Our contemporary societies are characterized by a puzzling divide. On the one hand, discontent with the current socio-economic state of affairs, with contemporary economic and working conditions, has increased enormously in recent years. More than ever in the postwar era, people are outraged at the social and political consequences unleashed by the global liberalization of the capitalist market economy. On the other hand, this widespread outrage seems to lack any sense of direction, any historical sense of its ultimate aim. As a result this widespread discontent has remained oddly mute and introverted, giving the impression that it simply lacks the capacity to think beyond the present and imagine a society beyond capitalism. The disconnect between this outrage and any notion about the future, between protest and a vision of a better world, is a novel phenomenon in the history of modern societies. Ever since the French Revolution, major social movements have been motivated by utopian visions of a future society. Here we might think of the Luddites, Robert Owen’s cooperatives, council communism and other communist ideals of a classless society. But today, these currents of utopian thinking, as Ernst Bloch would have put it, seem to have been interrupted. Although the outraged have a clear sense of what they do not want and what outrages them about current social conditions, they have no halfway clear conception of the goal to which the change they desire should ultimately lead.

Finding an explanation for such a sudden decline in utopian energy is more difficult than might appear at first sight. This can hardly be due to the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, to which intellectual observers like to refer when they proclaim the end of all hopes for a society beyond capitalism. Those who are outraged at the growing divide between private wealth and public poverty, though without having a concrete idea of a better society, certainly do not need the fall of the Berlin Wall to be convinced that the social welfare provided by Soviet state socialism came at the cost of a lack of freedom. Moreover, the fact that a real alternative to capitalism did not exist until the Russian Revolution did not prevent people in the nineteenth century from dreaming of peaceful coexistence in justice and solidarity. So why should the bankruptcy of the communist bloc have caused this apparently deep-seated capacity for utopian transcendence to wither? Another oft cited cause for this peculiar lack of vision is the abrupt shift of our collective sense of time. According to this claim, our entry into “postmodernism” – starting in the world of art and architecture and spreading into the broader culture – has devalued characteristically modern conceptions of teleological progress and paved the way to a consciousness of eternal recurrence. This new, postmodern conception of history supposedly hinders visions of a better life, since we have lost the notion that the inherent potential of the present necessarily strives to expand beyond itself and point the way towards an open future of continuous progress. Instead, the future is seen as having nothing to offer but reprises of past life-forms and social models. However, the very fact that we have become accustomed to advances in medicine or the enforcement of human rights casts doubts on this presumption. Why should transcendental imagination be alive and well in these fields, and yet impossible when it comes to the question of whether society can be reformed? The claim that we now have a fundamentally altered sense of history assumes that we can no longer anticipate a new and different kind of society, thus ignoring the strong, though certainly exaggerated hopes in the global implementation of human rights.¹ A third explanation could thus refer to the difference between these two fields, i.e. between a structurally neutral establishment of internally sanctioned rights and a reorganization of basic social institutions, in order to draw the conclusion that it is only in the latter sphere that utopian forces have slackened. My impression is that this comes closest to the truth, though without capturing it completely, for we still need to explain why the current socio-political material should be unsuitable to utopian expectations.

It might help to recall that current economic and social events appear far too complex and thus opaque to public consciousness to be capable of intentional transformation. This is particularly true when it comes to processes of economic globalization in which transactions are carried out too quickly to be understood; here a kind of second-order pathology seems to make institutional conditions appear as mere givens, as being “reified” and thus immune to any efforts to change them.² On this view, Marx’s famous analysis of fetishism in the first volume of Capital is only applicable today, as the general sense that social relations essentially consist in “the form of a social relation between things”³ did not exist as long as the workers’ movement still regarded society as capable of change – as is demonstrated in their dreams and visions.⁴ Reification, therefore, only applies to the present state of capitalism. If this were true, as everyday observations and empirical analyses indeed seem to suggest,⁵ we are unable to anticipate social improvements in the basic structure of contemporary societies because we regard the substance of this structure as being impervious to change, just like things. On this account, the inability to translate widespread outrage at the scandalous distribution of wealth and power into attainable goals is due neither to the disappearance of an actually existing alternative to capitalism, nor to a fundamental shift in our understanding of history, but rather to the predominance of a fetishistic conception of social relations.

This third explanation, however, still does not explain why traditional utopian conceptions no longer have the power to dissolve or at least make a breach in reified everyday consciousness. For more than a century, socialist and communist utopias electrified their addressees with visions of a better form of life, making them immune to feelings of resignation. The extent of what people view as “inevitable” and thus necessary about their social order depends largely on cultural factors, particularly on political patterns of interpretation which show that what appears inevitable is in fact any-thing but. In his historical study Injustice, Barrington Moore gives a convincing account of how German workers’ sense of hopelessness began to disappear once powerful re-interpretations of contemporary conditions demonstrated that institutional givens were in fact subject to arrangements and negotiations.⁶ This makes the question as to why classic and influential ideals have lost their power to unmask and destroy the phenomenon of reification all the more urgent. To pose the question more concretely, why do visions of socialism no longer have the power to convince the outraged that collective efforts can in fact improve what appears “inevitable”? This brings me to the main topic of the following four chapters of this brief study. Two related issues appear to me to be of particular intellectual relevance today: first, the internal or external reasons for the seemingly irrevocable loss of the power of socialist ideas to inspire; second, the conceptual changes needed to restore the vitality these ideas have lost. To do so, however, I will need to reconstruct the original idea of socialism as clearly as possible (section I). Only then can I turn to the reasons why these ideas have become so antiquated (section II). In the two concluding chapters I put these antiquated ideas back on their feet by making a number of conceptual renovations (sections III and IV). It should also be noted that the following considerations have a metapolitical character, since I make no attempt to draw connections to current political constellations and possibilities for action. I will not be dealing with the strategic question of how socialism could influence current political events, but solely how the original intention of socialism could be reformulated so as to make it once again a source of political-ethical orientations.