Why utopia is good

As a decentralised global movement that gives its members autonomy and demands politics in which citizens lead , Extinction Rebellion also echoes ideals from ecotopian novels. In Ecotopia and many other similar works, most aspects of life are decentralised, from small-scale agriculture to neighborhood-specific healthcare. In Pacific Edge, the direct brand of politics Extinction Rebellion advocates is central to social and ecological wellbeing.

Extinction Rebellion urges efforts of wartime proportion to decarbonise by — a utopian target that has been met with scepticism in some quarters. But whether or not it is achievable, such a demand has been crucial in highlighting that what is presently deemed politically possible is not sufficient to stop catastrophic climate breakdown. Their radical visions have shifted the climate and ecological crises to the forefront of the political agenda.

And, crucially, they have switched millions on to the idea that fundamental transformations in the way we organise and power our societies are possible. To some, the serious political proposals outlined by Extinction Rebellion and in the Green New Deal might seem as unrealistic as the literary works that imagine their realisation.

The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and moreover is demanding its due, your attention. It always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present.

Haunting can and does produce traumaticic paralysis or destructive repetitive compulsions. Some of us are very familiar, too familiar, with this. But haunting very often produces a something-to-be-done, and this something-to-be-done brings us into the domain of the utopian. Or it did me. I also think that our deepest utopian aspirations are often so bound up with loss that they cannot help but leave us feeling melancholy.

But, as I try to make the utopian the first and not the last word, this passage makes me think about what it means to have described the utopian as something that haunts the social order. It is, ironically, a statement Marcuse made at the beginning of One-Dimensional Man , the book in which his despair over the possibility of radical social change was most pronounced.

From the vantage point of this reality principle, the utopian haunts. And, if the utopian haunts, it has to be present and visible and knowable because there is no haunting without ghosts, and ghosts are the felt sense and presence of the things, people, and knowledge which were supposed to be gone or not-there.

If the utopian haunts, it is disruptive and unsettling because haunting is frightening. That indeed can make the present waver, make it not quite what we thought it was. But, when I called the utopian the exile of our longing for non-sacrificial freedoms and exuberant unforeseen pleasures, I treated those desires as if they had no home, as if they were always destined to be extradited to some elusive place where exiled longings live.

It exists when the utopian is not the future as some absolute break from the past and the present, but a way of living in the here and now. The utopian is not only the exile of our longing for non-sacrificial freedoms.

I was wrong about that. It is something more. It is the articulation of social movement in the general sense of the term: the ongoing building of an alternative civilization, with its own reason, its own home, and its own system of value. For all these utopians … socialism is … a mere accident. Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific In Alexis de Tocqueville's Recollections , we're told of a day in June We're in a lovely apartment on the left bank, seventh arrondissement, at dinner-time.

The Tocqueville family is reunited. Nevertheless, in the calm of the evening, the cannonade fired by the bourgeoisie against the rebellion of rioting workers resounds suddenly--distant noises from the right bank. The diners shiver, their faces darken. But a smile escapes a young waitress who serves their table and has just arrived from the Faubourg Saint Antoine. She's immediately fired. Isn't the true specter of communism perhaps there in that smile?

The one that frightened the Tsar, the pope … and the Lord of Tocqueville? Isn't a glimmer of joy there, making for the specter of liberation? It is not the smile of a ghost, but rather the smile of the servant who has suddenly and unexpectedly appeared as a secret agent, exposing nothing more but nothing less than the existence of another intelligent world they do not and cannot own or dismiss.

The scandal of the qualitative difference is what Marx and Engels tried to avoid by making socialism into a science rather than a "utopian" "mish-mash.

There's much more to say about Fourier who was an astounding critic of Western civilization's "savants" and a remarkable thinker in so many ways. Nonetheless, in both cases the recourse to social science was at the heart of their grave mistakes, the glue that held their respective projects together and the glue that kept them stuck. But this life was not enough for Engels; he required other guarantees for what makes change desirable, possible, and real. This guarantee, which he found in scientific laws, shrank the vision he collaborated with Marx to produce.

But he lived the life of the isolated visionary--lonely, bitter, and demanding of others, especially of those who most loved and respected him. Nothing was ever enough for him and his actual life was as far from his vision of Harmony as it could be. Harmony was literally the place he exiled his longings.

And, in that disapora, he too needed to establish the guarantees missing in his own life and in the real world which so frightened him. No guarantees that the time is right that is, no historical laws ; no guarantees that just a little more misery and suffering will bring the whole mess down; no guarantees that the people we expect to lead us will no special privileged historical agents ; no guarantees that God or Newton or the Genome Project is on our side; no guarantees that we can protect future generations or ourselves from "our deformed and repressed social habits," if we just wait long enough or plan it all out ahead of time; no guarantees that on the other side of the big change, some new utterly-unfathomable-but-worth-waiting-for happiness will be ours.

The search for the secure guarantee responds to a basic need that should not be trivialized, but the secure guarantee often requires a complicated contract. One of the reasons utopian socialists are almost always dismissed as simplistic is because, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, they "carry on regardless" of this contract, with perhaps more simple beliefs. There are no guarantees of coming milleniums or historically inevitable socialisms or abstract principles, only our complicated selves together and a reliable reality principle in which the history and presence of the instinct for freedom, however fugitive or extreme , is the evidence of the utopia's possibility because we've already begun to realize it.

Begun to realize it in those scandalous moments when the present wavers, when it is not quite what we thought it was. There are no social scientific guarantees, only the active and intelligent use of what Marcuse, in an effort to invalidate the opposition of reason and imagination, called "our faculties of freedom.

In the end, or maybe it's just the beginning, "the point of such a shift is not to deny in an act of willful disregard the calamities of abusive authority, the alienations of exploited labor, the violence of dictatorial ideas, or the dehumanization of our capacities and habits. The point is simply to encourage those of us who see ourselves as politically engaged radical intellectuals or social change activists to be a little less frightened of and more enthusiastic about our most scandalous utopian desires and actions.

Knowledge for social movement ought to move us as well as educate us, and for this it requires a particular kind of courage and a few magic tricks.

Jacoby, along with Todd Gitlin, is one of the worst exemplars of self-appointed left managerialism, but he speaks for others. That's why the others continue to speak to him. Many of us know from experience and from hundreds of years of history what it means to be trivialized and dismissed as a "merely" this or that. See below on the "merely Utopian. The End of Capitalism is stronger, in my view, in conveying the standpoint of "capitalocentrism" and its colonizing tendencies, than it is in filling in that "empty social space" where capitalism is "negated.

Toni Morrison New York: Pantheon, , p. Braudel's attempts to define capitalism by distinguishing between where it exists and where it does not is fascinating and thought-provoking. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism , xviii-xix, chapter 17 below. Jeremy J. Shapiro London: Free Association Books, , p. Angela Davis brought this passage to my attention.

I thank her for sharing it with me and also for our ongoing dialogue about Herbert Marcuse, critical theory, and vocabularies of resistance. It nagged at him, for good reason, but he kept pushing it to the margins just as he continued to grapple with the Marxist distinction between freedom and necessity, but increasingly only in the footnotes. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber Boston: Beacon Press, , p. I have selectively taken from Marcuse what is useful for my own purposes. That said, it is also the case that I believe I have captured the spirit of what Marcuse was aiming for.

Moreover, I think it is worthwhile to celebrate his uninhibited enthusiasm for utopian subjectivity, derived almost entirely from the inspiration he took from a variety of social movements "incompatible with traditional forms of political struggle," Essay on Liberation , p. Douglas Kellner remains Marcuse's most comprehensive and respectful commentator and scholar.

Although approached from the point of view of "anthropological" claims about the "human species," Cosimo Quarta in "Homo Utopicus: On the Need for Utopia," Utopian Studies , Spring , pp. Hannah Arendt, trans. Benjamin makes a similar point when he distinguishes between those who are "firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins" and those who are only "nourished by the image of … liberated grandchildren," p.

Michael Sprinker London: Verso Books, , p. Engels had to do Marx's empirical research work for him, had to take care of him financially, had to endlessly defer to and stroke the other's ego, had to suffer Marx's patronizing disdain of his live-in relationship with Mary Burns, showing the most despicable cruelty and indifference towards Engels's feelings when Burns passed away.

Engels was responsible for popularizing Marx, and also for basically writing everything that had to meet a publication deadline. Engels's critique of St. Simon, Owen and Fourier is, quite frankly, not very persuasive. There is no best way to live because there is so much variation in how people want to live.

Therefore, there is no best society, only multiple variations on a handful of themes as dictated by our nature. For example, utopias are especially vulnerable when a social theory based on collective ownership, communal work, authoritarian rule, and a command-and-control economy collides with our natural-born desire for autonomy, individual freedom, and choice.

Moreover, the natural differences in ability, interests, and preferences within any group of people leads to inequalities of outcomes and imperfect living and working conditions that utopias committed to equality of outcome cannot tolerate. We had tried every conceivable form of organisation and government.

We had a world in miniature. We had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result.

Most of these 19th-century utopian experiments were relatively harmless because, without large numbers of members, they lacked political and economic power. But add those factors, and utopian dreamers can turn into dystopian murderers. If you pull the switch, it will divert the trolley down a side track where it will kill one worker. If you do nothing, the trolley kills the five.

What would you do? Most people say that they would pull the switch. More coined the word to describe an island community with an ideal mode of government.

In BC, Plato wrote his dialogue The Republic, in which Socrates describes a communistic, egalitarian city-state ruled by philosopher-kings called guardians, made up of both men and women. Instead of procreating within a family unit, these leaders leave the city once a year for a wild sex orgy.

The resulting children, happily ignorant of their real parentage and brought up by the state, become the new generation of guardians. Various medieval works also imagined what an ideal society might look like. A very different idea of utopia, meanwhile, also entered the mainstream by the midth Century. This was the Land of Cockaygne, a utopia concocted by medieval peasants and preserved in the Kildare Poems, compiled around in Ireland.

The Land of Cockaygne, as imagined by Pieter Brueghel, was a land of fun and equality — and no work. Memorably imagined by Pieter Brueghel the Elder in his painting, Cockaygne was a land of no work, equality between men and women and no authority figures.

As the poem goes:. A key feature of the Land of Cockaygne? Free love. Monks and nuns cavort freely. After prayers, the nuns throw their clothes off and jump into the lake:.

When the young monks see that sport, Straightway thither they resort, And coming to the nuns anon, Each monk taketh to him one, And, swiftly bearing forth his prey, Carries her to the Abbey grey, And teaches her an orison, Jigging up and jigging down.

Monkish life itself was under attack from the forces of the Reformation, and was soon to reach a climax with the dissolution of the monasteries in His vision of a perfect society was a long way from the sensual self-indulgence dreamt of by the peasants in Cockagyne.

Forget free love and lying around doing nothing. Instead, in Utopia, there is a class of bosses — called the Syphograuntes — who look out for work-shy slackers. And citizens are constantly being watched. There are also no wine-taverns, no ale-houses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, no secret meeting-places. Utopia has communistic elements too. They live in perfect liberty, and have neither king nor lord.

They observe no laws. They have their habitations in common, as many as six hundred sharing one building.

In Utopia, private property is abolished. Every three months, the people pile up loads of stuff in the market place; anyone can come along and take what they need — like a recycling centre. Above all, Utopia was the earnest attempt to create a fair society, not one which benefited only the rich. Most of these visions looked either backward or forward: they celebrated an old-fashioned ideal of community or envisioned a future paradise where the machines did all the work.

Then in , polymath and Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon produced a book called New Atlantis , proclaiming science as saviour. His was a tech-based utopia and featured aeroplanes and submarines. In the 17th Century, some attempted to move beyond theory and create living, breathing alternative societies. This was a turbulent period. But rather like later communist governments, the natural tendency of the ordinary people to buy and sell products, celebrate pagan rituals and try to enjoy themselves overcame.

In the middle of all this ferment, a farmer called Gerrard Winstanley attempted to create an ideal colony. His followers were called Diggers — and they were the Occupy movement of their day. The Diggers were attacked by both local men and landlords.

Undeterred, Winstanley and his 20 or so followers moved to nearby Cobham Manor where they built four wooden houses. But the local vicar paid a bunch of men — rather like when security guards are paid to remove protestors from road-building projects — to roust them and pull down any more houses or tents they made.

The Diggers gave up that particular battle.