Hothouse Utopia: Dialectics Facing Unsavable Futures

What people are saying about

Hothouse Utopia

The passage from radical theory to transformative practice may seem today more strewn with obstacles and bereft of guideposts than ever before. And yet, as Ryan Gunderson urges in his unsentimental account of hothouse utopianism, the challenges we face in pursuing it should not lead us down the opposite path to quiescence and resignation. There are still genuine possibilities for transcending the status quo worth our efforts, despite everything, to realize their promise.

Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Reason After Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory (2016) and Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations (2020)

The possibility of dialectical thought has never been more hopeless, the need for it never more pressing. Revisiting the negative utopias of the Frankfurt School in the blood-red light of global ecological catastrophe, Gunderson works critical theory against the grain in a careful, painstaking effort to save philosophy from nihilism, hope from fatuity, and pessimism from despair. Hothouse Utopia is a timely, useful, and important contribution to the impossible yet necessary project of thinking a human future in the Anthropocene.

Roy Scranton, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative at the University of Notre Dame, and author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) and We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018)

Hothouse Utopia

Dialectics Facing Unsavable Futures

Ryan Gunderson

Hothouse Utopia

Dialectics Facing Unsavable Futures

Ryan Gunderson

Winchester, UK

Washington, USA

JOHN HUNT PUBLISHING

First published by Zero Books, 2021

Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,

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© Ryan Gunderson 2020

ISBN: 978 1 78904 769 1

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Contents

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright

Contents

Previous titles

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1 Doomed on All Fronts

Chapter 2 Alienated Reconciliation: Justify, Act, Hide

Chapter 3 Three Flagellations of the Dialectic

Chapter 4 Utopianism Buried Between Catastrophes

Chapter 5 Anticipatory Reconciliation: Mere Possibility and Mundane Transcendence

Chapter 6 Hope in Negativity: Revolutionary Reformism Without Optimism

References

Author Biography

Guide

Cover

Half Title

Title

Copyright

Contents

Previous titles

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Start of Content

References

Author Biography

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Previous titles

Gunderson R (2020) Making the Familiar Strange: Sociology Contra Reification. New York: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0367894429.

Stuart D, Gunderson R and Petersen B (2020) The Degrowth Alternative: A Path to Address our Environmental Crisis? New York: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0367894665.

Stuart D, Gunderson R and Petersen B (2020) Climate Change Solutions: Beyond the Capital-Climate Contradiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN: 978-0472038473.

For Su. Even the darkest nights can’t change who you are – the brightest, boldest, and roundest gem I’ve ever seen shining in this world. Thank you for coming into our family.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank David Ashley, Claiton Fyock, and Diana Stuart for conversations related to themes developed throughout this book. Special thanks to Diana and Brian Petersen for helpful comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank William Attwood-Charles for reading recommendations, Stephen Lippmann for unknowingly titling the first chapter, and Jonathan Levy for unknowingly inspiring the imagined future slogan, 4°C is worse than 3°C!

Some paragraphs and sections from chapters 3, 5, and 6 draw on:

Gunderson R (2015) A defense of the Grand Hotel Abyss: The Frankfurt School’s nonideal theory. Acta Sociologica 58(1): 25-38.

Gunderson R (2017) Ideology critique for the environmental social sciences: What reproduces the treadmill of production? Nature and Culture 12(3): 263-289.

Gunderson R (2018) Degrowth and other quiescent futures: Pioneering proponents of an idler society. Journal of Cleaner Production 198: 1574-1582.

Gunderson R (2020) Dialectics facing prehistoric catastrophe: Merely possible climate change solutions. Critical Sociology 46(4-5): 605-621.

Chapter 1

Doomed on All Fronts

Introduction: A searing sunrise

In a famous passage from the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel (1967: 75) calls periods like our own, a birth-time, and a period of transition, where the:

spirit of man has broken with the old order of things hitherto prevailing, and with the old ways of thinking, and is in the mind to let them all sink into the depths of the past and to set about his own transformation. … [T]he spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown—all these betoken that there is something else approaching. This gradual crumbling to pieces, which did not alter the general look and aspect of the whole, is interrupted by the sunrise, which, in a flash and at a single stroke, brings to view the form and structure of the new world.

Yet the generalized anxiety of our own age is not only caused by undefined foreboding that characterizes any period of rapid change, but, more distinctively, even the silver lining of birth-times, the sunrise previews into the new world, are blinding and burn the skin. Our sunrise is uncontrollable fires, more intense and pervasive heat waves, species extinctions, the spread of fascist-lite politics, facial-recognition technology, and other trends that strike us as desirable as they are controllable.

We feel the weight of an old world crumbling while accelerating and bubbling full of unwelcoming possible futures. For similar though distinct historical reasons, Adorno opens Negative Dialectics with a dark rejoinder to Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach— Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it—by alluding to Hegel’s other metaphor for periods of transition, that of pregnancy and birth.

Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried. (Adorno 1973a: 3)

Before exploring the meaning of this passage for dialectics today, let us first stare into our searing sunrise and inspect the swelling of another miscarriage of catastrophic proportions.

Political-economic trends and contradictions

Even after nearly half a century since its onset, it remains impossible to write a word about political-economic trends and contradictions of contemporary capitalism without discussing neoliberalism. In response to the contradictions of the Keynesian-Fordist form of capitalism dominant from the Second World War into the 1970s, neoliberalism emerged as a political project to restore the power of the corporate and ruling classes against the relative political and economic power of organized workers and the welfare state (Harvey 2005). In theory, neoliberalism stresses individual freedom, especially to pursue free enterprise, and a state that promotes strong individual private property rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade (Harvey 2005: 64). In practice, neoliberalism is associated with the deregulation of finance, more flexible labor markets (more part-time work, fewer benefits, weaker unions, etc.), reductions in social spending, the privatization of public goods and services, reductions in progressive taxes, and an overall business-friendly state. Neoliberalism as a political-economic program took hold in the 1970s in Chile after General Pinochet’s murderous US- and CIA-backed coup and then found firm footing in the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the US and UK, respectively. It has since become, and still is, the dominant global ideology of capitalism.

Peak neoliberalism is manifest in the US government’s first organized response to the COVID-19 pandemic, where, amid skyrocketing unemployment and shortages in testing supplies and protective equipment, a $4.5 trillion corporate bailout was passed with little regulatory oversight along with a negligible single check for non-corporations (i.e., adult humans) (Carter 2020). Earlier, the Great Financial Crisis from 2007-2009 was an outcome of neoliberal policies as well as the structural transformation on which neoliberal ideology was erected: a transition from monopoly to monopoly-finance capitalism (Foster and Magdoff 2009). Late capitalism, ruled by giant monopolies, is necessarily marked by a lack of profitable investments in the real economy (overcapacity) and, thus, is increasingly reliant on debt and financial markets for investments. Finance, once tied to industry, has become a relatively autonomous feature of the economy (financialization). Monopoly-finance capital is marked by a prolonged period of stagnation, which, for the common person, means increased precariousness and inequality (Foster and McChesney 2012).

There are a few direct byproducts of neoliberal capitalism and its acceleration that concern us here: massive inequality, increased precariousness, and the rise of right-wing populism.

First, massive inequality. The wealth gap between the top 5 percent and the bottom 90 percent of Americans has steadily increased since the dawn of neoliberalism (Wolff 2017). Here are just three statistics that capture the enormity of inequality in the US (see Inequality.org 2020):

•Three men own as much as the bottom half of Americans (Collins and Hoxie 2018).

•The richest 5 percent of Americans own two-thirds of the wealth (Wolff 2017).

•The top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent of Americans have more than doubled their wealth since 1983 (in 2016 dollars) while the total debts of the bottom 40 percent now exceed their assets (negative wealth) (Wolff 2017).

Thanks in part to Occupy Wall Street (Gaby and Caren 2016), the problem of massive inequality has thrust itself into mainstream discourse. Yet, as Robinson (2019: 52ff) states in a clear summation of key indicators of US inequality, the average person does not comprehend the severity of inequality even if they are aware that society is unequal. Norton and Ariely (2011) found that most Americans want relatively egalitarian wealth distributions, and that actual wealth inequality is far greater than what they believe is the case. For example, respondents believed that the top 20 percent of the wealthiest Americans owned around 60 percent of the wealth but that they should own half that. The top 20 percent actually owns more than 80 percent of the wealth.

At the global level, wealth inequality is even more pronounced. One statistic communicates this clearly: eight men own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world (3.6 billion people) (Oxfam 2017). Commentators like Bill Gates like to point out that global poverty has decreased while inequality has increased. However, if one picks a global poverty line that is higher than $2 a day—e.g., living on less than $7.40 a day—, the number of people living under the poverty line has increased (Hickel 2019).

Increased precariousness is massive inequality’s bedfellow. I mean increased precariousness relative to the unionized manufacturing jobs of the Keynesian-Fordist period (cf. Kalleberg 2011).¹ In hindsight, the ability to afford a middleclass life working on a factory line during mid-twentieth century capitalism, with its truce between capital and labor, should be interpreted as an exception to, rather than the rule of, capitalist social relations. Today, as before this Golden Age, those who need to work, work more, or work in better jobs are often faced with an inability to make enough money to buy commodities necessary for survival. The neoliberal post-Fordist economy is characterized by flexible labor markets of structural unemployment, underemployment, and involuntary part-time and/or temporary work. While I do not believe they are a new class (see Jonna and Foster 2016), Guy Standing’s (2011) popular notion of the precariat helpfully captures the lives of many workers today, including difficulty in finding secure and stable work, low wages, no healthcare, weak or no union protection, irregular working times determined by the employer, and unsafe working conditions. However, even securing precarious employment is lucky relative to the global labor force, where over 60 percent of the available working population is inactive, unemployed, or vulnerably employed (e.g., rural subsistence workers), categories that do not even include temporary and part-time laborers (Jonna and Foster 2016).

The rise of right-wing populism is another political-economic byproduct of neoliberalism. Right-wing populism is a global tendency, including the administrations of Donald Trump in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK, Narendra Modi in India, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the increasing popularity of right-wing populist parties throughout Europe (e.g., Alternative for Germany, the Swiss People’s Party, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally/Front in France), and the 2019 coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia.

What does right-wing populism have to do with neoliberalism? First, neoliberalism as a political project has little ideological legitimacy today, and is widely viewed for what it is: a political project to redistribute wealth upwards (Harvey 2019). We are in the midst of the most pronounced legitimation crisis since the beginning of the end of the Keynesian welfare state (Habermas 1973). Today, the neoliberal project lives on through right-wing populist movements – neoliberalism is now in an alliance with neo-fascism (Harvey 2019).²

There is a second connection between neoliberalism and right-wing populism: the precarious conditions created by post-Fordism produces a desperation that powers right-wing populist movements and parties. Center-left parties, who ostensibly represent the common person, are responsible for pushing many of the neoliberal policies that put so many in desperate situations. In the US, the Democratic Party abandoned a mild social-democratic platform in favor of elite interests decades ago (Frank 2016). Yet the US is not unique here. In Capital and Ideology (2020), Thomas Piketty attempts to explain why, in the face of increasing inequality, people in the US, France, and the UK are turning to nativists instead of, as they did in the past, the left (for summary, see Schechter 2018). Based on voting behavior since the late 1940s, his thesis is that, beginning in the 1970s, center-left parties increasingly represented the interests of the Brahmin Left (the highly-educated elite) while the conservative parties continue to represent the Merchant Right (the traditional business elite). In contrast to the past, when voting behavior was primarily along class lines, now more educated citizens vote for the Brahmin Left parties while high-income and -wealth citizens vote for the Merchant Right parties. Both parties are detached from the interests of the common person, who, in an increasingly precarious situation, reacts against the establishment, a disdain rising long before scapegoats like immigrants could