Keywords

Social science’s principal role and purpose is to explain how and why humans evolved from living in caves and banding together to gather and hunt for food to living in the age of aerospace, nuclear power and the United Nations. It should provide explanations of how and why humans are now living in a world confronting increasing poverty and inequality, where more than 2 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, and where everyone on earth faces another war and the use of nuclear weapons. Social science should provide explanations and ways and means to change the existing world system to rapidly advance the wellbeing of all humans, protect them from the destruction of their environment and for humans to live together in peace. The analytics of geopolitics can be a progressive tool in this project in its relevance in the dialectics of historical materialism.

Historical materialism is a broad paradigm consisting of evolutionary theoretical frameworks, explaining human development throughout the ages. The modern age’s emancipatory content and potential were codified and analysed by eminent European political philosophers who mastered the significance of the age of capitalism in the destruction of the European feudal order. The age of capitalism was initiated by the industrial revolution and the power and force of capital in changing human societies and relations, powering capital imperialism in the conquest of the earth. German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a witness and interpreter of the new age of capital and the industrial revolution, defining the changing economic social and political conditions of Europe and the rest of the world. It was a time of revolutionary upheavals in the human condition and interaction with nature, permanently changing human relations with the earth.

Society was being reshaped and commodified in classes and in their struggle for power. Marx highlighted the transformation and destruction of the feudal order, resulting in European-wide revolutions, uprisings and civil wars. At work was a process of adaptation and diffusion of technological and technical developments. These resulted in radical changes in the institutions mobilised by capital and technology to gain and expand the political power of capital, capitalists and their agents. Marx’s analysis of the emerging new political economy marked the construction of the nation-state and a new fulcrum of political power in the development of the state as the embodiment of the power of capitalism and its expansionary and imperialist imperatives. Political scientist Ellen Wood argued that Marx’s contribution to a general law of history consisted in identifying contradictions arising in the interactions between forces and relations of production associated ‘with the uniquely capitalist drive to revolutionize productive forces’ (Wood 2016: 135).

Marx’s evolutionary interpretation of world history specified changing modes of production in developing material forces of production. Capitalism was a new historical mode and highly favourable for economic growth and the expansion of economic and political power to conquer the world. Every mode of production contained the contradiction of human struggle for emancipation from exploitation and suffering of the many at the service of the few. Marx identified capitalism as a mode of production, including the forces of production of technology and the division of labour. It gave rise to a new form of struggle embedded in the formation and expansion of the working class. Capitalism was a new mode of materialism energised by continual technological and technical development. Marx’s contribution was to recognise, ‘the historical specificity of its “laws” or seeking to uncover what produces them’ (ibid.: 138). Marx’s recognition of the specific dynamic of capitalism ‘made it possible to raise the question of the “transition” to capitalism’ (139). Wood highlighted the importance of evolutionary transformation in Marx’s analysis within capitalism, powering a socialist transformation.

Marx provided a mode of analysis to understand the central role played by the state in the construction of the nation-state. The centrality of the state in the capitalist mode of production became a centre of gravity in the struggle to gain power and change its policy. Marx’s other contribution to political economy analysis was to demonstrate the process that led to the differentiation of the economy from society. Capitalism succeeded in seceding, abstracting the economy from society, bringing it within the political power of the state and concentrating political power of capital in the control of the state (Wood 2016: 1920). Equally important is his contribution to historical materialism as an evolutionary theory of human development was his insight of the contradiction integral in modes of production, leading to the likelihood for the eventual transition of capitalism to socialism. This theme was developed and elaborated in Marx’s lifetime in collaboration with his close German capitalist friend, Friedrich Engels, in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels 1848/1977; Andreas 1963).

They anticipated capitalism’s potential to liberate and emancipate humans and foresaw the economic transformation of society from capitalism to socialism, and for a ‘true democracy’ to emerge. Emancipation was to be found primarily in the economic and social transformation of society and where socialism would free humans from the domination of economic interests. Sociologist Erich Fromm’s critique of Marx’s bears on Marx’s axiomatic preponderance of economic interests. Marx’s historical materialism, centred on human activity rather than physiology, underestimated the complexity of human passions (Fromm 1973: 246). Human passions and strivings, Fromm argued, are ‘in themselves the most powerful driving force for human development’ (ibid.: 263). Marx, said Fromm, was too optimistic and failed to recognise ‘the irrational forces in man which make him afraid of freedom, and which produce his lust for power and his destructiveness … he paid no attention to the necessity for a new moral orientation, without which all political and economic changes are futile’ (ibid.: 264). Fromm maintained that Marx ‘had little appreciation for the power of irrational and destructive passions which were not transformed from one day to another by economic changes’ (ibid.).

Marx and Engels’ Manifesto said historian and political philosopher Eric Hobsbawm retains its force as a contemporary document and analysis of the present global crisis. Capitalism’s mode of production is not permanent and a stable phase in the history of humanity (Foster 2014). Embedded in the Manifesto is the condition for its supersession by another kind of society. The transformation of the world by capital heralded by Marx and Engels has occurred, creating uneven development, growing inequality and the conditions for another global war. The revolutionary potential of world socialism by the proletariat has not happened because the working class has been nationalised, further heightening world tensions and crisis. More critical is the expanding reality that capitalism’s mode of production, initiated by the industrial revolution some two hundred and fifty years ago, has induced climate change and global warming.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, scientific knowledge had advanced to the extent that it could understand and measure the changing environment of the earth and of its physical, chemical, and biological constitution and reproduction. Science has made major breakthroughs in understanding the biology and behaviour of humans. It had found the molecular basis for biological inheritance (DNA), advancing the field of genetics and genetic engineering and the reproduction of life. Knowledge of the organic life on earth and its interaction with humans had substantially increased, showing human-induced extinction of many organisms. The COVID-19 epidemic of 2019–2022 was instrumental in raising public knowledge and concern of the capacity of human mode of production and consumption to severely damage the earth’s habitat and human life and for the likelihood of future pandemics.

Scientific publication and media coverage on climate warming provided a clear causal link to the capitalist mode of production and consumption damaging impact on human relations, health and reproduction. New measurements quantified the effects of capitalism on human life and relations, giving rise to a new consciousness about present and future conditions, projecting images of an uncertain future for human life on earth. They demonstrated that capitalism as a mode of production is essentially embedded in the age of fossil fuel, and that the impact of capitalism on human wellbeing is endangered by high levels of toxicity of the environment. Above all was the rapid increase in the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, threatening human life on earth. It was directly related to the high intensity of capitalism’s mode of economic production and consumption based on the growing use of earth materials.

Pollution and toxicity of the air, water and food were increasingly threatening the future of human life on earth. Humans were polluting their ‘homeland’, threatening their own existence and the future of their progeny. Capitalism’s mode of production was slowly destroying the conditions for human existence on earth. The twenty-first century heralded the end of the age of fossil fuels and the beginnings of the decarbonisation of the world economy and the transformation of the mode of production based on renewable sources of energy, including nuclear energy. The transition institutionalised in the 2015 Paris Agreement plans for the world nation-states to cut greenhouse gas emissions as close to net zero as possible by 2050, with any remaining emissions re-absorbed from the atmosphere, including by capture and storage. Would a world powered by unlimited and inexpensive renewable energy change human relations towards friendliness, cooperation and solidarity, banning nuclear weapons and war?

Changing the World

Historian Eric Hobsbawm applied dialectical materialism as a scientific method to study history and analyse its meaning to explain historical change, turning history as a mean to advance a socialist revolution (Bonfanti 2020). For Hobsbawm dialectical materialism was a science of totality to provide a realistic theory of historical explanation. The first characteristic of dialectical materialism was its scientific character. Marxist historians were scientists seeking to discover the laws of historical development and make predictions. These required confirmation by empirical research in history’s totality. Capitalism was a universal phenomenon and Hobsbawm was committed to study it as a global historical phenomenon. A second aspect of historical materialism was to concentrate on analysis rather than narrative. His concern was to ask why something happened rather than what happened. It meant to question, ‘why and how societies change and transform themselves: in other words, the facts of social evolution’ (ibid.: 72). His analysis of history included the importance of ideas, culture and human agency. Hobsbawm was not deterministic in his analysis and wrote about the impact of ‘accidents’ and the importance of ‘fortuity’.

They were unpredictable factors of human agency influencing the direction of history, this was the case with the important influence of great leaders. Ideas could not be studied in isolation from their global historical and social milieux. A third of Hobsbawm’s dialectical materialism was the critical role of class struggle (Hobsbawm 2011). The contradictions existing in capitalism as a mode of production led to struggles in the historical development of society and the world at large, advancing the potential to move towards socialism. Lastly, Hobsbawm’s was to use dialectical materialism to turn history into the reality of a political narrative of human evolution as an existential struggle. It was configured in capitalism’s history of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements leading to socialism. History in Hobsbawm’s analysis encapsulated the reality of the human struggle towards a different mode of production and the possibility for a more peaceful future.

It foresees the possibility in the transformation of the nation-state and the world order, ending the prospect of another global war. Hobsbawm argued that nations were made by the power and force of the state in establishing effective sovereign territorial control over space and population. Nations were engineered by the state and capitalism. In recent time, globalisation of the world’s population and the growing economic, political and social interactions of nation-states mobilised by technology were advancing ‘the new supranational restructuring of the globe, relegating most nation-states to ‘subordinate, and often minor roles’ (Hobsbawm 1990: 182). Hobsbawm’s view of the nation is consistent with Benedict Anderson’s analytics that the nation-state is an imaginary political community that will continue to dominate the world (Anderson 2006).

A dangerous feature embedded in the nation is that it requires and mobilises group hatred of ‘others’. All other nations are perceived as potentially ‘non-human’, belonging to some other and potentially threatening alien species. Erik Erikson’s work on psychosocial identity argued that humans split into pseudo-species in the forms of nations, ‘binding their members into a pattern of individual and collective identity, but alas, reinforce that pattern by mortal fear of and a murderous hatred for other pseudo species’ (Erikson 1965: 246). A ‘race’ is a representation of a pseudo-species, and one of its common manifestations is nationalities which Erikson stigmatise ‘as collective myths which bring out not only the best but also the very worst in people’ (Gutmann 1974: 69). Nationalities are fictitious ‘races’. National identities, Erikson maintains, turn their adherents into ‘belligerent groups which can only maintain their own sense of uniqueness and humanity by dehumanizing others’ (ditto).

Hobsbawm was opposed to nationalism because it undermined the universalist goal of revolutionary social movement to unite humans. Nationalism eliminated the possibility of class revolution. The future of beyond nationalism, he argued, was to stimulate ‘a renewed international revolutionary agenda, reimagining the political project of the Enlightenment’ (Ciáurriz 2020). The choices were between socialism and the barbarism of nationalism. He wrote, ‘I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment … It is also the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human being to live anywhere on this earth, and for the assertion and defense of their human rights as persons’ (ibid).

His hope was for the rise of citizens’ nationalism, redirecting its potential power towards a universalist project of emancipation in response to the urgency of the existential crisis of climate change and nuclear war. Nationalism in Australia and elsewhere, particularly in the US, had to universalise resistance and mobilise the population to build a new global society, overcoming the private interests that have captured the state, ending the injustices that plague the world. Political philosopher Noam Chomsky maintains that the world situation can only be countered by progressive social movements based on international solidarity, but the struggle will be long and difficult (Chomsky 2020). Activists must establish linkages not just at home but globally with other social struggles. He writes that, the ‘urgency of “looming extinction” cannot be overlooked. It should be a constant focus of programs of education, organization, and activism, and in the background of engagement in all other struggles’ (ibid: 75). A general awareness and understanding of the looming extinction may already exist, but it needs to be expanded to inspire a deeper consciousness, requiring the mobilisation of resistance to build a new global society.

Owl of Minerva

Historian Eric Hobsbawm concluded that capitalism was bankrupt, and that socialism had failed (Hobsbawm 2009a). Socialism of the planned economy of the Soviet Union ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The bankruptcy of capitalism imploded in the 2009 Global Financial Crisis and demonstrated the failure of the neoliberal counter-revolution initiated in the reformation of the global order by the governments of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and US President Ronald Reagan. Hobsbawm argued that the future belonged ‘to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left’ (ibid.). The left, he maintained, had access to the ‘old toolbox of Labour, including nationalisation, but did not know what to do to overcome the existing crisis’.

The future of socialism, Hobsbawm argued, was to be directed at the pursuit of policies to widen ‘the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the “capabilities” of all through collective action’ (ibid.). Public decisions, he said, should target ‘collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain––not maximising economic growth and personal incomes’ (ibid.). He foresaw that the environmental crisis would mobilise citizens away from the free market economy towards new forms of solidarity and public action. Climate change and the deterioration of the global economy would likely lead to a rapid shift in the politics of Western democracies, including the US. It raised the important question about the future of the nation-state and the nation-state system in a world order subjected to the hegemonic struggle among great powers for global domination.

Hobsbawm’s extensive study of the history of nations and nationalism concluded that nationalism had completed its formative role in the partitioning and territorialisation of the earth (Hobsbawm 1992a). The world’s population was now closely integrated and interacting in complex economic, social and political networks, enabled by major advances in scientific knowledge and technological development. Historical materialism in the role of technology had succeeded in constructing a global labour force and social conditions, cutting through the geography of political boundaries. An entire global political economy was energised by capital, flowing ‘across and through space and over borders in the search for endless accumulation’ (Harvey 2011: 154). Cyberspace was now actively engaging a world community in global affairs and actions in the prospects of a common future.

Nationalism, Hobsbawm maintained, is historically less important and the existing world can no longer be contained within the nation-states. It will now be activated and framed in supranational and infranational politics, clearly exposing ‘the decline of the old nation-state as an operational entity. It will see as retreating before, resisting, adapting to, being absorbed or dislocated by the new supranational restructuring of the globe’ (Hobsbawm 1992b: 191). However, he pointed out, ‘it would be absurd to claim that this day is already near’ (ibid.). He predicted in 1992 that the owl of Minerva, bringing wisdom, was already ‘circling round nations and nationalism’ (ibid.). Some thirty later it was clear that the future of the nation-state and the nation-state system was endangered by the spreading of human misery and warfare. By 2023, climate change was an existential crisis to humanity. It would not survive the existing world disorder and warfare and the continuation of the US manifest destiny to free the world from evil and dominate the world. The nation-state system would need to pursue a close collaborative policy to adapt to climate change and avoid another world war and the likely use of nuclear weapons, descending into barbarism.

Geopolitics

Conflict and violence in society and the world are caused by the existence of contradictions in their organisation and modes of operations. The contradictions embedded in the nation-state system and the world order are structured in the existing struggles within and between nation-states in the world order. The dialectics of capitalism as a mode of production are energising a class struggle within each nation-state and between them. Essentially, the dialectics of capitalism are being played out in the existing nation-state system and the world order. Geopolitical dialectics are embedded in the dynamics of the human species’ civil war being waged world-wide, essentially in the confrontation between capitalism and socialism structured in the politics and political relations in and among nation-states. It is radicalised in the struggle among nation-states, configuring the US project to dominate the world.

The politics and the political of the nation-state are embedded in the existence of the binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as expounded by sociologist Michel Foucault. He wrote that in the politics of the nation-state, ‘we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefield that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are replaced by a binary structure’ (Foucault 2004: 51). The internal struggle being pursued in every nation-state opposes a left–right political discourse and struggle over the purpose of economic growth, the distribution of income and wealth, and the purpose and nature of foreign economic and political relations with the rest of the world. The reality of existing relations among nation-states is embedded in major contradictions based on inequality and uneven development.

These have created major regional and global conflict, leading to warfare and major human catastrophe. Nation-states’ international relations are now entirely mobilised by the hegemonic struggle among major powers for global domination. Imperialism dominates the nature of foreign relations. It is dominated by a totalitarian attempt to dominate the world by the US. The political and politics of every nation-state is also embedded in the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary. Their interactions are both actively engaged in the nation-state civil and international war. These embody the contradiction structures in capitalism as a mode of production and the nature of the existing global struggle. The struggle against capitalism is likely to be played out in the age of the Anthropocene if the world overcomes the threat of a nuclear war or even survives a ‘limited’ nuclear war. In the age of capitalism, the US project to dominate the world is mobilised not only by its dominant military power and force deployed in the control of space, seas and aerospace, but by the force of US capital to dominate the world economies.

Capital is mobilised and energised by technological development in methods of communication and mathematical computation, and in the expansion and competition of corporate power, both in finance and in commerce. Corporate power is constitutionalised by the nation-state system in the role of central and national banks and governmental economic and political foreign policy. As a social formation, capitalism segregates society, deepening inequality in wealth and power. Financialisation is capitalism’s corporate power operating engine in the twenty-first century, consisting of several essential modes of operation, defining major processes at work. Financialisation is a global system of wealth creation and accumulation powered by national economic growth. It is predatory in its function to extract and appropriate a surplus profit, benefiting corporate entities and a dominant elite. It creates fictitious capital and engineers economic and political crises.

Financialisation maintains and expands corporate power and the power of a wealthy class, funding a dominant elite in national governance. Secondly, it serves to expand the power of corporation in the control of the economic life of society and the state. The expansionary and totalitarian role of capital is incorporated in the analytical framework on financialisation, driving to formally integrate every living being on earth in a matrix of domination and exploitation. It exposes a major contradiction in the capitalist mode of production in that financialisation is essentially a flag and spear carrier in the pursuit of national imperialism, creating vast and growing inequality among nation-states while seeking to undermine national governance opposed to its operations. In that sense, capitalism is intensely racist as an imperial project in its financial operation strategy and outcome. Violence is structured in financialisation, creating growing social, political and economic inequalities, fuelling social disorder and suffering. It is destructive of the environment, polluting the earth’s biosphere, endangering the reproduction of life. Moreover, financialisation deepens the capitalist mode of production and consumption, generating destructive lifestyles and the production of dangerous waste, increasing the toxicity of the air, soil, food and water.

Finally, financialisation is totalitarian because it is driven to commodify every person on earth, incorporating each household in a national and global economy and financial system, ratcheting economic growth and wealth accumulation. It creates a social system based on the commodification of social relations dependent on the growth of material extraction and consumption wherein individual household compete with every other household to accumulate assets. Financialisation segregates society into classes in the distribution of life opportunities and outcomes. As a central engine of capitalism, financialisation is prone to periodic crises due to corruption, greed and criminality and a major contributor to the growth of military expenditures and warfare in the world. The financialisation of capitalism may be thought of as essentially a religious phenomenon, embarking humans on domination by those who control access to the means of production in a ceaseless and futile quest for money and material (Foster 2022).

At the present juncture in human evolution, imperialism and the financialisation of capitalism are conjoined in the US imperial project to dominate the world (Paul 2018; Farrell and Newman 2023). Corporate strategy is to conquer the world market and deny the rise of any power contesting its primacy in the world economy. The business strategy of corporate America is embedded in the military-industrial-surveillance complex, sharing their interests in dominating the world. Corporate America is also corrupting the power of the Congress by financing elections and controlling the mass media. Capitalism spies on Americans and powers the growth of inequality in the US. Growing inequality is embedded in the concentration of corporate economic and political power. Corporate and financial business assets dominate the US economy (Wikipedia 2023). The concentration of power of private capital is manifested in the existence of the US’s three largest money managers: BlackRock Inc., Vanguard and State Street Corp who together own about 20% stakes in the biggest US companies (Evans et al. 2017). BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group alone were managing a total of $20 trillion of assets (ibid).

The growth and power of corporate America are heavily subsidised by the US state. One channel is in the commercialisation of technologies developed by state-funded research to expand the power of the US military. These scientific advances in communication, energy and material are then open for their commercialisation by the private sector as in the case of nuclear energy, the microchip and the internet. Other forms of subsidies are related to government military expenditures, favourable tax provisions, limited liability and direct subsidies. In the case of the 2009 Global Financial Crisis, the state assistance program risked nearly $3 trillion of public money to avoid the collapse of the US economy, providing Federal Reserve short-term collateralised lending to banks, and the operations of ‘13 programs of varying sizes, all funded by the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds authorised by Congress in late September 2008’ (Anderson and Gascon 2011). The use of debt is fundamental to the expansion of private capital and power. Professor of political economy Alan Nasser says that the fundamental role of debt is to finance corporate acquisitions (Nasser 2018: 179). He writes that financial instability is closely linked to the ‘centrality of debt to financialised capitalism, and the liability of debt-driven capitalism’ (ibid).

US capitalism’s viability is increasingly dependent on expanding its overseas operations, including the central role of finance in the expansion of earning and power. Corporations create subsidiaries overseas and occupy an increasingly important share of the economic activities of many countries. Their success is backed by the US capacity to spy on other countries and gain critical information on foreign businesses and governments (Farrell and Newman 2023). It is also advanced by the US corporate world’s capacity to minimise their tax obligation, to both the US and other countries. US Congressional research shows that ‘US-based corporation overseas ‘booked 43% of their foreign earnings in five tax-haven countries: Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland’ (Kuttner 2018: 228).

Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, writes that ‘Apple computer is the champion tax evader, using transfer-pricing, tax-havens, and special tax deals’ (ibid.). Corporates and capitalist oligarchs hoard huge wealth in overseas tax havens, estimated at some $7.6 trillion (Hedges 2018: 7). US overseas investments play an important role in the process of the concentration of power taking place in the US economy. Economist John Coates makes the point that few individuals will soon have practical power over the majority of US public companies (Levine 2018). Coates concludes his analysis of the process of concentration of corporate power that, ‘It is not an exaggeration to say that even if this mega trend begins to taper off, the majority of the 1,000 largest US companies will be controlled by a dozen or fewer people over the next ten to twenty years’ (ibid).

The US is imperial by design and is driven to assert power over the earth space, establishing political domination over the Eurasian continent and the military dominance in aerospace, balkanising the territorial integrity of China and Russia. US corporate power and capital constitute a spear and flag carrier to commodify the economies and social relations on the Eurasian continent and other continents. The US is the most powerful military and surveillance machine in the world. It also represents the most powerful concentration of corporate power in the world, dominating the global economy in its reach of all the world’s national economies. US geopolitical dialectics of world domination are subject to a damaging and potentially lethal internal and external crisis. The US confrontation with China, Russia and other countries is creating conditions that could lead to another world war and the use of nuclear weapons.

Achilles Heel of Capitalism

Capitalism is now threatened by the existential crisis of climate change. The growing destructive path to the global economic world and the nation-state system of global warming constitutes the Achille’s heel of capitalism. Historian Erik Hobsbawm writes that:

As the spectacular expansion of the global economy has undermined the environment, the need to control unlimited economic growth has become increasingly urgent. There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit. This is the Achilles heel of capitalism. We cannot at present know whose arrow will be fatal to it. (Hobsbawm 2011: 12).

The United Nations’ Secretary-General has warned the world that, ‘we are sleep walking to climate catastrophe. In our globally connected world, no country and no corporation, can insulate itself from these levels of chaos’ (UN 2022a). António Guterres said that the world is on a ‘fast track to disaster and that unless governments everywhere reassess their energy policies, the world will be uninhabitable’. He insisted, ‘this is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policy. We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5 °C limit that was agreed in Paris in 2015’ (UN 2022b). At the launch of the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Guterres warned of a climate emergency, declaring that ‘new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness’ and that ‘some government and business leaders are saying one thing-but doing another. Simply put, they are lying’ (IPCC 2022; UN 2022b).

Greenhouse gases (GHG) trap heat in the atmosphere. Since the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, the world has emitted more than 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the US and the EU’s advanced capitalist economies, constituting the Western core of the global economy and military power, were responsible for more than 51% of global emissions (Ritchie 2019). Since 1751, the US has emitted more CO2 than any other country, around 400 billion tonnes or 25% of total cumulative emissions, or twice more than China (ibid.). Until 1980, the US and Western Europe, including Russia, were responsible for nearly 70% of all cumulative emissions (Ritchie and Roser 2019). In 2020, the Western alliance consisting of the US, Canada, the EU, UK, Japan, Australia and New Zealand’s CO2 emissions totalled about 27% of the world’s total in contrast to China’s 28%. China’s emissions per capita in 2020 were 7.05 T or less than half the US 14.4 T per capita or Canada’s 15.2 T and Australia’s 15.0 T (IEA 2020; UCS 2022).

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most significant and long-lived greenhouse gas in the earth’s atmosphere. Its accumulation in the atmosphere comes primarily from the use of fossil fuels and deforestation. It is an acidic gas that causes ocean acidification and the destruction ‘of clams, mussels, crabs, corals, and other sea life that rely of carbonate ions to grow their shells and thrive’ (Cooley 2019). Methane is another atmospheric gas. It is the most potent GHG, trapping more heat than CO2. Methane gas has a shorter life impact on the atmosphere but is 84 times more potent than CO2 (Wikipedia 2022). Atmospheric methane concentration has been increasing, rising from 722 parts per billion (ppb) in preindustrial times to 1919.5 ppb in 2023 (Statista 2023). Methane gas is produced in agricultural practices and land use and the decay of organic waste and in the production of fossil fuels. Record thawing of permafrost in Alaska and Siberia is increasing atmospheric methane and may constitute a self-reinforcing tipping point in global warming.

Decarbonisation of the world economy requires bigger extraction of natural resources such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare-earth metals. Economic growth depends on the use of ever-increasing volume of natural resources, further endangering the ecosystems on which survival depends. Material footprint measures the total amount of raw materials extracted to meet final consumption demands (UN 2017). The global material footprint has accelerated by about 70% since 2000 and reached 92 billion metric tonnes in 2017. The UN report notes that ‘the global material footprint is increasing at a faster rate than both population and economic output … at the global level, there has been no decoupling of material footprint growth from either population growth or GDP growth’ (ibid.). Boris Frankel, social theorist and political economist, points out that free markets ignore the reality that ‘three-fifths of the world’s population only consumes a fraction of American per-capita material consumption’ (Frankel 2020: 17).

Global income and wealth inequalities are closely linked to ecological inequality as measured by the consumption of carbon per capita. Humans, on average, emit 6.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per capita per year (WIR 2022). The Paris School of Economics report on inequality shows that ‘global income and wealth inequalities are tightly connected to ecological inequalities and to inequalities in contributions to climate change’ (ibid.). At the global level, there are important emissions inequalities. Energy consumption correlates with per capita material consumption. Boris Frankel writes that currently, ‘affluent OECD countries have an average of 27 tons per capita material consumption compared to low-income countries per capita consumption ranging from two to six tons’ (Frankel 2020: 468). A study by the University of Leeds Sustainability Research Institute across 86 countries and income classes exposes ‘large inequality in international energy footprints; the consumption share of the bottom half of the population is less than 20% of final energy footprints, which in turn is less than what the top 5% consume’ (Oswald et al. 2020: 2). The authors conclude that: ‘Ultimately, energy footprints will sheer further away from each other. We can anticipate that increasing income inequality will be translated into even larger inequality’ (ibid.: 10).

The world is creating greater and more dangerous risks, ‘pushing the planet towards existential and ecosystem limits’ (UNDR 2022: 4). The number of human-induced disasters globally per year is likely to increase from around 400 in 2015 to 560 in 2030. The trend accentuates the pace and severity of those events and their danger to human life, resulting in growing economic losses and the severe degradation of social and ecological systems. These will likely impact on existing global networks and integrated supply chains (ibid.). Scientist James Hansen explains that existential threats to human civilisation arise from the combination of sea level rise, the increasing difficulty of life in the tropics and the subtropics in the summer as temperatures rise, and the increase of climate extremes as higher temperatures drive droughts, heat waves and fires, on the one hand, but also heavier rains, greater floods and stronger storms on the other hand. These effects will increase emigration pressures from low latitudes and coastal cities, thus potentially creating a planet that is practically ungovernable (Hansen 2021).

Heat is the main driver of climate change. It is the power that is changing the world and the way people live and work. In his book, Jeff Goodell writes about what happens to the human body as the heat rises above 41 °C. He says that as heat rises, the proteins unfold and the bonds that keep the structures together break. At the most fundamental level, your body unravels … ‘your insides melt and disintegrate–you are haemorrhaging everywhere’ (Goodell 2023). Heat mortality has been grossly underestimated. Death from extreme heat has been largely diagnosed as heart attack or circulatory issues. The simple truth, says Goodell, ‘is that the planet is getting hotter because of the burning of fossil fuels. This is the simple truth, as clear as the moon in the night sky’ (ibid.). According to scientists, it is ‘virtually certain that July 2023 is going to be the world's warmest month since records began. Some researchers believe it might even be the warmest month in the past 120,000 years’ (McGrath and Poynting 2023). The thermal range of life is changing rapidly. It will have a profound impact on the existing distribution of the population. Populations in the equatorial regions will find life increasingly difficult and millions will be displaced by the rise of sea levels and the flooding of coastal areas, including coastal and estuarine megacities of Bangkok, Djakarta, Ho Chi Minh and Manila.

Climate change renders capitalism’s financialisation and the existing nation-state system unsustainable. Global warming constitutes an existential threat to humanity. The nation-state system as it exists is unlikely to survive the Age of the Anthropocene, confronting humanity with the stark choice of barbarity or working together, constituting some form of federal socialism, uniting humans in a peaceful and lasting union. Actuarial studies on the impact of climate change on existing economic models that underpin financial services show the real impacts of climate change, including the impact of tipping points on national economies. Some estimate a 65% GDP, ‘or a 50–60% downside to existing financial assets if climate change is not mitigated, stating these are likely to be conservative estimates’ (Trust et al. 2023: 6). The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the University of Exeter reports that three different credible institutions estimate ‘the impact of a hot-house world on global GDP by 2100 as ranging from −73%, to a milder −18%, to ongoing GDP growth, which is counter-intuitive given the severe physical risks we anticipate if temperatures continue to rise’ (ibid.: 13). A more severe estimate by Ortec Finance is for a negative GDP impact of 73% in the event of a failed transition (ibid: 14). Climate science estimates that the emergence of tipping points will cause significant loss of GDP as temperature rises (Kemp et al. 2022).

Eventually, climate change will greatly disrupt national social life and the global economy. It will bring considerable displacement of the earth population, millions moving away from increasingly inhabitable regions to more temperate northern and southern zones. It will be a time when the global GNP will have significantly shrunk due to the increasing level of bankruptcy experienced by corporations and other major disruption in financial markets, depreciating all tangible assets and eliminating all existing sources of fictitious capital, including the closure of all derivative and future markets. Global warming will be a time when national borders will lose their significance and legitimacy as forceful mass migration and population transfers occur. These circumstances will force states to become more authoritarian in their response to climate change’s existential threat to humanity.

As tipping points further destabilise the nation-state system, many states will become more powerful, collaborating to maintain some form of social and global order. As they do so they are likely to nationalise corporate assets and power, relegating the private sector to the generation of small businesses localised in the major urban centres, providing necessities and needs. It will generate opportunities for the expansion of networks of barter economies and cooperative movements to sustain basic local and regional needs. Climate change will eventually transform the capitalist mode of production and consumption. It will lead to growing state power and authority to impose control over all major corporate assets and power and regulate living standards, regulating the production, distribution and consumption of social needs. The United Nations may gain further traction, enabling the empowerment of a newly formed collaborative entente among the major global states, heading by a group uniting China, the US, an expanded European Union (EU) to include Russia, India and Australia, providing global security and organised to maintain the continuity of humanity on earth.

Climate change raises the critical issue of the future of international relations during the interim period leading to higher thresholds in global temperature towards the end of the twenty-first century. Some aspects are already becoming apparent in the case of Australia’s decision to become a US protectorate state. The Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) treaty should be viewed as the continuation of the geopolitics of counter-revolution in the world. AUKUS signifies Australia’s central role in the US imperial project of world domination. It implies that AUKUS power is being directed at the continuation of warfare to gain control of the Eurasian continent. Its geostrategy is presently formulated to regime change in China, Iran and Russia, and balkanise their territorial integrity. AUKUS is an Anglo-American response to the existential crisis of climate change.

It represents the decision of the US and the Australian government to weaponise climate change, bringing the wagons together, confronting the coming world crisis. AUKUS represents a core capitalist states’ reactionary conservatism, deciding to construct a leviathan state to drive their planned planetary sovereignty and survival project. AUKUS ‘counterrevolutionary power drive is missionary and evangelical in character, driving American exceptionalism and manifest destiny to save the world from evil forces and rogue states’ (Dolan 2004). It positions China not only as AUKUS’ enemy but places China’s role firmly in the Maoist political tradition to save the world from capitalism’s destructive path. Political economist Minqui Li develops the theme that China offers the way forward and needs to re-energise a reformed Maoist political tradition (Li 2008). French philosopher Alain Badiou’s critique of the existing reactionary interlude prevailing in Europe and the world is a reminder of an earlier crisis in the nineteenth century and the potential that the present situation awaits the renewal of a universal consciousness of the communist hypothesis (Badiou 2015).