Mutual Aid Extends Income Sharing

from Commune Life

This spring I was in a book group where we were talking about the Gandhian version of social change.  This particular session was on his Constructive Program which is the part of his thinking that I was most excited about and we talked about what we could or should be doing now in this country.

One person in the group wanted to see the government give everyone a basic income.  Good anarchist that I am, I said I was skeptical of government programs.  I, of course, suggested income sharing communities.  The woman who suggested the basic income idea had an interesting response to that.

She basically asked what would happen if there were two income sharing communities, where everyone was equal within each of the communities, but one community was a lot wealthier than the other.  How should we deal with inequalities between communities?  What if one community was located in a more resource rich area than the other?  What if one of the communities was mostly white and the other was majority BIPOC?  What if one was filled with well-to-do folks and the other was mostly working class?

This is where I think that mutual aid is really important–particularly between communities.  I think that, just as the point of egalitarian communes is to reduce inequality within a community,  mutual aid can be used to level the economics between communities.

I have said that I see communities as laboratories for social change.  I don’t think that it’s really social change if we create a lovely little commune that only benefits whoever lives there.  So while I think that building income sharing communities is a great start (unsurprisingly, since that is the point of this blog), I don’t think that it’s enough.  Sharing between communities is just as important, as is finding ways of sharing with those not in communities.

Now, there has been some of this happening.  The networking of communities is important, from things like the Louisa County cluster to the (hopefully) revitalized Federation of Egalitarian Communities.  But this is only the beginning.  As we build the communities, one by one, we also have to build the networks and try to figure out ways to include more people in what we do.  We need to think about marginalized folks and their needs and how the communes can help them. We need to think about everyone and their needs.  The communes can make a difference if they reach out.  I think that the communities movement needs to be working on “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old,” as the IWW put it.

And so I’m convinced that the communes need to practice mutual aid to extend the work of income sharing.