Imagining a post-capitalist future is harder than capitalism allows us to imagine

Several people have asked me to write a blog post about the kind of society I see as emerging out of the Covid-19 epidemic, one that learns lessons from the pandemic and reorients itself in a more compassionate direction. This request joins a long lineage of requests for descriptions of the future, from what an eco-socialist BC might look like, how the Pacific Northwest might look with a bioregional system of political economy, what a post-imperial global order might look like.

It is not so much that I refuse to do these things as that I cannot do these things. The feats of imagination being asked of me are far beyond any human’s imaginative capacity. Furthermore, the belief that such feats are within the capabilities of human beings in our present moment, is, itself, dangerous.

Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers have a lot more in common than is often credited, especially in this day and age when fake intellectuals like Jordan Peterson try to conflate them. But one area of considerable overlap is the understanding that the system of relationships that comprise a social order, whether we call it a “stage of history” or an “episteme,” is the understanding that what we can imagine is profoundly conditioned by that order. The human imagination is never unfettered; it is always circumscribed by culture and knowledge. Late stage capitalism opens us to certain new areas of imagination—how a sexualized ideal of ourselves might look in our mind’s eye, new possible flavours of ice cream, how to appropriate and commodify some part of another’s imagination or our own—but it also works to dim or eliminate all kinds of imagining. And yet, at the same time, we are told that imagination is pre-social, individual and unfettered by material or cultural conditions. One of the central lies of capitalism is that it does not fetter the imagination. And we often can only guess at what it is that we have lost the capacity to imagine, given that we have lost it.

That is not to say that I do not expend huge amounts of my mental energy imagining places and times other than this one, in the past, in the future, or in a universe with different physical properties. Indeed, doing this has been one of the greatest and longest-standing passions of my life. Since being prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set by a child psychiatrist in 1981, I have spent thousands of hours imagining different worlds, different societies and sharing them with my friends.

As an adult, I became a historian and completed a PhD and postdoctoral fellowship not just in the study of the past but in the study of the imaginary past of the Mormon church, one in which God is from the planet Kolob and in which people called the Jaredites traveled from Eurasia to North America in submarines four thousand years ago.

But just as the Book of Mormon is actually a commentary on Jacksonian America, its controversies, limitations and imagination, my games are simply essays on the limitations of the late capitalist imaginary; no one is so special as to transcend it.

That stated, it does seem to be true that those most capable of imagining a future different from today are those most versed in the wide array of human societies of the past and present, historians, folklorists, classicists, medievalists and anthropologists who can use the physical and documentary evidence left by other societies to try and reach outside the imaginative limitations of our own.

That is why I have always treasured Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia, a book in which Fawcett tries to reach outside his own consciousness to report on the thoughts of his dead friend while engaging in an extended meditation on Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Fawcett’s ultimate conclusion is this: the main thing that conditions our ability to imagine possible futures is our ability to remember the past.

That is why the Khmer Rouge and other despotic movements attempt to obliterate knowledge of the past or replace it, whole cloth, with an “all now” consciousness in which human nature and human society have always been essentially identical, with the only thing in flux being labour-saving technology. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the term “revolution” was redefined as “return to the past.”

Perhaps the most clear-headed thinker political thinker on the limitations of the human imagination and how these limitations impeded the revolutionary project was Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had argued, in original dialectical materialism, that the capacity and will to rise up against capitalism and smash it varied directly with how alienated capitalism had made a person, not just in the Marxian economic sense but in the larger social and cultural sense this encompassed.

People who did not control when they went to work or when they came home, who did not own their tools, who did not own their homes, who were cut off from cultural production and participation: these would be the people who would take up arms against capitalism: the working class of England, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Lenin saw it more clearly. Rising up against this alienation was contingent on the ability to imagine something different. And the ability to imagine something different was contingent on the ability to remember something different. Consequently, he came to believe that Russia’s highly distinctive way of industrializing made it the best candidate for revolution.

Most of the industrial proletariat of Western Europe had become factory workers as part of a multigenerational process of dispossession and urbanizatioin. The workers in the steel mills of England, France, Germany and the Netherlands were mostly from families whose ties to the villages where they once farmed had been slowly cut over more than a century. Even if someone had migrated from the countryside in their own lifetime, the countryside they left was one whose feudal obligations and common lands had vanished long before. First, feudal title changed into fee simple title and then lords turned into landlords; inherited peasant land became rented land; the rural poor descended from renter, to debt peon to part of a landless and increasingly mobile rural proletariat. Urban, industrial labour was not an alternative to life as a peasant on aristocratic or common lands but an alternative to life as a migrant agricultural labourer.

Thus, for the proletariat of Western Europe, only a small minority had a clear memory of living and farming on a family plot with hereditary rights, owning one’s tools, etc. But in Russia, things were different. Serfdom still existed in Russia, as did a wide network of common lands where serfs were operationally free people but legally, the tsar’s property. Also, the landed aristocracy and the urban elite were not two overlapping communities, as in England but a single community, comprising the identical people.

Consequently, what made economic and political sense was for boyars to open factories in St. Petersburg or Moscow and then simply uproot a portion of their serfs from their rural estate and staff the factory with them. Even the factory workers who had urbanized less coercively had typically done so within a generation or two, not within five generations, meaning that nearly everyone in a Russian factory retained a memory of owning their tools, inheriting their home and making most of the things they needed in their local community.

Lenin understood that there is a difference between alienation and consciousness of alienation. Alienation is the reason to revolt. Consciousness of alienation is the motivation to revolt. Or, in Fawcett’s terms, Russian workers could imagine a future outside capitalism because they could remember a past outside it.

This did not merely instill in Lenin one of the most profound sociological insights of all time. It also forced a curious kind of humility on him. Like Jefferson, Madison and the contributors to America’s Federalist Papers, Lenin understood that the new society that would succeed capitalism was something that could only be haltingly, incrementally thought into being after the revolution, when the constraining power of capitalism on the imagination slowly receded.

From what we can adduce of his thirty or so months of holding power after the end of the Russian Civil War, it appears that rather than proceeding with a clear plan to build a particular society, he attempted to ignite the same kind of halting, confused, self-contradictory conversation that allowed America to think liberal capitalism into being, the century from the declaration of Independence to the Supreme Court ruling that all “rights” could adhere to individuals and individuals were the only thing to which rights could adhere.

So, Lenin changed economic policies a number of times and poured money into the arts, hoping expand the horizon of possibilities available in the Russian political imaginary. He made some big mistakes too in limiting necessary discourse to make the project possible. But often our imagination of what 1921-24 was like is coloured by our knowledge of what was to come next.

What followed Lenin’s death was, of course, a tragedy with the rise of Joseph Stalin. There are many things for which to indict Stalin (and Lenin, for that matter). But central to the problem of Stalin is this: he believed that the Soviet Union was not only imaginable but had already been imagined by him. The experimental art and literature of Leninism came to be supplanted by Soviet Realism. What is meant by “realism” is clear: the real is that which already exists, has already been imagined, is already known. The limits of Soviet communism became the limits of a single man’s consciousness formed under monarchical absolutism and Dickensian capitalism.

My refusal to describe an eco-socialist future for BC or Canada or the Pacific Northwest does not just come from an attempt at a Leninist humility, a willingness to take seriously how seriously capitalism has narrowed my horizon of possibility and reshaped my imagination in fetishistic, solipsistic ways. It also comes from an understanding of the totalitarianism that is incipient in believing one can imagine a future beyond capitalism with the tools capitalism has placed at our disposal.

For this reason, we need to read history. We need to read speculative fiction. We need to read the myths and stories of cultures far off in space and time. And we need to practice our social imagination in dreaming up other ways of being, knowing and working. But we should not confuse that for fashioning a plan or blueprint for the post-capitalist world. All we can do is ready ourselves for that task when it is thrust upon us.