Owen, Blair and Utopian Socialism: On the Post-Apocalyptic Reformulation of Marx and Engels

Abstract

This article argues for utopianism, an activity which has all too often been denigrated by socialists. Its starting point is Donnachie and Mooney's article for issue 35(2) of Critique on the connection between Robert Owen and Tony Blair, in which their shared utopianism is viewed as a key element in their class collaborations and flight from the reality of capitalism's voracities. Whilst I do not argue against most of the criticisms made of Owen and Blair, I take issue with the implied anti-utopianism of Donnachie and Mooney's critique, a position they draw on from Marx and Engels. In contrasdistinction I argue that Marx and Engels (in spite of themselves) were great utopians, that utopianism needs to be seen as a broad method of social investigation (being counter-revolutionary as well as revolutionary but ground worth fighting for—not just a flight of fancy), and that socialism is and always has been impoverished by attempts at discursive closure or, as the dystopian Zamyatin would put it, Fantasiectomy (the surgical removal of the imagination). Whereas the utopian imagination has come to be associated with the monographic fantasy of a powerful or charismatic individual, our solution should lie in the democratization of the political imagination, of the imagining of the ‘best of all possible worlds’, rather than in its abandonment. The latter approach merely leaves fallow ground to be occupied by those already with a voice, such as Owenites and Blairites, rather than encouraging the historically silent to speak for the first time, freed from the anti-utopian restraint of ‘well, you can only speak this way, because this is the way it has always been done’.