Okay. Here’s yet another thing few new communities want to think about. How and when do you tell someone to leave? Who gets to decide? What does your community agree are grounds for expulsion?
Again, as hard as confronting these questions as you are starting a community is, it would be a lot harder to figure this all out after someone does something that makes at least someone so uncomfortable that they want the person out of the community.
Two of the main things that you need to decide are, first, what are expellable offenses, and second, what is the process for expulsion.
In terms of offenses, violence? Is it violence if everyone involved consents (ie, BDSM)? Non-consensual sexual approaches (rape, assault, inappropriate touching)? Something involving children? Theft? Harassment? Illegal activities? Are there things that would get a warning the first time but potential expulsion if repeated?
In terms of who gets to decide that someone should be expelled, does it take one person? A majority? Consensus minus the offender? Consensus minus the offender and anyone that they are involved with?
There are certain situations where someone has been hurt that you want the offender out of there immediately. Do you call the police? Are there situations where you would give the offender twenty-four hours (or whatever) to get their things together before they have to leave? There may even be situations where things are so unclear that you ask the victim to leave, temporarily, while a decision is being made.
It’s good to not make a policy hard and fast. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. But, like a lot of these policies, you want something that you can fall back on in situations where emotions are running high and you can’t get agreement.
As difficult as all this is to think about and talk about, having a policy around all this should make everyone feel safer.
Finally, a policy that may be even harder, the final one that I want to look at, is when do you decide to dissolve the community? How do you do it if you need to?
Very few communities start thinking that they’re not going to last very long. Unfortunately, most communities don’t last very long.
The second most popular post on this blog over the last couple of years has been my post on Four Steps to Building a Commune. In it I said, “Step Two is about working on vision and agreements together.” I later wrote a post about the process of making agreements. Recently, as I ended my series on Starting from Scratch, I wrote a whole piece on Agreements and Policies, outlining what I think are the most important agreements and policies a beginning commune needs to make. In this series, I am going to go over each of them in more detail, starting with what I think is the first thing a fledgling community needs to do: you need to decide how you are going to make decisions.
What most people in this society are used to is deciding things by voting. While voting is certainly better (and more democratic) than having decisions made by one person (king, queen, or dictator) or a small group of people, there’s a big problem with voting. It creates winners and losers. While I am not particularly an advocate for voting in general, this is a lot more problematic in community where you have to live with the losers. If you have a community of say twenty-one people and eleven of them vote in favor of something, that means that there are ten folks (nearly half the group) that don’t agree with the decision and they will all be living with you. That may not be fun.
There are, however, a lot of alternatives to majority voting. I am a strong advocate of consensus decision making, however it is not the only way to go. There is a large range of decision making structures between majority voting and strict consensus, including things like supermajority voting (you need to get 60% or two-thirds or three-quarters of the vote, etc) on one hand and consensus minus one, or two, or three (so that one or two people can’t block a proposal) on the other. There are also things like Sociocracy and Holacracy that often work better for larger groups. I do believe, however, that consensus works better for smaller communities, especially income-sharing communities and co-op houses, and I’ve seen it work well in both of these.
The problem at the very beginning is that you haven’t agreed on a decision making process and in chicken-and-egg fashion, how do you make a decision on a decision making process if you don’t have a decision making process in place?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that you make this first decision by consensus, even if the decision is to use another decision making system. I’ve seen groups use consensus to decide to use a different way to decide things from then on. (And none of these agreements are locked in place. Really, you can use any form of decision making to decide to decide differently.) The advantage of using consensus to decide on a decision making system is that at least everyone knows that you have all collectively decided that this will be the way that you make decisions.
Once you have done this, congratulations! You are on your way to making many agreements and policies.
Now, you need to decide (together, using your newly agreed upon decision-making system) what your group is all about. That will be the focus of my next post on Agreements and Policies: writing Vision and Mission Statements.
As I said in my last ‘Starting from Scratch’ post, I’ve just moved into an already functioning community. One of their major challenges was that they didn’t start with much in the way of agreements. In this post I want to look at a list of agreements and policies I think every community should have and I will briefly say why I think each of them is important. For many of them, I will write future posts detailing the particular agreement or policy. (I’ve written about agreements before, but mostly about why they are important. Here I want to list most of the agreements and policies you want to make. And as I mentioned in my previous post, I developed this list from my time working with Cotyledon and Glomus Commune as we were developing policies, as well as watching communities like Compersia struggle to create policies, and also after reading Yana Ludwig’s book on Building Belonging which has a good list of policies that starting communities should think about.)
Here is my list, along with a bit on why.
First of all, you need to decide how you will decide things. This is the first thing you need to do, because you need a way to collectively make decisions in order to create these policies and agreements. I will talk more in a future post about various methods of decision making.
Next, I believe, your group needs to create a Vision/Mission Statement. This is key because I believe that everything else, all your community’s policies, flow from this statement. Again, I hope to devote a whole post to this.
After this you can begin to create your community’s policies. Here’s my current list of what I think are important policies to have in place.
A Labor System: Everyone is going to need to work, at least in some capacity, to keep the community going. This is a lot more important in income-sharing communities, where work is the currency, but every community has some work involved, and to be fair, everyone needs to do some. How do you decide who does what and how much should each person do? Yes, this will be another post.
Financial Systems: How are you going to get money? How are you going to track the money you get? How are you going to budget? You can be as communist as you want but your community still has to survive in a capitalist system.
Stipend/Allowance/Mad Money: Income sharing communities take care of each members needs but it’s also good to have some money that each person has that they can spend on little extra items they might want, money that they can spend, no questions asked. How much? How often do they get it? How do you decide what’s a necessity and what’s a luxury?
Membership Process: How do you decide who is a good fit for the community? (I’ve seen communities try to go without having a membership process and I’ve also seen it backfire. Badly.) Like the decision making, this is tricky at the beginning. What do you do about the initial group of people? Make them go through the process or just grandmother them in?
Legal Structures: You have to deal with the outside world as a community and it’s good to have some kind of legal entity. Welcome to the world of LLCs, 501c3s, 501ds, housing cooperatives, and home owners associations. It’s as much fun as it sounds like. And yes, you are probably going to need to consult with a lawyer at some point. Hopefully only briefly.
Land Ownership: Who owns the land, the buildings, the property? In an “egalitarian community” it’s all supposed to be equal–either we all own it or no one owns it. (You can have a community where everyone is a renter.) Two interesting possibilities are land trusts and permanent real estate cooperatives.
Exit Agreements: It would be nice to assume that everyone is going to stay forever, but the reality is people come and go from communities. How do you make it easier for someone to leave if they decide to or need to? We take care of each other while we are living together and I think it’s important to take of someone when they leave, particularly if they’ve been a member for a while and put quite a bit into the community.
And those are the easy policies. Here are the ones that are trickier but you absolutely want in place because things will be worse if you don’t
Conflict Resolution Structures: Most people don’t like conflict. (I’m an admitted conflict avoider.) Having some kind of agreed upon way of managing conflict before conflict happens makes things a bit easier.
Violence Policy: Hopefully it’s not going to happen, but you don’t want to try to figure this out when you are dealing with a really difficult situation.
What to do if a member is sick, disabled, or dies: If your community is around long enough, it’s going to happen.
Finally, the two you really don’t want to think about and you really need to have in place: a Member Expulsion Policy and a Community Dissolution Policy. No one wants to think about expelling members and even less about dissolving the community but, like the violence policy, it’s going to be even more horrible if you are trying to come up with a policy under the high stress of one of these happening.
The good news is that these don’t have to be permanent policies. You can revisit them or change them over time. When we dissolved the Common Threads community, we had a policy in place which we basically ignored because another solution made more sense at that point.
Policies aren’t there to bind you if everyone can agree to something else. They are there as a fall back when you can’t agree. Fortunately, you already have something in place as a default. Having policies already can make a really hard time just a bit easier.
I’ve reviewed books written about how to create communities, most notably DIana Leafe Christian’s Creating a Life Together. Yana Ludwig has also written a couple of books that talk about (among other things) community building, but the FIC just published her latest book, Building Belonging, which simply focuses on it and may be the best thing I have ever seen on how to build community.
This book fits well with my ‘Four Steps’. Chapter 2 is entitled “What Makes a Good Founder and Founding Group?” (That is, it starts with the people.) Chapter 3 is entitled “Phases of Community Creation”. The first phase is “Set the core patterns for this community” and mentions the following ‘pieces; ‘Vision and Values’ (which is covered in Chapter 5), ‘Decision-making system’ (which is covered in Chapter 7),and ‘Membership processes’ (which is covered in Chapter 8), before talking about ‘Economic structures’ and ‘Labor structures’ (both covered in Chapter 9). Phase 2 is “Property acquisition” (a lot of which is covered in Chapter 11). My four steps are to find the people, work on vision and agreements together, figure out sources of income (more important in an income-sharing community, but as Yana points out, economic and labor structures are important for any community), and then look for a place. Notice that Yana’s order and mine are basically the same.
When she gets to Part 2, Yana devotes the first chapter (Chapter 5) to “Visioning Your Community”. As I’ve worked with and visited more and more communities, I have come to believe that everything flows from your (collective) community vision. This is why I’ve given a couple of workshops on ‘Collaborative Community Design’. I think that this is the most important first thing (other than possibly deciding on your decision-making process) a new group can do. Yana writes “This visioning work is often the first real chance to practice sharing power.” She gives a story from her community building attempts where they didn’t start by visioning together called “Learning from my pain on visioning”. And finally, she reprints six different mission statements from successful groups that she thinks are “really good”. I will write a post in the future about why I think that vision and mission statements are so important.
She also has a bunch of exercises for groups that want to start a community to do and refers to more from her Cooperative Culture Handbook. I could go on and on about why I think that the individual things in this book are absolutely key (she covers things like “Culture, Diversity, and Justice Work”, “Power, Conflict, and Decision-making”, “Some Basics of Community Design”, and “Becoming a Good Community Member” among many other topics) but I just want to say that I think this is the best, step-by-step book on creating community that I have seen. If you are one of what seems to be many, many folks interested in starting a community of any type, this book is for you. This is especially true if you are interested in starting an income-sharing community. Where Diana Leafe Christian’s book on Creating a Life Together has a bit of a bias against income-sharing communities, Yana Ludwig’s book has a little bit of a bias toward it.
Building Belonging is published by the Foundation for Intentional Community and is available from them. What more can I say? You want to build community? You want to read this book.
I can’t say this enough. Community is all about relationships. I can’t say it enough because there are people who still think that if you can get the place and figure out the right way to do it, you can easily create a community. There are people who try to do this and can’t figure out why they can’t make it work. Community researcher Katarzyna Gajewska.calls this the Techie Fallacyafter folks who seem to regard community building as an engineering problem.
The first step in creating community is finding people, but once you’ve got a community up and going, the best way to make it last is to focus on relationships. So the big question is how do you build relationships in a community and, maybe more important, how do you make those relationships stronger?
The communes have developed several tools to do just this.
Recently, much of the mainstream world celebrated Valentine’s Day. While I am sure that there are people on the communes that send a card to their sweethearts, many of the communes have transformed this day into Validation Day. Rather than sending a card to one person telling them how much you love them, on the communes, cards are created for all the members and most people write notes on them with positive things they like about the person. Thus, on Validation Day, everyone gets a card with lots of lovely things on it. Someone said these cards were natural antidepressants–if you felt down you could just look at your card and feel better.
The cover of my Validation Day card one year
Another tool for paying attention to relationships is the clearness process. Like consensus, clearness is a process developed by the Quakers that was secularized by the group Movement for a New Society who put out a pamphlet about it which Acorn Community then used and later other communities, including Glomus Commune, have incorporated into their membership processes. I see the clearness process as a social hygiene tool. It’s important in busy communities because members tend not to talk about little irritations which then build up. Communities that use this process often require at least once a year clearnesses with every other member. (Which usually comes down to twice yearly clearnesses–once because member A needs to do a clearness with member B, and then again when member B is doing clearnesses and needs to do one with member A.) Two members sit down together and make sure that they are “clear” with each other–and, hopefully, talk about any difficulties that they might have with each other. And, if the members can’t work it out, the community as a whole may get involved. I see this as a way of dealing with relationship problems before they blow up.
Yet another tool that the communes have pioneered is a set of communication processes called Transparency Tools. Paxus (who helped develop them) has made them available in a “fingerbook”. They consist of several different exercises that range from simple ones like “If you really knew me” to more daring ones like “Hotseat” and “I have a story about you” and some that can be tricky like “Withholds” and “Unsaids”. The point is that these are all ways to get to know someone better. I’ve often seen them used at events like the Communities Conference but they are much more useful in a real functioning community situation. To give a trivial example, if I meet someone in a workshop and they say “If you really knew me, you would know I love the color purple”, that’s nice but if I never see them again, it’s not really helpful, but if this same thing is said by someone you live with, that’s good information–and maybe helpful if you want to get them a surprise gift or do something nice for them. And if someone says, “If you really knew me, you’d know I was abused by my father”, it’s tragic, but there’s not much you can do for someone in a workshop. However, that’s something important to know about someone in your community. Warning, these tools seem simple but can be powerful. Paxus warns about making sure that everyone is okay after going deep–they can be dangerous in the wrong hands, like letting someone who is drunk use a chainsaw.
Finally, I mentioned consensus earlier. While consensus is a decision making process, it definitely has relationship strengthening side effects. While voting creates winners and losers, consensus, when it’s done well (and it often isn’t), involves listening and trying to understand each person’s needs and points of view. People can end up feeling closer after making a difficult decision, especially if they feel heard and included.
Probably the most important thing that strengthens relationships is listening. Listen to each person. Seek first to understand, then be understood. Remember, relationships are the most important part of a community.
It’s September and Commune Life is back in operation. It’s also Wednesday when we normally post videos–so here is Theresa pointing out the difference between Consensus and Consent.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” Karl Marx
Kat Kinkade, the founder of three successful communal ventures, who re-defined contemporary utopian theory, and who spearheaded the rebirth of a communal movement, improbably spent her waning years living alone in a small house with just her cats and pet rabbits for company.
Kat Kinkade
I first met Kat in 1982, and remained her friend until her death. On December sixth, the day that would have been Kat Kinkade’s ninetieth birthday, I looked her up online. I knew Kat to be a towering intellect and a complicated person, but the Kat Kinkade that I knew, and the legacy that she has left, were not represented in the articles I found. So I want to try here to take a shot at setting the record straight about Kat Kinkade.
In 1967, at the age of 36, Kat Kinkade didn’t merely want to start a commune where she and her daughter could live, she wanted to build a communal movement. After starting Twin Oaks, she founded the magazine, Leaves of Twin Oaks. She edited Communities Magazine and made sure that Twin Oaks kept the magazine afloat by putting in a great deal of money and labor until, many years later, it eventually became self-sustaining. Communities Magazine annually produced a Directory of Communities—the sole reference source for seekers looking for intentional communities. Later, Communities Magazine went online, creating the web site ic.org, still the go-to informational center of the global intentional communities movement.
Kat wrote and published two books, A Walden Two Experiment, and Is it Utopia Yet, about the founding and evolution of Twin Oaks Community. Twin Oaks held the first communities conference a year after getting started. This enduring yearly event (between 100 and 200 participants each non-covid year) has been the birthplace of dozens of additional communal ventures. Kat helped found the network of income-sharing communities, the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. That organization provided the inspiration, template, and early staff for the much larger, more expansive communal network, the Foundation for Intentional Community.
Kat Kinkade approached her movement building with missionary zeal. Her mission: a society based upon absolute equality. Kat meant to forge a model of society that would manage to defy the central failure of societies world-wide—the gravitational tendency of wealth to concentrate; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. So, how do you know if a society has attained equality?
“Equality in a community is a relationship structured so that no member envies another. Simple. [Equality creates]a general feeling of fairness, a logical first step in the pursuit of happiness.”
(Kat in “Journal of a Walden Two Commune,” from “Walden House Newsletter,” Aug, 1966, p. 14)
My attitude to every request for special privilege was always the same: “Why you?” In other words, what is there about you that makes you deserve to have more than other people? …
I was known as a hard-nosed egalitarian, and this is one of the reasons people called me “very idealistic.”
(Kat in Is It Utopia Yet? 1994, p. 46-50)
Kat read the novel, Walden Two, about a fictional utopian society written by the behaviorist B. F. Skinner. She became inspired, and wasted no time gathering a small handful of other idealists who saw this book as a how-to manual for starting an actual utopian community.
Even as those first eight pioneers unloaded their bags from a van in June of 1967, adherents arrived, eager to join, but, over the coming years, the community chose, to Kat’s enduring disappointment, to put new applicants on a wait list, allowing the community to grow only at a modest pace. In a few years, frustrated that her cohorts lacked appropriate enthusiasm for growth, Kat left Twin Oaks and founded East Wind community. Kat Kinkade’s goal was to gather up all of those eager young people seeking community being turned away by Twin Oaks and to quickly grow East Wind to several hundred members. Kat drafted East Wind’s initial policies in order to welcome open membership as a means to spur growth. Kat’s stated ambition was for the community to grow to 1,000 members. Yet, as East Wind stabilized at around fifty or so members, contentiousness escalated. Rather then fostering tolerance, strife from open membership caused the community to change direction, slow growth, and become more selective.
Disappointed yet again, Kat Kinkade left East Wind. Eventually, Kat rejoined Twin Oaks where, twenty years later, as Twin Oaks had a growing wait list, Kat set about starting her third communal experiment, Acorn community, essentially an anti-Twin Oaks, and an anti-East Wind. No longer focused on rapid growth, Acorn would remain small. There would be more commitment to interpersonal connection, less focus on written policy. At Acorn, financial rules would be looser than at Twin Oaks, so people could meet individual needs more easily.
All three communities, Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn continue to thrive today.
Although all founded at different times and having differing premises, among these different communities there are structural commonalities:
–A commitment to financial and political equality among all members—no class divide.
–The structure of the community is a corporation. The corporation owns everything. No individual’s name is on anything—not a house, a plot of land, or even a car—therefore, no one person will control decisions.
–Equity accrues to the community—no draining of communal coffers for personal pay-outs if (when) members leave.
–In case of dissolution of the community, communal assets are not divided up among the members—no temptation to dismember the community once it becomes financially successful.
–Labor is valued equally—no tendency to develop a professional elite. This type of labor ideology also recognizes as valuable work that in other societies is devalued and done by the disempowered—often a racial minority, or women, or immigrants, or children—or all of the above.
–Members accepted on the basis of their ability to work and get along with others—no purchasing membership privileges.
Keenan and Kat
Kat Kinkade and I were, bizarrely, both in the same visitor group at Twin Oaks, applying for membership in 1982. Kat was returning from her stint living “in the wilderness” after leaving East Wind. (The wilderness, in this case, was Boston.) While living at Twin Oaks, Kat did not hold back on expressing her disappointment at the many failures of the community. I was surprised to hear the founder disagreeing with the entire premise of the community that she founded, and where she was living.
Part of my disillusionment came from watching the worst aspects of communism in action. I saw a larger and larger part of the community sitting around on the front steps of the dining hall smoking cigarettes and drinking their wake-up coffee at 11 in the morning, and heard them ridicule as “workaholics” the people who made the money and kept the organization together. There was gross exploitation, but in reverse. The proletariat was exploiting the manager.
Particular personalities are watchdogs to make sure that nobody else gets more than them. I just loathe this trait. So little by little I thought, “This is not merely an ugly trait in a particular individual.” Our rigid equality sanctifies envy. You know what I said when we first started this community back in 1967? I wrote, “Equality in our community is that state in which no one member envies another.“
(Kat in Is It Utopia Yet? 1994, p. 87-89)
It took me about seven years and a fair amount of self-examination, as well as observation of the people I lived with, to discover some unsettling things about my equality theory. People will and do work for the common good…when the Community desperately needs to have a great deal of work done in a hurry, it relies about ninety percent on good will, personal conscience, the labor system, and community feeling…if we’re going to get the other ten percent, we need to add an incentive program of some kind, some method by which added effort gets added reward. I have learned that personal gain is, not a stronger motivation than the good of the Community, but a more reliable one. I no longer preach absolute equality. I live…a rough equality that doesn’t create gross differences or engender severe envy. Give people a little chance to serve themselves on the side, and they will give heartily out of their core efforts for the group.
(Kat inIs It Utopia Yet?1994, p. 46-50)
Kat, in her later years, tried to gently moderate the extreme egalitiarianism embodied in Twin Oaks’ policies—the very policies that, years earlier, she had drafted. Kat, as a community planner, created communal labor budgets that allowed people to write music, articles, books and plays—as well as to perform music and plays. Kat was part of a group that re-worked the labor system to allow more individual flexibility (Members who worked more hours each week would gain more freedom from labor constraints.) Kat established a committee that offered labor and money grants to individual members for their personal hobbies or needs. To allow people to travel, Kat created a seniority-based vacation fund. Kat supported the community in creating an income incentive program that allowed a member or groups of members to work “off the system” for money to fund personal and group projects.
However, Twin Oaks was populated by idealists why had been drawn to Kat’s earlier writings about absolute equality—many had not kept up with Kat’s own evolving ideology. Each of Kat’s proposed “liberalizing” policies was approved only over resistance, or allowed only on a temporary, experimental basis. As Kat lost political influence these policies were re-examined, cut back, or canceled completely. Currently at Twin Oaks, every one of these policies that Kat favored has been undone.
Kat Kinkade eventually just wanted to live on her own. In 2005, at the age of 74, she moved into a small house near Twin Oaks, paid for by her daughter. Soon after that Kat was diagnosed with cancer. In 2007, once she began to seriously decline, Kat moved back to Twin Oaks, and died in July of 2008. Her daughter, Josie, a doctor, said that her Mom received Rolls Royce care those final months at Twin Oaks.
Online these days, uninformed critics of communal living refer to Kat Kinkade as a guru—they paint a fearsome picture of her as a domineering presence. Kat provided leadership, but she did not have the traits typically associated with a guru. She started a new community and, once it was on its feet, she left. By this means, Kat ensured that other leaders emerged, overcoming the problem of “founder’s syndrome.” Kat did not feel threatened when members aspired to leadership, rather, she sought out and encouraged leadership in others. Far from being the keeper of the ideological light, Kat was often critical of whatever community she lived in, this granted space for other members to step forward as the public face of the community. Kat actively disliked acolytes. She gave short shrift to anyone who could not engage in a lively intellectual debate—she was pleased by members who could cogently disagree with her.
Being willing to actually change her mind was the key attribute of Kat’s that allowed her to be so effective. Kat believed in honestly looking at her own beliefs—even deeply held beliefs—to see if they held up in the light of new information. Kat believed in trying things out—experimenting—then examining and accepting the results of those experiments. Because Kat Kinkade grounded her actions and policies in reality-based information, what she created endures—three thriving communities and a thriving communal movement. Thank you, Kat.
Today seems like an appropriate day to talk about governance. Not of countries (although I assume there will be many folks thinking about that today) but of communities–specifically, egalitarian income sharing communities, the kind that are in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (aka the FEC).
The ‘egalitarian’ in both phrases is because not all income-sharing communities (ie, communes) are egalitarian. There are income-sharing groups (mostly spiritual communities) that have a guru or bishop or abbot or some other leader who makes most of the decisions for the community. Egalitarian communities have some sort of ‘horizontal’ governance structure where most to all members have a say in decisions.
That having been said, there are a variety of decision structures in the communes that I am familiar with. The older, larger communities (Twin Oaks and East Wind) have unusual structures, where most of the newer, smaller communes (like Acorn and Glomus) use consensus decision making.
The FEC only requires of its communities that a community “Uses a form of decision making in which members have an equal opportunity to participate, either through consensus, direct vote, or right of appeal or overrule.”
I have written about how consensus works. I’ve also written about when it’s better to use it or not. My summary of that last article is that consensus works better in small, somewhat homogeneous groups. For a small commune (including Acorn, which has thirty folks) I think that consensus is the way to go. Twin Oaks and East Wind are older and larger and don’t use consensus.
Twin Oaks, 1987
Twin Oaks has a very complex decision-making structure that involves their planner/manager structures, their O&I board, and their policies. Paxus and Keenan, who both live at Twin Oaks, have written about how Twin Oaks governs and they can explain it better than I ever could.
The East Wind community has a whole page on its website devoted to Self-Governance. It’s worth reading because, like Twin Oaks, their governance structure is complex. One of the statements on that page is “Our bylaws set forth our purposes, direction, ideology, define the rights and obligations of membership, and state the guarantees made by the community to its members. The bylaws allow for experimentation and are intentionally minimal in their restrictions. The bylaws can be amended in any manner desirable with a two thirds majority vote of full members. The bylaws state that East Wind may ‘govern itself by any reasonable means which its members desire.’ We encourage those who are interested in visiting East Wind to read our bylaws in full.” It goes on to discuss several other decision making structures, including “Legispol” which is something that I’ve heard East Winders talk about and wouldn’t say I had any real understanding of.
East Wind folks, 2016
For the Fourth of July last year, Theresa wrote a Facebook post that pointed out while communities claim to strive to have all voices be heard, there are barriers, often, to that happening, particularly for people of color or folks coming from other classes or cultures. This will probably mean changes in our way of governance.
I have claimed that communities are laboratories for social change. I think that we are places where we can experiment with new methods of governance, and today, as the US changes its government and, perhaps, tries to improve some things, it might be good to look at other ways of governance for society as well as for communities.
It’s not that I think that you could run a whole countries could be run by consensus (although there are forms of consensus that I think could work with larger groups–I heard of a situation where over a thousand anti-nuke activists needed to agree to an arrest plea and were able to do that using something called small group to large group consensus) and I even suspect that you couldn’t run a country using sociocracy, but I think that we need to look at ways to decentralize power, and I think that the communes are at the forefront of that.
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The two previous book reviews this week (books on sustainable community and collaborative groups) focused on books written about how to do collaborations (including communes and communities) well. Today I want to review a book about what not to do. It’s called Come Hell or High Water and is subtitled “a handbook on collective process gone awry”. It’s published by AK press–“one of the world’s largest and most productive anarchist publishing houses”–that also publishes a bunch of other interesting books (including adrienne maree brown’s book on Emergent Strategy which I based twoblog posts here on).
As the cover illustrates, this is a funny, cynical book that has a bunch of cartoons illustrating some frustrating problems. It also has a lot of hard won lessons about how all these wonderful processes that we talk about here and which other commune building guides extol can go terribly wrong. It’s written by a couple of anarchists who believe strongly in “egalitarian collectives” but have seen the pitfalls in the process and have looked at ways that form what the authors term “predictable patterns” that can lead well-meaning groups to things like “hierarchy, mistrust, looking out only for oneself, and sometimes even underhanded scheming.”
Although this is a modest sized book (and a quick read–127 small pages) Delfina Vannuchi and Richard Singer look carefully at issues like misusing consensus, how not to do power sharing, the difference between politeness and kindness, character assassinations and banning, justice and due process and free speech, and how vagueness can lead to authoritarianism.
I’ve seen reviews of this book that complain that this book is overly ‘pessimistic’. However, I think that it provides a nice counterbalance to all the books on the wonderful things you can do with group process. (See my two previous reviews this week.) The cartoons are also a nice touch that makes the emphasis on problems easier to take.
The authors end the book with a section that they entitle “There’s hope” where they talk about how “Virtually all problems in collectives can be overcome by applying compassion, and by being thorough and even-handed in our thinking.” Sounds lovely but not easy to do, especially when things are tough.
Here’s the last paragraph in the book, which is a nice summary of their thinking:
“An egalitarian collective is meant to accept and incorporate differences and heterogeneity. The task is to create a productive, relatively peaceful community out of all the different and sometimes contradictory personalities that form the group. No collective will ever be a perfect picture of unity, but it doesn’t have to be. A working collective is more like a crazy-quilt of disparate styles, all stitched up by a common thread. Frayed edges and all, that’s what a functional egalitarian collective looks like.”
It’s a nice reminder for people living in or trying to build communes.
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