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(Paul, HS teacher/Member of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/case-for-job-guarantee-review-pavlina-tcherneva)

The Case for a Job Guarantee is not an overly detailed blueprint of how the author thinks the program should be implemented. It does, however, offer an inspiring vision of what society would look like if we utilized the various talents and skills working people possess. The job guarantee would essentially act as a public option for employment, expanding during periods of economic slowdown and shrinking during periods of private sector job growth. The private sector simply cannot be relied upon to deliver full employment. A never-ending slew of incentives and tax breaks would be needed to make firms get anywhere close to it. This program would give every worker the option of attaining a living wage job through the federal government. There is certainly a lot of work that could be done to improve our society, and there are plenty of people to do it. Employment through the job guarantee would provide a base wage of $15/hour and benefits like health insurance, childcare, and paid leave. This would establish a de facto minimum standard for all employers to meet. Private firms would recognize that if they didn’t improve conditions their workers could always get a better paying job through the federal job program. Importantly, Tcherneva advocates for mandatory increases of the base wage to match inflation. Unemployment offices that exist in every county could be converted into employment offices that administered the federal jobs guarantee. Though the program would be funded at the federal level, it could be locally administered. This could open up opportunities to experiment in more democratic forms of governance, with unions and other organizations participating in developing local job-creating projects. These employment offices could offer training, credentialing, education, and apprenticeship opportunities to transition people out of the program to a job in the private sector. American Job Centers already deliver many of these required services, but they need more funding and support.

(Zachary Karabell is a WIRED contributor and president of River Twice Research. https://www.wired.com/story/green-new-deal-just-vague-audacious-goal-we-need/ , 2-12)

Given the plan’s sweeping nature and lack of concrete details, it made an easy touchstone, and in an insta-age, a perfect media foil; its vagueness allowed both proponents and opponents to cast it in whatever light they chose. Maybe that was part of the intent: Articulate sweeping, revolutionary goals, catch the attention of a media hungry for broad, simple, and controversial themes, and watch the debate spin. Whatever your view of the merits, though, the plan highlighted how the United States has retreated from big ideas begetting bold action. For more than 20 years, most of our political upheavals have been reactive: ending welfare as we knew it; the War on Terror in response to 9/11; Obamacare’s massive unruly tweak to a chaotic health care system; and the id of Trump’s election without any substantial legislative agenda. That record contrasts sharply with a long period in American history, beginning with the Progressive Era in the early 1900s and continuing well into the 1980s, of the “Big Idea” driving federal politics; that now seems like distant history. Take this language for instance: “We possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.” That was John F. Kennedy appealing to Congress in May 1961 for a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to put an American astronaut on the moon before the end of the 1960s. We know, of course, that it worked, that Neil Armstrong leapt over moon rocks in 1969. The Green New Deal, of course, invokes the first New Deal, that plethora of 1930s projects, agencies, and laws passed under Franklin Roosevelt. No one speech or plan launched the New Deal. FDR as a candidate had pledged “to a new deal for the American people”; he began his administration on March 4, 1933, with a call for action, with the famous words that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Today, critics would belittle such a speech as lofty but empty words. Roosevelt’s point, however, was that fear is so enervating that it creates “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Shifting the public mood, he believed, was a prerequisite to meaningful action. Later calls to the public to rise to the moment include the Marshall Plan to rebuild post-World War II Western Europe; JFK in June 1963 demanding civil rights legislation; and Lyndon Johnson reaffirming and expanding that a year later, then articulating a vision for a “great society” that launched a series of government programs ranging from public housing to Medicaid. Like these efforts or not---and Americans then and now are hardly united in their view of these dramatic and society-altering initiatives---they began not as detailed blueprints but as ambitious and vague ideas. The vision of a better future brought about by people acting collectively, spurred by government initiative, led to a successful space program, to the various reforms of the early Progressive Era such as child labor laws, and arguably to the innovations of Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s, which benefitted immeasurably from Cold War defense spending on everything from the early internet to semiconductors..

(Richard, EmeritusGeo@Berkeley, , 3-26)

As we think about a possible Green New Deal, what lessons does the original New Deal hold? RW The first lesson is about ambition. The Green New Deal resolution is in line with the original New Deal’s ambitious aims. The New Deal introduced a wide array of programs that addressed a broad spectrum of the country’s problems. The Green New Deal tries to do a similar thing. It doesn’t just attack climate change, but also social justice, jobs, wages, infrastructure, modernization, and more. That’s what the Roosevelt administration tried to do. DH A lot of centrist types object to the Green New Deal’s proposed wide swath of programs. They think it’s too broad, too inclusive — that we should focus on climate alone. What do you say to that? RW I saw a Washington Post editorial to that effect. I was appalled. Focusing on climate alone would be so narrow-minded — and it would make a Green New Deal politically dead in the water. I admire the Green New Deal’s approach to climate change (which is, by the way, a lot like the target-setting already in place in California, my home state). Yet climate change isn’t the only serious problem we face as a nation. There’s the issue of low wages, poor quality of jobs, regional decline — and, of course, massive inequality. You have to address those issues, which have led to tremendous political alienation in the country and fueled the right-wing populism that we see benefiting Trump and the Republicans. If you don’t deal with the needs of working people, you can kiss all major climate policies goodbye. You’ll still be living in the world of Trump.

(Audrea, sw/editor@Verso, , 5-19)

Still, there is some cause for hope. Sustainable farmers, scattered throughout both urban and rural areas of the US, are already deploying permaculture methods of farming that, in some cases, can even help sequester carbon from the atmosphere. On her Soul Fire Farms in Albany, New York, Leah Penniman cultivates some of her crops on rocky slopes that Namibian mounding and Kenyan terracing farming techniques have made productive, but which industrial agribusiness would have considered unusable. Some 1,500 miles away in Minnesota, the indigenous environmental activist Winona LaDuke initiated a project in 1989 to recover reservation lands lost settlers, revive old traditions of land stewardship, and produce wild rice and other Ojibwe foods. Further west, in Washington state, migrant Mexican farmers who organized the Familias Unidas por la Justicia farmworkers union have launched a new farm cooperative, Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, to grow organic berries and offer a more secure future for its worker-owners. There are others too, run by brown, black, and indigenous farmers drawn to sustainable food-growing methods both as a cultural inheritance — organic farming is a method developed across millennia, but first revived in the US by a black farmer, Dr George Washington Carver, in the early 1900s — and as a way to provide cheap, healthy food for their communities. Could these be, to borrow AOC’s words, the “resources” that the federal government needs to mobilize with investment? Some elements of such a Green New Deal might already be found, in limited, seedling form, within existing legislation and government programs. The federal Farm Bill’s 2501 program includes special funding, through land trusts, community colleges, tribal governments, and nonprofit organizations, to help farmers of color acquire, own, operate, and retain farms. Penniman suggests that farmers be paid, via the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Reserve Program, for using methods that conserve the environment and sequester carbon. (And, on the flip side, industrial agriculture should be taxed for outsourcing the long-term effects of its pollution and ecological destruction onto the public). Yet these measures leave intact the economic and political structures that favor corporations and the wealthy over sustainable farmers, and will continue to be limited by one essential factor: land. Last spring, Penniman helped convene a gathering of the Northeast Farmers of Color Network, an informal alliance of about 150 black, Latinx, and Asian organic farmers. The animating question: “What are the biggest obstacles for being able to feed and sustain our communities, and maintain the businesses that support our families?” One answer emerged repeatedly: “access to land.” Long-term planning and construction projects are difficult for farmers who rent, and this includes investing time and money into implementing (and, in many cases, learning) sustainable farming methods. As long as people depend on water, air, food from the earth, and natural environmental processes to survive, these resources — and the land that holds them — should not be controlled by a small number of billionaires. A just, equitable Green New Deal would acknowledge that land is a major source of wealth and inequality, and work towards what activists call “land justice” — the access to land that farmers need to “build healthy, equitable food systems that provide jobs and keep the food dollar in the community,” as Eric Holt-Giménez, the executive director of think tank Food First, writes. It might do this by creating, as Penniman and the Northeast Farmers of Color have advocated in the past, a commission to “study reparations and propose a comprehensive redistribution of wealth and land.” Federal programs to buy back land are, while limited, not entirely without precedent. The Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations allocated $2 billion in 2009 to repurchase indigenous lands that had been “fractionated” into small, individually owned parcels, and returned to reservations and communal tribal ownership under the Cobell v. Salazar settlement. And in an interview, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz noted that, despite its manifold problems and shortcomings, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act — part of the original New Deal — did include funding to buy back similar lands and restore them to tribes. These steps would not reverse the historical processes that deprived black, brown, and indigenous communities of resources, power, and dignity for generations — the same ongoing processes that drive corporate resource extraction and created the climate crisis. But they would be steps toward rectifying historical wrongs. And climate chaos, spreading heat waves, deep freezes, droughts, floods, and fires throughout the continent will only further threaten land access for people long divested of it. USAID has stated that land tenure “will be instrumental in managing the increased population in migrant-receiving communities” — in other words, climate migration. Even the World Bank acknowledges that “secure land rights are essential to reduc[ing] disaster risk and build climate resilience.” Land rights allow communities to grow their own food, build their own housing, install their own solar panels, and create public places where local markets and social networks can be cultivated — resources that, when disaster strikes, can make the difference between perishing and bouncing back. Yet at the Northeast Farmers of Color gathering, the questions did not stop at the issue of land access. “When we have access to land, what are ways to hold land in common?” “There’ve been communities all over the world who, before they were impacted by capitalism and globalization, were operating in a similar fashion,” said brandon king of Cooperation Jackson, laying out their vision for an “eco-village” on a block of land they’ve acquired near downtown Jackson. The imagined eco-village would be a mixture of new and renovated homes, all manufactured by the industrial 3D-printing Fab Lab machines they’ve acquired; permaculture design and a farm; and solar panels for the community. “The eco-village is a way that we can show a different way of life and relating to the land, and to each other,” he said. “It’s those models that we want to affirm.”

(Nick, (Kul Wicasa) is a cofounder of The Red Nation and is currently the American Democracy Fellow at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, 8-6)

Each movement rises against colonial and corporate extractive projects. But what’s often downplayed is the revolutionary potency of what Indigenous resistance stands for: caretaking and creating just relations between human and nonhuman worlds on a planet thoroughly devastated by capitalism. After all, the image of the Water Protector and the slogan “water is life,” which were popularized at Standing Rock, are icons of this generation’s climate justice movement. And both are political positions not exclusively Indigenous, but grounded in decolonization. If Indigenous movements are foundational to climate justice, then why isn’t decolonization as well? The Green New Deal (GND), which looks and sounds like eco-socialism, offers a real chance at galvanizing popular support for both. While anti-capitalist in spirit and paying lip service to decolonization, it must go further — and so too must the movements that support it. That’s why the Red Nation, a Native resistance organization I helped cofound in 2014, recently drafted a skeleton outline of what we’re calling the Red Deal, focusing on Indigenous treaty rights, land restoration, sovereignty, self-determination, decolonization, and liberation. We don’t envision it as a counter program to the GND but rather going beyond it — “‘Red’ because it prioritizes Indigenous liberation, on one hand, and a revolutionary left position on the other.” The GND has the potential to connect every social justice struggle — free housing, free health care, free education, green jobs — to climate change. Likewise, the Red Deal places anti-capitalism and decolonization as central to each social justice struggle as well as climate change. The necessity of such a program is grounded in both the history and future of this land, and it entails the radical transformation of all social relations between humans and the earth.

(Mikael Lyngaas, https://mronline.org/2020/07/24/beyond-work-the-shortcomings-of-post-work-politics/ , 7-24)

In 1845, Karl Marx wrote that in a communist society, workers would be freed from the monotony of a single draining job to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner”. Since then, there have been many new ideas theorizing the nature of work and how capitalism exploits labor. These ideas have convinced a number of leftists to push for the emancipation of the working class through the abolition of work as a whole. This corner of the left argues that rising automation and movements for a universal basic income will eventually neutralize the contradictions of capitalism or abolish it altogether. “Post-work” theories, like other political groupings on the left, arise from the failures of the 19th-century socialist revolutions. Rather than a novel form of emancipatory politics, post-work is better understood as a return to the utopian socialist tradition of Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon, all of which Marx and Engels furiously polemicized against. Engels writes in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that “One thing is common to all three [Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon]. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat… Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers”. A different, but similar kind of “kingdom of reason” is brought forward by contemporary post-work theoreticians. Instead of tackling the difficult questions of the transition from class society to a classless society and its revolutionary and strategic implications, the post-work theoreticians leap over these immensely difficult questions by favoring fantasies of technological futures free from labor and struggle. In this process, labor becomes something distorted from its material reality and takes on the form of the supposed core of capitalism, the root of class society, and all its evils.

(Seth, , 6-23)

Peter Frase has an essay at The Activist arguing that the Left’s focus on “jobs” as a political demand is wrongheaded. He’s even so bold as to headline his piece: “Stop Digging: The Case Against Jobs.” Frase’s underlying point is straightforward: the Left at its best has always opposed alienated labor, so there’s something paradoxical about the demand that lots more of it be created. What people really need is income — not jobs — he says, and we should keep our eyes fastened on a politics of basic income, work-sharing and free time rather than demands for more bossed drudgery. In these respects, Frase’s view is quite close to Chris Maisano’s in his recent Jacobin piece “Take This Job and Share It.” What should we make of arguments like these? I have more to say about the Frase-Maisano view than can fit in this blog post. (Even the internet in its great infinitude imposes some limits.) But what I’ll say here is this: Although Frase is right to reject a left vision whose goal is forever squeezing out more per capita units of consumption, the politics implicit in his argument are fundamentally perverse. For the fact is that the working class is never more obsessed with jobs than in a period of joblessness, and never less obsessed with jobs than in a time of full employment. The only viable route to a mass politics of post-productivism is a permanent plenitude of paid, alienated work. If that seems like a contradiction, it is not. It is simply a paradox. And it is borne out by history. (And lest we get tangled in words, let’s remember what full employment means and has always meant: simply that all those who want a job can get one.) There are also a few technical/factual questions to be raised. Even if we could immediately impose a tax raising 20 percent of GDP and distribute it per capita as a universal basic income, it would only amount to $9000 per person. This would not come close to replacing the lost full-time income of a single, unemployed worker. So if the right demand is “jobs or income now,” who gets the jobs and who gets the income? Would there be a permanent class of jobless living on the social wage while the rest work? Would that be a politically or socially healthy development for working-class politics? Towering over every other issue among the concerns of the working class today is the grueling prevalence of unemployment. Its effect is devastating not only for the 9 percent who are unemployed but the 91 percent who face a terrifying and possibly fruitless job search in the event that tomorrow they should find themselves out of work. To simply dismiss that concern as misplaced — even if in some final and philosophical sense it can be construed to be so — would be a criminal waste of potentially radical energy. Post-productivism is a vision for the Left, a vision that should by all means be spread, through agitation and propaganda, including in Jacobin or The Activist. But it can’t be confused with praxis in the here and now.

(ALYSSA BATTISTONI is a doctoral candidate in political theory at Yale and an associate faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. https://inthesetimes.com/article/how-the-rich-ruin-the-environment)

We need to think seriously and expansively about these kinds of work and value — and about the real costs that ​“sustainability” will impose on individuals and communities. And we need to recognize that this is a truly collective project — that individualized, atomized systems of work and reward are increasingly untenable in the face of the interdependent tangle in which we’re enmeshed. How might we do that? To begin with, by divorcing income from conventional notions of production, and by instituting a social wage in the form of universal basic income. Basic income won’t, in and of itself, solve environmental problems; it won’t replace coal plants with solar panels or ease pressure on depleted aquifers. If instituted as a justification for cuts to other social programs, it would be disastrous both socially and environmentally; robust public services are necessary if we’re to live on less. But it marks a critical starting point in rethinking the relationship between labor, production and consumption, without which environmental hand-wringing will go nowhere. More pragmatically, in providing an alternative to dependence on destructive industries and removing the threat of job blackmail from communities desperate for livelihoods, it makes change a real option, giving workers and communities more power to demand protections against environmental harms. It can start to reorient social focus away from an eternal game of consumption catch-up toward the good life. It admittedly won’t do much to curb the upper bounds of consumption, at least not right away. But it might point in that direction. Environmentalists like to point to World War II for evidence that people will accept restrictions on consumption for the sake of a shared cause, but the so-called Greatest Generation didn’t exactly accept rations with a patriotic grin. What that experience does demonstrate, however, is that while people don’t like limiting consumption under any circumstances, what they really don’t like is cutting back if everyone else isn’t doing the same. That sentiment is typically mobilized in service of anti-welfare politics: why should I have to work if someone else just gets a check? But during the war, it went the other way: More than 60 percent of the population supported capping incomes at $25,000 a year, a relatively paltry $315,000 today. Of course, the post-work future has long been over the horizon; to propose it as a solution to such time-sensitive problems may seem wildly, even irresponsibly utopian. The revolution might happen in time to avoid environmental catastrophe, but we probably shouldn’t count on it, though some African climate activists have put basic income grants, financed by wealthy nations’ payment of ecological debt, at the centerpiece of their demands.

(Mikael Lyngaas, https://mronline.org/2020/07/24/beyond-work-the-shortcomings-of-post-work-politics/ , 7-24)

The struggle for domestic workers’ right to wages, a global UBI, and full automation are all important topics for any contemporary radical looking to end the alienation of labor. Envisioning a possible future and what it might look like is important for creating the possibility for socialism. The imagination of post-work may inspire class struggle but it is also useless without a well-thought-out and systematic approach to enact their demands. The common lack of a clear political strategy and semantic games about the correct meaning of the word “work” place most post-work theories into the camp of pseudo-academic phrase-mongers rather than serious revolutionaries. Slogans such as “End all work!” might seem appealing, but if we take it together with the most common definitions of labor it would quickly lead down the rabbit hole of meaninglessness and despair. There is already a myriad of working-class demands that are worth fighting for without having to delve into the jargon-filled language of academic philosophers. As capitalism creates work that is mundane and meaningless, the post-work theoreticians respond by trying to regain some notion of working-class agency. Yet this agency is mistaken and only exists in theory. Technology might bring an end to neoliberalism, or even capitalism, but only under the control of the producers through intensive struggle. It is not the task of serious Marxists to create prophecies about the future but rather to deal with the current situation as well as the vast history of communism and the working class. There will be no grand acceleration of capitalism, but rather a continuing economic decline together with an enormous environmental collapse. Post-work theories are then revealed to rely heavily on predictions and technological optimism for the future without dealing with the present or the past. Marx says in the Eighteenth Brumaire that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”. Without properly connecting theory to history and political practice it might never break out of the sphere of philosophy and speculation. We already have over a hundred years of working-class struggle to learn from and thousands of pages of valuable theory that directly corresponds with the lived reality of the masses. Although we should not fetishize the past, we should avoid doing the same to the possible future. There is naturally a great need to go beyond wage labor and abolish it with more socialized forms of labor aimed at bettering the quality of life for all. This emancipatory project can however simply not be reduced down to a revolutionary imagination or vague hyperbolic demands. The notion of new theory for a new time might be appealing but we do not need to reinvent the wheel. We need to take up the study of Marxism and fight for the immediate goals of the working class as well as the long-term goal of communism. Post-work doesn’t help us do this, they simply create new vocabularies that lead down avenues of vagueness and confusion.

(Anton Jäger is is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, working on the history of populism in the United States. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/post-work-labor-ubi-coercion-capitalism)

DH Yeah, I once heard this argument about nurses — for example, they love their work, they love taking care of patients. But what they don’t like is the way the doctors treat them, the way their pay is stagnant, the way they’re always expected to do more and more work with fewer and fewer resources. They like the work, but the conditions under which they have to perform it are what’s oppressive, not the work itself. AJ Absolutely. I think there is a tricky thing in just calling for the defense of the dignity of labor. This is a critique of the article that is often leveled: “Oh, he’s just calling for the liberation of socially valued labor from capitalist labor.” The idea is that, “Oh, you can just liberate the concrete from the abstract and everything will be done with.” So the idea is, “If we just get rid of the doctors and the tyrannical hospital bosses, then the nurses can just run the hospitals for themselves.” But that’s a tricky thing, because even that concrete form or socially valuable form of labor is completely conditioned by the employment relationship. I would just call for defense of the dignity of labor. But at the same time, there is this easy abolitionism which just says, “Oh, these nurses are just culturally wrong to believe that the work they’re doing is valuable.” I find that not only condescending, but I think it’s also untenable, because it just doesn’t speak to people’s real desire for independence in many ways. DH By making the argument against work itself, as you point out in the piece (and you’ve said other people have pointed out), you’re writing off all questions of the organization of production and the organization of labor. We’re not talking about how we should organize work, we’re not talking about how we should organize economic life. We’re just throwing up our hands and saying, “Just write me a check for a UBI.” AJ Yeah. And I think the skepticism I have for post-work extends into the skepticism I have for UBI. I think if you look at the long history of social policy in which these kinds of basic grants have been proposed, the UBI is, again, a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s, where there was, first, this idea that there is a sort of neutralization of production. You have an abundance of consumer goods, you have the idea that full-on automation is around the corner. So the sphere of production really gets abandoned by certain people on the Left. And the idea as well that the main battle will now be waged on the level of consumption. But at the same time, it’s again an argument that’s not very tenable, because we have realized that consumption was still being determined by production. And if you want to seek emancipation of the sphere of consumption, you always have to ask the question, “Well, what is the sphere of consumption dependent on? Oh, it’s dependent on the sphere of production.” And if you don’t control production then you’ll never be able to fully seek freedom in the sphere of consumption. What I think UBI does nowadays is it naturalizes a whole list of factors which are actually intrinsically political. It naturalizes unemployment, it naturalizes low growth, it naturalizes the retreat from the sphere of production, which is already going on, certainly in the labor movement itself. I mean, there are technical objections to be made to the UBI. You can ask how much it costs. You can ask what it actually addresses with some of the real problems with our labor market. But at the same time, I think the real problem with the UBI is that it’s very, very unattractive politically, because the vision that underlies it —I don’t think it’s a vision hospitable to real notions of freedom, basically.

(Anton Jäger is is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge, working on the history of populism in the United States. https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/post-work-labor-ubi-coercion-capitalism)

DH The anti-work or post-work people make several arguments, which I think are empirically flimsy, but one is that jobs are disappearing, and since they are disappearing, we might as well just go with it and make that our program. I first noticed this in the late nineties among people like Jeremy Rifkin and Stanley Aronowitz, who were making this argument. But you see it now with Paul Mason and others: “The robots are taking over and there’s no more jobs anyways, so we might as well make the best of it.” What’s your reaction to that line of argument? AJ Well, I’m highly, highly skeptical. I mean, I’m not a trained economist myself, so I have to rely on secondary accounts here. But I think what we need to realize first, historically, is that these kind of automation panics are really a cyclical thing, even in the postwar period. So, they occur every fifteen years, where you have this outpouring of literature on how work’s disappearing. And, surprise, surprise, ten years later work still hasn’t disappeared, it’s become more brutal and more coercive. But at the same time, work itself, the employment relationship, has not disappeared. There are two arguments to be made here. The first is a sort of descriptive refutation. The other is a normative refutation. Descriptively, what we are seeing is that the global workforce, or the proletarian workforce, has never been bigger in history. At the same time, there are now tricky arguments of whether there’s a growing surplus population or a permanent surplus population, which means that now we have a section of the planetary proletariat that’s pushed out of the wage relationship altogether. But even if this descriptive statement holds true, the normative question of whether we can have postcapitalism without labor is just hugely improbable to me. Just think about something like decarbonizing an economy. If we need to actually save humanity from climate apocalypse, you will have to think about how you retrain and how you create all the kinds of industries that actually allow us to survive beyond our current carbon economy. If you want to do that without labor and without full automation, I think you’re going to run into huge logistical difficulties to even ensure survival for the human species. In that sense, I find it normatively quite irresponsible to just say, “Oh, we’re working for a post-work, post-coercive labor future.” Because, I mean, I think it really is quite threatening in the light of what’s actually come at us in the coming fifty years.

(Kali, Leader@CooperationJackson, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/kali-akuno-interview-climate-change-cooperation-jackson. 2-15)

We’re in an interesting political moment where there’s a lot of excitement around a GND coming from insurgent left-wing Democrats, but also a lot of pushback from centrists in the party who have a lot of power, as we saw in Nancy Pelosi’s move to weaken the Select Committee on a GND. How can we be strategic about interacting with different representatives and power players? Looking forward to 2020, how can we orient ourselves towards the most radical GND possible? KA Organizing is the answer. We have to organize a strong independent base to advance the transition program we need, be it the Green New Deal or anything similar. Without that this epic issue will be held hostage to forces seeking to maintain the capitalist system as is, whether it be the Democratic or Republican variety of this worldview and its articulated interests. And we have to build this base to advance two strategies at once. One, we have to organize a mass base within the working class, particularly around the job-focused side of the just transition framework. We have to articulate a program that concretely addresses the class’s immediate and medium-term need for jobs and stable income around the expansion of existing “green” industries and the development of new ones, like digital fabrication or what we call community production, that will enable a comprehensive energy and consumption transition. This will have to be a social movement first and foremost, which understands electoral politics as a tactic and not an end unto itself. For our part, one of the critical initiatives that we as Cooperation Jackson are arguing for is the development of a broad “union-co-op” alliance that would seek to unite the three forms of the organized working-class movement in this country — i.e. the trade unions, workers’ centers, and worker cooperatives — around what we call a “build and fight” program. It would seek to construct new worker-owned and self-managed enterprises rooted in sustainable methods of production on the build side and to enact various means of appropriation of the existing enterprises by their workers on the fight side, which would transition these industries into sustainable practices (or in some cases phase them out entirely). We think this is a means towards building the independence that is required to dictate the terms of the political struggle in the electoral arena. The second strategy calls for mass civil disobedience, as we witnessed at Standing Rock. We have to recognize that the neoliberal and reactionary forces at the heart of the Democratic Party are only part of the problem. The main enemy is and will be the petrochemical transnationals. We have to weaken their ability to extract, and this entails stopping new exploration and production initiatives. This is critical because it will weaken their power, particularly their financial power, which is at the heart of their lobbying power. If we can break that, we won’t have to worry about the centrists, as you put it.

(Kali, Leader@CooperationJackson, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/kali-akuno-interview-climate-change-cooperation-jackson. 2-15)

You’ve pointed to indigenous leadership in stopping pipelines at places like Standing Rock and argued we need to “scale up our campaigns against the oil companies,” including through direct action. Others have called for nationalizing and shutting down oil and gas companies. What does scaling up the fight against fossil-fuel companies look like? What’s the political path to taking down these incredibly rich and powerful companies? KA As I noted, the type of direct action that we witnessed at Standing Rock is where we are going to have to go. The march of death that the petrochemical companies are leading us on leaves us with no other choice. There are some critical steps that must be taken before we get to that level of mass direct action on an ongoing basis. We have to do a much more thorough job of getting the masses of people to understand the severity of the crisis and our collective ability to do something about it. We have some hearts and minds to win; and we have to defeat the notion that capitalism can’t be defeated. It’s going to be hard, but it’s not an immutable system. The forces of reaction are doing everything within their power to make the direct action we’ve seen over the last decade explicitly illegal. They are going to escalate their brutality. Standing Rock should have taught us that. Indeed, many land, water, and sky protectors are already getting killed throughout the Global South. We are going to have to get people to understand that preserving life on this planet is well worth the sacrifices that thousands if not millions of us are going to have to consciously make, by throwing our bodies directly on the line against the system. We are at the midnight hour, and it’s eco-socialism or death. We have to be clear about what it will entail to eliminate the current system. This type of consciousness-raising has to precede options such as nationalization as a means of liquidating fossil capital. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t introduce the idea and use it as a motivating factor, but we have to be real that it is going to take millions of people acting in accord with one another to make this option a concrete reality.

(Keith Brower Brown is co-chair of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a PhD student in geography at UC Berkeley. Jeremy Gong is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America in California’s East Bay. Matt Huber is assistant professor of geography at Syracuse University. He is the author of Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. , 3-21)

Second, the absorption of working-class militancy into elite Democratic Party brokerage politics was fatal. FDR and key segments of the trade union bureaucracy suppressed rank-and-file radicalism with political sabotage, legal persecution, and force. The dangers of being cajoled and absorbed into an even more business-friendly Democratic Party are even greater today. Bernie Sanders is fortunately not the kind of liberal “save capitalism” politician that FDR was. But, as he himself keeps saying, we need not one president, but a persistent mass movement of millions to overcome corporate control of our government. We hope today’s renewed workers’ militancy paves the way for a truly independent, mass working-class party that can secure and advance our gains in the state. We have to make sure militancy keeps building after we win a GND — otherwise we won’t get to keep it.

(Dean Snyder is assistant professor of political economy at Antioch College. Matt Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College and author of Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in U.S. Public Policy (Oxford University Press 2019). )

Toward a New Politics of Consumption Building that future requires bringing consumption under public, democratic control. At the same time, a new vision of consumption is essential to making a post-carbon economy and society politically sustainable. Unless Big Tech, Big Telecom, Big Media, Big Retail, and the interlinked firms that control twenty-first-century advertising are confronted directly, many Green New Deal initiatives — from converting the energy grid and encouraging sustainable land use, to renewing ecosystems and nurturing small businesses and farms — will be under relentless political threat. Imagine a Sanders (or, someday, an Ocasio-Cortez) administration backed by a progressive-socialist-majority congressional bloc. What might the FTC and FCC look like? Here, we push left policy boundaries by sketching a strategy with two principle aims: raising product quality and sustainability standards, and breaking our information and communications systems’ commercial dependency to bolster democratic alternatives. A new politics of consumption might center on the creation of a robust product standards enforcement system with high thresholds for quality and durability, environmental impacts, and labor conditions. A revitalized FTC, FDA, and Consumer Product Safety Commission might collaborate to raise the quality of consumer goods and end destructive practices like planned obsolescence and the production of the cheap, plastic, throwaway products. Such aggressive regulatory measures draw from the 1930s consumer movement, which was able to push to the floor of Congress a bill directing the FDA to seize goods and potentially prosecute firms for violating new advertising standards that prohibited misleading consumers “by ambiguity or inference.” This product quality standards regime could be supported by a grading and labeling system that provides clear and accessible information about the origins, makeup, and impacts of consumer goods — another key demand of New Deal and World War II-era activists. The point isn’t strictly to help us make individually rational purchasing decisions, but to foster public momentum for a new consumption regime: by deflecting manipulative advertising and providing leverage for organized groups to demand high-quality goods, a grading and labeling system could bolster popular support for publicly enforceable product quality, packaging, and promotion standards. A new product standard regime could compel retailers like Walmart and Amazon to redirect supply chains to higher-wage manufacturers using cutting-edge sustainable production systems. Public subsidies could also be channeled to democratically structured small- and medium-sized retailers to encourage a more far-reaching shift in how we get basic consumer goods. This new system would require strong, comprehensive, accountable government action — mandating and enforcing corporate information disclosure along supply chains through legislative and executive action backed by popular pressure, re-staffing and reequipping regulatory agencies with independent expertise and enforcement capacity, and democratically empowering civil society groups and ordinary consumers to help build out and oversee the system. A product quality system could work in tandem with vigorous new data privacy protections and tough restrictions on commercial advertising and the digital surveillance practices that feed it. But a new consumption regime also requires broader efforts to democratize communications systems to open space for public discourse and strengthen grassroots control over Green New Deal initiatives. For example, the FCC could support democratically governed municipal media hubs, in a regionally federated structure, with significant authority to implement communications policy. Federal funding could be allocated to remake underused spaces in public schools, community colleges, libraries, and abandoned buildings into cutting-edge centers for popular media creativity and civic digital media education. These hubs might provide hardware, software, training, and technical support for citizens, civil society groups, and grassroots organizations. Hubs could also offer subsidized communication facilities for citizen-journalists and creative workers, and incubate noncommercial, worker-owned/-operated media co-ops, such as online news organizations and documentary collectives. Substantial, accountable, and responsive state support for democratic communication could provide concrete leverage against corporate media and Big Tech, challenging (and eventually displacing) their control of news and public information. This idea for media hubs advances existing reform proposals such as Sanders’s plan to use new advertising taxes to fund noncommercial media. Proposals like these also require an infusion of expertise into government to support and elaborate the visions of elected officials and popular groups with specialized analysis, motivated by a commitment to public interests. Rejecting the neoliberal reliance on insulated technocrats applying minor, corporate-friendly system adjustments, a new politics of consumption would put computer scientists, telecommunications specialists, supply-chain analysts, consumer attorneys, creative workers, and others in close contact with diverse publics through new democratic institutions. This kind of project presents opportunities to channel growing progressive activism among tech industry employees and gathering generational skepticism of Silicon Valley claims to improving the world. A politics of consumption for the Green New Deal would learn from the New Deal by again making public service attractive to talented and capable people who seek meaningful work tackling interesting and important problems.

(Kate Aronoff is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a contributing writer to the Intercept. Alyssa Battistoni is an editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in political science at Yale University. Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College. , 2-5)

This Jacobin series takes up those questions from a left perspective and with no illusions about the climate science. Time’s running short: this is the moment to start a broad debate on the practical challenges and possibilities of fast, transformative change. The Left can’t afford to sit out the biggest debate in half a century over how to restructure the economy. And we can’t leave saving the species from climatic catastrophe to a handful of politicians, their congressional staffers, and allied think tanks, however good their intentions. We can draw on a rich history of radical ideas, like the vision put forth by workers and communities in the Just Transition movement of the 1980s, which sought to counter the Reagan-constructed dichotomy between good jobs and environmental protection. But what will determine how the GND plays out is more than ideas — it’s who has the power to implement them. Not Your Neoliberal Columnist’s Green New Deal This time, the GND’s most visible and compelling champion isn’t a cliché-spouting columnist, but a democratic socialist with the political savvy to match her principles: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Within just a few weeks, AOC has reshaped the political landscape, putting everything from the GND to a 70 percent marginal income tax on the table. Her draft vision of a GND calls for a massive increase in federal government spending, paired with a job guarantee, to decarbonize the entire US economy by 2030. So far, so good. But the details are still vague. Which makes it easy to sign onto: politicians from Cory Booker to Michael Bloomberg are signalling tentative support for a GND. We’ve seen the same dynamic with Medicare for All — including the inevitable backtracking. There’s new energy in the Democratic Party, but Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to grant a Select Committee on a GND real power reveals the party’s limits. Growing but ambiguous interest in climate investment is no guarantee that the climate action we get will be big enough, fast enough, or egalitarian enough to prevent climate catastrophe and improve people’s lives in the process. Only a broad coalition built around short-term material gains for working people can muster the political power to force huge change and keep the planet habitable in the long term.

(Richard, Politics@Leeds, Climate science, the politics of climate change and futures of IR, International Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117820946365)

Climate action requires political action simply because, without political action, the scale of the challenge as well as the time within which this action must be achieved cannot be met. If the shutting down of the global economy during the first 4 months of COVID-19 led to an 8 percent annual decrease in carbon emissions, and this decrease is required yearly for the next 10 years, nothing short of coordinated national and international action can be effective. As the logic behind the CoP15 Paris Agreement understood, in a world structured by a system of states, the state remains, in relation with other states, the effective focus for these national and international acts of coordination. One can maintain, of course, that concerted reflection on goals and their practice cannot be rehearsed within the same state system that, in co-evolution with capitalism, has produced the climate problem in the first place.24 Yet, my argument here is simple: (1) climate action must be of a political kind if this action is to be coherent and effective, and the horizon of this understanding of the political (comprehensive and effective action) is in a vital sense defined by the state; (2) this political action redounds above all to the agency and responsibility of the state both in relation to its own citizenry and in relation to other states and their citizenry. In response to the challenge of time and scale, I argue we should turn to, not turn away from, the state as an agent of change. Only if one renounces the potential of political action today through historically constituted practices of political efficacy does one shun this kind of conclusion. In which case, I would argue, one has renounced politics for our age, as well as the major emotion on which politics is based, hope.25 Since Max Weber, the state is sociologically defined by the legitimate monopoly of violence that it holds over all other forms of force within a nationally determined territory.26 There are many ways in which this monopoly is contested today. The description of a state as ‘vulnerable’ is nothing but the indication that a particular state does not hold the monopoly of violence within its territory. Prior to questions of political authority and legitimacy, all states are today vulnerable in this sense given the nature of global challenges that follow intended and unintended processes of interdependence (global financial instability, global terrorism, migration flows, pandemics, climate change, etc.). That said, the responses both to the financial crisis of 2008 and (much more so) to the present COVID-19 crisis testify to the fact that the monopoly of violence particular to the effectiveness of state governance remains in place. Among an increasing complexity of social actors, the state still holds the levers of power that are decisive in effecting social transformation. Consequently, to one side of the empirical fact that countries constitute the beef of the UNFCCC climate regime, I am arguing that the state remains the primary vehicle of a politics of climate change. As the emerging literature on the Green New Deal implies, the state can do the following. At a national level, it can organize and steer fiscal, monetary and sector-policies like those of energy, transport, agriculture, the communications industry and housing in such a way that both businesses and consumers are motivated to shift behaviour towards a carbon-neutral society. This model of the state is one of a regulated market economy that uses the coordination of state direction with market dynamism to effect broad social change. Governments respond to markets as they plan ahead with regard to climate change (the rapid fall in the price of solar and wind energy, for example), and much of the new green infrastructure is/will be locally distributed and assembled (no ‘giant public works’ given that contemporary technology is smart).27 That said, governments are the sole governance body with appropriate fiscal and monetary tools (1) to set up the rebuilding of national economies with new strategic priorities; (2) to steer and to guarantee concerted action across sectors; and (3) to guarantee, in turn, that this action is underpinned by the principles of ‘a just transition’.28 If the timeline to a 50 percent reduction of carbon emissions is 2030, then the state must so organize and steer that solutions to climate change are integrated. Attention to ‘the climate emergency’ alone will not lead to the necessary change. This last point is important and suggests why the idea of the Green New Deal, whether one is on the Left or Right, harbours the appropriate response. The integration of climate policy with radical policies for poverty alleviation and re-employment in sustainable industries and commerce provides the only way in which the shift from an extractive to a regenerative economy and society is possible in the first place. Without this convergence of solutions, practical solutions to climate change will not only tackle the scale and timeline of the problem; they will re-create a deeply divided polity of the employed and unemployed that could lead to ever-worse scenarios of a politics based on division and fear, not community and hope. It is the state alone – in conjunction with the forces of the market and civil society – that can provide the vision, the terms of execution of this vision (organized integration) and, critically, the policy-leverage that can bring about economic and social convergence.

(Kate Aronoff is a fellow at the Type Media Center and a contributing writer to the Intercept. Alyssa Battistoni is an editor at Jacobin and a PhD student in political science at Yale University. Daniel Aldana Cohen is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative, or (SC)2. Thea Riofrancos is an assistant professor of political science at Providence College. , 2-5)

From the New Deal to the Green New Deal The original New Deal offers both inspiration and cautionary lessons. As a set of policies, it created the foundation of the American welfare state as we know it. For the first time in American history, the government took responsibility for ensuring social welfare, in the process curbing the power of capital and recognizing labor’s right to collective bargaining. Huge new public programs undertook interventions in industrial policy and employed millions in work ranging from bridgebuilding to public art. Today, the New Deal seems radical compared to the past forty years of neoliberalism. But for socialists, it saved capitalism from itself. Brokering a class compromise that ensured decades of labor peace, it recreated the conditions for economic growth and, eventually, an era of mass consumption that substituted the credit card for the union card. Even the New Deal’s liberal promise of moderate equality was betrayed by the reproduction of gender and racial inequalities. Because the New Deal coalition relied on Southern Democrats, its labor protections excluded domestic and agricultural workers, reinscribing patriarchy and a racial division of labor. And New Deal housing policy laid the foundation for lasting segregation and the massive wealth gap that divides white and black Americans to this day. Nor was the original New Deal an environmental model. Yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal investment in the Civilian Conservation Corps helped restore forests and other ecosystems all across the country and should be revitalized today. Urban investments in public goods, from public swimming pools to experimental theatre in working-class black communities, are a model of sustainable urbanism. And a surprisingly democratic engagement with Puerto Rico, after a brutal 1932 storm, still stands as a model for post-disaster recovery. But, along with the mobilization for World War II, the New Deal model yielded an unprecedented era of fossil-fueled growth, accelerating environmental devastation. The segregated suburbs that flowed from the New Deal were also an ecological disaster. White Americans fled the cities for a landscape of leaky homes, car-choked blacktop, and giant malls. Suburbs’ demography is today more complex, but their ecological costs are still daunting. And yet, we find ourselves turning back to the New Deal example. Two of its core features stand out as particularly useful today. The first was the spirit of bold, public experimentation, led by the federal government but responsive to militant mobilization, and often fostering local democracy. Looking to the original New Deal, we can appreciate how practical its efforts were in the very best sense: getting things done. Its second core feature was its scale. From massive landscape interventions through programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority, to the millions or unemployed put to work by social service agencies, the New Deal went big. It transformed American life in profound ways, from how people worked to how they grew old. It remade life in the factory and family and it reshaped forests and farms. It literally rebuilt the country, and a good chunk of the global economy along with it. Not all of those changes were for the good. But today, facing down a merciless climate timeline, when “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are called for, a New Deal scope of ambition is what we need. The GND can’t just be a bill or two. It needs to be the framework for politics for the next few decades. That fight starts now. It must be ambitious. Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy isn’t enough if we leave untouched the patterns of production and consumption, housing and transit, agriculture and trade that fuel global capitalism. If you could press a button that decarbonized the world in an instant, we’d still be facing massive ecological crises: a great extinction, planetary deforestation, rampant freshwater pollution, plastic contamination of rivers and oceans, a wrecked nitrogen cycle, and mountains and islands of garbage. We need to challenge a capitalist growth model premised on racial and gendered hierarchies, colonial extraction, and environmental destruction. That doesn’t necessarily mean pitching the GND as an anti-capitalist proposal, although Republicans will surely do that for us. There’s a huge amount we can do in the next few years to make climate progress under capitalism, while gathering strength to press for more. But we do need to think creatively about the world we want to build in the long-term — and who will build it. The white male breadwinner and his family were at the heart of the original New Deal; the GND is a vision for today’s multi-racial working class — women of color working in the low-carbon care and education sectors, immigrant workers whose ranks will grow as climate change wreaks havoc across the globe, the growing number of people who can’t afford to live on meager wages. The GND’s big ideas transcend what feels immediately feasible, offering a vision to expand the sense of possibility and motivate action: guaranteed jobs, ubiquitous wind and solar. But leaning into the nitty gritty helps refine both the world we hope to build and the political strategy for getting there. That’s why we’re running pieces digging into the politics of what a truly transformative GND would look like. We’re at the beginning of a long and complicated fight. The series’ contributions reflect the scope of what it will take to win it — green energy and good jobs, to start, but also taking on the fossil fuel industry and green tech’s extractive underbelly, the significance of indigenous leadership and the revitalized labor movement, struggles for energy democracy and racial justice, demands for public goods from finance to housing to transit, and more. These days, all politics is climate politics. Nothing will shape the lives of working people in the decades ahead more than climate change. Extreme weather is coming. But the greatest changes will come in how we respond. How quickly, how intensely, and how democratically we decarbonize prosperity will be the economic story of the century. If billionaires steer climate investment to protect their wealth and private luxuries, it may be the last century we get. The alternative is to build another world on our one planet, harnessing wind, sun, and water to smash the hierarchies that oppress us and win back our future.

(Ben, CEO of International Nepal Fellowship Australia – a charity supporting healthcare and community development in Nepal. For over 20 years Ben has worked and campaigned with leading Christian NGOs and campaigning groups in Australia and Nepal. Extinction: Worth rebelling against , Nov)

So how does Crisp persuade himself, and attempt to persuade the reader, that maybe extinction is for the best? Largely by disguising the weaknesses in utilitarian philosophy through the very nature of the thought experiment he poses. The hypothetical asteroid, it turns out, is not just (hypothetically) destroying all life on Earth; it is also doing a lot of work to divorce Crisp’s moral logic from any encounter with the actual threats the world faces. The asteroid of the argument diverts our attention away from the rational actors – particularly corporations and politicians – who are most responsible for causing and contributing to these threats. Its presence in the argument also obstructs any reasoned consideration of privilege and inequality, providing – as unlikely as it seems in a discussion of planetary extinction – a measure of psychic comfort for people whose privilege and power derive from and drive the causes of the threats, namely fossil fuel extraction and the rampant plunder of the natural world. First, Crisp’s asteroid disguises the responsibility and agency of those who are causing or contributing to actually existing existential threats. The hypothetical asteroid cannot be held responsible (even hypothetically) for posing an existential threat to life on Earth. That is not the case with the existential threats of runaway climate change, nuclear conflict and ecosystem collapse. Those causing or contributing to each of those current and actual threats are rational and morally responsible agents – corporations, governments and individuals. It is not wrong for the Prime Minister to urge us to ‘adapt to’ climate change as he did in the wake of Australia’s catastrophic 2019–20 bushfires. Climate disruption and harm is part of our present and foreseeable future, so it is important to prepare ourselves and support others to prepare. Yet the attempt to divert attention away from the government’s capacity and responsibility to address the root causes (not merely effects) of climate change is deeply disingenuous. Particularly while the government he now leads – and has been a senior member of since 2013 – directs significant energy and resources towards making the problem worse by undermining or delaying Australia’s urgently- needed transition towards zero-emission energy, transport and agriculture. Second Crisp’s thought-experiment collapses morally meaningful distinctions between those who suffer enormous pain and those who do not. Crisp is aware of the euthanasic connotations of his argument and draws them to the surface. Many of us, he acknowledges, do not suffer terribly in life and would experience extinction as a grievous loss. But, he asks, for those who suffer atrociously, might not extinction come as a blessed relief? Reflecting on the person-destroying experience of torture, he asks whether extinction might not be a good thing if it ensured that no person among the billions still to be born would experience torture of the kind that disfigures both body and soul. Possibly; but this is surely an argument for putting an end to torture and torturers rather than to all life on Earth. Although, according to the attenuated utilitarian logic underpinning Crisp’s thought experiment, if you encounter Torturer and Victim, and can only end the existence of one of them, you should consider killing the Victim, whose suffering – we assume – is quantifiably greater than the Torturer inflicting it. It is worth noting also that Crisp nowhere asks the victims of torture whether, given what they have suffered, they would prefer to have died. Which seems odd, as people’s valuing of their own lives – even without considering the value of the lives of innumerable other creatures into the future – ought to give him pause. He never once considers what it is that drives the vast majority of those who suffer to continue to fight for, or cling desperately to, their very survival and some semblance of dignity and hope. Which is simply to say that the value of existence is not easily weighed in a scale against an Oxford don’s projections of possible future suffering. Non-existence is, indeed, the end of all such calculations of suffering versus utility and to embrace it is not utilitarianism but, rather, nihilism. By obliterating all of ‘us’, the comfortable and the afflicted, at the same moment, the hypothetical asteroid also obscures a kind of genocidal logic that emerges when legitimate moral questions about end-of-life care or assisted dying for a suffering individual are applied to whole populations. In Crisp’s thought-experiment, there is no point asking who exactly suffers, how and at whose hands they suffer and what could be done to avoid, alleviate or provide redress for the suffering. We are all (hypothetically) equal when the hypothetical asteroid snuffs us out equally. In the real world, though, the specifics of who suffers, why and at whose hands they suffer, and what should be done in response is of enormous moral significance. Comfortable people taking comfort in the idea that extinction will end the suffering of others has a noxious historical pedigree. The comforting fantasy that extinction could provide a merciful end to suffering at population or planetary level should be particularly horrifying for Australians, where the genocidal dispossession of First Nations peoples was justified by just such Social Darwinist myth-making. Nineteenth and early twentieth century policy-making was predicated on the undisputed ‘backwardness’ of First Nations peoples and their inevitable demise, leading anthropologists Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen (1899) to assert that the only course of action was to make their ‘path to final extinction... as pleasant as possible’. Political leaders are not wrong to urge that we will need to ‘live with’ Covid-19. The coronavirus and its impacts are now an ever-present and rapidly-evolving global reality. This glib slogan, though, paints over the vast inequalities in how we will live with the pandemic at a national and global level. We are not all equally likely to suffer ill-effects from COVID-19; people in poverty and those with underlying health conditions are most at risk. We are not all equally able to avoid exposure to the virus; people with insecure work, inadequate housing and little social protection are most exposed and least able to cope with the public health measures – such as business closures and travel lockdowns – used to contain the virus’ spread. We do not have equal access to vaccines and treatment; we can already see that First Nations Australians and people in poorer communities pay the price for historic neglect and contemporary misjudgements. The same – or even greater – inequalities of exposure, impact and capacity to respond apply when considering how climate change will affect communities in Australia and around the world. Finally, the immediacy of Crisp’s hypothetical asteroid strike – ending all human and non-human suffering in an instant – obscures the temporal reality of the actual existential threats we face. Climate change, nuclear conflict and ecosystem collapse will not mercifully end the suffering of all in a single, terrible instant. Rather – with the possible exception of all-out nuclear war – they will mercilessly increase suffering, particularly for people whose lives and security are already precarious. The extinctions they cause will not be swift, but protracted and painful – a species at a time, an ecosystem at a time, a life at a time, a marginal community at a time, an island nation at a time. In short, asteroids make for gripping science-fiction but are less helpful when it comes to moral philosophy. Embracing a truly biblical vision of life will lead us to conclusions entirely different to those Crisp draws. While space forbids a fuller treatment of a subject touched on in every part of the Bible, from Genesis to Wisdom and Prophetic literature, from the Gospels to the New Testament Epistles, it is worth noting briefly how the book of Revelation points us towards these alternative conclusions. While the blood-drenched imagery of Revelation has been used in some quarters to justify an indifference to the created order, it provides, in fact, resources to resist this indifference and to rebel against extinction and ‘the destroyers of the Earth’ (Revelation 11:18). The elders and the angels who gather round the enthroned lamb in the visions that animate the early chapters of John’s Apocalypse are joined by the four living creatures – lion, ox, human person and eagle – who represent all of creation joining in worship. Later, John will portray parodic counterfeits of this true worship of the One who brings life – worship of the dragon and the beast and fornication (a common prophetic and apocalyptic metaphor for idolatrous worship) with the woman of Babylon (Revelation 13–18). Collectively, these represent the idolatrous religion of empire, the targeted violence of empire and the extractive and exploitative wealth of empire. These powers who stand against the people and purposes of God are the destroyers of the Earth who are themselves slated for destruction, as God overturns the ‘kingdom of the world’ and remakes it as ‘the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah’. John’s call to Christians in this context is a call to resist and rebel, to ‘come out of’ the seductive and coercive embrace of empire’s wealth, violence and idolatry. As Richard Bauckham notes in his Theology of The Book of Revelation, By no means all of [John’s] readers were poor and persecu­ted by an oppressive system: many were affluent and compro­mising with the oppressive system. The latter are offered not consolation and encouragement, but severe warnings and calls to repent. We cannot rest easy with a philosophical indifference to the ecocidal exploitation and pollution of our Earth. We must not go along with political leaders who can plan for submarines to be developed for wars decades hence but who refuse to plan and act to prevent the extinction catastrophes we are witnessing now. Unlike Crisp’s asteroid, the actual existential threats we face are caused and exacerbated by rational and moral agents who can be confronted, restrained and called to account. Suffering and extinctions from climate change, nuclear conflict and ecosystem collapse are not inevitable results of cosmic chance and Newtonian physics, but are the entirely avoidable consequences of human choice and indifference. The indescribable suffering – and extinctions – these threats are already causing and will continue to cause harm us all. Though they will harm already marginalised and vulnerable communities disproportionately, while the comfortable use their wealth and privilege to secure physical and psychic comfort for as long as possible, even in the face of implacably intensifying and entirely avoidable catastrophe. So, the only moral, and indeed Christian, conclusion to be drawn from Crisp's propositions is not the one that he cautiously entertains: that maybe extinction wouldn’t be so bad. The only moral conclusion of these propositions is a commitment to action; to rebel against threats to life with all our might. And, indeed, to rebel loudly against leaders who respond to these existential threats not with urgency and ambition, but by admonishing us to protest – if protest we must – a little more quietly, a little more politely.

(Daniel P., postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative THE IMMANENT APOCALYPSE: HUMANITY AND THE ENDS OF THE WORLD A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy)

For my part, I see no inconsistency between, on the one hand, Foucault’s avowed antihumanism and endorsement of the situated struggles waged by the ‘specific’ intellectual and his endorsement of the peculiar situation of the atomic scientists on the other. Instead, I believe it would be a tremendous mistake to assume that Western humanists somehow possessed a monopoly on universalism or that any mention of totality revives all that was most dubious in traditional Western metaphysics. Foucault himself seems to takes for granted that, to rephrase his earlier claim slightly: because ‘the atomic scientists had a direct and localized relation to scientific knowledge and institutions’ (or ‘specific position in the order of knowledge’), they could credibly ‘articulate a discourse that could at the same time be the discourse of the universal’ because ‘the nuclear threat affected the whole human race and the fate of the world.’194 At issue here is the difference between two types of universalism that both crop up in Foucault’s work and are easy to confuse but reward keeping separate. This involves what philosopher and Foucault scholar Colin Koopman lucidly identifies as “a crucial distinction between universality and universalizability, or what might be described as a distinction between eternal universals and historical universals, or in yet another way as necessary universality and contingent universalizability.”195 Expressed in these terms, it is clear that almost all claims to ‘necessary universality’ in human affairs have rightly come to be viewed with reflexive suspicion over the course of the last half century. At the same time, there have also been many who have permitted the belief that “the whole is the false”196 to be the last word in political wisdom while overlooking the ‘contingent universalizability’ of a growing number of phenomena that can credibly claim to impinge on the lives of every living human being. Universal death did not exist when Foucault was born in 1926. It became universal at a terrestrial scale when the creation of massed stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons breached the biological threshold of modernity by introducing the power to kill life itself. There is nothing necessary about the prospect of universal death by hydrogen bomb, just as the prospect of annihilating all complex life in nuclear fire or a tide of synthetic viruses robbed the whole order of terrestrial Nature of any lingering claim it might have had to being ‘necessary.’ What remains is a near infinitude of contingent processes that collectively make up the continuous flux of a finite Earth. Within this welter, it has become possible for human beings to initiate new processes that universally impinge on the survival of all human beings, and even all complex life. While it remains urgently necessary to treat all contingently universal claims with careful scrutiny, the introduction of the power to kill life itself into human affairs means that the critical thinkers of today should not be too hasty in concluding that “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat”197 or that “despite their claims to universality…‘end of the world’ discourses are more specifically concerned about protecting the future of whiteness.”198