![]() ![]() (In any case, has the word not always been used by some of the most eminent political figures on all sides as an insulting slur on their enemies?) Marcuse the end of utopia pdf free#But why not simply discuss those issues directly and openly, without recourse to this, seemingly literary, third issue of utopia? Indeed, one could turn the question around and say that we are perfectly free to discuss utopia as a historical and textual or generic issue, but not to complicate it with politics. So two practical-political issues are at play here: a left critique of social-democratic reformism, within the system and on the other hand a free-market fundamentalism. The two uses do seem somehow to overlap, and imply that a politics which wishes to change the system radically will be designated as utopian-with the right-wing undertone that the system (now grasped as the free market) is part of human nature that any attempt to change it will be accompanied by violence and that efforts to maintain the changes (against human nature) will require dictatorship. Marcuse the end of utopia pdf code#Thus ‘utopian’ has come to be a code word on the left for socialism or communism while on the right it has become synonymous with ‘totalitarianism’ or, in effect, with Stalinism. The term alone survives this wholesale obsolescence, as a symbolic token over which essentially political struggles still help us to differentiate left and right. In the other, unparalleled wealth, computerized production, scientific and medical discoveries unimaginable a century ago as well as an endless variety of commercial and cultural pleasures, seem to have rendered utopian fantasy and speculation as boring and antiquated as pre-technological narratives of space flight. ![]() In one of these worlds, the disintegration of the social is so absolute-misery, poverty, unemployment, starvation, squalor, violence and death-that the intricately elaborated social schemes of utopian thinkers become as frivolous as they are irrelevant. ![]() Does this peculiar entity still have a social function? If it no longer does so, then perhaps the explanation lies in that extraordinary historical dissociation into two distinct worlds which characterizes globalization today. U topia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation. ![]()
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