Alumni Articles - Peter McKillop '73

The Final Crisis of Capital

Thousands of climate cognoscenti are gathering in New York for Climate Week. Walker Daniel Peatross is not one of them. Instead, he'll be working his day job at a Texas pharmaceutical company. Too bad. Two years ago, Peatross wrote a brilliant master's dissertation, “Climate Change: The Final Crisis Of Capital,” which he says “breaks from the typical language of climate discussion.” 
 

To put it mildly.

Peatross is of a growing school of “Climate Marxists,” arguing that climate change is as much a political economy issue as it is a matter of science. “Capitalism is indisputably the hegemonic political-economic organization that governs the world today, and with that reality comes an unavoidable contradiction with the environmental stability of our planet,” he writes.

We discovered his thesis in a footnote to an interview we had a few years ago with Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry of the Future. Intrigued, we called him last week (in spite of his phone periodically melting down in the Texas heat) to better understand what he describes as the most profound contradiction of our times. “Capitalism requires the infinite expansion of natural resources on a finite planet. This dynamic is driving the escalating climate crisis because capital has no endpoint. Nature does.”

Read the interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, republished in Climate & Capital this week

Global capitalistic hegemony

Peatross, to be sure, is not the first to use Marxist analysis to probe the climate crisis. A decade ago, Naomi Klein argued that humans don't cause climate collapse; capitalism does. In his 2009 cult classic Capitalist Realism, the late British philosopher Mark Fisher wrote that the new post-Cold War consensus is that “there is no alternative to capitalism.” 

This “capitalist hegemony” spells disaster, warns Peatross. The “incessant expansion of production required to preserve the function of capitalism will necessarily drive the exploitation of natural resources beyond this concrete limit, rendering vast swaths of the Earth inhospitable to human life.”

Probing planetary limits

He said this as forest fires raged out of control last week in northern Portugal and record floods battered Central Europe and killed thousands in Nigeria. Across the African continent, in Sudan, tens of millions are fleeing climate and military violence as climate change turns once hospitable regions into uninhabitable hellscapes.

Not surprisingly, pinning the blame on capitalism has not made climate Marxists the darlings of convenings like Climate Week, Davos, or COP. None are invited to panels this week at the United Nations, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the FT, or MSCI. This, says Pesatross, “reflects the prevailing conventional wisdom of capitalist realism, where it is assumed that positive climate action only arises from the unquestioned assumption that the continued growth of profits must be maintained.” Those who suggest otherwise are treated as “idealistic, draconian, and uncompromising.”

Keynesian climate solutions?

Peatross, Klein, Fischer, and others raise a profound dilemma first made by the Marxist political theorists Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, who wrote that “it's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” The influence of capitalism is now so pervasive that it has gotten personal — triggering a growing global despondency that nothing can be done to save the planet. Fisher himself may have been a victim, as he, at the age of 48, committed suicide eight years after he wrote his seminal book.

But before killing himself, he had one final idea he called “Acid Communism.” Psychedelic ”liberation” was needed for “a new humanity, a new seeing, a new thinking, a new loving.”

Robinson, and Peatross offer an alternative solution to Harris’ global ‘Summer of Love vision. LSD aside, the only practical way to curb the climate crisis, they argue, is to replace the invisible hand of capitalistic self-interest with the heavy hand of state power.

The solution, says Peatross, is “an industrial economy built on renewable energy and need-based production that can operate in balance with the limitations of the natural world.” Robinson calls it “a kind of Keynesian way to get the job done” where governments “would drive rapid change, create new money to pay for it, and pay private industries and businesses to do the big, non-profitable parts of the job.” What cannot continue, says Peatross, is a “commodity economy and its ever-expanding pursuit of profit that creates environmental harm.”
 

The end of neoliberal climate solutions?

Of course, this top-down embrace of government flies in the face of more than half a century of economic conventional wisdom championed by Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan. It also raises the obvious question of whether we could adapt to such a radical lifestyle change. Are we ready to return to the ration books and Liberty (now organic) Gardens of World War II?

But an even more profound question is whether we will have a choice. Solving the climate crisis without controlling capitalism will not solve the planetary ecological death spiral humanity now faces, Peastross argues. “If tomorrow we magically reduced global carbon emissions to zero. Then, topsoil degradation would threaten agricultural collapse. If not that, then the growing shortage of clean, fresh water will, or the collapse of ocean ecosystems.”

The climate crisis, he concludes, requires “solutions that cannot coexist with capitalism today.”

Or as another wise climate philosopher, Alex Stefan, warns:

“We’re no longer capable of preventing a massive planetary crisis — we’re in one. Nothing we can now do will roll back the clock. A pathway to an orderly transition with minimal disruption and a return to continuity no longer exists. Climate is no longer an issue but the era in which a new Harris presidency will play out.”

We are entering an era that will require a rethink of everything we do, like it or not.