Analysis of: We can move beyond the capitalist model and save the climate – here are the first three steps
The Guardian | February 12, 2026
TL;DR
Hickel and Varoufakis argue capitalism's profit imperative blocks climate solutions despite technological capacity—proposing public banking, democratic planning, and worker-owned firms. Their analysis is sound; the strategic question they leave unaddressed is how to build power sufficient to implement these reforms against capital's resistance.
Analytical Focus:Contradictions Material Conditions Historical Context
This opinion piece by Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis represents a significant intervention in mainstream discourse—The Guardian publishing an explicitly anti-capitalist analysis of the climate crisis. The authors identify the fundamental contradiction between capitalism's growth imperative and ecological limits, arguing that profit maximization systematically overrides both human needs and planetary boundaries. Their central insight—that we possess the technological capacity to meet human needs sustainably but are prevented from deploying it by capitalist relations of production—echoes Marx's analysis of productive forces straining against relations of production. The material analysis presented is compelling: fossil fuels persist not because they're cheaper (renewables are now less expensive) but because they're more profitable. SUVs proliferate while affordable housing languishes because capital flows toward profit, not need. The authors correctly identify capital's dictatorial control over investment decisions as the structural barrier to rational economic organization. Their observation about investment firms abandoning climate commitments post-Trump illustrates how even voluntary capitalist 'reforms' evaporate when they conflict with accumulation imperatives. However, the piece's strategic proposals—public investment banks, deliberative democracy, worker-owned enterprises—represent a fundamentally reformist path. While these are reasonable transitional demands, the authors elide the central problem: how does the working class build sufficient power to implement such reforms against organized capital's resistance? Historical experience suggests capital will mobilize state violence, economic sabotage, and ideological warfare against any serious challenge to its prerogatives. The article's appearance in The Guardian—capital's progressive face—perhaps explains this strategic gap; explicitly revolutionary analysis remains beyond mainstream discourse's acceptable limits.
Class Dynamics
Actors: Capitalist class (big banks, major corporations, the 1%), Working class (producers of goods, services, technologies), State apparatus (governments influenced by capital), Global South populations subjected to imperialist extraction
Beneficiaries: Capitalist class through continued profit accumulation, Fossil fuel industry, automobile manufacturers, private contractors, Financial institutions maintaining investment discretion
Harmed Parties: Working class globally through economic insecurity and precarity, Global South through resource extraction and debt mechanisms, Future generations through ecological collapse, All humanity through climate destabilization
The authors explicitly frame capitalism as 'economic dictatorship'—the capitalist class maintains unilateral control over investment decisions, production priorities, and resource allocation regardless of democratic political forms. This power operates through ownership of productive assets and capital, enabling the ruling class to determine 'what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit.' The state functions as capital's instrument, subsidizing fossil fuels and road construction despite public interest in alternatives.
Material Conditions
Economic Factors: Profit rate differentials between fossil fuels and renewables (3x higher for fossil), Capital's need for perpetual growth regardless of social utility, Pricing mechanisms tying electricity to expensive LNG rather than cheap solar, Investment flows determined by profitability rather than social need
The article identifies the fundamental contradiction in capitalist production relations: social production (workers collectively create goods and services) combined with private appropriation (capitalists control surplus value and investment decisions). The authors note that 'we are the producers' but lack decision-making power over what we produce. This separation of producers from control over production generates the irrationality they describe—overproduction of profitable luxuries, underproduction of necessary but unprofitable goods.
Resources at Stake: Global energy infrastructure and transition pathways, Labor power of the working class, Natural resources of the Global South, Atmospheric carbon capacity, Public finance currently directed toward private accumulation
Historical Context
Precedents: Post-2008 austerity demonstrating capital's ability to socialize losses while privatizing gains, Failed voluntary corporate climate commitments (ESG abandonment), Historical pattern of imperialist resource extraction, Neoliberal privatization of public goods since 1970s-80s
The article emerges within late neoliberalism's crisis phase, where financialization has concentrated capital ownership while ecological contradictions intensify. The authors' proposals—public banking, democratic planning, worker ownership—echo demands from earlier capitalist crises, particularly the 1930s-40s when similar structural reforms seemed possible. The post-Trump abandonment of climate commitments signals neoliberalism's exhaustion of even reformist capacity, as capital increasingly dispenses with legitimating ideologies in favor of naked accumulation. This represents what Gramsci might identify as a crisis of hegemony, where the ruling class cannot secure consent and the subordinate classes cannot yet achieve power.
Contradictions
Primary: The fundamental contradiction between capitalism's requirement for endless accumulation and the finite ecological basis of production. As the authors state: capital requires 'perpetual growth—ever increasing aggregate production, regardless of whether it is necessary or harmful.'
Secondary: Contradiction between social production and private appropriation of surplus, Contradiction between technological capacity to meet human needs and capital's allocation of resources toward profit, Contradiction between democratic political forms and economic dictatorship, Contradiction between core accumulation and peripheral exploitation in the global system
The authors propose resolving these contradictions through three reforms: public investment banking, deliberative democratic planning, and worker ownership. However, they acknowledge these require 'overcoming the capitalist law of value'—effectively transcending capitalism itself. The unaddressed question is whether such transformation can occur gradually through institutional reform or requires more fundamental rupture. Historical evidence suggests capital will not peacefully surrender its prerogatives; the contradiction may resolve either through successful working-class organization for structural transformation or through ecological-social collapse.
Global Interconnections
The article explicitly connects domestic economic organization to global imperialist dynamics. Capital accumulation in advanced economies 'relies on massive inputs of cheap labour and nature from the global south,' maintained through 'debt, sanctions, coups and even outright military invasion.' This frames climate politics within the world-system: core capital externalizes ecological costs to the periphery while extracting resources necessary for metropolitan accumulation. Any genuine climate solution must therefore address unequal exchange and imperialist relations—a point the authors raise but don't fully develop strategically. The piece also illuminates the ideological function of mainstream climate discourse. By publishing explicitly anti-capitalist analysis, The Guardian performs system critique while containing it within reformist bounds. The proposed solutions—public banking, deliberative democracy, corporate reform—remain within liberal institutional frameworks, avoiding questions of state power, class organization, and revolutionary transformation. This represents ideology operating at its most sophisticated: acknowledging systemic critique while channeling it toward system-compatible reforms.
Conclusion
Hickel and Varoufakis have performed valuable work in bringing Marxist ecological analysis to mainstream audiences, clearly articulating how profit imperatives—not technological limitations—block climate solutions. Their three-step program offers concrete transitional demands around which movements could organize. However, the strategic gap between naming capitalism as the problem and achieving the power necessary to transform it remains unbridged. The working class faces a dual task: building organizational capacity for immediate defensive struggles while developing the consciousness and institutions capable of transcending capitalist relations entirely. The climate crisis compresses historical timelines; the contradiction between capital's time horizon (quarterly profits) and ecological time (generational survival) may force this resolution sooner than either reformists or revolutionaries expect.
Suggested Reading
- Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel (2020) Hickel's own extended argument develops the degrowth framework implicit in this article, providing fuller analysis of how capitalism's growth imperative contradicts ecological sustainability.
- Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg (1900) Luxemburg's classic addresses the strategic question the article leaves open: whether capitalism can be reformed incrementally or requires revolutionary transformation—essential for evaluating the authors' three-step program.
- Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster (2000) Foster's recovery of Marx's ecological thought provides theoretical foundation for understanding the 'metabolic rift' between capitalist production and natural cycles that underlies the current crisis.
- Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin (1917) Lenin's analysis illuminates the global dimensions the authors reference—how imperialist extraction and subordination of the Global South is structurally necessary to core capital accumulation.