Commie Clothes

When explaining Twin Oaks’ core economic agreements, I often tell visitors applying for membership that if they are accepted as provisional members, they can show up at the end of the Twin Oaks driveway completely naked and without a cent to their name, and the community will provide them with everything they need.  This of course gets most people laughing as they picture this in their mind, but that is essentially the core economic agreement: with your contribution of labour, the community will provide you with all your necessities.

Commie Clothes is the somewhat tongue-in-cheek name of Twin Oaks’ system of  community provided clothing.  It is an example of an everyday form of egalitarian resource sharing.

Almost the entire upstairs of the building called Harmony is devoted to Commie Clothes.

A section of Commie Clothes

The system is simple: any member can go up to Commie Clothes, find an article of clothing that works for them, and either put it on right there or take it elsewhere.

There are many things available beyond clothes:

Shoes

Bedding

Towels

When finished with an article of clothing, it can be tossed into one of the laundry bins on the ground level.

One of the assigned jobs that is done almost every day is community laundry.  Typically in two hours shifts, those who sign up for this job wash the clothes in our industrial washer, and hang them out to dry (or use the dryer if needed).  Dry clothes are hung back up in Commie for use by another member.

Clothesline from ground level. Looks like someone was really into the tie-dye this week.

It is possible for people who live at Twin Oaks to rely entirely on Commie Clothes, not own any clothes themselves, and never have to wash their own clothes, or hang them up.  There are a few people who essentially do this.

Clothing at Twin Oaks, as a whole, is also an example of a system with dual levels of ownership: public and personal.  While the community maintains this great system of communal clothing, there are no restrictions on members being able to have their own personal clothing that is not a part of the Commie Clothes system.

When a member takes clothes from Commie, those clothes are considered to have been ‘personalized,’ now in the possession of that member, out of the public system entirely.  That person can basically keep those clothes as long as they want.  Clothes can be worn or just a few hours and then returned to be washed, or they could be kept in one’s personal collection in one’s room, and returned years later (or even never at all).  Most other buildings have a washer, clothesline, and dryer people can use for their personal clothes.  But, they have to do this on their own time, just like most people in dominant culture.

Most members choose to fall somewhere in between total reliance on Commie Clothes and retaining only personal clothes.  It would be difficult to estimate the number of people who regularly use Commie Clothes, and the extent.  Commie clothes often end up becoming privatized, but privatized clothes are then returned to the system.

Some interesting dynamics about the overall system:

Clotheslines viewed from Commie Clothes window

• Doing the laundry, organizing, or mending of Commie Clothes are all official jobs in the community for which one can receive labour credits.  Doing the same for one’s personal clothes is not.  This creates an incentive to favour using the public resources over the private.  People can of course maintain their personal clothes at the level they desire, but they do that in their own free time.
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  Commie Clothes' industrial sized washer

  Communal systems save time and resources.  Instead of 100 people washing their own clothes every few weeks, one person can get through the typical amount of public clothes in a few hours a day.  Instead of everyone having to purchase their own washing machine and dryer, or rely on laundromats, there is one centralized place that is free to all (plus a few more in some other buildings). Instead o all the associated resource use issues with creating washing machines for 100 people, and the chemicals, water, and energy required to run them, one large industrial washer can instead be used.  And, instead of always using dryers, those who work in Commie Clothes strive to hang stuff up to dry outside when possible instead of wasting electricity on dryers.

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  Organization signs and some artwork

  Commie Clothes is well organized and maintained, as can be seen in the above pictures.  In the recent past, the similar public clothing system at Acorn community was essentially a pile of clothes in one room.  It still was used by those who needed something, but people only have so much patience for hunting through disorder.  When organization and maintenance decline, so do people’s reliance on public goods.

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  Some nicer dresses

  For members to keep relying on Commie Clothes, there has to be a wide selection of clothing.  This means different sizes, types, colours, and styles.  It’s not going to work if we only have size 30-34 blue jeans (although we do have a lot of those).  Recently, there has been an influx of ‘business casual’ clothing compared to the past, which are things of the quality of being able to wear to business meetings in dominant culture (which we do more often than one may suspect), so these aren’t just a bunch of poor quality work clothes (although there is also a section for those, which are very useful if one is going to, say, paint a room).

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  Mending area

  Similar to the above point, there has to be a general influx of new clothing.  We can mend old clothing, but only to a reasonable extent.  Perhaps even more important than the mending is the perception that there will almost always be something new in Commie Clothes.  This gets people in there to ’shop around,’ and keeps up the idea that this is a resource worth using and maintaining. In recent years this hasn’t been an issue: we often get donations, and members moving here often make a large amount of their clothing public when they arrive.  If anything, we’ve had to made donations to goodwill because we have had too many clothes in Commie.

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  Winter clothing, currently stored far in the back, out of the way

  Like most public goods, Commie Clothes assumes that there will not be an unpredicted or unmanageable rush on goods.  This typically happens when the seasons start to change, although it can also happen at less predictable times.  On the first day after the high temperature has dropped down below something like 70 degrees, there will be many people seeking warmer clothes and blankets.  We can anticipate seasonal changes somewhat, but some areas can look rather decimated for a few days after a quick change in weather.  (Luckily, I’ve already grabbed my winter clothes!)

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  Costumes, wigs, and other things for parties like Halloween

  Hoarding can be problematic.  Since anyone can personalize clothes by bringing them to their room, the only hard limit for how many clothes one can take from Commie is the cubed area of one’s room.  Some members in the past have used a lot of this space; piles of clothes taller than their height in their room is not much of an exaggeration.  If more than a handful of people do this, the system won’t work.  Most of the above methods can be seen as hoarding prevention.  If there is a well maintained system that consistently has new clothes, people will, in general, not feel the need to privatize many items.  If the system is not well maintained, and people start to have the perception of scarcity, the ‘grab what you can’ mentality will reassert itself, and the system won’t work again until there is a large influx of new clothes of that type.

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  Shelf of underwear and such. It's all clean, but still seems sort of...eww...

  There are limits to what can be effectively shared.  While there are a large number of shoes, there are probably only a few choices for that person who wears size 13.  It’s also difficult for those of us who wear more common sizes to find shoes that actually fit completely right, or heavy duty boots for things like construction work.  The community therefore offers each member a yearly subsidy through Commie Clothes to buy shoes, which doesn’t cover the entire cost, but it enables people to purchase them more easily.  Similarly, not many people seem to want to rely on the bins of public underwear or mismatched socks, mostly due to typical biases about wearing those items that other people have worn.  Subsidies are offered for those as well.

Most of these dynamics can also be seen in other types of public/communal sharing systems.

Tagged: economics, egalitarianism, resource sharing, technics, Twin Oaks