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Notes -
No I'm actually quite interested in your perspective, I appreciate you laying it out here.
Can you expand on what you think consists of 'everything else?'
IT's hard to say, because it's a lot, right?
But if I had to bet on one thing it would alienation; both in the Marxist sense (from you labor) and in the common sense (from communal living.)
That seems to be the main difference. Two examples: We had really excellent avocado trees on our property, and everybody near us knew that. So, when they wanted good avocados for some reason, they'd come to our house, yell up the path, and bring us some baked goods/coffee/a fish they caught/ some nails/ whatever.
Nobody tracked the value of exchange, everybody just kinda had a feeling of "our ledgers are more in X's favor, better bring them some chicharron from the pig we just slaughtered."
The thing that makes this different from similar structures in the VERY capitalistic USA is that this would happen with people you barely knew or had only met once, because the community was actually a community. You can't get this in any way other than actually living communally I think; no amount of church groups will replicate it.
If you want the benefits of communal living, you have to be a communist in a literal sense type of thing. It isn't enough to attend a reading circle once a week, you have to be willing to put someone's cousin who you've never met up in your house for the weekend because the river flooded and he's stuck on your side.
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