Why Communal Living Makes Sense

I possess a washing machine, oddly enough.
I possess one, because I wear clothes and these clothes need washing. As, of course, do my sheets.
I possess a tumble drier. The function of this is to dry clothes.

Both of these items get used between once and twice a week. And neither is exactly full.

My chief thought every time I go outside for a cigarette after loading the machine up is to look up the street and wonder how many washing machines and tumble driers are in the street.
How many half full washing machines and tumble driers there are, washing and tumbling away.

And then to wonder just how many washing machines and tumble driers would ACTUALLY be needed to serve the street. If the street owned the said machines in common. And paid for them in common. Would we all of us living in that street not be a lot better off owning shares in an adequate number of washing machines and tumble driers?

Every fortnight I toddle down to Morrison's and spend a good fifty quid on food. And I'm not a big eater. And I'm pretty stingy about food- if it's buy one get one free on economy burgers, I'm doing it. Then again, I waste money on expensive seafood snacks and the like.
But I still use a fan assisted oven or a grill to cook what is always a meal for one.

And this food is kept in a fridge freezer.

Again, I can't help feeling that if the street as a whole had somebody whose job it was to get our food and cook it for us and it was stored in a much larger fridge freezer, the cost per head would be significantly less.

It strikes me that one of the things we like about going on holiday, is the fact we get to stay in a hotel. Where so much of the routine crap we waste our every day time on, is done for us and the cost is included in the bill.

And the only reason we as a society generally don't all decide to live in hotels is that they make us pay through the nose for that privilege. The only problem a hotel has, is filling its rooms- if it does that, it can't fail to make a profit. Since most manage to do that quite easily and still manage not to be full that often, it's quite clear that living such a lifestyle is actually quite efficient- it doesn't cost as much to provide per head, as the ACTUAL life we lead- and yet the actual life we lead, is harder work. If instead of paying fifty pounds a night to the hotelier for the room, the hotel was always full and we simply paid our share for the running of it- imagine how much lower our living costs would be than they are now?

The problem is, you mention that you believe life would be better if people lived in communes and people automatically think spaced out hippies walking slowly along a field throwing seeds into a furrow. Or sitting around strumming guitars and smoking pot.

Well, that's maybe why their communes didn't work so well. The Commune bit, good. The organisational system, somewhat lacking. A commune that consists of a few tents in the Arizona desert probably isn't a great idea. But then, farms of any kind in the Arizona desert aren't necessarily great ideas.



What I kind of envisage, is people living in vast, organised hotel complexes. The family home disappears, along with the conventional family. And in fact, one of the benefits of this, is it actually gives the individual more freedom to be an individual within a community which caters for his basic needs.

I would recommend each Commune/Hotel to house about five hundred individuals. It would fulfill the same dynamics a village does, in terms of community spirit, but would also replace the dynamics of the family. Within it, each adult would have their own apartment. Their own private space. With their own bedroom, living room, bathroom, etc. They wouldn't need a substantial cooking area, maybe just an area for preparing drinks and snackfoods.

And the individual would simply pay a flat rate for living costs. As of course, we do now. We now pay rent/mortgage, but we also pay bills, we buy food, we pay in our council taxes for our rubbish to be collected and our children to be educated.

So the flat rate for living costs would include the cost of these. But it would also include the other costs that living this way now meant could be handed over to the commune and the individual wouldn't need to worry about.

The Commune would have a domestic staff to cook and clean, do the laundry, maintain the property, etc. All these functions are now the responsibility of the commune. The individual actually no longer has to worry about doing ANYTHING. His/her life now becomes extra simple. S/he works, hands over one payment to the commune, and spends what is left on themselves. That's it. No need any longer to scrimp and save, life is now simple.
There doesn't NEED to be a family any more with this mode of living, not in the way we now have it. In a commune/hotel, there can be a creche and nursery which takes care of the upbringing of children with full time nannies and the individual can spend as much- or as little time- with their children as suits them. And the imperative for couples to live together or indeed, have any commitment to eachother at all for any other reason than that they personally want to, has now been totally negated. Indeed, even if people did choose to be in a couple, there wouldn't ever be any drama concerning a breakup, because each one would STILL have their own living space, and whatever they chose to do would have absolutely no impact on any children they had.



And the most important point is, of course, that huge part of the fruit of your labours that is drained away by 'ownership' of the building in question. The biggest part of the life costs of most human beings is simply paying for the right to have a roof over your head. Paying a landlord to get rich simply because he owns it and you don't, or paying a bank many times what the bricks and mortar are actually worth, for an asset which has been paid for many times over somewhere along the line.

If every adult on reaching adulthood is automatically deemed to own an equal share in each of these commune/hotels and have an equal democratic voice in appointing its administrators, than that vast amount of personal credit each individual sees being syphoned off in a kind of 'roof tax', will no longer be being syphoned off.

It's not unreasonable to think that the typical bill being given to the individual to live this sort of life- if we chose to look at it in modern cash terms and include everything we now get as a 'bill' or a necessary living cost of some kind- would be around three hundred pounds a month. Less, probably.

Moving away from a cash based system; It would give the individual a far higher quality of life, far more personal credit in return for the labours they put in, and a necessity for far less labour to be put in at all.

So- why DON'T we choose to live like that?