The Utopia We Deserve
The anti-utopian utopianism of the early- to mid-twentieth century eschewed flights of fancy for concrete world-building. Now we are stuck between a dystopianism that promises an end and a utopianism that does the same.
In 1891 the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) found itself in a quandary. Having grown into the most powerful social-democratic outfit in Europe, they were facing the increasingly real and scary prospect of power. What would a world in which the socialists were in office look like? In the same year, a German employers’ magazine published an article envisioning a hypothetical future with the SPD in charge: Sozialdemokratische Zukunftsbilder (frei nach Bebel). Wohin führt der Sozialismus? (“Social-Democratic Images of the Future (Freely Based Off Bebel)—Where Does Socialism Lead?”)
Composed by a liberal publicist, the pamphlet was a careful exercise in dystopian futurology. It predicted that a socialist government would usher in a destruction of civil liberties, a siege of the economy, and a mass flight of civilians. Although conceived as a fictional diary of a social democrat who reports on the aftermath of a victorious revolution, the novel ends with the construction of a border wall to prevent citizens from fleeing to neighboring countries—an eerie premonition of what would happen when Germany’s socialists would finally get to build their state after 1945, under Stalinist supervision.
In 1891, of course, SPD politicians were unanimous in their dismissal of the pamphlet. Socialism would look nothing like the clichéd barracks society the piece warned about. Yet neither did they counterpose it with a positive vision that could falsify the original. As in Puritan iconology, the SPD’s utopia could not be depicted; socialism was the terminus of the human journey, yet no one knew exactly what socialism looked like—and did not want to guess, either.
The SPD’s wager was different: socialists had to intensify and work with the trends immanent to capitalist society itself, including the daily struggles of the working class, rather than busy themselves with recipes for the workshops of the future. Utopianism, so the Second International’s guiding argument ran, was the product of a pre- or not-fully-capitalist society. There, a gap between reality and norm was determined by the relatively small surplus the society in question produced. These critics reminded readers of Augustine’s distinction between the City of God (civitas Dei) and the City of Man (civitas hominis): here a finite world of human aspirations, running into the hard limits imposed by the deity, and there a land of plenty placed in the afterlife. By analogy, a precapitalist utopianism only served to cool emancipatory ambitions, putting freedom out of reach in the present and into the socialist afterlife.
The full development of capitalism introduced a change in this calculus. Rather than accepting a separation between “is” and “ought,” Marxism grew immanently out of possibilities generated by capitalist society itself as “the real movement of things.” Suddenly, the present seemed pregnant with possibilities absent before; the gap between now and then could shrink. “Only what is not, is possible,” as German socialists liked say it; or, as Adorno put it, Marx and Engels “were enemies of utopia for the sake of its realization.” Yet it was clear that this pure evasion of utopian imagery was never sufficient. As Adorno himself stated in a letter to Ernst Bloch, the “ban on images” that communist movements practiced could not be maintained indefinitely. “One may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner”, he claimed. “the prohibition of casting a picture of utopia [is] actually for the sake of utopia…. [This] has a deep connection to the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make a graven image!’” Pictures of heaven would distract, and make it more difficult to actually build heaven on earth.
