CONCRETIZING COMMUNISM

RADICAL INTENTIONAL COMMUNITIES IN THE UNITED STATES—FROM THE 1960s ONWARD , 2019

Intentional communities in the United States are greatly varied. They may be religious, secular, autonomous, and exclude themselves from society physically, intellectually, socially, morally, and ideologically. The psychological factors, ways of life, religions, and histories have been well documented by many researchers (Kurzman 2008; Fournier 2002; Kanter 1973; Wallmeier 2017). This thesis dissects and explores a comparative framework of these factors within several different groups, from a cultural anthropological perspective. My research objective is to develop a better understanding of some of the influences for intentional community formations, some of the varieties of intentional communities' ideological values, structures, and lifestyles, and explore both the longterm sustainability, and disintegration of intentional communities. I draw upon my own personal experiences with two intentional communities, and reflect upon these experiences anthropologically. I then focus on a further understanding of intentional communities, which form in political, governmental, authoritative, structural, and social resistance to the United States, starting with the Vietnam War Era. I achieve this by researching literature on the breadth of intentional communities in the United States, from the 1960s onward, and by analyzing these data through cultural anthropological, post-structural, and postmodern theories.

2012

strugglepreconceptions-and-realities-intentional-communities Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au 21 Realizing Utopia Bill Metcalf Utopian Struggle: Preconceptions and Realities of Intentional Communities I have been personally involved with and often living in intentional communities for 40 years, and I have been actively researching and writing about them for over 30 years. My interest started by looking at what worked, or didn't, within contemporary intentional communities. To that end, I have visited and conducted research in over one hundred intentional communities in Europe, North and South America, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Over time, however, my research and writing has shifted to looking more at the history of these social experiments and the historical lessons to be learned from them. I have found that many people try to create or live within an intentional community but know nothing about the rich history of the movement. So they foolishly "reinvent the wheel." While this history has been reasonably well researched and written up in the United States and the United Kingdom, it has not, until recently, been so well researched in other parts of the world, including my own country, Australia-and that is now my mission. Intentional Communities Defined Intentional community: Five or more people, drawn from more than one family or kinship group, who have voluntarily come together for the purpose of ameliorating perceived social problems and inadequacies. They seek to live beyond the bounds of mainstream society by adopting a consciously devised and usually well thought-out social and cultural alternative. In the pursuit of their goals, they share significant aspects of their lives together. Participants are characterized by a "we-consciousness," seeing themselves as a continuing group, separate from and in many ways better than the society from which they emerged.

Feminist, environmentalist, and social justice critiques of capitalism show us how much we need to “construct non-capitalistic ways to reproduce our life” (De Angelis 2012, xii). A postcapitalist politics (Gibson-Graham 2006b) attempts to do just that, through uncovering and enacting economic possibility in a diverse array of spaces and practices, where capitalist social relations are just one set among many. In this chapter, we bring together thinking on social reproduction and community economies to help us imagine a postcapitalist politics of life’s work. We do so by exploring practices of life’s work as they occur in homes, workplaces, and community spaces. These practices of provisioning, caring, and income generating can reproduce capitalist social relations, but they also “hold the possibility for altering, undermining and undoing these relations” (Mitchell, Marston, and Katz 2003, 433). How, then, can we imagine and enact a postcapitalist politics of social change through the practices and spaces of life’s work? For Mitchell, Marston, and Katz the possibility of confounding reproduction and making something else becomes more concrete when glimmers of possibility in life’s work are both consciously appropriated and reworked into new modes of practice (2003, 433). In this chapter, we use our research in Boston, Massachusetts (United States) and Xining, Qinghai (People’s Republic of China [prc]) to explore a postcapitalist politics that comes through recognizing and proliferating possibilities, intentionally appropriating them, and reworking modes of practice. Through these cases, we go on to argue that this occurs when life’s workers negotiate surplus and necessity through caring, provisioning, and income- generating activities.

Polish Sociological Review, 2016

1.Roberto Esposito in his book Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community powerfully stated that:Nothing seems more appropriate today than thinking community; nothing more necessary, demanded, and heralded by a situation that joins in a unique epochal knot the failure of all communisms with the misery of new individualisms. Nevertheless, nothing is further from view; nothing so remote, repressed, and put off until later, to a distant and indecipherable horizon (Esposito 2010: 2).Frankly speaking, I share Esposito's scepticism on the prospects of establishing community today on par with his reservations towards re-inventing a new form of community. In fact, I am compelled to say that to me no idea is more worrying, unsettling, problematic and doubtful than that of community. In fact, it is in particular the question of a political community and even more so the calls to establish one that concern me most in political discourse. I am equally puzzled and caught unaware when I ...

The U.S. has experienced a dramatic proliferation of corporate master-planned communities, along with a related equally sharp increase in the numbers of people governed by private residential community associations (RCAs). Increasing by approximately 9,500 annually, RCA's are expected to grow from 130,000 in 1990 to approximately 225,000 by the year 2000. This trend is a manifestation of both the historical commodification of urban and community space and the gradual imposition of the corporate bureaucratic structure into community maintenance and governance. Intended to stimulate commodity need fulfillment and ensure the continued dominance of patriarchal bourgeois ideology, this new community form has come to dominate alternative community form. This examination places these trends in critical perspective, specifically addressing agency, conflict, resistance, and the historical and current struggles to create cooperatively self-determined alternative community space that funda...

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 2007

Higher Education Quarterly, 1984

The word community does a job in the English language for which there appears to be a perennial perceived need. It refers to social ideals of belonging, togetherness, participation and camaraderie. Previously the phrase 'civil society' and before the eighteenth century simply 'society' fitted the bill. Each term briefly summed up a sense of immediacy and directness of personal relationship, in contrast with some organized establishment such as the 'state'.' This special kind of social relationship was felt to be lacking in the emerging industrial society of the nineteenth century. An acute sense of loss was felt: Disraeli bemoaned modern society's 'acknowledging no neighbour'. Pioneer social scientists attempted to analyse this apparent loss-of-community, frequently relying on popular definition and scntimcnt for direction. The classical, and frequently misunderstood, treatment of this theme is in the work o f Ferdinand Tonnies.2 'Tijnnies distinguished between two kinds of society in terms of the quality of relationships which characterise them. The social type declining in the nineteenth century was associated with gcmeinschuft (usually translated 'community'). Increasingly, social relations in industrial capitalist society were of the gesellschuft ('association') type. Pre-industrial social relationships were more iisuall). based on ascribed status, linked with territory and kinship. Church and family supplied the social glue which all made for enduring, emotionally satisfying, and thus, according t o Tbnnies, more meaningful social relationships. With industrialism and urbanism, however, Tonnies noted an increase o f scale, and o f impersonality. Relationships were increasingly hased on contract (especially the labour contract) and on calculation. For Tonnies, the shift to gesellschuft-type of