THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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bourgeois utopia, for the first time in its existence, and in fact a Lubberland did not arrive with this utopia. The appeal to the philanthropy of the exploiters, common to
all pre­Marxist plans for world­improvement, also wrecked this world­improvement; not only did nothing come of this Lubberland, it became a hell. So much for
Carlyle, as a side utopia to Ruskin's neo­Gothicism and to the Old New formations of Morris. All other latecomers, after Morris, tread a familiar beaten track in their
utopias, and are — at least in so far as they still remain liberalism — a diluted modernization of Thomas More. In the twentieth century H. G. Wells leads the way in the
fabrication of these peepshow images of a better future. Half a dozen dream­trains, time­machines, and Mr Britlings who write until daybreak were dispatched into the
future by Wells and brought back snapshots. And it is characteristic here that hardly one of these snapshots shows related landscapes, apart from the liberal lilac; and
even that is perforated with sarcasm in the ‘Time Machine’, which is interesting from a technological­utopian point of view. Among other things, Wells wrote the idyll of
the future with Greek embellishments ‘Men like Gods’, 1923, a frolicking life like that of naked piano­teachers in Arcadia. Bourgeois utopias thus end in skylarking,
imagination has disappeared too, and the so­called noble future, which dodges Marxism because of its own vagueness and especially its bourgeois substitutes for
socialism, becomes odd or epigonic. Thus what remained in the end was dilettantism and chaff; the grain of the social utopias has been removed along with Marxism.
Even socialism then becomes, in the mocking words of Engels, nothing other ‘than the existing social order minus its defects’; in this way of course bourgeois­liberal
utopianizing still finds adherents.
Otherwise it would be totally inconceivable to want to improve the economy in such a particularly silly way, i.e. piecemeal. And all this sort of thing, even when it is
dressed up in a particularly naive Anglo­American fashion, follows the lead of one of the most dubious utopians, Proudhon. In this way, strange dwarfish creations like
the free money and shrinking money* utopia appeared, building socialism on mere currency. Capital is ‘abolished’ in Silvio Gesell's dream of free gold by a kind of
legal inflation; thus it does not breed interest any more. Similar measures are taken against ground rent, relations of ‘free money — free land’ to the older utopia of
* References to Silvio Gesell's economic theory.