Communes still thrive decades after the '60s, but economy is a bummer, man
http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2014/12/communes-still-thrivedecadesafterthe60sbuteconomyisabummerman.html
Sky Blue found his proper place in the world when he was 19, a college dropout who visited a Virginia commune called Twin Oaks. Fifteen years later, he’s still there, amid a thriving mini-society spread out over 450 acres of farmland, gardens, woods and small factories....
As the 34-year-old Blue has found, even utopias can’t escape the dystopia of a 21st-century economy. Twin Oaks was created to demonstrate how a completely classless society could work, and Blue was attracted to a life that might offer him an alternative to the drudgery of dutiful moneymaking he felt was the sole goal of his education....
It’s not an isolated blow. In recent years, many of the U.S.’s roughly 3,000 intentional communities — a term their members tend to prefer to the word “commune” and its connotations of sex, drugs and burned-out hippies — have had to tighten budgets as the economy has slowed down. They’ve also had to grapple with how ballooning student debt may be constraining new membership. A look inside an intentional community in the midst of the economic slowdown is a look at what it’s like to live set apart from our society’s dearest economic values — acquisition and individual ownership, debt, consumption as fuel for the growth imperative — but still remain under their influence.
What it all indicates is that moving outside of the long reach of the mainstream financial system is not so easy to do, even in utopia.
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