Time for a Transformation
On 16 September 2019, The Financial Times launched a campaign for a better form of capitalism with its powerful brand platform, The New Agenda. When an establishment paper like The Financial Times launches The New Agenda with the headline, in bold capital letters CAPITALISM. TIME FOR A RESET, only the slow, the cowardly, or the deliberately obscurantist can fail to get the message that something is afoot. The screamingly obvious can no longer be denied – we are living in the midst of a crisis with transformative potential. We have been for a long while.
The FT is concerned to encourage business leaders to find opportunity in the new normal and promote stronger corporate purpose. Introducing the concept to FT readers, editor Lionel Barber said:
“The liberal capitalist model has delivered peace, prosperity and technological progress for the past 50 years, dramatically reducing poverty and raising living standards throughout the world.”
He continued:
“But, in the decade since the global financial crisis, the model has come under strain, particularly the focus on maximising profits and shareholder value. These principles of good business are necessary but not sufficient. It’s time for a reset.”
The liberal capitalist model has also delivered militarism and ecological crisis and looming catastrophe. It’s time for a reset. That ‘reset,’ concerns the measures to be taken to preserve ‘the liberal capitalist model,’ not to replace it, environment be damned. Politics is hard boards and hard realities, and the hard facts are these – there are people who, in the face of social and ecological crisis, are concerned not with the health and integrity of the commons, but with keeping existing asymmetries within prevailing power relations intact. They are already working on it. Whilst radicalism is being reframed as a ‘radicalism’ that changes nothing even as it claims to be changing ‘everything,’ real radicals being marginalised, isolated, and neglected, the ruling class and its minions are showing their usual political assertiveness with respect to power.
Instead of a genuine radicalism aiming at system transformation we get a liberal environmental activism under the auspices of the corporate form. The ‘NGO-ization of resistance’ as it has been called is devised to engineer a manufactured consent for a ‘change’ that serves the ruling class agenda. ‘Climate action’ in these terms has nothing to do with system change and everything to do with ‘unlocking’ public money in order finance huge capital investments. The problem is identified as climate change, a technical question of fossil fuels, rather than being located in the contradictory economic and ecological dynamics of capital; class analysis and the critique of political economy has been erased in favour of a general appeal to a common humanity; and a consensual politics is being advanced in which the oppressed and exploited are conformed to identify with the oppressor and the exploiter.
The people who mobilize the masses behind general appeals to untransformed governments to ‘act’ can certainly not be considered “radicals,” the very opposite in fact. To be radical is to go to the root of a problem and act accordingly. The “rebels” may be against “extinction” as a surface level manifestation of a deeper problem, but they evidently not against the symbiotic relation of state and capital that generates the problem.
I wonder how many people know that Conservation International, who funded Thunberg’s short film with George Monbiot, are heavily sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, its investors and even Amazon palm oil companies? That’s the problem with ‘action’ styles itself technical and practical rather than political. We live in a political world in which governmental institutions, business, finance, and technology are all linked together in one big exploitative chain.
This is a masterclass in diversion, conversion, and perversion, shifting the narrative from the system-change which is the real solution to the crisis to a system-preservation which will continue to generate the crisis. It’s greenwashing and the trick is to get people to do it for themselves, be the agents of their own deception. The trick is to use a mega "green" NGO to shift the focus from the real nature of the problem to the ‘solutions’ that deal with surface level manifestations. And that shift also involves a re-branding from ‘natural capital solutions,’ which too easily revealed the monetarist drives and pecuniary motivations having capital as their end, to ‘natural climate solutions,’ which made the planet the end. People who would oppose the former would support the latter.
The capital system is a systematically irresponsible system of anarchic, subjectless production. No wonder, then, that the world is devoid of adult responsibility. Political and business leaders pretend to be in control, but the undeniable facts of converging social, economic, and ecological crises tell the truth that no-one but ‘the system’ is in control. Thunberg asks where the adults are and why they aren’t acting, and the adults who have been ducking questions of power find her inspirational. In a world without responsible adults, people in despair are making a cult of children as superheroes. There is a reason why adults aren’t acting and it has little to do with moral and psychic failure – it is systemic constraint. The attempt to employ moral and emotional blackmail to shame adults into action will fail, because the problem is not in the first instance weakness of will, not even of corruption. As Marx argued all along, the agents of the capital system are merely the personifications of economic categories and relations within an alienated system of production. They act this way because, within certain parameters with regard to accumulation, they can do no other. The adults cannot be goaded into the responsibility and action required to address the climate crisis, they are prisoners within the very parameters driving that crisis.
But to point out systemic imperatives and constraints is to be ‘political’ and ‘divisive,’ raise awkward issues of class, power, and distribution of resources, and demand long-term transformations when ‘we don’t have time.’
In a world without responsible adults, the children have become superheroes to follow. But the issue is not the infantilism of adults and maturity of children – it is the systemic irresponsibility at the heart of an alienated system of capitalist production. That has always been the problem. And too many have chosen to look away from the root cause in the past, and continue to look away in the present. The system is destructive and is failing, but it has also delivered material quantity for sufficient numbers of people to incline them to remain complicit. They choose confinement within the gilded cage to the vagaries of an alternative social system which seems nowhere in sight. Bad systems like bad theories will remain in place until replaced by better ones. And there’s the problem, not enough people are engaged in the replacement which comes under the heading of system-change.
On the surface level, mobilising big numbers of people the world over for what is claimed to be the largest environmental protest ever is no mean feat. As ever in politics, though, we should be critical and cautious. It is easy for people desperate for action, and deficient in politics, to get carried away by surface appearances. The whole point of massing numbers is to invoke feelings of movement under way. The positive media coverage that Thunberg has received, meeting Popes and ex-Presidents, gaining access to the highest forums to speak without check, should be grounds for suspicion. No revolutionary gets the stage given to them to score a free hit.
We have seen the emergence of new environmental NGOs such as We Mean Business, protest movements like Extinction Rebellion, and policy ideas like the Green New Deal. When the headline in The Financial Times reads that it is time to ‘reset’ capitalism, we should know that there is something afoot. On the one side, the establishment are expressing the need to ‘reset’ capitalism, on the other side radicals are demanding system change. As Istvan Meszaros demonstrated at length, capitalism is reaching its absolute limits. All that the establishment can do is attempt to patch it up and try to pump life into its corpse. For socio-economic reasons alone there is every reason to be engaged in system transformation; looming ecological collapse makes that system change imperative. And that requires that adults reclaim conscious collective responsibility from an anarchic, subjectless, irresponsible system of production. Instead, system-change is again being rejected as too difficult, too conflictual, and too political and energies are being diverted into yet another attempt to breathe life into the capital system’s corpse. ‘Action’ is focused firmly within the institutional parameters of the capital system and will entail little more than huge investments and ambitious government plans to reboot a flagging capital economy.
This may or may not be the agenda of those stage-managing Thunberg’s media appearances, whether these people may be behind her or around her. I am more interested in an institutional and structural analysis. The nature of an alienated system of production is that its imperatives get served regardless of the intentions of its agents. Morningstar has done the investigations here, and opened herself to the accusation that she is involved in a conspiracy theory. She reveals the whole operation to involve some of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations, whose contributions to the climate debate were complicit in weakening the plans to mitigate the effects of climate change. These foundations are heavily implicated in the narrative and negotiations leading up to the Paris Agreement, a suicide pact which treats worst-case scenarios as an acceptable 50:50 chance. Thunberg denounced this gambling as unacceptable in her UN speech. She is entirely right. But there is a reason why the dire warnings of people outside of these negotiations are routinely ignored. (And the warnings of those from developing countries within these negotiations for that matter).
Despite contributing a mere 0.1% to climate finance, this handful of philanthro-capitalists have profoundly shaped the climate debate to steer environmentalism far away from system-change to develop and advance voluntary, market-based and bottom-up approaches. Such approaches can never sum and scale to the ‘global’ systemic problem that is climate change. But whilst they are a failure in terms of addressing climate crisis, they are political and economic successes with respect to system preservation. The effect of these approaches is to eclipse the radical transformatory impulse of grassroots social and environmental movements so as to buttress capitalist-friendly solutions such as carbon-trading instead.
The problem is still not being addressed as a social problem but as an institutional and technical one, a question of legislative and regulative frameworks, policy, and technological fixes. The aim is for “net-zero” emissions through technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage, or “negative emissions” through technologies such as the unproven BECCS. All of this is to equip capitalism with ‘clean’ energy for another burst of expansion, all requiring vast tracts of land, fertilizer production and freshwater consumption. Such plans involve not merely a continuation of the enclosure that characterised the capital system from the start, but its acceleration. The requirements at the heart of such ‘climate action’ entail large-scale land grab. This appropriation of nature is being called ‘green grabbing,’ and it is part and parcel of the financialization of nature. And through branding, marketing, and PR, environmentalists used only to defeat, frustration, and failure in their climate campaigning are joining in enthusiastically.
The first book I ever wrote was entitled The Proletarian Public. It documented the ideas and activities of the industrial unionists, revolutionary syndicalists, and council communists, covering figures like Tom Mann, James Connolly, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, and Antonio Gramsci. Noteworthy was the extent to which people, once wedded to the tradition of socialism from below, joined Bolshevism’s state-centred socialism from above in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917. Years of defeat brought a politics of despair, with the victory of the Bolshevik Party restoring hope and faith. The enthusiasm was misplaced and derailed socialism for the rest of the century.
The Green New Deal is also being presented as a radical solution to climate change. It is anything but. Read Keynes. Keynes was a conservative concerned to use government intervention to protect capitalism against its socialist enemies. This programme is all about rebooting capitalism. No bad thing, you may say, since no-one wants to live under the strains of a failing economy. But this is so much less than the radicalism that is not only required, but is possible and is being demanded. We are living in a crisis with transformative potential. That makes transformation necessary, but not inevitable. The dominant forces of the established order are not so stupid as not to see the profound nature of the crisis. Their job is to manage the crisis to ensure the preservation of existing power relations, preventing any ascending class from realizing radical potentials for system transformation. In 1946, British conservative politician Quintin Hogg said in parliament that if you do not give people reform from above, they will give you revolution from below.
“If you do not give the people reform they are going to give you social revolution.” (As quoted by Harpal Brar in Social democracy - The enemy within, p. 162).
Social transformation is most certainly in the offing. The job of the ruling class is to keep transformation off the agenda, and induce sufficient numbers of people to accept reform.
Funding NGOs such as Extinction Rebellion serves to mobilise people into backing a consensus that is framed entirely in reformist terms. Those raising awkward questions of money, power, and corporate control are marginalised and delegitimised. There is a heavy emphasis on consensus and a cultivation of conformity, and an evasion and suppression of conflict. The GND amounts to the extension of the corporate form, involving huge government investment, rollout of vast installations, purchase of western-manufactured, corporate controlled, climate technology. There’s the reboot of capitalism. In the name of “saving the planet,” climate action makes the planet available for a further burst of rapacious expansion and exploitation.
This is social engineering from above under the guise of “non-political” action to address the problem of climate change.
The “nature-based” climate solutions endorsed by Thunberg and Monbiot are the old “natural capital solutions.” The lack of awareness when it comes to politics and political economy is breath-taking. But no surprise to me. Modern society has been living on the surfaces of things since its birth, that superficiality defines it, in terms of accidentalism, empiricism, and atomism. Life is just a series of discrete events and happenings. There is no depth, no underlying structures or reality. This is a world that has lost touch with essential reality. And it has created people without depth, people who see only what is at the end of their noses, people who wade in the shallows. Critique is now considered conspiracy theory. To go deeper is to be guilty of inventing realities that do not exist. It’s an ancient theme. Modern society lives entirely within Plato’s cave mechanics. The prisoners see the shadows on the wall and think them realities. Those who go deeper and expose the forces casting the shadows are shunned and worse.
Instead of equity, justice, and common but differentiated responsibilities, it is power relations that shape climate politics. The phrase “listen to the science” is repeated like a mantra. But science is not ethics and politics. I make that point to underscore the need for ‘action’ that is affective as well as effective. Unfortunately, those who think climate change a technical problem of impersonal natural forces make de-politicization and de-moralization a virtue and an end. Without question, they are hankering after the authoritarian advantage that scientistic dictatorship brings. They are physicalists and sensualists who are entirely without meaning, without soul, without hope, and without humanity. And it shows in the failure of their environmental politics to find any kind of ground in the social lives of people. Their anti-politics and inhumanism mirrors the indifference of the nature they model their insight on. Nature doesn’t care and neither do they. Survival is their end, for no other reason than survival. On account of life, to give up the reasons for living. I state at extremes to induce those who evidently do care to
The demands that governments declare a ‘climate emergency,’ and the demands that these declarations be backed up by ‘climate action’ entails is an orchestrated campaign to force governments to back ambitious plans with public money in support of big ‘green’ business, saving the system under the pretext of saving the planet. The system change and social transformation necessary to uprooting capital’s accumulative dynamic is excised, quite deliberately, from the agenda. The “non-politics” of emergency is designed to remove time and space for deliberation, contestation, criticism, and questioning with respect to power, resources, control, accountability. Urgency replace equity, justice, and accountability as basic elements of effective, enduring climate action, those lower down the scale in terms of power and money, within nations and between nations, be damned.
Significantly, there is no hint of a critique of capitalist political economy in any of these plans. Anti-capitalism is screened out at every stage. Those involved in framing climate politics as a “non-politics” place the accent on consensus, harmony of interest, and collaboration. That strategy may well work in building a broad coalition for climate action undertaken by government, but it ultimately fails on account of diverting attention from the socio-economic drivers of the socio-ecological crisis. In addition to the lack of a critique of the capital system there is an absence of critical references to militarism, despite the immense ecological damage it causes (not to mention the death-dealing politics it supports and advances). These oversites are not politically innocent. In fact, they are not oversites. References to capitalism and militarism are deliberately excised in order to de-politicize and de-radicalize the issue. Entirely removed is the view that the exploitation of labour and the exploitation of nature proceed hand in hand. That is plainly ideological in the sense of removing existing power relations from public controversy, challenge, and possible alteration. By defining the problem as climate change, attention is removed from socio-economic causes and, as a result, shifts the focus from a transformative politics focused on social relations to governmental actions and policy frameworks. Turning a technical problem into a social problem is therefore plainly ideological.
This, despite the fact the US military is the biggest institutional polluter on the planet, responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than most countries on the planet. The old leftist and, indeed, religious denunciation of war is removed from view. It is here that claims to be involved in a form of political diplomacy, turning blind eyes merely to initiate action, fall down. Militarism and war are significant causes of environmental destruction, and to ignore them cannot be put down to an environmental realpolitik. Here, ‘environmentalism’ is walking hand in hand with the very forces responsible for environmental degradation. In fact, the real name for this ‘environmentalism’ is capitalism, militarism, and imperialism. And barbarism. The problem with a pragmatism based on political timidity and evasion is that it soon becomes complicit with the Kingdom of the Beast. Remove the critique of the capital system and of militarism and you’ve removed the whole point of any meaningful politics. Instead of equity, justice, and the responsibility entailed by a genuine authority there is authoritarian imposition of an ‘environmentalism’ that intensifies international conflict, exacerbates existing inequality within and between nations, and increased revenue streams for the corporations within a reinforced and rebooted capital system. The people who contested exploitation, oppression, and injustice are cast aside, for the reason that they have understood from the first that planetary health requires the uprooting of capital rule. That’s the dividing line. Those who obfuscate on that issue are, ultimately, complicit in preserving the very system driving ecological collapse.
Capitalism is in danger of collapse, and the bourgeoisie will always be on hand to save it. And have everyone else save it, too. That, of course, means both labour and nature, the two sources of wealth. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, ‘the bourgeois viewpoint’ will never see beyond prevailing exploitative, competitive relations. To the bourgeois, history has ended with the capital system, and they will act to preserve that system against alternatives even if it also means the end of nature and of civilisation. Too many may well learn that lesson too late, if they learn it at all.
The people organising the protests and orchestrating the campaign routinely claim most ‘ordinary’ people either don’t know or don’t care about climate change. That has been the constant refrain, and it is utter self-serving, self-righteous, and self-validating bunkum that not only draws a discrete sanctimonious veil over past failures in political action, communication, and engagement, but permits their continuation into the future. People have got the message and don’t need informing and educating. The myth has grown that climate change has not been covered and is never covered. It has. What is missing is the means and media of effective collective action. The only thing that climate ‘educators’ offer here is ‘government.’ Where are the collective means and mechanisms enabling popular participation in a just transition beyond capital’s social and ecological contradictions? Years ago I argued that you can only demand action when you have developed the means of effective, equitable, enduring action. All that has been proposed, and all this is being proposed now, is government, appropriate policy frameworks, and legislative and regulative intervention. This “non-politics” is elitist, bureaucratic, and authoritarian to the core. Instead of turning people on, it turns them off, and does so in droves. Don’t blame the people for your political failures, your lack of understanding, and your inability to relate, connect, engage, and move. The idea that only the liberal middle and upper classes know and care about the environment is pure class conceit. In the first instance, the working classes, the poor, the marginalized are mired in the hard tasks of daily social survival and simply cannot afford not to take a break from that struggle to ‘care’ for the planet. Most people live in the here and now. That’s not lack of consciousness, understanding, and compassion, that’s a struggle in teeth of the hard facts of living. In the second place, the working class, the poor, the oppressed are involved in environmental actions that are not only democratic mass movements, but integrate social and ecological concerns in a way that elitist movements, in eliding class, do not. They are fighting for the provision of public transport, the prioritising basic needs over luxuries, and the radical redistribution of wealth, all of which are integral to mitigation. One thing that mass democratic movements from below do not forget, because they cannot afford to forget, is that the struggle for the environment is a struggle against the capitalism that destroys that environment as both a social and ecological environment.
My view is Marxist based on praxis as a dynamic interaction between theory and practice, the one informing the other. That view in thoroughly and inherently democratic. In Marx's phrase "the educator must also be educated," by which he meant that human beings are active agents who transform themselves as they transform the world. This is the direct antithesis of the view which treats people as dupes to be managed and manipulated from above.
I reject this "beyond left and right" appeal as a non-politics, an evasion of the contentious areas of power and resources. There is a concerted effort to drive a consensual politics. The slogan "unite behind the science" is designed to cultivate blind allegiance to an authority that people trust. The problem is that that trust lies in science qua science. This builds ties of loyalty between people and mobilizes them to an agenda in which “the truth” comes out of the scientific realm and into the domain of politics and ethics. The problem is that it doesn’t enter that domain as politics and ethics, but as unarguable, unquestionable scientific fact, or “truth.” Truth is a slippery notion in science. Science doesn’t actually establish truth. It accumulates facts and offers explanations which are ever open to falsification through contrary facts. By employing science as unimpeachable authority in politics, a line has been crossed that is illegitimate.
I have noticed a tendency to evade conflict and adopt a heavily consensualist approach to politics. This approach involves the exertion of a strong pressure on people to conform and not deviate by raising difficult questions and concerns. This is the politics of capitulation. We live in a political world in which the spineless get nothing or become complicit in servitude to power to ensure others get nothing. I was a survivor of the Hillsborough Disaster who, for a quarter of a century, fought for justice. I saw how ordinary men and women, hung out to dry by the establishment and by the public, fought on and made them experts in law, forensics, investigative journalism, politics, everything. I hold elitist strategists seeking to manage and manipulate people in complete contempt. Such strategists who approach people and politics in terms of statistics achieve nothing, precisely because they lack the very quality which brings enduring worthwhile change – human beings themselves as autonomous agents. I have heard people claim that climate litigation is the way forward, since law, unlike politics, has to acknowledge facts. I don’t know whether the naivety is greater than the ignorance here. Such claims are utterly deficient in understanding. If the verdicts on Hillsborough can be overturned, I read, then climate litigation is possible. I shall pause before commenting here, lest I tell people who argue thus what I really think of them …. The verdicts on Hillsborough were overturned not as a result of some dry process involving truth, facts, and law. The Hillsborough families and justice campaigners already knew the truth. The establishment knew the truth and sought to cover it up. The lesson is that truth alone is not enough. It was men and women fighting for justice that bodied forth the truth, and that is a matter of ethics, emotions, solidarity, effort, blood, sweat, and tears. And long hard practical commitment. Most of all, it involves people, human beings. If you don’t move and motivate people from within and work with that essential core, your truth is no more than cold indifferent fact.
You don’t even need to be a careful reader to see something decidedly iffy about the Thunberg phenomenon. You can understand the simplification and generalisation easily as part of a deliberate strategy to win broad support. The same with respect to the call to panic and respond to an emergency. The questions relate to what happens in response to popular mobilisation and the demands levelled on governments for ‘climate action.’ What action precisely? Here is where we start to see pigs in polks. At a TED Talk in Stockholm, Thunberg declared that “the climate crisis already has been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.”
In the speech delivered to the UN, she said this:
“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”
We already have the solutions, in the one; the solutions are nowhere in sight, in the other. Which is it? Whose solutions are being ruled out?
I think the solutions are most certainly in sight for those pushing for climate action, ready to be unveiled as soon as government – taxpayers and workers – lays down the hard cash. You can get them straight off the shelf. At a price. Welcome to an age of environmental austerity, ‘whether you like it or not.’ The only “solutions” I see here are corporate “solutions” within a rebooted capitalist economy, and the “non-politics” of climate emergency and urgency is designed to suppress the time and space of a genuine politics, demanding consensus, conformity, and acquiescence. The language and principles of the Left, a record of the historic struggles against class exploitation and social inequality and against poverty and oppression, for freedom, human rights, empowerment, and emancipation will all be appropriated to induce compliance whilst at the same time being turned against us as the agents of corporate and institutional power.
The working class should not be diverted by a class politics being packaged under the false “non-political” prospectus of “the environment,” greenwashing capitalism, the corporate form, austerity, and authoritarianism. The deeply elitist scepticism towards democracy and the ‘ordinary’ human beings composing the demos - based on notions that not enough people know and care – expresses itself as a hankering after the authoritarian advantage of dictatorial regimes which order people according to notions of “truth.” I take no backward step before those who argue for truth in politics. But such people are just decadent Platonists without the wisdom to see that reason does not, and cannot, rule alone. Plato was wise enough to know that we need the true, the good, and the beautiful, and that the good life was a result of all our faculties working in tandem. Make truth the overriding concern and you lose the balance required for the integral environmentalism Plato established.
But if this really is a case of mere survival in an emergency, then we can really stop pussyfooting around and devising strategies and stating principles and baring bleeding hearts for public effect. We live in an age in which a disenchanting science has revealed the horrible truth that we live in an objectively valueless and meaningless universe. There is absolutely no point to the game of life other than staying in the game. Some 99% of species that have ever existed have already gone extinct. That’s as final as anything can get. The human species will also go extinct. There will be no memory of anything. All human deeds, good and ill, gone. Hence my interest in this hysterical – and that’s the only way to describe it – crying over what is repeatedly called an ‘existential crisis.’ The existential crisis, when conceived in such shallow terms, surely came a long time ago, when Nietzsche declared the death of God. There is no immortal soul, no eternal life, no design, no purpose, no end. We have been living in an age of purposeless materialism for a long time. Very many among the environmentalists make this cold, indifferent, amoral nature the height of philosophical wisdom. People advocate a kind of Eastern fatalism here. Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching begins with the lines "Heaven and Earth are heartless / treating creatures like straw dogs". That sounds cruel, but isn’t. It’s amoral and indifferent. And it is heartless. Su Zhe explains: "Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness.” Fine. There’s no cruelty. And no kindness either, for the same reason. There are the limitations of the naturalist view laid bare and naked. The grass pays no mind.
I am seeing and hearing people crying in the streets about having their futures stolen. The cold, amoral truth coming from nature is that you don’t have a future anyway, not beyond your natural span. And the hard social truth under capitalism is that most people have had and continue to have their lives stolen by capital, alienated away to serve an accumulative imperative. It’s not cruel, comes the rationalization, ‘it’s nature,’ ‘it’s the system.’ But it is heartless. And it is soulless. And it brings civilization to this, a Juggernaut out of control, and no way to motivate people to respond and alter directions other than by the call to panic. Capital intensifies and accelerates nature, time, and space.
I am profoundly unmoved, except in a hostile way, by current constant references to ‘existential crisis,’ for the very reason that, in their loudness, they ring hollow. This is what Max Weber described as the age of ‘convulsive self-importance’ finally crying out in protest, but at the wrong thing, the finitude of all physical things. That this discovery of finitude in the material realm seems to have caused shock, with so many now declaring themselves ‘scared’ for the future indicates how much has been lost. This existential fear betrays an unease right at the heart of the modern world view. The moderns have been living existence through ‘things,’ their pursuit, possession, and enjoyment. Brought up on notions of continuous progress through material expansion, people are now seeing the future, once constantly expanding in front of them, contracting and turning back on them. Where once it was possible to exude in the illusion of immortality through incorruptible eternal machines, modern men and women are seeing the failures of their new gods. They have been all too willing to strike Faustian bargains with their alien powers, serving them and their imperatives rather than take responsibility for them and restitute them to the social body. The moderns have gained the physical world in exchange for their souls, and now is the hour to pay in full. You have had the world as your possession, but all finite things come to an end. All in good time, you may retort. With climate change things are not coming to a natural end. That’s precisely happens with the colonisation of time and space under capital. The very thing that people are now noticing with respect to the planet is precisely how many have experienced their lives under the capital system, not merely a stolen future, but a stolen present. Very many people have experienced a foreshortening of their lives but also a narrowing of experiences and horizons. Marx referred to the parcelling out of social experience. Capitalism has always come with a differentiating out of social experience, expanding opportunities for some, narrowing and removing them for others. One of the first things we studied in Ron Noon’s history classes on modern Britain was the differential experience of the 1930s. We were asked for our images of 1930s Britain and, being a class drawn predominantly from the working class, the references were to mass unemployment, hunger marches, depression, and poverty. The question then came back as to why the Left struggled politically and why, in elections, these experiences did not translate into a radical politics. The fact is that if you remained in work, and lived in other parts of the country, you had never had it so good. It was a decade in which cheap consumer durables flooded the market, when you could buy a house on a modest salary. Towns and their inhabitants were cast aside and left to die, and people serving their own material interests looked the other way. Under capitalism, people disregard the testimony of their social senses. This is what is striking about a rebellion which seems utterly oblivious to the way that people have had their social presents stolen, let alone their futures, under capitalism. I live in an old industrial town where people have gone to early graves with illnesses as souvenirs of their time working at the coalface. Such areas have also been on the receiving end of punitive, repressive governments passing and enforcing naked pieces of class legislation. The image and reality of government is not as benign in the working class experience as it is for the middle class. The middle class view will tend to see government very much in terms of its ‘ought to be’ as the embodiment of the universal interest; the working class have been on the receiving end of its reality as a surrogate for private interests and the dominant class forces.
Very many people have had their futures stolen under capitalism. That’s the deal under capitalism, a system which is based upon the systematic appropriation of labour, the creative essence defining human beings. Capital is alienated labour, organised theft and extortion. The colonisation, intensification, and acceleration of time and space defines the experience of life under the capital system. Alienation under capitalism denotes systematic loss in terms of the qualitative conditions of living well: the loss of our essential powers, the loss of our connections to others, the loss of our commons, the loss of our ability to control the means whereby we live, the loss of our ability to shape the ends to which we live. At the heart of this loss is appropriation.
Of course our futures have been stolen! The fact that this has come as news, causing consternation, should be taken as an indication of complacency and complicity, how comfortable far too many have been within capitalism so long as it has continued to deliver on material quantity. Weber may have described the ‘irresistible force’ of capitalist economic determination as an ‘iron cage,’ but that cage is a gilded cage too. Marx in 1843 noted the extent to which many are comfortable in their alienation. This was one reason he identified the proletariat as the revolutionary, the emancipatory, and the universal class. The other classes wouldn’t budge, they would pursue reforms that would leave the pillars of alienation still standing. They have done.
The accusation levelled at ‘adults’ for having stolen the futures of the young can be rendered more institutionally and socially precise. The theft of the future lies precisely in the theft and exploitation of labour and nature, the two value creating powers, which lies at the very heart of the capital relation. To point the finger at ‘adults’ here is of a piece with general claims that ‘we,’ ‘humanity,’ is responsible. Such statements reveal nothing and hence are politically vacuous. General accusations and appeals may win broad assent, but are not politically actionable; they are lacking in social relevance and practical value. They miss the target.
The issue of stolen futures relates directly to stolen labour and land. Marx concludes the chapter on “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” in Capital vol. 1 with a passage on the ‘robbery’ upon which capitalist production proceeds:
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil…. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1976: 637–38
The view that Marx has nothing to say on ecology has long since been decisively refuted. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx explicitly states that labour and nature are the two sources of wealth:
‘Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use-values (and surely these are what make up material wealth!) as labour. Labour is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labour power.’
Marx CGP 1974
The problem is the ‘robbery’ of labour and nature. Marx shows clearly that ‘robbing the worker’ and ‘robbing the soil’ proceed hand in hand under capitalist relations. At the heart of capitalist production is the exploitation of both nature and labour as a twin process. The environmental crisis, then, refers to much more than the crisis in the climate system to encompass the expropriation and commodification of labour and the expropriation and commodification of the earth. Environmental crisis is therefore directly attributable to the contradictory socio-ecological dynamics of the capital system. As Marx states earlier in the paragraph quoted above:
“capitalist production…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.”
The robbery of the workers and the robbery of the soil are inextricably related and generate the rift in the metabolic relation between human society and the Earth. Marx’s ecological critique of capital’s contradictory dynamics was informed in part by German chemist Justus von Liebig’s critique of industrialised agriculture provided. Liebig made explicit reference to the “robbery system” (Raubsystem) and the “robbery economy” (Raubwirthschaft), in association with high farming. (Justus von Liebig, “1862 Preface to Agricultural Chemistry,” Monthly Review 70, no. 3 (July–August 2018): 146–50; William H. Brock, Justus von Liebig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 177–78.)
Marx extended this robbery from external nature to human beings in society. As corporeal beings, human beings are a part of nature. Joseph Fracchia writes well on how Marx develops a corporeal materialism (“Organisms and Objectifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the ‘Human and Animal,’” Monthly Review 68, no 10 (March 2017): 1–16; John Fox, Marx, the Body, and Human Nature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).) Capital’s expropriation and commodification of nature therefore has its counterpart in the expropriation and commodification of human bodily existence. As Terry Eagleton writes in After Theory:
Marx considered that by turning even our senses into commodities, capitalism had plundered us of our bodies. In his view, we would need a considerable political transformation in order to come to our senses.
Eagleton 2003 ch 6
And it is precisely the need for that “considerable political [and social] transformation which is now on the agenda as we live through a crisis with transformative potential. The social transformation that is needed is most certainly political, hence my interest in the attempts to frame the narrative of change in “apolitical” and “non-political” terms. Certain forces are at work in the attempt to steer transformative shifts in much less than radical directions. Hence my concern for clarity with respect to institutional analysis, contradictory dynamics, and material roots in capital and class.
The expropriation, commodification and resulting rift in the natural metabolism is also an expropriation, commodification and rift in the social metabolism of human beings. Capital, as alien labour, exists by stealing the essential and vital powers of human beings as part of the general theft of the commons. This robbery of land and labour results in the destructive physical impacts we now see in environmental crisis.
The complaint that the future has been stolen demands a precise social and institutional analysis of the “robbery system” and the “robbery economy.” And the cries of those confronted with an existential crisis demand a clear answer to the question as to why it all matters. To whom or what are the cries directed to?
The disenchantment of the world has revealed the world to be objectively valueless and meaningless. You may proclaim nature to be your god and goddess, but nature could care less. You may proclaim the ‘God’ of Einstein and Spinoza, the god of a physical universe that unfolds in complete indifference to human concerns and affairs. That physical universe could care less. You may use moral terms, but they lack a referent. Your ethic is empty and has no meaning and no motivational power. You may, therefore, eschew moral terms and merely state physical and logical truths. Those truths, likewise, have no meaning and no motivational power; they lack the affective and social dimension that is integral to human life. Your truth is partial and, in its partiality, is false to human beings. You are merely preparing the intellectual and psychological grounds for entry into the impersonal, inhuman, undemocratic Megamachine, the push-button order which proceeds without regard for persons. This is the ultimate in capitalist alienation. Science delivers ‘nature’ as an empty signifier and, through a process of reification, subjects us to a false necessity rationalising an authoritarian politics. This whole spectacle merely shows a hollow civilization clinging to its empty life. It shows the impossibilities of the destinationless voyage.
All things pass. All flesh corrupts, decays, and dies. Civilisations die too. Did you think that your machine gods would bring immortality? I believe in eternal life. I live in the eternal now. I can resist complicity with the Beast of a capitalist civilization you still wish to bargain with. You sold your souls long ago, and now the price is being exacted.
In his famous conclusion to After Virtue (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that “the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.” (MacIntyre 1981 ch18).
It is still either Socialism or Barbarism. MacIntyre thought Marx and socialism very much part of the modernity that was doomed. If that is true, I’ll still not be crying. Because there is a higher Truth, and I live in accordance with that. You can call me an absolutist and a purist, if you like. But I have hope, and you do not; I have a point to my existence, and you do not; I am at peace, and you are not. I don’t panic easily, least of all in the streets. I’ve seen people who have had their futures stolen, I live among people who have had their futures stolen. I’ve seen people killed in front of my eyes, the crime concealed by establishment injustice; I’ve seen people thrown on the unemployment scrapheap; I’ve seen communities left to rot for decades. When you and your communities have been on the receiving end of official callousness and cruelty, you learn to be somewhat circumspect about handing over sweeping powers and responsibilities to government, least of all government that has proven itself to be the handmaiden of money and commerce to the detriment of the common good.
So let me come to the real nature of my objections, what lies beneath my refusal to join in this last mad gamble on the planet. I never had any faith in the machine gods of modernity, nor much love for the modern way of living in any case. Something was lost in this civilization a long time ago, and this demise was foretold.
So many people saying they are scared. The truth is that everything passes. I don’t scare easily. I don’t scare at all, in fact, when it comes to the important things. I’ve seen death and not recoiled; I have faced death, even, and not winced; I’ve faced gangs of robbers demanding money and goods with menace, and have seen them off without flinching. I’m not so faithless as to have to cling to the ephemeral. I do care about the immortal soul. I do care about the soul of the world. The tradition of living I belong to involves men and women robbed of their commons, their livelihoods, their lives, even; these are the people who, in every age, have been on the margins for living in close harmony with true reality. This is the subterranean current in history, offering visions of the world we could have had, had the knowledge aristocracy ruling according to a truth divorced from reality actually possessed an ounce of understanding and hence known better, and had people been less inclined to strike Faustian bargains with the forces and powers that enslave them in their promises to set them free. We now know that these people, defeated, marginalised, even destroyed in every age, were actually the true realists living in truth. So I may well be on the margins but, along with the people above, going back to John Ball and before, I am in touch with a deeper reality, the true reality. I am with those who “tell the truth,” the whole truth, and not the obvious truth that, physically, life is imperilled.
Complicity, conformity, and cooperation with the dominant forces of a dysfunctional social organisation has brought the world to the brink of catastrophe. And even now, at the final hour, we are being induced to join in in an attempt to salvage something from the ruins, even if all that that is is mere survival. Mere survival is the best that this civilization can hope for after all its bold expansion. ‘Heroic materialism,’ Kenneth Clark called capitalism in Civilisation. That’s all we have left. And it’s not enough. I watched Clark’s Civilisation when I was young and watched the development from early days, when the west made it ‘by the skin of our teeth.’ To the present day, 1969, when Clark leaves us with the distinct impression that we are not going to make it at all. Clark’s final words were rather bleak and prophetic. He spoke about a civilization produced by the triumph of science and practical rationality, covering the world with industry, machines, mega-cities, and towering architecture. It is heroic, indeed, and has brought ease and comfort within the reach of billions through electricity, automobiles, airplanes, and computers.
As editor of the FT Lionel Barber wrote when introducing the need to ‘reset’ capitalism to the readers: “The liberal capitalist model has delivered peace, prosperity and technological progress for the past 50 years, dramatically reducing poverty and raising living standards throughout the world.” He declares the principles of good business as “necessary, but not sufficient.” Even within the capitalist establishment there is a concern to restore the missing social and ethical dimension. That really is nowhere as easy as Barber thinks. The capital system is based on the systematic ‘robbery of nature,’ as Marx called it. Indeed, it appropriates and hollows out the commons of all kinds. I mention Marx precisely because Marx, socialism, capital and class are the very things that people searching for an easy way out always seek to avoid. Until people are prepared to look the monster square in the face, the problems will continue.
Kenneth Clark indicted contemporary for its soullessness and superficiality, as evinced in the ugliness, chaos and confusion of the great metropolises. He compares and contrasts, most unfavourably, the modern mega-cities with the spiritually ordered harmony of Medieval Chartres and Renaissance Florence. Architecture reflects the spirit of the age, but if the age is spiritless, then there is nothing to reflect. The only thing resembling an orienting spirit in modern cities is material gain and money-making, their principal buildings being citadels to an empty power. This does not generate an aesthetically and morally pleasing culture or way of life; indeed it is most uncivilizing. The dominant buildings of contemporary civilization indicate what the age considers to be of the highest value: money. These buildings are neither political edifices denoting a collective pride or public concern nor religious edifices denoting spiritual devotion, but meaningless monuments to the endless expansion of economic power: The Empire State Building, the Aon Building, the Chrysler Building, etc. You name them, they reach on ever upwards and boundlessly into infinity, denoting the endless expansion of material quantity.
Impressive, visually, in the superficial sense of the immediate senses. But there is no elevated vision to them, and no depth. Whilst there is too much material quantity, there is nothing in this that is near enough to satisfy the deepest longing of the human spirit, nothing that could offer an organizing and orienting ideal for a truly human society.
Clark comments on the failure of Marxism, a view which would have identified him as an anti-socialist in 1969. But he is very far from being an apologist for capitalism. With the demise of the Marxist alternative, all we are left with, he says, is the heroic materialism of western capitalism, and that, he says, “is not enough.”
In this prophetic summation, Clark is doing far more than opt for the facile moral equivalence approach too easily embraced by the intellectually lazy and politically evasive in recent decades, the view that Capitalism and Socialism are both the same in being two sides of the same coin, both equally wrong. That view is far too glib, betraying a very shallow understanding of the question. Rather, Clark is going much deeper than merely rejecting Marx, socialism and communism to identify the source of modernity’s malaise in what Lewis Mumford called a “purposeless materialism,” Max Weber “the disenchantment of the world,” and Pope John Paul II the “practical atheism” of Western civilization. All of these terms contain a moral protest against the pathos of means becoming enlarged to the status of ends. We live in “godless and prophetless times,” wrote Max Weber. Mumford had no religion, Weber was writing in the aftermath of the loss of religion as civilization’s orienting principle, and the Pope was, well, the Pope. What united all three was a deeply ethical, indeed spiritual, concern at the way modern society has made scientific progress, technological innovation, and economic expansion the highest ends, displacing values of ultimate concern. And in the end, Clark concludes, that is “not enough.” Such endless expansion of material quantity cannot ever fulfil. Fulfilment implies limits; the endless expansion of capitalist accumulation knows no limits. Hence the paradox of an endless materialism that generates too much but never enough:
In Arsy-Versy world, all sorts of experts by the score
Plead with those producing goods to turn out more and more.
And the way the turn-out turns out is somehow always such
That though there never is enough, there’s always far too much.’
A Poem by Hugo Dewar, printed in Socialist Worker, January 3, 1976
The ‘heroic materialism’ of capitalism entails a ‘far too much’ that ‘never is enough.’ There is no fulfilment, since there is nothing that nourishes the soul. Capitalism can feed the physical flesh, and that’s no mean achievement, lest it be overlooked. But man does not live by bread alone. What about spiritual nourishment? Clark’s Civilisation may well now be considered ‘old-fashioned’ on account of the heavy emphasis he places on the role that Christian spirituality, theology, art, and architecture played in the development of Western civilization. Turn to Clark’s words on Dante in the earlier episodes, and to what he says on Chartres, and then cut to the final episode. What becomes crystal clear is that Clark was not taking a stand on the political clash between capitalism and socialism, but expressing a far deeper point concerning the dissolution of the Christian ethos through the triumph of a practical, soulless, dispiriting, purposeless materialism. Clark calls this materialism ‘heroic.’ Its ambitions certainly are, and achievements too, no doubt. But it’s empty. And unfulfilling. And not nearly enough. Here we can recall Dante’s infernal encounter with Ulysses, damned as a Fraudulent Counsellor for leading his crew to their doom. Through his legendary gift of persuasion, Ulysses leads his men in an attempt to take Mt Purgatory by storm, only to be engulfed by the seas. Suffering eternal damnation in Hell, Ulysses recalls the pitch he made to his men:
‘Consider how your souls were sown:
you were not made to live like brutes or beasts,
but to pursue virtue and knowledge.’
This expresses such a noble truth that many quote this passage out of context and present it as Dante’s view. Dante does believe we have been granted the inclination to pursue virtue and knowledge as a gift. But his central point is to underline how we are tempted to misuse that gift in pursuit of wrong ends. Those who consider truth to be sufficient in itself and to trump all things need to consider the moral lesson that Dante delivers. Ulysses directed that noble truth to an ignoble end in pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge. In pursuit of virtue and knowledge, Ulysses led his faithful crew beyond the limits of the known world. Heroic it may have been, but he was driven by a false god, the god of his own outsized ego, and he and his crew paid for that vainglory with their deaths and the eternal damnation of their souls. In using the life-giving, life-affirming truths gifted by God not to their true ends, but to mislead the men under his command, in seeking to satiate his own insatiable craving for knowledge, Ulysses’ heroism brought death and eternal damnation. Likewise with the nihilism of ‘heroic materialism,’ the endless accumulation of means for the sake of further means. In seeking to storm Heaven and attain Paradise by the expansion of our material powers, we, the practical atheists of modern capitalism, have brought Hell on Earth. Kenneth Clark’s conclusion to Civilisation is making the point that the Christian narrative has been supplanted, and its memory eclipsed or distorted, by a more immediately powerful, but much less enduring, narrative, the story of endless material expansion.
There is a profundity to Clark’s conclusion that is easy to miss given the ease with which Clark expresses it. Greta Thunberg caused something of a storm with her condemnation of ‘fantasies of eternal economic growth’ in her UN address. Many read this as a reference to Marx’s critique of endless capital accumulation. It also savours a great deal of the ecological truism of the madness of infinite economic growth on a planet of finite resources. Without a supporting explanation it is impossible to say, and such words impress and excite by the associations they incite in the mind of those who hear them. I pick up on the word ‘eternal.’ To me, this suggests the sense of capital as a new idol and false god, with promises of eternal life now displaced from the infinite heavens to the finite material world. Capitalism is not simply ‘irreligious’ as John Maynard Keynes said, it is actually a new and bogus religion, and all the more dangerous, deluded, and perverted for that. To adapt what Bronowski says in The Ascent of Man, this is what happens when men aspire to the knowledge and power of gods.
To couch existential crisis in these terms denotes the spiritual impoverishment of the age. It also entails the compromise of what we know, or should know, to be right and true in order to survive. Survival is not an end in itself. If it were, Socrates would have walked out of his prison and chosen to live. He would have lived as a morally compromised being, true, but if survival is all that matters, his bones, blood, and gristle would have survived, regardless of what his conscience told him. Socrates couldn’t live on those terms. The fact that so many today can is an indication of how much has been lost in the age of ‘heroic materialism.’ There’s nothing heroic about it at all. It’s all very small and craven.
What is needed most of all is not a ‘resetting’ of capitalism, nor even a social transformation leading to socialism, but a coherent and cogent re-telling of the religious story. We could be specific and identify the Christian story here. But that would amount to a recovery, and one that reintroduces and reinforces splits in the world. It think a religious re-telling avoiding exclusive claims is the way forward. That said, the story of a Creator God who created the universe out of love, who so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son so that human beings might be elevated beyond their fallen nature to share the very life of God, is a story which will resonate with the men and women of a modern age crying out for meaning, purpose, and belonging, just as it did to the people of the past. To those who say that we know better now, just consider Ulysses’ heroic pitch to his men in terms of using their virtue and knowledge to go beyond the bounds of the known and knowable world. In thinking we know better, that’s precisely where we have ended up, producing a civilization which is on the brink of being engulfed. The God of Love, the personal God of relationships, of partnership, gives us an ultimately more powerful story than that of capitalism’s ‘heroic materialism’ and any other secularist ideology. This is a story which is about something much more enduring than survival in the physical sense, but brings us back in touch with eternal life. It is this sense of the eternal, brought into everyday life as the eternal now, which will serve to create the ethos and culture of a true civilization. It just needs individuals with the moral courage, the intelligence, the vision, and the imagination required to refuse complicity and compromise and to “tell the truth” again.