Commune (intentional community) Totally Explained

Everything about Commune Intentional Community totally explained

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's 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 finical resources to keep the community's economy alive as they're 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 Pagan or Christian. 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

Categorization of communes

Benjamin Zablocki categorized communes this way:

Egalitarian communities
Eastern religious communes
Christian Communities
Psychological Communities(based on mystical or gestalt principles)
Rehabilitational Communities(see Synanon)
Cooperative Communities
Alternative-family Communities
Countercultural Communities]]
Political Communities
Spiritual Communities

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's just more economical to live communally. Many contemporary squatters pool their resources in this way, forming urban communes in unoccupied buildings.

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's a long history of communes in America. A few notable examples include:

The Harmony Society started by Johann Georg Rapp in Harmony, Pennsylvania, in 1804 and dissolving around 1905 in Economy, Pennsylvania, was one of the longest-running financially successful communes in American history.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Blithedale Romance is a fictionalized portrayal of the Brook Farm commune, existing from 1841 to 1847, where Hawthorne stayed for a while.

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.

Ganas is a commune currently in existence in the New Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island, New York.

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.

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.Further Information

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