Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism

by Maple Razsa

Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants in what they call alterglobalization or "globalization from below." Ethnographer Maple Razsa follows individual activists from the transnational protests against globalization of the early 2000s through the Occupy encampments. His portrayal of activism is both empathetic and unflinching—an engaged, elegant meditation on the struggle to re-imagine leftist politics and the power of a country's youth.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2015

Reviews

[Anna]

When I started reading Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism six months ago, I was surprised to find that despite the fun title it is written in full academic style complete with in-text citations. That's on me for not paying attention. I found the introduction quite dense, so put the book aside for months. Then last week I was annoyed by non-fiction that should have included more references, so picked up Bastards of Utopia again. Once I'd got through the introduction, I was accustomed to the style and found it compelling and readable. The book is a robust, thoughtful, and detailed examination of anarchist life and activism, based on more than a decade of fieldwork with three anarchists based in Slovenia and Croatia. Their activism took them across Europe, notably to Thessaloniki, Greece in 2003 for a major protest at a meeting of EU heads of state that is examined in chapter three. A later chapter focuses on the Occupy movement in Slovenia during 2011.

Razsa's work is very much in the tradition of David Graeber, as he explains in the introduction, befriending the anarchists and participating in their activities as well as analysing them. I recall Graeber writing that anarchism isn't an ideology but a practice, something that you do. Razsa definitely echoes that within Bastards of Utopia, by listening, observing, and talking with the anarchists. He evidently didn't treat them just as research subjects, which is probably why they were happy for him to hang out with them for many years! The book is accompanied by a video documentary and refers to short videos throughout the book. These are available here, although I haven't watched them yet due to not wanting to interrupt my reading.

I found Bastards of Utopia fascinating and insightful as recent history and political anthropology. Although it isn't a book of theory, there are some thought-provoking theoretical implications of the anarchist ideas and practices discussed:

[Quote from Andrej:] There is, after all, no position outside of power relations from which we might act. It is possible, however, to use a discourse of rights without falling into state-centred politics. There is no necessary contradiction, in fact, between claiming rights while trying to construct stateless sociabilities and communities. Direct democracy for us means that we reject the transfer of rights and powers to any sovereign. So we have to find new ways to produce rights - by defining them such that we simultaneously build our power to realise them. This is a politics of small steps that accumulate new forms of alternative power that can be used in the war being waged globally by financial institutions, markets, and the institutions of representative democracy against our generation.

[...] What Andrej is describing is a radically different understanding of rights (Kurnik 2011) than one encounters within classic liberal theory. What he envisions are not natural rights, God given or otherwise, which we have by belonging to the human race (human rights), or legal rights, which we have as citizens of a state, democratic or otherwise, that has guaranteed those rights constitutionally (civil rights). Instead, these are rights that are produced collectively, that we possess only insofar as we have the capacity to assert them socially, i.e. only insofar as we build together with others the collective capacities to exercise them.

I really enjoyed reading about the practical applications of this, including practices of Direct Social Work and action to help the homeless. I found the whole book hopeful and stimulating.

[Maarya Abbasi]

holy holy holy holy holy shit

this is the kind of ethnography i've been waiting my whole life to read

will forever be processing this work, i think

damn

(more thoughts to come)

[Mara Reba]

Read for my prof’s class.

[Caroline Shin]

Read for Professor Rasza’s GS352 Liberation struggles class — makes me want to become a global studies major….