Through a critique of Left realism, culturalism, and pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism, Gary Wilder insists that we place questions of solidarity and temporality at the center of Left political thinking. He makes a bold case for embracing a concrete utopian politics of the possible-impossible adequate to current planetary crises.
"A bold, ambitious critique of Left political theory, Concrete Utopianism refuses the stale antinomies of pessimism and optimism, the traps of 'realism, ' progress, even historical time, and instead resuscitates a radical imagination that embraces solidarity and understands the future not as a roadmap but an orientation; not as hope but horizon. Gary Wilder calls on us to think and struggle in the world, with the world, and toward the 'impossible' world we desperately need if we are to secure a possible future . . . together."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"This is an extraordinary piece of work, at once a political manifesto, a philosophy of politics and history, and an impressive rereading of some major texts that sheds new light on them and their utility for thinking about our present. In turning to Black intellectuals on the same terms as White European intellectuals, Wilder rethinks the canon of what counts as Left thought."--
Joan Wallach Scott, Institute for Advanced Study
Never before has it been more important for Left thinking to champion expansive visions for societal transformation. Yet influential currents of critical theory have lost sight of this political imperative. Provincial notions of places, periods, and subjects obstruct our capacity to invent new alignments and envision a world we wish to see. Pessimism is mistaken for radicalism and political fatalism risks winning the day.
Gary Wilder insists that we place solidarity and temporality at the center of our political thinking. Heterodox Marxism and Black radicalism, he shows, offer precious resources to think cultural singularity together with worldwide interdependence. They envision futures that may already dwell within our world: traces of past ways of being, charged residues of an earlier generation's unrealized struggles, dialectical reversals embedded in the contradictions of the given order.
Concrete Utopianism makes a bold case for embracing the possible-impossible. The book invites Left thinkers see beyond inherited distinctions between
here and
there,
now and
then,
us and
them. Guided by the spirit of Marx's call for revolutionaries to draw their poetry from a future they cannot fathom yet must nevertheless invent, Wilder calls for practices of anticipation that envision and enact seemingly impossible ways of being together.
Gary Wilder is a Professor of Anthropology, History, and French at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
