Nice shorts he has tho’. Ralph Lauren – is the brand still ‘of the moment’?

(No gay shorts joking from me – yet).

We should Unashamedly Embrace Utopia

We should be, without hesitation or embarrassment, utopians. At the end of the twentieth century it is the only acceptable political option, morally speaking. I shall not dwell on this. I will merely say that, irrespective of what may have seemed apt hitherto either inside or outside the Marxist tradition, nothing but a utopian goal will now suffice. The realities of our time are morally intolerable. Within the constricted scope of the present piece, I suppose I might try to evoke a little at least of what I am referring to here, with some statistics or an imagery of poverty, destitution and other contemporary calamities- But I do not intend to do even this much. The facts of widespread human privation and those of political oppression and atrocity are available to all who want them. They are unavoidable unless you wilfully shut them out. To those who would suggest that things might be yet worse, one answer is that of course they might be. But another answer is that for too many people they are already quite bad enough; and the sponsors of this type of suggestion are for their part almost always pretty comfortable.
 http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/geras1.htm

There is more than one sort of utopian and more than one sort of anti-utopian. Those who tend to be most seduced by utopias, *and* more repressive of utopias are not the people that offer a bold vision of a future remade but those that seek to impose a fictitious past on a reluctant present i.e. they are reactionaries.