Utopianism and Marxism (review)

Vincent Geoghegan here reissues his useful survey Utopianism and Marxism (originally published in 1987) in an attractive new edition from Peter Lang, in the Ralahine series in utopian studies edited by Tom Moylan and Michael Griffin of the University of Limerick. Ralahine, of course, is the name of the most famous Irish experiment in utopian sociopolitical organization and an appropriate name for the series. At a time when the relevance of both Marxism and utopian vision is greater than ever, it is reassuring to see this book brought to new audiences. It is important, too, to be reminded of the historical resources of the Western tradition, in the wake specifically of the Althusserian technocracy and the more general antihumanist, poststructuralist trend of critical theory of the last thirty years.

Geoghegan importantly explodes and widens the term utopian in order to recognize conservative or even Fascist utopianism: not to endorse them, of course, but to caution us that "conservatives utopianise the present" (19). His first chapter is on the "utopian socialists"—Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen. Geoghegan notes that they considered themselves to be eminently realistic and practical in focus and that therefore the term utopian socialist has to be seen as a label applied retrospectively by Marx. Yet their work was vulnerable to the charge of elitism and seems now reminiscent of Comtian technocracy, Fourier in particular being convinced that he'd determined the fundamental laws of human nature. This then sits interestingly with Fourier's late-career preoccupation with sex, pleasure, and fantasy.

Chapter 2 is on Marx and Engels themselves. Geoghegan reinforces our sense of Marx's familiarity with the "utopian socialists" and wishes to point out the watermark of their work in the later writings of Engels and Marx—the idea of the "withering away" of the state, in the wake of the proletarian revolution, derives from the utopian socialists. Nevertheless, for Marx and Engels, the utopians were guilty of a kind of naive idealism, in that they project a future that makes a complete break with the present, and this involves them detaching themselves from the material conditions of the present.

Chapter 3 surveys the Second International. In the context of Darwinist determinism, we see the emergence of Kautsky's "scientific" anti-utopianism. But Kautsky calls forth critiques from Korsch, and also Bernstein, who begins by recognizing the need to update Marxism to keep up with the evolution of capitalism, yet ends by lapsing into reformist liberalism. The greatest Marxist thinker of this era is Luxemburg, yet her stress on spontaneity and the "undirectability" of the proletariat hampers her ability or willingness to project a utopian future. Plekhanov, in a move not unlike that of Connolly in Ireland, projects an initial naive "Narodnik" utopianism, suggesting the historical revolutionary potential of the Russian peasantry. But he eventually rejects this line of thought. Lenin, on the other hand, in both State and Revolution and What Is to Be Done? (and under the influence of Chernyshevsky), left some space for what he called "dreaming."

Chapter 4 swoops back to Engels and his use of the work of Lewis Morgan in The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. The point here is to offer the deep history of the tendency in some Marxist thinkers—William Morris and James Connolly—to retroject the utopian impulse to find a "golden age" of primitive communism (in Morris's medievalism and Connolly's Celticism) in the past. Geoghegan then moves forward again to Georges Sorel, with his interest in the "non-rational" of myth, yet noting the danger in such a focus for the Left.

Chapter 5 bravely notes the "utopianism" even of Stalinism—in its wish to recast society entirely. This chapter moves sinuously and dialectically between pointing out the horrors of Stalinism and the harm it did to the Marxist tradition and recognizing that there was a risk entailed in Leninist vanguardism in the first place. Geoghegan notes the power for the West of the narratives of conversion...