Class, Capital, Climate Change, and the Common Good
I found this ‘Open Letter to Greta Thunberg’ on a site subtitled ‘A rational take on an increasingly weird world.’ There follows the usual rationalism stating the obvious – all good things are good, with which all good people are in agreement – combined with what first appeared to be the trademark rationalist political, sociological, and moral illiteracy, which I was inclined to dismiss with all such other appeals, until it got much more interesting.
I have spent a lot of time trying to develop the political, socio-economic and moral literary of environmentalism over the years. I have also worked in ecopoetics and literary ecology, in an attempt to foster the moral imagination. I have noticed the extent to which people who style themselves ‘rational’ can be remarkably uncomprehending once we move beyond the simplicities of ‘things’ and their counting and operation. Human beings may be machines, as many claim, but they are very complicated ones, and their societies are made in that image. The letter writer writes:
‘I understand what it is for respect for others to be a matter of survival, and I’ve experienced the contrast between cultures where people work together, and where people fight each other. You and I, we realize that when people work together, when people stop fighting and start pulling in the same direction, that humanity has only begun to scratch the surface of our potential. So many people don’t understand respect or cooperation at all, have no idea of our responsibility to each other.’
Right, agreed, with the significant qualification that neither cooperation nor collaboration are virtues in themselves. The social instincts of human beings have been frequently hi-jacked in history and diverted to serve private ends. It matters a great deal with whom people collaborate and cooperate and to what ends. So many people who advocate collaboration and cooperation in general fail to understand that.
The statement above defines quite generally the fundamental problem of politics, one whose solution requires an institutional framework and social and moral infrastructure. It doesn’t quite state the problem, which pertains to the advantages that accrue to those who break ranks and take short-run decisions to serve their own interests, those advantages building up over time within the system to undermine the long-run collective good. All lose when the system fails, but the destructive perversity is that it pays the more powerful to take decisions that yield an advantage to them in the short-run, even if the whole process ends in common ruination. The perversity is also systemic in that the powerful have to seek such immediate private advantage, lest their rivals steal an advantage over against them and eliminate them from the competition.
Clearly, we need a framework so as to gear society and its members towards actions leading to the long-term common good. Such a thing is not for the asking, something we can order or take down off-the-shelf. There are various ways of establishing the conditions of what I call a ‘rational freedom.’ This problem has been at the centre of my work. Basically, politics and people need to conform to reality. ‘How do we do that?’ I was asked. The answer lies in my work as a whole. In the first off, there is a need to recognize that in an age when individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit, there is no ‘we.’ If people refuse to conform to reality, there is no way of constraining them morally, socially, and institutionally within present relations. Most importantly, there is no basis for them to constrain themselves, either. The social identity required for the self-assumed obligation necessary for the long term good does not exist and stands in need of creation.
The answer does not lie in a plan or a programme or a strategy, because the logic of collective action is not something that can be reduced to such terms. The failure to understand that is leading us into a mechanical mindset that is distorting actions and ambitions. In part, this Open Letter betrays precisely the operation of the mechanical mindset, the very mentality which has been instrumental in generating the converging social, moral, and environmental crises in the first place. Note well the language employed:
‘Yes, we can fix climate change. I have a deep faith that, given the will as a global society – whether that comes from desire or desperation – we will engineer our way out of this crisis. You spoke of depending on technologies that barely exist. When I was your age, they didn’t exist at all. In my lifetime, I’ve seen technology invented to clean up oil spills, to produce clean drinking water in places where there is none, and to depollute rivers and streams we depend on to anchor our societies. I’ve seen people invent machines to clean plastic out of the ocean, and to generate power without fossil fuel combustion. Human beings have learned how to power our society by harnessing the natural, inexhaustible forces of our world.’
That ‘deep faith’ is a faith not in human beings, but in technology. This is the language of fixing, engineering, and technology. It is precisely the ‘men as gods’ delusion I criticized at length in Of Gods and Gaia. Except that it is the machines and not the men who are deified. There is nothing by way of class analysis in this Open Letter, nothing on specific social relations and forms, nothing on political economy and its critique, and nothing on ethics. Instead, technology: ‘All while we have the technology to stop. Today. It already exists, and we have had it for decades.’ That should be a piece of cake, then. The fact that the technological power for a better world has existed not merely for decades, but since ever, should beg the screamingly obvious question as to the social, economic and moral causes of a constantly misfiring technics. We can detect the germ of such a critique emerging in the Open Letter. The tone, however, is that of a self-defeating lament. It picks up on this quote from Greta Thunberg’s UN Speech:
‘You say you hear us, and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that, because if you really understood the situation, and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil, and that I refuse to believe.’
Thunberg is to be criticized for failing to understand the systemic nature of socially and environmentally destructive decisions. The capital system is geared to pursue exchange values through a parasitism upon and exploitation of use values. The Open Letter may well be pointing in this direction. But instead of the precision that is required here, the writer of the Open Letter identifies the problem as one of ‘evil.’ To Thunberg’s charge that people with the power of decision are evil, the letter writer confirms that ‘they are, and you have to believe it to win this fight.’ That seems to be the beginning of insight into the systemic nature of climate crisis. But there is need for much greater precision. The category of ‘evil’ is too fuzzy to be of value, inviting an impotent moralism in place of a social and institutional precision. I read the letter writer generously as pointing us in the direction of a socio-economic and institutional analysis that would reveal that the problem to be less one of personal ‘evil’ than of the overriding importance of the systemic imperatives of the capital system. For successful resolution of the problem of collective action, there is a need to identity this ‘evil’ with the decisions and choices leading to deleterious consequences and then explain how these decisions and choices are necessarily made within the capital system. Accumulation is the sine qua non of the capital system. If you argue for degrowth, then you need to be clear that you are seeking to uproot the accumulative dynamic of the central spring of the capital system. And you need to locate the ‘evil’ in an alienated system of production. You need to be clear in analysing the material roots, class relations, and contradictory dynamics of the capital system. And in doing so, you need to pluck up the courage to see ‘why Marx was right’ (Terry Eagleton) and why you need to reclaim socialism and identify as socialist, putting aside all ‘beyond left and right’ pretensions aside as the ideological evasions they are.
Those institutional and systemic analyses reveal why Thunberg’s appeal to the rich and powerful in government and business is misguided. (Unless it is part of a green corporate agenda). At best, it amounts to an appeal to the socially and environmentally destructive to temper their destructive activities out of their own self-interest. Such people, though, are not in charge of the system. Capital is a subjectless system of alien control. Pardon the jargon, but there is no way of putting it otherwise. I explain it all at length in the Marx and Meszaros books I have written, and refer people to those. The basic idea is that the capitalists are not in control in an alienated system of production but are controlled by the accumulative imperatives arising from that system. As Marx wrote at the beginning of Capital, the capitalists are mere personifications of economic categories. They do what they do simply because they must in order to survive in a competitive system. As Hobbes told us in 1649, at the beginning of the entire process, power is preserved only by being constantly expanded: one accumulates or gets accumulated. Moral and rational appeals are ineffective in such a system. The state, too, is not determinant, it is determined. The role of the state as capital’s political command centre is to provide the unity and control that capital needs but cannot supply itself. The state is also charged with establishing the conditions which facilitate the process of private accumulation. That’s why Thunberg’s appeal will fail to realize anything other than the further entrenchment of the corporate form. But we need to say more than that the power-brokers and decision-makers are ‘evil.’
The writer of the Open Letter could have gone down that route. The criticisms made in that letter certainly point in that direction. Instead, there is more than a hint of a self-defeating misanthropic moralism:
‘I didn’t want to be the one to ruin your innocent belief that deep down, humans are good at heart, but you deserve to be told the truth, even if it’s a horrible truth. Dear, sweet, lovely Greta, they are evil. I’m so, so sorry. Every one of them.’
For a site claiming to take a ‘rational view,’ the writing is loose and lazy. Are we to take that these humans who are ‘evil,’ ‘every one of them’ include also ‘dear, sweet, lovely Greta’? And the writer too? And you and I, who are clearly meant to respond to the Letter? Clearly not. There is a flaw in logic there, which suggests that the reference is specifically aimed against the capitalist class. This seems confirmed by the next lines:
‘They are complicit in the greatest crime against humanity of all time, one that will cost us our very existence, and they’ve done it for filthy lucre. And they don’t care. They don’t feel the shame of your words or your scorn. They don’t care about your fear or anger. They don’t even pretend.’
Which is a demand for class analysis. At long last. Before you can have redemption, you have to identify a sin and name it for what it is. Capital, accumulation, and class exploitation and division. Be careful, though, because you might have to recognize that Marx was right and that ‘we’ need to be socialist to unravel the logic of collective action:
I’m writing to you in the hope that you will reach the understanding that appealing to the deep inner morality of oil barons and their thoroughly debased government toadies is futile. Proselytizing to the soulless isn’t the solution. They must be overthrown, and destroyed so that they never return. I hate to see your energy and effort wasted, and that’s why I say this to you: this isn’t a discussion, it’s not a debate: it’s a fight.
A fight? You mean as in class struggle? This is a demand that we dispense with this general humanitarian appeal on climate crisis and eschew the politically and socially neutral appeal to collaboration and cooperation as mere ideological evasion seeking to work within the very alienated system to be overthrown. Instead, we need to recognize the reality of class division and class struggle against it. The world have spent three or four decades doing its best to make middle-of-the-road moderation, incrementalism and reformism work. The approach has racked up decades of failure and brought us to the brink of collapse. It’s not a time for faint hearts:
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; 'tis dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles until death.
Tom Paine