The Communitarium Project: Oh God, Not Communes Again!
The Communitarium Project isn’t about reviving communes or escaping society—it’s about building transitional, interstitial spaces where people can live, think, and act together differently. Not utopias, but shared infrastructures for sense-making, coordination, and care—without enforcing consensus or closing down difference.
It’s a familiar reaction. Mention “communes” in leftist circles and you’re likely to get a mix of eye-rolls, half-hearted smiles, and uneasy memories. For many, the word evokes a long history of well-meaning but often unsustainable experiments in collective living—some genuinely inspiring, others chaotic, insular, or quietly authoritarian. The skepticism is understandable. And yet, the desire to live differently, to reorganize how we share time, space, labor, and care, hasn’t gone away.
The classic idea of the commune is often structured around a kind of withdrawal. The hope is that by stepping outside capitalism, outside the state, outside inherited norms, people can start fresh. A new society in miniature, designed from scratch. But in practice, the world tends to follow us in. Patterns of domination, resource scarcity, informal hierarchies, and cultural sediment don’t stay outside the gates. They come along for the ride. And when the project buckles under their weight, it’s easy to conclude that the whole idea of living collectively is naïve or doomed.
But maybe the problem isn’t with the desire for a more communal life. Maybe it’s with the model we’ve inherited—and the assumptions it carries about how transformation happens.
The Communitarium Project is not an attempt to revive the commune. It isn’t a separatist outpost, an idealized return to the land, or a lifestyle alternative. It doesn’t promise self-sufficiency, purity, or escape. Instead, it proposes something quieter and more deliberate: we’re not trying to leave society behind; we’re trying to reimagine it in place. We’re not building enclosed utopias where existing rules are suspended; we’re building transitional, interstitial spaces that engage with the world as it is, while gradually reshaping it from within.
The structures we’re experimenting with—whether we call them hubs, nodes, collectives, or something else—are meant to support shared life in a way that remains open, adaptive, and historically aware. They’re designed to hold people in common purpose without collapsing difference, and to support coordination without reproducing hierarchy or burnout. The point isn’t to create a single model for everyone to follow. It’s to cultivate conditions where different communities can generate their own practices, based on their own needs and histories, while still finding ways to communicate and align across differences.
What also distinguishes the Communitarium Project is its emphasis on how we perceive and process the world together. Most collective projects focus on shared outputs—labor, decision-making, provisioning—but the Communitarium emphasizes shared intake as well. It’s designed to help people collectively interpret a world that has become too complex and contradictory to navigate alone.
That said, this is not a call for consensus thinking or interpretive uniformity. On the contrary, multiplicity and divergence are essential to the process. The goal is not to arrive at a common worldview, but to build the capacity to hold different perspectives in active relation—to metabolize disagreement, asymmetry, and partial understandings without collapsing them into a single narrative. The work is not about finding the right line, but about inhabiting the conditions under which lines can be drawn, revised, and challenged in good faith.
This is what makes the Communitarium’s model metabolic rather than doctrinal: it digests contradiction rather than eliminating it. It doesn’t offer ideological security, but the opportunity to participate in collective inquiry that remains grounded in material needs, shared time, and cohabitation with difference.
For that reason, the Communitarium is not meant to be isolated. It is interstitial by design. It exists in the gaps and overlaps between institutions, between geographies, between official narratives and lived realities. It aims to be locally rooted but globally connective, rigorous without being rigid, durable without being enclosed. In this way, it serves not as an escape hatch, but as a set of proto-infrastructures—an evolving effort to build and test the social forms that could support a more just, more livable future.
The word “commune” carries a great deal of historical and emotional baggage. That baggage has often led people to dismiss any attempt at collective living as utopian, impractical, or cultish. But if we let that skepticism become a reflex, we risk shutting down some of the most important work we still have to do. The Communitarium Project doesn’t promise utopia. It offers something more modest, and maybe more useful: a way to begin building shared life differently—not all at once, and not everywhere, but in ways that are attentive, accountable, and capable of change.
So yes, it’s okay to groan a little when you hear talk of communes. But it’s also worth asking whether that groan is doing the work of caution—or just reinforcing a sense of futility. The question isn’t whether we can go back to the commune. It’s whether we can build something forward-facing that’s able to hold us—and help us hold each other—through what’s coming next.