While the year 2022 might have marked a return to ‘normal’ following a global pandemic that pretty much closed down advanced capitalist economies, it also marked the return of high inflation rates and an acute cost of living crisis, particularly in the UK. Meanwhile energy companies are accumulating record profits. To be able to deal with such inflationary pressures partly caused by exorbitant energy prices, British workers in sectors like the railways, the National Health Service, and Royal Mail chose to strike to demand a pay rise decent enough to be able to cope with the rising cost of living. As I write the conclusion of this work, the strikes are ongoing and nobody can say whether workers will succeed. What can be said with confidence, however, is that the crisis has brought into sharp relief the follies of the capitalist market. Most notable of these is not so much the fact that capitalism creates winners and losers but that some (a few) effectively benefit from the destitution of others (many). It is under such circumstances that change comes to be desired; that utopias provide us with the hope that things could be otherwise.

So how would the utopia offered in this book be expected to deal with such problems? Is a cost of living crisis even likely to exist under intersectional socialism? Before I answer those questions, let's look more closely at the underlying causes of the crisis in an advanced capitalist society like the UK. A very sharp rise in energy prices is certainly to blame for this. For, it does not only directly affect consumers of energy like the gas or electricity used to heat water, but also the businesses those consumers rely on for, say, their weekly food shopping. An increase in energy prices, therefore, leads to a more general rise in the cost of living. Individual consumers are pretty much powerless in the face of such developments. Only the energy companies and governments can choose to act to reduce the prices in question, but doing so would go against the capitalist logic of accumulation. The main role of a privatized energy company is to provide their shareholders with a return on their investment. Any measure that would likely decrease this return would be regarded as problematic.