«This text is based on a lecture I gave on Jat a conference organized by wissentransfer and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in Berlin on the same theme.

I am not at all surprised to find myself once again in a generation which has become skeptical of capitalism, although it also do not believes in our alternative» Sober observers believed this system would in the long run overtake capitalism in productive capacity. Abstract utopias were imagined states, postulations and thought experiments that were not intended to be brought into being. As absurd as it may sound now, between 19 reasonable observers assumed that the state-controlled economic system of the Soviet Union with its five-year plans, which even the most sympathetic visitors had to find primitive and inefficient, represented a global alternative model to Western ‹free enterprise.› At that time the word ‹capitalism› attracted just as little approval as the word ‹communism› does today. In his magisterial multi-volume tome, The Principles of Hope, Ernst Bloch identified two important trends in this utopic thinking: abstract and concrete utopia. Capitalism itself appeared to be standing at the edge of an abyss. We were all marked by it.✳ A few years later, in his autobiography, he reminded us that – in view of the prevailing opinion since 1991 that there was absolutely no alternative to the society of individualistic capitalism and the political system of liberal democracy – «during the greater part of the 20th century … such assumptions seemed quite implausible. Concrete Utopia (Korean: ) is a 2023 South Korean disaster-thriller film directed by Um Tae-hwa and starring Lee Byung-hun, Park Seo-joon and Park Bo-young.The film is based on the second part of webtoon Pleasant Bullying by Kim Soongnyung, which is about an earthquake and its aftermath. The world which fell apart at the end of the 1980s, thus Eric Hobsbawm in the «Age of Extremes» (1998: 18), was a «world shaped by the effects of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The 20th century was, on the one hand, a «century of socialism,✲ on the other – when it ended – a century of defeats and disappointed hopes, which were connected to socialism. In the introduction to his «Tübinger Philosophie,» Ernst Bloch (1996: 95) differentiated between utopias that are «abstract» and «utopias that become concrete.» They remain abstract in so far as «their schemes could not be connected to the available societal tendency and possibilities … they have to remain abstract in so far as they came too early.» Concrete utopias, on the other hand, contemplate a life without fear and compulsion, which is really possible and necessary, as the negation of the existing relations. Social-Ecological Transformation and Climate Justice.Infrastructure, Social Rights, and Social Justice.Antifascism and the Politics of Remembrance.

Abstract utopia is the realm of wishful thinking and is. Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism concrete utopia, without which the transformative utopian impulse cannot be accurately portrayed.Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies.Academic Trustees of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.Historical Centre for Democratic Socialism.Centre for International Dialogue and Cooperation.

Abstract and concrete utopia