Utopia
David McNally
The international left-wing movements of the 1990s and early 2000s renewed activists’ investment in the concept of “utopia.” From the Zapatistas’ 1996 call for an “international of hope” (1998, 13) to the 2001 convening of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil under the banner “Another World Is Possible,” radicals organizing against neoliberalism embraced a search for radical alternatives. Confronted with the narrowing of political horizons induced by the defeats of the neoliberal era—such as Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the British coal miners’ union in 1985 or the destruction of the tin miners’ union in Bolivia the same year—radicals have since the 1990s frequently invoked utopia as a signature category for imagining the new world that might be built on the ashes of the old.
Coined from the Greek “ou,” meaning “not” and “topos” meaning “place,” “utopia” literally means “no place.” Its usage signifies the search for a place that does not yet exist but which ought to be created. Since the 1930s, “utopia” has been linked to the affirmation of hope in the face of barbarism and oppression, making the concept of “hope” utopia’s key companion. In gesturing toward a better world yet to be made, the invocation of hope encapsulates what German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch described in 1918 as “the spirit of utopia.” For Bloch, the principle of hope is the driving impulse of utopian politics. One glimpses this sensibility today in the Zapatista declaration “We will know how to resist to the end. We will know how to hope” (Womack 1999, 283) or in the banner carried at the May Day 2001 demonstration in London that implored participants to “overthrow capitalism—and replace it with something nicer!”
For their part, numerous critical theorists confirmed their allegiance to utopia by revisiting previous revolutionary engagements with the concept. Daniel Bensaid’s 1995 Marx l’intempestif was the first of these efforts, followed by David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope (2000) and the Socialist Register 2000, which bore the title “Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias” (Panitch and Leys 1999). The more recent collection of essays Anarchism and Utopianism (Davis and Kinna 2014) reflects the wide-ranging use of utopia as a central concept in contemporary anarchist thought. Often these utopian injunctions have come with qualifications. In particular, critics distance themselves from a variety of “bad utopias” marked by an elitist tendency to prescribe what a future society ought to look like. Nevertheless, utopia has come to be associated with a reinvigorated politics that boldly push the boundaries of the social imaginary. Drawing on science fiction, architecture, folklore, visual and plastic arts, insurgent histories, and all manner of cultural and political experimentation, this renewed left utopianism implores us to imagine revolutionary transformations without precedent in human social relations, in the interactions between humans and the natural environment, and in the values that animate all dimensions of social life.
Critical deployment of the concept of utopia is usually traced back to Thomas More’s 1516 text, Utopia (More 1965). Inevitably More’s work is deeply marked by its time and by the author’s privileged social position. For instance, More operates with profoundly patriarchal assumptions and is untroubled by the moderate use of slavery (though not of a racialized variety). Nonetheless, many recognizably utopian themes animate his text—most notably the vision of an egalitarian society without money and private property. More was indebted to centuries of utopian folklore spanning many cultures, all of which featured similar images of infinite abundance and a life free of suffering and oppression. In the Ancient Greek comedy of Telecleides, for instance, we are offered an image of a society in which “the earth produced no terror and disease. . . Every torrent flowed with wine, barley-cakes strove with wheat-loves for men’s lips. . . Fishes would come to the house and bake themselves.”
With the rise of modern capitalism, utopia took on new significance. Exploitation, urban poverty, colonialism, the factory system, and the slave trade all induced efforts to imagine their undoing. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s 1771 novel L’an 2440 is among the most inspiring of these in its depiction of a slave revolution that overturns all colonial relations. The heroic figures of an actual slave revolution in Haiti (1791–1804) later gave substance to such utopian visions, which inspired Black surrealist visions of the marvelous throughout the twentieth-century (Kelley 2002, 157–94).
The utopian socialist perspectives and experiments that developed in Europe and America during the nineteenth century all sought to grapple with the “social question” that emerged during the transition to industrial capitalism: why did mass poverty exist in a society experiencing explosive growth in machinery and new technologies, and how could such misery be eliminated? Some, like Henri de Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in Britain, celebrated modern machinery and industry for their potential to end poverty, while others were considerably more cautious in this regard. However, all called for principles of cooperation to displace those of competition. And while a number of these socialist critics looked to the state to plan society from above, others promoted the formation of cooperative communities. Indeed, Owen used some of his own fortune as a wealthy manufacturer to establish one such community, known as New Lanark, in Scotland. Similar principles and experiments were also at work in parts of the United States, where an Owenite community called Utopia was founded in Ohio in 1847.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously criticized utopian socialism. Nevertheless, they were far more favorable toward the utopians than is often recalled. As much as they chastised the likes of Owen and Fourier for attempting to conjure up “recipes for the future,” they also praised their writings as “full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class” (1973, 96). What troubled Marx and Engels most was the utopians’ tendency to ignore the central role of workers in their own self-emancipation.
Still, radical utopianism continued to find expression in literature. In 1888, the American socialist Edward Bellamy published his highly influential novel Looking Backward, in which a young Bostonian awakens in the year 2000 to a post-capitalist future. Two years later, the English Marxist William Morris brought out News from Nowhere, in which a new society emerges from a victorious working-class revolution. These texts, however, were exceptions to a general trend in many Marxist quarters, where a critical approach to utopian socialism hardened into a sterile dogma.
In opposition to utopianism, Marx and Engels argued for a “scientific” socialism, and the concept became the basis for Engels’ 1880 text Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. By “scientific,” they meant that socialist politics should be grounded in actual social-historical movements and struggles rather than in the theoretical speculations of individual critics. By the 1890s, however, notions of “science” had been stripped of their earlier philosophical meanings and were often conflated with mechanical models of cause and effect like those that had come to dominate the natural sciences. As a result, social democratic theorists like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein frequently insisted that the victory of socialism and the working class was an inevitable product of history’s evolutionary laws. Consequently, they encouraged a gradualist and reformist approach that neglected the conscious action of actual human beings. Those who continued to talk of revolutionary will and action—like the Polish-German leftist Rosa Luxemburg—were thus subsequently dismissed as unscientific “utopians.” While the initial excitement following the 1917 Russian revolution pointed in a different direction (as can be witnessed through a consideration of John Reed’s classic Ten Days that Shook the World), the spirit of mechanical determinism began to infiltrate the communist parties as revolution receded and the Stalinist era began.
During the early twentieth century, the spirit of utopia largely resided within parts of the anarchist movement. While Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) is often seen as a key text, his earlier book Fields, Factories and Workshops (1898) better embodied the utopian impulse. In that work, Kropotkin advanced a vision of a social order in which people would be relieved of poverty and toil thanks to tools and machinery capable of drastically reducing the time devoted to labor. By the 1930s, Marxists were once again affirming the spirit of utopia.47 With the defeat of revolutions in Hungary, Germany, Italy, and China (1918–27) followed by the rise of European fascism, a group of critical Marxist thinkers set out to rehabilitate utopianism for revolutionary politics. Essays by Ernst Bloch—particularly “The Fairy Tale Moves on Its Own in Time” (1930) and “Marxism and Poetry” (1935)—invoked utopian folklore and literature as imaginative resources necessary to renew Marxism in the face of European barbarism (Bloch 1988). Bloch’s meditations in this area were later expanded into The Principle of Hope (1995), a monumental three-volume study in which his notion of concrete utopia would receive its fullest elaboration. One finds a more nuanced utopian impulse in the 1930s writings of another German Marxist, Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, utopian possibilities took the form of fragments from the past, which embodied the afterlives of revolutionary dreams and aspirations (Benjamin 1999). A key task for revolutionary politics, he urged, was to reactivate the utopian energies buried in these fragments by bringing them into contact with the struggles of the present. Some of these themes can be found in a less overtly political form in the subsequent writings of “Frankfurt School” theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno. In particular, Marcuse’s writings of the late 1960s and early 1970s stimulated visions of a new society characterized by “the convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play” (Marcuse 1970, 68).
Notwithstanding such efforts, left-utopianism barely survived the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War. With the emergence of a global New Left during the 1960s, however, a young generation of radical activists began to seek out a left-wing politics that was distinct from the bureaucratic approaches of communist and social-democratic parties. “Be realistic, demand the impossible,” intoned the radical slogan found on walls throughout France during May and June of 1968. Such injunctions captured the utopian impulse that flourished during the mass worker and student uprising of those months. In the heady days of insurgent antiwar, Black Power, and women’s liberation movements, utopian themes—embracing anti-racism, feminism, anarchism, and socialism—emerged once again in influential novels like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Amid these social upheavals, a utopian cultural politics began to develop, deploying science fiction to depict new forms of social life beyond gender, race, and class hierarchies. These efforts left invaluable legacies in art and cultural production. Nevertheless, in contrast to the 1970s, contemporary utopian art (and theory) tends generally to be disconnected from mass politics.
For left movements, utopia is politically and strategically ambiguous. On the one hand, images of utopia carry a critical charge capable of fueling our imaginative sense of other possible futures. On the other hand, a utopianism detached from real movements can too easily become a purely in-house operation in which artists and intellectuals imagine themselves (rather than the majority of oppressed people) to be the real harbingers of social change. It can become tempting for left-wing currents in the Global North, which often lack any real roots in working-class communities and organizations, to attempt to create spaces (from co-ops to communes) consisting of handfuls of people who imagine that they operate on a higher moral plane than the wider society. These efforts are typically characterized by the substitution of lifestyle choices for real mass organizing. At the same time, much of what passes for mass politics on the contemporary left is often found to be singularly lacking in the utopian impulse. Especially under conditions of neoliberal assault and the daily grind of parliamentary politics, NGO work and trade union organizing tends to produce a cautious “routinism” hostile to insurgent mobilizations and utopian visions of radical change.
All of this reinforces Ernst Bloch’s calls for concrete utopia—a revolutionary vision of a world turned upside-down that resists becoming disconnected from the real, living struggles of the present. We need, says Bloch, “to hope materialistically,” by which he meant that radicals must envision means of overturning the present social order that remains rooted in and speaks to masses of real people (Bloch 1995, 1, 335). Without utopianism, we will never get there. But the utopianism we need must move to the pulse of the concrete.
See also: Commons; Community; Demand; Future; Hope; Politics; Prefiguration; Revolution; Space
47. Significantly, The Spirit of Utopia was the title of an important 1923 volume authored by Ernst Bloch.