We have to fix the climate even if we can't end capitalism

As much as I want ecosocialism to be a panacea right now, it's not.

Charles Fourier in 1835

A specter is haunting climate discourse—the specter of ecosocialism. I hate to be the “it’s a nice idea but it’ll never work guy,” but making your climate change plan “end capitalism” is a little like having your retirement plan be “end capitalism” (And for the record, this describes my retirement plan. I just don’t think it’s a very smart plan). Even if you’re a die-hard communist, steeped in dialectical materialism, and ready for a revolution at any moment, you should probably form some sort of backup retirement plan in case capitalism still exists when you’re 70. The clock is ticking and the stakes are high.

And this does seem to be where the heads of a lot of serious climate people are at right now.

Jason Hickel pretty much always has insightful things to say about climate change, and when I read his recent Current Affairs article headlined “What Would It Look Like If We Treated Climate Change as an Actual Emergency?” I got pretty much what I expected: a description of what a rapid, emergency transition away from fossil fuels would look like, and a primer on his pet concept: degrowth. “Capitalism—which depends on perpetual growth just to stay afloat—is structurally incapable of sustaining such a transition,” he writes in the avowedly socialist publication.

Here’s the basic concept of degrowth vis-a-vis climate, from Hickel’s expanded article on the topic: “[S]cale down the material real-world economics and energy throughput of the global economy […] by reducing waste and shrinking sectors of economic activity that are ecologically destructive and offer little if any social benefit (such as marketing, and the production of commodities like McMansions, SUVs, beef, single-use plastics, fossil fuels, etc.).”

Some sort of transition to a whole new social and economic paradigm would certainly be a good way to do what I’ve said in the past is necessary: stop producing fossil fuel as soon as possible, even in cases where there’s no immediate replacement. For instance, I’m sure we can’t immediately switch all the superyachts in the world over to electric motors. During the transition, people will have to just not use their superyachts at all unfortunately. This sort of thing might hurt GDP, but in a new, post-capitalist paradigm, GDP won’t be synonymous with prosperity anymore, so that matters little if at all.

Hickel is certainly right that capitalism is standing in the way of degrowth. Ipso facto, the answer is to replace it with capitalism’s arch nemesis: socialism. A lot of very serious climate people want to make this switch. Meteorologist and activist Eric Holthaus is an ecosocialist. Very famous author Naomi Klein is also an ecosocialist. In a way, I’m one too .

But whenever I read about transitioning to socialism as a cure for climate change, I nod and say “yes, good, of course!” and at the same time I get this queasy sense of dread. Not because I don’t think socialism is a good idea, but because a worldwide transition away from capitalism isn’t on the table right now at all, not on the kind of timeline we’re talking about. There’s just approximately zero chance of it happening in time to positively impact the climate.

Sure, socialism is well represented on social media, and it’s experienced a little polling bump in the past few years. Last year, 56 percent of Democrats told The Hill they favor socialism, versus 53 percent who favor capitalism (and a decent number of people apparently like both, God love ’em). But socialists are running for elected office and very much not winning. In 2019, only about 42 percent of all Americans said they like socialism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, socialists had a disappointing 2020, and as of last week, had a disappointing 2021, electorally speaking at least.

But running for office isn’t everything. In fact, if you’re trying to transition to a whole new kind of society, electing President AOC won’t really do much to bring the US toward a speedy transition to ecosocialism as long as Republicans still hold vast amounts of power—let alone the esteem and support of many many people. For that, you need to bring an overwhelming majority into the class struggle. (For ecosocialism to work, this also has to happen globally, by the way, not just in the US).

This sort of working class uprising is not in evidence. If there were a fired-up socialist movement in America right now, Amazon workers in Alabama probably wouldn’t have voted down a union in April, and similar workers in New York wouldn’t be struggling to get past the first stages of unionizing. Last month’s wave of labor unrest—dubbed “Striketober”—was inspiring, but it was probably spurred on by leftover resentment from COVID, and a bunch of unfulfilled promises and fake gratitude toward “essential workers.”

As Hamilton Nolan pointed out in In These Times, labor organizers didn’t even demonstrate that they could turn October’s strike wave into a movement with widespread momentum, and get more people into the labor movement. “The question is whether the institutions of organized labor — big unions and the AFL-CIO — will make a plan to capitalize on this in a systematic way. And fund the plan. And execute the plan. Of that, we have no evidence yet,” Nolan wrote.

I don’t mean to imply that there will never be a vibrant labor movement in the US. I both believe, and hope with all my heart that there will be. I just don’t think us ecosocialists have a tangible plan for filling in the gap between where we are now and where we’ll have to be to start the work of transitioning to a post-capitalist, eco-utopia. Socialists with a primarily materialist outlook, and who spend a lot of time talking about how society is supposed to switch over to socialism tend not to mince words about the hard work this entails.

So lets single out one idea from the Current Affairs article for how to end capitalism. Hickel (whose stated plan is degrowth, not ecosocialism, for the record) talks about the need to nationalize the oil companies—have the state take ownership of them, and phase them out.

If the oil companies were nationalized tomorrow, that would be cool with me. But I suspect “the government should own the oil companies” is a bad protest chant. It sounds very scary, and bad, and even undemocratic to non-leftists. The leftist economist Richard Wolff has written about this. “Where socialist experiments meant state ownership and control of major parts of industry and agriculture (as in eastern Europe and China), concentrated state power became excessive, then dysfunctional, and finally socially unacceptable. Socialists cannot win without defining a socialism credibly organized to preclude such excessive state power.”

Wolff’s prescription for climate—and pretty much everything—is to empower workers, and I happen to think he’s on to something. “Worker co-ops can operate as a structural bulwark against excessive state power,” he writes. And he thinks a transition to ecosocialism would come from a transition to democracies at all levels including “residential communities and likewise in our workplaces, politically and likewise economically.” In other words, we get an eco-utopia when we create a society in which everyone has the same amount of power, not when we have a superpowered ecosocialist President.

But as these materialist socialists so often say, the transition to an empowered working class is something you accomplish through decades of hard work. As commentator Freddie DeBoer wrote on Tuesday in The New York Times, Americans are used to calling themselves capitalists, and that’s an obstacle. “My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives,” according to DeBoer.

Karl Marx, for his part, thought the end of capitalism was inevitable. He writes as if it was close at hand when he was writing, and that was way back around the time of the American Civil War, and that hasn’t been how it’s played out so far. But in some ways Marx was building off the work of French philosopher Charles Fourier, who had gone one further, saying a sort of eco-utopia was inevitable back in 1820. “[Civilization] is only a transient stage—a state of temporary evil with which globes are afflicted during the first ages of their career; it is for the human race a disease of infancy, like teething; but it is a disease which has been prolonged in our globe at least twenty centuries beyond its natural term, owing to the neglect on the part of the ancient philosophy to study association and passional attraction.” Cool! I hope something like this is correct, even though I guess Fourier would say we’re twenty-two centuries past due for an eco-utopia now.

But right now we’re in emergency mode*. Catastrophic warming is here, and getting worse. The famous 1.5 degree window is rapidly vanishing. Our current carbon budget will be spent in seven years and eight months (and I’ve seen tighter timelines for this, but let’s go with this for now). I’d love to transition the whole world to socialism too, but the only real way to do that is from the bottom up—to get the workers of the world to unite—and that’s not going to happen in seven years and eight months.

The working class people in my life—friends and family members who wear camouflage baseball caps, and work at such places as HVAC repair companies and at the front desks of doctors’ offices—are not whispering to one another in break rooms about Marx right now; they’re whispering to one another about downloading Robinhood and Coinbase, and I get why: those things offer an immediate—if illusory—escape hatch from low-paying labor. And the escape they offer is an individualized one that doesn’t make people feel like “takers” rather than “makers,” to paraphrase an obnoxious recent tweet from Elon Musk.

I currently do not have a better climate plan than “end capitalism,” and Elon Musk’s plans, which include “get people to buy Teslas” and “Go to Mars” are, to my mind, also bad plans. But 45 percent of the people thinking about buying Teslas claim to be doing so because they care about the environment. For a million reasons, I think that’s a terrible way to use your environmentalist energy. But for now, people are spending billions of dollars trying to buy their way out of climate change, and socialists don’t have enough time to convince them that that’s bad.

So given that we’re on a seven-year and eight-month timeline, I see zero evidence of the end of capitalism coming close. And I see some energy for some kind of short term movement to stop climate change that involves personal consumption habits—the existing mainstream climate plan, basically, except much faster. Though I don’t see that doing the trick either.

Like I said, I don’t have a plan of my own. If I did, it would be something like this: Get the many people who are energized around the issue of climate change to gather in large groups, go where unjustifiable greenhouse gas production or emissions are occurring and, without harming anyone, make them stop. (And please don’t ask me how to determine which are the “unjustifiable” places to do this, or how to make sure this is nonviolent. I didn’t say this was a plan!)

In the meantime, “let’s do socialism so we can stop climate change” sounds like a trojan horse to non-leftists. It is not a no-nonsense plan for stopping warming at 1.5 degrees. I wish it was.

*I’m aware that some leftists label this sort of thing “bourgeois eschatology.” I don’t think that term fits, and it also disturbs me to hear people on the left wave away the very real danger of climate change. But your mileage may vary. Maybe I’m a bourgeois eschatologist. Sorry!