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 change and other severe environmental problems demand working class solutions. The productivity and creativity of workers is vital to ecological alternatives. The often forgotten history of working class environmental politics demands study.(...) Workers produce and can produce alternative sustainable futures, the concept of workers’ plans for ecological production is important

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.

Capitalism turns the ‘free gifts of nature’ into profit. And in the incessant drive to raise profitability, it depletes and degrades natural resources. And as nature is privatised and turned into private property, the owners of ‘nature’ can also extract rent from the exploitation of labour. However, there is a continual battle by capital to control and lower rising raw material prices as natural resources are depleted and not renewed, adding another factor to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The drive for profit has led to an uncontrolled expansion of industrialisation, energy and commodity production in agriculture that emits carbon emissions and provokes natural resource depletion that is heating up the planet to levels that threaten its very existence.

By pointing to the intersection of capitalism with patriarchy, racism and speciesism on the world scale, socialist ecofeminism allows to see ecological transition as an intersection of different struggles for ‘system change’. Taking this vision seriously could help socialist organizations to free themselves from their inherited obsession with the forces of production and GDP growth – the capitalist/industrial version of modernity – and envision a true ecological revolution.