The Problem is Political, and so is the solution.
I would like to comment on this article:
After a half a century of increasingly clear and dire warnings of environmental stress and threat, some scientists are beginning to say that they have had enough. “We need to recognise the problem is political and that further climate change science may even divert attention away from where the problem truly lies.”
The time for pressing science into service as politics and ethics has long since been over. The interesting thing for me about this statement is that it is precisely those people in the environmental movement who have needed to shift from science to politics who are getting so excited by this statement. I and many others who are unafraid of politics and the critique of political economy have been saying precisely this and a whole lot more besides for a long time now, either to be ignored as irrelevant, on account of coming at this from a political rather than a scientific standpoint, or dismissed as extremist and divisive. Now, very late in the day, those in the grip of scientism and naturalism are beginning to see the politically (and morally) debilitating consequences of the constant emphasis on science, education, and on technological and institutional fixes. Having failed to incite the necessary response and transformative action, some are now seeking to change tack. All I can say is that it has taken an awful long time for an awful lot of awfully clever people to learn an incredibly simple lesson: science cannot do the job of politics and ethics, scientific knowledge cannot motivate the will, inspire effort, and obligate actors. Dress it up as ‘necessity,’ sound the alarm, and call for panic all you like – if there is no inner motive force, no proper diagnosis, and no socio-economic purchase, then all that there can be is a top-down institutional imposition. It seems that, at long, long last, environmentalists may be inclined to seek a proper diagnosis of environmental crisis at the level of social systems, something which will lead them to a properly political resolution of the problem. Whilst I should welcome this development, I couldn’t resist making a few tetchy comments on the pages of science-based environmentalists, letting them know that in the past fifty years that scientists have been reporting on environmental stress and issuing warnings, thinkers and activists in the field of politics and social action have been locating these problems precisely in the political economy of the prevailing social system. It is for those who have clung steadfastly to ‘the science,’ often making a point of rejecting politics, and denouncing all those demanding social transformation as ‘extremist’ and ‘divisive,’ out of some claimed independence, neutrality, and dispassionate truth, to explain why it has taken them so long to appreciate the importance of politics in addressing environmental crisis. They have been far too busy fighting an irrelevant war with the people they label climate ‘deniers,’ taking every clash as an opportunity to repeat the same climate facts and figures. Such ‘education’ has zero practical force and is merely a repetition that falls on deaf ears; it has zero motivational quality and persuasive power. The same with respect to the environmental activists and campaigners and their permanent protest. They are engaged not in a genuine politics but a war of attrition which is designed to sap the energy out of the public sphere, wear government and government down until peace as pacification is sought in some extremely ambitious and expensive climate programme. This is not a genuine politics but an attempt to bully and coerce pre-determined political ends. The governed have played no part in determining and accepting the huge commitments that government has been pressured into making on their behalf. Those maintaining the pressure this way may congratulate themselves on account of scoring so many victories in the short run; in the long run they risk a revanchism in which every victory is uprooted and rescinded in the name of popular democratic liberation.
I shall briefly comment on this article. I shall begin by saying that I find no encouragement at all in the fact that the people responding so positively to the message of the article remain so firmly in the grip of scientism that they will only take lessons on the limitations and failures of science as politics from scientists. That makes it crystal clear that they still see natural science as not merely a superior form of knowledge, but the only form of knowledge. They still remain deaf to all those who work in the field of the social sciences, politics, culture, humanities: frankly everywhere and everyone who lacks a background, a training, and a myopic obsession with science and technology. There, in a nutshell, is one very big reason for the failure of environmentalism to initiate and maintain the fundamental societal transformation that alone will resolve the environmental crisis. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, knowing that I shall have to keep saying it again: the climate crisis is not the fundamental problem that the world faces but is the physical manifestation of contradictory dynamics that are embedded within prevailing social relations. Those relations require a proper systemic transformation, the complexity of which far exceeds top-down government engineering. Sad to say, but environmentalists are still far from appreciating how deeply rooted in social arrangements the problem we face is and how difficult a task the supplanting of social forms is – ‘the economy’ cannot simply be taken over and re-directed by way of some engineering feat. I don’t have time and space to go into those practical questions – and no longer have the energy and the will to repeat lessons I have laboured long and hard on over the years. I shall simply direct people to my Academia page or Being and Place site and advise them to investigate my work over the years. If there is one work for people to read here, I would suggest An Introduction to the Thought of Istvan Meszaros, on account of it being short, concise, clear, and pertinent.
The authors of the article are Bruce Glavovic, Professor, Massey University; Iain White, Professor of Environmental Planning, University of Waikato; Tim Smith, Professor and ARC Future Fellow, University of the Sunshine Coast.
The article is written in response to a very basic question: ‘governments have failed to act at the scale and pace required. What should climate change scientists do?’
I’m surprised that people are still surprised, shocked, and even outraged by the fact that governments have failed to respond appropriately to the repeated warnings of scientists.
The belief that governments would act in response to scientific warnings is based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of government in the capital system. At the heart of this belief is an understanding of government as the embodiment of the universal interest, involving a determination to act for the public welfare and secure the governed against public harm. The people who believe this have taken the self-image for the real identity. That image is a description of how we would like government to be and how we think government ought to act. It betrays a complete ignorance of the nature and function of government within the capital system. Too few understand the place of government within the capital system, not merely because no-one taught them this lesson, but because those who did the teaching here were Marxists, socialists, radicals, and extremists. Now, at last, those who thought a constant education and proselytising would do the trick have come to realize that their facts and figures have fallen on deaf ears. Too few have been prepared to address the socio-economic roots, class relations, and contradictory dynamics driving this crisis, for the reason that they sought a reasonable and peaceful workaround to political conflict. The whole approach betrays an ignorance born of cowardice, indicating a fear of entering politics, confronting embedded power, and, most unpleasant of all, engaging and aligning with citizens and ‘ordinary’ folk, plebs who know nothing of science, mere empty heads to be filled/educated. Such a politics rehashes all the over failures of reformism and is based on the old illusion that the state is determinant: the state is not determinant, it is determined. The capital system is not a public domain amenable to rational, moral, and democratic persuasion but a private regime concerned with the accumulation of capital. Those who have placed their faith in science have mistakenly taken the idea of government – public welfare, the universal interest – as the real. They have fallen hook, line, and sinker for the state as ideological project claiming to serve the common good. Instead, the function of government is to secure the conditions for and facilitate the process of accumulation. As an institution within the capital system, the government is the crucial second order mediation which secures unity and coherence within a fundamentally divided, competitive, and anarchic system of production. And why shouldn’t government serve to secure unity and accumulation, given the extent to which the incomes and welfare of the governed depend on the healthy functioning of the economy? The capital system is systemically deaf and blind with respect to nature, making it pointless to expect government to ensure that the capitalist economy does what it is structurally incapable of doing. Once governmental inroads into the processes of investment, accumulation, and valorisation start to be made, there will be a systemic reaction, with either government retreat in face of economic crisis following or root-and-branch social transformation. Whilst the demands that government act on environmental crisis imply the latter, it is clear that very few of those making the demands have any idea of what this implies. To the extent that they think that government could undertake such a transformation, they have zero understanding of the complexities of the social system. Without social transformation, increased environmental demands on government will involve either a) a deliberate crashing of the economy, which will be met with a legitimation crisis, since the governed – as well as the government – depend on the resources generated in the private economy; b) an austerian environmental regime regulating one and all under the clean green corporate form. It is time for people to wise up now, and quickly. The stakes are high. Uprooting and supplanting the social forms of the capital system is no easy task. Given the lack of knowledge, motivation, and interest at present, I would suggest that it is an impossibility for another generation at least. Such people who identify as leftist at present are busying themselves in the work of protest, deconstruction, and destruction, tearing things down, grandstanding, and sloganizing. I doubt that many of them know which end of a shovel to use. Such radicals need to get truly radical and start putting a shift in when it comes to the work of reconstruction. Or do they think that this all-powerful ‘government’ they address all their demands to will give them socialism too? Be careful what you wish for.
At this point I would like to quote from Paul Mason’s article in the Guardian, Chaos is Being Normalised. The article states:
‘The liberal establishment – found in the corporate boardrooms, among the masters of Oxbridge colleges, in law and medicine and among the old-money landowners – does not know what to do. Meanwhile the working class is more divided culturally than at any point since Oswald Mosley tried to march down Cable Street.’
Society in general is divided culturally. If you were a ruling class at bay, you could have done nothing better to divide the growing opposition than to have invented identity politics and culture wars. Here is the interesting point about that: identity politics replaced class and culture has replaced politics in light of the political defeat of the working class, the destruction of its social institutions, and its structural fragmentation. In light of this, the social transformation I called for above is lacking its classical revolutionary agent. That leaves the leftist case for the ecological transformation of social relations somewhat bereft of inner motive force. Where is the agency with the structural capacity to act?
I now tend to shift the focus from identity and even class and look at the virtues, character formation, and the creation of a citizen body within a Green Republicanism. This doesn’t dismiss and discard the working class, only the ideological identification of the working class as inherently and necessarily socialist. The working class is fragmented and cannot be unified by its shared socio-economic interests and class position. Unity and commonality has to rest on ties and loyalties that are more solid and secure than economics and material interests. Marx’s mistake was to have rested community on the most ephemeral and transitory of ties and bonds – economics and material interests. He had good reason to at the time, with capital’s objective processes of socialisation concentrating workers together with a great deal of homogeneity. But those nineteenth century determinations no longer apply. Further, the working class is in large part conservative, demonstrating a concern with the primary loyalties, proximal relations, and intermediary societies and associations. This all involves a familial concern with past, present, and future, with family, locality, tradition, community, the environment as a living space. The solution is to ensure that ambitious ‘global’ environmental programmes – the concerted action within a comprehensive framework that climate campaigners and scientists demand – be rooted in small scale practical reasoning, proximal relations, individual as well as communal responsibility and ownership, and love of home and place. Such an argument is a blend of socialism and conservatism, calling for a political shift beyond received categories.
In his article, Mason warns, rightly, of the growing threat of fatigue as a result of constant crisis, eroding the will of the authorities, the capacity of government to govern, and the spirit of the people. It refers to ‘the fragility of the unwritten constitution’; to the fact that parts of the British media – and I would argue the authorities in general - ‘have no stomach for the task of actively defending the rule of law and the principle of accountability’; and to the ‘atmosphere of weariness’ that is ‘descending on the mass of people.’ The authors refer to the weariness of people in face of a constitutional crisis that never seems to end. On top of that we have economic depression and pandemic. Environmentalists and other protesters and campaigners trying to right the wrongs of the past are playing an incredibly dangerous game here. In engaging in a war of attrition at a time when governments and governed are under stress, they risk kicking the conditions of a democratic polity and governance over the cliff, never to return. They may think it a strategically clever thing to do, but they see only the robustness of civil politics and democratic governance when in reality these things are fragile. The fetish of law-breaking in light of a greater – if arbitrary and particular – ethic is the stuff of tyranny.
The authors call this right, citing Erich Fromm, who identified that the ideal conditions for the rise of dictators and autocrats was a “state of inner tiredness and resignation,” which he attributed to the pace of life in stressed, industrialised societies. That’s the state we are getting to, and the outcome won’t necessarily be the social transformation radicals may hope for (once they finally learn that ‘government’ won’t deliver according to demand). Fromm observed among the German working class “a deep feeling of resignation, of disbelief in their leaders, of doubt about the value of any kind of political organization and political activity … deep within themselves many had given up any hope in the effectiveness of political action”.
Somewhere, somehow, those who have a fairly definite idea of what the problem is and what needs to be done to resolve it, have to reconnect with the human roots that feed politics and start to inspire people with practical, active hope. The thing that strikes me most about contemporary leftist politics is the fear and loathing of ‘ordinary’ people. Unless that is overcome, leftist politics will remain without transformative potential.
The authors write, rather pompously and idealistically, of the ‘unwritten social contract between science and society.’ ‘Public investment in science is intended to improve understanding about our world and support beneficial societal outcomes.’ Public investment in science has been deeply implicated in industrial, economic, and military purposes, masked by the idealistic claims of public beneficence. So when the authors claim that for climate science ‘the science-society contract is broken,’ it is clear to me that their view is based upon a certain innocence and idealism born of ignorance of political economy and the embeddedness of science in ‘big science’ and ‘big government,’ both in the service of accumulation.
The failure to act decisively is an indictment on governments and political leaders across the board, but climate change scientists cannot be absolved of responsibility.
Instead of a moral indictment of governments and political leaders, there is a need to understand government as functional for capital accumulation. It ought by now to be clear that the deafness of government is itself an expression of the systemic deafness to use value of an economic system geared to exchange value. There is precious little to be gained by turning on the personifications of economic categories within an alienated system of production, for the very reason that it is not the personifications who are responsible for contradiction and crisis but the systemic imperatives they serve.
But there is some cause for optimism in seeing that scientists and those who ‘follow the science’ are, finally, beginning to see that they are being had and being tricked into constant repetition of ‘the science.’
As we write in an article about this conundrum, the tragedy is the compulsion to provide ever more evidence when the phenomena are well understood and the science widely accepted. The tragedy is being gaslighted into thinking the impasse is somehow our fault, and we need to do science differently: crafting new scientific institutions, strategies, collaborations and methodologies.
Having long laboured to get people to see precisely this point, I feel entitled to give my now weary and exhausted self some little praise here. Ten years and more ago I warned that climate activists were being drawn into a phony war by ‘deniers.’ Every time ‘deniers’ ‘denied the science,’ scientists, activists, and campaigners took the bait and wasted their time and energy in repeating what was known. And whilst they did that, the areas of practical politics where decisions are made and things get done were neglected. In the works I issued over a decade ago, I warned explicitly that this was a diversionary tactic designed to draw environmentalists away from precisely those sites and arenas were change takes place.
So, yes, I agree, but again urge environmentalists and greens to heed the warnings and take the advice of people who know about politics, the social sciences, and the humanities, not just scientists. You are expecting scientists to deal with issues that are not within their competence, hence the delay and deviation. I have written time and again on this quote from Gus Speth:
I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.
~ Gus Speth
It is for environmentalists hooked on science to now immerse themselves deeply in the works of those who do know about what is entailed by a social, cultural, and spiritual transformation. Unfortunately, I have to record that whenever I have made these points in the past, they have either been ignored or summarily dismissed on account of not being based in science and technology. So I will say openly that those in the grip of scientism, that is, those who think ‘science is everything’ (as I was once told), bear a heavy responsibility for the wretched state of green politics.
The authors now give us the killer line:
‘At some point we need to recognise the problem is political and that further climate change science may even divert attention away from where the problem truly lies.’
It’s not the science that is the problem, the science is necessary. The problem is the belief on the part of so many that science gets to dictate action to government, that physics trumps politics, that nature and necessity have a prior claim over the human social world. That view is so politically, socially, and anthropologically illiterate as to be heart-breaking. So many people of good faith and with good intentions have laboured for so long with little effect for the reason that they have been doing politics wrong. Many did so because they thought they knew better. In fact, the denigration and devaluation of politics remains the dominant view among greens and environmentalists. It is easy to dismiss political rhetoric as ‘blah blah blah.’ Every time I try to get environmentalists to see the reason for deafness and inaction by addressing systemic and structural roots in the capital system, very many of those go deaf. I have also been told many times that such an analysis is extremist and divisive, that an ‘us and them’ division is evidence of anachronistic thinking. I believe that many of those who reason that way see themselves as members of a classless ‘universal class,’ occupying an independent and neutral position on behalf of all ‘humanity.’ Others I see as just plain deluded, political naifs who think science and sweet reason will suffice. It has taken them fifty years to start to see that ‘education’ and ‘consciousness raising’ won’t be anything like enough. Have they got what it takes to engage with people and sustain a political with a critical cutting edge?
The authors speculate that COP26 was too little, too late. Let me express a little irritation here. In fact, let me express a lot of irritation. I’ve done all the COP stuff, all the climate conferences going back to Rio, up to Paris. I was always sceptical, although I tempered my criticisms out of loyalty to the green cause. But when every conference, every initiative, every protest was defended as a ‘beginning,’ I pulled clear. I supported Paris whilst noting its fatal flaws. My position was incoherent and finally fractured when I had to defend Paris in light of Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the agreement. I found myself having to meet the arguments of Trump supporters who argued that Paris was useless, ineffective, and expensive. As much as I knew the game they were playing, I had to agree that Paris was useless, ineffective, and expensive. I made the same points myself, once more attempting to bring environmentalists to the politics of social transformation. In the main they carried on with the enthusiasm for the latest conference and COP. Until in the end, Thunberg comes along and calls it ‘blah blah blah,’ and the former COP cheerleaders suddenly find they have something and someone else to cheer. The final straw for me was seeing a number of these people now turn on COP, but still ignore the institutional, structural, and systemic analysis I have put under the noses for years in favour of the latest radical chic – patriarchy and racism. To a photograph of white men in suits, these ‘radicals’ took aim against colour and sex and demanded women and people of colour take over. This is regressive, reactionary drivel that has nothing to say on the social and structural causes of environmental crisis. It is another deviation – capital doesn’t give a damn about skin colour and genitalia. I no longer soft peddle my criticism here, but simple expose those who think themselves radical as the reactionaries they are.
The article doesn’t say much at all about the structural and systemic analysis and social transformation required to address the environmental crisis. Its focus, instead, is on the place of science and the responsibility of scientists. It asks what climate change scientists ought to do in the face of the evidence for government inaction, deafness, and complicity. My answer to that is simple: scientists should carry on doing the science, and stop expecting science to do the job of politics. That’s a lesson for those who insist politics ‘follow the science.’ The question is not what scientists ought to do now, it is a question for what environmentalists should be doing – and the answer is politics.
The authors identify three possible options — two that are untenable, one that is unpalatable. And that, I would say, is the end of that. I don’t need to quote further, because those options are clearly non-options – the solution lies above.
But here, in short, are the options:
The first option is to collect more evidence and hope for action. This is more of the same, then, and will end the same way. ‘We know why global warming is happening and what to do. We have known for a long time.’ The problem is not a scientific problem, it is a social problem. I have repeated the same point to climate activists: climate change is not the problem, it is the physical manifestation of a problem that lies within social relations. Invert that relation by making climate change the problem, expecting people and politicians to put aside their differences and act, and you are simply demanding the impossible;
‘The second option is more intensive social science research and climate change advocacy.’ That doesn’t strike me as too different to the above. There is a mass of social science research. We know more than enough. The problem lies in the field of practical reason (politics and ethics), and all the advocacy in the world doesn’t substitute for effective agency with the structural capacity to act;
‘The third option is much more radical, but unpalatable. We call for a moratorium on climate change research that does little more than document global warming and maladaptation.’ Years ago, I called the endless reporting on ‘the science’ on the part of campaigners and activists ‘writing our obituary.’
The article has been shared widely and incited a lot of comment. I read it in hope having seen the excitement it has generated among some environmentalists. Speaking frankly, it is something of a damp squib. It states things that experience alone should tell us to be true. It doesn’t remotely go deeply enough into political economy and the capital system. The authors clearly believe, idealistically, that government ought to serve the common good, and still hold out the possibility that government will reinstitute the science-society contract. This is idealistic nonsense, precisely the kind of mentality that has taken environmentalism up-a-creek-without-a-paddle:
Attention needs to focus on exposing and re-negotiating the broken science-society contract. Given the rupture to the contract outlined here, we call for a halt on all further IPCC assessments until governments are willing to fulfil their responsibilities in good faith and mobilise action to secure a safe level of global warming. This option is the only way to overcome the tragedy of climate change science.
As a conclusion, this is utterly lame. This third option is described as the ‘only way’ to overcome the tragedy facing climate science, even though it has already been admitted that this solution is ‘unpalatable.’ That being so, we can be sure that it is no solution at all, just another in a long list of hopeless hopes. Instead of seeking to effect the transition from the field of theoretical reason/science/knowledge to the field of practical reason (politics and ethics, with economics as a branch), instead of taking politics seriously and engaging in properly political action, there is a call to re-instate what they call the science-society contract – which is a very idealised view of the role of science in relation to governments maintaining asymmetrical power relations – and to effectively bully and coerce government into climate action – basically what climate activists and campaigners are doing with their war of attrition against what is left of the public. This is wretched. This is a continuation of rank bad environmental politics, the very thing which has rendered environmentalism impotent and ineffective with respect to transformative action.
Abandoning research is an idle and futile gesture. The people labelled climate deniers would love this, because it would allow them to claim ‘we don’t know’ what is causing environmental events, and call for further research. I heard Benny Pieser doing this in Liverpool more than a decade ago. It is an act of emasculation. Research has to continue, so that we know what we are dealing with and ensure that the problem cannot simply be dismissed as politically created rather than articulating the facts of real science. But the challenge all along has been that of the transition from the findings of theoretical/scientific reason to practical reason (the world of ethics and politics, of which economics is a branch), because it is in the latter world that the problem arises and it is in that world it will be resolved. That’s when we get into the real hard and complex problems of social forms, practices, and relations, socially as well as naturally material processes, class dynamics, interests, stakes, motivations, dialogue, persuasion, communication, action … And much more. Environmentalism has barely scratched the surface of transformative action.
My fear is that people will remain in scientistic mode and continue to think they can design and engineer the way out, devising some plan and programme to be implemented/executed by some ideal ‘government.’ I can predict an austerian environmental regime on precisely those terms very easily, but I wouldn’t hold my breath that it would spell the end of the capital system. Just ask yourself who has the power and resources to push technology to the kind of scale required by ambitious climate programmes. Some class or classes other than capital will bear the full weight of any ‘necessity’ on those terms. I keep coming back to internal societal transformation. Which leaves me looking for the agents with the structural capacity to act. I wish I could offer something easier. My views on this have been consistently dismissed as too ambitious, too long-term when we no longer have a long-term. I take them to mean simply that the proper solution is too difficult, so they instead look for surrogates.
My intellectual mentor in the mid-1990s, Istvan Meszaros, was saying all of this and more back in 1971, before the Club of Rome, locating the problem in the critique of political economy. The same with Murray Bookchin, who wrote before Rachel Carson. They were ignored because they were radical and explicitly political. Always there has been this shying away from politics and the political, and the presumption that some ‘beyond politics’ or non-politics focused on ‘the science’ will do the trick. It won’t. The people who are now talking so loudly about ‘system change, not climate change’ need to understand precisely what is entailed by system change, and actually engage in politics properly, i.e. do more than ‘tell the truth’ and demand action.
As I made these comments on social media, someone else commented:
My proposal is that scientists should recognize that global capitalism, and its addiction to fossil fuel combustion by design, is arguably the primary driver of global climate collapse.
If this is true, it follows that the only way to effect the necessary change, is to design and globally implement the truly ethical-sustainable dwelling-economy we will need to survive catastrophic global climate collapse, and regenerate our planetary ecosystems, to avert our pending self-extinction, as a viable species on a viable planet. Just my opinion; and, of course, I do have a design proposal for accomplishing this.
As I had feared would happen, a social problem which exists at the level of social relations of production – with all that that entails in terms of social forms, value, division of labour – was made a design problem, with the solution to be ‘globally implemented.’ By who, I would ask. By government? In which case the criticisms I made above apply. By way of a societal transformation which involves a mass movement and organisation of people? An ecological self-socialisation from below that scales up to the global transformation that is required? If so, then that involves more than design. I’m afraid if this is the best we have, then we are just utopian technocrats rehashing Saint Simon, planners with design proposals to be implemented. Everyone has a plan: plans are a dime a dozen. When I saw the above comment on design and global implementation receive a ‘love,’ my heart sank. Because, coming from a background in politics and history, I’ve seen and heard such impotent utopianism a million times before. That is not how change happens, it never has been and it never will be – it’s the stuff of technocratic utopias, the kind of stuff that should have died a death in the world wars and totalitarianisms of the twentieth century.
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