Dreaming in Defeat, not Defeated Dreams

Why is it that defeat acts as a powerful soporific for utopian dreaming? In the ur-Utopia, published in 1516, Thomas More imagined an ideal society in contrast to the brutality that surrounded him, where lords displaced peasants from common lands in favor of profitable wool production. The defeat of the English peasantry by the world’s first capitalists spurred More to contemplate what was perhaps the first socialist alternative. More than five centuries later, the present situation in Germany—with fascism ascendant within and genocide abetted without—demonstrates how capitalism may have changed its appearances, but its destructive tendencies remain just as monstrous as in More’s lifetime. Yet, even in this era of defeat, many radicals are dreaming of utopia. As More fantasized about an ideal island society five centuries ago, the German-speaking left today is exploring projects centered on the socialisation of housing and energy infrastructure, democratic planning, and ecological stabilization with renewed sense of urgency and remarkable sophistication. The physics of solidarity has its own law of conservation of energy, with the utopian imagination storing potential after defeat. 

The gambit of this book is that—by cohering the fragmentary dreams of the German left and beyond into a systematic, democratically planned alternative—the contemporary flourishing of utopianism will help social movements turn defeat into opportunities and spot new revolutionary openings. Much, however, has been lost in recent years. A reactionary wave has inundated the Federal Republic’s once mighty climate movement, forcing activists into retreat even as ecosystems collapse, energy systems shudder, and a stagnating capitalism squeezes the middle and working classes alike. Even as Europe has become the fastest-warming continent on Earth, Friedrich Merz's government is slowing renewable energy adoption and returning to methane-fired home heating and power plants. Germany has simultaneously secured long-term liquified natural gas imports from Argentina and Canada and remains one of only three EU countries whose fossil-fuel imports have increased rather than declined in the wake of the war on Iran. 

In 2019, when we first conceived this book during a chat at a bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there were few positive programmes delineating an egalitarian and ecologically stable society. The left-leaning environmental books we had both devoured too often left us unsated. While plenty offered brilliant, creative critiques of the actually existing capitalism, many remained silent on what might replace it, and offered solutions that seemed too modest for the daunting task at hand. Suggestions always appeared in an all-too-brief epilogue, a pattern poet Joshua Clover diagnosed as “Eleven Chapters of Marx, and One Chapter of Keynes”. Even the most radical books tended to trace this familiar diminuendo, ending with an agenda that was either vague (e.g., the talismanic ‘commons’ as a solution) or only mildly more progressive than the wonkish center-left platform that had been vociferously criticized in the first eleven chapters (e.g., a wealth tax). Back then, we recalled Toni Morrison’s advice that “if there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it”, and decided to try our own hand as dreamers. The message of Half-Earth Socialism operated on two levels: first, we sketched our own utopian proposal rooted in recent scientific findings in the environmental sciences, Earth-system science, renewable energy, epidemiology and other fields; and second, we argued for utopianism itself as a crucial practice allowing us to perceive the whole of a complex system. The release of this German edition in 2026 comes at a much darker time than 2019, when the climate movement was in retrospect at the height of its powers, yet one where the utopian spirit is stronger. 

Utopias occupy an awkward nook in the history of socialism. They have guided liberatory movements since Thomas Müntzer’s rainbow-flagged Peasants’ Revolt, even as other radicals lambasted utopianism, a position buttressed by Karl Marx’s quip that has hardened into an unquestioned ukase that one should not write ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’. Yet, as is often the case with Marx, socialists who cite him uncritically risk ignoring how the contexts of their own struggles are far removed from the conditions he faced. The seer from Trier offered a nuanced assessment of the utopian socialists who preceded him, at times more sympathetic than is popularly remembered, but more importantly Marx wrote in response to a lively social movement. There is no comparable utopian base preceding today’s socialist revival. Quite the opposite: Dispirited readers made Mark Fisher’s 2009 Capitalist Realism a surprise best-seller, while Fredric Jameson’s sage remark that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ has lost its sting and become a cliché in many a socialist tract. Yet, even during the fin-de-siècle doldrums that so despaired Fisher and Jameson, sturdy pockets of hope endured—as they always do wherever there are people on the ground who remain steadfast and remember a time of strength. It is no coincidence that the utopian seeds that survived the salted earth of the 2000s bloomed into the most exciting movements the following decade. 

Consider the explosion of popular radicalism during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Those movements devoured the ideas developed by prison abolitionists over the previous dystopian decades. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore analyzed how workers in California in the 1990s, abandoned by a truncated welfare state and facing the largest prison construction project ever, organized themselves around the revived radical demand of a world without incarceration. Through long rides on rickety public transit to remote prisons in the countryside, those multi-racial movements “exemplify what utopia is these days,” as Gilmore observed, a vision of “social perfectibility recognizable in something as modest as people getting on a bus,” a set of ideas that inspired young radicals to mobilize after the murder of George Floyd. Fisher and Jameson were right, however, that in the 2000s plausible anti-capitalist alternatives were almost impossible to imagine. At such moments of weakness, utopian goals like prison abolition—assumed by Gilmore to be possible only in a communist society—may seem like distant dreams, but they can inspire practical near-term blueprints. Without the lodestar of utopia, however, movements risk listlessness and melancholy.

Fortunately, thanks to the seeds sown by the struggles of the 2010s, the barren world that Fisher and Jameson had endured is beginning to sprout utopian seedlings today. In Germany, activists and academics are reviving the long-dormant proposal of socialization, a framework to bring essential goods such as land, housing, and energy under public and democratic control. These utopians are once again raising questions central to the socialist tradition: Who owns infrastructure? Who plans production? Should food, energy, and housing remain subordinated to markets? What should be humanity’s relationship to nature? Such questions emerge from a recognition that market provisioning cannot satisfy fundamental needs, and their answering requires utopian yet concrete alternatives.

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Scientific utopia

Our book descends from the same lineage of thought, one that can be traced back to Otto Neurath. Little known today except to logical positivists (he was part of the Vienna Circle) and graphic designers (he was a co-founder of ISOTYPE), Neurath was an influential participant in debates over socialization in the 1910s and 1920s, basing his utopianism on his experience as a planner in the short-lived Bavarian Council Republic (yes, schickimicki Munich was once a hotbed of working-class radicalism) and before that, as a war planner for Austria-Hungary. The republic, which was led by unorthodox, arty radicals, including playwright Ernst Toller and translator Gustav Landauer, socialized housing and granted workers control of factories during its short lifespan. The polymathic Neurath combined the romantic with the practical, an approach encapsulated by his evocative neologism of “scientific utopia,” used to describe a mode of public reason where democracies holistically evaluated possible futures. Because collective desire could never be reduced to a single number, like profit or utility, Neurath thought society could only plan its future by deliberating over practical blueprints that worked systematically through interconnected social and material sufficiency problems. Neurath didn’t have time to realize his blueprint democracy in revolutionary Bavaria—the SPD, allied with the Freikorps, brutally quelled the Republic—so he, like many other utopians, developed his unorthodox theory in defeat.

In our book, we adapt Neurath’s scientific utopian approach to contemporary environmental and planning debates. To stay within planetary boundaries, we propose a plan involving widespread veganism, gigantic rewilding projects, energy quotas, and a rapid shift to renewable energy, but we are careful to note that other scientific utopias exist that could navigate trade-offs differently. Perhaps the most successful aspect of our utopian endeavour has been the book’s accompanying video game, available at https://play.half.earth in ten languages. There are players—some 200,000 so far from around the world—can think through different policies and technologies and navigate the political and social challenges entailed by those various pathways. Our hope was to inspire debate and disagreement on how humanity could consciously and democratically decide its own fate, predicated on a shared commitment of a good life for all within planetary boundaries. In this way, we tried to update Neurath’s republic of blueprints for the present day.

While there have certainly been periods of utopian dormancy, it is surprising how a lineage of thought stretches from Neurath’s struggles in post-war Bavaria to the German-speaking left of today. Central to this lineage is socialization, which remains a generative concept in German left academic and activist debates. This beacon of utopia, necessary for any serious planning at scale whether in Neurath’s time or the present, has made inroads into debates beyond academia thanks to the struggle of activists and social movements, such as through the successful 2021 referendum to expropriate private real-estate firms with portfolios exceeding 3,000 units in Berlin. Although the referendum did not itself enact legislation, it generated considerable momentum: the campaign drew thousands of new participants into housing activism, elevated rents and housing provision as central social questions, and forced a serious engagement with expropriation and socialisation. In response to the Senate's continued failure to implement the referendum, Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen’s campaign has since drafted its own socialization law based on Article 15 of the German Basic Law. Communia, a think tank, is working alongside organizers, researchers, and lawyers to develop concrete plans for how democratic planning and socialization could operate in practice, especially in the energy sector through projects like “Demokratische Energiewende.” 

Beyond the aegis of socialization, planning theory more broadly has revived in recent years in the German-speaking world. Degrowth theorists, drawing on separate lineages, are also now offering detailed analyses of planning beyond capitalism. Taken together, these contributions demarcate the burgeoning range of contemporary planning debates in the German-speaking world. The question is whether these experiments in planning, socialization, and democratic coordination present a plausible alternative in the heartlands of ordo- and neoliberalism? At present, the far right is on the rise, and establishment parties are in free fall, yet no political formation has a clear path to a mandate. 

Climate debates and conflicts over energy are a major reason for this impasse. At its high point in the late-2010s, the climate movement in Germany was possibly the strongest in the world, mobilizing millions and carrying out countless actions. Though weakened by lockdowns during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the energy and organization created by those activists helped Bündnis 90/Die Grünen enter government after the 2021 federal elections, bringing to an end sixteen years of CDU rule by forming the Ampelkoalition. Although criticisms of green neoliberalism are hardly new, there was a sense amongst climate activists that the Overton window around climate and economic policy was shifting, opening space for more ambitious demands. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine destabilized methane supplies, even Christian Lindner—then finance minister and long the car industry’s attack-dog against climate activists—described renewables as “Freiheitsenergie.” Similarly, the introduction of the 9-Euro-Ticket in the summer of 2022 briefly showed the possibility of a just transition based on state provisioning, making public transport affordable and available at an unprecedented scale. 

However, green politics have long been obstructed by fiscal orthodoxy, Germany’s export-oriented economy, and dependence on energy imports. After the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in November 2023 that the Ampelkoalition’s attempt to reallocate funds into the Climate and Transformation Fund was unconstitutional, the Greens’ political project lay in ruins. Outside the Bundestag, the climate movement faced escalating criminalization. What unfolded was a multi-layered countermobilization, a “greenlash”: a specific, organized, and politically charged opposition to the energy transition that extends far beyond the traditional lobbying of the fossil-fuel industry and its economic base, and which emerged as a part of a broader authoritarian turn towards neo-fascism. On the streets, activists increasingly confronted not just the police, but also angry citizens who harassed and attacked protesters. The right became increasingly adept at manufacturing moral panics, degrading debates over necessary infrastructural change into paranoid questions of personal freedom and social control. The misinformation and conspiracies that revolved around the Gebäudeenergiegesetz, the so-called “Heizungshammer,” makes it a prime example of a well-orchestrated greenlash. Similar dynamics extended beyond housing policy: proposed changes to dietary practices or transportation systems were likewise recast as harbingers of an impending eco-dictatorship.

For now, neo-fascism in Germany has complemented rather than supplanted the neoliberalism we centered in the book. The process has been going on for nearly two decades now, since the global financial collapse—which began in 2007 and continued for years afterwards in the form of sovereign debt crises in Europe—ended the golden age of neoliberalism. An early example of a neoliberal-fascist hybrid emerged in 2010, when Thilo Sarrazin penned the hateful Germany Abolishes Itself. Sarrazin, a card-carrying SPD member and central banker, neatly tied together fiscal prudence with pseudo-scientific racism, occasionally citing neoliberal patriarch Friedrich Hayek as an adhesive between the two. In 2013, austere economists founded the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) to similarly mix hard money with hard politics. Even after the exodus of the party’s less bigoted wing in 2015, many of the AfD’s leaders exemplify the party’s twinned traditions, including Alice Weidel, who was a member of the Hayek Society until 2021, and Beatrix von Storch, who remains one. One finds a similar admixture in Austria, where the Freedom Party—founded by two ex-SS officers in 1955—was represented in parliamentary negotiations by the director of Vienna’s Hayek Institute, Barbara Kolm. Whether the fascists will reach a ceiling in their support remains to be seen, but it is clear that the political floor has been lowered by the struggle over the Energiwende. The greenlash cannot, however, indefinitely defer the consequences of the climate catastrophe. A new political order will emerge eventually, and ecosocialism or climate barbarism, whether in the form of neoliberal solar radiation management or neo-fascist lifeboat ethics, are the only options.

It is clear that the centre cannot hold. The Green Party’s progressive bonafides were tarnished by the Ampelkoalition’s 2023 decision to feed the village of Lützerath into the maw of the Garzweiler II strip mine. More than 30,000 protesters tried to protect Lützerath and its forest in the face of widely documented police violence, images of which—including officers carrying Greta Thunberg away from the site—circulated around the world. As Lützerath crystallized the contradictions of centrist environmentalism, the hitherto moribund Left Party finally returned to political relevance by embracing social populism (Sozialpopulismus) and message discipline that foregrounded housing, wages, inflation and public services. One recent example of this shift is the party’s campaign for the Berlin state election, organized around the slogan “Berlin bezahlbar machen,” which combined demands for the expropriation of major real-estate corporations with proposals for public provisioning such as Kiezkantinen. While this strategy has proven effective in rebuilding the left, it risks relegating climate conflict as secondary to questions of social provision, leaving the right with considerable freedom to shape public perceptions of the ecological transition.

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The problem of the problem bear 

Our gambit is that our scientific utopianism offers one way out of climate politics as culture war. Rather than treating ecological transformation as a series of moralized life-style conflicts (e.g., home heating, meat, cars or travel) it asks people to confront the material constraints and trade-offs directly. What forms of production should receive scarce energy? Which land-uses should be prioritized? How should burdens and benefits be distributed? Democratic planning does not make these conflicts disappear, but it changes their terrain: from resentment and symbolic polarization toward collective decision-making over shared social priorities. 

Consider a scientific utopian analysis of energy-use in Germany. Primary energy demands have declined in the past decades to around 4300 Watts per person, a respectable achievement compared to other rich nations but far above the ‘2000-Watt Society’ we promote in chapter two. However, that number is somewhat misleading because Germany’s consumption-based carbon footprint is larger than one based on in-border production alone, meaning that at least several hundred megatonnes of carbon each year are emitted abroad for the sake of German consumption. If energy-use were to drop to 2000 Watts, Germany could instantly eliminate its costly dependence on petroleum and methane. Much of the country’s fossil-fuel consumption is in transport, industry, and heating, which means both that significant capital investment is required for an energy transition, but also that decarbonization will pay substantial dividends because a significant fraction of fossil-fuel primary energy in these sectors is wasted. Heat in a car engine is energy not translated into motion, and, indeed, compared to the elegant solar panel, burning fuels is terribly inefficient. Energy consumption in Germany is split evenly between buildings (mostly heating), transportation (mostly cars and trucking), and industry (chemicals and steel are major culprits). Pathways to savings are well-understood and treated at large in the book.

Another hope we have for this book lies in its capacity to expand what remains, in the context of German debates, an impoverished ecological imagination. As the country’s landscapes are either farms or tree plantations, and because encounters with wildlife (especially megafauna) are so rare, the reappearance of wild nature often provokes disproportionate panic. In 2006, the first wild brown bear seen in Germany in over 170 years was swiftly declared a “Problembär” after killing some livestock. Bruno, as he was nicknamed, was shot and stuffed for a display at Munich’s Museum of Man and Nature, where he is now guilty even in death: his taxidermized corpse will forever knock over a beehive. The Canis lupus’ return has provoked a similar storm of hysteria in ‘the greenest nation.’ In 2000, a she-wolf gave birth to a litter for the first time within the borders of the present FRG since the mid-nineteenth century. By 2025, some 20,000 wolves lived in Germany. In early 2026, the right-wing backlash culminated in legislation to cull the beasts. 

These murderous campaigns contrast with the widespread worry about the fate of “Timmy” or “Hope”, a doomed humpback whale beached on the coast of the Baltic Sea in March 2026. Extensive media coverage, privately funded rescue efforts and emotional identification coalesced around a single struggling animal. This nationwide frenzy, however, ignored structural threats whales face, including habitat loss, declining food sources, noise pollution, collateral damage from the fishing industry, ocean acidification, and disrupted migratory patterns. More so, however, it generated a wave of conspiracy theories and right-wing mobilization, as the whale became a symbolic vessel for claims that authorities and environmental organizations had deliberately abandoned the animal to die, feeding broader anti-elite narratives that the state is indifferent to the suffering of ordinary people. Rewilding, as these three responses to German megafauna makes clear, is an ideological struggle against a fantasy of perfectly controllable nature as much as it is a material struggle over land use. 

One encouraging development is that activists within the climate movement are increasingly cognizant that their struggle cannot be reduced to carbon accounting alone. The fight against Tesla’s Gigafactory in Grünheide in 2024, for example, brought questions of forests, water resources and biodiversity to the center of ecological mobilization, enabling alliances with local residents who might never have joined a climate movement centred on carbon emissions alone. Out of such struggles, an emerging water movement has begun to develop forms of place-based environmental organizing focused on water justice and local conservation. This is politically significant because Heimatschutz protection has often been ceded to, or exploited by, the far right, which regularly attempts to counterpose environmental conservation to climate action. These movements instead point toward an eco-socialist politics capable of taking both concerns seriously at once. They offer a glimpse of the broader shift needed to make a different relation to the natural world conceivable, one in which bears, wolves and whales are understood not as isolated tragedies or threats, but as participants in shared and thriving ecosystems.

It is the material side of biodiversity, however, that is the central focus of Half-Earth Socialism. We respond to the fixation on carbon common to contemporary environmental books, even as other crises—particularly the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction in the nearly four-billion-year history of life on Earth—have causes distinct from those driving greenhouse gas emissions. The single largest driver of biodiversity-loss is habitat degradation, driven primarily by agriculture and animal husbandry, the latter encompassing 80% of agricultural land-use world-wide. The German diet is similar to other wealthy countries, with very high levels of annual meat consumption. At over 70 kg per capita in 2023, the average German eats ten times more meat than their Ethiopian counterpart. Provisioning such a gigantic meat industry requires vast swaths of land for pasture and fodder production. Indeed, it cannot be provisioned solely within Germany itself, necessitating “ghost acreage” 2.5–3 times larger than the land taken up by domestic agriculture. Agriculture occupies half of German territory, an expanse that could be reduced substantially by lowering the fraction allocated to inefficient animal husbandry and biofuel production. Environmental scientist Matthew Hayek quantifies the ‘carbon opportunity cost’ of land used for the meat industry, identifying that a global switch to the EAT-Lancet diet (i.e., a seventy per cent reduction in meat and dairy) or veganism would lead to the removal of the greenhouse gases equivalent to nine or sixteen years, respectively, of fossil-fuel consumption. Fortunately, carnivory in Germany is declining, driven in part by a growing taste for plant-based protein, but the country is still far from the 30 kg per capita recommended by the EAT-Lancet diet and even farther from the veganism we embrace in our book.

It has been a cliché that forests have occupied a hallowed place in the German imagination since Hermann annihilated Varus’ legions, yet the reality is that today German forests face a new Waldsterben. Acid rain is less of a threat than ecological collapse from replacing wild forest with wood plantations. Only one percent of Germany is occupied by biodiverse “natural” forests. Much of the rest is monoculture, providing little shelter to the many plants and animals that need a healthy mixture of species and dead wood to support their full range of behaviors. Such poor habitat and land management intensification may partially explain why flying insects have recently declined 76%, while the 12.7 million breeding pairs of birds disappeared in just over a decade. Once common animals, including dormice and hedgehogs, have suffered severe declines in their populations in recent years.

Carbon, too, is captured better in diverse ecosystems. Tree plantations tend to exhibit rapid growth in above-ground biomass, meaning carbon stored in visible tree trunks and branches, while mixed or biodiverse forests outperform both in long-term carbon storage and in below-ground sequestration (i.e. where carbon is stored in the soil, a far larger reservoir). Rewilding these forests will not only provide refuge to a larger number of species, but will also help the carbon budget. Fortunately, there are a number of biodiversity hotspots that could serve as seeds for a wilder Germany. The Green Belt, a wild area along the former border between East and West Germany, already serves as an unintentional biodiversity oasis that could be expanded into the spine of a park network, connecting the salt marshes around Lübeck and into Mecklenburg on the Baltic Sea coast all the way to the unique raised bogs in the Rhön Biosphere Reserve. Rewilding Europe is carrying out several ambitious projects in Germany, including reintroducing bison, northern bald ibises, and the long-vanished aurochs.

From Fascist Fantasies to Utopian Dreaming

Utopias force dreamers to think through vaguely held sentiments to their logical conclusions. What, after all, is the society that they want? This imaginative exercise perhaps explains why fascists make terrible utopians. Ornery, inchoate complaints about refugees or ‘wokeness’ may mobilise the disgruntled, but when transformed into concrete ideas or practice such a program either evaporates into inconsequentiality or hardens into genocidal fantasies. 

Utopian thinking forces advocates of cruelty to justify themselves, usually with absurd results. The salutary example of More’s original dream—that is, thinking through difficult problems to their conclusions—heartens our belief that democratizing, and thus politicizing, everything would bring humanity closer to the utopia proposed in the book that follows. Neurath’s scientific utopianism involves concrete discussions of material tradeoffs, not symbols, via face-to-face encounters with one’s neighbors. It is the antidote for far-right rhetoric, which depends on isolation and fear.

With the far-right ascendent, it may seem strange to call for faith and trust in one’s fellow citizens in a shared utopian project. Indeed, ours is a utopia without guarantees. We propose a world of free collective choices, unshackled by the profit motive, with the full knowledge that people could choose a path of hysteria and prejudice. Based on our experience in the labor and climate movements, we believe strongly that when presented with real material decisions, people rise to the occasion: the same people who may be tempted by the reactionary wave otherwise. Indeed, the Bürgerräte Klima—an assembly of ordinary German citizens tasked with studying the climate problem and making nonbinding recommendations—proposed quite radical interventions, like substantially reducing livestock numbers. Expanding such assemblies and making their recommendations binding would begin to realize Neurath’s dream of a society of scientific utopians. It’s a countercultural sentiment, certainly, as cynical capitulation to the far right is in vogue with mainstream politicians in Germany and elsewhere. Yet, if utopias thrive in dark times, perhaps trust in the abilities of ordinary people should too. A gentler, greener world is possible, as this book shows, and with existing technology, but it will entail revolutionary changes to overthrow both the external yoke of the market and the internalized capitalist values of consumption and control. Dreaming of such a utopian world during this era of defeat marks the beginning of a new cycle of transformation.