Communities that Abide—Part V: An Example of Success

Pete Ryan

Last week's post featured an extended excerpt from Peter Kropotkin, who counted off the main reasons of failure among communist groups: communal living, small size, and separatism from the wider world. Yes, an anarchist worker cooperative of a few dozen members that relocates into the American wilderness, shuns the world, and tries to make a go of it is likely to fail: the members will fall out with each other and live out Sartre's dictum that “hell is other people”; they will lose their young people who will flee to seek new experiences elsewhere; they will either become enslaved by a “big brother” or become “utterly depersonalized.” Give up the thoughts of farming and of complete self-sufficiency and zero in on the concept of gardening in close proximity to a city that can offer a stimulating environment, a market for the produce and opportunities for the children as they grow up. Keep in mind, says Kropotkin, who you are: you are not “monks and hermits of old” but industrial labor that wants to get out from under the heel of the capitalists and the rentier class.

Kropotkin talks of life animated by struggle—against social injustice in the wider society—as being essential for an active person. That struggle goes on: just last week we saw walk-outs by fast food workers in the US who thought it unfair that their wages were low enough to qualify them for public assistance and that the terms of employment often offered them only part-time work but with the condition that they be available to work at any time, precluding them from finding any other work. This is the end result of a couple of centuries of class struggle. Labor has lost. Gone are all of their gains: regulated work week and overtime pay for nights and weekends are history; guaranteed old age pensions are finished; right to public education replaced with right to attend public schools where students are taught little, tested endlessly and medicated into submission for misbehaving.

One might think that if labor has lost, then capital must have won. Indeed, on paper the capitalists are doing better than ever, with greater than ever wealth disparities, equity markets at all time highs (for how much longer?) and non-stop displays of ostentation and conspicuous consumption by those whose profits are subsidized by the Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program that keeps their workers fed. But look at it another way: the capitalists and the rentier class are surfing on a gigantic wave of debt, and the collateral for that debt is rather doubtful. An economy that is 70%-driven by consumer spending, where 80% of the population is toying with poverty, is not too promising. If labor is the horse and capital is the rider, and the horse dies, where does leave the rider? On foot, I would think.

Kropotkin's story is a story of failure: industrial workers weaned on stories of social and economic progress who absorb all the right theories of anarchic organization and communist patterns of production and consumption, try to make a go of it, and fail. They cannot act like one big family because that's not how they are; they cannot shun the world because then their young people run away; they cannot live in small groups forever because they end up at each other's throats, or they end up enslaving each other, or both. Examples of failure are useful, to a point, but so are examples of success.

One such example is presented by the Hutterites, who are Anabaptists living in small agricultural colonies of 75 to 150 people predominantly in the Dakotas, Montana and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. They started out in Tyrol some five centuries ago. Jakob Hutter, who gives them their name, was martyred just three years after he took up preaching. They faced much persecution over the years, mostly over their communist lifestyle and their refusal to serve in the military. They spent time in various countries including Ukraine, where they did not fare well, and when they left for the United States some hundred years ago they numbered just four hundred, but now number around 42,000. For a time they had the highest birth rate of any human group, with over nine children per family.

The Hutterites are entirely communist, practicing the doctrine of “all things in common.” One of their founding episodes involved laying out all of their possessions on the ground and redistributing them based on need. They live in communal houses where each family has a separate room or apartment, but children over a certain age go and live in the Kinderhaus. They take their meals together in a separate communal kitchen and dining hall.

The Hutterites are also entirely anarchic: although they are organized into three major groups, called Leute, their governance structure does not really rise above the level of the commune. There are lines of responsibility that go to certain individuals, but all lines of authority really proceed from the full meeting of the commune, which tends to rule by consensus. They do hold elections for positions of responsibility which, when the result is a tie, are resolved by casting lots.

They refuse to send their children to outside schools, instead building school buildings right inside the commune. They separate the school day into German school and English school. The day begins and ends with German school, where the children are instructed in all things Hutterite. In the middle some time is left for the public curriculum, presented by an outside, English teacher. Grades are regarded as unimportant. There are no pictures (the Second Commandment prohibits graven images), no musical instruments, no radio or television, no newspapers or magazines (except for trade publications devoted to agriculture or mechanics). There is no higher education, because the Hutterites try to put their children to work at age fourteen or, at the latest, fifteen (as mandated by Education Canada).

Hutterite youth are allowed to leave the colony and work “in town.” If they return, to be baptized and to marry, rejoining the colony as adults (as most of them do) they are allowed to use their savings to furnish their rooms. Other than such outside earnings, the Hutterites have no money as individuals: everything they own is in fact owned by the “church.” (There are no church buildings or other physical manifestations of this church, theirs being a simple and austere faith.) Giving their youth the ability to leave and come back (no questions asked) provides an important relief valve, and also makes sure that when young people come back to rejoin the fold they do so with complete commitment and not willy-nilly, and it is the strength of this commitment that keeps the Hutterite colonies strong.

It may be interesting to ask whether the Hutterites are happier than the rest. Their way of living provides ample opportunities for hard, rather monotonous work, little opportunity for personal growth or recreation, little room for expression of individuality, and a large burden of responsibility before others. Yet they seem to have virtually no substance abuse, violence, depression or suicide, few psychiatric ailments, and generally seem content with their lot in life. It probably helps to understand what they see as their goal: it is not personal success or self-realization but harmony within the commune and living out one's allotted days in accordance with what they see as God's will.

The Hutterite notion of gender roles is strictly 16^th century, and this strikes many people as unacceptable. The women have no voice (except in prevailing on their husbands) and no opportunity to compete with men. They take their meals at a separate table from the men (the children have a table of their own). It's tempting for some to call the Hutterites patriarchal, except that they have no archon (Greek for “ruler”) and exhibit no hierarchy. Instead, there is gender dimorphism, which exists in many species, human species included. Keeping an open mind about such things is difficult for many people, but really we have no more basis to judge the Hutterites (not being Hutterite ourselves) than we do to condemn the practices of our even more sexually dimorphic cousins—the orangutans and the gorillas. Is strict separation of gender roles essential to Hutterite success? I really have no idea. Their concept of gender roles is what it is because they, as a group, are five centuries old. They abide (which is why we are talking about them here) and their concept of gender roles abides with them. What would happen if they were suddenly forced embrace gender equality? They would probably see it as yet another episode of persecution and head yet again for lands less settled and less “progressive”... but, lucky for them, we won't get the chance to run that cruel experiment on them.

And so we have to contend with the fact that Hutterite communes abide whereas Kropotkin's anarchist worker communes have all failed. I do have an idea why that is: because of the people they involved (or, no pun intended, “evolved”). If you want to make a commune, start with some Hutterites—that seems to work almost every time; don't start with some industrial workers looking for social justice and self-realization. This may seem like a terribly unfair thing to say. What do you have to do to win at this game? Become someone else? That's quite a trick, isn't it! Most of us wouldn't want to become Hutterites, even if we could (and we can't; the Hutterites aren't recruiting). Don't all of us have an inalienable right to “be yourself”? But I think it is still worth thinking about the process of becoming someone else, because the drastic changes to economy and climate that will unfold over this century will render most of us (those who manage to survive, that is) barely recognizable, making labels such as “progressive” and “conservative” about as relevant as the color of the plumage on the Dodo bird. The requirement of “being yourself” seems like a prime candidate for the leading cause of extinction, at every level. The Greenland Norse went extinct because they wouldn't eat fish. I suspect quite a few Americans will cook themselves to death because they will refuse to turn off the air conditioning. Giving up on being who you are is probably one of the more painful experiences a living being can go through—up there with dying and being born. But what if it's necessary anyway?

Thus, I feel that it is possible to form a commune that abides and succeeds; that success, however, will not be for the individuals who found it, who will have to sacrifice themselves to the cause and vanish as individuals in the process—it will be for the commune itself, in which there can be no individuals—only roles and responsibilities for someone to voluntarily accept. And few Western, empowered, rugged individuals coached in the rhetoric of human rights and invested with a great sense of self-worth and entitlement would voluntarily accept any of that. But what if there is no room for them in this gravely damaged ecosphere? There is a quote from Fight Club (the novel) that comes to mind: “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.” Maybe the Hutterites have more of a sense of that than we do, which would explain their almost casual attitude toward death (versus their very serious attitude toward life). They are not put on this earth to achieve self-realization or success or status; they are put on this Earth, for a time, to do what they see as God's will, and their goal is to not make a mess of it. It seems like a worthy goal for our messy times.