CollectiveUs for the rest of US

Don’t be surprised at millennials’ increased demand for communally owned…everything

It’s pragmatic to want access to food, shelter, healthcare, and opportunity. That’s not a radical thought. Nor is it radical to think that the institutions, power structures, and political parties of our parents’ generation will be woefully inadequate in addressing the shit-stuck situation of those of us who are in the millennial generation or younger.

Let’s save the outrage of the next years and decades and predict what the next thinkpieces will be about with regards to our generation. Soon someone will catch on to the fact that millennials don’t hold dear many of the economic and political standards that previous generations revered as immovable. That doesn’t just include a reverence for capitalism, either. It includes our whitewashed ideas of racism in our society. Millennials aren’t just susceptible to more radical ideas from the left — the blithely content white folk in our midst are also much more susceptible to white supremacist radicalization. Because why fight the actual power structures when you can cling to the harmful and murderous ways of white supremacy to advance your own inflated mediocrity?

But let’s get away from the Nazis and talk more concretely about what I think and hope is more common, and that’s not communism or fascism. It’s communalism. Communal housing. Communal land. Communal farms. Communal businesses. Communal…bath houses. It’s all coming, because the millennial appetite for it is here. Allow me to explain, as presented in headlines of the future:

Roomates at 34? It’s more common than you think.

No, we’re not talking about the idea of having roommates. We’re talking about houses on land, next to each other or perhaps attached, which are communally owned by several individuals or family members. Because we literally cannot afford to own houses on our own. And the benefits to going in on a compound-type thing with friends or family are numerous. Universal childcare? We sure as hell don’t have that. Safety net? None of that. But maybe our cooperative, communally owned housing arrangement will help alleviate both issues, as well as the economic pain associated with capitalism’s dark end days.

Are millennials becoming communists? An essay by an 80-year-old rich dude

Listen, we don’t have any of your attachments to the red scare. None. The idea of communism isn’t inherently scary at all. Literally any other system than capitalism seems like a pretty good idea right now. Print money, plant trees, live naked on the high seas? If that’s an economic system, I’m in. But back to the real point: We know that capitalism as it exists doesn’t work. We feel it. Our entire life has lived it. So selling some sort of red-scare-lite messaging won’t work.

Meet the two MIT Grads who started the bathhouse revival movement

Inevitably, two white kids whose parents were loaded will be able to pay for an inane number of twitter ads to sell us on this topic. But let’s talk about communal bathouses for a moment, before they ruin it. Bath houses. Yes. Aside from our reality of inheriting a shredded social safety net, millennials also grew up in an age of the Incredible Shrinking Civic Space. Urban, rural, or suburban, there are increasingly fewer places that we can congregate in public. Our downtowns were stripped and demolished thanks to the thirst of King Car and the soulless pricks at Wal Mart. Parks turned to developments. Schools and their buildings languish from lack of funds. Public turned private. Public also turned expensive, in the case of public universities. And private maybe— if we’re lucky—got converted to a corporate-sponsored public-private partnership place (trademark pending), as sponsored by the bloodthirsty motherfuckers who have already ruined everything for us. But hey, thanks for the parklet that’ll soon be automatically programmed to use robots to kick out homeless people.

It’s in this reality that a mind can drift to a utopian ideal of what a civic space, and even what a business, could be. A place that’s healthy, accessible, and dare I say beautiful. We can dream! That’s well within our rights. I dream of a public bath house. Now, this obsession could be taking hold because of the recent subzero temperatures in these parts of the north (hello from 0 degrees F in Maine) but it speaks to a larger yearning for civic space. While American traditions of public bathing are more limited than in other countries, human civilizations have enjoyed public bathing for eons. Health benefits abound, especially in northern climes with shrinking daylight (hello from just past 4pm, it’s dark) where seasonal depression is VERY REAL. But anywhere, really, I do believe there are benefits. And the collective yearning for beautiful buildings constructed for us all. By us. For eternity. I like to think of the communal civic bath house as delivering a massive, collective, union-made slap to the face of neoliberalism— even long after that depraved ideology shits the bed (trademark pending).

Bath houses are just one random example of the utopian ideal. I went to a for-rent hot-tub spa the other day, ominously named “Heavens Door” which was really lovely, actually. Did I leave thinking about my desire to buy a hot tub? Nah. Chemicals are dirty. Hot tubs are too expensive. But would I go in on operating a communally owned wood-fired hot tub company? Hell yes I would. Even better, what if we created institutions that offered needed services and resources (even more needed than saunas in subzero temps — think food, housing, etc) that are communally owned? It sounds more feasible than relying on housing vouchers from a defunct HUD, or waiting on SNAP benefits to kick in (right after the state-mandated drug test clears, of course) or relying on the soon-to-be-decimated services of Medicare and Medicaid to still be around.

So when you inevitably start seeing these pieces come up, please don’t be surprised. We’re just planning our ways to survive out here in this disaster of a climate. These are coping mechanisms, and they aren’t as far out as you may think. What else are we supposed to do when our generation inherits a structurally racist, inequitable, broken and corrupt political system? We sure as hell won’t rely on it to do us justice. But maybe we’ll rely on each other more.

Welcome to the future. Clothing optional.