Kabo, Utopia, and the Communism of the Margins

A new book in the theory of speculative fiction and communism, Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature: A Commons Poetics, claims that utopian writing has entered a new and fruitful era—one whose core principles extend beyond the page and reflect the ethos and possibilities of political organizing since the 2008 financial crash. Published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2023, the book grew out of the dissertation research of its author, Raphael Kabo, a British scholar, poet, and software developer. The book builds on work by Tom Moylan and Fredric Jameson to offer a new and convincing periodization of utopian speculative fiction (and allied genres) since 1960. In particular, it defines a new and ongoing movement within the history of utopian writing, which Kabo calls the period of “commons utopias.” 

Under this heading, Kabo groups recent works by Cory Doctorow, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mohsin Hamid, Juliana Spahr, and Lidia Yuknavitch. These stories (and poems) are not set in a distant otherworld radically unlike our own, but rather begin in a world we nearly recognize and show the piecemeal process by which a new liberated communality is built within it. Another author might have called these texts “process utopias” or “revolution utopias”: they’re books that explore utopian feeling within a world that is not a finished product, that is in the midst of being transformed by the agency of the oppressed. Kabo contrasts them to what Moylan has called the “critical utopias” of the sixties and seventies—think The Dispossessed (1974), Trouble on Triton (1976), Russ’s planet of Whileaway. Those famous otherworlds are separated by an unbridgeable gulf from our own, a gulf of time and space and possibility, and so they serve as laboratories in which the reader can reflect on what would and would not be desirable, or functional, within a just society. Standing outside of the present, they hold up the seductive image of an imperfect but enticing alternative and ask the reader whether she would like to step inside. But the emotional response the reader gets from the “commons utopias” of Kabo’s analysis is not “I want to go there,” but rather “I want to do that.” These writings start in mostly near-future worlds facing environmental, economic, and political collapse and show the tactics characters use to solve problems together and build a space of abundance held in common.

Kabo chooses “commons,” not “process” or “revolution,” as his key term to emphasize that this form of writing is about “commoning,” meaning the collective act of building, replenishing, and defending a resource or social space that’s available for all to use. “Commoning” is an irritatingly wonkish term for a basic mode of human sociality, but it has the advantage of being more specific than “process,” more open-ended and piecemeal than “revolution.” We common when we give each other good ideas; when we dance through a shared kitchen with a dishrag, making it shine; when we tend wells of power so that they can be drawn on in future struggles; when we retell stories of our ancestors (and transcestors); when we open ourselves to our own lack of control and offer to others shelter and food that we barely have ourselves. A commons can be a place, but only in a transitory way: what makes a public library public are the social relations that sustain it and keep it open to all, not the physical structure of the building. Commoning requires technique; it is as much about the how as the where.

This relation between “how” and “where” is one of the core theoretical moves in Utopia Beyond Capitalism: these utopias play out in what the Russian poet Galina Rymbu has called “the moving space of the revolution” (or, as the poet Joan Brooks has alternately translated it, “the traveling space of the coup.”) [1] They are in large part about the libidinal, social, and technological practices oppressed people begin to do together in order to build and then iteratively improve a constantly changing space held in common. Kabo is writing against the idea, articulated by Fredric Jameson among others, that the future is absent from the imagination, that utopia’s “deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future.” Kabo says that this was one moment, now past, in the history of utopia. In response to this temporal stuckness, commons utopias have come to focus on the how of building an elsewhere within the here. “Living in an ongoing present,” Kabo writes, “the question then becomes not how to escape into a better future—because it is no longer accessible—but how to transform and refashion the present.” These texts neither promise nor negate the queer prospect of utopia’s unfolding. Instead of waiting for a bright messianic future, they suggest that we start right where we are.

This goes some way towards answering a longstanding objection among certain hard-nosed Marxists to utopian thinking; namely that in trying to work backwards from a vision of the good society to a concrete program of socialist action, we necessarily lose sight of things as they are, what’s possible, what’s already in motion, and how we can increase the material capabilities of the working class. Kabo might say that this new utopian writing answers this challenge in two ways. First, as I’ve said, it starts in something like our world and focuses heavily on the process of building out collective power. Second, Kabo frames these works as themselves acts of commoning, part of an unfolding commons of thinking together: rather than representing a static dream, each work is a rough draft of an interesting idea offered in an ongoing conversation.

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The politics of Kabo’s book—which pull from communization theory, the utopianism of German Jewish Marxist Ernst Bloch, the ecological thinking of Donna Haraway and other science studies scholars, the free software movement, and Italian autonomism, among many others—reflect a trend in contemporary leftism that I might call the communism of the margins (as opposed to the communism of the center). This is an ecologically-minded communism of many solutions, an anarchist-inflected communism that rejects the primacy of a central state apparatus, a post-Fordist communism that deemphasizes workers’ struggles at the point of production, and an additive (rather than substitutive) communism that focuses on building out new spaces and mechanisms rather than appropriating or dismantling old ones. Instead of attacking and overtaking the center, we construct new spaces in the half-abandoned zones. The community garden, the mutual aid, the shadow library, the DIY hormone collective, the occupation, the rave, the riot: these political projects and spaces are thought to grow in some sense organically out of widespread longing and the choice to identify in solidarity and wildness with others subjected to exploitation, empire, and climate collapse.

This avoidance of the center (if only because we can’t agree on what the center is) has its drawbacks. The claim that exploiting labor is the only or primary way capitalists can extract value in our society is not just an abstract one; if true, it has a practical utility, because it means that the growth of the laboring class also lays the groundwork for the overthrow of capitalism. In other words, capital contains the seeds of its own undoing. So the primacy, the indispensability, of labor at the point of production gives the workers’ movement leverage, and more broadly the identification of ways, like imperialism, in which the capitalist system is self-undermining (Marxists call this, annoyingly, “contradiction”) helps revolutionaries know when and where to attack. [2]

As an example of contradiction, the fruits of the free software movement undergird the whole modern technical stack, but recently there has been a great deal of recognition of the way corporations have cannibalized and enclosed this commons of knowledge and code without contributing to it in equal measure. Meanwhile, tech workers, historically exploited far less than, say, service sector workers, are now being laid off en masse in a bid to break their prior privilege. Big Tech’s self-destructive plunder is impossible to ignore: platforms are enshittified [3], large machine learning models are enclosing vast amounts of prior intellectual and artistic commons, and the battle to preserve underground repositories of free scientific knowledge like Sci-Hub and Anna’s Archive is raging. Free software is a techno-libertarian movement whose condition of possibility is the collective ownership of the means of production, and this contradiction has become too severe to ignore.

I bring this up because Utopia Beyond Capitalism feels in many ways like what it is: an uncommonly erudite tech worker’s book. Indeed, among the roots of Kabo’s thinking, the free software movement stands out. Kabo has a history of developing open-source software and, having departed academia, now works as a salaried software developer for the Guardian in the UK. One of the works examined in Utopia Beyond Capitalism, Walkaway (2017), draws explicitly on theories about open-source collaboration and was written by Cory Doctorow, a veteran of the Electronic Freedom Foundation who releases his writing under a Creative Commons license. And there are deep cultural ties between the European strands of autonomism and communization theory and radical left-wing free software projects.

The problems in which Utopia Beyond Capitalism is interested—how to collaborate, how to live together, how to interconnect and resist—are problems that atomized, “post-Fordist” workers like software developers, and like myself, feel keenly. Consider, for example, this excellent talk by software developer and comics artist Julia Evans—an entire keynote at a major tech conference dedicated to ultrabasic strategies of how to think through and solve hard problems collaboratively. When I watched it a few months ago, I was stunned by how much Evans’ deceptively simple advice reflected my own experience of doing education and strategy within horizontal political organizations. But it is specific forms of life that produce these particular longings! When tech workers (and nonprofit workers like myself) dream of communism, we dream of ways of being entangled with others, because that is what we lack.

Even the literary idea of “commons poetics” speaks to a certain extent to the deeply atomized imagined audience of this book. Kabo writes that the commons poetics of his chosen texts shows up even in their use of language, in the way that sentences extend and ramble and link out to a broader community of speech and genre. But the notion that language would ever not be communal, that it would not be allusive, intertextual, paratactic, and so on, speaks to a particular life experience, a very real structural condition that these techniques of commoning seek to overcome. It dramatizes a return to the social, rather than realizing that we are already there.

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In some ways, my mild rebuke of Kabo’s book echoes the criticism made by Samuel R. Delany in his famous longform essay “To Read The Dispossessed.” At the risk of oversimplifying, Delany critiques Le Guin’s famous “ambiguous utopia” not at the level of content but at the level of form. Le Guin, he says, is writing about a queer, non-white, alien world without private property, but her language betrays her. She writes in the language of a respectable whiteness; her narrator is surprised by the same things by which a reader of the New Yorker would be surprised and takes for granted what the average graduate of Smith College would take for granted. In a similar way, Kabo’s book is formally at odds with the (breathtakingly beautiful) communal sociality he finds in the texts he is reading.

Black radical thinkers have sometimes described what I’m calling the “communism of the margins” through the figure of the maroon. Maroons were slaves who escaped to the inland wildernesses of places like Haiti and Brazil, building settlements there, practicing African traditions, training in survival and combat, developing their own political institutions, and sometimes planning the defeat of their former masters. In Haiti, maroons helped lead the eventual slave revolution that overthrew the French. But crucially, marronage in Haiti and Brazil was not always, or exclusively, a kind of separatism. Because maroons knew that there was a significant chance of them being re-enslaved, they also used their time free from slavery to prepare themselves to survive re-enslavement and to escape again. When they were recaptured,  maroons shared knowledge of living off the land, of fighting techniques, and news from other parts of the colony with slaves back on plantations. In other words, marronage involved a building outside of the center, but it was often also involved in the return to, and overthrow of, the center.

Marronage (and its sister formation in the US, the Underground Railroad) might be a good reference point for understanding some of the revolutionary strategies in the books Kabo reads. “Walkaway” might nearly be another word for “maroon,” but Exit West (2017), Mohsin Hamad’s literary novel in which mysterious portals open seemingly at random all over the world, enabling people to travel from place to place without regard for national borders, also echoes the “fugitivity” of marronage. The portals in Exit West bring the “migrant crisis” (in other words, the movement of people from poor countries into the countries that have made their homes unlivable) to a head, with border enforcement becoming virtually impossible. By the end of the novel, people have begun to learn to live together, but for much of the plot, those escaping repressive border regimes are fugitives, living in the margins of a society that does not accept them as equal participants. Even the first text Kabo reads, the dazzling poetry collection That Winter the Wolf Came (2015) by Juliana Spahr, possesses, in its reuse of Language poetry techniques to represent ecological interconnectedness and resistance, as much a “fugitive poetics” as a “commons poetics.”

So there is an alternate account of the communism of the margins that draws on the history of transatlantic slavery and African tradition, and it offers a real historical model, however imperfect, for how the construction of a liberated space in the margins can lead to the return and overthrow of the center. [4] But Kabo largely neglects this. Even as most of the texts Kabo reads are either set in settler colonies or deal directly with the aftermath of colonialism, he avoids delving into these political theorists, preferring instead to lean on the figure of the commons with its roots in British economic history. This limitation is partly derived from the texts Kabo chooses, but since Utopia Beyond Capitalism is meant to be a contribution to a commons of liberatory imagination, it’s a limitation keenly felt. 

Similarly, for a book entitled Utopia Beyond Capitalism in Contemporary Literature, there isn’t much discussion of the nuts-and-bolts struggle against capitalism. If wage-labor exploitation, rent, and colonial extraction are three of the core engines of capitalist domination, you’d expect the book to engage heavily with labor unions, tenants’ unions, and internationalist politics, but, with the exception of the chapter on Kim Stanley Robinson, it doesn’t. To reiterate, this is a book that came out during a year in which there were around 400 labor strikes in the US alone and the largest anti-war movement in recent memory began (albeit after the book’s publication). Kabo just isn’t very interested in this. 

Kabo writes that “commons utopias represent and explore collective and collaborative utopian formations, in particular ones which operate alongside capitalist social relations, but are radically opposed to them.” His emphasis is on the “patchwork” of commons spaces that gradually interconnect, provoke conflict with the capitalist totality, and perhaps eventually overtake it. He writes in praise of this nonlinearity, this growing-up-through-the-cracks, the inventive struggle of “the subjects of this precarization [who] can no longer be distinguished nor hierarchized along traditional lines.” This is beautiful and important. But the choice between the communism of the margins and the communism of the center is a false dichotomy.

For example, take the twenty-first-century labor movement. Kabo quotes a French collective closely associated with the development of communization theory, the Invisible Committee: “it’s not about possessing territory … it’s a matter of increasing the density of the communes, of circulation, and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority.” The labor movement is often seen as anachronistic, rooted in a rearguard defense of the territory of the factory, and in the figure of a “traditional worker,” whose significance is dwarfed by the precarious under- un-, or non-traditionally (and, indeed, illegally) employed. But production hasn’t stopped, nor has it diminished in importance. Rather, the shopfloor has been scrambled, encrypted by the technological and logistical capabilities of the capitalist supply chain. A contemporary factory worker in the Global South probably works for an employer who contracts with the actual brand whose name is on the goods they produce or who contracts with a contractor; sometimes these chains of subcontracting are several layers deep. Factories are often smaller, and if one unionizes, the brand can simply switch to another factory. Thus the shopfloor itself is fragmented and mediated by highly fluid, reactive technologies. This isn’t efficient and it makes quality control much harder, but it makes it easier to break labor. Something similar happens with gig work systems like Uber or Mechanical Turk.

What this means is that, for the twenty-first-century labor movement to be successful, it has to use exactly the kinds of high-tech, adaptive, asymmetrical, emergent tactics for commoning that Kabo is excited about in order to counterscramble the capitalists’ scrambling of the shop floor and to hide organizers’ own operations. Global labor politics now demands exactly what the Invisible Committee called for: “increasing the density of the communes, of circulation, and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable.” Twenty-first-century unions, too, are more about the how than the where. The communism of the margins and the communism of the center need each other. But this book tends towards keeping them apart, and it suffers for this.

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There are more places for “commons utopia” as a concept to go. Experimental texts from the 1960s and ’70s, like the Revolutionary Letters of Diane di Prima (1968) or The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell (1977), can be reinterpreted as protocommons utopias. [5] Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 (2022), which was published too late to be included in Kabo’s book and which I reviewed here, also fits perfectly into the category while bringing it to new heights. Anthologies like A Punk Rock Future and Whether Change are incubating more of this kind of writing within genre speculative fiction. In other words, Kabo’s concept has historical roots, present-day currency, and predictive power. So Kabo is absolutely right in identifying and characterizing a new trend in utopian writing. His contribution will be cited widely in science fiction and climate fiction scholarship, and “commons utopia,” although it is an opinionated category, may well become the preferred term for periodizing left-wing utopian fiction of the twenty-first century. 

There’s also ample room for other approaches not based around close reading. Given that the “commons poetics” about which Kabo writes supposedly operates on three levels—namely, form, content, and the broader conversation—the obvious next step is to ask how these utopian visions are taken up within a broader commons of liberatory imagination and revolutionary planning, which is something Kabo doesn’t really go into. In other words, since commons utopias are supposed to be “rough drafts” of ways things could change put forward as part of an ongoing conversation with other politically committed humans, the form screams for an anthropological and sociological study of how people actually read, discuss, and improve on these visions, one that looks both at literary and nonliterary “drafts of utopia.” What are the institutions, the informal networks, what Ghassan Kanafani called “the circulation of the blood,” [6] in which these dreams are born and grow in 2024?  This doesn’t have to be highbrow; I’d love to see writing about the ethnography of role-playing games, which offer an accessible way to “play out” revolutionary scenarios and explore tactics of both commoning and class war.

Critics could also stretch Kabo’s work to other art forms—music, for example, which, because it is performed live, functions both as a way to represent commons utopia and as the structuring element in a real-life commons space (although these days it also functions as something darker, more open to the death drive; after all, since 2020 attending live music has meant risking death or permanent disability [7]). The hardcore and rave scenes are of course both explicitly political, oppositional, and often anarchist from the jump, as well as deeply rooted in African-American politics and aesthetics; today’s ravers and DIY scene kids are heirs to Black traditions of commoning (for example, PLUR in rave culture) that have inspired several of the books Kabo touches on, and they play the kinds of occupation and riots that Juliana Spahr writes about. I’d argue we can even see the capitalist music industry’s recuperation of commons poetics in some recent chart-toppers: Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ’Em” (2024), Tyla’s “Water” (2024), and Rema and Selena Gomez’s “Calm Down” (2022)—the first country, the latter two Afrobeats all keep the listener suspended in the warm embrace of a postapocalyptic glow, a queer futurelessness that is also queer utopia, and trade in what Kabo (after Spahr) calls the “sweaty relation” of solidarity. 

But at times the jangling positivity of Kabo’s literary constellation becomes really frustrating. A lot of the books Kabo reviews shy away from confronting the hardest moments of revolution head on, yet Kabo doesn’t seem to see that as an issue. Two of the texts effectively elide the most dangerous parts of collective struggle with magical realism. For example, by introducing those magical portals that appear all over the Earth that make it impossible to keep the migrants out, Exit West gets to skip over the question of border conflict between rich countries and migrants from the countries they’ve made poor. Walkaway, meanwhile—a book I actually love—nonetheless largely handwaves the material question of how the oppressed are to acquire (read: capture) the resources with which to build their utopia, imagining that, instead of seizing the means of production, we can simply “walk away” and 3D-print new ones. The novel also escapes towards the end into an extremely fun but far-fetched flight of fancy about mind uploading. And Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came, which is a stunning collection of poetry, does have a rigorous and honest view of the difference between “nonrevolution” and “revolution,” but it sticks to showing the former; its utopian elements are always “on the barricades,” in the temporary autonomous zone—it doesn’t represent, and doesn’t try to represent, class war that actually succeeds en masse. So the books Kabo analyzes are mostly either not showing the actual moment of revolutionary conflict or they’re showing it through magical thinking and metaphor. Yet Kabo’s tone remains mostly complimentary throughout; he doesn’t critique this failure of imagination, although that is exactly what it is.

There are times, reading Kabo, when one misses a commitment to older Marxist ideals—the “ruthless critique of everything existing”—as well as the “cognitive estrangement” of Darko Suvin, who defined science fiction as that genre dedicated to the rigorous and realistic working-out of the answer to the question “what if?” Kabo himself seems to acknowledge this relentless positivity in the conclusion to his book. But there is a lot to like here, too. Kabo reads these texts closely and imaginatively. You can feel his love for the world he wants to create. He hands us a strong set of concepts and an intellectual genealogy with which to understand an important movement in the (English-speaking) utopian imagination. Those interested in science fiction theory and communist aesthetics, both inside and outside of the academy, should read this book. It is a flawed but worthy contribution to a commons of liberation thinking that, I hope, is already beginning to bear fruit.

Endnotes

[1] In Rymbu’s alliterative, assonant original, “передвижное пространство переворота.” [return]

[2] It’s not that theories centered around the idea of a marginal commons can never give us this predictive and strategic power—Fred Moten and Stefano Harney convincingly argue that the University is self-undermining in this way in their 2013 book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. But the emphasis on the positive, the additive, the invention of new ways of living and building together, tends towards the fantasy of staying forever one step ahead of the long arm of the law, remaining light on our collective feet, never turning and fighting, and there is a legitimate question about whether, in the long run, this politics of evasion can outpace the enemy. [return]

[3] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification. This term was coined by Cory Doctorow to describe a process by which the incentive structures of corporate finance drive platforms (social platforms like Facebook, commerce platforms like Uber, and so on) to degrade their user experience over time—after they have established quasi monopoly power and formidable network effects, of course. [return]

[4]  Interestingly, the establishment of guerilla maroon communities in the hinterlands and then the return to attack the state is in a nutshell what was to follow John Brown’s unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry. [return]

[5] These texts have been favorites of communization and social reproduction theorists—Sophie Lewis, whom Kabo cites repeatedly, wrote the forward for a fiftieth anniversary reissue of Di Prima’s classic book of verse. Samuel R. Delany’s later writing, too, has been an influence for this train of thought—even serving as an inspiration for José Esteban Muñoz’s queer theory text Cruising Utopia (2009). [return]

[6] This term, which refers to how individuals (especially young people) and ideas move through institutions, comes from “Thoughts on Change and the ‘Blind Language’,” a lecture on the structure of Palestinian society and resistance delivered in 1968 by the Palestinian novelist and PFLP spokesperson in the aftermath of the defeats of 1967. [return]

[7] In Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark, an icon of the kind of techie post-Marxist leftist theory Kabo draws from, actually writes directly against the view of the rave as protoutopia, finding in it far more specific and complex political affects. I disagree with Wark about capitalism broadly but it’s a brilliant book. [return]