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Title: The Utopian Impulse Author: Dan Chodorkoff Date: December 1983 Language: en Topics: utopian, social ecology Source: http://social-ecology.org/wp/1983/12/the-utopian-impulse-reflections-on-a-tradition/
The ecosphere is threatened to a degree unprecedented in humanity’s
tenure on the planet. The rupture with the natural world is symptomatic
of and a causal factor in the breakdown of social relations. The
consciousness of exploitation and domination extends to both people and
nature and given their concurrent evolution it is unlikely that one will
be eliminated exclusive of the other.
The ecology movement, at least in its most conscious manifestations,
that is, parts of the antinuke, alternative technology, and ecofeminist
movements, has recognized the need for a reconstructive vision that
acknowledges the primary importance of these interrelations. The radical
ecology movement rejects simple technical fixes as the solution to
ecological problems that have their roots deeply embedded in the
culture. The movement has stressed the need for a holistic approach to
ecological problems and further, has suggested that basic changes in the
ethos of the culture and the structure of its institutions are necessary
if we are to ever achieve a truly ecological society.
Radical ecologists are attempting to create a theory and practice for
such an ecological society: a reconstructive vision that they can begin
to actualize in the here and now. In the creation of their
reconstructive praxis they draw inspiration from many sources, including
the scientific discipline of ecology, the traditional cultures of Native
American peoples, and the spiritual paths of the East.
There is another tradition that informs their vision as well though
unfortunately it remains largely unknown, ignored, misunderstood, or
unacknowledged, even by the movement itself. It is the utopian
tradition.
While using a different language and set of references, the utopian
tradition in many ways parallels the concerns of the radical ecology
movement. There is much in the theory and history of utopia that can
help illuminate critical problems in social ecology.
What follows are reflections on that utopian tradition, a typological
analysis which differentiates various strains in the tradition, and an
analysis of those aspects of the tradition most relevant to the emerging
praxis of the radical ecology movement.
Throughout the whole of history there have been attempts to transform
the given social circumstance in basic ways, to visualize and to
actualize a society more harmonious, fulfilling and clearly close to
ideal than the one given. These attempts have taken a variety of forms
ranging from the purely philosophical and conceptual to the
reconstructive and revolutionary. In a broad sense, these efforts can be
understood as part of the utopian impulse.
Utopia is a term coined by Sir Thomas More in 1515. He traces the root
to two Greek words: outopia, translated as no place, and eutopia, the
good place. The word has acquired, since Frederick Engles’ critique of
“utopian” socialism in Anti-Duhring, the negative connotation of
outopia—cloud cuckoo land. For our purposes, the term must be understood
in a more neutral way: as a description of an approach to social
reconstruction oriented toward the creation of an “ideal” society.
The utopian impulse is a response to existing social conditions and an
attempt to transcend or transform those conditions to achieve an ideal.
It always contains two interrelated elements: a critique of existing
conditions and a vision or reconstructive program for a new society.
Utopias usually arise during periods of social upheaval, when the old
ways of a society are being questioned by new developments. Thus,
Plato’s Republic emerged in Athens after the victory of Sparta in the
Peloponnesian Wars, More’s Utopia emerged during the Age of Discovery,
and the industrial revolution gave birth to numerous utopian
experiments.
While these utopias and countless others are all distinct in a
programmatic sense they share certain structural elements. The
combination of critique and reconstructive vision has already been
noted. They also share a holistic perspective, focusing on the
reformation of society as a whole rather than the simple reform of
specific social institutions. They tend to choose a humanly scaled
community as their locus of action and elaborate their transformative
vision within that context.
Utopias often display an orientation toward “happiness” defined in terms
of material plenty (communal property) and “justice,” a concept defined
in widely divergent terms. They frequently emphasize equality between
men and women, and an integration of town and country. The themes of
balance and harmony resonate throughout utopia.
Utopias develop their vision either by drawing on residual traditional
elements or historic tendencies of a society that are seen as positive
and elaborating and supporting those elements—as Plato took inspiration
from aspects of Greek tradition—or by drawing upon and elaborating new
developments, often scientific or technological, that seem to hold
promise—as Francis Bacon did in New Atlantis.
The impulse toward utopia has persisted over millennia. Paul Radin
suggests that even primitive hunters and gatherers harkened toward
utopia, as reflected in their dream/myths of a past Golden Age that
would return in the near future. We see a certain continuity of utopian
thought from the philosophical writings of Plato through the Christian
Myth (the Garden of Eden) and Eschatology.
In more recent times, utopia has shifted from the religious to the
secular arena. From the Enlightenment onward, utopia began taking a more
explicitly social form. Here too though, we must distinguish between the
utopias of intellect and attempts to actualize utopia through
communalistic or revolutionary experiments.
In examining the broad historic tradition that comprises the utopian
impulse we can develop general categories of utopias that display
similar characteristics. At one end of the continuum, the literary and
philosophical utopias present a theoretical “blueprint” for a perfect
society, while on the other end, utopian social theories, experiments
and movements make concrete attempts to bring about “utopia.”
These two approaches to utopia are described by Lewis Mumford in another
context:
“One of these functions is escape or compensation; it seeks an immediate
release from the difficulties or frustrations of our lot. The other
attempts to provide a condition for our release in the future. The
Utopias that correspond to these two functions, I shall call the Utopias
of escape and the Utopias of reconstruction. The first leaves the
external world the way it is; the second seeks to change it so that one
may have intercourse with it on one’s own terms. In one we build
impossible castles in the air; in the other we consult a surveyor and an
architect and a mason and proceed to build a house which meets our
essential needs; as well as houses built of stone and mortar are capable
of meeting them.”
Philosophical and literary utopias are the work of individuals and as
such tend to reflect their creators’ likes and dislikes. These
idiosyncratic approaches have given rise to the cliché that “One man’s
utopia is another man’s hell.” While the philosophical utopias address
themselves to important social problems they tend to generate
“solutions” that take the form of mechanistic plans requiring an
authoritarian social structure for enforcement. They are usually
hierarchical, dogmatic, static societies. (This rationalization of
society and the concurrent rigidification of social hierarchies is
described by Karl Popper and brilliantly explored in Stanley Diamond’s
critique of Plato’s Republic, the archetypal literary utopia.)
Reconstructive utopian social movements approach the problem of creating
a new social order in a more organic fashion. The emphasis at the outer
edge of the continuum is on utopian process, with the actual
reconstructive details of the “new society” left to the participants’
determination. At this end of the continuum we can place the various
“people’s utopias” which have a long history suggested by the early
slave revolts, the heretic communities such as the Gnostics (the
Paterini and Lombardi in Italy), the Brotherhood of Free Spirits, the
True Levelers and Diggers during the English Revolution, the revolt of
Thomas Munster and other movements of the Reformation, peasant revolts,
the Paris Commune, and in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
anarchist praxis in Russia, Spain, and elsewhere.
These are the more libertarian forms of utopia, to varying degrees
participatory, democratic and non-hierarchical, and all dynamic and
transformative in their approach.
In Mumford’s words:
“The Utopia of reconstruction is what its name implies: A vision of a
reconstituted environment which is better adapted to the nature and aims
of the human beings who dwell within it than the actual one; and not
merely better adapted to their actual nature, but better fitted to their
possible development.”
“By a reconstructed environment I do not mean merely a physical thing. I
mean in addition a new set of habits, a fresh scale of values, a
different net of relationships and institutions.”
At a variety of points between the extremes, we can place the ideal
constitutions, planned communities, intentional communities, communes,
and revolutionary movements. They conform to a general definition of
utopia that includes the combination of critique and reconstructive
program—a holistic vision of the new society that insists on the
integration of the various psychological, social, economic, political,
and spiritual aspects of society.
The tradition of the reconstructive “people’s utopias” is an old one,
predating the literary and philosophical. It is in all probability a
tendency that predates written history. “People’s utopias” have been
efforts on the part of groups of people to actualize their utopia rather
than to relegate it to a lost paradise or to defer it until death. They
have been concerned with a total restructuring of society from the
bottom up. These efforts have taken the form of the institution of the
new social order either through the creation of separatist intentional
communities or through active revolutionary opposition to the old order.
The communitarian efforts of the classic “utopians”—St. Simeon, Fourier,
and Robert Owen—were an outgrowth of the idiosyncratic “systems” usually
associated with the literary tradition. Yet they did attempt to bring
their utopias into being and in so doing laid the foundations for modern
socialist thought, which can itself be understood as a further
expression of utopia. On the other end of the continuum of “people’s
utopias” stand the revolutionary anarchist movements of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
One way of defining utopian social movement in the nineteenth century is
by examining the distinction between these movements and the “scientific
socialism” of their chief critics, Marx and Engels. The Marxist critique
of utopian socialism is most clearly expressed by Engels in
Anti-Duhring. He acknowledges the contributions made by Fourier, St.
Simeon, and Owen toward the formulation of the basic ideas of socialism.
In Engels’ words, “In St. Simeon we find a comprehensive breadth of
view, by virtue of which almost all the ideas of later socialists, that
are not purely economic, are found in him in embryo…” Of the utopians in
general he states, “We delight in the stupendously grand thought and
germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic
covering.”
It is the “phantastic covering” of St. Simeon’s system of which Engels
was critical. He argued that St. Simeon’s utopia, a unification of
science and industry in a “New Christianity” in which the bourgeois are
transferred into public servants by the spirit of reason and
cooperation, was an expression of a period when industrial capitalism
and its ensuing class antagonisms were still in an undeveloped state.
Though he recognized an embryonic class consciousness in St. Simeon’s
overriding concern for “the class that is the most numerous and most
poor,” ultimately St. Simeon is seen to be dominated by the historical
situation that stimulated his theory. “To the crude conditions of
capitalist production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude
theories.”
Fourier is praised by Engels for his astute and biting criticism of
French society. However, in Engels’ words, “Fourier is at his greatest
in his conception of the history of society. He divides its whole
course, thus far, into four stages of evolution—savagery, barbarism, the
patriarchate and civilization.” Engels sees in Fourier’s historical
ideas an application of dialectics analogous to Kant’s use of the method
in natural science. Yet, Fourier, despite his brilliant insights into
the workings of society and history, projected a complete system as the
solution to France’s social problems. Engels said, “These new social
systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked
out in detail the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure
phantasies.”
Yet, by dismissing Fourier’s “phantasies” Engels and others dismissed
the most prescient and provocative aspects of Fourier’s thought: his
emphasis on the emotional content of life in his utopia, a whole
psychodynamic dimension displaying a set of concerns with the
nonmaterial quality of everyday life. Unfortunately, this did not
reemerge as a major theme in socially reconstructive thought until the
1960s, when it was once again developed by theorists such as Herbert
Marcuse and Norman O. Brown.
The idiosyncratic element in these utopian systems was, in Engels’ view,
inevitable. As with the literary and philosophical utopias, they were
the works of individual thinkers who saw the new society arising out of
reason and self-conscious activity, divorced from a specific historical
period and level of economic development. They were an expression of the
likes and dislikes of their creators, conditioned by their subjective
views and expressing their own absolute truths. Unfortunately, in his
search for “science” and in his insistence on a narrowly defined class
analysis, Engels rejects some of the more profound aspects of the French
utopian tradition.
Robert Owen was a formulator of systems as well, but the industrial
capitalism of nineteenth-century England, where Owen put his theories
into practice, was significantly more developed than in France. Owen,
who began his career as a social reformer from the unlikely position of
factory manager, gradually came to believe that socialism was the only
means of guaranteeing justice to the working class he saw battered and
degraded by the new system of production. Owen made the transition from
philanthropist to socialist upon his realization that “the newly created
gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and
to enslave the masses, offered the foundations for a reconstruction of
society; they were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked
for the common good of all.” He saw private property, religion, and the
present form of marriage as the obstacles to the institution of his
ideal society. While his attempt to actualize his ideal in the form of a
communist community in Indiana met with failure, he was a major
influence on the British working class. Owen’s communism, grounded in
the materialist view that people were a product of their heredity, but
moreover their environment, was still an appeal to reason. Rather than
looking to the proletariat to emancipate themselves, he demonstrated the
logic of his system and hoped to convince the bourgeoisie through that
logic.
This brings us to another crucial point in Engels’ critique of the
utopians. He states that despite a genuine concern for the working
class, “one thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a
representative of the interests of that proletariat, which historical
development had in the meantime produced.” Here Engels is referring to
the failure of St. Simeon, Fourier and Owen to represent the interests
of the proletariat exclusively, based on their lack of perception of
what he saw as the deep, irreparable chasm which developed between
bourgeois and proletariat under the impetus of industrial capitalism.
There can be no doubt that all three were concerned with the plight of
the working class but they did not envision the new society born of a
confrontation between classes over control of the means of production.
Theirs was not a truly revolutionary socialism; they still believed in
the ideal of reason, which lay at the root of the bourgeois revolutions,
and in the ability of reason to bring about the new social order. The
essence of Engels’ critique of the utopians lies not with their
formulation of the basic ideals of socialist theories, but with their
lack of understanding of the process by which the new society may be
brought into being and their idiosyncratic projections of what form the
new society will take.
After the classic utopians, socialism began to take on an identity as a
revolutionary movement, first in France, later in other European
nations. This development followed two distinct paths, the “scientific”
socialism of Marx and Engels, and a continued “utopianism” best
presented by the anarcho-syndicalist Proudhon and the anarcho-communists
Bakunin and Kropotkin. Both positions were influential among the
emerging workers’ movement; Marx’s influence was strongest in Germany
and England where an industrial proletariat had developed and, according
to Marx’s theory, the material conditions were sufficiently evolved to
allow for the development of socialism. The anarchists’ theories were
embraced by workers’ movements in France, Italy, Switzerland and Spain,
where the craft tradition of the small workshop and individual producer
had not entirely given way to the factory system necessary for the
creation of a true industrial proletariat.
The Marxists and anarchists were the two major forces in the first
International Working Men’s Association. Though doctrinal differences
had surfaced before the formation of that organization (most notably in
the dispute between Marx and Proudhon, sparked in part by Proudhon’s
refusal to collaborate with Marx) it was in the International that the
issues which divided the Marxist “scientific” socialists and anarchist
“utopians” clearly surfaced.
The differences revolved around three interrelated questions concerning
class analysis, organizational form, and the role of the state.
Though the anarchists recognized a severe class antagonism and had
discarded the classic utopian’s view that the bourgeois would reform
themselves, they did not accept Marx’s notion that the only truly
revolutionary class was an industrial proletariat, organized and
disciplined by the factory system. They posited the concept of
revolutionary activity arising from a multiplicity of classes: workers,
to be sure, but also peasants, déclassé intellectuals and students, and
even the sans culottes, that lumpen element for whom Marx had nothing
but contempt. The Marxists criticized this position as petit bourgeois.
Indeed, in Proudhon we do see a naive belief in the ability of the
workers to create the new society without a direct confrontation with
the owners, but Bakunin and Kropotkin both clearly express a belief in
class struggle as the means of carrying out the “social revolution.” The
dispute lies then not with the concept of class struggle, but with the
composition of the classes that make the revolution.
The second major dispute was based on two very different concepts for
organizing the socialist movement. Marx saw the need for a rigid,
disciplined, centralized party organization that would take as its model
that most efficient form of organization yet devised, the factory
system. Workers, organized and disciplined by the industrial processes,
would find the embryo of the new society within the sweatshop of the old
and use any means possible, including parliamentary activity, to end its
exploitation. The anarchists were highly critical of this approach. They
saw it as a repetition of the bourgeois pattern in the sense that it was
hierarchical, authoritarian and stifling to people’s individual
initiative. They believed that this approach, though it might bring
economic justice, would perpetuate the larger structures of bourgeois
society. They were not simply concerned with ending exploitation, an
essentially economic concept, but with ending domination as well, a
broader social concern. They opted for an organizational model that was
decentralized, egalitarian, non-hierarchical and committed to a strategy
of direct action. The anarchists believed that the means and ends of
their movement could not be separated: that the form of organization for
building the new society must be congruent with the forms they wished to
create in that new society.
This dispute over organizational forms is directly connected to the
third major area of disagreement: the role of the state. Marx called for
the creation of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would seize
state power, and through a transitional period, pave the way for the
“withering away of the state.” The anarchists were convinced that rather
than withering away, such a state would make its highest priority its
own perpetuation. They proposed the dissolution of the state per se, and
its replacement by a decentralized federation of autonomous production
units and communities, which under direct self-management would
coordinate the economic and social life of what was formerly the state.
With the communist anarchists Bakunin and Kropotkin, we see a new
definition of utopia emerge. They were not concerned with blueprinting
the ideal society for inherent in their approach was an aversion to
“systems” and preconceived utopias. Rather they tried to develop a
process whereby a multiplicity of new societies could form themselves.
They had a strong belief in cultural diversity as a value to be
encouraged for its own sake. They recognized in the vestiges of
authentic community life that survived the state, as well as the new
organizations created by the workers, the embryo of the new society.
They visualized communism developing in accordance with the specific
cultural tradition of each community, and each community, though
participating in a regional and national economy, retaining a distinct
cultural identity and the greatest degree of autonomy possible, without
sacrificing that degree of coordination necessary to insure the smooth
functioning of an industrial society. They saw the creation of a network
of such self-managed communities, social and economic units as a
substitute for the state. The anarchist vision of the new society took
much of its inspiration from what they saw as the authentic social life
and culture of the people. They envisioned personal responsibility and
self-conscious ethical behavior taking the place of law. They called for
the creation of “people’s assemblies” as the basic unit of governance.
(Kropotkin offers the Folk Mote of the Medieval commune, the Russian
Mir, or peasant village commune, and the cantonal structures of
Switzerland as possible models.) The anarchists developed concepts of
leadership that were substantially different from those which ruled
bourgeois society. Their ideal was much closer to communal and
traditional leadership roles, with leaders emerging in specific
situations because of specific skills, and with responsibility and
decision making ultimately lying with the collectivity. The anarchists’
brand of communism was close to the communal economic base
characteristic of pre-state peoples. They envisioned the creation of
self-reliant communities which integrated industry and agriculture, town
and country, and work and play. They projected the collectivization of
the means of production under the direct control of the workers and
peasants, not mediated by the state—as it is under a policy of
nationalization—and coordinated on the local, regional and, ultimately,
planetary level by a process of federation. Their ethos was from each
according to their abilities, to each according to their need. The
anarchists are a clear extension of the tradition of the people’s
utopia. Yet, despite their differences, and despite the denial of many
Marxists, in a sense, so too is Marx himself.
If we view utopia as a cultural development that replaces the political
association of the state as the organizing principle of society with a
multiplicity of authentic social and economic associations, we gain a
perspective which allows us to understand the utopian element in
Marxism. While Marx never spelled out his “utopia” in concrete terms, he
maintained that the new society must emerge from forms already present
in the old. Certain writings are pregnant with implications of the form
a post-revolutionary development might take. As Martin Buber points out,
Marx’s formulations concerning the “withering away of the state” point
in a direction similar to that suggested by the anarchists. In 1844 in
his essay “Critical Glosses,” after discussing revolution as the last
“political” act, Marx says, “But when its organizing activity begins,
when its ultimate purpose, its soul emerges, socialism will throw the
political husk away.” Marx’s belief in the ability of and need for the
proletariat to seize direct control of the organs of production is
reflected in his attitude toward the Paris Commune of 1871, (also
claimed as a model by the anarchists) which he praises as an expression
of “the self-government of the producers.” Marx believed that ultimately
“the communal constitution would have rendered up to the body social all
the powers which have hitherto been devoured by the parasitic
excrescence of the State which battens on society and inhibits its free
movement.”
Contradicting his own statements that capitalism must organize the
forces of production before socialism can emerge, Marx indicates in his
letter to Vera Zasulitch concerning the prospects of adopting the
cooperative tradition of the Mir, the Russian peasant community, as a
basis for socialism, that such communal forms would prove valuable as
models for the new society and in fact might be able to transcend the
development of capitalism and move directly into communism. Here Marx
was not advocating a return to primitive village communism, but rather
the integration of the tradition of cooperation and communal ownership
at a higher level of development into the new society.
Further indication of the utopian element in Marx’s theories can be
found in the section of the Grundrisse discussing pre-capitalist
economic formations. Marx’s descriptions of the institutions of
primitive communism and their evolution into those of capitalism
communicate a sense of the respect that he had for those earliest
economic forms. In the dialectical formulations concerning the emergence
of socialism from capitalism, it is possible once again to get a sense
of the reemergence of the communist impulse, latent in society for
epochs, on a higher level, set free by the development of material
conditions that provide the preconditions for socialism. The impulse is
not a mechanical application of tribal, communal organization but an
unfolding of the same human potential in a new set of economic
conditions.
Marx does not look to a change in human nature as the catalyst to bring
socialism into being, but rather to the maturation of material
conditions. In reference to the Paris Commune he says, “It has no ideals
to realize, it has only to set free those elements of the new society
which have already developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois
society.” Marx avoided any but the sketchiest intimations of what the
“developed elements” might be, beyond the organization of the
proletariat provided by the factory system, but he leaves no question as
to the composition of the new society. It is “classless” in the sense
that the class antagonisms between proletariat and bourgeois will be
resolved by the elimination of the bourgeoisie, and it will be organized
by the workers themselves. Marx’s critical attitude toward the early
utopians and all socialists who proposed complete “systems” for the new
society is reflected in his unwillingness to draw his own blueprint. He
focuses his attention instead on the process through which the new
society can be actualized. It is, significantly, in the realm of process
that his vision departs from the tradition of utopianism.
In the creation of the increasingly rigid and reified body of
theoretical work that forms the basis of his political legacy (most
noticeably in Das Kapital), Marx betrays his own utopian promise. In his
search for a science with regular “predictable laws” and a universal,
inexorable dialectic, he commits the very error for which Engels
chastised the French utopians; he creates a rigid system that, despite
many valuable insights, allows for no deviation and that fully
incorporates Marx’s own idiosyncrasies. Despite his unwillingness to
blueprint his utopia, by the “scientific” pretense of his endeavor and
by thus enshrining the limitations of his thought (ultimately bourgeois,
according to Murray Bookchin), Marx doomed his followers to a betrayal
of his utopian impulse.
Marx’s utopianism is in a certain sense the most interesting,
provocative and inspiring aspect of his vast, often contradictory volume
of work. This is the core of Marx’s humanism and the engine that drives
forward his revolutionary project. It is the positivistic “science” of
Marx that has prevented the realization of this utopian core, and
allowed for its distortion by the various parties and sects that bear
his name.
As Ernst Bloch points out:
“A distinction has to be made between the Utopistic and the Utopian; the
one approaches circumstances only immediately and abstractly, in order
to improve them in a purely cerebral fashion, whereas the other has
always brought along the constructural equipment of externality. Of
course only Utopism, as it reaches out abstractly above reality, need
not fight shy of a mere empiricism that undertakes only another form of
abstract apprehension below reality. A real Utopian critique can only
proceed from a viewpoint that is adequate, that does not—so to
speak—correct or even replace over flying by a factistic creeping.”
Certainly, this sense of Marx’s critique of capitalism can be seen as
utopian. The utopian perspective is able to provide a valuable critique
because it exists outside of the given. Unlike ideology, utopia is a
projection of that which does not yet exist, rather than a reflection of
the ruling class and the dominant culture. As such, it is exempt from
decay. In Bloch’s paraphrase, “Only that which has never yet come to
pass cannot grow old.” Bloch concurs with the view that the urge to
utopia is a primal one, discernible from the earliest epochs to the
present, though represented by different forms in different historical
situations. However, he sees continuity between the various aspects
which utopia presents. The urge toward utopia, the vision of an ideal,
harmonized society, ever shimmering on the horizon, is in Bloch’s view
an archetype which precedes even formalized mythology. Bloch identifies
Marx as an heir to that tradition. It is the promise of utopia, not its
specific image, which gives urgency to the Marxist project. That
promise, while never crystallized, is central to understanding the
dynamics of revolution.
In Marx’s own words:
“Our slogan, therefore, must be: Reform of consciousness, not through
dogmas, but through analysis of the mystical consciousness that is
unclear about itself, whether in religion or politics. It will be
evident then that the world has long dreamed of something of which it
only has to become conscious in order to possess it in actuality. It
will be evident that there is not a big blank between the past and the
future, but rather that it is a matter of realizing the thoughts of the
past. It will be evident finally that mankind does not begin any new
work but performs its old work consciously… to have its sins forgiven,
mankind has only to proclaim them for what they are.”
In terms of his critique and his implicit vision, then, even Marx
(though not the Marxists of varying hues which populate the left) must
be understood to contain an element that is utopian. Orthodox Marxism,
as practiced by “socialist” states and parties, however, is certainly
distinct from the utopian praxis of people’s movements.
“People’s movements” are an expression of a different set of organizing
principles, as exemplified by the split between the Marxists and
anarchists over the three interrelated questions of the constituency of
the movement (proletarians versus proletarians and déclassé
intellectuals, peasants, petit bourgeoisie, and lumpen elements); the
structure of the movement (decentralized versus centralized); and the
role of the state and politics (dictatorship of the proletariat versus
decentralized federation, party versus movement, political economy
versus holistic socio-economic-cultural reconstruction). Closely related
to these major differences are questions about the forms of ownership
and decision making (nationalism versus collectivization, central
planning versus self-management). The relationship between the two
positions has been complex historically and hard and fast categorization
is difficult, belt these are the central questions. From the time of the
Paris Commune on, we can clearly note this bifurcation. The decentralist
movements, as they reject the statist framework and “political” (really
parliamentary) activity as a valid means for cultural reconstruction,
are the more direct line of connection to the utopian continuum.
Given the historical trajectory of the libertarian wing of the utopian
tradition, it is not surprising that there has been an association of
the anarchist and reconstructive aspects with the conscious elements of
the radical ecology movement. Aspects of the tradition that bear a
direct relation to the more conscious and radical elements in this
ecology movement grow out of the theoretical congruence of concerns
which transcend gross economic issues to examine the over all quality of
life. The utopian (particularly anarchist) concern for a process and
organization that embodies the ideals of the new society is an obvious
point of connection. The most profound insights of the utopians contain
a core of logic that seems almost prescient when one considers that the
concerns were addressed and articulated by a movement that existed
hundreds of years before the word “ecology” entered our vocabulary.
In its concern with the whole of people’s lives and its refusal to opt
for the simplistic reductionism of the more mechanical “scientific
view,” the utopian tradition displayed an intuitive understanding of the
holistic approach embodied in ecology as a scientific discipline. The
perception of society as a whole and the concern of the utopian impulse
with the transformation of the whole, rather than the reform of its
parts, is reflected in the understanding that grows out of the study of
ecology: that there are critical interdependencies and relationships in
any system, social or ecological, that create a totality greater than
the sum of its parts. The integration of components, the awesome display
of unity growing from the diversity of nature, provides a powerful
paradigm for the understanding of social interactions. This shared
outlook, this concern with whole systems, is the underlying connection
between the utopian tradition and the radical ecology movement, but it
is further refined by a whole set of particulars that the two share as
well. It must be understood, however, that the “laws” of natural ecology
that influence the vision of the ecology movement are paradigmatic,
powerful metaphors for the harmonious, homeostatic reworking envisioned
by the radical ecology movement.
In that reworking, we could do well to reconsider the role of utopia,
for as Bloch points out,
“Utopian consciousness remains wholly without description inasmuch as
the moment of its fulfillment is still outstanding—and certainly not for
skeptical or agnostic reasons. Yet this Utopian consciousness does not
obscure its blinding goal with solutions, let alone with more reified
means from the route to that goal, and then (even on a Hegelian level)
offer an absolutized half light in conclusion. Its reason for not doing
that is superlatively real—the most objective correlative ground that
Utopian consciousness possesses: the world substance, mundane matter
itself, is not yet finished and complete, but exists in a Utopian—open
state, i.e.: a state in which its self identity is not yet manifest.”