Modern thinking about the good society has inevitably involved the conception of plenty created by the development of the social productive capacities of human societies that has been advancing so spectacularly for centuries now. This is true whether we think of Marx and Engels’s vision of ‘Scientific’ as opposed to ‘Utopian’ socialism (Engels 1970[1880]) or of Keynes’s (1963[1930]) vision of the ‘Economic possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Production and its technology were critical. Though in our own times ecological challenges – of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution – have caused many to speak of ‘degrowth’ (Victor, 2008 is a persuasive argument), and while these perspectives are certainly right to say point to the environmental consequences of growth and of the endless and mindless desire to consume, we must make at least three caveats. First, over the neoliberal decades, growth has been slower even as ecological damage has accelerated. Clearly, low growth per se is not synonymous with environmental protection. Depending on how growth is measures, a very green economy that cuts down on resource and land use and even eliminates fossil fuel consumption could register as growth. Second, the challenges themselves imply better technology that works in harmony with the natural environment even without growth. So socially determined priorities for production and a cultural sphere free of the commercial impulses that stimulate meaningless and socially destructive consumption will be critically necessary. Finally, action on the environment therefore assumes, even if this is not always specified in so many words, a democratically planned economy of precisely the sort that Marx or Keynes had in mind.
