What Happens After Capitalism?

In this time of uncertainty,

where fascists are seizing power and climate chaos supercharges

disasters, killing thousands and displacing

millions, where a whole world is content watching settler colonial genocide

unfold, it can feel hard to see any light at the end of the tunnel.

It feels like the future is grim.

But all is not lost.

The future can be beautiful and bright.

A future where our needs are met, our communities, and our environments

thrive, and we all feel fulfilled in our daily life.

But to bring about that world, we need to escape the confines of capitalism.

Imagining and then building a world free of capitalist

exploitation and destruction, an ecosocialist world.

Today, we dive into that vision of the future.

What does it mean?

What would an ecosocialist

world actually look like?

And why giving shape to that world in our imaginations

is crucial for building radical

movements in the here and now.

It feels like hope is a dwindling flame in the dark.

That change is impossible.

But we can and must rid ourselves of that notion.

We need to light a spark under that dwindling

flame and imagine a better world for ourselves and our communities.

We can't just surrender to the exploitation

and destruction of capitalism.

Indeed, as educator Ashley C.

Forward writes, "The goal of oppressors

is to limit your imagination about what is possible without them.

So you might never imagine more for yourself

and the world you live in."

As I covered extensively

in this video, hope must not be just a feeling.

It's a revolutionary act.

It's a tool that gives us a north star, a heading from which we

might chart a course to a more liberatory

and just world outside the depravities of capitalism.

Because to transform and topple our current system of fossil capitalism

to build movements, we need as much world building as we do critique.

We need to envision what a zerocarbon

liberatory world might look like so that we have something to fight for, not just against.

As environmental historian and author of half earth socialism,

Troy Vatess argues in a conversation I had with him a while back >> that

having this utopia, this end goal is very useful cuz that actually glues together

your coalition that actually binds you together.

Luckily, there are so many beautiful visions of a future based on the needs

of the people and the planet from video games like Terranil

or all the varied visions of solar punk or even the pan-African

ecote utopia of Wakanda.

Unfortunately, these pieces of art often lack political direction and insight

which is why we must define and give shape to the political systems

that might actually produce

those visions and that system is ecosocialism.

For Candace Dixon, working at an Amazon fulfillment

facility meant risking injury every single day.

And that day eventually came as she threw out her back and then was

made to go back to work quickly

for fear of losing her job. >> I got injured.

I pulled my back out.

>> Her doctor told her to limit heavy lifting.

But she says Amazon

sent her back to work, still dealing with heavy boxes,

and her injury got worse.

>> Unfortunately, Candace Dixon is not alone.

Amazon's workplace injury rate is almost double that of the industry average

as workers are forced to labor at speed to bring profits to the likes of Jeff Bezos.

And there are so many more and worse life-threatening

industries that prioritize profits

over life and the planet.

This is life under capitalism.

A system based on the accumulation of profits and capital.

We need a vision of a world that runs wholly counter to this. We need ecoocialism.

a system based on the needs of both people and the planet.

While there will not be and cannot be one singular vision of how ecosocialism

might work, there are a number of different through lines that run through the

manifestos and agendas of leftists.

And books like The Red Deal, a People's Green New Deal, half-Earth Socialism,

The Future is Degrowth, and so many more point the way.

To sum up, many of these visions in their own way seek to wrestle

free from the oppressive shackles of capitalism,

the shackles of worker exploitation,

the shackles of racism,

the shackles of colonialism,

the shackles of patriarchy,

the shackles of abbleism,

and the shackles of ecological destruction.

To do so, however,

requires a radically different mode of production.

One where workers own, control, and decide what gets made and when.

That mode could be ecosocialism,

an economic and political system that calls for a worker and peasant-led

revolution that rips ownership of production

away from the elite and puts decision-making

power into the hands of the masses.

Unlike capitalism, which prioritizes

decisions based on the endless creation of products to sell for more profit,

ecosocialism advocates for an economy that makes decisions based on the well-being

of all people and the planet.

Because one of the foundational tenants of ecosocialism

must be that the fruits of everyone's labor aren't funneled into the coffers of

a single capitalist, but instead

distributed according to people's needs.

In the famous words of Karl Marx, from each according to their ability

to each according to their needs.

But what would that actually entail?

What kind of world could foster a good life for all and a harmonious

connection with the natural world?

To start, an ecosocialist

project would need to build out a robust

system of free universal basic services.

An ecosocialist world must supply what capitalist systems are loathed to provide for fear

of workers no longer needing to deflate their wages just to live.

Free goods and services

required for a good life.

As Sean Blackman from the Party for Socialism and Liberation

>> "Under a socialist government,

every person would have unrestricted

access to food, clothes,

shelter, health care, quality education,

and gainful >> Universal services means a nationalized

or even global health care system where you no longer have to go deep

into debt to get basic or advanced medical care.

It means free child care for those who need it and generous compensation

for those who wish to care for their kids full-time.

It means extensive and free mental health services as we unpack the traumas of

past oppression under capitalism.

Free education from pre kindergarten

through college is also a must because critical thinking and curiosity

need to blossom in an ecosocialist world.

Importantly, all of this work is non-extractive and lowcarbon.

These are inherently green services.

But universal services don't just stop at care.

Imagine zerocarbon housing that is free or low cost.

No longer tied to speculative markets and crushing rent spikes.

Lowcarbon retrofitted homes and apartment buildings would be affixed with solar and battery storage

and co-ousing and co-op living across all ages would be the norm.

No longer does the very house we live in distance us from the people

we love or destroy the planet.

Of course, for those who are uninterested

in community living, there would be sustainable single family homes.

homes available too, but they would be a far cry from the McMansions

of suburbia that are so popular now.

Housing, especially in the United States,

would need to degrow an individual

side, but expand in capacity

so that we can assure that no one is living on the streets and everyone is comfortable.

People would no longer own multiple homes and instead

access to vacation homes and resorts would be shared and could be tied to

work hours and community contributions.

put enough time in at the solar plant or the farm and get three

weeks at the cabin on Lake Michigan

because all commons from parks to natural wonders to golf courses

must be decommodified and accessible to all.

An ecosocialist society must foster conditions so that places where people can congregate

outside of the home

flourish and are free.

Whether it's neighborhood cantens,

free theaters, museums, parks, cafes, or library,

living the good life means access to activities within your community.

And to get between all those places,

this world needs electrified,

accessible, and free public transit.

Not just intercity tra, buses, and trains

accessible to all with disabilities,

but also bike sharing programs with ebike options

and extensive walking paths as well.

And for those who have specific accessibility

needs, electric taxis could bring people from door to door if needed.

Zooming out past the urban landscape,

Max Isle envisions a web of cities and green belts in his book, A

People's Green New Deal, wherein he writes, "Green belts surround all cities as popular

planning converts sprawling suburbs into farm swarts.

Highspeed rails link bigger cities to smaller ones, smaller ones to capillary

lines, leading to outlying hamlets.

And alongside housing, transit, and care, an ecosocialist

economy must transform food systems.

Regeneratively grown, tasty, and nutritious food should be available to all.

No longer relying on industrial

agriculture that guzzles fossil fuels and destroys the soil.

Food should be distributed via free cantens

or local grocerers, not locked behind everinccreasing price tags.

But all of these free universal

services are just the start.

To build a better world for all people in the planet, we must dramatically

transform not only the way we work, but also why we do it.

Under capitalism, we work jobs we're uninterested

in for meager wages.

Indeed, at the core of the capitalist model is worker exploitation.

Very simplistically, this means that during an 8-hour workday, for example, if a laborer

is paid $80, a small chunk of a worker's time is actually spent making

$80 worth of products.

The rest is unpaid or surplus labor.

That is where the capitalist makes their profit.

The longer capitalists can stretch that time of unpaid work and the more efficient

they can make their workers,

the more profits roll into their wallets.

And workers are forced into this exploitative

situation because if you don't work, you can quickly lose access to a roof

over your head and food on the table. This must change.

There must be guaranteed

green and care jobs for all who want them.

And those jobs must pay a generous wage to live with dignity,

not just to survive.

Or perhaps in the future, jobs won't need to pay a wage at all

because all needs are already provided for.

The work week would shrink to 4 days, encouraging

everyone to foster recreational

and communal hobbies, and in the process recognizing the importance of rest, family, and community life.

Crucially, the factories, restaurants, and businesses

are not owned and operated by elites or capitalists,

but instead by workers themselves.

They collectively decide how the workday happens

in order to create what is needed for the people.

Because ultimately, an ecosocialist

world will focus on creating products and services we actually need

rather than commodities to sell for a profit.

And this means no more

jobs, as anthropologist David Graver puts it, where all you do is create emails to middle management.

But it also means an ecosocialist

world must create a culture without consumerism.

One that bans advertising

and fosters a creative

comments, one that enshrines

the right to repair and rejects throwaway culture.

When we build an economy that centers around use

rather than profits, the need for marketing to drum up false needs, as I

talk about in this video, and the prevalence of planned obsolescence drops dramatically.

Imagine a world without incessant

ads telling you to buy more at every moment.

A world where the creative-minded

among us don't need to flock towards marketing agencies

to create art for products, but instead are supported enough to explore and make beautiful art.

In short, people's creative energy could be poured into making art, movies, and music for all.

Art that doesn't need to be behind a payw wall or stuck in a

museum or behind a movie ticket.

Because under ecoocialism, culture becomes a shared public good.

And in turn, this new culture informs

not only our economies,

but also how we relate to each other and the world.

All of these services

will require a fair amount of energy,

but compared to our capitalist system,

significantly less power will be needed as energyintensive

commodity production of useless items

is scaled down and production is oriented

towards real needs and ecological

sustainability, aiming to provide a good life for all.

And as we shrink the energy demand hole we've dug ourselves into for the

last 50 years, we must simultaneously

scale up renewable energy at a massive scale

while phasing out fossil fuels completely.

This means renewable energy super grids that balance out regional variability

when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

It means smaller community-owned

solar and wind micro grids.

And it means a mass expansion of battery and storage capabilities

with technologies like pumped hydro.

Ultimately, all of this agenda

must be couched in anti-racist,

anti-atriarchal, anti-imperialist, and anti-opressive agendas.

As co-author of the Red Deal, Melanie Yazi notes,

>> you need to divest

from the institutions that cause the greatest harm on behalf of the state, right?

Prisons, police, the military,

and divesting from those institutions,

we must reinvest in the common dignity of all, which means healing our bodies

and healing our earth.

So building an ecosocialist

future necessitates degrowing and eventually abolishing

violent industries like the police and prison system and the milit

weapons of state violence that have long terrorized

people of color for centuries,

especially in the United States.

Fiscally speaking, global military budgets eclipse funding for climate action, healthcare,

and education, and are used to carry out settler colonial genocides

like the ongoing one in Palestine.

One of the monumental

tasks of ecosocialism must be to divert our economy

away from one of violence and oppression

and towards one of care.

Instead of punishment and the stick, we must focus on the carrot,

encouraging care by helping zero-carbon

communities, social programs, and restorative justice initiatives thrive.

But of course, it's not enough to just end police and imperial violence and

claim that ecosocialism has rooted out white supremacy and imperialist infections.

This will be a long struggle,

but as Sean Blackbon

suggests, it might start with

>> reparations being paid to black Americans

for the centuries of unpaid

labor and super exploitation

under enslavement, Jim Crow,

mass incarceration, and other forms of institutionalized disenfranchisement.

All government treaties with Native Americans will be under and restitution

would be made for the land and resources

stolen by the deposed capitalist class.

In short, an ecosocialist

world must have at its core policies of reparations,

repayment of climate debt, demilitarization,

indigenous sovereignty, and land back

as a means to start repairing

the centuries of racial

and colonial capitalist harm.

Fundamentally, a market system cannot do any of these tasks.

If profit is the driver of invention or production,

we will inevitably slide right back to where we are.

Indeed, the market economies of today lead to waste and inequality,

and they are irrational in their chaos.

If we right now already need to heavily regulate markets with elaborate

mechanisms to lessen the massive harms

just a little bit, why bother with the market in the first place?

That's why an ecosocialist

economy must be a democratically planned economy.

I talk a lot more about how and why planning must be central to

any ecosocialist project in this video, but in short, there are many ways in

which a planned economy could not only be successful but also thrive.

Troy Vatess and Drew Pendergrass

present a case of a half-earth

socialism that sets broadscale

goals like global veganism,

energy quotas, and forest reing

and stewardship under indigenous

control based on linear programming.

We can imagine feasible

ways uh to use simple algorithms

to plan plausible ways of organizing

society and then debate about what those

plans look like and on various levels.

That's Drew Pandergrass, co-author

of half earth socialism.

He goes on to add >> so we kind of imagine a little federalism

where we set broad

core goals at a large level and then figure out in detail

what that looks like as you go towards the more local level.

In the context of climate change, socialist planning is crucial because as fatesse

>> then you begin to think

okay like how many

how much energy can we use as a society

or where are we getting our energy from?

How much land are we using with animal agriculture?

How much of that land could be reved?

You begin to see these things in their totality

which is difficult to do or possible to do under capitalism.

In very simplistic but more concrete terms, a linear programming ecosocialist

planning model requires us to plug in a number of desired parameters

like we want to cut emissions by 7.6%

every year, rew 25%

more land, and redistribute

wealth for a good life for all all by 2030.

And then according to those parameters,

the program might spit out a variety of plans ranging from more lenient energy

quotas but faster uptake of vegetarian

or vegan production and consumption

or perhaps more aggressive reing

and aforestation instead or a more rapid increase in renewable production.

On a global scale, Fatesse and Pendergrass

envision thousands of planners and scientists

plugging a massive amount of data into a central mainframe,

much like what already happens in climate models, which then charts out various course

blueprints 5 to 10 or even 25 years into the future, envisioning

what it would look like to cut emissions,

rewet, and redistribute wealth at different speeds.

Those broad plans are then disseminated,

debated, and transformed as they pass through to global, national, and local levels.

This is socialist planning in motion

because for ecosocialist planning to succeed,

it must be intensely

transparent, accessible, and subject to debate.

Plans must come from everyone, be formulated

and run through modeling tools, and then sent back to the masses in an

endless cycle of construction and exploration.

But to get from now to that future,

we can't just imagine. We must act. We must build.

An ecosocialist future is possible,

but it's not inevitable.

It will be a long road from the current rise of fossil fascism,

settler colonial genocide, and intensifying

climate disasters to an ecosocialist

future that prioritizes a good life for all.

But that work is already in motion.

There are already climate and leftist movements fighting to build power within capitalism

in order to eventually

break away from it.

Because it's not enough just to envision what could be possible.

Radical hope requires action.

That means working towards transitional

demands and non-reformist reforms

that alleviate the harm of capitalist destruction right now.

Those look like defunding the police, moratoria

on fossil fuel extraction,

closing coal mines, raising wages,

shortening work weeks, expanding

community-owned renewable grids, ending settler colonial violence,

and expanding access to universal services.

These goals, these transitional

demands build power by stealing it from the hands of capitalists.

Of course, these are part of the end goal, but they are not the end goal.

They are just steps on the path towards a future of liberation

where all people can live a good life on a thriving planet.

But it will take all of us with whatever capacity we have to make that happen.

And that starts with you joining a group doing the work in your area

while always imagining and dreaming of what a world outside of capitalism could be.

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