Aaron Bastani

Rather than calling for climate justice through appeals to turn down the volume on modernity here, criticism of fossil fuels is situated within the broader frame that they are an obstacle to yet higher standards of living.

The call for clean energy must become synonymous not only with the expectation of permanently falling costs but also common ownership. Prosperity, democracy and the commons as not only connected, but mutually constitutive.

The technologies needed to deliver a post-scarcity, post-work society – centred around renewable energy, automation and information – were absent in the Russian Empire, or indeed anywhere else until the late 1960s. Indeed, amid efforts to catch up with the more advanced capitalist economies of Europe and America, the Bolsheviks became students of the Taylorist science of productivity

Just as FALC is appropriate for a world where technology leaves us on the cusp of previously unthinkable abundance, the party-form which emerged in response to closed, under-developed societies makes increasingly little sense. The same is true for forms of worker organising, radical or reformist, which are erroneously premised on the society of work enduring forever.

The problem is not, therefore, that most people do not care about politics but rather they cannot afford to care in the face of so many competing demands.

The point is not to change the words we use, but the reality they describe.

The current approach to climate change isn’t about ‘working together’, it’s about passivity presented as partnership.

Here ‘global coordination’ is merely the international adjunct to capitalist realism, allowing the biggest polluters – who are also the most powerful nations – to avoid changing their path.

Rather than integration we need imitation, with the power of the demonstrable example far more compelling than elite interests framed as multilateral compromise.

When we wanted to connect the world through trains, cable and roads, it was through example and imitation. When we desired universal literacy and sanitation, the same applied.