Es gibt keine Utopien für das 21. Jahrhundert

In der heutigen Ausgabe der ZEIT (Hamburg-Seiten) zitiere ich Erck Rickmers, den Unternehmer und Gründer des New Institute, mit den Worten: »Die Menschheit taumelt einer Zukunft entgegen, für die es kaum utopische Szenarien geben kann.«

Das ist ein Satz, dessen Wucht und Tragik man wohl leicht unterschätzt.

Denselben Gedanken lese ich jetzt — etwas weiter ausgeführt — in einem Essay des Literaturwissenschaftlers Nathan Brown.

Browns Denken bewegt sich in den Bahnen marxistischer Theorie, also einer der utopischen Denkrichtungen schlechthin, doch er hat wenig Hoffnung, dass diese auf das 21. Jahrhundert noch anwendbar ist.

Brown schreibt:

»[C]limate change […] has altered the fundamental basis of the class relation as it will play out in the future of the twenty-first century: some areas of the globe will remain habitable and some will not. Proletarians in some parts of the world will have to work in impossible temperatures to reproduce their existence, and those in other parts of the world will not. This will be the fundamental political division of the second half of the twenty-first century. It is certainly a class division, but it is also a division determined by geography. Those proletarians and those surplus populations who will have to work and live in uninhabitable temperatures will have to migrate, or they will die. It seems probable that some five hundred million to one billion people will have to migrate in search of livable climates by 2075 or 2100. Notably, this geographical determination divides rather than unifies the proletariat as an international class: as we have seen, those proletarians who do not live in what will become uninhabitable regions will tend to resist the migration of those who do, making common cause with brutal border regimes and neofascist forms of populist politics.«

Daraus folgt:

»The future of politics at an international level appears as a brutal confrontation of wealthy states and rootless populations, the former massively armed, determined to preserve their borders and to crush any internal resistance to that preservation; the latter’s strength resting only in sheer numbers, which is indeed a formidable power but ultimately unlikely to overcome the drone and robot armies of the present and the future.«

Dieses Szenario ist gespenstisch nah an dem Satz, den George Orwell einst in seinem Roman 1984 formulierte:

»If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.«

Nathan Browns Essay unter dem Titel Absolute Alienation erschien im Onlinemagazin e-flux notes, es ist hier nachzulesen.