From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism

By Too Black

Republished from Hood Communist.

“As word of what some would later call the “Negro uprising” began to spread across the white community, groups of armed whites began to gather at hastily-arranged meeting  places, to discuss what to do next.”

Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

“For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration.”

- Yannick Giovanni Marshall, Black liberal, your time is up

“Black capitalism is still capitalism.” – Terrell

The Tulsa Massacre began 100 years ago on May 31st, 1921 when an angry white mob accused a 19-year-old Black man, Dick Rowland, of raping a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page. Flustered by the perceived “Negro Uprising” of Black men armed to defend and protect Dick Rowland outside the Tulsa courthouse, the inflamed white mob, sanctioned by the state, responded with brute terror — burning down the Black segregated neighborhood of Greenwood destroying 1,256 homes, nearly 191 Black businesses and the death of roughly 300 (likely more) people by the morning of June 1st, 1921.

100 years since these 16 hours of white barbarism occurred, suppressive forces have steadily worked to delete this tragedy from scribing its crimson pages into the books of American history. But, as history shows, bloodstains prove difficult to remove. Recently, decorating over these stains as “blemishes” of an otherwise promising American Dream towards Black capitalism has proven to be a more sufficient means to quell dissent. What has materialized is an emphasis on what was destroyed over who was destroyed. Effectively, redeeming the state — the combined authority of government (elected), the bureaucracies (positions), corporate control, and private interests — in the process.

Decorating a Utopia that never was

As the summer of 2020 was steaming from protests against continued racialized state violence, the attention economy suddenly rediscovered the blood of 1921 by pivoting to what Booker T. Washington reportedly called “Negro Wall Street” or what is now known as Black Wall Street — the historic Black business district of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood destroyed in the massacre. According to Google Trends, the term “Black Wall Street” was googled more in June of 2020 than within the last 5 years.

Posited within 3-4 Blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood, this business district, disparagingly referred to by Tulsa whites as “Little Africa,” was the home to a number of Black-owned enterprises including a fifty-four room hotel, a public library, two newspapers, a seven-hundred, and fifty seat theater, multiple cleaners, and two dozen grocery stores among more. Through these efforts, Black Wall Street produced a prosperous Black business class fancying “some of the city’s more elegant homes” and successful Black businesses in the state.

Faced with only these facts, it’s understandable why one would view Black Wall Street as a wealthy “self-sustaining” utopia violently interrupted by a white vigilante mob as it’s widely reported to have been. However, a much more complicated narrative scrubbed from decorated legend lies underneath the folklore of a Black American Wakanda.

Although Black Wall Street certainly brought pride to the Black residents of Greenwood, that pride failed to translate to a prosperous economic status for most. A report by the American Association of Social Workers on the living conditions of Black folks in Tulsa at the time stated, “95 percent of the Negro residents in the Black belt lived in poorly constructed frame houses, without  conveniences, and on streets which were unpaved and on which the drainage was all surface.” Furthermore, most Greenwood residents were not only living in substandard housing but were employed outside of Black Wall Street according to the Oklahoma Commission study on the Tulsa Race Riot:

“Despite the growing fame of its commercial district, the vast majority of Greenwood’s adults were neither businessmen nor businesswomen but worked long hours, under trying conditions, for white employers [emphasis added]. Largely barred from employment in both the oil industry and from most of Tulsa’s manufacturing facilities, these men and women toiled at difficult, often dirty, and generally menial jobs — the kinds that most whites consider beneath them—as janitors and ditch-diggers, dishwashers, and maids, porters and day laborers, domestics and service workers.  Unsung and largely forgotten, it was, nevertheless, their paychecks that built Greenwood,  and their hard work that helped to build Tulsa. [Emphasis added]“

Truthfully, as the report makes clear, Tulsa and Black Wall Street were both consequences of de jure segregation. Segregation operated as a public policy purposely made to suppress Black wages for the benefit of white capital while simultaneously limiting where those suppressed wages could be spent — inadvertently creating a monopoly for a petite Black professional class. Put differently, it was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District. Neither could have existed without the presence of poor Black people. Yet, their presence is rarely acknowledged in the revisionist plot. The suffering of the Black poor typically only matters when it can be used to bolster the class position of the Black Elite — the appointed political, cultural, and social representative and a moneyed class of Black people — and reinforce the state.

Decorating Blackness

As previously indicated, last summer, while police precincts became bonfires illustriously lighting up the night sky, the terms “Black Wall Street” and “Black business” were receiving more Google searches than ever before. The presuppositions of the searches call for questioning: Will a world on fire be resolved by the memory of a business district burnt down by a white mob? What is the correlation between a cop kneecapping a poor Black man’s neck and buying Black? How can I buy my way out of a chokehold? Do corporate pledges to “support Black business” deflect the oncoming bullets of State violence?

All Black people are subject to a degree of state violence but in today’s post-civil rights era, those flung to the bottom of the capitalist ladder  *George Floyd* experience the worst fate — police murders, stop and frisk, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, and worse. In essence, LeBron James’ sons could not be Kalief Browder because not only can LeBron afford to bail his sons out of jail but Brentwood, CA is far from the overpoliced neighborhood Browder was originally profiled in. Despite her same race and gender, Oprah is not Breonna Taylor. No knock warrants are unheard of in Montecito, CA, and gentrification does not work in reverse.

The point here is not to diminish the racism experienced by the Black Elite but to challenge the universalizing of Blackness. Universalizing Blackness as a flat experience allows Amazon to proclaim #BlackLivesMatter, create a Black-owned business page but crush the unions organized by its Black workers. It allows the NBA to paint BLM on its hardwoods, highlight Black business during the NBA finals but pay its predominantly Black and temp workers dirt wages. Universalizing Blackness distorts Blackness itself. It is decorating at its worst.

A repercussion of universalizing Blackness is elite capture — what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines as “how political projects can be hijacked—in principle or effect—by the well-positioned and resourced.” This begins to explain how a radical demand such as abolishing the police either becomes dismissed or co-opted while the state offers its full cosmetic support behind Black business and representation. The class of Black people most well-positioned to make demands upon the state is better situated to benefit from Black business creation and corporate diversity hires than police abolition or the unionization of Amazon. They are considerably less afflicted by the problems of the people they claim to represent.

Universalizing Blackness collapses the interests of Black people as if we’re all equally invested in the same solutions. It’s precisely how the knees of killer cops on Black necks correlate with buying Black because as Táíwò notes, “When elites run the show, the “group’s” interests get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top.” It’s how the poverty of Greenwood ceases to appear in documentaries or presidential speeches when the Black wealth of a few needs attention. Commenting on sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s groundbreaking 1954 text The Black Bourgeoisie, Táíwò observes how two seemingly opposing ideas continue to find continuity, “Why did the myth of a Black economy as a comprehensive response to anti-Black racism survive when it was never a serious possibility? In Frazier’s telling, it did because it furthered the class interests of the Black bourgeoisie.” The class interests remain.

Black Capitalism, the Ultimate Decoration

The elite capture of a movement requires a series of decorative myths — ideas that obscure the nature of the problem for the maintenance of the status quo. Last Summer Black capitalism emerged once again as the most decorated myth. The revisionism of Black Wall Street, as an extension of Black capitalism, neatly fits the narrative of universal Blackness. It utilizes the universality of a tragedy suffered by an entire Black population to advocate for a solution (Black capitalism) that has shown to primarily benefit a particular class of Black people.

Black capitalism is a concatenation of propaganda. It relies on complementary myths such as Black buying power and Black dollar circulation that are premised upon shaming Black people, particularly the poor ones, for their alleged frivolous spending. Besides the fact that Black people spend their money no more recklessly than anyone else, Black capitalism feeds on stereotypes of broke Black people foolishly buying Jordans and weaves they cannot afford to justify its existence. The saying typically goes “if we spend with our own then we can have our own” as if Black people’s spending habits are moral barometers.

This decorative myth is exemplified in the creation of the Greenwood banking app. Popularized by rapper Killer Mike and actor Jesse Williams this app is “inspired by the early 1900’s Greenwood District, where recirculation of Black wealth occurred all day, every day, and where Black businesses thrived.” The website, littered with unsubstantiated claims of Black dollar circulation, conveniently fails to discuss the rampant Black poverty in the “1900’s Greenwood District” they claim to want to recreate. To highlight such a contradiction would ruin their business model.

Businesses such as Greenwood use the history of how collective Black wealth has been systematically destroyed by capitalism to leverage (guilt) white investors for funding. In the case of Greenwood, receiving 40 million dollars from banking institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Trust among others. The billions of corporate dollars injected into “racial equity” campaigns this last year were all sparked by the militant response to the blatant murder of a poor Black man who was allegedly arrested for purchasing items with a counterfeit bill. Disturbingly, the death of poor Black people is a lucrative fundraising drive for everybody but the ones experiencing death.

Decorating an Empire

What rests at the heart of these issues is the Black Elite’s general unwillingness to confront the state and all the violence it subsumes. As a class, they are much more invested in collaborating — either for perceived survival and/or personal gain. What tends to go unsaid is that when they collaborate with the state they often lose even on their terms. The police still confuse them for poor “thugs.” They remain underrepresented and underpaid in their respective fields. Laws that sustain their lifestyle are constantly eroded. Yet, historically, they have made the most “progress” in periods where the masses of Black people dissented. Due to their economic instability, they are unable to exist as a class by themselves — hence the need for the symbolic support of the masses analogous to how Black Wall Street needed the paychecks of the Black poor to thrive as a business district.

The state uses these decorators of empire, knowingly or not, to maintain its legitimacy. White supremacy may have obliterated Black Wall Street — 1st through violence, 2nd through policy — nevertheless “if that massacre never happened who knows how that shapes America today.” The bloodshed of the past is decorated by the false promise of “a more perfect union.” Organizing for a world beyond American hegemony is scolded as unrealistic and sophomoric. The most moderate of Black radical demands such as “defund the police” are derided and blamed unfairly for costing congressional seats as if Democratic party success is synonymous with Black liberation.

Decorators of empire must corral dissent. This type of agency reduction has a footprint leaping back to the Cold War and much further. Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College, thoroughly documents how the Black Elite of the time — Black Cold War liberals, “reduced the collective agency of other African Americans by marginalizing or maligning the panoply of liberation strategies emanating from the Black left.” This was a necessary strategy because the Black Cold War Liberals “formed important relationships with powerful Whites to procure goods and services for the Black community while offering no challenge to exploitative economic and social relations.” Modes of thinking outside of these brokered relationships threatened to bring backlash from the state. Faced with the mounting repression of the anti-communist McCarthy era,

“…Black Cold War liberals began to distinguish themselves from the left by rejecting militant agendas that might align them with those deemed “communist fronts,” including the Council on African Affairs (CAA), the Peace Information Center (PIC), and the National Negro Labor Council. Black Cold War liberals signaled such rejection by casting their platform in anti-communist terms and by constructing Black people as loyal, trustworthy Americans who deserved to be recognized as full citizens.”

Consistent with elite capture, Black Cold War liberals corralled the ideologies of the Black masses. “Seditious” communist ideas and “backward” social behavior would not earn the acceptance of the state. Irrespective of the oppression they faced, Black people of the time were corralled to focus their aspirations on proving to the state they were just as American as everyone else.

Today, building on a similar logic, Black American suffering is promoted as a badge of honor — a “justice claim” made because “we built this country.” Black people are “the Soul of the Nation” who “saved American democracy.” Again, the bloodshed of the past is used to redeem the present. President Biden, in his speech for the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, leveraged this Black American exceptionalism to bolster the empire, “we should know the good, the bad, everything. That is what great nations do. They come to terms. With their dark side. We are a great nation.” Only in America can a nation be “great” for acknowledging a single massacre 100 years later with no reparations to show — decorating at its finest.

Conclusion

Remembering the Tulsa Massacre not as a violent white response to Black self-defense and determination but instead as the destruction of property and mythical Black wealth favorably leaves space for American redemption. It reduces the violence to a tragic interruption of the American dream and Black capitalism while minimizing other race massacres that did not include a well of black business class.

Wall Street is a parasitic model we should not emulate — still, I empathize with Black  people’s desire for Black ownership and self-determination. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this desire. However, positioning slogans like #BuyBlack and #SupportBlackBusinness as the respectable alternative to radical transformative demands is decorating for the state — particularly when these slogans are attached to faulty concepts like trickle-down economics and universal Blackness. Black ownership is elite capture without the correct redistribution and collective ownership of the wealth we create.

Lastly, it need not be stated that the victims of the Tulsa Massacre — as well as their descendants and all African people — deserve their reparations. That is not in question. We should question the state’s legitimacy to define our collective goals. We must be vigilant towards the state’s attempts to use the atrocities committed against us as a means to redeem itself by decorating its crimes. The world we deserve is irreducible to a Black Wall Street and abundantly superior to anything America currently has to offer. It’s on us and those in solidarity to fight for it.

Too Black is a poet, writer, and host of The Black Myths Podcast based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.

The Revolutionary Potential of Hope and Utopia

By Yanis Iqbal

We live in disconcerting times. The wealth of USA’s 643 billionaires has soared by 29% since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. On 13 August, 2020, the top twelve US billionaires had surpassed a combined wealth of $1 trillion. This year, the world’s 500 richest people have grown their fortunes by $871 billion, a 15% increase. All this while, the misery of the oppressed people has been increasing.  Due to the Coronavirus-caused intensification of income inequalities, an additional 132 million people will go hungry than previously predicted this year. Moreover, by the end of 2020 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself. Brutally indifferent to the hunger of the oppressed masses, the transnational capitalist class has instead opted to maximize its profit. Between January and July 2020, eight of the biggest food and drink companies paid out $18 billion to shareholders - ten times more than has been requested in the UN COVID-19 appeal to stop people going hungry. While looking at the present-day conjuncture, one can’t help but remember Karl Marx’s incisive description of capitalism: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

The progressive deterioration of socio-economic conditions has created a situation which is objectively revolutionary. By forcing the subalterns into a state of semi-starvation and perpetual precarity, the ruling class is producing a chain of circumstances whose ultimate result will be the aggravation of capitalism’s protracted crisis. In order to understand the objective damage done to capitalism through the hyper-exploitation of the lower classes, the phenomenon of income squeeze can be briefly studied. Reduction of the working class’s income leads to a crisis of over-production since the purchasing power of the workers is not able to keep up with the pace of production. Consequently, the lack of money on the part of the working class results in a decrease in aggregate demand since the ratio of consumption to income is higher for wage earners than for those living off the surplus. Demand-reducing effects arising from the consumption side reduce output, capacity utilization and lower investment over time, further exacerbating the initial crisis of neoliberal capitalism.

Need for a New Narrative

Objective conditions in-themselves, however, don’t possess the capacity to bring about a revolution. To take an example, capitalism has temporarily and unsustainably fixed the crisis of overproduction-under-consumption through credit expansion and debt-financed spending. The fact that capitalism has continued to patch up its contradictions - in however an instable way - proves that objective conditions are inadequate for replacing capitalism. Therefore, objective conditions need the presence of another major element to produce the prerequisites of a revolution.

Proper objective conditions need to cohesively combine with subjective conditions to bring forth a revolution. Subjective conditions refer to the attainment of class consciousness by the proletariat and the consequent construction of hegemony. Class consciousness and the construction of hegemony together constitute the subjective dimension of a revolution through which bourgeoisie ideological apparatuses are subverted. Presently, the Left is primarily waging a battle on the subjective plane in order to build counter-hegemonic bases of resistance and refine the embryonic consciousness of the oppressed masses. While doing this task, it has encountered the hegemonic force of right-wing populism which is culturally re-defining the status of the subalterns and utilizing emotively expressive symbolic methods to over-power the ideological efforts of the Left. In order to institute the hegemony of socialist forces in the civil society, new cultural strategies need to be devised which can combat the influence of the ascendant Right.

Right-wing populism denotes a politico-cultural force capable of emotionally expressing the discontent of the subaltern classes with neoliberal globalization and simultaneously consolidating the power of capitalism. To do this, the Right uses a variety of tactics. It initiates a personalized politics of muscular leaders; divides society into ethnically polarized groups; and uses extra-institutional street violence and mobilizations to infuse politics with raw emotions. All these political methods share a common feature: they aim at aestheticizing politics. In his seminal essay “The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin, a German Marxist, had lucidly explained the relation between aesthetics and politics while talking about fascism: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.”

Right-wing populism’s emotionally energetic and politically persuasive practices are able to symbolically soothe the psychological wounds of neoliberalism. The Right’s visceral strategies stand in contrast to the emotionally dry politics of the Left. In its singular pursuit of emphasizing the economic defects of capitalism, socialist politics has renounced the effective use of varying emotions. While pointing out the contradictions of capitalism and focusing on economic issues, socialists tend to forget that the human being is incomplete, unfulfilled and laden with unrealized potentials which are the motor of human activity. Since humans are unfinished, they take recourse to repositories of subjective support comprising of emotions and ethics.

Bertolt Brecht, a communist and one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century, had famously said: “Food comes first and then morality”. Today’s Left has misinterpreted and dogmatically followed this dictum and forgotten the dialectical unity in which food and morality co-exist. A lack of dialectical thinking on this issue has led leftists to believe that a person can exist without the presence of vivid emotions. Refuting this point, Ernst Bloch, a famous Marxist philosopher, had stated: “Human beings do not live by bread alone, particularly when they have none.” By not unifying the scientific critique of capitalism with the power of emotions, the Left has allowed the subalterns to be swindled by the expressive politics of right-wing populism which symbolically re-activates unfulfilled pasts and unrealized futures.

To counter-act the hegemony of right-wing populism, a new narrative of hope needs to be built which can soak the critique of capitalism in emotions, affections and feelings. Bloch had theorized this synthesis of critique and emotions in his magnum opus “Principle of Hope” where he made a distinction between two dominant strains of Marxism: cold stream and warm stream. The cold stream is concerned with the scientific critique of capitalism and the unmasking of mystifying ideologies. The warm-stream is concerned with a utopian revolutionary imagination which utilizes the power of emotions to produce a commitment to emancipation.

Both cold stream and warm stream should operate in a dialectical unity and the ruthless critique of capitalism should always be warmed up in the fire of emotions and affects, a fire that turns “reasons to act into imperatives to act.” As soon as both the streams are unified, a new knowledge structure is produced wherein reason speaks through the heart and guides the latter. The dialectical unification of heart and reason can be completed through the introduction of hope and utopia which produce a captivating vision of a desirable alternative, rooted in anger at the injustices of the world in which we live and infused with confidence about human possibilities.

Hope and Utopia

Utopia is omnipresent in capitalism. It is concentrated in works of mass culture and the bourgeoisie political system which many Marxists tend to flatly dismiss as concerned with “false consciousness” and thus, “manipulative”. Instead of such a uni-dimensional critique, a nuanced analysis of politico-cultural artifacts reveals that they are explicitly utopian. Fairy tales, films, theater and jokes not only mystify the consciousness of an individual but also express in abstract and idealist fashion the potentialities for a better future. On the political level, the bourgeoisie concept of citizenship not only blocks the emergence of class identities but also functions as a vision of a classless society where everyone would be politically and economically equal. A nuanced ideology critique, therefore, “is not merely unmasking…but is also uncovering and discovery: revelations of unrealized dreams, lost possibilities, abortive hopes - that can be resurrected and enlivened and realized in our current situation.”

The omnipresence of utopias in capitalism means that the oppressed classes have been silently struggling for a better world. Socio-cultural and political utopias are imperfect yearnings for what is more fully developed in Marxism and socialism. Leftists have to work with this contradictory subaltern consciousness which contains within itself the seeds of communism. By refining the nascent consciousness of the subalterns, leftist activists can form the utopia of communism. This form of constructing hegemony works with the pre-existing thought-systems to sharpen its edges and subvert it from within.  A letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge dated 1843 explicitly supports this method of constructing hegemony: “Our motto must therefore be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness which is still unclear to itself. It will then become apparent that the world has long possessed the dream of a matter, of which it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality. It will become apparent that it is not a question of a great thought dash between past and future, but of the carrying-through of the thoughts of the past.”

The formation of a communist utopia is inevitably accompanied by the institution of hope as an important axis of struggle. A communist utopia anticipates a new future and rejects the existing state of affairs. Correspondingly, to maintain a conviction in the new future and keep on struggling against the status quo, hope needs to be firmly established as the fluid which constantly flows throughout the matrix of the communist utopia. Hope in a communist utopia is not synonymous with naïve optimism. If that was case, hope would merely become another form of voluntarism. In contrast to voluntarism, hope in a communist utopia is intertwined with the knowledge of material conditions and reaches out for a new global future while taking full account of all the pressures towards a civilizational collapse. Consequently, hope denotes a terrain of constant striving where the communist activists are familiar with the indeterminacy of their class struggle which has not yet been defeated but likewise has not yet won. In spite of this indeterminacy, communist militants continue to maintain a commitment to emancipation and derive hope from the immense power they posses. Their power emanates from a fundamental flaw at the heart of any system of domination: the dependence of the dominator on the dominated. Recognizing this fact, subaltern classes believe that they have the capability to challenge capitalism and steer historical processes in the direction of communism.

When communist utopia and hope are used as the cultural tools of a revolution, a resilient environment of social sensitivity and emotional energy is produced. In this environment, the rhythms of revolution are composed of a critique of capitalism and a forward-looking, hope-infused conceptualization of a communist society. By highlighting the obscenity of capital accumulation through a scientific critique of the existing system, rage, fury and indignation are generated among the masses. John Holloway, a Marxist sociologist, powerfully expresses the sentiment of “refusal” which is created as a result of fury and indignation: “We are the fury of a new world pushing through the foul obscenity of the old. Our fury is the fury of refusal, of stifled creation, of indignation. Who are these people, the politicians and bankers who think they can treat us like objects, who think they can destroy the world and smile as they do it? They are no more than the servants of money, the vile and vicious defenders of a dying system. How dare they try to take our lives away from us, how dare they treat us like that? We refuse.”

The loud refusal of capitalism is accompanied by the soft glow of revolutionary hope which moulds the anger of the masses into a communist utopia. With the help of this communist utopia, subaltern classes are suffused with the echoes of emancipation and act on the basis of what Marx had designated as “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.” The act of overthrowing capitalism, therefore, becomes ethically grounded and rooted in the everyday emotions of subaltern people.

In the contemporary period, a re-invigorated leftist strategy – combining emotions and scientific critique – is indispensably needed as the Right intensifies its cultural techniques and effectively aestheticizes politics to satisfy the demands of the oppressed classes.  Today, more than ever, we need the presence of revolutionary hope and a well-built communist utopia capable of emotionally articulating the repressed desires and existential needs of the masses. A poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet of the Russian Revolution, beautifully expresses the revolutionary imagination which is needed to revitalize the global Left:

“We will smash the old world
wildly
we will thunder
a new myth over the world.
We will trample the fence
of time beneath our feet.
We will make a musical scale
of the rainbow.

Roses and dreams
Debased by poets
will unfold
in a new light
for the delight of our eyes
the eyes of big children.
We will invent new roses
roses of capitals with petals of squares”

The Price of Utopia: Abundance & Injustice

By Nick Partya

This is the third part of a multi-part series on "The Value of Utopia."

Part One: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

Part Two: The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

On The Value of Utopia

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates it most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place, is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort on need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. What is so valuable about thinking about utopias is that it allows us to both critique present societies, but also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must be first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

One important value of utopian thinking is that it permits one to think about themselves in relation to society, their place in the social order, to reflect on basic commitments and values of their societies, to consider the proper aims of their society. Few take time to consider the basic structure of the societies they live in, few notice the myriad of inter-connected systems of coordinated behavior, sometimes voluntary sometimes coerced, that create the often seamless appearance of the regularity and orderliness of society. In order for society to reproduce itself, certain kinds of work must be performed, and the more complex the society, the more sophisticated the system of internal coordination required to successfully reproduce the necessary elements of that reproduction. It is the duty of citizens to confront this basic structure, this way that society re-creates itself, and once confronted, one cannot help but adopt a moral attitude toward this basic structure. Utopian thinking allows us to think about our most basic moral orientations toward society and its mode of reproduction.

Ursula Le Guin's short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, offers an excellent opportunity for such reflection. [1] The main point of describing this utopian society as she does is to pose to the reader the questions, Would you stay or go? The point is to make the reader confront a moral dilemma, and test their moral intuitions, to see what kind of a person the reader is. The analogy to the dominant capitalist world economy is very clear. And the question posed in each case is very stark, How comfortable is one with enjoying a prosperity predicated on the intentional creation of suffering and injustice? This question is a kind of test, wherein one's answer reveals s deeper elements of one's character. In some ways the moral dilemma Le Guin constructs is similar to that in Robert Nozick's famous experience machine thought example. Nozick imagines a virtual reality machine that could be programmed to give you any set of experiences you wanted. You could live your ideal life in a virtual space that is identical to the real world in all sensory respects, one might think of the popular film The Matrix. Every five years or so, you would be woken up, so to speak, and asked if you wished to continue. Nozick asks, would you choose to stay in the machine, or not. If you choose not, the implication is that this must be because you value things other than hedonistic physical pleasures. One's response to this dilemma reveals something about one's underlying character, and in this case, what one values.

The Ones Who Walk Away

When Le Guin first introduces the reader to the town of Omelas an ostensibly important festival is set to begin. And people from a network of communities are making the journey to Omelas to participate in this festival, such is its importance to the community. The town is full of dancing, music, and gaiety. Young and old, everyone is joyful, thankful for the prosperity of the community, and everyone indulges in delicious food, festive music and dancing, as well as amiable conversation with family, friends, and neighbors. The residents are described as amiably conversing with each other, while various processions move through the city towards a field outside of town. In this field a kind of ceremonial horse race is to take place as a key part of the festival being celebrated. Le Guin describes a quaint, well-kept town by a bay, and with bountiful fields stretching out beyond. The general impression of this festival, and of the town celebrating it, is unmistakably one of universal joy and celebration of prosperity and abundance. What comes to mind is the New England, or Pacific Northwest fishing town on the coast. Indeed, 'Omelas' in reverse is 'salem O', and the town of Salem, Oregon is where Le Guin resides. In one's mind, one conjures the image of the kind of bucolic small town, the aesthetic of which many Americans continue to crave and to drape themselves in, and which loom so large in the American cultural imagination. The image conjured here is of the kind of place many Americans would associate with a "simpler" time, with a more virtuous and un-corrupted country both physically and morally.

And indeed, Omelas has many characteristics which have been typical of utopian communities since the time of Thomas More. The reader is given the impression of Omelas as an egalitarian, and democratic community, one that eschews violence, hierarchy, luxury, and avarice. The reader is told that in Omelas there are no police, no military, no wars, no civil conflict, there are only a few simple laws and so there is no need for lawyers, and there is full gender equality. The citizens of Omelas reject significant aspects of the capitalist economy, its structural imperative towards endless growth; its self-destructive pursuit of extreme luxury and decadence; its relentless exhortations to consume; its rationing of access to consumption goods by income. In Omelas, in contrast to the dominant characteristics of capitalist societies, there is no poverty, no homelessness, no one goes hungry, no one lacks medical care, access to education, or to productive employment. Everyone enjoys enough leisure time to be able to cultivate their talents, so that the arts, and other cultural productions, thrive in Omelas. The people of Omelas are rational people, spiritual without being rigidly moralistic, e.g. they seem to be less obsessed with guilt and shame the same way the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions are, or about the same things. The prevalence and acceptability of public nudity, at least during the important festival, is a sign of a less repressive, more enlightened attitude towards body image and sexual morality.

Early on in Republic Glaucon and Adiemantus disagree with Socrates about his initial characterization of the best kind of community. Socrates describes a simple society with few needs, and Spartan sensibilities about décor, utensils, diet, et cetera. This kind of life, where virtuous people subsist on their "honest cakes and loaves" fails to appeal to Socrates' younger interlocutors, who insist on adding important elements to the ideal city, elements necessary for living the best kind of life. Yet, introducing these elements of luxury creates all the social and political problems that the Philosopher-Kings have to be created to solve. So too does Le Guin understand that when it comes to utopia, tastes will differ. Thus, while she offers important details, and creates a vivid impression of the life of the community at Omelas, she leaves much of it open ended, so as to suit individual tastes. She can do this since, what she wants is to get the reader to imagine Omelas in whatever way they need so as to think of it as the ideal kind of life, and the ideal kind of community. If an orgy would be necessary to make Omelas appealing enough to attract some, then add one in is Le Guin's attitude. Prefer less technology, less urban hustle-&-bustle, a more abstemious community, then so it is. Prefer the opposite of these, then that's fine too. For those who like intoxication, Le Guin describes Drooz, a kind of wonder-drug that offers all the appeal of psychotropic substances without being habit-forming or destructive to the body. She is also happy to have beer in Omelas. Omelas is to be the home of all good things, in whatever measure one thinks appropriate.

Yet, Omelas is not the place that many will have imagined it to be thus far. There is a dark side to the prosperity of Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings in the town there is certain room. It is small, dark, and dank. The room has a bare dirt floor, a small window covered in grime and filth, and a couple of rusted buckets and old mops fouled by rot and mold. This is a room most do not visit, but that everyone in town knows about and thinks about. All things being equal the dilapidated condition, and lack of maintenance for this room would be unremarkable. Yet, all other things are not equal in this case. This is because a child lives in this room behind a locked door, and has lived in this room all its life, and will live the entirety of its life in this squalid little room. Periodically someone comes to empty the buckets filled with the child's excrement, and re-fill the child's water and food bowls. As one might imagine, as any child raised in such conditions, the child in this room in Omelas is malnourished, intellectually stunted, cannot read, write, has no conception of the world beyond that basement room. In short, the child lives a horrible and degrading life, full of deprivation, fear, and isolation. And to top it all off this child is as innocent as any, there are no circumstances that might be adduced to mitigate the sympathy the reader very likely naturally has for the child.

When each citizen of Omelas comes of age, between eight and twelve years old, they are told about the room, some even go to see the room. All are fully aware that there is a causal relationship between the child's suffering and the town's prosperity. Le Guin never specifies what this mechanism is, and does not need to. First, this is a work of utopian fiction, so it is not essential to include this, and second, the point of the story is to pose the reader a moral dilemma, not to describe how this mechanism could work. She is content to leave it to the reader's imagination as to how this causal connection works. Perhaps it is a kind of sacrifice to whatever god exists, or whatever, the details on this point are not essential. Without the suffering imposed on this child the town would not, indeed could not, be the place of joy and abundance that it is.

Some people are unable to live in Omelas, to enjoy its prosperity and abundance, knowing what the true cost of it is. These are the titular 'ones who walk away'. Sometimes the young children who go to see the child do not adapt to the necessity of its suffering, and they leave the town. Other times older adults, as Le Guin tells us, will suddenly become quiet for a couple days and then walk right out of town. All these people could not reconcile the joy and abundance enjoyed by all but one in Omelas, and the suffering of that one, when the latter is the pre-condition of the former. These people leave Omelas, and never return. Where these people go, the citizens of Omelas do not know. Le Guin tells us it is a place that would be even less imaginable for us than Omelas, a place that might not even exist. Are the ones who walk away going to their deaths? Are they going to a place where they can live without imposing suffering? All Le Guin tells us is that those who walk away seem to know where they are going.

An Omelas in the Modern World?

What makes Omelas unique is that everyone who lives there is acutely aware of the price of their prosperity. And each has made a deliberate and conscious choice to stay. Our modern world is very different from Omelas in this regard. Though not secret, the source of and true price of the material prosperity of those in the so-called "first" world, are usually hidden. Few Western consumers see behind the neatly arranged items on the shelves of their local stores, to the often long and sophisticated chains of interconnected operations that unite the production of raw materials and the consumption of finished goods. This is because many people do not care to know, others do not care how much others have to suffer for them to enjoy the things they want, and also because the large firms which produce these goods deliberately try to obscure the morally dubious origins of the ingredients that make their products possible. If we look at only a couple of some basic products that many people consume on a routine basis will expose the immense quantities of suffering that is produced in order to furnish these products to consumers. We can look to the basic cotton t-shirt, the cellular telephone, and the chocolate bar, for ample evidence of the outsized costs of 'simple' luxuries.

Consider the common t-shirt. They appear ready-made on store shelves, but in fact have a complex history. At every step in the production-process of a simple t-shirt involves many kinds of hidden costs, both human and ecological. Ecologically, cotton is a very greedy crop in terms of water requirements. Devoting vast tracts of land to cultivation of cotton can have serious effects on water supplies. In an era of climate change, when large-scale drought is quickly becoming a significant problem, this strain on water resources will become increasingly problematic. As with other kinds of farming, the use of pesticides and other chemicals to increase crop yields causes problems as it leeches into the water supply. Turning picked cotton into fabric involves a series of complex operations, many dispersed by thousands of miles geographically, and linked by the ability to cheaply ship bulk commodities using fossil fuels. Many of these operations are largely automated. The environmental costs of burning fossil fuels, the main source of energy for the machines that produce yarns and fabric, as well as the ships and trucks that transport the semi-finished product as is progresses through the production process, are well known.

The disaster at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh 2013 brought many in the world face to face with some of the most morally troubling aspects of the production of their clothing. The use of young children in sweatshops, the unsafe and unhealthy conditions in most factories, the low wages, long hours, and abuses by supervisors that workers experience were brought to the attention of a public that is all too eager to look away. The sub-contracting relationships that dominate the garment trade, that large retailers use to shed responsibility for the wages and work conditions of the workers who produce their products, enable a culture of don't ask, don't tell on the part of the retailers and the suppliers. These kinds of abuses have been documented over and over again by NGOs, human rights groups, investigative journalists, et cetera, in the third world countries where most of the world's garment production takes place. And despite the high-sounding pledges made by retailers, the kinds of abuses that lead directly to the Rana Plaza disaster, and many other tragically similar incidents, are still routine practices.

Think about your cell phone. It is probably in your pocket or purse right now, or maybe on a table or desk within one's reach. This item has become so ubiquitous in the last few years that we now taken them for granted. The so-called "smart" phone has established itself with the same ubiquity even faster. Yet, some of the basic components that make these devices work have rather problematic histories from a moral perspective. Most people use their cell phones every day, and hardly ever, if at all, think about the Rare Earth Minerals (REMs) that make them work. The production of these essential components causes much ecological and human damage, in both their mining and refining, as well as their recycling. Elements like Neodymium, Terbium, Cerium, Lanthanum, and Yttrium are all essential materials for making the components that make our "smart" phones work. And they all must be dug out of the earth, and processed into a form useable by industry.

Mining, for rare earths, or merely for gold and silver, is an inherently a physically destructive endeavor, and whole landscapes can be, and have been, wiped away in the quest for what lies underneath. In many poorer countries around the world, where the agents of trans-national capital extract much of the raw materials for their products, regulation is lax and corruption high. This combination leads quite naturally to wholesale environmental degradation through unrestrained avarice, as well as often crude technologies. These same conditions lead to large human costs, as mining techniques are both inherently dangerous, carried out with dilapidated and inadequate equipment, with no safety regulation or precaution, miles from medical help, and undertaken by desperate people willing to take risks others would deem unacceptable; in all too many instances mining work is done by slave labor, child labor, or child-slave labor. Mining is, of course, done differently in different places, and yet even in America mining is a dangerous occupation. Moreover, the use of toxic chemicals, especially mercury for gold mining, also contributes to both ecological damage and ill-health in humans. Once mined, these mineral must be transported, the same way cotton had to be, to the locations where they are to undergo the next stage of their transformation into products one will find in a store. This transportation process, as one that relies on burning fossil fuels, adds to the burden being placed on the earth's ecosystem.

Refining rare earth minerals is not only highly energy intensive, but also causes widespread harm to human beings, as the rare earths are toxic, as they are always found in nature next to radioactive elements. Exposure to radiation effects workers in, as well as the communities surrounding refining facilities. Moreover, irresponsible, if not in all cases illegal, dumping of the radioactive waste products of refining rare earths causes a myriad of health effects on the human beings exposed. In one community in Malaysia near a rare earth refining facility run by an Australian company, residents exposed suffered from a range of ill effects ranging from skin disorders, to high rates of miscarriages and birth defects including blindness, severe retardation, and leukemia.

Most rare earths are mined and refined in China and other Asian countries. Most are then sent to other Asian countries to construct sub-components, which are in turn shipped to another production facility, where they are fitted in larger sub-components, and so on, until all the sub-components reach the final assembly facility, from which the final product is shipped again, and not for the last time, on its way to the final destination on the shelves of local retail outlets. The human costs exacted during the assembly of the various sub-components of the myriad of electronic gadgets and gizmos that dominate our lives are appalling, and the rash of worker suicides at Foxconn factories testifies to the draconian nature of the work regime there. The companies, now notorious, response was to place nets around the factory buildings to prevent workers who successfully made it out the window from dying. Workers in China, and other low-wage, low regulation Asian countries are routinely subjected to brutal treatment, long hours, low wages, unsafe and unhealthy conditions, not to mention predatory behavior by the company in the form of mandatory residence in company housing -often cramped, ill maintained, and lacking basic amenities- the rent for which is automatically deducted from workers' pay.

One might think that the troubles involved in mining and refining could be mitigated if only we all recycled more of our electronics. Yet, even recycling has a nasty after-taste, once one looks into. The net flow of new products is into the developed world, but there is also a reverse flow of obsolete products back to the Asian countries, again predominantly China, from which the rare earths originated. The unfortunate reality is that the recycling process of obsolete electronic from the first world is very crude. Most "e-waste" is shipped, again using fossil fuels, to small Chinese villages where elderly people break down the components by hand, often using little but their bare hands, an open flame, and toxic chemicals, especially acids. This is how the people involved in this recycling work are exposed to the chemicals that result in detrimental health effects, including much higher rates of cancer. The link between the recycling work and the cancers is so strong that the places where this work is done have come to be called " cancer villages".

Even the unassuming, seemingly innocent, and above all delicious, chocolate bar has a decidedly bitter side, and a morally problematic history. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the production of chocolate is the apparent pervasiveness of child-slave labor on cocoa plantations in the West African countries where most of the world's cocoa is cultivated. Making the matter worse is that many of the child-slaves on these plantations have been kidnapped or hoodwinked by middle men and trafficked from neighboring countries for exactly this purpose. The world's major chocolate companies are aware of the presence of child-slave labor on these plantations, and continue to buy from wholesalers in these countries. Much like the garment industry, sub-contracting relationships allow the chocolate giants, like Nestle, to evade responsibility for and scrutiny about the nature of the labor practices of the producers.

These three examples are by no means the only products which most Western consumers use on a daily basis, taking entirely for granted, but which have a morally dubious origin and history. The amount of harm caused to both the environment, and to other people during the process of producing the goods we consume is hardly ever considered, let alone factored into the price of those items. From the frozen veggies in our freezers, to the coffee makers and sugar packets on our countertops, to the cleaning agents we use, to the paper products we over-utilize, we find that the production process that ends with our individual usage contains significant abuse of both the environment, and of the human workers at every stage. It is clear now that the modern world is an Omelas of sorts. The prosperity of the developed world is intrinsically linked with the under-development and poverty of the rest of the world, the latter being the pre-condition of the former. Our world has the equivalent of the dank, dark, neglected basement in Omelas. It is the sweatshop, the maquiladora, the Export Processing Zone factory, the illegal mining or logging camp, the plantation, the company town, the cancer village, the ghetto, and the favela.

What Does it Mean to Walk Away?

In Omelas, the ones who stay are able to rationalize the suffering of the child, those who cannot walk away. For the ones who stay, their rationale, as reconstructed by Le Guin, is very similar to the 'There Is No Alternative' (TINA) style argument. Indeed, Le Guin says that the place those who walk away go is almost unimaginable. Those who decide to stay, even if they recognize the child's condition as a bad thing, as deeply regrettable, as morally troubling, seem to eventually accept that there is nothing to be done. To let the child out now would do it no good, so they reason, since it is so stunted and maladjusted it could not possibly live anything like a flourishing life. This child has simply been too abused and neglected, too maligned and degraded, to live a decent life even in more comfortable circumstances. No one individual possess the power to abolish the mechanism linking the child's suffering to the communities' prosperity. So it is that after a period of days, or maybe weeks, those who stay come to reconcile the enjoyment of abundance with the price paid for that abundance. We have here another parallel with our modern capitalist world economy. Many Western consumers feel powerless to change the capitalist-imperialist system that delivers them the necessities and luxuries they require, even if they see this system as morally problematic. They feel that since there is no alternative to capitalist-imperialism, there is no choice but to just accept it.

The ones who walk away from Omelas are not able to reconcile the child's suffering with their own individual prosperity. But, What does it mean to walk away? Le Guin tells us that those who walk away seem to know where they are headed, but is very cryptic about the place they go. Clearly, if those who walk away are not simply going off to die, then wherever they are going it must be a place where the relationship between suffering and prosperity in Omelas no longer obtains. Perhaps the ones who walk away are going nowhere, as they would rather die than live a morally corrupted life. This would of course imply that there is indeed no alternative to the rule linking suffering and prosperity, and that the only real choice individuals have in deciding whether or not to walk away from Omelas is one between life and death. Thus, it seems terribly pertinent to ask, Is there an alternative? If there is another way of life possible, that severs the connection in Omelas, and in capitalist-imperialism, between the suffering of some and the prosperity of others.

The TINA argument that supports the decision of some to stay in Omelas, as well as the decision of people in our world to accept capitalist hegemony, simply does not hold up. One has little reason to think that there is no alternative, or that the only alternative is death. There is another way to live, and because there is an alternative, the choice to stay becomes less a bit of Stoic equipoise, or the British stiff upper lip, and more a self-serving excuse for complicity in imposing suffering. What is this alternative? How can we live, but at the same time, not depend on impoverishment, degradation, and oppression to furnish a standard of living most contemporary Westerners would consider minimally decent? The answer, in short, is socialism. In particular, a non-market participatory socialism centered on a scheme of de-centralized, participatory, democratic economic planning. One such model is called Participatory Economics, or Parecon, and has been developed by Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert.[2]

Many will still wonder whether such an economy is feasible. It is, of course, not possible here to fully describe and defend this model. Let me offer then a few words on feasibility. First, "free" markets are not only not free at all, but are much less efficient than is often supposed. [3] Even the notion of "efficiency" is not what it seems on its surface. The technical meaning of efficiency in a competitive, capitalist economy differs importantly from the colloquial usage most are familiar with. Markets are in fact rather inefficient. Not only are markets inefficient, but the achievements of planned economies have been consistently, and significantly distorted or ignored entirely. Today, the historical example of the former Soviet Union is massively misunderstood in America; the example of Yugoslavia all but forgotten in the wake of the wars of the early 1990s; and the example of Cuba has been so thoroughly ignored, it is as if maintaining the blockade erased its existence for most Americans. If the technical challenges to send human beings safely to, and then return from, the Moon, can be overcome, then constructing a economic system that meets at least the basic subsistence needs of everyone in terms of food, clothing, shelter, education, and healthcare can be overcome.

What may perhaps come as a real surprise to many is how close we are already to a planned economy. The oligopolistic firms which have increasingly dominated, through mergers and "creative destruction", the U.S. economy since the end of the Second World War already engage in large-scale economic planning; mostly it is a product of co-respective behavior, and long-term planning for the management of capital assets in the interest of shareholders. During the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War, the U.S. economy was entirely re-made, and in the interests of capital and capitalists. Between the exigencies of fighting two World Wars sandwiched around the greatest economic crisis of the 20th century, forced the government and the private sector to come to terms with each other and cooperate to save liberalism and capitalism. Coming out of the Second World War the stature achieved by these firms was immense, and their ability to control, regulate, and manipulate all markets was unprecedented. Most importantly for today, the data these firms have accumulated over decades, on everything from production rates to consumer habits, et cetera, makes the technical challenges of economic planning much less daunting. Moreover, the kinds of inventory tracking systems that make retailers like Wal-Mart so efficient, are exactly the kinds of systems that will also make the technical challenges associated with production and distribution easier to manage. For now, all this data is propriety information, that is, it is the private property of the various firms themselves.

At present, the economic planning that occurs is planning for the enrichment of capitalists. That is indeed the raison d'être for firms in keeping records, and collecting data on consumers, and engaging in long-term planning. When this data is nationalized, when it all can be collected, the problems that many still see in the idea of a planned economy become far less formidable. Indeed, many of these problems become more issues of calculation rather than issues of conceiving how a solution could even be possible; as was the case in the 1930s, when the original socialist calculations debates took place.

Conclusion

Our world, like Omelas, is a place where prosperity and abundance co-exist with horrific and structural injustice. Indeed, things are much worse in the real world, as injustice here is not confined to a single individual in a single room. Quite the opposite, the majority experience toil and deprivation so that a minority may indulge in opulence. Even in Omelas, where brutal and unjustified suffering is imposed on only one individual, some cannot bear the price of their abundance and must walk away. Now let us revisit the question implied by the story, Would you (the reader) walk away from Omelas? Could you stay and live a utopian life, all the while knowing its true cost? If yes, if the thought of the child in the basement, abused, alone, half starved, and naked, makes you unable to enjoy the cornucopia on offer, then the same moral intuition applies a fortiori in the case of our modern capitalist economy.

The dark basement of contemporary capitalism can be found in the sweatshops, the favelas, and the factories of the so-called "developing" world. Only because the commodity chains, whose final link are the shelves of the local stores of Western consumers, are so internationally dispersed, that they are largely hidden from consumers. The moral imperative felt in the case of Omelas is in fact only more intense in the real world. We face a moral crisis many times the scale of the hypothetical choice in Omelas every single day. Every day one chooses to uncritically accept and consumer the goods on offer from capitalist imperialism, then one too become complicit in abuses far worse than anything described in Le Guin's story.

If yes, if one would walk away from Omelas, What then? Where would you go, and How would you get there? Walking away from Omelas, walking away from capitalism, does not mean choosing death, it does not mean refusing to eat because everything you can buy is tainted by association with the capitalist mode of production. Walking away from capitalism does not mean forsaking technology, or innovation, or even incentive. What is clear already is that the productive forces that nineteenth and early twentieth century socialists worried about not being insufficiently developed, are now quite ripe. The main question is no longer about production, that is, how to make enough, but rather, it is about distribution, or how to make sure everyone has enough. What is also very clear is that markets are a lot less efficient than they are alleged to be, and that the alternatives to markets are much more practicable than is commonly supposed. Given that markets fail in many important respects, and that more democratic alternatives are feasible, the destination of those walking away should be a form of participatory socialism incorporating democratic economic planning. Knowing that there is a place to walk away to, might hopefully give some the courage needed to leave Omelas, to reject capitalism.

Notes

[1] Le Guin, Ursula. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". The Wind's Twelve Quarters. 1975. William Morrow Paperbacks; 2004.

[2] See, Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Verso; 2004. Also see, Albert, Michael & Robin Hahnel. The Political-Economy of Participatory Economics. Princeton University Press; 1991.

[3] See Donnaruma, Colin & Nicholas Partyka. "Challenging the Presumption in Favor of Markets". Review of Radical Political Economics. Vol.44 no.1 (2012):40-61.

The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

By Nick Partyka

This is the second part of a multi-part series. Read Part One here.

On The Value of Utopia

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates its most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place, Is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort on need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - recognize as a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and as such not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. The value of this is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, but also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

In another part of this series I discussed the American tradition of radical utopianism. Owenites, Fourierists, as well as various and sundry religious sects, all attempted experiments in communal living inspired by utopian political or spiritual ideologies. By removing themselves from the world, these groups sought to re-make society in miniature, as an example that could be replicated throughout the country as an alternative to the ascendant bourgeois society. American history also contains a dystopian tradition. Some individuals who came under the sway of certain utopian idea also happened to have large amounts of money, and or were proprietors of large business concerns. Several very wealthy businessmen cum would-be philanthropists embarked on many now forgotten utopian experiments. In some ways their schemes resemble Owen's original New Lanark project, in that a firm's profit-motive was used to argue for less abusive working conditions for workers. I am talking, of course, about the company town.[1] A term now, and for good reason, loaded with connotations of anti-democratic forms of dependence and surveillance, a modern industrial feudalism, that galled observers and greatly angered many worker-residents.

At many points in American history wealthy capitalists saw it as beneficial to construct planned communities for their workers. These ran the gamut from unsanitary ramshackle slums and ghettoes with little planning or services, to highly elaborate planned communities designed according to the proprietors' ideology of choice, in which even small details were prescribed and regimented. In some of these capitalist-inspired utopian experiments, designed to 'elevate' workers, one can see clear examples of many dystopian themes manifested in real-life. Looking at the experience of company towns one readily discerns significant dystopian elements, e.g. some rather reminiscent of George Orwell's now famous Big Brother. The high-handed, obtrusive, and moralistic scrutiny of private life; the regimentation of work and social life; the uniformity of living standards; strictly imposed and enforced moral codes, are all dystopian elements one can find in the work of the most well-known dystopian writers, e.g. Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin.

The United States has had a unique experience with company towns, quite different from the experience of European countries. America saw both a greater number of company towns, as well as greater diversity among them. The uniqueness of the American experience has to do mainly with the size of America and the prominence of the frontier, and the small-government sensibilities of the founding generation. That the country was expanding geographically, and that the government was typically disposed to take a laissez-faire stance on interference with the private undertakings of businessmen and entrepreneurs. These factors combined to allow private sector actors wide latitude in their ability to construct ideal communities, that is, communities that were ideal for the bosses in that they served the bosses' interests more than those of workers. This freedom for the private sector has sometimes resulted in neo-feudal conditions, e.g. like those that were found in many Appalachian coal towns, and other times in the more bucolic and rural utopian project of magnates like Milton Hershey.

In the Beginning There Was Lowell

The Pilgrims who came to North America had designs to create a 'city on a hill', a symbol to all the world of how to live justly and righteously. There is a certain obvious utopian aspect to this view. The chartered basis of these colonies, and their need to make a profit gave them some of the shades of the company town. They remained for many years trapped in a cycle of debt, always needing to consume more in supplies to sustain themselves than the value of their exports would purchase. This is one reason that the early colonists pursued whaling, as well as fur trading and trapping right from the start. Beaver pelts in particular were extremely lucrative, and it was the expressed intention of many colonial leaders to use export of pelts to pay for not only the debts incurred for the initial transportation to the American continent, but also the provision, supplies, and other goods the colonists would eventually want and need to import.

A famed British historian writes, "Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton".[2] Thus, we should not be surprised to see cotton, the company town, and utopianism come together in the early phase of American industrialization. As such, one must look first to Lowell, Massachusetts where its eponymous founder Francis Cabot Lowell established one of America's first water-mill operations, as well as one its first well-known company towns. Indeed, the town, famous for its past, continues to drawn large numbers of tourists year after year.

Francis certainly had some utopian ideas behind his designs in business, and community building plans. A wealthy Boston merchant, Lowell, toured England in 1811 where he saw first-hand the conditions in the mill-towns of industrializing Britain. What he saw there, especially in places like Manchester, shocked him, as it would many others including Friedrich Engels. The poverty, degradation, squalor, misery, disease, and "moral corruption", which was perceived to run rampant in the new large urban industrial city, disturbed Lowell. Those few capitalists who did have qualms about industrialization, and the rise of industrial society, tried to find ways to achieve the social benefits of industrialization, but to avoid the crushing desperation of life in industrial cities like Manchester. This is the inspiration for Robert Owen's brand of utopian socialism. His New Lanark mill-town was a model of reform, and saw the material improvement of workers and their living conditions as the basis of the transformation of society. It is in this same spirit that Francis Cabot Lowell conceived his American mill-town. Lowell sought to create the opposite of what he saw in Manchester, a bright, healthy and virtuous community. Yet, he also certainly sought the immense profits to be made in the textile industry. He certainly had no intention of operating his business at a loss. Owen, for instance, while certainly a prosperous businessman, had a moral and ideological mission, which balanced his quest for profits, and New Lanark was profitable.

Lowell imagined his mill-town as an intellectually and morally uplifting community, which would fit into the needs of American society at large, and in this way help form the economic basis of an American capitalist utopia. His community would help create that 'city on a hill' so many different groups had hoped to turn America into. Lowell's plan was to recruit his workforce from the younger women living and working on the farms in the area. These young New England ladies would come to work seasonally in Lowell, not become full-time proletarian toilers. In order to attract these workers Lowell advertised the intellectually stimulating, culturally vibrant, and moral upright way of life that characterized the community. He wanted these young women, and especially their parents, to think of their time in Lowell as a kind of preparation for adult life and for marriage. Francis was always keen to point out in his pitch that his lady workers had access to such essential icons of "middle class" life as books and pianos. He also highlighted the presence of older women who acted as supervisors of the boardinghouses where these young women were housed, and who enforced a strict 10pm curfew. Between studying music, or literature and poetry, attending free lectures or other amusements, life in Lowell was supposed by Lowell himself to be as good for the workers, their families, and even the country, as it was profitable for himself and his business partners.

The reality of the life of the town, and the experience of the people who resided in it, differed in several large respects from Cabot Lowell's intentions. Some aspects of the life of the community at Lowell we will see re-appear in company-towns throughout American history. The most important of these is despotism, in one or another of its many forms. The control wielded over the life of the town, and thus over the residents, by the company's owners would work to foster several dystopian and despotic elements in Lowell, as well as in later company towns. The company regimented the rhythms of life in town, fitting it to the needs of the production process, and it announced the progression of each day's routine through the sounding of bells. Workers were woken at 4:30am, and required to be to work by 4:50am. The working day ended at 7pm, and there was a 10pm curfew in town. The bells marked the transition from each part of the day to the next, when to get up, when to work, when to eat, when to rest. This regime was no doubt onerous to many. Lowell's vision of where his workforce would come from soon crumbled, as he failed to attract as many young New England ladies as he hoped. Thus, very soon Lowell and his partners had predominantly immigrant workforce in their town.

On the job, workers were subject to the personal discipline of the foreman. This was usually entirely arbitrary, and workers lacked any recourse against such depredations. Off the job, workers were subject to the scrutiny and censure of a system of "moral police" operating in the town. The older women boardinghouse-keepers were some of the main agents in this network of spies and informants, of which other workers might well also be a part. The company, i.e. its officials, could fine or fire any workers for immoral conduct, like consuming alcohol. Any employee that failed to fulfill their contractual one year of service, because they quit without the contractually mandated two weeks' notice or were not "honorably discharged", would be blacklisted from employment in the area. Workers were required to attend church services, and to pay a mandatory fee to support this church. They also had to pay a fee to stay in the boardinghouses, which apparently not lacking in food, were over-crowded, poorly ventilated, and lacking entirely in privacy. Workers came to live and work at Lowell despite these kinds of conditions because the pay was too good to pass up.

A striking vision of the lives of the women who toiled in the factories like these in antebellum America can be found in a lesser-known work by famed American author Herman Melville. In his short-story, The Paradise of the Bachelors & the Tartarus of the Maids, Melville paints a vivid picture of the drudgery of the actual work of producing cotton textiles in these early factories.[3] Though the workers in his story are making paper and not textiles, the main outlines of the workers' experience would have been much the same. Melville describes the entrance to his fictional, yet all too real, mill in the most daunting imagery, invoking the idea of "Dantean gate" one must pass through. In describing the operations, and workers of this mill Melville uses language that evokes the toil, degradation, over-bearing foremen, the sexism, being beholden to the whims and demands of the company on whom one depends. Melville is just one rather famous example of a common view at this time, that factory work, wage work, was a kind of slavery. At a time of rising sentiment of opposition to slavery, this was a potent objection to capitalism, and to the plans of capitalists, that it was slavery by another means, and not acceptable treatment for white people. This sentiment was also part of the inspiration for two strikes in Lowell in 1834 and 1836 largely in response to wage cuts announced by the company in reaction to falling prices for textile goods.

Utopian Paternalism

Francis Cabot Lowell was not to be the last American capitalist to dream of creating a model community where the vices and sins of the rapidly modernizing world would be excluded, and a more idyllic life re-created. First and foremost of these new modern ills, in the minds of capitalist utopian visionaries like George Pullman, Milton Hershey, and Henry Ford, among others, was labor strife, that is, labor unions. Thus, one of the main foci of the efforts of capitalist utopian was preventing workers from organizing and bargaining collectively. What we will see in each of the examples mentioned above is that these attempts at creating a more ideal kind of life within modernizing, and industrializing American society share certain dystopian elements. The most apt way to characterize the main themes of these capitalist - led efforts at building and operating planned communities is as utopian paternalism. Capitalists like Pullman and Ford certainly saw themselves as advancing the workers' own good, even when those workers' views about their own good were to the contrary. These men thought they knew better than workers what was in their best interests. Unsurprisingly, none of these utopian experiments was successful from the point of view of their founders, since they all failed to prevent the rise of labor unions.

In 1880 George Pullman, maker of the famous Pullman Palace Car, the ubiquitous sleeping car which made transcontinental rail travel more comfortable, began to construct an ideal community on the outskirts of Chicago.[4] The town of Pullman would feature several lavish public buildings, including a library and theater. The residences were supposed to be more commodious, most were connected to natural gas and running water, some even featured bathrooms. There was a wide array of shops housed in public buildings to accommodate the needs of the town's residents. Much effort was made to create a pleasant aesthetic in the town, from the design of the buildings to the layout of the community. Pullman desired to re-create a more bucolic atmosphere to contrast with the grit and grime of the cities. Pullman, based on a firm profit motive, believed that treating workers better would make them more loyal, harder working, and less likely to want to join a labor union. His model community would not only save money by locating workers near their place of work, but also would help to forge a new kind of worker. This new worker would be more dependable, more docile, more compliant, et cetera. This change would of course be more conducive to capitalists' accumulation of wealth.

One thing every building in Pullman had in common, from the work buildings, to the residential buildings, was that they were all owned by the Pullman company. Workers were compelled to be renters, and not permitted to own their homes. The rent payments for which were deducted automatically from workers' paychecks. Not just workers, but also all community organizations, were prohibited from owning buildings, and anyone could be evicted with a mere ten days warning. Moreover, what came to pass for a municipal government in the town of Pullman was completely under the control of the Pullman company. The foundations of community life were only further eroded by the use of "inspectors' by the Pullman company in its town, whose job it was to report on the workers, their activities, affiliations, and opinions. These inspectors were to report any resident who was found to have undesirable or immoral views, attitudes, or habits. The atmosphere of the town of Pullman was best described as a kind of, "benevolent, well-wishing feudalism" with George Pullman as its king.[5] Discontent with conditions in the town of Pullman contributed to the desire of workers to unionize, and helped spark the famous 1894 strike of the Pullman company by the American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs. [6]

Inspired to some extent by the example of Pullman, the man and the town, in 1903 Milton Hershey began work on his own planned industrial community. [7] His was to be modeled to a degree after the Mennonite villages familiar in the area of Pennsylvania Hershey chose. The area had one key virtue for him, lots of dairy farms nearby to provide the critical ingredient he needed for his chocolate, i.e. milk. Like Pullman, and others, Hershey was a critic of the growing urban society. The urban environment was seen as morally corrupting and physically unhealthy for the people who lived in them. Thus, Milton thought that by re-creating a more pastoral, healthier kind of life workers lives would be improved. What could also be improved was his profits, by reducing labor agitation. In the same profit-first motive of Pullman and Lowell, Hershey thought that contented works would be more productive, more loyal, workers. In a further echo of the Amish who lived in the area, Hershey envisioned a prosperous community full of clean-living residents. Even more than Pullman, Hershey invested in public buildings in his town, including the now famous Hershey Industrial School which housed and educated orphaned boys. His eponymous town would in this way, and others, serve as a living advertisement for his product, the wholesomeness of the one reinforcing that of the other.

The town of Hershey would also experience many dystopian elements, despite it is founders' intentions, though perhaps less intensely than in Pullman. In contrast to Pullman and Lowell, the high-handed moral despotism in Hershey would be doled out by the proprietor himself. In the town of Hershey, Milton was the moral police; he was also the mayor, chief of police, and fire chief, as there were no elected officials. The comfortable life available to worker-residents of Hershey came as part of a trade-off in which one sacrificed democracy. In exchange for having no control over their community, worker-residents received several benefits, medical coverage and a retirement plan; free garbage pick-up and snow removal; public buildings like churches and schools, including a junior college with free tuition for workers; and, despite having all this, there were no local taxes.

In many ways Hershey's plans came to fruition, and the town enjoyed a fairly harmonious existence for many years. Indeed, it was not long before the town achieved notoriety as a tourist attraction, both the chocolate factory as well as the "Hershey Park" amusement park. The modern world caught up to Hershey eventually, leaving a large black mark on the town's reputation. In 1937 labor violence in the town made all the wrong kind of headlines. Local dairy farmers dependent on selling to the Hershey factory brawled with striking workers. Outnumbered four to one, the strikers were badly beaten and chased away from company grounds by the mob of dairy farmers.

Henry Ford also fancied himself a philanthropic businessman, someone who could help educate workers and elevate their lives. His famous $5 a day plan was built on the same kind of hard-headed, profit-oriented logic we've seen in both Pullman and Hershey, as well as the capitalist utopian visions of the moral improvement of workers. And just like both of these others, Ford's generosity came at price. There was a rather dark side to Ford's desire to improve the lives of his largely immigrant workers. In exchange for a higher wage, workers had to pledge to live wholesome lives, that is, conduct themselves both on and off the job according to Ford's moral precepts. Just as we saw with Lowell, higher than average wages attracted an enormous glut of applicants. Workers came and they stayed, despite the brutish tactics of Ford's anti-union henchmen in the Service Department and the condescending racism of Ford's Sociological Department, because of the higher pay and benefits offered.[8]

The infamous Service Department at Ford was headed by Harry Bennett, a vicious enforcer whose egregious abuses of workers remained mostly secret from the public. He used fear, intimidation, and a paramilitary gang to pressure workers into doing as they were told. The main job of this secret police force was to prevent and disrupt and potential union organizing activity by Ford workers, by any means necessary. Surveillance and beatings were to main tactics Bennett and his thugs applied to suspected union activists. Bennett also constructed a huge network of spies within the company, so that potential agitators never knew if they were talking to one of his informers. Ford's Sociological Department was responsible for turning his immigrant workers into "real" Americans. In a racist and very insensitive way, workers were to be stripped of their foreign customs and beliefs, and then re-made to be as American as apple pie. Employment was conditional on workers learning English and American civics at company provided classes. Intentionally symbolically, the highly choreographed graduation ceremony for the Ford school began with workers in their native dress, and ended with them in American-style clothes. After graduating workers were supposed to have gotten rid of their old ways, and completely adopted American ideals and values.

Ford's Sociological Department was also responsible for a highly intrusive regime of surveillance of workers and their personal lives. Members of the Sociological Department interviewed workers, and their family members, often several times, asking extremely invasive questions about many different aspects of workers' lives. Though billed as a project aimed at social reform, the operatives of this department collected massive amounts of information about Ford employees and their families. How many times they were married, how much debt they had, how much money they remitted to relatives, and whether they had bank accounts, were all questions Sociological Department agents asked workers. These interviews were not one-off affairs. Two, three, even four, interviews would not have been uncommon, and this applies to the workers' family members as well. Workers were lectured by these company-men to maintain a certain standard of cleanliness and order at home. Naturally they were heavily discouraged from the vices of drinking, smoking, and gambling.

Industrial Feudalism

The darkest side of the American experience with the company town can be found in the example of coal and steel towns, as well as oil boom-towns. Hardy Green concisely describes this variety of the company town as, "exploitationville".[9] This title is largely self-explanatory. This is because the image of the coal town, especially the Appalachian coal town, has remained such a vivid part of America's popular consciousness. The reign of the company, its officials and its store, is legendary for its ruthlessness, brutality, arbitrary punishment, and oppression through debt. The famous song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford affixes in the popular imagination the tyranny of the company in the coal town; the drudgery of the work; the inadequate pay; company theft of that pay; reliance on debt, and corresponding servitude to it, as well as the despair and despondency this way of life created. Often times these 'towns' were little more than camps or agglomerations of shacks, shanties, and hovels. There were often few or no public services, and when they did exist workers were usually forced to pay exorbitant prices for the most basic services, e.g. garbage collection and sanitation infrastructure.

Like other company towns, workers in coal towns were not allowed to own property, and thus forced to rent from the company at the prices it set. Workers were often paid in 'scrip', a form of local money only good at the company store. They were thus dependent on the company for everything they needed. As one might expect, workers were routinely bilked of their hard-earned wages by their unscrupulous employers through inflated prices for staple goods, as well as taxes and fees for basic services. Like in other company towns, there were usually no elected officials, and all law enforcement was overseen by the company. The 1871 Coal Creek War in Tennessee is a prominent example of the kind of reaction workers had to the many ways their employers dominated, oppressed, and robbed them. It is also a characteristic example of how employers in many different sectors dealt with organized labor in similar ways. Nor were such practices limited to the coal mining industry. Mining communities all over the country endured conditions, to one degree or another like those of the coal towns, from the omnipresent surveillance and spies, to the tyrannical foremen and threats of violence.

In many cases steel towns were not much better, though the housing might be better than the notoriously poor housing afforded workers in mining towns, particularly the coal towns. Gary, Indiana, and Homestead, Pennsylvania are two prominent examples of company towns in the steel industry. Both projects were motivated by the same utopian capitalist logic about making workers materially better off enough to reject union membership. The broad outlines of the story in both communities are familiar: inadequate, unsanitary, and or over-crowded housing; housing allocated by status; housing dependent upon employment; over-priced rents automatically deducted from wages; abusive foremen acting with impunity; workers forced to sing "yellow dog" contracts promising not to join a union as a condition of employment; no independent stores; workers paid in company 'scrip'; over-bearing moral codes imposed on workers by "moral police". Conditions at Homestead, in addition to issues like wages and hours, were one of the most significant factors in sparking the infamously bloody strike in 1892. Labor strife would come to Gary in a big way in 1919. Workers striking for improves wages, and reduced hours, were certainly also very upset about the living conditions in town. In both cases, the owners, with help from the state, used violence to disperse the workers and repress their demands and their organizations.

American Dystopias

It should be clear, after a look at the historical experience of company towns in America, that, in many, if not most, instances this experience contains many distinctly dystopian elements. Indeed, the experience of workers in company towns across America forms a unique American dystopian tradition, which contrasts sharply with its robust utopian tradition. When we look to the works of some of the great dystopian writers, we will notice the same themes that we saw in the real-life, historical experience of American company towns. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Evgeny Zamyatin, all present visions of future dystopian societies which embody - in some cases to a fantastic extreme- the abusive treatment and horrible living conditions that characterized the life of many American company towns.

All three dystopian authors depict future societies in which an authoritarian government, composed of an elite minority, rules despotically over the rest of the population. Moreover, in all three, the activities of the dominated population are structured in a way that furthers the social, economic, and political aims of the ruling elite. All three of these dystopian societies make use of some particular combination of omnipresent surveillance, brutal and violent repression and torture, or some form of psychological conditioning to compel the population into compliance with the government's policies. The people of these dystopian societies are led, or forced, to believe that the current order of things is actually for everyone's benefit; though clearly some benefit more than others. All three are portrayed by their leaders as peaceful and harmonious societies, despite the fact that violence and repression, of one kind or another, are needed to maintain order in society.[10]

Whether Orwell's Big Brother in Oceania, Huxley's Alphas in the future London, or The Benefactor in Zamyatin's the One State, features from all three of these dystopian societies find analogs in American company towns: a single-minded and ideologically motivated founder or leader; the enforced dependence of the population on the state, that is the elite minority who run it; the abusive treatment of the population by the officials of the state; an unrelenting and intrusive propaganda offensive against the enemies of the state; monopoly on the press, and censorship of rivals as a form of persecution; universal surveillance of the population by the ruling elite, including an extensive network of spies and informers; unhealthy and degrading living conditions for the majority of the population, but opulence for the elite; systematic theft from, or exploitation of, the population to meet the needs of the ruling elite; thoroughly rational, totally invasive, and frustratingly stultifying regimentation of life both on and off the job.

Conclusion

The company towns in America all seem to share one thing in common, a pattern of boom and bust. This might be separated by decades, but all company towns seem to share a common fate. Namely, when the business dries up, or the industry collapses, the town dies. Sometimes the death is quick, other times long, drawn-out, and painful. The oil or gold boom-towns would be on one extreme, as they could disappear entirely over-night, and re-established at the next site in rapid order. Closer to the other end of the spectrum, company towns collapse because the industry changed or relocated, e.g. Lowell or Pullman. Other company towns collapse because their reason for existing disappears, e.g. the coal seam, or silver vein is tapped out. Sometimes company towns survive the collapse of the firms that dominate them, but as mere ghosts of their former selves, e.g. Gary. Only a very small successful few remain in operation, like Hershey. It is in light of this history of the company town in America that one should see the collapse of Detroit. One industry so dominated employment in that city, that as it fortunes flagged, so too did those of the city. Just as the industry declined, and resorted to new methods to remain competitive and continue to generate the profits shareholders expect, indeed demand, so too did Detroit decline. And, as a result, the city was forced to resort to measures that accelerated the city's decline by encouraging disinvestment, diminishing public services, and eroding quality of life.

To many Americans, fascism, as represented in regimes like Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, is the ultimate real-life dystopia. Many Americans also think that this is a foreign problem, something embedded in the cultural DNA of the Old World. Many think of this kind of ideology is not, and cannot be, indigenously American. Hence the extreme xenophobia that arose during both world wars, and the antipathy many Americans felt towards the early labor movement. Yet, the historical experience of the company town in America demonstrates that these conceptions are quite misleading. When given freest reign, capitalists, have created social environments that resemble quite closely the kinds of literary dystopias that most haunt our imagination. Fascism, in fact, has an American pedigree in the legacy of the company town. The legacy of the company town also quite nicely illustrates that fascism is not only bigoted hate-groups waving swastika flags. It also comes in more patriotic, more benevolent and well-meaning forms, like the kind of utopian paternalism that was evident in most company towns. It can also be seen, naked and direct, in the violent and authoritarian regimes that dominated some company towns, especially those associated with the mining industry.

Notes

[1] For an interesting history of the company town, see; Green, Hardy. The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy. Basic Books, 2010.

[2] Hobsbawn, Eric. Industry & Empire. 1968.The New Press, 1999; 34.

[3] Melville, Herman."The Paradise of the Bachelors and the Tartarus of the Maids". 1849. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Perennial Classics, 2004.

[4] See Green (2004): 27-35.

[5] Richard T. Ely quoted in Green (2004):31.

[6] For an interesting insight into the living conditions in Pullman, and the how they contributed to the 1894 strike see; Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross. 1947. Haymarket Books, 2007.

[7] See Green (2004): 35-41.

[8] See Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia. Picador, 200: Ch.2 & 4.

[9] Green (2004); Ch.3

[10] See Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.; Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932; Zamyatin, Evgeny. We. 1924.

The Value of Utopia: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

By Nick Partyka

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates its most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place? Is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort one need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - call a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. The value of utopia is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, and also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

Brief, but spectacular. That is how I think of the Occupy movement. An article I read recently lamented that the anniversaries of this movement seem to come and go now with but a murmur, a faint echo of the voice that all too briefly seemed capable of shaking American society out of complacency, of opening up new possibilities. There have by now been enough autopsies of this movement, and its failures, that there is no need for another. One thing that stands out is of course the fact that the movement never coalesced around a set of demands, never formulated a coherent political programme. Whether or not the Occupy movement did a good job distilling its critique, and its vision, neither were sufficiently theoretically developed or promulgated. Occupy in many senses seem to try to be a leaderless and theory-less movement. Of course, the main reason for the end of the Occupy movement was the physical clearance of the encampments by the thugs of the ruling class, that is, the police.

Much more fruitfully, when we look to the practice of Occupy, and the many encampments around the country, and indeed around the world, we can see that there is certainly a clear political, and moral ethos animating the activity and structure of the movement. What emerged from the Occupy encampments was an ethos of self-organization, free association, of de-centralized participatory democracy, and non-market modes of distribution. In Occupy encampments around the country people organized themselves to provide many kinds of basic, and some more advanced, services and community infrastructure, e.g. free meals, free educational opportunities, free healthcare, and much more. The diversity of services offered by different Occupy encampments was truly an amazing display of cooperation, solidarity, and self-organization. And indeed, this is what was really threatening about the occupy movement, it offered a robust vision of a more participatory, more solidaristic form of community, and worked diligently to create this, first within the bounds of its camps, and then the communities around the camps. Building up a vision of a new society, and a physical representation of that vision, became a major challenge to the ruling class because of the speed with which this movement grew and gathered strength.

Occupy was not the first time "utopian" ideas of more democratic, more participatory, more egalitarian, forms of community captured the imagination of Americans, and threatened the ruling class by becoming a movement. This has happened several times in our history, but, as one might expect, these lie outside the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Thankfully, in the wake of Howard Zinn, much work has been done to recover and disseminate the knowledge and memory of the existence of radicals and revolutionaries, not to mention their important role, in American history. Utopian ideas, and vision of better societies have captured the imagination of Americans, and become large movements more than once. These largely forgotten episodes include the Bellamyite movement in the 1890s, and the Fourierist movement of the 1840s. These latter two represent the more secular and political end of the spectrum of utopian experiments in American history.

Looking Backwards, on Bellamyism

While it is almost totally forgotten now, at the end of the 19th century, the only American works of fiction to sell more copies than Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards were Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Ben-Hur. His book, and the ideas and vision contained in it, was so wildly popular that is spawned an intense, but short-lived political movement in the form of Bellamyite "Nationalist Clubs"; indeed they were often called "Bellamy Clubs". These clubs arose quickly following the release of Bellamy's novel, and while the first club originated in Boston, chapters soon popped up in cities across the nation. These clubs, via coordinated activity, became a political force as a movement in the first half of the last decade of the nineteenth century, before disappearing after merging with the Populist movement. They turned Bellamy himself into a politician, although he was perhaps not well suited to the role of leader of a socialist political movement.

When Looking Backward was published in 1888 its popularity owed much to its readability, engaging narrative, but especially to its grand vision of a utopian future. Another big part of its popularity was conditioned by the times in which its author lived. Over the course of Edward Bellamy's forty-eight years he saw a great deal of turmoil, indeed, he would have been around fifteen the year the Civil war ended, and not quite twenty five when the Long Depression began in 1873. After the war American society experienced the rise of giant integrated capitalist firms - the infamous trusts - to positions of monopoly power; it had experienced a series of sometimes devastating economic recessions and depressions; it was experiencing increasing labor militance and strikes, for example the Great Strike of 1887; in conjunction with the latter, there was much radical socialist political agitation, see for example the 1886 Haymarket Affair and its highly controversial aftermath. Over this time the social effects of capitalism and industrialization became more pronounced. As is the still the case, it was workers, and the poor who bore the costs of material "progress". From the end of the Civil war to the turn of the century was when American capitalism really came into its own, when it rose to social and political dominance. As material prosperity of society increased, it looked to increasingly many Americans that, economically and politically, the decked was stacked against them, and that the lion's share of these gains were being accumulated by the wealthy.

Bellamy adopts the Rip Van Winkle trope and has his protagonist fall asleep in then present-day 1887, and wake up over a century later in the year 2000. Bellamy's hero, Julian West, finds himself in a utopian future society in which the evils of the world of 1887 have been rectified through application of reason, science, and technology. The book takes the form of a kind of guided tour of the future given to Julian by his host, a Dr. Leete, who is caring for Julian after he wakes up. Dr. Leete and his family take turns escorting Julian around, showing him different aspects of the future, and answering his many questions about how the world of the future works, and how things came to be that way. Long story short, the Unites States of the future has been transformed by a rational and irresistible bloodless revolution into a socialist utopia, as one giant national trust, operated for the public benefit. All industries have been nationalized, and are democratically controlled by their workers; there is centralized distribution of important goods; there is gender equality; the economy has been reorganized as a rational and egalitarian "Industrial Army". As Bellamy describes this future, there are no wars, no government, no bankers, no corruption, no jails, and no more "buying" and "selling".

The social revolution that brings about the society of the future, as Bellamy presents it, occurs much like Marx describes. The revolution is a natural occurrence, and as such irresistible, that happened once society developed to a certain level of rationality. Once people become sufficiently rational they simply perceive the need to radically transform society, and then do so in the form of a revolutionary mass social movement that peacefully takes power and then restructures society. Bellamy, like many of his age, was not keen to abandon the benefits of industrialization, and mass production, but wanted to change the composition and distribution of what is produced. Thus, his vision of the future economy is one where society takes the form of one large trust, but because it will be run democratically by worker-citizens, it will pursue their interests. Bellamy's vision is a kind of syndicalism, in which a congress of industrial unions forms the core of the national government. Moreover, because the people of the future are so rational they organize their society along the most rational, and thus egalitarian, lines. This is why, for example, in Bellamy's utopia social classes are not abolished but re-organized on rational lines, which for him means according to age. This there is a course of age-based classes, or stages, all persons pass through. All the stages are designed to maximize the development of citizens' personal talents and capacities, to effectively train people to be competent workers fit for important jobs, as well as to be active and engaged citizens.

The application of reason to social problems results, in Bellamy's utopia, in progressive policies like equal educational and occupational opportunities for women; everyone must work between 21 and 45; universal basic education for all until 21; occupations decided, as much as possible, by aptitude; remuneration based on effort; college open to all, with admissions based on social need and individual merit; free universal healthcare. In keeping with his syndicalist vision, Bellamy's utopia has a political structure framed around industrial unions. Bellamy's novel envisions the future President of the United States as the general of the Industrial Army, and serving a five year term. This person is to be elected by a vote of all those worker-citizens who have retired, i.e. those over forty five years of age. In this utopia there would be ten industrial departments, or unions, each with its own head, or chief, elected by the retied members of the individual departments; the group of these chiefs serves as a kind of cabinet to the President. There is a national congress, which meets every five years to pass or revise laws. He proposes a separate entity he calls, the Inspectorate, to pursue consumer complaints, fraud, abuse, misconduct, et cetera. The job this agency is to seek out graft, inefficiency, or waste, as well as health, safety, or environmental hazards.

The central metaphor of Bellamy's novel is presented in his analogy of the General and the Balloon. Dr. Leete in trying to explain the reasoning behind the organization of the society and economy of the future tells Julian, "It is easier for a general up in a balloon with perfect survey of the field, to manoeuvre a million men to victory then for a sergeant to mange a platoon in a thicket". [1] It is most rational to organize society into one big corporation because this will facilitate macro-level social and economic planning in the public interest. The idea is to harness the power of the large trusts, because their centralization afforded them a larger view of the economic landscape, and allows them to plan accordingly. Under capitalism this planning took the form of the great trusts trying to manage competition between oligopolists to keep prices and profits high. When all the nation's industries were organized under centralized control, like in a trust, and all these trusts nationalized, society would be able to engage in the kind of economic planning that can create the utopian society Julian West encounters.

The idea for the Bellamy clubs emerged very soon after the novel debuted. A reporter in Boston, Cyrus Field Willard, is credited with coming up with idea, as there is a surviving letter in which he ask Bellamy for permission to found a club to promote Bellamy's ideas. Bellamy assented, and the ball began rolling. In the fall of 1888 Willard's "Nationalist Circle", merged with the independently organized "Boston Bellamy Club" of Charles E. Bower & Arthur F. Deveraux to found the first permanent Bellamyite group. The Bellamyite movement was at this point more a moral association than a political party. In 1889 they began publishing a magazine, The Nationalist. Groups were very quickly founded in large Eastern cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.. The movement was particularly strong in California. That state had sixty five local clubs, whereas, even a large and populous state like New York had only sixteen local Bellamyite groups.

The early Bellamyite movement eschewed political action, that is, participation in a 'democratic' political process they felt was rigged. They focused instead on propaganda, e.g. organizing public lectures, printing and distributing pamphlets and periodicals. As the fever pitch of labor and socialist militance and agitation, combined with events like the Great Strike of 1887 and the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Bellamyite movement reversed course and engaged furiously in political activity focused on more immediate gains, with a particular emphasis on the elections of 1892. The economic and political climate of the age created other reform minded groups in addition to Bellamyites, groups which would cooperate and compete with each other as they often had large segments of over-lapping memberships. Economic depression, political corruption, financial speculation and market manipulation, all fueled the rise of the Populist movement, and of the People's Party. Bellamy, and many other members of the Nationalist clubs were so supportive of the People's Party that eventually the Bellamyite movement merged into the Populist movement. The failure of Bellamy as a political candidate did not help the situation, as the alliance of the People's Party and the Bellamyites rendered most of the latter's organizational functions redundant. In the wake of the 1892 elections the Bellamyite movement began to dissipate as it was largely subsumed by the Populist movement.

In early 1894 Bellamy's own journal, The New Nation, was forced to close due to financial difficulties. Later in this same year Bellamy ceased his political activity on behalf of the movement that bore his name. Other Bellamyite periodicals continued to be published over the next couple years, but in dwindling numbers. By 1896 there were only a handful of Bellamyite groups still active, for example those in Wisconsin which were organized enough to run candidates for state offices that year. After this, the Bellamyite movement basically vanishes as a movement, save for a scattering of die-hards. Bellamy himself would die only two years later, on May 22nd 1898. Though he claimed that he did not write his novel with the aim of providing an explicit plan of economic and political reform, his utopian vision of a more democratic, more equal future resonated deeply with a nation weary of the effects of capitalism.

Political Utopias in Antebellum America

The populist and reform movements of the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the socialist movement emerging in this era, had important precursors in American history. Indeed, the success of a radical utopian inspired movement like Bellamyism will not surprise one acquainted with the utopian movements of antebellum America. There was a very limited Owenite movement in America during the 1820s, the culmination of which was the experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana. Much more extensive and successful was the Fourierist movement that emerged in the 1840s. [2] This movement attracted a fairly large following, and was able to establish a number of experimental communities, called Phalanxes. In contrast to Bellamyism, which was an American movement, both Owenism and Fourierism are European movements which crossed the Atlantic. The success of Fourierism, and relative lack of success of Owenism, in transplanting to America is explained in part by the differences in the economic climates in which they came to America. Fourierism resonated more deeply with Americans than Owenism mostly because they were more open to radical utopian experiments in the wake of the economic crisis of 1837, and the depression that followed. If not for the economic crisis of 1873 and the ensuing depression, the 1886 Haymarket Affair, the Great Strike 1887, the crash of 1893 and the depression that followed, Bellamyism may not have emerged as a mass movement.

One major difference between Owenism and Fourierism, and a factor in their respective levels of success, is in the manner of their transplantation to America. While Owenism was brought to America by Owen and his sons, Fourierism was brought back to America by an American disciple of Fourier's, Albert Brisbane. Owen purchased the town of New Harmony in Indiana from its previous occupants with the intention of founding a utopian community there based on his philosophic principles and the lessons learned in operating his mills at New Lanark in Scotland. American Fourierists began with editing Fourier's ideas into a coherent form, and then propagandizing on behalf of these ideas. When these agitation efforts combined with economic depression in the wake of 1837, with the lingering effects of the second Great Awakening, the example of successful utopian communities in America, and the sympathetic affinities of various immigrant groups Fourierism became a rather large movement. At its high point the Fourierist movement could boast of dozens of Phalanxes across America.

Owenism

The Owenite movement in America was comprised almost entirely of the experimental utopian community the movements' founder Robert Owen established, and his efforts to acquire funding and attract personnel for this community. Though there were other Owenite communities in the U.S., the story of Owenism in America is largely the story of the New Harmony colony. Unfortunately, Owen found little success in America, less than some of the experiments within Great Britain, and his utopian experiment lasted only four years before the colonists abandoned the Owenite philosophy. The community at New Harmony persisted, but they were no longer an Owenite utopian project. Owen had originally purchased the land, and a few buildings, from the previous residents at New Harmony. These previous occupants were Rappites colonists, a mostly German Protestant religious sect, which had moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania to more freely practice their beliefs and communal way of life. After establishing the first group of settlers at his community, Owen left his son William in charge at New Harmony and returned east to find more funds and colonists for his project. When Owen returned in April of 1825 he found the community of several hundred residents in chaos. He did his best to put matters in order, and succeeded fairly well, he departed again in June 1825 in search of more funds and colonists. In all, Owen spent only a few months residing at New Harmony.

Within two years of its founding as an Owenite utopian experiment the New Harmony community was an economic failure, that is, it was not financially or materially self-supporting. There are a host of reasons that account for the failure of the Owenite experiment at New Harmony. The colony had trouble attracting residents, and those who did come were not always of the highest caliber. While New Harmony did bring in many ideologically committed Owenites, it also welcomed in many types of people. In a letter, Robert Dale Owen, one of Robert's sons, describes the population of New Harmony as, "a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in".[3] In another letter, William Owen, another of Robert's sons, says that besides committed Owenites, New Harmony had attracted, "crackpots, free-loaders, and adventurers whose presence in the town makes success unlikely". [4] There was a laundry list of complaints about why the New Harmony project failed; not enough skilled craftsmen; not enough unskilled laborers; insufficient and inexperienced management and supervision; not enough housing; not enough land; not enough privacy; too much freedom; not enough freedom.

Robert Owen was often away from the colony and, like him, many colonists only stayed a few months. This high turnover, as well as the problems listed above, seemed to doom this project from the outset. Between the motley collection of colonists, the factional infighting, and the lack of economic viability, the New Harmony settlement ended as a failure for Owen. The lack of economic success and factional squabbles over questions of theoretical principles and practical organization led to a large schism at New Harmony in 1826. A group carried on the Owenite project for another couple years, but finally gave up the ghost in 1829. In 1827, Owen severed ties with the community he founded, transferring ownership to his sons. After 1829 the town abandoned Owenism, and converted their community to a traditional capitalist private property system.

While the town was a failure as a utopian experiment, it did produce some very interesting and significant results and persons. Under Owenite leadership New Harmony could boast of the first free public library, and the first free public school. It also became a leading center of scientific discovery in the natural science, in particular in geology where Owen's third son David Dale achieved prominence. Robert Dale, the oldest son of Robert Owen, in addition to publishing many books and pamphlets, served in both the Indiana state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. He advocated for women's rights, for free public education, and opposed slavery. It was in fact Robert Dale Owen who introduced the bill which founded the now world famous Smithsonian Institution.

Fourierism

Like the Owenites, the practical activity of the Fourierist movement in America was directed towards the founding of utopian communities. In the minds of the Fourierists these communities, or rather the network of these communities, would form the basis of the new society, and the transformative effects would radiate out from these communities. Though the Fourierists did much to expound and promulgate their theories in writing, their main energy was directed at founding and linking Fourierist phalanxes. A working example of their vision of a utopian way of life would, in their estimation, be the best piece of propaganda they could have. An operational model Phalanx was more likely to attract actual converts than hundreds of pounds of printed literature. One quite decisive advantage of the Fourierists was that they, unlike Owen, were not intensely skeptical. Indeed, the embrace of religious arguments, appeals to religious morality, and the use of religious modes of presenting Fourierist ideas very much helped Fourierism gain a large following in America.

The Fourierist movement was more successful than the Owenite movement in America, and thus it was larger and more diverse. It was however, more distant in its ideology and practice from its founder than the Owenite movement was from Owen. The experience of the movement is not so directly tied to any one individual community. This movement was, like Owenism, short-lived, despite many Fourierists being intensely passionate. Albert Brisbane, an American traveling in Europe, became a votary of Charles Fourier and his utopian socialist philosophy. In the early 1830s Brisbane returned to America and eagerly set to work proselytizing for Fourier's ideas; edited and parsed by Brisbane for American audiences. By 1840 he was publishing The Phalanx, a Fourierist journal, but his big break came in 1842 when Horace Greeley allowed Brisbane to purchase a front-page column in his popular newspaper The New York Tribune. This platform allowed Brisbane to bring Fourier's ideas to the huge audience of the Tribune's readership. Running for about a year and a half, and reprinted in dozens of other newspapers, Brisbane's column, helped ignite the spark of the American Fourierist movement. We should note that Brisbane was not alone in working to advance Fourier's ideas in America, nor was his journal the only Fourierist publication, though it was among the earliest.

Over the next decade, Fourierist phalanxes sprung up across the country, perhaps the most famous of which was the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts. The organized Fourierist movement established at least thirty phalanxes, and at it height, the movement consisted of perhaps as many as fifty Fourierist communities. One must be cognizant that there were several strains of Fourierism in America, and so deciding which communities count as Fourierist can sometimes be a matter of debate. The "phalanx" was the name Fourier gave to his ideal utopian communities. They were largely agricultural, but did not reject machinery. They were designed to self-sustaining communities in which all participants would have a chance to prosper. Fourier's phalanxes were not communist, since they were supposed to contain inequalities, that is, individuals were to be rewarded both for their effort as well as their contribution of capital. By the mid-1850s however, all but a hardy few phalanxes remained. What few did survive the collapse of the movement, were wiped out by the Civil war. Most Fourierist phalanxes lasted, on average, only a couple years; indeed, critics labeled Fourierists, 'four-year-ites'. The longest lasting community was the North American Phalanx of Colts Neck, New Jersey, which was in continuous operation for twelve years.

There is one very important way that the experience of the Brook Farm community was characteristic of the larger Fourierist movement. The Brook Farm community was originally established as a utopian community by Transcendentalist-inspired reformers. In the spring of 1841 George Ripley, and a small coterie of fellows, decamped to Brook Farm and established an experimental utopian community. Their aims were to counter the effects of a depersonalized and unequal society by removing themselves from that society, and forming a more ideal communal way of life. The Brook Farmers rejected Emerson's more individualistic, more isolationist, vision of Transcendentalist "self-culture". After four years of disorganization, factional quibbles, and lack of a cohesive vision, inhibiting the communities' prosperity, the Brook Farmers decided to adopt Fourierism in1844 because it offered a more concrete plan and structure. This is what attracted many, beyond Transcendentalists, to Fourier's system, and to Fourierist phalanxes, in this era. It was a detailed plan of action for forming communities in an age when so many utopian schemes were vague and ill-defined.

The Fourierist movement, brief as its life may have been, as well as the legacy of its example, made important contributions to later American political movements. Several important legacies of the Fourierist movement stand out. First, in the 1840s the Fourierists were among the earliest and strongest critics of the nascent industrial capitalist order. The Fourierists criticized capitalism as an anti-democratic system of "industrial feudalism" which subordinated workers to employers. Fourierism, and indeed the whole communitarian movement, achieved its prominence at a kind of tipping point in American history, and its failure to stop the advance of the burgeoning industrial capitalism set American society on different path than had this movement had more success. On a longer view, the legacy of the Fourierist movement continued to be seen in the communitarian aspects of the American socialist movement, as well as in the American labor movement, especially in its advocacy of producers' and consumers' cooperatives. The Fourierist movement has an additional interesting legacy in the way that it influenced the thinking of Edward Bellamy. Indeed, several important elements of Fourierist philosophy appear in Bellamy's utopia.

Conclusion

The utopian alternative was very much alive in 19th-century America. The threat various utopian movements constituted can be seen in the sheer numbers of people who flocked to religious or secular utopian communities all over the country. From the 1820s through the 1850s thousands and thousands of Americans experimented with utopianism, joining one or another experimental community. Over these decades nearly one hundred different utopian communities and projects were launched in America. Some lasted just a few months, others only a few years. Others, however, enjoyed some longevity. In general, the utopian communities that tended to last longer were the religiously inspired ones, which also very often had the advantage of being ethno-religious groupings. Many utopian groups like the Rappites or Harmonists, the Amish, and the Hutterites, were largely German Protestant sects. Though there were religious groups, e.g. the Shakers, who were successful at converting many different kinds of people to their way of life. Other utopian groups attempted to create new religions, e.g. the Mormons, and the Oneida community.

In a fairly common pattern, people turned to utopian communities when economic hardship became most acute, and then left when conditions improved. The very existence of alternative, non-for-profit, ways of living posed a threat to the nascent capitalist order in America. It was only in the decades after the Civil war that most kinds of utopian communities became economically unviable as corporate consolidation, mechanization of production, and economies of scale replaced durable hand-made goods with cheaper but less durable factory-made goods. Utopian communities, as small-scale industrial producers of craft goods could simply not compete. Though many of these communities continued to be self-sufficient and survived as communities, their prosperity at first slowly, and then rather quickly, diminished, making attracting new followers and maintaining their communities difficult.

What the experience of utopian communities, both religious and secular, testifies to is the ability of possibility to capture the imagination, and to inspire action. Their many different aims and principles notwithstanding, these utopian movements all sought to transform the lives of human beings through radically transforming social relations. Beyond utopian experiments in communal living, utopian thinking provided some inspiration for more practical movements like the early women's suffrage movement, the abolitionist movement, and the prohibitionist movement. The Occupy movement, brief but spectacular, is part of this utopian tradition in American history. Its memory is worth preserving, its anniversaries worth noting, because of the utopian aspect of its existence. Even for a brief time, just as with our 19th century forebears, a utopian political movement allowed a great many people the freedom to participate in the dream that a better world is possible, to experience the thrill of feeling that such a possible better world could be realized.

Notes

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. 1888. Quote from Claeys, Gregory & Lyman T. Sargent. The Utopia Reader. New York University Press, 1999.

For an excellent history of the American Fourierist movement see; Guarneri, Carl J.. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in 19th Century America. Cornell University Press, 1991.

Quoted from; Clayton, Joseph. Robert Owen: Pioneer of Social Reforms. A.C. Fifield, 1908.

Quoted in; Wilson, William. The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony. 2nd Ed. Indiana University Press, 1967.