Re-politicising the Environment
Environmentalism in its mainstream form demonstrates a strong scientistic and technocratic bent, with politics and ethics considered merely secondary and derivative terms passively receiving their truths constituted in the realm of nature, or dismissed on account of any deviation from such truths.
In seeking an explanation for the strong scientistic and technocratic bent we need to consider the ontological status of nature. Environmentalism evinces a dual nature which combines the two wings of a scientism concerned with natural facts and a naturism which projects value and significance on nature. Both wings combine to preclude a genuine politics and ethics enabling human beings to act in the realm of practical reason.
Erik Swyngedouw writes critically of the ‘fantasy displayed in calls for restoring a true (original but presumably presently lost) humane harmony by retro-fitting the world to ecological balance or in the longing for a Nature that functions as the big ‘Other’, the one that guides the path to redeem our predicament.’ (Erik Swyngedouw, Depoliticized environments and the promises of the Anthropocene January 2015).
Nature is thus invoked as the ‘external’ power that bestows the plenitude required for living in harmony, should we, the servants, attend to it properly, but which threatens disaster and death should we not. That human beings are natural beings who, as parts of nature, should participate in its internal functioning is easily enough understood. But human beings are also social and cultural beings, and create quite naturally out of nature. The result is that human beings are immersed in a society and culture that is removed at a certain distance from the bio-ecological matrix. It is how we deal with the second-order mediations that determines the character of human participation in the socio-natural world. The ‘big Other’ is missing:
“Nature is a transcendental term in a material mask that stands at the end of a potentially infinite series of other terms that collapse into it.”
Morton, 2007: 14
Nature and its derivatives such as ‘sustainability exist as empty/floating signifiers. Lacking a referent, there is an absent centre at the heart of an environmentalism that fails to analyse the specific forms of mediation in the relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature. Herein lies the empty core of an ecology that privileges nature over, and to the neglect of, the political and social dimension.
A socially and environmentally just politics cannot be scientifically ‘read’ from a singular Nature that does not exist, but has to be constituted and accomplished through a socially mediated practice at the heart of the metabolic relation with nature.
This inversion of relations and missing mediation not only explains the scientistic and technocratic bent of environmentalism, but has debilitating political and ethical consequences. The depoliticization and demoralization of citizen subjects deprives society of its ability to order its existence and orient its affairs to true ends. Instead, non-negotiable environmental imperatives come to be added to the accumulative imperatives of the capital system, producing a clash that can only be managed, but not resolved, in increasingly authoritarian ways. The depoliticization of citizen subjects is the intellectual, psychic, and political preparation for entry into a new austerian environmental regime under the corporate form:
”Let’s start by stating that after ‘the rights of man’, the rise of the ‘the rights of Nature’ is a contemporary form of the opium for the people. It is an only slightly camouflaged religion: the millenarian terror, concern for everything save the properly political destiny of peoples, new instruments for control of everyday life, the fear of death and catastrophes …. It is a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects.”
Badiou 2008: 139
“In the name of indisputable facts portraying a bleak future for humanity, green politics has succeeded in de-politicizing political passions to the point of leaving citizens nothing but gloomy asceticism, a terror of violating nature and an indifference towards the modernization of modernity.”
Beck, 2010
The focus on a singular Nature that stands in need of being ‘sustained’ and ‘managed’ supports a scientistic and technocratic non-politics of expertise and forecloses the asking of political questions with respect to authority, legitimacy, power relations, resources and their distribution, control and how these are articulated via specific forms of social mediation. The consideration of possible alternative socio-natural arrangements is thus precluded.
“Scientism” and “naturism” are thus flip sides of the same coin, signifying a view which lacks a critical understanding of mediation with respect to the precise forms constitutive of society and its reproduction. The approach is depoliticising and demoralizing and softens the citizen body up for their entry into an austerian environmental Megamachine under the corporate form.
Badiou thus argues that ecology has become the new opiate of the people, supplanting religion as the axis around which our fear of death and disaster comes to be articulated. There is no promise of redemption, though.
We are being presented with a vision of an environmental Apocalypse which, with or without revelation of its true nature, delivers no redemption from its causes and consequences. These imaginaries of catastrophe are ‘leaving behind any hope of rebirth or renewal …. in favor of an unquenchable fascination with being on the verge of an end that never comes’ (Jay 1994: 33).
Neil Smith uses the term ‘nature-washing’ to describe the situation in which the socio-ecological roots of the environmental crisis are recognised at the same time that this “socially changed nature becomes a new super determinant of our social fate.”
These ecologies of fear both conceal and cultivate a reactionary design and intent. Although expressed in the radical rhetoric of the necessity for change and transformation in order to avert immanent catastrophe and collapse, this statement of political emergency and necessity is accompanied by a range of technical, managerial, institutional, societal, and other measures that ensure that the socio-economic core of society remains fundamentally unaltered. This is a system-change that changes things around within the system in order to preserve it. climate change is not the problem, it is a symptom of a problem that lies in the alienated form of mediation between the social and natural metabolisms. Science can't pronounce here, but others do it for them, hence the lack of critique of political economy. That missing mediation is key, because it results in an anti-politics in which 'nature' is seen as something to be 'sustained' and 'managed.' And this task will be undertaken by the very corporate forces who are the only ones able to scale up to the size of the challenge.
The demands for system-change, not climate change are more in the form of opiate leading to the political stupefaction of the masses rather than a radical demand in the hands of the self-active, self-organising people. And here we are "unite behind the science" is the call to blind loyalty, the end of politics, the end of the citizen voice, the end of creative democratic agency: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Jameson 2003: 76).
Hence the paradox of an ecological condition that people obsess over with serious intensity, and yet ignore as social and political beings: “Despite the fact that we know very well that the world is in serious ecological trouble, we continue as if we do not know.” (Zizek). I take that statement to refer to the seriously deficient politics on the part of those concerned with socio-ecological crisis. At the heart of that deficiency is the failure to address the social and structural causes of crisis in alienated forms of mediation. Commitments in favour of the complete change of everything mean precisely nothing without an understanding of the precise constitution of ‘the system’ and its internal relations.
In the absence of a critical analysis with respect to the mediated relation between society and nature, there is a socially and politically vague focus on ‘nature’ and a general ‘humanity’ which rationalizes the governance of a politically neutral knowledge aristocracy charged with the task of ‘sustaining’ nature and ‘managing’ catastrophe and collapse. The phrase ‘beyond the political’ is issued as a call to humanity to put their political and social differences behind them and unite behind the science. This is an explicit call to put politics – and people – on ice to justify a post-political (techno-managerial) attempt to address the crisis in the climate system. As a result of the missing mediation, however, the slogan ‘system change, not climate change’ is as empty as the ‘Nature’ it claims as referent. Without a critical analysis of mediation, we are in the world of empty signifiers in which terms can refer to everything and nothing at the same time, presenting a politics that declares ‘this changes everything’ as seductive promise but in practice changes nothing.
One of the most dangerous factors in this environmental crisis is the constellation of incompetence, incomprehension, and impotence among the various agents. The techno-managerial elites are charged with addressing climate change on the premise of a knowledge of and know-how in relation to a referent that doesn’t exist. Too few understand the roots of the crisis in material relations, class and contradictory dynamics pertaining to specific forms of social mediation, or are prepared to analyse the problem in the depth it deserves. The political implications are indeed radical. There is a verbal commitment to system-change that is not backed upon by practical organisation and structural force. In part, that is down to a discourse that combines ‘scientism’ and ‘populism.’ We may thus envisage the emergence of a Post-Political Environmental Populism that mobilizes, or is mobilized, in support of actions directed by the scientific expertise of an ostensibly neutral knowledge elite. This discourse elides class and eschews class analysis to evoke ‘the people’ as such. Swyngedouw (2013) thus notes that ‘sustainability’ does not identify a privileged subject of change (as in Marx’s proletariat), but invokes a global environmental threat that concerns ‘everyone’ and involves ‘everything.’ Those terms signify a politics of everything and nothing. Climate change is read as a universal predicament and condition common to all humanity and thus entails a common appeal that cuts across class differences to call for mutual collaboration and co-operation in a humanity-wide action. The result is a delitimation and depoliticization of a class analysis and politics, with politics frozen on the basis of prevailing power relations. The internal social tensions or generative conflicts of a class-divided society are occluded and eliminated in face of an assertion of ‘the people’ as a distinctly non-political singularity. The agonistic heterogeneity of the real people as a result of the class structure is denied at the political level.
The result is that the impulse towards system-change comes to be diverted into system-preservation. In making nature the referent and climate change the problem, instead of addressing the specific forms of socio-nature metabolic mediation, a techno-managerial anti-politics preserving existing power relations comes to replace the class politics which, equipped with the organisational and structural capacity to engage in system transformation, is alone capable of uprooting the dynamics of the socio-ecological crisis. You can solve a problem only if you have correctly identified it in the first place. You can neither manage nor resolve a contradiction.
And so, we have the appeal to a non-politics of mutual collaboration and co-operation. Neither collaboration nor co-operation are virtues in themselves. It matters a great deal with whom we collaborate and co-operate, and to what ends. Once more, the absence of a critical awareness on the specific forms of socio-nature mediation is shown to be politically debilitating.
Unable or unwilling to identify the ‘enemy’ within a system of class division and exploitation, the ‘enemy’ thus comes to be externalized and objectified. As Swyngedouw argues, ‘its fundamental fantasy is that of an intruder, or more usually a group of intruders, who have corrupted the system.’ For all of the demands for system-change, there is no real sense in which the problems being addressed are considered endemic to ‘the system’ as such. ‘Why not just abolish fossil fuels instead of abolishing capitalism? I was asked. In making climate change rather than the capital system the problem, the demands for system-change either become redundant, rhetorical, or merely rationalizing in the sense of concealing power in order to preserve it. As Swyngedouw argues, problems are seen not as a result of a contradiction endemic in the system which comes out in its necessary operation, but is transposed onto the external ‘enemy’ itself, which is staged as some pathological excess.
The institutional architecture of such inherently populist governing takes the form of stakeholder participatory governance that operates beyond-the-state and is performative through forms of self-management, self-organisation, and controlled self-disciplining
De- and Re-politicization
Swyngedouw identifies the de-politicization at the heart of this misdiagnosis and sets out the conditions for a re-politicization. He argues that such a post-political techno-managerial arrangement signals a depoliticised public space in which expertise, interest intermediation/negotiation, and administration defines the zero-level of politics, as against the inherently democratic and agonistic struggle between alternate platforms over the content and direction of socio-ecological life. (Swyngedouw 2013).
The restoration of the missing mediation is therefore key. The re-politicization and re-moralization of the environment is thus predicated upon identifying and removing alienated forms of mediation disturbing the relation between the social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature, and replacing them with non-alienated socially self-mediated forms. These forms re-politicize the political passions of the people and embody their constitutive power. A genuine political ecology is based on the unconditional democratic assumption of equality in the constitution of legitimate authority and public community, in respect of the principle of self-assumed obligation, and thoroughly rejects the anti-political notion of environmental philosopher kings whose unanswerable authority is based on the expertise of an assumedly neutral scientific knowledge.
Such a politics affirms the real possibility for the presentation and pursuit of alternate possible public socio-ecological futures that articulate the democratic presumptions of freedom and equality. I firmly reject the anti-political (techno-managerial) attempts to address climate change. Climate change is not the problem, it is the symptom of the problem lying in alienated forms of social mediation. In inverting this relation, the masses are being mobilized headlong into their further enslavement under the corporate form via a techno-managerial anti-politics.
Reclaiming public space, and spaces, for democracy and the citizen voice in all its difference and plurality is a condition politics as the articulation of egalitarian agonistic dissension and dispute. Such reclamation is, as Swyngedouw argues, the ‘foundation and condition of possibility for a different, but democratic, socioecological order.’ (2015). The ‘post-politics’ we are being presented with as a condition of ‘sustaining’ and ‘managing’ nature and addressing climate crisis ‘is about realising the possible.’ Such a politics is possible because the conditions for it are already here and in place, as is the catastrophe it caused and is now claiming to be able to avert. ‘The Political is about demanding the impossible,’ commoning the commons. Reclaiming the political involves reclaiming our political and ethical commons as well as the physical commons. It doesn’t involve consenting to making the loss of the commons permanent by handing power and initiative over to a techno-managerial elite governing by knowledge and expertise. And it doesn’t involve a collaboration and cooperation in which the terms and ends of association have not been democratically deliberated and determined.
“It’s useless to wait – for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides” (the Invisible Committee)
The combination of scientism and naturalism, social neutrality, and fundamentally de-political drive of this new wave of environmentalism is actually an expression of a deep-seated and long-standing ‘non-political’ environmentalist politics combining elitism in initiative and populism in appeal. I subjected this to searching criticism in the Appendix to Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx, the substantial article entitled Politicizing the Environment, Repoliticizing the World. Drawing on the work of Badiou, Swyngedouw, Beck, Zizek and others, I show how everything that is wrong in environmentalism as (non/anti)politics has roots that go back much further than recent events. I put this link here not only to show that my criticisms go back to a time before Thunberg and XR, but actually anticipated the anti-politics of fear and despair expressed in these developments.
see also
Erik Swyngedouw, Trouble with Nature “Ecology as the New Opium for the Masses”, Society Environment Research Group, Geography University of Manchester, Second meeting of the Human-Nature Platform The natures of natures in political ecology Lausanne, 1 July 2013
wp.unil.ch/societenature/files/2013/07/Swyngedouw-July2013.pdf