the term ‘utopia’ is played out, and target practice for conservatives…//Fredric Jameson on Why Socialists Need Utopias
The term ‘utopia’ is played out and has suffered a century as target practice for capitalists. This just plays into the hands of capitalist propaganda. In The Last Revolution I have proposed a new approach: utopia as a model for new form of government, and then calling it something else as the term is set aside.
The term was always contradictory and open to the suggestion of unrelializability! Our idea of ‘democratic market neo-communism’ points to some realizable, practical, with an intelligent model of socialist economy and a way to remorph liberal systems into (neo-) communist ones. Creating a new social system from scratch in the name of ‘utopia’ has always failed.
Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has spent his life’s work exploring the political significance of utopia. For Jacobin, Jameson argues that socialists today can revive utopian ideals by showing that change is in fact possible.
1848+: The End(s) of History 