As a community, we’ve been at our population capacity of 92 members for an almost unbroken stretch of three years.  However, in a given year an average of 20 people leave, and are replaced by new members (or, more rarely, previous members returning).  While some years the turnover percentage is slightly lower or higher, overall the average remains consistent.

This situation is fairly consistent in every intentional community I’ve visited.   Twin Oaks’ current situation of being at capacity for so long is actually fairly rare; in the past there have been a number of open spaces for people who want to join, and Pop Cap was more of a theoretical possibility, or perhaps the goal to aim for.

While places like Twin Oaks can truthfully say that they have a population of around 100 in their descriptions, that doesn’t really give the complete picture.  Most of the population at any point won’t be living there in just five years.  The current median membership length of Twin Oaks is around three and a half years (which remains fairly consistent over time).  Another way of phrasing this would be to say that every three and a half years, half of the population will have left and be replaced by different people.

This situation created several consistent cultural factors that need to be continuously addressed:

• Continuous retraining of simple tasks.  This is built into the systems of Twin Oaks through orientations for visitors and new members about many basic things.  Major work areas always need to take into account that some people will leave the community and need to be replaced by new people.  Even if the tasks are relatively simple, unskilled work, such as washing dishes, cleaning a barn, or weeding the garden, the loss is efficiency is clearly noticeable.  It often seems like many areas are in a state of constant training of new people.
• Loss of technical knowledge.  While it’s possible for unskilled tasks to be explained, some of the more complex tasks simply cannot.  If the people who have the knowledge to fix vehicles leave, that’s potentially something that one could teach one’s self, but over a long period of time.  Even more extreme is the knowledge for maintaining things like Twin Oaks’ computer network and phone system, which is surprisingly more complex than any other place I’ve worked.  Even if there are people willing to learn to run areas like this, it may simply not be possible to pass on the technical knowledge necessary in a reasonable amount of time, as most people who have worked in an area like computer networks have at least some years of formal schooling as a background.  Often, communities just have to hope that they will get a new member soon with these skills, hire other people from dominant culture (usually at a high cost), or decide to not have these services (or let them slowly deteriorate).
• Continuous cultural assimilation.  Like the retraining of simple tasks, this is possible to overcome, but it must be ongoing and fairly comprehensive.  When and where is it not appropriate to ask people questions about work?  What are the norms about ten people sharing the same bathroom in a house?  There’s a huge amount little things like these that make up everyone’s everyday existence, and if many of them change quickly, this can be very disorienting and frustrating.
• Ongoing reintroduction of cultural patterns of dominant culture.  If people are not effectively assimilated into a community’s culture, they will do what most humans do, and keep behaving the way that has worked for them in the past.    For the most part, this isn’t a huge problem, as most people who end up moving to a place like Twin Oaks do so because they are attracted to the core ideals of the community, such as non-violence.  However, there’s often a significant slide towards many dominant culture values over time if the values of the community are not reenforced.  This is especially true for issues beyond the core values, or ones that are maybe at the limits or borders of the core values.
• Introduction of new technology.  When I moved to Twin Oaks in 2007, I was one of the few people to have a personal computer, let alone a laptop.  Now, almost everyone who moves to the community has some sort of internet capable device.  The introduction of new technology isn’t inherently a problem, but there are many types that will affect the social structure.  Twin Oaks has had a ban on televisions for the purpose of watching broadcast television since the inception of the community.  Yet with a personal computer and internet connection in one’s room, one can essentially have the same thing at this point.  In effect, the decision to not have people watching television shows by themselves in their rooms has been undone, not because of an intentional community discussion and decision, but because of the lack of discussion and decisions on new forms of technology.
• Loss of close friends.  One can think of a cluster of people who join the community within a six month period as a mini-generation.  Often, but not always, this will be the primary source of one’s close friends in the first year or so, mostly because those people often end up starting to work in the same areas, and go through similar new member experiences at about the same time.  After only a few years of membership, these groups, which can be around a dozen people, can be down to less than half that amount.  Those who are members for more than five years are lucky if one person from their group is still around.  Even those who have been around for many years can decide to leave.  Some of the very long-term members have a fairly detached relationship with most other members, and there are some who don’t even get to know the names of the newest members until they have been around for half a year.  This is probably one of the saddest realities of living in a small community.

Turnover is a major source of a large number of issues communities continuously face.

At Twin Oaks, we have aimed in recent years to maintain around 2000 strawberry plants in the main garden.  The strawberries from those plants are eaten fresh early in the harvesting stage, and later processed to be frozen and used for jam later in the year.

Strawberries are an early fruit in central Virginia, the first one we can harvest in any significant quantity.  So, people are already somewhat desperate for fruit after a long winter.  It’s often at around the time of the first harvest that conflicts around the strawberries start to be heard.  One of the main contentions around strawberries is who gets the first few that we harvest.  Even with that many plants, in the first few weeks of harvesting, there are only going to be a handful to a few hundred strawberries ready to be picked.  This is somewhat of a problem for a community of 100 people who are aiming to share resources and the products of their labour: how exactly does one distribute 50 strawberries to 100 people fairly?  Cut each of them in half and give everyone one piece?   Give strawberries to those who have the most ‘need’ for fruit?  Let the garden shift of 10 people each eat 5 until there are enough for everyone else?  Hide them somewhere and don’t let anyone take any until there are enough to reasonably distribute?

Almost all those answers are either unworkable or will in some way upset some people.  Cutting strawberries into equal pieces and equally distributed, while about as equal as one could get, would probably not be acceptable to most people just for the amount of time it would take.  And then we’d probably need to come up with some way of making sure that everyone got their share and nothing more (how could anyone cut that many strawberries and not pop a few into their mouth?).  Giving strawberries to those who have the greatest ‘need’ for them is also fairly absurd, as I imagine the ridiculous discussions of us trying to define how one ‘needs’ strawberries more than another.  Having the people who harvest the small amount sharing it amongst themselves is done often in early harvests, but this often causes resentment from others in the community.  News about strawberries being ready spreads fast, and hearing that the garden crew is hogging all of them would just prompt some people to go into the garden themselves before the crew could get to them.  Hiding them until there’s a significant amount to go around is something that we do often, but some people won’t agree with this method, and will find them no matter how well they’re hidden.

Aside from the early distribution problem, how much time and money we put into strawberries has also been a topic of debate.  Strawberries are relatively labour intensive compared to other crops, mostly because they stay in the ground for two years, as opposed to almost everything else we grow, which at most last for the growing season, and then die with the cold weather.  Crops that have a planned end can be tilled into the ground and cover crops can be planted, both of which reduce the need for continuous weeding.  Smaller plants like strawberries that are going to be in the same place for two years can’t be controlled in this way.  The nature of the way they reproduce makes it hard to even use human-powered tools like hoes to control weeds.  What this means is that strawberries need to be weeded by hand.  And, with how weeds grow here, even with mulch like ours they still need to be weeded at least once a month, which can seem somewhat discouraging to do in the off-fruiting season when so much else needs to be done.  All of this adds up to many hundreds of work hours spent on the strawberries each year.

Spending all this time and effort on a small fruit crop brings up some much larger questions about what we are trying to accomplish in the garden, and for the community as a whole.  One view would be to look at strawberries from a purely economic standpoint.  Each hour we work in the garden is theoretically one hour we could be working in an income generating business, the income from which we could use to purchase things like strawberries.  Find out the retail cost of a pound similar local organic strawberries, multiply that by the number of pounds we produce, and divide that by the number of hours we put into that crop.  If it turns out that it would take us less time to work in our businesses to make the amount of money necessary to purchase the amount of strawberries we want, perhaps we should just focus the labour there, instead of trying to grow these things ourselves.  This perspective would allow us to create some sort of economic cut-off point, where anything that was less price efficient to grow ourselves than purchasing would not happen.  This is how a lot of the economic system of dominant culture functions.

Another way to look at this situation is to consider other goals that the community has, such as obtaining some degree of self-sufficiency and sustainability.  Those with this perspective would likely argue that we should try to grow as much as we can regardless of the cost, primarily because we are producing what we need by ourselves.  We then won’t be dependent on selling products from our businesses to people who potentially live thousands of miles away, to earn money and participate in an economic system that many of us have strong objections to, and use that money to purchase food products grown further away under conditions we can’t necessarily verify (are these organic strawberries that were transported across the continent really organic?).  This perspective holds that producing local and doing things ourselves is almost always better than dependency on the dominant economic system, even if doing a particular action would be considered to be the wrong economic choice by mainstream economists.

One final disagreement around strawberries is how they are used.  While we usually eat the first few weeks worth fresh, if the harvest is plentiful we often freeze the bulk of them and make them into strawberry jam throughout the year.  While many people appreciate having some sort of processed food product throughout the winter, others won’t eat something with that much sugar added to it (I was quite surprised myself when I saw the amount of sugar that used to make a batch of jam).  Should the strawberries be eaten fresh, should some be frozen and made into desserts throughout the year, or should some be used to make jam-like products, and how much of each?  And, often most contentiously, who decides?

The example of strawberries probably seems fairly silly to talk about in such a serious way, and to a large extent it is.  Strawberries obviously aren’t an essential need of anyone.  The community will survive just fine if all the strawberry plants disappeared forever.  After reading this description, the main thing one could take away from this is that we often spend a lot of time thinking and arguing about relatively unimportant things.

I think that there’s more to take away than just that.  The issues described above about strawberries could just as well apply to many other types of food we grow.  A lot of the dynamics could also apply to any relatively scarce good the community was trying to provide to everyone.

Many of the types of food we have here are not subject to the same dynamics because we can have as much of them as anybody could ever want.  For example, rice is extremely cheap to buy, and we simply purchase as much of it as we eat.  If we start going through it faster, we can simply buy more, with no significant economic strain on ourselves.  This doesn’t just apply to things we can buy cheaply, it can also apply to in-season crops.  For example, July through October we will essentially have as much sweet corn as anyone could possibly want to eat.  Situations like these are close to the creation of an “economy of plenty,” where all resources that people desire are freely available in the amounts they want.  This is the polar opposite of an “economy of scarcity,” where there are a limited number of resources that is much smaller than what people desire.  Viewing the world as an economy of scarcity is a fundamental assumption of mainstream economics.

What is interesting about the strawberry example is that strawberries would be a scarce commodity in a system of private production, ownership, and distribution.  Each of us, living on our own with the amount of money we would make as individuals living the way we do would at best be able to afford a few pounds of strawberries each year buying from producers who were charging as much as they could for their fruit.  But, through the elimination of private ownership, and through the principle of resource sharing, we all are able to have much more than we could as individuals living alone in a default state of competition, with a much fairer distribution.  While far from perfect, changing the way a resource is distributed moves something like the distribution of strawberries from being a scarce resource more towards one of plenty.

However, strawberries are clearly still scarce (at least far from unlimited), and the politics of a ‘fair’ distribution should not be ignored.  The debates about things like strawberries are important not because we have a need for strawberries themselves (despite some heated arguments I have personally overheard), but because such discussions are about how we try to fairly distribute resources in general.  Who gets how much, when, in what form, and who decides?  At the moment, we are arguing about things like strawberries, which are of relatively little importance.  However, I often wonder how we would handle ourselves if we had to have these discussions about resources that were actually scarce and necessary for our survival.  If the global economy continues to deteriorate, the price of rice may suddenly become a major issue.  The same goes for things like healthcare.  Or, potentially one day, something as important as water.  How would egalitarian resource sharing fare with very little resources to go around?

Commie Clothes is the somewhat tongue-in-cheek name of Twin Oaks’ system of  community provided clothing.  It is an example of an everyday form of egalitarian resource sharing.

Almost the entire upstairs of the building called Harmony is devoted to Commie Clothes.

A section of Commie Clothes

The system is simple: any member can go up to Commie Clothes, find an article of clothing that works for them, and either put it on right there or take it elsewhere.

There are many things available beyond clothes:

Shoes

Bedding

Towels

When finished with an article of clothing, it can be tossed into one of the laundry bins on the ground level.

One of the assigned jobs that is done almost every day is community laundry.  Typically in two hours shifts, those who sign up for this job wash the clothes in our industrial washer, and hang them out to dry (or use the dryer if needed).  Dry clothes are hung back up in Commie for use by another member.

Clothesline from ground level. Looks like someone was really into the tie-dye this week.

It is possible for people who live at Twin Oaks to rely entirely on Commie Clothes, not own any clothes themselves, and never have to wash their own clothes, or hang them up.  There are a few people who essentially do this.

Clothing at Twin Oaks, as a whole, is also an example of a system with dual levels of ownership: public and personal.  While the community maintains this great system of communal clothing, there are no restrictions on members being able to have their own personal clothing that is not a part of the Commie Clothes system.

When a member takes clothes from Commie, those clothes are considered to have been ‘personalized,’ now in the possession of that member, out of the public system entirely.  That person can basically keep those clothes as long as they want.  Clothes can be worn or just a few hours and then returned to be washed, or they could be kept in one’s personal collection in one’s room, and returned years later (or even never at all).  Most other buildings have a washer, clothesline, and dryer people can use for their personal clothes.  But, they have to do this on their own time, just like most people in dominant culture.

Most members choose to fall somewhere in between total reliance on Commie Clothes and retaining only personal clothes.  It would be difficult to estimate the number of people who regularly use Commie Clothes, and the extent.  Commie clothes often end up becoming privatized, but privatized clothes are then returned to the system.

Some interesting dynamics about the overall system:

Clotheslines viewed from Commie Clothes window

• Doing the laundry, organizing, or mending of Commie Clothes are all official jobs in the community for which one can receive labour credits.  Doing the same for one’s personal clothes is not.  This creates an incentive to favour using the public resources over the private.  People can of course maintain their personal clothes at the level they desire, but they do that in their own free time.
• 

  Commie Clothes' industrial sized washer

  Communal systems save time and resources.  Instead of 100 people washing their own clothes every few weeks, one person can get through the typical amount of public clothes in a few hours a day.  Instead of everyone having to purchase their own washing machine and dryer, or rely on laundromats, there is one centralized place that is free to all (plus a few more in some other buildings). Instead o all the associated resource use issues with creating washing machines for 100 people, and the chemicals, water, and energy required to run them, one large industrial washer can instead be used.  And, instead of always using dryers, those who work in Commie Clothes strive to hang stuff up to dry outside when possible instead of wasting electricity on dryers.

• 

  Organization signs and some artwork

  Commie Clothes is well organized and maintained, as can be seen in the above pictures.  In the recent past, the similar public clothing system at Acorn community was essentially a pile of clothes in one room.  It still was used by those who needed something, but people only have so much patience for hunting through disorder.  When organization and maintenance decline, so do people’s reliance on public goods.

• 

  Some nicer dresses

  For members to keep relying on Commie Clothes, there has to be a wide selection of clothing.  This means different sizes, types, colours, and styles.  It’s not going to work if we only have size 30-34 blue jeans (although we do have a lot of those).  Recently, there has been an influx of ‘business casual’ clothing compared to the past, which are things of the quality of being able to wear to business meetings in dominant culture (which we do more often than one may suspect), so these aren’t just a bunch of poor quality work clothes (although there is also a section for those, which are very useful if one is going to, say, paint a room).

• 

  Mending area

  Similar to the above point, there has to be a general influx of new clothing.  We can mend old clothing, but only to a reasonable extent.  Perhaps even more important than the mending is the perception that there will almost always be something new in Commie Clothes.  This gets people in there to ‘shop around,’ and keeps up the idea that this is a resource worth using and maintaining. In recent years this hasn’t been an issue: we often get donations, and members moving here often make a large amount of their clothing public when they arrive.  If anything, we’ve had to made donations to goodwill because we have had too many clothes in Commie.

• 

  Winter clothing, currently stored far in the back, out of the way

  Like most public goods, Commie Clothes assumes that there will not be an unpredicted or unmanageable rush on goods.  This typically happens when the seasons start to change, although it can also happen at less predictable times.  On the first day after the high temperature has dropped down below something like 70 degrees, there will be many people seeking warmer clothes and blankets.  We can anticipate seasonal changes somewhat, but some areas can look rather decimated for a few days after a quick change in weather.  (Luckily, I’ve already grabbed my winter clothes!)

• 

  Costumes, wigs, and other things for parties like Halloween

  Hoarding can be problematic.  Since anyone can personalize clothes by bringing them to their room, the only hard limit for how many clothes one can take from Commie is the cubed area of one’s room.  Some members in the past have used a lot of this space; piles of clothes taller than their height in their room is not much of an exaggeration.  If more than a handful of people do this, the system won’t work.  Most of the above methods can be seen as hoarding prevention.  If there is a well maintained system that consistently has new clothes, people will, in general, not feel the need to privatize many items.  If the system is not well maintained, and people start to have the perception of scarcity, the ‘grab what you can’ mentality will reassert itself, and the system won’t work again until there is a large influx of new clothes of that type.

• 

  Shelf of underwear and such. It's all clean, but still seems sort of...eww...

  There are limits to what can be effectively shared.  While there are a large number of shoes, there are probably only a few choices for that person who wears size 13.  It’s also difficult for those of us who wear more common sizes to find shoes that actually fit completely right, or heavy duty boots for things like construction work.  The community therefore offers each member a yearly subsidy through Commie Clothes to buy shoes, which doesn’t cover the entire cost, but it enables people to purchase them more easily.  Similarly, not many people seem to want to rely on the bins of public underwear or mismatched socks, mostly due to typical biases about wearing those items that other people have worn.  Subsidies are offered for those as well.

Most of these dynamics can also be seen in other types of public/communal sharing systems.

“A system of internal economics that holds all land, labor, and other resources in common, and makes the material benefits of the Community available to all members equally or according to need.”

I have already argued that this is one of the core principles of the Social Contract of the community.

Holding resources in common is an old concept, which seems to have existed throughout written history ever since humans were first organized into hierarchical societies, dominated by an elite warrior/priest alliance, where resource distribution was an inegalitarian system based on social class that the colonized world has functioned under ever since.  Many reform or revolutionary movements in history held the sharing of resources to be one of the primary ways they wanted to organize differently from dominant culture, such as several Christian reform movements (almost all reforms over two millennia start with a move more towards Omnia sunt Communia of the apostles before they become corrupted to varying degrees), and more modern political movements like socialism, communism, and some forms of anarchism.

Sharing resources, distributing them based on equality or need, is one of those vague concepts that revolutionary organizations and movements often say that they hold, but in practice have no idea how the specifics of that system would actually function, usually leaving that question to a point in the future when some revolutionary event (like “seizing the means of production”) has occurred, and then figuring out how to realize that goal in practice.  This proved to be quite a disaster in the first few years of the Soviet Union, when Lenin attempted to provide all resources from the State and abolish money .

There are several ways that egalitarian intentional communities have tried to implement this aspect of resource distribution:

• Equal profit sharing–  All profit from commonly held businesses are distributed equally amongst the members.  This is the worker run and controlled model of organization, which is more likely to be found when people share a business and little else, and in intentional communities with lower levels of integration.  Members get individual paychecks, and can do whatever they want with this money.  They are still expected to get food, housing, and other necessities on their own (which they can sometimes buy from the community), but this model does not necessarily exclude some members choosing to combine funds.  Often, members who work less (usually measured in hours) will get proportionately less of a share in the profits, but this system differs from group to group.  This form of resource distribution can exist side by side other businesses in capitalist societies, although they would be considered quite radical comparatively (see organizations like Red Emma’s in Baltimore).
• Need-based profit sharing–  Similar to the above model of profit sharing, where member’s primary relationship is through their collective business, and they receive profits from that business.  The main difference is that this form decides to distribute the income based on need, even if the contributions of the members are seen to be equal.  For example, a collective could decide to allocate 1.5 times the normal wage to a single parent, and not as much to a single individual who doesn’t need (or want) as much.  This model only works if the decisions about resource distribution are made using some form of consent involving all members.  Need-based profit sharing is not exclusive of equal profit sharing; equal sharing groups can often decide to unequally allocate based on need for a specific situation, like unexpected medical costs.
• Equal resource distribution–  In more economically integrated communities, especially where members are living together in addition to working in collectively owned businesses, work may not directly translate into a paycheck, but instead members would receive the resources directly from the community.  In this model, members would be entitled to the same amount of resources as everyone else.  People would be able to receive equal amounts of food, equal housing, equal healthcare, and so on.  If the organization starts making more profit, the resources will increase for everyone equally, and would decrease equally in times of loss.  If all resources were distributed under this model, there would be no poverty or wealth except the collective poverty or wealth of the organization.
• Need-based resource distribution– Similar to equal resource distribution, but with the same modifications as need-based profit sharing had to the equal version of that.  This model would hold that people have needs for different levels of resources.  Some people need to eat more food than others, or different types.  Allocating the same amount of rice for everyone each day would lead to some wasting their portion, and others going hungry.  This could be applied to virtually any resource.  The tricky part, of course, is knowing what each person’s individual needs are.  Most people have trouble knowing themselves this well, or have difficultly distinguishing between needs and wants.
• Free resource access– Resources are made completely available to anyone through established production and distribution systems.  People can take the amount of food they want, the amount and type of clothing they want out of what is available, and so on.  For free resource access to work, there often needs to be an economy of plenty (as opposed to the typical economy of scarcity in dominant culture), where resources are effectively unlimited; demand will never exceed supply.  Another way to accomplish this method is by the members of this economic arrangement knowing their personal needs and wants in relation to others, the condition of the total supply of that resource, and then individually practice self-restraint to ensure that everyone can get some of that resource.  Many systems rely on a combination of an economy of plenty with reasonable (or perhaps predictable) individual self-restraint, as many people suddenly deciding to hoard a lot of common resources can suddenly cripple a system that was thought to always have more supply then possible demand.

These are not mutually exclusive categories.  A single area could be a mix of these forms of distribution.  Universal health care at Twin Oaks is an example of a combination of equal and need-based resource distribution.  Everyone is guaranteed the same basic care (such as a vision checkup), but members with different needs will likely get more resources (such as those of us with strong eyeglass prescriptions), contingent on the financial status of the community, of course.  Communities can also be organized to have different areas operating under different forms of distribution, but may still consider the community as a whole to be egalitarian in terms of their total wealth, just using different systems as needed based on their local conditions.

Later, I intend to give specific examples of some of these systems, as many of them have interesting dynamics in practice.

Written documents, as have already been referred to in previous posts, can tell us a lot about the structure of a given society and their culture.  However, there are many limits to what we can know from written documents:

• There is often a gap between what is written, especially with broader goals and vision, and current practices.  It would certainly be convenient if the stated vision of a community accurately described the common goals of the individuals in that community, but there is often a disconnect between the two.
• Even with formal government structures and processes, written documents often do not accurately describe how those systems function in practice.  Reading the relevant sections of the US Constitution or the standing rules of the Senate would only in the most general ways prepare an appointed Senator with no political experience for getting legislation passed. Things like lobbyists, the bureaucracy, campaign donations, and intra-party dynamics are simply not explained anywhere in those documents.  Those systems are often so complex and situation specific, that in most circumstances it would be difficult to produce an overall general operational guide to explain how all of those competing interests will generally function.  Network analysis starts to scratch the surface in explaining these dynamics, but often usually just comes up with creative visualizations to show the complexity of a given system.
• Many written documents do not explain the purpose of the given agreement/rule/policy/law.  This isn’t as relevant in dominant culture for most citizens, because all that really matters it that one does not disobey the laws and incur sanctions, which happen regardless of the reasoning of the law itself.  In PostRev societies, purpose is more relevant because those societies try to organize in a way where coercive institutions will not be as necessary, meaning people will have to follow agreements out of their own free choice because they make sense.
• Written documents do not always in themselves explain the history behind the agreement/rule/policy/law.  § 18.2-509 of the Code of Virginia prohibits anyone from shining a bright light into a structure for animals at night “that causes such animals to panic or become injured.”  You’ve got to wonder, what happened that the state legislator felt the need to create a law about this?
• Written documents, especially in the forms of agreements or policies, rarely give detailed insight into the daily lives of individuals, which even in the most hyper-regulated societies are not controlled to this extent.  Occasionally individual practices may be forbidden or encouraged formally, but this often only happens in more extreme situations.
• In many modern complex systems, it is nearly impossible for any individual to have a comprehensive understanding of a complex set of legislation or administration.  There is not one lawyer on the planet that knows all the laws of the US.  There probably isn’t one who even has a complete grasp of the entire tax code, only one section of law.

The incomplete viewpoint of written documents, coupled with many social sciences’ emphasis on what is written, combine to create fields of study that try to pass off partial analyses of societies as comprehensive studies.  Often these biases are a result of the unrecognised assumptions of the culture the researcher is from, which in most fields is a culture of high levels of hierarchical organization, bureaucracy, contracts, laws, and other written documentation.  Since these are the things that are important in the researcher’s society, they often look for these things in other societies, ignoring the relevance of aspects of daily existence that are important for both societies.  Focusing on laws and regulations, changing voting patterns and party alliances, the written histories of the elite class that command others, or vast amounts of statistical information, can only tell us about those specific parts of a given society.  One can only truly gain deep understanding of how things really operate by spending significant amounts of time in a society, living as a member of that society as much as possible for a long period of time, often several years.

The previous paragraph conflicts with most of what one would learn, train for, and practice in various social sciences in academia, because it is not possible to acomplish soley by reading books in ivory towers.  One of my motivations for writing this blog is to explain a variety of systems and structures of core importance that are not written, instead existing as a result of routine practice, commonly understood yet unwritten systems, or other various parts of daily life that are not written.  Later posts will focus on the dynamics between what is written and what is actually practiced (both in general dynamics and specific areas), but also on these unwitten systems that are very essential to the functioning of PostRev society.

Those who support the State also claim that it is organized for specific purposes.  However, despite various theories like the Social Contract that often claim that the State exists for more benevolent reasons, most modern States still have at their core the absolutist form of government of Europe of the late middle ages: massive hierarchical military structures, centralized administration, and disproportional resource distribution.  Most social programs and limits on governmental power, despite contract theorists arguments, come from social struggle of sectors of the population to achieve those goals, which are only later formally added into constitutions or laws of the State.  Taking off the blinders of nationalism, most States are extremely similar at their core, and cannot truly be said to be organized for specific goals or purposes in the same way that intentional communities can.

Communities organized for specific purposes typically have these goals listed in their fundamental documents.  Having a clear vision is extremely important for these communities because such visions:

• are guiding principles of the community, and can often help to determine decision-makers’ choices on a given issue
• are motivations for people living in the community to continue their daily practices
• can give and reinforce common purpose, as opposed to the dominant culture of conflicting competing self-interests
• give a sense of historical continuity over the years, even if the systems in place to try to reach that vision end up using very different methods at different times
• gives a more general sense of the answer to “what are we all doing here?”
• attract new members who are looking for a life organized to reach such goals

A conflict of a community’s vision can put all these things into doubt, and lead to many other disagreements at lower levels because these guiding principles are not agreed upon by all members.

It is not only important to have a clear understanding of the specific principles of the overall vision, but also how those principles fit together, and if some have a greater emphasis than others.  For example, a community may have at the same time two goals of becoming a working model of an egalitarian society and promoting the creation of similar communities throughout the rest of the world.  Because of limitation of time and resources, the community may not be able to focus on both goals with equal energy.  But which one should get more of the focus?  The members who believe more in the “working model” goals would have the community focus more of their time and resources on their own internal development, and then do outreach to others as an additional project as long as there was no major conflict with the primary goal.  Those with the more “outreach” oriented perspective would want to focus more time and energy on traveling to events, making publications, and other tactics to try to spread the word about the world they are trying to create.  This disagreement about the priorities of the goals of the community creates conflict not just at the long term visioning level, but also vin medium to short term planning (as in, how much money should be allocated to external outreach), and the day to day operation of the community (how many people do we want doing outreach outside the community at a given time when there is so much work needed to be done here?).

The vision, goals, and purpose of a community may be written in fundamental documents.  However, like the Social Contract, it is not always possible to determine if what is written is actually the present goals of the given community.

Twin Oaks has many goals listed in their bylaws outlining the purpose of the community, and the methods in which the community will try to implement those bylaws.  However, what is written is not necessarily what is actively held to be most important.

Here are several different visions that I have identified that a significant number of people hold at Twin Oaks:

• A community in which income and resource sharing can provide all the material benefits of a typical US middle-class lifestyle for all members, even though per capita income would put individuals well below the poverty line if they were not income sharing.
• A community that strives to be as self-reliant as possible, producing all of its own food, water, energy, and other core resources, and having the least amount of reliance on the outside society as possible.
• A community that is children and family focused, and devotes a large amount of resources to supporting the growth of families and their children.
• A community with an ecological focus at its core, which will neither create nor support any business or general resource use which is not ecologically sustainable.  (“Sustainable” more in the sense that permaculturalists use it: that a given relationship with nature can be continued indefinitely into the future.  This is significantly different than current corporate and statist portrayals of sustainability, which asks a question more along the lines of “what is the maximum amount of resources we can extract without ecological collapse?”)
• A cool place to hang out now that I’m out of college and am trying to figure out what to do with my life (ok, that was a bit snide, but I do think there are a good number of people who move here for that reason and that the community is accommodating to them, which is not necessarily a negative thing).
• An activist community, which actively promotes its methods and ideas into dominant culture through a wide variety of outreach.
• A community that has no one central vision, but instead is more of a confederation individuals who agree to make at least the minimum economic/labour contribution required to the community, and can mostly do what they want outside of those requirements.

There are several more visions I can think of, but these are some of the major ones.  Note that these are visions of what individuals view the community to be, not just their personal preferences of what is important to them or their personal priorities.  This is an important difference.

Not all of these visions are mutually exclusive, of course.  The ‘self-reliance’ and ‘eco-focus’ visions often exist together to a certain degree, as well as the ‘middle-class’ and ‘family focus’ visions.

Problems often arise that end up being not just about the specific issue, but often more about these visions in conflict:

• Greater income vs. ecological: Should we continue to expand the hammocks business when many are uncomfortable with continuing to produce products that require polypropylene and other oil-dependent compounds?  Should we buy components from overseas?
• Family centric or not: Should certain buildings be adult only residences to accommodate those who do not want to live with children?  How do we deal with families needing more space nearby when they have children?
• Activist or internal-focused: Even within the bounds of the law, how much attention from law enforcement do we want to draw to ourselves?

The understanding of one single vision itself can also be in conflict:

• Self-sufficiency: Is it more self sufficient to have a stable business to buy the food we want, or it is more important to produce the food we want on the property, especially if it is more efficient in time and money to get those goods from the revenue from high dollar-per-hour businesses?  Should we devote more resources to becoming self-sufficient in power generation, or should we reduce our dependency on electricity altogether?

Without clear focus, which vision gets priority can change over time.  The same members may decide that one of the things that they used to feel was very important no longer ranks as high.  Membership can change greatly over time, and the amount of people attached to a certain vision can change over time with the changing population.  By many accounts, there has been a large move in recent years at Twin Oaks from the hammocks business being of central focus, and doing things like garden and the dairy program as sort of beneficial add-ons to the community, to those other on the farm agricultural areas being of central focus.

While the dynamics of cultural change is an important factor in any society, PostRev societies have a greater potential to focus their cultural evolution with a shared common vision.  Risks of dissent and dissolution are also greater.  If the society does not have (or does not desire to have) a enforcement system like in dominant culture (courts/police), then there must be a large degree of individual buy-in to the shared vision of the community, otherwise many forms of factionalization around the overall vision will continually occur.

A more complete analysis would focus more on what Lewis Mumford called “technics.”  Technology is a part of technics, but it is only one part.  The “wishes, habits, ideas, goals” also need to be taken into account in a more complete view of production, in addition to the technology itself.  It is important not to just look at a specific machine to see what it does under traditional economic criteria, such as efficiency, cost, and productivity, but also to examine all of the social causes and consequences of that machine.  What were the goals of creating such a machine in the first place?  Why was the existing technology seen to be inadequate?  What performances are now necessary for those operating the machine?  What were the material costs in the production of the machine, and do these outweigh the benefits it produces?  And so on.

From the perspective of technics, it is possible to have a complex society that is extremely developed, in terms of meeting what they perceive to be the needs of their society and how they try to meet those needs, yet has what we would consider a low level of technology.

Conversely, under this definition most modern societies in dominant culture have high levels of technological development, yet have an embarrassingly haphazard and ineffective system of overall technics.  These societies could, for example, have extremely misallocated resources to the military, a elite class, Pyramid/Pentagon building, or other similar wasteful projects at the expense of using their technology to better the whole of society.  The technology could also force undesirable changes in workplace conditions and many other parts of the social structure to serve the needs of the particular machines, regardless of the utility of the products being produced.  The factories of the late 19th century are a well known example.

Mumford also made the distinction between what he called monotechnics and polypechnics.  Monotechnics is what most of dominant culture is being consumed by.  It takes over other technics because all others are seen to be inefficient and ineffective in the organization of modern society.  Modern monotechnics is founded on what he would in his later works call the Pentagon of Power: production, profit, power, (in terms of energy), prestige, and property.  Monotechnics often has more of a focus on the machine (or rather, the entire systems of organization that serve the machines) rather than keeping the focus on humans.  Humans typically simply have to adapt to service of the machines and productive processes in monotechnics.  Most of the systems of monotechnical society are focused on achieving these five goals.

Polytechnics do not mandate a single form of productive organization, instead relying on a variety of technics that live side by side.  Different approaches are taken by different groups to reach similar or different ends.  Polytechnics can be more human as opposed to machine or system focused, although this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.  The diversity of technics allows for things like experimentation, exchange of ideas, local control, and multiple backup technics available against systemic failure.  Polytechnics would appear to function much more like an organic system, while monotechnics would have many of the characteristics associated with machines.

A common example Mumford uses is his continual criticism of cars.  He views cars as purposely poorly constructed machines, with features such as premature obsolescence, superficial fashion changes, and other defective aspects of design, where people accept these factors only because of the constant barrage of advertising.  The monotechnical nature of cars also has many effects in other areas of society.  They necessitate (and to a large degree have caused) factory line production, where workers are reduced to drones carrying out repetitive tasks.  Cars have led to massive changes in the structures of cities for almost a century, which are now almost entirely built around car transportation, at the expense of most other modes of travel.  They cause massive amounts of pollution, directly cause tens of thousands of deaths each year, create a massive structural dependence on one form of energy, and cause city planners to construct massive highways (which are essentially useless ‘dead zones’ for anything that is not a car, even in the middle of the night when there is no traffic) to accommodate the transportation method of choice in urban sprawl.

A polytechnic organization of transportation would by contrast not focus on one form of technology that achieved dominance through having support of key sectors of society.  Cars would likely still exist, but the entire transportation network would not be focused on accommodating them.  Cities could be structured where more goods and services were within walking distance (this is, after all, one of the major purposes of having cities in the first place).  Mass transit systems would probably be the transport of choice for people living in urban areas, and what we would often consider to be “alternative” forms of transportation would become much more prevalent, such as an extensive network of bike paths, making them a more common mode of transportation than cars in some cities.  The difference between monotechnics is that multiple technics are in use at once, with the goal of meeting the concrete needs of people, not people having to adapt to one mode of technology.

This is relevant to PostRev because with this form of analysis, societies that may seem ideologically opposed have the same form of organization in terms of technics.  An example Mumford uses often is the similarities between the Kremlin of the USSR and Pentagon of the US.  While ideologically opposed, both have organized large portions of their societies into Megamachines, machines consisting of millions of people working to the same destructive tasks based on similar rational insanity.  Both are focused on monotechnics (which at this level he calls Megatechnics), and the goals of the Pentagon of Power.

Critically analyzing the technics of a given society is one of the most overlooked yet most important factors to consider.  Technics will almost always have more of an effect on the practices and conditions of people’s daily lives than any form of ideology.  Dominant culture has given us the impression that technology, like modern science, is a neutral force and that any problems arising from it are a result of how we use it, not necessarily from the technology itself.  The adoption of new technology is also often wrapped up in the ideology of US-style “freedom to choose” new technology, the choice usually being up to the consumer to select which toaster oven truly fits in with their kitchen decor.  The above example about cars should be enough to explain that a given technology is not neutral: looking at technics, we can see it altering our workplaces, the structures of cities, energy needs and infrastructure, credit and finance schemes, and the way we relate to one another.  In PostRev societies, how a community chooses (or fails to choose) how to handle present and new technics can have lasting effects on all sectors of their society.

Social Contracts are usually not the fundamental documents of a given society.  They are usually philosophical concepts that explain why individuals should obey the fundamental order of society, and all the regulations that lawfully come out of that process.  Some influential examples:

Thomas Hobbes essentially believed that people needed to be ruled by an absolute sovereign because we would otherwise all kill each other, both justifying in his mind why society was formed and why it should be maintained.  John Locke had a similar view of human nature as Hobbes, but thought that people could choose what specific freedoms to give up to the State (the right to kill other, for example), and the State would only exist for specific, limited reasons, mainly neutral protection of everyone’s life, liberty, and property.  Rousseau believed that through some magical process, citizens meeting in popular assemblies could create something called the General Will, and since the General Will came from this process of popular sovereignty, it was everyone’s duty to obey (or be forced to obey) it.

There are, of course, many problems of the very concept of the Social Contract by most philosophers who have used it.  Probably the most glaring, in my view, is that these theories are not contracts at all.  Contracts assume that all parties involved have consented to the agreement.  This was not the case in the formation of most societies.  Humans never lived as isolated individuals in our prehistory, at war with each other, fighting all the times for scraps of food.  This ignores some of the most widely accepted and understood aspects of homo sapiens, especially the fact that we are helpless at birth, and require years of a caring, supportive environment to survive to adulthood.  The norm was for humans to be in large extended families, clans, and tribes, which is far from many of these philosophers’ perspective on the “State of Nature.”  Even if such a state of existence did exist, it is extraordinarily unlikely that people in that condition would gather at a meeting place, come up with a Social Contract, and formally start a new society.  (This concept is absurd sounding enough from the very biased perspectives of modern anthropology, but looks evem more ridiculous when we take into account the feminist perspectives of human ‘prehistory’, such as Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade, or Marylin French’s Beyond Power, accounts that seem to have more and more supporting evidence each year as anthropology and archiology rid themselves of long standing biases.)

Standard contracts also are negotiated, written, and the parties sign them.  This is simply not done with the Social Contracts of dominant culture.  Who remembers when they signed on to obeying the US Constitution?  Unless you were in a situation where you took a special oath for some reason, like joining the military or immigrating, you never did.   Did you have a chance to argue out of that pesky sixteenth amendment, because you didn’t want to agree to the income tax?   Lysander Spooner infamously made a fanstastic legalistic argument that the Constitution only actually applied to those people who personally signed it, and why their signatures have no authority to compel others to obey what they claimed to agree to on our behalf.  Other anarchists, like Proudhon, argued that the only contracts that needed to exist were the ones that individuals made freely with each other, and that the State was simply an unnecessary oppressive organization that should be done away with.

While flawed in many ways, the concept of a Social Contract is very useful in others.  Many philosophers believed that the social order must be based on dome degree of the “consent of the governed,” and if the State ever violates these fundamental agreements, then citizens have the right and duty to change the unjust laws or even (depending on philosopher) the social order itself.  This idea has become so pervasive in the modern world that almost every type of government (including extremely authoritarian regimes) needs to claim that it is acting in the interests of it’s citizens in order to appear legitimate.  How the “consent of the governed” is measured is a point of major debate.  Ultimately, in modern regimes it comes down to who controls the military, and whether or not key sectors of the population support, are indifferent, or actively work against the regime.  The recent disposal of the president of Honduras has all of these factors playing out at the time of writing.

Does a Social Contract have any relevance in PostRev?  In societies that have goals such as egalitarianism,  integrated labour/economic systems, and participatory government, Social Contracts are much more revelant, as more is expected from both the society and the individual contributions to that society.

At Twin Oaks, members sign a membership agreement upon joining.  In essence, this document says that the joining member agrees to follow all of the community agreements, and in return the community will commit to providing for the member’s food, housing, clothing, health care, and so on, to the best of the community’s ability.  As opposed to typical jurisdictions in dominant culture, where obedience to the ruling authorities is assumed, intentional communities usually have these agreements (whether written or unwritten) where the joining member formally agrees to the basic Social Contract.  (Agreeing to the Social Contract does not mean that one wholeheartedly agrees to every community agreement that exists or will be made in the future in the Rousseauian form of Social Contract and General Will, something that will be discussed often in later posts.)

The Social Contract varies from community to community based on the focus and goals of that particular organization (for example, religious communities will obviously have more of an agreement to focus on their spiritual practices).  Like constitutions of States, Social Contracts of intentional communities can not necessarily be derived from simply reading foundational documents, although such documents can often give good indications as to the nature of the Social Contract.

I would argue that the Social Contract of Twin Oaks is as follows: the community will provide for all the material needs of the members, and many material goods beyond the minimum level as long as they are made accessible in an egalitarian system.  The members in turn are expected to contribute at least an equal amount of labour towards providing these community services, and in general are expected to have liberty in what they choose to do with their time beyond those obligations.

There are many additional goals of the community listed in the bylaws, and many different things many members try to make Twin Oaks to be, but I believe that this labour/economic system is essentially the core agreement.  Labour is important because it is not necessary to have money or other resources to “buy in” to the community to join, as it is with many other intentional communities, only a willingness to contribute the minimum labour requirements to the community.  If that labour contribution ever stops (as in when one decides to drop membership), the benefits of the community also stop.  This doesn’t mean that this is the only agreement one needs to follow to be an ideal member of the community or stay out of conflict, nor is this the only thing the community provides to its members.  It is, however, one of the most long-standing core agreements that most members have held in agreement for the existence of the community.

Important differences between this PostRev type of Social Contract and most Western philosophical ones:

• Notwithstanding the above point about the membership contract having more in it than that essence of the Social Contract, it is an actual written contract, signed by the joining member and representatives of the community.
• The joining member is freely and actively choosing to abide by the terms of the contract, as opposed to the assumed obedience to things like the US  Constitution or the Crown.
• Members can take an active role in modifying the terms of the Social Contract.  While this is possible in dominant culture, it is much easier (although often still quite challenging) to change the relationship between a member and one’s community compared to the citizen/State or subject/ruler relationship.

Most works about new societies or better ways of organizing specific aspects of our current one are often filled with vague descriptions.  Most often, they describe their societies as the lack of certain negative qualities of our current world: no war, racism, sexism, hunger, poverty, etc.  But what do these worlds actually look like?  What would people’s day-to-day existence consist of?  Would a world lacking all these negative qualities be a utopia, or would there still be many unresolved social problems?

There is already a wealth of information about what a Post-Revolutionary society would look like from looking at intentional communities.  Many of these communities were formed specifically to address the elimination of many of the negative aspects of dominant culture, and have over decades of work established many systems and structures to that end.  This blog will focus on many of those systems.

Intentional communities of course are still a part of the larger global system.  The State still has jurisdiction over them, they are still dependent to varying degrees on external economic conditions, are still taxed, and so on.  While not free from the larger forces of dominant culture by any means, many intentional communities are relatively free to organize their internal structures as they wish, often largely ignored by the outside power structure, or sometimes are even able to achieve some degree of independence on their own.  Even while being negatively affected by dominant culture, many of the internal systems can help to mitigate or even eliminate many of those effects, and help to create a more positive conduct of life.

Working theories and practices about daily life in a post-revolutionary society are essential to the success of progressive and revolutionary goals:

• These practices give us the vision of the world we are trying to create.
• Having clear goals are essential for planning successful strategy and tactics, something that has often been overlooked in the struggles of the past decades.
• Working models of post-revolutionary organization that exist on a small scale in pre-revolutionary society can be tested, revised, deployed, and consolidated while related struggles are waged to bring the rest of dominant culture to the point of being able to organize using similar models.  Instead of cutting off the head of the king and then wondering what should be done next, many working and well-tested models will already be available to choose from and adapt to local conditions.
• The entire planet does not need to be involved in one unified strategy and tactic, coordinated by the Leadership.  Some people can focus on making these smaller working models of positive societies.  Others can focus on actions to move the part of society in which they have influence closer to their goals, and others still can try to alleviate the suffering of those who still are firmly entrenched in dominant culture.  Diversity of tactics and a multitude of alliances are needed.

What’s the deal with the title of the blog?

Because of intentional communities’ ability to internally organize based on these positive progressive or revolutionary goals, I am referring to these places as examples of Post-Revolutionary societies.

By “Revolutionary,” I mean groups or communities that are organized to achieve goals that are typically considered to be the ends of leftist ideologies (broadly defined), such as collective control of the means of production, equitable distribution of goods, egalitarian political organization, and other progressive social innovations.

By “Post-”, I wish to emphasise that many of these ends have been realized in these societies to a large degree.  I also want to draw attention to the methods in which people can get to a point where it could be considered that they have accomplished many of these major revolutionary goals.

“Practice” is used in multiple senses of the word at the same time.  It refers to the repeated actions, experimentation, and revisions that one must engage in to master a complex task, as in, practicing for the creation of a post-revolutionary society.  It means the action or process of doing something, as in, the practices of living cooperatively.  Finally, I also mean “practice” in the post-structuralist sense, which looks at how power is formed and functions by our everyday practices, how that constructs our identities, and to what degree post-revolutionary societies have the ability to intentionally shape these forces.