[Michael Albert interviewed Kristen Ghodsee in a recent episode of RevolutionZ. Kristen is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written multiple books including Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence, and Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism, among others. In this interview, Michael talked with Kristen about her latest book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, which examines utopian projects through history and especially those with visionary ideas about gender, family, and sexuality. The following is a slightly edited transcript of the interview.\

——————

Michael Albert: Hello my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that’s titled Revolution Z. This is our two hundred and thirty-fourth episode and my guest this time is Kristen Ghodsee. Our episode title is Utopias and Us. 

Kristen is a professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, Jacobin and ZNet, among other outlets. And she’s appeared on PBS News Hour and France 24, as well as on dozens of podcasts including NPR’s the Throughline, New York Magazine’s The Cut and the New York Times Ezra Klein Show. Kristen’s latest book is Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About The Good Life. So, Kristen welcome to Revolution Z.

Kristen Ghodsee: Thank you, Michael, so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael Albert: It’s my pleasure to have you on board. You have been giving interviews and writing articles about your new book on Everyday Utopia quite widely. Indeed, I have to say, I would personally love to know how you get all the invitations so you can convey your insights so widely. It is incredibly impressive. But setting that aside perhaps to revisit at the end, as advice for listeners who write, I would like to cover different ground here than what listeners can access many other places. So I wonder, if to start, I could ask what would be for some the hard last question they might ask after an hour of your discussing the many actual real world experiments you’ve researched, and then we can go wherever your answers may take us. So, having researched so many collective, communal and otherwise outside the mainstream box ways of living, daily life relations, even while and despite that the progressive experimenters are part of societies that are incredibly politically, economically, sexually and culturally dystopian, what are some key lessons that you have arrived at, perhaps each of which we can then continue on to explore?

Kristen Ghodsee: Thank you for the opening question. That’s a great place to start because as I’m sure you know this book really covers a lot of ground. It really kind of starts with the Neolithic era and comes up to the modern day and it’s very wide-ranging and cross-cultural and trans-historical. And so, one of the things that really struck me is that most societies are less than ideal, I mean when you sit down and really look at the historical record, there isn’t a moment; there isn’t a golden age. There isn’t some time when there was real justice in the world. That is very much a future-oriented project, and it’s a project that people in all cultures at all historical times have oriented themselves toward. So, I have this great map. I don’t know if you can see it on the wall behind me since we’re on a video. It’s called the Oxford Cartographer’s World History Timeline and it’s this really beautiful visual representation of world history. On the vertical axis are the historical areas of the world and on the horizontal axis is time.

And it gives you a real sense of the rise and falls of empires–the rise and falls of different cultures, different political movements. I think one thing that we know is that change is constant and that people are constantly striving for a better future. So, the one thing I really took from all the research I had to do for this book is that there’s this other 1%. There’s the economic 1% that we talk about in the contemporary moment; the economic elites. But there’s always been another 1% and that is the utopian 1%. There has always been–again in all cultural contexts and across history–groups of people (small groups of people, usually they start out very small) who go out there into the world and they look around at their societies and they say, you know what? This sucks I think we can do better. I think we can actually live a better way.

Some of them go out and try to create revolutionary movements. Some of them are insurgents or rebels. But many of them actually retreat into what we would think of as kind of pocket utopian communities and they start to build the world that they want to see with their own people and their own followers. A form of pre-figurative politics that allows people to dream and come up with other ways of living in the world.

Now, as again, I’m sure you know many of these societies get crushed quite brutally by mainstream society, because they pose a threat to mainstream society. But many others have persisted and I would say that everywhere I looked there’s always this tiny little 1% out there. Sometimes it grows. I think if you look at the case of early Christianity, the pre-325 AD Christians, [Before Christianity became an official state religion] they were very much a weird utopian community. And when you realize today that just the Catholic Church alone has 1.3 billion followers, and that’s not including the other denominations of Christianity, I would say that for those people who think of Jesus Christ as a proto-Marxist, that was a fairly successful utopian movement.

Similarly, the early followers of the Buddha, in the subcontinent, we’re also very much considered a utopian, fringe, marginal community–a bunch of cultists or whatever around this radical figure. And yet again there are now about half a billion Buddhists in the world. A lot of other movements have not been obviously as successful. But they’re always there and I think we ignore them really at our peril, because when we face challenges in the world, as we are right now, many challenges, it’s these utopian communities, these utopian ideas that get us to move forward. They give us the ideas and they inspire in us what I call in the book “the cognitive capacity for hope,” for dreaming of another future and finding ways to actually instantiate that future.

Michael Albert:

There’s a lot there. I could, maybe take off from. But I want to perhaps instead hone in on just a part of it. Much of the creative and progressive attention that you uncover has gone to re-conceiving how we live with children. As a group of people that sees what’s wrong or feels what’s wrong, starts to address how it might live better, it’s pretty natural that it’s going to address that aspect of life, basically having, bringing up, and living with children and partners. I wonder what you think of the possibility of, and perhaps even the necessity to eliminate the roles of mother and father such as we now know them, so that children have parents who do both kinds of caretaking rather than seeing one role as largely defining who women are and another role as largely defining who men are. I didn’t come up with that. That was put forth by a sector of feminists back in the period of the New Left and I found it quite compelling. Nancy Chodorow was the woman who first wrote about it then, and she made a case that it may well be the modern day source, I guess you could call it, of the reproduction of, the sexism, the reproduction of patriarchy. I’m wondering whether you found in your studies that it made sense to tackle that problem, mothering and fathering as compared to parenting.

Kristen Ghodsee:

Yes, and I think that is a point made well before the New Left, in Plato’s Republic Book 5, right?

Michael Albert:

Wait, that much earlier?

Kristen Ghodsee:

Plato, yeah-that much earlier. So we’re really talking prehistory, antiquity here. When he is talking about the ideal family situation for his Guardians of his ideal city of Kallipolis, he basically wants to abolish the roles of mother and father. But he also really wants to rethink the whole role of the family. So, in Chapter 5, in Book Five of the Republic he says basically that everybody should be group married to each other and that no child should know their parent and no parent should know their child and that there should be a special group of nurses, both men and women, (which I think is really fascinating, right? To think about this in ancient Greece,) to raise the children in common.

He was also concerned about wet-nursing so that all children would have adequate nutrition, that the babies should be collectively wet-nursed. And, so geez, if you go back that far, and you think about, wow, so this was a really early vision of radically rethinking mothering and fathering because let’s face it, ancient Greece had very, very, very traditional roles around what a mother’s job was and what a father’s job was. What a woman could and couldn’t do. What a man could do. 

That vision of group marriage then gets weirdly picked up in 1848 with the Oneida Community in upstate New York. It’s almost like John Humphrey Noyes was reading Plato and thinking about how he could achieve this ideal utopian vision of a big family, while really destabilizing the roles of mothers and fathers. So, when I was up in upstate New York just in January, and I visited the Oneida mansion, there are a lot of memoirs of children who came out of that experiment. One of the things that’s really interesting is the children themselves actually say it was pretty great to have all these parents around. It was really hardest on the mothers. The mothers were the ones who really desired to have connection with their biological children. You have a similar thing with the Kibbutzim in Israel where they also tried collective child rearing and collective sleeping, [the latter] which was an experiment that I think didn’t really work out. But again, when there was pushback, it often came from the mothers. So our ideals of mothers and fathers are very socially-constructed by society but they’re also deeply internalized. I think that’s a real challenge.

Now again, as I talk about in the book, there are other types of communities that are challenging the role of mother and father, but by not having children biologically their own. So again, this starts with early Christian practices of chastity and it’s the Bogomils who were a dualist sect in south-eastern Europe that were basically, I like to call them vegan, asexual anarchists. They did not have material or physical relations in any way. They thought that flesh was the work of the devil. But they did raise children, as did later groups like the Cathars, the Albigensians, [and] the Shakers in the United States. They took in orphans, they took in children that were born out of wedlock, and they raised children collectively, but they were not their biological children. The mother and father roles were also being destabilized by these practices of celibacy. So, there are different ways of thinking about how we destabilize the mother and father role. 

But I would say that almost in every single utopian community, there is an attempt to do what evolutionary anthropologists would call cooperative breeding, which is what we did historically in our deeper evolutionary past, which was to raise our children more collectively. The model of bi-parental care for our own biological children is a relatively recent phenomenon and it’s out of this reification of the model of bi-parental care that we get these very strict sex-gendered roles around what a mother is supposed to do and what a father is supposed to do. And I think one of the projects of my book, and really all of my work, is to destabilize the historicity of these two roles as we think of them–mother and father–as natural. And part of that means really attacking lots of stuff that’s going on in the Catholic Church because it turns out that the Catholic Church is one of the most historically salient and important creators of our ideal of the monogamous nuclear family– [the] heterosexual, monogamous nuclear family and bi-parental care for our own biological offspring. But it’s also important to show that even within the broader culture of Christianity there were always challenges to that model, either through, as I said, these practices of more group marriage (non-monogamy), and then also through the practice of celibacy, but still cooperative breeding of children.

Michael Albert: I’m really curious if you are aware that, I guess it was 1970s, that this woman Nancy Chodorow wrote a book called the Reproduction of Mothering. Are you aware of that book?

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, yes, absolutely.

Michael Albert: Okay, so very few people are and I thought it was really a very impressive contribution at the time.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, before I before I moved into, I’m now a Professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies, but before I moved to Penn, I spent 15 years in a Gender and Women Studies program. And I have a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. So, I know those classic texts and I think those texts are really important and it’s a terrible shame that people don’t go back and reread them.

Michael Albert: It’s incredible.

Kristen Ghodsee: It’s incredible, right? But I also think it’s really important to show this deeper prehistory of these ideas all the way back into antiquity. They say there’s nothing new under the sun but I do think that people are really shocked. When you think about The Republic, right, it’s really rather shocking when you read Book 5 and you realize what Plato is doing is. First of all, he makes this incredible case for the equality of men and women which in ancient Greece was really, really, really out there. But secondly, he is creating in so many ways the world’s first written vision of utopia. Now he based that on his understanding of the Spartan way of life and also, if we believe Iamblichus, he was also very interested in the way the Pythagoreans had lived in Croton.

Because the Pythagoreans, again, we know Pythagoras for the Pythagorean Theorem but what we don’t realize is that Pythagoras lived in essentially a commune where everybody owned all their property in common and where men and women were equals. I think that a lot of people would be surprised to realize that some of these ancient figures–these people that we learn about in school–had these incredible radical politics which were very much out of keeping with mainstream society in their historical context; and we don’t learn about that. Partially, I think the omission is because some people fear that it will undermine the value of their more famous ideas. But I think this an essential part of understanding that some of the most interesting historical figures were precisely part of this utopian 1 %.

Michael Albert: Yes, there’s probably a partly benign explanation which has negative effects which is that people can’t even see it. They could probably read the works and not even see it, it’s so foreign. But then there’s also the nefarious version that you’re describing, which I think is quite true, which is that it’s threatening and therefore you keep it silent. I wonder the extent to which you think the examples of alternative ways of living that are available to access and think about are while, eye-opening and involving many insights, also problematic as to what they teach because the people creating the different ways of living were hamstrung by their overall social situation. Capitalism, racism, etc. Unless they challenge all that too which many didn’t. What do you think?

Kristen Ghodsee: I mean, I think that this is a question of the perfect being the enemy of the good, and the idea that any one social movement or group of people can challenge capitalism and structural racism and sexism and patriarchy and all the various problems that we are facing or that people faced in that past. If you look at the Essenes–this was a Jewish group from the second century BC into the first century CE–they were a group of people who owned their property in common, they didn’t believe in money, they didn’t hold slaves (which was very rare for this period of time), and they were driven by this idea of self-labor. That’s why they didn’t own slaves; they did all of their work for themselves. Now, of course the Romans hated them. You cannot try to create a community without money in a society where you have to pay taxes and tributes. So, not to mention, again, when you think about these pre-325 Christian groups, if you believe the stories, these Christians were so incredibly persecuted by the Roman government. At that time, if you think about how long the Roman Empire lasted, the scope of its geographic reach and how powerful Rome was and how unjust, quite frankly, it would be almost impossible, from living within that historical period of the Roman Empire, to imagine a world in which the Roman empire did not exist. That’s like on that that Oxford Cartographer’s map that I showed you: the Roman Empire is this big massive red blob in the middle of it that spans almost a thousand years and is like this huge geographic region and yet, one day, guess what? The Roman Empire ceased to exist. I think that would have been incomprehensible to people within that historical epoch.

So yes, you could have created a social movement whose sole goal was the destruction of the entire Roman Empire, which would have felt completely impossible at that particular moment of time. Or you could have created these small, little fringe communities, of which as I’m sure you know, there were many, that tried to create a sort of egalitarian way of living, to try to create a more just way of living within the great injustice which was the Roman Empire at the time. And guess what? Some of those societies, some of those little weird fringy utopian groups, most of them didn’t survive, like the Essenes did not, but some did. And so, I think we have to always balance what is really capable in our lifetimes, what are we actually trying to achieve. 

And here’s where I think that this concept of pre-figurative politics is really important. I am very much of the opinion that we should stand up to power. I believe that we should be active politically, that we should be out there trying to live a better life and, in our current context of the nation state, [get] that nation state to expand social safety nets, to raise the standard of living for as many people as possible. That being said, in the absence of state response to our demands or in the absence of avenues to even influence the state, there are still things that ordinary people can do. And yes, by necessity these communities are going to be smaller and they’re going to be more insular, but there are things we can do, I believe, to start living in a more equitable, just and sustainable way.

Michael Albert: I’m not faulting trying to do that, clearly. And I’m not faulting necessarily lessons that arise. Yet I do think I have something of a difference, which would go sort of like this: I venture to guess that if a movement started tomorrow that was geared to anti-racism and was focused on it; or anti-inequity or anti-capitalism and was focused on it; or on ecological survival and was focused on it; and such a movement had within its structure gender relations, sexual relations, hierarchical sexual relations, patriarchal relations, you would doubt the likelihood of its success. As would I, even just on grounds of its having embodied and accepted that flaw; that the acceptance of that hierarchy exudes a force field that would corrupt a lot of the other activities of the movement. Same thing in reverse, do you agree?

Kristen Ghodsee:

Okay, yes, I mean I do think that this is a problem, right? But again I think that what the book talks about is that almost every single one of these Utopian movements, whether they were Buddhists or early Christians or early Jewish groups or anarchists, feminists, environmentalists, communists, Utopian socialists–running the gamut; they all coalesce on a very similar package of policies about the way people live together, about the way they raise and educate their children, about the way they own their property and about the way they form their families.

And so, I would say that, and I thought really hard about this because, for instance, in the book I talk about these contemporary Christians, I call them the “Bible communists;” bible communist Christian communities like the Bruderhof or the Hutterites. Now, these are people who live together really in what we would think of as communes. They own their property in common. They raise their children in common, but they do still have vestiges of patriarchy and the patriarchal form of the family operates, because of religion, it operates in a really unique way. But because of the way they own property in common and because of the way the United States government taxes them (there’s a little known bit in the tax code that allows for the existence of these things called apostolic associations which means that they have to have a community treasury and then every single adult in the community gets an equitable portion of the distributed, ah, product of their labor), whatever money is generated, it gets equitably distributed to everyone in the community, which means that it’s being equitably distributed to women as well. And so, it turns out that women living in these Bible communist Christian communities, (which are, I would argue, still fairly patriarchal), are much better off economically and financially than women who might consider themselves feminists but are in a traditional marriage with a breadwinner, homemaker kind of thing.

So, some of it has to do with, yes, there is a commitment to politics or a commitment to a certain sort of ideal, but then there’s also the underlying practice. And what I argue in the book is that, we really need to challenge, like what I’m saying is: if we challenge the single family home, the idea of the monogamous, nuclear family, of bi-parental care [and] living in a single family dwelling surrounded by hordes of their privately-owned stuff, that that is part of the structure of capitalism. Capitalism relies on that model, and that structure is also the vehicle for the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege, largely from wealthy white men to their legitimate heirs. And we have things like assortative mating and all sorts of ways in which this gets exacerbated in the contemporary moment. But every single one of the utopians that I write about really wants to trouble the family as this unit for the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege. And I think once you start troubling the unit of the family, once you start doing that, you’re going to start chipping away at racism and sexism and most importantly, the structures of capitalism. But again, if we think about these ideas going back to antiquity, it’s not only capitalism, it was feudalism, it was slaveholding societies.

So, the family is the place–the domestic sphere is the place–from which the people that make up the larger project of the state are produced, and in order to trouble the state you need to trouble the family. And so, yes, I agree that many of these experiments are not directly tackling things like racism or even sexism or class politics. Sometimes they’re just trying to re-imagine the way that people live together in community. If you go back and you look at St. Benedict of Nursia and the Rule of St Benedict: there’s this text from 530 CE which is really about how do a bunch of cenobitic monastic monks or nuns live together in harmony. A lot of that text is about: they shouldn’t own any private property, and if they take children in, they should raise them collectively. So, it created a very different world and I think it has potential. 

It’s not perfect, and I’m not saying it’s perfect. I think that that would be a mistake to say that it’s perfect. Many of these societies devolved into weird hierarchical cults of personality. So, I don’t want to ignore the negatives, but I do think there’s something really positive and inspiring that we can learn by looking out across history and realizing that this 1% of the population that decides to do things differently (even if it’s only in their own lives) can be really important and influential in social progress.

Michael Albert: I’m going to ask you about the 1% a little bit later because that’s a real issue there. But, I think first of all I’m in awe of your knowledge that you’re displaying. I mean I can barely keep up.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, you know I spent a lot of time in the pandemic just reading. Some people made sour dough, some people…

Michael Albert: Sure, yeah, but you remember it.

Kristen Ghodsee: But well, yeah, I mean, you know, it’s one of those real, you know, like we all had our pandemic survival modes and my survival mode was reading about Utopian communities.

Michael Albert: Okay, that explains it about 10%. There’s a lot else at work. But in any case, I think what you’re describing for, let’s call it the kinship sphere, that’s the way I would talk about it, is that that is a fundamental thing, a fundamental part of life, obviously true. It’s responsible for breeding and nurturing the new generation, true. It emanates a kind of a field of force because of its internal structure which other spheres of life have to accommodate and relate to or else there’s going to be a kind of a war between them, and maybe your community will get crushed or maybe it will spread its influence elsewhere. But you see I think the same thing can be said for the economy and the polity and the culture, and so I’m not contesting a whit the importance that you’re attributing to kinship. But I am saying, and I hope it’s not a catch-22 for ultimate social change, I am saying that I think winning, writ large, does depend on addressing all of them. Addressing all of them as profoundly as the one you’re addressing right at this moment. I can see you’re nodding. Our listeners can’t see you’re nodding.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, yeah, so that’s, no, that’s a really great point. And I agree with you, and because I think that there are many other scholars and activists out there who are addressing the polity, who are addressing the economy, [and] who are addressing the society. I think my contribution here is to address the kinship sphere.

Michael Albert: Agreed.

Kristen Ghodsee: So, that’s why I mean, to come back to something that you said earlier which I think is really Important. So, Alexandra Kollontai was one of the old Bolsheviks; she was involved in the revolution, pre-, the revolutionary movement pre-1917. And then was very much involved in the very early period of Bolshevik governance, except for that she really did keep trying to warn her comrades that if they didn’t deal with the family…

Michael Albert: Including her most famous  husband.

Kristen Ghodsee: Well, her husbands, yes, but Kollontai worked together with Krupskaya and Armand. This sort of other troika, these were sort of the troika of women around Lenin. But she was the one who warned Lenin and Trotsky and the other comrades that if you don’t deal with this fundamental problem of the family, this whole bigger project is not going to be sustainable in the long run. And she was right. And the thing is that Lenin, both Lenin and Trotsky and the other male comrades very much thought, well, if we deal with the polity and the economy first, we’ll get to the family later. The family stuff is too complicated, it’s too expensive and there’s a lot of resistance from the peasants. So, we’re just not going to deal with it. And then, you know, Kollontai goes off into exile. She’s an ambassador in Norway and Mexico and Sweden and she doesn’t actually end up coming back to the Soviet Union until after the Second World War. So, she’s very much sort of exiled from politics. But I would argue that in many ways she was right.

Michael Albert: Yes she was.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, she was, and so I really take inspiration from people like Kollontai because I think that there are a lot of very, very smart people out there today who are arguing about changes that we can make to the polity, changes that we can make to the economy, changes that we could make more broadly in our societies, but they’re a little hesitant to deal with the family. They’re a little hesitant to deal with kinship structures because that’s where people tend to dig in the hardest.

So, my contribution to this conversation, I can’t write about everything, but my contribution to this conversation is to really talk about the way that I think kinship plays an important role. And I’m, you know, here with Kollontai. I would say if anybody wants to tell me ever that they have a political program for the economy or the polity that doesn’t include a rethinking of gender relations in the home or the way that we raise and educate the next generation, I’m just going to turn around and tell them, I’m sorry, it’s already not going to work.

Michael Albert: Which is exactly what I guessed you would do a little while ago, and rightly so, but the anarchists also had a critique of Lenin and all the rest that you mentioned you know, Trotsky, etc., and the anarchists were right too.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, right, absolutely. I mean that’s why Kollontai, I’m sorry just to interrupt you, I just want to point out that Kollontai joined the Workers’ Opposition… And their most famous pamphlet is written by her and it’s partially for her support of the Workers’ Opposition, sometimes called the left opposition, which were the anarchists really, that she gets exiled. Yeah, so absolutely I think that’s very important.

Michael Albert: But and it’s no accident. That is to say having challenged injustice, really challenged it, in the kinship sphere, she was quick to pick it up in the other sphere. Lenin and Trotsky, having been pathetic on authority in what they were working on, the polity and the economy, I mean really pathetic, at least in my view, were equally incapable regarding kinship. So, there’s these fields of force there, these accommodations between these realms.

But let me ask you a slightly different question. In my own experience, very limited, back in the 60s, there were certainly people who, friends, people who I experienced who were doing what you’re describing what this 1% were doing, and it was more than 1% at the time. So, I am thinking of hippies, not all, but a lot of them who were creating communes. They were creating places to live. They were creating places to bring up kids. And they were challenging the exact same kinds of things that you’re describing as being challenged. And those of us who were aligned with them, so to speak, but were also in the more traditional anti-war, anti-capitalist part of the left, had a criticism. And the criticism went like this: you’re right to be bringing up all that stuff just like, you know, Chodorow was right at the same time but from a different perspective; so, you’re right to be bringing up all that stuff but there’s something insular about what you’re doing. You’re going off, which is fine, and setting up a commune but you are completely forgetting about General Motors or the workplace or the neighborhoods where most people live who aren’t as young and mobile as you are. And that insularity is going to, this is the opposite version of what you’re criticizing in a movement that doesn’t address gender  that insularity is going to fuck up your effort; and I think it did.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, so okay, there are several different answers to this question. I think, maybe I’ll work backwards from the contemporary moment and then try to address that question more historically. So, one of the things that I would say in the contemporary moment that I was most inspired by were the eco-villages. In the historical context, I would say that most people who lived communally initially were religious people who for spiritual reasons wanted to live collectively in order to get closer to God. In the 60s and 70s, I think there was really a way of sort of trying to extract oneself from capitalism and the injustice of the system without really understanding that if you were just sort of going off on your own and trying to create a commune that you really weren’t going to be contributing to these larger movements for social change, which really needed to happen

But in the contemporary moment the vast majority, I think, of really successful communities that are thriving today, and there are many of them, are these eco-villages. And many of these eco- villages are based on principles of sustainability and perma-culture which are sustainable forms of native agriculture. And they’re really trying to live in such a way to reduce their carbon footprint. And it turns out that living in sort of more collective groups really does reduce carbon emissions. It really does have a profound impact on reducing human taxation on the earth. So, in the case of the eco-village movement, their vision is that if they can just get more and more people to live in this more sustainable resource-sharing way, that it actually will have an impact on the larger project of reducing the carbon footprint of humanity. And also by the way, probably reducing population, which is another thing we can talk about later. But, and you can disagree with them, and I think many people do disagree with them and think that you should go the way of Extinction Rebellion, right, and really get out there and be confronting power and confronting fossil fuel companies and confronting states, that maybe there’s a place for both of those things, right?

Michael Albert: Both, yes.

Kristen Ghodsee: And so, I think that that’s how I would apply that historically, is that maybe it was really important that there were people out there on the frontlines fighting injustice. But it was also equally important to have these people who were retreating. So, for instance, a community like Twin Oaks in rural Virginia which comes out of that moment has existed, and it still exists, and it’s almost like a University for Utopian ideas. People go to that community for short periods of time and then they leave and they spread these ideas of like car cooperatives and communal wardrobes and things like that, around the country. There’s this way in which some anarchists talk about “contaminationism,” which is where you can spread ideas more organically. 

Because I do think about David Graber’s ideas of direct action. Like, what is direct action? How do we act directly? How do we act pre-figuratively in our politics? For some people, that is really confronting the state, that is really trying to make serious political, economic changes through this direct confrontation with the state. But for other people, I think that direct action is just acting as if the state doesn’t exist. Acting as if we already live in a world in which the state doesn’t exist and that means creating communities of care and support and solidarity that are able to kind of come up with other interesting ways of being in the world.

Michael Albert: You mentioned that we have these two kinds of effort. One kind is the one that you wrote your book about, which is people essentially finding a place for themselves where they try to create a model, not so much with the model aspect in mind but with their own well-being in mind; trying to set up a situation in which they’re living in a better way. Then the other kind of effort, it came out of my question about the 60s, the other situation is people trying to end a war, trying to end global warming, whatever it is, and perhaps even a set of things, but addressing it in the form of political movements, demands, etc. And you said there’s room for both and I agree.

However, beyond there being room for both, it seems to me that an improvement is if each respects the other, and therefore if each learns from the other. So, while for instance, in the 60s there were lots of hippie communities formed, it would have been better had they respected what was going happening on campuses, etc., and even supported it, so as to undercut that tendency toward insularity. Or to offset in the movement side, the tendency toward a sort of pragmatic movement that has lost track of what it means to live a life. So, both sides have something to learn from the other, to benefit from the other, and I don’t see any reason why that can’t happen even though it’s a little difficult.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, and I mean I agree with you. I don’t think that they’re mutually exclusive. For instance, my last book, as I’m sure many listeners will know, was called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other, um, what is it? Now I don’t remember the name of my own book, sorry. My last book was called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. In that book, I really am talking about policies that states can institute which will drastically widen our social safety nets. I really do look historically at a variety of state socialist experiments in Europe to say, hey, this has been done. It worked and it can be effective and it actually ends up making life better for everybody, not just women. So, I agree with you again that there is a real place for social movements. But, if we think back to the 60s and for instance, the anti-Vietnam anti-war protests there, you know, yes, there were people who were very much resisting the state. But then there were also a lot of people who quite understandably dodged the draft and moved to Canada. And all those people who left the United States, they were a very important form of protest, too.

Michael Albert: Sure.

Kristen Ghodsee: Now, I’m sure that they were very selfish because they’re like, “why should I go die for a war that I don’t believe in?” And there’s something very unjust about all these other people who aren’t dodging the draft and are actually going to fight and die. There’s no solidarity there; it’s undermining the resistance to the war. There are all sorts of ways in which draft dodgers were considered somehow, you know, um, extremely selfish, right? But on the other hand, the fact that so many people did decide to get out, they burned their draft cards and then they disappeared, I think that was also a really profoundly important form of protest.

Michael Albert: Sure.

Kristen Ghodsee: And so, the problem of insularity and the problem of people trying to create a life for themselves, a happy life, a joyous life, a connected life, I think that’s really important. And it’s one of the things that I feel too many political movements on the left, particularly on the left, but I’m assuming this is true on the right…

Michael Albert: I’m not so sure.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, because I don’t spend time in those movements, but like, let’s face it, leftists are kind of a bummer. They’re morose. They’re serious. They don’t know how to have any fun and um, I think there was a wonderful Jacobin article, I think it was in Jacobin, a couple of years ago about “in defensive of brunch,” like brunch for the people. But which I thought was sort of facetious, but it was also really important. We need to be joyous in our politics. We need to allow our politics to fill us up rather than to allow it to drain us. 

And quite frankly, as I was listening to you speak, I have a 21-year-old daughter and I teach and I have taught for the last 25 years, 18- to 22-year-olds, and now at Penn I have students that are a little bit older in their 20s and then, of course, I have this massive group of former students who are now in their 30s and are having kids and starting families. And one of the things that I will say is that the politics of this country, in particular, but any kind of really public-facing political activism, for many young people, is extremely draining and disheartening because they’re afraid. The minute they take a stand on one issue, they get criticized for not caring about another issue. There’s divisiveness.

Michael Albert: Or even their way of criticizing the one issue.

Kristen Ghodsee: Exactly, even their way of criticizing the one issue. And so, in my experience, a lot of these young people have become very apathetic, and worse, depressed and anxious about the world. And so, one of the things that I think is so useful about really going back and reimagining a utopian form of politics, is the fact that utopia is sort of by its nature is unachievable, right? So that the goal isn’t a concrete goal of achieving x, y or z policy outcomes, but it’s a goal of creating a movement of people who believe in the possibility of a better future together and then within that movement, within that community, you find joy and you find care and comfort and support and solidarity. 

And I think that we, especially on the left, have done a very, very poor job of tending to our comrades’ emotional needs. That’s why I feel like part of what my book is trying to do—because my previous work has really been very concretely about policy things that we could do—but this book is really about trying to re-instantiate a politics of hope, because I think we’ve lost a lot of that, particularly in the context of the climate crisis. I think too many young people are feeling immobilized by what’s happening in the world today.

Michael Albert: I couldn’t agree with you more. I call it the stickiness problem where, what I mean is, I was on a panel, I guess it was thirty years ago but even then it was 20 years from the 60s, and I was calculating in my head how many people had come into the vicinity of the left or been deeply in the left. And I put the figure at that time at a very low-end estimate of 10 million, just in the US, and a higher-end estimate was more. And I said, well, where the fuck are they? That is the big problem. Ultimately, it’s like a bathtub with the bottom open and the spigot on but it’s going out as fast as it’s coming in. And if you don’t talk about why it’s going out, you’re an idiot or you’re not trying to win-one or the other. I mean, it’s just obvious. And so when we then ask, well, what’s the cause of people bouncing off activism instead of being attracted ever more strongly, because that’s what happens, and it’s what you’re talking about. It’s that partly that people do come in with prior problems, after all, we live in a totally fucked up society.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, exactly.

Michael Albert: So, naturally we have problems. I mean, we shouldn’t be embarrassed by it. People are products of the world that they’re in and that means they’re flawed, so people coming into the left are flawed. I mean, the left is supposed to be creating a better world, the left is supposed to be good people, supposed to be nice. So, it should be that when you get into the vicinity the left  you’re drawn ever more strongly. Every student that you’ve had should be in the left, or every student I’ve had should be. We should be drawing these people in.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah.

Michael Albert: So, we both agree that’s a problem and we have to solve it and I think both sides have something to teach about that, but in any case, maybe a last realm of questions. You started this whole thing off with, there was the 1% people running society now and then there was the 1% who initiate these kinds of efforts to create something different. And now the question is why is it 1%?

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, well I think that the key thing here is that it’s 1% because it’s a steady 1%. Like the economic elite is a 1% that exists, that is, you know, just a statistical fact, right? There’s always going to be the top 1%.

Michael Albert: Yeah, until there is a better system, they own everything, yeah, it’s not complicated.

Kristen Ghodsee: They own everything, right. But, I’m saying that in any society, if you have 100% of people then the richest 1% are going to be the richest 1%. Yeah, I think that the 1% of the utopians that I’m talking about here is a flexible 1%. So, the economic 1% is a statistical artifact of the fact that there’s always going to be a 1% of the wealth distribution. But in a utopian way, we think about utopianism, the way that I use the 1% is that there’s always going to be a minimum of a 1% who are trying to create better, like that 1% can expand massively, but it can also recede, but it never really seems to go beneath a particular threshold. Those people are always out there. The anthropologist Victor Turner talked about…

Michael Albert: What distinguishes them?

Kristen Ghodsee: What distinguishes them is liminality.

Michael Albert: What’s that?

Kristen Ghodsee: They’re liminal to society. They live in these areas where, you know, Victor Turner talks a lot about like poets and shaman and medicine men and women and people who are always sort of seen as somehow being outside of the norm. And those people, they’re like the dreamers, they’re often the writers and the musicians; they often are believed to have some kinds of spiritual powers or connections. 

So, we can look in every single society; this is like a weird consistency of human societies; is that you always have these people on the margins. All these people in these sort of liminal spaces where sometimes they’re feared, other times they’re highly revered, often, they’re just ignored because nobody really knows what to do with them, right? But, the key thing is that they’re always there, and one of the roles that these people play is to re-imagine human relations in the world. That’s one of the key things that they do.

I think if we go back and we really look seriously, historically and cross-culturally, at different communities and experiments over time, what we will see is that a lot of the things we take for granted today in our world, things like daycare for instance, or divorce on demand, started out as the most outrageous utopian goals.

So, if you look at the St. Simonians or the followers of Fourier in France in the aftermath of the French revolution, they really wanted divorce, they really wanted the ability for children out of wedlock to be treated equitably, they thought about collective child-rearing in a certain way and they were completely…I mean the St. Simonians were actually thrown in prison for being, what’s the word, like against public morals or something like that, obscenity. But nowadays, every time you drop off your kid at a childcare center, every time you file for divorce, you are actually living out in your daily life a project that started with these utopian communities. So, I really do think we forget. And I mean, I keep mentioning this, but I think it’s important, that the Catholic Church these days is probably one of the most conservative organizations in our society, but it was not always that way. And there have always been currents in the Catholic Church that were quite utopian and quite liberatory, particularly in places like Latin America with Liberation Theology.

Michael Albert: Sure.

Kristen Ghodsee: So, I do think that, again, it’s at our peril we ignore the importance of these utopian communities.

Michael Albert: The thrust of my question isn’t to ignore or undermine, or deem it less important. It’s rather this issue of a certain number of people move first. I mean, there’s another possible explanation. One possible explanation that you’re describing is that there’s this set of people in a position in society that causes them to be a little different be, a little outside, and to perhaps attract negative attention, and they’re moved to think in this creative way and in this different way and then to act on it.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah.

Michael Albert: Okay, I don’t think it’s so different on the other side. So, in other words, take now the realm of larger scale political activism. It doesn’t start full size. It starts small and it grows or it doesn’t grow. And the question becomes, again, why do some people get moving faster than others and then what happens. And what you described in the utopian example is that sometimes they devolve into, you know, a leader, I don’t know what you call it…

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, a charismatic leader.

Michael Albert: A cult figure. But on the other side, the same thing happens, or sometimes happens. And actually, it isn’t even just there. If you look at sports, athletics, along comes a new generation of players and it always turns out to be that a few are at the top, and not very many. Sometimes, it’s two or three, and until they almost die off, or retire, they maintain it. And what’s going on, I think, is that the ones who move first have a head start. They have confidence. In other words, they’re practicing earlier, they’re developing confidence earlier, they’re filling roles which are hierarchical.

Kristen Ghodsee: Okay.

Michael Albert: In other words, instead of, you could imagine a process on either side, the utopian or the political, which is so non-hierarchical that this doesn’t happen.

Kristen Ghodsee: Um, yeah, right.

Michael Albert: And that it’ll start with a few, it has to start with a few, not everybody moves at once, of course. So, that’s not a problem. But the few don’t remain the few. And if that’s a right picture, we still have a question of what distinguishes the first few. I’m not contesting it; you may be exactly right in what distinguishes them, but I want to know because we need them and we don’t want them to become authoritarian.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, we don’t want them become investment bankers. Yes.

Michael Albert: But we also don’t want them to dominate the utopian vision or the movement process, but we do need them to get things going and so it would be nice to be able to identify them. Anyway, I have another question for you that’s very related to this. A friend of mine…

Kristen Ghodsee: Can I just say one thing to that because I think it’s important to make a distinction here between what I’m talking about, the utopian 1%, and then the concept of the vanguard party? Because I’m not down with the vanguard party, okay.

Michael Albert: I know that right, right.

Kristen Ghodsee: So, I think that part of what you are saying is that it would be nice if the utopians were a part of the vanguard party without being a vanguard party, but that’s a difficult thing to have at both the same time. So, we need them, but also I think that the minute we start to drag them into the mainstream in order to get them to, you know, inspire… the minute Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Byzantine Empire, it became a force of oppression rather than a force of liberation.

So, I think we have to be careful here, and I’m totally on board with the confederative politics, that’s why I like the idea of contaminationism, this idea that people can inspire people. There’s a wonderful concept of swarm theory, how murmurations of Starlings work for instance, and it’s a sort of node-and-spoke vision of organizing movement among different individual beings, in this case birds. But it can work for schools of fish and I think it can work for political movements as well. You were going to ask about your friend. Yeah.

Michael Albert: I’m going to guess now that you’re also familiar with Rosa Luxembourg.

Kristen Ghodsee: Of course, I am yes, yes.

Michael Albert: And I will guess that you probably have seen the passages where she talks about the difference between a mindless herd and self organizing people. I know you didn’t mean that but it’s what came into mind, a mindless herd that basically seems to be very collective but it’s not. It’s really just obeying. Or a herd of people but each one of whom is conscious and not following orders and not just filling a role.

Kristen Ghodsee: Right, well, that’s exactly why I think swarm theory is so perfect here because the way that it works is that each individual node in the swarm, affects like eight units around it and then each unit of that is another eight units, and it’s an autonomous way that nature has evolved.

Michael Albert: I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not so sure it’s such a good analogy because none of them are thinking, they’re all mechanical.

Kristen Ghodsee: Well, sure in the case of birds, but I do I think that it’s an interesting way of, a way that nature has evolved for organizing large groups of sentient beings into action, which I think is interesting because we tend to think that nature is full of hierarchies. But it’s not. There are other models in nature that we can look to.

Michael Albert: And now we have Kropotkin.

Kristen Ghodsee: Exactly. I just taught The Conquest of Bread and Mutual Aid and I think that those are precisely the kinds of texts we need to really push back at this social Darwinism that we’re in, and say, hey, in scarce environments maybe cooperation is more evolutionarily suitable rather than competition.

Michael Albert: I have forgotten the question I was going to ask, which is fine.

Kristen Ghodsee: Oh, you were going to ask about a friend of yours, you were saying something about a friend of yours.

Michael Albert:

Yes, thank you, yes, this friend was an organizer in the Midwest and he was in both camps. So he was creating with another person an area of mutual celebration, mutual aid, sharing, etc. But he was also very much in the other political realm. He had been in the army, etc. Anyway, after a time, he burned out I suppose you could call it, but that would be a little too simple. It wasn’t that he burned out. It was that he felt organizing was like being a therapist. People came with just too much baggage to be able to do anything. He was organizing in the Midwest in very, difficult areas to organize, in some sense, and it’s a problem. It isn’t just that we have to be sticky because we are dealing with these things. It’s that these things aren’t so simple to deal with.

Kristen Ghodsee: Exactly.

Michael Albert: And they aren’t so simple to deal with, I suspect on both sides. In other words, in the utopian experiments you mentioned, some of them go bad in diverse ways. People can no longer relate to what they’re supposed to be doing. They want their own kid, or people see the possibility of more wealth and say, this has been fun but I’m moving on, or you know, there’s the cult leader. So both sides have this problem and this too is not seriously addressed.

I want to ask you if you would agree that the reason these things aren’t seriously addressed is because we’re not trying to win at some level. In other words, and this I think is a problem on the utopian side maybe more so but it’s on the other side also. People are so down and so depressed and so doubtful that another world is possible, you know it sounds good to say let’s have one; but then ask people what the other world is and the belief and the possibility begin to quickly dissipate because they don’t have any answers.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yes, I mean that’s why I think that religion is one of the places where people run to, right? So, like if another world is possible and it’s not in this life then that’s really easy to… there no counterfactual, right? It’s like we’re going to get together and we’re going to dream and we’re going to live in a particular way and then when we die, we’ll get our reward. I mean, that’s like the classic kind of move out of this. I don’t think that’s a useful move. I mean I am a materialist in the sense that I do think we have a responsibility to try to make this world a better place, that there is another world possible today, here and now, and not just in the afterlife. But I do think that the utopians are at least much more honest about that problem.

Michael Albert: That’s true.

Kristen Ghodsee:

They recognize that their answers, their solutions are… you know, utopia in the ancient Greek really literally means no place, right? It’s a homonym for Eutopia with an ‘Eu’ which also means a good place. And so, I think that there’s always been this ambiguity within these more insular utopian communities about what it is that they’re trying to win. Whereas in more socially active movement politics, I think that the winning is just harder to define because different people want different things out of the movement. What for some people is a huge win, like universal federally-funded or subsidized childcare in the United States for me would be a massive win, but it would immediately be seen as an incremental step, right? People would say, well that wasn’t really what we wanted, what we really want is a fully socialist economy where everybody owns the algorithms that are going to replace our jobs in common, and where we have some kind of universal basic income and where we’ve gotten rid of sexism and classism and racism and other forms of discrimination. And so, what for me felt like, oh great, we got universal childcare, which would be a huge step in the right direction for the kinds of policies that I’m talking about, would immediately be seen as a half-measure or an incrementalist step. So, I think that’s part of the problem.

Michael Albert: It is part of the problem but there is a solution, I think, in the sense that you could fight for universal childcare or lots of other things we could name, and you can fight for it as an end in itself, or you can fight for it as part of a process. What’s missing is where the process is going and in the absence of where the process is going really, the only way to fight for it is an end in itself. And then it is reformist. That critique becomes valid but not because it’s intrinsically that way but because the people who are pursuing it are going to win and go home.

Kristen Ghodsee: Yeah, or they burn out.

Michael Albert: So, they’re entwined, these problems. Anyway, all these problems are obviously of great consequence. I guess at this point we’ve covered a lot of ground and I know you have another appointntment coming up. So I want to thank you for doing this, it’s been a lot of fun.

Kristen Ghodsee:

Yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.

Michael Albert:

So okay, this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.

---