The Business of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Architecture of Communal Societies in the 1960s and 1970s

Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth history of three US-based communal societies that operated in the late 1960s and 1970s—Soul City, Stelle and Twin Oaks—with an emphasis on their financing, marketing, and entrepreneurship processes. These communities reflect the diversity of people who were dissatisfied with the direction in which American society was heading—often underpinned by concerns over racism, sexism, the environment, and capitalism—and decided to take the radical step of joining a communal society. A moral economy approach offers a lens on how these communities were prevented from fully realizing their visions due to the confines of capitalism, as embedded in banking practices, zoning laws, and systemic racism.