Our Utopia Will Be at Least As Complex As Capitalism

While it might be beneficial (and even fun) to simplify our politics to something digestable and pithy, when we actually enact ideas upon material reality and try to cultivate the social and institutional relations of a future society we will need to commit to many complex and unforseeable details along the way that no one can really predict.

This is why it’s absurd when people approach activists and request an “elevator pitch for world peace” on the spot, often followed up by a rigorous questioning about details that span multiple fields that relate to both transition and the final utopian system. No one can rightly predict the details and context required to respond to these hypotheticals which cascade against one another across time and space. It’s probably not possible to answer such questions without being at least a bit of a charlatan.

The way the systems of the future will work will be very complex. For example, the way our current inherited system works is so complex in it’s particulars that it defies accurate total description, and the average person is not prepared to answer questions on it outside a narrow band of expertise. The same would be true of any sufficiently large system.

The real world’s complexity is the result, in part, of the life’s work of thousands and thousands of specialists who deal with details unique to their specialization, with nuances we cannot imagine. We can literally never imagine it. Even if I placed you in a room full of books that explained it all. You would never stop reading. You would be reading and reading and reading until you died. You would die not understanding. Of course, any one of us can gain an impressive amount of knowledge if we set our mind to it, but never even close to a complete understanding.

The typical simple explanations for capitalist production necessarily leave out major and essential details for a full accounting of the processes at play. Some of the forces are prices, markets, local/regional/national/international legal contexts and regulations with overlapping and sometimes unclear boundaries, democratic institutions whose policy is shaped in a jumble of stakeholder relations, smoke-filled backrooms, and outside pressure from the grassroots, industry, and worker institutions, and a noosphere of cultural ideas and norms which sustain it. To describe how these things work together in one particular region is a major research project, to describe how it work under capitalism around the world would take a team working a lifetime. That’s how complex the systems of resource procurement, production, distribution, regulation, and so on really are. We can make generalizations and identify patterns, and we should, but we should accept that doing so will necessarily mean smoothing over exceptions, erasing critical aspects and layers, and removing detail for the purposes of legibility. A map must always leave out some details of the territory in order to fit in our pocket.

So, I am a bit suspicious of political advocacy which has the unspoken assumption that there will be a new simplicity to the functions of life, production, democracy, and distribution, after capitalism. It is mistaking the simplicity of understanding something for the simplicity of actually doing something. This is a critical misunderstanding: it may be easier to understand a child’s drawing of a house than an engineer’s blueprints, but if you try to build something from the simple drawing, you may end up with something which is dangerously unstable, or worse, doesn’t actually even function as a house.

Our utopia will be at least as complex as the current society. It’s possible that democratization will make things, in some places, more complex. In other places, non-functional and unecological complexity can probably be reduced. In the end, it’s a safe bet that things will remain too complex to be simply summarized.

Another place where this inorganic drive for simplicty rears its head in radical politics is the hope that a single clarifying strategy, party, or framework is sufficient to address the crises we face. This is not the case, and the drive for this false simplicity will make unsteady houses of our movements. We need the intellectual courage to admit that not only do we not know everything, but we cannot know everything except through collaboration and trust.

In order to transform society into an ecological and democratic one, we need to embrace three realities:

• The world we inherit is resilient in part due it’s complexity, and it’s the product of an emergent process with millions of political agents and contextual experts working in their own fields over generations in a way that no one understands in totality.
• The democratic and ecological world we wish to create will necessarily be at least as complex as the current one if we succeed. No single analyist or perspective is going to be able to describe an alternative world in totality which can match the complexity of the current world, because no one could do it for the inherited world either.
• Our world is too complex, and the stakes of failure too painful, to fantasize about changing everything at once. The processes of social transformation are complex and unpredictable, and there is no singular tool or simple strategy which is sufficient to transform the inherited situation into our utopia. The process of our utopia being built will be an unpredictable and partially-emergent collaboration between first hundreds, then thousands, then billions of people. There will be leaps and cascades along the way we can shape, but we must embrace the mystery.