by Kim Scipes

Well, the Democrats failed to keep Donald Trump out of the presidency again. That’s going to hurt a lot of people. I assume most of us would prefer that he was not in this position. However, I argue that if we carefully examine the situation, we can see that the situation is not as bleak as initially suggested—for example, Trump is an “attractor,” not a leader—and that if we on the left respond intelligently, we can have a major impact on this country and its role in the world.
The question now is how might the left—very broadly defined—understand and respond to the current political situation in the US? Assuming others will try to address this issue as well, I will share my analysis. (I don’t think any one person has all of the answers, but I believe that we can each contribute our respective analyses to help develop a valuable collective understanding.) Since I have been researching and writing over the last 40-plus years, I evaluate where my analysis was right and where it was wrong. Then I suggest where I think we might move to shape the future.
My biggest failure regarding the 2024 presidential election was not in my analysis, but in my lack of imagination. I think my analysis was very prescient, especially the part of the seismic economic changes that have been taking place in the country over the last 40 years and the on-going failure of capitalism for working people. However, I failed ultimately because I could not imagine people in response rallying behind Donald Trump; by voting for him, they were endorsing a representative of all the forces and policies that had destroyed much of the domestic based economy and local communities on which they had previously depended.
But who to turn to? Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the large majority of the Democratic Party have also been complicit in this corporate-led internal suicide that has victimized tens of millions of the US’s working people, and without having any real concrete proposals to address the social devastation of the last 40 years, they were at a serious disadvantage; at least Trump acted like he cared for those victimized, or at least he sympathized.
In short, I underestimated Trump and his ability to attract and hold on to followers. This, I argue, does not make Trump a leader; it argues he is an attractor; he attracts people. There is a big difference. What I’m saying here is that Trump has no real solutions to address social problems he and his campaign had identified. Therefore, we should recognize that there is a big difference between MAGA activists and pro-Trump voters: there is a space between them, and we need to blow this unity apart. Trump has an ability to unify those who think they have been mistreated, rightfully or wrongfully and, through his personality, get them to see commonality and the follow him. I deem him “sniveler in chief”; no solutions but plenty of “I’ve been done wrong…!”
This is an important distinction that must be understood: this was an election against all our problems, not one that advanced solutions to address them.
What the Democrats got right in this election, in my opinion—pushed by core constituencies—is the understanding that we must include everyone possible into the American “family,” and that we can no longer tolerate inequities in how different groups get treated; that we cannot go back to the days or excluding white women or people of color from the pie; that white and male supremacy is totally unacceptable. Period. And this has grown as more and more people have received college educations, where these understandings have been developed and pushed.
However, at the same time, the Democrats ignored poor and working Americans, of all ethnicities, those white and people of color.
(And, at the same time, the Dems refused to honor those—particularly younger activists—who have a global perspective, hate the US role in the world, and care about people outside of our borders; the most grievous “fuck you” came around a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention.)
The problem is that enlargement of the American “family,” if you will, comes at a time when this family has been and remains under unrelenting attack by capitalism, and that this has been true for over 40 years, and capitalism’s ability to support working and poor people cannot expand; it can only continue to shrink. And nobody wants to address this reality: capitalism provides no long-term solution for the large majority of us!
So, with limited resources—as I argue below, for the elites, the Empire always comes first!—the elites of both parties have prioritized the needs of those in urban areas over those in rural areas. Supposedly, the cities were where the votes “lived,” but a lot of ones and twos spread over space out can come to a total a higher number.
This was an election where the rural United States rebelled against the urban US; I believe it was more of a “you’ve ignored us, and now we won’t let you do this anymore!” rather than the beginning of a rural-urban real war. And from what I can tell, there’s a lot of truth to this; the elites have ignored rural folks throughout the country. (For a powerful yet succinct analysis of how Wisconsin, a largely rural state, has been screwed over since the 1970s, see Roger Bybee, “The Role of Corporations,” in It Started in Wisconsin, edited by Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, 2012, Verso: 127-143.)
In Z Net, during August 2023, trying to combine all I had learned as a scholar and primarily a labor activist over the years, I published an analysis of the last 40 years (1981-2023) of the US in the world. I argued that we had to take a global perspective to truly understand this situation. (It is a very lengthy article, although it has also been published it in five separate articles—both are on-line for free. Parts 3 & 4 are most relevant to this article. It was also published by Green Social Thought.) I have seen nothing comparable to it, before or since. In this, I quickly reviewed how the social order emerged from World War II, how it developed until 1981 (the end of Jimmy Carter’s administration), and then went in detail of its “development” since 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president.
I’m not going to review this entire article—I recommend that everyone reading this read the original article—but want to draw your attention to one very crucial detail that was all but ignored in this recent election campaign: the US National Debt. Quickly, the National Debt is a collective representation of all the surpluses and deficits enjoyed by the country since its founding as an independent country in 1789; it includes expenditures for all of the many US wars, social projects (such as New Deal), and specific programs (space program, interstate highway system). From 1789-1981 (192 years) the US National Debt reached $909 billion dollars or, more helpful for our purposes here, $ .9 trillion dollars. Ronald Reagan came into office after running as a “fiscal conservative” and, in eight years (1981-1989), doubled the National Debt from $ .9 to $2.7 trillion! (You can’t include what you started with, so it’s doubled instead of tripled.) That has expanded since then, under both Democrats and Republicans, and today, the National Debt is almost $36 trillion! (The annual deficit for 2024 alone was $1.8 trillion—twice that of the entire National Debt in 1981!)
Why is this important? What does it mean? It means that the economy, as bad as it has been, has been this good not because of solid economic production, as “suggested” by the political-economic elites, but because of financial manipulation; our leaders have been spending money that they don’t have, they have been writing “hot” checks! It is this financial manipulation that has allowed the US to do as well as it has; it has not been based on solid economic growth!
Now that in and of itself should be alarming. If you go to the US National Debt clock, which shows the national debt in real time, they also show how this compares to Gross Domestic Project or GDP, which is a measure of values of goods and services produced by this nation every year for the market (to be bought and sold). In 1960, the debt to GDP ratio was 52.21 percent; by 1980, it was down to 34.70 percent; by 2000, it had climbed to 54.48 percent, and as I write on November 9, 2024, it is 122.84 percent. And although they do not include a measure of the ratio of debt to GDP (which could be easily added to the chart), the St. Louis office of the Federal Reserve System publishes a visual representation of the growth of the National Debt since 1960 which is at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN.
Now, this in and of itself is a disaster in the making. But it’s even worse: as the National Debt continues to increase—and it is—the rate of interest on the debt increases. Going back to the National Debt clock, we are paying somewhere around $5.5 trillion this year just on the interest alone! This does not include paying down any of the principle of the debt owed. This is money being paid to investors, including to governments of foreign countries, that must be paid to enable us to continue to sell US Treasury Bonds to them to help finance the National Debt; if investors refuse to buy our bonds, we become observably bankrupt. Think of it as similar to the minimum monthly payment on your credit card; it must be paid to maintain any kind of recognizable economic viability.
So, until forthrightly addressed by our “leaders,” our National Debt will continue to climb, it is over 100 percent of GDP—which means if everyone worked for a year and took no pay checks (stay with me!), no investors got paid money due them (please!), etc., etc., we still could not eradicate the debt within a single year. This will continue to worsen the longer it continues: the interest rate due on the debt will increase (which, in turn, will add to the National Debt, and our National Debt will increase to greater and greater extents (i.e., exponentially).
Now, despite being unknown by most Americans, this is not rocket science and it is recognized by Central Bankers around the world: the US is bankrupt; we can never pay back these debts in any foreseeable time, especially if we continue as we are doing.
Why have these bankers not shared this with the world? Because should the United States declare bankruptcy, it would cause the entire global economy to collapse with immense social and individual suffering; the global economy is dependent on the US serving as the market of last choice, as the country that will buy their own goods and services under any conditions which, in turn, allows their respective economies to work: without that US capability (or perhaps, more realistically today, China’s), it would be catastrophe in probably every country in the world, and certainly all but the largest.
Part of this is by design; part of it is a natural outgrowth of the design. The design was the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, when the US and the UK planned the post-World War II global economy under the conditions then existing: US domination of the world economy, as the only industrialized country to emerge all but unscathed from the death and destruction of the war and with the most modern and productive economy in the world, and with a dynamic labor movement that could force the largest corporations to share with their members. They designed the post-War economy to continue this status quo.
The natural outgrowth of this design was that it directly benefitted those of us in the US as well as those who lived in other imperialist countries (often referred to “developed” countries, but we were never told the basis of how they developed) at least until the late 1960s-early 1970s. Then, inter-capitalist competition—initially from corporations in imperialist countries and then, in the late 1970s, from a few corporations from a few formerly colonized countries—started changing the game, so that by 1980, major change had to come to the United States. (This is what Ron Cox’ work on global capitalist corporations—referenced in the original analysis—illuminates, while my work focuses more on the social ramifications of all of this.)
In any case, qualitative change occurs, beginning with the Reagan Administration and continuing til August last year (and continuing to date), which I documented in the original “40 years” article. My analysis has held up extremely well.
So, the current situation is the result of the United States seeking to dominate countries around the world, developing the US Empire and dismembering our domestic economy to do it: while destroying tens of millions of jobs, the US has spent at least $18.3 trillion on US war-making capability between 1981 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (when the US started funding Ukraine after helping to instigate the Russian invasion in February 2022), and that doesn’t include the cost of developing and maintaining the US nuclear arsenal, nor does it include the $17.9 billion sent to Israel between October 7, 2023 and September 30, 2024. To put it another way, US elites of both political parties have sacrificed the well-being of all Americans for the elite’s vastly overinflated desires to control the world.
Trump voters seem to have recognized that money being spent in Ukraine has come at their expense, and perhaps to pay for Israel’s genocide since October 7, 2023; it’s not as clear regarding Israel. However, in general, they have not recognized the larger situation; that it is the US Empire to which their well-being is being sacrificed. (I’m not being down on Trump voters here; most Harris voters don’t recognize this either, and they don’t even understand about the money going to Ukraine.)
In other words, we on the left—however defined—have ignored a big opportunity and I think it’s time we address this problem: people can repudiate the US Empire, or we can take care of the American people by trying to create a domestic, non-capitalist economy that works for our people: we cannot do both! (While this sentiment is based on the work of Abraham Maslow, my experiences with mostly white, rural, working class students in Indiana over the last 20-plus years have shown they choose to take care of Americans almost anytime this choice is addressed and then presented to them! It doesn’t come automatically, but when discussed intelligently, they prefer taking care of Americans.)
The elites of both mainstream parties have cowed us by their incessant fear mongering about the need for “defense,” which is really money for maintaining if not expanding the Empire and building on past fears of Russia and China. It’s time we confidently take this on.
I think the elites are vulnerable here if we on the left will honestly go forth and challenge US militarism. There are two parts of this: one, neither China nor Russia is going to invade the United States. Period. If either tried, their forces would be decimated. And if the US thinks it can successfully invade either country, we will certainly lose; regarding Russia, just ask the Nazis! (Contrary to much of the US propaganda, at great cost—something like 27 million Russian and Eastern European people, men, women, and children—died defeating the Nazis, compared to the US losses of something like 400 thousand, mostly men in uniform, in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of war; while the US can claim victory over the Japanese, we cannot legitimately claim victory over the Nazis.) And the US Empire has been 0-3-1 in Asia, post-World War II, with the tie being against North Korea in the early 1950s.
The point I’m trying to make here is that our “defense” budget could be cut by about 90 percent and still provide necessary protection for the United States. That money could be used to address our National Debt, as well as do things that would help Americans.
The reality that must be faced is that the continuing arms race with Russia, China or whomever, cannot be won. We can spend until the cows come home—or Central Bankers get honest, which probably won’t be anytime soon!—but there is no way we can gain military superiority over either, much less both, of these countries: we can never eradicate their threat with our current policies. (And they cannot gain military superiority over the United States.) Should anyone of these countries—and a few others—feel existentially threatened by an opponent, it’s nuclear war time; and that means “lights out” for all of us.
In light of this, there is an alternative: now, it would have to be much more elaborate than simply this, but the heart of the issue is to get the major countries to end any thought of dominating another. What I’m thinking is of some sort of a global treaty whereby each major power agrees to not threaten each other or any other political communities, and to do this, immobilize their militaries to the bare necessity. For example, I argue that the US military could adequately defend this country with five of our nuclear submarines. (I assume Russia and China could do the same with their submarine forces.)
Think about it. While I’m behind on the latest operational capability of the US Navy, I think I’m in the ballpark: each of these subs carries 10 missiles, each which carries 16 independently-targeted hydrogen bombs. What that means is that each US nuclear submarine can attack 160 separate targets¸ such as cities, with a nuclear explosive. How many times do you want to make the rubble bounce?
[If you think I’m being crazy, think about the report analyzing the impact of a successful nuclear attack by the US on the USSR in the early 1960s. According to the late Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, he participated in a study meant for the “President’s Eyes Only,” in which this estimated that 600,000 people would have been killed—in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union—and that was if the attack was a success, meaning the US had knocked out the Soviets! Ellsberg himself recognized that this was multiples of the numbers killed in the Holocaust!] If there were a global “non-attack” treaty—and all of the other military weapons and troops needed to serve them were destroyed and/or demobilized—and there were heavy tax burdens placed on the extremely rich, then there would be billions and billions of dollars available to take care of one’s peoples and perhaps others, especially over time. At the same time, this drastically reduced military capability would still serve as a deterrent to an attack by anyone violating the treaty.
The point is that Empire=Death or at least national bankruptcy with increasingly widespread social disruption and economic distress. Capitalism has failed the large majority of people, both in this country and around the world, and threatens the extermination of all humans, animals, and most plants by the turn of the next century (the year 2100); see my talk at https://znetwork.org/zvideo/the-climate-crisis-capitalism-or-human-animal-most-plants-survival (with link to video). We need to create a new economic system to surpass capitalism that will not destroy the environment nor the atmosphere surrounding the planet, and which will place the economic stability and security of all people at the forefront.
It’s time we on the left quit half-stepping and go for the entire enchilada! We must repudiate the US Empire and all of its death and destruction, and seek alternatives to capitalism, both to provide economic support for all of our people and to keep from burning ourselves to death, and for ways to help people in formerly colonized countries! Anything less than a sweeping proposal such as this is, from the beginning, doomed to failure: we need hope, not doom.
And now that we have this complete analysis (which hopefully will continue to develop), it is time to develop a strategy to achieve it: how can we get from where we are today to ending the Empire and capitalism, while allowing humans, animals and most plants to survive? We need to build organizations to develop and implement our strategy, to educate our members, and to win people over to our side, repudiating the false choice between Democrats and Republicans; neither can provide solutions facing most of us. It will take time to do this—it will not happen within an election cycle or two—but we want to try to make decisions on all levels that will move us toward achieving our three-pronged goal.

Adam Aron’s The Climate Crisis:

Science, Impacts, Policy, Psychology, Justice, Social Movements

–Review Essay by Kim Scipes

Cambridge University Press, 2023; Paperback; ISBN: 978 1108987158

Adam Aron has written an ambitious book, one he intends to be the book on the subject of the climate crisis; and he has succeeded in many ways, especially for those who want as many of the specifics as possible.  He has written a book carefully supported by evidence and much research that not only includes the science behind “global heating”—his term for “global warming”—but also argues for the necessity of generating sufficient public pressure to facilitate political will to force governments and corporations to take action to keep fossil fuels in the ground, while transitioning to an electricity-based infrastructure and society.

Aron’s first three chapters are not anything that someone familiar with the issue of climate change would not have seen before, although he has put them together in a coherent package that is quite useful.  He joins the information with charts that well illustrate his points.  He notes that James Hansen testified to Congress in 1988 that human activities were affecting the planet to dangerous levels, and that “Since his testimony, more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gases in human history have been omitted…” Further, Aron argues, “Time is now running out to keep global heating from reaching levels that would be catastrophic for millions of species and for organized human existence as we know it” (p. 7).

He describes the history of efforts to stop climate change, climate science, and impacts of these changes.  Most importantly—and he refers to it numerous times throughout the book—“… as the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading and internationally recognized “expert” on climate change-KS] recognized in 2018, even a 66-percent probability of keeping [planetary warming below 1.5 degrees Centigrade] would require cutting 2010-level emissions by about 45 percent by 2030” (p. 57).  [According to statistica.com, greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 were 46.99 billion metric tons; a 45 percent cut would limit emissions to approximately 21.5 billion tons; the actual emissions in 2022 were 53.79 billion tons-KS.]

The importance of not exceeding a warming of more than 1.5 degrees Centigrade is monumental; it is the upper limit, according to general scientific consensus, to prevent potentially irreversible effects of climate change (Chu, 2023).  Above 1.5 C, it gets riskier as the temperature increases, ultimately risking crossing “tipping points,” beyond which processes initiated cannot be stopped or reversed, such as a river boat going over a waterfall!

The fourth chapter looks at capitalism and the climate crisis.  It is in the fourth chapter where things get interesting and he opens up ideas that heretofore have been confined overwhelmingly to those who are political radicals of one sort or the other; here, he essentially connects the climate crisis with capitalism.

In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, he focuses on how people who deny climate change develop their beliefs, and he suggests how that can be counteracted.

In Chapters 8, 9, and 10, he focuses from moving people to getting them to engage in collective action.

Aron begins Chapter 8 with a quote from long-time environmental activist and author, Brian Tokar, who argues that the problem of the climate crisis “is not a technical problem to be ‘solved’, but rather a systemic problem, rooted deeply in social and economic structures.”

 Aron talks about national responsibilities for greenhouse gas emissions, noting that the New York Times argues that “just twenty-three wealthy, developed countries have been responsible for half of all historical CO2 emissions, while more than 150 nations have shared responsibility for the other half.”  He further notes that “the USA ,,,  by itself is responsible for almost a quarter of all of these historical emissions,” and then comes Germany, the UK, Japan, and France, with the rest being western European countries and Australia” (p. 192).

Further in this chapter, Aron focuses on the problems of “extractivism,” the metal mining and projects to extract raw materials from the Earth to help advance the supply of renewable energy.  And here he’s generally focusing on multinational corporations’ effects on developing countries.

The rest of the chapter is extremely interesting:  he focuses on technical and market solutions to the climate crisis.  In doing this, among technical fixes, he considers large hydropower projects (dams); bioenergy, biomass, and biofuels; new nuclear power plants; and geoengineering.  Under the section on market fixes, he considers cap-and-trade efforts, carbon offsets, and carbon pricing or taxing.  In short, he argues, “… the only sure way to prevent more global heating is to leave remaining fossil fuels in the ground and invest in a fast and massive build-up of renewable energy sources” (p. 220).

And what I find especially of interest in this chapter is that he carefully examines and largely refutes all of the various proposals put forth by multinational capital and most of their controlled governments, including projects advanced by the US government.  To carefully address these various proposals in the way that he did should provide activists with ammunition to knowledgably oppose these kinds of projects.

Chapter 9 is where Aron provides a technical and social framework to guide climate action.  He starts off by quoting another climate activist and author, this time Stan Cox, who argues “to free ourselves from fossil fuels as soon as we can, to establish ecological stability and to ensure fair shares for all” is our goal.  Aron follows that path.

He examines the technical feasibility of the transition to renewable energy by examining challenges for a near-total reliance on renewable energy sources—examining the cost; and land, raw materials, and energy requirements—and then advances a framework for political action, including economic support, regulations and policies, social programs, and strategies for combatting the compulsion for consumption.

The penultimate chapter, Chapter 10, is exciting.  Although he did not put as sharply as would have I, he argues the necessity of collective action to make the changes necessary:  “… the kinds of changes that will be necessary to complete the transition from fossil fuels in time to avoid the worst consequences of global heating are unlikely to take place without concerted governmental oversight and action, which in turn is unlikely to take place unless national decision makers are compelled to act by pressure from below” (253).  In other words, people have to get mobilized and organize themselves to force governmental officials to do the right thing when they are deciding these issues; without this grassroots mobilization, it is unlikely that the government will take necessary action.

In this chapter, Aron discusses social movement theory, including forms of organizing, types of struggle, frames of meaning, and locus at which social change is focused.  He then discusses social psychology theory.  Then he gives examples of climate change movements, during which he discusses 350.org, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement.  He then follows with an interview of Masada Disenhouse, the Executive Director of San Diego 350.  Then, interestingly, he discusses how an individual can be active without being an activist, which suggests a number of things one can do to contribute to making the world better without having to devote your life to activism, suggesting how they can contribute to the struggle.  This is something quite useful that I have not seen previously.

Altogether, he concludes his book with three “conclusions”:  (1) that international agreements will not be made workable until they have succeeded at the national level; (2) that to avoid catastrophe, fossil fuels must be left in the ground; and (3) that the key to widespread public support can only be won when individuals and collective efforts join together create active grassroots mobilization.

—

There is both a lot of excellent information and, in my opinion, political confusion in this book.  As far as I can tell, his analysis of the climate crisis is well done and congruent with many critical thinkers.  It seems excellent and is based on the best scientific knowledge currently available.

However, there are a number of areas that I feel are inadequate for his purposes and are worthy of further discussion.  I take them in turn.

Aron never considers conservation efforts; and “conservation” is not even listed in the index.  This is important because there are studies showing that we cannot replace all energy requirements met today by fossil fuels with renewables alone; we are going to have to considerably reduce our energy usage or continue to use fossil fuels.

His proposed “solution” or set of solutions is contradictory and inadequate; like many “Green New Deal” advocates, he has thoughtful ideas.  However, while he believes that capitalism is causing the environmental problems, his proposed solutions are limited to reforms—yes, fairly radical reforms in places—but they do not address the heart of the problem:  capitalism is killing us.  We simply cannot live as we are today, building onto the growth model, and ensure the survivability of large numbers of humans, animals, and many plants into the 22^nd Century:  we are going to have to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and quickly.  From the science I’m reading, there is no alternative.

While I think he’s absolutely correct to specifically interrogate the role of capitalism in the role of climate change—and agree with many of his findings—I don’t think he goes far enough.  While I do not know if Aron considers himself a Marxist or not, his approach limits his work in ways comparable to how Marxist analysis is generally limited.

In other words, the strength of the Marxist approach is the focus on the economic system and the political institutions that support it (specifically, their version of the state).  And this is certainly a key part of any critical analysis. 

However, Aron ignores the issue of power and domination beyond the economic system.  In other words, I argue that there is more to the world than economics; that there is also a political realm that is not limited by economic production, distribution, and consumption.  [There are other realms as well—such as community and kinship—but I want to limit my comments here to the political aspect.]  In other words, this political realm operates on its own dynamic—the striving for power and domination—that is not constrained by economics.

This is important in that it allows us to include the concept of “Empire” in our analysis.  Basically, the idea of Empire incorporates much of human history, where those having power actively seek to dominate and control not only people and area of their own land, but also those of other lands, whether because of seeking economic resources (such as raw materials, natural resources, related production, and/or human beings for home-country development), geo-strategic advantages (such as naval base locations), or even social benefits [such as demonizing “others” (i.e., “minorities”)] so as to buy social acquiescence from the majority), or any other reason that those seeking this power can put forth; a capitalist analysis simply cannot encompass all of this without stretching itself all out of shape.

In other words, Empire allows us to understand how one capitalist—or usually, one group of capitalists—can either seek to dominate or protect itself from another group of capitalists:  by mobilizing the productive capacity of multiple capitalists and converting some of their economic resources into military weaponry under military leadership of armies, navies, and air forces, as well as other forces such as the CIA and/or the NED (the so-called National Endowment for Democracy), they extend the reach of their power.  Thus, capitalists within an empire are able to project their control and/or defend their land in ways simply unavailable through general capitalist production.  And, when used offensively, an empire can secure more economic resources, geo-strategic advantages and/or social benefits for enhanced capitalist production and profitability not only in the “home” country but in the subjugated lands as well.

Aron makes the same mistake that many leftists today make:  they do not recognize that the United States of America is the homeland of the US Empire, the greatest, strongest, and most destructive empire (to date) that the world has ever seen.  Accordingly, there is no discussion in this book of the US Empire seeking to maintain control over as much of the world as possible since at least 1945, if not earlier.

Nonetheless, the cost of the US Empire has been great on the world’s peoples, with the costs escalating dramatically since 1981, with the Reagan Administration but continuing under both subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations.  Its military is the single largest polluter in the world, and each invasion involves much killing and destruction, and is an environmental nightmare that continues for decades if not longer:  Vietnam is still suffering from Agent Orange and unexploded ordinance utilized in the American war, which ended in 1975, and Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering as well, along with the other countries bombed by the US Empire but not invaded (Libya, Syria, and former Yugoslavia come immediately to mind although the list is much longer.) 

Over $18 trillion dollars of US taxpayer money has been spent on the Empire’s war machine alone—I refuse to call it “defense”—over the past forty years, resources stolen from the American people that could have been utilized for advancing education, providing health care, improving the infrastructure, addressing social inequities, aiding environmental recovery, addressing homelessness, and mitigating against climate change here at home.  Somehow, this was not mentioned, much less addressed, by Aron.  [While I am commenting specifically on Aron’s positions, I do not mean to demonize him; most leftists still do not understand the US Empire, and I am arguing it is way past time that each of us incorporate this understanding into our respective analyzes.]

However, an Empire cannot depend solely on its economic and military power alone; it must gain acquiescence if not active support from its “home” population; after all, this home population is where it has got to obtain “soldiers,” the cannon fodder, for the imperial armies.  Thus, there needs to be a cultural apparatus to tell the population that basically—and traditionally—“war is good business; invest your sons” (and more recently, daughters), and encourage them to do so.  This gets projected in many ways, starting with the education system, and this usually includes the religious system, but this is where plays, novels, TV, radio, film, and much of social media come into importance; seize the imagination, seize the acquiescence! 

If you think I’m exaggerating, think about all of the cultural energy in the United States that goes into sports (both local high school and college, as well as professional); explicit sexual material (“pornography” and all things related); celebrity gossip; beauty, fashion, and modeling; and news production; each intended to draw attention away from problems such as hunger, poverty, and inequality, much less capitalism, war, empire, and the climate crisis.

And these “diversions” are not “small” things; each of these areas require overall investments in the multiple billions of dollars, seeking even greater profits.

And we on the left have generally failed to include the mainstream corporate media and their role in “setting the agenda” in our analysis as to what people should focus upon.  During Fall 2023, an incredible amount of attention was paid to Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021—as it should have been—but there was so much focus on the details of this that the climate crisis had all but disappeared from US news reporting.  Then, after October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its military attack on Israel, almost all coverage was of Israel as “victim,” and for a long time, was the only perspective seriously reported; it was only after massive protests across the US that some news from a Palestinian perspective or even from critical Israeli sources even was shown.

At the same time, despite all of the extravaganza, our political elections are generally devoid of providing substantive information and addressing real issues, usually only providing to audiences of Americans the “thinking” of those who have been able to raise the most money from the rich.  Money buys further attention which, in turn, attracts further financial contributions, which allows the successful candidate to represent the interests of contributors, not constituents.  And much of the political “debate” is in-fighting among political candidates; and almost as soon as one election cycle is completed, other candidates emerge and start the diversionary process anew, always seeking money, time, and attention.

At the same time, however, even these people are constrained by the interests of the “news” producers, who do not allow candidates to address issues inimical to their’s, or to go beyond their limited parameters; think how little time has been devoted to the climate crisis in contemporary mainstream political discussion/debate.

And yet, the consequences of such elections can have profound impacts on people around the globe, both abroad and at home.  They behoove those of us who are politically aware to participate, at least to certain extents.

In short, this larger “ideological apparatus” is as important to the Empire as is the economic system or the war machine although perhaps not as immediately noticeable.

And, once established, cultural norms become especially important because of the dominative power they project over subjects; questioning established norms, and especially challenging them individually, risks making oneself vulnerable to counterattack, however defined, but covering the range from denigration, mockery, to being made to feel vulnerable and, ultimately, physical violence.

Thus, central for effective cultural domination is the establishment of individualism as desirable; “I don’t want to be with anyone else; they’ll betray me, they’ll cheat on me, they’ll make me limit my desires.”  And they may persuade me to look at things differently than I would on my own.

Yet—and this is the key point—individualism precludes resistance at much of any level.  And this is illustrated by the old saying, “You can’t fight City Hall,” a warning, if there ever was one, of the futility of challenging power, whether structurally, culturally, or even normatively.

However, that saying and all it suggests can be easily undermined by simply adding one word, which illuminates the power of collectivity:  “You can’t fight City Hall alone!”  Add that one word, and you change everything:  broadscale social change, while perhaps extremely difficult it might still be, is now possible when you seek others to join you in the same project.

This is where we come back to capitalism, which is essential to confront.  The fact is that capitalism is killing us.  And it’s killing us through growth; an essential requirement of capitalism is that it must grow to survive; i.e., it is a growth machine.  And it is so much of a growth machine that it must grow beyond what is needed for survival or even living at a sustainable level by every human being on the planet; it must create the demand for growth beyond what is naturally there.  In other words, to put it in terms perhaps more metaphorically understandable, it is like a cancer that must continue to grow even if it destroys the host, ultimately causing its own destruction and demise.

In plain language, we either kill the cancer or we kill the host:  there is no alternative.

The point I’m making here is that Aron is basically on target:  our established production system threatens the existence of humans, animals, and most plants on this planet.  By utilizing fossil fuels for energy, each—oil, coal, and natural gas which, when burnt, attack the atmosphere surrounding and protecting the planet from the sun’s rays by emitting “greenhouse gases” (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and low altitude ozone)—are contributing to the escalating threat to survival of living things on this planet.

As Aron has explicated, for over 100 years, scientists have shown that adding carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere has raised the temperature of the Earth.  We now know that for over 800,000 years—no misprint!—the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere have never exceeded 300 parts per million (ppm).  Yes, natural processes, such as exploding volcanoes have released CO2 into the atmosphere, causing heating to increase and decrease over time, but never in this time period has it ever exceeded 300 ppm.  Until around the year 1950. Today, according to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), one of the most scientifically renown bodies in the world, it is 422 ppm (see NASA, 2023).

As the greenhouse gases have attacked the atmosphere, which is overwhelmingly made up of oxygen (78%) and nitrogen (21%), it has allowed more heat from the sun to get inside of the atmosphere and keep more of what gets in for a longer period of time.  This has warmed the planet approximately 1.1 degree Centigrade since the 1850-1900 period, roughly the beginning of widespread industrialization.

While that might not seem like much of a warming, nonetheless, it has caused myriad changes to our planet.  Most importantly, it has melted glaciers and the ice that cover the planet, and this has led to rising oceans, changes in weather patterns around the world (with increased deaths and destruction by hurricanes and typhoons, along with more deforestation and increased fire damages), death of coral reefs (the home of plankton, the base of the aqua-marine food system that feeds approximately one-third of the world’s population), etc., etc.  And the melting ice does not reflect as much sunlight back into space, keeping that heat inside the atmosphere, and further increasing the temperature of the planet, which leads to more ice melting….

To prevent this problem from escalating further, emissions must be stopped and, ideally, the CO2 and associated chemicals removed from the atmosphere; but in any case, stopped. 

And not in the real-distant future:  if we don’t make major changes by roughly 2030, we’re going to see the beginning of extermination of the human species by the turn of the 22^nd Century, a mere 77 years from now.  That’s within the lifetimes of many of us, and certainly within the lifetime of Gen Z’s children.

This is why incorporating empire into our analysis is so important:  it allows us a way forward beyond which a simple capitalist analysis does not.  By arguing that the United States is the physical homeland of the US Empire—the site of economic production to produce the military weaponry, the financing that enables its use, and the location of politicians who can decide to use/not use it—the US effort to dominate the other countries of the world (usually through political and economic domination, instead of the traditional territorial acquisition) is foregrounded and brought into focus. 

The US has been consciously trying to dominate the rest of the world since at least 1945, if not earlier—and that US governments under both the Democrats and Republicans increasingly have been diverting resources away from the American people since about 1981 so as to ensure the continuation of the US Empire (see Scipes, 2023a).  Accordingly, with this understanding, we can show the necessity of building global solidarity between “ordinary” Americans and the peoples of the world for the good of each of us.

From that, we can mobilize our resources to join together to challenge our respective forms of capitalism that is threatening to destroy us all.

We Americans must reject the US Empire’s efforts to dominate other people’s out of solidarity with the peoples of the world, as only through global solidarity do we have a chance to kill the cancer of capitalism; in other words, only by uniting in global efforts to refuse to overproduce can we have a chance to stop the climate crisis.

That will look different in diverse countries.  The imperial countries, who have tried to capture and monopolize the resources of the world, will have to give up usage of large amounts of them.  This is so as to give the formerly colonized countries additional resources to improve the lives of their peoples, and then keeping the rest in the ground.

In other words, by recognizing the US Empire, we activists are forced to look at all the countries of the world, and not just concentrate on our own.

Concurrently, the issue is do we forthrightly confront that problem collectively and try to come up with solutions addressing historical inequities and having the least impact on the largest numbers of people, or do we continue as usual, and let the rich make the decisions—either directly or through their bought-off politicians—which will hurt most of us dramatically and detrimentally?  That is the issue at hand.  Yet nowhere in this book is this laid out so forthrightly.

And finally, I must go even further.  To his credit, Aron recognizes that mere “policy positions,” scientific papers, etc., while necessary, are not sufficient to fight climate change; we need to mobilize the citizen to force the end of greenhouse gas emissions as well as other forms of environmental destruction.  He is clear on that.

However, in my mind, even that recognition is not sufficient.  We must have a program by which to try to win support from the US population as part of the global upsurge; for an earlier effort, see Scipes (2017).  But I’d also go further than Aron in another way:  he argues for mobilization, but that, too, is not sufficient; as I’ve argued elsewhere (Scipes, 2023b), we need to build organization as the foundation for mobilization.

In short, I argue that while Aron is raising critically important issues—and I give him credit for going as far as he has done—I don’t think he goes far enough in fully understanding them so that we can attempt to resolve them.

CONCLUSION

Overall, how do I see Adam Aron’s The Climate Crisis?  I think the scientific material to be quite strong, although I wish he could write more directly; his use of charts and graphs is quite helpful.

I am less impressed with his political “answers.”  However, he raises a lot of key points not usually included that have stimulated my responses, and I expect they will raise responses from others.

I think this is an important contribution, and definitely deserves additional attention.

References:

Chu, Jennifer. 2023.  “Explained:  The 1.5 C Climate Benchmark.”  MIT News, August 27.  On-line at https://news.mit.edu/2023/explained-climate-benchmark-rising-temperatures-0827.

NASA.  2023.  Evidence as to climate change:  on-line at https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.

Scipes, Kim.

—        2017.  “Addressing Seriously the Environmental Crisis:  A Bold, ‘Outside of the Box’ Suggestion for Addressing Climate Change and Other Forms of Environmental Destruction.”  Class, Race and Corporate Power.  On-line at http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/classracecorporatepower/vol5/iss1/2.

—        2023. “Forty Years of the United States in the World.”  Z Network.  On-line at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/special-history-series-40-years-of-the-united-states-in-the-world-1981-2023/.

—        2023.    “Organizing to Save the World:  Building Organizations from the Group-up.” Green Social Thought.  On-line at http://www.greensocialthought.org/content/organizing-save-world-building-organizations-ground.

Biography

Kim Scipes, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Purdue University Northwest in Westville, Indiana, and a long-time political activist.  He has published four books and over 260 articles in peer-reviewed and specialty journals, general interest magazines, and local newspapers in the US and 11 different countries; a complete list of his publications, many with links to original articles, can be found at https://www.pnw.edu/faculty/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/.  Scipes taught a course on “Environment and Social Justice” bi-annually between 2006-2022.

Radical Democracy: Towards a global ecosocialist alternative

On the agenda globally is the re-emergence of a comprehensive vision of a future beyond capitalism. And just in time, given the emergence of neofascism as potentially the last gasp of a dying capitalist order.    

In what follows, we have combined critique of the dangerous path along which the pro-capitalists are taking us (austerity for the people, endless wars, profligacy for the rich, and disregard for the rest of nature) with a commitment to those alternative paths that the people in motion are creating. We have also searched the historical literature for the numerous roots of the continuing struggle for democracy and social justice, extending back as far as the liberal opposition to absolutist feudal rule and continuing forward to the Marxian inspired movements for a radically democratic communal society beyond capitalism. We have also tried to learn from the shortcomings and failures of the socialist movements of the twentieth century.      

We have paid close attention to the newer forms of organization and implicit goals of the developing social movements and the new paths being forged by people in struggle in the first quarter of the twenty first century, examples which are inspiring for their courage and promise. In this respect we have paid attention to the continuing struggles of the world’s indigenous peoples and the implicit reminder these struggles contain of the deep history of humankind as a communal species. We have taken care not to narrow our identification of the roots and nature of the current struggles, hence our preference for the use of such broad designations as green social democracy for the goals of the newly emergent movements, emphasizing the convergence that is occurring of the indigenous, environmental, labor, feminist, anti-racist, LGBTQ+ and other democratic and social justice movements. In our view, what is being forged is a movement for radical democracy, but more on that later. 

We begin with the identification of the planetary emergency which is propelling people in all corners of our planetary home to change course, develop and advance alternative policies and programs for our future, a future that is just, democratic and sustainable. 

Dimensions of the planetary emergency

The recognition that we are faced with a planetary emergency in which the life sustaining features of our natural and social environments are at risk is growing, ranging from some who more recently moved beyond the denial stage to the increasing number of people in action to counter these existential threats. Even among the morally retrograde members of the economic elite, some have begun to show a little concern that goes beyond clinging to the hope that they can purchase their own escape from the environmental and social crisis. 

The social dimensions of the crisis evidently include vast wealth and income inequality within and between countries that has grown during the decades of the neoliberal era and which continues to leave a large part of humanity in poverty in spite of continual gains in labor productivity and per capita gross domestic product globally and in most countries. 

The environmental dimensions of the crisis include waste production that exceeds the Earth’s capacity to absorb and recycle it. Among these wastes are greenhouse gases that add to those already accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere, causing the global average temperature to rise and weather variability to increase, resulting in havoc across the globe, well before the worst effects of the current level of greenhouse gas accumulation are experienced. Other effects include melting of the permafrost, ocean acidification, loss of the Earth’s glacial covering, and seasonal loss of the Arctic Ocean’s ice cover, each ensuring even further increases in the average global temperature and weather variability.  

Equally serious is the threat to the Earth’s supply of clean water and fertile soil, with life threatening consequences. Loss of species diversity and non-renewable mineral resources, together with consumption of renewable resources, such as wood and fish, at rates faster than their renewal are additional long-term threats to human life and possibly civilization itself.

Compounding these dimensions of the planetary emergency is the existence, continuing production and threat of use of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical and biological). The re-emergence of a global peace movement, allied this time to the environmental and social justice movements, is the necessary response, including the determination to end the production, storage and threat of use of these weapons, beginning with the removal and banishment from political and economic power of all who support and profit from militarism and war. 

Socio-economic causes of the planetary emergency require political-economic and corresponding cultural changes 

The main cause of the planetary emergency is the globally dominant capitalist socio-economic system, with its hierarchical structure, monopolistic characteristics, increasing roles for reckless mineral extraction and financial speculation and its evident resistance to moving decisively away from a reliance on fossil fuels.

This system is increasingly burdened and limited by its hierarchical structure and socially destructive cultural attributes, including authoritarian tendencies, a fetish on consumerism, and possessive individualism in the relationships among people and between people and nature. Each of these behavioural tendencies is generated by the treatment of nature and people’s labor as private property, that is, by the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of capitalism as a system.  

The two sides of current economic activity include a capitalist market economy (defined by the use of money as a medium of exchange with usury as a characteristic feature) and the traditional non-market economy (based on social sharing of the remaining commons). The continuing expansion of the capitalist market economy now occurs at the expense of what remains of the traditional non-market economy. Given that the latter is the source of our efforts to make our way in the world through cooperation, the relative advances of the former undermine our capacity to address the environmental and social problems we now confront. No amount of private income and wealth will provide even the wealthiest security against the ravages of climate change and violence. Only cooperative action can do that.

Redefining economics as the sum of the market and non-market economy restores to economics its original Greek meaning (which treats the economy of a society as metaphorically the equivalent of a household economy, that is, which embraces all that we do for ourselves and each other to provide us with a living from nature). Only a science of economics based on this recognition of the totality of economic activity can serve us to address the crises which the deformed view of economics has aided and abetted.  

The economy is a relationship between people and nature; it is a subsystem of the biosphere, that part of the Earth that contains living things, a subsystem nestled within the sum of all of Earth’s ecosystems. The health of the economy is dependent on a healthy environment. Human welfare and the welfare of the environment are inextricable.  

The notion that breathable air, drinkable water and food that is nutritious is only of concern to “environmentalists” and that some other breed of people called “workers” are only interested in earning income to pay for commodities is a false dichotomy, in part the product of a divide and rule strategy by capitalism’s anti-rational defenders. Advocacy of a just, sustainable future expresses the inextricable link between the welfare of people and nature. It is through the unity of the environmental and labor movements that we can have a realistic expectation of steering a course away from the cosmic Black Hole towards which the neo-liberal defenders of capitalist privilege are leading us.  

The necessity and centrality of democracy to address the challenges we face

The alternative to an irrational system of infinite expansion of mere busyness on a finite planet is the forging of a system that functions in harmony with nature. Getting there will require the greatest extension of cooperation and the most imaginative and knowledgeable participation in problem-solving of which we are capable. An unprecedented level of democracy is the necessary condition for inclusion of all the knowledge, ability and latent talent that will be needed if we are to successfully meet the challenges now confronting us. In that sense, democracy is not merely a desirable aim, a banner to attach to a movement or a cause, it is the only means available that can unleash all the forces that are critical to addressing the problems we now confront. No subset of our species can do this. No authoritarian, top-down form of organization is up to this challenge.  A desired end, more democracy, has become the necessary means.

The history of capitalism is replete with movements and even governments committed to building alternative systems. Social democracy, socialism and communism are descriptors that come readily to mind. The defenders of capitalism – especially the representatives of its most privileged elite – spare no effort to remind us of the string of short-comings, failures and outright abuses attached to the political movements that have resisted and countered capitalism. Moving forward requires acknowledgement of the failures and identification of the causes of these failures. Foremost among these causes is the economic and political power of the capitalists and their successful efforts at diverting and misrepresenting their opponents. But we must acknowledge and address the powerful role of capitalism’s example as a model of behaviour – an example that is multiplied by historically recent experience with feudalism and even slavery, including their continuing traces in our current capitalist socio-economic system.   

Most obvious should be the role of dogmatism and authoritarianism. These may begin as methods to hold together class-divided societies, but they persist as behavioural traits that when dominant can create insuperable barriers to movement beyond capitalism.

The other primary cultural heritage from capitalism and prior exploitative societies is the rift in our consciousness and behaviour between ourselves as a species and the rest of nature. An exploitative attitude and habit in relation to nature, when dominant in our behaviour, is also an effective cultural barrier to moving beyond capitalism. This exploitative cultural habit may have contributed to the historically rapid expansion of our species into every corner of the Earth and to the creation of great private wealth, but it has become painfully clear that we will have no future at all unless we successfully forge new attitudes and habits that accommodate our need for a healthy, supportive environment and our need for cooperation to achieve this.

To move beyond the impasse these cultural habits create, account also needs to be taken of one further cultural barrier. Probably a majority of those who currently want a more just, sustainable future identifies its aims with a capitalism that has a more human face than the beast now on offer. This majority includes living generations that experienced periods of time under capitalism during which their conditions and prospects improved. It also includes the increasingly smaller proportion of people who enjoy the kind of privileges that a sustainable path would no longer afford.

For the former, worsening conditions open the door to recognition that capitalism itself, by its very nature, is the main problem, not in the first place personal failings, that the fight for a healthy natural environment and the fight for social justice are two sides of one common struggle against the ravages of capitalism as a system. For this majority, educational activity features learning through engagement in the struggle against the worst features of the system. 

For the latter, those who will necessarily lose privileges that are environmentally unsustainable, we can point out the obvious. No-one will survive an environment insufficiently healthy to support human life. Neither the grandchildren of the wealthy nor those of the poor will survive a lifeless planet. 

Learning through experience will likely be delayed for most of the materially privileged – a likelihood we need to consider. Probably only in the new society can the education of that minority through their new experiences convince them that maximum levels of human well-being are achievable at levels of material comfort that fall well-short of those now enjoyed by the ruling political-economic elites. It will be possible only then to test the logical expectation that ahead of all of us lies a practically unlimited horizon for cultural and social development and attendant happiness and well-being of future generations. In the meantime, however, it is possible to become acquainted with the supportive evidence that this is so from research comparing existing capitalist societies. The work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2010, Bloomsbury Press) The Spirit Level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger is instructive in that regard. And if time is short, then perusal of the graphs and tables it contains may do.  

In all events, a primary concern here needs to be to reduce the potential for violent resistance from our ruling political-economic elites. Neither human life nor nature can withstand the destruction that these latter have the means to cause. Our primary approach to the most materially privileged must come from our recognition and declaration that we are all bound up in the system that feeds us until we replace it. Our struggle is to replace the system and not those bound up by it, which now includes all of us. In doing so, the materially privileged who selflessly join the struggle for a more just, sustainable future are necessary allies. 

The present as a transitional stage of the struggle for a globally just, democratic and sustainable civilization

So, what name might capture this early twenty first century moment in the struggle, but still give some guidance concerning the aims of the peoples’ movements? In the prior draft versions of our writing, the provisional title, Towards a Green Social Democracy, was adopted as the descriptor of the emergent green and continuing social democratic movements. The separate designations, green and social democratic, are honourably associated with movements that separately address at least one side and increasingly both sides of the socio-environmental crisis we face. Socialist might be an alternative descriptor, but only to the extent that those adopting it demonstrate in practice that their version of socialism excludes the hierarchical practice of placing some sub-set of the people in charge of society, presumably the planners. 

In order to emphasize this qualification, such descriptors as democratic socialism and ecosocialism have been used. Here we emphasize the necessary role of bottom-up decision-making, where the people can lead in both the planning and development of the new system. Only such a system has a chance of being successful in engaging humanity in addressing the socio-environmental problems which hierarchical forms of society have created. 

Such a system can include the sovereignty of local communities, whose participation and representation in projects that involve broader cooperation is made conditional on their informed consent. It can also include either direct democracy or representative democracy in decisions that involve cooperation of a larger population, provided that the representatives are accountable and recallable by the local communities who elect them. 

Operational principles might thus include a preference for local decision-making on matters that can best be undertaken locally, whereas projects that benefit most from wider cooperation can be planned and carried out cooperatively, using direct democratic participation of all those involved in carrying out the plans. When this is not feasible, then accountable representatives, readily recallable by those they represent, is an option, provided that moral, practical and legislated constraints are exercised over the representatives to avoid the re-emergence of class relations (privileges and consequent power of the representatives over those they represent). 

Defining the movement for the achievement of a globally just, sustainable civilization as the common ground for all in the present stage of the struggle might serve to unite both opponents of capitalism and those whose support for capitalism is limited to community and worker cooperatives and small scale family and local enterprises where employees share equitably in the decisions and benefits.

This same designation of the aim of the broader movement (a globally just, democratic and sustainable civilization) will still work when this aim appears to the majority of people as only achievable through the establishment of new economic, social and governmental institutions by constitutional, legislative and regulatory action and supporting cultural change linking education and democratic participation of all in economic, cultural and social development. Broadly speaking, this achievement equates to the genuine, comprehensive social democracy long envisioned by the critics of capitalism and represented today by those committed to a global ecosocialist democracy. 

The aggregate of the institutional and cultural changes needed to address the planetary emergency in which we find ourselves will, in our view, define a new socio-economic system, the heart of an ecologically sustainable global civilization. The achievement of such an ecological civilization will in that sense equate to a revolutionary change. As a constructive alternative to the downward, violent death spiral of contemporary capitalism, such a green social democracy is the antithesis of capitalist violence. It is at the same time a revolutionary movement, that is, one that leads to a fundamentally different socio-economic system with associated cultural characteristics. Such a society does not correspond to a revolutionary event, but rather the achievement of dominance over the propertied classes by the relatively property less. 

The aim is an historic era in which the exploitative social systems of the Holocene geological era (slavery, feudalism and capitalism) are successfully subdued by the people, politically, culturally and economically. This is likely to include a period mirroring that which is now coming to an end, but in which the people will have the upper hand. It will then be up to the victorious peoples’ movements to foreclose upon the re-emergence of the class relations that now threaten the very future existence of humanity.    

The epochal nature of the period we are entering

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously declared in the very first sentence of the Communist Manifesto (written in 1847 and first published in 1848) that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”  They could not have been more mistaken, as Engels later acknowledged in a footnote to the 1888 edition, based on archeological and anthropological studies that were being published and made more widely available at that time.  

Today, the deep history of our species is rapidly being documented by the combination of a variety of disciplines and tools of investigation, including paleontology, linguistics, biochemistry (notably DNA analysis), the development of new geological dating methods and the ability to use oral histories of the world’s indigenous peoples in conjunction with the accumulating physical evidence. Accordingly, the history of our species, homo sapiens, is known to trace as far back as possibly 300,000 years, and reliably to at least 160,000 years, with consistent evidence that human society has been characterized during nearly all this history by a communal mode of production (mainly cooperative foraging). 

Only beginning with the Holocene geological era, that is during the latest 10,000 years of human history, is there clear evidence of class division within human societies, where class is defined as differential access to the means and results of human productive activity. Even then, when circumstances have permitted, such as geographic isolation, societies based on communal foraging or communal farming have continued to exist, with some surviving into the present era. Moreover, communal relationships of reciprocity have continued to exist even within class-divided societies, although in a politically subordinate form. No class society could long endure without the continuity of communal relationships within them.

Class division historically arose from either differential access to natural resources or to the tools needed for harvesting and transforming natural resources into useful products. Tools in this sense can also include means of capture, confinement and coercion of some humans by other humans, that is, slavery. Understood in this way, every class system is a form of slavery, beginning with its most direct form, the private ownership or control of some people by other people, patriarchal control over women’s labor and reproductive capacity, and extending to the private ownership of productive land and resources, private ownership of the physical tools needed for production, private ownership of knowledge (for example, in the form of copyrights and patents), private ownership of rental property, and private ownership of the money supply (capital). 

The removal of the cultural blinders that obscure these exploitative social relationships is the essential cultural condition for moving beyond capitalism. This removal will also be a marker for the epochal transition from slavery to human freedom, corresponding to the full restoration of the commons.  

Those readers interested in considering these matters in greater depth are encouraged to consult: Chris Harman (1994), Engels and the origins of human society, https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1994/xx/engels.htm (in which Harman fills some of the gap between Frederick Engels’ account of the origins of human society and more contemporary research); Chris Harman (2008, Verso) A People’s History of the World (which not only includes an  Introduction and Part One: The rise of class societies which are particularly relevant and accessible on the issues of origins, but which is also a worthy addition to the library of anyone looking for an intelligible overview of world history addressed from a global, rather than the more usual Eurocentric perspective); www.wikipedia.org(for its sections on Archeology, Deep history, Prehistory, Neanderthal extinction, Paleoanthropology, and Historical linguistics); Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail (Eds., 2011, U. California Press) Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (a work which  brings together specialist contributions from the various lines of research that combine to address the mysteries of Deep History, among which we especially recommend Chapter 4, Energy and Ecosystems by Mary C. Stiner and Gillian Feeley-Harnik); and last but not least, Richard Borshay Lee (2004), Power and property in twenty-first century foragers: A critical examination, https://tspace.library.utoronto..ca/handle/1807/17943; Stephanie Coontz & Peta Henderson (Eds, 1986, Verso) Women’s Work, Men’s Property: The Origins of Gender & Class

While comparisons are inevitable with past periods of revolutionary change in socio-economic system, the changes that are now emergent in the character of the struggle to address the problems created by capitalism mark the beginning of the end of the succession of socio-economic systems characterized by conflicting economic classes (whether slave, feudal or capitalist or some modification or combination of these). These changes already include experiments in horizontal and bottom-up democracy and collaborative forms of educational, scientific, communicative and economic activity, in each of which knowledge and imagination play a decisive role. The current epoch, if it witnesses the continuation of this process to its logical conclusion, will ultimately signify the rejoining of all of humanity with the long period of our species’ development as a communal one, including continuity for some and restoration by most of the indigenous characteristics of communal decision-making, cooperation and sharing.  

This change will restore to their former prominence communal non-market relationships among people and a stewardship relationship of people with nature. Accordingly, this change will necessarily include a period of restoration of the human rights of all the world’s oppressed indigenous peoples and the unification of the vast majority of the world’s people in opposition to rule by an ever-narrowing circle of political-economic elites. Also characteristic of this period is likely to be the growing social isolation of the court jesters and social parasites who endeavour to borrow some of the elite’s economic and political power by voluntarily serving to maintain it.

But we need more than a modest change in our conceptualization of human history. Communal relationships turn out to be the historical norm. The relatively brief period of class-divided human history, usually told from the perspective of the exploiting classes, is the aberration, not the norm. In this recognition humanity can find the way out of its current existential crisis. Contemporary capitalism has indeed paved the way to its own demise by doing what is in its nature, concentrating economic and formal political power in the hands of an ever-diminishing part of the global population. An alliance of those exploited as an economic class with those oppressed by the denial of their human rights, two overlapping categories, would include the overwhelming majority of humanity. At no time in history has the ruling elite been more vulnerable to moral isolation from the rest of humanity. In this reality lies the key to achievement by the majority of a revolutionary transformation, returning humanity onto its communal journey.

Charles Posa McFadden and Karen Howell McFadden

Fredericton, New Brunswick, CANADA

www.greensocialdemocracy.org

apcamcfadden@aol.com

The climate crisis is rapidly warming the Arctic, and the effects are being felt from Alaska to Greenland.

The northernmost point on the planet is heating up more quickly than any other region in the world. The reason for this warming is ice–albedo feedback: as ice melts it opens up land and sea to the sun, which then absorb more heat that would have been bounced off by the ice, leading to more warming. It's a vicious circle of warmth that's changing the environment at the north pole. 

The global warming situation is absolutely crazy.  Millions of people are already experiencing drought, famine, floods, wildfires, superstorms and other climate disasters.  As a species, we are teetering on the edge of full-blown catastrophe, with extinction a distinct possibility.  Yet, we can’t seem to put in place obvious solutions that are sitting right there in front of us.