System Change or Climate Change - which of the two alternatives is the easiest to envisage? Which is the most likely?
I take system change seriously. I am deeply sceptical of the politics of sloganeering, of political demands made upon others, particularly existing governments and institutions. The responsibility for constituting an alternative social order falls squarely upon those demanding system change. To demand system change from authorities and institutions constituted to entrench and sustain the very capital system that is driving the crisis in the climate system is frankly incoherent, betraying a hopeless innocence in politics that will not end well.
I raised these questions on social media, and received absolutely no reaction. Instead, there was a predictable repetition of demands for substantial change issued by scientists. I see no evidence that the people repeating "we need to act now" have the first idea of what system change implies. It's needed. But it requires much more than demands putting existing governments under pressure to act. I'm afraid that's about the size of environmental politics here, a half-assed reformism through the very institutions that are implicated in the climate crisis. A reformism from above through government action allied to a reformism from below through lifestyle changes. I see no structural transformation capable of delivering system change being proposed.
I've removed my social media post to my blog, for the simple reason that my attempt to provoke serious thought on system change received no interest whatsoever. People seem content to issue demands without an effective politics to back them up. It's a pathetic spectacle. There are only so many times that I can suffer hearing the politically vacuous word 'we' before recoiling in complete disdain and disgust. I'm more interested in Marx. Seems most others are not. I hope they have a good supply of fairy dust, because I don't see how else they will make good their big claims. Governments cannot and will not act as required and lifestyle changes will never scale up or sum to make the global changes required.
'As we view Marx on his 200th anniversary, it is important to see both his brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.'
Marx’s concrete dialectic as open and expansive, and not tied to nineteenth century determinations. This was one of the points I was concerned to make in my own work on Marx earlier this year:
'The kind of analysis presented above shows Marx as our contemporary, not least his grasp of the limitless quest for surplus value by capital, and the concomitant deep alienation and exploitation that it visits upon the working people, from factories to modern call centres.
At the same time, these kinds of statements, especially when read out of context, have been used for decades by Marx’s critics, both conservative and left-wing, to portray him as a thinker whose abstract model of capital and labour occludes national differences, race, ethnicity, gender, and other crucially important aspects of human society and culture.
On the one hand, these critics are wrong because capitalism is in fact a unique social system that overturns and homogenises all previous social relations, tending towards the reduction of all human relations to that of capital versus labour. Thus, one cannot understand contemporary family and gender relations, ethno-racial and communal conflict, or ecological crisis fully without examining the underlying relationships described above. For the family, the ethnic tableau, and the natural environment are all conditioned by the underlying fact of a capitalist mode of production.
But, on the other hand, these critics pose questions that make us look more carefully at Marx’s theoretical categories. It is very important in this regard to realise, if one truly wants to appreciate Marx’s originality, that his concept of capital and labour was posed not only at a high level of abstraction, but that, at other levels, it encompasses a far wider variety of human experience and culture. As Bertell Ollman (1993) has emphasised, Marx operated at varying levels of abstraction.
'The present article centres on three related points.
First, Marx’s working class was not only Western European, white, and male, since from his earliest to his latest writings, he took up the working class in all its human variety.
Second, Marx was not an economic or class reductionist, for throughout his career, he considered deeply various forms of oppression and resistance to capital and the state that were not based entirely upon class, but also upon nationality, race and ethnicity, and gender.
Third, by the time of Marx’s later writings, long after the Communist Manifesto, the Western European pathway of industrial capitalist development out of feudalism was no longer a global universal. Alternate pathways of development were indeed possible, and these connected to types of revolutions that did not always fit the model of industrial labour overthrowing capital.
'Marx is hostile to mere empiricism, embracing a dialectical form of totality. He at the same time castigates, as did Hegel, the abstract universals of traditional idealist philosophy and of modern liberalism, with its human and civil rights that are so often little more than formulaic to those at the bottom of society. Yet, at the same time, he embraces what he and Hegel called the concrete universal, a form of universality that was rooted in social life, and yet pointed beyond the given world of the “pseudoconcrete.”'
There are a lot of points made here that I developed at length in my own works on Marx this year. Marx is key to understanding the systemic dynamics of the ecological crisis. You would think those who speak so loudly of the need for system change would take an interest. I have constantly met with indifference in pressing this point. I can now say openly that large sections of the environmental movement are politically naive, evasive, and hopelessly and congenitally ineffective. They would rather be right on the science than effective on the politics. And they will be saying 'I told you so' repeatedly as the planet burns.
My own work on Marx from earlier this year:
I post this up because we are, after all, engaged in civilization change, if we are to have any form of liveable life at all in the future.
'It's the final call, say scientists, the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures. Their dramatic report on keeping that rise under 1.5 degrees C says the world is now completely off track, heading instead towards 3C.'
'Keeping to the preferred target of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels will mean "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.'
Forget that target - we require 'rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society' - and that means understanding key societal dynamics. Unless you really do think 'government' will do it all.
Governments have been told before - the systemic illogic of capital holds sway here. Let's examine the institutional and structural forces standing in the way of effective response. As one of capital's alienated second order mediations ... the abstraction of the modern state is the political command centre of the very capital system that is kicking the biosphere over the cliff, in pursuit of exchange values in complete indifference to use values. The deafness and blindness is systematic. And the problem is way more than Trump or any other of the personifications of capitalist categories. Without a social movement with the structural capacity to act globally, all rational and moral appeals will fail on account of their abstraction from appropriate social identity and for the want of collective means and mechanisms of action.
Designed to fail, divided to fall - to those who say elections are won from the centre ground, I say the centre ground does not exist, it has been hollowed out by capital and its monstrous abstract progeny, and sent to extremes. Final call? Sounds like the soliloquy of scientists and ethicists in a world structured to be deaf to fact and value. Which is why the prophetic voice is repetitive.
I'm just wondering if people calling for system change instead of climate change actually understand what deep and rapid change in "all aspects of society" really entails. I've given my views in the pieces on Marx and Meszaros above - it's a big ask. I have no faith in governments acting as environmental rescue squads.
'Civil society groups are also piling pressure on policymakers to turn warm words into action. “The difference between impossible and possible is political leadership,” said Stephen Cornelius, chief adviser on climate change at WWF. “We are already seeing loss of natural habitats and species, dwindling ice caps, rising sea levels, impacting on our health, livelihoods and economic growth. We know what is needed and we can do it relying mostly on proved technologies, such as decisively scaling up renewable energy and halting deforestation.”'
I just hope that environmentalism does succeed in constituting an effective political 'we,' to give the demands being issued some institutional and structural capacity.