Global Capitalism and Climate Change: The Need for an Alternative System by Hans A. Baer

Abstract

It is something of a cliché to quote Karl Marx’s (1845) observation in Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, where he wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” A universe of ink has been spilled over the past 177 years, but philosophers have come no closer to changing the world than they did in Marx’s day. The productive powers of capitalism have been exercised to the fullest, yet there is no sign that its replacement by some form of socialism or communism is any closer than in Marx’s day. Hans A. Baer, the author of Global Capitalism and Climate Change, argues that only ecosocialism can eliminate the depredations and destruction of nature and people caused by global capitalism and climate change but, like the philosophers, provides little guidance or instruction about how this objective might be achieved. Baer is not the first to offer such solutions without a plan or program for change, and he certainly will not be the last. According to Baer, his book “constitutes an effort to develop a critical social science of climate change ... [that explores] the systemic changes necessary to create a more social just and sustainable world system” (4). Thus, after introducing the problem of climate change and the logic—and contradictions— of the capitalist world system, Baer examines how greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to capitalism and why tinkering around the edges of its structure is insufficient to prevent climate change. He then examines the local, national, and global climate movements; argues on behalf of an ecosocialist alternative world system; and attempts to provide a road map to how we can fundamentally change the system for the better. Why have philosophers, as well as activists, movements, politicians, entrepreneurs, and natural and social scientists (including anthropologists, of which Baer is one) failed so far to do something meaningful about climate change? Their failures are not due to lack of effort or programs or projects or conferences or markets or diktats or communiques. Indeed, the discursive “niche” called “climate change” is so densely occupied that it is almost impossible to hear anything amid the noise (McDonald 2021).