Marxism and the convergence of utopia and the everyday

Abstract

The relationship of Marxist thought to the phenomena of everyday life and utopia, both separately and in terms of their intersection, is a complex and often ambiguous one. In this article, I seek to trace some of the theoretical filiations of a critical Marxist approach to their convergence (as stemming mainly from a Central European tradition), in order to tease out some of the more significant ambivalences and semantic shifts involved in its theorization. This lineage originates in the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then stretches to Georg Lukács and the so-called ‘Gnostic Marxism’ of Walter Benjamin (as mediated by the important figure of Georg Simmel), and culminating most recently in the work of Agnes Heller. Such a Marxist theory is inseparable from a political project that seeks to unveil and critique what it takes to be the debased, routinized and ideological qualities of daily existence under the auspices of modern capitalist society, but also attempts to locate certain emancipatory tendencies within this selfsame terrain, an orientation that can be summed up in the phrase ‘everyday utopianism’. Although there are occasional lapses into dualistic modes of thinking in the work of these writers, the key insight they present to us is the need to overcome the pervasive dichotomy between the everyday/immanent and the utopian/transcendental, of a sort that has bedevilled the work of many other theorists and intellectual traditions.

Heidegger, Education and the ‘Cult of the Authentic’

“…This in turn leads to ‘inauthentic’ modes of existence as we learn to view everything in terms of those ideals of the Enlightenment, ‘objectivism’, ‘positivism’, ‘naturalism’ and ‘rationalism’. For many of the early critics of modernism these ideals had led to a cultural and spiritual crisis in Europe (Gardiner, , p. 14). It is these same ‘crises’ that appear to be the target of ‘authentic’ education, to stop people becoming ‘passive recipients of trivia’ (Bonnett, , p. 231), or just ‘flexible raw materials in the service of the world's technological system’ (Peters, , p. 16), and to defend an education that ‘runs the ever present risk of degenerating into a form of curriculum‐making where technicalization and hyperrationalization dominate’ (Magrini, , p. 133).…”

“…What marks a ‘strong’ from a ‘weak’ utopian reading is the relationship those dichotomies of ‘authentic/inauthentic’, ‘everyday/utopian’, ‘immanent/transcendental’, ‘individual/social’, have to one another. The weak ‘everyday utopianism’ is a ‘series of forces, tendencies and possibilities that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of daily existence’ (Gardiner, , p. 2). Whereas a strong utopianism is a future ideal state modelled through nostalgia for a long‐lost ‘Golden Age’.…”

“…Gardiner's () work identifying ‘utopian’ readings within Marxist thought, looking at the relationship between the ‘everyday/utopian’ and the ‘immanent/transcendental’, and the Messianic impulses that accompany their stronger variations are, I will argue, present in those educational philosophies that invoke ‘in/authenticity’ as a value‐judgment. The story here is that due to the corrupting affects of ‘enframing’ (Fitzsimons, ) from the modernist‐capitalist world people are just ‘flexible raw materials in the service of the world's technological system’ (Peters, , p. 16).…”

“…everyday/immanent; utopian/transcendental) not as ‘irreconcilably opposed’, but as necessitating one another we can deliver something closer to an ‘everyday utopianism’ (Gardiner, , p. 1). What is meant by ‘everyday utopianism’ is not:

… an ideal society located in some romanticized past ‘Golden Age’, or in some distant imagined and perfected future understood in a ‘blueprint’ or ‘social engineering’ sense, but as a series of forces, tendencies and possibilities that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of daily existence (Gardiner, , p. 2).

‘Everyday’ or ‘weak utopianism’ fits with ‘authenticity’ not as ‘value‐judgement’ but as an ontological choice. Here we do not become ‘authentic’ by rejecting the world and embracing some other system of values and traditions, but by taking the old ones on as ‘heritage’.…”

“…… an ideal society located in some romanticized past ‘Golden Age’, or in some distant imagined and perfected future understood in a ‘blueprint’ or ‘social engineering’ sense, but as a series of forces, tendencies and possibilities that are immanent in the here and now, in the pragmatic activities of daily existence (Gardiner, , p. 2).…”