We’re burning alive, and only the ideas of Karl Marx can save us.
I’ll explain why by stepping back in time five years. When the COVID-19 pandemic went global in 2020, I wrote an article for Salon Magazine (later republished by Yale University) observing that the pandemic highlighted major flaws in capitalism. It did this, I added, in the same way that climate change does so.
A similar point could be made about man-made climate change. Even though the scientific consensus is clear — global climate change is real, caused by humans and poses an existential threat to our planet — Trump continues to deny it solely because fossil fuel companies and other special interest groups don’t want to lose money.
There in an additional factor in both the coronavirus and climate change denialism, of course: A distrust of intellectuals who use pesky, inconvenient facts in disciplines like epidemiology and climatology to make arguments that go against conservative, free market doctrine. After all, a strong centralized government is needed to regulate the economy in ways that will protect the planet from climate change and to save lives as the pandemic worsens. Because right-wingers don’t want to believe that the federal government should have this power, they cannot acknowledge that it is necessary on these occasions — and certainly not when doing so would seemingly concede a point to the left.
The American public seemed to understand this as well. Like all supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, I’ll always remember those heady days when he rolled up primary and caucus victories. He only lost because the Democratic Party establishment, fearing his democratic socialist agenda, convinced every other candidate to drop out and support their preferred choice, former Vice President Joe Biden.
For that reason, democratic socialist ideas remained rigidly out of the White House. Biden was an establishment liberal, in the tradition of America’s founding fathers, but he was no Marxist. For that reason, the ideas of great contemporary Marxist thinkers like the University of Tokyo’s Dr. Kohei Saito never reached President Biden’s ideological dojo.
Per my 2024 Salon interview with Saito about the English translation of his seminal book, "Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto":
As Marx started to study natural sciences later in the 1850s and 1860s, he came to realize the development of technologies in capitalism actually don't create a condition for emancipation of the working class. Because not only do those technologies control the workers more efficiently, they destabilize the old system of jobs and make more precarious, low skilled jobs. At the same time those technologies exploit from nature more efficiently and create various problems such as exhaustion of the soil, massive deforestation, and the exhaustion of the fuels, and so on.
Marx came to realize that this kind of technology undermines material conditions for sustainable development of human beings. And the central concept for Mark at that time in the sixties is metabolism. He thinks that this metabolic interaction between humans and nature is quite essential for any kind of society, but the problem of capitalism is it really transforms and organizes this entire metabolism between humans and nature for the sake of profit-making. Technologies are also used for this purpose. So technologies are not for the purpose of creating better life, free time and sustainable production, but rather it exploits workers and nature at the same time for the sake of more growth, more profit, and so on.
My point is basically Marx was quite optimistic when he was young in terms of the development of technologies, but later he came to realize actually technologies have more damaging impact on both humans and nature. So he became more critical of that possibility of solving those problems of poverty and ecological problems using technology. That's how the issue of degrowth and eco-socialist ideas came to be central for his ideas.
Humanity has no future if we fail to contain climate change. As we continue to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere through our use of fossil fuels, we raise the Earth’s temperature at an accelerated rate. If the temperature anywhere measured by a wet thermometer in the shade as water evaporates off it, also known as wet bulb temperature, exceeds 31°C (88°F), people in the affected areas will not be able to consistently perform physical labor without endangering their lives; should they ever exceed 35°C (95°F), people will die within a few hours without access to water or shelter.
Nine out of ten people alive will experience these conditions if climate change worsens unabated.
"It is important to understand that wet-bulb temperatures of 95°F (35°C) are not conditions we can just get used to," Dr. Peter Reiners, a professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona, wrote for Salon in 2021. "Human bodies have fundamental physiological limits; our planet's perturbed, angry climate doesn't care about them. Air conditioning may save some, but increased demand and likelihood of outages in already strained power grids makes this a risky bet at best."
Hence my earlier statement: We’re burning alive, and only the ideas of Karl Marx can save us.
Back Seat Socialism
Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.