NICOLE’S IMPOSSIBLY POSSIBLE IDEAS
They say communism is impossible
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few weeks ago, I drove through Orderville, Utah on the way to give a reading at BYU. Orderville was, for a while, a fully cooperative town. Based on a tenet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that members should all give the church 10 percent of their income for the general benefit of others, the town of Orderville established a cooperative grocery store where all farmed goods and made products were donated to the store. People came in Nicole Walker and exchanged what they had to give for what they needed. Orderville doesn’t operate exactly like that anymore, but unlike other small towns that I drive through on my way to Provo and Salt Lake, it’s hanging in there. There are apple orchards and little cabins you can rent among the trees. There’s a zipline and a trout farm. In my imagination, the apple farmers and trout fishers still share their
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harvests while zipping across the Virgin River, then sitting around the campfire by the little cabins. Communism has been denounced as an impossible dream. Even socialism, the
benign brother of communism, is seen as anathema by a large number of Americans. People bristle at the thought. Turn defensive. Start calling you names like Stalin and Nazi. Words hurt, apparently. The resistance seems to be that we shouldn’t give our hard-earned work and dollars to ‘the man.’ The man, in this case, is the government. But we seem pretty comfortable giving our hard-earned dollars to A Man. On the drive through Orderville, I was listening to Lily King’s Euphoria, a book about three anthropologists in a love triangle while studying Indigenous people in New Guinea. The anthropologists, in the midst of a community of Tam people, get down to work, sorting people by type—Northern people are aggressive, Southern people are chill. Eastern people are spiritual and Western people interested in the mind. So you can figure yourself a Northern Western kind of person. Or Southern, Eastern. The Nazis, in the book, took this compass of personality type to augment their whiteis-right philosophies. The idea fails when it’s obvious our two narrators, Nell Stone and Andrew Bankson, are a better match than Nell’s actual husband, Fen. After Fen commits a heinous act, the three flee the Tam. As Nell and Fen, abandoning Bankson, wait for the boat to take them from Sidney back to New York, Fen makes an astute statement when Nell lists the troubles that will come for the Tam and other peoples along the Sepik River. The rubber, the ore, the minerals will be taken from this land and sent to the “North” for wealth-building. Braxton turns his head at the statement. Fen says something to the effect of, “Ah, never
talk to the British about what the colonized start talking about where the money comes from.” It was funny to think of Nell, a white American and Fen, a white Australian, as extensions of British Colonies, but, in a way, they are. The English frown at talking about where the money comes from because it’s not a pleasant story. It comes from the work and exploitation of people and land. It made me think of the BBC drama Downton Abbey. I remember the outside shots of the manor. The inner workings of the upstairs/downstairs economic system are on display but we never know where the funds originally came from to build that estate. To buy that land. To the manor born is our understanding of how wealth systems worked in England. I think of a brick in that manor house and recognize each one was built by someone who gave their time and work to it. Each brick was baked and transported, set and mortared by people who will never live in that house. Capitalism is a kind of socialism in the way feudalism is a kind of socialism. You give your work to A Man. He lives in the house. You send another brick, or engine part for a private airplane or fiberglass for a yacht to your feudal lord, be it Bezos, Trump, Gates or Musk. Say the word “communism” and all the “big government tears” start falling: “How can I trust the government with my money? One day the government wants to build a school. Another day they say the government wants to build a park! Why should we build a park? We have plenty of grass in our backyard.” Somehow, it’s a lot more palpable to give your money to A Man and the manor. Perhaps we’re proud of the work we see in the lay of the castle, the layers of fiberglass on the yacht. “Look at my brick!” we say from your hut on the edge of the manicured gardens. It would be great if the lords joined us in celebrating that brick but they can’t. They’re too busy on the inside of the manor, making sure we keep helping to build his castle instead of our parks and schools, charting out treatises about why socialism, at least the kind where the money doesn’t go to him and his castle and yacht and manor, is an entirely impossible idea. Nicole Walker is the author of seven books, most recently Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster. She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The words here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer.
