It’s a classic but i’m also a critical enjoyer. I enjoy it on two levels: It’s kind of practical! A lot of it sounds pretty reasonable, seems to be in line with how i see people working together and the pressures of economics wrecked by distributed mass action. But I also enjoy it as a fantasy story, one person’s mad dream with lots of humor and absurdity built in. Having a timeline for the creation of your utopian society taking less than 10 years and mapping it all the way a thousand years into the future with the breakdown of that society is somehow cosmically funny.

That said there’s also a lot I don’t like now that i’ve read more theory and criticism from people outside central europe. a lot of the ideas he has are kinda primitivist / of the noble savage. as mentioned somewhat in his updated notes there’s a lot of odd ideas about ‘other cultures’ outside of the A/B deals, aka the “the third world”. There’s some weird colonial white guy attitudes in there.

Also the idea that people couldn’t be excludable from bolos is very dangerous, radical scenes have huge problems with rapists and other abusers maintaining strong positions for years because of rape culture attitudes very much still present in our larger culture. It’s a rough complex thing to deal with but it’s surely not going to get better if you can’t even ask that your abuser be kicked out of the group home you share.

Still, there’s some banger quotes:

Reformists tell us that it’s short-sighted and egoistic to follow just one’s own wishes. We must fight for the future of our children. We must renounce pleasure (that car, vacation, a little more heat) and work hard, so that the kids will have a better life. This is a very curious logic. Isn’t it exactly the renunciation and sacrifice of our parents’ generation, their hard work in the ’50s and ’60s, that’s brought about themess we’re in today? We are already those children, the ones for whom so much work and suffering has gone on. For us, our parents bore (or were lost to) two world wars, countless “lesser” ones, innumerable major and minor crises and crashes. Our parents built, for us, nuclear bombs. They were hardly egoistic; they did what they were told. They built on sacrifice and self-renunciation, and all of this has just demanded more sacrifice, more renunciation. Our parents, in their time, passed on their own egoism, and they have trouble respecting ours. Other political moralists could object that we’re hardly allowed to dream of utopias while millions die of starvation, others are tortured in camps, disappear, are deported or massacred. Minimal human rights alone are hard to come by. While the spoiled children of consumer society compile their lists of wishes, others don’t even know how to write, or have no time to even think of wishes. Yet, look around a little: know anybody dead of heroin, any brothers or sisters in asylums, a suicide or two in the family? Whose misery is more serious? Can it be measured? Even if there were no misery, would our desires be less real because others were worse off, or because we could imagine ourselves worse off. Precisely when we act only to prevent the worst, or because “others” are worse off, we make this misery possible, allow it to happen. In just this way we’re always forced to react on the initiatives of the Machine.

I’ve never heard of it before, what’s it about?

I also think that bolo’bolo should be more widely read. It’s really well written and really thinks through how an alternative society could work, it often feels like an Ursula Le Guin book to me. It’s critique of both capitalism and state communism as the Work Machine is pretty great.

I think its spot on about the size of community that’s best for humans (a few hundred), and I like that each bolo is based around some guiding principles, I often think that’s important for a community to stick together.

It’s obviously not perfect or an exact blueprint but its great food for thought and I wish other plans for alternate societies were worked out in engaging detail like bolo’bolo