For the last year and a half, I’ve had the privilege of living at the Trellis, an intentional community house in Northeast Portland, Oregon, that’s home to six people, two cats, and one dog. Life at the Trellis includes weekly meetings, shared chores and cooking responsibilities, and pooling money for groceries. You can often find us playing Bananagrams, chatting in doorways, dancing in the kitchen, and trying to find a time to watch the next episode of whatever TV show we’re watching. (There’s a lot of scheduling. So much scheduling.)

The Trellis is just one example of what communal living can look like. The Foundation for Intentional Community defines an intentional community as simply “a group of people who have chosen to live together or share resources based on common values.” Intentional communities take many forms, ranging from 150-person ecovillages to small-scale, urban communal housing.

Since moving to the Trellis, it’s hard to imagine living any other way. I love hearing people start their day in the next room—frying eggs and making coffee. I love ‘alone-together time,’ when we each do our own thing in the same room. I love knowing someone will be there to help me if something is too hard for me to do on my own. It’s all of the details of community living that make my life so much richer and fuller.

Living at the Trellis also reflects my politics. Sharing space and resources with others makes me less reliant on capital than I would be if I were living alone. It reduces my cost of living, which means I can work less and spend more time organizing (and just living). Although living in a community is part of my personal political values, the Trellis itself does not have an overtly political goal: the house's mission is to be a supportive space where we help each other grow, as a trellis supports plants in a garden.

As I’ve deepened my work exploring the concept of communal care as a research fellow for Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center over the last year and a half, I’ve had mixed feelings about the Trellis’s apolitical mission. I’ve found myself wondering about the role of our home lives in our political aspirations. Our homes are always political because they are shaped by the structures we live under, but how much could they (or should they) be part of our radical* political work? How radical can living in community really be?

PART I - THE POWER OF PREFIGURATION

The best argument for the radical potential of communal living is in its power of prefiguration, or seeing how we transform the world as just as important as what the world becomes. I want to live in a world where people live close to each other and the land, provide for each other’s needs, create and heal together, and spend a lot of time hanging out. Prefiguration says, if I want to be part of building that world, why wouldn't I start now? Prefiguration is focused on process, on living into the world we want as much as we agitate to make it happen. This approach reminds me of a common principle in manifestation: that you have to feel what it would be like to get what you want in order to be in the energetic space to receive it. Our bodies, emotions, and lived experiences are powerful! If we don’t take the time to experience the joy of being in community, how will we possibly build toward it?

The other gift of prefigurative projects is that they create cracks in our daily reality through which other possibilities can shine. We can get so stuck in the status quo that we can’t even imagine any other world. Practicing new ways of being can show us that they are indeed possible, and spreading the word can help others see that too. That’s not nothing.

I see prefiguration play out in my household all the time, particularly through building relational skills. Every day, my housemates and I practice considering each other’s needs, making decisions together, and wading through conflict and disagreement. Just the other day, we cleaned out our linen closets, and a whole host of emotions came up as we decided what to keep and what to get rid of! It felt a little silly, but I practiced saying what hurt my feelings and listened to everyone else's needs and desires. It was a tiny moment, but it was a chance to practice how I want to be in relationship with others in the world I want to build.

If we want to create strong social movements, we’re going to have to make a lot higher-stakes decisions than which sheets to keep! We need relational skills to build strong movements, and the home is often where we do our deepest relational work. Our home lives are, then, mirrors of our work outside the home. For that reason, it’s worth asking ourselves what we’re practicing there.

Beyond functioning as a prefigurative and relational practice ground, communal living also creates some structural conditions that support political participation. Doing organizing work is more possible for me because so much of my time is freed up by being one of six people doing housework. To this point, real estate developer William J. Levitt said during the Red Scare in the 1940s that “no man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do.” According to Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, this was a fairly common sentiment in the post-war years: politicians and business magnates alike promoted single-family home ownership to discourage Communism.

Communal living also provides a pool of people to mobilize. The Trellis is at the center of a web of all our individual family members, lovers, and friends, so knowing each other compounds our organizing potential. You have to have relationships to have people to organize! As potential pools of people to draw from, intentional communities might flow in and out of having more overt political goals as they mobilize for a certain cause and then return to life as normal.

This happened at our house when we mobilized to meet an urgent need in our community during our annual Halloween party last year. While we were planning the party, the government shutdown was causing a food security crisis, and SNAP users were seeing their benefits suspended. One of my housemates had the idea to ask people to bring food for us to donate, so we spread the word and ended up with a huge pile of canned goods to give to our local food pantry!

Our house also provides physical space in which to organize. Living together in a big house rather than separately in tiny apartments means we have space to gather people! Being able to host parties and neighborhood potlucks has been one of the greatest joys of living at the Trellis for me. It’s one way I want our house to be more politically engaged, too—by offering the space for other kinds of gatherings like organizing meetings. In this way, communal living has radical potential simply by providing time, people, and space to gather.

Finally, living at the Trellis makes me a better organizer because living here fills my cup. Having a warm, loving place to come home to makes it more possible for me to attend meetings and protests. I also happen to live with other organizers and people interested in social justice, and they help me refine my ideas and hold me accountable when I’m doing too much or too little. In other words, living with others facilitates my participation in movement work in ways living alone wouldn’t. It gives me sustenance to stay in the struggle. That source of sustenance might be different for different people—living alone might give someone else the peace and groundedness they need to do movement work—but whatever form it takes, having space for rest and connection is a crucial part of organizing.

PART II - THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT HAPPEN AT HOME

Since living at the Trellis, I’ve come to see that communal living offers significant potential for radical political participation, but by itself, it will not create radical change. All of the factors that make communal living potentially radical could just as easily be used for other purposes: people could use the free time, space, and people provided by communal living to host raves or play video game tournaments (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

The reality is that living in an intentional community makes my life better, but it does very little to change our collective conditions. Social ecologist Olivia Chandler points out that intentional community living can quickly become “lifestyle anarchism,” a term coined by Murray Bookchin, if we aren’t careful. Lifestyle anarchists seek alternative ways of living for their individual betterment rather than collective liberation. For larger-scale, rural intentional communities whose missions include a sense of separation from mainstream society, this danger is particularly prevalent. A group of 100 people striving to be as independent from capitalism as possible is admirable, but their efforts don’t, on their own, help everyone else get free.

If our goal is to radically change society, by, say, overturning capitalism and dissolving the state, alternative living alone will not achieve that. Communal living does decrease my house’s reliance on capitalism, but those are small drops in a very large bucket. Millions of people would have to live communally before it became threatening to the state or the market. And even if intentional communities became more widespread, without control of the means to produce food, shelter, clothing, and medicine, these communities would be extremely limited in their radical potential.

It will take highly disruptive actions, such as general strikes, workers taking over factories and stores, and the creation of new institutions, to dramatically change our economic system. To build up to actions like those, we need massive organizing, which means participating in groups in our wider communities. None of that happens in our weekly house check-ins.

Intentional communities can be a really significant means of imagining a more communal future—I’ve experienced it myself—but, alone, they will not rattle the larger political and economic systems we live in. Communal living nourishes my organizing work in many ways, but it is distinct from it. For me, communal living and organizing feed each other in a beautiful loop, one incomplete without the other. I’m beginning to understand communal living as a launching point for external political work rather than where the work ends.

The connection between my home life and my organizing life will likely ebb and flow— sometimes they will more directly inform each other than at other times. I’ll always be looking for the right balance between my home as a place to rest and as a place that encourages me to act. However our home lives look, I hope we all remember that creating the new world will require action from us outside of our homes. May we have the abundant care, support, and relationships we need to rise to that call.

*I use the term “radical” throughout this essay to mean “capable of creating political transformation” rather than simply “against the mainstream.” Communal living is certainly socially radical in a culture that still values the nuclear family model and expects people to live with their families. In this essay, I’m specifically interested in exploring communal living’s potential as a vehicle for dramatic political change.

Marin Hart (they/them) is an organizer, writer, and research fellow at Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center. Marin is from Houston, Texas, and owes much of their reproductive justice education to the kick-ass advocates of the South. Marin got their bachelor's degree in Gender and Women’s Studies from Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. When Marin is not reading or writing, they love going for long walks, singing in community, and eating pickles.