Our Utopia


Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.


What is paradise?

Orwell said it was hard to imagine. Instead, people imagined the end of whatever hardship they faced - whether it be hard labor, poverty, hunger, extreme weather, lack of sex, and so on. But the end of a hardship can't be the definition of a new world. Is the medieval idea of heaven, free from labor and sickness, a compelling existence for all eternity? We still don't know what it IS, only what it's not!

Right now, paradise-on-earth to a lot of people is breaking out of poverty. They see this dream stoked by politicians promising them healthcare/housing/tuition reform or the return of forever-gone manufacturing jobs. For most of us, financial stability may be our first genie wish. But what comes after we are no longer in trouble?


Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. (http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/socialists/english/e_fun)


Every time the USA has moved towards social policies of brotherhood and sisterhood, there has been severe backlash from the capitalist system that demands individualism in order to maximize profits. Remember how dumb it was for the world to fight World War 1? A war fought entirely for nation vs. nation rich-people interests with the blood of the working class. It was famously opposed by a socialist movement led by Eugene Debs, which resulted in a conviction for "sedition" and a sentence of 10 years. And what did Eugene say that required this incredibly harsh punishment, in a land of "Free Speech"?


But in all of the history of the world you, the people, never had a voice in declaring war. You have never yet had. And here let me state a fact--and it cannot be repeated too often: the working class who fight the battles, the working class who make the sacrifices, the working class who shed the blood, the working class who furnish the corpses, the working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war. The working class have never yet had a voice in making peace. . . . Then, when we vote together and act together on the industrial pledge, we will develop the supreme power of the one class that can bring permanent peace to the world. We will have the courage. Industry will be organized. We will conquer the public power. We will transfer the title deeds of the railroads, the telegraph lines, the mills, the great industries--we will transfer them to the people; we will take possession in the name of the people. We will have industrial political Democracy. We will be the first free nation, whose government belongs to the people. Oh, this change will be universal; it will be permanent; it looks towards the light; it paves the way to emancipation.


Advocating the removal of capitalist institutions? Urging people to resist fighting in a war in which they had nothing to gain and everything to lose? 10 years in the dungeon, and never being allowed to vote or run for office again. At his sentencing he had this to say:


Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.


Debs (and later, Orwell) give us these pictures that allow us to see a brighter world, and it's painful to read Debs' intense optimism for the future of the socialist movement. American authorities, concerned about the potential of a labor-movement revolution, cracked down hard with the policies of the First Red Scare. Of course, the efforts of 1920-oppressed black communities to unify themselves against a hostile exploitative majority was painted by the New York Times as stirring up discontent, and lining up the black vote with "radical groups" as if the establishment had done anything to earn the vote of blacks! Reading this article today, I found it very striking that the reader is assured at the end that the government is on the case to put an end to this freedom of association and expression of ideas.

Yes, of course we have freedom of speech, but don't expect the government to stand idly by while you say things that might weaken the grip of authority!

The US had the Great Depression following WW1, in which even though the US had won the war and increased in wealth and global stature, the workers themselves who operated the country were left hungry and cold, just as Debs had said they would be. The rise of the USA Communist party began as championing (including directly intervening against authorities) the cause of the poor unemployed (who are considered worthless by capitalist ideology) and the blacks (who were considered sub-human by national policy, law, and prevailing culture).

Unions, socialist ideas, and communist groups influenced the government. When combined with the severe economic collapse of 1929-1933 and the failure of charity relieve the poor, these factors led to an unprecedented act for America - the implementation of the New Deal. And not out of the goodness of rich hearts, but rather out of their fear that they may lose EVERYTHING instead of only the amount it would take to keep humans from starving to death in the streets of America.


Political and business leaders feared revolution and anarchy. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., who remained wealthy during the Depression, stated years later that "in those days I felt and said I would be willing to part with half of what I had if I could be sure of keeping, under law and order, the other half" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#origins)


The phrase "New Deal" specifically meant a "more fair chance to share in the distribution of national wealth" - you see, people weren't dying in poverty because the nation was poor, but because the rich hadn't been worried about the poor finally coming for their heads yet.

The Secretary of Labor that Roosevelt brought in to figure out how to do this came in with a list of priorities:

  • 40 hour work week

  • minimum wage law

  • worker's comp for injuries on the job

  • unemployment pay for layoffs

  • ban child labor

  • Social Security for retirement

  • health insurance

  • public works - airports, hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, dams, etc.

This list handed out rich people's money in order to benefit the broader society in ways that Charity can never accomplish. Every single one of these items remains a target that the mouthpieces, organizations, and lawmakers of the rich fire against endlessly to the present day.

At the time, though, the massive popular appeal of the Deal meant that it was adopted by both Democrats and Republicans. Eisenhower expanded Social Security when he succeeded Roosevelt, and even wrote in a private letter (which did not age well at all):

Should any party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course, that believes you can do these things [...] Their number is negligible and they are stupid.


Oh Eisenhower, how you have underestimated greed!

For all the good and bad of the New Deal, it was disliked by many, either for going too far or not far enough, and alternately called Fascism (a comparison to rising Nazi Germany) and Communism (a comparison to Soviet Russia) but rather than being either of those, it instead showed that public works and labor benefits were things that could be provided under any system of government. Indeed, many politicians were relieved and inspired that the USA had found a compromise between the two in the 1930s, and many radicals were heavily disappointed with the apparent rescue of capitalism, which they saw as a dying ideology in an industrial and increasingly automated world.

The energy behind the New Deal was radically disrupted by the outcome of WW2, with America riding on top of the world with boundless economic prosperity - and it had done so without having to go hard on Communism or Fascism. The boom cycle made providing for the average citizen trivial. The new USA global imperialism (formerly only Western Hemisphere Imperialism) required the establishment of equally imposing global opponents, easily found in the post-war Soviet Union. In that light, it's clear to see a war-weakened USSR fighting a losing proxy war to prevent the USA from taking over the entire world. Spoiler: They failed.

During the second red scare and the re-emergence of bold-faced profit-oriented business interests, the political gains of the laborer were inevitably in decline. The capitalist system of the nation had done what was needed to survive and now it was time to resume business as usual.

Back to business as usual

So began the gradual slide back into a "purer" capitalist policy, fueled by US imperialism across the world, constant war, and until recently seemingly endless opportunities for profit growth. With no real remaining enemies to fight, a whole world free to exploit without opposition, and a war machine that needs to remain profitable, it wasn't really a possibility for the US to stop overseas military operations. And anyway, it wasn't hard to create a cycle of exploitation and reactionary violence against the small-scale counter-attacks of the exploited.

Meanwhile, the USA's inability to lead the world in quality of life rankings implies that despite its unmatched dominance, we're still missing something as far as improving the human condition. I wonder what Debs would say now given the brush with "full communism" and the re-solidification of capitalism merged with some socialist policy. I imagine it would take a similar upheaval to WW2 to shift the global order from where it rests today.

What purpose does this forced march back to worker poverty serve?

The inescapable answer is that it serves to make the powerful incomprehensibly wealthy, and it serves to make me comfortable and (ideally) complicit. And that's where my selfishness comes in - I don't want to be complicit. I want to raise people up. I want to live on policies of unity, not on policies of murder and exploitation. I want my life's work to improve the common lot, not to add a smidge more value to some capitalist's net worth.

But what does that even mean? What does a new world look like that would put my conscience at ease? As Orwell put it, it's hard to imagine. Here's a take on it from Kropotkin:


Somebody said that dirt is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to nine-tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great men, we are struck with the number of “idlers” among them. They were lazy as long as they had not found the right path, and afterwards laborious to excess. Darwin, Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers. ...

Do not you see that by your methods of teaching only impose a system good for mediocrities, conceived by an average of mediocrities? Your school becomes a University of laziness, as your prison is a University of crime. Make the school free, abolish your University grades, appeal to the volunteers of teaching; begin that way, instead of making laws against laziness which only serve to increase it.

Give the workman, who is stifled at his little tapping machine, which he ends by loathing, give him the chance of tilling the soil, felling trees in the forest, sailing the seas in the teeth of a storm, dashing through space on an engine, but do not make an idler of him by forcing him all his life to attend to a small machine, to plough the head of a screw, or to drill the eye of a needle.

Suppress the cause of idleness, and you may take it for granted that few individuals will really hate work, especially voluntary work, and that there will be no need to manufacture a code of laws on their account. (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread chapter 12 close)


Here is a glimpse of it: This guy had the right connections and training and was able to come up with a treatment for a never-before-seen genetic disease. He was then able to put together a framework for rapidly solving each unique genetic disease. There's no profit motive in this because these diseases are rare, but instead the point is that it isn't even that resource-intensive to solve these problems it's just that those with the means (aka, all the money) see using money on something with no profit as being useless. This is what happens when value is determined by capitalist measurements. We could do this for everyone and every disease, but we don't. It's just a matter of deciding that's how we want our society to be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdmQUlD7P40

Instead, we have pharma companies high-fiving each other until their hands are bruised over patenting a drug to treat the opiod crisis that they themselves caused. We have the "alternative medicine" movement leading people who can't afford real care down harmful paths. We have drug patent holders (frequently researched with tax money) increasing the prices of drugs by huge amounts because they know their buyers are trapped - take a look at insulin prices in the USA compared to other countries.

We have a world where it's great to be rich, tolerable to be in high demand to the rich, and awful for nearly everyone else.