When American journalist Eric Reece landed at Twin Oaks in 2014, he went into raptures. ‘It is a place’, he wrote, ‘where everyone seems busy and productive, where obnoxious foremen don't exist, and where all workers share equally in both the ownership and the profits from their labor’ (Reece, 2016 , p 171). What's more, everything indicated, on the surface at least, that Twin Oaks community had managed to make work into something other than a sad obligation whose potential for individual and collective development had been spoiled by the capitalist world. Since at least the 19th century, the socialist tradition has been searching for the conditions under which the products of human labour would be, in the words of Karl Marx (1932, p 277), ‘as many mirrors from which our natures would shine forth’. In the section of the ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ from which that excerpt is taken, Marx asserts that to produce as human beings requires a person to experience an individual pleasure in work that expresses their individuality. One must also feel the satisfaction of gratifying a human need, be recognized by others as a complement of their own being, and ultimately realize one's authentic nature, that of a sociable being. Private property, Marx adds, is an insurmountable obstacle to the realization of such a vision. When the means of production are monopolized by the few, ‘my labour […] is the alienation of life’, it is ‘only a forced labour’, it is ‘my self- loss’ (Marx, 1932, p 278, emphasis in original).

Like other intentional communities that have opted for equality, Twin Oaks and Acorn have abolished private property within their domains. By setting themselves up as little republics of the commons, they have taken a great step towards a world that is still largely unknown: the world of concrete utopias, where work is not reduced to the level of forced labour but is regarded as an emancipatory practice vis-à-vis the institutions of straight society. As shown in the previous chapter, intentional communities cannot do without some form of composition with the market. But the market's shadow is not so pervasive as to taint all the productive activity conducted outside the mainstream world.