Counterculture and Communes

Contemporary Group: Garry Wills (A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) maintains that anti-governmental attitudes were embraced by many secular utopian groups, such as the communes of the late 1960s. They wanted to be totally candid, totally voluntary, acting with organic spontaneity. Government represented the very things these people were fleeing -- it was mechanical, regulatory, based on division of labor rather than sharing, on remote and often secret processes of arranging other people's lives instead of letting them arrange everything themselves.

origin and names

late 1960s communes emerged in large numbers
New York Times reported 2,000 communes; the National Institute of Health said that 3,000 was more accurate
as diverse as 19th century ones
self described as:
· Jesus freaks and atheists
· revolutionaries and apolitical
· sexually puritanical and promiscuous
· feminists and male chauvinists
· rural and urban settings: half the communes in each place
· technologically primitive and sophisticated
· retreat from modern world and missionary to save the world
· drug-free and drug-based

location

New England (rural and urban)
Southwest (deserts)
northern CA and OR (urban and mountains) Visit Haight Ashbury in San Francisco: the best known center of the Counterculture and communal living in the late 1960s.

Comparison of Past and Present Communal Societies:

19th century	late 1960s-
relatively poor background	middle class background
to achieve comfortable life (middle class) and/or spiritual life	"natural" lifestyle (materially simple and poor)
model for larger society (wanted to inspire imitation) or dropout from large society	dropout from larger society (but did not expect to be imitated)
farm settings	urban and rural settings
farming and crafts	social services and farming & crafts
embraced dominant technology	rejected dominant technology (appropriate and ecological only)
long life-span: 13 - 100 years	short life-span: less than 10 years
deeply spiritual (Christian)	many different purposes

Remember: Intentional groups struggle to create `prefect' communities that often provide guidelines for future dominant societies.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler and last revised on 24 May 2007.