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This Courage Called Utopia:
Representations of Utopia in New Left Art and Politics
The Occupy movement that has swept the world last year has been vehemently
criticized for not proposing a clear list of demands or a coherent alternative to the present.
And yet the movement managed to radicalize an entire generation, introduce millions of
people to the experience of direct democracy, and create a global network of activists still
active today in assemblies, direct action campaigns and alternative media, thanks largely to
the evocative post-capitalist utopia represented in its encampments and mass manifestations
on the streets. What was this utopian vision? More generally, what types of utopias can we
imagine today or which notions of progress are still operative today? And how do utopias
allow people to engage in transformative action? These are the questions I will try to engage
in this paper by looking at three instances of utopian representation in New Left art and
politics, two from literature and one from radical politics.
It has often been said that we are undergoing not only a socio-economic crisis of
systemic proportions, we also suffering from a crisis of imagination. Our ability to devise
social models and institutions outside the logic of growth and profitability has been atrophied
by decades of being told There Is No Alternative. Even left-leaning intellectuals, who have
made a name for themselves writing about utopia, have demonstrated an uncanny “resistance
to representing the future” (Jacoby cited on Kumar 2010:561). An attitude of erudite
skepticism towards the authoritarian dimension of utopia has eclipsed the courage to imagine
a life beyond capitalism. This position may be commendable, but it shuns the responsibility,
however difficult, of mapping out the coordinates of a better society that might animate our
collective desire (and constituent power) to struggle for its realization. Whatever threat of
closure haunts utopia, we still require positive visions of future fulfillment if not to guide, at
least to inspire radical political action. This is true especially in times of crisis such as these,
when the “end of history,” the idea that the future is only more of the present, lets off a
scream of outrage.
Taking the need for utopian representation seriously, this paper looks at three attempts
to map out “this desire called utopia” (Jameson 2005): Ursula Le Guin’s classic “ambiguous
utopia,” The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s seemingly conventional but at the same
time revolutionary text, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and finally the encampments
built in the initial stage of the Occupy movement. Interestingly enough, all three examples
offer glimpses of an anti-authoritarian utopia – a decentralized, egalitarian society where the
principles of competition and accumulation have been replaced by mutual aid, selfgovernment and resource conservation to produce an almost spiritual synergy between people,
nature and culture.
The anti-authoritarian sensibility of the New Left has always functioned as a powerful
counterpoint to our highly technocratic, profit-oriented culture. These three utopian
representations, however, are not a direct product of the ‘68 counter-culture with its
masculinist guerilla tactics, on the one hand, and susceptibility for hip consumerism, on the
other. Le Guin and Piercy’s work as well as the Occupy camps are far more powerfully
shaped by the ecofeminist backlash to ’68 macho revolutionary culture (especially the nonviolent direct action movements of the 70s and 80s) and the de-growth democratic socialism
of forgotten thinkers like Ivan Illich, André Gorz and Murray Bookchin. If we were to
identify a notion of progress still operative today it would have to be this version of antiauthoritarian socialism. Its triumph is not the result of some ideological victory over
contending political visions, for the anti-authoritarian Left is still minoritarian. Rather,
representations of utopia adopt often an anti-authoritarian form because of a seamless
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congruence between utopia and prefigurative politics, a core element of the left libertarian
program meant to anticipate the society to come through intentional communities, alternative
economic arrangements, and aesthetic practices. No matter how weak in terms of strategy or
organization, the courage to offer a sensuous taste of utopia has earned this vision of
socialism “from below” more enthusiasm than any other political tactic could have. We see
this manifested clearly in the case of Occupy, which I discuss in greater detail in the final
section of the paper. The camps may not have helped the movement develop concrete
strategies for winning the war of maneuver against the forces of accumulation, but without the
zones of utopian sentience that were the camps it is hard to imagine the anti-capitalist rhetoric
of Occupy gaining as much traction as it did.
Utopia: dead or suspect
The term utopia stems from Thomas More’s conflation of the two Greek terms eutopia
(“somewhere good”) and outopia (“nowhere”): Utopia is the good place that is to be found
nowhere. There is a paradox here that all students of utopia have had to grapple with. We are
afraid of losing utopia, but also reluctant to imagine it.
Pronouncements that we have come to the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) or that
we are now dominated by “capitalist realism” (Fischer 2009) frighten us with their ontological
firmness and moral unassailability. Having buried the body of actually existing socialism and
absorbed the dissenting elements of the autonomous left, there does not seem to be much
room left in these neoliberal times for utopian thinking or the radical politics it requires.
Hence, our exasperation with just how easy it has become to imagine the end of the world as
opposed to that of capitalism.
But even those in the business of imagining the end of capitalism, i.e., left
intellectuals, have a difficult time drawing out the contours of utopia. After the Second World
War and all throughout the Cold War, we find an entire intellectual tradition skeptical of the
authoritarian (both fascist and socialist) strain in utopia. “Jewish utopianism,” as Russel
Jacoby termed it, “listens for, but does not look into the future” (cited in Kumar 2010:561).
Ernst Bloch (1986), who perhaps delivered the widest definition and most rigorous
exploration of utopia, covering art, popular culture, technology, architecture and science,
recognizes the utopian desire as an indelible part of our ontological condition, but is careful to
differentiate between dream and the impulse to make reality into a dream. What is
empowering and useful about utopia is not its plausibility, but the critical attitude towards the
dominant order it cultivates inside us. For Adorno, cantankerous as usual, utopia needs to
remain primarily negative, an “eternally dissatisfied force which destroys the conditions of the
present” (http://nomadicutopianism.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/art-and-utopia/). As for
Jameson, “it is a mistake to approach Utopias with positive expectations, as though they
offered visions of happy worlds, spaces of fulfillment and cooperation” (2005:12). Such
idyllic representations belong to liberal political theory made for bourgeois comfort, not to the
kinds of revolutionary interventions expected from utopians. One easily gets the impression
here that there is almost something distasteful about making utopia into a positive vision of
radiance and fulfillment. If it is to be taken seriously by these canonical (all male) authors,
utopia must remain immanent and immaterial.
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Of course, utopian programs should not be taken literally or, at least, with a grain of
salt considering their bent for transcendence and ideological closure. But we should also resist
the tendency common in erudite circles to lament the disappearance of utopia while, at the
same time, scolding the courage to represent it. Representational concreteness does not
always end in stasis and systematization. Sometimes its affective import can be an effective
tool for struggle. The advantage of utopian representation, no matter how imperfect or
implausible, is to provide an immanent critique of the present and, more importantly, to allow
people to become emotionally invested in the promise the future still holds. The possibility to
mentally inhabit and sensorially imagine how alternative institutions, social relations and
value structures might look and feel like in real life is crucial to embolden the collective
desire for radical change, including the political work needed to realize that change. To
completely do away with the spatial dimension of utopia, to only treat utopia as an imaginal
machine, a heuristic device or a negative force is to lose the specificity of utopia. This
confuses utopia, an exercise in prefiguring the “good place,” with utopianism, the anticipation
of or action for utopia (http://nomadicutopianism.wordpress.com/2011/04/22/art-and-utopia/).
Utopianism without utopia is solipsistic.
Traditionally, the task of representing utopia has fallen in the territory of art (or
literature), with science fiction being generally recognized as the literary home of the utopian
imagination. But it has also been the terrain of revolutionary praxis and intentional
communities. The reason why the literary utopia has triumphed over other genres is, to
borrow a phrase from creative writing, because literature shows, rather than tells how the
guiding principles of the good life play out against the rich tapestry of lived existence.
Whereas political theory (e.g., Hobbes’ Leviathan, Rousseau’s Social Contract, or Marxist
thought) contains strong elements of utopianism, it is only in literature that we find detailed
and evocative accounts of how people dress, work, celebrate, and organize themselves in
different socio-political arrangements (Kumar 2006:176). If political treatises are primarily
concerned with demonstrating the legitimacy and truthfulness of their proposed vision, the
literary utopia is free to live out the dream of a better future in its most minute detail. This is
not to say that literary utopias do not also provide an immanent critique of their “nonutopian,
parent societies” (Moylan cited in Keulen 1991:22), only that they “perform better than any
other form what utopia mostly aims to do, namely to present a ‘speaking picture’ of the good
society, to show in concrete detail what it would be like to live in such a society, and so make
us want to achieve it” (Kumar 2010:555).
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The literary utopia has always thrived in times of great upheaval, like the late 19th
century, when various expressions of resistance emerged in opposition to corporate power
structures and their dehumanizing forms of control, or the period immediately after the ’68
revolts, when the need to exploit humanity and nature to generate ever greater levels of
affluence produced a “Great Refusal” precisely among the demographic expected to become
the politico-managerial elite of the future. In times of political closure, however, like the
Second World War, the Gold Age of postwar reconstruction, or even the recent period of
neoliberal ideological convergence, utopia has always been absorbed into, if not entirely
resolved by, affirmative ideologies, like Fascism, Socialism or Advertising (Moylan 1986:711). (Of course, all ideologies contain an element of utopian desire, but that desire is brought
back into the fold to reinforce the legitimacy of the given order.) Fortunately, the present
period of turmoil has reawakened an appetite for utopian representations, not exactly for
literary utopias but for their aesthetic cousin, the “concrete utopia.” Bloch described this as
the moment when history opens up to reveal concrete utopian possibilities (Moylan
1982:159). Others have called it the radical event (Haiven 2011). Despite their rarity and
fragility, neither the literary nor the concrete utopia has been spared criticism.
Bloch was afraid that the completeness of the literary utopia would destroy its
usefulness. Whereas in every other cultural instance utopia appears as a “tendency” or
“latency,” in literature it appears as a finished goal that disarms, rather than empowers
through its completeness and definitiveness (Moylan 1982:160-1). Jameson goes even further
to argue that utopian fiction is a sign of our ideological closure. Limiting the utopian
imagination to science fiction is a reflection of “our own incapacity to conceive [of utopia] in
the first place” (2005:4). I want to suggest a different way of looking at utopias that might
compel us to be more receptive to the purpose and power of literary utopias.
Literary utopias are not intended to offer a blueprint for perfection or point out a clear
revolutionary path for getting there. Their role is to measure the distance between what
actually is and what could be and, in that gap, insert a vision of the future that stimulates in
the readers a desire for change and faith in its possibility. Especially, the “critical utopias” of
the 1970s, which I focus on in this paper and which are much more textually open and
politically progressive (as well as historically cautious) than utopian novels of the 19th
century, take very seriously the task of helping us think through historical contradictions, be it
at the level of ideological contestation or as part of revolutionary praxis (Moylan 1986:48-52).
The primary mode for assessing literary utopias should be how well they allow us to imagine
a better society and how much they stir our collective desire for it.1
Even harsher criticisms befall the concrete utopia. Instances of concrete utopias occur
when the flow of history is broken to reveal new possibilities for action, new forms of social
cooperation and, in general, new obstreperous temporalities (Haiven 2011). Radical events,
like the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, May ’68, or the 2011 Year of Revolt, that
gave birth to the Occupy movement have different historical conditions and ideological
orientations, but they all share a commitment to direct action, to “acting as if one is already
free” (Graeber 2009:203), acting outside established channels of political contestation to
shape the conditions of one’s existence. This exercise of embodying the change one wants to
see in the world, known as prefigurative politics, is a form of representing utopia. It allows
people to work out the details of the future society in the here and now. Since the 1960s,
1
Also to remember is the fact that, if literary representations of utopia paint the future society in such iincredible
detail, it is not to plan or predict it, but rather because in the utopian genre the social structure is the hero of the
story. Whereas in most other literary genres the socio-political context is mere background, in utopian writing
plot and protagonists are a pretext for better understanding and inhabiting a strange historical situation. This is
why the literary utopia can never be reduced to its content. Neither an analysis of its characters nor of its political
images exhausts its potential (Moylan 1986:36-7).
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however, prefigurative politics has acquired a somewhat dubious reputation, its political
credentials and aesthetic qualities constantly scorned both from the Right and the Left.
A constant complaint with prefigurative politics is the lack of a coherent ideology and
the absence of a clear strategy for building the mass social movement needed to oppose the
forces of domination. Since direct action is usually organized around single-issue campaigns
like “Free Mumia” or “Strike Debt” that lack the coordination of a central organ or a common
strategy, prefigurative politics, the complaint goes, limits itself to spontaneous and disparate
acts of resistance of little consequence for our material reality. Furthermore, the aesthetic
qualities of these forms of action, which borrow from medieval carnivals, guerilla theatre,
pagan spirituality, and even some New Age elements, not to mention punk and black bloc
tactics, have an alienating effect on most people. Without the support of a relevant
constituency, be it workers, minorities or even local communities, prefigurative politics
becomes notoriously susceptible to state repression or cooptation. In most cases, this
vulnerability has not given way to a heightened antagonism with the dominant forces, but led
activists to insulate themselves from capitalist society to build self-sufficient communities that
would lead by example. Unfortunately, this separatism only further exacerbated their cliquish
lifestyle choices, condemning them to obscurantism in the eyes of the wider public. We saw
instances of this also in the Occupy camps although, as we shall see, the very same tactical
and aesthetic choices that made the encampments such as affront to public opinion and a
“health and safety” hazard for city officials are also what gave the movement its unique
utopian dimension and, ultimately, its popular strength.
Once again, in discussing concrete utopias, I wish to focus less on the strategic, longterm efficacy of prefigurative politics than on its equally strategic and long-term affective
impact. Where prefigurative politics trumps all other forms of political intervention,
especially those emphasizing organizational discipline and ideological purity, is in its ability
to collapse the distance, so germane to politics, between people and experts, public and
private, speech and action, present and future, strategy and utopia, and create a strong
experiential topos. If we take this thoroughly immanent quality seriously, we realize that
prefigurative politics lacks none of the features its detractors claim it does: “It is not opposed
to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology.
Those new forms of organization are its ideology” (Graeber 2002:68). It is not devoid of
strategy. Its strategy is to not defer utopia for a single more day. It is not the victim of
apolitical lifestylism. Its transformation of everyday life is crucial for working out the
political details of the free and egalitarian society we aspire to. Its aesthetics are not esoteric,
but welcoming all of differences to create a “carnival of resistance.” Of course, this is very
much a work in progress “full of all sorts of stumblings and false starts” (ibid. 72), but at least
it allows people to experience a culture of democracy they rarely have access to and which
will leave an indelible mark on their sense of human possibilities. In the words of renowned
proponent of prefigurative politics, David Graeber: “It’s one thing to say, ‘Another world is
possible’. It’s another to experience it, however momentarily” (ibid. 72).
Anti-authoritarian utopias: ambiguous, active, prefigurative
Towards the late 1960s, affluent Western societies found themselves pressured by a
series of contradictions, the most significant of which was the tension between the growing
material abundance enjoyed by the white middle-classes included in the liberal democratic
compromise and the profoundly undemocratic price for this affluence, involving racial and
gendered exclusion at home and imperial domination abroad. For the first time, the question
emerged whether we wanted progress for need or for profit. Were we going to use the
technological innovation and organizational capacity developed after the war to make poverty
and drudgery history, or were we going to use these advances to consolidate a technocracy of
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total control? The issue was not only economic, it was also organizational, technological,
ecological, and, most importantly, cultural: What kinds of values did we want to promote?
What kinds of lives did we want to lead?
All the great ideological conflicts of the time revolved around questions of how to best
organize wealth and power to produce a society that was at the same time abundant and
egalitarian: “centralization and decentralization, continued industrial growth or ecological
balance, the persistence of patriarchy, the needs of public society or personal fulfillment,
party or autonomy, maintenance of the new society or expansion of the revolution,
nationalism or internationalism, parliamentary politics of the gun” (Moylan 1986:48).
Consensus on these matters was rare, but the general understanding was that utopia had to
include “the categories of cooperation, equality, mutual aid, liberation, ecological wisdom,
and peaceful and creative living” (ibid. 10). Above all, this would require abolishing the
capitalist principles of competition and accumulation through targeted cultural and technical
interventions, and replacing them with a culture of mutual aid, reciprocity and the creation of
non-commodity use values (ibid. 12). It would also involve the abolition of patriarchy, the
liberation of nature, and the reorganization of work and life with a focus on participatory selfmanagement (ibid. 27). This is, in a nutshell, the essence of the anti-authoritarian vision: a
principled opposition to capitalist relations of exploitation along with the tools of domination
(patriarchy, racism, scientific rationality) and systems of repression (monopolies,
bureaucracies, central governments) used to legitimize and implement them.
In broad strokes, this is the utopia we see most often represented since the late 1960s.
The cultural sensibility of the New Left has always has exerted great influence upon the
political unconscious of liberal democratic countries, especially the United States, despite
vicious cultural crusades against it. Although its political ideals are far from dominant, at least
the ethos of autonomy, spontaneous creativity, and cooperation stretches across the entire
political spectrum, from direct action anarchists to Silicon Valley techno-libertarians and to
the Tea Party, and it permeates popular culture, management theory, and public discourse. But
it is the prefigurative bent of the New Left that we owe the dominance of the antiauthoritarian utopia to. Literary and lived utopias are the logical outcome of a type of politics
which aims to anticipate the society to come in its most elemental detail. Whereas the other
mass utopias of the 20th century, constrained by their desire to seize power and shape the
world in the image of their ideology, had to constantly strategize which means might better
serve their goal of establishing cultural or political hegemony, prefigurative politics has no
such ambitions. It is uniquely in the business of “demanding the impossible,” as a famous
May ’68 slogan used to say (not coincidentally, also the title of Tom Moylan’s book on
critical science fiction utopias of the ‘70s). At most, its utopian vision is a mental and
muscular exercise for revolutionizing everyday life in non-hegemonic ways.
There is a further affinity between prefigurative politics and the feminist movement,
which accounts for the strong feminist connotations seen in all three utopian representations I
discuss below, and explains why most authors of anti-authoritarian utopia were women
(Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Sally Miller Gaerhart). During the ‘70s,
feminists displeased with the macho revolutionary culture of the student and civil rights
movement went off to create their own organizations, tactics and communities, which were
generally much more loyal to anti-authoritarian principles than the Black Panthers or the SDS
ever were. Liberated from the constraints of masculinist (read: instrumentalist) politics and its
related divisions between public and private, reason and emotion, reality and utopia, women
could finally engage (and indulge) in those utopian musings they were told did not have a
place in politics. Their ambitions were grand – to reinvent daily life as a whole, but they
always started from the concrete conditions and decisions that reproduce life: eating, cleaning,
housing, care and education. The revolution of everyday life starts at home.
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Making these activities public or, even worse, the focal point of political deliberations
invited the scorn and suspicion of those used to having others make political decisions for
them as well as those used to having others cook and clean for them (usually one and the
same). This is why we find the ideas of ecofeminist democratic socialism most often
represented in science fiction literature or limited to small activist circles. With other, more
official channels of knowledge and communication remaining closed off, utopia
representation became something like Foucault’s “subjugated discourse”: forms of knowledge
and experience critical of the dominant culture and effectively marginalized and disdained by
it. Even major (male) social theorists of the New Left, like Murray Bookchin, André Gorz and
Ivan Illich never taught at universities, nor are their works being taught there. But the disdain
is mutual in this case. Since ecofeminists insist on the connectedness of theory and practice,
research and activism, mental and manual labor, they have little interest in rational science
divorced from everyday experience and embodied knowledge. The fear of ridicule has never
stopped feminists (and ecofeminists) from insisting that a radical reorganization of our present
must begin by excavating the most salient and yet most ignored element of social life, what is
traditionally known as “women's work,” or it cannot begin at all.
The following three representations of utopia rise up to this difficult challenge in
different ways: Ursula Le Guin’s utopia insists on gender equality but shies away from
adopting an explicitly feminist vision; Marge Piercy paints an ecofeminist utopia so inspiring
it justifies the guerilla-style actions needed to bring it about; and the Occupy camps adopt a
feminist understanding of radical politics that privileges the social reproduction of struggle
over moments of spectacular antagonism, and turns this social movement into a selfreproducing life form.
The ambiguous utopia
The most common criticism of utopia is that it presents a static, ahistorical vision of
perfection that is either unattainable or ripe with authoritarianism. Le Guin had precisely this
problem in mind when she wrote an “ambiguous utopia,” as she subtitled the book, that
remained attuned to “the enduring reality of social conflict and historical change” (Davis
2005:3). The Dispossessed contrasts a growth-obsessed society with a resource-poor anarchist
planet, detailing their respective limitations. The former planet, Urras, is a highly stratified
society that leaves large swaths of the population subject to misery and suffering, and makes
life even for its privileged citizens devoid of meaning and dignity. The latter society, Anarres,
is so consumed with separating and protecting itself from its materialist rival, from which it
seceded 200 years prior, that it falls prey to cultural conformity and bureaucratic rigidity that
end up stifling individual freedom and creativity to preserve mutual aid, social equality, and
the few natural resources the planet still has. At the heart of this confrontation, very similar to
the Cold War détente, lies a young Anarresti physicist, named Shevek, who travels to Urras to
develop a General Temporal Theory hoping to break down the communication barriers
between the two planets. His adventures and travel experiences guide us through this complex
geopolitical world.
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Of greatest interest is, of course, Le Guin’s description of Anarres, for which she
draws heavily upon examples from her own time, like Murray Bookchin’s radical
libertarianism, principles of mutual aid, voluntarism and individual freedom developed by
anarchist Peter Kropotkin, anarcho-syndicalist practices and forms of organization best
illustrated by the International Workers of the World (IWW), and various elements from the
civil rights movement, the 68 student revolts as well as the socialist models of China, Cuba
and Yugoslavia (Moylan 1986:96). As a result, utopian Anarres is an egalitarian,
ecologically sound, and technologically savvy libertarian-communist alternative to the nations
of Urras and, by extension, to the geopolitical constellation of the Cold War. It is a resourcescarce planet with a syndicalist economy organized for the satisfaction of basic needs with the
help of highly sophisticated technology that is not meant to release Odonians from the realm
of necessity but to better assist them in meeting their survival needs. Work, a mixture of
manufacturing, agriculture, craftwork, fishing and mining, is shared in by all members of
society, with every Odonian having to perform routine menial tasks, like garbage disposal.
The loose structure of local syndicates is balanced out by elements of central planning, like
the Production and Distribution Committee and the Division of Labor agency. These are, in
turn, counteracted by the Syndicate for Initiatives meant to ensure social dynamism and
innovation.
Odonians live modest, communal yet highly self-directed lives: they work out of
passion and conviction; they consume goods only for their use value and dispense with
luxuries; they live and take meals communally; education and health care are universal;
energy is renewable and used with great care; and art, celebrations and rituals are integrated
into everyday activities. With the state no longer acting as a stand-in for popular sovereignty,
the social contract extends solely between individuals. They may be asked to occasionally
sacrifice themselves for the collective good, but no one is forced to go against their will. The
ultimate moral choice lies with the individual, all the while keeping in mind that the
permanent revolution that inspired this society requires a parallel transformation at the level
of subjectivity and everyday life.
Two hundred years before Shevek’s voyage to Urras, the two planets struck a deal in
which anarchists were given permission to set up an independent state on the moon of Anarres
as long as they continued to supply Urras with rare minerals. So far the agreement had
produced a fairly peaceful détente, but only in geopolitical terms. On a societal level,
however, Anarres’ strategic vulnerability causes the planet to literally cut itself off from the
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rest of the world to protect whatever small island of freedom and autonomy it had cultivated
for itself. Geopolitical stability comes at a high cost for the anarchist society. The central
bureaucracy grows into an organ of control that demands full conformity with its ideological
line in the name of peace and cultural preservation. Dissidents like Shevek, who left Anarres
to re-open the dialogue between the two planets, knowing full well that his nation strictly
prohibits such contact, are ostracized. While we might expect such aberrations from a highly
centralized and militarized society, with Anarres these rigidities alert us to the dangers that
loom over any revolutionary project: How to prevent the initial revolutionary fervor from
solidifying into dogmatic ideology and technocratic rule? As we all know, institutions are
indispensable to achieving durable social change but they also carry with them the danger of
turning into self-serving organs of elite power reluctant to change.
The problem does not get resolved in the book. The Dispossessed remains a
profoundly “ambiguous utopia,” this ambiguity referring less to Anarres, which is a rather
“static utopia” (Davis 2005:10), than to the nature of utopia itself. It is this insight that has
made Le Guin into a darling of utopian literature. For utopia to remain a useful and
empowering stimulus for change, it must avoid stasis and conformism at all cost, it must steer
clear of the didacticism of perfectionist utopias, even one’s own (Moylan 1986:101). The
commitment to openness and dynamism is a noble one, but it finally causes Le Guin to adopt
a position that is less than satisfying.
Shevek, the male, heteronormative, and immensely talented protagonist, returns home
victorious after having invented an instantaneous communication device (the Ekumen) that
will enable better cooperation between the planets. To the extent that he restores the spirit of
the permanent revolution it is transferred onto an electronic device that does not resolve, only
erases the contradictions at the heart of the novel, collapsing them into a Habermasian ideal of
rational deliberation. “The prime achievement of the action of the novel is the production of
knowledge and the development of an electronic commodity that makes possible a galactic
détente (Moylan 1986:116). Even at a formal level, the narrative does not move beyond the
trope of the romantic hero. Le Guin’s vision of Anarres insists on gender equality and
welcomes homosexuality and polyamory, but women and minorities are not granted special
worth, which is why Shevek’s wife, Takver, and his homosexual best friend, Bedap, never
become heroes in their own right, only aides to the hero who will eventually realize success
on his own. This liberal understanding of diversity and equality ends up limiting revolutionary
action in The Dispossessed to the figure of the dominant male or the vanguard leader. Other
forms of political action and organization are sidelined. Sadly, it is those that shaped the antiauthoritarian vision the most: anti-war activists, ecologists, anarchists, Third World
revolutionaries, and most of all, the women’s movement (ibid. 113).
The active utopia
Marge Piercy’s writing is even more directly linked with New Left politics than Le
Guin’s. An active member in the anti-war movement of the late ‘50s, which she later on
abandoned for work in ecological, mental health and the women’s movement, Piercy
understood her writing to serve an explicitly activist function. This “overt political edge […]
leads the [Woman on the Edge of Time] to be more concerned with the process of revolution
itself”, with what must be done, than with the actual content of utopia (Moylan 1986:122).
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Woman on the Edge of Time is a fairly conventional utopia. It uses the visitor-guide
pattern, the most common literary device in utopian writing, to introduce us to a pastoral and
egalitarian “ecotopia” that is far superior to the highly technocratic present (United States in
the ‘70s), with its attendant racism and sexism. The book revolves around Consuelo (Connie)
Ramos, a 37-year old unemployed and Chicana woman living in a New York ghetto. Her
story is by no means exceptional. It documents the powerlessness and humiliation that come
with living in a phallocratic society where men rule via state authority, scientific rationality or
sheer physical force.
Connie has a history of poverty and exclusion, which in the eyes of the officials
translates to a history of violence. While coping with the death of her lover Claude, a
pickpocket who died in prison after taking part in a medical experiment that promised to make
him some money and release him early from jail, Connie impulsively hits her daughter
Angelina and breaks her wrist. The act lasts only a split second, but its repercussions would
haunt Connie her entire life. She is labeled as a child abuser, admitted to a mental institution,
and loses custody of her child. Once released, she promptly has an altercation with her niece’s
pimp, breaks his skull and confirms what state officials already knew: Connie is a violent
woman with schizoid personality disorder. More accurately, though, she is “a sane woman
labeled insane, a survivor reduced to a victim” (Moylan 1986:123).
In the hospital, Connie is reduced to bare life, her voice dismissed, her opinions taken as
a sign of disobedience. Her only good fortune is to be included in a highly invasive medical
experiment that would “make the streets safe” by controlling the brain activity of violent
people with electrodes. Desperate and disempowered, Connie’s only respite is to make
telepathic contact with Luciente, a creole woman from the future society of Mattapoisett who
introduces Connie to an ecofeminist utopia, which Connie will have to prepare the path for.
Connie is skeptical, at first, because of how much Mattapoisett reminds her of the rural
Mexico her parents left behind for Connie and her brothers could have a better life. But with
Luciente’s patient guidance she begins to see the crimes committed in the name of “progress”
and come to understand that people like herself can blossom only in free and egalitarian
societies like Mattapoisett.
In Mattapoisett, “[w]e’re all peasants” (Piercy 1976:64). We are dealing here with a
largely subsistence economy, where only repetitive, industrial tasks have been mechanized
while domestic and agricultural work continue to be done collectively by hand. Work is
This Courage Called Utopia
11
socially useful and personally meaningful. So is education, which is integrated in all aspects
of life and always dedicated to socially useful ends, except for the sabbatical, which is
reserved for pleasure and travel. A rigid division of labor is avoided by allowing manual and
mental work, arts and sciences, production and social reproduction, politics and child rearing
to bleed into one another. Like in The Dispossessed, resource scarcity is negotiated through
conservation and smart technology powered by wind, sun and compost energy. There is no
money in Mattapoisett although a credit system allows individuals to acquire luxury goods,
like wine and expensive cheese. Cultural commodities, like Michelangelo paintings or festive
clothes, circulate from town to town and can be used or borrowed as needed. Basic needs are
provided for by each according to their abilities to all according to needs. Collective decisions
are made via a participatory and transparent system in the grand council, to which people are
elected by lot. Although a pacifist society, Mattapoisett is still engaged in a war of attrition
with corporate forces from the future (the Rockemellons, Morganforts, Duke-Ponts) that rule
over a population of androids, robots and automated humans from the moon. Life in
Mattapoisett is valued much more highly than in Connie’s time, yet no one is absolved from
having to defend this way of life with their own life. Such is the cost of permanent revolution.
“This is not a perfect society. Needs and conflicts persist, but then “some problems you solve
only if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer” (ibid. XXX).
Woman on the Edge of Time blends together elements from peasant societies, creole
and indigenous cultures, and the American counter-culture to construct a thoroughly antiracist, anti-sexist and anti-ageist society: “We learned a lot from societies that people used to
call primitive. Primitive technically. But socially sophisticated. […] We tried to learn from
cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming of age,
growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying…” Different from Le
Guin’s notion of gender equality, women’s liberation is not achieved by erasing the
specificity of women but by moving the tasks and attributes usually associated with women to
center stage where they can shape the entire form of social organization: Parenting and
farming are the most esteemed and valorized types of work; everyone involved in child
rearing is technically a “mother”; and there are dozens of festivities celebrating women’s
roles. It is female forms of knowledge and action, not their biological manifestation that are
accorded a privileged place in this society.
The point of these time travels is not purely demonstrative. Luciente needs Connie’s
help to prepare the way for Mattapoisett: “We must fight to come to exist, to remain in
existence, to be the future that happens” (Piercy 1976:189-90). The future depends on
Connie’s actions here in the present. But Connie is hesitant, at first, because in her experience
the poor do not make history. Luciente disagrees with this view of history:
The powerful don’t make revolutions… It’s the people who worked out the labor-and-land
intensive farming we do. It’s all the people who changed how people bought food, raised children,
went to school… who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wards, wrote and educated
and made speeches. (Piercy 1976:190)
When Connie finally accepts the responsibility and poisons the entire medical team in charge
of the medical experiment threatening her life and that of her friends in the ward, she
condemns herself to a life spent in a mental institution. But, at least, Piercy wants us to
understand, she does not allow someone else to determine the shape of her future. This is
essentially Piercy’s activist message: Change is never a natural consequence of unbearable
contradictions; it must be brought into existence through human choice and collective action.
When set against Le Guin’s work, Woman on the Edge of Time rarely fares well. The
tone is didactic and the form conventional. There is no ambiguity in Piercy’s representation of
utopia. She is wholeheartedly committed to the ecofeminist society of Mattapoisett and the
guerilla actions required for its fulfillment. We can see these shortcomings, however, as
This Courage Called Utopia
12
belonging more to the genre than the author (Keulen 1991:44). As far as utopian literature
goes, Woman on the Edge of Time is quite revolutionary: It is one of the very few instances of
a female writer using a male-dominated genre to present a society organized around feminist
principles. Piercy’s contribution should be assessed less in terms of stylistic innovation than
based on how her political vision fares against Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward or
William Morris’s News from Nowhere (ibid. 49). For Piercy, far more important than the
stylistic conventions of the utopian genre is the relation between authoritarian present and
utopian future, her greatest worry being that, as Connie explains, people will refuse to rise up
against power because “[w]e hate ourselves sometimes […] worse than we hate the rich”
(XXX). Piercy’s hope is for activists of all strands will join in a broad oppositional struggle
for the feminist, ecological and autonomist principles they hold dear (Moylan 1986:146).
The prefigurative utopia
The concrete utopia enacted in the Occupy camps was, of course, never as detailed and
complex as those represented in science fiction literature. The encampments were fairly shortlived social experiments, far messier and short-lived. They managed, however, to take the
anti-authoritarian sensibility seen in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Piercy’s Woman on the
Edge of Time out into the streets and give it a concrete social and spatial dimension. Instead of
placing specific demands on the state, as is usually expected from social movements, Occupy
rejected everything and demanded nothing. Occupy was a scream of outrage against capitalist
society, as John Holloway (2002) would call it or in the words of the inexhaustibly eloquent
Matt Taibbi (2011), a “visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of
our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss
of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that
American mass society has become.”
Of course, pundits complained the movement lacked a coherent political vision or a
clear strategy for moving from means to ends, and this was partly true but only because
Occupy intentionally replaced strategy for process and instrumental rationality for collective
ritual. Their tactic was to capture as much public space as possible and transform it in
accordance with a distinct utopian program from the ground up. This program, which was
evident both in the political content of the movement and the aesthetic from of the
encampments, was an eclectic mélange of New Left currents and principles from autonomist
Marxism to anarchism, ecofeminism, anti-racism, indigenous struggles, and other social
justice movements against the dispossessions of global neoliberal capital.
Let’s take, for instance, the camp at Liberty Plaza in New York. It was a kind of
“living installation or social sculpture” (Schwendener 2011) made of assembly and lecture
spaces, information booths and media centers, cooking tents, day care corners, barter tables, a
library space, drum circles and an endless array of banners and posters separating it from the
curious eyes of tourists, press and police officers. Inside the camp magical things took place:
people made their first contact with direct democracy, homeless people found food and
shelter, work was cooperative, art and music were made, social cohesion emerged in the place
of isolation and depression. In the words of a participant in the May ’68 events in Paris,
people were “living beyond their intellectual, emotional and sensorial limits: each person
existed above and beyond himself” (cited in Haiven 2011:71).
The Occupy camps were, first of all, a great meeting ground for people who usually
only communicate online, as it was a great antechamber of politicization for people not
previously involved in activism. Political theorist Jodi Dean (2011), who covered the New
York occupation relentlessly, recalls she was spending three hours a day in face-to-face
meetings, a rarity for an academic whose work consists mostly of sitting alone at the desk or
being part of some surrogate community on social networking sites. Against the segregation
This Courage Called Utopia
13
and isolation of everyday life Occupy offered participatory structures and open
communication. It invited people to experience first-hand what an inclusive and egalitarian
society might look like and how far we were from it. The general assemblies and working
groups, while famously grueling and time-consuming, allowed an entire generation of
otherwise voiceless and apathetic people to come into contact with direct democracy.
Learning how to plan an agenda, speak up, listen to others, work towards consensus, and take
collective action will have an enduring impact on these people’s lives and actions, if it is only
to doubt the mantra that There Is No Alternative.
Also important, the camps allowed people to live in public, to do things usually
reserved for the private sphere – cooking, cleaning, and caring, or things deemed suspicious
when they occur in public without state supervision or corporate endorsement – assembling,
camping (loitering), and celebrating. If one of the greatest forces behind the political apathy
of our generation is that “[w]e have lost the pleasure of being together” (Bifo and Lovink
2011), cooking together in the camps, sharing free goods, building a people’s library, and so
on was the simplest and yet most efficacious way of counteracting the isolation, consumerism
and competition responsible for our powerlessness. Renown Marxist feminist writer, Silvia
Federici, has long been making the case for “put[ting] an end to the separation between the
personal and the political, and political activism and the reproduction of everyday life” (cited
in Caffentzis 2012). Where many of our strategies on the Left focus on one-off spectacular
events, such as demonstrations and strikes, greater concern for the social reproduction of
resistance would help the struggle extend to all moments of our lives, throughout the entire
fabric of our communities until it became a self-reproducing “round-the-clock bodily
presence” like the Occupy camps (ibid., Federici 2005). The experience of Occupy confirmed
Marge Piercy and so many other feminists’ intuition: utopia is in the quotidian details, it is in
the way we organize the mundane activities that reproduce our collective existence. Utopia
starts at home.
Living in public was also the surest way to demonstrate just how militarized and
corporatized public space has become in recent years and how distant this was from people’s
real needs and from real democracy. Taking public squares and filling them with networks of
mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, free food and education, spontaneous creativity and
participatory structures, especially in countries like Greece, Spain and the United States where
people have to bear the brunt of austerity politics, was less an act of occupation than a
liberation of space from the hands of corporate interests and riot police.
This Courage Called Utopia
14
Even more upsetting than living in public was perhaps the public display of collective
enjoyment. Protest and art, politics and festival were integrated in a “carnival of resistance”
many bystanders found ineffectual, if not outright offensive. Carnival, street theatre,
drumming circles, surrealist and situationist artistic practices have been staples of the alterglobalization movement since the 90s, to the exasperation of police and public officials who
never know how to respond to this “non-violent warfare” other than by using violence and
demagogy, which only further delegitimize their rule (for a quick summary of carnivalesque
tactics see Graeber 2002). For protesters, however, these rituals of collective enjoyment forge
a sense of solidarity and social cohesion, crucial at a time when the moralization of debt and
the humiliation of precarious work, not to mention police repression are working to obscure
the chains that oppress us along with the bonds that could empower us. Rebecca Solnit (2012)
captures the spirit well:
There was a tremendous emotion around it [the camps] – the joy of finding you were
not alone, the shame that was shed as the prisoners of debt stepped out of the shadows,
the ferocity of solidarity when so many of us were attacked by the police, the dizzying
hope that everything could be different, and the exhilaration in those moments when it
was.
Finally, there were the esoteric looks of the camps, the most dubious element of them
all. New Age rituals, drum circles, free hugs, incense and all sorts of cliché “hippie”
paraphernalia were a constant presence in Occupy encampments. Conservative pundits treated
these as a threat to public “health and safety” or an obstacle to rational discourse, but here is
more to the spiritual element in Occupy, which can range from ecofeminism to New Age
mysticism. Used to an instrumentalist conception of politics that separates rulers and ruled,
private and public, and reason from emotion, we sometimes rush to dismiss all collective
displays of ecstasy and spirituality as indications of “savagery.” In the ecofeminist tradition,
however, spirituality comes from the rediscovery of the sacredness of life, human and nonhuman, and is essential for liberating women, nature and subaltern people from patriarchal
and technocratic rule. Metaphors like “reweaving the world”, “healing the wound”, and reconnecting and interconnecting the “web” are not always New Age affectations. Sometimes
they are serious attempts to imbue reality with a spiritual dimension explicitly shunned in all
modern traditions of thought, liberal or socialist, that equate the highest human potential with
the expansion of material wealth. A spiritual orientation that is mindful of the material
relations underlying the estrangement and isolation it is supposed to heal can go a long way in
This Courage Called Utopia
15
repairing the destruction of traditional knowledge and self-sufficient life forms stretching
back to the “witch hunts” and the early days of colonialism (Mies and Shiva 1993).
Without a doubt, the Occupy movement has allowed millions of people to participate
in (or at least witness) a post-capitalist anti-authoritarian utopia never before seen outside
science fiction literature. It created a utopianism for the here and now. Concrete
representations of utopia such as these are powerful weapons of struggle in so far as they
affectively invest us in the promise of an alternative future and stir our collective desire for it.
But how exactly do representations of utopia embolden transformative action? Is there not a
danger for the utopian feeling to start eclipsing the strategic kind of action needed to
generalize and normalize utopia? This has certainly been the greatest concern with the
Occupy camps, which echoes earlier misgivings about intentional communities and directaction campaigns of the ‘60s and 70s. In the concluding section, I discuss this problem only
with reference to concrete utopia of the Occupy movement because it is a more recent
example I am far more familiar with than the events and debates Marge Piercy and Ursula Le
Guin were writing against in the 70s.
Utopia Don’t Be Shy
Despite pundits declaring Occupy Wall Street dead on the one-year anniversary of the
occupation at Zucotti Park in New York, Occupy has accomplished more in a year than any
other leftist social movement or organization over the past few decades. Of course, if one
equates Occupy with the encampments in Zucotti Park and other squares across the globe, the
conclusion must be that the movement is already history. But this is an incredibly narrow and
outright ignorant understanding of what Occupy stood for. Occupy was, from the very
beginning, about creating alternative pathways for political organization and communication
to prefigure the real democracy to come. Within only one year, Occupy introduced millions of
people to the experience of direct democracy; it radicalized an entire generation of previously
discouraged and apathetic youth; it built test zones for imagining and living out a postcapitalist utopia organized outside profit or competition; it created a global network of
activists that remain active in neighborhood assemblies, guerilla gardens, soup kitchens, direct
action campaigns and independent media forms; and it radically shifted the terms of the
debate from the morality of austerity to a collective resistance movement against the dictate of
public and private debt (Roos 2012). The success of Occupy cannot be measured by or
reduced to the longevity of the encampments, but neither would Occupy have had such
resonance had there not been the concrete utopias of the camps to give people a sensorial taste
and participatory stake in its oppositional vision. For change to be effective it must be
affective. It cannot just offer a critique of the present, no matter how correct or convincing, it
must also substantiate this narrative with an experience people can relate to and have a part in.
This is the principal task of the radical event.
Writing about May ’68, Max Haiven describes the radical event as follows:
Radical events of collective action are animated by and refract a “flash” of a utopia of
unalienated labor. […] Here collectivities, to the extent that they are able to create
temporary (even partial and problematic) conditions of autonomy, create their own
form of life and collaborate “biopolitically” on their own accord. These events are, at
least in one valence, radical experiments with organizing social cooperation another
way. As such, they (often inadvertently) open themselves to the raw ‘magma’ of
human cooperation or the “social flow of doing.” It is precisely this openness that
marks the event as “radical,” as fundamentally at odds with a form of capitalist
biopolitics that tyrannically seeks monopoly over the possibilities of social
cooperation. (2011:70)
This Courage Called Utopia
16
Radical events are moments when politics explodes from its “representational” casket,
erasing the lag between speech and behavior, theory and action, public and private. Divisions
of labor, hierarchies and socially assigned roles, official channels of communication and the
very category of “the public” as an entity that needs representation by either political or media
vehicles dissipate. Radical events release individuals and collectivities from the “done” of
their being into an unalienated social flow of “doing.” The normal order of things dissolves,
however briefly, to reveal vulnerable cracks and surprising possibilities. In such days of
intense social activity, like the three months that passed before most American Occupy camps
were removed in a coordinated “shock and awe” operation, time moves faster, events seems
more real, experiences arrive unmediated, and people become makers of their own history
(Haiven 2011:72). Politics assumes a sensuous quality like in this famous Paris ‘68 slogan:
“The more I make love, the more I want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the
more I want to make love.” This is “a utopia in which the production and reproduction of
reality is totally unalienated and monstrously democratic” (Haiven 2011:75).
None of this is to paper over the many political and organizational problems that
plagued the Occupy movement and especially the camps: power differentials, exclusions,
activist snobbery, and so on. Often the strong social cohesion and aesthetic dimension of the
camps came at the expense of an institutional structure or strategy that could have helped
make the social relations built in the camps durable and generalizable. But such is the nature
of radical events: their obstreperous temporality can rarely accommodate questions of strategy
and organization (Haiven 2011:70, 73). In return they leave an enduring affective trace on
their participants. Radical experiments in social cooperation like the Occupy camps will shape
an entire generation’s sense of what is politically possible and desirable. This might not mean
much in terms of concrete strategies for winning either the “war of position” or the “war of
maneuver,” but it is certainly more than any previous social movement since the radical
events of ’68 can boast. The critique of banks, big business and the collusion with state power
prompted by the movement would have never been as widely shared and deeply felt had there
not been the encampments to demonstrate a positive, life-affirmative corollary to this critical
impulse. No matter how fleeting or foolish it might have seemed, without the prefigurative
This Courage Called Utopia
17
utopia of the camps it would have been nearly impossible for this movement to prove that life
after capitalism might be worth fighting for. The next step, already on the minds of many
Occupy activists today, should be how to translate the affective content of the radical event
into a strategy of self-sustainable radical politics, how to turn counter-culture into counterinstitutions. After all, it is only by enabling mass participation in transformative action that
representations of utopia can remain politically useful in the long run. However, this cannot
happen by erasing or denying the contribution of the Occupy camps, with all their aesthetic
dramatizations, carnivalesque tactics, and time-consuming decision-making structures. When
the forces of reaction are engaged in a campaign of erasing any collective memory of success,
it is our task to remember that other forms of living and cooperating are possible. When the
capitalist economy is being presented as unassailable truth, it is up to us to keep our dissident
history alive, and recognize its power over the present and over who we are today (Haiven
2011:84).
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