Utopian Socialism

[alanjjohnstone]

There has been criticism of our loose description of the Middle Ages and i wonder if we are also guilty of unfairly disparaging the concept of Utopian Socialism.

I was reading some Winstanley and began ask myself if his goals were actually unattainable.

First, the material conditions.

We view abundance not as a situation where an infinite amount of every good could be produced . Similarly, scarcity is not the situation which exists in the absence of this impossible total or sheer abundance. Abundance is a situation where productive resources are sufficient to produce enough wealth to satisfy human needs, while scarcity is a situation where productive resources are insufficient for this purpose. Abundance is a relationship between supply and demand, where the former exceeds the latter.

Who can deny that in the 17thC peoples desires and their consumption patterns were very different and much less than today. They were not the same expectation as there is now for goods and services. Working people were satisfied with a lot less…nourishing food all year round, a home, clothes for all the seasons, tools for the town artisans, land for the country-folk. Not very high demands to be satisfied and supplied.

The economy was very localised. We call for world socialism in our time because of the worldwide nature of capitalism.

They also had a global mercantile supply chain, one which Winstanley offers his solution on the issue of international trade.

But for all practical purposes, their “world” was mainly at the county-level, not even country-wide, with the provincial market towns being the epicentres of the economy. Farm produce and handicrafts traded, sometimes bartered, money had a limited circulation. Then there were regular county fairs taking place for wider choice from and for further afield.

Culturally, too, it was parochial, town- and village-life was the primary concern. Geo-political problems were the affairs of the King and the Church.

So were the aspirations of Winstanley, the Diggers (and Ranters) so radical that they could not be accomplished?

Was it more a lost opportunity rather than an impossible task, as many see it nowadays?

But one thing puzzles me, the Digger movement disappeared from history for a couple of centuries, only to be re-discovered in the late 19thC. Even the Chartists and Owenites did not incorporate the tradition into their ideas but had to begin afresh.

Successful State suppression? Or simply that it had no beneficial relevance worthy of inheriting?

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for this, Alan.

As far as I am aware, every utopian effort ended due to deliberate suppression. Take that away, and I don’t see why they would have been bound to fail.

Take away the class system, wherein a ruling class is fearful of challenges from those it rules, and we have socialism. That doesn’t mean groups of people with singular interests and affinities won’t live together (one can’t be friends with, or in love with, or have the same hobbies, as everyone else), nor that there won’t be some who like solitude, celibacy, etc.

Of course, whilst the dominant society is a class one, that makes for corruption  within utopian communities, and also fear, and then we see them imploding, setting up petty tyrannies of their own, destroying themselves (the Taipings, cults, Jim Jones syndrome).

On the other hand, some religious utopian communities like the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish, have proven extremely successful for centuries, and resilient to both corruption and persecution.

[Author]

Posts