The Green New Deal is a viable path to challenge capitalism—it’s the only solution that can garner mass support.

The Green New Deal is a viable and realistic alternative. In its vision of workers holding good jobs—as they convert and rebuild energy production, transform human communities to be energy efficient and shielded from climate change, and restore the natural environment—it offers a sharp contrast to the dismal vision of sacrifice presented by analysts such as William Barnes and Nils Gilman. The only alternative, they argue, in the absence of a fortuitous technological breakthrough or the investment of unprecedented resources and geographical space to green energy, “is a drastic reduction in aggregate global production, which will require enormous shifts in the way people in many societies live: less travel, less heating in winter, less cooling in summer, less light at night, less opu- lent housing, less gadgetry, less elaborate clothing . . . and the list goes on. In sum, with regard to all forms of material production and consumption, serious emissions reduction boils down to just one word: LESS.” 22

With a Green New Deal there would be less of some things. Less opportunities for capitalists to profit as much of the economy would be decommodified and there would be fewer workers to exploit since so many of them would be working for governments and publicly owned entities at local, regional, and national levels. And there would be less government bailout of capitalists from the consequences of the global warming they created.

The Green New Deal promises the investment needed to convert to a zero- emissions economy, but the consequences of such intense spending would be to improve most Americans’ lives. They would end up with more of good things not less: More good jobs, cleaner environments, and more collective control over investment decisions. Above all, workers would gain the satisfaction of doing work that preserves rather than destroys the natural environment and that ensures the well-being of future generations rather than making our planet uninhabitable.

Such a vision offers a compelling contrast to what we can expect to hear from the Right. Since climate change will create an unprecedented number of refu- gees, the Right will be able to appeal to racism and other forms of bigotry. If most people have less, as has been the case in the United States for forty years, and especially so since 2008, those appeals will be effective unless there is a realistic promise of good jobs. The Green New Deal offers that and so can effectively counter the Right’s most potent issues.

The Green New Deal’s name is designed to evoke the last time in U.S. history that a large public sector was created and capital was regulated. However it will be politically difficult to recreate today the political conditions that allowed for the original New Deal. We need to remember that large national-level firms coexisted with a large number of locally based firms in the 1930s. New Deal reg- ulations limited the extent to which large corporations could impinge upon smaller firms’ markets and unions gained important legal protections that endured into the 1970s. 23 Today large corporations can engage in predatory behavior against smaller competitors and break unions with little fear of sanc- tion from government. Similar neoliberal restructuring and declines in rates of unionization have transformed the political economies of many European coun- tries, narrowing the space for popular mobilization there as well. 24

Today the space for workers and other non-elites to organize and mobilize is far narrower than in the 1930s or 1960s. At the height of the misery caused by the lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were some signs of mass mobilization, such as the teacher strikes in “red” states and wildcat strikes and protests by workers who endured low wages and unsafe working conditions in warehouses and meatpacking plants. 25 Those actions offered the hope that the United States was entering a period of rapid unionization or escalating mass demands for reforms and reregulation, recreating a new era of reform that pre- serves the essence of capitalism as happened during the 1930s. Under immense pressure, capitalists would agree to concessions that could include greatly expanded social benefits, a higher minimum wage, limits on predatory behavior toward workers and consumers, and new regulations to reduce environmental damage such as CO 2 emissions. So far protests and strikes have not been sus- tained, perhaps because the generosity of the various pandemic relief bills have sufficiently softened mass misery.

It is, however, impossible to see how owners of fossil fuel firms could agree to reforms that would abolish their industries and negate the value of their prop- erty. Those capitalists whose businesses are based on the endless increase of CO 2 emissions, like the slaveholders of the American South, have to be defeated and their property nullified. The question thus becomes what programs and strategies can build an alliance powerful enough to win against fossil fuel capitalists, even if capitalism and capitalists outside that sector continue to exist?

Politically, the original New Deal and the post-1945 European social democra- cies were made possible by worker–farmer alliances. Gøsta Esping-Andersen shows that such alliances were necessary for any Left party to take power through democratic elections in wealthy capitalist countries. 26 Today farmers are a much smaller part of the American electorate and, indeed, of electorates in Europe or East Asia. They certainly can be recruited into a green alliance. Farm- ers already are suffering from the effects of climate change, and they have been immiserated by corporate control of land and especially of the transport and processing facilities that determine farmers’ abilities to sell their produce and the prices they will receive.

The Green New Deal has said little to farmers so far, but it can easily be extended to offer public funds for farmers to manage land in ways that will reduce CO 2 emissions and produce food in environmentally responsible ways, as Raj Patel and Jim Goodman argue in chapter 3 of this volume. Farmers can be paid for such work, and, as with other sorts of green jobs, these will be lasting and not easily open to capitalist exploitation. Environmentally sustainable agri- culture is also inherently small-scale and localized. Thus, a Green New Deal for agriculture would preserve and revive small farming communities, allowing those who want to live in rural areas to do so.

Workers and farmers will be joined by another group that has often been central to radical movements: young people. The numerous organizations involved in the Global Climate Strike and other such actions are predominately joined by students who see that they will have no future if CO 2 levels aren’t capped very soon. 27 Young people also are looking toward adult lives in which they will be contingent workers without clear career paths or incomes that will allow them to support families of their own. A program like the Green New Deal, which offers jobs that are both good in terms of pay, benefits, and security and that also are meaningful, will be enormously appealing for our nation’s young people.

Climate change is and will be catastrophic. The enormity of the disaster already is leading many to become fatalistic. However, it is also becoming a basis for mobilization, especially among the young who will live long enough to see the full consequences of global warming. The Green New Deal offers an alternative to pessimism and denial. As a plan for action, it provides a focus for political organizing and presents a vision of a just society that can overcome the corrosive and corrupt effects of neoliberalism and the reactionary political movements that follow from severe inequality. The Green New Deal promises good jobs doing socially valuable work and the fulfillment of collective action to create a political opening for a far less exploitative society.