Advancing Utopistics: The Three Component Parts and Errors of Marxism

Inspired by Immanuel Wallerstein's Utopistics, this book shows why utopistics cannot advance without sober and self-critical revisitations of its own intellectual heritage. Most sympathetic critiques of Marxism have targeted the shortcomings in its practices and/or theories (including its materialist conception of history), while regarding Marx's materialist dialectical method as sacred ground. Through a succinct analysis of the inner contradictions of the three practical, theoretical, and methodological tenets of classical Marxism, Tamdgidi argues that the root causes of Marxism's decline must be sought in Marx's method itself. This book concludes with a critical reexamination of the relation of Marxism and utopianism, arguing that Marx and Engels's debunking of utopianism in contrast to science had more of an ideological function than substantive merits, an ultimate error that set back the cause of advancing alternative strategies for radical social change for decades. A substantial methodological appendix is devoted to the exposition of a non-reductive, creative dialectical method more conducive to advancing utopistics.

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi is Associate Professor of Sociology, teaching social theory at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of Gurdjieff and Hypnosis: A Hermeneutic Study (Palgrave 2009) and Founding Editor of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge.