The Fullfillment*Centre 2/2

I had been up to Lancaster a week or two before, and rented the cheapest house I could find, a one bedroom with a separate living room and kitchen. The trend at that time was for an all-in-one kitchen and “dining” space and this separation allowed us to have two bedrooms and no communal space. It was just north of the Lune, in an area that had suffered flooding in the summer of 2014, something the estate agent assured me had been a one off, but the risk seemed to be reflected in the rent. 

I didn’t know exactly what we would do in Lancaster in terms of getting involved, I had been in contact with the local Momentum group and a few people in the council, offered some kind of nebulous help or support, and we were arriving with some money in our bank accounts, a couple of grand, savings, last month’s wages. We were still waiting for the DPS to return our deposit, the landlady fighting for every last penny she could claim from us, but that would boost our coffers when it arrived, the difference between a deposit returned in London and one paid out in Lancaster. 

There were things like the Lancaster Initiative starting to spring up in a number of places at that point, including in London, but it was too expensive to live there, if we were going to be poor, we needed to try and spin out the little money we had as we tried to build something new. There were a number of phrases that swirled around at the time to explain what was struggling to emerge, “to be born” as everyone, at least everyone who shared my interest  in left  wing politics  and theory said. Co-operatives, anchor institutions, economic democracy, solidarity economy, the Cleveland Model, common wealth, participatory economics, next system, no growth, steady state, Universal basic Income, Universal basic services, post-capitalism, post-scarcity, Communism, the Green New  Deal. I forget all the terms exactly, it was all so long ago now.  Still, previous defeats had lead us to the conclusion that the new middle path between Capitalism and State socialism, if you were a social democrat of some kind, or their transcendence if you were harder left was collective ownership at the level of the firm, decommodification and common ownership of the necessities of life and trapping value locally.  

Nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth would satisfy us. We were I suppose, utopian.