A Utopian World Order Is Possible

As U.S. global power shifts, Zócalo is taking a look at what is emerging in its stead. “What Is the New World Order?” is a series of editorial essays and a public program, presented in collaboration with JLF Los Angeles, that draws on history, literature, and politics to help us understand the world’s next turn.

The bustle of contemporary politics does not leave much room for grand visions of alternative futures. People are too busy focusing on the current scandal, the next protest, or the immediate crisis to distract themselves with bold but distant utopian visions of better societies.

This perspective, while understandable, is a mistake if we want a future world order that is different from and radically better than our current one. Political action, particularly when oriented toward liberatory ends, is deficient without fictional accounts of utopian futures.

Utopian writers, stretching back at least as far as Thomas More, who coined the term “utopia” in his 1516 book, have created worlds of fulfillment and happiness. In the face of defeats and failures and in dystopian times like today, they pique the desire for another world.

The act of utopianizing is a potent reminder that there is nothing necessary about the current coordinates of government. Utopian novels demonstrate how, from small beginnings, large-scale changes can result.

Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most influential figures in contemporary science fiction, has written several utopian works, including 1990’s Pacific Edge and 2017’s New York 2140. His most recent, 2020’s The Ministry for the Future, tells the story of the remainder of the 21st century. In this future history, the Paris Agreement of 2015 has become the key event of our times. It establishes the eponymous Ministry for the Future, which aggressively pushes for ambitious economic and social reforms designed to simultaneously prevent dangerous climate change and secure a more just world.

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Robinson teases out the potentialities hidden in the existing infrastructure of global governance. “It can never be emphasized enough,” explains the narrator from the perspective of the end of the 21st century, “how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable.”

The utopian genre does not necessarily make predictions; the Paris Agreement is weaker now than it was when Robinson wrote The Ministry for the Future. But the novel, as utopian fiction must, traces lines of liberation. It roots around in the politics of the present for signs of novel developments, shining a light on hidden pathways that might otherwise be missed.

The uncovered possibilities serve to demonstrate that the future is still open. Ernst Bloch, one of the great philosophers of utopia in the 20th century, captured this well. “Humans on earth can alter course toward a destination that has not yet been decided—toward redemption or perdition,” he said in 1961, “The world remains, in its entirety, very much a working laboratory possibilis salutis.”

In addition to exciting the imagination, utopian fiction also shows us, in concrete and precise terms, better worlds to strive for. While the problems of the present cannot be solved by a single creative visionary constructing a perfect society in the future, strategic demands emerge from the pages of recent utopias that can help offer a unifying vision (rather than a personal dream) of the world to come. Visions of alternative futures play a role in binding together movements for social change. In offering an inspiring point of orientation, they reinforce the ties of solidarity and commitment that underpin collective political action.

Scholar-activists M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi’s 2022 novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072, is interesting in this context. O’Brien and Abdelhadi, who are involved in anti-colonial, feminist, and queer movements, imagine what the world would look like if the commune became the central body of government.

Taking inspiration from small-scale attempts at communal self-government in the past—from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Oaxaca Commune of 2006—the new institution plans social and economic life in an egalitarian and democratic fashion. In the mid-21st century, it coordinates food distribution in a time of extreme shortage, ensures that healthcare is provided to all in the midst of a pandemic, and even establishes an alternative communication system after the breakdown of the internet. The commune, the authors suggest, could be the basis of new political struggles in the future, just as it has been in the past.

Utopian fiction exists in a feedback loop with the demands of popular struggles. For each of the great challenges of the contemporary moment, there is a utopian response, including structural racism in Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep, creeping authoritarianism in Claire G. Coleman’s 2022 novel Enclave, and the environmental crisis in E. J. Swift’s 2025 novel When There Are Wolves Again, which recently won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. As with Everything for Everyone, these utopian writers look to real political events for novel ways of living, synthesize these fragments into a totalizing vision of an alternative world, and then deliver this back to political actors to help them concretize their goals.

One might wonder whether this reciprocal relationship between utopia and politics is active in the present, where dystopian, apocalyptic narratives reign and politicians often prioritize fear over hope. A skeptic might ask: What is the political influence of the novels discussed here?

By way of response, it is worth recalling economist Harold Laski’s visit to the Cumberland coalfield in Noth West England in the 1930s. There Laski observed “the tattered pages” of William Morris’ late-19th-century utopian writings, which included A Dream of John Ball and News from Nowhere, “in house after house of the miners there.” In this moment of hardship and poverty, Laski wrote, “the song that Morris sang is more profoundly in the hearts of the working class than at any time in his own lifetime.”

As Laski reminds us, utopias have a long afterlife; they can continue to shape consciousness well after their original publication.

It is too soon to say whether contemporary utopias like The Ministry for the Future or Everything for Everyone will be found on the shelves of political activists working against oppression and exploitation in the years to come. While these texts may fall into perdition, they may also be redeemed through the actions of those inspired and energized by their visions of the future. The potential is there. It just awaits realization.

Joe P. L. Davidson is the author of Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times, a defense of the importance of contemporary utopian fiction and politics.

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Primary editor: Jackie Mansky | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard

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