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.