Jakob Schäfer: “Mellopolis ’48”: A dream city as an alternative

The capitalistically organized world society has become absolute and appears to many contemporaries to have “no alternative”. The classic dystopias of the last century (Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell) continued their present negatively. However, books about utopias located on exotic islands, where people lead an unknown but better life, have now been lost to us – like “promised lands” in general.

Jakob Schäfer tries to remedy this and travels back in time to the fictional city of “Mellopolis”. This is a self-sufficient commune in a not too distant future that has already left capitalism behind after a “great crisis” followed by “broad upheaval.” If there are still connections to the global economy, these are unclear. The author comes from our present and therefore has difficulty finding his way around this utopia. As in all travel reports about distant lands and unknown futures, it is difficult to separate the wishes and dreams of locals, observations and information from travelers, and the prejudices, projections and fables of anthropologists. That’s why it’s helpful when Schäfer gives up the role of travel reporter in the second part of the book and talks about the “political-philosophical foundations.”

But first, let’s talk about the characteristics of the dream city of Mellopolis as the author imagines it today. The founding and post-capitalist transformation of Mellopolis were only possible in the wake of the great social upheaval that took place there a few decades ago (and about which no further information is known). The abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the nation state – the classic project of communists and anarchists – is no longer an issue; it is tacitly assumed, as is the abolition of bureaucracy, the army and the police. The same applies to gender equality and the reform of the sexual economy, even if “free relationships” and the definitive dissolution of the bourgeois nuclear family are still controversial. It is laconically said of the state that it is still not completely “dead”.

All innovations serve to reduce the necessary working hours and the fight against global warming. The division of labor and class divisions have been abolished, along with poverty and unemployment; A subsistence economy with a widespread reduction in the use of machines and energy has replaced the production of goods and exports. Money has also been abolished, goods and services – as long as they appear on the list of “basic needs” – are distributed free of charge; Only special requests are paid for with working time vouchers.

Material production has been reduced (“degrowth”), private automobiles no longer exist; In general, passenger traffic is restricted. The city’s territory is gradually being reduced in size, there will be “primeval forests” in the surrounding area and “forestation” and “urban gardening” in the city. Agriculture is practiced by everyone – primarily with manual labor. Multi-family or multi-generational houses with shared kitchens and small group daycare centers are the preferred form of living. More important than combating symptoms and medical care is prevention – a comprehensive “salutogenesis”. All city residents have basic knowledge of crafts and care. The model is the (playful) “productive” person; The necessary work should become attractive (“enjoyable”) through rotation, which counteracts specialization.

Parties form around alternative (including “outdated”) interests and projects and compete for majorities. Decentralization is king; The rule is: as much local and regional self-government as possible, as few decisions by central, i.e. state committees, as necessary. Schäfer’s vision of a post-capitalist council commune is reminiscent of both Karl Korsch’s concept of “industrial autonomy” developed 100 years ago and Charles Fourier’s housing and production cooperative “Phalanstère” conceived 200 years ago. While Fourier was particularly concerned with the architectural planning of his model settlements, Schäfer describes the Mellopolitans’ time management: Every month, 90 hours of work “for general tasks for the entire population” are obligatory for all able-bodied residents; on average, 20 hours are worked per week; At least ten hours per person are free from work every day. Despite resolute material and energy savings, work productivity has increased to such an extent that further reductions in working hours appear possible in the future.

For “Mellopolis,” Jakob Schäfer partly builds on his book “The Commodity Society and the Challenge of Multiple Crises,” which was published in 2022. Marx and Engels, complemented by Ernest Mandel and Daniel Bensaïd, figure as the guiding stars of his “philosophical-anthropological compass”; In addition, reference is made to recent archaeological and ethnological studies that have proven the existence of egalitarian, stateless cultures.

Since the model colonies designed (since Plato) and founded by followers of the utopians and prophets were supposed to be “suitable for everyone,” sooner or later coercion was necessary. And so dystopia lurks in the best-conceived utopias. Hundreds of model colonies that had been founded in the old and new world since Fourier’s days did not – as he had hoped – provide the impetus for the transition to a new, better way of life worldwide, but fell into disrepair after a few years or decades. Engels called Fourier a satirist, but quite a few utopian drafts and constitutions of early socialist colonies read today as if they were their satires.

What’s new about the concept of “Mellopolis” is that its residents not only seem determined to do everything they can to stop the impending climate change, but that, as a result of the said “upheaval” – and with the tools of self-government – at least in their city and have a real opportunity to do so in a network of similar municipalities. “Utopia skips time,” wrote Max Horkheimer. For the utopians, “the change in what exists (…) is relocated to the head of the subject.”

In “Mellopolis” there is a fear of a “relapse into old behavior patterns from the competitive society”; the long-term effort to “convert from the subject to the collective” is seen as “an essential achievement of the revolution”. This option for anti-individualistic collectivism marks the point in Mellopolitan thinking at which their fear of relapse (into “outdated” ways of life) drives them straight towards such a relapse. With the abolition of private property and the state, the memory of the barbaric 20th century seems to have been lost in Mellopolis, in which the large, human-devouring regimes promoted individualism (proscribed as “bourgeois” or “reactionary”) and the sought to eradicate individualists with the help of “anti-mass mass movements”. But Marx and Engels did not want to undo modern emancipation and a return to group ego and clan conscience. Rather, they wanted the “class individuals” of capitalist society to be freed from this “objective dependence” and to have a “free individuality”.

Let us put it in the words of the Russian poet of the revolutionary period, to whom we owe the first dystopia of the last century (the novel “We”, written in 1920): “The world lives only through heretics (…). We have lived through the era of oppression of the masses; Today we are witnessing the oppression of the individual in the name of the masses; tomorrow will bring the liberation of the individual in the name of man.”

Jakob Schäfer: Mellopolis ’48. A report. New Academic Press, 125 pages, €12.90.