a crash crash course on the golden age of hollywood
to state the obvious, this is not meant to be a be all end all guide. it’s just a start for people who wanna know more about some of the essentials of the era. there’s plenty of people and movies i didn’t include but at least now you can listen to vogue and understand all the references.
i feel like every activist should read about fruitlands.
fruitlands was a transcendentalist utopian commune founded in the 1840s. the founders (including louisa may alcott’s dad) thought that the existing capitalist economy was evil: alcott described it as a tree “whose root is selfishness, whose trunk is property, whose fruit is gold.“ so they decided to create a commune that was completely divorced from the economy. like, their response to the "you say you’re against capitalism but still participate in it! checkmate socialists!” people was literally “you’re right, let’s not!”
they refused to consume any materials or foods that couldn’t be locally grown, like tea or sugar. they were also highkey vegan: not only was it immoral to eat animal products and use animals for leather and wool, but using animal labor or even using manure as fertilizer was forbidden. and they refused to trade for anything they didn’t have within the commune because participation in an oppressive economy was bad, especially if it supported slave labor (ex: wearing cotton fabric).
it fell apart in less than a year because they didn’t have enough food to survive the winter.
why?
well, part of it was circumstantial: the site they picked had little arable land and they arrived a month behind in the planting schedule. part of it was the impracticality of living in the 1840s and being so vegan that they couldn’t even use oxen to plough their fields or wear clothes that were warm in cold weather.
but the main reason was that the men of the commune (and they were almost all men, except for alcott’s wife and another woman, ann page) didn’t actually, like, do anything. they left all the household chores and childcare to the women, plus most of the farm work, while they sat around and philosophized about how cool their utopia was. even before it fell apart, most people there had began taking “vacations” away from fruitlands so that they could take hot baths and avoid trying to till the soil with their bare hands.
there are a lot of good lessons here.
1. it’s very easy to talk about your great ideas for society but putting them into practice is much harder. you have to actually do the work to achieve the goal: you can’t shunt it off onto other people based on the same oppressive systems you’re trying to subvert.
2. you need to consider the practical implications of what you’re arguing for, including potential downsides. banning wool for ethical reasons is all well and good until you’re stuck wearing linen clothes and canvas shoes in the middle of a massachusetts winter.
3. you can’t expect that a utopia is going to be all the things you like about society staying the same and everything you dislike being changed. that is at best naïve and at worst intensely selfish.
tl;dr: talk is cheap, praxis is hard.
to be clear, since a lot of responses seem to be confusing this point: the principles on which fruitlands was established weren’t the problem. there’s no inherent flaw with their being vegan or refusing to participate in an economy that ran on slave labor. and they could have established a commune based on totally different principles and the outcome would likely have been the same.
like, the problem isn’t “it’s impossible to farm without any animal labor, lololol the transcendentalists were stupid.” plenty of people, native americans in particular, managed to do so just fine before them. the problem is “bronson alcott and charles lane said that animal labor was immoral, but found out that digging with your bare hands is hard, and instead of just doing it, they weaseled out of it (taking vacations, making the women do it, and, when it got close to winter, compromising their morals and buying an ox and a cow), and that meant they didn’t have any food when december rolled around.”
like, you can brainstorm more practical methods of maintaining your values, knowing that sticking to a pure ideal is extremely difficult if not impossible in real life. or you can suck it up and till the soil with your bare hands, because sticking to those pure ideals is more important to you. what you can’t do is say you’re adhering entirely to your purest beliefs and then be all surprised_pickachu.jpg when it turns out that doesn’t result in everything being happy rainbows.
this is a thing that happens in essentially all political circles to some degree: it’s not just a thing I see from leftists, but it’s also what bothers me the most about libertarians. you need to actually think through your political ideas and consider possible ways that it could fail: because of bad actors, or unexpected issues like a natural disaster, or simply “not everyone is going to just accept that this is a good idea.” if you do think that through and go, “yeah, this thing would suck, but that’s something I’m willing to do because the alternative is worse,” that’s fine! but then you need to actually do that! you can’t sit on your ass and talk about how wonderful your political ideals are while other people do the work for you!
‘Gangnam Style Half Speed’ by Glee Cast “It sounds like demons at a strip bar and you walk in because demons took you capture and they need to take you to their boss, but the boss is at a strip bar and you walk in and everything is in slow motion, and theres hot demons pole dancing, and you look around and theres gross demons shouting and throwing money and off to the side with a cigar is a big demon guy with a suit whispering something to a waitress and you look at them and they glare at you and then at your handcuffs.”
I FUCKING HATE THAT I GREW UP WITH THE GOOD INTERNET I HATE THAT I REMEMBER GOOGLE SEARCHING A TERM AND FINDING OUT EXACTLY WHAT IT WAS I HATE THAT I REMEMBER WELL DESIGNED WEBSITES MADE FOR EASY VIEW AND NOT TO BOMB YOU WITH ADS I HATE THAT I REMEMBER WHEN APPS WERE TRYING TO BE THEIR BEST AND NOT TO SELL THE MOST I HATE HOW CAPITALISM AFFECTS EVERYTHING AROUND ME AND I HATE THAT I CAN SEE IT SO CLEARLY IN HOW IT AFFECTS THE INTERNET
