For R16 Unamended: Beyond The Green Dead End

The author motivates Resolution 16: “Beyond the Green New Deal” and argues against the proposed amendment to the resolution.

The gravity of the ecological crisis cannot be overstated. Certain catastrophic transformations of the planet are inevitable, and on our present course, people who are currently alive will live to see the day when the long-term survival of the human species becomes unimaginable. Capitalism has manufactured a truly apocalyptic future for us all, and if the capitalist class is allowed to lead us further into it, the societal consequences will be dire: war, despotism, genocide, and the abandonment of billions of working and oppressed people to die in rapidly worsening famines, pandemics, and extreme weather events.

No one is going to save us but ourselves, and if we fail there will be nowhere on Earth to hide. It is imperative that we, as socialists, organize a movement of the working-class majority that is capable of defeating ecocidal capitalism and reconstructing a just and sustainable society. This is a task that will take time, a resource which is in very short supply for us. The margins are desperately thin, and we cannot afford to become stuck in strategic dead ends.

Resolution 16: “Ecosocialism Beyond the Green New Deal” is an attempt to help direct DSA away from one such dead end. For years now, the Green New Deal approach to ecosocialism has been hegemonic in DSA, meaning most of DSA’s ecosocialist work has taken the form of pressure campaigns for legislation designed to reform the capitalist economy into a “green” social-democratic one. R16 critiques the limitations of this approach, both in regards to the content of the demands it advances and the strategic assumptions on which it relies.

Meet the New Deal, Same as the Old Deal

While the Green New Deal’s program is ambitious relative to the despair of the neoliberal “end of history,” the solutions it offers fail to meet the minimum standards for human survival in a liberated world.

The logic of capitalism itself has brought us to the brink of extinction. Endless growth, and therefore endless expansion of material throughput, would continue to transform the planet beyond the point of habitability even if the entire capitalist world-economy was run on carbon-neutral energy sources. The green capitalism envisioned by the Green New Deal, appropriately named after the era of reform that saved and revitalized capitalism for the age of American hegemony, is a mirage, a fantasy of an economic system running up an ecological debt that will never come due. 

Perhaps even less forgivable than the Green New Deal’s “green capitalism” is its “green imperialism.” The rare earth minerals and other raw materials necessary to accomplish a “green” transition in an economy as large as the USA’s would necessitate further ecological destruction and imperialist exploitation, reorganizing the economies of the periphery to continue serving the economies of the imperial core, now merely in a “green” manner.

The antidote to ecocidal capitalism is the fundamental restructuring of the economy so that it supports human needs rather than the endlessly expanding exchange of commodities demanded by capital. This inherently requires the controlled shrinkage, or degrowth, of the economy to eliminate ecologically and socially destructive sectors and reduce overall material throughput. A degrowth-oriented approach to ecosocialism is irreconcilable with the program of the Green New Deal, which not only fails to challenge the logic of imperialist capitalism, but positively calls to reinforce it by “spurring massive growth” in United States manufacturing to make the US “the international leader” in a green capitalist world-economy, per the text of the House Resolution submitted by former DSA national endorsee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The Class War, the Ecocidal Enemy, and the Battle for Democracy

The Green New Deal stands opposed to democratic socialism. It is neither socialist in its horizons, because it aims to stabilize rather than transcend capitalist social relations, nor is it rooted in a consistently democratic political practice.

The underlying strategy of the Green New Deal relies on false assumptions about the nature of the United States government. Setting aside the disqualifying limitations of the Green New Deal’s demands, in order for legislative pressure campaigns to be a winning strategy for the implementation of its green capitalist vision, we would need to live in a democracy, or at least a political system pliable enough to be forced to concede sweeping reforms when they become sufficiently popular. We do not. The slave owners and capitalists who wrote the Constitution a quarter-millennium ago never conceived of the Green New Deal, but they could not have devised an instrument of oppression and antidemocratic minority rule more perfectly suited to preventing its passage.

Five years into the ten-year period of “national mobilization” for climate justice it originally called for, the Green New Deal’s track record is as follows: voted down by the Senate (2019), cannibalized for Joe Biden’s platform by the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force (2020), reintroduced in the House, then killed in committee (2021), abandoned in favor of successively weaker reforms culminating in a bundle of subsidies for the private energy sector in the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). 

This unfortunate track record is not a simple organizing failure, rather, it reflects the inability of the legislative pressure campaign strategy to cope with a fundamentally antidemocratic system. The Constitution provides for a Congress that can afford to ignore popular pressures. That includes a Senate whose wildly disproportionate distribution of voting power makes it possible for Senators representing a conservative minority of the population to veto wildly popular legislation, or even for individual Senators like coal baron Joe Manchin to whittle bills down to their standards despite, in Manchin’s case, representing only 0.5% of the population.

Any conception of ecosocialism which requires the Green New Deal to actually be enacted as law can safely be considered dead on arrival. Very simply, the Green New Deal is never going to pass into law so long as the Constitution remains intact. 

In a recent article voicing support for an amendment to R16, comrade Judith Chavarria takes a different tack. Chavarria recognizes that the antidemocratic constitutional regime blocked the realization of the Green New Deal’s demands in 2019-2022, but argues that “this is what made the Green New Deal worth fighting for” because “battles like this show working class people what they’re up against and how necessary it is to fight back.” But it is unclear how, exactly, this “battle” that the Green New Deal decisively lost has politicized the working class in this way. Rather than demoralizing the working class by losing the same battle in the same way indefinitely, we must clearly communicate that winning the battle for democracy is a necessary precursor to preventing climate extinction, and organize accordingly.

What’s in a Program?

Chavarria’s approach, which locates the primary value of the Green New Deal not in the notion that it could someday pass but in the struggle to pass it, and the opportunity to reach large numbers of working-class people through that struggle, deserves credit for being free of what Chavarria correctly refers to as “reformist illusions.” However, if the goal is to organize the social base for a revolutionary socialist party through struggle, the Green New Deal is not up to the task.

The strength of a program lies in the party that is built around it, and the shape that party takes reflects the contents of its program. If we want to have a party that will someday be capable of smashing the capitalist state and pursuing degrowth, we will need to start with a program that recognizes those things as necessities, and consistently apply it in our political education and organizing work. The Green New Deal has no place in such a program, because it relies on the existing state to cut a “deal” for working people that not only falls short of but actively detracts from the long-term goals of socialism.

True, the Green New Deal already enjoys broad public support, as our comrade points out. But to determine that we must therefore base our program around it in an effort to capture that support is backwards. Instead of attempting to construct a program based on what the working class already broadly supports, we should base our program on the objective conditions for working-class liberation and then fight to build a base of support for it.

Comrades, if you agree that the stakes of the ecosocialist struggle are life-and-death, that we are running out of time to spend on false solutions, and that a truly democratic socialist path is the only way out, I encourage you to vote YES on “R16. Ecosocialism Beyond the Green New Deal” to direct national YDSA to begin assisting chapters with ecosocialist political education and campaign work, and NO on amendment R16-1 to ensure that YDSA’s ecosocialist work moves beyond the dead-end Green New Deal rather than recommitting to it.