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p After the upsurge it experienced in the first half of the 19th century, the communitarian movement in the United States entered an almost 100-year period of decline. A handful of communities scattered across the nation "went almost unnoticed and involved a decreasing percentage of the population",  [217•2  and their impact on the social fabric was minimal.

p The situation began to change in the latter half of the 1960s. "Now, in the last ten years [from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s], the process has reversed itself and communitarian experiments are attracting more and more people.”  [217•3  The absence of easily accessible documentary evidence, their short life span and their frequently semiclandestine nature make it impossible to accurately ascertain 218 their number in this or that period. Still, most American researchers agree that in the 1960s and 1970s from 1,000 to 3,000 Utopian communities existed in the United States.  [218•1 

p The new upsurge of communitarianism coincided with the rise of mass democratic movements in the United States, but this was hardly a mere coincidence. The attempts to both transform American society and escape from it were rooted in the general critical attitude to the dominant institutions, relations and values. The humanitarian, political and social crisis was perceived all the more acutely because it manifested itself against the backdrop of economic and technological growth which technocratic consciousness connected with the possibility of overcoming at least the more pressing social contradictions.

p Modern communities proved more numerous and more diverse than 19th-century ones. Herbert A. Otto, who studied the communitarian movement in the United States, estimated that in 1971 there were 16 types of communities differing in their leanings and objectives, including “ agricultural” (based on the principle of self-sufficiency), “political” (uniting their members around a common ideology and a common political credo and subdivided by Otto into anarchist, socialist and pacifist), "spiritual/ mystical" (which strove for inner perfection), “nature” or, more precisely, “environmental” (which advocated support of the ecological system and unity of man and nature), “craft”, “art” and other communes.  [218•2 

p They were also classified by location (rural and urban), by their attitude to religion (religious and secular), by their organizational principles and by the type of relations existing in them (“authoritarian”, anarchist, etc.).

p The urban community was a new development without precedent in the past. It was usually a "big family" whose 219 members were united in their desire to create an “ unalienated” atmosphere and ensure mutual assistance. Gathering by the fireplace after work, people of different ages and occupations (but usually of the same social background, color of skin-mostly white, and religious denomination) felt they were basking in the warmth of spiritual companionship and understanding.

p As evidence of the increasing social and political alienation in postwar America, urban communities were a typical symptom of exacerbation in the crisis of the existing family relations and traditional institutions of socialization which no longer met the needs of either society as a whole or the individual. Essentially, by looking at the communities of the 1960s and 1970s, one could pinpoint the pain centers of America with sufficient accuracy. The decline of the cities, the disintegration of traditional family structures, the crisis of the success-oriented business and work ethics, the feeling that the technological world which was trampling nature and man underfoot was hostile and uncontrollable, as well as many similar developments-all this found a distinct reflection in the communitarian movement.

p As before, the communitarians often turned to religion in their search for solutions to the problems they faced. But this time these were mostly esoteric Oriental religions, specifically Zen-Buddhism with its conspicuous mysticism which, compared to technocratic ideology and its social development projects, appeared to be geared better than Western religions to removing complex problems and establishing contacts between man and nature, man and the cosmos, man and man.

p Not all communities of the 1960s and 1970s were distinctly Utopian, that is, not all of them observed and preached values and orientations at variance with the objective trends and dominant values of contemporary American society. Lonely old people gathered under the same roof, young artists bent on setting up a cooperative of sorts and similar groups could not set for themselves any far-reaching sociocritical goals. Strictly speaking, however, even such communities did contain Utopian elements since they countered the privately compartmentalized life of American capitalism with a collective element, albeit in primitive form.

p Modern communities were born on the spur of the 220 moment, through a spontaneous coincidence of interests among people of the same social background. And, while these communes comprised people representing virtually all age, social, occupational and ethnic groups, predominating in them was the member aged 20 to 30, of middle-class extraction, usually educated in the arts, dissatisfied with his job or studies, lacking a family and a stable income, and skeptical of society’s ways and morals.  [220•1  This means that in his social characteristics, the average member of the modern Utopian community differed strikingly from his 19th-century predecessor.

p As Moos and Brownstein point out, "the new communards generally had a much clearer understanding of the faults of the society they sought to abandon—materialism, spiritual bankruptcy, environmental decay, insane competitiveness, racism and militarism—than they did of the form the alternative communities should take".  [220•2  Their organizers usually relied on the natural course of events which not infrequently, as developments soon proved, either destroyed the community or led it far astray from the original goals.

p Few of the communities of the 1960s and 1970s were established to implement a definite Utopian project, the way it was with 19th-century Owenite, Fourierist and Icarian communities. Twin Oaks, set up to realize the project advanced by B. F. Skinner in his Walden Two, was clearly the most colorful of them all. In 1966 a group of Skinner’s followers gathered at Ann Arbor decided to organize a community based on behavioristic principles and described in Walden Two. This community, originally composed of 8 members, was established in Virginia the following year.  [220•3 

p The communities were usually small (a few score members at most) and fluid in their composition. In most cases the composition changed spontaneously: some left, others joined, sometimes visitors were accepted on certain terms 221 for some time. For example, by 1971 up to 45 people, including some 10 visitors, lived at Twin Oaks, but of the 8 founders only 2 remained.  [221•1  The communities mostly lacked a clear-cut organizational structure and reflected a broad range of lifestyles-from anarchistically free to rigidly disciplined and hierarchical (although the consensus is that the latter were few).

p Among them there were, naturally, communities which, like Brook Farm long ago, were consciously striving to discharge a "model function". Describing his impressions of a visit to one of the "most stable and authoritative" U.S. urban communities of the 1970s, the Soviet sociologist Igor Bestuzhev-Lada notes: "The members of the Lyndisfarn Community are indeed united by a common idea. They feel as though they are in a Noah’s Ark in an ocean of social reality unacceptable to them. And they would like to set an example for mankind by an attempt to save themselves from this reality.”  [221•2  But "model communes" were relatively few even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the new communitarian wave was at its highest. Mostly, they were cases of attempted escape from society into a "different life". People were fleeing loneliness and isolation; alienated, monotonous and backbreaking work, the mundane pursuit of success, money and creature comforts.

p As in the 19th century, most new communes were shortlived; according to Moos and Brownstein, their life span did not exceed two years.  [221•3  The causes of their disintegration were largely the same as a century ago—heterogeneous composition, no definite organizational structure, differences of opinion and economic difficulties. According to D. Moberg, "commune problems can be as endless as those families encounter and quite similar, but communes do not have the same proclivity to stick together. Illness, poverty, conflicting demands on limited resources, disputes between people ’earning money and those who aren’t, and struggles for power over communal direction—all have contributed to the failures.”  [221•4 

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p As in the past, what contributed greatly to the collapse of Utopian communities was the hostility on the part of the neighbors who saw the activities of the communes not only as a violation of "law and order" but also as an assault on the norms and values underlying their own existence. This reaction of bourgeois society was natural because whether the communes tried to discharge “model” functions or not, whether they consciously advocated an antibourgeois alternative or not, they were objectively an alternative institution which stimulated critical thinking and fed the urge to leave traditional bourgeois ways behind. Yet again, Utopian communities came into conflict with history and, yet again, were defeated.

p The defeat was all the more painful because modern communes clashed with the bourgeois state, a powerful force not yet fully developed in the first half of the 19th century but blatantly repressive now. Walter H. Clark, a professor of religious psychology, says that "the laws, the police, and hostile neighbors constitute serious problems for many communes. They give rise to generalized paranoid ideas and a feeling of insecurity that weaken and poison the sense of community that ideally characterized such fellowships. Following the finest traditions of the Inquisition and modern police states, some law enforcement agencies have been known to plant spies and even agents provocateurs in communities. Understandably, measures taken to guard against such persons will have negative effects on the bona fide members themselves, not to mention the resulting breach between the community and the larger society".  [222•1 

p By the mid-1970s the communitarian movement began to wane. This coincided with the decline of mass democratic movements in the United States and other Western countries. It was time for stock-taking, for digesting and analyzing the experience gained.

p What was the social ideal the new communities were trying to reach for consciously or unconsciously? What was the type of relations established objectively among their members? As Judson Jerome notes aptly, "the structures of the new communes are more like skeletons under the skin, which can be intuited and hypothesized, but remain 223 implicit—to the extent that the communards themselves are often unaware of them".  [223•1  Still, by summing up eyewitness reports and the evidence supplied by participants in communitarian experiments and by students of this social phenomenon, one can try to answer the questions posed.

p For all the differences in their value orientations, the ideal which most communes were striving unconsciously to attain can be defined as an unalienated society in which man would realize his own worth and not be subjugated by things, other people, groups, organizations or the state.

p People were dreaming of a community in which each could expect affection, empathy and understanding from others and be ready to respond in kind, without any fear of retribution for this kind of softness. In Getting Back Together written after the author’s visits to several communes, Robert Hourriet recalls that in many, people were obviously eager to render material and moral support to others, to care for the sick, to help in raising others’ children—in other words, to work selflessly for the common good.

p People were dreaming of a community of free, creative labor which would enable each to assert his abilities and draw on man’s inner resources. According to Herbert Otto, members of the communes he visited were unconsciously trying to introduce an element of play into their work, to make it "a form of joyous self-expression and self- realization"  [223•2 

p People were dreaming of a community where the purpose of life would be shaped not by external pressures but by “nonrepressive” inner motivations of the individual, where spiritual and not material incentives would dominate and where man could, as a result, feel freer than before.

p People were dreaming of a community where man would reestablish “friendly” contact with nature as a source of not so much material wealth as moral purity, physical health and creative vigor. People were dreaming of a simpler existence free from a multitude of unnecessary things-that is, of setting up an uncomplicated and transparent social 224 organization in which each man could see all the social mechanisms at work and in which he could, competently and with justification, form his own judgment with respect to all developments and processes occurring before his very eyes.

p “I came here because I wanted to simplify my life as much as possible," says a Utopian commune member. "I had a lot of things to get rid of—a car, a hi-fi, a million useless things....

p “I had done the political trip for a while, but I got to the point where I couldn’t just advocate social change, I had to live it. Change isn’t something up there, out there.... It’s in here.... This is where I have to start if I want to change the whole ... system.

p “We don’t want to be in the materialist bag anymore, and we don’t want to get caught up in the nine-to-five career bag, the two-week vacation, barbecues-in-suburbia bag....

p “It was my dream to belong to a tribe, where the energies flow among everyone, where people care for one another, where no one has to work, but everyone wants to do something because we’re all mutually dependent for our survival and our happiness.”  [224•1 

p People were dreaming of many other great and small things, but the essence of the alternative underlying these dreams was clearly anthropocentric. The Utopian community focused not on the state, not on society but on the individual, on the free and allround man as he could be pictured by those living in an alienated, mass consumer society.

p This means that the social ideals which the communes of the 1960s and 1970s tried to translate into reality mostly stemmed from romantic, democratic and socialist Utopias, although, as a rule, these ideals did not conform to this or that Utopian type fully or exclusively.

p Significantly, most modern Utopian experiments regarded questions involving forms of property and the ways of distributing the surplus product and of organizing production-questions over which 19th-century Utopians agonized— 225 as minor, negligible and routine, to be solved in the course of routine efforts. This was not simply a sign of theoretical infantilism but also a direct consequence of the influence exerted by the consumer society which glossed over the issue of the system of property and relegated it to the periphery of critical thought. True, as the workings of a utopian commune were being “debugged”, all these problems made themselves felt more or less acutely and demanded practical solutions. Still, the fact remained that the issue of Utopian goals was discussed in isolation from the question of the system of property as a necessary condition for their attainment.

p For some time, life in a Utopian community could evoke in its members a feeling of psychological relief and moral satisfaction because it contrasted sharply with life in the outside world. Despite all financial difficulties, it was possible to create, for a brief period, a new atmosphere free from mercenary attitudes, from consumerism, hostility, competition, the fear of losing one’s job and social status, and free from the interminable and pointless rat race. With the passage of time, however,-and if the community retained its viability-it simply had to tackle a multitude of routine, prosaic tasks concerning economic matters, relations among the members and contacts with the outside world. This gave rise to contradictions, problems and difficulties which were nonexistent in the world from which the members had fled.

p Virtually no Utopian commune of the 1960s and 1970s succeeded in realizing all the principles proclaimed with any degree of success or in establishing the results achieved as a feature of everyday life. (This does not refer to the typically religious communities whose life was influenced by devotion to religious dogma.) The actual communitarian practice was in many respects different from the ideal. Suffice it to cite the example of Twin Oaks, all the more so because its organizers had a clear grasp of what they wanted. According to a Twin Oaks member, "We raise our own beef, pork, and organic produce; supply our own dairy products; do our own repairs on cars, trucks, and farm machinery; are architects, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians; and produce income mainly through the manufacture and sale of handmade rope hammocks, but also through the sale of our own publications, typing services, miscellaneous 226 crafts, and through some short-term work in nearby cities. There is no one leader. A planner-manager government is responsible for formalizing decisions reached by group input and consensus. A labor credit system helps us organize and share equally a constantly changing flow of work. All income and most property are held in common. Each individual’s needs for food, clothing, shelter, and medical services are met by the community as a whole. Over time, Twin Oaks has evolved a unique culture that continues to grow. Cooperation instead of competition; sharing rather than possessiveness; equality in place of exploitation; gentleness, not aggression; reason instead of authority; an end to sexism, racism, and consumerism: these are some of the ideals around which our culture has developed.”  [226•1 

p Agreeing that Twin Oaks closely resembled other Utopian communities and was "a blend of planning and happening",  [226•2  its inhabitants maintained that it was indeed behaviorist and that behaviorism should be interpreted more broadly.

p It is easy to see that little was left of the project put forward by the commune’s behaviorist father. A visitor to Twin Oaks wrote that had Skinner visited that laboratory he would have been very disappointed. Indeed, the community failed to attain its most important goal-to implement the “reinforcement” principle on which Skinner insisted— and its “behaviorism” was merely a signboard attracting numerous visitors and helping the community to keep afloat.

p Deviations from the original ideal were all the more typical of many communities because their view of this ideal was vague; it assumed different shapes depending on the circumstances. "Freedom from alienated labor" often meant idleness. "Some collectively allocated labor; some survived through the efforts of a minority who chose to work; and some subsisted on welfare or outside contributions, preferring to avoid work altogether.”  [226•3  "Sexual liberation" often meant promiscuity which frequently resulted in tensions within the community; "relations of cooperation" degenerated into parasitism; "unity of man 227 and nature", into orientation on preindustrial imperatives; and so on and so forth.

p It would hardly be right to conclude, however, that these failures and deviations prove the essential impracticability of the principles themselves. Rather, the record of modern (and 19th-century) American communes proves the inadequacy of the methods used to implement these principles and of the conditions in which Utopian experiments were attempted.

p But the communitarian experience of the 1960s and 1970s was not confined to negative significance only. Like 19th-century communities, modern communes made a positive impact on American society-an impact we will be able to gauge precisely only later, when the overall result of their activities becomes more pronounced. Today, however, one can already state with sufficient justification that Utopian communes played a noticeable role in the emergence of the new types of consciousness and the personality ("social types") which appeared in America in the 1960s and 1970s—not only because scores of thousands of eager and sometimes wayward young people who will live in the 21st-century United States have passed through these communities but also and above all because the new personality and consciousness “models” were tested precisely in these communities. In this regard the communitarian experience was a much more influential and constructive force than the theoretical constructs of Roszak or Reich who built them mostly on the basis of the experience accumulated in Utopian enclaves.

p Many American researchers point out that the communes have contributed to the emergence of a new cultural climate in the United States, expressed in so-called counterculture, and that they have helped in the creation of new cultural values which are objectively antibourgeois and are a factor in the disintegration of bourgeois civilization.

p There is much truth in these statements. As an alternative subculture formed within nonconformist social groups, counterculture is a complex and contradictory phenomenon performing different functions. It springs from a variety of sources and is shaped by different mechanisms. While its more crude expressions hysterically rejected culture per se, that is, appeared as an anticulture, counterculture reflected a rebellion of petty-bourgeois consciousness not 228 against culture as such but against the values and orientations of mass society, against the technocratic version of mass bourgeois culture. Hence the polemical attacks of counterculture against the philistine concepts of prosperity, wealth, success, against rigid morals and social conformism, as well as against the claims to omnipotence on the part of science which it regards as guilty of the mass culture phenomenon.

p Of course, the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s did not become a mass, real alternative to dominant bourgeois culture. Some of its elements even became part of the U.S. cultural establishment and were used by the ruling class to manipulate public consciousness.

p At the same time, one cannot deny that this counterculture was a reflection of protest against the dehumanization of social relations, the bureaucratization of the social fabric, the growing alienation of the individual from society, etc. Keith Melville was right to note that while Utopian communities and the counterculture they spawned could not tell one where one should go on from there or how to restructure society and its culture, at least they pointed to the real problems of American society  [228•1  and thus discharged a heuristic and critical cultural function.

Today, when "new conservatism" is on the rise, one can easily get the impression that the trends which surfaced in communitarian experiments 10 to 15 years ago are finished once and for all and that the Utopian quest for an alternative America is over, at least for a long time. But this conclusion would be a mistake. Although the number of communes has dropped sharply in recent years and so has their sociocultural role, the search for an alternative livestyle and alternative values goes on. As an example of the movement for a new alternative lifestyle one can cite the North American Movement for Voluntary Simplicity. Tomorrow this search may precipitate a new wave of Utopian experiments.