, are hierarchically structured (meaning nested, not referring to top down power), with predictable and consistent scaling ratios across social layers. Eglash has described the fractal nature of certain villages in Africa (Eglash, 1998), and here, we propose that the structure of the communes may follow a similar structure of nested organization. Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves at many different scales, and this is something that observed in the larger ecosystem of the communes at scale. Even within communes there are subcommunes, small, specialized groups providing specialized and niche care. Anecdotal evidence as presented here suggests that the tools of fractal analysis can provide a valuable lens through which to examine the behavior of networks of communes. Further work would be needed to formally assess the fractal nature of these structures.

Fractal structures are inherently hierarchical (aka. nested), while the rhizome is decentralized, decentered; “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance”. Nature provides examples of structures embodying both fractural and rhizomatic properties in parallel (Fitter, A.H., & Stickland, 1992; Masi & Maranville, 1998). Here we wish to make the claim that the networked structure of the communes embody both features. The rhizome is not necessarily structure-less, but more aptly border-less. Examples in nature of fractal rhizomes abound. A fractal system is a complex, non-linear, dynamic system which has the ability to adapt to changing environments. These systems can be generated from bottom up self-organization of semi-autonomous agents acting according to specific rules of interaction. Deluze & Guattari’s (1987) depiction of the rhizome is more a process than a built structure, and here we present the argument that the social structure of the communes displays elements of both the rhizomatic and fractal structures.

All in all, the communes are a powerful collective force. They are the social mutations that our society needs if it is to benefit from the laws of natural selection for social formations. They are tools for humans to self-organize and build lasting resistance and alternatives to dominant systems, whether those be dominant forms of economy or social structures such as gender and the family.

In Conclusion

It is our hope that this paper has gone some way to providing a window into the distributed ecosystem that comprises the networks of modern day communes. We have described overlapping and distinct networks of collaboration, human movement and cultural transfer embedded in experimental spaces and autonomous zones. In doing so, we call for a different manner of assessing success and impact in these spaces, that addresses the larger organism that is the collectives of communes. We have attempted to generate a proto-cartography of the present, that both depicts ‘a record of what we are ceasing to be and a seed of what we are the process of becoming’ (Braidotti, 2016). Lastly, we describe the social structure of the collectives of communes, as embodying both fractal and rhizomatic properties. We focus our efforts less on the built structures of the communes, and more towards the commoning that takes place within them, as the real site for exploration of alternatives to capitalism— not only in reclaiming old and forging new modes of production, value and exchange, but also in shaping new culture, language and subjectivities that are prerequisites of building post capitalist societies.

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