II.

But what is Utopia in the first place? Or if it is really a “nonplace,” what is the concept of Utopia, and what is its political usefulness? It is obvious that in asking this question, we are immediately confronted with a complication, namely the confusion of Utopia with “real” or historical politics. We also have to face the fact that we have no good term for the opposite of Utopia in this sense. We have said that its opposite is not dystopia but rather the status quo; but surely, much of so-called progressive politics simply wants to change the status quo, sometimes radically. So, how would we distinguish between a Utopian politics and a radical politics?

When we put it that way, the opposition that immediately comes to mind is the great traditional one between socialism and communism: one that can even claim its origins in the opposition between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Among intellectuals, in recent years, there have been efforts to revive the use of the word communism, which, rightly or wrongly associated with Stalinism, fell into disfavor and even oblivion after the fall of the Soviet Union. As for socialism, for people on the Left, it has been tainted by the wholesale desertion of the social democratic parties, in both theory and practice: in theory by the systematic elimination of Karl Marx and Marxism from their written programs and in practice by their disgraceful espousal of neoliberal policies — privatization, austerity, and the like — whenever they do reach governmental power.

Still, I have found it useful to distinguish between a progressive politics within the system, that is, one that leaves the general framework of capitalism intact, and a politics that would seek to modify that framework and that is nowhere visible today — witness the retreat of Syriza when the chips were really down. Does this then not suggest that Utopian politics remains the politics of nowhere and that it is precisely to be found where it is unrealizable? We must, in other words, distinguish sharply between concrete practical political proposals and those that are clearly “Utopian,” or unrealizable wish fulfillments. This proposition can be clearly measured by looking again at one of the last truly successful traditional Utopias, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. Now, for one thing, he wrote before computers, and therefore the integration of an information technology that today figures so massively in our daily lives, and its framing a vision of Utopia, did not have to be faced. (The computer of course figured prominently in any number of wildly Utopian visions and speculations at the moment of its general introduction into daily life, around 1982; but it is precisely the patent failure of such Utopian wish fulfillments in the present age of monopoly platforms and consumerism or commodity appropriation that marks the dilemma.)

Meanwhile, Callenbach made things easier for himself by excluding race from the picture (separatist black Utopias are thus assigned to San Francisco, outside the framework of his narrative). As for gender, yes, no doubt his Ecotopia is run by women, but this very specification now seems to us implausible, namely that aggressivity is a feature of the male (and which is here dealt with by way of the so-called war games, which are supposed to get it out of men’s systems!). Meanwhile, it becomes apparent that Callenbach is also trying to preempt two other general objections to socialism: namely, that it kills entrepreneurship and that it stifles debate, argument, free speech and opinion, and the like. For the last, we get plenty of lawyers and litigation. The question of entrepreneurship and small business is a welcome topic, inasmuch as it has always seemed to dictate anti-monopoly positions and the like on the Left. But Vladimir Lenin welcomed monopoly as the path toward nationalization (and as a sign that socialization was indeed proceeding, as a tendency, within advanced capitalism). There clearly needs to be a distinction here, in actual policy, between small business and monopoly; and Callenbach’s Utopia raises the issue of innovation in a welcome way. As for separatism (Utopia in one county?), is not Ecotopia itself (Oregon, Washington, Northern California) a separatist republic? Or better still, is not Utopia itself a separatist phenomenon? As the idea of Utopia is to the reality of politics, so such actually realized imaginary Utopias are still separatist with regard to imagined reality.

So, Utopia remains Utopian up to the point at which it can be realized, can be translated into practical policies; at which point it falls back into politics and ceases to be Utopian. But that is a rather discouraging argument for Utopia! It is, however, a very obvious proposition when we translate it back into our other opposition, where it reads like this: communist policies are Utopian as long as they cannot be realized, and they become social democratic as soon as they fall back into the real world of political give and take. What I called obvious here is the mark of the framework itself, or the system, namely capitalism: social democratic measures become merely reform politics when they are designed simply to correct, strengthen, and reproduce the system, or capitalism as such; communist politics aim to transform the system and substitute something else, namely a radically new kind of system. This is why it is always odd, in moments of financial crisis for example, to find progressives and even socialists bailing out the banks and trying to restore the functioning of the system as a whole, when their premise has been its transformation and replacement. François Mitterand’s socialism is a case in point: when elected in 1981, he began to implement genuine socialist measures; a worldwide crisis supervened, and he was persuaded to shelve all those measures in favor of patently capitalist and even neoliberal ones, observing that it was foolhardy to want to make socialism in the midst of a crisis. But there is always a crisis, and indeed when else — wartime, depressions, etc. — are revolutions made? Are we missing a step in this whole discussion?

III.

There are really two missing pieces here: one is called cultural revolution and the other is called the party. Suspending the discussion of Utopianism for the moment, the tradition has generally imagined the relationship of the two entities — socialism and communism — as a chronological or developmental process. First comes the construction of socialism, and only after that does communism become visible on the horizon. But then, the same practical question we confronted earlier pops up in new form: we wanted to know how you got from capitalism to socialism; now, we want to know how you get from socialism to communism. In all such periodizing issues, there lurks a philosophical problem: the dialectic of Identity and Difference. It is as though we require a fundamental Identity of capitalism and socialism for the latter to emerge, as Marx once put it, “from the womb” of the former. That has indeed always been the social democratic position: that from fundamental reforms within the system — regulations, nationalizations, etc. — another system might be able to emerge. As a matter of historical fact, that has never happened, and the older profit system has always proved to be powerful enough to absorb those changes and reemerge strengthened or at least enlarged. What therefore proves to have motivated this program or strategy is in fact the fear of violence: reform is a peaceful revolution, or wishes to be. But it looks as though even those revolutions have always failed.

Let’s take another concrete historical situation. At the end of the civil war, the Soviet Union is in crisis; and in particular, the peasants are not delivering grain to the cities: Stalin faced an analogous situation in 1927. Lenin’s solution, however, was not forced collectivization but rather (as some of the comrades claimed) the partial reintroduction of capitalism, the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which would in effect be repealed after his death. In his last years and during his final illness, Lenin was led to reflect on ways out of this crisis, ways in which the peasantry, which traditionally wants its land and private property, can be reconciled with the needs of the cities and the new socialist state. He reflects, indeed, on Robert Owen and cooperatives in his very last text (left unpublished until much later).

But he also has another idea, and it is the one he invents a name for, namely cultural revolution. You can see that it functions as it were in the opposite direction from the theorization of Mao Zedong, who wanted to reconcile the intellectuals, and also the cities and the workers, to the mentality of the peasants. Lenin wants to raise the peasants’ mentalities to the level of the workers and to reconcile them to cooperative ownership; in another country and at another moment in history, this is what Che Guevara will call “moral incentives,” but that is a little too restrictive a slogan, just as the campaign for literacy gives only a partial picture of the process of cultural revolution, which must involve the literature fully as much as those “morally” engaged; it must mean change for everyone, and not just peasants or intellectuals.

Well, as we know, none of these efforts succeeded, and in the meantime, with agribusiness and the capitalist green revolution, the peasantry disappeared all over the world, and its former population became farmworkers and proletarians. But at least we can now see what was missing in our earlier discussion. It is the cultural revolution that was absent from our view of the passage of socialism to communism; it was the cultural revolution that was missing from our theorization of the difference between politics and Utopia. To think Utopia in some practically meaningful way requires us to include the problem of cultural revolution within our theory.

IV.

But I said that there was another missing piece, namely the party itself, something nobody wishes to talk about anymore, but which everyone secretly remembers as a dilemma to be confronted. At some point early in his rule, Gamal Abdel Nasser declared Egypt a socialist republic. Everyone went to bed on this day and woke up to discover that nothing whatsoever had changed. There was no socialist party, and therefore businessmen still had their businesses and everything ran as usual, with the possible exception of name changes: these were now socialist businesses, a socialist bureaucracy, etc. And as everything remained exactly the same, it was easy enough gradually to forget that they were now to be called socialist.

To be sure, when we think today about an episode like this, our first temptation is to imagine armed party members bursting into those same shops, demanding changes, firing capitalist-minded businessmen, and so on. But this is to assume that there were even enough people to make up a party large enough to fulfill such a function, which is then, as our imaginations develop it, slowly or not so slowly transformed into army and secret intelligence police, intelligence officers on the order of the Stasi, businessmen, etc. And of course, it is easy to forget that in some places, in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) for example, the Stasi were the true intellectuals of the revolution. They were the only people you could talk to, said Christa Wolf.

Still, it is unlikely that we would want to include them in our cultural revolutions, let alone in our Utopias. Indeed, such violence is a key component of what was to have been avoided by cultural revolution in the first place. So, the party has to be seen as an instrument with both defensive and offensive functions: the defensive ones are those that resist the violence of counterrevolution and that oppose violence to violence or, if you prefer, that oppose force to violence.

But the offensive function of the party will then have a quite different, nonviolent function, namely to serve as the vehicle of cultural revolution; and thus, in our current context, to foment and spread, if not Utopia, then at least the very idea of Utopia. We may recall the great revolutionary cry of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just at the high point of the French Revolution: “A new idea is rising over Europe: the idea of happiness!” So here too: but the idea is now the idea of Utopia itself. Its propagation will take two forms: the resistance to anti-Utopians, or what I would simply call anti-anti-Utopianism; and the transmission, by example, by expression, by way of the situation itself, of the anticipation of Utopia as an experience.

Let’s remember the philosophical dilemma here: Utopia is a position of radical Difference in the face of the Identity of the everyday, of the status quo. But what is radically different from us is precisely what we cannot experience, what by definition is out of the range of our imagination. On the scale of knowables and unknowables, it is again virtually by definition the unknowable unknowable. And this is of course also the source of the fear of Utopia and the resistance to it: in order to know Utopia, presumably we must shed everything that we do know, everything that is meaningful in our present, along with everything repugnant and hateful in it. It is Søren Kierkegaard’s leap in the void and a loss of everything familiar that promises nothing in return. Even this experience, not of Utopia, but of the very idea of Utopia, is an act of self-estrangement. It is thereby clear what role the party has to play in such a conversion; the party are the enthusiasts — they represent people who in one way or another can claim to have approached that experience, the ecstasy of the political, as it were, to have the authority and legitimacy if not to transmit it then at least to convey its feeling, its inner promise.

I have used the word conversion; and the analogy with religion certainly imposes itself, at the same time that it demands explanation and a degree of caution. For it has often been said that Marxism was a kind of religion, and this is generally meant, even by religious critics, as a disparagement if not an outright insult. But what is not so often observed is that this judgment, which has a certain validity, is a two-way street. We would rather say that the religions are figural and superstitious anticipations of a unity of theory and practice that could not have been available in the societies in which they first emerged, and that Marxism is their secular realization in the first kind of society — capitalism — in which their truth —universalism, salvation, justice, the existence of the Other — could at least begin to be apprehended as a realistic possibility. So, the religions do offer a first way in which the experience of Utopia (or its idea) might dimly and as yet inadequately be grasped; or, in our present context, in which the mission of cultural revolution could begin to be formulated.

Cultural revolution is the superstructure of which the party is the infrastructure. Why not? Provided we reckon into this formulation all the historicity that it demands, the concrete nature of our current or historical situation, its unique limits, the nature of the obstacles not only of tradition but of the here and now, and not least the inevitable shortcomings of the intellectuals called upon to play their part in what must be a radically new political and historical experiment.

V.

Perhaps a further word on religion is appropriate here. For Alain Badiou, the historical adventure of Christianity (but it could also hold for the other “great” or “major” religions) lies in its universalism, its political success in mobilizing masses of people and creating its own superstructures, its own cultural revolution, around itself. I would agree that these are immensely instructive and impressive examples but also say that in the secular world they can no longer have the same efficacy.

I would also agree that Marxism, or socialism if you would prefer, would have to emulate that universalism in order come into its own, as it seemed on the point of doing during the Cold War. Immanuel Wallerstein, however, was prescient enough to argue that the latter was not a struggle between two systems but rather the struggle between the one dominant system of capitalism and what he called “anti-systemic” forces or movements, of which socialism was not the only one.

Later on, we find the instructive case of Robert Heilbroner, a mainstream economist who always had a certain tolerance for Marxism but who, after the “Fall,” suggested that socialism was still possible but only as a kind of religious enclave like the Islamic state, open to true believers but not universally practicable. Thus does Utopia return to its origins and to the monasterial conditions of Thomas More’s original Utopia, More having been a Roman Catholic who either mocked Utopian fantasies in his literary-experimental effort or else deduced their true origins in the monastery as a form (and probably both).

But religion is no longer viable in the secular world, except as ethics — the opposition between believers and nonbelievers — and consumerism or consumption as its ritual. In that case, the task of the Utopian imagination will lie in finding a substitute for ethics in politics and finding a substitute for subsumption in the aestheticization of life (on which Herbert Marcuse and Paolo Virno have written luminous pages).

About “aesthetics” as such, it can certainly be said that today, along with all the other specialized disciplines, like philosophy, it is a dead letter. Walter Benjamin, however, opposed aestheticization in the context of the fascist triumph in Europe. Postwar Marxists have used aestheticization as a counterweight to productivism and a way out of what they saw as the straitjacket of Eastern Marxist theory and practice.

But it seems to me that the aesthetic can include both: it is a productivism in its own right, and many modernist aesthetics have insisted on the process of production (energeia) as opposed to the inert product (ergon) as the truth of art in the first place. On the other hand, it offers the possibility of an object-world, a humanly produced world, a human age, as Wyndham Lewis liked to denounce it, in which we are unable to avoid realizing that this world is our own production and our own praxis. The Utopian wager here would be that in such a world consumerism in its addictive form would no longer be necessary and would shrink to manageable proportions. (The even worse scourge of our societies, that of narcotic drugs, presents the spectacle of another enhancement of the “natural” — and no doubt of religious ritual itself that further progress in pharmacology and satisfaction in “activity” (Hegel’s word, Tätigkeit) or production — Marx’s — might be able to assuage. At any rate, perhaps we might add addiction to the deeper subjects of any truly socialist critical literature.)

VI.

In the light of all this, I venture to say a few words about my own effort in An American Utopia. It is a text that has been an embarrassment to present abroad, particularly in countries where brutal repression by military regimes does not incline its listeners to any great fondness or sympathy with such institutions. A few of those internal differences may be stressed in order to underscore the unique difficulties of a left politics in what I call the “superstate” today. The United States, as this expression suggests, is not a nation-state and cannot thereby draw on the affective resources of an older nationalism; indeed those resources, insofar as they mobilize distinct communities, tend to work in favor of fascist and counterrevolutionary movements.

But I have in mind first and foremost the peculiarity of our federal system and the existence of our Constitution. All state legitimacy has so far been founded on a kind of fetishism, whether of an event or a leader or an object of some kind: the storming of the Bastille, the person of Nelson Mandela, the reverence for a capital city or a sacred battlefield. Legitimacy is thus in the long run a kind of totemism; and Kant rightly stressed the historical novelty by which this founding fetish was first transformed into a written constitution and a documentation of rights as well as of duties and obligations. No intelligent American leftist would want to call for the abrogation of a document of this kind that protects us as much as it does the class enemy, and this, despite the fact that it is one of the most successful counterrevolutionary documents ever devised and one that goes far toward ensuring the impossibility of revolution in the United States.

It does so primarily by way of its organization as a federal system; and one must say, from the very outset, that any Utopia must confront the logic and necessity of federalism to have any purchase on political reality today. Federalism is the demand for Difference, as opposed to the equalities and Identity of direct democracy, and it is the reef on which both the Soviet Union and the “former” Yugoslavia foundered.

For federalism expresses not only the heterogeneity of the populations involved but also and above all the inequalities of the terrain itself, of the earth on which we are all ultimately dependent. The terrains of any national unity are uneven with respect to natural resources, richness of soil, access to energy, and so forth: only a federal system can guarantee that the wealthier areas of the state contribute to the amelioration of the more infertile parts (and this is as true on the international level as on the national one, where ecology comes into play along with so-called underdevelopment, industrial pollution, and the like). It is then also clear why, in the appropriate situations, the richer parts of a union will wish to pull away and abandon the poorer ones or search for an arrangement whereby dependency and underdevelopment can be exploited for profit.

The American Constitution, in part for different historical reasons (slavery), secured as best it could some security of the smaller and more impoverished states over against the richer ones. But this leads, as a kind of unexpected collateral damage, to the situation of political decentralization today, where left movements are unable to win any kind of overall consensus or hegemony and are condemned to local or state-limited effectiveness and are thereby necessarily denied any long-range possibilities.

Faced with this structural quandary, I suggested that it might be worth considering the political availability of one the few trans-state political forms, an institution capable of acting across state boundaries without in any way defying the structures posited by the Constitution: those could remain in force at the same time a transcendence of them could come into play that existed on another level entirely and did not technically conflict with them, namely the “universality” of the armed forces. Whence the historical language of dual power, borrowed from a key moment in the Russian Revolution. This formulation was a third possibility, to be added, in the American case, to the Gramscian alternative of wars of position and wars of maneuver, seizures of power or the long social democratic march through the institutions: Winter Palace or ballot box.

Meanwhile, the very existence of the army as an institution — and one in many cases designed to produce a national homogeneity out of the multiple languages and identities of the already existing nation — might serve, in such a Utopian manifesto, to convey something of what a genuine party form might do, how it might be reimagined, and what its new powers and capacities might consist in. But like all politics, this proposal was based on a contingent situation, on American (or norteamericano) realities, and the figure it took was clearly not necessarily something available in other national situations.

VII.

But the Utopian questionnaire is endless — maybe that is the usefulness of the topic — and there are always further problems to note, dilemmas to point out, contradictions to be “triumphantly” demonstrated. Yes, I have often tried to insist on the fear of Utopia, inasmuch as the passage from the known to the unknown, the sacrifice of everything we have invented to make life livable on this side of Utopia, the prospect of a thoroughgoing existential transformation of the self and its relations to others and to nature — these are indeed fearful matters. And of course, why change anything if you are comfortable enough in your existence? Which is surely the case with a substantial part of the US public.

Assuming, however, that we are motivated to cross this momentous threshold — whether by internal factors — subjective distress — or external ones — poverty, ecological disaster — what then do we confront after what has been called “the end of history,” which in our context simply means American global hegemony, the triumph of the free market and of its representative system of electoral “democracy”; or what Marx calls “the end of prehistory,” by which he means a form of socialism or communism he is careful never to define?

Many of these questions simply reproduce the basic ones: the matter of labor unions, for example, simply replays the antagonism between individual interests and systemic ones — the system, in capitalism, being the demands of accumulation and the preservation of the profit mechanisms, while in socialism it would take the form of what I called federalism, namely the necessity of reconciling the inevitable unevenness of the various parts and participants. Both of these, in a paradoxical way, are forms of dual power: the union under capitalism claims to occupy the space of a democracy of workers, while under socialism, ideally, it is the party which, replacing management, claims to represent the interests of a different kind of totality over against individual demands. This is why Solidarity (with a little help from the Roman Catholic Church) became a reactionary force as soon as it won; and why, in Francis Spufford’s wonderful novel Red Plenty, the party is unable to use its magical new information system to accede to the demands of the workers.

But this is a conflict that cannot be solved philosophically, which is to say, in the abstract, and for good and all, as some kind of new law. Each of these conflicts will be contingent and can only be solved on a uniquely historical basis. This is what is meant by the persistence of antagonism in Utopia, or better still, by the transfer of the antagonisms of class struggle to those of ontology itself.

I’ve said that every Utopia is written against certain current cultural objections; and that was certainly the case with An American Utopia, where the ostensible enemy was the prospect of boredom and of a candy-coated world in which there are no longer any conflicts and everything comes in pastel shades. But obviously and by definition, there is always generational conflict — it is the principal inner danger for any kind of Utopian system; and then there are issues like that of the labor unions that illustrate a tension between empirical individual interests and those of the totality.

And then there is bureaucracy: What of its critique? And are not all negative judgements on socialism ultimately objections to bureaucracy? (Thus, the terror itself, the arrests and trials and the like, are surely in the long run to be attributed to the rigid bureaucracy of the state and its police?) But I have tried to make the point elsewhere that what we called “dissidents” are in fact socialist dissidents and an organic part of any genuine socialist culture. The fundamental topic of any properly socialist literature is the critique of bureaucracy; the critical job of a socialist culture lies precisely in its attention to the weaknesses and malfunctioning of the system.

All of this amounts to what both Antonio Gramsci and György Lukacs called “the end of Capital,” or, in other words, of the book and of the critique of the system it staged. It is what Jean-Paul Sartre meant, I think, when he said that at this point in history (the end of prehistory, as Marx would say), Marxism will give way to existentialism and ontology. Dilemmas that were hitherto political ones now are fought out on the ontological level.

Thus, individual relations and their incompatibilities do not disappear but become part of the existential adventure of the individual life. As for group antagonisms, perhaps Callenbach is right, and secession is one solution that any federalism needs to envision (provided it is somehow integrated into the global state itself in new ways). We are told that various kind of people want to live by and among themselves: if it does not involve conflicts over land — one of the primary issues in present-day world politics, as I have tried to show elsewhere — a form of autonomy within federalism seems to offer a satisfactory solution (and probably one that will in the long run dissolve itself).

As far as the conflict with Nature is concerned, the paradox must be this: that in order to have a worthy antagonist, in order to restore Nature to what it has traditionally been, namely the fundamental enemy of an autonomous human race, Nature must itself be restored from its poisoned, enfeebled state, or in other words from the condition in which modern human beings have left it, and rendered again fit to be the world in which we can alone exist. The paradox lies in the way in which, as a natural species within an organic totality, we have made ourselves semiautonomous and capable of living independently of that system, within which, however, we can alone exist. We could, of course, become completely autonomous and separate from that system, but that means self-annihilation. As a species, we then reenact the drama of all separatisms but on a scale that is the terminal one for us.

Yes, I have insisted, perhaps too much, on the “death of the subject” (an old and well-worn structuralist tune) and on the Sartrean nothingness of consciousness, etc. But I remain a Sartrean, and this is the bias through which I seek to correct other misunderstandings of Utopia, communism, politics and, in the long run, I guess, existence itself. Like so much else, this can easily be mistaken for nihilism, or maybe I should say, recognized for the nihilism it also is. But once again, I want to emphasize a basic ambiguity in the argument: life may well have no meaning, or else its meaning is that as a species we have a fundamental function, after which we are quite unnecessary and to be discarded like a worn-out shoe. My point, however, would be that it is we ourselves who give that meaningless life a meaning and that we don’t need Nature to do it for us.