Is It Possible To Live In A Utopia?

Is it possible to live in a Utopia?

After reading about so many different Utopias and dystopias, it is hard to really believe that they can actually work in a real society. The two topis I will be discussing are Karl Marx and the film Blade Runner. It's strange to even imagine living a life where you were restricted to so few lifestyles and to follow them. Living in our society today I learn new things everyday and am encouraged to explore outside of my own life. When I was sitting down trying to think of what my own Utopia would be like, I kept stopping myself because I realized that a utopian society really can't work. The Communists tried to make their own socialist world, and when they thought of bringing it to the US we got so nervous and immediately put a stop to it. Human instinct is too strong to put that many restrictions on life and greed and all those other human traits can never disappear.

Karl Marx was against Capitalism. He wrote about the need for change. He thought that the capitalists were treating the workers poorly, by only paying them enough to survive and nothing more. The workers feel that their only purpose in life is to work and to produce income for the capitalists. The Capitalists were the owners of the factories, which meant that the workers could not gain from their production. This made the workers feel that they worked for survival only, and not for self gain or pleasure or anything of that sort. It alienated them from the products they were working on, since none of them could ever dream of having the product they were making for themselves. Marx felt that this would eventually cause an attempt to overthrow the capitalists. Hugely influenced my German philosopher Hegel, but Marx's ideas contradicted Hegel's by saying that history was a succession of economic systems and production whereas Hegel saw history as a succession of ideas and working out contradictions.

In order to change the current system of production, Marx introduced 'The Labor Theory of Value'. " The labor theory of value states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor that went into producing it" (Karl Marx) This new theory could then help the workers by selling their products in order to by commodities that satisfy their own needs. This is much different than the Capitalist system.

I feel that the problem with Marx's ideas are that human instincts such as greed and desire are too strong and can never be taken away. Workers are going to want to sell their products for more, and once they get the freedom to gain from their products they are going to want to buy a lot more and greed will overcome anything. The capitalists were wrong and Karl Marx's ideas were wrong as well. They just can't work when humans were born with their instincts.

In the film Blade Runner, Philip Dick's ( author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) world of humans and Replicants is a true illustration of what people think the future will hold. Why everyone thinks that robots will rule the world in the future I will never know, but it seems to be the topic in every sci-fi movie about the future. Dick's version of a Utopia is quite the opposite, in fact it is more of a dystopia, as things go wrong. The replicants are sent to other worlds as slaves and even though they don't really have human instincts (they are given fake memories and ideas) they suddenly go awry and start to hurt humans. So they have to then create more robots to disarm the replicants, thus the Blade Runners are born. If the movie continued perhaps the Blade Runners would go awry and they would have to create another robot. I just don't think that creating something to do the work of a human is the easy way out. In the film, the replicants