Against Environmental Non-Politics
I’m finding the politics of climate activism increasingly incoherent. Activists call it a ‘non-politics.’ ‘This ain’t politics,’ says an activist friend, it is ‘survival, sustainability, and science.’ Implicit in that view is the idea that ‘nature’ and ‘necessity’ trump politics – and people. I will err on the side of generosity and claim that such people are so sincere in their beliefs, and so correspondingly naïve in their expression, that they do not realize the anti-democratic implications of their views. To argue that there are pre-political truths is one thing. I affirm the existence of transcendent standards of truth and justice, climate activists insist that governments ‘tell the truth.’ To insist that politics and people recognize, accept, and repeat that truth without the mediation of a political process and negotiation of political exchange and dialogue is something else entirely. If the truth already exists and is already known – ‘listen to the scientists’ – then there is nothing for politicians and citizens to do but obey.
This ‘non-politics,’ then, may more accurately be described as an anti-politics. There is nothing for politics – politicians and people – to do but obey. The role of politics is rendered passive. The view is unpersuasive and incoherent.
The incoherence comes out in many ways. As a socialist, I am particularly interested in the ambivalent relationship of environmentalism to socialism. Effective and enduring climate action requires substantial social and structural transformation, ‘system change,’ so as to ensure that the economic exchange with nature proceeds within planetary boundaries. That the capital system is systemically incapable of recognizing limits to its accumulative drive is central to the socialist critique. And yet environmentalists have consistently identified socialism and capitalism as variants of the same species of techno-urban industrial expansionism. Historically, socialism may well, in its dominant forms, struck Faustian bargains with the very capitalist powers it was supposed to abolish, willingly or otherwise. I would argue that the entrenched nature of such powers makes it difficult to avoid some kind of compromise for pragmatic reasons of getting something done. Weber’s rationalization thesis pointed to the inertia of institutions, something which simply cannot be abolished. The entire rule and logic of capital stands in need of being uprooted, something that involves much more than expropriating the institutions of capitalism. A genuine socialisation involves more than nationalisation and the changing of the title deeds on property. Too often, socialism in practice failed to appreciate that distinction and so took the form of a state capitalist industrial expansionism that environmentalists, rightly, criticise and reject. But that is not socialism. Socialism is the resolution of the contradictions and crises of a capitalist system now transgressing social and natural limits.
That resolution involves an explicitly political position. There can be no hiding behind ‘the science’ here, as if politics simply has to accept ‘the truth.’ The issue will be resolved in the mediated relationship between human social practice and nature. Those environmentalists who insist that physics trumps politics lack a conception of mediation and, for that reason, will fail in the realisation of their demands. Worse, those demands will take authoritarian form, being imposed without the mediation of politics. Politics is disagreement, dialogue, negotiation, the building of will and consent, self-assumed obligation, policy. Without those things, truth is passive, inert, and authoritarian imposition. Truth cannot just be given but has to be consciously recognised, assimilated, embodied, lived, and bodied forth. The view I express sees socialism as reconciling the two great wings of the philosophical tradition, objectivity (reason-nature, the realm of fact) and subjectivity (reason-culture, artifice, will, the realm of value). In the absence of that reconciliation we simply have the paralysis of two worlds in collision, with destructive and negative implications for one or the other or both. If planetary (and social) boundaries are being transgressed by the assertion of politics over physics, the solution is not to oppose physics (as unanswerable ‘truth or ‘necessity’) to politics (as arbitrary). That doesn’t solve the problem, merely inverts it. The solution is to bring physics and politics into proper relation by putting mediation on a harmonious basis. That is a question of establishing appropriate social forms. And that is something very different from a civil disobedience aiming to get unreconstituted governments within an untransformed capital system to ‘tell the truth.’
In the appendix of Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx I argue for ‘Politicizing the Environment, Repoliticizing the World.’
That view affirms a proper sense of the political as the means by which human beings, as self-conscious nature, organize their common affairs with each other in the context of their interchange with the planet. Politicisation, then, involves something very different from constant protest and campaign.
I have also covered this in various posts
In this post, I am concerned to make these points not merely to express a critical view of the authoritarian and undemocratic implications of the ‘non-politics’ of environmentalism, but to distinguish socialism from that environmentalism. We are in the midst of a crisis with transformative potential, one that calls in question the core relations and institutions of the prevailing social system. The danger is that the radical moment will come to be diverted and lost through a lack of clear thinking, and a lack of political nous and nerve. There are no institutional and technological workarounds here, no way of avoiding the need to challenge and change existing relations of money and power. Those that seek a ‘third way’ will betray the radical moment to the forces of reaction who are concerned to preserve existing power relations.
Put this way, my concern is less to criticize environmentalism than to make the proper case for socialism. The case for socialism rests on its own merits, regardless of whether there is an environmental crisis or ‘necessity’ spurring necessary actions. The case for socialism as a free, democratic, co-operative society that has put an end to relations of exploitation and domination is one that stands on its own merits and does not require the sanction of ‘the science’ and the unanswerable force of ‘necessity.’ Critics accuse ‘environmentalists of being watermelons, green on the outside but red on the inside. There is a truth in this that many environmentalists are concerned to deny – effective environmental action does require substantial social and structural change and transformation on that scale does support what has historically been the socialist case against the capital system. Those in denial on this point are allowing themselves to be cowed and intimidated by conservative critics who want to exploit the negative connotations of the name of socialism. There’s only one way to deflate the ‘Red Scare’ and that’s not to be scared, and present the positive case for socialism, not abstractly, as an intellectual proposition, but from within the very heartlands of the community expressing the ‘gut’ concerns of the ‘ordinary’ people. Politics as distinct from protest, then.
Many environmentalists are beginning to grasp that beyond institutional and technological changes, there is a need for substantial system-wide transformation to avert eco-catastrophe. I read one writing today, in response to Biden’s climate plan:
‘Deep, structural, progressive change is essential over the next 4 years to:
1 stop climate breakdown
2 relieve working class suffering
3 prevent even worse Trumpist in 2024
Pardon me but I do not see how we prevent catastrophe if nothing or very little fundamentally changes.’
To repeat, twin socio-economic and ecological crisis is a crisis with transformative potential whose roots lie in the core relations and institutions of the capital system. Without any substantial alteration of those relations and institutions, the crisis will deepen. Neither a reformism that proceeds within the system incrementally nor a third way that seeks to go round and past it will work, the former works with the drivers that are implicated in crisis, the latter tries to ignore them.
I am noticing an increasing impatience on the part of the more politically minded people with an environmentalist concern with respect to environmentalist protest and campaigning. ‘Shock tactics’ are subject to the law of diminishing returns and, sooner or later, lose their value. At this point, there is a need to scale up politically. Failure to do this invites a degeneration into more extreme methods of protest. Here, those radicalised by protest can move from peaceful, non-violent approach to something more drastic. Hence the need to be critical whenever people defend protests and campaigns by reference to people who ‘passionately believe’ in their cause. Everyone who is motivated to go into politics does so because they are deeply interested in an issue and concerned that it should prevail. Politics is about how people of different concerns and interests mediate their differences. The problem with holding a belief to be so passionately held as to trump the beliefs of others – particularly when backed by ‘truth’ and ‘necessity’ – is that, if met with frustration, it can easily move to authoritarian imposition. Politics is disagreement and is therefore predicated on each person having a ‘no’ which they can say to another person’s ‘yes.’ That’s regrettable for those who wish for their view to prevail – tyrants, despots, dictators and such like – but that’s the nature of politics. The fact that each person possesses their very own ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is the ineradicable human basis of democracy. That doesn’t imply that each person has a right to their own view of truth, only that the democratic appreciation of such truth is a mediation of object and subject, not the imposition of the former on the latter. That capacity for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ is incited in political exchange and dialogue, and is suppressed by an anti-politics that asserts the existence of pre-political truths that must be accepted and obeyed. The problem is the failure to establish a bridge between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, the world of scientists) and practical reason (politics and ethics, the world of citizens). Instead, there is a blunt, brute rationalism informing heads and expecting, demanding, ‘action.’ The springs of response do not exist and have not been cultivated, leaving only authoritarian imposition.
I am noting the beginnings of dissent within the environmentalist camp on the Greta Thunberg cult. An environmentalist friend invited his environmentalist friend to watch the I am Greta movie. His response was emphatic:
“I would rather organize my sock drawer with my eyes closed while listening to the teletubbies sing.”
I would have taken the message that he is not interested and left it there. But said friend persisted, and thereby provoked a tirade:
“I refuse to be lectured by this screeching child that rails against western culture while completely ignoring India and China.” says another.
Abuse of Thunberg is, of course, routine. But what was noticeable in these exchanges is that it was environmentalists themselves breaking ranks. These are environmentalists not right wing ideologues.
Another writes: “It is frankly an insane notion to cripple our economy while other more dangerous and aggressive countries continue as normal.”
And so on. Climate alarmism, panic, raising awareness, shock etc has a very short shelf life. The time comes when any issue gets down to practicalities. The law of diminishing returns kicks in and there is then a need to move to the next level. What is it? Demand that climate change is covered by the media? If that demand is all people ever hear, they will soon tire. The idea that environmental crisis is never covered and that people are unaware may make for great campaigning, but it isn’t true and makes for wretched politics. The lack of means and mechanisms for environmental transitions and transformations beyond the capital system has been the problem since the issue was raised. Environmentalists seem to work within a scientistic or rationalist model, proceeding from facts and figures to government action. This was the temper of Club of Rome ‘Limits to Growth’ environmentalism of the seventies, and it failed for its lack of politics and hence lack of democratic significance. The belief that governments should govern according to reason and universal interest is a plainest idealism that is betrayed by political and historical experience. The state is not an ethical agency of the long-term common good but, within capitalist relations, has become the surrogate of private interests. People are shocked at the way in which the public realm is subject to monetary power, colonised within by corporate power and controlled systemically without by accumulative imperatives, and demand that this situation end. Ending that situation in order to recover the primacy of the political has been the historical cause of and case for socialism.
Greta Thunberg, on 30th September 2020, tweeted this:
‘Ending fossil fuel capitalism doesn’t mean we have to implement socialism. We’re stuck in an unimaginative 20th century debate. Regardless of what we’ll call the economic system, it is essential that it functions within the planetary boundaries.’
Note that that tweet doesn’t target the capital system as such, only ‘fossil fuel capitalism.’ Given that the most cogent, most persistent, political challenge to capitalism in history has come from socialism, this concern to issue a denial with respect to socialism is politically significant, not least when it comes from someone who places great emphasis of being non-political. Ending fossil-fuel capitalism is perfectly compatible with a re-booted capitalism fuelled by renewable energy. And who has the power and resources to push these new green technologies to scale? The corporations, of course, backed by ambitious government programmes and investment. The abstract ‘we’ that certain environmentalists continually predicate their ‘non-political’ action on thus take the familiar form of state and capital in a fundamentally untransformed social system. ‘We’ the people remain firmly within the sphere of alien power and its exploitative relations.
The Green Party keep sending me emails, even though I have left.
“Peter,
We often say that we have the plans and solutions to make England and Wales fairer and Greener. But what do we mean by that? We mean that our policies:
✅Empower local governments and communities
♻Build an economic system that works for people and the planet, not the other way around
🏠Make sure that everyone has a roof over their head and food on the table
📍Lay the groundwork for a movement that recognises that collaboration is our key to success
💚Includes a social security system that lifts every single one of us up.
I don’t disagree – hence the reason that The Green Party is the only political party I have ever been a member of. I don't much trust the others. But I grew tired of the way in which the radical rhetoric of a transformative politics was contradicted by a bourgeois reformism in practice. Green politics is liberal to the core and predicated upon classic liberal dualisms and separations which, when it comes to addressing a ‘global’ problem like climate change, is incoherent. I’ve developed this argument in many places and won’t repeat it here. I refer readers to the critiques of liberalism and environmentalism on the “Posts” page.
The message from The Green Party continues:
“In 2021, we will be fighting the largest number of elections at one time. We'll be fighting for a transformed England and Wales. We won't let the events of this year be just another reminder of how broken our societies are. Next year, we'll make real transformative change happen. Will you take action with us, tip the balance of power and help put an end to business as usual? Better is possible when we build it together.”
I responded:
“Collaboration" is not a virtue in itself; in a class divided society, it matters a great deal with whom we collaborate and to what end. Capital has hijacked our collaborative instincts and diverted them to private ends. That needs to be identified precisely, uprooted at source, and supplanted by new forms of social mediation. Vague 'neither left nor right' thinking asserting togetherness has nothing to do with system change, and merely extends bourgeois modes of thought and politics into 'radical' politics. That is, it isn't radical at all - like all bourgeois liberal parties, it promises much, delivers little, and won't get us to system change. Instead of a critical analysis of specific social forms and relations in order to achieve a genuine unity, there is recourse to surrogates, ‘togetherness’ as an abstract collectivity. This is not an alternative to the prevailing order but an expression of it. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels described the state as ‘the illusory community’ and ‘illusory general interest’ to which bourgeois minds have recourse in order to check, constrain, and transcend the self- and sectional interests of real civil society. It does no such thing. Whilst, at the level of political principle, the state (or government) ought to embody and articulate the long-term common good, we have learned that under the capital system it functions as the surrogate of private economic interests. That people are still shocked to learn of the corporate capture of the public realm indicates how prevalent bourgeois notions remain. Within capitalist relations, the state has always been subject to the external systemic constraint of capital and its accumulative imperatives. Again, this has been central to the socialist critique. Environmentalism needs to take the field of practical reason as seriously as it has the field of theoretical reason.
The Greens are hopeless in appealing to a "we" that exists nowhere socially and politically. Without the social force and structural capacity of the working class – the democratic content and bedrock of socialism - such 'non-political' politics is just a continuation of bourgeois reformism, tending to idealism and abstraction. With respect to notions of ‘transformation’ and ‘system change,’ such a classless ‘non-politics’ is a continuation of the bourgeois expropriation of socialism and the working class. Such an approach constrains political energies within the system that stands in need of being changed. I warned my local party a decade ago that, on this basis, The Green Party risks becoming merely an environmentalist hygiene movement refuelling capitalist accumulation with green energy. Socially rootless and hence politically fruitless.”
I await a reply.
As I wrote these words I listened to Dan Wootton interview Dr Emily Grossman from Extinction Rebellion on Talk Radio. I wish to hone in precisely on what appears to be the end-game, using Grossman’s words herself, lest I be accused of misrepresentation.
Grossman wants us to ‘acknowledge that we are all culpable for this, we are all responsible. This is something we all need to take a look at, our individual behaviour. But actually we can’t because we are living in a system where our governors, our society, is in a fossil-fuel economy… The only thing we can do is acknowledge that we are all part of the problem but that actually, really, in order to change that it has to come structurally, it has to come from above and it’s only the government that can really get us out of it.’
Grossman describes herself as ‘a science communicator, broadcaster, and educator, and an expert in molecular biology and genetics. I teach maths and all 3 sciences, at all levels.’ Grossman is smart, and made many telling points under hostile pressure in the interview. But her approach is science heavy and is politically and sociologically deficient. Critics know this and target this area relentlessly. Where is the human understanding? Without it, environmentalism has a democratic deficit at its core. Critics will continually target that deficiency in the human political and social reality, and responses in terms of facts and figures and science will not bridge the gap. Science cannot do the work of politics and ethics. Such responses are fine if society were a laboratory inhabited by scientists, but are blunt when addressed to citizens. It is pointless to address citizens as if they were scientists or demand that citizens become scientists. This is to conflate two distinct areas and orders of experience and will fail as a result (and has failed). That leaves an unrecognized truth with nowhere to go but authoritarian imposition. How that imposition comes may be speculated upon. Liberal and conservative critics warn of ‘socialism,’ an eco-communist dictatorship concerned to overthrow capitalism. As a socialist, I am concerned with a scientistic rationalism deficient or lacking in a genuine politics – and democratic content – coming to licence extensive bureaucratic government control of civil society in the name of ‘necessity,’ preserving dominant capitalist relations under the pretext of preserving planetary boundaries.
Dr. Grossman describes herself as an ‘Educator, Speaker, Trainer & Activist.’ A lot of environmentalists are involved in such activities, informing, educating, training. This is a world apart from politics, a world which seeks to shape politics and perceptions. Somewhere, progressive politics has lost touch with the creative agency of the people and reverted back to the theoretico-elitist model of the past, seeing the individuals composing the demos as passive heads to be filled and bodies to be directed, a mass to be engineered, and not as a true public. This returns to the scientific and technological road to socialism, with an enlightened vanguard replacing the working class agency as the agency of political and social change.
Grossman comes close at times to an integral understanding, but only in the way that a student anticipates likely questions and objections and delivers well-rehearsed responses. She is challenged on hypocrisy – and the fact that prominent environmental campaigners are celebrities urge austerity on the part of ‘ordinary’ folk whilst leading lavish lifestyles themselves. It’s a criticism designed to strike a chord with common people who have been deprived of political agency and rendered the objects of political and cultural change. Grossman responds: ‘yes as a society we’re all hypocrites .. we are forced to be hypocrites because of the society we live in and why we can’t do anything about it unless it’s changed by the government.’
She appears to accept the criticism but actually does so only to bury the hypocrisy of specific voices within a general hypocrisy. ‘We are all hypocrites.’ The truth is that just as some are more responsible for deleterious environmental impacts than others, so some are far more hypocritical than others. The emptiness of vague, politically neutral terms such as ‘we’ and ‘all’ humanity has political consequences and explain the abstraction of the political end-game. These patterns of behaviour are socially structured within capitalist relations, and hence cannot be altered by individual action and responsibility alone. There is recognition that the problems are structural by Grossman, only for the responsibility for structural change to be levelled upon ‘the government.’ Vagueness – and outright substitutionism - at the level of social identity and class thus generates abstraction and utopianism at the level of political agency.
The basic lesson of the last hundred years and more of radical vs reformist politics has still not been learned: the state is not determinant vis the private economy within capitalist relations but is determined. To argue that the problem is structural and hence only ‘the government’ can resolve it is muddled thinking that inverts the true relation. That argument identifies those appearing to demand system change as reformists, cleaving to the delusion that ‘the government’ has primacy over the private economy. It doesn’t, and the delusion that it does was the principal characteristic of parliamentary socialism, explaining its powerlessness, failure, and eventual defeat. The case for socialism, at base, lies in the attempt to assert the primacy of the political and the values and practices of public life over the primacy of the economic. That will not happen unless and until the capital system is uprooted at source. That is a question of social and structural transformation, not of institutional action alone. ‘The government’ cannot be the agent of such substantive transformation for the very reason that it is one of the principal second order mediations of the capital system, charged with the task of facilitating the process of private accumulation. Government cannot check and constrain still less end that process without thereby undermining its own base. As capital’s political command and control centre, the state provides a unity that capital, as a competition of capitals, cannot deliver itself. To argue that government secure the long term environmental good is to argue for the substantial social transformation that enables government to function as a genuine public community in this manner. That, I argue, is the case for socialism.
For all of their talk of ‘system change,’ people who level their ambitious demands for change upon government are reformists and not radicals, translating the call for structural change into demands for government intervention and action. Transformation of this scale presupposes the reconstitution of government, it is the plainest error to presuppose that this government already exists. It doesn’t. To proceed in this manner is to invite authoritarianism. The approach is ill-tempered in extending and entrenching bourgeois dualism. Authoritarianism thus emerges as the evil twin of the libertarianism that has been ravaging society for the past half century.
An environmentalism levelling ambitious plans upon untransformed government reveals a complete ignorance of how capital functions as a system, constituted by a whole range of support networks and mediations that have to be targeted as a whole.
I make this point at length in:
Instead, there is a simple – and classically liberal – dualism of the state and civil society, both held in abstraction, the former ruling in the long term universal interest to transcend particular interests and resolve problems arising in the latter. That is a very old and, by now, very worn dualism, entailing a split between a realism of self-interest and an idealism of universal interest. Marx subjected that dualism to ruthless critique in the 1840s, and yet it is still being offered as integral to a transformative politics. It isn’t; it is a blind alley. The reformist delusion lies in seeing the capital system as a public domain which is amenable to moral and scientific appeal and democratic control. That view misses entirely that, as a key second order mediation within the capital system, the role of government is to facilitate the process of private accumulation, and most certainly not to impair it. Indeed, the key issue at the heart of the class struggles of the twentieth century was precisely the extent to which workers’ power grew to the extent that it threatened to obstruct and subvert the mechanisms of investment, valorisation, and accumulation. To be told that this ‘debate’ is unimaginative and outdated tells me that greens and environmentalists demanding net-zero and a degrowth economy are either politically clueless as to how these ends are to be attained or being duplicitous in leading us deliberately to an austerian green capitalism under the figure of necessity. Either way, the result will be policies and practices that backfire spectacularly to produce a wasteland. The result will be a democratic and legitimation crisis, with popular discontent held down only by force. And I am concerned to distinguish socialism and class politics from it. However much critics call such environmentalism socialist, it is not. The critics of green politics have noticed the socialist implications of the substantial social transformation proposed by environmentalists. Dear Greta may call for an economy that functions within planetary boundaries whilst refusing the label socialist – critics see where it ends. My argument is that environmentalists should develop a similar political awareness.
There are some core political and sociological truths to be learned here, and learned quickly. The capital system is not a public domain but a regime of private accumulation; the state or government is not a free-floating independent agency of the universal interest but one of capital’s second order mediations and key to the functioning of the capital economy. To argue for government coming to act for the long term universal interest is to presuppose the existence the very thing that socialism spent the best part of a century trying to achieve – a genuine public life ensuring the democratic will and welfare of the people. Socialism didn’t so much fail as was blocked and checked in that endeavour. This is a political struggle. And a class struggle. To identify that struggle as anachronistic and outdated is to ensure the continuation of class division. To predicate green policies on the existence of that genuine public community, rather than engage in the social transformation to bring that community about, is the plainest idealism. And it will default to existing and entrenched power.
Dr Emily Grossman states this delusion concisely when she says that the problem is structural and ‘we can’t do anything about it unless it’s changed by the government.’ She identifies the problem correctly but delivers the wrong solution. The government is not all-powerful in this way against capital. Government can only be recovered as the public interest of the community as a whole – creating the ‘we’ that such reformers presume – on condition of the social power alienated to capital being restituted to the social body. The disempowerment of capital is thus the condition of the reempowerment of government and its establishment as a genuine public community. To argue as if this has already happened is to ensure the defeat of environmental reformist ambitions and invite their likely realization as their opposite – an eco-authoritarianism presiding over an austerian, and still accumulative, regime.
Grossman wants us to ‘acknowledge that we are all culpable for this, we are all responsible.’ This is too vague. The problem with capital as an alienated system of production lies in the loss of responsibility on the part of human agents, both capitalists and proletarians. The capitalists themselves are personifications of economic relations, subject to systemic imperatives to accumulate that they must serve and facilitate; the proletarians are themselves subject to a double determination. To ratchet up pressure on people to act in environmentally friendly ways in an environmentally unfriendly system will neither resolve the problem nor cultivate support.
It is certainly important to affirm the unity of personal and collective responsibility so as to ensure that changes at micro- and macro-level proceed hand in hand with each other and hence that transformative action does not become an either/or. To argue that ‘we are all responsible,’ though, has the danger of making collective problems a matter of personal responsibility, failing utterly to address the issue of uncoordinated, incremental actions generating supra-individual forces and constraints beyond individual comprehension and control. Grossman’s next line is therefore a crucial qualifier. She begins by arguing that ‘this is something we all need to take a look at’ in terms of ‘our individual behaviour’ but acknowledges that ‘we can’t because we are living in a system where our governors, our society, is in a fossil-fuel economy.’ Individuals are therefore locked within structured patterns of behaviour, making the right choices on their part more difficult than ecologically (and socially) harmful choices, forcing individuals to choose immediate self-interest over the long-term social good. Such alienative relations are therefore a denial of personal responsibility – that in a nutshell states the problem of environmental action, the divorce of individual action and collective consequence and the lack of collective means and mechanisms enabling social responsibility.
Since this is so, I would like to know what Extinction Rebellion, for whom Grossman is a spokesperson, thinks it is doing by engaging in a campaign of civil disobedience that deliberately disrupts the everyday activities of ‘ordinary’ folk to demand a change of behaviour on their part and of policy on the part of government. They recognize that individuals are locked into socially and ecologically destructive patterns of behaviour and that only structural or institutional action can break the impasse. They know that and yet subject members of the public to a war of attrition. They fail to recognize that government within the capital system is also locked into those socially and ecologically destructive patterns of behaviour.
This is a dangerous game. First of all, the approach reveals an inherent elitism. The defence that such actions are about raising awareness of the climate catastrophe are elitist to the core, revealing a poor view of the citizens in presuming that ‘ordinary’ people are either unaware of climate crisis or don’t care. This is unwarranted and likely to breed reaction. It’s not that people don’t know and don’t care, it is that within the constraints of a competitive market society that alienated their power, labour, and sovereignty, they lack the means of exercising (co-)responsibility. Providing those means is the task of those aiming for system change. Secondly, such actions reveal a breath-taking cynicism, subjecting ordinary folk to constant pressure whilst also acknowledging without institutional and structural change there is little that individuals can do to respond in any case. This is tantamount to punishing people for sins that they cannot avoid making and cannot renounce. Thirdly, there is, at best, political naivety – engaging in a war on the public in order to force government to yield to its – impossible – demands. Neither the public nor government can act in the ways demanded. Targets such as net-zero by 2025 may make for good campaigning but involves a lousy self-defeating politics. There is no concern to build an enduring public in such activities. This will induce fatigue and issue in a backlash. People do not bear chaos for any length of time. Protest politics is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Beyond the initial shock, people will want to see the end-game. Such activists ‘telling the truth’ to politicians and people have missed the massive populist revolt taking place against elites of all kinds. Even if they are right, people prefer to be asked rather than told.
Grossman wraps up this statement by arguing that since these patterns of behaviour are supra-individual and beyond the control of discrete individuals, change ‘has to come structurally’ – which is right – and ‘it has to come from above and it’s only the government that can really get us out of it’ – which is idealist (‘from above’), elitist and authoritarian (under the auspices of those who know, people like themselves and not the poor benighted members of the demos who stand in need of education), and sociologically and politically illiterate (‘the government’ is not the ethical agency of the universal interest within the capital system, it is agency of private accumulation).
It is incoherent, too. Effectively, this movement undermines democracy and circumvents the democratic voice of the people, undermines the rule of law, weakens government, only to charge government with the task of acting as a strong and effective public realm. We lose the agency with the social force and structural capacity to engage in transformative action and become reliant on the institutional agency which is embedded within the capital system. A genius strategy. The anomalies and incoherencies stem from the fact that environmentalism lacks any kind of grasp of politics and any kind of connection with the people. Without social roots, this environmentalism will bear no political fruits.
The recourse for authoritarian force follows the lack of a genuine politics. This concerns me, both as an authoritarianism that denies the democratic voice and as a misrepresentation of socialism in politics (by both leftists and their critics).
I am leery of a radicalization that proceeds by way of vanguardism and extremism. Mallen Baker highlights the way that Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam quotes extreme outliers of the science to argue that if something has only a 5% chance of happening, a precautionary approach should be adopted to ensure it doesn’t happen. This isn’t a genuine politics, motivated by a positive vision of a future society – socialism as a free, democratic, cooperative society – but a vehicle to engineer hopelessness and despair on the part of people, deprive them of their creative agency, make them passive and pliable, ready to submit to authoritarian order.
The whole areas is surrounded by controversy and exaggeration, so it is wise to focus on considered statements made by the protagonists and not those made under pressure of aggressive questioning. These statements still have the character of a polemic and propaganda that is designed to recruit people to a cause out of a combination of idealism and fear, swelling the ranks and giving it the appearance of a democratic mass public. The main thrust of recruitment has been the claim that governments and leaders have failed them, failed to take environmental action in time, and that as a result they are unlikely to grow old.
At a time of rising mental health problems grace of the crisis-ridden unstable times we live in, this message could be designed to push people over an edge that is all-too near as it is. Fear is debilitating in its impact and chokes the hope that people have in themselves and in the future, the hope that people need in order to build for the future. There is precious little point in building and planting for the future if there will be no future. People will not be inspired to act to bring about a healthy future if they are told that that future is no longer available. To tell a generation that they have no future at all on account of climate change is tantamount to committing political suicide. The message is utterly self-defeating. In its demotivating effects, it ensures that objective trends and tendencies become long-term inevitabilities. What is lost is the sense of creative human agency. Such tactics may make for an effective recruiting tool, but its true effectiveness here depends upon what the objectives are. If such claims are true – and that’s a big if – then each, any, and every earthly cause is rendered pointless. The only thing to do is prepare to face the music and make one’s peace. This is how it always ends when mortal men aspire to the power and knowledge of gods.
Whenever I am faced with presentations of facts and figures that spell future doom, my response is always the same – such is life in a godless, purposeless, meaningless universe: why do you cry, nevertheless, and to whom do you cry? Nature conceived through the lens of a disenchanting science doesn’t care; why should we care? Do you think there may be a God after all, a personal God, a God of love and relationships giving meaning to life beyond merely surviving in an unwinnable game?
I analyse the problem and then make my peace with a force greater than any on Earth. I don’t panic easily, then, and I am moved by a transcendent hope, not by fear.
Even if true, there are better ways to frame the message. If the claims are false or are based on exaggerations and half-truths, then they are politically stupid and morally wicked. The matter therefore merits close analysis.
Framing the message this way has served to make climate change an emotional issue, employing language that is calculated to provoke a response and incite the passions. I am not against emotions, the very contrary. I argue for the integration and use of all the human faculties, reason and emotion together. I fully affirm Aristotle’s ‘three modes of persuasion,’ logos, reason and evidence, pathos, the emotions, and ethos, ethics.
The persuasion triad of Aristotle remains pertinent. Aristotle held that the art of persuasion comprised a combination of three appeals:
1) Logos — Appealing to Logic
2) Pathos — Appealing to Emotions
3) Ethos — Appealing to Ethics, Morals and Character
Anyone seeking to persuade an audience should craft his/her message by way of a combination of these three appeals. Anyone seeking to persuade an audience should craft his/her appeal by reference to facts (logos), tapping an argument’s emotional aspect (pathos), and by presenting his/her apparent moral standing (ethos). Ethos consists of three sub-qualities: the persuader’s professional intelligence, virtuous nature, and goodwill.
In the case of logos, those who seek to persuade uses facts, statistics, citations of reputable sources/experts, references to knowledge. This is the side of the appeal attempts to show that an argument rests on fact and knowledge.
Aristotle knew that this appeal to logos was insufficient in itself. An argument requires pathos and ethos in order to be effective, to motivate, inspire, and move people to practical effort. There therefore had to be an attempt to tap argument's emotional aspect (pathos), and present its moral weight and standing (ethos).
The appeal to pathos therefore entails presenting the argument in a way that incites the emotions of the audience. The appeal to logos lacks this appetitive and emotive quality. The appeal to facts and figures that are cold, flat, impassive, and ‘dead’ works in a scientific setting, where one scientist is communicating research and findings to another scientist. The facts and figures on global heating are exchanged on the basis of the logos. To convey these findings to a non-scientific audience outside of the scientific environment, however, needs to tap the emotions. Pathos is therefore the emotional means by which the findings of the logos are conveyed to the audience.
Ethos concerns not merely the ethics of any appeal, but also the character of the persuader making the appeal. An audience will listen to an appeal made by someone who combines the moral and intellectual virtues, that is, is a specialist in the field and has practical intelligence, has a virtuous nature, and has good intentions and a good will.
There is a need to make the three appeals together if an argument is to be persuasive. We live in an age which considers scientific knowledge to be the only true knowledge and hence that appeals to fact are sufficient. This is mistaken, and profoundly so. For Aristotle, ethos comes first. There is first of all a need to establish trust, point, and purpose within the wider scheme of things. In separating fact and value, making the former the realm of reason and knowledge, the latter the non-rational realm of value judgement, the modern world has effectively undercut its own basis and undermined its own motivational springs. It generates intellectual and technological capacity without moral and motivational capacity, and hence finds itself in a constant educational mode. For Aristotle, ethos, establishing trust, was the most important aspect of honest persuasion to good ends. Winning trust and reinforcing it are crucial is an audience is to begin to respond to the persuader’s appeal to logos and pathos. The challenge, then, is to integrate and organise the three appeals around a plan, a plot, or a purpose. A reference to facts, an emotional hook, a presentation of character to build trust all play a role in creating a persuasive design.
Each of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion has a place and a use. None of these things alone will be sufficient. My problem with the emotionally charged way in which the message of climate disaster is framed is not a genuine emotionalism at all, it is an engineered and calculated approach designed to incite and shape the emotions. The approach is cynical and manipulative and lacks the true quality of the emotions. It’s the kind of thing that very clever rationalists do. It is monstrously insensitive, crass, and inhuman.
I was once a member of both Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, campaign groups who have tended to stick to the science and the facts of the case. I praise their efforts, but recognised the need to join fact and value and build a bridge from the scientific world to the world of politics if people are to be moved and mobilized. Having come round to this point, very late in the day, certain environmentalists are adopting a pressure-cooker approach, thinking that politics, ethics, and motivations can be forced. These things have to be cultivated, nurtured, as something organic that grows from within, not something commanded ‘from above’ and introduced ‘from without.’
Extinction Rebellion has targeted the emotions in this way for sheer effect, moving people towards certain pre-determined ends. This engineering and manipulation of the emotions, however, is not a genuine emotionalism. In fact, it is the very antithesis of a genuine emotionalism, reducing the emotions that move people from within to the status of mere means to external ends that are in the hands of others. This approach reproduces the very estrangement and instrumentalism that characterises bourgeois society within a movement that styles itself as radical, but which in truth is reactionary, elitist, and undemocratic to the core. Even the much vaunted ‘Citizens Assemblies,’ which XR people cite as evidence of their democratic credentials, have the hallmark of an engineered and manufactured public. We have ‘citizens assemblies’ now, they are called parliaments, and you are free to stand. The truth is, environmentalists have themselves failed, politically, on account of not having learned to do politics well. They have failed to make their message politically persuasive at the ballot box. So, naturally, they seek to circumvent established political institutions. There is no way in the world that the general public will countenance a hand-picked group of people being fed information to make a decision on important issues that will be binding on everyone. This is not politics, this is cloud-cuckoo land and more fool anyone who goes down this route. I can only think this is the politics of despair, people who have realized that their politics has failed now having one last stand. They should learn to do politics properly. And that means situating themselves within the heart of the citizen body, rather than being an educational vanguard issuing edicts from the Empyrean up above. Such edicts lack internal motivational force and hence can only be established by external force. Hence my concern with a) guarding against a degeneration into eco-authoritarianism and b) distinguishing socialism as a democratic social transformation from such vanguardism.
Rupert Read quite candidly admits his manipulative approach to the emotions. Indeed, so insensitive are the emotional engineers that they seem to solicit praise for their being so clever and so understanding: ‘one thing I think is quite important is creating some kind of emotional resonance and that’s one of the reasons why I always say something like I’m afraid for you.’ He uses the emotions for effect, then, and not out of genuine concern. That is both manipulative and cynical, laying bare the mechanics at work, pushing the right buttons and pulling the right levers to get the right response from people. That deprives people of their humanity. Going back to Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion, this is not a genuine persuasion but denotes a process in which human beings are acted on from the outside, having their emotional buttons pushed to direct them in a certain way. The democratic way is to establish a happy habitus integrates all the faculties and enables human beings to direct themselves.
If it is factually correct to argue that young people today are going to die early as a consequence of climate change, then why be so manipulative, so fevered, so extortionate in engineering a mass public for climate action? There may well be hard truths to face, but this stampeding of people to action is the very opposite of facing the truth. In fact, action is a classic example of neurotic denial.
Are the facts correct? There is a relentless barrage of bad news science ‘but it’s much worse than that.’ Mallen Baker draws attention to this repeated phrase ‘it’s much worse than that.’
These statements predicting climate doom are layered one upon another to reveal a pattern and a deliberate plan, feeding a downward spiral of despair in those being addressed. As a rhetorical device, it can be effective. But as politics it is debilitating.
Again, as s perversion of Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion, it is cynical and manipulative.
I have argued for the recovery of rhetoric in communication and persuasion, but this is not the proper use of rhetoric, it is misuse.
In the past, I have made critical observations of the wrong directions being taken by environmentalism when it comes to politics and communication. In Let us not speak of them, look and pass by in December 2017 I identified this use of ‘it’s worse than that’ as a rhetorical device and criticized it:
“I just have a hunch that there are folk out there reporting on this who will be telling us that it's a whole lot worse than that. 'We're doomed.' Welcome to the world in which we get to write our own obituary. The situation is bad enough. I can do without empty promises, idle threats, pious moralizing, resentment and recrimination. And I can do without the constant tension and feckless argument and howls of impotent rage. Goodbye and good riddance to all of that, and welcome to a sane and sober reckoning with realities.”
Whilst I made that point as a criticism, hoping environmentalists will change direction, it has come to be established as a recruiting and radicalizing tool. I subtitled my critique ‘against self-perpetuating, self-consuming cycles of climate despair.’
I also argue for the recovery of rhetoric – properly understood and respected – in What Place Value in a World of Fact
I wrote this back in 2015. It is an hour long read, and hence unlikely to have been read by many. But the lessons are clear and the ones that the age needs to learn. Years on, and the same errors being made at speed, I would suggest an hour is not too long an investment of time.
Rhetoric is the capacity to give our wisdom practical effect in face of specific, uncertain, unfolding situations of life. As such, it is every bit as important as science and theoretical reason. The abuse and misuse of rhetoric and the emotions effectively cannibalises the motivational economy at the heart of practical reason, subordinating it to the field of theoretical reason. This approach is not a coherent response to the mechanisation of life but an extension and confirmation of it.
If we check the factual claims, we see a conflation of science and polemics. Governments have set targets of achieving net zero by 2050, in order to meet their commitments with respect to the Paris agreement. These targets are technically possible, but are not binding. It’s a process of climate diplomacy, and some will take the lead and some will drag their feet, The process requires human effort and intervention and won’t happen without it. I don’t criticize XR for having a critical view here: Paris falls far short of where we need to be. Even if – and that is another big if – the Paris commitments were met, they would fall short.
Mallen Baker criticizes that Rupert Read ‘could use the platform to recruit young people to get involved in helping to make it happen because it’s our best hope but that’s not his message. His message is we’re almost certainly dead. That’s not a scientific statement but a prediction based on not much more than gloom.’
To this, I would say that if Paris really is ‘our best hope,’ then we are indeed almost certainly heading for dire straits.
‘But now he tells us that it’s worse than that,’ says Baker.
By now I’m not sure how much worse things can get. I feel like I’m in the presence of one of Monty Python’s four Yorkshireman. ‘Tell young people today that, and they won’t believe you.’
One of the issues here comes back to the debate between capitalism and socialism, and whether economic growth – capital accumulation – is necessarily harmful to the planetary (and social) ecology. I argue that it is (and refer people to my extensive writing on capital accumulation as a non-organic growth). Baker takes issue with Read here. Read argues that the commitments that governments have made to reaching targets under the Paris accord are flatly contradicted by their immediate plans to stimulate further economic growth by way of building more industrial infrastructure, more transport infrastructure, and so on. These plans for continued economic expansion stand in stark antithesis to what needs to be done to fulfil commitments under Paris.
Is Read right? Does economic growth – capital accumulation – necessarily contradict net zero carbon commitments? I would argue that it does. But I would not predicate the attainment of socialism on this question. What if it can be shown that we can fuel a continued capitalist economy with green energy, would we then cease to argue for socialism as the free, democratic, cooperative society that has put an end to class division and the exploitation of human beings and nature?
The dangers are contained in that tweet I cited earlier from Greta Thunberg, when she claimed that ending fossil fuel capitalism doesn’t necessarily imply socialism – it could mean a green capitalism. I argue for socialism on its own merits, as a democratic polity beyond class exploitation, embodying human freedom. I would argue that such a society also possesses a benign relation to the natural metabolism, in a way that the capital system does not.
Baker focuses on the details to deny that economic growth necessarily produces carbon emissions. He may be right here, in that the transition to a zero and low carbon energy infrastructure would make it possible to achieve net zero emissions in the context of a still growing economy. In fine, the Paris agreement does not imply zero growth or degrowth. I think that that is a contentious claim, but rather than contend it here, I would prefer to make the case for socialism not on energy infrastructures and emissions but on democracy, equality and justice – achieve harmony within the social metabolism and, I would argue, you will achieve harmony between human society and the universal metabolism of nature. Restrict the focus to the natural metabolism and it is entirely possible to entrench an exploitative class relation at the heart of human society under a green corporate form. I would argue strongly that a ‘green capitalism’ is a contradiction in terms, but I would prefer not to take my stand on the pros and cons of such a notion in relation to ‘nature’ as the arbiter of truth. I would therefore decouple the political argument for future society – and critique of present capitalist society - from statements framed in terms of environmental necessity. Taking that approach makes it possible to release the case for socialism from environment and make it in terms of values of public happiness, freedom, democracy, and justice. I would argue this socialism to be perfectly compatible with environmental health, indeed the condition of that health. But not conditional upon that health. Which is to say, I argue for a future socialist society on its own merits, a society worth achieving for reasons much more inspiring than mere survival. Flourishing is a notion that applies in both the social and natural metabolisms and is established in their mediated relationship.
Baker comments that the idea that economic activity must necessarily be pushing against reducing carbon emissions is plainly false – it may involve additional nuclear power capacity for base load energy. Environmentalists may object to nuclear but, as Baker quips, hey, it’s a crisis remember. In that, he exposes the dangers of framing an argument in terms of environmental necessity – it may lead to some very nasty, unpalatable conclusions. In Of Gods and Gaia in 2012, I anticipated one large and last geoengineering gamble on the planet to save a collapsing civilisation.
That is still possible. Regardless of the intentions of well-intentioned, idealistic activists, the non-politics of environmental necessity possesses a logic and develops a momentum of its own, irrespective of one’s own values and ideals. To make a virtue of a non-politics whilst declaring an imperative to act in face of necessity is tantamount to writing a blank cheque that only money and power can cash.
And it’s so much worse even than that, says Read … The IPCC process seriously underestimates the possibility of feedbacks which could spiral the climate system out of control and which may already be kicking in potentially explaining the disastrous weather chaos of the last few years.
The fact that I have heard such statements many times before, many years before (and made them myself), does not make them wrong. But I note the exaggeration. I’ve employed that tone myself in the past. Look under the “Climate Change and Global Heating” heading of the “Posts” page and you will find extreme language being employed: ‘teetering on the brink of climate catastrophe,’ ‘the final curtain,’ ‘seven years to save the planet,’ ‘countdown to eco-catastrophe.’ And so on. On October 1 2012 I wrote an article entitled ’50 Months Left to Tackle Climate Change.’ It wasn’t me saying that, but ‘the scientists,’ or those who draw their conclusions from the researches of scientists. But it was 97 months and two weeks ago. If environmentalists (such as my good self) were right then, then it is time for resignation and reconciliation, the age of men as gods is over, ending as it could only have ended. I think the case for climate action then was strong. I think the politics and ethics has been wrong all along, hence the failure.
Which brings me to the contemporary reactions against that failure and attempts to be more politically and practically effective. Here I note the tendency to state the science at extremes for public attention and political effect. The outliers get picked up and are amplified. Baker underlines the extent to which Roger Hallam quotes extreme outlier examples of the science and amplifies them in the public realm. The intention is to tie climate change to civil disobedience and bring down the regime. Baker disapproves of such extremism. I disapprove of the critique of the capital system and the concern to achieve a socialist society becoming identified with such manipulative tactics. Baker criticizes that the totally unrealistic demand of zero carbon by 2025 is put forward solely to radicalize people, put it in their heads that they or their children are all going to die unless they act and force governments to act, knowing fine well that governments cannot meet impossible demands. People will be encouraged to keep taking the next step as pressure is ratcheted upwards, from getting arrested to overthrowing the state. It all sounds a little far-fetched. I see little prospect of such revolutionary vanguardism. Instead, I see a pressure exerted on government to commit to large scale environmental programmes under corporate control. Bake identifies XR as extreme left, and it is this that concerns me, from a socialist perspective. Baker claims that, as a left group, XR supports a state-led solution and not a business solution. Straight away, that has my socialist alarm bells ringing. Marx identified the state as an alienated social power to be reappropriated and reorganised by the citizen body. He may have been utterly deluded in this, with ambitions for the realization of democracy that way issuing only in expanded bureaucratic government. So liberal critics can legitimately argue. That’s not my argument here. I am more interested in the ready identification of socialism with the state and state control. Baker claims that Hallam ‘shied away from the label of authoritarian but that’s exactly what is implied.’ That’s exactly what I am concerned to guard against, steering socialism away from the twin reefs of a liberal order that swings between libertarianism and authoritarianism. I argue socialism as a balance of autonomy and authority.
But evidence of authoritarian, not to say totalitarian, implication and intent is not hard to find. When XR cofounder Gail Bradbrook argues that the country needs to mimic the wartime spirit, she refers to the willingness of the population to submit to rationing and the draconian powers of the wartime economy. Her claims on how we shift easily from business and politics as usual through a citizen’s assembly should be taken with a pinch of salt. This reference to the citizen’s assembly is the stock claim XR spokespersons make, knowing fine well that they lack any kind of democratic connection, support, or mandate. Again, I note the background in the natural sciences - molecular biophysics – and the little grasp of human beings and human societies. Bradbrook talks about people as if she really knows them, from having observed them, and even spoken to a few, saying that there is a need to ‘come up with a package that people can get behind because I have ordinary people on it who’ve been taught critical thinking skills and been given evidence but as an example of what happened in wartime the government concluded that that it wasn’t going to come from taxation, an unfair burden on the poor, so they brought in rationing.’
And here, even my infinite patience is being tested beyond endurance. Imagine that, ‘ordinary people’ who have acquired ‘critical thinking skills’ and can appreciate ‘evidence’ and therefore almost reach levels of intelligence of the members of the enlightened few, the elect. I swear I am not making this up, and urge people to check Mallen Bakers’ video, where Bradbrook can be heard saying this at the end.
I find such people insensitive, inhuman, uncomprehending, undemocratic, cold, and unappealing. And so do ‘ordinary’ people. I have no doubt that they would class me as belonging among the ‘ordinary,’ standing in need of enlightenment and education. It’s just that in being ‘ordinary,’ and having not only learned but taught ‘critical thinking skills,’ I can spot a racket a mile off. Such people are nowhere near as clever as they are. They are typical of idealists and elitists who consider themselves superior to people and secede from the society of others in order to legislate to it from the Empyrean they occupy above the clouds. From here, they govern ‘ordinary’ folk, and all the more effectively in being able to mould their minds and manipulate their emotions.
To repeat – this has nothing to do with socialism, it is the very antithesis of socialism as a self-governing society. The use of the wartime analogy is the give-away, the taste for war-time control and order. How about social revolution instead of war, a social transformation to get rid of the poor and their would-be universal dictators?
Baker is scathing in his condemnation for other reasons. He argues that the Committee on Climate Change Net Zero by 2050 programme argued that it is possible to achieve net zero without people having to make difficult and unpopular sacrifices and without having to put back the progress we’ve made worldwide in reducing absolute poverty. Although he is arguing from and for a position that is very different to mine, Baker makes a point with which I firmly agree here. Something very strange has happened in what is presented as leftist politics. Through the colonisation of socialism by the professional middle class and bourgeois, socialism was turned into social (parliamentary) democracy and fitted to the contours of bourgeois society. Along the way, the working class were ejected from their own politics, and the promise of a socialism predicated on science, technology, industry, and modernisation was lost. Instead, the bourgeois antithesis of capitalist modernity as the end of history and the romantic yearning of a pre-modern fullness came to be offered as the only two options in history. The future became no more than the capitalist present enlarged. The realisation that that future is impossible without swallowing up the world in a global heat machine has rendered the liberal left nostalgic, reactionary, and backward, turning against the human potentialities developed by the capital system, renouncing such anthropocentrism and demanding a return to the past. Marx presented socialism as a forward looking society that realized the potentialities repressed within capitalist relations; this environmental liberal leftism is really a nostalgic romanticism and reaction and looks backward. The movement is dominated by well-off and comfortable bourgeois and high bourgeois campaigning against the claims and concerns of ‘ordinary’ people. It is a middle class expropriation of leftist politics and its reshaping in its image. The socialist case for the abolition of the capital system is based on the realisation of the potentials for a free, more equal, more democratic, more technologically advanced society. Against this, environmentalist radicals are demanding an end to both capitalism and, beyond it, socialism, to return to a pre-modern existence, living on locally sourced food and never travelling. Whereas Marx saw the Industrial Revolution as developing the means of the free and equal society of socialism, and capitalists see people as being healthier, wealthier, better educated and longer lived than at any time in history, environmentalists consider it the worst thing that has ever happened in history. Whether the Industrial Revolution will seal humanity’s doom or establishes the basis for the socialist society is debatable. I argue the latter, and do so at length elsewhere. To understand that argument requires a dialectical appreciation of Marx’s critique of alienation. Here, though, I am more concerned to distinguish the socialism I argue for from what is being presented as socialism or leftism. In truth, this environmentalism is thoroughly pre-modern, backward, undemocratic, elitist, authoritarian, and reactionary. It is the incarnation in leftist politics of the nostalgic romantic fantasy that is the twin antithesis of capitalist competition in the bourgeois viewpoint:
It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.
Marx Gr 1973: 162
Some of the bourgeois have realized that capital has come to reach its limits, beyond which it can go no further. From this, taking for granted the eternal nature of capitalist categories, they have concluded there is no further progress. The idea of socialism as Marx presented it is not even considered. And so they look backward. Their view of necessity in politics is determined to make people poorer and seeks to impose an extraordinary austerity on ordinary people – shutting down industry, stopping people flying and travelling, putting people out of work. Zero carbon by 2025 entails a drastic destabilization managed by an environmental austerity that makes the economic austerity of recent times look like happy days. The claim is that such measures are necessary to avert an ecological catastrophe that undermines the living conditions of millions of people. The truth is that that is precisely what such measures would bring about – the progress made in turning back disease, poverty, famine unravelled, with who knows what implications. Such a view will never be accepted democratically, and they know it. So there is this war of attrition. For what? No one will vote for this backward fantasy of living a small and meaningless life enclosed in space. Should such ideas be put before the public, few would vote for it. Hence the pressure that is placed upon government to enact and enforce legislation in the here and now of environmental crisis and necessity. They know fine well that the vast majority of people would not agree with them, hence the ruse of citizens’ assemblies to be fed specific information on certain issues. There is an inherently undemocratic element at the core of the argument and that alone identifies it as anti-socialist. It’s simple: no autonomous voice and agency on the part of the common people, then no socialism. You may call it what you like, but it isn’t socialism.
It is this that I object to in Mallen Baker’s critique. He is right to criticize Extinction Rebellion as authoritarian and undemocratic, he is wrong to identify them as left-wing. He states that XR ‘want an authoritarian left-wing eco-government that forces people to live in the approved lifestyle.’ XR make a big thing of being ‘beyond politics.’ I distrust any and every claim to be non-political, not least when advanced in the public sphere.
Baker claims that he is not reading minds here in making this criticism, ‘it’s entirely there in what they say.’ The elitism and authoritarianism is manifest. My worry is why so few people on what is left of the left haven’t been alive to this. I suspect that many are so blinded and so excited by the anti-capitalist implications as to miss the anti-socialist practice.
Baker makes another good point when he states that whilst the majority of people who have joined the movement probably wouldn’t want an eco-authoritarianism, the way that the recruitment process is designed to radicalize people to the maximum extent could, in time, mould a public supporting eco-austerity. XR clearly hope that they will get a wider movement of highly committed activists prepared to be arrested and ‘then go the whole hog.’ The problem is, without an explicit politics entailing a clear end-game, it is not apparent what that whole hog might be. If it is government acting to curtail capital accumulation and carbon emissions, then it is based on an impossible premise – the state as integral to the functioning of the capital economy lacks the autonomy and the power to act this way, meaning that such ambitions are destined to be frustrated. That leaves a lot of radicalised people convinced of the fundamental rightness of their cause. In interview after interview of people defending the campaign of civil disobedience, note how many claim that those being arrested and disturbing the public peace ‘passionately believe’ in their cause. With that licence, there is no telling how far they will be prepared to go once it is realized that government is not free to act at its bidding. Social (parliamentary) Democracy learned the hard way in the twentieth century that the capital system is not at bidding of the speeches of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no matter how many victories in democratic election social democratic parties won. The politics of permanent protest is destined to meet with a similarly hard lesson, taking us right back to addressing the nature of the political within capitalist society – the original spur for socialism.
For all the claims of being engaged in peaceful, non-violent protest, there is no telling where an explicitly lawless movement – having broken the taboo of law-breaking – may go in light of its failure. As Baker argues, you may well end up with highly radicalized people who decide to go underground and eschew the non-violent principles the group espouses and use violence instead. And why not, given that the cause is right, they have truth on their side, and they passionately believe in their cause? This is presuming that government hasn’t appropriated statements of environmental necessity to itself and instituted an authoritarian austerian environmental regime. Either way, these are entirely predictable consequences of the sort of radicalisation process that XR are promoting.
I agree there is a need for concerted action within a comprehensive framework on climate change. I have argued this at length since the 1990s, and continue to argue it. I have made that case time and again with respect to those who have sought to block, frustrate, and prevent climate action. In engaging with people identified as ‘deniers’ over the years, I noticed the extent to which arguments over the science were actually a proxy for politics. The real problem was not the science, and campaigners who restated the science over and again wasted their time. The problem was the politics, and it still is. And environmentalists are still refusing to engage in the politics, combining protest with authoritarian imposition, all lecturing and educating, and precious little engagement and mobilisation.
I said years ago that I have a hunch that things will get worse before they get better, and sooner than the mainstream thinks. But putting a date on climate catastrophe is neither here nor there. We know enough to know there’s big problems afoot. The question is one of practical transformation. Not action within prevailing institutions and relations implicated in eco-catastrophe but action that brings about their transformation in transitioning to a new society. I was told many years ago that such a position entails a long-term transformation at a time when we have lost the long-term. And so the necessary conditions of transitioning to future society were not cultivated, ensuring that we do indeed lack a long term. I’ll not be joining in the demand for authoritarian imposition to ensure survival in a meaningless universe. I see no point whatsoever in it. Survival is not an end in itself; humanity has to be worthy of survival. There needs to be a reckoning with the purposeless materialism that brought us to this. I warned that it would come to this, with geoengineering gambles thrown in for good measure. With every warning I issued ignored and my concerns about the failure to engage the people dismissed – ‘tell them we’re doomed’ I was told after raising concerns – I’ll be damned if I shall be joining this rescue squad.
Baker warns of those who would seize on the environmental crisis and seek to use it to further their own agenda. I’m not sure what to make of that criticism. The causes of this crisis can be identified and addressing these causes cannot but come with political and moral implications. I make an issue of this in the cause of my consistent argument for Rational Freedom, balancing autonomy and authority as against the constant swinging between the extremes of libertarianism and authoritarianism. Authoritarian governments have never been to the benefit of the people not have they been environmentally sensitive, says Mallen Baker. I agree, and would add that neither have their counterpart libertarian regimes.
Baker opines that these bourgeois leaders of XR might be ‘too nice to become the vanguard of a leftist eco communist revolution, which is why few people involved will take these warnings seriously.’ Nice, reasonable, non-violent people conceived in the hypocritical image of a bourgeois society that reproduces itself through the anonymous tyranny and violence of ‘the system.’ This is an estranged world built on a systemic irresponsibility, those comfortable within that estrangement being oblivious to its systemic violence, pushing the constant revolutionising that Marx noted in The Communist Manifesto to its limits and beyond. Baker notes that the process of radicalisation that has been initiated will have unintended consequences. How could it not, given the extreme likelihood of its ends being realized? Ask for the impossible, as a campaign tool, and someone may come along and take it as a political programme. ‘They will hold up their hands and say we could never have known. I’m here to right now to say yes you should know, I am here waving the flag at you, inconvenient and annoying you may find it.’ I’m waving that flag, too, the red flag of real socialism, as against the bourgeois flirting with eco-authoritarianism.
Every centralized system, every concentration of power, ever turned tyrannical and despotic. The warning signs are all over this strand of environmentalism. It’s not new, but is inherent in the scientism and rationalism of a movement that consistently denigrates politics and undercuts the democratic voice. In my critique of ‘climate rebellion’ (cited above), I traced this issue back to the authoritarianism of The Club of Rome.
Addressing crises, however pressing, does not justify abandoning the hard-learned and hard-earned lessons of political history.
See the The Mallen Baker Show upon which the above is based here
Put simply, these are classic cult recruitment methods and do not cultivate a true public or an active, informed citizenship. Movements such as this build a cult of authority, cultivate a followship rather than a fellowship of equals. The radicalization it involves can develop into a fanaticism that goes to extremes.
XR’s ‘demand’ for the creation of Citizen Assemblies does not prove their democratic credentials, quite the reverse. This is dressed up as a call for more democracy, but its motive is transparent. No authoritarian politics ever presents itself in the first instance as being anti-democratic. On the contrary, they always flag up their concern to represent the democratic will of the people. The ‘real’ will of the people, that is, their ‘objective interest,’ what the people would will were they ever in the fortunate position of having being trained in critical thinking skills and being presented with the right evidence. What is striking is how infantile it all is, and what is worrying is how many lack the political and historical awareness to see the obvious pitfalls. Baker writes in a comment that ‘to argue that a glorified focus group fed carefully controlled inputs is somehow more democratic that one person one vote takes an Orwellian use of redefining words and what they are supposed to mean. Roger Hallam is on record as stating that the group's strategy is intended to achieve the overthrow of the state - hence the insistence by various spokespeople that this is not a protest, it's a rebellion. The logic of a zero carbon by 2025 position is draconian centralised control, imposed rationing, banning of various activities such as flying. The group's insistence that it rejects any contributions to solving climate change that would leave the current system intact is striking. No to new generation nuclear power. No to smart farming methods to make agriculture more drought resistant. No to carbon capture and storage. If you were interested in solving climate change rather than overthrowing capitalism, all of those solutions would be seen as having a role to play - not an easy get-out-of-jail-free role, but a role nonetheless. At some point you have to look at the implications of what people say and call the obvious conclusions.’
Precisely. Set up the question in terms of environmental necessity, and the solutions that Baker identifies are all on the agenda, and more geoengineering besides. If system change really is the goal, then do it the right way by building a mass movement and establishing a constructive model containing transitions strategies.
As it is, the XR approach is neither fish nor fowl.
Baker is insufficiently alive to the extent to which the current political system is subject to corporate capture and systemic constraint, thereby undermining its capacity to effectively to converging social and ecological crises. XR are right on this, only to pile on massive demands onto government without the social transformation necessary to make that government anything but an authoritarian regime. It is absurd to argue that the social system which brought us to the brink of eco-catastrophe is able to pull us back from the brink without substantive social transformation.
That’s my case for socialism. I shall end by quoting Baker’s critical response:
“First, I see no evidence that the British system gives undue influence to corporations. Unlike the US system where the terms of donations routinely given would be considered corrupt practices in the UK. I see plenty of decisions that go against the wishes and interests of corporations. However, any good system of governance will have open ears to all stakeholders - all groups affected by decisions. And that includes the private sector, which is responsible for the creation of wealth that makes all things possible. A system where you transferred decision-making authority to a focus group (I won't call it a Citizen's Assembly - it's not elected so it doesn't represent citizens) means you deliberately exclude the voices of those that would be affected by decisions from decision making. Happen to be no farmers in the room? Well, that group won't mind policies that ruin the fortunes of farmers. No energy workers? Well, they may come to believe any old rubbish about what's possible. So then you're relying on the quality of information that gets fed into them. Who selects that? Because that isn't a democratic process at all.
Sorry - that is not better democracy. It's a perfectly fine consultative process, which is how it was used in Ireland. But if you're talking about governments ceding decision making power to it, then it's something else entirely.
There's no attempt on my part to straw man anything. I'm describing the implications of what is proposed. It's hard to straw man what XR wants, because they don't talk about what they want. They have no programme. They don't say "this is how we think we can get to zero by 2025, but these ideas should be put to a Citizen's Assembly to see what people think". They look at the detailed programme behind the Committee on Climate Change, which illustrates the practical measures needed to be taken in all sectors, and don't engage with any of the detail, they just say "too little too late". But then they have no programme of their own - they just say they'll hold a glorified focus group and somehow the magical answers will emerge from that. How is that a more credible solution to anything? It's hard to straw man that process really.
Rejecting a half-baked proposition for change is not the same as suggesting that "the current system is working fine". However, if we are going to be able to deal with climate change, we need ways to do so that will work with the UK system, the US constitutional democracy, China's communist/capitalist authoritarian system, the Islamic states - all of them. A version that requires all systems of governments to be converted to a completely untested version that some random campaigners think might be a good idea before you can take effective action - that is an extremely odd version of what you would do in a time-urgent crisis. If you think that structural changes to the system are needed to tackle the situation, you ought to be able to articulate what those structural changes should be. I haven't yet seen anyone even attempt it, so the argument carries zero credibility.”
Those last two lines indicate precisely where our energies should be.