Utopia in the Service of Modernity: on the Sources of Cooperativism

chapter 1 Utopia in the Service of Modernity: On the Sources of Cooperativism

Bartłomiej Błesznowski

Utopianism is the polestar of all planning. ernst bloch, “Anticipated Reality”

The science of society rests on the accord between social reason and social practice. Well, it will be given to our era to admire that science […], in all its grandeur and sublime harmony! pierre-joseph proudhon, System of Economical Contradictions: or, the Philoso- phy of Poverty ∵

The roots of cooperativism, which is a political, social, and partly also histo- riosophical idea, reach at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first source of the cooperative idea lies much further back though: in the dream, present from the dawn of thought, of creating an ideal society based on cooperation, mutual aid, and equal access to power and goods. With the beginning of modernity and the decline of the old sacral-feudal order this “utopian”—as some might sneer—dream assumed previously unknown di- mensions. Strengthened by the Enlightenment ideal of reason and the moral imperative, it acquired many forms and grew continually in the ideological landscape of modern history, sometimes resulting solely in ivory-tower per- egrinations and at others leaving a permanent stamp on world events. One of the indubitably most emblematic figures in the history of cooperativism and simultaneously the most difficult to appraise and classify is Charles Fourier, the self-styled apostle of social renovation, a dreamer, visionary of happy humanity, and author of several dozen works in which serious political criticism is combined with theosophy and mesmerism, and economic theory is dependent on a theory of planetary movement. In placing him in his era, Walter Benjamin noted that

2 Błesznowski

The secret cue for the Fourierist utopia is the advent of machines. The phalanstery is designed to restore human beings to a system of relation- ships in which morality becomes superfluous. […] Fourier does not dream of relying on virtue for this; rather, he relies on an efficient functioning of society, whose motive forces are the passions. […] Fourier harmony is the necessery product of this combinatory play.1

With his characteristic penetration, Benjamin listed the basic features of the utopia that was to give rise to the idea of free associations and consequently to begin certain socialist, solidarity, and cooperative movements. First, at the basis of Fourier’s utopia—which comes after the initial civilizational development and the industrial revolution—lies the idea that the foremost task of the new egalitarian society is to free humanity from the shackles by which civilization has fettered it. It was not, however, a matter of returning humanity to the state of prehistoric natural communities, leading interdependent lives without complicated machines and tools, undisturbed by greed, but rather of giving power over industrial processes back to the people. The aim, as Marx would later say, was to invalidate the process of alienation, in which goods and mon- ey, through their social vehicles—the owners of large capital—rule the greater part of humanity. If the world is full of riches, they are not for the workers, not for their producers, as these are divided from their own products. It’s a “topsy- turvy”2 world, claimed Fourier, in which “penury results from excess itself,”3 that is, from the concentration of capital, the negative “sympathy” of things. The growth of industrial civilization thus stimulates development of the idea of free associations in a dual, somewhat subversive sense: industrialization and capitalism, while leading to poverty and the exploitation of working people, also furnish them with an opportunity no previous generation enjoyed; in pushing them to the edge of expropriation and economic vegetation, it causes them to begin seeking alternative paths to ensure decent living conditions for themselves and participation in power. Here, however, Fourier’s thought en- counters its basic weakness: How was the future society to be reached? How were new laws to be effectively decreed? How was a society that could survive within capitalism to be constructed? Later cooperativists would say that the path derives not from above, not from the office of a legislator or visionary

1 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts, and London, England 1999, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press p. 16. 2 M. Orsetti, Karol Fourier. Apostoł pracy radosnej [Charles Fourier: The Apostle of Joyous Work], Warsaw 1927, Wydawnictwo Związku Spółdzielni Spożywców rp, p. 15. 3 F. Armand, R. Maublanc, Fourier, translated J. Hochfeld, Warsaw 1949, Książka i Wiedza, p. 210. Translated from the Polish—Tr.