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[https://www.twinoaks.org/ Twin Oaks in Virginia] is one of the oldest “intentional communities” in America, having been around since its inception in the 60’s. It’s a hippy commune, one of several scattered across the country. It consists of about 100 members who must work a total of 42 hours a week in return for a private room (in a shared house, one of several), shared food (dining hall), medical care, and a small stipend which they can use to buy personal items. It is instructive to see how this [[community]] works since it is voluntary and moneyless (to a large degree).

All work is equal at Twin Oaks and labor hours are required. In a sense they are currency because you need them to keep living there. If you fall below your required hours for the week, you have to make them up. If you get too far in debt you can be kicked out.

But work is the central problem at Twin Oaks. They grow alot of their own food and have some businesses (eg making hammocks and tofu) which are heavily dependent on manual labor. It turns out no one likes manual labor and there is a constant battle to get people to put in their hours, or charge their hours honestly. The [[ratings system]] of Twin Oaks is informal, but it exists, and alot of it centers around who does the work, who doesn’t, etc.

One might think that despite this, it all works because the [[community]] has survived for so long. But it’s more complicated than that. It turns out that there is a 20% turnover rate at Twin Oaks. Alot of it consists of a revolving labor pool, people who join Twin Oaks and go through the visitor and application process, a process that makes them work, and then quit. Others stay as full members for only a short time. They are motivated, idealistic, and usually young. So at least one critique of Twin Oaks is that it remains solvent though migrant labor.

Another critique is that it is not that egalitarian. There is an aristocratic class of old timers (mostly) who manage the farms and production houses/farms. They do less manual labor than the others. Furthermore the commune mostly attracts white, college educated people, so it can’t be viewed as a microcosm of American society. Needless to say, they are attracted to the ideological principles but manual work is not their forte. It appears that their informal [[ratings system]] is not, by itself, enough to overcome these structural barriers to work, not to mention the human tendency to avoid it.

Here are a few links that talk at length about Twin Oaks and provide some of the insights mentioned above:

https://communelifeblog.wordpress.com/2021/03/29/kat-kinkade-the-anti-guru-her-complex-but-enduring-legacy/

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/31684f65-02cc-462a-8134-3c3f6c9c76fc/content

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wortley-clutterbuck-understanding-utopia

This is somewhat similar to experiments in socialism by nation-states. An experience in Chile when it elected a democratic socialist president, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende Salvador Allende], in the early 70’s, illustrates this. The president was not good at economic policy. Industries were nationalized and workers were often allowed to “take over” the companies they worked for. The idea was to make goods cheaper, optimize production to the needs of the people, and give workers democratic participation. In fact, work simply stopped. Since they would be paid for just showing up, workers often did nothing except participate in “planning” exercises, ideological discussion, and so forth. Anything except real work. Empty store shelves and hyperinflation soon dominated Chilean economics and a violent military coup in 1973, supported by the US, ended Allende’s presidency. A prompt return to free market capitalism followed.

These examples are instructive and they should give us pause as we criticize our own society. We might reflect on the fact that, for all its flaws, American society has solved the singular problem of getting people to work. One of the great realities of our comfortable lives, often unnoticed, is its reliance on a vast amount of manual labor. We may treat our workers badly but they get the job done and we don’t have a serious problem filling the ranks of our laboring class. Our mail gets delivered, the shelves are stocked, the garbage is collected, the potholes are filled, etc. The system largely works and even Marx marveled at the [[productivity]] of capitalism.

This is a serious problem for any society striving toward egalitarianism. It would seem that only market capitalism has really solved it. Furthermore, we might even argue that capitalism, in its exploitation of the workers [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_marxsanalysis.html “surplus value”], as Marx put it, makes possible new investment and is thus a good thing. Viewed this way, capitalism’s only flaw is a side effect, that workers do not share equitably in the wealth.

Would a voluntary [[community]] based economy and [[ratings system]] work for work? We are assuming that ratings balanced with need, will form the “currency” with which people obtain the necessities of life. The balance here is important. The need weighting needs to be high enough that people live reasonably well and the rating weight needs to be high enough to motivate people to do their best. We do not want idle people. However, if the need weighting is too high, then everyone will live equitably but the motivation to work might decline. Conversely if the rating weight is too high then an unequal society will result and some people will be poor. Communities will have to experiment with the weights to ensure a reasonable balance.

Another consideration is for those who are incapacitated for whatever reason and cannot work. The [[ratings system]] can take that into account and rate them relative to their ability to produce. Indeed, this would seem like a reasonable way to judge everyone: by the ratio of their production to their productive capacity. Thus we expect the highly capable to produce more and hold them to a higher standard.

We should take a moment to re-emphasize that our ideas, and the ratings criteria, are malleable. We are not creating a fixed ideological system like Twin Oaks or Chilean style socialism. Members of a [[ratings system]] can change things whenever they want or not participate at all. They can join communities and leave them at will. The algorithms and weights by which people are rated can be tuned. We can only presume that they will prioritize work for the sake of their own well-being but if they don’t, and their economies suffer, they can modify the [[ratings system]].

We should also stress that a functioning [[ratings system]] should overcome some of the problems in socialist culture. One issue at Twin Oaks that observers have pointed out is that while the consequences of not working are officially severe, in practice they are not. The [[community]] is generally tolerant, perhaps overly so, and often begrudgingly accepts work that isn’t up to par. Getting kicked out is hard. In socialist countries, it is often the case that individual [[productivity]] is not rated that highly to begin with, and a culture of laziness quickly takes over. This is made worse by the fact that socialist cultures are rarely all that egalitarian so a ruling class of bureaucrats, who themselves don’t work very hard, ends up influencing everyone else. A functioning [[ratings system]] should make clear the real values of society and bring contradictions to the fore very quickly.

Surfacing again here are two somewhat contradictory philosophies, libertarianism and egalitarianism. I would argue that the two provide a healthy combination and one that checks the excesses of the other. The US founders also believed roughly in this idea. They believed in a [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-the-founding-fathers-believed-stock-ownership-for-all#:~:text=Rushmore%20%E2%80%94%20George%20Washington%20and%20Thomas,America%20from%20fulfilling%20its%20promise broad sharing of property] (mostly land in those days) so as to create a middle class of landowners who would best support democracy.