When Saving the Planet is merely Saving the Capital System
Or,
When system-change is appropriated and perverted to serve the end of system-preservation.
This is the “inconvenient truth” behind the activation, mobilisation, and canalisation of climate activism.
I argue for real socialism. In Part 2 of “The Road to Wigan Pier,” George Orwell argued that "a real Socialist is one who wishes – not merely conceives it as desirable, but actively wishes – to see tyranny overthrown." And works to prevent tyranny from being established in the first place, least of all in the name of socialist principles. Orwell declared himself a “real Socialist” in this sense. In "Why I Write" (1946), he wrote:
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”
If socialism isn’t democratic and isn’t constituted on the basis of popular self-emancipation and creative agency, then it isn’t socialist at all. That should be easy enough to understand. Marx explicitly distanced himself from those well-meaning folk who considered the workers too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and said so clearly towards the end of his life in "The Critique of the Gotha Programme" of 1875 and other places, as advice to the newly formed socialist parties. He feared that these parties were veering away from that principle, with disastrous effects. They were and they did. Just be cautious of those “would be universal reformers” and “alchemists of revolution” (both quotes from Marx) who would invert and pervert your politics if you allow them. Marx overcame the need for lawgivers and philosopher-kings in politics. His lessons here have yet to be learned, with the result that democratic emancipatory politics continues to be diverted into sterile elitist channels.
In a topsy-turvy world in which fair is foul and foul is fair, and strikes are called protests and protests strikes, we should be cautious of a permission-granted radicalism; we should know that the fix is in for any emancipatory movement. We should always be prepared to ask: “what about the workers?” The real tragedy of modern politics lies in the abandonment of the working class and the concomitant devaluation and depoliticisation of socio-economic concerns. Politics thus abandons the working class who are subsequently abandoned to the market. Where are the workers? Fragmented, defeated, confined in a legal straight-jacket, culturally devalued, political devoiced, dismissed. Who gives a damn? The loss of a future? Now you know what it is to be working class facing a future of mass unemployment. That's my history on Merseyside in the 1980s.
People are crying out for an authentic public community, but seem to have lost the capacity to create one. The demand is there. And we are told that we live in an increasingly educated society and integrated world in which millions should be able to participate in determining the terms by which they are governed. There seems to be a growing demand on the part of people to run their own lives, not merely as individual choosers on a market, but through their collective will and nous. And yet, continually in the political realm, we are confronted by something alien and thwarting: an explicitly manipulative politics, of all stripes and persuasions, some aggressive, some merely cynical, taking our deepest needs, our undying thirst for justice, our most precious values and principles, only to invert them and thereby turn them against us. The result is we see a politics that was once, maybe, our own creation now coming to stand against us as the agent of alien money and power. Beware the corporatisation of public business. And beware the attempted corporate capture of nature.
George Orwell knew all about inversion and perversion in politics and language. “Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” I affirm politics in a deeper and richer sense than that, a politics of self-understanding and self-realisation. A politics of friendship and community, of trust, proximity, virtue (back to Aristotle!). A politics of love. That’s the politics that has been inverted and perverted. People read Orwell’s critique of the Soviet Union and conclude he was anti-socialist. That’s another inversion of the truth. Orwell’s politics are … complicated. He described himself as a “Tory anarchist” at points. But he declared himself consistently to be a socialist, one who is in touch with the “ordinary” folk, the working class who are too often acted upon in politics rather than being valued as the actors. He wrote the book “The Road to Wigan Pier” about the working class experience in my part of the world, Wigan being the next town to my home town of St Helens. I am a proud Wigan Digger! I have the T shirt! We know Orwell round these parts. I am a commoner.
Orwell wrote this in “Wigan”:
“Socialism is such elementary common sense I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system. Yet the fact that we have got to face is that Socialism is not establishing itself. Instead of going forward, the cause of Socialism is visibly going back.…What I am concerned with is the fact that Socialism is losing ground exactly where it ought to be gaining it. With so much in its favour … the idea of Socialism is less widely accepted than it was ten years ago. The average thinking person nowadays is not merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. This must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda.”
And action. Orwell tried to correct these modes of thought and action, and that’s what I’m alive to in contemporary movements. Too many people fall for empty words and easy solutions in politics, and try to silence critical voices. Self-criticism in a political movement and cause is a condition of health and sanity.
The people who know Orwell to be a socialist know this line from "Homage to Catalonia," where Orwell joined the fight against fascism:
“It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.”
He knew this self-emancipation to be the true strength of socialism, not the ABC of Revolution, and he lamented the extent to which the working class were always having to take the backseat to the professionals and strategists of all types and parties.
I quoted this passage from Simon Clarke over and again in my work in the 90s:
“Marx was naively optimistic in his belief that socialism would inevitably arise out of the spontaneous development of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, but the tragedy of Marxism, in both its Leninist and its Western variants, was that it abandoned Marx's faith in the ability of the working class to achieve its own emancipation. This led Marxism to detach the liberating potential of Marx's critique of capitalism from its concrete foundations in the socialisation of the working class, to locate it not in the collective organisation of the working class, but in the alienated forms in which the socialisation of labour developed under capitalism, as the concentration and centralisation of capital. Socialism was then identified not with the transformation of social relations of production, but only with the nationalisation of the means of production, so that human social powers confronted the individual in the equally alienated form of the state.” (Simon Clarke Marx, Marginalism, and Social Theory 1992).
That's right, and it's an error that keeps being repeated. Always, I ask, “what about the workers?” True socialisation comes with democratic content. I do think true solidarity transcends class and sectional interests, mind. There are greater bonds between us than economics. I love Jacques Maritain's work here. Basically, solidarity involves being warm, open, and alive to real folk. Christian Socialist R.H. Tawney called it his “Henry Dubb” test. Whatever you believe in in politics, run it by Henry Dubb. Always have Henry at your elbow. I know Henry well. I see him on my rounds. At least I do when my deliveries arrive. The drivers seem to have gone on strike. Or protest. Whatever people mis/call it. By which I mean whatever our lords and masters give us permission for.
I am trying hard to avoid commenting on Greta Thunberg. I need to identify specific demands and see them being joined up in a systematic analysis of the problem and a coherent solution to it. You can't argue with a vacuum. By ‘coherent’ I mean something more than piecemeal measures to be legislated and implemented by government. I am suspicious that the practical proposals I can identify all fall in particular areas, all of which lend themselves easily to the corporate capture of nature under the auspices of a ‘green’ government. I see an interest in land restoration, in alliance up with George Monbiot, which is a step in the right direction. I withhold judgement. The radical demands may yet issue in a radical analysis and a radical reformation of structures, relations, and institutions. That, I would suggest, is what most who have been involved in the environmental movement over the years have been aiming for, consciously or otherwise. I am concerned to ensure that that impulse comes to be channelled in the direction of a genuine system change, rather than being diverted into preserving the prevailing, expansionary, exploitative, destructive system. If you want ‘degrowth,’ then identify the source of the problem clearly and correctly as the accumulative dynamic which is central to the capital system. Let's have an end to slippery euphemisms here, please. Name it for what it is, and have practical, viable, proposals to uproot it.
I have always argued that ambitious large-scale programmes of climate action will succeed only if they are buttressed by and grounded in small-scale practical reasoning, personal moral effort, the cultivation of ecological virtues, social proximity, trust relations, a unit of accountability, and love of home and place. That approach integrates above and below through the principle of subsidiarity, holding that power is located and resources directed at the lowest level of competence and responsibility. The key is to cultivate responsiveness within a (co)responsibility. This new wave of environmentalism splits this apart, on the lines this article identifies, ensuring that environmentalism merely becomes another top-down bureaucratic failure without social, democratic, and moral content. Another instalment in technocratic elitism. And worse – it plays right into the hands of corporate capture. But there it is, in the absence of a serious politics that succeeds in winning sufficient numbers of people to a constructive platform, too many are happy to become complicit in the loss of every principle they held dear. The problem with movements led by personalities is that they tend not to survive when the personality fades from view. I always argued for ecology as a self-governing, self-organising principle applied throughout society. It seems we will remain within the tyranny and violence of abstract and surrogate communities with a top-down totalising approach. Having heard environmentalists labour the point about overpopulation, even use phrases like “it’s time to cull the herd,” I fear that kind of concentration of power.
It is amazing how people who run a mile from the considered analysis I have put forward over the years become positively ecstatic when reading their dreams and visions into a line or a phrase from Greta Thunberg. I write on capital accumulation, and am accused of being divisive and putting ‘moderate’ people off environmentalism; Thunberg denounces economic growth, and she is lauded to the heavens. This is bizarre, in that those waxing lyrical I know come from entirely different political positions. The language is clearly vague enough to allow people to read their own political views into her words. GT is a political wish-fulfilment. That’s the appeal. We await the generalized demands firming up at the practical level. I fear for this girl. There are too many adults incapable of serious politics and citizen engagement who are investing all their indolent dreams in her. I think it's an embarrassment and a disgrace. I don’t doubt her sincerity. I am interested in the well-oiled machine behind her. I'm struck by how many who profess concern at the expropriation of the commons are happy to cheer this operation on so uncritically.
I’m looking at the images of the people with the top talk at these climate conferences. They fly in, they drink out of plastic water bottles on their tables, they discuss the investment and financial opportunities of a climate action sponsored by the World Bank. Are these the institutions environmentalists are addressing demands of radical reformation to? Not only are these people not interested, their disinterest is systemic and not personal. They are the mere personifications of economic relations and imperatives. Those who shift the responsibility for action upon these personifications will find their demands defeated and betrayed. These people are not independent actors, they are the passive agents of the priorities of money and institutional power. Their words to the contrary are worthless. There is an idolatry of words as well as an idolatry of things in this world. These masters of the universe are servants of idols of money and power, their job being to continue to deliver up human sacrifices. Their words are of the same status and have value only to that end. People should avoid offering themselves up to be sacrificed. Be careful of what you wish for. Believe the words of personifications of economic categories at your own peril. With every wish there comes a curse.
This Green New Deal is all about unlocking investment and finance for reflating and rebooting the capitalist economy. And re-energising it, fuelling another burst of expansion with clean energy paid for at public expense, either through subsidies or prices. Call it ‘green’ to sell it to the uncritical desperate clean-hands idealists of the world. They are the mass fodder for the corporate capture of nature. You can call it Laurel and Hardy if you like. A rose is a rose by any other name. But not by any other number. Call it what you like. It is what it is, whatever the warm words by which you want to know it.
The rich and powerful have appropriated the commons and guard access to the resources that people need in order to govern and determine the ways in which they live. The corollary of that is that 'we the people' do not need any investment or finance nor any expensive, sophisticated technology provided externally; we just need to redesign our modes of life and action in relation to the resources we use, no extraneous technology and finance. That entails the social appropriation of technics. Ambitious plans of climate action are necessary but require require vast levels of finance and technology. These are in the hands of the corporations, not people and communities. Level general demands for climate action on government, and you betray the environment into the hands of those seeking its capture, control, and exploitation. There is a democratic deficit at the heart of environmentalism. That will either hobble it as politics or turn it in an authoritarian direction in practice. The Earth was made a common treasury, declared Gerrard Winstanley, and it is to be made a common treasury once more. The resources we need belong to all life on Earth, including other beings and bodies in the more-than-human world. The issue is how we come to use, and share, these resources. And that does mean looking at the Earth as a treasury and not a storehouse of usable resources. I don’t see that shift in modes of thought, organisation, and action in the Green New Deal. Do you? If so, please show where and how.
Land, food, access to water and shelter should be free to all as basic human needs. How did we come to a civilisation in which access is controlled at a price, governed by an an economy of excess and lack? The social relations of production and distribution are key here. Reduce a problem to technical analysis and resolution, and you have missed the key issue, betraying demands for radical action into the arms of the very forces driving exploitation and despoliation.
Strikes? What is being sacrificed? What sanctions are being applied to enemies in order to alter their behaviour? Stop paying your student fees. Don’t take out student loans in the first place. Don’t go to university. You have no future in any case. Stop going to school and university, and don’t get a job either. Risking the wrath of teachers hardly stacks up against this, not least because schools have fallen over themselves to grant permission. It’s a protest, not a strike. And not merely with permission but with praise. A day out. That’s far from my recollections of the UK Miners’ Strike of 1984-85.
I don’t know enough to determine whether anyone is a manufactured puppet. I have heard that accusation or accusations like that made so often over the years, with the concomitant view that the mass of people who follow are unthinking dupes, that I pay it no attention. Noam Chomsky has been accused in the past, Naomi Klein in the present. I have no doubt that puppet-masters exist. But I’d prefer the critical focus to fall on the advance of the corporate form through society here. I am struggling to see the substance of the GND with respect to the structural transformation we need. If people are to be as good as their motto ‘system change, not climate change,’ then they need to be clear that the Green New Deal is about system-preservation and not its transformation. Its rationale is to suck those with an environmental concern into the defence of the system against its transformation, having them run headlong into the shackles of impoverishment and indebtedness, all given a bright green coating. We are ignoring practical solutions! And lo! the solutions are put in place through substantial governmental programmes.
There is a need for some detailed, painstaking research on this question. I don’t have the time. I have just been reading Cory Morningstar on this: "The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – for Consent." Her work boasts a wealth of research. I never take arguments at face value. I like claims to be checked. In the very least, Morningstar’s critical concerns are mine. She seems to have provided substantial evidence to prove the case that the corporate capture of environmentalism is well underway, with environmentalists being mobilized into the betrayal of their principles and demands. The entrenchment and extension of the corporate form in all areas has proceeded apace in recent decades. We have been subject to the corporatisation of public business these past three or more decades. The corporate capture of nature is on the agenda, and what better way than to achieve it by public consent, indeed by active popular demand. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the most prominent climate campaigns underway would come to be co-opted by the world's corporate and financial elites. Morningstar identifies the large environmental NGOs as the principal agencies of this hi-jack, directing environmental activists into serving a pre-determined agenda that is concerned with defending capitalist relations against radical challenge, rebooting capital for further expansion: in other words, preserving the capital system as opposed to addressing the crisis in the capital system. In the very least, Cory Morningstar deserves a considered response. Instead, all I see is abuse and dismissal, accusations that she is splitting the environmental movement just as it is poised to succeed, thereby doing the work of rich climate deniers. (So much for the stock defence that critics of GT are triggered white males). That response is not merely unworthy, it indicates a dogmatism and imposed conformism that always sounds the death knell of political movements in respect of principle. Morningstar could well be highlighting the betrayal of the whole point of environmentalism as a condition of success. In the very least, people should be concerned. Success, it seems, comes at the price of corporatisation. So I will raise a critical voice and refuse to be cowed into silence by those so desperate for the triumph of their political demands that they turn a blind eye to their betrayal in practice. It’s been done too many times in history. This is how the slide into opposites occurs, first with the complicity of the masses, then with their shackling.
I am leery of conspiracy theories in which people are no more than dupes and tools. I explicitly argue they are not and that, through resistance and activism, people as knowledgeable moral agents are capable of coming to see the forces of oppression and exploitation. That's Marx's argument of social change as a self-change too. Other than that … Cory Morningstar’s critique of the "Wrong Kind of Green" looks similar to my own critical comments. Morningstar is raising concerns that are not dissimilar to issues that are bugging me. In fact, she goes much deeper. Her work boasts a wealth of research. Her claims deserve a response. Somebody somewhere needs to check the claims she is making. If true, if the whole truth, and not selected truth and distortion to fit the manufacturing/puppet narrative, then they are explosive.
I am withholding judgement on this. And by that I don’t mean suspending judgement and ignoring the critical issues, waiting to see how it resolves itself. Wait too long, and the process of corporatisation will be completed so as to make future resistance futile.
I tend to avoid views which see the masses as brainwashed, asleep, stupid, ignorant, confused, bemused, and distracted. Those accusations always strike me as a leftist apologetics with respect to their own failures to communicate and activate. They also strike me as resting on the self-defeating assumption that the people are passive unthinking beings to be indoctrinated, programmed, and directed.
That’s the problem with democracy, I was informed by a climate campaigner: 'not enough people know enough to be concerned about the things that matter.' That’s not a problem with democracy, I responded, but with the failure to cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues. That’s the problem with liberalism, I continued. Leaving individuals alone to choose the good as they see fit seems liberatory, protecting the individual from a good imposed on them by others, but it comes with the corollary that individuals are perfectly free to exit any collective endeavour for the common good. Climate action, for instance. The challenge of climate change cannot be addressed on the individualist premises of liberalism, for the very reason that individuals are perfectly free and entitled not to join with others in collective action. The problem is not a problem of democracy but the absence of the social, moral, intellectual, organisational conditions for making democracy work. If we are to be governed by democratic institutions then the character of the individuals composing the demos matters. The good has also to be constituted in common terms, taking us beyond individual choice. An aggregate of subjective preferences does not constitute a public life, it denotes the fracturing of the public. Constituting the conditions of public life is the key to making democracy work.
Present such an argument, and you may sometimes be met with the blunt assertion that ‘people are stupid.’ People are stupid, politicians are corrupt, the political sphere has been taken over by money. I am struck by how surprised so many are at the influence of money in politics. Parliament is an institution which originated in the rich nobles coming together to determine their taxes. Nothing new. Does anyone remember Marx arguing that the state is a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie? Or have they always known it but preferred to believe otherwise, lest they have to do something to make democracy a reality. People may be stupid, but they are not as stupid as their would-be rulers, regulators, and ‘universal reformers’ (to quote Marx, to emphasize the inherently democratizing logic of Marx’s approach). And people are certainly not as stupid as those apprentice philosopher-kings think they are. People are closer to reality than those caught up in the intellectualization of the world. Human beings are capable of seeing through and breaking through any web of deceit and manipulation that they are caught up in. Further, in living closer to practical social reality, 'ordinary' people possess more structural and epistemological capacity than those caught up in the world of intellectual abstraction. Rather than point the accusative finger at those who are being manipulated, it is more profitable to expose the manipulation underway and uproot the corruption of motives at source. Those who merely condemn people as clueless, bemused and confused dupes are themselves also clueless, bemused, and confused with respect to what it takes to raise consciousness, stimulate practice, and inspire the people to action. Sneering at those seduced into the shackles of corporate sorcery is not the road to take in politics. Showing them the way out and the way forward is.
I was inclined to leave this whole area well alone, given the trouble and controversy it causes. But it is precisely that clamping down on critical voices which indicates precisely why there is a duty not to withdraw. The corporate capture of nature was central to the material I appended to the Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx I wrote last year. This is how such corporatisation not only comes to happen, but does so with the active consent of the people. As a strategy it's exquisite! I note people who have screamed at me over the years, demanding that I supply a ‘strategy,’ joining the circus with enthusiasm. I note how the extent to which the same people react with hostility to those critical voices who attempt to raise concerns in this area. I also note their consistent failure to analyse the systemic causes of crisis.
I reserve judgement on NGO’s and the non-profit economy. I have seen Morningstar criticized for portraying a lot of the good guys as bad guys. I have yet to see a rebuttal of the research.
I would avoid a conspiratorial approach which treats people as unaware prisoners of the sophisticated processes proceeding above their heads. Even so, given that the corporate form has been busy capturing everything and everyone else, it seems more than likely it would be seeking to co-opt environmental movements and campaigns into their attempt to capture nature.
I am extremely suspicious of the extent to which some of the most vocal supporters of Thunberg are repeating her general demands with respect to climate action, even the ultimate platitude that we want action and not platitudes! I keep listening and reading closely to try to identify the principal goal behind this generalized pressure. That seems, most clearly, to be to reduce carbon emissions. That’s a demand that is levelled upon government and business, entailing no transformation other than new energy infrastructures. I see no demands other than demands for Renewable Energy. Those demands are to be delivered through ambitious government programmes and expenditure and through new technologies that are in the hands of corporations. What other agency possesses the financial resources and organizational capacity to undertake and implement ambitious programmes of climate action? Where are the plans for control of local energy systems? I can’t see them in these generalized demands. Demands so general have one rationale only: they are a broad appeal to win mass support, with the specific details filled in at a later stage by interested parties.
The reduction of carbon emissions is a necessary task, of course. But carbon is not the whole problem, which involves land and water too. In fact, I would go so far as to insist that climate change and fossil fuels are not the problem, only the symptoms of a deeper problem with respect to social relations. Treated as the problem, it lends its support to a solution that involves a globalized green industrialization under the auspices of a re-energized military industrial complex. Adapting Lewis Mumford’s critique, the heavy science and technology bias of environmentalism thus serves as the intellectual and psychic preparation for entry to the new environmental Megamachine.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a number of critical articles based on an objection to the mode of politics being conducted by the new wave of environmental radicalism. My criticism was not that this environmentalism was radical but that it wasn’t radical enough or, even, radical at all. The deficiency with respect to political economy and its critique is telling in this respect. The circumvention of democracy and inadequate views on reconstituting public community is also telling. There is no respect for the citizen voice. There is no pretense of citizen engagement. The great public are merely a passive mass to be informed, educated, evangelized, and directed. In this form, this new wave of environmentalism seems elitist to the core. My claim is not that this movement is consciously working for corporate forces in order to hi-jack the environmental concerns of millions. I reserve judgement. I have no doubt that some are working for that. I have no doubt that many are sincere. My principal concern is with the shallow radicalism of the movement, eschewing systemic analysis and transformative social action in favour of demands that can be satisfied within the system. There seems to be little more than an attempt to make governments meet their climate commitments and implement policies to deliver the net zero economy. What else? Have I missed something with respect to democratic participation? I am seeing nothing more than a green Keynesianism, bearing in mind that Keynes’ overriding concern was the preservation of capitalism as against its replacement by socialism. If this is so, then the fix is in for the environmental movement, corporatization is underway, and people are being led into demanding the completion of the process in the mistaken belief that its primary concern is the preservation of planetary boundaries. In truth, this process is a move to divert, convert, and pervert a genuine concern with restoring the conditions of a living planet into support for a green industrial revolution which is concerned with the preservation, entrenchment, and expansion of capitalist relations.
The extent to which Greta Thunberg is a witting party to that corporate hi-jack I don’t profess to know. I don’t doubt her sincerity. I don’t doubt the effect she has had in galvanising the climate public. I do know that the attempt to put an intellectual and moral shield around anyone in politics is cause not merely for suspicion, but for demolition. If you intervene in politics, you make yourself available to answer forthright questions with respect to your claims, intentions, and motives. You cannot wield a sword in politics whilst expecting opponents not to wield a sword back. Seeking to hide the aggression behind a shield is an attempt to disam. This is to launch attacks on opponents whilst denying them of the right to defend themselves and strike back. You may think this a great strategy, especially since it its overt target is those who have blocked climate action for decades. The problem is that strategy applies to all who are deemed to stand in the way of ‘climate action.’ I am raising concerns about the corporate hijacking of environmentalism and its diversion to pecuniary ends. I, too, and others concerned with an environmentalism worthy of the name, will be delegitimised, marginalized, and silenced by such an approach. Regardless of one’s particular positions with respect to the issues at stake, contestation and exchange in which all platforms, even and especially those of contrary persuasion, are legitimate is the very stuff of politics. To wield a sword with such aggressive intent whilst claiming to be no more than a peaceful, passive, benign shield is the end of politics, which deprives all of us of a voice. The pursuit of this aggressively anti-political strategy in pursuit of a single aim, however laudable, is counter-productive, confirming the fracturing of the body politic into sides so entrenched that no dialogue still less compromise is possible. The strategy involves a plainly authoritarian attempt to overcome the impasse in which modern society has degenerated into endless self-cancellation. At some point, in face of the need for climate action, this condition of modern politics will descend into mutual self-annihilation. I take the supporters of this environmental anti-politics to be engaged in an attempt to break a political impasse that will doom human civilization. In this respect, they are counter-image of a similar anti-politics practices by those who similarly refuse engagement and have been involved in politics to block each, any, and every attempt at climate action. I seek the roots of this anti-politics in a modern condition in which the absolute has been relativized and the relative absolutized. By that, I mean that the overarching and authoritative moral framework binding each and all has dissolved with the “death of God,” leaving individuals free to pursue the good as they see fit. Many environmentalists are scientistic atheists and naturalists, thinking ‘nature’ or ‘physics’ and their laws all that there is to existence. Whilst they must, surely, know that all material things corrupt, decay, and die, in complete indifference to ‘nature,’ there is a suggestion that, subconsciously, there has been a belief in immortality and eternal life in the shape of technology and the sense that the technical mastery of nature could yield Heaven on Earth. They are now confronted by a looming ecological catastrophe as a result of the global heat machine that ‘men as gods’ have created. These apprentice gods have discovered that the means have proven too powerful for them to comprehend and control, taking over and inverting the ends. Instead of correcting the pathos at the heart of this ‘existential crisis,’ instead of restoring social and moral connection, there is recourse to authoritarian technocratic solutions, as mechanistic as the worldview that brought the world to this in the first place. If nature ‘doesn’t care about ethics and politics,’ as I have been told, then here is an authoritarian anti-politics that ‘doesn’t care’ either. And deep down doesn’t care about human beings. There may be a concern for humanity in the abstract, hence the emphasis on survival; but not for human beings and what they think and do in the particular, except in noting how greedy, stupid, destructive, and mistaken individuals are. It seems pointless to point out what politics is and how it proceeds, then. There is no concern with politics, only with dictating extra-political truths to recalcitrant human beings. But I’ll do it all the same. If you advance political arguments and demand certain changes, particularly sweeping transformation, then in the least you will be expected to defend your positions by questioning, and you are also most likely to be criticized. You may even be criticized in vociferous terms, often ugly. There’s not a political leader on the planet, or ever, who has not been so questioned and criticized. Jeremy Corbyn, for instance, has been entirely reasonable and well-mannered in the way he has conducted himself as leader of the UK Labour Party. He has, however, been subject to the most vehement of attacks. President Trump both gives it and takes it. Name anyone saying or doing anything of note in politics, and you will see that a fairly vigorous exchange is part of the territory. To expect to be able to make huge statements demanding huge changes in the way society conducts its affairs and transacts its business without encountering resistance betrays a totalitarian mind. Further, the more aggressive you are in your attacks and demands, then the more vigorous, or hostile, the reaction back will likely be. If you still struggle to understand that fairly simple and obvious point, I would suggest you find the scene in Monty Python and The Holy Grail where the assertive, rude, and cantankerous anarchist Denis finally provokes the very reasonable and mild-mannered King Arthur into demonstrating ‘the violence that is inherent in the system.’ (Python fans will know precisely what I am saying here, and know I am right. Others will be baffled).
Whoever is behind this strategy is a disgrace and those who have been complicit in allowing it to proceed this far in the environmental movement should be ashamed of themselves. It is self-defeating. They are precisely the kind of people who, throughout history, have betrayed the ends they have fought for by resort to means which contradict them. The attempt to remove a political platform from challenge and contestation is to be thoroughly rejected. The attempt to raise any figure or movement to the status of unquestionable, incontrovertible, unassailable authority is to be resisted and rejected with all the force you can muster, as a condition of your own freedom and autonomy in politics.
I am, frankly, staggered by how many adults, many of great intelligence and experience, have fallen for what is one of the oldest, most deceitful, and most transparent tricks in the political book. It is this that makes me worried as to how easy it may be to lead a crowd to less than benign ends by manipulation of their environmental concern. The fatal conceit lies in their purist notions of truth and reason, as though these things trump all things, and their innocence of politics combined with an utter disdain for politics and by implication people. Those who are seeking to insulate the environmental movement from criticism via the moral and intellectual shield of children may be doing so out of desperation, hoping that truths they know to be right come finally to succeed in face of the malign political forces ranged against them. They have proven politically ineffective in translating these truths into practice, and have failed to persuade and mobilize the numbers that count in politics. So here is an anti-political workaround. The problem is that there may well be others who are motivated by less than pure concerns, seeing environmentalism as a cause they can ride to power and take to market. Either way, the gambit is that most people will be stupid to see the strategy that is being worked, and the rest will be too few to resist it. Either way, the gambit has to fail and backfire for all our sakes, because this is a descent into decadence. In Consumed, political theorist Benjamin Barber argued that modern culture and society is descending into an “infantilism” based on calculated appeals to emotions severed from reason. He argued this in favour of reconstituting a genuine public community of active, informed citizens capable of engagement and dialogue in politics. This anti-politics seems to accept infantilism as the default state and is mobilizing a mass movement on emotion. Wrong, you may say, given the emphasis on science. But note that this “follow the science” is not science as such but the use of science as overriding political authority. Note, too, that science is not politics and should not be pressed into service as politics. When science is used in this way, it is done to suppress and silence political exchange through the statement of a non-negotiable fact or reason.
I don’t know about Greta Thunberg. I do think the public are entitled to know. This is politics, and the questions at issue effect each and everyone in their daily lives and their futures. I don’t for one second swallow this “I’m just a little girl” routine, not least because we should know the involvement of adults in the performance. I utterly reject moral and emotional blackmail in politics.
As to this strategy it is so transparent as to be embarrassing. Put young persons forward as the symbol of a pristine and pure nature before the corruption of man; have them present their case en masse, loudly, visibly and vocally; condemn those who criticize and question as bullies engaging in illegitimate and inappropriate behaviour. The youth of the world are entirely disinterested and are innocent of impure motives, wanting only to save the world … entailing … the root and branch transformation of society as a whole. I argue for some such thing. But I argue it. And I seek support, active consent, and legitimacy. Because I have this strange notion that if you seek some such thing as an end, you may well need a few million or more participants, not merely to support it but actually put a shift in to make the new institutions work. To think you can do without all of that indicates a belief that top-down government and bureaucratic officials and planners will be able to do it all. I find the spectacle sordid, a demonstration of how thin the commitment to principle actually is among too many who seek to ‘change the world.’
In making my objections here, I am in good company. Marx lived long enough to see the beginnings of the new socialist parties. He did not like them one bit. Not only are Marx’s criticisms as an old man rarely noted, the extent to which he took his stand on principle is rarely noted either. Marx felt loyalty to those forming the new socialist parties. But he knew they were setting off on the wrong lines, with potentially disastrous consequences. Here is Marx to Bracke on 5 May 1875:
It was therefore not a 'pleasure' by any means to write this long screed. It was necessary, however, so that friends in the party, for whom it is meant, will not misunderstand the steps I shall later have to take. Namely, after the unity congress Engels and I are going to publish a short statement dissociating ourselves from the said programme of principles and stating that we have had nothing to do with it. (Marx CGP 1974).
Poor Marx. He expected human beings to be more rational than they actually are. This, I think, is the biggest flaw in Marxism. Marx got plenty right and I have written extensively on this. Marx, however, shares a deficiency with the modernists and humanists coming out of the Enlightenment tradition – the belief that human beings can discard God, take morality into their own hands and go it alone. Given human imperfectibility, it is wise to proceed from the direction of humility rather than power. Planetary catastrophe is what happens when human beings aspire to the power and knowledge of gods. Marx was right to condemn the inversion and perversion of true ends within the alienated capital order, but ultimately remained within the same humanist rationalism revolving around power. He expected too much of human beings. His adherents misunderstood him from the first. He is still misunderstood now. The world cannot be governed by philosophical reason.
You could, of course, condemn Marx and Engels as sectarians, splitting a movement and undermining unity. His point, which ought to have been heeded, is that there is precious little point in a political success that comes at the expense of the very values which stimulated political organisation and action in the first place: “The German workers' party - at least if it adopts this programme - thus shows that its socialist values do not even go skin-deep.” (Marx CGP 1974).
Politics and ethics matter. They are the lifeblood of any movement. They are the means by which any abstract, passive, inert truth comes to life and take social form in a way of life. Lose politics and ethics, and truth becomes impersonal and inhuman. Which is precisely how many environmentalists conceive nature (as a projection of their own misanthropy, I would suggest).
Whilst I don’t know about Thunberg, in analysing the demands of the campaign around her, I do know where their realization will lead: the net zero economy is not the ecological society I have spent a lifetime arguing for. It is merely a clean-energy version of the current system.
There is a need to organize and act towards the achievement of an entirely different goal. Certainly, there is a need to drastically reduce and end carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. But that in itself says nothing. The end of the game of chess is checkmate. There are many ways to that end. You cannot just keep repeating the end, and repeating the reasons as to why that that is the end. It is determining and deciding the ways of getting to the end that matter, not least when the suspicion is that certain corporate means to the end will certainly reproduce existing social and ecological problems and generate more besides. The reduction of carbon emissions is not the only end, either, and seeing as it is not the problem as such, it cannot be the end. System change is the end. That’s a problem of social forms and relations. The problem we face, in other words, is not simply an ecological problem, in the sense of the natural metabolism, but a problem of social ecology. Even addressed as a natural ecology, the emphasis on reducing and eliminating carbon emissions is only one part of the problem and should not become the singular focus. There is a need to engage in widespread restoration with respect to soils, water tables, and functional biodiversity. And still, having done that, focus upon transformations within the social metabolic order. Miss that and you have missed everything. ‘This changes everything’ translates into ‘this changes nothing’ if we adopt a singular focus on the natural metabolism.
I don’t doubt that those with a vested interest in preserving the status quo are active in divining any potential threat to their power. That’s not grounds for silent support for dominant positions, mind, quite the contrary. Those same forces will also be doing all that they can to divert, convert, and pervert radical movements into sterile channels – the preservation of the status quo. I read vocal and passionate denunciations of those daring to raise critical concerns, to the effect that such critical voices are dividing the environmental movement within and in effect working for the enemies of climate action. How about those suppressing dissent are working to create blind mass loyalty behind positions which deliver the environmental movement into corporate hands?
I will remain critical and will never support political platforms out of blind loyalty. Our first allegiance is to first principles. The problem with politics is that it too easily degenerates into a herd instinct, involving a loyalty that fetishizes ties to others, an adherence to the idolized symbol at the expense of principle. I became an environmentalist for certain reasons. I will not be herded into supporting a green industrial revolution under the auspices of the corporate form on account of the reason that it is the only game in town and time is short. In the 1990s we were told that globalization was the only game in town and that our responsibility was to make it work. Of course, the principal agents of that globalization were the ones who assumed the most responsibility for action, and they proceeded to make it work in their own favour. The globalization of capitalist relations, massive inequality, destabilization of communities, and bankruptcy of economies was the result. Be careful what you wish for. Wish every wish there comes a curse. Remember the monkey’s paw. Wish for substantial climate action on the part of government and business and you may well get it - just not in the form required.
Until I start to see evidence of a commitment to a wider social transformation, something that involves the active participation and constructive contribution of citizens, something more than individuals mobilized in mass protest around pre-determined positions, I will remain sceptical. Instinctively, having spent my entire life battling the authorities, from the Miners’ Strike and the establishment cover-up of the Hillsborough Disaster to the sellouts of Clinton, Blair, Obama, I just know deep down that the fawning attention this ‘little girl’ gets in the corporate media is suspicious. I’m putting this mildly. The most alarming thing for me is not GT, but how easily her deliberate vagueness has served to seduce so many people who claim to be environmentalists. That confirms something I have long suspected – that for all the counter-cultural, anti-civilizational, and oppositional poses, far too many are unthinking, uncritical, dull, unimaginative, and conformist.
Keep your eyes and ears open, remain critical, take nothing at face value, do not succumb to wishful thinking, never come to believe that something is true because you wish it to be true, and never ever in politics lend support blindly to platforms simply because they promise success. Examine the terms. Thinking critically and acting responsibly is the key to success.
Given the publicity she has received in corporate media, I don’t think the powers that be, in tandem with those who are aiming to be, consider Greta Thunberg a threat. The very opposite, in fact. You may think you are supporting radical environmental action delivering system change, but you may well be merely cheering sides in a palace plot and coup. Power will be reshuffled, but asymmetrical power relations will remain firmly in place.
With respect to wind and solar technologies, the question is who owns, controls, and profits and to what end. It is impossible to use these technologies to eliminate fossil fuels. It also takes energy to produce energy. These technologies are themselves ecologically destructive. The problem is not here, the solution is not here. All we have when we take this route is change in the character of the problem, not a solution to the problem; it’s the same environmental problem in a new green corporate form.
In that respect, it is wise to remove the focus from Greta Thunberg as soon as possible and focus on identifying a strategy at work. The problem with a focus on Thunberg is that it makes the controversy about her, the poor little girl with autism bullied by brutish older white males. I’ve heard her, I’ve read her speeches; they are unoriginal, a rehash of others’ work, and a deliberate repetition of simple, general slogans with which all unthinking beings desirous to make the world’s problems go away can agree. The genius here is the strategy, seeing so many become so misty eyed in the presence of an unassailable authority. Those characteristics have proven tyrannous and murderous in both politics and religion. Never trust an ideal that can’t laugh at itself, wrote Alexander Herzen. Laughter correlates with intelligence as far as I’m concerned, emotional intelligence most of all.
More than anything, though, I am concerned about the platform that Greta Thunberg has been awarded so quickly for having done so little, in order to demand large-scale climate action of a most indistinct and uncertain kind. It’s as if a mass demand is being built in order to be satisfied later. In my business classes, we were taught basic marketing – present a desirable end, create a mass desire for it, show how difficult it is to attain, then provide it all done and complete and offer it for sale … at a price that yields a handy profit. There’s PR and marketing at work here. There is a strategy at work. We need answers on handlers and advisers and their financial and business connections. We ask that of all other politicians. Those seeking big changes in politics should declare their associations and connections. Unless Greta really is a genius who has got to where she is, knowing all she knows, all by her own inspiration. Cory Morningstar has identified the forces at work behind the Greta Thunberg phenomenon.
For all of the apparent success in promoting the climate cause, this approach could backfire spectacularly on environmentalism, causing it to shift its focus to top-level grand projects, draining it of personal moral effort and concern in close proximal relations. The ecological self-socialisation that is key to a biospheric politics is thus emptied of content.
The sincerity of Thunberg’s motivations will become clear in time. It is unwise to speculate. Some say she is being used as a front for the environmental movement, to be discarded at a later date. I doubt that that could happen without a massive backlash destroying any position attained. She may be retired in some diplomatic way. She may get a place on the board. We may all have to accept that saving the planet can only be attempted through a corporate form that has taken over politics, society, culture and nature. That may be the point. I am interested in the fact that she has succeeded in mobilizing so many. That may be a good thing. Having incited the active interest and concern of people, Greta Thunberg may have inspired a movement that comes to transcend any corporate confines within which extraneous agents would seek to channel it. People may start to look deeper, analysing the question in social and institutional terms, proceeding to demand more radical action at the level of politics. Having radicalized so many on the global stage, it will be well-nigh impossible to de-radicalize them. Such action therefore generates a momentum that transcends any narrow limits of those seeking to work within the system. If it is a corporate strategy, then it may well backfire in these terms. In inspiring a broad concern and support for the living planet, the intellectual, moral, psychic potential for radical environmental action is being created. But potential is not in itself actuality and there is no necessary uni-linear line of development leading from the one to the other. The creative realization of potential depends upon appropriate organization and action, efforts oriented to the right ends. At this juncture in history, the evidence is that the broader environmental movement has either been blocked or stymied on climate action or seen its efforts diverted, converted, and perverted through being channeled into support for ‘green’ industries and technologies. To raise a concern that the new wave of climate activism could well be re-directed, converted, and contained in similar fashion is not to split the environmental movement but to raise awareness of a very real risk. Any attempt to coerce conformity here for the sake of unity will serve only to channel the movement in precisely the wrong direction – locking the cause up within the environmental Megamachine in the service of the corporate form. We can present this movement in the appealing terms of a new industrial revolution. That is not in itself a bad thing. It depends not merely on the industries but most of all on social forms and relations. A green industrial revolution may well be possible. But not under the auspices of the corporate form within capital rule. The only green industrial revolution worthy of the name is one that is embedded in appropriate social forms and relations respectful of planetary boundaries, a social and ecological restoration.
It takes more than one person to effect a radical social transformation. The fact that we are being presented with a one-person figurehead for a movement is cause for concern. In such operations, it is the financial power that has the clout.
I don’t see this Green New Deal as the great panacea the left-of-centre in conventional politics sees it as. It’s a green Keynesianism and a reformism from above. That’s a tradition concerned with the use of the state to preserve capitalist relations against possibilities of socialist transformation. Keynes’ intentions with respect to government intervention in the economy were entirely conservative. That’s fine if you think the capital system the only viable economic system we have, and that transition to socialism involves a massive gamble that is likely to backfire. Keynes believed some such thing. The problem with Keynesian reflation is that the state can spend all the money it has and more besides, but if there is little or no value being engendered in the economy in the first place, then stimulating economic activity will do nothing with respect to valorization. There is nothing to valorize. All you have done is increased debt. What we will have is a green corporate form run on green/smart energy. Now this really is a pig in a poke. Green energy doesn’t need 5g.
The big problem is that too many people persist in the belief that technology makes energy by some kind of magic; the truth is that it is energy that makes technology possible. That inversion leads to the presumption that the solution to our problems is a mass programme of environmental construction, with the energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels serving to meet all our maintenance needs, these technologies replacing all fossil fuel use. People don’t understand that it takes energy to create energy and that technology is not a workaround. The same misplaced optimism can be seen in the belief in the possibility of a 100% recycling of materials, with many believing further than all the energy required for this will also be supplied by these new technologies. Much of the faith in environmental solutions is rooted in an implicit technological optimism which assumes that we can carry on covering the Earth with technology until the materials run out, regardless of the ecological destruction wrought.
Human beings are storytelling creatures immersed in the narratives they create. That this is true doesn’t make the stories that human beings create and tell true. There is a truth outside of the stories. The stories have to be on nodding terms with reality, then. The narratives around green economics are an eclectic mix of the valid and the downright dishonest. There is little point of warning of the possibilities of corporate hi-jack; the point is that the corporate form is already in the field.
There is indeed a need to initiate movement, and this can happen by a focus on focusing on one of the aspects of the system, such as energy/carbon. But to be meaningful, change requires that complex technologies be reduced to simple ones, since the fundamental problem lies deep in the complex technological system itself. In terms of the distinction that Lewis Mumford drew decades ago, that involves the supplanting of an authoritarian technics involving centralized control by a democratic technics involving localized control. That switch is not something I see set out in the Green New Deal. The very opposite, in fact.
The fixation on carbon emissions leads to the mistaken view that the issue is one of fossil fuels and their elimination pure and simple. I presenting my Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx I was challenged thus by an advocate of green capitalism: ‘instead of abolishing capitalism, why not abolish fossil fuels?’ That challenge is perfectly logical if we see the climate problem as being the result of fossil fuel use and no more. This, however, is not the problem. Environmentalism risks becoming paralyzed in its singular focus on the problem of the carbon generated from fossil fuels. The danger is that movement will stall on that question until civilization collapses, as it most certainly will if we continue to misdiagnose the problem. There is no way of slowing down, let alone preventing catastrophic climate change if environmentalism continues with its single focus on carbon emissions. The point is broader. There is no way we will slow or stem climate change if the focus is on energy and energy systems. The question is one of energy use, and that is a function of the social relations of production. It is not so much this or that energy that is the problem or solution as energy use and the exorbitant demands for energy arising from an economy organized around an accumulative dynamic.
I think we know enough by now to form more than a tentative view on Thunberg, beyond speculation over her connections and personal motivations. I think we know enough to see through this single brave little girl staying out of school façade. There is more to politics than protest, and more powerful players with more powerful sanctions than teachers and their wrath. She’s not on her own nor a rebel with a bunch of kids of her own age. And the kids are not counter-cultural rebels. She is now being presented in the corporate media as ‘the symbol of environmental protest.’ She's more than that; she is the public face of an extremely well-oiled and well-funded public relations machine working for the cream of the not for profit organizations, themselves owned by large corporations that are very much for profit in areas of investment banking and a renewable energy which isn't renewable at all.
Criticism here cannot be deflected. The fact that criticism is being deflected is cause for concern. The fact that environmental activists have suspended their critical faculties to the extent they have is even more worrying. The denigration and abuse that is being directed towards those who ask legitimate questions suggests something even more sinister taking place.
'Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering for certain men?' asks an article in the Irish Times. Time and again I have seen criticism of Thunberg deflected by the citation of this article. The article is being used to delegitimize criticism from all men. I have yet to see any criticism from any man – or woman (Cory Morningstar) for that matter – that is deemed legitimate. This has all the hallmarks of a cult.
One person answered the above question: “Because she's exposing their sick paedophilia?”
Derogatory comments such as this have been too frequent for comfort. Those who dare raise a critical voice risk insult and abuse. The collective hysteria around Thunberg has left me wondering if there is also a sexual angle to this deification of Greta, the innocence personified symbol of ecological purity. I have frequently criticized the schizophrenic split of environmentalism into a scientism on the one hand and a decadent naturism on the other. There are many who have a benign and romantic notion of Nature as mother and goddess. Thunberg seems the very symbol of that purity. I find it not merely an expression of a trademark bourgeois romanticism, but decadent. "Romanticism always turns into decadence," wrote Camile Paglia in Sexual Personnae (2001). The return of the Mother Goddess in an urban culture is always a sure sign of its descent into decadence.
The whole phenomenon of saints and worshippers is creeping me out. I also know that even if I agreed 100% with every statement a political leader made, I would vehemently criticize and reject this worshipful adulation that elevates a person beyond human questioning.
I read this comment from one critic to another: “I don't know how you're getting away without a browbeating. Any time I mention Greta I get dragged over the coals.”
This is not merely wrong, it betrays an inner perversion at the heart of any political movement. Even if the cause is right - and be clear that I think it is - there is a debate to be had over the means of its realization. The closure on debate over both means and ends, and the vitriolic nature of the assault on all those who raise critical issues with respect to either, indicates a movement insulating itself from not only external criticism but also internal criticism. That closed mode of thought indicates a closed organisation, which itself suggests that the end-game is already in place. Our role is to serve as cheerleaders.
Cory Morningstar has written at length on “the Manufacturing Greta Thunberg.” She backs her claims with a wealth of research. I can’t vouch for the quality of research. The claims she makes need to be tested by a similar depth of research. I haven’t the time to do that. I can’t say that Morningstar is right or wrong on this. I can say that there are some very awkward questions to be answered. If Thunberg won't answer them, then her handlers and supporters ought to. They may well have good answers. As things stand, Greta Thunberg is the symbol not of the purity and innocence of nature but of a well-oiled, well-funded green machine, the public face for those in charge of that machine, the culmination of a project which has been in process for years. The end is not system change and ecological restoration but a green industrial revolution based on the corporate capture of nature. That’s the deeply critical conclusion you draw as a result of reading Cory Morningstar. If her research holds up to scrutiny, then the conclusion is damning. And depressing, given the extent to which so many are following uncritically in cult-like manner.
It would be wrong to say that Greta Thunberg is actively working for the corporations, in full acceptance of her role as the benign public face of the corporate capture of nature. I will say for certain that there is a well-oiled, well-funded, well-connected machine and strategy seeking to embed and extend the corporate form in all areas of life, politics and culture to society and nature. Two decades ago in my economic studies at Keele University I argued that the political contest between public and private was in fact a screen for a deeper transformation. What was and is still called privatization is actually the corporatization of public business. It is the corporatization of the things of the public. And that includes nature. Anyone who is blind to this is simply blind.
Much of the Thunberg narrative fits this corporate hi-jacking of environmentalism to re-direct it to the corporate capture of nature. I have noted the fixation on carbon and its implications. Some of her statements don't fit the narrative. The mobilization of millions behind slogans of climate justice, for instance, contains an inherently radical potential that transcends the narrow confines of specific corporate solutions within the existing institutional framework. That may be an intended or unintended consequence. There may be an attempt at some point to rein back demands to the level of the feasible, the extent of the feasible here being determined in relation to existing political institutions and social systems. I would also draw attention to Thunberg’s comments on various climate solutions that are available and being ‘ignored.’ She has teamed up with George Monbiot, for instance, to argue the virtues of land restoration. This is something that would appear to fall outside the narrative of corporate capture, in that the large corporations have little to gain here in the short term. This could be an example of Greta Thunberg's sincerity as an environmental leader, it could be her coming off script to give other aspects of environmentalism a hearing, it could be a tactic designed to give the impression of a holistic environmental commitment, seeming to depart from any corporate narrative in order to cover its tracks. By the fruits you shall know the tree is all I will say. I would recommend that we keep our wits about us at all times. If you are in a poke, beware of pigs being offered for sale.
Thunberg has mobilized ‘the masses.’ Or some of them, anyway. To what end?
In her critical examination, Cory Morningstar emphasizes that Thunberg has stated repeatedly that her strike will continue “until Sweden is aligned with the Paris Agreement.” Is that all that her climate activism amounts to? As the world-weary song asks, ‘is that all there is?’ After much huffing and puffing, has not the mountain of climate activism laboured long only to bring forth a restatement and reenactment of the aged old mouse of climate reformism? Whatever else that demand entails, it is not system change. It is a demand that governments come to govern in the long term interest of all. This, we ought to have learned by now, is precisely what governments embedded in the capital system, subject to its external constraints with respect to accumulative imperatives and the agents of these imperatives, cannot do. It entails a demand for the assertion of the primacy of the political and public interest over the economy and private interest. In abstract terms, shorn of details with respect to specific social forms and relations, that demand constitutes precisely the point and purpose of socialism as Marx conceived it. That socialism is not for the asking but is a question of considered institutional and structural transformation. Then and only then can global agreements at the level of political and legal institutions command an authority backed by practical social force. Without that, we have … the Paris Agreement. This entails a regulative and legislative approach to the climate crisis at the level of the state and market-based solutions under the corporate form at the economic level. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre, Manchester, is right: the age of greening current institutions is over. Judging Thunberg by her clearest statements, the singular, overall goal of the climate strikes she is inspiring is for governments to live up to their commitments with respect to the Paris Agreement. I supported the Paris Agreement out of loyalty to environmental friends, in the hope that in time they would recognize the flawed nature of the agreement and add the missing elements. Momentum was key, and Paris would be the beginning of a process of climate action that would become deeper and more radical as it built. Another ‘beginning,’ that is. Just as people are currently inclined to tone down their criticisms of the Green New Deal now, on the reasoning that it is a beginning of more radical developments. We have now had decades of these beginnings that never go any further. The environmental movement is a case of permanent arrested development, like the boy in The Tin Drum, so fearful of the world that he refuses to grow up. The lesson is that first principles and foundations matter most of all; start on the wrong foot, and you never go in the right direction. The movement is rootless and hence fruitless.
We are expected to silence any critical doubts we may have and, out of loyalty to the cause and agreement on its ends, lend support to positions that are deficient. Inadequacies are often acknowledged, only to be skirted over by the claim that ‘this is the beginning.’ It’s important in the first instance to inspire and attract people, not deter them with discussions of finer points that divide and cause argument. If we were at ‘the beginning’ I would agree. The problem is that this is the apology we have heard from the real beginning of an environmental movement that has now racked up decades of political and institutional failure. We heard this apology at Rio in 1992 and at every environmental conference and event since. Paris was supposed to be the real breakthrough, the agreement that was the real game-changer. I supported it strongly whilst making mild criticisms in public, only to be told emphatically that Paris was never intended to be the perfect solution, only ‘the beginning’ of a long process … The same with movements like Occupy. I ask for clarity with respect to structural and institutional analysis and political objectives, only to be deflected by the claim that ‘this is only the beginning.’ A beginning that takes this long is a clear case of arrested development, one based on a lack of clarity with respect to analysis and understanding in the first place. The problem with the apologetics of beginnings is that whenever people who are well past such beginnings start to analyse more deeply the problems we face and elaborate their resolution, those demanding ‘action’ move away. Whenever, in other words, we start to achieve precision in analysis, understanding, and ambition, there is a reversion to generalisation and simplicity. We are not at the beginning here, we are close to the end. This failure to scale up intellectually, politically, morally, and institutionally to the level of the problem in front of us is how things end. Evolution is challenge and response. Cultural evolution entails an attempt to create Heaven on Earth through science and technology, a goal explicitly set out by the most aggressive advocates of science since the seventeenth century. It gave us a massive expansion of material quantities. In the context of the separation of fact and value, and the exaltation of the former as true knowledge over the latter as merely subjective preference, the expansion of means also brought about a diminution of meaning, so that every increase in knowledge and know-how was accompanied by an awareness of the world as objectively valueless. A disenchanting science overthrew God, and human beings, armed with scientific knowledge and technical capacity, thought themselves clever enough to take control and go it alone. We are not at the beginning at all, we are at the end, surveying the wasteland as masters of nowhere.
And still there is this shying away from power, conflict, and politics so inveterate as to be congenital.
A whole vocabulary has been invented to allow those who shy away from power and power relations to speak in euphemisms. So they will expatiate at length on ‘degrowth,’ whilst carefully avoiding reference to capital and its accumulative dynamic. A way, therefore, is found of discussing economics as if it were a technical problem to be resolved by expertise, eco-design, and implementation. References to power, command, and the control, ownership, and distribution of resources are occluded. Instead of organising an effective political movement, there is an obsession with training and education in centres in which the future functionaries of the Green Megamachine are accredited and certified. This is a world not of political parties, movements, and campaigns but ‘teams.’ The disdain of and contempt for politics is palpable on the part of those who seek to raise expertise and truth above the arena of dialogue, contest, and negotiation. Science and technology are good servants but bad master. The modern world exhibits the pathos of means becoming so enlarged as to replace ends. Those who think truth trumps all things are impatient with and disdainful of politics. The truth they adhere to, of course, is defined in accordance with their understanding of what constitutes knowledge (and know-how, with technology as the product of science). Forget the poets, their words are just aesthetic embellishments. Forget ethics, too, since there is no such thing as moral knowledge. Any ethics espoused is merely patterned on nature. And politics, as the realm of endless dissension, is despised most of all. So training is underway to reverse the worlds of means and ends. Keynes the economist was always clear that economists are merely the custodians of the good life and never made the mistake of believing that economics was the key to defining the good life. Same with politics. Politics is the arena in which human beings come together to determine the terms on which common problems are to be resolved and common affairs governed. Technical expertise – truth - can inform political dialogue and deliberation and decision but not determine and decide it. Know-how can implement any plans agreed. So we must act and thus convert science and technology as the product of science to be our good servant and not bad master. Most of all, we are charged with recognising that the world is going to Hell on a handcart as a result of a capitalist Juggernaut that is a global heat machine. If you are going over a cliff the wise thing to do is to change direction, not debate the fuel being used.
So we try the same thing again, meet with the usual failure, and then go away only to come back with yet another beginning. To do the same thing again. A flawed approach is a flawed approach, and it won’t work just by trying harder.
Paris is flawed to the core and the argument that could once have held, that it is worth supporting as the beginning of more ambitious actions, doesn’t hold. Paris is an alternative to and substitute for precisely those actions. As is the Green New Deal, on the terms on which it is currently being presented. At the heart of the Paris Agreement is the expansion of nuclear, the financialization of nature, further privatization of the commons, which, whilst dressed up as ‘market-based solutions,’ is really the corporatization of nature and the capture of natural ‘resources,’ “large scale CO2 reduction,” (which takes the form of carbon capture storage), and a re-heated Keynesian attempt to stimulate flagging economic growth. It is in precisely these terms that the Thunberg inspired climate campaign is intended to build pressure on governments across the world to bring their policies in alignment with the Paris Agreement.
And that is reasonable, surely? The stark realities of climate crisis are becoming starker by the day. The delay on climate action here has already imposed a procrastination penalty upon the world. Emissions need to be cut drastically, and quickly. The world needs to see zero emissions by 2036, says the IPCC: ‘we need zero emissions by 2036.’ The emissions path that the global economy has the world on is entirely in the other direction. Put simply, the issue reduces to ‘a stitch in time saves nine.’ Delay means that the rates of reduction required become ever steeper and more rapid.
That’s the unvarnished climate truth. But is it the whole truth? That’s one kind of green, the kind which scales up to the ‘global’ forms and forces of the world of abstraction. The point of ecology, though, was surely to rescale power and diffuse control? We are being charged to resolve problems generated by the overscale world with the tools and technologies of that world. To act in alignment with Paris is to be complicit with the plans and practices of the ruling classes, translating their priorities of money and institutional power into environmental form. Adherence to the Paris Accords is the connecting theme which unifies the mainstream NGO movement, with marketing, PR, and promotion spearheaded by organizations such as 350.org, Avaaz, WWF, Greenpeace, working in tandem with the UN (“Changing Together”), the World Bank (“Stepping Up“), and the World Economic Forum (WEF). That, at least, is Morningstar’s critical analysis of the situation.
I hear the response back: carbon emissions on current trajectories spell the destruction of the conditions of civilized life. That is certainly true. Climate change is a ‘global’ problem that requires ‘global’ solutions, and to be effective action needs to of an appropriate scale. You have to fight fire with fire. If this is the case, then it follows that an effective environmentalism requires big financial and technological battalions on its side. Survival on terms of the green corporate form is being presented as an alternative to the system change that is required, but whose political, organizational, intellectual, and moral conditions are nowhere in sight. If socialism is the solution, where is it? If the socialist critique is correct, the question is begged: where is the socialist movement capable of undertaking system change? The history of marxism in the twentieth century has been chercher le proletariat.
So that leaves us with no more lofty politcal ideals other than 'survival.' The twin scientific and industrial revolutions promised to create a Heaven on Earth. Robert Boyle spoke boldly of establishing ‘the Empire of Man’ on Earth. God was overthrown since human beings claimed to have the power to go it alone. You can chart the success in terms of CO2 emissions, from 280ppm in 1750 to over 400ppm in the present day. The path to Heaven was sought through a global heat machine that has proceeded to kick the biosphere over the cliff. William Blake saw it clearly, his ‘dark satanic mills’ referring not to the dirty factories of carboniferous capitalism but to the alienating mechanical reason that brought about this industrialisation. Against this, Blake preserved the divine vision in times of trouble. This is a modern crisis, a story of self-made man and his undoing. This crisis is self-authored: own up and own it! All those dreams of power and conquest of nature to create Heaven on Earth have come to this, survival as the loftiest ideal of the age!
“Hold it the greatest sin to prefer existence to honour, and for the sake of life to lose the reasons for living.” (Juvenal, Satires).
Survival is not reason enough; it is not a reason at all, in that it begs but does not answer the question: ‘survival for what?’ To continue doing the same? Solutions are being pursued via the very institutional, social, and technological forms that brought the crisis in the first place, on the reasoning that these are viable and within reach.
Unpacking this ‘environmental movement’ fact by fact is long and hard work. It is much easier to launch politically and socially vacuous statements like ‘climate justice for all’ and mobilize the masses around corporate plans. It is one thing to wake people up and make them aware of looming ecological catastrophe and civilization collapse, it is entirely another thing to identify the specific institutional and social forms of this crisis and power a movement up to confront the social causes of the crisis. The route being taken is one that deliberately avoids addressing the structural causes, material relations, and class dynamics of the converging social and ecological crises. Instead of challenging existing power relations, the attempt is being made to redirect purposes and priorities within them. If Marx is right, if Meszaros is right – and my two big books of 2018 says they were – then this strategy will doom us all. It will entrench and extend the corporate form for the near future. Which for some is precisely the point.
I have paid little attention to Thunberg. I listen in an attempt to discern a precise critique, point and end-game. All I can discern at the moment is adherence on the part of governments to the Paris accords. I believe that earlier on she was open to a number of environmental ideas. In time, the message has become more precise and more focused, with a clear emphasis on technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels. Could it be that, the first wave of idealism over, the need for precision has taken over and taken her in the direction of mainstream environmentalism – the environmentalism of regulative and legislative intervention within the existing institutional framework, buttressed by familiar technologies and energies. What once seemed new now appears old and stale. It’s an attempt to press the old demands with renewed force.
In which case this isn’t about her – let’s accept that she is completely sincere – but about those who have seen her as an opportunity to advance a particular, pre-determined agenda that is more concerned with the preservation of the capital system through the extension of the corporate form than with the preservation of planetary boundaries. Instead of being a creative agent leading an autonomous grassroots movement engaged in the ecological transformation of ‘the political,’ Thunberg has been stripped of political implication and turned into a benign symbol of the corporate capture of nature. The nature worshippers and planetary fetishizers who populate the decadent romantic end of environmentalism have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, seeing her as the innocence of nature personified. Try and raise a critical point with respect to plans, actions, and interests and you will be met with a reaction so visceral and abusive that it is plain we have moved into the realm of a cult and a false religion: it is the language that true believers reserve for heretics and non-believers.
I keep looking. For someone who has had an awful lot to say, Greta Thunberg’s statements actually reduce to precious little in concrete terms. To those who make climate change as such the central problem of the age, entailing a single focus on cutting carbon emissions by a certain date, then this precious little is not just an awful lot but is the whole climate truth. In which case, Greta is indeed the saint of the climate movement. I think this fixation is misguided and is based on a misdiagnosis of the problem. Why not just eliminate fossil fuels instead of capitalism, I was asked by an economist. In Social Restitution I address that question in terms of the systemic deafness of capital to the realm of use value, something which remains regardless of the energy mix. Social transformation is a big ask, not the work of a summer's day, and presumes we know what we are doing. I set harsh alternative institutions requirements, lest attempts at transformation yield precisely the opposite in the form of an economic wasteland and political repression (it has been known). I argue this in terms of an internal transition as against some external physical abolition and reconstruction via some political agency. That will always produce some "dictatorship of the officials" as Max Weber argued. So I emphasize the immanence of this transition heavily. With addressing climate change a priority, certainly eliminating fossil fuels is key. But since climate change is not the problem, only an expression of a deeper contradiction, then the elimination of fossil fuels cannot be the solution.
The narrow focus on climate change, of course, comes from the loss of the long-term in politics. Drastic measures in the immediate are the order of the day, and that means working with the organisations, institutions, and technologies to hand. The critics of my position may well be right; my criticisms of their position may also be right. In which case it is time to face the music and make your peace with God – your machine gods have failed, own up, own the crisis, beg mercy and forgiveness. And recognize that, for all your science and technology, you were not gods at all.
Is reducing carbon emissionsthe big idea? Is that it? In face of governmental inertia over the decades, the intention is to mobilize mass support behind the same old idea. And ignore institutional and structural analysis? Build pressure through protest? Avoid social organisation and the creation of the material counter-organizations that give force and capacity to a social movement? Turn rebellion into revolution? No?
If that is all that there is to the climate message, then I can tell you know what it reduces to: stop burning fossil fuels and reduce carbon emissions to zero by a certain date (2030-2050). As an abstract target, it seems like the solution to the problem. If the problem of global heating is caused by carbon emissions, then it follows that the solution is to reduce and abolish carbon emissions. Simple. By what means and mechanisms? When the demand is issued that ‘we’ must act on climate change, the question is raised as to who this ‘we’ are and what the media of this action are. To be effective, demands that ‘we’ take action require appropriate means and mechanisms of collective action. I am, as a democratic who values citizen agency and autonomy, presuming that such mechanisms involve the participation of flesh and blood men and women, not merely technocrats of various stripes. Maybe that makes me guilty of an anthropological optimism. In a fractured society divided by class, group, and sectional interest, though, there is no ‘we.’ Inevitably, the demands for collective action come to be projected outwards and upwards to surrogate collectivities, those concentrated forces that are capable of acting in a collective way. We remain within the alien communities of the very system driving climate crisis. In practical institutional terms, the demand to cut carbon emissions translates into the support for global industry and large corporations within a military industrial complex, a veritable environmental Megamachine committed to the construction of Renewable Energy installations designed to keep the current techno-urban capitalist civilization expanding ever onwards. Until I see the technical demands on climate accompanied by a critique of political economy and a commitment to democratization, then the conclusion I draw there stands. Something I find utterly debilitating is the extent to which people are allowed only to say wonderful things about Thunberg, reinforcing the positive imagery and connotations. She is the bright green glow blinding people to the corporate reality; she is the natural innocence that uncritical nature romantics find irresistible in its impression of uncorrupted human nature, and which draws them into the support of an utterly cynical and corrupt strategy. In the very least, it is possible that she is being used as a symbol and a cipher by corporate and statist interests, an icon and a touchstone to cover what is really being planned and is already underway. Dare make that suggestion in public and brace yourself for the reaction. It is the uncritical approach to bright green visions combined with the hostility to criticism that should be a cause for concern with respect to any political movement. I’d suggest that the intellectual and moral compass is in the process of being lost. How do you think socialists ended up supporting Stalinism?
I would suggest the need for self-criticism and reflexivity, insisting that environmental action does not reproduce the very things that have brought the environmental crisis upon us. There must be an explicit statement in favour of a collective emancipation from alien social and institutional forms, removing the environmental movement completely from the dangers of capitalist encroachment and opportunism. Making the agenda one of emancipation rather than merely ‘survival’ (whether of capitalist power relations or planetary systems), we ensure accountability in political and social terms, building active democratic content into the very fabric of the movement. That makes it clear that environmentalism is not merely an abstract and technical issue but an anthropological and moral one, one concerned with what Marx called 'human emancipation in general.' That end orients actions beyond ‘survival’ (answering the question ‘survival for what?’). Lose that end and we risk making mere means ends in themselves. This, in turn, makes it easier for those with other agendas to prevail as a result of a false or skewed presentation of the problem. Climate change is not the problem, but a symptom of the problem. Carbon emissions is one part of the solution, it is not the solution. It is a necessary solution, a big ask, requiring big action. Make it the be-all and end-all, and we have a politics that places action in the hands of those currently operative within the Megamachine.
To be radical is to go to the root. That’s precisely why I describe nature-worshippers and planetary fetishizers as uncritical. They are too impressed by symbols and symbolic action, mistaking protest and concern for radicalism. If you think I am being harsh then monitor, for a short time, the statements made by far too many on the environmental crisis. There will be general statements on how beautiful and bountiful Nature is, followed by lamentations on how ‘we,’ ‘humankind,’ and ‘humanity’ is greedy and destructive, how ‘we’ are selfish, how ‘we’ need to change our ways, how ‘we’ need to act. People who speak in these terms think they are being radical and critical. They are not. They are being reactionary. Their misanthropy leaves no reason to expect that human beings either can and will ever come to change their ways. “We” are destructive and greedy and stupid by definition. There is no analysis here of how certain features of human nature are enhanced or inhibited by specific social relations created in history. To be radical is to go to the roots. Such people don’t do that and neither does Thunberg (from what I have heard and read from her). It’s a match made in Heaven. Especially for those with corporate plans to take us to Hell.
As I wrote above, in practical institutional terms, the demand to cut carbon emissions translates into the support for global industry and large corporations within a military industrial complex, a veritable environmental Megamachine committed to the construction of Renewable Energy installations designed to keep the current techno-urban capitalist civilization expanding ever onwards.
There’s the abstract ‘we’ taking precise form. What precise form does your ‘we’ take? Stop making a virtue of a political vacuum. Identify yourself, commit to a specific politics and put it in the public arena for contestation and challenge.
I see nothing radical here, only more of the same, the final solution as the final insanity, the last word and last breath from ‘men as gods.’
Life is/frightened out of its highly enlightened wits by the return of ancient nightmares: the tales of the sorcerer's apprentice, of dwarfs with magic powers. The promise of Heaven for the poor in spirit is understood to mean that, on earth at least, they should be educated into clever people able to manipulate and let loose the technical installations of Hell.
Erich Heller The Disinherited Mind
Climate crisis is an existential crisis, says Greta, and her worshippers repeat the phrase like a mantra. I don’t think they have the first idea what an existential crisis is, because they don’t know what existence is in anything deeper than the shallows. The only meaning to the game of life, evolutionary biologists say, is to stay in the game of life. ‘Survival’ then. An existential crisis in these terms is merely a threat to survival. But there’s so much more to an existential crisis than mere survival. In merely physical terms, life as such is an existential crisis. 99% of species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. Gone for good. In evolutionary terms, that's a simple fact of no concern and consequence. The regret implies something more than the merely physical is at stake. If human beings are so greedy and destructive, if life really is nasty, brutish, and short, why are people so concerned to ‘survive?’ It’s as if there is something else driving them on, some purpose other than survival. A meaning, even. What is it? Let’s get deeper into this notion of existential crisis. Be radical, be critical, be meaningful.
In making my usual case that the fields of theoretical reason and practical reason need to be bridged, and that there was a need to overcome the scientistic and technocratic bias of environmentalism to develop a genuine ethics and politics (and a view on systems of economic provision and exchange), I was told in forthright, and fairly dismissive, terms that “unfortunately the physics of the global climate system doesn't care about your ethics and politics, and so we’re doomed.” That response made me wonder why said person was so concerned with the planetary unravelling, which he evidently was. For all of the statement of a harsh necessity inflicted on us by an uncaring nature, the word ‘unfortunately’ suggested a regret or a lament in face of unalterable fate. It may, of course, merely have been a sarcastic remark directed at my very human concern with ethics and politics. But the consistent interest in the environmental crisis and doing something about it on the part of the same character seems a moral concern to me, regardless of whether nature cares or not. That denotes a care and consideration that is independent of indifferent nature. I set to thinking even further on that statement. For all of the moral concern, the statement betrays precisely the scientism that has been instrumental in debilitating ethics, stripping the world of meaning, value, and purpose.
This claim that ‘physics doesn’t care’ is significant with respect to the underlying anthropological pessimism it reveals. Because if this statement is true, it means that physics doesn’t care whether good or bad politics or ethics prevails, it doesn’t care what human beings think, say, or do. It reveals the basic debilitating, self-negating truth at the heart of scientistic atheism. When asked if he believed in God, Einstein replied that he believed in “Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." In a nutshell, that is the cold, amoral, indifferent nature which environmentalists as naturalists affirm. Some even worship this nature, seemingly taking some perverse misanthropic delight in embracing a greater power that doesn’t give a damn about human concerns. This loss of connection with the transcendent source and end of all things, sustaining hope and inspiring moral effort, conferring meaning and creating connection, lies at the heart of the ‘existential crisis’ to which many environmentalists repeatedly refer. They may not understand this, but their perspectives are entirely absorbed by a clinging on to physical existence, despite deep down knowing that nature doesn’t care one or another. Nature doesn’t care at all, in fact. It takes the God of Love, the God of personal relationships and human interconnection, to draw individuals out of themselves into relation with the world and others, expanding their being in myriad ways. Fortunately, this God does care about ethics and politics, politics in the sense of human interrelation, self-understanding, and self-actualization in a communal setting. Lose that, and all you have is a physical existence that soon passes, the facts of personal lives being of precisely no meaning or concern to anything or anyone outside of that personal concern. Environmentalists of scientistic atheist persuasion, whose ethics are a naturalism mirroring an indifferent ‘Nature,’ have not learned that human beings cannot adhere to higher aims and objectives and accept and embrace binding rules for a common good – think the preservation of planetary boundaries or social justice – unless they can see something greater than they are, to which they, each and all belong in unity and equality. To free individuals from this membership of and responsibility to a greater entity that cares is to abandon them to themselves, causing them to curve inwards on their own egos as the only meaningful reality available to them. In time, these individuals and the world which they constitute with their practice become demoralized.
The effect of disenchanting science has been dispiriting. The justification of the disgodding of the universe on the part of such scientism has been the promise to create Heaven on Earth. The engine of this humanist imperialism has been a capitalist industrialism that is the very global heat machine that has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe. I know this person to be a militant atheist who is virulently anti-religious. To such persons, I would say this catastrophe is self-authored, and it is for the men who thought themselves gods to own it. You can chart the descent into Hell on Earth by the rise in CO2 from 1750 to the present day, from 280ppm to over 400ppm. That correlates precisely with industrial expansion and the advance of disenchanting science. To such people I would say, your disenchanting science tells you that you are doomed. But there is a greater Reason than this. Your Heaven is turning into Hell, and you have nowhere else to go. This sheds some light on the histrionics over the ‘existential crisis’ we are being repeatedly told we face. The phrase evidently refers to physical existence, as if it has come as news that all material things corrupt, decay, and die. This is an existential crisis for a civilization built up notions of eternity and immortality through technology. An age raised on progress through science, technology, and industry is now being confronted with a destructive backlash of technics, and it experiences it as a religious loss. The new gods of human self-creation have failed, and the cries are deafening. Anyone with a genuine religious faith would never countenance a despair that sees us as doomed.
In this sense, very many climate rebels and protestors are not being radical at all, to the extent they are merely demanding that governments align themselves to the Paris accords. At best, such action is necessary but insufficient. It may be diversion from the key socio-economic drivers of the crisis and absorption into the corporate form that lies at the heart of the problem. The deeper systemic and structural reasons behind climate disruption, the social forms and economic factors operative in that, brings clarity with respect to what is capable of resolving the problem and what is not. Those who are truly radical and serious about getting real in addressing the environmental crisis would not shy away from such critical concerns. Unfortunately, in my experience, far too many people do. They see such critical concerns as divisive and hold rigidly to a centrism that avoids controversies over issues of power, authority, control, and resources. They think that there is a workaround, common solutions that all reasonable people can agree upon. Not only is that ‘third way’ centrism a politically evasive delusion, it plays right into the hands of corporate forces through the false portrayal of a social problem as a technical problem. The environmental problem has been depoliticized, demoralized, and neutered. The centrists take their stand on a classless appeal, little realizing that the common ground has been occupied by the corporate form. Or maybe they do realize and are working explicitly for the corporate dollar.
“To change everything we need everyone.”
This changes "everything," and this general appeal is issued to "everyone." And nothing and no-one in particular. I argue for cooperation and collaboration. In my thesis I argued for socialism as the cooperative mode of production. The problem, though, is that cooperation in itself is not a virtue. The same with respect to collaboration. It matters a great deal with whom we cooperate and collaborate and to what end. Demands to change ‘everything’ need to identify specific forms of mediation. Arguments that "we need everyone" are appeals designed to obscure class relations and dynamics. I know by experience that there are groups working in commons transitions who are shy of controversies over class and wish to elide the realities of social division. When the concern for creating and extending collaborative structures and networks takes the form of class collaboration within an untransformed class system, that’s when the corporate form takes root and spreads. The fallacies of slogans like “we need everybody” become clear once one introduces the capitalists, the bankers, the financiers and speculators, the war mongers, and other miscellaneous characters populating the military-industrial complex. We need to apply sanctions to and exclude the expropriators, enclosers, parasites, and free riders. In terms of a commitment to collaborative endeavours, we can encourage the free riders into cooperation and proceed to rebuild the society. But that strategy involves clarity with respect to the facts of social division, not a deliberate evasion on account of being conflict averse. A systematic conflict aversion involves a choice not to see the reality of the socially structured divisions and how these generate conflict. It means evading a problem rather than addressing it. Paul Mason summed it up concisely: too few people are prepared to identify and address the material roots and class dynamics of the contemporary crisis. The liberal mind stands perplexed and paralyzed in front of a ‘populist’ revolt it neither understands nor empathizes with. In fact it detests people, holds them in contempt for daring to have a contrary voice.
I see Thunberg pictured with Obama. These are friends in high places. Or low. I have spent a lifetime arguing for system change. The likes of Obama, and Clinton and Gore before him, would see me as precisely the kind of socialist extremist likely to lose votes and elections for the moderate centre left party. They wouldn’t be inviting me to meet them. The same with these other political parties, all of them excluding and marginalising radical voices in an appeal for a centre ground that nowhere exists. Such a politics is a cover for the continued monetization of politics. In his speaking gigs, Obama boasts that America was extracting more oil and LNG on his watch than ever before. The liberal fixation on Trump serves to project the sins of every previous administration upon the current president. In point of fact it was Obama who lifted the ban on offshore drilling, and it is worth emphasizing that he did so after the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe in 2010. Why meet with President Trump, since he doesn’t listen to the science, states Thunberg. So she thinks that Obama listens to the science? His efforts on climate were so meagre it took little for Trump to rip it all up. Something so flimsy was never fit for environmental purpose. It was always a cosmetic exercise to make it look as though something was being done. This is before we even start to count the number of bombs that the US dropped on other countries in the last two years of the Obama administration. The US military has the biggest carbon footprint of any organization on Earth. When I hear Thunberg take issue with militarism and imperialism, I shall start to believe that the “this changes everything/everything must be changed” sloganeering is taking a genuinely radical turn. At the moment, she is meeting the bombs and oil President. Instead of revolting at the image, millions are fawning over it. Once people are rendered complicit in their own oppression, then it is game over. When we see supposedly green figureheads lauded and praised at the top tables, then we should know that the fix is in for environmentalism. Here, collaboration takes shape not as encouraging free riders into cooperation, but in the form of the class of parasites, expropriators, and exploiters seeking to position themselves within and profit from ecological collapse.
This is a response I encountered on social media, to someone who merely raised the issue tentatively, seeking clarification, rather than make decisive statements one way or the other:
“Dude, she's not being used. The ONLY message she's bringing out is the actual science...... and from an organic grassroots growth, she's captured the hearts, minds and worries of that generation. Don't even START debating this..... she is just an autistic 16 yr old with extreme courage and big concerns. Listen to HER and not the bs flying around. It's all coming from the ultra-right wing and old jealous and threatened pervs and paedophiles... as is the so called minority "science" of the climate deniers. It's not a belief or political thing she's doing. She's simply raising the alarm and shaming all the adults talking complete and utter bs. :-(
“Dude, she's not and she's not being used. [questions on her associations and connections with respect to those in the background. Are we expected to believe she is doing this alone?]
The ONLY message she's bringing out is the actual science...... [“follow the science” is not much of a message, and we don’t need a figurehead for that. There is much more to this problem than the climate science. Science is silent in the realm of politics and ethics. Science decides nothing here, merely clarifies the nature of the problem. We don’t need a messenger on the science, we know it. The pressing of science into service as an authoritarian politics is a circumvention of democracy and the citizen voice. To “follow the science” I’ll add another slogan: “follow the money.”]
and from an organic grassroots growth, she's captured the hearts, minds and worries of that generation. [the problem being that ecological self-socialization from below, the very thing that attracted me to ecology as politics, is being betrayed into the hands of a top-down authoritarian and centralized movement within the constituted realms of alien power. This isn’t the expansion of an organic grassroots growth, it is its betrayal.]
Don't even START debating this.....
[excuse me, politics is debate, dialogue, dissension. The suppression of contrary voices is an attempt to put politics on ice. This is the plainest attempt to intimidate, abuse, and silence critical observations and objections.]
she is just an autistic 16 yr old with extreme courage and big concerns.
[that is moral and emotional blackmail. This is the revenge of identity politics upon people who believe in objective truth. I have no doubt that the science on the crisis in the climate system is sound. There is such a thing as truth. And that truth has nothing to do with the identity of the person speaking it. Something isn’t true because Thunberg is autistic. There is a clear distinction between proposer and proposition. I bitterly resent this exoticization of Thunberg’s Asperger’s by people who want to use her as a moral and intellectual shield, hiding their own beliefs and prejudices behind an unassailable authority. I despise the way in which these people are using AS to raise Thunberg to the status of prophetess with mysterious powers of clarity and foresight. And I reject firmly Thunberg’s own presentation of AS as a “superpower.” It most certainly is not. And I say this as one who has Asperger’s as a deep-seated and long-standing condition that has disabled me in most areas of life. One thing I have managed to do well, very well, is write on a range of complicated subjects. I will never ever hid behind AS in presenting these writings as necessary truth. It is downright deceitful to make pronouncements and present claims on the basis of a mental or physical condition that gives authority. It doesn’t. The arguments stand or fail on their own merits. If Thunberg starts to speak as an unassailable authority, using her condition as a special power, she needs to be checked immediately. If people start to do likewise, they need to be checked in the most forthright terms.]
“Listen to HER and not the bs flying around. [I am. I am trying to identify the specifics behind general statements. Generalisation works fine at the level of slogans designed for mass appeal. Real politics proceeds in the specifics. It takes no special insight to understand that there is a climate crisis, it takes no special intelligence to say “follow the science.” It takes a bit more to ask, understanding that there is a crisis, what is to be done?]
“It's all coming from the ultra-right wing and old jealous and threatened pervs and paedophiles... as is the so called minority "science" of the climate deniers.
[When people not from the “ultra-right wing” try to raise critical objections they are immediately abused and harassed. You can’t use this as a rebuttal against those within leftish environmentalist circles. The fact that this is a response to people within left environmentalism contradicts the assertion that ‘it’s all coming from the ultra-right.’ As for the reference to ‘pervs and paedophiles,’ I would have to ask the accusers here for clarity. I have heard this accusation more than a few times now. I don’t understand it. But the accusation has been repeated so often and so vehemently now it made me realize that there is some visceral instinct involved. It made me think further. The conclusion I have drawn is that we are seeing here the split in contemporary environmentalism between a scientism on the one hand – science is dominant and explains everything, all other human areas “follow the science,” and problems and solutions are a matter of technology, technique, design, and expertise – and “nature fetishism” or nature worship – nature is pure, benign, and bountiful. In Of Gods and Gaia I criticized the planetary engineering being prepared under the corporate form in claimed resolution of the climate crisis. In reaction to such depoliticized demoralized technocratism I examined Goddess-worshipping naturalism as a reaction. I didn’t argue for that, merely speculated that the former would drive people into the embrace of the latter. It is plain to me now that “scientism” and “naturism” are not alternatives at all but twin poles of the same deficient understanding of the world and the human relation to it. Two cheeks of the same backside. In that respect it makes complete sense to see how gullible nature-fetishizers have been with respect to messages like “follow the science.” They have no grasp of mediation, no understanding of political economy, let alone its critique, see such things as the ‘corruption’ of human agency, greed, self-interest, stupidity, and destructiveness. There is an inherent misanthropy to such views, with almost anything that human beings do being considered a sin against pure and pristine Nature. Human beings are not pure and pristine. But to these people, Greta is the personification of Nature in its uncorrupted, untainted condition. These people are infants themselves, yearning for Eden, unable to meet the challenge of earning a living by labour. They reject it as a violation. Hence the lack of a political economy: they despise such a notion. Hence the lack of politics.
“It's not a belief or political thing she's doing. She's simply raising the alarm and shaming all the adults talking complete and utter bs.”
[The denial of politics … The denial of debate and dialogue. It is clear, then, that this science as authority is really Nature as Goddess, the final authority, ‘Mother Nature as Boss’ as I hear repeated. The scientists are merely the mouthpieces of this unanswerable Goddess. And it’s bunkum from first to last. Nature is not this benign, bountiful deity; human beings lived a precarious existence close to nature, having to conquer necessity by technique and organization. People who argue that human beings should live as natural beings are presenting a naïve view that is neither true to nature nor to the nature of human beings. Human beings are culturally creative by nature; they are immersed in culture, soft and hard culture, including technology. The challenge is to master this creativity in relation to ecological constraints. The actual problem keeps being evaded. Hence the bland recourse to “government.” This recourse to abstract community comes precisely on account of a deficiency and an absence within environmentalism of the means and mechanisms of collective self-mediation.
I shall declare myself uncomfortable with the indications that there is a machine at work using a young girl to advance a political cause that is deliberately short on political details in order to gain as widespread a support as possible. Once that demand for action is incited, the pressure then falls on “government” to undertake large, ambitious programmes in tandem with the corporate forces who are the only ones possessing the tools for delivery. Addressing the climate crisis socially involves mechanisms of investment, regulation, and delivery in which it is the specific details that matter. On this there is nothing. I greatly admire the work of philosopher Ray Monk and am honoured to count him as a friend on FB. His book on Wittgenstein is exceptional. He also wrote an insightful article on Wittgenstein’s “forgotten lesson,” by which he means Wittgenstein’s warnings concerning one of the primary fallacies of the age, “scientism,” or the idea that science explains everything and all things reduce to science. That scientism is all over the environmental movement.
Ray's defence of Greta Thunberg from criticism is revealing: “Greta has not proposed any specific measures. She has demanded only that governments make dealing with climate change a top priority and that they listen to the science.” To be clear, he was defending Thunberg against accusations that she represents a "clueless fanaticism." He may be right to defend her against that charge. But I found his defence revealing: Thunberg’s message reduces to the need for government action in light of what scientists are saying with respect to climate change. All the complicated questions of politics, policy, consent, economic systems, energy infrastructures, investment, will, motivation … frankly everything that is important and in need of being thrashed out is absent.
Or is it? Call me cynical, but I don’t believe that an operation this big is so innocent at all. I think the people supporting and handling Thunberg have some very specific plans in mind. I don't like the use of youth as a political front.
Take this video from “The New Weather Institute.”
Listen to the statements. They are carefully crafted for emotional appeal. The strategy is blatant, so blatant as to be crude. And so crude as to make me more worried that we are dealing with a citizen body that has lost the critical faculty. 'We’ve had the strikes, now here is the plan.' Just like my marketing classes. The demands were raised and millions joined it – the debate is over. ‘We want’ what we want - Now make it happen! And here it is: the Green New Deal. The demand is raised and, hey presto, can now be satisfied. Yesterday we were worried, now we have nothing to worry about. Christmas dinner can be delivered, just heat and serve, cut out all that worry and work.
Listen to the demands and the appeals in the video. They are perfectly calculated. We need the change. Yes. Climate scientists tell us it must be rapid and far-changing. OK … But we don’t make laws. Climate emergency has been declared but nothing is happening. Terrible! Climate breakdown won’t sortitself out. Something should be done! I would have thought that those demanding that something be done would associate together as the somebodies of this transformative action, and would have some idea of what this something is that has to be done. No. ‘That’s the job of the government.’ And so government is to pass laws and impose regulation ‘so that we can have a world we can flourish in.’ I note the language of Aristotle being abused in support of a top-down technocracy that contradicts every principle of the polis as the best regime. ‘We need the government to back a Green New Deal, a system that works for everyone,’ “stop climate breakdown and go green.” Renewable energy. Clean energy. Create lots of jobs. Win-win-win-win, everything we have ever wanted, jobs, growth, investment, happiness as flourishing, Adam Smith and Karl Marx rolled into one, if we all just go green! I’m interested in the fact that it is all young people making these appeals in this video. Hence the false modesty and attempt at political disarmament – ‘but we don’t make laws.’ Not that we are circumventing the citizen voice and telling people and governments what to do (we are). Ignore this feigned weakness and humility – we are just poor children, protect us! Note instead the imperative voice employed throughout, a voice inimical to dialogue. Behind this are some very adult forces using children as a shield. It’s an old ploy to put women and children out in front as a protective shield. As to what has to be done: science, business, and government. The same old. Change, it is apparent, is neither system change nor democratization, merely the exchange of energy systems within capitalist relations.
I note the comment underneath the video.
“Great to see the younger generation as a leading voice in this matter!”
Anyone who really thinks young people really are the leading voices in this environmental solution then they are either desperate or foolish or both. The environmental movement has been politically thwarted and defeated for so long that large swathes of it are evidently happy for the mere semblance of advance and success, and are willing to pay any price. These sweet and innocent young faces are the mask of hard-faced interests with an agenda. Note again the feminisation of the message, too. It’s a cultural trigger. In an age of toxic masculinity, it is the female voice that leads. And youth. And young female. This is utterly reactionary.
The mobilization of so many is only a good thing if they are being mobilized for the right ends, and retain some substantial degree of control over the process radicalization. This is an age in which many are being radicalized by extraneous forces. The danger is that so many may be being diverted into directions which will generate further problems rather than resolve them, and this with their own will and consent. In specific terms this boils down to the fixation on reducing carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and Renewable Energy as a solution. Climate change isn’t the problem, it is a symptom of the problem; and Renewable Energy is not the solution and isn't even renewable. Mobilization here is taking us down the wrong path, away from an understanding of the deeper structural causes of the problem, away from the systemic changes that provide real solutions. It’s the wrong focus with respect to solutions, but precisely the focus one would expect from those working to extend the corporate form.
Could radicalization go in the right direction in time? That depends upon the extent to which people in the mobilization emerge as knowledgeable creative agents in their own right, or remain passive agents of the ideas and actions of others. The fact that Thunberg has such a huge platform, with doors being opened to her at the top tables, suggests that radicalization is not the point of this mobilization. Real solutions require radicalization beyond global capitalist industry, a monetary economy, the corporations. Right? I’m only rendering the sweeping generalizations with respect to “rapid and far-changing” climate actions. We are expected to agree with the young people with respect to their generalisation. I agree. Everything - and everyone – must change. Now, let’s get down to it. It is here where my attempt to encourage greater precision with respect to the specifics of system change begins to jar with the delicate sensibilities of conflict averse co-operators and collaborators. That leaves me wondering just how the specifics of environmental action will come to be thrashed out. Because somebody somewhere, some organisation or organisations or others will have to act. The problem with aversion and vagueness here is that it ensures that practical action resolves itself in favour of already organized forces and institutions, the existing state and government and business. That the demand for action as a result of climate mobilization merely takes shape in the form of programmes of large-scale government action in league with corporate business is a very real risk, in which case the deficiency, aversion, and absence with respect to political economy will serve only to carry environmentalism into the wrong direction – the continuation and extension of the military-industrial complex as the environmental Megamachine. I am therefore concerned to shift the focus from Thunberg and speculations over her motivations and intentions – by the fruit you shall know the tree - to the notion of climate mobilization as a mass radicalization. The real question concerns how the environmental movement underway will be carried further or diverted and thwarted by those in high and low places. I consistently argue the need for concerted action within a comprehensive framework buttressed by small-scale practical reasoning, social proximity, virtuous communities, and love of home and place. That puts the above and the below together. Any split here and we are lost – the above works to an agenda remote from people and planet, the below remains impotent. We need to scale upwards and downwards at the same time to ensure effective action. The movement for environmental action may become diverted and perverted in the service of a ‘green’ industrial revolution, or may proceed towards restoring the living planet. Where Thunberg is with respect to this divide, if it is a divide, I don’t quite know. At the moment we are having to piece her views together from scattered speeches and statements. Whatever future we may have, there will be economic activity and an exchange with nature; there will, then, be an economy. There is nothing inherently wrong with the notion of a green industrial revolution. Green industry will be integral to an economy of ecological restoration. A Green New Deal in the hands of the corporate form, however, is inimical to such restoration. There is therefore a need to mobilize people through the demand for a green industrialisation with ecologically restorative and regenerative actions at its basis. That is precisely what isn't there or, if it is, I can’t see it in more than bland and general terms that say nothing. In terms of hard facts, arguments, and identifiable goals, the environmental movement is being sent in the wrong direction which, given that time is of the essence, will likely prove fatal for civilization.
Sooner or later, if people are serious, and if their radicalisation proceeds beyond protest against the things they know to be wrong, they will get more precise with respect to political institutions, social relations, and economic systems. The problem is, whenever this stage has been reached in the past, too many have withdrawn from the truly radical implications of their demands at the level of practice. Practitioners have consequently shied away the critique of political economy and invented a language that allows them to bury the radicalism in euphemisms that naturalize capitalist relations. But still the problems remain, and get worse, until the day finally comes when people return to add nerve to nous in order to see a problem for what it is and are prepared to act for its resolution.
So, in the end, with continued mobilization and radicalization, people will get precise. That anthropological optimism is central to my argument, contradicting views that human beings in the mass are fools and dupes, and that leaders of mass movements are tools diverting people into sterile channels. That there are shadowy forces in the worlds of money and power who engage in such tactics of diversion and perversion is a different point. So I am careful to distinguish GT from the forces of corporate capture. Morningstar openly states it's a racket. We shall see.
At the same time, no political movement should be hanging on the say-so of a single person like this. That's not a movement at all. It may make sense as a mobilization for the survival of civilization, and to that end this is fine. But be clear that that is a movement for survival, not transformation. Questions of transformation involve distinctly political questions that, we are told, are secondary to the “physics.”
I have read Thunberg’s UN statement. She is right on the facts. Which is to say that those who have been doing the numbers for years on this are right. Which is to say that adults haven’t failed at all. The failure is of specific social forms and relations and the way that these determine economic purposes with respect to the interchange with nature. That’s the breakthrough in understanding we need to make. The climate problem is most certainly real and the cause is right. I have called it The Last Great Cause. Resolve this issue, and all the great ideals of politics, ethics, and movements for justice and equality in history will be much more easy to resolve. If human civilization is up to the task of scaling up to solve this problem, it can crack the others. The paradox lies in the way this demand for system-change is constantly being issued to the very institutions which are charged with running the system to be changed. That's the institutional and political flaw at the heart of this movement, the demand that a lion be a lamb. That will lead to frustration, defeat, and dissipation. Radicalisation has to move quickly into specifying and transforming the core institutional and structural features of capital’s social metabolic order. The environmental movement is big on ecological sin. The only redemption it seems to offer, though, is technological. It is leery of political issues. This is a flawed theology. You have to be prepared to name sin for what it is if you are to expect mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. Until people are prepared to name ‘the system’ to be changed for what it is – capital – then they will keep talking around the problem, letting both transformative and redemptive possibilities go begging. Growth is accumulation! State it for what it is instead of using slippery euphemisms for fear of being political and hence controversial.
My point is not that there is a clear corporate hijack. That there will be an attempt at such a thing is clear enough. Morningstar presents a lot of evidence to that effect. I think it is a very strong claim to say that Thunberg is the figurehead of a corporate heist. My point is different, arguing that the failure to scale up demands in systemic and structural terms will force resort to action through the very "politics- and business-as-usual" institutions that are complicit in the climate crisis. This will be so because these, and the vast financial and technological resources they command, are the only games in town capable of acting at the scale required to address climate change. As ever, though, it is what Marx called the transformation of the social relations of production that is missing. It’s survival and not transformation, then. The language being used at present is ambivalent, although the demands being raised are most certainly radical. They are demands that invite further radicalization. They are demands that not merely invite us into contemplating the structural and systemic aspects of the crisis, but force us to.
Thunberg’s UN statement is, of course, right on climate. It’s the skirting of the question-begging institutional implications that worries me. I shall cut the emotional blackmail, it cuts no ice, and I have a profound distaste for adults who exploit sentimentality to sway people by emotion. I prefer a genuine emotional intelligence.
“I also have a dream: that governments, political parties and corporations grasp the urgency of the climate and ecological crisis and come together despite their differences – as you would in an emergency – and take the measures required to safeguard the conditions for a dignified life for everybody on earth.”
That appeal for unity in a class divided system will fail, as it has failed in the past, for the very reason it presupposes a social identity that doesn’t exist and which stands in need of creation – an identity in which individual and social good coincide. Whenever I hear a moral appeal for people in politics and society to “come together,” I know we are rehearsing for the defeat that is sure to come. The problem is not one of will, it is one of structured social relations, stakes, and interests. The commonality and universality that is frustrated in bourgeois civil society as a sphere of antagonism and egoism is always projected upwards into a heavenly but impotent moral appeal. That said, the declaration of emergency is calculated to override all such tricky problems and ensure a common action that allows civilization to survive, so that human beings can go back to their social divisions. A self-cancellation leading to a self-annihilation is built into the capitalist social fabric. We need to uproot it at source.
“I have a dream that the people in power, as well as the media, start treating this crisis like the existential emergency it is.”
The capital system is a subjectless and anarchic system of alien control. ‘The people in power’ are not in power at all, they are the personifications of economic categories and social relations. The repetition of the phrase ‘existential crisis’ is an attempt to add moral depth, but refers merely to physical existence. Those who have subjected the world to a disenchanting science, revealing the world to be objectively valueless and meaningless, have no right to write of an existential crisis in this purely physical sense. All material things corrupt and die. Those who say that ‘history will judge us badly’ are really lost souls in search of God. Nature doesn’t give a damn. It can’t. There is no God. There is no responsibility to anything or anyone but one’s own ego. That’s the sophist world the age that has abandoned God and religion has delivered. These existential problems are self-authored: own them. Or beg mercy and forgiveness. And shed the new idol of capital and its accumulative imperatives.
“In fact I have many dreams. But this is the year 2019. This is not the time and place for dreams. This is the time to wake up. This is the moment in history when we need to be wide awake.”
I dearly wish people would wake up, particularly those making such calls. I am wide awake. Last year I wrote on Istvan Meszaros, my old intellectual mentor, who died in 2018. Meszaros was writing on ecological limits before The Club of Rome issued Limits to Growth. Here’s the difference, Meszaros related these to the ecological contradiction of the capital system. The Club of Rome didn’t, but instead issued a series of books arguing that the governments of the world hand over control of the economy to a panel of experts. That idea didn’t go down well with either governments or the governed, and for want of a serious politics the ecological cause was marginalised. And now the spectre of eco-authoritarianism is back. Environmentalists need to wake up socially and politically.
“And yet, wherever I go I seem to be surrounded by fairytales. Business leaders, elected officials all across the political spectrum spending their time making up and telling bedtime stories that soothe us, that make us go back to sleep.These are “feel-good” stories about how we are going to fix everything. How wonderful everything is going to be when we have “solved” everything.”
I shall leave aside what this denigration of fairy tales denotes in terms of the lack of a moral imagination.I shall simply refer people to my writings elsewhere on this. Suffice to say, that denigration denotes a mindset governed by the dominant fallacy of the age, that of “scientism.” That idea has been instrumental in the degradation and destruction of the natural world.
I don’t disagree at all with the claims made here. But they are pitched at such a general level that they are really invitations to the rest of us to draw the obvious conclusions. Progress has been achieved, economic growth is not our saviour, behind it is an accumulative dynamic that is eating and heating up the planet, and those with reformist institutional and technological fixes are selling us a pig in a poke. Again, it is important to name what lies at the heart of it all: the capital system. If you are not prepared to name the problem for what it is, then you are not prepared to be truly radical. For want of diagnosing the problem accurately, in terms of systemic analysis, you will be led into proposing and selling a remedy that is every bit as much a ‘fairy tale’ as those you decry. ‘The people in power’ are not in power, and expecting these people to implement a solution is a delusion.
“But the problem we are facing is not that we lack the ability to dream, or to imagine a better world. The problem now is that we need to wake up. It’s time to face the reality, the facts, the science.”
Right, “scientism.” It is by now abundantly clear that science and technology cannot go it alone in resolving the crisis in the climate system. The ‘existential crisis’ that is climate change cannot be addressed exclusively, nor even mainly, by through science and technology. A scientistic, technical reason cannot govern alone, we require the integration of all our faculties. This statement betrays everything that is deficient in a rationalized world, the idea that ‘reality’ is merely physical existence, that ‘facts,’ divorced from and privileged over values, are the only form of knowledge, that “the science” is our authoritative framework. It’s time that people wake up to the fact that this has been the dominant culture of the modern age and it has brought us to this very existential crisis.
“And the science doesn’t mainly speak of “great opportunities to create the society we always wanted”. It tells of unspoken human sufferings, which will get worse and worse the longer we delay action – unless we start to act now. And yes, of course a sustainable transformed world will include lots of new benefits. But you have to understand. This is not primarily an opportunity to create new green jobs, new businesses or green economic growth. This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.”
That can be read that as a statement against ‘green capitalism’ and the attempt to co-opt environmentalism and corporatize public life and nature. Environmental action is undertaken as an end in itself, not because it is good for business. I agree. A statement like this could contradict the narrative of corporate hi-jack. But note well that the lack of specifics with respect to the way forward leaves the environmental cause open to hi-jack. And note further that the language of emergency is designed to create an impatience with regard to identifying specifics, such things being considered time wasting when there is an imperative “to act!” Note, too, that the statement does not rule out green capitalism under corporate control. The language is disarmining and makes no overt presentation of a corporate solution, or any solution, merely says that ‘this is not primarily’ a business opportunity. I draw attention to overt expressions of denial and what they may connote. 'Not primarily a business opportunity but is all the same.'
Shakespeare drew attention to this phenomenon when he wrote 'The lady doth protest too much.' There isn’t too much of a protest here, in that ‘green economic growth’ under the auspices of corporate capital is not denied. We don’t get anything like that precision. But it is still a mild example of an overkill signal which implies a disinterest, but reveals also a desire. Another way of putting it would be to say that resolving the climate crisis is not about fuelling the engine of a new green economic growth … but it may well involve such a thing as a necessary means to an end.
Most of all note the attempt to foreclose further analysis and debate. “This is above all an emergency,” and not any old emergency, either: “This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.” We must be prepared to use whatever tools and technologies are available, then. We have to be politically realistic. Socialist transformations are idealized fantasies, and there is no time to lose. Who or what, I ask, are the agents on hand that have the power, the resources, and the global reach to scale up to the problem of climate action? An emergency demands that action be taken NOW! Who or what has the power to act with sufficient weight? But it’s OK, because this is an ‘existential crisis’ that is all about ‘survival.’ No other values beyond physical immediacy matter.
“Stop pretending that you, your business idea, your political party or plan will solve everything. We must realise that we don’t have all the solutions yet. Far from it. Unless those solutions mean that we simply stop doing certain things.”
Who has promised that a plan of action “will solve everything?” Who is pretending? Name names. And who is hiding a political plan behind platitudes and appeals to unanswerable science? This sounds like setting up a strawman to knock over. These are initiatives in eco-design and transitions that do sound too easy and simple to be true, as with market solutions, as with … well, anything that anyone proposes. This attack is quite underhand. It involves a pretence of innocence in intent, the pretence that nothing is being offered, nothing being sold, no agenda being slipped past people. Others, however, are offering their particular solutions as the whole solution and, as such, are to be treated with caution and scepticism. We, on the other hand, have entirely pure disinterested motives and are foisting nothing at all on people. It is the disarming quality that gives the approach it's appeal. But note that it contains a stricture against those who, having engaged in institutional and structural analysis with respect to the precise nature of the social system, suggest the way to proceed. This passage is strong on what we should be against, but not merely agnostic but positively atheistic on what we should be for. Alternate platforms are denigrated whilst nothing in particular is offered in their place. This creates a political vacuum; it rules out any proposals that you or I may have. It blocks particular plans and proposals arising in the world of politics and business, the world of practical reason. It leaves us facing an emergency that threatens human civilization in a vacuum. It will be filled, of course. But by whom?
“Changing one disastrous energy source for a slightly less disastrous one is not progress. Exporting our emissions overseas is not reducing our emission. Creative accounting will not help us. In fact, it’s the very heart of the problem.”
Quite true, and I and many others have said precisely this many times. Many of us have woken up to the systemic causes of this crisis, which means the way forward is not as obscure at the above statements allege. We should be suspicion of innocence in politics. I’d go further and state that how we fuel the expansionary capital system is not actually the problem. Replacing fossil fuels is indeed imperative to cutting carbon emissions. But that is not the end of the problem, just an integral part of dealing with the problem.
The statement comes to the mere 50 per cent chance the world has of staying below a 1.5 degree Celsius of global temperature rise above pre-industrial levels. There is recognition that these calculations include neither the non-linear tipping points as well as most unforeseen feedback loops like the extremely powerful methane gas escaping from rapidly thawing arctic permafrost, nor the already locked in heating hidden by toxic air pollution. I note how many repeat these figures without noticing something that lies right at the heart of this ‘existential crisis.’ The moderns have been brought up on the perverted religion of progress, with salvation coming in the form of scientific advance, technological power, and industrial expansion. It’s made people healthier and wealthier and longer-lived than at any time in history. It has also brought us to the brink of ecological collapse. With climate crisis people are being made to confront the fact that their delusions of heroic materialism have turned destructive and their machine gods have failed.
Be that as it may, this remains an accurate assessment of the perilous situation we face, a mere 50% chance of avoiding climate destabilisation that sets off “an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control.”
Reading that phrase “beyond human control” makes me think of Marx’s alienation thesis, which describes a situation in which human creations come to escape human control and comprehension within alienative relations, acquire an existential significance of their own, and subordinate human subjects to a passive, self-destructive, dependence on ‘things.’
We get the lessons on the carbon budget:
“So where do we begin? Well I would suggest that we start looking at chapter 2, on page 108 in the IPCC report that came out last year. Right there it says that if we are to have a 67 per cent chance of limiting the global temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, we had, on 1 January 2018, about 420 Gtonnes of CO2 left to emit in that carbon dioxide budget. And of course that number is much lower today. As we emit about 42 Gtonnes of CO2 every year, if you include land use. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining budget is gone within less than 8 and a half years.”
It is indeed “time to act.” There follows a criticism of President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. I condemned Trump for this too, vociferously, whilst pointing out that Paris was flawed to the core. Surely, those flaws cannot be skirted? We had the appeals to unite behind Paris. Such appeals skirt the flaws that will issue in failure. (Although they may serve a political and economic purpose, advancing certain interests on the back of the environmental crisis).
“Four-hundred and twenty Gt of CO2 left to emit on 1 January 2018 to have a 67 per cent chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees of global temperature rise. Now that figure is already down to less than 360 Gt.
These numbers are very uncomfortable. But people have the right to know. And the vast majority of us have no idea these numbers even exist. In fact not even the journalists that I meet seem to know that they even exist. Not to mention the politicians. And yet they all seem so certain that their political plan will solve the entire crisis.”
True. But that criticism applies most certainly and most of all, in fact, to Paris. Nations cannot go it alone, but the idea that Paris is the solution is fanciful, a ‘fairy tale’ indeed. “And no matter how political the background to this crisis may be, we must not allow this to continue to be a partisan political question. The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics. And our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy now is physics. And we can not make “deals” with physics.”
Be clear that beyond ‘party politics’ means ‘beyond politics’ pure and simple. This is where the technocratic workaround in relation to power and politics kicks in. This is where the trick is turned. We have the political disarmament, the denial of ulterior motives, the pressing of an emergency, now the unanswerable authority of ‘nature’ and ‘science.’ Making deals is politics. This is an attempt to remove the environment from the realm of politics and people. We end on the commercial: “But you must not spend all of your time dreaming, or see this as some political fight to win. And you must not gamble your children’s future on the flip of a coin. Instead, you must unite behind the science. You must take action.”
What action? “Stop pretending that you, your business idea, your political party or plan will solve everything."
The statement is a clear example of the politics of anti-politics. Be very suspicious of the absence of specifics with respect to politics and economics. Be very cautious of authoritative appeal to science in politics. We shouldn’t see this as politics, we shouldn’t have a voice at all, we have no moral right to argue or question. “The science” is clear. And we end on the imperative voice – we “must” unite behind the science. This is not merely mistaken, it has all the hallmarks of a calculated plan. It is carefully crafted, pushes all the right buttons.
I say mistaken because, I repeat for the umpteenth time, that science is not politics and is not ethics, and can say nothing on questions of value, meaning, and significance. The challenge is to bridge the worlds of theoretical reason (science, facts, our knowledge of the physical world) and practical reason (ethics and politics, of which economics is a branch). Scientific knowledge and technological know-how give us the ability to act, they do not create the will to act. To subordinate the latter realm to the former possess downright totalitarian intent on the part of a very spurious politics. The politics of emergency is a demand for authoritarianism.
Statements like this are superficially right in so far as they go. It's where they go from here that is the key issue. It's the next stage where diversion, conversion, and perversion kicks in. Or, if radicalization also entails enlightenment, not, and momentum takes us into a challenge against the global capital system. They don't hand Nobel prizes out for that. We are certainly living in a crisis with transformative potential, and this movement certainly has the potential to realize that potential beyond existing relations. This is always how change in history comes about, it is never clean and clear. Someone has to check against the tendencies of many to opt for "third way" "moderate" compromises, for fear of extremists like me making a perfectly reasonable idea like climate stabilisation sound awfully like socialism. When I was out campaigning for the Green Party at some election or another, I was with another Green in Gillars Green, St Helens. As we talking with voters, trying to claim their souls, a Labour Party over the road shouted to warn the voters: "Beware of Greens bearing gifts!" I may make this a slogan. There are various kinds of green. (We had already sewn up the postal vote in the road, we told him).
Please read this article by Jeff McMahon.
I didn’t notice Thunberg’s critique of the Green New Deal, either. In fact, she doesn't even mention the Green New Deal, let alone subject it to detailed criticism. For McMahon to refer to Thunberg’s general dismissal of unspecified alternatives as a ‘critique’ indicates a political bias on his part against ‘liberal’ (or socialist or radical) politics. That he could recruit Thunberg so easily to a false centrist position (free market) should be cause for concern. Politics abhors a vacuum. General statements that evade discussion of specific social forms, structures, and relations, are really the political equivalent of blank cheques. Draw these on government and business, and you may well be mortgaging your future for a long, long time.
I noticed the attempt to circumvent politics from the first. As I suspected all along, there is an attempt to hide a very distinctive politics behind physics on the pretence of being non-political. This is not merely an evasion of politics and discussion over specific details with respect to climate action, it is an attempt to impose a pre-determined climate solution through specific agencies:
"we must not allow this to continue to be a partisan political question. The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics." (Greta Thunberg)
Forget "party" here, that is an attempt to remove the environment to a place beyond politics and beyond dialogue. That is to employ the environment as an overarching and authoritative imperative dictating to politics. This is the raising of what is most certainly a political platform beyond challenge and contestation. Don't believe any of this guff about taking the politics out of climate so as to encourage conservative forces on board. It's rot. There is a strategy at work here in which both socialist and conservative forces are both denied a legitimate voice and are merely being seduced into a pre-determined agenda around a 'green' industrial revolution. It's a clearly political attempt to trump legitimate political platforms, however divided between left and right, by reference to "physics" as unanswerable authority. When they say "follow the science" they mean obey the scientists, that is, some of the scientists. On the one hand there is this "scientism" in which science explains everything and is the ultimate authority, on the other hand there is this "nature fetishism" in which Nature is worshipped as being in control. Pure, pristine Nature before corrupt greedy, destructive human beings intervened. This bogus environmentalism is designed to put politics and people on ice to work a pre-determined agenda.
Note well the denigration of "partisan" politics. Politics is "partisan." Dissension, debate, and dialogue are the very stuff of politics. Politics is the raising and contestation of alternative platforms. Treat the forces of depoliticization with deep, deep suspicion.
Let me quote from this McMahon article:
“Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of Congress last week took no prisoners and showed no favor to heroes of the left who have styled themselves friends of the environment.
Though Thunberg did not utter the words “Green New Deal,” she characterized partisan efforts that envision an idealized future as unhelpful dreams.”
I would need to check precisely what Thunberg did say, lest McMahon be putting his own twist on them. That said, having heard her speeches many times, I am always struck by the absence of politics and political economy, and the emphasis on statements so general with respect to “listening to the science” that I am left wondering what the excitement is about. And the science implies what, precisely, at level of institutions, policies, economic systems, relations of production? Any attempt to identify specifics here is open to denigration and devaluation as mere unhelpful dreaming. Unless, of course, it involves corporations in command of finance and technology and substantial government intervention.
Thunberg’s criticism – which didn’t actually mention the Green New Deal - culminated in these words:
“No matter how political the background to this crisis may be, we must not allow this to continue to be a partisan political question. The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics. And our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy now is physics. And we can not make ‘deals’ with physics.”
How convenient! Let’s put aside the background and causes, all those nasty and controversial questions of politics, issues of power, resources, authority, control, those kind of things. That appeal is plainly ideological in Marx’s critical sense of concealing, rationalizing, and preserving existing power relations. But there are other problems with this statement.
Let me state clearly here that that setting of physics and politics in antithetical relation is an entirely false way of stating the problem. Addressing climate change is not a question of the physics trumping the politics, but of establishing the proper relation between the two. That entails more than politics bending the knee to physics but of a political reordering of institutions and systems so to establish concordance between the social and the natural metabolism. I set this out clearly in Social Restitution. Thunberg here is merely repeating an argument that has been done to death in environmental circles over the years.
(Those who insist on asserting physics over politics are merely scientific naturalists stating no more than the trite truth that all material things come to an end. In which case I would simply say that if life is meaningless, then nothing is more meaningless than the science which says it is so. It is, I would suggest, that bleak atheistic philosophy that has brought the civilization to the brink of catastrophic collapse. This is the reason for their extremely shallow notion of existential crisis).
McMahon draws conclusions which attempt to steer environmentalism away from radicalism:
“The Achilles’ Heel of the Green New Deal is that it deploys the climate crisis as a liberal cause, which ensures conservative opposition.
The climate crisis is a universal cause.
Conservatives need a way to get on board. It’s difficult for them to support a policy that evokes the New Deal. And conservative opposition will relegate the Green New Deal to the realm of fantasy at least until a cataclysm arrives like the one that inspired the original New Deal.”
That view rules out radical transformation and system change. It even rules out a Green New Deal, as though such a thing really were liberal and socialist. Those who think New Deal economics socialist need to think again, because the truth is precisely the opposite. They need to read this article, Keynes Was Really a Conservative by Bruce Bartlett. Bartlett was a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and as a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush. He argues that Keynesian interventionism was designed to protect the capitalist system against socialist attempts to replace it.
This passage from Thunberg has all the evasion of controversial questions of power, authority, control, resources, class, and material relations of production which characterises an ideological project:
“Wherever I go I seem to be surrounded by fairytales. Business leaders, elected officials all across the political spectrum spending their time making up and telling bedtime stories that soothe us, that make us go back to sleep. These are ‘feel-good’ stories about how we are going to fix everything. How wonderful everything is going to be when we have ‘solved’ everything. But the problem we are facing is not that we lack the ability to dream, or to imagine a better world. The problem now is that we need to wake up. It’s time to face the reality, the facts, the science. And the science doesn’t mainly speak of ‘great opportunities to create the society we always wanted’. It tells of unspoken human sufferings, which will get worse and worse the longer we delay action – unless we start to act now. And yes, of course a sustainable transformed world will include lots of new benefits. But you have to understand. This is not primarily an opportunity to create new green jobs, new businesses or green economic growth. This is above all an emergency, and not just any emergency. This is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.”
The very things which are at issue with respect to the socio-economic drivers of climate catastrophe are absent. Just maybe that criticism of fairy tales could well apply to the systematic exclusion of class and accumulative imperatives from discussion of commons transitions and climate solutions. I could certainly take these lines and apply them to countless transitions and solutions that have been offered and are still being offered by environmentalists of various kinds: “These are ‘feel-good’ stories about how we are going to fix everything. How wonderful everything is going to be when we have ‘solved’ everything.” I have heard more than a few of these stories. The consistent thread of all these fairy-tales is the absence of political economy and its critique. Try to introduce these things and you will soon meet with disquiet, scepticism, and criticism. I note there is no mention of capital and class in Thunberg’s supposedly realistic and hard-hitting pronouncements, either here or elsewhere. I can go on social mediaevery day to hear someone say “we need to act now.” The same with respect to the demand that people “wake up.” People have “woken up.” The obstacle to effective action is not lack of awareness, it is the absence of appropriate and effective means and mechanisms of collective action. Creating and networking material counter-organs to constitute the ecological society within the shell of the failing civilization is the responsibility of the environmentalists.
I have constantly argued for an ecological self-socialisation in this sense. Instead of eco-citizens constituting the Green Republic, though, we have protestors demanding government action. And little wonder, when statements like this are applauded, despite being almost entirely bereft of political and social content. Instead, it’s the same old use of science as authority, translated into political necessity: “It’s time to face the reality, the facts, the science.” “The science.” Those words alone are deemed to constitute an unanswerable argument: “the science.” Science can establish the facts with respect to the physical environment, but it can say nothing with respect to how we deal with the crisis upon us, organize our economic systems, what we ought to do, the values we live by, why we should bother. Nothing. And “the science” is not even a decisive voice. The arguments over whether climate change is even happening, and whether it is down to human made or natural factors continues. It shouldn’t continue, of course. “The science” is as clear as and as certain as science could ever be, but it has resolved nothing politically. Because science is not politics, and the sooner environmentalists realize that and start to engage in politics properly the better it will be. In the absence of that engagement, we have this attempt to circumvent the political realm with statements of unarguable, unanswerable facts, demands for “action,” backed by the corporate tools to realize them.
Thunberg described her Asperger’s as a “superpower.” The hell it is! It is very far from that. In my experience it is utterly disabling. It makes you obsessive about certain things and issues. I have been relentless in my research, reading, and writing. I write extensively. And repetitively. But one thing I would be clear about is this – the arguments I make stand or fall on their merits. There is no superpower here, just the ability to gnaw away at a question when most people would have given it up. I utterly reject the exoticization of Asperger’s. A person doesn’t need to be a genius or a mathematician or an engineer or a prophetess nor even a philosopher to be valued. Most AS people are far from being geniuses and struggle on life’s margins. Those who think it is a superpower because it allows them to associate their views with some special vantage point make me wretch.
This is where McMahon draws conclusions which identify an incredibly reactionary bent in the whole phenomenon:
Greta’s most important superpower is her integrity. She’s not going to take a limo back to the hotel. She’s not going to compromise for convenience. She’s not going to compromise for feel-good friends or would-be allies. She’s not going to seduce us with utopian palliatives. She’s going to keep telling the truth.
She sailed here just to insist that we read and heed the science.
McMahon praises this as a good thing. But it’s pure flapdoodle. We don’t need Thunberg to tell us there is a climate crisis, we know. Those that don’t get it don’t get it for reasons that are beyond rational persuasion at the level of fact. That’s where politics and social interests come in, both of them legitimate areas. It is that refusal to leave the simple realm of scientific fact and enter the political world of debate, dialogue, and contestation that identifies the trademark elitism and cowardice at the heart of environmentalism. Far too many environmentalists are shy of politics and argument, hence their search for a scientific certainty that trumps the yes/no of politics and ethics. They like the idea that truth and reason are non-negotiable. They are utterly lost in a world in which truth needs to be exposed in dialectic. Here, Thunberg’s repetition of the message “follow the science,” the statement of the unvarnished truth on climate change, is not the act of bravery it is portrayed as at all but precisely the opposite – a cowardice in face of real politics. That criticism applies generally.
Let’s look at those lines from McMahon again: “She’s not going to seduce us with utopian palliatives. She’s going to keep telling the truth.”
Those lines encapsulate everything that is amiss in environmentalism as politics. I have now grown tired of repeating this point – the truth cannot simply be given, it has to be actively willed, internalized, and lived on the part of the citizen body. You can tell the truth until you turn blue in the face, but if you have not cultivated responsiveness through community connections, practices, the virtues, then that truth will not ‘take.’ The failure of environmentalism to build a habitus in which the ecological virtues can be known, understood, learned, acquired, and exercised in practices will doom it and force recourse to abstract communities and collectivities. As for the claim that “she’s not going to seduce us with utopian palliatives,” that statement immediately denigrates all attempts at system change. There is an incoherence in this new wave of environmentalism that needs to be clarified and quickly. When protestors demand ‘system change not climate change,’ we need to know whether they do actually mean system change. Because the likes of McMahon would straight away dismiss this as utopian fantasy. His dismissal can be turned on its head, of course. Because those ‘utopian palliatives’ he dismisses describe precisely attempts at a reformist greening within the institutions of the capital system. I sincerely hope that Thunberg isn’t attempting to seduce us with such institutional tinkering. I think she is saying that we are beyond that. And I hope that the environmental movement refuses to compromise its integrity by settling for some such thing. But you can see, here, how a vagueness with respect to political economy leaves a vacuum that forces extraneous to environmentalism can occupy. We need clarity with respect to specific forms of mediation here and quickly. The longer we go without clarity, the more it becomes evident that this activism is empty on radical intent.
This trite, contrived portrayal of a politics as "fairy tales" needs exposing. I have no doubt those words would apply to my attempts to envisage the future. Or anyone else's. As to her own vision … Thunberg offers platitudes amounting to no more than "follow the science," condemns those working out the specifics at the level of political institutions, forms of governance, economic provision as peddling "fairy tales," still offers nothing but platitudes herself, other than references to new technologies all in the hands of the corporations. And in face of this we are supposed to silence our partisan voices. I note also the abuse that is directed against those who dare raise critical concerns with respect to this cynical politics masquerading s politics behind the personification of nature's Edenic innocence.
Note that the rejection of "partisan" politics here is an attempt to pose as a disinterested "third way" that stand above the normal fray of politics. It's a clear attempt to claim political authority. Note the denigration of specific political platforms. But note, most of all, how incredibly thin on specifics this Thunberg is. If you can find them, let me know. I've been searching. All I can find is an insistence that governments align with the Paris Agreement and carbon emissions be drastically cut - and then we get the green energy installations. No deliberation, no debate, just the insistence the "we act now." Who is this "we?" More to the point, can we ask who the people around Thunberg are. I am not one of that "we."
I don't care if you are left or right in politics, there is a real danger that you are being had here.
As a socialist I'll argue for fairy-tales. Because, steeped in the work of the profoundly conservative J.R.R. Tolkien, I know what fairy tales are; I know the real value of fairy tales and how they nurture the moral imagination. This technocratic elite working for the corporate capture of nature have no idea what fairy tales are. They don’t want to know, either. They know they are worthless; they nothing by way of ethics and imagination. Nor politics in the genuine sense. I can spot a totalitarian mugging a mile off. And maybe that is what certain environmentalists really want. I am reading an argument which presents China as a leader on climate action. China, it is claimed, is the largest investor in renewable technology in the world. China possesses what is called an authoritarian advantage – which refers to the substantial powers that government possesses to impose new technologies and energy systems. Is that the future? Is that what environmentalists really want? There is a dark social and ecological side to China’s industrialisation, of course.
I don't remotely see the Green New Deal as Left at all, certainly not socialist - the very opposite in fact. I see the diversion and perversion of a mass movement underway, a radicalization in the direction of sterile channels.
The ignorance of political economy is breath-taking. The identification of a New Deal as Left beggars belief. Read Keynes, the whole point of such interventionism was to stave off socialism. It just expands the state, increases expenditure, does nothing with respect to valorisation and is a typically liberal half-measure that makes a problem worse and costs fortunes doing it. We are in for a long period of environmental austerity under the thumb of the Megamachine with this crowd.
I have observed how people have encountered incredibly hostile reactions in raising even tentative concerns and criticisms of Thunberg. And not even criticism, merely questions seeking clarity with respect to her goals and the identity of her handlers. It remains a source of regret that so many people in politics still see their job as that of cheering their own side on and booing their opponents. We will never get the world we seek so long as so many are so fervent to see their beliefs proven to true as to cease thinking critically, substituting a cult for healthy community. Some see it as a sign of political ignorance, but I think it goes much deeper than that. There is a political naivety that stems from a distaste for politics, itself expressing a hankering after the certainty and reassurance that comes with overarching unanswerable and unassailable authority. Very many get that authority from “Nature.” And they express themselves explicitly in this sense, declaring that “Mother Nature is boss.” There is no “deal” with Nature. As Thunberg says above, “we cannot make ‘deals’ with physics.” There is a sleight of hand being worked here, whether conscious or not I don’t care to speculate. That pitching of politics and physics against each other, to make the point that physics trumps politics, is an underhand way of advancing a politics as a non-politics behind unanswerable authoritative Nature as a mask. And, of course, when Thunberg says “follow the science,” what is meant is that “we”, all of us, listen to what “the scientists” tell us about nature. “The scientists” are the ones who speak with the authoritative and unanswerable voice of Nature. We cannot argue back. Making ‘deals’ is the very stuff of politics. But here we are being presented with a highly political version of scientific reason as non-negotiable. And it is highly political precisely because it entails changes in forms of governance, policy, economic systems. I argue for these very things. But I argue for them in the realm of politics, as one platform among many. This anti-politics of “scientism” and “naturism” denies the “partisan” nature of politics and, in so doing, denies the legitimacy of alternate platforms. If conservatives have complained most about demands for climate action, note that this attempted neutralisation of climate politics also denies the socialist position I argue for. This purported neutrality is merely an attempt to smuggle in a politics that has failed to win sufficient support by conventional channels, on the pretence of being above politics.
Compare this article and how it interprets Thunberg’s words to Paul Mason’s observation that few are prepared to identify the material roots, social relations, and class dynamics at the heart of the contemporary crisis. This appeal to a commonality abstracted from social reality and political division is a clear attempt to shift the focus well away from class analysis in order to advance a nefarious ‘all things to all people’ agenda. “Climate justice for all” Thunberg repeats. There’s no need for a critique of class division when there’s only the one “humanity” after all. Every critical aspect of politics is neutered by this approach.
The critical comments with respect to the evasion of political economy may, in time, stand in need of revision. I hope so, and hold out that possibility. Here and there, there are hints of a more critical direction to be taken in the future. We are well used to environmentalists criticising economic growth and demanding degrowth. What tends to be missing is the identification of this growth as the central accumulative dynamic that defines the capital economy. Should the campaign move onto this terrain, then we have left the realm of apologetics within a corporate agenda. This statement from Thunberg seems to go beyond the usual criticisms of economic growth:
“We're at the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"
I agree very much. But I would ask the people getting so excited at this language, as though they are having an epiphanic moment: where on earth have you been all your lives? For ‘eternal economic growth’ read the endless accumulation of the capital system. That is the central dynamic of the modern economy, the engine of the expansion that is eating up the planet. This is basic Marxism. This is such basic Marxism that the people getting so excited now, presuming that they are of a certain age, must know this. Hence my question as to where they have been when these arguments were being made in the past, and made in much greater theoretical depth, supporting political platforms aiming at deep structural transformation of production relations. Maybe they didn’t much like the character of socialist politics, or of socialists, particularly those of a working class background, with all that blunt talk about class war. Maybe they disliked conflict and class struggle, or maybe the tendency to dogmatism and sectarianism ruined the cause from within. The ruling class engage in class struggle to win. They are aggressive and can make life difficult for those who fight back. With the ruling class waging class struggle from above so aggressively, maybe it was better to cease waging it from below, seek peace and survival as best as you can. Whatever the reason, the result has been a combination of political cowardice, defeat, retreat, and compromise leading to complicity in social dislocation, economic instability, and ecological despoliation, with converging crises leading to catastrophe. The admonition is misdirected. The agents of “eternal economic growth” are mere personifications of economic imperatives and relations; they no more give a damn about the destruction wrought than does the system they serve. But the rebuke delivered here at least invites us to show some guts for once and discard politically evasive euphemisms to name a sin for what it is: capital accumulation. And there is no point issuing a reprimand here: the process of accumulation is based on a pursuit of exchange value that is systemically deaf to the exploitative abuse of the realm of use values. Accumulation is not a case of anyone daring to use and abuse labour and nature, it’s simply what the system must have its agents of alien power and alien labour (capital) do in order to ensure reproduction. The ‘people in power’ are not in power; capital is a relation and not a ‘thing,’; morals cut no ice against an entirely amoral, indifferent, irresponsible system. Capital can dare because it is entirely indifferent, a disembedded economy cut off from the political, ethical, social, and physical commons. Its agents are the servants of impersonal, irresponsible power.
Greta seems to be emboldening the formerly timid into asking some awkward questions with regard to political economy, leading to some very awkward demands. If her campaign starts to veer into explicitly Marxist terrain, or lead people there, then the possibility of environmentalism being co-opted by the corporate form would be much diminished. But if that is the direction of her thought, then she should say so. Time is, after all, short, and the situation we face so serious as to demand plain speaking. We don’t need to be interpreting every line or phrase of every statement from Thunberg each passing day. Already I see people on the right claiming her words are aimed against liberal or left-wing solutions; her rejection of ‘eternal economic growth’ would appear to me to be aimed against the endless accumulation of material quantities which is definitive of the capital system. Which is it?
The critical comments with respect to the evasion of political economy may, in time, stand in need of revision. Here and there, there are hints of a more critical direction being taken in the future. We are well used to environmentalists criticising economic growth and demanding degrowth. What tends to be missing is the identification of this growth as the central accumulative dynamic that defines the capital economy. Should the campaign move onto this terrain, then we have left the realm of apologetics within a corporate agenda. This statement from Thunberg seems to go beyond the usual criticisms of economic growth:
“We're at the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"
I agree very much, with qualification. But I would ask the people getting so excited at this language, as though they are having an epiphanic moment: where on earth have you been all your lives? For ‘eternal economic growth’ read the endless accumulation of the capital system. That is the central dynamic of the modern economy, the engine of the expansion that is eating up the planet. This is basic Marxism. This is such basic Marxism that the people getting so excited, presuming that they are of a certain age, must know this. Hence my question as to where they have been when these arguments were being made in the past, and made in much greater theoretical depth, supporting political platforms aiming at deep structural transformation of production relations. Maybe they didn’t much like the character of socialist politics, or of socialists, particularly those of a working class background, with all that blunt talk about class war. Maybe they disliked conflict and class struggle, or maybe the tendency to dogmatism and sectarianism ruined the cause from within. The ruling class engage in class struggle to win. They are aggressive and can make life difficult for those who fight back. With the ruling class waging class struggle from above so aggressively, maybe it was better to cease waging it from below, seek peace and survival as best as you can. Whatever the reason, the result has been a combination of political cowardice, defeat, retreat, and compromise leading to complicity in social dislocation, economic instability, and ecological despoliation, with converging crises leading to catastrophe. The admonition is misdirected. The agents of “eternal economic growth” are mere personifications of economic imperatives and relations; they no more give a damn about the destruction wrought than does the system they serve. But the rebuke delivered here at least invites us to show some guts for once and discard politically evasive euphemisms to name a sin for what it is: capital accumulation. And there is no point issuing a reprimand here: the process of accumulation is based on a pursuit of exchange value that is systemically deaf to the exploitative abuse of the realm of use values. Accumulation is not a case of anyone daring to use and abuse labour and nature, it’s simply what the system must have its agents of alien power and alien labour (capital) do in order to ensure reproduction. The ‘people in power’ are not in power; capital is a relation and not a ‘thing,’; morals cut no ice against an entirely amoral, indifferent, irresponsible system. Capital can dare because it is entirely indifferent, a disembedded economy cut off from the political, ethical, social, and physical commons. Its agents are the servants of impersonal, irresponsible power.
And when all is said and done, for all that this reference to “eternal economic growth” savours of Marx’s concept of accumulation, without a detailed critique of political economy it remains a radical flourish that works by whatever imagery it conjures up in the minds of recipients. It appears radical, and many will be content to rest with appearance. I say this noting how many people I know to be evasive of class and class struggle and leery of Marx and socialism are fawning over every word and statement of Thunberg. My attack here is not on her, but involves a question put to some of her most enthusiastic supporters who have been hitherto somewhat reticent with respect to radical critiques of capital: when others have made similar statements with respect to “eternal economic growth”/accumulation, supplying a radical politics to make that criticism effective, why have these same people conspicuous by their silence or criticism? Why do they suddenly become so bold when led by a teenage girl? Does she appear safe in a way that a full-blooded socialist revolutionary speaking the language of class struggle doesn’t? If you are content with appearances then you are not radical.
I am reading a very good appeal made by a scientist friend to the world of politics and government. I’ll not identify the person, lest this be considered a personal attack. (My concerns here are putting me at odds with green friends. It's painful. But there is plenty that is amiss. I've never been afraid to go it alone). Plenty is right in the appeal. It’s the bit that is missing that concerns me. S/he writes on global heating and the way that the resulting climate emergency makes cuts in carbon emissions imperative. The CO2 content from the air has increased from about 280 ppm in the mid eighteenth century to 415 ppm today. The result has been temperature increase, ice melt, and sea level rise, among other things. S/he argues for the rate of greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced to zero by 2030. S/he acknowledges that this is actually an incredibly tall order, whilst making it clear that even if achieved, disaster will not be averted given the level of greenhouse gas already in the atmosphere. The arguments above are consistent with what the bulk of climate scientists say (there are very few dissenting voices who are climate scientists). But that’s not where my interest lies. My interest lies in this notion that the changes being demanded are a tall order. And my interest lies too in the way that these large-scale sweeping transformations are being ‘demanded,’ dictated even, not by “science,” but by those who speak with the authoritative voice of science.
I’m going to say that the author of this statement is right on the science here. I know no credible argument to suggest it is wrong. I’m going to say, though, that there is a deficiency in political understanding here that hobbles climate politics and points it in the direction of totalitarian imposition.
On the current pathway, the world is increasing the rate at which CO2 is added to the air. Unless this is reversed, heating will continue and will result in catastrophic consequences, destroying the conditions for civilized existence.
The move to carbon net neutrality is, however, not enough, and there has to be a concerted effort to reduce CO2 to the levels of over a century ago. All this has to be done as soon as possible, soon as in ‘now.’ Note that a climate emergency legitimates an emergency politics that removes contentious issues from debate, challenge, and contestation. A politics that is given its orders has ceased to be a politics. If this is an argument for authoritarian imposition, then people should say so. But, of course, to say so would be to provoke a reaction that defeats the attempt. It works, therefore, in terms of creating a rationale and preparing the psychological grounds for authoritarianism.
A CO2 content of 350 ppm is presented as a target to take us to our goal. The challenge is not merely to end emissions but also to remove the carbon that has already been emitted into the air. There are, then, two objectives defined for government and policy to enact: the elimination of carbon emissions and carbon sequestration. And both must be undertaken immediately given that this is an emergency. It is an emergency, too. And this statement is succinct on the problem and solution.
The elimination of carbon emissions involves an end to gas and the use of renewable electricity in the heating and running of homes, a programme of home insulation, huge programmes of wind and solar electricity generation. Carbon sequestration involves reforestation and the adjustment of farming practices to maximise carbon retention in the soil whilst minimising greenhouse gas emissions.
There is full recognition that these demands involve action and change on a vast and unprecedented scale, beyond anything that has previously been imagined let alone achieved. That's honest, clear, and true.
I’m interested in arguing neither the science nor the practical objectives based on the science. I’m going to say that this analysis and the demands arising from it are correct. It seems entirely correct according to my understanding. I have frequently criticized the singular focus on carbon emissions, something that misses out land use. This statement puts both together. Excellent.
It is the imperative voice in politics that is my concern. That word ‘must’ is repeated with every point made. In fact, the word ‘must’ is used a lot in environmental statements.
“Everything must change.” Which entails that “everybody must change.” We are assured that these ‘massive,’ ‘vast,’ ambitious and ‘unprecedented’ objectives are all technically feasible using technologies that are already available. It can all be done and it has to be done. So why is it not being done? The only thing standing in the way of their achievement is governmental and political inertia. That's politics, folks. We still haven’t got the socialism I argue for, after well over one hundred years. If you think that socialism is not as important as climate action, then ponder Rosa Luxemburg’s slogan: ‘socialism or barbarism.’ And ponder what Istvan Meszaros meant when he added “barbarism if we are lucky.”
There is a lack of political will, both in government and in society. Hence there is inaction at a time when action is imperative. We are living in a climate emergency, we are reminded. These proposals state what ‘must’ happen if civilization is to survive. I think this claim betrays an almost complete ignorance of how the state and government are embedded within the capital system. The argument is made that it is the job of governments to govern. We ought to have learned that the state and government are not autonomous realms proceeding according to rational and democratic appeal, persuasion, and will but serve as the political command centre of the capital system, providing unity and stability in a fundamentally anarchic system of production. That’s the lesson I have been concerned to deliver to environmentalists demanding that government undertake ambitious climate programmes involving sweeping social changes. The obstruction to these technically and financially feasible plans is not merely government inertia but the systemic constraints arising from the capital economy within which governments operate, involving both the domination of the priorities of money and power and corporate capture. Government is not autonomous. The state is not determining, it is determined. The deficiency of institutional and structural analysis here leads to an idealism in politics that, in turn, encourages a reliance upon surrogate collectivities in undertaking and implementing solutions. An emergency politics proceeds in imperative mode, circumventing the dialogue and contest that is the normal stuff of politics. It is in that sphere of negotiation and exchange that political will is developed. The lack of time with which to tackle the climate emergency means that there is a need to circumvent the political realm. “We” cannot wait for persuasion and for the cultivation of political will. These things simply “must” be done. By who? By what agency or agencies? “Everything” must change and “everyone” must be on board. Without the specifics, “everything” means “nothing” and “everyone” means “no-one.” It’s a vacuum into which abstract collectivities and surrogate agencies step. The common agreement and interest that is needed but is lacking in real social relations comes to be projected outwards and upwards, hence the consistent resort to “government” in all these demands for action. Governments “must” govern.
The lesson that has been learned the hard way that governments have become surrogates of private interests is ignored. That may be political naivety. It may be a lack of consciousness. It may be some subconscious hankering after an authoritarian politics in which truth trumps all things and all people. It may even be a very conscious and aware demand for some such thing. The analysis and presentation of objectives, goals, and plans above are all delivered from the standpoint of climate science. These actions simply “must” be taken from this standpoint. There is an imperative being delivered here from science to governments, politics, and people. The lesson that people do not respond to a truth that is passively relayed or dictated has not been learned. That will either lead to failure in a democratic regime or to a demand that democracy be suspended or ended and truth imposed under an authoritarian regime. The specific details concerning how these ambitions schemes are to be undertaken and outcomes achieved are left absent. I shall strike a controversial note here, quite deliberately. The science is the easy part. It’s the world of practical reason, political will, and moral motivations bound up with social stakes and interests that is the hard part. If you have nothing to say here, then you have nothing to say: you are left holding a passive and inert truth. If you issue imperatives in the abstract, then you are effectively licensing government to effect political necessity and austerity as they see fit. We are told that the precise way in which these plans are to be implemented and outcomes achieved is the duty of government, with the role of citizens being that of mandating the politicians to take the action that is necessary. Note the dangers of defining the role of the citizen in this way, involving not the active and autonomous citizen voice, but conceiving citizens as merely the passive medium through which a climate truth discerned elsewhere by scientists is passed on to political representatives. That sounds fairly close to the view I set out when arguing that truth cannot just be given but must be actively willed. But the details of that active willing are missed out: the communities of character, virtue, and practice, the relations between people, the interaction and engagement in the associational space of civil society. But maybe the door is open for the likes of me and others to supply the details. My point here is that citizen autonomy means precisely that, the role of the citizen being much more than serving as the passive voice of science and truth. Miss that and you miss the affective qualities that are crucial to realizing truth and living by it. I am concerned most of all to avoid environmentalism becoming an anti-politics. I see a most explicit hankering after a politics based on an authoritarian advantage in which the knowledgeable few come to impose necessary actions on the many. The idealists who think reason will be in control are deluded. It will be a reason mediated by money and power. As ever. “Reason has always existed,” wrote Marx, “just not always in rational form.” I am interested in social forms. As should all interested in climate stabilisation and human survival. All should therefore be interested in the forms of social mediation.
A tall order, you say. Look at those figures on carbon emissions and the current pathway again. Consider the plans for carbon neutrality by 2036 (or some point between 2030 and 2050, whatever). Consider the extent to which emissions have continued to rise despite all the climate negotiations and agreements. Add to this the recognition that continued heating of the planet is already baked into the atmosphere.
And why, on earth, shouldn’t the corporations co-opt the environmental movement? Indeed, why wouldn’t environmentalists who want to see effective action not want to be co-opted? The environmental movement evidently lacks the tools to scale up to the global nature of the problem. The corporations have not merely financial muscle and technological power, they have global reach in every respect. And perhaps those seeking a workaround that evades politics and citizen engagement and support understand precisely this, exchanging their esoteric knowledge between themselves and seeking to lead the rest of us by mere approximations of the truth. They have the truth, we have the Noble Lie. And, maybe, I suggest in self-criticism, that is the best we can hope for. Rousseau and the moderns are wrong: Plato cannot be democratized. In which case, my criticisms serve only to divide and disempower a movement which is humanity’s best chance to address what may well be the greatest threat to civilization ever. The concern that the environmental may have been, or may well be, co-opted by the corporations is therefore beside the point. After all, if physics doesn’t care about ethics and politics, then it certainly doesn’t care about my commitment to God and socialism. Such things are a complete distraction. As are poetry, literature, music, culture, football, everything that makes for a human being and for a life worth living… Survival, I counter, is not enough; there has to be a reason to survive, a reason to live. The real source of this existential crisis is the loss of connection to the sources of meaning and belonging. That points to the impossibility of life as the destinationless voyage.
The critics of my position argue that the abolition of capitalism is merely a secondary issue in the fight against climate change. (I use their words here, not mine. I understand abolition in the German, Hegelian sense, indicating an internal transition; and I think notions of fighting climate change are misguided). In this reading, the transition from capitalism to socialism is, at best, merely a secondary long-term consequence of addressing climate change in the here and now. In the meantime, any environmental solutions that don't co-opt the power, resources, and reach of the corporations in the immediate term will fail. In other words, instead of worrying about the corporations co-opting environmentalism and turning it to their ends, environmentalists should be attempting to co-opt the corporations and reorienting them to serve the common green good through slowing, reducing, and finally eliminating carbon emissions. In this scenario, critiques such as mine serve only to divide and confuse, getting in the way of efforts to find solutions to the environmental crisis.
I hope I have framed the criticism in an honest and cogent way. My response is developed throughout this piece. The most important point to make is that this position is formulated from the standpoint of almost complete despair. The reasoning is diabolic, confirming the inversion of means and ends that characterises the modern world and which has brought us to the brink of catastrophe. An enabling of the same means of our destruction will not serve to achieve the desired end. The reasoning has the true relation entirely the wrong way around. Socialism will not be the end of this process, and neither will environmental health. This is a diabolic attempt to get environmentally harmful means to serve environmentally healthy ends. Instead of socialism being, at best, a possible end of climate transitions, the creation of appropriate and effective forms of social mediation in the first place are the key to putting the world on the right path. In attempting to co-opt the corporations, environmentalism will indeed find itself co-opted and directed to entirely the wrong ends – completing the corporate capture of nature, the very thing that has been in process since the start of the enclosure movement. To argue that this is now the only means forward is tantamount to waving the white flag of surrender on principle and purpose. Survival is not an end in itself. There is more to life than physical existence. This is the very point upon which Socrates sacrificed his life. The modern reductionism to a scientistic understanding of the physical discarded the moral life in the Socratic tradition. This is their end. Because they have nothing more than the physical to cling to. Hence the wailing, hence the reference to doom. There is no doom for those who live in the eternal now.
Thunberg ends with “You must do the impossible.”
Impossible in what sense? In the sense of getting institutions to act in a way contrary to their entire functional purpose within the capital system? In the sense of capitalist economics being the solution to its own crises and contradictions? In the sense of expecting an economic system geared to the constant expansion of monetary values to go into reverse without crisis and crash? In the sense of another round of technological innovation to fix the unfixable? All these things are, indeed, impossible. Are we being asked to attempt the resolution of climate crisis through the corporate form? Problems have solutions, contradictions do not. This is why it is so important to understand that climate change is not the problem but an expression of the contradictory dynamics unfolding at the heart of the capital system. In making climate change as such the problem, solutions are pursued within the very contradictions that generated the problem in the first place.
So I would suggest that, out of a combination of misdiagnosis, political deficiency, and moral desperation, environmentalists with big hearts and the best of intentions settle for whatever they can get to get the ball rolling. From another angle, the world has been annexed, appropriated, enclosed, exploited, commercialised, used, taken to market, flogged, looted, pillaged to the brink of exhaustion and collapse. Excuse the number of words, but I think that’s a suitably emphatic statement as to what has been taking place in the era of capitalist industrialisation. The agencies at work in this ecological despoliation are systemically deaf to the damage done to people and planet. In truth, the agents and apologists of industrial expansion argue that the capitalist system has delivered a material wealth for more people far in excess of every previous civilization. If you want facts, Steven Pinker will be happy to give you the facts that show this to be the case. My point though is that whatever side of this divide you are on, the question is not one of apologetics, but of what Marx called the ‘laws of motion’ of the capital economy. The accumulation of capital is the sine qua non of the capital system. Capital must expand its values or else there is crisis and crash. The imperatives arising from the need for exchange value trump the health of nature. Capital is simply indifferent for systemic reasons to anything other than value. The problem is that that systemic indifference comes to spread through every institution in society, so that a destruction of the conditions of life comes to be wrought perversely, in full knowledge that it is taking place. Moral appeals here will fail precisely because the problem is not one of a failure of will, but of an alienated system of production, power, and politics that constrains behaviour in such a way that individuals of all kinds are induced to act against their better nature, their critical understanding, their will. It is easy to say that the people in charge of a system inflicted ecocide are sociopaths; it is much more insightful to argue that the system itself is sociopathic, breeding a sociopathy into its members, making them passive agents of alien power and labour in a regime of accumulation.
Moral appeals with changes in social relations and identity will simply fail. So I would suggest that environmentalists demanding action on a huge scale do so knowing fine well that it is a huge ask, not merely unprecedented but impossible. The insistence that we “do the impossible” is tantamount to demanding that we have one last chance to perform a miracle. Which is another way of confirming what many long ago concluded that the game is up and the show is over. We are out of time. The global heat machine that ‘men as gods’ made the engine of progress has kicked the biosphere over the cliff and into a place that is beyond recall of even the most powerful of our technology. In which case, what to the environmentalists is an impossible dream that is our last hope is to the expropriators one last chance to return to the well and hit the till. And both sides come together in the Green Megamachine rooted in the corporate form.
Draw down projects may be technically and financially feasible, so why not mandate government to back them in ambitious programmes of climate action? After all, as Greta Thunberg says at the end of her UN speech, “giving up can never ever be an option.” She also says that “you must not gamble your children’s future on the flip of a coin,” referring to the 50% chance of avoiding a 1.5C increase. She also wants the governments of the world to align themselves to the Paris Agreement, even though it and the IPCC has gambled all on a fantasy silver bullet technology. Thunberg repeats that our earthly home is on fire and that time is running out. She’s not remotely the first to say that. But there’s a difference here. The people I know who have been presenting this message have been condemned as doomsters, whereas Thunberg is hugely popular. She inspires hope. But in what? We should not be remotely surprised that something that fits the contours of a capital form looking to have one last drink from the well would be far more popular than something that says the game is over. “Inspirational,” many good judges say. A mass mobilisation has most certainly been needed to overcome psychological apathy and exhaustion and break institutional inertia. Nothing else has worked, and there’s nothing else around that looks remotely like working. There is a dam that has been building for decades, and maybe this is the catalyst to unblock it. This is the optimistic scenario. Now quickly as possible to the institutional questions, moving beyond abstract appeals to unity to identify the precise social dynamics at work.
I get the impression that, deep down, everyone knows fine well that it is capitalism in some description that lies at the heart of our predicament, but lack the nerve to say so so bluntly. They have an implicit understand of what Marx identified as the economic and, indeed, democratic and ecological contradictions of capital, but fear saying so lest they have to address the question of social transformation. They know that the system is bust but don’t know how to change it. This results in precisely the false fixities that Marx sought to subvert and overthrow. The neoliberal reaction was concerned to naturalize specific economic relations by dinning the message into people that ‘there is no alternative,’ and people stopped contesting, gave up hope, and gave in. This ideology backed by harsh economic necessity made capitalism the 'common sense' of politics and people, an unalterable reality that people had to accept as given for all time. The trade unions were defeated and legally shackled, socialism went into retreat, and Left politics became mired in what Ralph Miliband in Divided Societies (1989) describes as the crisis in the agencies of labour. As a result, people were left socially defenceless against a concerted capitalist onslaught in all areas of life. The capital rule and relation and its effects have been so normalised that people can no longer conceive an alternative. People have been so immersed in a 'capitalist realism' they cannot conceive an alternative in political and social terms. Instead, the worlds of music and film offer an outlet for frustrated class struggle, serving as safety valves for the angry but hopeless. In line with Gramsci’s understanding of cultural hegemony, we can see how people have been constantly confronting a crisis they seem unable to address, let alone resolve. We live in a dangerous interregnum and have been for several decades now. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” That’s a quote attributed to Gramsci in The Prison Notebooks, (although I can’t find it in my copy, it may be a loose translation of an idea from Gramsci). People are aware that there is something badly amiss in the world, but the system still pays just enough to have them sticking with it. They cannot see the new and have lost the capacity to build it. Raising in a condition of dependence on external power and hopelessness, they have lost the will, too. Those in power have built on institutional and systemic imperatives to manacle people to the existing order, stake them in, even using economic crash to confine people within an austerian straightjacket that ratchets control over them to the extreme. Instead of resisting, people give up hope and give in. Reality is given and unalterable. The capital system thus comes with an incredibly coercive conformity that is imposed through economic systems and inculcated through politics, media, and culture. Most people confined within the system can neither criticize it nor reject it, merely accept it, otherwise they risk losing their jobs, their income, their houses.
I shall quote this praise of Greta Thunberg on social media: “The difference with Greta is that because of her ‘disorder’ she represents a kind of liberated quality that everyone who isn't a right-wing ideologue has been longing for both intellectually and spiritually.”
By ‘disorder’ here is meant Thunberg’s Aperger’s. So if I may, as one who has a long-standing and deep-seated AS condition, I should like to speak freely and bluntly. In fact, I can speak in a manner that is far freer and blunter than Greta Thunberg. I wonder how many who are discomforted by my words will allow me the licence they evidently allow her? I have spent a lifetime outside of the system, fending for myself, as an extreme case with respect to social interaction and communication. I have no career, no long term job, no property, no house, no car, no nothing. I claim no benefits. I am entirely free, outside of the system, an exile who can see society and the people in it objectively. I live off my wits and savings from various jobs. I am outside of the social factory. In exile, see the chains and the manacles. I see how people are bought and sold, confined in a steel-hard cage, both externally and internally. I see the bars that the prisoners don’t see, the bars that exist on the inside. I see it in the eyes, and the thoughts. The system imprisons people’s very subjectivity. I see the manacled minds and bodies. People who, year after year, witness injustice and tolerate it; people who turn away from the ‘extremes’ in politics and make a virtue of being ‘moderate’ in a centre ground that exists nowhere; people who see a centre ground being enclosed and hollowed out before their eyes, barely raising barely an objection in politics; people who vote for a lesser and necessary evil in politics rather than waste their vote by joining with the few who stand apart and stand on the right and the just.
I’m very liberated on account of my 'disorder.' I can be free and blunt from my position in exile in a rotten and corrupt society. So mark my words well when I say that Greta Thunberg is only skirting the depths of the contradictions the world faces. She’s not speaking bluntly and plainly at all. If she stood up at the UN and cut the fine words short to shout “it’s f^£$ing capitalism!” I would cheer her. But still be critical. Because the problem we face is much deeper than the institutions of capitalism and concern capital rule and the accumulative dynamic. “It’s the capital system!” So I shall take my opportunity to be blunt and speak some hard truths to those who, claiming the moral high ground whilst still yet not coming close to even identifying and naming the problem, let alone addressing it, insist on telling the world to wake up, it’s time to act. I’m struck by how often militarism is overlooked in a lot of mainstream environmentalism. It’s overlooked to such an extent one would think it less an oversight than a deliberate evasion on the part of those still wedded to the very social system they claim to want transforming. When I read admonitions to “wake up,” I shout the very same instruction back. I would not make a virtue of being pictured with Barak Obama, the bomb and oil president, the man who promised Main Street and instead gave us Wall Street.
I saw this comment from Cory Morningstar:
“It's quite a spectacular phenomenon. Consider how many children and teenagers are getting bombed/killed on a daily basis in countries targeted by the US & Nato states for resource extraction and geopolitical interests. Yet the same populations that cares so deeply for Greta (a child insulated by immense privilege) - do not appear to give a f**k about these kids.”
Is that criticism fair? I am a bitter critic of ‘what-aboutism’ as one of the primary fallacies of the age. You can care for one thing and another thing, compassion is on a continuum. I think Morningstar is big on the critique of militarism and hence notes the absence of any reference to the military in the GT phenomenon. Her concern here is laudible.
A point worth emphasising is that the US military has the biggest carbon footprint of any organisation on the planet. Militarism in general is a leading driver of climate change. The $1.7 trillion arms budget is a monstrous waste of resources. There’s nary a mention of the issue. Thunberg is happy to appear with Obama. The lives of some children, it would seem, are worth a whole lot more than the lives of others.
We are living in an age of convulsive self-importance, an age in which incredibly privileged people protest without fear of sanction and pretend that they have been on strike. I came to political age during the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85. There is no comparison.
And let’s end this utterly false and destructive opposition between the young and the adult. This cult of youth is reactionary. The repetition of this line has all the hallmark of a PR gimmick put together by adults. The science that Thunberg directs us to is one put together by adults, adults have been in the field pitching for years on this issue. General statements like this are on a par with those claims that ‘humanity’ is to blame for climate crisis and obscure the true nature of the problem. Specific adults within specific social relations are the problem. When the kids go back to school, finish their education, get jobs, they will find themselves embedded in socially structured patterns of social behaviour. They will see how easy it is to become complicit in climate breakdown. It is these social structures that need to be changed.
Thunberg is saying nothing that many thousands of other people haven't already said, said better and in more detail. There’s little on the science and less on solutions. All that there is is delegation. It’s how I used to work at PC World, despite knowing precious little about the techie products being sold: “I don’t know, but I know a colleague who does.”
I don't see too much bluntness on the issues of politics. In fact, I see the all-too familiar evasion of these issues. That fits an agenda of mass mobilization in support of a green industrial revolution under the auspices of corporate capital. Whatever else that is, that’s not the ecological cause I have supported over the decades. I'd be happy to be proven wrong. At least, if we replace a dirty capitalism with a clean capitalism, we will be able to carry on the fight for the free and just society. At the moment, we are being asked as to whether we want to die of a heart attack or cancer.
People who have lacked the guts to call capitalism out and fight back hard are now lining up behind a young girl. I make no criticism of her here. My anger is directed at people who, knowing that capitalism and its apologists have been destroying public life, community, and the environment are now marching behind a young girl as if her innocence has given them permission to protest what they have known to be wrong since ever. It denotes a political gutlessness. These, let’s be clear, are the same people who resisted every attempt by the left in politics to fight back in the decades when capitalist despoliation was being extended aggressively, when working class organisations were being attacked and destroyed, when socialists were being vilified, thrown out of parties of the left, excluded, jailed, left to rot in communities left behind by economic globalisation and much more. If you need a young girl to find your backbone, then you are pathetic and need to grow up. Instead of projecting all your frustrated hopes and wishes onto her, start to do politics properly, have the guts to first name and then confront the monster eating the world alive, and organize and fight, hard and for real. Can we have an end to political naivety? Or do you want to limp on, inviting the vicious counter-revolution to the revolution you know you should be prosecuting, but lack the guts to initiate and sustain?
“Anyone who attacks her [GT] provides a list of those who are in direct contravention to everyone else's survival. So as she gains momentum, keep note of the people who attack her (e.g. Trump, Maxime Bernier etc) These are the people on the very wrong side of history.” The fact that the most vocal, or the most public, critics are right wing climate deniers actually makes the situation far worse. This actually ensures the corporate forces seeking to capture and divert the environmental movement. The scientific case for human-made climate change is so clear that anyone left still trying to claim that the science says otherwise stands revealed as an ideologue pure and simple. That kind of opposition merely strengthens the hand of those now pushing for climate action on terms that need to be scrutinized more closely.
That ‘wrong side of history’ argument is historicism at its very worst, too. A lot of people seem to have learned nothing from the corruption of Marxism. Whether history goes in the wrong or right direction depends on human agents and their decisions and actions. I notice this kind of comment a lot in mainstream environmentalism. It’s as though, having abandoned God through the embrace of a disenchanting science, environmentalists lack an authoritative framework and judge, and so have nothing left but the bench of history. To say that history will judge those despoiling the environment badly is to say no more than we now, at present, judge them badly. And they don’t care either way. Now what? This kind of moral constraint only worked when society was united in a belief in God. But you were all so clever as to take morality in your own hands and go it alone, weren’t you. That’s the problem with going it alone, humans don’t always agree on the right thing to do and reserve to themselves the right to bail out of any common endeavour. There are no moral imperatives binding on each and all in such a world. The modern world has been left bereft by “the death of God,” and people promoting good causes remain morally impotent.
I’m leery of the use of children to promote any cause. I despise the way the attempt to raise a critical voice here is immediately interpreted as patronising children, soliciting or enforcing praise of children as incredibly knowledgeable and intelligent, so much more than the rest of us. So I shall limit comment here to my good self: at sixteen, I was a total idiot interested only in football and Elvis. My objection is not to the voices of children. On the contrary, I argue for a politics which proceeds as it ought to proceed, through negotiation and contestation via a plurality of citizen voices. My objection is to the exaltation of the youth voice as unimpeachable authority. It’s a front. The environmental movement has been engaged in the circulation of child spokespersons for years, from Xiuhtezcatl Martinez a few years ago to David Suzuki's daughter more recently and now Thunberg. We don’t need to speculate on the motives of those involved to find this tactic of mainstream environmentalism a little disquieting to say the least. I suspect politics that reduces to a personality cult, not least when there is an agenda put together by others behind the personality up front. Some people are saying it openly, Thunberg is the 'accidental' poster child who fitted the bill for a planned corporate appropriation, diversion, and perversion of the environmental movement. We should know: if something is in the corporate mainstream, then there is a good chance that it has been manufactured or is being manipulated in accordance with the ultimate goal of profit and control over resources.
The environmental centrists and collaborators who reject “partisan” politics for common solutions which accent the science and technology are either involved in the heist or are, through being conflict averse, being recruited in its service. They are falling into contradiction, their means being utterly incapable of realizing their end. The commons transition comes to be hi-jacked in process. The result, then, is a neoliberal corporate conservation based on “the paradoxical idea that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions.” (Büscher (2012: 29). Personality cults and mass mobilizations around general, politically and socially indistinct, demands for action merely create pressure and expectation which, without appropriate and effective means and mechanisms of delivery, come to fall into the remit of already constituted power and authority. Whether that is the precise intention of the strategy at work or not, that is most certainly the result. And that entails an environmental austerity which delivers added burdens on the working class already at the receiving end of the class system. Such an austerity levels an unfair level of guilt and cost on the ‘ordinary’ people whose impact on the environment is sleight in comparison with the actions of capitalist industry. Hence my profound hostility to the attempt to remove the climate question out of politics. This is not merely an attempt to hijack the environmental cause by a well-organised, well-connected, and well-funded group with a definite political agenda, it is a systematic attempt to insulate the core foundations of the prevailing social system from criticism. It steers us away from political economy and its critique, clarity on which are the condition of identifying the source of current problems and their resolution.
“With “capitalism in danger of falling apart” (a rare, cryptically honest quote from Al Gore), and years of stagnant global economic growth now in a free fall, the Greta campaign must be understood for what it is. An elaborate distraction that has nothing to do with protecting the natural world, and everything to do with the manufacturing of consent. The required consent of the citizenry that will unlock the treasuries and public monies under the guise of climate protection.” –
– Cory Morningstar and Forest Palmer, from The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg – For Consent: The House is on Fire & the 90 Trillion Dollar Rescue, 2019
“One might think that if someone were conscious enough to recognise that global ecology was compromised and that pollutants were destroying fresh water, and the land, and that global warming was quite possibly going to make huge swatches of land non arable — you might think that person would look for solutions in a political frame. After all it was global capital that had brought mankind to this historic precipice. But instead, many if not nearly all the people I speak with, frame things in terms of personal responsibility. Stop driving big diesel SUVs, stop flying to Cabo for vacation, stop eating meat, etc-. But these same people tend to not criticize capitalism. Or, rather, they ask for a small non crony green capitalism. I guess this would mean green exploitation and green wars? For war is the engine of global capitalism today. Cutting across this are the various threads of the overpopulation theme. A convenient ideological adjustment that shifts blame to the poorest inhabitants of the planet.”
– John Steppling, Trust Nothing, 2019
The issue for me is not Thunberg’s sincerity and motivations. I am more interested in the well-oiled corporate machine seeking to co-opt environmentalists in their agenda, satisfying the demand for climate action according to their own interests. My political nostrils tell me that when someone is lauded in the corporate media and the conventional political sphere, it is most unlikely that system change is underway. Thunberg has had extensive coverage in the corporate press, has been granted many interviews in which she has been allowed to state her views, making many great demands for sweeping governmental action and being barely unquestioned; she has an endorsement by tech start-up company, “We Don’t Have Time,” (We don’t have time for what? For debate, for politics, for questions and answers, for citizens?), and applauded by voices from industry for her promotion of “sustainable development.”
We can be sure that those receiving this kind of coverage are unlikely to be perceived as a serious threat to the prevailing social order. Noam Chomsky writes well on a corporate approved dissent which gives the illusion of debate but which is in fact a form of censorship.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
– Noam Chomsky, The Common Good, 1998
So when you come back from your ‘strikes’ and go back to school, study the history and politics books as hard as you can and understand that protests granted with full permission are no more than a licensed radicalism in lieu of the real thing. I would suggest that whenever, if ever, said strikers ever get round to radically questioning, even more, challenging and subverting the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation and valorisation, permission will be quickly withheld and sanctions applied. That’s why trade unions are in a legal straightjacket, and worse, the world over.
Kenn Orphan hits the nail smack on the head and hard:
And this ties into the notion of personal responsibility. Solutions to our environmental crisis have been reduced to “life style changes” which have also become the en vogue activism of the day. It is a line of thinking that is accepted and even endorsed by corporations, banks and neoliberal governments because it poses no real challenge to their power or their ongoing destructive practices. To the mainstream, tweaking one’s lifestyle is all that is needed. Buy an electric vehicle or use a bicycle. Don’t take a plane on your vacation. Buy reusable bags. Choose organic only. Go vegan. Buy reusable straws. While there is nothing wrong with doing these things in general, they must be understood as individual choices that are based on privilege and that have little impact in addressing urgent crisis our biosphere is facing right now.
What they do manage to do is deliver an added punishment on the poor and working class, people who are struggling to make ends meet. It places an unfair level of guilt on ordinary people whose impact on the environment is relatively negligible compared to the enormous destruction caused by the fossil fuel industry, mining companies, plastic and packaging production, shipping and the military industrial complex. Seldom (if ever) questioned are the basic foundations of the current economic order which is driving the decimation of the biosphere for the benefit of the wealthy Davos jet set.
The primary driver of climate catastrophe, the accumulative dynamic of the capital system, is never highlighted and never questioned. I don’t believe this to be an oversight. In fact, I believe this to be ideological, in Marx’s critical sense of a view of reality that serves to conceal and preserve existing power relations. There is a systematic obfuscation of issues in the sense of a constant appeal to a harmony of interests and commonality that does not exist. That harmony ought to exist, but it is blocked by the facts of class division. In highlighting the reality of class and social division, it is noticeable how many working in commons transitions and eco-design turn away, considering such talk divisive. My response is that it is the system itself which is divisive, and a refusal to address those facts makes one complicit in continued division, regardless of any commitment to harmony and commonality. It seems that the prevailing capitalist organisation of the economy is beyond question, and that the transition to any future social form is to be conflict-free and entirely reasonable. People are to be encouraged into cooperation by the design of systems so good that no one could refuse to join.
Kenn Orphan writes:
“With this in mind political solutions, like the Green New Deal, are being trotted out by democratic socialist and neoliberal politicians that merely cloak the problem, never identifying the root of it all: Capitalism. In fact, many of these policies are weak on protecting nature and are simply designed to keep capitalism afloat. At its core this is a system that is incapable of even beginning to address climate change or biospheric degeneration. Its principles are based upon the exploitation of the environment for the material gain of the ruling class, kept alive through institutions of repression and corporate state violence.”
That’s the view I set out in theoretical detail in Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx. I have frequently posted it on social media in an attempt to persuade and enlighten Green friends. It has excited little interest, other than a question as to why we shouldn’t just abolish fossil fuels instead of capitalism. Such people would evidently see me as one of the partisans peddling idealized fantasies and fairy-tales about the future society. And they, of course. It is those with the finance, the technology, and the connections who are the great realists who are able to get things done. Their view of the future, of course, is no more than that of the present enlarged – the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form. That’s no fairy tale, we are more than halfway there.
Continually I ask “what about the workers?” What about “Henry Dubb?” And Henrietta, a woman who can be any age. Continually I emphasise that the emancipation of the people is an act of the people themselves. Hence my consistent reference to democracy and politics as against some scientific-techno-elitist model of change.
“But despite the machinations of the ruling class to obfuscate, infiltrate and co-opt movements, there remains a genuine longing for connection to the ever besieged living planet and solidarity with one another that transcends the indifferent and sadistic brutality of the capitalist order. This is especially true as capitalism begins to implode and the biosphere continues to degrade. Therefore the most coherent response to what we are witnessing will always come from ordinary people in community, especially the poor and especially indigenous peoples who are on the front lines of a war being waged by governments serving the interests of the wealthy ruling class and global capitalism. But we can be assured that anything that emanates from the halls of power will be merely another ploy to maintain their control and fill the coffers of the uber-rich at the expense of the rest of us and the living earth itself. And they have no problem using the innocent passion of a 16 year old girl to hide all of their crimes.”
Kenn Orphan
Such forces would be happy to use children in general to force through their agenda through an emotional blackmail. Society has a moral duty to protect children, and here are the children in their thousands protesting the loss of their future. The children are not wrong, mind. The issue is specifying the precise nature of the action to be undertaken and identifying the principal agents of this transformation (or preservation, depending on what it is that takes place).
And those who are vociferous in abusing and insulting those who raise critical concerns in this respect, hiding questionable political issues behind Thunberg’s youth, sex, and autism, are merely the useful idiots of the entire heist.
I wonder how many noticed and pondered the first words of Greta Thunberg’s speech at the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit:
"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!”
Greta Thunberg is entirely right, and that fact should shame all the adults now suddenly emboldened after years of political pusillanimity. I attack not her, I attack the indolent, soft, soppy adults who have lacked a political spine for so long as to have become jellyfish. I feel for her having to carry the hopes and dreams of those who have lacked the political nous to carry them for themselves. And by that I mean having the nerve to contest issues of class, power, distribution of resources not merely in relation to ‘ordinary’ people but with such people, on their side, within their communities. Something more than delivering lectures and relaying information downwards as knowledgeable elites. Thunberg’s accusation is aimed directly at those adults whose failures over the years to address individuals as citizens, engage them as citizens, mobilize them around political platforms, locate themselves within the social lives of people and address popular concerns, and actually have some practical connection with the roots that feed politics have led to this carnival of the grotesque. It is their political infantilism, involving an arid rationalism that reduces to fact and logic, a disconnect from real people, a disrespect for the concerns of ‘ordinary’ people, a disregard of the entire motivational economy of human being, a conflict aversion that is no more than a fear of contrary voices and a cowardice in face of power, and an emphasis on a mistaken enlightenment model of informing empty passive heads that has brought adults to turn to children for leadership and courage. ‘How dare you!’
I’ll leave you with one last quote. It is from Tony Blair who, as British Prime Minister, presided over financial liberalisation and deregulation, PFI, illegal invasions, record levels of social inequality, the Hillsborough Disaster cover-up, and more. He was all in favour of the green industrial revolution. That doesn't make the idea wrong, of course. It sounds like a very good idea, in fact ... in general:
“We need to develop the new green industrial revolution that develops the new technologies that can confront and overcome the challenge of climate change; and that above all can show us not that we can avoid changing our behaviour but we can change it in a way that is environmentally sustainable.”
Who could disagree? It’s time to act! "We" have the tools. What’s keeping you? You are not still arguing and asking awkward questions are you? There's no time for politics and division. "The science" is clear!