The Reality & Limits of Utopian Thinking:
Not Everything Can be “Perfect”
Image by Galina Nelyubova.
When the idea of liberation springs to mind, I imagine an older Aunty, having migrated to the U.S. decades ago, perched on her favorite chair in her favorite room of her spacious apartment, watching her favorite Desi soap, surrounded by her grandchildren, some of them rolling their eyes at the screen. Her hands are calloused, her feet still feel sore after a lifetime of working in one of the government-operated but community owned supermarkets in the Edison area, aisles and aisles filled with pounds of Basmati, okra, jars of pickled mangos, and of course, racks of lamb hanging in the freezer. But her legs have been feeling better due to access to a doctor in the nationalized system, a younger woman she trusts, whose parents hail from the same region of the subcontinent our Aunty once called home. Her husband, snoring next to her, his body as well weighed down by years and years of labor at a medical center handling the quotidian tasks of filing papers and translating for patients, but that’s in the rearview. They have the next few decades to themselves, to travel, to eat food they always wanted to try (maybe a brand of egg curry one of her former co-workers from Kashmir had suggested), or to simply sip tea in the mornings, holding hands from their balcony to watch the sun rise over the horizon of bustling shopping districts, and roads, and to spend the afternoons streaming epic soap opera tales until their minds grow weary from all of the colors and excitement, and instead, each drift asleep a few minutes apart. Those trained by the local government usually visit them every other day, sometimes every day during bad weather, making certain the fridge is stocked, that their blood pressure isn’t zigzagging anytime soon. Sometimes, they sleep through the visits as the government agent assigned them sweeps leaves or dirt off the balcony right before they too head back to the office to write notes.
Given the degenerative state of the world currently, my own mind sometimes wanders and chooses to reflect on what an alternative society, for everyone, could and should be. As a Marxist-Leninist, I believe that such things as the “free market” must be taken out back to the shed and put out its own inefficient misery for the masses of humanity to truly experience a lifetime of dignity and opportunity for joy. There are other elements involved in this process of shifting the world beneath our feet to match what we desire and need as a species, but nevertheless, it is a process that’s critical to examine and explore.
Marx himself was very much fond of offering up “hints” as to what he sought in a freer and liberated world. One of the clearest and most memorable of these moments can be found in his Thesis on Feuerbach, upon which he surmised that living in a socialist society was finally allowing the majority “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”[1] The time and space to be ourselves that we’re denied under capitalism has been justly returned to the masses. Our sense of humanity is ours again.
Yet, Marx himself discussed the difference between “work” and labor, and of how society, even when it is socialist, would still require labor to exist. It is not necessarily Marxist to be anti-labor or anti-working. There will still be a need for people to take part in maintaining the critical elements of societal infrastructure.[2] Freedom and dignity do not correlate with an absence of expertise and some form of regulation and guidance. In some sense, this lack of healthy guidance is what we have already in terms of not being able to rely on any major public goods and services for what we need to live, as clearly revealed during the Covid-19 pandemic, when so many of us were forced to run to the nearest store to purchase our food and masks from private companies, as prices were allowed to rise. Many of us were forced to order off Amazon instead, fearing exposure to a deadly virus that continues to rampage through the U.S., injuring people, killing so many.
Audre Lorde, in her tour of Soviet Russia and the surrounding region, marveled at the government intervention that essentially launched a nation that was wracked with the horrors of two world wars and was fundamentally a peasant country into nearly first world status. As much as she critiqued the U.S.S.R. for some of its internal issues, Lorde was transfixed by how the government was able to harness peoples’ labor, not for the select few as has been the case under capitalist dogma, but rather, for public benefit. “Long, efficient looking trains and tanker cars and ten-car passenger trains pass by us, going through switch houses with blue and white ceramic tiles and painted roofs, all managed by women,” she’d written, visiting towns beyond some of the major cities, “We stopped for a harvest festival lunch at a collective farm, complete with the prerequisite but very engaging cultural presentation, while vodka flowed.”[3] As she was led deeper by her guide into the rural parts of the country, she noticed how every town, at its base level, had new buildings, new forms of infrastructure, and a community that appeared vibrant and engaged. “Each town that we pass through has a cafe, where the villagers can come and spend an evening or chat or talk or watch TV or listen to propaganda, who knows, but where they can meet.”[4]
Famed Italian Marxist and now, personal intellectual hero, Domenico Losurdo, emphasized how for many serious Marxists they may have had a particular form of ideal society rummaging in their heads, but that vision had to also comport with objective realities, objective needs. To create a liberated Marxist society was itself a “learning process.”[5] Although Lenin was convinced that someday there would be a society that no longer needed a government (since conceivably everyone would have been politically developed to know how to act and think in accordance with a baseline of revolutionary values and zeal), in the interim, he recognized how important it was to retain expertise to help keep society at least functioning. Even in State and Revolution, which was published prior to the Bolsheviks seizing power, Lenin admitted that the economy must be run as efficiently as the “postal system” with “technicians, managers, bookkeepers” at the helm with an armed proletariat looming, serving us some measure of accountability but nevertheless, a layer of bureaucracy too.[6] Bureaucracy that one can rely on to enhance peoples’ lives rather than to diminish it.
At the very heart of effective liberatory praxis, not just mere reimagining of what become valued as “good” ideas, is managing this tightrope between the ideal case scenario that we all strive for in various ways and meeting the actual material needs of most people. Theory does play a significant role in this. Yes, one can devour all the books, and scraps of knowledge one can find and still not have a comprehensive view nor a viable one about how people should live. Still, theoretical analysis remains a fundamental part of building that better world, as are modes of philosophy. Theory offers the chance at developing a broader, more systematic understanding of the world around oneself, beyond the limits of one’s day-to-day experiences. Lived experience alone cannot present systemic solutions. Marxist theory teaches us, itself a product of historical analysis, that goods and services that everyone needs cannot be concentrated in the hands of private enterprise. Not only is the issue of capitalism a modern dilemma of people having to work for the profits of a few, it is a society that’s run extremely inefficiently and typically, against the interests of the public. Take housing for instance. On a human level, housing and shelter are elements that everyone requires. Yet, in the U.S. “housing market”, the priority is for allowing private developers and landlords to distribute what is a fundamental human need, usually with the goal of creating a “demand” that forces people to want to pay exorbitant prices for whatever is “available”. Even then, the availability that’s there is itself a direct product of a housing market dominated by profit-seeking interests.[7]
Why does this theoretical analysis, born of historical substance, matter? It reminds us that it’s not enough for someone to suggest that all we need is simply “more housing” within the extractive model and consumerist one that currently looms over us.[8] Of course, the government, even without a total revolution, can and must step in to start building an alternative sector of the housing market, but ultimately, the true resolution to this “problem” of affordability for basic human needs like housing, one that’s been examined by Marxist and other radical schools of thought and analysis, is a housing situation in which private powers have little to no influence in such a process. This is what separates Marxist theoretical concerns from what could be considered as “idealistic” ones, in which there is suddenly a utopia where everyone has what they need has simply materialized before our eyes overnight. Attached to our Marxist-aligned thinking of matching the ideal long-term society with the concrete steps to get there are foundational questions too about the strategies involved in devising a governing body of institutions, publicly controlled, that could find ways that are more efficient and “ethical” for the masses of people when it comes to the distribution of housing. How much public control should be allowed? How should the bureaucrats be trained in assessing the needs and interests of said working “people”?
“A Marxist worldview is at once ethical and scientific,” the philosopher Vanessa Wills writes in what will become a seminal text in grasping such concerns, Marx’s Ethical Vision.[9] Returning to the point about how labor will still be required in a socialist and liberated world, and how the act of labor is part of sustaining a far more “just” world, Wills clarifies, “For Marx, unalienated human beings perform labor for one another not as a sacrifice but as an act of self-realization, in conditions of human emancipation, circumstances are arranged so that in satisfying the needs of others in society I am also directly satisfying my own needs.”[10]
For a liberated society to flourish, one must account for the need for laborers to continue producing what everyone must have, like food, like masks for a pandemic, like infrastructure and utilities. One must also note how certain occupations need a set of expertise to fulfill, like doctors, nurses, construction, and even those in charge of making sure the streetlights at the busy intersection function as they should. Liberation does not mean unwinding the clock, or in some sense, living the libertarian “dream” of each of us being wholly responsible for the other, including those of us who don’t have the time nor skills to do so. Liberation should be what’s seen in countries like China, where a state builds hospitals to counter Covid-19, not what one can already experience in the rural parts of the U.S., deprived of stable roads and infrastructure, forced to brew basic medicine in bathtubs with instructions read online or some of us in the major metropolitan area making soap and masks when Covid-19 first hit.[11] For various reasons, that chaotic “libertarian” vision aligns easily with the desires and interests of the major capitalists themselves, having us scrounging for basic resources without the government “intervening”, allowing us the “freedom” to poison ourselves.
A major reason why many anti-colonial movements succeeded following the end of WWII, in parts of Africa and Asia, had of course, something to do with the diminished nature of European control, having bombed themselves into oblivion. But another major reason for the wave of anti-colonialism that would sweep through places like India, China, Vietnam or what was known as French Indochina, Ghana, Cuba, Algeria, among other places was there capacity and willingness to provide an alternative vision to the masses, and to literally offer resources and services many people otherwise didn’t receive from their European colonizers, nor the various governing institutions that were set up by European-backed corporations, and the various minions they employed to extract and exploit us.[12]
As the leader of the PAIGC, the main political vessel seeking to overthrow fascist Portuguese control over Guinea-Bissau in Africa, Amilcar Cabral routinely examined, sometimes in front of crowds of people, what a future liberated society should be, but all the while, situating that discussion and his vision within the day-to-day struggle as well. Although not explicitly a Marxist, Cabral was highly educated, had been groomed to be yet another bureaucrat in the colonizing machine, a machine of death and suffocating oppression supported by the arms and money of the U.S. and her NATO allies. However, he rejected this fate and turned himself toward the light of revolution. Almost immediately him and his comrades forged alliances with other Marxist-inspired forces in the southern part of the African continent, as well as drawing inspiration from their comrades in Vietnam and other parts of the colonized world. The PAIGC were a militant group, actively fighting against Portuguese control of the territory, receiving support from the USSR and even some nominally social democratic nations like Sweden. Like the Viet Minh, the PAIGC did not just focus on expunging themselves of the Portuguese military presence throughout the region, parasitic as they were. They also channeled the funding they did receive from their regional and international alliances into their development of institutions and programs in those areas that had been “liberated” from so-called Portuguese civilization. In an interview at the University of London (one should view Cabral a missionary of anti-colonial gospel), he stated, “The liberated regions in fact already contain all the elements of a state—administrative services, health services, education services, local armed forces for defense against Portuguese attacks, tribunals, and prisons,” adding, “The immediate problem is to move from the liberated to the non-liberated areas, and to enlarge our state till it encloses the whole country.”[13] There was always this sense of imagining and reimagining, of testing the boundaries of what could be, and of course, delineating the difference between forms of independence from Europe that were not truly about creating a more free and dignified form of living.
In another discussion with African American activists in New York City, a year prior to his assassination at the hands of the Portuguese, Cabral explained how the Guinea-Bissau future state would not just be about one group of elites replacing another. The purpose of independence was to finally create an economic and political system in which people have an abundance of dignity and joy that was predicated on the material concerns of having access to basic rights and goods. “In some countries they only replaced a White man with a Black man, but for the people it is the same,” Cabral expressed to the crowd.[14] Cabral discussed the need for a state, for government functions to be able to help develop an economy that could meet the needs of the average person of a free Guinea-Bissau, once more reflecting the necessary melding of materiality with the process of developing a new future for all. “We have to create for ourselves the instruments of the state inside our country, in the conditions of our history, in order to orientate all to a life of justice, work for progress, and equality.”[15] Behind the development of the ideal are concrete steps that must be explored and re-examined along the way.
The flourishing of a utopian society relies on groups of people grappling with very material concerns and steps. What would make most people have a more dignified standard of living? In other contexts, what would help oppressed people truly attain independence from the oppressor class? What is the requirement of the people, and of our ability to build institutions to facilitate that newer and bolder world?
As Losurdo discussed in Western Marxism, for Ho Chi Minh, and others in the colonized setting, it was pertinent to develop government structures and machinations that could help nations break away from an overreliance on Western gratuity and corporate cunning. In essence, there had to be a development of nationally controlled major industries to maintain a type of life for the masses in such countries, leading to the creation of a level of autonomy that otherwise would immediately go missing if colonized peoples would instead, be compelled to purchase their major goods and services from essentially Western-backed corporations instead or from companies at the national level that desire allying with such Western “interests”. Even the “opening” up of the Chinese economy, with the Communist party still in charge of this critical process, as Losurdo describes, was a strategic move in maintaining a level of abundance that most Chinese residents could access, all the while still retaining a level of independence hat other nations do not have given how swiftly they’ve gutted indigenous regulation of major businesses, allowing for local societies to be molded for the extreme benefit of Western companies and governments rather than for most of the local peoples. In the Philippines, for instance, there is no real attempt as there is by the Chinese communist party, in regulating foreign businesses, or in maintaining a rigorous set of government institutions with the power and capacity to regulate. As one would expect, the Philippines economy, therefore, has become extremely reliant on the goodwill of U.S. mega-corporations, in sending their best and brightest abroad to the U.S. to make enough money which they can send back home in remittances.[16] It’s been quite the opposite inside China, with a strong government presence in the economy, and in its capacity to develop the country.
As Jennifer Ponce de Leon and Gabriel Rockhill write in their introduction to Losurdo’s Western Marxism, “In over seventy years of Communist Party rule, the country has been completely transformed. Life expectancy, which was only around thirty years in the late 1940s, has been increased to seventy-seven years, surpassing life expectancy in the United States.”[17]
When we turn to our own history here in the belly of the beast, any attempt at salvaging forms of democracy or basic standards of freedom has depended on this melding of the ideal with the concrete steps to get there, and how this can create some challenges of course, along the way. Anything that eschews a discussion of this is itself anti-liberatory and very much a form of idealism that can be counterproductive and, in some cases, dangerous for the oppressed. A perfect example of this is what took place following the end of chattel slavery in the U.S. The end of chattel slavery itself required militant action by the enslaved, followed by a violent war against the violence of an authoritarian state across the south. The Confederacy, for all its southern white gentlemen tripping on beautifully designed canes and white woman wearing ball gowns much like their incestuous aristocrat families in Europe, was a savage state, one that would not have fallen if not for violence against it. During the era known as Reconstruction, however, intervention by the federal government was still necessary. First, as a means of quelling the incessant guerilla mobs of Klansmen, and other forms of white supremacist political violence. None of these groups would’ve been persuaded to put down their guns. They had to be crushed by government power. But apart from this, and very similar to again future forms of successful anti-colonial struggles, the federal government, pushed as it were by African Americans organizing and radical Republican legislators, developed programs that could help lift the downtrodden and oppressed from a position of extreme poverty into somewhat of a stronger economic position in terms of accessing basic resources like public schooling and healthcare. In some cases, the Freedmen’s Bureau, created by the federal government due to public demand, divvied up land once owned by slaveowners among the African Americans who actually made the land profitable and healthy as it could be, the true inheritors of the kingdom of god on earth. The true heart and soul of any kind of democracy that could ever flourish within these United States.
In his seminal text detailing this period, Black Reconstruction, the godfather of sociology, W.E.B. Du Bois, regarded the Freedmen’s Bureau as “the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted.”[18] The issue with reconstruction was that it didn’t go far enough as it needed to, and gradually unraveled under the weight of white supremacy in D.C., with pro-southern anti-black feeling winning out and leading to the retreat of federal troops from the south. But until then, the deepening of such freedoms, the freedom to organize, the freedom to have land, the freedom to go to school, all that was made more possible for many African Americans, because of a concrete set of steps taken to form a governing set of institutions that “made laws, executed them, and interpreted them”, that “collected taxes” and of course, “maintained and used military force.”[19]
In the modern context, when we do think of the steps that pave the way toward a more ideal future, it will require a serious tackling of how best to organize institutions that are capable of providing goods and services for all. It will require some mode of thinking or discussion that has us really reflect on how best to contain what could only be as described as counter-revolutionary actions, especially in the infancy stages of creating a newer society. One can’t be serious about creating a new world and not expect a bewildering and deadly response from our enemies. It is not, in fact, an enlightened position to simply allow for particularly deadly forces to regroup and exact what they feel is revenge, usually against those among us who are the most vulnerable. It is not a liberatory position to not realize that either steps must be taken to contain the fury of the old world order desperate in its lashing out, or one simply allows the most exploited and oppressed to lose it all, including their lives.
For that Aunty to be able to spend her days, preferably years, in some form of comfort, to have the time to rest her head back on her chair, for her snoring to reverberate throughout their two bedroom, such thinking of the connections between materiality and fighting for a newer, truly humane, world must be elevated in our political discussions. To imagine her and her husband, on their balcony, having a trained nurse (who wouldn’t also feel the sense of urgency as many do now to treat patients like people on an assembly line) to visit them, make them their breakfast and some tea, the steam rising with the sun, needs us to be serious about the real concrete steps that could bring about this world to fruition, not to mention some of its challenges and concerns. For the couple to enjoy themselves in their twilight, they would need more hospitals, better roads, places to be in, like community centers for senior citizens, places where they can still feel active and socialized. This means more construction, wiping away abandoned lots, paving over some of the natural wildlife. But how much would be too much? That should be determined by not only the government bureaucrats but those in these communities attending their townhalls. But there could be segments of the community who desire more, some who do not and instead, value more bundles of trees being planted, and others who find themselves floating politically. One could think that maybe some bureaucrats themselves, those with the training to identify environmental issues, might be forced to reconsider and even push back against segments of other government officials and the constituencies pulling them.
Liberation cannot be something we wait to discuss. It is also not an abstract part of an idea lurking in our heads for the right time to shine, finally. In fact, as we think through what liberation could be, how to get there, this would orient ourselves in the here and now as well, in our examination of which reforms even are worth attempting to push, and how to connect reforms to its revolutionary potentialities. As mentioned earlier, when we desire a society that has housing for all, we then pursue a strategy of demanding government, until we completely change everything, steps in to build housing that’s not in the “private market” sphere. Same with wanting a government-funded and organized healthcare system, and not simply another ACA because we know now that the ACA does not lead us to that future in which our Aunty can finally feel safe and cared for.
Aunties everywhere, uncles too, need a future in which efficiency has been intertwined with dignity and care for most. A future by which one has the time to fish, think, read, gossip and gaze at the sunrise, able to appreciate its orange and red hue.
NOTES
1. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels. 1998. The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach (Great Books in Philosophy) (New York: Prometheus). ↑
2. Hadas Their. 2020. A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics (New York: Haymarket Books). ↑
3. Audre Lorde. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press), 24-25. ↑
4. Lorde, 25. ↑
5. Domenico Losurdo. 2024. Western Marxism: How It was Born, How It Died, How It can Be Reborn (New York: Monthly Review Press), 68. ↑
6. V.I. Lenin. 1943. State & Revolution (New York: International Publishers), 44. ↑
7. Hadas Thier. ↑
8. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. 2019. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermine Black Homeownership (Durham: The University of North Carolina Press). ↑
9. Vanessa Christina Wills. 2024. Marx’s Ethical Vision (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ↑
10. Vanessa Christina Wills. ↑
11. Yuliya Talmazan. “China’s coronavirus hospital built in 10 days opens its doors, state media says,” NBC News, Feb. 3, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-s-coronavirus-hospital-built-10-days-opens-its-doors-n1128531. ↑
12. Domenico Losurdo. ↑
13. Amilcar Cabral. 2022. Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral (New York: Monthly Review Press). ↑
14. Amilcar Cabral, 144-145. ↑
15. Cabral, 151. ↑
16. Adrian De Leon, “What is forgotten in the U.S.-Philippines friendship,” Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/09/25/what-is-forgotten-us-philippines-friendship/. ↑
17. Losurdo, 30. ↑
18. W.E.B. Du Bois. 1992. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 (New York: The Free Press), 219. ↑
19. Du Bois, 219. ↑
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