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.