The Commonwealth Alternative

Or: What two conquered peoples can teach us about organizing power without becoming what we hate

I’ve been thinking about the word “Commonwealth” lately. Virginia calls itself one. So do Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Kentucky. Most Americans assume it’s just a quirky historical label, like how Rhode Island’s official name included “Providence Plantations” until 2020 when they finally noticed what that implied.

But “Commonwealth” wasn’t supposed to be decorative. It was supposed to mean something.

The term comes from Latin res publica - literally “public thing” or “public matter.” It’s an English language rendering of the same concept that also gave us the word “republic.” The thing that belongs to everyone, not to a king or aristocrat. When Virginia adopted the title in 1776, they were making a philosophical statement: this polity exists for the “common weal”, the common good, not to enrich a ruling class.

Except Virginia’s common wealth was built on slavery and stolen land. The “commonwealth” was designed exclusively for white property-owning men. Everyone else could go to hell.

So was “Commonwealth” just revolutionary cosplay? Pretty words papering over the same old hierarchy?

Maybe. But here’s where it gets interesting: other cultures actually implemented the idea. Not as rhetoric, but as functioning political technology. Two in particular spring to mind: the Scottish Gaelic clan system and the Iroquois Confederacy.

Both got crushed by imperial powers. Both got dismissed as “primitive.” Both were actually more sophisticated than the systems that destroyed them.

The Scottish Model

The Declaration of Arbroath (1320) established something radical: sovereignty flows through the king, not from him. The community of the realm is the source of political legitimacy. And if the king fails the community, they can depose him.

Scottish clans practiced this. The co-chomann system meant land was common holdings with use rights and reciprocal obligations. The chief was steward, not owner. Major decisions required council agreement. The tànaiste (designated successor) and council could challenge or remove a failing chief.

Compare this to English monarchy where removing a bad king meant civil war and regicide.

Scottish women had property rights and political voice under Gaelic law (féineachas) that wouldn’t exist in England for centuries. The system worked at scale - organizing the entire Highlands and Islands for centuries with relative stability.

Then the English conquered it, outlawed it, and spent two centuries erasing it from memory while calling it “progress.” The Clearances weren’t just about sheep and profit - they were about destroying a political alternative that embarrassed the imperial system.

The Iroquois Model

The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) solved similar problems differently but with parallel principles. Six Nations (originally Five), each autonomous, confederated for mutual defense and collective decisions. The Grand Council required consensus - not majority rule, consensus. They governed territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi at the Confederacy’s height.

Benjamin Franklin studied their system when thinking about colonial unity. The Albany Plan of Union (1754) was explicitly modeled on Iroquois federalism.

Key features: No absolute rulers. Sachems (chiefs) selected by Clan Mothers who could remove them if they failed. Women controlled food distribution, had veto power over war. Matrilineal descent gave women structural power in the system.

Land was commons - the Three Sisters agriculture (corn, beans, squash) worked because land was held communally with use rights, not ownership. You couldn’t sell what you didn’t own.

The Confederacy grew by adopting whole tribes and individuals. “Iroquois” wasn’t ethnicity - it was political identity you could join. Multiple overlapping systems prevented power concentration.

Like the Scottish system, it got crushed. Not because it didn’t work, but because it couldn’t compete militarily with centralized European powers that mobilized resources faster and didn’t care about consensus or legitimacy - just victory.

Virginia’s Lie

The Founders knew about these models. Jefferson owned books on Native American governance. Franklin had direct Iroquois experience. Scottish Enlightenment thinking - Smith, Hume, Ferguson - was required reading.

But Virginia’s “Commonwealth” kept slavery, property requirements for voting, the plantation system. They removed the crown from the hierarchy’s top and called it revolution.

Colonial language does what it always does: promises universality while practicing exclusion. Says “this belongs to all of us” while meaning “us, specifically.”

But language creates pressure. Once you’ve said “Commonwealth,” it becomes a measuring stick. Abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights activists could all point and ask: whose wealth? Whose common good? Where’s our voice?

The gap between rhetoric and reality generates political tension. Which is why power always tries to control language.

What We Lost

What the Scottish and Iroquois models had that Virginia’s “Commonwealth” didn’t:

1. Actual accountability - not elections every few years, but ongoing community oversight with real consequences

2. Distributed decision-making - genuine power-sharing that prevented concentration

3. Land as relationship, not property - which limited exploitation and maintained ecological balance

4. Women’s structural power - embedded in the system, not granted as favor

5. Consensus requirements - forcing compromise, preventing narrow majority tyranny

6. Conditional authority - leaders served at community pleasure, period

These aren’t romantic nostalgia. They’re proven institutional designs that worked for centuries at scale.

We lost them not because they failed, but because they were incompatible with empire. You can’t run extraction economies with consensus governance. You can’t maintain slavery with Clan Mothers having veto power. You can’t clearcut forests when land is commons.

Centralized coercive power won because it was better at conquest, not because it was better at human flourishing.

What We Can Rebuild

I live on two-thirds of an acre in semi-rural Utah with my wife, Lady T. We’re part of a mutual aid network we laughingly call “the Commune” - about a dozen households practicing permaculture, resource sharing, and collective problem-solving.

We didn’t set out to recreate clan structure. But that’s what we’re doing. No formal hierarchy. Decisions by consensus. Shared resources and reciprocal obligations. Food production on common principles even with individual properties. Knowledge sharing. Support networks that don’t depend on functioning government.

It’s small. It’s vulnerable. It’s imperfect. But it works.

As central authority becomes predatory rather than protective, these distributed networks become more relevant. The Scottish clans couldn’t save themselves from the Clearances. The Iroquois Confederacy couldn’t save itself from colonial genocide. Virginia’s “Commonwealth” couldn’t save itself from becoming just another extractive state.

But the ideas survived. The institutional knowledge survived. The patterns survived.

In the ruins of this particular empire, we get to ask: what worked? What failed? What can we rebuild? Because there will be a chance to try again.

“Even the most despotic government cannot stand except for the consent of the governed. The moment subjects cease to fear despotic force, its power is gone.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

“Commonwealth” was supposed to mean something. The Scots and Iroquois showed us what. Virginia forgot, or chose to forget.

We don’t have to.

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