Most communal groups in the United States today (of which by far the largest number are urban) are expense-sharing groups, at least as far as such things as groceries, mortgage or rent, taxes, utilities and vehicles used in common are concerned. Most make some distinction between these common expenses and “personal” expenditures, which may include such things as medical bills, vices, personal transportation, gifts, clothing, perhaps furniture (and sometimes even buildings), record and tape players, and other property over which individuals (or sub-groups such as families) want to maintain control. The “allowances” at kibbutz-type communities symbolize that there are at least some minimal areas of personal choice essential for happiness. If I want to send my mother a birthday present, I may not want to put the matter of how much I should spend up for community discussion. (One mother in community reported receiving gifts from her grown non-member children and finding it ironic that she was not really free to send them gifts. They could come to visit her, being put up as visitors by her community for a small fee, but she was rarely free to visit them.)
Few communes practice resource-sharing, though the exceptions are important. Most of the large religious communities expect total commitment of all resources of those who join, and among the largest, most stable and most effective secular communities, such as the members of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, resource-sharing is required. There is no question that this arrangement is nearer the communal ideal of holding all in common and meeting all needs from a common pot, and it has a number of very practical advantages for communities, as the relative size and stability of these few communities indicate. But my concern here is with the tens of thousands of other communes (such as Downhill Farm, where my family and I have lived since 1972) which for one reason or another have been unable or unwilling to make that kind of commitment. One problem is that of finding an appropriate legal structure in our society for such groups. Most have no legal structure at all. In what entity’s name is property to be held — and what provision is made for the community’s continuation beyond its current membership, for those who leave the community, for non-member relatives, and other economic questions insoluble strictly within the limits of community concerns? There are better or worse answers for such questions, but most of these communities have no answers, have not formulated a process for responding to the questions, and therefore cannot take the step to pooling their resources. Expense-sharing is a compromise.
A Question of Personal History
Most communes are made up of unattached adults, which I will call here UAs. Most are in their twenties or thirties, though some are in their teens and some are in their forties or older, sometimes refugees from or graduates of marriage-and-the-family, sometimes retirees, or individuals who have some independent income. Among UAs one might classify single parents with preadolescent children (mostly very young ones), though this group, including their children, is almost large enough to constitute a separate classification. There are very few families in most communes (though some of the old-line cooperative communities and some religious communes, especially Christian, are composed almost entirely of families), and not even dyads seem to survive well in communal contexts. I don’t know how typical Downhill Farm is, but since 1972 there have been perhaps 40 adults who called this home. Marty and I (married for over thirty years) and the youngest of our five children (now 11) have lived here more-or-less as a family unit until we combined with another woman and her three daughters to form a triad of adults and extended family including all the children. One family with two young children lived here a year. Three sets lived here as couples — two of these in the first days of the commune, leaving in less than six months. The third is the only couple relationship which began here, and after living as a couple for a year, they left to set up private housekeeping. One single parent with infant lived here for the first year of the child’s life. All the others were UAs. Some formed sexual liaisons with one another which lasted for short periods, but they did not move in together and live as dyads. As I said in Families of Eden, couples who move into communes tend to break up (sometimes recoupling with others — inside or outside the commune), and couples who begin their relationships in communes tend to move out. There is a basic antipathy between the commune and the family unit (or any other strong sub-group) which has been noted since the early communal experiments in America, and apparently only in those groups sharing a strong religious commitment to the family does the family survive.
These factors have an inescapable bearing on the question of resource-sharing. The UAs who populate communes are typically from middle-class families, WASP, with perhaps some college or a degree, no settled profession or trade, no stable source of income, and no property in their own names (except sometimes a car). They tend to be all in favor of resource-sharing, since they have no resources to share except their current labor and income-earning ability, and because of their similarity of background, the latter is generally within a narrow range — not like sharing income between a day-laborer and a brain-surgeon, for instance. They usually have no responsibility for dependents. (Divorced fathers with child-support payments to make have a problem in joining communes. A few have tried it at Downhill Farm, but they have all had to leave to increase income. Single mothers accompanied by children often have welfare or child-support to sustain them, which is usually more than enough in communal contexts.) Rarely are UAs supporting elderly parents or other such dependents.
Resource-sharing is relatively rare in urban communes, where UAs are likely to be employed and have a wider variance in salary than characterizes rural jobs. Some rural groups hire themselves out at day labor and share the proceeds, recognizing that while some are employed “outside,” others are carrying on the essential non-renumerated work of the farm. Resource-sharing is most common in those rural groups that have their own industries. If their work at income-producing is shared in common (or balanced with other essential community work such as cooking or gardening), it is a relatively easy step to resource-sharing.
“Income” is not the same, however, as “resources.” The whole question of resource-sharing is simplified if the terms are made equivalent for all practical purposes, for it is clearly evident to the group that so much work per day or work per month brings in so much money, which must be divided up to meet community expenses. But there is little possibility of accumulation of capital under these circumstances. In the kinds of industries communes are able to engage in, on the periphery of the economy, limited by conscience to a fair-price structure, avoiding purely speculative activities (imagine a commune playing the stock market!), income is almost bound to be consumed by current needs. It can meet the mortgage, but not make the down-payment. It can buy the gas and pay for repairs of machines, but not buy the heavy equipment that might produce more income. And the daily needs of relatively healthy, able UAs give no measure of the total cost of the community. Lack of capital is linked to absence of dependents and other external concerns. To build a “total” community, including infants, the disabled, the elderly, medical facilities, recreational facilities (and opportunities), educational facilities (and opportunities), and other such appurtenances of a society which somehow accommodates the full range of human needs, requires capital, something, alas, beyond a fair return for a fair day’s labor or decent product.
UAs outside communes receive a variety of subsidies. A father co-signs the note for one’s first car. Sometimes parents give newlyweds a house. Sometimes a family business or property is made available. Often the credit line of a family or friends is used to acquire what the UA could not acquire independently. A dozen UAs sitting in a grubby communal living-room trying to figure out how to get a business started might represent millions of dollars in credit resources which would be available to them if they were in private life but which they are either unwilling or unable to tap as members of a commune.
Those who have property or investments in their own name are rare but important in communal economy. Evangelical religious communes often benefit from them in significant ways. Their members usually come to them as a result of a powerful conversion experience. Since prosperous people are often the ones most in need of salvation, they come bearing a bundle, of which the community relieves them. It takes only a few such conversions a year to make religious community a good business. When, as often happens, the inspiration fades, the experience of community sours, or these individuals do not successfully integrate with the community, the separation can be as messy as a divorce. Secular communities are likely to be cautious about accepting total and sudden investment, as was the leader of one Christian community who told a rich lady who wanted to join and give her money to the group to get rid of her money and property first and enter poor. Indeed, a number of communities have been wiped out by prosperity, especially if it comes unearned from a single source. After a few agonizing separations, a community may come to prefer those who arrive with a knapsack only, whose departure will be no more disruptive than their entrance. Prosperous UAs may have a greater than ordinary desperation to belong to something, to be accepted by someone, to sense purpose in their lives and utility in the wealth. Such motivation can lead to impossibly high expectations and bitter disappointments. Essential as it is for accumulation of community capital, the absorption of subsidies of any kind, especially those linked to the fortunes and families of UAs, is perilous. Communities tend to prefer to pull themselves up by the bootstraps of income resulting from their current industry.
Bands: The Once and Future Social Unit
Before discussing some of the specific practical problems communities face as they move toward resource-sharing and the implications of these, I would like to describe a kind of ideal I think most of us in community have in our imaginations. Our society seems designed to generate UAs. Even at young ages children are given allowances and expected to learn to manage their “own” money. They are often career-typed early, and both their individuality and their potential income-producing qualities are admired and encouraged at school and at home. It is in the system’s interest that we be essentially isolated from one another, interchangeable parts with specialized, utilitarian functions, and human linkages are discouraged or curtailed. Once I was sitting in a row of typists when our first weekly checks were delivered to our desks. Innocently I began comparing mine with my neighbor’s. The supervisor loomed over us instantly. I was violating the basic ethic — as though I were cheating in school — by sharing information about income.
If getting serious about life means going back into the system, the commune movement has failed.
The communal ideal we oppose to that is one of total melding, obliteration of individual differences at least in economic respects. I suspect that it is a genetic need traceable to our emergence from other hominid strains to be a member of an affectional group of perhaps a dozen or more adults and their children, something like the hunting-gathering bands which were our primary mode of social structure throughout our two-million or so years before the emergence of agriculture some twelve thousand years ago. In one way or another we are still in search of the lost Band — a group larger than the nuclear family (hence not so sexually repressive as family groups) and smaller than the tribe. We do not yearn to be part of an anonymous mass, but of a group bound in mutual dependency and caring in which each individual is valued as a total person, for uniqueness, but not utility. This is an instinctual, emotional yearning for an ideal that probably cannot be realized under any general social structure, certainly not under that of our contemporary system. But it helps us understand ourselves, our disappointments and frustrations as well as our satisfactions, when we realize how deeply the ideal is lodged in our make-up.
In the surge of communalism of the late sixties and early seventies the pursuit of this ideal reached sometimes comic, sometimes tragic proportions. Instant bands were formed, with a pretense of total loving and responsibility. The group was a great Mother with an ample bosom, to absorb and provide all. Some communes were conceived of as group marriages, with sexual access of each to each and, theoretically, diffuse and shared responsibility for all children. They pushed the river — the essential love they relied upon being mostly illusory.
Yet the ideal remains important. We may despair of its realization, but I think most of us still shape our action to some degree according to this model. Imagine, say, three to a dozen adults living in some mutually acceptable relationship in which there were no exclusive dyads. They have genuinely combined their resources and income-gaining efforts. They are sensitive to the total needs of each — including distant members of the families of each. For example, suppose that George gets his absent father to co-sign for an educational loan to help Myrtle’s grown daughter go to law school. The group accepts responsibility for protecting George’s father’s risk. Luke wants plastic surgery, which most of the group regard as vanity, yet they take on a few extra hours of work per week over the next few months for the sake of Luke’s happiness. A teenager in the group has gotten pregnant and wants to keep the baby. The group commits itself to the responsibilities of child-rearing. My brother, or perhaps even my cousin, gets nabbed for possession. If I were in private life I might put my property in hock to help with his bail. These are things that happen in families, burdens families bear. How willing will a band be to take such actions? Fear of such contingencies, and of any group’s unwillingness (or simply slowness) to respond causes many to be unwilling to consider joining a group which requires total sharing of resources. They want freedom of choice in aspects of life in which they cannot expect group understanding and sympathy. I doubt that simple acquisitiveness or desire for personal wealth for selfish reasons is a strong factor in their reluctance. They are worried about others outside the group for whom they feel somewhat responsible.
Most resources for emergencies such as I have described lie fallow most of the time. If a group were to pool them, they would have an insurance policy of much greater power than the resources of any individual. But because the decisions pertaining to the use of those resources for such emergencies as I have mentioned depend so much on love and so little on reason, and because we cannot make love happen among a dozen people, cannot even be sure when and whether it exists, we do not form such bands. Our triad of adults and our four dependent children is an effort to create such a band, but our numbers are small, and the interfaces of the combined families with the outside world are hazy. The thought of adding another member is threatening, so difficult is it to maintain close contact and caring among the seven we have now. It is difficult to imagine how our trust and intimacy could reach out to four or five adults instead of three, six or eight children instead of four — never mind a band of a dozen or two.
The Committed and the Transient
Communes result from UAs in search of bands, settling for compromises. Some very creative approaches to the problems of dealing with individual economic needs and varying economic capacities through communal means have been worked out by communes old and new. But not many of us know quite what to do about the Blotzes. Here they come down the lane in a camper, exploring community. They would like to join our raggle-taggle mob, but they want to do it right. They have, for instance, a design for a solar-energized house, with all the amenities, they would like to build for themselves and a few others who might move in, and from the sale of their last home they have the hundred thousand the house and solar generating equipment would cost. They have two school-age children with them and a third in college. They would like some kind of alternative school, or a commitment from the community to help them with the younger children and continue to support the eldest. They also support Mr. Blotz’s invalid mother. They want to help capitalize some kind of industry that will both benefit the community and allow them to maintain something of their life-style — not luxuries, in their view, but essentials, such as insurance payments, orthodonture for Suzy, maybe a family trip to Spain they have been planning for years and hate, now, to relinquish. And what about their summer place on a lake in Michigan? They co-own it with another family. It would be a shame to sell their share. Maybe folks from the community could use it from time to time, if that’s agreeable with the co-owners. But there is an annual upkeep cost, and there is, of course, the sailboat . . . And so on.
I don’t think I am inventing extraordinary complexities. Those are the situations we deal with. What community would not like to have a resident M.D.? Well, here’s your Dr. Blotz, two Dr. Blotzes (one a psychiatrist). One might react morally and say these folks are really not interested in community if they want all those things, are unable to make a more total break with their past. But do we really want a future without orthodonture (for cases diet won’t correct or prevent) and trips to Spain? Or is our moralism a rationalization for our inadequacies as communities?
I can imagine the permanent residents settling into bands of a few adults and their children, perhaps several of such bands having separate households on the same acreage. As UAs pass through, some of these would settle out, joining existing bands or forming new ones. Presently communes focus on prospective members — sometimes not allowing people to stay unless they have a serious interest in joining or are in the process of joining. The fiction is that all will be there forever, though the facts are that many, perhaps most, are transient. Probably few mean to deceive, but group pressure is such that each person, no matter how uncertain his long-range intentions, has to maintain that fiction. Thus the group pressure may encourage a kind of hypocrisy. Somewhat cynically I have come to believe that those who talk most about community as an ideal and their personal commitment to it are likely to be the first to leave. Much bitterness and ambiguity surround relations with people in the commune who have privately decided to leave but have not announced their intention.
Those who talk most about community as an ideal . . . are likely to be the first to leave.
The opposite assumption — that most are there temporarily — might be healthier. A number of friends and sometime residents of Downhill Farm have never made a pretense of membership, though some have lived here as long as a year at a time, participating fully in all activities and decision-making. Since there is no expectation on either side, there is no bitterness about their departures or arrival. We gain a great deal from their occasional presence — for a weekend, week, month or year. Such people need clear terms (here it is $5 per day plus labor), easy entrance and exit, no requirements of investment, no need to report property or income or intentions. And some of them may one day join us permanently.
If communes were structured that way I would expect the band or bands of permanent members to share resources fully, taking account of the complex family needs of each. Transients would clearly be there on a pay-as-you-go basis. My guess is that the total population of such communes would average 40 percent permanent, 60 percent transient (more in summer, fewer in winter). Pressure to join, to become a part of a band, would be against the ethic of such a place: that would be like pressure to make love.
Resource-sharing through love or contract is an important communal goal, but there is no clear, simple best means to work toward it. One of the strengths of the commune movement is the diversity of communities within it and the wide-range of choices possible to those who join. I hope I have not given the impression here of having any “answers.” Certainly we have not solved the problem at Downhill Farm. But by raising questions and suggesting possibilities I hope to stimulate a variety of creative responses among communities of diverse types.
Defining “Resource Sharing”
If communes are organized to force resource-sharing they are likely to continue to be made up of UAs with little to share, little complexity in their lives, people who bring in little and take little away if they change their minds, having contributed while they were there such labor as earns their subsistence and a little more permitting gradual improvement of the community. In time some permanent members will settle out of the generally transient pattern, raise children, grow old, become disabled, develop the full range of a human community. Meanwhile occasional increments of gifts or accumulated resources of incoming members will increase their substance and enable them to develop increasingly effective means of gaining economic support. This has already happened, in a remarkably short time, in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, whose businesses gross over a million dollars a year and whose combined assets are in the million-dollar range. That may be the soundest pattern for overall growth of the movement.
Meanwhile there are thousands of communes which do not find resource-sharing possible or desirable but which lack other models for stable growth and development — and I think these amorphous groups are the ones which are most likely to provide the Blotzes with an alternative where they can finally turn in their camper on a truck, provided a legal structure can be found which makes sense in terms of the commune’s structure and which provides security for those who want to make their resources available for community development yet need some relative freedom of choice in meeting their complex needs.
I am not happy with the analogy, but in many respects communes are like colleges. UAs come to them for some important growth period in their lives, then move on when they have derived as much benefit as they believe they can and have developed interests and commitments which cannot be pursued in present communes. Some “graduates” have expressed guilt at having ripped off communities by gaining skills there and undergoing personal growth and then having moved on, depriving the community of these benefits. Were they alumni of a college they might express their gratitude in annual gifts or bequests. Indeed, they might, while living in the community, pay a tuition for the educations they were receiving.
Among other analogies I do not like are hotels, camps, half-way houses, sanitaria, research institutes, monasteries, retreats. Communes have many characteristics of all these. All the analogies have in common a core or staff of permanent residents and a considerable flow of transients. (My guess is that communes have between 25 and 50 percent turnover per year. About a third of Americans generally change residence each year.) A considerable number of communal members would be in tax-subsidized institutions, from the army to mental hospitals to jails to public colleges, if they were not in communes. In many respects they are laboratories of social experimentation providing data which could have many applications throughout society. It seems as though there ought to be some tax~exempt format which would enable them to clarify their status and derive benefits they deserve from the social services they perform.
My fear is that both resource-sharing and non-resource-sharing communities, but especially the former, are selecting against the Blotzes, selecting for UAs. Suppose we really like the Blotzes, love them, find no conflict between their values and our own, their behavior and our own. Moreover they are people ready and able to make commitments, deep, serious, life-long commitments. To what extent are we driving them away from us and attracting the uncommitted? The Blotzes walk around the property talking about reforestation, a sauna, a greenhouse. They want to know what will happen when they are in wheelchairs. For the most part we haven’t even theoretical answers for them. We are worrying at most about firewood for next winter, replacing our worn-out pickup.
When Downhill Farm had a going industry — manufacturing Hollolog planters from sections of oak — we operated on the basis of a monthly assessment of $150 per month per adult and paid ourselves $3 per hour for working in our little factory. Thus 50 hours of work per month met basic needs. Some worked overtime for cash (the first $150 never changed hands) for personal needs. When the orders were coming in, we might have committed ourselves to working 40 hours per week instead of 50 per month and put the surplus into improving the land, the facilities, the business, expanding our functions, getting into outreach into the larger community around us, looking toward children and adults, making some arrangement for medical care, and so on. But because we consisted of UAs for the most part, these were low priorities compared to free time for reading, meditating, personal development, gardening, walking in the woods. We didn’t come out here in the country to get rich, we kept saying. Why build ramps for wheelchairs when everyone is able-bodied? Economic homogeneity is a kind of self-perpetuating system. The community was a good place for UAs. Prospective members could see that immediately and make choices accordingly. When members found their interests or concerns extended beyond what the community was providing or likely to provide, they moved on. That was easier than changing the community.
And we had no requirement of resource-sharing, which, I think, would have further discouraged those who might have brought in resources to share. What we want is love and responsibility — attitudes we cannot create by fiat. We can create structures which change processes and in turn facilitate the growth of desirable attitudes. Resource-sharing seems at first to be one of those structures, one which will impose equality and so make possible mutuality, peership, loving and responsible community relationships. But it may have the effect of selecting out rather than smoothing out differences. If we have an attractive plan for those with nothing or little to lose, one which is threatening for those with a great deal to lose, we may expect our population to continue to be drawn mainly from the footloose — who will simply move on when they reach a stage in life when commitment and attachment develop to meet fundamental needs. For example, many have left communes precisely when they began having children, as though intuitively recognizing that it was time to stop playing around and get serious about life. If getting serious about life means going back into the system, the commune movement has failed.
This article is reprinted, with kind permission, from Communities, A Journal of Cooperative Living (Box 426, Louisa, Va. 23093; subscriptions $7.50, or $1.50 for a sample copy).
Judson Jerome, author of Families of Eden, writes regularly for The Green Revolution, Writer’s Digest, and other magazines. After writing a dozen books, and working for 20 years as a literature professor, he moved to Downhill Farm in Hancock, Maryland, to have more time to write.
— Ed.
