The Dialectic of War and Utopia: Systemic Closure and Embattled Social Life in the Work of Fredric Jameson

War is a form of socialism.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, "War Diary, September–October 1939"

War is war perverted. … The thing, then, is not to abolish war but to find the true war.

—Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (1966)

In October 2011 at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, a month before occupiers were ejected from Zuccotti Park, a two-minute video posted online sparked a small flurry of commentary as it migrated from YouTube to a host of other sites. The clip depicts two US Marines standing near the park and responding to remarks by Fox News commentator Sean Hannity that the protests were unpatriotic and anti-American. While many online comments focused on the calm and cogent dismissal of Hannity, punctuated with the occasional well-placed expletive, less attention was paid to the cardboard sign held by one of the Marines. Framed in the opening and closing shots of the video, blocked in large black lettering and accompanied by a peace sign, the placard reads, "Second time I've fought for my country. First time I've known my enemy." The message creates a connection between two theaters of war: ongoing US military actions abroad, across the Middle East and Central Asia; and economic war on the domestic front, where conflict and combat between social classes become systemic crisis as austerity measures, capitalist competition, and popular upheaval intensify the struggle over wealth erosion and social transformation. Within the sign's linkage, economic war overrides military conflict, and systemic critique is imagined in martial terms. As a nuanced antiwar gesture, the sign simultaneously critiques and preserves war, transforming and repurposing the category itself in the process. It locates its opposition to one sort of war within the necessity of fighting a war of different kind.¹

The two Zuccotti Park Marines join a longer lineage of protest and revolt seeking to articulate military critique with economic critique. We can think here of the antiwar and disarmament movements in the United States between the 1960s and 1980s, and more specifically of Martin Luther King, in the final year of his life, linking his Poor People's Campaign with the US war in Southeast Asia.² Also central to this tradition is the 1915 Zimmerwald Manifesto, calling for resistance to the First World War coupled with a renewed insistence on international class war: "Civil war, not civil peace—that is the slogan!"³ The antifascist Popular Front during the 1930s also belongs here, as could Henry David Thoreau's 1848 lecture on civil disobedience, a prescient outlier lodged at the beginning of the epoch of modern warfare, situating a refusal to pay his poll tax within the wider context of resistance to US military and economic expansion into Mexico. Despite their apparent differences, such positions not only share a strong conjoining of military and economic analyses but also, in that, manifest an ongoing attentiveness to the intimate and complicated relationship between martial imaginaries and socioeconomic critique.

To argue for including Fredric Jameson within this rubric seems at once both familiar and strange. From 1971's Marxism and Form to his later work on postmodernism and on Utopia, Jameson's status as a trenchant critic of capitalism is well known. At the same time, his work does not feature, at first glance, a firmly articulated position on war, nor do his writings, with salient exceptions, take up war as a theme or topic with any consistency or thoroughness. Nevertheless, Jameson's writings not only display repeated recourse to the category or figure of war but also, at a deeper level, conduct an enduring conversation between the notion of war and systemic, or anticapitalist, critique. We might call this persistent conceptual thread a dialectic of war and Utopia. Rather than defining Utopia in a positive sense, in terms of a specific kind of content—hope or longing, for instance—or employing a taxonomic approach in order to gather a canon of Utopian texts and objects, Jameson's dialectic brings Utopia into focus through an ongoing process...