Utopia

     Throughout history people’s social relations have been shaped primarily by power relations. The rich take advantage of the poor and think it only right [1].  The strong and violent victimize their weaker victims. The necessary suffering arising from illness, accident, anxiety, and death has been supplemented by ceaseless exploitation, coercion, and war imposed by people upon themselves. Yet some have always dreamed of a truly just social order and have recorded those fantasies in myths of a golden age and in utopian fiction. A few have consciously sought to construct a better society than the one in which they found themselves. Fictional accounts of a happier existence are sometimes located in remote and undiscovered lands, sometimes projected backward into the beginnings of time or forward into a future yet to arrive. However chimerical the scheme, each utopia presents a critique of the author’s lived reality inspired directly by the particular time and place of its composition, though many across the centuries have also had certain elements in common. One is so universal that it must strike any student of utopias: in Asia as well as Europe, through the centuries, in both myths and semi-practical proposals alike, the residents of utopias are freed from alienated labor either through the magical elimination of work altogether or, in more realistic programs, through the institution of communism.
     Once one separates the true utopias from dystopias like Brave New World and 1984 and from satires like Gulliver’s Travels and Erewhon, the fact is evident [2].  A sampling of examples will establish its range. In Hesiod (circa 700 BCE) the fabulous character of the Golden Age is evident in the fact that people had no need to toil at all. They were nonetheless able to feast due to the fact that at that time “the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint.” [3] A decline is then steadily traced in increasing inhumanity beginning in the Silver Age during which they begin “wronging one another” [4] including making war until finally even families break apart. This notion of the earth providing food without labor occurs again and again, as in Hindu accounts of the Krita (or Satya) Yuga, Vergil’s Eclogue IV, a second-hand plots of one of Athenaeus’ loquacious diners, The Faerie Queen, “The Land of Cokaygne,” or “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” [5].
     Yet some texts go beyond the Pinocchio-like fantasy of a land of no work and all play. The Confucian Book of Rites describes a similar primordial ideal society and its subsequent devolution. In early times Confucius says crime and malice did not exist. Under the “Great Way” (Datong), “ the world belongs to everyone.” [[6] Here the intersection of the utopian with the practical attracted the attention of modern reformers in search of a workable plan for a peaceful society [7].
     Utopianism sometimes intruded into the world of affairs in a variety of ways. Early Christian teaching clearly counseled communal living. The central passage in Acts could not be more explicit.


And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. (Acts 2: 44-46)


Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. (Acts 4: 34-5)


      This practice doubtless accompanied apocalyptic expectations in the earliest days, though the church never lost its preference for communism until the nineteenth century, referring, for instance, to monastic communities which eschewed private property as an ideal of which not all were capable. The church clearly condemned usury (then defined as charging any interest whatsoever), but Aquinas plainly goes further, condemning all commerce as a sinful form of theft, citing the traders Christ expelled from the temple as well as a phalanx of church fathers in support [8].  During the nineteenth century a number of Christian communities with socialized ownership of the means of production arose, such as the Shakers, the Oneida Colony, or the Amana Colonies in Iowa. Some groups survive yet today such as the Bruderhof, the Community Doukhobars, and the Catholic Worker movement.
     Doubtless the most fully delineated utopian design of Classical antiquity is Plato’s Republic. In the Republic, though the class system is fundamental, goods are nonetheless held in common to a considerable extent. There is dispute about the degree of common ownership outside the guardian class [9] but the preference is clear. Elsewhere Plato makes social ownership the prime desideratum of a just society.


“Friends have all things really in common.” As to this condition,—whether it anywhere exists now, or ever will exist,—in which there is community of wives, children, and all chattels, and all that is called “private” is everywhere and by every means rooted out of our life, and so far as possible it is contrived that even things naturally “private” have become in a way “communized,” . . .no one will ever lay down another definition that is truer or better than these conditions in point of super-excellence. In such a State,—be it gods or sons of gods that dwell in it,—they dwell pleasantly, living such a life as this. [10]


     Though other utopian communist visions of antiquity have been lost – I am thinking of those of Zeno the Stoic, Iambulus, and Euhemerus — the record is clearer as one approaches modern times. More’s Utopia is, of course, wholly communist, and virtually all the utopian novels from the centuries since have eliminated private property: Johann Valentin Andreæ’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae for instance, in which money does not exist, or Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun in which, as in Plato, lovers as well as chattels are held in common.
     During the nineteenth century a great many secular experimental programs were proposed by the thinkers whom Marx contemptuously called “utopian,” notably Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. Several hundred communes of greater or lesser duration were established along the lines of one or another of these authors including New Lanark and New Harmony (Owenite), the North American Phalanx and La Reunion (in Dallas) (Fourierist), as well as Brook Farm, the Ruskin Colony, and countless others which blossomed (and often as rapidly vanished) as people tried to build new societies in the New World.
     While orthodox Marxism frowned on the utopians, it had its own version of perfectionism not only in the classless withering away of the state foreseen in communism, but at the other end of time, in Engels’ notion of primitive communism in The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State in which he portrays an Edenic origin myth, a Golden Age in the early stages of tribal, what was then called “savage,” human culture. His claim may be myth with the pretense of science, but it is clear that cooperation before the rise of classes (dramatically multiplied with the development of language) provided much of the impetus for the success of our species.
     With considerable differences in detail and emphasis visionaries in the last century and a quarter have regularly prescribed communist arrangements: Morris’ News from Nowhere, the Brotherhood of Man in London’s The Iron Heel, Bellamy’s Looking Backward (where socialism is called “nationalism”), H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia, even B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two where stability is achieved through operant conditioning.
     Clearly these flights of imagination as well as the consistent attempts to form workable intentional communities all recognize that, just as conflicts among other animals may center about females or food, among people property is the central issue that inspires ego rivalry. Accordingly, short of the loss of ego that accompanies enlightenment, one can eliminate most human fights and thus increase efficiency and cooperation and presumably human happiness by ensuring economic democracy. The church fathers were correct in considering the pursuit of wealth to be a debilitating and corrupting temptation arising from greed. In our consumer culture, people, whether inner city hustlers or respectable business executives, are programmed to be addicts, to want always more regardless of need and regardless of the welfare of fellow humans. We assume today, as all cultures have done, that our own assumptions are the true ones, and that cupidity is an inevitable human characteristic. In doing so, we ignore the higher flights of the human imagination where other possibilities are proposed, including the arrangement of human affairs so that we need no longer waste our effort and ingenuity on the ignoble task of chasing the dollar, but instead make room to pause, look about ourselves, and figure ways to enjoy more fully the lives we have and to embrace our fellow creatures. Violence and exploitation may never be wholly erased from the earth, but the direction is clear toward a better future.



1. The bulk of writings from any age will illustrate this principle. A particularly telling, and not so very ancient, example is the vast body of apologetics for slavery prior to the American Civil War, the greater number of them from a putatively Christian perspective.

2. Among the other works often labeled utopian which do not fit my scheme are Luo Maodeng’s land in the Western Ocean whose primary salient characteristic is peace though details of how this is achieved are scant, and Bacon’s New Atlantis which focuses on the research plans of Salomon’s House. Among the rare exceptions is Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana in which private land ownership is limited and regulated but not prohibited. Plato's Republic and the Hindu first yuga combine social ownership with rigid class systems.

3. Works and Days, 113-118.

4. Line 135.

5. Mahabharata XII (Shanti Parva), 231.12-20, Book V of The Faerie Queen; Deipnosophists VI 268 b-d in quoting The Amphictyones a lost work of Telecleides.

6. Book of Rites, Li Yun 1.

7. Confucian scholar and calligrapher Kang Youwei (1858-1927) advocated communism on the Da Tong model in his Da Tongshu.

8. Summa Theologicae 2a2ae,77. Tertullian had flatly declared that trade arose from avarice, Ambrose said that lying was concomitant with trade, and Augustine said that trade always involved fraud. To the church fathers for over a thousand years it was theft to sell merchandise for a higher price than one had paid as well as to ask more from a borrower than had been lent. See An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing: Value, Consent, and Community by Lianna Farber, p. 15-16.

9. See, for instance, Aristotle, Politics 1264a, 11–22.

10. Laws 739c-740b. The first quoted line cites a Pythagorean saying quoted also in the Republic (424a) and in Euripedes' Orestes 725.

A Few Proletarian Writers

     American literature has a grand heritage of progressive politics. Simply thinking of our great anti-racist Huckleberry Finn or of such supporters of old John Brown as Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman indicates that this is the main line of the tradition. The world crisis of the 1930s produced an intellectual milieu in which a great many artists considered themselves Marxist and developed theoretical literary perspectives based on their activism as well as producing poetry and fiction they felt would serve the revolution. The American 1960s, when I was in university, provided a weaker echo of this tendency.
     Though willing always as a good citizen to do my part to move society forward, I have never integrated my politics with my critical or artistic practice. In this I am not alone. I recall a number of academics whose disjuncture between theory and practice was the mirror image of mine. I took a graduate seminar from a Marxist professor whose home displayed expensive and beautifully framed Cuban graphic art, but who never appeared at campus demonstrations. I recall a European Marxist composer of electronic music who considered his abstruse pieces, heard by a small coterie of intellectual aficionados, to be his contribution to the coming revolution.
     And even the most orthodox Marxists must contend with the fact that Marx himself had what might have been called bourgeois, even aristocratic taste, admiring Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, and Goethe, yet taking little notice of the engagé writers of his day. More pointedly Engels explicitly condemns ideologically driven fiction, what he calls the Tendenzroman, while noting that the novels of the royalist Balzac contain more data on French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.” [1]
     It is difficult today for Americans to imagine to what an extent a vulgar sort of Marxist view of literature dominated intellectual circles during the late 1930s. This Depression vogue stimulated an efflorescence of writers whom few today read, yet some of those who might be described as “proletarian” were first-rate, and deserve readers of all tendencies.
     Edward Dahlberg, for instance, even in his early work, is a painstaking stylist. His Bottom Dogs the original edition (1929) of which was brilliantly, if oddly, introduced by D. H. Lawrence, who said it depicted “the mass of failure that nourishes the roots of the gigantic tree of dollars.” Lawrence goes on to analyze the American obsession with bathroom fixtures and halitosis as a sign of “secret physical repulsion between people,” a dramatic shift from the European “flow from the heart” that resulted in “thousands of little passionate currents.” Lizzie, the itinerant practitioner of barbering and related trades, reminds me of Neal Cassady’s feckless father, another bottom feeder. The story is told with eloquence and convincing verisimilitude. His rhetoric is straightforward but calculated and cadenced. He became a more ornate stylist (and I fancy this manner as well) in his later books Can These Bones Live, The Sorrows of Priapus and finally Because I Was Flesh.
     Charles Reznikoff is well-known today as a central figure in Objectivism and for expanding the sort of use of documentary material in Dos Passos and Williams’ Paterson into the powerful “found words,” the purposeful collages of Testimony and Holocaust. Yet his work received little attention for most of his life as he pursued art and integrity, ignoring money and fame. Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan (1939) is an unusually poetic version of the Jewish immigrant experience, including, as do most of the genre, the themes of poverty, bigotry, and the labor movement. His hero Ezekiel is convincingly Jewish in his sense of profound social alienation and in his ethical standards. Seeking the best, he praises Icelandic sagas and Aucassin and Nicolette, while, like the author but unlike some of his fellow immigrants, stubbornly resisting economic goals. And in each of these qualities, many non-Jewish readers will, of course, see themselves as well. As always, his words are palpable and well-chosen, laid into a solid masonry on the page, rarely attracting attention, economical and, so very often, just exactly right.
     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930) simply and movingly tells the story of the hardships of a poor immigrant family. The fact that so very many Lower East Side Jews prospered in America, moving before long to Washington Heights, Queens, or Jersey, does not invalidate this negative example. Gold was a central figure in Communist Party USA circles for decades. If he sometimes refers all suffering to poverty, flattening his thematics, details such as the bedbugs and Mrs. Fingerman’s parrot make it sufficiently real to carry the reader. When he is not addressing culture (for him Gertrude Stein was an “idiot” and Marcel Proust a “masturbator”), I appreciate Mike Gold’s journalism as first-rate agit-prop.
     Nelson Algren’s first novel Somebody in Boots (1935) was originally to be titled Native Son before Algren decided to give the title to Richard Wright with whom he had worked in Chicago’s John Reed Club and the Federal Writers Project. In Algren’s case the “native son” was Cass McKay, a “Final Descendant of the South,” descended from landless, slaveless white workers, an incipient criminal whose native “Americanism” is presented as every bit as ironically as that of Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
     Written on an advance of a hundred dollars based on a single story and set in Texas where Algren himself was imprisoned for stealing a typewriter, whatever Romantic attitudes about poverty the author had, he, like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Charles Bukowski, earned them.
     His other novels Never Come Morning, The Man with the Golden Arm, and A Walk on the Wild Side (which includes material from Somebody in Boots) made him more money, but for me his outstanding work is the short stories in The Neon Wilderness. Algren’s losers are presented with love and sympathy, for all their sordid foolish fecklessness.
His Chicago: City on the Make presents the most emotionally and rhetorically powerful arguments for a simple Marxist view of literature in combination with a defense of progressive tradition among Midwestern writers, a people’s history of Chicago, and a personal memoir.
     Though he once shocked and alarmed the city fathers (the Tribune called the book “an ugly, highly scented object,” a comment featured on the back of the book), I understand that a statue of the writer has been installed in his old neighborhood in the Polonia Triangle though the local Poles successfully fought against naming the location for him.
     On occasions such as that controversy, or the one during the 90s over National Endowment for the Arts funding, or over Chris Ofili’s elephant dung in the Brooklyn Museum, it is clear that right-wing opponents of art know nothing about the subject. Whereas I fear it may be that well-intentioned leftists may sometimes also make artistic judgments on non-aesthetic grounds, I recognize their far more creditable motives, and I am glad to recommend these books regardless of the dubious turns in political line some of their authors may have negotiated. (I am thinking of “democratic centralism” and tailing the Soviet line in particular. So far as I am concerned these policies harmed the American movement.) Now that the Occupy movements have focused the social contradictions on the most significant single element: money, it is well to recall the achievements of a long tradition of right-thinking American writers.


1. Letter to Margaret Harkness. In an earlier letter to Laura Lafargue, he expresses the same admiration, this time in contrast to the leftist writers: “all the Vaulabelles, Capefigues, Louis Blancs, et tutti quanti.” Engels refers to Balzac’s “revolutionary dialectic.” Both are included in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress, 1976. p 93. Marx, too, thought Balzac, with Cervantes, the greatest novelist and planned to write a book on him. Fielding was another of his favorites. (Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, p. 439)