The best books about the possibility of collectivist modern life

Mutual Aid is an argument against social Darwinism: against the idea that social progress, like natural evolution, relies on cutthroat competition in which the fittest survive.

Kropotkin begins from a different premise. From the idea that life is foremost a cooperative struggle. Beings struggle together against outside forces before they struggle against others of their own kind. First published in English in 1902, the book is a popular and loving account of gregarious life. It teems with examples of beings acting cooperatively: struggling together for their existence and taking pleasure in the sheer fact of being together.

Its many examples are sure to dazzle curious children and dismay self-assured relatives seated next to you at family gatherings. 

Mises' warnings about socialism bringing about the end of civilization have entered popular lore a sort of common sense, so it's worthwhile to read the original.

This book is less a scientific analysis than an ode to market liberalism: to “the desperate struggle of lovers of freedom prosperity and civilization against the rising tide of totalitarian barbarism.” At stake is the very possibility of non-market modernity.

Mises argues that modern society cannot function without a market defined by acquisitive trade: individuals' peaceful cooperation hinges on their ability to make rational choices about their production and consumption of things, and such choices are possible only when a system of competitive market price expresses the true value of every commodity.

“The socialist order of society,” he warns, “is not realizable” and will lead to the collapse of (western) civilization itself: “Nomad tribes from the Eastern steppes would again raid and pillage Europe, sweeping across it with swift cavalry. Who could resist them in the thinly populated land left defenseless after the weapons inherited from the higher technique of Capitalism had worn out?”

72 people died when the Grenfell Tower burned in 2017, hundreds more lost their homes.

As survivors slept out in London's mosques and churches, one politician suggested requisitioning empty investment properties to house them. But the idea was shot down as a violation of human rights: those of the property owners. Whyte's Morals of the Market opens with this historical anecdote to ask how neoliberalism and human rights discourses evolved together.

Working through published and archival sources, the book shows that neoliberal thinkers “developed their own account of human rights as protections for the market order.” To their authors, such claims were not cynical. They were moral: grounded in a political morality that equated social progress with commercial relations, collectivism with moral failure, socialism with civilizational regression.

As people whose social worlds have been shattered by neoliberal policies increasingly turn to right-wing populism for a new kind of collectivist future, Whyte's book returns us to the fact that neoliberalism is itself a moral project. It makes us ask why its architects found this image of society righteous, and whether today we still do. 

Mass democracy guided the 20th century. Socialists and liberals disagreed about what exactly a government “of, for, and by the people” would look like, but they agreed that, in principle, it was desirable.

Even the fascists agreed. “Fascism,” wrote Mussolini, “is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered from the point of view of quality rather than quantity... a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live.”

But by the end of the century, democracy gave way to another ideal: special “zones” punched holes in the image of a democratic nation state with micro-nations and gated communities, crypto-currencies and special economic zones, charter schools and AirBnB schemes.

Slobodian's Crack-up Capitalism traces the emergence of this new social ideal. It examines the theory and practice of privately managed spaces erected to protect capitalism from democracy, markets from politics, profit seeking from claims to the common good. And it shows us that these are also utopian projects – albeit, ones explicitly disinterested in democracy's promise. 

49 years after The Dispossessed was first published, the internet is full of user reviews written by people who claim that it changed their lives, enthralled them, made them true believers, made them want to move to the moon. I, too, am one of these people.

The Dispossessed is a book about anarchists on the moon. It divides the 20th-century ideological standoff over whether modern life should be governed by competitive (capitalist, hierarchical) or cooperative (socialist, egalitarian) logics with an expanse of interplanetary space.

An anarchist physicist named Shevek (modeled after J. Robert Oppenheimer) travels between the two planets – the moon where he's from, and the patriarchal hierarchical society on earth, which he hates – to work on his studies of simultaneity. The story of his life unfolds in chapters alternating the narrative present and past, and shows the good and bad aspects of both societies.

This book made me believe that we can live otherwise: that there is an arid desert moonscape somewhere to which we can abscond to live a collectivist modern life, with all its material hardships and frustrating social relations.

But this is an illusion. The two planets are not really separate; their political economies interweave. Cargo ships land every quarter to take the rare minerals mined by the anarchists back to the hierarchical planet in exchange for some basic necessities that the anarchists cannot produce. And we – back on our earth – we only have the one earth. No moon to abscond to.

As our societies start to look more and more like sci-fi anti-utopias, I hope we will find the collective strength to make them otherwise, instead of seceding.