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The missing part of all of these stories, IMO, is: where does the shared money go? If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice. In larger society we leave that to the government, or at least a local church, at significantly higher graft than my hypothetical, and someone trying to “make it on his own” is an obvious tax evader.
But I expect this isn’t the whole story, and the reality is an excess of men who don’t work or women who aren’t married or an unusual quantity of drink for the amount of money earned. That’s what’s really wrong: the family exerts authority to tax, but not authority to force good behavior. That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.
But I’d be interested in the specifics. The above is largely prejudice.
It also depends on how much is communalized. Even if it just goes to the needy, any poor community is going to have enough needy that you could easily take away every penny that someone earns, give it to the needy, and still have needy. And the community isn't going to say "well, the needy already got 30% of his income, we'll let him keep the rest".
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It's the same phenomenon.
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Based on my dad's telling, it was a combination of drink, gambling, covering for injured/elderly men and women, covering pawn shop debts since frequently the money would run low just before the husbands returned from the sea. There was also an expectation of low-grade neighborhood socialism and enough men died or were injured on the boats that there was a pretty constant flow of widows, orphans and the like. Also my dad was there for essentially a very particular social moment between the Second World War (half the town was still ruins from the Blitz for his childhood) and the obsolescence of the Northern fishing communities for a plethora of reasons a few decades later. Which also increased the pressure on neighborhood charity networks since there were less boats and therefore less men going out on them and making great money for the time and place.
I haven't made a deep sociological inquiry of it, and my dad first left the fishing town at 14 to go to military school and then completely left the country at about 30 without spending all that much time actually living there.
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