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In the 21st century, humanity is facing the insurmountable challenge of ecological collapse emanating after the rise of industrialisation as a result of capitalism. Capitalism and climate change are two sides of the same coin. Climate change is killing the cedars of Lebanon. Not just that. Since 1998, extreme heat has killed more than 160,000 people, and could kill millions more if climate change goes unchecked. The free market is the greatest invention of human beings. But here is the catch: markets only work their magic when prices reflect real costs. And current prices are out of whack. We are letting the firms that sell fossil fuels and, indeed, anyone who emits greenhouse gases cause enormous damage for which they don’t have to pay. If capitalism is not controlled and reimagined for the sake of humanity, it will result in horrendous fallout for the earth and its inhabitants. Capitalist-driven climate change could cause some unyielding fallouts that are potentially hazardous to society.

The world is failing to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — and the consequences are dire. Due to the capitalist mode of production, the emission of greenhouse gases causes record heatwaves and droughts which adversely affect not only the human ecosystem but also food production. Ocean acidification threatens coral reef ecosystems and fish populations, which provide food for billions of people around the world. Furthermore, the warm seasons will last longer, as disease-carrying insects will become more prevalent and occupy larger areas, infecting countless people with life-threatening illnesses. Farming regions will be at tremendous risk of crop failure as local weather behaves erratically or changes completely. In the developing world, it will create massive water and food shortages, resulting in unspeakable death tolls.

In the last year of Trump’s volatile presidency, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been, and kept it there in 2021, worrying that even “the means by which leaders had previously managed … potentially civilization-ending dangers are … being dismantled or undermined” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Citation2020, 8). The post–Cold War reversal of nuclear arms control accelerated under Trump and the Biden administration changed little. Prosecuting the previous administration’s New Cold War on China with equal if not greater zeal, it made the South China Sea “the most dangerous place on earth” (The Economist Citation2021b), alarmingly migrating a label once applied to South Asia after Pakistan acquired nuclear weapons to a conflict involving the world’s superpowers. Disastrously withdrawing from Afghanistan to focus on confronting China, forming AUKUS with the UK and Australia to do so, the US offered the latter nuclear-powered submarines, raising proliferation concerns (Masterson Citation2021). A few weeks later, Biden declared the US would defend Taiwan region against (yet-to-be-threatened) Chinese attack, and early the next year, rushed headlong into a potentially nuclear confrontation with Russia over Ukraine.

The new prospect of nuclear war arises in an altogether new and more dangerous configuration of international and nuclear power: both major forces that spared the world nuclear war for over three quarters of a century are weaker. Nuclear weapons proliferation appears to have complicated the logic of deterrence and the peace movement stands at an historic ebb with considerable sections of the Left, which once organised and led it, failing to oppose, when they do not outright support, imperialist wars festooned with the hypocrisy of protecting democracy and human rights. The Ukraine crisis, which finds most of the Western Left seduced by Western rhetoric, displays this tendency with a vengeance.

Geo-ecological challenges include the unfolding planetary cataclysms of climate chaos, mass extinction, and the less appreciated cumulative, lasting damage of other inter-related, destructive impacts on ecosystems (Ripple et al. 2017), such as radioactive waste, deforestation, wetland loss, and pollution by persistent organic toxins and heavy metals. These impacts have unforeseen consequences because there are mutually transforming effects at different scales (small areas to the entire planet) occurring between air, water, land, and organisms. For instance, permafrost regions contain about half the world’s subsurface carbon. As it has been disappearing, the soil methane trapped for millennia is being unleashed at much faster rates than expected as subsurface conditions get warmer. The methane is released in part as a result of the greater activity of soil microbes favoured by higher temperatures.

Soil organic matter in permafrost regions is also degrading as it is broken down through the action of soil organisms and chemical reaction with oxygen, such that more carbon dioxide can be released and contribute further to global warming and less carbon can be stored in those former per- mafrost soils (Feng et al. 2020; Kramshøj et al. 2018). The reduction in permafrost alters habitat and vegetation composition so that some land-based organisms need to migrate to other regions in search of food, among other needs, and other organisms (unable to migrate) may die out locally (Richter-Menge, Druckenmiller, and Jeffries 2019; Schuur and Mack 2018). People living in such regions already suffer from the disappearance of some of the food sources on which they relied and must forge new forms of living and travel infrastructure, among other forced changes in life- ways (Crate et al. 2017).

This article focuses on both emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing impact of anthropogenic climate change on health. We argue that given the multiplicity of social structural, health, and environmental contradictions resulting from global capitalism, humanity is now at a juncture where, to ensure planetary health, it needs to transition to an alternative world system based upon social parity and justice, deep democracy, environmental sustainability, and a safe climate, a sweeping mitigation strategy termed eco-socialism. In making this argument, we address questions of social justice and the issue of power and hegemony by asserting that climate mitigation is the needed adaptation for all of humanity (and not just privileged sectors of it) and beyond. Given the unprecedented rate of change that is occurring, we cannot “adapt” (in the conventional sense of the term) our way out of the climate crisis. Rather, we need a new and more fundamental understanding of adaptation that unites social justice and mitigation.

Capitalism in a Metabolic Rift with Nature

It’s striking to note that even many of the most wealthy businesspeople in the world, like Elon Musk and Richard Branson, have recognized that a radical change in the economy will be necessary in order to adapt to the next wave of automation. The most popular policy prescription is a universal basic income, a government program which would provide a livable income to every citizen regardless of employment or financial means. Most of these pro-UBI billionaires hope that this policy would allow markets and private ownership of capital to continue indefinitely— effectively a bandaid solution to adapt capitalism to an increasingly jobless world.

But there are good reasons to believe that capitalism and a UBI can’t coexist for long. Such an arrangement would likely lead to a great amount of civil unrest and social instability. Class divisions would be made much more obvious and grotesque in such a scenario, and the unemployable majority would look at their trillionaire overlords with envy and disgust. It would quickly become clear to everyone that the owners of capital are not providing anything of use to society, and are simply extracting rents at the expense of the general population.

On the surface, basic income does indeed appear radical, suggesting that its appeal ‘seems to lie partly in its very transgressiveness’ (Sloman, 2018: 638). But there are also dangers posed by its implementation, which is evident from the bourgeois support for UBI both historically and today.

A ‘shape-shifting social policy’

Throughout British political history, UBI has primarily been an interest of the ‘free-market right’ and the ‘pragmatic centre’ rather than the Left (Sloman, 2015: 9). Despite the idealism of the Enlightenment thinkers who first introduced the concept, the most influential of basic income proposals have been regressive, seeking to resist or weaken the welfare state. For example, Rhys-Williams’ scheme, emerging as it did amidst the post-war consensus, ‘might plausibly be read as an attempt to resist the growth of progressive taxation and the rising bargaining power of the organised working class’ (Sloman, 2018: 629). Such an impression is reinforced by her ‘ambivalence’ regarding the sum that would constitute a basic income and her concerns about ‘conditionality’ (Sloman, 2018: 629).

There is a moralising of work within the Right’s support of UBI, one of the key components that make it antithetical to any Leftist variation. Following the publication of the Beveridge Report which made the key recommendations on which the British welfare state was based Beveridge’s ideas, and the Labour government’s willingness to implement them, inspired an anxiety in Rhys-Williams and her fellow conservatives that ‘[n]ot only will the idle get as much from the State as will the industrious workers, they will get a great deal more’, which would result in an ‘undermining [of] the will to work’ (Rhys-Williams, 2004: 164). In order to combat this, Rhys-Williams argued for a “new social contract”, ‘expressed by the actual signature of a contract between the individual [...] and the State’, in which the recipient of a basic income would be obliged to ‘devote his best efforts’ to societal wealth creation in exchange for a basic safety net (2004: 167). A UBI on these terms would essentially be a form of workfare, and a comparatively timid solution when contrasted with what actually emerged as the post-war consensus.

The final big idea to gain traction during the pandemic is Universal Basic Income (UBI), a regular guaranteed payment from the state to citizens that would purchase the basic necessities of a decent life. Its popularity was already growing amid the austerity that followed the 2008 crisis and came to a head amid the unemployment, precarity and uncertainty generated by the pandemic and lockdowns and the demonstration effect of the various income support schemes that were laid out by governments (Macqueen 2020). Opinion makers from the left website Democracy Now! to think tanks such as the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), fairly prominent political parties such as the Scottish National Party, public figures and politicians across the political spectrum from left to right and even elements in the Silicon Valley (Morozov 2016) have signalled their support.

The idea had emerged from discussions around the welfare state and its crisis and was well developed by the 1990s (van Parjis 1992). It takes many different forms and, inevitably, shades off into other ideas, such as a guaranteed minimum income or other sorts of income supports. However, as the most serious studies (for instance, Coote and Yazici 2019) point out, if the level of the basic income is to be adequate for citizens to live on and not the sort of derisory payment that at least some of its right-wing supporters advocate, it would cost anywhere between 20% and 30% of GDP.

There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of contemporary iterations of the JG proposal. The JG cannot accomplish price stabilization and wage restraint functions while also advancing working class power by removing the reserve army of labour and increasing worker bargaining power. As Wray points out, Minsky makes a distinction between moving towards full employment and maintaining full employment.38 Minsky contends that, for the most part, the former has produced inflationary pressures (particularly through incentives for private investment and generalized growth promotion) whereas little evidence suggests that maintaining low or full employment in his model would be inflationary.39 He and Wray both predict that the political shock of the program’s implementation will cause some price inflation, but they maintain that the dynamics of the JG program would be such that full employment could become a feature of the regulated capitalist labour market without driving inflation. This prediction is based on the assumption that a tight full employment labour market will also generate a dynamic wherein wages rise faster in the lagging sectors than in the leading sectors of the economy, which will help balance any inflationary pressures brought on by full employment.40 The problem with this, as Minsky himself recognizes, is that institutional mechanisms would be required to maintain wage restraint in higher wage and more productive sectors while wages were encouraged to outstrip growth in lower wage sectors.41 This lesser-noticed aspect of the proposal is markedly similar to the Swedish “wage solidarity” scheme, which had coordinated sectoral collective bargaining as its prerequisite.42 In the United States, with its decentralized bargaining system and much lower union density, no institutional mechanisms exist to play this wage-coordination role. Were a feasible JG to be implemented, it is likely that its base wage would have to be kept low and be coupled with some form of incomes policy. Even with sectoral bargaining or an incomes policy of some sort, it is questionable whether or not the conditions of a JG with rising wages in the lower rungs of the income distribution would hold, as the unravelling of centralized bargaining in the Swedish case partially indicates.43

Thus, the argument that a JG could be used to augment working class power seems to run aground on the idea’s conceptualization as a wage floor that does not encourage private sector wage demands. In other words, under present political conditions, it seems likely that it would simply be another way in which to pool the reserve army of the unemployed in a way that does not meaningfully change the composition of class forces. It seems that a job guarantee is no technocratic fix to the political problem of strengthening organized working class power.

Like UBI, the job guarantee appears as a social and economic panacea in the writing of some of its advocates. However, JG writers most commonly claim a job guarantee can do three things: maintain full employment; strengthen workers’ overall bargaining power in the economy; help solve the climate crisis by creating green jobs.

As neoliberal capitalism moved away from policies to generate full employment after the inflationary crises of the late 1970s, some left economists looked for ways to solve the full employment-inflation trade-off. This is the origin of the idea of guaranteeing paid work through a government “employer of last resort” program. The notion, put forward by economist Hyman Minsky, was that the government could simultaneously maintain full employment and stabilize the economy through a job program that grew and shrank according to the business cycle.

The reaction to this was exactly as Kalecki forecast. One way to understand the emergence of neoliberalism as the game-plan for running economies from the 1970s onwards is that it was a direct attempt to wrest back control over the economy on the part of management, breaking union organisation as it did so, and radically depoliticising all questions about the economy – from the distribution of its rewards to the control over what and how it produced.

In terms of presentation by the government and media, the economy was shifted from something that we all take part in and create – something, in other words, that is the product of all of our work, plus the natural riches of the world we inhabit – and into a mysterious external force that, like an angry volcano-god, demanded sacrifice: unemployment, pay cuts, austerity. This brutality was glossed over with rhetorical appeals to competition, and to calculation: one was good, the other necessary.

To meet the demands of the Green New Deal, which proposes to convert the US economy to zero emissions, renewable power by 2030, there will be a lot more of these mines gouged into the crust of the earth. That’s because nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic table and around the world. To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there’s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla.

It’s not for nothing that coal miners were, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the very image of capitalist immiseration—it’s exhausting, dangerous, ugly work. Le Voreux, “the voracious one”—that’s what Émile Zola names the coal mine in Germinal, his novel of class struggle in a French company town. Capped with coal-burning smokestacks, the mine is both maze and minotaur all in one, “crouching like some evil beast at the bottom of its lair . . . puffing and panting in increasingly slow, deep bursts, as if it were struggling to digest its meal of human flesh.” Monsters are products of the earth in classical mythology, children of Gaia, born from the caves and hunted down by a cruel race of civilizing sky gods. But in capitalism, what’s monstrous is earth as animated by those civilizing energies. In exchange for these terrestrial treasures—used to power trains and ships and factories—a whole class of people is thrown into the pits. The warming earth teems with such monsters of our own making—monsters of drought and migration, famine and storm. Renewable energy is no refuge, really. The worst industrial accident in the history of the United States, the Hawk’s Nest Incident of 1930, was a renewable energy disaster. Drilling a three-mile-long inlet for a Union Carbide hydroelectric plant, five thousand workers were sickened when they hit a thick vein of silica, filling the tunnel with blinding white dust. Eight hundred eventually died of silicosis. Energy is never “clean,” as Muriel Rukeyser makes clear in the epic, documentary poem she wrote about Hawk’s Nest, “The Book of the Dead.” “Who runs through the electric wires?” she asks. “Who speaks down every road?” The infrastructure of the modern world is cast from molten grief.

Like a thousand-page novel with a MacGuffin or stylistic outrage on every page, the Green New Deal presents a challenge for critics. There are just so many levels on which it will never work. There is an infinity of worlds in which the GND fails—a million President Sanderses or, with more urgency, Ocasio-Cortezes presiding over the disaster. One might write an entire essay, for example, about its political impossibility given the complete saturation of the US state by corporate interests and a party-system and division of powers that lists badly to the right. Another essay about how, even if it were politically possible, outlays on the order of several trillion dollars per year would most likely wreck the dollar, driving up projected costs. An essay about vested interests and the war they’d wage. An essay about how, even if you cleared both those hurdles, the history of recent monetary interventions into the economy–$4.5 trillion injected into the economy during Obama’s tenure by the Fed’s quantitative easing, $1.5 trillion for Trump’s cuts—indicates that the Green New Deal will struggle to encourage corporations to spend this money as intended, on investment in green infrastructure, rather than funneling it straight into real-estate and stocks, as has happened in all these prior cases.

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds here and lose sight of the essential. In each of these scenarios, on each of these sad, warming planets, the Green New Deal fails because capitalism. Because, in capitalism, a small class of owners and managers, in competition with itself, finds itself forced to make a set of narrow decisions about where to invest and in what, establishing prices, wages, and other fundamental determinants of the economy. Even if these owners wanted to spare us the drowned cities and billion migrants of 2070, they could not. They would be undersold and bankrupted by others. Their hands are tied, their choices constrained, by the fact that they must sell at the prevailing rate or perish. It is the class as a whole that decides, not its individual members. This is why the sentences of Marxists (and Marx) so often treat capital as agent rather than object. The will towards relentless growth, and with it increasing energy use, is not chosen, it is compelled, a requirement of profitability where profitability is a requirement of existence.

KATHARINA PISTOR: The real distinction is between whether we are talking about redistribution at the back end or the creation of wealth at the front end. And I’m interested in the front end. I want to show first how wealth is being created, and then also think about whether the typical policy advice, like taxation, is actually an effective tool to deal with the wealth creation at the front end.

So economists, because they believe that ultimately it’s the markets and better skills and better know-how and better resource management is what produces wealth, they are less concerned with predistribution.

Despite some recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, including economic recovery, everything seems to be more unstable and fragile. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy cases in recent months, although not the only one, has been that of the United Kingdom, with its temporary shortage of gas and shop windows—a sign of scarcity not so long ago associated almost exclusively with the Global South, where the trend certainly continues, such as in the recent energy shortages in Pakistan and Sri Lanka, among other places.6 Beyond the conjunctural issues, the energy crisis is underpinned by a series of structural aspects that are spreading to all spheres like an oil slick, including one of the most serious: surpassing the peak of conventional oil—the highest quality—reached in 2005, as recognized by the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the peak of all petroleum liquids at the end of 2018. In addition, the peaks of coal and uranium, and to a lesser extent natural gas, are also exceeded or very close to being exceeded.7 Thus, global capital and its hangers-on could continue to look away from the elephant in the room, but its insatiable energy gluttony will eventually crush us if we do not change its diet in time. Additionally, the ongoing climate catastrophe should be enough to generate a call to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

Still, even in the context of climate change, the extreme extractivist model continues, with the result that all of the critical factors mentioned are leading to an unprecedented increase in the extraction costs of fossil fuels and most minerals, with the consequent loss in the energy rate on investment.8 This further reveals the extreme difficulty in addressing a smooth transition to “clean” energy sources—the energy capacity of which is and will be evidently lower. The challenge is even greater if these ambitious “Great Transformations” are to be carried out simultaneously across the world and in all economic sectors. For example, in its report on critical minerals, the IEA has noted that, by 2040, the demand for lithium will have to multiply by forty-two, graphite by twenty-five, cobalt by twenty-one, nickel by nineteen, and rare-earth minerals by seven times as a result of the expected renewable deployment. Among its recommendations to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries is the build-up of strategic reserves to cope with possible supply disruptions.9

Over the past several decades, economic growth rates have slowed down throughout the advanced capitalist economies. Figure 1 shows the 10-year trailing average growth rates of real GDP for the United States and the OECD countries.

The underlying trend growth rate of the US economy declined from about 4 percent in the 1960s to about 3 percent in the 1970s and 1980s. After recovering to about 3.5 percent in the 1990s, the US economy’s trend growth rate has declined further to about 2 percent over the last two decades. Similarly, the OECD countries’ average economic growth rate declined from about 5 percent in the 1960s to about 3 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, the OECD countries’ average economic growth rate has been around 1.6 percent.

Second, in the narrow view, capitalism's chief irrationality is its built-in tendency to economic crisis. An economic system oriented to the limitless accumulation of surplus value, appropriated privately by for-profit firms, is inherently self-destabilizing. The drive to expand capital by increasing productivity through technical advances results in periodic drops in the rate of profit, the overproduction of goods, and the overaccumulation of capital. Attempted fixes like financialization only postpone the day of reckoning, while ensuring it will be all the more severe when it does arrive. In general, the course of capitalist development is punctuated by periodic economic crises: by boom-bust cycles, stock market crashes, financial panics, bankruptcy chains, mass liquidations of value, and mass unemployment.

Finally, the narrow view proposes that capitalism is deeply and constitutively undemocratic. Granted, it often promises democracy in the political realm. However, that promise is systematically undercut by social inequality, on the one hand, and by class power, on the other. Then, too, the capitalist workplace is exempt from any pretense of democratic self-governance. It is a sphere where capital commands and workers obey.

Living under the terrible pressure of this acute general crisis, many people are defecting from the prevailing common sense that previously more or less held things together. They no longer believe that free markets are the solution to their problems, that governments need only “remove all the red tape” and let the market do its magic. They are turning away from entrenched elites and mainstream political parties.

This adds a new dimension to the crisis, which now includes what Antonio Gramsci called a “crisis of hegemony”. People are looking for new, out-of-the-box solutions. On the one hand, this represents an opening for emancipatory left-wing projects, but it also has a dark side: many gravitate to authoritarian strong men who engage in vicious scapegoating of minorities. Every country has its own version of this, be it the alt-right white supremacy movement in the United States or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.

Let me now trace the progression of my investigation through the seven chapters of this book. My point of departure, in chapter 1, is the discourse of “crisis of capitalism” that emerged in the aftermath of the 2007– 2008 economic meltdown. I trace the deflation of the narrative of a grand, terminal crisis of capitalism and the rise of one about the unfairness of inequalities, which has spurred calls for redistribution across the left–right political divide. This shift suggests something significant about the nature of the “legitimacy deal” between citizens and public authority—that is, what citizens consider to be valuable services the state can and must perform for society. What is being obscured in the preselection of grievances deemed worthy of political notice is an equally significant part of the legitimacy deal. Why have pressures increased on the state to deliver economic justice by reducing inequality rather than by alleviating poverty or providing stable employment? This invites us to take a closer look at the selective process of politicization—that is, the way society’s afflictions, from unemployment to lack of physical safety and growing economic uncertainty, are or are not being presented as issues demanding political attention and policy action. The theme of politicization will be central to my investigation: namely, which social problems are considered deserving of public attention, and how social anxieties become political problems worthy of policy action.

The unfairness of inequality has become the dominant frame of social protest since the Occupy movement proudly stated, “We are the 99 percent.” I take this indignation, which I address in the first chapter, to be a symptom not of the crisis of capitalism but rather of its unfailing good health. This is the case because remonstrations against inequality present the matter of capitalism’s numerous and grave failures as issues that can be easily tackled with a dose of redistributive policies and strengthened oversight. Thus, what appears to be a radical challenge to neoliberal capitalism is instead a reinforcement of it, as we inevitably validate the model of life into which we seek equal inclusion— what I describe as “the paradox of emancipation.” Public protests thus unwittingly relegitimize the social system they purport to challenge as they seek to diminish the inequalities neoliberalism has engendered without addressing the root causes of the economic and social crisis. (Note that the growth of inequality was an outcome of this crisis, not a cause of it.) Thus, capitalism has continued to prosper despite growing public dissatisfaction. Its economic engine is having considerable difficulties with delivering growth and prosperity for all, yet the legitimacy deal in Western societies has been altered so as to endow it with renewed authority. There is no crisis of capitalism. We inhabit, instead, a crisis of the crisis of capitalism, as I shall suggest.

Obviously, this cannot happen overnight. It also, however, is something that cannot take place in stages. The idea of putting off some questions until a later stage is prepared is alien to a concept of an organic system. The continued presence of elements of capitalism does not simply mean that socialism is at yet incomplete because a few parts are missing. After all, what kinds of people are produced within the old relations? In fact, every moment that people act within old relations is a process of reproducing old ideas and attitudes. Working within a hierarchy, functioning without the ability to make decisions in the workplace and society, focusing upon self-interest rather than upon solidarity—these activities produce people on a daily basis; it is the reproduction of the conservatism of everyday life—indeed, the reproduction of elements of capitalism.

The concept of socialism for the twenty-first century as an organic system theoretically posits what the experience of the twentieth century has demonstrated—the need to build all sides of the socialist triangle. One war, three fronts. In the absence of a struggle to subordinate all the elements of the old society, the new society is inevitably infected by the old society. And, the matter is worse if we choose homeopathic medicine to cure the infection. In short, rather than build upon defects (such as the orientation toward material self-interest that Marx warned about in his Critique of the Gotha Programme), the point is to subordinate them.40