Communism necessitates the abolition of a multifaceted relation [value] that has evolved over time, but to abolish it simply means that we cease to constitute value, and it ceases to constitute us. The radicality of our own period is that this is now the only way we can conceive it. Endnotes, Communisation and Value Form Theory, Endnotes #2 (2010), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/communisation-and-value-form-theory

The Endnotes stand critically against an ideological conception of labour and value met in “traditional” Marxism, which in the end of the day do not call for immediate abolition of Value and call for a period of transition where this gradually happens. They are supporting the communisation project, which they conceive as a movement characterized by immediate communist measures which would aim at stopping constituting capitalist forms. They view the project of communization theoretically related and following the new readings of Marx of the 60s and 70s which constituted the value-form theory. There, a new, critical reading of Marx is attempted, which emphasizes the autonomization of value (and capital as value), which forms the totalizing social structure that encompasses social life in capitalist societies.

According to an old developmental narrative, agricultural employment would decline as agriculture became more productive, precipitating lots of potential new workers into towns, who would then be taken up by expanding industrial production. These developments would eventually bring every country into modernity. For orthodox Marxists, this would tendentially form a proletariat unified under the hegemony of its most “advanced” fractions in industry. But as the global peak of industrialisation recedes into history, it looks like something else is now happening. While agricultural employment has not halted its decline, those workers shed are less likely to join the ranks of the industrial working class than to enter a vast and heterogeneous service sector. At the world level, there are now twice as many workers in services as compared to industry: services account for 44 percent of global employment, while industry accounts for just 22 percent. […] Just as agriculture comes to employ a decreasing share of the workforce, since there are limits to growth in the demand for food, so too with manufacturing: there are supposedly limits to the demand for goods (apparently, there is, however, a limitless demand for services). The result, according to this perspective, is that over time, a rising demand for services will dynamically pull workers into the service sector, just as in an earlier phase workers were pulled into the industrial sector. In reality, the dynamic draw of manufacturing during industrialisation was unique to that sector. To manufacture something is to take a good — or to transform a service, such as dishwashing, into a good, such as a dishwasher — and to produce that good in a factory, according to ever-more efficient techniques. It is the resulting rise in the efficiency of production within the space of the factory that rapidly lowers costs of production in manufacturing lines. That leads, in turn, to a rapid fall in relative prices. Markets for manufactures expand, making possible a dramatic expansion of output. Concomitantly, huge masses of humanity are pulled into work in manufacturing lines. That is the key to the dynamic growth of manufacturing output and employment: the former is very rapid, and that is why, in spite of high rates of labour productivity growth, the latter expands, raising the manufacturing employment share. The same does not take place in the service sector. Services are precisely the sorts of activities that cannot be — or have not yet been — substituted by goods. In services, labour productivity tends to increase slowly if at all, and concomitantly, prices follow the same trajectory. In fact, as long as real wages are rising, the relative price of services will itself tend to increase. Since relative prices do not fall dramatically, there is no impetus for markets for services to expand rapidly. Hence, there is no dynamic tendency to dramatically expand output and thus to draw lots of labour into the sector; instead, employment in the service sector expands slowly. […] The shift from industrialisation to deindustrialisation is necessarily the shift from an economy that grows rapidly, with big booms and busts, to one that grows slowly, tending towards stagnation. In such a context, booms and busts are given merely by financial bubbles being blown up and deflated around the world by surplus capital. There is a corollary to this theory, which explains why a large portion of the surplus population ends up in the service sector, particularly in the low-wage, super-exploited section and in the informal, self-exploiting section. As service work tends to be labour-intensive, a large proportion of the final costs are made up of wages. Because real wages do not usually fall across the economy, it is difficult for service sector firms to lower their costs on a regular basis (general tendencies towards falling costs in industry and agriculture are due to increases in the efficient use of more expensive labour). This results in a relatively low level of output growth in services. But precisely for that reason, when workers are expelled from other sectors, it is possible to get much cheaper workers into services — as those discarded as surplus will usually have to accept a lower wage level. This lowers costs and allows for some expansion in demand for, and output of, services. In the service sector, there is greater room to expand the market by lowering wages. By contrast, in most manufacturing activities, wages make up only a small portion of the final cost of the product, so there is less room for manoeuvre. […] While it is difficult to identify a precise and determinate “logic” as to why some activities become really subsumed and others do not, the fact that certain activities require delicate work or direct human contact, and therefore must remain labour-intensive, is clearly key. There appears always to be a remainder of such activities, an assortment of differentiated tasks, mostly in services. Insofar as services remain services, they tend predominantly to be a source only of “absolute”, and not “relative” surplus value. This is simply another way of saying that there are limits to raising productivity. Consequently, economies that are “post-industrial” and concentrated around service work tend to be low-growth. In such conditions, it is imperative for capitalists to get as much out of their workers as possible, by increasing the duration or intensity of labour. To some extent, the prerequisite for the existence of many jobs becomes pressurised work conditions. If super-exploited sectors take up a growing share of the labour market, this also puts downward pressure on all wages, and increases insecurity, as workers lose bargaining power and bosses are emboldened to demand ever more flexibility. With this, the door is opened for a whole range of abuses to be unleashed upon the worker — sexual, emotional and psychological, as well as the stealing or retention of wages and chronic overworking. Certain positions, such as that of the low-wage service sector worker, thus appear as a kind of special category of surplus worker, akin to the informally self-employed in low-income countries (and in high income countries over the past decade or so). Low-wage service workers must become extreme self-exploiters, as well as being super-exploited, if they are to get work. Many of these jobs (deliveries, house-cleaning, supermarket baggers, and so on) can only exist because the wages of the people performing the service are a fraction of what those consuming the service are paid. Thus, the condition for finding a job in a growing service sector is often accepting a significantly lower than average wage. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

Far from representing the emergence of a coherent agent, the expansion of the surplus population marks the tendential disappearance of the previous revolutionary horizon. It was once possible — indeed quite reasonable — to think of the proletariat as an emergent social subject, becoming ever larger and more unified with the global spread and development of the capitalist mode of production, and particularly with the incorporation of a growing portion of the class into industrial employment. Today, in an era of slowing economic growth — which is also an era of general deindustrialisation — the revolutionary orientations of the past no longer make sense. The working class — always internally differentiated — displays a diminishing capacity for unification under a single hegemonic figure, thus realising its always latent tendency to decompose into fragments, facing off one against the other. At the heart of this fractiousness is the division of the class into two parts: (1) a shrinking one that retains higher wages and social protections, but must constantly fight rearguard actions against capitalist “reforms” and restructurings; and (2) a growing one that faces poor prospects of employment and is offered few social protections. The more secure sector — which is also more organised — often needs the support of the more precarious in order to win its struggles. However, calls for greater “inclusion” of such people may stoke valid fears that this will undermine more secure positions, opening up access to education and training, and thereby increasing labour supply and reducing bargaining power. At the same time, members of the more precarious part may be rightly suspicious of the motives of the more secure: after the sacrifices have been made, won’t it be merely the latter’s rearguard battles that have been won? After all, those with security rarely take to the streets when it is the less fortunate who are getting screwed. The expansion of the surplus population is important in explaining this division, but it is not the only meaningful one within the class. There is a potentially infinite variety of such distinctions, so the question of explaining current divisions can in a sense be reversed: What was the unity that is now in advanced stages of decay? How did it come about? This is a question that we have attempted to answer elsewhere in this issue, in ‘A History of Separation’. For our purposes here though, it is enough to note simply that there was once a hegemonic identity and orientation among workers that could provide grounds for affirming certain struggles as central, while excluding others as secondary or unimportant. It is equally clear that this affirmation seems less and less plausible today. In place of the identity of the worker, we are now faced with so many competing alternatives, each with its own strategic priorities: those who want more jobs against those who want to stave off environmental catastrophe; those who want to preserve the family wage for unionised male workers against those who want gender equality; those of dominant national or racial identities against those of racialised minorities, and so on. In this sense, the fractiousness of “identity politics” is symptomatic of an era. In a period of increasingly slow economic growth under the threat of ecological catastrophe, it seems diminishingly plausible to claim that fighting the battles of one part of the class will advance the class as a whole. This is why we reject any attempt to find in surplus populations an ersatz social subject that might replace the hegemonic role played by the white male factory worker in the workers’ movement. At present there seems to be no class fraction — whether “the most strategically placed” or “the most oppressed” — whose struggles express a general interest. At the same time, attempts to conjure up a new unity from this diversity by simply renaming it as “multitude” or “precariat”, for example, merely gloss over this fundamental problem of internal division. If there is any revolutionary potential at present, it seems that it stands to be actualised not in the struggle of any particular class fraction, but rather, in those moments when diverse fractions are drawn together in struggle in spite of their mutual suspicions; despite the lack of a stable, consistent hegemonic pole. In such moments, the demands of various sections of the class come into conflict with one another — a conflict that may bring the prospect of destabilising or undermining mutually exclusive demands and identities. The modes by which social life is organised and segmented within capitalist societies can then come to appear as obstacles to further struggle, dividing workers against one another. The question of how to move forward is then at least raised, though with no easy answers. After all, a definitive answer would involve an overcoming of the unity-in-separation that organises social life. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

Marx defines the surplus population as workers without regular access to work: a worker “belongs to” the surplus population “when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed”. [Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (MECW 35) pp. 634-635.] Marx refers to this surplus population as a “relative surplus population”, because these workers are not absolutely surplus, as in a Malthusian account (which is to say, it is not a matter of there not being enough food, water, shelter, etc). Instead, these workers are surplus relative to the needs of capital — that is, relative to capital’s demand for labour. In the history of capitalist societies, large masses of people have been absorbed into the labour market and have come to depend entirely upon earning wages in order to survive. They cannot leave the labour market unless they can get other workers to support them. In other words, workers have to work regardless of what sort and how much work is available. They are at the mercy of capital’s demand for labour. When that demand falls and there isn’t enough work to go around, workers do not stop working altogether — unless they really have no options, in which case they become paupers. Instead, they enter one or another branch of an extensive and variegated surplus population. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

Marx thought that the problem of the surplus population — ultimately a problem of the growing oversupply of, and under-demand for, labour — would intensify over time and, as a result, people would increasingly find themselves disconnected from labour markets, and hence from regular access to the wage. Indeed, Marx describes this as the “absolute general law of capitalist accumulation”. What happens is that capital’s ongoing accumulation process leads to rising labour productivity, which in turn expands the “industrial reserve army”, causing the “consolidated surplus population” — “whose misery is in inverse ratio to the amount of torture it has to undergo in the form of labour” — to grow, and increasing “official pauperism”; that is, those who cannot make enough in wages to survive, and so must beg for their bread.5 The overall result is that the accumulation of wealth occurs alongside an accumulation of poverty. In Marx’s account, the main reason capitalist development leads to the growth of the surplus population has to do with what we have called “technological ratcheting”.6 In essence, Marx argues that the demand for labour in each industry eventually falls as labour productivity rises. New industries do come on line, at a faster or slower pace, increasing the demand for labour. However, these new industries never start out from zero: they do not need to reinvent e.g. steam power, the assembly line, the electric motor. Instead, new lines absorb technological innovations that preceded them. As a result, the emergence of new industries is less and less effective in increasing the demand for labour. Hence capital has what Marx terms a “rising organic composition”. Marx argues that it is the older lines, which have not yet been technically renewed, which tend to absorb the most labour. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

[…] today, what renders many workers surplus to the requirements of capital is a dual tendency: on the one hand, towards overaccumulation — which reduces profit rates and hence slows the expansion of output — and on the other hand, towards the ongoing growth of labour productivity, which arises out of capitalist competition and results in a loss of jobs in those economic sectors where output does not increase at a rate equal to productivity. The combination of these factors ensures that, in an economy wracked by overaccumulation, the demand for labour will fail to keep up with its supply. That, in turn, will expand the surplus population. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

[…] the tendency towards increasing superfluity is not a tendency towards a literal extrusion of a part of the working class from the economy. Surplus workers still need to buy at least some of what they need to survive, and therefore they must earn or acquire money in order to live. Those who are produced as surplus to the needs of capital may still receive wages in super-exploited sectors, or they may be informally self-employed and thus self-exploiting (since they lack access to capital). […] It would thus be a mistake to identify surplus populations with “the unemployed”. This category is, to some extent, an artifact of 20th century high-income countries’ provision of unemployment insurance. In the 19th century, as in most low-income countries today, “being unemployed” in this sense was simply not an option. Unemployment insurance did not exist — and today covers few workers in low-income countries — so workers could not afford to be without work for long: they needed to find employment as soon as possible, regardless of the degree to which their labour was demanded by capital. If there was no demand, they needed to set up shop for themselves, without any employer — by picking through rags, for example. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

Additionally, in the global economy — in which mobile flows of surplus capital discipline states — high-income states must do everything they can to prevent outright unemployment, and thus unemployment provisions, from growing too dramatically. Welfare expenditures, which are ultimately funded from tax receipts, must be kept to a minimum to avoid worrying bondholders and taxpayers. Current UK government policy, for example, is to try to eradicate, as far as possible, possibilities for unemployment as any kind of stable category, transforming welfare into workfare. As a result, in the high-income countries, many workers fall in and out of relative superfluity during their lifetime, due both to the increasing flexibilisation of the labour market and its destabilisation of categories of employment at a structural level, as well as the falling demand for labour. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

On the one hand, this relatively simple theory of the tendential production of surplus population can help greatly in explaining various key aspects of the present global situation. It gives us a basis for explaining deindustrialisation, the relative growth of services, the spread of forms of insecure and flexible labour, and the numerous abuses for which this opens the way. In turn, these tendencies intensify and exacerbate the difficulty of unifying the working class under the hegemony of the industrial worker, in the way traditional Marxism anticipated; it thus gives us a basis for explaining the crisis of the left and present strategic predicaments. It also seems to offer an explanation for declining growth rates over recent decades, as relative surplus value-producing labour has become a diminishing share of global labour. […] On the other hand […] What seems to be a standard misinterpretation or over-extension of the theory of surplus population is characterised by a hypostatisation of “the surplus population” as a singular social subject, with the apparent implication that this may be viewed as the new revolutionary agent, or at least that it is the agent behind various forms of contemporary struggle. This involves a conceptual slippage between general tendency and particular sociological or empirical cases. While it would of course ultimately be false to separate the two, it is also important not to identify them too immediately or simplistically. Thus, the theory of surplus population does not involve some kind of neo-Bakuninite romanticisation of a surplus subject “more radical” or “more dangerous” than the organised working class; nor does it involve a reading of present struggles as those of some “surplus” subject. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

It is amongst these pressurised sections of the working class — the more insecure, informal, racialised stratum, which struggled to be reabsorbed by the labour market — that the riot became particularly prominent as a mode of struggle, from the mid to late 1970s, and it seems reasonable to hypothesise that this newfound prominence is directly related to the absence of possibilities for “normal”, regulatory, demands-making of the corporatist type. In developments dialectically entwined with the struggles of this section of the working class, the police in this period increasingly developed new tactics of repression specifically targeted at poor urban neighbourhoods. One might even say that the riot and its repression became a sort of proxy way in which class relations were regulated, in the absence of the “normal” mode of regulation exercised by wage bargaining, etc. This is not a perverse point: historically riots have pushed demands towards which the state has made concessions. This proved true of 2011 just as it did of 1981; more recently it has proved true in the US, after the 2014 Ferguson riots. In Endnotes 3 we termed the social logic of stigmatisation associated with such developments “abjection” — a concept borrowed from Imogen Tyler’s recent book Revolting Subjects. With its in some ways dubious provenance, we were not especially fond of this term, but it seemed nonetheless quite appropriate as a name for certain problematics with which we were grappling. What was useful was that this term named a particular kind of abstract structure in which something is cast off, marked as contingent or lowly, without actually being exteriorised. The relevance of such a structure here should be obvious: the initially racialised communities subject to the forms of oppression that develop through this period are socially marked as a problem — or even as a sort of rejection from the healthy core of the body politic — without being literally exteriorised in any sense from either economy or state. Police repression looms large in the immediate experience of abjection in this sense, but the term is also intended to capture broader social processes, such as the moral crusades of reactionary press, or the constant obsessing of politicians over the various failed subjects of the nation. These are not simply unconnected moments; concrete connections between all of them could be articulated such that we see a particular socio-political pattern of oppression. […] If the development of new styles of policing might be partially linked to the management of a surplus population at the outset then, this tie becomes increasingly tenuous as we get into the 1980s and 90s. One might speak of a developing “autonomisation” of the apparatus of repression and its related stigmatising and racialising logics. By this we mean that an apparatus which initially seems to apply in particular to clear, economically marginal, parts of the class, becomes dissociated from that strict function. While those who are subject to these processes of abjection come to symbolise the limits of affirmable class, these limits are in actuality unstable, shifting and ill-defined. They become more a socio-political, or perhaps socio-cultural, than a political-economic construct. If this is the case, it is doubtful whether we are likely to have any luck constructing the object of this apparatus in purely political-economic terms. Who is “abjected” then? We might provisionally reply, somewhat tautologically: those who are defined as such by the fact that they are the object of these processes of repression. There is no particular pre-existing trait or social categorisation which must, in itself, necessarily or inevitably mark one out as an object of these processes, which is not to say that certain social categories do not end up being reproduced in such positions. Abjection is closely related — though not identical — to racialisation. […] If we are now speaking of the subjects of “abjection” rather than “surplus population” here, how about the abject as a social subject? These developments signify, however, not the creation of a new form of social (or potentially, revolutionary) subject, but rather the problem of any class subject at all. In itself, that which is abjected would seem to be by definition unaffirmable, ununifiable, for it is not a positive existence of its own, but merely the negative of something else. Those who are abjected are not something other than the proletariat. More often than not they are workers, students etc. Only, they are workers, students etc who are vilified, cast beyond the pale of social respectability. These developments represent problems for the constitution of a unified class subject; indeed, they are direct expressions of the decomposition of the class. The abject is projected as a sort of limit-concept of affirmable social class, in an operation where that class is itself negatively defined against what has been abjected. “We are not like them” replaces “the workers united will never be defeated”. And as such, abjection can have a somewhat fractal quality: not applying uniformly to one social group, but across and between social groups, depending to some extent on where one stands in the social landscape. There is always someone more abject than you. Endnotes, An Identical Abject-Subject?, Endnotes #4 (2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/an-identical-abject-subject

[…] groups like Mouvement Communiste, Négation, and La Guerre Sociale advocated a conception of revolution as the immediate destruction of capitalist relations of production, or “communisation”. As we shall see, the understanding of communisation differed between different groups, but it essentially meant the application of communist measures within the revolution — as the condition of its survival and its principal weapon against capital. Any “period of transition” was seen as inherently counter-revolutionary, not just in so far as it entailed an alternative power structure which would resist “withering away” (c.f. anarchist critiques of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”), nor simply because it always seemed to leave unchallenged fundamental aspects of the relations of production, but because the very basis of workers’ power on which such a transition was to be erected was now seen to be fundamentally alien to the struggles themselves. Workers’ power was just the other side of the power of capital, the power of reproducing workers as workers; henceforth the only available revolutionary perspective would be the abolition of this reciprocal relation. Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead

What provided the impetus for a new conception of revolution and communism (as communisation) was not simply an understanding of the content of communism derived from a close reading of Marx and Bordiga, but also the influence of a whole wave of class struggles of the late sixties and early seventies which would give a new meaning to “the refusal of work” as a specific content of the revolution. By the early 1970s journalists and sociologists began to speak of a “revolt against work” afflicting an entire new generation of workers in traditional industries, with rapidly rising rates of absenteeism and sabotage, as well as a widespread disregard for the authority of the union. Commentators variously blamed: the feeling of expendability and insecurity brought about by automation; the increasing assertiveness of traditionally oppressed minorities; the influence of an anti-authoritarian counter-culture; the power and sense of entitlement afforded by the prolonged post-war boom and its hard-won “social wage”. Whatever the reason for these developments, what seemed to characterize the new struggles was a breakdown in the traditional forms through which workers sought to gain control over the labour process, leaving only the expression of an apparent desire to work less. For many of those who had been influenced by the SI, this new proletarian “assault” was characterized by a “refusal of work” shorn of the techno-utopian and bohemian-artistic elements which the SI had never been able to abandon. Groups like Négation and Intervention Communiste argued that it was not only the power of the union which was being undermined in these struggles, but the entire Marxist and Anarchist programme of the liberation of work and the triumph of “workers’ power”. Far from liberating their work, bringing it under their own control, and using it to seize control of society through self-managing their workplaces, in the French May and the subsequent “creeping May” in Italy, the “critique of work” took the form of hundreds of thousands of workers deserting their workplaces. Rather than an indication that struggles hadn't gone far enough, the absence of workers’ councils during this period was thus understood as an expression of a rupture with what would come to be known as “the old workers’ movement.” Endnotes, Bring out your Dead, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/bring-out-your-dead

The allegedly realistic designs of a “first phase” of socialism hinge upon contradictory assumptions: on the one hand, it presupposes people who are partial to free association, but on the other hand, these same people would still be animated by the good old shopkeeper’s spirit, wanting to take advantage of everyone else. A social revolution would once again risk missing out on creating a free society if it did not from the get-go act according to its new principles: making all work voluntary and transforming it—as much as possible—into travail attractif, free access to all goods, and the re-absorption of state power by society. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

if one does not think of revolution as being a complete miracle, as something that proletarians will achieve in the heat of the moment, almost accidentally, spontaneously, and without any goal set in advance, and if one does not delegate the project of human emancipation to the machines, then it would appear reasonable to try and reach some sort of understanding concerning the basic features of a classless society. Several objections to this have been raised: it’s premature (“the struggles aren’t quite there yet, the time isn’t ripe”), unnecessary (“people will take care of it eventually”), pretentious (“you can’t just predetermine it”), or simply impossible (“you can’t anticipate that”). But there’s never been a continuous movement defying the existing order without an idea, however vague, of what could take its place. A purely negative critique of the status quo, which some radical leftists invoke, is ultimately impossible. For example, aiming for “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common” (Capital) follows necessarily from the critique of private property. But because this leaves a lot of room for imagination — including scenarios that have little to do with freedom and happiness — revolutionaries should state clearly what they want. Not in order to peddle recipes for redemption, but as a contribution to the necessary discussion on how to leave the old world behind. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Traditionally, communist critique of existing social relations would begin from the premise that the technical productive forces developed by capitalism, reified into machinery, simply need to be freed from the fetters of private property by overthrowing the relations of production, so that the productive forces can then enter into the service of a self-conscious humanity. Yet as early as the 1840s, Marx and Engels had noticed that capital-driven development would eventually reach a stage “when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which under the existing relations only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces.” (German Ideology) Just as Herbert Marcuse noted that certain “purposes and interests of domination are not foisted on technology ‘subsequently’ and from the outside,” but that they “enter the very construction of the technical apparatus,” the Operaist Raniero Panzieri, with reference to Marx, criticized existing technology as a means of subjecting living labour to the commands of capital. The purpose of generating surplus value is not external to machinery, but constitutes and shapes every fibre of it just as it shapes the totality of the labour process. This idea must be further developed. On the one hand, the “automatic factory potentially establishes the domination of the associated producers over the labour process” (Panzieri) and is therefore a precondition for a free society without scarcity. On the other hand, machinery in the modern factory system appears as “the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force”. The capitalist use of machinery […] determines the development of technical progress itself. […] Under existing conditions, digital technology and analogue machinery both serve as a means in the class struggle from above: their purpose is not to improve living conditions, but to effect the most efficient exploitation of human labour. Specifically, they determine the rhythm of work and the organization of production, ensure the conformity of employees, and finally serve to destroy all interpersonal contact. By enforcing the Taylorist program of an extremely fragmented work flow in all areas of production, they contribute significantly to the devaluation of the commodity labour-power and consequently to the weakening of workers’ bargaining power. In addition to this weakening, it also subjects those dependent on wages to the “despotism of the factory,” as Marx described it. Workers are even more demoted to being mere appendages of the—now “intelligent” and networked—machinery. Driven by process-optimizing software, they primarily experience emptiness, stress, overwork, they are robbed of even the smallest amount of freedom and sometimes of any knowledge of the production process at all. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Undoubtedly, the wealth of contemporary society includes many things for which a liberated society would no longer have any use. Certain forms of work organization, energy and food production would have to be abolished alongside technologies invented solely for the supervision, control and regulation of human labour and the freedom of movement. However, a distinction should be made between the technical elements of contemporary machinery by themselves, and the arrangements they assume for the purpose of producing surplus value. Machinery as it exists today is more than the sum of its parts. Gears, rollers and belts, as such, do not make an assembly line. Although modern scientific progress and technical inventions have been subordinated to the imperatives of profit maximization, liberation will have no other forms of knowledge, technology, and machinery (or at least not in sufficient quantities) to start from. The notion that the machinery and science left behind by capitalism would be of absolutely no use after the revolution then seems ideological. […] Just as the wheel and belt don’t naturally form an industrial production line, the circuit integrated microchip doesn’t necessarily serve to surveil the wage-dependent. A headset, a camera and Java code, as individual technical components, are not surveillance systems for logistics, and it is not for nothing that socialist hopes have been linked to the emerging digitization. […] Certain goods (operating systems, software, music, texts and so on) can be digitally duplicated without much effort and loss, and as a result they do not fit easily into the commodity form. This has made it possible to conceive of new, non-proprietary forms of distribution and collaboration. Even the Internet, despite its military origins, nourished early ideas of cybersocialism, where people’s needs would be evaluated on a global scale in real-time, and production would be adjusted accordingly. Under the label “the internet of things”, which means nothing more than the fact that different devices (things) are connected to the Internet and can respond according to predetermined criteria, this potential for satisfying needs in real-time has expanded to the sphere of tangible products. This does not just refer to “smart” refrigerators or to cybernetic housing units, that is to say, the often overemphasized consumer side of things, but to the changes brought about in production, maintenance and transport by networked machines. Here, automatically monitored and demand-oriented maintenance cycles unleash a great potential for savings. The principle of just-in-time production can be implemented much more efficiently than the warehouse worker could, simply because the warehouses can communicate directly with the suppliers, bypassing human intervention. Storage robots receive, sort and register the orders directly. Once put into operation, such fully automatic feedback loops replace a considerable number of workers, since the only human intervention they require is to be serviced from time to time. Under currently existing conditions, where potential free time and leisure manifest themselves as unemployment, this is indeed a technological attack on worker’s power, but it also points to the possibility of a world that makes physical labour superfluous on an unprecedented scale. For these reasons, the digitalization of labour and distribution processes should be welcomed as steps towards a well-functioning planned economy and the actual abolition of toil. Even if it only serves to exploit human labour power more intensively, it would be a fetishization of technology to blame technological progress as such for the misery of the current situation: though ascribed to technology, the forces at work are in fact social in origin. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Like every new productive force, the “digital revolution” can at times point beyond what currently exists and come into conflict with the given relations of production and ownership. Capital has responded with “innovations” that curtail the potential of ever-increasing computing power. In the software industry, a large portion of the research has gone into enforcing the commodity form in the digital sphere for many years. Furthermore, personal computers are no longer “universal machines”: their possibilities are limited by their assigned interfaces and programs so that they function only as the terminus of digital capitalism. This is justified as “user-friendliness”: anyone who uses a computer for reasons outside of research, development and production today is no longer supposed to understand what is going on in the device, and is instead made dependent on digital services. As with most productive forces within capitalism, the development of the computer is characterized by the fact that in dealing with them, the user does not learn any of the skills proper to the productive force. On the contrary, we find ourselves in a situation in which the widespread usability of computers is paired with an extensive digital illiteracy. Technological progress has become a source of social regression; the culturally pessimistic suspicion that smarter phones require ever dumber people is not that far-fetched. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

A revolutionary movement must advocate neither for the socialist mass-production of computers and smart objects as they are today, nor for a blind destruction of technologies. Instead, it would have to work towards the development of these technologies’ potentials. On the one hand, this means spreading the knowledge necessary to use these technologies and on the other hand, identifying those elements of the machinery whose sole purpose is to serve the mandates of surplus-value production and rendering them harmless. The point is not just to abolish titles of ownership, but to reclaim social control over technology, which would also mean profoundly transforming the existing machinery to meet people’s needs. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

[…] Despite the immense scale of productive forces that the commune will acquire, it is certainly possible that bottlenecks will still occur. However, these will not be eliminated by adopting timesheets. A control system of that sort would actually unnecessarily tie up energies and hinder the transformation of consciousness necessary for the creation of an “association of free individuals” and “social individuals.” The success of the communist revolution may ultimately depend on this change of consciousness. People themselves must be added to the list of productive forces whose potential can only fully develop in a free society. Here, it is apt to recall thinkers from Fourier to Marcuse, who theorized a liberated society in which ‘passion’ would become productive without coercion. According to various sociological studies, the top priority of employees in technologically and economically developed regions of the world is that their work be interesting, meaningful, and that it carry responsibility. As David Graeber shows by pointing to bullshit jobs, jobs so stupid that their completion would fill any half-sane person with shame rather than with pride or satisfaction, capitalism is unable to satisfy these needs. In the commune, these jobs will be eliminated. Others will be automated. What remains will be transformed as much as possible into travail attractif; work that is done in free cooperation with others instead of under the command of a boss, work that helps develop the workers’ “senses, capabilities, and faculties of reflection” (Meinhard Creydt) rather than just aiming at maximum output. And finally, even boring jobs could become bearable if they are rotated and thereby only performed for short periods of time. Of course, steel production cannot simply be turned into play. […] ‘passion’ will become productive not so much when it comes to monitoring mostly automated processes, but in solving tricky problems. Rather than establishing a control regime that prevents people from shirking their work duties, the communards ought to dedicate themselves to organizing and imparting practical and theoretical knowledge, education, and skills in all sectors of society in an egalitarian manner. Even today, skilled workers are more productive than the unskilled, and communism can be less than ever a communism of factory workers. Instead, everyone’s capabilities would be developed so that fields like mechanical engineering, medicine, transportation services or computer science would be available to them. Overcoming the division between manual and intellectual labour as quickly as possible would have to be a guiding principle for the revolutionary movement from the start: the noticeably high amount of manual labour performed as a hobby — the arts and crafts boom, urban gardening, model making, fixing up old cars, etc. — indicates a ‘productive’ passion to do something with one’s hands. The goal should not be the most fair distribution of work and free time, but rather the humane abolition of this very separation along with the greatest possible automation of production. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The wealth of the commune will hardly be the same as the wealth we know, only produced under different relations. Nor is the point to give metropolitan residents more of what they already have: more flights, cars, cell-phones, and ugly, cheap t-shirts. And not because those needs could be denounced as “artificial” and juxtaposed with so-called natural ones. As the late Marxists from Frankfurt demonstrated, distinguishing between artificial and natural needs tends to be arbitrary in an authoritarian sense, because nature, as manifested in individuals’ drives, and society are inextricably intertwined in every need. As products of the existing class society, however, needs are not innocent nor should they always be projected into a classless society. Adorno answered this dilemma on the one hand with the dialectical core of his argument: reorganizing production towards the satisfaction of “even and especially those [needs] produced by capitalism—then the needs themselves would be decisively transformed”. It would “quickly emerge” that the masses don’t need the “trash” forced upon them today. On the other hand, he answered with ideas of equality and solidarity: “The question of the immediate satisfaction of need is not to be posed in terms of social and natural, primary and secondary, correct and false; rather, it coincides with the question of the suffering of the vast majority of all humans on earth. If we produced that which all humans now most urgently need, then we would be relieved of inflated social-psychological concerns about the legitimacy of their needs.” […] Without posing the question of ‘true’ and ‘false’ needs and far from any austere anti-hedonism in a green guise, a social revolutionary movement would aim at a different kind of wealth in the capitalist centres. While wealth today presents itself as an ‘immense accumulation of commodities’, being not so much social, but a mere sum total of private, unequally distributed possessions, the commune would have to aim not only for maximal socialization in the sphere of production, but also in the spheres of use and consumption. Contrary to any cult of community, the “right to solitude” (Marcuse) and the retreat into private life would be inviolable. However, unlike in the profit economy, built on bulk sales and planned obsolescence, the private sphere in the commune would no longer be primarily the space in which a steadily increasing flow of accumulated commodities must be devoured in order to keep the machine running. If canteens and laundromats became spaces of encounter beyond their bare functionality, it would no longer be necessary to have a dishwasher and washing machine in every apartment. With a few immediate measures, the commune would be capable of solving problems in a flash that technocrats endlessly grind their teeth on. Rather than continuing with the unmitigated disaster that is “e-mobility”—electric cars consume the same amount of labour, resources, streets and space in cities as cars that run on gas, and instead of exhaust gas pollution there is the highly toxic production of batteries — the commune could simply build a few tramways (with cars gone, there is no need to expend huge amounts of effort to dig tunnels into the earth). With no harried tourists and managers, air traffic could be reduced drastically in order to let the planet breathe a little. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

If a council, however, is simply understood as everyone who lives or works in a certain place discussing matters of common interest, putting the results of those discussions into practice, and consulting with other councils by means of delegates recallable at any time, then this form would likely be the backbone of a new commune. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The basis on which councils, grassroots assemblies — or whatever one may want to call them — organize and how they interface with one another would differ from place to place in accordance with local conditions and would certainly change frequently. According to Horkheimer, “the instability of the constitution would be a characteristic trait of a classless society: the forms of free association do not condense into a system.” Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

Decentralization, as envisaged in the 1871 program of the communards and still desirable to this day, has its limits. For example, it does not make any sense and it is not even possible in some cases to produce everything locally. A global commune, or one encompassing only large regions for a time, would face questions concerning the use of limited resources that can only be answered centrally. Such a commune, based on non-authoritarian structures whose central organs merely follow directives “from below”, could be easily overwhelmed by its tasks. For everyone to be involved in every decision may be utopian in the negative sense of the word. Such limits would have to be dealt with in some fashion to prevent the emergence of a political sphere populated by specialists. Hence, the disappearance of the state would not yield an amorphous condition, but rather require a highly developed form of social self-organization. The “re-absorption of state power by society” would demand an entirely new way of dealing with problems for which the law, criminal justice and prisons are responsible today. Much, even most, of what is now crime, like property crimes, is the product of material necessity and would automatically disappear with said want, but some problems would remain. We must build on the critique of the Soviet legal scholar Evgeny Pashukanis who deemed “criminal law, like law in general” to be “a form of the relationships between egoistic and isolated subjects” and rooted in the bourgeois principle of equivalence. Retribution must be replaced by a practice of betterment and rehabilitation which will “render the court case and court verdict totally superfluous”. Instead of building prisons — “a social crime and failure”, according to Emma Goldman — and wasting time with a legal system, which today is growing out of control, the communards of the future would have to work towards a new method of resolving conflicts which helps “ameliorate” violent individuals. This may even involve some coercive measures. Fundamentally, the challenge is to make sure that the dissolution of legal relations does not amount to a regression to a condition worse than the status quo, in which at least the very abstractness of the law ideally protects the individual from state despotism. The “re-absorption of state power by society” cannot mean that the individual is entirely at the mercy of the caprices of their neighbours or that a bourgeois society governed by abstractions is replaced by the immediacy of small communities. For this, there is no guarantee. It is one of the many great but not unsolvable challenges that humankind would face. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

the married couple and family would disappear, if not as a way of life, then as an economic unit, since there would be no private wealth, no bank accounts, no real estate, no inheritance. The unholy fusion of material interests and intimate human relationships would be eliminated. This would almost certainly be beneficial to the relationships between parents and children and between genders. No woman would be forced to suppress her wish for a divorce for fear of sliding into poverty because she no longer has access to her husband’s income or a roof over her head. Moreover, the private and the social would take on an entirely new character through changing their relationship. The hope for happiness placed in the family today, often only to be greatly disappointed, is mostly a reaction to inhuman conditions; the homey existence in the small family collective is the polar opposite of a society in which no one can feel at home. If people still want to live in nuclear families after the revolution, certainly no one would be inclined to forbid this, but the desire to live this way would diminish. And if it does not disappear entirely, it would still yield less tragic results than today, as individuals would have a completely different place within society, and the economic function of the family would be gone. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

To the extent that today’s gender relations are enmeshed with a certain opposition between wage labour and housework, including child rearing, a social revolution would fundamentally facilitate the emancipation from those relations. There is, however, no guarantee of any progress whatsoever. Even if child rearing is organized rationally and socially, it could still be left to women; thus, all those facets of gender relations outside of a certain division of labour would be even less likely to disappear by themselves. The historical link between classical gender stereotypes — which continue to exist, though they are in flux in late capitalist, liberal countries — and the partition of the social process into a market economy and private reproduction is quite obvious. Nevertheless, they have thrust deep roots even in the most hidden corners of people’s inner lives and continue to be a source of identity. If only because these gender roles are developed and lived subconsciously, their complete elimination will take time: “Whereas particularly the destruction of state power can be thought of as a concentrated ‘overthrow’, the necessary transformation and self-transformation of (one’s own) gender subjectivity can hardly be thought of as anything but a lengthy, culturally revolutionary process, that can become eruptive from time to time but will generally only take place little by little in everyday interpersonal relationships and new cultural production”. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The transition to the commune can neither be thought of as the conquest of state power nor as the result of a gradual expansion of an allegedly already burgeoning new logic of production, and not even as a combination of both, that is, as a joint venture of a left government and alternative practices from below. Not much needs to be said about the Marxist-Leninist understanding of revolution: conquest of state power, nationalization of the economy followed by a patient waiting game as the state “withers away”. In rejecting this view, however, the necessity of a rupture has given way to an alternative gradualism under titles like Commons or Wertkritik, an allegedly ground-breaking renewal of Marxist thinking that, after its farewell to the working class, moved increasingly closer to the green, alternative ideology of the 1970s. Embellished as a decoupling from the “commodity-money system”, islands with a different way of living and producing are to be established in order to undermine that system step by step. To the extent that it is possible to create a livelihood outside of the market, there is certainly no reason not to do it. Not much can be done, however, without putting an end to property, understood not just as the expropriation of those who currently control the means of production (the first decisive confrontation), but also ending the separation between enterprises, which would be abolished as such and replaced by mere nodes in the flow of social production. Without a revolutionary mass movement, it is not possible to attain sufficient resources for a different kind of life and, if they were available, they could hardly maintain their independence from market relations in the long term. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The transition to the commune is only conceivable as an unstoppable movement of occupations, appropriating whatever is of use for it — housing, public buildings, factories, farmland, means of transportation — while blocking or sabotaging anything that must be shut down. The key is to use anything that is captured to keep expanding the movement, otherwise the whole thing would collapse. Goods must simply be distributed, services like medical care or transport provided for free; money would not be “abolished” by decree as in Soviet war communism, but would become superfluous, likely having already been devalued by the deep social crisis. Such a practice has appeared in all the great uprisings as the common goal makes petty questions of ownership irrelevant; in May 68, farmers brought the fruits of their fields to the occupations in Paris; in many of the square occupations of recent years food was given out freely, the injured were treated, tasks that needed to be done were shared voluntarily. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The challenge, however, which can hardly be overstated, is to go beyond the looting and distribution of goods and to start producing in a new way. How a factory works is best known to those who work in it; nothing happens without their cooperation, even in the age of high-tech; supported by anyone who is interested in this endeavour, they could begin immediately to adapt work processes to their needs, and, if necessary, to convert production in accordance with the requirements of the movement and give their products to the embryonic commune. Even the social revolution in Spain in 1936/1937 faced the problem of being economically dependent on regions that were not in upheaval. More so today, the global division of labour would quickly doom any purely local attempt at revolution. This does not mean that the revolution would have to break out on the same day everywhere in the whole world, but rather that everything would be lost if it does not quickly spread to large areas which, at the very least, are able to furnish it with the bare necessities. A deep crisis spreading to a number of countries could turn out to be the catalyst for such an expansion. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

The crux of the matter is that, in its present state, the production apparatus that today spans the entire globe is a terrible starting point for an upheaval, no matter its potentials. There is a deep chasm between the present state and the possible commune, and the leap over that chasm suggested here may appear in some respects quixotic. Politically, this is reflected in the aforementioned turn to the localized Commons and to a kind of neo-anarchism that sees “infrastructure” as the enemy and which aimlessly destroys railway tracks. But it is also there in the postulate of the indispensability of the state: the world has become so complex, it is claimed, that the transition to a postcapitalist society cannot do without the leadership of the great helmsman. That both extreme positions are wrong can be shown quite easily. The first surrenders without hesitation before the enormous challenge of re-appropriation, while the second overestimates the controllability of the capitalist economy. Drafting any kind of counterproposal is all the more daunting. Precisely because the commune is not predetermined by the objective course of history, an outline of what it might look like should be discussed today. The more that the working class discusses it across the globe today and the more clearly a completely different world can be visualized, the more likely it is that another revolutionary movement could arise after all. Friends of Classless Society, Contours of the World Commune, 2019, https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-5/contours-of-the-world-commune---friends-of-the-classless-society

I find the third, and decisive, weakness of the theory of value to be the overgeneralization of a specific case of the subsumption of the lifeworld under the system. Even if we trace the dynamics of class conflict back to the "fundamental contradiction" between wage labor and capital, processes of reification need not appear only in the sphere in which they were caused-in the sphere of social labor. As we have seen, the economy steered by money depends on being functionally supplemented by an administrative system differentiated out via the medium of power. Thus, formally organized domains of action are able to absorb communicative contexts of life through both media-money and power. The process of reification can manifest itself just as well in public as in private domains, and in the latter areas it can attach to consumer as well as to occupational roles. By contrast, the theory of value allows for only one channel through which the monetarization of labor power expropriates from producers work activities abstracted into performances. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.342

There is in the action-theoretic foundations of the theory of value an error similar to the one found in Weber and in two lines of Weber reception, Western Marxism and Parsons: the model of purposive rationality is viewed as fundamental for social action as well. Marx was unable to conceive the transformation of concrete into abstract labor as a special case of the systemically induced reification of social relations in general because he started from the model of the purposive actor who, along with his products, is robbed of the possibility of developing his essential powers. The theory of value is carried through in action-theoretic concepts that make it necessary to approach the genesis of reification below the level of interaction, and to treat as derived phenomena the de-formation of interaction relations themselves-the deworlding of communicative action that is transferred over to media and the technicizing of the lifeworld that follows upon this. "The one-sided interpretation of basic action concepts, according to which action can be understood only as productive-objectifying activity, takes its revenge in underestimating the extent of neutralization that comes with the reduction of abstract labor. Marx is too harmless, in categorial terms, when it comes to determining the neutralizations of action required for system integration” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.342

Marx was right to assign an evolutionary primacy to the economy in such societies: the problems in this subsystem determine the path of development of the society as a whole. But this primacy should not mislead us into tailoring the complementary relationship between the economy and the state apparatus to a trivial notion of base and superstructure. As opposed to the monism of the theory of value, we have to allow for two steering media and four channels through which the two complementary subsystems subject the lifeworld to their imperatives. Reification effects can result in like manner from the bureaucratization and monetarization of public and private areas of life. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.343

As against these revolutionary expectations, Weber's prognosis has proven correct: the abolition of private capitalism would not at all mean the destruction of the iron cage of modem industrial labor. Marx's error stems in the end from dialectically clamping together system and lifeworld in a way that does not allow for a sufficiently sharp separation between the level of system differentiation attained in the modern period and the class-specific forms in which it has been institutionalized Marx did not withstand the temptations of Hegelian totality-thinking; he construed the unity of system and lifeworld dialectically as an "untrue whole:' Otherwise he could not have failed to see that every modem society, whatever its class structure, has to exhibit a high degree of structural differentiation. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.340

Marx's misperception also has consequences for his theory of revolution. He does not want merely to describe how the systemically autonomous process of capital's self-realization is experienced from the lifeworld perspective of the wage laborer as a continual exploitation, how the subsumption of labor power under the commodity form tears the workers out of their traditional conditions of life, uproots feudal modes of existence in a plebian fashion, and then shapes them into proletarian forms. Rather, he projects a practical-political perspective for action, which, in its assumptions, is exactly contrary to the perspective tacitly adopted by systems functionalism. Systems theory presupposes that the world-historical process of instrumentalizing the lifeworld, particularly the sphere of social labor, in line with the imperatives of self-regulating systems - the process that Marx denounces-has already come to a close. The marginalized lifeworld can, it is supposed, survive only if it transforms itself in tum into a media-steered subsystem and leaves be- hind the communicative practice of everyday life as the empty shell of formally organized domains of action. As opposed to this, Marx has in view a future state of affairs in which the objective semblance of capital has dissolved and the lifeworld, which had been held captive under the dictates of the law of value, gets back its spontaneity. He foresees that the forces of the industrial proletariat, at first merely in revolt, will, under the leadership of a theoretically enlightened avant-garde, form them- selves into a movement that seizes political power for the purpose of revolutionizing society. Along with the private ownership of the means of production, the movement will also destroy the institutional foundations of the medium through which the capitalist economic system was differentiated out, and will bring the systemically autonomous process of economic growth back again into the horizon of the lifeworld. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.339-340

System and lifeworld appear in Marx under the metaphors of the "realm of necessity" and the "realm of freedom:· The socialist revolution is to free the latter from the dictates of the former. It seems as if theoretical critique has only to lift the spell cast by abstract labor (subsumed under the commodity form). The intersubjectivity ofworkers associated in large industries is crippled under the self-movement of capital; theo- retical critique has only to free it of its stiffness for an avant-garde to mobilize living-critically enlivened-labor against dead labor and to lead it to the triumph of the lifeworld over the system of deworlded labor power. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.340

This new equilibrium between normalized occupational roles and upgraded consumer roles is, as we have seen, the result of a welfare arrangement that comes about under the legitimation conditions of mass democracy. The theory of value was wrong to ignore the interchange relations between the political system and the lifeworld. For the pacification of the sphere of social labor is only the counterpart to an equilibrium established on the other side, between an expanded, but at the same time neutralized, citizen's role and blown-up client's role. The establishment of basic political rights in the framework of mass democracy means, on the one hand, a universalization of the role of citizen and, on the other hand, a segmenting of this role from the decision-making process, a cleansing of political participation from any participatory content. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 2, p.342

For Marx, this development toward a disenchanting "science" was theoretically and historically progressive. Adorno may have said more than he realized when he sardonically accused Marx of wanting to turn the whole world into a factory. For Marxian theory, the reduction of concrete labor into abstract labor is a historical as well as theoretical de­sideratum. Abstract labor may be a creature of capitalism but, like capi­talism itself, it is a necessary "moment" in the dialectic of history. Not only is it a medium for rendering exchange ratios possible on an exten­sive scale, but, from an even larger perspective, it becomes part of the technical substrate of freedom. By its very plasticity, abstract labor ren­ders human activity interchangeable, the rotation of industrial tasks possible, and the use of machinery flexible. Its capacity to flow through the veins of industry as mere undifferentiated human energy renders the manipulation and reduction of the working day possible and, con­ currently, the expansion of the "realm of freedom" at the expense of the "realm of necessity." If Marx's communism was meant to be a "society of artists," he was not prepared to recognize that the colors on their can­vases might be limited to varying tints of gray. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.230

To Marx, both the labor process and the cerebral design that guides it are essentially utilitarian: they have an irreducible technical ground, a modus operandi, that acquires the neutrality and rigor of scientific lawful­ ness. While their effectiveness may be enhanced or diminished by his­ tory, the design and the labor processes that execute it are to him ulti­mately a physical interaction. Indeed, without such an underlying, socially neutral interaction, Marx's theory of "historical materialism"­ with its deus ex machina called the "means of production"- would be as meaningless in Marxian social theory as Hegel's ruthless teleological system would be without the Hegelian notion of "Spirit." Both systems must be moved by something that is not itself bogged down in the con­tingent. Hence the design process and the labor process are necessarily equipped with a suprahistorical refuge from which they can preside over history-and into which Marx retreats from time to time with all the second thoughts that riddle so much of his theoretical corpus. That Marx and many of his Victorian contemporaries disparaged "nature idolatry" in extremely harsh terms is not accidental. The Ro­ mantic movement of the nineteenth century echoed a much broader and ancient sensibility: the view that production should be a symbiotic, not an antagonistic, process. Although the movement was primarily aesthetic, it combined with anarchist theories of mutualism - notably Kro­potkin's extraordinarily prescient writings-to ferret out a much broader "natural design": a "marriage" between labor and nature that was con­ceived not as a patriarchal domination of "man" over nature but as a productive relationship based on harmony, fertility, and creativity. Lib­ertarian and aesthetic movements in the nineteenth century were still heir to the image of a fecund interaction between humanity's craft and nature's potentialities. But labor was seen not as "fire," or industry as a "furnace." The imagery of these movements was drastically different. Labor was viewed as the midwife, and tools as the aids, in delivering nature's offspring: use-values. Such a view implied that the very "imagination" in which the "ar­chitect raises his structure" is socially and ethically derivative . Perceived reality involves an epistemology of domination-or liberation-that cannot be reduced to technical grounds alone. Hence the design images of production, the very figures reared in the minds of engineers, archi­tects, artisans, or laborers, are not socially or ethically neutral. There is no irreducible technical ground from which to formulate a value-free theory of technics and of labor. The images of labor as "fire" and of natural phenomena as enshrouded by a "death-sleep" are formed from the visual reservoir of a highly domineering sensibility. The imagery of modern technical design has its origins in the epistemologies of rule; it has been formed over a long period of time by our very specific way of "knowing" the world-both one another and nature-a way that finds its ultimate apotheosis in industrial agriculture, mass production, and bureaucracy. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.227-228

"Natural scarcity," "property," and "rule" thus persist in the very name of the critique of class society, exploitation, private property, and the acquisition of wealth. By veiling the primordial blood oath that con­strains the development of hierarchy and domination into class society, economic exploitation, and property, the class critique merely replaces the constraints of kinship with the constraints of economics instead of transcending both to a higher realm of freedom. It reconstitutes bour­geois right by leaving property unchallenged by usufruct, rule unchal­lenged by nonhierarchical relationships, and scarcity unchallenged by an abundance from which an ethical selectivity of needs can be derived. The more critical substrate of usufruct, reciprocity, and the irreducible minimum is papered over by a less fundamental critique: the critique of private property, of injustice in the distribution of the means of life, and of an unfair return for labor. Marx's own critique of justice in his remarks on the Gotha Program remains one of the most important contributions he made to radical social theory, but its economistic limitations are evi­dent in the tenor of the work as a whole. Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.87

That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value. Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.379

The capitalist who produces surplus-value – i.e., who extracts unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities, is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner, of this surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners, etc., who fulfill other functions in the complex of social production. Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c. It is only in Book III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of surplus-value. On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at their value the commodities he has produced, without concerning ourselves either about the new forms that capital assumes while in the sphere of circulation, or about the concrete conditions of reproduction hidden under these forms. On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner of the entire surplus-value, or, better perhaps, as the representative of all the sharers with him in the booty. We, therefore, first of all consider accumulation from an abstract point of view – i.e., as a mere phase in the actual process of production. So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded in selling his commodities, and in reconverting the sale-money into capital. Moreover, the breaking-up of surplus-value into fragments neither alters its nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an element of accumulation. Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial capitalist retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who, in the first instance, appropriates it. We, therefore, assume no more than what actually takes place. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of the process of accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation which brings it about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact analysis of the process, therefore, demands that we should, for a time, disregard all phenomena that hide the play of its inner mechanism. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.400

Such a fall in the value of labor-power [from 10 work-hours to 9 work-hours] implies, however, that the same necessaries of life which were formerly produced in ten hours can now be produced in nine hours. […] and this cannot be done, except by an alteration in his tools or in his mode of working, or in both. Hence, the conditions of production, i.e., his mode of production, and the labour process itself, must be revolutionised. By increase in the productiveness of labour, we mean, generally, an alteration in the labour process, of such a kind as to shorten the labour time socially necessary for the production of a commodity, and to endow a given quantity of labour with the power of producing a greater quantity of use value. Hitherto in treating of surplus value, arising from a simple prolongation of the working day, we have assumed the mode of production to be given and invariable. But when surplus value has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus labour, it by no means suffices for capital to take over the labour process in the form under which it has been historically handed down, and then simply to prolong the duration of that process. The technical and social conditions of the process, and consequently the very mode of production must be revolutionised, before the productiveness of labour can be increased. By that means alone can the value of labour power be made to sink, and the portion of the working day necessary for the reproduction of that value, be shortened. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.319-320

In order to effect a fall in the value of labour power, the increase in the productiveness of labour must seize upon those branches of industry, whose products determine the value of labour power, and consequently either belong to the class of customary means of subsistence, or are capable of supplying the place of those means. But the value of a commodity is determined, not only by the quantity of labour which the labourer directly bestows upon that commodity, but also by the labour contained in the means of production. For instance, the value of a pair of boots depends, not only on the cobbler's labour, but also on the value of the leather, wax, thread, etc. Hence, a fall in the value of labour power is also brought about by an increase in the productiveness of labour, and by a corresponding cheapening of commodities in those industries which supply the instruments of labour and the raw material, that form the material elements of the constant capital required for producing the necessaries of life. But an increase in the productiveness of labour in those branches of industry which supply neither the necessaries of life, nor the means of production for such necessaries, leaves the value of labour power undisturbed. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.320

Let us assume, that some invention enables the spinner to spin as much cotton in 6 hours as he was able to spin before in 36 hours. His labor is now six times as effective as it was, for the purposes of useful production. The product of 6 hours’ work was increased six-fold, from 6 lbs to 36 lbs. But now the 36 lbs of cotton absorb only the same amount of labor as formerly did the 6 lbs. One-sixth as much new labor is absorbed by each pound of cotton, and consequently the value added by the labor to each pound is only one-sixth of what it formerly was. On the other hand, in the product, in the 36 lbs of yarn, the value transferred from the cotton is six times as great as before. By the 6 hours’ spinning, the value of raw material preserved and transferred to the product is six times as great as before, although the new value added by the labor of the spinner to each pound of the very same raw material is one-sixth of what it was formerly. This shows that the two properties of labor, by virtue of which it is enabled in one case to preserve value, and on the other to create value, are essentially different. On the one hand, the longer the time necessary to spin a given weight of cotton into yarn, the greater is the new value added to the material; on the other hand, the greater the weight of the cotton spun at a given time, the greater is the value preserved, by being transferred from it to the product. Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p. 143

The exceptionally productive labour operates as intensified labour; it creates in equal periods of time greater values than average social labour of the same kind. […] the capitalist who applies the improved method of production, appropriates to surplus labour a greater portion of the working day, than other capitalists of the same trade. […] On the other hand, however, this extra surplus value vanishes, so soon as the new method of production has become general, and has consequently caused the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value to vanish. The value of commodities is in inverse ratio to the productiveness of labour. And so, too, is the value of labour power, because it depends on the values of commodities. Relative surplus value is, on the contrary, directly proportional to that productiveness. It rises with rising and falls with falling productiveness. […] if, in consequence of increased productiveness, the value of the necessaries of life fall, and the value of a day's labour power be thereby reduced from five shillings to three, the surplus value increases from one shilling to three. […] Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. The value of a commodity is, in itself, of no interest to the capitalist. What alone interests him, is the surplus value that dwells in it, and is realisable by sale. […] Now, since relative surplus value increases in direct proportion to the development of the productiveness of labour, while, on the other hand, the value of commodities diminishes in the same proportion; since one and the same process cheapens commodities, and augments the surplus value contained in them; we have here the solution of the riddle: why does the capitalist, whose sole concern is the production of exchange value, continually strive to depress the exchange value of commodities? […] The shortening of the working day is, therefore, by no means what is aimed at, in capitalist production, when labour is economised by increasing its productiveness. It is only the shortening of the labour time, necessary for the production of a definite quantity of commodities, that is aimed at. he fact that the workman, when the productiveness of his labour has been increased, produces, say 10 times as many commodities as before, and thus spends one-tenth as much labour time on each, by no means prevents him from continuing to work 12 hours as before, nor from producing in those 12 hours 1,200 articles instead of 120. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.323-326

In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versa, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.50

The object of all development of the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist production, is to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.326

[…] let some one capitalist contrive to double the productiveness of labour, and to produce in the working day of 12 hours, 24 instead of 12 such articles. […] If therefore, the capitalist who applies the new method, sells his commodity at its social value of one shilling, he sells it for threepence above its individual value, and thus realises an extra surplus value of threepence. […] This augmentation of surplus value is pocketed by him, whether his commodities belong or not to the class of necessary means of subsistence that participate in determining the general value of labour power. Hence, independently of this latter circumstance, there is a motive for each individual capitalist to cheapen his commodities, by increasing the productiveness of labour. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 35 (International Publishers), p.322-323

In so far as each single transaction invariably conforms to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labor-power, the laborer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so far as all of this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labor-power is itself but a portion of the product of other’s labor appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and laborer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever-repeated purchase and sale of labor-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this – the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialized labor of others, and exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labor. At first the rights of property seemed to us to be based on a man’s own labor. [...] Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its products, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the laborer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labor has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.412-413

In so far as each single transaction invariably conforms to the laws of the exchange of commodities, the capitalist buying labor-power, the laborer selling it, and we will assume at its real value; in so far as all of this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labor-power is itself but a portion of the product of other’s labor appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and laborer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of the transaction, and only mystifying it. The ever-repeated purchase and sale of labor-power is now the mere form; what really takes place is this – the capitalist again and again appropriates, without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialized labor of others, and exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labor. At first the rights of property seemed to us to be based on a man’s own labor. [...] Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its products, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the laborer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labor has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.412-413

To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist and the individual worker, we view in their totality, the capitalist class and the working class confronting each other. But in so doing we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity production. Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in commodity production. The relations between them cease on the day when the term stipulated in the contract they concluded expires. If the transaction is repeated, it is repeated as the result of a new agreement which has nothing to do with the previous one and which only by chance brings the same seller together again with the same buyer. If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated processes, is to be judged according to its own economic laws, we must consider each act of exchange by itself, apart from any connexion with the act of exchange preceding it and that following it. And since sales and purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals, it is not admissible to seek here for relations between whole social classes. However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding accumulations the capital functioning today may have passed through, it always preserves its original virginity. So long as the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange the mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionised without in any way affecting the property rights which correspond to commodity production. These same rights remain in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer, who, exchanging equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his own labour, and also in the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever- increasing degree the property of those who are in a position to appropriate continually and ever afresh the unpaid labour of others. This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the labourer himself, of labour-power as a commodity. But it is also only from then onwards that commodity production is generalised and becomes the typical form of production; it is only from then onwards that, from the first, every product is produced for sale and all wealth produced goes through the sphere of circulation. Only when and where wage labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a whole; but only then and there also does it unfold all its hidden potentialities. To say that the supervention of wage labour adulterates commodity production is to say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own inherent laws, develops further, into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production change into the laws of capitalist appropriation. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p.414-415

On every occasion, by every hyperpolitical means, we must publicize desirable alternatives to the spectacle of the capitalist way of life, so as to destroy the bourgeois idea of happiness. […] We must everywhere present a revolutionary alternative to the ruling culture; coordinate all the researches which are currently taking place but which lack a comprehensive perspective; and incite, through critiques and propaganda, the most advanced artists and intellectuals of all countries to contact us in view of a collective action. We must put forward the slogans of unitary urbanism, experimental behavior, hyper-political propaganda, and the construction of ambiences. The passions have been sufficiently interpreted; the point now is to discover new ones. Debord, Report on the Creation of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.16

Your role, revolutionary artists and intellectuals, is not to complain that freedom is insulted when we refuse to march alongside the enemies of freedom. Your role is not to imitate the bourgeois aesthetes who try to restrict people to what has already been done because what has already been done doesn’t bother them. You know that creation is never pure. Your role is to find out what the international avant-garde is doing, to take part in the critical development of its program, and to call for its support. Debord, Report on the Creation of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.15-16

An international association of situationists can be seen as a coalition of workers in an advanced sector of culture, or more precisely as a coalition of all those who demand the right to work on a project that is obstructed by present social conditions; hence as an attempt at organizing professional revolutionaries in culture. Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Internationale Situationniste #1, https://libcom.org/article/theses-cultural-revolution-guy-debord

The groups that recognize the fundamental (not merely circumstantial) failure of the old politics must also recognize that they can claim to be an ongoing avant-garde only if they themselves exemplify a new style of life, a new passion. There is nothing utopian about this lifestyle criterion: it was constantly evident during the emergence and rise of the classical workers movement. […] Otherwise the militants of these groups would only constitute dull propaganda societies, proclaiming quite correct and basic ideas but with virtually no one listening. Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0

The formation of new organizations depends on a deeper critique, translated into acts. There must be a complete break with ideology, in which revolutionary groups think they possess official titles guaranteeing their function (that is, we must resume the Marxian critique of the role of ideologies). It is thus necessary to leave the terrain of specialized revolutionary activity -- the terrain of the self-mystification of "serious politics" -- because it has long been seen that such specialization encourages even the best people to demonstrate stupidity regarding all other questions; with the result that they end up failing even in their merely political struggles, since the latter are inseparable from all other aspects of the overall problem of our society. Specialization and pseudoseriousness are among the primary defensive outposts that the organization of the old world occupies in everyone's mind. A revolutionary association of a new type will also break with the old world by permitting and demanding of its members an authentic and creative participation, instead of expecting a participation of militants measurable in attendance time, which amounts to recreating the sole control possible in the dominant society: the quantitative criterion of hours of labor. A genuine enthusiastic participation on the part of everyone is necessitated by the fact that the classical political militant, who "devotes himself" to his radical duties, is everywhere disappearing along with classical politics itself; and even more by the fact that devotion and sacrifice always engender authority (even if only purely moral authority). Boredom is counterrevolutionary. In every way. Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0

There is no other way to be faithful to, or even simply to understand, the actions of our comrades of the past than to profoundly reconceive the problem of revolution, which has been increasingly deprived of thought as it has become posed more intensely in concrete reality. But why does this reconception seem so difficult? Starting from an experience of free everyday life (that is, from a quest for freedom in everyday life) it is not so difficult. It seems to us that this question is quite concretely felt today among young people. And to feel it with enough urgency enables one to rediscover lost history, to salvage and rejudge it. It is not difficult for thought that concerns itself with questioning everything that exists. It is only necessary not to have abandoned philosophy (as have virtually all the philosophers), not to have abandoned art (as have virtually all the artists), and not to have abandoned contestation of present reality (as have virtually all the militants). When they are not abandoned, these questions all converge toward the same supersession. The specialists, whose power is geared to a society of specialization, have abandoned the critical truth of their disciplines in order to preserve the personal advantages of their function. But all real researches are converging toward a totality, just as real people are going to come together in order to try once again to escape from their prehistory. Situationist International, The Bad Days will End, Internationale Situationniste #7, https://libcom.org/article/bad-days-will-end-0

In addition to the direct means that will be used for specific ends, the positive phase of the construction of situations will require a new application of reproductive technologies. One can envisage, for example, televised images of certain aspects of one situation being communicated live to people taking part in another situation somewhere else, thereby producing various modifications and interferences between the two. More simply, a new style of documentary film could be devoted to “current events” that really are current and eventful by preserving (in situationist archives) the most significant moments of a situation before the evolution of its elements has led to a different situation. Since the systematic construction of situations will give rise to previously unknown sentiments, film will find its greatest educational role in the dissemination of these new passions. Debord, Report on the Creation of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.15

Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type. The most general goal must be to expand the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible. One could thus speak of our enterprise as a project of quantitatively increasing human life, an enterprise more serious than the biological methods currently being investigated, and one that automatically implies a qualitative increase whose developments are unpredictable. The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play. This perspective is obviously linked to the continual and rapid increase of leisure time resulting from the level of productive forces our era has attained. It is also linked to the recognition of the fact that a battle of leisure is taking place before our eyes, a battle whose importance in the class struggle has not been sufficiently analyzed. So far, the ruling class has succeeded in using the leisure the revolutionary proletariat wrested from it by developing a vast industrial sector of leisure activities that is an incomparable instrument for stupefying the proletariat with by- products of mystifying ideology and bourgeois tastes. The abundance of televised imbecilities is probably one of the reasons for the American working class’s inability to develop any political consciousness. By obtaining through collective pressure a slight rise in the price of its labor above the minimum necessary for the production of that labor, the proletariat not only extends its power of struggle, it also extends the terrain of the struggle. New forms of this struggle then arise alongside directly economic and political conflicts. Debord, Report on the Creation of Situations, theanarchistlibrary.org, p.13-14

Mascolo is right in saying (in Le Communisme) that the reduction of the work day by the dictatorship of the proletariat is “the most certain sign of the latter’s revolutionary authenticity.” Indeed, “if man is a commodity, if he is treated as a thing, if human relations are relations of thing to thing, this is because it is possible to buy his time.” But Mascolo is too quick to conclude that “the time of a man freely employed” is always well spent, and that “the purchase of time is the sole evil.” There can be no freely spent time until we possess the modern tools for the construction of everyday life. The use of such tools will mark the leap from a utopian revolutionary art to an experimental revolutionary art. Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution, Internationale Situationniste #1, https://libcom.org/article/theses-cultural-revolution-guy-debord

Like the moment, the situation "can be extended in time or be condensed." But it seeks to found itself on the objectivity of artistic production. Such production breaks radically with durable works. It is inseparable from its immediate consumption as a use value essentially foreign to conservation as a commodity. The Theory of Moments and the Construction of Situations, Internationale Situationniste #4, https://libcom.org/article/theory-moments-and-construction-situations

Both the colloquial definitions and the anti-utopian position illustrate the fact that the concept itself is an ideological battleground. The elision between perfection and impossibility can serve to invalidate all attempts at change, reinforcing the claim that there is no alternative, and sustaining the status quo. Perhaps, as Khayyám suggests, we would do better to forget the future and drown our sorrows. But even among different groups committed to change, the derogatory meaning attaching to utopia is what dominates. People rarely claim that their own aspirations are utopian but even dream- ers may hurl the epithet at others. The rejection of other people’s projects as utopian and unrealistic is part of the process of promoting the merits of one’s own plans, and is thus an intrinsic part of the political process. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.4

Utopia is the expression of the desire for a better way of being. This includes both the objective, institutional approach to utopia, and the subjective, experiential concern of disalienation. It allows for this desire to be realistic or unrealistic. It allows for the form, function and content to change over time. And it reminds us that, whatever we think of particular utopias, we learn a lot about the experience of living under any set of conditions by reflecting upon the desires which those conditions generate and yet leave unfulfilled. For that is the space which utopia occupies. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.9

Colloquial usage thus tends to dismiss speculation about the good society as intrinsically impractical. This dismissal may be tolerantly good-humoured, seeing utopia as an interesting if esoteric byway of culture and the utopian as a well-meaning dreamer. It may, on the other hand, be extremely hostile, seeing attempts at instituting utopia as highly dangerous and leading to totalitarianism. This anti-utopian position is typified by Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.3

Sometimes utopia embodies more than an image of what the good life would be and becomes a claim about what it could and should be: the wish that things might be otherwise becomes a conviction that it does not have to be like this. Utopia is then not just a dream to be enjoyed, but a vision to be pursued. Yet the very term utopia suggests to most people that this dream of the good life is an impossible dream – an escapist fantasy, at best a pleasant but pointless entertainment. Those utopians who seek to make their dreams come true are deemed to be hopelessly unrealistic, or worse, actively dangerous. The view that utopia is not escapist nonsense but a significant part of human culture is a fundamental assumption of the expanding field of utopian studies. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.1

This book sets out to clarify the meaning of the term utopia and provide a new definition. Such a project could be undertaken from many points of view: definitions are tools, not ends in themselves. The aim here is to address some of the problems that arise in the field of utopian studies from the absence of a clear and agreed definition. The purpose is firstly one of clarification, to show the basis of the current variation in usage of the concept of utopia. Since this variety arises only in part from a lack of conceptual rigour on the part of commentators and more fundamentally from the range of questions and approaches that are involved, it is important that any common definition which is proposed takes account of this variety. The object is not to impose an orthodoxy, but to encourage communication about issues which are already being addressed and to suggest new ones. Above all, it is to encourage a greater degree of conceptual clarity in discussions of utopia. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.2

In exploring existing definitions of utopia we can consider three different aspects: content, form and function. Firstly, there is content. There is a common assumption that utopia should be a portrayal of the good society. It is however obvious that this will vary, being a matter not just of personal taste, but of the issues which appear to be important to different social groups, either in the same society or in different historical circumstances. […] The variation in content, however, makes it particularly difficult to use this as part of the definition of utopia. Definitions in terms of content tend to be evaluative and normative, specifying what the good society would be, rather than reflecting on how it may be differently perceived. The issue of possibility also relates directly to the content of a utopia, and again judgements differ. Secondly, one can attempt to define utopia descriptively, in terms of form. The common sense equation of utopia with a description of a good society (leaving aside the question of possibility) is one version of such a definition. Another is the equation of utopia with an ideal commonwealth. Some commentators take the form of More’s Utopia as a model and argue that utopia is a literary genre, involving the fictional depiction of an alternative society in some detail. However, as we have already suggested, depictions of the good society do not necessarily take the form of literary fictions – and indeed this form is only available under certain very specific historical conditions; is it then to be assumed that when these conditions do not exist, there are no utopias? Broader historical comparisons require more inclusive definitions, to accommodate changes in the way in which aspirations for a better life may be expressed. Thirdly, one may define utopia in terms of its function. This is less obvious; to focus on the function of utopia is already to move away from colloquial usage, which says nothing about what utopia is for, but implies that it is useless. […] utopia is seen as presenting some kind of goal, even if commentators as opposed to the authors of utopias do not see them as necessarily realisable in all their details. At the very least, utopias raise questions about what the goal should be. Many commentators, however, go further and use the function of utopia as a defining characteristic – although that function is differently represented by different authors. […] Broadly, one may divide approaches to utopian studies into two streams. The liberal-humanist tradition tends to focus on definitions in terms of form. In contrast a largely, but not exclusively, Marxist tradition has defined utopia in terms of its function – either a negative function of preventing social change or a positive function of facilitating it, either directly or through the process of the ‘education of desire’. Contemporary utopian studies draws on both these traditions, and definitions of both kinds may be found, although those in terms of form tend to predominate. […] It is argued that all definitions in terms of form, function or content are problematic. Not only do they place limits upon what may properly be regarded as utopian and thus upon the field of enquiry itself, they also obscure variations in the utopian genre. In order to make such a claim, one must of course be able to locate something which remains constant while content, form and function vary. This element, I would argue, is that of desire – desire for a better way of being and living. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.5-8

There is an ambivalence here: utopia fascinates as an expression of the felt problems and solutions of particular historical situations; it inspires as a response to the recurrent problems across history; yet it provokes fear that the revolutionary may make the mistake of taking it literally. There is an implied model of the process of social change, as well as its direction: ideas are the motive force in social progress, so that utopia must be taken seriously as a contribution to this – but not too seriously, or evolution and progress may turn to revolution and disaster. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.9

The Marxist tradition has for the most part been strongly antipathetic to utopianism, which it has understood as the construction of blueprints of a future society that are incapable of realisation; the charge of utopianism has also been levelled at Marxism by its opponents, using a similar definition. Throughout the twentieth century there have been notable exceptions to the dominant unpopularity of utopianism (including the views of Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse and Edward Thompson, discussed in subsequent chapters) but the idea that utopia can be valuable for Marxists has always been a minority view. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.41

The roots of Marxist objections to utopia can be found in the writings of Marx and Engels; however, their criticisms of utopian socialism have been used illegitimately as justification of a general rejection of descriptions of the future socialist society. The concept of utopia deployed in this rejection, besides being a political weapon in a process of ‘annihilation by labels’, conflates two issues: speculation about the future, and the possibility and means of transition to socialism. The real dispute between Marx and Engels and the utopian socialists is not about the merit of goals or of images of the future but about the process of transformation, and particularly about the belief that propaganda alone would result in the realisation of socialism. The general orientation to utopia that has developed not only misrepresents the views of both Marx and Engels, but has had thoroughly deleterious effects on the socialist project in the past hundred years. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.41

Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equal naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 3, p. 296. (Cited in Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47)

Marx’s suggestions as to the nature of communist society range from very abstract principles put forward in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the more specific statements in the Grundrisse. In Marx’s early writings the goal of communism is the transcendence of alienation, the overcoming of the estrangement of human beings from themselves which results from the institution of private property. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47

although it [communism] is in one sense a goal, it is not very specific about the precise institutional arrangements which will prevail. There are two reasons for this. The more fundamental objection to describing communist society is that the needs, wants and capacities that will develop within it are neither static nor predictable from within the constraints of capitalism. In addition there is a strategic reason for silence: the criticism of utopian socialism in terms of its supposition that its schemes would be self-realising would be undermined by appearing to offer a competing plan of the good society. Hence Marx’s reluctance to identify communism as a state rather than a process: "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 5, p. 49) Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.50

The abolition of private property through social ownership transforms the nature of work. It is alienated labour which is the root of alienation; hence it is only through the transformation of the work process and its place in communist society that human estrangement can be overcome. A key issue here is the division of labour, which turns people into extensions of the productive process and prevents the full development of each individual’s broad potential. Hence the familiar statement in The German Ideology that “in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.47-48

Finally this new society entails the production of a different kind of person, not just in the sense of increasing their powers as atomised individuals but (and in fact this is how the increase of individual powers is possible) as the production of fully social human beings. Alienation affects not just the relationship of people to themselves and to their work, but to one another. The recognition of interdependence and of the social nature of production and of human existence in general leads not only to a transformation of work, but also means that the relationships between individuals both within and outside the work process cease to have the instrumental and competitive nature they assume in capitalist society. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.50

Similarly, ‘in a communist society there are no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities’. The division between mental and manual labour is abolished, and the division between town and country. On this point, the utopian socialists were commended by Engels in Anti-Dühring: "The utopians were already perfectly clear as to the effects of the division of labour, the stunting on the one hand of the labourer, and on the other of the labour function, which is restricted to the life-long uniform mechanical repetition of one and the same operation. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country was demanded by Fourier, as by Owen, as the first prerequisite for the abolition of the old division of labour altogether ... abolition of the antithesis between town and country ... has become a direct necessity of industrial production itself ... . The abolition of the separation between town and country is therefore not utopian.” Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.48

In the Grundrisse it is made clear that the new human being who develops with communist society does so through the expansion of ‘free time which is both leisure and time for higher activity’, which transforms ‘its possessor into another subject’. Work remains a realm of necessity in contrast with the realm of freedom outside work, where human development is an end in itself. This does not mean, however, as one commentator has suggested, that the problem of freedom is in the Grundrisse reduced to the problem of free time, nor does it mean that the realm of work consists of alienated labour. Work does not become ‘pure fun, pure amusement, as in Fourier’s ... childishly naive conception’, since ‘really free work ... is also the most damnably difficult, demanding the most intensive effort’. But if ‘labour cannot become a game, as desired by Fourier’, it remains to his great credit that he ‘stated that the ULTIMATE OBJECT is the raising of the mode of production itself, not [that] of distribution, to a higher form’. And the nature and conditions of work are to be transformed so that work, while necessary, is nevertheless free: "Work involved in material production can achieve this character only if (1) its social character is posited; (2) if it is of a scientific character and simultaneously general [in its application], and not the exertion of the worker as a natural force drilled in a particular way, as a subject, which appears in the production process not in a merely natural, spontaneous form, but as an activity controlling all natural forces.” (Marx, Grundrisse, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 28, p. 530; Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 29, p. 97) Work in communist society is both greatly reduced and transformed in character. These features depend upon the expansion of productive powers, made possible in the first instance by capitalism but then exponentially so by its demise. Abundance is a necessary condition for communism. These four key features – the abolition of the division of labour, the development of individual potential, the transformation of work and the increase in material prosperity (made possible by the social ownership of the means of production) – are summed up in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: "In a higher phase of a communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of common wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!“ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 87.) Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.49-50

Whether the sexual division of labour is also to be entirely abolished is less clear. There is certainly support for communal living arrangements as a new productive force, involving the development of new machinery and the abolition of the family, in The German Ideology, which is entirely congruent with Engels’s praise for the saving in labour power implied in Owen’s planned communities. Ollman argues that the communal raising of children is implied by the need that parents be prevented from exercising a destructive influence over their children without forcibly separating them from each other. He does concede, however, that this is never made explicit in Marx’s writing, and that Marx never deals with the limitations child-rearing imposes upon the self-development of adults, in practice usually their mothers, although Ollman asserts that ‘he was surely aware of it’. Although it is clearly intended that the all-round development of the individual in communist society should apply to women as well as to men, the means by which this is to be made possible have to be inferred or invented. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.48

The difference between Marxism and utopian socialism does not, then, rest on the existence or otherwise of an image of the socialist society to be attained, nor even on the content of that image. It rests upon disagreements about the process of transition. Even here the question of who is most utopian in the sense of unrealistic is a matter of dispute. Martin Buber, in Paths in Utopia, defends the orientation of utopian socialism (including not just Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, but Proudhon, Kropotkin and Landauer) to this problem. Buber’s argument is that a ‘society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals but of associative units’, and that the health of a society depends on the density of voluntary associations that constitute it; capitalist society is thus ‘a society inherently poor in structure and growing visibly poorer every day’. The strength of utopian socialism is that it addressed itself to the issue of ‘a renewal of society through a renewal of its cell-tissue’, and aimed to ‘substitute society for State to the greatest degree possible’.23 Buber argues that neither Marx nor Engels gave sufficient attention to the process of social restructuring, in spite of the assertion that the new society matures in the womb of the old. Organic restructuring necessitates the development of a network of cooperative settlements which go beyond simple consumer or producer cooperatives – as in the Israeli kibbutzim. […] His arguments in favour of cooperative settlements rest upon a recognition that the social relations of production lie at the root of the character of society. His claim, however, is that the post-revolutionary leap and the dictatorship of the proletariat involve a contradiction between means and ends which is not present in utopian socialism. The so-called utopian does not believe in this post-revolutionary leap, but in ‘continuity within which revolution is only the accomplishment, the setting free and extension of a reality that has already grown to its true possibilities’. In Buber’s view the ‘utopian’ approach to the problem is more realistic, since it is difficult to see how the centralisation of the first phase of socialism will give way to full communism. In other words, the expectation that the state will somehow wither away is itself utopian, i.e. unrealistic. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.53-54

Early in 1852 Marx observed that one response to political defeat was for the working class to retreat into essentially utopian schemes: "In part [the proletariat] throws itself into doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionising of the old world by means of the latter’s own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather, to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion, within its limited conditions of existence, and hence necessarily suffers shipwreck.” [Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 11, pp. 110–11.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.61

It is clear that the basis of Marx’s and Engels’s criticisms of utopian socialism is not an objection to speculation about the future, but a difference of view about the process of transformation. As Vincent Geoghegan puts it, ‘what is under attack here is not anticipation as such, but rather the failure to root this anticipation in a theoretical framework cognizant of the essential dynamics of capitalism’. […] Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one: "The chief offence does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement.” [Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 24, p. 93] In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 64, 66

“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism ... bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social utopias, of founding isolated ‘phalanstères’, of establishing ‘Home Colonies’, of setting up a ‘Little Icaria’ ... and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.” [Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Lawrence & Wishart: London), Vol. 6, pp. 515–16.] The fundamental error of the utopian socialists which gives rise to this unacceptable political position is the expectation that society can be changed by the appeal to all classes on the basis of reason and justice, and the belief that their blueprints of the good society will be the cause of social transformation. It is this idealist, as opposed to materialist, concept of social change which is the real problem. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.60

It is abundantly clear that in their hands the term is indeed used in a way which emphasises the unrealistic nature of utopia, More’s ‘no place’. However, the imputed lack of realism applies less to the content of the Utopian systems in question than to the models of social change associated with them. Since the primary concern of both Marx and Engels was with fostering such changes, the rejection of utopia is a rejection on the basis of its imputed social function – that of distracting the working classes from more suitable political activity, from ‘conscious participation in the historical process revolutionising society before our very eyes’. Utopian socialism draws up schemes for the future. Its main fault however is not that it does this, or that the schemes themselves outline the wrong sort of future, but that it entails an idealist model of social change, suggesting that the mere propagation of such schemes will have a transformative effect. Utopia here is effectively defined in terms of its function, which is seen as a negative, counter-revolutionary, one: The chief offense does not lie in having inscribed [a] specific nostrum in [a] programme, but in taking a retrograde step at all from the standpoint of a class movement to that of a sectarian movement. In their terms the key question is whether movements foster a deeper understanding of the class struggle, or whether they disguise it behind plans to persuade all classes to combine in the construction of a society based on harmony. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 66

Sorel also argued that ideas, in the form of myths, could potentially perform a mobilising and transformative function. The distinction drawn by Sorel between myth and utopia is interesting in its own right, but doubly so when compared with the analysis offered by Karl Mannheim, probably the most well-known theorist of utopia; for Mannheim’s argument similarly insists on this transformative potential, while attributing it to utopia. Part of the difference between the two is terminological, with Sorel’s use of the term myth having strong similarities with Mannheim’s definition of utopia. There are, however, also differences of substance, particularly concerning the emphasis on human will and the political evaluation of myth or utopia: Sorel celebrates the non-rationality of myth for its effectiveness; Mannheim fears the irrationality of utopia as well as the possibility of its extinction. The focus for both writers is […] on the role of ideas in social change; but whereas in Marxist hands utopia is defined in terms of the negative function of preventing social change, here myth and utopia, respectively, are defined in terms of the positive function of promoting it. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 69

Bloch’s relationship to Marxism is more problematic. Like William Morris […] Bloch stands at the juncture of Marxism and Romanticism. His project can therefore be seen as an attempt to import into Marxism a concept of utopia deriving from a mixture of mysticism and the Romantic tradition and thus as a contamination or dilution of Marxism itself, or it can be seen in Bloch’s own terms as an attempt to reinstate Marx’s own intentions within Marxism through the fundamental but neglected Marxist concept of utopia. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 97

Bloch refuses the identification of utopia with a literary genre: "to limit the utopian to the Thomas More variety, or simply to orientate it in that direction, would be like trying to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed. Indeed, the utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole total of philosophy becomes necessary … to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia.” [Bloch The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1986, p. 15.] Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 99

Bloch would agree with Mannheim that ‘wishful thinking has always figured in human affairs’ and that ‘myths, fairy-tales, other-worldly promises of religion, humanistic fantasies, romances, have been continually changing expressions of what was lacking in actual life’. He would agree too that they have a compensatory aspect and even that they are susceptible to manipulation: the mirror in which wishful images are reflected is ‘a beautifying mirror which often only reflects how the ruling class wishes the wishes of the weak to be’. However, the compensatory aspect of wishful thinking does not in itself mean that it operates, as Mannheim supposes, to sustain the status quo. It is not merely fictitious compensation for the discomforts of experienced reality, but a venturing beyond that reality which is essential to the inauguration of a transformed future. Utopia contains compensation, but also anticipation. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 100-101

The designation of utopia as ‘anticipatory consciousness’, which is the subtitle of part two of The Principle of Hope, depends upon Bloch’s central concept, the Not Yet. It has two aspects, the Not-Yet-Conscious and the Not-Yet-Become – its ideological and material, or subjective and objective aspects. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101

The idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious is developed through a critique of Sigmund Freud. In Bloch’s view, Freud regarded the unconscious as a kind of rubbish bin of repressed material that was no longer conscious; this overly negative approach on Freud’s part disregarded the additional and countervailing characteristic of the unconscious, that of being a creative source of material on the verge of coming to consciousness. The unconscious is also the pre-conscious, is intrinsically creative and the source of the utopian impulse, which Bloch appears to regard as a fundamental human propensity. The expression of the Not-Yet-Conscious is of course subject to social determination and thus varies with individual and historical circumstance; hence the variation in utopian expression demonstrated in the rest of The Principle of Hope. The Not-Yet-Conscious is at its strongest in youth, is expressed par excellence in the creative arts and is intensely present in times of change, particularly revolutionary change. Thus ‘all times of change are filled with Not-Yet-Conscious, even overfilled; a Not-Yet-Conscious which is carried by a rising class’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101

What prevents the Not-Yet-Conscious from being a purely psychoanalytic or ontological category is that it is the subjective correlate of the Not-Yet-Become, a category which applies to material reality. It is fundamental to Bloch’s argument and to the concept of the Not-Yet-Become that the material world is essentially unfinished, the future is indeterminate and therefore that the future constitutes a realm of possibility. Once the world is seen as in a constant state of process, but a process whose direction and outcome is not predetermined, there are always many possible futures – futures which are real possibilities, rather than merely formal possibilities. Not all projected futures are real possibilities; there are of course constraints, and Bloch’s model is not one of pure voluntarism. Nor are all real possibilities desirable: they include ‘devastatingly, possible fascist Nothing’ as well as ‘finally feasible and overdue, socialism’. These possible futures must be seen as part of, rather than outside, reality despite the fact that the indeterminacy of the future means that there is no necessary development from potentiality to actuality, and despite the fact that not all real possibilities will in fact be realised. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 101-102

Anticipatory elements are identified with concrete utopia (and, as we shall see, Marxism), compensatory elements with abstract utopia; thus Bloch refers to ‘the power of anticipation, which we [call] concrete utopia … (as distinct from the utopistic and from merely abstract utopianizing)’. It is not a question of dividing the mass of material outlined above into concrete and abstract examples, as a division of sheep from goats. Just as Mannheim pointed out that ideology and utopia are ideal types and appear in reality interwoven with one another, so too Bloch sees abstract and concrete utopia, compensation and anticipation, as interwoven in the objects of his study. Unlike Mannheim, Bloch carries this to its logical conclusion: the task is to reveal and recover the anticipatory essence from the dross of contingent and compensatory elements in which utopia is dressed up in particular historical circumstances. Abstract utopia means that the derogatory sense of the term remains, and rightly so, but should not outweigh the positive sense that pertains to the function of concrete utopia: ‘the category of the Utopian, beside the usual, justifiably pejorative sense, possesses the other, in no way necessarily abstract or unworldly sense, much more centrally turned towards the world: of overtaking the natural course of events’. Bloch’s celebration of the anticipatory element present even in vestigial or contaminated forms across the range of human culture, and his simultaneously ruthless attitude to utopia’s abstract trappings, recall Engels’s response to utopian socialism; it is a celebration of the thoughts that break out through fantastic coverings, coupled with a rejection of the coverings themselves – and implying that it is a greater blindness to reject the former than to be deluded by the latter. Nevertheless, the distinction between abstract and concrete utopia is fundamental to Bloch’s project. The rehabilitation of utopia depends upon the removal of the abstract elements which clutter up the concrete core. Concrete utopia must be winnowed out, stripping wishful thinking of that which is purely fantastic, compensatory and escapist. The process entails: "knowledge and removal of the finished *utopistic element*, with knowledge and removal of abstract utopia. But what then remains: the unfinished forward dream, the docta spes which can only be discredited by the bourgeoisie – this seriously deserves the name utopia in carefully considered and carefully applied contrast to utopianism; in its brevity and new clarity, this expression then means the same as: *a methodical organ for the New, an objective aggregate state of what is coming up.*” [Bloch The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1986, p. 157.] What can then happen is that the utopian function ‘tears the concerns of human culture away from … an idle bed of contemplation’ and ‘opens up, on truly attained summits, the ideologically unobstructed view of the content of human hope’ [Bloch The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell: Oxford 1986, p. 158.]. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 104-105

A large part of the substance of The Principle of Hope consists of Bloch’s attempt to demonstrate the core of concrete utopia in a range of cultural forms, including both religion and bourgeois culture. The reclamation of these as more than repressive ideology is justified by the idea of cultural surplus. Bloch does not dispute the view that the ruling ideas in any age are the ideas of the ruling class, or that ruling class ideologies justify social conditions by disguising their own economic roots and the system of economic exploitation. However, many cultural productions outlast the conditions that give rise to them: they ‘reproduce themselves in cultural consciousness even after the disappearance of their social bases’. This formulation is unsatisfactory in that it ignores the fact that cultural productions do not reproduce themselves, but are reproduced within historical contexts, even if these differ in some respects from those in which they originate. However, Bloch argues that ideology would be unable to carry out its most important function, ‘namely premature harmonization of social contradictions’, if it consisted only of deception and false consciousness; and those elements which are detachable from the immediate conditions of creation are designated cultural surplus. This surplus is differentially distributed between different cultural forms, being more prevalent in architecture than philosophy, and particularly so in music; it is this that creates continuing culture, and this which must be reclaimed. Cultural surplus is equated with concrete utopia: ‘it becomes clear that this very surplus is produced by nothing other than the effect of the utopian function in the ideological creations of the cultural side’. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 105-106

[Bloch] treats religion, and particularly the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with considerably more respect than is general among Marxists. It is the mystical rather than didactic elements of religion which appeal to him and he argues that the biblical tradition is the major source of utopian striving in the Western world. […] In Bloch’s view, this is not simply because the ideological supremacy of institutionalised Christianity made the Bible an available cultural resource which could be extensively drawn on by architects of the utopian tradition: in the third volume of The Principle of Hope Bloch makes far more radical claims about the importance of the Christian concept of the Kingdom of God. Bloch’s overall project has been described as an intention to fill the gap into which the Gods were imagined. He refuses to belittle the importance of the gap or to underestimate the richness of the way in which it has been filled by religion. Again, he denies that this involves any departure from Marx, who observed not only that religion was the opiate of the people but that it was the heart of a heartless world and the spirit of spiritless conditions. For Bloch it is also therefore an anticipation of a world no longer heartless, conditions no longer spiritless. Religion carried utopia as goal and as aspiration and would continue to do so as long as reality fell short of the conditions for a truly human existence. […] Bloch’s view of Marxism does not involve simply the assertion that the conditions for communism as a better mode of social organization exist, although this was part of his thesis. What is prefigured in all utopian traces is the overcoming of antagonism between humanity and the world – a state which begins to be really conceivable and approachable through Marxism, in communism. The resolution of antagonisms that is represented in the image of the Kingdom is more profound than could be imagined in any currently conceivable social state for it, like Brahms’s Requiem, involves the overcoming of death, the most profound problem of human existence and the most profound anti-utopia. What Bloch argues is that for religion to become unnecessary (for his is an atheistic position, if one that can only be misunderstood by merely describing it as atheistic), Marxism must absorb the field of hope represented by the Kingdom. Or, to put it another way, the idea of God must be separated from that of the Kingdom, and repossessed as at least a potential embodiment of true humanness, the *humanum*. The Marxist inheritance of religion involves the abolition of religion, but it also involves the affirmation of faith in a redeemed future which Bloch sees as religion’s positive aspect. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 114-116

In the end, there is no doubt that Bloch’s view of utopia rests on anthropological claims about the nature of human beings and human consciousness, embodied in the concept of the Not-Yet-Conscious, as well as on cosmological claims about the unfinishedness of the world and real possibility embodied in the Not-Yet-Become. These, as well as the political claim that Marxism makes concrete utopia a real possibility, are contestable, but there are other reasons why Bloch’s work has not had more impact outside the realms of theology. For most readers the problem of whether or not Bloch is orthodoxly Marxist is not a burning issue, and rightly so; the question of whether his position is right, or at least useful, is of much greater importance. Yet problems remain for Marxists and non-Marxists alike and Bloch remains difficult to assimilate to either a Marxist or a liberal-humanist tradition. For Marxists, there is a suspicion that Bloch’s Romanticism and mysticism render him fundamentally anti-materialist (although this judgement is far too simple). […] Further, within both Marxist and liberal-humanist traditions in the Anglo-American academic world the predominantly positivist orientation is at odds with the non-verifiable nature of the argument. If Bloch is not hopelessly mystical, he is at least irredeemably evaluative. From the point of view of both these traditions there are major weaknesses in Bloch’s argument: the positing of transcended alienation as a goal disconnected from the process of material production; the emphasis on subjective experience; the failure or refusal to provide clear or verifiable criteria for his distinctions; and a teleology which suggests that history has a goal rather than simply that human beings have purposes. These weaknesses make it difficult to assimilate Bloch’s strengths, which in the end may be more important. Besides the fact that Bloch brings into focus both the question of the function of utopia and the boundaries, if any, of the field of its subject matter, his work transcends the limits of purely intellectual enquiry. He reminds us that utopia involves fundamental questions about the human condition and its future, and he refuses to abandon faith in the possibilities of that future. His legacy is therefore too important to be left solely to theologians. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 121-122

Tillich opens with three assertions about the status of utopia. First, utopia ‘is rooted in the nature of man himself ’. Secondly, it is not possible to understand history without reference to utopia, since human consciousness and action are meaningless without reference to utopia as beginning and end. Thirdly, with clear dependence on Bloch, he argues that ‘all utopias strive to negate the negative … in human existence; it is the negative in that existence which makes the idea of utopia necessary’. Utopia has both positive and negative characteristics: it contains truth, in so far as it contains the telos, the goal and the purpose of existence; but it also contains untruth, in that it forgets that estrangement is a condition of human existence. Utopia is fruitful in that it opens up possibilities which would have been lost without utopian anticipation; but it is unfruitful in that it is in the nature of the wish to describe impossibilities as real possibilities. Utopia contains power, the power of transformation, and the ‘root of its power is the essential – the ontological – discontent of man in every direction of his being’; but utopia is also impotent in that its negative inevitably leads to failure and disillusion. This contradictory nature of utopia – again defined in terms of function and implicit content – calls for its transcendence. Tillich sees this as accomplished by reference to two orders, the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal is that of the political and social, of immanent utopia. The vertical is that of radical transcendence, the divine, which continually breaks through. In this breaking through, the Kingdom of God actualizes itself in history; but it is always resisted and suppressed, so that fulfilment in the horizontal is only ever partial. Although Tillich’s debt to Bloch is obvious there is also a radical departure here. Bloch did not see estrangement as a necessary feature of the human condition, but as a contingent one. As we have seen, despite the suggestion that utopianising is a fundamental human propensity, Bloch denied the existence of a fixed human nature which would make it possible to posit estrangement as a necessary and universal condition. ‘There is’, he says, ‘no fixed generic essence of man … ; rather the entire course of human history is evidence of a progressive transformation of human nature’. Bloch saw in communism a way out of estrangement, so that utopia was a real possibility. Although there are similarities between Tillich’s notion of radical transcendence and Bloch’s discussion of the fulfilled moment, there is no doubt that Bloch believed more strongly in the possibility of the full actualisation of utopia – at least if the abstract content (which corresponds to Tillich’s negative aspects) were to be eliminated. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 120-121

A utopian method relevant to the twenty-first century […] is both appropriate and necessary. It provides a critical tool for exposing the limitations of current policy discourses about economic growth and ecological sustainability. It facilitates genuinely holistic thinking about possible futures, combined with reflexivity, provisionality and democratic engagement with the principles and practices of those futures. And it requires us to think about our conceptions of human needs and human flourishing in those possible futures. The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise, individually and collectively, subjectively and objectively. Its expressions explore and bring to debate the potential contents and contexts of human flourishing. It is thus better understood as a method than a goal – a method elaborated here as the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society, or IROS. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xi

The economic and ecological crises mean that change is both essential and inevitable. It is the nature of that change that is in question. We need to think about what kind of social and economic system can deliver secure and sustainable livelihoods and ways of life for all. For those who still think that utopia is about the impossible, what really is impossible is to carry on as we are, with social and economic systems that enrich a few but destroy the environment and impoverish most of the world’s population. Our very survival depends on finding another way of living. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xii

The encounter between sociology and utopia implies reconfiguring sociology itself. Sociology must affirm holism and must extend this to include ‘the environment’, locating our human and social existence within the ‘natural’ or material world. It must embrace the normativity that it has systematically sought to exclude, address the future which it has systematically sought to evade and engage with what it means and might mean to be human. Insistence on the historical determination of human nature distances such existential questions, but all images of the good society unavoidably posit what is necessary for human happiness and human flourishing. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xv

This encounter also implies thinking differently about what constitutes knowledge. It challenges the assumption that sociology constitutes a form of knowledge while utopianism is simply a form of speculation, and seeks to legitimize utopian thought not as a new, but as a repressed, already existing, form of knowledge about possible futures. […] The distinctive feature of knowledge in the contemporary global economy is its commodification. Increasingly, knowledge is not something possessed as part of ‘the commons’, but is privately owned and exploited for profit. All societies restrict access to knowledge, especially knowledge that generates power or profit, but the contemporary extent of this is unprecedented. Knowledge is also very fragmented. This is partly the result of complexity and necessary specialization but is also connected to the institutional organization of knowledge and especially the emergence of separate ‘disciplines’ within universities. The current emphasis on interdisciplinarity is, of course, an attempt to overcome some of these problems and return to more integrated thinking, while discursively reinforcing the primacy of disciplines. This fragmentation accompanies a short-term orientation to problem solving in which the future appears only as an extrapolation of the present: ‘if present trends continue’. Favoured forms of knowledge are those which are non-evaluative and highly specialized and which can be sold as ‘real’ knowledge under the badge of ‘science’. Other, exploratory, evaluative, holistic forms of knowledge do not receive this endorsement. The consequence is a situation better described as the stupid society than the knowledge society. The explication and defense of utopia as method challenges these assumptions. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xv-xvi

The French sociologist André Gorz argued that ‘it is the function of utopias, in the sense the term has assumed in the work of Ernst Bloch or Paul Ricoeur, to provide us with the distance from the existing state of affairs which allows us to judge what we are doing in the light of what we could or should do’. This reading is supported by Bloch’s claim that ‘utopian conscience-and-knowledge … confutes and judges the existent if it is failing, and failing inhumanly; indeed, first and foremost it provides the standard to measure such facticity precisely as departure from the Right’. This suggests that utopia is at least a regulative ideal, a standpoint or measure for evaluating our circumstances and actions. As such, its literal plausibility and desirability are crucial. But neither Gorz nor Bloch would be content to leave it there, for if utopia is no more than that, it is stripped of the transformative capacity that both of them intend – a transformation both of existential experience and of the objective structures of the social world that generates that experience. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xvii

Part III maps out the Imaginary Reconstitution of Society as a method, and one which has three aspects. The first of these is an analytical, archaeological mode; the second an ontological mode; and the third a constructive, architectural mode. The architectural mode is precisely what characterizes the literary form of utopia, and gives it its sociological character. It involves the institutional design and delineation of the good society – and, in the case of intentional communities or prefigurative practices, its partial concrete instantiation. The archaeological mode complements this, for it involves the interpellation of absent or implicit elements in political, literary or artistic utopian ‘accounts’. Its similarity with archaeology lies in the excavation of fragments and shards and their recombination into a coherent whole. The point of such archaeology is to lay the underpinning model of the good society open to scrutiny and to public critique. And the ontological mode is concerned precisely with the subjects and agents of utopia, the selves interpellated within it, that utopia encourages or allows. These modes or facets of the utopian method are analytically separable from one another but are also intertwined; for the distinctive characteristics of IROS are its holism and its institutional specificity. Wherever we start in the process of imagining ourselves and our world otherwise, all three modes must eventually come into play. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xvii

There are several advantages of utopian thinking as a method. It is holistic. Unlike political philosophy and political theory, which have been more open than sociology to normative approaches, this holism is expressed at the level of concrete social institutions and processes. It allows, as both Gorz and Bloch suggest, an element of ethical and institutional separation from the present. Although the critical edge of utopianism depends upon imagined alternatives possessing a reasonable degree of internal coherence and at least theoretical possibility, it is less constrained by what now seems immediately possible. Importantly, its explicitly hypothetical character enables us to insist on utopia’s provisionality, reflexivity and dialogic mode. Explicit alternative scenarios for the future are fundamental to any kind of democratic debate. This means envisioning alternatives, but also setting out the images of the good society buried in the constant barrage of political rhetoric and policies. The utopian method involves both making explicit the kinds of society implied in existing political programmes and constructing alternatives. It entails also considering the kinds of people we want to become and that different forms of society will promote or inhibit. Our institutional arrangements affect both the imagination and the reality of human flourishing through the values, skills, capabilities, experiences and relationships they encourage or suppress. To put it another way, utopia as method is concerned with the potential institutions of a just, equitable and sustainable society which begins to provide the conditions for grace. Levitas, Utopia as Method, Introduction, p. xviii

The very term utopia is fraught with difficulty. Its meanings are various and contested in both academic and lay discourse. Thomas More coined the word as the title and locus of his 1516 Utopia in a pun which conflates outopos or no place and eutopos or good place. Consequently utopia is widely understood as an imagined perfect society or wishfully constructed place which does not and cannot exist. Such imaginings are held to be unrealistic so that utopia has connotations of impossibility and fantastical dreaming, divorced from the hard and the joyful realities of the world and life we actually inhabit and where, as Wordsworth put it, ‘we find our happiness, or not at all’. New generations are inducted into the view that utopia is dangerously escapist through popular children’s literature. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry spends two nights gazing at his lost family in the Mirror of Erised, around which runs the inscription ‘Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi’ (I show not your face but your heart’s desire). On the third night, Professor Dumbledore intercepts Harry and tells him that the Mirror of Erised ‘shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. … However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible’. The mirror will be removed and hidden, and Dumbledore counsels Harry that ‘it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live’. Defending utopia entails insisting that the identification and expression of the deepest desires of our hearts and minds, and those of others, is a necessary form of knowledge and of truth. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 3

[In ‘The Concept of Utopia’] I concluded that most definitions rested on one of the form, or the function, or the content of utopian expressions, and that this placed unsatisfactory limits on understanding the historical shifts in the utopian imagination. I argued for greater clarity about usage and in favour of the more open definition of utopia as the expression of desire for a better way of living and of being. This analytic rather than descriptive definition reveals the utopian aspects of forms of cultural expression rather than creating a binary separation between utopia/non-utopia. It allows that utopia may be fragmentary, fleeting, elusive. It mirrors an existential quest which is figured in literature, music, drama and art, and which, as we shall see, Dennis Potter described as looking for the blue. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 4

[…] one element in the transformative process is what Abensour calls the education of desire. Where utopian literature is concerned – and this may be equally true of other artistic forms – Abensour sees the main function as estrangement or making the familiar unfamiliar. The utopian experiment disrupts the taken-for-granted nature of the present. It creates a space in which the reader may, temporarily, experience an alternative configuration of needs, wants and satisfactions. As I argued in *Concept*, the claim here is that utopia works towards an understanding of what is necessary for human fulfillment and towards a broadening, deepening and raising of aspirations in terms different from those dominating the mundane present. Or, as Thompson glosses Abensour: 'And in such an adventure, two things happen: our habitual values (the “commonsense” of bourgeois society) are thrown into disarray. And we enter into Utopia’s proper and new-found space: the education of desire. This is not the same as “a moral education” towards a given end: it is, rather, to open a way to aspiration, to “teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way”.’ [Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Merlin Press 1977, pp. 790–1] This has similarities with Bloch’s idea of *docta spes*, informed or educated hope. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 4-5

In Bloch’s account, music, art and literature not only carry utopian desire but offer a glimpse of what it is that is missing. Although all cultural artefacts are shaped by the social and historical circumstances of their production and reception, Bloch argues that some have an element that cannot be reduced to these conditions. He calls this transcendent element cultural surplus, which produces, at the moment of encounter, the fulfilled moment – a prefiguration of wholeness or a better way of being. Read in this way, utopia does not require the imaginative construction of whole other worlds. It occurs as an embedded element in a wide range of human practice and culture – in the individual and collective creative practices of art as well as in its reproduction and consumption. Utopian method here is primarily hermeneutic. We can explore culture (in its broadest sense) for its utopian aspects, its expression of longing and fulfilment. The strength of this analytical definition is that it encourages the identification of an element that different cultural forms have in common, although in so doing, it may also at times gloss over important differences between them. If we start from here, it is evident that contemporary culture is saturated with utopianism, even (or especially) where there is no figurative representation of an alternative world. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 5

Bloch is frequently represented in utopian studies as giving a kind of blanket endorsement to all forms of ‘utopian thought’. In a way this is true. Yet Bloch can also be quite sardonic, referring to ‘a beautifying mirror which often only reflects how the ruling class wishes the wishes of the weak to be’. He is also adamant that wishful thinking or abstract utopia (which is a start) needs to become will-full thinking in reaching concrete utopia. For Bloch, the development from abstract to concrete utopia is a process rather than a classification, the process of *docta spes*. It is in part a move from the purely fantastic to the genuinely possible. It is also a move from the potentially fragmentary expression of desire to social holism, a move from speculation to praxis and to the social and political pursuit of a better world. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6

The central idea of not yet carries the double sense of not yet (but expected, a future presence) and still not (a current absence and lack). The not yet operates at two levels: the subjective, individual not-yet-conscious, the essentially creative preconscious utopian impulse, that which is on the verge of coming to consciousness; and the objective, external condition of the world, the not-yet-become. The not yet is real; for Bloch, reality includes the horizon of future possibilities and the novum as it comes into being. He refers to the perception of the future in the present as Vor-Schein, pre-appearance or anticipatory illumination. Utopia as forward dreaming is not an esoteric byway of culture nor a distraction from class struggle, but an unavoidable and indispensable element in the production of the future, for ‘the hinge in human history is its producer’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6

The subject position of human flourishing is figured by Bloch in terms of human dignity as the upright gait, ‘the individual who is no longer to be humiliated, enslaved, forsaken, scorned, estranged, annihilated, and deprived of identity’. Bloch concludes The Principle of Hope with the aspiration for the world anticipated as outcome of this process: "But the root of history is the working, creating human being who reshapes and overhauls the given facts. Once he has grasped himself and established what is his, without expropriation and alienation, in real democracy, there arises in the world something which shines into the childhood of all and in which no-one has yet been: *Heimat*. [Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Basil Blackwell 1986, p. 1376.] [The English translation renders Heimat as ‘homeland’. This never captured the resonance of Heimat] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 6-7

The most common objections to utopia reflect hostility to the fundamental utopian wish to make the world otherwise. Public discourse and political culture are profoundly anti-utopian, portraying utopia as an impossible quest for perfection whose political consequences are almost necessarily totalitarian. This position is predicated on the climate of the Cold War and the later capitalist triumphalism that accompanied the fall of communist regimes after 1989. It contains two implicit equations: ‘utopia equals totalitarianism equals communism equals Marxism equals socialism’, and ‘communism equals totalitarianism equals fascism’. The founding texts of contemporary anti-utopianism date from the 1940s. Friedrich von Hayek’s 1944 The Road to Serfdom argues that all state intervention leads inexorably down the slippery slope to dictatorship. Karl Popper’s 1945 The Open Society and its Enemies and his later lecture on ‘Utopia and Violence’ reinforced the anti-utopian position, as did works by Hannah Arendt, Jacob Talmon and Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s. Norman Cohn’s 1957 The Pursuit of the Millennium made a specific link between medieval millenarianism and both Nazism and communism. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 7

The problems of coercion, terror and violence are of course real. What is at issue is how far such problems are attributable to utopianism. Moreover, laying totalitarianism at the door of utopia is a political move that is intended to make any aspiration to social change impossible. As Jacoby puts it, anti-utopianism is always ‘a political reply to the political project of realizing utopia’. He also points out that utopianism does not consist solely or even primarily of detailed plans intended for implementation. Sargent, the foremost authority on utopian literature, endorses this, saying that ‘very few actual utopias make any pretense to perfection’, and that ‘many utopias welcome the possibility of change’. And yet it remains the case that ‘conventional and scholarly wisdom associates utopian ideas with violence and dictatorship’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 8

If utopia is understood as the expression of the desire for a better way of being, then it is perhaps a (sometimes) secularized version of the spiritual quest to understand who we are, why we are here and how we connect with each other. Both the fulfilled moment and Heimat can be understood in relation to the existential components of alienation. For Marx, alienation had four components. The first two concern the labour process and commodification of products under capitalism. Wage labour is a system in which people sell their labour power, and both the process of work and what is produced are externally controlled and literally alienated or separated from the intention, ownership or control of the worker. This has profound existential consequences which go beyond the material facts of expropriation, exploitation and dispossession. It divides us from each other and from our essential humanity. Marx describes this as alienation from others and alienation from ‘species-being’: in the commodification of our relationships with others they become means to our ends rather than ends in themselves; and the treatment of ourselves as commodities distorts our humanity. Heimat is the expression of a desire for a settled resolution of this alienated condition, while the fulfilled moment is the fleeting glimpse of what such a condition might be. It is a quest for wholeness, for being at home in the world. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 11-12

Tillich’s theology employs what he calls a ‘method of correlation’. It begins with the ontological questions raised by existential philosophy, and seeks answers in terms of what Tillich claims as Christian revelation, but in unconventional terms which can be read by both critics and sympathizers as compatible with atheism. His portrayal of grace bears a secular interpretation, yet one which points to the inadequacy of secular language to encapsulate the human experience and aspiration at issue here. There are, argues Tillich, no adequate substitutes for the terms sin and grace that carry appropriate gravity and intensity. The recovery of their proper meaning ‘leads us down into the depth of our human existence’. Sin, says Tillich, is not an act of wrong conduct and should never be used in the plural. It is a state of separation, something we all experience: ‘separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being’. Separation is part of the human condition, necessarily born from the existential anxiety provoked by the unavoidable knowledge of our inevitable death. Grace is the polar opposite of sin. It entails connection, acceptance, reconciliation, wholeness. ‘Grace occurs in spite of separation and estrangement. Grace is the reunion of life with life, the reconciliation of the self with itself’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 13

Bloch’s project has been described as an attempt to fill the gap into which the Gods were imagined. The longing for Heimat and for the fulfilled moment can also be understood as the quest for a (sometimes) secular form of grace. ‘Grace’ has both secular and religious meanings. Its secular forms are predominantly active: it is the root of gracefulness and graciousness; we may act with good or bad grace. In both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, grace is freely given by God to fallen humanity, independent of human action, will or desert. […] However, grace here is not exactly an existential state. Because it belongs to the supernatural order, it is outside our experience and can be known only by faith. […] Grace is also the defence against death. Thus ‘God does provide grace to heal death’. Such a view of grace is incompatible with a secular understanding, as it depends on belief in a divine giver and thus a divine being.

For Tillich, grace is emphatically not a matter of belief or of moral progress. We are struck by grace: ‘a wave of light breaks into our darkness’. epiphanic quality of the incursion of redeemed experience into the mundane, which transforms both our relation with ourselves and our relations with others: "In the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to others and to ourselves. We experience the grace of being able to look frankly into the eyes of another, the miraculous grace of reunion of life with life. We experience the grace of understanding each other’s words. We understand not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry. For even then there is a longing to break through the walls of separation. We experience the grace of being able to accept the life of another, even if it be hostile and harmful to us, for, through grace, we know that it belongs to the same Ground to which we belong, and by which we have been accepted. … For life belongs to life. And in the light of this grace we perceive the power of grace in our relation to ourselves. We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we.” [Tillich, Theology of Culture, Oxford University Press 1964, p.7-8] The power of the term grace lies both in its intrinsic reference to emotional depth and in its otherness. […] utopia in this sense shares the quest for what Tillich describes as ‘the aspect of depth in the totality of the human spirit’. […] The supposition of utopia as a hermeneutic method is the parallel secular claim, that in many (if not all) aspects of culture, we can recognize the (sometimes) unconscious utopian aspect. Tillich says that ‘in poetry, in visual art, and in music, levels of reality are opened up which can be opened up in no other way. … But in order to do this, something else must be opened up – namely, levels of the soul, levels of our interior reality’. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 13-14

Tillich is adamant that the (religious) orientation to ultimate concern must not dissolve itself into art. Utopia too must resist such dissolution. The suggestion that grace might have a transformative effect on social relations points in the direction of Heimat, that projected state in which grace is more accessible and more stable. […] Utopia also entails refusal, the refusal to accept that what is given is enough. It embodies the refusal to accept that living beyond the present is delusional, the refusal to take at face value current judgements of the good or claims that there is no alternative. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 17

[Tillich] concludes by arguing for the transcendence of utopia. Utopia strives to negate the negative in human experience. Truth lies in utopia’s expression of what is, individually and socially, necessary to human fulfilment. Untruth lies in the goal of overcoming that estrangement which – deriving as it does from human finitude – is an inescapable element of experience. Fruitfulness lies in the capacity of utopia to anticipate human fulfilment and thereby to open up real possibilities for the future. Its unfruitfulness is that it can do this only by pushing beyond what is actually possible, by failing to distinguish emergent possibility from impossibility. One might say that Tillich here posits the intrinsic impossibility of a decisive move from abstract to concrete utopia, not just in imagination but in reality. […] […] untruth and unfruitfulness lead also, through the inevitability of disillusion, to impotence. Disillusion is the result of failing to recognize the necessary provisionality of utopian projections Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 17

For Tillich, the transcendence of utopia’s suspension between positive and negative characteristics requires us not to abandon commitment, but to commit ourselves without idolatry, that is to ‘recognize that we are not committed to something absolute but to something preliminary and ambiguous’. […] the shift both in utopian writing and in its criticism in the decades following the publication of Tillich’s essay suggest that provisionality and contingency became deeply embedded in the later utopian imagination and in our retrospective reading of earlier works. Modernity, let alone postmodernity, enforced the understanding of the contingency of imagination and thereby enforced an element of reflexivity and provisionality. The difficulties which Tillich identifies can be overcome by understanding utopia as a method rather than a goal – and this time as a constructive rather than hermeneutic method. Utopian thinking in this sense is not about devising and imposing a blueprint. Rather, it entails holistic thinking about the connections between economic, social, existential and ecological processes in an integrated way. We can then develop alternative possible scenarios for the future and open these up to public debate and democratic decision – insisting always on the provisionality, reflexivity and contingency of what we are able to imagine, and in full awareness that utopian speculation is formed always in the double squeeze of what we are able to imagine and what we are able to imagine as possible. The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society means envisioning the social institutions and social relations of a better society, and thus making a shift from the aesthetic and existential to the social and political – or rather, acknowledging (as critical theory has always done) the interdependence of the existential and the political. For if, to paraphrase John Ruskin, we are concerned with what kind of life is good for human beings and makes them happy, we are necessarily concerned with society as structure, not (just) with the realm of aesthetics. And yet we are still concerned with aesthetics, both because the reading of the aesthetic realm in terms of the utopian impulse involves a philosophical anthropology, a claim about what it is to be fully human, and because the ultimate criterion of judgment of our social arrangements is how far they can deliver the satisfaction of human longing. This raises core questions about the social construction and satisfaction of human needs and the potential for human flourishing, as well as the construction of the subjects and agents of utopia. It is the holism and institutional specificity of the social utopia that provide the critical link between utopia and sociology Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 18-19

The problematic polarity between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ later becomes definitive of sociology. This generates a vantage point in which sociology is the dominant narrative, explaining the various forms and expressions of utopianism in their social contexts as part of cultural anthropology or the history and sociology of culture. If utopia is the expression of what is missing, of the experience of lack in any given society or culture, then a proper understanding of any society must include the consideration of unfulfilled aspirations which it produces. The sociology of utopia defines the legitimate relation between the two. Wells suggests something else. He argues that ‘sociologists cannot help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia’. We must consider the utopian assumptions, the assumptions about what should be, in sociology. That is, rather than confining ourselves to the sociology of utopia, we must consider sociology as utopia, as well as utopia as sociology. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 66-67

[…] literary utopias are always intended – and predominantly read – as a criticism of the present, and thus also embed a sociology of the originating society. They represent and explain the institutions and practices of the society from which they arise, offering accounts of how its substantive irrationalities produce negative outcomes. They contain narratives of the place in history of both originating and alternative societies, of how we got here and how we might get there. They delineate the future as a criticism of the present, and also, as Beaumont emphasizes, reconstruct the present as the prehistory of the future. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 75

Sociology and utopia are similarly engaged in making explicit the processes and relations embedded in the social imaginary, while themselves forming part of it. But they do this in slightly different ways. Sociology foregrounds what utopia backgrounds, while utopia foregrounds what sociology represses. Sociological models are explicitly holistic, descriptive, explanatory and present (or past) oriented. They are, necessarily, imaginary: any model of how society works entails an imaginary reconstitution of society. Sociological models are sometimes explicitly critical, normative and prescriptive, but more usually implicitly so: our very silences shape utopias. Utopian models are explicitly holistic, imaginary, critical, normative, prescriptive and (often) future-oriented. Nevertheless, most of them contain descriptions of present conditions, not just as a foil for the better utopia but as an explanation of how social processes work and therefore what needs to change. In this sense, they are present-oriented. But utopia involves the imaginary reconstitution of society in a slightly different sense: it is the imagining of a reconstituted society, society imagined otherwise, rather than merely society imagined. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 83-84

The denial of utopia resulted in a triple repression within sociology: repression of the future, of normativity, and of the existential and what it means to be human. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 85

Wells challenges the one point of consensus, namely that sociology should be regarded as, and should aspire to be, a science. Looking back, he said ‘I insisted that in sociology there were no units for treatment, but only one single unit which was human society, and that in consequence the normal scientific method of classification and generalization breaks down’.10 It is an argument against reductionism, and for respecting the level of the social as something indivisible: ‘We cannot put Humanity into a museum, or dry it for examination; our one, single, still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing in the real world with which to compare it’. […] In consequence, ‘Sociology must be neither art simply, nor science in the narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively and with an element of personality, that is to say, in the highest sense of the term, literature’. He distinguishes two appropriate literary forms. One involves ‘the fitting of “schemes of interpretation” to history’, anticipating later arguments following Clifford Geertz that sociology, like anthropology, is best understood as ‘thick description’. The second, both ‘smaller in bulk’ but altogether ‘under-rated and neglected’, is the creation and criticism of utopias. Wells suggests a project of utopography to map all the different versions of the ideal society, ‘a sort of dream book of huge dimensions’ and claims this ‘would be the backbone of sociology’. The role of utopia is two-fold, and in both cases the relation with sociology is interpenetrating rather than hierarchical. Given the indivisibility of human society and hence the impossibility of comparative method, utopia provides a virtual point of comparison. Max Weber would not have wholly disagreed with this, since he explicitly describes ideal types or conceptual models as utopias. For Wells, the comparison is also prophetic and normative, measuring what exists against the direction of social development and (simultaneously) against the ideal society. This underpins his view of social action and what sociology is: in A Modern Utopia, he defines sociology as ‘the study of the aggregations and of the ideals of aggregations about which men’s sympathies will twine, and upon which they will base a large proportion of their conduct and personal policy’. He argues that the interpellation of utopias is inevitable, and should be explicit than implicit. […] "There is no such thing in sociology as dispassionately considering what is, without considering what is intended to be. In sociology, without any possibility of evasion, ideas are facts. … I submit it is not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavour to disentangle and express one’s personal version of [the Social Idea], and to measure realities from the standpoint of that idealisation. I think, in fact, that the creation of utopias – and their exhaustive criticism – is the proper and distinctive method of sociology … Sociologists cannot help making Utopias; though they avoid the word, though they deny the idea with passion, their very silences shape a Utopia.” [Wells, ‘So-called Science’, pp. 367–8.] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 87

What is distinctive about Wells is that rather than devaluing literature relative to science he recognizes both sociology as utopia and utopia as sociology as legitimate and necessary forms of knowledge. He is right that building alternative scenarios and exploring the interrelationships between elements, structures, systems and processes does result in better understanding of both present realities and future options. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 91

The question of normativity is related to, but not identical with, that of scientificity. Utopia may be rejected as sociology either because of its literary form or because of its evaluative content. In the 1960s, undergraduates were taught that sociology was concerned with what is, not what ought to be, and that these could and should be rigorously separated. The distinction reprised Hobhouse’s inaugural editorial in The Sociological Review: ‘sociological thinking must start with a clear cut distinction between the “is” and the “ought”, between the facts of social life and the conditions on which society actually rests and the ideal to which society should conform’. Less attention was drawn to his following comments on the difficulty of the distinction, to his belief that sociology and social philosophy are intrinsically connected, or to his suggestion that it may sometimes be possible to deduce ought from is. Hobhouse is critical of the danger of collapsing what ought to be into representation of what is actually the case. Again, this suggests that if sociologists are not open about their aspirations for the future, their very silences make utopias. Neither Hobhouse nor Wells thought that the distinction between is and ought implied that sociology should be solely focused on the former. Endorsing the role of utopia as a proper mode of sociological orientation is not to collapse this distinction, but to admit normativity as a proper aspect of sociology itself. […] Wells is surely right that sociologists carry silent utopias in their work, both as substance and as inspiration. Utopia’s exclusion was never absolute, but its presence was persistently denied. It was not recognized as sociology, and the utopian content of sociology was seen as a serious flaw. But sociology contains repressed utopias. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 92

If we understand utopia to be a totalizing (though not therefore totalitarian) representation which is holistic, social, futurelocated, unequivocally better and linked to the present by some identifiable narrative, and one which embeds a view of human flourishing, then postmodernism is profoundly anti-utopian. These positions implied not just a loss of hope in the social, but a loss of belief in it. The quest for utopia in this reading is an irretrievably modernist, and therefore irredeemably flawed, project. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 98

Horkheimer argued in 1937 that traditional social theory was concerned only with explanation and understanding, whereas a properly critical social theory was oriented to critique and to social transformation. […] Horkheimer’s formulation implies a distinction from (and superiority to) ‘ordinary’ social theory and sociology, and that difference lies in the explicit normativity of critical theory, as well as its claims to greater explanatory power. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 98-99

Sociology is comfortable with utopia only as an element in the social imaginary that is the object of explanation. It repeatedly approaches utopia and retreats from it. And yet the impulse towards social transformation, there at the origin of the discipline, does not go away. The warm stream runs underground. Both the general diffusion of utopia across culture (in Bloch’s sense) and the parallels between sociology and utopia (in Wells’s sense) would lead us to expect this. For the excitement and promise of sociology lies in this presence; the disappointment lies in its recurrent repression and denial. Substituting sociology for politics in Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili’s defence of utopia, we might say that: "To be utopian … is the stuff of [sociology], and it first involves subjecting the [society] of the present to critique. Secondly, it involves imagining human communities that do not yet exist and, thirdly, it involves thinking and acting so as to prevent the foreclosure of social possibilities in the present and future.” Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 101-102

By the 1970s, however, change was overtaking both utopian literature and utopian commentary. These were affected by same intellectual and political challenges as social theory, with similar results. An upsurge of political activism in the 1970s stimulated utopian thought, and the very nature of those politics altered both its content and its form. This brought contingency, provisionality and reflexivity centre-stage. But this political impetus overlapped with and gave way to the postmodern turn, in which sociological and systemic analyses were downplayed in favour of questions of representation and literary form. This signalled a retreat from reading utopias as programmatic proposals for social transformation; issues of process rather than structure and form rather than content, or form as content, took priority, while ‘openness’ was preferred to ‘closure’. The risk here is that utopia becomes a vehicle only of critique rather than of transformation. The best work implied a dialectic of openness and closure, transcending that binary through an implicit though not yet conscious treatment of utopia as method. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 103

[…] the impact of postmodernism on the relationship between social theory and utopia was ambiguous: it undermined utopia in the sense of a specification of an alternative social structure, but simultaneously intensified concern with the very desire that is the motive force of utopia in its analytic sense. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 104

For Siebers, aesthetics becomes central to postmodern theory because objects of art are ‘allegories of desire’ and postmodernism, like utopia, turns on questions of desire. This is endorsed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, one of postmodernism’s founding texts. Deleuze and Guattari contest both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The Oedipal triangle, they argue, is a formulaic representation which does not describe the ‘natural’ development of desire, frustration, and healthy transcendence or otherwise. Rather, Freudian psychoanalysis demands that we understand our blocked desires in terms of the Oedipus myth, which both constrains and denies our experience, and proves our desires to have been illegitimate in the first place. Desire should be understood as a much more variable complex of libidinal flows. It is not oriented solely sexually, nor to parental figures, but to fragmentary, partial objects. They argue against Lacan that the centrality of the phallus, like the oedipal triangle, is a totalizing myth, which denies the fragmented character of flows of desire; and it intrinsically links desire to lack, which Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly oppose. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 104

[…] postmodern aesthetics involves the willed transformation of the body by ornament, diet, exercise and surgical intervention. As David Morris argues, ‘utopia in the postmodern era has largely fixed its new location in the solitary, private, individual body’, reflecting ‘a belief that the only valid remaining space of perfection lies … in our own individual flesh: a paradise of curves and muscle’. If utopian thought of all kinds is expressive of a desire for a better way of being, its projection onto the body rather than the body politic is a retreat from hope, at least social hope, to desire. It is a retreat from understanding desire, as Deleuze and Guattari, Reich, and Marcuse did, in terms of a libidinal energy suffusing the realm of the social, and thus fuelling capitalism and fascism as well as their potential utopian alternatives. For these writers, desire may emanate from the body in an essentialist, vitalist way; but it does not stay there. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 105

I think this is a manifestation of the ideological hegemony of individualism and neoliberalism. Desire and change acquire an individualistic character, retreating from any ambitions of transforming the social. Although indeed a big part, I don’t think body and flesh are the sole or even main location of the individualistic “utopia”. I am thinking of “personal growth” and “self-help”, along with the quantitative character of measuring progress. Also, the dream of passive income, making money, being more productive etc.

Bloch is more sympathetic, regarding even the most trivial imaginings as proleptic social critique. He recognizes that utopian longing is not necessarily profound: ‘Most people in the street look as if they are thinking about something else entirely. The something else is predominantly money, but also what it could be changed into’. A shop window proclaims ‘Utopia: Everything Five Pounds’. People may take refuge in daydreams about winning the lottery and having the resources for more substantive escape. Most lottery winners buy a new house. This creation of a personal utopian enclave is underscored in twenty-firstcentury Britain by the prevalence of television programmes dedicated to property transformation on all scales, including the renovation of the Country House and (as Mumford noted a hundred years earlier) its miniature suburban imitation. Such programmes also emphasize the reciprocal process of the conversion of utopian capital back into its economic form. The travel industry constitutes another repository of compensatory utopianism, advertised in explicitly utopian and paradisical terms. Both dreams imaginatively transform only the dreamer’s place in the world, not the world itself, although property markets, the DIY industry and the travel industry of course have profound physical, social and economic effects both locally and globally. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 107-108

Utopia may do more than articulate through compensatory fantasies the unsatisfactory nature of present reality. As critique it foregrounds and makes explicit this inadequacy, identifying the source of dissatisfaction as something more systemic, more general than one’s own place in the world. A sociological imagination is brought into play and personal troubles become public issues. This is a necessary though not sufficient condition for utopia’s strongest function, that of change. For many, utopia’s importance lies its capacity to embody hope rather than simply desire and to inspire the pursuit of a world transformed. Williams argued that this willed transformation of the social world was an essential characteristic of the utopian mode, and that without it, there was the danger of utopia settling into ‘isolated and in the end sentimental ‘desire’, a mode of living with alienation’. Such willed transformation is the target of political and ideological anti-utopianism. But it demands a holistic, sociological approach, normative judgement and political commitment, all called in question by the social and cultural conditions of late modernity. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 108

Such stories include ‘downsizing’, trading fast-paced urban living and visible material consumption for an imagined higher quality of social relationships. They may be delusionary, entailing forms of rural life that require high levels of capital available only to the rich, and not necessarily implying smaller ecological footprints; but they do envision an alternative set of desires and satisfactions. These narratives are not always liberatory. There is overwhelming cultural pressure to monitor and control our bodies through diet and exercise: imagining the perfect honed and healthy – and especially not obese – self points to downsizing of persons rather than lifestyles. Health and longevity become an individual responsibility, and physical imperfection, illness and death itself marks of failure. Managerial texts offer technologies of self prescribing conformity to models of personal behaviour and promising financial and social success: they are perhaps the only dreams the powerful wish us to have, offering as they do a more comfortable fit between our disciplined selves and the demands and satisfactions generated by the world we currently inhabit. Imagining ourselves otherwise is thus imposed on us and extracted from us. Structural as well as ideological processes are at work here. Richard Sennett argues that character, in the sense of a coherent and consistent developmental narrative of self depends crucially on the possibility of stable employment. If this is true at an individual level, the possibility and nature of collective narratives also depends on structural and institutional processes, a point Marx made very clear in relation to class consciousness. Envisaging ones desires and capacities somewhat changed is an everyday occurrence. The question of how this is or may be oriented to social transformation is a social and political question, not primarily one of human imaginative capacities. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 122-123

Harvey takes issue with writers who want to keep choices about the future endlessly open, or want to keep their own hands clean of prescription. Eternal openness leaves utopia as ‘a pure signifier of hope destined never to acquire a material referent’. It is politically evasive. It entails ‘a failure to recognize that the materialization of anything requires, at least for a time, closure around a particular set of institutional arrangements and a particular spatial form and that the act of closure is in itself a material statement that carries its own authority in human affairs’. The refusal of closure is a refusal to take responsibility around the question of that authority. Without such closure, we cannot define or discuss where we might want, collectively, to go. Of course we are unable to ‘leap outside of the dialectic and imagine that we are not embedded and limited by the institutional worlds and built environments we have already created’; by implication, then, our imagined alternatives must be provisional and accompanied by some reflexive awareness. But eternal openness offers no direction home. It leaves us, says Harvey, quoting Roberto Unger, ‘torn between dreams that seem unrealizable and prospects that hardly seem to matter’. Harvey’s […] ongoing commitment to social change, reminds us that desire is not enough and returns us to the question of hope. Only thus can we rescue transformative political thought or future-oriented sociology from the excesses of postmodern literary and social theory. Critique which disrupts the ideological closure of the present is essential, but it is even more important to disrupt the structural closure of the present. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 124-125

Even critique depends on some degree of plausibility of the utopian alternative. If this is absent, dreaming the world otherwise risks appearing to be compensatory fantasy, mere wishful thinking. Hope requires us to imagine a potential new society and to imagine it as possible. The transformative function of utopia depends on preserving utopian desire, but offering (as Morris does) an argument about the conditions of utopia’s (partial) realization and desire’s (partial) fulfilment. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 124-125

Bloch’s concrete utopia or the vision Morris sought to keep before the eyes of the working classes require that we read utopias literally and take them seriously in that mode, although they certainly do not require that we only read them in this mode. Without a certain element of closure, specificity, commitment and literalism about what would actually be entailed in practice, serious criticism is impossible. If utopia is constrained both by possible imagination and imagined possibility, the political task is to push outwards the limits of both. The imagination and critique of utopian alternatives as speculative sociologies of the future generates forms of knowledge, of social systems that are at least theoretically possible and of tendencies in the real that might make them potentially really possible. We are embedded in conditions which resist both contrary imagination and oppositional action. Both the anti-utopian present and our understanding of contingency mean our attempts at the imaginary reconstitution of society must be provisional, reflexive and dialogic and, as Wells said, subject to exhaustive criticism. But the conditions under which we live, which are not of our own choosing, require us to create radically altered means of livelihood, ways of life and structures of feeling. Only a form of utopian thought and of reading utopia that engages with the actual institutional structure of the present and the potential institutional structure of the future can help us here, and this demands an understanding of utopia as method rather than as goal. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 125-126

The most frequent qualification is that utopia should be, or in particular cases is, ‘realistic’ or ‘feasible’. This recurs across disciplines and outside the academy in relation to both cognitive models and prefigurative practices. […] Qualifying utopia as realistic sets limits on its legitimacy, potentially confining it to a conservative reading of the present or binding imagination too closely to what can be imagined as possible rather than what can possibly be imagined. What remains may be only, in Mannheim’s terms, a form of ideology. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 129

The tension between realism and utopia occurs in relation to both abstract theory and practical politics, where it is expressed in the opposition between pragmatism and utopia. Karl Popper identified utopia with intellectual and social closure, insisting on the superiority of gradual and piecemeal change. The usual meaning of political pragmatism, more usually contrasted with ideology, is pursuit of ‘what works’. It prioritises short-term fixes for problems within the current system; questions of the viability or justice of that system itself, and certainly radical alternatives, are placed outside legitimate political debate. Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 132

The Soviet Union faced catastrophe unless it could develop production and replace the ingrained traditions of the Russian peasantry with systematic habits of social labor. In this situation, the respect and even admiration of Marxists for the scientific technology, the production system, and the organized and regularized labor processes of developed capitalism was if anything heightened. If the old Social Democracy tended to view the capitalist mode of production as an immensely powerful and successful enterprise with which it was necessary to compromise, the Communists tended to view it with equal awe as a source from which it was necessary to learn and borrow, and which would have to be imitated if the Soviet Union were to catch up with capitalism and lay the foundations for socialism. We need only recall that Lenin himself repeatedly urged the study of Frederick W. Taylor's "scientific management," with an eye toward utilizing it in Soviet industry. The Taylor system, he said, "like all capitalist progress, is a combination ofthe refined brutality ofbourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration ofcorrect methods ofwork, the introduction ofthe best system ofaccounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet Organization of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our ends." In practice, Soviet industrialization imitated the capitalist model; and as industrialization advanced the structure lost its provisional character and the Soviet Union settled down to an organization of labor differing only in details from that of the capitalist countries, so that the Soviet working population bears all the stigmata of the Western working classes. In the process, the ideological effect was felt throughout world Marxism: the technology of capitalism, which Marx had treated with cautious reserve, and the organization and administration of labor, which he had treated with passionate hostility, became relatively acceptable. Now the revolution against capitalism was increasingly conceived as a matter of stripping from the highly productive capitalist mechanism certain "excrescences," improving the conditions of work, adding to the factory organization a formal structure of "workers' control," and replacing the capitalist mechanisms of accumulation and distribution with socialist planning. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.8-9, Monthly Review Press 1998

The similarity of Soviet and traditional capitalist practice strongly encourages the conclusion that there is no other way in which modem industry can be organized. And this conclusion had already been sufficiently encouraged the tendency of modem social science to accept all that is real as necessary, all that exists as inevitable, and thus the present mode of production as eternal. The problem can be fruitfully attacked, it seems to me, only by way of concrete and historically specific analysis of technology and machinery on the one side and social relations on the other, and of the manner in which these two come together in existing societies. Such an analysis could well start with the possibility that the present mode of the organization and control of labor arose in capitalist society for reasons specific to that society, and was transferred to Soviet society and imitated by it for reasons that have to do with the specific nature of that society. Recognizing that there are very few "eternal" or "inevitable" features of human social organization in an abstract sense, such an analysis would proceed by way of an understanding of the historical evolution which produced modern social forms. And most important, such an analysis must not simply accept what the designers, owners, and managers of the machines tell us about them, but it must form its own independent evaluation of machinery and modern industry, in the factory and in the office; otherwise it will create not a social science but merely a branch of management science. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.11-12, Monthly Review Press 1998

Socialism, as a mode of production, does not grow "automatically" in the way that capitalism grew in response to blind and organic market forces; it must be brought into being, on the basis of an adequate technology, by the conscious and purposive activity of collective humanity. And this activity must overcome not just the customary conditions of the previous mode of production, but those of the many millennia during which class societies of all sorts have existed […] Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.16, Monthly Review Press 1998

Marx did, of course, give a position of primacy to the "means of production" in social evolution. But this was never conceived as a simple and unilateral determinism which "causes" a specific mode of production to issue automatically from a specific technology. Such a determinism is false to history in general, and particularly useless in confronting revolutionary and transitional epochs, with which Marx was especially concerned. In such epochs, clearly, societies exhibiting a variety of forms of social relations coexist on the basis of substantially the same technology. Marx's solution to the problem of transition turns upon his conception of the development of the productive forces within a system of social relations, until they outgrow it, come into conflict with it, and burst its bounds. This has two important implications which clash with the interpretation of Marx as a "technological determinist" wielding a simple formula. On the one hand, it means that the same productive forces that are characteristic of the close of one epoch of social relations are also characteristic of the opening of the succeeding epoch; indeed, how could it be otherwise, since social and political revolutions, although they may come about in the last analysis because of the gradual evolution of the productive forces, do not on their morrow provide society with a brand-new technology. [...] On the basis of this sketch, we would expect the technology and organization of production of early capitalism to be much closer to those of the late feudal epoch, and those of late capitalism much closer to those of early socialism, than they are to each other. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.13-14, Monthly Review Press 1998

The problem [of job dissatisfaction] as it presents itself to those managing industry, trade, and finance is very different from the problem as it appears in the academic or journalistic worlds. Management is habituated to carrying on labor processes in a setting of social antagonism and, in fact, has never known it to be otherwise. Corporate managers have neither the hope nor the expectation of altering this situation by a single stroke; rather, they are concerned to ameliorate it only when it interferes with the orderly functioning of their plants, offices, warehouses, and stores. For corporate management this is a problem in costs and controls, not in the "humanization of work." It compels their attention because it manifests itself in absentee, turnover, and productivity levels that do not conform to their calculations and expectations. The solutions they will accept are only those which provide improvements in their labor costs and in their competitive positions domestically and in the world market. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.16, Monthly Review Press 1998

Within the historical and analytical limits of capitalism, according to Marx's analysis, technology, instead of simply producing social relations, is produced by the social relation represented by capital. The capitalist mode of production is traced by Marx from its beginnings, when it "is hardly to be distinguished, in its earliest stages, from the handicraft trades of the guilds, otherwise than by the greater number of workmen simultaneously employed by one and the same individual capital, through domestic industry, the manufacturing division of labor, machinery and modem industry, and the factory system, in which the capitalist mode of production is at last fully created and the inherent social form of labor under capitalism "for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality." From this point of view, the first volume of Capital may be considered a massive essay on how the commodity form, in an adequate social and technological setting, matures into the form of capital, and how the social form of capital, driven to incessant accumulation as the condition for its own existence, completely transforms technology. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.14, Monthly Review Press 1998

Having created new social relations of production, and having begun to transform the mode of production, they found themselves confronted by problems of management which were different not only in scope but also in kind from those characteristic of earlier production processes. Under the special and new relations of capitalism, which presupposed a "free labor contract," they had to extract from their employees that daily conduct which would best serve their interests, to impose their will upon their workers while operating a labor process on a voluntary contractual basis. This enterprise shared from the first the characterization which Clausewitz assigned to war; it is movement in a resistant medium because it involves the control of refractory masses. The verb to manage, from manus, the Latin for hand, originally meant to train a horse in his paces, to cause him to do the exercises of the manege. As capitalism creates a society in which no one is presumed to consult anything but self-interest, and as the employment contract between parties sharing nothing but the inability to avoid each other becomes prevalent, management becomes a more perfected and subtle instrument. Tradition, sentiment, and pride in workmanship play an ever weaker and more erratic role, and are regarded on both sides as manifestations of a better nature which it would be folly to accommodate. Like a rider who uses reins, bridle, spurs, carrot, whip, and training from birth to impose his will, the capitalist strives, through management, to control. And control is indeed the central concept of all management systems, as has been recognized implicitly or explicitly by all theoreticians of management. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, p.46-47, Monthly Review Press 1998