A classical example, cited by Hilferding in his Finance Capital (1910), was the international proliferation of peak employers’ organizations in response to the new industrial unions of the early twentieth century. In the German case, the Free Trade Unions had “developed a technique of labor struggle known as ‘Einzelabschlachtung’—literally, ‘knocking them off singly.’ The organized workers did not tackle an industry on a broad front but plant by plant. While the workers of one plant were on strike, their fellow-workers in other plants of the same industry would continue work and provide funds for the strikers.” Initially this was a great success, and “it soon became apparent that organized labor could be fought only by an organization of employers which corresponded in scale and financial resources to the unions.” The result was the formation of two national employers’ organizations, one for heavy industry and textiles, and the other for light industries, which emulated the research and coordinating functions of the central union leagues, and, like the unions, provided mutual aid and financial support during strikes and lockouts. As Carl Schorske observed, “unionization [by 1914] had produced its counterpart—a powerful enemy, armed with equal or superior weapons.”

The workers’ movement can and must confront the power of capital in every aspect of social life, organizing resistance on the terrains of the economic, the political, the urban, the social-reproductive, and the associational. It is the fusion or synthesis of these struggles, rather than their simple addition, which invests the proletariat with hegemonic consciousness.

Marx and Engels, for example, clearly believed that mass socialist consciousness would be a dialectical alloy of the economic and the political; of epic battles over rights as well as over wages and working hours; of bitter local fights and great international causes. Since the formation of the Communist League in 1847, they had argued that wage-labor constituted the only serious social force able to represent and enact a consistently democratic program of suffrage and rights, and thus provide the hegemonic glue to bind together a broad coalition of workers, poor peasants, national minorities, and radicalized strata of the middle class. While the mind of the liberal petty bourgeoisie easily amputated political rights from economic grievances, workers’ lives refuted any categorical distinction between oppression and exploitation. The “growing over” of political into economic democracy, and of economic class struggle into the question of state power—the process that Marx characterized as “permanent revolution” in the contexts of 1848 and Chartism—was a recurrent motif in all the great European social crises from 1848 to 1948.

There is a legend about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly. Proletarian subjectivity does not evolve by incremental steps but requires non-linear leaps, especially moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people, even when this contradicts short-term self-interest, as in the famous cases of Lancashire cotton workers’ enthusiasm for Lincoln and later for Gandhi. Socialism, in other words, requires non-utilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual. Marx rightly scourged romantic humanism in the abstract, but his personal pantheon—Prometheus and Spartacus, Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare—affirmed a heroic vision of human possibility that no longer seems to have any purchase in our fallen world.

Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed—almost as analogues to Keynesian “pump-priming”—to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Although the IPCC never spells it out, its mitigation targets necessarily presume that windfall profits from higher fossil-fuel prices over the next generation will be efficiently recycled into renewable energy technology and not wasted on mile-high skyscrapers, asset bubbles, and mega-payouts to shareholders. Overall, the International Energy Agency estimates that it will cost about $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas output by 2050.9 But without the large quotient of “automatic” progress in energy efficiency, the bridge will never be built, and IPCC goals will be unachievable; in the worst case—the straightforward extrapolation of current energy use—carbon emissions could easily triple by midcentury