
John Meynard Keynes, in 1930, predicted that a century later economic powers such as the United States and affluent European countries would be blessed with a fifteen-hour workweek.

This would mean the end of utopia” (Five, Marcuse 62) We also have the capacity to turn it into the opposite of hell.

“Today we have the capacity to turn the world into hell, and we are well on the way to doing so. “I believe that as a society we have not much work left” (Stanley Aronowitz) Pascual Sisto, I Would Prefer Not To, 2011Ĭapitalism and the Impossibility of Utopia: or the Incompatibility Problem The previous conclusion could explain why the Utopian as a political tool is not the most efficient, and why the Utopian today expresses itself predominantly in more concrete forms. The need for neoliberalism to absorb inconsistencies within the organization of society in order to persist can, equally, be said to be the perquisite for Utopia. This paper, therefore, examines the structural similarities between Utopianism, based upon the literary canon and our current politico-economic system. However, in order to come to the conclusion that capitalism is a threat to our creative abilities to think beyond the status quo both sides of the spectrum need to be compared and weighted out against each other. The existing analyses of the interaction between the Utopian in literature and our current politico-economic system carefully look into the mechanisms of capitalism and its perverting consequences, while omitting any extensive observations of the Utopian. The crisis of Utopianism is often related to and explained by the critique-numbing effects of capitalism.
