January/February 1970
By the Mother Earth News editors
Twin Oaks Community either already is, or is working toward, all of the above-hence, the members think of themselves as a post-revolutionary society. ability to create happy, productive, creative people."
Twin Oaks is different than most other rural communes in three important respects: It is not an agricultural subsistence commune; they raise only part of their food - the rest they purchase with money earned by their hammock-making industry. They consider this a more efficient use of time (hence less hours of work) than trying to raise all their own food. Second, Twin Oaks embraces rather than rejects modern technology - their aim is to use technology in every way possible to reduce the per-person work load and enable people to lead more satisfying lives. Twin Oaks is working hard to develop a strong economic base. And third, Twin Oaks is not a religious or drug-mystical community. Rather, it is based on experimentally altering societal structures so as to discover structures that are most satisfying to the people of the community. This process is an ongoing thing which will take into account peoples' changing values - this is especially important for the first transitional generation that will only gradually be able to throw off their previous conditioning by straight society.
Ideas at Twin Oaks are oriented towards an ever-expanding group of people. Twin Oakers hope their own community will grow to encompass a large number of people, perhaps 500 to 1,000. Then other communities will be formed, some by people who have lived at Twin Oaks. All of these communities will hopefully cooperate economically and in other ways. They don't want to be isolationist, rather, they and their counterparts want to eventually have a system of living, government if you will, that can be successfully applied to whole nations of people.
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Central to Twin Oaks is the "labor credit" system of dividing labor among the members. Briefly described, the community decides each week how much work and what jobs need to be done. Then people sign up for the jobs they want to do. The number of hours each person must do is determined by dividing the total number of hours of work for that week by the number of people there are to do it. The various jobs are given different "labor credits" depending on their "desirability" or "non-desirability" and this is determined by the number of people who sign up to do any given job. If not enough people sign up to do a certain job, say dishwashing, the labor credit value of it is increased (hence, a person will have to work less hours doing that job to receive the same labor credit) until enough people want to do the job. The labor credits are constantly changing as people get tired of a job, the seasons change, etc. Visitor labor ("slave" labor as one member referred to it) is figured into the system and materially lowers the total amount of work a person must do. When we visited the community, people were doing about a 40 hour week - actually comparatively little compared to the typical straight world person, as the 40 hours at Twin Oaks included such things as cooking, dishwashing, shopping, etc. And at Twin Oaks, a week is seven days long; work, play and rest going on every day - as opposed to the straight world's five day "work" week and two days of "rest" (recovery).
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