An important realization for any dissident ideology, is that the system we live in and under is not only not sympathetic to your goals, but actively hostile. This puts pressure on dissidents to form intentional communities in order to be in control of their own destiny, and not at the beck and call of the hegemonic regime. There have been examples in recent US history of intentional communities, most fail, but some are successful. The most successful were the Mormons, they in effect became the new ruling ideology in Utah, but in their first days were living in a society parallel to the US of the 1830s and 1840s. For the purposes of this paper, intentional communities will be understood as societies that are parallel to and holding beliefs incongruous with the reigning hegemonic regime. The goal of this community is to be as economically, politically and infrastructurally independent from the hegemonic regime as possible. Total independence may in many cases be impossible. A wise founder of an intentional community will figure out what can be done outside the scope of “regime regulation capture” and what cannot, investing his time in the former. These communities may at some point become so successful that they become the new hegemon, like the Mormons, or remain parallel, like the Amish. This paper will not discuss the nature of going beyond this phase, but only the factors to take into account at this phase. Furthermore this paper will not talk about how to form an intentional community or what values one ought to hold to, both of which are important questions, but fall outside the scope of this paper. While this is can be objected to at a certain level, I will assume a sort of fungability for intentional communities. This is because the forces and conditions exerted on any given intentional community by external powers are similar enough that for a theoretic fiction assumed fungablity is helpful. Imagine a flow chart, where the block labeled ‘intentional community’ is connected to other blocks and arrows that point to relevant concerns for the community; this will be the topic of this paper. The goal of this paper is to highlight and detail the ways in which an IC stands in relationship to other communities and persons. Strategies for dealing with them will be in a later article.

Let us begin by discussing how people stand in relation to the intentional community (IC), this will determine one’s political relationships with them. Imagine a series of concentric circles radiating out from an inner core, that inner core are the members of the IC. These are the people who have fully given themselves to the project of this community and are integrated into the life of the community. This is the basic political element we are working with. This core group of people get all the perks, benefits and support of the community. It is their interests, which are paramount to the leadership of any given IC. We can envision three modes of relationships between an IC and the rest of society: political, geographic and power differential. For the first two, a concentric circle analogy is effective; it is not really applicable for the latter.