Description:

An urgent demand for a People's Green New Deal, foregrounding global agricultural transformation and climate justice for the Global South

The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal?

In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, ideological underpinnings and limitations, he goes on to sketch out a radical alternative: a 'People's Green New Deal' committed to decommodification, working-class power, anti-imperialism and agro-ecology.

Ajl diagnoses the roots of the current socio-ecological crisis as emerging from a world-system dominated by the logics of capitalism and imperialism. Resolving this crisis, he argues, requires nothing less than an infrastructural and agricultural transformation in the Global North, and the industrial convergence between North and South. As the climate crisis deepens and the literature on the subject grows, A People's Green New Deal contributes a distinctive perspective to the debate.

Review

Max Ajl's A People's Green New Deal is an act of classification. It takes the sprawling, contradictory, and often deliberately vague discourse that has gathered under the banner of the "Green New Deal" since 2018 and sorts it into two piles: one that preserves the architecture of imperial accumulation and one that would dismantle it. The book is not a policy proposal, a technical roadmap, or a work of independent empirical research. It is a political-economic polemic built on a synthesis of dependency theory, world-systems analysis, and eco-socialist theory, layered with close reading of primary planning documents from ruling-class institutions and of the secondary literature produced by the left-liberal climate commentariat. Its central claim is that a truly transformative Green New Deal must be eco-socialist and anti-imperialist, and that every alternative on offer—from the World Economic Forum's "Great Transition" to the Breakthrough Institute's eco-modernism to the Markey/AOC resolution and the literature that surrounds it—amounts to the greening of ongoing colonial value transfer. The book's own position is that climate debt payments from North to South, demilitarization, food sovereignty, Land Back, and the dismantling of the world-system's hierarchical division between core and periphery are the non-negotiable foundations of any just transition, and that anything less is what Ajl, with a polemicist's precision, calls "greenwashing."

The argument is at once a diagnosis of the contemporary left's strategic impasse and a genealogy of the ideologies that have produced it. Ajl opens with an anecdote that functions as a thesis statement in miniature: Jeff Bezos, asked about the Green New Deal, replies with a studied vagueness that contrasts sharply with the material footprint of Amazon's logistics, cloud infrastructure, and planned-obsolescence business model. The point is not that Bezos is insincere—though he is—but that the Green New Deal, as a floating signifier, can be made compatible with Amazon's supply chain or can "wreak havoc" on it, and that the difference between these two possibilities is a class question before it is a climate one. From this opening, Ajl plunges into the world-system argument that will structure the entire book: the wealth of the North was built on the poverty of the South, and the atmospheric space that remains for a transition was already appropriated by the core. He quotes Frantz Fanon—"Europe is literally the creation of the Third World"—not as a rhetorical flourish but as a material claim about the origins of the carbon budget, and he treats the Cochabamba People's Agreement of 2010, which demanded climate debt payments from developed countries, as the moral and political foundation that the US Green New Deal debate has systematically buried. The introduction is a declaration of method: the book will read every climate plan as a document of class war, and it will judge them by whether they acknowledge the colonial origins of the crisis they claim to solve.

Part I, "Capitalist Green Transitions," is the book's diagnostic engine. Across four chapters, Ajl dissects what he argues are three variants of a single ruling-class program: the "Great Transition" literature produced by the World Economic Forum, Brookings, and the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative; the eco-modernism of the Breakthrough Institute and its left-wing analogue in Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism; and the green social democracy of the Markey/AOC resolution, Naomi Klein's On Fire, A Planet to Win, and Robert Pollin's full-renewable-substitution program. The first chapter is a reading of the Great Transition documents as a project of what Ajl, drawing on Philip McMichael, calls "green social control": militarized borders, Malthusian population management, the commodification of ecosystem services through the "Nature Risk Rising" frame, and the financial enclosure of southern states under the "de-risking state" architecture that Daniela Gabor has named the Wall Street Consensus. Ajl reads the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative's demand that "permitting and litigation rules" be revised to remove judicial checks on project delivery as a confession that the Great Transition requires the dismantling of peripheral sovereignty, and he treats the Warren Pentagon climate bill—which would green the Department of Defense while preserving its global police functions—as the most comprehensive statement of what a "national-security" climate policy actually means. The argument is that the WEF, Brookings, and the CLFI are not separate from the eco-modernist and social-democratic variants but are their most honest expression: they say openly what the others say with euphemism.

The second chapter traces eco-modernism to its intellectual parent, Cold War modernization theory, and the argument is both genealogical and empirical. Ajl names Walt Rostow's The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto as the explicit Cold War doctrine that contemporary eco-modernism revives, and he reads the lineage from Rostow through the Dutch ecological-modernization school of Arthur Mol and Maarten Hajer to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's Death of Environmentalism and the 2015 Eco-Modernist Manifesto. The claim is that "decoupling"—the idea that economic growth can be separated from environmental impact through technological change—functions as ideological counterinsurgency, substituting a technological promise for a distributional politics that would threaten the existing distribution of wealth. Here Ajl deploys Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis's "Is Green Growth Possible?" as the empirical refutation, and he devotes a substantial portion of the chapter to dismantling Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism on its own terms. Bastani's asteroid-mining proposal is demolished with a NASA study that concludes, in Ajl's quotation, that "there is no economically viable scenario we could identify that depends solely upon returning asteroid resources to LEO or the surface of the Earth"; Bastani's Green Revolution hagiography is countered with the Cornell study documenting that the yield gains Bastani attributes to plant breeding were actually achieved through fossil-fuel inputs; and Bastani's cultured-meat advocacy is read as a misrepresentation of the energy, land, and labor economics that would make lab-grown protein a continuation of industrial agriculture by other means. The chapter's theoretical core is the claim that technologies are not socially neutral—Ajl invokes David Noble's Forces of Production to argue that machine tools were designed to deskill workers—and that the doctrine of technological neutrality is the specific ideological form through which eco-modernism defuses the question of power.

The third chapter takes up energy and the carbon budget, and it is where Ajl's argument becomes most quantitatively specific. The IPCC's SR15 provides the 420 GtCO2 carbon budget for a 66 percent probability of holding warming to 1.5°C, and Ajl argues that this budget cannot accommodate continued Northern consumption levels. He deploys Joel Millward-Hopkins, Julia Steinberger, Narasimha Rao, and Yannick Oswald's modeling of a high-welfare, low-energy "caves" scenario—a global energy system at roughly 1960s consumption levels that provides "highly-efficient facilities for cooking, storing food and washing clothes; low-energy lighting throughout; 50 L of clean water supplied per day per person" alongside universal healthcare and education—to argue that degrowth-compatible abundance is empirically modeled, not utopian. He works through the EROI limits of renewables, the CO₂ "bump" of building replacement infrastructure, and the environmentally unequal exchange embedded in lithium, cobalt, and copper supply chains, and he argues that the renewable transition will reproduce colonial value transfer through mineral extraction unless paired with prior and informed consent, just prices, and southern commodity cartels. Stan Cox's program of mandatory hydrocarbon caps, declining permits, and import-export bans is endorsed as the most realistic downshift framework for the US, and the chapter concludes with the demand for open, decommodified, sovereignty-respecting technology transfer, quoting the Intercultural Dialogue to Share Knowledge declaration from the Cochabamba People's Conference: "Create in each country and worldwide a bank of knowledge… knowledge belongs to everyone not those who've been wanting to privatize it."

Chapter 4 is the book's central polemical engagement. Ajl reads the Markey/AOC Green New Deal resolution as a text, and what he finds is green social democracy, not eco-socialism. He quotes AOC's former chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti—"The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all… We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing"—to demonstrate that the resolution was conceived as a deployment vehicle for idle private capital seeking "low risk with moderate returns," and he reads the resolution's "national security" and "threat multiplier" language, its offer of "public ownership stakes and returns on investment" to private business, and its elision of climate debt in favor of "technology transfer" as a substantive political choice, not an oversight. He then turns to the literature that surrounds the resolution: Naomi Klein's On Fire is criticized for praising the Markey/AOC framework while sidelining climate debt and treating 350.org and the Sunrise Movement as "social movements" when, as Ajl quotes Extinction Rebellion's own statement, "We are not a socialist movement… A banner saying 'socialism or extinction' does not represent us." A Planet to Win is treated as the most radical of the "GND moves left" texts but criticized for near-omission of climate debt from its index and for strategic ambiguity on technology. Robert Pollin's full-renewable-substitution program is critiqued for treating the technical "how" of energy transition as separable from the political question of distribution and imperialism. And Todd Stern, Obama's climate negotiator, is quoted—"the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just categorically reject that"—to demonstrate that "recognition without reparations" is the official US position, not a failure of left messaging. The chapter is a systematic argument that the green social democratic left has mistaken a vehicle for idle private capital for an anti-systemic program, and that the NGOs it mistakes for social movements are, in fact, foundation-funded liberal formations that explicitly reject socialism.

Part II, "A People's Green New Deal," is the book's constructive half, and Ajl is careful to call it "notes" rather than a blueprint. Chapter 5 sketches the industrial and urban dimensions of an eco-socialist transition in the North: worker control of surplus (drawing on Stefania Barca's Forces of Reproduction), mandatory workweek caps of 20 hours or less, cooperatives and self-managed factories, decommodified care work, urban planning that nests cities into ecological cycles, local and carbon-negative building materials (mass timber, bamboo, rammed earth), and transport based on electrified public transit, high-speed rail, and the deliberate downscaling of aviation and freight. Chapter 6 is the book's most concretely grounded section, making the case for food sovereignty through agrarian reform, land-to-the-tiller, dismantling of agribusiness, parity pricing, agroecology, agroforestry, adaptive multi-paddock grazing, and the rejection of what Ajl calls the "global veganism" agenda of EAT-Lancet and the Breakthrough Institute. He deploys Chris Smaje's model of British agriculture to argue that even with severe yield reductions agroecology could feed substantially more than Britain's current population; he invokes Rob Wallace's thesis that agroecology functions as a "firebreak" against animal-incubated pandemics; and he quotes Ivette Perfecto, John Vandermeer, and Angus Wright's Nature's Matrix to argue that agroecology is best understood as a matrix intercut with biodiversity reserves, not a replacement for wilderness. The chapter is a direct assault on the EAT-Lancet "planetary health diet," the Half-Earth conservation framework, and the lab-meat agenda that Ajl reads as a corporate project to dispossess pastoralists and smallholders in the South under the cover of climate science.

Chapter 7 is where the book's political architecture becomes fully visible. Ajl argues that the national question—sovereignty, climate debt, demilitarization, and Land Back—is the foundation of a People's GND, and that national liberation is the political container through which climate debt and eco-socialism can actually be realized. He quotes Amilcar Cabral on national liberation as "the regaining of the historical personality" of a people, and he names the Palestinian struggle as "the most globally cherished struggle for liberation and justice in today's world" to make the case that national-liberation politics, not class abstracted from nation, is the operative form of anti-imperialist climate struggle. The chapter draws on the Cochabamba People's Agreement, the Anchorage Declaration, the Red Nation's Red Deal, and the People's Climate Justice Tribunal demands, and it treats Land Back as immediate climate infrastructure: Indigenous-held lands harbor equal or higher biodiversity than "protected areas" in 136 of the world's 233 most biodiverse ecoregions, and Indigenous prescribed burning is a living alternative to the settler fire regime that produced the 2020 West Coast wildfires. Ajl writes, in a passage that reframes the entire book's relationship to the US landscape, that "apocalyptic wildfires have dyed the skies of the US West Coast a hazy orange," and that Land Back is the climate intervention that would prevent the next cycle. The conclusion defines eco-socialism against green social democracy, argues that the historical conditions that produced 1940s–1960s social democracy—a credible anti-capitalist threat in the form of the USSR, Communist parties, and national-liberation movements—are now absent, and that no parliamentary path can reproduce them without a comparable threat, and ends with the concept of "development by popular protection": domestic decommodification combined with climate debt payments and southern sovereignty.

The book occupies a specific and contested position within several canonical traditions simultaneously. It is an anti-imperialist text in the lineage of Fanon, Amin, and Rodney, and it is an eco-socialist text in the lineage of John Bellamy Foster and Monthly Review. It is a decolonial text that draws on the national-question literature of Lenin, Cabral, and the Sam Moyo/Paris Yeros/Praveen Jha school, and it is a degrowth text that draws on Hickel, Kallis, and the Millward-Hopkins/Steinberger high-welfare low-energy modeling tradition. Its cross-references are dense and specific: Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth provides the moral and material foundation for climate debt; Amin's delinking thesis provides the structural framework for southern auto-centered development; Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" provides the deflation of the "climate emergency" frame—"the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'emergency situation' in which we live is the rule." The book is in sustained argument with the entire field of green-capitalist and green-social-democratic climate planning: with Rifkin's The Green New Deal, read as a "social market economy" framework that protects private capital; with the Australian Breakthrough Institute's "Existential climate-related security risk" report, read as a militarized Fortress Eco-Nationalism; with the EAT-Lancet Commission, read as a Stordalen/Wellcome/Gates-funded corporate agenda; with Mark Jacobson's 100 percent renewable energy modeling, criticized for the deeply unequal watt-per-person allocations it presumes for Africa and South Asia; and with the entire "de-risking state" architecture of the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative. The book's engagement with A Planet to Win is particularly instructive: Ajl treats it as the most radical of the available GND texts and still finds it wanting on climate debt, and he quotes the sympathetic counter-reference—"We still need to talk about climate debt"—to demonstrate that the omission is widely noted even among allies.

The book's weaknesses are structural and acknowledged. Ajl is not conducting primary archival or field research; his evidence is drawn from publicly available institutional reports, IPCC modeling, FAO statistics, and a wide range of scholarly and activist sources, and he relies on secondary literature rather than independent verification. The climate-debt quantification is borrowed from a single Swedish researcher, Rickard Warlenius, and while the 746.5 GtCO₂ figure is the best available accounting, the book does not subject it to independent scrutiny. The argument is openly polemical and programmatically political, which both sharpens the analysis and limits its evidentiary range: the treatment of the 2019 Bolivian coup as a US-backed operation is presented as established fact rather than as a contested claim, and the book's reliance on US military pollution statistics—the Pentagon as the 47th-largest polluter if it were a country—is, while documented, not independently interrogated. The book's strategic conclusions are also, by its own admission, "contested": the argument that the parliamentary path to social democracy is blocked by the absence of an anti-capitalist threat comparable to the one that produced the postwar welfare state is a historical claim that requires more evidentiary support than the book provides, and the assertion that the defeats of Sanders, Corbyn, Mélenchon, and SYRIZA demonstrate the structural impossibility of green social democracy through electoral means is an argument about which reasonable people within the same traditions disagree. The book is strongest when it reads primary planning documents against the grain—the Markey/AOC resolution, the CLFI report, Rifkin's framework, the Warren Pentagon bill—and weakest when it asserts historical necessity without demonstrating it.

What the book most distinctively does is to insist that the climate crisis is a crisis of imperialism before it is a crisis of emissions, and that any program that does not begin with this recognition will reproduce the colonial value transfer it claims to solve. This is not a position that can be accommodated within the existing Green New Deal debate; it is a position that redefines the terms of the debate entirely. Ajl's argument is that climate debt is not a supplementary demand but the foundation of any just transition; that demilitarization is not a bargaining chip but a structural requirement; that agroecology and food sovereignty are not "co-benefits" of decarbonization but the decarbonization strategy itself; and that Land Back is not symbolic justice but immediate climate infrastructure. The book is for readers who already suspect that the Markey/AOC resolution was a vehicle for idle private capital, who are already skeptical of the foundation-funded NGO formations that pass for "social movements," and who are already looking for an eco-socialist, anti-imperialist alternative to the green-capitalist and green-social-democratic programs on offer. It is not for readers who want a technical roadmap, a policy white paper, or a reconciliation with the Democratic Party's left flank. It is a book that takes the tradition of the oppressed seriously, that quotes Fanon and Benjamin and the Cochabamba declarations as primary sources rather than as decoration, and that concludes, with a clarity that is either bracing or disqualifying depending on your position, that anything less than eco-socialist anti-imperialism is the greenwashing of ongoing colonial transfer. In a debate that has been dominated by the question of what is politically feasible, Ajl has written a book about what is materially required, and the two answers do not converge.