The Pros and Cons of Living in an Income-Sharing Commune

In the heart of Washington, D.C., seven people live in a single home and pool all of their incomes, which range from upwards of $80,000 to a couple thousand. The residents of Compersia Commune embrace an ideology that values unpaid labor and disavows capitalism. In this tiny, socialized economy, the collective gets everything you have—which, for some, has been liberating. “We talk a lot and think a lot about trying to transform our relationship to money,” says GPaul, one of the commune’s members in this Atlantic documentary. “We’re doing all of this work so that worrying about money [and] stressing about money is not so present in our lives.”