I think this is a pretty good perspective (thank you political author Snot Flickerman, god I love the internet)

I’ve heard very similar explanations for why communes falls apart You start with a group of adults who want to live communally, they get that rolling and sometimes it works out really well. But they almost never survive the second generation because too many of the commune kids don’t really care about the group and just want to get away and build their own lives.

If anything, practices like the Amish sending their kids out into the world and letting them choose to return to the life probably work out a lot better to disperse teenage rebellion and reestablish the values and ideals of the community.

If the leadership (and there’s always leadership, even if informally) is open, then the influx of new ideas can also help prevent stagnation, but for exactly the reasons outlined above (institutional capture, stagnant high-rankers more concerned with status quo and the security of their positions) leadership tends to close itself off.

I do think the capitalist mode makes this worse though. In theory, communal projects just fall apart when they fail to adapt, since they lose their purpose. Capitalist organizations can often keep going in zombie mode, because the actual function of ALL capitalist organizations is to make money. Anything else is literally idealism layered on top, the material reality is that capitalist organizations exist to make money. And when the ideals fall away, that still remains and becomes the hungry driver of all future decisions.

I’m reminded of a thing I complain about all the time: the festival cycle. Say you learn about a new festival, or outdoor concert, or similar such thing. The first year will typically be chaotic, a little disorganized, but the people tend to be enthusiastic. They want to be here, they want to have fun, but they also are motivated early-adopters and friends of the organizers, so they want to help make it a good festival.

The 2nd through 5th-ish years of the annual festival are the prime years. Success in the first (and subsequent) years attracts better talent, more talent, and more people. The festival is lively, fun, and often carries some idealism as well. Like, “this festival celebrate music in our community” or “all proceeds of the fair go to feeding the homeless!”

By the 6th year though, if it has continued to be successful, this is about the time when the amount of “party people” is severly out-weighing the commited festival goers. These are the people that dont make costumes, dont camp out, dont really engage with the festival beyond pure trasactionalism: I give you money, and you give me fun.

There’s now too much money, profit, in the system and usually a big national company makes a buy-out offer now, or the festival is simply big enough that managing it necessitates building a company and the finance people just worm their way in. Ticket prices go up, tickets get partitioned into VIP tiers, local acts get replace with big corporate names, ads and merchandising begin to dominate your eye lines everywhere in the festival.

Eventually, it either outgrows its birthplace and moves somewhere bigger, or becomes so large and mismanaged that it becomes too unprofitable to run anymore and gets shut down. A few people go “man, remember how cool Blahfest was? What if we got some friends together and organized a new BlergFest?!” and the cycle begins again.