As a child, I often wondered what the communist paradise would look like. For some reason, despite my family's atheism, I imagined lots of people wandering around on clouds (and eating lots of sweets) – clearly my religious education lessons had seeped in somewhere. But what did people actually do in this better world? How did they live? And what was it about this world that gave people more satisfying and fulfilling lives? Communism, it seemed to me, was all about making a better world, but what I wanted to understand was what that better world might actually be like. And indeed, as introduced in Chapter 1, progressives have been accused of spending much more time focusing on what they see as wrong as opposed to articulating what ‘right’ would look like. Socialism, writes Bregman, has become little more than a force for resisting and reigning in the opposition: ‘Anti-privitazation, anti-establishment, anti-austerity. Given everything they’re against, one is left to wonder, what are underdog socialists actually for?’

So what kind of society would need to exist for the full development and thriving of each individual, each community, and the planet as a whole? That is the subject matter of the present chapter, which critically explores the nature of a far future progressive utopia, based on the psychological principles outlined in Chapters 3 and 4, the system-wide principles of cooperative organisation set out in Chapters 5 and 6, and then the practical steps of Chapter 7. The chapter begins by setting out why utopian thinking may be so important for progressives, and then defines utopias in terms of the realisation of highest-order needs and wants. On this basis, the chapter uses the eight fundamental directions, set out in Chapter 3 – as well as directionality itself – as the basis for considering what an ideal society might look like. Key here is the creation of synergies (Chapter 4): to maximise benefit in a society, we need to find ways in which multiple highest-order needs and wants can be realised together, rather than in opposition to each other. Of course, along the lines of previous chapters, the aim here is not to pin down – definitively – what a progressive utopia should look like.