Capitalism Is Failing... What Comes Next?

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: We have less than 25 years to stop climate change from displacing 1.2 billion people and wiping out $41 trillion of the economy. But that's not even our biggest problem. Because right now, the current solutions to climate change, to mass starvation, and to inequality aren't working. This is why we need socialism. But I don't mean the socialism you're probably thinking of. Today, we're going to lay out why we need to build eco-socialism right now. Not just to prevent the worst of climate change, but to build a world where you, sitting at home, don't have to work your ass off just to put food on the table. I want to build a world where you can instead actually live a joyful, fulfilling life where the world isn't crumbling around you. But to get there, unfortunately, there are so many obstacles. Later, we'll explore the many tendencies and philosophies of eco-socialism, the failures and wins of actually existing eco-socialism, and how we might begin to build an eco-socialist world right now. But for right now, we need to understand how we got into this mess in the first place. Because understanding is always step one. And if you want to dive even deeper into eco-socialism, I'm releasing a ton of Patreon-exclusive resources every month to help you, and me honestly, learn theory and take action. This month, I created a companion video to this one all about China's ecological civilization model. I wrote up a detailed book note on Salvatore Engel-Domaro's book, Ecosocialism, an Introduction. And if you want to see my face working through some of the key points of that book, I have a 20-minute breakdown video of my takeaways from his book. Not to mention, you can watch the next R-Changing Climate video a month early. That's four brand new pieces of OCC media that hopefully will help you grow in your eco-socialist learning journey, alongside a backlog of over 20 exclusive videos, interviews, and access to a Patreon-only Discord server where you can meet like-minded people on the climate left. If you want to check out all of that stuff, support OCC, and join a leftist learning community that cares about climate action, consider joining the R-Changing Climate Patreon at patreon.com slash r-changingclimate. 2.8 to 3.2 degrees Celsius. That's how much the global temperature will change by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels. But that's if all countries meet their stated goals. [00:02:12] Speaker 2: That's the goal. [00:02:13] Speaker 1: And thanks to the stranglehold fossil capital has on the economy, countries across the world are already backsliding on those commitments. The United States, for example, has pulled out of the Paris Agreement, repealed many of its measly renewable and electrification deployment subsidies under Trump. But even under Biden, emissions reductions were still well below where they needed to be according to Carbon Breed. So, well above 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming seems to be the current fate of our capitalist mode of production. And that trajectory means catastrophe. Irreversible tipping points like the Greenland ice sheet collapsing will trigger dire sea level rise displacing millions. Pandemics, heat waves, and wildfires will become more and more frequent. Island communities and desert cities will become barely livable. And smoke from wildfires will make summer days unbreathable as billions will be on the move trying to find a place untouched by the ravages of a hotter world. But no such place will exist by the end of the century. And this is just a middle ground scenario of the climate crisis. As the endless production and endless accumulation of capitalism push us into old growth forests and intensify factory farming, pandemics at the scale of COVID-19 will only become more likely. Not to mention, the relentless desire for trees and fresh pasture will continue to push forests like the Amazon to the brink of collapse. This is not some fluke of human nature nor overpopulation. We can clearly see that before the rise of industrial capitalism, the toll on the natural world was minimal. We will see later on in this video why exactly this happens, but for now one thing is clear. Capitalism wrenches us from the natural world and rends the environments around us for profit and the enrichment of those that own the means of production, the capitalists. This is not simply a problem that can be solved by buying better commodities or choosing the right ethical product. We can never shop our way out of climate change. As eco-socialist author Salvatore Engel-Domaro writes, "The primary objective of capitalism is profitability, the accumulation of capital. Even if cars and cleaning products were made through ecologically sustainable activities and raw materials, the pressure to constantly raise the number of sales will make for ecologically unsustainable endless resource use and waste generation." Or as Marxist Hadass Thier explains, "All capitalists, whether they're particularly [00:04:33] Speaker 3: psychopathic like Elon Musk or they're attempting caring capitalism like Ben and Jerry, are compelled to compete for ever greater market share or be left behind and face bankruptcy." [00:04:45] Speaker 1: What this means is that these crises are social. It's not your individual buying decisions or how much gas you use that is fueling these catastrophes. But instead, the way in which we've constructed our economies and social relations. We live under a global capitalist order. One that is predicated on forcing the vast majority to produce an endless and ever-increasing amount of goods for just a few corporations and business owners so that those few can maintain their rate of profit. Although we are told that this system is democratic and egalitarian, it is not. Just a few capitalists hold vast amounts of power as they control supply change, influence politics, and spew massive amounts of emissions into the air. Capitalism has failed for over 200 years in its modern industrial form to distribute and feed the over 800 million people that are starving day in day out. Its chaotic market strategy leaves millions without a roof over their head while speculators and real estate investors hoard land and luxury condos. Capitalist reform has also failed. So-called green capitalism has not worked. The US, a paragon of late capitalism, is woefully behind where it needs to be in terms of emissions as it tries to tinker around the edges of the market, trying to nudge renewable construction with subsidies during one administration and then sliding into fossil fascism in the next. Nor can concepts like steady state economies or degrowth be successful within a capitalist system. Because ultimately, these are the antitheses of capitalism. Businesses must grow and constantly produce, else their competitors will capture their markets, sell more than them at a lower price, and smother them into bankruptcy. Capitalism not only will not deliver us out of climate destruction, but it will continue to dig us deeper into our own grave. A grave built on exploitation, inequality, plunder, and imperialist violence. So, the choice is ecosocialism or barbarism. But wait, what exactly does ecosocialism mean? The amorphous nature of the terms communism and socialism, let alone ecosocialism, makes discussing their importance and merits quite difficult. So, before we go any further, let's understand the various tendencies of ecosocialism and properly define what we mean when we say socialism and ecosocialism. The ecosocialism I'm usually talking about is rooted in the Marxist tradition of scientific socialism. A socialism that distances itself from utopianism and instead looks critically at the past and the present to understand how we might best build a liberatory future. Scientific socialism is as much a theory as it is a practice. For Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and so many others in what's known as Marxism-Leninism, or for others Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, socialism is the next mode of production that places maximum power into the hands of the people. Through planned worker and peasant control of the forces of production, socialist politics seek to eliminate the chaotic disasters of capitalism and instead build a world of deep and real democracy where everyday people have agency in every aspect of their lives. The way in which this is achieved, through full worker control of the state as a transitional stage, to eventually dissolve that state and capitalist class relations and embrace a world where everyone needs are met, is what separates Marxists from other political ideologies under the socialist umbrella, like anarchists who seek the immediate and simultaneous abolition of the state and capitalism as the only way to usher in a stateless, classless society. Okay, so what is ecosocialism then? Ecosocialism builds on this political ideology and worldview, but crucially it repositions the natural world as a foundational piece to economic, social, and political relations. Okay, that was super vague, so to put that in much plainer language, ecosocialism, at its most basic form, is a system that rejects the capitalist mode of private ownership of production and capital accumulation, and instead seeks a worldwide economy and social system that meets everyone's basic needs, establishes social equity through worker and peasant control of production, and crucially, does so within ecological limits. But it's here where everything explodes into a variety of different ecosocialist tendencies that lead to academic bickering and sectarianism. There are countless definitions of ecosocialism. Ecosocialist author Ian Angus describes ecosocialism as: [00:09:22] Speaker 4: "Ecosocialism is not a separate organization. It's a movement to win existing red and green groups and individuals to an ecosocialist perspective. It is socialism that recognizes that there can be no true ecological revolution that is not socialist, and no true socialist revolution that is not ecological." [00:09:40] Speaker 1: While Salvador Engel DeMauro claims that ecosocialism stands for the development of biophysically sustainable, egalitarian, classless communities worldwide. My working definition of ecosocialism is this: It's a politics that sees capitalism as the root cause of our current ecological and social struggles. As a result, ecosocialism seeks to completely eradicate the systems of private property and profit motives that drive our current capitalist economy, and in their stead, build an economy and social system built on the ownership of the state and the means of production by workers, communities, and peasants. This system seeks not only the equality of all people everywhere, but the flattening of class and with a guiding north star of ecological sustainability. The ultimate goal of ecosocialism is to transition to a stateless, classless, ecologically harmonious world which operates on the maxim, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. But of course, if you disagree with this characterization of ecosocialism, go ahead and fight me in the comments. Ecosocialism is not a monolith. There are various currents and offshoots that run through ecosocialism, differing both in the question of how we get there, and why we need to get there. Among the many visions of an ecological socialism, Salvatore Engel de Morrow parses out two main currents in his remarkably thorough introductory textbook on ecosocialism. Those currents are ecomarxism and ecofeminism, which splinter off into even more granular differences. Ecomarxism is best explained as an ecosocialism that wields Marxist analysis to reveal capitalism is not just the root to so many social ills, but also at the core of our environmental problems. Ecomarxists, often academics like John Bellamy Foster or John O'Connor, have argued for the idea of the metabolic rift as one of the core and main contradictions of capitalism. O'Connor explains this concept that alongside the first core contradiction of capitalism found in the exploitation of laborers and capitalists laid out by Marx, there is a second contradiction. Capitalism separates humans from nature by concentrating work and the means of production the factories, etc., together into cities, and then siphons and rends the countryside of all of its resources. In doing so, capitalism lays the groundwork for its ecological demise. As a result, in the view of many eco-Marxists, nothing short of replacing capitalism in the capitalist state with a socialist one seeking communism can fully address our deep-rooted environmental problems. In short, as Salvatore Engel de Morrow explains, eco-Marxists tend to advocate for some sort of state involvement or takeover and/or some sort of wide social movement that is not necessarily averse to state intervention, essentially adhering to Lenin's arguments within the state and revolution that to topple capitalism we need some form of revolutionary vanguard party. Of course, the eco-Marxist interpretation of that ranges from direct worker and peasant armed seizure of the state all the way to the democratic eco-socialist strategy of the electoral politics route that attempts to reform and take power through pre-existing power structures. But eco-Marxists aren't alone under the eco-socialist umbrella. Eco-feminism, although born out of Marxist tendencies, advocates for a different analysis of the root of capitalist and environmental destruction. Critiquing and building off of eco-Marxist analysis, socialist eco-feminists argued that the struggle against gender oppression is woefully lacking in eco-Marxist politics. As socialist eco-feminist Mary Mellor explains, "Socialism that does not challenge the economic and sexual domination of women by men will never achieve an egalitarian society, nor one which is ecologically sustainable." In turn, eco-feminists have developed various approaches to understanding the root causes of our ecological crises. One prominent eco-feminist, Ariel Soleil, argues that the destruction of nature is not just through class contradictions, but also simultaneously through gendered contradictions. As Saleh notes, "The domination and exploitation of women and women's bodies [00:14:06] Speaker 5: under a capitalist patriarchal civilization is identical and interlinked with the domination and exploitation of nature. Both women and nature are treated as resources. Socialism, feminism, indigenous decolonial struggles, [00:14:25] Speaker 1: ecology is a single issue." But of course, there are so many other currents and visions that depart and converge in the river of eco-socialism, like Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vitese's Half-Earth Socialism, which leans on utopian socialist aesthetics to envision a centrally planned, plant-based, eco-socialist economy, by: [00:14:43] Speaker 6: "expanding democracy into the economy, so having democratic control over, you know, parts of the economy that are currently governed by the market." [00:14:53] Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about their vision, you can watch the full-length interview with Drew and Troy, exclusively on MeansTV and Patreon, or Max Isle's anti-imperialist vision he presents in the People's Green New Deal, which leans into an agrarian internationalist politics. He argues that any anti-capitalist or eco-socialist politics [00:15:11] Speaker 2: needs to focus on climate debt repayments, world food sovereignty, national control over farming systems, national control over technology, basically the elimination of world militaries, the respect for national sovereignty in the south, and in fact, a wide-ranging transition in the entire world system, recognizing that the climate crisis is not separable from the world imperialist capitalist system." [00:15:39] Speaker 1: But there's also indigenous socialism, a sort of parallel politics that interweaves with many of the tenets of eco-socialism exemplified in projects like the Red Nation's book, The Red Deal. [00:15:49] Speaker 7: "We're very serious about, you know, a revolutionary struggle and what it means to build a political program for that type of revolution." [00:15:55] Speaker 1: That's Melanie Yazzie, co-author of The Red Deal. She goes on to add: [00:15:59] Speaker 7: "And as indigenous people, we think that our environmental justice struggles and our struggles for climate justice must also be responsive to the demands for abolition that are coming historically, right, from the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement for Black lives." [00:16:12] Speaker 1: Her co-author, Nick Estes, goes on to add that indigenous socialist politics is for: [00:16:17] Speaker 8: "The decolonization of the atmosphere through the reduction and absorption of first world emissions, primarily the United States. A technology transfer. We also advocate for paying the climate debt, first and foremost." [00:16:29] Speaker 1: What we can glean from all of this is that everyone has their own opinion. But more seriously, some point of conversion on eco-socialism is that it's a system that seeks the disillusion of capitalism, whether through building parallel power or directly seizing the state, to then build a mode of production that is ecological, anti-imperialist, decolonial, and democratically planned by workers and peasants from the local to the international level. And in order to get there, we need to move first through the revolutionary toppling of capitalist states by organizing workers, peasants, and dispossessed people everywhere to then establish an eco-socialist state wherein the people, the workers, the farmers, those that have been ravaged by centuries of settler colonialism and imperialism, control and decide what is produced and distributed based on use and not exchange or profit. This could look like the early moments of the USSR where worker-run Soviets came together to decide on central plans, or it could look like Drew Pendergrass's vision of an eco-socialist federalism. "So we kind of imagined a little [00:17:34] Speaker 6: federalism where we set broad course goals at a large level and then figure out in detail what that looks like as you go towards the more local level." Or it could look like the socioeconomic and political [00:17:47] Speaker 9: structure of the Haudenosaunee. "The Haudenosaunee have the oldest continuous democracy anywhere in the world. In addition to that, we are matrilineal." That's Michelle Shenandoah of the Oneida Nation [00:18:01] Speaker 1: Wolf Clan. She explains that amongst the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the matriarchs of the clan act as [00:18:07] Speaker 9: representatives in another kind of federalism. "The clan mothers are the ones who are there for the people, they listen to the voice of the people, what the people want, and they take that then to the chiefs. You have clan mothers who are really the decision makers for the people. They are the ones who inform the chiefs. This is what you're going to say. This is the interest you're going to represent when you go [00:18:33] Speaker 1: to represent us in council." There are so many beautiful alternatives to structuring our society and economy, but crucially, as many revolutionary eco-socialists point out, the construction of an eco-socialist worker and peasant state must be seen as a transitional phase towards the greater goal of some form of eco-communism, a stateless, classless society wherein all humans, regardless of race, gender, ability, live a harmoniously ecological life by adhering to the maxim, from each according to their ability, to each according to their means. In my mind, this is what the images of solar punk capture. At the end of the day, however, these are all just words and images. If we are to truly embrace a scientific eco-socialism, we must move past what constitutes eco-socialism and look at what has actually worked in the real world. The beautiful visions of solar punk excite me and drive me forward in my work of achieving a stateless classless society where everyone's needs are met in an ecologically sustainable way. But there is just one problem. These pieces of art, although useful in helping reveal potential futures, don't reveal the present. To build those beautiful futures, we need to grapple with the messy and muddy facts of reality. We need to stare down the brutal truths and the promising developments of actually existing socialism. Because we are not starting from scratch, and if we are going to be real with ourselves, toppling capitalism and building out eco-socialism needs to happen quickly to avoid the worst of the climate crisis. So we need to learn where we went wrong and what worked in past socialist states so we're not starting from square one and repeating mistakes. Often when you put environmentalism and state socialism together, however, the screams of Chernobyl, Errol Sea, Productivist Socialism surround you on all sides. But if you actually look at the numbers, the plain fact is that state socialism has fostered more environmentally sustainable economies than both capitalist and socialist governments with capitalist economies models. In his book Socialist States and the Environment, Salvatore Engle de Morrow meticulously weeds through the environmental record of socialist and capitalist states to understand the historical impact of these modes of production. Tracking 26 socialist states and their histories, and comparing them to socialist governments with capitalist economies as well as full-fledged capitalist states, De Morrow reveals that socialist states on the whole actually had a better track record than capitalist states. And this is despite constantly being under siege from capitalist states like the United States while also raising most well-being metrics across the board. Take the USSR, for example. Often criticized by environmentalists for being an industrial monster and ecologically destructive, the USSR's state socialist project from 1917 to 1989 was comparably much more environmentally friendly than its capitalist contemporaries. If you are judging the USSR on its environmental disasters, then yeah, Chernobyl was catastrophic, and the draining of the Errol Sea was devastating. But if we're grading a mode of production's ecological performance on disasters, then surely capitalism takes the cake. The worst oil spill ever was under capitalism. The BP oil spill, the Exxon Valdez, the shrinking of Lake Chad, and the Centralia coal fire in Pennsylvania that has been burning for 64 years all outstrip the worst of the USSR's disasters. So as Professor Adnan Hussein explains on the Gorilla History Podcast, using an absolutist method of pointing towards individual disasters as metonyms for comparing modes of production, is useless. [00:22:17] Speaker 10: If you're only looking at these absolutist modes of analysis, you can come up with any sort of data that you want. You can say, "Chernobyl is the biggest nuclear disaster of all time. Therefore, state socialism is the worst thing for the environment of all time." Instead, if we compare socialist states and [00:22:33] Speaker 1: capitalist states during the same time period as Engel DeMauro did in his book, we begin to see a clearer picture. On the whole, socialist states environmentally outperform their capitalist contemporaries. But if we take another mode of comparison, we have the final nail in the coffin. When we look at socialist states backsliding into fully capitalist modes or socialist governments with capitalist economies, things become a little more clear. By the early 1990s, as the USSR and many other socialist states dissolved, their emissions and environmental degradation increased. In large part, this was thanks to China, as it slipped deeper and deeper into a capitalist mode of production, soaking up the manufacturing waste and pollution of the imperial core. But of course, China is full of contradictions. Even as it slipped further back into a capitalist economy in the late 20th century, in the beginning of the 21st century, its socialist government has tried to steer the country towards stricter environmental standards in ecological production. Their quote-unquote "ecological civilization plan" could potentially and is already altering our future ecological path. But I deal with that more in depth in the exclusive bonus video on Means TV and Patreon. At the end of the day, socialist states reveal that socialism, not capitalism, must be the path forward if we are to truly address climate change at the root. But it's easy to sit behind a computer and claim that ecosocialism is the path forward. But how do we actually build it? Luckily, we already have glimpses in socialist states, as well as potential models for functioning across the world right now that we can borrow bits and pieces of. Like Venezuela's Ministry for Ecosocialism, which has worked with local communal councils to build a more egalitarian sustainability within a capitalist economy. Or Thomas Sankara's socialist revolution in Burkina Faso in 1983, where for four years before he was assassinated by imperialist meddling, the people of Burkina Faso spearheaded substantial environmental education, water reservoir building, and reforestation efforts among many other ecosocialist initiatives, while simultaneously raising well-being. But the reality is that both of these countries have been deeply sieged by the forces of capital for decades and are forced into brutal economic choices thanks to economic sanctions, warmongering, and in the case of Venezuela, kidnappings. So, we must organize and build revolutionary ecosocialist power wherever we can. Because for ecosocialism to truly thrive, capitalism cannot exist. Every time a socialist threat has arisen, capitalists have sought to violently exterminate it. The revolution will most likely come from the margins inward. But that's not to say that we in the imperial core cannot and should not organize. Whether that means joining and agitating within your union to build worker power, or joining up with your local DSA chapter and bringing it closer to a revolutionary vanguard party for ecosocialism. Of course, this is only part of the struggle. Reality is that we must also reduce the harm of the climate crisis and capitalism right now, and perhaps, along the way, build power from those harm reduction strategies. This means building networks of mutual aid, creating disaster preparedness programs in your community, winning revolutionary reforms, or even sabotaging pipelines. We need to look towards all of these methods and more to build ecosocialism. We must use every tool in our toolkit, because everything is at stake. And one of those tools is political education. So, if you want to dive even deeper on ecosocialism or other topics on the climate left, I've released hours of videos and interviews with authors and activists on Patreon that I've never been able to put on YouTube. In fact, I just put out four brand new, exclusive learning tools to help you dive deeper into your ecosocialist education. I just published my detailed notes on Salvatore Engel DeMauro's book, Ecosocialism and Introduction. I put out a Patreon exclusive companion video to those notes highlighting my takeaways. I created an exclusive bonus video on China's ecological civilization. And I just published next month's YouTube video a month early, all on Patreon. And I'll be doing this each month. I'll be publishing bonus videos, book notes, a video version of my takeaways from those book notes, and my main YouTube video a month early on Patreon. And perhaps, if people are interested, we could even do a little discord book club. I'm trying to make the Our Changing Climate Patreon an educational space for those on the climate left. So let me know what would help you on your climate action journey. And if you do already know you want to join in and learn about better futures and how we can create them, head over to patreon.com/ourchangingclimate or click the link in the description and say hello in Discord or in the Patreon comments. I'd love to hear your thoughts.