You can’t build a commune by yourself

by Raven

This is, I suppose, a variation on a theme here, but I am not sure that it can be said too much. Our posts on creating communes are the most popular things on this site. It seems like everyone wants to create a commune.

And I keep saying that the first thing that you need to do is find people. People are what creates a community.

I suppose that you could buy a property and open it up to create a cohousing ‘community’–just advertise openings and get people who want to do a little more than wave at their neighbors, but it’s a lot more difficult when you are trying to build an income-sharing community.

Yesterday, Cicada and I were at the Collaborative Living Conference in Belfast, Maine. Cicada did a presentation on Glomus Commune where we both live and I held a small group on income-sharing. Cicada joined me and we had a half dozen folks sitting at a table asking us questions about income-sharing. They were all quite curious but I joked with Cicada afterwards that if we were talking about handing poisonous snakes there would be a lot of people curious about it but that doesn’t mean they would want to do it. I doubt that many of the folks who asked us questions were going to start income-sharing afterwards.

The Collaborative Living Conference flag

Income-sharing requires a certain amount of trust and trust is built over time. This is one of the reasons a commune is built collectively. Another is that we are egalitarian communities. We don’t have a leader, we have a horizontal decision making structure. And, again, it takes time and effort to learn to work together and make collective decisions.

A commune is built on relationships. This is another thing that I don’t think I can say too many times. You can’t build a commune by yourself because a commune is all about relationships and the real work is building those relationships.