Utopian Thinking
Utopian theory is not then abstractions and ideals that are designed to be imposed upon the world, dreams that will come into existence after the revolution, but is the collected experience of cooperative structures that can be generalized into a broader vision. This broader vision, however, is not an imperial vision or one that exists in some abstract universal space. It is a utopian theory that is more a process of coordinating, collecting, and connecting the experience and knowledge created through experience in a way that can be adapted and applied in varying situations and contexts in pluralistic fashion. The task of the utopian theorist is that of acting as a diplomat between struggles, sharing wisdom and experiences, connecting and synthesizing ideas created through everyday experience, and offer such back to the community.
The struggle for liberation isn’t about creating unrealizable plans or visions, but about bringing ideas about cooperation and non-hierarchal organizing into our daily lives. Utopian thinking becomes looking at forms of liberatory social relations, extending their logic, and beginning to implement such notions and ideals within the way which we live our lives now. We create the space for revolutionary thought and action by creating those spaces where community grows, where our lives and political and struggles can be sustain in an ongoing fashion. It is the task of bringing what Durruti called “the new world we carry in our hearts” into existence as a tangible reality, even if only in a piecemeal fashion. The reformulation of utopian thought is not finding a better way to imagine a future revolution, but drawing from human experience in finding way to live liberation now.
An extract from An Ethnography of Nowhere: Notes Towards a Re-envisioning of Utopian Thinking by Stevphen Shukaitis, University of Essex.
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