Visions of the Future: Utopias and Dystopias

Visions of the Future: Utopias and Dystopias

Tonight’s topic is huge. In the past I have talked about that huge, amorphous socio-econo-ideological silly putty that is religion, but tonight’s topic dwarfs it in at least one sense – the temporal one. Science Fiction is a fairly young literary genre – although older than you might think, as the first SF was a 17^th century novella about a journey to the moon by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, and there are elements of what would become common SF tropes reaching back to Shakespeare, Thomas More, Plato and Aristophanes – but its province is the future.

 The future is, as Star Trek VI put it, the undiscovered country. The future by its very nature is indeterminate and yet we feel that it is tangible in some way – that it is potentially concrete. So it is fertile ground for our imaginative impulses and a repository of our hopes and fears.

Our futures can tell us a lot about ourselves. If, as Marx has it, it is not consciousness that determines being but being that determines consciousness, our imagined futures can reveal to us our present by revealing the nature and limitations of our hopes, fears and imaginations.

I have titled this meeting Utopias and Dystopias because as socialists our greatest aim is to change society, and the visionary construction of utopias reflects a desire for something akin to our aims, while the terrible dystopias haunt us, spectres warning us of the cost of failure.

As Marxists, however, we have a very specific idea about our hopes for the future, and in this talk I want to address some of the desires for a socialist future that have been expressed in SF as well as those that are more reflexive in their depiction of our own times. I want to finish by suggesting that socialist ideas about the future are fundamentally different from those that are offered by SF, because it is centred around a problematic rather than a vision. I’ll explain more what I mean by this towards the end.

In this talk, I could have used dozens of authors, films and shows. However, in order that the talk takes less time than the meeting, I’ve divided the talk into several headings: utopias, nightmare utopias, the fractured world, dystopias and the uneasy present. In each section I will discuss one example in relation to socialist ideas of a future we would want to see.

Utopias

Let us start with utopias. These, from a socialist perspective, are hard to find. We could delve back towards Plato to see the construction of an ideal society – but for us it would be no utopia! Plato’s Republic is mechanistic, restrictive, oligarchic and profoundly unequal. In Plato’s utopia, hereditary philosopher-kings devote themselves to reflection while hereditary guardians run the country and fight its wars, leaving hereditary auxiliaries to do the work and live in a society so strictly controlled that even the music is prescribed for them.

So if this is no utopia, what might count? The clearest example I know of is William Morris’ News from Nowhere. Morris was a socialist, although not a Marxist. In his book he imagined a traveller from the present (the mid-nineteenth century) doing a reverse Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and finding themselves in the future, after the revolution. Wikipedia neatly sums up the plot:

the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

This does indeed sound like a utopia, and Morris describes it lovingly. However, even here there are criticisms that we, as Marxist socialists need to point out. There is a lot to be said for the idea that under socialism work will be enjoyable. However, the idea of an agrarian future, or that unpleasant work will not need to be done, is unrealistic. The point of a socialist society is that it is one in which all share in the work, and that the value produced by our labour is available to all. This does not mean that the only work that we will do is work which we find pleasurable. It does mean that there will be less of it to do, however!

Nightmare Utopias?

Some utopias are written with good intentions, yet to a person with a scrap of empathy would sound like the kind of society that no one would wish to live in.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series provide a prime example of this kind of world. In the Foundation series, technology has transformed humanity in to a bountiful galaxy-wide civilisation. Machines do all the work and Asimov’s characters flit around vast sections of space in an oddly empty-feeling universe as gentlemen (and in Asimov’s writing it is almost always gentlemen) of leisure. In the Foundation universe, a stable human civilisation has been created by having a democratic parliamentary system – and a secret organisation of telepaths who control the parliament. This is a common trope in a lot of the bright, shiny SF from the 50s and 60s – that robots will make the need for workers redundant, and that the ideal society is one which is stable and materially prosperous.

But what do socialists want from the future? First of all, we are socialists. We believe in the power of the working class to transform society and do away with classes altogether. ‘Stability’ is not enough. Seen from the correct distance, a lot of societies can seem to be ‘stable’ – the USSR, Nazi Germany or the feudal system, for example. For a given value of ‘stable’, almost any regime can be justified.

Secondly, as socialists we maintain that any society with classes is never truly stable. Classes mean antagonistic social relations (in short, that some do the work and others live off the wealth created by the workers). These tensions can often be managed, but are always antagonistic.

We want the abolition of exploitation, the abolition of the ruling class. At the heart of Asimov’s idea is the belief that ordinary human beings cannot be trusted to run their affairs for themselves, and that an enlightened elite should do this for them. In this country, that idea is known as One-Nation Toryism, which has been rather disturbingly unearthed sewn back together and is currently having the electrodes applied to its temples by Ed Milliband. For us, the patronising attitude of One-Nation Tories, who see the whole country as an Edwardian family with themselves as a firm but fair paterfamilias is the self-delusion of those whose position in society is based on the exploitation of those below, and whose belief that they are ruling solely for the benefit of others is, at best, the result of wilful blindness and at worst a mendacious, cynical fantasy created for the benefit of the credulous.

But in short, for socialists, if there’s a ruling class, it is not a utopia!

The fractured world

The bright and gleaming future of Clarke and Asimov that the fifties and sixties brought us had its mirror. If Clarke and Asimov showed technology at the service of masters, if they showed us an efficient, planned future under the control of a small, centralised authority, a view where society seemed purposeful and to some degree united, the sixties also brought us their chaotic other in the form of authors such as Philip K Dick and Kurt Vonnegut. While Star Trek brought us a benevolent, primary coloured vision of a future US imperium, one critic wrote of Philip K Dick’s book Valis ‘It is … about madness, pain, deception, death, obsessive delusory states of mind, cruelty, solitude, imprisonment, and it is a joy to read.’ The film maker and former Python Terry Gilliam has observed ‘For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K Dick got there first.’

Dick often created dystopias, but this is rarely the focus of his books. He created worlds riven with not just multiple perspectives on reality but with an idea that perception could alter the subjective in a direct way. 

In Dick’s world, order is a fragile and mistaken notion, which quickly tumbles into chaos. An excellent example of this is Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, in which a woman’s experimentation with drugs causes the complete collapse of reality.

In Flow My Tears, the protagonist’s problem is that he is an internationally famous singer and TV host who has suddenly ceased to exist. This causes him some distress: ‘He tried to speak but couldn’t. Inside him his mind churned like a tattered rubber ball, sinking and rising, slowing down, speeding up, fading and then flaring brilliantly; the shafts of light scampered through him, piercing every part of his body.’ At one point he finds one of his own records and tries to play it: ‘swiftly he got it from its jacket and sleeve, placed it on the spindle … Sound of the needle touching plastic surface. Background hiss and the inevitable crackles and clicks. Still no music. The records were blank.’ He then goes upstairs to find the woman who has been helping him – who had left the room a few minutes earlier. He finds ‘on the floor, a skeleton. … The foot bones had cast aside the high-heeled shoes A few tufts of hair clung to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: The eyes had gone, all the flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow.’

Dick’s books are often set against the backdrop of a totalitarian or near-totalitarian state, but the reader is faced with multiple perspectives and repeated shifts of the reality that underpins the narrative itself. Dick’s worlds are isolated, barely comprehensible. The central characters rarely know what is going on, and the privileged knowledge that many authors afford the reader cannot be trusted. When we are looking for our future, Dick offers us a delirious intensification of the experience of life under capitalism, where our alienation from each other is taken to the point where we are alienated from reality, and even from our sense of self. A powerless and lonely future perpetually on the brink of annihilation.

It’s interesting that Dick is one of the most-filmed SF authors of all time. Screamers (Second Variety), The Adjustment Bureau (Adjustment Team), Next (The Golden Man), Paycheck, Total Recall (We Can Remember it for you Wholesale), Minority Report, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and A Scanner Darkly all have their origins in Dick stories, with several more being lined up for production, including Flow My Tears. Something about his alienated view of the future appeals to us, even when severely mutated by the Hollywood development process.

From a socialist viewpoint, we recognise that capitalism produces alienation. As workers we are alienated from the products of our work, because we do not produce them for our own need or use, and do not realise their value ourselves. As individuals we are alienated from each other through the competitive processes of the labour market, and as a society we are alienated from the value produced by our societies, as more and more of it is captured by fewer and fewer people. Dick’s work is an expression of capitalist relations, that Marx would have recognised:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Dick’s work often concludes with a return to some form of reason and reality, but his work is almost universally profoundly pessimistic, and though it may end with a nuclear war and the return of the Neanderthals, as in The Simulacra, we do not find a sense that humans can act in together to achieve a revolution that can overthrow the police states that populate his novels. Dick captures something of the experience of life in a capitalist or police state, but does not offer us anything we can hope for either – as such, he can show us what a dystopia feels like but not a way out.

Dystopias

Having some idea of what a dystopia might feel like, we should now find out what they look like. The problem with dystopias is that there is no shortage of them. It is telling that we find these much easier to imagine than utopias, but that doesn’t make choosing a case study any easier. I was going to go with the most famous and overused of the dystopian novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I think if there is one that captures the spirit of a dystopia, a society which represents the antithesis of humanity is the book that Orwell based Nineteen Eighty-Four on, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 book, We.

Zamyatin was a Bolshevik whose work was a banned in the USSR as it was satirical about soviet society. He also, although this has no bearing on my selection, worked in the shipyards in Wallsend and lived in Jesmond from 1916 until the October Revolution, when he returned to Russia to help with the overthrow of the Tsar.

We is a more perfectly formed surveillance state than Nineteen Eighty-Four. It takes place in the One State, a city whose buildings are made out of glass – the police of the One State don’t even need the telescreens of Orwell. The citizens of the One State have no names, only designations. They have no sense of self and, towards the end of the novel are queuing up voluntarily to be lobotomised by the state to remove their emotions and creativity, the only things which prevent them from being purely functional work units. This truly is a dystopia, a place which has many of the features that as socialists we would like to see: equality, collectivisation, a planned economy. Yet these things, which we think of as tools of liberation, are presented as features of a state so totalitarian that it is barely even a separate entity any more.

What should we say about Zamyatin’s vision? I think the point for us is that collectivisation does not itself equate to socialism. Unless the workers themselves are those who exercise power, freely, it is not socialism. In We, the nature of the ruling class is hard to see, as the One State’s rulers are as invisible as the members of a crowd, but nevertheless they are separate. They are not accountable, they are not part of the working class; they are a separate group who exploit the labour of others through fear. Socialism means a genuinely classless society, which the One State only appears to be.

The Uneasy Present

The last future vision I want to consider is probably the most common in all of SF – the uneasy present. Most SF deals with contemporary themes and heightens specific aspects of our society. For example, Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film of PD James’ book The Children of Men focused on the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, which did not feature significantly in the source book. I have decided to use the TV series Battlestar Galactica as an example of this idea.

Battlestar Galactica was revived and ‘reimagined’ in the early 2000s. It takes place in a world where humans live in a federated republic run by a president. The economy is capitalist. The Battlestar of the title is part of a fleet of gigantic space aircraft carriers. Many of the concerns of BSG are familiar to us – the role of military force, the place of democracy, human rights, religious fundamentalism, religious conflict, terrorism, suicide bombing, the role of the media, even labour disputes. There are two major departures from the current US political and social milieu: the existence of artificial intelligence in the form of humanity’s nemesis, the Cylon; and that the human race in the series are the only survivors of a vast nuclear holocaust committed by the Cylon in the opening moments of the first episode. However, AI has been a live issue for several decades now, and genocide is a familiar problem for us today; and together these two allow humanity, which stands in for the US, to see itself as a victim of an aggressor which is (because Cylons are physically identical to humans) inscrutable, intelligent, organised and cannot be distinguished from humanity itself, which again is a common way of perceiving the country by many of its citizens, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.

This is a vision of the future as the present. BSG replicates the post-9/11 American political landscape, with all of its tensions and conflicts, but reconfigures the US so that a single terrorist atrocity becomes a holocaust. With the Cylon, terrorist cells become an all-pervasive threat - from without and within. They have a terrifying military capability, but could also be the man or woman next to you. In fact, because they can programme Cylons agents so well, they could even be you, and you would never know! By making such a change, the US can be cast as a victim, which cannot be achieved to the same extent outside of an SF setting, where it would come up against certain inconvenient truths.

Sound familiar?

The world of BSG is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a depiction of our modern world – attempting to assert itself and yet with a sense that the old narratives are no longer satisfactory. The central characters of BSG commit war crimes, allow themselves to become an oligarchical ruling class that still pays lip service to democracy, and is a shadow of its former self still attempting to retain its sense of itself in the face of a changed world. All of this should sound familiar to us. As socialists we would apply the same criticisms to the vision offered that we apply to the actually existing class societies that we see in the world around us today.

What do we want from our future?

I have tried to outline five different ways in which popular SF attempts to depict our future, and I have suggested that none of them are satisfactory utopias from our point of view as revolutionary socialists.

Part of the problem is that we are not in a position to dictate what a future socialist society will look like. If we were, that society would not be socialist and we would be just another group looking to establish itself as a ruling class. We believe that a socialist revolution can be made only by the working class, who form the vast majority of people under capitalism, and that it is through the working class acting for itself that revolution will be made and the path to socialism embarked upon.

Ultimately, what dystopias and socialists share is a problematic. Dystopias identify features of contemporary society that are cruel, unfair, or just plain terrifying. Similarly, as socialists we focus on what we do not want to see, because we see it in the society around us. We want change in the structure of society, but do not think it should result in the kind of nightmare utopia that Asimov created, or the agrarian daydream of William Morris, because we do not know what kind of society the workers who make the revolution will create. What we have in common with these visions of the future is the understanding that something is wrong in the world in which we live now, where we differ are our hopes and the ways in which we think the society of the future could develop.

However, just because we would hesitate to define the minutiae of a socialist society, this does not mean that we cannot think about some of the features of one.

John Molyneux, one of our comrades, has written a pamphlet on this very subject, called ‘The Future Socialist Society’ in which he describes some of the things that a future socialist society would need. He says that in the immediate aftermath of a revolution

the core institutions of the new state will be not the workers' militia but the network of workers' councils. Workers' councils are regional bodies of delegates elected from workplaces which in turn will send delegates to a national workers' council. It is this latter body that will be the highest power in the land. The government, the militia and all other state institutions will be responsible and accountable to the national workers' council.

…

Workers' control of industry is essential. A working class that is unable to control its own workplaces will not be able to control its own state. If control of the new state industries is transferred to a privileged bureaucracy, as happened in Russia, then sooner or later this will come to exert a decisive influence in the society and class divisions will re-establish themselves.

…

Once workers' ownership and control of industry are established it will be possible to proceed to the introduction of a planned economy. Again it is necessary to distinguish between socialist planning and the capitalist, and state capitalist, planning we are used to. The plan will not be a rigid scheme imposed from above. The working class must be the subject, not the object, of the plan.

The planning process will begin at the base in workplace meetings, factory councils and workers' councils, with a determination of people's needs and priorities and an assessment of the productive capacities of each workplace. On the basis of this input from below the government will have to draw up a coherent plan matching capacity to requirement. The whole plan will then have to be submitted to the working class for debate, and to its representatives in the workers' councils for amendment and approval.

It will be an intensely democratic process and it is only on a democratic basis that it can hope to succeed. For, as the experience of Stalinist Russia has shown, bureaucratic, authoritarian planning leads to false information being fed in from below and formal rather than real plan fulfilment.

The achievement of a workers' planned economy will not only solve the worst economic problems of capitalism (unemployment, inflation, etc) but will open immense possibilities for the future.

The establishment of a planned socialist economy on an international scale will put an end to the recurring crises of capitalism which result in the destruction and waste of productive resources through bankruptcies, under-investment, overproduction and mass unemployment. It will mean the truly immense scientific, technological, economic and human resources currently devoted to the preparation and waging of war will be redirected to socially useful purposes.

[The working week will be reduced, work will lose its character of oppressiveness and humiliation, automation will reduce the need for menial jobs and] Everyone will become both a producer and a planner of production. Everyone will have the time, the energy and the education to participate in the collective shaping of the environment-work which will require the fusion of artistic, scientific, technical and social knowledge, and which will be a collective, creative process.

Finally, we socialists are the sort of people who will never be happy with a utopia. Frederick Engels’ book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific lays out a good case as to why not. Firstly, a future socialist society should have no need of a state at all:

Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.

But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole:

in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;
in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;
in our own times, the bourgeoisie.

When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out.

Secondly, utopian socialists ‘do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. … they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice … If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius’. There was something of this in the work of the utopians like Asimov. Utopias ignore the economic, political and social forces that define the limits of particular actually existing societies.

In the end, utopias are stories about the way we would like the world to be. They tend to treat actual human beings in a fairly instrumentalist way, with the exception of William Morris’. When we look around at this world, we see the ills that capitalism has visited upon it: huge inequality, in wealth, social status and power, massive exploitation of the many by the few, racism, sexism, starvation in a world that produces enough food for everyone, environmental destruction, the list goes on. We want a better future for ourselves and those who will come after us. We know we can make the revolution, but we do not believe we can or should dictate the future to the victorious revolutionaries. We cannot afford to be instrumentalist about our fellow workers. We are part of the class that has the capacity to end capitalism and must be a part of it, but we cannot and should not speak for a future that has the potential to be the most energetic and creative in human history, as humanity as a whole becomes free for the first time.

There followed a lively discussion. I tried to respond to some of the points raised in my summing up:

• The idea that change is something to be feared in much science fiction was raised. I suggested that this is because much popular science fiction represents the ideology of the ruling class, and that for the ruling class in a capitalist society change is very much an object of fear. They are a class forced by their economic position to continually revolutionise the means of production, yet the consequences of such change cannot be measured, and the prospect of losing power or privilege haunts them. This is particularly true of American SF, certainly since the economic crisis of the 1970s and especially since 9/11, which reflects an unease in the American ruling class about maintaining their global supremacy. The second reason that so much SF presents fear of change is that it is a useful idea – that if workers are cautious and suspicious of social change then it will make them less likely to accept it. Of course, anyone who has ever lost their job or found their independence at work marginalised through technological revolution will in all likelihood have a suspicion of change in this sense anyway, as they are on the receiving end of the changes in production that the bourgeoisie perpetually make.
• The ideas of the evil computer, the evil corporation, and formerly the mad scientist had been discussed. I suggested that this is a feature of alienation, expressed through art. In science fiction the idea that technology is going to overtake us, artificial intelligences will take away our agency in some way, or an individual with access to knowledge we cannot understand and cannot control is as common as the idea of alien species that are hostile to humanity. All express the experience of life under capitalism. All express the lack of control we have over our lives, and that every instrument we use is part of a process that we do not fully understand.
• Finally, the idea of a perfect age in the past, a Golden Age, had been discussed, and the idea that a Golden Age was a permanent feature of human history. I suggested that Golden Ages and utopias have the same well-spring: a desire for a force majeur that can deliver us from our current state; either a divine intervention that can return us to a state of grace long lost, or a belief in an impersonal force of Progress that will drive us forward to a perfect society.
• In closing, I pointed out that utopia is a Greek word which means 'nowhere' and that utopias are not and cannot be real places. The socialist vision of the future is based upon the concrete and achievable, and the search for a perfect society is the search for a society in which human agency is not really present – a society which should not, and hopefully cannot, exist.