1. What is a work community?
2. What is communitarian work?
3. The destruction of the meaning of the expression "Communitarian Work"
4. Does communitarian work imply that there is a work community?
5. Is work in a Work Community Communitarian Work?
6. Why are the members of a Work Community and those who perform Communitarian Work called "Communards" if they are two different things?
7. The importance of calling a spade a spade

What is a work community?

A work community is a form of organization characterized by the collective ownership of all the means necessary to produce (the commons of that community). All the resources necessary to carry out the work are collective property, and the surpluses generated from the sale of products or services return to the communal, that is, they are incorporated into the set of resources that the members possess in common, or are invested in the social development of the environment surrounding the community.

It is not just a simple collaboration platform, but rather a team that works closely together to achieve common goals. The members of a work community not only share responsibilities, they also develop their own common knowledge through their work. This knowledge, accumulated and refined over time, in turn develops a commons of knowledge of whose preservation and dissemination the community is responsible.

Examples of work communities are numerous and date back to ancient times. The epicureans in Antiquity¹, the Benedictine monks in the Middle Ages or the hutterites from the 16th century onwards, are early examples of groups organized around an ideal of shared work and life. These groups, in addition to producing goods and services, eliminated mercantile relations among their members. In the world opened up by the French Revolution, work communities through the labor movement, from the French Icarians to the Israeli kibbutz².

In our time, new cooperative movements, such as Maximalist cooperativism, advocate for work communities organized on the basis of egalitarian principles based on common ownership and collective labor and adapted to the possibilities and challenges of the century. They not only seek out the welfare of their own members, but they also seek to contribute to the development and welfare of the larger community around them.

Historically, work communities have been closely linked to egalitarianism, both in their internal organization and in their message to the outside world. They have been true laboratories of social change: the first eight-hour working day, the practical establishment of equality of tasks, decisions and responsibilities between men and women, the implementation of the first sustainability plans (in the 16th century!) or the first technologies focused on sustainability, such as drip irrigation, were born in work communities decades, in some cases centuries, before their extension to society as a whole.

What is communitarian work?

"Communitarian work" has its roots in agrarian societies in which towns and villages collectively managed a "commons" consisting of forests, fisheries, pastures or cultivated areas. The existence of specific terms in different languages to describe communitarian work reflects the importance and almost universal extension of this practice. In Asturian and Spanish, it is known as andecha; in Portuguese, it is known as mutirão; in Basque, as auzolan; in Russian, as toloka; in Finnish, as talkoot; in Norwegian, as dugnad; and in Quechua as minka.

It was organized in a communal manner, with the participation of all, to maintain and protect communal resources. Communitarian work in that environment consisted of such practices such as clearing forests, mowing communal pastures, or maintaining cattle paths, roads, irrigation ditches and water pipes. In medieval al Andalus the practice of communal work also extended to urban guilds such as potters, involving both Christians and Muslims in the management and maintenance of the kilns.

Both in the countryside, where the entire village is involved, and in the city, circumscribed to guild boundaries, the meaning is the same: communal work is the collective and organized effort of a community to maintain a commons that it owns and manages collectively.

The destruction of the meaning of the expression "Communitarian Work"

The paradox is that today the term, although it maintains its traditional use, tends to become diluted. The use of communitarian work has become widespread to the point where it can be used to refer to work performed by social workers or work hours imposed by judges as part of a court sentence. The height of the misappropriation of the term can be seen with multinational NGOs calling volunteering "communitarian work". But in all these examples, there is not one commons that is being maintained or developed, nor does it entail an organized effort by the entire local community.

The work done by social workers or volunteers is actually a service provided to the community, but it is not communitarian work. There is no commons, no shared resource being collectively managed, but rather an external intervention aimed at solving specific social problems. Similarly, the work hours imposed by judges are nothing more than a form of sanction, which while it may benefit the community, has nothing to do with the existence of a commons or a community that organizes its management.

On the other hand, it is rare to find contributions to free software - the first of the universal commons characteristic of our times- being characterized as "communitarian work"... although that is exactly what they are.

Does communitarian work imply that there is a work community?

No. Communitarian work does not necessarily imply the existence of a work community. A village or an association can organize communitarian work activities, such as clearing a communal forest, building infrastructure, or even organizing celebrations, without becoming a work community. Work in commons for the sake of the shared commons is all what it takes. A free software development community or an association that maintains a specialized dictionary or wiki are not work communities either.

Is work in a Work Community Communitarian Work?

In a strict sense, yes, to the extent that all the work of the community ends up reverting to the commons that sustains it. In practice, however, the community members call communitarian work exclusively that which they do in favor of the commons owned by inhabitants of areas in which they are inserted as part of a larger community structure.

Why are the members of a Work Community and those who perform Communitarian Work called "Communards" if they are two different things?

The collective owners of a commons, whichever it may be, are called commoners. In the traditional agrarian and guild communal lands, the commoners are obliged to participate in the Communitarian Work that maintains their commons. In other words, the communal work is carried out by the commons collective owners.

Work Communities, although generally organized as a worker cooperative, differ from other cooperatives in that they grant a central role to the commons they share and develop together. That is why members usually identify themselves as commoners rather than as cooperativists. In the English-speaking world during the last ten years the use of communard (communard in the sense of The Communards of Castile or of the communards of the Paris Commune of 1871) was used instead of commoner (co-owner of a commons) as a result of a bad translation of the term from the Spanish comunero and which ended up taking root due to the romanticism associated with the historical references it raises.

The importance of calling a spade a spade

Ten years ago the University employed all its force in order to dilute the meaning of the term "commons" hoping to turn their study into an employment niche for post-graduates. The meaning of "Communitarian Work" is already in question on account of the University itself and the NGOs that use it to dress up with a communitarian term the methodology of welfare interventions. "Work Community", for the moment, seems to be only a term misused by European cross-border projects in the Pyrenees and on the Portuguese-Leonese border, which have already created an administrative figure with a name that neither corresponds to them nor describes them.

But hollowing out the meanings of words is never innocent. When terms lose their meaning, the alternatives they articulate are also diluted. When those who do so are large institutions with media and educational impact, history and memory are also diluted.

In our time, moreover, we find equals and allies by navigating on the Internet. What comes up on the first two pages of results is accepted as what's out there. If the concepts that articulate worlds are eroded and stripped of meaning, search terms and results are drowned in a soup of confusion. Destroying meanings is atomizing persons.

It is time to recover some basic meanings related to the communal and the collective.