Tarquin O’Flaherty wrote this of community cooperation:

A.L. Morton in his ‘The English Utopia’  has the following to say, (He begins by quoting Marx):

“When the productive forces of society have expanded…then will the narrow bourgeois outlook be transcended…then will society inscribe upon its banners;  ‘From everyone according to his capacities, to everyone according to his needs!’

More [Sir Thomas] understood what Morris[William] understood later….that this principle…was the only basis for a classless society. Reason led the learned Humanist to the same conclusions as those instinctively grasped by the simple men who had depicted ‘The  Land of Cokaygne’.[ the original English peasant Utopia]

In some ways it was easier for them and for More to reach this conception than it has been for others who had to live in a fully capitalist society. England in the 16th century, in spite of the development of commodity production, still retained much of the primitive agrarian collectivism that had persisted under cover of feudalism. Though the family had an individual tenement, this land lay scattered with those of other members of the township throughout the common fields and its working depended on the joint plough team and involved a considerable co-operation at certain times. And even in More’s day, when the gap between town and country was widening….[More ] had in his mind [when writing his Utopia] a picture not very different from what might still have been seen in the England of his own time.

More’s communism, that is to say, is not merely an imaginative picture of something that might happen in the future, but even more the extension and transformation of something already existing to the conditions of a society different from his own but nevertheless related to it and arising out of it.”

I offer this as a sad reflection on how easily a bloody good idea (a co-operative society) is taken and trounced to the point where the very mention of the notion of communism nowadays sends shivers down the spine.

Thinking people truly believed, in the 19th century, that not only was Utopia a real possibility, but that it was inevitable.

Money decided that this was a bad idea, and replaced it with boom and bust, the perfect way to keep the lower orders on edge, unsettled and not too uppity.

Sad stuff… and now we are to accept Abbott’s contemptuous impoverishment policies, while industry and the banks make mind-blowing levels of profit.

I think Abbott might be about to discover that the people who voted for him did so because they believed he was telling the truth, that he was a man of his word.

How silly of them.

Tarquin O’Flaherty 

To which Anthony Eames replied:

A very interesting piece that gave me a neuronal whirl – and set the synaptic relays clattering excitedly.

In our myopic way, we assume that the anglo-saxon version of market capitalism is the one, eternal pathway to prosperous modernity.  We have uncritically bought the propaganda wholesale.  Challenging this, however, is the rapid growth of China and the other Asian countries following their own, quite different systems.

As well, the developed countries achieving the best results in balancing both economic progress and quality of life (Scandinavia, especially) have social democratic, mixed systems.  By most social capital metrics, such as income equality, access to quality education, healthcare, social equity, public infrastructure, crime, etc., they leave the good old USA way behind.

But if you look across the full sweep of human history and prehistory, you will see that for all but a few generations we lived as hunter-gathers under a form of primitive communism and later as farmers in communalist systems.  I guess that one reason why many Aborigines find it hard in today’s Australia is that in their culture everything is shared and so no one individual easily accumulates the capital to start a business and ‘get ahead’.

As I wrote earlier, the East Asian instinct for collective cooperation is surely founded on the special character of rice-farming which calls for intensive, wholesale effort that would be beyond the resources of a single family.  (Interestingly, recent research has shown a significantly higher degree of individualism among the family-unit wheat farmers of Northern China than their southern, rice-eating compatriots.  Fuji tells me there is a similar difference between Japanese rice-growers and the wheat and potato farmers of the northern island of Hokkaido.)

We heard all about the deadening effect of bureaucratic sovietism – and I do not doubt that for a moment.  However, the sheer wastefulness of our market-efficient economy is prodigious.  Think of all that artificial competition with its needless duplication, the contrived product differentiation, parallel distribution networks, the armies of advertising and PR specialists producing little of real value, all the legal to-ing and fro-ing, the incessant goading to over-consume – and the huckstering of fripperies and flim-flam that add nothing to human existence, but only distract us from what is important and urgent.

These are serious criticisms, to be sure, but much the worse is that we live under a system that makes money the measure of everything.  Money buys you power, leverage, respect and worth.  It is, first and last, the final, and often the only, arbiter.  In such wise, it reduces most people to economic functionaries, disenfranchised and scurrying around as unreflective about their condition as ants.  And along the way, we are compliantly robbed of our humanity.

There must be another, better way to create a society that makes the fullest – and fairest – use of every individual’s potential.

Aux barricades!

Anthony Eames

And a brief rejoinder from Tarquin

…..Incidentally, and apropos More’s Utopia, the ‘great Humanist’ takes landowners and the monarchy to task over their ruthless exploitation of an already disenfranchised peasantry following the shameful Enclosures Acts.

The only thing that saved More from having his head chopped off for his ‘Utopia’ opinions was the fact that he published his work in the international language of scholars; Latin.  He also published his work only in Belgium and France because Europe was where the audience was.  Having divorced himself from Henry (in a matter of divorce) More had his head divorced from his shoulders.  More’s name being anathema in Henry’s lifetime, the first English translation of More’s “Utopia’ did not appear until after Henry the Eighth’s death, when it could do More less harm, more or less…