The European reaction to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has overwhelmingly been one of horror: at being cast out, weak and under-equipped, into a grown-up world full of terrors. Yet the framing that the NSS represents America’s “divorce” from European concerns seems precisely wrong. Instead, it marks the opposite. Walking back its Pacific commitments in the interests of a stable equilibrium with China; its “spreading [of] liberal ideology” in Africa; and its “misguided experiment” in urging Middle Eastern regimes into “abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government”, Washington’s new strategic doctrine is explicit in retreating to core interests. In its declaration of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, Washington reasserts its traditional right to dominance over the Western Hemisphere. When it comes to our own continent, it makes clear that rather than casting us adrift, Europe is to be drawn closer into America’s now openly civilizational empire.

Suggested Reading

Maduro has called Trump's bluff

By John Masko

With Washington confronted by two overt civilizational states — China and Russia — the NSS makes clear a division between the world without, in its declaration to maintain “good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours”, and its new assertiveness in dominating the world within — the sphere that was, until recently, unabashedly called “Western civilization”. So, the NSS declares, Washington will “push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms” in a process of cultural retrenchment limited to the “countries that share, or say they share, these principles” of Enlightenment liberty, drawn from Europe’s unique civilizational path. The NSS cannot be clearer that this is Washington’s aim: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Again and again, the document emphasizes its civilizational focus: Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”, it declares. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence”, because “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.”

Yet rather than a civilizational state, Europe’s current form of governance looks more like a civilizational suicide note to the Trump administration. Like a stern parent gathering its wayward charge back into the family fold, the United States now limits its interest in the domestic politics of foreign nations to that of its European kin. As the Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared after leaving Brussels: “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”

How much more explicit could Washington be over its determinedly civilizational ethos? Perhaps it is because such a worldview is now so alien to Europe’s rulers that this clearly and repeatedly expressed focus has been glossed over in European commentary so far. Or perhaps it is because they fear, while “perched in unstable minority governments” as the NSS cruelly if accurately observes, that it may strike a chord among the European peoples they so waveringly rule. Though expressed snarkily, The Economist’s defense editor Shashank Joshi is perhaps closer to the mark than most in tweeting “Trump national security strategy: Make Europe White Again.” Likewise the comment by the EU’s former high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, that Trump “wants a white Europe divided into nations, subordinate to his demands and voting preferences”. What both Joshi and Borrell frame pejoratively as a “white” Europe is, of course, the until-very-recently uncontroversial belief that individual European countries should remain the homeland states of their titular peoples: that Finland should be predominantly composed of Finns, for example, and Italy of Italians. This is, after all, the organizing principle by which almost every European state was founded, and over which many bloody wars have been fought.

As the NSS declares, in a frank manner that would invite censure if not police attention in Europe itself: “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” A Trump administration that has rejected any interest in the internal affairs of Asia, Africa and the Middle East has no desire to manage the tumultuous affairs of their diasporas in Europe itself. There is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, for America in the total “Birminghamization” of Britain, or the replacement of Europe’s wider population by non-Europeans, especially after the failure of America’s experience of world hegemony, in which advocates of distant peoples were permitted to “suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own”.

Such a worldview is of a piece with Trump’s recent declaration that he will ban Third World migration to the United States, coupled with his preference for European immigration, and preferential asylum for white South Africans. Even within the Western Hemisphere, it is Canada that the Trump administration expresses the desire to annex, and not Latin America, where, the NSS declares, America’s interest lies in ensuring the region “remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. The Trump administration is increasingly strident in its declarations that the Hart-Celler Act, which opened the United States to non-European migration, was disastrous. In the President’s overt support of “remigration” — seen in its current, explicitly hostile focus on America’s Somali minority — the terminology of Europe’s Nouvelle Droite has entered the Oval Office, just as the Department of Homeland Security now spends its time tweeting openly Dissident Right memes. The borderless Utopianism of the 2000s, and the radical, racialized discourse and policymaking of 2010s liberals have brought about precisely the nativist reaction they were always warned against. Just a decade ago, all of this seemed unthinkable: now the rhetoric and policy goals of a few dozen Austrian, French and German Identitarian students are returning to Europe via the White House. For European Rightists, this may prove a mixed blessing.

The NSS declares that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism”, and that “our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory”. An unpublished version of the document seen by the Defense One website adds that “we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life… while remaining pro-American”, and focus on specific countries such as Poland, Austria, Hungary and Italy “with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union]”. The document’s assertions that Europe’s elites survive through “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” — and “subversion of democratic processes” which “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” — imply that Washington will not look kindly on quasi-constitutional attempts to prevent Right-wing parties from gaining power: such as the forthcoming state elections in eastern Germany. Rather than actively helping Right-wing governments into power, then, it is more probable that the Trump administration will prevent faltering liberal administrations from clinging onto by dubiously undemocratic means.

More From This Author

Britain can't escape its imperial master

By Aris Roussinos

Yet while it is difficult to imagine the Brussels clerisy, already faltering against a populist upsurge driven by unwanted mass migration, rallying angry European voters against Trump on this exact matter, there are nonetheless risks for Europe’s Right-wing parties. Deepened integration — or rather subjugation — within America’s imperial realm would pose fewer immediate risks if a Republican victory, and a Vance administration, after Trump were a more certain prospect. But a win for a Democratic Party that is now increasingly Third Worldist in both composition and aspiration would surely mean that Washington’s might and influence would be deployed against the European Right just as nakedly and unsparingly. In any case, the gulf between rhetoric and action within the Trump administration has often been a wide one. Europe’s current elites can perhaps be forgiven for their “wait and see” approach: perhaps the Republicans will lose the midterms, and with them the opportunity to reset the empire according to their vision.

Yet the looming and unsatisfactory conclusion to the Ukraine War adds extra time pressure to Europe’s leaders, a sense of jeopardy which works in Washington’s favor. The war initially seemed, in a strange way, a blessing to Europe’s leadership: a chance to preserve their legitimacy, in demonstrating the strength, will, and autonomy of a united Europe and so stave off their reckoning at the hands of their voters. Instead, due to their incompetence, it has accelerated their downfall. Europe is simply not ready to confront Russia alone, and so must cling tighter to Washington’s skirts even as Trump mocks and reviles its leadership. A Europe that can defend itself against external threats — as the Trump administration claims to want — will, eventually, summon up the hard power to become an autonomous actor in a world of predatory empires. Some measure of independence may yet be found, in decades to come, from this terminal point of Europe’s century of humiliation.

It would, though, have been better to have asserted our autonomy before this moment of existential crisis, as France has long urged. Yet the Atlanticist elites too long insisted otherwise, and now bewail, with genuine bewilderment, the kicking they receive from the boot they were installed to lick. Now, faced with aggression from the East, they must subject themselves to humiliation from the West. Like the Byzantine officials who, at the Eastern Roman Empire’s lowest ebb, declared the Ottoman turban to be a better fate than the Papal tiara, the choice at this perilous moment is which subordination will prove less painful. The price of American protection, the NSS makes clear, is ideological conformity: it is not Europe being discarded by its imperial master, but its current leadership. For us Europeans, whom they have dragged to this civilizational nadir, their removal will at least be some small consolation.

Between 2018 and 2020, I spent three years living in Rojava, the region governed by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). There, I heard a different take on the revolution’s successes almost every day. US military commanders saw the region as a useful ally against Isis and a counter to Iranian influence. Kurds, women, and Christian and Yazidi villagers were pragmatically grateful to AANES for guaranteeing Syria’s highest standards of human rights and humanitarian provision in the face of ethnic cleansing by Turkey and Isis.

Yet some anarchist volunteers left despondent, their idealised view of the “Rojava revolution” foundering on the reality of mass poverty, limited political engagement and an increasingly prominent security apparatus. Many more remained, accepting ideological “contradictions” as part of the revolutionary process. Certainly, since 2013, it has become apparent that the revolution could never have survived without fulfilling a number of seemingly contradictory roles.

Rojava achieved autonomy after the 2011-12 Syrian uprising saw regime forces withdraw from the country’s Kurdish north. This enabled Kurdish fighters loyal to Abdullah Öcalan, their long-imprisoned leader, to descend to northern Syria from the mountain eyries where they had long been engaged in a bitter guerrilla war against Turkey. There, a committed cadre lived a necessarily communal and frugal life. Kurds who have spent time “in the mountains” speak nostalgically of the comradeship and holistic relation to nature they found there. But these political organisers now found themselves tasked not only with fending off Isis, Al-Qaeda offshoot Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Turkish Armed Forces, but also with establishing a society capable of sustaining millions.

These lifelong partisans of the Kurdish cause have experienced an almost rapturous vindication of their struggle. One middle-aged woman told me, with shining eyes, that 38 of 40 Kurds in her initial training group had lost their lives fighting Turkey, only for a liberated Kurdish homeland to suddenly emerge across the Syrian border. Privately, though, Kurdish militants will often admit frustration with a restive local population uninterested in their leader’s lofty ideals and rhetoric.

Ideas such as Öcalan’s have never before been implemented on such a mass scale. Following his 1999 capture by Turkey’s intelligence organisation (MIT), Öcalan — whose Kurdistan Workers’ Party had been fighting for an independent, socialist Kurdish state — encountered the work of US anarchist Murray Bookchin. Building from Bookchin’s “social ecology”, he developed a critique of state socialism also informed by feminist thought. The Kurdish leader came to advocate a “federation of federations” — a decentralised network of local communes feeding consensus decisions via city-level municipalities into a democratic polity, all based on a re-evaluated relationship with the natural world and a cooperative economy.

Suggested reading

Mosul and the Law of the Cigarette

By David Patrikarakos

There is a certain mysticism to Öcalan’s writings. His works were transmitted to the outside world from the prison island Imrali in lieu of defence submissions at court, and the subsequent lack of references makes its arguments hard to parse. His works are peppered with gnomic historical speculations, often prefaced with the disclaimer “Could it be…?” Rather, the jailed leader’s brilliance lies in distilling Bookchin’s complex analyses into maxims accessible to the Kurdish public. He deploys a Bookchinite account of history as the steady expansion of “hierarchy” from the patriarchal-gerontocratic tribe through the city-state to capitalist modernity. This teleology is then tied to the fate of the long-dispossessed Kurdish people in their Mesopotamian homeland, with Öcalan marshalling his people as the inheritors of the Fertile Crescent’s idyllic “natural society”.

The idea was for a network of self-governing communes to grow up alongside and ultimately supplant the authoritarian states which today occupy the Kurdish homelands. But, as Rosa Luxemburg observed after October 1917, revolutions do not grow up little by little: they are ejected into the world fully-grown and shrieking. In Rojava, Öcalan is respected as a symbol of Kurdish and women’s liberation, but little-read by civilians; Bookchin is known only to the Kurdish nomenklatura, and that indirectly. Reality, in the form of inter-ethnic warfare, bread shortages and depleted energy resources, immediately intruded on Öcalan’s somewhat utopian vision.

Most obviously, without its black-market petrol revenues, the impoverished Rojava administration could never have kept millions from starvation. Ambitions to build a greener economy by transitioning to more localised, cooperative agriculture and renewable energy sources have been frustrated by a number of factors: Turkish damming of the Euphrates and control of key water infrastructure; the diversion of power to areas controlled by Assad and Turkish-backed jihadist militias; war damage to dams and oil refineries; and an embargo preventing industrial imports. Hence the unlikely spectacle of a “green revolution” underwritten by oil wealth. (Could it be…?)

Economically, too, the AANES has been forced to proceed cautiously, expropriating Syrian regime holdings, but largely leaving private property and capital untouched. Oil revenues subsidise cheap diesel and bread, with these efforts reaching far more people than the scattering of co-ops. Sporadic attempts to develop agricultural autarky are limited in their effectiveness by the economic embargo and subsequent forced, continued reliance on smugglers who bring in the weapons the Kurds need to fend off Turkey, but also flood the markets with cheap Turkish chicken stock, flip-flops and cigarettes.

Suggested reading

How Iran’s protests erased the Kurds

By Norma Costello

Similarly, economic pressure, priorities of national defence and the challenges of managing conservative and sometimes openly pro-Isis local populations have hampered AANES’s efforts to promote genuine grassroots political participation. AANES has made truly impressive steps in challenging deeply-entrenched patriarchal norms by introducing women-led governance, restorative justice and social education programmes, even in former Isis heartlands — but the devolution of decision-making authority is partial and inconsistent. I’ve attended commune meetings in the Kurdish Jazira. Here, locals complain about road repairs, bread and price-gouging, but absent calls for greater investment in infrastructure, the Kurds broadly align behind the AANES. Directing an economy or a war requires centralised policy, and most locals are content to leave these issues to their leaders, visiting the commune only to collect the chits for their subsidised bread and oil.

Paradoxically, it is in those conservative Arab regions only recently liberated from Isis that the AANES has been repeatedly forced — through admirably open-minded public consultations, pressure from conservative tribal federations, and street protest — to rethink, revise or defend its positions on issues such as women’s education, conscription, the detention of Isis-linked individuals, and relations with Assad. Neither Öcalan nor Bookchin envisaged the scene I witnessed in Raqqa, in which tribal sheikhs quarrelled with Kurdish women’s activists over the primary-school curriculum. But these thorny controversies are the lifeblood of a unique democracy. These Arab-Kurdish tensions are the primary internal crisis facing Rojava today. But they also produce its most genuinely democratic and revolutionary moments. With typical far-sightedness, Bookchin recognised that “any self-managed community that tries to live in isolation and develop self-sufficiency risks the danger of becoming parochial, even racist”. Rather than Arab chauvinism merely being an obstacle for “the Kurds” to overcome, their fractious relation with these neighbouring communities creates genuine, if imperfect, federalism.

Thus the most interesting contributions to a new essay collection, Social Ecology and the Rojava Revolution, are not the sketches of Bookchin and Öcalan’s ideals, but the recent analyses from on the ground in Rojava. As Bookchin writes in his anthologised essay “What Is Social Ecology?” (1993), “new ecological attitudes will remain vaporous if they are not given substance through real and objective institutions”. The Trotskyist-turned-anarchist-turned-iconoclast would certainly be open-minded enough to consider the “Rojava revolution” on its own, distinct terms.

Bookchin repeatedly turns Marx’s maxim “the social revolution…cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future” against both Marxists themselves and eco-capitalists. But while he warns against “the glorification of history” and a desire to return to prelapsarian “primitive communism” and modes of social organisation, in practice Bookchin himself risks valorising an unobtainable historical ideal. As the Rojava experiment demonstrates, the approximated restoration of “natural society” through village communes and local co-operatives is noble in theory, but impractical and insufficient at scale. Bookchin’s self-described “utopianism” becomes reality not when applied in asocial, isolated Leftist enclaves kept pure by those he damned as “lifestyle anarchists”, and still less via the “mystified primitivism” of Trad-Right doomerism, but when material conditions make them a necessity for ordinary people.

Suggested reading

Black gold fuelled the Iraq War

By Helen Thompson

So, where one contributor to the essay collection cites the remarkable autonomous women’s village Jinwar as an example of Rojava’s social ecology in action, a more representative model of the region’s unique political identity might be the refugee camp I visited south of Tel Abyad, a town seized and ethnically cleansed by Turkish forces in 2019. Here, Arabs, Turkmens and Kurds — some displaced three times by war — must live side-by-side, solving grievances via the local reconciliation committee. It is here, and not in comparatively well-off Jazira, that the large and growing agricultural cooperative constitutes a genuine lifeline to destitute families.

As most international volunteers in Rojava are clear-eyed enough to recognise, any immediate efforts to implement similar ideals in the West cannot succeed at scale. Absent a decade’s armed struggle on the basis of a violently repressed national identity and even the very war against Isis, which served as the basis for building a trans-ethnic political consensus, Rojava could never have succeeded in mobilising a mass movement, still less in uniting peoples so recently at war. Rather, it is more likely to be through climate catastrophe and a retreat from globalism that we see new Rojavas emerge in the terra nullia left behind by shrinking states. The dialectic of history will lead some of us to anarchism — along, no doubt, with more authoritarian alternatives.

For his part, Bookchin somewhat reluctantly addresses “how to go from here to there” only in the final two pages of his magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom, gesturing to a Marxist theory of historical crisis while admitting genuinely effective “libertarian forms of organisation” are yet to develop. Ten years on from the revolution, this is perhaps the most important lesson Rojava has to offer: it is only when the regional political consensus is fractured by extreme internal and external stresses that genuine opportunities to refashion it emerge.

Now, though, that’s all changed. Since the financial crash of 2008 and the ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, socialism has gone mainstream. The values the Left defends, primarily liberal and cosmopolitan, are almost a prerequisite for a career within the professions. It is unfashionable, or unseemly even, to reject them. But: this “socialism” is not what it once was. It is customary to locate the Left’s evacuation of class politics with the rise of the New Left in the Sixties, in particular, with the theory of the Frankfurt School philosopher, Herbert Marcuse. But the Left’s shift from economics to culture, however, was more protracted than this narrative suggests. It began in the Sixties and continued apace under neoliberalism in the Eighties and Nineties, as deindustrialisation undermined organised labour. Its denouement, though, was in the 2010s, after official communism had collapsed and social democracy had capitulated to the global market.

Responding to the comedian Russell Brand’s notorious Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman in 2013 (in which Brand defended socialism and attacked the vacuity of capitalist democracy), the cultural theorist Mark Fisher diagnosed the pathologies of the modern Left with precision. Even then, he captured its obsession with identity — above all, race, sex, and gender — its po-faced moralism, its joylessness, its resentment-fuelled feuding, and its individual competitiveness. In short, its unambiguously bourgeois subjectivity. Instead of celebrating Brand’s assault on the neoliberal status quo, the Left, nourished mainly by a poststructuralist diet of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, responded by lambasting him as a fraud and a misogynist. With this it was clear to Fisher that the gentrification of the Left was complete. “The Left”, he wrote, “has all but disappeared”.

Not surprisingly, alongside the New-New Left’s elision of class is an ignorance, also, about its traditions. Proletarian literature — such as Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, and Alan Sillitoe’s novella, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner — is no longer a source of inspiration. (Presumably, too white and too male.) Nor are the figures who galvanised the first generation of Labour MPs into action: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Giuseppe Mazzini — and particularly William Morris. On the contrary, they are seen — if, that is, they are known about in the first place — as an embarrassment. Relics of the 19th century, nostalgic and reactionary, espousing superannuated opinions about the compatibility of nationalism and internationalism, capitalism as an unmitigated disaster, duty, and the dignity of labour.

The current Left isn’t interested in universalism, virtue, non-elective communities, or technical skill. It is relativist, individualistic, hedonistic, and preoccupied with abolishing borders and work. As one influential text put in 2015: “the classic social democratic demand for full employment should be replaced with the future-oriented demand for full unemployment”. It would be misleading to present the Left as a monolithic block. Both the socialists who wrote this (Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams), and their Fully Automated Luxury Communist successors, cared and care about class. But it is a version of class from which the traditional working class has largely been expunged, disciplined for bad behaviour — Brexit and various Brandish misdemeanours.

Suggested reading

Labour's lost love for Leave

By Richard Johnson

Nonetheless, the modernism these socialists embrace makes Marx seem parochial. The modern Left, if it is not totally blind to class, is excessively technophilic. It holds that because communism is dependent on a fully automated economy, it was impossible until now. The irony, however, is that the pseudo-socialism of the present moment — all narcissism and technocratic utopia — has been articulated and critiqued before. The revival of these ideas rhymes with a similar intellectual tendency which emerged in the 1880s. Then, the Left and the early Labour Party correctly rebutted it, sowing the ideational seedbed for our postwar welfare state in the process. But, if we are not careful today, this distorted socialism which has reappeared may win out, fundamentally corrupting any socialism rooted in class solidarity and egalitarianism.

Aside from the systematisation of Marx’s thought accomplished by Friedrich Engels during the period, three thinkers defined this debate on the Left in late-19th century: Edward Bellamy, the author of Looking Backward, the political Oscar Wilde found in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, and William Morris. The Left today is heir to the first two, and indifferent to, or unaware of, the third. Fully automated luxury communism is simply a rehash of Bellamy’s utopian novel. And its partner in crime, millennial socialism — a vague tendency rather than an organised phenomenon — is the unconscious offspring of Wilde, minus the wit, the self-conscious cynicism, and the theatricality. It was William Morris, on the other hand, who was to supersede the jejune arguments of both contemporaries.

Published in 1888, Looking Backward is set in the year 2000. Capitalism has evolved into communism. The state has nationalised the means of production, co-opted the efficiencies effected by monopoly capitalism, and rolled out labour-saving machinery wherever it can. People start work at 21 and finish at 45, with the option to opt out at 33 and receive some kind of Universal Basic Income. And while Morris would write his own medievalist utopia, News from Nowhere, in response, he also criticised Bellamy directly in a review in the socialist journal Commonweal. Looking Backward was a utilitarian travesty, he wrote, devoid of spirituality and offering no meaning or pleasure in life to its citizens. It was the thought experiment of a person perfectly satisfied with modern civilisation, the utopia of the professional middle classes concerned with order and the eradication of inconsistencies and waste. A “machine-life is the best Mr Bellamy can imagine”, Morris complained.

Suggested reading

The secret millennial class war

By Chris Clarke

Unlike Bellamy, Morris believed that labour was a chief ingredient of a fulfilling life. It should not be dispensed with, but made pleasurable instead. Hatred of modern civilisation, with its severing of the connection between labour and art, was the “leading passion” of Morris’ life. What, he asked, will the workers make of Bellamy’s regimented scheme? They will reject it, naturally, as arid and dull. It was propaganda for capitalism. And the same is true of the soul-destroying machine lives concocted by post-work socialists today.

Who, after all, wants to be condemned to onerous leisure (luxury communists have presumably never been unemployed and, one imagines, count few retirees among them) and the rule of technical elites? Because that’s what the post-work socialists, scornful of work and workers, are devising for us in their books, journals, and think tanks. Even journalism and complex surgery will be delegated to machines. Instead, Morris believed that variety is enriching. Individuality is a social good. He also believed, however, in cooperation. The individual, as such, is a fiction and incapable of living well when it does succeed in breaking free of the group.

Oscar Wilde, by contrast, held that socialism was of value “simply because it will lead to individualism”. It relieved us of “that sordid necessity of living for others”. And more fully than any other 19th-socialist, Wilde was the herald of the concept of self-realisation, an idea that millennial socialists — eschewing customs, authority, and limits of various kinds — have adopted wholesale from Wilde’s foundations. “Be thyself,” he proclaimed, will be the motto of the new world. The difference is that, in his own time, Wilde remained an outlier; in ours these ideas are hegemonic on the Left.

Suggested reading

Keir Starmer the shapeshifter

By Mark Seddon

As with many millennial socialists now, Wilde was unimpressed by ordinary people. Real people are people who have realised themselves. They are the poets, the philosophers, the scientists, the people of culture — in a word, they are the bourgeoisie. Betraying an extraordinary lack of imagination, Wilde saw the lives of the poor as containing no intrinsic value. They are spoilt by the performance of duties, where the self is sacrificed to others. “To live is the rarest thing in the world,” he wrote condescendingly. “Most people exist, that is all”.

In Britain, the Labour Party of the early-20th century chose Morris’s fraternal universalism over Bellamy and Wilde. Second International socialism in Europe likewise remained, for the most part, socially conservative. Almost across the board, until the Sixties, solidarity continued to trump subjectivity. Ignoring Wilde’s juvenile edicts, figures such as R. H. Tawney, Clement Attlee, and William Beveridge volunteered at charitable institutions like Toynbee Hall. They worked closely with the poor and the working classes, and, consequently, understood their trials and sensibilities. And they won elections too.

Before they can do so again, socialists must degentrify. And they can learn how from Morris. As he wrote of his imagined future in News from Nowhere, “this is not an age of inventions”. Now ought not to be either — either in technology or theory. Modern socialists, at any rate, are only reinventing the wheel.

And then, in 1906, an earthquake destroyed the fragile city. Buildings toppled. Broken gas pipes and fallen powerlines started fires. The authorities tried in vain to create firebreaks, resorting to dynamiting whole blocks of houses, but there was no stopping the fires that burned for another four days. More than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. At least 3,000 people were killed, and the majority of survivors were displaced from their homes.

It is what followed the disaster, though, that is truly fascinating. San Francisco transformed. It went from a city renowned for cut-throat competition, race riots and brothels to the site of an extraordinary upsurge of public-spiritedness. Residents who survived built impromptu health clinics and makeshift shelters.

A beautician, Anna Amelia Holshouser, recalled how she and others stitched blankets and sheets together to make a tent for children, and then set up a soup kitchen, feeding as many strangers as they could out of a few unbroken plates and tin cans. All across the wrecked landscape, groups of survivors banded together to create places of safety and mutual aid. Rebecca Solnit describes the small-scale initiatives on each rubble-strewn street of San Francisco as “little utopias” — that is, idealistic micro-societies where people lived as much for others as for themselves, spontaneously rejecting the dominant narrative of individualism.

What occurred in San Francisco was a rare thing, but it had happened before and it would happen again. Over and over throughout history, idealistic, cooperative communities have sprouted up in the wake of disasters.

Suggested reading

Why utopias always fail

By Mary Harrington

There are few examples as clear as the communities that followed the First World War, less than a decade after the earthquake in San Francisco. On a single day in the war — 22 August 1914 — the French army lost 27,000 men: half as many soldiers dead as the United States would later lose in the entire Vietnam War. In addition to ten million lives lost over the course of the conflict there was the wider damage: the uncounted millions scarred in body and mind; the disorienting sense of an entire social order destroyed.

People reeled under the compound effect of war and an influenza pandemic — robbed of their young, their hopes destroyed, uncertain of what the future held. But amid the destruction arose an impulse that was optimistic, energetic and humanitarian.

As in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, small groups of men and women began to rebuild, starting experimental settlements, renouncing old ways of living and trying to create new ones. Many people around the world believed the old social order was to blame for the Great War: the preoccupation with capitalist gain and nationalistic competition. Their response was to lead lives built around philosophies of non-materialistic mutual aid. In Germany, coteries of students and intellectuals took to the country to live collectively and farm cooperatively. In Japan, so many idealistic settlements were started that the conservative press reported anxiously on a “new village craze”. These post-war groups, though drastically different in style and structure, all had shades of the resilient, compassionate and communally-minded action that defined the days after the earthquake in San Francisco.

What can we learn from these reactions to disaster? Perhaps simply that adversity itself can prompt what is good in mankind — the urge to redraft the lines along which our societies are built for the better; a turn to co-operative social striving that would otherwise never have manifested.

And yet few utopias last long. In San Francisco, it was just a matter of days before thousands of soldiers were “restoring order” in the city — which included shooting those who were trying to collect food for the needy. New modes of living rarely spark large-scale social transformations, and all too often the status quo resumes.

Suggested reading

How Preston became a socialist utopia

By Gavin Haynes

But short-lived though most utopian communities are, they are connected in a beneficial way to the existing social order. They are in what German sociologist Karl Mannheim called “dialectical tension” with it: offering a reconfigured version of the outside world, expanding people’s sense of social possibilities, while at the same time being shaped by the mainstream’s needs. Even the communities that disintegrate quickly leave traces behind them, some of which are absorbed into the dominant social structures. And their examples gesture towards the fundamental idealism and resiliency in the human spirit, and the easily forgotten truth that it is always possible to recast the way we live.

We’re passing through another disaster now. And though the defining nature of this pandemic has been that people have been forced to live apart, it has nonetheless sparked impressive examples of idealistic activity, of cooperation and social action. Drivers in Wuhan created a volunteer car fleet to transport medical workers to hospitals when public transport shut down; young people in India mobilised to provide aid packages for those without savings; experts created the open-source library “Coronavirus Tech Handbook”, pooling knowledge on technologies and organisational methods for fighting the pandemic.

Climate change is a slower-moving crisis. Like the First World War, it has sparked in many a sense of the failure of the underlying systems of society and governance, which seem to be unable or unwilling to cope and change. Collectives experimenting with low-impact modes of communal living — ecotopias, as some of them call themselves — are proliferating.

At Old Hall Community in Suffolk, a group of 50 share a manor house, farming, cooking communally and keeping their carbon footprint as near as possible to net zero. In the mountains of Asturias in northern Spain, sixty Spanish, French, Danish and German women and men live in the remote commune of Matavenero, where they grow their own food, build their own houses and consume as little as they can. There are larger initiatives, including the community of Toyosato in Japan, where several hundred participants aim to demonstrate a fulfilling life built on sustainable farming, cooperation and minimal possessions. This settlement is one of more than 70 low-impact communities that form the Yamagishi movement, which stretches to Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the United States.

These contemporary utopias are not a replacement for long-sighted national and international legislation, or for the much-needed regulation of corporate actors. In many ways they may be less effective than change-oriented activists such as Extinction Rebellion. But ecotopians put their money where their mouths are. They live in the way they think we all ought to live.

Suggested reading

Inside Melbourne's eternal lockdown

By Tom Chodor

There seems to be a time limit on utopian communities. When the disasters that inspired them are forgotten, they generally collapse, or are absorbed back into the old order with its attendant oppressions and injustices. Sometimes, they mitigate that old order, demonstrating practices that can help make society a little better, a little more just. But climate change falls outside of this pattern. We are not likely to live to see the end of this global disaster. And if we insist on holding fast to the old order, to the dominant ideologies of hyper-individualism and materialism, the crisis will only deepen.

Utopian living, at its best, creates an opening in the fabric of society, allowing us to see how fragile the habits and structures which seem immutable in day-to-day life really are. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” wrote the young reformer Dorothy Day of the San Francisco earthquake, having watched her mother give away her clothes to survivors. We haven’t quite reached the moment of imaginative, communal rebuilding that people are capable of when faced with disaster. We must hope that this moment will arrive soon.

To some extent, anyway: history provides numerous examples of people living in isolation. From lighthouse keepers maintaining a watchful eye over stormy seas to anchorites in the desert, not only did these people cope, but many saw the experience as contributing to their spiritual betterment.

Meanwhile there has been a utopian strain in the writing about the Covid-19 crisis, with some commentators expressing the hope that we shall emerge on the other side transformed, convinced of the value of communitarianism/socialism/universal basic income/insert pet solution to world’s ills here. Could this period of lockdown lead us to the promised land? Or will we all just end up hating each other?

Here in the United States, the vast landscape practically invites you to disappear, self-isolate and start afresh — and many have done just that. Famously, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is an account of the two years and two months the author spent living in a hut in the woods, getting back to nature, seeking self-betterment, etc. He got a book out of it that high school kids are still made to read today — a pretty good result, all in all.

More from this author

Nineties Russia prepared me for coronageddon

By Daniel Kalder

Well, perhaps not. Thoreau isn’t actually a good example of life under lockdown. He complained of having more visitors than when he lived in town; the record was “twenty–five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof.” In Covid-19 conditions, he’d be a super spreader. A more recent American hermit, Ted Kaczynski, was more committed to avoiding people, and also got a book out of it. But he did wind up sending letter bombs to scientists and was sent to prison for a very long time for murder. So maybe not a good example, then.

No man is an island, as they say. Perhaps isolation brings better results if you do it with a select group of like-minded people? Certainly, many have tried to find perfection this way, forming self-contained communities dedicated to this or that vision of utopia throughout the nation’s history.

Take, for instance, the Rajneeshpuram community in Wasco County, Oregon, subject of Netflix’s fascinating documentary Wild, Wild Country. Rajneeshpuram was founded in 1981 by an Indian guru who went by the name of Rajneesh, after his foundation got into a spot of bother with the Indian authorities over millions of dollars in unpaid tax. Moving to the US, he hoped to be able to lead his followers to enlightenment unhampered by such petty, worldly concerns.

Alas, it didn’t turn out so well. One minute it was all peace vibes, maroon clothing and hippies rutting in public “like baboons”; the next it was all stockpiling guns, poisoning 751 people in the neighboring town, attempting to murder a US Attorney, prison sentences and deportation for the guru.

Suggested reading

The truth about lockdown in Leningrad

By Anna Reid

OK, so maybe that’s also not a good example. The good news is, there are lots of other American utopian communities to learn from. In fact, more than 100 were established in the century prior to the Civil War alone. Surely one or two of them worked out, right?

Well, some certainly managed to exist for a while. One group was founded in the early nineteenth century by a certain George Rapp, who was convinced that the return of Christ was imminent and that it was necessary to prepare for the moment. To that end, he established three communities: Harmony, Pennsylvania in 1804; followed by Harmony, Indiana in 1815; and then Economy, Pennsylvania in 1824.

Celibacy was part of the deal, until a cove styling himself as the “Count de Leon” arrived from Germany in 1831 and persuaded about 200 people to seek the pleasures of the flesh and demand their share of the community’s funds. Rapp wound up embroiled in lawsuits but lived on until 1847; the remaining celibate Rappites dwindled during the second half of the century, before finally disbanding in 1906.

The Shakers were another famous utopian community, founded by Ann Lee, the illiterate daughter of a Manchester blacksmith who had emigrated to the American colonies in 1774. “Mother” Ann declared that she was the ‘divine female principle’ completing Christ’s male principle, ushering in the millennium. Like Rapp, she imposed celibacy on her followers. In the 18 Shaker villages that popped up, the sexes were housed in separate barracks; it was forbidden to touch at communal dances; and men and women were seated at separate tables during meals. To compensate, they leaped up and down and writhed in ecstasy during services.

The Shakers, nonetheless, made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. To compensate, they performed ecstatic dances during their services, and the collective trembling which ensued led to their name. The Shakers made a good run of it for a community forbidden to procreate; the community existed for almost 200 years before dying out, and along the way opposed slavery and pioneered equality for women. Today their lemon pie lives on at Martha Stewart.com.

Suggested reading

Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

Bad news for unbelievers staring down lockdown: secular utopian communities were markedly less successful.

I dimly recall learning, back in my Scottish schooldays, about the model village of New Lanark, where the Welsh manufacturer and reformer Robert Owen conducted experiments in education, communal living and the amelioration of poverty. What my teachers didn’t tell me was that Owen then travelled to the US where he went full utopian socialist.

To get a head start, he purchased the already extant utopia of Harmony, Pennsylvania from the Rappites in 1825, renamed it “New Harmony”, and then burned80% of his fortune over the next two years as disagreements erupted over details as small as the correct form of government and the role of religion (Owen didn’t have any). A flurry of Owenite communities — 12 in all — suffered a series of similarly rapid rises and falls, starting with great hope before voting to abolish themselves.

A swift demise awaited many other utopias, whether they were established on the principle of free love (like the hopefully named community of Free Lovers at Davis House, Ohio, 1854-1858), vegetarianism (like Octagon City, Kansas, 1854-1858) Fourierism (like Brook Farm in Massachusetts, 1841-1847) or anarchy (like Fruit Hills, Ohio, 1845 – 1852).

The Icarians were more successful, perhaps because their founder — Etienne Cabet, a friend of Robert Owen — had written a novel, Voyage en Icarie, which at least illustrated what his followers should aim for (a primitive economy without private property or selfishness). The Icarians got off to a shaky start in Texas in 1848 but eventually its members founded settlements in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and California where they enjoyed four decades’ worth of splits, schisms and factionalism before eventually admitting defeat in 1898.

Perhaps the most ambitious utopians, however, lived at the Oneida Community, established by John Humphrey Noyes in New York state in 1848. Noyes, a relative of the US president Rutherford Hayes, extolled the virtues of “complex marriage”, by which he meant that everybody in the community was married to everybody else. This led to a complicated system of regulated polyamory.

The Oneida Community also dabbled in eugenics and held vigorous mutual self-criticism sessions. In 1879, however, Noyes fled to Canada to escape charges of statutory rape; there God blessed him with the revelation that conventional marriage was complex enough. The community disbanded the following year, only to promptly reinvent itself as a silverware manufacturer. By the 1980s Oneida, Ltd. made half the cutlery in the United States.

Suggested reading

Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

So, will we all emerge from this period of confinement — be it with our loved ones or locked in the airless virtual communities of the like-minded on social media — improved and enlightened? Almost certainly not: there is a reason why monks take a vow of silence, and why prisoners don’t hang out in the yard all day. Even so, the American utopian experience contains a couple of lessons that might help you deal with this lockdown, should it drag on.

Firstly, you stand a better chance of overcoming squabbles, factionalism and dissent — and generally holding out for a long time — if you hold Millenarian beliefs. The Shaker’s Mother Ann, for instance, persuaded her followers that she was the feminine incarnation of the Godhead, in regular communication with the angels and all that. So if you can channel a little of that sweet End Times action and convince yourself that the Coronavirus is actually a prelude to Christ’s imminent return and that now is the time to prepare — have at it. You might even find the whole lockdown experience strangely fulfilling.

On the other hand, the whole Millenarian thing can go down the pan very quickly if the wrong type of charismatic leader turns up. Take Rajneesh, for instance. So if anyone in your house (or on your Twitter feed / a Facebook group chat) is talking excitedly about the new world that will emerge post-Covid while growing a very long beard — watch out.

Finally, utopia does not await us on the other end of this, but you might still come up with some good ideas or develop some helpful new skills. The Owenites, for instance, opened a free library in New Harmony; the Shakers invented the clothespin. You can still buy Oneida cutlery; I use it to eat every day.

Maybe, that’s the solution. Forget utopia — if you want to get something valuable out of this lockdown experience, do something good for others or learn a craft. In particular, knowing how to make things with your hands might come in handy in the, er, “changed economic conditions” that await us once this is over.

Virgil, Aeneid.

Magic is a belief in short cuts. Whether it is turning lead into gold, making beautiful women fall in love with you, or transforming lepers into Olympic athletes, magic promises an instant route to where we want to go – quick as a flash, abracadabra. This fantasy of the philosopher’s stone appeals just as much today as it ever has, perhaps even more so.

That magical thinking persists in an age of science is not so much that people continue to be inexplicably stupid and superstitious, refusing to understand and accept the success of the scientific revolution; but rather that they continue to be, as humans always have been, wishful – a word that describes a point on the spectrum that slides dangerously between hopeful and deluded. At its core, a belief in magic is a belief in quick power. This is why magic is a ‘dark technology’. That is why magic is widely seen as dangerous.

In Marlow’s play, the ageing academic Dr Faustus – frustrated with conventional wisdom – summons a dark power in order to extend his life. He renounces his baptism and makes a deal with the devil. He has found a short cut. But this short cut is ultimately disastrous.

If Marlow were writing Faustus today he might make the hubristic academic someone like Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google. Kurzweil promises that the accelerating power of technology will one day conquer death itself. The day is coming, this modern-day necromancer insists, when we will be able to upload our core being into some cloud of software and live forever. We don’t think of this as magic because we have been persuaded that science is the very opposite of magic.

Further reading

Who wants to live forever?

By Nigel Cameron

This assumption seems patently obvious to people. As the sociologist Max Weber claimed, the modern, scientific world-view is one in which:

“…no mysterious forces are in play, eluding calculation, and that our calculations can (in theory) master everything… We need no longer to rely on magic as a device for mastering spirits or pleading with them – unlike the savages for whom such forces used to exist. Calculation and technical equipment do the job.”

It is a telling passage, for while it imagines magic as being overthrown by “calculation and technology” it also accepts that they “do the [same] job”. That is why the futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke was correct when he claimed: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

To be fair, the persistence of magic in an age of science has nothing to do with proper science or proper technology. Rather, it has to do with our over-inflated expectations of their power. Most of us non-scientists now rely on things for our everyday existence that we do not begin to understand. When we text our friends, surf the web, take a flight, or even turn on a light switch.

Further reading

Why flawed science should concern us all

By Tom Chivers

Some of us have a sketchy idea how these things work. But for most of us muggles, we rely on that which is beyond our understanding. And so we get used to the idea that there are forces beyond our ken that have this massive power to fix things. We end up trusting in the (to us) mysterious to solve our problems. We don’t know how it works but we believe it anyway. We end up believing in magic.

Perhaps the most dangerous form of magical thinking today comes when it is claimed that technology will be able to sort out the existential crisis of climate change. As scientists agree, the world has warmed up by 1.5 degrees since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, that coalition of technological ‘advance’ and international capitalism. The magical thinking of technology is that we can continue to dig for coal, fly on planes, eat meat; that we can continue to go on living beyond our environmental means, and that it doesn’t really matter because, one day, someone will come up with some (magical) technological fix. This is wishful thinking.

Our culture has surrendered unquestioningly to the power and promise of technology. It has become the omnipresent grid by which we chart our way in the world – chips with everything – offering us salvation from the threat of the unknown. Through technology we imagine ourselves to be masters of the universe. And that we are more advanced than those Weber called the “savages” that went before us. Technology flatters us with the fantasy of our specialness. We are now a super species, approaching the power of the gods themselves.

Further reading

Have our scientists run out of steam?

By Peter Franklin

Forget Harry Potter. The place where that magical thinking is flourishing today is within the world of technology. The lead magicians of our times are fêted as public figures. They work in NASA and Apple and Tesla. Elon Musk imagines we can evade human extinction by founding a colony on Mars. Post-humanists imagine Homo sapiens evolving into some entirely new species; stronger, faster, longer-lasting.

Algorithms curate our reality, determining our online experience, knowing us better than we know ourselves. Technology in agriculture will provide more food for the needy. Artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, promising potentially limitless solutions to the human condition. DNA wizardry imagines it can create life itself in a petri dish. “Thy kingdom come,” we all intone. As with magic, we are mastering the unknown. There is no need for us to be afraid of the dark any more. Technology is the new sacred, the new salvation. All hail!

Technology, once a means to an end, has now become an end in itself, and an object of worship. And woe betide those who question this new realm of the sacred, for they will be met with the same angry reaction as those, throughout history, who have dared to question the gods: “All criticism of it brings down impassioned, outraged, and excessive reactions,” as the great Jacques Ellul wrote in The Technological Society.

Further reading

All hail the AI dictatorship

By James Bloodworth

Why is magic so dangerous? Because it refuses to accept the existence of limits. Faustus is a morality tale about a man who transgressed the limits of what it is to be human. Likewise, climate change is turning into a morality tale about a planet that has transgressed the limits of sustainability. Both are tales of human hubris: and with climate change we have become like Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

Real science rightly pushes against the boundaries of human ignorance. But there are certain boundaries that it cannot wipe away because they are the constituent conditions of what it is to be a human being. The boundaries Faustus perceived to be a limit were, in fact, the defining features of what it is to be human. Think of it a bit like this: Faustus pushed over the walls of his existence, thinking they imprisoned him, not appreciating they sustained the roof over his head. This is how magic destroys us. And why, for centuries, people have been afraid of it. Remember: some things are just too good to be true.

From the same author

Why we need more superstition

By Giles Fraser