Imagine you have the ability to create a new society.
Imagine that it�s you who decides whether society is competitive or cooperative, stratified or egalitarian. Imagine that it�s you who determines whether society assigns the interesting jobs only to a small percentage of the population, or assigns all jobs---interesting as well as uninteresting---to everyone in equal allotments. Imagine that it�s you who decides whether a few people will have the majority of the wealth, or whether everyone will divide all wealth and resources equally.
Before you make your decision, there is one thing to consider. You don�t know your place in society yet, you don�t know whether you have special talents or average skills, and you don't know whether you will be a minority member or a majority member. What sort of economic and social system would you choose?*
Utopia 2000 has answered the question with a proposal for a socialist intentional community.
Combining classic socialistic elements of Robert Owen, William Morris, and Bernard Shaw, Utopia 2000 repudiates the Marxist notion of violent revolution and hierarchal authority. Utopia 2000 is devoted to community in which all members participate in governance as well as labor, deciding for themselves the ratio of abundance to leisure they seek. Utopia 2000 is committed to ecology, feminism, cooperation, and rationalization.
Is such a society possible? Utopia 2000 takes as its model the existing income-sharing communities Twin Oaks and Los Horcones---and adds the aim of eventually creating a network of associations trading amongst one another independently of capitalism. As B. F. Skinner said: �Utopias are science fiction, and we have learned that science fiction has a way of coming true.�
* This premise was first proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, (Cambridge, MA.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).
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