Communard Interview #3: Anthony Beck

Over the course of nearly six years, Anthony Beck has lived at four income sharing communities–Twin Oaks, Cambia, Compersia, and Glomus–and prior to that spent two years in housing co-ops in California.  He is primarily a farmer, but also an artist and Buddhist practitioner.  In his spare time, he can be found reading nonfiction, playing board games, or spending unhurried time in nature.

Raven:  You have now lived in four different income-sharing communities. What are some of the challenges and insights that you have encountered at these different communities?

Anthony: Obviously different communities are different. Some of the communities I’ve lived in have been very different. I’ve lived in large communities and very small communities and rural communities and an urban one. 

One thing I’ve learned along the way is that for young communities, it really seems that founder energy matters a lot. As one person I lived with put it, you can’t unbake a cake. Once a community has been founded with a certain energy or a certain set of values, those aren’t easily rewritten. It really seems that what sort of energy you found a community with matters a lot. For example, if a community is founded by a really tight-knit group of people, like a couple or, regardless of romantic relationship, a really small and tight knit group of people, those people need to be very proactive about bringing in more people and sharing power with them. If you founded a project with a small group of people, that will be the energy that you start with, and if you want a larger group later, it’s going to take extra work to overcome that initial energy versus if you start with more people in the first place.

The same thing is true with the racial makeup of a community. All the communities I’ve been in  are predominantly or completely white. I’ve been in situations where we’d like to diversify our community, but if you “bake the cake” by starting with a predominantly white community, it’s going to be difficult to overcome that energy.  If you want a diverse community, it is going to be a lot less energy overall to start with a diverse founding group.

I’ve found urban communities particularly challenging. It’s a different economic reality than rural communities. If you’re in an urban environment and you don’t own your land, you have this kind of constant pressure of rent, and unless you have a very favorable and affordable rent, that’s going to be a few thousand dollars each month that just evaporates for you.  There has to be a lot more hustle in order to maintain that sort of situation. 

Also, in an urban community, there’s frequently a lot more spreading of people’s energies outside of the community – and I think that’s good. I think it is really important for communes to be engaged with the communities outside of their household, but it can also be a challenge, particularly in urban communities. When some people are working full-time jobs in order to drive the economic engine of the community, it makes them a lot less available for other things that might be important in the community like interpersonal labor. 

If someone is really invested in their job outside the community or really invested in their organizing outside the community, that can be great, but it also needs to be balanced with the internal needs of the community, which need to be met as well. There’s just really so many hours in the day and, if there’s a wealth of places to put your energy outside of your home, you need to be extra intentional in budgeting where you put your energy. It’s tricky balancing external engagement with the internal work that maintains a community. 

I’ve also found urban communes to be uniquely challenging in the diversity of labor.  At Twin Oaks, people do different things, but they tend to do most of their work on the farm. In an urban community, you might have people working outside for money a lot more, as well as people who don’t do that as much and are more focused on maintaining the home, or who have income-producing work but do so from home. It can be easy for the people who work outside the community and put a lot of effort into doing so to perceive that others are not facing the same challenges that they do, or working the same way (and in a real sense, they don’t). At the same time, the people who may be doing more work maintaining the home may not feel seen for that, because the other people who are working out of house aren’t there to witness the labor they do. 

I find urban communities trickier in a lot of ways. I think there are still a lot of challenges to be worked out about them. I don’t think that at Compersia we were ultimately as successful in working out these challenges that are unique to urban communes as we needed to be.

Anthony in the Glomus garden

Raven: With almost six years in income sharing communities, what insights or thoughts do you have about the movement as a whole?

Anthony: I’ve lived in income-sharing communities for a fair amount of time and I think they have really important things to offer to the world. I’ve also come away from that time with some pretty clear critiques of the intentional communities movement as a whole. It’s really clear that income-sharing communities provide an engine to accomplish more with fewer resources. For example, looking at Twin Oaks, here at Glomus, or just about any income sharing community, you see that the amount of money per person required to live a good life is a lot less than if people are living separately. 

I think this ability to do more with less is powerful, and I think that soon, as things get more difficult in the world – and I unfortunately think they are likely to – what intentional communities teach will become more relevant. In difficult times, Intentional communities will continue to gain attractiveness, and they will offer blueprints that allow people to live a good life together. We’re in a pandemic right now, and we’re already encountering increased inflation and supply chain issues. If these and other issues continue to intensify, then I think the collective economy seen in communes will become more widely adopted as a matter of necessity. I also think the collective nature of communes is valuable as an antidote to some of the ills in our society caused by individualism and greed.  I see many of the issues that we face in this time as stemming from the extreme sense of individualism that exists in our society, and the difficulty many people have with feeling united with and responsible for a circle larger than humans, or even just their immediate friends and family members. We need to be able to change these mindsets, and living in intentional community is one on-the-ground way to practice that. 

My biggest critique of the intentional communities movement as a whole is that it seems rather focused on itself rather than on the world that it exists in. To an extent that’s understandable – you have to maintain your own home and safety to be able to contribute to the world – but I have found intentional communities on the whole to be overly focused on intentional community as the end in and of itself, rather than a means to an end. In short, they can be rather self-absorbed, overly interested in anything that falls inside the border of “intentional community” and by comparison unconcerned with those things that fall outside that border.

An analogy I have used recently is that if the intentional communities movement were a car, I want to see us focusing on where this car can take us and what resources we can move around from point A to point B with this car. However, I have seen the tendency of intentional communities to become rather obsessive about overdesigning the car and keeping it in good repair, and overly fixated on who’s inside the car and who’s not – and whether we can pile more people in this particular clown car that is intentional community – with relatively little interest in what is happening “outside the car.” Again, to an extent, this makes sense – a car in poor repair cannot do much for us – but I think we need to shift our main focus to what we can accomplish with a car in good repair. Who will we show up to support in this car? How can we ultimately build new cars that can take different sets of people where they want to go, instead of stuffing them into ours and taking them where we want to go? How can we make sure that different models of cars are accessible to everybody whose lives can be improved by them? 

I would like to see more intentional communities asking what being together and pooling resources allows them to achieve in the world, rather than treating intentional community as the end itself. This is my biggest critique of the movement as a whole.

In this vein, I think the movement can learn a lot from people who are doing social justice and mutual aid organizing. These are the people who have their finger on the pulse of what people need, and are building networks and webs of support to meet those needs. By connecting to and placing themselves in service of these networks, intentional communities have the potential to benefit a lot of people – by offering tools, acting as safe places for people who need them, functioning as conduits for resources to pass through, etc. When asking questions about how to make intentional communities accessible for more people, or how to allow more people to employ the sharing technologies that communes demonstrate, I think we would do well to humbly show up and make ourselves available to folks doing grassroots organizing – oftentimes organizers have firsthand experience with what it is to be marginalized in our society (as themselves or through the communities they work with), and they can potentially show us how to connect what intentional communities have to offer with the folks that can benefit the most from those tools and resources. 

I was initially attracted to the intentional communities movement by what I see as its revolutionary potential – the potential to give more people the ability to meet their own needs and their community’s needs in-house, and to live a life of sufficiency, autonomy and purpose. I think this potential is still there, and would love to find ways myself and with others to fully employ that potential. I think a great place to start is by strengthening our connections with the communities already organizing in this way, to be generous with our resources, and curious about how we can offer them.

Raven: How does being in a commune interact with your being a farmer? In what ways does living and working in a communal context support or impact your work farming?

Anthony: I think one of the biggest ways in which being in a commune supports my work as a farmer is that it allows us to farm differently here than if we were not living collectively. For example, on a typical production farm, you have to be very efficient with your time and might not, for example, be able to waste time messing with recycled materials. Because farming is a very, very thin margin business, you can’t necessarily afford that sort of thing. I do believe as a farmer in using time well and tapping into efficiencies. However, living in an intentional community allows us here to work with recycled materials more, repair things rather than replacing them, and generally get longer use out of some of our materials rather than just throwing them away. I like that living together allows us to go a little further to farm in ways that are consistent with our values than if we were a business that had to achieve higher margins that support people living individually (in a sense, less efficiently).

It’s also nice to not have to commute to work. I’m able to give more energy directly to farming because I wake up where I farm. 

It is challenging on the other hand to have relatively little work/home life separation. If I get frustrated with someone that I live with, it immediately bleeds into my work life. If I’m having a hard day at work, it immediately affects my ability to show up well at home. Having more separation between those things sometimes seems like it could be healthy but I’m also frequently grateful to have such intimate relationships with the people I work with. When we’re working together well, I think we can reach a very high level of coordination, because we are so familiar with one another.

I’m also personally at a point in my arc where I’m primarily interested in in the craft of farming, perhaps more so than living in community, so there is this tension that comes up – am I a farmer who happens to live in a commune and accomplishes his farming through living communally, or am I a communitarian who happens to farm? I know this tension also comes up in the community at large sometimes – are we a farm first, or a commune first? I personally feel these days like I’m a farmer first, but not everyone around me necessarily approaches it the same way and I don’t know if we have consensus about that, which can be challenging at times.

The East Brook Community Farm crew: Rachael, Cicada, Andie, and Anthony

Raven: What are your favorite aspects of communal living, and what do you find most difficult?

Anthony: I live well with other people generally speaking. I like to be surrounded by a lot of people and have a lot of casual opportunities for social interaction. I feel like that need is very well met for me by living communally, especially while living in a pandemic. I like the fact that I’m “podded” with such a large group of people. It means that I’m much more able to get certain social needs met in the context of this pandemic than if I were living alone. It would be a lot more work if I was living on my own or with one or two other people to get my social needs met.  I would have to consider how serious the case count is right now, or consider if the people I’m seeing are vaccinated and have to mask up. I’m willing to put in that effort and I currently want to make more friends that I don’t live with, but it also is really relieving to be able to have a lot of my social needs met without going through all that.

One of the most challenging aspects is that it’s just hard to live with people. More specifically, you have to learn to live with people even when you really don’t agree with them or if you really just don’t want to live with them right now –  you have to figure out how to do it anyway. There are a lot of contexts in which, if I don’t like that person or if I don’t have good synergy with that person, I just don’t have to interact with them. You can even do that at a commune that is sufficiently large, but in a small one, that’s not really an option. As someone I live with once said, you don’t always have to like one another to love one another. That’s the practice. How can we be committed to loving one another, to meet one another’s needs, to be good to one another, even when we’re really not seen eye-to-eye?  

In many contexts it’s very easy to just write someone off and decide you don’t want anything to do with that person but in a small commune, you don’t have that option. That can be a challenge because sometimes you really do need space from someone to be safe, and that’s legitimate, but also I think it’s good for us to learn to set boundaries and move toward reconciliation without necessarily just removing a relationship from the picture entirely. 

Raven: Are there any other things you would like to share from your communal experiences? 

Anthony: I probably already talked too much, so no.