SOYMB has been pointed in the direction of a site where ten classic Utopia novels are listed. There are many lists of this kind, they can feature music, sports teams and sports players, food, tourist destinations, even politicians and leaders (sic). Some lists are concerned with which historical or contemporary figures or States ended, through various means, wars, famines,colonisation, gulags, genocides, the most human lives. Depending on the timeline that list could be extensive.
Obviously, lists tend to be subjective and the person compiling a particular one is influenced by many factors. Out out the ten on the website (link below) William Morris’s News From Nowhere is this present writer’s only proper Utopian piece. Subjective opinion.
Utopia, to many who continue to support the exploitative capitalist system, is something that will happen, human nature don’t ya know, or some such spurious reason, and the word is actually used as a sneer and an insult; You’re Utopian, you’re an idiot!
The concept of a Utopian society goes back a long way, first posited in 1516 by Thomas More, but as the Socialist Standard article shows the idea goes much further back into history.
Socialists would not make the claim that with the transition from Capitalism to Socialism society as a whole would immediately become Utopian. But it depends how you define the meaning of the word. It is beyond doubt that with the move away from the present social system many of the problems that afflict the world and which are directly related to Capitalism would be eradicated. Even a small amount of Utopia would be welcome compared to the dystopian system which holds us all in its grasp now.
https://www.thereviewgeek.com/10-classic-utopia-novels/
From Socialist Standard, July 2009
'The
word utopia, together with its derivatives utopian and utopianism, is
a familiar part of our political vocabulary. It originated as the
title of a work by the Tudor lawyer, statesman and writer Thomas
More, first published in Latin in 1516 as a traveller’s description
of a remote island. Utopia is a pun: it can be read either as
ou-topos, Greek for ‘no place’, or as eu-topos, ‘good place’
– that is, a good place (society) that exists in the
imagination.
More invented the word, but the thing it
represents is much older. Plato in his Republic discussed the nature
of the ideal city state. Medieval serfs took solace in the imaginary
ease and plenty of the Land of Cockaigne. More’s utopia, however,
is the first to embody a response to capitalist social relations,
which in the early 16th century were just emerging in England and the
Low Countries (in agriculture and textiles). As the first modern
utopia, it has a special place in the emergence of modern socialist
thought.
Contents
of More’s Utopia
The
work consists of two ‘books’. Book I is More’s account of how
he came to hear of Utopia. Book II describes the Utopians’ way of
life – their towns and farms, government, economy, travel, slaves,
marriages, military discipline, religions.
More presents
his story as true fact. Henry VIII sends him to Flanders as his
ambassador to settle a dispute with Spain – and we know that this
is true (it was in 1515; the dispute concerned the wool trade).
During a break in the negotiations he meets his young friend Peter
Giles, who introduces him to an explorer, Raphael Hythloday, just
back from a long voyage. There follows a long conversation between
More, Giles and Hythloday.
Giles and More urge Hythloday
to put the vast knowledge acquired on his travels to use by entering
the service of a king. Hythloday refuses, arguing that no courtier
dare speak his mind or advocate wise and just policies. This exchange
is thought to reflect More’s misgivings about his own career in
royal service.
The conversation then turns to the
situation in England. They discuss the enclosure (now we call it
privatisation) of common land to graze sheep, the consequent
pauperisation and uprooting of the peasantry (“your sheep devour
men”), the futile cruelty of hanging wretches who steal to survive,
and other social ills.
This leads them to the question of
remedies. Hythloday declares that the injustice, conflict and waste
inherent in the power of money can be overcome only by doing away
with private property. More objects that this would remove the
incentive to work. (Sounds familiar?) Hythloday replies that More
would think otherwise had he been with him in Utopia.
Utopia
is, indeed, a society without private property. Households contribute
to and draw freely on common stocks of goods. Money is used only in
dealings with foreign countries, while gold and jewels are regarded
as baubles for children and “fools” (i.e., the mentally
retarded). In these respects Utopia resembles socialism as we
conceive of it.
In other respects, however, it does not.
Decision-making procedures are only partly democratic. A hierarchy of
“magistrates” enforces draconian regulations: travel, for
instance, requires official permission. The main penalty for serious
transgressions is enslavement – not to individuals, of course, but
to the community. Thus, there is a class of slaves who do not
participate in common ownership but are themselves owned. Utopia is
not a classless society.
Was
More joking?
Almost
all critics treat More’s factual presentation as a mere literary
device. They do not believe that he met an explorer while in Flanders
or that he was influenced in his description of Utopia by information
about real places. This is not to say that they attribute everything
solely to More’s fertile imagination. They often draw connections
between his ideas and the thought of Greco-Roman antiquity. In the
foreword to an edition of Utopia published in 1893, William Morris
even calls Utopia ‘an idealised ancient society’. More was one of
the foremost classical scholars of his day, so it is a plausible
view.
Yet More always maintained, even in private
correspondence, that Utopia was based on fact. Was he joking? He
liked a good joke.
Two researchers take More at his word.
It is quite possible, they argue, that he did meet an explorer who
had encountered or heard about a pre-Columbian society in the
Americas that served More as a prototype for Utopia. Arthur E.
Morgan, an engineer who was chairman of the Tennessee Valley
Authority in the 1930s, takes the Inca Empire as the prototype
(Nowhere was Somewhere: How History Makes Utopias and How Utopias
Make History, University of North Carolina Press 1946), while the
anthropologist Lorainne Stobbart identifies the Utopians with the
Maya of the Yucatan Peninsula in present-day Mexico (Utopia:
Fact or Fiction? The Evidence from the Americas,
Alan Sutton 1992).
They argue that it is not valid to
argue that Hythloday cannot represent a real person because Europeans
knew nothing of the Maya or Incas at the time when More was writing
Utopia (1515—16). This is true only if we accept the conventional
chronology that conflates discovery with the military expeditions of
the Spanish conquistadors (Cortes first landed in Yucatan in 1517;
Pizarro entered Inca territory in 1526). But Morgan and Stobbart
refer to old maps and documents indicating that Portuguese explorers
reached the eastern shores of Central and South America as early as
the 14th century (Hythloday is Portuguese), while English sailors
were trading with the new lands by the 1470s. Whether any of these
early travellers got as far as Peru is less certain, though some may
have obtained indirect information about the Incas.
How
closely does More’s Utopia resemble the Maya and Inca
civilizations? Morgan and Stobbart detail numerous similarities in
political and economic organization, dress, social customs, city
layout, family life, science and art, and so on – even down to such
practices as the erection of memorial pillars and ceremonial wearing
of quetzal feathers. The Maya and the Incas, like the Utopians, used
money only in foreign trade and had common stores from which
officials distributed produce (except that, in contrast to Utopia, it
was rationed). It is extremely unlikely that so many close parallels
should arise purely by chance.
But there are also
important differences. The most telling criticism made against these
authors is that they obscure a wide gap in social structure between
the aristocratic autocracies of the Maya and the Incas and the
basically democratic governance of More’s Utopia (see George
Logan’s review of Stobbart in Moreana, June 1994).
It is
therefore doubtful whether Utopia is a direct representation of any
specific pre-Columbian society. Nevertheless, More’s account does
probably reflect the influence of knowledge of such societies that he
had somehow acquired, possibly from a Portuguese explorer he met in
Flanders.
A
bureaucratic mode of production
This
conclusion has implications for our understanding of the development
of socialist ideas. For it means that a seminal work of modern
socialist thought bears the imprint of archaic societies that though
not based on private property were far removed from the classless
democracy of genuine socialism.
The Maya and Inca social
systems are strikingly ‘pure’ examples of what Marx called the
‘Asiatic mode of production’. In this mode, a royal bureaucracy
extracts and redistributes surplus from pre-existing peasant communes
and directs public works. The monarch is considered the owner of land
and resources. The word ‘Asiatic’ does not, of course, fit the
New World context (Marx had mainly India in mind). Karl Wittfogel,
stressing the centrality of water management, coined the term
‘hydraulic mode of production’. Or we might call it the
pre-industrial bureaucratic mode of production.
Louis
Baudin paints a vivid picture of what it was like to live under this
system in his Daily
Life in Peru under the Last Incas (Macmillan,
1961). It was a hard life for the common people, but their basic
necessities were supplied: a small dwelling, two woollen garments
each when they marry, a patch of land, relief in the event of local
famine. They were more fortunate in this regard than poor people were
in More’s England – or than they themselves would be after the
Spanish conquest. But they were victims of class exploitation
nonetheless.
It is understandable that the Incas and the
Maya should have appealed to early European critics of capitalism.
Theirs, however, was not the only alternative model that the
pre-Columbian Americas offered to the reign of private property. The
New World was also home to the much more egalitarian ‘primitive
communism’ of peoples like the Iroquois who so fascinated the
19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and through him Engels
and Marx, influencing their conception of ‘advanced communism’.
An
upright and honest official
More’s
utopia is a sort of compromise between the democratic and
authoritarian-bureaucratic conceptions of communal life. He omits
important information that would help us clarify the nature of the
society that he is portraying. In particular, how are the higher
officials appointed or elected? (We know that lower-level officials
are elected.) Do they have material privileges? Does Utopia have an
aristocracy of any kind?
I interpret this ambiguity in
light of More’s general attitude toward the lower classes. He felt
genuine compassion for the suffering of the poor. This is clear not
only from the sentiments he expresses through his alter ego
Hythloday, but also from his reputation as an upright and honest
judge and official. He did not take bribes from the rich and he
patronised the poor. By the standards of his day and age, he was
open-minded and tolerant. He belonged to the same social type as that
other upright and honest official, his near-contemporary in Ming
China, Hai Rui.
But More, like Hai Rui, was no rebel. He
was a “good servant” of God and king, a member of the ruling
class with a strong belief in order and hierarchy. His ideal was not
the fully democratic self-administration of society, which he could
hardly imagine, but rather paternalistic “good government” by
upright and honest officials like himself.
In
conclusion
So
what shall we make of More’s Utopia? It is, to be sure, an eloquent
critique of the cruelty and perversity of capitalism, all the more
remarkable for having been written at a time when that system had
scarcely bared its fangs. However, More – although he envisages the
abolition of money – does not provide a picture of what we now mean
by socialism. But then that could hardly have been expected of him.'
Stefan
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