From Green Gloom to Green Growth
It is curious that people who well know recent history concerning the corporate capture of the public business, as part of a long history of the enclosure of the commons, and who may be very well aware of the possibility of the environmental movement being co-opted in this way, can’t countenance the very real possibility that such a hijack may very well be already underway. Given the history of corporations moving in quickly on any commons of value, it would be more surprising if such encroachment was not taking place. There are sweeping demands being made on government and business, involving changes that must involve substantial expenditure, investment, and technology. For all of the aversion to specific details with respect to the political economy as to how the world got here and how, precisely, it will get out, changes will involve economics.
‘How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just "business as usual" and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than eight and a half years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.’
I agree very much with this, as a general statement. It’s just that being so general, a statement like this is designed to solicit agreement. The facts on the carbon budget are clear, and the economic system geared to exponential growth is eating that budget up rapidly. The world is failing. We know this, so we agree with the statement. But it is only by getting into the institutional and systemic reasons of this failure that the effective transformations required become possible. This is where the aversion to talking about money becomes not merely question begging but paradoxical:
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
The condemnation of ‘business-as-usual’ cannot be understood as a condemnation of ‘business-as-such,’ and the condemnation of the obsession with money has to be understood as a rejection of a system in which the priorities of money dominate over all others. The phrase ‘eternal economic growth’ comes very close to Marx’s identification of the accumulative dynamic as the central spring of the capitalist economy. ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and all the prophets,’ Marx wrote in Capital. One way or another, then, we are going to have to talk about money and business.
The words cited here lend themselves very easily to the Marxist critique of political economy linked to the transformation of the capital system.
Sweeping changes are needed in ten years. Everything must change.
‘The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.’
Even changes of this magnitude give us just a 50% of staying the right side of the critical 1.5 degrees threshold. Much greater changes are required. Thunberg also takes a swipe at the silver bullet technology on which Paris relies:
‘Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.’
All of that builds up to a demand for changes on a scale so vast and on such a short time scale as to be entirely without precedence in history. I would suggest that if such an ambitious goal had the remotest chance of succeeding, the world would already be advanced in developing and applying tools, technologies, policies, and programmes. Thunberg, however, states that ‘the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.’ These two statements simply do not add up. I take it that this speech has been carefully crafted, certainly to maximize public impact. That is certainly how it has been received. But few have noticed a disparity in problem and solution so chasmic as to be simply impossible to bridge in the given timescale. We are presented with changes so vast and sweeping as to be without historic precedence, with only a decade in which to act, only to be told that ‘the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.’ What is significant in this text is not what is said but what is left unsaid. Clearly, Thunberg and those advising her believe solutions are within reach, otherwise there would be no point in making such demands for sweeping changes. The criticism of ‘business-as-usual’ implies a demand for ‘unusual’ business. For all of the aversion to talk about money, changes of this scale require massive financial investment. Again, the presumption is that such financial resources are there. The changes also require tools and technology. The changes required are all technically feasible using the technologies now to hand. This statement is designed to maximize popular demands for change and level that pressure on governments ‘to act,’ that is, to make substantial expenditures and commit to ambitious climate policies and programmes that unlock huge investment opportunities.
And why not? Who else is capable of undertaking the sweeping changes required to address the crisis in the climate system? But why not make that case overtly? You can’t have this argument both ways, claiming a problem of such a scale that we would require the tools for its resolution to be already available to us, only to claim innocence in this respect. As a strategy designed to advance the case for climate action out of disinterested concern, it’s perfect. But if the campaign is genuinely innocent of solutions, then it fails, for the simple reason that if tools and technologies are not available in the here and now for its resolution, then it simply cannot be done on this timescale. Or, since we well know that these tools and technologies are not only available, but the corporations and organisations in command of them are already in the field pitching, then the mask of political innocence slips. Of course there is a plan and an agenda. And, of course, that will involve business and money. The denial of a pecuniary interest could become very lucrative indeed for some. We are being asked to allow some particular forces to ‘save the planet’ at a price, we the people mandating governments to buy and rent corporate tools and technologies, handing power and control over to the planetary engineers.
You will have to make your own mind up as to whether this entails an attempt at a ‘green’ reboot of capitalism via such things as the Green New Deal or does entail an attempt to suppress the accumulative dynamic. I think we are dealing with the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form, a new social form which continues the objective anti-social socialization of the capitalist economy, taking the potential that Marx saw for socialism as the cooperative mode of production and developing it as a techno-bureaucratic mode of production concerned with environmental planning. The capital relation will remain in place, meaning that the accumulative dynamic will still drive the economy, but under the direction of an authoritarian state. The rationale for an austerian environmental regime will be developed in terms of climate stabilization.
In light of all of this, it is very easy to see why those who continue to argue for socialism are simply ignored, treated with disdain for the most part, or occasionally abused. If anything is ‘nowhere in sight’, then it is socialism. The working class voice has long since been marginalised and excluded in politics. The biggest shock and surprise of the liberal establishment in face of the ‘populist’ revolt is that so many working class people are still around and still can make themselves heard. But the working class self-initiative and self-organisation in building a material counter-public within the shell of the old is merely embryonic at best and nothing like the working class movements of the past. The working class itself is fragmented, the world of work is differentiated, the old class unity and solidarity – which itself was never what Marxists either thought it was or hoped it would be – is gone. When I argue for socialism, people ask ‘what is that?’ and, most of all, ‘where on Earth is that?’ I was a member of the Socialist Movement in Manchester in the 1990s. It renamed itself as ‘Socialist Movement Networking.’ I never noticed much by way of movement and never saw anywhere enough people involved to enable networking. In writing research reports in Manchester I would make frequent references to ‘the socialist movement’ and what it intended to do in changing the world. I didn’t do it for long. The academic supervisors queried the term and asked for specific details. I didn’t have any. There was no ‘socialist movement,’ just a few socialists trying to create one. I argue for social transformation as a solution to environmental crisis knowing fine well that there is nothing like the socialist movement required to initiate and drive through such a transformation to successful conclusion. But, as we keep telling ourselves, socialism is a long-term project. That’s not exactly how Marx saw it. Marx saw the movement from capitalism to socialism as an internal transition, with creative human agency advancing and directing developments already underway within the capital system. There is no such thing as ‘building socialism.’ Maybe, then, with other changes with respect to the capital form, initiated by climate action, we may recover the long-term and start to direct socialization in the direction of the truly social.
At the moment, talk of socialism is an idle fantasy, a distraction. So it is claimed. And so we put aside the critique of political economy and adopt an uncritical demand for sweeping changes to ‘save the planet.’ Socialism is a fantasy, capitalism is productive, and green corporatism is the future. For all of the condemnation of ‘eternal economic growth’ as a fantasy, we need to note how frequently and how consistently demands for climate action make reference to ‘capital.’ This is significant. Below I refer to a supporter of Thunberg’s demand for sweeping climate action who refers to harnessing ‘social capital.’ In a previous essay, I picked up on Rob Hopkins of Transition Towns and his reference to ‘the reorienting of capital and business.’ Similar references to ‘capital’, seemingly innocuous and benign, can be found all over the climate movement. These references are significant. No matter how good the intent behind many of these arguments, couched in terms of taking over and directing capital to the social and ecological good, they betray a misunderstanding which will prove fatal to all good intentions. Capital is not a ‘thing’ that can be appropriated and re-directed according to specific ends but a relation that comes with an implicit accumulative dynamic that imposes imperatives of its own. People who refer to ‘capital’ as a thing are merely repeating the text-book definition. Their statements can be rewritten in a more benign way as entailing a commitment to use resources for the public good. That’s fine as a general statement, but still rather meaningless to the extent it fails to specify the social relations of production involved. Failure to identify the specifics here falls back on the conflation of the capital relation and capital rule with ‘the economy’ itself. That conflation is likely once one adopts the text-book definition of capital. This, Marx notes, has the ideological effect of naturalizing and eternalizing a capital relation and rule that is socially and historically specific. Bakunin accused Marx of wanting to turn us all into logicians and metaphysicians of revolution before we could act. Against this, Bakunin emphasized the creativity and power of just acting. Marx cautioned that acting blindly in this manner serves only to reproduce the very system you are seeking to replace, entrenching it even further. Fail to make fine distinctions here and it becomes clear that the commitments to system-change only go skin-deep.
Maybe socialism is an idle pipe-dream, a dangerous delusion, a totalitarian temptation; maybe the truth is that the demands of actually running a socialist society are far beyond human capacities. The profit motive and the appeal to self-interest are the drivers needed to incite individuals to effort and action, turn up and put a shift in in the economy. Capitalism has been immensely productive, leading to a world in which people are better fed, better educated, healthier, wealthier, and longer lived than in any civilization in history. And in much greater numbers, too. Why abolish that, least of all for the vagaries of a socialist future few seem able to define, let alone act for? And maybe ‘green capitalism’ under the auspices of a techno-bureaucratic elite of environmental planners is the substitute socialism you get, for want of the real thing? Or maybe the Marxists are right after all, for all the reasons Marx gave
Climate Change Isn’t Just “Man-Made” — It’s Made by Capitalism by Umair Haque
I set that argument out in much greater systematic depth in the two works I published last year on Karl Marx and Istvan Meszaros.
At the same time, I acknowledge that any transition to socialism will be internal rather than an external imposition by some vanguard with a blueprint and a plan. I also acknowledge a distinct lack of interest in some such thing.
So I have a feeling that the world is in the position it was in in 1900, when Max Weber surveyed the coming force that was socialism and subjected it to withering assault. The odd thing about Weber’s critique is that plenty that Weber said with respect to socialism becoming ‘the dictatorship of the officials’ and the ‘housing of the new serfdom’ could have been made by Marx. The failure to go beyond the institutions and personnel of capitalism to analyse and uproot the capital relation, rule, and accumulative logic made a state directed accumulative regime inevitable. Weber thought this bureaucratisation of socialism inevitable given the untranscendability of modern rationalised institutions and technology. He missed the emphasis on social relations. He’s not alone in missing the centrality of transforming relations of production rather than mere title deeds on property.
But here we are, faced with
Marx’s socialism as a utopian pipe-dream that few seemingly understand, even if they were interested in making it work;
the probability of a techno-bureaucratic elite of social/environmental planners running a rational capitalism;
Weber’s defence of a private capitalist economy and free market as our last defence of individual liberty, even though that very system lies at the heart of this alien socialisation and bureaucratisation.
Of all three options, the most realistic option is option b).
The fate of civilization will be decided in the next ten years, we are being told.
Weber’s words at the close of Politics as a Vocation need to be read closely and pondered at length:
“Now then, ladies and gentlemen, let us debate this matter once more ten years from now. Unfortunately, for a whole series of reasons, I fear that by then the period of reaction will have long since broken over us. It is very probable that little of what many of you, and (I candidly confess) I too have wished and hoped for will be fulfilled; little – perhaps not exactly nothing, but what to us at least seems little. This will not crush me, but surely it is an inner burden to realize it. Then, I wish I could see what has become of those of you who now feel yourselves to be genuinely ‘principled’ politicians and who share in the intoxication signified by this revolution. It would be nice if matters turned out in such a way that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 102 should hold true:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days.
But such is not the case. Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights. When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive? And what will have become of you all by then? And what will have become of all of you by then? Will you be bitter or banausic? Will you simply and dully accept world and occupation? Or will the third and by no means the least frequent possibility be your lot: mystic flight from reality for those who are gifted for it, or – as is both frequent and unpleasant – for those who belabour themselves to follow this fashion?
In every one of such cases, I shall draw the conclusion that they have not measured up to their own doings. They have not measured up to the world as it really is in its everyday routine. Objectively and actually, they have not experienced the vocation for politics in its deepest meaning, which they thought they had. They would have done better in simply cultivating plain brotherliness in personal relations. And for the rest – they should have gone soberly about their daily work.
I am tempted by ‘mystic flight.’ I shall shortly resume work on my book on the peerless poet Dante Alighieri, to be published in time for the 700th anniversary of the great Florentine’s death in 2021. Except that I don’t see Dante as a flight from reality at all. Enthused by the Love that animates the universe, a Love that disseminates from Ultimate Reality, Dante wrote with political intent, seeking to induce individual men and women to face the world and change it, and themselves, from within. I am tempted by withdrawal, abstention, and conversion in relation to the Megamachine, whether this takes the form of The Benedict Option or eco-communalist option. Whether this emphasis on a creative minority keeping the tradition of the virtues alive takes Christian or ecological or communitarian form (Dreher, MacIntyre, Mumford, Bahro, I draw on all of them), I see it as an evasion of politics. If there is a central corruption at the heart of society, it will sooner or later come to corrupt all things, even and especially those seeking to preserve local communities of virtue. These communities need to scale upwards and outwards so as to restore virtue to a corrupt society. In short, we have to take politics seriously and measure up to the demands of public life. I argue for Republicanism. Instead of an austerian environmentalist regime under the corporate form, I argue for the Eco-Republic. And I also argue for ‘something’ as against the ‘nothing’ of the bleak, meaningless, existential universe proposed by a disenchanting science. I very much argue for ‘cultivating plain brotherliness in personal relations,’ as Weber puts it. And sisterliness. Hence my belief in a personal God, the God of Love, the God of personal relations, the God of more than physical creation. I very much affirm this ethic. And I affirm Weber’s emphasis on politics:
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard-boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth – that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.
Weber, From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology 127-128
I would argue in the strongest of terms that in an age of social dislocation, economic instability, moral uncertainty, and ecological degradation, men and women of all persuasions are being called to measure up to the demands of politics and together develop the collective nerve and nous to navigate the troubled times that are upon us. I would also argue that successful political engagement is not merely a matter of will and character, but of restoring unity within social relations, and a shared moral language and culture. The problems that beset up cannot be resolved by an external policing and regulation alone or even mainly. The effectiveness of these things depend upon an internal self-policing and self-regulation in modes of conduct and character. In highlighting social divisions and problems of equality, I would also emphasize a moral confusion and uncertainty. In addition to the economic poverty that those concerned with social justice highlight, I would highlight a moral poverty. In the absence of a moral framework capable of uniting people around shared norms and values, a common language, society fractures into individuals pursuing their own goods. This results in a series of clashes without internal resolution, for the very reason that exchanges are conducted in terms of incommensurate values. On top of the facts of social division and inequality, these moral clashes over rival and competing goods turn violent. The political sphere is incapable of mediating conflict as it once did, precisely because the unity in extra-political society is lacking. Social division and breakdown is in large part a severing of individuals from bonds and connections with others. In the absence of a social identity grounded in relation to society, individuals look to recreate identity by joining gangs, which serve as surrogate families and communities, satisfying a need for belonging, solidarity, meaning, and purpose that is frustrated and denied in wider society.
Here are two articles giving contrasting views on the Greta Thunberg phenomenon.
In the first article, David Roberts praises the complete absence of political and economic prescription in Greta Thunberg’s call for climate action. This absence is considered a virtue, despite the fact that such action does most certainly entail sweeping institutional changes.
In the second article, Ed Conway in The Times picks up on a very rare instance of Greta Thunberg actually hinting at anything specific by way of political economy, and subjects it to criticism. In the UN speech, Thunberg criticized the fantasies of ‘eternal economic growth.’ That language suggests something more than the usual calculated vagueness with respect to politics and economics, savouring a great deal of what Marx identified as the central accumulative dynamic of the capital system. There is nothing by way of systematic analysis to make the meaning of the phrase clear, so we are left making what we like of such words and phrases. Those on the left can get excited and think socialism is being promised, others can be reassured that it is merely a verbal radicalism lacking programmatic intent. A lack of clarity that would not be tolerated in either students or politicians is being treated by indolent commentators and supporters as genius. It is as if the environmental movement has found its Chance the Gardener. I have no faith whatsoever in chance in politics. And Conway has no faith in solutions that promise to take us beyond capitalism. Conway defends capitalism as an economic system that has done more to lift people out of poverty than any other economic system, past or present. He accepts that climate change is real and needs to be addressed. He also accepts that the global capital economy is faltering. He therefore puts the case for a ‘green’ reboot of a flagging global capitalism.
There are critical voices who are arguing that this, precisely, is the entire point of the Green New Deal and this new wave of environmentalism. Conway, inadvertently, argues for green growth in order to stave off the socialism he evidently thinks the environmental movement has in mind. I don’t see socialism, I see a techno-bureaucratic elite instituting an environmental planning. But Conway may have drawn the conclusion that this immense pressure around unspecified political and economic demands is designed to have people draw.
I shall comment on each article in turn.
I’m not interested in responding to climate deniers. The climate science is clear and as certain as science can be on anything. The crisis in the climate system is deep and requires large-scale action and quickly. It is the political, institutional, and economic details of this transformation that are lacking. If transformation it will be, instead of a mere reform proceeding within existing institutions.
My interest lies in the politics that is on the agenda in tackling this crisis. The important question is not that of defeating the opposition of hardball climate deniers. Climate campaigners have been involved in that battle for so long that they have come to see it as the only battle to be won. And seemingly at any price.
I shall pick out some key lines in this article.
‘She keeps the focus on science, and they hate it.’
That constant focus on the science, rather than moving over explicitly into the domains of politics, ethics, and economics, has characterised the climate campaign. This explains the failure of environmentalism to bring the significant numbers of people on board. There has been too much of a focus on the science. Roberts finds this praiseworthy with respect to Thunberg. Such a thing is praiseworthy only in the sense of not offering a political opposition an explicit target to criticize and counter. You can’t hit a target you can’t see. That’s a clever political strategy to work against opponents who have been as ruthless as the deniers have been. But it is also deceitful and underhand, a political cheat that, in the end, cheats us of our political power, with potentially dangerous consequences. This leaves quite open the precise institutional nature of the solutions to be applied. Indeed, it suggests that the solutions are already in place and ready to be rolled out once the public pressure for action on the part of government has been built. The democratic involvement in these solutions is precisely zero. There is no politics and no participation. The people are cut out when it comes to determining ends and means. The role of the people is to cheer.
I am looking at this from a very different standpoint than that of climate denialism. To keep an exclusive focus on the science is itself to wield a trans-political truth and knowledge to political ends. Statements of scientific fact have nothing to do with democratic will, choice, and opinion; these are two entirely different areas and should not be conflated. In saying ‘follow the science,’ a non-democratic language is being used to build the case for political action. The specifics of that action are not made public and not offered for scrutiny, challenge, not opened for popular contribution.
Were this a strategy being advanced by the right wing in politics, the objection of democratic subversion would be made immediately. And rightly. Yet this calculated apoliticism is the subject of praise:
‘What’s remarkable about this is not that the right-wing slime machine has gone to work against a new progressive threat. That’s what it was made for. What’s remarkable is how ineffective it’s been, how little it has affected Thunberg and her extraordinary influence.’
Having tangled with climate deniers over the years, there is some satisfaction in seeing them meet their nemesis. My concern, though, is with the implication that you have to adopt a hardball denialist politics to beat such a denialist politics. At the heart of such a politics is non-negotiation. This is not merely a non-politics, it’s an anti-politics. We have spent centuries trying to advance the principle of self-assumed obligation, only to see it first constrained by the imperatives of the private economy and then subverted by the encroachment of money and vested commercial interests in the public realm. This has stood in the way of effective climate action and does indeed need to be overcome. Overcoming opposition to climate action, however, should also involve the unshackling of the democratic revolution, not a continuation of its obstruction. Instead, I see dangers of an alternative democratic subversion through not merely a focus upon scientific language but a privileging of that language at the expense of the citizen voice. To say that the basics of climate science are easy to grasp and that citizens ought to become scientifically literate is to entirely miss the point. That’s like saying it is for citizens to learn their lines, lines that have been written independently of citizen agency. This inverts the true relation. The citizen voice comprises a judgement over a whole range of issues. The temper of politics is judicious. Once it becomes a matter of truth and expertise, it ceases to be politics. At that moment, a democratic deficit is built into the heart of the action to be taken.
I steer clear of the abuse of Thunberg. Like the abuse of all people, it is vile. I steered away from those who celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher. I don’t abuse Jeremy Corbyn as a Marxist nor of Trump as a fascist. Each person should be treated with respect.
But I note this interesting detail in the abuse quoted in the article. Here, Michael Knowles at Fox News saying that Thunberg is a “mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left.” The abuse backfired and Fox apologized to viewers and saying it would no longer book Knowles. The entirely justifiable outrage concerned the abuse of Thunberg’s AS. I am more interested in this association with ‘the international Left.’ I didn’t know there was such a thing. It cheered my heart to think that the old Socialist International may have been alive and well. When I was researching and writing political theory papers in Manchester in the 1990s, I had a habit of referring to ‘the socialist movement.’ I was checked by the questions: ‘what is this socialist movement?’ and ‘where is it?’ I couldn’t answer and thus stopped referring to the socialist movement. I know of no links of Thunberg to the international Left. I’m not aware of any ‘international Left’ as a homogenous movement with an identifiable organisational structure and aims. This association only works by the association of any kind of action involving collective intervention in the ‘free’ market. That’s a matter of ideological conceptions of freedom which are inimical to any kind of regulation or law as an infringement on individual liberty. I don’t see anything ‘left’ about Thunberg’s prescriptions and solutions at all, for the simple reason that she doesn’t offer any. Politically and economically, her statements are a void. The implications of the climate science are certain radical with respect to politics and I have no doubt that it is this that critics identify as a danger (and radicals become excited about). But the institutional details are not merely vague but absent. I see this as creating a dangerous vacuum that is easily filled by forces waiting in the wings. I don’t doubt that there are such forces preparing to occupy a political space. This vagueness is actually being presented as a virtue, in respect of not offering opponents a target. I don’t like the implications of this argument. It means that the momentum is being continually built until the popular clamour is such that governments must take action. It is at this point, past the point of no return, that the plans will be unveiled. And neither you nor I nor anyone will have a say in it one way or the other. Sweet. And that is how easily the corporate hi-jack of environmentalism will take place.
The article continues along the lines of how untouchable politically Thunberg is. The article emphasises the sheer lack of political detail and praises this as a virtue. This makes me not merely extremely suspicious, it makes me nervous with respect to the future that is being prepared by others, without the say of the people. It is evident that we are expected to be grateful for being saved, even at the expense of being reduced to servants, slaves and cog-workers in the Megachine. In researching hard to write in defence of Marx in the 1990s, I had to meet the perfectly legitimate and cogent criticisms of liberal philosophers who identified the totalitarian temptation at the heart of Marxism. This temptation doesn’t just refer to specific aspects of Marx’s writings in politics - the abolition of the institutional separation of state and civil society, the abolition of the separation of legislative and executive, the assertion of class interest as an end in itself - it also referred to the tendencies to blind loyalty, the division of politics between the good and the evil, the tendency to assert necessity over will and choice as an argument, the recourse to vanguards claiming knowledge of objective interests acting in place of actual agents. There is also the resort to questionable assumptions, such as the notion that class is the basis of political conflict, implying that the abolition of class entails the end of conflict and hence of politics. That training made alert to the misuse and misapplication of truth in politics and to the temptations arising in those claiming possession of truth to override the views of others. Those who hold that truth trumps all things and that reason is non-negotiable may have virtuous qualities in the field of science; take those qualities into politics, such people are crude, clueless oafs utterly lacking in the judgement, emotional intelligence, empathy, and imagination required to relate to others. Through political experience and philosophical training, I also developed a deep suspicion of vagueness in politics, particularly on the part of people who build pressure for action whilst being somewhat circumspect with respect to detailed plans. Those proposing big political actions should offer these for scrutiny and discussion. The simple response back is that the precise political details are being left to government and politicians mandated by the people to decide. It is therefore democratic. This feigned political innocence conceals an agenda that is transparent. The scale and complexity of the changes demanded by ‘the science’ are such as to make the solutions of a very particular kind. These solutions may be necessary, they may be reasonable, they may be justifiable. They should be offered in a political arena in order to render them legitimate. The people, as ever, are to wheeled on, if at all, to give their consent to pre-determined positions.
I claim no great insight here. These points on political vagueness are, surely, understood by anyone on nodding terms with politics and, indeed, with any respect for liberty and democracy. This article praises Thunberg for her silence on political details, and yet acknowledges that Thunberg is ‘politically potent.’ That is a lethal combination in politics. Do we really have to warn people about the dangers of buying a pig in a polk? This was such a basic lesson in political theory and philosophy classes, checking any tendency to vagueness on the part of those presenting a political case, that I am left not merely wondering where people’s critical faculties have gone, but fearing a strategy at work exploiting popular credulity.
The article continues:
‘It’s important to note, as she frequently does, that Thunberg has not single-handedly created this movement. She stands on the shoulders of generations of activists before and alongside her.’
This is so patently true that it says something about cult worship that it is deemed an important point. And it is precisely as one of those activists that I suggest that this process may not be as benign as it is being presented. I have spent years advancing the cause of climate action, investing time that I could have spent elsewhere, losing a small fortune in the process no doubt. So why do I not feel as though we stand on the point of triumph? For the very reason that I see a democratic deficit at the heart of this movement, something which augurs badly for the future climate regime to be established. That may seem a ridiculous statement given the mass protests, but protests are quite different from an active participation that shapes an agenda. That agenda is being set elsewhere. The facts are non-negotiable, the ends will be given by the science, the policies will be worked out by governing elites and will be financed and implemented by corporate business. The role of the great public will be limited to cheering the whole process on. Ambitious plans of climate action are needed, certainly. But once this austerian climate regime is in place, we are entitled to query whether the cuts and constraints will fall equally upon all. In The End of Politics (1984), political theorist Tony Polan described Marxism as a huge gamble that it would be unwise to take. We may get localisation and democratisation and a redistribution of wealth and a dismantling of the arms industry and all the things that Greens such as I have argued for for decades. We may not. And that’s my point, the lack of internal democratic constraint and check. The role of the people is limited to an external check pressuring governments on climate action and monitoring governments to ensure that such action takes place. My argument is that there should be democratic participation in defining, determining, and driving such action on.
Politics speaks the language of priorities. The problem is that when ‘survival,’ based upon the need for climate stabilisation, is the priority then it is easy to see many things sliding off the list. Have people not learned lessons with respect to the failures of the liberal establishment and technocratic elite over recent decades and the way that this has fostered a populist backlash? More than two decades ago I warned that the project of European integration would risk disintegrating as a result of a democratic deficit. The EU hasn’t disintegrated, but it would be a whole lot healthier than it is now if democratic involvement had been made more central than it has been. The same argument applies with respect to environmentalism. But, of course, the argument is that the role of the people is to mandate those with the decision-making power, the finance, the technology, and the tools to get the job done. Agreed. Where is the mandate? By that, I mean more than the mobilisation of protests. I see little evidence of the ecological transformation of ‘the political’ in this movement; instead, I see a continuation of the technocratic takeover of the political. The climate question is defined precisely in terms that give science and technology a privileged voice. It is this privileging of expertise and devaluation of other voices that lies at the heart of this denigration of democracy. The space for creative citizen agency is narrowed to merely passive activities.
The article takes a look at why the usual tricks of climate deniers don’t work with Greta Thunberg. Roberts singles out something I would consider a flaw in a political movement as reason for praise: ‘Greta avoids the trap of recommending specific policies.’ That’s a trap!? Britain is mired in a Brexit crisis that is increasingly dividing the country precisely because of an extra-political movement without a plan or a vision of alternate institutions succeeded in mobilizing popular anger against the EU, blaming the EU for the ills afflicting Britain, building up pressure over a period of time until finally the dam broke. There was no plan, no clear presentation of alternative institutions and arrangements, no analysis, merely the vaguest of visions that struck a chord with the wishes, fantasies, dreams, and delusions of people. This is an extra-political power without political responsibility and it is a blight in politics. It either splits a polity apart or supports a tyranny. The effects may yet split the UK. To raise such a huge demand for action without a plan is the height of irresponsibility. But I am sure things are nowhere near as bad as that with respect to the demands for climate action. There is, I would suggest, a very clear plan. And I would suggest that the tools, technologies, and mechanisms of delivering that plan exist. That’s why the denial of political intent is a deceit. The claim that it is for politicians to work out the details is less than innocent. The parameters of the problem are defined so clearly that the details of the plan can only be worked out in certain ways. Politics just becomes a matter of choosing the most appropriate and effective means to a pre-determined end. Only certain forces in society possess such means. The goal with respect to cutting carbon emissions and carbon sequestration is clear, it is within technical and financial reach, it can be done. All we need is for the governments of the world to commit individually and to coordinate efforts internationally. Great, the very thing we have been demanding since Rio. Hence the understandable praise for Thunberg.
Just don’t hand blank cheques to government and business.
There is near unanimity among businesses, scientific institutions, investors, and governments across the world in recognizing the urgent need for action on climate change. Even St Helens council has declared a climate emergency. Which will help.
‘The science has made it inescapably clear that business as usual leads to disaster,’ states the article. We have known this for a while. The same with respect to politics-as-usual. But recognition of the need for action, however near universal, is only the beginning and is not remotely the end. Roberts writes: ‘Many debates remain over the best path forward, but the basic case for action has become unassailable.’ I surely can’t be alone in identifying the complacency of statements such as this. Those ‘many debates’ as to ‘the best path forward’ are precisely where this issue should have been all along, instead of wasting decades ‘debating’ the science. This is precisely the thing to be debated now. Politics is this debate, politics is debate. We need to be having precisely that debate over the best way forward. That debate is not merely over means, it is over the ends too, insofar as these relate to social interests, democratic involvement, community architecture. There is no debate over the science. The science is the science. Anyone with alternate explanations of climate events could have put up at any time. Instead, the scientific case for human-made climate change has been strengthened with every wasted year. Those years were wasted precisely because of the almost exclusive focus on science, leaving politicians and people without anything like a viable environmental option in the political arena, something to mobilize around, something connected up with social interests and concerns in the here and now. It seems that some climate activists seriously think that governments will make ‘the economy’ a secondary consideration to the long-term planetary health and that citizens will sacrifice their interests with respect to jobs, pensions, health, education, housing and so forth for the good of the climate. Of course they won’t. Human beings live in the ‘here and now.’ The challenge has always been to bring the environmental crisis into that immediate by writing it into all the bread and butter issues which concern people and motivate their efforts. That this wasn’t done indicates a serious a political failure. Too many blame the people for their lack of concern, selfishness, and ignorance here. That’s a libel against the people and a copout for a seriously deficient politics. So an alternative approach is being taken. It may work in building pressure for change. But the democratic deficit it opens up comes with a serious danger. Should this wave of climate mobilization stall, the lack of social, democratic, and affective content will return with a vengeance. There are good reasons to think demobilization won’t happen, and that the people are taking to the field for good this time – not least the fact that the effects of climate change will, most certainly, get worse with every passing year. We won’t need to ‘debate’ the science, the fact of climate change will be tangible. The problem is that the paradox of climate action kicks in here: by the time people will have become aware of climate change it will be too late to do anything about it. That time is now. But we know that we are not fighting climate change; climate change will be with us for a long time into the future. Which leaves me wanting clarity as to what is in store in the future. We will move from a politics of emergency to a politics of necessity. Simply forcing climate action through popular pressure is not the victory. The nature of that action matters a great deal.
It is not at all difficult to see a future of austerian climate regimes justifying the imposition of policies without, and even against, popular will on account of necessity and survival. Will the burdens be shared equally? Who will be in charge? To whom will they be accountable to? And removable by, if at all? If you think I am fear-mongering, I can quote James Lovelock arguing for a suspension of democracy. In fact, it isn’t hard to find any number of environmentalists over the years arguing for authoritarian regimes as a result of the inadequacies of democracy in making the right choices and taking the right courses of action. Of course, what they condemn as democracy has never been democracy at all, it has been the atomism of society and individualism of culture in conditions of competition and inequality. Liberal capitalist modernity, then. The democratic revolution has stalled in the face of capitalist relations. Marxism and socialism led the political assault on capitalism in the name of advancing democracy, and yet were subject to damaging criticisms by liberal philosophers on account of being anti-democratic or being characterised by a totalitarian concept of democracy. I defended Marx against the charge, but can see the reason the criticisms were made. I am wondering why people who style themselves ‘progressives’ are almost entirely silent on the clear authoritarian and anti-democratic implications of climate politics as conceived by this militant wave of environmentalism.
Roberts comes to the bit that interests me, the lack of political, economic, and institutional details as a virtue:
‘For climate scientists and advocates, it’s a familiar trap. Any political program sufficient to address climate change at scale is, almost by definition, going to be radical, which allows the right to dismiss it as “far left.” The go-to attack on the climate movement is that it’s a “watermelon,” green on the outside and socialist red on the inside — that climate change is just a cover story for the political program.
Thunberg has sidestepped attacks on her motives by almost entirely refraining from endorsing specific political reforms or policies. “I can’t really speak up about things like [politics],” she told Wallace-Wells, “no one would take me seriously.”’
Any movement that demands radical action on the part of government and business, but doesn’t offer specific details and plans would not be taken seriously and should be approached with great suspicion. Praise here is being given for what is merely an old refrain: ‘something should be done.’ That vagueness is never persuasive in politics and is an absolute blight in office. Again, though, that modesty with respect to politics is false – there are specific political reforms and policies in mind, and there a range of ‘green’ groups ready to support and implement them.
Roberts praises the focus on ‘the science.’ This constant emphasis on ‘the science,’ accompanied by an explicit denial of politics (and, heaven forfend, ethics or values) is precisely evidence of the ‘scientism’ in support of technocracy against democracy I utterly repudiate. Roberts writes:
‘Her insistence on this point was illustrated when she submitted the IPCC’s report on limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius in lieu of testifying to the House. Attached was a short letter that said: “I am submitting this report as my testimony because I don’t want you to listen to me. I want you to listen to the scientists. And I want you to unite behind the science. And then I want you to take action.” She refuses to allow her opinions to become the focus.’
This is not a mandate, it is a licence for an authoritarian buttressed by an unanswerable science. Note well that there is no democratic mediation between ‘the science’ and government policy and action. There is no will, deliberation, choice, and agency on the part of the people at all. The principle of self-assumed obligation, which we have spent centuries establishing, is simply discarded. It’s not even a consideration.
Roberts writes:
‘Coming from almost any adult, this strategy would be vulnerable. Adults have political worldviews and very few have the discipline to keep them entirely hidden. But Thunberg is, in her own words, an “uneducated teenager.” She’s 16 years old! She can’t be expected to know what actions government agencies need to take and she doesn’t pretend to.’
Coming from anyone, this strategy would surely be identified and rejected as an attempt to sell a pig in a polk. It's a shield. The people driving the agenda must surely know that those opposed wouldn’t be so stupid as to fall for it, but must think sufficient numbers of greens are. The mobilization of a youth innocent of politics (of course we have to say that young people are all-knowing and far more politically knowledgeable than the rest of us) is thus Youthwash, nice positive images that makes us all feel that the future belongs to us. The presentation of political innocence is a clear strategy of disarmament. The praise for a position in politics in which those seeking action and change exercise ‘discipline’ so as to keep their ‘political worldviews’ ‘entirely hidden,’ reveals an utterly sinister intent. There are specific plans but, rather than offer them for scrutiny, debate, and questioning in a public platform, they are to be kept hidden to be revealed after action has been mandated. Of course, should they be presented in a public platform, these plans may be defeated in the normal course of politics. So contest is avoided.
As Roberts says in the next line: ‘She just drags the focus back, again and again, to the subject grown-ups want to avoid: the need for immediate action and their longstanding failure to take any.’ Which grown-ups? Very many people have been demanding immediate action for years. It is particular people who have stalled, and we know who they are and the reasons why. My concern is that in defeating this hardboiled opposition that would object to each, any, and every proposal for climate action, the climate movement comes to defeat itself by betraying the environmental cause into corporate hands. Power is best preserved by being concealed and insulated from challenge and contestation.
Roberts proceeds to argue why Thunberg has proven unassailable in face of right wing assaults:
‘But this is where Thunberg’s autism has proven, as she has put it, a kind of superpower. She has Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder that makes her indifferent, often blind, to social cues and incentives as well as inclined to focus intently on a single subject, a tendency Thunberg says is exacerbated by obsessive-compulsive disorder.’
I have Asperger’s too, and an extreme case. I am entirely indifferent to the mass adulation that Thunberg has inspired, and possess an obsession with politics and political detail. I am not a science geek, though. I see counting and categorising the physical things of the universe the easy part. It doesn’t surprise me that so many scientists have an attraction to ‘things’ that don’t answer back. Human beings are not ‘things.’ They do answer back. I obsess over the complicated part – the paradoxical creatures human beings are in terms of psychology, morals, motives, will, agency. Too many science and technology people I know and have known express disdain for such areas. That is their failing, a failing they bring into environmentalism. The lack of the human factor holds that movement back. Scientist and mathematician Jacob Bronowski teaches such people a lesson here. Standing in the ashes of Auschwitz, he says: ‘We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.’ (Bronowski 2011: 284-5). Those words were not aimed at science and technology, but made in defence of the humility of science. Bronowski’s target was certainty, arrogance, and dogma, qualities we can all too easily find in politics and ethics. In bringing scientific truth into the realm of practical reason, be careful not to wield it as unanswerable authority in support of the push-button order. Leave the greater part over for the creative human act.
I like people, I like democracy. I loathe elitists and technocrats, people who think reason is non-negotiable and truth trumps all things, people most of all. I have spent a lifetime among people being spoken over and down to, ignored, ordered, treated as subordinate. I resist vehemently the tendencies on the part of ‘clever’ people to talk over ‘ordinary’ people and thereby rob them of their voice and their agency. It’s in being ordinary, people prefer to be asked and persuaded rather than told. In arguing for democracy I was once told that ‘people are stupid.’ My response was that people may indeed be stupid, but, in being grounded in practical social realities, they are nowhere near as stupid as their would-be rulers and reformers are, and nowhere near as stupid as these people think they are. It wasn’t the people who made derivatives the height of economic wisdom, or who came up with PFI, or the realpolitik that has mired the world in war and terrorism for decades. I am entirely uncomfortable with the domination of science and technology in the environmental movement. I have met enough clever people to know that I don’t want them establishing themselves as environmental philosopher kings. Should they attempt to do so I, as a Marxist, would have no compunction in joining with Hayek in defence of individual liberty. Time and again, my experiences have confirmed a contempt for ‘ordinary’ people on the part of ‘clever,’ certified, highly qualified, trained, and expert people. In open, friendly discussion, I have heard such people bemoan ignorance and stupidity and overpopulation and say that ‘it’s time to cull the herd.’ I checked that particular assertion with the question, ‘which government would you empower to do the culling, and how would have them choose who gets to live and who gets to die?’ So I want specific plans, details, and politics and refuse to give licence to any organisation or movement in politics. Necessity is the tyrant’s plea.
‘I’m far from the first to draw a connection between Thunberg’s autism, her authenticity, and her effectiveness.’
I can’t claim to be effective, but I have the other two qualities. I think talk of Asperger’s as a ‘superpower’ is bunkum, and I value each and every AS person for who they are, whether or not they are genius mathematicians, engineers etc. This exoticisation of AS on the part of people who simply enjoy having their views confirmed has made me wretch. I have autism and I most certainly am authentic. I have no dog in the fight. I am a member on no political party, no political movement. I have no financial interests, no sectional interests to advance or defend. I work in the intellectual commons, where I make my work available in free access. I have no academic career. I have no academic reputation or political position to defend. I may well be wrong in the things I write. But, when I write, I go with the creative flow and let the argument go where it will. And if I am mistaken in my views here, I am in error in an effort to recover the missing social, democratic, and affective dimensions of environmentalism. I see the psychological, intellectual and organisational ground of the Megamachine being prepared, and too few are prepared to speak against it. The fact that it is the climate denying right who are most vocal makes the situation even worse. In the effort to defeat those people, whose politics will indeed doom civilization, we may well defeat the whole point of our own politics – which I take to be more than survival.
‘In characteristically vile fashion, the right in both Europe and the US has attempted to use Thunberg’s mental health against her, but the attempt has largely backfired. For one thing, it is virtually impossible to watch her speak for any length of time and maintain a good-faith belief that she is responding to social pressure from adults. She is manifestly authentic, direct in a way unique among public figures, no more subject to flattery than to coercion.’
This is a good defence of Thunberg against the ‘vile’ right, but misses the point. Attacks on Thunberg are not worthy of response. The value of response, of course, lies in establishing the irredeemable vileness of political opponents. I am neither a right wing climate denier nor, as one who has Asperger’s, an abuser of those with AS. I am something raising serious questions with respect to the well-oiled, well-resourced, well-connected machine around her. I hear defenders say there is no such machine and that Greta Thunberg acts alone and on her own initiative. We are expected to believe that she is here, there, and everywhere, meeting Popes and Presidents and at the top tables at the UN simply because powerful people find her authentic.
‘She’s not intimidated or dazzled by social hierarchy. She just drags the focus, again and again, back to her fixation, what the grown-ups don’t want to talk about: the need for immediate action and their long-standing failure to take any.’
I am not remotely intimidated or dazzled by reputation and I don’t give a damn about popularity. I am a member of no political party, having let my membership of The Green Party lapse. I just drag the focus, again and again, back to my fixation, which is the evasion of the institutional and structural causes of the converging social and environmental crises as endemic to the capital system and the devaluation of democracy, ethics, and politics. The long-standing failure of governments to act is to be located in these evasions. If we are indeed being permitted to use autism as a shield, whilst wielding a sword, then I shall speak plainly and bluntly and call out the people praising Thunberg so highly for her lack of specifics: you are the real climate deniers! In refusing point blank over the years to look at the material relations, contradictory dynamics, accumulative imperatives, and class roots at the heart of the climate crisis, you are very much among the grown-ups who are in denial! J’accuse! You have evaded the real social and systemic source of the problem, and still are! Praise that guileless plain-speaking from an authentic, if usually ineffective, autistic person if you can.
I know from experience that in presenting that case in the past I have been met with evasion, cowardice, and hostility, with environmentalists accusing such thinking as ‘divisive,’ ‘anachronistic,’ ‘off-putting,’ ‘extremist,’ ‘irrelevant,’ and much much worse. I have a good and long memory and hold a grudge. Those who say that there is no time for Marx and socialism never had any time for such things in the past. They are the same people who, labouring the science over and again, now claim to be bereft of political details when it comes to stepping up to the plate. I’m also calling out those greens who continue to see capitalism and socialism as two sides of the same thing here, too. You have had long enough to learn that the character of specific social relations matters a great deal when it comes to the use of human powers. That is precisely what the socialist critique of the capital system entails. People think they know what socialism is, refuse to look any further, remain mired within a status quo they know is unsustainable and, for want of any idea as to how to move forward, or inclination for that matter, idle away their days yearning for a return to a natural past that never was. So many people find it much easier to envisage the end of civilisation than the end of capitalism for the very reason they are exhausted and politically soft, lack what it takes to create a future society, and see nothing beyond present relations in any case. Such people are bourgeois to the core, and therefore trapped within the antithesis of an untranscendable present and an impossible past. That’s my fixation. I should tone the language down, no doubt. But reason has failed in the past. So maybe a blunt telling of how it is may shock them into opening their eyes. Over the years I have been the one being abused. I shall quote what I was told for my troubles: ‘left wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism.’ I see now these same people wetting themselves in their excitement over what appears to be a breakthrough in climate action. Greta Thunberg is being praised for being so forthright in demanding respect for ‘the science’ and so insistent on ‘action.’ That’s precisely what we have been arguing for since ever. It’s the message reduced to basics. There are only two rules: One: obey the science; Two: obey all the rules. It seems that people love Thunberg because she says precisely nothing politically and socially, allowing them to write whatever they like into her. She’s a cipher. At least for those who are conflict averse when it comes to politics in a class divided society. These are the people in part responsible for the ‘long-standing failure’ to address the climate crisis, for the very reason they have lacked the nerve to identify the precise roots of the crisis. They have lacked an effective politics all along. And this praise for apoliticism tells me that they still lack a politics. Their excitement here lies in the invitation they see to a technocratic workaround that allows them to avoid the messy business of addressing ‘ordinary’ people. The common folk are all dumb in any case, why bother with them?
‘When Greta disregards social cues, it sends a social cue.’
Same here. I am disregarding my usual public politeness to tell it like it is. I hold those who disregard people for not knowing what you know and think important in contempt.
‘But, in part through their indifference to social cues, people with autism have a unique capacity to face the facts clearly. And the facts about climate change are f&%£ing terrifying.’
Please, the facts of ordering a meal at a fast-food outlet fill me with terror. The ordinary facts of life in general are terrifying for me. Even speaking my mind, rather than dressing my thoughts up behind clever words, worries me. Instead of speaking bluntly, I censor myself. As I write, my thought processes are dominated by the worry that I have been speaking out of turn and should return to the above and render the same point in more diplomatic terms. But it wouldn’t be authentic, it wouldn’t be blunt, it wouldn’t be the unadorned truth. As I see it. I am usually diplomatic, in writing and in person. You would have to meet me in person over time. Then I will speak so bluntly as to the facts of life as to terrify you. The facts of climate change hold no terrors for me. Read the history books. Human beings have done everything they could to each other and to other beings and bodies. I’ve seen every foul and depraved practice, seen the civilizations rise and fall. The lot.
‘There’s a kind of courage in ignoring the pervasive social pressure to calm down about climate change.’
I am loathe to praise courage here, not least when there is a systematic evasion of politics and economics, a repetition of safe general statements like ‘unite behind the science,’ itself an appeal to conformity, and ‘climate justice for all.’ Then there are the significant omissions, especially references to militarism.
I very much feel that pervasive social pressure to calm down and conform. For a long time I have known that I am out of kilter with my FB ‘friends,’ and have suppressed my thoughts for fear of upsetting them. That’s the very pressure to conform upon which capitalism reproduces itself, or induces its servants to act in its reproduction. Something didn’t smell right here from the start. So I thought, pondered, and considered at length. I may be blind to the reasons why Thunberg appeals to so many. I don’t get it. I may well be missing something. If I am, then remember that I have a pretty extreme case of Asperger’s. I miss plenty in life. I miss the blandishments and briberies by which individuals are drawn into complicity with a normality that is corrupt, destructive, nasty, and perverse. Normality is what most people do. It passes me by. So if I am missing something, consider that my social blindness allows me to see others’ blindness in respect to her. I see the mass response and appeal, but that only has me questioning why so many respond to so little. What she is saying isn’t new, and her calls for action lack details. I see nothing. I see people responding to nothing, and ask questions as to why they, not her, are so deficient in the qualities needed for an effective politics.
The trigger for me was Thunberg’s attempt to exploit the coverage of the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral to make the point about the planet being on fire. I thought that not merely callous, but an example of one of the primary fallacies of the age, ‘what-aboutism.’ What struck me most about this is that no-one noticed and no-one cared. No one gives a damn about religion. I do. I noticed the insensitivity, the lack of concern, the inhumanism. And I say it goes right to the heart of environmentalism. The fire was rightly in the news and this was an attempt to use the event to advance a cause. There followed any number of posts on social media denigrating Notre Dame, setting human culture and nature in a false antithesis. A concern for one thing will entail a concern for other things; since all things are interconnected, concern lies on a continuum. This monomaniacal concern with climate change told me that there is an agenda being driven, and that the fire at Notre Dame was treated as an unmissable PR opportunity. The lack of concern this demonstrated with respect to the sensibilities of those concerned with Notre Dame indicated an agenda. The abuse of religion I then had to suffer on social media revealed the extent to which an utterly false dichotomy between nature and culture lay at the heart of a certain strain of environmentalism, betraying a basic misanthropy.
‘In ignoring social cues, Thunberg has become one: A signal to other young people around the world that, yes, this really is an emergency, and yes, they really can and should speak up.’
I may not be as young as I was, but I remain young at heart. And I’m speaking up on the structural and systemic roots of climate crisis. In addition to speaking up, people need to listen. Will people remain deaf?
‘I hope she continues to refrain from policy recommendations …’
That’s fine in respect to her, since she is not remotely in any position to make recommendations. My criticism is not directed at her, it is against those who also refrain from specifics when it comes to social analysis, directions, policies, and plans. If this system is to be radically changed – and ‘the science’ says it should so be changed, we are repeatedly told (and I believe it to be true) – then people who are serious need to get down to specifics quickly and engage with citizens to recover democratic legitimacy.
‘Sooner or later, she’ll do something, join something, or say something that forces her out of the improbably apolitical space she now occupies — and the public tends to be unforgiving of females who disappoint their expectations, even young white ones. No human being can survive the full intensity of the right-wing smear machine undamaged.’
I’d go much further than this. She needs to be removed from central focus as quickly as possible, with adults stepping up to take environmentalism out of this ‘improbably apolitical space’ to engage in real politics again. That means meeting and defeating the challenge of opponents whilst winning popular support for specific platforms. And it means engaging with individuals as citizens, too. That’s politics. That’s what the world has been missing. That’s what I want back.
‘If Thunberg is to have a meaningful long-term effect, it can’t be through staying in the spotlight. It must come from others adopting some of her focus, determination, and courage, learning to disregard the social pressures that suppress their fear and anger and prevent them from speaking up, connecting, and finding hope in one another. It will come from others — especially those in positions of power, with access to social capital — listening to her and treating the threat to her generation’s future as the crisis it is.’
And that’s just the kind of conclusion I feared was coming. I have argued for adults to disregard the social constraints and pressures of serving the capitalist machine, throw off their fear of challenging entrenched power, and find the nous to develop alternate institutions and systems with popular involvement. That would amount to a real social transformation. Instead, in one line, we get precisely what I believe to be on the cards. Adults need to act, “especially those in positions of power, with access to social capital.” That appeal totally inverts everything Marx ever wrote about social transformation. Marx argued for the restitution of social power back into the hands of the people and the society from which it originated. In complete contrast to this, Roberts makes an appeal to people in positions of power. This appeal understands precisely nothing about the capital system to be transformed. The people in power are mere personifications of economic categories; they act as they do because they have to serve systemic imperatives arising from the process of accumulation. If you don’t understand that, then you understand nothing. Marx defined capital as a relation. Capital rule has to be uprooted. Roberts defines capital as a ‘thing,’ repeating the classic definition of capitalist economics, thus making something social and historically specific natural, eternal, and unalterable. The capital system will be with us always, then, burning up the planet as it goes.
At which point, you are left wondering whether such people are merely ignorant and need educating when it comes to social forms; lack courage and merely need emboldening; or are part of the corporatisation of nature that is most certainly in the pipeline. I mean, just think about it: who else is capable of acting on the scale that ‘the science’ tells us is required?
There is clearly an agenda that is being driven here. There is complete silence on private property, inequality, class, accumulation, and militarism, which has an enormous climate impact. The only reference to capital is the usual definition of it as a ‘thing.’ This is a dead giveaway, since this definition naturalizes what ought to be historicized, rendering eternal and untranscendable the very rule and relation that lies at the heart of the environmental crisis. There are those who criticize that the intent is merely to save and reboot a capitalism that is in crisis, but it is so much worse than that: this is about the corporate capture of nature.
I shall continue to argue for a Global Commons and for a Global Commons Constitution. I argue that we need to reclaim our ethical and political commons as well as our physical commons. This Commons is to be governed and sustained by a network of countless small horizontal democracies of self-determining citizens. The Commons Constitution would prevent the use of money to make money, will institute and practice peace, and will expand rights as care to the other beings and bodies of the more-than-human world. A pipe-dream, of course. An idealized fantasy that is far removed from the push-button order of the Megamachine. All those things that people praising Thunberg’s realism are saying. We can, of course, be realistic, just by changing energy systems and imposing restrictions on consumption within prevailing capitalist institutions, all the time pretending that we are changing everything.
This climate action to be taken involves the agency of the UN, an institution that has long since been taken over by big capital, the forces that pervade the World Economic Forum. It very much seems, then, that I shall be left continuing the fight that Gerrard Winstanley started all those years ago, urging people to start reclaiming the global Commons wherever they are.
Another world is possible.
Cory Morningstar is clear that this current wave of climate activism is a global PR campaign driven by an agenda that serves the corporate capture of nature. She provides a wealth of research to back her argument up. Morningstar analyses the We Mean Business Group and its links to some of the biggest corporations on Earth. There is no accusation levelled at Thunberg, and those who continue to vouch for her authenticity are either missing the point or are in on the agenda and highlighting her sincere concern with climate change and knowledge of the science to continue with the Youthwashing. It is most important to look past Greta Thunberg and not become absorbed in debates about her, her sex, her autism, her youth etc. The important thing is to look behind the simple message of ‘follow the science’ and take ‘action.’ No movement so influential on this scale can be explained by the cogency of such simple slogans. There is nothing here that hasn’t been said before. There is a need to look behind her and her words and identify a strategy at work and an agenda being driven by powerful groups. There is no evidence of systemic analysis into the causes of the climate crisis let alone of a commitment to system change, the very opposite in fact. The agenda, Morningstar argues, is all about rescuing and revitalizing a failing economic system through the final incorporation of nature. Why do so many find this conclusion so surprising and shocking? I shall shortly come to the conservative commentator Ed Conway in The Times, who presents this very thing as a good idea. You can only find the idea of incorporation outrageous if you do actually believe the movement for climate action is in some way socialist. It isn’t and it never was. If you believe that effective climate solutions entail socialism, as I do, then you need to get to work on the politics quickly. Read Morningstar, who shows how the initial attempt at incorporation was made with the phrase ‘natural capital solutions.’ It didn’t prove popular. Now the phrase ‘natural climate solutions’ is used. Same solutions, now popular among greens. Monbiot uses the term.
This is merely the completion of a process that began centuries ago with the enclosure and commercialization of the commons. Why do environmentalists who know this and have protested against this over the years find it so shocking that the environmentalism they are supporting could be subject to corporate takeover? Precisely because of their emotional commitment to the ideals and images that are being projected by the movement. The mobilization is all about building emotional investment and attachment and then exploiting and re-directing it. We know from the history of the last few centuries that capital exists by the annexation and commercialisation of resources, subordinating labour and nature to the pursuit of exchange value. The system is inherently deaf to the realm of use values, sacrificing everything of value on the altar of accumulation. Anyone who is shocked or surprised either doesn’t know this or, through wish fulfilment with respect to political ideals, cannot countenance that the politics they support can be captured and re-directed to these ends. Given that the economic story of the past quarter of century has been the corporatisation of public business, it takes a remarkable innocence – or desperation as a result of long political failure and frustration – not to see that corporate forces would organize and mobilize in order to capture and monetize nature. Those who refuse to see that are really intellectual and moral cowards who don’t want to see it lest they have to resist. They will choose a more ‘realistic’ path, one that offers practical solutions that are within reach. Of course, being realistic in these terms means embracing the institutions of politics- and business-as-usual, even as they reject both.
This is a defining moment. With time running out, this is a time for people to decide and show their true colours. And their mettle. And their nous. Which side are you on? Carry on prevaricating with respect to the systemic causes of climate crisis, and you remain complicit with the long standing failure. It could be that it is so late in the day that system-change is simply a non-option precisely on account of being so profound and long-ranging. We have lost the long-term. The order of the day is precipitate effective action with whatever institutions, tools, and technologies we have merely to ensure the survival of civilization. Lofty political ambitions are an indulgence that distract us from the real task at hand. Lofty ideals like socialism, certainly. And democracy?
That is a diabolic reasoning worthy of Faust. There is no reason why action cannot conceive the short- and long-term on a continuum, the actions that civilization must take now passing over into long-term transformation. There is, indeed, every reason why that this should be the case, the end in view of an ecologically healthy society serving to orient actions in the immediate and keep them on the right path. To effect a split here is to make a distinction between a real that is available in the present and an ideal that is postponed indefinitely into the future. When that happens, we lose the very end we seek to serve. All that remains to us is what is already in front of us, which is the very system to be changed. This is where the incorporation and reorientation takes place, resetting the capital system to preserve it as opposed to transforming it out of existence. That leaves one and all asking what environmentalism means to them, and answering in terms of what they think is possible, desirable, and necessary in both short and long terms. In the very least, I would suggest that environmentalism is meaningless if it doesn’t set a legitimate concern with the health and happiness of human society in the context of the flourishing of the natural world. We have to answer the question what kind of world it is we want to live in and how far we are prepared to go in order to bring that world about. This is the time for reflection and clarity on goals and ends, because a wrong move now will set us on a detour at a time when there is no time to spare. Get the direction wrong and we can kiss goodbye to a future worth having. This is the time to hold your nerve and resist compromise with a politics of necessity seducing us into complicity with the very forces that have brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Environmentalists need to beware betraying their ideals to the Megamachine and the corporate form, out of impatience for the climate action required to save civilisation. Whilst it may not seem a time for prevarication and deliberation, reflection is needed, since any action will not do. Climate action that merely resets and reboots the capital system through a green new deal under the auspices of the corporate form will ensure catastrophe. Fuelling an ultimately unsustainable system with renewable energy serves only to buy time for those whose only desire is to hit the till one last time.
There is nothing easy in making this choice, given the extent to which so many have, on the one hand, bonded and identified with the environmental cause and, on the other, with corporate culture. Put the two together and you have an immensely appealing movement. The trick is to take the concerns and the language of environmentalists, appropriate and attach them to corporate ends, rebrand, conflate. The corporate capture of environmentalism, through positive images of youth and women, proceeds inexorably to the corporate capture of nature.
Age and sex have nothing to do with the truth or otherwise of an argument. I'm sick to the back teeth of the self-immolation of males with respect to feminism (they say how great women and girls are so often you'd think they were trying to persuade themselves of its truth). I utterly reject notions of "white male privilege," and would like to see notions of toxic masculinity joined by notions of toxic femininity in recognition of sinful human nature as such. But that’s unappealing language that discomforts and deters people. Such critical language contrasts markedly with the greenwash, youthwash, and girlwash so many fall for. The Liberal Democrats in the UK have just elected Jo Swinson as leader. She made a big thing of being a feminist and a green, and so she was presented as a breath of fresh air. The Guardian newspaper, which consistently hammers Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, could barely contain its excitement. She was a member of the coalition government and her voting record on social and environmental issues is appalling. She has also taken money from fracking companies. People fell for the image she projected of herself as a green woman. Write that identity large in terms of a mass mobilization, and you have the basis for mass deception.
I said this decades ago, and I'm in print and dated on this: identarian politics will destroy the Left from within. In fact, with the abandonment of the working class and socio-economic issues on the part of the intellectual left, the destruction has long since happened, linked as it is to socio-economic changes fragmenting the class and its culture and politics. The crowd that remains are basically liberal, lamenting the status quo but unable to transcend it. There is no depth in thought and analysis, and a reformist timidity with respect to what is to be done. Such people lack what it takes to constitute a genuine public community. It takes more than an aggregate of the favoured identities to constitute a public life. In fact, this worship of favoured identities is utterly reactionary, and not liberatory at all.
We had the "strikes" (protest with permission, that is), and now we have the plan! It's like marketing for dummies. In my business class at St Helens Chamber we were given the example of Christmas dinner. We were presented with the tempting image of all the family around the table, open fire, uncle Nobby pulling a cracker; then we were shown all the impossibly hard work required to bring this festive delight about; and then, magic, we were presented with the actual product, all finished and wrapped and ready to buy. Simple: create the demand and offer the product that satisfies it. At a price. Popular participation is limited to consumption, as in buying a pig in a polk. Benjamin Barber in the book Consumed warned of the destruction of the public realm through an "infantilism" that is all about the manipulation of images and emotions and desires. This is the complete antithesis of the public life I have worked hard to recover over the years.
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 have always argued for ecology as a self-governing, self-organising principle applied throughout society. It seems that 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 would argue strongly that we should resist such concentration of power. Power tends to concentration, and concentration of power always corrupts and turns tyrannical. I can but keep presenting my views positively, and be ignored by green friends, or express my concern, and be abused for my trouble. Or take myself out of politics completely. My consistent view is that politics can no longer mediate conflict between people since the conditions for doing politics well have been lost. This is nothing like the Green Republicanism I have always argued for. The virtues in their true sense have been extinguished.
It is amazing how people who run a mile from the considered analysis I put forward get ecstatic when reading their dreams and visions into a line or phrase of Greta Thunberg. I fear for this girl. Too many adults incapable of serious politics and citizen engagement are investing all their indolent dreams in her. I think it's an embarrassment and a disgrace. I am not interested in her, other than to say that I hope her handlers will now withdraw her for a period of normality. I see science friends like Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University, vouch for her sincerity, seriousness, and scientific knowledge having met her. Rahmstorf is a fine fellow and top scientist and we can believe his words. I have no reason to doubt anything he says here, but don’t see it as the issue in any case. I am just wondering why he made that statement. Is he responding to claims that Thunberg is in on an agenda? This misses the point. The science is right and the need for climate action is right. Thunberg is right on this and there is no reason to doubt her sincerity. Let’s take her sincerity as read. That still leaves the issue to be addressed. I am more interested in the well-oiled machine at work behind her than I am in her. Because there is such a machine. If she is silent on politics and presents no agenda when it comes to climate action, others will have a politics and an agenda. In fact, I would not only be surprised but disappointed if people didn’t. We haven’t come this far on climate and remained utterly bereft of solutions, surely? The claim coming from environmentalists involved in ratcheting up the pressure that it is for governments and politicians to work out the details of the climate action that is necessary is a piece of underhand politics. The very institution that activists and campaigners claim has been stalling on climate action, whilst they have been working on solutions, is now charged with coming up with the plans and details in just ten years. The plans and details are out there, and environmentalists well know this, having been working on them for decades.
It’s the silence on institutional questions and the feigned innocence on politics that is cause for concern here. There is clearly something being prepared, hidden from view, awaiting the go-ahead once the pressure for action has mandated governments to commit. I'm just struck by how many who profess concern at the expropriation of the commons are happy to cheer this operation on so uncritically.
To those who enjoy the sight of girls leading on the environment, I would say be cautious of Youthwashing. I am all in favour of personal moral effort and commitment, and argue that all collective schemes will fail for want of those things. I don't like to see girls being used as a front for a politics contrived by and in the hands of others. I want to see some real politics. This is all imagery and stereotyping (which also has the corollary of associating others - white males usually - with negative connotations). It's principally a branding and marketing to elicit positive responses. At least the bombardment of youth I am currently suffering in my Inbox is. This is the corporate capture of youth with the corporate capture of nature in mind. I am ignoring the fact that so many associates are cheering this on and remaining critical. I will not join out of loyalty or out of fear of upsetting people. There is an agenda that is being driven from behind the scenes here, and we can identify the principal agents. The public are being presented with the floor show and are falling for it. This is not "left" at all. All critical faculties have been lost. The smart people are in favour of it as mandating the large scale action needed. They are under no illusions about any green or democratic ideals. Survival is the name of the game for them, nothing else. That may seem hard-headed and realistic, but the price of their pragmatism will be to betray environmentalism into corporate hands and bind it even more firmly to an unsustainable system than it is now. I suspect they think that this is the only way forward and wish to prepare the ground and justification without openly supporting it, thus appearing to be betraying their principles. The cheer leaders are just happy that the ball seems to be rolling at last.
The new agenda is about resetting capital within a climate regime. I'm taking the time out to remind myself as to what environmentalism means, in terms of a genuine commons uniting each and all, ethical and political as well as physical. I'm not seeing that here. Instead, I am seeing "scientism," technocracy, an expertise and elitism that goes over the heads of the people, a political emergency that is quickly converted into a political necessity, an austerian statist regime serving corporate power. It's justified by the end of "survival." And it may indeed be the only chance civilization has. Which wouldn’t surprise me at all. This is the ‘men of gods’ fantasy facing its end. The people who are complicit in this abandoned God a long time ago. This bleak politics and philosophy of survival is all that they have to cling to.
The whole phenomenon has made me uncomfortable from the first, and the more I look at it, the more of a hijack it appears. It builds on our need to conform, be loyal. That's how all great ideals on the left betray themselves. I'm glad to be awkward and on the outside, it means I can see clearly without fear. This is wrong, it is inherently authoritarian, contemptuous of 'ordinary' people, denying them a voice (other than as a mobilized mass around pre-determined positions). The ruling out of systemic analysis and structural transformations makes the corporate liberal purpose clear. I note the girlwash. Females are nothing new to Green politics. I can go back to when Petra Kelly was the great inspiration of Der Grunen. The leader of The Green Party in the UK was Caroline Lucas, now its only MP. Then there was Natalie Bennett, and now Sian Berry. I campaigned for them all. Females have always been to the forefront in ecology. Francoise d'Eaubonne coined the phrase eco-feminism in the 1970s. Anyone presenting females at the forefront of environmentalism as a new development is engaged in cynical smiley bright greenwashing gimmickry. It's building consent for something that is quite authoritarian and technocratic, the last gamble of ‘men as gods’ on the planet. I am not merely suspicious now, I am discomforted. Whatever next? Puppy dogs. Who could resist?
This is the time we need to remind ourselves what we mean by environmentalism. Environmentalism has never involved the worship of nature for me, a nature that is indifferent to us and our concerns. That fetishism of nature translates easily into an inhumanism in society. If nature doesn’t care, then why should we? For anything and anyone. I see this inhumanism in the scientism presented as politics. We need to remind ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. We are being told this contemplation is ‘naval-gazing’ and a distraction, since these are the actions we "must" take to have a world to live in at all. The problem with political necessity, though, is that once it is instituted, it tends to remain for an awful long time. Now is the time to reflect and organize and try to pull some of these environmentalists back from the clutches of the industrial complex in the service of corporate power now being put in place If that is the price of survival, I would merely quote Juvenal: "On account of life, to lose the reasons for living."
To those who are making a virtue of the lack of political content I would simply say: be very, very sceptical. There is an agenda being driven. You really shouldn’t need a PhD to be wary here, it takes no academic training. That said, statements presented with a calculated vagueness set all the alarm bells ringing in my politics classes. Anyone trying this tactic in politics was always regarded with suspicion. This article cheers it on because it is a way of defeating the right in politics. What isn't noticed is that the very same tactic also defeats anyone raising critical objections or presenting alternate platforms. It's a corporate hijack, says Morningstar, and people are cheering it on, precisely because their support has been cultivated every step of the way. I attack not her, I attack the adults who are so deficient in politics that they cannot win sufficient support in the public arena for their political platform, and so are happy for success at any price. This kind of anti-politics is miles away from my visions of environmentalism, from Gerrard Winstanley to Lewis Mumford. If people can't see it, they can't see it. I can. Stay critical, take nothing at face value. I think events in the next decade may well decide the future for a long, long time.
Does anyone fancy living in an austerian climate regime concerned with preserving the system rather than the planetary ecology? Who else has the power to undertake climate action on the scale "the science" says is required? I have a feeling that the society I want to see will be further away than ever. 'Men as gods,' the oldest destructive delusion, bringing Hell on Earth. I should dig out that "Of Gods and Gaia" I wrote a decade ago. I saw it coming. I didn't see how they could manacle people by their own consent. Now I can. Take people’s own ideals and values and present them back to them in alien form. People will identify with the symbol, neglecting the practice that contradicts the principle. They will do so in the first instance because the practical details will be hidden from view rather than offered for public deliberation and consideration.
This is a revealing article. Ed Conway is a conservative columnist at The Times. In criticising climate protests as left wing, Conway inadvertently hits on the very thing that lies at the heart of the agenda behind Greta Thunberg: a "green growth" that reboots a flagging capitalism. He recommends this as against what he sees as the leftist agenda driving the climate protest. I see this “green growth” as the very thing in the mind of a climate agenda that is far from left in the true sense. (He's also the only person other than myself who has made the connection with Brexit, the power without responsibility making demands upon government whilst not specifying details or plan).
‘Climate activists want to return to a pre-industrial age instead of embracing new technology,’ the article begins. That is so manifestly not true that I find myself tempted to argue that the move for corporate capture pervades media, culture, and politics. Here is where the case for climate action is normalised and removed from the hands of left wing ideologues, to be placed under the control of those who possess the tools and technology to address climate change, whilst boosting jobs, growth, and investment at the same time! This is wonderful. The climate activists have succeeded in pressing the case for climate action with a force and a vigour that cannot be denied. The problem is that activists’ woolly and dangerous ideals with respect to socialism, which has been tried and shown to be disastrous in practice, and back-to-nature romanticism, which is merely an indolent fantasy, need to be discarded. Instead of these notions, those who desire an effective climate action need to embrace new technology! And capitalism! The idealists cheered the movement on, but now the time has come for effective action, it is for the realists and pragmatists to take control. And the corporate form.
Conway accepts that the science on climate change is all too right and downright depressing. But the most depressing thing, he says, is ‘the way people are reacting to the science: by losing sight of reason.’ This, of course, is not Greta’s fault, seeing as she is, as she says, a child who shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing. The young climate strikers have been right to press the issue, but when it comes to politics and economics they are out of their depth, whilst the adults who have been cheering them on are lacking in reason: ‘many climate strikers would prefer to return us to the pre-industrial era — as long as they can keep their smartphones.’
I am well aware of a wing of environmentalism which nurtures back-to-nature fantasies, expressing a loathing of modern society, civilisation, industry, people, frankly. But I don’t see these as the main support here at all. In fact, those driving the agenda are loaded with new technologies. Can it be at all coincidental that Conway in The Times is now demonstrating a hard-headed restraint with respect to environmentalist fantasies to point the movement in the direction of a reinvigorated capitalism harnessing the new technologies? This is the very corporate agenda that leftist critics have been warning of. And here it is, presented in the most reasonable of terms.
‘Consider some of the “people’s demands for climate justice”, the climate strikers’ quasi-manifesto: no to fossil fuels by 2030, no to new coal projects, no to technologies sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, no to a global market for food, no to intellectual property rights on new technology, no to “market approaches to climate action”. No, in short, to any of the plausible solutions to the climate crisis.’
There it is, in plain black and white. The case for climate action is clear. It is for government and politicians to work out the details. Many have been thinking that some form of socialism was on the agenda. As a socialist, I have never seen anything remotely like that. The eco-socialism I espouse is very much a marginal consideration in the environmental circles I frequent. More often than not, the eco-socialist case is met with scepticism, often hostility, with constant reference to the appalling environmental record of the old Soviet Union. It’s some form of small-scale green communitarianism that seems dominant among the idealists. Their anti-capitalism is skin-deep, verbal. When it comes to the socialist alternative, they reject it even more vociferously. There is, frankly, an incoherence at the heart of environmentalism when it comes to political economy. There is a wing in favour of commons solutions. There is little unity and clarity. Oddly, there is a failure to respect the laws of ecology and join the dots.
Enter the case for a green capitalism and the use of capitalist incentives and markets as the only effective economics in view. Here is where that reticence on hard institutional and systemic details in politics and economics lays environmentalism wide open to incorporation. In fact, the practical proposals offered are so implausible, so lacking in popular support, that there is a case for saying that rather than being worried about being co-opted, environmentalists should be seeking to co-opt the corporations. Alternate agents with sufficient power and resources to act are conspicuous by their absence. If you make survival the goal of climate action, then you need the means. The corporations have them. What do environmentalists have? Environmentalists know what they don’t want, but lack agreement as to what they do want: ‘it turns out that climate strikers are very good at explaining what they don’t want but very bad at explaining what they do want.’
Conway’s criticisms are telling. From a conservative standpoint, he highlights the deficiencies in political economy at the heart of this climate campaign. I have consistently demanded that environmentalists clarify their commitment to the no-growth and degrowth economy in terms of a critical awareness of the accumulative dynamic at the heart of the capital system. Few show any inclination to go there, precisely because they know that Marx and socialism lie in that direction. And we know that that kind of thing involves addressing class division and exploitation, risking conflict and putting all right-minded people off. So the movement is deficient. A half-hearted solution here, attempting to govern capitalism with its central spring of accumulation disabled, will be an economic disaster. Conway strikes hard:
‘It all adds up to a vision of zero or sub-zero global growth. That is the logical consequence of their demands, though one wonders whether the strikers realise that. Consider the paradox in their first two demands. We cannot abolish fossil fuels and maintain anything but a fraction of our current energy supply if we also immediately abandon coal. Why? Because you cannot build wind and solar farms without using steel and you cannot mass-produce steel without using coal.’
He identifies another flaw, the idea of renewable energy. It takes energy to produce energy. I have been involved in a continuous battle to get environmentalists to understand that they have the problem the wrong way round. They think that my concern with socialism a distraction, ‘since nature doesn’t care whether capitalists or socialists win.’ That view is entirely wrong-headed, leading to a position that forces recognition that Conway, here, is right. I shall leave aside the fact that nature doesn’t care about anything any species does, since nature doesn’t care period (a point of some ethical importance, with respect to care, attending, will, and motivation – you cannot develop an effective ethics on the basis of indifferent nature, you need a moral ecology). It is very much the way that human society organizes its interchange with nature that determines the human impact upon the environment. That is a matter of social forms and social relations. Get these wrong, and you get … climate change. Climate change is not the problem, it is a symptom of the problem. This is a statement which environments reject. In so doing, they make resolution a technical matter concerning energy. Hence the emphasis on renewables. That, in turn, leads to pro-market, pro-capitalist economists pointing out the complexities of energy. Add the references to capital as a ‘thing,’ and bit by bit the environmentalist case finds itself unable to transcend capitalism and market economics. Conway is right, because the environmentalist argument has inverted the nature of the problem.
For all the technological advances of recent decades, when it comes to essential resources — building materials and energy provision — we are still in the Victorian era. Even today, generating electricity mostly entails passing air through a turbine in much the same way our forebears used to. Even today, you cannot make a high-speed train or an electric car without using all sorts of minerals dug up from the ground and plenty of steel, which means that, like it or not, for the time being we need coal. The great irony is that in the face of climate protests, governments and investment funds have begun divesting coal from their portfolios and, guess what, hedge funds are now making a killing buying those assets on the cheap and flogging the coal to steel manufacturers.
I think that challengeable, but it is not where my principle interest lies. Conway highlights the one phrase where Thunberg actually said something almost meaningful in political economic terms: ‘eternal economic growth.’ I shall have to leave aside the incredible spectacle of adults who are more than capable of making meaningful statements on politics and economics – or ought to be – hanging on every word of Greta Thunberg and seizing on those that seem to prove what they want to have proven. If adults have something to say, they should say so. Is that really so difficult? People evidently find it hard to resist the tendencies to conform cultivated by ‘normal’ society. Thunberg isn’t ‘normal,’ so she emboldens them. That so many seized on Thunberg’s attack on the fantasy of ‘eternal economic growth’ to celebrate her apparent radicalism had me pondering Mikhael Bulgakov’s words on cowardice as lying at the source of every corruption in society and politics.
Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!'
In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov makes a powerful argument in favor of courage over cowardice. Describing cowardice as “the worst sin of all,” the principal storylines of the book demonstrate the power of courage and the terrible consequences of cowardice. With courage defined as the willingness to take a stand against something in order to defend and further a greater good, most of the characters populating the novel fall far short, exhibiting self-interest, greed, and dishonesty. Bulgakov thus exposes the way that a corrupt status quo is reinforced by the collective cowardice that lies at its midst. Regardless of whether individuals possess evil intentions or not, their cowardice sums to give society as a whole a “sinful” character. For Bulgakov, moral cowardice comes in a number of forms, but always serves to strengthen the corruption at the heart of normal society. I am not ‘normal’ and don’t feel the pressure to conform as much as others. So I may speak boldly and, hopefully, embolden people who know the uncomfortable truths about prevailing society, to name those ‘sins’ for what they are.
I shall speak plainly. Marxists have been presenting a systematic analysis of the accumulative logic endemic to the capital system, showing the problems of the world to stem from the crisis tendencies and contradictory dynamics at the heart of capital rule. Marxists have been interested, socialists take it as read, a few of them read further, people in the main run a mile. Such questions are all most off-putting to reasonable people of moderate temper. People such as I who have questioned the neglect of politics and economics in the Thunberg phenomenon, have been told to read closer and see that she is far more radical than critics allow. Only in emboldening the cowardly, I would say. I don’t require permission to be radical and I don’t need to hide behind a shield. Too many lack moral and intellectual courage. Those who yearn for a radical turn have seized on this phrase and expressed nothing short of joy. It’s as if these three words were the equivalent of the three volumes of Capital, and Thunberg has become the new Rosa Luxemburg. Anyone who has ever read Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital will appreciate the point I am making. Luxemburg was marginalised and murdered and ignored. But in chapter after chapter, she analysed the accumulative dynamic and how it will drive civilization to destruction. ‘Socialism or barbarism,’ she declared. Stalin’s state capitalism turned socialism into barbarism. Luxemburg’s conclusion that the limits of the capital system was the principal driver behind imperialism and war led her to campaign vociferously and actively against militarism, showing immense courage in a most militaristic of societies. Militarism has a hugely damaging climate impact. I await reference to militarism in this new wave of climate activism. I find the absence of any reference here deeply suspicious.
In fine, we need a systematic analysis of the accumulative dynamic at the heart of the capital system, not just three words, and not just a commitment to degrowth. The absence of such analysis disqualifies any movement from calling itself serious and radical with respect to system change. That, of course, may not be the point. The appearance of radicalism is to mobilize the masses behind the call for change and action. Job done, the masses are demobilized and the professionals, experts, and planners take over. And then the dreams of uprooting the mechanisms of investment, accumulation, and valorisation are ended for a dose of economic realism. ‘There was something unsettling in the words of .. Greta Thunberg to the UN this week,’ Conway observes, ‘as she chided world leaders for fixating on “fairytales of eternal economic growth.”’
Conway proceeds to write a paean of praise to capitalism and economic growth:
The telling thing about this phrase is that it seems to cast economic growth as a futile government obsession rather than what it actually is: the most potent force for helping people live happier, longer lives. It was economic growth that liberated hundreds of millions of Chinese people from poverty. It is economic growth doing precisely the same thing for hundreds of millions of Africans. It is economic growth that narrows the gap between rich and poor more effectively than any tax or spending lever. Climate change may be killing people but ending economic growth will kill far, far more. Eternal economic growth is not a phrase one spits out in derision; it’s precisely what we should be aiming for.
As Marx wrote in Capital: ‘Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!’
‘Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth.’ (Marx, Capital ch 24 section 3).
That’s the central spring of the capital economy. Marx identified its necessary workings. You can’t play along with this central dynamic and logic, you have to engage in root and branch transformation. Or simply accept that capitalism is the most successful and productive economic system in history, developing the productive forces so as to abolish dire poverty and unify the world in a global trading system. And all manner of other good things. Like climate change. My point is that Marx is under no illusions and advocates of capitalism like Conway are under no illusions. Conway makes the case for a green capitalism clearly and forthrightly:
True: there is a chance we will never be able to replace those industrial revolution technologies with genuinely clean alternatives. There is a chance we will waste a lot of money. But even if you’re totally sceptical about anthropogenic climate change, consider it another way. The world is already trapped in an economic malaise; productivity is flatlining; central banks are out of ammo. Might this be the monumental fiscal stimulus the world needs to get growth going again? And there is every hope we shall succeed in generating genuinely green economic growth. We know as much because it is already happening. For nearly half a century developed economies have been slowly weaning themselves off carbon dioxide. Even when you adjust for the emissions they have effectively outsourced to China and India, global growth is far less carbon intensive than it was even a decade ago. The reduction is too slow but it is happening nonetheless.
There is the plan laid bare in full view. All you need are eyes to see. The global economy is stagnant and in desperate need of a boost. Ambitious programmes of climate action deliver the ‘monumental fiscal stimulus the world needs to get growth going again’ and, embracing new technologies that are available, this investment will generate a ‘genuinely green economic growth.’
This is not about ‘saving the planet’ at all, it’s about saving the capital system by a green reboot. The green industrial revolution thus serves to extend and entrench the corporate form. Leftist critics argue that initiatives like the Green New Deal are concerned with unlocking trillions of dollars of investment in green economic growth. Ed Conway makes the same argument from a conservative standpoint that is all in favour of this very thing:
Supercharging the green industrial revolution won’t come cheap. No wonder the former chancellor Philip Hammond wanted to resist the government’s target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. What he misunderstood is that the trillions necessary to rebuild the economy and eliminate emissions might even pay for itself. That was the conclusion of a report published this week by the UN’s economic wing UNCTAD: that a splurge on green investment could create so much economic growth that it would make everyone richer.
The UN has been taken over by billionaires. Here is their corporate agenda. Liberals, radicals, leftists, progressives, greens, democrats, and anarchists have been presented with a crisis with transformative potential for the best part of five decades now, but have proven unable to unify around a critical analysis and coherent political agenda. This has never been principally an environmental crisis; the environmental crisis is at heart a crisis at the heart of the capital system. Far too few have had the intellectual, moral, and political courage to look into the face of the Gorgon. The horrible truth is even worse than that. Very many have, deep down, suspected that the origins of this crisis lie in the class system, but have shied away from looking any further lest they be drawn into the unpleasant business of class struggle. They have, therefore, sought harmony and cooperation and collaboration through technical, non-political workarounds. Or through a ‘third way’ politics. That cowardice has resulted in an ineffectual politics, a failure to diagnose the problem properly, and a diversion of transformative potential into system-preservation, rebooting the very economic system whose central dynamic is driving climate catastrophe. The result of that ‘moderation,’ or cowardice, is that the space has been left wide open for corporate capture and redirection. Pretend solutions and insipid cooperation does not work. And now, after a decade or more of social engineering, and the case for climate action is made, the corporations step in. How can you resist, when you have raised the white flag of political surrender? The details of how this ambitious programme of climate action are to be worked out is a matter for governments and politicians after all. That’s what the leaders and supporters of this new wave of environmentalism are saying. Very well, then, and here are the details, in the conclusion of Ed Conway in The Times:
It is not often science tells you that you can have your cake and eat it. But that is precisely what the economics tells us. We don’t need to return to the Stone Age to eliminate carbon emissions and revamp the world. We have a once in a millennium opportunity. An opportunity for investment, for new technologies and, yes, for eternal economic growth.
Cory Morninstar summarizes her extensive research:
1) We Mean Business represents 477 investors with 34 trillion USD in assets and 1,018 corporations with a 20.1 trillion market cap.;
2) Both Greenpeace & Purpose (Avaaz sister org, NYC PR firm specializing in behavioural change) both assisted in the creation of We Mean Business;
3) We Mean Business works alongside World Economic Forum (WEF) – the world's most powerful CEOs & billionaires - now intent on as "fourth industrial revolution" to reboot the capitalist system. WEF & We Mean Business are both behind the "New Deal For Nature" (financialization of nature that no NGO or "leader" speaks of). WEF has formed a partnership with the UN and is now in charge of implementing the so-called the SDGs. The WEF, We Mean Business are overseeing this week's UN Climate Action Summit. These two entities with the World Bank now dominate governments the globe (and have successfully herded the masses to demand the very solutions they wish to deliver – by unlocking the funds to save the system in decay. In other words to save themselves).
Note well the omissions – you will hear nary a word of any of these things:
1) Militarism, Capitalism, Imperialism
2) Financialization of nature (to be delivered in 2020)
4) Industrial scale everything
5) Eradication of superfluous goods and wasted energy (approx. 40% of all energy created is wasted)
6) The OFFICIAL corporate capture of the UN itself, deems it an official tool for corporate power. The UN, dressed in sheep's clothing, partnered with the WEF, signifies more exploitation and injustices for the working class, peasantry sand Indigenous peoples.
The climate campaign mobilizes people behind a number of key platforms designed to build pressure for climate action and reinforce an unthinking conformity.
First of all, there is the repetition of the slogan ‘unite behind the science.’ This is the systematic cultivation of an unthinking acceptance of truth and blind allegiance to authority, exploiting the status of science as the best reality check against the natural facts we have. ‘The science’ is true, its motives pure and disinterested, so figures who speak on the science have a trust and legitimacy with the public. Gone in a stroke are all those contentious questions of ethics, interests in economics, and principles and values in politics. The things that divide us are trumped by ‘truth.’
Secondly, if you analyse statements made by Thunberg closely, you will find precious little that is concrete by way of specific commitments. There is the demand to cut carbon emissions, to be done by ensuring governments align with the Paris Agreement. The flaws of Paris have long since been laid bare. Even before President Trump pulled out of Paris I posted a video of climate scientist Kevin Anderson presenting a breakdown of the flaws in the Paris Agreement. You can still find this video on YouTube, and others from Anderson on the same theme. The insistence on governments aligning with Paris is curious, given that the agreement is a suicide pact with the very industrial forces destroying the planetary ecology. In its favour is the fact that this agreement unlocks nature, finance, and technology for a further bout of commericalisation and exploitation.
Thirdly, the Green New Deal, which paranoid critics and indolent adherents present as socialism, is about saving capitalism under the pretence of saving the planet. Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff says this of it: “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”) (July 10, 2019). Joseph Stiglitz says much the same thing. Except that it doesn’t ‘change the entire economy’ either. The GND is a green reboot of capitalism preserving its relations intact, staving off the socialist threat and ensuring that the current crisis with transformative potential is resolved in favour of system preservation as against system change.
“The poor shall inherit the earth or there will be no earth left to inherit.”
– John Bellemy Foster (Monthly Review, 2019)
The following article sets the above out as plain as day.
'There seems to be two branches of what I see as a drive toward global domination, global hegemony, by the ruling class. One is the Trump phenomenon and the narratives and political actions that accompany his presidency (often in the background). Second is the new ruling corporate control of environmentalism.
'I find it so curious that many of the left (pseudo or soft left) don’t even blink when those with honorifics before their name, with royal titles, issue proclamations about climate change or overpopulation or new Green corporate solutions.
'the ruling class is the face of the new environmentalism. Unless its an Asperger’s fifteen year old who increasingly (and painfully) appears in distress and cognitive confusion. This is not an attack on Greta, that attack is being carried out by the white billionaire faces of western capital. But I will be accused of attacking her, and that in itself is an aspect of how the new propaganda works.
'I wrote before about the demand that everyone submit to the consensus- – meaning not that the earth is getting warmer or even why, but the moral hand wringing and outrage at those not submitting. The demand is that one join in the outrage and alarmism. The very term *denialism* suggests the typical bourgeois response to anything disruptive of their privilege.
'This is corporate greenwashing and corporate capitalism steering or creating “social justice” movements that will serve capitalism, while expropriating true social justice and true social justice movements, and thereby diffusing and destroying any valid legitimate meaningful POTENTIAL social movements.
'The entire thrust of the new corporate and billionaire backed projects on climate action are there to preserve a hierarchical status quo. It is to rescue Capitalism itself. And the implications of much of it are near genocidal. I think it is not an accident that the grave problems of industrial pollution (just think the waste sites for cyber technology) are relatively forgotten in these narratives from the ruling class.
'There is almost no dialogue about this stuff. There are proclamations. Public life is carried out by proclamation and twitter.
'“The sober images of Thunberg, as depicted and shared by the Climate Group, and the media at large, are very much intentional as outlined in the document “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode: A New Strategy for the Climate Movement" published by The Climate Mobilization:
'Just the title, We Mean Business. None of this, of course, has anything to do with saving life and protecting the planet. None has anything to do with a radical de-militarizing of the Imperialist states. Nobody is suggesting the rich change the way they live. You poor folks, well, yeah, you might have to change a little (and oh, live in a FEMA camp, but not forever….we don’t think).
'Again, anti communism, the template has always been, let the ruling class decide.
'If royalty and billionaires are flocking to exploit the Greta phenomenon (and to help shape that narrative), one should be highly suspicious of the solutions and strategies being offered. The fact that militarism and the packaging industry are relatively ignored in the presentation of the new green movement suggests more suspicion.
'“Thus madness reappears in the very posture which pretends to fight it.” – Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle)
'The environmental crises is real. The marketing of it is not necessary. Why then does it exist?'
If you want an answer, then look behind the PR and marketing, pay attention to the agents, identify the end-game:
'What Morningstar gets at in her research is this: the wealthy philanthropists, marketers, economists, politicians and corporate players are merely more well-heeled versions of the middle-class family man looking out and finding a way to unsee the massive canyon in Zabriskie Point. Although they understand that climate change is real, that the choking of earth’s ecosystems through waste and pollution is real, they don’t gaze upon this destruction as an impetus to abandon capitalism as a system. They don’t kneel down in shame and gratitude and rejoicing that we yet can remake our relationship to our home, this Earth. Instead, they see it as a way to make a buck.
But they can only make a buck off of this rolling catastrophe if they shove a quiet, thoughtful teenager in front of us. Galvanize us through heart and empathy. And redirect our tender emotions not into collective ecosystem restoration, but rather into “make-a-buck” solutions that will only serve to reproduce our separation from this home, from one another, and from the ineffable meaning that could nurture our brief time here.
And I can’t help thinking how paltry it all is.
When you read about kids across the country getting off school to take part in the climate strike, pay attention to who stands behind brave Greta Thunberg. Pay attention to who talks after her.
Who is waiting there to channel your energy to heal this place into the weightless unmeaning futility of make-a-buck?'
But seeing as I am doing no more than ask people to do what Plato asked people to do with his cave metaphor, maybe the horrible truth is that human beings can only understand surfaces and shadows. Who, I ask, has the power and reach to undertake the climate actions required on the timescale we have?