What would Greta do? Anthropocene politics and the reclamation of universal Earth justice

Justice discourse faces potent critiques from decolonial, environmental, feminist, and indigenous perspectives. Yet the imperative for universal frameworks to build solidarity and address Earth system breakdown has never been more urgent. The youth climate justice movement (YCJM) offers clarity by grounding universalist political aims in climate crisis materiality. By identifying the assemblage of transnational corporate networks, supportive political structures, and extractive regimes, YCJM exposes what Marx first analyzed - systemic forces no longer obscured by philosophical charges of "onto-theology." The climate catastrophe presents an undeniable ethical demand transcending individual "life goals." YCJM, like the divestment and Black Lives Matter movements, confronts elite resource capture and cynical deployment of 'universal justice' frames, revealing how networked coordination reproduces capitalist conditions and generates path dependencies, causing long-term intersectional harms. I draw on Slavoj Žižek’s prodigious Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist political theory to develop a rough-cut strategic assessment of the YCJM’s chances for success.