Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism

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However, energy supply is not the only issue confronting us. Resource depletion, and carbon and other harmful emissions, are crucially the result of the consumption habits of the wealthiest 10% or so of the globe’s inhabitants. Globally the richest 10% generate 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the richest 1%, 80% of that total. Without curtailing this waste we stand no chance of survival. In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today’s thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. As a matter of principle we cannot understand utopia without confronting dystopia, for they are intimately interrelated. Much greater social equality is upheld in nearly all utopian visions, whilst extreme inequality is typically associated with dystopia, and with current neoliberal societies like Britain and the US, and kleptocracies like Russia. So we will need a Universal Basic Income, a four-day work-week, the guarantee of universal health care and so on. Right-wing “utopias” typically rely on the labour of the many to support the ideal lifestyle of the few — think of Nazi Germany, but also white supremacy racism generally. Enslavement, pervasive fear, widespread disinformation, and oppression of minority groups typifies these “utopias”, which are dystopias for the minority. So if we accept a modified version of the Morean paradigm of utopian republicanism, greater equality and widespread consent must define any future utopian vision. So my book proposes that the history and concepts associated with the utopian tradition can be extremely helpful in the transition to sustainability. The utopian tradition has long relied on the idea that both individual and social happiness rests on substantial social equality, and that such equality in turn rests upon a contempt for vanity and the obsessive consumption of luxury goods. This we glean both from the theory of works like Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), but equally from large numbers of practical utopian communal experiments, mostly from the 16th century onwards, in which the price of social harmony has often been calculated in terms of a willingness to place needs above wants, and to discourage excessive consumption. Original, punctiliously researched, and erudite, Utopianism for a Dying Planet suggests a possible and potentially effective way of responding to what is increasingly and universally seen as the gravest crisis ever faced by humanity.” —Artur Blaim , University of Gdansk

The main themes of the utopian tradition from the twentieth century onwards have been the reconstitution of self and society through technology. During the last century or so utopian thinking, and its dystopian double, was far more likely to focus on the possibilities of space flight, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and so forth, that on the benefits of rejecting technological modernity and all its possibilities. Often, work in this vein has been dystopian. But much of it – from Wells’s technocratic visions through the socialist-transhumanist biology of J. B. S. Haldane and J. D. Bernal to the worlds of Ursula Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson and Iain M. Banks – has embraced various utopian technoscientific visions. Perhaps this intellectual shift signaled the end of an earlier phase of utopian writing, focused on questions of luxury and enhanced social belonging (though I think this is arguable). But even if it did, it meant that a new phase in utopianism had emerged that reflected, and sought to harness, many of the dominant intellectual, political, and cultural trends of the societies in which it was produced. This is the world to which Wells, Le Guin, Robinson, and an army of others, were responding, whether to warn of its profound dangers, map its contours, or to search for the possibilities of emancipation it contained. And it is this literature that has had the most to say about the Anthropocene. Note: The post gives the views of its authors, not the position USAPP– American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics. A timely rethinking of the usefulness of the utopian tradition in the light of climate change and the consequent necessity to add in sustainability as one of its essential components.” —Gareth Stedman Jones, author of Karl Marx: Greatness and IllusionThis blog post is based on book, Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism (Princeton University Press, 2022) and first appeared at the LSE EUROPP blog. Gregory Claeys is Professor of History of Political Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. His main research interests lie in the fields of social and political reform movements from the 1790s to the early twentieth century, with a special focus on utopianism and early socialism. Professor Claeys’s book, Utopianism for a Dying Planet, seeks to elaborate a utopian theory that can help us respond to the climate crisis.

As a matter of principle we cannot understand utopia without confronting dystopia, for they are intimately interrelated. Much greater social equality is upheld in nearly all utopian visions, whilst extreme inequality is typically associated with dystopia, and with current neoliberal societies like Britain and the US, and kleptocracies like Russia. So we will need a Universal Basic Income, a four-day work-week, the guarantee of universal health care and so on. Right-wing “utopias” typically rely on the labour of the many to support the ideal lifestyle of the few – think of Nazi Germany, but also white supremacy racism generally. Enslavement, pervasive fear, widespread disinformation, and oppression of minority groups typifies these “utopias”, which are dystopias for the minority. So if we accept a modified version of the Morean paradigm of utopian republicanism, greater equality and widespread consent must define any future utopian vision. You discuss the concern that utopia’s alleged drive towards perfection makes it totalitarian. How do you respond to other arguments that utopia is authoritarian because it requires or enforces a certain type of participation from individuals, e.g., that their behaviour is somehow improved, that they are more community-minded, kinder to one another, etc? Do you think that there is anything to the accusation that utopia is illiberal in this sense? In the context of the climate crisis, do we have the time to be worried about this type of concern? What utopianism almost uniquely offers us is firstly a demand that we think about long-term futures rather than the short four- to five-year economic and political cycles which typically dominate our thinking. Secondly, utopian thought usually envisions a vastly better future than the one we live in. Thirdly, it involves a concern with the common good rather than the profits of the few. And fourthly, it is predicated on a vision of improved social relations between people, on enhanced solidarity, amicability, mutuality, respect, and greater social equality. These are the key utopian values, portrayed in thousands of ideal worlds from the Renaissance to the present. In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability.The excision of science fiction leads to an overly narrow account of the development of the utopian tradition in the twentieth century. It means that much of the most innovative and influential writing on imagined futures is sidelined or redescribed as if it didn’t form part of the genre which helped to shape it. Indeed, I would suggest that during the twentieth century, and especially its second half, utopianism and science fiction became largely inseparable. The utopian tradition, in other words, was reconfigured. Science fiction was and remains the dominant register in which visions of the future, or of alternative worlds, whether utopian, dystopian, or something else, are imagined. It is where the “futurological function” has found its most widespread and powerful expression. The massive expansion in the popularity of science fiction, in literature, film, television, and computer gaming, was itself a reflection of the ever-growing dominance of technoscience in societies throughout the world. Science fiction is the principal reflective literature of twentieth century technological modernity – its most authentic literature, as J. G. Ballard often commented. Of course, there were utopian texts – Huxley’s Island (1962) is a famous example – that challenged the value of technoscientific visions of society. But like William Morris’s classic News from Nowhere (1890), they form part of a minority tradition, a counterpoint to the dominant trends in twentieth century techno-utopian thought. Twelfth, and perhaps most obviously, we must drastically restrict carbon consumption to reduce C0 2 and other emissions. This will entail an immediate move to renewable forms of energy, reforestation, a drastic reduction in the most dangerous forms of consumption, and many other measures. Thirdly, we need to reduce the impact of fashion on consumption, again perhaps by legislating against advertising, impossible though this sounds. Sober readers will point out that such results could have been predicted (and were) long ago. We have known for decades that the process known as global warming was a near-inevitable result of industrialisation. But we doubted its severity and, bombarded by downright lies and widespread disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, we chose instead to embrace the comforting thought that our high (northern) standard of living need not be upset by a few degrees of further heat. 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.

Secondly, we need to curtail certain forms of advertising – it has recently been proposed that the use of attractive young men and women to sell anything should be abolished. [Oliver James. Affluenza, p. 333.] This will not release us from the tyranny of branding, nor will it end the emulation of social ideal types, but it is a step in the right direction. 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.)Published by Princeton University Press 2022 6 The Triumph of Unsocial Sociability? luxury in the eighteenth century From the book