What does it mean to change the world? The Left has long proclaimed the need to “change everything” — to foment revolution rather than advance reform, to replace the dismal existing state of affairs with a better, more rational order. And yet in the meantime capitalism itself is already changing everything faster than we can keep up: constantly rooting out new resources, implementing new modes of production, shuddering through crisis after crisis.

Such a mercurial, unstable order seemed to Marx doomed to ultimately destroy itself. And yet capitalism has managed to survive even as it constantly remakes the world around it.

Now, though, Naomi Klein argues that capitalism has finally gone too far. Globalization was bad enough — but global warming is even worse. Capitalism is now changing the world very literally, altering the planet’s climate and threatening to destroy the prospect of a livable future on Earth. As the climate changes, everything else is going to change whether we like it or not. Thus the duty to change the world deliberately is more urgent than ever before.