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.
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