According to the United Nations, we have eleven years until the climate catastrophe imparts irreversible damage on to our planet, and that warning was issued nearly a year ago. Time is ever constricting humanity like a snake, and actions, not rhetoric, are needed more than ever. But time is also a lake, slowly evaporating, but at a rate we don’t notice it until it’s too late. We cannot let it be too late, for the future of humanity is quite literally dependent on it. The climate catastrophe is the most pressing issue to date and must be until it is resolved; or, until humanity is gone, just a blip in the history of the universe.

What is important here is understanding the genesis of this current crisis: capitalism. With profits remaining supreme, all other considerations are pushed aside in order for firms to survive. Moreover, the incentive to accumulate as much capital as possible pushes firms towards monopolization and cutthroat competition at the expense of the environment and the proletariat at large. As capital expands as it must do in order to survive, more markets must be created, and more resources extracted and exploited with no consideration of the proletariat or the environment at large, and as this extraction and exploitation occurs, access to scarce materials increasingly shrinks, and more damaging practices in order to secure diminishing amounts of resources must be practiced. Furthermore, firms, in conjunction with the apparatus of the bourgeois state, must compete in order to secure these resources, manifesting in imperialist wars, with ever increasing ferocity and frequency as capitalism continues to decay. It is impossible to separate this fundamental feature of capitalism, imperialism, from capitalism itself. No reform can accomplish this. The bourgeois state will never let itself be subjected to fundamental and substantive change in any peaceful manner. No Green New Deal, nothing. In fact, the Green New Deal destroys not only ecosystems through the vicious extraction of rare-earth minerals in the Global South, but also communities through the slave-like conditions imposed onto the proletariat in these areas. Disconnected in every sense from their labor, these proletarians, as all have been and continue to be, are roboticized by their work, the origin of which lies in capital itself.

It is fruitless to critique the superstructure and the superstructure only, or base any critique off of the superstructure. Because what creates that superstructure? The base. This obsession of some “communists” with the ever-ambiguous concept of hierarchy as their primary (sometimes only) critique of capitalism neglects in entirety the base from which any kind of “hierarchy” can be or is derived from and instead only superficially examines the mode of production and thus lacks any basing as a substantive argument. It is clear that in order for “hierarchy” (or any other concept for that matter) to be abolished, the conditions which create the aspect of the superstructure being critiqued must be abolished. This thusly includes the formation and maintenance of the state, a “hierarchy.” If what created the state, i.e. the base, isn’t transformed in such a way where the state cannot reassert itself, then this abolition or dissolution of it matters in no substantive way. The same principle applies to the environment. If you don’t substantively change the base (capitalism) which leads to ecological collapse (the superstructure in this case), you cannot hope to actually save the environment in any meaningful manner.

All is not bleak and hopeless, however. Capital’s judgement of humanity is damning, yes. But capital in of itself is no longer a historical necessity. We have reached the age of decadent capitalism. No longer is the development of capitalism necessary for communism to be reached. No longer is it a historical necessity. The shackles it has placed on us, on humanity, can be broken. Our current seeming inevitability of becoming extinct isn’t an inevitably. It can be subverted, but not without the abolition of capital itself. Not without the international proletariat actuating upon its status as the only revolutionary class can the climate catastrophe can be solved. Only through the reaching of the socialist mode of production can this crisis be averted. It is now, more than ever, either socialism or barbarism.