Permission to Say “Capitalism”: Principles for Critical Social Science Engagement With GGR Research

The grand scale of GGR deployment now necessary to avoid dangerous climate change warrants the use of grand interpretive theories of how the global economy operates. We argue that critical social science should be able to name the global economy as “capitalism”; and instead of speaking about “transforming the global economy” as a necessary precondition for limiting climate change, instead speak about transforming, or even transcending, capitalism. We propose three principles are helpful for critical social science researchers willing to name and analyse the structural features of capitalism and their relation to greenhouse gas removal technology, policy, and governance. These principles are: (1) Greenhouse Gas Removal technologies are likely to emerge within capitalism, which is crisis prone, growth dependent, market expanding, We use a broad Marxist corpus to justify this principle. (2) There are different varieties of capitalism and this will affect the feasibility of different GGR policies and supports in different nations. We draw on varieties of capitalism and comparative political economy literature to justify this principle. (3) Capitalism is more than an economic system, it is ideologically and culturally maintained. Globally-significant issues such as fundamentalism, institutional mistrust, precarity, and populism, cannot be divorced from our thinking about globally significant deployment of greenhouse gas removal technologies. We use a broad Critical Theory body of work to explore the ideational project of maintaining capitalism and its relation to GGR governance and policy.

The Politics of Hope and Fear in a Future of Less Work

The Conclusion turns to the daunting political challenges that already face big redistributive programs like those advanced here, and that will be refracted through the prism of automation. Popular anxiety about job losses might even exacerbate the divisive ethnonationalist politics that have taken hold in much of the United States (and beyond). The chapter argues for the importance of cultivating a stronger narrative of cross-racial solidarity and shared interests, and for the distinctive capacity of labor unions, grounded as they are in the fertile medium of shared work, to credibly propagate that narrative. And it argues that the strategy proposed here—centered around securing decent work (but less of it) for all—offers a broadly appealing program around which to organize diverse workers. The chapter, and the book, concludes with reflections on the future of capitalism, and the varieties of capitalism, in a future of less work.

Resisting the Great Recession: Social movement unionism in Croatia and Serbia

Addressing the debate regarding the impact of the Great Recession on changing union strategies in post-socialist Europe, our analysis shows that in Croatia and Serbia the crisis, while depressing strike numbers, was nevertheless met with substantial union resistance. Developing a paired comparison and relying on protest event data for the period 2000–2017, we argue that the differences among the two countries’ respective varieties of capitalism drive divergent union strategies described as social movement unionism. In Serbia, the role of unions in protests articulating workers’ demands remained more central and unions were overall more present in the protest arena, while in Croatia, unions have exhibited stronger propensity to forge alliances and adopt innovative policy strategies. While taking on board scholarship that portrays social movement unionism as signalling union weakness, we argue that strategies which increase union mobilization capacity may also be understood as increasing union resilience in changing social circumstances.