Foremost among them is how socialists should conceive of the Green New Deal now that its precondition, the prospect of administering the state, has receded into the distance; and how the left can reconcile the ‘long game’ of democratic socialism with the urgency of the climate timeline.
At Labour’s September 2019 conference, a motion approved by party members and two of Britain’s three biggest trade unions defined the GND as ‘a state-led programme of investment and regulation, based on public ownership and democratic control, for the decarbonization and transformation of our economy.’ Bernie Sanders’s presidential manifesto contained a more expansive definition: ‘a ten-year, nationwide mobilization centered around justice and equity during which climate change will be factored into virtually every area of policy, from immigration to trade to foreign policy and beyond.’ Looking back at these proposals, it is tempting to view Biden’s ‘green Keynesian’ infrastructure plan as a concession to the GND .
Marxist economist Mary Robertson – who, as Corbyn’s head of economic policy, was the unsung architect of this agenda – has pointed out that Labour’s public ownership programme aimed, through ‘removing key areas of social and economic reproduction from the system of production for profit’, to delink large sectors of the economy from the commodity structure as a vital component of its decarbonization plan.
Corbynism marked a welcome turn away from the mimetic revolutionary politics of Trotskyist grouplets, yet the urgency of the climate crisis had nonetheless robbed us of the luxury of the ‘long march through the institutions’.
Quite the opposite: new green industries; existing low-carbon sectors valorized and enlarged; decommodified public utilities and renewed trade unions, freed from the need to protect carbon-heavy jobs, would together change the balance of class forces.
Both shared the same vision of a just, state-led transition away from fossil fuels, foregrounding mass green job creation and the revival of trade unions.
Perhaps the most significant shift from AOC’s GND congressional resolution in November 2018 to the Sanders presidential programme was the latter’s explicit commitment to public ownership of new renewable energy infrastructure.
Sizing up the annual 0.6% of GDP that the plan allocates to ‘climate-related’ projects, The Economist, in its own understated way, concurred with such critics: the scheme is, ‘if anything, a little on the low side of most estimates for the costs of rethinking and largely recreating an industrial civilization.’ Measured against the $16.3 trillion of public investment that sat at the centre of Sanders’s GND, Biden’s proposal seems almost trivial.
One of Biden’s headline pledges is to ‘build, preserve and retrofit more than two million homes and commercial buildings’, whereas the plan to decarbonize Britain’s energy system – drawn up by energy experts and civil engineers and adopted in Corbyn’s manifesto – aimed to retrofit the country’s entire housing stock: 27 millionhomes within a decade.
Last November, shadow secretary of state for work and pensions Jonathan Reynolds demanded that UK pension funds be made carbon neutral by 2050, declaring with no hint of irony that ‘the climate emergency demands urgent action’.
In both the US and UK, then, the GND as a programme for decarbonization through socialist transformation – which would be able to take action at the speed and scale necessary to mitigate catastrophe – will not materialize for the foreseeable future.
With democratic planning a distant prospect, it’s easy to envisage the GND being absorbed into a ‘green’ capitalism that would not address the fundamental drivers of climate breakdown.
Imagining that the GND might be adopted by centrist politicians – if only they are pressed hard enough – is a recipe for confusion and demobilization at best, and abandonment of the programme’s non-reformist potential at worst.
As Brian Deese, director of the president’s National Economic Council, put it in a recent interview: Biden is ‘thinking about the infrastructure investments necessary… in contra position to what he is seeing China doing, in terms of strategic investments’.
There are already institutions which render socialists well-placed to recapture the initiative: left-led trade unions in Britain, Momentum, Labour for a Green New Deal, the DSA’s eco-socialist working group, and think-tanks like Common Wealth and the Democracy Collaborative.
Beyond some academic circles, there has so far been scant engagement with Holly Jean Buck’s warning that oil companies could use carbon capture projects to ‘essentially take us hostage’, monopolizing these nascent technologies to redouble their illusory promises of net-zero.
If the emergency brake is ever to be glimpsed, let alone grasped, then a socialist climate movement bound together by the Green New Deal is a good place to start.