Economics and Utopia

In this chapter we focus on political economy as a way of providing a new social and political realm. Our project is not an economical proposal but we start claiming that economy definied hardly our lives and if we do not control the economic system it controls us instead.

The socialist tradition here stems mainly in Marx analysis of the capital and in its possible abolition to reach an unavoidable end of a communist future. From this analysis we take here his concept of alienation.

Alienation, describe as the reaction that human being has when producing something that does not belong to her and therefore that she produces is an alien.Firstly, because you are also what you do, you are what you produce. If your main task is to produce an alien object,in the labour division of function of our society, then there is a lack of meaning and a lack of satisfaction.

We analyses this concept that is related to production in the factories,shifting it to the current white-collar factories, the contemporary offices and the levels of dissatisfaction that office employees suffer, as Rosse and Saturay (2004) show.

To attack the current structure we have to focus on late-capitalism, and for that we use its political opposition, this is socialism. First we will focus on production, and after in consumption. However, we do not believe not the socialist utopia neither the liberal utopia.

The Liberal utopia, has its roots in Adam Smith's natural economy. This is the natural right of humans to take the material good of the earth, own, transform them to fulfil their needs, and sell them in a market among free individual fellows. But, as Marx argues, this natural way its not natural but historic, it has been socially constructed and imposed. There is not an origin or beginning of it. This beginning, or the mith of liberalism, is expressed in Robinson Crusoe adventure.

In our proposal we use both sources, on the one hand, the socialist superstructure of a lack of individual ownership, the lack of capital and the communist production, but abstracted into a unique individual-society, so using the mith of a Robinson Crusue whose island is the office and whose material goods are manufacture products.

Here Utopia, or may be Dystopia, is not used as and end, just as a means to a very personal and particular end that no longer will bring any universal salvation, but just a personal awareness of our character.