Editor’s note: Modern industrialized states face a stark challenge when dealing with systemic risk. Such states are often large and locked into political pathways of growth predicated on increasing consumption and enhanced complexity. The authors of this chapter suggest that these pathways work strongly against the possibility of change and that under these conditions, existing institutions are likely to fail to adapt. This is particularly true against large, existential threats such as climate change, which the authors suggest is the largest and most important risk faced by society.
Despite these many difficulties, the authors propose a positive vision of political organization that they believe may be the only functional alternative to warlord entrepreneurship in post-crisis conditions. This vision, which they call “Green Social Democracy,” focuses on localized productive capacity and strong civic values that, they hope, will provide both the economic self-sufficiency and political meaning necessary to combat the worst elements of warlordism. This sense of vision in the face of pessimism is our first example of a “bright side” example of post-collapse conditions.
As the present volume documents, the early twenty-first century is a sea of icebergs, full of hazards, threats, and crises-in-the-making, whose obscured bulk we are just beginning to appreciate and map. Atmospheric carbon, accumulating out of sight for two hundred years, is a mega-berg, one with the potential to sink modern civilization by itself. Climate destabilization, now inescapable, promises to exacerbate other crises, turning this mix into a thousand-year “perfect storm.” The long-term futures of societies all over the planet will be shaped in large part by their experiences of and responses to the destructive ramifications of climate change, especially as those ramifications interact with other crises. It is already too late to avoid a cascade of local and regional “natural” disasters in the medium term (i.e., by midcentury), and heroic near-term action will be required to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if a long-term civilizational catastrophe of historic proportions is to be avoided. This, in combination with the panoply of other system-threats and crises covered in this volume, is humanity’s playing field going forward—like it or not.
The message of this volume is that on this playing field, those of us who see green social democracy as the only winning game plan are at a distinct disadvantage. Of course, we already knew that, but this volume adds a new dimension to the problem. Our adversaries and competitors are not just those wedded to the status quo—its official agents, champions, and beneficiaries—but also the protagonists of the deviant underside of that status quo: those amoral warlords, smuggler cartels, mafias, and narrowly self-interested profiteers, whose lack of scruples makes them better positioned to take short-term advantage of the weaknesses and breakdowns of established systems, and who have no interest in seeing those systems replaced by any more beneficial alternative.
One must begin these sorts of discussions by emphasizing that major breakdowns of the existing world system, and some kind of long-term transition to a more decentralized world, are now inevitable. As it becomes more and more difficult to remain blind to the handwriting on the wall, the sorts of adversaries and competitors discussed in this volume will nonetheless continue to pursue their narrow self-interests, no matter what the larger human costs. The key political question will be, what kinds of local and regional actors will predominate in the new ecology of the climate-changed world that is coming, and will any of them organize any larger positive hegemony—such as what we refer to here as Green Social Democracy—to partially replace the current “official” world system. Will the advocates of such Green Social Democracy (with whom the present authors identify) gain the ability to accomplish enough politically, programmatically, and institutionally that we can not only co-opt or neutralize most of the “liberal” and “conservative” defenders of the current status quo (as it declines and collapses), but also hold off the warlord entrepreneurs? Or will quasi-fascist larger-system-builders (perhaps warlords writ large) have outdone us in those regards and be the only serious adversaries of the run-of-the-mill warlords? Or perhaps we are destined for a mix: a world “governed” by alliances, truces, and modus vivendis between and among local warlords, criminal gangs and cartels, regional quasi-fascist regimes, and lucky and plucky city-states—with the latter perhaps joined in regional “Hanseatic Leagues,” defending, and preserving for future use, something like Green Social Democracy.1
Indefinite business-as-usual GHG emissions are now virtually certain to increase planetary temperatures by at least several full degrees centigrade by the latter part of this century (perhaps sooner), and likely a good deal more thereafter.2 But it is misleading to focus on increase in global average temperature per se. The essential point is that such warming will manifest in the form of regional extremes in temperature increase (multiples of the global average, including in the arctic and regions already prone to hot summers). These changes will be accompanied by the virtually complete disappearance of precipitation in some places, and frequent extreme rain and wind phenomena in other places. Such will produce extensive flooding in some areas and permanent drought in others, dramatically alter hydrologies on every continent, destroy the agricultural productivity of many of the world’s bread baskets—and also allow the permanent spread of tropical disease-carrying insects and pathogenic microbes into regions where they formerly could not survive the nighttime low temperatures most of the year. In the longer term, these developments will raise sea levels, destroying coastal and river-delta cities that are home to several billion people and the majority of today’s industrial and long-distance-transportation infrastructure. All of this will lead to massive refugee flows, as large areas and mega-cities become incapable of supporting more than sparse human population. Nor will these effects arrive smoothly or incrementally, allowing societies clear projections and ample time to adapt; rather they will unfold as cascading acute crises, producing social and political breakdowns in weaker nation-states, if not everywhere. Scarcity-fueled interstate conflicts will be likely, with conflict over control of fresh water sources and flows particularly threatening. All of these developments have already begun in some parts of the world, and the latest data show the above-referenced (midcentury) global-warming calendar accelerating.3
And it gets worse—because accelerating climate change is intruding into a world fraught with other profound ecological and human problems. Quite apart from any direct impact of climate change, inequality within and between societies has been increasing over recent decades (despite the rise of hundreds of millions from poverty into the lower middle classes in China, India, and other large “developing” countries), as has material and existential insecurity among the billions of poor—particularly in the Global South—in the form of rising crime, social violence, and governmental weakness and dysfunction. Additionally, the world is running short of clean, fresh water and easily accessed and processed stocks of many resources key to modern life, especially petroleum (the current moment of great fracking success not withstanding)—at the same time as population growth continues.4 Moreover, no matter what we do going forward, increasing numbers of disasters related to extreme weather—especially in coastal Asia, Central Africa, and the Caribbean—are already baked into the future, the result of GHG emitted over the last two hundred years (because much GHG remains in the atmosphere long-term).
For the foreseeable future, barring major war or worldwide pandemic disease, the epicenter of social impact will be the megacities of the Global South. Dramatic warnings come from diverse perspectives. In 2010, Left urban theorist Mike Davis wrote, “For thirty years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without counterpart public investments in infrastructure, housing or public health.… Sheer demographic momentum … will increase the world’s urban population by 3 billion people over the next forty years, 90 per cent of whom will be in poor cities. No one … has a clue how a planet of slums with growing food and energy crises will accommodate their biological survival, much less their aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.”5 And counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen writes in his 2013 book Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla.
Four megatrends are driving most aspects of future life on the planet.… These are rapid population growth, accelerating urbanization, littoralization (the tendency for things to cluster on coastlines), and increasing connectedness. If we add the potential for climate-change effects such as coastal flooding, and note that almost all the world’s population growth will happen in coastal cities in low-income, sometimes unstable countries, we can begin to grasp the complex challenges that lurk in this future environment.
This unprecedented urbanization is concentrated in low-income areas of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Cities are expected to absorb all the new population growth on the planet by 2050, while simultaneously drawing in millions of migrants from rural areas.
The world’s cities are about to be swamped by a human tide that will force them to absorb—in just one generation—the same population growth that occurred across the entire planet in all of recorded history up to 1960. And virtually all this urbanization will happen in the world’s poorest areas—a recipe for conflict, for crises in health, education, and governance, and for food, energy, and water scarcity.
Cities are in a state of dynamic disequilibrium … there is no status quo, no “normal” to which to return, no stable environment to police. Think about Dhaka, exploding from 400,000 to 15 million, or Lagos, growing from 3 to 20 million, or Mumbai from 2.9 to 23 million, all in the same time frame. These aren’t stable systems; even if you could somehow temporarily get every city function under control, the frantic pace of growth would rapidly overtake the temporary illusion of stability. In fact, that’s exactly what has occurred in many cities, where planners have repeatedly devised solutions to problems as they exist at one particular moment, only to find these solutions overtaken by events before they can be implemented.… Rapid dynamic change has gotten inside planners’ and political leaders’ decision cycles: they repeatedly develop policies that would have been adequate for a set of circumstances that no longer exists.6
The foregoing gestalt constitutes a constellation of mutually exacerbating “super wicked problems”—impossible to get a firm grip on, much less to bring under control or resolve.7 And this super-wickedness is increasingly compounded by the fact that accelerating climate destabilization means that “stationarity” is increasingly dead. “Stationarity—the notion that natural phenomena fluctuate within a fixed envelope of uncertainty—is a bedrock principle of risk assessment. Stationarity makes the insurance industry work. It informs the engineering of our bridges, skyscrapers, and other critical infrastructure. It guides the planning and building codes in places prone to fires, flooding, hurricanes, and earth quakes.”8 In this super-wicked world, business as usual means that risk becomes increasingly incalculable; everything we do—including doing nothing—increasingly suffused with recklessness. Ultimately, if the alarms of those like James Lovelock are to be credited, the human carrying capacity of the planet will decline drastically.9 Short of global thermonuclear war, modern civilization has never faced a more dire existential threat.
It is this world, not the world of the 1950s or 1960s, into which the effects of accelerating global warming are now intruding ever more powerfully.10 If humanity fails to build up societal capacities for mitigation, adaptation, emergency response, and remediation in advance of this oncoming cascade of disasters, then, as such accumulate toward the middle of this century, all of our attention and resources will be sucked up by disaster management and short-term remediation and adaptation efforts—with nothing left to address longer-term solutions. At that point, the abstract technological feasibility of far-reaching “solutions” would become irrelevant.
To moderate the foregoing will require a profound remaking of contemporary industrial modernity. The vast majority of all industrial, agricultural, mining, transportation, and mechanical processes that rely on hydrocarbons for fuel (or that produce substantial greenhouse gases as byproducts) will have to be either converted to clean/green technology or drastically curtailed—on a planet-wide basis. Unfortunately, barring a technological deus ex machina, it is highly unlikely that effective clean/green technological substitutes will be developed and deployed to replace current industrial processes within the time frame required to avoid catastrophe.11 Absent such new technologies—or even with the development of some such technologies—the only choice will be to cut back on our aggregate industrial output (including factory farming). This, in turn, will necessitate far-reaching changes in energy-intensive, high-waste, highpollution lifestyles—not just for a decade or two of “emergency,” but, for all practical purposes, permanently. In other words, irrevocably downshifting our production and consumption patterns is the only route open to us if we want to hold open a long-term future for other prized aspects of our existing civilization.
Much has been written about what might and should be done economically and technologically to mitigate and cope with climate-change issues. What gets less attention, however, is the magnitude of the political requirements for seriously addressing climate change.12 In recent years, a steady accumulation of scientific evidence and opinion has generated a broad consensus among policymakers and informed publics that anthropogenic global warming is both real and a very serious long-term threat to human well-being. This is good news. And yet that consensus has not led to political action; attempts to create GHG abatement policies and protocols have stalled, and the political will to make necessary changes remains nonexistent—especially where it matters most, in the United States, China, and India. Absent a radical revision to the very conception of modern political legitimacy, such political will is unlikely to emerge. That’s not just bad; that’s a potential civilization-killer.
Thus a realistic review of the challenge of climate change, representing the leading edge of a whole series of systemic disruptions and crises, yields the following syllogism: a drastic reduction (80 percent or more) in global GHG emissions by the 2050s is required in order to avoid civilization-killing climate change in the long term (and that reduction needs to be front-loaded, or it will need to get close to 100 percent before 2050).13 Such a reduction can only be accomplished either by wholesale conversion of the energy system to renewables or by a massive reduction in total energy consumption (really a combination of a whole lot of one and a great deal of the other).14 Wholesale conversion to renewables within the specified time frame is, even if technically possible in the abstract, an unimaginably monumental—and politically impossible—undertaking. The only feasible alternative is a gross reduction in total energy consumption, combined with as much conversion as we can get. And this, in turn, must mean a radical reduction in aggregate production and consumption of most classes of material goods. It means not just smaller and fewer motorized vehicles, but less travel, less heating in winter, less cooling in summer, less light at night, less opulent housing, less electronic gadgetry and entertainment extravaganza, much less meat … the list goes on. In sum, with regard to all forms of material production and consumption, serious emissions reduction boils down to just one word: LESS.
The conditions and inputs necessary to the maintenance of modernity’s “normal” levels of system functioning are, in a word, history. This chapter attempts to move away from the wishful thinking that so often infuses and clouds climate-change debates and instead proposes conceptually coherent and imaginable moves toward a realistic (albeit terrifically challenging) alternative. Rather than join the unrealism of the political hopes and technological utopianism of most environmentalists, we instead find promise in a different direction—one based on the possibility of retrieving, reformulating, and reinstating a once-prominent alternative form of “capitalist” political economy—early industrial “producerist republicanism”—as a constituent element of a forward-looking Green Social Democracy.
Typically, when arguments such as we make here are introduced, liberals and green pragmatists step forward and say, “But wait, if we can just get the prices right on carbon, this will put in place the incentives that will inevitably push entrepreneurs, scientists, and inventors to perfect and deploy the technology necessary to radically reduce GHG emissions while still generating all the energy we need to maintain and spread our modern way of life.” The hope that many pragmatists place in a technological fix is an expression of high-modernist faith in the unlimited power of science and technology as profound—and as rational—as Augustine’s faith in Christ. The assumption here, often voiced explicitly without much hard evidence to back it up, is that “all the necessary GHG abatement technology already exists”15 and only political gridlock, incompetence, or venality is preventing its deployment.16
Green technocrats, recognizing that most people don’t want to give up their carbon-intensive habits or aspirations, assert that we must—and therefore we can—somehow find a way to reconcile decarbonization of the global economy with people’s consumerist desires. Such self-described “ecological modernization theorists” insist that it is possible to give the modern global political economy an eco-friendly makeover. They promote the idea of making economic growth and affluence “sustainable,” while remediating the environmental damage caused by earlier dirty growth and development.17 The scholars and policy intellectuals in this tradition, it should be said, are not without their own politically audacious proposals, demanding massive public and private investments in the development and deployment of clean/green technology, as well as substantial institutional reform of capitalist political economy (typically in the vein of the “Third Way”18). What this literature shies away from, however, is the need for any fundamental change in culture or politics beyond that held to be already triumphant in the form of the “post-materialist” culture and politics of the “knowledge workers,” the “creative classes,” and the modern middle classes generally.19
Exemplary of this school of technological utopianism are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of the acclaimed 2007 manifesto Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and founders and directors of the Breakthrough Institute (whose journal and blog serve as a leading platform for technocratic utopianism).20 For them, prosperity, like consumption, is an entirely unproblematic concept. They see nothing excessive or unworthy in the hegemonic version of the American dream. This posture is related to the assumption, central to all earlier modernization theory, that modernization and modernity naturally and necessarily come as a coherent package—and that the materialistic affluence of upper and upper-middle classes is part of the package. The aspiration to share in that affluence, the “psychic mobility” that makes it possible to see one’s own future in those terms, is an essential part of what it means to be modern.21
The “American way of life” is a gloss on that package, dressed up for popular consumption by the twentieth-century advertising industry. This is not to argue that all of the American dream’s satisfactions are inauthentic—far from it. But, contrary to the thrust of both modernization theory and the advertising industry, there is no reason to believe that the integrity of those satisfactions depends on “having it all” or that toned-down, modest versions of such are not as good or better than versions-on-steroids. Work such as that of Nordhaus and Shellenberger begs the question of what constitutes adequate satisfaction of material needs and what constitutes the kind of overindulgence that actually stands in the way of recognizing and cultivating “higher” needs and values.22 In any case, the climate change we now face means that the content of the high-modernist dream must be disaggregated and some heretofore preeminent parts of the package given up entirely—the legitimation of material luxury, the glorification of wealth, the prospect of possession without limit—we must end the orienting and preemptive power of such over the development of human aspiration and human capital throughout the world’s population.23 But for Nordhaus and Shellenberger and their ilk, this is anathema.
The foregoing reveals the pivot of our disagreement with Nordhaus and Shellenberger and with ecological modernization theory more generally. Ecological modernization theory remains wedded to the assumption that the post-WWII form of modernization was not a wrong turn, but rather a positive development that generated some unanticipated externalities. By contrast, we assert that we now know enough about the nature and consequences of those externalities—and of planetary sensitivities and limits—to realize that they put the nail in the coffin of modernization theory and its glorification of industrial productivity and high-tech mass consumerism. We must face up to the reality that the last thirty-five years of “turbo capitalism” has been the culmination of a grand, historical wrong turn that began in the last third of the nineteenth century and reached hegemony in the twenty years after World War II.24
Of course, Nordhaus and Shellenberger are well aware that their vision of modernization spreading from today’s materialistically privileged minority to a much larger segment of the population through the application of current (fossil fuel) technology will have the unfortunate consequence of boiling the planet. Knowing this, Nordhaus and Shellenberger fall back on the classic high-modernist magic of the “technological fix.” They assert, without any real basis, that clean/green technology will allow us to have our high mass-consumption cake on a global scale and yet eat it in a low carbon-footprint manner. To be sure, Nordhaus and Shellenberger recognize the magnitude of the technological investment and innovation that they are calling for and relying upon. But at the end of the day, their way out of the GHG emissions quandary is to assert that technological breakthroughs can and will lead the way through the coming travails to a new postmodernity that is simultaneously affluent, green, and global. Indeed, they seem to believe that the new technology will not only limit the damage from the climate change (which they acknowledge to be already baked-in) but also make it possible to restart and complete the spread of near-affluence throughout the world population without further exacerbating global warming. They can cite no persuasive evidence for either of these positions. Their program is as much a matter of quasireligious faith as is new age environmentalism for its acolytes.
To realize the futility of hoping that a technological fix can solve our GHG problem without requiring a massive reduction in energy consumption, one must understand the dimensions of the global energy system. The current global economy requires the regular availability of about sixteen terawatts of electrical power generating capacity. Reducing GHG emissions by 80 percent over the next twenty-five years or so (and that target is an artifact of now outdated science—as of early 2014, it is clear that we need even greater reduction in that time frame25), can logically mean only one of two things: either we need to massively cut energy consumption (which necessarily will entail drastic cuts in aggregate economic output) or else we need to generate approximately thirteen terawatts of electric power from renewable sources.26
How feasible is the latter? An answer has been sketched by Saul Griffith, inventor, polymath, and recent MacArthur Fellowship winner: “Imagine someone said you need 2 terawatts of wind, 2 terawatts of photovoltaic solar, 2 terawatts of thermal solar, 2 terawatts of geothermal, 2 terawatts of biofuels, and 3 terawatts of nuclear to give you 13 new clean terawatts. You add the existing 1.5 terawatts of biofuels and nuclear that we already use. You can also get 3 terawatts from coal and oil. That would give humanity around 17.5 terawatts”—enough to allow “only” a 10 to 20 percent decline in energy consumption per capita over the coming generation.27 “What would it take to do all that in 25 years?” he asks.
Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells [the best currently available commercially] every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told [again, the best that is currently commercially available], we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of biofuels? Something like 4 Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 61,000 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build three 100-megawatt steam turbines every day—1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week—52 a year, times 25.28
Griffith argues that, were it built, this new global energy infrastructure would require a space approximately equal to the size of the United States, not counting the space needed for transmission lines, energy storage, materials, or support infrastructure—not to mention the costs of decommissioning coal plants, oil refineries, and all the rest of the infrastructure and detritus of two centuries of hydrocarbon indulgence. This, then, is the brutal physics and engineering of what it will take to make a wholesale conversion of the current global system from hydrocarbons to renewables, without reducing total energy usage.29
Griffith’s calculations (and our use of them), particularly as to the magnitude of the space requirements of the new energy system, have been challenged by various techno-optimists. For the sake of argument, let us stipulate that the green techno-optimists are correct about the near-term technical feasibility of 100 percent conversion of the world to clean/green energy—the readiness of solar and wind for deployment at scale; the manageable magnitude of the necessary physical plant, transmission infrastructure, and land footprint; and the relatively unproblematic efficiency of operation and maintenance of such massive structures and machinery, once in place. In fact, Griffith has said that he agrees as to technical feasibility in the abstract.30 But as Griffith’s description indicates, the manufacture of the components, the construction of the generation facilities and the storage and transmission infrastructure, and the retrofitting of major urban cores and industrial complexes to mesh with the new system will amount to the most monumental and complex engineering and construction undertaking in human history. Looking just at the societies with very large industrial, urban, and transportation sectors (roughly fifteen to twenty countries), such a project would dwarf the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, or the U.S. national highway system—or, indeed, all of those combined. A more realistic comparison would be with the transformation of the U.S. industrial and energy systems over the entire half century from World War I through the first fifteen years of the post-WWII boom—with the added burden of dismantling and disposing of the system built over the subsequent half-century (and writing off sunk costs). But as we stand right now, we don’t have half a century to work with.
Plus, the manufacture and rollout of the machinery and massive structures of this new energy system will themselves be highly energy-intensive, and, at least during the first phase, almost all that energy will have to come from burning hydrocarbons—without much, if any carbon capture and storage (CCS). And that may be true beyond the first phase, because there are real questions as to whether massive CCS will ever be viable.31 So the creation of the new energy system will necessarily be carbon-intensive, meaning we will necessarily make our problems considerably worse—in a long-lasting way—before we start to become effective on the solution end.32 There is simply no way out of this trap, absent something miraculous.
How much progress in building such systems and getting them up and running is conceivable, under the most optimistic assumptions, over the next ten, twenty, or thirty years? In the United States, major progress over the next ten years appears utterly impossible, even if the Koch brothers drop dead tomorrow. It is hard to believe that there will be much net progress over those years (i.e., increased burning of hydrocarbons—without CCS—will likely match or exceed increased clean power generation).33 But let’s suppose the improbable, that the United States and others attempt to enter upon a huge crash program early in the next decade. Is appreciable success in fulfilling the global conversion project (or even such a project for fifteen to twenty countries) conceivable under anything like existing institutional and decision-making structures?
The techno-optimists find all this perfectly feasible, because they imagine the availability, assemblage, and on-going management of huge expanses of land and massive material and technological resources, entirely abstracted from the political, legal, governmental, and organizational processes and transactions—and the human capital requirements—that would be integral to actually carrying out such a project in the real world. The problem is not just political feasibility narrowly conceived (winning elections, getting legislation passed, and prevailing in litigation, all in the face of deep-pocket opposition). Accomplishing systems-reconstruction of this magnitude within a time frame of several decades is radically beyond the system-capacities of the actually-existing governing entities of the world. Some vague recognition of this problem has very recently begun to appear among some techno-optimists, but as yet to no great result.34
Let us give the last word on this issue to Vaclav Smil, the world’s leading expert on the historical development of modern energy systems.
Installing in 10 years wind—and solar—generating capacity more than twice as large as that of fossil-fueled stations operating today while concurrently incurring write-off and building costs on the order of $4-5 trillion and reducing regulatory approval of generation and transmission megaprojects from many years to mere months would be neither achievable nor affordable at the best of times: At a time when the nation has been adding to its massive national debt at a rate approaching $2 trillion a year, it is nothing but a grand delusion (to say nothing of the fact that solar generation is far from ready to be deployed on a GW scale).
And as with all technical innovations, a definite judgment regarding long-term capability and reliability of wind-driven or PV generation is still many years ahead. Decades of cumulative experience are needed to assess properly all of the risks and benefits entailed in large-scale operation of these new systems and to quantify satisfactorily their probabilities of catastrophic failures and their true lifetime costs. This means that we will be able to offer it only after very large numbers of large-capacity units will have accumulated at least two decades of operating experience in a wide variety of conditions. This ultimate test of long-term dependence and productivity will be particularly critical for massive offshore wind farms or for extensive PV fields in harsh desert environment.35
And Smil concludes a later article with this.
Turning around the world’s fossil-fuel-based energy system is a truly gargantuan task. That system now has an annual throughput of more than 7 billion metric tons of hard coal and lignite, about 4 billion metric tons of crude oil, and more than 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. This adds up to 14 trillion watts of power. And its infrastructure—coal mines, oil and gas fields, refineries, pipelines, trains, trucks, tankers, filling stations, power plants, transformers, transmission and distribution lines, and hundreds of millions of gasoline, kerosene, diesel, and fuel oil engines—constitutes the costliest and most extensive set of installations, networks, and machines that the world has ever built, one that has taken generations and tens of trillions of dollars to put in place.
It is impossible to displace this supersystem in a decade or two—or five, for that matter. Replacing it with an equally extensive and reliable alternative based on renewable energy flows is a task that will require decades of expensive commitment. It is the work of generations of engineers.36
We hasten to emphasize that our position in this chapter is not to be confused or conflated with the comprehensive rejection of ecological modernization theory cum Third-Way-capitalist/high-modernism characteristic of new age radical environmentalism.37 Like us, such new age radicals recognize the inevitability of the decline and breakdown of existing systems—and the disappearance of high-modern abundance—under the stresses and strains of multiple crises in the context of permanent climate destabilization. And, like us, new age radical environmentalists accept the imperative of the human race as a whole (particularly the upper/upper-middle classes) making do with dramatically lower levels of materialism. But the new age hope of enacting that imperative depends upon the availability and effectiveness of a fix even more demanding than that relied upon by mainstream liberal environmentalists: a virtual spiritual revolution leading to an enlightened humanity voluntarily giving up modern materialism (not just luxury) as a practice or an aspiration. Such green radicals see this spiritual revolution as opposed primarily simply by the ignorant and the terminally greedy and selfish of the world—with the latter’s hold over the thinking of the former (presumed to be the majority) seen as contingent and ultimately tenuous. In our view, this perspective greatly underestimates the character and scale of the opposition to the proposed new age “revolution” and the difficulty of the educational and political tasks at hand.38 Moreover, left out of the picture entirely is the fact that, as things stand, warlord entrepreneurs and their ilk are much better positioned and prepared to benefit from system crisis and breakdown than are new age environmentalists.39
The optimism of the new age environmentalists is based on the conviction that the shift to a radically less materialistic, less narcissistic culture is, in the end, wholly for the good, because of the humanistic value of the expected spiritual outcome over the present materialistic lifeworld. The spiritual revolution is a winner because more and more people will come to appreciate this human truth. But this is optimistic in the extreme. The reality is that, even were it successful on its own terms (a major unknown), such a transition away from materialism would certainly come as a painful shock to the vast majority of today’s non-poor, most of whom have focused their adult lives on securing and maintaining a modern middle-class standard of living. For many, the result would be, paradoxically, existential crisis and spiritually impoverished, if not corrupted, lives (as is common among the downwardly mobile in the United States today). For those whose level of materialism is well below real affluence, radically scaling back material consumption as part of a program to save the planet would be akin to getting a gangrenous leg amputated—there’s nothing inspiring or ennobling about it, even if it is better than the alternative.
Continuing the metaphor, our problem is that, most of the time, this materialist gangrene actually feels good—and a variety of powerful forces assure us that the infection is not dangerous and urge us to enjoy it (here “legitimate” economic actors and deviant entrepreneurs are in full partnership). So how can people be convinced to accept amputation before it’s too late? It would be one thing if entire populations could leap from where they are straight into a fully formed world of universal rights, reliable public goods, and rich social capital. That would be the equivalent of immediately being fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthetic. But, of course, the world does not work that way—not least because of the shared vested interests of “legitimate” economic actors and deviant entrepreneurs in precluding it from doing so.40
Realistically, the difficulty of making “less” work politically can hardly be overstated. “Less” is something that present-day political classes literally do not know how to think about, much less how to sell to a mass public raised on “more.” Just look what happened to Jimmy Carter when he made a modest gesture in that direction—his sensible cardigans are still a political laughingstock, and not just on the Right. What would it take for politicians to champion—and publics to accept—levels of consumption well below those they have either become accustomed to or been taught to long for? Not “less” in the form of a one-time cut to material goods and energy consumption, but a steadily diminishing less, as the necessary changes are phased in over the course of a generation—less, then less, then even less, until, if we are lucky, we reach some kind of a safe plateau, as clean/green technology matures and population growth ceases planetwide.
For rich democracies, the prospect of such systemic change is politically intransigent. What elected politician can hope to sell diminishment to a population that for generations has been taught to consider a rising standard of living a birthright and has internalized the myth that “each generation does better than its parents” (where “better” means more material consumption)? From the eighteenth century on, Western visions of progress and national development have treated ever-increasing material abundance as table stakes in any definition of political or societal success. Modern and modernizing governments (of whatever ideological stripe, from Teddy Roosevelt and Lenin, through Thatcher and Gorbachev, down to the present American and Chinese leaderships) have staked their claims to legitimacy on the premise and promise of delivering MORE.41 With a few frightening exceptions, such as Kim’s North Korea or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all governments of the postwar period have promised a rising standard of living to most if not all of their people. Social compromises and political hegemonies have been brokered on the assumption that continually increasing economic productivity would neutralize distributional conflict.
To get a sense for how profoundly politics will have to change in order to fit an age of diminishment, consider how effectively the U.S. Republican Party was able to use the word “rationing” as political kryptonite in the 2009–2010 debate over health-care reform. Here was a case in which private insurers are already imposing rationing, and the government was not planning to impose any additional rationing, and still the charge was politically poisonous.42 Now imagine the government trying to actually impose rationing—and rationing of a stringent sort—across every aspect of material production and consumption, in exchange for an uncertain outcome—amounting, at best, only to a reduction of secular trends from catastrophic to difficult. American conservatives are, in this respect, relatively clear-eyed about the political-economic implications of serious climate-change mitigation efforts. That they respond by mendaciously denying the climate science itself—and depicting environmentalism as nothing but a Trojan Horse for authoritarian statism—should not distract us from the fundamental political truth they are putting their finger on, namely, that any serious effort to restrain greenhouse gases must necessarily mean a full-scale assault on what they (and many others) mean by “the American way of life”; in other words, a dismantling of a way of life defined, to quote modernization theorist Walt Rostow’s famous phrase, in terms of “the age of high mass consumption.”43
As difficult as it may be to imagine American or European or Japanese publics accepting “less” rather than “more” as their national mantra, it is even harder to imagine the emergent middle classes of the Global South willingly leaving the promised land of consumerism just at the moment when they have finally arrived. Even in authoritarian systems such as China and Russia, elites seek to employ their populations in carbon-intensive modernizing projects for the nation, and coercion by itself does not work to keep those populations dutifully on-task; some degree of social contract, some substantial payoff, must be offered and at least partially honored. A decline in China’s astounding growth rate is often cited as the single factor most likely to destabilize the political system of the world’s most populous country.44
Ultimately, it is impossible to predict what confluence of environmental and political events could sufficiently galvanize political elites and wider publics to break this intellectual and political deadlock. The environmental changes associated with GHG emissions (as typical of major system shocks in general) are likely to be nonlinear, and the political reactions to any climate-related disasters are equally unpredictable, thus piling one radical uncertainty on top of another. Two things, however, are clear: the first is that decisive political leadership, rooted in a fundamentally different conception of the economy, is absolutely required in order to take the necessary steps; and the second is that denying the magnitude of the necessary economic and cultural change—as most of our elites and policy intellectuals continue to do—makes the emergence of such political leadership all but impossible. In this latter respect, it must be pointed out that even the most politically hardheaded portions of the contemporary environmental movement are still not admitting the magnitude of the required industrial changes and the consequent political challenges.45
As argued in the last section, above, the problem is not just political feasibility narrowly conceived (winning elections, getting legislation passed, and prevailing in litigation, all in the face of deep-pocket opposition). The required level of societal and cultural reconstruction is radically beyond the system capacities (particularly political/governmental, but also epistemological) of the world’s governing entities as they actually exist. Given the existing political economies and cultures of the world—and their organizational instantiation—the broad, effective, lasting mobilization of the political and organizational will, creativity, leadership, discipline necessary to carry through a project of this magnitude, complexity, and inherent difficulty is simply unimaginable, even absent the determined opposition of well-endowed obstructionists. This is a super wicked problem that existing authorities are not going to solve.46
The climate-changed and multiple-crisis-ridden world that is coming spells the breakdown of modernity as we have known it. What will follow? Other contributors to this book have noted the power that “deviant actors” can rapidly amass during and after crises. But the kinds of deviant actors they are referring to have two great advantages over the kind of progressive “deviant” political agents that we are hoping to see rally. First, warlord entrepreneurs and their ilk are on the path of least resistance—they go with the grain of the dominant materialism rather than against it. They encourage and profit from greedy, shortsighted consumerism. In a perverse paraphrase of the old song by the Police, in a world that’s running down, they make the best (for themselves) of what’s still around.
Second, these entrepreneurs seek to take advantage of systemic failures in order to further narrow agendas. They have no interest in contributing to repair, regeneration, and improvement of larger systems, at least not beyond the trade and finance networks they utilize. They prefer that larger systems remain weak, incapable of effectively monitoring or confronting the entrepreneurs’ operations, and amenable to covert manipulation through bribery and intimidation. Thus, in crisis environments, warlord entrepreneurs have distinct operational advantages over actors with broader agendas and ambitions, both existing authorities committed to stabilization of existing systems, and radicals and humanitarians who seek system transformation in the name of a just and viable future for their grandchildren and humanity at large. Warlord entrepreneurs can focus their attention, their muscle, their human capital, and their resources much more narrowly and be more forceful and persistent in their targeted involvements. Unlike humanitarians of all stripes, warlords do not need to inspire idealistic commitment from far-flung cadres and mass bases in order to leverage limited material resources in the mounting of broad campaigns that neither return any direct pecuniary profit to the central leadership nor motivate the cadre with the prospect of quick enrichment via capture of spoils. Of course, in the climate-changed world that is coming, ultimately, only those truly ready to live by the principle “après moi, le déluge” will be able to maintain such advantageous freedom of maneuver.
It is true, as the editor of this volume has said, that particularly successful warlord entrepreneurs may “become large and invested enough to seek to stabilize their position and consolidate their gains. In this condition, they shift from entrepreneur/exploitation mode to service provider/maintenance mode, in which they become subject to implicit and explicit agreements with their customers/subjects/constituents for continued support. Thus over time, they begin to assume the role of the state itself.”47 This is still happening—and will continue to happen—on a localized level, but comprehensive extension over larger territories will become increasingly rare. In the climate-changed and multiple-crisis-ridden world that is coming, larger projects will become difficult or impossible without idealistically inspired, committed cadres and mass bases. It will be increasingly difficult to make the shift from local dominance to larger system-consolidation (requiring, among other accomplishments, the integration/subordination of all the other warlord entrepreneurs in the territory), except by committing to and sacrificing more immediate interests to some new social democratic vision—or some quasi-fascist vision. In short, transcending Puntland without becoming Pyongyang will require becoming a lot more like Portland (at its “best”), and a lot less like Houston.
Avoiding both the Puntland and Pyongyang scenarios requires developing an alternative political economy that can survive and cope in the face of the new world that is coming.48 While large-scale governmental institutions will be important on certain crucial dimensions in any Green Social Democratic version of the climate-changed world of our future, in most ways, that world—whatever version eventuates—will necessarily be much more decentralized than the current world. What would such a political economy look like, and how might we get there from where we are now? What resources exist that might make possible the building of Green Social Democracy under such difficult conditions? While it is not true that we already have—even in the lab—everything we need in the way of clean/green technology, and all that is lacking is the will to fund full development and deployment, it is true that around the planet there are many people, groups, and communities that know and practice (at least in bits and pieces) something like the techniques, methodologies, and policies needed to step back from high-carbon materialism.49 The state of Kerala in India, with a population of over thirty million, has been (in some respects) a striking large-scale example.50 There are also many lessons, models, and toolkits to be picked up from communities and organizations around the world.51 And cross-fertilization between all this and advanced clean/green technology has taken off. What we do not have is an example of a national society adopting such practices anywhere near comprehensively—or even trying to move decisively in that direction. This is particularly true of the largest societies. As things stand, the voracious, high-ecological-footprint urban and industrial sectors of the largest societies will drag the rest of the world down into oblivion with them, no matter how green the rest of the world becomes.52
For national societies to move decisively toward institutionalizing appropriate practices and technologies, existing institutions must be reconfigured so as to enable, coordinate, and manage appropriate investments, and both institutional personnel and the population at large must buy into the program with some dedication.53 This will require a profound switching of gears, an intellectual and political reorientation that, in turn, demands a retooling of the entire stock of human capital of the social sciences, the professions, organizational management, and public administration.54
So is there some way to gather the lessons, technological innovations, stores of knowledge, toolkits, and green practices that are accumulating around the world and to synthesize them into a set of models that majorities everywhere might be persuaded to choose among, adopt, and enact? Note that the result must include the legitimation and administration of lawful coercion—up to and including the use of paramilitary force, if necessary—against ostrich-like status-quo dead-enders and self-serving deviant actors. As we have laid out above, existing environmental movements aren’t going to get that job done, given their reluctance to face up to the magnitude of the challenge—and given the power of elite opposition, the recalcitrance of majorities in thrall to materialistic modernity, and the tactical advantages of warlord entrepreneurs. What is needed then is a larger narrative with the potential to legitimize radical departure from the status quo to wider audiences, including renunciation of aspirations to affluence and the moral ostracism of those who insist on indulgence in material luxury. Neither radical environmentalism nor centrist ecological-modernization policy discourse is providing the larger narrative we need to challenge and replace the orthodoxy of neoliberal modernization theory and “the American way of life.”
The twentieth century’s leading sources of broad, transformative vision, the Marxist and socialist traditions, are largely unhelpful in this regard, given that they expected to build on the material abundance and technological wizardry of advanced capitalism. In most mainstream versions of socialism, capitalist consumerism was cast not as ecologically unsustainable, but rather as the penultimate form of economic modernity, one revolution short of the end game. In the finalized form, the entire population was to enjoy a version of the affluence formerly limited to the wealthy, as well as “higher” values. Even those who saw the early years of the “transition to socialism” as occurring in the context of Spartan Third World revolution assumed that the revolution would eventually fulfill itself in a socialism of mass abundance.55 That a life of higher values might be constructed in the permanent—not temporary—absence of mass affluence was not contemplated in these traditions, at least not in their twentieth-century versions.
We propose looking to a different historical tradition, namely, the petty bourgeois political culture of capitalism’s early and middle industrial eras in North America and Europe. This tradition did not call for the overthrow of capitalism but rather argued for a more modest and cautious (in a sense, more “conservative”), more egalitarian and democratic, more decentralized “producerist” capitalism.56 A twenty-first-century producerist capitalism would recast this politically democratic tradition, but in the context of vigorously and comprehensively Green economics. This kind of robust, community-centric self-empowerment could perhaps be a viable alternative to going down with the ship of high-modernist capitalism as it breaks up or to taking to the lifeboats captained by warlord entrepreneurs.
Many countries can look back to their own early-modern experiences for something analogous to producerist republicanism. In Russia, they might look back to Bukharin and the New Economic Program years; in China, it would be the World War II cooperatives and the “Yenan Way” born out of that experience; for India, it would involve looking to how the Kerala of the last fifty years has built on Gandhi’s movement.57 But the history of conflicts within the development of capitalism in the United States is particularly instructive in this regard.
From the American revolution through the 1930s, the United States has a rich history of democratic radicalism and enlightened populism among skilled craftsmen, artisans, family farmers, business people, professionals, and intellectuals, centered on the lower middle class, but reaching up into the higher middle classes and down into the rural and urban working classes. These traditions have often been denigrated by both Marxists and liberals as entirely unenlightened—anti-industrial and antimodernist, prone to anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-intellectualism. But such judgments, while by no means entirely wrong, crudely homogenize a highly variegated history and set of movements.58
What these movements and traditions, at their best, had in common was along the following lines: the demand that self-managed, self-enhancing work and political citizenship be valorized and protected from the depredations of federalist aristocracy, the slave power, the robber barons, the trusts, Wall Street, and corporate capitalism. Most of the leaders and cadres of most of these movements and organizations, including many of the agrarian Populists, were neither wholly modernist nor wholly antimodernist. They were not enemies of commerce and industry per se. Many were professionals and teachers, tinkering “mechanics,” agricultural and sociopolitical innovators, interested in science; they participated vigorously and rationally in the public spheres and civil societies of their days—indeed, they were among the most important authors of the greatly expanded public spheres of their days. By the later nineteenth century, a substantial proportion of the leaders and cadres of these movements were women, pioneers of female civic activism, who went on to be key leaders and cadres of the elaborate, Progressive civil society of the early twentieth century.
The social protection these movements sought included public construction and ownership of major infrastructure and government regulation of the corporate capital, finance, and the factory system. They promoted widespread small production, linked together in a “cooperative commonwealth” through large-scale producer co-ops and vigorous political organization. Social and political identities were understood to be rooted in such cooperative arrangements of production and community self-management, rather than in privatized, individualistic practices of consumption.
This political tradition provides an Archimedean point from which to critique the pop-modernization-theory view of economic viability and societal success that has become hegemonic over the past seventy-five years. Recapturing the energies and hopes of this lost political assemblage allows us to see more clearly the assumptions and limitations of the orthodox, growth-centered vision of modernity that has led us to the brink of global ecological catastrophe. From the Civil War to World War II, neither economic theory nor popular political folklore insisted that modernity necessarily came as an integrated package, a package whose central components include the unlimited pursuit of industrial revolution, incarnated in gigantic, ravenous factories; the transformation of the population into “personnel” within complex, hierarchical organizations; and the elaboration and institutionalization of a culture of material consumerism and high-tech entertainment. The hegemonic culture that sees these developments as central to modernity is not the product of the natural progress of efficiency, science, and rationality; a particular pattern of contingent political victories and defeats has played a major role. This pattern need not be accepted as irreversible; path dependency need not be enshrined as unbreakable.59
We now need to revive aspects of the popular political culture of petty bourgeois civic republicanism that valued community, solidarity, moral economy, meaningful work, self-management, and democratic citizenship over economistic individualism, material affluence, and private consumerism. Note that we are not saying that any of the earlier incarnations of producer republicanism could have been fully victorious in its time, nor are we saying that any could be or should be reincarnated whole now. Recovery must include critically-minded updating and reformulation in the light of the lessons of the past seventy-five years. In particular, we need to spike that heritage with a major dose of cosmopolitanism regarding race, gender, and sexuality,60 and we must give up the vision of an eventual metamorphosis into a socialism of abundance. Such a project is surely not without intellectual rewards, and, as a leading historian of American Progressivism and petty bourgeois radicalism has said:
Nor are such utopias unattainable.… Charles Sabel, Michael Piore, and Jonathan Zeitlin have created something of a school of political economy that has demonstrated the economic viability of small-scale production within flourishing, democratic economic networks. Historically, Sabel and Zeitlin reconstruct and rehabilitate a craft-based alternative to mass production, an alternative that had impressively strong roots in various cities and regions throughout the nineteenth-century transatlantic world. Flexibility and constant innovation in specialized production formed the foundation for a labor process that revolved around skilled workers … with owners and workers often attaining a solidarity difficult for us to imagine as part of business relations. And despite the many defeats this small-scale alternative met at the hands of both capitalist and social democratic advocates of a mass-production economy, it did not disappear but merely went underground, showing a remarkable resurgence since the 1970s. Especially strong in western Europe, “flexible specialization,” or “small firm networks,” provide a contemporary living model of what Michael Albert has aptly characterized as “Capitalism against Capitalism.”61
The ray of hope that we hold out is that our imagined Green Social Democracy, underpinned and legitimized by producerist republicanism, will ground itself in an acceptance of the limits imposed by the fecundity of local environments and networks, rather than a Promethean ethos of constant overcoming of those limits. As such, it would encourage localized sourcing, localized production, and localized consumption. It would focus on the conversion of public infrastructure to low-carbon, clean energy as quickly as possible. It would provide universal access to such infrastructure, while making private use of centrally generated power and water quite expensive above a very modest minimum allotment. Tax and regulatory policies would focus on environmental impact and resource management. Governments, educational systems, and civil society would prioritize training, equipping, and enabling the population to be low-carbon “producers” of useful goods and services (especially the “human services”), and informed, environmentally conscious, responsible citizens within local communities, organizations, and enterprises. In other words, it would be something like the comprehensive elaboration of an intensely green version of the “social economy” model that has worked on the local level in Quebec and other places, and the “transition town” model that has taken off in England.62
Given the scale of necessary systemic retrofits—and the onslaught of disasters that must be prepared for, engaged, and recovered from—there will be a huge amount of work in energy and manufacturing conversion, infrastructure adaptation, ecological reclamation, emergency response, human services, and community development, and so on. This will be a full-employment economy, for the most part locally focused. Moreover, such a political economy—one emphasizing high levels of environmentally conscious human and social capital, largely situated in small production units (owned privately or through co-ops or local government) and community-based human services, supported and coordinated (but not centrally planned or directed) by larger, environmentally informed public institutions—would enable cutting GHG emissions and render societies more resilient and adaptive in the face of climate change. It is plausible that people whose lives are rich in social capital, educational opportunity, interesting work, and citizenship rights and responsibilities will be more amenable to being weaned off materialistic addictions—or they wouldn’t develop strong addictions in the first place—particularly if a supportive political culture has been brought into being in advance and is rising toward hegemony.
This brings us back to the question of whether there is any realistic prospect of overcoming the political obstacles that are so formidable as to render the programs of both radical and mainstream environmentalists unrealistic. Why should our suggested political project fare any better? Why should mixing environmentalism and producer republicanism produce a viable, powerful hybrid, much less a magic bullet? Why should a new Green Social Democracy, struggling to establish itself under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, do better in remaking failing systems than warlord entrepreneurs do in exploiting system breakdown? Is it at all realistic to think we might create a path whereby we eventually find ourselves with modest Portlands outnumbering Puntlands and Pyongyangs?
Hope arises from two fundamental and connected facts. First, none of the political economies and political cultures of the modern world is monolithic or completely controlled by those wedded to the status quo. They are shot through with tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions, even societies (such as the United States) where dominant groups have been quite successful in legitimating themselves and institutionalizing their hegemony. Middle classes and “publics” are highly variegated, both within and across societies, and full of ambivalence. This represents an opening for those who would save the system from itself. As system failures and breakdowns accumulate in the climate-changed and crisis-ridden world that is coming, along with ever more credible warnings of worse to come, the existing high-modernist narrative will become less and less convincing and its hegemony harder and harder to sustain. More people will be increasingly open to a new “education.” Second, some of the necessary political culture is still there, deep in the American grain, substantially co-opted, but never eliminated by the hegemonic, hyper-materialistic version of the “American way of life.” Elements of producerist republican political culture are, in fact, being asserted in current public debate, including in right-wing constituencies, whose knee-jerk opposition to environmentalism may be weakened by a green producerist republicanism that invokes new versions of familiar old values.63
Again, we note that the result must include lawful coercion—including the use of paramilitary force, if necessary—against ostrich-like status-quo dead-enders, their quasi-fascist successors, and self-serving warlords of all kinds. But it should also be noted that the producerist republican tradition is full of episodes of armed citizen militias—even rising to the level of armies—defending their way of life and their communities against enemies of various kinds. Historically, this may have been reprehensible as often as it was admirable—and we see quasi-fascistic manifestations of it all over the world today. But we can also find many episodes that contain positive examples and lessons that might be modernized and incorporated in the larger project we are proposing. The great French social democratic leader and theorist Jean Jaures proposed exactly such a project.64 It is not unreasonable to dream of Portlands—joined in regional Hanseatic-type leagues—successfully defending themselves against warlords and perhaps even against fascist regimes (given that no one is going to be able to afford much in the way of air forces or missiles). (Of course, a lot will depend on whether the world still contains deliverable nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.)
The most we can do now is prepare a suite of building blocks that might allow such a project to get off the ground once current political economies and governments are in profound, undeniable crisis due to the socioeconomic consequences of climate destabilization. Such preparation must include maximizing the development of clean-energy and decarbonization technologies and the elaboration of disaster mitigation, management, and adaptation programs. But above and beyond such efforts, we require the construction of a politics and a cultural narrative that prioritizes shared public goods and responsible citizenship, creating a higher capacity for authoritative, collective decision making. That new politics and cultural narrative must persuasively explain the need for everyone in the world to give up material affluence as either a practice or an aspiration (constructing what we might think of as an enlightened “lower-middle-class” model of material sufficiency and sharing—drawing on “producer republicanism”—as a universal moral imperative). Turning the social sciences, the professions, public intellectuals, academia, and the modern middle classes in general decisively in this direction—and away from technocratic utopianism—is the most urgent imperative, particularly in the United States. And none of this can be accomplished absent the decisive political defeat of those who are determined to maintain their wealth and privilege no matter the cost.
We recognize that realization of our hopes on any grand (i.e., sufficient) scale is unlikely, but the foregoing is the best strategy we can think of and, in any case, as Mike Davis says, “either we fight for ‘impossible’ solutions … or become ourselves complicit in a de facto triage of humanity”—which Davis counts (quoting a UN report) as “a moral failure on a scale unparalleled in history.”65 Unlike much radical green thinking, our analysis is not predicated on semireligious or New Age hopes for a spiritual revolution; it is firmly rooted in class and social analysis. Clearly, in order to succeed at any grand scale, a broad, cross-class coalition must be developed, based on the conviction that continuing commitment to high-modernist affluence makes one complicit in a civilizational and human catastrophe of unfathomable proportions. Is it possible for the middle and lower-middle classes in the most advanced societies (and the largest societies, in particular) to become part of the solution instead of part of the problem? The human potential is there, but can it be widely realized within the current conjuncture and available time frame?66 It may well be that we cannot retool (technologically, institutionally, culturally, psychologically) fast enough, given the inertia of the old ways and the power of those who blindly insist on carrying those old ways forward. We cannot know, but what we can say is that it looks like the next couple decades will be our last chance to build the political and human-capital base that might make the conversion possible.67