There is an ugly campaign underway to discredit Greta Thunberg. That campaign is based on fear of the momentum that Thunberg’s activism is building for climate action, inspiring millions worldwide. I distance myself completely from this campaign. The motivation here is plainly political and is designed to obstruct the climate action that is desperately needed to avert eco-catastrophe. The science is very clear on this. Thunberg’s simple message that the planet is on fire is simply true. And the people making the ugly assaults on Thunberg and environmental campaigners are involved in plain hardball politics. I wouldn’t ban them, silence and suppress them, still less prosecute them for telling lies harmful to humanity. The claims that people should be prosecuted for climate change denial fills me with horror. There is a right to blaspheme against orthodoxy. All great truths begin as blasphemy against orthodoxy. The most tyrannical regimes in history took their stands on the defence of truth. The translation of truth into politics is neither simple nor uni-linear, a progression from passive fact to act. To start to legislate and control action and behaviour according to truth is a crude, dictatorial, self-defeating approach. And Inquisition to impose and maintain belief produces only non-believers. My great fear is that this non-politics of accusation, incitement, and provocation serves only to give renewed vigor to those climate deniers who have long been in retreat. There is a ‘populist’ revolt against elites underway in the western world. How idiotic it would be for the environmental movement to indulge in a hectoring and lecturing divorced from real social and political engagement, inviting the climate deniers back as liberators of the people from the damnations of ecological zealots. Unfair or not, that’s how the deniers will frame it. And the ambitious actions being demanded of governments the world over, with precious little behind it by way of practical politics other than legislative, fiscal, and regulative intervention – an austerian climate regime in other words – will make the deniers politically plausible at a time when their scientific credibility is zero. This approach could backfire spectacularly on the environmental movement, both in this sense, and in the sense of delivering environmentalism into corporate hands.
I don’t doubt that there are climate ‘deniers.’ I have tangled with many of them over the years. I also know that ‘denial’ comes in many forms. Those who deny climate science are the most obvious and least worrisome. The truly problematic denialism lies elsewhere. The people who deny the science outright are actually a minority. We waste time ‘debating’ with them, merely restating climate truths that we already know and which their intended targets find unpersuasive and will do so to their dying day. Years ago I argued that this was a strategy not merely to confuse and obfuscate where there is clarity, nor even merely to waste time and sap energy, but to keep environmentalists away from the fields in which people can be motivated and mobilised and their behaviours. The accusation that those advancing climate action are not engaged in real science but in politics and belief was designed, I argued, to have climate campaigners restating the science ad nauseum, forever shying away from the field of politics and ethics instead of advancing into the terrain of practical reason. Denunciations of ‘the new religion of climate alarmism’ and accusations of political motivation caused climate campaigners to shy away from politics, ethics, religion, and psychology – precisely those areas which galvanize people to act and change their behaviours and societies.
I have since drawn the conclusion that too many environmentalists possess a deep conflict aversion with respect to social division and the launching of alternate political platforms. They seek unity and consensus, emphasize collaborative networks, avoid disagreement and disruption. Such a politics is incapable of making a clean break with the capital system, but will forever be drawn into entanglement with it. It will produce any number of fancy numbers to mask capitulation and absorption, but at no point will it succeed in making a break with capital rule and its accumulative logic. (I’ll stand correction here. After all, in the work on Marx I produced last year, I emphasized Marx’s ‘socialism from within,’ in the sense that socialism is not built or implemented but emerges from within the socialization processes of the capitalist order. There remains a clean break with the capital relation all the same.)
Here there is another kind of denialism. The failure to take politics, ethics, and psychology seriously, as though science and technology will suffice to do the job, is a political and sociological denialism. The same with respect to those who fail to trace the crisis in the climate system to its source in the accumulative dynamic of an exponentially expansionary capital economy. At risk of sounding heretical – and I hear climate opponents score telling political points when they refer to a burgeoning eco-Inquisition seeking to police behaviours through state and law – climate change is not the problem; climate change is the symptom of a deeper problem which has its roots in specific social forms mediating the human interchange with nature. Denialism here amounts to understanding that climate change is real and that the climate science is as near certain on this as science can ever get, but settling for half-measures that proceed within existing institutional arrangements, demonstrating a pronounced reluctance to go to source. Campaigners demand that ‘government’ strengthens its climate commitments. I point out that the state is integral to the very capital system driving ecological destruction, one of capital’s second order mediations, its political command centre establishing unity in an anarchic system of production. Demands for climate action are being levelled on one of the key institutions of the ecologically destructive capital system. And there are people who do this do so in the name of ‘system change.’ They are misguided. The process of accumulation lies at the heart of the capital system. To argue for the degrowth economy is to demand that the accumulative dynamic at the heart of the capital relation be uprooted. I rarely see the argument made publically in those terms, possibly because it would be tacit recognition that old Marx was right after all and socialism may not be, as greens have been telling us since ever, merely the flip side of capitalism. That's a political and structural denialism.
Linked to this is the awareness that many in government and industry who know fine well that climate change is real and that climate scientists are telling the truth, but who act otherwise in their public activities. If they don’t openly lie – and many do – their actions are to the contrary of what they know to be true with respect to climate change. It is here that we frequently hear demands for prosecution from environmentalists. Leaving aside issues of freedom I adumbrate above, I take this as a counsel of political despair, retreat, and defeat. It is the old recourse to a mythical lawgiver or abstract standard in order to ensure the triumph of truth in politics that have proven elusive by political means. Law will not compensate for deficiencies in politics in this way. The real climate denialism here is not a matter of personal choice but is systemic, and those who think otherwise are themselves in denial of the structural facts of social life. (see how tricky that term 'denial' becomes, when it can be used so easily to locate the fault in the failures of others. Denialism is a convenient term that enables people to carry on in ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of their own faults. It is a term that discourages self-examination and encourages a dangerously complacent self-righteousness.
There are some tricky ethical issues here with respect to personal responsibility and moral choice – each individual is responsible for their actions and cannot shuffle off responsibility to others, ‘society,’ ‘the system,’ anonymous ‘history.’ But the fact remains that individuals are entangled within socially structured patterns of behaviour within a capital system that determines our lives with what Max Weber – Marx’s great critic – described as ‘irresistible force.’ The system is in control. And it is, as Meszaros argues, a ‘subjectless system of control.’ Weber, too, argues that the system proceeds ‘without regard for persons.’ ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets,’ Marx wrote in Capital. Marx treated the economic agents of the capital system as personifications of capitalist economic categories. In this sense, the lack of responsibility – denialism of the deleterious social and ecological consequences of capitalist accumulation – is endemic to a systemically irresponsible capital economy deaf to the health of the realm of use values. The functionaries of that system will be in denial of damaging consequences with respect to labour and nature. But those who think that making such personifications of economic categories personally responsible for the events of a systematically irresponsible accumulative dynamic are failing to grasp a deeper sociological and institutional truth.
The international scientific community keeps on repeating that we have just _ years to act to stave off climate catastrophe (fill in the blanks yourself. I have a book entitled Seven Years to Save the Planet by Bill McGuire. It’s a good book, very detailed on the science. It was written eleven years ago …) Those seeking to communicate the climate message often express the view that too few people are listening and even less care. My response back is that this lack of response is not personal but systemic. Individuals find themselves acting within an economic system that is systemically deaf and indifferent to use values, oriented as it is towards the exploitation of resources to accumulate exchange values. To elicit a response to appeals (or alarms), you have to create and cultivate the modes of effective response, both organisational and psychological. That involves much more than lifestyle changes.
And so what we take to be climate denial thrives in all areas. In face of a climate emergency, government and business are doubling down on fossil fuels, even those who declare that do indeed face an emergency. To call such behaviour immoral, hypocritical, deceitful and so on misses the real point by a very wide mark. Until we trace climate change to source in an alienated system of power, politics, and production, activists will keep on demanding that devils behave as angels, or cats as dogs, whichever way you want to put it. We live within a system of entrenched, organised, endemic irresponsibility, human beings serving ends and imperatives which are external to them. Fail to grasp that point and you have grasped nothing but surface level manifestations. You can observe them, protest them, but unless you get to the drivers, you will be unable to do anything about them. I try desperately to avoid the schizophrenia that results from a deficiency, which has environmentalist rebelling and breaking the law on the one hand, and then embracing climate litigation and demanding climate deniers be prosecuted on the other. There is an arbitrariness whose practical political implications I am leery of. In the very least it gives political opponents the opportunity to portray climate campaigners as eco-Inquisitors hunkering after an authoritarian climate regime.
The denial of climate science is not the problem. It has never been the problem. Time and resources have been dissipated on the presumption that the problem is one of climate education. As irritating and annoying as they undoubtedly are, climate deniers aren’t the problem. The real trouble lies with what I call climate liars: the thousands of politicians who secretly accept climate science but publicly deny it for political gain. If the climate movement is going to prevail, we must be crystal clear about this distinction. Very few people deny the reality of climate change, fewer still argue that climate science is a global conspiracy designed to raise taxes and expand government and institute socialism. It depends on the country, of course, but I have seen figures that in the US some 15% of the population are deniers in this sense. That’s still quite shocking, but it leaves some 85% to play for in political exchange and dialogue. But it is here where the real problem lies, for the reasons given above. Individuals are embedded in a social system, with roles, interests, and identities bound up with that system. To demand climate action without appropriate transformation of that system is to demand a level of self-sacrifice on the part of individuals that is irrational, contrary to dominant conceptions of rationality and interest. There is here the failure to transcend the dualism of egoism and altruism which characterises the modern order. Real society is constituted as a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism, forcing recourse to an abstract sphere for the common good. The appeal to and/or imposition of an external altruism is an impotent moralism that is destined to fail. Such appeals presume the existence of a social identity in which self- and social interest, immediate and long-range good, coincide. That identity does not exist, therefore the appeal fails, causing environmentalists to bemoan the selfishness, stupidity, and indifference of the people. That’s an error. The deficiency lies not in personal responsibility but in systems and identities. The appeal to human beings as individuals is sociologically and psychologically illiterate. The truth is that individuals, decision-makers, politicians, consumers, industrialists who act in ways contrary to climate health do not actually deny the reality of climate change nor the science which reveals it; they’re acting in denial because that is precisely how their interests and identities within an ecologically destructive economic and social system constrain their behaviour. The truth is that most climate contrary politicians and industrialists don’t actually deny the science on climate change; they either pretend to deny it or pay lip-service to it to win political office or markets. The real obstacle standing in the way of the environmental movement is not lack of scientific education, literacy, and acceptance but lack of political and social purchase within the social order.
This point is critical, so I make no apologies for repeating it for the umpteenth time. The climate cause may be science-based but it cannot win on the science alone. Nor technology. Science and technology are parts of the solution, and not even the main parts. The most effective tactic in the armoury of the climate deniers has been to put a shield around politics and ethics/religion, seemingly denigrating these things when claiming that environmentalists are not doing real science but engaging in politics in the name of ‘the new religion of climate alarmism.’ That claim has outraged climate campaigners, who have then proceeded to deny science and ethics to fall back on endless restatements of the science. Science does not motivate and create will for action; it informs, but in itself it does not incite and mobilize. In causing climate campaigners to shy away from politics and ethics, and from a critical analysis of economic systems, climate deniers have effectively caused campaigners to eliminate themselves from the field of practical reason, the realm in which will, motivation, response, and action proceed. This is ironic. Ecology is supposed to teach holism and interconnection, and yet environmentalists have demonstrated a palpable failure to connect the dots and engage in an integral strategy. Instead of bemoaning politics, beliefs, ethics, values, resisting the politicization and moralization of climate change, we must positively embrace it by bridging the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason. That means going past climate-denying protagonists. They are not merely not the problem, to the extent that you take them to be the problem you not only waste time and energy in the fruitless pursuit of persuasion, you ensure that climate change remains tucked away in the attic of science, instead of coming down to the realm of politics and ethics where the people are. The lack of social and political power and purchase at the level of the practical world is the problem. Here is where you can mobilize the numbers that matter – not the financial numbers of those with a vested interest in carboniferous capitalism, but those of individuals as citizens of the new Eco-Republic. It’s possible, once we establish the right connections between science, technology, government, policy, will, action, values.
Spokespersons for entrenched economic and political power, will be defeated only by widespread social mobilisation and an ecological self-socialization that is rooted in a critique of political economy. The current wave of environmental activism is short of this, although I entertain hopes that, in time, it may come to develop it. Mobilisation is how understanding develops. It needs to develop quickly. Because the danger is that this wave of activism may come to be diverted by powerful, already organised and fully-resourced, forces into a ‘green’ corporate form. I am not encouraged by the anti-socialist attitudes I have experienced over the years. They may be correct with respect to the state capitalism of ‘really existing socialism’ in the past – but that’s precisely what those regimes were – regimes of capital accumulation under the auspices of the state. To be effective, environmentalism needs to grasp the precise nature of the socialist critique of and challenge to the capital system. It is misunderstandings and deficiencies here that I am concerned to check. I trust that environmentalists have been around long enough and know enough to be able to detect ‘greenwash’ when they come across it and reject it. That said, it is also apparent that these corporate forces command such resources as to be able to intervene in any process of transformation and curtail it within existing forms. And such curtailment will have its appeal as against those pushing for radical measures. Any ‘green’ business is better than dirty industry any day, after all. The danger is that many, in desperation for any kind of climate action, after decades of failure, will come to accept the corporate form as the most feasible option, in the short-run, given ‘it’s time for action’ now!
Let's ask some fundamental questions: Who are the stakeholders? Who appoints them? To whom are they accountable? How do we make sure that those undertaking climate action are genuinely committed to addressing the crisis in the climate system? (And not just seeking to overcome the crisis in the capital system?)
The problem is not one of energy and technology but of social relations. To the extent that people seek resolution in terms of clean energy and new technology, they fail to transform fundamental social relations, effectively preserving and re-booting the very expansionary dynamic at the heart of social and environmental destruction. There are those seeking commons transitions and collaborative enterprises. All power to them. But to the extent they think this offers a conflict-free, politics-neutral workaround, then they are deluded. If they can encourage free-riders into cooperation, all well and good. I argued for some such strategy in Being at One. I suspect that the possessing class will seek to carry on guarding its possession from encroachment, however much it may entail a positive sum in the interests of all.
The science behind climate change is solid, the case for action is clear, the ugly attacks on Greta Thunberg are aimed not merely against her – no martyrs, please – but against all who campaign for climate action. That’s me, too. I’m a sensitive soul who works in isolation, unpaid, for free, using my savings, and getting hammered by all manner of criticism and abuse. I feel a martyr to the cause to. I have asked for no sympathy. Which is for the best, seeing as I have had no sympathy. I’ve been dismissed and sneered at and patronised by people advancing the climate cause, mind. My areas of expertise and understanding – history, political theory and practice/high politics, economics, sociology, ethics, philosophy, religion, literature, football, people – are considered somewhat secondary and ephemeral compared to science and technology. I would say such things are the stuff of human life. If you are deficient here then you are deficient period. It shows. With all the scientific knowledge and technological know-how in the world, the environmental cause has fallen consistently short. I am not interested in martyrs and so won’t waste time defending Greta Thunberg against these assaults. Such is politics. There’s not a political leader on the planet who is not subject to abuse and criticism. Listen to the abuse hurled at Reagan and Trump, or Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. If you intervene in politics, then expect to come under assault. And I’m not interested in those who are concerned to preserve an intellectual and moral shield around their political concerns. It won't work, except in the short run. I'm not interested in responding to the abusers. Much as the views of the likes of James Dellingpole are loathsome, it's the game that he and his ilk want. It takes us away from the root of the matter and the things we need to be doing to incite change for the better. He’s been abusing George Monbiot for years. Let’s not turn it into an issue of feminism or neurodiversity, either. The men, too, have been getting the abuse for as long as I can remember. Expect it, deal with it, do politics properly, engage the public – educate, agitate, organise!
My remarks below will be critical. I do hope it is clear that they pertain to the ways of doing politics and promoting a cause, and do not involve personal attacks on Greta Thunberg. As someone who also has Asperger’s, I am hardly likely to be joining in with those who are labelling her as a borderline moron and worse. At the same time, I am loathe to join in with those who exoticize the condition, as though AS gives a person special genius and insight. You get obsessive and become fixated on things, you can focus and concentrate over time, you don’t give your special interests up and can be relentless. With Greta, the science is right, and she repeats that simple message. That doesn’t make a saint. Many others have been doing the same. Deification and demonization are two sides of the same coin, and I don’t do either.
Let me begin with this quote:
“I think the next revolution will be led by a younger person, by a woman, and I feel that Greta Thunberg is that person,” Satish Kumar says. “I think that some kind of divine power but also some kind of unseen, unimaginable, unexplainable force is working through her.”
Note the positive connotations with the young and the female, because there seems to be a strategy underway that quite deliberately fashions and taps into a positive cultural identity that is being constructed to give the appearance of radicalism. It’s not radical, it's the very opposite. Be cautious of this strategy. We need a true public that includes all shapes and sizes. Even older white males, if you please! There are books out there emphasising the message that 'capitalism is a girl's best friend.' 'The future is female' is another message. I greatly distrust such positive images. The corporate form has already colonised much of society. It is easy to envisage the corporate capture of nature, seeking to recruit members of the environmental movement to its cause. An increasingly repressive society under the sway of the corporate form is being represented in libertarian terms, as an emancipation for hitherto oppressed and marginalised groups, generalised as a universal human emancipation in 'green' form. By means of a cultural politics based on identity, people are at risk of being led into being active agents of their own enslavement and oppression, all in the name of green rebellion.
I'm calling halt here. The deification of Greta is insanity betraying a complete absence of politics and respect for the citizen voice. It is the flip side of demonization, and I don't care for either. This is the ‘infantilism’ that Benjamin Barber warned about in Consumed, the appeal to image and emotion subverting the rationality of citizen discourse. Repeating the science on climate change in response here does not work, because that's not the issue. There are some crucial things absent in the environmental discussions and debates which dominate at present – class, exploitation, the iniquitous distribution of resources, and political economy. There’s an absence of politics, too, in the sense of genuine citizen engagement and interaction as against the mobilization of mindless mass pressure (mindless because there is nothing to think about or deliberate and decide upon, since the positions are already considered established, by science and expert agreementswith action merely being concerned with their promotion).
Who, precisely, we need to ask, are the change-agents of this politics? There are general references to ‘we’ and to ‘humanity’ and to ‘human-made’ climate change. When it comes to causes and solutions, this vagueness implies that a poor peasant in India is just as responsible as a rich company executive in the US. This is dangerous nonsense that opens the door to politically neutral corporate forces. When it comes to specifics with respect to causes, actions, and solutions, there is a distinct absence of class analysis. I have raised the issue with eco-designers and environmentalists, only to be told in forthright terms that such ‘us and them thinking is an anachronism.’ We are confronted by an ‘us and them’ class system, I replied. And on that, appeals to reason will stall and fall. Anyone who thinks that those who have succeeded in institutionalising and embedding their power and interests will be persuaded to sacrifice them to any extent as a result of sweet reason is deluded, no matter how perfect the system you devise and offer. This observation makes me wonder about the politics-neutral positions which are dominant among those who work in eco-design, renewable energy, and new technologies. Such an environmentalism is characterized by the absence of a critique of political economy and an analysis of class and capital. There is a general appeal to the rich as well as to the poor. Indeed, such a politics comes with a dependency on resources derived from within existing power relations as a condition of getting things done. Who else has the resources?
The clear conclusion I draw is that a new accumulative regime is in the process of being prepared and is already emergent, with the intellectual, psychic, and technical capabilities of that new order being prepared by those who seem to be most vocal about the need for climate action. Hence the evasion on class division is grounds for suspicion. Should we quibble and ask for specifics, the response is that ‘we don’t have time.’ We evidently don’t have the time to wait for the long awaited transition to socialism. People who give the impression they would wait forever for sweet reason allied to technological solutions to work make it clear that they have not a minute to spend on a class analysis entailing a socialism which seeks to restructure power and resources in favour of the common people. It is that emergency mode in environmental politics that a dominant power counts on, allowing it to take the emergency measures which serve to short-circuit any democratic movement underway and channel its emancipatory demands into repressive restraints serving to preserve existing power relations. Sensationalizing basic truths in order to create a rationale for emergency action that ignores democratic willing and consent with respect to common ends is not conducive to democratisation but to its nullification. The ruling class and its cultural apparatus identified fairly quickly that Green language could serve as a cover and rationale, buttressed by science on the one wing and nature-worship on the other, enabling them to re-tool industry whilst extending the corporate form. And it's 'Green.' Green is good. It's what the public wants, after all. Instead of transformation, we get a redistribution of power within prevailing power relations. The social relations of production remain unaltered, the accumulative dynamic remains in place, capital rule remains entrenched.
I am leery of this approach to building mass support. It may be the only way to a radicalisation of the people, one that is capable of breaking through institutional and psychological inertia. I agree. But Marx’s praxis was never ‘blind.’ I can see how any blanks in politics can come to be filled in, and I can see which forces are around happy to do the filling in. I am leery of certain strains of environmentalism and how these may come to be realised as an environmental austerity under the coercive state. The underlying austerian strain is evident most of all in the manufacturing of the overpopulation argument. But it is prevalent in nearly all discussions about global heating or rising sea levels or most anything relating to planetary ecology. The public is being schooled in the language of an environmental necessity that passes easily into a political necessity. There is indeed a need to recognize limits. That’s the whole point. The capital system can accept no such limits and is instead committed to an endless accumulation The problem comes when there is no recognition of the need to curtail the capital system and its limitless accumulation and the way that this transgresses planetary boundaries. Nature's limits are being projected upon the public, who are being prepared to have their expectations curtailed within prevailing relations. What is bothersome here is that the voices I am hearing warning of mankind’s immanent demise are mostly voices from affluent, even privileged classes. I see few, if any, working class voices. It is possible. Instead of pitting environmental action against employment, why not promote the Just Transition? Here is John Bellamy Foster on Ecosocialism and Just Transition.
"it is precisely when the call for a just transition becomes universalized, taking into account the needs of the world populations, future generations, and the diversity of life on earth itself, that it becomes obvious that any such transition is impossible under capitalism. Indeed, it represents the concrete negation of capitalism. Here the message of the ecosocialist movement, embodied in organizations like System Change Not Climate Change in the United States, are indispensable. A just transition, if it is to be more than words, demands another mode of production altogether, one no longer based in the logic of “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 742).
This is the approach I support. I distrust vagueness and I distrust science being used to legislate politics and ethics. I distrust the absence of politics. I distrust an anti-politics, however much I support the challenge to the conventional political sphere and the way it has been colonized by monetary power. Slogans like “listen to the science” and “follow the science” express a contempt of politics and the legitimacy of alternate voices and platforms. They express a disdain of the citizen voice. The citizen voice is legitimate only insofar as it parrots 'the science.' This science as authority is an attempt to put politics and people on ice. In the book On the Shores of Politics, Jacques Ranciere argues against the totalitarian temptations of those who enter politics armed with truth. Politics, he argues, is about dissension and the organisation of dissent. I argue that politics is more than that, but Ranciere's point is valid. Science as authority is the very antithesis of politics in this sense. It puts politics to sleep. And I reject it firmly. If you want to succeed, you will have to take politics – and ethics – far more seriously than this. And you will have to respect individuals as citizens and as knowledgeable moral agents capable of taking (co)responsibility in the public life. Short-cuts here take us to totalitarianism. Necessity is the tyrant’s plea.
And this, frankly, just fills me with disdain.
You don’t have a plan? This has got to be wrong. I know people associated with environmentalism who have plans. Take Aubrey Meyer's Contraction and Convergence. Aubrey's work is excellent. I recommend that people check it out and bring it to the forefront. We are not short of plans. Paris? Double up on governmental commitments and targets?
Or is the strategy here to mobilize the masses around general statements you can only agree with – ‘climate justice for all’ – to build pressure on governments to act, only for certain 'shadowy forces' behind it all to step forward with their own very definite plans?
Big Tech, I read, creates more carbon emissions than the aviation industry, but sceptics claim, there is no criticism of Big Tech from either XR or GT. It is easy to build a conspiracy theory and easier still to start becoming so obsessed as to believe in it. I read that, Luisa-Marie Neubauer, who regularly accompanies Greta Thunberg in student strikes all over the world, belongs to the organization “One Foundation,” which is supported by a number of wealthy financiers. Of course, George Soros is identified as being behind it all. ‘Behind every world famous 16 year old climate activist there is a liberal oligarch and a globalist movement.’
None of this stock-in-trade of conspiracy theory is my concern. It is no step at all from here to the idea that climate change has all been made up by said wealthy backers in order to institute world government. Here, conspiracy theorists on the Left join those on the Right, who argue precisely the same, only for the end in view being Socialism. Simple soul that I am, I take the view that the climate science is at it is because the scientists have got their sums right.
That said … it is noticeable that the XR and GT scripts, although they employ the ‘system change, not climate change’ slogan, are decidedly short, even silent, when it comes to actually challenging capitalist relations to transform the prevailing system. It’s rebellion and resistance they are engaged in, in an attempt to get existing institutions to act differently, not to bring them down. Protest and disruption implies a little tweaking of the system will suffice, saving the planet and system at the same time. A more rational and green capitalism, then. Just as the Fabians promised when they replaced class struggle and the socialism of the working class with the rational state regulation of the professional, educated middle class bureaucrats.
I am currently reading leftist conspiracy theorists writing that if GT started to talk of overthrowing the current system and its agents, then her ‘shadowy backers’ would quickly dump her. For the life of me I don’t see this at all. The activism that GT is inspiring is radical in its energy, intent, and aspiration; it has the potential to become radical in its social and institutional understanding. The billionaires and their servants attacking GT clearly see this, hence their vitriol. Having raised such demands and expectations, these backers would cease to be shadowy and be exposed in cold light of day should they come to drop GT so quickly. There may be something amiss, but this isn’t it.
I am suspicious of this demand on governments. We have a plan. Don't draw blank cheques on governments. Be sure, the rich and powerful will be happy to oblige and fill in the details. On their terms, of course, preserving their interests in the process. Is that the end-game?
“Act now or we will” is another message, repeated on the placards held by young people who are taking to the streets in support. I do hope their enthusiasm is not being cynically exploited. I hope dearly that this radicalism will build such a strong momentum of its own that it transgresses any boundaries seeking to restrain climate insurgency within the corporate form. And I hope that activists are indeed developing the political will and organisational capacity to act, rather than leave it all to governments operating firmly within the capital system.
That’s the potential I see in mass mobilisation. In terms of Marx’s praxis, this, social and system change as a self-change. I don’t see climate protestors as dupes, nor as tools or willing agents of corporate power. Leftist criticisms to that effect are a complete betrayal of Marx’s insights on praxis. I don’t see ‘save the planet’ as code for ‘save the capitalist system.’ I do think that forces within capitalism can see opportunities for hijacking environmentalism and turning it to this end.
As popular pressure designed to push governments into taking more robust climate action, climate rebellion is fine. Heaven knows, we need such action, and quickly. Everything that has been tried so far hasn’t worked. Now, at last, we have movement, and that has the potential to develop a momentum of its own. Here is where radicalisation proceeds further than general demands for action and can take a more precise institutional focus. That needs to happen, and quickly. As politics and strategy, general appeal is question-begging, and disingenuous and dangerous the more it persists. It is a power without responsibility. Where is your plan and programme? What, precisely, is the end in view? And how are we – or the governments charged with acting – to get from 'here' to 'there'? Detailed plans and transition strategies are available. I have mentioned Aubrey Meyer's C&C and also Just Transition. There is a wealth of plans and strategies. Why are they not being integrated and used? The adults we are being told have failed have put decades into ironing out the details here. So why not make use of their work? Why not use the public platform you now have to present these plans? Instead, an environmental necessity buttressed by science – ‘you can’t ignore the science’ – is being ratcheted up to pressurise governments into doing 'something.' Fulfil the commitments made under the Paris agreement (as inadequate as they were), yes, agreed. And do much more besides, because Paris is woefully inadequate. But the fact that this emphasis on government and government action is the dominant element in the pressure and mobilisation of this rebellion makes me suspicious. In addition to concerted action within a comprehensive framework from above, I argue for an ecological self-socialization from below. This self-socialization forms the social and democratic content of climate action. It organizes active consent and creates the political will and legitimacy sustaining climate action. Where is it? The slogan ‘we don’t have time’ applies very much to politics in all forms. An emergency politics can only proceed in its very immediacy within the very institutions, structures, and relations which are responsible for causing climate crisis in the first place. ‘We don’t have time’ for the substantive social transformation that is required. That foreshortening of timescales in politics should set alarm bells ringing. It is the tyrant’s tactic to cut off debate and deliberation, insulating political platforms from challenge and check. It cuts off more radical possibilities.
I have heard this 'somebody must do something' demand many times in politics. You are that somebody, and you are charged with identifying that something and acting upon it. The fact that many do and are doing, again, makes me wonder about the vagueness here. It seems like a deliberate strategy on the part of those who have a very specific plan of action, to be implemented somewhere down the line via a suitably coerced government.
You are the ones demanding radical sweeping changes, where is your plan? We have a plan, we can be more precise than this.
The threat “act now or we will” is similarly question-begging. Evidently, the supposed radicals consider government to be the go-to agency of transformation, the principal actor in environmental action. There is little or no recognition of the extent to which the power of government within the capital system is secondary and derivative. Government is not determinant but determined. This is an old lesson that a reformist parliamentary socialism learned the hard way, and stalled and fell upon. Environmentalism will fall upon this obstruction, too. In the very least the democratic and egalitarian demands associated with social ecology will fail. The capital system is not a public domain amenable to democratic will, scientific reason, and moral appeal but a regime of private accumulation that is systemically deaf to labour and nature in the realm of use value. In short, any action proceeding within this system can go so far but will always stop short of subverting the mechanisms of investment, accumulation, and valorization. To expect otherwise is the plainest idealist utopian delusion. Ideals needs to be attached to their means of realisation, buttressed by organisational and structural capacity, and carried through by way of the creative agency of that class of people possessing material potentiality and futurity. Without that, and you have nothing but abstract ideals projected upwards and outwards to surrogates in community and politics – you will remain firmly within the logical and rule of capital. What remains is environmentalism stripped down to its scientific and technological aspects.
Hence my deep scepticism with respect to a rebellion levelling its demands for change upon an unreconstituted government operating within the capital system.
To those who threaten government with the message “act now or we will” I say: “well act then!” And organize! This is precisely what is needed. Governments in hoc to capital have refused the radical action required for decades now and have done so not through a deficiency of will and information on their part but on account of a structural dependency upon capital. Governments are not autonomous agents but proceed within the systemic constraints of the process of private accumulation. No government will sacrifice economic self-interest for sake of long-term planetary health. Human beings live in the here and now. Governments are dependent upon ‘the economy’ for their resources, legitimacy, and popularity. To argue that governments can override such constraints and impose the environmental policies required for ecological survival is to argue for the suspension – at least – of democracy and of representative government; it is to openly argue for an environmental austerity under the auspices of environmental philosopher kings. That is precisely what is implied by the bald statements “follow the science” and “you can’t ignore the science.” That means “obey the science,” which in turn means “obey the scientists.” This is science employed as unanswerable political authority. It is this evidently authoritarian approach which lay behind the failure of environmentalists to follow up on the first waves of ecological concern in the sixties and early seventies. I wrote in a previous essay about the politically disastrous consequences of the eco-authoritarianism expressed in the books with which The Club of Rome followed up The Limits to Growth. People rejected not the need for environmental action but the authoritarian politics that were claimed to be necessary in undertaking such action. John Bellamy Foster is spot on in emphasising a Just Transition. I would go further. A legitimate public community is based on the principle of self-assumed obligation, citizens being bound only by laws that they have had a hand in making. That principle has been badly undermined by the systemic constraints of capitalist accumulation and the encroachment of money and finance upon the public realm. It is this that needs to be resisted by way of a thoroughgoing democratization. To sideline that process in the name of environmental emergency and political immediacy amounts to opposing one set of elites to another, and one extra-political necessity – accumulative imperatives – to another – ecological imperatives. This is not transformation but a shuffling of the elites within the same system. Unless … the ambitious schemes being implemented above can be buttressed by commons transitions and eco-communities and democratic technics below. If so, let’s join things up in an integral approach, organize and network by creating the infrastructure of the ecological society.
I repudiate the exclusive focus on top-down approach in the most emphatic terms. To those who issue the threat “act now or we will” I simply ask: if you are indeed capable of acting in this way, then why aren't you, given the evident failure of government is symbiotic relation with an ecologically-destructive capital system? Why are you not acting, organising, mobilising around a common plan and programme? This is your failure. You cannot accuse adults of having failed to act, and then also fail to act, by which I mean develop constructive models of the future ecological society and organize and network in its creation. Maybe activists lack the models and the plan, which is quite a deficiency on the part of those arguing for system-change. It is beholden on those demanding substantive action and transformation to engage in constructive thinking themselves, to devise a plan and programme, provide details of viable alternative institutions and, importantly, build active consensus and support for any transitions. In contrast to this, the mobilisation of extra-political, extra-legal pressure to coerce government action is an anti-politics that, in the end, will paralyze politics and overwhelm governments subject to contrary pressures and pulls.
I am concerned to nail another self-rationalizing deceit, the idea that the only people opposing the new climate rebels – young and female – are older white males who are bitter and resentful that their days of power and domination are over. I never had any power and domination, the very opposite in fact (and nothing like the middle class privilege and entitlement which characterizes many in this wave of environmental warriors, weighed down with new technology and consumer culture and lifestyle). And I am most certainly not a denier of climate change, anything but. This current attempt to pitch the young and the female, as the leaders of climate activism, against old white males is a moral screen designed to advance distinctly political causes without having to go through the normal rough-and-tumble of politics. It is patently designed to silence, override, delegitimize and suppress alternate voices. That is precisely the tactic used by dominant voices and cultures in history. You could present this positively as beating the oppressing class at their own game. Or you could see it more perniciously as denoting the emergence of a new would-be dominant class. It's the political agendas and economic interests it conceals that I am interested in exposing. There's something that doesn't smell right here. Workers of all lands unite. All workers, all lands, all shapes and sizes. I can see the corporate forces organising; I see Just Transition barely being given a mention except as an add-on to suggest workers' participation.
I am not against rebellion, so long as it is has an end-game that involves a transition delivering substantive social and structural transformation. If it remains mere civic disobedience, an attempt to pressurize government into legislative action, entailing no further commitment to system-change, then it is complicit with prevailing social forms and relations, giving us a new variant of the very system implicated in socio-economic, democratic, and ecological crises. I agree with John Bellamy Foster on this, who argues that the Green New Deal proposed by US Democratic politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has value, but only if it is “the entry point to … wider, eco-revolutionary change.” Without that substantive transformation, we are merely giving the dominant exploitative economic system a ‘green’ upgrade, equipping it with clean energy – and vast government expenditures – for a further burst of socially and ecologically damaging expansion. Bellamy Foster explains:
“We have to go against the logic of the system even while living within it. There are no merely technological solutions to the climate problem, though technological innovations are necessary.”
“In the long run] we have to have a full ecological and social revolution, transcending existing capitalist relations of production. We have to reach zero net carbon emissions globally by 2050, and as long as we are committed to pursuing the logic of profit before people and the planet, getting there is impossible.”
My critical view, then, does not come from the same direction as the conservative critics of climate activism, for whom the likes of Greta Thunberg are demanding fundamental socialist transitions. If only that were true, is my response from an eco-socialist position. My fear is that the current wave of climate rebellion will go no further than leveraging popular pressure on existing governments, compelling legislative action and investment programmes set firmly within prevailing capitalist social relations. Instead of the socialist, democratic, and ecological revolution that the current wave of radicalization promises, we get an environmental reformism designed to facilitate the further extension of the corporate form.
In Keynesian terms, some such thing is infinitely preferable to the potential authoritarian disaster of socialism. Although the free market right loathe Keynes, Keynes’ principal concern was to ensure that the liberal capitalist economy survived against attempts by socialist opponents to abolish it. Keynes thus made a distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics, arguing that government’s role lay in setting the framework of the latter to enable the free interplay of the former. This point should be laboured to make two points about the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal, like the original New Deal, is not in itself revolutionary, quite the opposite. Successfully applied, it offers an alternative to the deep social transformation entailed by socialism. Whether that is a good thing depends on how cogent you find the socialist critique of the capital system and socialist proposals for its replacement. A Green New Deal giving us a green reboot of capitalism is a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your understanding of the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. My view is that the converging social and ecological crises have their causes in the necessary operation of the capital system, and deep down I believe Keynes understood this too. (Read ‘A Short View of Russia’ in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), which I discuss in forthcoming work). I analyse the necessary relations of capitalist production and the ways in which these are implicated in ecological degradation and destruction. Environmental crisis is not, in other words, merely accidental, to be resolved by a few, or many, incremental reforms, but only by system change. Such a notion transcends the terms of Keynesian New Dealism, which explicitly seeks the preservation of the liberal capitalist order. You can make your own judgment here.
We are living within a crisis with transformative potential. It is the job of the ruling class and its organs of control and mediation to ensure that this potential is diverted into prevailing forms, thereby blocking the emergence of alternate forms. The argument that we don’t have time for long-term substantive transformations is not only wrong and misguided, but could serve as an ideological obfuscation that works in favour of absorbing radical forces into the status quo. There is no reason whatsoever why the short- and the long-term cannot be conjoined dialectically in a twin-track approach, the necessary measures required to avert climate catastrophe in the near term being associated with institutional, organisational, and structural forms that pass over into long-term transformation, thus turning mass action and consent into active participation in the creation of new social forms. To insist that there is 'no time' in this context is to rule out anything beyond prevailing relations as beyond the political pale, and that is plainly ideological in Marx’s critical sense of serving to conceal, protect, and preserve existing power relations intact.
The same point applies to those who continue to reject class analysis on account of the argument that ‘us and them’ thinking is divisive and outmoded. In an ‘us and them’ world, the facts of division, exploitation, and domination need to be confronted and addressed, and that requires more than a sweet reason that appeals to each and all. I have just been in France and passed through Monaco. I can tell you in all candour that the rich and the powerful couldn’t give a rats for your common reason and are utterly deaf to your moral appeals to all humankind. What will you do then, when those with the wealth and power to make the most difference, choose to maintain the status quo against your arguments for the necessity for change? Do you think government has the power to override them? That flies in the face of all we have come to know of the constraints within which government operates vis the private economy. Harold Wilson's account of his exchange with the Governor of the Bank of England, having become British Prime Minister, is instructive on this contradiction:
Claiming that our failure to act in accordance with his advice had precipitated the [sterling] crisis, he was now demanding all round cuts in expenditure, regardless of social or even economic priorities, and fundamental changes in some of the Chancellor's economic announcements.Not for the first time I said that we had now reached the situation where a newly elected government with a mandate from the people was being told, not so much by the Bank of England but by international speculators, that the policies on which we had fought the election could not be implemented; that this government was to be forced into the adoption of Tory policies to which it was fundamentally opposed. The Governor confirmed that this was, in fact, the case.
I asked him if this meant that it was impossible for any Government whatever its party label, whatever its manifesto or the policies on which it fought an election, to continue, unless it immediately reverted to full-scale Tory policies. He had to admit that was what his argument meant, because of the sheer compulsion of the economic dictation of those who exercised decisive economic power.
Wilson refused to accept this frank assertion of the ‘sheer compulsion of the economic dictation of those who exercised decisive economic power’ since it would 'bring down the curtain on parliamentary democracy', since it amounted to a recognition that the control of policy was in private hands. A good thing too, say economic liberals. On point of political principle, Wilson was right. On point of economic fact, Cromer was right. Given the inherent economic determinism of capitalism as an alienated system of production, Cromer won and Wilson lost. ‘There were severe expenditure cuts and no devaluation. Expansion therefore ceased, the National Plan was abandoned, and nothing was done to make it possible for the spare resources released to go to exports where they could lay the foundation for the future’.
The fiction that the sterling crisis and devaluation of 1967 were simply problems of economic management brought about by incompetent politicians implies that the problems that beset us can be resolved by electing a set of competent and committed politicians. This is the fiction that conceives the political system as democratic and determinant when in fact it exists at the behest of autonomous economic processes beyond the powers of political intervention and control. This is a necessary fiction, crucial to ensuring legitimacy and the adherence of the people. Even after the Governor of the Bank of England, Lord Cromer, had confirmed to Prime Minister Harold Wilson that, regardless of the democratic mandate he had as a result of winning a general election, he had to do the bidding of the markets. Wilson refused to accept the conclusion since it would ‘bring the curtain down on parliamentary democracy.’ For careerist politicians, maintaining the political fiction is far more important than having to admit the reality that Marx was right and engage in radical social transformation to ensure the democratisation of power:
‘For what would happen to all our much-vaunted democratic rights and freedoms if it were to be discovered that in all the crucial areas of our common lives there are no real choices to be made? This was of course not a lesson that the Labour Government was going to draw publicly. Accordingly, they attempted the only possible alternative: to put the pressure on those who they claimed to represent’
Blackwell and Seabrook 1985: ch 5
The Labour government turned thus upon the people who had created, supported and sustained the Party and elected it into office. I fear that lessons have yet to be learned, meaning that history will repeat itself. This time, the basis of civilized life is at stake.
This ambiguity was implicit in Parliamentary Socialism from the start and eventually brought it down. For ‘if managing the economy is the highest function that Labour is called on to perform, this implies that capitalism is a fundamentally sound and benign system’ (Blackwell and Seabrook 1985: ch5). The socialist case is that it wasn’t and it isn’t. But those who constrain their ‘radical’ demands to Keynesian New Dealism evidently believe it to be so and hence fail to seek, let alone develop a viable alternative.
Where, I ask, is the system-change? Where are the new modes of thought, action, and organisation capable of delivering system-change? And where are the popular democratic organs of democratic association, initiative, and control? Instead of this, demands for climate action are being levelled upon 'government.' This makes me very uncomfortable. We should be cautious of presenting government with vague and imprecise demands for action, because those who already possess power, resources, and authority are more than willing and able to supply details which correspond with their own interests.
The lesson has yet to be learned that governments are not independent democratic organs representing the democratic will but are embedded in a capital economy upon which all - entrepreneurs, investors, workers, consumers - depend. The role of government is to facilitate the conditions for the effective, efficient operation of that economy. Any failure here results in an economic crisis which brings about a loss of resources, loss of popular support, loss of legitimacy. The idea that governments will institute a degrowth economy to save the planetary ecology demonstrates a sociological, political, and economic illiteracy that is too incredible to be accept. I suspect an environmental variant of 'disaster capitalism' being worked here, at least by some, whether the environmental liberal-left know it or not. It works this way: those with vested interests in green businesses and technologies cultivate popular demands and build a mass constituency in support of environmental action; they build momentum around demands so general as to command widespread support; governments give in and hand over substantial contracts to 'green' industry. Note how vague the slogans are – “follow the science” and “climate justice for all.” These demands are not accompanied by a clear, detailed, and coherent plan but are simply levelled upon governments. Ultimately, governments crack and take action. For all of the talk of ‘system change,’ no such thing is on the agenda. Instead, there is a change within the system, with government expenditure, investment, and contracts going in the direction of green business. Such a strategy is designed to upgrade and preserve capitalist relations under the pretence of preserving the planetary ecology. Instead of a genuine environmentalism, we get an environmental austerity within the same exploitative, extractive economic relations.
This is an exquisite, and thoroughly cynical, strategy designed to herd the idealists and utopians by their own hopes and fears, their dreams and their despair. There is a climate crisis. It’s an existential crisis. It’s a global crisis. ‘We’ need to act. It’s ‘time for action.’ Panic! Who can disagree? But, I will never stop asking, who, precisely, is this ‘we?’
“What’s infuriating about manipulations by the Non Profit Industrial Complex is that they harvest good will of the people, especially young people. They target those who were not given skills and knowledge to truly think for themselves by institutions which are designed to serve the ruling class. Capitalism operates systematically and structurally like a cage to raise domesticated animals. Those organizations and their projects which operate under false slogans of humanity in order to prop up the hierarchy of money and violence are fast becoming some of the most crucial elements of the invisible cage of corporatism, colonialism and militarism.” — Hiroyuki Hamada, artist
I don't buy this 'not profit' conspiracy theory, but aspects of this criticism ring true. Read this statement from Greta Thunberg upon landing in New York and try, if you can, to extract anything of any political and sociological meaning from it:
“The climate and ecological crisis is a global crisis and the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced and if we don’t manage to work together, to co-operate, and to work together in spite of our differences then we will fail. So we need to stand together and support each other and take action.”
That merely states the obvious – diverse elements need to converge to produce a common solution, in the absence of which there will be failure and collapse. That applies to politics in general. The climate crisis has been called a 'wicked problem' for a good reason. There’s no simple, one-size-fits-all solution. Nearly everything connects to the problem, making it extremely difficult to connect everything up. "We" - who? - are charged with integrating myriad disconnected threads into a unified approach to resolve the problem. The complexity of the problem and the difficulty of the solution is only revealed when we analyse those diverse elements and how they divide around material relations. To ask government to resolve it all is a reversion to the oldest delusion in the book - governments never govern alone.
Greta says she will not talk to President Donald Trump, asking why would she, seeing as he doesn’t listen to the science. But that’s always been precisely the problem: the various groups and interests and people who don’t ‘listen to the science’ and who obstruct climate action. That there has been a flagrant denial of the findings of climate science is plain (I’ve challenged it for years). But that's not actually the problem. We ought to have learned by now that there is no uni-linear progression from scientific truth and evidence to political action. Politics is difference and dissension, the public forum in which human beings engage, argue, and iron out their differences to realize as common a solution as is possible. Statements like we face a crisis are obviously true and say nothing about the more difficult and contentious questions as to causes and solutions. The statement that ‘we must work together in spite of our differences’ merely restates the nature of the political problem – how to reconcile discordant elements for a common good. It doesn't resolve the problem. We should all be prepared to sink our differences for a greater good. So why don't we? The age-old problem with messages like this is that they nearly always involve an understanding on the part of those issuing them that they are fundamentally right and that others sacrifice their interests to agree with the platform being advanced by those making the appeal. For the sake of unity, why not sacrifice your interests and sink your platforms and join with those who oppose you? Because you think you are right? The problem is that the others think they are right. You have science on your side? If scientific truth trumps the citizen voice, then what has happened to the legitimate role of politics? Who, moreover, is this ‘we’ that has to act?
There is no ‘we.’ No wonder, then, that this 'we' reduces to 'government,' the surrogate community, the abstract common good, what Marx called 'the abstraction of the political state' and 'the illusory general interest.'
Politically, the value of statements like this is zero. In fact, they are counter-productive, entailing a vacuum that comes to be filled by those with financial and organisational resources. it is always someone specific rather than a general, non-existent abstract ‘we’ that acts. The only use of such statements is to make an appeal so broad and so emotionally compelling as to win mass support. That’s fine, but the question then follows: what next?
Take time to research The Climate Group, one of the co-founders of We Mean Business. It is described as “a coalition of organizations working with thousands of the world’s most influential businesses and investors.” That's worlds away from the likes of me. Research a little further and it becomes clear that we are far, far removed from the eco-socialism and the ecological transformation of politics that people like me advocate. Instead of being raised to the status of eco-citizens possessing initiative in politics, we are being reduced to a passive mass cheering our future lords and masters on. We are at the opposite pole, betraying eco-socialism and the environmental cause into the hands of the green bourgeoisie, socialism taking the form of a coercive environmental collectivism and a green corporatism, entrenching and extending the corporate form. It saves the capital system from itself, for another burst of expansion, but it does precious little to save the planet from further exploitation.
My words may upset environmentalist friends. I am trying to be careful. But I’ll be damned if I join delusions of green capitalism for the sake of loyalty, betraying every ideal and principle that the eco-socialism I have spent a lifetime arguing for stands for.
Allow me to tell the worst case scenario for a wee while, before affirming the more radical potentialities that exist in the current wave of climate activism.
I believe climate rebels are precisely that, people in rebellion against the current way of doing things. I just ask for people to pay attention to some of the climate agents in the field. Take a look at the list of the founding partners of "We Mean Business": Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), Ceres, The B Team, The Climate Group, The Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group (CLG) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Research is needed. In this essay, I am merely concerned to pull myself clear of this corporate circus masquerading as environmentalism. These groups represent the most powerful and wealthy corporations in the world; they are integral to the corporate form which is extending itself throughout the social and institutional fabric of every nation on earth, obliterating the old division and debate between public and private. And they are working to a strategy designed to unleash 100 trillion dollars for the ‘green’ industrial revolution.
Part of that strategy involves inciting and organising popular pressure, not so much building a public as corralling the masses, manacling people by their own consent, particularly youth and women, which are powerful identities in the culture wars underway. Who dare argue back, to reveal themselves to be bitter white older males motivated by misogyny? This is a well-resourced, highly organized, sophisticated, and hugely cynical ‘climate campaign’ whose main purpose is not system change at all, (and certainly not socialism and democratic control), but a shift in the distribution of power and resources within prevailing structures and institutions. Popular concern and energy is being captured and re-canalised in order to save, entrench, and extend the very the capitalist relations which lie behind the converging crises in the first place. The people are being herded in their desperation to ‘take action’ of such a kind as to ensure their own destruction.
Over a century ago, the nascent socialist movement came to be diverted into collectivist techno-bureaucratic forms under the auspices of the professional, educated middle class. Now we have the green bourgeoisie doing precisely the same with the potential that exists for an ecological transformation of the political that embeds socialist and democratic forms.
I fear the democratic input into environmentalism being restricted to being no more than a mass support for pre-set positions and agendas based on a complex network of capitalist companies and corporations; these companies and corporations are pushing not for a radical transformation of the global capitalist system but for their own specific technologies and businesses, extending their reach and control over society, saving the capital system under the pretence of saving the planetary ecology to avert the worst impacts of anthropogenic global heating. This declaration of a climate emergency and call for a climate mobilization is a strategically incited and orchestrated campaign financed and managed by some of the world’s most powerful corporate bodies, with the aim of embedding their power and interests in a green corporate form that preserves capitalist relations. Far from uprooting the accumulative logic and dynamic of the capital system, this demand for ‘system change, not climate change’ is all about facilitating the conditions for a new phase of ‘green’ growth within capitalist relations. The concern with a climate crisis that is evidently upon us is being cynically exploited by forces within the very global capitalist elite that has generated this crisis. The mass mobilization for climate action looks impressive but, without institutional and organisational force, it is mere potential without an end-game. That end-game is now being supplied by forces extraneous to the democratic socialist ecological impulse. There is a deliberate attempt to incite and exploit the popular demand for climate action by diverting it into supporting a legislative and regulative regime instituted by government to sustain initiatives and programmes that serve ‘green’ industry rather than people, their communities, and the planet. Note well the completely passive role of citizen agency, limiting to supporting positions developed independently of the popular voice.
Hence my scepticism with respect to slogans like ‘follow the science.’ That use of science as an authority legislating and dictating truth to politics entails the total delegitimization and demobilization of the citizen voice. The result is that the potential for social, democratic, and ecological transformation comes to be canalised into the undemocratic and asocial collectivisation of a techno-bureaucratic green corporatism concerned with the revitalization of a stagnant global capital economy that has run out of value. The end-game is to level environmental demands upon governments which, in turn, make substantial investments, running into tens of trillions of dollars, in ‘green’ industry and infrastructure. Instead of system-change, we get a green Industrial Revolution based on renewable energy which is concerned with rejuvenating faltering capitalist relations and restoring capitalist hegemony. The green movement thus emerges as a twenty-first century hygiene movement concerned with supplying an inherently expansionary capital economy with clean energy. The corporate capture of the state which has been secured these past decades is now extending outwards to the capture of the new social movements which had been formed with the intention to transform existing relations and institutions. Dominant economic forces and social movements are thus being merged within the ever more entrenched corporate form, a continuation of the capitalist colonisation of the commons that has been underway from the very first. The social movements, of which ecology had been a part, had promised the reclamation of the political and the ethical as well as the physical commons. The intention from within corporate capital has been to target, colonize, and nullify that threat and turn it to sterile forms. People are being managed and manipulated to demand actions designed to further their oppression and exploitation, as well as the continued despoliation of the planetary ecology, all to ensure popular compliance with the accumulative imperatives of the capital system, ‘economic growth’ in the popular idiom. And central to this strategy is the organisation of the consent of those most concerned to demand climate action, people who, after decades of political defeat on environmental issues, are so desperate as to settle for any kind of action. The hegemonic forces of corporate capital are now salivating over the mass mobilization behind demands so vague and general as to give them the blank cheque to draw on government. The details will be filled in by government and business, not by eco-citizens in a genuine public realm.
The reality of climate change and the insistence on declaring a climate emergency is all part of this organized stampede on the global level. The alarm is sounding and people have to heed the call. Note well that the role of the citizen body is to ‘follow the science,’ that is, to follow those armed with the facts and figures on climate change, those equipping government and business with the scientific rationale to institute an environmental austerity and green corporate expansion. We cannot pause and ask questions, engage in close institutional analysis, since the "house on fire" and we must “panic.” The people are not citizens with a voice but a mass to be panicked and herded into pre-determined positions. There is no critique of political economy, no critique of the accumulative dynamic of capital, nothing on the state as capital’s political command centre, nothing on the corporate form, complete silence on militarism and imperialism. Nothing. The emergency is suspiciously and significantly bereft of socio-economic and political content. Existing relations of domination and exploitation are being repackaged in the name of ‘rebellion’ and people are being led in the masses into further oppression as a result of a blind, unthinking politics conducted in emergency mode. This emergency is so urgent and global as to demand that already constituted authorities - governments, NGOs and corporations – make substantial investments to save an increasingly debt-ridden and moribund capital system. Under the pretence of an ecological politics we get a coercive environmental corporatism under the auspices of a green bourgeoisie.
My fear is that environmental activism is being canalised into a green capitalism advancing and entrenching a green corporate form. An activism based on ‘heroic,’ even deified activism – read that indolant quote from Kumar again - is perfect for an age of organised spectacles, self-chosen identities and images, when people talk endlessly about being ‘inspired’ but lack the capacity for autonomy, spontaneity and creativity. Such individuals – the ‘last men’ that Nietzsche and Weber wrote so disparagingly about (mechanized petrification embellished with a convulsive self-importance, wrote Weber) are perfect fodder for the new industrial revolution, with politics and government, NGOs, and media colluding under corporate hegemony to induce ‘the masses’ to support the very economic practices, industries, and relations they ought to be transforming into something fundamentally different. Consent is being manufactured for a coercive environmental collectivism and green corporatism, channelling the resistance to the capital system into servitude to the very oppression it aims to subvert, colonizing and nullifying it in the process.
I am using judgement and intuition here. This doesn’t smell right. Research is needed here to support these claims. But I have seen enough and read enough to draw conclusions: the mass mobilization around vague, general slogans, the levelling of demands on unreconstructed business and government, the use of science as unanswerable authority, the passive radicalism of a mass mobilization in support of fixed positions … It’s an anti-politics, the very antithesis of the citizen democracy at the heart of a genuine socialism.
And if you think my criticisms here and in recent posts make me a climate denier, I suggest you re-read and, having understood that the very opposite is true, come to examine your own commitments here and how they may be being manipulated and diverted by some very powerful corporate forces. Yet again, I see a popular movement being diverted, derailed, and distorted into its very opposite. I may be a purist who knows revolution only in theory, but pulls away from it in practice. I’ve seen how easily political principles can be thrown away in pursuit of transitory success, their contrary becoming institutionalised as a result. I’ll not discard principles for expediency.
“We Don’t Have Time.” Really?? What does that mean? We don’t have time to research, think, deliberate, check? Just ‘act?’ We don’t have time for politics? Why bother consult with people? Just tell them what to do. Just ‘follow’ science? Just follow orders, without asking where they come from and who issues them and who such people are accountable to? Just obey. We put our critical reason to sleep at our peril, and that of our deerest principles. It's precisely because I am a socialist that I would oppose Stalin. I vehemently reject the view that this opposition is tantamount to supporting Fascism. Stalinism did untold damage to the name of socialism. It's fair to say that socialism has never recovered.
Of course climate crisis is upon us, and of course it could have been averted by timely action. But all action comes in time and in place. When it comes to imperatives possessing overriding significance, be prepared to ask who or what stands behind them. Who issues the demands and to what end? It is a classic tactic of tyrants, bullies, and extortionists to compress the time for thought and deliberation. I take time; I insist on time. Time is always our greatest resource in coming to truth. I look upon individuals as knowledgeable moral agents, citizens of their own public realm, not sacrificial lambs for global corporate forces.
Take a look at the board members and advisors, the leaders and partners, to “We Don’t Have Time.”
Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, 350.org, Avaaz, Global Utmaning (Global Challenge), the World Bank, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Far from being about degrowth, this strategy is aimed at resuscitating economic growth in a global economy that is stagnant. This is a point I made in a recent post, examining Joseph Stiglitz's view of the Green New Deal. Changes: Climate Change, System Change, Civilization Change, Self-Change
The concern is not with averting civilizational collapse as a result of climate change but averting the collapse of the capitalist economic system. The crisis in the climate system is thus understood as delivering the 'opportunity' of investment, expansion, and profit, and the measures deemed necessary to bring about the new regime of accumulation – including the exploitation of the demands for radical change coming from the associational space of civil society, including young people. That's how it is described and justified. Youth and females are being targeted to this end, cultural stereotypes woven into a common thread with money, power, and nature to be absorbed into a coalition of forces connected with corporate capital. The strategy culminates in the commodification of nature, with prices and payments attendant upon ecosystem services being laid: the final enclosure, annexation, and financialization on a global scale. And so we enter the Matrix as the military-industrial complex morphs into the environmental-industrial complex through a process of strategic social engineering, something which crucially involves a psychic manipulation inciting support and expectation and organising consent to the commodification of nature. Instead of system change and the transformation of social relation, capital remains firmly in place as a natural capital at the core of renewed expansion. Those involved in ‘rebellion’ may sincerely think they are furthering the cause of system-change. Unless they take ownership of the political, intellectual, institutional, and psychic-moral means of initiative and control, they risk being mobilized to system-preservation, their creative energies being channelled into the forms of a renewed exploitation and domination. Climate rebellion thus comes to be diverted and negated to tell a story of capital, consent, and conformity within the corporate form. It’s a story of manufactured mass movements being stampeded into ‘action’ by the emergency mode in politics.
To what end? Whose interests are being served? To save the planet? Or to save capitalist relations? The corporate hegemony in green form? Answer these questions.
“How is it possible for you to be so easily tricked by something so simple as a story, because you are tricked? Well, it all comes down to one core thing and that is emotional investment. The more emotionally invested you are in anything in your life, the less critical and the less objectively observant you become.”
— David JP Phillips, We Don’t Have Time board of directors, “The Magical Science of Storytelling”
These questions can be answered.
I’m reading around and finding I am not alone in expressing scepticism with regard to XR and Greta Thunberg. There are some environmentalists, particular of deep green persuasion, who think the notion of ‘net zero emissions’ a neoliberal construct. Kim Hill is a steadfast environmentalist, writer, and activist who writes this:
"With the entirety of life on this planet at stake, any course of action needs to be considered extremely carefully. Actions have consequences, and at this late stage, one mis-step can be catastrophic. The feeling that these issues have been discussed long enough and it is now time for immediate action is understandable. However, without clear goals and a plan on how to achieve them, the actions taken are likely to do more harm than good."
That seems reasonable. I note that XR supporters are objecting to such criticisms, as no doubt they would object to my concerns. My argument is not that XR are a tool of Neoliberal Capitalism. So I shall rebut that criticism before it is directed my way. To argue that ‘Green’ capitalists are ever ready to hi-jack the climate movement is quite different from claiming that these environmental groups are either witting or unwitting tools of ‘green capitalism.’ But criticisms of XR are not so easily dismissed. A lack of systemic analysis with respect to the capital system and the way it is implicated in climate crisis does entail a lack of clear goals and realizable plan of action. Whether any action uninformed in this way does more harm than good remains to be seen. Such action could easily backfire, or be taken over by organised, interested, well-resourced forces with a clear agenda; at the same time, action could so inspire those involved as to develop a momentum of its own, transcending current limits in understanding and leading to clear-sighted demands for deep social transformation. My point is that the more clarity with respect to system analysis, goals, and plans we have to begin with, the less of a political gamble climate action becomes. We may get demands for ecological transformation out of climate rebellion. How else could the popular will for such transformation come? There is no ABC of Revolution to learn before the fact. Revolution is a process which involves human beings as knowledgeable change-agents. If we consider human beings to be dupes and tools, then we have lost revolutionary agency.
At the same time, wishful thinking has to harden into institutional and structural analysis and action at some point, the sooner the better. The more the learning curve stretches out here, the more likely it is that the forces of ‘green capitalism,’ forces which are already in the field, will prevail, diverting demands for climate action in its direction. The report behind the Green New Deal explicitly states its purpose to be that of stimulating growth in the economy. This report includes plans to extract “remaining fossil fuel with carbon capture.” We are also promised green growth, to be delivered by energy companies promising to make all our lives easier. The resources to finance this green expansionism will come, of course, from the same old extraction in relation to the Earth and from exploitation the form of pension funds, carbon taxes, and climate emergency levies. The transition to a net-zero economy requires organisation, planning, and financing. It’s not something a government simply implements in response to popular pressure. Carbon capture facilities require roads, pipelines, powerlines, and shipping, further disempowering local economies and enclosing them within corporate control. The gas and oil companies are in on this. “Shell’s plan to reach net-zero is to make more than a billion cars, cover millions of acres of land with solar panels, build a new large-scale carbon capture facility every day for 40 years (that’s more than 14 000), and for one third of current oil consumption to be met by bioenergy. This would leave a large proportion of the world’s human population without food, and most of the world’s wildlife without homes.” Net-zero lobbyists within the governments of the world as well as the EU are seeking to implement this very strategy. Hence the need for clarity of analysis, goal, and plan. Because vague demands levelled on government for climate action can very easily come to take the above form, and be presented as the fulfilment of climate rebels’ demands. Rebels will no doubt call foul, but the problem will be that, to most people, it will seem as if governments are taking the climate action the rebels so vocally demanded, and that those who persist in protesting are mere professional activists pressing impossible demands that can never be satisfied.
In recent months, the US senate has passed a number of bills to increase subsidies for oil companies using carbon capture. There are also bills to subsidise wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, research and development, and even more carbon capture, which are scheduled to pass in the near future. The process of greening capitalism under the corporate form is already underway and at an advanced stage. The very public activities of climate rebellion may make it seem as if we are at the beginning of a movement that may lead to fundamental social transformation. The process of green adaptation to the corporate form is actually already advanced, and will seek to absorb rebellion into its clutches, giving the corporatisation of ecological transformation its popular legitimation.
The claim that governments ‘are not doing enough’ to address climate change needs to be made in terms which specify far more clearly what governments ought to be doing. Stated in vague terms, that demand could easily justify governments going the whole hog with respect to the corporatisation of ecological concern. The UK government is implementing a transition to net-zero which involves carbon capture, nuclear, bioenergy, hydrogen, ammonia, wind, solar, oil, gas, electric cars, smart grids, offset trading, manufacturing and, of course, the non-negotiable sine qua non of the capital system, ‘economic growth.’ In fine, environmental action remains firmly entrenched within a regime of accumulation. In implementing these plans, the government is receiving advice and input from the oil, gas, and fossil fuel industries, from finance, CCS, bioenergy, renewables, chemical, manufacturing, hydrogen, nuclear, airline, automotive, mining, and agriculture industries. It’s the full capitalist house. If you demand more climate action on this front, you will get it, and no doubt be asked to pay one way or the other.
Climate rebellion risks being canalized into a ‘clean growth’ accumulative regime that gives capital a new lease of life. And what is wrong with that? Capitalism is a highly productive economy, the only problem being that of the dirty energy which fuels its expansion. Just replace fossil fuels with clean energy, and the world will benefit from clean green growth. I’ve had this put to me in making my criticisms. And this from people pushing for action on climate change. It’s not capitalism that is the problem but the energy which fuels it; clean energy is the solution, enabling capitalism to carry on raising living standards the world over.
I’ll leave that statement uncommented on, to make clear the extent to which lack of clarity on climate demands, evading fundamental questions of political economy, will leave climate action in the hands of those playing the only game in town. That was the argument we were given with respect to the globalisation of capitalist relations in the 1990’s, our task being defined as that of making that process work rather than to oppose it. Two decades on, we are reaping the whirlwind. The liberal establishment stand powerless and clueless in front of ‘populism.’
Everywhere you care to look you can see the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. If we look at Europe, we see the corporate-funded European Climate Foundation busily advising the European Union. The EU is preparing to implement a similar plan to that adumbrated above. As it must, to remain competitive within the world economy and facilitate growth. From top to bottom in industrial economies, from nation-states down to councils, plans are afoot to transition to a decarbonised economy in light of declarations of a climate emergency.
Let me now make it clear that I don’t think that Greta Thunberg is the creature of Green corporate capital, or that she is a knowing (or unknowing) tool of business interests, or that her supporters are unthinking dupes, or that the people involved in Extinction Rebellion (XR) are entitled middle-class liberals preparing to sell-out mass demands for radical transformation for yet more reformist tinkering within the system. I am saying that there are corporate forces hanging around environmentalism in the hope of duping environmental activism in this way, and that the soft 'third way' underbelly of environmentalism could settle for diversion. It is indeed possible that radical social activism could come to be hi-jacked by external forces and diverted and perverted within existing institutional channels. And there may well be some business forces and pecuniary interests poised at present intent on some such thing. At the same time, the demands for climate action arising in mass protest around the world contain a momentum which would refuse such short-circuiting, containing the potential to challenge and subvert prevailing institutional and systemic constraints. My optimistic view is that climate rebels would not be easily bought off by another bout of environmental reformism. That approach has racked up decades of failure, and is precisely what the voice of mass protest is rejecting. I very much affirm the creative agency of those being drawn into climate activism, as against a reading that sees the masses as dumb dupes of shadowy business interests.
A sustainable capitalism through a New Deal is a much better idea than the current unsustainable carboniferous capitalism. The problem is that, as a system that pursues exchange values to the neglect of labour and nature in the realm of use values, the capital system is unsustainable by definition, a limitless expansionism that systemically transgresses social and ecological (and moral) limits. There is no need for conspiracy theories here. Indeed, such theories are not merely wrong but are counterproductive, missing the point by a very wide mark. An institutional and systemic analysis of the capital economy reveals the nature of the crisis that civilization faces, and it has nought to do with the activities of particular agents. As Marx argued, these agents are themselves personifications of economic categories, having to act as they do in order to facilitate the process of accumulation. Conspiracy theories here not only take attention away from the necessary institutional and systemic analysis of prevailing material relations, they are effectively self-negating in denying agency to subaltern classes. Instead of emphasising the possibility of social movements to emerge to challenge and ultimately subvert prevailing relations, the emphasis is on elites in government and business who manufacture and manipulate the masses. The ‘masses,’ it is evident, are considered incapable of a knowledgeable autonomous agency. This is the very antithesis of Marx’s view. It is, moreover, false and self-defeating, leaving us forever trapped within alienative relations and institutions unless emancipated ‘from the outside’ by a revolutionary vanguard. That vanguard, in Marx’s terms, can only be reactionary, to the extent that it maintains a dualism between active elites and passive masses, the few knowledgeable agents and the many who are acted upon. This translates into a cynical view of environmental activism, neglecting the agency of those involved in protest, campaign, and design to focus on the actions of the big powers in politics and business. Activists are merely dupes and pawns of power, lacking autonomous creative agency. This is a bastardization of Marx’s view, who affirmed the capacity of human beings as knowledgeable agents to see through and breakthrough alienated power relations. My argument is therefore premised on the structural and epistemological capacity of the people in their struggle to reclaim social power from alienated systems of politics and production. A conspiratorial view presents a picture of passive masses being duped and manipulated by powerful elites with result that radical platforms come to be diverted into the preservation of capitalist relations, a reformist greening that proceeds within the corporate form. That is a possibility that I am concerned to caution against. I am convinced that very many among the new wave of environmental activism will understand that threat and be concerned to guard against it. Environmental activism contains a momentum that is capable of rupturing any attempt to constrain environmental action within prevailing relations. Accenting that view protects us against debilitating conspiracy theories which sees the new wave of environmental activism as merely a front for a green capitalism entrenching and extending the corporate form. In warning of the dangers of a hijacking and short-circuiting of environmental activism in this way, I nevertheless affirm the creative agency and organisational and intellectual capacity of activists to transition to a much more subversive politics. The minds of the radicalised ‘masses’ will not so easily be colonized, particularly if we flag up the dangers of incorporation, increase awareness, and most of all identify the precise institutional and structural causes of the converging crises of contemporary civilization. With clarity here, it will be well-nigh impossible to stymie environmental action within a green corporate capitalism without resistance and protest. That is to insist on environmental activists as subjects capable of ‘making history,’ not mere passive objects of alien power. There is a need, then, to stimulate the agency of people as subjects of history rather than neutralize that agency by considering ‘the masses’ to be mere passive objects of alien power. That is precisely the approach that Marx took in addressing the dualism of agency and structure. I affirm Marx’s view of individuals as knowledgeable change-agents imbued with their own autonomous capacity to transform society and ‘make history’ (interests, intelligence, morality) as against the view of human beings as dupes and tools of active ‘elites.’ The emphasis should, therefore, be on the development of organisational, moral, intellectual capacities among the people, rather than on the extent to which external interests can manufacture political platforms and manipulate the people through them. Elites can do this, and have done so throughout in history. But such elites are not the only actors in history, and we make a mistake by emphasising elite agency to the neglect of popular agency. There is a need to affirm human beings as change-agents with their own capacity to confront, challenge, and ultimately subvert any ‘elite.’ The idea that the current wave of environmental activism is lacking in this capacity, or lacks the interest and momentum which in time could develop this capacity, is self-defeating, debilitating nonsense that ironically confirms the very elite power that is supposedly being protested and contested. If elites are indeed the only, all-powerful, agency, then all activism is destined to be betrayed, defeated, perverted. The possibilities of activism and of popular agency are much greater than this.
We should not be surprised that the agents of the capital system work to obstruct the solutions we need to the converging crises that civilization faces, and are concerned to channel radical energies into reformist half-measures or sterile forms. But it’s a big jump from there to conclude that environmental activism as such is a front for corporate capital on account of the involvement of green business here and there. To say that a clean capitalism is better than a dirty capitalism is a truism that anyone can accept. It is the tendency to reduce choices to such basic options that gives cause for scepticism. The transformative potentials of environmentalism yield much greater possibilities than a new accumulative regime fuelled by clean energy (at public expense). I am issuing a caution that I expect environmental activists to heed. Should this attempt at corporate hi-jacking take place, I would expect activists to protest and press on in furtherance of the message of ‘system change, not climate change.’ It’s a big crisis, after all, as Greta says:
“If there really was a crisis this big, then we would rarely talk about anything else. As soon as you turned on the TV, almost everything would be about that: headlines, radio, newspaper. You would almost never hear about anything else. And the politicians would surely have done what was needed by now, wouldn’t they? They would hold crisis meetings all the time, declare climate emergencies everywhere, and spend all their waking hours handling the situation and informing the people what was going on. But it never was like that. The climate crisis was just treated like any other issue or even less than that… And we must admit that we are losing this battle… Most of us don’t know almost any of the basic facts because, how could we? We have not been told. Or more importantly, we have never been told by the right people. You cannot rely on people… to read through the latest IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, track the Keeling Curve, or keep tabs on the world’s rapidly disappearing carbon budget. You have to explain that to us repeatedly, no matter how uncomfortable or unprofitable that may be… This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced… For too long, the people in power have gotten away with basically not doing anything to stop the climate and ecological breakdown. They have gotten away with stealing our future and selling it for profit. But we young people are waking up. And we promise, we will not let you get away with it anymore.”
Half-measures within the corporate form won’t cut it, for the reasons Greta Thunberg has given. So I don’t see this as a simple exercise in duping and diverting the masses. People are ‘waking up’ to see the true nature of the climate crisis, the origins of the problem and what is required when it comes to solutions. Conscious, aware, informed, and active, such people will not settle for any half-way house which seeks to constrain and stifle radicalism within certain economic relations. People are, in other words, more than the unconscious tools of capital. Instead of passively accepting a fate determined by external business forces, sanctioned by government, law and state bureaucracy, there is a potentiality in climate activism which points in the direction of new class struggle capable of unifying an international working class within a universal mode of production. So I shall credit the new wave of environmental activists with precisely the same creative agency as those who engaged in struggles past and learned by experience to adjust their behaviour accordingly in the struggles for justice, freedom, and equality. Such people are not easily bought off.
Beware a dogmatism and sectarianism that, in its (legitimate) concern with the objective forces of alienation, exploitation, and oppression, comes to neglect the subjective factor in their subversion. The idea that environmental activists as dupes of a green-capitalism is an attack on the possibility of radical agency as such, implying that individuals are incapable of learning from experience that capital lies at the source of social and environmental problems and needs to be thoroughly transformed. That conscious realization can only come through praxis and experience, not by a passive education on the part of an external agency or vanguard. The radicalism inherent in activism unfolds in the very process of taking action. Activists do not hit the campaign trail as fully-fledged revolutionaries armed with a comprehensive knowledge of the social world and its workings. Any criticisms directed against environmental activists here are misplaced and should instead focus on the failures of the intellectual Left in abandoning socio-economic and class concerns in recent decades for cultural concerns. There has been a complete failure to build a viable socialist movement capable of mobilizing people around a coherent and cogent message. Class analysis and politics has been abandoned for academic careers peddling postmodern fantasies, something that has perfectly fitted the decadent liberalism and consumerism of late capitalism. An influential part of the intellectual Left declared the age of grand narratives to be over, just as the capital system went global. The Left started to think and act small just as it its capitalist adversary went big. The result is that the working class has been left fallow and flabby, incapable of resisting the reactionary right’s assault on science and rationality, becoming susceptible to the surrogate communities offered by myriad populisms, fundamentalisms, and nationalisms.
The Left has to offer much more than conspiracy theories here. Because if we see elites as the only agency possessing knowledge and initiative, manipulating working people as tools susceptible to the reactionary appeals of populism and nationalism, then we have lost the principal resource of radical social transformation – the sense of human beings as knowledgeable, moral change-agents.
Let me phrase this carefully, lest there be any misunderstanding. I’m reading XR supporters’ responses to criticisms of XR, and they exhibit a defensive outrage that is big on denouncing those who are raising critical concerns and rather sullen in their acceptance that critics may have a point. I don’t want my criticism to be easily dismissed as an accusation that GT and XR are either tools or dupes of a green corporatism. That’s a foolish conspiracy theory that certain kinds of leftists may entertain. That’s not my criticism.
My argument is not that climate rebellion is a knowing agent of these corporate plans, nor that it is an unwitting dupe of them. The rebels are genuine and sincere; they are also smart and knowledgeable and, in the main, will see any corporate hi-jack for what it is. Climate rebellion is not part of a corporate takeover of the ecological concern. At the same time, there is plainly a corporate takeover underway, and it is at an advanced stage. These companies are already in the field, already have the connections within government, the financial resources and the global reach. Level vague demands for climate action on government in this context, and we very easily proceed further on down the road of corporate capture of climate action. Ultimately, you will be left protesting against the form of climate action being undertaken. The problem is, with vast sums already committed and plans in place, it will be exceedingly hard to mobilize and radicalize a public who will consider that the climate issue is being addressed.
I read that attempts to ‘demonize’ XR and diminish the significance of GT are not helpful. Lack of clarity with respect to specific social forms, mediations, goals, and plans is not merely ‘not helpful,’ it is a positive blight. The corporate form will colonize that vacuum in no time.
I have noted the extent to which XR supporters attempt to raise a shield in response to criticisms from their right-wing climate denying opponents. Many may think this entirely legitimate given the extent to which these deniers have set out from the first to obfuscate, obstruct, and negate with respect to the climate crisis. I argued that we need to talk right past the NONO's years ago. The NONO's are those who negate, obfuscate, nullify, and obstruct when it comes to climate science and climate action. I have had dealings with them going back to the 1990s. You might as well hit your head against a wall. They waste your time and sap your energy. I was told that engagement was necessary, not merely to check error, but to communicate environmental truths to a wider audience that may be listening. You may not persuade deniers, but other people are always listening, taking note. After a period of time, though, "debate" either bores or confuses. So, maybe, there is a justification for a shield. The problem with shields, though, is that it can delegitimize all criticism from all sources, effectively insulating a political cause from the reality-checks it needs to stay on course. It may well cut off demands for climate action from internal criticisms strengthening the case and sharpening its focus. Is this really how you want to win in politics? Because in winning this way, you lose every ideal your politics has ever stood for.
Here is one bad argument that I came across on the climate forums I participate in on FB. This argument was directed against a critic of XR (and is therefore capable of being directed my way). “Nothing would make climate deniers happier than seeing purist progressives turn against Greta Thunberg and XR to create internal strife.” So I have to stifle my doubts and maintain silence, sit by passively and allow a corporate approach appropriate environmentalism to its own ends. That's an imposition of unity behind leading forces that have been removed from criticism. It's a suppression of dissent, an explicit identification of critics as divisive forces, and therefore disreputable. I reject such coercive unity. I reject any movement that attempts to stifle critical concerns in this way. (The person who made this comment is a prominent environmentalist, activist, and writer. I shan't name him. What makes matters worse is that his work is generally impressive, and I admire it a great deal. It is so disappointing to see how easily those espousing a liberatory cause can slide into the totalitarian temptation. It's a lesson on how difficult it is in politics to defeat your enemies whilst avoiding becoming what they are. To avoid accusations of causing 'internal strife,' I would leave such a movement without compunction and criticize it openly from the outside as an attempt to override the citizen voice. The accusation is that XR critics are dividing the environmental movement within and doing the work of the Koch Brothers and other billionaires bent on ransacking the planet for them. This kind of reasoning leaves me cold. It's flawed. In the 1990s, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee summed up the attitude of many when she said we must ‘hold our noses’ and vote for Tony Blair. Anyone who complained that Tony Blair was bad was told that the Conservative alternative was even worse. So people voted for the lesser evil. The result was continued privatisation under PFI, illegal and immoral wars, and economic crash. If something is wrong or is potentially on the wrong course, you have a responsibility to point it out, and not join in support out of misplaced loyalty. This response to criticism was priceless: “There's nothing wrong with constructive dialogue about priorities, but it's essential to keep the fundamentals clear. Don't do the billionaire's dirty work for them!”
The problem is that if the fundamentals of averting climate catastrophe are clear at the level of science as well as the need for climate action, the policies, goals, and actions within a coherent plan most certainly are not. Hence the concern that the pressure building for climate action could easily come to be channelled into an extension of the corporate form through ambitious and expensive government programmes. I am not prepared to exchange one set of billionaires for another.
The idea that critics are doing the ‘dirty work’ of opponents of climate action is a classic piece of Stalinist reasoning: those who do not support Stalin are ‘objective fascists.’ I refuse to be browbeaten into supporting a cause blindly on the flawed reasoning that if I don’t then I shall be supporting the forces opposed to it. I support neither Stalinism nor Fascism but seek to navigate safely beyond their false choices. I am concerned to check the tendency of radical movements for change to descend into dogmatism and despotism. An uncritical approach will make the corporate takeover of environmentalism all the more likely. I say this having been around the ‘green’ movement since the 1980s. I could fill a book with comments from environmentalists as to how socialism is at least as ecologically destructive as capitalism as a species of industrialism. I had this from a Green in a recent exchange concerning Marx and socialism: “what next? Marx was a climate activist? ffs you visit the C19 if that’s your thing but I want to live now and deal with today’s pressing problems.” Generous soul that I am, I cleaned up the language and the grammar.
My response was to say that Marx’s critical method is inherently updating and is designed to be applied to specific social forms and mediations in time and place, independently of nineteenth century determinations. I dare say I shall have to keep making that point. Because in my experience, the ‘neither left nor right’ voices of the green ‘third way’ are congenitally incapable of grasping the material relations, contradictory dynamics, and class roots of the converging social and ecological crises that are upon us in the modern world. And that leaves them forever short of grasping the source of environmental ills. People grasp the stupidity of pursuing infinite growth on a planet of finite resources, and quote Kenneth Boulding to this effect repeatedly. Far too many have yet to work out that this insane and impossible drive is endemic to the capital system as an regime of accumulation, and that this has to be uprooted at source if we are to have any chance of averting ecological catastrophe. Hence I make an issue of the need for clarity, given the extent to which corporate forces are already extending their form throughout the fabric of climate action. A quarter of a century ago I studied the economics of the European Union. I made a good case for the EU (EC as it was then), reconstituting the controls that had broken down at the national level at the supra-national level, giving us a European-wide industrial strategy. I warned, however, that the growing domination of Transnational capital within the European economy would unravel all such plans, leaving us with a competition policy at best. The plans for a social democratic Europe based on a social market model would lie in ruins, provoking a revanchism of the regions. The EU is still together, it’s not unravelled. But the social market hasn’t prevailed over the liberal market. TNC influence is entrenched. There is uneven development. There are ‘populist’ reactions on the part of those left behind (and left behind by a wider capitalist globalisation). If I am here in a quarter of a century, I don’t want to be citing my warnings of the corporate takeover of climate action, living under an environmental austerity designed to preserve capitalist relations, and saying “I told you so.” Frankly, if there is a corporate takeover, it won’t matter by that stage in any case. You had better make peace with God and beg mercy and forgiveness.
The bitter irony, of course, is that it is the hardball denialism of those who have blocked action on climate change for so long that has brought us to this. If this politics of climate panic and emergency does constitute a threat to democracy, not just in the actions that circumvent democratic institutions but in the attitudes it cultivates, then it is a politics that we have been reduced to as a result of failed appeals to scientific and moral reason over a long period of time. The one produces the other as its counterpart. It would be a real tragedy should ‘Greens’ come to mirror the politics of their opponents in order to defeat them. Do we really have to adopt the hardball politics of those who oppose us in order to mount an effective challenge to entrenched power? In order to win, it is to give up the very point of winning. Unless survival really does trump all, ideals and principles included. In which case, what is the point? Survival does not work as an end in itself. Survival for what? Continued politics of winners and losers? Continued relations of exploitation and domination? Is the suspension of democracy and the corporate capture of nature the price we have to pay for survival? Ever the idealist, I ask what remains of the vision of and hopes for a Green Republicanism, ecological restoration as the restoration of public life. Maybe, one day, after all the conflict and rebellion and shouting is over, reconstruction will take place. It’s just that temporary measures in politics have a terrible habit of becoming permanent in a politics of necessity. Those who gain power tend to want to retain it against enemies and potential enemies.
In many respects, GT is the constructed counter-image of the climate deniers. (It's hard to avoid using that term, although it is unfortunate in the way it devalues a contrary voice, the very thing I am criticising in this article). Climate deniers are impossible to engage and dialogue with. They negate and nullify and, in refusing to recognise common standards in science, have removed the decisive force in the armoury of climate activists – the science. GT reverses the power play and says very simply: ‘follow the science.’ There is no debate. The science is non-negotiable. In refusing debate, GT denies the deniers the possibility of denial. She is young and female and has Asperger’s. She’s untouchable. Critics can be portrayed as older white males, and therefore awful. Their criticisms martyr her. References have been made to ‘toxic masculinity.’ It’s a perfect strategy to delegitimize contrarian positions on climate change.
If victory in the climate wars is the overriding concern, then it would seem that GT is the perfect leader. She is unassailable, immune from criticism. If we force the action on climate change that is needed, who cares about the means by which that action has been ensured?
There are some big problems with this reasoning. The presumption that the end justifies the means is one of the most dubious doctrines in politics. On more than a few occasions, that doctrine has issued in a politics in which the means have supplanted the ends and delivered us into a thoroughly disreputable, even disastrous politics. What is the precise nature of the climate action being proposed, undertaken, justified? Through which agencies, with what support, in whose interests? The use of an unassailable authority in politics lends itself to any number of possible outcomes, not all of which are worthy. Further, such means amount to a betrayal of all the hopes invested in the ideal of the ecological society as the realization of social justice, democratic participation, and environmental balance. It’s the continuation of the worst kind of politics, a politics in which victory is determined not by truth and justice, but by manipulation, appeals to emotion, the shaping of perceptions by powerful forces. It’s not only climate deniers who can be marginalised, silenced, and overridden by such tactics. Hence I draw attention to the ways in which those attempting to raise critical concerns within the environmental movement are accused of being divisive, splitting the movement from within, giving succour to opponents of climate action, doing the work of the deniers for them. This is not merely duplicitous, it is a dereliction. If it matters that the world gets action on climate change, it matters a great deal that we get the right kind of action. That makes me a ‘purist,’ I read. It makes me a pragmatist. Because the wrong kind of action will backfire, spectacularly. Betray the environmental cause into the hands of the corporate form, and you can kiss goodbye to all the great ideals human beings have fought for over the ages. In the end, you can kiss goodbye to civilization. I shall continue to demand more from environmental politics than an inversion of the hardball politics of the climate deniers.
I reject vehemently any attempt to bully silence, coerce support, or cajole complicity in favour of political platforms and causes of any kind. The successful prosecution of good causes rests on the internal capacity for self-criticism. In 1921, Bertrand Russell accompanied a party visiting the USSR to assess the merits of Soviet Communism. He thought the new regime repressive. His report back was not appreciated by those who thought the Bolsheviks had shown socialists the way forward. George Orwell was unpopular for pointing out the tyrannous, death-dealing delusions of Stalinism. Had these criticisms been taken to heart instead of being rejected, socialism could have been liberated from its Communist prison: there was something rotten in the state of socialism as it had come to be instituted. Out of loyalty to an ideal, many closed their ears to criticism. The betrayal of principles through adherence to symbols comes as easily as that. To make that point is not purism, but comes with an eminently practical concern. Those who turned a blind-eye to the deviations from an ideal or principle as they occur, out of loyalty to a cause, may come in time to discover that their loyalty has come to be invested in a reality that is as far away from the ideal or principle as could be imagined. For entirely practical reasons, there is a critical responsibility to check deviations and seek clarity every step of the way. To do so is not to give succour to political opponents. The damage that political opponents did to socialism was nothing like as destructive as the damage that socialists did to themselves through blinkered, dogmatic, uncritical practice. There is enough confusion within environmental circles with respect to capitalism and socialism to warrant a critical view here. Too many lack a specific understanding of social forms and mediating terms, instead going straight to the question of ensuring that ‘the economy’ respects planetary boundaries. With respect, that entails understanding precisely why the capital system is inherently deaf to such concerns, which is precisely the understanding that Marx’s critique of political economy delivers. Given the remarkable capacity of the corporate form to colonize all forms of commons and corporatize public business, which the past quarter of a century has amply demonstrated, I would suggest that critical concerns with respect to the vagueness of the demands being pressed upon governments to ‘act on climate’ are entirely legitimate. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Any gaps in politics tend to be very quickly filled by those forces that are quickest to organize and intervene. The likes of Kevin Anderson are explicit that the depth of the climate crisis is now so deep as to rule out former hopes for the reformist greening of the system. The Eco-Socialism I espouse requires an ecological self-socialisation from below via an interimbrication of material counter-organisations capable of constituting a new public. I don’t see this. I see the mobilization of mass pressure on an already constituted and untransformed governmental realm. I see no real transformative process taking place. I see a momentum that has the potential to pass over into such a process. That is precisely where I am arguing it needs to go. I know from experience that whenever I argue for this transition, I am met by opposition from those who consider socialism ‘extremist.’ I was told in the most forthright terms that ‘left wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism,’ by which was meant that people such as I, setting political demands at impossible extremes, were not only putting people off the climate cause but also ignoring opportunities in business, technology and government policy to green capitalism from within, without need for any challenge to power. It seems that the billionaires who spend vast fortunes funding climate denial have wasted their money. Climate solutions that all can agree to are available and, should we see reason, we can embrace a win-win situation. Like George Orwell, I tend to trust the political nostrils of the ruling class. The Koch brothers and their ilk have seen from the very first that climate change implies the deep transformation of the economic system from which they profit. Indeed, they have seen this far quicker and far deeper than the environmentalists seeking climate action. If the billionaire defenders of the capital system can be called ‘climate deniers,’ then there is also a certain denialism at work among those environmentalists who refuse to see the material roots of climate crisis in capital’s contradictory dynamics and class relations.
My concern here is motivated by a conclusion, drawn from extensive hard analysis, that the capital system, for all of its undoubted success in creating a civilization in which people are healthier, wealthier, better-educated and longer-lived, and in greater numbers, than any other civilization in history, is a limitless, expansionary system that has become cancerous and is eating up people and planet with its systemic greed.
There are a number of scenarios with respect to future developments here. The pessimistic view is that climate ‘rebellion’ fails to develop its demands into a systemic analysis that moves beyond protest and disobedience mode and instead settles for reformist or regulative measures undertaken by the untransformed state. That’s a view I am cautioning against, pointing to the corporate green forces circling around the movement in anticipation of government contracts and expenditure. That is a peculiarly static view that completely fails to acknowledge the dynamic character of activism as a learning experience. The optimistic view, then, sees environmental rebellion transitioning to social revolution through the experience of climate activism. On balance, I think the optimistic scenario more likely than the pessimistic. After all, green capitalism is hardly a new idea. It’s been tried. That won’t stop the same forces continuing to try. But the attempts to ‘green’ business have been long underway, and we have learned that it is not enough. Studies have examined Green Capitalism and rejected it as a contradiction in terms. The ‘economic growth’ that is endemic to the system of capitalist accumulation is the problem, an accumulative dynamic that proceeds without regard to limits in the realm of use value. We know this, so it is unlikely that environmental activism will come to be curtailed by being canalised within the corporate form. Hence the demand of climate rebels to ‘change the system, not the Climate.’ It is a fairly jaundiced view that sees in this demand merely a slogan without practical concern and understanding. Any green-washing here will be exposed for what it is by the ever worsening crisis in the climate system, with green capitalism being seen as a diversion from required social transformation.
To be consistent to the demand for system change, the target of radical action will move from government to the corporate forces whose interests the government serves. Government is embedded in a capital system and is concerned to facilitate the process of accumulation. Environmental activism thus, sooner or later, arrives at the critical point where climate action and ‘climate justice for all’ demands a radical social transformation. But what, exactly, does social transformation entail? Those who point to past experience claim that socialism is just as ecologically damaging as capitalism. There is a need to ensure a genuine transformation to avoid the rule of an autocratic elite presiding over a state capitalism in which carbon emissions remain as great or even as greater than the prevailing capital system. In Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx argued that Marx developed a ‘socialism from within,’ emphasising the emergence of socialism through an internal socialisation that reclaims the commons and builds the cooperative mode of production from within capitalism. There is a need, then, to learn the historic lessons of the failures to ‘build socialism’ through the state and untransformed capital relations in the past, making and understanding the distinction between the capital system and capitalism, the logic and rule of capital on the one hand, and merely the institutions of capitalism on the other. I elaborate at length on the importance of these distinctions in Social Restitution and direct people in that direction to understand the point in depth. The principal concern is to avoid social transformation degenerating into a state capitalism, a socialisation that remains firmly within the accumulative dynamic of the capital relation. Critics mistakenly describe this as socialism, but they are wrong. Unfortunately, many people who call themselves socialist are insufficiently alive to the distinction and so can take socialization down the path of state nationalization.
At this point we need to go beyond the social vagaries of the Anthropocene to identify the specific social relations implicated in the environmental crisis defining the Capitalocene. The problem with the Anthropocene, when it is extended beyond the realm of geological science, is that it is sociologically illiterate, holding humanity in general responsible for ecological degradation and destruction, instead of identifying the specific social processes and practices at work within a class divided society. My concern in Social Restitution is to establish the role of the Capitalocene in the exploitation and destruction of the realm of use values in pursuit of exchange values.
People need to see that reformist and regulative intervention, which may well be required, is insufficient to stave of environmental catastrophe. They need to see, in other words, that the environmental ills we face are not accidental features of the system, to be removed by incremental reforms, but endemic to that system. It is upon this necessary understanding of crisis that the case for a substantial social transformation – socialism – is based. Reforms driven by a green capitalism within the corporate form amount to a green upgrading of the old accumulative economy and, as such, do not deliver the required transformation. My concern is that environmental activists identify and spring the trap. Reformist delusions in the direction of green capitalism merely confuse and divide the environmental movement within and delay, even halt, the transition to the ecological society. There is a need to break clearly from the ‘growth’ ideology attendant upon the accumulative imperatives of the capital system.
In its traditional form, the reformist argument holds that capitalism can be gradually taken over from within, extending democratic control within existing institutions. This is a delusion that R.H. Tawney, himself a Christian Socialist rather than a Marxist, saw through a century ago. You cannot skin a tiger claw by claw, he stated, vivisection is its trade and it does the skinning first. We have had a century of socialism being skinned alive and turned into a top-down bureaucratic state control. The reformist argument makes the mistake of identifying capitalism as a public domain amenable to democratic will and rational persuasion, when it is in fact a regime of private accumulation. The state, no matter how democratic, cannot override the ‘laws of motion’ of the capital economy. It is in this context that the structural limitations of the Green New Deal become apparent. The Green New Deal (GND) is not socialism but a left liberal/reformist social democratic programme. It may well be worthy in itself. But instead of the social transformation entailed by socialism, it involves a social Keynesianism of the kind that dominated politics until the neoliberal reaction. It may be a viable alternative to the vagaries and impossibilities to socialism. But part of the justification for the neoliberal reaction was the failure of Keynesianism to resolve the growing crisis tendencies of the capital system. Such a reformist politics rests on the hope that the problems we face are not endemic to the capitalist system but are accidental features that can be removed by effective legislation and regulation. Such a reformism holds out the possibility of a sustainable growth without the need to extinguish capitalist relations. A reassuring outcome, surely? We are called upon to determine the extent to which those involved in the current wave of environmental activism would rest content with the delivery of the Green New Deal through the state, without any further transformation of capitalist relations. The ‘dupe’ theory of environmental activism holds that activists are being led to this eventuality, seeing it as the height of their ‘system-change’ ambitions. Should environmental activism halt here, then activists would indeed be dupes of green corporate forces. That’s precisely the derailment I am concerned to warn against. In warning, I am confident that enough activists will learn by practical experience to see the need for further transformations, and will have developed the organisational capacity to act upon that awareness.
This Green New Deal is in direct line of descent from the Keynesian approaches to capitalist crisis in the past, using state intervention and expenditure to reflate the economy, recycle income, boost investment and employment. The problem is that if value is not being added to the economy, then all the reflationary expenditure in the world overcome problems in valorisation. The problem with the reformist Keynesian argument, green or otherwise, is that the problem is not one of underconsumption but of valorisation and falling profits. You cannot valorize in the absence or insufficiency of value. To put the point simply, state expenditure to stimulate growth will not succeed if capitalists are not assured of a sufficient return on their investment. Here is where the diversion and distortion come into play, with activists being encouraged to settle for a reformism instead of a radicalism, opting for a left corporate liberal solution. This is often misidentified as ‘socialist.’ In fact, it entails austerian assaults upon workers in order to drive down the costs of labour to boost profitability. My fear is that the ‘greening’ of the New Deal in this respect adds the element of environmental austerity backed by an unassailable science to its basically capitalist programme.
I would relate this left liberal reformism from above to the notions of reclaiming the commons as a left liberal reformism from below. Again, there is an absence of class analysis and class politics. There is an aversion to class conflict that betrays transformative politics to a reformist agenda that remains firmly within prevailing social relations. Many consider notions of class to be divisive and a diversion from the real issue of cutting carbon emissions. Ultimately, such commons transitions are dependent on a social democratic government to enable and facilitate them, legally creating a ‘commons’ as collectively owned property. The two go together, commons transitions below and a green Keynesianism through the state above. It sounds good, and seems worthy of support. The problem is not one of reforms as such. Reforms that make things better than they are are obviously worthy of support. The problem comes when the reforms become the end in themselves, with no further transformation sought. It is at this point that environmentalists seeking system-change are being invited into system-preserving green delusion. The corporate forces fostering and preparing to exploit such a delusion are already poised. If you fall for it, don’t have the temerity to call it socialism, because socialism it most certainly is not – it is a coercive environmental austerity implemented through the top-down state to entrench and extend the corporate form.
“My argument boils down to this: In order to save and preserve what we have in common, the earth, we must transition to a form of society that respects the commons. It is not about passively waiting for such a society to miraculously arise: the commons is already here, although hidden from view by the ideologies and structures of existing society. By fighting to reclaim the commons—which includes not only the land but also the social powers at our disposal to collectively organize our lives without recourse to hierarchical forms of domination—we can transition to a new society, at the same as saving the earth itself. It seems to me that working for this would be worth the effort.”
The problem with the GND as a left Keynesianism is the same failure demonstrated by past Keynesianisms, in that it is unable to address the structural roots of the crisis in the capital system. We will have a phase of austerity, spend money to no avail, and invite yet another neoliberal reaction in the name of emancipation. The dangers here lie in derailing environmental radicalism and diverting activists into a creeping corporate control, in the name of environmental necessity and socialist transformation. That would be to take the language and ideals of eco-socialism and turn them into their opposites.
One reason for my worries here, despite affirming the creative agency of people, is the repeated tendency of people to embrace the mythical ‘third way’ when faced with crisis. I address this at length in my Introduction to the Thought of Istvan Meszaros. I refer here to the tendency of too many people to remain within what Marx in the Grundrisse described as ‘the bourgeois viewpoint,’ unable to see beyond the present stage of free competition in market society as the end of history, yearning for a return to a pre-modern original fullness in their romantic decadence. The ‘third way’ is a trap and a snare that too many, unable to transcend the bourgeois viewpoint, fall for. The Green slogan ‘neither left nor right’ expresses a yearning for this delusory ‘third way.’ The problem with it is that whilst environmentalists may reject capitalism, in rejecting socialism with equal vehemence they have nowhere to go but ‘back to nature.’ Or to the anti-politics of scientism. Time and again I have been confronted by environmentalists who argue that the socialism of the USSR and China was at least as ecologically damaging as western capitalism. To which I would say, of course they were/are, precisely because they are not socialist but state capitalist, pursuing a socialisation that is set firmly within the capital relation and its accumulative dynamic. That is the point I make at length in the Social Restitution piece. In making that point, I have been told bluntly that Marx knew nothing of ecology and climate science and therefore has nothing to say about current problems. Not only is that view simply incorrect, it is also irrelevant. Climate change is not the problem, it is a symptom of the problem. Further, that dismissive attitude towards Marx also applies to all political thinkers, philosophers, writers, economists, artists, everyone who worked before the rise of climate science and the problem of climate change. None have anything to teach when it comes to human action, motivation, meaning. And people are still wondering why all the ever-so-clever moderns are struggling so badly to get out of the mess they are in, despite a wealth of science and technology. I dare say that Wittgenstein knew nothing of climate science, too. He knew a lot about the deficiencies and delusions of scientism, though.
In Social Restitution, I emphasise that, for Marx, socialism is not an ideal, a blueprint, or a programme to be implemented from above by the state, but is the potential future society that already exists in embryonic form within capitalism. As against the old debate between socialism from above and socialism from below, I argue that Marx argued for a socialism from within as against a socialism from without, integrating the unifying ideal with self-mediating social forms. This is to argue for what Marx designated as ‘rational control,’ removing parasitic and alienative capitalist forms to allow the socialist potential to unfold and develop. The only way to address the crisis in the climate system whilst simultaneously developing a planful and respectful relation to nature is a socialism based on democratic councils networked on a global scale. Whatever else that is, it isn’t a top-down statism.
The word ‘ecology’ was not in use until sometime in the 1860s and 1870s. That Marx didn’t use the term is sometimes taken as evidence that Marx has nothing of significance to say on ecology. This is mistaken, and profoundly so. It betrays not only ignorance, but also a serious deficiency in understanding. Marx used the concept of metabolism to analyse the contradictory relations between human society and nature. What mattered for Marx were the specific forms of social mediation by which humans organised their exchange with nature. ‘Ecology’ as a concept lacks explanatory power. Terms such as ‘Nature,’ ‘Humanity,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘God,’ are abstract and explain nothing unless related to the specific forms of mediation prevailing within specific social relationships. ‘Nature’ or ‘ecology’ is not some universal objective datum that never changes but is something that changes with every new mode of production. Marx’s critique of the capital system is based upon this dynamic, interactive concept. The nature of ‘Nature’ is in process of continuous transformation as a result of the interchange with human society. The realm of production comes to be hijacked by capital through alienative and exploitative relations. The contradictory societal and ecological dynamics of capital are determined by the parasitic and exploitative relation of capital to the realm of use value (labour and nature), something which is implicated in the degradation and destruction of nature (including human nature). Hence the name ‘Extinction Rebellion.’ The question is how far such a rebellion needs to go, and how much the rebels understand in this respect.
Ecology can only be understood and apprehended via the mediating terms that connect human society and nature. John Bellamy Foster employs the concept of Metabolic Rift to identify the damage that the capital economy does to nature, showing the extent to which environmental destruction is endemic to the system, not a mere accidental aspect of economic growth that can be reformed away.
The challenge is to keep objective and subjective factors together in dialectical relation. Neither nature nor capital are objective forces outside of human intervention and alteration. Human agency has a creative role to play, meaning that any objective metabolic/physical process is always humanly objective.
Marx sought to show the ways in which the capital system entails a multi-layered alienation. The critical concept of alienation is central to any analysis of ecological collapse that is oriented in a socialist direction. Here, I am interested in socialism as properly understood, not the bureaucratic party-state collectivism that has gone by the name of socialism in the past. Marx argued against any collectivism that proceeds under the auspices of "would be universal reformers," and so do I. I try to move away from shadow boxing on this, arguments conducted in terms of market vs state, "individual" vs "government." These are all abstractions which are built upon the liberal ontology that falsely distinguishes the discrete, self-possessing "individual" from society, the individual contracting in or out of society in accordance with self-interest. Debates like this proceed in abstract terms and, as a result, prove inconclusive. The world has not ‘tried’ socialism at all, it has attempted a collectivisation by decree through "the abstraction of the political state," which is a "modern product" that arose in symbiotic relation with capital. Those quotes are from Marx in the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State. Socialism, moreover, is not a legislative programme or ideal to be "tried" in this manner, and to the extent it is reduced to such a thing it becomes objectified as part of the very system it is supposed to be replacing. Collectivisation within regimes of accumulation, ‘green’ or otherwise, is not socialism, however much adherents and enemies present it as such. Such collectivisation proceeds within the rule of capital. The coercive government that libertarians of the right despise is precisely the product of the capital relation, from the original separation of people in their communities from their commons, ethical and political, from their means of life and organisation. Bureaucratisation arises on the soil of capitalist abstraction, from the way that individuals are separated from the bonds of community, from moral and communal restraint, from tradition.
Capitalism, Marx argued in the Paris Manuscripts, alienates us from four things which are crucial to identity, community, and belonging: from ourselves, from each other, from the products of our labour, and from nature. Human beings thus develop an abstract and adversarial relationship with each of these terms essential to being as a result. Social atomism below and political centralization above go hand in hand. The central state as surrogate community grows in the context of social fragmentation. The commonality that is denied in a civil society that dissolves into a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism comes to be projected upwards and outwards to the state as community and universality in abstract form. A political heaven that contrasts to the hell of earthly bourgeois society, wrote Marx. That abstract state is not socialism, but an extension of the alien control constitutive of the capital system. The capital system has delivered on material quantity, certainly. But at a certain point, when means displace true ends, that endless accumulation of material quantity becomes a nihilism. Marx argued very clearly and consistently that the state is an alienated social power to be restituted to the self-governing society. That practical reappropriation and reorganisation of social power entails the end of exploitative capitalist society, thus restoring the metabolic unity of human society and nature.
That, in fine, is socialism, as distinct from a top-down coercive environmental authoritarianism in the service of the corporate form. And that requires the rejection of the ‘greening’ of the capital system as socially and ecologically suicidal. With respect to the new social movements that are now proclaiming the need for system-change in order to address climate change, there is a need to play an integral part in contestation and mobilisation so as to steer action beyond the twin reefs of state and corporate co-option. And that involves valuing rather than denigrating the agency of environmental activists, warning them of the attempts to deflect or neutralise class struggle rather than escalate it and develop it through the creation of material counter-organisations.
The crunch comes with the increasing success of the movement coming to yield reforms via the state. At a certain point, environmental demands will threaten the mechanisms of investment, valorisation, and accumulation. At this point, the movement for environmental action is either prepared to press forward – and is organisationally equipped to do so – to subvert and transform the prevailing system, or it accommodates itself to the untransformed system by accepting a range of reforms. It is here where those would-be leaders of climate rebellion step to the fore and preach acceptance of capitalist reform as the moderate and reasonable option to take against the extremism and uncertainty of socialist revolution. It may be a good bargain, depending on how far the intellectual, organisational, and moral-psychic grounds of social transformation have been prepared. The more environmental activism remains within a protest mode focused on forcing government action, the less the grounds for substantive social transformation are prepared, the more reforms appears reasonable and socialism unreasonable. That’s the dialectic at work here.
In this critique of climate rebellion I am concerned not to reject rebellion nor to dismiss climate rebels as middle class dupes. That's nonsense. That’s the kind of thing that climate denying critics are saying, emphasising the extent to which the movement seems to be dominated by white middle class educated persons. As though there is something inherently bad about any of these things. I need to jump in here and make it clear to distinguish the class analysis I call for from these fake class warriors seeking to portray environmental politics as the politics of a privileged middle class exuding a sense of entitlement when pushing for environmental policies which will impose financial costs on the working class. That’s clearly a cynical attempt to play class politics to divide people against one another when they ought to be on the same side. At the same time, in reaction against that cynical ploy, we lose the class analysis at our peril. A general classless appeal to common solutions based on reason will fail for want of structural capacity. If the students go on strike, there is irritation; if the workers of the world go on strike, the lights go out. Of course, the workers are not united in their own countries, let alone the world, they are fragmented. Many are content to hold on to their jobs and protect their pensions. The working class are bound within a legal straightjacket and are not effective political players. The levers of class politics don’t work like Marx thought they would. In addition to recent developments in social structure, I would also argue that there was a problem in the initial conception. Marx was right to seek unity and community as against the separation and atomism of bourgeois society. His error was to ground these things in the most ephemeral, transitory, and self-interested of all ties, economic and sectional interest. I argue for solidarity on much richer, deeper, and more inclusive lines, in keeping with Catholic social ethics and the work of such as Jacques Maritain. There’s no evading the need for class analysis, though, even if there is certainly a need to avoid political enemies falsely dividing middle and working classes and fractions within, classic divide and rule tactics.
I am arguing for agency and escalation embedded in a critique of political economy. I am concerned to emphasise the missing mediation in ecological perspectives, a dialectical understanding that sees the human social metabolism and the natural metabolism as a contradictory unity in continuous motion, with class struggle oriented on the interchange with nature concerned with the resolution of that contradiction, transforming society so as to restore metabolic unity with nature.
There is a need to develop an understanding that the same forces that are causing social and ecological crisis are also incubating the future socialist society within. Hence my definition of Marx’s ‘socialism from within’ in Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration. There is nothing automatic or inevitable in this emergence of socialist society. The only thing that will evolve from capitalist relations is more capitalism. Socialism from within will not emerge automatically as the result of some agency intrinsic to history, nor will it be created as a result of some external agency of knowledgeable elites who are able to see further than the duped masses. Socialism emerges through a conscious class struggle which resolves the contradictory dynamics between capital and nature. It is environmental struggle passing over into class struggle through the revelation of capitalist realities with respect to environmental degradation that will deliver a practical lesson to people that the capital system has to be supplanted. This can only be done by its alienated subjects losing their passive inertia as objects of economic imperatives, learning by experience, becoming conscious, organising social movements for change and building the material counter-organisations of the future society. But at this point I am letting my socialist fantasies run wild. Such visions need to be buttressed by practices, viable institutions, and modes of conduct. There is a long way from here to there. My argument is concerned to develop an environmental activism that moves beyond a rebellion mode centred on the untransformed state to an activism that takes initiative and responsibility for collective solutions into its hands and pushes beyond a state reformism that too easily institutes a coercive green corporate capitalism.
What, precisely, are climate activists pushing for? Greater action from governments on climate change? When I hear GT say “I want a plan,” my immediate reaction is to ask ‘which plan?’ Cutting emissions is a goal, but not a plan. Is there something specific in mind? The Paris accords? It makes sense to pressure the governments of the world live up to their commitments with respect to Paris (or, in the case of the US, to re-commit to Paris). And go much further, actually, since we know that Paris is flawed and inadequate.
The Green New Deal? The Green New Deal is a beginning. If we see it as an end in itself, then its rationale appears to be more clearly about re-energizing the prevailing economic system rather than altering it. I see the value of a Green New Deal as the reformist component of a longer term eco-socialist transformation, delivering socio-economic measures that are feasible in the present whilst transitioning to a new social order in the long run.
It’s not impertinent to ask for greater clarity when it comes to specifying alternate institutions and social forms. The dangers of imprecise demands is that powerful forces already active and organized in the field are able to write their own demands on the environmental wish-list and present this as the action that activists are demanding. As I read the daily accounts of climate activism it is easy to be inspired by the sights and sounds of so many people flocking to the banner of climate action. You see a momentum building for change here, breaking the institutional and psychological impasse that has stalled the environmental cause for years. All well and good. It has been much needed. Nothing else has broken through the inertia of politics- and business-as-usual. So far, so good, and such movement has the potential to build capacity for further, deeper developments and transitions. Maybe I am impatient for movement to press on to that next stage. I am certainly sceptical of economic, social, and institutional vagueness and evasion with respect to demands for change. I may have missed something. I am going by the very vocal and most public statements, which are daily. 'If we can save the banks, we can save nature,' says GT. It’s a good line with immediate appeal at the disparity in the way the current world values things. It exploits the resentment at the way in which the architects of the recent depression were rewarded and the victims subject to austerity. But there is an ambiguity, too, in that nothing is said to the effect that the banks should not have been bailed out and the bankers sent to jail for playing fast and loose with the economy and kicking it over the cliff. That may be implied, but it isn't said. Nothing is said, either, about the politicians who set the permissive framework for such irresponsible economic activity. I’m seeing precious little critical comment with respect to necessary transformations of the current economic and financial system, only how particular aspects of it are implicated in the climate crisis. Maybe the intention is to start from the simple and build a momentum and popular will that takes us to the complex with respect to social transformation. Excellent! The demands for climate action are indeed radical and imply some such thing. There is little hope for an outright demand for substantial transformation succeeding in the first instance. There have been those – myself – demanding such a thing for decades, to no effect. The only way to present such a demand effectively is to prepare the moral, intellectual, and psychic grounds to normalize measures and practices that transcend prevailing arrangements. In which case, we may be witnessing a brilliant strategy that is succeeding where all previous attempts at radical social transformation have been obstructed, marginalised (themselves), and failed. It depends on how far the supporters of climate action are prepared to go. It’s not difficult to envisage many settling for a few tweaks here and there within the system to ‘save the planet.’ The banks that were saved carry on, the ecological degradation continues, and the banks get supported and bailed out again, since they are now ‘green’ banks. I’m painting a nightmare scenario, of course. But just as Paris is an invitation into more radical action that doesn’t have to be taken, so the Green New Deal proceeds firmly within existing economic and institutional parameters. It has the potential to go further. Or it invites a momentum to go further. It could also settle for the realization of its limited aims and goals, re-booting capitalism with green energy and infrastructure and fuelling it for a further bout of exploitation and extraction.
Read these articles in succession, and see how certain conclusions form:
Keynes Was Really a Conservative by Bruce Bartlett, domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and as a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush.
Why the Green New Deal needs a grand strategy by Patrick Doherty
A Green New Deal Is the First Step Toward an Eco-Revolution by John Bellamy Foster
The Green New Deal: Realistic Proposal or Fantasy? By Peter Hudis
"To be a realist today does not mean to only seek for what can be done under political constraints, but to exploit existing opportunities to start to immediately mitigate climate change and at the same time push for radical social change. Putting the Green New Deal discussions into the context of our socioeconomic system and its power relations is hence vital."
I’m all in favour of inspiring hope. GT and XR are doing that. Without the motivational springs of action, individual and collective, all the knowledge, technical capacity, and ideas in the world remain an inert and frozen truth. I am hugely sceptical of blind hope, though, as I am of blind faith. Here, our greatest strength, our determination to press on against what the facts which tell us the situation to be hopeless, could easily become our greatest weakness.
I’m told that we don’t have time for debates between capitalism and socialism, that nature doesn’t care either way (of course: how could it? That’s a question for those who insist Nature is the only god we have to serve, a statement which merely reduces to the demand ‘survive’), and that such debates are irrelevant since they are both species of the same thing. And we don’t have time for reading, either, since it is time for ‘action.’ I’m a speed reader, page a minute. Peruse the articles above your pleasure and leisure. Such attitudes miss precisely what is at issue. The specific social forms by which human society organizes its interchange with nature matter a great deal, because that’s where the problems and solutions lie. Climate change is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. Understand what that means, and we are in business.
When I argued for “the good life,” my DoS groaned. “You don’t like the good life?” I asked. “Me? I love it,” he replied. “Can’t get enough of it.” “I just don’t want to buy a pig in a poke.” I’ll argue for socialism. But not for botched jobs, evasions, halfway houses that are neither fish nor fowl and go off half-cock. I’ll argue for a climate momentum that opens the path to substantive social transformation. I’ll even argue that a ‘green’ industrial revolution through the development of new productive forces beyond the shackles of carboniferous social relations is an advance on the prevailing system. By definition, that is precisely what it is. Those who rule out socialism as an impossible fantasy will most certainly extol the virtues of a green capitalism. The capital, new technologies, connections, and corporate forces to power a ‘green’ industrial revolution are already in place, whereas the forces for socialist transformation are conspicuous by their absence, confusion, and fragmentation. Thirty five years ago the economist Alec Nove wrote the book Economics of a Feasible Socialism. He argued the case for a socialism that could be realized in a generation or two, as against the dangerous utopian fantasies of Marxism. Reading the book now, Nove’s eminently achievable socialism seems much less likely to be achieved now than visions of green capitalism. If, as activists persist in claiming, time is too short for interminable political debates over the relative merits of capitalism and socialism, and pragmatism is the order of the day, then it is inevitable that action will proceed through existing and untransformed parameters. It is in this way that the environmental movement is being cultivated and oriented to enable the capital system to reboot as a new ‘green’ regime of accumulation. Of course, the PR will all be about warm words of ‘saving the planet’ and such like. Such words appeal to those for whom ‘human’ arrogance in general, and not specific (capitalist) social relations, has brought us to the brink of eco-catastrophe. Hence my profoundly critical view of those endless denunciations of anthropocentrism and ‘humanity’ in general. ‘There’s only nature and she needs us,’ writes Dr Glenn Barry, expressing a view that many repeat in similar terms. Such views neglect the specific social forms and relations mediating the human interchange with nature and, in so doing, miss precisely the causes of environmental crisis and the wider parameters of its resolution. Within this calculated vagueness, the PR will focus on a caring and sharing for the sake of the planet, something that takes us beyond possessive and exploitative relations. Who could disagree? I don’t. I argue for this very thing, as far as it goes. But I advance that view in the context of a critique of political economy, showing how possession and exploitation are definitive of capital rule. It’s that dimension that I find missing in the XR and much else besides. I notice others making that criticism and being given short shrift. This is an important issue to clarify. There are contrarian voices which, although they claim to be on the left, tend to only become vocal about left principles only when attacking ‘middle class’ and ‘bourgeois’ political causes such as environmentalism. They tend to be much less vocal and much less passionate pressing their leftist principles against conservative platforms and capitalism. Indeed, their leftism seems to involve pitching the working class against bourgeois left-liberals pressing environmentalist causes whilst promoting industrial expansion, technological innovation, and global economic growth. The tactic is plainly to become class warriors only to spread dissension and undermine unity within progressive movements. Whilst it is fairly easy to spot those employing this strategy to divide movements within, adopting the right response is difficult. Earlier I referred to accusations that environmentalists are engaging in politics rather than doing real science when advancing ‘the new religion of climate alarmism.’ I noted how this accusation provoked rebuttals which denied such accusations by constant repetition of the science. The effect was to make environmentalists shy of politics and ethics/religion, the very motivational forces that inspire effort and action in the world of human affairs. The effect was to debilitate environmentalism by keeping it restricting its focus on science. Likewise, this bogus class politics waged by critics of environmentalism as ‘bourgeois’ and ‘middle class’ is designed to induce environmentalists to deny all class analysis and class division, reject the class designation, carry on making a classless appeal, and hence continue to ignore the class dynamics that are key to challenging the capital system. In raising the issue of class I have been met with not merely indifference but hostility, with defences that hold that there is nothing wrong with being middle class (‘none of us choose our fathers’). Marx’s whole point concerning class has been continuously misunderstood as involving the investment of the proletariat with heroic qualities whilst other classes are denigrated. Marx could be scathing of persons and of other classes, but in the main his focus was on classes as the expression of economic relations and categories. It is these which embody relations of domination and exploitation which determine the way in which value is produced and appropriated in the capital economy. Any movement which seeks to transform the system which lacks an awareness of these material roots and class dynamics will be seriously deficient, resorting to sweet reason, impotent moralism, and abstract collectivities such as government and law to compensate for the lack of a practical purchase on social reality. It should be born in mind that the whole point of Marx’s emphasis on class politics was to bring about the end of class. Those who find the notion of class distasteful are not alone. Marx thought class division abhorrent and sought its abolition. Marx consistently referred to free individuals rather than ‘the proletariat’ as some homogeneous collective. He did so to such an extent that Alasdair MacIntyre argues that the failures of Marxism can be partly attributed to the strong strain of radical individualism that Marx took from liberalism. The point, however, is that those who find class repellent and wish to restore the dignity and ultimacy of each and every person – an ethic deriving from the Judaeo-Christian tradition that I most heartily support – find their strongest advocate in Marx. Marx’s point is that if you do indeed wish to see an end of class society, division, and exploitation, then you have to engage in a class politics on the side of a subaltern class against the dominant class. It’s not Marx and Marxists who are divisive, it is the system they seek to uproot at source. Seek a workaround and avoid talk of class for its divisive and distasteful nature, and you merely evade the problem. Don’t let fake class warriors seeking to spread dissension in the progressive camp prevent you from analysing class and waging class struggle. Learn the lesson of Ralph Miliband’s Divided Societies (1989). If you are not waging class struggle from below, rest assured that the ruling class will be waging it from above. Paul Mason was spot on in a recent article when he argued for a proper class analysis.
“The liberal establishment – found in the corporate boardrooms, among the masters of Oxbridge colleges, in law and medicine and among the old-money landowners – does not know what to do…
One of the most dangerous factors in this situation is the incomprehension of Britain’s technocratic elites…
Few are prepared to address the material roots and class dynamics of this crisis, because nobody taught them to do so. But they are clear.”