Nothing can come without striving for it. People must dream and tell others of their dreams. A shared dream is the basis for joint action, which only can make people closer to the future. The goals must be formulated as clearly as possible, which would not only make the struggle for the new life conscious, but also remove any undue expectations, with all the disappointments they could bring afterwards.
One must be honest with oneself. There are no gods that could give people a paradise, and the future has to be built today, using the materials and skills people have now. One cannot expect that some deed would bring Utopia into life, and that everything will be perfect in the world after that. Utopia gives only the direction of effort, while the result may be quite different and require a change in the original principles and views.
To reach anything one should avoid making it the focus of attention, but rather concentrate on the ways to it. People should not plan to build the Utopia as something really existing; the metaphor of Utopia can only be productive for personal orientation and choice. Utopia says about what is undesirable now more than about what will be present in the future.
Complete knowledge is the indispensable condition for the improvement of anything in the world. Any act directed to bringing knowledge to the people would make the humanity closer to the future, while any act concealing something from common knowledge is a crime against the future.
When a person does something in the ways of Utopia, this brings all the humanity closer to it. General movement consists of individual efforts.
Any society that would limit wasting the material and spiritual resources on wars, economic competition, religious and other rites, silly entertainment, advertising, intricate laws etc. - any such society would hence contribute into constructing the society of the future, and must therefore be greeted, despite of possible deficiencies, inconsistencies or mistakes. The attempts to build the new world may repeatedly fail - but they will show the way for the next generations, and the humanity will learn from those great experiments, however difficult they may prove.
One cannot persuade a capitalist to abandon exploiting the others. It is useless just to suggest that religions stop wasting their enormous resources and give them away for the benefit of the people, rather than a handful of greedy clerics. There may be exceptions, but, as a rule, the representatives of every class are bound to behave in accordance with their social position. Consequently, the only way to promote the changes is to change social organization in such a way that it would support all the efforts in the "positive" direction and suppress the opposite tendencies. This may be called dictatorship by those who do not want the changes, but it will provide more freedom for those who are building the future.
The transitory society should expropriate the wealth of the richer layers of the society to use it for improving the life of the masses and to promote social and economic reorganization.
One cannot just forbid the "false" ideas - one has to suggest new ideas that would be much more robust and attractive. Though it will be necessary to limit religious propaganda, the main attention ought to be paid to the propaganda of the new ideology, demonstrating its universality and consistence.
Though the world may differently develop in its different parts, the uniformity in overall economic and social organization is necesary for efficient propagation of ideas. The new economic system will most probably be established all over the world, thus eliminating the competition between the two systems from the very beginning. This will save material resources and efforts that would be otherwise wasted on defense. No reservation areas for the adepts of the past. No place for religion, property, economic competition, national distinctions etc. If somebody tends to like living in the past, this is an illness that must be cured, not tolerated.
The remnants of the old social organization can temporarily be preserved in some distant parts of the Solar system, but this is an unstable state, which must be brought under control as soon as possible.
Obviously, no local revolution can lead to such a global rearrangement. Local events can only initiate the process of transition. This is the difference from the revolutions in the class society, where different social systems can co-exist for a long time, since they all belong to the same level of social and economic development, civilization.
However, the necessity of a global revolution implies that there must be global means of uniting individuals into a force that could become stronger than globalized capitalism. Such a role could be played by the telecommunication, when it develops into a true "neural system" of economy, so that no class could totally control it.
Every economic formation grows from within the old society. It is only when the new organization is strong enough that it can take over the results of a revolution and become the core of the new world. This is how revolutions win.
Every attempt to try new social relations, however limited, must hence be praised as a glimpse of the future. Of course, all such utopian projects are doomed to suffer from the diseases of the capitalist society, but the new has to wear the old forms for quite a while before it constituates itself as the new.
Contributors
Pavel Ivanov (Russia)
Jon Will (USA)
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