Commune (intentional community)

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A commune is one of many types of intentional communities or planned communities. There are several different types of intentional communities. An Eco-village or ecovillage is one where the focus of the community is to create a community that is completely environmentally friendly and recycle as much as possible. Whereas a co-housing community is where several individuals or families reside in a large house and share a community kitchen and living room area. In a commune they share financial resources to keep the community's economy alive as they are privately funded by the members. A co-op is usually a bit more expensive and reside in urban areas. There are also communities that are created based on shared interests, such as painting, or religions such as Paganism or Christianity. In all cases the personal prosperity of the members should remain theirs and should it be taken away then something is wrong.

The planned communities that existed from the 60's and later have changed considerably. Today most people are seeking to create a new type of community where the housing is more affordable and the people who are members are in fact people you know. People who create and reside in the communities are seeking a return to a better way of life. There are many contemporary intentional communities all over the world, a list of which can be found at the Online Communities Directory.

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[edit] Categorization of communes

Benjamin Zablocki categorized communes this way:

Of course, many communal ventures encompass more than one of these categorizations.

Some communes, like the ashrams of the Vedanta Society or the Theosophical commune Lomaland, formed around spiritual leaders; while some communes formed around political ideologies. For others, the "glue" is simply the desire for a more shared, sociable lifestyle. Moreover, some people find it is just more economical to live communally. Many contemporary squatters pool their resources in this way, forming urban communes in unoccupied buildings.


[edit] Communities in the United States

Although communes are most frequently associated with the hippie movement-- the "back-to-the-land" ventures of the 1960s and 1970s-- there is a long history of communes in America.

A few notable examples include:

  • Fruitlands was a commune founded in 1843 by Amos Bronson Alcott in Harvard, Massachusetts. The tempo of life in this Transcendentalist community is recorded by Alcott's daughter, Louisa May Alcott, in her piece "Transcendental Wild Oats."
  • The Oneida Society was a commune that lasted from 1848 to 1881 in Oneida, New York. Although this utopian experiment is better known today for its manufacture of Oneida silverware, it was one of the longest-running communes in American history.
  • The commune Modern Times was formed in 1851 in Long Island.
  • The anarchist Home Colony was formed in 1895 across the Puget Sound from Tacoma, Washington on Key Peninsula, and lasted until 1919.

[edit] Communes in the world

Beyond the United States, there have been other famous communes, such as the kibbutzim in Israel. Also, many cultures naturally practice communal living, and wouldn't designate their way of life as a planned 'commune' per se, though their living situation may have many characteristics of a commune.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Margaret Hollenbach, Lost and Found: My Life in a Group Marriage Commune (University of New Mexico Press, 2004), ISBN 0-8263-3463-6.
  • Timothy Miller, "Assault on Eden: A Memoir of Communal Life in the Early '70s", Utopian Studies, Vol. 8, 1997.
  • Laurence R. Veysey, The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Communities in Twentieth Century America (1978).
  • Benjamin Zablocki, The Joyful Community: An Account of the Bruderhof: A Communal Movement Now in Its Third Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1971, reissued 1980), ISBN 0-226-97749-8. (The 1980 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog called this book "the best and most useful book on communes that's been written".)
  • Benjamin Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes (The Free Press, 1980), ISBN 0-02-935780-2.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Roberts, Ron E. (1971). The New Communes Coming Together in America. New Jersey: Prentice Hall inc. Fitzgerald, George R. (1971). Communes Their Goals, Hopes, Problems. New York: Paulist Press. Lattin, Don. (2003, March 2) Twilight of Hippiedom. The San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved March 16, 2008, from http://www.sfgate.com/ Meunier, Rachel. (1994, December 17). Communal Living in the Late 60s and Early 70s. Retrieved March 16, 2008, from http://www.thefarm.org/lifestyle/cmnl.html Lauber, John. (1963, June). Hawthorne’s Shaker Tales [Electronic version]. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 18, 82-86. Wild, Paul H. (1966 March). Teaching Utopia [Electronic version]. The English Journal, Vol. 55, No. 3, 335-337+339. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. (1925). The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.


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