Utopia is Not a Political Project, or “Citizen Cabet’s Plans for Emigration” (1848)

Abstract

With Cabet’s appeal to the French communists the utopic figure turns into a political project, Icarie. It entails a plan to move to another place, thereby tactically responding to bourgeois maneuvers at the height of the class struggle. Marx criticizes this transformation, however. He complains less of utopia than of its foundation. Cabet “has immensely aided the proletariat,” writes Marx; “he has successfully fought for suffering humanity.” How? He served by writing a book eight years earlier, The Travel Adventures of Lord William Cansdall in Icarie.² Not only is utopia not “realizable,” but it cannot be realized without destroying itself. Included in its functioning is the notion of not indicating the means for its construction; it cannot even signify the goal or propose the erection of the Perfect City. Utopia is not tomorrow, in time. It is nowhere, neither tomorrow nor yesterday. It does not have its foundations in hope. Cabet makes this mistake, too: he “is hoping that twenty to thirty thousand communists will be ready to follow him.” Hope takes control of the future by applying the rational strategy of a project, except for believing in the positivity of chance. Utopia does come from expectation, however. It is constantly based on surprise before the future contained in every moment of the present. Utopia is the attempt to read and construct the traces and signs of the future into a text, traces and signs we meet and come up against. Utopia is the latent thrust of what occurs, of what is said, of what is done to bring on the future and the unexpected in the flow of unexpected speech. In this way, utopia is the form the unexpected takes. It is the narrative figure or pictorial form produced by history in the process of being made.³

Karl Marx, La Revue communiste, 1858, No. 1. I thank Madam M. Cranaki for bringing this interesting text to my attention.