The Jacobin series includes short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in accessible and popular form.
The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.
Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:
Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel
Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant
Strike for America by Micah Uetricht
The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff
Four Futures by Peter Frase
Class War by Megan Erickson
Building the Commune by George Ciccariello-Maher
The People’s Republic of Walmart
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozwroski
All-American Nativism by Daniel Denvir
Capital City by Samuel Stein
Red State Revolt by Eric Blanc
Without Apology by Jenny Brown
A Planet to Win
Why We Need a Green New Deal
KATE ARONOFF,
ALYSSA BATTISTONI,
DANIEL ALDANA COHEN,
and THEA RIOFRANCOS
First published by Verso 2019
The collection © Verso 2019
The contributions © The contributors 2019
Foreword © Naomi Klein 2019
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-832-3 (UK EBK)
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There is nowhere to go now but forward. But which way is forward?
Roland Wank, chief architect, Tennessee Valley Authority, 1941
CONTENTS
Foreword by Naomi Klein
Introduction: Bad Weather, Good Politics
1.Bury the Fossils
2.Strike for Sunshine
3.Rebuilding the World
4.Recharging Internationalism
Conclusion: Freedom to Live
Acknowledgments
The Green New Deal burst onto the political stage when organizers held a sit-in in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) last fall. She dismissed the idea as a “Green Dream, or whatever,” but organizers were unfazed. They shot back that the Green New Deal was indeed a dream, a badly needed one about what organized and focused people are capable of accomplishing in the face of a crisis that threatens the habitability of our home. Given how radically and rapidly our societies need to change if we are to avert full-blown climate catastrophe (and given the prevalence of ecological doom and despair), sharing some big dreams about a future in which we do not descend into climate barbarism seemed like a very good place to start.
The interplay between lofty dreams and earthly victories has always been at the heart of moments of deep progressive transformation. In the United States, the breakthroughs won for workers and their families after the Civil War and during the Great Depression, as well as for civil rights and the environment in the sixties and early seventies, were not just responses to crises, demanded from below. They were also the products of dreams of very different kinds of societies, dreams invariably dismissed as impossible and impractical at the time. What set these moments apart was not the presence of crises (which our history has never lacked), but rather that they were times of rupture when the utopian imagination was unleashed—times when people dared to dream big, out loud, in public, together. For instance, the Gilded Age strikers of the late nineteenth century, enraged by the enormous fortunes being amassed off the backs of repressed laborers, were inspired by the Paris Commune, when the working people of Paris took over the governing of their city for months. They dreamed of a “cooperative commonwealth,” a world where work was but one element of a well-balanced life, with plenty of time for leisure, family, and art. In the lead-up to the original New Deal, working-class organizers were versed not only in Marx but also in W.E.B. Du Bois, who had a vision of a pan-working-class movement that could unite the downtrodden to transform an unjust economic system. It was the civil rights movement’s transcendent dream—whether articulated in the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. or in the vision of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—that created the space for, and inspired, the grassroots organizing that in turn led to tangible wins. A similar utopian fervor in the late sixties and early seventies—emerging out of the countercultural upheaval, when young people were questioning just about everything—laid the groundwork for feminist, lesbian and gay, and environmental breakthroughs.
By the time the 2008 financial fiasco was unfolding, that utopian imagination had largely atrophied. Moral outrage poured out against the banks and the bailouts and the austerity that was sure to follow. Yet even as rage filled the streets and the squares, generations who had grown up under neoliberalism’s vice grip struggled to picture something, anything, other than what they had always known. Science fiction hasn’t been much help, either. Almost every vision of the future that we get from best-selling novels and big-budget Hollywood films takes some kind of ecological and social apocalypse for granted. It’s almost as if a great many of us have collectively stopped believing that there is a future, let alone that it could be better, in many ways, than the present.
The climate movement