The term “utopia” is used in two distinct ways:

1)       As a term of criticism; as in: “Your ideas are utopian; they are uselessly over-idealistic, they could never work.”

2)       As a term of positive appraisal; as in: “These utopian ideas give one real hope: the utopia they describe would be worth aiming for.”

The standard view is that it is utopian in the first sense to seek to radically transform our society. This unfortunately tends to rule out the possibility of utopia in the second sense. And I believe it is that possibility which we have great need of, at the present time.

Why? Because without it, we are probably finished. I mean: we are now in a situation which makes it the case that without radical transformation, without radical hope, we are doomed. Mere reformism will not be enough to save us from climate catastrophe and its causes: rampant fossil fuel interests; uncontrolled capitalist accumulation and commodification; the hegemony of economic growthism; continual production of artificial ‘needs’ (e.g. by advertising); and a profound failure to challenge the resultant individualist ‘aspirational’ consumerism, even on the so-called ‘Left’. Most ‘Leftisms’ are hopelessly in hock to growthism. And to a ‘deprivation model’ which means that their prescription for society is simply: more of the same, shared out a bit better. ‘Ferraris for all’, as the book has it. Yes, that really is the title of a book that someone has written and published. That such books exist is a testament to how desperate our predicament is. That the egregious ‘Spiked’ magazine likes the book a lot tells you most of what you need to know about what is within its covers.

So my claim is that the standard view is exactly wrong. The true utopianism in sense (1) now is: belief in anything like the status quo. For instance, belief in liberal political philosophy, in economic growth, and so forth. What is needed is the ambition to aim at a version of utopianism in sense (2): a radical democratic ecologism, serious about a post-growth future and about relocalising our world. Our ambitions need now to be utopian (in sense (2)): only such ambitions stand a chance of going far enough in the direction of change.