The Future Belongs to Those Who Fight: Climate Change for Beginners

Philosopher-journalist Todd Dufresne provides an urgent analysis of the climate revolution. Arguing against the entrenched environmental trope of polite hope, he makes a powerful case for a radical, anti-capitalist utopic realism that values freedom, collectivism, and human rights. We are living through the sixth mass extinction. Capitalism, the essential driver of carbon emissions, is reaching its inevitably brutal endgame: techno-feudalism. Not only are we facing a climate emergency – we need to prepare for climate revolution. In a series of reports from the front lines, philosopher-journalist Todd Dufresne provides an urgent analysis of the knowledge and morals that are fuelling this revolution. His manifesto outlines the links between Western values, capitalism, and climate change, rejecting the "pathology of politeness" afflicting mainstream climate activism and warning that the systemic violence of post-capitalist society will be met with violence. Dufresne champions the radical critics of capitalism whose ideas, courage, and exuberant energy have the power to forestall the social murder of humanity in service of short-term profits for a tiny, irredeemable elite. A fearless – and fearsome – account of the world-historical social and material conditions confronting us, The Future Belongs to Those Who Fight is a call to support utopic realism: a vision that embraces empathy, freedom, community, and universal human rights. It lays out what may be the only path to a world worth living in: left populism.