The alternative is a class-based movement towards socialism—rejecting capitalist ideology is key to sustainability.

Indeed, history has been unkind to all such attempts to provide detailed forecasts of the future, particularly if they simply extend current trends and leave the bulk of humanity and their struggles out of the picture. It is for this reason that a dialectical view is so important. The actual course of history can never be predicted. The only thing certain about historical change is the existence of the struggles that drive it forward and that guarantee its discontinuous character. Both implosions and explosions inevitably materialize, rendering the world for new generations different than that of the old. History points to numerous social systems that have reached the limits of their ability to adapt their social relations to allow for the rational and sustainable use of developing productive forces. Hence, the human past is dotted by periods of regression, followed by revolutionary accelerations that sweep all before them. As the conservative historian Jacob Burckhardt declared in the nineteenth century, “a historical crisis” occurs when “a crisis in the whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs and all or many peoples of the same civilization.… The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled.” He called this the “acceleration of historical processes.”91¶ Burckhardt principally had in mind social revolutions, like the French Revolution of 1789. This was an acceleration of history that, as the modern French historian Georges Lefebvre explained, commenced as a series of widening revolutions, mutating with terrifying speed, from an aristocratic revolution to a bourgeois revolution to a popular revolution and then a peasant revolution—finally taking on the character of a historic “bloc, a single thing,” seemingly unconquerable, which reshaped much of world history.92¶ Could such a revolutionary acceleration of history, though on an incomparably greater scale, happen in the twenty-first century? Most establishment commentators in the hegemonic countries of the world imperialist system would say no, based on their own narrow experience and limited view of history. Nevertheless, revolutions continue to break out in the periphery of the world system and are, even now, only put down by imperialist economic, political, and military interventions. Moreover, the failure of capitalism on a planetary scale today threatens all of civilization and life on the planet as we know it. If drastic changes are not made, global temperature this century will increase by 4° or even 6°C from preindustrial times, leading to conditions that will imperil humankind as a whole. Meanwhile, the extreme capitalism of today seeks to expropriate and enclose all the bases of material existence, siphoning off almost the entire net social surplus and robbing the natural environment for the direct benefit of a miniscule few.¶ As a direct result of capitalist social relations, the material challenges now facing humanity are greater than anything ever seen before, pointing to an accumulation of catastrophe along with the accumulation of capital.93 Hundreds of millions of people under these circumstances are already being drawn into struggles with the system, creating the basis of a new worldwide movement toward socialism. In his book Can the Working Class Change the World? Yates answers yes, it can. But it can only do so through a unifying struggle by workers and peoples aimed at genuine socialism.94¶ It may be objected that socialism has been tried and has failed and hence no longer exists as an alternative. However, like the earliest attempts at capitalism in the Italian city-states of the late Middle Ages, which were not strong enough to survive amongst the feudal societies that surrounded them, the failure of the first experiments at socialism presage nothing but its eventual rebirth in a new, more revolutionary, more universal form, which examines and learns from the failures.95 Even in failure, socialism has this advantage over capitalism: it is motivated by the demand for “freedom in general,” rooted in substantive equality and sustainable human development—reflecting precisely those collective social relations, borne of historical necessity and the unending struggle for human freedom, crucial to human survival in our time.96¶ The great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter, who, as Austrian finance minister in Red Vienna, had allied himself for a time with the socialist government and found himself attacked on all sides, once wrote that capitalism would perish not because of “the weight of economic failure,” but rather because its “very success” in pursuing its narrow economic ends, had undermined the sociological foundations of its existence. Capitalism, Schumpeter exclaimed, “‘inevitably’ creates conditions in which it will not be able to live and which strongly point to socialism as its heir apparent.”97 He was, it turns out, in many ways correct, though not entirely in the way he expected. The global development of monopoly capitalism and financialization spearheaded by the very same counterrevolutionary neoliberalism that first arose in response to Red Vienna in the interwar years—at a time when Schumpeter himself was a major actor—has now undermined the material bases, not so much of capitalism itself, but of global society and planetary ecology. The result has been the emergence of an “atmosphere of almost universal hostility” to the prevailing social order, though, playing out in the confused context of the present, less as opposition to capitalism itself than to neoliberalism.98¶ It is capitalism’s undermining of the very basis of human existence that will eventually compel the world’s workers and peoples to seek new roads forward. An inclusive, class-based movement toward socialism in this century will open up the possibility of qualitative new developments that the anarchy of the capitalist-market society with its monopolistic competition, extreme inequality, and institutionalized greed cannot possibly offer.99 This includes the development of a socialist technology, in which both the forms of technology utilized and the purposes to which they are put are channeled in social directions, as opposed to individual and class gain.100 It introduces the prospect of long-term democratic planning at all levels of society, allowing decisions to be made and distributions to occur outside the logic of the cash nexus.101 Socialism, in its most radical form, is about substantive equality, community solidarity, and ecological sustainability; it is aimed at the unification—not simply division—of labor.¶ Once sustainable human development, rooted not in exchange values, but in use values and genuine human needs, comes to define historical advance, the future, which now seems closed, will open up in a myriad ways, allowing for entirely new, more qualitative, and collective forms of development.102 This can be seen in the kinds of needed practical measures that could be taken up, but which are completely excluded under the present mode of production. It is not physical impossibility, or lack of economic surplus, most of which is currently squandered, that stands in the way of the democratic control of investment, or the satisfaction of basic needs—clean air and water, food, clothing, housing, education, health care, transportation, and useful work—for all. It is not the shortage of technological know-how or of material means that prevents the necessary ecological conversion to more sustainable forms of energy.103 It is not some inherent division of humanity that obstructs the construction of a New International of workers and peoples directed against capitalism, imperialism, and war.104 All of this is within our reach, but requires pursuing a logic that runs counter to that of capitalism.