For a Radical Green New Deal: Energy, the Means of Production, and the Capitalist State

ABSTRACT

The Green New Deal (GND) has emerged on the national stage as a plan to address climate change by reforming the energy system. It would be hugely expensive, and likely involve the redistribution of accumulated wealth from the bourgeoisie, and controls on carbon-intensive fractions of capital. The GND would also threaten the bourgeoisie by democratizing the means of the production in the energy sector, and possibly inspiring a wider referendum on capitalism itself. Anticipating attacks on the GND by capital, I propose that workers’ needs be placed at its center. I make this case by explaining how capital exerts power over the state, how labor can fight capital using strikes, and how the proletariat could force the bourgeoisie to submit to a state-led GND. Along the way I make the case for broadening the scholarship that focuses on energy's importance to the state by explaining energy's importance as a vital means of production and not mainly as a source of rent.

KEYWORDS:

• Green New Deal
• energy
• the state

Acknowledgements

Thank you Matt Huber for reading and commenting on this paper many times through its various forms. Thank you to the peer reviewers and editor Saed Engel-DiMauro for engaging with my argument and evidence. Thank you to Jamie Winders, Don Mitchell, Tod Rutherford, Antonio Ioris and Mark Rupert for reading and commenting on the paper when it was still a dissertation chapter. Thank you to the wider community of socialists, activists, and representatives involved in the pressing discussion over the Green New Deal. All errors of fact or interpretation are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Karl says her petro-state category only applies to “capital-deficient oil exporters” (1997, 17). Using GDP per capita as a measure of capital, she avoids making claims about “capital-surplus,” i.e. rich countries, like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Libya, and Iraq (Ibid., 18). She limits her petro-state thesis to poor countries like Algeria, Indonesia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Iran, even though Iran had a higher GDP per capita than Iraq according to her own data (Ibid.).

2 This has not stopped Karl's petro-state thesis from being applied to Russia (Goldman 2010) and Canada (Nikiforuk 2012).

3 Marx uses the words auxiliary (1867, 203; 209) or accessory (Ibid., 181) interchangeably when referring to means of production that vanish during the labor process but modify the product. I picked auxiliary because other Marxist scholars seem to have converged around the term auxiliary to describe energy as a means of production (Harvey 1982, 206; Heinrich 2012, 136).

4 It's true that fossil fuels are an indispensable feedstock (“raw material” in Marx's terms) for fractions of capital in petrochemicals (Huber 2013, 61–95) and fertilizer production (Huber 2017) but I’m mostly interested energy as an auxiliary means of production here.

5 “In addition it may prove necessary for the state to supply means of production which have a general significance for capital e.g., infrastructure, energy supplies, transport, basic research and development and economic statistics” (234, emphasis added).

6 Like a lot of Marxist state theory from the 1970s, Poulantzas’ work is dense and hard to follow, and he contradicts himself in places. (This might stem from errors in translation, and there is a need for a reading of Poulantzas by a French-speaking eco-socialist. Although he was Greek by origin, he published in French). For example, he contradicts his own notion of the state's relative autonomy in the same book where he introduces that concept, “The relation between the capitalist state and the dominant classes or fractions pushes them towards their political unity under the protection of a hegemonic class or fraction” (Poulantzas 1973, 239). Regardless, relative autonomy is the idea that was picked up and developed by the scholarship (Das 2006) and was improved upon by the likes of Clarke (1983).