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User:Ausmisterfrank

2013-06-19T09:41:24Z

/* '''ausmisterfrank - about me:''' */

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	[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism Anarcho-communist.]		[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism Anarcho-communist.]

-	Born in the fifties and educated in the clearly not United Kingdom and Ulster - we heard news even as kids and I loved short wave on a beautiful old wooden-cased valve radio in our bedroom. (Learned what propaganda sounded like pretty quickly and listened to Radio Tirana as satire.) Precocious readers both, me and my little brother in school uniforms from about 4 years of age living with mum and dad in a semi-detached front and back garden house with a sports field behind it. Dad had an allotment too. School- Boys Grammar, quite good- when I wanted to be. A teenager with a Che poster on my bedroom wall - painted it my self in art class. A year in-between, with me working and being on the dole before uni. - BA. Literature, Essex - a very small 2200 student early-60s campus grouping of six fifteen storey tower-blocks for us and a central block with piazzas for them. Met lots of nice people in the park! and lived and took part in post-68 rearguard actions of rebellion and resistance. Student life and student politics a decade after Paris, wishing we'd been there. Hearing almost daily the shooting exercises of the second biggest garrison of british soldiers in England just across the river from our student accommodation in the towers. Knowing that the troops would be shooting for real in Northern Ireland.	+	Born in the fifties and educated in the clearly not United Kingdom and Ulster - we heard news even as kids and I loved short wave on a beautiful old wooden-cased valve radio in our bedroom. (Learned what propaganda sounded like pretty quickly and listened to Radio Tirana as satire.) Precocious readers both, me and my little brother in school uniforms from about 4 years of age living with mum and dad in a semi-detached front and back garden house with a sports field behind it. Dad had an allotment too. School- Boys Grammar, quite good- when I wanted to be. A teenager with a Che poster on my bedroom wall - painted it my self in art class. A year in-between, with me working and being on the dole before uni. - BA. Literature, Essex - a very small 2200 student early-60s campus grouping of six fifteen storey tower-blocks for us and a central block with piazzas for them. Met lots of nice people in the park! and lived and took part in post-68 rearguard actions of rebellion and resistance. Student life and student politics a decade after Paris, wishing we'd been there. Hearing almost daily the shooting exercises of the second biggest garrison of british soldiers in England just across the river from our student accommodation in the towers. Knowing that the troops would be shooting for real in Northern Ireland. For part of one year I lived off campus and had my first experience of living in a commune. see: [[Rodwell House 1977 -1978]].

	I have been influenced by the Beatles, Pink Floyd “'''Soft Machine'''” and “'''Gong'''”, the counter-culture of the early- and mid-1970s,and also by the writings of [[Peter Kropotkin]] and of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Ward Colin Ward] (Anarchy in Action), [[Gerrard Winstanley]] and the [[Diggers]], the anarchist collectives in the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution Spanish revolution], New Musical Express, [[Undercurrents]] magazine, and by the late Stephen Housego, B.A., M.A..		I have been influenced by the Beatles, Pink Floyd “'''Soft Machine'''” and “'''Gong'''”, the counter-culture of the early- and mid-1970s,and also by the writings of [[Peter Kropotkin]] and of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Ward Colin Ward] (Anarchy in Action), [[Gerrard Winstanley]] and the [[Diggers]], the anarchist collectives in the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution Spanish revolution], New Musical Express, [[Undercurrents]] magazine, and by the late Stephen Housego, B.A., M.A..

Community networks

2013-06-19T03:30:36Z

/* Italy */ new link

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	===Italy===		===Italy===
-	*[http://www.mappaecovillaggi.it/level198.htm RIVE - Italian Ecovillage Network]	+	*[http://www.ecovillaggi.it/ RIVE - Italian Ecovillage Network]
-		+

	==Regional/Local Community Networks==		==Regional/Local Community Networks==

Rodwell House 1977 -1978

2013-06-14T15:01:38Z

New page

''We sat by the last hearth in the world''

''With the first force which blew there''

''Gusting still beyond the doors and shutters,''

''Whilst we within revolved around some newer magic.''

Rodwell House, Suffolk 04.11.1977.

I don't know whether we ever seriously said to people that we were a [[commune]], but certainly I felt at the time that we were at least a 1970s counter-cultural student version of one. It was my first experience of living in [[Intentional Communities]], and it was very different from the decade old student housing that I had experienced previously in my year on campus. For a start, we lived a good twenty five miles from the campus, well away from big towns on a B-Road in the next county. And it was a smaller mixed group of friends and acquaintances which had chosen to live together in this lovely historic red brick house in the suffolk countryside rather than the large group of over a dozen guys which had had a whole storey of one of the six modern tower blocks at the university park but which had been random in its make up of occupants.

We were six young men and two young women, nearly all of us undergraduates. Four of the guys were computer studies students, which dictated some of the character of the house, at least to what stuff was left lying around. (I have never lived with so many bits of computer hardware - and the hardware of the late nineteen seventies was fairly big.) Otherwise three others were humanities students, one of them a graduate doing a post-grad course, and there was a friend who wasn't a student. Most of us had made friends during the previous year living on campus where, even if the student flats were large and thrown together by chance, there had also been a sense of community. In that year, we had formed a campus student clique that called itself "the anarcho-frivolists", inspired partly by the Gong band and their ideas of floating anarchy, partly by the Merry Pranksters.

The house belonged to the family of one of the computer students, and the elder members of his family had had connections to many members of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsbury_Group Bloomsbury Group]. It was wonderful to live in a house where many of them had been and there was some sort of guest book in the house where many Bloomsbury people had written things. Around the fireplace there was a beautiful mosaic done, I believe, by [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Anrep Boris Anrep].
In addition, there were a number of other smaller works by members of the Bloomsbury group, and a wonderful, old clockwork gramophone. It was definitely a good place to start my experience of living in groups. It was a real gift to have the chance to live in this amazing place and pick up the vibrations and see some of the things left by previous occupants.

Most of us moved in at the start of the autumn semester 1977 and I lived in a attic with sloping sides directly under the roof. It was more or less undecorated and unfurnished. It was cold, and there was a gap under the window where the wind blew in. I blocked it up and plastered it over, but the result was neither very professional, nor particularly beautiful. It bulged like a grey beer-gut. The wind no longer blew through it, but the room was still very cold. Indeed, it was only possible to sleep there in winter if you had your clothes on inside a sleeping bag inside the bed clothes. I think that the only heating in the house was the open fire in the sitting room and an AGA cooker in the kitchen. I decorated the plain white plaster in my room with moon, stars and flying saucers executed in lamp black using a lighted candle as my paint brush. When my friend's mother discovered my attic artistic experiment in a house full of "real art" she was not amused. My friend's father was rather more relaxed, although maybe he just did not show his irritation. On the other hand, I believe that he had grown up with some contact to the left-liberal, lively and sometimes scandalous folk of the later Bloomsburies.

Although I liked our "landlady", she was, like Queen Victoria, "not amused" a number of times while we lived there. I don't think she entirely trusted us not to completely muck up the house or break things. And it is true that we were not always very caring towards this wonderful house. One night we nearly burnt it down when embers from the fire set the antique hearth rug alight - ruining what I imagine was a valuable heirloom. And we were not very good at cleaning, which meant that one weekend, when most of the others were away and my friend's parents came to visit, I spent quite a long time on my hands and knees with his father scrubbing the brick tiled kitchen floor which we had managed to turn black with the mud of the autumn and winter. However, it must really have been clear to her that a bunch of people in their late teens and early twenties were not going to be particularly house trained.

(Not really an [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGA_Saga AGA saga])
{{stub}}

[[Category: Personal stories]]

Krinitza

2013-06-10T07:00:54Z

/* The first years */ corrected spelling

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	The communards at Krinitza put physical work on the land as their basis for communal life.		The communards at Krinitza put physical work on the land as their basis for communal life.
-	At a meeting at the start of 1889, they set three main goals: communal property and work, self-managed work and communal child-care and education. From the start, the aimed for self-sufficiency and a minimum of luxury, concentrating on the satisfaction of basic needs. On the other hand, it was not their intention to be and “ivory tower” or an isle of happiness outside the existing society. They were open to guests, and, at the same time, saw themselves as being part of a radical movement to change Russian society through the creation of autonomous rural communes. They distanced themselves from the hegemony of the Russian Orthodox Church but believed that without a spiritual aspect real change was impossible and that communal life would fail. Simply changing the organisation and economy of society would not succeed without a renewal of the human spirit. The commune had no statute at the beginning as they believed that this would only regulate outer things. On the other hand, they saw the future of the Russian peasantry as lying in the formation of well organised agricultural cooperatives, a step that they were themselves later to take in 1909.	+	At a meeting at the start of 1889, they set three main goals: communal property and work, self-managed work and communal child-care and education. From the start, the aimed for self-sufficiency and a minimum of luxury, concentrating on the satisfaction of basic needs. On the other hand, it was not their intention to be an “ivory tower” or an isle of happiness outside the existing society. They were open to guests, and, at the same time, saw themselves as being part of a radical movement to change Russian society through the creation of autonomous rural communes. They distanced themselves from the hegemony of the Russian Orthodox Church but believed that without a spiritual aspect real change was impossible and that communal life would fail. Simply changing the organisation and economy of society would not succeed without a renewal of the human spirit. The commune had no statute at the beginning as they believed that this would only regulate outer things. On the other hand, they saw the future of the Russian peasantry as lying in the formation of well organised agricultural cooperatives, a step that they were themselves later to take in 1909.
	In the first two years, they were able to cultivate only 40 of the 250 hectares, and indeed, in this period lost two harvests of wheat. Attempts to cultivate maize and medicinal herbs also failed. It took some time before they had gathered enough experience to successfully cultivate their land. During these first years, they lived mostly on beetroot and potatoes. Other foodstuff was a luxury they could seldom afford: the health of the communards suffered accordingly.		In the first two years, they were able to cultivate only 40 of the 250 hectares, and indeed, in this period lost two harvests of wheat. Attempts to cultivate maize and medicinal herbs also failed. It took some time before they had gathered enough experience to successfully cultivate their land. During these first years, they lived mostly on beetroot and potatoes. Other foodstuff was a luxury they could seldom afford: the health of the communards suffered accordingly.
	Originally, the founders did not intend to find new members. However, they did plan growth through the adoption of orphans and through fostering peasant children. Nonetheless, people came from all over Russia to join the commune, some remaining for longer or shorter periods and contributing little to the economy of the commune – an experienced shared by many intentional communities in the past.		Originally, the founders did not intend to find new members. However, they did plan growth through the adoption of orphans and through fostering peasant children. Nonetheless, people came from all over Russia to join the commune, some remaining for longer or shorter periods and contributing little to the economy of the commune – an experienced shared by many intentional communities in the past.