The US dollar and the pound sterling: The role of currencies in the uneven process of decline of hegemonic imperialist powers

Michael Pröbsting
27 June, 2024


We have repeatedly dealt with the historic decline of U.S. imperialism — the hegemonic power among capitalist states since 1945 — and the rise of new rivals, mainly China and Russia. While the US is still a leading power it is no longer an absolute hegemon that dominates the world economy and politics.1

We have also pointed to the uneven character of this process of decline. On one hand, the US is no longer first, or is closely rivalled by China, in global output, manufacturing, trade, top corporations or the number of billionaires. (See tables in Appendix below.) On the other hand, there are fields where Washington still has a strong lead. This is, for example, true in the military field where the US possesses the largest number of foreign military bases as well as the strongest navy. However, when it comes to nuclear missiles, Russia is similarly strong. Furthermore, China is rapidly expanding its armed forces (including nuclear weapons) and is already second in military expenditures behind the US.2

Challenges to Western-dominated financial institutions

Furthermore, Washington’s rivals are starting to challenge long-time US hegemony in these spheres. In response to the accelerating US policy of imposing sanctions against rivals, other powers have started to build independent systems for payments settlement. Russia created the ruble-based SPFS, China its CIPS (where domestic and international payments are done in Chinese RMB), and India has built its UPI. In addition, European powers have created INSTEX to facilitate trade between Europe and Iran. Russia and China have already started the process of linking their respective international payment systems.

One can therefore only agree with the following remark of an economist: “There is still a long way to go before there is a real threat to the dominance of the dollar, but the trend toward the fragmentation of the global financial system cannot be reversed now.”3

In addition, there are serious efforts within the China/Russia-led BRICS+ alliance to establish a new international currency, called the Unit, as an alternative to the US dollar. The Unit would be anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%). It is said that the concept for this new currency has already received backing by the BRICS+ Business Council and is on the agenda at the ministerial meetings in Russia in the coming months.4

In fact, the past two years have shown that the new imperialist powers, China and Russia, have been able to challenge Western hegemony even in the financial sphere.5 Despite unprecedented sanctions by the NATO states, Russia’s economy not only withstood this pressure but continued its vast trade relations with many non-Western countries.

The Economist, mouthpiece of the Anglo-Saxon neoliberal bourgeoisie, noted in a recently published special survey: ”To a Muscovite banker, globalization is not dead. It simply no longer involves America and its allies. [This] case suggests an epochal shift in the global financial system. This report will argue that an array of forces – some long-standing, others newer – have combined to reduce the system’s dependence on Western capital, institutions and payment networks, and on America in particular.”6

In the past decade there has been an intense debate among Marxists about the decline of US imperialism. Our opponents rejected the thesis of the rise of Chinese and Russian imperialism and claimed that we exaggerate US decline.7 To substantiate their thesis they refer not only to Washington’s military strength but also ongoing US domination of global financial institutions.

In response, we have argued that the financial position of a state, important as it is, does not accurately reflect its role within the capitalist world economy and politics. This is because it only reflects indirectly and in a delayed manner changes in the process of capitalist value production. Hence, the position of the US currency is much stronger than its position in the productive sector of the world economy. This is because such changes do not take place simultaneously but with an interval. We stated that the current position of the US Dollar in the global currency market does not represent the actual economic strength of Washington but rather reflects its past strength. Hence, it is only a matter of time until the position of the currency adjusts to the position in the real economy.

In this article we would like to discuss a precedent for such a process — the decline of British imperialism and the role of its currency, the Pound Sterling before World War I.
The uneven decline of British imperialism in the first half of the 20th century

In the early period of the imperialist epoch, Britain was the hegemonic power. It possessed by far the largest colonial empire, the largest navy, was the largest capital exporter etc. However, Britain faced emerging imperialist rivals, most importantly Germany and the US. The result was an uneven process of decline, as can be seen from several figures that reflect the relation of forces between the imperialist powers shortly before World War I.

In capitalist value production, Britain had already lost its leading position in the years before 1914. Germany had a higher share of global industrial production and the US’ share was nearly double the British. When it came to world trade, Britain was still first but only slightly ahead of its rivals. (See Table 1)

Table 1. Great Powers’ Share in Global Industrial Production and Trade, 19138

Industrial Production World Trade

Britain 14% 15%

United States 36% 11%

Germany 16% 13%

France 6% 8%

However, in the spheres of military, capital export and currency, London was still by far the dominating power — similar to the position of US imperialism today. Britain’s overseas investments were as large as the combined share of the next three powers: Germany, the US and France. (See Table 2)

Table 2. Great Powers’ Share in Global Capital Export, 1913 9

Britain 41% (44%)

France 20%

Germany 13%

United States 8%

We see a similar picture when we compare the maritime strength of the Great Powers. In contrast to its economic decline, Britain was able to keep its dominating naval strength among the European powers. (See Table 3)

Table 3. Warship Tonnage of the European Powers, 1880 and 1914 10

Country 1880 1914 (1) 1914 (2)

Britain 650,000 2,714,000 2,205,000

Germany 88,000 1,305,000 1,019,000

France 271,000 900,000 731,000

Russia 200,000 679,000 328,000


The very slow decline of the Pound Sterling

Similar to the US today, Britain also retained the leading role of its currency, the Pound Sterling. According to economist Barry Eichengreen, “between 1860 and 1914 probably about 60 percent of world trade was invoiced and settled in sterling.”11

Likewise, the Sterling was by far the dominant currency in known official foreign exchange assets at the turn of the century. Although its share declined, it was still in a leading position before the beginning of World War I. (See Table 4)

Table 4. Shares of Currencies in Known Official Foreign Exchange Assets, 1899-1913 12

End of 1899 End of 1913

Sterling 64% 48%

Francs 16% 31%

Marks 15% 15%

Other currencies 6% 6%

It is remarkable that the Sterling remained a leading foreign currency after World War I and even for some time after World War II, as in 1950 over 55% of foreign exchange reserves were still held in Sterling. By then, Britain was clearly no longer the hegemonic power — neither economically, politically nor militarily.

Catherine R. Schenk, an economic historian, writes: “In the 1950s the sterling area (thirty-five countries and colonies pegged to sterling and holding primarily sterling reserves) accounted for half of world trade, and sterling accounted for more than half the world’s foreign exchange reserves. In the early post-war years this share had been even higher; the IMF estimated that official sterling reserves, excluding those held by colonies, were four times the value of official dollar reserves and that by 1947 sterling accounted for about 87 per cent of global foreign exchange reserves. It took ten years following the end of the war (and a 30 per cent devaluation of the pound) before the share of dollar reserves exceeded that of sterling.”13
Concluding remarks

Our brief historical comparison has shown that the law of uneven and combined development in history applies also to the process of decline of a hegemonic power.14 We saw this in the early period of the imperialist epoch when Britain was no longer the dominating power and challenged by emerging imperialist powers such as Germany and the US. Currently, there is a similar process underway as US imperialism — hegemon among capitalist countries since 1945 — experiences a process of decline while China and Russia are rising as new Great Powers.

However, such a process of decline takes place in an uneven and contradictory way. Britain was no longer the leading industrial producer or trading power, and, more fundamentally, it could no longer dominate world politics. However, it still possessed by far the largest navy, which allowed it to control global oceans and, hence, world trade. Likewise, it owned nearly half of the world’s foreign direct investments and the Pound Sterling was the dominating currency on the world market.

The evolution of the US’ decline has many similar features. China has already surpassed, or is closely behind, the US in terms of capitalist industrial production, trade, leading global corporations, billionaires, etc. At the same time, Washington still has the strongest armed forces and dominates global financial institutions. This is also reflected in the leading position of the US dollar in the global currency market. However, such a leading position does not reflect so much the current but rather the past strength of the declining hegemon.

In fact, the old Western-dominated global order of the capitalist world economy is close to collapse in the face of the new imperialist powers. The Economist recently warned in an editorial: ”For years the order that has governed the global economy since the second world war has been eroded. Today it is close to collapse. A worrying number of triggers could set off a descent into anarchy where might is right and war is once again the resort of great powers.”15

For all these reasons, we oppose the thesis advocated by some Marxists that the US is still the dominating hegemon and its rivals, such as China and Russia, are not imperialist powers. We are no longer in a world dominated by a single hegemon but rather one that is characterised by an accelerating rivalry between old and new imperialist powers. As developments in the second decade of the twentieth century have demonstrated, a strong military or dominating currency do not guarantee the hegemonic role of a declining Great Power.

In such a historic period, it is crucial for Marxists to recognize the imperialist nature of all Great Powers — the Western (U.S., Western Europe and Japan) as well as the Eastern (China and Russia) — and to intransigently oppose all of them!

Michael Pröbsting is a socialist activist and writer. He is the editor of the website http://www.thecommunists.net/ where a version of this article first appeared.
Appendix

Table A. Top Six Countries in Global Manufacturing, 2000 and 2022 16

Rank Country Share 2000 Share 2022

1. China 9.8% 30.7%

2. U.S. 23.7% 16.1%

3. Japan 10.2% 6.0%

4. Germany 6.4% 4.8%

5. South Korea 2.5% 3.1%

6. India 1.4% 3.1%



Table B. Leading Exporters in World Merchandise Trade excluding intra-EU Trade, 2023 17

Rank Country 2022

1. China 17.5%

2. EU 14.3%

3. U.S. 10.4%

4. Japan 3.7%

5. South Korea 3.3%



Table C. Top 10 Countries with the Ranking of Fortune Global 500 Companies (2023) 18

Rank Country Companies Share (in%)

1 United States 136 27.2%

2 China (without Taiwan) 135 27.0%

3 Japan 41 8.2%

4 Germany 30 6.0%

5 France 23 4.6%

6 South Korea 18 3.6%

7 United Kingdom 15 3.0%

8 Canada 14 2.8%

9 Switzerland 11 2.2%

10 Netherlands 10 2.0%



Table D. Top 5 Countries of the Forbes Billionaires 2023 List 19

Rank Country . Number of billionaires

1 United States 735

2 China (incl. Hong Kong) 561

3 India 169

4 Germany 126

5 Russia 105



Table E. Top 5 Countries of the Hurun Global Rich List 2022 20

Rank Country Number of billionaires

1 China (incl. Hong Kong) 923

2 U.S. 691

3 India 187

4 Germany 144

5 United Kingdom 1341

Our most detailed works on the Marxist theory of imperialism are two books Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Great Power Rivalry. The Factors behind the Accelerating Rivalry between the U.S., China, Russia, EU and Japan. A Critique of the Left’s Analysis and an Outline of the Marxist Perspective, RCIT Books, Vienna 2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/anti-imperialism-in-the-age-of-great-power-rivalry/; The Great Robbery of the South. Continuity and Changes in the Super-Exploitation of the Semi-Colonial World by Monopoly Capital Consequences for the Marxist Theory of Imperialism, RCIT Books, 2013, https://www.thecommunists.net/theory/great-robbery-of-the-south/
2

Michael Pröbsting, "Inter-imperialist rivalry and the specter of de-dollarization: On the decline of the US Dollar since the start of the Ukraine War," LINKS, 12 May, 2023, https://links.org.au/inter-imperialist-rivalry-and-specter-de-dollarization-decline-us-dollar-start-ukraine-war
3

Alexandra Prokopenko: "How the Latest Sanctions Will Impact Russia—and the World", Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 20, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2024/06/finance-sanctions-russia-currency
4

Pepe Escobar: De-Dollarization Bombshell, 13 May 2024, https://www.unz.com/pescobar/de-dollarization-bombshell/
5

See e.g. Michael Pröbsting: "BRICS+: An Imperialist-Led Alliance", 30 August 2023, LINKShttps://links.org.au/brics-imperialist-led-alliance
6

The Economist: "Special Report: Deglobalisation of finance", 11 May 2024, p. 3
7

See on this Michael Pröbsting: “Imperialism, Great Power rivalry and revolutionary strategy in the twenty-first century”, 1 September, 2023, https://links.org.au/imperialism-great-power-rivalry-and-revolutionary-strategy-twenty-first-century; Michael Pröbsting: “‘Empire-ism’ vs a Marxist analysis of imperialism: Continuing the debate with Argentinian economist Claudio Katz on Great Power rivalry, Russian imperialism and the Ukraine War”, 3 March 2023, https://links.org.au/empire-ism-vs-marxist-analysis-imperialism-continuing-debate-argentinian-economist-claudio-katz; “Russia: An Imperialist Power or a ‘Non-Hegemonic Empire in Gestation’? A reply to the Argentinean economist Claudio Katz”, New Politics, 11 August 2022, at https://newpol.org/russia-an-imperialist-power-or-a-non-hegemonic-empire-in-gestation-a-reply-to-the-argentinean-economist-claudio-katz-an-essay-with-8-tables/
8

Jürgen Kuczynski: Studien zur Geschichte der Weltwirtschaft, Berlin 1952, p. 35 and p. 43.
9

Paul Bairoch and Richard Kozul-Wright: "Globalization Myths: Some Historical Reflections on Integration, Industrialization and Growth in the World Economy", UNCTAD Discussion Papers No. 113, 1996, p. 12. The late Eric Hobsbawn gives the figure of 44% for Britain’s share in foreign investment. (E. J. Hobsbawm: The Age of Empire, Vintage Books, New York 1989, p.51)
10

Figures for the columns 1880 and 1914 (1) are taken from Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Unwin Hyman, London 1988, p. 203; figures for the column 1914 (2) are taken from Niall Ferguson: The Pity of War, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London 1998, p. 85.
11

Barry Eichengreen: Sterling’s Past, Dollar’s Future: Historical Perspectives on Reserve Currency Competition, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 11336, p. 4. see also Peter H. Lindert: Key Currencies and Gold 1900-1913,” Princeton Studies in International Finance No. 24, International Finance Section, Department of Economics, Princeton University, (1969); Violaine Faubert: Learning from the first globalisation (1870-1914), Trésor-Economics No. 93, October 2011
12

Ibid, p. 28
13

Catherine R. Schenk: The Decline of Sterling. Managing the Retreat of an International Currency, 1945–1992 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2010, p. 30
14

On the law of uneven and combined development in history see Michael Pröbsting: "Capitalism Today and the Law of Uneven Development. The Marxist Tradition and Its Application in the Present Historic Period", in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory (Volume 44, Issue 4, 2016), pp. 381-418, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03017605.2023.2199592
15

The Economist: "The new economic order", 11 May 2024, p. 7
16

Figures for the year 2000: APEC: Regional Trends Analysis, May 2021, p. 2; the figures for Germany and India in the first column are for the year 2005 (UNIDO: Industrial Development Report 2011, p. 194); figures for the year 2022: UNIDO: International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics Edition 2023, pp. 36-37
17

WTO: Global Trade Outlook and Statistics, April 2024, p. 40
18

Fortune Global 500, August 2023, https://fortune.com/ranking/global500/2023/ (the figures for the share is our calculation)
19

Forbes: Forbes Billionaires 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2023/04/04/forbes-37th-annual-worlds-billionaires-list-facts-and-figures-2023/?sh=23927e7477d7
20

Hurun Global Rich List 2021, 2.3.2021, https://www.hurun.net/en-US/Info/Detail?num=LWAS8B997XUP

ANC’s crushing electoral defeat: A nightmare of coalitions, splits and neoliberal crisis

Gunnett Kaaf
29 June, 2024

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First published in Socialist Project.

South Africa is in the throes of a deepening political and social crisis. The precipitous electoral loss of the African National Congress (ANC) by a whopping 17 percentage points, from 57% to 40% in general elections held on 29 May 2024, was a signal of this deepening political and social crisis. It was a decisive rejection of the ANC by voters, following the ANC’s political dominance for 30 years, during which the ANC presided over a neoliberal economic development that wrought dire development outcomes such as a high level of unemployment, massive poverty, huge income and wealth inequality, rural and urban underdevelopment and poor delivery of basic public services by the state. This was accompanied by a widespread corruption within the state, leading to a decline of confidence in public institutions.

The voters have rejected the ANC for its neoliberal development project and its wide spread corruption within the state in the last 30 years. But voters did not vote for a party to succeed the ANC as a ruling party; even worse, they did not vote for parties that will help exit the deepening neoliberal crisis. The viable alternatives that are needed to exit the neoliberal crisis cannot be found among mainstream parties. That’s why South Africa is in the throes of a deepening political and social crisis.

Going into this election, it was largely expected that ANC was to fall below 50%. That is a big dynamic of this election because it implies the break of the ANC’s 30-years-long dominance of electoral politics, since the official fall of apartheid in 1994.
Political shockwaves

Most survey polls before the elections were putting ANC at 45%, tending toward 40%. But then the general expectation was that the ANC was going to get anything between 45% to 50%. In that case, forming a coalition government would not be such a nightmare because they would simply pick up small parties to patch up to get 50% plus. Now that the fall is so steep at 40%, shockwaves have been sent throughout the political system in South Africa.

Another big shocker of this election was the spectacular performance by former President, Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) party [not to be confused with the military wing of the ANC], just after six months after its formation. MK won 14.58% of the national vote, and received 45% in Kwazulu-Natal province, which is the second largest province where some 20% of the SA population lives. They also registered significant electoral victories in Gauteng, the province with the largest share(24%) of the population, and in Mpumalanga where they won 17% of the provincial vote, bringing the ANC down from 70% to 51%. MK’s surge definitely happened at the expense of the ANC, because they share the same electoral base with the ANC. MK is a splinter party that was formed by Jacob Zuma, a former president of the ANC and the country, who enjoys large popularity among ANC members and supporters, despite being corrupt and conservative.

This article analyses the political and social dynamics that set the context for the ANC’s crushing electoral defeat and the implications of the election results for the realignment of political and social forces.
Why did the ANC dominate for 30 years, without a challenge?

The first democratic election of April 1994 was a victory of the national liberation struggle over apartheid. Led by Nelson Mandela, the ANC won the 1994 election by a landslide victory of 62 % and earned the mantle of being the sole party of national liberation, with a mandate to lead the people to the promised land of a truly liberated South Africa, where there is “a better life for all.” The ANC earned the sole mantle of being a party of national liberation because other liberation movements that fought in the struggle against apartheid, alongside the ANC, had significantly weakened by 1994 and never revived the post-apartheid South Africa.

From the 1980s into early 1990s, the ANC succeeded in inserting itself within and allying itself with major mass movements of the anti-apartheid historical bloc, organised around the United Democratic Front, which included hundreds of affiliates drawn from the youth and students movements, the civics, trade unions, the women’s movement, church organisations, sports organisations etc. In a way, the ANC succeeded in establishing itself as the leader of a powerful anti-apartheid historical bloc going into 1994 and beyond. So, for the first 15 years, even up to 20 years, of the last 30 years, the ANC enjoyed large active support, deriving from the legitimacy it had as a governing party of national liberation, following the fall of apartheid. Thus, it was difficult to effectively challenge the ANC from outside.

However, these mass movements allied to the ANC were autonomous and often challenged the ANC leadership when it was necessary. For instance, the Congress of South African Trade Unions(Cosatu) fiercely challenged the ANC when it adopted a neoliberal macroeconomic policy, Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) in 1996. It was GEAR that significantly consolidated the neoliberal restructuring of the economy in post-apartheid South Africa from a coherent policy framework.

By 1999, the ANC succeeded in co-opting a considerable number of the leading personnel of mass movements into government and business positions, through affirmative action and black economic empowerment schemes. Civics were no longer independent social movements of residents organised within the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO), they had now joined the ANC led alliance with the South African Communist Party and Cosatu, to make it tripartite plus one. Once the leadership of mass movements was co-opted by the ruling ANC, and their autonomy was lost, these mass movements eventually collapsed into the ANC fold, leading to the dissolution of the anti-apartheid historical bloc in the early 2000s.

Thirty years is certainly a long enough period to fail, trying to pursue a development strategy and trying again, and again, until you succeed. But with the ANC, the failure has been dismal because they were not committed to any sovereign radical development project. Instead, they succumbed fully to the dominant neoliberal development philosophy that allots a decisive role to market forces.

As the neoliberal crisis, of dire development outcomes combined with widespread corruption within the state, was reaching maturity around 2009, the ANC’s legitimacy started to seriously erode. At this stage, the transformation of the of the ANC from a leftist national liberation movement into a centrist neoliberal party had come full circle, with the ANC fully established as an agency of neoliberal economic development and a link to international finance capital. To this you add the widespread corruption of the ANC that was already running very deep within the state.

Thus, from 2009, when Zuma who is associated with the worst forms of corruption, ascended to presidency, the ANC electoral decline has been irreversible. They declined from 69.69% in 2004 to 65.90% in 2009, to 62.10% in 2014, down to 57.50% in 2019. As you can see though the decline has been a solid trajectory, it was with smaller margins of 3.79 and 3.80 to 4.60 percentage points. That is why this election’s crushing defeat of 17 percentage points, from 230 seats to 159 seats in the National Assembly, has shocked them to the core. It caught them off guard; whilst dreaming in their slumber about their self-convinced eternal dominant might; “the glorious movement” as they are fond of referring to the ANC.

What could have halted and reversed this decline, is a genuine renewal of the ANC to rid itself of corruption and pursue a genuinely meaningful social transformation that fulfils the promise of a better life for all, by redistributing income and wealth in favour of the black majority, extending social wage to include a basic income, pursuing a sovereign industrial policy and improving the delivery of public services such as health, education, housing, public transport, etc.
ANC engaged in a fake renewal

But sadly the ANC instead engaged in a fake renewal process; they have been pretending to be engaged in a renewal process to self-correct, since Jacob Zuma left the ANC presidency in 2017. This sham of a renewal process has made matters worse for them because they claimed they were ditching corruption and embarking on a radical economic transformation; to restructure the Reserve Bank, implement a radical land reform, and redistribute wealth and income for the benefit of the poor black majority. None of this happened, because they were never committed.

Now they are more discredited, even worse than in the Zuma years, because they don’t have a Zuma and other discredited corrupt elements to scapegoat for their mess. If you want to see that did they did nothing about corruption, look no further than their list of members of parliament due to be sworn in following this election. You will see many of those implicated by a statutory commission of inquiry into state capture and corruption (the Zondo Commission). The minster of sports and culture was arrested just a week after elections, on charges of receiving bribes worth R1.6-million ($89,000) from a business man who received government contracts worth R400-million ($22-million).

Worse even, their current President, Cyril Ramaphosa, whose ascent to high office was based on an anti-corruption ticket, has a big cloud hanging over his head: the Phala Phala scandal that involves the theft of a stack of cash of more than half a million US dollars from his Phala Phala farm, of which the real source remains unexplained.

In November 2022, the ANC used its majority in parliament, to block the impeachment inquiry arising from serious violations and crimes by the President at Phala Phala, as established prima facie by the Independent Panel of two retired judges and one senior advocate. The formal reason they advanced when they were quashing the recommended parliamentary inquiry was that the President had taken the report of the Independent Panel on review in court. Once the ANC parliamentary majority voted down the report, the President went back to court to withdraw his review on grounds that the report of the Independent Panel had become academic since parliament had rejected it. Those were pure monkey tricks of the ANC to evade accountability!

The matter of Phala Phala has now been taken to the Constitutional Court by Economic Freedom Fighters, to challenge the irrational decision of parliament by ANC majority. The EFF application has been set down for hearing in the coming months. If the court rules that parliament acted irrationally on the Phala Phala matter, and refers it back to parliament conduct impeachment inquiry that will destabilise the new Government of National Unity(GNU). More about the GNU below.

The arrest of the speaker of parliament following a R4.5-million($25,000) bribe scandal in April 2024, during an election period, also added fuel to the flames.

Unemployment, low growth rates, low investment levels, inequality, poverty, the poor delivery of public services including health, education and housing, and the deterioration of public infrastructure have all gotten worse since Ramaphosa took over at the 2017 ANC conference, on the back of a radical economic transformation that was going to improve the lot of the poor black masses. There are no radical policy interventions that have been put in place since Cyril took over. So both the proclaimed anti-corruption stance and radical economic policies, which are the twin pillars of the sham ANC renewal, have fallen flat.

On the contrary, we have witnessed heightened neoliberal austerity of budget cuts in important public services, including health, education, housing and roads, and on government workers’ wages. Austerity has also extended to the reactionary, tight monetary policy of increasing interest rates. This is supposed to fight off inflation. But that inflation that did not come from the oversupply of money as a result of wages increases or a high consumer spending, but came from price increases by monopoly corporations and from imports due to breaks in global supply chains, following the Covid slump. This fiscal and monetary austerity has worsened the cost of living for poor families, workers and the middle classes.
The neoliberal crisis and the rise rightwing forces such as MK

The neoliberal crisis tends to polarize societies through inequality and other exclusive development outcomes such as unemployment, precarious labour, poverty, underdevelopment and the squeezing of the middle classes. Add to this, the discredited ruling classes (both the political and economic), a declining democracy, and the absence of a coherent radical sovereign development project to exit the impasse of the neoliberal crisis. This social decay has set the stage for the far-right and neofascist forces to rise and mobilise on the basis of social exclusion and blaming others; mainstream parties and institutions, including foreigners and other racial groups.

The lower voter turnouts over the past two elections is a sign of a declining democracy, where the voter turnout was 66% in 2019, dropping from 73% in 2014 and dropping further down to the low of 58% now in 2024.The voter turnout is has always been in the 70’s, except for 1999 where it was 89%. This is worse when you include the fact that 15 million eligible voters did not bother to register to vote. This means that out of 42 million eligible voters, only 16 million turned up to vote in this election, which puts the actual voter turnout at 38%.

It is in this context of the social decay and crisis of neoliberal capitalism that rightwing populist parties such as MK, tend to gain the center stage by blaming the ruling ANC without presenting any viable alternative. Even though they use an anti-capitalist and the radical economic transformation, they don’t really mean it, they only do it to mobilise the working classes and poor communities who constitute their base.

Apart from exploiting the neoliberal crisis without posing a positive vision, MK was riding on the popularity of corrupt and reactionary Jacob Zuma within the ANC base. MK tends to be more strong in the KZN and two other provinces with a significant size of Zulu ethic communities, Gauteng and Mpumalanga. This is because Zuma is steeped in Zulu nationalism politics and cultural identity/symbolism.

However the decisive factor in MK’s spectacular electoral performance is Zuma’s popularity within the ANC’s electoral base. That is why ANC’s demolition from 54% to a low of 16.99% in KZN can only be attributed to the spectacular rise of MK, which got 45% in KZN. MK acquired a large electoral support in KZN by dispossessing the ANC because of Zuma who is popular among ANC supporters.

Despite MK’s posture as a leftist party, in their manifesto, they openly declares support of conservative ideas such as giving more constitutional power to unaccountable traditional leaders and even making elected politicians subordinate to traditional leaders. They also declare that they will abolish the checks and balances that come with the current constitutional order, and replace it with an unchecked order of a parliamentary supremacy wherein “the majority” will rule unconstrained by the checks from the judiciary. They also make it clear that they will bring back the apartheid era military conscription to instill discipline in our youth.

The other rightwing populist party that was on the rise in this election is the Patriotic Alliance that won 9 seats in the National Assembly. PA is led by two ex-convicts who mobilise the mixed race communities(who make up 8.2% against the 81.4% black African) on a racialised communitarian ideology that combines with a crude ferment of xenophobia that openly calls for the expulsion of all foreigners, irrespective of their legal status.
Dilemmas of forming coalition government for the ANC

Now that the ANC got 40% of the vote, the shortfall to form a government is too big. Unlike the expected 45%, in which case they would simply ask small parties into a coalition, and they would be spared the drama that comes with big parties. The three big parties-DA, EFF and MK – bring drama into coalition negotiations because of their diametrically opposed ideologies and policies.

Democratic Alliance (DA) is a liberal conservative party that is openly steeped in neoliberal policy positions that include: fiscal and monetary austerity, privatization, free trade, flexible exchange rate, cuts in public spending, tax reductions for corporates and high-income earners, deregulation of business activities, liberalisation of capital controls, labour market flexibility. They also don’t support transformation policies that in the context of South Africa that are aimed at bringing about substantiative social equality that do away with the legacy of apartheid and colonialism and mitigate the effects of the neoliberal crisis. These include affirmative action, land reform that transfers land to black communities, national minimum wage, workers rights, national health insurance, basic income grant.

The transformation policies that the DA opposes are mandated in the country’s Constitution, so as to realise Bill of Rights and the substantive social equality through the progressive realisation of socio-economic rights.

The social base of the DA is the white community that makes up only 7.3% of the SA population(4.7 million whites out a total population of 62 million), yet they remain most economically and socially privileged and powerful racial group, 30 years after the official fall of apartheid because genuine social transformation measures that redress past imbalances and advance a better life for all, were never implemented after 1994.

The option of a coalition with the DA was initially rejected by the mass base and the left wing of the ANC, in its National Executive Committee, by the SACP and COSATU. But it was the preferred option by the ANC establishment, so they found a way to impose it from above.

The difference between ANC’s neoliberalism and DA’s is that the DA is open and actively committed in its articulation of neoliberal policies, whereas the ANC’s embrace of neoliberalism is because their lack of a sovereign development strategy and bourgeois capitulation out of pressure from big business and finance capital. That’s why the ANC still has a leftist National Democratic Revolution political strategy, even though it is inadequate, and a social wage to protect the poor from extreme poverty, even though it gets limited by budget cuts stemming the austerity fiscal policy they pursue.

The ANC could go into a coalition with Economic Freedom Fighters. The EFF has made it clear that it will not go into a coalition that has DA, this is despite their backing of the DA in local governments, following 2016 election results that did not produce outright winners, like in this 2024 elections. On the other hand, DA has also made it clear that they will not go in coalition where EFF is also a partner. This made it difficult for the ANC to have both the EFF and DA in one coalition government at the same time, thus the ANC chose the DA.

The EFF is a leftist nationalist organisation that is led by the charismatic Julious Malema, who was ANC’s youth league in 2012 when he was expelled in 2012 for advocating the nationalisation of mines and expropriation of land without compensation. He, together with his fellow youth league comrade, Floyd Shivhambo, with whom he was expelled from the ANC, formed the EFF in 2013. The EFF is typical bourgeois parliamentary party that is only interested in political office. Though they sound more radical than the ANC, they are cut from the same cloth as the ANC and are trapped in old, exhausted national liberation ideological framework. They don’t have a clear left vision of challenging the neoliberal capitalism that has been developing in South Africa over the last 30 years. They are stagnating around 10% of the vote, for two successive elections now. And because they have their eyes on government office, they are becoming fatigued and frustrated with voters and venting in a way that shows the strategic limitations of left politics that purport to advance the social demands of the popular classes. The other day, Malema said they will no longer support poor communities that do not vote for them.

MK does not seem willing to participate in a coalition with the ANC. There is just too much hostility between the two.

A better coalition option for the ANC that could succeed without drama of big parties, would be working with small parties. But the ANC is not inclined toward this option. They did not go for this option because they thought ignoring the DA when it was such a highly preferred choice of big business and finance capital would be suicidal in the context of their own sworn neoliberal ideology that they have been committed to over the last 30 years.

But if the ANC was prepared to ditch neoliberalism, as their own renewal process promises, they would embark on building a sovereign economic project that would be so robust so as to withstand the shocks coming from the backlash of capital and financial markets, at least in the medium to long term. In that case the effect of the backlash would only be a temporary setback. The option of working with small parties, without the DA, remains unattractive to them but not because it can’t work. It can work if they changed their economic policy and thinking, but they have no courage nor the inclination to ditch neoliberalism and move toward a sovereign development project that delinks from the neoliberal global capitalism. That’s why the political and social crisis is going to get worse. The ANC is simply not capable of resolving it.

The ANC has announced that they are forming a coalition with the DA as the main partner. They call this coalition a Government of National Unity. This so called GNU does not have clear a purpose or criterion of establishment distinct from an ordinary coalition, unlike the GNU which was constitutionally prescribed in 1994, and had a clear purpose of managing the transition from white minority rule to a democratic dispensation. The 2024 GNU is all about deals between parliamentary parties. The negotiations for this so called GNU are conducted in a veil of secrecy, the public only gets to know of the deals once they are finalised. Twenty-five days after voting the composition of national government was yet to be announced. This has never happened before.

Alongside the GNU, they have called for a National Dialogue process – involving political parties, civil society, labour, business, and other sectors – to discuss critical challenges facing the country and develop a national social compact to enable the country to meet the aspirations of the neoliberal National Development Plan (NDP). This National Dialogue is already a nonstarter, a failure, because it seeks to enforce a neoliberal consensus based on an already failed neoliberal development strategy, the NDP itself.

In all honesty it is not a GNU, but a coalition based on a neoliberal pact that is already on shacky grounds because it cannot address the very social and political crisis that gave rise to it, within the framework of neoliberalism.

The GNU minimum programme that has been announced does not herald a break with the neoliberalism of the past 30 years. It’s all neoliberal business as usual. Only revolutionary measures can help us to exit the neoliberal crisis. The ANC-DA government cannot meet that challenge. Even if the coalition will finally include EFF and more parties in the final deal to make it a grand coalition, for has long as neoliberalism is not abandoned, and replaced with audacious measures, the deep social crisis will persist and get worse. It is up to the left and popular classes to pose a radical political challenge. Without revolutionary measures such as income and wealth redistribution, state-led sovereign industrialisation with a corresponding macro-economic management that delinks from neoliberal global system, the deal-making of the political elites will deepen the social crisis instead of building national cohesion and unity.
The way forward from a left perspective: Prospects for a left renewal in South Africa

The left was absent in this election because it is too weak as a political force. Of course there are small left parties such as the Bolsheviks Party of South Africa and African People’s Convention that participated but performed way dismally, did not get a seat in the national assembly or any of the provincial legislatures. The left will be absent in all future elections if does not rebuild strong political and social forces to pose radical alternatives on the electoral terrain and beyond. The left has to rebuild by intensifying mass struggles that advance social demands of popular classes as they build formidable mass movements. These demands are easy to articulate because the deepening neoliberal crisis has accentuated them in the dire developmental outcomes it has produced; high levels of unemployment, massive poverty, huge wealth and income inequalities, underdevelopment in rural and urban areas, the energy crisis, and the ecological crisis.

Popular classes and the left must organise and wage struggles for pressing social demands which include the basic income grant, permanent employment in public sector schemes and industries, and the delivery of quality free basic services such as housing, sanitation, water, electricity, roads, education, health, transport, and communication. These can be easily sacrificed by a version of national unity that will require respect for the markets and investors. The ANC-DA coalition means that workers, poor communities and the unemployed must develop the capacity, means and tools to sustain their vigilance against.

The ANC crisis has become an intrinsic part of the neoliberal capitalist crisis deepening in our country and globally. A meaningful exit out of this crisis is not to renew or reform the ANC. That is not possible. The ANC has to be transcended by a social revolutionary advance in order to exit from the deepening neoliberal crisis. Mass movements waging mass struggles and registering decisive victories must be built urgently. Of course, that has to be done outside elections but then exert political weight on elections, on the basis of political victories scored before elections, not after. Failure by the left and popular classes to live up to this task and challenge will perpetuate the ruinous crisis as it gets worse. •


Gunnett Kaaf is a Marxist activist and writer, who is with Zabalaza Pathways Institute, South Africa.

Activist Diary #2: Life as an Activist

By Peter Bohmer

June 25, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


Image by Peter Bohmer, in Greece



“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters.” Frederick Douglass

I have been an activist for reform and revolutionary transformation since 1967. For me, being an activist has meant directly involving myself in activities groups, and organizations in order to change policies at a local and national level and to raise consciousness about the causes, consequences and solutions to poverty and the inequality of income and wealth, police brutality and repression, U.S. militarism and intervention in other countries, climate justice, for quality health care and housing for all, and for reproductive rights. This in addition to solidarity with liberation struggles and ending capitalism and ending capitalist alienation, exploitation, and oppression. Being anti-racist has also been central to my theory and practice since the 1960’s, strongly influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movement and in the 1970’s, the Chicano and American Indian Movement (AIM).

Here are five key moments, examples from the 1960’s in furthering my lifelong commitment to activism for a better world.

Vietnam Summer, 1967

This was my first organizing experience although I had attended a few anti-Vietnam war and civil rights demonstrations and SDS meetings before. We first educated ourselves at the Vietnam Sumer office in Boston about the history of Vietnam and French and U.S. colonialism there. I remember then going door to door and asking people if they were willing to discuss the Vietnam War. In 1967, most people who answered the door supported the war and thought opposing the US war against Vietnam as being disloyal to US troops (this changed substantially after the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam). If people were interested in talking with us and possibly opposing the US role, we asked them to invite their neighbors and we presented a slide show about the war followed by a discussion. We then asked the people if they opposed the Vietnam war to actively show their opposition in a way that they decided on. Common was a visit with the assembled group to their Congressperson’s office to express their opposition to the US war against Vietnam. We stayed in touch with them.

I was shy at first and would only go door to door with a more experienced organizer, but I increasingly found my voice. It has never left. One of the key organizers, Mike Ferber, suggested I read two books, The Political Economy of Growth by Paul Baran and Monopoly Capital by Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran. These books changed my life as I was by this time although not earlier, ready to integrate their analysis into my very being. Both books showed the limits of reform, the irrationality of capitalism, and how much of the wealth in the U.S. and Western Europe came from extracting the surplus (wealth) from what we called the Third World and now call the Global South. Having a political economic analysis has been one reason for my continued activism. Anger at injustice and excitement are not enough. I also saw first-hand how people can change but we have to go out to meet them, not expect them to come to our events.

March on the Pentagon, 1967

In October 1967, there was a large, well over a hundred thousand people protesting the Vietnam War in a march from Washington DC to the Pentagon. Just before 5 PM when our permit ended, civil rights activist and comedian Dick Gregory asked if we were going to be just 9-5 protesters and what was more important the law or justice. I was very moved. Since then, I have always prioritized justice over what is legal. Everyone I had come with, we were from Boston, returned to DC then where we were staying. I decided to stay at the Pentagon as did 10,000 others. It was the demonstration where protesters, mainly women, put flowers on the bayonets of the military police (MP) guarding the Pentagon and tried to talk to the soldiers; almost all refused. I was inspired by the community that formed among us resisters: welcoming, sharing food and stories. Many had driven east from the recently completed, “Stop the Draft Week” in Oakland, CA. Many of us burned our draft cards.

At about 9 PM, the last camera left, the British BBC. After that the military police turned violent, beating people with their bayonets on the grass by the Pentagon. A few of us, a small minority fought back. What also affected me was that James Reston, the major NY Times reporter and friend of the powerful and wealthy wrote, shortly thereafter on the front page of the NY Times that the demonstrators had turned violent. I had seen the opposite and when I found out that Reston had been in Denver the day of the march although his article implied, he was at the Pentagon. My belief in the objectivity of the New York Times was forever shattered. I continue to read the NEW York Times but since than always critically.

Noam Chomsky, 1968

In spring, 1968, I took a class at MIT where I was a graduate student in economics with Noam Chomsky and Louis Kampf, “Intellectuals and Social Change”. It furthered my transition to becoming a lifelong radical left activist. By radical I mean going to the root of then problem, which I consider to be capitalism, and seeing fundamental change coming primarily from the bottom up.

Noam Chomsky has been a big influence in my life. I have learned so much from Noam Chomsky, much more than in this paragraph. I learned that building strong and growing social movements and protests in the streets are more important in changing policy, such as ending the Vietnam war, than trying to convince politicians through arguments and lobbying, or electing liberal politicians. I also learned that claims of expertise and saying we should unquestionably accept the so-called experts are used to justify policies such as carrying out the Vietnam War in order to silence dissenting voices and to delegitimize grass roots movements. Similarly, the term, national interest, or the assertion, “this war serves the national interest” is usually used to disguise the interests of the capitalist class. The interests of working people diverge from those with economic power. Thank you, Noam!

Chicago, 1968

Another formative event was the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. I had planned to go but was working with a group, Mothers for Adequate Welfare, a branch of the National Welfare Rights Organization. We were demanding a guaranteed income of $6500 for a family of four (about $40,000 in today’s prices). This was an early form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). I hadn’t finished writing my report to the Boston City Council at the time the buses were leaving from Boston to Chicago so I couldn’t go. I remember watching the convention every night that August at a bar in Brattleboro, Vermont. I was enraged each night at the beatings of protesters by the Chicago Police under the orders of Mayor Richard Daley and of the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat who had publicly supported the Vietnam war. This reinforced my perspective that ending the war was not going to come from within the Democratic Party even though the majority of the country now opposed it.

I realized that anger and rage at injustice are important and necessary fuel for long-term activism, although hopefully our anger is primarily directed at structures of oppression and those with economic and political power—and not at someone who has cut us off driving. Continuing anger at injustice is an important factor in my continuing activism up to and including the present. Today my central focus is directed towards ending U.S. support for Israel, and in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli War and Israeli Occupation. As I write this on May 11, 2024, the growing and inspiring student movement in solidarity with Palestine and against U.S. and university complicity with Israel and U.S support for Israel, reminds me of 1968, e.g., the Columbia University uprising, and the upcoming Democratic Party Convention in Chicago that plans to nominate another pro war President, Biden. I expect massive protests at the 2024 Chicago Democratic Party Convention this August although hope that US support for Israel stops by then and that there is a permanent cease fire. The global movement in support of Palestine although not yet sufficient to change U.S. and especially, Israeli policy is so important.

Anti-Imperialist Coalition in Boston, 1969

I was active in the fall of 1969 in an anti-imperialist coalition in Boston, The November Action Coalition (NAC) Our focus was ending the direct support of MIT for the US military in Vietnam, i.e., developing weapons systems for them. We blocked the entrance to one of the main MIT weapons labs, The Instrumentation Lab, until the police forced us away from the entrance, their clubs swinging.

One of the member groups of NAC was the Boston Black Panther Party (BPP) which I respected and learned from. Impressive to me was their free breakfast program in Roxbury and their organizing of low-income Black youth. The murder of 21-year-old leader of the Chicago BPP, Fred Hampton on December 4, 1969, affected me more than any of the many assassinations in the 1960’s. The willingness of the US government to kill revolutionaries especially Black leaders had become even more apparent. I remember being depressed and not being able to get out of bed for a few days after Fred Hampton’s brutal murder by the state and thinking because I was white, I was somewhat safer. I thought about the level of my commitment to transforming the U.S. Reflecting deeply on his assassination furthered my commitment to ending racial capitalism even if it meant serious risks.

It has made anti-racism and solidarity with people of color and movements, then called, Third World people, inside and outside of the United States, central to my theory and associated practice. So has solidarity with societies such as Cuba defending themselves from the U.S. war and blockade against them. Fred Hampton Presente!

Another group within the November Action Coalition (NAC), whose theory and practice have influenced me in a major way was Bread and Roses, a socialist women’s liberation organization. Bread and Roses differentiated itself from left organizations who claimed a women’s organization or women’s caucus was unnecessary or divisive, and from other women’s groups that claimed women could not work with men. Within NAC, Bread and Roses won their demands to be able to caucus at any time which would temporarily halt the meeting, and that all the leadership committees such as the steering, tactics, and media committees be at least one-half women. Bread and Roses challenged sexism within NAC and in the society. They were socialist and feminist, an anti-imperialist women’s group both within NAC and beyond. Bread and Roses was autonomous rather than separatist. The concept of autonomy together with principled unity, e.g., working against all forms of oppression in a group with the goal of unity, are a central part of my perspective and organizing.

Conclusion

Our activism makes a difference; we usually win less than what we demand but nevertheless the gains matter. Those who concede will never admit that raising the social cost to them of continuing oppressive policies was the cause of their conceding, but this is often the case. By social cost, I mean that the cost, not mainly in dollars, but loss of legitimacy of the elites and the growth of anti-capitalist movements, causes them to concede, at least partially. This is because the social cost of not conceding begins to threaten their rule. An example is the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa from 1976 to the early 1990’s, where those in power in South Africa increasingly feared not only losing their political power but also their economic power if they didn’t release ANC leaders including Nelson Mandela from prison and concede to elections where the Black population could vote, i.e., universal suffrage. I was active in the anti-apartheid movement in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and especially in Pittsburgh from 1984 to 1987 with a strong multi-racial group, Pittsburghers Against Apartheid. We contributed to the end of apartheid, an important victory led by the people and movements inside South Africa although structural racism continues there and whites still have most of the economic power in a very unequal capitalist economy.

I have continued to be active from 1967 to the present and will continue to be so. I advocate for a participatory socialist society. Check out the group Real Utopia, realutopia.org, that I am a member of. I am anti-capitalist but equally important for me and necessary and desirable is to be for a liberatory and ecological socialist alternative on a global level.

Although I have suffered some serious repression, it has not been a sacrifice to be an activist. Most of my closest friends are people I have been active in the struggle with. We have accomplished some real gains although they are never permanent as we can see in the current growth of authoritarian, racist, patriarchal, anti LGBT, anti-environmental and anti-immigrant movements, and political parties such as the Republican Party and similar authoritarian anti-immigrant parities globally. Being involved and active in the struggle for societal liberation has kept me young in spirit. I can look myself better in the mirror, and it has given my life more meaning.

Free Palestine!

Si se puede!

Peter Bohmer is a member of Real Utopia, Economics for Everyone (E4E), and Palestine Action of South Sound (PASS). He is Faculty Emeritus in Political Economy at The Evergreen State College.


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Peter BohmerWebsite

Peter Bohmer has been an activist in movements for radical social change since 1967, which have included anti-racist organizing and solidarity movements with the people of Vietnam, Southern Africa, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Palestine and Central America. For his activism and teaching, he was targeted by the FBI. He was a member of the faculty at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA from 1987 to 2021 where he taught political economy. He believes alternatives to capitalism are desirable and possible. Peter is the proud parent of a daughter and three sons.

Two (wrong) views on Marx, degrowth, and productivism (plus John Bellamy Foster on ecosocialism and degrowth)

Monthly Review
23 June, 2024


[Editor’s note: LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal is sponsoring Ecosocialism 2024, which will be held June 28–30, Boorloo/Perth, Australia. For more information on the conference, including how you can participate online, visit ecosocialism.org.au.]

First published at Monthly Review.

The term Promethean, referring in this context to extreme productivism, first entered into the ecological debate as a censure aimed almost entirely at Karl Marx. It was adopted as a form of condemnation by first-stage ecosocialists in the 1980s and ’90s, who sought to graft standard liberal Green theory onto Marxism, while jettisoning what were then widely presumed to be Marx’s anti-ecological views. However, the Promethean myth with respect to Marx was to be subjected to a sustained attack, commencing twenty-five years ago, in the work of second-stage ecosocialists, represented by Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature (Haymarket, 1999) and John Bellamy Foster’s “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift” (American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 [September 1999])—followed soon after by Foster’s Marx’s Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000). Here it was understood that the outlook of classical historical materialism was not that of the promotion of production for its own sake—much less accumulation for its own sake—but rather the creation of a society of sustainable human development controlled by the associated producers. The key analytical basis of this recovery of the classical historical-materialist ecological critique was Marx’s theory of metabolic rift.

On the basis of the recovery of Marx’s deep-seated ecological critique, ecosocialism has made major advances over the last quarter-century. One notable work, in this respect, was Kohei Saito’s Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017), which brought additional evidence to bear on the critique of the Promethean myth and on the development of Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. The result was the emergence of powerful ecological Marxist assessments of the contemporary planetary crisis provided by a host of thinkers, including such notable figures as Ian Angus, Jacopo Nicola Bergamo, Mauricio Betancourt, Brett Clark, Rebecca Clausen, Sean Creaven, Peter Dickens, Martin Empson, Michael Friedman, Nicolas Graham, Hannah Holleman, Michael A. Lebowitz, Stefano Longo, Fred Magdoff, Andreas Malm, Brian M. Napoletano, Ariel Salleh, Eamonn Slater, Carles Soriano, Pedro Urquijo, Rob Wallace, Del Weston, Victor Wallis, Richard York, and many others too numerous to name.

However, in the last couple of years, the myth of Prometheanism in Marx’s thought has been reintroduced in ghostly fashion by thinkers such as Saito, in his latest works, and by Jacobin authors Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips, representing two opposite extremes on the issue of the role of productive forces/technology. The result has been to erect a “Tower of Babel” that threatens to extinguish much that has been achieved by Marxian ecology.

In his two most recent studies, Marx in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Slow Down (Astra Publishing House, 2024, originally titled Capital in the Anthropocene), Saito has gone back on his earlier contention in Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism that Marx was not a Promethean thinker, and now insists, drawing on the largely discredited work of the “analytical Marxist” G. A. Cohen, that Marx was a technological determinist for most of his life. The about-face by Saito on Marx and Prometheanism is clearly designed to accentuate what Saito now calls Marx’s “epistemological break,” beginning in 1868. From that point on, Marx is supposed to have entirely abandoned his previous historical materialism, rejecting all notions of the expansion of productive forces in favor of a steady-state economy, or degrowth. However, since there is not even the slightest textual evidence anywhere to be found in support of Saito’s claim on Marx and degrowth (beyond what has long been argued, that Marx was a theorist of sustainable human development), Saito is forced to read between the lines, imagining as he goes along. The thrust of his new thesis is that the “last Marx” concluded that the productive forces inherited from capitalism formed a trap, causing him to reject growth of productive forces altogether in favor of a no-growth path to communism. Such a view, however, is clearly anachronistic. Naturally, the fact that planned degrowth is a real issue today (see the special July–August 2023 issue of MR) does not mean that the problem would have presented itself in that way to Marx in 1868, in horse and buggy days, when industrial production was still confined to only a small corner of the world. (On Saito’s analysis, see Brian Napoletano, “Was Marx a Degrowth Communist?” in this issue.)

Ironically, Saito’s thesis that Marx was a Promethean up to and including the publication of Capital (viewed by Saito as a transitional work in this respect) receives strong backing from Huber and Phillips in their article “Kohei Saito’s ‘Start from Scratch’ Degrowth Communism” (Jacobin, March 9, 2024). Proudly holding up a “Promethean Marxism” banner, Huber and Phillips present themselves as belonging to a long tradition of well-known Prometheans, including not only Marx and Frederick Engels, but also V. I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. For the Jacobin authors, for whom Marxism = Prometheanism, Saito is thus to be faulted not for suggesting that Marx was Promethean up until the writing of Capital, but rather for his claim that Marx jettisoned his Prometheanism in his white-beard years, failing to carry it all the way to his grave.

Although they adopt a Marxist cover, the views of Huber and Phillips on technology and the environment are virtually identical to those of Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource (Princeton University Press, 1981) and the leading anti-environmentalist critic of the ecological limits to growth within the neoclassical-economic orthodoxy in the 1970s and ’80s (see Foster’s “Ecosocialism and Degrowth” in this issue). The Jacobin authors thus adopt a view that is not so much ecomodernist in orientation as a form of total human exemptionalism from ecological determinants, in which humanity is presumed to be able to transcend by technological means all Earth System limits—including those of life itself. The metabolic rift, we are told, does not exist since it is dependent on a rift in a nonexistent “balance of nature.” Here they ignore the fact that the notion of anthropogenic rifts in the biogeophysical cycles of life on the planet, raising the issue of mass extinction, extending even to human life itself, is central to modern Earth System science. It is not a question of a “balance of nature” as such, but rather one of preserving the earth as a safe home for humanity and innumerable other species.

Going against the current world scientific consensus, Huber and Phillips explicitly deny the reality of the nine planetary boundaries (climate change, biological integrity, biogeochemical cycles, ocean acidification, land system change, freshwater use, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and novel entities). Rather, they insist in their total exemptionalism that there are no biospheric limits to economic growth. Hence, “there is no need,” they tell us, “to move to a steady-state economy…to return to more ‘appropriate’ technologies, to abandon ‘megaprojects,’ or to critique…a ‘metabolic rift’ with the rest of nature which,” they say, “[does] not exist.” Words like “commons” and “mutual aid” are classified as mere “buzzwords.” All arguments for “limits to growth” are by definition forms of “Malthusianism.” Nuclear power is to be promoted as a key solution to climate change and pollution generally. To cap it off, they contend, in social Darwinist terms, that capitalism itself is somehow integral to natural selection: “So as far as the rest of nature is concerned, whatever we humans do, via the capitalist mode of production or otherwise, from combustion of fossil fuels to the invention of plastics, is just the latest set of novel evolutionary selection pressures.”

Phillips has gone even further elsewhere: “The Socialist,” he declares, “must defend economic growth, productivism, Prometheanism.… Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.” The ultimate goal is “more stuff.” What is required is “a high energy planet, not modesty, humility, and simple living.” With a brazen display of irrealism, Phillips bluntly asserts: “you can have infinite growth on a finite planet.” The earth, we are duly informed, can support “282 billion people”—or even more. Marxists who have questioned the nature of contemporary technology, such as Herbert Marcuse, are summarily dismissed as proponents of “neo-luddite positions.” Phillips openly celebrates Simon’s reactionary work, The Ultimate Resource, the bible of anti-ecological total exemptionalism (Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff [Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015], 59, 63, 89, 250, 259).

Huber and Phillips’s bold advocacy of a “Promethean Marxism” in their Jacobin article was delivered with a panache that must have left the capitalist Breakthrough Institute green with envy. It has already led to a strong backlash in left-liberal environmental circles against the inanities of so-called “orthodox Marxism.” This can be seen in an article by Thomas Smith titled “Technology, Ecology and the Commons—Huber and Phillips’ Barren Marxism” (Resilience, March 21, 2024, resilience.org). Here we are told, in a further retreat from reason, that Huber and Phillips, in their total contempt for ecology, are simply “toeing the Marxist line,” promoting the “promethean Marxist dogma”—as if their views could be seen as representative of “orthodox Marxism” (which, as Georg Lukács famously said, is related entirely to method), or as if their outlook were one with that of Marxism in the world today. Neither is the case. In twenty-first-century conditions, socialism is ecology and ecology is socialism. Perhaps the most important aspect of Saito’s own analysis, despite all of the contradictions in his most recent work, is that it recognizes that a deep ecological view was present classically within the work of Marx (and, we would add, Engels), and that this constitutes a theoretical foundation on which all those committed to the philosophy of praxis today can draw in their struggles to create an economically egalitarian and ecologically sustainable world.
Ecosocialism and degrowth


First published at Monthly Review.

This interview by Arman Spéth with Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster is a revised and extended version of the interview first published in Spring 2024 in the journal Widerspruch, Beiträge zu sozialistischer Politik (Contradiction: Contributions to Socialist Politics), Zurich, Switzerland.

Degrowth is on the rise. In recent years, several internationally recognized publications have appeared that speak out in favor of the ecosocialist degrowth approach. The journal Monthly Review, of which you are editor, has adopted this approach recently in your special July–August 2023 issue, “Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development.” What are the motives behind this and how do you explain the popularity of left-wing degrowth approaches?

Although “degrowth” as a term has caught on only recently, the idea is not new. Since at least May 1974, Monthly Review, beginning with Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, has explicitly insisted on the reality of the limits of growth, the need to rein in exponential accumulation, and the necessity of establishing a steady-state economy overall (which does not obviate the need for growth in the poorer economies). As Magdoff and Sweezy stated at that time, “instead of a universal panacea, it turns out that growth is itself a cause of disease.” To “stop growth,” they argued, what was necessary was the “restructuring [of] existing production” through “social planning.” This was associated with a systematic critique of the economic and ecological waste under monopoly capitalism and the squandering of the social surplus.

Magdoff and Sweezy’s analysis gave a strong impetus to Marxian ecology in the United States, particularly in the fields of environmental sociology and ecological economics, for example in Charles H. Anderson’s The Sociology of Survival: Social Problems of Growth (1976) and Allan Schnaiberg’s The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity (1980). So, “degrowth” in that sense is not new to us and is part of a long tradition, stretching over a half-century. Our “Planned Degrowth” issue merely sought to develop this argument further under the deepening contradictions of our time.

Yet, while Monthly Review has long insisted on the need to move in the rich countries to an economy of zero net capital formation, today this issue has become more urgent. The term “degrowth” has woken people up to what ecological Marxism has been saying for a very long time. It has become necessary, therefore, to provide a more precise answer as to what this means. The only answer possible is the one that the MR editors provided a half-century ago. Namely, there are two sides to the question. One is the negative one of stopping unsustainable growth (measured in terms of GDP). The other is the more positive one of promoting a planned social response to the capitalist accumulation regime. Our “Planned Degrowth” issue seeks to emphasize this more positive response, one which only ecosocialism can offer.

For ecosocialism, the notion of degrowth, although recognized as a necessity in the more developed economies in our time, in which ecological footprints per capita are greater than what the planet as a place of human habitation can support, has always been seen as simply part of an ecosocialist transition, and not in itself the essence of that transition. A degrowth path, insofar as it is one of deaccumulation, is directly opposed to the internal logic of capitalism, or the system of capital accumulation. In fact, I wrote an article in January 2011 called “Capitalism and Degrowth: An Impossibility Theorem.” The nature of the struggle means going against the logic of capitalist accumulation even while we exist within it. That is the historical character of revolution, today driven forward by absolute necessity. The struggle for human freedom and the struggle for human existence are now one.

The relation of degrowth to ecosocialism is most straightforwardly expressed by Jason Hickel in an article titled “The Double Objective of Democratic Ecosocialism“ in the September 2023 issue of Monthly Review: “Degrowth…is best understood as an element within a broader struggle for ecosocialism and anti-imperialism.” It is a necessity in terms of present conditions in the rich, imperialist core of the capitalist economy, but not a panacea and not a sufficient basis in and of itself in defining ecosocialist change.

The July–August 2023 issue of Monthly Review was on “Planned Degrowth,” but the emphasis of the issue was on bringing planning to bear on our ecological problems more broadly. Thus, within ecosocialism, degrowth is merely a realistic recognition of contemporary imperatives centered in the rich economies with their enormous ecological footprints, while the proper emphasis is on ecosocialist planning rather than the degrowth category itself.

Part of the popularity of the term “degrowth” is because it so squarely offers an anticapitalist approach and cannot be co-opted by the system like so much else. But the overall approach of ecosocialism cannot be articulated just in negative terms, as the mere inverse of capitalist growth. Rather, it needs to be seen in terms of the transformation of human social relations and means of production by the associated producers.

In his bestselling book Slow Down (2024), Kohei Saito claims to have discovered an “epistemological break”—a major transformation in Karl Marx’s thinking in the last years of his life. Marx, he claims, had turned into a “degrowth communist” and discarded his “progressive view of history,” that is, abandoned the idea of the development of productive forces as the driving force of human development history. What do you think about this? How does your degrowth approach relate to your understanding of historical materialism?

Saito’s earlier book, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism, was a valuable work. However, his more recent work, which includes Slow Down and Marx in the Anthropocene (2022), is wrong where the main theses that he advances with respect to Marx are concerned—even if the idea of degrowth communism, viewed in more general terms, is an important one.

It is true that Saito has raised some fundamental issues. Yet, there is very little that is new in his argument. Marxian ecology has stressed Marx’s theory of metabolic rift for a quarter-century. The fact that Marx advocated what has been called “sustainable human development” has been advanced over that entire period by Paul Burkett, me, and numerous others. Moreover, it has long been emphasized that the mature basis of this in Marx’s work was to be found in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and the letter (and draft letters) to Vera Zasulich—the very sources that Saito relies on almost exclusively in contending that Marx embraced degrowth communism. Even the focus of Marxist ecology on the contributions of Georg Lukács and István Mészáros, in this respect, is at least a decade old.

What can be considered new in Saito’s latest work is not substance but form, along with the exaggerated character of the argument that he now advances, which requires that he repudiate much of his own earlier analysis in Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism. In his new works, Saito introduces the notion that Marx altogether abandoned productivism/Prometheanism, which is supposed to have dominated Marx’s thinking at least in latent form as late as 1867 and the publication of Capital. Saito characterizes Marx’s Capital as a transitional work that incorporated an ecosocialist critique while not yet entirely surmounting historical materialism, which Saito himself identifies with productivism, technological determinism, and Eurocentrism. Only in 1868, we are told, did Marx engage in an epistemological break, rejecting the expansion of productive forces altogether, along with historical materialism, thus becoming a “degrowth communist.”

There are two fundamental problems with this. First, Saito is not able to provide a single shred of evidence that Marx in his final years was a degrowth communist in this sense of rejecting the expansion of productive forces. Nor, for that matter, is Saito able to provide evidence that Marx was Promethean and Eurocentric in his mature work in the 1860s (or even prior to that), insofar as Prometheanism is understood as production for production’s sake and Eurocentrism as the notion that European culture is the only universal culture. There is absolutely nothing to substantiate such allegations. The well-known fact that Marx saw collectivist/egalitarian possibilities in the Russian peasant commune (mir) is consistent with his overall outlook of sustainable human development. However, there is no justification for taking this to mean that he thought that a revolution in Tsarist Russia, still a very poor, underdeveloped, largely peasant country, could occur without the expansion of productive forces.

Second, the picture of Marx as a degrowth communist is a historical anachronism. Marx wrote at a time when industrial capitalism existed in only a small corner of the world, and, even then, transportation in London, at the center of the system, was still in the horse and buggy stage (not discounting the early railroad). There was no way that he could have envisioned the full-world economy of today, or the meaning that “degrowth” has assumed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Saito’s analysis in his most recent works is therefore useful mainly in the controversy it has generated, and in the renewed focus on these issues that his work has provided. In the process, he indirectly has helped move us forward. Nevertheless, it is important to apply Marx’s method when analyzing the changed historical conditions of the present, and Saito’s jettisoning of historical materialism does not help in this respect.

You use the terms “degrowth” and “deaccumulation” interchangeably. Can you please explain what links these terms in your understanding?

“Degrowth” is an elusive term, like “growth” itself. The latter reflects the (often irrational) way that GDP is calculated under capitalism, expanding normal capitalist bookkeeping, based on a system of exploitation, to a national and even global level. The real issue is zero net capital formation, that is, instituting a process of deaccumulation. This has long been understood by Marxist ecological economists, as well as other, non-Marxist ecological economists, like the late Herman Daly. Growth, as Marx’s reproduction schemes demonstrate, is based on net capital formation. To recognize this is to emphasize that it is the system of capital accumulation that is the problem.

The idea of “planned degrowth” is at the center of your considerations. Could you explain what exactly you mean by this and how “planned degrowth” differs from other degrowth approaches?

I do not think there is anything complicated about this. Degrowth, and sustainable human development more generally, cannot occur without planning, which allows us to focus on genuine human needs and opens up all sorts of new possibilities blocked by the capitalist system. Capitalism works ex post, through the mediation of the market; planning is ex ante, allowing a straightforward approach to the satisfaction of needs, in line with what Marx in his “Notes on Adolph Wagner” called the “hierarchy of…needs.” Integrated democratic planning operating at all levels of society is the only route to a society of substantive equality and ecological sustainability and to human survival. Markets will still exist, but the path forward ultimately requires social planning in areas of production and investment controlled by the associated producers. This is especially the case in a planetary emergency such as today. As I have indicated, Magdoff and Sweezy argued as far back as May 1974 that stopping growth was essential in the rich economies, given the planetary ecological crisis, but that this needed to be approached more positively in terms of a planned restructuring of production as a whole.
Critics of degrowth

Cédric Durand in his September 2023 article in Jacobin, titled “Living Together,” criticizes the degrowth approach and writes “the abandonment of ‘the productive forces of capital’ and the scaling down of production would result in a de-specialisation of productive activity, leading to a dramatic reduction in the productivity of labour and, ultimately, a plunge in living standards.” Other critics, such as the economist Branko Milanovic, believe, as he wrote in “Degrowth: Solving the Impasse by Magical Thinking,” published on his SubStack in 2021, that degrowth advocates “engage in semi-magical and magical thinking,” because they cannot admit that the approach that they advocate would mean a loss of living standards for the vast majority of the population. How do you respond to these criticisms?

Durand and Milanovic would have a point if the question were one of “capitalist degrowth,” which, as I have already said, is an impossibility theorem. But the very changes needed to address today’s environmental and social crises have to do with changes in the parameters that define capitalism. Thus, attempts to criticize degrowth by insisting that it will reduce “productivity” increases, measured in narrow capitalist value-added terms, is simply to beg the question. The real issues have always been: productivity increases to what end, for whom, at what cost, requiring what level of exploitation, and measured by what criteria? What is the significance of increasing productivity in fossil fuel extraction if it points to the end of life on Earth as we know it? How many lives, as William Morris asked in the nineteenth century, have been rendered useless since compelled to produce useless and destructive goods at ever higher levels of “efficiency”?

Moreover, it is simply not true that economic growth is needed for productivity improvements, if this is seen in terms of real productivity increases (increase in output per labor hour), as opposed to increases in “productivity” measured simply as growth in value-added to GDP, which is a very narrow and misleading—even circular—conception. It is perfectly possible to generate endless qualitative improvements in production, reduce the labor time per unit of output, and thus, to advance efficiency, in a context of zero net capital formation, particularly in a socialist-oriented society. The productivity improvements in that case would be used to satisfy broad social needs, rather than for economic expansion for the enrichment of a few. They would be oriented primarily toward use value. Working hours could be reduced. It would mean that the benefits of productivity would be shared and human capacities in general would be augmented.

In his book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (2022) and in his articles for Jacobin magazine, Matt Huber explicitly argues against your view, claiming that solving the ecological crisis requires massive technological expansion. How would you respond to this view?

Jacobin is now the principal left-social democratic journal in the United States, and Huber’s argument is developed in that vein. Social democracy, as opposed to socialism, has always been about a “third way” in which the irreconcilables of labor and capital (today, also including the irreconcilables of capitalism and the earth) can supposedly be reconciled via such means as new technology, increased productivity, regulated markets, formal labor organization, and the capitalist welfare (or environmental) state. However, the basic system would remain untouched. The idea is that social democracy can organize capitalism better than liberalism, not that it will go against capitalism’s fundamental logic. Huber in his book throws into the mix capitalist ecological modernization in a form that does not differ much from liberal ecological modernization, as represented by the Breakthrough Institute, but with the addition, in his case, of organized electrical workers. This perspective has consistently defined Jacobin’s approach to environmental issues, which has generally been opposed to ecosocialism and environmentalism more broadly. I wrote an article titled “The Long Ecological Revolution“ in Monthly Review in November 2017, questioning Jacobin’s strongly ecomodernist approach in this respect, which has included pieces by the author Leigh Phillips, who, in his book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts (2015), went so far as to suggest that “the planet can sustain up to 282 billion people…by using all the land[!]” and other similar absurdities.

In an article that Huber cowrote with Phillips in Jacobin in March of this year (“Kohei Saito’s ‘Start from Scratch’ Degrowth Communism”), the two authors reject the planetary boundaries framework advanced by today’s scientific consensus, which seeks to demarcate the biophysical limits to the earth as a safe home for humanity. In the planetary boundaries/Earth System framework, climate change is depicted as just one of nine such boundaries, the transgression of any one of which threatens human existence. In contrast, Huber and Phillips adopt a position virtually identical to that of the neoclassical economist Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource (1981), who pioneered in propagating the notion of total human exemptionalism, according to which there are no real environmental limits to the quantitative expansion of the human economy that could not be overcome by technology; that it is possible to have infinite growth on a finite planet. On this basis, Simon was recognized as the foremost anti-environmentalist apologist for capitalism of his day. In this view, technology solves all problems irrespective of social relations. In near identical fashion, “the only true, permanently insuperable limits that we face,” Huber and Phillips reductionistically claim, “are the laws of physics and logic”—as if the biophysical limits of life on the planet were not an issue. Climate change, according to this view, is merely a temporary problem to be solved technologically, not a social-relational (or even ecological-relational) one. But for Marxists, social relations and technology, while distinguishable, are inextricably and dialectically entangled. An outlook that denies the planetary crisis by resorting to the promise of a technological deus ex machina, while absenting both historical and ecological limits, is in conflict with historical materialism, ecosocialism, and contemporary science—all three.

Today’s scientific consensus, as represented, for example, by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—particularly the stances taken by scientists, rather than governments involved in the process—states with absolute clarity that technology alone will not save us, and that we need a revolutionary-scale challenge to the present political-economic hegemony. We are now on the verge of a 1.5°C increase in global average temperature, and a 2°C increase will not be far beyond that if we do not act quickly. We have now crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries, with the likelihood of crossing still more. Yet, this trajectory could be altered. We already have all the technologies we need to address the planetary crisis, provided that the necessary changes are made in existing social relations. But there is the rub.

Huber and Phillips polemically reject degrowth as a backward strategy, even if organized on a planned ecosocialist basis. They argue rather that net capital accumulation can continue indefinitely if it is greened and if there is a reconciliation between capital and labor, and capital and the earth, along ecomodernist lines. At best this can be seen as the Green New Deal approach, or ecological Keynesianism. But their overall thrust goes beyond that and is, in fact, one of total human exemptionalism in which all lasting environmental limits, associated with the biogeophysical cycles of the earth, are denied. The main fault I find in this analysis is that it is willing to forego scientific realism and dialectical critique for political expediency, ending up with a kind of techno-utopian reformism that in fact goes nowhere, since it backs off from any serious confrontation with the capitalist system. This is hardly rational when the issue is a social system that is now threatening—in a matter of years and decades, not centuries—to transgress the conditions of the planet as a safe place of humanity. There is nothing socialist or ecological about such views.
What to do?

In your article “Planned Degrowth,” you emphasize the need for a revolutionary transformation to overcome ecological challenges. Could you explain what you mean by revolutionary transformation and why you believe it is essential? And how would you respond to the arguments that follow the principle of the “lesser evil” and support the possibility of an ecological transformation within the capitalist system, partly due to the urgency of the situation?

Today’s science says that we need changes in our socioeconomic system, applied technology, and our entire relation to the Earth System, if humanity is not to lay the basis this century for its own complete destruction. If the necessary, urgent transformations in the mode of production (which includes social relations) are not made, we will see death and dislocation of hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of people due to climate change this century. Climate change, moreover, is only part of the problem. We have now dumped 370,000 different synthetic chemicals into the environment, most of which are untested and many of which are toxic: carcinogenic, teratogenic, and mutagenic. Plastics, another novel entity in the planetary boundaries classification, are now out of control, with the proliferation globally and in the human body of microplastics, and even nanoplastics (small enough to cross cell walls). Billions of plastic sachets are being marketed by multinational corporations, primarily in the Global South. Global water shortages are growing, forests and ground cover generally are vanishing, and we are facing the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet.

With six of the nine planetary boundaries now crossed, we are facing unprecedented dangers to human existence, and an existential crisis for humanity. The cause common to all these planetary crises is the system of capital accumulation, and all immediate solutions mean going against the logic of capital accumulation. The struggle will naturally occur within the present system, but in every moment of this struggle we are faced with the urgency of putting people and the planet before profit. There is no other way. Capitalism is dead to humanity.

The scale of the change required must be measured in terms of both time and space. Our relation to both today necessarily must be revolutionary and stretch around the globe. Whether we will succeed or not is something we cannot know at present. But we do know that this will be humanity’s greatest struggle. In this situation there is no “lesser evil.” As Marx said, on a much smaller scale in relation to Ireland in his day, it is “ruin or revolution.”

Finally, how do you assess the feasibility of ecosocialist degrowth with regard to the current political realities (Kräfteverhältnisse)? Where do you see opportunities, where do you see obstacles?

Opportunities are everywhere. Obstacles, largely a product of the present system, are also everywhere. As Naomi Klein said of climate change: This Changes Everything. Nothing can or will remain the same. That is the very definition of a revolutionary situation.

The most concrete and comprehensive study of what could be done practically in our present circumstances is to be found in Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams’s 2017 book, Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation. As Noam Chomsky said of their book, it demonstrates “that the ‘revolutionary systematic change’ necessary to avert catastrophe is within our reach.”

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. Arman Spéth is a PhD student at Bard College, Berlin, studying the development of capitalism in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Until the end of April 2024, he was also an editor of Widerspruch.