ACFM - #ACFM Trip 9: Utopia

Episode Date: April 19, 2020

Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn discuss Utopias, including the Paris Commune, analogue dreamlands and kettle logic. Edited and produced by Olivia Humphreys, Matt Huxley and Matt Phull. PRS LICENCE NUMBER: LE-0016481 Tracklist: Goldfrapp – Utopia / John Lennon – Imagine / Nairobi Sisters – Promised Land / Harry McClintock – Big Rock Candy […]

Hello, you're listening to the podcast version of ACFM on Navarra Media. Unfortunately, because of the way copyright works with the internet, the version you're listening to only has the conversation and discussion from the show. The music and archive material is only available in the version you can stream online. So, really, you're only getting half the picture or seeing through a glass darkly or on a really weak dose. Why not head over to the Navarra Media website or our video website or our video. SoundCloud, where you can stream the whole thing in its glorious fullness. The link is also in the description of this podcast version, too.

But if you just want the chat, keep on listening. Hello, everyone. This is Matt, one of the editors of ACFM. Just popping up with a quick note to share with you that all of us here at the show feel understandably conflicted about releasing an episode on Utopias, given the current state of the country and the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It's fair to say that when we recorded this episode a few weeks ago, I don't think any of us had anticipated what was going to happen.

We will be back with a special episode on the COVID-19 pandemic very soon, but in the meantime, we hope that this episode can provide you with some sort of relief in whatever state of isolation or lockdown you find yourself in. I would also say that the interview with Judy Thorn mentioned within the show will be going online very soon as a separate microdose and we really would encourage you to listen to that as well because there's loads of good stuff in it. All of us here at the show hope you are keeping well

and we send our love and solidarity to you wherever you may be. Okay, Nadia, take it away. So I want to ask each one of you guys, name three things in your utopia. You know, free time, fresh air and beauty. Is that too vague? No, no, I think that's perfectly good. Yeah, free time, i.

Limit on necessary work, basically. So we have free time to do, to pursue our own development. Fresh air is a great one, you like that, and link to the countryside. side. And what was your third one? Beauty. Oh, yeah, and beautiful cheeses. That's my... It's the theme that will not die. Well, I would have to be honest and say, without cheeses,

without cheeses, it could not be a utopia for me. If I can't eat cheese, it's not my revolution. I'm going to let the, like, the ACFM side down by saying I could live without dairy completely. My utopia would have really good design and architecture, a good balance between private space and communal space, and the things I'd like to see in communal space are like eating, really important to me, having the outside in in terms of like really good lighting and greenery and plants and access to nature, not being like the countryside necessarily,

but feeling like there are living plant life in the spaces that I had to live and work. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by Keir Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about utopias.

So I'm interested in utopias because I'm interested in big thinking. I'm interested in kind of rising above current organizing and political struggles. I think it's important as a way of thinking. I think you can't do day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month work without kind of having a vision of what you want. And I'm also interested in the actual exercise of thinking, how would I, if I could have my ideal way of living, like day to day, what would that look like? What sort of a space would I live in? How would I relate to other people? Where would plants be? What would the architecture look like? What would by day look like? What would work look like? And I think it's also through those visions that, you build relationships with other people who you can best organize with to get to that future in a sense. So because I was excited about this, one of the first things I did is I went to interview Judy Thorne, who's an old comrade of mine from Plan C, and she has actually done

an entire PhD on Utopias. So we had a two-hour chat, and I think we'll talk about a few of the things that she brought up there. So, yeah, that's my interest in the topic. There's also, I think, a, you know, a very specific conjunctural reason. Well, you might want to talk about utopias. This is the second podcast we've recorded since the election. And since the election, there definitely has been a closing in of what seems possible, right? A closing into the space of possibility.

And one of the reasons you might want to talk about utopia is because it helps to break down what currently seems possible. Do you know what I mean? It helps us to denaturalize, you know, the way our present society is organized, you know, raises our horizons a little bit. So that might be a reason, you know, a very specific reason why we want to talk about utopias at this moment. Yeah, I think it's probably worth saying as well, actually, when we were first planning the podcast, like at one stage, I wanted, I wanted this to be the first topic. I wanted us to do something about utopianism because I thought, because when I was getting interviewed a lot by journalists like that year and being asked what, what is us in Corbynism, what is this on about? My most shortest, you know,

like one sentence's answer was, you know, it's an attempt to bring, you know, utopianism, like into mainstream politics and it's to also recover the lost utopian dimension of progressive politics. So I think it is, I don't think, I mean, really, Nadia's sort of set out, I think, well, you know, to some extent what that means. But I think, I think it, to me, utopianism, utopianism is a sort of spirit which can inform even quite, you know, moderate, you know, quote unquote moderate political programs as well as really radical ones. And it can be absent as well. And in its presence is really important, you know, as a kind of animated sense of open

an sort of open possibilities and openness to the possibilities of the future and a kind of willingness to accept that the limit to the present moment might be transcendible, there must be transcendable. The sort of classic utopian song is imagined by John Lennon.

Imagine there's no heaven. Imagine there's no war. It's easy if you try and all that sort of stuff. And we know what Lenin said about the song. What did he say about the song? He said it's basically the communist manifesto because I sugar-coated it. You know, people accept it. That's a great line.

I think we should start talking about like examples of utopia, both in reality and in fiction. Because I think, you know, like, unless you know about, well, I know about the Paris Commune, I don't know about very many others. But it's kind of like, if you first hear about the Paris Communion, you cannot believe it's real. But I just can't, but every time I hear a different thing about it, I cannot believe that this actually existed in history. And it changes my relationship with the present and with what I think is possible. It's 1871, and it's happening in Paris when the Prussians have seized Paris during the, Franco-Prussian War.

And so because the French state is in crisis, the, I mean, basically the sort of working class of, you know, the people of Paris, including a large working class element, form their own government. And it is basically a sort of democratic, highly democratic participatory, sort of federated government based on kind of neighborhood councils and a sort of Paris council, I think. And it becomes this really important point of reference,

both for the sort of anarchist and sort of what become the communist strand of the, workers movement. So, you know, it's for, you know, Lenin famously, like a couple of few months into the Russian Revolution, like, I can't, it's in his diary or in a letter, it says, we've now lasted longer than the commune. And that was the big thing. And it was seen as the first example of a government that had significant working class elements. And then it becomes this reference point. It'd be interesting to think about the afterlives of of the Paris commune, because like one of the things was just, ah, how many tens of thousands of people were massacred after the Paris Commune.

Like something like 30,000 people just get killed, lined up and shot in the street, you know. They basically, it was such a massive threat. They had to physically wipe out just about everyone who was there. But the people who escape, there's all around the world. And, you know, you have, when you look at, like, different movements, etc., you find, like, you know, veterans of the communards have been in the middle of it, You know what I mean? That experience had been so out of,

out of the rest of history in some ways that, like, you know, people couldn't go back to normal lives, because they were dead, or they just went off and found struggles all around the world, you know what I mean? But are there other big examples like the Paris Commune? People often point to, like, Barcelona in, you know, 1936 or something, during the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell's homage to Catalonia.

It's like, you know, him wandering around Barcelona, and he's saying it's the first time I've been in this city where the working class is in the saddle, basically. And, you know, his mind is completely blown. It doesn't last very long because the fascists come in and defeat the Republicans. But there's lots of examples. So people also point to things like,

so the Zapatistas in the 1990, the Zapatistas communities in, which is in Chiapas, which is a region, sort of, region in Mexico. They're just still there. They've just stopped being news. But could be, could we just just, Before you go on, Keir, so apart from the working, Orwell's saying the working class being in the saddle,

which doesn't necessarily sound utopic to me. It sounds like it's politically pretty good, but it doesn't necessarily make it utopic. Like what are the other aspects of, do you know anything else about like 1930s Barcelona or what Orwell said? Well, yeah, so Spain was one of the only places where, like, anarcho syndicalism was like the dominant form of the workers movement. in Spain for particular reasons. So, like, yeah, it was, you know, the unions, the syndicates, the unions ran everything. But, like, what all of that's going on about is just, like, how all of a sudden it just, like, has an effect on the way people relate to each other. So basically, waiters stop treating you with, like, obsequiousness and stuff like that and all these sorts of things, do you know?

Yeah, I mean, that's the sort of stuff that's that I find. really interesting. It's like, it's not like, because the union's running everything could mean like fairer wages for workers and like better structures, but it could still be shit experientially. I mean, what that kind of Spanish anarchism usually means in practice is what we would, we would sort of recognise it's highly federated, highly devolved forms of democracy. So it's basically participatory democracy. Everything is run by councils of kind of local neighborhoods or workplaces, you know, people at the top of any kind of decision-making. structure are always accountable, you know, routinely accountable to everybody at the bottom.

It's that sort of thing. It's that sort of mode of organisation. You know, sort of, you know, I mean, it's sort of, you know, I mean, the word anarchism in English is always sort of problematic because it conjures up. And for a lot of people, it does mean, just this idea that there's no state, there's no authority, there's no, but it'd be more accurate. I mean, in some way, as it'd be more accurate, it's called it sort of radical democracy in a way, I think. So it's sort of radical democracy and with a sort of, you know, class politics. And that is, yeah, I mean, I think but it's even today, I mean, you know, regions of Spain that were heavily influenced by that movement and one of the sort of provide some of the key examples, don't they? Because Barcelona,

I mean, Barcelona city government, the past few years, has been being run by people who really have their roots in that anarcho-syndicalist tradition and been trying to implement similar practices. And then there's places like Rojava is one of the places people will talk about today. You know, the Kurdish territories are all, again, organized along principles, you know, partly inspired by the American kind of green sort of anarchist thinker, Marie Buchchin. But in practice, again, what it means is this sort of radical participatory democracy. It means everything is organized in terms of sort of democratic structures where everybody has a vote. and everybody's accountable to everybody. But is it joyful?

Well, people say it is, yeah. I don't know. I mean, Rahava, yeah, they're fighting a war, you know, to some extent. They've been fighting a war against ISIS. It's in the middle of a pretty grinding horrendous war. That makes it unutopic for me. It doesn't make it utopia for me. No, well, it's hard for me to imagine as such.

But I think, but people who go there who were into that sort of thing, they report the same kind of actual feelings as like Orwell is talking about in homage to Catalonia, don't they were this feeling that everything is different because of the way the social relationships are organised unless somewhere has like massive canteens in really well organised architectural spaces where loads people eat together like it's not like that's like my number one for a utopia well i think they do all eat together in rohava but i but again but of course you're right i mean that partly touches on the issue of luxury doesn't it because there is a tradition of utopian thinking which thinks that will actually our kind of need for what

physical luxuries is the sort of symptom of decadence and that in a certain kind of utopia we just won't need all this stuff you know we'll be happy with you know simple food you know low technology etc have either of you come across this book bolo bolo by p m it's this little it's this classic it lasts from 1983 it's little little book um and it's basically it's sort of like It's sort of like a map of a of a utopia by this guy called, he chose the name PM, but he's actually called Hans Widimir. I've met the guy. And it's like this fantastically practical but also sort of like crazily detailed model of utopian society. So Abolo is like a community of people, like perhaps 300 people or something like that. And so Abolo Bolo is like, you know, a federation of these. of these sort of communities. And like, it's a little bit like that

when we talked about the situationist sort of like areas or whatever. So he thought that like Bollos would be created around sort of shared sort of interests in some way. So we had these, he had like a list of possible Bollos. So one Bolo was a Les Bolo. And everyone was a play Bolo.

And one of them was like an Alco Bolo, but then they were like religious Bollos as well. So you'd sort of federate And like each urban bolo would be linked to a rural bolo. And it's sort of like there's just about all work is like freely chosen. And there's no, the thing I always remember about it is there's, all property is common apart from every person has like a box, which is like, I don't know, 100 centimetres by 50 centimetres or something like that.

And anything you can fit in that box is your own personal property. And everything outside of everybody's boxes is communal property. But this guy, Hans, he's actually put this into practice in Switzerland. He had this project called Restart Switzerland. And he's built a couple of these quite large housing co-ops. The first one, in fact, was called Craftwork One, which I always like. And they're sort of like, they're these housing co-ops which are try to model all of the divisions in Swiss society and then try to overcome them. So that there's like age divisions, young people have to look after the older people in their sort of co-op.

There has to be migrants have to be included So you know you don't get this thing in housing courts But it's just like the wealthy middle class Who are the ones you've got the time to do it All that sort of stuff Yeah that's pretty amazing This is one of my favour It's a quite obscure 70s reggae track

By the Nairobi sisters Called Promise Land Which is, I mean, really, it's, I mean, the lyric, you know, is sort of, you know, Christian sort of raster millinarianism. I mean, they say, you know, they say there's going to be, you know, can't remember the exact lyrics now, you know, basically people are going to be killed. There's going to be up wading a gnashing of teeth and stuff. When we reach the land, as well as it being like a joyous day for the people singing. But then, you know, that is part of the sort of revolutionary imaginary of early 70s.

You know, Rastafarianism, which is borrowing this biblical language. I mean, really to imagine revolution and give it a really kind of, you know, arresting sort of beat. What is the sort of actual conceptual status of, utopia. So it means a Greek term and usually it's translated into meaning no place. And it comes, it does come from a book by Thomas Moore from the 16th century, which was, it's sometimes called the first science fiction novel in English because it is imagining, kind of future society, which I don't think, I don't think it's, I don't, I don't, can't remember actually

if it is sort of radically technologically advanced, but it's characterized by different social relationships. It's sort of communal and egalitarian. And, um, I suppose I, I, think it's a sort of actually, it's something that we all sort of share, and probably most people who aren't just strictly anti-utopian would all pretty much sign up to, which is that, well, of course you don't want utopia as a sort of formulated blueprint for what the future society is actually going to be like and you're determined to make that. And of course you don't want to live in a society that thinks it has achieved utopia

because that would be sort of Stalinism and sort of was Stalinism. But utopia has a really important imaginative function and then a kind of motivating function as a sort of, you know, either as a sort of what, you know, can call it like a regulative ideal. Like, you know you're never going to quite reach that level, but you strive towards it anyway.

Or as a sort of horizon, what Jody Dean calls the communist horizon. I mean, I like, the phrase I always like is as a direction, not a destination. You know, it's not that you actually think that's the place you're going to get to, but it's the direction you're always going to head in. just a tiny interjection on that

I think that phrase while it really resonates with me as well I think that only makes sense to socialists and communists I think most people would be like that doesn't make sense about like it's the journey not the destination

or maybe Buddhists or whatever but it's like for most people to be like but how how can we make this work like how does this you know what I mean? Well I think it's sort of I mean it speaks to something interesting

there's been this interesting debate since the election I mean, there's a general sort of consensus that we've, the Labour Party and sort of a lot of the intellectual work around the party became too focused on policy. So we had all these kind of interesting policies and not nearly enough sort of strategy, not nearly enough sense of all actually, what are the political obstacles to us realising this? And how do we move from just a sort of volunteerism that we just because we want it enough and there's enough of us knocking on doors, we'll get it? How do we have a more strategic sense? And obviously I sort of endorse a lot of that. And historically, I've sort of written bits about how, you know,

you should never think about policy without thinking about strategy. But also I think it's important to think about what is the role that say policies plays. What is a role that a policy like the four-day week plays? And the role it plays in sort of political thinking and political imagining is not, it is a sort of intermediary thing in between a kind of purely utopian desire for more free time to have started more free time and more freedom. and less regulated by work and a purely pragmatic, like, what reforms could we do like tomorrow that would be achievable?

Like, how would we, you know, change national insurance rates by point, national insurance rates by 0.5% and put that money into, you know, some public, you know, particular demarcated area of public services. And the role of policies like that is to sort of is to have this as a function of orienting us in a direction, even though we don't really know exactly like what it would look like in practice to get there, like, what it would be, you know, what the actual end state would definitely be. So I sort of think, I think you're right, Nadia, about how people think about it,

but I think it can be that notion of the sort of transitional imaginary, if you like. You know, I think it can be conveyed to people, can't it, like quite? People can imagine things being better, can't they? Yeah, but this is the whole thing with capitalist realism stuff. Well, no, actually, because we're only talking about, it could also be the capacity. issue you can imagine i don't know well it is nearly that i mean it was a big issue it was an issue at the election wasn't it a big issue at the election was people could they couldn't imagine it or they couldn't feel like it was actually plausibly possible to realize any of these things but that's

a good point about capacity because the sort of thing i've been thinking a lot since the election along these lines actually is well look there's an argument that people are not steep in people have a good intuitive sense actually of whether a political program actually has the forces at its disposal to do the things it says it wants to do and it's going to do. And I think people sort of looked at us, a lot of people and probably rightly judged that, well, even if we got into power, we just, we didn't have a kind of movement or an assemblage of forces on the kind of scale that would make it actually possible to realize those kinds of objectives. And I think it makes the issue of utopianism really important because

without a bit of utopianism, you just can't inspire people. You just can't break past capitalism. And you just get trapped. in it. But then unless it's sort of, unless that utopianism is sort of animating and animated by a project for capacity building, then it does just become utopianism in the bad sense, in the sense of, well, just a statement of what you would ideally like to happen without any kind of sense of how you would get there. There was something else that came up on, in Judy's interview, which is her research project. I just thought her actual research project was really interesting, which is basically you're trying to go and ask people about utopian thinking,

ask about utopian thinking to the type of people who basically are suffering from bad affects or sad affects. So she was like interviewing, asking people about utopian thinking, asking the people who'd come out of job centres, which had been, you know, and job centres, she talks about how job centres have really been designed, you know, to grind you down and make you feel hopeless, et cetera, and then to go and ask people about what they, what they thought about utopian hope, etc. It seems like a really interesting thing. Now, in some ways, that's our problem. One of the problems thrown up by the election was, you know, how do you raise

the horizons of people who've been defeated continuously for 40 years and have had their horizons ground down tremendously? Do you know what I mean? Which is one of the stories of the Red War, we might put it that way. Do you know what I mean? How can you make utopianism a viable discourse amongst people who basically have the hope kicked out of them? While I don't like to romanticise the 90s, I'm going to romanticise the 90s because at least I had a local library, there was less rubbish on the ground, like people seemed like they were less like zombies in the street, etc. So is it that if I'm thinking about like in a really localized level. Like, what are the things that would make my living, my actual lived

environment more utopic? Or, like, what are the things that I would imagine in a utopia? If I'm thinking things like libraries, like basically, do you think about libraries if you've got libraries? But if you've got libraries, a utopia in relation to libraries is to think, how could we get this form of organization and expand it to more than books? Do you know what I mean? I like, which is what the sharing economy was supposed to be before it got, you know, basically turned into the renting economy, which is what we actually have. Do you know what I mean? So the question is like perhaps if you have robust libraries that are used,

does it make it easier to imagine those forms of relationships, you know, extending to other sorts of, you know, to more of life, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it is, I mean, for me personally, I would say, to be honest, it was specifically libraries that made me a sort of left social Democrat, even though I've always been, you know, as a Trotsky's friend told me in like 1990, you know, or theoretically an anarchist, you know, but made me sort of a less Social Democrat because my experience of libraries was just, this is just amazing. Like even, you know, during the period of Thatcherism and it felt like civilization itself was being assaulted, but as evil force,

there were still libraries that you could just go into the library and find a book and anything you want, and if they didn't have it, you could ask them to get it for you and it would come and you would read it. And I just thought, this is fantastic. I mean, to me, it just seemed amazing. And it seemed like, well, clearly this works. So the idea that you can't have any form of state or government that is evil clearly isn't true. So on some level. So it's a, yeah, it was extrapolating from that precisely in thinking, well, more things could be like this.

Actually, I did, you know, when my kids used to go to Woodcraft, fake, the sort of youth wing of the cooperative movement, once I organized a session where we took the group, we took the group. kids to Waterstones and then we took them to the library and we talked about the difference between like a shop where you have to pay for stuff and the books where all the books belong to everybody. Well the Waterstones is the best is quite good though in terms of like the lighting and stuff so there's certain things about Waterstones which are different to different bookshops which make you like them which might be a little bit cynical but you know I've been in libraries where I'm like wow the atmosphere is amazing and I've been in libraries where I'm like oh my god this is quite shit.

That's a good point. I mean, you know, I mean, but that's, you know, that's the classic Marxist point is that capitalism is good at generating a lot of those things. And they need to be appropriated at certain points in the process of development. I've got to more books, books are the one of the commodity I fetish more than anything else. I find it that giving up, given up my library would be like, you know, the test of my, my library of all my little books or all my little squiggles and marks on it would be. I mean, you're talking about your personal life. personal library, yeah. Not anybody else's library. I'd need a massive, one of those massive fuck-off boxes, much bigger than 100 centimetres by 50 centimetres to cram my books into. That's the real test of my socialist ethics. Yeah, yeah, where you're just like, have everything except my book. But obviously, like, books are completely redundant technologies. I can, obviously, everybody can have my books if they're, if they're turning into, you know, zeros,

and ones, which they all are on the internet somewhere. Why redundant technology? What does this mean? Well, I mean, they're not redundant because they're great. But basically, all of the information in those books I can see on my shelf over there, they probably are already freely available to borrow for nothing on the internet somewhere in some corner of the internet, or at least they could totally be. That's like saying, why have a wife and I can have a sex doll?

That's kind of like, that's what a Kindle is. That's what a Kindle is. like the, yeah, sorry, I'm quite militant about this. It's like human being sex doll. Okay. I mean, I'm not precious about the institution of marriage, but I think you may be I'm not either, that's right, that's right. Actually, I take it back.

I'm not precious about it. But basically, yeah, like, you know, some people can do, can do like Kindles and stuff. It's like, no, no, no, I completely hear you about books with squiggles and dog-eared and that you've lent out and you've looked for and forgotten about it and then got back and whatever. But I would say, I would say, say that is an issue of technology. I mean, I used to think before Kindles were invented, actually, I thought we were heading towards a situation which everybody was just had printers at home that could print whole books and bind them for them. I mean, that would be achievable.

You'd need a massive recycling program and a massive reforestation program to grow enough trees to make enough paper. But that's an example of something that could happen. I've always said the same thing about digitise and analogue music. Like there's an alternative future in which you know instead of all music having to be digitised for everybody to get access to it like everybody's got a everybody's got like our everybody's got a really good high fire at home and every like neighborhood has a kind of you know a pressing plant that can make double plates of vinyl of anything you want you know towards it brilliant this is good this is good this is what I want to hear

I want to hear people's utopia so so definitely in my utopia I will definitely have some of my own books I mean no one's taking Kea's books away from him clearly and they're not taking mine either but there are other things that are like I that I think that there's lots of stuff that I would want communized like I absolutely love the idea of there being like public places where you can go and you know get your vinyl or you know it doesn't have to or whatever where you get you where you listen together like we did have at the world transformed like listening sessions where you can places where you can go and listen to music together like stuff like that in terms of like the senses is

is like really central. We're talking about analogue utapias here, aren't we? That's distinct from digital utopias. And basically the digital utopia that we're now living in, which we are to an extent, you know, I'm here in the States, you know, at the moment, you know, being a visiting professor at Brown. And basically the whole visit would be,

have been totally just unthinkable for me 20 years ago because I can talk to the kids on, you know, FaceTime and Skype every day. I can do this with you guys. And I didn't need to sleep like, 500 books over in a crate because they're all digitised. So we are living to some extent, especially if we're in a position of wealth and privilege in this sort of digital utopia. But that digital utopia was produced by foreclosing the sort of analogue utopia,

which would only have been achievable if we had continued to extend and radicalise social democracy from the 70s onwards. And so it is the sense this digital utopia is, again it's the substitute we've been given for the possible future like we could have had where we could actually be free on the streets and where and where you know we didn't we don't have to you to try and fumble around with a kindle because we've got the publicly owned you know ecologically sustainable printing workshops in every you know neighborhood big rock candy mountain song my dad used to sing to me as a lullaby tell us about it here Well, it's late 20s, and it's from a sort of like hobo imaginary, right?

It's recorded by Harry McClintock in 1928, actually. It's got lines in it, like, in big rock candy mountain, all of the, the dogs, the dogs have rubber teeth, is one of the ones they saw, the dogs that are chasing them off. One of the things that really that I loved there was it goes, you know, in Big Rock Candy Mountain, there's be Lemonade Springs, right? And that's one of the things that came up when we did a workshop on, at the World Transform, we did this workshop. We were trying to get people pretend they were Joy Consultants, how would they change a city? And one of the things people came up with was, I think they came up with pink lemonade fountains. It's pink, peach iced tea, wasn't it? Peach iced tea, fountain.

Close enough to lemonade springs. You know, it is. It's very close. And then they've got this great line about, we'd kill the Turk who invented work. So it's that it's a particular form of like, you know, a utopian vision, but rooted in a particular lifestyle.

One evening as the sun went down and the jungle fire was burning, down the track came a whole go hiking. And he said, boys, I'm not turning. I'm headed for a land that's far away beside the crystal fountain. So come with me We'll go and see

The Big Rock Candy Mountains In the Big Rock Candy Mountains There's a land that's there Well he was a lifelong member Of the industrial workers of the world The so-called Wobbleys, McClintock And it was a wobbly anthem I mean it was just

It is just on the surface It's just, well not actually no It's not If you go into all the lyrics like you just did It's obviously politicised But you know It's a hobo It's a nice little ditty

dreaming of a kind of imaginary sort of perfect environment but it is you know he was I mean the idea of the hobo is a potentially radical figure was important to the industrial workers of the world who was the great american syndicalist union of the early 20th century and still one of the great sort of reference points anyone listening who doesn't know about the IWW check out the working class history podcast because they're obsessed with it they've basically everything that can be known and I think about the IWWW they've done episodes about, and done it really, really well. Utopia.

Utopia. Utopia. Planet of your wildest dreams. Everybody drives a Cadillac car. And the streets are paved with Hamburgers. Utopia. Where all your needs are catered for.

Anticipated. Calculated. You know, Freud has this famous phrase, this great phrase, kettle logic. He's referring to a scene in which somebody says to somebody, somebody borrows the kettle from someone

and they damage the kettle. and then but they don't want to take responsibility for damaging the kettle so they say oh I never borrowed your kettle it was like that but it was like that when I got it and it wasn't my fault it's not me who damaged it so people say oh this it's the trouble with the utopianism is it's trivial but and it's impossible impossibility but it's also dangerous so like it's all three at the same time like it's it's dangerous because it leads to totalitarianism but it's also silly, and also it would be impossible anyway. Yeah, and that it's accepted that even though it's illogical, that has, that illogical

logic pertains. Yeah, and that sort of, I mean, on a certain level, anti-utopianism is the defining characteristic of the whole conservative tradition. I mean, modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke saying, the French Revolution is definitely going lead to a disaster because any attempts, because all of this kind of attempt to create an ideal society from scratch, like it's definitely can only lead to totalitarianism. And that, you know, the only stuff that works is stuff that's tried and true and traditional. And if you want to change things, you can only ever do so incrementally in a way which doesn't try to fundamentally change what's gone before. And that is, that is an ad. And he's not even talking about

socialist. He's talking about radical liberals, you know, the people who make the French and American revolutions but but anti-utopianism is just you it is fundamental to the sort of conservative imaginary actually and then it becomes you know anti-utopianism becomes part i mean there's a version of the reaction to kind of 1968 you know in its aftermath from the counterculture like in in france and other places again there's this version of it which you know it feeds into sort of certain strands of post-modernism in the 80s. And it feeds into, I would say, the kind of intellectual milieu which gives rise to sort of hegemonic neoliberalism in the 90s,

which is just ideologically committed to the idea that basically any attempt to address social problems systematically, any attempt to prosecute a politics that's animated by utopian desires. and utopian sensations is just inherently wrong. It will either will lead to totalitarianism or it will fail. It will fail and even if it didn't fail, it would be bad that it succeeded.

And that's one of the reasons, and that really does, you know, it's fed into our sort of political mainstream to the extent that, you know, it's, you know, in a way that really is, I mean, that is the sort of condition of possibility for capitalist realism, actually. I mean, that's what, I mean, capitalist realism is one name,

for a condition under which utopian thinking has been simply driven out of any form of utopian thing has been driven out of political discourse and imagination, isn't it? Yeah. It's a great irony, in it, is that the great Blair Wright anthem was things can only get better. But also that's partly, it's partly not an irony because that was their whole thing. The thing is only, things can only get better. So you don't have to have a big vision. You don't have to have a big vision because you just have to know any change of government

is going to be a slight improvement, you know, because things are so fucked now. So, and they were, you know, they were sort of, you know, that they were really, I mean, and the 90s Blairites were really proud of their kind of anti-utopianism. There's an interesting question actually is to whether neoliberalism has, whether it is utopian, because you can make an argument, yeah, I mean, one way I always say neoliberalism is totally utopian on its own terms is basically neoliberalism claims you can create a society which is highly unequal but which has really high levels of social mobility you know if you dig into what they claim they're going to create it's always that they say yeah we're fine with inequality

but we're going to give everyone an equal chance to succeed and and you know every will have you know very you know rewards will be distributed on the basis of your success or failure as an entrepreneur but that's totally never happened like there's never been a society ever, it was inequality increased and social mobility increased. In fact, social mobility is just a myth. There's no such thing as social mobility. There's either inequality or equality. And the more inequality you have, the less people are managed to travel

between one social class and another. So on those terms, neoliberalism is itself sort of totally, is itself a sort of, is a failed utopianism. It is a sort of failed utopianism. It also has an ideal concept of what a human being should be like. basically, which is like, you know, entrepreneurial version of Homo Economicus. It has a model that you have to measure people up against. And if they fail, then they should be disincentivized, et cetera.

So it is in some ways a utopianism. I hear a new world. I hear a new world. So strange and so real One of the things we wanted to talk about was Well, what's the relationship between projects which are just trying to create a kind of discrete social space Like a town, a community, a commune, or what have you?

What's the relation to the between that and kind of, you know, properly anti-systemic politics? And, you know, the, I mean, historically, I mean, we used the phrase enclave, didn't we? We were talking about this earlier. And actually, like, I mean, the idea of the enclave, it is a powerful idea when utopian thinking, you know, the historical critique is always, well, look, if you just try to create your little bit of heaven, your little bit of paradise, without ultimately challenging, you know, the systemic power of the capitalist class or the state agencies that are beholden to them or what have you, then you'll either get swallowed up or sort of even worse, you know, you sort of become, you become part of the problem, you become part of the general structure that sustains it.

I mean, look, I remember the first time I went to, as an adult anyway, went to San Francisco, like the early 2000s, you know, it was before San Francisco. go become totally colonised now by to take industry and it was sort of really amazing in the way that everybody always said it was you know it's this incredible bohemian centre and there was all kinds of you know community activism going on from a very libertarian left point of view and there was you know sort of it was the world capital of psychedelic culture and everybody there was unbearably smug like absolutely everyone I met like wanted me to congratulate them on how clever they were of having moved to the best place in the world but I remember coming to

away from it after a week thinking, well, if you were going to save America, you'd have to destroy this place. Because this place just, it acts as this, this kind of big enclave. It's just this place where America has allowed, like, all of it, the kind of most ambitious dissenters from mainstream American norms to go and live. And they sit there, kind of generating ideas and creativity, which it was already clear at that point was important to Silicon Valley, having them there to kind of suck up their, you know, sort of parasitize a lot of their ideas and innovation. And but for other people in America, for the people who don't get to go live there, that's sort of part of the problem, because all the people who should be kind of, you know, progressive and

radical in their communities, they all want to go live there instead. I mean, I don't know if that's a true model. I'm not saying that was like a correct analysis, you know, probably has something to it, but it's just illustrating the fact that, you know, Raymond Williams has this, you know, analytical distinction between alternative cultures and oppositional cultures. Like alternative cultures just want to create some space for. themselves and oppositional ones want to actually engage in direct confrontation with established forms of power and I guess I mean the historic critique of utopianism by people like

Marx is that well actually you know you just end up you end up hiding in your enclave and defending your enclave like rather than actually confronting wider structures of power but isn't it an experiment in itself about whether you are able to set up an enclave and how far you can go, right? Yeah, you're right. They're laboratories, their experiment, they're experiment and you learn from them. And that learning, like, contributes to the sort of wider movement. This idea of an enclave is something that Frederick Jameson talks about these big book on utopies I can't remember the name of. And like, you know, he's talking about sort of like, perhaps even just moments or like areas which sort of operate under a different

logic to the logic we're in all the time and perhaps even to a different temporality, right? and because when I was reading it, I thought about my experiences of going to festivals, particularly free festivals in the late 1980s, which then turned into sort of like, you know, outdoor raves, etc. But just because they were run under a completely different, especially the free festivals, they were running under a completely different logic.

And I did find it mind-blowing, you know, coming from the Welsh valleys. You know what I mean? It was that, it was the ability to be in a, different place where you step outside it and then be able to look a little bit more about like, you know, the constrictions on your life. Yeah, it's something like that. But also I think you could, well, I heard Will Davis doing an interview recently

where he talked about, you know, enclaves, you could have enclaves in a sort of like Jamesonian sort of sense, which would give us some sort of relief from the sort of stress and pressures of contemporary sort of like social media life. You know what I mean? But would you be able to construct them? Like, this is the key question. Like, are you, is it going to be allowed, are you allowed to? Well, I mean, yeah.

If you look at the history of festivals, no, they got closed down as soon as they got to a certain level. But I just think it's interesting, like, because it takes us back to that idea, what is the role of these utopias and what are the role of these sort of enclaves? Like, are they compensatory mechanisms helping us just cope with the stresses of, contemporary life do they have more radical potential i mean obviously probably depend they're probably the answer to that depends on the the sort of like things that surround them whether there's you know strong movements and and political projects which they could fit into or not you know absent those and they can basically only be compensatory perhaps i think but there's at least

three functions they can have isn't it that one is that they're just compensation they just and they just help sustain the system by offering people a sort of safety valve and a way of coping with an otherwise intolerable situation. And the fear, you know, when you're doing anything like putting on regular parties, you know, the fear is always that that's what, that's the function for me, the function they'll end up serving for too many people. A ritual of licence. Yeah, exactly, a ritual of licence.

And basically a thing that just enables them to keep doing their kind of shitty job and living in a shitty place without challenge and not bother challenging its shittiness because at least they have fun at the weekend. So that's a danger. But that's only one function. The ideal function is they become kind of actually assembled into a kind of broader assemblage with a political movement where, you know, even if you're not, you know, doing radical didactic didacticism on the dance floor, people have a quite intentional sense that they're participating in this space as part of participating in some wider movement, which is sort of oppositional in nature. And then there's a kind of, there's a sort of space in between that where, I mean, basically, they are basically therapeutic, but they're therapeutic for people who are in struggle and are kind of. consciously in struggle. So, which I would say to be honest, I think that is, that's like with

my parties, that is their main function. Like I don't, at their best, at certain moments they have seem to be, you know, they've sort of resonated enough with political developments, so they help to amplify them. I don't know. ...and... ...and... ...that... ...and...

...the... I thought I'd mention again this, I think it's a record from a couple of years ago and I think it's genuinely my favourite record of the past like 30 years. It's an album by an American jazz musician called No Brass Jr called Broken Cloud Orchestra, which is doing, it's a sort of mixture of jazz and sort of ambient electronics. I remember in the early 90s when there was that big wave of interest in ambient music because people were playing it in chill-out rooms at clubs and raves. I remember saying to someone that the ideal title for an ambient compilation

should be music for After the Revolution. And for me, that kind of music does have this kind of, you know, it's just really, really pleasant to listen to, but also it's very kind of virtuosic and very sort of engrossing. And it's also very deliberately sort of futuristic in its use of electronics and its mixture of electronics with acoustics. To me, that is a real music. manifestation of a certain kind of utopianism, a utopian spirit, because it is, you know,

there's nothing kind of harsh or angular about it. And yet it's, and yet, and it does sort of put you in an affective state, which is, you know, a sort of utopian one, but it's also, you know, so future-oriented and open and kind of porous. I'm sure I'm wishing. Thank you very much. This podcast is brought to you by Navarra Media. video interviews and articles at our website, Navaramedia.com. And you can subscribe to our podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.

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