Creating Communal Culture

November 14, 2022November 12, 2022 communelifeblog3 Comments

by Raven

In June of 2020, as the pandemic was raging away, I wrote a long post on Facebook which got over five hundred views and had 31 comments (admittedly, several were from me) about “Communes and Tribal Society”. I reprinted the post and most of the comments on this blog in August.

It’s a question that I’ve struggled with for a while. If humans are a tribal species, why do so many of us live (and feel we want to or need to) individually? In my post last week (which did horribly on Facebook, by the way), I began by mentioning I know several former community folks that now live by themselves.

My belief is that the reason for the paradox of humans being tribal and many current folks wanting or needing to live individually is that we have inherited a culture that glorifies individualism. I think that Theresa said it the best in her comment on my “Tribal” post: “It’s easy to think about individualism like it’s an individuals [sic] problem to fix,” she wrote, “like some personality defect, when actually it’s a defect of history.” Our society, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, have all worked to break those tribal bonds. Our history has gone slowly from tribes to extended families to nuclear families. Many, many folks I know have been raised as only children and love the idea of living collectively but have trouble dealing with the unfamiliar realities of close day to day living with people.

This makes the reality of creating communal living situations quite difficult. It has almost always been easy for me, but I was raised with four siblings all of which I mostly got along with (and, yes, sibling rivalry and having to learn to live and share with one another are real and difficult). I still enjoy my time with my siblings and we all get along pretty well. But I know that I’m an exception. Folks I know who did grow up with siblings often were hurt by them and may want nothing to do with them now. Abuse and trauma further alienates people from living together.

So how do we create a culture that supports community and sharing and connection? I’m watching folks crying out for this while I’m also watching communities collapsing. (I love this video that someone shared with me about how community can dismantle patriarchy/capitalism/the system.)

As I pointed out in my last post, this is not going to be easy. We are fighting an upstream battle. This culture encourages individualism and discourages sharing. We were taught we needed to make it on our own, and so were our parents, and their parents.

This society does not want communalism to succeed. The only way that we are going to be able to create a communal culture is to build community after community and when they collapse do it again. And again. And again. To reach out and join with those who crave community and work through all the hard stuff and create models for how we can live together and share more.

It’s what I am currently doing and it’s difficult much of the time to keep going when person after person expresses interest and then wanders off, partly, I suspect, because they begin to realize how difficult it’s going to be and partly because they get distracted by some other interesting thing that they decide to pursue.

Given how much is stacked against creating community, I’m not sure at all I will succeed, but I know that if I don’t try, it seems obvious to me that it won’t happen.

In the meantime, I would just like to ask everyone who is reading this to think about how you could share even a little more and create a little more community in your life. The only way we are going to create a communal culture is if lots of people keep moving in that direction. So while I know that many people want connection and community, it really isn’t going to happen unless we reach out and work together.

Public/Private Options

November 29, 2021November 25, 2021 communelifeblog3 Comments

by Raven Glomus

Twin Oaks has several systems that I think are worth looking at by communes in general and which use what I am going to call public/private options, that is, giving folks the choice of sharing or not.

An example of this is the communal clothes area at Twin Oaks, called by most folks “Commie Clothes”. Many of the communes seem to have a Commie Clothes spot (I know that both Acorn and East Wind used to and even small Glomus Commune has a place we call Commie Clothes), but I want to focus on the one at Twin Oaks. Commie Clothes is an example of what I call radical sharing, trying to figure out how to share as much as possible.

The way it works (at Twin Oaks, at least) is that communards go to thrift shops and yard sales and buy up lots of cheap clothes. It’s all organized in Commie Clothes, which takes up most of a floor in a building at Twin Oaks. Any member can go in and take whatever clothes they want and wear them and keep them as long as they want.

Here’s where what I call public and private options come in. If someone wants to, they can just wear something and toss it in the communal laundry and it gets washed by someone who gets labor credits for doing the work and gets put back in Commie Clothes. On the other hand, if you really like it, you can keep the piece of clothing–but you have to wash it and take care of it. You can privatize anything in Commie Clothes, but the cost is that you need to do the laundry.

A similar situation exists with bicycles. There are lots of bikes around Twin Oaks. They are a major means of transportation around the community (which is large and spread out) and occasionally between communities. At Twin Oaks, any member can pick up any public bike that has been left around and ride it to wherever they need and leave it somewhere where they or some other member can pick it up and take it to their next destination. The bicycles are all taken care of (organized and repaired) by the bike managers. You can also take one of the bikes and make it your own, but if you do, you need to take care of it–either repairing it yourself or using your labor credits to have the bike manager fix it.

What I like about these systems is that they give you a choice: do you want to keep the thing communal and share it with everyone, or do you want to make it your own? If you decide to privatize it, the cost is that you need to take care of it yourself. I love that Twin Oaks has come up with systems with options and that the private option comes with a price.

I think that other communes could learn from these systems and they could easily be set up in other places. I wonder what other systems could be set up in similar ways so that folks can share but also have options. Any suggestions?

Hardwired to Connect

June 28, 2021June 26, 2021 communelifeblogLeave a comment

by Raven Glomus

There’s a lovely old article where someone interviewed Amy Banks, an instructor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She points out that “Neuroscience is confirming that our nervous systems want us to connect with other human beings.” She says, “We are, literally, hardwired to connect.”

What does this mean for communal living? I have written that I believe that humans (along with our close cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos) are tribal animals. We are meant to live in groups and nuclear families (not to mention loads of folks living in couples or by themselves) are modern aberrations. I’ve also pointed out that communities (especially small communities) are built by relationships. If we are truly wired for connection, then this all makes sense. We are built to be with one another, even if we live in a society that is bent on keeping us apart.

And this is why communal living is so satisfying and also why it’s so hard. Communal living is a contradiction to capitalism. If we got our needs for connection met, we wouldn’t need so much stuff–and the system would collapse. We are literally schooled to be individuals, trained to think of ourselves first, and we are influenced to see life as a zero-sum situation where if others get stuff, we don’t. This makes sharing scary.

One of the things that I have found intriguing is understanding why chimpanzees (which are basically a hierarchical, competitive, violent species) and bonobos (a much more egalitarian, much less violent, and generally cooperative species) are so different. One theory is that there were changes on one side of the Zaire River that made food abundant there and scarce on the other side. The bonobos developed on the side with abundance and the chimpanzees on the side with scarcity.

Here’s the thing. I believe that sharing creates abundance. If you see things through a zero-sum lens, then you ignore that desire for connection. Fear gets in the way. Isolation becomes a way of life and, as Dr Banks points out, isolation leads to trauma. She says that “we downplay the importance of love and connection in a culture based on the success of ‘the rugged individual.’”

To the degree that we are able to move through the fear and the training in individualism and begin to share more and more, the more we will find abundance and the world becomes a less scary place. Dr Amy Banks ends the interview by stating: “If we can teach our children how to connect, and we can teach our mothers and fathers and caregivers to raise connected children, we can foster the positive change that is emerging throughout the world.” I would add that we can also foster connected adults, when we are able to work through our stuff and share.

____________________________________________________________________________

Thanks for reading! This post was made possible by our patrons on Patreon. The Commune Life team works hard to bring you these stories about our lives in community, and that work couldn’t happen without support from our audience. So if you liked this article, and want to help us make more like it, head on over to https://www.patreon.com/communelife to join us!

Deep gratitude to all of our patron communards:

Aaron Michels
Brenda Thompson
Cathy Loyd
Colby Baez
Heather
Janey Amend-Bombara
Jenn Morgan
Joseph A Klatt
Kai Koru
Kate McGuire
Kathleen Brooks
Lynette Shaw
Magda schonfeld
Michael Hobson
Montana Goodman
Nance & Jack Williford
NorthernSoul Truelove
Oesten Nelson
Peter Chinman
Raines Cohen
Sasha Daucus
Suzi Tortora
Tobin Moore
Twin Oaks
Warren Kunce
William Croft
William Kadish
William Scarborough

Thanks!

Emotional Flossing: Personal growth, social hygiene, and being triggered the commune way

January 8, 2021January 7, 2021 communelifeblogLeave a comment

by Liv Scott

Illustrations by the author

“What is the biggest challenge of living on a commune?,” I asked when realizing that the regenerative farm I was spending my COVID days was just that. It was as much an icebreaker as it was a question to ease my nerves, as I was taught growing up to proceed with caution when it came to communes. I awaited the answer.

“We trigger each other.” It was so human and so true for moving through life, commune or not.

Without a car, in a pandemic, for five months, I was submerged into the small commune. What struck me most was the awareness of social hygiene of the community: the meetings to form a collective understanding of an individual’s growth and role within the whole. We certainly got on each other’s nerves, but we also held each other, bonded, and evolved as people together.

Every human has baggage or “areas of improvement,” which we so often cannot recognize until a sudden disruption forces us to stop life, in order to see the pattern of ourselves. Our own pattern of responding when under a stressor ripples out affecting others. We trigger each other. Perhaps in the hectic pace of life we can, overtime, put our pattern together make it conscious and actively “work on it.” It takes time to see that pattern when interactions are brief and often shallow.

However, in the community, these ticks are apparent immediately, where we are constantly bumping up against people’s ups and downs of life. I saw how we quickly learned what each person needed on an emotional level during their ups and downs. It was remarkable to see how people got vulnerable and held each other through COVID anxieties, moods, disagreements, and mournings. Personally, I learned how to communicate my own emotional needs and to trust people in sharing my needs rather than bottling everything up until some idealistic romantic love comes along. I learned how to lean on and be held by others. I was flexing my emotional intelligence muscle.

All the emotional flossing, holding, trigger-induced growth on that small commune, I found beautiful. Yes, at times it was frustrating, but it was also special. It was how strangers coming together to live together can live, work, and build together. It is how basic needs of survival can be met, so the collective can be rooted in their ability to offer something outwards.

This experience opened me up to a whole new way of thinking about the so-called emotional underbelly of human interactions – being triggered. We live in a traumatized and traumatizing culture, but safe collectives can be catalysts for our own self-awareness, emotional growth and trauma healing. I am grateful for my time living in a commune. Like any real challenge, it is where the true learning lies, so I am glad to have cast my caution aside, built relationships and experienced some healthy individual growth.

Communal Commons: A Review

November 16, 2020November 15, 2020 communelifeblog1 Comment

by Raven Glomus

This week on the blog I want to review a bunch of things that are not books. (I hope to have at least one more week of book reviews in the future.)

This review will focus on a very academic article that I had the privilege to read. Everything but the abstract is behind a paywall at the Wiley Online Library. I strongly suspect that you might only be interested in reading the original paper if you were really interested in understanding how Elinor Ostrum’s commons framework applies to income sharing communities or you yourself were writing an academic paper about the communes.

Basically, Elinor Ostrum challenged Garrett Hardin’s influential article “The Tragedy of the Commons”. He said he thought that with any common shared thing among many people, everyone had the incentive to get as much of a scarce resource as possible and thus shared resources will be used up rapidly. Elinor Ostrum did ethnographic research and showed how in traditional cultures this is not true, that communities found ways to make resource sharing or the sharing of the commons, relatively fair–and they had the incentive to maintain this fairness in a way that was sustainable.

Nazli Azergun at the University of Virginia has written a paper about how Ostrum’s framework could be applied to the Twin Oaks community: “Resource allocation at an income-sharing community: An application of Elinor Ostrom’s commons framework”, which was published in the journal Economic Affairs–a journal published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which describes itself as “the UK’s original free-market think-tank”. This explains the British spellings in the article.

The author points out that: “As an income-sharing community, Twin Oaks meets all needs of its members in kind, through various communal resource-sharing/pooling mechanisms. Relatedly, resources that are not usually considered as commons outside Twin Oaks, such as labour, utilities, or food, are transformed into commons through members’ willing participation in community structures and norms.” And further, “…Twin Oaks aims to provide for its members’ every need through egalitarian communal resource-sharing structures. This, most members believe, provides for a more sustainable and equitable livelihood than they experienced in ‘the mainstream’ United States, where free health care and education and many other welfare provisions are considered inaccessible luxuries.” A quote that I really like is “Members usually appreciate the community structure as an ‘anti-capitalist bubble within the capitalist economy’, acting as ‘communal and egalitarian within, and profit-driven and capitalistic without’, which ensures benefits and comforts that they would not be able to enjoy were they participating in the market economy on their own.”

Clothesline at Twin Oaks–picture not in original article

In this paper, Nazli Azergun discusses Elinor Ostrum’s basic premises as well as looking at the many different ways that the ‘commons’ framework is applied. She states that “By centring my analysis on the resource-sharing and labour-pooling mechanisms at Twin Oaks, I aim to shed light on the actual processes through which human-made commons are generated and allocated as such…” She then gives a history and description of Twin Oaks before diving into a discussion on Resource Sharing and Labour [sic] Pooling at Twin Oaks. She uses Elinor Ostrum’s definition of common-pool resources as “natural or humanly created systems that generate a finite flow of benefits where it is costly to exclude beneficiaries and one person’s consumption subtracts from the amount of benefits available to others” and points out that once you are a member at Twin Oaks, you are able freely share in the community’s resources with “little oversight or restriction of access”.

The author talks a lot about the TO labor system and how it incentivizes sharing and collaboration. But she also notes that the system is vulnerable to abuse and quotes several Oakers who fear that there are people that are abusing the system, and thus making other folks work harder.

Nazli Azergun doesn’t hesitate to look at the downside of all this. She has a section in the paper called “Twin Oaks: ‘Not Classist or Racist but Clueless’” where she looks at how some of the rigid egalitarian structures at TO support middle class folks and work against folks that are working class and/or people of color. She states “Those who oppose strict egalitarianism in labouring point out that the members who have appropriate educational and social backgrounds pursue physical labour-light areas such as office jobs or childcare, without granting others the opportunity to rotate between labour-light and labour-heavy areas. And, they emphasise, those who do not have the appropriate educational and social background are mostly the non-middle-class individuals and/or persons of colour. To correct for this reproduction of mainstream racial and class hierarchies at Twin Oaks and make the community more accessible to minorities, this group proposes that the community drops strict egalitarianism in labouring processes in favour of an equitable treatment that takes into account the imbalance of physical labour in different areas.”

Her conclusion is “…income-sharing communities such as Twin Oaks seem to work decently enough in practice, as most members claim to be contented with the ways of life that they offer. What is problematic, according to some members, are implicit instances of classism and racism which become visible when communal frameworks fail to address the overlapping system failures and problems of people of colour and non-middle-class members. While the opposing groups within income-sharing communities connect the resolution of these issues to a prioritisation of equity over equality in resource-sharing and resource-pooling, I would also argue that Ostrom’s permission for dynamism and pragmatism in relationalities across individuals and institutions allows for a better adjustment of institutional frameworks, rules, and values to ensure greater benefits for all. Despite the differences in commitment levels and practicality issues, I believe income-sharing communities constitute promising models of equitable and sustainable commons management, similar to the way Ostrom had imagined.”

As I said, this is a fairly academic paper published in an economic ‘free-market’ journal. I don’t recommend that readers rush out to purchase access to it unless, as I said, they really want to see in detail how Twin Oaks fits within the ‘commons’ framework or they are also academics wanting to add references to their work. Rather, I am excited that a group of folks who have probably never thought about these issues, now needs to confront them. Ironically, this paper describes a very viable alternative to the free-market system in a journal which describes itself as a think tank for that very system. If it gets one or two of those folks to realize that there are more useful possibilities beyond that system, maybe it will have accomplished its purpose. Who knows, maybe it will encourage someone to think twice about the free-market system and maybe even consider leaving it.