'Utopia and Consciousness: In Defence of Utopian Socialism'

'Utopia and Consciousness: In Defence of Utopian Socialism' - Hari Bravery

Within the writings of Marx and Engels the idea of utopia “acquired heavily pejorative overtones,” dismissed as ahistorical, paternalistic and overly abstract, outlining future social systems founded on philosophical idealism that will never come to fruition due to its divorce from the material conditions of the historical present. However, it is significant to remember that the moniker of ‘Utopian Socialism’ was retrospectively applied by Marx and Engels to previous socialist thinkers (namely Cabet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen), thinkers whose ideologies actually had very little relation to one another, aside from a shared tendency to envision a perfected future society based on the principles of institutional design. Let me take some of the primary arguments used by Marxian socialists (the shared socialism of Marx and Engels, as opposed to ideas developed by later Marxists) to disparage utopian socialism and show why these are non-foundational.

The empirical criticism of utopian socialism as ahistorical offered by Marx and Engels is that utopian plans and blueprints are unnecessary, since satisfactory solutions to social problems emerge from the unfolding of historical process without themselves needing to be designed. This Marxian argument poses that utopianism is divorced from history, failing to alleviate the suffering of the proletariat due to its “dogmatic abstraction” from reality. This perception of utopian socialism is best caricatured by Engels within Socialism: Utopian and Scientific asserting that for the utopians:

“Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue its own power. And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered."

Engels mocks the utopians’ conception of a socialist futurity so divorced from the mechanics of present society that the advent of socialist society is rendered historically arbitrary, failing to understand that the conditions for socialism only appear at a particular stage in the historical development of humankind, in contrast to the ‘scientific’ argument that socialist revolution is a direct result of specific historical conditions. This sentiment is repeated in Marx’s ‘For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing’ in which “it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one,” annexing the past from conceptions of the utopian. Thus, for Marx as for Engels, it is the “drawing [of] a great mental dividing line between past and future” that is the primary evil of utopian socialism. However, this argument can quite easily be dissected. The claim that the basic structure of the ideal socialist society develops automatically within existing capitalist society, needing only to be delivered (and not designed) by human agency, is unsupported by Marxian argument as well as by subsequent historical experience.

On an epistemological level, the parallel Marxian argument that utopian socialism is invalid since it presumes an accurate knowledge of the future that cannot be acquired is a less compelling claim. The impact of unforeseen historical events and circumstances does not mean that all plans or structures for societal progression need be abandoned; human limitation and the unpredictability of historical process may render wholly accurate socialist forethought impossible, but something less than a completely accurate plan is still of constructive use. On a more simple level, these empirical and epistemological criticisms of utopian socialism can be resolved by the now common critical view of utopia as metaphor (see Melvin J. Laskey’s Metaphor and Revolution: On the Origin of a Metaphor). In such a view, utopia is intentionally separated from the historical present, intentionally flitting between the real application to a historical present and an abstract allegory for a possible avenue of human progression. This ambivalence is indelible in the etymology of Thomas More’s coining of ‘utopia,’ simultaneously ‘ou-topia’ (‘no place’) and ‘eu-topia’ (‘good place’). If Marxian thought dislikes the idea of utopianism, it is due to a lack of applicability to the present, but application is not the purpose of utopianism – it is rather a space of academic debate, in which philosophical can be carried through to its logical end-point. Utopianism is an ideal, not a destination – this abstraction is what Marxian thought dislikes.

Further, in Engels’ conception, the utopian mode of socialist thought results only in “a mish-mash allowing such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society [...] as excite a minimum of opposition.” For Engels, utopianism – far from presenting radical visions of future society – actually diminishes political radicalism which is “rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook,” bringing socialism further towards a populist conservativism than if it did not exist. Yet, what Engels fails to acknowledge is that his definition of ‘utopian’ essentially encompasses various, largely unrelated socialist thinkers. Utopian socialism under the Marxian definition is essentially a catch-all for early 19th century socialist thought. It is no wonder then that these thoughts, economic theories and philosophies would be diffuse - they were newly birthed and awaiting refinement by later thinkers.

There is a fundamental contradiction in Marxian anti-utopianism. Marx and Engels assert that a given populace should be urged to change the social world radically through the implementation of socialism, but urge the population not to waste time thinking of the form of society that this upheaval will bring. Marx and Engels obviously had some broad vision of their own ideal socialist society, thus Marx and Engels both conceived socialist utopias. The refusal to flesh out those visions with the degree of detail that is found within the literature of the utopian socialism that preceded them becomes an arbitrary distinction; a utopia in the Marxian mind, not rendered linguistically, is just as utopian as the Fourier’s ‘Harmony’. The final line of the ‘Development of Utopian Socialism’ section of Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific asserts that “[t]o make a science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis,” yet in searching for this base point Engels is forced to Other previous socialisms, in essence discrediting the very works that led to the advent of Marxian socialism. In the place of utopianism as a community process, Engels offered socialism as a scientific system. I do not dispute the need for so-called ‘scientific’ socialism’s emphasis on the grounding of socialist thought in historical actuality through the provision of a material basis for socialism. An awareness to the mechanics of contemporary society is entirely necessary if socialist political thought is ever to be implemented, but the complete disavowal of the majority of previous socialist thought as naïve and ‘utopian’ seems reductive. In their canonical formulations of utopian socialism, Marx and Engels often fail to do justice to the complexity and variety of utopian socialisms plural, instead using the catch-all label of ‘utopian’ to constitute scientific socialism as a distinct intellectual endeavour. In the words of Frank and Fritzie Manuel, “[m]ost utopias are born of utopias, however pretentious the claims to complete novelty may be – the utopia of Marxian socialism is no different, born from utopian socialist thought.