The alternative is ecological socialism.

A revolutionary struggle in these circumstances will need to occur in two phases: an ecodemocratic phase in the immediate present, seeking to build a broad alliance—one in which the vast majority of humanity outside of the ruling interests will be compelled by their inhuman conditions to demand a world of sustainable human development. Over time this should create the conditions for a second, more decisive, ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle, directed at the creation of a society of substantive equality, ecological sustainability, and collective democracy. All of this points to the translation of classical Marx’s ecological critique into contemporary revolutionary praxis. 60

In the ecodemocratic phase, the goal would be to carry out those radical reforms that would arrest the current destructive logic of capital, by fighting for changes that are radical, even revolutionary, in that they go against the logic of capital, but are nonetheless conceivable as concrete, meaningful forms of struggle in the present context. These would include measures like: (1) an emergency plan of reduction in carbon emissions in the rich economies by 8 to 10 percent a year; (2) implementing a moratorium on economic growth coupled with radical redistribution of income and wealth, conservation of resources, rationing, and reductions in economic waste; (3) diverting military spending, now universally called “defense spending” to the defense of the planet as a place of human habitation; (4) the creation of an alternative energy infrastructure designed to stay within the solar budget; (5) closing down coal-fired plants and blocking unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands oil; (6) a carbon fee and dividend system of the kind proposed by Hansen that would redistribute 100 percent of the revenue to the population on a per capita basis; (7) global initiatives to aid emerging economies to move toward sustainable development; (8) implementation of principles of environmental justice throughout the society and linking this to adaptation to climate change (which cannot be stopped completely) to ensure that people of color, the poor, women, indigenous populations, and Third World populations do not bear the brunt of catastrophe; and (9) adoption of climate negotiations and policies on the model proposed in the Peoples’ Agreement on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010. Such radical change proposals can be multiplied, and would need to affect all aspects of society and individual human development. The rule in the ecodemocratic phase of development would be to address the epochal crisis (ecological and economic) in which the world is now caught, and to do so in ways that go against the logic of business as usual, which is indisputably leading the world toward cumulative catastrophe.

The logic of the ecodemocratic phase of the struggle, if it were carried out fully, would create the conditions for an ecosocialist phase in which the mobilization of the population on their own behalf, and the cultural and economic changes that this brings about, would give the impetus to the creation of a society of from each according to ability, to each according to need. 61 The system of social metabolic reproduction would be reconstituted on a more communal basis taking into account not only present and future generations, but the Earth System itself and the diversity of life within it. The necessary social and ecological planning would start from local needs and local communities and would be integrated with larger politicalexecutive entities responsible for coordination and implementation in relation to these needs.

Such a society would be democratic in the classical sense of the word— rule of society by the people, the associated producers. 62 It was this that Marx had in mind when he stressed (as quoted above) that “socialized man, the associated producers, [would] govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way … accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.” For Marx in the nineteenth century this was a struggle for human freedom; today, in the twenty-first century, it is a struggle for human freedom and human survival.

In 1980, the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson wrote a cautionary essay for New Left Review titled “Notes on Exterminism, the Last Stage of Civilization.” Although directed particularly at the growth of nuclear arsenals and the dangers of global holocaust from a nuclear exchange in the final phase of the Cold War, Thompson’s thesis was also concerned with the larger realm of ecological destruction wrought by the system. Rudolf Bahro later commented on Thompson’s ideas in his Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster, explaining: “To express the exterminism-thesis in Marxist terms, one could say that the relationship between productive and destructive forces is turned upside down. Marx had seen the trail of blood running through it, and that ‘civilisation leaves deserts behind it.’” 63 Today this ecologically ruinous trend has been extended to the entire planet with capitalism’s proverbial “creative destruction” being transformed into a destructive creativity endangering humanity and life in general. 64

“The dream that man can make himself godlike by centering his energies solely on the conquest of the external world,” Mumford wrote in The Condition of Man, “has now become the emptiest of dreams: empty and sinister.” 65 The result is a kind of economics of exterminism. Today making war on the planet is a means to the end of capital accumulation, in which the limits of the earth itself have become invisible to the narrow value calculations of the system. Turning this economics of exterminism around, and creating a more just and sustainable world at peace with the planet is our task in the Great Capitalist Climacteric. If we cannot accomplish this humanity will surely die with capitalism. The prophecy of all defenders of the current order over the last century will then be fulfilled: capitalism will mark the end of human history by bringing to an end human civilization— and even human existence.

The Great Capitalist Climacteric presents us with a fatal choice: System Change Not Climate Change!