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 17th
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.
