So perhaps the main reason all my efforts at communal living failed was that they were secular. For if the history of American attempts at founding the Promised Land are anything to go by, having a robust religious creed is less an impediment to successful utopia than a vital precondition.
125 Utopias And Why They Failed
Mary, very sad you missed out on the Doukhobours and Hutterites. Both have successful colonies still going. The Doukhobours used to be famous in Canada fro their propensity to march as an entire community, naked, when protesting government interference, and a thing for arson when you really stirred them up. But being Russian they have an edge of nuttiness the German ones you talked about, do not quite have.
The main problem with this and wokeness in general is the unwillingness to take on real responsibility and then be able to slink back into society when things get a bit tougher, worse still they are then given bandwidth to voice their failure on the society they use to cushion their fall.
Years ago my wife and I lived in a kibbutz in the Negev. All property was communal, and the kids were raised communally. It was a great place to live, but we moved on so I could get my Masters in England. The place still exists, but the problem seems to be the intergenerational depletion of participants. The problem is that when boys and girls are raised communally, they see each other as brothers and sisters, not potential mates, so they leave to find lovers and marriage partners.
The irony is that the problem is rooted in evolutionary psychology- humans are reluctant to mate with people they consider siblings. Yet the entire premise of most communitarian endeavours is that humans are the produce of cultural/ social conditioning. The second generation of most communitarian projects demonstrate the absurdity of that belief.
I resented almost everyone around me. After Annie refused to take white supremacy training I still joined. After they had taken unsolicited pictures of protesters in D.C in june i still joined. After the trauma of what I believe to be outright racial discrimination at my first disciplinary hearing with Annie Newman for missing 3 daily zoom calls I still stayed.
The reason why utopias fail is because all people are different and even if you take a seemingly similar group and cocoon it the group will all have different ideas of what utopia really should be. Utopia is a myth, sadly dystopia is no myth and the Woke movement is just the latest in a long line of groups with their own idea of what utopia should be who are hell bent on turning the world into a dystopia.
In addition to their work with children in Head Start, applied behavior analysts have also addressed social justice through educational interventions designed to improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged students in inner-city schools which, in turn, improves their ability to compete in the job market (e.g., Gardner, Heward, & Grossi, 1994). Perhaps the best known evaluation of these interventions was in the Follow Through programs to help disadvantaged children maintain their gains in Head Start. A nationwide evaluation demonstrated the superiority of behavioral programs; however, they were never broadly adopted (see Watkins, 1988, 1997). The culture prefers cognitivist and humanistic educational practices over humane and effective ones, even though they may hinder income equity in the long run.
Skinner's work also inspired the development of the personalized system of instruction (PSI), which allows students to move at their own pace through courses that are broken into curricular units that have to be mastered before moving on to new material (F. S. Keller, 1968; see also interteaching, Boyce & Hineline, 2002). This system has been used in schools and universities nationally and internationally for decades with much success and is currently being integrated with computer technology to increase its usefulness (e.g., Crosbie & Glenn, 1993; T. L. Martin, Pear, & Martin, 2002). Skinner's influence on education is also shown in the development of entire schools based on behavior analysis (see, e.g., Johnson & Street, 2004; Twyman, 1998). Finally, now that colleges and universities are becoming more interested in the scholarship of teaching, and thus with teaching outcomes defined in terms of student learning, they are promoting behavior-analytic teaching practices (e.g., PSI), albeit unwittingly.
The New World changed that. Small groups could organize civilized communities based on any peculiar theory, with little concern for conquering hordes. All they had to do was be economically and socially viable. This new opportunity spawned a flood of utopian experiments, beginning with the first colonists.
Most schoolchildren know that the Mayflower pilgrims came to America to escape the persecution they encountered in Europe. A more obscure fact was that the Plymouth Colony was originally organized as a communal society, with an equal sharing of the fruits of everyone's labor. At least, that was the plan. Their governor, William Bradford, documented how this degenerated over the next two years into "injustice," "indignity" and "a kind of slavery." Productivity was shot, and the community starved. Bradford wisely placed the blame not on the flaws of his people, but on the system their society had chosen. They abandoned communal ownership and, lo and behold, the fields sprouted with life. As Bradford writes:
Hundreds of utopian experiments followed Plymouth--religious and secular, communist and individualistic, radical and moderate. But all had to make impossible sacrifices in the service of their ideals. The Shakers and Harmonists were very successful economically, and bound tightly in a common spirituality. However, their way of keeping a lid on worldly desires was to practice celibacy. Now, anyone who has raised children knows what a resource drain they can be, and would not be surprised that communities without offspring could get ahead financially. Nevertheless, the celibate life had only so much appeal, and these sects eventually died off.
The long series of failed experiments yields some interesting lessons. The first is that internal power grabs are even more poisonous to utopian dreams than external threats. The gold standard of utopian leadership, the benevolent prince or philosopher king, is inherently unstable. Solomon, Marcus Aurelius and Suleiman the Magnificent failed utterly to provide successors with anything like their talents.
Finally, if you're going to suppress your members' worldly desires, you need a mechanism for self-selection. Several religious sects, like the Old Order Amish, have successfully stifled material interests over multiple generations. Their people are happy because they don't require much stuff. But they know that everyone can't be kept in the fold. Anabaptist communities who believe that only adults can be meaningfully baptized provide this safety valve. The 10% of Amish who don't stay allow the other 90% to maintain their culture.
While many people believe that utopias are doomed to failure because of human nature, it's much more useful to approach utopia as the ultimate governance challenge. The U.S., itself, was a far more successful experiment because of that approach, expressed in James Madison's view that, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."
At the core of this seminar is a moral and political concern: to whatextent is it possible to achieve a more egalitarian, humane and democraticsociety within a capitalist society? It is a fundamental tenet of Marxisttheories of the state that the state in capitalist society is deeply shapedand constrained by the class relations of capitalism, but this leaves quiteopen the extent to which progressive change can be achieved within thoseconstraints. At one extreme is classical Leninism, which sees the capitaliststate as so profoundly imbued with a capitalist character that even wherenominally democratic institutions exist, there is little prospect for progressivechange. The state is fundamentally a "superstructure": its form and structuresfunctionally reproduce the basic class relations of capitalism. As a result,to use Lenin's expression, the state must be smashed; serious reforms inan egalitarian direction will inevitably fail or be reversed. At theother extreme is classical social democracy which viewed state apparatusesas basically class neutral and regarded class structure as simply one amonga variety of obstacles to be overcome. Popular mobilization, particularlywhen organized through a coordination of the labor movement and socialistparties, had the potential to gradually reform capitalism in a radicallyegalitarian direction through social democratic state policies. Between theseextremes are a varietry of theoretical and political positions which seethe constraints on radical change imposed by the capitalist state as variable,both in terms of the kinds of changes they permit and the extent to whichstruggles can transform the constraints themselves. The "contradictory functionality"of the state creates a complex, variable political space within which egalitarian,democratic, and even emancipatory politics can be pursued.
The concept of class is one of the most contested concepts within sociology. Sometimes this is just a question of how the word class is being used, but behind the alternative uses of the term thereoften lurks deeper theoretical disagreements about how best to understand the underlying nature of economic inequality in contemporary societies. This seminar will explore in a systematic and rigorous mannerthe full range of alternative conceptualizations of class. The focuswill be on contemporary approaches, although there will be some attentionto classic statements. The course will give students an opportunity bothto gain a deeper understanding of the substantive issues around the analysis of class, but also to engage in a very fine-grained manner the problem of carefully defining concepts. Sociologists often take a quite casual attitude towards the problem of concept-formation. While they may worry quite a bit about the theoretical arguments that link concepts together, much less attention is often paid to the abstract definitions of the concepts themselves.
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