Paul Signac. Au temps d’harmonie: L’Âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir (reprise) [In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Has Not Passed, It Is Still to Come (Reprise)], 1896
Miquel Amorós
Redes Libertárias, nº 5, Spring 2026/online 23/06/2026
It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colours, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
Utopia is a specific way of imagining social activity that is opposed to the prevailing reality and, therefore, radically critical. It is not merely a happy vision of a blissful way of life presented as an ideal. Utopian, said Herbert Marcuse, “is everything that the power of the dominant societies forbids from coming to light.” Karl Mannheim, in his influential work Ideology and Utopia, considered utopian any thought that questioned the established order and incited revolt. Thus, only “those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as Utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.” Utopias manifest the aspirations, ideals, and value systems of great social movements; they are, therefore, coherent and structured global visions of the world, and they represent the profound needs of an era. From 1750 onward, with the publication of The Year 2440: A Dream if Ever There was One by the quarrelsome Enlightenment thinker Louis Sébastien Mercier, utopias ceased to be non-places, impossible imaginaries, since they did occur, only in centuries to come. In this sense, we prefer to speak of an ideal, or simply an “idea,” as the Spanish anarchists did. We would add that when the subjective and objective conditions for the realisation of a free society are not favourable, when the material and intellectual forces capable of achieving profound social change are not present in sufficient magnitude, when no credible revolutionary project is immediately achievable, the radical negation of the existing order acquires utopian connotations. The utopian or romantic dimension of critical thought—the aforementioned ideal, anarchy—saves rebels from defeatism, transferring the desire for a life without constraints to the realm of imagination and dreams, awaiting the opportune moment for its realization. The utopian climate liberates from demotivation, since it maintains the yearning for a perfect society and sets in motion the will for change. In the libertarian case, more than in any other, utopia is nothing more than a propaganda tool to showcase expectations of future emancipation with which to mobilise the suffering masses. Far from being an escape from history into fantasy, “it is the truth of tomorrow,” in the words of Victor Hugo, something within reach, pure anticipation. The libertarian utopia, in its eagerness to demonstrate the capacity of men and women today to live rationally in community, without laws or regulations, without bosses or property, is part of the social struggle: it reflects the egalitarian and fraternal aspirations of the most radical factions of the oppressed classes. As an achievable ideal, it is a program.
2. Lights of Utopia
Anarchism is a worldview rooted in the radical social and political traditions of universal culture, particularly those that advocated for directly exercised popular sovereignty and rejected all forms of oppression. Critiques of authority and all forms of separate power can be found in Greek and Chinese philosophers, singular figures like Rabelais and La Boétie, Enlightenment thinkers, and 19th-century socialists. Likewise, extreme factions advocating for liberty and equality have been present in riots, revolts, and revolutions throughout history. However, anarchism, as we understand it today, did not acquire a minimally coherent body of doctrine until the amalgamation of anti-authoritarian social critique with federalism and the class struggle, which occurred within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). By refusing political action within bourgeois institutions and advocating the abolition of capitalism and the state as its immediate objective, anarchism positioned itself firmly within the realm of stark reality. However, on a theoretical level, the general constitutive features of the society resulting from the revolutionary class struggle remained to be explained—fundamental elements for the ideological destruction of capitalist illusions. The internationalist and friend of Bakunin, James Guillaume, recognized this need when, in an article titled “The Social Commune” and published in 1871, he outlined what would be “a commune immediately after the social revolution, during the transitional period in which it will be necessary to build socialism with the people and means of today.” With this first step, the task remained of “drawing a picture of society as it would appear in the future, with individual liberty moving anarchically within the social community and producing harmony,” something Joseph Déjacque had attempted to do in 1858 with his Humanisphere, the first purely anarchist utopia. In short, what was missing was the outline of an emancipated society that could function, based on the harmony of interests and free participation in common duties, without gods or masters; a society that was the final product of the revolutionary process. Thus, the probable formulation of the libertarian ideal was lacking, even if only in the form of fiction. Consequently, anarchism was oriented toward anti-bourgeois utopia. In complete opposition to Marxism, anarchism posited that human conduct was determined more by the ideal than by historical necessity, to be defined by experts in the field. With the exception of past events, which should be taken into account, tomorrow generally carried more weight than yesterday.
3. Utopia, Happiness and Reason
The repression of the Paris Commune and other revolutionary attempts, along with the subsequent persecution of the International in Latin countries and the demobilisation of the oppressed masses, led to a division within the anarchist movement around issues such as organisation, violence, legality, communism, and even civilization itself. At the International Congress in London (1881), a majority opted for ephemeral affinity groups and propaganda by the deed. The contradictions between means and ends, between daily struggles and ultimate goals, between pragmatism and utopia, provoked heated debates and resounding excommunications. The degree of divergence was so great that it generated a flood of publications on anarchism and libertarian communism, the latter being the dominant tendency. Prestigious authors such as Errico Malatesta, Élisée Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Jean Grave, Charles Malato, Sébastien Faure, Anselmo Lorenzo, and others tackled the issue of establishing a society of free and equal men and women from the perspectives of politics, modern science, law, education, philosophy, and every other angle, demonstrating the rational, progressive, and perfectly feasible nature of the social model they advocated. In his 1895 pamphlet, “Anarchy“, Élisée Reclus rejected the label of “utopian”: “The dream of worldwide freedom is no longer a purely philosophical or literary utopia. It has become a practical goal that is actively pursued by masses of people united in their resolute quest for the birth of a society in which there are no more masters, no more official custodians of public morals, no more jailers, torturers and executioners, no more rich or poor. Instead there will be only brothers who have their share of daily bread, who have equal rights, and who coexist in peace and heartfelt unity that comes not out of obedience to law, which is always accompanied by dreadful threats, but rather from mutual respect for the interest of all, and from the scientific study of natural laws.” Anselmo Lorenzo would later express the same sentiment: “We are anarchists, but not utopians […] we reject those imaginative futurisms that want to give the society of the future a certain resemblance to the celestial Edens of religions” (Acracia, 1908). Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread and in various articles in The Nineteenth Century, had attempted to demonstrate that the materials and ideas necessary to build anarchy were already present in contemporary society, and he believed that “utopian ideals should only be applied to conceptions of society based solely on what the writer considers ‘desirable’ from a theoretical standpoint; they should never be applied to conceptions based on the observation of what is already developing in society. In that case, we move from utopian prediction to science…” It was clear that anarchist writers pejoratively dismissed as utopian only the daydreams of exuberant paradises and futuristic golden ages, but, as attentive readers of Fourier, they did not disdain the use of literary formulas that bordered on the idyllic.
4. The Golden Age is in the Future
In 1878, Giovanni Rossi published the novel A Socialist Commune in Italy, whose criticisms of institutions, the family, and religion landed him in prison. He attempted to demonstrate how a wretched town could be transformed into an exemplary community without resorting to authority, property, or the law, all thanks to organised labour, comprehensive education, and close-knit community life. In 1880, the internationalist Andrea Costa sent a short story to the printer entitled “The Dream,” in which he himself awakens years later in his hometown, completely transformed thanks to a “great international revolution.” The dream device, patented by Thomas More, would be used again in Edward Bellamy‘s famous authoritarian utopia, Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887, and, on its flip side, in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, the most influential utopian novel of the era. Morris was not an anarchist, although he was a friend of Kropotkin, and, given its content, his utopia can certainly be described as libertarian. Ricardo Flores Magón would also write “Pedro’s Dream”. The initiatory journey is a device employed by the first Spanish libertarian utopias. In ¡Pensativo!, Juan Serrano Oteiza narrates a visit to a town reorganised in freedom thanks to the astute advice of an educated man. As one might expect from an author who championed legality, mass organisation, and comprehensive education, the change unfolds peacefully. However, in Ricardo Mella‘s The New Utopia (1890), it is “the product of a profound social upheaval.” Other stories place their utopian communities at the North Pole (Louise Michel in her novel The New World) or in the dense jungles of Brazil (Vicente Carreras in the story “Acraciópolis“), but the typical shipwreck off an island is more common, as in Josep Llunas i Pujals‘ Catalan story, “Amoria,” in Jean Grave‘s communist fantasy “Free-Land”, or in “The Peaceful Ones” by the individualist Han Ryner. The International Congress of Amsterdam, held in 1907, highlighted the preponderance of syndicalist tactics within libertarian circles, which influenced utopian ideals. The clearest example is Émile Pouget and Émile Pataud‘s novel, How We Shall Bring About the Revolution, the first syndicalist utopia, published in 1909 with a preface by Kropotkin that invited reflection on the major problems revolutionaries would face. However, the majority of utopian ideals followed both the path of individualism, more concerned with changing the individual, abolishing marriage, and returning to the land, and that of anarchist communism, more interested in the abolition of money and the “seizure by the masses.” There were also those who believed in extreme spontaneity, who saw the development of any plan as an intolerable display of authoritarianism. Besides the works of Grave and Ryner, mentioned above, those published in Argentina by Joaquín Alejo Falconnet, alias “Pierre Quiroule“, stood out: Sobre la ruta de la anarquía, a violent return to nature, and La Ciudad anarquista americana, with an urban critique unlike anything we had read since Morris’s News from Nowhere. Quiroule’s message warned against preserving existing forms of production and the urban agglomerations inherent to them: “Under no circumstances should we imagine a new society cast in the mold of the current one. Everything that exists must be replaced by something more rational and in accordance with true human needs and aspirations […] The anarchist ideal consists of small groups of rational beings who seek, through association with their fellow human beings, the means to obtain maximum well-being with minimum individual effort and broad, unrestricted freedom.”
5. Concrete Utopia
We would be unable to paint a complete picture if we disregarded the attempts to realize utopia within class-based society, as proposed by the experimental movement. These include not only the attempts at complete segregation from capitalist civilization, but also the garden city projects theorised by Ebenezer Howard, cooperative workshops, interest-free loans, and outlines of equitable exchange. Its proponents believed that society could begin to change without waiting for favourable circumstances, that is, by anticipating the desired model of society on a smaller scale. The aim was to demonstrate, through “concrete utopias,” that another way of living was possible at any time, in other words, that the anarchist ideal was directly viable. From this perspective, communal experiences could be the best tools for social transformation. Such experiments, with varying degrees of success, proliferated in America. In Man and the Earth, Reclus referred to “a work of direct experience manifested through the founding of libertarian and communist colonies: these are small attempts that one can compare to laboratory experiments carried out by chemists and engineers. These trials of model communes all have the fundamental defect of being built outside the ordinary conditions of life, that is, far from the cities where people mix, where ideas arise, where intellects are renewed. And yet, many such ventures can be cited as having been completely successful.” Kropotkin corresponded with some followers who had founded a colony in Scotland, in which he lamented seeing his friends withdraw from the work of propaganda and ultimate emancipation to devote themselves entirely to perhaps doomed experiments that could lead to complete disillusionment. Even so, he offered practical advice for a successful start in the endeavour and for avoiding the usual dangers that beset communes. Experimental anarchism, eminently presentist, on the other hand, relied on a rediscovery of the past. Its most direct point of reference was medieval village communities, a historical phenomenon highlighted by Reclus, Kropotkin, and Rossi. The most famous experiment in “practical socialism” was undoubtedly “La Cecilia“, a colony founded in 1890 by Giovanni Rossi in Brazil, successful materially but frustrated in its convivial aim of free love. On the eve of the German Revolution, Gustav Landauer championed the cooperative experiment as a revolutionary tactic: the revolution had to show a constructive side, offering socialist counter-models. In short, on one side or the other, communal experiments never ceased, and in 1932 the individualist Émile Armand documented them in a book explicitly titled Ways of Life in Common without State or Authority: Sexual and Economic Experiences through History.
6. The End of Utopia
When the revolutionary possibilities of an era materialise, utopia loses its raison d’être. Reality will surpass it in both hope and disappointment. The Russian Revolution, in its early stages, produced various experiments, as well as several utopian visions, one of the first being that of the Gordin brothers [Abba and Wolf], Why? or How a Peasant Got into the Land of Anarchy. It likely inspired The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia, a work of fiction opposed to the industrial development promoted by the Bolsheviks, which, during Stalin’s time, led to its author, Alexander Chayanov, being accused of conspiracy and executed. The degeneration of the Revolution into a state-controlled hell produced the first dystopia, We, an anti-utopia that its author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, never titled, and which did not gain popularity until its publication in France in 1929. Throughout the interwar period, quite optimistic libertarian utopias were written, such as My Communism: Universal Happiness, by Sébastien Faure, an absolute affirmation of the individual above any contractual obligation, willingly sharing everything with the community—a fitting counterpoint to authoritarian socialist ideology. Others of a naturalist bent were also written. Albano Rosell, in In the Land of Macrobia, a place mentioned by Herodotus, describes a rural Arcadia where the original conflict between the individual and society (and between civilization and nature) has been settled. A society of naturally good vegetarians gives free rein to their primitive instincts with the best possible results. Rosell followed the path laid out by the naturists, of Henri Zisly, a current that still produced the novel Los Náufragos [The Shipwrecked] by Adrián del Valle and in the 1920s left a lasting mark on Spanish anarchists. Déjacque’s Humanisphere was translated into Spanish. In the following decade, or more specifically, during the period leading up to the Spanish Revolution, the utopian dimension abruptly gave way to reality: the conditions for the materialisation of utopia were approaching, and anarchism was becoming more messianic. The moment of truth had arrived, and the proletariat was preparing to take to the streets and achieve a victory that no one could take from them. When one believes oneself to be on the verge of anarchy, the constructive forces that would ensure the new revolutionary order become more important, and these are clarified in explanatory pamphlets. Consequently, Higinio Noja Ruiz would focus entirely on the new social organisation; Pierre Besnard, on the role of trade unions and the proper use of technical skills; Federico Urales, on free municipalities; Isaac Puente, on the structuring of libertarian communism; Bruno Lladó, on its base and middle ranks; Rafael Ordóñez, on love affairs in communist society, etc. Only one author, Alfonso Martínez Rizo, dared to write utopian visions. In 1933 he published 1945: The Advent of Libertarian Communism, a dreamed-of year in which the happy event turned out to be a revolution with hardly any violence, thanks to long and effective trade union preparation. The catastrophic outcome of the Spanish Civil War, the collapse of the international libertarian movement in the face of totalitarianism, and the Second World War extinguished the utopian flames. From then on, this type of literature would lose all its readers. Faith in the advance of the rebellious spirit, in the growing breath of freedom, or confidence in the imminent unleashing of social forces, no longer resonated with a world of defeated ideals, with imagination buried and inclined toward the immediate. George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984, which revolves around the total control of the human mind by a totalitarian state in the hands of a single party, could be the most fitting requiem for the death of utopia. However, Maria Luisa Berneri, whose early death we will never sufficiently mourn, chose to write Journey through Utopia, believing that in a hopeless age “it would be a healthy exercise to turn our gaze back to those who dreamed of utopias and rejected everything that did not satisfy their ideal of perfection.”
Utopia Scorned
The discrediting of Stalinist-rooted state capitalism, the catastrophic effects of science and technology at the service of industry and power, along with the terminal implosion of globalised capitalism, have completely delegitimised both communist-leaning doctrines and citizen-centric and neoliberal ideologies, giving rise to a world more akin to dystopias. The idea of progress is over: the future will be worse. Today’s dystopians—if they exist at all—seem to be the most insightful realists. The extinction of the utopian dimension undoubtedly indicates the disorientation of anarchist thought in the face of the disastrous actions of its official representatives during the Spanish Revolution, a disorientation that has spread in the face of the new, complex, and difficult-to-unravel order. The very idea of social revolution, rejected during their exile by figures like García Prada, Santillán, Horacio Prieto, Fidel Miró, Souchy, Leval, Rüdiger, Rocker, and others, seems to have been discarded by a segment of the libertarian movement in favor of dead-end identity politics. These are ill times for millenarian ideals, given the almost unlimited rearmament that can be achieved by states and their immense repressive capacities; but history has reached a false conclusion. As Jérôme Baschet said regarding the Zapatista movement: “It is time to reopen the future… the utopian impulse is indispensable.” It is to be hoped that the progressive breakdown of order and the retreat of control mechanisms will leave behind deregulated spaces where necessity compels a form of social self-organisation balanced with nature and outside the Manichean spectacle of politics and the global market. This fracture in temporal continuity could become a utopian moment and halt the march toward catastrophe. Under certain conditions of abandonment—at a moment like the one mentioned—the crisis can be faced by developing autonomous spaces, that is, independent and self-governed spaces, where the economy and politics can be dissolved as separate activities or, in other words, by re-implanting in them use value, the public square and the direct democracy of the grassroots assemblies and councils, something that the triumphant authority believed it had overcome forever with its undeniable victories.
The utopian dimension
[In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Has Not Passed, It Is Still to Come (Reprise)], 1896
Miquel Amorós
Redes Libertárias, nº 5, Spring 2026/online 23/06/2026
It is often said that Anarchists live in a world of dreams to come, and do not see the things which happen today. We do see them only too well, and in their true colours, and that is what makes us carry the hatchet into the forest of prejudice that besets us.
Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: its philosophy and ideal (1898)
1. The Dream of a Harmonious Society
Utopia is a specific way of imagining social activity that is opposed to the prevailing reality and, therefore, radically critical. It is not merely a happy vision of a blissful way of life presented as an ideal. Utopian, said Herbert Marcuse, “is everything that the power of the dominant societies forbids from coming to light.” Karl Mannheim, in his influential work Ideology and Utopia, considered utopian any thought that questioned the established order and incited revolt. Thus, only “those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as Utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time.” Utopias manifest the aspirations, ideals, and value systems of great social movements; they are, therefore, coherent and structured global visions of the world, and they represent the profound needs of an era. From 1750 onward, with the publication of The Year 2440: A Dream if Ever There was One by the quarrelsome Enlightenment thinker Louis Sébastien Mercier, utopias ceased to be non-places, impossible imaginaries, since they did occur, only in centuries to come. In this sense, we prefer to speak of an ideal, or simply an “idea,” as the Spanish anarchists did. We would add that when the subjective and objective conditions for the realisation of a free society are not favourable, when the material and intellectual forces capable of achieving profound social change are not present in sufficient magnitude, when no credible revolutionary project is immediately achievable, the radical negation of the existing order acquires utopian connotations. The utopian or romantic dimension of critical thought—the aforementioned ideal, anarchy—saves rebels from defeatism, transferring the desire for a life without constraints to the realm of imagination and dreams, awaiting the opportune moment for its realization. The utopian climate liberates from demotivation, since it maintains the yearning for a perfect society and sets in motion the will for change. In the libertarian case, more than in any other, utopia is nothing more than a propaganda tool to showcase expectations of future emancipation with which to mobilise the suffering masses. Far from being an escape from history into fantasy, “it is the truth of tomorrow,” in the words of Victor Hugo, something within reach, pure anticipation. The libertarian utopia, in its eagerness to demonstrate the capacity of men and women today to live rationally in community, without laws or regulations, without bosses or property, is part of the social struggle: it reflects the egalitarian and fraternal aspirations of the most radical factions of the oppressed classes. As an achievable ideal, it is a program.
2. Lights of Utopia
Anarchism is a worldview rooted in the radical social and political traditions of universal culture, particularly those that advocated for directly exercised popular sovereignty and rejected all forms of oppression. Critiques of authority and all forms of separate power can be found in Greek and Chinese philosophers, singular figures like Rabelais and La Boétie, Enlightenment thinkers, and 19th-century socialists. Likewise, extreme factions advocating for liberty and equality have been present in riots, revolts, and revolutions throughout history. However, anarchism, as we understand it today, did not acquire a minimally coherent body of doctrine until the amalgamation of anti-authoritarian social critique with federalism and the class struggle, which occurred within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). By refusing political action within bourgeois institutions and advocating the abolition of capitalism and the state as its immediate objective, anarchism positioned itself firmly within the realm of stark reality. However, on a theoretical level, the general constitutive features of the society resulting from the revolutionary class struggle remained to be explained—fundamental elements for the ideological destruction of capitalist illusions. The internationalist and friend of Bakunin, James Guillaume, recognized this need when, in an article titled “The Social Commune” and published in 1871, he outlined what would be “a commune immediately after the social revolution, during the transitional period in which it will be necessary to build socialism with the people and means of today.” With this first step, the task remained of “drawing a picture of society as it would appear in the future, with individual liberty moving anarchically within the social community and producing harmony,” something Joseph Déjacque had attempted to do in 1858 with his Humanisphere, the first purely anarchist utopia. In short, what was missing was the outline of an emancipated society that could function, based on the harmony of interests and free participation in common duties, without gods or masters; a society that was the final product of the revolutionary process. Thus, the probable formulation of the libertarian ideal was lacking, even if only in the form of fiction. Consequently, anarchism was oriented toward anti-bourgeois utopia. In complete opposition to Marxism, anarchism posited that human conduct was determined more by the ideal than by historical necessity, to be defined by experts in the field. With the exception of past events, which should be taken into account, tomorrow generally carried more weight than yesterday.
3. Utopia, Happiness and Reason
The repression of the Paris Commune and other revolutionary attempts, along with the subsequent persecution of the International in Latin countries and the demobilisation of the oppressed masses, led to a division within the anarchist movement around issues such as organisation, violence, legality, communism, and even civilization itself. At the International Congress in London (1881), a majority opted for ephemeral affinity groups and propaganda by the deed. The contradictions between means and ends, between daily struggles and ultimate goals, between pragmatism and utopia, provoked heated debates and resounding excommunications. The degree of divergence was so great that it generated a flood of publications on anarchism and libertarian communism, the latter being the dominant tendency. Prestigious authors such as Errico Malatesta, Élisée Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Jean Grave, Charles Malato, Sébastien Faure, Anselmo Lorenzo, and others tackled the issue of establishing a society of free and equal men and women from the perspectives of politics, modern science, law, education, philosophy, and every other angle, demonstrating the rational, progressive, and perfectly feasible nature of the social model they advocated. In his 1895 pamphlet, “Anarchy“, Élisée Reclus rejected the label of “utopian”: “The dream of worldwide freedom is no longer a purely philosophical or literary utopia. It has become a practical goal that is actively pursued by masses of people united in their resolute quest for the birth of a society in which there are no more masters, no more official custodians of public morals, no more jailers, torturers and executioners, no more rich or poor. Instead there will be only brothers who have their share of daily bread, who have equal rights, and who coexist in peace and heartfelt unity that comes not out of obedience to law, which is always accompanied by dreadful threats, but rather from mutual respect for the interest of all, and from the scientific study of natural laws.” Anselmo Lorenzo would later express the same sentiment: “We are anarchists, but not utopians […] we reject those imaginative futurisms that want to give the society of the future a certain resemblance to the celestial Edens of religions” (Acracia, 1908). Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread and in various articles in The Nineteenth Century, had attempted to demonstrate that the materials and ideas necessary to build anarchy were already present in contemporary society, and he believed that “utopian ideals should only be applied to conceptions of society based solely on what the writer considers ‘desirable’ from a theoretical standpoint; they should never be applied to conceptions based on the observation of what is already developing in society. In that case, we move from utopian prediction to science…” It was clear that anarchist writers pejoratively dismissed as utopian only the daydreams of exuberant paradises and futuristic golden ages, but, as attentive readers of Fourier, they did not disdain the use of literary formulas that bordered on the idyllic.
4. The Golden Age is in the Future
In 1878, Giovanni Rossi published the novel A Socialist Commune in Italy, whose criticisms of institutions, the family, and religion landed him in prison. He attempted to demonstrate how a wretched town could be transformed into an exemplary community without resorting to authority, property, or the law, all thanks to organised labour, comprehensive education, and close-knit community life. In 1880, the internationalist Andrea Costa sent a short story to the printer entitled “The Dream,” in which he himself awakens years later in his hometown, completely transformed thanks to a “great international revolution.” The dream device, patented by Thomas More, would be used again in Edward Bellamy‘s famous authoritarian utopia, Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887, and, on its flip side, in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, the most influential utopian novel of the era. Morris was not an anarchist, although he was a friend of Kropotkin, and, given its content, his utopia can certainly be described as libertarian. Ricardo Flores Magón would also write “Pedro’s Dream”. The initiatory journey is a device employed by the first Spanish libertarian utopias. In ¡Pensativo!, Juan Serrano Oteiza narrates a visit to a town reorganised in freedom thanks to the astute advice of an educated man. As one might expect from an author who championed legality, mass organisation, and comprehensive education, the change unfolds peacefully. However, in Ricardo Mella‘s The New Utopia (1890), it is “the product of a profound social upheaval.” Other stories place their utopian communities at the North Pole (Louise Michel in her novel The New World) or in the dense jungles of Brazil (Vicente Carreras in the story “Acraciópolis“), but the typical shipwreck off an island is more common, as in Josep Llunas i Pujals‘ Catalan story, “Amoria,” in Jean Grave‘s communist fantasy “Free-Land”, or in “The Peaceful Ones” by the individualist Han Ryner. The International Congress of Amsterdam, held in 1907, highlighted the preponderance of syndicalist tactics within libertarian circles, which influenced utopian ideals. The clearest example is Émile Pouget and Émile Pataud‘s novel, How We Shall Bring About the Revolution, the first syndicalist utopia, published in 1909 with a preface by Kropotkin that invited reflection on the major problems revolutionaries would face. However, the majority of utopian ideals followed both the path of individualism, more concerned with changing the individual, abolishing marriage, and returning to the land, and that of anarchist communism, more interested in the abolition of money and the “seizure by the masses.” There were also those who believed in extreme spontaneity, who saw the development of any plan as an intolerable display of authoritarianism. Besides the works of Grave and Ryner, mentioned above, those published in Argentina by Joaquín Alejo Falconnet, alias “Pierre Quiroule“, stood out: Sobre la ruta de la anarquía, a violent return to nature, and La Ciudad anarquista americana, with an urban critique unlike anything we had read since Morris’s News from Nowhere. Quiroule’s message warned against preserving existing forms of production and the urban agglomerations inherent to them: “Under no circumstances should we imagine a new society cast in the mold of the current one. Everything that exists must be replaced by something more rational and in accordance with true human needs and aspirations […] The anarchist ideal consists of small groups of rational beings who seek, through association with their fellow human beings, the means to obtain maximum well-being with minimum individual effort and broad, unrestricted freedom.”
5. Concrete Utopia
We would be unable to paint a complete picture if we disregarded the attempts to realize utopia within class-based society, as proposed by the experimental movement. These include not only the attempts at complete segregation from capitalist civilization, but also the garden city projects theorised by Ebenezer Howard, cooperative workshops, interest-free loans, and outlines of equitable exchange. Its proponents believed that society could begin to change without waiting for favourable circumstances, that is, by anticipating the desired model of society on a smaller scale. The aim was to demonstrate, through “concrete utopias,” that another way of living was possible at any time, in other words, that the anarchist ideal was directly viable. From this perspective, communal experiences could be the best tools for social transformation. Such experiments, with varying degrees of success, proliferated in America. In Man and the Earth, Reclus referred to “a work of direct experience manifested through the founding of libertarian and communist colonies: these are small attempts that one can compare to laboratory experiments carried out by chemists and engineers. These trials of model communes all have the fundamental defect of being built outside the ordinary conditions of life, that is, far from the cities where people mix, where ideas arise, where intellects are renewed. And yet, many such ventures can be cited as having been completely successful.” Kropotkin corresponded with some followers who had founded a colony in Scotland, in which he lamented seeing his friends withdraw from the work of propaganda and ultimate emancipation to devote themselves entirely to perhaps doomed experiments that could lead to complete disillusionment. Even so, he offered practical advice for a successful start in the endeavour and for avoiding the usual dangers that beset communes. Experimental anarchism, eminently presentist, on the other hand, relied on a rediscovery of the past. Its most direct point of reference was medieval village communities, a historical phenomenon highlighted by Reclus, Kropotkin, and Rossi. The most famous experiment in “practical socialism” was undoubtedly “La Cecilia“, a colony founded in 1890 by Giovanni Rossi in Brazil, successful materially but frustrated in its convivial aim of free love. On the eve of the German Revolution, Gustav Landauer championed the cooperative experiment as a revolutionary tactic: the revolution had to show a constructive side, offering socialist counter-models. In short, on one side or the other, communal experiments never ceased, and in 1932 the individualist Émile Armand documented them in a book explicitly titled Ways of Life in Common without State or Authority: Sexual and Economic Experiences through History.
6. The End of Utopia
When the revolutionary possibilities of an era materialise, utopia loses its raison d’être. Reality will surpass it in both hope and disappointment. The Russian Revolution, in its early stages, produced various experiments, as well as several utopian visions, one of the first being that of the Gordin brothers [Abba and Wolf], Why? or How a Peasant Got into the Land of Anarchy. It likely inspired The Journey of My Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia, a work of fiction opposed to the industrial development promoted by the Bolsheviks, which, during Stalin’s time, led to its author, Alexander Chayanov, being accused of conspiracy and executed. The degeneration of the Revolution into a state-controlled hell produced the first dystopia, We, an anti-utopia that its author, Yevgeny Zamyatin, never titled, and which did not gain popularity until its publication in France in 1929. Throughout the interwar period, quite optimistic libertarian utopias were written, such as My Communism: Universal Happiness, by Sébastien Faure, an absolute affirmation of the individual above any contractual obligation, willingly sharing everything with the community—a fitting counterpoint to authoritarian socialist ideology. Others of a naturalist bent were also written. Albano Rosell, in In the Land of Macrobia, a place mentioned by Herodotus, describes a rural Arcadia where the original conflict between the individual and society (and between civilization and nature) has been settled. A society of naturally good vegetarians gives free rein to their primitive instincts with the best possible results. Rosell followed the path laid out by the naturists, of Henri Zisly, a current that still produced the novel Los Náufragos [The Shipwrecked] by Adrián del Valle and in the 1920s left a lasting mark on Spanish anarchists. Déjacque’s Humanisphere was translated into Spanish. In the following decade, or more specifically, during the period leading up to the Spanish Revolution, the utopian dimension abruptly gave way to reality: the conditions for the materialisation of utopia were approaching, and anarchism was becoming more messianic. The moment of truth had arrived, and the proletariat was preparing to take to the streets and achieve a victory that no one could take from them. When one believes oneself to be on the verge of anarchy, the constructive forces that would ensure the new revolutionary order become more important, and these are clarified in explanatory pamphlets. Consequently, Higinio Noja Ruiz would focus entirely on the new social organisation; Pierre Besnard, on the role of trade unions and the proper use of technical skills; Federico Urales, on free municipalities; Isaac Puente, on the structuring of libertarian communism; Bruno Lladó, on its base and middle ranks; Rafael Ordóñez, on love affairs in communist society, etc. Only one author, Alfonso Martínez Rizo, dared to write utopian visions. In 1933 he published 1945: The Advent of Libertarian Communism, a dreamed-of year in which the happy event turned out to be a revolution with hardly any violence, thanks to long and effective trade union preparation. The catastrophic outcome of the Spanish Civil War, the collapse of the international libertarian movement in the face of totalitarianism, and the Second World War extinguished the utopian flames. From then on, this type of literature would lose all its readers. Faith in the advance of the rebellious spirit, in the growing breath of freedom, or confidence in the imminent unleashing of social forces, no longer resonated with a world of defeated ideals, with imagination buried and inclined toward the immediate. George Orwell’s dystopia, 1984, which revolves around the total control of the human mind by a totalitarian state in the hands of a single party, could be the most fitting requiem for the death of utopia. However, Maria Luisa Berneri, whose early death we will never sufficiently mourn, chose to write Journey through Utopia, believing that in a hopeless age “it would be a healthy exercise to turn our gaze back to those who dreamed of utopias and rejected everything that did not satisfy their ideal of perfection.”
The discrediting of Stalinist-rooted state capitalism, the catastrophic effects of science and technology at the service of industry and power, along with the terminal implosion of globalised capitalism, have completely delegitimised both communist-leaning doctrines and citizen-centric and neoliberal ideologies, giving rise to a world more akin to dystopias. The idea of progress is over: the future will be worse. Today’s dystopians—if they exist at all—seem to be the most insightful realists. The extinction of the utopian dimension undoubtedly indicates the disorientation of anarchist thought in the face of the disastrous actions of its official representatives during the Spanish Revolution, a disorientation that has spread in the face of the new, complex, and difficult-to-unravel order. The very idea of social revolution, rejected during their exile by figures like García Prada, Santillán, Horacio Prieto, Fidel Miró, Souchy, Leval, Rüdiger, Rocker, and others, seems to have been discarded by a segment of the libertarian movement in favor of dead-end identity politics. These are ill times for millenarian ideals, given the almost unlimited rearmament that can be achieved by states and their immense repressive capacities; but history has reached a false conclusion. As Jérôme Baschet said regarding the Zapatista movement: “It is time to reopen the future… the utopian impulse is indispensable.” It is to be hoped that the progressive breakdown of order and the retreat of control mechanisms will leave behind deregulated spaces where necessity compels a form of social self-organisation balanced with nature and outside the Manichean spectacle of politics and the global market. This fracture in temporal continuity could become a utopian moment and halt the march toward catastrophe. Under certain conditions of abandonment—at a moment like the one mentioned—the crisis can be faced by developing autonomous spaces, that is, independent and self-governed spaces, where the economy and politics can be dissolved as separate activities or, in other words, by re-implanting in them use value, the public square and the direct democracy of the grassroots assemblies and councils, something that the triumphant authority believed it had overcome forever with its undeniable victories.