I’m in Jacobin this week analyzing the climate implications of a new report from Joan C. Williams and Jared Abbott, “The Left’s Coalition Crisis” that shows the rising ideological gap between the liberal, educated base of the Democratic Party, and the wider working-class voters who the Democrats are (sometimes happily) hemorrhaging.

The methodology was pretty clear, as I described in Jacobin:

The report is specifically interested in comparing the class gap between upper-middle-class liberals — people with college degrees who vote or lean Democratic and who have household incomes in the top 25 percent of the distribution — and a specific portion of the US working class defined as “the group that has veered far right . . . middle-status voters.” This group is specified as non-college-graduate households in the middle 50 percent of the income distribution, making between roughly $40,000 and $100,000 per year.

The overwhelming reaction (on social media at least) was anger that Williams and Abbott compared one sample that was ideologically liberal (“Dem Leaning” as described in the report) while the working-class sample was not. But this was by design — the goal of the report was to compare the base of the Democratic Party with the specific portion of the working-class we know is susceptible to shifting to the the populist right.

It should be obvious why this comparison is important. It is not only that the Democratic Party has historically been the party of the working-class — so the views of those in the middle income distribution and lacking college degrees should be of interest — but also if the Democrats do not win over such workers, their capacity to build durable majorities will never come to pass. And, without durable majorities the current doom loop of partisan vacillation and political gridlock is assured. As Matt Karp memorably put it years ago, we will continue to be 51% losers.

But, many other complaints questioned the report’s definition of the working-class specifically (ignoring the report’s own rationale for only looking at part of the working-class). As a Marxist interested in reviving working-class politics, it has been frankly astonishing to see this question — who is the working class? — skyrocket to the top of media punditry with many prominent outlets giving their own take on the matter.

Most of this discussion is because in a highly circulated New York Times interview with democratic socialist Mayor of NYC Zohran Mamdani was asked how he defines the working class (the same interviewer, Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked the ill-fated Graham Platner the same question back in May). Mamdani’s answer caused a lot of controversy for its expansiveness:

I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.

It’s cool to be able to say this out loud, but the socialist, cadre Mayor Mamdani is using a basic Marxist definition of the working-class: those who are forced to sell their labor power in exchange for a wage or salary to survive. This is what I’d call the ownership definition. In our society, some own capital (businesses, productive resources), wealth (like a trust fund yielding returns) or property (rent) that they can live off, but the vast majority of us only own one thing that can allow us to live — labor power — and we must sell it day-by-day and work for a living. We usually sell it to capitalists, but can also sell it to government or nonprofits.

It is important to point out that this definition is not occupational, but relational: a carpenter who owns their own contracting business is not working-class, but one who works for a contracting corporation is (the relation is employer and employee in this case).

So who is the working-class from this perspective? Recently, Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner provided an elegant answer in the New Left Review with the following two tables:

As they explain,

Putting these two pieces of evidence together, we can establish a lower bound for the quantitative extent of the working class. Even assuming that all households with self-employment income are owners of their main means of production and do not rely on wages, 68 per cent of the us population would be in the working class. Accordingly, at this level of generality, Marx’s claim that the nineteenth-century working class constituted the ‘vast majority’ of capitalist society remains correct.

But, for Marxists, this is not the whole story. Class is defined not only by what you own, but also your power (the “power definition”). Obviously, capitalists are defined by their control of the “means of production” and thus possess a dictatorial level of power over the workers they hire in the workplace. But, some of those who sell their labor for wages also have significant amounts of power over others in the workplace (there’s a great overview of all of this on the Confronting Capitalism podcast with Vivek Chibber).

Managers are the classic example: they might be paid a wage, and they might even be quite precarious (imagine you are a manager at a Dollar General), but because they have power over other wage workers (and, in fact, contribute to their exploitation) they can’t be considered working-class. The extreme example would be a hired CEO who manages a corporation (but let’s imagine the CEO is given zero ownership stakes in the company itself).

However, power is not only power over others, but also autonomy over your own work life and decisions. Here the classic example is a tenured professor (ahem) who has significant autonomy over what they research and teach (mind you this is increasingly an extinct species as increasing proportions of faculty lack tenure, and even the tenured among us are subjected to more-and-more top-down, “corporatized” governance structures that try to dictate what we can teach, research or even say on social media ).

Other so-called “creative class” occupations in film, art, media and even marketing might have significant degrees of autonomy over their work. Yet, for most of them (including me), they are forced to work most days to earn their living. So it’s fair to include them in the broader working-class even if some might want to equivocate that they are part of the “professional class”, “PMC” or “middle class.”

There have been efforts to define the extent of the working class that takes power/autonomy into account. In his book, On New Terrain (2017) Kim Moody — drawing on the Michael Zweig and his indispensable book, The Working Class Majority (2011)— uses census data to code occupations in terms of power/automny and comes up with the following table (outdated as it is from 2010). Even if we take out the professionals and managers (even the “proletarianizing” portions of the professional class like K-12 teachers and nurses), we again are left with the vast majority of the workforce —63%. Moody also points out we must include those working but not for wages in the household or in other unpaid care capacities (He estimates this should take the estimate up to 75%).

So, what does this all mean when we go back to the report from Williams and Abbott? First, it is clear from a technically Marxist point of view, some of the “liberal elite college grads” sampled — even with their position in the top 25 percent of the income distribution — are in the “working class” (a point that Marxist academics who fit this description never tire of pointing out). Second, there are most likely a small percentage of people in the “working class” sample who are managers or small-business owners, and thus not technically part of the “working class.”

But, their sample of non-college educated, middle income was never meant to define the working-class, but rather act as a proxy for the bulk of the working-class, and, more specifically, the specific portion that has been known to be shifting right toward Trump. While Marxists get very angry about measuring “working class” by education-levels, it is plainly the case that education has been a major driver of political polarization (many call this “educational polarization” but it also maps onto what Abbott and others call “class dealignment”). In other words, this way of looking at the class gap between affluent educated voters and the wider working-class is extremely important for our political conjuncture (even if it doesn’t cleanly map onto a Marxist definition of the working-class).

On the other hand, even if we do include many professionals and other middle class people in the “working class,” it is also the case that these people, by and large, already are disproportionately liberal or progressive or even socialist. We should not worry about losing them to our left-wing political project. But we are losing those without college degrees (and I’d add blue collar workers in particular).

In sum, Marxist politics is the attempt to build a politics capable of uniting the whole working class into a majoritarian, mass force. So it is extremely important to study and understand the views and attitudes of the parts of the working class shifting right. That is precisely what Williams and Abbott’s report sets out to do — and its extremely valuable for that reason.

I just did a thread on X engaging with a recent interview in the New Left Review with Thea Riofrancos on the concept of ‘green capital’, and what it means for Left climate organizing. The heart of the matter was Thea’s claim:

“We need to understand why, and maybe even endorse a paradoxical position: that a stronger fraction of green capital would create better terrain for left-wing organizing than the current situation, dominated by the tech oligarchy and the war-making machine.”

We had an interesting exchange, and it led me to additional thoughts. Insofar as we imagine a sector of ‘green capital’ it is one that produces commodities for sale on the market available to private market participants (solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles). As I say in the thread, this stands in contrast to what I think is most consequential for actually effective decarbonization: public infrastructure investments in transit, transmission, carbon removal, just to name a few. has often made this important distinction between electricity technologies that are merely “household consumer goods” (he often also calls it “personal property”) vs. public infrastructure. It is the latter that will yield decarbonization at scale.

It is totally conceivable to imagine a world in which green capital provisions private ‘green’ commodities in a way that actually exacerbates inequality. Call it K-shaped decarbonization: Green commodities primarily for wealthy homeowners (rooftop solar + electric vehicles + heat pumps) and capitalist offshoots of electricity deregulation such as solar independent power producers (aligned with Wall Street’s hunger for lucrative tax credits).

As Thea points out in the interview (in which she starts by mentioning the K-shaped economy), much of Biden’s tax-credit-model of climate policy ended up disproportionately benefitting wealthier consumers: “…as many have pointed out, the consumer rebates—for buying an electric vehicle or installing a heat pump in your house—were, unsurprisingly, captured by the rich” (Good reporting on this by Dharna Noor, a slight nuance was the tax credits were means-tested to avoid the richest consumers taking advantage, but I think the general point that they disproportionately benefitted wealthier PMC types stands).

As I said in the thread, I really don’t think the strength of green capital really matters much for the prospects of Left climate organizing. I could put it even more strongly, in a bizarro world where Kamala Harris won the 2024 election and much of the EV + wind/solar tax credits stayed in place, a policy further strengthening ‘green capital’ could even forestall more robust (and effective) climate action by making upper-middle class people feel they’ve already done their part and the arc of history is bending toward progress. But actually flattening the curve toward net zero will require so much that is not profitable to capital (the most obvious example being carbon removal — a substance that must be disposed of rather than sold!)

The problem is the climate doesn’t really care about your feelings (sorry) — or it doesn’t really care that you got an EV, rooftop solar and a heat pump. It is a public crisis of our atmospheric commons that requires coordinated planning and long-term infrastructure investment and restructuring. Green capital will yield decarbonization for the few, but real, effective climate action will need a much more robust public-oriented politics of public investment, public goods, and public ownership. As I said in the thread, the New Deal is about our only model for how this would look. But this requires digging ourselves out of a neoliberal, decades-long hole where effective state-capacity and public planning is once again centered in our political economy (Zohran Mamdani’s clear move toward centering public sector efficiency and delivery is one of the most inspiring aspects of his politics in my view). Biden’s approach of simply throwing tax credits at the problem is not enough.

As someone who writes a lot, I can’t deny it’s exciting to publish something in the “paper of record”: The New York Times. But, this particular opinion essay — arguing that the Democratic Party should not campaign on the climate crisis anymore — has ignited a fierce backlash (along with some appreciation!)

One bit of debate focused on whether or not the essay was a departure from the arguments laid out in my 2022 book Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on Warming Planet. I posted (and maintain) that the core thesis of the book and the essay are the same: we can not meet the scale of climate change without broad-based political power rooted in popular, majoritarian working-class politics.

I was then yelled at by Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs that this is not true: while the book was “superb” (thanks Nathan!) the essay was, “one of the biggest piles of shit I’ve ever seen in the NYT (and I read it every day so I’ve seen some truly steaming manure)” (yikes!). Nathan astutely found a passage that argued for linking a Green New Deal to a rising climate consciousness. It’s true I’ve become less convinced of this idea, but it still does not contradict the core thesis.

The book tries to argue that solving climate change is a question of power (and for such a large-scale challenge as this, one of class power). The path to power is a traditional Marxist one: working-class power.

But the working class is rapidly shifting politically, and since the book came out I’ve become less optimistic that a rhetorical focus on the “climate crisis” should be the central impetus of the political project to build that power. The most important problem that should concern any Leftist or socialist is the problem of “class dealignment” —that is, former working-class parties shifting their base toward more affluent-educated voters, while working-class voters shift rightward. This problem has only gotten worse. In 2024, for the first time in decades, Trump won voters making less than $50,000/year (in 2012 Obama won that segment by 28 points). Trump also won voters without a college degree by a whopping 14 points in 2024 (a margin that just keeps going up: he won this group by 8 points in 2020, and 7 in 2016).1

Mind you, one could argue that this process of class dealignment has intensified during the very period where climate change was a top issue in Democratic Party debates (2020) and policy (the Biden Administration 2021-2025). In other words, class dealignment continued during the era of the Green New Deal (~2018-2024). To make matters worse, we went through a cycle of political struggle over this climate-centered political idea and, on climate grounds, very little to show for it (US emissions rose in 2025!), besides the charred remains of the Inflation Reduction Act (to be clear, there are parts of the IRA that still exist and are good!).

At least according to one set of polls, climate is also clearly an issue reinforced by class dealignment. David Shor’s Blue Rose research made a presentation in 2024 that not only showed that climate and environment rank low in voters concerns in general, but also that climate is a top issue only for “rich Democrats” making over $150,000/year. Poor democrats do not rank it highly at all. As I put it in the piece, “The voters who already prioritize climate action are firmly in the Democratic camp and highly educated and affluent, or as the economist Thomas Piketty calls them, the ‘Brahmin left.’”

So what happened? The core argument underlying the New York Times essay is that the Green New Deal —and climate more broadly—has become a poisoned and polarized issue. But it didn’t have to be this way. When the Green New Deal exploded on the scene in 2018 when AOC sat in with the Sunrise Movement in Nancy Pelosi’s office, it had the potential to evolve into as kind of mass, working-class program focused on jobs, public goods and the decommodification of core material needs like health care, housing and even (ambitiously) electricity.

As I’ve written before, that initial sit in the activists parroted Bernie Sanders-style universalist messaging “green jobs for all” (despite that not really being possible) and many suggested the Green New Deal could become the climate “Medicare for All” for the Democrats.

But, almost immediately, the policy was hijacked by the professional class base of the Democratic Party residing in academic, environmental NGOs, and DC think tanks. As I argued way back in 2019, professional class climate politics does not want to make climate change about broadly felt working-class benefits, but rather about “marginalized communities” that are “disproportionately burdened” by the toxic byproducts of fossil capitalism. The more liberal climate advocates are also obviously highly educated and obsessed with climate change as an issue of belief or denial of the “science” or one that is technocratically focuses on emission targets, carbon budgets, and other benchmarks.

The film To the End (see my review here) documents the Sunrise Movement’s struggle over the Green New Deal up until the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Strikingly, soon after the infamous sit in at Pelosi’s office, the activists find themselves at an organizing conference in a fancy hotel ballroom with many other left/progressive NGOs (we now call them “The Groups”.) Strikingly, to me anyway, was how the conference seemed to devolve into what is oh-so-typical of Left organizing spaces: lots of accusations about ‘silencing’ voices, privilege, and the like. We were already far, far away from building a mass working-class program of universal benefits.

Then, AOC came into office and very quickly introduced the “Green New Deal” resolution to Congress. She did a media blitz in association with the proposal and, for reasons I’ll never understand, her office released a truly unhinged FAQ document that spoke of a long-term goal to “fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes.” The document also disavowed nuclear power and carbon capture (standard fare for environmental NGOs, but deeply offensive to unions).

To add insult to injury, it seems clear AOC nor anyone else in the movement actually worked with the affected labor unions to get their ideas on the Green New Deal resolution. As such, the AFL-CIO came out against the policy (another central argument of my book is that unions represent a critical institution of organized power that must be harnessed to fight the climate crisis).

The issue of the Green New Deal was quickly churned through the Fox News culture war grinder, and politicians were equating the Green New Deal with efforts to take away Americans’ hamburgers.

To be fair, the Sunrise movement and others did organize sufficient pressure to genuinely influence the Biden Administration’s platform and eventual prioritization of climate with the Inflation Reduction Act. But, interestingly, once Biden had won I distinctly remember some of the most prominent ideological supporters of the Green New Deal emphasize that the most important policy goal in influencing the Biden Administration was no longer “Green Jobs for All” — or any kind of universalist working-class program — but something called the “Justice 40”: the idea that 40 percent of climate investments must go to means-tested “disadvantaged communities.” The Biden Administration listened. They set up something called the “environmental justice screening tool” and much of the money appropriated went directly not to working-class people, but NGOs who claim (often falsely) to represent these marginalized communities.

In short, I really do think the Green New Deal could have been a mass, working-class program that helped build the majoritarian coalition I argue for in my book, but unfortunately it degenerated pretty quickly into an NGO-led cocktail of insane technological ideas combined with moralistic dictums of “centering the marginalized.”

And all the while, as pointed out consistently (RIP The Liberal Patriot — an indispensable chronicler of class dealignment that apparently was killed by the climate movement), the working-class continued to shift away from the progressive Democratic Party’s ideas on climate and much else. So my NYT piece was an attempt to grapple with this history and admit the climate issue in general and the Green New Deal in particular might just be….cooked. It has just become too politically polarized to be the vehicle for working-class power. But working-class power is what we need to solve the climate crisis. On that point, nothing has changed.

And, with examples like Zohran Mamdani, I’ve become convinced the path to working-class power is a “socialist minimalism” as put it; a “laser focus” on working-class material concerns of immediate day-to-day survival. That agenda would be much broader than the climate crisis. It would be an anti-austerity public goods agenda that could absolutely include climate investments in electricity, transport, housing and more, but that would also concern much else that concerns the working-class — health and child care, affordable education, etc.

In the end, solving climate change will require broad-based power — as Kate Aronoff put it, “durable, hegemonic majorities.” It might be time to admit that the climate crisis itself may not be the vehicle to build it.

In the wake of a full-scale assault on Iran by the US and Israel, and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, oil-based theories of imperialism are having a moment. Lucky for me, I happen to be teaching my course “Geography of Oil” for the first time since 2018. The course has given me the opportunity to revisit arguments that the 2003 Iraq invasion was, in the words of David Harvey in The New Imperialism—a tract written in reaction to Iraq itself —“All About Oil.” As we approach the 23 year anniversary of the invasion, I thought I’d write up what I found in preparing for this class.

On the surface, the case that the Iraq invasion was motivated by oil seems indisputable. First, of all, after the chaos of much civil strife, you can see the invasion led to a veritable surge in Iraq’s oil production (Chart 1). Iraq is now, in fact, the sixth largest producer of oil in the world. Second, it was obvious to everyone at the time that Dick Cheney and George W. Bush themselves had very close connections to the oil industry. Indeed, Cheney himself, former CEO of Halliburton, said in 1999 that Middle Eastern oil is “where the prize ultimately lies.” Deputy Secretary of Defense, and arch neo-conservative, Paul Wolfowitz was once asked point blank why the Bush administration chose to invade Iraq over say North Korea. His responded candidly, “The most important difference between North Korea…is [Iraq]…swims on a sea of oil.” The Federal Reserve chairman at the time Alan Greenspan also later admitted, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

So it seems like case closed? Not so fast.

Problem #1 — The Malthusian Premise

Many theories claiming Iraq was an invasion for oil were based on the popular, but now completely discredited, peak oil theory that was prominent at the time. Or, more specifically, the theory was the US itself was running out of oil and thus growing perilously reliant on “foreign oil.” Michael Klare was the most prominent advocate of a “resource scarcity” theory of conflict that led to a slew of books — each with increasingly Malthusian titles like Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet and The Race for What’s Left. All were based on the same premise: resource scarcity was driving geopolitical conflict in general, and US imperialism in particular. Klare became the go to oil analyst on the left in the 2000s informing Harvey’s theories about Iraq (sad since Harvey himself authored one of the most devasting critiques of Malthusianism at the height of its influence in 1974) and the Monthly Review even published an article titled “Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism,” drawing from Klare and other peak oil alarmist-geologists.

The problem with these theories is they often emerge in periods of high oil prices, but those very prices tend to incentivize capital to find more oil. And find oil they did: the shale or fracking boom in the USA not only restructured the entire global oil market, it also allowed the US to surpass its previous “peak” of production in 1970 — the peak that M. King Hubbert had predicted, making him the peak oil prophet — but also become by far the largest oil producer in the world. With imminent glut, sooner or later, the problem for oil producers is not oil scarcity, but oil abundance and prices crash….as they did around 2014-2016 and again in 2020. Today, it’s generally understood the oil market is still relatively oversupplied.

One might argue that even though peak oil theory turned out to be wrong, it seemed plausible in 2003 and could have still motivated the Bush Administration’s invasion. Perhaps, but I’m skeptical. Cheney and Bush’s close ties to the industry is a prime reason they would also be skeptical of such Malthusian scarcity mongering. The industry has had rounds of false prophets of resource depletion in the 1920s, 1950s and 1970s. Why would this time be any different?

Oil for whom? Three oil theories debunked

When people say the Iraq War was “for oil”, the obvious question is oil for whom? There are three basic theories of the case. First, as Jacob Mundy’s excellent article on the topic explains (the article I assigned for my class, in fact!), citing US foreign policy critic Andrew Bacevich, “to preserve the American way of life, rooted in a specific understanding of freedom and requiring an abundance of cheap energy.” Yet, any analyst of the global oil market would understand that if you want cheap oil, the last thing you should do is ignite massive geopolitical conflict in the Middle East (as I write this, two days into the invasion of Iran, oil prices are spiking). Indeed, the invasion of Iraq was followed by one of the largest booms in oil prices in the history of the industry (not only because of the War it must be said — mostly because of surging demand from China). Cheap oil did return, but not really because of Iraq. It was more because of the surge in US domestic production.

Second, there is a more straightforward theory that the US did not only want cheap oil, but specifically wanted Iraq’s oil for its own consumption. It wanted to, as Donald Trump claimed it should in 2011, “take the oil” for US consumers specifically. The evidence for this is even less convincing. According to the EIA, in 2024 only 6 percent of Iraqi’s crude oil exports go to the United States. This is not an outlier — it was only 4 percent in 2021, and only a bit higher at 14 percent in 2014. As with most Middle Eastern oil these days, most of Iraq’s oil is bound eastward —72 percent of its exports go to Asia.

Third, perhaps the most alluring theory given the Bush Administration’s oil ties, is that the invasion was not on behalf of the American consumer at all, but on behalf of American oil capital. Many expected the invasion to lead to a full-on neoliberal privatization of Iraq’s nationalized oil sector, and a veritable bonanza for US firms. However, this also, did not happen. In fact, the regime installed by the US went out of its way to privatize just about everything except oil. As a helpful explainer from 2016 puts it,

“there was no appetite among Iraqi politicians or people for privatisation. The occupation was also in no position to push through any reform that could unite nearly all the country’s political forces in opposition. In the end, the US-led administration announced in September 2003 that foreign investment was acceptable for the rest of the economy but not for the oil sector.”

Nevertheless, even if the oil sector was not privatized, perhaps the US oil firms still invested and benefited from Iraq’s notoriously rich oil reserves. Also no. According to the EIA’s latest report, all Iraq’s oil production projects are managed by firms like Italy’s ENI, Russia’s Lukoil, PetroChina, and one by BP. There is a recent report that Iraq is trying to offer more favorable terms to US oil investors to curry favor with Donald Trump, but no one could claim this was the final chess move in a 23 year process to invade Iraq on behalf of US oil capital.

If not oil then what?

On balance, it seems pretty clear that the invasion of Iraq really was not “All about oil” or if it was, it was an extremely incompetent job. There is basically no link you can make between Iraq’s vast oil reserves and direct benefits for the US state, consumers, or large oil companies.

So, if not oil, what was the reason? I certainly am no expert on the Middle East, nor the American neo-conservative movement circa 2003, but if I had to guess I would say it was part of the larger neo-con project to simply project US global power throughout the Middle East and the World. The 1979 Iranian revolution, and Saddam’s audacious invasion of Kuwait in 1991, were evidence of a region out of the US’s tight control. By taking out Saddam’s regime, the US could implant another ally alongside Saudi Arabia and Israel (and others) to protect US interests in the region. Of course, this theory isn’t exactly that convincing either given the only result of the invasion has been basically nonstop chaos and instability since (a strong conclusion of Mundy’s analysis cited above). This chaos continues today as the US tried to inspire a regime change in Iran (one that could not happen simply with bombs from above). But, at least, there is evidence that the neocons and the “Project for a New American Century” were thinking this way.

An annoyance of mine is the trend over the last several decades that in order to address the ecological crisis, and the politics to overcome it, Marxists had to concoct a new ‘green’ theory of ecological Marxism. If capitalism has a core, “first” contradiction, then ecological crisis constitutes a “second contradiction of capitalism.” If Marx himself was an ecological thinker, it was because of his tangential mention of an “irreparable rift” near the end of Volume 3 of Capital. If Marxists tended to focus on production, ecology was rooted in its opposite (under capitalism): reproduction and ‘life making.’

I will not deny the immense insight of these theories, but the problem is they treat existing and more basic Marxist theory as somehow unecological or unsuited to ecological analysis. But, I would argue (and I have), that theories of exploitation, class struggle, the dialectic of forces/relations of production, are perhaps even more useful to understand our ecological predicament than the panoply of Eco-Marxist theories. And rather than digging deep into unpublished manuscripts and Volume 3 to try to cudgel the “metabolic rift” as somehow Marx’s central ecological theory, I would favor a more basic focus on Marx’s theory of ground rent — including his analysis of landed property as a “third class” alongside capital and labor — and its implications for the class politics of land and ecological systems (I’m deeply influenced by Paul Burkett and Fernando Coronil for centering rent at the core of an understanding of nature-capital relations —I also just learned of this other new article in CNS that argues the same).

My new article in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism — perhaps the most central journal in the canon of ecological Marxism — argues for an ecological theory of another central concept in Marxist theory and politics: the focus on the proletariat as the “agent” of revolutionary change (I prefer to describe this as Marx’s focus on “working-class self-emancipation”). I call it “proletarian ecology” for two reasons. First, Marx’s theory of the proletariat is inherently ecological in that proletarian class formation is only realized through the dispossession of the mass of the population from the “means of production” most notably the land and ecological sources of subsistence. Second, Marx’s theory was always that the proletariat was an agent of human emancipation — it is a theory at the scale of the species. I argue, via a concept of “the planetary mode of production”, that the planetary ecological crisis requires such a global agent; an agent that classical Marxism provides in the proletariat.

I argue that ecological Marxism was part of a larger current of academic (and “New Left”) Marxism that had sought to decenter (or even say “farewell” in André Gorz’s terms) to the working-class in their political theories in order to accommodate a more diverse set of “new social movements.” This is summed up by former CNS editor Joel Kovel’s statement, “The proletariat may not be privileged in red-green discourses, but it remains a full partner.” We need to be honest that this hope that a “movement of movements” would coalesce into a force with the power to take on capital has not, as yet, come to fruition.

But, anonymous reviewers helped me realize that it is not only a lack of attention to the “working class” as such that was the problem — indeed, a focus on the metabolic role of “labor” is absolutely central to nearly all ecological Marxist texts. Rather, the problem is the lack of attention to working-class organization as the key political task of the Marxist project itself. You will find barely a passing mention of trade unions and working-class political parties in the literature (whereas there is an oversized attention to a broader set of non or semi-proletarian “social movements” over land, resources, and ecological injustices).

Anyway, this post is just to alert subscribers to the article (which is OPEN ACCESS). Please read and share.

“My aim is not to offer false hope, but rather to simply point out that the socialist project has always been rooted in a kind of optimism in the human endeavor. It is ultimately based on a wager: if we struggle, and wrestle control of production away from the depredations of capital, there is nothing we can’t do. An energy transition is not only possible; it’s only the beginning of what we can accomplish.”

This is the last paragraph of my newly published piece in Jacobin — a book review of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More: An All Consuming History of Energy. It’s the latest attempt of my long running effort to revive a socialist politics rooted in a positive vision of the future. Seven years ago, I published what remains my best title ever, riffing on Engels, “Ecosocialism: Dystopian and Scientific” arguing many “ecosocialists” root their politics in the need to avoid dystopian visions of the future.

Fressoz’s book lends itself to the same kind of ecosocialist pessimism. Industrialization is painted as an “all consuming” historical force where the only option, as Walter Benjamin put it, is to grab for “the emergency brake.”

But, Marx, Engels, and the socialist movement saw industrialization quite differently — as a singular historical force creating enhanced productive capacity and, thus, the conditions (only the conditions) for human emancipation. This was the essence of socialism’s optimism that the capacity already existed for the abolition of poverty and the repurposing of production toward social needs. Even under capitalism, it seems obvious to me that, as I say in the review, industrialization has been a “net positive” for human society at large.

Certainly the ecological crisis has led most on the Left (and socialists specifically) to abandon such optimism, but why? Right now, the ecological crisis is ultimately driven by a production system directed by anarchic and amoral market forces; goods and services are usually only produced if they fit the narrow logic of profit. We do not think enough how constraining this system is. It should be obvious among socialists that if society were given a chance to subject production to wider criteria of fulfilling social needs and solving ecological problems, surely we could do much, much better than capital. Socialism should be about unleashing the potential shackled by capitalist social relations.

That said, as I show in the review, it’s also clear from Fressoz’s narrative that capital stumbles into ecologically beneficial technological changes to production (metal replaces wood pit props in coal mines, creosote makes wood last longer, saving forests, tractors save millions of acres of land needed to feed working animals, nuclear power generates energy abundance with very little land or material footprint).

The problem is these environmental gains are transient and almost accidental under a capitalist system, but they do show how possible it is. To actually solve climate change and other ecological problems, there would have to be much, much more coordination and public planning to not only transition away from fossil fuels, but also develop more rational and collective systems of housing, transport, and water provision (among many other dimensions).

The problem with Fressoz’s narrative is it will give the reader the sense that making these changes is almost impossible — indeed readers come away thinking such anarchic and profit-oriented growth is a natural and inherent product of industrial society itself. I reject this view. The barriers to a ecological sustainability are wholly social. It is capital —a social relation — that constrains us. We generally have good ideas on how to decarbonize our energy systems, but the problem is such a process will take untold trillions of investment — investment capital is not willing to make (I would add to Christophers’s focus on solar and wind technology, nuclear power, carbon removal, green steel, and much more). If socialism is ultimately about democratizing production, it is about creating new logics of investment…as if human society and our planetary future mattered.

Anyway, please read and share the review. I really enjoyed reading the book and writing it.

“In particular, Trotsky located the origins of bureaucracy in scarcity—‘when there is little goods, the purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order.’ He believed bureaucracy could be overcome by the achievement of abundance.” ~Ian Birchall, “Bureaucracy and Revolution.”

I’ve always felt the core of the socialist project is rooted in the concept of abundance. Many associate capitalism with a kind of abundance — and it is that — but it is a constrained abundance only for the few, while the many suffer through artificial scarcity and deprivation.

So, you can imagine my surprise when the liberals Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance took the world by storm in 2025 leading to much…discourse. The book, indeed, recognizes its debt to socialist thinking, and favorably cites Marx’s fettering thesis. But the debate that followed was extremely frustrating. Nearly everyone on the Left rejected Klein and Thompson’s framework as just more warmed over neoliberalism. Few grappled with the insights in the book, and the more nuanced calls for a fundamentally new political orientation in the Democratic Party focused on growth, technological innovation, and increased supply if key goods like housing, energy, and medicine.

So, I’m just putting up a post here to alert subscribes (welcome!) to some new content from me and my co-authors on this abundance debate. First, my essay with and first published in Jacobin, has been updated (and profusely footnoted) for the scholarly journal Catalyst “The Left has Always Fought for Abundance.” You have to subscribe to access, but it is truly worth it!

Second, here on Substack or any podcast platform, you can read or listen to a really great conversation I had on abundance with . I think I made some OK points, but Chibber didn’t just ask questions, he really brough substantial insight to the conversation (owed to his decades of research into the nature of the state and industrial policy). I can’t recommend this conversation enough!

That’s it for me. My semester starts tomorrow, so pray for me that I can keep posting to this platform.

Oil markets work through commodity cycles of boom and bust. When prices are high, oil capital is keen on investing in new drilling. When prices are low (like today — see the chart, above), less so. While the current price level is somewhere in between, prices are overall depressed, and have been for most of the last decade (apart from the boom associated with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022). Given Venezuela’s “heavy” bituminous crude oil is very difficult and costly to extract, I suspect it might not even be profitable to produce with oil prices below $60/barrel (I can’t easily find what the ‘break even’ price is for Venezuelan oil in particular, likely because of data problems, but it’s worth noting one industry estimate on the break even price for similar Canadian oil sands is $65/barrel). You’ve probably heard that Venezuela has the largest “proven reserves” in the world, but note that category hinges on whether or not the “reserves” are economical to produce (and it’s not clear they are).

Therefore, apart from Chevron, who already has much capital ‘sunk’ into Venezuela, I can’t imagine there will be much interest among the major US oil companies to invest in new drilling (What is more disturbing is how Trump’s “gangster imperialist” ploy will affect Chinese companies who have already invested some $2.1 billion since 2016).

There has been much discussion of Trump’s contradictory goals of solving “affordability” problems by bringing the price of gasoline down (it is down, for what its worth), and his desire to “drill baby drill” in the United States. It is also well known that shale producers in the US use high-cost and complex hydraulic fracturing techniques, and thus need high prices to remain profitable. To “drill baby drill” Statista gives estimates of a variety of shale plays in the US — and all require prices above $60/barrel to break even. In other words, if Venezuelan production were to increase it could depress the global oil price further and damage the US oil capitalists (and workers) at the core of the MAGA coalition. But, again, I’m skeptical oil production will increase in Venezuela anytime soon anyway.

One of my favorite quotes on the political economy of oil comes from the leftist collective “Retort” and their 2005 book Afflicted Powers:

“The history of twentieth-century oil is not the history of shortfall and inflation, but of the constant menace…of excess capacity and falling prices, of surplus and glut” (p. 59).

Originally, this menace was combatted by a capitalist cartel — “The Seven Sisters” oil companies — who carefully divided oil production and markets among themselves on a world scale, but this role was subsequently taken up by OPEC countries interested in maintaining high prices that translate into high rents/taxes. Regardless, despite popular narratives, the oil industry is not always chomping at the bit to extract any and all oil. Their more keen interest is in maintaining and reproducing the scarcity needed to keep prices high enough for profitable accumulation (this is also a core and important argument of Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy). In the context of depressed prices today, they would be far more interested in pumping the oil they have and recouping previous investments, as opposed to drilling new wells.

The other key factor here that is likely to dissuade oil companies from investing is “political risk.” I wrote a paper on this almost two decades ago, but mining and oil companies in particular much prefer to invest in countries where the political situation is stable and, hopefully, favorable to private investors (i.e. low royalty and tax rates). Obviously, that is not the case in Venezuela since it is literally not clear who is in charge at the moment.

Raymond Vernon’s 1971 Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises articulates a powerful theory of the “obsolescing bargain.” In short, when prices are low, extractive enterprises have leverage and can make favorable deals with low royalty and tax rates in host countries. However, when prices (inevitably) rise, the “bargain” becomes obsolete, and host countries can renege on their previous agreements, raise royalty and tax rates, or, even, expropriate them altogether. This is indeed what we could say happened with Chavez in the 2000s — a leftwing socialist environment combined with an oil price boom.

Regardless, if oil companies were going to invest in Venezuela on favorable terms today, there would need to be much more certainty on the political situation. For that, I suppose we will wait and see. One caveat to this analysis, is the question of whether Trump himself will grease the wheels of investment (make it clear to specific companies that investing in Venezuelan oil will yield other political favors). It’s possible, but the historical record of oil capital’s reticent investment patterns during low price periods will be a lot to overcome (especially in the degraded infrastructural context of Venezuela).

Finally, what I’m aiming for in this piece is to push back against an overly “instrumentalist” account of the capitalist state where this invasion was undertaken on behalf of US oil capital. I really doubt it. I agree with Adam Tooze’s description that Donald Trump is more interested in, “feckless reality TV Cosplay resource imperialism.” The fact that after the invasion, the White House posted a meme with the term “FAFO” (“Fuck Around and Find Out”), illustrates how interested he and the administration is in the depraved theatrics of it all.

If I had to guess, I wouldn’t be surprised if no (zero) oil company executives or investors were directly pushing for this invasion. Marxist state theorists talk a lot about the “relative autonomy” of the state, but Trump’s form of narcissism-as-governance really does raise the question of whether or not we’re talking about the absolute autonomy of the state. This is not the first time where this administration appears to be acting in ways that do not align with what one might imagine as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. What this means for global capitalism at large, and the centrality of the American empire in overseeing it, is really unclear and up for grabs.

In Jacobin, I tried to write the most compact “case for” nuclear energy, with the hope of shaping an emerging debate on the Left (it is fair to say this debate barely even existed 10 years ago). Predictably, the piece created a lot of hostile reactions on the (mostly) anti-nuclear Left. Things got particularly feisty on the platform of the ancients (Facebook), and one comment was from Simon Pirani who expressed bewilderment that I never responded to his many critiques of my work with Fred Stafford on electricity (see here, here, and here. I’m going to mostly respond here to the peer reviewed journal article here).

I honestly don’t know why Pirani seems to think his writing demands a response. I’ve received, uh, my fair share of criticism in the last 3.5 years since my book came out. It would be impossible to respond to all of it. Nevertheless, the exchange did force me to revisit Pirani’s arguments, and the blessed end of semester does give me a bit of extra time, so here’s a response.

A Summary of the Debate

To lay out the stakes of this exchange, for the last few years, I (along with Fred Stafford) have set out to advance a critique of the shibboleths of left energy ideology:

• That it will be all or mostly a transition to wind and solar energy.

• That it will be shaped by a profound decentralization of the energy system to distributed energy.

• That the struggle over energy — particularly public power — is one between local ‘communities’ vs. big, centralized state and corporate entities.

• That we need more ‘energy democracy’ in the form of local participation in the governance of electricity systems.

• That nuclear power (and a variety of other non-solar/wind technologies such as carbon removal, hydrogen, and more) are ‘false solutions’.

These ideologies took hold on the Left in the 1970s, and I would say the vast majority of leftists, especially on the climate and energy Left, still believe this stuff. I think it’s healthy to have alternative perspectives on these things, and Stafford and I aim to offer a perspective that is quite rare on the socialist left (although I was excited to see this new book by Bill Sacks and Greg Meyerson, The Poverty of Green Philosophy: A Marxist Case for Nuclear Energy in a Cooperative World which looks very good, and there are a few socialist fellow travelers out there like David Walters, who, I should add, was himself a unionist in IBEW and worked at a power plant).

Simon Pirani clearly is one of those leftists who believes pretty much all of the above. In other words, he really doesn’t differentiate himself from the common sense among the Left. This Left is rooted in the academic humanities (Pirani is a historian), social sciences, environmental NGOs, and a smattering of ideologically aligned energy system modelers.

Stafford and I do not follow this common sense, and think it is wildly out of touch with the material and engineering requirements of the electricity grid as it exists. In contrast, we support nuclear power, respect centralized utilities for their role in building and maintaining societal-scale grid infrastructure, look the unions/labor for leadership on complicated questions of decarbonization, and advance a ‘bigger’ vision of public power less shaped by local/community/municipal ownership, and more by large-scale investment in electricity infrastructure like the Tennessee Valley Authority. We tend to draw our analyses more from engineers and experts (like public utility commissions, RTO/ISOs, government reports, etc.) and the actual workers/unions in the electricity system itself.

It is important to say at the outset that Pirani and I are coming from totally different ideological positions on these questions. Each of us can marshal all the studies and empirics to back up our position, but it’s not likely this will convince either one of us of the other’s position. Stafford and I are simply trying to win some modicum of converts on the Left for our heretofore mostly heretical positions. We’re not surprised Pirani and others aim to defend their position.

The Nuclear Question

To respond to some more specific points. First, on nuclear power. Pirani can rehearse all the common anti-nuclear talking points he wants — he can even call pro-nuclear arguments “outdated” (p. 68), even as much of the world is realizes it will be necessary (not just Trump, but the Biden Administration too, and China…and the IPCC…even Japan is restarting nuclear reactors).

My article in Jacobin basically answers all of his anti-nuclear arguments, except one I left out for space: Pirani argues, “[C]limate change deprives us of time. Nuclear power stations take many years to build, while decentralised renewable energy systems do not” (p. 64). To channel some of Pirani’s often uncomradely and dismissive language, this is a gross simplification. It ignores the fact “decentralized renewables” must also be integrated into a complex grid network, which can take many years if not decades (outside of China). In the United States, renewable projects wait “a median of 5 years” in the interconnection queue. More concerning, however, is that more renewables will undoubtedly require thousands of miles of new long distance transmission lines; projects which face innumerable legal, political and environmental barriers to completion and are often abandoned.

Meanwhile, France basically decarbonized their grid by building 40 reactors in a decade a half century ago. Nuclear power stations can be plopped right on top of retired coal stations with easy hookups to transmission. The hard reality is that building a new, zero-carbon electricity grid is going to take a lot of time regardless of which path you choose. A renewables-based grid might take a shorter amount of time, but it also probably would need replacement faster than a nuclear-powered grid (I think the former infrastructure is reasonably estimated to last 20-30 years, whereas the latter is more like 80). Regardless, it is our position that we will need both so the divergent timelines don’t matter as much.

Decentralized Renewables — Neoliberal or Emancipatory?

Second, there is the question of how much we could rely on “decentralized renewables” themselves. For all of Pirani’s optimism about some “third industrial revolution” integrating digital technology, smart meters, micro-grids, and the rest, the fact is most societies still rely on centralized power stations for the bulk of their electricity (in our Catalyst article we used EIA data to estimate around 86 percent of US generation comes from traditional, centralized generation). Pirani cites many countries that do increasingly get quite a lot of their electricity from renewables — sometimes around 40-50 percent coming from solar and wind at certain times of year (Denmark, Spain, California, Germany, the UK, are common examples), but downplays the extent to which all these countries still rely heavily on imports, natural gas backup, or plain, old coal to make up the balance (I’d prefer the nearly 100% clean grids of France and Sweden, powered by nuclear and hydro above else, over any of those cases).

He also challenges the extent to which decentralized renewables are a product of neoliberalism or fully under the control of the private sector. He is correct that the early periods of neoliberal electricity restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly to the benefit of “merchant” gas generators (and yes, even some nuclear), but the significant increase of renewables in the last fifteen years is simply a continuation of these neoliberal trends.

As I argue in a recent peer reviewed article in the journal Development and Change, the vast majority of renewable projects in the United States were undertaken by private-fort-profit independent power producers (IPPs) dislodged from the public utility system (“In 2023, 81 per cent of wind generation and 86 per cent of utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) generation was provided by IPPs (the remainder is mostly utilities)” (p. 991)). As I describe in the article, drawing from research by Sarah Knuth, tax policy means these IPP projects are also nefariously aligned with some of the wealthiest institutions in the entire economy — tax equity investors like Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway and others who take advantage of the tax credits the US government uses exclusively to incentivize renewable investment and production.

For a broader view, and regardless of the state origin in places like Denmark or Germany, it is indisputable that outside of China, the renewables industry is largely a private sector affair. My new article also cites Brett Christophers’s claim that, “the developed world, a mere 4 per cent of renewable energy projects are publicly owned. In the developing world, with the legacies of public power, the figure is slightly higher at 28 per cent” (and, as Pirani hints, most of that is likely due to China).

Pirani also refuses to see an overlap between “decentralization” and neoliberalism, preferring a view of neoliberalism as the consolidation of the power of “big, centralised corporations” (p. 71). This is a very simplistic view of the concept. It not only denies the real ways in which neoliberal deregulation of electricity literally decentralized control from centralized utilities to a more dispersed network of small-scale IPPs (among other actors), but also ignores that the entire process of neoliberal globalization could be seen as one of capitalist decentralization (offshoring, subcontracting, vertical disintegration, etc). Regardless, my point is to show the ideological affinity between neoliberal economic utopias of decentralized market forces, and energy thinkers like Amory Lovins et al (who is himself quite neoliberal despite his alignment with the environmental Left).

Pirani claims we are “mistaken” by raising any reliability concerns with variable renewable energy, even as many grid operators warn that we need more “dispatchable emissions-free resources” to ensure reliability (read: non-renewables like nuclear and geothermal), and the Biden Administration recognized the necessity of “clean firm” generation to keep grids reliable.

And, blaming “fossil fuels” for blackouts in grids that rely heavily on fossil fuels, as Pirani does (p. 66), is like blaming blood flow for a heart attack. For example, the reason you can’t blame renewables for the catastrophic, deadly blackout in Texas (“Winter Storm Uri”) in 2021 is because ERCOT was not counting on renewables to keep the lights on in the dead of winter. They counted on natural gas, and it failed. More to the point, Pirani wrote his critiques before the Iberian blackout of Spring 2025 which, regardless of whether you want to ‘blame’ renewables, happened in a grid heavily reliant upon solar generation (The Economist helpfully points to a number of grid investments needed to make the solar more reliable).

Pirani seems to think Stafford and I are “anti-renewables” (even going so far to say we’re parroting fossil fuel talking points). That’s not at all true. We just oppose the simplistic and biased focus among leftists on renewables and nothing else. We follow unions in supporting a “broad based” approach to decarbonization that includes renewables, but also a variety of other technologies.

Quibbles for Days

Pirani’s critique is infused with countless quibbles that don’t actually contest the main point were were trying to make. It would be hard for me to respond to each and every one. Let me try a few.

For one, it may be true that we don’t accurately represent Idel’s research into the systems costs of renewables integration, but this does not change the fact that these systems costs are indeed real and belied by constant claims that renewables are now the “cheapest” electricity sources out there. Since Pirani’s critique appeared, again, Brett Christophers’s work has thoroughly dismantled these claims showing that the entire methodology of Levelized Cost of Energy (a) ignores prohibitive constraints to renewable investors such as land costs, interconnection fees (i.e. systems costs), and more and (b) because of this, actual investors in the sector do not take the LCOE claims seriously.

To quote Christophers, “JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest described the metric as a ‘practical irrelevance’. He was expressing a position widely held among his peers in the financial sector.” In his own elaboration on his blog, Pirani cites research that claims renewables might sometimes be costlier than nuclear or “somewhat less competitive” when these systems costs are taken into account, and quotes one article claiming, “it is important to avoid simplistic claims that system integration costs are large.” But, we never said systems costs were “too large”. We said they exist, and are often occluded by claims of supercheap renewables.

On another point, Pirani is right that Mark Z. Jacobson is not the only only modeler who claims the possibility of a 100% renewable grid (although we maintain his influence is massive and, as we point out in a newer article, circulates much more broadly than academia). Yes, there is a robust literature on the real, potential of 100% renewable electricity systems. But, our larger point is that outside these purely academic models, no such 100% renewable systems exist in the real world (outside of marginal cases with huge proportions of hydro and geothermal), and, as we mention above, grid planners actually working in these systems explicitly worry we need lots more non-renewable clean power for decarbonization.

Third, we describe Mark Nelson as an energy analyst which Pirani thinks is incorrect because he is a “consultant” and “nuclear advocate.” Nevertheless, we would still call him an analyst.

And, one can quibble back. Just because Engels said nice things about Robert Owen’s co-ops, does not invalidate his searing critique of the utopian socialist tradition (of which Owen’s cooperatives were a prime target). I was just reading Bruno Leipold’s brilliant study of Marx and Engels’s republicanism, and he claims Engels did flirt with small-scale cooperative utopianism, but that Marx had “never had any time” for such experiments and that Marx influence him to, “abandon these earlier enthusiasms.”

Pirani refutes Marx saw socialization and centralization of production as connected. I agree Marx’s main focus is on the socialization of labor laying the material conditions for socialism, but in the climactic passage of Capital he does indeed couple this concept with centralization (“The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.”). Regardless, you would be hard pressed to find a better example of the socialization of labor than an electricity grid made up of centralized power stations, long distance transmission, and dispersed distribution networks. Such systems require vast planning and socialized coordination — including a dense division of technical engineering knowledge and manual skill — to constantly balance supply with demand. Unlike most markets, this socialized planning is a physical and infrastructural necessity.

Finally, yes, union leaders do not always speak for their members, but that does not mean union members are clamoring for what are inherently temporary construction jobs in the renewables sector (with the caveat that only offshore wind really provides a long term, durable industrial infrastructure that unions are excited about). The actually existing solar industry today is any workers nightmare, featuring low pay, transient work sites away from family for weeks and workplace hazards like extreme heat, alligators and snakes.

It is fashionable among socialists of a Trotskyist orientation (or other tendency) to wholly dismiss trade union leaders as “business unionists”, but when it comes to decarbonization and technology I would take their much more practical perspectives and proposals over most environmental NGOs.

Agree to Disagree

Let me close by just saying the main issue here is we simply disagree on a lot. And that’s OK. A healthy Left would be defined by divergent positions and open debate. I hope readers can decide for themselves which vision of socialism and electricity they find most compelling.