Intentional Communities and Communal Economics

Motivation for Sharing

In a communal economy, commonly owned assets are entrusted to individuals for their use, not earned in exchange for a person's labor. Upholding all agreements, such as the community's bylaws, property code, and behavior code, as well as its labor contribution requirement (sometimes called a labor quota), earns the individual's right to membership, and in turn, membership provides access to all the wealth of the communal society.

There are different motives for individuals to produce common wealth to be shared by all members of the communal economy. In many communal societies, a focus upon spiritual values serves to motivate religious persons to share communally, and some of the most successful and long-lived communal traditions are spiritual or religious, such as Catholic monasteries, Buddhist temples, Hindu ashrams, and Anabaptist colonies. Yet since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution, there have also been many secular communal societies, arising from a rational or intellectual rather than a spiritual motivation for the sharing lifestyle. For many religious communities, the motivation to share is considered to originate from an external revelation (to be of a transcendent nature), while for secular communities and many Earth-based spiritual communities the motivation to share is considered to arise intuitively (to be of an immanent nature).

Anthropologist Richard Leakey offers an explanation for the motivation for sharing. Through his study of human prehistory in Kenya, he arrived at the theory that evolution has resulted in the development of our sense of obligation and generosity and other emotions, as human instincts helping to assure the success of our species. He asserts that “sharing, not hunting or gathering as such, is what made us human” (Leakey 1978, p. 120). Therefore, our ability to know right from wrong and to seek peace, love, and harmony (referred to in some spiritual traditions as our “inner light”) may simply be an aspect of human development, like language capability, that evolved through natural selection. Some people may seek community because their sharing instinct is stronger, while in others the competitive instinct is stronger, keeping them from sharing.

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