The use of the term utopia to refer to a category of social fictions is rejected by Mannheim as historically naïve and descriptive rather than analytical. Literary works commonly designated utopias are, at least initially, only individual expressions; they can become truly utopian only if and when they become the expression of the will of a social group, and the inspiration of successful social action in pursuit of change. Much of what is conventionally (and sometimes pejoratively) regarded as utopian is therefore excluded on this definition and consigned to the realm of ideology.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.80
According to Precht, the insight that material rewards spoil people’s character has a deeply disturbing aspect. After all, our entire economic system is based on such exchanges. And if economics is the continuation of ethics by other means, as economist Karl Homann and others claim – what kind of ethics is it that causes tens of thousands of people to starve to death every day? They are the ones who did not have enough to offer in market exchanges.
Accordingly, the question arises how people might withdraw from this peculiar power of money without a “fundamental criticism of our entire economic system,” which Precht, too, presents as illusory. Social psychologist Harald Welzer rightly deems so-called Realpolitik as a “politics of illusion,” if we consider the extent to which people have closed their eyes on the global societal catastrophes. In this respect, he contends, only utopian politics are realistic.
Habermann, We are not Born as Egoists, https://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/we-are-not-born-egoists
Appears in 3 boards
Bloch thus traces a path through ‘the little waking dreams to the strong ones, via the wavering dreams that can be abused to the rigorous ones, via the shifting castles in the air to the One Thing that is outstanding and needful’. All merit inclusion as utopian, because all are examples of wishful thinking. The notion of wishful thinking does not here carry its usual pejorative connotations. 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’.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.100
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. Utopia, as the expression of the Not-Yet-Conscious, is vindicated in so far as it reaches forward to the real possibility of the Not-Yet-Become; it is thus actively bound up in the process of the world’s becoming, as an anticipation of the future (rather than merely a compensation in the present) and, through its human purpose and action, as a catalyst of the future. Human activity, informed by imagination, has a decisive role to play: ‘the hinge in human history is its producer’.9 Utopia is the expression of hope, a hope construed ‘not ... only as emotion ... , but more essentially as a directing act of a cognitive kind ’.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.101-102
With no other writer is the rejection of form as a defining characteristic of utopia as consistent and explicit as it is with Bloch. The reason for this rejection is simultaneously political and theoretical: Bloch’s Marxism, unorthodox though it may be, means that his central preoccupation is change. The assumption that dreams of a better life may play a part in this leads Bloch to define utopia in analytic terms, as an element in this process, rather than in descriptive terms; hence the overt emphasis on function rather than form or content. Since the function of expressing, anticipating and effecting the future can be identified in a vast range of cultural forms, the subject matter of utopia is identified in terms of the common characteristic of the intention towards a better life.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.116
The preoccupation with change makes the function of utopia its central characteristic. This was true for Marx and Engels, although for them utopia was defined largely in terms of its negative function of obstructing the revolution. Bloch abandons these negative connotations, and (like Mannheim), defines utopia in terms of the positive function of effecting transformation. The process of change is a complex one, and consequently the function of utopia has several aspects. Hudson identifies four of these:
“its cognitive function as a mode of operation of constructive reason, its educative function as a mythography which instructs men to will and desire more and better, its anticipatory function as a futurology of possibilities which later become actual, and its causal function as an agent of historical change.”
One might add a fifth, which precedes all of these: its expressive function, as an articulation of dissatisfaction. These are properly read not as separate functions, but as different facets of a unified utopian function. This model of utopia, which is later reasserted in the work of Zygmunt Bauman, confronts many of the usual objections to utopia. These include the claims that utopia is unrealistic because it refuses to respect the constraints of external conditions, as well as dangerous since the pursuit of utopia leads inexorably to totalitarianism. It is essential to Bloch’s view of utopia that he rebuts both claims. With the Not-Yet-Become, the emphasis on process and tendency, he denies not the existence of constraints but the degree of constraint implied in ‘finished’, closed and static world. The space that is opened up in Bloch’s cosmology requires utopia in order that humanity may be able to imagine, will and effect the future.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.117-118
News from Nowhere was written in 1890 and has always been by far the most widely known of Morris’s socialist writings. […] Subtitled An Epoch of Rest, it is an account of England in the twenty-second century, to which Morris travels in a dream, waking up on the site of his own house by the Thames at Hammersmith. The first part of the book describes a journey from here to meet ‘Old Hammond’ at the British Museum. The second part is a long conversation with Hammond (who, it is whimsically implied, is Morris’s grandson), explaining both how society works and the revolution by which the change came about. The third part is a journey up the Thames from Hammersmith to Kelmscott in Oxfordshire (where Morris had his country home) for hay-making. The world portrayed in the first and third sections is compatible, at least on a superficial reading, with a view of Morris as woolly, well-meaning and fundamentally impractical; but this is substantially belied by the insistence on the need for revolutionary change and for the building and growth of the new society.
In this future England, most of London has disappeared to be replaced by fields and gardens: the distinction between town and country had been abolished. Villages remain, with communal meeting places, and markets where produce is brought for distribution, but no money is used; one simply asks for what one wants. Schools no longer exist, and children learn practical skills through both play and participation in society. The Houses of Parliament are used to store manure – ‘dung is not the worst kind of corruption’. The ugliness of industrialism has been superseded by an ecologically sustainable system largely based on craft production. However, in spite of the apparent dominance of handwork there is machinery available, and power which can be used as fuel for transport as well as supplied as required to small workshops, making large factories unnecessary. The central theme is of work as pleasure, and the separation between mental and manual labour has been overcome. It is a dream from which Morris wakes to the reality of industrial capitalism and political struggle; but the book ends with the words ‘if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream’.
Despite the fact that News from Nowhere contains a long section on ‘how the change came about’, which takes the form of a proletarian revolution followed by the withering away of the state, the dominant mood of the book remains anti-industrial and the society presented by Morris is one of much greater simplicity than can be regarded as feasible.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.124-125
“I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men’s energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be a pain; a gain to humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are more completely equal than Mr. Bellamy’s Utopia would allow them to be, but will most assuredly come about when men are really equal in condition ... the true incentive to useful and happy labour is and must be pleasure in the work itself ...”
Morris, ‘Looking Backward’, in A. L. Morton (1984), Political Writings of William Morris (Lawrence & Wishart: London), pp. 252–3, quoted in Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.126
Thus the transformation of work lies at the heart of socialism. Moreover, this is not something that can be brought about by massive centralisation, but requires the active participation of individuals in all aspects of the social process:
"there are some Socialists who do not think that the problem of the organization of life and necessary labour can be dealt with by a huge national centralisation, working by a kind of magic for which no-one feels himself responsible; that on the contrary it will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details, and be interested in them; that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of some abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other; that variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and that nothing but a union of these two will bring about real freedom: that modern nationalities are mere artificial devices for the commercial war that we seek to put an end to, and will disappear with it. And finally, that art, using that word in its widest and due signification, is not a mere adjunct of life which free and happy men can do without, but the necessary expression and indispensable instrument of human happiness." [William Morris, quoted by Levitas]
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.126
For Bloch, on the other hand, the utopian function of art is more active. It nourishes the sense that ‘something’s missing’, and is a necessary inspiration to social transformation. Without art to embody the dream of a matter, we will not be able to possess it in reality.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.129
Hope. Now there's at least one disease this civilization has not infected us with. We're not despairing for all that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is of a piece with waiting, with the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the present - in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare one self in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is expected nonetheless. It's to remove oneself from the process so as to avoid any connection with its outcome. It's wanting things to be different without embracing the means for this to come about. It's a kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know what we want, we're no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We're daily informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole oppressive feeling of powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It's an avoidance of now. But there isn't, there's never been, and there never will be anything but now. And even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only way to understand something in the past is to under stand that it too used to be a now. It's to feel the faint breath of the air in which the human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined to flee from now, it's because now is the time of decision. It's the locus of the "I accept" or the "I refuse," of ''I'll pass on that" or ''I'll go with that." It's the locus of the logical act that immediately follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus ofpresence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides. Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. "In the end," things will change; "in the end," beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let's go on this way, let's remain what we are. A mind that thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It doesn't seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like a monstrous accumulation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But life is always decided now, and now, and now.
Everyone can see that this civilization is like a train rolling toward the abyss, and picking up speed. The faster it goes, the more one hears the hysterical cheers of the boozers in the discotheque car. You have to listen carefully to make out the paralyzed silence of the rational minds that no longer understand anything, that of the worriers who bite their nails, and the accent of false calm in the exclamations of the card players who wait. Inwardly, many people have chosen to leap off the train, but they hesitate on the footboard. They're still restrained by so many things. They feel held back because they've made the choice, but the decision is lacking. Decision is what traces in the present the manner and possibility of acting, of making a leap that is not into the void. We mean the decision to desert, to desert the ranks, to organize, to undertake a secession, be it imperceptibly, but in any case, now.
The epoch belongs to the determined.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.16-18
Such demands today are not based on some sort of utopianism. They are based first of all on the struggle of the proletariat at all levels, and on all the forms of explicit refusal or profound indifference that the unstable ruling society constantly has to combat with every means. They are also based on the lesson of the fundamental defeat of all attempts at less radical changes. Finally, they are based on the extremist strivings and actions appearing today among certain sectors of youth (despite all the efforts at disciplining them and repressing them) and in a few artistic milieus.
But this basis is indeed utopian in another sense of the word, in that it involves inventing and experimenting with solutions to current problems without being preoccupied with whether or not the conditions for their realization are immediately present. (It should be noted that this utopian type of experimentation now also plays a key role in modern science). This temporary, historical utopianism is legitimate; and is necessary because it serves to incubate the projection of desires without which free life would be empty of content. It is inseparable from the necessity to dissolve the present ideology of everyday life, and therefore the bonds of everyday oppression, so that the revolutionary class can disabusedly discover present and future possibilities of freedom.
Utopian practice makes sense, however, only if it is closely linked to the practice of revolutionary struggle. This latter, in turn, cannot do without such utopianism without being condemned to sterility. Those seeking an experimental culture cannot hope to realize it without the triumph of the revolutionary movement, while the latter cannot itself establish authentic revolutionary conditions without resuming the efforts of the cultural avant-garde toward the critique of everyday life and its free reconstruction.
Canjuers & Debord, A Unitary Revolutionary Program, 1960 (Situationist International Anthology, PM Press, p.392)
[…] the fact that utopia is no longer constrained by the need to appear immediately possible allows a freer exploration of desire. Utopia can be a much deeper exploration of the implications of alternative values than when it must be seen as realistically attainable from the here and now. And most utopias now present the transition as (i) merely possible, rather than inevitable; (ii) involving some kind of radical break from the present, necessary because it is not possible to identify trends in the present which seem likely to lead to utopia; (iii) a very vaguely defined event. The transition does not form a central issue.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.228
The essence of utopia seems to be desire – the desire for a different, better way of being.
Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p.209
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