As for your question about why I fight against the “political economy”: well, I do not think of the “political economy” as a solely a radical epistemology bringing politics and economics together. I think of politics and economics already materially being a part of the social landscape as one thing (i.e. neoliberalism and libertarianism), regardless of how many politicians deny this fact. But this makes me simply a Foucauldian I guess, more than a Marxist (at least as I far as I understand these fields of thought).

I have no doubt that the protesters know that the wall is just a symptom, not the disease. In other words, I’m sure they’re aware that they’re fighting a symbol of pan-american and global economic injustice and that even if the powers that be say “okay, you’re right, down with the wall!” the poverty and slums and ghettos will go on, etc.

Which brings me to another thought. Isn’t it that the Black Panthers–here I go again!–were so threatening to the status quo not because they wore berets, leather jackets, naturals, and guns, but because for a while they were a smoothly running machine giving away free breakfast and free education to the people in the ghettos? And they mainly came from the ghettos. Are the No Borders Camp activists—at least on the Mexican side—directly affected by the poverty that makes people risk their lives to cross the border? And for the American side, how else do they express their solidarity with the poor? If chanting “tear down the wall” and getting beat up is all that they’re doing, I respect that, it’s still much more than what I’m doing, but I don’t see any power in that to change anything.

when we talk about Marxist conceptions of Utopia the category of change becomes a tricky one. The dialectic is fundamental to conceiving of a true notion of utopia, namely not as perfection but as process. It is precisely this form of change Jameson stresses: change is not envisioning an alternative as much as it consists in a perpetual dialectical process that pinpoints the contradictions of the present. Jameson is very Blochian here, defining utopia rigorously as the “not yet,” in other words as that, which can not be thought in the present, since a teleology of perfection would neither be a dialectical hypothesis nor a true move beyond the limiting logic of the present (and would thus contain neither true futurity nor progressive or even utopian thought/politics). As uncomfortable as this may makes us, utopia and a truly different future per se must remain unthinkable. Ergo, we as critics should spend less time envisioning a perfect society (which in Marxist terms would not just be illogically anti-dialectical but also not progressive, since it would just be an extension of our present logic) and instead create the future in the dialectical examination of the present and past contradictions that need to be worked through–our job is analysis and through this analysis create true futurity–we should be the archaeologists of the future (a job which, as the title suggests, should be thought of as rewarding precisely because it is a job primarily interested in and consisting of contradictions–and that, after all, is the most important thing in Marxist analysis.)
hope this helped a bit–cheers, cj