Communes had a brief resurgence in popularity in the 1960s’ and 70’s with the Hippie and Back-to-the-Earth movements.
The communes of this time had three main characteristics: first, egalitarianism – that communes specifically rejected hierarchy or graduations of social status as being necessary to social order.
Second, human scale – that members of some communes saw the scale of society as it was then organised as being too industrialised (or factory sized) and therefore unsympathetic to human dimensions.[1]
And third, that communes were consciously anti-bureaucratic.
Many communes followed core principles: such as
- Live and work together
- Have a communal economy, i.e. common finances and common property (land, buildings, means of production)
- Have communal decision-making, usually consensus decision making
- Try to reduce hierarchy and hierarchical structures
- Have communalisation of housework, childcare and other communal tasks
- Have equality between women and men
- Have low ecological footprints through sharing and saving resources
Each hippie commune was different: some were deeply religious communities while others were completely secular. Drug use was rampant on some hippie communes and forbidden on others. Some were strictly self-sufficient agrarian societies, but other hippie communes participated in capitalism–owning businesses such as selling music tapes and arts and crafts. There was no “one-size fits all” model, and each hippie commune developed its own culture, rules, and personality over time.
By the 1980s, the original fascination surrounding hippie communes had largely faded, and they began dropping off the map, while a few continue to limp along today.
The dissolution of the hippie communes usually came about for two reasons.
The first was due to internal squabbles and personality conflicts. Typically, cliques would form among members that would be on opposite sides in decision-making and would eventually end in feuds and arguments. Finally, core members would leave, and the remaining members would struggle on for a few years before they too abandoned the whole idea.
The second reason is their popularity. Those communes that were initially successful, and had open memberships, became more widely known which attracted numerous potential members. Many of these new recruits however, had social problems, were addicts, or drifters, and those whose motivation for joining had more to do with finding a free ride than utopian ideals.
As so often happens, a few dedicated members would work to support the rest, but without the equal effort and participation of all members, the community becomes unsustainable and inevitably ends in collapse.
This same pattern is evident in our current society where the expensive salaries and benefit packages of bureaucrats and government employees, along with welfare payments to the underprivileged, are all paid for by an increasingly shrinking middle class. This is equally unsustainable and likewise headed for collapse.
Similar in ideology and often identified as hippie communes were the artists’ communes. These were similar in structure and operation as most communes throughout history, but the focus of their efforts was on creating art rather than farming or manufacturing.
On example was Drop City, a counterculture artists’ community that formed in southern Colorado in 1965. Abandoned by the early 1970s, it became known as the first rural hippie commune.
In the 1960s and 1970s art communes such as Friedrichshof also known as the Aktionsanalytische Organisation flourished. Creative art was enthusiastically produced within such groups, which became gathering points for the counterculture movement.
While artists’ communes are identified with the hippie movement of the 60’s and 70’s the concept dates back much earlier. In the 19th and early 20th century they were called Art Colonies.
It is estimated that between 1830 and 1914 some 3000 professional artists participated in a mass movement away from urban centres into the countryside, residing for varying lengths of time in over 80 communities.
An art colony or artists’ colony is a place where creative practitioners live and interact with one another. Artists are often invited or selected through a formal process, for a residency from a few weeks to over a year.
Artists’ colonies were run according to three types of organizations:
- Villages with transient and annually fluctuating populations of artists. Such as painters who visited for just a single summer season.
- Villages with a semi-permanent mix of visiting and resident artists. Some artists would live year-round in shared or private dwellings, with guest rooms or cabins for visiting artists.
- Villages in which a largely stable group of artists decided to settle permanently whereby artists bought or built their own houses and studios.
Today’s art communes are a mix of artists, drifters, collectivists, activists, Dadaists, and hangers on. Such groups are more politically and ideologically diverse than their mid-20th century counterparts. Most offer the benefits of time, space, and refuge from the usual workaday world.
Lessons learned from the hippie and artist’s communes are that while opening the doors to your community to anyone and everyone is an idealistic and egalitarian sentiment, it always ends in disaster.
The artists colonies were more successful because they screened their members before acceptance. Typically, anyone wishing to join such a community needed to show their ‘body of work’ which in effect proved, not only that one had talent, but that one could actually work to create something thus weeding out those who could talk a good game but actually produced nothing themselves.
For this reason, in order to weed out undesirable elements, this plan recommends that regardless of what type of community you form potential members should be required to provide a history or portfolio, so to speak, of past works and skills, and/or undertake some prerequisite training such as enrolling in, and passing a standard First Aid and CPR program, or passing a firearms safety course, or taking a self defense course.
If a potential member cannot do this on his
or her own, then they are not likely to provide any value to the community.
[1] Basically, keeping membership numbers low, reflecting the lesson of low density organizations we discussed in tribes.