The Alternative
(Page 2 of 6)
September/October 1970
By Michael Bennett
Upstairs are the sleeping quarters; a communal room where several members of the commune sleep on floor mattresses; another large room is being partitioned off for private sleeping quarters. Dick, one of the communards, is a writer and described the situation this way:
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"Basically, when we started the commune, we tried to set up a private area and a communal area, a concept that hasn't worked out, to the best of my knowledge, in any other commune. Most communes are immediately walls down, and many people are put into a situation that they can't cope with . . . We went through this at many meetings . . . what it boiled down to is this – if people need private space, these people will be taken care of as well as those who need communal space."
The operation of a city commune is especially interesting to me because until recently, I had always identified communal living with being in the wood, getting back to nature.
"The commune is a base from which to operate . . . There's no attempt to make everyone think, behave, act or get involved in the same type of things; this would be contrary to the nature of what we're trying to do . . . The commune itself is an experiment in life-style.
Many communards foresee that the communizing now taking place will eventually result in a nationwide network of communes in both the cities and the country. The people at The Loft are currently involved in the Alternate U's group on communes, where knowledge and resources of all communes can be pooled to make the communal operations of each flow more smoothly. They are hoping to get together several city communes and approach farmers and offer them complete purchase of their crops if they grow only organic foods.
If this is successful, such an arrangement could be expanded to a national scale; sympathetic farmers who don't want to screw up their soil with chemicals, as well as people living and working on country communes, could grow exclusively organic crops in order to supply the city communes and themselves. In this way, the communes could establish themselves as a self-sufficient society, at least as far as the basics are concerned. The success of this large-scale project would be enormously valuable as a living, working illustration that people only have to work to live and to help others live.
This could also lead to exchange programs between city and country communes. Members of a city commune go to a country commune and vice-versa for periods of time to kelp run the respective communes that they are visiting.
People in the city would then be educated in the fundamentals of farming and country life, and the country people could come to the city to get themselves together in ways which require the resources the city has to offer.
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