Today I'd like to go on a little segue from the reading [Bernstein vs. Luxemburg]. See, the 'Communist Manifesto' was published in 1848 in the German language in London, but as of that date in the Indiana Territory of the United States of America, two experiments in communal living had failed. [as have all but three in the world, though those are close as of the date of composition...] I'm talking about a little place called New Harmony, Indiana, where I happen to have spent the past summer.
In 1814 a gentleman named Johann Georg Rapp bought a tract of land on the Wabash river to establish a religeous commune for his fellow immigrant/persecuted sectarians. I find this entertaining because he had to raise the capital to do so. I shall now paraphrase how he did so, a full description of his exploits may be found here:
{http://www.usi.edu/hnh/pdf/Expanded%20Text%20on%20the%20Harmonist%20Society.pdf}
Anyhow, by pooling the funds from his followers, he aquired 30,000 acres of prime Indiana swamp. The Harmonists moved there, made the land habitable, and then he rewrote the charter making it nigh impossible for those wishing to leave his sect to have their investment refunded. [One should want to leave if one wasn't a prominent member of the sect and wished to, say, get Married, as the Harmonist principles promoted chastity]
Rapp used capitalist principles to found his community living experiment, and when it failed, he sold the entire town and used teh proceeds to relocate himself. And some followers[Irony?] New Harmony failed because some members of the Harmonists from the old world [Germany] moved to New Harmony but had incredibly different views of how they ought to act while being members of the sect [return again to the previous example of marriage, though Trade and Malaria did figure in]. Wait, wait, wait! They were too far from a trade route, ergo move... we return to Bernstein's idea that socialism needs to change simply into giving means and power to the working class.
The second experiment stemmed from the guys who purchased the land from Rapp, William Maclure and Robert Owen. They tried to establish a commune for educational and equality reasons. Unfortunately, the scientific founding of this experiment meant that they didn't focus enough on agriculture, and it was torn apart because of inequalities in Labor. Hmm... 'Let us intellecutals study while you proletariates farm' doesn't sound like very well thought out communal living to me. Kinda like going back to serfdom. At least the 'leaders' were 'working' though.
New Harmony produced two examples of why communism/socialism fail. Human beings, and most other mammals for that matter, work best in a hierarchic society. This may be due to a lack of self confidence on a personal level. Perhaps socialists would do better to promote individual self confidence as the means to overarching equality, instead of, to borrow a phrase from Schlafley, neuterizing sociery.
