This article presents Edward Abramowski’s vision of an order based on associations such as cooperative businesses and self-help friendship unions. Abramowski imagined the new, grassroots-derived order to be the answer to the permanent disorder produced by capitalism and state coercion. Cooperatives are necessarily guided by the aim of economic profit, but that profit is divided equally among the cooperative members; friendship unions are guided by empathy and rely on reciprocity. Voluntary associations can provide nearly everything society needs in order to function. They can thus replace the state, including the socialist state, in which the institution of coercion – even if democratic – is inscribed. Abramowski thought that partitioned Poland could be reborn in this form, even while the nation remained formally under the sovereignty of the Russian tsar. The author of the article describes Abramowski’s vision of a reborn Republic as part of the current of “a-capitalist” utopias which derive from the Aristotlian concept of utility-based friendship. In the form of the sharing economy this current reappeared after the economic crisis of 2008.
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