I’ve frequently talked about communities being “laboratories for social change.” But what kind of social change? What sort of society are we working to create?
It’s easy to talk about what’s wrong with this society (the many varieties of oppression–often intersecting, climate change, environmental destruction, militarism and violence and war, etc, etc–I could spell it all out, but that would be more than a whole post in itself and lots of people have spelled it out elsewhere). What I want to look at is the question of what kind of society do we want? Just what are we trying to replace this whole mess with?
Obviously, I want something that’s kinder to people (all people!) as well as to the environment/ecology/earth. I also want something with a lot less inequity. Beyond that? I want to see a world that delights in diversity, and that creates abundance, not scarcity. As adrienne maree brown put it as the final element of her Emergent Strategy, we need to be “Creating More Possibilities”. David Holmgren, one of the founders of permaculture, talks about twelve basic principles. “Use and Value Diversity” is number ten. Another permaculturist, Ben Falk, at one point listed seventy-two ‘directives’, one of which is “Increase Diversity, Don’t Reduce It.” I have also written that I am more interested in a diversity of communities than having diversity within a community.
Yes, this blog is devoted to income-sharing communities, but I strongly support co-op housing and cohousing, ecovillages and hybrid communities, and many other different kinds of secular and spiritual communities, especially communities which support cultures beyond mainstream middle and upper class white culture as well as those that support a variety of marginalized people. I’d like to see more of all of these in the future–but I also think that the future needs to also include people living alone, or in couples, or in a great variety of families.
So why am I pushing communes/income-sharing communities here? Why don’t I at least feature other kinds of communities in this blog? Two reasons. First, there are lots of other places with articles about and information on various kinds of communities. The Foundation for Intentional Community is a good place to start if that’s what you’re looking for. The second reason has to do with the Overton Window.
The Overton Window is about public opinion and how it shifts over time. The concept has been used to explain how politicians decide what policies to pursue but what it really looks at is what people think is good, acceptable, or just too far out there–or what they are aware of at all. The point is that this window shifts over time and people with extreme positions can shift it–not to where they are but by increasing the awareness of their positions, they can change the opinion of what’s moderate.
A real life example (from politics) is someone I knew well who actually ran for governor while espousing some fairly radical positions and was covered in the media. She didn’t get elected but some folks claimed that the fairly progressive person who did get elected owed it to her, because what she put out made his positions seem moderate.
In a similar way, pushing the extreme end of the communal/sharing continuum, and making it clear that this is a real possibility, makes all the other community experiments all the more possible. If a community like Twin Oaks can succeed using radical sharing, then your co-op, cohousing, or ecovillage should certainly be possible.
On a daily basis on Facebook, we publish accounts of income-sharing communities and ideas, many of which are successful. Hopefully, the more awareness there is of these communal experiences, the more folks will begin to consider what they want and how they can achieve it. Also, the income-sharing communities that we do publicize here are far from identical. Each of them is unique in their own way, and I want to encourage folks (maybe even you!) to figure out what it is that you want and try to imagine that you might be able to get it. If it’s a diverse future that we want, we will have to build it together.
Debbie talks about insulating houses, going off grid, the communities she’s lived in, Magnolia House and Magnolia Collective, and the work of Living Energy Farm.
John joined Living Energy Farm a couple of years ago and talks about the process of getting there and what it’s like being there and why living this way is important.
Lately I have been reading a lot about what has been called “evolutionary biology” or “evolutionary psychology”. I just finished (at least much of) Trust and Reciprocity, a book edited by Elinor Ostrom and James Walker, and I’m currently reading Sapien: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari and Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal (a primatologist who also had a chapter in Trust and Reciprocity). All this has gotten me thinking once again about how humans evolved to live tribally and why we don’t anymore.
Trust and Reciprocity discusses the “evolution of cooperation”, why humans (and most apes, as well as other animal species) cooperate in the first place. Many theoretical economists see us as essentially selfish creatures and Garrett Hardin, in his influential 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, argued that if everyone acts in their own interest shared resources would quickly be destroyed. Yet, as Elinor Ostrom has pointed out (not in Trust and Reciprocity but in other work), there are groups that have been sharing common resources sustainably for centuries.
Trust is a major reason folks can share and cooperate. One of the issues discussed in Trust and Reciprocity is the question of how trust evolved. One theory involves what has been called “reciprocal altruism”. (I see it as a “I’ll take care of you if you will take care of me” theory.”) Robert Trivers used the term in a 1971 essay to describe why people (and animals) might take a risk and make a small sacrifice if they think it may be rewarded later.
This intrigues me because I see income-sharing as folks making a small sacrifice which has a large pay off. But income-sharing requires trust.
Trauma damages trust. When people have been hurt or used or abused, they are far less likely to trust as easily again.or often even trust at all–especially if the trauma occurred when they were young and vulnerable. I am beginning to believe that trauma may be more widespread than most people realize, and that many people may feel safer living alone or with one trusted partner (and even then more and more relationships seem to end in separations or divorces).
Trust is a hard thing to regain once it has been broken. A dozen good experiences may not offset a single bad one, especially if it was very bad. And for someone with childhood trauma, even a not so bad experience can seem to confirm that people can’t be trusted.
I’m not sure what we can do about all of this, but I do believe that sharing makes things better for everyone and that we need to build systems which can work for most folks, which means working on building trust and creating systems of accountability.
It won’t be easy but I think it’s what the world needs, and I think that the fact that the communes work at all, is a good example of what we need to do.
I thought that I had written something about this before. I was pretty sure I wrote a Facebook question about this, but I couldn’t remember the responses. Well, I did, and, unfortunately, there were no responses to remember..
It’s still something that interests me.
Twenty-something years ago, I was in a community where we were talking about doing income sharing (which we eventually did). We decided to explore what it meant to people by asking what were their greatest fears about doing it. One person said that their greatest fear was that they would have to account for every pair of socks they bought. I remember that mine was that we would never actually do it.
One of the things that I realized about communal living in general, as I did it, was that it’s a lot less intense than living with one person. With one person, you have to deal with all of their flaws and difficulties. The more folks there are, I found, the more people bring different perspectives and create a bit of a buffer to the intensity each person brings. With money, as well, more people bring more ideas and perspectives, more ways to bring in income, and more folks to deal with it when there are difficulties. More people bring more of a buffer to money anxiety. If we are low on cash, it becomes a collective problem rather than just one person’s worry.
I suspect that trust is the biggest issue in income sharing. And, yes, I know of a few cases where someone (the bookkeeper usually) has taken advantage of the situation–or let it deteriorate to the point it endangered the community. Definitely more than one person should pay attention to the books. (I would advocate that at least two folks who are not close go over a community’s finances regularly.) But I’ve done income sharing many times at this point and there have been very few problems. In fact, in most of the situations, it’s worked out better for everyone involved. But because sharing your income with more than just your partner and/or your offspring is so unusual, there are still folks who are afraid to try it.
gil is an activist, artist, and compost manager. He (along with me, Raven) was one of the folks who helped create Cotyledon, an income-sharing community in Queens, New York, that lasted almost two years (from the end of November, 2017 to the end of September, 2019). He has some interesting ideas about how to create an urban income-sharing community.
Raven: I usually start with this question: How did you hear about community and what attracted you to it?
gil: Back in 2013, I had just joined this artist’s collective in western Queens called The Flux Factory and one of the artists there, a community organizer named Jamie Idea, was curating a group show called Utopia School. It was a one month long program. It had all these radical ideas and interesting people from all over the world who were coming into New York and sharing about their practices and one of the groups that came into that show was Point A. Point A was a group of communards primarily out of Virginia, a project of rural communes going to urban areas, primarily on the eastern seaboard, to try to create a commune in a city, so that there could be more exchange between rural and city areas. People in rural areas like to visit the city and plenty of people in the city are visiting and guesting at these communes but it was kind of a one-way thing because people in cities can afford to do that but people in communes when they go to the cities have to take a leave of absence because there are no communes that are sharing labor there.
This was kind of a crash course on communes at large. The folks that were there were primarily from Twin Oaks and Acorn. I was learning about income-sharing and learning about businesses that are owned by a large group of people that were living in the communes together. That was my first introduction to all this. I think I’ve been interested in more of a communal way of living in a mutual aid lifestyle for most of my life, but I never had the language or knew anyone that was doing this and didn’t know this was really a thing until then. I had been around people talking about buying land upstate but it was always this separate but together model that never really appealed to me. The commune model really did. I was basically instantly smitten.
I think that was in October of 2013. In November I went down as a guest at Twin Oaks, and I got to go over to Acorn and Living Energy Farm and Mimosa and experience what the communes were like. I just got to dip my toe in the water. I started going back a little bit. I went to one of the infamous New Year’s Eve parties and went to the Communities Conference for a few years. That was really my introduction to the communities movement.
gil and little friend
Raven: Having done income sharing, what are your current thoughts about it?
gil: Income sharing was really an interesting idea and I really liked the idea a lot. There’s specific issues with it, doing this in an urban context. I think for the most part when I was starting up this commune and I was living with you and DNA, it took us a while to figure out how we were doing it. At first we didn’t really have any money and then I got a job and DNA was doing some gig work and we had a little bit of money. I really liked the accountability and the group process as well as the collaborative effort in personal and household bookkeeping. It felt good. It felt great to support one another financially and to be supported in other ways, including domestically and all these other beautiful ways of living. When we talk about income sharing what gets really lost is there’s all sorts of labor that is shared.
Sometimes there’s this comparison of income sharing to a marriage or a domestic partnership where a husband and a wife are sharing income. What’s problematic is that there’s this sexist expectation that the woman will do all the housekeeping and child rearing. That wasn’t the case in our situation. DNA did some housework, I did some housework, and you did a lion’s share, Raven. I was working a lot. It was nice to come home to meals sometimes. It was nice to know that the money that I was making was paying for everything else that needed to happen around the house and everyone else’s well being. And I think that’s lost a lot in conversations about income sharing by people who are new to it. They just focus on sharing money, not the labor sharing and domestic duty sharing but that’s what comes along with income sharing. That was a revelation that took a while to understand.
We had talked for a couple of years, we were meeting and talking about doing this thing before we finally did it. I really enjoyed it. We were only income sharing for two years and the first several months we weren’t making any money. We were mostly unemployed.
The thing that got difficult with income sharing was actually dating in this city. Going out, meeting new people, and trying to spend time with them outside of the household, in the city. I pride myself on being scrappy, dumpster diving, freeganism, not needing to go out and eat, keeping it low budget, but when you are dating, sometimes it’s a little bit different. It’s hard to get to know someone and you come across as really cheap when you only have a $35 a week stipend. That can be difficult. It also can ward off gold-diggers. (laughter) That was the biggest drawback for me; trying to date and have a good time in the city with a little bit of money.
Travel was also a little bit difficult. I could as an individual choose to save up my money and go traveling and that could be a choice for me but when you have a whole commune making decisions about how you’re going to be spending money and traveling being one of those things, one person’s desire to go out and experience the world doesn’t necessarily trump the need of the commune to have a safety net and to be able to support the social endeavors that we were doing and all the other really good and important stuff that we were doing. It was definitely a compromise to not be able to travel as much. Not only was that a compromise in terms of having a hard time agreeing to have travel be a big part of what we did, but it had consequences. We did our fair share of traveling but for me, participating in the commune and income sharing in the city, I took on a full time job in order to support the commune. Being a breadwinner for the community, that full time job didn’t allow me the time to travel the way that I was used to traveling the five years leading up to then, dashing away from the city whenever I wanted or needed to.
We got really lucky because we found an apartment that was affordable here in New York City. I think that if we didn’t have such an affordable place, income sharing would have been a lot more difficult. New York City is a difficult place to live in financially, period, but we got lucky with that apartment.
The Cotyledon Crew at the beginning of 2019: Lacey, Raven, DiNA, gil, and Matthew
Raven: When Cotyledon ended you said that if you were going to build another community, you’d start by creating a worker co-op business first and then build a community around it. Can you say more about that?
gil: One place I got inspiration from was the union built developments in New York City like the Amalgamated Houses up in the Bronx and other examples of workers who, through their union funded the construction of workforce housing for their union members and families, and people who worked together in allied fields, union labor, building lives together in the same complex. So that was an inspiration.
Also, as we were income sharing in Cotyledon and had this fourth bedroom that we had different people coming in with varying degrees of interest in income sharing, it became difficult to actually find a fourth communard to income share with us. A lot of that, I think, was based on trust.
Money is a very emotional subject. I read a statistic that the majority of marriages in America fail, because of disagreements about money. The majority of businesses that are started, don’t succeed because they can’t make enough money. And a number of communes that are started, don’t make it, not necessarily because of money, but I’m sure that it’s an issue. Because of the nature of urban society, the economic factors in the city necessitate a little bit different model than how communes have traditionally been created in rural areas. I think that it can be done. But it would take a lot of capital to begin with or someone who can give a large portion of money. I’ve seen that model work, at least for a little while.
But the way I am envisioning building out a sharing economy is through building trust among co-workers who are worker owners in a cooperative business. We could start with this economic model of exchanging your labor for money and then folks can manage that money together for the benefit of the workers who work there. Building that trust and building the solidarity network between different worker owned cooperatives, leads to beginning to know who people really are.
Another problem with New York City is that there are a lot of transient people. That takes a toll on a community. I think that if people are already rooted in their community through the work they’re doing and they have good, healthy jobs that are fulfilling, they’re less likely to leave. When you have a foundation like that, you can start building something solid that can last a long time.
I don’t want to say that Cotyledon was a failure because it was part of all three of our journeys to do that work, but thinking about the fact that it doesn’t still exist, and thinking about all the work that went into it, it could be depressing, but in reality we just have to learn how to do it better. For me, the idea is to create that trust through a responsible network of people using money to benefit a broader community of worker owners who they have professional and personal relationships with–when you work with someone for any amount time you end up getting to know their families, getting to know their medical conditions, and understanding when and how they like to take vacations, and you’re having weekly business meetings about how to spend money. This can lead to understanding how they act and react when it comes to money issues, and that builds a lot of trust, and that can propel people who already trust one another to start living together.
The model in many places is to have a big house and have a lot of people live together, but the housing stock in New York City doesn’t really allow for that. This could be more of a co-op type building. Co-op buildings are very common, they are not as ‘solidarity economy’ as a commune–but they could be. I think that’s another interesting avenue to look at. What would happen if cooperative business owners took up residency and started buying out cooperative buildings and worked through the co-op board of that building to create more of a solidarity economy and worked towards creating a commune?
Instead of trying to create a commune straight up, taking over a building little by little and working towards some people in that cooperative development sharing resources, which could be income, or could be sharing childcare, which isn’t income but is a resource that builds trust and brings us closer to that solidarity economy, or could be sharing cooking responsibilities, or dog walking responsibilities, starting to share all these responsibilities that each individual or nuclear family are expected to do themselves. We can help one another and in this process we can move towards income sharing which becomes a lot less scary when we already trust someone with our child, when we already trust someone to cook us dinner, when we already trust someone for all these other daily needs that we have. When we work and communicate in a good way together that engenders more and more trust and moves us towards enough trust to actually start income sharing and becoming a commune.
Raven: Do you have any other things that you’d like to share with Commune Life readers?
gil: I think there’s an opportunity here. I liked the ideas of connecting rural and urban, I really liked the concept of labor exchange between communes, of human resources being moved and shifted around to different places when and where they are needed in order to support the communally owned businesses. If you look at the income flows and the human resource needs of businesses operating in the urban environment, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for exchange there.
I’m also really interested in the idea of creating community through a club or a membership, whether it’s people putting on events every month around a certain theme, or a book or dinner club, gardening/composting together or providing other forms of mutual aid as a group. Creating community around a certain theme and plugging that in, in addition to this live/work/play/income sharing idea could create the synergy, trust and momentum needed to launch a sea change in urban life.
In New York City, real estate is at a premium, so if there is a small group of people who are income sharing they could be supported by a broader group of people who appreciate that and are invited into the space for get togethers on a semi-regular basis. The broader group of people could support them financially and get some material benefit, but they’re not income share, rather they’re interfacing but in a different way than just coming for interviews or just hanging out every once in a while. They’re actually part of a circle, not quite the core or working for one of the businesses, but this membership/club model can blend a lot of different things. It lends to complexity which complements the urban life and I think that that’s necessary.
I’m a maximalist so I don’t shy away from complexity. I think for a place like New York City, you really have to put a lot of different balls in the air and you’ve got to keep them there. There’s enough people to actually support that and enough interest at varying levels, from being part of a worker owned cooperative to being part of a social scene that is supporting a business of working cooperatives and/or a household of income sharing communards that are working together to create cultural value, which you’re invited to as a supporter. The variety of ways to participate offers flexibility which most urban dwellers need and value.
I don’t want to commodify work but we live in the context of capitalism, so finding that gray zone which we are okay inhabiting and living in is pretty important–or else we exclude ourselves from society, or we throw ourselves completely into it and lose ourselves to society. Finding that happy medium is really important.
Income-sharing communities have a long and rich history in the communities movement. From tribal life, to the early days of nuns and monks living together and sharing one home in a convent or monastery, to Oneida community in the 1800’s (the original makers of today’s Oneida silverware), our roots are deep.
The Oneida Community in the mid nineteenth century
Current income-sharing groups may vary widely in their lifestyles and values, but all share a central economic practice. Some groups live a spiritual life focusing on the word of God. Others define themselves as secular and focus on aspects of shared decision-making and ecological sustainability.
An income-sharing community is an economic unit unto itself. Income produced by members, either in a community-owned business or outside work, goes directly to the community. In exchange, the community provides for all the basic needs of its members, including housing, food, health care, etc. (Individual groups may define “basic” needs somewhat differently) There is also collective ownership of community resources, such as land, buildings, vehicles, etc. In many cases, neither money nor particular skills are required to join; simply a willingness to wholeheartedly join the community in it´s purpose is sufficient. This opens membership to a wide range of people.
One of the most attractive features of this type of living is the interdependence and the level of engagement we share with each other. There is a high level of involvement in each other’s day-to-day lives. Our co-workers are our extended family, and we come to know each other holistically. Members also have access to a variety of resources they might not otherwise have. For example, the community may provide a professional-quality wood-working shop for member use, or an outdoor hot tub, or free yoga classes by a skilled member.
The Oneida Building at Twin Oaks
“Great! Sign me up!” you say. What else does it mean to live in this type of community? Living so interdependently often means members need to posses fairly well developed social skills. The ability to cooperate with others, to keep agreements, and to resolve difficult interpersonal situations can go a long way in dealing with the conflicts that naturally arise out of such close living. A flexible attitude can help members respond to living with less personal financial autonomy than they may be used to. Most people who live with their own income are used to making decisions themselves about what quality of housing to live in, what style of car to drive, what type of food to buy, and how much to spend on favorite leisure activities. It can be challenging to make the same decisions with a group of people whose tastes, values and class backgrounds may be radically different from one’s own.
Income-sharing is definitely on one end of the spectrum of what it means to live communally. This type of community has never been a majority in the communities movement, and yet we have always been a strong presence. Much of this is due to our ability to focus resources, which in turn makes more time available to members who do networking and organizing.
Income-sharing is not for everyone, but those who choose to live this life find it a source of endless riches. It is a life full of unity and diversity, struggle and growth, and ultimately, deep community.
In a capitalist culture, money (which becomes the means to get what you want and need) is dependent on how much you work (unless you inherit money). Your survival in this culture generally depends on money and your acquisition of money depends on work. (Unless you are a “Moneyless Man“.)
If you live in an income-sharing community, however, your relationship to money changes. Since the community provides whatever you need (although usually not luxury items), money doesn’t mean much. (There is an oft quoted story that you can leave a $20 bill around Twin Oaks and find it just where you left it a week later. Don’t leave a candy bar around, though, and expect to find it again.)
Twin Oaker offering raspberries
Work is basically the currency in most income-sharing communities. Twin Oaks and Acorn Community have a requirement that most members work 42 hours a week. (Twin Oaks has a “pension plan” that allows long-time members to work one less hour a week for every year over 50.) East Wind requires 35 hours of work a week. Glomus Commune (and former communes Sandhill and Compersia) doesn’t (or didn’t) have a work hour requirement–but everyone is still expected to work, and at Glomus most folks work hard.
I’ve talked about income-sharing as a direct challenge to the idea that different people are worth different amounts. (The CEO of many corporations get six–or more–figure salaries. Many of their workers get minimum wage.) In an income-sharing community everyone (at least economically) is valued equally–regardless of race, gender, class background, or ability. Hierarchies are diminished, although there are still power dynamics. (The communes are working on that but human nature is stubborn.)
We’re all in this together
Money still exists within the communes because we are still embedded in a capitalist society. People get stipends/allowances to spend on “luxury items” (although it doesn’t work that way at Glomus where people can spend what they want on themselves–although they are encouraged not to spend too much). However, the stipend money is not dependent on how much someone works; basically everyone gets the same amount.
With the link between work and money broken, the communes are creating a very different economic culture, a culture where you don’t have to worry about where your next paycheck is coming from and how you will pay the rent, buy food, etc. We are creating places where people work and play and live together and enjoy life. We haven’t eliminated all worries–but the communes have practically eliminated most economic concerns.
What bothers me is how they define “commune”. The first article seems to claim it’s just another way of saying “intentional communities”, although later they point out that “intentional communities” include everything from co-housing and eco-villages to “communes” (which now is “where everything from money to food is pooled”). The second says they mean “a set of adults living together by choice rather than economic necessity” and goes on to say, “To be clear, I’m not talking about people sharing their personal incomes…” Unfortunately, when I use the word “commune” I’m exactly talking about people sharing their personal incomes.
A hippie commune from the sixties
Anyone who reads this blog regularly probably knows that I use the word “commune” to describe an income-sharing community, and usually, for here, an egalitarian income-sharing community. Merriam Webster defines a commune as “an often rural community, organized on a communal basis.” And since their definition of “communal” uses communities and communes it becomes a rather circular definition. Britannica has a somewhat more accurate definition: “a group of people who live together and share responsibilities, possessions, etc.” Wikipedia claims “A commune is an alternative term for intentional community. “
On the other hand, the Foundation for Intentional Communities website lists types of communities and says the link to what they call “Communes” “Displays communities which indicated they are 100% income sharing.”
Obviously, the definition of “Commune” is up for grabs. My hope is that through Commune Life we can make the idea of communes as income-sharing communities more widespread–and maybe more attractive, too.
commune life 