Only depression-level collapse is necessary and sufficient to spark movements towards localized sustainability

Yet it is very unlikely that the kind of transition envisaged could begin unless there is major breakdown in the existing consumer-capitalist system. As long as it keeps the supermarket shelves stocked, discontent is likely to be muted, and focused on demands for more jobs and higher incomes rather than system replacement. The Goldilocks outcome would seem to be an economic depression that falls short of catastrophic breakdown, but is serious enough to convince large numbers that the system is not going to provide for them.

The challenge to the Left

This analysis has especially important implications for those who are radically critical of consumercapitalist society. Firstly it is evident that the revolution required to solve the problem is far bigger than that which Marx envisaged. Merely getting rid of capitalism will not suffice. Secondly, the most promising frontier now for such critics is the challenge to current society being set by unsustainable resource and ecological impacts. Latouche said the limits to growth are giving critical theory its last chance (2012: 75). Yet the foregoing argument has been that this opportunity has hardly been recognized, let alone taken up. Bookchin saw this some time ago. "The New Left, like the old left, has never grasped the revolutionary potential of the ecological issues, nor has it used ecology as a basis for understanding the problems of communist reconstruction and utopia" (1973: 242). Significant and increasing numbers of ordinary people are seriously concerned about these issues and are thinking more or less in the general direction of replacing consumer-capitalism with localism and simpler ways. These themes are likely to be the most effective foundations for critical social theory and practice now.

But unfortunately the Left has a deeply entrenched reluctance to embrace these ideas. The traditional assumption has been that when power has been taken from the capitalist class, the contradictions preventing full application of the productive forces will be removed and technical advance will lift all to material wealth. Socialism is distinctly not conceived today in terms of frugality or localism. Indeed some socialists embrace 'ecomodernist' ideas, notably Phillips (2014) and Sharzer (2012), who explicitly spurn the suggestion that local or simpler ways are necessary or desirable.

David Harvey represents the many Marxists who reject localism both as a goal and as a revolutionary strategy in favor of the typical socialist focus on action at the state level (Harvey 2017). For a critique, see Springer (2017). The Marxist position fails to address current circumstances, where the goal must be to contradict individualistic competitive affluence and must focus on citizen involvement in local economies. Major change at the central or state level cannot be achieved before a profound cultural revolution has been achieved, and this is most likely to occur via developments at the local level.

Delusion and denial: the inability to respond

There are difficult and puzzling issues for social theorists that will not be taken up in this article. They are the psychological and institutional reasons for the failure to deal adequately with the limits to growth predicament, or with its major sub-problems such as the looming petroleum supply, debt, and climate change crises. The core phenomenon to be explained here would seem to be failure to even recognize the existence and/or seriousness of the problems, rather than lack of appropriate remedial action.

The essential causal factor is surely that if the limits to growth analysis is accepted then perhaps the most deeply entrenched post-Enlightenment assumption has to be jettisoned, i.e., the taken-for-granted conviction that progress and the good life are defined by capacity to produce and consume more and more material wealth. The suggestion that the supreme social goal should be materially simple lifestyles and systems, with no prospect of rising to greater affluence over time, would seem to be about as distasteful and unthinkable to workers and the lumpenproletariat as to the super-affluent 1%.

6. Conclusions: a reorientation of social theory

The argument is that the advent of the limits to growth issue should be seen as requiring a major shift in the focal concerns of social theorists, especially those interested in critical perspectives on contemporary society and in sustainability and utopian themes. To begin with, a limits perspective involves a commitment to an inescapable logic that leads to quite specific conclusions regarding desirable social forms and how they might be achieved. If the limits are as severe as has been argued, then the goal must be transition from consumer-capitalist society to a general form that involves far lower resource use, and this has to mean mostly small-scale local economies that are self-governing, basically cooperative and committed to materially frugal lifestyles. If this is so, then the transition is essentially a cultural problem, and it is difficult to imagine how these ways could be established other than through a slow grass-roots process whereby ordinary people increasingly coerced by scarcity and economic deterioration take on the restructuring of their own suburbs, towns and regions (Alexander and Gleeson 2019).