Climate Change Mitigation, Capitalism, and the Capitalist State: Towards a Theoretical Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The politics and political economy of significant state-led climate change mitigation remain underexplored. This article discusses and critiques dominant perspectives on mitigation, and advances an alternative framework grounded in Marx’s value theory and a state theory shaped by it. It argues that capitalism is not incompatible with significant climate action in any absolute sense, but imposes structural constraints on how far and how fast the state can act. These limits arise from the state’s need to maintain capitalist profitability, uphold market logic and national competitiveness, and manage periodic crises—particularly in the conjunctural context of fossil fuel dependence. Although the capitalist state may exercise limited autonomy, its capacity to mitigate climate change is shaped by the balance of forces within civil society between “brown” and “green” fractions of capital, and between common people’s movements for climate action and the capitalist class, which often enjoys state support. As the balance of power differs across nations, so does the ability of the state to mitigate climate change. But overall, the global capitalist system is not conducive to significant and swift climate change mitigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".