Abstrakt
Separation from the hegemonic capitalist system in the form of nation(state)s, autonomous regions or small-scale communities has historically resulted in the creation of competing economies, oppositional social arrangements and alternative cultures. Various right-wing anti-immigrant movements, nationalist and ethnic fundamentalisms and orthodox religious communes have demonstrated that separation is not necessarily pro-socialist or pro-communist; nativist sentiments coupled with fundamentalist, authoritarian, sexist and racist resentments do not represent viable opposition but rather emerge alongside capitalist expansion, often as aspects of what David Harvey in Spaces of Hope described as capitalism's production of uneven spacial and temporal development.
Although more egalitarian separatist communities have embodied opposition to exploitation and ecological destruction, I will argue in my presentation for the need of global horizons in such communities as well. To these ends, I will consider the criteria Timothy Miller associated with intentional communities in The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America--a sense of common purpose and of separation from the dominant society, some form and level of self-denial, geographic proximity, personal interaction, economic sharing, real existence and critical mass (xx-xxii)--but I will concentrate on the concept of intention.
To further the presentation's argument, I will turn to a selection of recent poems by Marge Piercy.