ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Ernst Bloch's use of the term Concrete Utopia', maintaining that he uses it for two distinct reasons: Firstly, it is because he believes that Utopia always already exists. It is all around us in what he called the largely unconscious Vorscheine of a better world. Secondly but in dialectical alliance rather than logical contrast it is because its existence is only an as yet impossible potentiality. Merging G. W. F. Hegel's and Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas of Werden and Sein, he thus proposed a processual move towards an autopoietic utopianism whose only truly concrete characteristic was its Not-Yetness. Bloch was, like Henri Lefebvre a partisan of possibility and not of inevitability. Post-industrial consumerist capitalism rests precisely in the privatization of utopian hope, the fundamental neo-liberal contention that individualist aspiration and ruthless competitive consumerism is the only thing that will bring ultimate happiness.
