The following is based on a presentation at the Socialism 2014 conference, held in Chicago on June 26–29, 2014.

I’m going to start with talking about two events that took place in New York a couple of years ago. The first was a benign, somewhat unremarkable and inconsequential event. The Museum of Modern Art curated what I thought was a pretty interesting exhibit. In response to the epidemic of foreclosures and decimated local economies around the United States, they invited a few architectural firms to design models for five towns in different parts of the country, which would incorporate themes of affordable housing with economic and ecological sustainability.1

There were some cool ideas that came out of it. One project was based on Orange, New Jersey, which is a town with no major public transportation system, but is along a regional New Jersey Transit line. The concept they came up with was to create a pedestrian city centered on the transit stop that basically gets rid of roads and cars, and fills in the space with mixed-use buildings that have both affordable housing units, commercial and office space, and public green spaces.

This project would allow people to work in walking distance from where they live. It would get rid of streets, which are an economic burden on a struggling city, and cars, which are an ecological burden on the city and planet. Roofs would be converted into public spaces as well as house energy generators with solar panels, something that is particularly important in New Jersey, the fifth highest energy consumer among the states. And the buildings would be connected at certain places, in order to collectivize building nodes, so that there is more efficiency in things like plumbing and electricity.

Another project turned Keiser, a suburb of Portland, Oregon, into a city that is both denser in terms of inhabitants, but also with three times the amount of public, open space, including a 158-acre nature reserve, urban farms, sky gardens, space for animal habitats, a composting hill, and interior waterfalls that would help provide energy for the town.

There were many other ideas I don’t have time to get into—some more interesting than others—but in general these were pretty cool concepts that addressed the economic realities of towns that have suffered financially, and whose sprawl is both a drain on the environment and a disaster for individual health and lifestyles.

The second event, a few months later, was much more remarkable and much less benign, and that was Hurricane Sandy. Of course, as people know, it didn’t just hit New York, but took nearly 300 lives and wreaked about $68 billion worth of damage across seven counties, destroying entire neighborhoods, crushing or flooding homes, and devastating countless lives. In New York City alone, over 300,000 housing units were destroyed. And many of those who had bought their homes are still paying mortgages on their wrecked, uninhabitable remains.

The super storm made two things unquestionably clear. First, that climate change is not an abstract problem for the future, but is a devastating reality now. And, second, that the people who are bearing the brunt of it are the poor and working class, and disproportionately people of color.

So what is the connection between these two events? Unfortunately, not much—and that’s really the point. There are great ideas and concepts, and people thinking and researching about how to create human-friendly, environmentally sustainable habitats, but then there is reality, and never the twain shall meet.

In fact, there are a lot of things that could have been done in New York to prevent the kind of devastation that we saw during Hurricane Sandy, from basic adjustments and investments in infrastructure to more radical, but still very practical changes—like the proposal to green the coast of the city with wetlands and marshes that can absorb the energy of incoming water during storms. (This is a much more realistic and affordable solution than the idea of building higher and higher sea walls around the city, which is being floated by some politicians.) The fact is that the New York City coastline was expanded many years ago by creating and building out an artificial landfill. Not surprisingly this area is among the most flood prone in the city.

The growing number of superstorms like Sandy and the recent flurry of droughts and wildfires should really be proof enough of not only the alarmingly quickening pace of climate change, but also the devastating impact that it is already having on our lives. And just like the economic crisis, the people least responsible for causing the ecological crisis have and will continue to bear the cost of it.2

But the other deeply troubling aspects of the ecological crisis are the so-called “solutions” on offer. At best, we have what might be chalked up to naïve individualism—that by each of us reducing our own carbon footprints we’ll be able to stop global climate change. At worst we have cynical maneuvers to greenwash the same corporations that are profiting hand over fist while destroying the planet. For instance, in New York, we had Toyota, Con Ed, and United Airlines sponsor Earth Day celebrations in April, when in fact the greatest contribution these three corporations could make to the preservation of our planet would be to disappear.3

Yet at the same time, it is also a very promising time to be an ecosocialist and an environmental justice activist. There exists right now a tremendous opening to build a real movement that offers both a more radical critique of the crisis and poses radical solutions.

Getting to the root of the problem

When I was first becoming an environmentalist in junior high, everyone was talking about Styrofoam use and recycling. Today, I think it’s clear to more and more people that, if nothing else, the sheer scale of the crisis requires much more sweeping action. Chris Williams talks about this in his fantastic book on Ecology and Socialism: no individual can build a wind turbine, dismantle a coal-fired power station, or set up a light-rail system in their city by themselves.4

Today, I think the question is being posed in a very real and concrete way to tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people: Is the root of the problem actually capitalism? If so, how do we stop it? These are questions that are being raised by major figures in the environmental movement. The title of Naomi Klein’s forthcoming book, for instance, is This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.5 The need for a more radical analysis is becoming especially obvious as it becomes clear that the technology, the wealth, and the ideas already exist to address the crisis in both short- and long-term ways. But it is not happening for economic and political reasons.

In the short term, we need to fight a largely defensive struggle to shift the current trajectory and buy ourselves time for a more fundamental transformation. To stop the advance of global warming, we have to leave most oil, gas, and coal in the ground and instead invest in technology to produce a mix of wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal renewable energy. At the same time, we need to reduce energy consumption—through collective, not individual, changes—by vastly expanding public transportation infrastructure, instituting regulations to winterize and “summerize” buildings, and powering all vehicles and heating all homes from renewable sources.

According to a report by Scientific American, converting energy sources to renewables by 2030 would require building 3.8 million wind turbines and installing 90,000 solar panels.6 If you think about the fact that 70 million cars are produced every year, these numbers don’t seem so unrealistic.

British socialist Jonathan Neale estimated recently that it would require between 100 million and 150 million workers twenty years to implement such a strategy for the whole world.7 That would certainly require a lot of money. But if these numbers seem daunting, consider the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion program to procure F-35 fighter jets, which according to the Pentagon aren’t really reliable.8

The $600 billion or so spent per year on the Pentagon is well over three times the military spending of the next biggest spender, China. So even if we were to just make the modest demand to cut the military budget to only double that of China, we could free up over $200 billion dollars a year to spend on renewables.

And of course, this is to say nothing of the $1.7 trillion (by conservative estimates) bailout of the banks beginning in 2008, or the wealth of the hundreds of billionaires in the world. If we took just a 10 percent tax on the richest twenty people in the world, we could build—right off the bat—about half of the 3.8 million wind turbines that the Scientific American report called for.

The fact that these types of solutions are not being implemented is not a problem of not having the technology, or the money. It’s not even a carbon problem. It’s a political and socio-economic problem. And by this I don’t just mean the spinelessness of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration. A system based on profitability simply cannot function in a rational way, no matter how much evidence piles up in front of it or how many technological solutions are available.

For this reason, anticapitalist and ecosocialist politics are urgently needed—in order to provide an accurate and cogent explanation of the crisis, in order to inform our current movement strategies, and in order to provide a long-term vision to transform society into one that can be truly sustainable.

Why is capitalism trying to kill us all?

I want to take a couple of minutes to flush out why there is no solution to planetary devastation within capitalism. And I want to start by going back to one of Marx’s basic formulas about capitalism. Marx summed up the circuit of capital in three letters: M-C-M´.9

Essentially, the basic pattern of capital is that production begins with Money (M). That money is invested into inputs of labor, natural resources, and technologies in order to create Commodities (C). Those commodities are then sold for More Money than was originally invested—M´ (the prime mark indicating that the final M is a bigger sum than the initial M). The trick to turning an initial sum of money invested into more money lies in the exploitation of labor in the production process. Basically the capitalist pays workers less than the value of what they produce.

What does this have to do with climate change? There are three points I want to highlight from this formula:

1) “Exchange value” vs. “use value”

Before the rise of capitalism, trade was based on a simpler circuit: C-M-C. You start with a commodity and sell it in order to buy another one. Say you’re a bread maker, but you need shoes. So you swap the commodity you have for another commodity of equal value, and you use money as a simple intermediary to make that exchange possible.

Capitalism flips the script, so that rather than the purpose of exchange being a utilitarian one (I make such and such commodities, I need something else), the sole purpose of exchange is money. In this case commodities become nothing more than the intermediaries to make more money. Which commodities are made in order to increase capital, are completely incidental. In the 1960s this was famously articulated by the controller of Bethlehem Steel, who told Fortune magazine, “We’re not in business to make steel... We’re in business to make money.”10

Every capitalist, in order to survive and out-compete others in the industry has to worry about just one thing: How to make some amount of money into more money. Whether or not the products are useful, rational, fulfill needs, or whether they create landfills full of crap, exists nowhere as a line item in corporate budgeting strategies.

So, for instance, mass production of any commodity is generally the most efficient way for capitalists to turn a profit. In the case of agriculture this leads to monoculture farming, which is a disaster of a system. It both depletes the soil and creates a need for artificial pesticides, basically poisoning both the earth and us at the same time.

Even if one company were to spend the resources necessary to cut down on pollution, carbon emissions, and waste, it would be competing with companies that don’t do this and can therefore sell their products more cheaply and in greater numbers, and the responsible company would quickly find itself pushed out of its necessary market share. Capitalism therefore promotes a built-in focus on short-term profitability to stay ahead of the game, with regard only to the money at the end of the process, rather than the utility or rationality of what is produced.

Of course a focus on short term gains is deadly for the environment, which by definition is a long-term issue. As Marx put it: “The way that the cultivation of particular crops depends on fluctuations in market prices and the constant change in cultivation with these prices—the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits—stands in contradiction with agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of successive generations.”11

2) Inputs/outputs

Capital regards natural resources, just like labor, as simple inputs into the production process. It behooves each capitalist to obtain these inputs as cheaply and as quickly as possible.

As Marx put it, under capitalism,

For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.12

More recently, the People’s Agreement (2010 Cochabamba) made the same point: “Under capitalism, Mother Earth is converted into a source of raw materials, and human beings into consumers and a means of production, into people who are seen as valuable only for what they own, and not for what they are.”13

If natural wealth and labor are inputs, capital considers output to be simply whatever is sold. In this regard, waste is not counted on either side of the equation. It’s not industry’s concern how much waste is produced or where it goes. It only matters what gets sold.

In some cases that waste is poison for us and for the planet. In other cases that waste is actually made up of useful things that are dumped rather than used productively. This leads to a somewhat unfathomable situation in which the amount of food thrown away by supermarkets, restaurants, stores, and consumers in the US is enough to feed all one billion of the world’s malnourished population.14

But it is worse than just benign neglect; waste isn’t simply something that capital disregards, it is actively promoted. It’s a lot more profitable to make gadgets that break down or become quickly technologically obsolete than to make products that will last. If you own an iPhone, you know that you literally can’t hold on to this $700 gadget for more than a year or two before being forced into getting a new one, since your old phone, even if it still works perfectly well, is no longer compatible with the latest software.

3) Constant growth

Lastly, this circuit of M-C-M´ implies constant growth for individual capitalists in order to stay competitive. The more you make at the end of the production cycle, the more you can invest in the next round of production and the more you can invest in newer/cost-saving technologies to beat out your competitors. This process then also feeds a system-wide growth in which more and more is constantly being produced. Capitalism goes into crisis if it isn’t constantly growing.

In fact, the entire process of M-C-M´ itself implies an unending process, since the end goal is not a commodity to be used or consumed, but is money which in and of itself doesn’t do anything unless reinvested into the next round of production. As the ecosocialist writer John Bellamy Foster puts it, “capital by its nature is self-expanding value.”15

This drive for expansion at any cost puts capitalism at odds with the environment both because it needs more and more inputs on the production side, pillaging our natural resources as fast as they can be used; and because it needs more and more of a consumer base to sell as many products as possible. Sell things you never knew you needed, like plastic, disposable everything. Sell things that used to be free, like access to water. Sell things that are inherently destructive, like nuclear warheads.

The requirement for ever-greater material and energy to keep expanding puts capitalism profoundly and irrevocably at odds with a sustainable planet. Indeed, according to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the world economy exceeded the earth’s regenerative capacity in 1980, and by 1999 had gone beyond it by as much as 20 percent. Today the gap is estimated to be about 30 percent.16

Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto summed it up very eloquently: “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”17

Anticapitalist vs. capitalist strategies

If the basic logic of the system is inherently unsustainable, the logical conclusion would then be that we have to change the system altogether. But I also want to emphasize that understanding that the market drives environmental destruction in the first place also impacts what kind of reforms we fight for on our way to broader system change, in two significant ways:

We can’t incentivize corporations, we have to regulate them, against their interests, to do the right thing: Market-based solutions and incentives like cap and trade will not work, since the entire logic of the market is itself the problem. Short of ending the market—the end goal—we need, in the meantime, to regulate it as much as possible. This will only happen against the wishes of capitalists if they are forced to make concessions by mass, democratic movements from below.

Capitalism’s short-term view of labor and natural resources as mere inputs into the production process creates the need for a unity of resistance between labor and environmentalists. This has been the case since the birth of capitalism. The conquest of nature and the conquest of man have been one and the same process.

There are many concrete manifestations of this need for unity between labor and movements for ecological justice today. For instance, every time a corporation moves to China in search of cheaper labor, they undermine the international working class in a race to the bottom, and they also create incredible environmental waste and degradation, as massive numbers of products have to be shipped across the world daily instead of being produced and sold locally.

The myth that we have to choose between jobs or the environment is all too common, especially within the labor movement. As author and activist Jeremy Brecher puts it:

One starting point for that story is to recognize the common interest both in human survival and in sustainable livelihoods. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if God had intended some people to fight just for the environment and others to fight just for the economy, he would have made some people who could live without money and others who could live without water and air.

There are not two groups of people: environmentalists and workers. We all need a livelihood, and we all need a livable planet to live on. If we don’t address both, we’ll starve together while we’re waiting to fry together.18

Or in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, our choices are socialism or barbarism.19 We can and should build movements to regulate and reform the system, but ultimately this only buys us time against a system that can’t but expand, pummel, and destroy. Ultimately we need to get rid of the profit system completely and replace it with one based on human and ecological need.

What would ecosocialism look like?

This is obviously not a question I can answer or predict in any detail. But I will say a couple of thoughts by way of broad outlines.

There are some things that seem very clear we need to do right off the bat, and many environmental justice activists and ecosocialists have written and spoken about what such actions might look like. For instance, in her article “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” Naomi Klein writes:

Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is through big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.20

Ian Angus and Simon Butler, outline the following steps in their book Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis21:

Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and biofuels, replacing them with clean energy sources.

Actively supporting farmers to convert to ecological agriculture; defending local food production and distribution.

Introducing free and efficient public transport networks.

Restructuring existing extraction, production, and distribution systems to eliminate waste, planned obsolescence, pollution, and manipulative advertising, and providing full retraining to all affected workers and communities.

Retrofitting existing homes and buildings for energy efficiency.

Closing down all military operations at home and elsewhere; transforming the armed forces into voluntary teams charged with restoring ecosystems and assisting the victims of environmental disasters.

A framework for sustainability

Beyond the initial first steps, I think there are a few broad themes that help provide a framework for thinking about a future based on need and sustainability versus profit.

If we are to heal the “metabolic rift,” 22 as Marx put it, between man and earth, we need to address the common rights of humanity and the earth. The right not to be contaminated also translates into the right to live with uncontaminated air and with uncontaminated water. More specifically, when we talk about human rights, we have to talk about anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Recognizing that it is poor people, people of color, colonized people who bear the overwhelming brunt of ecological disaster, we have to actively address those brutalities and inequalities. As the People’s Agreement from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth that took place in Cochabamba in 2010 put forward in its demands:

Developed countries, as the main cause of climate change, in assuming their historical responsibility, must recognize and honor their climate debt in all of its dimensions as the basis for a just, effective, and scientific solution to climate change. In this context, we demand that developed countries: Restore to developing countries the atmospheric space that is occupied by their greenhouse gas emissions. This implies the decolonization of the atmosphere through the reduction and absorption of their emissions; Assume the costs and technology transfer needs of developing countries arising from the loss of development opportunities due to living in a restricted atmospheric space; Assume responsibility for the hundreds of millions of people that will be forced to migrate due to the climate change caused by these countries, and eliminate their restrictive immigration policies, offering migrants a decent life with full human rights guarantees in their countries; Assume adaptation debt related to the impacts of climate change on developing countries by providing the means to prevent, minimize, and deal with damages arising from their excessive emissions; Honor these debts as part of a broader debt to Mother Earth by adopting and implementing the United Nations Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. The focus must not be only on financial compensation, but also on restorative justice, understood as the restitution of integrity to our Mother Earth and all its beings.

On the question of growth I think Marx has been widely misinterpreted. He celebrated the productive capacity of capitalism and saw it as laying the basis for a world of abundance that could make socialism possible. But this is not the same thing as favoring the continual growth of commodity production.

We can and should move forward and not backward in terms of the development of the productive capacity of society. But this does not mean we need to produce more and more stuff, as capitalism is driven to do. It means we need to continually advance in terms of technology, research, and so on. In fact there is a lot we should stop producing immediately—like arms, and ads—and others that can be drastically reduced as quickly as possible, such as cars and plastics.

Beyond that, there are complex questions to think about in terms of how to best facilitate meeting human need. For instance, how do we want to organize food production? There has been a lot of good research to indicate that that multicrop, rotating agriculture, which is a lot more sustainable for the soil, can also produce more crops than the common methods of corporate farming.

The key point is that capitalism forces us into a spiral of accumulation for the sake of accumulation. Planned development to improve the quality of life for the vast majority of humanity on the basis of sustainable production is its polar opposite.

In order for us to be able to effect this kind of planning on a regional and then global scale, we need a mass democratic system. Mass participation is essential in order to unleash the kind of creativity and ideas that we need to address the scale of the challenges we face.

How do we get there?

The million-dollar question, then, is how do we get there? There are no blueprints for transforming capitalism to socialism, but I will end with some general points about how we can move forward.

We need to deepen and develop the politics and theory that can explain why we’re in the state we’re in, why capitalism and a profit system is irreconcilable with a future, livable planet. Stronger theory, as I’ve said, has important implications for both short- and long-term solutions.

We need to build the anticapitalist wing of the movement at the same time that we engage with the broadest layer of activists. For instance, in New York the organization that I work with, System Change Not Climate Change (SCNCC), as its name implies, has radical anticapitalist politics. We’re working with many others to build for the People’s Climate Mobilization on September 21 that has been called by 350.org, Avaaz, and other large organizations.23 This assembly could be a serious game changer in the movement against global warming. It will likely be upwards of 100,000 people and the largest rally for climate justice to date. It can bring together large numbers at a time when the issue of climate change has become the key defining issue of our time.

At the same time, we are working with Global Climate Convergence and others on the left to have a conference on that same weekend that can complement the march and provide radical analysis and political discussion within a broader mobilization.24

We need a sustained movement. What happens after September 21 is as important as what happens on September 21. In 2003, during the lead up to the war on Iraq, many people in the antiwar movement thought that one mass march could stop the war, but today you’d be hard pressed to find someone who thinks that one mass march will stop global warming. So there is a political maturation here, and a great potential to use the momentum and the confidence that people gain from the march, to go back and build locally on our campuses, in our neighborhoods, and at our workplaces.

And ultimately we will need a mass movement. Imagine a movement where students strike to divest their university from fossil fuels; indigenous rights activists lead mass civil disobedience against tar sands extractions; working class and people of color in the Rockaways are staging sitins to demand resources to rebuild homes and infrastructure along ecologically rational lines; and workers who work in fossil fuel extraction strike for the right to be retrained and employed to do work that is safe, healthy, and won’t destroy our planet, our lives, and our children’s lives.

A movement of this scale—the scale we need to reverse course—will challenge the profitability and viability of capitalism. It won’t be built overnight, but we are making important steps today, helping to mobilize hundreds of thousands in September. There is a huge potential for this movement to grow, and for its politics to deepen. It requires some dedication, some flair, some politics, a good dose of impatience with the system and patience with each other. It’s not an easy or quick process, but it’s a necessary struggle. And in the long run, an ecosocialist world is a world worth fighting for.

To end with Marx:

From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously, are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, a boni patres familias [good heads of the household].”25