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A lot of counter culturalists scorned “the nuclear family.” We scorned marriage and parenthood as usually practiced. We scorned monogamy. I think that the middle-class hippies were very content with being scornful, but I was a practical boy from rustic beginnings, and I couldn’t just scorn things. I had to come up with something better.
While Lille Skole was under way, I began to work out the details of communal living. After my wife and baby left, I had a 4-bedroom house and a lot of friends. Many of us had counter-cultural leanings, and the idea of saving money by living together came pretty naturally. I recruited anybody that came along.
Some problems were relatively easy to solve. I made up a rule, for example, that no one could ever leave dirty dishes. Just to make sure, I washed dishes every time I went by the kitchen sink, and I expected everybody else to do the same. The biggest problem came from a married couple.
They were hippies from California in every sense, but male chauvinism was still what set their relationship. He liked to cook, but considered scullery work beneath him. The rest of us just looked the other way while she willingly cleaned up after him, but it was clear that their previous relationship was getting in the way of a real communal experience.
That’s kind of a general rule about change: the old patterns are the major obstacle to the new ones. Man/woman relations were hard to change. Parent/child relations even harder.
Another problem was dope. Most of us smoked marijuana from time to time, but in the 1970s people were still getting long jail sentences for simple possession. It wasn’t fair to endanger everybody in the house just because one or two people couldn’t or wouldn’t control their habits. My first solution was to say that the guy in the garage apartment could keep and smoke dope, and others could join him back there if they wanted. I felt, at least, that we had some legal protection that way.
Dope wasn’t just an obstacle in my personal struggles, it was a problem for every kind of social change, because the people interested in social change almost inevitably experimented with dope. The people interested in not having social change knew that and used their police to stop social change through prosecuting dope cases.
Some people, even today in 2015, think smoking dope is some kind of progress and that changing dope laws has something to do with an overall change in society. I’d say that dope use is a major setback for social change. People were stoned when they should have been thinking and acting clearly. People were incarcerated when they could have been participating.
I’m not saying that dope laws shouldn’t be changed. There’s no argument that marijuana is less harmful than cigarettes and liquor. Dope laws should be changed, but that is incidental to the struggle for actual social change. If we had a good society, good dope laws would follow; but it’s not the main priority.
Sex and sexual relations were, of course, a problem in every household, but honest respect for one another seemed to get us through that. Economics was a problem, even though all of us were saving so much money on rent and groceries that one would think everybody would cheerfully pitch in, and they did. My background in accounting was helpful, and at least the economic burdens were equal if not exactly fair. All the adults divided the communal expenses equally. Kids rode free.
The economics of communal living should have been more fair, I see in hindsight. We didn’t account for women’s oppression and had women paying equally with men. Also the work was divided without regard to sexual oppression in the general society. We should have made some adjustment, but we didn’t because we were, darn us to heck, utopians in our thinking. We thought we were living in some kind of exclusive world where the rest of the world didn’t matter, when it clearly did.
The hippies thought they were creating a new world, when in fact they were just living in the crevasses and cracks in the old one. I realized much later that most of the prominent spokespersons for the hippie world had an ace in the hole, affluent and indulgent parents. There were very few, almost none, working class hippies.
Lille Skole didn’t die a sudden and complete death, except in a legal and economic sense. Some of us that were involved in the school, including a couple of parents and their kids, stayed on in the last building that the school occupied. By then, I had communal living down to a science. We lived really well and very cheaply.
In all, I organized communal living in five different dwellings between 1971 and 1979. I found it a good way to live and would still be doing it if I thought it had any future benefit for people in general. Along the way, though, I began to think less and less about experimenting with my personal life and more and more about how change could really come about.
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