Undemocratic States, Accelerated Disaster: Can We Reverse the Economic Incentives that Are Killing the Planet?

Perpetual war and authoritarianism are on the rise. This is accompanied by the collapse of liberal democratic institutions. In her contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, Sabrina Fernandes discusses how democratic organizing could prevent the further escalation of the planetary polycrisis and enable a good life for all.

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We live in a planetary polycrisis with catastrophic potential, and the combination of imperialism, authoritarianism and climate change can be deadly. International institutions, such as the United Nations, have been ineffective in securing adequate climate action and even the most basic humanitarian protections for everyone on Earth. These multilateral spaces have always been criticized for being flawed and unequal. However, they used to have enough power to shame states into at least respecting international law to some extent. Now it seems that they will either crumble at the weight of international and imperial threats, or completely adapt to normalize the path of mutual annihilation.

It is not just the fact that the United States are exiting many of these institutions, it also about how state diplomacy has been reduced to speeches, with very little action. The genocide in Gaza is proof of this, since neither ICJ or ICC proceedings managed to bring justice and peace to Palestinians. The fact that Donald Trump kidnapped Nicolás Maduro to control Venezuelan oil is further proof that the previous justifications for US intervention were never about liberal democracy. As war continues in Ukraine, and now even Colombia and Greenland are threatened with military action and capture, we must seriously inquire about the economic incentives for perpetual war and authoritarianism and about the incentives needed to power democratic organizing that could save us from catastrophe.

Capitalism cannot escape its authoritarian and destructive tendencies

Taking an interconnected perspective based on ‘ecosystemic responsibility’ reveals that the current approaches to climate change and geopolitics – catalysts of the planetary polycrisis –are not just problems of broken promises, but rather, the promises were stillborn from the beginning. None of the climate conferences ever dared to question the root of global warming, and the very premise of the United Nations protected the interests of a few special states, whose veto power and perceived immunity have enabled the continuous accumulation of power through the years. This power, whether explicitly capitalist or with some alternative orientation like China, is exercised everywhere to promote infinite growth on a finite planet.

The capitalist economy, which operates through Westphalian state competition, is pushing us beyond planetary limits. Rich countries have played this game with more capacity, more technology, and more expertise due to colonization and overexploitation. Their ability to externalize negative impacts to other countries while limiting their access to important tools of change helped to rig the game even further. Worse yet, as imperialist states reject basic respect for the sovereignty of other states, they get to play the economy with authoritarian advantages that increase with capital accumulation.

We are all hurtling toward catastrophe due to excessive garbage and profit accumulation based on the misuse and depletion of resources, though not all of us are affected equally. Wealthy states are not only more resilient and better prepared to handle collapse because of past inequalities and advantages, but because they plan on keeping their mode of living and resource concentration, they can either promote green extractivism and colonialism, or uphold fossil capital and resource imperialism that will let them prosper a while longer while the rest of the world burns.

Normalization of authoritarianism

In a system of economic and ecological imperialism, private sector elites (and their political allies) act on a brand of immediate self-interest that is irrational in the long-run. We are headed for ‘game over’ because few state-level actors truly acknowledge that scientific fundamentals should dictate economic production, not the other way around. The general incentive should be global survival. However, the strengthening of authoritarian states shows that, despite bouts of scientific denialism, they are quite aware of the looming catastrophe. They are not trying to avoid it for the common good, but rather to assert their ‘sovereignty’ and fight over its spoils.

Even in so-called democratic states, self-interest and ‘sovereignty’ based on conquest and spoils continue to play a role, so we get to watch a game of mutual normalization. For example, European states with interests in the Global South or looking to close their borders to migrants and refugees might feel threatened by Donald Trump’s imperial actions. However, they will be slow and weak to reject them in case similar policies can be implemented at home. Meanwhile, territories where people have realized that survival requires radical change are left to combat the many sources of disaster and ecosystem collapse while facing existential threats of invasion and war from a few powerful entities.

Thus, the collapse of liberal democratic institutions is not solely due to attacks by overt authoritarians and wannabe dictators. The disregard of liberal democracy for deepening popular power has always been accompanied by the normalization of authoritarian trends because these authoritarian actors were useful for capital accumulation every now and then. However, when authoritarianism now resurfaces with full force to attack human rights, humanitarian values, and the fabric of life, threatening the basic global order of state sovereignty, it becomes clear that balancing liberal capitalism with authoritarianism is leading us toward mutual annihilation.

Radical democracy must tackle accumulation and dispossession

Our liberal democratic standards are so low and vague that authoritarian actors have learned to avoid traditional coups and claim legitimacy through elections instead. By taking over the media, marketing specific values and instrumentalizing fear, they advance an ultra-politics of friends and foes that is quite useful to manipulate the consciousness of voters. For Donald Trump, this is ‘America First’ imperialism. Its playbook can be replicated everywhere through extreme conservatism and repression by appealing to traditional values and convincing dispossessed workers that their terrible situation is the fault of other workers, not those in power.

This sentiment has been instrumental in electing wannabe dictators and neo-fascists to executive and legislative offices everywhere – from Brazil and Argentina to El Salvador, Italy, and Portugal – because they exploit the decline of mass organizing. Whereas episodes of grave repression and war show that some resistance is viable, it is harder to resist in the absence of strong popular organizations. It is even harder to prevent the rise of authoritarian leaders when the liberal political environment treats social movements, trade unions, and grassroots collectives as mere ornaments of democracy instead of its foundation.

We know that to win back the planet, it is key to uproot denialist rationalities and shift our priorities towards care, well-being, equity, stability and a strong positioning on efficiency with sufficiency. To be serious about peace and longevity – two basic requirements for true ecological sovereignty – it is important to reverse our economic and development rationale towards a revolutionary transformation of our approach to nature, production, decision-making and planning.

Thus, when discussing true democratic agency from class and territorial perspectives, it should be about more than including representatives from working-class organizations in consultative meetings or giving them access to rooms of diplomats and advisors. While these may be important for oversight, they have also defused organizing power and divided movements into those who are briefly consulted and those who are left outside protesting.

Towards ecosystemic responsibility

A true democratic alliance among workers, Indigenous peoples, peasants, and all the oppressed does not elevate one leadership over another. Rather, it recognizes our planetary interdependence. Our attempts at mutual cooperation must be based on our shared survival. Unlike competing states, we must value strengthening our own organization as much as another’s, fighting to regain rights and grounds for democratic and popular organizing. This means showing workers the strategic value of unions and impressing upon communities that they can secure short- and long-term victories by joining together.

Consumerism, neoliberalism, sacrifice zones, and other aspects of the capitalist way of life have divided our movements, creating the illusion that we must compete with one another to succeed. This distracts us from the fact that the system only works when we are all pitted against each other instead of reflecting on our shared plight. Don’t indigenous peoples suffer similar injustices to those experienced by industrial workers when they become part of the system? Therefore, only a rationality that recognizes the connections between all exploited people and attributes their suffering to a common cause – capitalism – can establish the territorial connections necessary to restructure the global economy in a way that respects nature’s metabolism while ensuring a good life for most of the world’s population.

Programmatically, we need a strategy that buys us time to advance more radical politics and stand together against an authoritarian takeover in order to avert climate disaster. The migrant rights movement’s motto, ‘No one is illegal,’ should be embraced by every citizen, as authoritarianism can manipulate legality to repress, imprison, and kill any of us simply for trying to survive. The concept of ecosystemic responsibility is powerful because it reminds us that we all share the same basis for life globally and that caring for each other is not optional but required to improve any group’s life.

Democratic organizing where we are told we cannot

Pragmatically speaking, disruption is in order. This is not just about mass protests. Disruption also means organizing where we are told we cannot. For example, workers at Starbucks and Amazon have formed unions, and frontline communities that were considered too dispersed have driven energy-hungry data centers away from their territories. It also requires putting an end to corporate lobbying and removing their agents from negotiation and government spaces. Ideally, we can also unite consumers to demand boycotts, fair prices, better quality, and the decommodification of goods and services. This will help impart class consciousness where neoliberalism reduced us to nothing more than consumers. A real alternative depends on an alliance of the dispossessed whose discontent can be unified to shift priorities on a massive scale.

Internationally, regional cooperation should focus on restoring common ecosystems through indigenous territorial sovereignty. This approach should favor ecological modes of production, such as agroecology. Additionally, it should establish that extraction and technology must serve to eliminate poverty and create well-being, rather than accumulate profit.

When we learn about good living (buen vivir) from our Indigenous comrades, it’s not about de-industrializing or eliminating important advances, such as sanitation and electrified hospitals. Rather, it is about shifting economic incentives to prioritize the basis of social production and reproduction: peace and ecological stability. It is a historical materialist lesson about regulating our needs according to nature’s metabolism in order to make room for genuine social desires such as rest, leisure, health, discovery, and kinship. A good life is not at odds with saving the planet, but quite the opposite. In order to save the planet, we need new rules that democratize production so that we can stay within ecological limits and finally overcome social and economic ones.