Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life After Consumerism

Welcome to a necessarily not-too-distant future, where the world’s governments have united under the all-powerful regulatory international body ECOCOM. ECOCOM presides over the Great Change, a global paradigm shift from cultures of conspicuous consumption to voluntary simplicity and compulsory sustainability. “Through satellite and drone surveillance” (477) ECOCOM enforces the “radical Green New Deal” (474). Every nation on the planet has undergone a rapid transition to renewable energy. Personal and corporate wealth has been taxed into oblivion. These tax revenues are funneled into ECOCOM’s multi-trillion-dollar “environmental reconstruction fund (ERF)” (490). Under the ERF, green energy and other new industries committed to sustainability have become publicly-held companies, returning land and natural resources to the care of the people. These burgeoning socialized industries have created jobs in reforestation, rewilding, public service, and urban renewal projects that are turning vast city centers into networks of walkable neighborhood units (496). ECOCOM workers are also employed in industries that ration global food consumption—fat intake is restricted to “40 per cent of what Americans consume” at the beginning of the twenty-first century (483)—and as feminist educators ensuring all the women of the world have access to reproductive health education (488). ECOCOM’s feminist education program is aiming for the global population to drop to the 5 billion mark, a number “often associated with sustainability at a reasonable standard of living” (488).There’s a lot of work to do to make the radical Green New Deal a reality. But at the same time, ECOCOM is not a harsh taskmaster. The four-day workweek is now an enforced norm. Hoping to minimize use of their “personal carbon budget (PCB)” (475), people eschew luxury vacations to the tropics, preferring to stick close to home and enjoy our neighborhoods and lush city parks. As the pedestrians and cyclists that fill our streets suggest, personal responsibility for a sustainable life is just as key to ECOCOM’s agenda as is corporate accountability. ECOCOM citizens model “our new human type” (468); we moderate consumption and mend and reuse goods, especially clothing. The order of the day is “public luxury mixed with some private restraint” (463). Step outside and our neighborhoods are full of friends, festivities, and thanks to our shortened workweeks, an extended Blochian “Sundayness” or sense of “relaxation and celebration” (11). Under ECOCOM, we consume less in the privacy of our own homes because we know that this is what it takes to ensure a survivable future for humans on this planet. What we sacrifice at home we gain through “enhanced sociability” (198) in our carbon-negative neighborhoods and green cities. All good ECOCOM citizens agree that “we must party to forestall the apocalypse” (501), and we do so with gusto.This is the vision of a sustainable utopia put forward in the final sections of historian Gregory Claeys’s truly magisterial Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism (2022). The project is twofold. Claeys takes readers through the history of utopian thought on sociability in its first three sections, and looks to a postconsumer future in section 4. The relationship between the two sections models Ruth Levitas’s call for understanding utopia as method, as Claeys’s gambit is that drawing on the history of “utopian social relations can help to offset the inevitable decline in consumerism which sustainability demands in the coming decades” (73). If the concept of a sustainable utopia jars—and let’s face it, ECOCOM and its subordinate enforcement acronyms smack of benevolent dictatorship—it is because, as Claeys argues in this volume, the best possible future we can hope for is not utopia but survival. Indeed, the book is less interested in utopia as such than in a compromise in which we prevent the arrival of an eco-apocalypse by pairing the best insights of utopian sociability with the demands of our rapidly warming planet. The sustainable utopia is neither pastoral escape nor techno-futurist dreamscape; it is, rather, a way of life that is committed to limited luxury, to equality on a planetary scale, and to “belongingness” (42) as an overarching societal priority.Claeys begins with the framework, drawn from the history of utopian thought that he is about to present, that “equality, sociability, and sustainability,” are the key characteristics of “a twenty-first-century utopia” (10). Known for his research into histories of Marxist and socialist thought as much as utopianism, Claeys now argues that the current climate crisis necessitates a move beyond faith in the promises “of modernity, economic (not social) liberalism and Marxism” (510) in favor of paradigms for social change that will be familiar to scholars in the environmental humanities, including “egalitarianism, voluntary simplicity, and sustainable consumption” (510). Fundamentally, then, Utopianism for a Dying Planet reaches after a qualified utopia, or what Claeys calls in the first chapter of the book a “redefined” utopianism, in which the triumvirate of luxury, sociability, and equality temper each other in service to a truly global and sustainable world system with some utopian perks.Claeys arrives at this triumvirate of utopian characteristics through his deep engagement with the history of utopian sociability, which occupies the first three hundred and fifty pages of this book. Following Lyman Tower Sargent, Claeys breaks his investigations into the three “faces” of utopianism, “utopian social theory, literary utopias and dystopias, and utopian practice” (24), taking us from the extreme asceticism of Lycurgan Sparta, to the Fourier Phalanx, to the literary techno-utopias of Bellamy, Morris, and Wells. In line with Claeys’s passion as an editor for making a broad range of utopian texts accessible to readers, he also covers François Fénelon’s 1699 The Adventures of Telemachus, mid-eighteenth-century neo-Harringtonians including James Burgh, and Ernest Callenbach’s still under-studied Ecotopia (1975). Many of the chapters in the book’s first three major parts could be read as stand-alone introductions to these diverse (albeit overwhelmingly Euro-Western) moments in the history of utopianism.What makes Utopianism for a Dying Planet unique is that Claeys in many ways rewrites his previous work on these histories to focus on how each takes up the question of sociability. Many early conceptions of utopia, as several sections of the project address, believed that true human equality required the rejection of luxury and an emphasis on frugality and toil. What we can take from these egalitarian utopias, Claeys emphasizes in discussions ranging from More’s foundational framework to Owenite socialism, from early American Christian colonies to Bolshevism, is a rejection of private property ownership and excessive consumption, and the embrace of community interdependence. Where these utopian visions often lost the support of the masses, Claeys argues, was in their insistence on extreme frugality, temperance, and moral piety. Historically speaking, there is little of the radical equality of the festival in egalitarian utopias, and Claeys sees Summer of Love– or Burning Man–style Sundayness as the form of sociability that is needed to temper the simplicity of these proposals for radically egalitarian life.A key turning point in the book is the late eighteenth-century shift from utopias that imagined a return to a simpler time, to utopian imaginaries that began to see the promise of a future utopian world achieved through science and technology. While this is a well-established moment in utopian literary studies, Claeys recasts its terms as what becomes in the centuries to follow “a contest between luxury and simplicity” in utopian thinking (247). The overall force of the book’s argument is most interested in surveying this contest as it unfolds through the rise of “commercial society” (66). Of particular focus are two facets of this contest that jostle for space across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first is utopian models that advocated for “public over private luxury, contending that this both facilitated sociability and permitted a reasonable amount of indulgence without entailing additional burdens on the poor” (349–50). The second is how forms of utopianism, whether literary or practiced, saw the rejection of fashionable clothing and consumer trends as key to the practice of equality and the development of utopian worlds shaped by the best human virtues. Claeys’s revision of the history of utopian thought in terms of this contest over what and how we consume (and over what not to wear), is in service to the book’s goal of asking what can be taken from the history of utopian thought to save the planet from its present environmental crisis, a crisis which the project identifies as firmly rooted in fast fashion and consumption writ large.The project’s emphasis on the social payoffs of public luxury and the depredations of private excess paves the way for the final section on “Modern Consumerism and its Opponents.” Arriving at this section, readers will notice a marked shift in tone from the familiarly detached historicism of the book’s first three sections to what I can only characterize as palpable anger. We have arrived, in other words, at our argument. Claeys is unwilling to conceal his disgust as he tracks the rise of consumer society from the 1930s to the present: “Today,” he writes, “millions parade disposable plastic coffee cups through the streets held aloft like torches of liberty to emphasise their busyness and lack of leisure” (358). This part of the book continues to address more recent histories of utopian sociability, from Eastern European and Chinese socialism, to Huxley, the first green literary utopias, and the rise of the 1960s Western countercultural moments. However, the real sticking point before we enter into our ECOCOM future is an indictment of the development of cultures of conspicuous consumption and what Claeys calls the late twentieth century’s formation of “consumption-centered identity” (375). This identity, built on extreme self-interest, obsession with novelty, and susceptibility to marketing (372), finds its utopias in mega-malls and online shopping. In this way, “modernity’s own monster, the all-desiring consumer, crafted from the detritus of airport duty-free zones and malls, ha[s] become a Shiva-like destroyer of the planet” (362). And not the planet only, Claeys contends, the self-interested consumer also moves against every vision of sociability in utopian history, bringing us to a contemporary moment in which people are lonelier and more isolated than ever before, even as the planet burns.At one point in its discussion of the formation of the modern consumer, Utopianism for a Dying Planet laments the contemporary demand for constant stimulation. The moderns “fidget, are never satisfied, get bored quickly, have short attention spans,” Claeys writes, “they forget the value of the moment, and of merely being” (366). Perhaps with us moderns in mind, Claeys structures the book in parts, chapters, and subsections, allowing for many accessible points of entry for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Euro-Western historians, English literature scholars, and those working in the environmental humanities in the Global North. While much of the material here will be familiar to theorists of utopia and dystopia, Claeys’s emphasis on the history of utopian sociability draws out some unique intellectual patterns. His focus on utopians’ preoccupation with fashion and egalitarianism offers valuable historical context for readers of the 2017 special issue of Utopian Studies on “Utopia and Fashion.” Similarly, the project’s emphasis on the value of public sociability and celebration, while addressing overwhelmingly white, Western contexts, reads compellingly alongside recent studies of race and utopia, including Alex Zamalin’s Black Utopia: The History of an Idea from Black Nationalism to Afrofuturism (2019) and Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (2021), both of which consider how Black sociability, community-building, and radical aesthetics have produced real and imagined utopian life-worlds in defiance of racialized violence and death.The toughest critics of Utopianism for a Dying Planet may come from the environmental humanities, particularly those deeply engaged with ecocriticism and environmental politics. The book’s “utopistics” conclusion (440), in which our ECOCOM future is schematized, does not quite match the rigor of recent projects from the political sciences including Hans Baer’s Democratic Eco-Socialism as a Real Utopia: Transitioning into an Alternative World System (2017) and Robert Albritton’s Eco-Socialism for Now and the Future: Practical Utopias and Rational Action (2019). It also places, particularly in its critique of the monster consumer, tremendous weight on individual action and responsibility for combatting climate crisis. This perspective sits uncomfortably with contemporary ecocritical thought that identifies corporations and world governments as the social actors that must necessarily be transformed to realistically combat climate change. The project concludes on a grim note, advocating fear over “mere ‘hopium’” as the emotion that might lead humanity most usefully to real climate action (509). This approach, too, pushes against the grain of contemporary ecocritical conversations. Environmental humanities projects contemporaneous to Claeys’s, including Min Hyoung Song’s Climate Lyricism (2022) and Matthew Schneider-Mayerson et al.’s Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change (2023), affirm that feelings of fear and helplessness do not translate into climate action, and that narratives of hope and some climate optimism (scarcely found in this volume) are more likely to translate into substantive action. Thus, environmental humanities scholars who engage with Claeys’s project may find more that provokes than enlightens in its pages.Still, it’s not all doom and gloom here in our pre-ECOCOM world. Utopianism for a Dying Planet succeeds in being a compelling history and application of utopian sociability theory to a radical Green New Deal, particularly in its emphasis on the value of exchanging private consumption for “as much joyous and celebratory sociability and belongingness as we can muster and afford” (510). In this sense, Claeys’s project is ultimately a reminder of the priceless value of community and friendship, and of the history of thought that has worked to legislate belongingness through simple dress, simple wants, and mutual care. In a post-COVID world defined more and more by virtual connection, online consumption, and social isolation, Utopianism for a Dying Planet encourages readers to get out and dance together. The paradox of the book rests in when the dancing can begin. If our sociability will be compensatory for what must be sacrificed, as the book argues, then does it only come after the sacrifice, and if so, how do we get there?