I think of myself as a pretty forward-looking person. I have written two books of utopian socialist fiction. My nonfiction book Why You Should Be a Socialist is also full of utopian suggestions (a reader-submitted list includes “public spaces with lots of flowers and fruit trees,” “high speed affordable trains to every major destination,” “a three-day work week,” “musicians everywhere,” and widespread “public bathrooms so beautiful you feel honored to poop there.”) We have, in the Current Affairs writers’ guide, a requirement that submitted pieces not just complain about why something is bad but include practical proposals for making it good. I am constantly railing against pessimism and resignation. I exhort people to work to build a future worth living in. That’s a huge part of why this magazine exists: to get readers to feel determined rather than despondent. For ten years now, I have done almost nothing except churn out a steady stream of articles and books that encourage people to dream of a better world. 

So I was quite surprised when I opened the website of Jacobin magazine this morning and found a new article that lumps me in as part of a “futureless” left of “doomers, preppers, and antinatalists” who think everything is going to hell in a handbasket and nothing can be done. This left, says writer Dustin Guastella, chants “no future,” and it is “unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.” 

Guastella criticizes antinatalism, the view that it’s not morally justifiable to have children. Some philosophers argue that there is no right to bring a child into the world, because life is a miserable vale of tears nobody should have inflicted on them non-consensually. (See David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existenceor Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. An opposing view runs through my children’s book Welcome to this Strange Thing Called Life: Introducing Newborn Humans to the Universe.) Antinatalism is a fringe philosophy, to judge by the examples of it Guastella finds in the wild, including an Indian man who sued his parents for having given birth to him and a man who bombed a fertility clinic out of a hatred of human reproduction.

But Guastella argues that antinatalism, and other forms of deep pessimism and negativity, characterize major swathes of the progressive left. This is a major problem, he says, because a left with no vision of the future is a left that is destined to fail. He writes:

Antinatalism isn’t necessarily a partisan ideology, though the sentiments are mirrored in quarters of the contemporary left. “Personally, I do not think it is obvious that we have any obligation to ensure humankind continues” argues Nathan Robinson, publisher of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs. “Let the manatees inherit the Earth.” Meanwhile, Antonio Melonio, a left-wing writer who edits the popular Beneath the Pavement Substack argues that having children is “the end of radical sentiment and, in many ways, freedom itself.” For Melonio, starting a family, far from opening up a new window on the future, a new connection to posterity, marks the ultimate submission: “It is very hard to protest, organize, riot, and set police cars on fire when you have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay.”

Now, the first problem here is that Guastella is flat wrong that antinatalism is “mirrored” in my writing. If the reader bothers to click the hyperlink (Guastella must be expecting they won’t), she will find that even in the headline, I explicitly reject antinatalism. The article in question criticizes both pronatalism and antinatalism. 

To sum up the issue: there are those on the conservative right who argue that there is a birth rate crisis and society needs to produce more children. My colleague Sam Miller McDonald has exposed what nonsense this is—the human population has exploded exponentially over the last century, and the major threat now is not that there won’t be enough humans reproducing but that humans will render the planet totally unlivable. But separate from the empirical issue of whether there is some kind of risk here, there is a philosophical argument that women in particular have some kind of obligation to have children. In my article, I was responding to Elizabeth Bruenig, who argued that “having children is good and should be promoted by society,” and if one believes humankind should continue, one is a “pronatalist.”

My own view is that we should be agnostic on the question of whether “having children is good,” because having children is a personal choice, and I have as much opinion on whether people should have children as I do on whether they should own hamsters. My argument here was not that humanity ought to go extinct, but that there is no moral obligation to continue the species. If you do think such an obligation exists, it raises all kinds of tricky questions. First, where does this obligation come from? If it’s from a utilitarian view that “maximizing the amount of conscious experience” is an inherent good, it can quickly take us toward the “longtermist” view that we must colonize the stars in order to maximize the number of humans in the world. How many humans ought to exist? Is it as many as possible? The same amount as we have now? Is it just enough to keep the species going? And who is obligated to have the kids? How should public policy get them to reproduce? What if they don’t want to have kids?

Like I say, all of these questions are not particularly interesting outside a philosophy class, because the fact is that we are in no danger of going extinct through a failure to have kids (if we are in danger of going extinct, I suspect it will likely be through nuclear war or disease). But I raised the point because I think the pronatalist position contains an element of moral judgment on the decision to have or not have children, and I don’t think the left should be judging that choice. Like I said in my headline, we should be neither antinatalist nor pronatalist.

So Guastella totally misrepresents my position and makes no attempt to deal with my argument. And in fact, he does the same to the other writer he says “mirrors the sentiments” of antinatalism, Antonio Melonio. Melonio’s postalso rejects antinatalism. He argues that the capitalist class wants people to have more children, and that when people have children they tend to become more conservative. They can take fewer risks, because they have kids to take care of, and they often (understandably) become more concerned with their children’s well-being than society’s:

It is very hard to protest, organize, riot, and set police cars on fire when you have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay; it is much harder for women to divorce and break up when young children are involved, even if and when the relationship turns abusive and violent; it is harder even to crave any sort of significant political change, no matter how unjust and parasitic the system becomes. In short: children — not growing older, as is usually stated — make you more conservative.

That is an empirical argument about what does happen, not a normative one about what should happen. Just in case a sloppy reader mistakes Melonio for an antinatalist, he writes: “Should that stop you from having children, if you want them? Fuck, no. Live your only life the way you see fit.” Thus Melonio shares my position: it is none of our business whether someone else has kids or not. Our job is to take care of humanity as it exists, not prescribe the number of humans who should exist. Does Guastella just not understand what we are arguing? Or has he deliberately left out the parts where we make clear that we don’t hold the position he’s attributing to us? If the latter, why? Is he just so invested in criticizing the left for its doomerism that he doesn’t care whether the criticisms are fair or not? I don’t get it. 

In fact, it turns out to be quite hard for Guastella to find an example of the doomer/antinatalist/futureless left. The only two writers he cites as embracing antinatalism are me and Melonio, who don’t hold the position. Providing further proof that the left is visionless and negative, he writes: 

Today’s progressives veer between despair and denial. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, for instance, insist that we’re witnessing “end-times fascism.” While they criticize the “bunker mentality” of the far right, their vision aims no higher, or further, than mere survival. “We have reached a choice point,” Klein and Taylor argue, “not about whether we are facing apocalypse but what form it will take.”

This, too, is an outrageously unfair distortion. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor are both forward-looking thinkers, not doomers. Taylor is the co-author (with Leah Hunt-Hendrix) of the marvelous book Solidarity, which shows how a solidaristic ethic can help us build a better future, while Klein is one of the foremost champions of the Green New Deal and radical efforts to stall climate change. In the very article that Guastella cites, Klein and Taylor write: 

We counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.

What is this but the very forward-looking, future-affirming leftism that Guastella says he wants? And yet he tells us that there is “an obsession with the present” among leftists, that we are “trapped” in 1968, “endlessly rehearsing the slogans and priorities of that cultural revolution over and over again,” and have given up on “providing any compelling vision,” although there are “periodic protests against racism and sexism.” (It’s not clear whether he supports those protests.) In certain sectors, “catastrophism reigns,” including among “ecoterrorists, various ‘abolitionist’ tendencies, and radical antinatalists.” Now, abolitionism seems to me an inherently utopian, forward-looking ideology, not a form of “catastrophism,” but more importantly, who exactly are these visionless leftists? Guastella cites the climate expert Alex Steffen, who has a course on how to “ruggedize” your life, but Steffen, too, cannot be labeled a doomer. (Nor is he obviously especially leftist, calling himself “moderately progressive.”) His “ruggedization” is about being ready for unpredictable dangers, but he makes clear he’s not saying we should simply assume the worst is inevitable, and “we still need to do everything we can to limit global heating and ecological collapse.” He advocates “​​hundreds of millions of new homes; wind farms and solar fields by the tens of thousands, factories churning out batteries and electric cars and induction stoves and geothermal systems,” and says that “we need thousands upon thousands of committed people learning how to lead in the real world…” Not exactly a mere sigh of resignation.

I think Guastella is making up an imaginary left, then. The leftists I know are all engaged and committed to fighting back. They’re not cowering doomsday preppers. They are working hard and showing more ambition than anyone else in politics. It’s the liberals and centrists who are the pessimistic, unimaginative ones who think we must take baby steps and that nothing good is possible. In fact, I think the excess negativity on the left here is Guastella’s. He is telling us we’re all a bunch of failures unworthy of the great Karl Marx. (“Are there any intellectuals of the Left today whose insights and commitment to humanity’s long-term horizon rival those of Karl Marx or Karl Polanyi?”)

But look, I believe in solidarity. I don’t want a rift with Guastella and Jacobin here, because I have immense respect for Jacobin and warm, comradely feelings toward them. I don’t feel Guastella is being fair to me or to Melonio, Taylor, Klein, or Steffen, but the important point is that we all agree, actually. He writes that “without a flag staked in the future — a clear vision of the world we want for our children and theirs — we lose track of where we want to go.” Well you don’t have to tell me, Dustin. I write things like that all the time. So let’s not bicker, eh? There’s no need to write articles in Jacobin castigating fellow leftists as “unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.” Just join with us as we build the glorious socialist future together. Solidarity forever!