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“To the great scandal of some, under the scarcely less reproving eyes of others, raising its weight of wings, your liberty.”

—André Breton, Ode to Charles Fourier

In the first part, before the dogs came, I explored the ruins of Llano del Rio: a utopian colony founded in 1914 by socialist lawyer and almost mayor of Los Angeles Job Harriman. We’ll get to him. That led us back in time to Charles Fourier, an eccentric and possibly mad Frenchman whose strange ideas galvanized a wave of utopian experiments across America in the 1840s.

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The dogs, in case you had doubts.

Fourier died in Paris in 1837. Less than a decade later, there were at least thirty Fourierist “phalanxes” spread across the United States. And the man responsible for this was a disciple and utopian propagandist named Albert Brisbane.

Brisbane was born in upstate New York near Rochester to a wealthy landowning family. He ended up studying at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he was quickly seduced, as Americans in Europe have been for centuries, by socialism. Specifically, he became interested in the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon, another – the other – early “utopian socialist”. I won’t go into Saint-Simon here. Suffice to say, we ended up living in his world, not Fourier’s.

This is Pirate Utopia, a newsletter about stories, systems, and hidden worlds (and sometimes utopia) by Stefan Kubicki. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here.

Brisbane quickly broke with Saint-Simonianism. Hunting around for a new belief system, he came across a treatise by Fourier and immediately packed his bags, traveling to Paris to seek out the master himself. Fourier invited the American into his circle, and Brisbane became a true believer. In his wife’s biography of him, which is, confusingly, mostly his own autobiography, he writes of his discovery:

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These views of Fourier produced a great revolution in my mind. The darkness which had rested on human destiny was dissipated; light began to shine in. In the application of law to the social organism I saw an invariable guide for the mind in the great work of social reconstruction; I saw a scientific certainty taking the place of all the blind, futile efforts of human reason which had so long failed in its legislative work. This was the first gleam of intellectual satisfaction which had come to me.
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Upon returning home, he published one of the first major American utopian treatises, synthesizing Fourier’s writings with his own, far less developed ideas. It was called The Social Destiny of Man.

It reads like a sermon, a distilled-for-American-tastebuds version of Fourierism with heavy religious undertones that Fourier himself never suggested, and would probably be appalled by:

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Association will establish Christianity practically upon Earth. It will make the love of God and the love of the neighbor the greatest desire, and the practice of all men. Temptation to wrong will be taken from the paths of men, and a thousand perverting and degrading circumstances and influences will be purged from the social world.
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Fourier believed all human desires were natural and could be integrated into a harmonious society. Brisbane had scarcely left Paris and was already in the business of replacing those with a single desire. He knew his audience wasn’t exactly the Parisian intellectual elite – though to be fair, Fourier’s audience in Paris wasn’t exactly that, either – and when he wrote about making “the love of the neighbor the greatest desire”, you can see how far he’d departed from Fourier already. Unless that was code for polygamy, which Brisbane took to later, albeit privately (and without the consent of his wives).

Brisbane is an archetype we’ll encounter in America again and again: the enterprising upstart who travels abroad, encounters strange new ideas, then returns home and repackages them for domestic consumption, adding some of his own special sauce for good measure. Replace Fourierism with Buddhism/Hinduism and the cycle practically repeats itself play by play in the 1960s counterculture, with Alan Watts or any number of others standing in for Brisbane.

Popularizing Fourier’s ideas was made easier by the fact that Brisbane wasn’t building the American socialist utopian project from scratch. The foundations had already been laid by another man: Robert Owen, who launched the first wave of American experimental communities in the 1820s as the father of a movement called Owenism. Your neighborhood grocery co-op, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those, is a distant relative of this movement. As is Mondragon, the largest and most successful cooperative business in the world.

Unlike Fourier, Owen took a swing at utopia with money in his pockets and a willingness to get his hands dirty.

New Lanark, New Harmony

A self-made textile entrepreneur from Wales who came of age working in the rapidly industrializing mills of Manchester, Owen was an intellectually curious, industrious character who genuinely cared for the welfare of workers. Though he had little formal education, he developed his heavily Enlightenment-colored moral views as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.

In 1799 Owen and a few partners bought the New Lanark Mill outside Glasgow. Having first-hand experience of the brutal factory conditions of the time, he resolved to run New Lanark on more enlightened principles. He began slowly instituting a series of reforms that were revolutionary, including shorter workdays (he coined the slogan “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest” at a time when 16-hour days were the norm), continuing education for employees, and free schools for their children.

At the time, many factories operated a truck system (which will rear its ugly head later in America’s utopian colonies) – instead of being paid real money, workers were compensated in tokens that were only good for purchases from the factory store. These were notorious for selling shoddy merchandise at highly inflated prices. Owen pioneered the co-op model when he instituted a truck shop at New Lanark that sold quality goods at near cost, passing on the savings to his employees.

There have been plenty of socialists who inherited massive fortunes accumulated by unrepentant capitalists, but as far as I’m aware, Owen is the only real example of a successful industrialist who evolved into a socialist during the course of actually running a profitable factory. Needless to say, his pro-worker stance caused him endless problems with his partners. When they protested that his social reforms were costing them too much money, Owen bought them out, outmaneuvered an attempt by his board to auction off the mill, and brought on a new set of partners more amenable to his ideas (including Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism).

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The mill, incidentally, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site housing a lovely hotel.

New Lanark became renowned throughout Europe as an example of how a successful factory could be run without sacrificing the well-being of its workers. Among the many statesmen and reformers who visited the mill was future Tsar Nicholas I of Russia (one wonders what lessons he took from it, since he went on to become one of Europe’s most reactionary autocrats). But despite making huge strides in improving the lot of his workers, Owen kept bumping up against the limits of what was possible under industrial capitalism and within the structure of a for-profit company. So in late 1824, learning that the town of Harmony, Indiana had been put up for sale, he packed his bags and together with one of his sons and a Scottish friend improbably named Donald McDonald boarded a ship for America. There, he planned on putting his ideas into practice without the compromises and obstacles he’d faced at New Lanark. He would purchase Harmony and use it as the foundation for a functioning model society based on the principles of cooperation.

Because of his widely-publicized success with New Lanark and his reputation in reformist circles, Owen was greeted with interest on arrival in America. He deftly leveraged his reputation to gain access to members of the highest echelons of government. After purchasing the town of Harmony and renaming it the New Harmony Community of Equality, he set out on a massive promotional tour. He even addressed Congress to outline his utopian vision. The audience for his speeches, if you can believe it, included five U.S. presidents (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and the President-elect, John Quincy Adams). These were almost certainly the first discussions of socialism (in practice if not in name, since the term hadn’t entered wider circulation yet) in the Americas, and at the highest imaginable level.

Unfortunately for Owen and for the rest of us, those speeches marked the high point of his American experiment. Because after investing the bulk of his fortune in New Harmony, things started to go wrong almost immediately.

Unlike New Lanark, where he’d methodically and gradually introduced reforms into a functioning system, New Harmony was a blank slate. He’d purchased the shell of a town complete with houses, agricultural fields, and some light industrial infrastructure, but it had no community aside from a few caretakers. The purpose of his promotional tour was to recruit residents. And in that, at least, he was successful – almost to a fault. When he returned to New Harmony in April, its population had already grown to more than 800 people. His son, who oversaw the township in its early months while his father was away recruiting, later described the members of the community as “a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.”

New Harmony’s trajectory foreshadowed the fate of the Fourierist colonies that were to come. Within two years, it collapsed into infighting and factionalism before Owen declared the experiment over. But the town and many members remained, and some of its utopian ideas carried on. So maybe there’s another way of looking at it – not as a failure, but as an “exit to reality”. An experiment that tested the boundaries of what society could be, discovering new ground in one direction, impenetrable walls in another, and then disbanded, leaving behind a redrawn map of the possible. Or as John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community (sex colony turned flatware producing powerhouse) put it:

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We made a raid into an unknown country, charted it, and returned without the loss of a single man, woman, or child.
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Owen bequeathed his interest in the town to his sons, who stayed in America, and returned to the United Kingdom, where he remained active as a social reformer and godfather of the nascent cooperative movement. He died penniless in 1858.

Oh, remember Fourier’s designs for his phalanstery?

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This was how Owen envisioned New Harmony:

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The two men never met, but they were separately working out their ideas for what a model society might look like at roughly the same time, in the opening decades of the 19th century. There’s no evidence to suggest they read each other’s work, but it’s impossible to ignore the similarities of their pastoral industrial estates.

With the Western world undergoing a transition from the field to the factory, maybe it was all just in the air. How else to picture harmony, a resolution to these seemingly opposed ways of organizing society and production, than as an idyllic synthesis of both?

Time for Association

The end of New Harmony leaves a utopia-shaped void in the American public’s imagination until Albert Brisbane returns from France and starts publishing books and articles espousing Fourier’s ideas with the intensity of a graphomaniac.

What happens next is unclear. By some accounts, he’s introduced to a man named Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune (and later congressman), who takes to him immediately and offers him a column where he can expound on Fourierism to his heart’s content. By other accounts, it’s Brisbane who seeks out Greeley and pays him a sum of $500 for the right to publish a front-page column in the Tribune. Whichever it was, the result is that by 1842, a short 15 years after the failure of New Harmony, Brisbane is pitching Fourierism – specifically the concept of “Association” – to the American public from the front page of one of the country’s preeminent newspapers. And America seems primed to hear him out.

Brook Farm might be the most well-known utopian commune of the 1840s, thinly fictionalized in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. Founded just outside Boston by Transcendentalists, and counting Hawthorne as one of its first (though reluctant) members, it’s a great example of the strange way in which homegrown self-reliance became mixed with Brisbane’s version of Fourierism.

Transcendentalism was a movement of spiritual and literary individualists who believed in the primacy of personal experience over received dogma, in the divine not being outside of this world but an integral part of its fabric. Think Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. Brook Farm was meant to be a place where these ideas could be embodied in day to day communal life.

And it functioned this way for a few years, imperfectly but reliably, until Brisbane’s Fourierism started to permeate the wider culture. Then things took a turn.

By 1844, interest in Fourierism had reached its zenith. It seemed like every week a new phalanx was popping up somewhere inspired by Brisbane’s newspaper columns, often with little to no capital and members utterly inexperienced in the day-to-day realities of self-sufficiency. An organization was established called – I’m not making this up – the General Association for the Friends of Association in the United States. At the founding convention, its members promptly dismiss Fourier’s more unconventional ideas and commit to building what can only be described as a communitarian bureaucracy, a “Union of Associations” to coordinate the efforts of the newly formed phalanxes.

It was around this time that Fourierism found its way to quiet Brook Farm, where the community of transcendentalist individualists promptly and somewhat inexplicably rebranded as a phalanx. And then they committed the cardinal mistake, the Fourierist kiss of death: they embarked on the construction of a phalanstery.

The project subsumed everything else. Quality of life on the farm deteriorated and the atmosphere became charged and unpleasant. There was food rationing. Staples like coffee and tea disappeared from the dinner table. Everyone got smallpox. But construction on the phalanstery doggedly continued, in a desperate race against time to complete the thing that would supposedly make the rest of Fourierism magically work. In 1846, just as it was nearing completion, it burned to the ground.

Most other phalansteries didn’t meet such spectacular ends, because they were never built. The few that were consumed capital and resources that could’ve been put to better practical use elsewhere, and accelerated the dissolution of the communities that constructed them. If the Fourierist mania of the 1840s taught future utopians anything, it was to think long and hard before making a monumental and impractical structure the centerpiece of their project.

Sensing American Fourierism spiraling, or maybe out of an awareness of having thoroughly perverted Fourier’s teachings, Brisbane, at the height of his influence as the figurehead of Association, packed his bags again and absconded to Paris. His stated reason was that he needed to “do more research”, maybe trying to figure out where he went wrong (he also wanted to learn to play music and embark on a study of embryology, apparently). But the effect was that without his symbolic leadership and guidance – and most importantly, without his regular newspaper columns promoting it – Fourierism fizzled.

Returning to America after his trip and surveying the failing phalanxes of Association, he washed his hands of it all:

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I thought that if one Association could be successfully started it would serve as a model which would attract all classes to the idea as soon as its advantages were made known. I expected of course that some years would pass over before such an undertaking could be realized as the result of an ardent propagation; but when the little experiments were begun and rushed incoherently without means and without knowledge, finally failing, I saw that there was no hope for success in the practical field. These failures had discredited the idea in the minds of the people; and so many false opinions and so many prejudices had been aroused, that I felt it was hopeless to begin anew.
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Finally, inevitably, he turned on Fourier himself, despite the man having died a decade earlier:

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I said to myself: “If ever a man deserved to be hanged for intellectual rashness and violence, it is Fourier!”
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Ending the chapter of his life devoted to the project of Association, Brisbane went on to travel throughout Europe, exploring esoteric subjects like animal magnetism and the culture of the vine (wine), along with regular visits to the continent’s insane asylums:

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I witnessed many other strange phenomena in the different insane asylums of Europe which I always visited with profound interest. A singular fact connected with such visits was that after having spent three or four hours in those institutions I imagined every one crazy about me when I came out.
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He tried his hand as an inventor, sinking time and money into a failed project to bring a vacuum oven to market, and married several times. Sometimes his wives overlapped, resulting in accusations of bigamy. It seems the one part of Fourierism that really stuck for him (despite leaving it out of his Americanized version) was the omnigamy.

Looking Backward

Most of the Fourierist experiments in America ended by the 1850s, and the Civil War wiped out any remaining popular utopian sentiment for a long time. But, like a brood of cicadas, the ideas stayed underground, dormant, waiting for their moment. And that moment came at the height of the Gilded Age with Edward Bellamy’s publication of a novel called Looking Backward in 1888. It went on to sell more than a million copies and became a cultural phenomenon.

Bellamy, like Brisbane, spent part of his youth studying in Germany. So we can guess what that means. He later worked as a journalist and trained as a lawyer before turning to literature, seeing little success until Looking Backward.

It has to be said upfront: Looking Backward is a bad novel, in the same way that Atlas Shrugged is a bad novel. Both belong to a long tradition of sociopolitical manifestos masquerading as fiction that stretches all the way back to Plato. But that hardly matters. It managed to do something few books ever do – to tap into the zeitgeist so exactly that any shortcomings of the work were liquified by the sheer force of its arrival in the culture.

The story goes something like this: Julian West, a wealthy young conservative living in Boston in 1887, is having trouble sleeping. He builds himself a sound-proof bedroom in his basement and hires a hypnotist to help him fall asleep. And sleep he does. For more than a century.

What follows is basically the plot of Encino Man: A retired physician, Dr. Leete, discovers our man during an excavation underneath what is now his house, and rouses West from his 113-year slumber. He then proceeds to introduce him to the United States of the year 2000 (as well as his pretty daughter).

The rest of the book is description after description of the strange new world West finds himself in. There was no violent revolution in America. Capitalist monopolies grew and grew until they were all nationalized. Money has been replaced by government-issued debit cards, and everyone, regardless of their job, gets allocated the same amount of credits, eliminating poverty and inequality. Industry has been militarized: young people get conscripted into the labor pool once they turn 21, and at 24 – Starship Troopers style – they’re assigned a career based on universal aptitude testing. You’re free to retrain, but once you hit 45, you have to retire.

There are no retail stores, no banks, no political parties, and no labor unions. Everything you might need or want is available at Government Costco – I picture this as the no-frills megastore on the UNAM campus in Mexico City – and delivered straight to your home by pneumatic tube.

Washing is done in public laundromats, but there isn’t much that needs washing: clothes are made from paper and discarded every night to be recycled. Public kitchens provide take-home meals and most people eat vegetarian food in government-run cafeterias.

Fossil fuels are gone, replaced with electrification (this is in 1888!), education and healthcare are free, and you’re even free to pick your doctor. What you aren’t free to do as an able-bodied citizen is not work – shirkers get solitary confinement and a diet of bread and water.

Basically, it’s the military – life aboard a battleship, except everyone is in the military, the country is the battleship, and there are no wars to fight.

Reading Looking Backward today is a strange experience, because a lot of what Bellamy described ended up actually happening. It just happened in a different country: Russia.

It’s difficult to overstate just how influential Looking Backward was, not only in the years following its publication but for decades afterwards. Roughly a hundred books were published after its appearance just in response to it. A similar number of “Bellamy Clubs” emerged across the country to discuss its ideas. Leo Tolstoy translated it into Russian. And it reignited a utopian impulse that had lain dormant since the Fourierism of the 1840s.

Incidentally, Bellamy hated the word socialism. He associated it with Europe, with revolution, with bloodshed. The problem was that he essentially came up with a version of communism from first principles, arriving there not via class struggle and the framework of historical materialism but through a detailed thought experiment working out solutions to the problems he saw in society. Unlike Marx’s vague sketches of what communism would actually look like, Bellamy’s vision was an elaborate blueprint. He defended his decision to avoid using the word socialism in a letter to his friend and mentor William Dean Howells, later editor of the Atlantic Monthly:

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In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed, I may seem to out-socialize the socialists, yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place it is a foreign word in itself, and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It smells to the average American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, and with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion, which in this country we at least treat with respect. Whatever German and French reformers may choose to call themselves, socialist is not a good name for a party to succeed with in America.
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Demonstrating a level of strategic marketing savvy that the American left has been unable to match since, he called his socialist utopian doctrine Nationalism and in doing so made it palatable to patriotic, God-fearing Americans.

From here, standing at the top of Mt. Bellamy, we can finally start to glimpse the outlines of our destination: the doomed utopian outpost of Llano del Rio.

(By the way, if you had a book club and your month’s theme was the battle for the soul of America, it’s hard to imagine a better double feature than Looking Backward and Atlas Shrugged. It might be the end of your book club, though.)

California, here I come

Howells – the one Bellamy wrote to about socialism – was one of the people inspired by Looking Backward to write his own utopian book. He published A Traveler from Altruria in episodic form in The Cosmopolitan (yes, that Cosmopolitan) between 1892 and 1893. Less than a year after it appeared, a Unitarian minister named Edward B. Payne from San Francisco rounded up thirty people – mostly members of his congregation and their families – and they set out to Sonoma to establish the utopian settlement of Altruria. Utopian fever was back.

You’ll recall the Altrurians from Ambrose Bierce’s dismissive quote in the previous letter. Just as Bierce predicted, their community soon failed (by – it kills me to say this – fixating on building what amounted to a phalanstery). But at least they had fun while it lasted. A few months before the colony disbanded, a visitor remarked: “They are already a success – for they are happy.”

In San Francisco, a young socialist originally from Indiana named Job Harriman was paying close attention to the Altrurian experiment. Taking over management of the colony’s co-op store after the original manager moved to the (still functioning) settlement, he simultaneously became president of Altruria Sub-Council Number Five – many of the utopian colonies at the time received support from affiliated groups in cities, from people sympathetic to the projects but unable or unwilling to make the sacrifice themselves. Harriman often visited Altruria, witnessing for himself the day-to-day challenges of utopian community life.

He also joined a Nationalist Club (another name for the “Bellamy Clubs”) in San Francisco. When Altruria disbanded, he took it as a logistical and planning failure, not an indictment of the ideas behind it. For the next fifteen years, he nurtured a vision of a new colony, one that would draw on the lessons of Altruria and other settlements to finally succeed where they had failed.

After Altruria, Harriman became deeply involved in socialist politics. He was the Vice Presidential candidate on a Socialist Party of America ticket with Eugene Debs, the preeminent socialist politician of the time, in 1900. They got 0.6% of the national vote.

Harriman made a name for himself as a criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles before returning to politics, running for mayor in the 1911 election. He was a favorite to win in a city where a huge battle was playing out between labor and anti-union factions. In late 1910, a suitcase full of dynamite planted in an alley next to the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times exploded, killing 21 employees. Two brothers, members of an ironworkers’ union, were arrested for the bombing. The Times was notoriously anti-union at the time, and the labor movement became broadly convinced that it was a setup.

The case became a huge national spectacle, and Harriman championed the brothers’ innocence on the campaign trail.

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The LA Times building after the bombing.

Just five days before the election, the brothers unexpectedly pleaded guilty and support for Harriman tanked. He lost badly, and gave up politics for good. But the vision of a successful utopian colony was still with him. And the end of his political career freed him to seriously pursue it.

Harriman was no wide-eyed dreamer. He knew his colony would live or die based on economic reality. It would need adequate starting capital, enough arable land to be self-sustaining, and access to markets where surplus produce could be sold. And it would decidedly not be constructing a phalanstery. From his decades-long involvement in utopian colonies and socialist politics, he knew the types of people the project would invariably attract, good and bad. If anyone could make this work, it was Harriman.

He found a tract of land for sale at bargain bin prices in the desert north of Los Angeles, just on the other side of the San Gabriel mountains, and he and a few supporters put down the initial payment. Unfortunately, the choice of location would prove to be the colony’s undoing. Because as anyone who’s seen Chinatown knows, the history of Southern California is a history of control over water.

After months of advertising and preparation, he was ready. In May of 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Harriman led a caravan of five families, five pigs, a team of horses, and a cow into the desert. This was the modest beginning of Llano del Rio.

The colony was organized from the start as a joint-stock company. Harriman issued two million shares and hired an agent to sell them on commission. Anyone who wanted to join had to buy exactly two thousand shares, structured as a minimum $500 down payment with an agreement that the rest would come out of the wages paid by the colony to every worker. That was a significant sum for the time – roughly $16,000 in today’s dollars. Not exactly within reach of the working poor, but an example of Harriman’s staunchly realist approach. In practice, because of constant financial struggles, the balances were never fully paid. The initial downpayment amounted to a one-time membership fee. If all this sounds familiar in the age of crypto, it’s because it is. ICOs funding DAOs buying land in the desert to build brave new worlds. At least the Llano colonists were mostly serious people.

Unlike the Fourierist settlements of 70 years earlier, Llano was the pragmatic and fully Americanized version of the idea, with its corporate structure and constant advertising in the era’s leftist magazines and newspapers. Harriman was selling a product, and the product was a lived experience of socialism. He anticipated Bucky Fuller’s famous idea: that if you want to enact change, you don’t struggle against the existing model (capitalism) but rather build a new one that makes the old one obsolete. And the only things lying around to build with were pieces of capitalism.

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The first Christmas, with the lodge in the background.

Other than the economic organization, Llano was vanilla American: nuclear families occupying modest houses (or tents, as was the case early on), with no esoteric belief systems, funny ideas about communal living, or “sexual novelties” in sight. Less charitably, it was an amputated utopia. A classic Western town that traded the saloon for a library, with maypole celebrations and renditions of La Marseillaise standing in for gunfights at high noon. Men went to their assigned jobs in the morning while women mostly kept house – though to be fair, things became more egalitarian as time went on. Non-whites were excluded from joining. In many ways, it represented a huge step back from the communities that had preceded it. But unlike those, it kind of worked.

Combined with Harriman’s reputation, this helps explain why Llano del Rio grew so rapidly. The flyers dating from the founding of the colony stress its practical draws: solving the problem of unemployment and providing long-term stability for its residents. The US welfare state didn’t really exist until the New Deal, so this was a proposition with undeniable appeal.

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The focused marketing attracted (mostly) serious and resourceful people willing to tolerate the hardships involved. But even Llano never quite solved the problem that plagued utopian colonies since Owen’s time: the shirkers, slackers, and revolutionary cosplayers drawn to them like mosquitoes to a barbecue. Robert V. Hine serves up one of these:

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Slackers appeared occasionally… Comrade Gibbons providing a notorious example. A former member of the I.W.W. and a constant spouter of propaganda, Gibbons was afflicted with mysterious aches and pains, none of which ever showed external evidence, but all of which kept him from active work. His complaint came to be called “gibbonitis”, which for years designated a shirker in the colony’s vernacular.
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One wonders if Bellamy’s solitary confinement with a diet of bread and water would’ve helped set Comrade Gibbons straight. But I think “gibbonitis” entering the lexicon is the harsher punishment. Iain Banks would’ve been proud.

Llano’s education system was revolutionary for its time and would be considered progressive even today. The colony established the first Montessori school in Southern California, enrolling over a hundred kids. Adults went to night school classes (or joined the gun club), while teens attended a hands-on Industrial School where they learned a trade while contributing to the colony’s production.

The whole place ran on a cocktail of grit and enthusiasm, sustained for years. But enthusiasm only gets you so far.

Democracy with the lid off

Since the colony was organized as a corporation, and each member held an equal stake in the enterprise, Llano was effectively a shareholder democracy. The company’s Articles of Incorporation served as its bare-bones constitution. A board of directors nominally ran the show, appointing a superintendent – the CEO, Job Harriman – to manage things. But the real power ultimately lay with the shareholders, and they wasted no time in testing the limits of the colony’s fledgling pocket democracy. Members called their gatherings in the dining hall the General Assembly. Hine writes:

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The sessions often lasted from after supper to midnight or even till two o’clock in the morning. Pet projects, personal quarrels, and jealousies were all aired. Dozens of resolutions passed each session, many to be discarded two weeks later.
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Even more memorably, one of its members described it as:

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An inquisition, a mental pillory, a madhouse of meddlesomeness… a jumble of passions and idealism – and all in deadly earnest… It became a monster which threatened to destroy the colony… The General Assembly was democracy with the lid off.
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In true socialist style, it took less than a year of the colony existing for a group of disgruntled members to try to overthrow Harriman. Calling themselves the Welfare League, they accused him of running a dictatorship and pushed to replace the existing system with pure direct democracy where every single decision would be put to a vote in the General Assembly. They plotted in the creosote bushes at the edge of the colony, which earned them – and future dissenters – the label “brushers”.

Their plan failed, and after an unsuccessful attempt to get Harriman removed by filing a complaint with the State of California, the brushers left the colony for good. They weren’t missed.

Despite holding together politically, as the colony grew from its modest five founding families to more than 900 inhabitants at its peak, other fractures appeared. Remember the truck system from Robert Owen’s New Lanark? Well it was back in Llano, with all the same problems. The credits members earned in lieu of wages slowly became worthless, earning the nickname “dobey money”, alluding to the colony’s early adobe dwellings with walls that melted away in the rain. Inhabitants complained of inflated prices in the co-op store, despite their leaders’ insistence that everything was sold at cost.

Ironically, these hardships had the effect of turning Llano’s original socialism with American characteristics into something more pure. Members attracted more by the prospect of steady wages than participation in a socialist experiment soon dropped out, while those who believed in the project stuck it out. Llano became, for all its faults, a community of hardworking idealists. Impressively for their size, they managed to actually achieve a measure of self-sufficiency, producing more than 90% of the food they consumed at their peak. But it was still a community of hardworking idealists supported by farming the desert. And no amount of idealism could overcome the water shortages they faced, or the destructive hypocrisy of the colony’s perfectly-named money man, Gentry Purviance McCorkle.

The dogs of Llano del Rio

I notice the incessant barking from the direction of the neighboring scrapyard when I arrive at the ruins. It soon fades into the background, a familiar bit of texture. The desert around Los Angeles has a pleasant edge to it: unpolished, subtly aggressive, though that edge seems to have gotten sharper over the past few years.

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Not an album cover for The Dead Utopians.

What’s left of Llano’s lodge – a pair of chimneys, some columns, and a foundation – sits just off of Pearblossom Highway, California State Route 138. Your first challenge upon visiting is simply getting off the road without being killed. CA 138’s nickname, “Blood Alley”, is well-earned: aging pickups with tinted windows competing with semis for the fastest time from nowhere to nowhere, and the California Highway Patrol only stepping in occasionally to play referee.

Llano’s immediate neighbor today is a fenced-off junkyard. The contrast works: California’s physical and ideological discards baking side by side in the desert sun. By the time I come across the only remaining underground cistern, part of the colony’s irrigation project, the barking has stopped.

I try to reconcile these modest remains with the promise of a socialist alternative to Los Angeles.

\n $\"\"$

The 1915 plan for the world to come.

The original city plan, drawn up by Leonard A. Cooke in 1915, was a grandiose radial layout for 30,000 inhabitants. Great promotional material, but utterly impractical given the actual capacity of the desert land.

The planned Socialist City attracted the attention of another architect and would-be city planner, Alice Constance Austin. The daughter of a railroad executive, she never became a member of the colony, but she saw its promise and set out to design its buildings and city layout.

I like her vision, even if it was pure science fiction. Drawing on Looking Backward’s underground pneumatic delivery systems, she placed the city’s entire logistics infrastructure in maintenance tunnels. Laundry, meals, and goods would be delivered directly to houses via these tunnels, freeing women from the shackle of housework. A ring road skirting the city doubled as a drag strip for weekend entertainment. Her designs for single-family patio houses featured sleeping porches and enclosed gardens – ideal for the Southern California desert climate. But by the time the plans were finalized, the colony was already in dire financial straits, and none of the houses were ever built.

\n $\"\"$

Llano del Rio patio house drawings by Alice Constance Austin, from Dolores Hayden’s brilliant book Seven American Utopias.

Standing there in the middle of it all, surrounded by dry brush and dirt, I feel immense disappointment. The gap between then and now is too great. The gap between dream and reality is even greater.

Llano del Rio ended not with a bang, but a series of whimpers. Chief among these were disputes over water rights with neighboring ranchers. When the colonists lost their case – the opposing side’s lawyer called them “socialistic plunderers” – it became clear that the settlement was finished.

Circling like a vulture to pick apart its corpse was “socialist banker” and real estate mogul Gentry Purviance McCorkle, whose name I will never resist spelling out in full. McCorkle was an early admirer of Harriman and helped him finance the initial purchases of the colony’s land. Recalling their first meeting, he wrote:

\n
Now I had often heard of Job Harriman. He was a leading lawyer in the state of California. He was the champion for the labor movement, defender of the poor, the dispossessed, the unfortunate and of the moneyless man. He was the chief defense of the working class in California. He was the best loved and most hated legal warrior in the city.
\n

Gentry Purviance McCorkle was no idealist. Though he put up the initial capital despite misgivings about the colony’s economic feasibility, he leased back or held in trust the land and bonds in question, at a “generous” 10-12% annually. When the colony began to fail, he took action to make sure he came out whole. Harriman recalls:

\n
He began to plot against the interests of the colony to gain possession of all the property for himself. He caused the Tilghman place – most valuable of our possessions there – to be lost and purchased it in the name of his wife, and entered into contracts with adverse interests by which he became beneficiary in many instances concerning both land and water. Under threats of foreclosure of mortgage, he forced the leasing of the entire place to outside parties, and, by cooperating with them, he stripped the ranch of the most valuable machinery and livestock. He then began foreclosure proceedings.
\n

So there’s Chinatown again: the story of water and real estate. In fact, Mulholland’s Owens Valley aqueduct was being built at the same time, just 20 miles away.

That marked the end of Llano del Rio in California. But Harriman wasn’t ready to give up. Finding a small logging town with twenty thousand acres of land for sale in Louisiana, he rallied Llano’s most committed members and orchestrated a move across the country in the summer of 1917. There they found ample water, but a host of new problems, isolation being a big one.

Harriman slowly grew disillusioned with the project. After contracting tuberculosis – the damp Louisiana climate didn’t suit him – he returned to California and died shortly thereafter. New Llano, as the Louisiana colony was christened, carried on into the Great Depression years under different leadership. They even built a phalanstery. But the settlement never achieved the size or energy of its original California incarnation. Eventually it too dissolved in an ugly mess of bankruptcy proceedings and lawsuits that continued for decades afterwards.

I kick a rock unenthusiastically and start walking back to my car, ready to leave Llano del Rio behind. That’s when I clock the first black dog emerging from behind a creosote bush, heading straight for me.

And then I see the dog has friends.

Of course, nothing means anything else. A pack of junkyard dogs is just that. Wrong time, wrong place. Ludicrous to attach deeper significance, to seek a through line, a recurring motif in the long history of doomed utopias. Panicking, but not panicking, I smoothly throw myself into the back seat of the car (I was in the middle of grabbing my camera) and slam the door just as the first dog arrives and hops up against the window to get a better look. The others – I counted six – circle the car with a practiced casualness that only animals know. I’m trapped in the back seat, deprived of agency, grateful for my cage. They’ll get bored soon. They’ll leave. Eventually, they do. Somewhere overhead, unseen but giving itself away by the faint lawnmower buzzing of its engine, a Predator drone from a nearby General Atomics airfield circles. I don’t think it cares.

In 1940, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, moved into a ranch house just down the road from the ruins of Llano del Rio. From his second floor window he could see the remnants of the colony a few hundred yards away. He also faced water difficulties, with his irrigation water controlled by a rancher higher up the mountain who released it only on certain days and at certain times. Years later, shortly before his death, Huxley followed in Bellamy’s footsteps and published his own utopian manifesto masquerading as a novel called Island. Unlike Bellamy’s sterile blueprint, Huxley’s utopia has a flair and weirdness that echoes Fourier.

Christopher Isherwood visited Huxley at the ranch, and later wrote about the local coyotes:

\n
They would send their bitches to lure away the male ranch dogs and then set on them and kill them. A few ranch dogs were said to have been so big and strong that they killed their attackers and thereafter ran wild as leaders of the pack.
\n

I’m just saying.

From Los Angeles,

\n","letter_content_source":{"label":"Letter content","type":"textarea","formatted_value":"

“To the great scandal of some, under the scarcely less reproving eyes of others, raising its weight of wings, your liberty.”

—André Breton, Ode to Charles Fourier

\n $\"\"$

The dogs, in case you had doubts.

This is Pirate Utopia, a newsletter about stories, systems, and hidden worlds (and sometimes utopia) by Stefan Kubicki. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here.

\n
These views of Fourier produced a great revolution in my mind. The darkness which had rested on human destiny was dissipated; light began to shine in. In the application of law to the social organism I saw an invariable guide for the mind in the great work of social reconstruction; I saw a scientific certainty taking the place of all the blind, futile efforts of human reason which had so long failed in its legislative work. This was the first gleam of intellectual satisfaction which had come to me.
\n

It reads like a sermon, a distilled-for-American-tastebuds version of Fourierism with heavy religious undertones that Fourier himself never suggested, and would probably be appalled by:

\n
Association will establish Christianity practically upon Earth. It will make the love of God and the love of the neighbor the greatest desire, and the practice of all men. Temptation to wrong will be taken from the paths of men, and a thousand perverting and degrading circumstances and influences will be purged from the social world.
\n

Unlike Fourier, Owen took a swing at utopia with money in his pockets and a willingness to get his hands dirty.

New Lanark, New Harmony

\n $\"\"$

The mill, incidentally, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site housing a lovely hotel.

\n
We made a raid into an unknown country, charted it, and returned without the loss of a single man, woman, or child.
\n

Oh, remember Fourier’s designs for his phalanstery?

\n $\"\"$ \n

This was how Owen envisioned New Harmony:

\n $\"\"$ \n

Time for Association

And it functioned this way for a few years, imperfectly but reliably, until Brisbane’s Fourierism started to permeate the wider culture. Then things took a turn.

Returning to America after his trip and surveying the failing phalanxes of Association, he washed his hands of it all:

\n
I thought that if one Association could be successfully started it would serve as a model which would attract all classes to the idea as soon as its advantages were made known. I expected of course that some years would pass over before such an undertaking could be realized as the result of an ardent propagation; but when the little experiments were begun and rushed incoherently without means and without knowledge, finally failing, I saw that there was no hope for success in the practical field. These failures had discredited the idea in the minds of the people; and so many false opinions and so many prejudices had been aroused, that I felt it was hopeless to begin anew.
\n

Finally, inevitably, he turned on Fourier himself, despite the man having died a decade earlier:

\n
I said to myself: “If ever a man deserved to be hanged for intellectual rashness and violence, it is Fourier!”
\n

\n
I witnessed many other strange phenomena in the different insane asylums of Europe which I always visited with profound interest. A singular fact connected with such visits was that after having spent three or four hours in those institutions I imagined every one crazy about me when I came out.
\n

Looking Backward

Basically, it’s the military – life aboard a battleship, except everyone is in the military, the country is the battleship, and there are no wars to fight.

Reading Looking Backward today is a strange experience, because a lot of what Bellamy described ended up actually happening. It just happened in a different country: Russia.

\n
In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed, I may seem to out-socialize the socialists, yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place it is a foreign word in itself, and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It smells to the average American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, and with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion, which in this country we at least treat with respect. Whatever German and French reformers may choose to call themselves, socialist is not a good name for a party to succeed with in America.
\n

From here, standing at the top of Mt. Bellamy, we can finally start to glimpse the outlines of our destination: the doomed utopian outpost of Llano del Rio.

California, here I come

The case became a huge national spectacle, and Harriman championed the brothers’ innocence on the campaign trail.

\n $\"\"$

The LA Times building after the bombing.

\n $\"\"$

The first Christmas, with the lodge in the background.

\n $\"\"$ \n

\n
Slackers appeared occasionally… Comrade Gibbons providing a notorious example. A former member of the I.W.W. and a constant spouter of propaganda, Gibbons was afflicted with mysterious aches and pains, none of which ever showed external evidence, but all of which kept him from active work. His complaint came to be called “gibbonitis”, which for years designated a shirker in the colony’s vernacular.
\n

The whole place ran on a cocktail of grit and enthusiasm, sustained for years. But enthusiasm only gets you so far.

Democracy with the lid off

\n
The sessions often lasted from after supper to midnight or even till two o’clock in the morning. Pet projects, personal quarrels, and jealousies were all aired. Dozens of resolutions passed each session, many to be discarded two weeks later.
\n

Even more memorably, one of its members described it as:

\n
An inquisition, a mental pillory, a madhouse of meddlesomeness… a jumble of passions and idealism – and all in deadly earnest… It became a monster which threatened to destroy the colony… The General Assembly was democracy with the lid off.
\n

Their plan failed, and after an unsuccessful attempt to get Harriman removed by filing a complaint with the State of California, the brushers left the colony for good. They weren’t missed.

The dogs of Llano del Rio

\n $\"\"$

Not an album cover for The Dead Utopians.

I try to reconcile these modest remains with the promise of a socialist alternative to Los Angeles.

\n $\"\"$

The 1915 plan for the world to come.

\n $\"\"$

Llano del Rio patio house drawings by Alice Constance Austin, from Dolores Hayden’s brilliant book Seven American Utopias.

Standing there in the middle of it all, surrounded by dry brush and dirt, I feel immense disappointment. The gap between then and now is too great. The gap between dream and reality is even greater.

\n
Now I had often heard of Job Harriman. He was a leading lawyer in the state of California. He was the champion for the labor movement, defender of the poor, the dispossessed, the unfortunate and of the moneyless man. He was the chief defense of the working class in California. He was the best loved and most hated legal warrior in the city.
\n

\n
He began to plot against the interests of the colony to gain possession of all the property for himself. He caused the Tilghman place – most valuable of our possessions there – to be lost and purchased it in the name of his wife, and entered into contracts with adverse interests by which he became beneficiary in many instances concerning both land and water. Under threats of foreclosure of mortgage, he forced the leasing of the entire place to outside parties, and, by cooperating with them, he stripped the ranch of the most valuable machinery and livestock. He then began foreclosure proceedings.
\n

So there’s Chinatown again: the story of water and real estate. In fact, Mulholland’s Owens Valley aqueduct was being built at the same time, just 20 miles away.

And then I see the dog has friends.

Christopher Isherwood visited Huxley at the ranch, and later wrote about the local coyotes:

\n
They would send their bitches to lure away the male ranch dogs and then set on them and kill them. A few ranch dogs were said to have been so big and strong that they killed their attackers and thereafter ran wild as leaders of the pack.
\n

I’m just saying.

From Los Angeles,

\n"},"letter_description":"A century of utopian experiments and the fall of Llano del Rio.","letter_description_source":{"label":"Letter description","type":"text","formatted_value":"A century of utopian experiments and the fall of Llano del Rio."},"letter_issue":"004","letter_issue_source":{"label":"Letter issue","type":"text","formatted_value":"004"}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://pulsar.api.cynium.com/kubicki/wp-json/wp/v2/letters/5787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}]},"_embedded":{"wp:term":[[{"id":2,"link":"https://kubicki.org/category/pirate-utopia/","name":"Pirate Utopia","slug":"pirate-utopia","taxonomy":"category","acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://pulsar.api.cynium.com/kubicki/wp-json/wp/v2/categories/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}]}}],[]]}},{"id":5759,"date":"2025-10-11T21:31:48","slug":"the-dogs-of-llano-del-rio-i","type":"letter","link":"https://kubicki.org/?letter=the-dogs-of-llano-del-rio-i","title":{"rendered":"The dogs of Llano del Rio (I)"},"categories":[2],"acf":{"letter_content":"

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

—Herbert Marcuse, The End of Utopia

\n $\"\"$

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:

\n
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.
\n

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:

\n
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.
\n

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:

\n
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.
\n

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:

\n
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.
\n

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.

\n $\"\"$

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.

\n $\"\"$

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:

\n
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?
\n

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:

\n
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.
\n

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,

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.

\n","letter_content_source":{"label":"Letter content","type":"textarea","formatted_value":"

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

—Herbert Marcuse, The End of Utopia

\n $\"\"$

All that remains of the lodge at Llano del Rio.

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

\n
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.
\n

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

\n
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.
\n

\n
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.
\n

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

\n
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.
\n

\n $\"\"$

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

\n $\"\"$

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

Adam Curtis has some final words, too:

\n
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?
\n

\n
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.
\n

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?

From a rainy Mexico City,

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.

\n"},"letter_description":"Searching for Charles Fourier in the ruins of a socialist commune outside Los Angeles.","letter_description_source":{"label":"Letter description","type":"text","formatted_value":"Searching for Charles Fourier in the ruins of a socialist commune outside Los Angeles."},"letter_issue":"003","letter_issue_source":{"label":"Letter issue","type":"text","formatted_value":"003"}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://pulsar.api.cynium.com/kubicki/wp-json/wp/v2/letters/5759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}]},"_embedded":{"wp:term":[[{"id":2,"link":"https://kubicki.org/category/pirate-utopia/","name":"Pirate Utopia","slug":"pirate-utopia","taxonomy":"category","acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://pulsar.api.cynium.com/kubicki/wp-json/wp/v2/categories/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}]}}],[]]}},{"id":5509,"date":"2025-02-03T23:47:37","slug":"notes-from-the-zone","type":"letter","link":"https://kubicki.org/?letter=notes-from-the-zone","title":{"rendered":"Notes from the Zone"},"categories":[2],"acf":{"letter_content":"

In 2007, I filmed a post-apocalyptic short called East in Ukraine’s Chernobyl Zone, our tiny crew talking our way past the checkpoints with the help of a bottle of vodka or two. This is the story of how that went.

\n $\"\"$ \n

One of the last landmarks on the road from Kyiv to Chernobyl is the egg. It’s just that, a concrete egg maybe a meter and a half long, sitting on its side in the middle of a ridiculously oversized traffic circle. The egg is there to remind you: you are small. Or more probably, because leaving such a big empty space without decoration offended someone’s sensibilities, and an egg is as good as anything else.

The traffic circle itself is eight to ten times larger than it has any reason to be, and, like the rest of the roads in Ukraine circa 2007, not really fit for wheeled transport.

We’d spent the previous day in Pripyat on an official filming expedition with an official car, official guide, official permit from the Ministry for Chernobyl and finally, official—if sketchy—radiation dosimetry. Pripyat is the largest town in the Zone, the place you see in all the pictures. The poster child for the catastrophe. Despite what you may read on the ‘tubes, access to Pripyat isn’t particularly difficult to get. At least one tour operator runs bus tours from Kyiv, and if you pull some strings—as we did—you can get a permit, a car, and private guide for a few hundred dollars.

\n $\"\"$ \n

Which is all good and fine, but we need more material for the film and a friend of a friend is originally from one of the smaller abandoned towns, one that has figuratively and literally disappeared from the map. So the day after visiting Pripyat we head back to the Zone of Alienation on an unscheduled visit, just five shady fellows in a ridiculously overpowered, natural gas-powered Chrysler minivan full of film gear.

There are a few checkpoints scattered around the border of the Zone aside from the main one outside Chernobyl. They all share the same characteristic roadblock: a heavy metal bar nearly foot in diameter attached to a lifting mechanism far too small for the weight. The guard lifts the barrier and one senses that he’s just daring you to try. Are you feeling lucky? But at present the barrier is down and a guard in Soviet block blue and white urban camouflage is eyeing us with the sort of expression you generally want to avoid at any roadblock, anywhere. The “and what have we here” expression, slightly amused, dangerously bored. He has a few questions which he would like answered, preferably inside the guardhouse. Would we mind?

Yura (the cameraman) and our driver Sasha share a dubious look and step out into the guardhouse. We wait. We wait some more. Some 20 minutes later they both come out accompanied by two guards now.

Where are you going? To Polis’ke.
\nAnd whatever could you possibly be going there for?

A story, mostly true. Our guide Kot—the friend of a friend—once lived there, and he would like to visit the family graves, the house from childhood.

And all this? Oh, about $100,000 worth of film equipment.

Not actually voiced, but that’s the idea. The guards have a chat between themselves while I idly begin to wonder if this whole adventure won’t land me somewhere I’d rather not land. Time for another consultation in the guardhouse. Seeing where this is going, the ever practical Yura takes a bottle of vodka out of his backpack before heading over. Another ten minutes go by. Should I be worried? To tell the truth, I’m more amused than anything else.

Yura, Sasha, and Guard #1 come back out. We’re almost there, apparently. The guard takes a look at the rest of us passengers.

All Ukrainians?

Da. Of course. Just don’t ask to see my passport. But with the vodka it’s clear that we are in the less I ask, the less I know, and the less I know, the less I’m responsible for territory now and after a bit more work the roadblock finally goes up.

Which is how we got free rein to the entire Zone.

\n $\"\"$ \n

The sky is a heavy grey and it’s cold for October. Approaching the our destination through a forest I don’t pay much attention to what’s outside until Yura tells me to look out the window. It takes a while to see it, but it’s no forest. We’re already there. There are houses among the trees, just a short distance away from the road. One after the other. Some have collapsed roofs from years of snowy winters, others look like they could be inhabited, but there are no lights, no smoke, few windows. It’s strange because unlike Pripyat, Polis’ke was evacuated as late as 1999 due to significant radiation contamination from the Chernobyl plant several kilometers to the east. Radiation that somehow went unnoticed or ignored for more than a decade.

You don’t expect nature to reclaim a place so quickly, but eight years is all it takes.

We drive slowly, because all the manholes have been stolen to sell as scrap metal and the streets are covered with branches and dead leaves. We pass a massive hospital, rows of 70s era apartment blocks. Nearly all of the windows are gone, leaving massive facades of square black holes. We stop at a large intersection with a school on one corner, some of its walls covered with paintings by children. A green dinosaur.

With the car engine off the peculiar silence of the place stands out. It’s the sound of wind, but unlike any other wind I’ve heard. Wind blowing through apartment buildings mixing with the wind rustling the trees. It sounds like deep, distant wolves. Or singing dunes. I silently wish we’d brought a sound recorder.

Polis’ke, or Chabno as it was once known, has a long history. It was founded in the 15th century and by the end of the 1800s was both home to a sizable Jewish population and a Polish noble family. Then the Soviets came and destroyed its castle and its churches, building in their stead a model Soviet town. And without people the place feels even more like some state planner’s idea of a town than an actual one. Like something you would build in Sim City – the obligatory hospital, school, stadium, housing, parade ground, Great Patriotic War memorial. All that’s left of old Chabno are the wooden houses, some probably centuries old, and the cemeteries.

There’s a fun perk related to driving around in a forgotten city. You can go anywhere your vehicle can physically go. Suddenly wide sidewalks, parks, city squares and even certain buildings are accessible to anything with enough ground clearance. Enjoying this freedom we finally begin to look for signs of people.

To say the Zone is abandoned isn’t accurate. People still live here, with varying degree of legal status. Aside from soldiers and cleanup personnel there are several dozen mostly elderly people who refused to evacuate and live isolated or in small groups, without electricity or running water. And then there are the squatters. I hear rumors of refugees from Chechnya moving into abandoned villages on the Belarus side of the border. Criminals also, I’m told. So it’s with some apprehension that upon finding a Lada in decent condition parked outside a large building with most of its windows still intact we decide to investigate.

Or rather, we send Kot, the local guy, to investigate while the rest of us wait in the car. Five minutes go by before our driver extraordinaire starts inexplicably honking. Now, honking in any big city is no big thing, just part of the soundscape. But honking in a place as abandoned and almost silent as Polis’ke feels like breaking some implicit law of the universe, to say nothing of attracting possibly unwanted attention, given that our own status driving around inside the Zone without a guide or even permission is questionable at best.

Kot finally emerges from the building, defusing some built up tension, but with inconclusive results. After a brief discussion in fast Russian it’s somehow decided that we’ll try again, but this time I’ll be going with Kot.

The building is clean and well-kept inside, and looks just like any generic Eastern Bloc mixed-use interior – offensive pastel green walls, concrete stairwells, 70s curtains and cheap aluminum doorknobs. It could be a hospital, or a small hotel, or a police station. Going up the stairs we hear noises on the next floor up, and coming out into the corridor we meet two burly fellows with shaved heads in camouflage pants next to a ping-pong table.

Kot defuses a tense moment of silence by explaining who we are, what we want, and after a few minutes we are on our way again with a rough set of directions to a street where apparently a few elderly people still live. It seems implicit the whole time that these men in camouflage are certainly not the people we are looking for.

\n $\"\"$ \n

The whole thing seems hopeless until we come across another large structure in good order, apparently a fire station but with no one in sight. A quick reconnaissance by Kot ends with his swift disappearance and a pair of men in military uniform coming out from behind the building and eyeing us, who are moments later joined by another two, while back inside the van we watch this quickly materializing army in bemusement sprinkled with something just short of panic. Our cameraman looks back at me from the front seat smiling nervously and gives a voice to the atmosphere: “o, kurwa,” roughly “oh, shit.”

The standoff continues, film crew in car vs. now six men in military uniform across the street, though nobody seems in any hurry to do anything but watch and wait.

Finally, Kot returns triumphantly with… an armful of yellow apples, our first but not last encounter with the apples of Polis’ke.

“So?”

“It’s a fire station, they’re all firefighters.” Kot takes a bite of an apple, passes the others around. We seem to be split 50/50 between those who are hungry and those who find the idea of consuming produce from the Chernobyl zone to be a questionable proposition. “They have a few trees.”

An older man with gray hair and a well-trimmed mustache, also in uniform, walks up to us. It turns out he’s the chief of the firehouse and one of the town’s original inhabitants. We ask him what a bunch of firefighters are doing out here, and it turns out the Zone has a serious problem with forest fires. But because emergencies are few, most of their work involves measuring radiation levels in the area.

He offers to give us a tour. Seats are rearranged and we head off again, this time with some idea of where we’re going.

Our first stop is a tiny Orthodox church hidden behind a thick wall of bushes and trees and accessible only by a narrow footpath. Aside from the fire station, it’s the only building in Polis’ke I’ve seen in decent, clearly looked-after condition. The inside is spotless, floors washed and what look like fresh flowers at the front. We ask our guide how many people still live here. Around ten, he tells us, scattered throughout town. All elderly who refused the evacuation order. We say we’d like to find someone for the film, and that’s how we came to meet Józefa.

We find her on the road to the church, just outside her house; a babushka with a blue headscarf carrying a bouquet of flowers.

It turns out no introductions are needed because upon seeing this group of poorly-dressed, unshaven men with a camera her eyes light up. A film? Poland? She disappears quickly into her wooden cottage. I tell Yura to roll the camera as she comes out again, hands full of the yellow apples we’re familiar with, a present for all of us. Accepting one is not enough, and she isn’t satisfied until our pockets are loaded.

Before I know it I’ve been given the bouquet meant for the church and am being led by the hand as she shows off her garden full of more flowers and vegetables, the last of which have been gathered ahead of the approaching winter. Then we’re led next door to an abandoned house repurposed as storage, its floors torn out to reveal the dirt two feet below, wooden planks crisscrossing here and there to allow access to the various rooms. The walls are lined floor to ceiling with chopped firewood for the winter. But this and everything else we’ve seen doesn’t prepare us for the apple room—what I suppose used to be the kitchen full of, well, apples. All over the floor, the table, the shelves. Hundreds of them.

Yura goes off to change the film in the camera so we can shoot inside while I’m left among the apples with Józefa, trying to understand her story across the language barrier. Luckily she needs little encouragement, and I catch just enough to ask questions to keep her going. She insists the radiation hasn’t had any ill effects. Actually, she says, her neighbors only got sick after they were moved to another village just outside the Zone, she she feels it’s better for her health here than elsewhere. Seeing her energy and enthusiasm it’s hard to disagree. I wonder if the apples have something to do with it. I ask her about food. Sometimes the fire chief brings her something, but usually it’s a 10 km bike ride to the nearest store just outside the Zone for necessities like bread.

With the camera loaded again we film Józefa in the room with her apples. The attention doesn’t bother her; she stands for a portrait as though posing for a photo.

Before we leave someone asks her if she doesn’t get lonely out here by herself. She smiles. She has a few neighbors, the church. Sometimes the firemen come by to check up on her. Why would she be lonely?

On the way back our guide asks if we want to see the old stadium. He notes that the radiation levels in the mud there are significantly elevated, several dozen times the amount considered safe. We pass and drop him off back at the fire station. He asks us to wait for a moment and comes back with four copies of his book, a parting gift. Only then do we find out that our guide was a poet.

Our last bit of work in the city is filming a drive through the town. With the camera rigged off the side of the van we go through the outskirts, through the city center and stop as the film runs out again. We all get out. The Ukrainians share a joint while I walk over into one of the houses intending to use the toilet, but the path through the living room is blocked with a fallen tree. I settle for the tree instead.

We make one stop on our way out of Polis’ke, for Kot. After more than a few wrong turns we end up at the cemetery. As he’s getting out I realize I still have Józefa’s flowers. I hand them to him, and Kot promptly disappears. After 20 minutes go by we start calling him. It’s already getting dark. He finally comes back after half an hour. We don’t ask about it.

The guards at the checkpoint give us some trouble on the way out again, checking to make sure we aren’t bringing anything—or anyone—out with us. It’s a fair precaution given that Belarus shares a long, unguarded stretch of border with the zone. The road back is quiet. From time to time we pass a bus stop out in the middle of nowhere. At each one there’s a small fire burning next to the road, with a few bundled up figures warming themselves, waiting.

\n","letter_content_source":{"label":"Letter content","type":"textarea","formatted_value":"

\n $\"\"$ \n

The traffic circle itself is eight to ten times larger than it has any reason to be, and, like the rest of the roads in Ukraine circa 2007, not really fit for wheeled transport.

\n $\"\"$ \n

Yura (the cameraman) and our driver Sasha share a dubious look and step out into the guardhouse. We wait. We wait some more. Some 20 minutes later they both come out accompanied by two guards now.

Where are you going? To Polis’ke.
\nAnd whatever could you possibly be going there for?

A story, mostly true. Our guide Kot—the friend of a friend—once lived there, and he would like to visit the family graves, the house from childhood.

And all this? Oh, about $100,000 worth of film equipment.

Yura, Sasha, and Guard #1 come back out. We’re almost there, apparently. The guard takes a look at the rest of us passengers.

All Ukrainians?

Which is how we got free rein to the entire Zone.

\n $\"\"$ \n

You don’t expect nature to reclaim a place so quickly, but eight years is all it takes.

\n $\"\"$ \n

The standoff continues, film crew in car vs. now six men in military uniform across the street, though nobody seems in any hurry to do anything but watch and wait.

Finally, Kot returns triumphantly with… an armful of yellow apples, our first but not last encounter with the apples of Polis’ke.

“So?”

He offers to give us a tour. Seats are rearranged and we head off again, this time with some idea of where we’re going.

We find her on the road to the church, just outside her house; a babushka with a blue headscarf carrying a bouquet of flowers.

With the camera loaded again we film Józefa in the room with her apples. The attention doesn’t bother her; she stands for a portrait as though posing for a photo.

\n"},"letter_description":"A questionable filming expedition into the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation.","letter_description_source":{"label":"Letter description","type":"text","formatted_value":"A questionable filming expedition into the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation."},"letter_issue":"002","letter_issue_source":{"label":"Letter issue","type":"text","formatted_value":"002"}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://pulsar.api.cynium.com/kubicki/wp-json/wp/v2/letters/5509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}]},"_embedded":{"wp:term":[[{"id":2,"link":"https://kubicki.org/category/pirate-utopia/","name":"Pirate Utopia","slug":"pirate-utopia","taxonomy":"category","acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https://pulsar.api.cynium.com/kubicki/wp-json/wp/v2/categories/2","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}]}}],[]]}},{"id":5511,"date":"2024-06-30T11:30:21","slug":"a-letter-about-nikolai-fyodorov","type":"letter","link":"https://kubicki.org/?letter=a-letter-about-nikolai-fyodorov","title":{"rendered":"A letter about Nikolai Fyodorov"},"categories":[2],"acf":{"letter_content":"

“He was a searcher for universal salvation. In him the feeling of responsibility of all for all reaches the ultimate and acutest expression… there was no man on earth who felt such sorrow at the death of people and such thirst to return them to life.”

—Nikolai Berdyaev

\n $\"Fyodorov$ \n

Why Common Task? Blame it on a 19th century Russian called Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov.

I’ve been thinking about Fyodorov a lot over the past few years. Nobody on earth has taken utopia as seriously, on an intellectual, spiritual, and practical level, as the Russians. We have the Brits (by way of Sir Thomas More) to thank for the name and a general distrust of the idea, and America may have been founded on some ostensibly utopian notions, but it’s the Russians who ultimately took the idea with the seriousness it merits and followed it to its (tragic, in their case) conclusion.

Fyodorov was a contemporary of the intellectual and literary heavyweights we sometimes just abbreviate to “the Russians”: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev. Half a century after Fyodorov’s death, Camus would write that if you wanted to be a philosopher, you should write novels. These writers were the embodiment of that observation. It’s strange, then, to think that just a few decades earlier, Russia was considered an intellectual wasteland:

\n
“Standing alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have learnt nothing from the world, we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have made no contribution to the progress of the human spirit, and everything that has come to us from that spirit, we have disfigured.… Today we form a gap in the intellectual order”
\n

That’s Pyotr Chaadayev writing about his homeland in a magazine called Teleskop, circa 1836. It’s a quintessentially Russian statement: overly dramatic, full of tragic feeling, yet recognizably true. The name of the periodical (Telescope) is prescient, given the role Russia would have in opening space more than a hundred years later, and the direct role Fyodorov would have in inspiring those who paved the way.

Very few people knew the name Nikolai Fyodorov while he was alive. Even fewer knew of him after he died, and practically nobody outside of the country had heard of him until well into the 1970s. He lived an ascetic life, working as a museum librarian in Moscow and sleeping on a trunk in a tiny rented room, forgoing warm food for months and owning as close as possible to nothing — not even a winter coat (this is pre-warming Russia, remember).

Yet this lowly librarian somehow managed to attract the admiration and respect of the greatest Russian thinkers of his day. Tolstoy said of him: “I am proud that I live at the same time as such a man.“ Dostoevsky wrote of Fyodorov’s work: “I am in complete agreement with these thoughts. I read them as though they were my own.” Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of manned spaceflight, met Fyodorov when he was a teenager and was also deeply influenced by him: “I regard Fyodorov as an exceptional individual, and my meeting him as my good fortune. For me he took the place of university professors, with whom I did not associate.”

\n $\"Fyodorov$

Fyodorov hanging with Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyov.

Fyodorov rejected private property both materially and in the realm of ideas. He wrote no books and sought no recognition. His writings, when they were finally published after his death by two of his students, were released for free (the originals are labeled “not for sale”) as the two-volume Philosophy of the Common Task. It’s a strange and powerful body of work, the sort of stuff you can dismiss as the ravings of a lunatic during the daytime and be moved to tears by late at night — the stuff of genius, in other words.

In it, Fyodorov described a comprehensive vision of humanity’s “common task”. The first step was to bring the climate and nature itself under man’s control. Russia in his time was plagued by drought and famine, and he envisioned the use of science and military technology to manipulate the weather (sound familiar?) and ensure the well-being of all people through a reliable food supply.

Then it gets really interesting.

Once famine and other natural disasters were vanquished and people no longer had to struggle for survival, they would finally be able to roll up their sleeves and unite to focus on the real task: the physical resurrection of the dead. All of the dead. Every human being who has ever lived. Not in an afterlife, not in some metaphorical sense, but here and now on Earth. And because this would inevitably lead to crowding and strain the limited resources available on our planet, humanity would colonize space to make room for everyone. The hundreds of generations who toiled and suffered and procreated and died in the great human relay race would be resurrected by their children to live among the stars. Whether they liked it or not.

Though he was a deeply religious Orthodox Christian, Fyodorov rejected mysticism and divine involvement in the world. He considered the task of resurrection and humanity’s expansion into the cosmos to be a human project: a task for men, not God. This is crazy, but not as crazy as it sounds. You have to remember that he wrote in the 1800s, at a time when Newtonian cause-and-effect still reigned supreme, before Einstein and Heisenberg and uncertainty turned everything upside down. The problem of resurrection was a problem of physics to him: a restoration of previous configurations of matter, which could be extrapolated backwards from the present. He believed that museums, whose role it was to preserve the past, would play a fundamental role in this. He also thought that the proper place of museums was in cemeteries, which makes a perfect sort of sense.

Fyodorov was obsessed with kinship. Humanity to him wasn’t a mass of individuals but rather an intricate web of fathers, sons, and daughters (but mostly fathers and sons – he was an unabashedly patriarchal thinker in the long tradition of Russian patriarchy, and mothers are almost entirely absent from his vision). This idea of kinship is central to the common task: he wrote that “we live not only at the expense of others, not only at the expense of blind nature, but also of others like oneself, even the closest, replacing and supplanting them; and such an existence makes us not only unworthy, but also transgressors.” Each person, in his view, lives at the expense of his ancestors, and owes a debt to be repaid. The common task is the repayment of this debt, and in the settling of accounts we will be made free. How’s that for a quintessentially Russian statement?

In Fyodorov, the idea of a universal utopia found its ultimate expression: a utopia for all, and that includes not just the living, but all who have ever lived. Humanity’s common task as the obliteration of death and, in some real sense, time as well. This wasn’t just some philosophical exercise for him: he felt it in his bones, and singlemindedly devoted his life to advancing the idea.

The word “task” is important, here. A task is not something to be thought or believed, but something to be done. It is not a question of faith, but of action. Fyodorov insisted that knowledge without action was worthless, and he disliked Western philosophy for its endless arguments and intellectual gymnastics that he felt led to nothing. His “common task” of resurrecting the ancestors was something to be enacted by all the living, together. It was to be the first and final common human project.

Fyodorov died in 1903, but his ideas would resonate through the entire 20th century and well into ours. He’s considered the founding figure of Russian Cosmism, a term retroactively applied to a loose intellectual movement that combined science, art, religion, and utopian socialism to explore a limitless human future at a time when it seemed just out of reach, before the darkest days of Stalinism and WWII. Transhumanism is just one of many descendants of the cosmists: cybernetics (now gutted, redecorated and being sold as “systems theory”) is another branch on the tree of cosmism, along with upstarts like simulation theory and accelerationism.

Fyodorov’s project was such a specific and singular vision that it had to die with him, and despite its outsize influence, it was very much a product of its time and place. But we can, echoing Bruce Lee, take what is useful and discard the unnecessary. The very idea of a common task, a universal human undertaking that we are all participants in, may be Fyodorov’s greatest legacy.

I’ll let Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote what is probably still the best summary and critique of Fyodorov’s thought way back in 1915, have the final word:

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“All the contradictory thoughts of the XIX Century spoke of a philosophy of the common task, all mixing up in it the old with the new and that to come. And in the XX Century the future philosophy will work at extracting the true kernel of the ‘philosophy of the common task’ and toss away the old trappings.”
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—Nikolai Berdyaev

\n $\"Fyodorov$ \n

Why Common Task? Blame it on a 19th century Russian called Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov.

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“Standing alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have learnt nothing from the world, we have not added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have made no contribution to the progress of the human spirit, and everything that has come to us from that spirit, we have disfigured.… Today we form a gap in the intellectual order”
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\n $\"Fyodorov$

Fyodorov hanging with Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyov.

Then it gets really interesting.

I’ll let Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote what is probably still the best summary and critique of Fyodorov’s thought way back in 1915, have the final word:

\n
“All the contradictory thoughts of the XIX Century spoke of a philosophy of the common task, all mixing up in it the old with the new and that to come. And in the XX Century the future philosophy will work at extracting the true kernel of the ‘philosophy of the common task’ and toss away the old trappings.”
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