I need to respond to a criticism from some on the left in politics of others on the left who have had the nerve to criticize the Greta Thunberg phenomenon. Since the specifics of the criticism do not apply to my criticisms then I should possibly ignore such criticisms lest I acquire a guilt by association. But I should perhaps spell out in crystal clear terms what I am not saying. And this really will be my last word on the issue, I have far more pressing issues in my life to be concerned with.
I nowhere deny the reality of climate change nor, therefore, the need for action. I do the very opposite in fact, and have argued the case for climate action for years now, something that has absorbed a considerable amount of my time and energy. That there are voices somewhere on the left who claim that climate change is a scam made up to leverage the world’s population into world government I don’t doubt, having run into a few of them, as friends and enemies, these past few years. Whilst I do see the dangers of a global environmental megamachine imposing a climate austerity as a condition of survival, I don’t see the crisis in the climate system as a political contrivance. If only it were, we would all be able to rest more easily and worry only about war, terrorism, social inequality and division, the unraveling of communities, and the collapse of the public realm.
I nowhere claim that those involved in the current wave of climate activism are dupes of green capitalist elites. Indeed, affirming Marx’s emphasis on the coincidence of social transformation and self-transformation, I emphasize the capacity of individuals in action and association to be able to see through and breakthrough intellectual and institutional constraints.
"Should Thunberg be captured, wittingly or not, by western elites, there is no reason to assume that the many millions of young and old alike joining her on the climate strikes will not be able to recognize her cooption or whether she has lost her way. Those making this argument arrogantly assume that only they can divine the true path. They assume that Thunberg’s words have no life, logic or moral force independently of who she is."
I not only agree with this statement, I have made it myself in criticism of the inherent elitism of leftist conspiracy theories. Time and again over the years I emphasize Marx's rejection of 'would-be universal reformers,' 'alchemists of revolution,' and 'workers' dictators.'
People can be dupes, though, and can be seduced into following contrary platforms through the appropriation and diversion of their ideals and values. To caution that some such thing could happen is not the same thing as saying that people will fall for it. I am worried about the lack of critical political economy and, more than that, about the reticence and evasion with respect to such questions on the part of those who place the emphasis solidly on the collaborative ‘we.’
I nowhere argue that Thunberg is a puppet. I have no idea, no interest, could care less. I find both the deification and the demonization thoroughly repugnant. And I think that to have her in the spotlight serves to divert attention from the hard questions. At risk of inviting the accusation of being conspiratorial, I would ask who benefits from that.
I nowhere put it all down to George Soros and his money. I pay no attention at all to such theories, placing them with David Icke and his seven foot lizards, or whatever it is he reckons runs the world. I treat all such notions with complete indifference. It is as though people are lacking in real agency, and only do anything when the smart, the rich, the powerful pull the strings. In the age old clash between elite theory and democratic theory, I argue for democratic theory. That doesn’t mean that I argue that democratic forms will necessarily prevail over elite forms, it merely means that if elite theory really is the one and only truth of politics, then there’s no point in anything anyway – we may as well pack up our pointless lives now and give up the ghost.
The danger is, in being a critic of the emergent green corporate form, I may well come to be bracketed with the idea that Greta Thunberg is a poster girl for a world capitalist conspiracy which involves making up the facts about climate change in order to pressure governments to declare an emergency and trillions of dollars in variations of a ‘green’ capitalism. I have read variants of that criticism being levelled against leftist critics. I have both seen that view being expressed, and rebutted vociferously. The tone quickly degenerates into abuse and counter-abuse. I don’t abuse, although heaven knows I have to bite my lip constantly, and I don’t suffer abuse. I insist that the points at issue are addressed, and precisely. I am also fairly tolerant of people whose views deviate from mine. Hence I have had people express the idea that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by global elites to me. They have expressed that view openly with me, in the mistaken belief that since I am critical of the Thunberg phenomenon and the politics of emergency then I must also see climate change as a money making scam invented by global elites. There’s no doubt that there are forces looking to exploit climate crisis for monetary gain. But my criticisms come from precisely the opposite direction, seeing climate change not merely as a physical reality but as a manifestation of capital’s absolute limits. For capitalist exploitation of crisis read capitalist causation. The ‘climate deniers’ have been aware of this from the first. They are motivated most of all by a rejection of any politics which entails the restraint and regulation of the accumulative imperatives of capital, and have therefore seen the need for climate action as implying not merely governmental intervention, legislation, and regulation but socialism. Socialists such as I make the same argument from the other end of the spectrum.
The constant focus on Thunberg serves to divert attention from where it ought to be, which is on the institutional, systemic, and structural issues. It is easy enough to point to ‘the science’ and then demand ‘action’ from government, but too often the hard political, institutional, and socio-economic questions are elided. Why? The optimists who object to the criticisms people such as I make hold that the approach has the merit of mobilizing a mass movement of climate radicals who, educated by their experience and activism, will start to ask the key questions themselves and engage in the deep institutional, systemic, and structural analysis required for radical transformation. I have at all points emphasized such creative agency as against elitist notions of brainwashing and conspiracy. I have at the same time sought to raise these issues of institutional power, structural force, and systemic operation and constraint. There is little point in demanding government ‘action’ without also identifying and uprooting the socio-economic drivers of climate crisis. To be made to feel awkward for even raising such a question, let alone demanding such an analysis for those big on ‘system change, not climate change,’ is indicative precisely of how general appeals and slogans serve to build and reinforce the pressure to conform. It matters a great deal with whom we cooperate and collaborate and to what ends. I shall return to this, because it is precisely the ‘non-political’ general and ‘humanitarian’ appeal that is my target in the dangers of climate politics becoming an ideological project.
Let me first respond to the charges. To criticize Thunberg is merely the old tactic of ad hominin assault, playing the man rather than the ball. This is true, hence my emphasis on institutional, structural, and systemic analysis, and hence my insistence that those inspired by Thunberg’s call to action engage in precisely this analysis, rather than merely levelling their activist demands upon an untransformed government within an untransformed capital economy. That radical transformation may well come, and if and when it does come, it will come through a mass mobilisation of citizens. Again, I repeat, the inspiration of activism and the mobilisation of people is instrumental in giving content to a radical transformative politics via the creative agency of people, citizens, workers. But on this point of playing the man rather than the ball, Thunberg is quite clearly being put forward prominently as a figurehead to be played. The extent to which the criticisms that are made are presented as personal assaults on Thunberg - her sex, age, asperger’s (delete as appropriate) – is noticeable. The argument is deliberately personalised so that any criticism can be presented as a personal assault and thereby rendered illegitimate. A truly radical politics is democratic to the core. The last thing a transformative emancipatory politics needs is a personality cult.
I shall not waste time on those critics whose scepticism with respect to certain dominant strains of environmental activism encourages them to make the enormous leap into full-blown climate denial. The crisis in the climate system is real, tangible, documented by a wealth of evidence going back decades. I know well that there are people who considered themselves leftist, Marxist, and anarchist who argue that climate change is a scam invented by (would be) global elites aiming at world government, I have tangled with a few of them, and have had a few others show interest in me in the mistaken belief that I have joined their camp. Anthropogenic climate change is real. My critical concerns all along here have been to focus activists and campaigners on a more precise institutional and structural analysis of its socio-economic causes and drivers. Hence my repeated criticisms of general appeals to ‘action’ and ‘government.’ I take absolutely none of that back and consider it essential to any politics and critique that counts as leftist and liberatory.
It is something of a relief to note that the criticisms of the critics of Thunberg recognize that there might well be ‘capitalists’ who are seeking to exploit any commercial opportunities that may arise from climate change and the public demand to act to address it. You can bet your life on it, and you may well have to. Of course, it is a big jump from that understanding to an argument which holds that climate mobilization is instigated and in the hands of these said ‘capitalists.’ I put the word in inverted commas because there is no substitute for detailed analysis. There are capitalists against government encroachment and regulation, there are capitalists in favour of government investment and expenditure. It all depends where the resources go. For all of the talk of ‘system change, not climate change,’ the danger is that the climate issue could take form as another ‘capitalism against capitalism’ scenario. Instead of the ‘socialism’ which radicals demand (whatever it is they envisage, however they name it), there will be a transition to a new regime of accumulation through the use of government, law, and regulation. Hence I insist on detailed analysis and not general demands and appeals. Of course there is a climate crisis and of course there is a need for action and change! What, precisely, by which agency or agencies?
Thunberg is celebrated for galvanising hundreds of thousands of people into demanding the changes that are required to prevent the climate change that threatens the planetary ecology, taking civilisation down will it. At risk of being accused, again, of idly splitting-hairs, that defence is loose. It isn’t that clear precisely what the thousands mobilizing are demanding. The organisational and structural capacity behind those demands isn’t clear, either. At risk of making an argument that would permit critics to accuse me of engaging in conspiracy theory, the mere fact of hundreds of thousands being inspired into climate campaigning does not in itself constitute an argument in favour. The whole point of having a figurehead to lead an agenda is to mobilize the masses. Are the masses in control of their own agenda is the crucial question. Are we dealing with a genuine movement in which power and initiative is, and remains, in the control of its members? A politics conducted in emergency and alarm mode is designed to create the demand for action. The question, though, is what action via which agency? To simply say that Thunberg has inspired hundreds of thousands, even millions, and proclaim this as in itself inspiring and emancipatory is to engage in wishful thinking.
The best critics of the Thunberg critics hold the mass movement of people and transformative action together as one. That’s precisely what I have done in my criticisms. But here is my quibble. The leftist critics here hold that this mass movement of people is a necessary step in a process that leads to a radical transformation in the way that the social world operates, which necessarily entails the transcendence of the capital system which lies at the root of the converging social, economic, and ecological crises we face. I very much agree with that. I just think that leftist and socialist supporters of climate activism are paying insufficient attention to the way that climate politics is currently constituted and focused. For a long while now I have sought to bring the message of eco-socialism to those arguing and campaigning for climate action. I have been met with a combination of indifference, criticism, disdain, and hostility. I shall leave aside the number of times I have been met with the observation that ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ are merely variants of industrialism, that the Soviet bloc emitted as much if not more greenhouse gases than capitalism, and that all such politics is old and ‘antiquated,’ like the left-right division it is based upon and reproduces. My greatest concern stems from the occasions I have seen greens and environmentalists start to raise climate issues requiring deeper institutional and structural analysis, only to have them pull clear when I have clarified material roots, class relations, and socio-economic dynamics and drivers. This has happened far too many times to be accidental. Hence my scepticism that this climate mobilization will transition naturally and neatly into social transformation. There may well be such a transformation. But if there is, mobilization will have also to be a radicalization in the hands of the people as creative agents owning the political, social, and economic forms they engender. Can we truthfully say that this is what is in process at the moment? When those demands for ‘action’ are levelled upon untransformed ‘government?’
I note a general criticism of ‘left’ critics like me, telling us we ‘need to get out more’ if we are unable to see millions of kids getting active and organised as positive. I want to know more of the organisation. I am all in favour of the self-activity and self-organisation of people as agents of their own politics. I am dead against people being activated and organised extraneously to ends that lie outside of them. Sadly, it is the latter and not the former that has been the norm in history.
I read another critic alleging ‘protest jealousy’ on the left when someone successfully organizes mass protest with respect to causes of which they approve. I don’t have a dog in this fight and, having had experience of left-wing politics over the years, have had reason to be suspicious of all the ‘someones’ out there seeking tom organize the ‘masses.’ I want to know who the ‘someone’ is. I’ll be flippant and say that my first instinct here was to consider that this global climate mobilization simply could not be left wing, because it is far too well-organized and too successful for the left.
The name of Cory Morningstar cropped up. The criticisms I have made are independent of Morningstar, and were made before I discovered her work. I find Morningstar interesting in that one of the stock defences of the Thunberg phenomenon is that it is all angry conservative middle-aged or elderly males. Morningstar is a woman, a leftist, investigative journalist and climate activist of long-standing. That’s all rather inconvenient. Morningstar’s book The Manufacturing of Greta Thunberg located the GT phenomenon within the privatisation and commodification projects of the ruling class, and the way that these are presented in such terms as to seem liberatory and generate support: ‘reducing poverty’, ‘country-owned development,’ and now ‘saving the planet.’ Whilst I have drawn upon some of Morningstar’s arguments, I have not used the same framework. I have neither endorsed nor rejected it. For all of the criticism of Morningstar – extremist, purist, conspiratorialist – I have yet to see a critique of her work which contradicts her key arguments and facts. Which I find significant, seeing that she makes several bold claims backed by a wealth of evidence. It is for critics to point out what she got wrong.
But my argument is not hers (and vice versa), so my case does not stand or fall on her work. I note that critics do, however, dismiss her and, seeing as I have quoted her where I think she is right – which is often – and seeing as we are FB ‘friends,’ I suspect that that dismissive, sometimes contemptuous, attitude also applies to me. Apparently, people such as I can’t be ‘real’ Marxists and ‘real’ left. So be it! I don’t give a damn for political labels, and false loyalty and conformity has damned and destroyed the political left from the start. I’ll not suspend the critical faculty for fear of being contrarian and unpopular. Popularity be damned! I will simply say that, with the real possibility of a radical transformation on the horizon, with capitalism crumbling and at bay, the left does itself absolutely no favours by ceasing to be critical so as to participate in a mass mobilization that may well have motives and ends working against system transformation and for system preservation. Of course, such is politics, and the balance of one against the other is to be fought over and fought for. And you can only do this from the inside of a process. I don’t disagree, in fact, I very much agree. I would at the same time point to the existence of forces and organisations that are not only already in the field, are well-organised, networked, and resourced, and have mapped out and staked down the territory from a long time back. We can hope that climate mobilization builds a radical momentum of its own, and hence forces transformations via the creative agency of self-acting, self-organising activists. Victory, as always, will go to the organized classes… My criticisms are not rejections and denigrations of activism and mobilization, they are demands for clarification. The mindless adoption of media friendly representations of climate activism in lieu of a critique that goes to the material roots, contradictory dynamics, and class relations at the heart of climate crisis merely serves to bury radical politics behind the ‘general’ ‘humanitarian’ appeal which is the dominant form of climate politics. It is in this sense, rather than alleging a global network of green capitalist forces and forms, that climate action will take shape in the form of system preservation and not transformation. For precisely the reason that such an activism is gutted of its class content and dynamics. That ‘humanitarian’ appeal proceeds along the lines of identifying climate change as a universal crisis that unites us all behind common solutions. That is a liberal framing that a) will fail to address and check climate change and b) delivers climate action into the hands of the only collective forces within liberal capitalist society, government and law.
I am, therefore, entirely unrepentant in my criticisms, despite the hostile reaction coming from people on the left who hold that this current wave of climate activism has the potential to pass over into system transformation. Such notions are indolent. Basing myself on a Marxist critique, it is apparent that the climate ‘action’ through ‘government’ being demanded – and which we are being conformed into championing – is a technocratic neoliberalism extending and entrenching the corporate form. For ‘natural climate solutions’ read the old ‘natural capital solutions,’ and understand the transition to a new regime of accumulation underway. It has caused me a degree of unease and disquiet to have to take such a contrary view to people whom I have come to be associated with over the years, but the real tragedy is to see how quickly and unthinkingly the left, green, and liberal left can support a politics so uncritically. Those who are critical of my view on this, but yet are on the left and are committed to social transformation, focus on the mass mobilization. Mobilization by whom and to what ends? The answer to that question makes all the difference. It may be an impertinent question. It’s a wise and necessary one in politics, though. Unless people are so desperate, so starved of political success, that they are happy to keep buying pigs in polks. I can’t think of a single example in history where the leader of radical social transformation was heralded by any number of ruling class figures, invited to speak on any number of prominent platforms and given constant positive coverage in the media. There’s a reason for that. The outrage over right wing commentators and climate deniers is utterly fake. Such ogres are a gift and a godsend, being so odious and incorrect that all right-minded people must, of course, be on the other side against them.
I note merely the extent to which Cory Morningstar’s work is labelled and abused rather than engaged and rebutted. She is accused of being an ultra-left Marxist and communist resentful of the massive upsurge in climate activism and condemning it because it doesn’t conform precisely to some purist model. Cue many and long criticisms aimed against purists and purism as entailing such impossible demands and positions as to prevent any change beyond the status quo proceeding. I’ll make a point of noting here the extent to which any criticism can be deflected by way of such a defence, effectively labelling all critics purists and therefore irrelevant, themselves tools of the status quo. It is just depressing to see that old Leninist tactic alive and well, sidelining those seeking to raise critical concerns as ‘ultra-leftist’ and, no doubt, guilty of an ‘infantile disorder.’ I’ll take that any day over Leninist Communism. It’s as easy as that for the left to betray itself.
It’s the lack of critical discernment and nuance that is really depressing. The fact that Thunberg is criticized by right-wing politicians and commentators is mentioned as if this contradicts those who draw attention to the way that she is lionized by other global leaders. There are fractions of capital in play at any one time. The fact that a Trump et al on the climate denying capitalist right etc loathe Thunberg does not identify her as anti-capitalist. To be loathed by Trump and climate deniers does not identify a person as leftist. You have to be more nuanced in analysis than this. I make the point regularly that Keynes’ interventionist economics was opposed by the free-market monetarists, and even presented by them as ‘socialist.’ It was nothing of the kind. Keynes loathed socialism, Marx, Capital, and ‘the boorish proletariat,’ and his interventionism was designed to defend and preserve capitalism to prevent the socialist alternative.
I note, yet again, how being critical opens me to accusations of doing the work of the climate change deniers. That kind of ‘objective fascism’ is of Stalinist descent. Again, it shows a corruption at the heart of a politics, and a betrayal to come. I may not be a climate denier, but in raising critical concerns I am whistling tunes that the deniers like to hear. That’s a charge that has been made. People hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest. I am serious about system transformation and socialism, the last things that deniers want to hear. They are also the last things that the dominant forces pushing for climate action want to hear. How do I know it? The combination of indifference, disdain, and hostility which greets those concerned to argue for eco-socialism. I’ve been accused of being extremist, divisive, and ‘anachronistic.’ I shall come shortly to the classless ‘humanitarian’ politics that such critics offer in place of socialism.
Before that, I would ask people to look at the ambitious scale of the action demanded of governments with respect to climate crisis and ask who has the financial, organisational, and technological resources to undertake it? It is one thing to praise Thunberg for galvanising millions, it is quite another to envisage those millions undertaking action of such scale and ambition themselves. Of course, the role of the millions in this mobilisation is to mandate governments to act. That, and not system transformation, is precisely why they are being mobilized! The climate truth is known and stated, emergency is declared, demands for action issued, and governments proceed to act in tandem with business. The mobilization of the masses will be followed by their demobilization once the mandate is delivered. That’s not democracy, that is engineering to give the illusion and cover of democracy. It is made to look as though it is the idea of the people when, in truth, the demands a pre-set prior to and independent of citizen agency. The people are merely passive agents. That’s very much the view of democracy and the members of the demos that one finds in elite theory. That doesn’t mean that people will be so easily demobbed once they have been galvanized. Radical transformation will result from mobilization gaining a momentum of its own through people coming to take ownership of their activism and its demands. That’s my view. I don’t treat people as passive dupes. But is that the view of the mobilizers?
There is a danger here of coming to succumb to a ‘capitalist realism’ as the condition of effective climate action. Examine the scale and the ambition of the climate demands that governments are being told are necessary to avert climate catastrophe and consider what forces have the resources to undertake such action. The obvious answer are the very capitalist forces that have been instrumental in engineering the climate crisis in the first place. Who else? You think an anarchic agrarian localism is going to cut it? There’s no workaround capitalism possible, so the only thing to do is embrace a ‘green’ (corporate) form under the auspices of government, mobilize the masses to secure a mandate, and have people persuaded that it was all their idea when they are made to pay for it! Sweet as a nut.
People still find it far easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism, even people on the left, and so end up embracing technocratic neoliberal solutions to capitalist crisis, in the name of addressing climate crisis, covering themselves by condemning critics as purists. Their thoughts have been colonised and hegemonized.
Is it so hard to comprehend the possibility of a popular movement coming to be co-opted and colonised so as to serve capital rather than subvert it? With radicals lending their support in initial stages, in the hope of transforming the world from the inside? It has been known. The only difference here is that whilst we are witnessing a popular upsurge and mobilization, this is not the same thing as a popular movement. There are popular grassroots movements. But this global mobilization is something that shows a degree of contrivance and planning and engineering. If anything, the best hope here would lie in the mobilized people coming to co-opt and colonize a global climate agenda that corporate forces had designed for other ends. But in being facetious I recognize that I risk being totally misinterpreted by people wholly lacking in nuance.
My criticisms are not ‘ultra-left,’ they are simply ‘left.’ They are anathema to those proposing ‘natural climate solutions’ precisely because they are diametrically opposed to the capital-generating 'green technologies' they favour. Something that Morningstar does is show the extent to which the environmental cause has been NGOised. There is a wealth of critical literature documenting this. I await a critical rebuttal. The process is a deradicalization, deliberately taking the political teeth out of climate crisis and the political responses to it. This is quite explicit in the ‘non-political’ ‘beyond the political’ politics, the humanitarian appeal, the collaborative solutions, and the socially neutral analysis. And behind it all is an agenda aimed at financialising and ‘valuing’ in capitalist accounting terms. People can abuse me all they like on this. I don’t care to be popular. I have spent a lifetime fighting the lies and deceit of the establishment, and the pressure and bullying that goes with it through culture, media, and society. In seeking to challenge and overturn the establishment narrative on the Hillsborough disaster, the Liverpool campaigners for justice were subject to pressure, cajoling, and often downright abuse from members of the public. We carried on. It’s not that I have developed a thick skin, the very opposite. I just don’t give a damn for compromise and complicity and can spot cowardice and conformism at a million paces. That doesn’t mean that there is a conspiracy theory and that people are unthinking dupes of those with an agenda. It does mean that, so long as they remain within capital rule, environmental activists will reproduce, however inadvertently, the neoliberal climate logic. This is inevitable once environmentalism ceases to be genuinely democratic and instead becomes another elite-led project, in long line of descent from the World Bank's 'reducing poverty project.' We are worlds away from Marx’s idea of a universal proletariat in command of a universal means of production and are, instead, being cajoled into embracing a global proletarianization through the 'NGOisation' of social movements under the auspices of neoliberalised global governance institutions. I’m only surprised that there seem to be people on the radical left who seem genuinely shocked and surprised by the idea, let alone the evidence in its favour. Social movements have been hegemonised by capital from the start. That’s one of the many ways that the power and rule of capital is reproduced. Morningstar engages in extensive political network analysis to demonstrate how a wide variety of NGOs have become immersed in the neoliberalised framings of issues, moving away from the idea of growth as being incompatible with environmental health to embrace the ‘green technologies’ agenda so as to make the idea of ‘green growth’ a win-win solution that all can embrace. Common solutions we can all agree with. For all of the talk of ‘system change, not climate change,’ when analysis is undertaken it reveals that the height of ambition is for governments to align themselves with the Paris climate agreement as a first step towards capital-centric climate ‘solutions,’ such as carbon capture schemes, schemes which do not stop environmental pollution, merely 'offsets' it by planting trees somewhere. This kind of ‘environmentalism’ is merely branding and marketing.
What is striking is the extent to which those who express a concerned with climate change by constantly detailing the latest scientific evidence are remarkably reticent on its socio-economic causes. The overwhelming emphasis is on the natural facts, with government action and policy following in light of that. As to the details, these are left to politicians and policy makers to work out, mandated by the people. I don’t accept that political innocence for one single solitary moment, for the very reason that it is far from innocent. That social and political neutrality is the dead give-away, in that it removes the critical edge from the search for the societal causes of climate crisis, and hence from the solutions to. It has science set the parameters and then assigns responsibility for solutions to those working within the framework of existing institutional and social relations. Such a pragmatism defaults to the status quo, the very relations instrumental in generating climate crisis in the first place. That position amounts to accepting capital logic and rule as the condition and extent of realism. The idea that this is realistic given the scale of the problem and the timescales available to us amounts to a de facto excision of the very system change that is being proclaimed as a slogan to mobilize the masses. The environmental crisis is being framed around ‘natural climate solutions’ which are not 'green' but capitalist. The dangers of rejecting criticism or engaging the substantive points raised are clear – the environmental movement ends up being pressed into the service of system preservation, not system change. Which isn’t to say that I am rejecting a climate movement because of the possibility that it may come to be co-opted by corporate power – which would indeed be a self-defeating purism - but that I am critical of that corporate power and the way it seeks to colonize and co-opt the commons in all its forms.
And I am critical of generalisation.
I shall therefore end with an old bugbear of mine – the constant appeal to a ‘we’ that exists nowhere politically and socially. Such appeals are utterly ineffectual when it comes to the system change that is required to address the converging crises that are upon us, but that may well be the attraction, making people feel like they are engaging in the transformative action required when they are in fact doing no such thing. Such appeals work well, therefore, in framing environmentalism in such neutral terms as everyone can agree, without the need for engaging in the politics of a class divided society. ‘We’ can just talk past such a thing. I have written on this over and again, and intend to spend no more time on it than is necessary. It’s evasion and cowardice, pure and simple, making those who raise questions of division feel awkward and ‘difficult’ on account of appearing ‘divisive.’
“HERE’S THE PLAN
The science is clear. The world faces climate catastrophe unless we act urgently. We must cut net greenhouse emissions from the current 55 gigatons per year to zero.
To get this done, we’ll have to ENGAGE EVERYONE. Politicians. CEOs. Investors. Media influencers. Activists. Citizens all over the world, young and old. We all have a role to play. Including you. Let’s count down greenhouse emissions. If we’re successful, it will be a countdown to a hopeful future.
It starts with a willingness to look at the science. We have a chance to avoid climate catastrophe if we can work together, from a solid scientific mindset, to answers these five giant questions.”
— COUNTDOWN
I love the way they picked up on the spirit of living the questions being so central to co-creating regenerative cultures everywhere and are challenging all of us to get involved in collectively living into the answers on these:
How rapidly can we move to 100% clean energy?
How can we re-engineer the stuff that surrounds us?
How do we transform the way we move?
How can we spark a worldwide shift to healthier food systems?
How extensively can we re-green the earth?
https://medium.com/@designforsustainability/join-the-countdown-turning-the-tide-on-climate-change-6176dd45b753
Note “EVERYONE.” Note the endless reference to the socially vacuous ‘we.’ The word ‘we’ is employed thirteen times in this passage, without reference to anything by way of social forms and relations by which it would be possible to identify its precise form. The fact that such a ‘we’ doesn’t exist merely underscores the liberal framing of this politics in imperative voice. The lack of precise social identity and form to define this ‘we’ results in projection and abstraction forcing recourse, in typically liberal fashion, to the surrogate ‘we’ of government and law.
Note the call to collaboration. And note the complete absence of a critical political economy and a reference to the facts of social division. It is a classless appeal in a class divided society and hence a call to complicity. It’s either ideology or cowardice. I took this kind of thinking apart in Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx. Please go the appendix and The Politicisation of the Environment
https://www.academia.edu/39267888/Social_Restitution_and_Metabolic_Restoration_in_the_Thought_of_Karl_Marx
Here’s the truth.
Whilst the science is clear on the natural facts of climate change, it cannot pronounce on questions of politics, ethics, policy, and economics. Whilst scientists can say that the world faces climate catastrophe unless precipitate action is taken, it cannot say precisely what form that action takes. And questions of agency are questions of institutions, forms of governance, economic systems, agency. To say ‘we’ here is to say nothing.
The language is circular in its emptiness – ‘we’ have to engage ‘everyone.’ Everyone is involved in engaging everyone. If ‘we’ really could achieve this general mobilisation, then ‘we’ would be doing it. What are the reasons and stakes? What is it that unites all as ‘we,’ thus bringing the world to the political Holy Grail? Climate crisis, of course. Climate change is a universal in that all lose when civilisation collapses as a result of eco-catastrophe. That means that ‘everyone’ would unite as a ‘we’ beyond divisions of left and right, beyond endless political debates, in order to address climate change and thereby discover the global map of meaning beyond politics, right? Wrong! I really feel like I
The idea that climate change will unite humanity is plain indolent fantasy. Even if it is true that the world faces climate catastrophe if ‘we’ don’t act, it isn’t clear what form those actions take, nor who should take them. Which is to say that there are a range of actions and a range of agents. And that spells conflict not unity, dissensus rather than consensus. Politics, in other words. Which has me thinking that the appeals to unity are not really serious appeals to unity at all. It is a projection of an agreement that exists nowhere upon a precise institutional form to serve as the agent of unity. That would be government working in collaboration with the economic agents capable of delivering on climate targets.
‘We’ have been given our orders from ‘the science,’ and ‘we’ are enjoined to ‘work together’ on the basis of ‘a solid scientific mindset’ to answer these five overriding questions:
How rapidly can we move to 100% clean energy?
How can we re-engineer the stuff that surrounds us?
How do we transform the way we move?
How can we spark a worldwide shift to healthier food systems?
How extensively can we re-green the earth?
Those questions cannot be answered in the terms they are asked for the simple reason they presume the existence of the very thing that stands in need of creation – a public ‘we’ capable of ensuring the long range common good. Statements like this are either hopelessly naïve or deliberately ideological in that they express a general interest to demand action in its name. When governments are mandated to act for the common good, who can disagree, and thereby identify themselves as self-interested opponents of the general interest?