Forming the Structure

by Raven

In the “Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World”, the Wobblies (the IWW, also known as the Wobblies, is an anarcho-syndicalist industrial union) use the phrase “…we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

Anarchist union organizing may seem far from communal living, but I think that “forming the structure of the new society” is one of the ways of looking at why we need income-sharing communities.  I have referred to intentional communities as laboratories for social change and I really think that’s true.  I am at base a social change person but someone who wants to build a different society from the ground up and I think that communities, especially income-sharing communities, provide both a model and a foundation.

Let me be clear.  I certainly don’t think that everyone should live in a commune.  I don’t even think that everyone should be in some kind of intentional community.  I think that there should be as many different (non-exploitive) ways of living as possible.  I do think that income-sharing communities push the limits of what’s possible for many people and thus create more possibilities, and so I’m hoping that there will be people who want to create more of them.  I  definitely do..

My last four posts were on a history of egalitarianism and communal sharing from prehistoric tribes to medieval experiments in continental Europe and later England to Gandhi’s “Constructive Program” and ended by pointing out that egalitarian movements either got destroyed (violently in continental Europe and with property destruction and threats in England) or just got ignored (after Gandhi’s death in India).  My conclusion was that we’ve got to keep trying.  The established structures have been held firmly in place and, as history shows, will lash out if threatened.  But I think this is a time when these structures themselves are collapsing.  Now is the time to form what will take their place.

As I’ve said a lot recently, this is a blog not only about communal living but also about sharing, and especially radical sharing, and I really think that sharing is going to be the basis for forming a different society.  To the degree that we share, more and more, we build the foundation for something new.  My vision is that we can extend that sharing by networking and by growing those networks we can help shape and form a new way of living that can replace the destructive ways we live now.

Perhaps by experimenting with new ways of sharing and new ways of living communally, we can truly help form “the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”