Denaturalising Society: Concrete Utopia and the prefigurative critique of political economy

Dinerstein argues that the form of utopia today is not abstract but ‘concrete’. Concrete utopias are ‘denaturalising’ capitalist-colonial society as they are negating the given and creating alternative practices at the grassroots. Dinerstein suggests that Marx’s critique of political economy constitutes the most unforgiving critique of capitalist society. Yet, in order to grasp concrete utopias, Marx’s critique should be read ‘in the key of hope’, that is through the lenses of Bloch’s principle of hope. Like this, Marx’s critique become a prefigurative critique of political economy that recognises the process of shaping concrete utopia as a critique of the value form from within the process of the self-expansion of value. In the final section, Dinerstein enquiries about the adequacy of the term concrete utopia to understand indigenous struggles for self-determination. She offers the notion of ‘subsumption by exclusion’ to argue for a particular form of subordination of indigenous peoples in capital. They ‘appear’ outside but also constitute a threat to the expansion of value. Both kinds of concrete utopia navigate the open veins of capital.