The End of Civilisation or the End of the Capital System
Affirming a Democratic Ecology against the Ecology of Fear
The overwhelming emphasis of climate campaigners and activists in public discourse is upon predicted temperature increases as a result of greenhouse gases and the need to achieve net zero by any date before 2050 down to 2025. The question of 'how' and by what means this target is to be achieved raises issues of transitions and transformations that are far more than institutional and technical, they involve forms of economic provision, governance, and lifestyle and hence people. Stated in such bald terms, with little or no thought given to politics, economics, and culture other than 'everything must change,' climate action implies authoritarian-elitist imposition – 'government' taking orders directly from 'the science' (or those who speak for 'the science' in the reified voice of 'Nature.') Such thing may signal the end of capitalism, it may not. It may herald a political, economic, and moral wasteland of an environmental austerity in which system preservation is rationalised in the name of necessity.
I make these observations in light of Frederic Jameson's statement that for some ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’ (Jameson 2003: 76). I make that point not to demand 'the end of capitalism,' but to try to get people to focus on the work of reconnection and reconstruction that needs to be undertaken to put civilisation on a viable basis.
At the heart of these questions is political economy and its critique. Driving the capital system from the first has been expropriation of the commons and their exploitation and use for private gain. The pursuit of exchange value spurred by the accumulative dynamic has driven the expansion of 'human activity' over the planet, transgressing both social and natural boundaries. The process of accumulation drives an endless and exponential expansion that knows no boundaries. This, defenders will say, is capitalism's great achievement, expanding material quantities far in excess of all other economic systems in history, giving people in ever greater numbers a level of affluence their ancestors could only have dreamt about. These defenders take no time at all in charging environmental critics, armed top to toe with energy-guzzling technology, not to mention time free from pressing social needs, with rank hypocrisy.
I do envisage the end of the capital system. But I envisage it more in the way that Marx envisaged it, as abolition as Aufhebung and Aufgehoben, in the Hegelian sense of a positive supersession that proceeds within a social and historical development process. A process, then, and not an event, a 'thing' undertaken by physical, institutional action and fiat. Hence my emphasis on the work of re-connection – restoring the ties, bonds, and loyalties of community between human beings, in terms of both public and social life – and reconstruction – establishing new forms of social mediation, new systems of economic provision, and new forms of government. Importantly, this all involves members of the demos themselves as conscious creative agents and citizens of the new social order. This is undoubtedly difficult work, institution building and system building. Most difficult of all, it involves people themselves as agents of social transformation as a self-transformation.
This work is long, hard, and boring – but the most effective and enduring. Try to shift the agenda in this direction and interest wanes. But this is where attention needs to be. If we are serious about supplanting the social forms driving the twin socio-ecological crisis that is upon us.
As I wrote this I received a message from an ecologist who specialises in the impacts of climate change on agriculture. Having read some of my work, sought advice, asking 'I am interested in solutions for the actual crisis of our society: social relations, ecological disaster, climate change, ... and how these relate to each other.'
How these things relate to each other is precisely my area. I tend to focus on solutions as they apply in the field of practical reason. My work seeks to build the bridge between the field of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the world, scientific knowledge, objectivity, fact, and its spin-off technological know-how) and the field of practical reason (politics and ethics, what we do in light of knowledge and know-how, value, subjectivity, motives and appetites, virtues, the moral know-why, and forms of economic provision). This is how I attempt the work of reconnection and reconstruction. Basically, I hold that a brute rationalism is not working and will not work and knowledge and know-how needs to be attached to the know-why, thus integrating the technical-institutional aspects and the practical aspects. This involves an analysis of social forms and relations with a view to supplanting ecologically destructive mediations by a more planful and respectful mediation. Instead of abstract, ahistorical, and sociologically meaningless references to 'humanity' and 'nature' and how 'we' 'must' 'act' I examine the mediated interchange between the human social metabolism and the universal metabolism of nature. This interchange is key, and makes the critique of political economy imperative, identifying specific social relations, forms, and drivers as against politically vague, neutral, and inert terms such as 'human activity' and 'we'.
Understanding how all these areas relate is key to effective solutions, transitions, and transformations. The three 'M's' as I call it: mediation, mediation, mediation. Or metaphysics, morals, and motivations, three more crucial 'M's' (my version of M Theory). This mediation is the 'appreciation' in the sage motto: 'freedom is the appreciation of necessity.'
Against that appreciation there is the danger of focusing on the facts and figures of climate crisis, and focusing so relentlessly as to give the impression that objective trends and tendencies are entirely lacking in subjective force and appetitive quality and hence are inevitabilities.
I won't go so far as to refer to climate disaster pornography, since I know the phrase traduces the work of many environmentalist friends who have been working tirelessly for years to sound the alarm on the looming eco-catastrophe. But there are institutional, systemic, and psychological reasons why governments, politicians, and people have been unresponsive to the alarm. The alarm has been heard. It is being heard daily. What is lacking are the effective and appropriate means and media of environmental action enabling a shift to a more benign existence. The state is not determinant but is determined, subject to the external constraints of the accumulative capital economy. Governments cannot, therefore, govern in the long-term interest of all – that public community does not exist and stands in need of creation. The state is one of capital's crucial second order mediations, providing the unity and degree of responsibility that capital, as a subjectless, irresponsible anarchy of global production, cannot provide. Demands for large-scale climate action issued to government are therefore being levelled upon an institution which is complicit in ecological crisis in the first place. There is a need, therefore, for social transformation to make government available as a genuine public domain amenable to moral, scientific, and democratic persuasion. Likewise the demands issued with respect to human behaviour. Individuals are caught up within socially structured patterns of behaviour. That point does not preclude personal responsibility. My work over the years has repeatedly emphasised that personal and collective responsibility go hand in hand. I consistently critique the liberal ontology that falsely separates and hold in antithetical the two essential aspects of human nature which belong together – individuality and sociality. Very many heated debates in modern society and politics issue from that false dualism, having people choose between personal responsibility – the liberal conservative, 'free' market option – and collective responsibility – the socialist option.
I develop socialism as that society which maintains a balance between the individual and the collective, recognizing freedom as a social project. I therefore give equal weight to personal and collective responsibility, insisting that the absence of the one impairs the quality, character, and operation of the other. Socialism here emerges as the socio-historical answer to Rabbi Hillel's question: 'If I am not for myself, who will be (personal responsibility)? But if I am only for myself, what am I (collective responsibility)?' Socialism, then, emerges as an associative mode of existence characterised by strong individuals and strong communities. That is not the society we live in, and there is little point in presenting problems for solution within current forms as if such a society of individual and collective responsibility exists. That society stands in need of creation. To repeat, the capital system is an inherently anarchic, subjectless, and irresponsible system of external constraint. In resolving the social and ecological crises issuing from a capital system that has expanded to its limits, we are charged with envisaging a new form of social existence beyond capital. My question goes back to Jameson's observation that many people seem more inclined to envisage the end of civilisation than the end of capitalism. The work of reconnection and reconstruction – in clear awareness that the capital system is being supplanted by a new social form – seems not to motivate and excite people in the way that warnings of doom and disaster to come does. I can only explain that bias in terms of Marx's observation in the Grundrisse that 'the bourgeois viewpoint' swings forever between presenting the prevailing capitalist order as natural and eternal, the end of history, on the one hand, and a romantic yearning for a lost unity, on the other – neither view takes us beyond the capital system, and will indeed ensure the end of civilisation:
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
It is in light of these observations that I interpret the obsession with the facts and figures of ecological crisis and catastrophe, the endless restatement of an ecological collapse that is underway. I received the message loud and clear back at school with warnings of acid rain. The claim is made that climate crisis is not being covered. It is. Daily. But not the full extent, comes the reply. Things are, of course, always worse. Actually, what has been reported, daily, is bad enough to have shifted energies towards transitions and transformations. That many are still at the alarm-sounding stage calls for explanation.
I won't call it 'climate porn.' Although there is undoubtedly an obsessive, fixated repetitive character to coverage that indicates unhealthy addiction. This fixation on crisis which characterises the modern distemper requires explanation. And if these comments do offend friends, then let me respond by stating that I, too, have been offended by the extent to which my efforts to relate crisis to precise social forms and relations within the capital system and develop solutions by way of new forms of social mediation have met with a lukewarm response, at best, or dismissed as 'politics' and 'ideology.' Such dismissive attitudes towards the field of practical reason indicate a mentality which is forever locked up in the world of theoretical reason – impotent and hopeless, and hence prone to idle, and often pious, lamentation.
People arguing for radical change used to be inspired by visions of the future society as a place we would all want to live, socialism as the free, rational, and cooperative society that puts back together all that the capital system has rent asunder. That's my vision, and I see it dismissed as 'old' outdated politics – or just plain 'politics' – time and again. Today’s activists seem motivated more by fear of the future than visions of the future as a feasibly better place to be, fear impelled by 'necessity.' Fear of necessity is not freedom as the appreciation of necessity. There is no recognition of human beings as both products and parts of nature, as natural beings participating culturally in the creative unfolding of nature. Many people seem more concerned to avoid catastrophe than realize utopia. Their views are not inspiring, they are debilitating and paralyse the will.
What this shows is that civilisation is more than institutions, structures, and buildings, it is a mental and psychic universe which is most fragile and quite easily lost. The most important elements of a civilisation are not the tangibles but the intangibles; the tangibles are the product of hope, purpose, meaning, and confidence, things that cannot be quantified and measured. The enemies of civilisation are fear, fear of all manner of things – economic want, social instability, anomie, war, disease, uncertainty. The greatest enemy of all is the fear of the future, making people feel that it is simply not worth while making the effort to build or construct in anticipation of a better way of life. The progressive undermining of self-confidence is potentially fatal to a civilisation. To pressure people and governments to act out of necessity, moreover, often results in decisions, actions, and commitments that reproduce and reinforce objective trends and tendencies, for reason of a panicky recourse to existing modalities and mentalities.
Then there is the feeling of hopelessness, which has frequently overtaken civilisations boasting a high degree of material affluence. The endless accumulation of material quantities has proceeded hand in hand with the destruction of the qualities that make for a meaningful and worthwhile life. The expansion of means is thus accompanied by a diminution of meaning.
And then there is the ennui which comes from satiety, a loss of meaning, a dis-at-ease. The world has a wealth of means but a confusion of ends, and this issues in a malaise which renders people either listless or excited, giving up on all politics and all causes – despite the very many outstanding issues of justice, freedom, and equality to be resolved – or seizing on a cause with a pronounced zeal. With respect to the latter, people find a meaning in a meaningless age, and pursue it relentlessly. It is ill-balanced and it derives directly from the purposeless materialism which is the scourge of the age. ‘Civilisation begins by a magnificent materialisation of human purpose,' wrote Lewis Mumford: 'it ends in a purposeless materialism. An empty triumph, which revolts even the self that created it.’ Purposeless materialism is ‘the vice that now threatens to overwhelm our own civilization in the very midst of its technological advancement.' (Mumford 1966 chs 3 and 4). Our mistake is to have treated materialization as an end in itself. In order to recover purpose we need to revalue the world. We need to see the world as objectively valuable, and appreciate that ‘purpose’ is immanent in all natural processes, and is not merely something we impose upon the world via abstract moral and intellectual systems, or something we just plain discard altogether, in light of the findings of modern mechanistic science.
Here, I am reminded of Waiting for the Barbarians, a poem by Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.
Waiting for the Barbarians
By C.P. Cavafy Translated by C.P. Cavafy
"What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution."
In this poem, the leaders and the people of some ancient city spent every day waiting in anticipation of a barbarian invasion, not mobilising to resist the anticipated invasion and sack but instead readying themselves to yield their land and their future to barbarians. It is the barbarians who are conceived to be the essential agents of political and social change, not the politicians and people who inhabit the city. Day after day the people wait in anticipation of the arrival of this external force, however terrible, only in the end to discover that the barbarians have gone away. The city is saved, but the people are disappointed: the sack would at least have been a resolution of their dissatisfied condition. Destruction would have been better than nothing. It gave a point to a pointless existence, it promised some kind of a future in a world where people could see none.
Whilst civilisation requires a degree of material affluence – and a distribution of it that gives each and all a stake – it also requires hope, meaning, and confidence such as to generate a security in the present and a commitment to the future. That confidence is expressed in terms of a faith in the laws, culture, and philosophy of a society, a confidence in skill, intellect, design, and technology – in powers of understanding and creation. This is hard to maintain when means of production have been turned into means of destruction, but that was precisely the socialist critique of the capital system from the first. People have lost hope in the socialist alternative and hence stand paralysed before a destructive capitalism, waiting for the barbarians to resolve the issue from the outside. The simple truth is that civilisations collapse because citizens have become hopeless and exhausted.
The real climate crisis is a human crisis. There is a need to pay at least as much attention to the human moral and social environment as there is to pay to the natural environment. These things are not antithetical but stand in metabolic relation. It is the nature of that relation and the social forms mediating that relation that needs to be identified, critically examined, and transformed. In light of such critical analysis, the real climate threat is identified as that of a determined minority of expropriators, exploiters, and emitters entrenching and institutionalising their iniquitous power and imposing an austerian order that privileges their class interests above the common good of each and all. To clarify and simplify, that entails a commitment to socialism and the supplanting of the capital system. The agency of political and social transformation is that of a socialised humanity, citizens of an associative democracy, and not the barbarism of external necessity and collapse.
Social, institutional, and ecological breakdown will not be halted by a change of political personnel. Politicians are not 'in power,' they are 'in office.' Resolution goes beyond changes in the personifications of economic categories to initiate the supplanting of those categories by new social forms of governance and economic provision.
There are many examples of climate coverage that selectively fetishizes natural science to reify the voice of 'Nature' in a way that is sociologically illiterate and politically hopeless. I find them thoroughly tedious and irrelevant now and don't waste time commenting. You can try David Wallace-Wells' The Uninhabitable Earth. There are many. The most striking quality of all such literature is the extent to which everything in nature is a legitimate agent except human beings. Such literature is the psychic preparation for an end that is sure to come – and welcomed as a relief - on these terms. The issue has always been the paradoxical nature of human beings who, as products and parts of nature, possess also a relative creative autonomy that can have human society working with nature or against it. Mediation, mediation, mediation – and capital's exploitative class society as against socialism. If you have no politics here, then you have no solution. You are effectively waiting for the barbarians.
I leave the science to the scientists. The issue will not be resolved by science, still less by 'the science,' the reified voice of 'Nature' serving as authoritative command. This is most decidedly not 'freedom as the appreciation of necessity.' In lacking a true sense of appreciation, it is merely a statement of an unanswerable necessity to the detriment of freedom. It is a crude rationalism which issues from the failure to establish the fields of theoretical and practical reason in true relation.
I have argued these points at length elsewhere and refer people to that work.
I would in particular refer people to the Appendix of this work, particularly 'Politicizing the Environment, Re-politicizing the World' and 'The Social Monist Critique of Environmentalism.'
Also the essays I collected here:
But, yes, clearly, without the effective action to reduce carbon emissions, civilisation will collapse. I can hear environmentalist friends groaning at the vagueness of that statement. Fine, a commitment to zero carbon by 2050 is insufficient. Governments committing to that target will spell the end of civilisation, not least because it is the nature of such targets to be missed given the immediate priorities of accumulation. And that's my point. You can argue for zero-carbon by 2040, 2030, 2025, tomorrow, or yesterday all you like, it is utterly idle and abstract, lacking in any institutional and social purchase within a capital system geared at all levels to accumulation. That's the nature of the beast, and that narrow purpose of endless exponential non-organic growth is hard-wired into the institutional, social, and, indeed, psychic fabric. The idea of government imposing cuts by fiat is the plainest idealism. It won't happen, certainly not on the timescales required.
But collapse in a physical sense won't happen either. There will be an authoritarian pacification in which the rich and powerful and their servants act to preserve prevailing social relations. The issue is being fought over those relations. There is no institutional or technological workaround, and those who continue to act and argue as though there is are effectively conceding the battle to the preservers – the expropriators, exploiters, and emitters. The real threat, therefore, is too little decarbonization that comes too late within an increasingly authoritarian-austerian climate regime that entrenches and extends existing inequalities of class, race, and gender. Climate crisis is a crisis with transformative potential, but the radical moment is in serious danger of being missed by a fixation on technical details at the expense of the critique of political economy. An emancipatory social critique needs to be allied to an emancipatory social practice based on a labour-environmentalist fusion. People are crying out for a genuine public community embodying and articulating values and practises of freedom, meaning, equality, democracy, and community. There is nowhere near enough attention being devoted to the constitution of such a public life. Instead, there is an ecology of fear, and it is politically debilitating and counter-productive. It is this fear – and the political evasion of asymmetrical power relations and their complicity in crisis and catastrophe – that will bring down civilisation.
That violence and destruction will result regardless of reductions of carbon emissions, whether sufficient or insufficient or not at all. Too few are prepared to address the fact that the capital system is destructive of the social and moral ecology as well as the natural ecology, and has been from the first. Both conservatives and socialists pointed this out from the first, from Thomas More in the sixteenth century. Even if the capital system was not ecologically destructive, it stands in need of supplanting. The case for a future socialist society is made in terms of the realisation of our most cherished political values – freedom, equality, democracy, justice. That is a positive vision of the future. The danger with the way that the environmental crisis is framed at present is that it gives the distinct impression that the capital system would be fine, pip, and dandy if it could be fuelled by renewable energy. This is a delusion stemming from political cowardice. Too many are prepared to yield to the barbarians within whilst waiting for the barbarism to come from without.
The kind of austerian climate regime adumbrated above is entirely compatible with a massive reductions in carbon emissions. We should know this from present facts, with carbon reductions proceeding within a disaster capitalism. Certainly, to state the obvious, the more we reduce carbon emissions by way of a governmental programme of egalitarian economic intervention, the less violence and disturbance there will be. But watch the reaction of entrenched power whenever – if ever – an elected government should attempt such an ambition programme of environmental reformism. It will face the same reaction that checked and undermined parliamentary socialism at every time and then finally extinguished it.
It should be clear from everything I have said and done over the years that my argument is not aimed against decarbonization, but against notions of a scientific, technological, and governmental road to the ecological society. In the absence of social transformation and the creation of new social forms and relations, that road will lead to an austerian environmental regime geared to preserving socially and ecologically destructive relations in the name of 'saving the planet.' It will be a pacification that will ensure the end of civilisation.
It is in light of this that I note the extent to which creative human agency and the citizen voice is absent in too much environmental literature. The words 'capital,' 'capital system,' and 'class' are usually absent, dismissed as 'politics' and therefore a secondary, 'ideological' issue, the problem and not its solution. This misses the very issue that is central – the socially mediated relation of humanity and nature in determinate social and historical relations.
By emphasising the need to bridge the fields of theoretical and practical reason, I don't wish to imply that very many environmentalists are not dealing with transitions – they are. I support things like the Transition Towns initiative, for instance. My concern is to see transitions and transformations accented, so that the resolution of crisis via concerted, comprehensive government coordinated action is sustained by participatory structures that hope, confidence, and direction, achieving the coincidence of self-change and social change, personal responsibility and collective responsibility. In that fight, we organize our societies along more equitable and efficient lines, each action buying time to build smarter, cleaner infrastructures. This generates confidence in a future that is worth having in itself, delivering an existential meaning that is something much more than survival in an objectively meaningless and valueless universe. 'Necessity' thus becomes humanly objective. Plenty is being done here. It needs to be coordinated and integrated and foregrounded. I am concerned to guard against the cause of environmentalism being betrayed into the hands of the very institutions and systems generating crisis in the first place.
It is striking – and significant – how much environmental literature avoids the dreaded 'c' words – 'capital,' 'class,' and 'contradiction.' That reveals the extent to which critics are still working within a liberal universe, taking historically and socially specific categories and institutions as natural and eternal. Note how often many refer to capital, if they refer to it at all, as a politically neutral 'thing' to be re-applied to social and ecological ends. Such thinking is bourgeois to the core and is destined to remain entirely within the logic and rule of capital. Capital is a power-infused process and relation, not a thing to be appropriated and used. The entire social relation has to be transformed, putting an end to capital and to exploitative class relations. Too few are prepared to identify and examine the social roots, material processes, class relations, and contradictory systemic dynamics at the heart of the socio-ecological crisis, but they are clear. It is those who persist in looking past the complicity of prevailing institutions and systems in socio-ecological crisis who are the true ideologists here, taking ideology in its critical sense as a rationalisation and concealment of existing power relations. Instead of sociological precise critique which hones in on the capital system, there are general lamentations of 'human activity,' highlighting the madness of 'humans' coming to destroy themselves in destroying the planet. Such a trite observation merits only a 'something should be done' in response. Too much of the coverage fetishizes aspects of the natural science in place of a critical socio-economic analysis to sound the climate alarm. Cue lamentations that the alarm is not being heard. That the deafness is institutional and systemic underlines the extent to which the task before us is to build responsiveness into the social system. To repeat, that means supplanting the capitalist economy by a socialist one. That's the solution, and people need to say so rather than grasping for surrogates within the same system.
As for the claims that are repeated daily … they are a turn-off.
Is it true that climate change is never covered? No. It is covered daily. The constant refrain that climate change is not being covered has worn thin and continued repetition will serve only to confirm to people that nothing is being done and that nothing can be done. The idea justifying endless campaigning that climate is not being covered doesn't wash.
Is it true that climate threats are underestimated? Maybe, probably, but it's not relevant. The threat that has been issued regularly over a number of years has been of sufficient danger as to be cause for alarm. That there has been insufficient response suggests that the problem is not lack of awareness.
Are people unaware of climate crisis and 'sleep-walking to oblivion' as I heard an Extinction Rebel say today? No. People are aware. Many have been actively involved in addressing the complexities of the issue. And it is quite an elitist and presumptuous to bully, hector, and lecture the public as if people either don't know and don't care. And off-putting. To constantly present people with a crisis without also offering the means of crisis-resolution breeds climate fatigue. It is counter-productive and drains patience and energy. The only rationale here is that there is a war of attrition being fought, ratcheting up pressure on government to concede to more ambitious climate demands.
If environmental action is being undertaken, is it enough? No. And the nature of campaigning is that action will never be enough. I have no objections to the game of campaigning, but that approach is premised on pressing for action within a prevailing institutional and systemic framework, not supplanting it with a new public community and social order. It's a game, setting goal posts only to move them, setting a target, only to set another whenever it is met. The problem with such a politics is not that it is radical but that it isn't radical enough – or at all. It cannot embed visions of an alternative social order.
Is runaway climate change the greatest danger that confronts civilisation? No. As I warned in Of Gods and Gaia back in 2012, the greatest danger we face is that of too little of the right thing, too late in the day to make a substantial difference, and too much of the wrong thing, serving to make things worse, all in the context of an entrenched and intensified class division, inviting last minute geo-engineering gambles with the planet. I am also alive to the clear danger of the language of a climate necessity coming to be ideologically appropriated within existing regimes in order to institute an environmental austerity designed to preserve the power of the socially and ecologically destructive exploiters and free-riders to continue to predate on planet and people. That is the very real - and inherently political - danger. Avoid politics at your peril. The solution to bad politics is not no politics but good politics. No politics merely entrenches us in bad politics.
Climate action and activism goes down a cul-de-sac if it is no more than climate policy. Environmental concerns need to be broader than this, taking in the human social ecology as well as the natural ecology. Environmentalism will develop a broad appetitive basis only by building on the practical social needs of people within the everyday lifeworld. Without that, it lacks a grasp of agency and hence is destined to be waiting forever for the barbarians. For all the talk of climate targets and carbon emissions, environmentalism is as social as it is natural and comes alive in metabolic relation and interaction between the two spheres. Environmentalism obtains an existential and motivational significance when it is rooted in the everyday necessities of real flesh and blood men and women active in the here and now, as against being merely a concern for an abstract, remote, indistinct future. In short, it is only by a fusion of climate necessity and the instincts and aspirations of the people against the embedded and institutionalised power and privilege of the expropriators, exploiters, and emitters that we can reclaim the future and oppose a democratic ecology to an austerian ecology of fear that leads in the direction of entrenched class division and the further decline of civilisation from within. It follows from this that the resolution of the converging crises that threaten us is not an increasing awareness and better grasp of 'the science' – there has been sufficient awareness and understanding for a long while now – but a greater political awareness and mobilisation, articulating political values of freedom, democracy, and equality whilst inspiring hope and confidence.
And that is the moral of the poem Waiting for the Barbarians. Say there are no barbarians after all, no climate reckoning, no necessity to impel or imperil us. Would you then settle back decadently into a capitalism of a material affluence never seen before in history, however ill-distributed? Is it only necessity that is making you demand action and change? I am committed to socialism as a vision of a better society, a place to be regardless of crises and threats of catastrophe. A socialist society is a place where we ought to be, in order to flourish well, regardless of any crisis to resolve and catastrophe to avert. That positive vision needs to be recovered. Where there is no vision, people perish. Cease making something or someone else the agent of political and social change, cease reifying and fetishizing 'things,' and recover a sense of creative agency in both individual and collective terms, associate with others to create means and mechanisms of common conscious control to supplant the alien and external control of capital and its various unintended consequences as necessities, both economic and environmental. And have the courage to identify the real threat as the capital system as an alienated system of production and have the confidence to reclaim socialism as the free, rational, and cooperative society, and have the hope in the future as a good place to be living. Replace the ecology of fear with a democratic ecology. This, I would suggest, is infinitely superior to waiting upon the barbarians who are in power and inside the gates now to act, which is merely the same as waiting for the barbarism that is sure to come if we continue down that road.
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