Pooled Income and Needs-Based Maintenance: The Commune Economy

The income-sharing model used by Twin Oaks, Acorn, and the Federation of Egalitarian Communities: all earned income goes into a common fund, all needs are met from it equally, and no member holds personal savings. Documented in Kat Kinkade's 1973 account and practiced at Twin Oaks for more than fifty years. Kibbutz Samar in Israel's Arava desert ran an open-money variant for its first decade before partially privatizing.

Pooled Income and Needs-Based Maintenance: The Commune Economy

What the commune economy is, and what it is for

The commune economy is the arrangement where every member's income goes into a shared treasury, and every member's needs are met from that same treasury. Nobody keeps a salary. Nobody earns more than their neighbor. The community maintains a budget, decides collectively what the budget covers, and meets each member's needs up to what the budget allows.

This is the most demanding form of economic life a secular community practices. It requires trust at a level most groups never test. It requires governance of money that most groups find uncomfortable. It requires an answer to the question of what counts as a need, and a way to enforce whatever that answer is, without either a market mechanism or a hierarchical employer doing the enforcement for you. The communities that have sustained this arrangement for decades are a small group, and the communities that have tried and moved away from it are considerably larger.

Kibbutz Samar is among the most documented long-run instances in the ToGather archive. Nir, a Samar member who grew up in the community, describes its founding logic: "the slogan etched on Samar's flag was: everyone does something, gives what they can and takes on a broad basis of trust." Eileen, who came to Samar from Detroit in 1987, describes what that looked like in practice: "All our money was together. We had an open money system. You go out and have dinner and later someone takes the money. It's the same. It doesn't matter. There's not a real differentiation between what's yours and what's the community's." Both are describing the same thing from different angles: an arrangement where the boundary between self and community was, for a time, genuinely dissolved at the level of money.

The communes that built explicit frameworks around this logic, the Federation of Egalitarian Communities in North America, Twin Oaks in Virginia, Acorn in Virginia, East Wind in Missouri, are smaller and more intentional than the classical kibbutz. They have written their income-sharing agreements into founding documents, developed labor credit systems to govern contribution, and built decades of practical knowledge about where the arrangement breaks down and why.

Where the commune economy came from

The theoretical lineage is well known. Marx's formulation, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs," is the philosophical expression of the arrangement. The practical lineage is older and less tidy. Hutterite Bruderhöfe in sixteenth-century Moravia practiced full income pooling under religious authority. The kibbutz movement in Israel-Palestine, beginning with Degania in 1910, built the arrangement at scale and without religious enforcement. The North American intentional community movement of the 1960s and 1970s produced a secular cluster of income-sharing communities that persist today.

The Federation of Egalitarian Communities was founded in 1976 to support member communities practicing income sharing, egalitarianism, non-violence, and participatory governance. The original members were Twin Oaks (founded 1967 in Virginia, following B.F. Skinner's Walden Two) and East Wind (founded 1973 in Missouri). Acorn Community (founded 1993, Virginia), close neighbor and frequent labour-sharer with Twin Oaks, joined later. The FEC's published Membership Standards define the full income-sharing requirement explicitly: member communities must practice income sharing among adults.

The kibbutz version grew out of the Zionist labour movement's vision of a productive, egalitarian Jewish society in then-Ottoman Palestine. Degania Aleph, the first kibbutz, was founded on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in 1910. By the state of Israel-Palestine's founding in 1948, there were hundreds of kibbutzim operating the same basic arrangement: all income from all sources pooled into a community treasury, all members' needs met from that treasury, all decisions about what the treasury covered made collectively. The classical kibbutz sustained this through the 1970s. The 1980s brought the first wave of privatization under financial pressure. By the 2000s, the majority of kibbutzim had moved to some form of differential wages, ending the full-pooling commitment.

How the commune economy actually runs

The income pool

In a full income-sharing community, every member who earns income from outside the community contributes it to the common fund. Community enterprises, farms, workshops, and commercial operations also contribute their revenue to the same fund. No member retains personal income from outside work; no enterprise retains profit. All of it flows into the common treasury.

The labour norm

The labour contribution norm is the counterpart to income pooling. At Twin Oaks, the norm is currently around 42 hours per week, tracked through a labour credit system. Each member maintains a credit balance and selects work from a schedule that posts community needs. Community-approved labour, from childcare to hammock-weaving to administrative work, earns credits. Members who fall short of their quota are in debt to the community; those who exceed it build credit. The system is explicit and auditable, which makes it materially different from the informal contribution norm at Auroville or the communal culture at Samar in its open-purse years.

The needs budget

The community sets a budget that covers the needs it has collectively decided to meet: food, housing, healthcare, childcare, education, a personal allowance for outside expenses, and any additional categories the community has agreed on. Members submit requests for items outside the standard package; the community or a designated committee decides. The defining commitment of the system is equality: a member who spent thirty years earning six figures before joining receives the same budget package as a member who arrived without assets.

The labour credit and the limit of formalism

Nir's account of Samar's open-purse system names the limit of informal income pooling: "as much as you need very quickly becomes as much as you want." The Twin Oaks labour credit system, and the kibbutz budget allocation processes before privatization, represent attempts to give needs-based distribution a more formal governance layer. Twin Oaks members can request process reviews if they feel their needs are not being met. The community's Planners and Managers structure distributes decision-making about resource allocation across multiple people rather than concentrating it in a single allocation committee.

FROM THE FIELD: Eileen's account of Samar's open-money years describes the dissolution of the boundary between self and community that full income pooling requires at its best: "There's not a real differentiation between what's yours and what's the community's." Yaniv's account of how that dissolved names the failure mode: "we have a high level of collaboration, so much so that it includes sharing money. And very low level communication. Both stemmed from the same principle which says: we are together, but everyone is stressed." Nir adds the structural analysis: "the economic partnership adds too much pressure and too many intrigues. You can do without it."

What the commune economy is and what it is not

The commune economy and Pour Tous share a contribution norm and a provision commitment. The difference is income pooling. Pour Tous does not require members to contribute external earnings to the AVMF; many Aurovilians have income from outside sources that they do not share with the fund. Full income-sharing communities require all external earnings to flow in. That distinction is where most of the practical difficulty lives.

The commune economy and a standard cooperative differ in the direction of obligation. A worker cooperative pools the enterprise's profits and distributes them among members; members retain wages from other employment. A full income-sharing community pools the wages themselves. The cooperative is a shared business; the commune is a shared life.

The commune economy and a religious communal economy, such as a Hutterite Bruderhof or a Buddhist monastic community, share the institutional structure but differ in the authority that enforces it. In religious communities, theological commitment and community of faith provide the compliance mechanism. In secular communities, the mechanism is governance, process, and culture, which are weaker and more contested, and which require more explicit maintenance.

Communities practicing the commune economy

Kibbutz Samar (Arava Desert, Negev, Israel-Palestine. Founded 1976)

Samar operated a full open-purse income-sharing model from its founding through the 2010s, when financial pressure and internal conflict pushed it toward a privatization process that was still underway in 2023. The Samar model was notable for the absence of formal labour tracking: the community ran on mutual trust rather than credit accounting. Eileen's account of the open-money years describes its strengths; Nir's account of the privatization process documents the limits.

FROM THE FIELD: Three published Samar interviews in the ToGather archive engage directly with the income-sharing arrangement: Eileen on the open-money years and their dissolution; Nir on the common purse, its founding logic, and the privatization process; Yaniv on the connection between shared money and the community's capacity for communication and conflict. These are among the most direct testimonies in the archive about what full income pooling looks like from inside, and what it costs.

Twin Oaks Community (Louisa, Virginia, USA. Founded 1967)

The longest-running secular income-sharing community in North America, founded by a group of young idealists inspired by B.F. Skinner's fictional commune in Walden Two. Twin Oaks currently houses roughly 100 adults and 15 children. It operates the FEC's full income-sharing commitment alongside a labour credit system, a planners-and-managers governance structure, and a set of community processes around joining, leaving, and resource allocation that have been refined over fifty-plus years.

Degania Aleph and the classical kibbutz tradition (Israel-Palestine. Founded 1910)

Degania was the first kibbutz, founded on the southern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The classical kibbutz model it established, full income pooling plus needs-based provision, was replicated across hundreds of communities through the first decades of the Israeli state. By the 2000s, most kibbutzim had privatized at least partially.

East Wind Community (Tecumseh, Missouri, USA. Founded 1973)

East Wind operates on the same FEC income-sharing principles as Twin Oaks, with a slightly larger land base and different community processes. East Wind's nut butter production business is a significant income source.

How to begin practicing this in your own group

QUESTIONS TO START ASKING

Can your group genuinely agree on what counts as a need, and enforce that agreement with fairness across members with very different backgrounds and expectations? This is the question that most community processes avoid and most income-sharing systems eventually collide with.

How will you handle members with dependent children, elderly parents, or medical conditions that produce costs outside the standard budget?

What happens when a high earner joins and a low earner leaves, or vice versa? Income pooling works best when the pool is stable. Have you modelled this?

How will you track labour contribution, and what happens when someone consistently contributes less than the norm?

What is your community's relationship to outside work by members?

How will you handle the transition if the community decides to move away from full income sharing? Build an exit protocol before you need one.

Six steps toward a pooled-income arrangement:

1. Draft the needs budget before you pool anything. The income pool is the visible part. The needs budget is what matters. What does the community commit to covering? Housing, food, healthcare, personal allowance, education, childcare: write each category down and put a number next to it. Make sure the numbers add up before asking anyone to give up their salary.
2. Decide the labour contribution norm and its enforcement mechanism first. Informal mutual trust can hold a small, ideologically aligned group for years. It does not hold a 100-person mixed community for decades. Decide whether you will use a labour credit system, informal community review, or something else, and write down what happens when someone consistently falls short.
3. Study Twin Oaks's governance documents. Fifty-plus years of documented process is available: the Planners and Managers structure, the labour credit accounting system, the membership process, the process for handling interpersonal conflict, the process for handling resource allocation disputes. Read them before building your own.
4. Start with a partial pool or a trial year. Most groups that have moved toward income sharing started with a subset of members, a time-limited trial, or a partial pooling arrangement. This surfaces the actual disagreements about what counts as a need before the stakes are permanent.
5. Visit an FEC member community before committing. A month at Twin Oaks or East Wind as a visitor or trial member will teach you things about income sharing that no document can convey. Apply for the visitor program before finalizing your founding documents.
6. Build the conflict process into the founding structure, not into the bylaws amendment process. Income-sharing communities generate disputes about fairness, contribution, and needs. Eileen's account of trying to introduce gishur (conflict mediation) at Samar, and finding it never really took off, is the cautionary version of this. Build the dispute process in from the start.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

The Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) at fec.coop is the canonical starting point for anyone interested in income-sharing communities in North America. Current member communities include Twin Oaks, Acorn, East Wind, and a handful of smaller or forming communities. Twin Oaks accepts visitors for 3-week stays via twinoaks.org.

Kat Kinkade, a Twin Oaks co-founder, wrote two books that document the community's founding and early years: A Walden Two Experiment (1973) and Is It Utopia Yet? (1994). Both are honest about the failures as well as the achievements.

The Samar interviews are the archive's most direct and longitudinal account of what full income pooling looks like over time. Eileen, Nir, Yaniv, Uriel.

Sources and connections

The Samar archive interviews (Eileen 69676373a6b2750ae0ca98f7, Nir 6967623dc43999a86b18336f, Yaniv 696761719c068fe730117fec, Uriel 696760d4ade306e3f5aaced5) are the primary fieldwork grounding for this entry. All four are published in the Base44 archive.

Twin Oaks and the FEC are documented through publicly available sources: the Twin Oaks website, the FEC website, and Kat Kinkade's books. The kibbutz material draws on published academic and historical sources; the archive does not yet include a primary kibbutz interview.

Connected library entries: Pour Tous: The All-Goods-Free Economy · Labor Credit Systems: The Twin Oaks Model · Ostrom's Eight Design Principles · The Tamera Forum · Restorative Justice: Repair, Accountability, and Return