Real Utopia as a Method? Utopian-Sociological Paths from Jameson’s Universal Army to a Postcapitalist Post Office

Abstract

This article uses Frederic Jameson’s An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army as the inspiration for a utopian-sociological method that brings together aspects of Erik Olin Wright’s ‘Real Utopias’ project and Ruth Levitas’ ‘Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’. It argues that these different approaches can be bridged through presenting fictional sketches of imagined futures of potentially socially transformative institutions alongside more conventional sociological analysis of such. Two concepts associated with the discipline of Utopian Studies – education of desire and concrete utopia – are used to suggest that the British Post Office might perform a better utopian role than Jameson’s chosen vehicle of utopian transformation: the US Army. To further build this case, and to demonstrate one possible application of this method, the history, current condition and an imagined future of the Post Office are explored and some concrete steps in the utopian directions suggested by these are noted.

Introduction

Assessing the fate of dominant left strategies of social transformation, Jameson (2016) notes, in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, that both revolutionary and reformist routes to a postcapitalist society have arrived at a point where their strategic viability appears exhausted. Jameson (2016) reminds us that a third transformative strategy exists – dual power – which has received relatively less attention. He notes various vehicles through which a dual power challenge to capitalism might be wrought (2016: 14–18), before settling on the US Army as the most promising candidate. Jameson then discusses his utopian vision, describing some of the changes that would be witnessed in a future where every US citizen had been instantaneously drafted into the Universal Army and tasked with building a postcapitalist USA.

Among Jameson’s briefly examined and rejected candidates for this role is the Post Office, and he refers to aspects of both its ‘European’ and US incarnations. Jameson (2016: 15) notes the Post Office’s role on both continents as a ‘uniquely relational system’ and its promising (for dual power purposes) ability to ‘print money in the form of stamps’, its census-like capabilities, its community-embeddedness and its provision of banking facilities. However, Jameson does not see that this institution can weather the storm that information technology poses to it and so looks elsewhere, before settling on his idea of the ‘Universal Army’.

In what follows, I will relate Jameson’s posited utopian strategy to two significant utopia-oriented sociological projects: Erik Olin Wright’s ‘Real Utopias’ and Ruth Levitas’ ‘Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’. Though the ways in which utopia is related to sociology differs within these projects, Jameson’s utopia, I argue, suggests means by which these approaches might be bridged. To illustrate this and to challenge Jameson’s dismissal of the Post Office’s utopian potential, I will present a three-stage exploration of the British Post Office, looking in turn at its development, its current condition and its role in an imagined dual power transition to a utopian society.

In exploring the institution’s development I will draw on Joyce’s (2013) The State of Freedom, in which the Post Office becomes visible as the key vanguard institution of a forming liberal state system. In surveying its contemporary condition, I will place focus upon the contrasts between the Post Office as an institution that had come to represent certain values associated with public services, and its fate in a society that has witnessed decades of such services and values being systematically dismantled. As for the Post Office as a dual power route to utopia: this will be explored in the form of a fictional utopian sketch, which traces a possible trajectory from the institution’s history, through its present, to a radically transformed future it has played a significant role bringing about and determining the social shape of. This imaginative venturing into a possible future for the institution to some extent mimics Jameson’s thought experiment but is intended here as an explicit use of utopia as a sociological method, following the methodological justification for such an endeavour set out by Levitas (2013), and as a more holistically utopian reorientation of the task of identifying upscale-able, desirable and viable vehicles for egalitarian social transformation, as sought by Wright (2010, 2012).

Subsequently, by noting some extant resources through which such a transformation might conceivably be assisted, I will aim to bridge some of the distance between this sketched future and the current condition of the Post Office and society more broadly. In this way I aim to contribute to work exploring the utility of utopia as a sociological method for understanding social possibility, with a view to influencing the orientation of projects for social change – and to demonstrate the case for the Post Office as a better vessel for a journey to utopia, than the one that Jameson floats.

Browsing for Dual Power, Utopian Sociology and Utopian Fiction

The use of the term ‘dual power’, with this revolutionary inflection, emerges with Lenin’s Pravda article of April 1917 (Lenin, 1917). Here, the term is used to describe the unanticipated situation of that moment, where the bourgeois Transitional Government was still in place, but an incipient alternative – the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies – was gaining strength. Subsequent developments of dual power as a consciously employed strategy for social transformation have been theorised and in some cases put into practice. Jameson notes Hamas, the Black Panthers, religions and the Mafia as having dual-power-like functions, and tries to identify other extant social formations that might be reconfigured into a dual power challenge to the US government. This process of browsing through institutions for expandable utopian potentials implies a similar methodology to that utilised by Erik Olin Wright in his ‘Real Utopias’ project. Through his decades-long work on Real Utopias, Wright sought in extant alternative forms of social organisation, elements of what might assist the transition to a just and sustainable future – through upscaling them or more broadly applying the principles at work within them. While Wright (2012: 12) envisaged a multiplicity of these forms as likely coming into play in such transformation, Jameson settles on one – the United States Army – as being the institution that could finally bring it about. Also, whereas Wright’s organisations of focus would remain ostensibly the same – in terms of the values and principles in operation through them – Jameson’s Universal Army has clearly undergone some transformations of principles and values, from those at work in the extant US Army, in order for it to become engaged in the task of building a postcapitalist utopia.

Jameson’s freer imaginative hand here is permissible because the intention in his work is less about offering a plausible path from the present to utopia, than it is about critically contributing to current understandings of social possibility, while maintaining imaginative space for utopian desire. Beginning with the book Marxism and Form, Jameson (1971), following Ernst Bloch, has investigated a pervasive utopian impulse detectable in cultural works, in which human desire for a wholly other way of living is expressed. For Jameson, this ‘otherness’ makes the utopia this desire is orientated towards unrepresentable as something complete: it can only be pointed towards indirectly through the traces it leaves scattered across culture. Attempts to portray utopian perfection were inevitably inflected by the conditions in which they were imagined from and risked occluding the utopian impulse with ideological projection (see Fitting, 1998; Milner, 2009; Wegner, 1998, 2011). This does not mean that utopia as literary, cultural, communal or political endeavour is misguided, indeed, as Jameson (2005) sets out in Archaeologies of the Future, his most substantial work on the matter, the necessity of utopia intensifies with neoliberalism’s narrowing of the scope of social possibilities. The main purpose and value of such endeavour becomes a refusal of this limitation of scope and a heightened focus on that which inhibits our ability to bring foreclosed social possibilities to realisation. Through focusing on the inauguration of the Universal Army as an agent of utopia’s construction, some sense of rupture with the prescribed inevitability of the present is maintained, but with utopia being a process then underway, rather than a completed task, the otherness of utopia itself is still held open, so leaving scope for the utopian impulse to remain un-occluded.

Wright’s utopian sociology eschews such imaginative licence, insisting instead on the necessity of making the case for a transformed society a properly social scientific one, and making the means of transformation to it as well understood as possible, carefully avoiding the ‘unrealistic’ connotations of the word utopia. However, this careful approach has been criticised by fellow sociologist Ruth Levitas for placing undue limits upon the power of the utopian imagination. By employing this method, Wright ‘refuses speculative holism [. . .] He thus rules out, in relation to the future, one of the great virtues of the utopian (and sociological) approach, namely the ability to explore how different spheres interact at the utopian level’ (Levitas, 2013: 144). We need instead to:

push forward to a less cautious and more imaginative engagement with possible futures, in which utopia is understood as a creative form of sociology, building on the strengths of the discipline which include its focus on institutions, its systemic holism, its attention to subjects and agents as well as structures and processes. Above all, we need to understand utopia as a method rather than a goal, and therefore as a process which is necessarily provisional, reflexive and dialogic. (2013: 149)

Levitas seeks a rekindling of what she sees as a suppressed affinity with utopian thought in the discipline of sociology. Sociology’s concern with its status as a social science had, for Levitas (2013), left the discipline disposed to eschewing its normative dimensions and to under-utilising its capacity to imagine societies operating according to different norms and comprising of different institutional forms. The critical potency of utopian literature, in its creative play with such norms and forms ought, Levitas (2013) argues, to be embraced in sociology and her method – ‘Imaginary Reconstitution of Society’ – sets out ways in which this might be undertaken. Through this method Levitas (2013: 153–220) seeks to show how utopian-sociological thought can give the ‘speculative holism’ neglected by Wright free reign. This comprises a process of three critical modes – Ontological, Archaeological and Architectural – through which logical conclusions implicit in extant or imagined programmes of social organisation are traced. These are examined for the ideas about human nature they imply (Ontological), the unearth-able values embedded within them (Archaeological) and the form that a society might take were it able to give these values and this human nature full expression (Architectural).

Through undertaking an imaginary reconstitution of society in tandem with assessing utopian potentials in extant institutions, An American Utopia seems to point the way to a utopian-sociological method through which something like Wright’s and Levitas’ methodologies might be combined, or at least made to have a fruitful complementarity. If extant institutions can be subject to an imaginative reframing, such that aspects of their functioning can be thought forward to and through their role in a radical social transformation, then something of the ‘Real’ of Wright’s project is maintained, but without the loss of ‘speculative holism’ that Levitas saw as limiting the power of the utopian in Real Utopias. One way of achieving this would be to incorporate utopian-fictional components into sociological accounts of such institutions.

This would clearly involve some movement away from sociology’s traditional epistemological repertoires. However, the use of fiction within academic sociological writing has gained credence in recent decades, with recognition of its value as a pedagogical tool, as a public sociological method and as a means of extending the possibilities of ethnographic research through portrayal of pertinent imagined scenarios (see Watson, 2022). Regarding sociological use of speculative fiction, Seeger and Davison-Vecchione (2019: 50) argue that the scenarios presented in dystopian literature can bring a potent ‘phenomenological richness’ to the sociological imagination’s linking of ‘personal experience and social structure’ and Davidson (2021: 1069) has pointed to the value of literary utopia’s ability to present critique of extant society, while also revealing ‘hidden possibilities for new ways of living’. While these latter authors are stressing the value to academic sociology of fiction created beyond academic sociology, Benjamin (2016) suggests that there is value in incorporating speculative fiction into sociological work itself, not least for the scope this affords the sociological imagination to reach beyond dire extant social circumstances with a critically grounded hope. When combined with more conventional sociological methods, this incorporation presents the possibility of a more direct, consistent and resonant thematic relationship between conventional sociological and speculative-fictional modes, offering means by which historic, empirical and imaginative sociological lenses can be focused simultaneously on the same subject.

In bringing together the critical-affective potency of the utopian imagination while tracing trajectories of possibility in extant ‘real’ institutions, a relationship between two key concepts from the discipline of Utopian Studies – education of desire and concrete utopia – is suggested. In the following section, I will introduce these concepts and use them to build a case for challenging Jameson’s dismissal of the Post Office as a possible vehicle for a utopian dual power.

Education of Desire and Concrete Utopia

Education of desire – a phrase describing a key social function of utopian literature – has come to obtain two different inflections of meaning within Utopian Studies. This difference arose from a shift in nuance the phrase obtained with EP Thompson’s reading of Miguel Abensour’s analysis of William Morris’ News from Nowhere (Allison, 2018; Nadir, 2010). The use of the phrase that follows Thompson’s refers to the cultivation of a refined and amplified sense that the world could and ought to be organised in radically different, more just and marvellous ways (Levitas, 2011, 2013; Williams, 2010). The second sense, later demonstrated as being closer to Abensour’s intended meaning, refers to the cultivation of a vigilant critical disposition relating to what seems socially desirable, thus compelling those concerned with the production of utopias, and the pursuit of better societies, to never allow such concern to settle into creating or advocating-for a specified, fixed – and therefore potentially authoritarian – programme (Nadir, 2010).

While the second sense of the phrase protects against the utopian impulse concretising into dystopia, it appears to extinguish the affective pull to action discernible in the first. Making utopia a critical endeavour with a permanent distrust of goal-formation seems more of a constant disciplining – rather than educating – of desire and, consequently, less like a process to which willing recruits might be affectively drawn. Perhaps a well-educated desire – a wise desire – might be one that had found ways of thinking these two senses of the phrase together. Indeed, work by Allison (2018) and Davidson (2019) demonstrates that a utopian project that vigilantly guards against authoritarianism, but that nevertheless preserves a forwards-reaching desirability, might yet be constructed. Could this be said of Jameson’s Universal Army?

Though Jameson’s utopia, through its provocative and playful critique, maintains fidelity with the second sense of the phrase, the fact that the vehicle for change is the US Army might be said to give this utopia an insurmountable undesirability, thus failing in terms of the first. Being a structurally violent, capitalist institution with a bloody, oppressive and unjust history, the chosen institution certainly presents challenges to utopian desire, although Jameson (2016: 28–29, 56–57) is at pains to point out that this Army operates more in line with the US Army’s constructive (e.g. disaster relief) rather than destructive potentials. However, the fact that such construction, even though utopian in orientation, would be initiated by way of military draft, seems to replace desire with compulsion and to prematurely discount the possibility that an effective, reconstructive, utopian social force might arise through a widespread ‘signing-up’, rather than a sudden conscription. This would suggest that education of desire could be thought of as part of the function of the pre-utopian dual-power-to-be, something at work through its active practical presence in social life; something to which the desire to engage in utopia-building would be drawn, rather than people finding themselves compelled to commence that task.

The Universal Army may also be lacking in a sense of concrete utopia. Again, this phrase has two identifiable poles of meaning – although the second is less often discussed – both arising from different senses Ernst Bloch imbued it with when outlining his utopian philosophy. This first sense describes engagement in action – or praxis – which is felt to be in alignment with what is sensed as necessary in order to bring closer the genuine realisation of a utopian situation (Bloch, 1995b; Hudson, 1982). This is juxtaposed to ‘abstract’ utopias, where an ideal society is described without any adequate sense offered that the means of setting out for such a society are concretely available to us in the here and now (Bloch, 1995a: 145).

Bloch also uses concrete utopia in an ontological sense, with utopia conceived as a fundamental aspect of consciousness and of matter. For Bloch, this is an as-yet materially incomplete universe, being steerable either to entropy or utopia through human efforts, with our sense of utopian possibility arising in part from a kind of yearning for self-realisation common to all matter (Bloch, 1995a, 1995b; Hudson, 1982). This speculative-materialist take on concrete utopia has been shown to run into something of a philosophical glitch, as Bloch apparently provides no means of demonstrating that his utopian reality-process would necessarily explain human actions or feelings one way or the other (Hudson, 1982), although recent work goes some way to rebutting some of the traditional challenges levelled against this aspect of his thought (Moir, 2020).

It may, however, not be necessary to accept Bloch’s ontological utopian world-process in order to accept some of its implications regarding people’s epistemological world-processing. For Bloch, part of the way this utopian aspect of consciousness manifests, is through an inevitable process of gap-filling that occurs as people try to negotiate a reality they can only ever incompletely sense (Moir, 2018). Part of this sketching-in of the gaps occurs through applying our sense of what is good counterfactually to the unsatisfactory state of the world as we sense and imagine it to be. This yearning at the edge of consciousness for things to be marvellously otherwise imbues art, music, myths, daydreams, religion and so on with much of their profound content (Hudson, 1982). This matters when it comes to left praxis, because neglecting to address this aspect of consciousness in the ways the left organised for and imagined the future – neglecting the ‘warmth’ of the implied future brought about through Marxist praxis – risked ceding this territory’s inspiring power to reactionary forces. For Bloch, this is precisely what had happened with the Nazis’ successful mobilisation of myth, romanticism and longing for ‘home’, where the dominant Marxism of the period had offered only a ‘cold’ scientific and critical social analysis (Bloch, 1995a, 2018).

In this way, these two senses of Bloch’s concrete utopia can be thought of as arriving at the same point from different directions: there is folly in advocating for utopia without paying enough attention to the concrete means of moving towards it, and there is folly in concrete praxis which loses sight of its motivating ‘warm’ utopian dimension.

Applying this to the matter of the Post Office versus the Universal Army: although Jameson’s Army, when established, ends up effectively being an army of concrete utopia, it is not clear how its inauguration might be something consciously, tangibly buildable-towards from the current moment. A reconceived Post Office as a force for utopian dual power might also be something of a test for the imagination, but it may be more imaginable – through the organisation’s concrete and pervasive presence across communities and through the possibility that its range of services might be added to incrementally, with each addition of service increasing the imaginability of the next. In other words: it may be easier to imagine the Post Office doing more than it currently does, than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

It could be argued that a similar process of accumulating functions, with similarly transformational consequences for society, is visible in the history of the Post Office’s development in Britain. In the following section, I will outline some key aspects of this history and of the Post Office’s remarkable socially transformative power.

The Vanguard of Modernity

While popular and official histories of the UK Post Office have portrayed its development as emblematic of an emerging, progressive, democratic, techno-bureaucratic modernity (Campbell-Smith, 2011; Sandbrook, 2012), Joyce’s (2013) examination of the development of the modern British state reveals it to be a key instrument through which ideas, norms and practices foundational to modernity were generated in the service of building and consolidating state power.

The Post Office’s emergence in England is traceable to channels of communication used for strategic intelligence by monarchical powers vying for advantage over threatening rivals. This system, traceable back as far as the Wars of the Roses (Campbell-Smith, 2011), comprised of ‘posts’ in strategic locations at which horses could be commandeered for the speedy relaying of messages. As networks of posts established, ordinary people began to make use of the system to convey their own messages, making payments to riders to take their own correspondence along with the official communications. Where this system was in place, previous colloquial systems of correspondence began to be supplanted – and these non-official communications would ultimately come to be formally incorporated into the nascent postal system (Campbell-Smith, 2011; Clinton, 1984).

This pattern of change, whereby developments in the efficiency of state power’s means of communication and control come to be popularly adopted and normalised – effectively through becoming too pervasive and ultimately too difficult to not use – becomes a familiar motif of the development of the modern Post Office, and indeed of the development of the modern state itself. Joyce demonstrates how the postal network played a vanguard role in establishing key infrastructures that drew people into a relationship with the state as a system. These infrastructures compelled new forms of interaction, through which new representations of what society was – and what was powerful, authoritative and official within it – were discernible (Joyce, 2013).

The rationalisation of the road network, telegraph lines, telephones, the standardisation of time and distance; street names, house numbers, literacy drives, engagement with trained ‘officials’, codes of civic conduct: all were pushed forwards and shaped either directly in service of, or through utilising and expanding the scope and reach of, the Post Office – thereby expanding the scope and reach of the state (Joyce, 2013). Ad hoc, local knowledges and means of organisation were supplanted by this unfurling state system and there was ultimately less and less that was extant ‘outside’ of it. To exist ‘inside’ of it was to exist with the inescapable, permanent sense of being in relationship with a powerful system.

Joyce shows how this overlaying of experience with this added sense-of-system was reinforced in the self through the roles that had to be assumed in order to engage with it, and that this largely worked in the service of creating disciplines and dispositions favourable to a liberal, marketised social order. However, Joyce (2013: 84) notes that within the new liberal-oriented conceptions of self and system, state and society that arose, was the potential for ‘a sense of collective ownership of the state in which the gap between state and society lessens, so that more socialised versions of the state may emerge’.

Nineteenth-century developments such as the introduction of the Uniform Penny Post and the use of cross-subsidies from more profitable to less profitable parts of the organisation were key to the development of the idea of ‘public services’ as they would come to be understood in the following century (Joyce, 2013; Sandbrook, 2012). The easing of laissez-faire governmental doctrine evident in such developments speaks more of a market-utopian fervour for reducing hindrances upon commerce (Gregory, 1987), than it does any commitment to providing a basis for the flourishing of its citizens via universal public services – but it does begin to offer a concrete substrate upon which such ideas might attach and seem realisable.

Indeed, writing in 1841, Robert Owen noted how the recently afforded accessibility of cheap postage across Britain, delivered through a system staffed by generally well-paid workers, pointed to the viability of his vision of a ‘scientifically’ organised, egalitarian society (Owen and Claeys, 2021: 480). Resonances with Owen’s vision of a good modernity are still detectable almost a hundred years later in the GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit’s celebrated short film of 1936, Night Mail. In this documentary, modernist aesthetics – augmented by WH Auden’s poetry and Benjamin Britten’s score – are wedded to a lyrical vision of a smartly efficient postal system, organically vital to society, serving all its citizens via a hard-working yet highly valued, nation-spanning workforce. The film was commissioned in part as an effort to shore up support for the service’s status as a public institution against plans for its part-privatisation and – though far from representing the socialist utopia Owen conceived – the film brings a poetic self-evidence to the value of a universal system through which a sense of collective social contribution and interdependence is mediated and sustained.

As Anthony (2019: 71) notes, Night Mail ‘expresses a genuine admiration for, and well-placed confidence in, the rising tide of social democracy’. It was precisely against such admiration and confidence that the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) began to mobilise, in the post-war decades, for a free-market utopia of privatised and commercialised public services. Though initially marginal (Blundell, 2015), this organisation gained increasing influence through the 1960s and 1970s. By the time the IEA’s Arthur Seldon published Charge in 1977 (in which a counterfactual vision of a commercially competitive Post Office freed from government control is briefly sketched [Seldon, 2005: 224]) politicians who would soon be entering government were eager to begin implementing their ideas. Now, after more than 40 years of neoliberal governance, dramatic changes to the Post Office have been witnessed, as the country has been reshaped according to ideological principles that had previously been the fanciful dreams of outsiders.

Having played such a consequential role in disseminating the idea and attributes of the state and its relationship to society, what significance does the organisation’s social presence come to have in a contemporary situation where so much of what these came to mean has been subjected to radical, neoliberal attempts at redefinition? In the following section, I will explore some ways in which these redefinitions are manifested in the contemporary condition of the Post Office.

The Humbling of the Post Office

While queueing up in the post office in Hulme, a significant, working-class, inner-city suburb of Manchester, you might wonder as you wait why your business must be conducted amid a distinctive sweet, yeasty aroma. The fact that the post office counter can now only be accessed by passing the counter of a Subway, and that these two counters are effectively operating in the same fairly cramped space, might seem jarring – the high commercialism of the Subway at odds with the Post Office’s eclectic range of mostly unexciting but often essential services. A less-stark but nonetheless tangible sense of at-odds-ness might accompany a trip to the main post office in a large town, where, instead of occupying a fairly impressive-looking building in a prominent position in the town centre, the counter is now to be found somewhere in WHSmith, the long-struggling high-street stationer and bookseller.

The withdrawal of post office counters into such commercial environments is a process that began and was accelerated under successive UK neoliberal governments as they attempted to restructure and reorient the Post Office’s functioning away from the practices and values that had been associated with public services for much of the 20th century (see Barnett et al., 2018; Beale, 2003). Some of the content of this change can be attributed to the kinds of businesses that are now viable in the locations that are suitable to locate a smaller, local post office in (Thomas, 2018), but specific government initiatives have contributed much more to this humbling of the Post Office. Since 2010, the Coalition Government-initiated Network Transformation Programme drove as many as 7400 ‘Traditional’ post offices (those with dedicated screened counters with ‘little other retail’) into retail premises or pressured their sub-postmasters into developing or expanding a viable retail offer, dramatically increasing the likelihood of encountering the service in this sort of retail environment (Barnett et al., 2018).

The moving of significant numbers of Crown Post Offices – those run directly by the Post Office itself rather than by an agent – into WHSmith stores in large towns, is a phenomenon that has less apparent connection with adapting to changing high streets than it does the strategic and ideological motivations of governments regarding public services per se. Though these relocations are ostensibly subject to public consultation processes and often provoke considerable local backlash, only one such consultation out of 74, as of 2019, had changed Post Office LTD’s plans (BEIS, 2019: Q 1-83). While previous manoeuvres towards privatisation of the Post Office have stalled (Beale, 2003) it is hard to view the restructurings of recent decades, including the dramatic drop in the Post Office Subsidy (government funding to support the Post Office system) from £210 million to £50 million, and the aspiration to make the Post Office a ‘self-funding network’ (Barnett et al., 2018) – as positioning the institution for a future that is meaningfully ‘public’. Privatisation of Royal Mail in 2013, represented a highly consequential cleavage of the institution, immediately bringing tens of thousands of the country’s most visible public service workers – postal delivery workers – into private employment. That this was done with a haste and ineptitude that is estimated to have lost ‘the taxpayer’ billions (We Own It, 2017), once again points to an ideologically driven, rather than an economically pragmatic motivation for such reforms.

With postal delivery workers now privately employed, a key element of the state system that the Post Office had contributed so much to naturalising was finally withdrawn from quotidian public experience. The legacy of high regard for postal delivery workers is still strong, but the work they do has become substantially more pressurised and physically demanding, with increased time spent outdoors on longer rounds carrying heavier bags of post (Mayall, 2018; Meek, 2011). The fondly remembered sense of friendly encounter and community knowledge associated with these workers is increasingly threatened by technologised management oversight, with workers having to carry electronic PDAs (Postal Digital Assistants) through which strict account is kept of their time spent at each location they deliver to (Mayall, 2018). Time to engage in the friendly work of knowing and caring about the communities they serve is, unsurprisingly, not prioritised.

The humbling of the Post Office and the harrying of Royal Mail’s workers has contributed to a markedly diminished presence of the state as something mundanely, routinely encounterable in the form of publicly owned, collectively contributed-to public services. This is a significant withdrawal from routine experience of contact with different values and logics to those of the commercial realm, and of such values and logics being seen to have any significant social power. Despite this, demands for such services to be brought decisively back into public hands and repurposed for the public good have gained some prominence and traction in recent years (Hall, 2020). The notion that the state system might yet be reclaimed and put to the work of creating a more just and equal society is still very much present in the public imagination (Niemietz, 2021). Could this be a resource from which a utopian future might be plausibly struck out for? Could a dual power postal strategy plausibly challenge and defeat the state in its late neoliberal form and a new, non-coercive, non-exploitative social system be built? In the following section, I will present a fictional sketch of how this possibility might play out.

The Utopian Post Office: A Report from an Imagined Future

A last-ditch attempt to maintain control, on the part of the legacy state, comprised of the offer of massive, low-interest loans to local authorities, with which to develop and raise revenue from local energy infrastructures. This proved unsuccessful, probably inevitably so, given that so much of what local authorities had previously offered as services were now effectively provided by the Post Office. In any case, the Post Office was already in a better position to facilitate such schemes, through its long-nurtured network of neighbourhood energy committees and their liaison with the Civil Engineers’ Assembly for Concrete Utopia. This was one of several key moments of rupture between the previous system and the current system, which are generally traced back to the Communications Strike – a more-or-less global strike that had had various local effects. In the UK it had finally brought about the four-day week, and the agreement in principle to the development of Universal Basic Services (UBS) – with a stopgap Universal Basic Income (UBI) introduced to protect people’s ability to meet basic needs through the course of that first transition. Where some had envisaged that these transformations would lead to the beginnings of a long-mooted post-work society, the outcome that has actually emerged is what is now happily referred to as The Postal Work Society.

The reintegration of the Post Office with Royal Mail had followed shortly afterwards, and the reunified and revived service was integral to the development of the nascent UBS scheme and perfectly positioned to administer the transitional UBI. Provision of UBS had necessitated what came to be known as a ‘Needs Audit’, which, unlike a census or other forms of survey, comprised of ongoing face to face conversations, carried out by postal workers on the new ‘Community Round’. This took a lot of time, and so required a significant increase in the numbers of delivery workers. Inevitably, lots of useful quantitative data were generated, which could be inputted into the Post Office’s new ‘Girosyn’ system. Much of the data acquired in such visits, however, would not be expected to be quantifiable, but would build up a certain qualitative sense of how things were going for people in a specific community – what their concerns were and how they generally felt about things. It had been realised that conversion of such affect into data had an inevitably alienating effect, and so the elicited qualitative understanding that the Community Round generated would only ever be ‘condensed’ as opposed to abstracted. This occurred through regular discussions between delivery workers for different communities, the findings from which would be discussed at assemblies regularly held at newly extended post office premises. These assemblies would always be followed by communal dining, music and provision of whatever made people feel relaxed and comfortable hanging out with each other. It became unusual to think of conducting any sort of Needs Audit or community administrative business without it being the excuse for at least some sort of low-key to fairly full-on festive aftermath.

The transitional UBI scheme had long been prepared for by the Post Office and by the time of its implementation it had designed several ingenious pooling initiatives, through which various levels of community undertaking could be funded by those who had the scope to contribute. A gamble had been made that people’s enchantment with individualised consumerism was in part driven by a sensed lack of the opportunity to engage meaningfully in changing the world immediately about them, so new opportunities for people to engage in cooperation in community endeavours had been prioritised. Such schemes, identified as desirable and viable through the local Needs Audit, could be relatively small to relatively huge – a clothes library, for example, or a thermal baths; a youth centre, or a pedestrianisation scheme. These proved to be compelling enough to keep much of what came to the community via UBI within the community and out of the hands of chain stores and Amazon, whose workers were anyway being gently reassigned into the Post Office system.

This system had been afforded something of a boon by the heroic success of the Post Office Phone, or POP. This device was effectively a replacement for your addresses: physical, email and IP. A key strategic manoeuvre in the early years of the struggles against the legacy state had been – perhaps counter-intuitively for an emerging Postal Work Society – to remove street names and the numbers from doors, and to seal up all letterboxes. The end of physical addressing was implemented so as to almost instantaneously ‘Block the Knock’: to hamper the state’s agents’ ability to make concrete contact with spaces of inhabitation and organisation. While the legacy state still maintained control of the GPS system for some time, this move added a significant enough degree of friction to systems organised for collection of debts, for evictions and arrests, to make them ultimately not worthwhile to attempt. This move also, initially, produced considerable difficulties for people just trying to go about the routines of daily life, but these were best overcome by what has become perhaps the greatest strength of the new system as it has consolidated: you really have to get to know the area you live in. This great resurgence – or reactivation – of local knowledge means nowhere and nobody is really unfindable (unless that is genuinely what they need to be the case) – you just have to ask around. And, of course, nobody knows the area and its inhabitants better than the postal workers – although this ended up being pretty much everyone, anyway.

The POP gave people a non-physical location within the Post Office system through which they could receive whatever phone calls or messages they wanted to and a verification system through which they could obtain (or choose how to pool) their UBI payments from the local post office. An initial suite of services could be accessed via these devices, reminiscent of those offered by the Minitel system that had predated the World Wide Web in France (Mailland and Driscoll, 2017). Though at first somewhat quaint and clunky by the technological standards of the day, the attractiveness of a device that was ‘unwatched’ by the internet spawned a highly creative subculture of early adopters, followed by rapid international uptake. This growing network began to offer modes of virtual socialisation and exchange that came to rival, and then to leech away, the vitality of the legacy Web.

Interaction on this communicative network came to have an altogether different quality to it due to the ‘rematerialisation’ of the communities in which the communicators were embedded. It had become less possible to relate to people, people anywhere, in the abstract. The necessary re-establishment of ‘present-ness’ of interaction in our localities was, to an extent, articulated remotely. Coordinated action between communications workers in various cities internationally had helped spark the series of transformations that have been witnessed more-or-less globally in recent decades. In the ensuing variety of struggles against the legacy powers, the importance of maintaining a sense of tangible connection between geographically distant communities has retained an almost sacred importance. Though international travel tends to be much slower now, exchanges of groups of community representatives are common between a neighbourhood and its various global ‘twins’. The presence of people from these twins adds to the sense of immediacy and shared concern in the various Inter-Neighbourhood-Needs-Audit-Exchange gatherings (at which twins are audio-visually hooked up via the POP-network) and the special collaborative festivities that always follow these.

In a way not unlike the formation of the state associated with modernity, the newly emerged system has developed largely through the extension and naturalisation of means of communication and conveyance, which then ‘translated’ other extant systems such that they came to operate according to the template of habits and practices, object and infrastructure creation that the communication and conveyance system had pioneered. Whereas the postal system that drove liberal modernity served to equip people with the things that they needed to be more-or-less competent participants in the market, our system pretty much just equips people with what they need to be a fulfilled person living in a world of tangible connectedness. Whereas the previous system had essentially enmeshed people into an ostensibly ‘free’ position within various structures of domination, ours translates legacy hierarchies and circuits of profit and exploitation into a system of cooperation.

Some Concrete Utopian Directions

As Joyce demonstrates, the naturalisation of the modern state and its relationship to society was in great part facilitated through the state making itself available to people as a means of connection, while, as it did so, equipping people with the objective and subjective requirements necessary for participation in a society organised primarily through market relations. This state came to be regarded as a vessel of organised freedom, while, of course, it was enforcing and naturalising various hierarchies of domination and circuits of exploitation. It is evident that a similar process is currently underway, through the new communicative infrastructures that have revolutionised commerce, work and social life for many in the space of decades. The power accruing through these infrastructures, to state and corporate entities best placed to harness it, is evidently considerable and consequential. As such, it remains as urgent as ever to identify means by which society might be oriented otherwise, in order that we might still enjoy a maximal connectedness, while knowing that domination and exploitation are not required by, or heralded by, any system that facilitates this. Achieving this might conceivably come via a dual power strategy, and if papers announcing conscription into Jameson’s Universal Army should arrive in the post (if you still have a letterbox) then they probably should not be burnt. But it may be preferable to give the Post Office a second chance at contributing to a good modernity.

Some concrete steps in such a direction are already suggested by the Communication Workers Union, which has advocated for the essential social role that its postal delivery workers play to be properly respected and has argued that this role could be expanded to include further socially beneficial tasks (CWU, 2020; Post & Parcel, 2020). We Own It (2019) has worked out detailed means by which greater public participation in the delivery of public services, including the Post Office and Royal Mail, might be implemented, maintaining a sense of tangible public involvement that articulates from the local to regional and national levels. The think-tank Common Wealth has suggested various means by which the UK’s inequality-exacerbating communication infrastructures might be brought under democratic control and the data generated through people’s interaction with digital systems recaptured for the public good (Hanna et al., 2020).

Achieving some of the relatively modest transformations suggested by these groups would represent, given the entrenchment of anti-public-ownership rationality in UK governance, remarkable victories. Maintaining a concrete utopian sense of where these victories would sit in any utopian scheme, would, perhaps, mean being resolutely dissatisfied with whatever situation they brought about, while being resolutely happy to engage in something that had created movement towards more desirable possibilities.

Conclusion

In this piece, I have demonstrated one possible means by which – inspired by Jameson, Levitas and Wright – a utopian-sociological method might utilise the holistic power of the utopian imagination, while maintaining a sense that the present from which it is imagined is somewhere from which it is plausible to take concrete steps in the directions suggested. The future society portrayed is not intended to seem perfect or complete (the matter of production is conspicuously absent in this account) but is presented as part of a method that explicitly incorporates imagined futures, as well as the history and present condition of a significant social institution. This application of the method seeks to maintain something of both senses of the term education of desire, through presenting an imagined social order that (hopefully) seems desirable, but which in its own terms and in its portrayal, remains open to critique and so offers a generative basis for altered or alternative visions. And it also seeks an orientation to concrete utopia, through emphasising the still-extant utopian potentials routinely encounterable in our cities, towns and communities and offering some sense of concrete means by which these might be activated and expanded.

Bringing together the utopian-sociological resources of Wright’s and Levitas’ differing methods does not necessarily provide any novel tools for use in the work of sociology’s engagement with utopian thought or in its orientation towards possible social futures, but by giving more emphasis to the utility of utopian fiction in such work, a timely focus and directness might be brought to bear in the way that the discipline engages its historical, empirical and imaginative capacities. As a discipline, sociology is well placed to understand that unless significant social change occurs very quickly, the grave social consequences already witnessed across the world of capitalism-driven climate change will deepen rapidly. This reality overlays and intensifies the neoliberalism-driven adversity imaginations face – as Jameson rightly identified – when seeking achievable, desirable, sustainable and egalitarian social futures. This rapid and intensified cancellation of the future makes a clear-sighted yet hopeful sociological imagination urgent and necessary in a renewed way, and imagining our way out of this tightest of spots – to the point of setting out in fictional scenarios how this might be achieved, supported by the epistemological solid ground of more conventional sociological analysis – seems like something worth having in our arsenal as we rise to this responsibility. In this way can connect our understanding of social change and the good and bad that emerges with it to plausible, desirable, yet critique-able and reshape-able scenarios that accompany and inform our insights – and assertions – about what urgently needs to happen.