ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors explore two versions of utopian capitalism, one that points forward to what Paul Mason calls postcapitalism and one that points backwards to what they might call retro-capitalism. Utopianism and capitalism have grown together. From Thomas More’s awareness of what it does to social relations and Gerrard Winstanley’s democratic challenge to its ideas of freedom, to the Paris Commune’s attempt to build an alternative mode of production and Herbert Marcuse’s ‘utopian’ reworking of Sigmund Freud’s theory of repression, to the lysergic acid diethylamide dreams of the 1960s, the historical context for utopianism has always been capitalism. For Karl Marx, each significant period in the history of human civilization has been constructed around a particular mode of production: that is, the way in which the society is organized to produce the material necessaries of life such as food and shelter.
