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.

Here is a 2009 functional example of a commune in eastern Germany:

SIEBEN LINDEN (in German, 7 Linden trees), a hamlet in former East Germany, half-way between Hamburg and Berlin, looks deceptively normal. There is a cluster of houses, some fields, a few cars parked by the side of the road and a small shop, all set against the backdrop of a looming pine forest.

Closer inspection, however, reveals a few peculiarities. Several of the modern-looking buildings turn out to be made of wood, straw and mud. There are huge quantities of logs, because wood-fired stoves and boilers provide all the heating, and quite a few solar panels, which generate most of the electricity. And there are more young people around than usual in rural Germany. Sieben Linden, a self-proclaimed eco-village (called communes in the 1960s and 1970s), is growing fast, unlike the surrounding towns.

The 120 inhabitants have decided to live in as green a manner as possible. They are trying to wean themselves off fossil fuels, grow their own food and timber, acquire fewer frivolous possessions and produce less waste. Food comes either from their own fields or from wholesalers, so there is no need for much packaging. Any scraps are composted. Urine from the toilets is diverted to a reedbed for natural purification, and the faeces are turned into compost for the community’s forest.

The residents live separately but share big appliances such as washing machines and cars. Before buying a new tool, say, they will put a note into the community’s logbook to ask if anybody has one they could borrow. If not, they will probably buy one secondhand. They often wear one another’s hand-me-downs. Unwanted possessions are left out for others to help themselves.

Carefree consumption is not actually forbidden, though it would raise eyebrows, says Eva Stützel, who helped to found Sieben Linden over a decade ago. But the main reason the inhabitants buy less and waste less is that they have a rich community life which does not revolve around trips to shops, restaurants and cinemas. They go ice-skating on a nearby pond in winter and swimming in summer; they teach one another horse-riding and yoga and tai chi; they put on plays and concerts and seminars.

The idea, explains Kosha Joubert, another resident, is not to adopt a dreary, ascetic lifestyle but to demonstrate that it is possible to live in a green manner without undue sacrifice or disruption. Western urbanites could easily adopt elements of the eco-village lifestyle, she says, by forming car pools, say, or shopping co-operatives.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler and last revised on 11 March 2009.