The world today can feel soul crushing. Whether
you’re churning out emails in a cubicle for eight hours a day, are forced to sew t-shirts
around the clock that are only worn once, or are bombarded by headlines of sea
level rise, droughts, and disasters, the crushing weight of global capitalism
feels inescapable. But all is not lost. While the destruction of climate chaos and the
chains of fossil capitalism feels suffocating, as science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin
argues, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right
of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change
often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” The story is a powerful
tool, one that harnesses the future to create change in the present. Stories plant seeds.
Beautiful visions that have the potential to germinate into alternative worlds that show us
that business-as-usual is not inevitable. So, as we struggle to upend the current status quo
of rampant emissions, and extraction at any cost, what role do visions of the future hold?
Are they even useful, and what stories and artistic utopias are out there that might bring
a light to the looming darkness of climate chaos? What is Utopia? (And is it useful?) In the days of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels,
utopias were under attack. Convinced that the utopian socialism of their predecessors was not an
effective way to end capitalism, Marx and Engels rejected any form of utopianism. They immersed
themselves, instead, in the material realities of history and developed critiques alongside a theory
of change that they called scientific socialism. This framework, unlike utopian socialism, argued
that society wouldn’t be changed by appealing to reason or ideals; it would only be transformed by
changing the material conditions of the economy. Or in other words, the direct overthrow of the
ruling class by the working class. As a result, Marx and Engels were critical of sketching out
what possible future worlds would look like and relying on those visions to create revolution.
For them, socialism was to be achieved not by attempting to appeal to peoples minds, but instead
by revealing and exacerbating the already present contradictions within capitalism. The core of
which was the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. This is not to say
that Marxists never once dreamed of the future, nor that speculative fiction is useless
in the struggle for a world beyond fossil capitalism. But instead, that as much as we need
the backbone of scientific socialism to critique fossil capitalism and guide us through ending
it, we also need visions of the future that give us something to struggle for. We need to imagine
what’s on the horizon. Because those imaginings, those brushstrokes of the future, are what
fuel our fire. Visualizing different worlds, at least for me, gives energy and purpose
to the hard struggle of the present. So, bringing these fictions to the page, to the
canvas, and to the screen are powerful tools of revolution. Which is why, as Ashley C. Ford
writes, “The goal of oppressors is to limit your imagination about what is possible without them,
so you might never imagine more for yourself & the world you live in. Imagine something better. Get
curious about what it actually takes to make it happen. Then fight for it every day.” But these
utopias of visionary fictions don’t have to be, and indeed shouldn’t be, perfect goalposts
that railroad us into a strict path towards liberation. Indeed, as degrowth scholar Giorgos
Kallis writes, paraphrasing Marxist scholar David Harvey “we should oppose utopias that are meant
as models or blueprints – not so much because they are unrealistic, but because the realization of a
perfect ideal tolerates no objection and crushes everything that stands in its way.” Kallis goes
on to say that we need “dialectical utopias,” ones that are contradictory, messy, and incomplete
that challenge us and make us reflect. Ultimately, this means we need to envision, in the words of
the Zapatistas, “a world where many worlds fit.” Countless authors, filmmakers, artists, and
creatives need to develop a diverse range of future worlds. So that it’s not just Elon Musk
[clip of elon’s future] or a white guy like me controlling the narrative of what’s possible.
So, if we know that these visionary fictions are crucial to sustaining the fire of an ecologically
just struggle for a better world, who’s dreaming up these futures right now? Which artists are
bringing light to the darkness of climate chaos? Visions of the Future:
The worlds of the future are bright, and coursing through these future worlds are political
currents that show us that a life without capitalism is possible. Degrowth, eco-anarchism,
and eco-socialism all seek an economy beyond capitalism that is just and ecologically sound.
But often, the political discussions of how to achieve these tendencies lack engaging narratives.
It’s hard to get excited about the future when technical terms like “means of production” and
“metabolic rift” are all that you hear. While it is crucial to understand the political and
economic theory behind tendencies like socialism, we need stories to fill those frameworks with
emotion and passion. The story is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down, or the
trojan horse that plants the seed of resistance by revealing the beauty and flaws of more liberatory
worlds. Politicians in power have long understood the pontency of envisioning future worlds.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, for example, didn’t just submit a jargon-heavy Green New Deal proposal
to congress and wipe her hands clean, she, together with Naomi Klein, painted her own vision
of what a future with a Green New Deal could be in order to sway peoples hearts. [XXX Play clip].
And on the campaign trail, candidates will often ground their platform in personal anecdotes.
[play clip] Because as neuroscientist Paul Zak reveals in his research, when we hear a narrative
rich with emotion and tension, our brain releases chemicals that influence us to create change. So,
for the anti-capitalist climate movement, we need not only direct action and political struggle, but
also stories. Narratives and visuals that reveal suffering and success not just in the present, but
visionary fictions that explore the possibilities of the future. And there are already countless
artists out there doing exactly that. One of the core examples is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The
Dispossessed. A sci-fi classic that delves into the specific contours of ecological anarchism. The
Dispossessed gives us two possible futures. One on the resource rich planet of Urras that squanders
it’s abundant resources through an overproducing market economy, and another on the resource
scarce planet of Anarres, a planet of exiled anarchists who thrive communally on very little.
The Dispossessed is ultimately a story of opposite planets. Opposite in the sense that the planet
of Annarres is the moon of Urras and vise-versa, but also opposite in the sense that, as degrowth
theorists Giorgios Kallis and Hug March write, “Anarres is what Urras is not and Urras is
what Anarres is not: dispossessed-possessed, barren-lush, horizontal-hierarchical.” Le Guin
doesn’t just tell us what anarchism can be, she shows us, through, for example, the
small vignettes of Anarresti children who are unable to conceive of a prison because their
society doesn’t function on the punitive basis of our current world. Or through the massive
afforestation projects that people of Anarres collectively maintain. The Dispossessed reveals
the quiet yet messy possibilities of a liberatory future. As philosopher Andre Gorz notes, the
book crafts “The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of…anarchist
society."And the work of speculative fiction and ecological utopias has blossomed since Le
Guin published her book in 1974. Solarpunk, for example, has witnessed a bright new emergence
of artists and writers developing futures that look very different from the capitalist extraction
economies of today. Animation studio The Line’s solarpunk world of electric apple harvesters, lush
farming cooperatives run on solar and wind power, and small technologies that tighten the
connection between humanity and nature is a perfect example of a Solarpunk future. One
that mends the relationship between nature and humanity through appropriate and community-centric
technologies, co-operatives, and decentralization. The imaginings of Solarpunk artists reveal that
an ecological future doesn’t have to mean living in scarcity or giving things up. It instead shows
us how beautiful the world could be when we live with appropriate abundance. Susan Kaye Quinn’s
short story The Seven Sisters gives us another glimpse into a Solarpunk world. One that isn’t a
romanticized and unrealistic view of the future, but instead reveals that struggle and loss will
still exist in a post-capitalist ecological world. Quinn’s future zooms in on a tea farming
co-operative in the American south that seeks to decolonize tea through education and fair
practices. At the farm, a close knit community of chosen family all grows the tea together, [“The
whole farm met the mandates to be net-zero on carbon and make your own energy, but the tea
house was quite the spectacle of green tech, from the passive solar design and geothermal
heat pumps to the solar glass windows and rooftop windmills.”]. But in a very Solarpunk manner,
the farm doesn’t rely on the backbreaking work of harvesting tea in the blistering sun of a
hotter world, they instead use solar powered harvest bots. But of course not everything is pure
bliss. The Seven Sisters co-operative struggles to stay afloat after a heat dome scorches seven
acres of their crop to ashes and their harvest drones fall into disrepair. [“She had only four
harvest bots running, out of 10 in the fleet, and it wasn’t near enough. Two were out for repairs,
the rest needing one thing or another. Aubree, the farm’s bot keeper, was laid up sick in the
guest house.”] Quinn shows that while the future is promising, there is still loss and pain.
Revealing that an ecologically just world will certainly be more pleasant to live within,
but it won’t be without scuffs and bruises. Alongside Solarpunk there are also visions of
decolonial, anti-racist realities embodied in the afrofuturistic vision of movies like
Black Panther. [Play Black Panther Clip] Specifically the capital city of Wakanda
which shows a vibrant urban center that seamlessly melds accessible transit, with
pedestrian centric roads, local fisherie, thrumming markets, and the integration
of advanced technology in the service of ecological living. All the while trying to
answer the question: what does the world look like without the destructive influence of white
capitalist colonialism. This imagery is crucial, and is expanded in the Indigenous futures of
storytellers like Gina McGuire who drills down into the complicated impacts a future where
meat is banned [“It had been 20 years since the meat industry had been shut down and
U.S. production had fully switched over to plant-based replacements…”] and how that ban might
impact those indigenous to the Hawaiian island: [“He, himself, had never liked the
idea of the plant-based proteins, of meat-being-made and had watched with
fear for his people, as the rising protein prices had come along with the industry. He had
watched as their waters had been increasingly fished by all those who couldn’t afford the
protein, returning to this ancestral icebox.”] Each of these fictions grounds notions of
degrowth, anarchism, ecosocialism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism in tangible vignettes. They
imbue these politics with humanity and emotions, and allows us to stretch out our legs and walk
around in the worlds we’re fighting for, if just for a moment. But there are also future visions
from scholars and activists, those that want to bring the power of the story to their political
framework. This includes work stretching all the way back to utopian socialist William Morris’
1890 book, News From Nowhere, which describes a socialist world in the year 2000. A world without
private property, hierarchies, money, class, or prisons. Since Morris, there has long been
a tradition of transforming the political into the fictional to give the struggle emotion and
purpose. Fiction allows the reader or viewer to step into another world or another person’s shoes
and feel the result. As professor of English, Patricia Valderrama writes, “Fiction can transmit
information really effectively in non-technical language.” Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass
tap into this tradition in the last chapter of their book Half-Earth Socialism. After mapping
out the political technicalities of Half-Earth Socialism through discussions of planning
algorithms, transitions to renewable economies, and creating a decolonial and biodiverse world,
they paint a very tangible narrative of a person waking up in a future that has achieved some
level of Half-Earth Socialism. While the world the protagonist inhabits does sound beautiful,
Pendergrass and Vettese attempt not to romanticize their vision. The solar factory workers still want
to go on vacation, albeit in this future world, that vacation is provided for by the community,
[“...Edith mentioned the extra vacation time, and I do like taking the train to the beach
and staying in one of those fancy houses they converted into a resort.”] and there are
still cafeteria arguments on exactly what the cap on energy usage should be. [“I can’t believe
those self-righteous people you hang out with on that farm… are pushing for a 750-watt quota…
I’ll just be voting for a little more energy; 1,750 watts is not luxurious, and you know it.”]
The characters still put in the work harvesting at the local cooperative-owned farm that services
the regional area. But at the same time, it’s a completely different future from our present.
There is no fossil fuel extraction and the economy is democratically and ecologically planned.
There are shared communal living situations, not unlike very nice dorms, where families can raise
their kids together, share in community meals, and enjoy quiet games of cards after a filling
meal. But this future lays out just one vignette of political possibility. In contrast, the youtube
channel Prolekult, shows something radically different: a world built on hemp-based production.
An economy that sequesters far more carbon than it produces and builds a socialist and ultimately a
communist world in the husk of a capitalist one: [“reindustrialization of the globe with a
plant-based economy. We must increase the production of goods using a combination of
the natural sciences engineering and carbon negative raw materials'']. All of these worlds,
from coastal waters of Hawa’ii to the deserts of the Annares reveal the energizing possibilities
of a post-capitalist zero carbon world. But these are just possibilities. To make the many worlds
of our imagination real, we need to join the struggle of building liberatory, zero carbon,
anti-capitalist, right now. But where do we start? Building futures today:
[“Daydreams are dangerous. Daydreams are pieces of imagination, they are bits of poetry.
They are the balloons that fly up in history.”] That’s Murray Bookchin, a political theorist
who believed in the importance of developing an ecological vision of the world that seeps into the
unconscious minds of the masses and sparks change. And hopefully the glimpses of the future worlds
we’ve just witnessed do just that. But daydreams are a double edged sword. They can change us,
but they can also paralyze us– trapping us in the comfort and beauty of an unrealized future.
The purpose of these speculative fictions is not to numb the pain of the current ecological and
capitalist crisis, it’s to ignite a fire under us by revealing that other worlds are possible.
We only get to live in those messy, complicated, but beautiful futures if we struggle for them in
the present. This means building those decolonial farmers collectives right now, like the Seven
Sisters farm in Quinn’s short story. It means, for some in Atlanta, defending their largest
remaining urban forest from destruction. It means organizing your workplace to demand stronger
control of production, and it means developing ecological, post-capitalist solutions like the
regional environmental planning of Half-Earth Socialism. This work of building those visionary
fictions today, is exemplified in the anarchist practices of Nowtopias. Developing more ecological
and just pockets of the world right now that seek self-administration, DIY attitudes, and
a strong relationship with nature. The freetown of Christiania right in the middle of
Copenhagen is a perfect example of this Nowtopia model. After a group of anarchists and ecological
archivists squatted in an abandoned military base, the Danish government eventually ceded
rights to the community. A community that, while still having to navigate the realities of
living in a capitalist economy, is carving out ecological and anarchists organizational
models that are reminiscent of the Ursula K. Le Guins’s Anarres: [“on some fundamental
areas we've tried to work on being independent we collect our own garbage we do our own road
works for the younger children we have our own children's institutions”] Christiania is just
one future world, realized today. There are so many other communities out there, like the 2,500
strong Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain, struggling for worlds beyond ecologically
destructive capitalism. So I invite you to dream. Take a moment out of your day and
sculpt a beautiful, ecological, post-capitalist, decolonial, and just glimpse of the future.
Write it down if you want to, draw it if you can, but most importantly start the work, and
struggle to make that world possible today.
