Calgary

I've always been interested in the concept of intentional communities and communes. However, the scope of things to go wrong there seems waaaaay to much. For example, they seem to be concentrated in operating a singular business in rural areas with almost full income sharing and so on. Plus, they kinda don't exist in Alberta. I have a full time job (minimum wage, but a full time job nonetheless) that I don't want to leave just to "try something out". I believe there might be a few folks here in the same boat as me.

At the same time, I've been looking for leftist in person communities to socialize with here in Calgary, but they kinda seem non-existent too.

So here's a little proposition. What if we have a super low stakes "commune"? What we do is, we organize a little community which has a fund. Contributions to the fund by each member are decided as a percentage of their income. Say 1% to start with. We don't have to live under the same roof. We don't have to work at the same employer. All that we do is this: contribute an x% of our paycheck to this fund. Every week, we meet and democratically decide where and how we spend the fund.

We could spend it on something like grocery credits (each member receives 100 dollars on groceries), x amount for a phone plan and so on. What are the advantages of doing this?

Here's how I envision a hypothetical commune like this to work:

• Members share a percentage of their paycheck. The size of the fund is dependent upon the income level of every member. This way, every member is incentivized to help other members increase their own respective incomes, as that translates to larger funds.
• Collective bargaining power is always good. We could buy stuff in wholesale much more easily. We could negotiate with service providers to get better deals, thus saving all of us money.
• Weekly meetings mean a nice little socialization thing.

Anyway, you probably have quite a few/many questions that I might or might not have answers to yet. You probably think this is a terrible idea. Or maybe you find this interesting.

Here's what I'm hoping to happen. We meet at central library or somewhere and discuss trying out a very short term, low stakes economic experiment. We decide that we contribute a very small percentage (say 2%) of our income for one month to a little fund. We then create a budget for the month on how to allocate that fund.

I'm interested to observe how this would actually work in person. Would there be total gridlock? How would legislation for this work? How would the spending priorities for the fund look like?

If we find out that it actually seems to be beneficial, we could go ahead with bigger and bigger percentages. If not, it could still be a fun little experiment that would last for a month!

What do you think? Anyone interested in trying something like this out?