Four Words
I prefer to always dream of the overwhelming reality that surrounds me.
R.M.
I.
On the coasts of the Cantabrian Sea, a sublime city stirs awake on a heap of earth, an emporium of opportunities and welfare for humanity and all living beings.
Here, we have all our needs met and live in a network of cooperation, never distressed by injustices common to previous dynasties and empires of capital, suffering, and violence.
Our Techno-Utopia, a boundless synergy of a truly liberated people, is the handiwork of a deep grassroots upheaval that freshly transformed the old world in a radical way, the horizon of workers nourishing its firm idealistic roots with the dreams of lunatics and bygone visionaries.
Our historical archives teach us that the Techno-Utopia was once a small village of anglers, once deprived of all well-being and all enlightenment by those in power.
Our kin—our comrades were born in empty fields, raised in rags, educated near the roughness of raging waves rushing forth, terrified by uncertainty, fearing the unknown, imbued by all the old blunders and fads. We were weakened by overwork and famished, lacking food for the belly and food for the brain. We wretched ones lived as outcasts, forced into exile away from the charade of “civilized” peoples, overlooked by stylish philanthropists and their family foundations at that time, those who preached frequent charity and voluntary poverty without the intention of getting wealthier while leaving the truly active members of society in a state of lack, misery, and despair.
From time to time, our community would lose hordes of locals. As a rule, they were young and stocky people, used for work like mules, taken to other towns by armed men dressed in colorful clothes who were, apparently, “organizers defending the common interests, lives and properties of the citizens.”
Those rude, gross rulers of cannon fodder did not empathize with our mothers and their tears or the wailings of our fellow workers. Their hearts were cast out of steel, as hard as their weapons. In addition, they toured our town annually, unannounced. These other men were ordered to collect a tax called the territorial and industrial contribution. They obtained it by force, via a procedure that called for the seizure or expropriation of poor people’s property when they were not able to pay the hateful tax.
Although the property was guaranteed and theft was punished, none of this was true of the so-called State, whose agents of “law and order” oversaw the trampling of all the laws it dictated. The poor anglers knew nothing more about what was happening in the rest of the world, since the church pastor, that lazy man living at the expense of the ignorance of his faithful, provided them with no mindfulness of the world and its affairs, only suggesting ideas aimed at plunging them deeper and deeper into the shadows that darkened their ignorant minds.
This is how our unfortunate ancestors of the Techno-Utopia lived and would have lived forever if a powerful universal upheaval, begun in unforeseen regions, had not reached our corner of the world and radically transformed it for the better. The fatal prologue to our immense, necessary transformation? Gunfire and deafening weapons, roaring cannons, the thunder of combat, streams of spilled blood.
Waking up from our long dormancy, we shook away our worries with revulsion and erupted like an unyielding volcano, demanding our dignity together. We moved away from out-dated traditions and customs and, to honor all the lives lost for the sake of our awakening, we entered this better world full of enthusiasm and vitality.
Several nuclei of workers joined the common folk of our once miserable hamlet and founded the Techno-Utopia. In the beginning, agents of change struggled with unbelievable obstacles: they had to overcome formidable resistance by external forces and circumstances, and not without titanic efforts were they able to realize their lovely ideal. Fear and ignorance, not yet banished from the moral order, made a marvelous work of a transvaluation, a revolution of values necessary. The old-fashioned maintainers of the status quo constantly fought against all innovation, and not without the continuous resurgence of new skirmishes was it possible, after much patience and unwavering fortitude, to reach our present charm.
Growing forth like a small but well-tended garden, a completely new moral order, a completely new social life not plagued with chaos and oppression, was being formed. Agents of change worked together to liberate each other of our previous vices, putting an end to our habits of servitudethat were founded upon abuses of the natural law of our anti-authoritarian ideals that were not yet understood or incorrectly interpreted. What is notable is the fact that these abuses came in general from those who resisted most tenaciously to the compassionate propaganda of our new ideas.
It took every single one of our ancestors making sacrifices to help educate those most reluctant to change understand that the family was not constituted by the mediation of a ridiculous farce of commandments, that citizens could get by just fine without the constant surveillance of their actions, that the workers who produce our world had a perfect right to all means of production and could use directly and freely all of them; that it did not need, in short, society, nor parents, nor privileged gods or masters, nor armed overseers, nor invulnerable judges, nor administrators turned into true lords and absolute owners of the common good, nor any other infinite number of quibbles that occurred, in the end, as everything corrupt occurs, as a result of piles of errors uncorrected and stigmatized by those who wrote and sold the history books.
As centuries passed, younger generations began wielding the true power that they as the-future-of-humanity possessed. They renewed and invigorated the novel social order, strengthening it by science, freedom, and unified demands for justice, not simply conceding to the surface-level appearance of charity and goodwill by those in power, the ones who fabricated and perpetuated
our social issues.
The Techno-Utopia is the material order and ecosystem of this tireless, steadfast organization and cooperation of the masses, of this body-breaking labor of several generations that has infinitely blessed us.
The nuts and bolts of our vast network include iron and electricity that flows madly through its technologies. Crowded dwellings, dimly lit rooms, ever-reducing spaces and confining borders of bedrooms, the filthy conspiracy of landfills, colonialism, and the kitchen, the dining room, the erratic alignment of streets; all these manufactured limitations of the obsolete system have disappeared completely from our Techno-Utopia.
In lieu of homely solitary confinement, architects and builders toiled to bring the town massive well-organized buildings, spliced by small gardens, where children of the neighborhood play happily. We dedicate one half of the city exclusively to housing, and on the other side reside cooperatives, farms on the outskirts, artisan and farmer markets, weaving together an extraordinary tapestry of human activity, work, technology, and creativity.
Buildings dedicated to housing satisfy all the prescriptionsof personal care and science: sufficient space, clean air and good lighting, clean potable water for all, electric charging stations for machine-driven services, and ingenious eco-friendly heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, cleaning and security devices. Stairs have disappeared, since we have elevators that assist us in abolishing ableism. For construction purposes, we have exchanged wood for the strength and durability of stone or brick and iron. Our innovative, worker-friendly technologies have also abolished the need for domestic services: each person can serve oneself without distress. These technologies have liberated women, especially women of color, who are no longer coerced into becoming domestic servants that provide cleaning, household maintenance, cooking, laundry, ironing, care for children and the elderly, as well as other errands for a spouse or wealthier white families.
The gardens near the buildings help pacify the unhealthy hustle and bustle within large cities. Everything is refreshingly novel, lovely, brilliant. Ornate differences do not exist: the palace and the cottage have merged into one modern building prescribed by science.
On the other side lies a magical horizon.Hundreds of windmills spin generators and create electricity. The web of humanity in all its teamwork, the machinery with all its combinatory grandeur for the translation of labor, eitherby steam, waterfall, or the electric motor that is abolishing coal and fossil fuels, keeping them in the ground and not in the air polluting our lungs and community. Machines work incessantly, so the worker has few other tasks than to direct and supervise the orderly process of the various technologies under their control. Light rail trams as well as trains circulate throughout our community for mobility of goods and people. Instead of perpetuating the exploitation of animals, that engine of blood, we utilize nonviolent means for agriculture and transportation.Our markets extend to both sides, providing a vast area of large bazaars joined with markets, and both serve as a center for exchange. The attendees move freely, without interfering in the least, thanks to the capacity of our warehouses.
Throughout the wide, pedestrian and bicycle-filled streets of the Techno-Utopia, numerous electric trams also circulate that can stop on a whim, and bright street lights radiate torrents of lumens at night, intense beams that compete with the sun. We can go from day to night without noticeable variation, thanks to the replacement of a large singular spotlight with innumerable lower-power bulbs that, taken together, are enough to provide warm lighting and safety to the entire population.
Some of our most notable facilities include public schools, a local affairs and relations center, a house of medical and evaluation services, free public libraries and museums, and recreational centers.
Public schools, promoted by initiatives and associations devoted to education, are true playgrounds of curiosity and imagination. The elements necessary for primary education gathered there allow children to acquire the consequent knowledge in the midst of their games, without restricting their freedom or warping the inclinations or spontaneous yearnings of their nature. Teachers, attentive to children’s own teaching lessons, take advantage of their curiosities, subtly introducing letters of the alphabet, geometric figures, demonstrative pictures of the first elements of geography, natural history, physiology, mathematics, and other branches of universal science among their toys. The gardens where students play operate as centers of experimentation. The hoop they play with can teach them the first notions about geometry, circumference, and lines. The ball in all its varieties also helps teach them about size and shape, colors, counting, the laws of gravity, while also enhancing their socialization, dexterity, and gross motor skills. The ball is also geometric means to know different kinds of lines, all while encouraging them to use their imaginations and be creative.
For this, a ball is covered with yarn in the colors of the rainbow and hanging by a string that in various positions determines the straight line, the curve, the ravine, the horizontal and the vertical. The plates, divided into pieces, entertain them in the combination of geographical charts. Other wisely chosen toys teach them the diversity of movement and its laws. Using cardboard cutouts, they arrange letters and numbers, and the garden’s multitudes can serve as units for acquiring the first elements of mathematics and natural science. Children’s natural curiosity is the teacher’s most helpful assistant.The spirited energy that manifests itself within them has its application in gyms, where they develop their strength and agility recreationally without fatigue.The child goes from one exercise to another, always happy and always learning.
Later, when their physical and intellectual development allows it, they expand their knowledge with general notions of all the sciences. The main theories are taught by practical methods that make it very easy to understand their nature and development. Various combinations of spheres with proper motions teach the principles of astronomy, and a multitude of entertaining experiments offer the student fundamentals of physics and chemistry. The movements and properties of the stars, molecular attractions and repulsions, circulation and diffusion of light, propagation of sound, composition and decomposition of bodies, the study of all the natural elements in its various expressions form the set of a wise integral and interactive pedagogy. There are miniatures of all the most important machines, working instruments of different kinds, farming tools, scientific instruments with marvelous results, everything that may be of interest to the instruction of life-long learners, from the most rudimentary to the most complicated combinations of laws. natural skillfully applied to work.
The purpose of these centers is not to train encyclopedic scholars, which is otherwise impossible, given the great development achieved by science. The teaching plan has no other object than to make known to all who wish to know the general principles of the arts, the sciences, so that in this way the inclinations of each one can freely manifest themselves and dedicate themselves to the specialty more in harmony with their temperament, character, and hobbies. The student is not ignorant of anything that may interest them, all orders of knowledge are common to them, and thus they can conscientiously choose their profession, in order to enter the social concert as a useful member to themselves and to their fellow comrades.
Intellectual inequality has thus taken a severe blow. Medical science lends its aid to teaching and removes many pathological and physiological imperfections that once opened veritable gulfs between people. There are small inequalities of abilities produced by nature itself, which always manifests itself in different degrees of different perfection, but not incomprehensible inequalities of the knowledge acquired, of the social means necessary for production. The manifestations may be uneven, but the root cause is identical. In terms of intelligence, everyone is essentially the same, the dreamers of the Techno-Utopia told themselves, and they did not give up their efforts until they saw this beautiful ideal confirmed by experience.
The local Affairs & Relations Center (A.R.C.) is what might be called a huge everyone’s home. It is made up of extensive rooms for public meetings, a large patio for notices and news of general or particular interest, and several rooms for offices. In the latter, the statistical association provides its services to the community on its own initiative and spontaneous agreement. Those who need publicity come to the patio and there they freely fix, without hindrance of any kind, edicts, calls, news, notices or important announcements for one or more groups, already in the order of production, already in the order of consumption, or in that of change, or in that of art, in science, etc. In the halls, the groups hold their assemblies, formulate their contracts, establish or modify their relationships, and finally discuss all matters that are of interest to the cooperation of two or more individuals, of two or more collectives. This center is, in short, the appropriate means for the community, the people, to meet, concentrate and communicate with ease, without waiting for any prior arrangements from others, or fearing strange interference. The citizens of the Techno-Utopia wanted to live the life of freedom and, for this, the annulment of all powers was sufficient in exchange for the spontaneous manifestation of all initiatives, both individual and group.
The House of Medical & Evaluative Services (H.O.M.E.S.) is a completely modern creation, with no antecedents in the ancient world system. In the Techno-Utopia there are no prisons, because when the cause of the crime disappears, the criminal also disappears. Those dens of corruption that the ancestors foolishly called correctional facilities belong to the past. The contagion of moral and intellectual diseases has disappeared at the same time as the prisons. With these, hospitals have also been abolished, creating a philanthropic lie, a false charity out of fashion. These epidemic centers, those prisons for physical criminals, those sick due to misery have no place where misery is a myth, and the Techno-Utopia has destroyed them, guaranteeing existence and work for everyone. Neither hospitals nor prisons! The one who is truly free, responsible for their actions, does not need other guarantees than those of mutualism and solidarity, and for both they go to the home of their friend, their sibling before the evil occurs, and prevents it and avoids it if it is possible. Why kill, where the death of one’s fellow human being has no purpose, neither because of theft, nor because of jealousy, nor because of ambition, nor because of envy? Why put ourselves in open struggle with the constituted society, when it guarantees us the satisfaction of all our desires within the natural order of life?
Techno-Utopia lives without care, rests on the very virtue of the principle that informs it: freedom.
All organisms obey natural laws. The universe rotates in the infinity of time according to immutable laws. Matter is transformed by composition and decomposition in the infinity of space, according to permanent laws. Humanity lives in the eternity of thought according to the immanent and indestructible laws. But there is no law without phenomenon, and one day the universal order seems to be disturbed by a body that disobeys the laws of gravitation or attraction, and thus humanity also seems to lose the established order, due to the presentation of a pathological, physiological phenomenon. or moral. The phenomenon arises, but neither the universal nor the human order is disturbed by it. The general laws of the existence of everything remain subjecting and subordinating it.
Thus, society never considers the phenomenon as a general factor in its constitution. It is organized according to the law, not according to the phenomenon.
The Techno-Utopia, formed according to the laws of human nature, has not brought the phenomenon into the combination of its constituent elements. It is a negative force that tends to destroy it and it is enough for you to prevent and guard against it.
So there are no longer criminals; there are few phenomena, rare exceptions to the general rule, and these phenomena, these exceptions, can only come from a physical, intellectual or moral imbalance. Nature sometimes breaks the regularity of its laws, or rather produces a disturbance by the intervention of a foreign agent in its functioning, and thus the individual, by the intervention of any agent, breaks the balance of one’s own organism and it disturbs. Discovering this agent in order to destroy it and restore balance is the only mission that society can and should assign itself. This agent goes by the generic name of disease. Social phenomena are thus sick, and every sick person needs to be cured; every organism decomposed, corrected.
On the other hand, the principle of social solidarity obliges the cure of the sick, and that is why the Techno-Utopia has created its House of Medical & Evaluation Services. The professors of this science, the specialists in various ailments, not well defined, that in other times were considered crimes or crimes, constitute a highly beneficial association, which is in charge, not by external delegation, but by its own will, of guarding society against the rare attacks of certain patients in order to reintegrate them later as useful members torn by science from an internal principle of individual destruction.
The House of Medical & Evaluation Services is a small compendium of what someone needs in social life. There the patient is studied in the midst of the inhabitants and their tasks; the intelligent gaze of the student of science follows them everywhere, and their eloquent word solicits them with affection in order to obtain adequate externalizations to the pursued object. The unfortunate patient enjoys relative freedom, according to the perniciousness of their illness, and they are not deprived of all the advantages society could offer them. They are transferred from a big world to a small world: that’s all. They work, study, walk, enjoy, enjoy, in short, life. When they are declared cured, they return to society excited, grateful for the care of those priests of science, of those healers who restore them to the physical and social freedom that their own diseased organism had deprived them of. They are a renegade of humanity, always prepared to fight for our survival through cooperation with their comrades, their human beings. What the sentimentality of prehistoric Christian charity had not been able to accomplish is accomplished by the sublime principle of universal solidarity established by a nucleus of radical dreamers in the Techno-Utopia.
Recreation centers, libraries and museums, true schools of moral and intellectual gymnastics, complete that grandiose picture of the highest degree of human perfection. I do not have the words to sing the excellencies of the beauty here, the wisdom, the fruits of our labor. The pleasure of study, art and science, the pleasant entertainment of hygienic exercises, ingenious games of patience and intelligence, have replaced vices that debased those enslaved, the passions that degraded them, the bestiality that engulfed them. As you already know, there is a remarkable difference between those who are enslaved and those who are free.
The magnificence of the Techno-Utopia, its material aggrandizement, responded to a proportionate elevation of ethics. Everything here is a product of a greater transformation of the world, carried out at the impulses of the revolutionary hurricane.
The wildest dreams have come true. Air navigation, underwater navigation, electrical power applied to movement, light and work, the word transmitted unalterable through time and space, wonders of photography never seen before; everything has been transformed into reality by the creative generations that sowed seeds of resistance.
On the shores of that beach covered with innumerable docks, crossed by railroads of immense power, you can no longer see the mighty colossus of the seas that wreaks havoc. From the smallest boat to the most formidable and ironclad transport, they are all vehicles of peace and happiness that cross the seas from one shore to the other with dizzying swiftness. The legendary sail no longer exists, and the terrifying wreck has been prevented. The Ocean, its history steeped in triangular eddies of violence and enslavement, now marvels at our labors.
How much useless shipwreck, how much pernicious concern, how many institutions, how many powers, how many fictitious forces, how many lying sciences have been destroyed, annihilated! Not even the infectious dust of the past has prevailed!
Everything is novel, how novel the idea, how novel is the beginning. how novel life is. Everything is pure, as pure is the ideal, the environment, the thoughts, the feelings, the works, an imperishable summary of a superior concept of Justice that has ended forever with the lies of religion, politics, economics, all the lies that we fed each other in distant times.
The Techno-Utopia is the world of our dreams. An eternal eulogy to the creation of this place!
II
If any resident of Techno-Utopia were asked what social regime brought forth such wonders, they would answer without hesitation: that of freedom.
“We live,” they would say, “in such an environment of equality and justice, that the greater degree of freedom we achieve, the more secure the resulting order. The worries and errors of the past are nothing short of incomprehensible to us. Thus we fail to explain why our ancestors needed so many written rules that they called laws, which enslaved and imprisoned them, when they reduced them to mere tools of their own misguidance. We do not understand the usefulness of those meetings with popular or privileged representatives, much less the preservation of the institutions called “public powers,” which are actually powers of the State. With so many obstacles and so much oppression, we cannot even imagine how social life was even viable. All these things have become strange curiosities for us, and it seems to us that the wise rulers, the powerful legislators of those times had many swindlers, and those who followed and supported them, much of voluntary slaves; that the so-called “guardians of law and order” were true tyrants, infamous despots, obeyed by cowards without feeling their own dignity; that the spiritual fathers were fantastic lie-makers to put the peoples to sleep; that the so-called owners were, in fact, some thieves protected by the laws; that the judges and magistrates, attributing themselves to the power of justice, were the protection of the rulers, the guardians of order, the proprietors and the priests, different gears of a machine ready to annul in others all their most appreciable qualities: dignity, sovereignty, reason, feeling, justice. Here, we live as we should; we are all completely free. We do not dispute the exercise of this or that right, nor do we dispute with anyone what were previously called political or social rights. We all enjoy the fullness of all human rights, and each of us exercises them as best as we can. Our primary intention is to care for our environment and fellow human beings, cooperating with them for the common good while working and producing for ourselves. If we tried to give rules for exercising certain rights, our social order would be disturbed immediately. We will not understand past illusions of “order” because we do not believe that it can exist except because of true, sustained freedom. By means of freedom, our path is easy and clear. We do not have any social problems or powerful people to rebel against. We do not need to uselessly pick fights with each other.The contradictions of the oppressive past have been resolved as we realized true harmony, the natural fruit of mutual respect for all initiatives, all activities. In short, our whole purpose comes down to this: to satisfy social needs as best as possible with the least expenditure of forces necessary, to develop as much as possible the sphere of our knowledge and our curiosities, and to contribute to the preservation of the many elements of society for the solidarity of mutual benefit.
The social system of Techno-Utopia is admirably simple. Its two fundamental principles are freedom and equality. Regarding the first, we use our natural dispositions, employ our activities, apply our forces without hindrance, without harmful friction. Nature is the only limit of it. For the second one has all the means they need for the real translation of the first: means of production, study and recreation that place them in a position of identity with their fellow citizens. The contract or pact is the only means of relationship, of transactions, in agreement between the various members of society. There is no single, general and permanent pact. There are a variety of more or less general and variable contracts, terminable and voidable.
All natural elements, plus those produced by the continuous work of generations, belong to the universal heritage. The private property of these elements has been banished from the Techno-Utopia. The isolated or associated producer always has the advantageous position of these general means of labor.
The organization of our work is extremely simple. We apply various operating procedures within agriculture according to the quality and circumstances of the land and its consequent tasks. Different associations are dedicated to cultivation, aided by modern technologies suitable for the purpose. Individual workers who prefer the pleasures of small crops in the orchard or garden can carry out whichever tasks they wish. Or they can join cooperative organization groups, harmoniously dividing the labor equally amongst themselves. Or small or large communities that the work demands and needs the very nature of uniformity.
This diversity of organic procedures makes production more fruitful and field tasks easier. The vast lands dedicated to cereals, the large orchards, the immense forests, are assiduously cared for by these patient and nurturing citizens, who, in their practice, gather enough scientific knowledge to better carry out their different operations. These groups are generally part of large federative nuclei, whose purpose is to preserve and promote solidarity and unity, ensure the good of the community and prevent unforeseen evils while knowing and establishing or fixing the needs of production, change and consumption in their relationships with other cooperatives.
The diversity of labor is even more remarkable. The infinite variety of products calls for a similar variation of applications and procedures. The isolated industrialist is not common in the Techno-Utopia, because the advantages of collective production result from such evidence, which determines a greater attraction among the workers. On the other hand, the great development of all industries has made, as in the sciences, specialties necessary, and a thoughtful division of labor increases production and perfects it in exchange for a small expenditure of forces. Yes, the worker of meticulousness has disappeared, the exaggerated specialty, exacerbated by the ambition of the exploiters, because this ambition has become a laudable encouragement of free people for the general good, and a more perfect instruction allows them to expand, to as well as the sphere of its scientific knowledge, that of its necessary applications. Associations are generally founded on free cooperation as most appropriate to human nature and social ends. The community, like individual exploitation, is the exception. By that other system or procedure, no one commits oneself to more than they can or want, without diminishing the strength of the collective, they are their own master, without modifying the conditions of the contract or breaking it for another one. In large factories these groups are subdivided into sections, according to the nature of the work, and each one assigns its task and is organized according to the purpose of the same. The engineer, the founder, the adjuster, all concur and cooperate to the same end in the sphere of their specialty, and they are completed without the need of the master, the feudal lord of industry in other times. How many in the cloth factories, the looms, how many contribute their work to the common needs of society? Its federations are immense and spread throughout the territory in perfect harmony with the agricultural, scientific and artistic federations. Conflicts are always resolved by freedom and justice and for freedom and justice, and only in this way can such vast ecosystems survive. These federative relationships are not specified in a locality, they are not locked into the exclusivity of a people but are maintained with other peoples in the necessary correspondence of reciprocity, mutualism and solidarity of interests and ends. The agricultural groups, the agricultural-industrial and the industrial groups, properly so called, frequently interact and agree and contract on certain objects of the moment for the future, and thus, through the voluntary and free cooperation of such varied entities, that one becomes a reality. Work based on freedom and equality of conditions is the simple application of this great event.
Like agriculture and industry, the arts and sciences have taken on new flights thanks to this process of association. The distinctive character of these groupings is that of a more marked original individualism. Scientists and artists come together for their studies and cooperate in their works, give each other mutual aid, but the production is more personal, more individualistic. Here the producer, by the very nature of the work, reserves a certain independence in their tasks, a certain isolation of one’s own in whom they need both in solitude and cooperation, subjective and associative work. The artist does not live without the mysteries of the quiet study; the student of science and these artists are not usually privileged beings alien to any directly useful production. Mechanical work is necessary for the balance of their organism, and they work ardently in various industries or agricultural tasks, according to their inclinations. Producers of the Techno-Utopia have free time to devote themselves to science and art. If they are a naturalist, the tasks of the field are for them at the same time a means of profitable study and necessary exercise for their body. For the chemist, the large workshops of corresponding products, very extensive fields of experimentation. For the mathematician, mechanical plants, priceless observation and application centers. For the artist, access to studio space and expensive equipment or materials offer you an endless horizon to study.Not everyone, however, can do double jobs. Doctors, for example, have plenty of obligations regarding the care and healing of their fellow human beings; health and well-being is necessary at school, in the workshop, in the field, and of course, at home. Whether one is a musician or a teacher, their well-defined mission calls them an ally of youth. Science and art are not, in short, a mystery to anyone, they are available to everyone.
The three orders of production, agricultural, industrial, and intellectual, form a harmonious whole in mutual correspondence of relationships and solidarity. They need each other and complement each other by grouping themselves by federative bond into vast local, regional, continental, and universal associations. This immense whole does not obey certain rules, nor does any strange force subsist. The cohesive forces of subsistence are their own, natural forces, which, following the example of the law of gravitation in the sidereal world, maintain the various elemental or simple and compound groupings in permanent equilibrium. The rules, the laws by which these organisms are governed and developed, are the immutable ones of sociology, deduced from nature freely and spontaneously observed by each one.
All obstacles broken, all the dikes that in ancient times vitiated the social environment of biological development and distorted the evolution of human progress, enslaving man and fostering antagonism and the war of interests, restoring human nature to its state of free manifestation and unfolding, the harmony and brotherhood of men and interests emerge bright and powerful, and the evolutionary improvement of society and the individual is carried out without violence by the double compensation of the struggle for existence and cooperation for the struggle . For the first, the necessary stimulus to the multiplication of products comes into the noble fight and gives society abundant means to fully satisfy its moral, intellectual, and material needs. For the second, forces are associated, and energy is conserved and directed to the common good, avoiding the perversion of the struggle and making the opposite stimuli converge to the same end, that of the greatest possible well-being through the least necessary effort. Magnificent fruit of freedom and association, true manifestations of the centrifugal and centripetal forces of the social organism!
Like production, change and consumption in their different material, moral or intellectual aspects, they necessarily respond to the new environment in which they take place.
Once the adaptation process has been achieved, an immediate consequence of the change made in human institutions, there is nothing with enough power to disturb the magnificent established order, there is nothing with enough force to nullify the effects of the freedom at such a cost conquered. Evolution, Revolution, Adaptation, three successive and complementary periods that have given all the necessary vigor to the new idea realized: that is the key to the problem.
The old form of the exchange, the commerce, the system of loafing and theft; the fictions of credit and monetary circulation, organization of usury and banditry, have been destroyed, annihilated even in their very structure, to the core. The real change of products and their regular circulation implanted by the revolution, has been perfected by evolution while society changed its habits, uses and customs. Universal and free credit, free from all old concerns, has entered as a major factor in this new order of things, and credit and exchange together solve the problem of the distribution of wealth, of consumption in all its variants in harmony with the brand new way of producing.
The bazaar and the market are great exhibitions of all kinds of products, more than enough to satisfy local needs. Each producer, each group of producers brings to the market or to the bazaar, if it deems it convenient, the result of their work and thus delivers it to general circulation. Each producer or each group of producers makes their personal or collective emissions of representative values of work done or to be done, simple signs of change with no more value than that attributed to work and the worker’s personal credit. Each producer or group of producers organizes, according to their needs, in the order of production and consumption, exchange and credit in their relations with other producers or groups, and thus by such expeditious means, without banking or commercial institutions of old-fashioned taste, each one communicates what they need, and as much as one wants to or can, they communicate their skills and what they can provide, as an exchange.
Interest, that social plague of the ancestors, does not exist here, and precisely for this reason that system of universal trust in credit and exchange can be carried out freely and for the general good of the social body. The administrative expense is reduced in the market and in the bazaar to tiny proportions that do not alter the value of the products at all, and the profit naturally suppressed, once the merchant is suppressed, the ideal of cost price change is verified, the ideal of change between equivalent or equal jobs.
The worker, the producer who carries out a long-term work, does not have to go through the deprivations that the lack of their own products released into circulation seems to indicate. Their current account in the market or in the bazaar, allows them to take into account the promised work, how much one needs, and their representative and personal values have the same value as a product made and exchanged. Social and private bookkeeping solves all conflicts, all difficulties. The worker who invents, who studies, who paints, all have, in the absence of exchangeable products now, equivalent personal credit to cover all their needs.
Since consumption is not a problem for anyone, it is not an abyss of misery for the worker. Here the community provides everyone with what is necessary from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, distributing goods and services through exchange and reciprocity when possible. Here, individual effort finds its equitable correspondence in transactions with other workers in the community and in our cooperative associations. Solidarity, social trust, through the complex freedom of human relationships, recapitulates in a single common interest the infinite variety of social, corporate, and individual interests. This diversity, enacted by the federative unity of so many elements in coordination and concert, which does not exclude any system, which blesses them all, in the immediate result of collective production, of the association of efforts and the unspoken sanctification of individual freedom.
As human beings, we feel, think, and work. This is a fact of indisputable evidence. Every obstacle interposed in the free expression of one’s feelings and in the realization and arrangement of their works is an attack against nature that has wanted to guarantee human beings those three ways of producing themselves on the individual level, as well as the communal, societal level. It is, then, by the freedom inherent in one’s personality that they direct their feelings, publish and propagates their thoughts, conclude and distribute their work. It is also for this same freedom that we choose the way and means of producing, changing and consuming. If someone wants to reserve the right to change their products, no one stops them; if someone wants to grant those products to the community, nobody hinders them; if someone wants to hand materials over for the sake of cooperation, no one opposes them. In the first case, they retain the property of the product, determined personally, if it is individual, or by means of the contract, if it is collective, until the moment they deliver it for wide circulation. In the second, one renounces this property in exchange for the right to appropriate whatever is indispensable to their needs. In the third, one can participate in these two extremes and in the same way ensure the property of the product and the right of appropriation of those necessary for life through exchanges. In all cases, personal belongings, the guarantee of one’s personal freedom, exist in the Techno-Utopia, and it is their choice what to do with them, prodigies only open to freedom without limits or barriers!
This brilliant system includes the same from the farmer, the industrialist, the artist, the scientist, because human beings not only have material needs, but also moral and intellectual needs. We do not live by and for the stomach to the exclusion of every other layer of human experience, but at the same time, we are sensitive, thinking and producing, and as such our needs are at the same time physical, psychic, and intellectual or ideal. Just as it manifests itself in these three forms, it is spent and replenished and consumed in the same way as if it is to keep the energy in your body active.
There are no longer castes or classes among us. All enjoy the material comforts, the artistic pleasures, the joys of study and science. They are all essentially the same.
The Techno-Utopia, the realization of a dream of many centuries, finally realized despite all the resistances of the past, has become our present truth. A truth that has united people in the wisest of aspirations, in the most positive concepts of life, the happiness promised in imaginary worlds by the merchants of poisonous and corrupting religions. This is the sublime truth that has forever established the horizon of universal camaraderie! This is the noble truth that has banished from the world the greed, ignorance, and fear of ancient times! This is the imperishable truth that assures humanity the enjoyment of Science, Liberty and Justice!
Techno-Utopia realized, the dream of innumerable insurgents, constant aspiration of the human being, your children bless you, sanctify you, and throw the mantle of their forgetfulness over all the worries and mistakes of the past! The present utopia is yours: may our successors perfect you and revere you as we perfect and revere you! May benevolent fruition be your only law, your only goal, because fruition is cultivation, joy, life itself!
III
Regarding public functions, we have reached the maximum degree of simplicity. All the mess behind complicated administrative and governmental structures, typical of a social State deviated from all logic and nature, has disappeared along with the very system that upheld those structures. If we have not deemed a specific community service to be unnecessary, then we have made them more effective because we have tailored our general relations to care and well-being, guaranteeing the purely mutualistic material benefit of all.
Assistance, sanctuary, statistics, communication, transportation, and of course, education, are the main public operations. Cleaning has been eliminated from communal services, since it is the private function of each producer to reduce the waste they create, while encouraging them to reuse their byproducts and compost their food waste.Each house also enjoys its own special water service, not only for consumption, but also for irrigation as a complement to spring-cleaning. Ultimately, we have carefully crafted the character of habitable buildings to citizens avoid a pain in the neck.
The hospital or force do not epitomize aid and care for our people are not represented by the hospital, by almsgiving and the cavalry sword as in other times. Associations of medicine and pharmacies have organized the first of these services in such a way that on no occasion or place can someone find themselves helpless against the blunders of nature, diseases. The Techno-Utopia provides as many medical facilities as public needs demand, and the experts of this science dispersed throughout various parts of the community for accessibility, generously and wisely lending their knowledge and skills to those without. This service of ours is accomplished with its relative, protection of our people. To organize it, there are groups dedicated exclusively to the propagation of insurance, and they organize insurance within their own chest.
Our community survives by means of cooperation and association. Safety services have ceased to exist, considered unnecessary in our social order and have been transformed into a material one, ceasing to be a scandalous exploitation of human needs. Our people have developed enough foresight that their worship of insurances strengthens them against thoughtlessness and levity, protecting them against any stirring of passions that might harm them.
Care and protection constitute two terms of a higher principle, solidarity, providing everyone the quiet enjoyment of the present good and the potential remedy for future evils. Each producer, with steady use of their strength, produces, in addition to what is necessary, a surplus which, by means of these healthy principles of care and protection, ensures a restful and pleasant old age. If you have a physical limitation, an unexpected disability, some present or unforeseen evil, that same principle of solidarity obliges all of us to ensure survival for those disadvantaged comrades of ours in wretched conditions, unable to sustain themselves in their struggle.
The pact of trust that constitutes any group necessarily includes this element of care or, at least, refers it to special groups devoted to this purpose of caring for our fellow human beings. What each one takes is thus their property, their right, and almsgiving, humiliating charity and pity, lying in opposition to our solidarity towards each other, is totally banished.
Social security against the attack of a fellow human being is unnecessary and the consequent organization of restorative justice is also unnecessary. The personal attack is reduced to a simple difference of appreciation, or it comes necessarily from a sick member of our community. In the latter case, justice shall be supplemented with medicine, and individual revenge has no reason to exist in the same way that the so-called public vindication has ceased to exist. In the first case, we freely air our questions, warranting communication and mutual understanding. Generally, we hand our thoughts and feelings over, if there is ample room to share them, to our friends and fellow human beings and they are resolved without violence or violation of human rights. Each offended and injured party elects its representatives, who, together with their social representation, which usually voluntarily determines the group(s) of which the contestants are part, form what is called the jury of integrity. Without written laws, without immoral prejudices, without judges of law, without absurd jurisprudence, each of our differences and disagreements are settled for the moment according to their special circumstances, according to the disputing parties, and at the same time the problem of each one demanding justice for themselves become a refuge for the communion of all. Such are the simple terms of our distribution of justice.
The organization of education has also lost its official character and its enforced uniformity. The ideal of the single rule, the universal producer, the pledges of the State, are concepts banished from all our reasoning. In this Techno-Utopia, we despise those institutions that assume powerlessness and insufficiency of individual initiatives, and thus they do not need the State as their healer, as an exclusive teacher, as a private tutor, as an indispensable manufacturer, as an irreplaceable bodyguard. For teaching, as for other manifestations of activity, the associated initiatives are enough. Those dedicated to childhood education form symbiotic groups, and they do not lack the cooperation of kind women and loving mothers, taking our lead from the matriarchs willing to share with us the hardships and joys of their lives. Not only are our bands of educators as diverse as possible, but their applied pedagogies are equally as diverse. Teachers celebrate each other’s differences, representing the diversity of our populace, since beings born to live constantly in mutualistic relationships must also be educated outside of all ridiculous forms of segregation. As a result, women and other formerly disenfranchised people acquire just as much knowledge as white men acquire and escape from manmade inferiorities that for so long have reduced them to servitude and marginalization with the intent to divide us up as much as possible. Each household and its guardians instruct their children as it sees fit, not forced to accept an impossible common regulation of education. The circulation of science has thus reached the highest degree of extension possible, all understanding its value, and all having, therefore, the necessary aptitude for its application to the needs of life, without the need for those academic titles that in ancient times were a privilege and that made the University a hateful center where, rather than spreading science, the privileged were given the necessary instruction to oppress and exploit the disinherited. Only in this way, education for the sake of liberation, has it been possible to achieve the wonderful results that we have mentioned elsewhere.
Another one of our most important public services, the organization of communities and transportation, is entrusted to the corresponding associations of railways, trams, steamboats, and other means of locomotion. They direct the telegraph and postal services while also carrying out the mission of regulating means of mobility. A well-studied division of labor, correlative to the similar division of groups, has made the expenses of locomotion and communication excessively cost-effective. Engineers, machinists, electricians, mechanics, smiths, carpenters, all the diverse elements that concur to this colossal undertaking, form an immense federation, a worthy correlation of other federations of production and change, education and safety, science, and art. Through this associative work, we have achieved efficiency and safety in locomotion services never seen before. The inviolability and regularity in communications have reached a high degree of perfection never imagined as well. The dignified emulation that presides over all functions, both social and private, has given this service so much improvement that there is no one who does not have free communication with their peers, because free is any service that only costs an aliquot part of the expenses incurred by it.
As a supplement to this harmonious ensemble, statistical associations are the laureate of our endeavors. Statistics of production, statistics of consumption, statistics of circulation, care, diseases, education; a careful study of each of these special statistics of the corresponding manifestations of work indicates the path that we must take with firm steps and guides us in the immense field of our operations. The local Affairs and Relations Center is the focal point of our beloved community. How many groups of workers do not carry out the studies and measures of their own concerns and interests? Using statistics, they can voluntarily deliver their data to be included in bulletins of other cooperatives and associations, forming comparative studies of results obtained by work, teaching, medicine, and endless others. These same statistical groups publish their works and summaries monthly, methodized and ordered according to broad scientific criteria, the results of their important tasks. Those who are eminent in economic science illustrate with their studies and deductions the finished work of this poetics of relation called statistics. As a result, the true laws of materiality and sociology are thus recognized without much toil, and this knowledge enables everyone to eliminate fault without violence, no longer acting at the expense of others.
The useless mechanisms of public services under the direction of the State has been, as can be seen, radically transformed. That archaic labyrinth of confusions, officially elevated to dogmas, to axiomatic truths, which imbued even the most eminent ones in their science into bad habits and otherness, which led society astray in a pandemonium of injustices and iniquities. That labyrinth has since disappeared, as those who heard the wails of the world gave rise to the great work of freedom. Work and private initiatives are no longer atrophied, no longer unaware of its virtues, no longer vitiated and corrupted by an infectious social environment by force imposed and force maintained.
What good would militarization provide in our Techno-Utopia? Of what use would an espionage organization be, of the police? How can an organization of justice be armed with the evils of revenge? How can institutions promote public goods, while also governing plantations, regulating worship, and maintaining foreign relations through imperialism and war? What services would hospitals, prisons, charities, or nursing homes provide that we have not deemed unnecessary or upgraded beyond burden? What services would colleges and universities provide that we cannot provide for each other easily and freely? Of what use was that ridiculous farce of “diplomacy”?
Us residents of the Techno-Utopia partake in a more just and rational concept of ourselves. Force and espionage are appropriate ways to guard oneself against ferocious brutes, not our fellow human beings. Revenge is a quality of demons, they said in ancient times, and human beings are nowhere near considering themselves anti-gods with unbridled passions. Each resident and their neighbors can promote public works and govern their property on their own or together, without the need for powers to be supplanted. Fads and crazes are reserved for personal feelings, detached from manufactured delusion and mania. Foreign relations correspond directly to the people, since direct, democratic sincerity has replaced diplomacy. Hospitals, prisons, hospices, nursing homes, all these belong to the category of institutions created by power to partially remedy authorities and their nullification of the individual and their ever-constriction coercion of the collective.
Mask of government hypocrisy, it has been torn off by destroying the very principle of government, of centralizing absorption. Official institutes and universities, created to promote erroneous and conventional teaching, within narrow and coercive limits, are abundant where freedom has invaded everything. Teaching cannot and should not be organized like a barracks or a convent.
Look for the link between the past and present, and you will hardly perceive the trace of what once was. An ever-expanding solution of continuity between yesterday and today. This solution leading to our survival as a species has a name: revolution.
This revolution demanded change, not only in public spheres, but also in our most private, intimate spaces. Everything has changed and will continue to change our lives for the better: principles of sociability, economy, justice; production, change and consumption; science, art and work; teaching, assistance, solidarity. The customs of those in power who define “morality” suffered a profound dismantling, especially of their egos and riches. Neither the priest, nor the judge, nor ambition, nor deception are involved in the constitution of our kinships. Love presides over all unions; freedom realizes them. The lovers love, the uniters unite. As for ritual formulas, each of us adopt the one we want. The serious interventions of the father and other manifestations of patriarchal customs usually accompanied people during momentous occasions in their lives. The mutuality of affections is enough to solve all these questions. Social customs determine, better than laws and without impositions, the ways and means of consecrating what is previously consecrated for love. The needs of statistics can be satisfied without the intervention of an officially imposed register. Births and deaths are, like the constitution of families, data that everyone willingly supplies.
Of course there are frictions, dislikes, and differences. Our Techno-Utopia is not a city of angels, but of human beings. Were those aversions not present within the system negated by the revolution? Weren’t our differences and disagreements before the revolution more in number and deeper in pain caused? Conflicts in our social lives are not given to us to suppress only to erupt later, but instead conflicts are meant to be remedied for the sake of mutual understanding and continued cooperation. Freedom, replacing useless, harmful contagions of discord, brings innumerable advantages to you and your fellow human beings. What does it matter if we cannot avoid or eliminate some of the inconveniences suggested by nature itself as long as we eliminate the ones humans have created?
This is only a small sketch of our Techno-Utopia. Without limits, without borders, our good news has spread throughout the world. Some corners remain uninformed, crystallizations that testify to a bygone age. From South to North, from East to West, we are resuscitating the world and merging into a universal coalition, linked by the identity of feelings, aspirations and interests, not pigeonholed categories that divide us up.
Perhaps this is only the integral phase of the revolution; perhaps the social elements tend to be definitively and permanently constituted by new principles continuously practiced. Societies are like the isothermal reactions of chemistry, which occur by themselves and form complex, enduring bodies, while a new force is unable to cause reactions to more complex states of matter.
We practice the principle of justice each day in the Techno-Utopia, and by this principle, we thrive, together, as one. The struggles of religion and politics no longer engage us in fratricidal wars. The fullness of our human rights, consecrated by freedom and equality, makes any violent clash of affections and interests impossible.
What has the power to torment the inhabitants of the Techno-Utopia that they cannot overcome by working together? Who would have an interest in its seizure? The revolution was its origin, Justice its end. A revived people, liberated from yesterday’s shackles after a united struggle, will not let their precious tour de force be taken away.
Let us celebrate what we have created together! Let us exalt ourselves in the harmonious transformation that a generation of revolutionaries has bestowed to us! Let us dance wildly with our radical imaginations!
The eternal principles of renewal and revolution assure us of the present and our survival.
To work, to transform, to feast, to study, to enjoy; ultimately, to live and love our lives is our common aspiration. To perfect our common ideals is our continual wish.
Come on, ghosts of the past, just try to snatch this triumph from us! Come on, try to plunge us back into the horrors of bigotry and fear! Come on, try to destroy this great work of the most imperishable of all revolutions and you will fail each and every time!
That world promised in ethereal regions by those interested in maintaining the status quo of confinement here below, no longer attracts us. Your better world, swindlers of humanity, has been organized by the same revolution that destroyed you.
How we laugh at your theological bullshit!
How your shallow pastimes delight us!
Oh, how we enjoy your dogmatic shenanigans!
Our present has severed itself from the violent past. Do not try to reverse the direction of the world. Everything is moving toward Justice, without looking back, without taking care of the one crushed by the weight of the revolution. If a small stone is placed on the railroad tracks, it will be crushed by our locomotive power, undeterred.
Teachers of the revolution, the agents of change who dared to challenge the colossus of tyranny, rise up and admire your labor! Compassionate beings who knew how to sacrifice your lives for the freedom of your children and your neighbors’ children, rejoice in your effort! Utopists of yesterday, who perished for your ideas, make your dreams come true today, wherever you are!
The cyclonic momentum of the revolution has swept away the miasmas of the past and the brilliant sun of freedom and justice bears its radiant gifts to the world.
The jubilant humanity shouts from one outskirt to the other: EUREKA! EUREKA! May we burst into exclamations of joy, united in our hymns honoring the revolution and its enactors that have broken all chains and overthrown all tyrants.
Our dearly beloved Techno-Utopia, the world reveres you at last! You are the truth realized, you are the ideal dream manifested. Within your ecosystem converge all the unknown virtues of human nature; in you the supreme good, the supreme happiness are joined together. You are a land of infinite bliss, once dormant of equanimity, compassion, and joy.
You are the beginning, the middle and the end of all things, the finished expression of the new life. You are the embodiment of sunshine, reason, science, nature, and justice.
Glory to the humanity that gives you life!
Glory to the one who realizes you!
Glory to the freedom that encourages you!
Long live the Techno-Utopia!