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Notes -
I have to imagine that a lot of the people sincerely responding to the prompt are working boring 9-to-5 jobs that they hate.
Take the very first person. Her answers were "leading discussions on theory", "making clothes from scraps", and "making lattes". These are clearly things this person enjoys: talking about political theory, creatively working with her hands, and serving other people. If I might be allowed to be cringeworthy myself for a second, I get it. All of that sounds pretty good to me too. Granted, if it were me it would probably be theology or religious philosophy rather than Marxist theory, and it's probably painting or being a musician rather than making clothes, but that kind of life sounds pleasant. Most of the sincere responses sound similar: there's intellectual stimulation, self-expression, maybe a bit of physical exertion as a break, a few who enjoy working with children, and so on.
In sum, it sounds a lot like common depictions of the good life. John Adams famously wrote, "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy... in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine." Suppose you were the grandchildren in this narrative. What would you study?
If I have problems with the commune, they're twofold, I guess. The first is on the object level that I think leftism or Marxism or what have you is wrong. The philosophical basis of the commune is bad. But that's fairly superficial, so to turn to the second - it's that the idea of the commune serves as a kind of imaginary justification for bad politics in the here and now. The commune sounds like an S&W-style prefiguratory community. This is the criticism of the guy who said his job would be telling everyone to go home and unionise. The commune may be fun as a brief fantasy, but if it displaces more productive visions of effective political action (and leaving aside the part where I don't want Twitter leftists to engage in effective political action), it may do more harm to the overall movement.
But I view those objections as pretty minor. To the first, the problem isn't that they're indulging in a utopian fantasy - it's that their undergirding political ideas are bad. I can just focus on those ideas themselves. And to the second, well, that's just a question of keeping things in proportion. If you fantasise about anything all the time it's disastrous, but I would not ban fantasy.
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