Almost twenty years ago a group of artists and political activists squatted a disused army barracks in Slovenia, a republic in the former Yugoslavia, in an act of defiance against local authorities. The site has been transformed into the Metelkova Autonomous Space, a hub of cultural creativity and positive resistance.
After the 10-day war in 1991 which followed Slovenia’s declaration of independence, the Yugoslav army withdrew from the nascent state – leaving behind the Metelkova…
It would be very easy to argue that the true “axis of evil” is actually rather short, and stretches from the White House across the river Potomac and down to the Pentagon. But perhaps we would begin to sound like “America bashers”.
The problem is, as many have noted, that in this reality there is one dominant force (in a hegemony that also includes Britain, most of the European Union and some of south Asia) and that is the United States.
Total warThe “war on terror”, or…
This short workshop is intended to provide an opportunity to investigate our own utopias: "don't dream about your life, live your dreams".
There are many utopias and some people have written their ideas down and they have become quite well-known, such as Owen, Marx, Bakunin and "p m" (author of Bolo bolo). But everyone has a view of their own utopia and while some of our ideas are similar, in other things we differ. Often we know nothing at all about our dreams and our political…
Roland Meighan is an acknowledged “educational heretic” for his view that mass compulsory schooling is an obsolete and counter-productive learning system which should be scrapped as soon as possible. His latest book, Natural Learning and the Natural Curriculum challenges the very essence of the education system today. It is a devastating critique-and rightly so.
Caroline Austin: In your latest book, Natural Learning, you quote Mark Twain, who “never allowed…
Technology has only become important to utopian proposals recently, but they have always depended on instrumentalist and rationalistic thinking. Plato's Republic, Tommaso Campanella's City of the Sun, and Thomas Moore's Utopia were all based on regimenting and bureaucratic ways of managing people.
We have to notice how these early utopias are incredibly authoritarian and, to our eyes, are really dystopias. Consciously created dystopias based on technologies…
Most radical thought and action about the environment could be described as “utopian”, since it envisages a radically different society with strongly sustainable development where the integrity of “natural” ecosystems is maintained.
Utopianism, popularly associated with a literary genre, is also a “state of mind” found in the constitutions, outlines or blueprints of any ideal republic. It always reflects existing social conflicts, and rejects existing society. The utopias of 1960s…
Harijan: You have said in your article in the Harijan of 15 July, under the caption “The Real Danger”, that Congressmen in general certainly do not know the kind of independence they want. Would you kindly give them a broad but comprehensive picture of the Independent India of your own conception? Gandhi: I do not know that I have not, from time to time, given my idea of Indian independence. Since, however, this question is part of a series, it is better to answer it even…
Oscar Wilde famously observed that he couldn't look at a map without it present among the nations, while Sir Thomas More invented the word with his 1516 treatise on the ideal society, compounding Greek words to mean not a place, literally nowhere.
The small matter of geographical non-existence didn't stop More however. In fact it was a prerequisite in his picturing of the perfect island community. And ever since that first named outing, utopia has spread across the world and beyond,…
During the Second World War, nuclear weapons were developed and used. Obviously they have no part in a utopia, but although these weapons can be taken apart, the materials used to make them will be left behind.
There are high-tech schemes to “zap” away these wastes, but they are enormously expensive and don't actually do the job. In addition, the huge volumes of radioactive wastes left from the manufacture of the weapons will present a threat of cancer for hundreds of thousands of…
It is important to note at the outset that my own intellectual and moral development was profoundly influenced by Martin Buber's writings. Buber's article “What is to be done” in Pointing the Way represents a milestone in the process of my ideological radicalisation. (Uri Davis, Crossing the border)
This, then, is a personal account of a critical Buber disciple. Buber did not live to witness the 1967 war and the cruelty and the violence of the Israeli occupation of…
This useful book contains thirteen essays and an introduction by the editor, from contributors to the international conference Millennium of Utopias, held at The University of East Anglia, Britain, in 1999.
As such, it ranges from academic but accessible overviews, from people evidently long-engaged with the field, plus snap-shots of two existent utopian-living experiments (at Findhorn, Scotland, and Twin Oaks, Virginia, USA).
The persistence of the word utopia indicates the…
Gerrard Winstanley famously once wrote that “words and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing”.
He was that unusual individual, a utopian thinker who not only committed his vision of a better world to print, but acted to turn his vision into a reality. That he failed, and the patch of land upon which the Diggers first established their commune is now one of the most exclusive private estates in England, is…
More than twenty years ago Dennis Hardy wrote a great book on alternative communities in 19th century England which is now out of print. He has now written a “sequel”, a history of community experiments in England during the first half of the 20th century.
This new book bears some of the stylistic hallmarks of the earlier one: it is written with deep sympathy for the pioneers and their projects. The text is complemented by a host of photographs and other illustrations that help bring…
