Intentional Communities and Mainstream Politics

Why People Choose to Form Intentional Communities

Communes, colonies, and ecovillages all can be classified as intentional communities. Variously described as alternative, experimental, and cooperative, intentional communities are groups of people with shared values who have chosen to live together in order to achieve common goals. Theoretically, the group could be as small as two or three people, but in practice most are closer to a dozen, comprising an extended household. Many include a hundred or more people and function as small, privately owned villages. The shared values can vary dramatically across communities, some emphasizing the value of community itself and others stressing individualistic free expression, some focusing on economic equality and others on spiritual hierarchy, some stressing secular self-actualization and others religious self-denial.

Likewise, the goals of intentional communitarians are as diverse as building an organic farm, developing a working collective of artists or musicians, supplying social services, and mobilizing a political movement for social change. Every intentional community embodies an explicit or implicit political vision of the proper role of leaders vis-à-vis rank-and-file members, ranging from dictatorship to democracy and encompassing everything in between. Children reared in such communities are politically socialized to the communal beliefs and practices regarding power and authority.

In the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands of young people in North America, Europe, and the Pacific created hundreds of small communities that were known as communes because their members often owned property jointly, or communally. The difference between such communes and traditional small villages is that those communes were created intentionally, in order for their founders to achieve shared goals such as cooperation, harmony, gender equality, organic production and consumption, and a simpler, more natural lifestyle. Participants had been disappointed by mainstream institutions' inability to let them achieve those goals. By contrast, traditional villages evolve slowly over generations without any collective vision or plan for the future.

Outsiders often referred to the wave of intentional communities that began in the 1960s as “hippie communes,” because the members often had long hair, wore beads and colorful clothing, liked rock music, experimented with marijuana and psychedelic drugs, and engaged in unconventional sexual behavior. Some of the communes, whether hippie or not, held radical political beliefs opposed to capitalism, industrialism, advanced technology, racism, and war. Many of their members became active in one or more political movements in their countries, whether the civil rights movement in the United States or the antinuclear movement in Europe. One result of the cultural radicalism and political activism of communitarians was that mainstream politicians often attacked them verbally, and local officials often harassed them for violations of local building codes, zoning ordinances, and health standards.

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