Characteristics of Communities that Abide- Part 3
We continue with the third group of  characteristics of what author Dmitry Orlov calls Communities That Abide. These communities of people are human systems and they are, Orlov and others note, the most crucial factor in being able to survive civilizational disruption and shocks.
Orlov says that a close knit, self-governing group of people commit to common purpose and protection is capable of exercising the necessary initiative, resiliency, and strength that will allow them to continue to survive and even thrive in a collapse scenario.
We strongly urge the readers of the Maroon Manifesto to purchase and study author Dmitry Orlovâs Communities That Abide in order to begin to understand the importance of having a group of resourceful people that one can work with and count on and in hope that you will be inspired to organize such a community.
A community that abides reserve the right to accept and reject certain elements from the surrounding societies. They do not create their unique culture out of nothing, or simply carry on forever with what has been handed down. Instead, they are always on the lookout for useful cultural elements they can adopt and adapt while rejecting the rest.
Such choices, or, rather, such limitations, and the willingness to impose them, may seem strange. But if you think about it, you too might see reasons to reject certain things.
The goal is simply to minimize harm. The idea is to block out and refuse to participate in any of the things that are harmful to the community and its members rather than beneficial. We all do this to one extent or another. The difference here is we try to do this as individuals and families, and usually fail; these communities do the same thing but as communities and usually succeed.
Orlov points out that many of these communities reject the concept of wage labor: they do not work for money as individuals. Surrendering one's time, judgment and free will to a stranger's (employerâs) arbitrary authority in exchange for mere money is, if you think about it, halfway to enslavement. And if you are doing this to earn money to make payments against debt which you can never pay off completely, then it is enslavement.
To enslave someone, start with a free individual who has the power to decide what to do on any given day, and turn that person into someone who is punished for not doing as he is told and rewarded for following arbitrary orders with blind, cheerful obedience. Any wages left over after paying taxes, rent, interest on debt, and other mandatory costs such as health insurance and auto insurance must be spent within the consumer economy, on a circumscribed set of products and servicesâ ones that can turn a profit for the slaveowner. The wage slave may be fired or laid off at any point, without warning, and may or may not get severance or unemployment compensation. This arrangement is a vestige of the industrial revolution, in the process of which people were dispossessed , run off their land, and made to work in factories at subsistence wages. This process is called proletarianization.
Most of the communities Orlov discusses refuse to be proletarianized. They will, of course, work, but only as work groups that are part of the community. There are variations and compromises: the Amish, for instance, will work in factories in order to make enough money to pay taxes; the Orthodox Jews will work for wages, but do their best to work for companies that are owned by Orthodox Jews; the Hutterites allow their young people to get jobs, to save up a bit of money and live it up a little. But, as a rule, even if they are forced to work for outsiders for a time, they refuse to treat such employment as a permanent arrangement. Some, like the Roma, refuse to take orders from outsiders, and will not bend to the will of a Gadjo (non-Roma) boss. They deal with the outsiders not as individuals but as a group, and this is a very large determinant of their success.
Another large commonality is the communalization of money.  Money generally does not circulate within the community itself: it is often considered taboo among abiding communities. Money may be allocated and distributed, and there is no internal trade or commerce, with gift and barter taking their place when exchanging personal effects and favors. Money that comes in from the outside normally goes into the communal fund. Individual possession of money is regarded as socially  corrosive.
One example Mr. Orlov showcases demonstrates this particularly well: at one point in the history of the Kibbutz movement, reparation payments from Germany for the Holocaust started showing up. These were, in some cases, very large sums of money. The issue of what to do with this money quickly became divisive, because previously egalitarian communities had to cope with suddenly having a very rich person in their midst. Suddenly, there arose the specter of massive inequality. Of course, each community had to decide what to do about it in open meeting. The successful solution turned out to be to give such people two choices: hold onto their money and leave, or put that money in the communal fund and stay. And, of course, the next thing that needed to be decided is what to do with this money, because one of the most destructive things that can happen to a community is for it to become wealthy. Children become spoiled, adults develop expensive tastes and bad habits, and the community becomes much less resilient when times change for the worse, as they always do sooner or later.
The communal fund tends to be spent on wholesale purchases for the benefit of the entire community, although the members usually have access to some spending money. For example, the Hutterites receive on the order of $10 a month to go into town and spend it on knick-knacks, but they receive everything they actually need from the community itself, through wholesale purchases and home production. They buy cloth in bolts and sew their own clothing; they buy foodstuffs in bulk. They even make their own shoes.
All of these communities have exactly the same retirement plan, and it is to retire as soon as a younger replacement is available. It is considered harmful to hold young people back, and the general rule is, if somebody younger is ready to take over what you are doing, then you have no business continuing to do it. The Amish farmers usually retire at fifty, but if they have sons that they had at a young age who can take over from them, then they retire even sooner. After that, the retired farmers continue to âlive inâ on the farm and act as advisors, making good use of their wealth of accumulated knowledge and experience. The Hutterites  retire in their 40s, and have a very explicit rule that older people have to clear the path for young people to rise to positions of responsibility, to prevent them from becoming disgruntled and leaving. Early retirement is one of the key elements that allow a community to retain its young people. Whenever old people are found to be clinging onto their jobs, Mr. Orlov warns that this should be taken as a sign of trouble. Of course, what makes such early retirement schemes possible is that these communities provide for their members regardless of whether or not they work. There is no concept of being âpensioned offâ: retired people continue to work, there are always tasks for them, perhaps more interesting ones than the ones they had before, and they are never excluded from the life of the community.
The fact is, none of these communities see any advantage in advertising their existence or putting themselves on display for all of the world to see. Their identity faces inward rather than outward. They restrict access to their internal identities by not showing them to the world, and instead presenting a plain and indifferent common front. Anthropologists often have a hard time infiltrating these communities in order to figure out what's going on. Their efforts are often further hampered by the fact that there are rarely any documents for them to examine, because the rules by which these communities live are unwritten.
Community success seems to depend on some âoptimumâ level of persecution by the surrounding society. If a community's relationship with the outsiders is entirely copacetic, the chance of failure is higher.
And so it is generally the case that a history of persecution is very helpful in holding a community together. For a lot of these communities, their foundational myth is based on some traumatic event: definitely with the Hutterites, definitely with the Kibbutzim, definitely with the Dukhobors. Ready acceptance by the surrounding community causes eventual disintegration. The sort of persecution that appears to work best is a few dramatic incidents of persecution separated in time, serving as periodic wake-up calls, with intervening periods  of relative tranquility and stability. Once in a while some event occurs that reminds the community who they are and why they are that way, and the rest of the time they are allowed to go on living peacefully.
All of these communities profess nonviolence, do not arm themselves beyond a few simple defensive weapons, and refuse to serve in the military.
Finally, for all of Orlovâs subject communities, splintering is a relatively normal process, to be expected when the community exceeds a certain size, or when its members find that they have developed differences significant enough to make it impossible for them to reach consensus on essential questions. In some cases communities splinter into families and smaller groups because of prosperity: they accumulate enough wealth to make it seem attractive to members to claim their share and leave. In other cases communities fall apart for the opposite reason: bankruptcy, which can happen because of high external costs, especially medical and legal costs, leading to the accumulation of unrepayable debt.
We will sum up this series with author Dmitry Orlovâs âCommandments for Communities That Abide.â
Pamoja tutashinda (Together we will win)!
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