Martin Suchanek
In spite of increasingly extreme weather events, recent years have been marked by ruling class inaction on the climate crisis. At the COP climate conference in Glasgow, world leaders failed to agree the most modest of proposals. Similarly, the ruling class has used the surge in energy prices following the sanctions programme against Russia to promote practices like fracking, at huge potential costs to the environment. As a result, governments are failing to meet the targets of even the moderate agreements that they do sign, such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord.
Meeting the range of interconnected threats to the environment, including ocean acidification, declining biodiversity, the weakening ozone layer, requires not only rapid remedial action but above all a strategy to organise human life in a sustainable way. A failure to address the developing ecological crises will ultimately threaten the basis of human life itself.
Under the weight of scientific evidence, and the pressure from growing environmental movements, a number of political parties have taken up the demand for a Green New Deal (GND). In Britain, for example, the first proposals for a GND were published in 2007/2008, by the Green New Deal group, composed of Green Party members, NGOs, and eventually some Labour members of parliament. Similar ideas were developed by other European Green parties and presented at the climate conference in Denmark in 2009.
More recently, the GND has been taken up and popularised by numerous left-wing forces. The Labour Party in Britain made the deal part of its 2019 manifesto, while figures like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also adopted it. The parties of the European Left Party also call for a GND, distinguishing theirs from that of the European Commission by placing greater emphasis on social issues and climate justice.
In the following article we deal critically with different iterations of the GND. Despite a colourful range of different authors and theorists, we focus on three main currents and the authors associated with them. Notwithstanding overlaps, transitions, and intermediate stages between them, these general distinctions point to the different social forces behind the campaigns for a GND. In the first instance, there is the ‘big capitalist’ GND as represented by the EU Commission, the Biden administration in the United States, and even the Chinese government. Second, there is the ‘left bourgeois’ GND, as advocated by the Fridays for Future movement, US Democrats, and writers such as Naomi Klein. Finally, there is the ‘left reformist’ Green New Deal as put forward by figures like Jeremy Corbyn and the German Left Party.
The ‘big capitalist’ Green New Deal
Just as the 1930s Roosevelt government was pressured into its New Deal by pressure from below, so elements of today’s ruling classes have been forced to recognise the reality of today’s ecological problems and the need for some kind of action. Let us look at the US programme. Between the massive $2bn stimulus programme and the ‘Clean Energy Plan’, the Biden administration envisages:
- Construction of roads and bridges, and the improvement of water supply systems, electricity and broadband networks.
- One million jobs to be created in the auto industry, with an emphasis on electric cars.
- All cities with over 100,000 inhabitants to be equipped with zero-emission public transport.
- Millions of jobs to be created through investments in the energy sector, which aims to achieve clean energy ‘made in America’, with zero emissions by 2035.
- Investment in the energy efficient refurbishment of four million buildings and the construction of 1.5 million ‘sustainable’ houses and apartments.
At first glance, Biden’s original programme appears to be very extensive. Around half of the $2 trillion targeted in the so-called Recovery Act was intended to convert the US economy to climate neutrality. However, the sum appears significantly lower when one considers that the expenses are spread over eight years. Due to the resistance of the Republicans and the concessions of the administration, half has already been cashed in, with $2 trillion becoming $1 trillion. The same happened, incidentally, to the social and job-creation programmes.
Furthermore, the Biden programme underestimates the funds required to achieve net zero emissions. Whilst it pledges the equivalent of 0.5 per cent of GDP per year, what is required is in fact between five and seven per cent, and is far short of the $16.3 billion programme proposed by Bernie Sanders.
What is also striking is how far the United States lags behind its imperialist rivals, even were the Biden proposal implemented. For instance, the US has just 500 kilometers of high speed rail, compared to China’s 19,000. Furthermore, the United States’ plans to set up 500,000 charging stations by the end of 2030 to facilitate the transition to electric cars is small when one considers that China has roughly 3,000,000, and Germany 1,000,000.
Since the Biden administration is not willing to confront US companies, even in a limited way like Roosevelt did, it has pledged that government spending will only account for a fraction of sums that flow into ‘green’ systems. The government spending is intended only as a spark to ignite a real investment firework. It is betting on financial markets to solve the problem, and using the government to ensure the profitability of sustainable investments.
This is not only far from ecologically sustainable, it also overstepping the limits of capitalism’s current accumulation dynamics. It is precisely the chronic over-accumulation of capital that allows investments to flow into speculative investments, into financial transactions. The investors and big players on these markets compare profit expectations between the individual spheres in order to achieve the highest and safest returns. In order for the capital to flow into ecological modernisation, this would require above-average profit expectations and in turn, expansion, a growing market, and high rates of exploitation in the so-called future industry.
Furthermore, a conversion of the entire US economy to ‘sustainability’ would necessarily require the end, or at least the reduction of, entire branches of production (oil, gas, mining), or the conversion of entire sectors. Under private capitalist conditions, this includes the destruction of existing capital, which the Biden government does not want, at least not at home. Ecological regeneration is good, but it must not curtail the profits of big US capital, and that of course means the oil multinationals, the auto industry and so on. Nor should international competition outdo US corporations in the field of new green technologies. Therefore, an ecological ‘complete renewal’ of the competitors on the world market, especially under the current conditions, inevitably leads to ruinous competition between the various national capitals, in which each struggles for leadership in the reorganisation of the world market, and therefore in over-accumulation and over-production.
The Biden climate protection programme, even if fully implemented, would not change the anarchic character of capitalism. On the contrary, it would exacerbate the problem by increasing the output of the US economy, and therefore exacerbate the ecological consequences.
Just as the US has its Green Deal, so does the European Union. Supported by a coalition of conservatives, liberals, greens, and social democrats, it pledges zero net emissions of greenhouse gasses by 2050, a decoupling of growth from resource use, and a third of investments in its next development package (€1.8 trillion) to flow into the Green Deal.
Like the US, the EU relies on the leverage effect of its subsidy programme to promote investments in the environmental sector. It published the world’s first ‘green list’ for sustainable economic activities, an official seal of approval for plants with real or at least claimed positive climate effects. In addition, the EU has also established a fund of €150 billion to subsidise regions with an above-average consumption of fossil fuels to make the transition to sustainable energy.
Unlike the Biden programme, the EU relies on CO2 pricing in order to use this mechanism and to stimulate consumption and investment in green products and branches of the economy.
Similarly to the US—and all imperialist states with a large capital stock—it is faced with the significant problem of converting its own industry and infrastructure to ‘sustainability’. Green renewal is therefore primarily a question of restructuring one’s own national capital in such a way that it proves to be more productive and competitive than others, expanding its position on international markets, necessarily at the expense of its rivals.
All such Green New Deals are therefore essentially national economic programmes—not just in the sense that the nation state is responsible for setting the legal framework or the economic incentives and sanctions, but above all in establishing their own big capital as the leaders of the world market. The role of the state in this is therefore to support the competitiveness of its own capital, which is hardly the basis for ecological sustainability. After all, saving the earth should not come at the expense of one’s own industries or one’s own imperial ambitions. It is better to rule in fossil hell than to serve in sustainable heaven.
The left (petty) bourgeois GND
The various forms of the GND that embed within themselves an overall concept of social and global ecological and social transformation clearly stand out from the bourgeois GND. These variants are often combined with severe and apt criticism of bourgeois environmental policy and of neoliberal capitalism.
This wing of the environmental movement is best represented by Naomi Klein, one of the most widely read authors in this direction with books such as This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate and On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. Notwithstanding the often brilliant critique of these books, they by and large represent the politically petty-bourgeois current of the environmental movement, for reasons we will examine.
The strength of Klein’s work lies in the vivid and engaging presentation of examples of ecological devastation, their connection to profiteering and their impact on people and nature. Those affected are not portrayed simply as victims, but also as subjects of resistance, as combatants. The forms of self-organisation they have developed, whether as indigenous communities, as wage earners or as climate activists, occupy an important place in Klein’s articles and books.
Another aspect of such texts, which undoubtedly enthrals many readers, is the focus on those responsible for environmental destruction and their social consequences. By naming and denouncing specific beneficiaries, i.e. individual corporations, players on the financial markets, and media and state bodies who openly and specifically support them, this indicates the systemic causes of the impending environmental catastrophe. For example:
‘We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period that we have been struggling to find a way out of the crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe, and that would benefit the vast majority, are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets’.
In this sense, Klein is typical of a much broader current of environmentalism which sees the fundamental social relation, the fundamental contradiction underlying the ecological catastrophes, not as the capitalist mode of production, but as ‘deregulated capitalism’, or neoliberalism. Moreover, this does not appear as a period of a mode of production at all, but as the dominant ideology and politics. In On Fire, Klein repeatedly emphasises the neoliberal turn as the breaking point in capitalist development itself, for example:
‘It is absolutely true that the global unleashing of the unbound form of capitalism known as neoliberalism in the ‘80s and ‘90s has been the single greatest contributor to a disastrous global emission spike in recent decades, and the single greatest obstacle to science-based climate action’.
Klein does not advocate a revolutionary break with capitalism, but rather a third, ‘democratic socialist’ path. Discussing the failure of the ‘autocratic, industrialised socialism’ of Venezuela’s petro politics, she states:
‘Let’s acknowledge this fact, while also pointing out that countries with strong democratic-socialist traditions (like Denmark, Sweden, and Uruguay) have some of the most visionary environmental policies in the world. From this we can conclude that socialist isn’t necessarily ecological, but that a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of al life, appears to be humanity’s best shot at collective survival’.
There is a parallel here with Roosevelt’s New Deal. Just as the examples of Sweden, Denmark, and Uruguay are intended to prove that a ‘visionary’ environmental policy and a degree of economic equality would be possible on the basis of regulated capitalism, the New Deal of the 1930s attempted to prove that the market economy could create great social progress in times of crisis if only the right social and political course was set:
‘In scale if not specifics, the Green New Deal proposal takes its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal, which responded to the misery and breakdown of the Great Depression with a flurry of policies and public investments’.
The force that Klein envisages can push through a GND is a global cross-class alliance consisting of: 1) The left wing of the US Democratic Party, including not only its best known representatives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but also a total of 105 members of the US Congress and Senate who have publicly committed themselves to the latter’s GND resolution, including Elizabeth Warren and even the Vice President Kamala Harris; 2) ‘Democratic-socialist’ governments in the imperialist and semi-colonial states such as Sweden, Denmark, and Uruguay, the major Green parties and movements like Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025); 3) Activist and campaign-oriented parts of the global climate justice movement such as the Sunrise Movement in the US, Extinction Rebellion in Europe, or the Fridays for Future movement globally; 4) Indigenous and peasant community movements in the semi-colonies, including petty-bourgeois left forces like the Zapatistas, who promise to build some form of local sustainable communities based on cooperative and petty-bourgeois property; and 5) Reformist forces from the left wing of the labour movement (European Left Party, Democratic Socialists of America, the Corbyn wing of the UK Labour Party).
For supporters of a left-bourgeois GND like Naomi Klein, the working class is by no means the decisive subject of change. Rather, it is merely one part of a broad alliance that extends from the ‘left-wing’ of capital through important sections of the wage-earning middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie to parts of the labour movement. The anti-capitalism of such an alliance is limited to a specific manifestation and ideology of the existing social order, neoliberalism.
This narrow aim is reflected in the programmes of the petty-bourgeois GND. Its basic proposition is that ecological renewal can go hand in hand with a jobs miracle, and that opposition to the GND projects could be overcome with the quick refinancing of a massive economic stimulus programme:
‘The Green New Deal will produce new goods and services to keep pace with and absorb new expenditures, [therefore] there is no more reason to let fear about financing halt progress here than there was to let it halt wars or tax cuts’.
According to Ocasio-Cortez, the GND’s investment programme should be funded as emergency measures. Congress should simply approve the necessary funds, which in turn are backed by the International Monetary Fund. In a similar way, this should also secure the programmes of other countries, especially in the global south. The associated increase in government debt would be covered by future revenues resulting from an expansion in economic output and profits.
This trend receives additional ideological support from the neo-Keynesian Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Its proponents also play down the problem of financing big investment projects:
‘Affordability is never an important question for a sovereign government—the relevant question concerns resource availability and suitability. There is thus a natural alliance between MMT and the GND. If we can identify technologically feasible projects that would achieve the GND’s goals […] then we can arrange for the financing of the programs’.
The petty-bourgeois GND strategy is, therefore, based optimistically around wresting the state and the central bank from the control of capital, or more precisely, its ‘fossil’ faction. Under the control of the ‘left’, the government could ‘tame’ corporations by eliminating subsidies, raising taxes, and spending on local transport and industrial and land-use planning, the kind of which existed in many capitalist countries before the neoliberal turn.
In conceiving of the GND’s political opponent as simply fossil capital, other elements of capital are considered as allies in the fight for a GND. This explains the striking omission from any petty-bourgeois programme of expropriation of large capital, even those of the biggest polluters. On the contrary, this trend sees itself as a more capable manager of capitalism:
‘Republicans in Washington [miss] one of the greatest benefits of approaching the climate emergency as a vast infrastructure and land regeneration project: nothing heals ideological divides faster than a concrete project bringing jobs and resources to hurting communities’.
In ignoring the foundations of the world economy and its environmental destruction— private ownership of the means of production—its goal is similar to that of what Marx and Engels called ‘petty-bourgeois socialism’, which aims to remedy social ills in order to secure the existence of bourgeois society. It is therefore necessary for them, as in all popular fronts, to exaggerate the radical intentions of some of its supporters. In this sense, its slogan, ‘system change, not climate change’, is more a complement to its bourgeois reform programme that a genuine part of it.
The left-wing GND
In September 2019, delegates to the Labour Party Annual Conference passed what was widely hailed as the most radical environmental policy by a major political party in the world. Styled as the Green Industrial Revolution, rather than a GND, it promised a £400 billion national transformation fund, £250 billion of which would be used for the expansion of renewable energy, the conversion of the transport system, and the preservation of biodiversity and environmental protection, creating a million new jobs in the process. It promised that by 2030, 90 per cent of electricity and 50 per cent of heat would be generated by renewable (including nuclear) energy. Notably, the proposal included plans for nationalisation, both of public transport and of the six major energy companies that dominate the sector in Britain.
There were nonetheless limits to Labour’s policy. The nationalisation proposals, both for the railways and for the energy companies, stated that private assets would be bought at market prices, funded by government bonds, meaning a huge transfer of wealth from taxpayers to beneficiares. This is symptomatic of the underlying position that the logic of capital must be allowed to prevail, and despite some nationalisation, much of the funds of the GND would go into the hands of private companies—Labour’s ‘partners’.
Naturally, were Labour able to pass such a programme, notwithstanding their compensation of capitalists, it would be taken by these ‘partners’ as a declaration of war. Its proposals for radically higher taxes to finance the GND, for example, would have triggered large-scale capital flight to keep property safe and ignited a debt crisis to bring down the Labour government. The threat of expropriation would have had a similar effect. In any event, Labour would have to respond to such sabotage with strict exchange and capital controls, with the unions enforcing workers’ control and opening up of the books of the companies involved.
All of this would have led to a massive intensification of the class struggle, which in turn would have raised systemic questions, i.e. the expropriation of the ruling class, the smashing of the bourgeois state apparatus and the establishment of a democratically planned economy. But a socialist revolution was not the intention of the left-wing Labour leadership under Corbyn either, and so the party was left with a more or less radical reform policy.
The negotiations at the Labour Party Conference, however, did not only reveal the weakness and limitations of their GND, but also the difficulty of negotiating even a basic reformist policy with union representatives whose primary consideration remained ‘their’ industry. Whilst activists have rightly recognised the need for broad support from the working class, including those currently involved in the fossil fuel consuming industries, one cannot resolve the antagonisms between the needs of the union bureaucracies of these industries and the needs of the class as a whole concerning climate by sweeping them under the rug. Yet this is precisely what happened with, for instance, airport expansion. The movement must openly admit that some products and manufacturing facilities must disappear—and quickly.
The problem reveals the fact that a fundamental ecological restructuring of the economy requires an overall programme of the working class that transfers workers from industries that are being closed into others, without loss of income and on equal working conditions—a so-called ‘just transition’. Such a necessary redistribution of social labour can only be carried out if the relevant companies are nationalised and placed under workers’ control.
Labour’s GND had similar limitations concerning its attempt to address the question of environmental imperialism. The international element of its programme is based on international exchanges of technologies and resources to help other countries achieve a GND. But these are fundamentally non-binding commitments, and there is no commitment to support the dismantling of the institutions of global imperialism that have enslaved the global south.
This particular conception of the GND has been widely theorised, and is striking in its resemblance to, for example, the three pillars of labour sociologist Klaus Dörre’s ‘new economic democracy’:
‘A democratic planning framework in which economic plans can be voted on and amended, through the use of universal, equal and free elections. A maximum of direct participation and democracy at the levels of the region, the municipality, the workplace, and the company. A real market economy and the use of markets as an important allocation mechanism.’
The idea that a ‘democratic planning framework’ could exist harmoniously alongside a functional or even a ‘real’ market economy, let alone be sustainable, is complete utopianism. It is tantamount to trying to leave the foundations of the capitalist mode of production untouched while eradicating all of its ills through a nebulous, non-capitalist ‘social order’. One could just as easily demand the abolition of capitalism on the basis of capitalism.
Another key figure of the left-wing GND is writer and former leader of the German Left Party Bernd Riexinger. Riexinger, towards the end of his term of office, tried his hand as a strategist for the party, publishing The New Class Politics in 2018, in which he defended the orientation of the Left Party. With A Left Green New Deal: An Internationalist Blueprint, he tries to present a long-term, strategic answer to the current crisis.
A critic of capitalism, Riexinger convincingly argues that our mode of production is producing a series of crises, those of:
‘Financial markets and the economy, climate change and the planetary limits of growth, social inequality, the breakdown of social infrastructure, […] the feeling that society is no longer holding together. The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified and worsened these multilayered crises of capitalism.’
Missing, however, is a concrete investigation of capitalism and how these ‘individual crises’ are therefore connected. This is reflected in his proposal for fighting the crisis: a ‘social-economic system change [through uniting] different social movements’. The overarching strategy here is to unite already existing movements to exert enough pressure on the state in order to force corporations and capital to make concessions. For instance, Riexinger puts forward this plan for the car industry:
‘The state must force the car companies to follow a socially just and ecological path of transformation. This will only succeed if those in the workplace, the trade unions, the environmental groups, and the climate movement pool their forces’.
Riexinger also proposes economic democratisation, arguing that the 40 major German companies should be at least 21 per cent public, and 30 per cent employee property, with private ownership limited to the remaining minority. This is based on the assumption that representatives of the state, ‘public property’, and the workforce would form a bloc. This is not necessarily the case, however. More realistic is that the state would form an alliance with capital, whilst the ‘employee ownership’ itself would be limited by their ‘co-ownership’ of the company, with a principle stake in the company’s competitiveness. What Riexinger presents as a step towards socialisation could all too easily turn out to be another bond of wage earners to ‘their’ company.
Furthermore, this belies a dubious analysis of the state, as ‘the field where different interests—class interests—are fought out’. Whilst this view has the advantage of showing the limits of purely trade union and social struggles, and acknowledges the need for political struggle, it fundamentally misunderstands the state as something that can be ‘won’ for workers, rather than as an instrument of bourgeois class rule. This is what (mis)informs the suggestion that economic stimulus packages could include conditions on aviation or car companies. The state, as an agent of these kinds of capital, considers the preservation of profit and the competitiveness of German capital as its primary objective rather than social and ecological issues.
Rather than a coalition of existing movements, a more suitable strategy would be the active intervention in such movements to break them from their reformist illusions. The working class should take a leading role in not only uniting disparate struggles, but in combining such struggles with a strategy to control the economy as a whole and to build its own power.
Conclusion
Despite important differences between the different forms of GNDs, which reflect the different class and social forces behind them, there is a certain underlying, unifying—unltimately, bourgeois—logic amongst all of them.
All recognise that the need for state intervention against the inadequacy of the ‘pure’ free market for ecological transformation, and call for capitalist growth successfully combined with ecological restructuring. The bourgeois state necessarily then becomes an instrument for regulating capitalism, and through reform can be used ‘properly’ to avert ecological catastrophe.
There is a common perspective amongst the various GNDs on strategy too. GNDs become enforceable by the consolidation of a social majority (alliance). The working class is certainly a part of such alliances, but not necessarily the leading element.
Finally, all of the GNDs are ultimately national (or related to a federation of states like the EU) programmes whose international component never goes beyond reciprocal, international legal agreements between bourgeois states and nebulous commitments to more ‘fairness’ in economic relations. The existing imperialist order and the division of labour on which it is based are actually presupposed and ultimately remain untouched.
By contrast, the ecological crisis shows the urgency with which we need to break with the system of private ownership and the constant pursuit of profit. But for the working class itself to become the decisive agent of this upheaval, it must itself be fundamentally changed. Decades of dominance of Stalinism and social democracy have wreaked havoc on class consciousness. And these are the kinds of ideas that inform false solutions like the GND.
As Marx, and especially Lenin showed, revolutionary class consciousness cannot be developed spontaneously or even out of economic struggle. The current ecological crisis is undoubtedly leading millions of workers, and above all millions of young people to consciously search for a solution to the systemic problems, and such searches are increasingly leading them to search for an alternative to capitalism. What the often-demanded ‘system change’ consists of, and how it can be fought for, is determined by the union of the working class, ecological criticism and scientific socialism: a revolutionary party and International. It requires an international programme of transitional demands which understands the fight against the ecological crisis as part of the socialist world revolution.
Only the overthrow of all conditions that make people contemptible, exploited, enslaved, oppressed, and one-sided beings represents the necessary, indispensable prerequisite for people to consciously shape and produce their own social form of intercourse—in harmony with their natural living conditions.