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Fellowship for Intentional Community
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Fellowship for Intentional Community: Our mission is to support and promote the development of intentional communities and the evolution of cooperative culture.

Anarres Two Cooperative Community

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Mission: To demonstrate the viability of democratic, voluntary, cooperative socialism. But the details of exactly how the community will function will be worked out by the participants.

From www.ic.org/directory/anarres-two-cooperative-community/:


I’m interesting in a forming a cooperative community based on a voluntary, egalitarian and democratic form of socialism (like a kibbutz) but which allows the members as much personal freedom as possible (people have choices, and they don’t have to agree on every little detail).

For now, the community is just a primitive camping cooperative (with one member who is rarely there). The easiest way to set up group ownership would be as a company with shareholders, but it would actually be a member owned cooperative. Zoning restricts us to one building or mobile home, which would probably serve as a community building, but since the land is zoned for agriculture/mining/recreation, a dormitory for farm workers (us) would also be possible, apparently. Currently the land is completely undeveloped, with no access to any utilities. The next major improvement would be a well (our neighbor to the west recently had one successfully installed).

At some point, we could try to develop cooperative, worker-owned businesses. I'd like to see it organized so that people could work the number of hours they choose (with some minimum), and then the profits would be shared according to hours worked. You could also work outside the community and share part of your income.

Ursula K. LeGuin wrote about a highly evolved form of such a community in her science fiction novel “The Dispossessed”. Anarres Two would not be an attempt to exactly recreate the society depicted on the planet Anarres in her book, but it’s an interesting vision of a non-hierarchical, cooperative society that can act as an inspiration (and as a warning about things that can go wrong). Cooperative communities like the Zionist kibbutzes and the Anabaptist Hutterite communities have been successful, but they are fairly rigid in their structure and ideology, while Marxist-Leninist states are clearly undemocratic and oppressive. At the other extreme, counter-cultural communes tend to lack a clear focus or long-term vision. I'd like to try to strike a balance.

Address
Physical Address
King's View Road
Imlay, Nevada 89418
United States