Luxury Items

by Raven

Most folks who are not wealthy see some items as necessities and some items as luxuries.  This is true of communes also–however, in a community, people have to agree which items are luxuries.

One of the things about living in an income sharing community is that the community will provide whatever you need.  However the community gets to decide what “need” means.  Many communes also give some sort of extra money to each person (a stipend or allowance, if you will) so that they can get things that the community doesn’t provide–but this is often a limited amount.  So while you never have to worry about “necessities” (however your commune defines that), you have to decide which luxury items you can afford on what limited cash your community provides.

For instance, at Twin Oaks (at least until recently–maybe still) coffee has been considered a luxury item.  That isn’t true in most of the other communes, but there are often other things that the community does decide is a luxury item.  

At Glomus, ice cream is sort of considered a luxury.  People do buy it occasionally–and use the commune’s money to do it–but I suspect that if this was a frequent thing it would be brought up at a meeting and talked about.  I’m sure some folks would question whether this was something that we could afford to do regularly.

Like people, if a community has a lot of money, it can afford to provide more luxury items for its members, but, knowing how communities work, I suspect that buying anything that some folks consider a luxury, would only happen after a lot of community discussion.

So living communally gives you a real opportunity to think about what your values are–and to engage with others who have different values.  It isn’t always easy, but it is an important part of communal living.  Collective decision making: it’s one of the things that makes being in a commune different from living by yourself.