What is the position of utopia today? This is a question Peter Beilharz leaves open in reflections, both personal and historical, on the fate of utopia across the twentieth century and early twenty-first (‘My Own Private Utopia’). Once abundant and collective, utopian dreams had, by the turn of the millennium, largely receded from the social world, leaving a void to be increasingly filled by new dystopias—climate destabilisation; resurgent right-wing authoritarianism; technological domination; plague—the future becoming a prospect less of collective hope or aspiration than dread. And yet, as Beilharz reminds us, utopia is not dead: ‘the principle of hope still has its carriers.’ Here I wish to pick up Beilharz’s narrative, suggesting that in our current conjuncture of cascading crises, the possibility of utopia emerges precisely in the ruins of the last century, in the dissolution of the dreams of modernity and the disintegrative sense of the end of the world today. What Beilharz observes as the hinging of utopia and dystopia after 1917, can, from this perspective, be seen as a broader dialectic, still in motion. And now that the neoliberal ‘utopia’ has descended unmistakably into dystopia, all that remains is to think the world anew.

Beilharz’s narrative begins at the utopian peak of the twentieth century. Coming of age as the 1960s passed into the 1970s, when social revolution still hung in the air and ‘utopia seemed ubiquitous; the possibilities of new worlds abundant,’ these were particularly rich ambient conditions for discovering not just the idea but also the substance of utopia. He recounts a constellation of formative moments offering passageways into other worlds and other ways of being: a first independent home, rich in communal spirit and ‘endless music’; music-making and the world wrapped around it (countercultural, politically radical, ‘ecstatic’); and voracious reading, which would eventually lead to Marxism, a utopian portal if ever there was one, for Beilharz, as he reflects elsewhere, a ‘point of carriage into so many other worlds and ways of thinking’ (2020, p. 1). But entering this portal is to step into ambiguity: to discover both the expansive multiplicity of the Marxist utopian horizon, but also to be faced with its darker associations, the nightmares brought to life, after 1917, in the name of Marxist dreams—the point at which, in Beilharz’s characterisation, ‘utopia and dystopia became something of a hinge.’ Utopia, then, ‘was everywhere, for better and for worse.’

But by the end of the century, utopia, once ubiquitous if ambiguous, had seemingly disappeared. The ‘communist’ experiments had given both Marxism and utopia a bad reputation, and the collapse of the Soviet Union signalled in the social imaginary the collapse of Marxist utopianism as such, indelibly disgraced by its ‘totalitarian’ associations. Meanwhile, the sense of utopian openness released by the 1960s had long dissipated, privatised, like everything else, in the neoliberal turn—itself a marker, of course, of the latter’s success as a utopian project, its universalisation heralded as the end of history. A singular, homogenising vision of globalised capitalism now dominated the terrain of the possible and imaginable, and what remained of utopian desire, no longer capable of envisioning social alternatives or believing in a future transformed, tended instead towards the cult of consumption: ‘Marcuse had been right all along.’

Through all this, Beilharz observes, the meaning and markers of the good life shifted. The Antipodean ‘modest utopia’ of decent work and the quarter-acre dream, a product of post-war Keynesian social democracy (ostensibly egalitarian, although always somewhat compromised in societies built on stolen land), was short lived. As market fundamentalism supplanted earlier values of social welfare, some secured a life of conspicuous consumption and a degree of freedom from wage labour as beneficiaries of a steep rise in real estate values, ‘serial landlordism’ a new pinnacle of aspiration. For others, though, consigned by the casualisation of work and the commodification of housing to a life of ‘shitwork’ and ever-increasing rents, aspiration has all but collapsed—a loss of futurity that only intensifies as climate change becomes ever more proximate and irrepressible, functioning as a hard limit on the utopian imagination today. In such conditions, it is no wonder, as Beilharz, riffing Bauman, notes, that ‘retrotopias’ have proliferated: ‘when you can no longer dream forward, then you may dream back.’ Thus the nostalgia overtly operative in the right-wing populist imaginary of the last decade, but also, slightly differently, in the desire to get ‘back to normal’ after the pandemic: ‘more lost opportunities.’ Meanwhile, the most explicitly utopian visions of our time, emerging from Silicon Valley, offer up only fantasies of exodus from a burning planet (SpaceX, Blue Origin) or Matrix-like dematerialisation (the Metaverse). These, then, are the dystopian ruins of the neoliberal utopia, in which the good life remains elusive for most.

Like many of the post-history generation—born after the death of communism, into triumphant neoliberalism and ‘happy globalisation,’ entering adulthood as these horizons started to collapse with the GFC—these were the broad conditions in which my own relationship to social hope was shaped. A utopian void, worlds away from the expansive formative encounters Beilharz recalls. But it is from this generational disjunct that I wish to pick up Beilharz’s notion of the hinging of utopia and dystopia, which takes on new meaning from the perspective of the ruins.

Because it is clear, today, as the utopian coordinates of neoliberal capitalism have dissolved into dystopian realities—indeed, as the utopian impulses of modernity as such, of progress and enlightenment, find their dystopian limits in environmental breakdown, technological domination, conspiracy theory—that this tendency of dreams and nightmares to bleed together, to be mutually implicated, is not peculiar to socialist history, but rather a broader dialectic of modernity. This insight is, indeed, implicit in Beilharz’s own narrative: he notes, for example, how just as the 1960s were a time of utopian abundance, ‘hell, or dystopia was there nightly on TV,’ in reports of the Vietnam war; he gestures, as well, to the colonial expression of this dialectic, settler utopias built on the dystopia of violent dispossession. Dreams and nightmares, heaven and hell, hope and dread: as modernity slips into decay (does it not feel, today, that we are living at the end of the world, or at least of a world?) it could be tempting to conclude that utopia must, finally, be abandoned as well, unable to escape its dystopian shadow. But this is to forget that the dialectic works in the opposite direction too. And as the dystopian coordinates of the present expand and multiply, it is utopia that forces its way through once more.

Thus it is precisely as the climate crisis has shifted from an apocalyptic fantasy into a present reality—a turning point we might locate in 2018, when the IPCC reported that only twelve years remained to limit irreversible climate catastrophe, since when emissions have not reduced, but reports of record-breaking temperatures, floods, wildfires have notably accelerated—that the necessity of transforming the human–nature relationship, the absolute impossibility of continuing on as we are, has been recognised for its utopian prospects. Alongside an increasingly militant and indignant climate activism has thus emerged, as well, a broad (and long-overdue) ecosocialist horizon. The most debated versions of this horizon are degrowth and the green new deal, and while much intellectual energy has been spent on the distinctions between these ostensibly competing visions, much more significant is their shared orientation to how the urgency of transforming our relationship to nature, to repairing what Marx described as the ‘metabolic rift’ of capitalism, represents not loss or sacrifice, but possibility. This emergent ecosocialist horizon thus reframes the climate crisis as an urgent utopian opportunity to transform, as well, our social relations, to be organised no longer according to the priorities of capital accumulation (offering a future of shitwork, empty consumption, then climate breakdown), but human, social need: a different kind of abundance, for all, within planetary limits. Almost as a matter of necessity, then, the utopian impulse is reactivated in the ruins, the end of this world creating the conditions for imagining what other worlds we might hope to bring into being.

These are the conditions, as well, for the rediscovery of older horizons. At the end of the twentieth century, it was assumed that the arc of socialist history had come to a close: Marxism, socialism, communism meant totalitarianism; only the market could ensure freedom, prosperity, and democracy. But the market hasn’t followed through on its promises, and as capitalism itself grows increasingly totalitarian, this post-history common sense, no longer tenable, has begun to dissolve. And in this state of hegemonic instability, socialist desire has been free to bloom once more: slowly, shyly at first, in the wake of 2008, picking up pace after 2016, unfurling memetically throughout the social imaginary, taking root where one would most expect it (left-wing movements and media, expanding from small enclaves into a broader socialist milieu) but also emerging in more surprising places (centrist parties in the neoliberal heartlands, popular film and television, Teen Vogue). It is, notably, the post-history generations at the centre of this re-emergent socialism: those for whom the Cold War bears little relevance, who have no stakes in the old debates, but instead, facing a future of shrinking economic prospects, resurgent right-wing enemies, and climate chaos, are searching for intellectual and utopian resources to imagine a way out of our current path to oblivion. Here, socialism is not a shorthand for totalitarianism, but, rediscovered with fresh eyes, signifies instead a much broader history of struggle, an archive of hope, and a horizon of possibility.

Today, then, we on new imaginative terrain. Utopia doesn’t look as it did in the twentieth century, with its competing grand narratives of capitalism and communism; teleology has collapsed, the fantasy of ‘progress’ no longer convinces. The utopian impulse, instead, ‘without guarantees,’ fossicks in the ruins, pulling together new horizons out of the lost dreams of the past and the steep challenges of the future, rediscovering hope precisely in the interstices of the end of the world.

In such imaginative conditions, the tradition of utopian Marxism offers critical intellectual resources still. The central figure here remains Ernst Bloch, whose insistence on the ubiquity of utopia—its diffuse cultural presence, the traces of different futures always discernible, even in the bleakest of conditions—echoes through the utopian impulse today. While thoroughly heterodox in his own time, rejecting both the rigidities of communist orthodoxy and the pessimism of western Marxism, Bloch’s thought made explicit the utopian core of Marxism, which as Fredric Jameson summarises, consists not simply in the utopian project of Marxist politics, but in the broader utopian ontology of historical materialism, ‘a conception of historical dynamics [positing] that the whole new world is also objectively in emergence all around us.’ This utopian ontology then facilitates ‘a more receptive and interpretive stance in which … we may detect the allegorical stirrings of a different state of things … the subliminal and subcutaneous eruptions of whole new forms of life,’ prefigured in the present (Jameson, 2009, p. 416).

Bloch’s own project, on this basis, was an exercise in fossicking for utopian surplus: through him, the archives of civilisation are transformed into a repository of the Not-Yet, desires and impulses towards an enriched humanity, an emancipatory future, still to be redeemed (a more hopeful messianism than Benjamin’s sense of history as wreckage upon wreckage, although their logics, often borrowed from one another, are similar). In Bloch’s teleology, these traces pointed towards the communist horizon; they would make up the future heritage of communism. No such certain faith, of course, can be mustered today, but nevertheless, utopia emerges once more, out of the ruins, as that ‘vital presence’ which, ‘beneath whatever distortions, whatever layers of repression, may always be detected, no matter how faintly, by the instruments and apparatus of hope itself’ (Jameson, 1971, p. 120). And perhaps this allows for the emergence of a more minimal, but durable faith: faith in the persistence of utopian desire, faith in the end of the world itself.

It remains to be seen how these re-emergent utopian desires might transform the political terrain in the twenty-first century. We appear to sit at the precipice of a longer political arc, a battle for the future far from the grand utopian visions of the twentieth century, but consisting instead in the asymmetrical challenge of wrenching back the basic conditions for the very possibility of the good life from a capitalism that rarely, any longer, even bothers to veil its violence behind utopian pretences. Back to the perennial choice: (minimum) socialism or (maximum) barbarism. The principle of hope will remain, through all this, a critical resource.

A note in closing. I take the title of these reflections from a passage I recently rediscovered packing up my postgrad office (a record of my own fossicking). An excerpt from Chris Kraus’ Where Art Belongs, quoting collage artist Paul Gellman in 2008 Los Angeles, written for a different context, it nevertheless captures or anticipates something of the position and feeling of utopia today. For Gellman, ‘being a good collage/assemblage artist’—

or, for our purposes, being utopian, today, at the end of the world—requires being a good scavenger. As you walk down the filthy streets outside of your hovel you are probably feeling depressed because for one you live in a hovel, or you are affecting an air of the disaffected … Use your downward gaze as an opportunity to see the beautiful detritus that our polluted city offers … Begin to see recurring themes, colors, shapes in the pieces of trash your eye is drawn to. If you are attracted to something, it is because in some way it represents you and the more you learn about yourself the more freedom you have from said hovel …

quoted in Kraus (2011, p. 36)

The polluted city, the ruins of modernity, contain utopian surplus still, the beautiful detritus with which we might reimagine the future once more.

References

Beilharz, P (2020) Circling Marx: Essays 1980–2020. Boston: Brill.

Jameson, F (1971) Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jameson, F (2009) Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso.

Kraus, C (2011) Where Art Belongs. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Author Bio

Georgia Lockie is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. She was recently awarded her PhD in sociology from Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. Her thesis, titled Resources for Hope, revisits the historical relationship between Marxism and utopia and explores a series of contemporary post-capitalist utopian constellations.