>>We had a Mormon faculty member who used to describe the original Mormon
>>economy as something that sounded like a crude socialist economy.
>
>Engels, in the Deutsches Bürgerbucj für 1845 (MECW, 4.214-228),
>presented a survey of actually-existing communist colonies and
>rather optimistically wrote this:
>
>"The reader will discover that most of the colonies that will be
>described in this article had their origins in all kinds of
>religious sects most of which have quite absurd and irrational views
>on various issues; the author just wants to point out briefly that
>these views have nothing whatsoever to do with communism. It is ain
>any case obviously a matter of indifference whether those who prove
>by their actions the practicability of communal living belief in one
>God, in twenty or in none at all; if they have an irrational
>religion, this is an obstacle in the way of communal living, and if
>communal living is successful in real life despite this, how much
>more feasible must it be with others who are free of such
>inanities..."
>
>The Shakers are the communal sect he describes at the greatest
>length in this article, and the Mormons are (unsurprisingly)
>unmentioned. But the development of the Mormon communities seems to
>fall in this same expansionary period of American utopian
>communalism.
Engels' reasoning seems less than sound here - why isn't it likely that the irrational religious beliefs are what keep the community together, and make their collectivism possible? Similarly, it's likely that the hunter-gatherers, so revered by many, were able to live their peaceful collective lives precisely because they didn't engage in production on anything but the smallest scale. Pointing to these models doesn't really offer much to the present and future, unless we all want to become millennarians and/or don skins.
Doug