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Communalism
From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
19. Étienne Cabet
20. Hutterites Again
EPILOGUE —
Post-Apocalyptic Communalism
Étienne Cabet was born in 1788, a year before the fall of the Bastille. For the first
forty years of his life he was the typical radical Jacobin of the post-revolutionary
generation, untouched by the disillusionment of older men whose youth and young manhood
was lived under the Terror, the Directory, and the Napoleonic Empire. In 1820 he gave up a
law practice in Dijon and became a director of the French conspiratorial revolutionary
organization, the Carbonari. In the Revolution of 1830 he was a member of the Insurrection
Committee. Louis Philippe appointed him Attorney General of Corsica, but he was dismissed
for his attacks on the government in his book Histoire de la révolution de 1830,
and in his journal Le Populaire. He returned to Dijon and was elected Deputy,
whereupon he was arraigned on a charge of lčse-majesté and was condemned to two
years’ imprisonment and five years’ exile. He went to Brussels, was expelled,
and emigrated to England, where he became a disciple of Robert Owen.
In the amnesty of 1839, Cabet returned to France and in the next year published a
history of the French Revolution, and Voyage en Icarie, a semi-fictional account
of a communist society, which he considered a modern version of Thomas More’s Utopia,
as improved by the economic theories of Robert Owen. There is nothing particularly
original or exciting about Cabet’s plans for a new society, but like More’s Utopia,
Voyage en Icarie includes a devastating criticism of the contemporary social order
— which was probably, for Cabet, its most important part. Its success must have
amazed him. It became a bestseller, read or at least talked about by every radical working
man and intellectual. For the next seven years in Le Populaire and a new journal,
L’Almanach Icarienne, he built up a following which he claimed to number
about half a million. At first, like Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward
at the end of the century, it did not occur to him that people would wish to put his
utopian ideas to practical application, but the great success of his movement finally
persuaded him. His followers were demanding that he lead them into the commonwealth of the
future, and he had already started a number of ill-conceived and abortive Icaries in
France.
In 1847 Cabet issued a call, “Forward to Icarie.” France was crowded,
worn-out with a despotic government, and would never permit the establishment of modern
communities, which soon would, by their example, revolutionize the society. In America it
would be possible to build a communist colony of ten or twenty thousand people on the
frontier, and in a few years millions would be converted. The response was tremendous. He
was deluged with gifts, pledges, and recruits.
Since Cabet had neither picked a site nor made any definite plans for settlement, he
must have been a little frightened, and went to London to consult with Robert Owen. At the
moment, Owen was enthusiastic about Texas, which had just been admitted to the Union and
was anxious for settlers. A short time later, a Texas land agent in London persuaded Cabet
to contract for a million acres on the Red River, “easily accessible by boat.”
On February 3, 1848, the advance party sailed for Texas. In New Orleans they discovered
that they had bought a hundred thousand, not a million, acres in the wilderness, two
hundred and fifty miles from the river, allotted in checkerboard fashion, the alternate
squares still in possession of the state; and by the terms of the agreement, they were
obliged to build a log house on each of their sections before July. Furthermore, the Red
River was not navigable beyond Shreveport, Louisiana, where it was blocked by an immense,
permanent log jam.
Undaunted, sixty-nine enthusiastic Frenchmen, totally inexperienced in coping with the
wilderness, stored most of their goods and set off overland with one wagon drawn by oxen.
They did not even know how to manage the wagon and oxen. They broke down and became stuck
in marshes. People began to get malaria. They ran out of food, but at last they reached
the site of Icaria, and met the land agents of the Peters Land Company, who informed them
that any land which was not occupied by a cabin and resident in each half-square mile
would revert to the company, which would be glad to resell it at a dollar an acre. There
was no possibility of fulfilling the contract, but the sixty-nine pioneers wrote a
desperate letter to Cabet and set to work. Although many of them were skilled mechanics,
almost none was a farmer or, curiously, a builder. They did not know how to plough, and
the thirty-two cabins they were able to build were hovels. More and more people became
sick, probably with malaria. Their doctor said it was yellow fever, but all of his
diagnoses were for fatal diseases, and it soon turned out that he was insane. Most of the
members became ill — the water was undrinkable, but few died. In the spring, ten more
settlers arrived out of the five hundred Cabet had promised.
Meanwhile, back in France, the Revolution of 1848 had overthrown Louis Philippe, and in
the next few months revolutionary leaders like the poet Lamartine, Cabet, his friend Louis
Blanc, and others of the left were discredited, partly by their own mistakes, but even
more by the organized opposition of the right and the Bonapartists. On December 15, Cabet
sailed for America with almost five hundred new colonists to find the shattered remnants
of the pioneer settlement back in New Orleans. Cabet wished to return to Texas, but those
who remained from the pioneer group rebelled. The winter was spent in bitter conflict, and
eventually almost two hundred, mostly members of the group that had just come with Cabet,
returned to France, and the others found temporary employment in New Orleans while Cabet
shopped for a new site. In the spring he bought all the available property of the town of
Nauvoo in Illinois from which the Mormons had recently migrated to Utah. For a
down-payment and a large mortgage he got a variety of mills and shops, a distillery, a
large community dwelling, numerous family houses, the ruins of the burnt-out temple, and
fifteen hundred acres of land. Two hundred and eighty faithful Icarians went up the river
with Cabet to their new home. Typical of the fate that dogged them, twenty died of cholera
on the way.
Nauvoo would seem to have been ideal. Like Owen at New Harmony, Cabet took over a
completely equipped village, or rather, small town, which the Mormon Church had operated
until driven out by persecution, not just successfully, but with such prosperity as to
arouse the envy of their neighbors. For a while, the Icarians seemed to prosper too. Cabet
had a tried-and-tested membership — tried, if not by fire, at least by mud,
mosquitoes, disease, and hunger. Most of the people were experienced artisans, and soon
the mills and craft shops were back in operation. Strangely enough, there were very few
farmers, so much of the fifteen hundred acres remained uncultivated. During the year, new
arrivals from France doubled the size of the colony. But the imbalance of craftsmen and
farmers increased.
With all the immense amount of propaganda which Cabet put out in France, he never seems
to have made the slightest effort to recruit specific kinds of workers to meet the needs
of the colony. With fifteen hundred acres of some of the best land in the Mississippi
Valley, Icarian Nauvoo did not, as similar unbalanced colonies had often done, hire farm
laborers. Instead, they bought most of their food on the market. The work of the shops
could not even begin to meet the steadily growing deficit, which was made up by the
contributions of cash which Madame Cabet kept flowing from France. It does not seem to
have occurred to Cabet that there was anything wrong with that. His letters and reports
from the time are uniformly optimistic, in fact euphoric.
As usual, the colonists started a progressive school, with instruction in both French
and English for their children and English classes for adults. They printed a newspaper
and several pamphlets. They had an orchestra, a band, and a theatrical company, lectures
by visitors and residents, and discussion and study groups. Cabet, however, was not
content. He still hoped to found a utopian city, not a village, in which the habitations
would be palaces, the labors of the people mere pastimes, and their whole lives pleasant
dreams.
In 1852 the colonists who had left him at New Orleans sued him for embezzlement and he
went back to contest the suit. The French courts acquitted him and he returned to a
welcoming banquet in New York, a triumphant journey across country, and another
celebration in Nauvoo. By this time, the colony was a modest success. Even the farming
problem was on the way to being solved, and the deficit was steadily declining. To Cabet
this was just the beginning. He went off to Iowa and purchased three thousand acres on a
mortgage for the site of his dream city and communist Garden of Eden.
The government of the colony had been as vaguely conceived as its economics. While in
France Cabet had been accepted as dictator for ten years, and this arrangement was renewed
in New Orleans and again at Nauvoo. But in 1850, convinced of the success of the colony
and its readiness for a pure communist government, Cabet gave up his dictatorship. A
constitution was adopted in 1850 with a board of six governors, and a variety of
administrative committees to take care of the details of the work and community life.
Cabot was elected president each year until 1855. That December he proposed that the
constitution be rewritten providing for the election of a president with dictatorial
powers to appoint the members of the board of directors and all committees.
The constitution had provided for annual revision in March, so the community rebelled,
and in the election of February 1856 elected J.B. Gerard president. This led to so severe
a conflict that Gerard resigned and Cabet was re-elected under the old constitution for
another year. For six months the majority of directors supported him, but most of the
general assembly of the whole community opposed him. The principal reason for this
opposition seems to have been Cabet’s increasing eccentricity. He had forbidden
alcoholic drinks in the community and insisted that the whole product of the distillery be
sold outside. He then proposed to forbid all use of tobacco and began to try to enforce
his own notions of diet and his eccentric but puritanical sexual morality. The fact of the
matter is that Cabet was becoming an old man, impractical in his visionary schemes, rigid
in his attempts at their application, and cranky in temperament — a typical product
of a lifetime spent on the fringes of radicalism. At the summer election, he lost his
majority on the board of directors and the colony broke down in chaos.
In no other communist community do we have records of such violent conflict. At first
factions stopped speaking to each other, withdrew to separate parts of the dining room,
and engaged in separate social activities. Work ceased in the mills and fields. The
children quarreled with each other in school, and soon the members were literally fighting
in the streets. At this point the anti-Cabet board of directors decided that those who did
not work should not eat, and cut off the rations of the strikers on August 13. Cabet and
the minority responded by petitioning the state legislature to revoke the charter of the
community. The majority answered this move by voting unanimously to expel Cabet and his
followers, who boycotted the meeting. Four weeks later, Cabet and a hundred and seventy
faithful followers, many of whom had been with him from the beginning in Texas, arrived in
St. Louis and, as they had long ago in New Orleans, sought individual jobs as mechanics. A
week later, Cabet was dead.
Cabet’s death was by no means the end of the Icarians. The majority at Nauvoo
reacted with guilt and repentance. In the course of time, the memory of his faults and
crankiness and the bitter factionalism of the last few years faded. Cabet became a kind of
culture hero, the founder of a new civilization, like Theseus or Romulus in the opening
pages of Plutarch, and selections from his wisdom were read at meetings, like the Gospels
and epistles in church.
The St. Louis group established itself in three large cooperative houses and pooled all
its resources. The members sent their children to public schools, but organized classes in
adult education, especially in English, in which they were still deficient. They had been
allotted a share of the large community library, and they added to it to furnish their
large recreation and study room. Weeknights they continued to have music and theatrical
entertainments, and on Sunday they met for instruction in the principles of Jesus Christ
and Étienne Cabet. They also issued their own journal, the Revue Icarienne.
Faithful to the end, they forswore the consumption of alcoholic drinks and tobacco in any
form.
The movement in France recognized the St. Louis group as the legal Icarian community,
and so it received steady income of contributions and periodic recruits of new members
from abroad. The men found employment at good wages and the community was functioning as a
quite successful urban commune, one of the very first of its kind. But they were not
content.
They purchased a farm, the Cheltenham estate, a site now well within the city limits of
St. Louis, and moved back to the land. Many of the members continued to go to their jobs
in St. Louis, but the income from that source dropped considerably. The site was unhealthy
— the whole Mississippi Valley seems to have been ridden with malaria in those days;
and communist colonies seem fated always to find the most malarial sites. There were still
not enough farmers, so that the land did not even feed the community. There were no shops
or mills, only a few log huts and one strong house. Within a year, the same faction that
had split Nauvoo developed in Cheltenham. The majority wished to perpetuate the
dictatorship established by Cabet. A minority insisted on complete democracy. Forty-two of
the democrats withdrew, and the colony was unable to recover from their secession, since
they comprised the majority of the skilled craftsmen and wage-earners. In 1864 only eight
men, seven women, and their children were left. The French movement had withered and no
money or recruits came any more from France. The mortgage was foreclosed and Icaria at
Cheltenham ceased to exist.
After the secession of the minority, the community of two hundred and fifty at Nauvoo
declined rapidly. Profits from the mills, shops, and distillery dried up, probably for
lack of skilled workers, most of whom had gone to St. Louis. The Mormons, who still held
the very considerable mortgage, threatened them with foreclosure. The plant was simply too
large for the members to operate. They decided to migrate to the site in Iowa where Cabet
had planned to build the palatial City of Utopia. They took over undeveloped land, far
from any settlement, encumbered with a mortgage at ten percent. In 1863 only thirty-five
ill-fed, ill-housed, and overworked communists were left.
They were saved only by the outbreak of the Civil War. Settlers flooded into Iowa to
save it for the Union. The colony found a ready market for its products at good prices,
and they sold two thousand acres which they were unable to cultivate for ten thousand
dollars. For twelve years they prospered, so much so that they bought back some of the
land. They built decent houses, laid out orchards and vineyards, and began to go in for
more intensive farming. Since they had had to learn by doing the art of agriculture, they
probably had to work too hard to waste time in quarreling. At least, considering their
past history, their personal relations were remarkably equable.
In 1876 there were seventy-five members. They had a dozen family dwellings on three
sides of a square, a large central building with a community kitchen and dining room, used
also for assemblies and recreation, a bakery and laundry, a dairyhouse, stables and barns
and a large number of log outbuildings, all on a handsome site on a bluff above the valley
of the Nodaway River; and behind them were two thousand fertile acres, seven hundred under
cultivation with timberland, meadows, and pastures. They had six hundred sheep, a hundred
and forty cattle, most of them milch cows, and raised corn, wheat, potatoes, sorghum,
vegetables, and small fruits besides vineyards and orchards. All meals were taken in
common, and many services like laundry were performed for the community as a whole. In the
evening after dinner there was dancing, music, organized or spontaneous recreation, and on
Sundays a service which included a lecture, singing of their own songs, and readings from
the works of Étienne Cabet.
The disastrous blow dealt to the French radical movement by the Terror which followed
the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 had brought them new recruits and had wrought
changes, some obvious, some subtle but profound, in the ideology of the community. France
itself has never recovered from the Commune, so it is not surprising that its effects were
felt so far away from Paris, amongst a little community of French radicals in the midst of
the Iowa prairies.
As the years had gone by, changes had taken place in the production economy of the
colony. Except for grains and other large-scale crops, the produce of the individual plots
attached to the family dwellings had come to dominate the food supply, produce,
vegetables, and milk. Similarly the small craftsmen functioned as almost independent
operators and commonly sold their products or took part-time jobs on the outside. The
situation was not unlike that on the Russian collective farms before Stalin’s
wholesale purges. It was the older generation of revolutionaries who had pioneered with
Cabet who insisted on this limited private enterprise. The young people, especially the
refugees from the Paris Commune, demanded a complete communism of production. Many of them
were disciples of Proudhon, Bakunin, Weitling (Weitling’s own colony, Communia, had
been in northeast Iowa, in Clayton County about fifteen miles from Gutenberg), or Marx,
and the massacres and deportations that followed the suppression of the Commune had pushed
them even further to the left. Communism had ceased to be a generalized life philosophy, a
sentiment or an attitude, and had become an ideology, or rather a number of mutually
antagonistic systems.
The older members had learned that ideology was not enough and insisted on keeping the
membership strictly limited. The younger members pointed out that the colony was poor and
overworked, seriously understaffed with only eighty people, and demanded that as many
members be admitted as the colony could support.
During the 1870s conflict became irreconcilable, and at last the younger group went to
the courts and sued to revoke the charter, on the technicality that the colony was
registered as an agricultural cooperative but engaged in manufacture. The court granted
the suit, and the rebels incorporated under a new charter in 1879, while the older members
were granted a thousand acres and several houses and other buildings — and no debt.
The debts were assumed by the rebels. The older group, which ironically called itself the
New Icarians, was modestly successful. The insurgents increased their membership, opened
new industries, cultivated more land with improved agricultural methods, and more than
doubled their membership. For the first time in the long life of the Icarian communities,
women were permitted to vote and hold office. The colony was officially declared
non-religious.
The economic expansion entailed an unmanageable debt, and the expansion of the
membership soon resulted in the growth of new, irreconcilable factions. By the fall of
1881 the younger community was disintegrating and unable to satisfy its creditors. Efforts
were made to move to California and combine with the Speranza colony at Cloverdale, but in
the meantime the Cloverdale project itself collapsed, and the property was sold off to
satisfy the creditors — some of it to the New Icarians.
The older party went on in their new community much as they had for many years. They
planted orchards and vineyards, worked hard, ate simply, dressed poorly — they wore
sabots to the end, and occupied their leisure with music and lectures by their members,
and with their library of more than a thousand books, all of them in French. In 1883 they
had thirty-four members. Their children left. They grew old. One by one they dropped away.
By the end of the century a large proportion of the remaining members were in their
eighties and unable to operate the property any longer, so it was sold off, all debts
paid, and the very considerable remaining money divided pro rata according to the time of
service. Each member got enough money to support him or her modestly to the end of life.
At least New Icaria ended in mutual good will and financial solvency. Cabet’s
utopia had lasted, in one form or another, from 1848 to 1901, one of the longest lived of
all secular communist ventures. Most remarkable, it lasted through incredible
difficulties, suffering, and sickness, almost continuous factionalism, hard labor, much of
it wasted due to lack of experience, and impractical and naďve financing, loss of money,
and accumulation of debts. Life was always poor in the Icarian communities. Life at Brook
Farm was sybaritic by comparison. At the end, the handful of survivors were still
enthusiastically committed communists, although it is difficult to say what they were
committed to. The theories of Cabet, where they were definite, were impracticable. Where
they were not, they were vague and sentimental or, as in his position on sexual relations,
women’s rights, and the use of tobacco, destructive or irrelevant. Its charismatic
leader was expelled early in the life of the colony and no one ever took his place. Yet
Icaria endured, and even the dissidents and secessionists remained, most of them,
convinced communists, and many of them migrated to other communes after Icaria was sold
off.
We left the Hutterites in 1770, invited to settle in the Ukraine and the Volga region
by Catherine the Great. In 1763 the Russian government issued a manifesto offering foreign
settlers free land — as it happened, some of the best agricultural land in the world
— complete religious freedom, their own schools, instruction in their own language,
exemption from military service, and considerable tax exemptions, on the sole condition
that they did not proselytize Russians of the Orthodox faith. Twenty-three thousand
Germans, mostly Pietists or Anabaptists, had responded. Many more came in the following
years. Until their settlements were broken up during the Second World War and they were
exiled to Siberia or exterminated by Stalin, the “Volga Germans” were a small
but significant portion of the population of European Russia.
In Rumania and Transylvania the Hutterites found themselves, as absolute pacifists, at
the mercy of the marauding troops of both sides. They appealed to the commander of the
Russian forces, Count Rumiantsev, and he invited them to settle on his own estates near
Kiev, under even more favorable terms than those offered by Catherine’s manifesto.
They arrived in the autumn of 1770, and before winter had already established the
essential plant of the colony. They brought with them their craftsmen; and in a few years
their village, known as Vishenky, had become a showplace, with a textile mill, a
blacksmith’s shop, distillery, and pottery. While they had been in the Austrian
Empire their ceramics had become famous, and examples can be found today in the museums of
Central Europe.
In 1796 Rumiantsev died and his sons attempted to cancel the old count’s written
agreement with the community. The Hutterites appealed to the new emperor, Paul I, who
upheld the original agreement and granted them all the privileges given to the Mennonites
who were migrating to Russia from Prussia by the thousands. After thirty-two years they
moved from Vishenky to Radichev, eight miles away, on land granted them by the government.
At this time they numbered a little more than two hundred adults.
Soon the Hutterites expanded their manufacturing enterprises and began to grow and
weave fine linen and silk. They were probably the first to raise silk worms successfully
in Russia. In these years, the life of the community differed little from that of the
Hutterite settlements in the United States and Canada at the present time — except
that there was far more manufacturing. Land was parceled out at a rate of about two and a
half acres per family, only enough to feed the members. There was complete communism of
consumption. They ate in a community dining room, men and women at separate tables. They
wore clothes issued to all alike. They were permitted a minimum of personal possessions.
Their children were raised in nurseries. The day began and ended with religious services,
and Sundays were spent mostly in their stark, unornamented chapel.
Their communism of production, which they had practiced from the beginning, had the
curious result of making them amongst the very first pioneers of the factory system. The
manufacture of products such as pots was broken down into a series of separate operations,
each performed by different individuals. However, people were permitted to change their
tasks, and even their occupation, to avoid monotony. The reports of Russian officials who
visited were enthusiastic, as well they might have been. Around the Hutterite settlement
were villages of Russian peasants, inefficient, disorderly, and filthy, virtually
unchanged since neolithic times.
By 1840 the land had ceased to be able to support the increased population, and in 1842
the Hutterites were moved by the government to the Mennonite settlements in the Crimea,
where they were granted land as individual farmers; and an effort was made, both by the
government and by the administration of the Mennonite communities, to break up their
communist mode of life. Some were absorbed into the Mennonites, but within a few years,
most had re-established the old communal patterns and were prospering. Although many of
their manufacturing enterprises continued on a small scale, it was in these years that the
emphasis shifted to agriculture.
In 1864 a law was passed putting all the schools in the entire empire under the
supervision of the State, and making the Russian language the exclusive and compulsory
medium of instruction. The government also announced that military service would be made
compulsory within ten years. The Hutterites, unanimously, and most of the Mennonites,
decided to emigrate. Members of both groups were sent to the United States, Canada, and
South America to find suitable land and governments which would permit them to preserve
their way of life. At the last moment the Russian government, anxious to retain such
valuable citizens, offered to grant most of the original terms of settlement, but only a
very few Hutterites, although a considerable number of Mennonites, remained behind. Those
who persisted in practicing communism were exterminated by the Bolsheviks during the Civil
War and World War II.
The first group of Hutterites, one hundred and nine people, left for Nebraska in 1874,
and soon moved from there to southeastern South Dakota to the James River Valley. They
were followed in the next three years by all the others who wished to migrate. In those
days the Dakota Territory was scarcely settled. The Indian Wars were still going on.
Custer’s defeat in 1876 and the Black Hills Gold Rush began at the same time. But in
1872 there were only twelve thousand people in what later became North and South Dakota.
Each colony as it came in spent its first Dakota winter in sod huts, but in the spring
immediately began work on stone houses and barns, and by the second winter were decently
housed. The colonies were far out of the way. The world ignored them and they ignored the
world. At last they were able to return to strict orthodoxy, discipline, and uncompromised
communal living; and due to their isolation they necessarily became almost entirely
self-sufficient. They spun and wove their own clothes, made their own shoes, did all their
own blacksmithing and iron work, and made their own simple farm machinery. However, except
for these absolutely necessary crafts, the Hutterites became purely agricultural colonies
in America. They were never to return to the craft and manufacturing enterprises of the
first hundred years.
The leader of the first colony, Michael Waldner, was a blacksmith, hence Schmiedenleute,
the Blacksmith People. The leader of the Dariusleute was Darius Walther. And of
the last group to arrive, the leader was Jacob Wipf, a teacher, hence the Lehrerleute,
the Teacher’s People.
Left to themselves, the colonies flourished. By 1915 there were over seventeen hundred
members in seventeen colonies, fifteen in South Dakota and two in Montana. The increase
was almost entirely natural. They made practically no converts. But they had, and still
have, one of the highest birth rates of any group in America. By 1917 they were no longer
isolated. Montana and the Dakotas were states, and the colonies were surrounded by settled
farms, and there were towns nearby.
The United States entered the war and the draft laws made no provision for
conscientious objectors, even on the part of members of the historic peace churches, or
even, as in the case of the Hutterites, though the government had originally promised that
the settlers, whom they were so anxious to attract, would be forever exempted from bearing
arms. The pacifist Secretary of War, and author of the draft law, Newton D. Baker, advised
all young men from the historic peace churches to join the army, go to camp, and ask the
commanding officer for noncombatant service. As might be imagined, this advice resulted in
imprisonment, torture, inspired persecution, and mob violence.
The Hutterites were absolutists and refused to have anything to do with the draft or
with war work. Besides very few of them spoke anything but German. They went to prison,
and in prison were subjected to relentless persecution. Two Hutterite boys died under the
torture of prison guards. Once again the Hutterites were forced to migrate. Not only were
their young men imprisoned as draft evaders, but mob violence and arson and wholesale
theft of their livestock by the neighboring farmers was steadily increasing. The state of
South Dakota revoked their incorporation, with the announced objective to “absolutely
exterminate the Hutterites in South Dakota.” Delegations were sent to the Canadian
government in Ottawa, and the provincial governments of Alberta and Manitoba, and
arrangements were made with the Canadian Pacific Railway. The State agreed to respect
their pacifism and refusal to vote or hold office. In fact, the Canadian government had
been trying to get the Hutterites to come since 1898. In the fall of 1918 the entire body
arrived and was soon distributed on new settlements, the Schmiedenleute in
Manitoba, the Darius and Lehrer in Alberta. Within ten years they had
bought back the old South Dakota sites and established new colonies in Washington,
Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan.
The Canadian government had never deliberately provoked anti-German feeling against its
own citizens, as had Wilson’s propaganda machine, directed by the liberal
intellectual George Creel. The war ended soon after the arrival of the colonists in
Canada, and for several years they were more than welcome, and once again prospered.
However, their high birth rate continued, and the colonies were continuously budding off
into new land, which they farmed far more successfully than did their Gentile neighbors.
They ceased to do their own weaving, although most colonists still make their own shoes,
and all knitwear. Blacksmithing is largely confined to horseshoeing and machine repair.
The old one-man ploughs, scythes, and cradle-scythes are a thing of the past. Unlike the
stricter Amish, the Hutterites believe in using all the latest farm machinery. In fact,
they have often been criticized for overcapitalizing their farms. Since they still live
lives of strict austerity and spend no money on entertainment or domestic utilities,
except refrigerators, which they usually get from the Amana Colony, and since radios,
televison, musical instruments, and all but the simplest clothing are completely
forbidden, and their farms are uniformly successful, they have little else to do with
their money except to spend it for farm machinery.
Only in recent years have the Hutterites permitted a very few carefully selected
members to continue their education beyond the legal minimum, although there is now a
growing feeling that they should produce their own doctors and teachers. In the past, a
rare member has withdrawn from the community, obtained a college education, returned,
repented, and served the community as a resident professional. Since they do not believe
in ever going to court, they at least do not need to produce their own lawyers. They have
always trained their own midwives and nurses.
Although the Hutterites have often adopted the policy of buying less desirable land
than that of their neighbors, they have always made more money out of it, and soon
improved it to the point where it was better than anything around. Their dress is odd,
although nowhere near as odd as the stricter Amish. They speak a bygone German dialect
amongst themselves, although they all speak English. Like the Quakers, they never haggle
over prices. They buy almost all outside goods wholesale, and even the heaviest farm
machinery is often bought for several colonies at once. They do not drive automobiles for
pleasure — women, incidentally, are forbidden to drive them at all. They are a
“peculiar people,” and in all contacts with Gentile society conspicuously
practice the apostolic virtues. Hence they are hated and envied. Canadian prejudice
against the Hutterites has steadily grown. It has never reached the fantastic degree of
persecution suffered by the Doukhobors, but simply because the Hutterites have only
responded by turning the other cheek. Unlike the Doukhobors, they do not believe in
confrontation or nonviolent demonstrations. They do not burn down their own buildings or
take off their clothes, parade naked through towns, or when their men are locked up
surround the prisons with a crowd of hymn-singing, naked women. Canadian prejudice and
pressure has so far operated under the guise of legality. Abusive gossip and malicious
myth-making are to be expected amongst competing farmers in the barrooms of the
neighboring towns. But what is astonishing is prejudice amounting to a rigid refusal to
see anything good in the Hutterites, and a kind of sniggering contempt amongst educated
professional people, including professors in Canadian universities, among them scholars in
the sociology of religion.
On the other hand, the Gentile Dakotans seem to have learned their lesson; and although
the Hutterites may be envied, they are rather admired. The brutal fact of the matter is
that, as was prophesied by its founder, a strictly lived Christianity inspires hatred and
fear in “the world.” The Roman State persecuted the early Christians because
they refused to burn incense to Caesar. The general populace hated them because they were
seclusive, dressed differently, supported each other economically, were honest and direct
in their dealings, and did not attend the gladiatorial combats in the circus, except as
unwilling participants.
The Hutterites form by far the oldest communist society in the world — or in
history, except for pre-literate tribes still more or less in the condition of
“primitive communism.” It is over four hundred and fifty years since Jacob
Hutter in 1533 joined the Anabaptist communities, gathered together from Switzerland,
Bohemia, Moravia, and the Austrian Tyrol, and persuaded them to adopt a completely
communal life. In the golden age of the Moravian settlements, there were over twenty
thousand members in more than ninety villages. Today in Canada and the United States,
there are more than a hundred and fifty colonies, yet the number of surnames is amazingly
small. All existing Hutterites are descended from the few families that survived centuries
of migration, persecution, and desertion.
It has often been pointed out that one of the principal factors in the failure of most
nineteenth-century communes, particularly the secular ones, was the lack of discrimination
in the acceptance of members. The contemporary Hutterite communities are the end-products
of the most rigorous selection imaginable. They have survived both martyrdom and
prosperity, and migration to and through the most incongruous political environments,
although their physical environment has remained remarkably uniform, the ecology of the
Ukrainian blacklands, the long grass prairie, and the Danubian basin. At the beginning
they deliberately recruited members with the necessary skills, both craftsmen and
successful peasants. In Moravia, and for a while in Russia, they were settled on large
manorial estates, where the self-sufficiency of the economy of a feudal community
survived, and which they were able to perfect. To this day they still profit from lessons
learned in centuries of a manorial way of life. Although modern liberal Christians might
call them fundamentalists, the Hutterite confession of faith is in fact more flexible,
less strict and, what is most important, more capable of etherealization than that of most
Anabaptist sects of the past or millenarian and pentecostal contemporary churches. In
fact, the chiliasm and millenarianism have died away.
The Hutterites do not look upon themselves as a remnant set apart to be saved out of a
world of evil at the Second Coming and the Last Judgment. They simply consider themselves
Christians, living the kind of life which self-evidently follows from the words of Jesus
and the narratives of the apostolic life in the Gospels and Acts. Since the Gospels and
Acts and the words of Christ are also, if read without preconceptions, marked by a
dramatic eschatology, the expectation of the imminent arrival of the fire and the kingdom,
this adjustment is comparable to that of the larger, respectable Christian sects. The
group which most resembles the apostolic Christians is probably Jehovah’s Witnesses.
But unlike Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Black Muslims, the Hutterites are not a
garrison society. If a community builds a sufficiently impenetrable wall around itself, it
will be broken down. The Hutterites are almost as open to the Gentile world as are the
Quakers. They quietly accept their religious beliefs and their way of life as
distinguishing themselves from the rest of the world, and are content. They do not use
cosmetics, or watch television, but such practices amongst the Gentiles do not arouse them
to a holy fury. They not only accept their relationship to the world, but the world’s
to them. This is very important. Had they been combative and indulged in massive
confrontation, as a tiny minority in the midst of a world which was often bitterly
antagonistic, and at the best indifferent, they would have long since been destroyed.
Hutterite society is truly a peaceable kingdom.
Most communal movements have depended on the charisma of one individual leader, a
Robert Owen or a John Humphrey Noyes, and have succeeded in a measure to which that leader
was also a practical administrator and a man of many knowledges, as Noyes was, and Owen
was not; or, at times, on the ability of the charismatic man or woman to raise up a
practical leader to share the governance of the colony. We are dealing with a very ancient
polity, the priest-king and war-king of the transition from the neolithic village to the
town. The constitution of the Hutterite communities was carefully adjusted to raise up out
of each commune individuals with just sufficient charisma and practicality to ensure the
cohesion of the community and the efficiency of its economic life. Perhaps it is carefully
controlled charisma which has helped the society to endure. The spectacular personalities
lie back at the beginning of Hutterite history — the founders and their immediate
successors, Jacob Widemann, Hans Hut, Jacob Hutter, Peter Riedemann, and Andreas
Ehrenpreis — and their influence overrides that of any leader since, let alone of any
contemporary. Their writings are still read in church and their hymns are still sung.
Actually, the Hutterite community owes its cohesion to a diffused charisma, of which
each member is the bearer. The community, like the mystical Israel, or the Church as the
Bride of Christ, is the pentecostal person. The Hutterites are well aware of this fact,
but such awareness seems to mark the limits of etherealization. We know little of the
interior life of the devout Hutterite, but there never seems to have occurred a mystical
hypostatization of the community. There are no visions of the Shekinah as amongst the
Hassidim. The round of work in the fields and kitchens, nurseries and shops, and the
congregational work seem to be charged with a consciousness of mystical glory sufficient
unto the needs of the very practical-minded Hutterites. There may be a contemplative life,
especially amongst older people, that Gentiles never know anything about; but at least
viewed from the outside, the Hutterites would seem to be a society of Brother Lawrences.
Unlike many, perhaps most, communal societies, secular or religious, the Hutterites are
governed more by custom than by written law, and they have seldom found it necessary to
make serious constitutional changes. At the head of each colony is a Diener am Wort,
the Servant of the Word. When a new leader is to be chosen, the heads of other colonies
are invited to a meeting and they, together with all the given colonies’ male
members, vote for one of a list of candidates submitted by the community. After prayer,
from those who receive more than five votes, one is chosen by lot. After a probationary
period of two years or more, he is then ordained by the laying on of hands of two or three
other leaders. He does not eat at the community table, and in many small ways lives a more
individual life in his own home.
Most leaders are comparatively young when chosen — between twenty-five and forty
— and serve for life or until incapacitated by sickness or old age. They are the
spiritual leaders of the community, and formerly the general administrators, although it
has become more and more common to elect by simple majority a practical administrator for
the economic affairs, known as a Haushälter, the Householder. As colony steward
he oversees the work, assigns tasks, takes care of the finances and bookkeeping, and
himself takes turns at various jobs, even the most menial. It is important not to think of
the Haushälter as “the colony boss.” He is more of a coordinator.
Under him is a farm foreman, and if the colony has other important activities, as very few
do, other foremen.
There is considerable rotation of tasks. A man may be a cobbler one year, a beekeeper
the next, and a farmer the third year. In the course of time, most people settle down into
a regular occupation, but often switch, even late in life. There is a similar hierarchy
amongst women — a Haushälterin, who supervises the kitchen, the sewing
room, the garden, and the kindergarten. There are also women who specialize in midwifery,
and most of the women are competent practical nurses. Although the doctrinal
constitutional documents of the Hutterites insist rather strongly on the submission of
women to the governance of men, observers are unanimous in their reports that Hutterite
women seem to be extraordinarily happy, working together in a state of cheerfulness
verging on euphoria. And of course, due to the nature of “women’s work,” if
it is done cooperatively by a large number of women, it is decidedly easier than the
chores of the single farm housewife.
Hutterite families live in separate homes or apartments with their children, and are
assigned larger ones as the family grows. In the past children were sometimes raised in
cooperative nurseries, but this practice has been dropped — except that babies and
very young children are cared for cooperatively while the mothers are working. Family
relationships are even stronger than those of the old-fashioned German patriarchal family.
Questionnaires submitted to children attending public school away from the colony reveal
practically none of the alienation, generation gap, much less “Oedipal conflict”
typical of modern youth. In spite of the lures of the outside world, with its commodity
culture, conspicuous consumption, and over-stimulating entertainment, Hutterite young
people almost all seem to want to be just like their parents and the five hundred years of
communist ancestors behind them. Those who leave in late adolescence, usually do so to
marry a Gentile spouse. They return on holidays and weekends to the colony, often settle
nearby, and frequently the spouse is converted, baptized, and the couple are returned,
with rejoicing, to the fold.
There is far less desertion of the Hutterite way of life than there is even of similar
but non-communist sects like the Amish, Mennonites, or Mormons, or the communists of
Amana. One reason for this probably is that there is nothing in the Hutterite creed so
improbable as to demand a drastic effort of etherealization on the part of a person
educated in modern schools. Very few Hutterites go on to college, although more do under
the direction of the colony than used to, to provide professional services and further
ensure the self-sufficiency of the community. Those who do, almost without exception,
return to the colony.
Furthermore, the twentieth-century movement imitating the original Hutterites, the
Brüderhof, founded by German and English intellectuals, and still made up largely of
college-educated and quite sophisticated people, has never come in conflict with the
birth-right Hutterite communities over matters of faith and morals. The disagreements have
been basically about customs and folkways of two radically different classes. This was
probably one of the weaknesses of the Shakers. As time went on, it became harder and
harder for people to believe in Shaker doctrines, especially since they involved celibacy.
So the Shakers were almost never able to hold the orphans they raised, and eventually were
unable to recruit new adult members.
In practice, the result of almost five hundred years of practice, the governance of the
Hutterite community is remarkable for its elasticity. The modest hierarchy of
administration can always rise to an emergency. Its flexibility makes it earthquake-proof,
and the general governance of the entire movement is similarly flexible. Both colony and
general councils, like the Quakers, try to avoid action without unanimity; and since the
Hutterite way of life is the end-product of almost every conceivable testing, this
unanimity is usually easily arrived at. “Not the rule of men, but the administration
of things,” as Marx said.
An interesting and possibly significant detail is that the Hutterite colonies, like
many villages of primitive people, practice a limited exogamy. Couples choose one another
from nearby colonies more often than from within a single colony. This, of course, creates
a web of cohesive family relationships, radiating out from the original settlements, and
preserves a wider hereditary range, a bigger “gene pool.” The gene pool is small
enough as it is. Outsiders are always saying “Hutterites all look alike.” In
1965, there were only fifteen surnames of the Haushälters of all one hundred and
fifty-five colonies. The Hutterites may all look alike, but they certainly do not look
like what is commonly meant by “inbred.” Hereditary diseases and dysfunctions
are practically unknown amongst them. They suffer less from such things than the general
population.
It would be possible to go on describing nineteenth-century American communes
indefinitely, but such work would be little better than a dictionary, and there is little
point in devoting space to what were really cooperative farms or boarding houses or to
abortive colonies that lasted only a few months. There were in the nineteenth century and
still are today communal religious cults, most bizarre in their doctrines and despotically
ruled by a leader who is the keeper of special revelations. It is a mistake, however, to
classify these as communes. They are actually rackets, large-scale collective confidence
games operated at immense profit to their leaders. Their history is an entirely different
subject and merits another book.
Earlier we referred briefly to a most significant movement in the early history of
communalism, the Jesuit settlements in Paraguay. There is amazingly little literature on
this subject in English. Still the best book is R.B. Cunninghame Graham’s A
Vanished Arcadia, published in 1924. When the Jesuits entered the territory in 1607
it was still “wild,” almost completely untouched by Spanish or Portuguese
influence. In the course of time their communities came to dominate much of the eastern
watershed of the River Paraguay. Their villages were really reconstituted tribes, provided
with as much of the technology of Europe as they could absorb; and ruled, or rather
guided, by a handful of priests, whose instruments of government seem to have been almost
exclusively the sacraments of penance and communion. The Indians were harried by slave
raiders from Sao Paulo and the Jesuits were almost as badly harried by ecclesiastical
jealousy. Yet they survived until the expulsion of the order in 1767, when most of the
Indian villages were destroyed. Their fields reverted to the wilderness, the Indians were
scattered and returned to a savage mode of life, or were enslaved, and their immense herds
of cattle roamed wild over the pampas.
The Jesuits did not establish their villages as communes deliberately. They simply
adapted the social organization of the Indians. The little societies were rather highly
structured. Status derived both from offices in the community government and from eagerly
sought-after roles in the various ceremonials. Life must have been very like that in one
of the more communal pueblos of the American Southwest — Zuni, for instance —
but in an environment far more bountiful and therefore permissive of much greater leisure,
much of which was devoted to ceremonial — Catholic, much modified by aboriginal
elements. Contrary to popular belief, the eminently successful missionary activity in
Paraguay was closely watched by the Church, and attempts were made to found similar
communities elsewhere in Spanish America, notably by the Jesuits in Arizona. Had the order
not been suppressed just as it was entering California, the story of the California
Indians would be quite different. The Franciscan missions were far from being communes.
The Indians were little better than slaves, and the turnover due to mortality was
appalling. After the Americans took over in the Gold Rush, the Indians were hunted down
like jack rabbits, California grizzlies, coyotes, and condors, until almost none of them
was left in the arable parts of the state. In Paraguay a few villages founded by the
Jesuits survive to this day. The social and economic relationships are those of free
enterprise, but the memory of the communities of three hundred years ago lingers on. In
many ways the Jesuit “reductions,” as they were called in Paraguay, are one of
the best organizations of society ever to exist, either in theory or in actuality. The
Indians were certainly happier than anyone would be in Plato’s Republic, or St.
Thomas More’s Utopia. Life was an almost uninterrupted ritual, a kind of group
contemplation suffused with joy. The extraordinary thing is that nothing like it has ever
happened at any other time in history, certainly not since the neolithic village.
At the opposite pole from the Jesuit “reductions” was the colony of
Topolobampo, founded in 1872 on the Gulf of California. This was the scheme of a
professional land developer, Albert K. Owen, who seems to have believed that the most
profitable way to develop a remarkably valuable site on a sheltered, deep-water bay was to
organize a settlement as a cooperative colony and joint-stock company. The initial plans
were certainly communalist, but in a very short time the colonists split into
private-enterprise and communalist factions. Separately, they did an immense amount of
work in opening up the country, digging by hand an irrigation canal eight miles long, one
hundred feet wide and fifteen feet deep, and many miles of ditches. The colony was open to
anyone who would buy stock, and in fact to anyone who managed to get there. Owen’s
schemes for a great port and commercial center came to nothing. The Mexican government
reneged on its promises. The colonists rapidly declined from six hundred to two hundred
members, most of them private enterprisers. A few descendants of the colony survive in the
area today, married into Mexican families. Topolobampo may be the only example of
communism as a form of capitalist business enterprise. Considering the scale on which
Topolobampo was planned, and the number of people involved, both colonists and nonresident
stockholders in the corporation, which was known as the Credit Foncier, there is an
extraordinary lack of information. A Southwestern Utopia by Thomas A. Robertson,
whose childhood was spent in the colony, was published in 1947, with a new edition in 1963
by Ward Ritchie in Los Angeles. The book is folksy and anecdotal, and unfortunately
Robertson’s family were members of the group that chose private enterprise, so there
is very little about the commune. The book has neither bibliography nor index.
One of the colonists at Topolobampo was Burnette G. Haskell, whom Robertson places
there in 1887, with his wife and family, and who, one would judge from Robertson’s
note, also died there. As a matter of fact, in those years Haskell was editing the
anarchist magazine Truth in San Francisco and busy founding and leading the
Kaweah Kooperative Kommonwealth in the foothills of the Sierras, in what became Sequoia
National Park, above the town of Three Rivers. Haskell seems to have been an unstable,
brilliant, and highly emotional person; and apparently he and James Martin, a socialist
and practical labor leader, quarreled from the settlement’s beginnings. Haskell and a
man named Buchanan, who led the great Kansas Railroad Strike, claimed to have presided
over an organization which was the legitimate successor of the First International after
it was split between the followers of Marx and Bakunin, and moved by Marx to America. At
immense, in fact incredible effort, the colonists built a road from Three Rivers into
Giant Forest, where they named the largest Sequoia, now known as the General Sherman Tree,
the Karl Marx Tree. The federal government invalidated the land claims of the colony under
the pressure of the railroads and lumber companies, but the latter were disappointed. The
whole area and the high country behind it was declared a national park. Haskell must have
gone to Topolobampo after this time.
Another even more famous revolutionary connected with American communalism was Wilhelm
Weitling, the working-class leader and theoretician, who in the 1840s had a much greater
influence than Marx and Engels, who borrowed liberally from him in their early days.
Weitling evolved a rigid system, secular but with a heavy millenarian and apocalyptic
emphasis. His communism really involved a rejection of industrialism and a return to a
cooperative handicraft system of production. The apocalypticism of Marx and Engels’s Communist
Manifesto reflects the influence of, and competes with, Weitling. After the failure
of the revolutionary movements of 1848, Weitling migrated to America and ran a newspaper
and founded a workers’ association which provided insurance, financial aid, and
pensions to its members, what Marx called a “coffin club.” In 1851 he became
interested in Communia, one of the many small colonies founded, mostly by German émigrés
from the Forty-Eight, into which he poured much of the money of his Arbeiterbund.
Quarreling and plain laziness soon bankrupted the colony and ruined Weitling. This failure
seems to have affected him far more than the failure of the 1848 revolutions. He became a
crank and evolved a universal system from cosmogony to economics, and his last years were
spent in profound eccentricity. Weitling is too little regarded in the history of
revolutionary thought. Quite independently of Hegel, and before Marx, he developed a
theory of human self-alienation as the primary evil of capitalist production, and some
years before Marx or Proudhon he was an avowed communist. In a sense, Marx and Engels
joined his communist movement and took it over. His only monument is the large building on
the site of Communia, which still functions as a social center and dance hall.
There is a temptation to go on and on describing at least briefly colony after colony.
Many of the religious ones were bizarre in the extreme but most of them differed from
communities like Oneida or the Shakers in that the founders and leaders were obviously
religious racketeers, in it for the money. Many of these people seem to have realized that
the more outrageous their gospel, the more dupes they would attract. The will to believe
things because they are impossible was not confined to Tertullian, but is a widespread
failing of the human race. Most of these movements held all things in common, but always
excepting the leaders who led lives of vulgar, ostentatious luxury. Such groups therefore
probably should not be called communes. The end in view was always to get the members to
give their life savings and from then on work hard without pay.
What are the conclusions to be drawn from a survey of the long history of communalism?
They are pretty much the conclusions that were drawn by intelligent leaders when
nineteenth-century communalism was at its height — by John Humphrey Noyes of Oneida
and Frederick Evans of the Shakers — and with few exceptions the colonies were open
to the criticisms of Marx and Engels.
To take the Marxist criticism first, what they called utopian socialism always
represented a return to an earlier, more primitive form of production and social
relationships. With few exceptions, communalist colonies were revivals of the neolithic
village with more or less modern technology. This is still true today. Communalism has
been haunted by a gospel of “back to the land” and in so many instances the
colonies have failed because the members have insisted upon basing their economy almost
exclusively on agriculture, even though the colonists knew nothing about farming, least of
all what hard work it was. In some instances, they even determined upon limiting
themselves to the most primitive agricultural technology, although this is more true of
the communes that have proliferated after the Second World War.
Secular communes have almost always failed in very short order. It is astonishing that
Robert Owen’s New Harmony should bulk so large in the history of communalism. It
lasted so short a while and managed to do everything wrong. A simple belief that all men
should live together as brothers is not sufficiently well defined to inspire a strong
commitment. And where the community is open to anyone who wishes to come and enroll
himself as a member, disaster is certain. Commitment is weak at best, but such colonies
attract the redundant individuals cast off by the dominant society — idlers, cranks,
and those who cannot get along with anybody at home or on the job, and who therefore think
themselves qualified to get along with the delicately balanced extended family of a
commune. An open-gate policy also admits sociopaths and criminals who, at the worst, seize
power or split the community, and at the least run off with whatever cash and movable
assets they can lay hands on.
Almost every commune has tried to be self-sustaining and to achieve both communism of
consumption and production. Only the Hutterites have managed to be financially successful
agriculturalists, and in their earliest days they too were primarily craftsmen. Ideally, a
community should have sufficient land to feed itself, and in addition have some
specialized manufacture which can compete in the market place because of its high quality.
Oneida, Amana, and in the twentieth century the Brüderhof are good examples.
Not only have the longest-lived colonies owed their cohesion and commitment to
supernatural sanctions, but they have also been governed by individuals of powerful
charisma. In some instances the leadership has been divided exactly as it was at the end
of the neolithic, between the religious leader and the practical leader, the priest king
and the war king, the apostle and the business manager.
A certain degree of interpersonal tension seems to further the cohesion of a colony.
The celibacy of the Shakers, which in their ceremonials verged on orgies without sexual
intercourse, and the group marriages and special techniques of sexual intercourse and
eugenics of Oneida, are really two forms of the same thing, two faces of the coin of
generalized erotic tension.
It should be emphasized again that communal living in theory is very advantageous to
women. Most of the work of a housewife or mother can be divided and distributed. Children
can be taken care of in a nursery by one or two women. Cooking, sewing, laundry,
housecleaning, all the tasks that were considered “women’s work,” can be
distributed so that each woman has considerable leisure. This, of course, is why Mormon
polygamy was more popular with women than with men. Thousands of women walked from St.
Louis to Salt Lake to take part in it.
However, just as today in many hippie communes the only work done seems to be done by
women, so in the history of many of the secular communes of the nineteenth century. Women
rebelled, because all the work was shifted to them, while the men sat around, drank
whiskey, chewed tobacco, and discussed communism, the equality of the sexes, and the
freedom of women.
Communism as such does not seem to have been a factor in the failure of most colonies.
Many, perhaps most that fail, do so for economic reasons. Commonly, they bought too much
land on expensive mortgages and were unable to use it profitably. Many enjoyed a
considerable income from non-resident members. Even the Kaweah Kooperative Kommonwealth
received money from a non-resident membership, both in the United States and Europe. The
secular colony Icaria, which persisted longest, received very considerable funds from
France until the final schism. Its special mistake was undertaking to farm too much land,
but it is difficult to understand why throughout the lifetime of the Icarian movement the
community life was one of desperately hard work and involuntary poverty.
Wherever there existed powerful forces for commitment and cohesion, a carefully
screened membership, and intelligent leaders with wide practical experience, communism
proved to be, economically, extremely successful. The model in this regard is the
Hutterite colony. Their principal problem today is the envy inspired by their uniform
success and prosperity.
It is difficult to relate the thousands of groups that call themselves communes that
have sprung up all over the world — except in the Communist countries — since
the Second World War. Many are not communes at all, but cooperative boarding houses in
university towns of the sort which have always existed. These are the groups that have
attracted the most attention from journalists because they are most accessible. Just
because their members smoke marijuana and sleep with each other indiscriminately does not
make them fundamentally different from the Greek-letter fraternities. Some open-gate rural
communes are in fact outdoor “crash pads.” Three hundred adolescent hitchhikers
bivouacking on three hundred acres which the more or less permanent members do not bother
to farm does not constitute a commune. Here again, sensationalist journalism has had a
field day. It is true that for many, perhaps most, contemporary groups that call
themselves communes, sex and drugs have taken the place of chiliasm and charisma. Even so,
a large number have managed to organize themselves as genuine communes — of
consumption, and a very few, of production.
The modern communalist movement is held together by a secular version of the old
millenarianism. It began with the dropping of the atom bomb. The fire and the judgment
ceased to be a matter of faith and became not too distant facts. A “saving
remnant” began to withdraw from the centers of population, and in many instances from
the northern hemisphere. In the early years of the Cold War the apocalypse did not seem to
be very far away and at least twice, once at Dien Bien Phu and again during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, it was imminent. People no longer talk very much about the bomb. It has
been taken for granted. However, a number of opinion surveys have shown that a majority of
college students do not expect to be alive in the twenty-first century. Shortly after
Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Alex Comfort said that if the Americans had not invented the atom
bomb, the modern capitalist State would have secreted it as a kind of natural product.
Just so, modern warfare has also produced an immense number of totally alienated people,
who matter-of-factly regard Western civilization as having come to an end in August 1914.
It is this pervasive and absolute alienation that takes the place of religion or
ideology amongst contemporary communards; and the modern communalist movement is a direct
attack on human self-alienation as such, discarding the roundabout maneuvers of socialism
or communism. “After all,” as someone once said in a meeting of the Italian
Communist Party, “we have had socialism over one-sixth of the earth for fifty years
and over an additional area and over twice as many people for twenty-five, and human
self-alienation has not declined but increased. What are we doing?”
Marx thought that the industrial process would teach the working class
class-consciousness, by which he meant Marxism. This is not particularly noticeable in
Detroit or Gary. But the breakdown of Western civilization has taught an immense number of
people, not all of them young, an almost instinctive response both to the dominant
society, as enemy, and to their peers as comrades, which greatly resembles the Communist
anarchism of Bakunin and Berkman, of whom few of them have ever heard. It is remarkable
how all-pervasive this is. Highly authoritarian groups like the Black Muslims, the Black
Panthers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Brüderhof, and the Jesus People may be defiant of
the outside world and present to it a highly structured exterior, but within each movement
a communal ethic has developed. This is true even of neo-Bolshevik organizations like the
Trotskyites or Maoists, which can no longer enforce the old Leninist rigid organizational
forms, and which also constantly spin off guerrilla grouplets, whose interpersonal
relations are as communist-anarchist as Kropotkin could have wished, and whose relations
to the dominant society are those of the terrorist-anarchist groups in France at the end
of the nineteenth century. Grouplets like this are born totally without ideology —
except that of total alienation. Modern secession is a continuum which stretches from the
Manson Family and the Symbionese Liberation Army to the religious anarcho-pacifists’
commune whose members spend at least two hours a day sitting in meditation.
One of the factors making for cohesion is cult. Medieval monasticism, with its
continuous round of Mass, Divine Office — the chanting of psalms, hymns, canticles,
and prayers every few hours throughout the day and night — and the continuously
varying rites of the year, so involved the monk or nun and so identified him or her with
the community that it was difficult even to think of breaking away. In America in the
nineteenth century the Shakers undoubtedly had the most highly developed cult. But even
the successful secular communes originated a ceremonial life, although doubtless the
members did not think of it as such.
Another factor often part of the ceremonies of the community was confession, a powerful
binding force in the Shakers and surviving today in many communal groups, the most famous
of which, in this regard, is Synanon, where the harshest group criticism of the members
and the most abject confession have been elevated to a governing principle in the
community. Any technique which systematically attacks the least appearance of
egocentricity obviously increases group cohesion, except of course that it runs the danger
of pushing the individual to the breaking point where he simply leaves.
Only the religious communities, and not all of them, have been able to hold their
children. This seems to be no problem at all to the Hutterites, who now can safely risk
sending selected young people away to college. One of the most important functions of the
Shakers was their care of orphans and abandoned children in a day when the orphanages were
few and bad. The children were raised in the Shaker life, but almost none of them remained
in the community. On the other hand, many secular communities survived principally as
“progressive schools.” With all its disasters and follies, this was the
principal contribution of Owen’s New Harmony; and the anarchist colony at Stelton,
New Jersey, soon became a cooperative suburban “development,” except for the
school, which kept the community alive until it was overwhelmed by spreading suburbia (it
is now almost entirely a Negro district). Some twentieth-century communes have been
primarily schools, the best example being Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas. It is
doubtful if Black Mountain College could be called a commune. Antioch College, however, is
the ultimate descendant of a number of converging communal groups, some of them spun off
from New Harmony.
In all the many books which have been written about the communalist movement in America
in the nineteenth century, there is little disagreement as to the factors that make for
success. They are:
A religion, or at least a powerful ideology which all the members of the group accept,
which should include the belief that the dominant society fails to provide sufficient
value for a happy life, and is sick, or doomed, or dying, or, nowadays, already dead, and
that the commune is a saving remnant plucked from the burning.
A leader with powerful charisma and, even more important, the ability to persuade
people to his will, and also with considerable equanimity. Noyes, for instance, seems to
have been blissfully unruffled by any of the contentions that developed at Oneida. Such a
personality can be extremely authoritarian and coercive. About fifty percent of the people
attracted to a communal life seem to be characterized by an extreme social masochism, and
they have little trouble finding communities ruled by small tyrants. The other fifty
percent are strong individualists and require the leadership of a highly skilled
manipulator, able to persuade them that his ideas originated with themselves. All the
charisma in the world cannot make up for a wide range of talents. Noyes, again, was a
truly universal man, who apparently could do anything well; and the Hutterite leadership
commonly revolved through most of the tasks of the community in their lifetime. If one
leader has only charisma, he has to have a business manager, and this dual leadership has
not been uncommon.
There should be an accepted method of assigning and rotating tasks, with both sexes
sharing the boring jobs of housekeeping. The laundry has traditionally been the focus of
discontent amongst women. And of course the members should be responsible — the tasks
should be done. Many contemporary communes, urban and rural, are characterized by
disorder, filth, and undone jobs.
Farming is very hard work. It is hard work even for experienced farmers. It is not just
the concentration of capital which created American agribusiness. For over a generation it
has been impossible to hold the sons on the small, two-hundred-acre or so family-run
general farm. And all over the semi-tropical and tropical world peasants desert their
little farms and move to the slums of the cities, where mostly they starve in squalor.
Farming today in America on a small marginal or worn-out general farm is a nearly
impossible proposition, and of course the acreage cannot sustain much capital investment
in machinery. A large truck garden and a couple of milch goats and some chickens can
provide a considerable proportion of the food for a medium-sized commune, and leave ample
work time free for some easily distributed specialized manufacture. This is the only
solution for a big-city commune, although some of them rent land for garden plots on the
outskirts of the city. “Back to the land” and “contact with Mother
Earth” are part of the mystique of most contemporary rural communes, whose members
find it more desirable to work hard and inefficiently for small returns than to shift the
economic base to crafts or manufacture. To each his own.
There is a certain unreality, moreover, about an old mansion or a twelve-room Riverside
Drive apartment occupied by lawyers, professors, psychiatrists, and social workers who
share expenses, play musical beds, and call themselves a commune. The nearer a community
comes to being potentially completely self-sustaining, the nearer it approaches its ideal
of a saving remnant, the nucleus of a society which will survive when the dominant society
perishes. There are a few urban communes which operate with a communism of production as
well as of consumption. They seem to be mostly religious and under extremely authoritarian
leadership. Of course, in the apocalypse the urban communes will perish along with the
cities, which is the best final argument for establishing communities in remote parts of
the country. The only trouble is that the war-making State has the same idea. The New
Mexico communes are in the midst of the original centers for atomic warfare, and even the
Hutterite colonies in North Dakota are within range of the silos for intercontinental
ballistic missiles. Sunburst Farms near Santa Barbara, one of the most successful
agricultural communities, is in the direct line of a blast on Vandenburg Air Base, and the
San Francisco Bay area is liberally dotted with atomic-war installations and communes on a
sort of share-and-share-alike basis.
A complete “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” total individual
anarchism simply does not work. A good many contemporary communes operate on this basis,
but they seem to have an average one hundred percent turnover every year. The commune
persists, essentially, as just an address. Most groups of this sort have come together to
share drugs and sex, and they are held together, insofar as they are, by the enmity of the
dominant society. All the contemporary methods making for group cohesion exist in one
community or another. Group sex, encounter groups, group confession and criticism —
many communes practice them all, and each group has its antecedents, not just in the
nineteenth century, but in the radical Reformation.
Finally, a community can endure as an immense “crash pad” with a completely
open-gate policy, but it cannot endure as a commune. Selectivity is the first law of
communalism. Even the most anarchistic, where nobody believes in laws, must at least
believe in anarchism. The communes that are most successful today either do not allow
visitors at all, or do not allow them to stay more than overnight, and prospective members
are subjected to a searching novitiate. In the early days of the post-World War II
movement, when every hitchhiker was welcomed with open arms, the communes not only filled
up with loafers and sociopaths, but they all faced serious problems with abandoned dogs
and abandoned children, left behind by wandering communards. The Rule of St. Benedict has
a chapter devoted to the menace of such people at the beginning of Western monasticism.
Abandoned dogs and abandoned children are social problems, but there is an aesthetic, even
ecological problem. Most rural hippie communes are approached by a dirt road lined with
dead and abandoned automobiles, which make great playground equipment for the scrambling,
naked children, but which are nonetheless an eyesore, and ultimately an expensive disposal
problem.
End of Kenneth Rexroth’s book Communalism.
Copyright 1974. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
[Communalism contents and index]
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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