Life Without Money: How the Communal Villages Actually Worked

Imagine a village where no one earns a wage, where no one owns their house, where the kitchen cooks your meals and delivers them to a communal dining room three times a day, and where the work you do for your lifetime has been assigned to you by the community elders. That was daily life in the Amana Colonies for nearly eighty years. The Amana Society assigned each family a house and each adult member an occupation.

Men worked in the fields, the woolen mill, the furniture shops, the sawmill, the bakery, the wine cellar. Women cooked in the communal kitchen houses, tended the kitchen gardens, preserved food, and wove cloth. Members received only a small yearly allowance, to be spent at the village stores.

If a member needed shoes or cloth or tools, they came from the community's stock. Fifty-five communal kitchens fed the seven villages, each kitchen feeding a few dozen people. The Küchebaas, or kitchen boss, typically a woman, oversaw cooking, canning, chicken husbandry, and the kitchen's garden.

Meals were communal affairs, served in gender-separated dining rooms in the kitchen house itself. New members joined as adults, signing agreements to contribute their labor and property to the community in exchange for lifelong care and support. The system worked remarkably well for nearly eighty years, sustained by shared religious conviction, by the community's economic self-sufficiency, and by a level of social solidarity that outside observers repeatedly found astonishing.