Communes in the Twentieth Century

The end of the twentieth century is fast approaching.This will probably be the last conference to be held in it.It is therefore appropriate that we look back and examine what has characterized communal history in the present century.We can state, without a shadow of a doubt, that the twentieth century was the richest of all for voluntary communes.In an overall review of the history of communes we can discern a number of characteristic lines:1. From the first years of the present century, large communal movements, which developed over the years, have existed continuously.The first of these is the Israeli kibbutz movement which had its beginnings in the first decade of the century and which at present has a total population of 125,000 souls living in 270 settlements.2. The second-largest communal group is the Hutterite movement, which is also the oldest communal order, andwhich was established in Central Europe in the sixteenth century.At the beginning of the twentieth century its communities in the United States had a population of approximately 2,000 souls, while today the number some 40,000 people living in 400 communes.3. A smaller movement that has maintained its stability and growth is the Burderhof, which had its beginning in Germany in 1920 and which today has a population of 2,500 souls in eight settlements in the United States and Great Britain.4. In the present century there has been an uninterrupted series of emergences of communes.Not a decade has gone by without the appearance of new communes.While in previous centuries, new communes were mostly