The One Country at Which Humanity is Always Landing
Utopian socialism, the humanity of orcs, the television murder rate, and more.
There has often been, in the history of socialism, a debate about whether or not it is a utopian ideal. Is the worker’s paradise a vision which we will one day obtain, or is it an impossible goal towards which we must forever strive, knowing it to ultimately be a fantasy at best or an illusion at worst? I don’t think it particularly controversial or even contradictory to say that it is both.
For some people, ‘utopian socialism’ is an abhorrent phrase. For them, socialist realism isn’t just an aesthetic; it’s a mandate for our very conception of the world we are trying to win. The idea of fully automated luxury communism, gay or space optional, is a pipe dream, a pie in the sky: the kind of dangerous nonsense sold by the bosses to distract us from material realities. The struggle is in the here and now, and those who would sell our comrades on a mirage of perfection are little more than hucksters fobbing off a phony bill of sale. Fairy tales are for children, and it is adults who must have the hard edge and the clear eyes to make a revolution.
Personally, I think that socialism must always be utopian. If we don’t believe that paradise is achievable, what are we fighting for? A world full of futile struggle, compromise, and difficulty is what we have now. If we cannot have freedom for all, all the time, in all ways – if we are to settle – then why not settle for the reality sold to us by capitalism? As far as I’m concerned, once paradise ceases to be free, it ceases to be paradise. It’s either for everyone or it’s for no one, and if it’s for no one, what exactly is all this about?
A utopian vision of socialism, however, is not just an animating mission, a Holy Grail whose light shines bright enough to keep us marching through the mud, a substitute opiate for the masses who have grown too sophisticated to believe in religion anymore. It is also clarifying, motivating, and inspiring. It is, indeed, that key distinction that we always preach is lacking in the neo-liberal approach of America’s Democratic Party: it is the thing we are fighting for and not just the thing we are fighting against. It is easy enough to define what is wrong with a world dominated by capitalism, but what is more instructive than thinking through the process – even if those thoughts are as nebulous as dreams – of what we are going to replace it with?
Utopianism is valuable because it prepares us for the future we want to have, and thus helps us prepare for the day we have it. Innumerable projects of liberation have fallen into inertia or even reaction because their revolution manages somehow to win the day, but leaves its initiators suddenly standing around the ruins of the old world with no clue as what new one to replace it with. We must think about the institutions and systems of tomorrow or else our project of rebirth will die on the vine; progress cannot be measured unless you know what you are progressing towards. But it is more than that: It is necessary because we need it to juice to life our efforts towards reaching it. A clear vision of the future not only presents us with the finish like we wish to reach, but clearly defines the path we are going to run. It shows us not just what we are trying to win, but how we are going to win it; we may not agree on tactics or strategies, but we must at least collectively understand what the game is, or we won’t know how to play. It is only by believing that we can win something infinitely greater, vaster, and better than anything we can achieve know that we can fight the innumerable hostile forces arrayed against us.
For those forces are many and dangerous, and they will accept nothing like a peaceful surrender. Anyone who dissents from their vision of order will not be dealt with through anything less than violence and destruction to the extreme, and we are only ever one bad stretch away from a return to the White Terrors. This is where the seeming contradiction arises. I say that socialism must by its very nature be utopian; we are asking for no less than the complete upheaval, destruction, and total replacement of the existing capitalist order, and we don’t intend to replace it with its exact opposite, if we do not want a utopia to supplant the dystopia the bosses have made, why risk all the trouble and pain? But I also say that as socialists, we must become accustomed to failure and defeat, and we must ever be ready to lose.
It is not just that failure is always with us, because the powers lined up to crush us are so many and so vehement that the new visionaries must spend a great deal of effort simply articulating them to realize how difficult their task is. It’s that many of our goals are so ambitious, and many of our ideas about how the world must be changed are so dauting in execution that we may struggle for a generation just to articulate them. If you are shaken by every loss, you will develop no taste for the fight, and socialism is not for you.
But here I see no contradiction. Every defeat shows us a new flaw, and a new reason that the flaw must be polished away. Every struggle teaches us the lessons we must learn to build a new world out of the ashes of the old. Every humiliation can be internalized, or it can be turned around and made an object lesson, an illustration, an example of how easily things can go awry and why those things have no place in our revolutionary heaven. Certainly, socialism promises no easy utopia; anxiety and sadness are part of us, and struggle is constant. We need not rally the troops with stories of victories easily won and perfectly preserved; we teach hope, not optimism. But we are like the proverbial gardener who plants a tree under whose shade she will never sit; we must take joy and strength in the planting, and know that someone will rest in that shade; otherwise, what’s the tree for?
A recent decision by the company that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, the 800-pound beholder of the role-playing game industry, to move away from identifying specific races of creatures in its fictional campaign settings as inherently evil, has caused a bit of a brouhaha amongst the usual suspects who insist that their hobbies must maintain an unwelcoming and reactionary nature lest they cease being any fun. The same people who got their skid-marks wrinkled over superheroes being reimagined as members of ethnic minorities, or over the protagonists of video games being portrayed as female, have moved on to losing their shit over the idea that the made-up gagoos in a fantasy world might possess feelings or in some way make you feel guilty about murdering them.
The ethics of all this aside (and let’s brush away, too, the questionable taste of Hasbro making this decision as a sort of sop to the Black Lives Matter movement, as if they’re somehow aware of the ugly link between vile subhuman fantasy races and real-world marginalized people and are trying to make a gesture in the direction of being anti-racist but are afraid to articulate it explicitly for fear of giving the game away), it’s really nothing new, and plenty of us who are nerdy enough to have been playing this type of game for a long time have been doing it for decades without corporate sanction. Even absent the idea that inherently evil creatures are racist, smart players and DMs have known for ages that they’re boring, and there are more adventures, games, and campaign settings than I can count that subvert this dumb trope and make orcs, kobolds, and hobgoblins have personalities and complexities, or outright making them the protagonists, just to make play more interesting.
As I am not an easily offended reactionary, I don’t know why anyone would be upset about this decision. It’s not as if a hall monitor from Wizards of the Coast is going to come to your living room when you play and take away your Monster Manual if you just decide to keep making your lizardfolk savage barbarian scum. The company is happy to keep selling you product no matter how retrogressive you and your nerd friends decide to be with them. But it’s an interesting phenomenon if you consider it as a manifestation of what people want out of this kind of thing. I’ve long suspected that the lasting appeal of the zombie genre, for a lot of – well, let’s be honest – men of – well, let’s be honest – a particular philosophical bent is that it allows them to indulge the fantasy of being able to get away with the mass slaughter of something that looks a lot like you do. In D&D, there has long been an ironic recognition of this tendency, to the degree that it has become a trope to refer to adventurers as “murder hoboes”; but what does it say about you if, presented with a vast and detailed world of fantasy, in which there is uncontrollable magic, majestic gods, unfathomably alien dimensions, and infinite possibility, and what you choose to do with it – and what angers you if anyone even suggests its alteration – is to kill without qualm, remorse, or consequence?
Speaking of murder without regret: I’ve never quite understood mother-in-law jokes. I love my wife’s mother! I’m sure they’re not all great, but the idea that there’s a whole genre of gags built around them is mystifying to me, in the same way that I sort of get why someone might find a rubber chicken kind of funny, but I cannot fathom how the use of one became such a commonplace prop. Anyway, my mother-in-law (hi Teri!) introduced me to the bizarrely popular British detective show Murder in Paradise, and I immediately got hooked on it.
I love the goddamn thing. I have opinions about the rotating cast of chief inspectors (I find Poole too aggressively unpleasant and Mooney too deliberately quirky and whimsical – the go-to British characterization of the Irish – leaving me to stan for Kris Marshall’s Humphrey Goodman), I enjoy the well-curated soundtrack of reggae and soca, and, in what is no doubt a manifestation of my advancing age, I just like to watch a bunch of attractive people lounging around in a tropical paradise. Objectively, the show isn’t very good; the mysteries are always unsolvable and overcomplicated, the characters tend to be trite, the humor is pretty corny, and of course, its politics are awful. But it still flows pleasantly across my brain like cool ocean water over warm sand.
What fascinates me about it is what it shares in common with other such police-procedural shows. Since murder is the sexiest crime – theft is too dull, sex crimes are too grim, and drugs are too political – Murder in Paradise, now in its ninth season, presents us with a Rube Goldberg machine of a killing every single week, which begs the question, if a lovely little island like Ste. Marie has a murder roughly fifty times a year, why on Earth is anyone vacationing there? Your odds of survival would be better if you just jumped off the cruise ship into the Atlantic Ocean on the way there. My beloved home of Chicago already has an unconscionably high murder rate, but if it kept pace with the many TV shows set here, the population of five million would be whittled down to the size of Lunenberg, Vermont by now. It’s a longstanding joke that Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher on the long-running Murder, She Wrote was in the vicinity of more wrongful deaths than the terrorists of 9/11 (“Cabot Cove Syndrome”, they called it), but what about NCIS? If an actual branch of the military featured as many major crimes and homicides as its fictionalized version of the U.S. Navy, it would have been shut down ages ago and been replaced with floating mall cops or explosive balloons.
As I discussed in my piece on propaganda a few weeks back, American television has normalized us to a staggering degree to the notion that random innocent people are constantly being murdered every day, and we need the cops to keep us safe from the uncountable predators who stalk our streets and back alleys. In reality, it has been over 25 years since the murder rate crossed the 20,000 mark in the U.S.; by contrast, more than twice that many people die every year from nephrotic syndrome, but curiously, there are no shows where a small but dedicated force of officers go around stopping people from putting too much salt on their food. To each their own entertainment, I suppose.
This week’s links: My friend Claire Zulkey expounds on the richly aggravating history of Sesame Street’s Mr. Noodle. My friend and comrade Ramsin Canon writes about the shifting boundaries of class struggle in the latter days of capitalism in the Midwest Socialist. My other friend and comrade Benjamin Balthaser discusses the history of the anti-Zionist Jewish left in Jacobin. President Trump, with the iffy cooperation of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, plans to deploy federal troops to Chicago. David Roth is unquestionably the best chronicler of the reign of our cartoon president, and his latest at the New Republic is another shot right between the eyes.