Communes in the New World 1740–1972 by Liselotte and Oswald Mathias Ungers, translated by Winston Hampel. REAL, 102 pp., $22
The problem with being the change that you want to see in the world is that the world will get its own back on you eventually. This strange little book, published in West Germany in the early 1970s and now wrested out of the dustbin of history and translated into English, is a sympathetic pocket guide to the various ways in which a prefigurative utopian socialism has been built in the United States of America since before its foundation. The Marxian objection to these experiments—that utopian enclaves do not affect the workings of the capitalist system at large and that capitalism will eventually force them to conform to its demands—is pretty spectacularly borne out by the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century around 100,000 Americans lived in communes (a significant number in a far less populous country of 23 million people—it would be over a million Americans today in relative terms), yet the US has notoriously nev…