When political prisoners were released by the British Recovery Expedition to Vekllei (BREVEK) in 1951, they comprised figures typical of the period, mostly of orthodox Marxist and some syndicalist persuasions. Labour unions exploded in membership and the Atlantic Communist Party, founded two days after the occupation began, found itself well positioned to form a successor government. BREVEK commanders, alarmed by the prospect of a communist Atlantic, orchestrated the Interim Prosperity Government to blunt revolutionary momentum. Rather than exclude radicals altogether, they invited sympathisers from the arts, sciences and legal professions – people who held socialist convictions but lacked the organisational networks to mobilise unions. Among these “loveable radicals” were two loosely defined factions that would shape the postwar state.
The first were the Federalists, associated informally with the British Fabian Society that had deep ties to the Commownealth’s mostly British-educated intelligentsia. Because of this, their political programme closely followed the gradualist democratic socialism of postwar Britain, including the nationalisation of industry, a new and robust welfare state, and the broad economic participation of government. In this sense they admired the British Labour government in power at the time, and indeed several prominent federalists were personal acquaintances of the Attlee cabinet.
The Federalists dominated the Interim Government’s economic committees and built institutional architecture that is still present in the Commonwealth today. Among them are the bureau system’s precursors (established as cooperative industries in 1968), the nationalised rail and banking corporations (1966), and the constitutional framework for federal republicanism agreed at the Atlantic Conference in 1965.
At the Conference’s conclusion, Interim prime minister Albert Macmillan declared:
“The meeting of the Interim cabinets and its Atlantic constituents has today established a political programme that will secure a modern, democratic and prosperous society on the far side of our transition to independence. What we have here is a document of great clarity, a document that is based in good political practice and proven government, and it will serve as a foundation of this country’s thinking going forward.”
This consensus was strained by second faction, who would later be known as the High Concept Group, or HCG, a name that stuck despite its pretension. They emerged in the late 1950s from younger members of the Federalist tendency who had moved away from gradualism. The HCG was eclectic by nature and drew on an unlikely combination of traditions. There was a great fear among its members that the revolutionary potential of the transitional period was being wasted. With the organised and student communists suppressed by occupation, a wide variety of influences characterised the HCG.
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Their communalist politics drew heavily on Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa and Yugoslav market socialism, two traditions that arrived in the Commonwealth through Pan-African networks and contacts in the nonaligned movement. Nyerere’s moral socialism (peculiarly rooted in African village communalism and Christian ethics rather than traditional materialism) demonstrated to some that collective ownership could emerge from existing social practices rather than class struggle. Yugoslav self-management was an extension of this idea, and provided a federal model in which worker cooperatives operated within a planned economy without central command. Both traditions appealed because Vekllei’s scattered island communities already resembled the small, self-governing units these systems imagined, and because neither required alignment with Moscow or Washington.
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The HCG’s vision of community life owed something to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonianism, which found many admirers the HCG’s abstract and often artistic political sympathies. You can see this emerge in many aspects of Commonwealth life today, especially in its municipalism and stewardship of land. These beliefs are closely related to Georgist land economics and Situationist ideas about the relationship between built environments and social behaviour. Atlantic Municipalism, as it came to be known, fused these influences into Vekllei’s distinctive property law, which recognises three competing claims to land (steward, public and sovereign) and treats the municipality as the primary economic actor through municipal corporations.
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The HCG were not solely responsible for the millenium shift towards Atlantic moneylessness, but its transition was closely related to Freiwirtschaft, the free-money theory of Silvio Gesell. Gesell proposed that currency should lose value over time through demurrage, which discouraged hoarding and forced money into circulation. A similar system was appropriated in the Commonwealth as a mechanism to wean society off money altogether, particularly in the expiring currency experiments of 1975–1985, when the country shortened the tender period of personal currency from a year to a month in an attempt to make cash functionally useless. The experiment was clumsy, spawned black markets and provoked a rush on goods, but it set in motion reforms that would achieve its underlying purpose: by the time personal currency was formally abolished around 2000 and the commons was established, most people had already stopped using money in daily life.
The tension between Federalists and the HCG defined Commonwealth politics through the 1970s and 1980s. The Federalists built much of the permanent state – its ministries, its parliaments, its planning apparatus – and expected this machinery to distribute wealth through conventional social-democratic means. The HCG wanted to make the machinery unnecessary in daily life by pushing economic activity below the state, into municipalities and cooperatives, and eliminating the wage relation entirely. Their first constitutional referendum on economic policy in 1969 marked the opening of this argument in public life.
It is important not to simplify the Commonwealth’s really political landscape. Many others were active in the transitional period, and their radical and competitive energy produced a synthesis of competing and sometimes contradictory ideas. The Federalists ultimately got their strong federal state; their ministerial parliaments and planned industrial economy. The HCG contributed to the country’s moneylessness, municipalism and the commons. The bureau system, established from cooperative industries in 1968, sits awkwardly between both visions – as a planned industrial federation that nonetheless retains enterprise-level autonomy and autonomy from the federal government. The outlawing of political parties in 1965 (and the transition to nonpartisan democracy) dissolved both groups as formal organisations, but their ideas carry on today in the institutional DNA of the Commonwealth.
The result is a state that is simultaneously over-governed and anarchic, deeply federal and fiercely local, planned and participatory. It is also, as critics within and without have noted, a state that is afraid of its own skeleton – ideological to its core but insistent that it is not ideological at all. The Federalists and the HCG are mostly historical names now, but they left behind a country shaped by their arguments, in which the compromises of occupation-era intellectuals became the lived reality of 26 million people.