Abstract
In his recent book Black Mass John Gray suggests that the idea of utopia, the good place that is also a non place, died in the ravaged cities of Iraq. His thesis is that the notion of utopia was torn apart by globalisation's terrible utopian twins, Islamic fundamentalism and American neo-liberalism, and that it is unlikely that we will ever take the notion of the perfect society seriously again in the wake of the everyday carnage of Baghdad and Iraq's other war torn cities. There is, of course, nothing new in declarations of the death of utopia and, in many respects, such proclamations are utopian in themselves precisely because they imagine the birth of a society that no longer dreams of a better future, a world without misery, poverty, and war. Despite the return of this conservative anti-utopian utopianism to the scene of today's global society, a return which incidentally supports the progress of the neo-liberal utopia in its drive to transform the entire world into a free trade zone unconcerned about the condition of human life, the last decade has seen the emergence of a new utopian movement, a movement of movements, which we might loosely call global anti-capitalism. Against the neo-liberal utopians, who radicalised Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand under conditions of globalisation and legitimised the coincidence of state power and corporate speculation through the cynical manipulation of the ideology of human rights and regime change, and the Islamic utopians, who countered this colonial utopianism with a global ideology of their own committed to the pursuit of Shari'a law and the birth of an Islamic super-state, the nascent anti-capitalist utopia began to emerge from the ruins of really-existing communism in the 1990s with a restatement of Marx's original humanism, which explained that humans should not have to live out their lives in miserable subordination to either the fetish of the market or other false Gods that similarly stifle their ability to express their true species being.
Although it took more or less a decade for global anti-capitalism to emerge from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, it is in many ways surprising that the impulse of utopian humanism contained in Marx's original critique of capitalism returned to the scene so quickly after over half a century of broken promises. Given the re-emergence of utopian humanism into global politics, in the form of grassroots movements such as the Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), and democratically elected governments such as Evo Morales’ Movement for Socialism Party in Bolivia (the symbolic links of Chavez's Party to both socialist demands for human dignity (more food etc) and utopian construction (more / More) through the acronym MAS (Movimento al Socialismo), which means ‘more’ in Spanish, should not be lost on the reader) and Hugo Chavez's United Socialist Party of Venezuela in Venezuela, I think it is true to say that it is now clear that the generalised desire for an end to misery, poverty, and the kind of everyday war provoked by the neo-liberal utopians, is more powerful than the feelings of betrayal, defeat, and hopelessness that consumed the left for a large part of the 20th century. The view that these feelings of despair, which culminated in the collapse of Soviet Union, the transformation of Communist China into perhaps the most savage neo-liberal, authoritarian, capitalist nation in the world, and Frances Fukuyama's celebration of the end of history and the final victory of the American model over all other ideological systems of social, political, economic, and cultural organisation, spelled the end of the leftist utopia committed to the principle of human dignity has not been borne out by the events of the last decade. The emergence of anti-capitalism signalled by the 1999 Seattle protests, the rise to power of Morales and Chavez, and the publication of serious works on the prospect of a post-capitalist future, such as Hardt and Negri's Empire, shows that utopian humanism is back on the scene. This truth is further supported by the glut of books that explore the coincidence of anti-capitalism and utopianism published every year. If we take five recent works, published by the radical publisher Zed Books, we can begin to see exactly how the original utopian impulse which has always haunted the modern world, and found expression in works as diverse as More's original Utopia, Marx and Engels’ early works, such as The 1844 Paris Manuscripts and The German Ideology, and Bloch's monolithic The Principle of Hope, finds new form in our contemporary global society.
The five books I have chosen to review include two dictionaries, Lowes’ The Anti-Capitalist Dictionary and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy's The Dictionary of Alternatives, a collection which surveys the state of resistance to neo-liberal capitalism in the global south, Polet's The State of Resistance, and two monographs on the situation of the left in contemporary global society, Harnecker's Rebuilding the Left, which offers an analysis of the state of the Latin American left, and Boaventura De Sousa Santos's study of the World Social Forum, The Rise of the Global Left. In many respects the two dictionaries, Lowes’ survey of terms surrounding anti-capitalism and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy's study of the language of alternative organisation, are in themselves utopian exercises. This is simply because they set themselves the task of tracing the symbolic terrain, and as such providing a more or less detailed picture of social, political, economic, and cultural alternatives to the contemporary global dominant, neo-liberal capitalism, the economic form which has largely colonised the other spheres of human endeavour, the social, the political, and the cultural, to the extent that alternative forms of organisation no longer seem reasonable or even possible. One view would be that the fact of this neo-liberal hegemon is the precise reason for the explosion of materials on alternatives, utopias, and anti-capitalism and as a result the ultimate cause of the texts under consideration in this review essay. If we swallow this claim then we might say that neo-liberalism has now started to generate its own resistance movements. Marx made a similar claim about industrial capitalism in the 19th century. But regardless of how we take this dialectical thesis, we know that the real danger of utopian projects committed to the completion of an archive of knowledge, such as those of Lowes and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy, is that they either become convinced of their own ability to achieve macroscopic completion and as a result turn into totalitarian projects determined to symbolise thought in all its forms or turn to small scale mapping exercises which simultaneously limit their field of interest to very particular areas of knowledge that it seems possible to control and exclude all modes of expression that fall outside of this narrow remit. Both projects are similarly utopian. In the first instance the totalitarian project bids to map thought and determine reality on a global scale. In the second instance the more restrictive brand of utopia, which we might more closely associate with the work of the early modern utopians such as More, limits the breadth of knowledge it seeks to categorise, but attempts to map the sphere of reality it chooses to consider in microscopic detail.
Fortunately, Lowes and Parker, Fournier, and Reedy avoid the temptation towards the creation of conservative utopias by making it clear that their respective surveys are necessarily incomplete. In this respect they acknowledge the impossibility of mapping their particular area of interest completely and implicitly recognise that the gesture necessary to limit a particular field of interest to a manageable number of statements is always violent precisely because the symbolic structures that codify reality work on the basis of networks of signs that are practically endless. In this way both dictionaries are reflective of what we might call utopianism, rather than utopia, since their authors understand that their knowledge mapping projects, set up to enable people to situate their opposition to neo-liberal capitalism, will never totalise, but always remain partial, open-ended, structures. Given this qualification both works are extremely useful surveys of utopianism. The Parker, Fournier, and Reedy publication is the more expansive of the two books because it considers the history of utopia as an alternative mode of social, political, economic, and cultural organisation. Despite the ambitious nature of the project, I think that the authors are fairly successful in their decisions about where to bound the project. They plot a course from the classical utopians, such as Plato and More, to current anti-capitalist ideas, such as de-growth and Islamic economics, but avoid the slide into the production of a comprehensive survey of world religion and the theological notion of paradise. Each extract is well conceived, short enough to hold the reader's attention, but containing enough detail to properly explain the topic under consideration.
If The Dictionary of Alternatives is more expansive in its conceptual treatment of utopianism, The Anti-Capitalist Dictionary suggests a more specific treatment of the contemporary world system. This specificity is simultaneously an advantage and disadvantage of the book because what the survey appears to gain in depth it loses in breadth. This concern for textual dimensions might not usually appear in reviews of traditional monographs, which are more or less specific depending on their author's focus, but it is particularly relevant when considering works structured by the dictionary format, which requires texts to be expansive in their treatment of a section of a particular symbolic system. I think Lowes attempts to address this concern by limiting the depth of his work and saving the dimension of breadth, and globality, necessary for a dictionary through a commitment to the broadest possible understanding of anti-capitalism. I am not sure this is a wholly successful strategy because it often feels as though his selection of terms is in danger of losing its relation to the master term, anti-capitalism, which is a more pointed concept than say Parker, Fournier, and Reedy's expansive master concept, the alternative. However, in many respects this criticism of Lowes’ collection may be unfair. Anti-Capitalism is a strange term, which is simultaneously extremely broad and difficult to define, simply because of the vast numbers of movements collected under its umbrella, and yet perfectly pointed in its general opposition to capitalism. I think that this is the bind that Lowes’ publication struggles to negotiate: how to convey the diversity of the ideas, concepts, and movements collected under the master term anti-capitalism, but maintain some sense of the kind of coherence demanded by the same term's commitment to opposing capitalism.
The essential reason that it is unfair to lumber Lowes with the responsibility for effectively weighing the need to encompass diversity and maintain focus in his work is because in many ways this is the problem of contemporary anti-capitalism itself, the real alternative to the current neo-liberal hegemon. We encounter the same problem in Polet's collection, The State of Resistance: Popular Struggles in the Global South. In this work there is little effort to focus the diverse contributions of over thirty writers and activists from Latin America, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. Instead the work simply presents a snapshot of the various resistance movements across particular parts of the world. While this exercise is useful on its own terms, I found the book ultimately problematic because there is little sense of the wider context necessary to focus such resistances and unify them into some more or less coherent form. In Polet's collection the problem is not only that there is little sense of the intersections and coincidences that might unite diverse resistance movements, but also that the object of resistance is only very loosely defined as neo-liberal globalisation. Beyond this broad definition there is little sense of capitalism in the book itself. Why is this problematic? The essential reason it is necessary to systematise neo-liberalism today, and understand it as an abstract global structure, is because it operates on a microscopic, bio-political, level that simultaneously naturalises and obscures its macroscopic, systemic, reality. Is neo-liberalism natural? The answer is ‘no’. Do local resistance movements undermine its capacity to translate human qualities into financial qualities on a mass scale? ‘Yes’, but the problem is that such resistance movements will always remain just that, resistance movements, until they find ways to relate their local schemes to a globalised anti-capitalist network able to confront neo-liberalism on an abstract, systemic, level. Again, we confront the problem of weighing the need for an appreciation of diversity and the necessity for focus in the anti-capitalist struggle against neo-liberal capitalism. In essence this is exactly the problem Boaventura De Sousa Santos and Marta Harnecker explore in the two monographs under consideration in the final part of this review.
For De Sousa Santos the key space of global anti-capitalism, the World Social Forum (WSF), is currently grappling with the problem of the relative importance of sustaining the diversity of local resistance movements and emphasising the need to unify these movements at a higher level in order to present a workable alternative to neo-liberalism on a global scale. His view is that the WSF has yet to suggest a proper alternative to neo-liberalism. This is because it has not been able to unify the myriad of local resistance movements across the world in ways that would enable it to rival the mastery of scalings displayed by neo-liberal capitalism which is simultaneously a macroscopic Empire, a series of regional cartels, an array of national capitalisms, and a more or less endless range of ways of living everyday life conditioned by the bio-political reach of the macroscopic level, the neo-liberal system itself. In this way De Sousa Santos presents a terrifying image of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. In his account neo-liberalism controls more or less the entire world from the macroscopic level of global finance to the microscopic level of everyday life and everything else in-between. Essentially, this is why local resistance movements and the WSF find themselves in such a difficult position today. How is it possible to combat the new form of totalitarian capitalism that has penetrated every aspect of human life from the massive scalings of global communications to the minutiae of everyday life? Perhaps the fact that local resistance movements, which have always been present, began to make use of the global scale to suggest intersections and coincidences, and as a result invented the ideas of anti-capitalism and the WSF in the first place, is evidence that the ‘age of endings’ caused by the emergence of neo-liberal totalitarian capitalism was never as complete as writers like Frances Fukuyama led us to believe in the early 1990s. The alternative position to this view that neo-liberal totalitarian capitalism was never really complete and that the ‘age of endings’ was always an expression of American ideology is the idea that it was the very fact of the complete domination of American liberal democracy obsessed with capitalism that produced the anti-capitalist counter-movement and raised utopian humanism from the dead (De Sousa Santos calls the leftist tradition ‘dead thought’).
Regardless of which view we choose to take, it is clear that there is some kind of resistance to the totalitarian mode of capitalism operative today and that this resistance exploded onto the global scene in the late 1990s with the Seattle WTO (World Trade Organisation) protests in 1999 and the formation of the WSF in 2001, the first year of the new Millennium. Following the formation of the WSF the term ‘Porto Alegre Consensus’ became common parlance in recognition of anti-capitalism's challenge to the neo-liberal Washington consensus on the value of monetarism, deregulation, privatisation, and the minimal state. Unfortunately, what this term suggests, which is that first there is some kind of consensus of opinion in the WSF about the way to oppose neo-liberal capitalism on a global level and second that linked to this consensus view the WSF has some kind of concrete programme for change in place that will realise the motto of the anti-capitalist movement ‘another world is possible’, is not reflective of the current reality of the movement. De Sousa Santos recognises this problem. He tells us that the WSF is a diverse gathering of resistance movements, now in its seventh year, that must become more than a ‘talking shop’. Although there is some resistance to the idea of the WSF as a co-ordinated movement with prescribed aims, precisely because it is thought this will offend the movement's commitment to the celebration of diversity, De Sousa Santos understands that it must start to deliver results. But how will the WSF deliver on its promise that ‘another world is possible’? De Sousa Santos sets himself the task of answering this question. Given that local resistance movements already exist, his view is that the WSF's role should be to co-ordinate the formation of a globalised critical utopia. He recognises that this co-ordination work is essential but is also sensitive to the need to prevent the emergence of a new conservative utopia crippled by the kind of ideological iron cage that dominated the left for much of the 20th century.
Thus De Sousa Santos maintains the view that the WSF must continue to respect local diversity and celebrate the need for internal critique. In other words, the WSF must evolve into a movement, or space, capable of sustaining a critique of both the stupid neo-liberal system, which simply reproduces itself for no reason worthy of the name reason, and its own structures in order to prevent its own transformation into a similarly stupid ideological system. In terms of the former objective to critique the neo-liberal system and suggest alternative worlds, De Sousa Santos offers a two-step strategy, which he calls the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences, in order to explore the utopian possibilities pregnant in other forms of knowledge, other conceptions of time, other notions of identification, other modes of scaling, and other ideas about productivity. If the aim of the sociology of absences is to explore alternatives ways of thinking and living ignored by neo-liberal culture, so that we might begin to see the advantages of other forms of identification, other ways of thinking through the issue of the relative value of local-global scalings, and other conceptions of productivity uncoupled from the pursuit of surplus value, then the objective of the sociology of emergences is to think about how these other ways of thinking might contribute what Harnecker calls ‘struggle potential’ to the confrontation with neo-liberalism.
Given that the overall aim of the sociologies of absences and emergences is to excavate possible futures from the neo-liberal present, which seems bereft of possibilities for change, I think De Sousa Santos is correct to align his vision of the WSF with utopianism, and in particular, the work of Ernst Bloch, who wrote about the present as a temporal state latent with possibility. If the role of the WSF is to provide a space for the translation of local resistance movements into a globalised movement of movements, then we might suggest that it has already begun to fulfil this role through its annual meetings in Porto Alegre in 2001, 2003, and 2005, Mumbai in 2004, and multi-centres in 2006, and 2008. But what we must not forget is that the next step in the WSF's strategy must be to scale the lessons learned at the global level back down to the local level where struggle really takes place. This is where De Sousa Santos is in more or less complete agreement with Harnecker, author of Rebuilding the Left, in that they both explain that what is needed today is a form of radical, high intensity, democracy to oppose the neo-liberal form of low intensity political participation that never really stretches further than intermittent contributions to local and national elections. In this respect both De Sousa Santos and Harnecker more or less agree about the relative weightings of theory-practice, globalism-localism, and organisation-diversity required by the global left. They both suggest that it is necessary to secure some form of organised, globalised, structure defined by a set of abstract principles able to provide local resistance movements with some sense of global community, but that this structure should not be allowed to solidify or turn into an ideological gospel impervious to criticism.
On the one hand, the necessity to ensure organisational flexibility is about the need to secure internal democracy in the WSF and prevent the emergence of a new brand of leftist totalitarianism, but on the other hand I think De Sousa Santos is quite right when he suggests that neo-liberal capitalism is too fast, too inter-connected, and too enamoured with spectacle to suffer old style ideology critique regardless of what the left concluded about its own needs. As he suggests, what we need today are tactics, rather than theory. Whereas the latter term suggests a logical system of ideas that is more or less fixed and not necessarily orientated towards practice, the former conception implies a recognition of first the necessity of mobility of thought, second the reality of conflict, and third the need for praxis, the need to translate thought into action. But surely this celebration of tactics, mobility, and short term thought is problematic? How are we to think about the long term future if all we have are tactics? For both De Sousa Santos and Harnecker we must try to escape from our modernist attachment to the long term and think about how tactics release us from the need to define our possible futures. This is where both authors’ utopianism shines through. Neither wants to map the future in the manner of the classical utopians. Instead both suggest that we must confront the present and try to build the future from the materials to hand. Although Harnecker is more explicit about her reasons for insisting upon the rejection of the Leninist model of the Vanguard, which failed the Latin American left so badly in the 20th century, I suspect that De Sousa Santos’ motivations for setting out his theory of radical democracy are similarly bound up with this knowledge of Latin American politics. In the end both writers reflect a commitment to local participation and radical democracy. They both reject the idea that politics is about working within the limits of the possible, since in their view contemporary politics should be about excavating the impossible from the possible and liberating the potential of the present from the iron cage of neo-liberal capitalism that admits no alternative futures. Thus we confront the condition of the leftist utopia today. The five books under consideration in this review essay provide an essential framework for thinking about the prospects for radical, socialistic change in our contemporary world. Hopefully these texts, two compendiums of utopian terminology, a survey of resistance movements in the global south, and two meditations on the utopian possibilities of anti-capitalism, will provide readers with plenty of material to consider perhaps the most pressing issue of the 21st century, the systemic violence of neo-liberal capitalism.