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Any discussion of which scenarios for the future have become more salient since Paul Raskin and his co-authors published their seminal 2002 essay Great Transition must place global capitalism and its crisis at the center of analysis. We are all too familiar with the symptoms of our existential predicament: unprecedented inequality; the spread of hunger and disease; the collapse of the biosphere; widespread social disintegration; the displacement of hundreds of millions by climate change, economic collapse, wars, and persecution; the breakdown of state legitimacy; and the violent crack up of the post-World War II international order. Yet all these symptoms have a common denominator that cannot be considered as simply another factor in discussion of alternative futures: a global capitalist system whose imperative to endlessly accumulate trumps all else.

The future is not predetermined, and nothing is inevitable. We are at this time in the situation described by Gramsci that so many people have of late cited, and with good reason: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old way is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We do not know which future we are living in precisely because the battle for the future is being waged at this very time. Nonetheless, as Raskin also observes, correctly in my view, the Barbarization scenario has gained significant ground over the past two decades at the expense of Conventional Worlds, whereas Great Transition scenarios have made considerably less headway.

We stand at a tipping point in history when acute dissatisfaction with capitalism is rising, not on account of its poor economic performance or the unfair distribution of wealth, but rather its excellent economic performance, its intensity. In other words, as the real income and the social clout of the working class has risen, exploitation is no longer the key engine of social injustice. Instead, it is the competitive production of profit—the key dynamic of capitalism—that is felt as harmful by all participants in this process. It is for the first time that acute injustices are experienced from, and social hostility is directed at, both the competitive and the productivist components in the operation of capitalism. What is being challenged is not simply the unfair distribution of wealth, but, importantly, the very process through which wealth is generated and the impact this has on individuals, communities, and nature. This is the case because the trouble with current-day capitalism is not just material inequality, but a massive economic and social uncertainty afflicting a growing multitude of groups beyond the poor and the excluded. The intensified competitive pressures of globally integrated capitalism have also done tangible damage to the winners in the distribution of power—labor market insiders with good and well-paid jobs, owners and managers of capital—and is triggering their discontent.

This novel multifaceted discontent is shaping a powerful political force. A variety of interests across class divides, educational levels, and cultural identities are making diverse individuals converge into a multitude united by an overarching grievance against the impact the competitive production of profit is having on their lives as well as their social and natural environment. Mobilized in a mundane and inglorious anticapitalist revolution, these forces can perform a social change yet more radical than any proletarian class struggle could ever achieve.

Revamping State Power to Support Commoning We have outlined a general stance towards the state in moving forward, but we have not burrowed into the deeper questions: In what specific ways can state power itself be altered to support commoning? What openings in law and bureaucratic behavior, or in politics and local action, might be exploited to secure stable beachheads for commoning? The first priority is to convince state institutions to back off. Recall Elinor Ostrom’s wisdom in her seventh design principle for successful commons. She asserted that state authorities must recognize the right of commoners to govern themselves.42 External governmental authorities must not challenge the right of the users of common resources (or “appropriators,” in Ostrom’s language) to devise their own rules and governance regimes. This is our starting point and a minimal requirement. We could derive a principle of noninterference from it. The state must get out of the way so that commoners can engage in the value-generating activities that only they can do. Given the realities, however, commons may find that they need legal recognition to grow and flourish. In instances where state institutions regard sharing as a crime — e.g., seed sharing, software collaborations, information sharing — commoning must be decriminalized. This is part of normalizing commons and acknowledging that the moral and political legitimacy of commoning exists prior to and independent of modern states.43 Consider how state power has been used to let investors form corporations and limit their liability, ostensibly because such organizational forms serve the public good. Monarchs and, later, legislatures saw corporations as a way to encourage activities that the state itself could not or did not want to undertake. Early ventures such as the investor-owned British East India Company, for example, developed colonial trade regimes, extracted natural resources, exploited cheap labor, and built railroads and waterways. Why shouldn’t state power also recognize the immense value generated by commoners by granting their institutions legal standing? Such recognition will not come easily, of course. Political leaders and bureaucrats who bow down before the standard economic narrative have trouble seeing other modes of value. Moreover, some state institutions themselves are designed to depend on market revenues. For example, the European Patent Office — an interstate governance body that grants patents under the European Patent Convention — is designed to finance most of its one billion euro budget by collecting fees from patent applicants. Since the more patents it grants, the more money it collects, the Patent Office has a strong incentive to make more scientific and technical knowledge proprietary. While it is understandable to charge patent holders for services provided — and not, say, the general taxpayer — this mechanism is a disincentive to support a world in which we Share Knowledge Generously. Such a societal ideal tends to be regarded as aberrant, if not faintly ridiculous. So are any ambitions to achieve social harmony and intergenerational continuity and protect cultural heritage. As for the potential contributions that subsistence communities and nomadic tribes make to eco-sensitive choices, many moderns continue to depict them as primitive, uncivilized, and hopelessly backward.44 Thus, we are imprisoned within a progress narrative validated and reproduced by state institutions. We are told the economy must grow (to fulfill targets contrived by corporations) so that we can compete successfully on the global market. World leaders urge us not to fall behind. Being outpaced in technological innovation is considered by the business and political communities to be the worst fate of all. One innovation after another — driverless cars, synthetic biology, nanotechnology — is pushed through regulatory procedures, at times with too little time to consider the full societal costs and benefits. All this makes it difficult for people to embrace a shift to the commons. Moreover, guardians of state power understandably think: why should the state cede any authority to nonmarket, decentralized activities or provide funding support to things that have no market value? It would only enrage elites and disrupt internal political arrangements. In addition, letting people withdraw from the circuitry of the market/state system will only embolden the yearning for self-determination, goes the thinking … and that could be dangerous. It would only encourage unregulated activity, amateur experimentation, and perhaps demands for greater autonomy. The guardians of state power may understandably fear that if people decommodify their everyday lives and wean themselves away from dependencies on market/state systems, it will reduce the state’s moral standing, political authority, and tax revenues. Thus the challenge: if the commons is going to evolve as an alternative matrix of governance and provisioning, it must somehow overcome a deep-seated skepticism about commoning among many bureaucrats, politicians, and governments. This does not mean that no workarounds are possible. As stated earlier, the state is not a monolithic institution. State decision makers, despite their zeal in defending their authority, could find it advantageous to authorize and support commoning under the right circumstances. At the local level, this means: allocating land for community gardens and co-housing; facilitating the formation of community land banks and trusts; encouraging local agriculture and food systems; using open source software in public administration; providing free community Wi-Fi everywhere; using open educational resources (OER) in classrooms; providing space and support for timebanks, repair cafés, hackerspaces, and much more. This is not a quixotic agenda. Those who wield state power are mindful of the need for public support and legitimacy. Many politicians, feeling the heat from fierce social protests against extractivism and the international trade regime, are looking for credible ways to escape the iron cage of neoliberal capitalism. Some political leaders are willing to concede the failures of the market/progress narrative to address climate breakdown, inequality, poverty, and hunger; but on the other hand, they are also fearful of breaking from dogmas about free markets and national identity. Around the world, many authoritarians have seized upon the many failures of the market/state system to promote various forms of nationalism. Although a complicated and varied process, much of this political trend is fueled by a search for meaning, purpose, and belonging that the market/state is incapable of fulfilling. The political left and center, meanwhile, cling to conventional vehicles for change: new laws, policies, programs, and procedural reform. While sometimes significant, these approaches generally are carried out in distant state venues (courts, legislatures, government agencies) and fail to engage people personally. In the end, many liberals and social democrats remain tethered to the dominant narrative of progress and show little interest in bottom-up empowerment or social transformation. The cultural dimensions of commons-based initiatives such as agroecology, community land trusts, platform cooperatives, and cosmo-local production, are generally ignored or seen as too small and inconsequential to be taken seriously. Businesses, for their part, generally see them as threats to their market share and profits.

As Williams also points out, in its early years under the leadership of Lenin, the Soviet Union took ecological sustainability very seriously both in terms of state policies and education (2010, 181–182). Williams writes, “Committed to the unity of theory and practice, the Bolsheviks did not limit themselves to theoretical reconceptions of a dynamic and interactive organic and inorganic world but actively supported little-known but nevertheless groundbreaking ecological practice” (2010, 182).

Writing of the ecological crisis, Minqi Li argues that “as capitalism ceases to be a viable historical system, socialism may prove to be the only viable solution to the fundamental crisis confronting humanity” (2013, 10). Li’s argument is especially compelling because he makes the case that “even if one follows the logic of mainstream economic theory” (2013, 12), socialism is more viable than capitalism. Li concludes, “Only with public ownership and society-wide planning could society achieve ecological sustainability without sacrificing the basic needs of the great majority of the population” (2013, 41). Socialism would be incomparably more viable than any form of capitalism. Insofar as it is the negation of capitalism, Marxian international socialism is the way out of the fatal deadlock that capitalist eco-imperialism is driving us towards. To Marx and Engels, socialist modes of production are defined in opposition to the capitalist modes of production and private property, and that is precisely why they emphasize the significance of the historical development of capitalism as a necessary condition for the transition into socialism. While the capitalist modes of production are centred around private property and the private ownership of the means of production, essential to socialism is the negation of private property and the private ownership of the means of production. However, under all forms of state socialism that have been attempted thus far, the private ownership of the means of production was not negated. Put differently, in all cases of state socialism to date, it was the state and party elites, not the public or workers, who controlled the means of production. Of course, these elites claimed to represent the interests of the proletariat, but that makes no difference in terms of the actual ownership of the means of production, and, thus, relations of production, which remained economically exploitative, socially alienating, politically oppressive, and ecologically devastating. In such state-dictated economies, the proletariat were not less disempowered than the proletariat in market-dictated economies. Workers in either case have been free only insofar as they freely choose the only option the system would give them, namely to sell their labour. This, in turn, greatly empowered the ruling class both nationally and within an international regime of antagonistic nation states, thereby further dividing the proletariat across the world.

A growing literature is now exploring options for so-called degrowth, which aims to promote human wellbeing and ecological resilience without requiring GDP growth (Hickel et al., 2021; Kallis, 2017; Keyßer and Lenzen, 2021; Wiedmann et al., 2020; Kallis, 2020). The experiences of the last few years, including COVID-19, may have shifted public understanding and opinion on these issues, especially in richer countries, which are best placed to lead with new policies. In a recent survey of people in G20 countries, 74% of respondents supported the idea that their country’s economic priorities should move beyond profit and increasing wealth to focus more on human wellbeing and ecological protection (Gaffney et al., 2021). Overcoming the research-implementation gap remains a challenge, however. We do not yet know how degrowth policies could be adopted at scale or how they would interact with our current economic processes and patterns of behaviour. Nonetheless, our climate predicament demands openness to new approaches. To better understand the options, further research into basic relations between societal metabolism and social-ecological wellbeing is crucial (Haberl et al., 2019; Hagens, 2020; King, 2020; Leiva and Schramski, 2020; Schramski et al., 2015; West, 2018; Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 2015; Garrett et al., 2020; Giampietro et al., 2013; Ringsmuth et al., 2016). Although the many challenges and risks associated with a fundamental economic transition are formidable, arguably, they may be overcome on the time scale of a human life (decades).4 Conversely, the risks associated with ever more radiative forcing as we avoid adequately reducing emissions include transitions of the Earth system to inhospitable states that may not be reversible on the time scales of civilisations (centuries to millennia) (Lenton et al., 2019; Steffen et al., 2018). The growing literature on tipping dynamics in socioeconomic systems may offer reasons for optimism about societies’ potentials for a timely rise to the challenge of systemic transformation (Otto et al., 2020; Lenton, 2020).

Equally important, the precise configuration of the capitalist order at any place and time depends on contestation--on the balance of social power and on the outcome of political struggles. Far from simply being given, capitalism's institutional divisions often become foci of conflict as actors mobilize to challenge or defend the established boundaries separating economy from polity, production from reproduction, human from nonhuman nature, and exploitation from expropriation. Insofar as they aim to relocate contested processes on the system's institutional map, capitalism's subjects draw on the normative perspectives associated with the various zones that we have identified.

We can see this happening today. For example, some opponents of neoliberalism draw on ideals of care and responsibility, associated with reproduction, in order to oppose efforts to commodify education. Others summon notions of stewardship of nature and justice between generations, associated with ecology, to militate for a shift to renewable energy. Still others invoke ideals of public autonomy, associated with polity, to advocate international capital controls and to extend democratic accountability beyond the state. Yet others cite norms of integration and community autonomy, associated with resistance to expropriation, to advocate prison abolition and police defunding. Such claims, along with the counterclaims they inevitably incite, are the very stuff of social struggle in capitalist societies--as fundamental as the class struggles over control of commodity production and distribution of surplus value that Marx privileged. These boundary struggles, as I shall call them, decisively shape the structure of capitalist societies.14 They play a constitutive role in the view of capitalism as an institutionalized societal order.

Based on the ideas of Marx and Engels, the original leaders of the Russian Revolution in 1917 – Lenin, Leon Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party – saw the overthrow of capitalism in Russia as the prelude to an international transformation of society. They understood that, economically, Russia was not ready for socialism, as it was mostly agrarian and only newly industrializing after centuries of feudalism. But the world was ready for such a transformation. For them the success or failure of the Soviet Union depended on the working classes of other countries successfully overthrowing capitalism. This is even truer today, with the increased integration of the world economy, than it was in 1917. With supply chain and production now conducted on an international level, the scope for coordinated international working class struggle has never been larger.

This is why Socialist Alternative is a part of International Socialist Alternative, with sections in over 30 countries. It is especially important to build a strong movement in the U.S. to challenge the American imperialist ruling class, which has been one of the greatest obstacles to international workers’ struggles over the past century. Having taken on the role of the world’s top banker and policeman after World War II, the United States’ history as a global superpower has nothing to do with its mythical exceptionalism or “freedom,” but its brutal interventions throughout Central and Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East to extend its control over the world’s resources and markets. In the process, it’s mowed over workers’ and oppressed peoples’ movements.

Concrete utopias for social reproduction are discussed throughout this book and I do not want to list those again here. Further examples can include the mutual aid groups that sprung up globally under COVID-19, as well as ones that pre-existed this period, throughout the world. Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar (2020) collect examples from Argentina, Brazil, India, Iraq, Mozambique, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, as well as Europe and North America. In the slums of the world, people raise animals on rooves and grow vegetables on windowsills. Urban squatters internationally are self-provisioning. In Africa, landless women have migrated to towns and appropriated vacant lots of land. Accra community gardens supply the city with up to 90 per cent of its vegetables. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, manioc is grown across the city and goats graze on green areas of streets. In Southern Nigeria, crops are grown and cows graze on university campuses. In Athens, the Exarchia neighbourhood hosts squats and social centres that provide solidary housing, healthcare, social and cultural spaces, and food to refugees, migrants, and others (Karlin, 2022). In the Taita Hills in Kenya, following the failure of colonial irrigation systems, locals have returned to precolonial systems based on complex common property, with households responsible for the sections close to them and repairs and decisions about the allocation of water policed locally (Brand, 2010; Federici, 2019; Basu, 2020b). Kothari (2014) highlights thousands of initiatives in India for decentralized water provision, biodiversity conservation, education, governance, the production of food, materials and energy, and waste management rurally and in urban areas. In the Mexican Oaxaca Commune of 2016, women organized collective reproduction, appropriating and redistributing resources such as food, water, fuel, and medical supplies.

Conclusions

Imagine what would be possible if workers ran the major industries. In the context of minimizing climate catastrophe, workers can cooperate to ensure cleaner, more efficient production and global trade, and oversee a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy while guaranteeing safe well-paid jobs and rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. In the context of a pandemic, workers could rapidly retool industrial plants to build much-needed medical and personal protective gear, and freely distribute vaccine formulas and disease research. Rather than suffering under the mismanagement of privatized, for-profit healthcare, instead doctors, nurses, and hospital workers could coordinate the distribution of equipment and information, while ensuring safe, adequate staffing and quality care to all patients.

Capitalism also results in the unnecessary proliferation of similar products. Companies fiercely compete to produce the first and seemingly best goods for the highest possible price, and then spend over half a trillion dollars every year to convince consumers to buy them. As a result, half of an aisle at the local pharmacy is devoted to thirty brands of toothpaste. Socialism would instead aim to produce the necessary amount of the best-quality products based on general need, and thereby save a huge amount of resources that could otherwise improve and innovate new goods and services. This is far from unrealistic: much of the information required to achieve such a feat of planning is currently under the control of Amazon’s corporate executives! Instead of giant corporations using online tracking to bombard us with tailored ads to convince us to buy products, these tools could enormously aid in democratic planning.

To these proposals, the pessimists will answer: yes, but individuals are motivated by infinite aspirations and desires which must be controlled, analyzed, suppressed and even repressed if necessary. Democracy could then be subject to certain restrictions. Yet ecosocialism is based on a reasonable assumption, previously advanced by Marx: the predominance of “being” over “having” in a non-capitalist society, that is to say the primacy of free time over the desire to own countless objects: personal achievement through real activities, cultural, sports, recreational, scientific, erotic, artistic and political.

The fetishism of the commodity encourages compulsive buying through the ideology and advertising specific to the capitalist system. There is no evidence that this is part of “eternal human nature.” Ernest Mandel pointed out:

Another objection to the studies thus far is that they do not show that a reduction in all relevant environmental pressures is possible to an extent that would comply with the planetary boundaries. Most of the studies focus on CO2 emissions, but this is merely one of the boundary values. The most comprehensive study from an ecological perspective, UNEP 2011a, takes the ecological footprint as the relevant ecological indicator. Nonetheless, in the UNEP scenario, not even the CO2 emissions are reduced sufficiently enough to limit global warming to 2 °C (Victor and Jackson 2011): according to the most ambitious UNEP G2 scenario, CO2 emissions will decrease by 35% between 2011 and 2050 (UNEP 2011a: 514). Rogelj et al. (2015) argue, however, that they must decrease by more than 50% within this time frame in order to comply with the peak values that are compatible with meeting the 2 °C target. A similar objection applies to the calculations in Calderon et al. (2014) if they are used to support the claim that an adequate decoupling will occur. Calderon et al. (2014) identify measures that can be taken to reduce GHG emissions to around 50 Gt CO2e (range 44–54 Gt) by 2050. With emissions at 50 Gt CO2e by 2050, however, climatological models calculate a low probability that the 2 °C target will be met (Rogelj et al. 2015). The range of GHG emissions in 2050 for which climatological models simulate a 66% probability of meeting the 2 °C target is between 99 and 26 Gt CO2e; the range for meeting the 1.5 °C target is between 4 and 19 Gt CO2e. The respective simulations thus far, however, do not answer the question of which measures should be taken to achieve these ambitious reduction targets, what these measures cost, and what effect they will have on economic output.

Some proponents of the green growth strategy also admit that it is not possible to provide a reliable estimation of the costs of transforming economies in compliance with the planetary boundaries. This is because the necessary increases in decarbonisation rates and resource efficiency require disruptive or even radical technological change (Hepburn and Bowen 2013, Aghion et al. 2014, Zenghelis 2016). Green growth proponents put forward various considerations in order to support their claim that over the next few years the necessary four- to ninefold increase in the rates of reduction in GHG intensity will be achieved: Hepburn and Bowen (2013) point to the potential in the photovoltaics industry (its substantial cost reductions thus far, and its upcoming potential technological developments), while Zenghelis (2016) points to the disruptive potential of electricity storage technologies. There is empirical evidence that economic agents tend, because of existing path dependencies, to stick with the technologies they have been using thus far, and not to invest in resource- or GHG-saving technologies (overview in Aghion et al. 2014). Green growth proponents conclude from this that if economic agents are persuaded away from existing path dependencies through political interventions (subsidies, incentives, institutional changes), this can escalate reductions in GHG intensity (e.g. Zenghelis 2016). This conclusion and the empirical and narrative evidence show that the necessary technological leaps are, in principle, possible. The evidence presented, however, does not prove that these technological leaps and their widespread diffusion and adaptation are at all realistic. They enable no reliable prediction that if the path dependencies are removed and GHG-saving innovations are promoted via other measures, this will bring about the reductions in GHG and resource intensity required in order to meet the ecological targets. This is because we cannot rule out the possibility that the rates of reduction in GHG intensity may nonetheless increase only 3-fold if all the proposed green growth measures are implemented consistently.

The sustainability literature usually considers economic growth, measured through gross domestic product (GDP), essential to moving toward a healthier planet and protection of biodiversity (WCED, 1987). Growth in GDP is said to promote technological efficiency while reducing the use of materials and energy and GHG emissions (Victor, 2010). Accordingly, decoupling of GDP from environmental and biodiversity impacts (Haberl et al., 2020; Wiedenhofer et al., 2020), or reducing such impacts while the economy is growing, is viewed as possible (Ward et al., 2016). However, so far dematerialization has been achieved almost exclusively through extraction of materials offshore and by only a few developed countries (Wiedmann et al., 2015). Additionally, any environmental and biodiversity improvements derived from efficiency gains have been generally cancelled by the “rebound effect” because such gains have further stimulated growth and hence materials and energy use (Schandl et al., 2018).

Recent publications show impacts on biodiversity from an ever-expanding growth fueled by continuous and intensive resource extraction. Encroachment and fragmentation of habitats; biotic homogenization; alteration of trophic structures; changes in species’ ranges and population sizes; and increases in invasive non-native species and local extinctions are examples of such impacts (Czech, 2000, 2008; Czech et al., 2012; Limburg et al., 2011; Otero et al., 2020). Expansion of intensive agriculture, forestry, fisheries, aquaculture, industry, urbanization, and transport also affect biodiversity by altering terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems (Albert et al., 2021; Czech et al., 2004; Froehlich et al, 2018; Newbold et al., 2015; Powers & Jetz, 2019; Sala & Knowlton, 2006; Weinzettel et al, 2013). Some authors have theoretically analyzed the relationship between growth and biodiversity loss (e.g., Czech, 2000; Czech et al., 2004), whereas others provide empirical evidence of it (e.g., Czech et al., 2012; Limburg et al., 2011; Weinzettel et al, 2013). For instance, Clausen and York (2008a) show how mean trophic level of marine catch decreases in nations with continuous economic expansion, urbanization, and population growth. Although in the earliest stages of economic development the mean trophic level of marine catches increases, further growth leads to a decline of species at high trophic levels and an overall ecosystem decline once GDP per capita and urbanization reach US$700 and 23%, respectively. DeFries et al. (2010) found a positive correlation between forest loss and urban growth and agricultural exports that continuously exacerbated forest clearance, particularly in the tropics. Estrada et al. (2017) found that 60% of primate species are threatened by extinction and 75% are in decline as a result of habitat loss through the expansion of industrial agriculture, large-scale cattle ranching, logging, oil and gas drilling, mining, dam building, and road construction. Marques et al. (2019) report industrial agriculture and forestry are major drivers of bird species loss; anthropogenic land use is responsible for up to 7% of this loss and a rise in the international goods trade is responsible for an additional 25% of bird biodiversity impacts. Results of several other studies also demonstrate that numbers of threatened plant, amphibian, invertebrate, fish, and reptile species increase with economic growth (Clausen & York, 2008b; Czech & Krausman, 1997; Naidoo & Adamowicz, 2001).

Nuclear weapons early on became entwined with the pursuit of US imperial policy and remain there. US presidents have routinely expressed moral abhorrence of nuclear weapons privately. Eisenhower told a naval aide that “overkill … frighten[ed] the devil out of me”; Kennedy muttered to Dean Rusk, “and we call ourselves the human race” after a particularly nightmarish briefing; and Reagan even agreed with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 that, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” However, they never publicly renounced the “all-out” option or stopped planning for it. None said “A nuclear war must never be threatened, or prepared for.” Such preparation continued because nuclear weapons became central to imperialism from the mid-twentieth century onwards. That they “continuously benefitted our military-industrial-congressional complex” (Ellsberg Citation2017, 271, 324), not to mention a declining US economy ever more reliant on it, also helped.

Since US imperial policy predated the Cold War and survived it, the world did not march toward liberal capitalist prosperity under benign US “hegemony” with a peace dividend in its bank account after the Cold War. Rather, it entered an increasingly tense space bounded by growing pluripolarity thanks to US economic decline and rapid growth in China and some developing countries and increasing US military aggression in response. Beginning by bombing retreating soldiers and civilians in violation of international law and the Soviet-brokered peace in the Gulf war (Hudson Citation2018, 158–159; citing the Committee to Stop War in the Gulf), the US went on to wage a string of illegal wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria and hybrid wars against other countries that sought autonomous forms of development unsuited to the interests of US and Western corporations. Today, this aggression has culminated in the New Cold Wars against Russia and China and has set off a new nuclear arms race even as declining US capacities become clear in Afghanistan and are about to become clear once again in the hybrid war against Russia over Ukraine.

Conversely, other causal links act in the direction of crisis towards war. On the one hand, economically, war happens to be integrated into the capital cycle, as the destruction of capital. According to the capitalist point of view, the expenditure on armaments being considered unproductive, would they not be a means of destroying surplus capital? We are dealing today, within the very power of finance, with a systemic crisis—which means that capital is not finding internal solutions to the contradictory dynamics it is deploying. This is the reason why the extreme form of devalorization of capital, i.e., military war, is more and more frequently used by the dominant financial fractions of capital. Instead of having, in the United States, an economic growth driven by an active strategy oriented towards production, these fractions of the dominant classes, at least as far as the “Globalists” are concerned, have on the contrary made the choice to promote an accumulation of fictitious financial and military capital. And on the other hand, politically, because it is the State that goes to war on behalf of capital, imperialist war is there to reproduce the conditions for maintaining the command of finance over the entire global capitalist system. These factions now retain their power only through their investments in the military-industrial complex, in order to offer capital new outlets and opportunities for speculation. The global system seems to function more and more directly through recourse to the armed forces of the United States or the military threat agitated by Washington—the basis of this visible violence being that, invisible, of capitalist relations of production. Militarization is the mode of existence of financial oligopolies. Backed by the U.S. military, finance capital is trying to keep control of the petrodollar—even if that means new wars or threats. Hence the armed conflicts maintained in the Middle East, an oil, de facto dollarized, and thus coveted region.

War and crisis are embedded phenomena. The 2000s began with the attack of September 11 (2001) and ended with the “subprime” crisis. In both cases, there was an intensification of wars in the Middle East (Afghanistan, then Iraq). After a decline observed during the post-Soviet or “peace dividend” era, military spending was on the rise again. The U.S. interest rate remained low to fight the crisis until 2004, before rising in mid-2005 to finance these wars. But it gave a boost to the real estate market. The mechanisms of the “subprime” crisis were put in place, with perilous risk-taking. A few months after the military engagement in Iraq and the raising of its interest rates by the Fed, mortgage loan installments began to be interrupted by debtors in default. The Fed kept rates high until mid-2007, when the crisis was already here. It was only late, after the summer of 2007, that it granted the banks huge amounts of interest-free credit, without managing to avoid the panic. Meanwhile, the economy had entered a depression. The 2008 crisis arose as the external and internal imbalances in the United States worsened: the first identifiable in the balance of payments, due in part to industrial relocations (to Mexico, China, etc.); the second (budget deficits and public debt) can be explained by several causes, the most decisive of which is the pressure exerted by increased financing needs to wage the imperialist wars that Washington is undertaking in an attempt to prolong its military control of the planet.

What does it mean to say that capitalism is the principal sociohistorical driver of global warming? At one level, this claim is empirical, a statement of cause and effect. Contrary to the usual vague references to "anthropogenic climate change," it pins the rap not on "humanity" in general but on the class of profit-driven entrepreneurs who engineered the fossil-fueled system of production and transport that released a flood of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That's a claim I shall defend empirically later on, when I turn to the historical portion of my argument. But there is more at work here than historical causality. Capitalism, as I understand it, drives global warming non-accidentally, by virtue of its very structure. It is this strong systematic claim, and not its weaker empirical cousin, that I unpack now.

I begin by preempting a possible misunderstanding. To say that capitalism drives climate change non-accidentally is not to say that ecological crises occur only in capitalist societies. On the contrary, many precapitalist societies have perished as a result of environmental impasses, including some of their own making-as when ancient empires ruined the farmlands on which they depended through deforestation or failure to rotate crops. Likewise, some self-proclaimed postcapitalist societies generated severe environmental damage through relentless quotidian coal-burning and spectacular one-off disasters such as Chernobyl. Such cases show that ecological devastation is not unique to capitalism.

Trust in both society’s institutions and capitalism is strained despite strong economic performance, according to Edelman’s 2020 Trust Barometer. The study found that 56% of the global population said "capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world." Most people also said traditional institutions, such as government, media, business and NGOs, don’t have a vision for the future that they can get behind. Fewer than half of respondents said government (35%), media (35%) and business (41%) have a vision for the future. NGOs received the highest approval at 45%. Now in its 20th year, the 2020 Trust Barometer’s results upended conventional wisdom that GDP growth correlates with higher trust, said Edelman global CEO Richard Edelman. This is the result of the broad belief that prosperity is not being fairly distributed. The study was originally built on the work of political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who advocated that economic mobility supported by a strong legal system could sustain and develop trust. However, events following the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recession proved to Edelman that model may "not [be] sufficient," he said. While much of the media narrative about socialism has focused on young people, Edelman said his work found little difference among age groups, noting the belief that capitalism does more harm than good is "universal." Fifty-three percent of respondents over the age of 55 said capitalism does more harm than good, as was the case with 57% of the 18-to-34 age group and 59% of people ages 35 to 54. "The essential truth is: people are scared," Edelman added. "Their fears are overcoming their hopes." In 15 of the 28 markets surveyed, most people said they will not be better off in five years, including the U.S., where only 43% of respondents said so, representing a 7% decline.

But there is another, less familiar idea that should also guide the process. Call it "pay as you go." Eschewing all forms of free riding and so-called primitive accumulation, twenty-first century socialism must ensure the sustainability of all those conditions of production that capitalism has so callously trashed. In other words: a socialist society must undertake to replenish, repair, or replace all the wealth it uses up in production and reproduction. First, it must replenish work that produces use values (including the carework that sustains people), as well as work that produces commodities. In addition, it must replace all the wealth it takes from "the outside"--from peripheral peoples and societies as well as from nonhuman nature. Finally, it must replenish the political capacities and public goods on which it draws in the course of meeting other needs. In other words: there must be no free riding of the sort that capitalism simultaneously incentivizes and disavows. This proviso is a sine qua non for overcoming the intergenerational injustice endemic to capitalist society. Only by observing it can a socialism for the twenty-first century dismantle capitalism's multiple crisis tendencies and irrationalities.

This brings me to a second set of reflections, concerning the classical socialist question of surplus. Surplus is the fund of wealth, if any, that society collectively generates in excess of what it requires to reproduce itself at its current level and in its current form. In capitalist societies, as I have already noted, surplus is treated as the private property of the capitalist class and disposed of by its owners, whom the system compels to reinvest it in hopes of producing yet more of it, on and on, without limit. This, as we saw before, is both unjust and self destabilizing.

The conceptualization of welfare as a problem—indeed, as a “mess”—among JG writers is embedded in a producerist view of the economy and the place of paid employment within it.48 Minsky, Wray, Kelton, and other JG writers frame “productive” labour as central to human dignity and use this framing to build a normative foundation for their arguments in favour of full employment and welfare reform. However, the ways in which they position waged labour as central to both human flourishing and sound economic policy also obscure the vital contributions of unpaid social reproductive labour to capitalist economies, as well as the ways in which capitalist market exchange fails to register the value of unwaged work.49 As Nancy Fraser argues, the realm of production remains structurally dependent on “the hidden abode” of largely feminized and unpaid reproductive labour.50 Indeed, as many feminist political economists demonstrate, a central point of political contestation is precisely how the lines of demarcation are drawn between production for exchange, waged labour, and market commodification on the one hand, and social reproduction, unpaid labour, and decommodification, on the other. Melinda Cooper, for example, has shown how neoliberal policymakers have often utilized neoconservative “family values” discourse as part of their push for free market reforms. According to Cooper, the neoliberal marketization of ever-greater areas of social life crucially depends on shifting caring responsibilities into the space of the family—the site of unpaid reproductive labour.51 As governments of various political stripes impose austerity on public services, more of the work of social reproduction is offloaded onto “the family.” Minsky’s case for a “welfare policy” focused centrally on increasing labour force participation has unfortunately contributed to this general thrust towards valorizing paid employment at the expense of a critical feminist approach to the relationship between paid and unpaid work, and the decommodification of social supports necessary to more equitably redistribute the labour of care.

The myopic focus on paid employment is not confined to Minsky’s work, however. Contemporary JG advocates—while less explicit in their opposition to welfare—also privilege paid work in ways that complement capitalism’s structural dependence on, and lack of recognition of, social reproductive labour. Wray, for example, tends to lean more heavily on the political feasibility argument, claiming that the ease with which neoliberal politicians have cut or “reformed” welfare programs shows the latter’s weakness as a policy solution to poverty.52 Wray maintains that this is particularly evident in the way that the War on Poverty transformed into a “war on welfare” from Reagan onwards. This history of welfare retrenchment evinces the need to reorient social policy towards job creation and greater labour force participation. Such an approach is further substantiated, according to Wray, by Clinton’s “reform” to “end welfare as we know it” with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, 1996, and replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, both of which are widely recognized to encapsulate the “welfare-to-work” push of the 1990s’ workfare state.53 Wray contends that the lack of public support for AFDC, and thus its susceptibility to political attack, substantiates the need for a social policy geared towards public sector employment and a job guarantee (the political feasibility argument). Yet rather than develop a critique of what they believe to be the prevailing public consensus on “welfare,” Wray and Kelton use this public antipathy to buttress their argument for publicly guaranteed full employment. In this way, they reinforce a discourse that privileges waged “productive” labour and fails to recognize the structural dependence of capitalist market exchange on social reproductive work, which is often unpaid.

Anti-capitalist organizing should not be based on objective or idealistic rationality in traditional (capitalist) economic terms, but based on an understanding of how the market exerts power in the interest of the bourgeoisie. Worker wages don’t necessarily rise in response to a shrinking labor market because capitalism attempts to adapt with long-term power as its priority. Business owners will underpay their work force and deny them benefits even if they end up understaffed — because it preserves an essential power dynamic. They would often rather close than capitulate to workers. If you understand market rationality only as immediate, corresponding responses to economic changes, you fundamentally misunderstand capitalism. The market is rational only in a macro-Marxist sense — it consistently acts with preservation of capitalism (and capitalists’ self-interest) as its motivation.

Socialists should be confronting capital and the political systems that submit to and enable it. We shouldn’t spend time guaranteeing a job that may or may not increase private-sector job wages but, at the very least, tie the minimum wage to inflation and force the private sector to pay more — and even this is only an extremely tepid reform! We should not endorse a proposal that provides healthcare through a federal job, when we could instead continue the fight for healthcare completely de-linked from employment. And we — the workers — should build workplace power by increasing union activity to protect workers against the reduced hours and layoffs that inevitably follow rising wages.

We need to really take stock of what we are talking about: a socio-technical revolution which goes well beyond command-and-control halting of hydrocarbon incineration. In this sense, I worry, too, that much of the new eco-socialist rhetoric is only somewhat less parochial, technocratic, and technicist than the GNDers. Managerial discourse of a clean-tech evolution is important but insufficient. There is a labor question, or specifically an agrarian question of labor.7 The GND, because it is fundamentally about a rejiggering of global energy use and a low-key jobs program, fails to address far too many questions. Where are we supposed to get food, when entire patterns of urbanization have been built on dollar-cheap food lubricated by dollar-cheap energy? Will we keep using hydrocarbon-based fertilizers to plant corn, which anyway might be devastated by the next blight to which Monsanto’s monocultures are uniquely vulnerable? Where will we get new genetic stock? Is that simply the job of hard-working peasants on the Mexican milpa? Do we bear any substantive burden for the transition? Why does scarcely anyone talk about this?

Moving from North to South, I wonder what happens when we stop talking about the Green New Deal, or even some eco-socialist models which effectively mimic the muteness of the GNC on questions of sovereignty and agriculture, and talk instead about something knottier but better, because it is big enough for everyone. What if we replace, or minimally complement, talk of a GND with something like (although by all means let us find a more felicitous phrase) a green consummation of national liberation? Some may object that national liberation is a done deal, a political vessel foundered on the shoals of neo-colonialism. But for Cabral, national liberation always looked to the far horizon, its aims set well beyond setting hands on the colonial state’s machinery. It was a perpetual revolution. It was a human force governing, but governing as a liberation movement, a revolution in power, impossible to ossify let alone petrify.