Utopia/Dystopia

[W1N5T0N]

Does Utopianism ultimately result in a Dystopia? Can Utopianism ever be achieved?

[RED DAVE]

Does Utopianism ultimately result in a Dystopia? Can Utopianism ever be achieved?Here's agood place to start.

Socialism Utopian and Scientific (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm)

RED DAVE

[caramelpence]

...this doesn't engage with your question directly, but I feel it's important to point out that when Marx and Engels use terms like "utopianism" or when they refer to "utopian socialists" they are not using "utopia" in the way it is normally used, to refer to unrealistic or idealistic political projects, including communism. They understand utopia in a narrower sense, in that they use it to refer to the school of socialist thought whose adherents have seen the detailed description of the future society as a legitimate and useful endeavor - so what makes someone like Fourier (for example) a utopian socialist for Marx and Engels is not that he is unrealistic as such, rather, it is the fact that he specified exactly how an individual's day might be divided up in the future and also charted the ways in which human beings and animals would be physically changed once society had been transformed. This is the level of detail that they associate with utopian socialism, and in this sense if not in others Marx and Engels were not utopians, as they were infamously unwilling to offer detailed descriptions of what communism would be like. It's probably also unfair to describe them as utopians in the broader and more popular sense of the term, however, because at no point do either of them say that communism will be a society that is devoid of conflict, which is a common component of utopian thinking. In fact, they sometimes implicitly suggest that communism will continue to embody personal conflicts of certain kinds even if these conflicts will become less severe and easier to deal with as a result of social conflicts between eliminated - so in the 1859 Preface, for example, Marx describes "the bourgeois mode of production" as the last antagonistic mode of production, but "not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence", the implication being that "individual antagonism" will still endure under communism.

Also, for what it's worth, I don't think Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is adequate as an expression of his or Marx's views on utopian socialism.

[Hexen]

"Utopia/Dystopia" are a dichotomy which that concept needs to be abandoned (which reflects the black & white view of society which reality is more complex than that).

[Aurorus Ruber]

I would say "utopia" and "dystopia" are more literary terms or tropes than descriptors of real political systems. No political system is literally utopian since it must accommodate the complexities and messiness of the real world and for that matter no one really agrees on what constitutes an ideal society anyway. Dystopias are typically reducto ad absurdum of social models or traits to which the user of the term objects. I think most people would agree that while real life abounds in unpleasant places to live, the situations surrounding them are too complicated to glibly label them "dystopias" as if we were reviewing a collection of science fiction.

[Magón]

Does Utopianism ultimately result in a Dystopia? Can Utopianism ever be achieved?

You've got your questions backwards. It should go the other way around, but either way the answer is no.

1. Because to achieve a Utopia, there'd have to be a TON of change in human nature, and I mean even past the general attitude and manner in which people have to change to achieve Communism, which obviously isn't an easy task.

2. Obviously we can't ever know if a Utopia can ultimately result in a Dystopia outside of a movie or book, because we don't even know if a Utopia could ever actually exist outside a movie or book.

[MarxSchmarx]

I think it boils down to whether a society can fully anticipate the range of human fallacies. "Utopian societies" become "dystopic" because they fail to accommodate the inherent randomness and capriciousness of people. As such, a society that has no mechanism for dealing with psychopaths ends up being ruled by psychopaths and taking on their worst characters.

But if this characterization is correct, it really is a matter of degree, not of category. For example, a society might be able to accommodate 1 ~ 2% of its citizens exhibiting psychopathic behavior at any given time, but would break down if 10~20% of its citizens exhibited such behavior. clearly a society that functions if and only if basically 0% of the people are doing as they are told (as happens in most religious utopian communities) then such societies are doomed to fail and suppress invididual will and indivial liberty - in short, become "dystopian" to attain 100% compliance.

I think phrased in these terms, the costs associated with the trade-off between social deviance and insane authoritarianism become quite clearer.