“Charles Fourier was the first to show the qualitative difference between a free society and an unfree society.”

–Herbert Marcuse, The End of Utopia

All that remains of the lodge at Llano del Rio.

The ruins of Llano del Rio, the largest and most important secular utopian colony in California’s history, sit scattered and forgotten just off of Pearblossom Highway between the desert gateway towns of Palmdale and Victorville, an hour’s drive northeast from Los Angeles. Palmdale is home to United States Air Force Plant 42, a sprawling complex where some of the most advanced aircraft in the US arsenal are built and tested, including the recently notable B-2 nuclear bomber. Victorville boasts the Southern California Logistics airport, a former Air Force base and now boneyard for hundreds of retired jetliners. It’s also a popular filming location. Chris Nolan crashed a 747 into a hanger here for Tenet – I crashed an FPV drone into derelict former base housing while filming a VR project a few years before that (hard to resist, the impulse to crash things out here). In the stretch of empty desert between the two cities, straight-out-of-Fallout General Atomics (“Global Progress Through Technology”) operates private airfields where they develop Predator, Reaper, and other cheerfully-named combat drones.

So, all in all, a strange place to be visiting with utopian ghosts. And in this context, being attacked by a pack of menacing black dogs patrolling the ruins of a forgotten utopian experiment seems, in hindsight, all but inevitable. But we’ll get to that.

This is Pirate Utopia, a newsletter about stories, systems, and hidden worlds (and sometimes utopia) by Stefan Kubicki.

I’d driven this section of highway many times over my years in Southern California, including when I moved to LA back in 2012, obliviously passing the ruins at the end of a long cross-country drive. It was only years later that I came across the name Llano del Rio in another forgotten artifact: Robert V. Hine’s 1953 book California’s Utopian Colonies, a survey of a period, difficult to imagine today, when California sprouted dozens of earnest, largely working-class utopian experiments that burned briefly and fizzled. Books can and have been written about what happened there: WWI and the crushing of a generation’s idealism; the Russian revolution and the first Red Scare in America, when people really thought a homegrown Bolshevik revolution was imminent; and the dogs of reality that invariably circle any utopian project foolhardy enough to actually make a go of it, waiting for the right opening to reassert their truths about how human things are and how they can only ever be. Or, as the great American cynic and literary disappearing act Ambrose Bierce put it at the time, writing about another “failed” attempt:

Of the amiable asses who have founded the “Altrurian” colony at Mark West it ought to be sufficient to explain that their scheme is based upon the intellectual diversions of such humorists as Plato, More, Fourier, Bellamy and Howells. That assures the ludicrous fizzle of the enterprise.

I’ve played the Ambrosian cynic at another point in my life, so I know the territory. But I think that if you squint a little, you can almost detect a hint of warmth (jealousy?) in Bierce’s evisceration of the Altrurians. And then he goes off and disappears in Mexico on a doomed quest to link up with Pancho Villa and experience the revolution first-hand. Anyway – this being a newsletter about stories (or so it says on the tin), some questions came to me in the desert that day amidst the ruins, while running from the dogs. What was this place, exactly? What drove these people to, against all common sense, try to organize a community along lines that went counter to nearly everything America supposedly stood for? And just what exactly was going on in the US at the end of the 1800s that suddenly caused all these utopian colonies to pop up like mushrooms after the rain?

As it turns out, that part of the story starts in France, with an exceedingly strange and interesting man named Charles Fourier.

Fourier was born 1772, making him a contemporary of the United States. His models of how society should function – or, I should say, disfigured versions of them – would become the blueprints for the first wave of intentional communities in fresh-faced America, still unscarred by civil war, like Brook Farm in Massachusetts and the imaginatively-named Utopia, Ohio (spoiler alert: not utopia).

As one of the original (in every sense of the word) utopian socialist thinkers, he was a late product of the Enlightenment and believed that it was possible to apply the limitless power of rational thinking to engineer a better society. He had a few big, foundational ideas that were radical at the time, even among social reformers, and with which we are (apparently, unfortunately) still grappling with today.

Fourier was the earliest major intellectual voice – almost certainly the first man – to advocate for complete gender equality. He literally coined the word “feminism”. He called women’s liberation “the general principle for all social progress”, and meant not just economic and political liberation, but sexual liberation, too. His solution to freeing women from what he considered to be a situation amounting to slavery (and his solution to the mess of Civilization in general) was to reorganize society around communal life in social units he called “phalanxes”.

The bedrock of these imagined communities was to be diligently-organized cooperation. Life in a phalanx would revolve around groups of carefully-assembled individuals with complimentary character traits rotating through a wide assortment of jobs they were uniquely suited for. These rotations would be made up of two-hour shifts (no more, no less) and “gamified” so as to make labor more akin to sport, with different work groups playfully competing with each other (the decidedly non-dystopian version of that Andor episode, no electrified floors required).

This meticulously calibrated arrangement left little room for spontaneity, and Fourier has taken heat for his mechanical – the world cybernetic is hard to avoid here – approach to human flourishing. As Italo Calvino put it:

Fourier’s dream, described in the title of one of his chapters as “the alliance of the marvelous with arithmetic,” we might today call “the alliance of Eros with cybernetics” without weakening the force of the contradiction, the irreconcilability that exists between dream and reality. The way we see it, Harmony is one vast controller of desires. The phalanx relies on a constantly active computer to make the calculations needed for the perfect sorting out of the various groups. Fourier worked for a lifetime in order to establish data that would bring about the happiness of the human race on punched cards.

In this sense, the socioeconomic organization of the phalanx could be considered a precursor to undertakings like Cybersyn: a self-regulating cybernetic socialist economy. But those were limited to material production, and Fourier had a much bigger playing field in mind: all of human activity, internal and external.

He considered poverty, rather than inequality, to be the root cause of social disorder. His idea was, sensibly, to raise the floor rather than lowering the roof. Disparities in wealth were acceptable as long as wages were sufficiently high, and he advocated for what was essentially a basic income to ensure those unable to work could get by. But lest we take Engels’ inclusion of him in the Marxist socialist camp too canonically, it’s also worth pointing out that Fourier’s phalanxes had investors, and profits were distributed according to ownership stakes. That being said, investors or not, every member of the phalanx worked their two hour shifts.

If there’s a single idea of Fourier’s that’s managed to break through to wider public awareness, it’s that of the phalanstery: the giant building or compound which would house a self-sustaining phalanx. This is interesting, unfortunate, and inevitable all at once: as a low-effort entry point into Fourier’s utopia, and the most concrete and easy to visualize element, it became a stand-in for a far more nuanced and complex system of thinking. The fixation on the building, the outward manifestation of something that required complete inner transformation, will help us understand why Fourierism failed to take root in reality.

Now, whenever you come across a utopia in your travels, a good question to ask once you’ve verified your state of sobriety (and right after “who makes the rules?” but before “where’s the exit?”) is “who cleans the toilets and why do they do it?” For Fourier, the superficial answer was whoever wanted to make some more money. Work would be compensated based on how desirable a job was, with incentives set based on the needs of the phalanx. But there was also another answer: whoever loved shit the most.

Fourier’s ideas about labor tapped into the essence of why we do things, what sorts of activities give us pleasure, and how those impulses might be harnessed in the service of building a harmonious society. His most radical idea in terms of social organization – I’d say even more radical than omnigamy, which today feels like just another quaint Bay Area thing – was that utopia required a reconfiguration of our relationship to work. As Marcuse put it, “the transformation of labor into pleasure is the central idea in Fourier’s giant socialist utopia.” To put it more bluntly, he connected labor to desire and made work an extension of the erotic.

Before getting into the logic of that, a few words about Fourier and his view on human “passions” are in order, because it’s one of the things that makes him utterly unique among social thinkers. Fourier didn’t believe in changing, erasing, or otherwise tinkering with our innate drives and desires. He did not set out to “fix” human nature. For him, there was no Original Sin except for Civilization itself, which he spared no vitriol for. He considered the passions the essence of mankind, inherently good, and his grand project became one of identifying, classifying, and integrating them into a holistic framework where they could be harnessed to build a harmonious society. His focus on our innate drives is one of the reasons recent scholarship considers him more of a precursor to Freud than Marx, but the truth of Fourier is that he was and remains unclassifiable, and any attempts at comparison will only ever illuminate a sliver of the whole.

So how would this work in practice? We all have specific things that bring us pleasure and satisfaction. Some of these are intrinsic to individuals (Fourier developed an elaborate classification system for types of character, identifying 810 – a bit more than Myers-Briggs), while others are tied to life stages. Fourier’s contribution to pedagogy was that children, for instance, were not underdeveloped humans to be civilized, but rather industrious early-stage people with a predilection for playing in the dirt, making noise, and cultivating chaos. Why not put those qualities to use? And so he did: the kids who enjoyed disgusting things (I’m reminded of myself and my brother planting firecrackers in dog shit outside our housing estate in central Poland) would be organized into Little Hordes, responsible for collecting the phalanstery’s garbage. Here’s Calvino again:

Thus what in Civilization is a vice becomes in Harmony a passion much appreciated by society, and what in Civilization is a repellent chore becomes in Harmony a game that answers to an inner vocation. Instead of being looked down upon, the Little Hordes are surrounded by the veneration of the public, their members are thought of as little saints, and this prestige stimulates their dedication to the common welfare. The children of the Little Hordes wear hussar uniforms, blow trumpets, and ring bells, as well as ride ponies (whereas the Little Bands, composed of gentler children who tend flowers, are mounted on zebras, animals of which Fourier was very fond). Making noise and using rough language are the prerogatives of the Little Hordes, indivisible from their social duties, which include catching reptiles and preparing tripe in the butcher shops.

Try to picture, for a moment, this merry band of filthy uniformed first graders riding around on ponies, swearing profusely while picking up the neighborhood trash. Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Adam Curtis, it turns out, has also gone down the Fourier rabbit hole. He provides another, less rosy example of attractive labor:

Fourier had no truck with the idea of changing people. All the different things inside their heads was just what they were like - and you worked with that extraordinary range of human nature and channelled it to create societies in which everyone played a role suited to their nature. His vision is wonderfully optimistic. Even potential murderers are allowed to work off their psychotic impulses - as butchers.

In his final years, a circle of devout disciples sprung up around Fourier in Paris. They took his ideas and cherry-picked, fixating on the easiest to digest – ideas that could be popularized – while selectively ignoring (or even burying) his more esoteric writings on sex and cosmology. They were so successful in this that his radical treatise on love and sex, Le Nouveau Monde amoureux, was only published for the first time in the 1960s. With its proposals of polyamory and omnigamy, affairs “in orchestra” and “amorous quadrilles”, it was soon taken up by proponents of less conventional lifestyles looking for philosophical systems to underpin their explorations. Which is ironic, because for all his talk of wildly varied sexual unions (in any conceivable configuration – remember, this was a utopia of satisfied desires), he had a prudish side, and many have wondered whether he actually experienced any of the sexual satisfaction he wrote so voluminously about. Amidst all the copulation, it’s also worth mentioning that the highest form of love for Fourier was Platonic love: a spiritual, “angelic” union. The caveat being that such a union would be maintained in its purity by way of copious sex with other people.

Fourier was a contemporary of another prolific writer on taboo subjects, the Marquis de Sade. Both had very different perspectives on kinks and fetishes, or “amorous manias” (to use Fourier’s term). In the utopia of fulfilled desires, where no passion is wrong or shameful, the satisfaction of all of these would be consensually arranged. Since nothing would ever need to be repressed, de Sade’s sadism would evaporate, according to Calvino, “in the perfect distributive mechanism of the societal system, in which every secret propensity can be understood and satisfied.”

As you can tell, I have a soft spot for these early utopians. Here, not unlike Nikolai Fyodorov, was a lone figure toiling in obscurity, envisioning worlds and ways of being with others that couldn’t be further from the realities of his time, and so far beyond his contemporaries that it’s taken generations to start coming to terms with his ideas. Fourier’s books didn’t sell (again, unlike Fyodorov, he really did try), and he waited patiently for the wealthy patron who would come along and bankroll the first phalanstery. Later in his life, his followers latched onto the phalanstery, the physical manifestation of his thought, while sidelining the weirder stuff. After all, it’s easier to build a building than to internalize an entirely new worldview.

Incidentally, in their fixation on the phalanstery, the Fourierists (and to a lesser extent, Fourier himself) anticipated 20th century ideas on how architecture could be used to transform society: Le Corbusier’s “machine for living”, Bauhaus beliefs that good design leads to better citizens, and Soviet ideas about how the right kind of building would forge the New Soviet Man. All these movements inherited the Fourierist faith in the transformative power of physical space, while sweeping under the rug the messier social and psychological realities of what social change entails. We can trace the roots of all of these movements back to the phalanstery, including what I think is its most closely-related living descendent: the arcology, as exemplified by Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti.

Arcosanti shows its wrinkles up close, but still well worth the trip (buy a wind bell).

The credit for “rediscovering” Fourier for the modern era, after he’d languished in drawers and dusty archives for decades, goes to the founder of surrealism: André Breton. As I write these words in Mexico City, I’m reminded of the story where Breton, on a cultural exchange commission from the French government, travels to Mexico in 1938. Nobody meets him at the airport. He finds himself adrift and lost in the city, unclear on what to do, where to go, and indeed why he’s there in the first place. He ends up meeting Leon Trotsky (not long before his assassination), but it’s his comment on the whole debacle that sticks: “I don’t know why I came here. Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.”

Breton escaped to New York in the early years of WWII and travelled throughout America, taking a particular interest in the native Pueblo peoples (phalansteries, anyone?). And it was in the aftermath of the war, in 1947, that he wrote his Ode to Charles Fourier – a strangely moving narrative poem, part dialogue with Fourier’s ghost and part meditation on utopia in the wake of one of the darkest episodes in human history.

From Breton’s Ode to Charles Fourier, translated by Kenneth White.

The mystery of Fourier is that he has somehow managed to remain, despite all of his antiquated and strange ideas, relevant, where so many other social theorists are all but forgotten. For some reason he continues to strike a chord with a wildly diverse group of thinkers and artists. I’m not sure why that is, but I have a hunch: there’s an unresolved element in his writing, something that remains out of rational reach, even among the lists and the taxonomies and daily work schedules. Fourier resists an easy conclusion, a neat classification. He leaves us with a void we can’t help but fill with ourselves. And socialists, anarchists, urbanists, Freudians, surrealists, and a steady procession of utopians (to name just a few) have been inserting themselves into that void ever since.

Adam Curtis has some final words, too:

Fourier’s romantic innocence seems intensely shocking to us today - because it seems so naive and optimistic. But it is their power to shock us in this way that potentially makes these long-forgotten utopian ideas genuinely revolutionary. You may not believe in fairies, but in today’s world it’s hard to believe in the infallibility of the laws of free-market economics. So which one would you choose?

While a few would-be phalansteries sprung up across Europe, it was in naive and optimistic America that Fourier’s imagined utopias would be attempted in earnest. But they would be brief attempts, because Fourierism proved itself to be the Dwarf Fortress of utopian thought: obsessively detailed, maddeningly complex, and utterly unplayable by normal human beings.

Before waving goodbye to Fourier, there’s a final question worth pondering, if only because others have asked it over the years. Was he nuts? Jonathan Beecher, who spent twenty years writing the most comprehensive biography of the man in English, weighs in:

Having lived (in a fashion) with Fourier for the better part of two decades, I think I know him better than I know a number of my closest friends. I would not care to argue that the man was entirely sane. On the other hand, I fail to see what might be gained if we could establish, beyond a doubt, that Fourier was mad. It is not given to all of us to imagine a world populated by antilions and anticrocodiles. Nor is it given to all of us to see as clearly as Fourier saw into the contradictions, the wasted opportunities, and the hidden possibilities of our own lives.

The better question might be: which of the great visionaries of the past, those who saw possibilities far beyond the confines of their time, would we consider paragons of sanity?

In part two we’ll dig into how Fourierism crashed and burned in America, explore the second – and arguably final – wave of American socialist utopian experiments, and, finally, meet the titular dogs of Llano del Rio.

From a rainy Mexico City,

S.

P.S. If you want more Fourier, I highly recommend Italo Calvino’s three essays on the man, which you’ll find in The Uses of Literature.