Climate Change — It’s Socialism or Extinction

The term “global warming,” which describes an increase in the Earth’s average temperature surface due largely to greenhouse gas emissions, is widely believed to have been coined in 1975 by Columbia University geochemist Wallace Broecker. It has been 47 years since this, and even in 1975 the actual process of warming had been theorized for several decades already.

Karl Marx, having been born much before the first CO2 emissions studies in the 1960s, could not have predicted the sheer disregard for life, planet and species the capitalist class has exemplified over the decades.In his time, it would have been around 275ppm. We are currently at ~420ppm in May 2022. However, Marx acknowledged that exploitation of labor and a single focus on maximization of profit would have disastrous effects on the planet, stating way back in the 1860s that “all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.”

Alas, Marx could not have predicted the spot we would be in currently. Human led climate change, also known as the Anthropocene Era, officially became theorized as a new epoch of geological significance in the ’80s. It is defined as “the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.” Although the start of this period remains a point of debate, it is generally seen as around the 1950s. Coincidentally, Vladimir Lenin theorized that the world had entered its imperialist stage of development around the start of the 20th century, ultimately becoming the base from which two World Wars would burst forth. The scale and intensity of these wars, along with war time production across much of the world, no doubt fed significantly into the start of the Anthropocene, breaking humanity from any sort of peaceful existence with the Earth and declaring war on the planet itself. This war has continued without pause to today.

A characteristic feature of imperialism is monopoly control of industry, finance and governments themselves. Today, transnational companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and other oil and gas corporations maintain natural monopolies on resources, and guide policy towards their short term profit goals. Any actions that might be taken to move away from these damaging sources of energy are met with the immense wealth and influence of corporate lobbies, corruption and bribery. Such is the nature of capitalism, and the promise of socialism is its inverse. A government controlled and made up of the working class, with recallable and democratically voted in representatives and a centrally planned economy that sets its main ‘optimization’ metric in line with the planet’s needs, is the only system capable of addressing the problems we have created for all life on earth. Following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the subsequent disintegration of a socialist block and deterrence of imperialism, the world has produced more fossil fuels in three decades than in all of human history prior to it. Today, China, Cuba, Venezuela and others represent the only viable alternatives towards ecologically sensitive growth. Even so, they are continually limited by operating within the framework of an imperialist hegemonic world market, spearheaded by the US and its sphere of influence.

To give a sneak preview of what the capitalist mode of production has in store for us:

• We are just months away from locking in 2℃ warming by the late 2030s, putting 10–20% of the world’s species at risk of extinction and exposing 80% of humanity to life threatening levels of heat and extreme weather. This is the end to life as we know it. Who will make up that remaining 20%? The ruling class, the billionaires and oligarchs in control of the majority of governments across the world, save the bastions of socialism still remaining despite the relentless threat of counter revolution.
• 4℃ warming is expected at our current rate by 2080, and it means mass extinction, very likely including the human race.

Economic growth with a capitalist profit motive at its center is a threat to all life. The scientific community has reached a consensus on this neoliberal growth scheme: abolish it or face extinction. This is why many Marxists use the slogan “socialism or extinction” to refer to the reality that humanity is at a crossroads: one direction leads off a cliff, and the other leads towards a return to coexistence with the planet and other nations, one that puts the needs of the average person and the planet above those of an increasingly minuscule minority with outsized control of our collective future. We have nothing to lose but our chains, chains that are currently being doused in oil and lit on fire with us still shackled in place, left to burn without an escape route.

In a follow-up, I’ll discuss the ways in which capitalist systems are positioning themselves in relation to the climate crisis, what types of idealist fantasies they use to keep the working class placated in the face of it, and how a turn towards authoritarian violence is more likely than anything in the coming decade(s).

Stay tuned and let me know what you think.

Sources:

Source for warming prospects: http://www.climatecodered.org/2019/08/at-4c-of-warming-would-billion-people.html

Source for Anthropocene background: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene

Source on PPMs over time: https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/carbon-dioxide-now-more-than-50-higher-than-pre-industrial-levels