A-Infos (en) Germany, AGDO: The apple & the tree trunk: IA. - GemÖks - just do it - CN => financial lack, poverty, conflicts over money (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We talk too much and do too little. This generally applies to many 
dynamics within the left-wing scene, but I always notice it particularly 
with one issue: community economies. Everyone wants them, but no one 
dares to. ---- Community economies, or community economies for short, 
are concepts for the collective organization of finances. People living 
in a community economy typically don't have their own money; instead, 
the money that comes in from the various members is pooled and belongs 
to everyone. The exact structure of a community economy depends largely 
on the wishes, needs, and requirements of its members; no two 
communities are exactly alike. The concept has many advantages; for 
example, it makes it significantly easier to weather difficult times 
when government benefits are cut or a boss puts someone on furlough. 
Community economies are an effective form of poverty prevention and 
counteract financial and other forms of isolation.

Understandably, this leads to many people who know about the concept 
wanting to be in a shared living arrangement. But almost every time I 
talk to people about it, I hear similar statements: "My flatmates have 
wanted to do this for a long time, but we've been stuck in a negotiation 
process for months," "We're really keen, but we want to discuss 
everything in detail before we try it."

And I think that's a mistake.

My story with GemÖks goes like this: two friends and I were in a 
difficult situation, including financial hardship. We couldn't manage on 
our own, paying for food, rent, and so on. So we simply pooled all our 
money and started a GemÖk from scratch, which has now been around for 
almost four years. Of course, it wasn't always easy. During the initial 
phase, we had frequent, lengthy plenary sessions where we reflected on 
how things were going with the GemÖk, discussed our relationship with 
money and the reasons behind it, the whole complex topic of "social 
capital," and our future prospects regarding the GemÖk. We talked about 
what we needed to feel reasonably secure, to what extent security is 
actually an illusion, and the extent to which our shared responsibility 
for each other extends beyond financial matters. It was a long process 
in which we constantly tried things out. We learned a lot about 
ourselves, our relationship with money and with each other, and how well 
we actually fit together as individuals. We have repeatedly made changes 
to the community management plan, then reflected on them after some time 
and either kept them, discarded them, or modified them. We have 
repeatedly encountered challenges, for example, regarding what to do if 
we suddenly need a large sum of money all at once, or what preventative 
measures to take in case we should part ways on bad terms.

It wasn't a simple process. The initial conditions weren't ideal. 
Generally speaking, emergency situations aren't the best basis for 
far-reaching decisions.

But I can't think of a single situation where we - given this 
constellation of people - could have done better. Certainly not by 
spending weeks and months negotiating the exact details of the Common 
European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

Because the thing is - it's hard to imagine things before you've tried 
them. Before the Community Economist project, I didn't know what my 
personal relationship with money was like, and I had no idea about it. 
Nor did I know how much savings I actually needed to feel relatively 
secure. Nor did I know what influence my relationship with my family of 
origin had on my sense of financial security. All the things we tried 
out over the past four years - before we actually did them, we had no 
idea, at best a vague notion, of how we would feel about them. We 
figured out how we wanted to shape our Community Economist project by 
simply doing it.

So: be brave. Just do it. If your group is keen on living in a 
community, then start one and do the planning and negotiation at the 
same time. If you talk for months without actually trying anything out, 
you might end up with a perfect concept that collapses after the first 
month of implementation.

Even if you think you know each other well enough to discuss everything 
before practical implementation - you might be surprised at how 
differently people actually behave.

Even if you think you have a pragmatic relationship with money - you 
might be surprised how emotionally charged the topic suddenly is for you 
in practice.

As with other steps towards a more collective way of life - from shared 
living arrangements for practical reasons to functional housing, from 
monogamy to non-monogamy - the problems that actually arise in practice 
are often quite different from those discussed at length beforehand. 
Even if it sounds daunting, it really can be the best way to take the 
plunge and learn to swim together.

https://archive.org/details/DerApfelUndDerStamm/Web_2026-03-13-Zine_Gemeinschaft_barrierearm/page/n1/mode/1up
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en