Have you ever felt like a stranger’s work was written for you especially? Or else, that you were the specific target of this stranger’s ire? Rare is it that these two experiences should intersect, and yet that it is precisely how I felt while reading Forest and Factory by Phil Neel and Nick Chavez. Starting from an excoriating critique of contemporary utopian thinking, they sketch an ‘anti-utopian utopia’ on the real constraints and conditions of communist construction. The aim of this self-conscious leap into the unknowable is to return Science to Science Fiction, and so construct a type of political imagination that actually concerns itself with what it means to make a social revolution. This is an admirable endeavor, and is sufficient by itself for me to recommend the piece. But though I would consider it a most fruitful contribution to the greater utopian genre, it seems as if the authors are intent on repudiating this association.
This is the part that stings. As someone who has dedicated a significant part of their intellectual life to the utopian genre, specifically in relation to the need for a post-capitalist imagination, the idea that my derivations may be no more sophisticated than those of the prisoners of Plato’s Cave (cleverly modernized in the article’s central metaphor) is hard to swallow. At the same time, I cannot help but be impressed by their broad-front assault on contemporary utopianism, as the niche nature of their references reveals a deep understanding of the genre.
What is so mystifying to me, then, is that they would present their own utopia as somehow anti-utopian, as if their project is of a fundamentally different kind to that of their self-sought opponents. Their own explanation for this turn is simple enough: Utopia signifies an absolute otherness, a place that cannot be reached, and which (by the admission of its authors) can only exist in the mind. As their opening quote by Bordiga implies, this is about as close to idealism as a piece of political writing can get, and this ought to be reason enough for any self-respecting communist to reject it. My reply to this perspective is equally simple: this is not (just) what Utopia means, and framing it as such leads Neel and Chavez to make an enemy out of their natural interlocutors. Even if I were to grant them the claim that many contemporary utopias are sloppy if not delusional—and this itself is worth critiquing—what their project represents is not some new Science Fiction, but merely another maneuver in the dialectic of utopia.
Let’s go back for a moment. Why have ‘we’ (Neel, Chavez, me, generations of political eccentrics) made such a bugbear out of the notion of Utopia? As with so many things, we could blame it on either Marx or Modernity. On the Marx end of things, there is the classic opposition between socialisms scientific and utopian, with the breakthrough of the former involving a rejection of the latter. Part of this opposition is explained by the aforementioned antipathy towards idealism: utopian socialists believe that political change comes about through the institution of an ideal state, a product of pure reason, instead of deriving from the conditions now in existence. While this is a potent critique of utopianism as a theory of change, it properly stands apart from a practical account of the utopians’ failings. Let us not forget that ‘real utopianism’ has already been tried, all the way back in the early 19th century. The establishment of various communal living schemes by people like Owen or Fourier proved unable to overcome the institution of a leaner, meaner mode of production, however ‘humane’ their designs were on paper. Thus, utopian socialism also failed as a practical project.
Much the same critique could be lodged against any day leftist who would practice an ‘intentional’ rather than a revolutionary mode of socialism. Really, there are countless ways of condemning such naïve initiatives: perhaps their creators are deluded ‘lifestyleists’ who think they can simply desert capitalist society. Or maybe they subsist on the privileged class character of their benefactors, who might well be members of the dreaded PMC.
If my tone is not obvious enough, I find such critiques to be overly contemptuous, if they have any content at all. Neel and Chavez do themselves dirty by even coming close to this line of attack. They argue that our appreciation of imaginary utopias, or our confusion of everyday practices for ‘real communism’, are both the delusional expressions of a demobilized people. In a way, it is the ‘opiate of the leftist’. But as with any opiate, it is better than pain, and scolding someone for using it rarely helps them kick the addiction. Moreover, it isn’t at all clear to me that the primary effect of these phenomena is sedative. Neel and Chavez point out that it at least represents a mass desire for change, even if the form of that change is grossly unscientific. I would argue that utopian thinking already does a great deal more than that. We can see this in the recent re-appraisal of the original utopians as pioneers of ‘dual power’ or ‘prefigurative politics’. While the meaning of these terms slightly differs, they both describe the need to instantiate alternatives to the dominant social order in the here and now. The effects of such practices can be many, from a direct confrontation with State and Capital to the learning of liberatory skills and habits. The function of prefigurative activities is rarely just ameliorative, and if people would connect them to hypothetical ways of life, that is not simply illusory. While we can and should acknowledge that some part of any ‘freed’ society would be utterly unimaginable to us, to make it entirely unrelated to present activities makes the latter seem rather pointless. The ineffable freedoms of the future offer no relief to our present suffering. Our approach should therefore be non-dual with regard to the question of sameness and difference, seeing the now and the then as part of an ongoing process of liberation. Hell, we might as well be honest about what this communist future really is: an illusion all its own, the means of effecting our liberating activity. And if drawing a connection between that future communism and some productive present practice helps people to motivate themselves, to work to ‘prefigure’ that future, then the imaginary of communism is doing its job.
This brings me to my central issue with Forest and Factory: why does it critique utopianism in the first place? Is its problem merely that previous utopian thinkers pursue the same goals with the wrong means? This is what a critique based in ‘scientific rigor’ would imply. If other utopias are simply sloppy, unengaged with what it really means to change the relations of production in an entire society, then Forest and Factory becomes an internal critique of utopianism: do better, everyone! I would again question the efficacy of this approach; I would hate for someone to refrain from writing their utopia for fear of it not being ‘scientific’ enough. In general, we need more utopias, not less. We especially need them to be in dialogue with one another, as each could then critique the deficiencies of the other. But to just condemn the genre as it exists? I don’t see the point of that.
That said, there would be point if Nick and Chavez mean to take aim at Utopia as such. This is what they claim to be doing, arguing that utopian thought represents an abdication of realism. But if the problem with the genre is that it’s a distraction from a proper political imagination, it hardly seems apt to critique its specific instances for not meeting your standards. You will simply have to look elsewhere. This, then, is the paradox of the piece. Neel and Chavez seem unable to decide whether their critique is internal or external, and thus they end up with an ‘anti-utopian utopia”.
So let’s try and resolve this paradox. At its core, I think Forest and Factory suffers from a misconception of what utopianism is and does. This is what I meant a little earlier about blaming Utopia on Modernity. Right at the start of the modern era, in 1516, Thomas More graced us with his bizarre narrative about an ideal Christian island society somewhere in the so-called New World. The origins of his chosen term are a bit of a cliche: while often rendered as eu-topia (‘good place’), it could just as well be explained as ou-topos (‘no place’). With the latter alluding to the narrative’s fictional nature, an anti-realist tradition was established. Despite this, the original Utopia was never lacking for real-world context. Besides its copious references to the discoveries of the day (Amerigo Vespucci mentioned) More seemed to do his utmost to make the narrative seem like a plausible series of correspondence, almost like the 16th century version of a found footage film. Among the literary utopians, he is hardly alone in this. Besides being the obvious product of their own time, many of them also engage with real history in some fashion, often overlapping with the genres of alternate or future history. The same is true on a meta-textual level, with many utopian narratives only coming about in response to another one, such as the famous dialectic between Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morriss’ News From Nowhere. Overall, instead of seeing Utopian literature as inherently anti-realist, I would locate it in the space between real and non-real, always trying to pass one off for the other. At its best, it estranges us from what is familiar, and familiarizes us with what is strange, allowing us to imagine a change from one state to the other.
Still, it is easy to see where the confusion comes from. Being the product of modernity, utopian thought has often been caught up in the project of State-Capital dominance, and all the unilateral delusions this implies. The absolute institution of a perfect society is only possible in the mind of narcissist, he who willfully ignores what might be other to his whims. Defined in this way, Utopia poses no danger of capitalism, but is rather its ultimate self-image. This is close to how Ernst Bloch defined utopia in the middle of the 20th century, and it is also what gave rise to the classic dystopias (1984, Brave New World) of that same period.
In response to the arguable nadir of utopia’s reputation, the cultural production of the New Left eventually gave rise to a crop of critical utopians, including such authors as Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Beyond portraying their utopias as somehow ‘ambiguous’, they also often placed them in dystopian circumstances, or painstakingly explained how they might emerge from present-day circumstances. Given that the later generations of these authors are as active as ever, and some of them are even referenced by Neel and Chavez, one wonders why this kind of utopianism isn’t to their liking. Part of it might be a perceived lack of ‘rigor’, returning the critique to an internal one. But perhaps the problem is one of framing. During the neoliberal period, critics like Fredric Jameson emphasized the ‘absolute negation’ which utopian fiction might represent. If there seemed to be no alternative to capitalism, anti-capitalist authors would simply have to get weirder to compensate. While I personally disagree with this abnegation of history, it was the style of the day, and may well be how Neel and Chavez came to think of the potential of utopianism. That would be a shame.
Ultimately, I believe that any revisionist conception of utopianism (critical, real, or scientific) should reckon with a simple truth: all imagination is derivative of reality. The function of the mind, augmenting and recombining our sense impressions, is never to create some autonomous world of imagination, or even to distinguish between real and false. Rather, it serves to motivate our engagement with the world, a world which is always greater, richer, and more profound than itself. In this sense, it is pointless to speak of ‘realism’ as a goal or subset of our imagination. If the most fantastical visions only exist at the behest of whatever inspired it, then the only way to be more imaginative is to engage with the Real, and vice-versa. The real problem with the ‘unscientific’ utopias is that they are boring, cliched, relying on stock phrases from the left wing lexicon. Ironically, they are not ‘derivative’ enough. The need for ‘realism’, then, is the need for a liberatory otherness which only a thoroughgoing engagement with reality could reveal. It is not the arbitrary restriction of our scenarios to what is thought to be scientifically plausible; it is stretching our imaginations as far as they can reach, and then seeing where we come up short. Forest and Factory understands this instinctively, pointing out all the questions which contemporary utopians are apparently too afraid to ask. And yet, in their rhetoric, Neel and Chavez rely on an appeal to ‘rigor’ and ‘hard science’, as if the problem is that we have not properly disciplined our imagination. If anything, we are far too disciplined, be it by genre, by ideology, or by seeing scientific reality as a limit on our imagination rather than as its primary liberator.
In the field of Utopian Studies, a distinction is sometimes made between Imagination and Fancy. Imagination stands in for the big ticket changes to society: no more gender, no more private property, etc. Fancy describes whatever’s left, the minor products of the author’s pet interests. The odd thing is, I believe that the peculiarities of Fancy might be far more potent from a utopian perspective than those large swings of the Imagination. Any old leftist can tell you what communism will be like if you let them keep it abstract. But only a few will tell you how the dining hall will be run, what beauty standards would predominate, what material the sewer pipes would consist of. These are not just the quirks of the author making their way onto the page; they represent the passions of a self-developing agent, and can betray the deepest thoughts that an author has ever had. If you can encourage someone to work up from that base interest, instead of starting from the theory we all know already, you may just get something insightful.
At the end of the day, the best way I could advocate for utopian fiction is by pointing out how it has inspired me to engage more with reality, not less. Just as I took to history through the lens of its imagined alternatives, so too do many of my intuitions in philosophy or political economy derive from the strange visions of well-meaning people. As long as you can understand that the fantastical is not an escape from reality, but one of its noblest products, you can yourself escape the traps of either self-referential idealism or vulgar materialism.
In their work, Neel and Chavez imply a tension between the aesthetic and the practical, as if affective appeal is some unfortunate necessity in selling a plausible-but-boring scientific socialism to the masses. Personally, I would maintain that there is ultimately little difference between what is Interesting and what is Real. In the realm of political imagination, what matters is that we practice what we preach, that the discursive space between utopias is a free and creative space in itself. With each pitching in their own area of expertise, making sure that others can advance their own idiosyncratic input, the total result will be disciplined by the doing, by the environment of mutual critique and development. Amidst this utopia of utopias, we can regard Forest and Factory as a valuable, if somewhat polemical contribution.
The inner Moon 