Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature

In The Principle of Hope (1954, 1955, 1959), Ernst Bloch emphasized the importance of “learning hope,” and indeed, amidst the multiple global and planetary crises we are facing today, hope—or rather the utopian drive to imagine better futures—has become an inevitable necessity. Raphael Kabo’s Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature: A Commons Poetics, with its renewed attention to the commons and its particular emphasis on the transformative power of the literary imagination, offers a valuable contribution in this regard and provides a vital update to utopian thinking in and for the twenty-first century.Utopia Beyond Capitalism opens with a brief history of utopian literature and a reexamination of Fredric Jameson’s seminal Archaeologies of the Future (2005), which “critiqued the possibility of genuine utopian transformation in the late capitalist present” (2). Echoing the famous sentiment that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” Jameson argued that we are so deeply entrenched within a late capitalist totality to preclude the imagination of coherent alternative worlds. Consequently, utopian literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century changed shape in that it had to examine and critique “the ‘ideological closure’ of this [the late capitalist] system in the first place” (2).Against this closure, Kabo claims, in the last two decades—particularly after the 2008 global financial crisis—a new literature has emerged squarely from within late capitalist reality, reopening the possibility for alternative futures. He argues that instead of imagining utopian totalities in opposition to the capitalist present or resigning altogether, these texts “pay an invigorated attention to the simultaneously negating and productive possibilities of utopia” and show a “newly politicized interest in the representation and production of commons” (2). Kabo calls these texts “commons utopias” and argues that they simultaneously “reflect the sense of living through a period of profound and ongoing crisis” (7) while embodying a desire not for escape but a desire to “transform and refashion the present” (11). In this, Kabo finds himself very much in the vein of Bloch, highlighting literature’s utopian surplus, its anticipatory consciousness of a future that has not yet arrived. At the same time, he follows Tom Moylan in that utopian literature must “stimulate in its readers a desire for a better life and . . . motivate that desire toward action” (3–4): literature thus as providing the necessary seeds for transformation.The works at the center of Kabo’s study do so through what he terms their “commons poetics,” that is, the creation and cultivation of commons in and through literature. Kabo identifies three different yet interconnected levels on which commons poetics manifest themselves: narrative; language and form; and politics. Kabo, for instance, asks how the texts he analyzes depict the commons and other collective formations, how the commons emerge on the level of language and form “through tactics including intertextuality, parataxis, polyphony and reflexivity,” and how the texts draw their readers into these fictional worlds, “finessing and shaping their utopian imaginaries, and creating textual spaces for them to see themselves represented” (3). Ultimately, Kabo argues that these works create their common utopian worlds precisely through the “combination of narrative, formal technique and political commitment” (3).Kabo brings together a broad variety of texts in Utopia Beyond Capitalism. Each of them, as he argues, “reflects its author’s interest in a specific crisis of the capitalist present and . . . offers a different depiction of a commons, complete with a cast of commoners and a commonwealth of resources” (8). Chapter 1, “Commons Beyond Capitalism,” engages with Julianna Spahr’s poetry collection That Winter the Wolf Came (2015), which deals with ecological disaster, economic precarity, and the difficulties, yet also unexpected joys of anti-capitalist struggle. Through exemplary readings of “If You Were a Bluebird,” “Transitory, Momentary,” “It’s All Good, It’s All Fucked,” and “Turnt,” Kabo compellingly demonstrates how Spahr generates a commons poetics by carefully interweaving “linguistic and literary commons,” for instance through her use of intertextuality, with “questions of collectivity” and “representations of spatial, social, economic, and ecological commons” (31), for example, through her explicit depictions of care and responsibility for human and nonhuman others. He particularly emphasizes how the poems navigate the “unconveyable complexity of a planetary multi-species commons” (35) while they also work toward a politics of collectivity in their imagination and prefiguration of an anti-capitalist future by showing that “the ongoing present of late capitalism is not just escapable, but can be transformed into a world of common flourishing” (50). This chapter is the only one in Kabo’s book concerned with poetry; yet by focusing on Spahr as a “poet-activist,” it wonderfully unfolds and demonstrates the full breadth of Kabo’s understanding of a commons poetics, which encompasses formal, narrative, and political strategies that gesture beyond a capitalist telos.Chapter 2, “Utopias Beyond Borders,” imagines a borderless world through Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017), in which mysterious doorways appear that allow migrants from the Global South to teleport to cities in the Global North, at once eliminating the arduousness of the migrant journey and enabling unconditional freedom of movement. Critically engaging with histories of colonization, empire, and contemporary neoliberal and necropolitical border regimes, Kabo argues that it is “through the transmission of poetics, tactics, ethics and politics of mobility justice and mobile commons” that the novel “can educate readers to move beyond capitalism and its border regimes” (86). Ultimately, the novel, as he posits, depicts a mobile planetary commons in which “anti-capitalist and decolonial modes of ‘solidarity, reciprocity, caring, trust, generosity and stewardship’ become the imagined world’s dominant form of social organization” (86). As in chapter 1, Kabo compellingly highlights the possibility of a future that has not yet arrived and pays close attention to the carefully crafted and tender world of Hamid’s Exit West.The temporality of chapters 1 and 2 is turned around in the third chapter, “Utopias Beyond Disaster,” which engages with ecological disaster in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017), in which New York City has been partially flooded due to rising sea levels caused by global warming. According to Kabo, the novel “is a blend of warning and hope, a novel about unevenly distributed capitalist disaster and the utopian commons which can emerge to oppose and attenuate it” (93). Whereas the two previous chapters work from the present or a near-present toward the future, Kabo argues that New York 2140 provides a “prefigurative version of the future as working upon the present in utopian ways” (93), and he shows how the novel calls upon the reader to “transform the world of the present into a commons which need not survive planetary catastrophe” (120). Kabo here provides an intriguing argument about the different temporalities and spatialities that commons utopias can encompass by showing how New York 2140 simultaneously extrapolates the present into the future while at the same time showing how this future vision in turn can affect the present.The final chapter, “Utopias Beyond Death,” looks at Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017), and the way these novels depict commons that “work against capitalism’s final, and most insidious, hold over human nature—its control of life and death via precarization, the maintenance of surplus populations and biopolitical management” (133). Veering into queer and posthuman theory, Kabo argues that the characters in both novels manage to “transcend the normative human condition” by surpassing death, ultimately opening spaces for “becoming-collective-across-time” (161). While both novels portray worlds that seem more isolated and distant from the present than the worlds of Kabo’s other texts, this chapter shows that their characters are similarly “exposed to precariousness and [need] the commons and collectivities they create”; Doctorow’s Walkaway and Yuknavitch’s Book of Joan depict “utopia as a never-finished process, as a collective mode of being, and as a space which emerges from within capitalism to oppose it” (162). It is therefore precisely in their careful attunement toward the precarity and vulnerability of the commons, and the revolutionary possibilities that emerge from within the capitalist system, that these two novels constitute commons utopias in Kabo’s understanding and fit seamlessly into his broader argument.Of course, Kabo does not provide a blueprint for the future in Utopia Beyond Capitalism, but his readings show how his texts can spark alternative visions of the future through their depictions of the commons “predicated on equality, sharing, accessibility, oppositional energy and future dreaming” (170). As the book attempts to bring together a multitude of different dimensions and elements from various scholarly backgrounds, the chapters sometimes seem fragmentary, and the argument is not as clear as it could be at points. Overall, however, Kabo provides a refreshing look at utopian literature and gestures at the possibility of life beyond capitalism, making this a valuable resource not only for literary scholars or scholars of utopia but also for activists and dreamers everywhere

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Capitalism · Commons · Economics · Literature · Neoclassical economics · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Utopia · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction