Dismantling the Juggernaut: Assessing the Potential of an Ecosocialist Green New Deal

Abstract

The Green New Deal proposes a holistic solution to an immense problem, arguing that the radical transformation of capitalism is the only option if humanity is to save itself from ecocide. The logical underpinnings of GND proposals are varied: Keynesian economists, environmental justice groups, Indigenous activists, and ecosocialists have contributed to its development and debate. The platform promises to impact many immediate appearances of climate-changing capitalism, from income distributions to fossil emissions. I ask whether it sufficiently addresses the underlying economic and political form-determinations that necessitate capitalist extraction, exploitation, and expansion, constituting limits to what can be achieved under this social metabolic order. The first research contribution is theoretical. ‘Ecological state-derivation’ combines ecological Marxism with a vein of state theory rooted in Marx’s third volume of Capital. It explains the capitalist state as a necessary mediation of capital’s economic and environmental contradictions. The resulting political forms are socially restrictive, yet contradictory and vulnerable to change. This enables a second, policy-oriented research contribution: a ‘form-analysis’ of the GND. I analyse three proposals according to their own terms and in the terms of ecological state-derivation. The result is an immanent understanding of the policy platforms and a deep interrogation of their adequacy. My ‘positive criticism’ finds the GND framework’s most radical variants to align with the insights of ecological state-derivation. A ‘radical’ or ‘ecosocialist’ GND installs an intersectional ‘working-class general interest’ into the very constitution of the state, intensifying the labour-capital contradiction in politics and the economy by way of ‘democratised decommodification,’ and as appropriate, decolonised forms of self-determination.