Use, Profit, and Reification

Even though I spend a lot of time bashing Karl Marx on this site, I’m going to spend some time examining a few terms he talked about that I think are directly relevant to the Utopian Socialist movement, although I may deviate from Marx’s conception of them somewhat. Namely, these are production for use, production for profit, and the reification of the economy. Production for use is when you produce something to be used directly - you grow food and then eat it. There is a straight and short line from production to consumption. In primitive, subsistence economies, production was almost exclusively for use, with people living in communities that were largely self-sufficient in the basic necessities of life. Production of commodities intended as trade items was limited mainly to luxury goods that were difficult or impossible to produce locally. In this type of society, the economy is comparatively small, and the majority of daily life is carried on outside of its confines. 

Production for profit is when you produce something that then becomes a commodity for exchange. People produce goods or services that they do not use themselves. Instead they are paid a wage which they use to purchase other goods and services, produced by other people, sometimes half a globe away. The distance between production and consumption here is often very long and much less direct. The driving force for production in therefore transformed from the direct satisfaction of human needs to financial gain, which gives rise to a formal, fully monetized economy. Over time that economy begins to colonize ever greater areas of human activity, until not only products, but almost every form of human interaction has been commodified and made part of the formal economy. 

Today’s globalized, capitalist economy is dominated almost exclusively by production for profit within an all-encompassing economy. The satisfaction of basic human needs has been wholly supplanted by the needs of financial capital and its growth imperative. Reification, where an abstract concept like the economy is treated as a real thing, with concrete needs of its own, is the end result. A professional class of economists subsequently arises whose job it is to manage, tweak, and generally appease the workings of this reified economy. Countless individuals and whole segments of society are sacrificed to its alleged needs, while the remainder are put to work to keep the reified economy running as smoothly as possible. Because the former self-sufficiency of every community has been sacrificed on the altar of efficiency, people are largely trapped into being participants of that economy. Their only option is to sell their labor in service to the financial demands of a reified economy that is spiraling completely out of control of the people is was ostensibly designed to serve.

Trying to alter this situation within the nation state model, however, is doomed to failure. The modern nation state came of age primarily as a mechanism for managing reified economies, the logic of which they have subsequently enforced across the world. Capitalism could not have spread without the scaffolding of the nation state to support it. The two have been in a symbiotic relationship from their infancy, with each strengthening the other at each step of development. Democracy within nation states, therefore, is effectively restricted to that which does not challenge the primacy of the capitalist marketplace. Countries that tried to implement socialism through the seizure and utilization of state power necessarily failed to disentangle the relationship between the nation state and capitalism and subsequently degenerated into state capitalism. 

Since the nation state and capitalism are two sides of the same coin, they try to bind everything to their dual logic. The only effective challenge to their dominance, therefore, must come from a stateless solution that consciously tries to minimize its involvement with the formal economy. Trying to tackle one without accounting for the other will result in failure. Fortunately, the 21st century Utopian Socialist movement is a solution that shows great promise against both. It makes no claim upon the state and seeks to build parallel institutions in the form of intentional communities and ecovillages that gradually assume the various functions of the state without reproducing its form. But aspiring to a stateless solution doesn’t ensure it will come to pass, or that it will remain so. Remaining enmeshed within the formal, fully monetized economy ensures that state power will eventually reconstitute itself as a means for managing that economy. A successful stateless solution can only be built by simultaneously seceding from the formal economy to the maximum degree possible. This can be accomplished by reverting primarily to system of production for use and away from production for profit. 

The existing communities that are financially self-sufficient at present are thoroughly enmeshed within the larger economy and must necessarily abide by its rules. This means they support themselves by producing commodities for profit. In the case of Twin Oaks Community, this would be their hammock industry. For East Wind it would be their organic peanut butter industry. In both cases they consume very little of the product they make and instead sell most of it on the market for financial gain. Despite their best intentions, this exchange ties them to the formal economy, and helps perpetuate its reification. But they are self-sufficient in at least two categories: hammocks and peanut butter. The amount of these that are used internally have therefore been produced for use, and not for profit. As more communities enter into their local network, each will add to the list of things in which they are self-sufficient, thus increasing the quantity of items that are produced for use and decreasing the need to produce commodities for profit. This will have the effect of shrinking the economy, of removing greater parts of human activity from its confines, and gradually allowing for the de-reification of the economy, with production being geared toward the direct satisfaction of human needs instead of the maximization of financial gain. This process is what will allow a stateless Utopian Socialism to flourish and avoid the re-imposition of state power. It is also the process that will lead the transition to a sustainable, post-growth world. 

Capitalism, Contradictions, and Growth

Marx argued that the internal contradictions within capitalism, which made it an inherently unstable system, would suffice to bring it down in the end. Despite this, capitalism continues as the dominant worldwide economic paradigm 135 years after Marx’s death. Clearly Marx was wrong. Imperfect as it is, capitalism has managed to keep expanding despite its internal contradictions. If the world were infinite, it would probably keep on doing so forever. But the world is not infinite, and capitalism is running up hard against the limits of our finite planet. That fact is what will bring capitalism down, not its many internal contradictions. There is little room left for growth, resources are being depleted at an unsustainable rate, and our planet is unable to absorb all the toxins and waste we continually dump upon it. To put it simply, capitalism is leading us to the brink of an environmental apocalypse, and that fact alone is what will eventually cause the whole system to come crashing down in ruins.

The fact that Marx was wrong about the self-defeating nature of capitalism offers important insights to the failure of 19th century Utopian Socialism. It is obvious to the modern reader that capitalism was not about to enter into terminal decline at any point during Marx’s life. It was still a dynamic force, with plenty of room left to expand. The size of the global economy would grow many times over in the period since his death. Even though the inequalities and injustices of capitalism drove many people in the 19th century to seek utopian alternatives, the optimism over growth capitalism generated was a powerful factor in limiting their appeal and effectiveness. It even injected a curious twist into the Utopian Socialist movement, with many of their communities being organized as joint stock companies. Their allegedly rational and harmonious organization, it was promised, would surely provide dividends that would outpace those of the irrational, capitalist marketplace. Of course it didn’t work out that way. Promoting yourself as a mechanism for outgrowing capitalism was a poor strategy, and one that was clearly at odds with their cooperative framework. This contradiction manifested itself in the internal strife experienced by many of the Utopian Socialist communities of that age, and was a large contributing factor in their eventual decline.

Of course Marxists were not immune to the optimism over growth. They embraced it wholeheartedly. One of the central claims of Marxism is that capitalism actually inhibits growth by limiting production to that which can be sold at a profit. If production were to be socialized, so the argument went, it would unleash the full productive potential of society, and a superabundance of goods could be produced. Having internalized the same growth oriented metric for societal well-being as their capitalist counterparts, the Marxists attempted to beat them at their own game. They announced improbable results for the various five year plans issued by their autocratic central committees, but in the end it became apparent that the productivist mania at the heart of Marxism was no less alienating for its workers, nor any less ruinous for the environment, than it was under capitalism. Eventually it could no longer keep up and collapsed under its own weight.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, though, optimism about growth is no longer a credible position. Some intrepid souls had foreseen the problem as early as the 19th century, but the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet is now clearly apparent for everyone to see. What should be equally clear is that Marxism, with its productivist mindset, is an ideology firmly rooted in the material scarcity of the 19th century. It’s emphasis on seizing and utilizing state power has likewise locked it into following the growth imperative inherent to the nation-state model. That it can somehow shed these characteristics and adapt itself to a post-growth world is implausible in the extreme.

What is needed is a solution that abandons the concept of growth as the measurement of societal well-being, while leading the transition to living in a sustainable, post-growth world. The intentional communities and ecovillages of the modern Utopian Socialist movement are just such a solution. As these do not aspire to either seize or utilize state power, they aren’t beholden to the growth oriented economies that are an integral feature of the nation state model. Their success could spearhead the transition toward an economic model based on sustainability rather than the aspiration toward continuous growth that is in the process of pushing us into ecological ruin. So it is the limitations of a finite planet that will cause the global capitalist system to come crashing down, not its internal contradictions. Even though this crash will occur in some form or another, there is no historical necessity that either Utopian Socialism, or any other variety of socialism, will be its successor. Any number of dystopian futures is possible in the coming post-growth world. But the more the groundwork for the Utopian Socialist model is laid out now, the greater the chances are of actualizing a system-wide transformation when the opportunity arises.

Transcending the State

Inspired by the events in the Rojava, in northern Syria, I have recently been reading and re-reading ‘The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan’. While some of it is specific to the Kurdish people and their relation with the Turkish state, much of it is broadly applicable, especially to Utopian Socialism. There is one particular quote by Öcalan that I want to analyze here (from pg. 142):

Democracy’s fundamental function becomes evident in this manner. It can only increase the opportunities for freedom and equality by restricting the state, making it smaller and by trimming its octopus-like tentacles and their power over society. Towards the end of the process, perhaps the state will become redundant and fizzle out. The conclusion we draw from this is that the relationship between the state and democracy is not of one toppling another, but of transcendence (emphasis mine).

Here he’s talking about the conflict between democracy (or Democratic Confederalism) and the nation state. And the crucial point Öcalan makes is that state power cannot be overthrown. Particular states can be overthrown, but state power itself cannot. Attempting to overthrow state power invariably results in the reconstitution of state power in a different form, with a new ruling elite. And once it has reconstituted itself, the state will never wither away of its own accord, as Marx unjustifiably claimed it would. The new state always seeks to institutionalize itself as it strives to maintain and broaden its own power, which is always to the detriment of democracy. The great number of Leninist inspired failures that litter the historical landscape bear this out conclusively. The key to building a stateless society, therefore, is that the state must be transcended. Again - state power cannot be overthrown, but must instead be transcended.

For the Kurds, having recognized that state power can play no role in the building of a democratic and sateless society, this means an explicit renunciation of any attempts to build a Kurdish nation state, separate from the Turkish state. Instead, they seek to establish autonomous, self-governing Kurdish communities within the framework of the larger Turkish state. These autonomous communities would parallel the functions of the state without reproducing its form. The Utopian Socialist movement seeks to follow the same general path with regard to the various nation states it interacts with. The degree of autonomy they can realize in practice is the degree to which they are able to insulate themselves from participation in the wider market economy and from entanglement with the state bureaucracy. The more self-reliant they can become, the more their autonomy will be self-actualizing and need not rely on any explicit recognition from the state itself. These parallel institutions can then begin to slowly usurp the functions of the state, thus causing it to “become redundant and fizzle out”. 

The concept of the nation state is beginning to show severe signs of decay around the world. As the number of failed states continues to grow, and even the seemingly more robust European models are beginning to fray around the edges, the transition could come more quickly than would at first seem likely. The events in the Rojavan area of Syria are a prime example of just how quickly that could happen. With the collapse of the Syrian state during their civil war, the Kurds, inspired by Abdullah Öcalan’s Democratic Confederalism, managed to quickly fill that void with their own stateless solution. Utopian Socialists should be primed to take advantage of similar opportunities in other failing states, and by expanding the intentional communities movement they would well poised to do so. 

Federation of Egalitarian Communities

Intentional communities are what Utopian Socialism is all about. They are the basic building blocks around which a future communal society is to be organized. But what exactly is an intentional community? Dictionary.com defines it as, “a community designed and planned around a social ideal or collective values and interests, often involving shared resources and responsibilities”. Wikipedia defines intentional community as:

An intentional community is a planned residential community designed from the start to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, or spiritual vision and often follow an alternative lifestyle. They typically share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include collective households, cohousing communities, coliving, ecovillages, monasteries, communes, survivalist retreats, kibbutzim, ashrams, and housing cooperatives.

So the definition of the term is somewhat broad and encompasses a range of positions between being partially cooperative to being fully cooperative. The type I want to focus on here would be the most cooperative of the intentional communities - the income sharing communities of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC). These are the type of community that are at the heart of the modern Utopian Socialist movement and the ones most representative of its goals and aspirations. So what distinguishes them from the many other types of intentional communities in the world? Their website (http://www.thefec.org/) lists the principles of the FEC communities as:

• Holds its land, labor, income and other resources in common.
• Assumes responsibility for the needs of its members, receiving the products of their labor and distributing these and all other goods equally, or according to need.
• Practices non-violence.
• Uses a form of decision making in which members have an equal opportunity to participate, either through consensus, direct vote, or right of appeal or overrule.
• Actively works to establish the equality of all people and does not permit discrimination on the basis of race, class, creed, ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
• Acts to conserve natural resources for present and future generations while striving to continually improve ecological awareness and practice.
• Creates processes for group communication and participation and provides an environment which supports people's development.

The first two of those items is what distinguishes them as fully cooperative, income sharing communities. The community’s businesses are entirely self-contained and are cooperatively owned and managed by their members. Instead of being paid a wage, the members receive a modest monthly allowance. In turn, all their needs, including housing, food, health care, etc., are met by the community. As all labor is paid the same allowance, these communities are extremely egalitarian in nature. 

The fourth and fifth items on the list highlight their desire to build non-hierarchical, participatory management structures. Some utopian communities in the past and present have had charismatic leaders who exerted an enormous amount of influence upon the direction of the community. The FEC, by contrast, has no one in a leadership role. Communities in the FEC have a decentralized decision making process that relies heavily on collective input.

The sixth item highlights the fact that living in intentional community is the best strategy for allowing mankind to minimize his ecological footprint and for avoiding environmental overshoot. It is clear that contemporary consumerist society is wholly incapable of addressing such issues in an meaningful way. If we are going to have any chance of limiting or reversing the extent of environmental damage currently being wrought, a transition to a communal society as embodied by the FEC is the only strategy that will deliver the desired results.

The communities within the FEC are broken down into three groups. The first is Full Member Communities. These are the six communities that follow all of the guiding principles listed above: Twin Oaks Community (in Virginia), East Wind Community (in Missouri), Acorn Community (also in Virginia), Compersia, Sandhill Farm, and Mimosa Community. Twin Oaks, East Wind and Acorn are the largest of the group. They form the backbone of the FEC. The other three are smaller groups numbering ten or fewer people. There are also ten Communities in Dialogue which are newer or smaller communities that working toward admission into the FEC, and four Allied Communities, which are groups, like Living Energy Farm, that share similar interests.

A critic might justifiably claim that this is a paltry sum to point at after 42 years of work - a handful of communities and about 200 people. Admittedly, such a complaint is not without merit. But I think the intentional communities movement, both within the FEC and as a whole, is on the verge of making great strides. If the same amount of money and effort that was wasted on Marxism in the past were to be invested into Utopian Socialism instead, then the possibilities for change are enormous.

Gandhian Economics

Something that has a great deal more relevance to the Utopian Socialist movement than many people might suspect is the subject of Gandhian economics. While I do not endorse all of Gandhi’s ideas, not even all the ones relating specifically to economics, there is still quite an overlap between his economic thought and the ideals of the Utopian Socialist movement, and I think they deserve more attention that they typically get.

As Gandhi described himself as a philosophical anarchist, the first similarity is with his view on the concept of the nation state, which he saw as being inherently oppressive. The more layers of hierarchy there are, the less the interests of the people are served, and the more that bureaucratic hierarchy comes to serve its own interests. Gandhi therefore thought society should be organized as a stateless, decentralized network of autonomous and self-reliant communities where the people are to manage their own affairs at the local level. And today’s intentional communities and ecovillages are the best embodiment of that approach in action.

The second similarity is with Gandhi’s opposition to capital intensive, large scale, industrialized production. Such production invariably fosters centralization, hierarchy, and the disempowerment of local communities. Instead, wherever possible, Gandhi advocated a dispersed system of small scale, localized producers that employed appropriate technology. This would be a level of technological sophistication that can be operated and managed at the local level, without the need for distant hierarchies. In the modern day, the Open Source Ecology program that is being tested and developed by Marcin Jakubowski and his team, is a perfect example of the Gandhian approach to technology.

A third similarity is with the desire to lead a simple life. Gandhi was very critical of the western materialist culture and its multiplication of human wants. The Utopian Socialists likewise see it as wasteful and wholly unsustainable. Humanity continues to exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth to ever greater degrees. Economic inequality skyrockets to outrageous levels. As a result, the sense that things are getting worse continues to spread to wider segments of society. It should be apparent that western consumerism is both morally bankrupt and unsustainable. The need to start treading more lightly on the earth becomes more urgent with each passing day. The most effective means for doing so is by living in community. Not only have studies shown that per capita use of resources for those in community is a fraction of those living in mainstream society, but the benefits derived from stronger, more vibrant community life is another tangible benefit. And a 21st century Utopian Socialism is the best mechanism for getting us there.

The last similarity that I want to cover is Gandhi’s view that production should be for use-value instead of exchange value. Ideally, this is the position that Utopian Socialist eventually aspires to. As intentional communities are currently situated within the larger capitalist economy, the ones that are economically self-sufficient have little choice but to produce commodities for exchange in order to remain financially viable. Externally at least, this binds them in to the the workings of the market economy to a certain degree and serves to compromise their autonomy. Utopian Socialist communities would therefore strive to withdraw from the production of commodities for exchange-value within a market economy as much as possible, and instead produce as for use-value, either for their own use, or for the use of communities within their local federation. The more communities can minimize their interaction with the economy, the less of an influence the rules of that economy will have on communal life. This is an important point. State power can never fully wither away as long as the economy remains the primary medium through which society satisfies its needs. State power will always try to reconstitute itself in one form or another as a mechanism for managing that economy. If communities strive for local self-reliance, with production for use-value, with the role of the economy being kept to the minimum necessary, the impetus for state power to reconstitute itself will be likewise be minimized. Aspiring toward statelessness while maintaining an economic system that induces the formation of state power is counterproductive. The system of economic production one engages in should harmonize with the aspiration toward statelessness. If it does, then the state will wither away peacefully. If not, then state power will always be a mere step or two away from reconstituting itself.

In the final analysis, many aspects of Gandhian economics in perfect alignment with Utopian Socialism. Small scale. Decentralized. Self-reliant. Sustainable. These are all concepts that are integral to both. As a prescription for how to organize and manage society, I think Gandhi has more to say that is applicable to the present day than does Karl Marx’s emphases on productionism and seizing state power. I think it’s time for those on the left to give Gandhi’s ideas a second look.

What Is Our Purpose?

If you’ve spent any time poking around on this site, you may wonder what the purpose of it is. Or what about it sets it apart from other sites that touch upon Utopian Socialism in one way or another. The answer is that this site has five specific goals in mind:

1. To demonstrate that the 19th century Utopian Socialist movement is not something that should be relegated to the dustbin of history and forgotten. Their failed social experiments conveyed many lessons to future generations that can be analyzed, corrected, and expanded upon. Their failure was not in vain, but has been part of a long process of experimentation that continues to this day. 

2. To demonstrate that the modern intentional communities movement is built upon the lessons learned from their failed 19th century counterparts. The colossal failure of Marxism represented an interruption of that process, but which is now being resumed and carried on. The result of that ongoing experiment is that it has been refined to a considerable degree and is now well positioned to deliver broader benefits to society. 

3. To increase awareness of the many groups and organizations that are doing valuable work in this field, to showcase some of their successes, and to demonstrate the likelihood of those successes continuing to a broader degree as we move forward. As it is, there is almost nothing in the mainstream media about the intentional communities movement. Even groups positioned on the left give it little to no attention. As their successes continue to fly beneath the radar of both the mainstream and left wing media, it is the goal of this site to shed some positive light upon them. 

4. To see a greater harmonization of efforts by the many disconnected groups and organizations that are working in this field under a broader Utopian Socialist umbrella. Groups like the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC), the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), and many others, are doing fine work within their own little spheres. But I don’t think they consider how their efforts intersect, or how their combined efforts could produce larger dividends. If, for example, the communities within the FEC were to act as test beds for the work being done in perennial polycultures by The Land Institute, each would benefit the other in the long run and serve to amplify each others successes. Similarly, if intentional communities were to contribute to the development and testing of Marcin Jakubowski’s Open Source Ecology, especially the Global Village Construction Set, each would help the other along. 

5. To position Utopian Socialism as the most promising venue for leftists to invest their efforts in the 21st century, and to thus become the leading successor to the failing capitalist paradigm. It seems increasingly unlikely that the coming capitalist-driven ecological apocalypse can be avoided in its entirety. The best that can probably be hoped for at this late stage is to mitigate its worst effects to some degree. The more that groups within the Utopian Socialist umbrella embrace this role, the better positioned they’ll be to surpass the antiquated notion of revolutionary Marxism on the one hand, and the ineffectual notion of reformist politics on the other, as the best method for usurping capitalism’s role as the dominant social paradigm, and of leading the transition to a sustainable and equitable society. 

Protest Is Not Enough

Protest, as the saying goes, is the highest form of patriotism. That may be, but it is becoming increasingly clear that protest, on its own, is an insufficient mechanism for ushering in the scope of change necessary to overcome the dystopian trajectory being laid out by the globalized neoliberal economic order. Since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, there have been some very large and passionate protests, like the Women’s March on Washington, or the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Before that, during the Obama administration, there was the Occupy Wall Street protest and the wider Occupy Movement that spread across the nation. Protests like these, and others, have inspired millions of people to stand up and express their growing dissatisfaction with our current political and/or economic establishments. These are all important efforts. But they aren’t nearly enough.

As long as the Left is unable to articulate a compelling alternative to the status quo, these protests represent little more than a rear guard action in a losing battle against a right wing that has been relentless in pursuing its ideological goals since the Reagan administration. You can’t win this battle by simply being against something. You have to have a vision of what you’re fighting FOR, otherwise all the energy that is expended in these protests ends up being dissipated through countless channels that amount to little or nothing. The Occupy Movement managed to do a little of that, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The Democratic Party, in its perpetual effort to stay only one small step to the left of the Republicans, is a useless organization for articulating or inspiring change. Even if Bernie Sanders were to somehow win their nomination, any good that might ensue would certainly fall well short of altering the essential workings of the neoliberal capitalist system. And as for the old guard Marxist-Leninists…I’m afraid their time on the world stage has long since come and gone.

What is needed is a movement that offers a compelling alternative to the status quo. One that would go beyond inspiring people to vote for the lesser of two evils and to instead start the actual work of building a working alternative to the current system. That movement is a 21st century Utopian Socialism as embodied in the growing intentional communities movement. They have articulated a vision for a sustainable and equitable future, and have demonstrated a growing degree of competency in carrying it into practice. Instead of merely protesting against the iniquities of the capitalist system, you need to build actual alternatives to that system. Alternatives that aren’t mere theory, but ones that people can observe and interact with. Alternatives where their passion and effort won’t dissipate into thin air as they endlessly wait for future revolutions or electoral victories, but tangible alternatives that will instead play a demonstrable role in building the type of world they want to live in right now.

Private, Cooperative, and In Between

Counting the broad concepts of private property on the one hand, communalism on the other, and the areas in between the two, there are four possible arrangements that are of concern to us within this article:

1. Privately owned business and privately owned housing.
2. Cooperatively owned business and privately owned housing.
3. Privately owned business and cooperative housing.
4. Cooperatively owned business and cooperative housing.

The first of those is the everyday capitalist society that most people in the western world currently live in. Businesses, or the means of production, are privately owned. People hire out their labor for a wage, which they partly use to purchase privately owned housing, or rent housing that is privately owned by someone else. This is a pretty straight forward concept that most people are very familiar with and spend most of their lives navigating. We don’t need to elaborate much further on it here.

The last of those categories would be intentional communities. Specifically income sharing communities, like those in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC), which are economically self-supporting. In these, the community businesses are cooperatively owned and managed, while the housing arrangements are likewise cooperatively owned. Except for personal possessions, there is no (or little) private property. The means of production, the land, and the infrastructure are all cooperatively owned and managed by the membership as a whole. Business and living arrangements are both self-contained within the communal organization. This represents the optimal arrangement by modern Utopian Socialist standards. This is the goal that all of their community building projects are ultimately geared toward. But it is not necessary to get there all in one step. The second and third categories listed above are at least partially allied with Utopian Socialist communalism and are generally supportive of it. They could also represent halfway steps toward the fully cooperative arrangement of category four. We’ll examine each of them in greater detail below.

The second category would represent worker cooperatives where the members maintain privately owned housing. The most famous example of this would be the Mondragon Cooperatives of Spain. This is a federation of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain that employs some 75,000 workers. Another example would be the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, Ohio. In both of these examples, the workers cooperatively own their businesses, but they all maintain private housing in the wider housing market. While worker cooperatives are vastly superior to privately owned corporations on every front, on their own they will not lead to a sufficient degree of social transformation. But they should be viewed as an important halfway step that is closely aligned with the Utopian Socialist ethos. And they could be converted to fully functioning intentional communities rather easily. If, for example, the Mondragon Cooperatives were to invest in cooperative housing for their workers, they could make that full transition in short order.

The third category comes in two varieties, with a stronger version and a weaker version. The weaker version would be the cooperative housing developments that are popping up across the US and Europe. These are membership-based entities where individuals own their own private unit, but which also have extensive common areas which are designed to foster a greater sense of community among those members. The members are all responsible for their own financing and usually maintain employment within the traditional job market. This weak version is the closest to category 1 and represents the least amount of change from it. But its popularization could lead to gains down the road for fully cooperative entities. The stronger version is represented by intentional communities and ecovillages that are not income sharing and are not economically self-supporting. Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, in Missouri, is a prime example of this. It’s members live communally, but mostly maintain employment outside the community in the private sector. There are some jobs within the community itself, but a minority of their membership earns their living this way. Most communities that bill themselves as ecovillages fall into this category. This stronger version is very closely allied in spirit with the Utopian Socialist ethos and is probably the closest of being able to make the final transition to being fully cooperative entities.

So in the final analysis, worker cooperatives and cooperative housing are only halfway steps toward Utopian Socialism. They are insufficient in themselves to bring about a necessary degree of social change, but they should still be viewed as allies and fellow travelers in the transition away from from the private ownership of an increasingly dystopian capitalist world, and their success can only have a positive impact on the eventual success of the 21st century Utopian Socialism.

Revolution or Reform? Neither!

I was at the Ann Arbor Art Fair yesterday. In addition to looking at all the artwork on display, I wandered through the non-profit section, where various political and social groups have booths set up in order to spread information in support of their many causes. First I picked up a newspaper from The Spark, which is a Trotskyist organization. Then I took another newspaper from the Democratic Socialists of America. Those two groups, we are told, represent the only two options for change that people have available to them: revolution or reform.

The Spark is the more pathetic of the two. They still cling tightly to their holy trinity of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, even after all these years. Well, Marx has been dead for 135 years, Lenin for 94, and Trotsky for 78. The thought that any of them has anything relevant to say to people in 2018 is ludicrous. They were products of a bygone era. Strategies that were relevant to the Europe of 1917 are simply not going to have the same relevance 101 years later. The thought that antiquated notions like “class struggle” are going to be revitalized to the extent necessary to wage a successful revolution is simply preposterous. So The Spark limps along, 47 years after its founding, without having accomplished a single thing, and with no prospect of ever accomplishing anything even remotely resembling a revolution. It’s a wonder they still manage to find enough people who are willing to go to art fairs to pass out their literature.

Unlike the moribund anachronisms of Lenin and Trotsky, the Democratic Socialist of America seems to hold more promise. They’re currently buoyed by a wave of enthusiasm, stoked, in part, by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. They have a slate of upcoming candidates who promise to reform the system. But do they really stand a better chance than the old guard Leninists of ushering in substantive change? The answer is that while they may succeed in passing some changes on social issues, their chances of fundamentally altering the working of the capitalist economic system itself are nil. You need only to look around the world to see the many ostensibly “socialist” parties who have fallen victim to the Iron Law of Oligarchy and who now act as de facto guardians of the globalized neoliberal system.

The alternative to the above two approaches is the Utopian Socialist model of transformation. It doesn’t seek to take on the herculean task of transforming the whole system from the top-down in one fell swoop. Rather, it seeks to withdraw from mainstream society and start building parallel institutions, with substantive change being initiated within each individual unit as it’s created. Change can be introduced in manageable pieces that go on to act as a network of mutual support the further they go. This is the bedrock upon which lasting change can be firmly anchored. The results of these changes can be implemented, tested and perfected as you go, thus providing tangible, real world progress in the here and now. The task of building intentional communities, ecovillages, and organizations that support the first two, are the basis of the Utopian Socialist model in action. This is incremental change that can be started now, as opposed to having to wait for some future revolution or electoral victory. And even though these accomplishments largely fly beneath the radar of the mass media, there has been an impressive amount of work done in that direction. And I think the 21st century is primed to see a large increase in those efforts as we move forward.

The Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth

The Brotherhood of the Co-operative Commonwealth (BCC) was an organization founded in the mid-1890s to promote and aid in the founding of Utopian Socialist colonies. Inspired by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which colonized Kansas with abolitionists prior to the Civil War in order to make the territory a free state, they planned to build a series of colonies in one state with the purpose of turning it into a socialist state. After being promoted in the newspaper ‘Coming Nation’, the BCC was established in 1896. Their constitution listed three goals:

1. To educate the people in the principles of Socialism

2. To unite all socialists in one fraternal association

3. To establish co-operative colonies and industries in one state until that state is socialized

In addition to other offices that were filled, Eugene V. Debs was elected as ‘Organizer’. They hoped that Debs’ fame would help popularize their cause, but Debs was fickle in his support and eventually left to help create the Social Democracy of America, which was the forerunner of the Socialist Party of America. With the loss of Debs and a few other defections, the BCC got off to an inauspicious start. Friction developed between the BCC and its fledgling colony (Equality Colony) over which had priority. This caused the organization to decline further until it was wholly subsumed by Equality Colony, which eventually collapsed in 1901. 

The BCC is the direct forerunner of modern groups like the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) and the Fellowship of Intentional Communities (FIC). The difference between them is that the BCC spent too much of its time looking at the big picture ideas of spreading communalism, without first finding out exactly what it took to build communities that could survive. The FEC and the FIC, on the other hand, have done pretty much the opposite. They’ve concerned themselves almost exclusively with nurturing their constituent communities, while doing relatively little to actively promote their spread. A further difference is the focus of their strategy. The BCC envisioned building a number of communities that would eventually provide the electoral base for voting in a socialist government. Community building was therefore seen as the means toward an end, rather than the end in itself. The FEC and FIC, by contrast, take the approach that community building is the end in itself. Their focus is on building parallel institutions that will gradually usurp the functions of the state and cause it to wither away. There is reason to believe, however, that having succeeded in the task of establishing communities that have staying power, the FEC and FIC will take on more of the strategic view of the BCC, if not its focus, and put more of their energy into actively promoting the concept of community building itself.

21st Century Utopian Socialism

Utopian Socialism, we are told, was a phenomenon that flourished in the mid 19th century, but which had sputtered out and died a pitiful death by that century’s end. It was the brainchild of an eccentric group of social theorists like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet and others, whose ideas spawned a wave of community building, all of which invariably failed to live up to their grandiose plans. If you do a google search for Utopian Socialism today, mostly what you’ll find are articles contrasting it with Marx and Engels' supposedly “scientific socialism”, and why, despite the great enthusiasm attached to these projects at the time, they were naive and impractical experiments that were all doomed to failure. With that wreckage swept out of the way, we are assured, socialism could proceed under the banner of Marxism toward its inevitable and glorious victory.

The astute reader will notice, however, that things haven’t quite worked out that way. Marx’s insistence on seizing and retaining state power has led straight to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and a century’s worth of top-heavy, bureaucratic and repressive regimes, all of which have either collapsed under their own weight, or which retain only a nominal and deformed resemblance to socialism today. If the 19th century supposedly demonstrated the death of Utopian Socialism, the 20th century should have left us with no doubt that Marxism was in an equally moribund state. Not only has Marxism manifestly failed to vanquish capitalism, but the latter has proven itself to be a far more resilient opponent than Marx predicted. None of the internal contradictions that Marx pedantically catalogued have been sufficient to stop it in its tracks. And the idea that the “class consciousness” of the workers can be rebuilt to the extent necessary to bring about a successful revolution is a notion that is more fanciful that the most fanciful of the Utopian Socialists ideas. It is utterly ludicrous.

That brings us to the 21st century. Now that we are beginning to extricate socialism from the 100+ year dead end of Marxism, perhaps it’s time to dust off the forgotten ideas of Utopian Socialism and see what they can offer us today. I would contend that not only is it a good idea, but that is exactly what is being done, whether explicitly or not, by the modern intentional communities movement today. The modern wave of community building, which began with the 1960s counterculture, is, for all intents and purposes, a resumption and continuation of the 19th century Utopian Socialist movement. It is an ongoing process of experimentation that, instead of tossing out the lessons of their 19th century counterparts, has learned from their mistakes and continues to improve itself. Not only have these communities managed to thrive, but they are beginning to deliver results that are far more tangible than those on offer from Marx’s anachronistic class struggle.

There is an incredible amount of positive activity within the intentional communities movement these days. If you scan through the ‘resources’ section of this site, you’ll see several groups that are making great contributions to the cause. The Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC), the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), they’re all making great strides in helping to foster and expand the number of intentional communities that are in operation across the world. It’s literally leaps and bounds beyond the tentative and ill-conceived experiments of the 19th century. Despite the level of success they’ve had in establishing themselves at the margins of society, though, they’ve yet to demonstrate the ability to broadly expand into the mainstream of society and supplant the capitalist system to any significant degree. But I’m convinced that if they got even a fraction of the support from the institutional Left that Marxism has gotten over the last several decades, that they could go a long way to accomplishing that goal. A 21st century Utopian Socialist program, in the form of growing a more focused intentional communities movement, is one of the only areas where the Left is making tangible progress in the world today. There’s certainly a lot more to look forward to there than from Marxists ever being able to revive something as obsolescent as the class struggle.

Libertarian Municipalism

Today I want to throw some light on the ideas of Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), who was an anarchist, social theorist and political philosopher. Specifically, I want to examine the ideas presented in ’The Politics of Social Ecology’, which is a short book (204 pages) by Janet Biehl detailing Bookchin’s views on Communalism and Libertarian Municipalism. Communalism, basically, is a system that advocates communal ownership of highly localized independent communities (Intentional Communities and Ecovillages) which are linked together in a federation. On that score, Bookchin is in perfect alignment with Utopian Socialism. Where his views deviate, however, is with his conceptualization of Libertarian Municipalism as the means for bringing such an arrangement about. 

Bookchin argues that the arena for libertarian social change should be at the municipal level. Basically that people should try to win elections to city, town, or village councils for the purpose of making them directly democratic and for promoting the general idea of Libertarian Municipalism. The eventual goal would be to replace the state with a confederation of these directly democratic municipalities. Unfortunately, I am convinced that this is exactly the wrong way to pursue a communalist goal. The way to build directly democratic, autonomous communities is not by going through the indirect process of co-opting the political sphere. Rather, it is by actually building directly democratic, autonomous communities without any reference to the political sphere whatsoever.

Any gains that are made by co-opting the political sphere will have been built upon a foundation of sand. As those municipal groups are nestled within the larger political landscape, they are subject to a variety of influences that will act to limit and blunt the scope and scale of change that can be implemented. Plus the fickle winds of political fortune will eventually provide an opportunity for opponents to overturn any changes that actually do get made along the way. The New Deal, and its eventual unraveling, are a case in point. The prospect, therefore, of being able to chart a course of continual change via the process of Libertarian Municipalism that successfully results in the implementation of Communalism seems remote in the extreme. A Utopian Socialist program of directly building intentional Communities and Ecovillages, without reference to the political establishment whatsoever, is the way to build change that has a secure foundation. 

Intentional communities are impervious to the fickle nature of political fortune. It makes no difference to the functioning of Twin Oaks Community, for example, what the current political climate is, or who is in office. As they are wholly independent from the political system, they are unaffected by its vagaries. Building Intentional Communities thus provides the bedrock upon which lasting political change can be successfully anchored. This Utopian Socialist program seeks to directly alter the building blocks of society, rather than by indirectly influencing its alteration through the electoral process. What this means is that Bookchin’s concept of Libertarian Municipalism is completely backward. You don’t change society by changing politics, even if you start at the bottom rungs of the political system. Rather, you change politics by changing society. And the way to change society is by engaging in the direct work of rebuilding it from the ground-up, one community at a time.

Why Utopian Socialism?

Utopian Socialism. The term was coined by Marx and Engels as one of derision. Someone perusing this site’s material may therefore wonder why we choose to make use of it ourselves. Well, there are a few reasons. The first is that the term ‘anarchism’ (as in anarcho-communism) is a problematic. Every discussion on anarchism invariably breaks down into interminable squabbling over the precise definition of the term, or the exact nuance of its use. I simply don’t have the patience for all that nonsense and thus avoid using it if possible. The term ‘libertarian’ (as in libertarian socialism) also has its problems. The chance of being confused in some way with the Libertarian Party and their ilk is too great. So I avoid using that one as well. 

The term ‘Utopian Socialism’, by contrast, is pretty unambiguous in its meaning. Everyone who has more than a passing acquaintance with the term knows, pretty much, just what it means. You don’t have to spend a lot of time clarifying your terms, or worrying that you’ll end up being confused with some other obnoxious faction. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that people don’t have  a lot of preconceived notions of what the term means, as many people do with anarchism and libertarianism. A simple explanation of the term is sufficient to allow business to proceed. 

But perhaps the greatest attraction of the term is precisely the fact that Marx and Engels intended it as a derisive one. As someone who goes to great lengths to point out the failings of the dynamic duo’s own brand of “scientific socialism”, I want a term that clearly sets us apart. What better way to do that than to commandeer their own term and use it against them? It’s similar to how the LGBTQ community appropriated the term ‘queer’ and turned it from being a pejorative into a positive one they have embraced themselves. Plus I don’t see anything wrong with being utopian. You have to dream big, even if the odds seem stacked hopelessly against you. 

Utopian Socialism: A Play in Three Acts

The ongoing drama of Utopian Socialism can be broken down into three Acts. The First Act took place in the 19th century, under the direction of people like Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet and others. Despite the elaborate plans they articulated on paper, in practice the communities they inspired were, for the most part, poorly planned and underfunded. Plus the great enthusiasm exhibited by their followers for these projects typically exceeded their practical experience in carrying them out. As a result, most quickly failed. But not all. Some thrived for a number of years. But as they lacked any institutional support, they were fragile. Crises, like fire or ideological schism, could send them into terminal decline. The result of this period of experimentation was that eventually all of the Utopian Socialist communities of the 19th century failed. On the positive side, many lessons were learned. Mostly on what NOT to do, but valuable lessons nonetheless.

The fruits of that labor were dismissively cast aside by Marx, however, as he took over direction of the play and began writing an entirely new script. I will not belabor the colossal failures of Marxism-Leninism here, other than to say that, ultimately, that historical dead end accomplished little more than to set aside the Utopian Socialist experiment for many decades. The Left, despite being beguiled by Marxism for far too long, eventually woke up to its moral bankruptcy and belatedly ushered in the Second Act of our play. This was a resumption of the Utopian Socialist experiment during the great “dropping out” period of the 1960s’ counter-culture. A second wave of community building commenced that, unfortunately, was neither better planned nor better funded than its 19th century counterpart. The result, again, is that most of these experiments quickly failed. But not all. This time some of them managed to survive. Twin Oaks Community, in Virginia, has been around for 51 years now. Beyond merely surviving, some communities have even demonstrated the ability to overcome the types of crises that typically did in the communities from Act One. The Farm, in Tennessee, is an example of a community that managed to survive a severe financial and ideological crisis. Clearly the play is getting better as the experiment makes progress.

Being able to merely survive at the outer fringes of society, though, does not exactly earn our actors a standing ovation. Far from it. If Marx were still in the critics’ box, he would no doubt continue to dismiss the play as being little more than a farce. But we would encourage Marx to stick around for the Third Act, which is now in the process of being written. There are now a number of organizations that have done a lot of rehearsal for the Third Act. They are patiently laying the groundwork that will enable communities in the 21st century to not only survive, but to expand. The question the audience no doubt wants answered is whether they can expand beyond the outer fringes of society into the mainstream. It is a valid question. The answer, I suspect, is that as long as Capitalism continues to function, even poorly, then nothing will come close to challenging its dominance. The thing that distinguishes the Third Act from the previous two, however, is that the status quo cannot continue indefinitely. In Acts One and Two, Capitalism still had room to expand. Its internal contradictions, exhaustively catalogued by Marx, were not enough to halt its progress. But now Capitalism is running up hard against the limits of a finite planet. Capitalism’s growth imperative has caused us to exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth by a substantial margin. The results are ecological destruction, climate change, vast inequalities, and an increasing number of failing states across the globe. The last of these presents the greatest opportunity for a rapid expansion of the Utopian Socialist experiment. The Rojavan revolution, in Syria, will come to be seen as a classic example of that process in action. Climate change played a large role in pushing to Syrian state to collapse. The vacuum that ensued allowed the Rojavan communitarian experiment, inspired by Murray Bookchin and especially Abdullah Öcalan, to rapidly fill that void. The proper role for Utopian Socialists as we move deeper into Act Three is to prepare themselves, as much as they can, to take advantage of opportunities similar to the one in Syria. As Capitalism reaches its climate-induced end game, such opportunities will only increase in number and present our actors the chance of bringing our play to a successful conclusion.