The Alternative
(Page 3 of 6)
September/October 1970
By Michael Bennett
The educational value of a commune set-up is also enormous. For children, there will be no repression of their ideas and instincts. Tools will be available as the new lifestyle creates a new technology aimed towards self-fulfillment rather than production.
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Before starting the commune, the founders met several times with the Hog Farmers to discuss the problems that would arise in the formative stages. They told me that in spite of the rapping, they still went through pretty much the same changes that the Hog Farm had gone through in getting itself together. Finley said:
"I don't think you can learn anything except from gut level experience . . . so we always repeat the same mistakes. Things get together for a couple of days and then start to come apart . . . people realize the crisis and get it together again . . . But each time we go through a crisis we come together a little more . . . we begin to think of some free, but viable, orderly way to make our existence work . . . Anybody who doesn't want to do something . . . that should be OK . . . If they don't want to come to meetings, they can work in the kitchen . . . the totality will flow to gether . . ." The general feeling was . . . "when you see something has to be done, you do it."
Larry Speed Freak, who greeted us at the door with a torrent of words which were mostly un-understandable, described the reason for the commune: "The purpose of people getting together like this is so each person can do his own thing and teach his thing to other people . . . Like, you can learn more in a place like this than in any other place in the world, because you have somebody here who knows how to do something else . . . I'm a photographer. Pedro puts up bubbles. He helped construct the one at Union Square on Earth Day , and is currently involved in the design and construction of inflatables, and Finley just things . . .
More generally, the purpose of the commune and of communes is to create an alternative society. In this sense, communes are to some degree political. Because the purpose of the commune is to eliminate the formal structures that keep us compartmentalized, these politics are of a different ilk than the politics we are so used to.
" . . . We are opposed, in principle, to ideologies. We want good relationships with any group that is in anyway making a contribution towards constructive changes in society . . . We're primarily concerned with finding creative ways and effective means, which is where both the arts and sciences come into our trip. For us, it is essentially a creative revolution; with the creative imagination you can solve every problem that arises, and you can alter your course of action any time you encounter resistance to it. The imagination can think up one or a number of alternatives so you can always keep moving , . . If you have one ideology and a plan of action and one of those are blocked, then the movement is stopped . . . So creativity is not only a means for the Revolution, it is the ultimate style of life for us, too . . . which is why we're interested in artists and technologists being able to do their thing here. The one thing that everybody has in common, whether they're artists or scientists, is that they're looking for an alternative life that is more creative, more together, more fully human . . . more real."
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