Utopia in the Recent Western Marxism: Anomaly, Hope, Science

Abstract

The article investigates the problem of utopia in actual Marxism. It is well known that Marx and Engels opposed their “scientific socialism” to “utopian so­cialism”. The followers of Marx have long supported this orthodox teaching. However, since the middle of the 20th century, Western Marxists have begun to talk about utopia as the central element of their social philosophy. Sociologist Alvin Goldner called these “anomalies”. They stood out as a separate system of critical Marxism from the theoretical system of “scientific Marxism”. The first person to write about utopia was Ernst Bloch. Then Herbert Marcuse turned to the subject. Since the early 1990’s, when it would seem that Marxism was in cri­sis due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the failure of left-wing politics, it has been actively theorized about utopia. In addition to philosophers (Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek) various types of sociologists (Erik Olin Wright, David Harvey) begin to write about utopia. The sociologist Göran Therborn called this trend in actual Marxism “American futurism”. The author of the paper writes that left-wing sociologists and philosophers abandon the traditional understand­ing of utopia (“blueprint”) and think it through in a new way. Sociologists try to talk about utopia in terms of science (“real utopias”), while philosophers theorize utopia as a hope, a horizon of the impossible, a desire for a better future. Despite the fact that these are two different understandings of utopia, the important thing is that for recent Marxists (even “scientific” ones), utopia is one of the most im­portant categories of social theory.