The most long-term successful secular income-sharing communities have been the ones that:
A) Chose to be large. Small groups can have a harder time weathering a single bad experience, and have trouble maintaining social dynamism for varied age cohorts
B) Had strong enough systems to exclude free loaders. Everyone’s approach to this differs, but it’s a pre-condition to giving everyone a sense of common ownership and avoiding resentment
C) Found a meaningful business into which new members could be trained relatively easily and that people don’t hate. Programming is unfortunately not a skill that’s easy to teach to sizable fractions of people joining communes, and lots of the people who are attracted to communes want to spend less time on a computer, not more
The communities I'm familiar with are all part of the FEC [0]. There may be other successful longstanding secular communes, but I'm not familiar with others that are still around.
- Twin Oaks: Founded in 1967, tofu and hammocks, large [1]
- Sandhill: Founded in 1974, sorghum, tiny [2]
- East Wind: Founded in 1974, nut butters, large [3]
- Acorn: Founded in 1993, heirloom seeds, medium [4]
Of these, they've all got longstanding businesses which new people can easily plug into. Sandhill is the only exception to the "needs to be pretty big" idea, they had the same small group of very longstanding members for decades and then had turnover recently. Hopefully the new group will make it through, but it's never certain with small groups.
Sandhill also has had Dancing Rabbit next door for the last 20 years, which is large enough to provide a lot of social support that other small communities haven't had. A similar dynamic happened with Acorn as it was getting off the ground down the road from Twin Oaks.
I'd like to talk about one of the things you said earlier:
> Had strong enough systems to exclude free loaders
It does seem like one of the challenges of any "pure" commune would be feelings of contempt for people that you don't feel like are pulling their own weight. Care to talk more about that aspect? What are the systems that you've seen to prevent that?
I feel like you'll never stop some people from "free loading", like if someone is just lazy and does the bare minimum and the quality of the their work is always pretty low, but otherwise they are a great person and a lot of fun to be around - how do you handle that type of situation?
Is it more about creating systems that measure their output and make sure its enough? Or creating systems that prevent other people from feeling contempt towards that person?
This answer is unsatisfying, but: There are lots of different solutions to this problem, and they work for different people more or less well, but there is no (and in my opinion never will be) a single system that does this thing.
From that document:
> "Twin Oaks’ labor system requires everybody to plan and record personal labor. This can be a trial, but the organization, accounting, equality, liberty, and flexibility that Twin Oakers enjoy depend substantially upon this minor clerical chore."
In other words, the Twin Oaks system is pretty exacting. You live at Twin Oaks. On Thursday (or whenever), you turn in a labor sheet saying what you intend to do the following week. Let's say you don't have a lot of responsibilities, so you're just saying that you want to help cook dinner on Tuesday afternoon and garden with your friend Shannon on Wednesday morning, but you don't really have other plans. This sheet goes to the labor assigner, who then schedules you for 42 hours of labor for the week and sends it back to you. Then you are responsible for doing what's on the sheet for that week.
If you don't do it, there's a series of consequences, meetings, and if you can't reach some agreed fair contributions, eventually your membership would be revoked.
The East Wind system is less regulated -- you don't need to schedule your activities a week and a half in advance, you can just decide what you want to do when you want to do it. However, you are responsible for writing it down, and working at least 35 hours/week. If you don't, consequences, meetings, eventual removal from the community.
Not all communities have labor accounting or labor sheets, and these systems do not work for everyone, but it seems virtually unavoidable in larger communities where peoples' contributions can become invisible. It's true whether they're slacking way off or if they're working themselves into burnout.
In communities without labor accounting, it's easier in one sense -- you don't have to remember to write shit down and keep track of what time it is, which is nice. It's also most common in communities that are small enough that virtually everyone conferences together daily around the breakfast/lunch/dinner table, and so it's informally easy to distribute responsibilities (e.g., "I've been really busy splitting and hauling firewood all day, but I noticed that the hose spigot in the garden is leaking again. Does anyone have time today to go look at it and figure out what to do?")
As a community gets larger, it becomes harder to see who's overloaded and take that off of them, and it becomes harder for them to distribute work to others. You'd think it would be easier (there's more people!) but in my experience, as a community gets larger, responsibility gets diffused. Somebody Else's Problem Fields pop up on all kinds of projects that people have any reason to believe someone else is going to handle without them having to do anything.
However... this doesn't seem totally true. Kommune Niederkaufugen in Germany, for example, has no required labor system but has 70 members. Each member is part of two different groups: a labor area, and a living group. My poorly-informed opinion is that this system works for them because members get support and create organizational structure within those smaller groups.
& there are always freeloaders. They can lie on their labor sheets, they can take half their time in breaks, they can take credit for others' work, whatever, any system has a method where people can be disingenuous about their labor contribution. There's also different levels at which people are capable of contributing, both as physical ability and psychological motivation and willingness. Members of communities with collectivized labor need to recognize that sometimes they will be the ones who are capable of "doing more", and sometimes they will not "pull their own weight."
Your example conflates a couple different factors:
> "if someone is just lazy and does the bare minimum and the quality of the their work is always pretty low, but otherwise they are a great person and a lot of fun to be around - how do you handle that type of situation?"
... make your minimum work requirement is something that everyone feels comfortable with actually being a minimum work requirement, reducing the feeling of nervousness and being judged by an unknown standard on behalf of everyone in the community
... allow the workers in an area to set their own standards and for them to give feedback and enforce them among each other, and to ultimately remove people from their work area if they can't improve output based on feedback
... recognize the value of labor contributions outside of business and domestic labor, such as cultivating a social setting that people enjoy living in, casual mediation that reduces tensions between people and groups, and encouraging healthy behavioral outlets for members of the community
for that last bit, I want to point out that you don't need to keep track of those hours in number -- it would be kind of hard -- but simply recognize that if you increase the number of hours that people need to spend working in the business and the kitchen, then you are reducing the number of hours that they have available to do the work that, honestly, is really why you want to live in community with a bunch of people, and that's why you set your minimum labor quota the way that you do.
A) Chose to be large. Small groups can have a harder time weathering a single bad experience, and have trouble maintaining social dynamism for varied age cohorts
B) Had strong enough systems to exclude free loaders. Everyone’s approach to this differs, but it’s a pre-condition to giving everyone a sense of common ownership and avoiding resentment
C) Found a meaningful business into which new members could be trained relatively easily and that people don’t hate. Programming is unfortunately not a skill that’s easy to teach to sizable fractions of people joining communes, and lots of the people who are attracted to communes want to spend less time on a computer, not more