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 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.

Source: Fredric Jameson on Why Socialists Need Utopias

Socialism of the 21st century

Socialism of the 21st century (Spanish: Socialismo del siglo XXI; Portuguese: Socialismo do século XXI; German: Sozialismus des 21. Jahrhunderts) is an interpretation of socialist principles first advocated by German sociologist and political analyst Heinz Dieterich and taken up by a number of Latin American leaders. Dieterich argued in 1996 that both free-market industrial capitalism and 20th-century socialism have failed to solve urgent problems of humanity such as poverty, hunger, exploitation of labour, economic oppression, sexism, racism, the destruction of natural resources and the absence of true democracy.[1] Socialism of the 21st century has democratic socialist elements, but it also resembles Marxist revisionism.[2]Leaders who have advocated for this form of socialism include Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Michelle Bachelet of Chile.[3] Because of the local unique historical conditions, socialism of the 21st century is often contrasted with previous applications of socialism in other countries, with a major difference being the effort towards a more effective economic planning process.[2]

Source: Socialism of the 21st century – Wikipedia

Half-Earth Socialism//are Verso and marxists paralytics?…Revolutionary action needed…

I will cite this book in my notes section 0/0 in the Last Revolution but note that authors on the ‘left’ constantly propose ‘solutions’, wave a wand, and then close for dinner. None of these proposals can be expected to happen. The left can’t even get the ‘working class’ disentangled from Trump…
Interesting anyway…

What we can do, environmental scholars Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass argue, is strive for a society able to ensure high living standards while stabilizing the environment: Half-Earth socialism. This means:• Rewilding half the earth to absorb carbon emissions and restore biodiversity• A rapid transition to renewable energy, paired with drastic cuts in consumption by the world’s wealthiest• Global veganism to cut down on energy and land use• Worldwide socialist planning to efficiently and equitably manage production• The involvement of everyone—even you!

Source: Verso

What You Don’t Have and Why – TomDispatch.com

What You Don’t Have and Why
The Never-Ending Impact of a Forgotten Blitzkrieg Against the American Lef
tBy Adam Hochschild
Donald Trump has had the urge to crush many things, including the last election. So I must admit I found it eerily amusing that, when the FBI entered his estate at Mar-a-Lago recently, they did so under a warrant authorized by the Espionage Act of 1917. History certainly has a strange way of returning in our world and also of crushing alternatives. Whatever Trump did, that act has a sorry track record in both its own time and ours when it has been used, including by his administration, to silence the leakers of government information. And because my latest book, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and America’s Forgotten Crisis, is about the crushing of alternatives a century ago in this country, in the midst of all this, I couldn’t help thinking about a part of our history that The Donald would undoubtedly have been the first to crush, if he had the chance.

Source: What You Don’t Have and Why – TomDispatch.com