http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/images/400ppm.jpg"400 ppm" is an eco-political music video which encapsulates climate crisis and climate justice in three minutes flat. . . . The arc of the song begins from basic observations -- symptoms of the crisis -- and then shifts to the ideological problem of denial, masked in recent years by massive Corporate Social Responsibility advertising and complemented by the emergence of "silver-bullet" geo-engineering schemes. At the song's midpoint, its bridge identifies the structural drivers of the crisis: carboniferous capitalism, and the contradiction between compounding capital accumulation and the principle of homeostasis which governs the biosphere. The next verse underlines that point and evokes, with the wheel of fortune, a financialized casino-capitalism inured to its material "externalities." Wes Carroll's spirited guitar solo is accompanied by images from Canada's notorious Tar Sands of bitumen extraction and what it leaves behind. But at this point the video begins to arc toward hope, with footage from the Tar Sands Healing Walk (featuring Cree activist and writer Clayton Thomas-Muller) -- an annual event since 2010 bringing together Indigenous activists, environmentalists, and others. The last verse gestures toward a just transition -- a power shift -- to a post-capitalist future that combines global justice and solidarity with ecological stewardship, and that abandons the consumer-capitalist logic of always having more, in favor of buen vivir: "living well." To get there, we had better start healing what Karl Marx called the metabolic rift between capitalist extractivism/accumulation and the conditions for a vital ecosystem. Mass popular struggle, building on but going beyond the September 2014 People's Climate March (the final image), is a necessary condition for such a radical remaking of our world.

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