Is there a place for utopia in scientific politics?

As is well known, the fall of the USSR and socialism in central and eastern European countries was not only a historical defeat of communism, but also a closure of alternatives to capitalism and its political and economic pathologies. Certainly, “the end of History”, Fukuyama’s infamous formula, proclaimed the global empire of capitalism, as well as the closing of horizons of expectations - a geographical extension correlative to a historical narrowing. A decade later, with the resuming of military intervention and the struggles for the control of the global economy, what became apparent is that we had negative futures ahead. To this day, the world economic system does not offer substantial improvement to populations, not even in the “first-world” countries; the ecological deterioration is evident even for lay people, and science has been “disenchanted” as it has lost the ability to evoke the hopes and promises that rose until the 1970s. Then again, science fiction shows this change, as it was by then that the genre, both in literature and other arts, in the USSR and in the West, became almost completely dystopian, as science’s role was subsumed to political and economic oppression (Moylan, 2000; Fitting, 2010). While in the Soviet imagination the socialist project required science as a social and economic driving force, to present population science is more a threat than a solution, both for common citizens and political leadership - albeit for very different reasons, of course.

As a consequence of such a lack of perspective and the dead end of capitalism, communism began to be reconsidered, and the theme science and utopias has gained new traction. In this matter, there is a whole range of positions. One side can be exemplified by French philosopher Alain Badiou, who tries to get rid of both references:

The real untiringly disproved scientific pretensions, so that is mandatory a critical distance with them. Only an understanding of societies stripped from the burden of the scientistic paradigm shall allow us to forge a will capable of leading them in the sense we consider more appropriate. (. . .) The communism I advocate is exactly the opposite to a utopia, even though is not “scientific” in any sense. It is simply a rational possibility of politics, and there are others, for example, the destruction of humanity due to the disastrous effects of globalized capitalism.

(Badiou & Gauchet, 2014, pp. 73—74)

Italian historian Enzo Traverso took a somewhat middle ground, not rejecting both categories, yet modifying them through the addition of the issue of memory, that is, the past as a source for the future:

Once cut short of its utopic dimension, Marxism stopped acting as a transmission vector of class memory, of emancipatory struggles and revolutions. (. . .) Science did not promise socialism, but this could rest on its results to satisfy the ancestral wish of happiness. Even reinterpreted as utopia - or possible alternative to barbarism —, socialism was still the historical telos, that is, the objective fixed by an action and fed by an ensemble of wishes that memory had cultivated. If we must summarize in one formula the Marxist conception of memory, we may take the definition proposed by Vincent Geoghegan, ‘remembering the future’”.

(Traverso, 2014, pp. 154-165, author’s italics)

Nevertheless, he also states that “the world can’t live with utopias, and it’s going to come up with new ones”, without ottering more elements for that wish.

At the other side of the spectrum, authors like Argentinian historian Ariel Petruccelli considers that “it is essential re-think calmly and thoroughly the problems of ethics and utopia, without abandoning the ones of science. The socialism of our time should keep a multiple commitment to ethical reflection, utopian imagination, scientific rigor, and political responsibility” (Petruccelli, 2016, p. 23). Moreover,

if we are to be faithful to the legacy of Marx, then we should pack in our backpacks the clothing of a rigorous scientist that try, productively yet perhaps without success, reach the truth, as well as the attires of the passionate revolutionary, willing to do the utmost sacrifices for his/her ideals. Thus, science and utopia.

(P- 287)

Actually, Petruccelli is far from being an orthodox communist, yet he represents the idea that science and utopia can and should be together in a post-Soviet socialism, as far as it does not repeat well-known dogmatisms.

Besides Marxism, with its understandable ambivalences towards the heritage of the "real socialism”, other political trends also decidedly included science in the search for future horizons. Some of them are reactionary, as the uses neoliberals and conservatives give to the new classical macroeconomics or sociobiology (Gomez, 2003; Rose & Rose, 2000). Others are antiestablishment, such as feminism which finds science as a necessary component for the subversion of the status quo. Philosopher Donna Haraway, in one of her most-known articles clearly stated: “Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason ‘we’ need it” (Haraway, 1991, p. 192). That is, women need science because they have been historically excluded from the production of knowledge and been unilaterally defined - and still are — by scientists incapable of realizing that they take as natural and mandatory what actually are their gender prejudices and ignorance. Feminist psychologists have critiqued, many times during the XXth century, the “natural” roles of motherhood and couplehood assumed by psychology' and psychiatry (Rutherford & Granek, 2010). Naomi Weisstein’s assertion that “psychology' has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know” (Weisstein, 1968/1992, p. 63) is still meaningful in that what psychology typically produces — including. I might add, Vygotskian inspired psychologies, as gender issues are not part of Vy'gotsky’s agenda and therefore are not regularly considered in this literature - does not seem productive or relevant for a future without gender oppression. Science then is a disputed domain because of the evidences, technologies and legitimation it provides, and therefore feminist psychology struggles against the androcentrism and patriarchy' both in their discipline as well as in society at large to provide knowledge and practices that would change the current relations among genders.

Contrary' to revolutionary Bolshevists, feminists seem to have been quite aware that their political aims are to be obtained in the long-term, not merely' in a few decades. As mentioned before, utopian thinking can be accepted as an inherently' positive value. Philosopher Claire Colebrook (2010) sensibly considers that a moderate hope towards the future can lead one to consider accomplished objectives beforehand, and so limit changes to very specific spheres. On the other hand, a radical utopia that implies an absolute break with the present situation leaves us without the present elements with which to build a future, and leads to dejection, cynicism and demands dislocated of present possibilities. According to her ideas, feminism should unfold a vision of a desirable future negatively inspired in the present, where specific attainments do not mean that the broad scenario became acceptable, but they provide a hopeful imaginary' that continues to drive activism through time. Can psychology, feminist or not, provide us with a sensible utopianism. this one described or any other? In any' case, it is apparent that we cannot accept ingenuity' or ready-made narratives when considering the possible futures our discipline is shaping.