Christian Høgsbjerglaunched his new publication for the Socialist History Society on March 27th at 7pm An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.

In what way is utopianism distinct from the broader categories of hope, wishful thinking and the imagination? Fifthly, restraining population growth will suppress demand for commodities. Sixthly, we must reduce our sense of self-identity as a reliance on having a choice of consumer goods. Social solidarity can only grow where an attachment to objects diminishes. Indeed Claeys admits that the line is hard to hold. This is most notable in the twentieth century and through to the present. After all, many of the most prominent utopian (or dystopian) writers of the era, including H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson, are at once canonical science fiction writers and regarded as among the most important contributors to the utopian tradition. (Margaret Atwood is a more awkward case, because she long denied – implausibly – that her work was science fiction, even as it was widely read and analyzed as a prominent example of it). This isn’t just a matter of locating writers in the appropriate genre, or of recognizing the utopian claims of much science fiction. Rather, it speaks to both a conceptual point about the character of utopian thought and an historical point about what happens to utopianism in the twentieth century.Reducing consumerism requires at least twelve strategies. Firstly, we need to end planned obsolescence, or the deliberate design of goods to have the shortest viable shelf-life. Our attitude must be, to paraphrase Aldous Huxley, that mending is better than ending. [ Brave New World (Penguin Books, 1955), p. 49.]

Ninthly, we require a vibrant feminism which results in equalising gender opportunities across society. Women, who possess considerably more power than men in disposing of household budgets, need full choice over their reproductive capacities, which will reduce family sizes. There is a way of averting this catastrophe, however. A programme of extremely rapid sustainable energy development, mainly wind, solar and tidal power, could produce 100% renewable energy supply by 2030. Eighthly, we can reduce our working hours, particularly as new machines are introduced, once demand for output is reduced. (But we need to avoid simply displacing greater demand to commodity-centred leisure activities.) A society defined by belongingness cannot be conjured out of nothing, but must rely on precedents of viable human behaviour. For most of us, by contrast to past utopianism, which has often urged a “return to nature” on the land, city life defines our basic existence. But cities are often unliveable, and created or developed largely for profit rather than for human life. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, August 2022) I conjecture that group theory indicates that neighbourhood identity can provide a vital form of belongingness in large modern cities, to counter the sense of alienation which living in large masses often produces. But cities will also have to become much more pleasant and sustainable, even as temperatures rise significantly in the coming decades. They will have to become much greener, with many more parks, outdoor plazas, and public meeting places, free of most automobile traffic, and easier to move around in, by free public transportation. Festivals and subsidised communal activities will need to provide many more opportunities to meet and enjoy the company of others — I term this a neo-Fourierist approach, after the famous French socialist Charles Fourier. The future utopia must be made as “attractive” (one of Fourier’s favourite terms) as possible. These features will allow us to compensate for a decline in attachment to luxuries and unsustainable consumption, and the many attendant difficulties and frugality which transition to a sustainable society will entail, by ensuring greater means of self-expression and forms of communal pleasure. A society defined by belongingness cannot be conjured out of nothing, but must rely on precedents of viable human behaviour. For most of us, by contrast to past utopianism, which has often urged a “return to nature” on the land, city life defines our basic existence. But cities are often unliveable, and created or developed largely for profit rather than for human life. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, August 2022) I conjecture that group theory indicates that neighbourhood identity can provide a vital form of belongingness in large modern cities, to counter the sense of alienation which living in large masses often produces. But cities will also have to become much more pleasant and sustainable, even as temperatures rise significantly in the coming decades. They will have to become much greener, with many more parks, outdoor plazas, and public meeting places, free of most automobile traffic, and easier to move around in, by free public transportation. Festivals and subsidised communal activities will need to provide many more opportunities to meet and enjoy the company of others – I term this a neo-Fourierist approach, after the famous French socialist Charles Fourier. The future utopia must be made as “attractive” (one of Fourier’s favourite terms) as possible. These features will allow us to compensate for a decline in attachment to luxuries and unsustainable consumption, and the many attendant difficulties and frugality which transition to a sustainable society will entail, by ensuring greater means of self-expression and forms of communal pleasure.To the doomers, in one corner of the ring, despair freezes action, and a sense of chilling remorse is supplanted by numbness which denies the possibility of any reprieve. To the denialists, in the other, none of this is real, and abundant profits await those willing to continue the exploitation of nature.

There can now be no viable political theory which does not centrally offer an analysis of humanity’s long-term future. And all forms of existing social and political theory which rely on ideas of an indefinite expansion of production, consumption, and population growth, which include most forms of both liberalism and Marxism, are no longer relevant and must be superseded. So we are at a real turning-point in history. Fourthly, we need to shift towards a concept of public luxury, shared by all in museums, festivals, including free public transport and the like, and away from private luxury, and at the same time shift our values towards ‘consuming’ experience shared with others (or alone, as in some computer games) and away from consuming unsustainable commodities. This will require remodelling cities to give a feeling of neighbourhood and ‘belongingness’, a sense of place with which we can identify, and which is in my view also a central goal of utopianism historically. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth century before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities.

Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism, by Gregory Claeys was published by Princeton University Press in 2022. Gregory Claeys is Professor of the History of Political Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London. Eleventh, we must eliminate the expectation that speed of delivery and the volume of the product are the ultimate goals in consumption. This process, sometimes termed the McDonaldization of society [George Ritzer. The McDonaldization of Society (9th edn, Sage Publications, 2019)] places a premium on quantity over quality, and haste (‘fast food’) and instant gratification over sociability and delayed satisfaction. It also encourages indebtedness (‘buy now, pay later’), and the downward spiral of shopping-to-compensate for the depression we feel from being indebted as a result of shopping too much. Slower is often better. Utopia is often wrongly identified with “perfection”, although we find crime, war, slavery and divorce in More’s paradigmatic text. To my mind “perfection” is a concept inherited from theology which ought not to be identified with utopianism, though we do occasionally encounter it in Christian utopianism. (Think of John Humphrey Noyes “Perfectionism” or “Bible Communism” and the Oneida community.) There are some secular equivalents: Condorcet writes of “true perfection of mankind” being achieved when all humanity had achieved a high level of civilisation. But utopias typically take human fallibility into account, and attempt to regulate behaviour without expecting that anyone can ever be “perfect”. They may be “perfectibilist” in the sense of striving for much better societies. But they never end in “perfection”. The psychology of the small group is central here to regulating behaviour without requiring stringent policing and physical punishment. We consent voluntarily to join groups and maintain their norms where we see benefit in so doing. We do not seek to evade the rules or become free riders where we accept that when everyone keeps to the rules the society functions much better. At the same time, our education systems must attempt to foster more co-operative behaviour. Competition has its place, but we must have a much stronger sense of communal ethos if we are to make the sacrifices necessary to creating a sustainable planet. Everyone interested in the past, present, and future of utopianism will find something of value in this book, as well as things to argue against. Here I want to focus on one point where I diverge from Claeys. Throughout Utopianism for a Dying Planet, and in his others writings on the utopian tradition, Claeys is adamant that it is necessary to draw a distinction between utopianism and science fiction. They are different genres, with different aims and ambitions. In Utopianism for a Dying Planet he makes the point in several places. Science fiction, he writes, is “generally excluded” from his analysis (18n38); elsewhere, he contends that utopian fiction “is a form of fantasy fiction but is closer to the realistic or realizable end of the spectrum, compared with the more extreme fantasy of science fiction” (27). This move follows, in part, from his commitment to the enhanced sociability model of utopianism; he wants to exclude science fiction narratives because, on his account, they do not engage extensively with this topic. As such, they are not serious instances of utopianism. I am not persuaded by this boundary-work.