As @gammison mentioned, there is more to it. In the Marxist sense it means a system that is conceived without studying society and its inner mechanisms, and thus that an utopia is something that will be inefficient to fight capitalism.
So it's good to have utopian hopes, but a society cannot be efficiently built just on these utopians hopes and must emerge from analysis of our current predicament and how to change it, I think in this sense then utopian can have both a pejorative and complimentary meaning
Right, yes. The question didn't frame 'utopian' in the marxist sense, so I went with the the sense that was both the original, and still the most commonly used. Didn't realize that would be controversial hehe
But ya, gammison's take is really good too. I think there's value in both the orthodox marxist take, and my more general take. It kind of parallels what you said, that there are both positive and negative dimensions to envisioning utopia. Which is why I'm not responding to astigmatic's negativity haha
Fully understand you position, I just thought since your answer was the top post it would be worth adding an explanation of that other point of view :p
As @gammison mentioned, there is more to it. In the Marxist sense it means a system that is conceived without studying society and its inner mechanisms, and thus that an utopia is something that will be inefficient to fight capitalism.
So it's good to have utopian hopes, but a society cannot be efficiently built just on these utopians hopes and must emerge from analysis of our current predicament and how to change it, I think in this sense then utopian can have both a pejorative and complimentary meaning
Right, yes. The question didn't frame 'utopian' in the marxist sense, so I went with the the sense that was both the original, and still the most commonly used. Didn't realize that would be controversial hehe
But ya, gammison's take is really good too. I think there's value in both the orthodox marxist take, and my more general take. It kind of parallels what you said, that there are both positive and negative dimensions to envisioning utopia. Which is why I'm not responding to astigmatic's negativity haha
Fully understand you position, I just thought since your answer was the top post it would be worth adding an explanation of that other point of view :p
Ya hell ya :) :heart-sickle: