Don’t Wake Up
I’ve been hearing people say “wake up” for too many years now. If that kind of ‘appeal’ didn’t work way back when, then the odds are that it won’t work now, because the appeal lacks any kind of political, socio-economic, and institutional purchase and rootedness: it is politically and sociologically illiterate. It presumes a social identity which does not exist but which stands in need of creation: an identity in which the short-term individual interest and good and the long term societal interest and good are combined. That is a matter of social formation, and character formation, too. To issue demands for ‘action’ in the absence of appropriate conditions and character within social relations making such action comprehensible is to invite continued non-response.
Hence the repeated, and increasingly shrill, recourse to fear, anxiety, and alarm is an expression of impotence – it reeks of hopelessness and anticipation of failure in light of past failure. It’s more of the same, only in louder, more desperate, form. We know that it is not persuasive. Such an approach is inevitable in the absence of a genuine inner motive power at the level of both individual persons and society. Such appeals lack motivational force, for the reason that the springs of action are lacking. Shout as loud as you like, with all the foul language at your command, the result will be the same. Such an environmentalism is missing the essential springs of action, it has no social and democratic connection and content, leaving only attempts to engineer that action extraneously via existing and untransformed institutions. That way lies authoritarian imposition and bureaucratic control, the ideal institutional incarnation of bland, classless references to ‘humanity,’ ‘we,’ and unmediated ‘nature.’
Having finally, at long, long last, understood the need for myths, morals, and metaphysics, the extremely clever folk that compose the main body of environmental activism are setting about doing what they have already been doing with values, virtues, visions, stories, and emotions, which is engineering a ‘scientifically correct’ myth for the age of purposeless, valueless, meaningless materialism. Without inner motive force, recourse to external management and manipulation becomes the inevitable form of ‘action.’ Any action which serves the predetermined end will do, by any means. The whole approach is lacking in transformative significance, either with respect to institutions or persons. The world and its contents are acted upon extraneously. People remain as passive as ever they were, with zero participation in their own transformation.
We should be careful not to mistake social media for reality. Unfortunately, environmental activists and campaigners tend to have strong social media profiles. Unfortunately, it does seem that we can judge environmentalism by its electronic identity. Far too many remain in ‘consciousness raising’ ‘wake up’ mode, in the utterly deluded belief that the problem is one of education and enlightenment. Switch on social media and you will see the same mentality right across the range of activism: ‘wake up, act now.’ Over a decade ago, as I sought to diagnose the environmental problem with more sociological, moral, and metaphysical depth than is normally done, I was met with the impatient cry that ‘it is the time for action!’ I asked for a proper diagnosis of the problem to ensure that the action taken was appropriate and effective. It was dismissed as ‘idle intellectualising.’ I was assured that we know what the problem is, and assured that we know what actions we need to take. This struck me as hugely complacent. It also struck me as remarkably elitist and authoritarian. There was no need to refer to the citizen body to determine the course of action to be taken, since it was already known; there was no role for creative citizen agency, since the ends were already known and hence pre-political. Socially and politically, the approach is empty. There is no mystery as to why such environmentalism meets with little response from the public – the public are excluded and treated as a passive mass. The only role for people is to consent to pre-determined environmental actions and policies – and to pay for them. People are not so much sleepwalking as sceptical of those who would act in their stead and spend their money in support of their own preferences and choices. It is environmentalists who need to do some waking up here, big time, and quickly: they need to wake up politically and socially, engage people properly, directly, from within, rather than harangue and hector piously and impotently from without, which we know is ineffective, as well as annoying. That endless lecturing from without is also politically dangerous in creating a psychic climate which normalizes ‘necessity,’ makes it available to ‘government’ to act on, and fosters a willingness on the part of people to accept – even demand – a curtailment of their liberty. Instead of a genuine social transformation addressing the root causes of the problems and crises to be resolved, we get an authoritarian pacification that keeps existing social relations and power structures firmly in place. Does anyone seriously think that power, embedded so deeply in the social and institutional fabric, will yield anything without political struggle? To think so is dangerously naïve. This is the part that interests me – the tendency of environmentalists to skirt, even deny, politics and social divisions – the thing we used to call ‘class.’
Instead of a class analysis that is attuned to the contradictory class dynamics and relations of the crisis, we get education and enlightenment. Far too many still think this a problem of ‘raising consciousness,’ of giving lessons on climate science to ‘cranky uncles’ in denial of ‘the science.’ Anyone who thinks that ‘cranky uncles’ are the problem and that ‘the science’ will somehow resolve the challenges of politics, ethics, policy, the embeddedness of specific social forms and relations, political economy, capital as process, logic, and relation, class dynamics, and the motivational economy - you know, the socially real questions of 'real people' in 'real society' – is still at school. It is those people who need to do the waking up here, both sociologically and politically.
I long ago concluded that Marx’s institutional and systemic analysis is fundamentally correct, but his revolutionary agency isn’t there, leaving his view as detached from its means of realisation as the utopian ideals he criticised. Hence the recourse to surrogates and extraneous engineering, with all manner of manipulative and authoritarian implications.
That leaves us with big problems to address. Science is little or no help here. For the reason that the problem is not, first and foremost, a scientific one.
I try to do some ‘waking up’ of my own. To be specific, I try to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers by stating bluntly that climate change is not the central problem we face but is the physical manifestation of a deeper problem that lies at the heart of our social relations, relations to one another but also the relation of the social to the natural metabolism. It’s the specific forms of mediation that matters. If you have nothing to say on that, then you have nothing to say, resorting to shouting, screaming, and bullying to mask the lack of substance.
Crisis and necessity are being normalized by fear and alarm, and it is all part of an environmental strategy that proceeds in lieu of a genuine politics and ethics. This is not merely wrong and ineffective, it is positively dangerous in clearing the path towards full-blown authoritarian rule. The problem with making ‘necessity’ the key driver in politics is that it is very easily appropriated and exploited by other political forces. One of the most dangerous features of the contemporary political situation is the sociological and ethical illiteracy and incomprehension of the principal political actors, whether we refer to the ‘elites’ in government or in media and culture. One of the remarkable features of the conflictual political scene is that the activists and campaigners are as clueless with respect to the social relations and class dynamics at the heart of this crisis. These roots and causes are, nevertheless, clear and they are key. Failure to address these material relations and contradictory social dynamics results in misdiagnosis, ineffective appeal and action, and displacement. The language of ‘necessity’ will be normalized only for it to take other political forms, not necessarily benign. Instead of the enlightened and benevolent despotism environmentalists may envisage in their political innocence and indolence, we will get pure despotism. And who could object? It’s time to act, after all. The end, as we are repeatedly being told, justifies the means.
I note the way that questions of class are consistently overlooked. Frankly, class is openly denied. I know this for a fact. In personal exchanges, whenever I have raised issues of class relations I have been repeatedly admonished to the effect that class is an instance of ‘us and them,’ ‘black and white,’ divisive thinking that is an anachronism. I respond by telling proponents of ‘humanity in general’ that we live in an ‘us and them’ world and that decisions over the allocation and use of resources are structured according to asymmetrical relations of class power. That critical observation on my part is met with little response and zero agreement. We are in the presence of the class that is not a class, the class that dare not acknowledge its existence as a class, lest its pretensions to neutrality and universality be exposed. In Affirming Politics and Democracy Against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism, I critically analysed this class as an update of Hegel’s universal class, the class compositing the state bureaucracy.
I am sceptical of those claiming independence and neutrality from some Archimedean point outside of society and its stakes and interests. Since there is no such point – other than the realm of Platonic forms – then all actors in the political arena have some relation to existing society and its arrangements. Although I argue for transcendent standards of truth and justice, those standards can only ever be incarnated, known, and lived in the specifics of time and place. Those claiming independence and neutrality here are in effect claiming a God’s-eye view and, with it, the unquestionable and unanswerable authority of God.
The scotomizing of class is significant, dangerous, and needs to be exposed on account of its political consequences.
I have been known to tell a joke I first heard circulating among academic colleagues back in the late eighties/early nineties. A professor meets his/her old PhD student. The dialogue goes like this:
Professor : what are you doing these days?
Student : I'm researching the survival of the class system in America.
Professor: I didn't know there was a class system in America.
Student : Most people think that. That's why it survives.
In an age of contention over any number of issues and identities, many of lying hundreds of years in the past, with many going to the dawn of civilisation and the rise of hierarchy and patriarchy, it is remarkable – distinctly suspicious and significant – how little fuss is made of class. The working class, if they are mentioned at all, are considered to be a dull and dumb passive mass, dupes of the system, uncaring and unknowing, complicit in the system in their greed and stupidity. This is not sociology, this is demonology. These are the sleeping masses to be woken up. Such attitudes reveal to me how little activists actually know ‘ordinary’ people, how little connection they have with them, and how little respect. We know we are in the presence of elitism of some form as soon as we see the extent and depth of scorn such as this.
Too few address the class relations that lie at the heart of the contradictory dynamics of the contemporary world, with climate change being one problem of many. Rather than address class, activists and campaigners make a fetish of physical things every bit as much as the people they claim to oppose: all are in the grip of alienation, engaging in a competition of rationalisations that redistributes power a little around the surface level without truly uprooting and restructuring it.
I now turn to the article ‘Class, the word that elites and would be elites want you to forget and ignore,’ and direct critical attention away from just the ruling class to the dominant voices in a supposedly oppositional politics to note the absence of class and class analysis, indeed the explicit devaluation and denial of the legitimacy of class.
Chris Hedges writes that ‘the culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage.’ He begins: ‘Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx grounded their philosophies in the understanding that there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the rest of us.’ He continues:
‘The oligarchs are happy to talk about race. They are happy to talk about sexual identity and gender. They are happy to talk about patriotism. They are happy to talk about religion. They are happy to talk about immigration. They are happy to talk about abortion. They are happy to talk about gun control. They are happy to talk about cultural degeneracy or cultural freedom. They are not happy to talk about class.’
Quite. I continually repeat this poem, in the hope that people get the point. They rarely do. Right to the end which recognizes one’s own personal responsibility alongside the structural cause:
Know thy enemy:
he does not care what colour you are
provided you work for him
and yet you do!
he does not care how much you earn
provided you earn more for hi
and yet you do!
he does not care who lives in the room at the top
provided he owns the building
and yet you strive!
he will let you write against him
provided you do not act against him
and yet you write!
he sings the praises of humanity
but knows machines cost more than men.
Bargain with him, he laughs, and beats you at it;
challenge him, and he kills.
Sooner than lose the things he owns
he will destroy the world.
SMASH CAPITAL NOW!
But as you hasten to be free
And build your commonwealth
Do not forget the enemy
Who lies within yourself.
- Christopher Logue, Know Thy Enemy
Frankly, if you were a member of a ruling class at bay, you could have done nothing better to break up a growing opposition than to divide it within by way of an identity politics that runs to infinity in its endless nominalist recreation of reality.
Hedges writes:
‘Race, gender, religion, abortion, immigration, gun control, culture and patriotism are issues used to divide the public, to turn neighbor against neighbor, to fuel virulent hatreds and antagonisms. The culture wars give the oligarchs, both Democrats and Republicans, the cover to continue the pillage.’
Beyond the divisions of left and right in the conventional political sphere, I am interested in the extent to which activists and campaigners are politicking 24/7 on seemingly every issue but class. It really is as if we have a licensed, even sponsored, radicalism of the kind that is utterly and ultimately safe for the ruling class. Class is off limits, precisely because it is the one ‘identity’ that has substantive transformative significance. Bizarrely, whereas Marx made class the key to the resolution of all other issues, contemporary activists tend to see the resolution of these other issues as the key to resolving socio-economic problems. Marx has been inverted, and it shows in the political and social impotence of an endless activism on the part of people who lament continuously that no-one is listening and nothing is happening. Might I suggest to such people that you are doing it all wrong – listen, learn, change. And instead of telling everyone to wake up, wake up yourself! Environmentalism has a long way to go before it becomes politically and sociologically relevant. At present, it is delivering truths from the outside – for a genuinely ecological transformation of the political, it needs to be on the inside, with a practical and critical purchase on the social terrain.
The problems here run deep indeed. Long before the world plunged into the endless inanities and insanities of ‘cancel culture’ (which are impossible to get out of, given the lack of a reality check serving to constrain a rampant nominalism). To the people who are insistently complaining over some end of the world or another that is always about to befall either them or all of us, I simply say life is hard and then you die, and I no more than the identity you have constructed or the nature you worship care.
I was writing of the self-cancelling ‘freedom’ that lies at the heart of modernity. This self-cancellation applies as much in ethics as it does in economics. In my PhD thesis, I developed Marx’s critique of free competition as the negation of individual freedom by way of its anti-social development. (Marx Grundrisse 1973:652). But economics is only one part of a bigger issue. The ethical dimension is profound, and one that people still underestimate. In a world in which each individual is entitled to choose the good as he or she sees fit, ethics has dissolved into value judgement, irreducible subjective opinion, with no objective standard available by which to evaluate and decide between competing claims. It was no step at all from this position to the view that truth about reality could be determined the same way. Science and ethics, fact and value, are twin poles: lose the one, and the other falls and for the same reason. I see little sign of that issue being understood, let alone addressed, let alone resolved. Too many are still getting excited by ‘conversation starters’ and ‘beginnings.’ That tells me that they still have it in their heads that the problem is one of education and enlightenment and that all you need to do is to inform empty heads, waken people up, and hey presto, action will happen.
The clash of incommensurate and irreducible values in unwinnable wars = all lose.
‘Where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights’ (Weber 1918).
It is in light of the above that I turn to the movie that is inciting extended commentary on social media. I comment here with great reluctance. The movie is insulated from criticism by the argument that ‘it has got people talking’ and brought climate change to public attention. The latter claim is as laughable as the claim that climate change is never covered. It beggars belief that environmentalists can be found still making the claim that the news media doesn’t cover climate change. Those who are critical rightly contend that the media does nothing but cover climate change! The assertion is being openly ridiculed, with seemingly every issue being reduced to climate change. Liverpool lose to Leicester in the football and the cause is sought in climate change. Pull the other one, because this is now manifestly untrue. I finally called this out early in 2019, when environmentalists were objecting to the attention the fire at Notre Dame cathedral received when climate change is never covered. Never covered as in every day! These are the claims of activists in the grip of campaign imperatives and they need to be called out on it, not only because it is boring, but because it may force them to the next level in politics, away from a permanent enlightenment and resistance:
As for the movie, it is overwhelmingly American-centric, as if the problem of climate change and climate change denial is American. It isn’t. Nothing in this movie has implications for the BRIC nations that account for more than 40% of the world’s carbon emissions. America is not the world. The American government could concede every demand made by the environmentalists – bankrupting itself and entrenching social divisions in the process – and make practically little difference in arresting climate change. So this is cultural narcissism, a reproduction of US cultural hegemony. This generates a thoroughly wrongheaded politics, placing the United States at the forefront of the response to a threatened global catastrophe, to the neglect of the rest of the world. That may be inevitable, since this is US movie for a US audience, appealing to American citizens to fight and win the global war for all humankind. There are other inevitable but regrettable complicities, not least that our global saviours – or educators at least – are multi-millionaire, A-list celebrities backed by a multi-million-dollar production. We are not merely a long way from Marx’s designation of the working class as the ‘universal class,’ the class whose particular emancipation will emancipate humanity in general, we are at precisely the opposite end. I can’t help but compare this inversion to the inversion of wealth creators and parasites in modern neoliberalism, with the rich now lauded as the creators of wealth and exploited labour damned as parasitic. In an age of inverted values we are expected to accept our revolutionary liberators to be those with fame and fortune. I don’t think so. The movie doesn’t so much ignore class as reinforce the jaundiced and caricatured image of class in the contemporary world. ‘Raising consciousness’ has naught to do with ‘class consciousness.’ The – predictable – criticisms of Trump take aim also at those who attended the Trump rallies. The working class appear only to be disparaged as stupid. The misanthropy that has stalked environmentalism since its incipience takes a precise focus when portraying the working class as greedy and selfish, not merely complicit in consumer capitalism but its mainstay. This is bigoted bourgeois bile. Trump’s biggest supporters were the upper middle class. The Democrats lost support of large sections of the working class as a result of being Wall Street rather than Main Street. That’s a political failure for the bourgeois to acknowledge and own.
The movie is also partisan in a narrowly political sense, crudely and simplistically contrasting the Democratic angels with the Republican devils. I can understand Americans with a dog in the political fight getting excited by the blatant pandering to their prejuduces; I’m incredulous at the way non-Americans are so pleased. Are they really so desperate, so politically bereft, that they see any coverage of climate change as a positive? If this is the extent of environmentalists’ political vision and ability, then the situation really is hopeless. It is easy enough to criticize the Trump administration for selling out science and the environment for private gain. The neglect of Democrat complicity in environmental degradation is not only partisan but deeply dangerous in the way it encourages politics-as-usual with the positive support of environmentalists who actually believe something positive is being done. The Biden administration is responsible for the greatest ever auction of off-shore oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Those who think environmentalism an anti-Republican issue are falling for the delusions of conventional politics and the idea that the inflation of small divisions constitutes the sum total of politics. The ruling class are agreed that the fundamentals are non-negotiable, and it is these fundamentals that are responsible for ecocide on the planet. Both Republicans and Democrats are capitalist to the core, seeing their role as being one to facilitate the accumulation process. The same with respect to militarism. To reduce the target to the Republican party leads to a terrible misdiagnosis and a tragic politics. Worryingly, environmentalists are lapping it up (if social media is anything to go by). Also worrying is seeing, yet again, the old Stalinist argument that anyone who is not in favour of the film is really part of the problem. If you are not for us, you are objectively on the other side. Or maybe, in being critical and pointing out flaws and inadequacies, critics might be seeking to strengthen the environmental case.
There are other aspects of the film which I have criticized as features of the environmental movement many times in the past. I am boring myself by repetition now, and no doubt others also. I refer people to my Posts page and the criticisms of environmentalism as politics. I oppose the World War II analogy and the demand for the world to go on a global war footing. War is authoritarian, totalitarian even, involving a suspension of democracy. If we can envisage something as widespread as war, then we can envisage social transformation – do it. The enemy is not external and hence is not easily identified and fought; the problem is internal and lies at the heart of social relations. The war analogy diverts attention away from the precise location and hence leads in the direction of the wrong solutions. It does – whether you consider this intentional or unintentional – lead in the direction of the ‘big state.’ I don’t care to live within the confines of the austerian Green Megamachine under the auspices of the clean, green corporate form. Much else is wrong. I have argued for the need for metaphysics and metaphorics, morals and motivations, tapping into the emotional intelligence of human beings. There is some sign that environmentalists are getting this, but their approach remains behavioural and manipulative. The use of asteroids and comets as external threats is really poor as a metaphor for climate change. The problem is not external but internal, the result of consequences perversely wrought by the normal operation of prevailing social relations – climate crisis is not an accident, to be overcome by ameliorative, reformist action, but necessary, to be overcome by transformative action. It is remarkable how the working class are routinely condemned for their greed and apathy, and yet the necessary systemic transgression of the capital system and its personifications go without scrutiny. The result is that a patently inadequate reformist politics involving massive government intervention and expenditure is offered as the solution in place of the substantial social transformation – uprooting social forms and altering systemic imperatives – that really is required. And activists who think themselves radical, progressive, liberal, enlightened, caring, and knowledgeable cheer it on. They see hope here; I see only desperation. How else to describe positive reactions to this film, claiming it to be bold and radical, revolutionary even, when it demonstrably is not. The only conclusion I draw in light of such responses is that political awareness is at a miserably low level. The ones trying to wake others up need to examine their own premises.
The movie is being defended as a ‘conversation starter,’ just as Greta Thunberg’s school strike was described as a ‘beginning.’ Environmentalism ought to be well beyond this stage by now. That it isn’t suggests an arrested development that is chronic and congenital, in which case it is time to take the environment out of the hands of environmentalists. Because they are evidently not up to the political challenge, leaving environmentalism wide open to appropriation, diversion, and perversion.
It is, admittedly, a deep-rooted problem and one that evades anything but the most difficult of solutions. Marx was unduly optimistic. I don’t think the working class are the revolutionary subject Marx thought them to be, at least not subjectively. Objectively, the class has also fragmented. Class consciousness, unity, and solidarity cannot be principally a matter of economics. Marx was right to condemn the diremption of capitalist society, but wrong to rest unity and community on economics, the most ephemeral and transitory of bonds and ties. A generation after Marx came Nietzsche and the ‘death of God,’ pointing to the loss of the authoritative and overarching moral framework, and then another generation on came Weber. The world still lives under Weber's shadow, and ‘where there is nothing, both the Kaiser and the proletarian have lost their rights.’ (Weber Politics as a Vocation 1918). There are no winners in a disenchanted terrain. The clash of incommensurate and irreducible values in such a terrain takes us into an era of unwinnable wars in which all lose in time. fight it out, win, lose, at least call it class struggle. And know that without God it's all a pointless power struggle in a sophist world anyway. Environmentalists persist in thinking Nature ground enough – and ‘God enough’ – for a secure foundation. They are wrong. Nature is not only an empty signifier, it couldn’t care less.
I address this question of Nature as an empty signifier at length here:
We live in prophetless and godless times, argued Weber. According to the materialists, the world is objectively meaningless, valueless, and purposeless and is entirely indifferent to human concerns. That was Einstein’s view of God, that’s what Monod and Dawkins say is reality, ‘you are nothing but a pack of neurons,’ says Crick. Environmentalists base themselves on this anti-metaphysics and then issue the moral imperative to ‘save the planet!’ Without an overarching and authoritative moral framework, there can be no moral imperatives. We can call them that, but they lack the true qualities of moral imperatives. Nietzsche was superb at showing the emptiness of modern moral values. They are inheritances of a God-centred framework – remove God, and they lack content and purchase: they no longer persuade, compel, inspire, and obligate. Environmentalists are trying to persuade, compel, inspire, and obligate on the basis of Nature, but Nature doesn’t care: there are biological imperatives to reproduce and survive, but moral commands on the basis of Nature have the same quality as the instruction to breath. To speak for Nature through the reified voice of ‘the science’ is merely a bogus morality and metaphysics. As with the metaphor of random celestial events and bodies, it is all bad and sad. We are past wake up alarm calls and conversation starters. The radical moment is now. The warnings came long ago.
Kommentare