Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism

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Gregory discusses the role of utopian and dystopian narratives as useful mechanisms for imagining meaningful social and political change. 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. But cities will also have to become much more pleasant and sustainable, even as temperatures rise significantly in the coming decades.

Most such daydreams, notably as fostered by the entertainment industry, offer fantasies of a better life for the individual, rather than the collective or entire societies. 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. It is liable to many of the same objections as some of Marx’s key theories, particularly the inevitability of a proletarian revolution to issue in the new world. Crucial here is the recognition that we have only a few short decades to avoid complete environmental catastrophe, with global warming of 3°C or more, and not only the breakdown of civilisation but the cruel deaths of billions of people, if not the earth’s entire population.At one point Claeys argues that John Stuart Mill should be seen, against conventional readings of his work, as a vital utopian thinker. luxury in the eighteenth century" In Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism, 222-276. His plea for introducing messianism and mysticism into Marxism — effectively going back to Thomas Müntzer — is also to my mind misplaced. It also saw the explosion of literary utopianism, triggered by the remarkable world-wide success of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888). It seems as though we don’t see many right-wing utopias, even though dystopia is utilized by both sides.

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. 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. There remains, however, a third alternative to capitulating before looming catastrophe, and simply sticking our heads in the ground, closer to the natural resources whose exploitation is its cause. Louis Menand on the American culture of the Cold War — “I believe that if you do what you want, and believe in doing things for yourself, without worrying about what everybody else seems to want from you, at some point the world will meet you halfway.Bloch’s system is moreover closely aligned to Marxism, his addition of a theory of human rights notwithstanding. Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism, by Gregory Claeys was published by Princeton University Press in 2022. 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. Claeys’s analysis is more even-handed in the sense that he provides thorough coverage of the development of utopianism from the early modern period into the present.