You say you want a revolution

Joseph Skvorecky, a survivor of both Nazi and Communist regimes, is quoted:

In 1981, long before the Iron Curtain fell, Mr. Skvorecky shared a stage in Toronto with Margaret Atwood, Allen Ginsberg and others who were discussing “The Writer and Human Rights.” He said that an artist must be a reactionary, to stand out from his culture by offering “some little opposition.”

“Frankly, I feel frustrated whenever I have to talk about revolution for the benefit of people who have never been through one,” he said. “They are — if you’ll excuse the platitude — like a child who doesn’t believe that fire hurts, until he burns himself. I, my generation, my nation, have been involuntarily through two revolutions, both of them socialist: one of the right variety, one of the left. Together they destroyed my peripheral vision.”

National Post, Jan 3/12

Compare, oh, say Ursula LeGuin, in "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974):

Amai had grown up in Odonion Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy.  And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for , this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.

reprinted in Claeys and Sargent, The Utopia Reader, p. 413

She does try to evade the peripheries via "anarchy", but, as I think we've seen (Spanish Civil War, etc.), this simply makes her revolutionaries  inept, not less burning. And LeGuin is certainly an example of someone who's been chastened to some degree at least by the 20th century:

There would not be slums like this, if the revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition,... So long as people were free to choose [!], if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people. 

pp. 417-8

But note the old, almost medieval scarecrows of "Business" and "profit". 

History vs. Utopia

Once upon a time, as I've said elsewhere, I was a socialist, and a "Marxian" if not a Marxist (the former indicating, not  a being from the planet Marx, but simply strong but not uncritical influence). In those days, this position was strongly associated with the idea of History (the upper case indicating that this was a special sort of abstraction). Indeed, in those days it was clear to we socialists that History was on our side, and this was a conviction built right in to the intellectual structure of the system. You can get a taste of this conviction from a passage like this, in Darko Suvin's overview of Science fiction:

When the industrial revolution becomes divorced from the democratic one [a way of putting the fact that capitalism has not given way to socialism] -- a divorce which is the fundamental political event of the bourgeois epoch -- activism becomes exasperated and leads to the demand for another epistemological and practical break, signalled by Blake's Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land and the cosmic "passionate attraction" of Fourier's phalansteries. Such imaginative energies converge in Marx, the great prefigurator of the imaginative shift still being consummated in our times.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 73-4 (emphasis added) 

It would never have done, of course, to admit that there might be elements of faith in such a conviction -- rather, it was always insisted that this historical bias or tendency was a matter of science, the science of history, aka dialectical materialism. But this was hardly the sort of politically disinterested science that is content to follow wherever research and observation points -- nor was it even politicized science. It was, from the beginning, a wholly political project that simply assumed or appropriated the mantle of science. And its notion of History, therefore, as a kind of force that constructs and controls the future was always merely the expression of a political desire or wish or dream.

Not unlike, ironically, the notion of Utopia. Except, of course, that Utopia is the wish or dream stripped bare, its cloak of "science" and inevitability torn away. Now, Suvin's remarks above were published sometime in 1979, before Thatcher and Reagan, and before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global disintegration of communism or "actually existing socialism". Since all that, the confident faith that we see in Suvin has certainly been tried, and in many cases has crumbled. And with that, it's not surprising, however pathetic, to see the former believers return to musing about Utopia again, sometimes, as we see in Jameson in 2005, with a kind frustrated defiance. Contrast the tone of the passage below with the blithe confidence of the Suvin passage above:

The relationship between Utopia and the political, as well as questions about the practical-political value of Utopian thinking and the identification between socialism and Utopia [!?], very much continue to be unresolved topics today, when Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a political slogan and a politically energizing perspective.

... What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available. The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a representational mediation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality,...

Archaeologies of the Future, pp. xi-xii

Anti-anti-utopianism

On the analogy to "anti-anti-communism" (Sartre):

... even if we can no longer adhere with an unmixed conscience [!] to this unreliable form [of Utopia], we can now have recourse to that ingenious [!] political slogan Sartre invented to find his way between a flawed communism and an even more unaccaeptable anti-communism. ... for those only too wary of the motives of its critics [!?], yet no less conscious of Utopia's structural ambiguities, those mindful of the very real political function of the idea and the program of Utopia in our time, the slogan of anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy.

Jameson,  Archaeologies of the Future, p. xvi

 Noteworthy for its moral, political, and cultural defensiveness -- the siege mentality of the contemporary Left. Akin, in this, to the replacement of "socialism" with "anti-capitalism" among the lumpen "masses".

Underlying it is also a rather bizarre notion of a separation between "art and culture" and "the social" -- "a separation that inaugurates culture as a realm in its own right and defines it as such". But then 

... that very distance of culture from its social context which allows it to function as a critique and indictment of the latter also dooms its interventions to ineffectuality and relegates art and culture to a frivolous, trivialized space in which such intersections are neutralized in advance.

p. xv

But, amid the confusions, bad faith, and special pleading involved in such contortions, you can feel a real pathos in such passages. And perhaps a certain courage, in facing the loss of belief, unaccompanied by any foundational alternative.