Quotes About Communes

For some time they talked of reformation; those who apparently desired it most favoring it only for their own profit, and the people who were to be the gainers expecting little and saying nothing. For a long time these poor people, either from distrust, incredulity, or despair, hesitated to ask for their rights: it is said that the habit of serving had taken the courage away from those old communes, which in the middle ages were so bold.

At the end of a century of grand revolutionary romanticism; frightful sacrifices for the sake of paradises and heavens on earth and the withering away of the state; passionate dreams of Utopias and wonderlands and perfect cities; attempts at communes and commonwealths, at co-operatives and kibbutzes and kolkhozes – after all this, would any of us have believed that most people in the world would settle gratefully for a little honesty, a little competence in government?

The young, naïve socialists who dream of socialism "from below" are caught in a conundrum. Non-state socialist communes can only work (poorly) on a small scale in an otherwise capitalist world. To replace capitalism with this system necessitates centralizing power in order to plan the economy. That ultimately results in state ownership, control, and tyranny. Society-wide socialism "from below" that doesn't entail state ownership is a contradiction in terms.

The first generation of Russian terrorists came out of the '60s counterculture - the 1860s in Russia bearing a striking similarity to the 1960s in the United States, with Russian students growing their hair, following gurus who extolled the 'new man,' and starting communes.

Back in the 60s, San Francisco artists lived in communes.

We are lost unless we can recover compassion, without which we will never understand charity. We must find, once more, community, a sense of family, of belonging to each other. No wonder our kids are struggling to start communes.

the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members.

Communes are good examples of co-operation without kinship. Sosis found that 6 per cent of secular communes were still in existence twenty years after their founding, as compared with 39 per cent of religious ones. In a follow-up study he found the more demanding the religious group, the longer its lifespan.2 Religion creates and sustains communities.

In the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth, self-contained communes based on a philosophy of communal sharing sprang up throughout the United States. All of them collapsed from internal tensions, the ones guided by socialist ideology after a median of two years, the ones guided by religious ideology after a median of twenty years.

MacKaye had been drawn to punk partly because it provided a community framework for his outsider thinking. "I've always been enthralled by gangs and communes, any collection of people where it's a family kind of thing

Today we use the word cult to describe a small group of extremists cut off from contact with the outside world by an all-controlling leader. People in antebellum America, however, struggled to find language for the phenomenon, largely because they had never seen anything quite like it before. As recent scholars have attested, "The historical record indicates that utopian and apocalyptic cults and communes first appeared as a major form in the United States during this epoch.

The time was one of great organization and aspiration, of communities, communes, and committees.

In the communes, sir," he had said proudly, "you will find no churches. You see, religion is for the helpless. Here in China we are not helpless any more." ———

Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.

It's like communes—people with nothing are always willing to share.

The here and the beyond are enough, but there were a few angels for whom it was not enough: who demanded a third dimension--who sought fusions, communes, who ate each other and created sex.

This case of Laon suggests several points that are true of the French communes in general. They were created especially at the expense of bishops and ecclesiastical lords, and the Church in consequence made a great outcry against them. "Commune is a new and detestable word," wrote an abbot of the time.

But communes are a good idea. People criticize communes because they don't last, but why in hell, will you tell me, should they last? Why does an order have to become a permanent order? Maybe we should live one way for some years, then try another.

The challenges communes faced were generally internal, not external. As one study concluded, "Many more communes went under because the dishes never got washed than were ever forced out of town by hostile neighbors or zoning boards.