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In 1997, the inhabitants of the tiny Hebridean Isle of Eigg finally succeeded in taking collective control of their island. Tensions had been running high for years: everything from the islanders' homes to their jobs to their electricity supply depended on the whims of the wealthy businessman who owned it. Sick of putting up with crumbling buildings while he took rich friends for picnics and jaunts in his Rolls Royce, they launched what today would be called a crowdfunder, and eventually raised enough money to buy him out.
[...] Today, Eigg is thriving. A community housing association has refurbished the islanders' homes and made rents more affordable. The island is 95 percent powered by community-owned renewables, giving islanders 24-hour electricity for the first time. The landscape, previously scarred by damaging spruce tree plantations, has been restored. There is even a community-owned broadband network. Decisions about the island's future are made democratically by the trust that owns it on behalf of all who live there.
Can collective ownership work in the rest of the UK?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2020, @03:11PM
I don't mean to downplay the impact of individual assholes or individual heroes, but I think the most important aspect by a large margin is actually on the number of people. Small enough communities that can run on direct democracy can do okay. Once everything gets big enough that you have to delegate leadership positions, it all goes to hell.
It almost makes me want to embrace the ideas of anarchist philosophers like Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin was a contemporary of Karl Marx who told Marx that state socialism would collapse into authoritarianism, and he told him that more than fifty years before Red October. Anarchists - not James Bond and Mission Impossible villains, real anarchists - just think that large bureaucracies of any kind unavoidably become corrupt, and the only solution is to never have a bureaucracy. Anarchists want to create a society of tiny self-governing communities with no larger government structure of any kind. (I'm posting that brief explanation for anyone's benefit, JoeMerchant, I would bet you already know all of this.)
The reason I'm not an advocate of anarchism is that anarchist communities will always be conquered by larger groups. If your community has 80 people in a direct democracy and mine has 1000 in any other form of political and economic organization, my community can do whatever it wants to yours and you won't have the resources to stop us. To the anarchist that says, "Socialism will never work because the bureaucracy will evolve into a dictatorship.", I say, "Anarchism will never work because anarchist groups are too small to defend themselves from larger communities of any kind. I will take my chances with socialism."