European Journal of Social Theory

Garforth, Lisa

doi: 10.1177/13684310251392829pmid: N/A

Attempts to imagine a better future from within the climate emergency must work in and through failure: failing eco-social systems, failed narratives, failures of political will, failures to change consumerist lifestyles. Utopia is intimately related to failure. It is a response to something wrong or missing. As a mode of critique and creation it is definitionally impossible to realise. But the climate crisis brings distinctive dimensions, disrupting linear temporalities, resisting solutions and posing existential dilemmas. This paper works through theoretical ideas linking utopia with failure in contemporary utopian and queer theorising, adapting them to the climate context and articulating a weak utopianism in response to theorists calling for a hard or strong utopia in times of crisis. It argues that climate crisis is better understood as a world than as a problem, and explores what kinds of implicated, everyday and entangled utopian desires might enable us to navigate the Anthropocene.

Øversveen, Emil; Kelly, Conor Andre

doi: 10.1177/13684310251394343pmid: N/A

Owing to the considerable ambiguity in his writings, there exists no consensus in the scholarly literature as to how Marx's theory of class should be interpreted. This article contends that there are three distinct modes of class analysis in Marx: a structural mode concerned with identifying the fundamental class locations of the capitalist mode of production, a sociological mode concerned with investigating the effects of class on various socio-economic phenomena and a political mode concerned with the relationship between class and politics. Distinguishing between these different modes, we claim, helps address several of the long-standing problems with Marxist class theory while also clarifying its distinct theoretical strategy and explanatory aims. Rather than an index of social privilege, class in a Marxist sense should primarily be understood as a category of compulsion that explains why people engage in the social practices necessary for reproducing the capitalist mode of production.

Swain, Dan

doi: 10.1177/13684310251379192pmid: N/A

This article explores disaster utopias in relation to two interconnected questions regarding utopian and prefigurative political projects. The first question concerns assessments of success and failure: Disaster utopias complicate assessment in these terms because they appear more effective at achieving immediate practical goals than existing systems, while this very effectiveness raises the spectre of a distinct kind of failure, in the form of co-option. The second question concerns the relationship of such projects to existing states: Fears of co-option tend to treat the state's entrance onto the scene as simply neutralising utopian potential. While such fears are well-grounded, it is important to also consider how such encounters might change the state itself. Moreover, these two questions inform each other: the question of how the state (and ideas of it) might be transformed can also inform assessments of success or failure.

Wagner, Peter

doi: 10.1177/13684310251409385pmid: N/A

Coward, Martin; Lisle, Debbie

doi: 10.1177/13684310251379196pmid: N/A

Our present is marked by multiple failures: of governance; of care; of hope. Amidst the wreckage, we see numerous attempts – real and imagined – to keep hope alive by dreaming of a better future. Such utopian exhortations are fuelled by the idea that it is not too late – we still have time to correct our failures. This secures a particular futurity for failure: we speculate on a utopian tomorrow to counteract the pressing failures of today, and we implement lessons today to course correct for a better future. We argue that it is already too late for such social dreaming. We turn instead to the uneven potentialities of the current ‘failure-scene’ through accounts of non-redemptive failure that refuse the normative coordinates of hope; flatten the elongated present of the ruins; endure the event-oriented temporality of crisis thinking; and improvise with whatever tools and energies are available to us.

Davis, Laurence

doi: 10.1177/13684310251391541pmid: N/A

What constitutes revolutionary failure, and how, if at all, can the utopian imagination reanimate unfulfilled revolutionary dreams and aspirations? In this essay I aim to demonstrate the inadequacy of commonly accepted accounts of revolutionary ‘success’ and ‘failure’, and to develop an original alternative account of revolution which foregrounds the role of utopian imagination in transmitting deferred or defeated revolutionary hopes from one generation to the next. I do so by means of close examination of selected works of utopian literature, social and political theory and an historical case study of an ostensibly ‘failed’ revolution. More specifically, I focus on the contested historical legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871, and the English artist and socialist activist William Morris's political and literary responses to it. My argument is that Morris's artistically mediated response to the Commune is an exemplary case of how a grounded utopianism inspired and informed by history's ‘failures’ can help to reanimate, albeit not unproblematically, as-yet unfulfilled revolutionary dreams and aspirations.

Renz, Flora

doi: 10.1177/13684310251379193pmid: N/A

This article aims to consider the COVID-19 pandemic as a unique case study for analysing the relationship between utopia and failure in the context of disabled people's efforts to create COVID-safe communities and spaces. As such it contributes both to literature on disabled people's utopianism and analyses the relationship between utopia and failure from two different angles. Firstly, utopia and its relationship to failure is explored in the sense in which some disabled people have characterised the initial phase of the pandemic as a fundamental utopian shift in how accessibility and inclusion can be understood. Of course, in the UK since then the government's failure to implement effective prevention measures at an early stage of the pandemic has led to COVID-19 becoming fully endemic. Hence, the second sense in which the tension between utopias and failure seems of relevance here is in the context of disabled and clinically vulnerable people establishing their own COVID-safe communities in the absence of effective containment measures during the ongoing endemic phase of COVID-19.

Hynes, Maria

doi: 10.1177/13684310251401531pmid: N/A

This paper examines the entanglement of aesthetic and economic factors in contemporary capitalism. Sociological engagement with this problem has focused on commodifying processes, within a framework that is poorly suited to the deterritorialized character of capitalism. What we need to understand today is the aesthetic character of the production of subjectivity; for this, a differential and postanthropocentric ontology is needed. I argue that economic production is preceded by the creation and realization of the sensible. Here, aesthetic machines have an expressive function, involving the creation of possible worlds and the subjects they include. Building on the work of Lazzarato and Guattari, I suggest that humanizing processes are only one of the aesthetic apparatuses at play in the subjective economy. An attention to dehumanizing and desubjectivating processes is also necessary if we are to adequately understand the alignment of subjective forces with the momentum of capitalism.

Jörke, Dirk; Studebaker, Benjamin

doi: 10.1177/13684310251393914pmid: N/A

Democratic theorists often argue that democracy is in crisis, but nonetheless maintain democracy can be revived. In contrast, this paper argues that modernisation and democracy have become opposed. Drawing on the work of Michael Th. Greven and Hartmut Rosa, it argues that as modernisation intensifies, it erodes the preconditions necessary for democracy to credibly make the promises long associated with it. This process of debilitation involves ‘ratchet effects’, such that it becomes steadily less possible to restore lost capacities. The regime that remains is like a marathon runner who has been subjected to an amputation – it continues on in a minimalist sense, but its horizons of possibility are irrevocably altered. Because this debilitated democracy is unable to check or manage modernisation, it will remain subject to the process that has debilitated it, further reducing its horizons in the years to come.

Noruzi, Mohammad Masud; Greener, Joseph

doi: 10.1177/13684310251410130pmid: N/A

This article brings Ali Shariati and Henri Lefebvre into dialogue to explore the everyday as a site of ideological contestation under capitalism. Through this comparative engagement, each thinker is reinterpreted in light of the other. While both critique the alienation of modern life, Shariati introduces Estehmar – a multi-dimensional condition of stupefaction encompassing economic, intellectual and spiritual subjugation. Lefebvre's materialist analysis of space and everyday life offers critical insights into capitalist modernity but often overlooks the existential and metaphysical dimensions that Shariati foregrounds. This synthesis advances a decolonial reading of everyday life that integrates structural critique with inner transformation as essential to emancipation.