The Utopia Principle — Locust Review

This is the editorial from *Locust Review* 8 (Summer 2022), written in late spring and early summer 2022.

“Emancipatory politics always consist in making seem possible that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.” – Alain Badiou

THE SOVIET Union saw an unprecedented number of time capsules buried in 1967. This was the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Most were dug up around the time of its centenary, in 2017.

Some are fairly mawkish. “We are a little jealous,” read one message unearthed in Arkhangelsk, “of all of you celebrating the centenary of our Soviet motherland.” But others reveal a genuine and sincere belief that, whatever deformities the Soviet experiment had generated, a world without greed, inequality, or war was in the offing. “You are the lucky generation,” reads another message, “wars are just history.”

Still others dreamt of the technological, cultural and medical marvels that a communist future might yield. One message from Novosibirsk envisioned representatives of the human race “talking with representatives of other galaxies about scientific and cultural collaborations.”

Still another, this time from Tiraspol in modern-day Moldova, asserted that the marvels of full communism would eliminate death entirely:

Dear comrades-descendants, the labourers of the 20th century are writing to you. Tell your children and grandchildren how we struggled for your right to immortality. We lived in heroic times when great discoveries were made, when the world was shaken by revolutions and wars burned the planet. […] You have probably already eliminated all harmful bacteria and viruses and live without aging or sickness. But it was us who helped you in this, when we discovered the mysteries of cancer and overcame the barrier of tissue incompatibility.

Moving. No two ways about it. And also, given the circumstances in which they were dug up, heartbreaking. The centenary of the Russian Revolution, at least as it was imagined by the comrades in 1967, never happened. It is difficult to imagine a landscape more dystopian, more opposite to the ideals and hopes unleashed in 1917, than that of 2017.

Difficult but not impossible. As we know, things have on the whole gotten worse in the past five years. Look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the devastation and death it wrought, the floods of refugees – along with the Eurocentric, racist double-standards reflected in governments’ responses – and the global wheat crisis unleashed. Russophobic reactions to this are not only wrong, they are painfully shortsighted regarding the role that global imperial rivalry played in it. Nonetheless, the central role that Russia has played in creating this hell shows us just how bitter history’s ironies can be.

The shortcomings of “actually existing socialism,” at least in its Warsaw Pact iterations, were significant. The democratic deficit of most of these countries was, directly or indirectly, the source of their disillusionment and downfall. The great tragedy of their demise wasn’t found only in the content of those societies but also in what their demise did to the collective imagination. “There is no alternative,” the triumphalist yelp of what we now know as capitalist realism, also signified a crisis in the very idea of utopia.

Enzo Traverso deftly describes this crisis as “breaking the dialectic of the 20th century.” We could easily and plausibly take it several steps further and say that it broke the dialectic of the entirety of modern history. For the main tensions of modernity have always been between what is and what could be, and specifically what could be better. From the minute the capitalist mode of production started to rear its head in the backwater that was late-medieval Europe, so did the idea that plentitude could and should be shared equally.

These shifting sands in surplus possibility were not by any means an unqualified good. They came as a result of extreme violence done against European peasants, Africans and the indigenous of the Americas. But these upheavals in the global order also brought with them the hope that things could be better, that the accumulation of wealth at the top of society might be brought back down to earth. It is, of course, no coincidence that Thomas More’s Utopia – the work that gave us the very word – came at a time when people’s sense of the world was dramatically opening up. Thus the competition between a harsh present and a better future took root. For every glutted monarch, a song for the world to be turned upside down. For every “dark Satanic mill,” a vision for a New Moral World.

The severing of this dialectic – thirty years to seemingly undo what took half a millennium to cultivate – bodes badly for all of us. Now, with climate crisis bearing down, the seams of society are popping. One doesn’t have to be a regular reader of Locust Review to know what we’re talking about, but it is also true that mining the bizarre and eldritch contradictions of this conjuncture are this publication’s raison d’etre. It is what sends us into examining the connections of such odd and idiosyncratic concepts like “critical irrealism,” “capitalist realism,” “gothic futurism,” “acid communism” and on and on and on. Something something easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism something something something…

YES, OUR imaginations are hemmed in. Nearly two generations after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with only free-market capitalism and its mutant authoritarian outgrowths reigning over the planet, this can hardly be a surprise. Reestablishing something like a utopian imaginary is, therefore, fraught with all manner of pitfalls both material and ideological. In the midst of so many overlapping crises, what use can utopia or imagination be? If utopia can only be imagined, then how does it solve the problems of late capitalist existence? Finally, if we accept that imagination itself is utopian – fanciful, indulgent, frivolous – then why bother with it? Why not concern ourselves with the bare factuality of what exists in order to change it?

These are worthy questions, but they start from a faulty premise. More specifically, they discount the role that human imagination has played in literally all societal transformation. Whether that imagination – that problem solving, that creativity – was provoked by necessity or whether it entered only after some form of long material struggle, it played an essential role. The bifurcation of what we call imagination from what we call reason isn’t the natural result of brain hemispheres but of a system that regards every human being as little more than a data bank destined for mindless tasks.

Countless writers and thinkers – mostly but not exclusively left-wing – have argued for the centrality of imagination in human cognition. More to the point, imagination is central to human subjectivity, our ability to look at the world around us, distinguish what needs changing, decide how to change it and then, finally, to change it.

There is, of course, a qualifier. Not every act of human imagination automatically lends itself to the project of bettering the world. Imagination is just as likely to produce death camps as it is movements for liberation (though the debate about the role that capitalist rationality plays in the former, what our comrade Holly Lewis calls “rational stupefaction,” is an open one). Nonetheless, we find ourselves taken aback by how readily this order, which thirty years ago declared its triumph the apex of human freedom, dismisses and represses what is arguably our most human quality.

The repression of imagination is, therefore, directly related to the weakness of the utopian ideal. Throughout most of history, to be “utopian” was not such a slur. It might have been a dismissal, but a dismissal that would consequently need to be argued. The ideal merited debate. Today it doesn’t. And that’s a grave problem. What’s more, we on the left haven’t attempted to solve the problem as much as we’ve adapted to it. And that simply compounds the problem.

One hundred years ago, the surrealists, that famous, much-misunderstood radical politico-cultural movement, in whose tradition Locust stands, viewed themselves in allegiance with Freud’s “pleasure principle.” Against all that capital dumped on humanity, burying our most primal pleasure-seeking impulses, the surrealists declared themselves.

Locust, in this issue, seeks to plant its flag in a similar direction: the utopia principle. The principle is the bottom line; the concept to which you cling most fiercely, even in the face of oblivion. And as we discuss among ourselves, as we absorb the terrors of the world and square them against the world we want, the world we want must be our metric. Far from being an inert nicety, a luxury for future post-revolutionary generations to indulge in, utopia is a framework through which everything must be regarded.

IN HER recent book Utopia In the Age of Survival, S.D. Chrostowska provides a thoroughgoing ontology of utopia in capitalism’s end-times. In this ontology, as the title implies, utopia is an analytical starting point due not to its distance from the need to survive in the face of ecological and political collapse, but its proximity.

“For it is now clear that,” the author writes, “to get out of the present dystopia, humans must be prepared for almost superhuman sacrifice and effort. We must be ready, in other words, to do the impossible, synonym for utopian.”

For Chrostowska, the fight for survival gives rise to both hope and desire, a dialectical interplay that makes utopian speculation so fecund. Put more simply, utopia may take root despite and because of the situation has become so desperate. One of her book’s secondary aims is the defense of myth as an essential part of the human experience, as a starting point for radical critique.

Not all myths, to be perfectly clear, are created equal. A great many are necessary for the functioning of late-late capitalism. We can list any number off the tops of our heads. “The best of all possible systems.” “Work hard and you’ll get ahead.” “War and violence, racism and sexism, are merely human nature.” And the list goes on.

Chrostowska insightfully points out that these kinds of myths run deeper and are necessary for the functioning of ideology. Capital is, after all, incredibly adept at creating and channeling desire, including utopian desire. It doesn’t take long to pick out the moments in which utopia itself becomes commoditized. In turn, our longing for the Good Society suffers the same fate.. As she writes:

Left-wing political myths can build up our desire for something better and greater for all of us. But not all popular myths converting despair into hope are equally serviceable to the left. Those that rapidly proliferate as a mainstream media spectacle should be approached with caution; they may be convenient enough to serve nothing but the status quo.

This is not unlike what China Mieville identifies in his essay “The Limits of Utopia” as “bad utopia.”

“Utopias are necessary.,” writes Mieville. “But not only are they insufficient: they can, in some iterations, be part of the ideology of the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.”

We don’t need to look very long for instances of this. It is evident even walking downtown. In the largest American cities this is where working class, homeless and indigent mix on dingy street corners beneath palatial penthouses whose occupants only dare venture outside behind the safety of the tinted window of a limousine. The rich have always been skilled at floating their paradise over our hellscape. We should expect the gap between the two to widen. If Elon Musk’s or Jeff Bezos’ respective jaunts into space are any indication, it will reach literally beyond the stratosphere.

The trick, of course, is in having us believe that we might one day get our individual ticket to the top. If collective utopia is impossible – indeed, isn’t even sincerely part of the discourse – then we had best spend our time striving to occupy the penthouse spaceships ourselves. The media landscape – as well as the landscapes of art and culture more generally – are littered with examples of these bad utopias. Right now, they have a massive upper hand.

HOW THEN to delineate the good and bad utopias? One of the key arguments of Utopia In the Age of Survival is teleological in nature. Time, as we have argued before in the pages of Locust, is empty and homogenous under capitalism. Day melts into day, repetition throttling our sense of anticipation and futurity, all so that the “assembly line time” of commodity can continue to flow with as little interruption as possible. Bad utopias thrive on this. The utopia of rugged individualism we see in pickup truck commercials fools us into seeing homogenous time as meaningful, even as the trucks themselves are part of an industry that robs us of a collective future. It is a telos that surrounds us even as it is ungraspable, a “success” that we all have internalized and yet are completely unable to achieve.

“True” utopian time is dramatically punctuated. It is the kind of time described by Walter Benjamin in his “Theses On the Concept of History.” This is time pregnant with possibility, containing the seeds of multiple outcomes, wildly divergent in potential and ready to erupt given the right push.

Of course, if it were as easy as simply identifying “the right push” it probably would have been made by now. Which is why so much of the utopian thought of the twentieth century – from Benjamin to Marcuse, from the Situationists to Ursula Le Guin, Miguel Abensour back to Ernst Bloch – sought to bring the utopias of the previous five hundred years off the page and make them immanent. To make utopia critical is to “educate desire.” This educated desire is one that dodges its capture by the culture industry and consumerism, refusing to accept the inevitability of boring wage labor. Once again, Chrostowska:

This idea of desire as emancipated through critical education, aspiring to and anticipating a utopian future, stands in sharp contrast to desire as morally disciplined consistent with the status quo or with a predetermined program for change that reproduces existing relations of domination.

This is what sets apart the false utopias of capital, and even a great amount of the utopias that animated the last decades of the Eastern Bloc. Meaningful utopia – or at least a society that strives for it – must be radically democratic in content. Its shape must be constantly in flux as we help educate and nurture each other, as our desires attain greater and greater heights of fulfillment and freedom.

And yet, it would be wrong to look at this “educated desire” as something completely apart from reality, or even our current pleasures and pastimes. Notions of communism as po-faced and self-serious, looking down its nose at the baseness of “low culture,” have predominated left iconography for too long.

There is a strong affinity between what Chrostowska writes and what the late Mark Fisher and Matt Colquhoun attempt to map in Postcapitalist Desire. This is a desire that necessarily must have its starting point in the contradictions of capitalism itself. The new human beings of socialism will not emerge fully formed. Nor, to take a bit of pressure off ourselves, should we really want them to. Our lives are not completely devoid in capitalism of pleasure or joy, the kinds of experiences everyone should have not only access to but have in spades. The problem, of course, is that the social arrangement of capitalism prevents it.

In the introduction of Postcapitalist Desire, Colquhoun looks at the Sleaford Mods’ “Jobseeker,” in which a long jobless young man shows up at the unemployment office to certify his benefits. When asked what he has done to find “gainful employment,” he simply replies “Fuck all!”

He elaborates: “I’ve been sat around the house wanking.” When asked by the office whether he wants to go back to work, it is a similar, deliciously honest response: “Nah, I’d just end up robbing the fucking place. You’ve got a till full of 20s staring at you all day; I’m hardly going to bank it. I’ve got drugs to take, and a mind to break!”

Filtered through the ironic-non-ironic finger-wagging of the bourgeois gaze, it would be easy to see the song as a satirical jab at British “benefits scroungers.” But anyone who knows anything about the politics of Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson knows that is far from the case. As Colquhoun writes:

The jobseeker rejects the moralised figure of the downtrodden and out of luck. It is the inverse of a figure like Daniel Blake, as seen in Ken Loach’s critically acclaimed 2016 film I, Daniel Blake. Rather than raising consciousness through sympathy, depicting, through a fiction, the abject reality of the British welfare state, Williamson raises consciousness through bloody-mindedness, bottling and weaponizing the shame of class subordination. This is not to say the Sleaford Mods’ rejection of a Ken Loach image is a rejection of that form of political consciousness; it simply offers up an inverse image of proletarian subjectivity: ejected from the system and loving it… Fuck your middle-class propriety! I’ve got desires to pursue!

The recognition of anti-work as central to proletarian subjectivity is in perfect tandem with the revival of utopian critique. It gives us a defiant, joyous, almost psychedelic standpoint through which to reimagine everything. To ask whether the current set-up truly benefits us or whether it’s just their boring, moralistic ideology talking.

How many of our jobs are useful only to the turn of a profit, completely unnecessary to our survival or enjoyment? How many of these could be reimagined to be more creative or rewarding? How many could simply be eliminated? How many of those remaining could be automated? Is there anything really keeping this from happening even as each and every one of us has all the shelter, sustenance, education and enrichment we could ever want?

It is precisely this – this rupture from the burdens that have weighed down our days – that makes utopian time so explosive. The education of our imaginations, the delineation of utopias is a matter of viewing every facet of daily life through the prism of what could be. To imagine them freed from the temporal confines of commodity, delivered into the transformative power of mass democracy, as enrichments rather than fetters and obligations.

Presently, we are seeing proof of what will happen if our imaginations cannot rise to the challenge. Historical ruptures swing both ways. The pandemic has already broken many of the threadbare connections of just-in-time production. Despite infrastructure becoming a central talking point of official politics, it is clear that the will to repair and expand it is completely lacking in Washington. Either the mechanisms of production will be transformed for human need, or they will collapse entirely.

UNFORTUNATELY, MUCH of the organized left has diminished the role of our imaginations and the primacy of utopia. Some of it can be explained by simple isolation. Until recently the socialist vision had spent so long confined to the margins that most groups could only cling to the basics. The orthodox Marxist polemic against the utopians – Fourier, Robert Owen, the Comte de Saint-Simon, all of whom had a massive impact on the visions of Marx and Engels – have been overdetermined and frozen into catechism. Among many of the very people whose raison d’etre is the achievement of a better world, utopia has also become a pejorative. As for socialist organization and activism, little wonder that both feel more similar to our day jobs than anything like liberation.

But times change, both for the good and the bad. The stakes are higher, but so is the number of people who count themselves among the ranks of socialists. We can afford to open our minds to the necessity of utopia; and we are in desperate need of its critical potentials.

Scattered throughout this issue are a few poems and/or song lyrics, encompassing a time period that stretches from the late medieval through the early 1900’s, from an age of peasant rebellions to the heyday of the Industrial Workers of the World. “The Land of Cokaygne,” reprinted here, is thought to have been written around the mid 1350s by an Irish Franciscan monk, who lambested the ascetic strictures of cloister life. The titular land is one of unlimited gratification and equality.

Though the version here first appears in the Kildare Poems of the mid fourteenth century, the land of Cokaygne (with various different spellings) was part of medieval myth throughout Europe. In France it was known as “Cocaigne.” In Italy it was “Paesse della Cuccagna,” in German it was “Schlaraffenland.” And in the Swedish dialect, where “lubber” came to be a word for “fat lazy fellow,” Cokaygne became “Lubberland.”

The 1685 broadside ballad “An Invitation to Lubberland,” obviously, takes its inspiration from this. Like Cokaygne, Lubberland is a place of infinite plenty and leisure. All play. No work. Sung as an address specifically to sailors and ship crew members, it may be easy to read a tinge of colonial-era romance into it. But given its date of publication, coming at a time of massive imperial expansion and the entrenchment of capitalism, when an untold number of poor peasants were torn from their land and thrust into either factory or ship’s hull, it is difficult to deny the egalitarian impulse and sneer against lawyers and judges.

Three hundred years later, “An Invitation to Lubberland” served as the inspiration for Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock’s “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” McClintock, a lifelong Wobbly and itinerant laborer, had spent years living as a traveling hobo. His song adapts the basic premise of Cokaygne and Lubberland to a more unmistakably modern timbre. Along with hens laying soft-boiled eggs and rivers of whiskey, the cops have wooden legs and jails hold no power. And the cigarette trees may very well be the same from which “they hung the jerk that invented work.”

It is, admittedly, only one branch in the lineage of utopia, and an undeniably Eurocentric one at that. What merits discussing here is that none of these compositions existed merely to entertain. In the context of profound inequality and immiseration, they should be interpreted as satire at its purest and most barbed. Not just a lambaste of present conditions, they could also serve as agitation, a carnivalesque promise of what lay on the other side of upheaval, rebellion, and revolution.

We are, luckily, not at a complete loss for a contemporary example, something to draw the visions of Cockaigne, Lubberland, and McClintock’s mountain off the page and into a praxis of immanent critique. In the United States, even as most of the organized left grapples with missed opportunities and identifying the best way forward, the labor movement appears to be waking up. Last year’s “Striketober” doesn’t appear to have been a flash in the pan. Some of the most viciously anti-union employers – companies that helped make the technophilic, “flexible” just-in-time economy what it is today – are reeling from the wave of unionization. At the time of writing, Starbucks seems unable to prevent literally hundreds of locations from going union. Apple stores are filing union petitions.

And then there’s Amazon. Nobody reading this needs to be reminded of what a soulless, hellish place Amazon’s fulfillment centers are. The constant surveillance of employees’ every move, punitive slashing of hours, the pissing in bottles. The company has been just as unscrupulous about undermining union elections, as the fake ballot boxes in Alabama last year prove.

In the face of all that, we still have this beautiful image: Christian Smalls, head of the Amazon Labor Union, who barely a year-and-a-half ago was sacked from the Staten Island fulfillment center, standing in front of it. “We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space,” he told reporters, “because while he was up there we were signing people up.”

The crowd cheers. Smalls pops a bottle of champagne. King shit. Proving that liberation was never meant to be so arid, so business-like. Smalls’ words are naturally some well-earned bravado after an historic victory. They are also a stunning encapsulation of two futures at war: Jeff Bezos’ bad sci-fi utopia, and the workers who dared to picture themselves in better control of the techno-hellscape that surrounded them.

We know which side we choose. We’d be willing to bet you do too. If enough of us can take that same cue, that same step toward reimagining everything, then maybe all the visions of fifty years ago – the space communes, the elimination of disease and war, even the conquest of death itself – might be redeemed after all.

Subscribe to Locust Review for as little as $1 a month.
Submit work to Locust Review by e-mailing us at locust.review@gmail.com.

Selected images from Locust Review 8. Click on image for light box.