After the insurgency of climate movement activity in the late-2010s, the politics of the 2020s have so far been dominated by other pressing concerns: plague, war, inflation, genocide. Even if our attention is diverted elsewhere, climate breakdown continues to rage as an urgent and existential threat to all life. Fossil fuels remain profitable and so temperatures continue to rise. Most recently, wildfires have ravaged new frontiers demonstrating that nobody is truly safe.

This process has been given a litany of names over the years. ‘Climate change’ was preceded by ‘global warming’ and followed by ‘climate breakdown’, ‘global heating’ and ‘climate emergency’. With more or less sincerity, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene and more names besides have been applied to the geological epoch defined by this upheaval.

For Ståle Holgersen, we should understand our current economic and ecological disruptions as crises of capitalism. ‘The climate crisis’ designates not just the process of heating but its interrelationship with the contradictions of capitalism. In his recent book Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in A Burning World (Verso, 2024), Holgersen offers both a theoretical understanding of the contemporary crises of capitalism and a political proposition for how ecosocialists should navigate them.

Crisis

Traditionally, crises in capitalism have been understood as disruptions to the endless process of capital accumulation. The most famous of these economic crises include the 1929 Wall Street Crash leading into the Great Depression, the 1973 oil shocks leading into stagflation and the 2008 financial crisis. In each case, markets crashing or growth stagnating led to an immense loss of value across the economy.

Holgersen explains that these specific events can be understood as crises because they represent a deeper underlying contradiction in capitalist relations. Economic crises occur when capital’s drive for more and more accumulation undermines its ability to continue to grow. Ecological crises come as the destruction of nature undermines both the conditions of life and accumulation through the exploitation of nature.

Crises may seem like problems for capitalism but Holgersen draws on theorists of ‘creative destruction’ to show that crisis is a necessary release valve for capitalism. Through these events the system resolves its contradictions with a purge of its inefficiencies and new innovations in profit generation. Any value lost through a stock market crash is offset by greater value realised through the innovative methods of the new regime.

In my own book, Burnt: Fighting for Climate Justice (Pluto, 2021), I lament that the climate movement should "stop letting crises go to waste". This point is reflective of an attitude prominent across the Left that crises represent opportunities to take advantage of.

Holgersen rejects this impulse, instead proposing a more sober analysis. He argues that crises always have negative consequences for the welfare of the poorest. Crises are not opportunities to encourage, but threats to fight off. This prescient point is most clear when it comes to the climate crisis. The scale of threat to life on Earth is devastating.

Capitalism

The interminable character of this threat makes climate crisis distinct to other crises. In Holgersen’s words: “Economic crises come and go, ecological crises seem to mainly just come”. The climate crisis’ temporality implies means it envelopes our past, present and future. 

Its planetary scale means that literally everybody, everywhere is affected. While it may appear to be a simple problem – “if we emit more greenhouse gases, it gets warmer” – the centrality of fossil fuel production to capitalist accumulation necessitates fundamental economic transformation. A simple problem for which the solution is of unprecedented difficulty.

A crucial question in debates of ecology and capitalism is whether climate change is likely to bring capitalism to an end. In the late-1980s, James O’Connor theorised a second contradiction in capitalism: between production and environment. He argued that ecological crises’ destruction of nature would in turn destroy profitability in the economy and therefore fundamentally undermine capitalism.

Holgersen does not reject O’Connor’s argument in its entirety, accepting a strong degree of uncertainty in the coming decades, but he does contend that the elasticity and resilience of capitalism means it is unlikely to be destroyed by the climate crisis alone.

I have tended to assume that climate change’s degradation of land, destruction of infrastructure, and displacement of people poses an existential threat to capitalism as a mode of production. But Holgersen challenges this thinking by highlighting capitalism’s track record of forging ways to profit through crises. He believes that accumulation can continue on a heating planet. 

Eco-socialism

To me it seems more likely that the value lost by climate destruction is likely to outweigh new value generated through the crisis. Whether or not this means capitalism is doomed to collapse, Holgersen is adamant that our task as ecosocialists is not to save capitalism from itself but defend ourselves by fighting it off and struggling for a socialist alternative to a crisis-ridden world.

Holgersen provides a critical overview of recent eco-socialist thought from socialist eco-modernists to degrowth communists to ecological Leninists. This also includes a review of various proposals for Green New Deals, accounting for their political diversity, but ultimately characterising the tendency as ‘Green Keynesianism’. While this is a major strain of Green New Deal such a generalisation is reductive, missing the transformational ambition which underpinned much of this politics.

Trotsky’s ‘transitional programmes’ and Gorz’s ‘non-reformist reforms’ are posited as alternative approaches. However, those of us engaged in the Green New Deal politics of the late-2010s know that these were the terms underpinning many strategic debates. 

The campaign group Labour for a Green New Deal (which I co-founded) agitated for a ‘socialist Green New Deal’ within the UK Labour Party which did confront questions of profit, ownership and workers’ control. Our failing was not in the correctness of our policy programme but the electoral defeat of Corbynism. 

Crucially, eco-socialist policy programs have been the subject of popular campaigning in recent years. The problem is that those ideas have not been undergirded by the popular power and mass organisation necessary to make serious gains.

Power

Holgersen concludes Against the Crisis by proposing another ecosocialist policy programme. It is an eminently sensible synthesis of the best ideas in recent debates. It includes arguments against private ownership and for destroying the fossil fuel industry; a nuanced take on economic growth; calls to deploy state power; and valiant opposition to racism and fascism.

Agreeable as his program is, Holgersen falls into the same trap as the Green Keynesianisms he criticises. Policy predominates while questions of organisation and power remain absent. He is transparent on this point, admitting that his is a project of critique with policy proposals obligatorily appended. I’m just not sure that this is enough anymore. 

It is one thing to advocate for class struggle in the face of climate crisis. It is another to seriously reckon with what this takes. Holgersen’s theory of climate crisis in capitalism is a vital contribution to a movement still lacking in fundamental understanding of the challenge we face. Unfortunately, it does not speak to the most pressing strategic-organisational questions.

Should ecosocialist struggle be conducted through socialist interventions in centre-left parties and trade unions? Do we need new political parties of Left-populist or communist varieties? Is social movement politics an appropriate vehicle through which to advocate for total economic transformation? Is it possible to build popular power around the climate crisis as an issue?

These are the urgent questions that we must all now prioritise working through both theoretically and practically. After a decade (or more) developing innovative policy responses to climate crisis, it is now painfully apparent that they are worth very little without powerful mass organisation to struggle for them. 

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh is a postgraduate researcher studying the climate movement. He co-hosts Crisis Point, a podcast series on crisis in capitalism, and is author of Burnt: Fighting for Climate Justice.