A Community of Work Together

Every talk of Peter's about the social order led to the land.  He spoke always as a peasant, but as a practical one.  He knew the craving of the human heart for a toehold on the land, for a home of one's own, but he also knew how impossible it was to attain it except through community, through men banding together in farming communes to live to a certain extent in common, work together, own machinery together, start schools together.

He held the collective farms in Palestine up for our consideration. Since Peter's death, Martin Buber's book, Paths in Utopia, has told of the experiments in Israel, and Thomas Sugrue has written a book, Watch for the Morning, on these great adventures in building up a place in the desert for a dispossessed people. Claire Huchet Bishop has written about the communities in Europe in her books, France Alive and All Things Common, showing how men can become owners of the means of production and build up a community of work together.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 224