The Low Bar: Crisis and Utopia in M. E. O’Brien
and Eman Abdelhadi’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022)
Gabriel Burrow
In a recent interview, Kim Stanley Robinson (2021) noted that “the bar” for what futures can be considered utopian “has got really low.” Given the climate crisis and escalating geopolitical tensions, visions of international cooperation that serve the needs of future generations and avert extinction slip comfortably over this bar. Robinson describes his own novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020), in these terms. Ministry does not shy away from the grave implications of environmental breakdown—it begins with a mass heat death event in India. However, this future is nonetheless utopian in its representation of characters developing solutions to address the climate crisis and bring about greater social equity. Carbon quantitative easing and geoengineering are both embraced across the globe to mitigate the worst effects of global warming. In proposing the low bar, Robinson follows in his mentor Fredric Jameson’s footsteps, rejecting “the ideal purity of a perfect system” on one hand and the impulse of critics to deny the possibility of utopia outright on the other (Archaeologies xi). The “low bar” view of utopia both recalibrates what can be considered a utopia and insists upon the possibility of achieving it.
Drawing from Robinson’s proposition of the low bar, this article explores what it means to evoke utopia in contemporary literature. In particular, I examine how Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien’s Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022) is typical of low bar utopian fiction in its use of oral history to represent a future of intensifying crises and utopian possibilities. The novel explores the formation of the New York Commune through a series of interviews conducted in the 2070s by fictionalised versions of the authors. Abdelhadi and O’Brien refer to the interviews as “life histories,” which document a diverse range of “distinct experiences, roles, geographies, and temporalities” between the years 2052 and 2072 (1). Together, the intersecting voices of Everything for Everyone’s interviewees describe how the New York Commune becomes a template for egalitarian living and part of a globally-networked project of communisation. Other novels that spring over Robinson’s low bar do so through similar means. Robinson’s Ministry, Carl Neville’s Eminent Domain (2020), and Yanis Varoufakis’s Another Now (2020) all use polyphonic narratives and formal characteristics that enhance a sense of realism, from policy reports, interviews, and meeting transcripts to obituaries and commemorative plaques. These contemporary utopias’ use of realism to represent the future sets the lowest of all bars, since it insists that utopia can be realised in the first place.
There is, of course, a long history of Marxist engagement with utopia. Frederick Engels (1880) draws a distinction between utopian socialism, which proposes unknown futures, and scientific socialism, which derives a concrete understanding of the world from historical materialism (66). This binary is echoed in Ernst Bloch’s (1959) engagement with the “liberating intention” of Marxist thought’s ‘warm’ stream and the “cool analysis” of its ‘cold’ stream (Principle Vol. 1 208-9; Boer 13). But Bloch argued that these two streams should be viewed as both dialectically interrelated and mutually constituted. Tom Moylan (1986) usefully frames this same dynamic in relation to the critical utopias of the 1970s: “one has, dialectically, to choose both a radical engagement with the world and a steadfast commitment to the transformed horizon” (xxii). Contemporary literary utopias of the kind Robinson describes continue in the same vein, engaging with the cold realities of the twenty-first century’s multiple crises and the utopian possibility of something better. This is a far cry from the perfection sought by 19th-century utopian socialists.¹
Utopia can itself be understood dialectically. There is little point in analysing material conditions without the belief that the world can be better, or building castles in the sky without some analysis of the system as it is. Etymologically, the term itself has dual meanings: ‘eutopia’ means ‘good place’ and ‘outopia’ means ‘no place’ (Cashmore 2; Bell 5). Scholars of literary utopias, and utopia more generally, often emphasise both this spatial aspect and the friction between ‘no’ and ‘good’ (Suvin; Bell; Taley; Cooper; Blanco). The tradition of utopian travelogues and travel writing, which is necessarily spatial in nature, dates as far back as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and was prevalent throughout the early modern period (Tally Jr. vii). Marx and Engels were themselves inspired by Cabet’s novel Travels in Icaria (1840), which describes a visit to a communistic utopia (Marx; Fokkema 19). However, even in travelogues’ representations of grand journeys, utopia is at once a place to which one travels and the process of getting there—of exploration. This processual understanding of utopia is better suited to the majority of contemporary utopias, including Everything for Everyone.
Everything for Everyone does not treat utopia as an “isolated locus” that could be travelled to, be it a place akin to an early modern utopia, or a temporal reality like those of the nineteenth century (Suvin 50).² Instead, as Robert T. Tally Jr. (2013) suggests, utopias in the era of globalisation are best thought of as a form of literary cartography. Drawing from Jameson’s methodology of “cognitive mapping,” Tally Jr. argues that “utopia in its present configuration can only be a method by which one can attempt to apprehend the system itself” (Jameson, Postmodernism 54; Tally Jr. ix). Viewed in these terms, contemporary utopias are an attempt to orient readers within a particular system while using aesthetic forms that enable them to engage with an otherwise incomprehensible totality (Tally Jr. ix; Jameson, Postmodernism 332; Lukács 60).
Both the world and the aesthetics of Everything for Everyone are grounded in realism. The novel accepts that a future of environmental devastation and economic upheaval is unavoidable, but also emphasises realistic ways of addressing their impact. Its use of academic writing and interview transcripts further buttresses the aesthetic realism of its content. This article will address these aspects in turn, beginning with the novel’s form (anthropological introduction followed by oral histories), then its relationship with crises, and finally how it charts a feasible path to utopia. My approach moves sequentially through the novel, beginning with the introduction and exploring subsequent oral histories (“life histories”) in turn. I will first discuss Abdelhadi and O’Brien’s use of oral history in relation to their introduction. I use the second interview, which engages with political activism in the Levant, as an example of how crisis is represented. Finally, I explore the utopian possibility of ecological restoration presented in the tenth interview, which is conducted with a conservationist. These life histories collectively constitute a utopia of the kind Robinson describes, achieved in the face of acute crises. Abdelhadi and O’Brien’s fictionalised New York could be considered a ‘good place,’ but that is not the novel’s primary concern. It engages with the process of the New York Commune’s formation, rather than dwelling on a perfect future state. The novel reflects the dialectical interrelation between individual experience and collective action, place and process, crisis and utopia.
Oral History as Utopian Storytelling
Everything for Everyone uses oral history to reinforce the materiality of its utopia and to reflect the characteristics of the New York Commune itself. The novel leans heavily into formal realism derived from its historical framing; fictionalised versions of O’Brien and Abdelhadi are projected into the future as interviewers and scholars, analysing historical events and the way their interviewees relate them. The pair use an academic introduction, along with footnotes and other parenthetical references, to engage with the formal characteristics of the text and the historical project that produced it. For example, they explicitly note that spoken interviews were edited in order to balance “maintaining some sense of the tone of the narrators’ spoken words with our intention to offer a readable text” (O’Brien and Abdelhadi 4). The authors explain that they conducted interviews, which they subsequently edited to produce this history. They each conduct their own interviews, almost always alternating throughout the novel according to their expertise and familiarity with the subjects. This relates to their real-world training: O’Brien is an oral historian who pays particular attention to possibilities for gender freedom under and in relation to capitalism and Abdelhadi is a scholar of religion and culture.
There is a well-established precedent for the incorporation of academic writing into literary utopias. Thomas More’s Utopia included a series of prefatory and postscriptural letters, which give the fictional narrative a frame of realism. These letters are written by More’s contemporaries, who probe at the material reality of utopia and how the text itself should be read (Davis 29). One (fictional) interlocutor, Raphael Hythloday, claims to have witnessed utopia firsthand; the veracity of this is discussed in letters from both Peter Giles and Guillaume Budé, both of whom were friends of More (More, The Complete Works). Emmanouil Aretoulakis (2014) argues that these paratextual materials “enhance, pre-emptively, the verisimilitude of the Utopian society as well as the materiality of the island at hand” (92). In a similar vein to Aretoulakis, Louis Marin (1973) asserts that More’s style is oriented towards “making us believe that Utopia is history” (39). However, Marlin emphasises that Utopia is not a singular narrative that is conferred historical reality by testimonials from More’s peers. Rather, the textexists as “a system of narratives referring and reverberating among themselves” (39). Marin goes on to engage with references to Raphael Hythloday’s first-hand account and More’s request for Giles to “let me know if you find anything that I’ve overlooked” (More, Utopia 5):
The truth or exactitude of More’s narrative is measured only through Raphael’s narrative, or through Peter Giles’ potential narrative… The validity and truth of the narrative of history would thus be proportional to the number of possible reflections of which the narrative is made. The more densely they intersect, the closer it would approach that veracity. (Marin 39)
Interconnectedness is the basis of Utopia’s sense of veracity. It acts as a fictional history that is constituted from the interrelation of different narratives. Indeed, Marin explicitly highlights the “utopic” nature of history, which is “a place… where narratives are spoken, one against the other” (40). This is not a simple validation of true or false, real or unreal; Utopia’s use of letters stages the complexity of the act of history-making itself.
Five centuries later, Everything for Everyone represents the process of characters narrativizing history out loud, working through how their experiences relate to those of others. O’Brien and Abdelhadi build on the utopian convention of “dialogues between insider and outsider,” which dates back to the Socratic dialogue of Plato’s The Republic (Fokkema 28). Each interview has similar opening questions, but the characters interviewed take discussions in idiosyncratic directions—including those that are explicitly noted as tangents. In the introduction, O’Brien and Abdelhadi acknowledge that “Oral histories are inherently contradictory” and articulate how this makes them suited to representing change (6):
Individual experience and shared collective action work in dynamic interrelationship to each other, just as they do within the life of the commune. Like the present work, many new histories reflect this methodological breakthrough: simultaneously fragmented and unified, heterogenous and integrated, open and coherent. (6)
Like the New York Commune itself, the oral history is statically charged with the interrelation of its participants. Memory, especially when affected by trauma, is necessarily fragmentary (Bal x); interviewees can contradict one another’s recollections of events, and indeed their own. One character, for example, was a member of a Christian cult in Staten Island in the 2050s, while another suffers from PTSD from serving in a bomb squad during a war in Iran and later fighting during a fascist insurgency in the United States. The latter finds that their memories from before and after the war have become jumbled, and the interview has to be stopped when they have one of their “intense flashbacks” of their sister being killed during the domestic conflict (173). In this way, the oral history mediates between the interiority of its characters and the collective history of the commune as a whole.
Low bar utopias like Everything for Everyone strike a balance between utopian conventions and the harsh realities of the contemporary moment. The twenty-first century offers no easy binary between dystopia and utopia. Margaret Atwood (2011) coined “ustopia” to describe the combination of the two—“the imagined perfect society and its opposite.” Abdelhadi and O’Brien’s decision to engage directly with the messy materiality of history-making from the outset is typical of this balance. When works of critical dystopian fiction use academic writing to contextualise their narratives, they generally do so at the end of the text. Orwell’s 1984 (1949) uses an appendix entitled “The Principles of Newspeak” to detail the failure of the language promoted by its totalitarian state of Oceania (312), while Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) ends with an address at a conference on the history of Gilead that reveals the rest of the novel was in fact a series of transcribed cassette recordings. These metatextual references to a comparatively desirable future beyond dystopia provides “a kind of ironic anticlosure” that leaves open utopian possibilities (Caldwell 338).³ In contrast, Everything for Everyone follows the utopian conventions established by Utopia’s postscript letters. But it uses the reality-conferring nature of academic writing to emphasise not only utopian possibilities, but also the impact of traumatising crises.
Inevitable Crisis
The inescapable reality of crisis is one defining characteristic of lowering the bar of utopian fiction. As Robinson argues, the material conditions of the contemporary moment have led to a shift in what futures can be considered utopian. Realist literary utopias must contend with what Berardi calls multifaceted apocalypse—“the financial crisis and the environmental crisis, intertwined and apparently intractable” (189). Everything for Everyone describes such a scenario. As Shinjini Dey (2022) puts it, “The novel is situated in an already present ecological and social collapse.” The first three decades of the twenty-first century are defined by cycles of booms and busts, paired with the onset of “global environmental catastrophe” (O’Brien and Abdelhadi 9). This comes to a head: “By the mid-thirties, a perfect storm of economic collapse and climate crisis brought the global economy to a grinding halt” (9). However, this era of crisis brings about change. While the novel does not present a teleology in which crisis leads to a better world, those decades are the precursors to a “global, communist phase of insurrection” (12).
The role that crisis might play in bringing about a socialist utopia is a frequent topic of debate. The accelerationist drive for the intensification of capitalism has been controversial. Arguments that capitalist speed alone will lead to its replacement through a “run-away whirlwind of dissolution” (Land, Thirst For Annihilation 80) are widely criticised (Srnicek and Williams 351; Gardiner 31), not least because they show little regard for the acute suffering associated with this process.⁴ Socialist engagements with degrowth have increasingly intersected with accelerationism (Buch-Hansen et al.; Hickel; Kallis; Saito; Schmelzer et al.). Both the argument that “the only way out is the way through” capitalism and that a return to non-productivist modes of social organisation is the way forward continue to be drawn directly from Marx’s writings (Shaviro 2; Saito 8). And these two, seemingly contradictory, impulses are each at work within Everything for Everyone: its communist insurrection is predicated on the intensification of global capitalism’s consequences, but the society that emerges also draws from principles of degrowth as it works to address those consequences. The novel is realistic about the devastation crises will bring about, and extrapolates a viable post-capitalist response.
In this sense, the novel reclaims the etymological meaning of crisis as “a moment of decision” (Castiadoris 115).⁵ For the ancient Greeks, “the concept imposed choices between stark alternatives” (Koselleck 358). Today, this meaning has been superseded by the conceptualisation of crisis as a drawn out, even endemic, state. Crisis is, in fact, increasingly defined as “chronic,” designating “a state of greater or lesser permanence” (Koselleck 358). Janet Roitman (2014) echoes Koselleck’s assessment, considering crisis to be “an omnipresent sign in almost all forms of narrative today” (2). The challenge for contemporary utopian literature is first to reclaim crisis as a signifier of decisive change and second to imagine how that change might be positive. Lisa Garforth’s (2005) work on literary utopias explores how they chart courses from ecological crisis to green futures. She describes how crisis can serve as a metaphorical “fresh start” and that an “apocalyptic scenario can thus enable the transition from an unsatisfactory present to a preferable (or at least different) way of life to be scripted as a decisive break” (Garforth, “Green Utopias” 398). Faced by capitalism’s multifaceted apocalypse, which intertwines ecological and economic collapse, the options are extinction or a concerted attempt to avert it.
In Everything for Everyone, the role of crisis—both ecological and financial—in bringing about change is most apparent in Kawkab Hassan’s account of the Levant’s liberation. Hassan contrasts the state of chronic crisis he experiences during his childhood in New York with crises in the Levant that necessitate regime change. He first describes the small-scale personal crises that plagued his low-income family:
there was always some crisis. The car broke down. We were behind on rent. Someone forgot to pay for the Internet, and it got shut off. One of us would get hurt, and the bills would dry up all the money. Endless fires to put out, ya know? (O’Brien and Abdelhadi 40)
This stages chronic crisis on a domestic level. Crisis exists as “a state of greater or lesser permanence,” in which “Endless fires” are extinguished, only to catch light elsewhere (Koselleck 358; O’Brien and Abdelhadi 40). It becomes a defining characteristic of day-to-day life. This can be viewed in relation to Henrik Vigh’s (2008) anthropological approach to crisis as a chronic “condition” (9). Vigh focuses on the “normalisation” of crisis, considering “normal” to mean “that which we do most and/or that which there is most of” (11). In time, quantitative and qualitative judgements of normality can make situations of profound volatility seem, paradoxically, routine. Crisis becomes an “ongoing experience… forcing people to make lives in fragmented and volatile worlds” (8). Instead of bringing about a change, either positive or negative, crisis itself was normalised for Hassan.
Crisis does bring about change in the Middle East of the novel, however. In Egypt, a military regime falls to interrelated environmental and financial crises. Heatwaves cause more deaths each year and much of the Nile dries up, causing “massive famines” (O’Brien and Abdelhadi 45). In parallel, “the economy started collapsing in the thirties” and this financial crash spells an end for the regime (45). It is a similar story in Palestine: US military aid to Israel becomes “financially impossible,” and the combination of insurrectionary pressure and local market crashes end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (47). While these crises cause extreme suffering for those living in the Levant, Hassan describes how they eventually pave the way for a future of peace and freedom for the people of the region.
Towards the end of the interview, there are references to the thriving Levant that has emerged by 2067. Abdelhadi asks Hassan how he makes his biannual trips between Gaza and New York, and Hassan explains that he travels by a combination of high-speed rail and a clipper. Abdelhadi notes that “the train systems aren’t as good here,” referring to the United States, “as they are in the SWANA region” (54). While America is not known for its world-leading railways, this alludes to widespread investment in rail infrastructure that produces a more connected Middle East and North Africa. The pair also discuss the recent test launches of solar planes in Cairo, which would make sustainable air travel a reality. Following a period of conflict, starvation, and deprivation, an era of increased interconnectedness and scientific innovation eventually emerges.
In The Seeds of Time (1994), Jameson distinguishes between his personal conceptions of dystopia and utopia. The former “tells the story of an imminent disaster… which is fast forwarded in the time of the novel,” while the latter “furnishes a blueprint rather than lingering upon the kinds of human relations that might be found in the Utopian condition” (Jameson, Seeds 56). Jameson sees dystopia as “generally a narrative” and utopia as “mostly nonnarrative” (55-56). Moylan responds to this distinction directly when he describes how the critical utopias of the 1970s combine “both the traditional eutopian evocation of a new spatial reality… and the temporal, dystopian account of personal suffering, systemic discovery, and radical action” (Moylan xviii). The low bar utopias of the twenty-first century follow in the footsteps of these critical utopias, balancing realist representations of the acute suffering associated with extreme weather events and economic collapse against the possibility of utopian transformations. In the case of Everything for Everyone, it is through personal stories like Hassan’s—the kind Jameson would associate with dystopia—that the interrelation between crisis and utopia is captured.
Available Solutions
The low bar for utopias is not only a product of the crises we face. It also relates to the availability of solutions, given sufficient political will and resources. The actions necessary to meet this lower threshold are generally existing, if under-utilised, practices. Engaging specifically with contemporary green utopias, Lisa Garforth (2018) notes that “Green hope is more widespread… but at the same time less visionary and radical” (3). But while Garforth focuses on ephemeral futures often defined by “narratives of loss and mourning,” Robinson’s low bar utopia is presented as concrete and achievable (Green Utopias 3). This kind of realism is at the heart of a new wave of utopian thinking. Socialist Erik Olin Wright’s (2010) Real Utopias Project sought to identify existing institutions within capitalism that were themselves a challenge to capitalism, be they participatory city budgeting, worker-owned cooperatives, unconditional basic income, or Wikipedia (1-3). Similarly, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman gained attention for his work on Utopia for Realists (2014), which makes a practical case for the implementation of Universal Basic Income, a fifteen-hour working week, and open borders. Both Wright and Bregman present systems, modes of organising, and policy decisions that have already been put into practice—or that could be achievable in the immediate future—as utopian.6 The neofuturist prospect of fully automated luxury communism, notably proposed by Aaron Bastani (2019), is more fanciful, but is nonetheless grounded in existing technologies such as solar and wind power, synthetic food production, and advanced rockets.7
The realism of contemporary utopian thinking runs counter to the capitalist realism that Mark Fisher (2009) described as dominating the “horizons of possibility” (81). It rejects the “political realism” of a centrist politics that makes only incremental changes within capitalist frameworks, and that adopts strict fiscal rules that prevent improvements in the lives of those most in need of state-provisioned support (Hardt and Negri 251; Alberro 51). Rather, contemporary utopias recalibrate what can be seen as realistic—including utopia itself. Any invocation of utopia is normative, measuring what futures can be considered ‘good’ in relation to the present. Contemporary utopias increasingly make the case for existing forms of radicalism through realism. Their narratives network a range of solutions, addressing criticisms of discrete reforms as “necessarily partial rather than systemic” and technological acceleration as “too narrow to count as radical change” (Levitas, Utopia as Method 144; Saito 161). And they make formal choices to insist the planet can be saved through a holistic blend of changes. Academic prose, transcripts, digitised records, and other modes of writing imbue key changes and policies with a formal realism that matches the realism of their content.
The tenth chapter of Everything for Everyone explores interviewee An Zhou’s participation in a tidal restoration project in coastal Long Island. The area has been flooded, radically changing its ecology. This requires both its ecosystem and the way humans interact with it to change. It becomes apparent that the best way to restore the ecology of Long Island is not a science-fictional solution, but to strip away the “old infrastructure” of the past (O’Brien and Abdelhadi 191). Echoing the famous phrase “Sous les pavés, la plage” (under the paving stones, the beach), pavement is stripped away to allow salt marshes to thrive.8 Various species of grasses suited to ocean water are planted. Climate adaptation and ecological renewal is achieved by greening the irrevocably transformed land. Bringing about a green utopia is presented as a process of mitigating “the consequences of the catastrophe of the old world” and learning from its mistakes by choosing to “not build in stupid places” (O’Brien and Abdelhadi 193). These practices align with principles of degrowth and rewilding, abandoning an extractivist relationship with nature in favour of ecological justice and the restoration of natural processes (Schmelzer et al. 31-2; Carver et al. 1888). This is undertaken globally: the work in Long Island is “part of broader ecological restructuring efforts underway around the world” (191).
In some cases, science-fictional bio-engineering is used to adapt entire ecologies to a changed climate. This includes the design of entirely new species to address biodiversity loss in damaged biomes. In effect, this is a practice of biological archaeology, in which ecologists “think through the roles of species that had gone extinct because of climate catastrophe, and try to create species that would replicate those roles or replace them” (193). Like Everything for Everyone’s use of oral history, this imagined process echoes utopian method; Ruth Levitas (2016) describes this as “an architectural mode of imagining alternative social possibilities—a kind of speculative sociology—with a critical, archaeological mode that probes the gaps and weaknesses in such putative constructions” (400). The fictional bio-engineers’ approach is a kind of speculative ecology, balancing pre-existing genetic characteristics that thrive in a particular biome with limitations that would prevent them from serving their necessary function. This is the “still living past” literally reanimated in living things (Bloch, Heritage 109).
Given the availability of transformational solutions such as bio-engineering, there is a risk of straying into technological utopianism, in which advances in technology supposedly lead to a perfected society. A blueprint that prescribes an “end state” of this kind runs counter to an open approach to the future (de Geus 227).9 And, as Lizzie O’Shea (2019) notes, technological utopianists overwhelmingly prescribe “more of the same: more capitalism, technologically optimized” (102).10 The recent live-action television series Extrapolations (2023) offers a damning representation of techno-utopianism in the year 2070. It shows how a technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere could become a way to rationalise ongoing emissions. Moreover, the continued release of carbon dioxide makes the technology more lucrative, serving as a metaphorical “vacuum cleaner for wealth” (Burns). Within our existing capitalist system, the profit motive will necessarily drive the decisions that underpin any technological solutionism. Behavioural and structural change, not “more capitalism,” is required for the implementation of technologies to prove effective in delivering utopian outcomes (O’Shea 102).
Everything for Everyone recognises that behavioural change is the foundation of climate adaptation, but imagines it in a way that retains the realism of Robinson’s low bar. Rather than drawing from the trope of “domination of nature in the ideology of progressive futurism” often associated with green literary utopias, the novel describes a synthesis of indigenous practices, agricultural principles, and biotech (Garforth, “Green Utopias” 394; O’Brien and Abdelhadi 193). The project rests on the three pillars of the globally-recognised Tunis Accords: “ecological restoration, biodiversity, and climate change mitigation” (O’Brien and Abdelhadi 199). These guiding principles were agreed in 2062 in the wake of Tunisia’s temperate forests dying off. Now, they serve as a basis for restoration frameworks. For example, Zhou notes that forest restoration is “centered around maximizing ecological niches, biodiversity, and variation through combining self-sustaining processes and deliberate intervention” (192). Describing an international agreement, derived from events in the narrative past, lends a realism to these cooperatively developed forms of conservation. They are a direct response to ecological breakdown, synergising existing practices with advancements in biotech to produce a utopia that rejects the pernicious characteristics of extractive capitalism.
The Same, Only Different
Since the 16th century, literary utopias have emerged out of periods of change, and have correspondingly responded with representations of radical difference. The critical utopias of the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged from a period of looming crisis and population expansion, synthesising dystopian characteristics into more traditional utopian forms (Moylan xviii; Garforth, Green Utopias 2). Contemporary utopias that spring over Robinson’s low bar follow this same tendency, presenting modes of thinking, behaviours, and technologies that meet the needs of worlds on the brink of collapse. And on account of their low bar, the crises and solutions they represent are not so radically different from our own.
In “In The Sun” (1999), which was originally addressed to Bloch, Walter Benjamin shares a teaching from Hasidic philosophy:¹¹
The Hasidim have a saying about the world to come. Everything there will be arranged just as it is with us. The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as here—only a little bit different. (664)
This way of thinking about the future is a far cry from the “radical difference” that Jameson associates with the utopian form (Postmodernism xii). But it has more in common with the utopian imaginary of the contemporary moment. Low bar utopias attempt to map out the totality of the world system, treating it like the room in the Hasidic saying. Whatever comes in the future will be “only a little bit different,” amplifying the existing climate crisis and the structural issues of ultra-financialised capitalism (Benjamin 664). But the solutions to these problems are already strewn around, like clothes in a room. While the sleeping child will age, they will remain the same person. As Bloch notes, “We have in us what we could become” (Principle vol. 3, 43). These utopias identify existing people and practices that could be mobilised for a positive project of future making.
Typical of this latest wave of literary utopias, Everything for Everyone insists upon the realism of utopian possibilities using both its aesthetics and its content. Across twelve interviews, it emphasises how the building blocks of its utopia and the people who assembled them were already present during times of seemingly chronic crisis. And it plots out the processes of local and international cooperation necessary to assemble them, reclaiming the etymological potential of crisis as a decisive moment of change. Capitalism is not deconstructed overnight, but is replaced piece by piece as part of a utopian process that responds to crises with every available practice and solution.
NOTES
- Faced by flawed societies, Engels argues, Henri Saint-Simon (1803), Charles Fourier (1808), and Robert Owen (1812) attempted “to discover a new and more perfect system of social order” (59). But Engels views their fixation on plotting out a perfect society as self-defeating, since “the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure fantasies” (59).
- Notable utopias in the early modern period include More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666). Nineteenth century temporal utopias include Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), Anna Bowman Dodd’s The Republic of the Future (1887), and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).
- The potential for utopian futures within both Orwell and Atwood’s novels is problematised. Phillip E. Wegner (2002) notes that 1984’s “academic prose style of the past—already suggests that the only place imagined to exist outside the world of Big Brother might be Orwell’s own immediate past or, at best, a future that looks very much like it” (188). Equally, a misogynistic reference that compares the “Arctic Chair,” a female scholar, to the “Arctic char” the attendees enjoyed for dinner is a sting in the tail of “Historical Notes On The Handmaid’s Tale” (Atwood, Handmaid’s Tale 311-12).
- It should be noted that Nick Land himself has moved away from the view that capitalism’s accelerating speed will lead to its replacement. In “A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism” (2017), Land asserts that “the prospect of any unambiguously ‘Left-accelerationism’ gaining serious momentum can be confidently dismissed. Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun.” This reflects his turn towards neoreactionary politics (Beckett). And in recent years his work has been embraced by Silicon Valley’s effective accelerationism movement (Rose; Andreessen).
- Similarly, the etymology of the word apocalypse “denotes revelation, the uncovering of that which was hidden” (Solnick 23). Both it and crisis are often used more generally to describe catastrophic scenarios, but their roots gesture towards a kind of contingency.
- Open borders is admittedly further from realisation in the context of today’s isolationism. Bregman (2019) himself referred to it as “the only truly utopian idea in my book.”
- Bastani’s formulation of fully automated luxury communism is part of a longstanding debate regarding the applications of automation within a socialist state (Kelly; Mason; Srnicek and Williams; Thompson). This particular framing has its critics: Kohei Saito argues the suggestion that “ecomodernist technologies can be utilized for the sake of socialist transformation once their ownership is transferred to the state” is “ungrounded” (160-161). Reviews of Bastani’s book likewise highlight the ecological implications of a future society that continues to be oriented around energy-intensive technologies, extractivism, and abundance (Barker; Kellokumpu). And David M. Bell mounts a broader critique of “utopian (post-)welfarism” on the grounds that the welfare state is made possible in part via exploitation, be that the mining of natural minerals or feminised care work; he argues that “it is unclear how—without more radical changes—the automation to which UBI is hinged can be produced without reliance on similar structural inequalities” (57).
- Although the phrase is often associated with the Parisian civil unrest of 1968, its original source is contested.
- “Blueprint utopians” often provoke scepticism (Jacoby xiv; Kateb 239; Levitas xvi).
- Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023) is a representative example of technological utopianism being used to legitimise the excesses of capitalism.
- Bloch’s status as the story’s recipient is noted in Walking with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy (2013) by Andrew Benjamin.
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Gabriel Burrow is a writer and editor based in London. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Leiden University with an MA in Literature and Society and is now studying for a PhD in Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Alongside academia, he works as a Senior Copywriter for a creative communications agency, writing articles, reports, and whitepapers for major technology firms. His story “Bonsai” was shortlisted for the Urban Tree Festival and featured in its Canopy anthology, while his scholarship has been published in Foundation and SFRA Review.
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