Hegemonic climate politics conceals that capitalism’s structural contradictions cause climate change, either articulating itself without confronting such contradictions or offers solutions which bring new equally sharp contradictions to the fore instead. I elaborate on the following contradictions throughout the article: capital and nature; capital and labor; time of capital and time of nature/climate; time of capital and time of labor; the necessity of effective climate policies and the demands of capital; the urgency of climate measures and postponement of targets to 2050; the climate commitments which pin its faith upon the order of capitalist economy and upon market mechanisms and emission reduction targets and the actual climate policies under operation; mitigation policies and application tools that do not have a feature for mitigation.

Yet much discussion of the GND lacks mooring in the political economy of the production of discourse, the environmental crisis, or shifts in capitalism. In what follows, light will be shed on why and how the GND emerged, as layers of space and time slammed together: shifts and challenges to US accumulation, the broader environmental crisis, and breakdown of capitalism as a political mode of rule in the core. The GND in its dominant anti-racist green Keynesian formulation emerges as one resolution—if not exactly a solution—to these instabilities.

This essay traces the history of the REDD-Plus initiative within a broader understanding of the changes within the international division of labour in world capitalism. It shows that the reconfiguration of nature is an important feature of resolving the crisis of accumulation within capitalism. Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that political and economic domination is a driver of uneven development in the reordering of world capitalism itself.

Climate justice politics cannot advance without a working class internationalism that confronts the climate class divide, climate apartheid, and climate patriarchy as a "rich totality of many determinations” – always with and within webs of life that have themselves been degraded and alienated. Let us remember that the affirmative dialectical corollary to Marx's oft-quoted observation on capitalism's degradation of “the soil and the worker” is this: the communist horizon is the real historical movement of the class struggle in the web of life.