Paula Keller

This paper examines justifications for Marxist anti-utopianism through a reconstruction of Marx and Engels’ arguments. While Marx and Engels have often condemned utopian thinking and especially Critical Theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer have derived from this a ban on utopian thinking, I argue that Marx and Engels’ own arguments do not support a wholesale opposition to utopian thinking. I identify and analyze two central anti-utopian arguments in Marx and Engels’ work: an argument from how history works and an argument from how consciousness is socially conditioned. The first claims that imagining utopia excludes proper attention to historical processes necessary for social change, rendering such imagination insufficient, redundant, and harmful. The second argument contends that imagining utopia wrongly presents historically contingent ideas as timeless truths. I demonstrate that these arguments target specific employments of imagining utopia rather than the activity itself. The argument from how history works condemns only utopianism as a political method—a strategy of imagining ideals and then working to implement them. The argument from how consciousness is socially conditioned objects only to the second-order belief that utopian imaginings represent timeless truths. It follows that the ban on utopia should be lifted. Even the most faithful Marxist is permitted to engage in utopian thinking.

Some say that the AIDS epidemic is a Holocaust or that women’s oppression is a form of slavery. Others have critiqued such metaphors for, first, misrepresenting and, second, instrumentalizing their source. I develop a third critique: such metaphors distract from their source because they make general conversation about the Holocaust and slavery seemingly superfluous and so conversationally impermissible. As such, they discourage bringing up these topics. A metaphor may inappropriately distract from its source even when it doesn’t misrepresent or instrumentalize. And such distraction is a good reason against using metaphors like those mentioned above.

Testimony is a source of knowledge. A speaker asserts what a hearer may therefore come to know. Assertion has widely been treated as the exclusive or at least the paradigmatic vehicle for testimony. I argue that we testify not only by asserting something, but also by taking something for granted within some other utterance. In philosophy of language, this is called semantic presupposition. The very reasons leading theorists of testimony have for thinking that assertion can be testimony are equally reasons for thinking semantic presupposition can be testimony.

There are at least three senses of sexual objectification: the moral sense of treating a person as if she were primarily a sexual object, the political sense in which women socially count as instruments for men’s sexual pleasure, and the epistemic sense of forming a belief that a person is as one sexually desires them to be. These different senses have been treated as rivals, competing about what the correct account of sexual objectification is, or they have been treated as entirely different projects. I argue for a third relation between them: each sense grasps an aspect of the existing social phenomenon of sexual objectification. Each further points out a wrong involved in sexual objectification. And the three aspects interact—we cannot fully explain any one sense of sexual objectification without the other two. To properly understand this interrelation I lean on an analogy: commodity fetishism as described by Marx helps make sense of the complex social reality of sexual objectification.