Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World

Ståle Holgersen
AGAINST THE CRISIS
Economy and Ecology in a Burning World
Verso Books, 2024

reviewed by Owen McCormack

In Against the Crisis, Swedish socialist Ståle Holgersen takes the reader on a tour of economic and ecological crises and the various ways Marxists and others have analyzed and explained them over the years. If the book was just a synopsis of the past crises and the trends they illuminate it would be a useful addition to every socialist’s library, but it does much more than that. Holgerson explains past crises to help us find our way out of them in the future.

Crises are far from being “opportunities” for socialists and the left—they are the basic tools with which capitalism reproduces itself, and reasserts its hegemony ideologically. Marxists and the left must not pretend they are opportunities, but something to be fought and exposed as central to capitalism’s functioning.

While the various economic crisis we have lived through even over the last few decades might suggest that Capitalism’s rule is fragile and weak, with its basic tenets becoming exposed and contested by billions of people, the continued rule of capital has never seriously been in doubt. To understand why Holgerson says we must look at how each crisis is resolved.

In a way, Holgersen echoes Marx in almost admiring capitalism’s ability to stay in power and revolutionize productive and social relations while maintaining its hegemonic grip. Even as “all that is solid melts into air,” around us and ordinary people are plunged into poverty, war or chaos, capital remains intact, like the beetles who could survive even a nuclear holocaust.

At one moment, its paid pundits and admirers declare capitalism rests on pure free market principles, risk-taking entrepreneurs and a small state, then without skipping a beat they pivot to demand billion dollar state bailouts for banks and financial institutions. It can move seamlessly (amid the chaos of ruined lives and cascading ecological disasters) from a liberal, inclusive, pro human rights and welfare state paradigm to a far right, near-fascist, pro-genocide and Handmaidens Tale structure of rule.

Quoting Marx, Holgersen argues that crises are “never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that re-establish the disturbed balance for the time being.” Crises are “capital’s problems solvers.”

Some of this is not news to Marxists or the left in general; it has been well understood how economic crises help reset the system, clearing out unprofitable enterprises and vast stocks of machinery and wealth to unleash a new round of accumulation.

“Creative destruction” describes the clearing of the decks that allows the next round of profit seeking to begin even as humanity emerges from poverty, job losses and ruined lives; even wars and global conflicts are part of the unseen hand that guides repeated crises within capitalism. New technologies, new productions, new class relations, again based on profit seeking and the unquestioned hegemony of capital, emerge from desolation. Crisis after crisis; now local, now national, now global. Rinse and repeat.

These rhythms in the economic cycle have produced massive suffering and destruction on global scales; they have propelled imperialism and global wars; yet what looms above us now is a new crisis, the one crisis to rule them all; the ecological and climate crisis. Capital’s symbiotic relationship with fossil fuels is driving the rupture with the earth’s planetary boundaries that has placed question marks over the planet’s future habitability for humanity.

Rephrasing Lewontin, Holgersen notes that while past agricultural practices were about growing food, under capitalism it is about converting petroleum into food. “The climate crisis is very much the explosive meeting of capitalist market time and biological time.”

“What really makes ecological crises rapid events and shocks is that their acceleration is not gradual: they come as abrupt changes.” While each economic crisis contains the solution in its own destructive force, the ecological crisis threatens the “demise of our societies as we know them.”

Holgersen demolishes market solutions and the hope of many greens that solutions can be found within the continued rule of capital, that progress will lead us all to a kind of Nordic environmental nirvana of high incomes and clean energy and streets. Capital is not decoupling growth from fossil fuel use, and the time remaining to cut emissions means that an all-in switch to renewables within capitalism is impossible. It’s not so much that “we don’t have time for your revolution” as “we don’t have time for your reforms.”

Holgersen notes “ecological crises have not been problems for capital. It does not matter how much people want “ecological” to equal “profitable.” The most important lesson from the history of capitalism is that capital has profited handsomely from creating environmental damage and ecological crises.” Capital will continue to seek profits from fossil fuels at 2 or 3 or more degrees of warming and to hell with the consequences. The last capitalist may sell gasoline to his last customers, or he may sell them survival kits—or both. “This is not the first time that mass murder has proved to be a good business idea.”

The key to getting out of this Groundhog Day nightmare is the role and potential of the working class. For all of the changes wrought by crises, what remains unchanged is the power of capital over workers and nature. The exploitation of workers, the extraction of surplus value from workers remains key to capital’s functioning. It is workers and the poor who suffer in each crisis for capital to reset itself. Ecological crises take this to new staggering levels; they strike downwards at the poorest and most vulnerable. Economic and ecological crises, are caused by one class, but another pays the price.

While there are tensions between environmental needs and workers’ needs, only the working class can stop global warming. “The main socialist challenge is to reconcile the class struggle in the environmental movement with the class struggle in the workplace. This is only possible through an organized and conscious socialist movement.”

The history of our failures has been long and painful; but in these dark days it is timely to again reassert the possibility of a working class alternative to capital’s rule and to recall the words of the great Irish labor leader who proclaimed many years ago: “The great only appear great because we are on our knees, let us rise, let us rise!”

Owen McCormack is a transport worker and former researcher with People Before Profit, a radical ecosocialist party in the Irish Parliament.