De/Reconstructing Utopianism: Towards a World-Historical Typology

We often find ourselves debunking utopianism because of the historical shortcomings of Marxism, despite realizing that Marxism itself, in its classical writings at least, never claimed to be a utopian doctrine in the first place. For the founders of "scientific socialism," in fact, being both scientific (as Marxism claimed to be) and utopian was a contradiction in terms. If anything, it would be more logical to explore the problems of Marxism with regards to its claimed scienticity than its alleged utopianism--if we intend to pursue a dialectical critique of the inner consistency of the doctrine, that is. For the contemporary critics of Marxism and utopianism, however, one seems to have been a failure because it has been the other. Underlying the above controversy over whether Marxism was scientific or utopian (with the former implying a positive attribute, and the latter a negative one--regardless of whether sympathetic or critical stands are taken vis-a-vis Marxism) is the commonly assumed typological dualism of science vs. utopianism itself. Frederick Engels, of course, famously immortalized this typological dualism in his 1880 work, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in order to legitimize the newly arisen doctrine as a "scientific" enterprise in contrast to its "utopian" precursors. Consequently, we still have a hard time treating Marxism as being both utopian and "scientific," which of course would make the attribution of its failures to the two aspects that much harder. It has to be one or the other--an instance of either/or formal logical dualism which seems to run counter, in fact, to the dialectical logic Marxism prided itself to have materialistically reinvented. The long-inherited binary structures of our knowledges seem again to pose a difficulty here. Is it possible that the real problem is with the way the problem itself has been posed--that the boundaries of science and utopianism are fuzzier than they appear to be? To be sure, those who are still interested in making efforts towards a just global society have found the identification of utopianism with Marxism to be an obstacle, to say the least. It may therefore be useful to make an effort at deconstructing our taken-for-granted positions on the matter and revisit the plethora of definitional and conceptual fuzziness and inconsistencies surrounding utopianism in the hopes of making a clearer stand on the subject. (1) My aim in this paper is to deconstruct utopianism as a world-historical social movement, and reconstruct a typology of utopianism that allows the interpretation of the historical debunking of utopianism by Marxism (or vice versa) as an expression partly of internal rifts among various types of utopianism, partly of gradual departure of Marxism from utopianism in its classical lifetime, and partly of the "false" consciousness of the movement about its own dual identity vis-a-vis utopianism and science due to ideological-political exigencies. Using the proposed typology of utopianism, in other words, I will argue that Marxism's efforts to distinguish itself from utopianism (and vice versa) had as much to do with ideological rhetoric as with substance and lack thereof. What explains the ideological aspects of the controversy has to do with self-promotion in light of the perceived failures of the other types. But this does not mean Marxism was not utopian in a certain sense; it was a specific type of it in contrast to others (as will be explained later). But it gradually lost its utopian message as it "matured," which should legitimately raise the question whether its failures were due to its specific form of utopianism and/or its gradual departure from utopianism altogether. I will argue below that Marxism failed its own ends both because of the limits of its specific approach to utopianism, and because of its gradual abandoning of utopianism altogether, (1) eventually embracing a non-utopian, "realpolitik," antisystemic mode preoccupied more with shattering (or running) the existing social institutions than with creatively building alternative ones in their midst, a way proven more effective in previous successful historical "transitions. …