Ralph Borsodi

No conquest of comfort is possible if we have to procure the essentials of comfort - food, clothing and shelter up to the standard of living to which mankind's progress entitles us - by excessive labor or by inexpressive and uninteresting labor. Because it is possible in industrialized America to secure these essentials with relative ease, we overlook the fact that the way in which we procure them is as important to our comfort as the food, clothing, and shelter are important to our survival.
What is more, we tend to believe that because America is producing creature comforts in greater quantities than ever before that the quest of comfort will end when it is impossible to further develop the system of production to which we now seem irretrievably committed. We have come to believe that comfort is increased to the degree in which production is increased. But when we increase production at the sacrifice of significance in our daily labor, then what we gain through the increase in the quantity of our so-called comforts is overbalanced by the decrease in our capacity for enjoying them.
We accept the sacrifice of comfort which our factory economy imposes upon us because it does not occur to us to ask whether some better method of procuring the necessaries of life might exist.
Yet a method does exist which makes it possible to attain a material well-being equal to that which we now enjoy with less unpleasant effort and greater security than is the rule today.
The necessaries of life can be procured not only without excessive and unpleasant labor but without fear and uncertainty. For no conquest of comfort is possible if we live fearful of our ability to secure these essentials of comfort; if we live menaced by the pervasive spectre of want; if unemployment, illness and old age mean not only misfortune but economic disaster.
We must feel as certain of our ability to procure the material essentials of comfort as we must feel certain that we shall inhale air when we breathe.

Under our factory economy the sequence by which those of us who have not inherited wealth secure what we need and desire is as follows:
1. We sell our labour directly or indirectly to earn money; we devote ourselves to production for sale.
2. But as we cannot eat the money, wear the money, nor house ourselves in the money, we buy everything we need and desire with the money we earn.
3. These things we buy, generally from retailers, who in turn buy them from manufacturers who make them in factories.

Under the economic system which I am advocating the sequence would be as follows:
1. We would move on a homestead of our own: install a workshop and loom-room; equip the whole with efficient tools and machinery; develop a garden and orchard; stock the place with livestock.
2. We then raise and make for ourselves all the things we need and desire and which it is practical and economical and pleasurable to produce for ourselves: we devote ourselves to production for use.
3. We work the remainder of our time at jobs or crafts or professions; with the money earned during this time we pay taxes, interest, and similar overhead expenses and buy the factory-made products which we cannot make advantageously for ourselves.

The change to this economic scheme would furnish three clear gains over the earn-and-buy system which most of us depend today:
1. The time we devote to work is spent more pleasantly.
2. We reduce the time which we have to devote to securing the material essentials of comfort and thus release time for art and science, for education and play.
3. We would become secure as to the basic necessaries of the good life.

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If the day ever comes when we devote to the organization of our homes and families the thought and interest which it is now believed should only be devoted to the organization of business, of religion, of education and of politics, we may develop true organic homesteads - organic in that they are consciously and with the maximum of intelligence organized to function not only biologically and socially but also economically. We shall then have homes which are economically creative and not merely economically consumptive.
The organized, perhaps incorporated, home may not be needed to assure the economic well-being of the very wealthy, but it is absolutely essential to the economic security of the average individual. For the poorer we are, the greater is the need of pooling individual resources and the greater is the benefit from the formation of an economic unit large enough to make it practicable for us to produce our own food, clothing and shelter. Such an economic organism, (which it is possible to establish without a preliminary lifetime devoted to accumulation, reform legislation, or social revolution), may be the only instrumentality through which those of us who are not wealthy and who aspire to a superior life even in this factory-dominated civilization — who seek conditions which will enable us to express ourselves in art, literature, science, philosophy — can achieve our hearts' desires.
The natural family seems to me the normal nucleus around which to build such a home. But an organic home might conceivably be established by a group of individuals unrelated to each other. Not marriage, not common blood, not even like tastes are essential. What is absolutely essential is that those who undertake to establish such a home shall be individuals with like values (Nota: comunità volontarie). To function with real effectiveness the group should be large enough to make division and rotation of the work of homemaking possible. The homestead must be organized so that it can continue to function uninterruptedly even when individual members are absent traveling or adventuring, or working and studying away from home. 'The "family," in short, should be large enough to enable the members to enjoy sabbatical leaves of absence; yet not so large as to preclude administration of its affairs by common consent based upon common understanding.

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Certain practical objections may be raised to the economy here outlined by those who have solved the problem of supporting themselves along other lines. They may have large incomes, they may be saving and investing, they may not be manually skilled, they may have no taste for bucolic delights, they may need and crave the glitter that the city offers, they may have become dependent upon the organized menial service which the city store, the city restaurant, the city hotel render. Many of these objections are based upon a failure to grasp the distinction between what I propose and the sentimentalism of the return to "nature" which Rousseau proposed or the "back to the land" movement of twenty years ago. Some of the objections are based upon a set of values which are meretricious; values which cannot be transvalued without great effort but which those who still possess the possibility of basic reeducation would certainly find worth transvaluing. The best answer to the objection that I tend to overlook the sacrifices involved and the practical difficulties of what I propose is the fact that I am no advocate of poverty and barrenness for the sake of its "beauty" and of hard manual labor for its "moral" value. I suggest an economy which begins with an organic homestead principally for two reasons: because it makes for economic independence, and because it makes for a richer and fuller life.

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We have applied all our ingenuity to solving the problem of enabling hundreds of families to live in the same house — to cook in separate kitchens, to marry, to give birth to sons and daughters, and finally to die in absolute privacy. This achievement we call an apartment. With equal ingenuity we have made it possible for hundreds of perfectly strange individuals to eat together and sleep under the same roof. And we call this achievement a hotel. I refuse to believe that it is impossible for men and women of like tastes, like educations, like social backgrounds, to live together in such a home as I have described, the individual members securing the freedom to develop themselves
by contributing a share of their time to the labor which furnishes the entire group the essentials of comfort.
Productive homes of this kind, by making us economically independent, would free us from the necessity of spending our time as the quantity-minded masters of the world now make us spend it and would make for that reintegration of work and play which is essential to a full conquest of comfort.