communes

I Grew Up in a Black Liberationist Commune

From 1973 to the early 2000s, the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church operated a communal home in a Detroit apartment building, dedicated to the collective project of replacing received notions of Black inferiority with a sense of possibility. 

Grandpa, Tell Us About the Division of Labor on the Hippie Commune

by Erik Loomis

Despite their grand countercultural goals, communes tended to follow a rigidly gendered division of labor.

The Lost Utopian Communes of the Midwest

by Evan Malmgren

"Inland America is pocked with the unmarked graves of communitarian utopias—primitive socialist and communist experiments—that tried to rebuild the world on what was assumed to be virgin soil."

Utopia’s Settler Colonialism Problem

by Jessica Namakkal

The commune movements of the 1960s counterculture were organized around a number of pernicious assumptions about indigenous people and the prerogatives of whites to settle and reorganize land. 

The Farm, home to free spirits for 42 years, is at a crossroads

Aged with years of cannabis and communal living, Stephen Gaskin’s body is worn and his words unhurried. At 78, he walks with slow intention. But the spirit of this tie-dye-clad hippie philosopher — iconic founder of The Farm — remains vibrant.Ask him about the beginning, and his blue eyes come ablaze.More than four decades ago, Gaskin led a caravan of nonconformists across the country, taking his band of beatnik brethren deep into the Tennessee woods. They traveled from San Francisco and settled on a 1,750-acre spread of land in Summertown in 1971 to form their own society — a spiritual commune called The Farm....