Classless and Hapless
I recently gathered my criticisms of Extinction Rebellion (XR) together and issued them on Academia, having expressed them in other places.
In that piece, I note and underline the lack of a class analysis and a consistent failure to locate the root of the climate problem in the capitalist system of production. Whenever socialists have made this point, they have routinely been met with the response that socialism has been at least as ecologically destructive as capitalism. I have checked that criticism time and again, going beyond definitions based on the title deeds to property to identify social forms and relations, particular the accumulative dynamic grounded in the capital relation. I have done this with ‘greens’ who know me, and know that with degrees in history, masters work in economics and a PhD in philosophy behind I’m no working class militant to be dismissed and spoken down to – the usual tone adopted by the superior and educated middle class. So they ignore. I have consistently identified the ideological intent and debilitating political consequences of the socially neutral ‘classless’ position and so intend to waste little time on this article that came my way. The article is Extinction Rebellion: Four More (Unconvincing) Criticisms by Chris Smaje, originally published by Small Farm Future (November 11, 2019). I would suggest that the criticisms might have been more convincing had they been properly presented, and not reduced to caricature.
1. XR is too white and middle class.
Smaje opens his defence here with this statement: ‘The arguments from the political right I’ve seen on this point from journalists and on discussion boards where I probably shouldn’t have been lurking seem like mere sneering to me and don’t require a serious response.’ He may well be right on this. The dominant form of criticism here is along the lines of ‘you criticise society and say it should be made better, and yet you live, work, and take part in society and are therefore guilty of the very things you criticize.’ The allegations of hypocrisy coming from the political right are indeed sneering and not worthy of serious response, except to note that there is a need for virtuous action, so that one practices what one preaches.
I am, however, interested in the fact that Smaje himself adopts a sneering tone with respect to left critics, whose arguments he utterly caricatures. It doesn’t require a serious response, so I am passing by briefly with a short commentary.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Smaje says to right wing critics alleging climate hypocrisy. He does at least recognize that ‘the arguments from the left require a more elaborate analysis.’ About the best I can say for his piece is that he does indeed grace the left critique with a more detailed response than ‘yeah, whatever.’ But only just. And what Smaje does say reveals just how anti-left, anti-socialist, and anti-working class his kind of middle class moderation, centrism, and liberalism is. Which comes as no revelation to socialists grown used to being on the receiving end of such supercilious characters. If you think that judgement harsh, note the title of his piece. When, at long last, such characters get round to acknowledging legitimate criticisms coming from subaltern and marginalised groups in society, the critics are dealt with in perfunctory manner, their criticisms deemed unconvincing and dealt with in the briefest of terms. Well pardon us for having the temerity to question. It gives a strong indication of how this crowd see Citizen Assemblies going. Their way. Because, of course, truth, fact, reason, and logic is on their side and, in a neutral framework, without nasty things like social interest, stakes, and class in the way, everyone will agree by reasoned deliberation and debate, that such people are correct.
He highlights what he considers to be the two principal criticisms:
‘first, that XR hasn’t done enough to attract and engage with working-class and minority communities and, second, that its strategy of arrestable civil disobedience is difficult for minority ethnic people to embrace or identify with in view of the discriminatory criminal justice system.’
On the first point, that is not even one tenth of the issue with respect to classless ‘humanitarian’ appeals that claim to be ‘beyond politics.’ Engaging with the working class involves much more than paying lip service, in response to criticism, to notions of ‘just transition.’ From my own background I can say that the antipathy to working class history and politics is palpable. That’s an issue that long predates XR. XR is merely the latest manifestation of a deep-seated and long-standing ‘classless’ ‘non-politics.’ The ‘populist’ revolt which middle class liberals stand paralysed, disapproving, and helpless before has not come from nowhere. I have politely dropped hints and offered advice within the green movement to people who be considered friends and associates, only to have my words dismissed in the most contemptuous of terms. From solid working class stock – a family of miners, builders and domestic workers – living and working in a solid working class community, meeting with and talking to ‘ordinary’ folk without political implication, I could have told the well-meaning bourgeois that not only had they lost the people, they never had them in the first place. And, of course, they could care less what ‘the people’ think, say, and do because, other than individuals, ‘the people’ is a totalitarian fiction. Either way, whatever you call them, they’ve left you and in droves. This doesn’t matter in the normal course of things, where bourgeois hegemony in politics and culture is dominant and the working class voice is marginalised, suppressed, and silent. The lack of popular support, however, is a serious hindrance in politics when one’s pet concern doesn’t necessarily have the rich and powerful on your side. In fact, it is positively debilitating when the rich and powerful turn up in sufficient numbers on the other side. But ‘the rich’ is just as vague a term as ‘the people.’ Chris Smaje, I see, has something of a background in the social sciences, so there is a need for greater precision. That’s precisely my point in eviscerating general humanitarian appeals and a classless non-politics. But Smaje treats class analysis with contempt. Whilst he says more than ‘year, whatever,’ we don’t exactly receive anything by way of an ‘elaborate analysis.’
‘On the first point, again, I’m barely involved in any XR organizing and I can’t speak for the movement – one that in any case has a pretty flat and leaderless structure, making it hard to demand that it implements policy from on high.’
Yeah, whatever. I don’t feel like dignifying this incredibly perfunctory and complacent response with anything much more than contempt. I have offered detailed criticisms elsewhere. Safe to say, this response doesn’t even recognize them. A slogan like ‘tell the truth’ indicates the existence of a certain ‘truth’ which governments are not merely being enjoined to tell but act upon. The claim that this movement implies no specific political position is errant nonsense. Huge, ambitious, and expensive climate actions are being levelled on government. We are being told that such actions are necessary if humanity is to avert climate collapse, ‘extinction,’ no less. And then we are presented with the ‘democratic’ vision of citizens being free to deliberate their answers to the loaded questions set by ‘non-political’ experts. I’m not going to waste any more words, because this answer to criticisms from Smaje is so brief as to indicate complete contempt. I would also draw attention to Roger Hallam’s talk on training for XR activists, where he draws three circles, the top circle containing the experts who know there is a climate crisis and a need for action, a second circle of “difficult” people interested in politics and who ask awkward questions – ‘socialists,’ he comments, eliciting laughter and complicity on the part of the audience – and the third circle of people who aren’t interested in politics but are so scared by the urgency of the crisis as to want something done. He draws an arrow from the first circle downwards to the third circle, connecting elite and mass.
Smaje concedes that on the basis of his experience ‘that white, middle class people like me are somewhat over-represented in XR’s demographic relative to the UK as a whole.’ He therefore finds that argument plausible that XR needs to do more to reach out to a wider base. That view indicates the almost total lack of comprehension that characterises ‘classless’ middle class politics with respect to class. You can read the words of such people and come away with the distinct impression that they think that the problems of classless society can be overcome with quotas and not by a transformation of social relations so as to end class oppression and exploitation. They don’t like the language. Deep down, they don’t really believe there is such a thing as exploitative and oppressive class relations. We should at least be grateful at the recognition that the working class still exist. In recent decades, the only other recognition has come in the form of the middle class considering the working class to be feckless, stupid, and slow, and more likely racist, sexist, and homophobic. I am incredibly sensitive to the sleights and have a good memory. When Emily Thornberry complained ‘this is what we are up against’ noting a UKIP poster in the house of a terraced house with a white van outside, I heard middle class green voices saying she has said nothing wrong. My dad was a bricklayer and had his own building company. We had a white van. So do many more working class people, the people I live with. The snotty condescension of those aiming remarks at ‘white van man’ as stupid betrayed sheer class bigotry and prejudice. It must have come as a great shock, then, to find ‘what van man’ coming to lend his support to political platforms diametrically opposed to all that the liberal middle class hold dear. And they still stand paralysed and uncomprehending, taking some resentful satisfaction in promising that working class people are shooting themselves in the foot by eschewing their liberal politics. They are, but the same point applies either way.
Smaje at least recognizes that in being ‘too white and middle class’ ‘XR is no different from just about every other major institution and political organization in Britain.’ The question is why. XR mirrors what is, after all, a society of class division and domination. But Smaje doesn’t go down that route. Because once you start going down that route, sooner or later you come face to face with the reality of class relations and issues of exploitation that cannot be assuaged by a ‘classless’ ‘non-politics.’ The fact that just about every ‘major institution and political organization in Britain’ is dominated by a particular class, with a particular view of the world, stands in need of explanation. At least it did when I was active in the social sciences. This is a social fact with roots in social relations and structures. Unless we buy the liberal myth of ‘equality of opportunity,’ with white middle class individuals repeatedly rising to dominance on account of their superior intelligence and skill.
‘That doesn’t mean the issue can be dismissed with a complacent shrug, but the extent to which leftist analyses of XR single it out for its white, middle classness strikes me as odd in this broader context.’ That is very much a ‘complacent shrug.’ The substance of Smaje’s charge here is focused exclusively on the fact that The Guardian, which he identifies as ‘Britain’s bastion of respectable, left-of-centre media commentary,’ has been decidedly ‘lukewarm’ in its approach to XR and has ‘endlessly recycled the critique of white middle classness.’ The Guardian is liberal, not left; it is a paper of the ethical and cultural liberals (left), against the economic liberals (right). It is very much that distinction that is in play in these controversies. It is a paper falling entirely within the conventional worldview. It is worth underlining the way in which Smaje describes The Guardian as a ‘respectable’ left-of-centre newspaper. That terminology is not innocent. To be radical is to be disrespectable. I read The Guardian regularly. The idea that it is a harsh critic of XR is laughable. Long, long after people such as I had made criticisms of XR with respect to class and race, The Guardian published a couple of articles raising these concerns. They did so through black African voices. I made a point then of commenting that this is the only way The Guardian could have found a way of making legitimate criticisms, attacking the whiteness of XR rather than its bourgeois liberal character. The criticisms of The Guardian, in other words, have been mild, forming a tiny proportion of the overwhelmingly positive coverage of XR. The Guardian is far from being left wing and socialist. The same comment applies to The Independent, which writes of XR’s ‘hapless stance on class and race.’
It’s wrong to single out XR here. Liberal politics has been hapless along these lines since ever; it is in its DNA. Smaje takes offence. He also says this: ‘There are many other critiques along similar lines in other “progressive” media outlets. The critique itself is valid but its ubiquity suggests to me that XR is touching a nerve on the left about something that runs deeper in its soul.’
Note how Smaje says that ‘the critique is valid,’ despite having put the word ‘progressive’ in inverted commas. And note, too, how he recognizes that there is an extensive critique of XR from the left, and yet at no point engages with that critique. I wish to stay with this, rather than address Smaje’s refutation of the second charge with respect to the fact that it’s easier for a middle-aged, white, middle-class woman to face arrest with equanimity than, say, a young, black, working class man. He accuses leftist commentators of missing the fact that XR’s protest is collective, focused on building strength through solidarity. He states that ‘XR teams wait in the police stations to give support to arrestees when they’re released.’ He needs to address specific criticisms that arrestees have been badly advised and left to their own devices. But that’s not my concern. I’m interested in Smaje’s conclusion here: ‘Nobody seems to be talking about this politicization of custodial space, but to me it seems probably as crucial as personal identity to the different experiences of XR protestors and people of colour to the structural discriminations of the criminal justice system.’
He does, then, recognize the existence of ‘structural discriminations,’ that is, the structural rootedness of the social problems we face. It’s worth highlighting this because Smaje goes on to allege that sections of the left are guilty of privileging certain groups and classes on account of their location in the social structure.
‘I think middle class XR activism has wrongfooted sections of the left because of the latter’s deep historical bias that authentic political critique can only come from the most structurally oppressed social groups – a bias it’s high time the left abandoned as a bad Hegelian legacy, rather than engaging in a rearguard defence of it by sniping at middle class activists for their privilege.’
That’s a rehash of Hindess and Hirst in the seventies and Laclau and Mouffe in the eighties, the view that ‘there is no necessary relation’ between class position and political/ideological expression. As Eagleton commented on that view in Ideology in 1991, it is pure coincidence why merchant bankers are not revolutionary socialists. On that view, it makes as much sense to solicit support for socialism from merchant bankers as it is from the working class. Indeed, on that view, there is no good social reason for anyone to be socialist in the first place, or liberal, or anything, as against being fascist. It’s a moral choice, in the sense of a morality detached from social position and class location. It is an assertion of classless in a class society, a general humanitarian appeal that presumes the very thing that stands in need of creation – social unity and harmony.
I don’t know where Smaje has been living these past few decades or what he has been doing, but the ‘bias’ that class position and structural location has something to do with political platforms expressed has been abandoned by the mainstream left in politics, and a long time ago too. That’s the reason leftist politics is up a creek without a paddle, seeing a ‘populist’ reaction to capitalist crisis that should have been going their way, but instead is playing into the hands of reactionary forces. Instead of making ‘sections of the left’ the architects of this disaster, middle class liberals like Smaje need to own up to the delusions and deficiencies of a classless politics that has brought us to this. Because this has happened on their watch. The western world hasn’t been practising anything like a leftist class politics. On this, the ruling class has been displaying far greater political insight, ruthlessly practising class struggle from above, forcing ever greater retreats from a class struggle from below. And now the time comes to fight back, the same ‘classless’ liberal forces remain dominant in the left-of-centre field, targeting the left on account of its class analysis and class politics identifying not merely structural oppression and domination but, most importantly, the structural capacity to act. Labour can autonomize itself from capital; capital cannot autonomize itself from labour. That is where the class struggle takes place. That’s why questions of structure are important. Smaje merely dissolves that understanding in a general humanity.
I note in passing the reference to the ‘bad Hegelian legacy.’ I take that to mean that Smaje doesn’t understand Hegel, either. His dismissive comment here reveals a familiar individualist liberal view that, in the words of Allen Wood, is ‘plain wrong’ and needn’t detain us. A reference like this can give the unsuspecting the impression that Smaje is smarter than he actually is. I know the view, the view that Marx never knew real proletarians and that his proletariat is more of a philosophical deduction read into history. Like Orwell, I trust the political nostrils of the ruling class. There has been a two hundred years war waged against working class self-organisation and politics. When Wilberforce was voting against slavery he was voting in favour of banning the trade unions, the combinations, to leave the working class fractured and disorganised, facing the market as individuals. That’s a view of the classless society of individuals whose political positions are entirely without structural implication and force. That’s the liberal view. That’s the ideological underpinning of Smaje’s dismissal of the leftist critics of XR.
‘Yes, it’s important to be aware of that privilege – and indeed to turn it to good social use, for example by engaging in forms of climate activism that people with other class or ethnic identities might judge too risky. But no, the existence of the privilege doesn’t intrinsically negate the activism.’
The criticism goes far deeper than that. It concerns the structural capacity to act. The problem is that climate change is not the problem, but the physical manifestation of the socio-economic and ecological contradictions of capitalist dynamics. Once that structural analysis is ruled out on account of ‘privileging’ some over others, the problem cannot be properly diagnosed, let alone addressed and resolved. Hence the predilection for WWII style climate mobilisation rather than social transformation, hence the recourse to ‘government’ rather than transformative class agency. Hence the utterly feeble politics that, with a wealth of scientific knowledge and technological know-how on its side, has done precisely nothing to stall the upward march of carbon emissions and concentrations.
My studies and researches were in the field of ‘political ideology,’ conservativism, socialism (when we could use the word), and liberalism. Socialism has come in many varieties, not all of them properly ‘left’ at all. If it seems that class has dominated leftist politics, then that is merely because class raises all the awkward questions of power relations, distribution of resources, control and authority that many would prefer to conceal and ignore. The dominant tradition has been the classless one, affirming unity and a harmony of interests in a class divided and disharmonious society. Political opponents have presented the mildest of reformist measures as motivated by class interests, whilst reformists, in constantly retreating from class, have been criticized by leftists, nearly always the minority position, from a class angle. The phenomenon is easily explained, the oppressed, the marginalised, the subaltern have no legitimate and ‘respectable’ place in politics, so whenever they or their concerns enter the political arena, their voices are considered loud.
And with that in mind let me return to Smaje’s comment here:
‘Yes, it’s important to be aware of that [middle class] privilege – and indeed to turn it to good social use, for example by engaging in forms of climate activism that people with other class or ethnic identities might judge too risky. But no, the existence of the privilege doesn’t intrinsically negate the activism.’
That view makes me want to retch. That has been the dominant reformist view in which ‘respectable’ educated, professional, middle class people use their privilege for the social good, doing good things for oppressed and downtrodden, which they are incapable of doing for themselves. There is, be clear, a legitimate form of political action and an illegitimate form. Only certain kinds of people can act legitimately, the respectable and reasonable kind. When the subaltern act for themselves, though, that is class politics and therefore illegitimate. Hence the resort to ‘government,’ a public realm in the hands of privileged middle class reformers.
There’s nothing new here. Age itself is not a criticism. It is entirely possible for something to be old and true. But these are the attitudes which lay behind the colonisation of socialism by the professional middle class over a hundred years ago, relocating socialism from the social realm to the abstracted political realm, seeking the top-down regulation of private capitalism rather than its transformation. This led in time to the expanded, bloated, overloaded state, stagnant capitalist economy, and libertarian free market monetarist reaction. In R.N. Berki’s book Socialism from 1976, Berki entitled chapter six ‘Moralism: The Way of Western Social Democracy.’ That and state-centred Communism were the dominant form of socialism in the twentieth century, and neither were socialist. At the heart of that moralism is a classless appeal detached from social structures.
Smaje engages less in class analysis than a moralizing differentiation of social groups based upon distinctions between public and private interests. That differentiation is moralizing precisely because, eschewing class analysis, it makes no effort at relating politics and ideas to social interests and positions.
‘It may also be worth homing in a little more sharply on exactly which middle class people turned out for XR. The ones most in evidence to me as I moved around the protests were teachers, social workers, doctors, health workers, engineers, scientists, researchers, architects, craftspeople and creative types, along with a few farmers – people who seemed committed at some level to work that creates wider public good. Less in evidence were middle-class bankers, hedge fund managers, company directors, media celebrities, tabloid journalists and generally people who consider wealth creation to be a public good in itself. In the years to come, I suspect the willingness to create in-kind public good will come to be seen as a greater political virtue than the economic standing (middle-class, working-class) accorded by a crumbling capitalist economy.’
A passage like that has about as much explanatory power as a distinction between goodies and baddies. The very thing that stands in need of explanation by way of ‘economic standing,’ that is, in terms of the capital-labour relation. However much the capital system is ‘crumbling,’ if you do not have the structural capacity to act, you have nothing put an impotent moral appeal. Hence the resort to ‘government,’ an agency for an abstract good which does nothing to further the social transformation which is the only solution of this crisis. Reading this passage gives the impression of a bastardized, decadent Saint Simonism, all the experts joining together to use ‘government’ to rule in the public good, as against all those with vested interests, not merely the capitalist class but also the working class. How convenient that, at a time when it is recognized that the capital system is ‘crumbling,’ we have a public-minded agency to hand, rendering notions of social transformation towards the socialist society through the agency of the working class obsolete. Over one hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen called for the revolt of the engineers, writing the proletariat off as less important. The working class are forever being written off in these terms.
Smaje reduces the politics to a simple choice between ‘middle-class protestors’ who ‘get themselves locked up for their climate activism’ and ‘middle class non-protestors pursuing paths of personal nest-feathering.’ To which I can only say ‘good grief,’ nothing learned. Back in 1972, after the failure of the Wilson Labour government he had been a minister in, Roy Jenkins called for an 'idealism' on the part of the people. 'We have to persuade men and women who are themselves reasonably well off that they have a duty to forgo some of the advantages they would otherwise enjoy for the sake of others who are much poorer than they are.' He continued in the vein of a moralism against a class politics, arguing that 'the gulf between majority and minority now cuts across class lines. Our only hope is to appeal to the latent idealism of all men and women of goodwill . . .' (Roy Jenkins, What Matters Now, London, 1972, pp. 21—2). Been there, done it, landed here.
Smaje addresses Nafeez Ahmed’s critique of XR and its ‘flawed social science.’ ‘He makes some good points, and has probed some of the issues more deeply than me, but I find a good deal of his argument problematic.’ Rather than responding to Ahmed’s ‘good points,’ which make it crystal clear how shallow Smaje’s arguments are, Smaje instead labours the problematic parts. And he does so in terms which are self-contradictory. He admits that ‘XR’s messaging is itself sometimes a little crass about what ‘the social science says’, only to claim that ‘so too is Ahmed.’ I agree with what Smaje says next: ‘I’ve argued here before against the idea of formulating policy on the basis of what “the science says” and, much as I hate to diss my own tribe – that’s also true with bells on when it comes to what “the social science says.”’ That’s a serious criticism that I have developed at length with respect to the movement for climate action as such. Climate change activism has to operate society-wide and respect creative citizen agency.
Ahmed argues that XR’s ‘beyond politics’ stance is untenable since ‘solutions to climate change are inherently political, and must involve an anti-capitalist commitment to degrowth.’ That’s my view.
Smaje writes:
‘I agree with the second sentence, but not so much with the first – which I think puts the cart before the horse, and demands of XR activists some kind of tribal pre-commitment of political allegiance. I think leftists should have more confidence in their own politics.’
I need some time to get my head around that statement. Smaje agrees with the anti-capitalist commitment to degrowth but disagrees with the view that this commitment is inherently political. I am left concluding that, as I have long suspected, climate campaigners think society will convert to a post-capitalist degrowth society by way of rational persuasion under the authority of a benign government. This is Saint Simonian delusion with knobs on. It’s a reversion to pre-socialist utopianism. It is a retreat from serious politics. The price of eschewing class politics and social transformation can only be authoritarian government presiding over an untransformed society, with power relations remaining firmly in place. Reformist delusions time and again lead us down the road of a bureaucratic collectivism and authoritarianism that, in turn, provoke libertarian reactions, delivering public business back into the hands of the market and private choices backed by money. What Gregor McLennan wrote in 1989 against claims that corporatism could offer a third way forward beyond class politics has lost none of its pertinence:
‘It does require a further leap of imagination and conviction, though, to treat corporatism per se as holding great potential for systemic transformation. To say that socialist progress can be made is one thing. To expect that capitalist strength can be effectively dissipated by that means alone is quite another. The idea that pervasive structures of economic power can be fundamentally altered through particular mechanisms of political representation involves an inadvisable degree of faith in the power of contingent, incremental change and in the charisma of democratic argument.’
McLennan Marxism, Pluralism, and Beyond 1989: 254
To argue for systemic social transformation uprooting the accumulative dynamic that defines capital as proceeding by a non-politics involves a degree of faith in moral and rational appeal that is inadvisable after a century and more of the failures of such appeals to make democratic inroads into power of capital. The idea that entrenched structures of private economic power can be fundamentally transformed without class and political struggle, ‘involves an inadvisable degree of faith in the power of contingent, incremental change and in the charisma of democratic argument.’ What is much more likely to happen is that the increasing pressure of climate change and climate activism will licence government to institute an austerian climate regime without any change in social relations and power dynamics. The idea that we get such a transformation as a consequence of climate action by government is not merely fanciful, it is positively dangerous. Because the accumulative dynamic will remain firmly in place. And the working class will remain the class upon whose exploited labour the whole socially and ecologically destructive system depends.
Smaje’s great hope lies in XR’s three demands. These are demands for the government to:
‘Tell the truth’ and communicate the urgency of climate action.
‘Act now’ to reduce emissions to net zero by 2025.
Go ‘beyond politics’ by forming a citizen’s assembly to lead government on climate justice.
What ‘truth?’ ‘The science says.’ So much for the citizen voice. What actions precisely? At what cost and to whom? With what legitimacy? Both these demands are dictatorial, and that fact isn’t remotely concealed by the notion of a ‘citizen’s assembly.’ Anyone who gives merely the briefest of consideration to the arguments that have been taking place over democracy with respect to the Brexit will understand this idea of a citizen’s assembly fanciful. The phrase ‘beyond politics’ is chilling. Politics is about dissensus, disagreement, debate, deliberation. Going ‘beyond politics’ means going past alternate voices and platforms. One of the things I had to do in my Marx studies was respond to liberal and postmodernist criticisms that a Marxist ‘democracy as the truth of the constitution’ entails the putting of politics on ice. That’s the totalitarian temptation at the heart of truth in politics, and there is a need to be alive to its dangers. Truth may be non-negotiable, but negotiation is the stuff of politics. These demands contain imperatives dressed up behind democratic fiction. The truth is the truth, there is nothing for citizens to debate; citizens cannot disagree, only agree. The role of the citizen is to agree with truth – ‘the science says’ – and then ‘lead’ a government that is being enjoined to ‘act now’ in any case. This is what happens when clever people with no understanding of politics and no connection to ‘ordinary’ people let their limited imaginations loose on politics.
‘It seems to me that plausible attempts to implement those demands and their underlying analyses and programs would by necessity push politics towards degrowth and non-capitalist frameworks – though not necessarily ones that exactly mirror existing mainstream leftist positions. But I can’t see the virtue of insisting on some headline commitment to the ‘correct’ analysis upfront, especially since XR’s key job is to build a groundswell of support for appropriate climate action and usher people into that process.’
How very clever … and cowardly. In other words, we get socialism without becoming socialists without even having to mention the ‘s’ word! Political opponents have far greater nous and nerve. They have spotted the socialist implications of climate action from the first, and are still referring to greens as melons, green on the outside and red on the inside. Shying away from that charge merely reinforces the public prejudice that socialist is a ‘very bad thing’ that all right minded people will stay clear of.
I’ve no academic position to defend and no political ambitions and allegiances to protect, so I can speak clearly and directly. This kind of thing makes me vomit now. Always, there is the need to deny a socialist politics or apologize for radical intent, dilute class and the necessity of struggle with some collaborative ‘humanitarian’ appeal. If I can spot the cowardice and evasion a mile off, then the ruling class and its lackeys most certainly will. And they will be howling to the world and its wife of the dangers of the encroaching socialist menace. Those who have succeeded in entrenching and embedding and institutionalizing their power will see this strategy coming a mile off. ‘You cannot skin a tiger claw by claw,’ wrote R.H. Tawney. ‘Vivisection is its trade and it does the skinning first.’ The capitalist tiger has been skinning a social (liberal) democratic left trying to ride it for over a century now. Even if the strategy succeeds in mobilizing mass support, then what? We have had Labour and socialist/SPD governments in the past. Not a single one of them proved capable of making democratic inroads into the power of capital. Every single time that those inroads started to obstruct, still less subvert, mechanisms of investment, valorisation, and accumulation there was a systemic reaction backed by interventions of the agencies of capitalist power. Once we reach the stage of obstruction and subversion – and I take Smaje at his word here, that he is committed to post-capitalist degrowth – then there will be a reaction and struggle that can only be described as political. To hide behind reason, truth, and the democratic will of citizens’ assemblies is cowardice.
Instead of an effective politics with a real social and critical purchase, there seems to a view that the right political view will emerge at the end of a citizen democrat process and, not only that, will prevail against power. I find the view fanciful so, to guard against misrepresentation, I shall present Smaje’s words here exactly:
‘the larger point is that XR has opened up a new space of mass public reflection on climate politics which points to the poor future prospects of the present political economy. It’s less clear that its role is to prejudge exactly how to fill that space. XR has taken the horse to the water. The onus is now on us collectively as citizenries to do the drinking. If XR prejudges that process, my fear is that it’ll negate the work of recruitment that it’s so successfully charted to date.’
We’ve done the $%&£*& drinking! Every damned time the citizen public has mobilized collectively to check the power of the capital system, that system and its representatives and functionaries, embedded in the socio-institutional fabric have fought back hard. Read that passage again to be clear. Smaje is saying that people will see that the socialist critique of capitalist political economy is correct, so we should let them draw their own conclusions and not prejudge the case by building on a wealth of socialist literature, critique, and experience. To the extent that his point may be aimed against instilling people with an ABC of socialism, Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, but instead emphasising revolution as a process, I couldn’t agree more. That was Marx’s own view. But none of that justifies such timidity on politics instead of clarity. Because governments acting under the imperative of ‘act now,’ will do precisely that, prior to and in lieu of any social transformation. Sooner or later, the horses will draw the conclusions many of us have long since drawn, and will be saying the things many of us have been saying for years, and will be facing the political obstacles we have been facing for years. We need to put this in some kind of political and historical context. Always, the socialist alternative is the one that there is great efforts to sideline and suppress. Back in the 1950s, we had Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, which argued that capitalism no longer existed. Instead, we had a ‘mixed economy’ which could be controlled by democratically elected Labour governments. All talk of class merely served to make Labour seem extremist, thus damaging their electoral chances. And on this went. Wilson, Callaghan, then Kinnock’s ‘new realism’ then Blair and ‘modernization.’ Now we see clearly that the capital system still exists and stands at the source of our converging crises, now we are faced with the need for social transformation, we are not allowed to say so lest we put people off.
‘Generally, my thinking on climate change has moved towards a pretty deep social adaptationism – social in the sense that I’m not really interested in thinking about individual prepping for an apocalypse, but about what kind of new social institutions people can forge to help them collectively deal with the grave challenges of our age. I struggle to see how those new social institutions won’t be ones geared around viable agrarian localism, and in that context while the new politics will be non-capitalist and non-growth oriented much traditional leftism will fall by the wayside. If we’re lucky, XR will help provide the tent within which we can hammer out the new politics. I don’t think we can expect more of it right now.’
I agree with the emphasis on the social forms and institutions that human beings engender, forging their own forms of social self-mediation. But since I don’t know what he means by ‘traditional leftism’ I can’t comment. Top down state control? Building the revolutionary party? The new politics will be remarkably like the old politics that Marx described, I would suggest. A view that those new social institutions will be ‘geared around viable agrarian localism’ sounds like opting for Henry George rather than Marx, which is an old evasion. That way is hopeless.
I agree with what Smaje says on the criticism that technological innovation will defeat climate change, and so will not tarry here. And I very much agree with Smaje’s statement here:
‘Far too much discussion of climate change is taken up with a focus on technological mitigation, at the expense of discussing social causation (back to that issue of capitalism and growth) and social adaptation.’
It is worth emphasising that Smaje throughout engages in a critical repudiation of capitalism and economic growth which is radical in its implications, in no wise contrary to the Marxist view. It’s worth making that point given the extent to which Smaje thinks he can make that post-capitalist commitment without having to make an explicit political statement. Those who are pro-capitalist will identify this as an explicitly anti-capitalist, socialist, and Marxist politics and declare it abroad for one and all to here. To argue back that it is merely a good idea based on truth and reason, the cogency of which increasing numbers are coming to see, merely brings us to political struggle in the end. In the past, the popularity of Green politics has increased when attention has focused on the issues, only to fall dramatically when the political implications become clear and start to bite through policies, prices, and taxes. It will again. My fear is that ‘climate emergency’ is equipping government with licence and legitimacy to institute an authoritarian environmental regime, regardless of democratic will and in lieu of social transformation.
The fourth criticism which Smaje addresses is that ‘XR is a millenarian death cult.’ He dismisses the view with contempt. ‘You’d think nobody would take such a claim seriously.’ Of course, XR are interested in the preservation of life as against the death and destruction that will follow in the wake of climate catastrophe. The criticism is made by Brendan O’Neill and Spiked. The emphasis on ‘extinction’ and the loss of a future, with claims of exaggeration, lie behind the criticism. I think there are serious criticisms to be made of the understanding of ‘existential crisis’ and the emphasis on emergency, panic, and necessity – a politics conducted in the imperative voice. Smaje looks at none of this. Instead, he is more concerned with attacking the messenger. He points out that ‘Spiked started life as Living Marxism – a magazine associated with Britain’s Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party – and then through some strange vicissitudes transmogrified into an allegedly Koch-funded mouthpiece of extreme rightwing libertarian opinion-mongering. Which is surely ironic, since it’s hard to think of millenarian death cults in modern times to match the havoc wreaked both by Trotsky-style revolutionary communism and its dreams of a future purified by the redeeming violence of the proletariat, and by market libertarianism and its dreams of a future purified by the redeeming violence of capitalist markets and their cargo cults. So what really needs ridiculing out of existence is ex-Trotskyist market libertarian publications lecturing anybody about millenarian death cults.’
I’m afraid that O’Neill and Spiked have rather provoked an unguarded and unnecessary statement from Smaje here that lends a somewhat anti-socialist colour to the whole piece. I have no time for Living Marxism and Spiked, nor Trotsky, nor Soviet Communism. None of this is Marx. But here’s the danger. Being so circumspect on politics and political commitments makes it easy for those who are pro-capitalist and anti-socialist to portray the case for climate action as socialist in precisely these terms of ‘Trotsky-style revolutionary communism.’
It’s lame. How lame is revealed by Smaje’s conclusion:
Nah, there’s nothing deathly or millenarian about the XR activists I know. They’re just ‘ordinary’, flawed, caring (middle-class) people like me, full of love and zest for life, and really, really scared about the deathly devastation that climate change threatens to wreak upon the world and the life they hold dear, unless governments act radically and immediately.
That last sentence needs to be highlighted, underlined, and scrutinized: ‘unless governments act radically and immediately.’ The truth exists and must be acted on, and all the talk of citizen assemblies and leading horses to the water to learn by a process of self-discovery is mere flannel. This was at the heart of my criticism in the essays released on Academia. Far from refuting the criticisms I made, this piece, summed up in that last sentence, confirms them. It is possible to envisage governments acting radically and immediately, but in the cause of system preservation not system transformation. A ‘non-politics’ of climate emergency makes the environment available for the rebooting and refuelling of capitalism under the pretence of ‘saving the world.’ Government is not an agency of system transformation, at least not unless it is set in the context of a substantial social movement for social transformation. That transformation is a process, not an event, and it comes through agencies engendered by and under control of the people themselves. Or, in less vague Marxist terms, through the self-organisation and self-activity of the working class. Because, in the capital system, it is the proletariat that has the structural capacity to act. After decades of middle class hegemony in culture and politics, it seems to hurt hard to have to concede that the much maligned working class and class politics have a greater role to play than a classless politics of the moderate middle way has said for a century and more. So we won’t concede the point at all. We’ll just assert the delusions of the middle class and identify ‘government’ as the agency of the long term universal interest. That old delusion. Government is capital’s political command centre, a surrogate for private power. This politics is tame and lame, rootless, toothless, and fruitless. It is a moralism allied to fanciful notions of government and law as neutral arbiters of the universal good. Structural force and capacity are here replaced by moralism and vague classless humanitarianism. This is the bourgeois mentality that was responsible for the relocation of socialism from the social to the abstract political realm in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. Instead of an analysis of specific social forms and identities, there is the resort to abstraction. The class analysis here is laughable, the nice public spirited middle class on one side, the nasty privately interested commercial middle class on the other side. This is so sociologically illiterate, socially neutral, politically feeble that we are left having to judge whether it is deliberate or merely an expression of a trademark bourgeois ‘classlessness.’ If it is deliberate, then this serves to ratchet up the pressure to act on a climate emergency, sidelining necessarily long-term and complex questions of a transformative politics, to deliver the environmental cause into the hands of a government working in league with a capitalist economy and its process of private accumulation.
The abstraction from socio-economic structure is plain. There is no need to struggle over production relations, exploitation, and surplus value. It is in light of this observation that we can read again Smaje’s claim that the left should abandon its ‘deep historical bias that authentic political critique can only come from the most structurally oppressed social groups.’ In other words, now that the cogency of the left’s critique of capitalist political economy has become apparent, and the inadequacies and failures of the abandonment of class analysis and politics on the part of left-of-centre politics have been laid bare, we are being enjoined to give up the very thing that is needed and embrace the very classless politics that has demonstrably failed! That amounts to a call to political disarmament at precisely the time that capitalism is at bay. It’s a call to come and join the politically feeble.
Questions of ‘the economy’ are things are taken for granted. The professional educated middle class adopt a legislative and regulative approach through the public realm and manage private capitalism for the public good. That’s the optimistic view. Of course, if the capital relation remains in place, then capital will continue to constrain society and government and coerce it to its own imperatives. How do we know it? Because that’s precisely the story of the past century and more.
I’m not sorry for the often ill-tempered and brusque nature of this piece. I have just learned that, after thirty years of campaigning, the victims of the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989 will have no justice. I’m in no mood for the fantasies and delusions of climate campaigners who think telling the truth will suffice to deliver climate justice through government and law. We told the truth on Hillsborough from the first, we established that truth against the lies and calumnies of powerful people, lies and calumnies which large part of the public repeated and turned against Hillsborough survivors, families, and campaigners. It will take a massive social and psychic transformation to deliver a society in which people and politics respond to truth in a positive way. Empowering government and law with truth merely gives iniquitous power the rationale to carry on with its death-dealing delusions. If you think climate and social justice lies at the end of that road then you are a fool or a tool. I take my leave of environmentalism now. I have spoken long enough and well enough for environmentalists to get the message. It is for them to get serious about ethics and politics. I’m looking at reality stark in the face, and it’s all lies and delusions, complicity and cowardice. The working class still count for nothing, despite being the value creating power upon which the whole rotten system depends. Without the structural capacity to act, you have nothing.
‘Revolution is not a game — and the work of a body of professional revolutionaries is a necessary but insufficient condition if decisive mass support is lacking or cannot be won.
How then to win mass support for a demand which challenges the way society is organised and which, if successful, will displace the powerful and dramatically reduce their wealth and power?
We have plenty of historical and contemporary examples, from the Chartists and suffrage campaigners’ demand for the vote, the TUC’s councils of action to defend the Russian Revolution, the General Strike of 1926, the united action against fascism, the campaigns for a second front against Hitler, against the British/French/Israeli invasion of Egypt, against the poll tax, against the Iraq war, and against austerity.
Two features are common to most of these examples. Firstly, they involved very broad masses of people; secondly they are most successful when the organised working-class movement is united and active and when they mobilise a range of appropriate and effective tactics.’
NICK WRIGHT assesses the programme and demands of the burgeoning ecological direct-action movement
Wigan MP Lisa Nandy
I can only caution environmentalist friends, yet again, to take these criticisms seriously. Because I am already hearing working class voices expressing this alienation. I'm hearing antipathy and downright hostility. And I'm hearing resentment that working class people haven't got the climate message and stand in need of education through disruption. There is a class prejudice at the heart of this claim to be raising public awareness, the idea that we know the truth and the people don't.
Calls for individual action can’t just be modelled on the lifestyles of middle-class city dwellers. Telling people to get out of their cars can’t be the solution in those parts of the country where decades of chronic underinvestment have left us without public transport. In towns such as Wigan, jobs have disappeared as investment flowed into cities, creating lengthy commutes on public transport for most working-age people. Trains are overcrowded, deeply unreliable and ceased to function entirely for a large part of last year, while the buses are few and far between, and often more expensive than getting a taxi. Demanding people abandon their cars isn’t realistic if the alternative is a round trip of 42 miles a day on foot or by bike, just to get to work. Campaigns to tackle climate change need to link up with campaigns for better transport and fairer funding for it, particularly for buses.
Rooting calls for action in the reality of people’s lives is essential if the battle against climate change is not to become a battle against each other. It is galling to be lectured on not eating meat when you and your family are struggling to get by and relying on help from friends and local food banks. It isn’t fair to ask families to forfeit the one foreign flight they have saved for all year, while we have global corporations whose business models rely on frequent air travel and governments that refuse to tax them for it.
Climate activists must also rethink their language. Phrases such as “dirty coal” are profoundly condescending to communities in which generation after generation did dangerous, backbreaking work down the mines to build the country’s wealth and influence at great cost to themselves; pneumoconiosis victims are still fighting for justice decades after the mines closed. Coalfield communities built our wealth and influence at great cost. We are owed new clean energy jobs, and the infrastructure to create them. In Wigan and Barnsley, the desire for good jobs that provide a sense of purpose is palpable. Positive movements for change, such as the One Million Climate Jobs trade union campaign, provide an antidote to the stark warnings about climate scenarios that often leave people feeling powerless to act.
There is a serious prospect that climate could become a further source of division in Britain. The last Labour government’s decision to load the cost of clean energy subsidies onto energy bills left the poorest paying six times as much as the wealthy and created fertile ground for an incoming Tory government to turn climate action into a political football and tear up the subsidies for clean energy schemes.
Instead, let’s seize this as an opportunity to rebuild our towns so they can play a major and significant part in our national story once again. Fighting for a better environment was always part of socialist tradition, as working-class people living among the smoke and soot of industry fought for parks, protection of the countryside, wildlife conservation, clean air and fresh water.
Those activists who are willing to reach out beyond their base will find there is an eager and passionate coalition waiting to be built.
The first Bolton Extinction Rebellion meeting saw people queueing out of the door on a hot summer evening, and I get more letters about the environment from my constituents than any other single issue. Building an environmentally sustainable future will require the talent, intellect and hard work of the whole of our society – so it’s time for the climate movement to break out of the cities to make itself a movement for the many, not just the few.
Finding new ways to empower the public in the battle against climate change is critical.
Building public support and advocacy at this level will create pressure for action from local and regional leaders to do more and create long-term change: an energy scheme jointly owned and run by hundreds of local people is so much harder to dismantle for an incoming government than a solar subsidy scheme conceived and run from Whitehall.'
The article in The Guardian is an abridged version of an essay in Hope not Hate