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Title: Who We Are Author: The Utopian Tendency Date: 2001 Language: en Topics: The Utopian, utopianism, position paper Source: Retrieved on 11th August 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%2018.3%20-%202019/utopian-program-statement-who-we-are/ Notes: Originally printed in Utopian 2001. Revised 2016. Rev. 2019
To look for Utopia means providing a vision for the future – of a world
worth living in, of a life beyond what people settle for as experience
clouds their hopes. It means insisting that hope is real, counting on
human potential and dreams.
To look for Utopia means providing a vision for the future — of a world
worth living in, of a life beyond what people settle for as experience
clouds their hopes. It means insisting that hope is real, counting on
human potential and dreams.
Utopians do not accept “what is” as “what must be.” We see potential for
freedom even in the hardest of apparent reality. Within our oppressive
society are forces for hope, freedom, and human solidarity,
possibilities pressing toward a self-managed, cooperative commonwealth.
We don’t know if these forces will win out; we see them as hopes, as
moral norms by which to judge society today, as challenges to all of us
to act in such a way as to realize a fully human community.
We can describe some of these possibilities: worldwide opposition to the
imperialist domination of the global economy; struggles against
dictatorship in China, Syria, Egypt, and Venezuela; fights for national
liberation in Ukraine, Kurdistan, Palestine, and China (including those
by Uighurs and by Tibetans); cultural movements for the defense and
recovery of indigenous languages and histories; struggles throughout the
world to guarantee women full sovereignty as a right, not a privilege,
dismantling the patriarchal systems that institutionalize the domination
and devaluation of women by men; changes in society’s acceptance of
LGBTQ people and people with disabilities; and struggles against racism,
for the rights of people of color, and for the rights of immigrants.
There will — we hope — be similar utopian phases ahead in mass movements
in the U.S.
But beyond these specifics, we are talking about something familiar to
everyone, although difficult to get a handle on. In small ways, every
day, people live by cooperation, not competition. Filling in for a
co-worker, caring for an old woman upstairs, helping out at AA meetings,
donating and working for disaster relief — people know how to live
cooperatively on a small scale. What we don’t know, and what no one has
found a blueprint for, is how to live cooperatively on a national and
international scale, or even on the scale of a mass political movement.
Nobody has described how the society we want will look, or how to get
it, though we know what it will be: a society where people are free to
be good, a society based on cooperation and peace, not dominance and
aggression.
This is a good time to be publishing a journal dedicated to Utopianism,
revolutionary socialism, and anarchism. Struggles of the red state
teachers; activism in the Black and Latinx communities, and of women,
lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, and queer people, indigenous
people, environmentalists, and people with disabilities — these, we
think, are all harbingers of another upsurge coming.
But these are perilous times as well. Destructive effects of climate
change are already being felt. They will get far worse. They demonstrate
capitalism’s disregard for life — human and otherwise — and for the
ecosystem. It is a graphic illustration of the need to reorganize the
way in which we (human beings) relate to and organize the world around
us, as well as our relations with one another, with other species, and
with the entire ecosystem.
The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the fact that China’s Communist
political dictatorship is state-controlled capitalism (with gross
inequality) have done more than just discredit authoritarian Marxism.
They have also discredited, for many, the very idea of changing society
fundamentally. Instead, we see many turning in desperation to the
demagogues of the right, while others look to the statist reformists of
the social democratic left.
Meanwhile, the fabric of the post-World War II world system, already
fraying, is unraveling at its core, the U.S. and Europe. Rising anger at
the gross inequality and assault on living standards of the majority has
resulted in the rise of right- wing movements throughout Europe and the
U.S. Racist, anti-immigrant authoritarians have ridden this anger to
electoral victory in the U.S., Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Turkey, to
name a few.
In the U.S. and the UK, social democrats have also gained adherents
(Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the U.S.;
Jeremy Corbyn in the UK). But these “democratic socialists” and
“progressives” think that capitalism can be reformed, its rough edges
smoothed. Their prescription to cure the predations of neoliberal
privatization is to increase the scope and authority of the state, with
their ideal being something resembling Scandinavian “socialism”
(contemporary Denmark; Sweden of the 1960s) and/or FDR’s New Deal. So in
the U.S. the leading demand is “single payer health care” — with no
discussion of how this would not be a top-down, bureaucratic
monstrosity, or how it would not come at the expense of another program.
But the cure for privatization is not to increase the power and
authority of the state (be it by regulation, taxation, or
nationalization) but to dismantle the state (the standing army and the
cops; the nightmare bureaucracies) and to reorganize society,
cooperatively and democratically from the bottom up, locally based and
with emphasis on mutual aid. We are confident that new mass movements
from below will rise again, in a massive surge, as did Occupy in 2011.
And we hope and anticipate that, like Occupy (in its initial stages, at
least), these movements will reject reformism and statism.
Another highly problematic phenomenon has been the rise of
Islamist/Jihadist religious fanaticism, which exploits radical hopes for
escape from western domination to build mass support for a tyrannical,
socially regressive, and exceptionally brutal war against both
non-Muslims and the great majority of Muslims. This development is
partly a response to the collapse of secular anti-imperialism in Africa,
the Arab world, and Asia in the past fifty years, and partly to
continuing European/North American domination of these areas, now made
worse by an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim backlash in Europe and the
United States. The road forward lies in rebuilding a democratic, radical
anti-imperialism, but how this may occur we don’t know.
Moreover, with a few exceptions, revolutionary anarchist and libertarian
socialist groups remain small and their influence limited. Various kinds
of reformism and Marxism still attract radical-minded people. Indeed,
the support for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries
and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) since the
November 2016 elections show that various strains of left statism,
reformist and Marxist, still attract radically minded people. Reformism
and Marxism, and their corresponding movements, accept the state,
capital-labor relations, conventional technology, and political
authoritarianism. Nevertheless, despite the dominance of reformists and
statists in the world of the organized left, over the past two decades
the influence of anarchists and libertarian socialists has clearly
increased (as was seen in the Seattle protests against the World Trade
Organization as well as the Occupy movement).
It is important to continue to work for freedom and to speak of utopia.
This racist, sexist, and authoritarian society has not developed any new
charms. It remains exploitative and unstable, threatening economic
collapse and environmental destruction. It wages war around the globe,
while nuclear weapons still exist and even spread. Even at its best —
most stable and peaceful — it provides a way of life that should be
intolerable: a life of often meaningless work and overwork; hatred and
oppression within the family, violence from the authorities; the
continuing risk of sudden violent death for LGBTQ people, women, and
Black people; the threat of deportation of undocumented immigrants. The
major reforms of the last period of social struggle, in the 1960s, while
changing much, left African Americans and other Black and brown
populations in the U.S. and around the world facing exclusion and daily
police (state) violence, literally without effective rights to life. The
videos we see every day (in which new technology makes visible what has
always been going on) reveal, like sheet lightning, the reality of the
system we live under. For this society, from its inception, to call
itself “democracy” is a slap in the face of language.
This paradoxical situation — a society in obvious decay but without a
mass movement to challenge it fundamentally — is, we hope, coming to an
end. As new movements develop, liberal-reform and Marxist ideas will
show new life, but so will utopian and libertarian ideas. We work with
this in mind. We have to do what was not done during the last period of
really radical social struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. Among other
things, revolutionary anarchist and libertarian socialist theory very
much needs further development, including its critique of Marxism, and
its ideas about how to relate to mass struggles, democratic and
socialist theory, and popular culture. And we need to reinvigorate the
ideals of anarchism/libertarian socialism and the threads in today’s
world that may, if we can find them and follow them, lead to a future
worth dying for and living in.
Based on all of the above, we state a few basic principles:
We fight for reforms, but we do not believe that capitalism can be
reformed or transformed into socialism via reformism or reliance on the
state, be that reliance via nationalization, parliamentarism, a social
democratic New Deal, or any such statist scheme.
We are opposed to social democracy, electoralism, and the capitalist
parties. Consequently, we are categorically opposed to supporting
Republican or Democratic candidates (including “insurgent” Democrats
such as Sanders, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez), and third parties.
We are not pacifists. We are internationalists who, as well, support
struggles for national liberation. We oppose neoliberal globalization,
but also oppose the virulent racism and scapegoating being directed at
immigrants, at women, at Black and brown people, at LGBTQ people, at
religious and ethnic minorities. We are for fully open borders.
We support and encourage workers to organize. Organizing may take place
outside the unions, inside the unions, or both inside and outside,
depending on current situations and future developments. And organizing
should not be limited to workplace issues, but should embrace broader
social, environmental, and community concerns as well.
We are anarchists and libertarian socialists. We seek collaboration with
all who share our core values, including those who consider themselves
libertarian Marxists, although our view — of which we hope to convince
them — is that Marx, far from being a libertarian, was an authoritarian
centralist and statist.
This future, we state clearly, is an ideal, not a certainty. The lure of
Marxism, for many, has been its promise that a new world is objectively
determined and inevitable. This idea is not only wrong, it is elitist
and brutal. If the new society is inevitable, then those who are for it
will feel free to shoot or imprison everyone who stands in their way.
That is the key to Marxism’s development from utopia to dictatorship,
which everyone except Marxists is aware of. Nor do we believe in an
inevitable collapse of the present system — capitalism may be able to
continue to push its way from crisis to crisis at the usual cost in
broken lives and destroyed hopes.
We fight all oppression under capitalism and urge all oppressed people
to work in a common struggle to end their own oppression and that of
their sisters and brothers.
We believe people have to make ethical choices about whether to accept
life as it is or to struggle for a new society, and then about whether
the society they are for will be democratic or authoritarian. The only
key to the future is a moral determination to get there, a dream of a
world in which those who were obscure to one another will one day walk
together. We do not know where this key may be found, but we know the
only way to find it is to search for it.
That is who we are.