UNFORTUNATELY WE live in a country where our Green Party has meekly surrendered to the demands of the very economic system that is eating up the planet at an alarming rate.
Under the (mis)leadership of James Shaw and Marama Davidson, this is a Green Party that is increasingly out of step with the international environmental movement. That capitalism is the primary driver of climate change has become more broadly accepted with books like Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate topping the bestseller lists. But it speaks volumes about the reactionary ideological climate within the Green Party that someone as important and influential as Klein is largely persona non-grata while co-leader James Shaw speaks to business conferences and speaks of the 'profits' to be made by those who aspire to Shaw's fantastical notion of a 'green capitalism'. Meanwhile Marama Davidson does...whatever she does.
Climate Change as Class War by Matthew Huber builds on the work of people like Klein. Huber, professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University in New York, contends that climate change is first and foremost a class issue that puts the interests of capitalists ahead of the rest of us, sacrificing the very future of the planet as a consequence. Huber observes:
'If the planet continues to burn, future historians will no doubt find our society puzzling: we clearly understood the gravity of climate change, but did nothing. It is capital and its associated ideologies blocking the changes needed.'
It is capital's drive for ever more profit - the 'accumulation drive for surplus value' as Huber puts it, that is also driving the planet further to the edge of the cliff. Such is the depth of this crisis, so called 'solutions' like carbon trading, electric cars and cycleways won't save us. Such measures, while they might appease the guilty consciences of the middle class, are little more than an attempt to blame climate change on the ‘irresponsible’ choices of individual consumers. For some reason, I couldn't help but think of the Green's Julie Ann Genter as I wrote this.
Naomi Klein has often taken aim at the practitioners of a 'middle class environmentalism' who are more than ready to appease capitalist interests and call it 'progress', While ecosocialism has come 'out of the cold' the fight against climate change still remains a fight that has been hijacked by the professional managerial class. They, write Huber, still assume - wrongly - that technological fixes and the 'right policy mix' will win the fight against climate change while, at the same time, leaving our destructive economic system gloriously intact.
Huber pointedly points out that middle class environmentalism holds the working class in contempt. While the lifestyles of middle class activists may remain unaffected, they want ordinary people to make do with less. But as Huber caustically observes:
'This austerity politics of less appeals to the professional classes and their carbon guilt. They feel excessive. But, make no mistake: a politics of ‘less’ and ‘limits’ has no resonance for the vast majority of people already living precarious and insecure working class lives.
'At the core of the professional contempt for the working (and consuming) masses is a deeper guilt about their own complicity in the consumer society and the deep contradictions between the equation of professional success with a lifestyle of privatised provisioning.'
Huber writes that the fight against climate change must also be a fight against the economic system that is destroying the planet. Delusions of a 'green capitalism' are the delusions of a professional class that is too deeply embedded within the political establishment to know any different. By necessity the fight against climate charge - and capitalism - must be led by the working class.
Huber evaluates the Green New Deal first proposed by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, like Huber, is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He sees it as an attempt to marry working class interests with the fight against climate change and propose an alternative economic model that rejects capitalism's greed for ever more profit and growth.
In the end Huber concludes that the struggle against climate change 'is a class struggle over the relations of ownership and control of the material production that underpins our social and ecological relationship with nature and the climate itself.'
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that the professional\managerial\liberal class is dangerously delusional. They actually believe the bullshit of their imaginary moral superiority, (this is just the particular flavour of the 'better-than' delusion I'm talking about here.)
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that they have form tight, narcissistic cliques and they are never challenged. This tribe puts the image of the tribe (and therefore their own image) ahead of any kind of reality. It is a protection racket in which they fervently cover-up each others misdeeds and at the same time 'purify' who they are in their own heads. It leads to a perpetual hypocrisy. The working class is scapegoate within a disingenuous ''sympathy''.
It is utterly infuriating. I have no idea how to penetrate it. I've challenged a few uttering an attitude of glee that the climate catastrophe will cleanse the world of the deplorables as they work on projects they naively believe will enable their own kind to survive the catastrophes that will depopulate the world. They don't use words like deplorables as they plan for a future without us.
I feel mean asking the questions they don't ask each other about who will perish and how it will come about, about who they understand will survive, how and why. And I try to be neutral as I ask about their 'devil take the hindmost' strategising, I say: so the poor here and internationally will suffer more severely will struggle until they can't go on. They will watch their loved ones die in misery and eventually they themselves will be unable to carry on?
And this will cede space and resources for your people? And you see your claiming of what we leave behind as what, heroic? As you rush to redeem the very planet with your clever toilets and solar panels? (I'd really like to be a fly on the wall if that fantasy ever collided with reality).
Where I come from people go to jail, and it's hard to hide dirty laundry. We don't have the luxury of imagining ourselves to be morally pure. And struggle throws up real-world dilemmas every day in which every alternative is at least somewhat impure. There is awfulness but there is genuine goodness, sharing, compassion.
The 'betters' are so used to being looked after by us, without ever knowing us. We are their caregivers and it is hard to understand caring as the ground rather than a strategy to win something for themselves. So easy to outsource the places they should feel shame to the working class, but ''kindly'' as they live inside their spotless, now retrofitted eco-minds.